Chapter 5

But the difficulty in the writing of such stories is that the narrator, as soon as he begins, becomes conscious of the successful methods of other men. I have been reading a number of War stories published recently, and it was painful to see how many were ruined by Kipling before this War began. Kipling was original, and his tricks of manner, often irritating, and his deplorable views of human society, were usually carried off by his genius for observation, and the spontaneity of the drama of his stories. But when his story was thin, and he was wandering in an excursion with his childish philosophy, he was usually facetious. As an obvious and easily imitable trick for dull evenings, this elaborate jocularity seems to have been more enjoyed by his disciples than his genius for narrative when he was happy, and his material was full and sound. Yet his false and vulgar fun has spoiled many of these volumes pollinated from India. They have another defect, too, though it would be unfair to blame Kipling for that when it may be seen blossoming with the unassuming modesty of a tulip in any number of _Punch_. I mean that amusing gravity of the snob who is sure of the exclusive superiority of his caste mark, with not the trace of a smile on his face, and at a time when all Europe is awakening to the fact that it sentenced itself to ruin when it gave great privileges to his kind of folk in return for the guidance of what it thought was a finer culture, but was no more than a different accent. It was, we are now aware, the mere Nobodies who won the War for us; and yet we still meekly accept as the artistic representation of the British soldier or sailor an embarrassing guy that would disgrace pantomime. And how the men who won must enjoy it!

XV. Waiting for Daylight

NOVEMBER 9, 1918. I read again my friend's last field service postcard, brief and enigmatic, and now six weeks old. I could find in it no more than when it first came. Midnight struck, and I went to the outer gate. The midnight had nothing to tell me. Not that it was silent; we would not call it mere silence, that brooding and impenetrable darkness charged with doom unrevealed, which is now our silent night, unrelenting to lonely watchers.

Near my gate is a laburnum tree. Once upon a time, on nights of rain such as this, the shower caught in it would turn to stars, and somehow from the brightness of that transient constellation I could get my bearings. I knew where I was. One noticed those small matters in the past, and was innocently thankful for them. Those lights sufficed us. There was something companionable even in the street lamp. But what is it now? You see it, when you are accustomed to the midnight gloom of war, shrouded, a funeral smear of purple in a black world. No bearing can be got from it now. What one looks into is the lightless unknown. I peer into the night and rain for some familiar and reasonable shape to loom--I am permitted to do this, for so far the police do not object to a citizen cherishing a hopeful though fatuous disposition--but my usual reward is but the sound of unseen drainage, as though I were listening to my old landmarks in dissolution. I feel I should not be surprised, when daylight came, to find that the appearance of my neighbourhood had become like Spitzbergen's.

That is why I soon retreat now from my gate, no wiser, bringing in with me on these nights of rain little more than the certainty that we need expect no maroons or bombs; and then, because the act is most unpatriotic in a time of shortage, put on more coal with my fingers, as this makes less noise than a shovel. I choose a pipe, the one I bought in a hurry at Amiens. I choose it for that reason, and because it holds more tobacco than the others; watch the flames, and take stock.

In the winter, as we know, it never rains. It is merely wet weather. Still, that means only a retirement into winter quarters, into those long evenings against which we have hoarded our books, light and warmth in store. Perhaps in the case of the more idle there may be the consideration, pleasant and prolonged, of that other book, known to no other man, not yet written, and perhaps destined to perish, a secret dream. But what are now these books? What now is even that book which is perfect and unwritten? It, too, has lost its light. I am left staring into the fire. The newspapers tell us of a common joy at the coming of Peace. Peace? If she is coming, then we are much obliged to her. I remember during an earlier and wasted joy at a word in France of the coming of Peace agreeing with several young soldiers that Brussels would be the place to meet, to hail there with flagons the arrival of the Dove. But I do not want to be reminded of what has happened since that day. That festival could now have but one celebrant. Then, in another year of the War, in a mood of contrition and dismay, some people began to feel that on the day Peace arrived it would be seemly if she found them on their knees in church. Since that day, too, much has happened; and when Peace does come I suppose most of us will make reasonably certain the bird resembles a dove, and go to bed early--taking another look at the long-lost creature next morning, in the presence of a competent witness, to confirm that we have not been deceived again by another turkey buzzard; and, if that is certain, then let the matter drop.

For in these years, when heavy weather obscures the fixed lights, and we are not certain about our bearings, it is useless to pretend that the darkness which once made us content with a book is now a worse kind of darkness only because intensified by a private shadow. The shadow of a personal grief does not wholly explain its sinister intensity. The night itself is different. It hides a world unknown. If a sun is to rise on that world, then not even a false dawn yet shows. When we stand peering into our night, where the sound of rain and wind is like nothing the memory knows, and may be even the dark tumult portending a day of wrath, we may turn again in solitude to what is left to us, to our books; but not with quiet content. To-morrow we may pull ourselves together. Curiosity about our new world may awaken. We may become adventurous, and make an effort towards greeting the unknown with a cheer, to show it there is no settled ill-feeling. But it has been my experience that when leaving port in dark weather, though the voyage to come was to be novel and interesting, one heard very little cheering from the glum figures working about the deck. The ship is sea-worthy, but she is bleak and foreign. In a week all will be well. We shall have cleared these icy latitudes. The sky will be fairer. We shall have more sun. We shall have become accustomed to our shipmates' unfamiliar faces and ways. It is only the start that is sullen and unpropitious.

And here is Peace coming, and a new world, and there are my books; yet though this pipe after midnight is nearly done, and the fire too, I have not been able to settle on a book. The books are like the ashes on the hearth. And listen to the wind, with its unpromising sounds from the wide and empty desert places! What does any of these old books know about me, in the midst of those portents of a new age? We are all outward bound, and this is the first night of a long voyage, its port unknown.

Even my bookshelves seem strange to-night. They look remarkably like a library I saw once in a house in Richbourg S. Vaast, which, you may remember, was a village near Neuve Chapelle. Those French volumes also survived from circumstances that had passed. They were litter. They had been left behind. I doubted whether, if I tried, I could touch them. They were not within my time. That was on a day more than three years ago--it was July, 1915--and Richbourg had then only just left this world. There was a road without a sign of life; not a movement, except in one house. The front of that house had gone, exposing the hollow inside, the collapsed floors and hanging beams, and showing also a doll with a foolish smirk caught in a wire and dangling from a rafter. The doll danced in hysteric merriment whenever hidden guns were fired. That was the only movement in Richbourg S. Vaast, and the guns made the only sound. I was a survivor from the past, venturing at peril among the wreckage and hardly remembered relics of what used to be familiar. Richbourg was possessed by the power which had overwhelmed it, and which was re-forming it in a changing world. To what was the world changing? There was no clue, except the oppression of my mind, the shock of the guns, and the ecstatic mockery of mirth over ruin by that little idiot doll.

Beyond the sloughing and leprous tower of Richbourg Church, where the ancient dead in the graveyard had been brought to light again, there was a house which seemed in being. I entered it, for I was told by a soldier companion that from a displaced tile in its roof I might see La Bassee. I looked through that gap, and saw La Bassee. It was very near. It was a terracotta smudge. It might have been a brickfield. But it was the Enemy.

What I chiefly remember to-day is only the floor of that upper room from which, through a gap in its wall, I saw the ambush of the enemy. On the floor were scattered, mixed with lumps of plaster, a child's alphabetical blocks. A shoe of the child was among them. There was a window where we dared not show ourselves, though the day was fair without, and by it was an old bureau, open, with its pad of blotting-paper, and some letters, all smothered with fragments of glass and new dust. A few drawers of the desk were open, and the contents had been spilled. Round the walls of the room were bookcases with leaded diamond panes. Whoever was last in the room had left sections of the bookcases open, and there were gaps in the rows of books. Volumes had been taken out, had been dropped on the floor, put on the mantelpiece, or, as I had noticed when coming up to the room, left on the stairs. One volume, still open face upwards, was on the bureau.

I barely glanced at those books. What could they tell me? What did they know about it? Just as they were, open on the floor, tumbled on the stairs, they were telling me all they could. Was there more to be said? Sitting on a bracket in the shadow of a corner, a little bust of Rousseau overlooked the scene with me. In such a place, at such a time, you must make your own interpretation of the change, receiving out of the silence, which is not altered in nature by occasional abominable noises, just whatever your mind wishes to take. There the books are, and the dust on them is of an era which abruptly fell; is still falling.

XVI. The Nobodies

NOVEMBER 11, 1918. The newspapers tell us that to-day the signal to "cease fire" will be given. This news is called "Official," to give us assurance in the fog of myth. Maroons will explode above the City. Then we shall know it is the end of the War. We ought to believe it, because They tell us this; They who do everything for us--who order us what to think and how to act, arrange for our potatoes, settle the coming up and the going down of the sun, and who for years have been taking away our friends to make heroes of them, and worse. They have kept the War going, but now They are going to stop it. We shall know it is stopped when the rockets burst.

Yet "The War" has become a lethargic state of mind for us. We accepted it from the beginning with green-fly, influenza, margarine, calling-up notices, and death. It is as much outside our control as the precession of the equinoxes. We believed confidently in the tumultuous first weeks of the affair that mankind could not stand that strain for more than a few months; but we have learned it is possible to habituate humanity to the long elaboration of any folly, and for men to endure uncomplainingly racking by any cruelty that is devised by society, and for women to support any grief, however senselessly caused. Folly and cruelty become accepted as normal conditions of human existence. They continue superior to criticism, which is frequent enough though seldom overheard. The bitter mockery of the satirists, and even the groans of the victims, are unnoticed by genuine patriots. There seems no reason why those signal rockets should ever burst, no reason why the mornings which waken us to face an old dread, and the nights which contract about us like the strangle of despair, should ever end. We remember the friends we have lost, and cannot see why we should not share with them, in our turn, the punishment imposed by solemn and approved dementia. Why should not the War go on till the earth in final victory turns to the moon the pock-scarred and pallid mask which the moon turns to us?

I was looking, later this morning, at Charing Cross Bridge. It was, as usual, going south to the War. More than four years ago I crossed it on a memorable journey to France. It seemed no different to-day. It was still a Via Dolorosa projecting straight and black over a chasm. While I gazed at it, my mind in the past, a rocket exploded above it. Yes, I saw a burst of black smoke. The guns had ceased?

A tug passing under the bridge began a continuous hooting. Locomotives began to answer the tug deliriously. I could hear a low muttering, the beginning of a tempest, the distant but increasing shouting of a great storm. Two men met in the thoroughfare below my outlook, waved their hats, and each cheered into the face of the other.

Out in the street a stream of men and women poured from every door, and went to swell the main cataract which had risen suddenly in full flood in the Strand. The donkey-barrow of a costermonger passed me, loaded with a bluejacket, a flower-girl, several soldiers, and a Staff captain whose spurred boots wagged joyously over the stern of the barrow. A motor cab followed, two Australian troopers on the roof of that, with a hospital nurse, her cap awry, sitting across the knees of one of them. A girl on the kerb, continuously springing a rattle in a sort of trance, shrieked with laughter at the nurse. Lines of people with linked arms chanted and surged along, bare-headed, or with hats turned into jokes. A private car, a beautiful little saloon in which a lady was solitary, stopped near me, and the lady beckoned with a smile to a Canadian soldier who was close. He first stared in surprise at this fashionable stranger, and then got in beside her with obviously genuine alacrity. The hubbub swelled and rolled in increasing delirium. Out of the upper windows of the Hotel Cecil, a headquarters of the Air Force, a confetti of official forms fell in spasmodic clouds. I returned soon to the empty room of an office where I was likely to be alone; because, now the War was over, while listening to the jollity of Peace which had just arrived, I could not get my thoughts home from France, and what they were I cannot tell.

But there were some other memories, more easily borne. There was that night, for instance, late in the August of 1914, when three of us were getting away from Creil. It was time to go. We were not soldiers. Lying on the floor of a railway carriage I tried to sleep, pillowed involuntarily on someone's boot. I never knew to whom that foot belonged, for the compartment was chaos, like the world. The carriage light was feeble, and the faces I saw above me drooped under the glim, wilted and dingy. The eyes of the dishevelled were shut, and this traveller, counting the pulse of the wheels beneath, presently forgot everything ... there was a crash, and my heart bounded me to my feet. There had been a fortnight of excitements of this kind. A bag fell and struck me back to the floor. Unseen people trampled over me, shouting. Somebody cried: "Here they are!" A cascade of passengers and luggage tumbled over to a station platform.

It was a chilly morning. And where were we? A clock in a tower said it was five. People hurried without apparent reason in all directions. So the world may appear to us if some day we find, to our surprise, that we have returned from the dead. I leaned against a lamppost, my mind gravel-rashed, and waited for something that could be understood. The Germans would do. We heard the enemy was close, and that the railway officials would get us away if they could. The morning became no warmer, there was no coffee, and our tobacco pouches were empty. But at least we were favoured with the chance of watching the French railwaymen at work. This was a junction, and the men moved about as though they were only busy on holiday traffic. They were easy and deliberate. I could see they would hold that line to the last pull of cotton-waste, and would run their trains while there was a mile of track. So we learned gradually that confident invaders are baffled by railwaymen and other common people, such as old women insistent on their cows, almost as much as they are by bayonets. A country's readiness for war may be slight, yet the settled habits of the peaceful Nobodies, which are not reckoned by Imperialists when they are calculating the length of the road to conquest, are strangely tough and obstinate. You could go to a girl at the pigeon-hole of a booking-office in France, demand a ticket for a place which by all the signs might then have fallen behind the van of the German Army, and she would hand the ticket to you as though she had never heard of the War. Then the engine-driver would go on towards the sound of the guns till you wondered, made uneasy by the signs without, whether he was phrenetic and intended to run the enemy down. The train would stop, and while the passengers were listening to the shells the guard would come along and give some advice as to the best thing to do.

A little ahead of the Germans, a train came into that junction and took us away. I fell asleep again, and presently awoke to see a sombre orchard outside my window of our stationary train. It was a group of trees entranced, like a scene before the stage is occupied. The grass in the twilight beneath the trees was rank. My sight fell drowsily to an abandoned _kepi_, and, while wondering what had become of the man who used to wear it, I saw a bright eye slyly shut at me. A wink in the grass! A bearded face was laughing up at me from under the _kepi_. A rifle with a fixed bayonet slid forward. Then I saw the orchard had a secret crop of eyes, which smiled at us from the ground. We moved on, and farewell kisses were blown to us.

Among the laurels of a garden beyond field batteries were in position. We crossed a bridge over a lower road and a stream. Infantry were waiting below for something, and from their attitudes seemed to expect it soon. My fellow-passengers were now awake to these omens. Broad streams of cattle undulated past our train going south, but west. "My poor Paris!" exclaimed a French lady. It was not for themselves these people were sorry. The common sort of people in the train were sorry for Paris, for all their unlucky fellows. The train moved with hesitancy for hours. During one long pause we listened to a cannonade. One burst of sound seemed very close. A young English girl, sitting in a corner with her infant, abruptly handed the child to her husband. She rummaged in a travelling case with the haste of incipient panic. She produced a spirit-lamp, a bowl, and a tin. She had suddenly remembered it was past her baby's feeding time.

Who won the War for us? It was such folk. They turned in docility, with no more than a pause, a pause of ignorance and wonder, of dismay they could hardly conceal, from the accustomed order of their days to form vast armies, to populate innumerable factories for the making of munitions of war, and, while their households came everywhere to ruin, they held stubbornly to the task fate had thrust upon them; yet their august governors and popular guides, frantic and afraid through the dire retribution which had fallen on that monstrous European society which so many of us had thought eternal, abjured and abused the common sort whose efforts were all that could save us. What did they call the Nobodies? Slackers, cowards, rabbits, and field vermin; mean creatures unable to leave their football and their drink. I recall one sombre winter's day of the first November of the War, when a column of wounded Belgian soldiers shambled by me, coming out of the Yser line, on the way to succour which I knew they would not find. The doctors and the hospitals were few. These fellows were in rags which were plastered to their limbs with mud. Their eyes had the vacant look of men who had returned from the grave and who had forgotten this world. The bare feet of some of them left bloody trails on the road. Others clutched their bodies, and the blood drained between their fingers. One dropped dead at my feet. I came home with that in my mind; and the next sunrise, hearing unusual sounds outside, I lifted the blind to a dawn which was cold and ominously scarlet behind skeleton trees. I saw beneath the trees a company of my young neighbours, already in khaki, getting used to the harshness of sergeants, and to the routine of those implacable circumstances which would take them to Neuve Chapelle, to Gallipoli, to Loos, to the Somme; names that had no meaning for us then.

That serious company of young Englishmen making soldiers of themselves in a day with so unpropitious an opening light did not look like national indifference. Those innocents getting used to rifles were as affecting as that single line of bodies I saw across a mile of stubble near Compiegne, where a rearguard of the "Contemptibles" had sacrificed themselves to their comrades. But one could not be sure. I went to find one who could tell me whether England was awake to what confronted it. I remembered he was a quiet observer, that he knew what allowance to make for those patriotic newspapers which so early were holding up in ruinous caricature their country and their countrymen for the world to see and to scorn. He was a scholar, he was a Socialist and a pacifist, he had a sense of humour to keep him balanced. But he had gone. He had enlisted; and he is dead.

It was a common experience. From the day the Germans entered Belgium a dumb resolution settled on our Nobodies. They did not demonstrate. They made long silent queues at the recruiting offices. It is true those offices were not ready for them and turned them away; and when by sheer obstinacy they got into the Army they were put into concentration camps that were as deadly as battle. That did not daunt them, nor turn them from their purpose, whatever that was, for they never said; and the newspapers, by tradition, had no time to find out, being devoted to the words and activities of the Highly Important. We therefore knew nothing of the munition factories that were springing up magically, as in a night, like toadstools, all over the country, and were barely aware that for some mysterious reason the hosts of the enemy were stopped dead on the road to Calais. Whose work was all this? But how should we know? Who can chronicle what Nobody does?