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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tales of War, by Lord Dunsany
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Tales of War
+
+Author: Lord Dunsany
+
+Release Date: May, 2004  [EBook #5713]
+Last Updated: August 18, 2012
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TALES OF WAR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by William McClain
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TALES OF WAR
+
+By Lord Dunsany
+
+
+1918
+
+
+
+
+The Prayer of the Men of Daleswood
+
+
+He said: "There were only twenty houses in Daleswood. A place you
+would scarcely have heard of. A village up top of the hills.
+
+"When the war came there was no more than thirty men there between
+sixteen and forty-five. They all went.
+
+"They all kept together; same battalion, same platoon. They was like
+that in Daleswood. Used to call the hop pickers foreigners, the ones
+that come from London. They used to go past Daleswood, some of them,
+every year, on their way down to the hop fields. Foreigners they used
+to call them. Kept very much to themselves, did the Daleswood people.
+Big woods all round them.
+
+"Very lucky they was, the Daleswood men. They'd lost no more than
+five killed and a good sprinkling of wounded. But all the wounded was
+back again with the platoon. This was up to March when the big
+offensive started.
+
+"It came very sudden. No bombardment to speak of. Just a burst of Tok
+Emmas going off all together and lifting the front trench clean out of
+it; then a barrage behind, and the Boche pouring over in thousands.
+'Our luck is holding good,' the Daleswood men said, for their trench
+wasn't getting it at all. But the platoon on their right got it. And
+it sounded bad too a long way beyond that. No one could be quite sure.
+But the platoon on their right was getting it: that was sure enough.
+
+"And then the Boche got through them altogether. A message came to
+say so. 'How are things on the right?' they said to the runner. 'Bad,'
+said the runner, and he went back, though Lord knows what he went back
+to. The Boche was through right enough. 'We'll have to make a
+defensive flank,' said the platoon commander. He was a Daleswood man
+too. Came from the big farm. He slipped down a communication trench
+with a few men, mostly bombers. And they reckoned they wouldn't see
+any of them any more, for the Boche was on the right, thick as
+starlings.
+
+"The bullets were snapping over thick to keep them down while the
+Boche went on, on the right: machine guns, of course. The barrage was
+screaming well over and dropping far back, and their wire was still
+all right just in front of them, when they put up a head to look.
+There was the left platoon of the battalion. One doesn't bother,
+somehow, so much about another battalion as one's own. One's own gets
+sort of homely. And there they were wondering how their own officer
+was getting on, and the few fellows with them, on his defensive flank.
+The bombs were going off thick. All the Daleswood men were firing half
+right. It sounded from the noise as if it couldn't last long, as if it
+would soon be decisive, and the battle be won, or lost, just there on
+the right, and perhaps the war ended. They didn't notice the left.
+Nothing to speak of.
+
+"Then a runner came from the left. 'Hullo!' they said, 'How are
+things over there?'
+
+"'The Boche is through,' he said. 'Where's the officer?' 'Through!'
+they said. It didn't seem possible. However did he do that? they
+thought. And the runner went on to the right to look for the officer.
+
+"And then the barrage shifted further back. The shells still screamed
+over them, but the bursts were further away. That is always a relief.
+Probably they felt it. But it was bad for all that. Very bad. It meant
+the Boche was well past them. They realized it after a while.
+
+"They and their bit of wire were somehow just between two waves of
+attack. Like a bit of stone on the beach with the sea coming in. A
+platoon was nothing to the Boche; nothing much perhaps just then to
+anybody. But it was the whole of Daleswood for one long generation.
+
+"The youngest full-grown man they had left behind was fifty, and some
+one had heard that he had died since the war. There was no one else in
+Daleswood but women and children, and boys up to seventeen.
+
+"The bombing had stopped on their right; everything was quieter, and
+the barrage further away. When they began to realize what that meant
+they began to talk of Daleswood. And then they thought that when all
+of them were gone there would be nobody who would remember Daleswood
+just as it used to be. For places alter a little, woods grow, and
+changes come, trees get cut down, old people die; new houses are built
+now and then in place of a yew tree, or any old thing, that used to be
+there before; and one way or another the old things go; and all the
+time you have people thinking that the old times were best, and the
+old ways when they were young. And the Daleswood men were beginning to
+say, 'Who would there be to remember it just as it was?'
+
+"There was no gas, the wind being wrong for it, so they were able to
+talk, that is if they shouted, for the bullets alone made as much
+noise as breaking up an old shed, crisper like, more like new timber
+breaking; and the shells of course was howling all the time, that is
+the barrage that was bursting far back. The trench still stank of
+them.
+
+"They said that one of them must go over and put his hands up, or run
+away if he could, whichever he liked, and when the war was over he
+would go to some writing fellow, one of those what makes a living by
+it, and tell him all about Daleswood, just as it used to be, and he
+would write it out proper and there it would be for always. They all
+agreed to that. And then they talked a bit, as well as they could
+above that awful screeching, to try and decide who it should be. The
+eldest, they said, would know Daleswood best. But he said, and they
+came to agree with him, that it would be a sort of waste to save the
+life of a man what had had his good time, and they ought to send the
+youngest, and they would tell him all they knew of Daleswood before
+his time, and everything would be written down just the same and the
+old time remembered.
+
+"They had the idea somehow that the women thought more of their own
+man and their children and the washing and what-not; and that the deep
+woods and the great hills beyond, and the plowing and the harvest and
+snaring rabbits in winter and the sports in the village in summer, and
+the hundred things that pass the time of one generation in an old, old
+place like Daleswood, meant less to them than the men. Anyhow they did
+not quite seem to trust them with the past.
+
+"The youngest of them was only just eighteen. That was Dick. They
+told him to get out and put his hands up and be quick getting across,
+as soon as they had told him one or two things about the old time in
+Daleswood that a youngster like him wouldn't know.
+
+"Well, Dick said he wasn't going, and was making trouble about it, so
+they told Fred to go. Back, they told him, was best, and come up
+behind the Boche with his hands up; they would be less likely to shoot
+when it was back towards their own supports.
+
+"Fred wouldn't go, and so on with the rest. Well, they didn't waste
+time quarrelling, time being scarce, and they said what was to be
+done? There was chalk where they were, low down in the trench, a
+little brown clay on the top of it. There was a great block of it
+loose near a shelter. They said they would carve with their knives on
+the big bowlder of chalk all that they knew about Daleswood. They
+would write where it was and just what it was like, and they would
+write something of all those little things that pass with a
+generation. They reckoned on having the time for it. It would take a
+direct hit with something large, what they call big stuff, to do any
+harm to that bowlder. They had no confidence in paper, it got so
+messed up when you were hit; besides, the Boche had been using
+thermite. Burns, that does.
+
+"They'd one or two men that were handy at carving chalk; used to do
+the regimental crest and pictures of Hindenburg, and all that. They
+decided they'd do it in reliefs.
+
+"They started smoothing the chalk. They had nothing more to do but
+just to think what to write. It was a great big bowlder with plenty of
+room on it. The Boche seemed not to know that they hadn't killed the
+Daleswood men, just as the sea mightn't know that one stone stayed dry
+at the coming in of the tide. A gap between two divisions probably.
+
+"Harry wanted to tell of the woods more than anything. He was afraid
+they might cut them down because of the war, and no one would know of
+the larks they had had there as boys. Wonderful old woods they were,
+with a lot of Spanish chestnut growing low, and tall old oaks over it.
+Harry wanted them to write down what the foxgloves were like in the
+wood at the end of summer, standing there in the evening, 'Great
+solemn rows,' he said, 'all odd in the dusk. All odd in the evening,
+going there after work; and makes you think of fairies.' There was
+lots of things about those woods, he said, that ought to be put down
+if people were to remember Daleswood as it used to be when they knew
+it. What were the good old days without those woods? he said.
+
+"But another wanted to tell of the time when they cut the hay with
+scythes, working all those long days at the end of June; there would
+be no more of that, he said, with machines come in and all.
+
+"There was room to tell of all that and the woods too, said the
+others, so long as they put it short like.
+
+"And another wanted to tell of the valleys beyond the wood, far
+afield where the men went working; the women would remember the hay.
+The great valleys he'd tell of. It was they that made Daleswood. The
+valleys beyond the wood and the twilight on them in summer. Slopes
+covered with mint and thyme, all solemn at evening. A hare on them
+perhaps, sitting as though they were his, then lolloping slowly away.
+It didn't seem from the way he told of those old valleys that he
+thought they could ever be to other folk what they were to the
+Daleswood men in the days he remembered. He spoke of them as though
+there were something in them, besides the mint and the thyme and the
+twilight and hares, that would not stay after these men were gone,
+though he did not say what it was. Scarcely hinted it even.
+
+"And still the Boche did nothing to the Daleswood men. The bullets
+had ceased altogether. That made it much quieter. The shells still
+snarled over, bursting far, far away.
+
+"And Bob said tell of Daleswood itself, the old village, with queer
+chimneys, of red brick, in the wood. There weren't houses like that
+nowadays. They'd be building new ones and spoiling it, likely, after
+the war. And that was all he had to say.
+
+"And nobody was for not putting down anything any one said. It was
+all to go in on the chalk, as much as would go in the time. For they
+all sort of understood that the Daleswood of what they called the good
+old time was just the memories that those few men had of the days they
+had spent there together. And that was the Daleswood they loved, and
+wanted folks to remember. They were all agreed as to that. And then
+they said how was they to write it down. And when it came to writing
+there was so much to be said, not spread over a lot of paper I don't
+mean, but going down so deep like, that it seemed to them how their
+own talk wouldn't be good enough to say it. And they knew no other,
+and didn't know what to do. I reckon they'd been reading magazines and
+thought that writing had to be like that muck. Anyway, they didn't
+know what to do. I reckon their talk would be good enough for
+Daleswood when they loved Daleswood like that. But they didn't, and
+they were puzzled.
+
+"The Boche was miles away behind them now, and his barrage with him.
+Still in front he did nothing.
+
+"They talked it all over and over, did the Daleswood men. They tried
+everything. But somehow or other they couldn't get near what they
+wanted to say about old summer evenings. Time wore on. The bowlder was
+smooth and ready, and that whole generation of Daleswood men could
+find no words to say what was in their hearts about Daleswood. There
+wasn't time to waste. And the only thing they thought of in the end
+was 'Please, God, remember Daleswood just like it used to be.' And
+Bill and Harry carved that on the chalk between them.
+
+"What happened to the Daleswood men? Why, nothing. There come one of
+them counter-attacks, a regular bastard for Jerry. The French made it
+and did the Boche in proper. I got the story from a man with a hell of
+a great big hammer, long afterwards when that trench was well behind
+our line. He was smashing up a huge great chunk of chalk because he
+said they all felt it was so damn silly."
+
+
+
+
+The Road
+
+
+The battery Sergeant-Major was practically asleep. He was all worn out
+by the continuous roar of bombardments that had been shaking the
+dugouts and dazing his brains for weeks. He was pretty well fed up.
+
+The officer commanding the battery, a young man in a very neat uniform
+and of particularly high birth, came up and spat in his face. The
+Sergeant-Major sprang to attention, received an order, and took a
+stick at once and beat up the tired men. For a message had come to the
+battery that some English (God punish them!) were making a road at X.
+
+The gun was fired. It was one of those unlucky shots that come on days
+when our luck is out. The shell, a 5.9, lit in the midst of the British
+working party. It did the Germans little good. It did not stop the
+deluge of shells that was breaking up their guns and was driving
+misery down like a wedge into their spirits. It did not improve the
+temper of the officer commanding the battery, so that the men suffered
+as acutely as ever under the Sergeant-Major. But it stopped the road
+for that day.
+
+I seemed to see that road going on in a dream.
+
+Another working party came along next day, with clay pipes and got to
+work; and next day and the day after. Shells came, but went short or
+over; the shell holes were neatly patched up; the road went on. Here
+and there a tree had to be cut, but not often, not many of them were
+left; it was mostly digging and grubbing up roots, and pushing
+wheelbarrows along planks and duck-boards, and filling up with stones.
+Sometimes the engineers would come: that was when streams were
+crossed. The engineers made their bridges, and the infantry working
+party went on with the digging and laying down stones. It was
+monotonous work. Contours altered, soil altered, even the rock beneath
+it, but the desolation never; they always worked in desolation and
+thunder. And so the road went on.
+
+They came to a wide river. They went through a great forest. They
+passed the ruins of what must have been quite fine towns, big
+prosperous towns with universities in them. I saw the infantry working
+party with their stumpy clay pipes, in my dream, a long way on from
+where that shell had lit, which stopped the road for a day. And behind
+them curious changes came over the road at X. You saw the infantry
+going up to the trenches, and going back along it into reserve. They
+marched at first, but in a few days they were going up in motors, grey
+busses with shuttered windows. And then the guns came along it, miles
+and miles of guns, following after the thunder which was further off
+over the hills. And then one day the cavalry came by. Then stores in
+wagons, the thunder muttering further and further away. I saw
+farm-carts going down the road at X. And then one day all manner of
+horses and traps and laughing people, farmers and women and boys all
+going by to X. There was going to be a fair.
+
+And far away the road was growing longer and longer amidst, as always,
+desolation and thunder. And one day far away from X the road grew very
+fine indeed. It was going proudly through a mighty city, sweeping in
+like a river; you would not think that it ever remembered duck-boards.
+There were great palaces there, with huge armorial eagles blazoned in
+stone, and all along each side of the road was a row of statues of
+kings. And going down the road towards the palace, past the statues of
+the kings, a tired procession was riding, full of the flags of the
+Allies. And I looked at the flags in my dream, out of national pride
+to see whether we led, or whether France or America. America went
+before us, but I could not see the Union Jack in the van nor the
+Tricolour either, nor the Stars and Stripes: Belgium led and then
+Serbia, they that had suffered most.
+
+And before the flags, and before the generals, I saw marching along on
+foot the ghosts of the working party that were killed at X, gazing
+about them in admiration as they went, at the great city and at the
+palaces. And one man, wondering at the Sieges Allee, turned round to
+the Lance Corporal in charge of the party: "That is a fine road that
+we made, Frank," he said.
+
+
+
+
+An Imperial Monument
+
+
+It is an early summer's morning: the dew is all over France: the train
+is going eastwards. They are quite slow, those troop trains, and there
+are few embankments or cuttings in those flat plains, so that you seem
+to be meandering along through the very life of the people. The roads
+come right down to the railways, and the sun is shining brightly over
+the farms and the people going to work along the roads, so that you
+can see their faces clearly as the slow train passes them by.
+
+They are all women and boys that work on the farms; sometimes perhaps
+you see a very old man, but nearly always women and boys; they are out
+working early. They straighten up from their work as we go by and lift
+their hands to bless us.
+
+We pass by long rows of the tall French poplars, their branches cut
+away all up the trunk, leaving only an odd round tuft at the top of
+the tree; but little branches are growing all up the trunk now, and
+the poplars are looking unkempt. It would be the young men who would
+cut the branches of the poplars. They would cut them for some useful
+thrifty purpose that I do not know; and then they would cut them
+because they were always cut that way, as long ago as the times of the
+old men's tales about France; but chiefly, I expect, because youth
+likes to climb difficult trees; that is why they are clipped so very
+high. And the trunks are all unkempt now.
+
+We go on by many farms with their shapely red-roofed houses; they
+stand there, having the air of the homes of an ancient people; they
+would not be out of keeping with any romance that might come, or any
+romance that has come in the long story of France, and the girls of
+those red-roofed houses work all alone in the fields.
+
+We pass by many willows and come to a great marsh. In a punt on some
+open water an old man is angling. We come to fields again, and then to
+a deep wood. France smiles about us in the open sunlight.
+
+But towards evening we pass over the border of this pleasant country
+into a tragical land of destruction and gloom. It is not only that
+murder has walked here to and fro for years, until all the fields are
+ominous with it, but the very fields themselves have been mutilated
+until they are unlike fields, the woods have been shattered right down
+to the anemones, and the houses have been piled in heaps of rubbish,
+and the heaps of rubbish have been scattered by shells. We see no more
+trees, no more houses, no more women, no cattle even now. We have come
+to the abomination of desolation. And over it broods, and will
+probably brood for ever, accursed by men and accursed by the very
+fields, the hyena-like memory of the Kaiser, who has whitened so many
+bones.
+
+It may be some satisfaction to his selfishness to know that the
+monument to it cannot pass away, to know that the shell holes go too
+deep to be washed away by the healing rains of years, to know that the
+wasted German generations will not in centuries gather up what has
+been spilt on the Somme, or France recover in the sunshine of many
+summers from all the misery that his devilish folly has caused. It is
+likely to be to such as him a source of satisfaction, for the truly
+vain care only to be talked of in many mouths; they hysterically love
+to be thought of, and the notice of mankind is to them a mirror which
+reflects their futile postures. The admiration of fools they love, and
+the praise of a slavelike people, but they would sooner be hated by
+mankind than be ignored and forgotten as is their due. And the truly
+selfish care only for their imperial selves.
+
+Let us leave him to pass in thought from ruin to ruin, from wasted
+field to field, from crater to crater; let us leave his fancy haunting
+cemeteries in the stricken lands of the world, to find what glee he
+can in this huge manifestation of his imperial will.
+
+We neither know to what punishment he moves nor can even guess what
+fitting one is decreed. But the time is surely appointed and the
+place. Poor trifler with Destiny, who ever had so much to dread?
+
+
+
+
+A Walk to the Trenches
+
+
+To stand at the beginning of a road is always wonderful; for on all
+roads before they end experience lies, sometimes adventure. And a
+trench, even as a road, has its beginnings somewhere. In the heart of
+a very strange country you find them suddenly. A trench may begin in
+the ruins of a house, may run up out of a ditch; may be cut into a
+rise of ground sheltered under a hill, and is built in many ways by
+many men. As to who is the best builder of trenches there can be
+little doubt, and any British soldier would probably admit that for
+painstaking work and excellence of construction there are few to rival
+Von Hindenburg. His Hindenburg line is a model of neatness and
+comfort, and it would be only a very ungrateful British soldier who
+would deny it.
+
+You come to the trenches out of strangely wasted lands, you come
+perhaps to a wood in an agony of contortions, black, branchless,
+sepulchral trees, and then no more trees at all. The country after
+that is still called Picardy or Belgium, still has its old name on the
+map as though it smiled there yet, sheltering cities and hamlet and
+radiant with orchards and gardens, but the country named Belgium--or
+whatever it be--is all gone away, and there stretches for miles
+instead one of the world's great deserts, a thing to take its place no
+longer with smiling lands, but with Sahara, Gobi, Kalahari, and the
+Karoo; not to be thought of as Picardy, but more suitably to be named
+the Desert of Wilhelm. Through these sad lands one goes to come to the
+trenches. Overhead floats until it is chased away an aeroplane with
+little black crosses, that you can scarcely see at his respectful
+height, peering to see what more harm may be done in the desolation
+and ruin. Little flashes sparkle near him, white puffs spread out
+round the flashes: and he goes, and our airmen go away after him;
+black puffs break out round our airmen. Up in the sky you hear a faint
+tap-tapping. They have got their machine guns working.
+
+You see many things there that are unusual in deserts: a good road, a
+railway, perhaps a motor bus; you see what was obviously once a
+village, and hear English songs, but no one who has not seen it can
+imagine the country in which the trenches lie, unless he bear a desert
+clearly in mind, a desert that has moved from its place on the map by
+some enchantment of wizardry, and come down on a smiling country.
+Would it not be glorious to be a Kaiser and be able to do things like
+that?
+
+Past all manner of men, past no trees, no hedges, no fields, but only
+one field from skyline to skyline that has been harrowed by war, one
+goes with companions that this event in our history has drawn from all
+parts of the earth. On that road you may hear all in one walk where is
+the best place to get lunch in the City; you may hear how they laid a
+drag for some Irish pack, and what the Master said; you may hear a
+farmer lamenting over the harm that rhinoceroses do to his coffee
+crop; you may hear Shakespeare quoted and La vie Parisienne.
+
+In the village you see a lot of German orders, with their silly notes
+of exclamation after them, written up on notice boards among the
+ruins. Ruins and German orders. That turning movement of Von Kluck's
+near Paris in 1914 was a mistake. Had he not done it we might have had
+ruins and German orders everywhere. And yet Von Kluck may comfort
+himself with the thought that it is not by his mistakes that Destiny
+shapes the world: such a nightmare as a world-wide German domination
+can have had no place amongst the scheme of things.
+
+Beyond the village the batteries are thick. A great howitzer near the
+road lifts its huge muzzle slowly, fires and goes down again, and
+lifts again and fires. It is as though Polyphemus had lifted his huge
+shape slowly, leisurely, from the hillside where he was sitting, and
+hurled the mountain top, and sat down again. If he is firing pretty
+regularly you are sure to get the blast of one of them as you go by,
+and it can be a very strong wind indeed. One's horse, if one is
+riding, does not very much like it, but I have seen horses far more
+frightened by a puddle on the road when coming home from hunting in
+the evening: one 12-inch howitzer more or less in France calls for no
+great attention from man or beast.
+
+And so we come in sight of the support trenches where we are to dwell
+for a week before we go on for another mile over the hills, where the
+black fountains are rising.
+
+
+
+
+A Walk in Picardy
+
+
+Picture any village you know. In such a village as that the trench
+begins. That is to say, there are duck-boards along a ditch, and the
+ditch runs into a trench. Only the village is no longer there. It was
+like some village you know, though perhaps a little merrier, because
+it was further south and nearer the sun; but it is all gone now. And
+the trench runs out of the ruins, and is called Windmill Avenue. There
+must have been a windmill standing there once.
+
+When you come from the ditch to the trench you leave the weeds and
+soil and trunks of willows and see the bare chalk. At the top of those
+two white walls is a foot or so of brown clay. The brown clay grows
+deeper as you come to the hills, until the chalk has disappeared
+altogether. Our alliance with France is new in the history of man, but
+it is an old, old union in the history of the hills. White chalk with
+brown clay on top has dipped and gone under the sea; and the hills of
+Sussex and Kent are one with the hills of Picardy.
+
+And so you may pass through the chalk that lies in that desolate lane
+with memories of more silent and happier hills; it all depends on what
+the chalk means to you: you may be unfamiliar with it and in that case
+you will not notice it; or you may have been born among those
+thyme-scented hills and yet have no errant fancies, so that you will
+not think of the hills that watched you as a child, but only keep your
+mind on the business in hand; that is probably best.
+
+You come after a while to other trenches: notice boards guide you, and
+you keep to Windmill Avenue. You go by Pear Lane, Cherry Lane, and
+Plum Lane. Pear trees, cherry trees and plum trees must have grown
+there. You are passing through either wild lanes banked with briar,
+over which these various trees peered one by one and showered their
+blossoms down at the end of spring, and girls would have gathered the
+fruit when it ripened, with the help of tall young men; or else you
+are passing through an old walled garden, and the pear and the cherry
+and plum were growing against the wall, looking southwards all through
+the summer. There is no way whatever of telling which it was; it is
+all one in war; whatever was there is gone; there remain to-day, and
+survive, the names of those three trees only. We come next to Apple
+Lane. You must not think that an apple tree ever grew there, for we
+trace here the hand of the wit, who by naming Plum Lane's neighbour
+"Apple Lane" merely commemorates the inseparable connection that
+plum has with apple forever in the minds of all who go to modern war.
+For by mixing apple with plum the manufacturer sees the opportunity of
+concealing more turnip in the jam, as it were, at the junction of the
+two forces, than he might be able to do without this unholy alliance.
+
+We come presently to the dens of those who trouble us (but only for
+our own good), the dugouts of the trench mortar batteries. It is noisy
+when they push up close to the front line and play for half an hour or
+so with their rivals: the enemy sends stuff back, our artillery join
+in; it is as though, while you were playing a game of croquet, giants
+hundreds of feet high, some of them friendly, some unfriendly,
+carnivorous and hungry, came and played football on your croquet lawn.
+
+We go on past Battalion Headquarters, and past the dugouts and
+shelters of various people having business with History, past stores
+of bombs and the many other ingredients with which history is made,
+past men coming down who are very hard to pass, for the width of two
+men and two packs is the width of a communication trench and sometimes
+an inch over; past two men carrying a flying pig slung on a pole
+between them; by many turnings; and Windmill Avenue brings you at last
+to Company Headquarters in a dugout that Hindenburg made with his
+German thoroughness.
+
+And there, after a while, descends the Tok Emma man, the officer
+commanding a trench mortar battery, and is given perchance a whiskey
+and water, and sits on the best empty box that we have to offer, and
+lights one of our cigarettes.
+
+"There's going to be a bit of a strafe at 5.30," he says.
+
+
+
+
+What Happened on the Night of the Twenty-Seventh
+
+
+The night of the twenty-seventh was Dick Cheeser's first night on
+sentry. The night was far gone when he went on duty; in another hour
+they would stand to. Dick Cheeser had camouflaged his age when he
+enlisted: he was barely eighteen. A wonderfully short time ago he was
+quite a little boy; now he was in a frontline trench. It hadn't seemed
+that things were going to alter like that. Dick Cheeser was a plowboy:
+long brown furrows over haughty, magnificent downs seemed to stretch
+away into the future as far as his mind could see. No narrow outlook
+either, for the life of nations depends upon those brown furrows. But
+there are the bigger furrows that Mars makes, the long brown trenches
+of war; the life of nations depends on these too; Dick Cheeser had
+never pictured these. He had heard talk about a big navy and a lot of
+Dreadnoughts; silly nonsense he called it. What did one want a big
+navy for? To keep the Germans out, some people said. But the Germans
+weren't coming. If they wanted to come, why didn't they come? Anybody
+could see that they never did come. Some of Dick Cheeser's pals had
+votes.
+
+And so he had never pictured any change from plowing the great downs;
+and here was war at last, and here was he. The Corporal showed him
+where to stand, told him to keep a good lookout and left him.
+
+And there was Dick Cheeser alone in the dark with an army in front of
+him, eighty yards away: and, if all tales were true, a pretty horrible
+army.
+
+The night was awfully still. I use the adverb not as Dick Cheeser
+would have used it. The stillness awed him. There had not been a shell
+all night. He put his head up over the parapet and waited. Nobody
+fired at him. He felt that the night was waiting for him. He heard
+voices going along the trench: some one said it was a black night: the
+voices died away. A mere phrase; the night wasn't black at all, it was
+grey. Dick Cheeser was staring at it, and the night was staring back
+at him, and seemed to be threatening him; it was grey, grey as an old
+cat that they used to have at home, and as artful. Yes, thought Dick
+Cheeser, it was an artful night; that was what was wrong with it. If
+shells had come or the Germans, or anything at all, you would know how
+to take it; but that quiet mist over huge valleys, and stillness!
+Anything might happen. Dick waited and waited, and the night waited
+too. He felt they were watching each other, the night and he. He felt
+that each was crouching. His mind slipped back to the woods on hills
+he knew. He was watching with eyes and ears and imagination to see
+what would happen in No Man's Land under that ominous mist: but his
+mind took a peep for all that at the old woods that he knew. He
+pictured himself, he and a band of boys, chasing squirrels again in
+the summer. They used to chase a squirrel from tree to tree, throwing
+stones, till they tired it: and then they might hit it with a stone:
+usually not. Sometimes the squirrel would hide, and a boy would have
+to climb after it. It was great sport, thought Dick Cheeser. What a
+pity he hadn't had a catapult in those days, he thought. Somehow the
+years when he had not had a catapult seemed all to be wasted years.
+With a catapult one might get the squirrel almost at once, with luck:
+and what a great thing that would be. All the other boys would come
+round to look at the squirrel, and to look at the catapult, and ask
+him how he did it. He wouldn't have to say much, there would be the
+squirrel; no boasting would be necessary with the squirrel lying dead.
+It might spread to other things, even rabbits; almost anything, in
+fact. He would certainly get a catapult first thing when he got home.
+A little wind blew in the night, too cold for summer. It blew away, as
+it were, the summer of Dick's memories; blew away hills and woods and
+squirrel. It made for a moment a lane in the mist over No Man's Land.
+Dick Cheeser peered down it, but it closed again. "No," Night seemed
+to say, "you don't guess my secret." And the awful hush intensified.
+"What would they do?" thought the sentry. "What were they planning
+in all those miles of silence?" Even the Verys were few. When one
+went up, far hills seemed to sit and brood over the valley: their
+black shapes seemed to know what would happen in the mist and seemed
+sworn not to say. The rocket faded, and the hills went back into
+mystery again, and Dick Cheeser peered level again over the ominous
+valley.
+
+All the dangers and sinister shapes and evil destinies, lurking
+between the armies in that mist, that the sentry faced that night
+cannot be told until the history of the war is written by a historian
+who can see the mind of the soldier. Not a shell fell all night, no
+German stirred; Dick Cheeser was relieved at "Stand to" and his
+comrades stood to beside him, and soon it was wide, golden, welcome
+dawn.
+
+And for all the threats of night the thing that happened was one that
+the lonely sentry had never foreseen: in the hour of his watching Dick
+Cheeser, though scarcely eighteen, became a full-grown man.
+
+
+
+
+Standing To
+
+
+One cannot say that one time in the trenches is any more tense than
+another. One cannot take any one particular hour and call it, in
+modern nonsensical talk, "typical hour in the trenches." The routine
+of the trenches has gone on too long for that. The tensest hour ought
+to be half an hour before dawn, the hour when attacks are expected and
+men stand to. It is an old convention of war that that is the
+dangerous hour, the hour when defenders are weakest and attack most to
+be feared. For darkness favours the attackers then as night favours
+the lion, and then dawn comes and they can hold their gains in the
+light. Therefore in every trench in every war the garrison is prepared
+in that menacing hour, watching in greater numbers than they do the
+whole night through. As the first lark lifts from meadows they stand
+there in the dark. Whenever there is any war in any part of the world
+you may be sure that at that hour men crowd to their parapets: when
+sleep is deepest in cities they are watching there.
+
+When the dawn shimmers a little, and a grey light comes, and widens,
+and all of a sudden figures become distinct, and the hour of the
+attack that is always expected is gone, then perhaps some faint
+feeling of gladness stirs the newest of the recruits; but chiefly the
+hour passes like all the other hours there, an unnoticed fragment of
+the long, long routine that is taken with resignation mingled with
+jokes.
+
+Dawn comes shy with a wind scarce felt, dawn faint and strangely
+perceptible, feeble and faint in the east while men still watch the
+darkness. When did the darkness go? When did the dawn grow golden? It
+happened as in a moment, a moment you did not see. Guns flash no
+longer: the sky is gold and serene; dawn stands there like Victory
+that will shine, on one of these years when the Kaiser goes the way of
+the older curses of earth. Dawn, and the men unfix bayonets as they
+step down from the fire-step and clean their rifles with
+pull-throughs. Not all together, but section by section, for it would
+not do for a whole company to be caught cleaning their rifles at dawn,
+or at any other time.
+
+They rub off the mud or the rain that has come at night on their
+rifles, they detach the magazine and see that its spring is working,
+they take out the breechblock and oil it, and put back everything
+clean: and another night is gone; it is one day nearer victory.
+
+
+
+
+The Splendid Traveller
+
+
+A traveller threw his cloak over his shoulder and came down slopes of
+gold in El Dorado. From incredible heights he came. He came from where
+the peaks of the pure gold mountain shone a little red with the
+sunset; from crag to crag of gold he stepped down slowly. Sheer out of
+romance he came through the golden evening.
+
+It was only an incident of every day; the sun had set or was setting,
+the air turned chill, and a battalion's bugles were playing
+"Retreat" when this knightly stranger, a British aeroplane, dipped,
+and went homeward over the infantry. That beautiful evening call, and
+the golden cloud bank towering, and that adventurer coming home in the
+cold, happening all together, revealed in a flash the fact (which
+hours of thinking sometimes will not bring) that we live in such a
+period of romance as the troubadours would have envied.
+
+He came, that British airman, over the border, sheer over No Man's
+Land and the heads of the enemy and the mysterious land behind,
+snatching the secrets that the enemy would conceal. Either he had
+defeated the German airmen who would have stopped his going, or they
+had not dared to try. Who knows what he had done? He had been abroad
+and was coming home in the evening, as he did every day.
+
+Even when all its romance has been sifted from an age (as the
+centuries sift) and set apart from the trivial, and when all has been
+stored by the poets; even then what has any of them more romantic than
+these adventurers in the evening air, coming home in the twilight with
+the black shells bursting below?
+
+The infantry look up with the same vague wonder with which children
+look at dragon flies; sometimes they do not look at all, for all that
+comes in France has its part with the wonder of a terrible story as
+well as with the incidents of the day, incidents that recur year in
+and year out, too often for us to notice them. If a part of the moon
+were to fall off in the sky and come tumbling to earth, the comment on
+the lips of the imperturbable British watchers that have seen so much
+would be, "Hullo, what is Jerry up to now?"
+
+And so the British aeroplane glides home in the evening, and the light
+fades from the air, and what is left of the poplars grows dark against
+the sky, and what is left of the houses grows more mournful in the
+gloaming, and night comes, and with it the sounds of thunder, for the
+airman has given his message to the artillery. It is as though Hermes
+had gone abroad sailing upon his sandals, and had found some bad land
+below those winged feet wherein men did evil and kept not the laws of
+gods or men; and he had brought this message back and the gods were
+angry.
+
+For the wars we fight to-day are not like other wars, and the wonders
+of them are unlike other wonders. If we do not see in them the saga
+and epic, how shall we tell of them?
+
+England
+
+"And then we used to have sausages," said the Sergeant.
+
+"And mashed?" said the Private.
+
+"Yes," said the Sergeant, "and beer. And then we used to go home.
+It was grand in the evenings. We used to go along a lane that was full
+of them wild roses. And then we come to the road where the houses
+were. They all had their bit of a garden, every house."
+
+"Nice, I calls it, a garden," the Private said.
+
+"Yes," said the Sergeant, "they all had their garden. It came right
+down to the road. Wooden palings: none of that there wire."
+
+"I hates wire," said the Private.
+
+"They didn't have none of it," the N. C. O. went on. "The gardens
+came right down to the road, looking lovely. Old Billy Weeks he had
+them tall pale-blue flowers in his garden nearly as high as a man."
+
+"Hollyhocks?" said the Private.
+
+"No, they wasn't hollyhocks. Lovely they were. We used to stop and
+look at them, going by every evening. He had a path up the middle of
+his garden paved with red tiles, Billy Weeks had; and these tall blue
+flowers growing the whole way along it, both sides like. They was a
+wonder. Twenty gardens there must have been, counting them all; but
+none to touch Billy Weeks with his pale-blue flowers. There was an old
+windmill away to the left. Then there were the swifts sailing by
+overhead and screeching: just about as high again as the houses. Lord,
+how them birds did fly. And there was the other young fellows, what
+were not out walking, standing about by the roadside, just doing
+nothing at all. One of them had a flute: Jim Booker, he was. Those
+were great days. The bats used to come out, flutter, flutter, flutter;
+and then there'd be a star or two; and the smoke from the chimneys
+going all grey; and a little cold wind going up and down like the
+bats; and all the colour going out of things; and the woods looking
+all strange, and a wonderful quiet in them, and a mist coming up from
+the stream. It's a queer time that. It's always about that time, the
+way I see it: the end of the evening in the long days, and a star or
+two, and me and my girl going home.
+
+"Wouldn't you like to talk about things for a bit the way you
+remember them?"
+
+"Oh, no, Sergeant," said the other, "you go on. You do bring it all
+back so."
+
+"I used to bring her home," the Sergeant said, "to her father's
+house. Her father was keeper there, and they had a house in the wood.
+A fine house with queer old tiles on it, and a lot of large friendly
+dogs. I knew them all by name, same as they knew me. I used to walk
+home then along the side of the wood. The owls would be about; you
+could hear them yelling. They'd float out of the wood like, sometimes:
+all large and white."
+
+"I knows them," said the Private.
+
+"I saw a fox once so close I could nearly touch him, walking like he
+was on velvet. He just slipped out of the wood."
+
+"Cunning old brute," said the Private.
+
+"That's the time to be out," said the Sergeant. "Ten o'clock on a
+summer's night, and the night full of noises, not many of them, but
+what there is, strange, and coming from a great way off, through the
+quiet, with nothing to stop them. Dogs barking, owls hooting, an old
+cart; and then just once a sound that you couldn't account for at all,
+not anyhow. I've heard sounds on nights like that that nobody 'ud
+think you'd heard, nothing like the flute that young Booker had,
+nothing like anything on earth."
+
+"I know," said the Private.
+
+"I never told any one before, because they wouldn't believe you. But
+it doesn't matter now. There'd be a light in the window to guide me
+when I got home. I'd walk up through the flowers of our garden. We had
+a lovely garden. Wonderful white and strange the flowers looked of a
+nighttime."
+
+"You bring it all back wonderful," said the Private.
+
+"It's a great thing to have lived," said the Sergeant.
+
+"Yes, Sergeant," said the other, "I wouldn't have missed it, not
+for anything."
+
+For five days the barrage had rained down behind them: they were
+utterly cut off and had no hope of rescue: their food was done, and
+they did not know where they were.
+
+
+
+
+Shells
+
+
+When the aeroplanes are home and the sunset has flared away, and it is
+cold, and night comes down over France, you notice the guns more than
+you do by day, or else they are actually more active then, I do not
+know which it is.
+
+It is then as though a herd of giants, things of enormous height, came
+out from lairs in the earth and began to play with the hills. It is as
+though they picked up the tops of the hills in their hands and then
+let them drop rather slowly. It is exactly like hills falling. You see
+the flashes all along the sky, and then that lumping thump as though
+the top of the hill had been let drop, not all in one piece, but
+crumbled a little as it would drop from your hands if you were three
+hundred feet high and were fooling about in the night, spoiling what
+it had taken so long to make. That is heavy stuff bursting, a little
+way off.
+
+If you are anywhere near a shell that is bursting, you can hear in it
+a curious metallic ring. That applies to the shells of either side,
+provided that you are near enough, though usually of course it is the
+hostile shell and not your own that you are nearest to, and so one
+distinguishes them. It is curious, after such a colossal event as this
+explosion must be in the life of a bar of steel, that anything should
+remain at all of the old bell-like voice of the metal, but it appears
+to, if you listen attentively; it is perhaps its last remonstrance
+before leaving its shape and going back to rust in the earth again for
+ages.
+
+Another of the voices of the night is the whine the shell makes in
+coming; it is not unlike the cry the hyena utters as soon as it's dark
+in Africa: "How nice traveller would taste," the hyena seems to say,
+and "I want dead White Man." It is the rising note of the shell as
+it comes nearer, and its dying away when it has gone over, that make
+it reminiscent of the hyena's method of diction. If it is not going
+over then it has something quite different to say. It begins the same
+as the other, it comes up, talking of the back areas with the same
+long whine as the other. I have heard old hands say "That one is
+going well over." "Whee-oo," says the shell; but just where the
+"oo" should be long drawn out and turn into the hyena's final
+syllable, it says something quite different. "Zarp," it says. That
+is bad. Those are the shells that are looking for you.
+
+And then of course there is the whizz-bang coming from close, along
+his flat trajectory: he has little to say, but comes like a sudden
+wind, and all that he has to do is done and over at once.
+
+And then there is the gas shell, who goes over gurgling gluttonously,
+probably in big herds, putting down a barrage. It is the liquid inside
+that gurgles before it is turned to gas by the mild explosion; that is
+the explanation of it; yet that does not prevent one picturing a tribe
+of cannibals who have winded some nice juicy men and are smacking
+their chops and dribbling in anticipation.
+
+And a wonderful thing to see, even in those wonderful nights, is our
+thermite bursting over the heads of the Germans. The shell breaks into
+a shower of golden rain; one cannot judge easily at night how high
+from the ground it breaks, but about as high as the tops of trees seen
+at a hundred yards. It spreads out evenly all round and rains down
+slowly; it is a bad shower to be out in, and for a long time after it
+has fallen, the sodden grass of winter, and the mud and old bones
+beneath it, burn quietly in a circle. On such a night as this, and in
+such showers, the flying pigs will go over, which take two men to
+carry each of them; they go over and root right down to the German
+dugout, where the German has come in out of the golden rain, and they
+fling it all up in the air.
+
+These are such nights as Scheherazade with all her versatility never
+dreamed of; or if such nightmares came she certainly never told of
+them, or her august master, the Sultan, light of the age, would have
+had her at once beheaded; and his people would have deemed that he did
+well. It has been reserved for a modern autocrat to dream such a
+nightmare, driven to it perhaps by the tales of a white-whiskered
+Scheherazade, the Lord of the Kiel Canal; and being an autocrat he has
+made the nightmare a reality for the world. But the nightmare is
+stronger than its master, and grows mightier every night; and the
+All-Highest War Lord learns that there are powers in Hell that are
+easily summoned by the rulers of earth, but that go not easily home.
+
+
+
+
+Two Degrees of Envy
+
+
+It was night in the front line and no moon, or the moon was hidden.
+There was a strafe going on. The Tok Emmas were angry. And the
+artillery on both sides were looking for the Tok Emmas.
+
+Tok Emma, I may explain for the blessed dwellers in whatever far happy
+island there be that has not heard of these things, is the crude
+language of Mars. He has not time to speak of a trunk mortar battery,
+for he is always in a hurry, and so he calls them T. M.'s. But Bellona
+might not hear him saying T. M., for all the din that she makes: might
+think that he said D. N; and so he calls it Tok Emma. Ak, Beer, C,
+Don: this is the alphabet of Mars.
+
+And the huge minnies were throwing old limbs out of No Man's Land into
+the frontline trench, and shells were rasping down through the air
+that seemed to resist them until it was torn to pieces: they burst and
+showers of mud came down from heaven. Aimlessly, as it seemed, shells
+were bursting now and then in the air, with a flash intensely red: the
+smell of them was drifting down the trenches.
+
+In the middle of all this Bert Butterworth was hit. "Only in the
+foot," his pals said. "Only!" said Bert. They put him on a
+stretcher and carried him down the trench. They passed Bill
+Britterling, standing in the mud, an old friend of Bert's. Bert's
+face, twisted with pain, looked up to Bill for some sympathy.
+
+"Lucky devil," said Bill.
+
+Across the way on the other side of No Man's Land there was mud the
+same as on Bill's side: only the mud over there stank; it didn't seem
+to have been kept clean somehow. And the parapet was sliding away in
+places, for working parties had not had much of a chance. They had
+three Tok Emmas working in that battalion front line, and the British
+batteries did not quite know where they were, and there were eight of
+them looking.
+
+Fritz Groedenschasser, standing in that unseemly mud, greatly yearned
+for them to find soon what they were looking for. Eight batteries
+searching for something they can't find, along a trench in which you
+have to be, leaves the elephant hunter's most desperate tale a little
+dull and insipid. Not that Fritz Groedenschasser knew anything about
+elephant hunting: he hated all things sporting, and cordially approved
+of the execution of Nurse Cavell. And there was thermite too.
+Flammenwerfer was all very well, a good German weapon: it could burn a
+man alive at twenty yards. But this accursed flaming English thermite
+could catch you at four miles. It wasn't fair.
+
+The three German trench mortars were all still firing. When would the
+English batteries find what they were looking for, and this awful
+thing stop? The night was cold and smelly.
+
+Fritz shifted his feet in the foul mud, but no warmth came to him that
+way.
+
+A gust of shells was coming along the trench. Still they had not found
+the minnewerfer! Fritz moved from his place altogether to see if he
+could find some place where the parapet was not broken. And as he
+moved along the sewerlike trench he came on a wooden cross that marked
+the grave of a man he once had known, now buried some days in the
+parapet, old Ritz Handelscheiner.
+
+"Lucky devil," said Fritz.
+
+
+
+
+The Master of No Man's Land
+
+
+When the last dynasty has fallen and the last empire passed away, when
+man himself has gone, there will probably still remain the swede. [The
+rutabaga or Swedish turnip.]
+
+There grew a swede in No Man's Land by Croisille near the Somme, and
+it had grown there for a long while free from man.
+
+It grew as you never saw a swede grow before. It grew tall and strong
+and weedy. It lifted its green head and gazed round over No Man's
+Land. Yes, man was gone, and it was the day of the swede.
+
+The storms were tremendous. Sometimes pieces of iron sang through its
+leaves. But man was gone and it was the day of the swede.
+
+A man used to come there once, a great French farmer, an oppressor of
+swedes. Legends were told of him and his herd of cattle, dark
+traditions that passed down vegetable generations. It was somehow
+known in those fields that the man ate swedes.
+
+And now his house was gone and he would come no more.
+
+The storms were terrible, but they were better than man. The swede
+nodded to his companions: the years of freedom had come.
+
+They had always known among them that these years would come. Man had
+not been there always, but there had always been swedes. He would go
+some day, suddenly, as he came. That was the faith of the swedes. And
+when the trees went the swede believed that the day was come. When
+hundreds of little weeds arrived that were never allowed before, and
+grew unchecked, he knew it.
+
+After that he grew without any care, in sunlight, moonlight and rain;
+grew abundantly and luxuriantly in the freedom, and increased in
+arrogance till he felt himself greater than man. And indeed in those
+leaden storms that sang often over his foliage all living things
+seemed equal.
+
+There was little that the Germans left when they retreated from the
+Somme that was higher than this swede. He grew the tallest thing for
+miles and miles. He dominated the waste. Two cats slunk by him from a
+shattered farm: he towered above them contemptuously.
+
+A partridge ran by him once, far, far below his lofty leaves. The
+night winds mourning in No Man's Land seemed to sing for him alone.
+
+It was surely the hour of the swede. For him, it seemed, was No Man's
+Land. And there I met him one night by the light of a German rocket
+and brought him back to our company to cook.
+
+
+
+
+Weeds and Wire
+
+
+Things had been happening. Divisions were moving. There had been,
+there was going to be, a stunt. A battalion marched over the hill and
+sat down by the road. They had left the trenches three days march to
+the north and had come to a new country. The officers pulled their
+maps out; a mild breeze fluttered them; yesterday had been winter and
+to-day was spring; but spring in a desolation so complete and
+far-reaching that you only knew of it by that little wind. It was
+early March by the calendar, but the wind was blowing out of the gates
+of April. A platoon commander, feeling that mild wind blowing, forgot
+his map and began to whistle a tune that suddenly came to him out of
+the past with the wind. Out of the past it blew and out of the South,
+a merry vernal tune of a Southern people. Perhaps only one of those
+that noticed the tune had ever heard it before. An officer sitting
+near had heard it sung; it reminded him of a holiday long ago in the
+South.
+
+"Where did you hear that tune?" he asked the platoon commander.
+
+"Oh, the hell of a long way from here," the platoon commander said.
+
+He did not remember quite where it was he had heard it, but he
+remembered a sunny day in France and a hill all dark with pine woods,
+and a man coming down at evening out of the woods, and down the slope
+to the village, singing this song. Between the village and the slope
+there were orchards in blossom. So that he came with his song for
+hundreds of yards through orchards. "The hell of a way from here,"
+he said.
+
+For a long while then they sat silent.
+
+"It mightn't have been so very far from here," said the platoon
+commander. "It was in France, now I come to think of it. But it was a
+lovely part of France, all woods and orchards. Nothing like this,
+thank God." And he glanced with a tired look at the unutterable
+desolation.
+
+"Where was it?" said the other.
+
+"In Picardy," he said.
+
+"Aren't we in Picardy now?" said his friend.
+
+"Are we?" he said.
+
+"I don't know. The maps don't call it Picardy."
+
+"It was a fine place, anyway," the platoon commander said. "There
+seemed always to be a wonderful light on the hills. A kind of short
+grass grew on them, and it shone in the sun at evening. There were
+black woods above them. A man used to come out of them singing at
+evening."
+
+He looked wearily round at the brown desolation of weeds. As far as
+the two officers could see there was nothing but brown weeds and bits
+of brown barbed wire. He turned from the desolate scene back to his
+reminiscences.
+
+"He came singing through the orchards into the village," he said.
+"A quaint old place with queer gables, called Ville-en-Bois."
+
+"Do you know where we are?" said the other.
+
+"No, said the platoon commander."
+
+"I thought not," he said. "Hadn't you better take a look at the
+map?"
+
+"I suppose so," said the platoon commander, and he smoothed out his
+map and wearily got to the business of finding out where he was.
+
+"Good Lord!" he said. "Ville-en-Bois!"
+
+
+
+
+Spring in England and Flanders
+
+
+Very soon the earliest primroses will be coming out in woods wherever
+they have been sheltered from the north. They will grow bolder as the
+days go by, and spread and come all down the slopes of sunny hills.
+Then the anemones will come, like a shy pale people, one of the tribes
+of the elves, who dare not leave the innermost deeps of the wood: in
+those days all the trees will be in leaf, the bluebells will follow,
+and certain fortunate woods will shelter such myriads of them that the
+bright fresh green of the beech trees will flash between two blues,
+the blue of the sky and the deeper blue of the bluebells. Later the
+violets come, and such a time as this is the perfect time to see
+England: when the cuckoo is heard and he surprises his hearers; when
+evenings are lengthening out and the bat is abroad again; and all the
+flowers are out and all the birds sing. At such a time not only Nature
+smiles but our quiet villages and grave old spires wake up from winter
+in the mellow air and wear their centuries lightly. At such a time you
+might come just at evening on one of those old villages in a valley
+and find it in the mood to tell you the secret of the ages that it hid
+and treasured there before the Normans came. Who knows? For they are
+very old, very wise, very friendly; they might speak to you one warm
+evening. If you went to them after great suffering they might speak to
+you; after nights and nights of shelling over in France, they might
+speak to you and you might hear them clearly.
+
+It would be a long, long story that they would tell, all about the
+ages; and it would vary wonderfully little, much less perhaps than we
+think; and the repetitions rambling on and on in the evening, as the
+old belfry spoke and the cottages gathered below it, might sound so
+soothing after the boom of shells that perhaps you would nearly sleep.
+And then with one's memory tired out by the war one might never
+remember the long story they told, when the belfry and the
+brown-roofed houses all murmured at evening, might never remember even
+that they had spoken all through that warm spring and evening. We may
+have heard them speak and forgotten that they have spoken. Who knows?
+We are at war, and see so many strange things: some we must forget,
+some we must remember; and we cannot choose which.
+
+To turn from Kent to Flanders is to turn to a time of mourning through
+all seasons alike. Spring there brings out no leaf on myriad oaks, nor
+the haze of green that floats like a halo above the heads of the birch
+trees, that stand with their fairylike trunks haunting the deeps of
+the woods. For miles and miles and miles summer ripens no crops, leads
+out no maidens laughing in the moonlight, and brings no harvest home.
+When Autumn looks on orchards in all that region of mourning he looks
+upon barren trees that will never blossom again. Winter drives in no
+sturdy farmers at evening to sit before cheery fires, families meet
+not at Christmas, and the bells are dumb in belfries; for all by which
+a man might remember his home has been utterly swept away: has been
+swept away to make a maniacal dancing ground on which a murderous
+people dance to their death led by a shallow, clever, callous,
+imperial clown.
+
+There they dance to their doom till their feet shall find the
+precipice that was prepared for them on the day that they planned the
+evil things they have done.
+
+
+
+
+The Nightmare Countries
+
+
+There are certain lands in the darker dreams of poetry that stand out
+in the memory of generations. There is for instance Poe's "Dark tarn
+of Auber, the ghoul-haunted region of Weir"; there are some queer
+twists in the river Alph as imagined by Coleridge; two lines of
+Swinburne:
+
+     By the tideless dolorous inland sea
+     In a land of sand and ruin and gold
+
+are as haunting as any. There are in literature certain regions of
+gloom, so splendid that whenever you come on them they leave in the
+mind a sort of nightmare country which one's thoughts revisit on
+hearing the lines quoted.
+
+It is pleasant to picture such countries sometimes when sitting before
+the fire. It is pleasant because you can banish them by the closing of
+a book; a puff of smoke from a pipe will hide them altogether, and
+back come the pleasant, wholesome, familiar things. But in France they
+are there always. In France the nightmare countries stand all night in
+the starlight; dawn comes and they still are there. The dead are
+buried out of sight and others take their places among men; but the
+lost lands lie unburied gazing up at the winds; and the lost woods
+stand like skeletons all grotesque in the solitude; the very seasons
+have fled from them. The very seasons have fled; so that if you look
+up to see whether summer has turned to autumn, or if autumn has turned
+to winter yet, nothing remains to show you. It is like the eccentric
+dream of some strange man, very arresting and mysterious, but lacking
+certain things that should be there before you can recognize it as
+earthly. It is a mad, mad landscape. There are miles and miles and
+miles of it. It is the biggest thing man has done. It looks as though
+man in his pride, with all his clever inventions, had made for himself
+a sorry attempt at creation.
+
+Indeed when we trace it all back to its origin we find at the
+beginning of this unhappy story a man who was only an emperor and
+wished to be something more. He would have ruled the world but has
+only meddled with it; and his folly has brought misery to millions,
+and there lies his broken dream on the broken earth. He will never
+take Paris now. He will never be crowned at Versailles as Emperor of
+Europe; and after that, most secret dream of all, did not the Caesars
+proclaim themselves divine? Was it not whispered among Macedonian
+courtiers that Alexander was the child of God? And was the
+Hohenzollern less than these?
+
+What might not force accomplish? All gone now, that dream and the
+Hohenzollern line broken. A maniacal dream and broken farms all mixed
+up together: they make a pretty nightmare and the clouds still gleam
+at night with the flashes of shells, and the sky is still troubled by
+day with uncouth balloons and the black bursts of the German shells
+and the white of our anti-aircraft.
+
+And below there lies this wonderful waste land where no girls sing,
+and where no birds come but starlings; where no hedgerows stand, and
+no lanes with wild roses, and where no pathways run through fields of
+wheat, and there are no fields at all and no farms and no farmers; and
+two haystacks stand on a hill I know, undestroyed in the desolation,
+and nobody touches them for they know the Germans too well; and the
+tops have been blown off hills down to the chalk. And men say of this
+place that it is Pozieres and of that place that it is Ginchy; nothing
+remains to show that hamlets stood there at all, and a brown, brown
+weed grows over it all for ever; and a mighty spirit has arisen in
+man, and no one bows to the War Lord though many die. And Liberty is
+she who sang her songs of old, and is fair as she ever was, when men
+see her in visions, at night in No Man's Land when they have the
+strength to crawl in: still she walks of a night in Pozieres and in
+Ginchy.
+
+A fanciful man once called himself the Emperor of the Sahara: the
+German Kaiser has stolen into a fair land and holds with weakening
+hands a land of craters and weed, and wire and wild cabbages and old
+German bones.
+
+
+
+
+Spring and the Kaiser
+
+
+While all the world is waiting for Spring there lie great spaces in
+one of the pleasantest lands to which Spring cannot come.
+
+Pear trees and cherry and orchards flash over other lands, blossoming
+as abundantly as though their wonder were new, with a beauty as fresh
+and surprising as though nothing like it before had ever adorned
+countless centuries. Now with the larch and soon with the beech trees
+and hazel, a bright green blazes forth to illumine the year. The
+slopes are covered with violets. Those who have gardens are beginning
+to be proud of them and to point them out to their neighbours. Almond
+and peach in blossom peep over old brick walls. The land dreams of
+summer all in the youth of the year.
+
+But better than all this the Germans have found war. The simple
+content of a people at peace in pleasant countries counted for nothing
+with them. Their Kaiser prepared for war, made speeches about war,
+and, when he was ready, made war. And now the hills that should be
+covered with violets are full of murderous holes, and the holes are
+half full of empty meat tins, and the garden walls have gone and the
+gardens with them, and there are no woods left to shelter anemones.
+Boundless masses of brown barbed wire straggle over the landscape. All
+the orchards there are cut down out of ruthless spite to hurt France
+whom they cannot conquer. All the little trees that grow near gardens
+are gone, aspen, laburnum and lilac. It is like this for hundreds of
+miles. Hundreds of ruined towns gaze at it with vacant windows and see
+a land from which even Spring is banished. And not a ruined house in
+all the hundred towns but mourns for some one, man, woman or child;
+for the Germans make war equally on all in the land where Spring comes
+no more.
+
+Some day Spring will come back; some day she will shine all April in
+Picardy again, for Nature is never driven utterly forth, but comes
+back with her seasons to cover up even the vilest things.
+
+She shall hide the raw earth of the shell holes till the violets come
+again; she shall bring back even the orchards for Spring to walk in
+once more; the woods will grow tall again above the southern anemones;
+and the great abandoned guns of the Germans will rust by the rivers of
+France. Forgotten like them, the memory of the War Lord will pass with
+his evil deeds.
+
+
+
+
+Two Songs
+
+
+Over slopes of English hills looking south in the time of violets,
+evening was falling.
+
+Shadows at edges of woods moved, and then merged in the gloaming.
+
+The bat, like a shadow himself, finding that spring was come, slipped
+from the dark of the wood as far as a clump of beech trees and
+fluttered back again on his wonderful quiet wings.
+
+Pairing pigeons were home.
+
+Very young rabbits stole out to gaze at the calm still world. They
+came out as the stars come. At one time they were not there, and then
+you saw them, but you did not see them come.
+
+Towering clouds to the west built palaces, cities and mountains;
+bastions of rose and precipices of gold; giants went home over them
+draped in mauve by steep rose-pink ravines into emerald-green empires.
+Turbulences of colour broke out above the departed sun; giants merged
+into mountains, and cities became seas, and new processions of other
+fantastic things sailed by. But the chalk slopes facing south smiled
+on with the same calm light, as though every blade of grass gathered a
+ray from the gloaming. All the hills faced the evening with that same
+quiet glow, which faded softly as the air grew colder; and the first
+star appeared.
+
+Voices came up in the hush, clear from the valley, and ceased. A light
+was lit, like a spark, in a distant window: more stars appeared and
+the woods were all dark now, and shapes even on the hill slopes began
+to grow indistinct.
+
+Home by a laneway in the dim, still evening a girl was going, singing
+the Marseillaise.
+
+In France where the downs in the north roll away without hedges, as
+though they were great free giants that man had never confined, as
+though they were stretching their vast free limbs in the evening, the
+same light was smiling and glimmering softly away.
+
+A road wound over the downs and away round one of their shoulders. A
+hush lay over them as though the giants slept, or as though they
+guarded in silence their ancient, wonderful history.
+
+The stillness deepened and the dimness of twilight; and just before
+colours fade, while shapes can still be distinguished, there came by
+the road a farmer leading his Norman horse. High over the horse's
+withers his collar pointed with brass made him fantastic and huge and
+strange to see in the evening.
+
+They moved together through that mellow light towards where unseen
+among the clustered downs the old French farmer's house was sheltered
+away.
+
+He was going home at evening humming "God Save the King."
+
+
+
+
+The Punishment
+
+
+An exhalation arose, drawn up by the moon, from an old battlefield
+after the passing of years. It came out of very old craters and
+gathered from trenches, smoked up from No Man's Land, and the ruins of
+farms; it rose from the rottenness of dead brigades, and lay for half
+the night over two armies; but at midnight the moon drew it up all
+into one phantom and it rose and trailed away eastwards.
+
+It passed over men in grey that were weary of war; it passed over a
+land once prosperous, happy and mighty, in which were a people that
+were gradually starving; it passed by ancient belfries in which there
+were no bells now; it passed over fear and misery and weeping, and so
+came to the palace at Potsdam. It was the dead of the night between
+midnight and dawn, and the palace was very still that the Emperor
+might sleep, and sentries guarded it who made no noise and relieved
+others in silence. Yet it was not so easy to sleep. Picture to
+yourself a murderer who had killed a man. Would you sleep? Picture
+yourself the man that planned this war! Yes, you sleep, but nightmares
+come.
+
+The phantom entered the chamber. "Come," it said.
+
+The Kaiser leaped up at once as obediently as when he came to
+attention on parade, years ago, as a subaltern in the Prussian Guard,
+a man whom no woman or child as yet had ever cursed; he leaped up and
+followed. They passed the silent sentries; none challenged and none
+saluted; they were moving swiftly over the town as the felon Gothas
+go; they came to a cottage in the country. They drifted over a little
+garden gate, and there in a neat little garden the phantom halted like
+a wind that has suddenly ceased. "Look," it said.
+
+Should he look? Yet he must look. The Kaiser looked; and saw a window
+shining and a neat room in the cottage: there was nothing dreadful
+there; thank the good German God for that; it was all right, after
+all. The Kaiser had had a fright, but it was all right; there was only
+a woman with a baby sitting before the fire, and two small children
+and a man. And it was quite a jolly room. And the man was a young
+soldier; and, why, he was a Prussian Guardsman,--there was his
+helmet hanging on the wall,--so everything was all right. They were
+jolly German children; that was well. How nice and homely the room
+was. There shone before him, and showed far off in the night, the
+visible reward of German thrift and industry. It was all so tidy and
+neat, and yet they were quite poor people. The man had done his work
+for the Fatherland, and yet beyond all that had been able to afford
+all those little knickknacks that make a home so pleasant and that in
+their humble little way were luxury. And while the Kaiser looked the
+two young children laughed as they played on the floor, not seeing
+that face at the window.
+
+Why! Look at the helmet. That was lucky. A bullet hole right through
+the front of it. That must have gone very close to the man's head. How
+ever did it get through? It must have glanced upwards as bullets
+sometimes do. The hole was quite low in the helmet. It would be
+dreadful to have bullets coming by close like that. The firelight
+flickered, and the lamp shone on, and the children played on the
+floor, and the man was smoking out of a china pipe; he was strong and
+able and young, one of the wealth-winners of Germany.
+
+"Have you seen?" said the phantom.
+
+"Yes," said the Kaiser. It was well, he thought, that a Kaiser
+should see how his people lived.
+
+At once the fire went out and the lamp faded away, the room fell
+sombrely into neglect and squalor, and the soldier and the children
+faded away with the room; all disappeared phantasmally, and nothing
+remained but the helmet in a kind of glow on the wall, and the woman
+sitting all by herself in the darkness.
+
+"It has all gone," said the Kaiser.
+
+"It has never been," said the phantom.
+
+The Kaiser looked again. Yes, there was nothing there, it was just a
+vision. There were the grey walls all damp and uncared for, and that
+helmet standing out solid and round, like the only real thing among
+fancies. No, it had never been. It was just a vision.
+
+"It might have been," said the phantom.
+
+Might have been? How might it have been?
+
+"Come," said the phantom.
+
+They drifted away down a little lane that in summer would have had
+roses, and came to an Uhlan's house; in times of peace a small farmer.
+Farm buildings in good repair showed even in the night, and the black
+shapes of haystacks; again a well-kept garden lay by the house. The
+phantom and the Kaiser stood in the garden; before them a window
+glowed in a lamplit room.
+
+"Look," said the phantom.
+
+The Kaiser looked again and saw a young couple; the woman played with
+a baby, and all was prosperous in the merry room. Again the hard-won
+wealth of Germany shone out for all to see, the cosy comfortable
+furniture spoke of acres well cared for, spoke of victory in the
+struggle with the seasons on which wealth of nations depends.
+
+"It might have been," said the phantom. Again the fire died out and
+the merry scene faded away, leaving a melancholy, ill-kept room, with
+poverty and mourning haunting dusty corners and the woman sitting
+alone.
+
+"Why do you show me this?" said the Kaiser. "Why do you show me
+these visions?"
+
+"Come," said the phantom.
+
+"What is it?" said the Kaiser. "Where are you bringing me?"
+
+"Come," said the phantom.
+
+They went from window to window, from land to land. You had seen, had
+you been out that night in Germany, and able to see visions, an
+imperious figure passing from place to place, looking on many scenes.
+He looked on them, and families withered away, and happy scenes faded,
+and the phantom said to him "Come." He expostulated but obeyed; and
+so they went from window to window of hundreds of farms in Prussia,
+till they came to the Prussian border and went on into Saxony; and
+always you would have heard, could you hear spirits speak, "It might
+have been," "It might have been," repeated from window to window.
+
+They went down through Saxony, heading for Austria. And for long the
+Kaiser kept that callous, imperious look. But at last he, even he, at
+last he nearly wept. And the phantom turned then and swept him back
+over Saxony, and into Prussia again and over the sentries' heads, back
+to his comfortable bed where it was so hard to sleep.
+
+And though they had seen thousands of merry homes, homes that can
+never be merry now, shrines of perpetual mourning; though they had
+seen thousands of smiling German children, who will never be born now,
+but were only the visions of hopes blasted by him; for all the leagues
+over which he had been so ruthlessly hurried, dawn was yet barely
+breaking.
+
+He had looked on the first few thousand homes of which he had robbed
+all time, and which he must see with his eyes before he may go hence.
+The first night of the Kaiser's punishment was accomplished.
+
+
+
+
+The English Spirit
+
+
+By the end of the South African war Sergeant Cane had got one thing
+very well fixed in his mind, and that was that war was an overrated
+amusement. He said he "was fed up with it," partly because that
+misused metaphor was then new, partly because every one was saying it:
+he felt it right down in his bones, and he had a long memory. So when
+wonderful rumours came to the East Anglian village where he lived, on
+August 1, 1914, Sergeant Cane said: "That means war," and decided
+then and there to have nothing to do with it: it was somebody else's
+turn; he felt he had done enough. Then came August 4th, and England
+true to her destiny, and then Lord Kitchener's appeal for men.
+Sergeant Cane had a family to look after and a nice little house: he
+had left the army ten years.
+
+In the next week all the men went who had been in the army before, all
+that were young enough, and a good sprinkling of the young men too who
+had never been in the army. Men asked Cane if he was going, and he
+said straight out "No."
+
+By the middle of August Cane was affecting the situation. He was a
+little rallying point for men who did not want to go. "He knows what
+it's like," they said.
+
+In the smoking room of the Big House sat the Squire and his son, Arthur
+Smith; and Sir Munion Boomer-Platt, the Member for the division. The
+Squire's son had been in the last war as a boy, and like Sergeant Cane
+had left the army since. All the morning he had been cursing an
+imaginary general, seated in the War Office at an imaginary desk with
+Smith's own letter before him, in full view but unopened. Why on earth
+didn't he answer it, Smith thought. But he was calmer now, and the
+Squire and Sir Munion were talking of Sergeant Cane.
+
+"Leave him to me," said Sir Munion.
+
+"Very well," said the Squire. So Sir Munion Boomer-Platt went off
+and called on Sergeant Cane.
+
+Mrs Cane knew what he had come for.
+
+"Don't let him talk you over, Bill," she said.
+
+"Not he," said Sergeant Cane.
+
+Sir Munion came on Sergeant Cane in his garden.
+
+"A fine day," said Sir Munion. And from that he went on to the war.
+"If you enlist," he said, "they will make you a sergeant again at
+once. You will get a sergeant's pay, and your wife will get the new
+separation allowance."
+
+"Sooner have Cane," said Mrs Cane.
+
+"Yes, yes, of course," said Sir Munion. "But then there is the
+medal, probably two or three medals, and the glory of it, and it is
+such a splendid life."
+
+Sir Munion did warm to a thing whenever he began to hear his own
+words. He painted war as it has always been painted, one of the most
+beautiful things you could imagine. And then it mustn't be supposed
+that it was like those wars that there used to be, a long way off.
+There would be houses where you would be billeted, and good food, and
+shady trees and villages wherever you went. And it was such an
+opportunity of seeing the Continent ("the Continent as it really
+is," Sir Munion called it) as would never come again, and he only
+wished he were younger. Sir Munion really did wish it, as he spoke,
+for his own words stirred him profoundly; but somehow or other they
+did not stir Sergeant Cane. No, he had done his share, and he had a
+family to look after.
+
+Sir Munion could not understand him: he went back to the Big House and
+said so. He had told him all the advantages he could think of that
+were there to be had for the asking, and Sergeant Cane merely
+neglected them.
+
+"Let me have a try," said Arthur Smith. "He soldiered with me
+before."
+
+Sir Munion shrugged his shoulders. He had all the advantages at his
+fingers' ends, from pay to billeting: there was nothing more to be
+said. Nevertheless young Smith went.
+
+"Hullo, Sergeant Cane," said Smith.
+
+"Hello, sir," said the sergeant.
+
+"Do you remember that night at Reit River?"
+
+"Don't I, sir," said Cane.
+
+"One blanket each and no ground sheet?"
+
+"I remember, sir," said Cane.
+
+"Didn't it rain," said Smith.
+
+"It rained that night, proper."
+
+"Drowned a few of the lice, I suppose."
+
+"Not many," said Cane.
+
+"No, not many," Smith reflected. "The Boers had the range all right
+that time."
+
+"Gave it us proper," said Cane.
+
+"We were hungry that night," said Smith. "I could have eaten
+biltong."
+
+"I did eat some of it," said Cane. "Not bad stuff, what there was
+of it, only not enough."
+
+"I don't think," said Smith, "that I've ever slept on the bare
+earth since."
+
+"No, sir?" said Cane. "It's hard. You get used to it. But it will
+always be hard."
+
+"Yes, it will always be hard," said Smith. "Do you remember the
+time we were thirsty?"
+
+"Oh, yes, sir," said Cane, "I remember that. One doesn't forget
+that."
+
+"No. I still dream of it sometimes," said Smith. "It makes a nasty
+dream. I wake with my mouth all dry too, when I dream that."
+
+"Yes," said Cane, "one doesn't forget being thirsty."
+
+"Well," said Smith, "I suppose we're for it all over again?"
+
+"I suppose so, sir," said Cane.
+
+An Investigation Into the Causes and Origin of the War
+
+The German imperial barber has been called up. He must have been
+called up quite early in the war. I have seen photographs in papers
+that leave no doubt of that. Who he is I do not know: I once read his
+name in an article but have forgotten it; few even know if he still
+lives. And yet what harm he has done! What vast evils he has
+unwittingly originated! Many years ago he invented a frivolity, a jeu
+d'esprit easily forgivable to an artist in the heyday of his youth, to
+whom his art was new and even perhaps wonderful. A craft, of course,
+rather than an art, and a humble craft at that; but then, the man was
+young, and what will not seem wonderful to youth?
+
+He must have taken the craft very seriously, but as youth takes things
+seriously, fantastically and with laughter. He must have determined to
+outshine rivals: he must have gone away and thought, burning candles
+late perhaps, when all the palace was still. But how can youth think
+seriously? And there had come to him this absurd, this fantastical
+conceit. What else would have come? The more seriously he took the
+tonsorial art, the more he studied its tricks and phrases and heard
+old barbers lecture, the more sure were the imps of youth to prompt
+him to laughter and urge him to something outrageous and ridiculous.
+The background of the dull pomp of Potsdam must have made all this
+more certain. It was bound to come.
+
+And so one day, or, as I have suggested, suddenly late one night,
+there came to the young artist bending over tonsorial books that
+quaint, mad, odd, preposterous inspiration. Ah, what pleasure there is
+in the madness of youth; it is not like the madness of age, clinging
+to outworn formulae; it is the madness of breaking away, of galloping
+among precipices, of dallying with the impossible, of courting the
+absurd. And this inspiration, it was in none of the books; the
+lecturer barbers had not lectured on it, could not dream of it and did
+not dare to; there was no tradition for it, no precedent; it was mad;
+and to introduce it into the pomp of Potsdam, that was the daring of
+madness. And this preposterous inspiration of the absurd young
+barber-madman was nothing less than a moustache that without any curve
+at all, or any suggestion of sanity, should go suddenly up at the ends
+very nearly as high as the eyes!
+
+He must have told his young fellow craftsmen first, for youth goes
+first to youth with its hallucinations. And they, what could they have
+said? You cannot say of madness that it is mad, you cannot call
+absurdity absurd. To have criticized would have revealed jealousy; and
+as for praise you could not praise a thing like that. They probably
+shrugged, made gestures; and perhaps one friend warned him. But you
+cannot warn a man against a madness; if the madness is in possession
+it will not be warned away: why should it? And then perhaps he went to
+the old barbers of the Court. You can picture their anger. Age does
+not learn from youth in any case. But there was the insult to their
+ancient craft, bad enough if only imagined, but here openly spoken of.
+And what would come of it? They must have feared, on the one hand,
+dishonour to their craft if this young barber were treated as his
+levity deserved; and, on the other hand, could they have feared his
+success? I think they could not have guessed it.
+
+And then the young idiot with his preposterous inspiration must have
+looked about to see where he could practise his new absurdity. It
+should have been enough to have talked about it among his fellow
+barbers; they would have gone with new zest to their work next day for
+this delirious interlude, and no harm would have been done. "Fritz,"
+(or Hans) they would have said, "was a bit on last night, a bit full
+up," or whatever phrase they use to touch on drunkenness; and the
+thing would have been forgotten. We all have our fancies. But this
+young fool wanted to get his fancy mixed up with practice: that's
+where he was mad. And in Potsdam, of all places.
+
+He probably tried his friends first, young barbers at the Court and
+others of his own standing. None of them were fools enough to be seen
+going about like that. They had jobs to lose. A Court barber is one
+thing, a man who cuts ordinary hair is quite another. Why should they
+become outcasts because their friend chose to be mad?
+
+He probably tried his inferiors then, but they would have been timid
+folk; they must have seen the thing was absurd, and of course daren't
+risk it. Again, why should they?
+
+Did he try to get some noble then to patronize his invention? Probably
+the first refusals he had soon inflamed his madness more, and he threw
+caution insanely to the winds, and went straight to the Emperor.
+
+It was probably about the time that the Emperor dismissed Bismarck;
+certainly the drawings of that time show him still with a sane
+moustache.
+
+The young barber probably chanced on him in this period, finding him
+bereft of an adviser, and ready to be swayed by whatever whim should
+come. Perhaps he was attracted by the barber's hardihood, perhaps the
+absurdity of his inspiration had some fascination for him, perhaps he
+merely saw that the thing was new and, feeling jaded, let the barber
+have his way. And so the frivolity became a fact, the absurdity became
+visible, and honour and riches came the way of the barber.
+
+A small thing, you might say, however fantastical. And yet I believe
+the absurdity of that barber to be among the great evils that have
+brought death nearer to man; whimsical and farcical as it was, yet a
+thing deadlier than Helen's beauty or Tamerlane's love of skulls. For
+just as character is outwardly shown so outward things react upon the
+character; and who, with that daring barber's ludicrous fancy visible
+always on his face, could quite go the sober way of beneficent
+monarchs? The fantasy must be mitigated here, set off there; had you
+such a figure to dress, say for amateur theatricals, you would realize
+the difficulty. The heavy silver eagle to balance it; the glittering
+cuirass lower down, preventing the eye from dwelling too long on the
+barber's absurdity. And then the pose to go with the cuirass and to
+carry off the wild conceit of that mad, mad barber. He has much to
+answer for, that eccentric man whose name so few remember. For pose
+led to actions; and just when Europe most needed a man of wise
+counsels, restraining the passions of great empires, just then she had
+ruling over Germany and, unhappily, dominating Austria, a man who
+every year grew more akin to the folly of that silly barber's youthful
+inspiration.
+
+Let us forgive the barber. For long I have known from pictures that I
+have seen of the Kaiser that he has gone to the trenches. Probably he
+is dead. Let us forgive the barber. But let us bear in mind that the
+futile fancies of youth may be deadly things, and that one of them
+falling on a fickle mind may so stir its shallows as to urge it to
+disturb and set in motion the avalanches of illimitable grief.
+
+Lost
+
+Describing a visit, say the papers of March 28th, which the Kaiser
+paid incognito to Cologne Cathedral on March 18th before the great
+battle, the Cologne correspondent of the Tyd says:
+
+There were only a few persons in the building. Under high arches
+and in spacious solitude the Kaiser sat, as if in deep thought,
+before the priests' choir. Behind him his military staff stood
+respectfully at a distance. Still musing as he rose, the monarch
+resting both hands on his walking-stick remains standing immovable
+for some minutes... I shall never forget this picture of the musing
+monarch praying in Cologne Cathedral on the eve of the great
+battle.
+
+Probably he won't forget it. The German casualty lists will help to
+remind him. But what is more to the point is that this expert
+propagandist has presumably received orders that we are not to forget
+it, and that the sinister originator of the then impending holocaust
+should be toned down a little in the eyes at least of the Tyd to
+something a little more amiable.
+
+And no doubt the little piece of propaganda gave every satisfaction to
+those who ordered it, or they would not have passed it out to the Tyd,
+and the touching little scene would never have reached our eyes. At
+the same time the little tale would have been better suited to the
+psychology of other countries if he had made the War Lord kneel when
+he prayed in Cologne Cathedral, and if he had represented the Military
+Staff as standing out of respect to One who, outside Germany, is held
+in greater respect than the All Highest.
+
+And had the War Lord really knelt is it not possible that he might
+have found pity, humility, or even contrition? Things easily
+overlooked in so large a cathedral when sitting erect, as a War Lord,
+before the priests' choir, but to be noticed perhaps with one's eyes
+turned to the ground.
+
+Perhaps he nearly found one of those things. Perhaps he felt (who
+knows?) just for a moment, that in the dimness of those enormous
+aisles was something he had lost a long, long while ago.
+
+One is not mistaken to credit the very bad with feeling far, faint
+appeals from things of glory like Cologne Cathedral; it is that the
+appeals come to them too far and faint on their headlong descent to
+ruin.
+
+For what was the War Lord seeking? Did he know that pity for his poor
+slaughtered people, huddled by him on to our ceaseless machine guns,
+might be found by seeking there? Or was it only that the lost thing,
+whatever it was, made that faint appeal to him, passing the door by
+chance, and drew him in, as the scent of some herb or flower in a
+moment draws us back years to look for something lost in our youth; we
+gaze back, wondering, and do not find it.
+
+And to think that perhaps he lost it by very little! That, but for
+that proud attitude and the respectful staff, he might have seen what
+was lost, and have come out bringing pity for his people. Might have
+said to the crowd that gave him that ovation, as we read, outside the
+door: "My pride has driven you to this needless war, my ambition has
+made a sacrifice of millions, but it is over, and it shall be no more;
+I will make no more conquests."
+
+They would have killed him. But for that renunciation, perhaps,
+however late, the curses of the widows of his people might have kept
+away from his grave.
+
+But he did not find it. He sat at prayer. Then he stood. Then he
+marched out: and his staff marched out behind him. And in the gloom of
+the floor of the vast Cologne Cathedral lie the things that the Kaiser
+did not find and never will find now. Unnoticed thus, and in some
+silent moment, passes a man's last chance.
+
+
+
+
+The Last Mirage
+
+
+The desolation that the German offensive has added to the dominions of
+the Kaiser cannot easily be imagined by any one who has never seen a
+desert. Look at it on the map and it is full of the names of towns and
+villages; it is in Europe, where there are no deserts; it is a fertile
+province among places of famous names. Surely it is a proud addition
+to an ambitious monarch's possessions. Surely there is something there
+that it is worth while to have conquered at the cost of army corps.
+No, nothing. They are mirage towns. The farms grow Dead Sea fruit.
+France recedes before the imperial clutch. France smiles, but not for
+him. His new towns seem to be his because their names have not yet
+been removed from any map, but they crumble at his approach because
+France is not for him. His deadly ambition makes a waste before it as
+it goes, clutching for cities. It comes to them and the cities are not
+there.
+
+I have seen mirages and have heard others told of, but the best
+mirages of all we never hear described; the mirage that waterless
+travellers see at the last. Those fountains rising out of onyx basins,
+blue and straight into incredible heights, and falling and flooding
+cool white marble; the haze of spray above their feathery heads
+through which the pale green domes of weathered copper shimmer and
+shake a little; mysterious temples, the tombs of unknown kings; the
+cataracts coming down from rose-quartz cliffs, far off but seen quite
+clearly, growing to rivers bearing curious barges to the golden courts
+of Sahara. These things we never see; they are seen at the last by men
+who die of thirst.
+
+Even so has the Kaiser looked at the smiling plains of France. Even so
+has he looked on her famous ancient cities and the farms and the
+fertile fields and the woods and orchards of Picardy. With effort and
+trouble he has moved towards them. As he comes near to them the cities
+crumble, the woods shrivel and fall, the farms fade out of Picardy,
+even the hedgerows go; it is bare, bare desert. He had been sure of
+Paris, he had dreamed of Versailles and some monstrous coronation, he
+had thought his insatiable avarice would be sated. For he had plotted
+for conquest of the world, that boundless greed of his goading him on
+as a man in the grip of thirst broods upon lakes.
+
+He sees victory near him now. That also will fade in the desert of old
+barbed wire and weeds. When will he see that a doom is over all his
+ambitions? For his dreams of victory are like those last dreams that
+come in deceptive deserts to dying men.
+
+There is nothing good for him in the desert of the Somme. Bapaume is
+not really there, though it be marked on his maps; it is only a
+wilderness of slates and brick. Peronne looks like a city a long way
+off, but when you come near it is only the shells of houses. Poziere,
+Le Sars, Sapigny, are gone altogether.
+
+And all is Dead Sea fruit in a visible desert. The reports of German
+victories there are mirage like all the rest; they too will fade into
+weeds and old barbed wire.
+
+And the advances that look like victories, and the ruins that look
+like cities, and the shell-beaten broken fields that look like
+farms,--they and the dreams of conquest and all the plots and ambitions,
+they are all the mirage of a dying dynasty in a desert it made for its
+doom.
+
+Bones lead up to the desert, bones are scattered about it, it is the
+most menacing and calamitous waste of all the deadly places that have
+been inclement to man. It flatters the Hohenzollerns with visions of
+victory now because they are doomed by it and are about to die. When
+their race has died the earth shall smile again, for their deadly
+mirage shall oppress us no more. The cities shall rise again and the
+farms come back; hedgerows and orchards shall be seen again; the woods
+shall slowly lift their heads from the dust; and gardens shall come
+again where the desert was, to bloom in happier ages that forget the
+Hohenzollerns.
+
+
+
+
+A Famous Man
+
+
+Last winter a famous figure walked in Behagnies. Soldiers came to see
+him from their billets all down the Arras road, from Ervillers and
+from Sapigny, and from the ghosts of villages back from the road,
+places that once were villages but are only names now. They would walk
+three or four miles, those who could not get lorries, for his was one
+of those names that all men know, not such a name as a soldier or poet
+may win, but a name that all men know. They used to go there at
+evening.
+
+Four miles away on the left as you went from Ervillers, the guns
+mumbled over the hills, low hills over which the Verys from the
+trenches put up their heads and peered around,--greeny, yellowy
+heads that turned the sky sickly, and the clouds lit up and went grey
+again all the night long. As you got near to Behagnies you lost sight
+of the Verys, but the guns mumbled on. A silly little train used to
+run on one's left, which used to whistle loudly, as though it asked to
+be shelled, but I never saw a shell coming its way; perhaps it knew
+that the German gunners could not calculate how slow it went. It
+crossed the road as you got down to Behagnies.
+
+You passed the graves of two or three German soldiers with their names
+on white wooden crosses,--men killed in 1914; and then a little
+cemetery of a French cavalry regiment, where a big cross stood in the
+middle with a wreath and a tricolor badge, and the names of the men.
+And then one saw trees. That was always a wonder, whether one saw
+their dark shapes in the evening, or whether one saw them by day, and
+knew from the look of their leaves whether autumn had come yet, or
+gone. In winter at evening one just saw the black bulk of them, but
+that was no less marvellous than seeing them green in summer; trees by
+the side of the Arras-Bapaume road, trees in mid-desert in the awful
+region of Somme. There were not many of them, just a cluster, fewer
+than the date palms in an oasis in Sahara, but an oasis is an oasis
+wherever you find it, and a few trees make it. There are little places
+here and there, few enough as the Arabs know, that the Sahara's deadly
+sand has never been able to devastate; and there are places even in
+the Somme that German malice, obeying the Kaiser as the sand of Sahara
+obeys the accursed sirocco, has not been able to destroy quite to the
+uttermost. That little cluster of trees at Behagnies is one of these;
+Divisional Headquarters used to shelter beneath them; and near them
+was a statue on a lawn which probably stood by the windows of some
+fine house, though there is no trace of the house but the lawn and
+that statue now.
+
+And over the way on the left a little further on, just past the
+officers' club, a large hall stood where one saw that famous figure,
+whom officers and men alike would come so far to see.
+
+The hall would hold perhaps four or five hundred seats in front of a
+stage fitted up very simply with red, white and blue cloths, but
+fitted up by some one that understood the job; and at the back of that
+stage on those winter evenings walked on his flat and world-renowned
+feet the figure of Charlie Chaplin.
+
+When aeroplanes came over bombing, the dynamos used to stop for they
+supplied light to other places besides the cinema, and the shade of
+Charlie Chaplin would fade away. But the men would wait till the
+aeroplanes had gone and that famous figure came waddling back to the
+screen. There he amused tired men newly come from the trenches, there
+he brought laughter to most of the twelve days that they had out of
+the line.
+
+He is gone from Behagnies now. He did not march in the retreat a
+little apart from the troops, with head bent forward and hand thrust
+in jacket, a flat-footed Napoleon: yet he is gone; for no one would
+have left behind for the enemy so precious a thing as a Charlie
+Chaplin film. He is gone but he will return. He will come with his
+cane one day along that Arras road to the old hut in Behagnies; and
+men dressed in brown will welcome him there again.
+
+He will pass beyond it through those desolate plains, and over the
+hills beyond them, beyond Bapaume. Far hamlets to the east will know
+his antics.
+
+And one day surely, in old familiar garb, without court dress, without
+removing his hat, armed with that flexible cane, he will walk over the
+faces of the Prussian Guard and, picking up the Kaiser by the collar,
+with infinite nonchalance in finger and thumb, will place him neatly
+in a prone position and solemnly sit on his chest.
+
+
+
+
+The Oases of Death
+
+
+While the German guns were pounding Amiens and the battle of dull
+Prussianism against Liberty raged on, they buried Richthofen in the
+British lines.
+
+They had laid him in a large tent with his broken machine outside it.
+Thence British airmen carried him to the quiet cemetery, and he was
+buried among the cypresses in this old resting place of French
+generations just as though he had come there bringing no harm to
+France.
+
+Five wreaths were on his coffin, placed there by those who had fought
+against him up in the air. And under the wreaths on the coffin was
+spread the German flag.
+
+When the funeral service was over three volleys were fired by the
+escort, and a hundred aviators paid their last respects to the grave
+of their greatest enemy; for the chivalry that the Prussians have
+driven from earth and sea lives on in the blue spaces of the air.
+
+They buried Richthofen at evening, and the planes came droning home as
+they buried him, and the German guns roared on and guns answered,
+defending Amiens. And in spite of all, the cemetery had the air of
+quiet, remaining calm and aloof, as all French graveyards are. For
+they seem to have no part in the cataclysm that shakes all the world
+but them; they seem to withdraw amongst memories and to be aloof from
+time, and, above all, to be quite untroubled by the war that rages
+to-day, upon which they appear to look out listlessly from among their
+cypress and yew, and dimly, down a vista of centuries. They are very
+strange, these little oases of death that remain unmoved and green
+with their trees still growing, in the midst of a desolation as far as
+the eye can see, in which cities and villages and trees and hedges and
+farms and fields and churches are all gone, and where hugely broods a
+desert. It is as though Death, stalking up and down through France for
+four years, sparing nothing, had recognized for his own his little
+gardens, and had spared only them.
+
+
+
+
+Anglo-Saxon Tyranny
+
+
+"We need a sea," says Big-Admiral von Tirpitz, "freed of
+Anglo-Saxon tyranny." Unfortunately neither the British Admiralty nor
+the American Navy permit us to know how much of the Anglo-Saxon
+tyranny is done by American destroyers and how much by British ships
+and even trawler. It would interest both countries to know, if it
+could be known. But the Big-Admiral is unjust to France, for the
+French navy exerts a tyranny at sea that can by no means be
+overlooked, although naturally from her position in front of the mouth
+of the Elbe England practises the culminating insupportable tyranny of
+keeping the High Seas Fleet in the Kiel Canal.
+
+It is not I, but the Big-Admiral, who chose the word tyranny as
+descriptive of the activities of the Anglo-Saxon navies. He was making
+a speech at Dusseldorf on May 25th and was reported in the
+Dusseldorfer Nachrichten on May 27th.
+
+Naturally it does not seem like tyranny to us, even the contrary; but
+for an admiral, ein Grosse-Admiral, lately commanding a High Seas
+Fleet, it must have been more galling than we perhaps can credit to be
+confined in a canal. There was he, who should have been breasting the
+blue, or at any rate doing something salty and nautical, far out in
+the storms of that sea that the Germans call an Ocean, with the
+hurricane raging angrily in his whiskers and now and then wafting
+tufts of them aloft to white the halyards; there was he constrained to
+a command the duties of which however nobly he did them could be
+equally well carried out by any respectable bargee. He hoped for a
+piracy of which the Lusitania was merely a beginning; he looked for
+the bombardment of innumerable towns; he pictured slaughter in many a
+hamlet of fishermen; he planned more than all those things of which
+U-boat commanders are guilty; he saw himself a murderous old man,
+terrible to seafarers, and a scourge of the coasts, and fancied
+himself chronicled in after years by such as told dark tales of
+Captain Kidd or the awful buccaneers; but he followed in the end no
+more desperate courses than to sit and watch his ships on a wharf near
+Kiel like one of Jacob's night watchmen.
+
+No wonder that what appears to us no more than the necessary
+protection of women and children in seacoast towns from murder should
+be to him an intolerable tyranny. No wonder that the guarding of
+travellers of the allied countries at sea, and even those of the
+neutrals, should be a most galling thing to the Big-Admiral's thwarted
+ambition, looking at it from the point of view of one who to
+white-whiskered age has retained the schoolboy's natural love of the
+black and yellow flag. A pirate, he would say, has as much right to
+live as wasps or tigers. The Anglo-Saxon navies, he might argue, have
+a certain code of rules for use at sea; they let women get first into
+the boats, for instance, when ships are sinking, and they rescue
+drowning mariners when they can: no actual harm in all this, he would
+feel, though it would weaken you, as Hindenburg said of poetry; but if
+all these little rules are tyrannously enforced on those who may think
+them silly, what is to become of the pirate? Where, if people like
+Beattie and Sims had always had their way, would be those rollicking
+tales of the jolly Spanish Main, and men walking the plank into the
+big blue sea, and long, low, rakish craft putting in to Indian
+harbours with a cargo of men and women all hung from the yard-arm? A
+melancholy has come over the spirit of Big-Admiral von Tirpitz in the
+years he has spent in the marshes between the Elbe and Kiel, and in
+that melancholy he sees romance crushed; he sees no more pearl
+earrings and little gold rings in the hold, he sees British
+battleships spoiling the Spanish Main, and hateful American cruisers
+in the old Sargasso Sea; he sees himself, alas, the last of all the
+pirates.
+
+Let him take comfort. There were always pirates. And in spite of the
+tyranny of England and America, and of France, which the poor old man
+perplexed with his troubles forgot, there will be pirates still. Not
+many perhaps, but enough U-boats will always be able to slip through
+that tyrannous blockade to spread indiscriminate slaughter amongst the
+travellers of any nation, enough to hand on the old traditions of
+murder at sea. And one day Captain Kidd, with such a bow as they used
+to make in ports of the Spanish Main, will take off his ancient hat,
+sweeping it low in Hell, and be proud to clasp the hand of the Lord of
+the Kiel Canal.
+
+
+
+
+Memories
+
+
+  ... far-off things
+     And battles long ago.
+
+
+Those who live in an old house are necessarily more concerned with
+paying the plumber, should his art be required, or choosing wall paper
+that does not clash with the chintzes, than with the traditions that
+may haunt its corridors. In Ireland,--and no one knows how old that
+is, for the gods that lived there before the Red Branch came wrote few
+chronicles on the old grey Irish stones and wrote in their own
+language,--in Ireland we are more concerned with working it so that
+Tim Flanagan gets the job he does be looking for.
+
+But in America those who remember Ireland remember her, very often,
+from old generations; maybe their grandfather migrated, perhaps his
+grandfather, and Ireland is remembered by old tales treasured among
+them. Now Tim Flanagan will not be remembered in a year's time when he
+has the job for which he has got us to agitate, and the jobberies that
+stir us move not the pen of History.
+
+But the tales that Irish generations hand down beyond the Atlantic
+have to be tales that are worth remembering. They are tales that have
+to stand the supreme test, tales that a child will listen to by the
+fireside of an evening, so that they go down with those early
+remembered evenings that are last of all to go of the memories of a
+lifetime. A tale that a child will listen to must have much grandeur.
+Any cheap stuff will do for us, bad journalism, and novels by girls
+that could get no other jobs; but a child looks for those things in a
+tale that are simple and noble and epic, the things that Earth
+remembers. And so they tell, over there, tales of Sarsfield and of the
+old Irish Brigade; they tell, of an evening, of Owen Roe O'Neill. And
+into those tales come the plains of Flanders again and the ancient
+towns of France, towns famous long ago and famous yet: let us rather
+think of them as famous names and not as the sad ruins we have seen,
+melancholy by day and monstrous in the moonlight.
+
+Many an Irishman who sails from America for those historic lands knows
+that the old trees that stand there have their roots far down in soil
+once richened by Irish blood. When the Boyne was lost and won, and
+Ireland had lost her King, many an Irishman with all his wealth in a
+scabbard looked upon exile as his sovereign's court. And so they came
+to the lands of foreign kings, with nothing to offer for the
+hospitality that was given them but a sword; and it usually was a
+sword with which kings were well content. Louis XV had many of them,
+and was glad to have them at Fontenoy; the Spanish King admitted them
+to the Golden Fleece; they defended Maria Theresa. Landen in Flanders
+and Cremona knew them. A volume were needed to tell of all those
+swords; more than one Muse has remembered them. It was not disloyalty
+that drove them forth; their King was gone, they followed, the oak was
+smitten and brown were the leaves of the tree.
+
+But no such mournful metaphor applies to the men who march to-day
+towards the plains where the "Wild Geese" were driven. They go with
+no country mourning them, but their whole land cheers them on; they go
+to the inherited battlefields. And there is this difference in their
+attitude to kings, that those knightly Irishmen of old, driven
+homeless over-sea, appeared as exiles suppliant for shelter before the
+face of the Grand Monarch, and he, no doubt with exquisite French
+grace, gave back to them all they had lost except what was lost
+forever, salving so far as he could the injustice suffered by each.
+But to-day when might, for its turn, is in the hands of democracies,
+the men whose fathers built the Statue of Liberty have left their
+country to bring back an exiled king to his home, and to right what
+can be righted of the ghastly wrongs of Flanders.
+
+And if men's prayers are heard, as many say, old saints will hear old
+supplications going up by starlight with a certain wistful, musical
+intonation that has linked the towns of Limerick and Cork with the
+fields of Flanders before.
+
+
+
+
+The Movement
+
+
+For many years Eliphaz Griggs was comparatively silent. Not that he
+did not talk on all occasions whenever he could find hearers, he did
+that at great length; but for many years he addressed no public
+meeting, and was no part of the normal life of the northeast end of
+Hyde Park or Trafalgar Square. And then one day he was talking in a
+public house where he had gone to talk on the only subject that was
+dear to him. He waited, as was his custom, until five or six men were
+present, and then he began. "Ye're all damned, I'm saying, damned
+from the day you were born. Your portion is Tophet."
+
+And on that day there happened what had never happened in his
+experience before. Men used to listen in a tolerant way, and say
+little over their beer, for that is the English custom; and that would
+be all. But to-day a man rose up with flashing eyes and went over to
+Eliphaz and gripped him by the hand: "They're all damned," said the
+stranger.
+
+That was the turning point in the life of Eliphaz. Up to that moment
+he had been a lonely crank, and men thought he was queer; but now
+there were two of them and he became a Movement. A Movement in England
+may do what it likes: there was a Movement, before the War, for
+spoiling tulips in Kew Gardens and breaking church windows; it had its
+run like the rest.
+
+The name of Eliphaz's new friend was Ezekiel Pim: and they drew up
+rules for their Movement almost at once; and very soon country inns
+knew Eliphaz no more. And for some while they missed him where he used
+to drop in of an evening to tell them they were all damned: and then a
+man proved one day that the earth was flat, and they all forgot
+Eliphaz.
+
+But Eliphaz went to Hyde Park and Ezekiel Pim went with him, and there
+you would see them close to the Marble Arch on any fine Sunday
+afternoon, preaching their Movement to the people of London. "You are
+all damned," said Eliphaz. "Your portion shall be damnation for
+everlasting."
+
+"All damned," added Ezekiel.
+
+Eliphaz was the orator. He would picture Hell to you as it really is.
+He made you see pretty much what it will be like to wriggle and turn
+and squirm, and never escape from burning. But Ezekiel Pim, though he
+seldom said more than three words, uttered those words with such
+alarming sincerity and had such a sure conviction shining in his eyes
+that searched right in your face as he said them, and his long hair
+waved so weirdly as his head shot forward when he said "You're all
+damned," that Ezekiel Pim brought home to you that the vivid
+descriptions of Eliphaz really applied to you.
+
+People who lead bad lives get their sensibilities hardened. These did
+not care very much what Eliphaz said. But girls at school, and several
+governesses, and even some young clergy, were very much affected.
+Eliphaz Griggs and Ezekiel Pim seemed to bring Hell so near to you.
+You could almost feel it baking the Marble Arch from two to four on
+Sundays. And at four o'clock the Surbiton Branch of the International
+Anarchists used to come along, and Eliphaz Griggs and Ezekiel Pim
+would pack up their flag and go, for the pitch belonged to the
+Surbiton people till six; and the crank Movements punctiliously
+recognize each other's rights. If they fought among themselves, which
+is quite unthinkable, the police would run them in; it is the one
+thing that an anarchist in England may never do.
+
+When the War came the two speakers doubled their efforts. The way they
+looked at it was that here was a counter-attraction taking people's
+minds off the subject of their own damnation just as they had got them
+to think about it. Eliphaz worked as he had never worked before; he
+spared nobody; but it was still Ezekiel Pim who somehow brought it
+most home to them.
+
+One fine spring afternoon Eliphaz Griggs was speaking at his usual
+place and time; he had wound himself up wonderfully. "You are
+damned," he was saying, "for ever and ever and ever. Your sins have
+found you out. Your filthy lives will be as fuel round you and shall
+burn for ever and ever."
+
+"Look here," said a Canadian soldier in the crowd, "we shouldn't
+allow that in Ottawa."
+
+"What?" asked an English girl.
+
+"Why, telling us we're all damned like that," he said.
+
+"Oh, this is England," she said. "They may all say what they like
+here."
+
+"You are all damned," said Ezekiel, jerking forward his head and
+shoulders till his hair flapped out behind. "All, all, all damned."
+
+"I'm damned if I am," said the Canadian soldier.
+
+"Ah," said Ezekiel, and a sly look came into his face.
+
+Eliphaz flamed on. "Your sins are remembered. Satan shall grin at
+you. He shall heap cinders on you for ever and ever. Woe to you,
+filthy livers. Woe to you, sinners. Hell is your portion. There shall
+be none to grieve for you. You shall dwell in torment for ages. None
+shall be spared, not one. Woe everlasting... Oh, I beg pardon,
+gentlemen, I'm sure." For the Pacifists' League had been kept waiting
+three minutes. It was their turn to-day at four.
+
+
+
+
+Nature's Cad
+
+
+The claim of Professor Grotius Jan Beek to have discovered, or
+learned, the language of the greater apes has been demonstrated
+clearly enough. He is not the original discoverer of the fact that
+they have what may be said to correspond with a language; nor is he
+the first man to have lived for some while in the jungle protected by
+wooden bars, with a view to acquiring some knowledge of the meaning of
+the various syllables that gorillas appear to utter. If so crude a
+collection of sounds, amounting to less than a hundred words, if words
+they are, may be called a language, it may be admitted that the
+Professor has learned it, as his recent experiments show. What he has
+not proved is his assertion that he has actually conversed with a
+gorilla, or by signs, or grunts, or any means whatever obtained an
+insight, as he put it, into its mentality, or, as we should put it,
+its point of view. This Professor Beek claims to have done; and though
+he gives us a certain plausible corroboration of a kind which makes
+his story appear likely, it should be borne in mind that it is not of
+the nature of proof.
+
+The Professor's story is briefly that having acquired this language,
+which nobody that has witnessed his experiments will call in question,
+he went back to the jungle for a week, living all the time in the
+ordinary explorer's cage of the Blik pattern. Towards the very end of
+the week a big male gorilla came by, and the Professor attracted it by
+the one word "Food." It came, he says, close to the cage, and seemed
+prepared to talk but became very angry on seeing a man there, and beat
+the cage and would say nothing. The Professor says that he asked it
+why it was angry. He admits that he had learned no more than forty
+words of this language, but believes that there are perhaps thirty
+more. Much however is expressed, as he says, by mere intonation.
+Anger, for instance; and scores of allied words, such as terrible,
+frightful, kill, whether noun, verb or adjective, are expressed, he
+says, by a mere growl. Nor is there any word for "Why," but queries
+are signified by the inflexion of the voice.
+
+When he asked it why it was angry the gorilla said that men killed
+him, and added a noise that the professor said was evidently meant to
+allude to guns. The only word used, he says, in this remark of the
+gorilla's was the word that signified "man." The sentence as
+understood by the professor amounted to "Man kill me. Guns." But the
+word "kill" was represented simply by a snarl, "me" by slapping
+its chest, and "guns" as I have explained was only represented by a
+noise. The Professor believes that ultimately a word for guns may be
+evolved out of that noise, but thinks that it will take many
+centuries, and that if during that time guns should cease to be in
+use, this stimulus being withdrawn, the word will never be evolved at
+all, nor of course will it be needed.
+
+The Professor tried, by evincing interest, ignorance, and incredulity,
+and even indignation, to encourage the gorilla to say more; but to his
+disappointment, all the more intense after having exchanged that one
+word of conversation with one of the beasts, the gorilla only repeated
+what it had said, and beat on the cage again. For half an hour this
+went on, the Professor showing every sign of sympathy, the gorilla
+raging and beating upon the cage.
+
+It was half an hour of the most intense excitement to the Professor,
+during which time he saw the realization of dreams that many
+considered crazy, glittering as it were within his grasp, and all the
+while this ridiculous gorilla would do nothing but repeat the mere
+shred of a sentence and beat the cage with its great hands; and the
+heat of course was intense. And by the end of the half hour the
+excitement and the heat seem to have got the better of the Professor's
+temper, and he waved the disgusting brute angrily away with a gesture
+that probably was not much less impatient than the gorilla's own. And
+at that the animal suddenly became voluble. He beat more furiously
+than ever upon the cage and slipped his great fingers through the
+bars, trying to reach the Professor, and poured out volumes of
+ape-chatter.
+
+Why, why did men shoot at him, he asked. He made himself terrible,
+therefore men ought to love him. That was the whole burden of what the
+Professor calls its argument. "Me, me terrible," two slaps on the
+chest and then a growl. "Man love me." And then the emphatic
+negative word, and the sound that meant guns, and sudden furious
+rushes at the cage to try to get at the Professor.
+
+The gorilla, Professor Beek explains, evidently admired only strength;
+whenever he said "I make myself terrible to Man," a sentence he
+often repeated, he drew himself up and thrust out his huge chest and
+bared his frightful teeth; and certainly, the Professor says, there
+was something terribly grand about the menacing brute. "Me
+terrible," he repeated again and again, "Me terrible. Sky, sun,
+stars with me. Man love me. Man love me. No?" It meant that all the
+great forces of nature assisted him and his terrible teeth, which he
+gnashed repeatedly, and that therefore man should love him, and he
+opened his great jaws wide as he said this, showing all the brutal
+force of them.
+
+There was to my mind a genuine ring in Professor Beek's story, because
+he was obviously so much more concerned, and really troubled, by the
+dreadful depravity of this animal's point of view, or mentality as he
+called it, than he was concerned with whether or not we believed what
+he had said.
+
+And I mentioned that there was a circumstance in his story of a
+plausible and even corroborative nature. It is this. Professor Beek,
+who noticed at the time a bullet wound in the tip of the gorilla's
+left ear, by means of which it was luckily identified, put his
+analysis of its mentality in writing and showed it to several others,
+before he had any way of accounting for the beast having such a mind.
+
+Long afterwards it was definitely ascertained that this animal had
+been caught when young on the slopes of Kilimanjaro and trained and
+even educated, so far as such things are possible, by an eminent
+German Professor, a persona grata at the Court of Berlin.
+
+
+
+
+The Home of Herr Schnitzelhaaser
+
+
+The guns in the town of Greinstein were faintly audible. The family of
+Schnitzelhaaser lived alone there in mourning, an old man and old
+woman. They never went out or saw any one, for they knew they could
+not speak as though they did not mourn. They feared that their secret
+would escape them. They had never cared for the war that the War Lord
+made. They no longer cared what he did with it. They never read his
+speeches; they never hung out flags when he ordered flags: they hadn't
+the heart to.
+
+They had had four sons.
+
+The lonely old couple would go as far as the shop for food. Hunger
+stalked behind them. They just beat hunger every day, and so saw
+evening: but there was nothing to spare. Otherwise they did not go out
+at all. Hunger had been coming slowly nearer of late. They had nothing
+but the ration, and the ration was growing smaller. They had one pig
+of their own, but the law said you might not kill it. So the pig was
+no good to them.
+
+They used to go and look at that pig sometimes when hunger pinched.
+But more than that they did not dare to contemplate.
+
+Hunger came nearer and nearer. The war was going to end by the first
+of July. The War Lord was going to take Paris on this day and that
+would end the war at once. But then the war was always going to end.
+It was going to end in 1914, and their four sons were to have come
+home when the leaves fell. The War Lord had promised that. And even if
+it did end, that would not bring their four sons home now. So what did
+it matter what the War Lord said.
+
+It was thoughts like these that they knew they had to conceal. It was
+because of thoughts like these that they did not trust themselves to
+go out and see other people, for they feared that by their looks if by
+nothing else, or by their silence or perhaps their tears, they might
+imply a blasphemy against the All Highest. And hunger made one so
+hasty. What might one not say? And so they stayed indoors.
+
+But now. What would happen now? The War Lord was coming to Greinstein
+in order to hear the guns. One officer of the staff was to be billeted
+in their house. And what would happen now?
+
+They talked the whole thing over. They must struggle and make an
+effort. The officer would be there for one evening. He would leave in
+the morning quite early in order to make things ready for the return
+to Potsdam: he had charge of the imperial car. So for one evening they
+must be merry. They would suppose, it was Herr Schnitzelhaaser's
+suggestion, they would think all the evening that Belgium and France
+and Luxemburg all attacked the Fatherland, and that the Kaiser,
+utterly unprepared, quite unprepared, called on the Germans to defend
+their land against Belgium.
+
+Yes, the old woman could imagine that; she could think it all the
+evening.
+
+And then,--it was no use not being cheerful altogether,--then one
+must imagine a little more, just for the evening: it would come quite
+easy; one must think that the four boys were alive.
+
+Hans too? (Hans was the youngest).
+
+Yes, all four. Just for the evening.
+
+But if the officer asks?
+
+He will not ask. What are four soldiers?
+
+So it was all arranged; and at evening the officer came. He brought
+his own rations, so hunger came no nearer. Hunger just lay down
+outside the door and did not notice the officer.
+
+A this supper the officer began to talk. The Kaiser himself, he said,
+was at the Schartzhaus.
+
+"So," said Herr Schnitzelhaaser; "just over the way." So close.
+Such an honour.
+
+And indeed the shadow of the Schartzhaus darkened their garden in the
+morning.
+
+It was such an honour, said Frau Schnitzelhaaser too. And they began
+to praise the Kaiser. So great a War Lord, she said; the most glorious
+war there had ever been.
+
+Of course, said the officer, it would end on the first of July.
+
+Of course, said Frau Schnitzelhaaser. And so great an admiral, too.
+One must remember that also. And how fortunate we were to have him:
+one must not forget that. Had it not been for him the crafty Belgians
+would have attacked the Fatherland, but they were struck down before
+they could do it. So much better to prevent a bad deed like that than
+merely to punish after. So wise. And had it not been for him, if it
+had not been for him...
+
+The old man saw that she was breaking down and hastily he took up that
+feverish praise. Feverish it was, for their hunger and bitter loss
+affected their minds no less than illness does, and the things they
+did they did hastily and intemperately. His praise of the War Lord
+raced on as the officer ate. He spoke of him as of those that benefit
+man, as of monarchs who bring happiness to their people. And now, he
+said, he is here in the Schartzhaus beside us, listening to the guns
+just like a common soldier.
+
+Finally the guns, as he spoke, coughed beyond ominous hills.
+Contentedly the officer went on eating. He suspected nothing of the
+thoughts his host and hostess were hiding. At last he went upstairs to
+bed.
+
+As fierce exertion is easy to the fevered, so they had spoken; and it
+wears them, so they were worn. The old woman wept when the officer
+went out of hearing. But old Herr Schnitzelhaaser picked up a big
+butcher's knife. "I will bear it no more," he said.
+
+His wife watched him in silence as he went away with his knife. Out of
+the house he went and into the night. Through the open door she saw
+nothing; all was dark; even the Schartzhaus, where all was gay
+to-night, stood dark for fear of aeroplanes. The old woman waited in
+silence.
+
+When Herr Schnitzelhaaser returned there was blood on his knife.
+
+"What have you done?" the old woman asked him quite calmly. "I have
+killed our pig," he said.
+
+She broke out then, all the more recklessly for the long restraint of
+the evening; the officer must have heard her.
+
+"We are lost! We are lost!" she cried. "We may not kill our pig.
+Hunger has made you mad. You have ruined us."
+
+"I will bear it no longer," he said. "I have killed our pig."
+
+"But they will never let us eat it," she cried. "Oh, you have
+ruined us!"
+
+"If you did not dare to kill our pig," he said, "why did you not
+stop me when you saw me go? You saw me go with the knife?"
+
+"I thought," she said, "you were going to kill the Kaiser."
+
+
+
+
+A Deed of Mercy
+
+
+As Hindenburg and the Kaiser came down, as we read, from Mont d'Hiver,
+during the recent offensive, they saw on the edge of a crater two
+wounded British soldiers. The Kaiser ordered that they should be cared
+for: their wounds were bound up and they were given brandy, and
+brought round from unconsciousness. That is the German account of it,
+and it may well be true. It was a kindly act.
+
+Probably had it not been for this the two men would have died among
+those desolate craters; no one would have known, and no one could have
+been blamed for it.
+
+The contrast of this spark of imperial kindness against the gloom of
+the background of the war that the Kaiser made is a pleasant thing to
+see, even though it illuminates for only a moment the savage darkness
+in which our days are plunged. It was a kindness that probably will
+long be remembered to him. Even we, his enemies, will remember it. And
+who knows but that when most he needs it his reward for the act will
+be given him.
+
+For Judas, they say, once in his youth, gave his cloak, out of
+compassion, to a shivering beggar, who sat shaken with ague, in rags,
+in bitter need. And the years went by and Judas forgot his deed. And
+long after, in Hell, Judas they say was given one day's respite at the
+end of every year because of this one kindness he had done so long
+since in his youth. And every year he goes, they say, for a day and
+cools himself among the Arctic bergs; once every year for century
+after century.
+
+Perhaps some sailor on watch on a misty evening blown far out of his
+course away to the north saw something ghostly once on an iceberg
+floating by, or heard some voice in the dimness that seemed like the
+voice of man, and came home with this weird story. And perhaps, as the
+story passed from lip to lip, men found enough justice in it to
+believe it true. So it came down the centuries.
+
+Will seafarers ages hence on dim October evenings, or on nights when
+the moon is ominous through mist, red and huge and uncanny, see a
+lonely figure sometimes on the loneliest part of the sea, far north of
+where the Lusitania sank, gathering all the cold it can? Will they see
+it hugging a crag of iceberg wan as itself, helmet, cuirass and ice
+pale-blue in the mist together? Will it look towards them with
+ice-blue eyes through the mist, and will they question it, meeting on
+those bleak seas? Will it answer--or will the North wind howl like
+voices? Will the cry of seals be heard, and ice floes grinding, and
+strange birds lost upon the wind that night, or will it speak to them
+in those distant years and tell them how it sinned, betraying man?
+
+It will be a grim, dark story in that lonely part of the sea, when he
+confesses to sailors, blown too far north, the dreadful thing he
+plotted against man. The date on which he is seen will be told from
+sailor to sailor. Queer taverns of distant harbours will know it well.
+Not many will care to be at sea that day, and few will risk being
+driven by stress of weather on the Kaiser's night to the bergs of the
+haunted part of sea.
+
+And yet for all the grimness of the pale-blue phantom, with cuirass
+and helmet and eyes shimmering on deadly icebergs, and yet for all the
+sorrow of the wrong he did against man, the women drowned and the
+children, and all the good ships gone, yet will the horrified mariners
+meeting him in the mist grudge him no moment of the day he has earned,
+or the coolness he gains from the bergs, because of the kindness he
+did to the wounded men. For the mariners in their hearts are kindly
+men, and what a soul gains from kindness will seem to them well
+deserved.
+
+
+
+
+Last Scene of All
+
+
+After John Calleron was hit he carried on in a kind of twilight of the
+mind. Things grew dimmer and calmer; harsh outlines of events became
+blurred; memories came to him; there was a singing in his ears like
+far-off bells. Things seemed more beautiful than they had a while ago;
+to him it was for all the world like evening after some quiet sunset,
+when lawns and shrubs and woods and some old spire look lovely in the
+late light, and one reflects on past days. Thus he carried on, seeing
+things dimly. And what is sometimes called "the roar of battle,"
+those aerial voices that snarl and moan and whine and rage at
+soldiers, had grown dimmer too. It all seemed further away, and
+littler, as far things are. He still heard the bullets: there is
+something so violently and intensely sharp in the snap of passing
+bullets at short ranges that you hear them in deepest thought, and
+even in dreams. He heard them, tearing by, above all things else. The
+rest seemed fainter and dimmer, and smaller and further away.
+
+He did not think he was very badly hit, but nothing seemed to matter
+as it did a while ago. Yet he carried on.
+
+And then he opened his eyes very wide and found he was back in London
+again in an underground train. He knew it at once by the look of it.
+He had made hundreds of journeys, long ago, by those trains. He knew
+by the dark, outside, that it had not yet left London; but what was
+odder than that, if one stopped to think of it, was that he knew
+exactly where it was going. It was the train that went away out into
+the country where he used to live as a boy. He was sure of that
+without thinking.
+
+When he began to think how he came to be there he remembered the war
+as a very far-off thing. He supposed he had been unconscious a very
+long time. He was all right now.
+
+Other people were sitting beside him on the same seat. They all seemed
+like people he remembered a very long time ago. In the darkness
+opposite, beyond the windows of the train, he could see their
+reflections clearly. He looked at the reflections but could not quite
+remember.
+
+A woman was sitting on his left. She was quite young. She was more
+like some one that he most deeply remembered than all the others were.
+He gazed at her, and tried to clear his mind.
+
+He did not turn and stare at her, but he quietly watched her
+reflection before him in the dark. Every detail of her dress, her
+young face, her hat, the little ornaments she wore, were minutely
+clear before him, looking out of the dark. So contented she looked you
+would say she was untouched by war.
+
+As he gazed at the clear calm face and the dress that seemed neat
+though old and, like all things, so faraway, his mind grew clearer and
+clearer. It seemed to him certain it was the face of his mother, but
+from thirty years ago, out of old memories and one picture. He felt
+sure it was his mother as she had been when he was very small. And yet
+after thirty years how could he know? He puzzled to try and be quite
+sure. But how she came to be there, looking like that, out of those
+oldest memories, he did not think of at all.
+
+He seemed to be hugely tired by many things and did not want to think.
+Yet he was very happy, more happy even than tired men just come home
+all new to comfort.
+
+He gazed and gazed at the face in the dark. And then he felt quite
+sure.
+
+He was about to speak. Was she looking at him? Was she watching him,
+he wondered. He glanced for the first time to his own reflection in
+that clear row of faces.
+
+His own reflection was not there, but blank dark showed between his
+two neighbours. And then he knew he was dead.
+
+
+
+
+Old England
+
+
+Towards winter's end on a high, big, bare down, in the south of
+England, John Plowman was plowing. He was plowing the brown field at
+the top of the hill, good soil of the clay; a few yards lower down was
+nothing but chalk, with shallow flinty soil and steep to plow; so they
+let briars grow there. For generations his forbears had plowed on the
+top of that hill. John did not know how many. The hills were very old;
+it might have been always.
+
+He scarcely looked to see if his furrow was going straight. The work
+he was doing was so much in his blood that he could almost feel if
+furrows were straight or not. Year after year they moved on the same
+old landmarks; thorn trees and briars mostly guided the plow, where
+they stood on the untamed land beyond; the thorn trees grew old at
+their guiding, and still the furrows varied not by the breadth of a
+hoof-mark.
+
+John, as he plowed, had leisure to meditate on much besides the crops;
+he knew so much of the crops that his thoughts could easily run free
+from them; he used to meditate on who they were that lived in briar
+and thorn tree, and danced as folk said all through midsummer night,
+and sometimes blessed and sometimes harmed the crops; for he knew that
+in Old England were wonderful ancient things, odder and older things
+than many folks knew. And his eyes had leisure to see much beside the
+furrows, for he could almost feel the furrows going straight.
+
+One day at his plowing, as he watched the thorn ahead, he saw the
+whole big hill besides, looking south, and the lands below it; one day
+he saw in the bright sun of late winter a horseman riding the road
+through the wide lands below. The horseman shone as he rode, and wore
+white linen over what was shining, and on the linen was a big red
+cross. "One of them knights," John Plowman said to himself or his
+horse, "going to them crusades." And he went on with his plowing all
+that day satisfied, and remembered what he had seen for years, and
+told his son.
+
+For there is in England, and there always was, mixed with the needful
+things that feed or shelter the race, the wanderer-feeling for
+romantic causes that runs deep and strange through the other thoughts,
+as the Gulf Stream runs through the sea. Sometimes generations of John
+Plowman's family would go by and no high romantic cause would come to
+sate that feeling. They would work on just the same though a little
+sombrely, as though some good thing had been grudged them. And then
+the Crusades had come, and John Plowman had seen the Red Cross knight
+go by, riding towards the sea in the morning, and Jon Plowman was
+satisfied.
+
+Some generations later a man of the same name was plowing the same
+hill. They still plowed the brown clay at the top and left the slope
+wild, though there were many changes. And the furrows were wonderfully
+straight still. And half he watched a thorn tree ahead as he plowed
+and half he took in the whole hill sloping south and the wide lands
+below it, far beyond which was the sea. They had a railway now down in
+the valley. The sunlight glittering near the end of winter shone on a
+train that was marked with great white squares and red crosses on
+them.
+
+John Plowman stopped his horses and looked at the train. "An
+ambulance train," he said, "coming up from the coast." He thought
+of the lads he knew and wondered if any were there. He pitied the men
+in that train and envied them. And then there came to him the thought
+of England's cause and of how those men had upheld it, at sea and in
+crumbling cities. He thought of the battle whose echoes reached
+sometimes to that field, whispering to furrows and thorn trees that
+had never heard them before. He thought of the accursed tyrant's cruel
+might, and of the lads that had faced it. He saw the romantic
+splendour of England's cause. He was old but had seen the glamour for
+which each generation looked. Satisfied in his heart and cheered with
+a new content he went on with his age-old task in the business of man
+with the hills.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Tales of War, by Lord Dunsany
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