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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77802 ***
+
+
+
+
+                                No Enemy
+
+                                A TALE OF
+                             RECONSTRUCTION
+
+
+                          _by_ Ford Madox Ford
+
+                               _Author of_
+                             NO MORE PARADES
+                               SOME DO NOT
+                                 _etc._
+
+
+                            _New York, 1929_
+                          THE MACAULAY COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+                           COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY
+                          THE MACAULAY COMPANY
+
+                         PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+                                  _To_
+                        ESTHER JULIA MADOX FORD
+
+
+_Très, très chère petite Princesse_,
+
+When you shall come to read English--which I hope will not be too
+soon--you shall find here adumbrated what the world seemed like to me
+just when you were preparing to enter it ..... a confused old world
+which your coming rendered so much clearer and dearer. And as these
+pages were written in the expectation of you--and for you!--I have
+thought better to leave them exactly as they were, bearing as they
+obviously do the traces of sufferings that, thank God, you never knew.
+And so, when you come to read them, give a tender thought to him to
+whom you have so often written--quitoubliejamé et qui t’aime de tou son
+coeur et encore beaucoupluss!
+
+                                                              F. M. F.
+
+New York, 21st June, 1929
+
+
+
+
+  What is love of one’s land?....
+                      I don’t know very well.
+  It is something that sleeps
+  For a year, for a day,
+  For a month--something that keeps
+  Very hidden and quiet and still
+  And then takes
+  The quiet heart like a wave,
+  The quiet brain like a spell,
+  The quiet will
+  Like a tornado--and that shakes
+  The whole of the soul.
+
+
+
+
+                           CONTENTS
+
+
+                  Part One--Four Landscapes
+
+   CHAPTER                                       PAGE
+
+     I  TO INTRODUCE GRINGOIRE                      9
+
+    II  GARDENS AND FLATS                          19
+
+   III  BLUE OF SWALLOWS’ BACKS                    39
+
+    IV  THE KINGDOMS OF THE EARTH                  47
+
+     V  INTERMEZZO                                 88
+
+    VI  JUST COUNTRY                              118
+
+   VII  PLAYING THE GAME                          129
+
+
+                Part Two--Certain Interiors
+
+  VIII  “MAISIE”                                  147
+
+    IX  THE WATER MILL                            176
+
+     X  FROM A BALCONY                            194
+
+    XI  “ROSALIE PRUDENT”                         222
+
+   XII  THE MOVIES                                258
+
+        ENVOI                                     293
+
+
+
+
+                                PART ONE
+
+                            FOUR LANDSCAPES
+
+
+
+
+                                   I
+
+                        _To Introduce Gringoire_
+
+
+The writer’s friend Gringoire, originally a poet and Gallophile, went
+to the war. Long, gray, lean, unreasonably boastful as a man and
+unreasonably modest as a poet, he was probably not too disciplined as
+an infantry officer, but he has survived to inhabit in tranquillity
+with the most charming of companions a rural habitation so ancient,
+frail and unreal that it is impossible to think of it otherwise than as
+the Gingerbread Cottage you may have read of in the tale of “Haensel
+and Gretel.”
+
+This book, then, is the story of Gringoire just after ... Armageddon.
+For it struck the writer that you hear of the men that went, and you
+hear of what they did when they were There. But you never hear how
+It left them. You hear how things were destroyed, but seldom of the
+painful processes of Reconstruction.
+
+So that your Compiler, taking pencils, tablets and erasers and
+availing himself of the singularly open hospitality of the poet and
+his charming meridional partner, came on many successive Saturday
+afternoons from the little old Grammar School where he instructs
+classes in English Literature and Physical Development, to sit in the
+garden at the feet of Gringoire, Gallophile, Veteran, Gardener and,
+above all, Economist, if not above all Poet.
+
+We would sit about on rude benches whilst Mme. Sélysette would bring
+us shandygaff brewed after a recipe of Gringoire himself. Then he
+would talk and your Compiler make furtive shorthand notes. Above all
+Gringoire loved to talk about cooking for he boasted that he was not
+only the best but the most economical cook in the world. How that may
+be your Compiler hesitates to say. To eat a meal prepared by Gringoire
+was certainly an adventure and when you felt adventurous had its
+titillations. But only Mme. Sélysette who had accompanied him into
+his English wilds from the distant South could have told you whether
+Gringoire was as economical in his cuisine as he professed to be. For
+he swore that the saviour of society in the end would be the good but
+excellently economical cook.
+
+But Mme. Sélysette, dark, alert and with exquisitely pencilled brows
+and as loyal as she was goodhumored, never got beyond saying that in
+his culinary furies Gringoire needed at least three persons--whom I
+took to be herself, the diminutive maid and the almost more diminutive
+stable boy--to clear up after he had boiled an egg.
+
+How Gringoire proposed to save the world by intensive kitchen gardening
+and exquisite but economical cookery may appear hereafter. His years in
+the trenches had taught him one thing--to be an eccentric economist,
+_in petto_, since he regarded himself as an extinct poet and proposed
+to live on his minute army pension. And I think his ambition really was
+to teach persons forced to live on minute incomes how to lead graceful,
+poetic and pleasant lives and so to save the world.
+
+Thus it would perhaps have been better could your Compiler have
+provided you with a work useful to young couples contemplating
+matrimony on ten shillings a week ... or a month ... or a year. That
+would have been an enterprise certainly to gladden the heart of
+Gringoire. Or it might have been better had it taken the form of a
+Cottager Cookery Book or a Cottager’s Guide to Gardening or the Keeping
+of Goats instead of the war-reminiscences of a contemplative and
+sensitive soul. Yes, to be sure that would have been better. One can
+only console one’s self that when it comes to war-reminiscences the
+contemplative and sensitive soul has been little represented. So, for
+the matter of that, has the poetic but economical chef.
+
+But the present writer, alas, has not the excellent--but _so_
+meticulous!--mind that will let him sit down and write _many_
+paragraphs such as that following this one. Neither has Gringoire the
+patience to dictate to the writer details of his methods. The most
+he has done is to let his Boswell into his frame of mind. We once,
+together, got as far as this:
+
+“_Chops, Mutton, to deal with._
+
+“_Fritto Misto_: Stock: Mixed Meats _en casserole_.
+
+“Take two chops. Pare off _all_ the fat till you have two _noisettes
+de mouton_. Save each particle of meat and each particle of fat from
+the tail ends of the chops, separate, but as zealously as you preserve
+every memory of your well-beloved. You will then have four little
+divisions: two _noisettes_ for the _Fritto Misto_; two chop bones
+for stock; a little pile of fat for rendering down; a little pile of
+fragments of meat. Place the bones immediately in a small casserole of
+water, with salt, two bay leaves, pepper, one leaf of sage, and rice if
+you like. It will help you if you tie the bones together with a piece
+of string having a long end so that you may pull them out. Let this
+simmer for thirty-six hours.[1] Have ready also six roots of salsify;
+one-half pound of French beans; one-half pound of cooked peas; and
+one pound of potatoes, cut into slices. (All these vegetables should
+be cooked ready. It will improve matters if the peas are _very_ young
+and boiled in syrup.) Also two tomatoes sliced in halves, the meat of
+two rashers of bacon, and a few mushrooms, and half a dozen sprigs of
+parsley. (The bacon fat must be saved for rendering down.) Also two
+slices of bread half an inch thick. Have ready also a large pie dish
+half filled with water.
+
+“Now take an earthenware frying pan with a white glazed lining. Put in
+sufficient frying fat to fill this to three-quarters of its depth when
+boiling. Set this on the fire and bring the fat to the boil. (Boiling
+fat will be absolutely still--stiller than any waters at even; as still
+as is Madame Sélysette when, in the same room, Gringoire is writing. It
+will have ceased to bubble, and, above its surface, will float a filmy
+wreath of bluish vapor. You may test it by dropping in a piece of bread
+crumb. If this becomes crisp in sixty seconds, your fat will be ready
+for what follows.)
+
+“As soon as the fat boils, drop in your two slices of bread, which
+will be large enough later to support the _noisettes_ and which will
+be trimmed to improve their appearance. During that minute, place in
+a frying basket your two _noisettes_ of mutton and the sliced cold
+potatoes. (Gringoire likes his fried potatoes not too crisp. Those who
+like them biscuit-wise should fry them in the basket for a quarter
+of an hour longer than the mutton.) Take out from the frying fat the
+slices of bread, let them drip into the fat, place them handy on a
+clean plate ... _D--n it, that’s enough!_”
+
+The reader will understand that at this point my friend Gringoire
+ceased dictating and ceased violently. Thus a Gringoire cookery book
+cannot be compiled. For, though Gringoire will cook for hours and hours
+if visitors are expected, and though he will talk, equally for hours
+and hours, about eating, about digestion, about French, Italian, and
+even German cookery as they affect the emotions, he finds it tiresome
+to tie down his mind to the recording of processes.
+
+It is the same with gardening; the keeping of goats, ducks, chickens;
+the training of dogs, cats, and horses. He will spend hours in
+meditating over his onion bed.
+
+And then Madame Sélysette will call from the bedroom window of the
+Gingerbread Cottage:
+
+“I do _love_ to see you, Gringoire, pottering about and pretending to
+be busy.” For Gringoire will have risen at 6:30 and will have done
+something with hoes, spades, trowels, lines, and other paraphernalia.
+But he will have thought more. For the rotation of crops on a quarter
+of an acre of sandy soil that has to be at once a formal garden and the
+main food supply of a couple, of the tiniest income--that is a subject
+for endless thought.
+
+It is a subject also for endless economies, schemes, calculations. The
+calculations concern manure--for the accounts of agriculture are the
+most complicated of accounts. You may show a loss on the fattening
+of an ox, a chicken, a goat, a duck, or a pig--and yet its droppings
+may so enrich your land as to give you actually a handsome balance of
+profit. Or again a crop may appear superabundant, little palatable, or
+unattractive--but, fed to one animal or another, it will beautifully
+adorn your board on Christmas day.
+
+So in the Gingerbread Cottage--and it is, in all but looks, a very bad
+cottage, with a roof that leaks, walls that used to drip with damp,
+cupboards that, till the advent of Gringoire, smelled of mold and bred
+the very largest spiders that can be imagined--Gringoire pursues at
+once his economies, his meditations, and his career as a poet.
+
+But he is only able to be communicative as to his meditations. If
+Madame Sélysette asks him how to make _potage_ this or that, he
+says: “Oh, throw in any old thing.” Or again! This spring the writer
+overheard the following dialogue between him and a small boy who was
+weeding whilst he dug.
+
+“What is the most important thing in gardening, boy?”
+
+“Manure, sir.”
+
+“What is the next most important thing?”
+
+“Tools, sir.”
+
+“And the next?”
+
+“Money to buy seeds, sir.”
+
+“Wrong in every particular,” said Gringoire in a terrible voice. “The
+first thing is brains; and the second thing is brains; and the third
+thing is brains. Do you understand?”
+
+The boy said, “Yes, sir.” But one may doubt if he was really much
+wiser. And Gringoire continued somewhat as follows: “I have no manure,
+no tools, and no money--but you will see in the autumn that I shall
+have the most productive garden in the country!”
+
+From which it will appear that Gringoire has some of the
+characteristics of a Southern origin. Today his garden would not at
+all points impress a French gardener--but in some it would. For, in
+his youth Gringoire sat under the great Professor Gressent, Professor
+of the Potager Moderne, at the Sorbonne in Paris. From him he learned
+that thought, devotion to the task, and any bit of metal on the end of
+a stick shaped like a hoe will take the place of manure, tools, and
+money. For Professor Gressent, during one session, used to commence
+every lecture by ordering his pupils to inscribe on their tablets the
+mystical sentence: “_Trois fois biner vaut deux fois engraisser._”
+
+And when his Boswell, the writer, asked him the other day how he got
+his results, he answered:
+
+“By trying to establish what that old fool Tolstoi called the Kingdom
+of God within me!”
+
+The writer took him to mean that it is the spirit in which a job is
+attacked that alone can sanctify the job--and that, in that way, the
+godly grow fat at the expense of the unrighteous. Before the war
+Gringoire was an ordinary poet, such as you might see in Soho or in
+various foreign underground haunts by the baker’s dozen, eating nasty
+meats, drinking nasty wines, usually in nasty company. How the war
+changed his heart is here recorded.
+
+This is therefore a Reconstructionary Tale.
+
+
+[Footnotes]
+
+[1] This is the result of the Army. I do not believe that Gringoire
+ever simmers his bones for thirty-six hours. But in the Army it was
+woe to the Colonel whose bones did not simmer for thirty-six hours or
+who did not say so when an apoplectic gentleman with a blue hat-band
+came around. The Colonel would lose his battalion, his D.S.O., and the
+esteem of his fellow men.
+
+
+
+
+                                   II
+
+                          _Gardens and Flats_
+
+
+“I wonder,” Gringoire[2] began one evening, “if my experience of
+landscape during the war has been that of many people....”
+
+It was an evening in spring. Gringoire had not been very long
+established in his cottage--which, because of the nature of the poet
+himself and of the poet’s adventurous establishment, the writer
+automatically styles in his mind the Gingerbread Cottage. Gringoire,
+with a spirit of hospitality that was large and open rather than either
+considered or calculating, had invited a party of London friends to
+share his Easter with him. During the day he rushed about a great
+deal, cooking highly flavored dishes of a ragout type, on paraffin
+stoves, washing up, sweeping, gardening, gathering unusual wild herbs
+for salads, so that he was busy, and we of the party saw little of him.
+
+Fortunately it was fine. For at that date the Gingerbread Cottage let
+in water like a sieve through the roof, the floor, the rough walls.
+Great holes indeed gaped in the plaster of the ceilings. But he had
+whitewashed the walls, stuck pots on shelves, improvised a couch out of
+his camp bed, and lit fires of sticks in the sitting room. So in the
+evenings we sat and listened to his talking.
+
+For Gringoire was a conversationalist. Like most dynamic, overwhelming,
+and energetic poets, he had not the patience to listen to the remarks
+of his fellows or to answer. He would be silent most of the day. But
+toward evening, as like as not, he would suddenly suspend all his
+activities, and with very possibly a hair-sieve or a trowel in his
+hand, gesticulating too, he would begin to talk.
+
+As a house party the Easter experiment was not a success for all of
+us. Gringoire had hardened himself in Flanders; the rest had not. But
+since, as a byproduct of the experience, Madame Sélysette had consented
+to share and adorn his lot, Gringoire had his reward. And the writer
+secured these records of his monologues:
+
+“I wonder,” then, he asked on one of these evenings, “if my experience
+of landscape during the war has been that of many people.” And without
+waiting he continued much as follows: “For I may say that before
+August, 1914, I lived more through my eyes than through any other
+sense, and in consequence certain corners of the earth had, singularly,
+the power to stir me.” But from the moment when, on the 4th of August,
+1914, the Germans crossed the Belgian frontier “near a place called
+Gemmenich,” aspects of the earth no longer existed for him.
+
+The earth existed, of course. Extending to immense distances of
+field-gray; dimly colored in singularly shaped masses, as if the colors
+on Mercator’s projection had been nearly washed out by a wet brush.
+Stretching away, very flat, silenced, in suspense, the earth--_orbis
+terrarum veteribus notus_--seemed to await the oncoming legions, gray
+too, but with the shimmer of gold standards that should pour out from
+that little gap, “near a place called Gemmenich,” and should obscure
+and put to shame all the green champaign lands of the world, as the
+green grass of meadows is put to shame and obscured by clay, water
+pouring through a gap in a dike. That was the earth.
+
+There were no nooks, no little, sweet corners; there were no assured
+homes, countries, provinces, kingdoms, or races. All the earth held its
+breath and waited.
+
+“And it is only today,” my friend went on, “that I see again a little
+nook of the earth; it forms the tiniest of hidden valleys, with a
+little red stream that buries itself in the red earth beneath the
+tall green of the grass and the pink and purple haze of campions, the
+occasional gold of buttercups, the cream of meadowsweet. The plants in
+the garden wave in stiffness like a battalion on parade--the platoons
+of lettuce, the headquarters’ staff, all sweet peas, and the color
+company, which is of scarlet runners. The little old cottage is under a
+cliff of rock, like a gingerbread house from a Grimm’s fairy tale; the
+silver birches and the tall pines confront it; the sunlight lies warmer
+than you could imagine in the hollow, and a nightingale is running in
+and out of the bean-stalks. Yes, a nightingale of midsummer that has
+abandoned the deep woodland and runs through the garden, a princess
+turned housekeeper, because it has young to feed. Think of noticing
+that!”
+
+During the four years that the consciousness of the war lasted, he had
+noticed only four landscapes and birds only once--to know that he was
+noticing them--for themselves. Of course, one has memories of aspects
+of the world--but of a world that was only a background for emotions.
+
+Even, for instance, when one saw poor Albert, by some trick of
+mnemonics, from the lettering of the huge word “Estaminet” across the
+front of a battered house in the Place where, in the blinding sunlight,
+some Australian transport men were watering their mules, and one
+recognized it for a place one had visited twenty years before and had
+forgotten--even when one saw the remains of the garden where, twenty
+years before, we had waited whilst our lunch of omelette, cutlets,
+and salad was prepared, or even when one saw the immense placard
+with “Caution” erected in the center of the white rubbish and white
+rubble of the Place, or the desecrated statue of the Madonna, leaning
+in an abandoned attitude from the church tower--even then one was so
+preoccupied, so shut in on one’s self, that these things were not
+objects that one looked at for themselves. They were merely landmarks.
+Divisional Headquarters, one had been told, was behind the N.E. corner
+of the Place, the notice-board was to the N.E. of one’s self, therefore
+one must pass it to reach Divisional Headquarters. It was Headquarters
+one wanted, not the storing of the mind with observed aspects.
+
+So Gringoire had four landscapes, which represent four moments in four
+years when, for very short intervals, the strain of the war lifted
+itself from the mind. They were, those intermissions of the spirit,
+exactly like gazing through rifts in a mist. Do you know what it is
+to be on a Welsh mountain side when a heavy mist comes on? Nothing
+remains. You are there by yourself.... And the only preoccupation you
+have with the solid, invisible world is the boulders over which you
+stumble and the tufts of herbage that you try to recognize as your
+path. Then suddenly the mist is riven perpendicularly, and for a moment
+you see a pallid, flat plain stretching to infinity beneath your feet
+and running palely to a sea horizon on a level with your eyes. There
+will be pale churches, pale fields, and on a ghostly channel the
+wraiths of scattered islands. Then it will be all gone.
+
+It was just so with the three or four landscapes that my friend saw
+during the war. There was the day in 1915 when Kensington Gardens
+suddenly grew visible. There were Guardsmen turning in fours, with some
+Guardee form of drill that is not usual to the Infantry. There were
+motor transport wagons going cautiously down the Broad Walk--parts of
+the familiar train of the war. And then, suddenly, there were great
+motionless trees, heavy in their summer foliage, blue-gray, beneath a
+very high sky; there was the long, quiet part of the palace; the red
+brick, glowing in the sun, the shadows of the windows very precise
+and blue. And Gringoire thought that old, stiff marionettes, rather
+homely courtiers and royalties, might step out of the tall windows
+onto the lawns and, holding tasseled canes to their lips, bow,
+pirouette and make legs, till the long chestnut wigs brushed the stiff
+rosebushes. Not _very_ gallant; not _very_ royal. No Rois Soleils or
+Princesses Lointaines but a Court nevertheless, whispering mercilessly,
+intriguing, smiling, betraying, much as in Versailles, only a little
+more rustically, in front of the old, homely Dutch orangery.
+
+Then the curtain closed again; the weight once more settled down. The
+trees again became the foreground and there was the feeling that
+Gringoire could never get away from--that they would be personally
+humiliated, shamed, abashed; as if they would wrathfully bow or avert
+their heads if ever field-gray troops passed down the Broad Walk, or
+the park keeper at the gates wore a Uhlan uniform! That was in the
+early days of the war--August, 1915, I think. The feeling that there
+might be an invasion was still, and was strong, in the air. There was
+no knowing, still, where the dam might give way and the mud-colored
+tide pour toward us. And somehow Gringoire figured it coming from the
+W. by S.W. from the direction of Kew and Fulham: high, gray, reaching
+from the legions on the ground to the gray airships towering on high--a
+solid, perpendicular wave of humiliation like the tidal wave of which
+one reads--of humiliation for the trees and the very grass.
+
+“I wonder,” Gringoire asked again that evening, “if other people
+had, like myself, that feeling that what one feared for was the
+land--not the people but the menaced earth with its familiar aspect.
+And I wonder why one had the feeling. I dare say it was just want
+of imagination: one couldn’t perhaps figure the feelings of ruined,
+fleeing and martyred populations. And yet, when I had seen enough of
+those, the feeling did not alter. I remember that what struck me most
+in ruined Pont de Nieppe, by Armentières, was still the feeling of
+abashment that seemed to attach to furniture and wall-paper exposed to
+the sky--not the sufferings of the civilian population, who seemed to
+be jolly enough--or at any rate sufficiently nonchalant--with booths
+erected under ruined walls or in still whole cottages, selling fried
+fish to the tanneries. No! what struck me as infinitely pathetic was
+lace curtains: for there were innumerable lace curtains, that had
+shaded vanished windows, fluttering from all the unroofed walls in the
+glassless window-frames. They seemed to me to be more forlornly ashamed
+than any human beings I have ever seen. Only brute beasts ever approach
+that: old and weary horses, in nettle-grown fields; or dogs when they
+go away into bushes to die.”
+
+He went on to say that perhaps prisoners of war had it too. The Germans
+certainly seemed to. But he had, naturally, never seen any of our own
+people in that condition. They are represented to us as remaining
+erect and keeping most of their _esprit de corps_. That may be why,
+in August, 1915, it was difficult to think of the sufferings of our
+possibly invaded peoples but only of the humiliation of desecrated
+herbage and downlands.
+
+“I don’t know.” And Gringoire meditated as if neither I nor Mme.
+Sélysette were in the room. “Perhaps I am lacking in human sympathy
+or have no particular cause to love my fellow men. But at any rate,
+at that moment, the feeling of dread that those gray-blue, motionless
+trees under the high sky might, under heavens more lowering, feel
+that final humiliation--that feeling was so strong that I remember it
+still as a pain. Nay, in the remembrance, I feel it so strongly that
+it is still a pain, like that of an old, deep cicatrized wound. For of
+course, it would have connoted that the broad and the small fields,
+copses, spinneys, streams, and heaths, stretching away to the quiet
+downs and the ultimate sea, would have felt that tread of mailed and
+alien heels.” He remembered looking up to the sky in an agony. And
+then he became again interested in the Guards at drill beneath the
+trees--whose dressing never altered. Why did they turn in fours at
+the command “Left turn” when they were in column of route? Why didn’t
+they form two deep? They were not doing sentry drill or any form of
+ceremonial that the ordinary Infantry practice. The command was not:
+“In fours: left turn.”
+
+So the workaday frame of mind came back--and we carried on.
+
+On hearing of the death of Lord Kitchener, he had another short moment.
+“I don’t know,” he wrote this in a letter, “whether the news had
+anything to do with it. I suppose it had. I will tell you. I was being
+motored to Dunmow Station, and when the car arrived at that little
+shanty, the stationmaster, whom I remember as quite an old man, came
+to the car-stop and just said: ‘Lord Kitchener has been drowned.’ He
+appeared quite expressionless, and I remember that both my companion
+and I laughed. I should say that I even laughed loudly. In those days
+and frames of mind, one reached, as it were, down to jokes obtaining
+only amongst rather simple people--and the joke underlying the idea of
+the drowning at sea of a man so supported by a whole land might have
+been quite ingenious in idea--like some joke of the reign of Queen Anne
+involving the raising of the sea above the dome of St. Paul’s.
+
+“But he succeeded in assuring us that Lord Kitchener had been drowned.
+‘The Field Marshal Commanding in Chief had been last seen on the
+nearly vertical deck, following a member of his staff.’--A good death
+for the man who had saved his land--and Europe.
+
+“For speaking not as an expert speaks but still as a student of the
+temper of war and the _moral_ of what in the Army is called ‘the men’
+I have no hesitation in saying--and I don’t apologize for saying
+here--that without the figure of Lord Kitchener the British Army would
+have remained negligible in numbers and would have taken a very small
+part in the war. And I suppose that, without the British Army, the war
+could hardly have been maintained to a successful conclusion.”
+
+At any rate, that was the way in which it appeared to Gringoire with
+a mind suddenly jumped into attending to this shocking fact from the
+designing of an aiming card for the Ross Rifle. For in those days it
+was his province to instruct in the use of that weapon nine hundred
+returned British Expeditionary Force, all time-serving men, and in
+consequence the toughest customers you could imagine. Indeed, it is
+difficult to imagine them.
+
+They had every guile from a military point of view. They were adepts in
+absences, swingings of the lead, drunks, excuses, barrack-breakings,
+cheerful lies, and a desperate determination not to exhibit any
+glimmerings of intelligence, let alone any proficiency, in the use of
+any kind of weapon, let alone the Ross Rifle, which was a gimcrack
+concern at the best, with aperture sights and fittings like watch
+springs and innumerable ways of being put out of order. And you could
+put your nose in half and get yet another month in hospital as easy as
+winking by pulling back the bolt in any sort of rapid practice.
+
+They lived--these desperadoes--in a tumble-down skating rink, and they
+exercised amongst the backyards and dust-bins of a great city, and
+such was the moral atmosphere of the shadowy and stifling vault in
+which this kind of khaki lived that when, at Easter, Gringoire proposed
+to bring in a priest to hear the confessions of the Roman Catholics
+with more convenience to them, the men sent three R.C. sergeants as a
+deputation to him. They said the rink was not a fitting place for a
+priest to see. And every one of them promised to walk three miles to
+confession and to perform all his Easter duties faithfully sooner than
+that a priest should see them as they lived.
+
+A great cavern of a place that was, laid out in stalls like a cattle
+market, where the officers labored intolerably filling up innumerable
+forms with an immense sense of pressure and of striving with tough men.
+A great sense of pressure. And he would walk up and down in front of
+the worst-dressed line that had ever been imagined--a fantastic line,
+for not one of the nine hundred professed to be able to stand straight
+on his legs--and Gringoire would exclaim gloomily and in alternation:
+“Thank God we’ve got a Navy” or: “Lord Kitchener says the war’s going
+to last another three years; hang me if you blighters will wangle out
+of going back to France.” Whereupon there would be groans down the line
+and a near-drunk man would whisper: “Good ol’ Kitchener!”
+
+It was out of that horseshoe-cavern of gloom in whose shafts of
+vaporous and disinfectant-colored lights moved these troublesome
+green-brown shapes that he had come for a very brief period of
+leave in a world that, again, included lawns, afternoon teas,
+standard roses, tall rooms, servants--not batmen, but with caps and
+aprons--pianolas--and no one, really, to clean one’s belt; as well as
+discussions of that higher, wilder, finer strategy, in which, in one’s
+capacity of a more or less professional student of tactics, one was
+so decidedly at a loss. Or perhaps it wasn’t immediately from the
+cavern that he had come; perhaps it was from the Chelsea Course. But
+there, amongst the Guards, the Kitchener “note” rang truer and cleaner
+and more insistently. And at any rate, he was certainly going back to
+that atmosphere of strain and rush; into the desperate effort to teach
+thousands and thousands bayonet fighting, gas tactics, measures against
+venereal disease, sentry drill, dugout building, why they were going
+to fight, how to manufacture grenades out of jam-tins, the history of
+the regiment, and _esprit de corps_--and doing it all in desperate and
+bewildered haste, with the aid of sacks, hairpins, can-openers and
+Japanese rifles with the wrong sort of bayonets, under the auspices
+of an orderly room driven mad by endless reproofs from brigades,
+divisions, the War Office, the civilian police, Boards of Agriculture,
+county asylums, parents whose sons had enlisted too young, and young
+women who had married privates too often married already.... But coming
+from it or not, Gringoire was certainly going back to it and, in its
+desperate and fleeting atmosphere, the idea of Lord Kitchener was the
+one solid thing onto which our poor poet could catch.
+
+So the stationmaster made it plain that Lord Kitchener was dead.
+
+It was just one of those situations in which one thinks nothing--a
+change in the beat of the clock. Gringoire was sitting in the little
+open shed of a waiting-room, the only idea present in his mind being
+that his crossed legs were stuck stiffly out in front of him, their
+weight upon his left heel and both hands in his breeches pockets.
+Nothing whatever! Absolutely nothing! No war: an empty mind; a little
+open shed with benches; a hatchway in one plank wall where they served
+out tickets; a bit of platform; a high, brick signal-box with clocks
+or things ticking; a brick house, no doubt the stationmaster’s.... The
+whole world, that was! And noiseless; and immobile. There was no France
+on the horizon; no English Channel. There was no awaiting of Zeppelins;
+there was no Right or Wrong.
+
+And so the veil lifted for a second. The flat lands of Essex were
+there, stretching out; flat fields; undistinguished beneath a dull sky.
+He speculated on the crops; on the labor it took to the acre to put in
+those cabbages; on the winds that must sweep across the comparatively
+hedgeless spaces. The ground looked like a good clay. Plenty of heart
+in it, no doubt they would say in auctioneer’s advertisements. But, on
+the whole, an unsmiling, foreign land. Not Kent or Sussex, but “the
+Sheeres.” If one settled down here, one wouldn’t know the postman, the
+tax collector, the old standers, the way they trimmed the hedge rows,
+the habits of the soil, or the course of the months, the brooks, the
+birds, the breed of sheep, the gossip, the local history--or the dead.
+A friendless, foreign country, the Essex Flats....
+
+And the southeastern saying came up into Gringoire’s mind: “You see yon
+man: he cooms from Sussex. He sucked in silliness with his mother’s
+milk and ’s been silly ever since. But never you trust a man from the
+Sheeres!”... It is Kent and Sussex against the world--just as no doubt
+it is Essex and Hertford; and Somerset and Devon; the North and East
+Riding and Durham and Cumberland and Denbigh and Flint, against the
+world--and it’s _never_ safe to put long straw under potatoes when you
+dig them in, trusting to the wet to rot it. At that point Gringoire
+remembered in 1899 buying some special seed, called, I think, “1900,”
+out of compliment to the coming century. He paid a big price; one
+hundred twenty shillings the hundredweight, I think. And he dunged
+them beautifully with rather long straw and artificial manure. But a
+long, long dry season came, and the Kentish land sloped to the south,
+and the straw dried, and the artificial manure never soaked down. He
+didn’t get a quarter of a ton to the quarter acre.
+
+On the other hand, under maize, if you can water heavily once or twice,
+long straw arranged in trenches, like pipes, is rather a good wheeze.
+It holds the water to the roots and maize will do with a topsoil like
+fire if the roots are cool. In 1899 Gringoire got some wonderful ears
+of sweet corn. And, toasted on the cob and buttered after toasting...!
+
+He changed heels under the puttees and considered his garden in
+Kent. He was going to try growing potatoes from seeds--not from
+seed-potatoes, but from the little seeds that form in the green
+berries. And he was going to put a light, whitewashed paling behind the
+sweet corn, on the north--to reflect the rays of the sun. It should
+ripen the cob three weeks earlier!...
+
+The Essex flats became again, slowly, visible land, planted with
+war-food. An airplane was going toward Bishop Stortford; the train
+was overdue because a unit was entraining up the line--once again
+every fact in the world was just a part, just a side light of the
+immense problem. Once again nothing existed just for itself. Trains
+were carriers of men and munitions. Stretched-out legs were encased
+in puttees, put in military boots; servant girls travelling with
+horn-handled black umbrellas and elastic boots were going to see
+their boys off at Waterloo; old farmers with white side whiskers were
+explaining why they had kept all six sons at home--in defiance of the
+gaze of Lord Kitchener that looked at them six times in that wee small
+station. And railway fares were going to be increased for civilians!
+
+I have little doubt that what, at that moment and for that minute
+space of time, had set our poet intent on planting potatoes and seed
+corn--perfectly certain that he was going straight down into Kent
+to plant potatoes in rows and sweet corn in hills--was that his
+unconscious mind was certain that the war was done and over with that
+death in the North Sea. I do not mean to say that he thought it--or
+even that he was conscious that something inside thought it for him.
+His surface-mind thought certainly of Essex, of Kent and Sussex; the
+subconscious mind seemed to be aware that his puttees were badly put
+on, that he had mislaid his warrant in one of several pockets--he had
+a vague consciousness of South Wales, blue mountains, like Japanese
+clouds. But some deeper center still was probably appalled and benumbed
+and was saying:
+
+“Now the war is finished and lost. Now, ‘_appry la gair finny_’ as the
+Tommies say, _je vais planter mes choux comme un maître d’école_.”
+There seemed to be nothing left but to plant out a kitchen garden.
+
+
+[Footnotes]
+
+[2] “Gringoire.” This is not of course, our poet’s name, but a nickname
+earned actually at school. There is a story by Alphonse Daudet, in
+“Lettres de Mon Moulin,” called the “Chèvre de M. Séguin,” which
+relates how in the end the wolf ate Mr. Séguin’s goat. This story, in
+the form of a letter, is addressed to a poet, one Gringoire, and is
+meant to show that though a poet may struggle all his life against
+poverty, in the end the wolf, starvation, will get him. At Gringoire’s
+school the Sixth Form were studying French from the “Lettres de Mon
+Moulin,” and since even at that date Gringoire wrote poems, his kindly
+schoolmates learned the name and so bestowed it upon him--as it has
+been bestowed on many out-at-elbowed literati.
+
+
+
+
+                                  III
+
+                       _Blue of Swallows’ Backs_
+
+
+Well, by the evening of his next monologue, Gringoire had planted
+out his kitchen garden; the onions, the lettuces, the carrots, the
+kohl-rabi, the spinach were aligned; that battalion was parading in
+full strength. Moreover, in a bed from which he had just removed
+spinach and onions, there were twenty little potato plants, grown
+from little seeds: under a twenty-foot quick-set hedge, beautiful and
+close like a wall, the sweet corn was already up to the hips. The long
+straws, like pipes, ran in a trench under the corn hills; the deluge of
+water, warmed because it comes from a dip on which the sun blazes all
+day, washed the deep roots; the nightingale was running in and out of
+the beanstalks; the swallows were throwing themselves through the air;
+over the low brick the sun was setting on the longest day of the year,
+and, D.S.G., the war was over and done. No longer D.H.Q., Bn.H.Q.,
+M.L.E., T.M.B.--but just D.S.G.! To God alone be the glory in the
+quiet garden evening.
+
+“I will tell you a curious thing,” said Gringoire in June, “but in
+gardens amongst woods, beside streams, there are so many curious things
+to tell of that I don’t know where to begin! I am like a child with
+the largest coin it has ever possessed outside a hundred entrancing
+shops. I began talking the other day with the idea of describing four
+landscapes--the great guns from Portsmouth now remind me, though I have
+written of only two, of yet a fifth.”
+
+We--Gringoire and the writer--had been for a slow walk, round three
+sides of a patch of heath. A man, leaning over a white gate, with a
+thin, red face, a blue suit and some very bright regimental tie, just
+said: “The telegram’s up in the post office. It’s official!” And,
+speaking of it that evening in the warmth of the garden beside the
+hammock of Mme. Sélysette, Gringoire said:
+
+“I assure you, on my honor, that the whole landscape, the commonplace,
+friendly landscape of elms, rather backward wheat, heather, gorse, and
+park-wall suddenly changed. It was as if the focus of the camera had
+suddenly clicked, readjusted itself--as if it grew--though before one
+hadn’t known it for anything but all that was possible of tranquillity,
+breadth, security, and peace--grew quieter, calmer, broader, more
+utterly secure and inviolable. English country!
+
+“I don’t know: there’s nothing to it, really. A spray of dog-roses;
+a whitethroat dropping over the hedge; some gorse; the long, rolling
+land; the high skies and clouds above the downs.... Well, it is
+one stage more toward a forever of security, of that being forever
+inviolable that one prays may be its portion. A great stage forward.”
+
+For coming home and sitting behind irregular, all but too old lattice,
+giving onto a deep wall of verdure, we had heard suddenly the heavy
+guns through the voices of birds.... And Gringoire said later that,
+at the sound of those distant guns through the overwhelming orchestra
+of birds, he had seen distinctly, against the warm brick of the
+house-wall, a tin hat.... But many tin hats dim in the blue-gray light,
+and a lot of Scotch Jocks, their kilts covered with khaki aprons, and
+an immense long train with innumerable shapes dropping out of it,
+their cries muted by the twilight: the crunch of feet on the gravel,
+before the tin sheds of the station. That had been Railhead behind the
+Somme. And then suddenly you were conscious of the innumerable voices
+of birds singing the sun down. And then through them the uninterrupted
+heavy discourse of the great guns at a distance came over the little
+hills and darkling trees of that downland country. It continued....
+Incessant, engrossed, almost as it were tranquil, almost like the
+bubbling of water in a pot, boiling up, dying down, going on and on,
+not penetrating but enveloping the cries of Tommy to Tommy or of
+footsteps to footsteps--and, rising through it, as if lances of sound
+were protruding upward through something soft and vaporous, the voices
+of thrushes. A great many thrushes: and the down getting whiter; and
+the “Fall In There’s” and the men moving off ...
+
+So that he said he half wished the Portsmouth guns would
+stop--five-point nines; ninety-eight pounders; fifteen-inch
+guns--whatever they are. One doesn’t want to hear them again, or again
+to feel them--dully on the air. Not at any rate in peace time.
+
+The nightingale amongst the bean-stalks; the thrushes in the shaw
+on the opposite hillsides; the swallows throwing themselves through
+the air! He did not remember any nightingale during the war; but he
+remembered those thrushes of Rébimont-Méricourt on a date in July
+’16. And he remembered some swallows--an immense sea of the blue
+of swallows’ backs. And he said that the Portsmouth guns of the
+28/6/’19 sounding through the birds’ voices from the hill opposite the
+Gingerbread Cottage brought it all back. Poets are like that and have
+these visions.
+
+It sounds, of course, queer--but it was like that. Up on a hillside
+that was covered mostly with thistles there was an Artillery
+Observation Post which consisted of a Lombardy poplar--though one did
+not see how the gunners got up it. At any rate, there was a pile of dud
+Hun shells on the roadside bank at the foot of the tree and beneath
+the O.P. was a pretty rotten dugout with a corrugated iron roof. The
+Battalion Trench Mortar officer lived there. Below him he had a view of
+a battery of French 75’s, of the chalky line of trenches; Martinpuich
+looked down on him, which wasn’t overly comfortable, and the Ancre
+wound away--to No Man’s Land. From time to time a field-gun wheel going
+along the road would catch its spokes in the corrugated iron of his
+roof--lift a corner and drop it again. I don’t know why the Trench
+Mortar officer lived in that dugout, but a gunwheel lifted his roof
+and dropped it again whilst Gringoire was dozing in it. He thought the
+bottom of hell had dropped out. It was his worst shock of the war.
+I shouldn’t wonder if it were not the worst shock any one ever had
+between the 4/8/’14 and the 28/6/’19. He mentioned it, he said, because
+it probably accounted for his immediately subsequent exultation; it
+was, I suppose, so good to be just alive after that.
+
+At any rate, after the Trench Mortar officer had come in--Gringoire
+had been waiting to give him a message--downhill through the thistles,
+dusty in the hot sunlight, Gringoire went with immense, joyful
+strides. He said that he was extraordinarily fit in those days! And
+an innumerable company of swallows flew round him, waist high, just
+brushing the thistledown. “They were so near,” Gringoire said, “that
+they brushed my hands, and they extended so far that I could see
+nothing else. It is one of the five things of the war that I really
+see, for it was like walking, buoyantly, in the pellucid sunlight,
+waist-high through a sea of unsurpassed and unsurpassable azure. I felt
+as if I were a Greek god. It was like a miracle.
+
+“Now, I see swallows from below, their rust-stained breasts against
+high, blotted, gray clouds--and I wonder if they are thinking of the
+near rising mayfly. I remember thinking on the other occasion that
+there were a good many dead amongst the thistles and that I must be
+putting up a huge number of flies. But that, again, was the thought of
+my subconscious mind. On the surface I just felt myself to be a Greek
+god, immortal, young forever, forever buoyant, amongst the eddies of a
+dark blue and eternal sea.”
+
+The feeling lasted until he got to the mule-lines of somebody’s First
+Line Transport, where he borrowed a terrible old brute of a horse, to
+take him to Divisional H.Q.
+
+It would be interesting to know what that class of feeling comes
+from--possibly from some sort of atavistic throwback to days when the
+gods were nearer. You get them now and again in action--but not so
+often as you get the reverse type of feeling when you are engaged in
+agriculture. That is perhaps why farmers are so often passionately
+disagreeable and apparently unreasonable men. For there is nothing that
+so much resembles contact with, wrestling with, a personal devil as
+to awaken one morning and to find that a whole crop of seedlings has
+vanished before myriads of slugs. That happens. If you don’t believe
+it, read White’s “Selborne.” It is loss, ruin perhaps. It is like a
+death: a profound and unforeseen disaster. And your mind personifies
+the slug as intelligent, malignant, a being with a will for evil
+directed against you in person. I think that, whilst it lasts, it is
+the worst feeling in the world.
+
+Drought is nearly as bad.
+
+
+
+
+                                   IV
+
+                      _The Kingdoms of the Earth_
+
+
+It was after Gringoire had speculated on slugs, without, you will
+observe, suggesting a remedy, that he continued:
+
+“I have given you, so far, three of the landscapes that remain real
+to me--for the detraining in the dawn at Rébimont-Méricourt is not
+one of those that are just always in my mind. I have to remember back
+to--to be reminded of it. It was the sounds of Peace Guns pierced by
+the multitudinous voices of thrushes that brought back to me that
+first-heard, unintermittent thudding and throb of the engines of war
+through which, like spears, thrust the voices of innumerable birds.
+But, just, I suppose, because one’s mind was preoccupied with the job
+of seeing that one’s valise was all right, that the men had all their
+kit and equipment at least potentially there--and no doubt with the job
+of seeing to it that one’s composure appeared absolute--one recorded
+less of visible objects, so that fewer visible objects return, and they
+return less vividly.”
+
+He remembered--and he knew that he remembered, accurately and
+exactly--every detail of Kensington Gardens on that day of August,
+1915; of the Essex Railway Station he said that he could tell you what
+advertisements were on the walls and how many people awaited the train
+as well as every word of the conversation he had had whilst driving to
+the station. And he remembered with an extreme clearness, as in the
+little paintings of Van Eyck on the Chasse de Ste. Ursule at Brûges,
+the swallows and the thistles of the ridge going down in the clear July
+weather behind Bécourt Wood in 1916. He had a job then, it is true--but
+not one calling for any immediate or complicated action. Besides, at
+that moment he had felt himself to be immune from danger and proof
+against death. So that those three landscapes became part of his
+immediate self.
+
+“They will probably remain part of myself to the end of my life: my
+grandchildren will probably be tired of them and, when I am quite aged,
+so probably will guests and casual strangers.” But--did you ever take a
+walking tour, or just a long walk and, in bed at the end of the day,
+perhaps in order to put yourself to sleep, did you ever try to remember
+every inch of the roads you had covered? Gringoire claimed that in that
+way he could remember a great many of the roads both of England and
+France of his boyhood when one walked or cycled a good deal for walking
+or cycling’s sake. Corners of roads, bridges, highways climbing over
+the forehead of downs--the road out of Bridport, down into Winchester,
+from Minehead to Lynton; from Calais over the flats to Arras, from
+Arras to Beauvais; from Blois to Tours; from Amiens to Albert in
+1892.... By shutting his eyes, or by looking at something blank, like a
+sheet of paper, or by not really looking at anything at all, he could,
+he said, evoke a panorama of any of those roads, or say from the North
+Foreland to Land’s End. Perhaps he couldn’t really, but he could have
+a pretty good try and get a lot right. “Well, in that way, I can evoke
+most of the roads ’round Albert, or Locre and the base of the Salient,
+or Bailleul, or Steenewerck, or Armentières; and plenty of other places
+of the Lines of Communication like Hazebrouck and Abbéville and St.
+Omer. But I daresay I should get some of it incorrect.”
+
+For instance, as to the detraining at Railhead in that dawn: he
+had distinctly the feeling that there was a woody, dark bank and a
+plantation of trees in which the thrushes sang, right up against the
+flat of the line. There wasn’t really. He found later, on coming out of
+Corbie and there entraining to rejoin his battalion, that there were
+only high elms against flat, champaign country with a muddy stream.
+However, there was a high farm-building just behind the elms, so, no
+doubt, the effect on the inattentive eye was that. And the thrushes had
+certainly sung.
+
+But he could evoke the rest of the road to the front line fairly well.
+On the right of the station, in the elms, was a brown Y.M.C.A. hut,
+where the officers got very greasy bread and rather black fried eggs
+and coffee. There were innumerable, old, dog’s-eared magazines on
+the mess tables in amongst the breakfast utensils. Twenty or thirty
+numbers of the “English Review,” like the dominoes, of a date when
+our writer used to own that periodical. It seemed an odd thing to
+see; an odd, queer thing to have owned. Near--too near--the hut were
+the men’s latrines; a little further, the officers’. On the left,
+then, as the Draft passed, was the station. A very fat old gendarme
+was standing, well back on his heels, his legs wide apart; about him
+were four market women, with bundles, and baskets containing fowls.
+They were grouped around the gendarme like pullets around chanticleer,
+as he watched the sunrise. A lot of Royal Field Artillery horses and
+riders came over the dust into the station yard; a company of Jocks was
+waiting outside the office of the Railway Transport Officer. The ground
+was soft dust, so that the reinforcement might have been marching in
+sandals.
+
+They continued their march parallel with the railway line, along
+a soft road, beside the little stream, between osier-bushes and
+elms--for about fifty yards. There were some stray mules belonging to
+a Kitchener’s battalion, Wiltshires or Cheshires--Nineteenth Division
+anyhow. There didn’t appear to be any drivers. There was a good deal of
+shouting; the Draft about-turned. The guide was taking them wrong. But
+who ever knew a guide take any one right anywhere? It was rather like a
+dream--not at all a bad dream--but, anyhow, a numbness.
+
+Or no: really it was more like being in the hands of doctors, on the
+way to an operation. Probably the anaesthetic would be all right; it
+wouldn’t hurt. At any rate, we had no volition; one’s feet moved;
+one’s haversack was a bit heavy--not very. One went on, one didn’t know
+where.
+
+In the same way you may remember the anteroom of your dentist. There
+is a big table in the center of the room; on the table some writing
+materials--and old periodicals, like the “English Reviews” amongst the
+solid Y.M.C.A. cups and plates.... But, on the one hand there is, solid
+and real, say, Mandeville Place: taxis drive about in it; the faces of
+the houses are of black-gray Portland cement, imitating granite. The
+street, then, is real: and the operating room will soon feel as real,
+even while one is waiting in the outer room. But the anteroom itself is
+a dream-landscape.
+
+So it was with the Rébimont-Méricourt road.
+
+When you come out of the station yard, on the right there is a high,
+white-walled, tile-roofed estaminet-farm. Australian First Line
+Transport men were watering their mules there, lounging on the steps
+with their tunics off. The road began to mount; on the left, on top
+of a high bank was an orchard. It reminded our poet of the nutwalk,
+on a high bank, belonging to a certain farm in Kent--at the bottom of
+Aldington Knoll, where the marsh begins. Mounting the slope, on the
+right, he came to a closed, empty, butcher’s shop. A superior butcher’s
+shop with grilles, green paint, gone of course dusty, marble slabs, and
+a gilded copper sign.
+
+The road opened out suddenly. It was a dusty expanse between houses:
+in England it would have been a village green. There were house walls,
+windows, archways in the dusty white plaster, giving onto farmyards
+or stables. Two men were harnessing a black mare into a hooded,
+two-wheeled, dusty cart. Four black Percheron stallions were standing
+in a string in front of a long cottage. “They reminded me,” Gringoire
+said, “of four black stallions I had seen, years before, outside the
+blacksmith’s at Beaumont-le-Roger. In those days it had seemed to be
+odd that stallions could be left unattended in a village-street. But in
+1916, I was used to that idea; what intrigued me, then, was that any
+civilian should have four stallions at his disposal. For they certainly
+were not French cavalry, or divisional or other transport.”
+
+The civilians seemed extraordinarily--not unreal--but, as it were,
+super-real! North French peasants, slow, ungainly, with heavy legs
+and feet. They were just the peasants one had always seen; hard, like
+granite--not comparatively soft and comparatively gray, like our own
+old peasants, who, when they look hard have the aspect not of wrinkled
+stone but of old, crannied, oak-tree boles. It was Sussex downland,
+that country--but like the people, harder, unsmiling.
+
+To the left of the Place--if you can call a flat space of dust
+a Place--there was a narrow street, high, mud walls; archways,
+semi-circular topped, gray wooden doors. On one of these was nailed a
+large white placard: headquarters of the 4th Army Veterinary Corps.
+(I hope this is no longer a staff secret.) The reinforcement had to
+drop some men of the Draft they had brought out--men for the poor 38th
+Division that was to be wiped out in Mametz Wood--at some other sort
+of headquarters at the end of the street; that was why some of us
+penetrated it. Yes: it was very narrow and high-walled--more Wiltshire
+than Sussex! There must have been vegetation on the top of some of the
+mud-walls. Opposite the Farriers’ H.Q. there was a little, thatched,
+sweet-shop sort of a place, and irises were growing on the thatch. I
+daresay they would not be there in peace time: you would say it was
+more Irish than French.
+
+In the sweet-shop they sold dates, clay pipes, picture postcards with
+English regimental badges, picture postcards with views of Albert
+and the toppling Madonna; silk-worked postcards of bright reds,
+whites, and bright blues, and postcards showing smiling ladies dusted
+with spangles. The women behind the low counter were very unreal: a
+motionless old witch with black eyes, a brown face, and dead white,
+parted hair; she stood, and only her eyes moved, and she appeared,
+not malignant, but grotesquely like a brown wooden image with moving
+eyes; an untidy dark girl, without even looking at us or at a perplexed
+Tommy who was pricing postcards, stood, her face sideways and repeated:
+“Ten ... a penny: ten ... a penny”--patiently, and as if from a great
+distance. She said: “Ten” very fast, then paused and added “a penny”
+slowly and as if with boredom. The Tommy grasped ten postcards and held
+out a penny, but she continued to say: “Ten ... a penny, ten ... a
+penny,” without either movement or expression.
+
+“So I could continue,” our poet went on, “to recall this itinerary,
+for many pages and for many hours: past the farm on the right, with
+the great dung heap, past the pond overshadowed by crab-apples; past
+another crossroads on the right, where, at a tent, facing a great,
+dull-brick aggregation of ruins, rafters, and fallen chimneys, which
+was once a sugar factory--the timekeeper’s office and the iron gates
+were still intact--we delivered up the remaining other Ranks of the
+Draft and went on, up the bare downland road, officers only, between
+the bearded wheat on the left and the immense field of thin oats to
+the right--upward to the Officers’ Distributing Center; tents just put
+up that day, on a bare, downland field, very white and with the long
+down-grass still untramped in their interiors....
+
+“Yes, I could keep it up for many of your pages and for many hours,”
+Gringoire said, “but I am not so much concerned to describe these
+landscapes, or to prove the quality of my memory, as to establish the
+psychological facts about the other four landscapes.” He had just gone
+back into memory, without any particular effort--without indeed any
+effort at all, and the roads were there, like a string unwinding from
+a ball. His eyes must have been at work but not his registering brain.
+The mind was working otherwise.
+
+“I have purposely omitted to mention,” he said later, “that, all the
+way, on all the roads, proceeding generally with caution because of
+the worn _pavés_, but sometimes getting a swift run for a couple
+of hundred or so of yards, sometimes one at a time, sometimes
+four together, at times in as thick a stream as motor traffic in
+Piccadilly--the ambulances passed us, on the left.”
+
+That was a detail of the mind rather than of the eyes. Gringoire knew
+in 1919 that they were there, because he remembered that several of the
+officers had to count them for a time. But they appeared to be rather
+symbols than concrete objects. They stood for BLIGHTIES--going home!
+They were part of what made the skin of the forehead over the eyes feel
+always a little drawn, part of the preoccupation that, always, turned
+one’s thoughts inward. I don’t suppose it was fear--or perhaps that is
+how fear really manifests itself.
+
+Here, then, is another landscape. It was up at the Officers’
+Distributing Center. Or perhaps it wasn’t officially called that,
+though that was what it was. It may have been an Officers’ Rest
+Camp--which it certainly was not. At any rate, there it was on an
+open, sloping downland field--seven new tents pitched, two more being
+pitched: cook-houses, wash-houses, latrines, batmen’s quarters, and
+the rest of it, down to the incinerator, were all, also, in process of
+being erected. The Senior Officer in charge of our party interviewed
+the Camp Commandant and the officers sprawled about on the bare
+hillside with the downland winds running over the grasses just as they
+do in Sussex on a cloudless day.
+
+“I have always thought,” Gringoire said, “ever since I was a small boy
+and used to ride on the downs behind Folkestone that the sun has a
+peculiar quality in the sky over downlands, as if chalk dust in the air
+whitened the rays. But that is probably nonsense.” Anyhow, the field
+sloped downwards; there was a white cart--or plow--track; then up went
+a great shoulder of the downs in a field all purple sections. I suppose
+cultivation for the time ended in the huge field of thin oats between
+the camp and the destroyed sugar factory. There was a very old man in a
+short blue blouse, with immensely long bow-legs--doing something with a
+scythe. It didn’t appear to be mowing.
+
+The down rising over against them appeared--so unable is the eye
+to measure these swelling distances--quite a small affair. But,
+halfway up it, seeming to tight-rope along a white thread, with an
+extreme slowness in passing from point to point, went transport
+wagons, incredibly tiny. So it was an immense, august, shoulder. A
+near-mountain!
+
+Gringoire said he could not just remember where the sun was: he ought
+to be able to work it out by the place and time. But I daresay it
+doesn’t really matter. At any rate, over the shoulder of the down--not
+in the least like a moon or an astral body but illuminated by the
+sun--silver and French gray, very slowly, a great body began to rise.
+One hadn’t much--one hadn’t indeed any--sense of proportion. It seemed
+immense--and alive as mushrooms are alive. Then, induced as the eye
+was to look into the pellucid sky, there became visible a number--some
+one counted fourteen--of tiny, shining globes. They appeared to be
+globes, because there was a fresh wind blowing straight from them and
+they turned end on. So, but slowly and incessantly heaving, did the
+immense one close at hand; a spider’s network of cordage went with its
+movements. Tiny and incredibly pretty, like films of gold dust floating
+in blue water and like peach blossom leaves--yes, incredibly pretty in
+the sunlight--airplanes were there. Because the--just as pretty--little
+mushrooms that existed suddenly in the sky, beside the sunlit
+dragonflies and peach blossoms, were pearly white, one officer said:
+
+“Hun planes!”
+
+The German shrapnel made black bursts. The officers were lounging in
+a group of six or seven. Another said: “_Their_ sausages too ... Out
+there! Fourteen!”
+
+The slow ascent of our own sausage took the mind into the sky. A
+broad-faced, slow, brown, very sympathetic young officer--he had a rich
+voice, a slight stutter, and one eye that frequently winked--said:
+
+“He showed Him the Kingdoms of the Earth.” Then: “From a high place,
+you know, old dear,” he explained, rather apologetically to Gringoire.
+“His career,” Gringoire said, “was constantly interlaced with mine;
+in the stream that carried us along, we bobbed together--at Cardiff,
+in Rouen twice on June afternoons, and even after the Armistice,
+once in Coventry Street, and once in York. Yet, though we were quite
+intimate, he calling me ‘Old Dear,’ or ‘Old Preserved Equanimity,’
+as my last Colonel nicknamed me, and though I called him ‘Old Dear,’
+and later, as the fashion became, ‘Old Bean,’ I never knew his name.
+He would be there, in Orderly Room, in an officers’ club armchair,
+at mess, dropping usually some single, rather apposite, slightly
+literary remark--with just the trace of a stutter and always in an
+extraordinarily sympathetic voice--a deep, modest, affecting being....
+I wish I knew who he was--but I suppose I never shall.
+
+“He sh-showed Him the Kingdoms of th-the Earth,” this officer said--and
+his voice just seemed homelike.
+
+Some one else said, “Let’s go up that mountain,” in the true Welsh
+tone and accent, and several: “Yes, yes, let’s.... Surely we’d see
+everything.... Surely to goodness, let’s not miss it....”
+
+And they figured to themselves a glorious run down, and a glorious
+run up, the shoulder and then a great, flat gray view--of everything,
+and of all who mattered--of the Kingdoms of the Earth. But the usual
+voice--Conscience, Caution, Fear of Broad Views, maybe said: “We’d
+have to get leave.... The Camp Commandant, you know.... Eh, what, you
+fellows?...”
+
+The Camp Commandant, a small, extraordinarily excited Highlander,
+voiceless with gas and gesticulating because of shell-shock--threw
+papers about, threw off his Glengarry cap, shrieked, wheezed, croaked.
+“I knew him quite well,” Gringoire said, “and, since he once hauled me
+out of bed at four o’clock of a freezing morning because some sort of
+Scots Brigadier wanted some one to play ‘Annie Laurie’ and the ‘Banks
+of Loch Lomond’ to forty drunken Scots officers in another hut, I
+permit myself to talk of him as he was, capless, exacerbated, grasping
+a telephone and throwing things about.”
+
+He didn’t know whether he could or could not give them leave to go up
+the brae; he didn’t care if they went and drowned themselves. Couldn’t
+they see he’d only been there forty meen-its and there were two hundred
+contradictory memoranda awaiting him? And oh to hell, and oh to hell....
+
+They loafed once more; they fell back into that eternal “waiting
+to report” that takes up 112/113ths of one’s time during war. They
+contemplated and made remarks about the veering of the sausage.
+
+It was then that Gringoire related a psychological anecdote that gives
+the note of this book. “I suppose it was my friend’s sympathetic and
+suggestive voice that did it ... for I suddenly began to see bits of
+a landscape that has pursued me ever since--until now here I sit in
+it. Not quite a landscape; a nook, rather; the full extent of the view
+about one hundred seventy yards by two hundred seventy--the closed up
+end of a valley; closed up by trees--willows, silver birches, oaks,
+and Scotch pines; deep, among banks; with a little stream, just a
+trickle, level with the grass of the bottom. You understand the idea--a
+sanctuary.”
+
+There were, in those days, you will remember, no more sanctuaries. All
+nooks of the world were threatened by the tide of blue-gray mud. We
+were out there to hold it back on the Somme. But could we?
+
+So that was a little nook, sanctuary; where you said “Feignits” to
+destiny--with a gingerbread cottage out of Grimm. You were a Haensel,
+holding some Gretel’s hand, tiptoeing, whispering, craning forward the
+neck.... A castle in Spain in fact, only that it was in a southern
+country--the English country.
+
+“I ask to be believed in what I am now saying,” Gringoire uttered the
+words slowly. “It is just the truth. If I wanted to tell fairy tales,
+I’d do better than this. Fairy tales to be all about the Earth shaking,
+and the wire, and the crumps, and the beef-tins.... You know. And that
+would be true too. Anyway this is....”
+
+He said that he didn’t pretend that he was gay at that moment: calm, no
+doubt; contemplative certainly--and certainly gently ironic. So many
+officers were fussy about things--air pillows, hooch, mislaid movement
+cards, how to post picture-cards, where their battalions were, and
+so on. The place no doubt brought it out. It left a good deal to be
+desired. So that, if he could smile gently, he didn’t pretend to have
+been without apprehensions. They hung vaguely at the back of the skull;
+they oppressed, a little, the breathing.
+
+And yet--ever since he had been a tiny child--he had, he said, been so
+much a creature of dreads that this was, in a sense, much less than
+dreads to which he had been well accustomed. The dreads of original
+sin, of poverty, of bankruptcy, of incredible shyness, of insults,
+misunderstandings, of disease, of death, of succumbing to blackmailers,
+forgers, brain-troubles, punishments, undeserved ingratitudes,
+betrayals.--There was nothing, Gringoire said, that he hadn’t dreaded
+in a sufficiently long life “which had been, mostly, a matter of one
+dread knocking out another.” So that, on the whole, the dread of what
+lay over the hill was less than most and limited itself, pretty well,
+to how one’s self would behave--except of course that one was damned
+afraid of being taken prisoner. Oh, damned afraid....
+
+Still it was on the whole such a relief to be out of contact with
+one’s civilian friends at home--for, as far as the Army was concerned,
+Gringoire said he never had one single moment’s cause for bitterness,
+but just contentment and making allowances--it was on the whole such
+a relief that he was more contented than perturbed. Nevertheless, the
+strain was a long strain, even if it was impersonal, since it was a
+strain concerning itself with the English Country and not at all with
+one’s regiment or one’s self. One’s regiment would go out, if things
+went wrong. It would go out, disappear, as sands disappear under
+great waves. One’s self too, probably, or it wouldn’t matter anyhow
+... But the contaminated fields, the ashamed elms--that was the long
+strain. And suddenly, at that point it came--the castle in the air; the
+simulacrum; the vision of the inviolable corner of the earth.
+
+I don’t mean to say that it came with great exactness at that time--but
+it came, no doubt as a progression from the train of thought in Dunmow
+Station. There, you may remember, Gringoire thought that he would
+have a garden in a southeastern county--and his thoughts had connoted
+that it would be a garden on a hillside that sloped to the south and
+that looked over a not very distant sea--a great view, showing on
+the horizon, during clear days, the coast of France; a view, as it
+were, from which one could see the Kingdoms of the Earth. “For there
+have,” said Gringoire, “always been only two Kingdoms of the Earth
+that mattered for me--our own land for its country and France for her
+people, her arts, her point of view.” Yes, undoubtedly it was to be a
+garden with a great view, and it should contain potatoes grown from
+seeds and sweet corn--also several rows of beans for which, whether
+for the flowers or the aligned stalks, Gringoire always had a great
+affection.
+
+In Dunmow station it had been merely an intellectual idea: as who
+should say, “After the war, we will take a cottage in the country and
+grow things and have a great view. At any rate, we will have a rest.”
+But, on the downside behind the Somme, it came differently. It came
+like one of these visions that one’s eyes, when tired, will see just
+before one falls asleep. There was a rhomboid of deeper, brighter
+green, of a green that was really alive, beyond the gray-green of the
+field they were in. It existed in front of the purple of scabrous
+flowers on the great shoulder that masked the battlefield. It wavered,
+precisely as you will see the colored image cast on a sheet by a
+magic lantern, then slowly, it hardened and brightened, took shape
+as a recumbent oval, like eighteenth century vignettes. Gringoire
+said that it became perfectly definite--“The little view that I shall
+see at this moment if I raise my eyes. And it didn’t connote any
+locality: it didn’t, I mean, suggest itself as being in the vicinity
+of the Trossachs, of Tintern, of Matlock, of Dungeness.... It was just
+country--but perfectly definite, rather an untrimmed and a rather
+hidden spot without a hard road going to it ... and with the feeling
+that many birds were lurking in bushes and watching me, as birds watch.
+You see the idea--sanctuary!”
+
+“I don’t mean to say,” he went on, “that I wanted to get out of
+the battle of the Somme. I certainly didn’t, either consciously,
+subconsciously, or with any plane of my mind. I will lay claim to so
+much militarism. But my subconscious mind was trying to assure itself
+that ‘appry la gair finny’ there would be a sanctuary where I would
+cross my second and my index fingers in the face of destiny and cry
+‘Feignits’ as we used to do as children at Prisoner’s Base. I daresay
+that has been the main desire of my life. I daresay it has been the
+main desire of the lives of all men since recorded time began.
+Unrecorded time too, no doubt. It was no doubt the basic desire that
+has given to the world in succeeding ages, the Kingdom of God, the
+Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of Thule, the Cassiterides, the Garden
+of the Hesperides, the land of Cockaigne where hot mutton pies ran
+about in the street asking to be eaten--the peace of God which passes
+all understanding.”
+
+And you see it was mostly for the sake of the little threatened nooks
+of the earth that Gringoire found himself on that hillside. For, then,
+as on the 4/8/’14, when the Huns crossed the Belgian frontier, “near
+a place called Gemmenich,” it was mainly the idea that a field-gray
+tide of mud was seeking to overwhelm the small, verdure-masked homes,
+the long, white, thatched farms of the world that forced Gringoire
+into political action. “All my life,” as he put it, “I have been
+fighting German scholarships, German modes of learning, of instruction,
+of collectivism.” But, before that date he hadn’t much imagined--or
+imagined at all--that he would ever indulge in political polemics. He
+had always had a dreamy contempt for politics: one is an artist, one
+is a poet, one is a builder of castles in the air, one is a gentleman,
+a farrier, a grocer, a miller--what you will--but a politician! “_Ah,
+mais non._ That one should prostitute one’s pen!...”
+
+But the field-gray tide threatened--not only the Kingdoms of the
+Earth that mattered, but the little, sacred homes of artists, poets,
+gentry, farriers, grocers, millers--menaced then the subjects of one’s
+pen, the objects of meditation of one’s heart. So one wrote endless,
+interminable propaganda; until the brain reeled and the fingers
+stiffened.
+
+Then the Germans killed Henri Gaudier and Teddy Jewell. Or perhaps it
+was only that Teddy Jewell went. Certainly he was killed sooner or
+later. “Such nice, good boys both--though I didn’t know either of them
+well.” So there had not seemed anything else to do. And indeed there
+was not anything else to do....
+
+Up there, on the hillside, that ran down to the battered sugar factory,
+he had the feeling that, if they could have had leave and have looked
+over the rim of that brown-purple slope, they would have seen the Huns,
+a white, tumultuous line, like advancing surf or like gnashing teeth.
+That was, of course, a feeling, not an intellectual idea. He knew that
+the German lines didn’t look like that--though, indeed, at times they
+did, when our gunners really got onto them in a chalky country. Then
+it was rather like surf--the smoke of shells and chalk dust going up
+together in the sunlight.... Still ...
+
+And anyhow that was a moment of complete idleness--a moment of the
+completest idleness that those officers had known for many, many
+months. They were just there, with nothing to do. Nothing: nothing
+whatever. If they had been allowed to look over the hill-brow, that
+would have been something, but, with the Camp Commandant’s refusal of
+leave, complete idleness settled down. In ten minutes, in an hour,
+perhaps; certainly before the passage of four or five hours, they would
+get the order to report that would take them beyond that hill past the
+battered sugar factory....
+
+Possibly that little vision of English country, coming then, was really
+a prayer, as if the depths of one’s mind were murmuring: “Blessed Mary,
+ask your kind Son that we may have the peace of God that passes all
+understanding, one day, for a little while in a little nook, all green,
+with silver birches, and a trickle of a stream through a meadow, and
+the chimneys of a gingerbread cottage out of Grimm just peeping over
+the fruit trees.” I suppose that is the burden of most prayers before
+battle. And of course that would mean that the Allies had won out and
+that the band would have played in the last war parade, with the white
+goat and its silver plaque between the horns, and sunlight, and even
+the Adjutant smiling--and all the Welsh dead appeased, and all the
+country nooks of the world assured sanctuaries, and every Englishman’s
+house an inviolable castle, and every Frenchman free to potter off to
+his café in the cool of the evening. No doubt it was a prayer of the
+unconscious, tired mind.
+
+“But even that isn’t my fourth landscape,” our poet-host went on,
+“since my fourth landscape took in very nearly the whole, if not quite
+the whole, of one of the Kingdoms of the Earth--and that the smallest
+that I ever hope to see.” It dissociates itself sharply from the others
+in that the observing of it happened to be Gringoire’s job of the
+moment. He had been sent up to Mont Vedaigne to mark down and be ready
+to point out to a number of senior officers all that immense prospect.
+
+And the tip of Mt. Vedaigne formed, oddly enough, one of those little,
+commonplace, rustic, idyllic spots that, months before, had formed
+itself for his eyes behind the Somme. There, in a small enclosed
+space, shut in by trees that just grew up to the edge of the steep
+escarpments of the hill, was, precisely, a little, gingerbread cottage
+out of Grimm. In front of it was a small, flat garden--not an acre in
+extent; in the garden grew potatoes already yellowed; beanstalks were
+aligned, already yellowed too; and there may have been three or four
+rods of tobacco plants and as many of haricots, yellowing too, for
+the fringes of autumn were upon the land. On the southern side of the
+garden were some plum trees in a hedge. If you looked over the hedge
+you saw Bailleul, Armentières, away to queer, conical, gray mountains
+that were the slag-heaps near Béthune, and away, farther, toward the
+Somme itself.
+
+On the northern side of the garden was a tall, dark plantation of
+birches and firs so that the gingerbread cottage--of white plaster,
+with little green shutters and a bright red roof of those S-shaped
+tiles that lock one into another, with a gutter painted bright green,
+like the shutters, and dependent from the gutter, right along the face
+of the cottage, bunches of haricot plants, hung up so that the white
+beans should dry in the rattling pods--the little cottage, then, had
+the air of being beneath a high, dark bank.
+
+But it was only trees, so that, if you went between their trunks you
+saw another great view. A flat, almost incredibly immense, silver-gray
+plain ran right to the foot of the waving descent, below. There was
+an oval--poor Poperinghe--with an immense column of snow-white smoke,
+descending upon it from a great height, and then little plumes of smoke
+here and there--and then, away, away, pollarded flats, windmills,
+church towers--and a gray, menacing, incredibly distant skyline,
+illuminated under drifts of smoke.... One imagined that one was seeing
+into Germany!
+
+I suppose Gringoire didn’t really see so far.
+
+On the east and the west, the views were cut into by “mountains”--the
+peaks of that little range of hills that formed practically all that
+remained of a Kingdom of the Earth--of the Low Countries! There was
+the Mont Noir with its windmill atop; the Mont Rouge with its windmill
+atop; the Scharpenberg, with its windmill, Mount Kemmel with its ruined
+tower, from high above which, in the pellucid autumn air, the sighting
+shells continuously let down their clouds like torsos of flawless,
+white marble.
+
+Gringoire had emotions up there! And he had a long time to wait. You
+may not know it--but, if a senior officer tells you to await him at a
+given point at 10:00 A.M., you arrive at 9:45 whilst he saunters in at
+11:00 A.M., 12:30 P.M., 2:00 P.M., or 4:30 P.M., according to his rank.
+
+On this occasion, Gringoire was Acting Intelligence Officer, and,
+having to familiarize himself with a landscape in which his division
+had only just arrived, he came on the ground at 8:45 A.M., having
+left Locre at 7:00 A.M., riding round by way of Dranoutre to receive
+his final instructions from Headquarters. He did not think that at
+Divisional Headquarters his zeal was appreciated. A sleepy, but
+eminently indignant, General Staff Officer I or II, something elderly,
+in pajamas, made various insulting remarks about early rising. These,
+his eyesight improving as sleep departed, he modified somewhat, because
+he could not tell who the devil Gringoire was. (I may say that, two
+nights before, our poet had been court-martialed for being in unlawful
+possession of a Field Officer’s Figure.) But the Major would not modify
+his statement that he had only been in bed half an hour. He stuck to
+it. I daresay, poor man, that he was telling the truth. He was wearing
+khaki-silk pajamas with purple cords. Gringoire, on the other hand,
+stuck with equal firmness to the fact that he was deputizing for a
+brother officer who was sick--so sick that he had mislaid his orders.
+Orderly Room had sent them to him with a slip attached: “_Passed to
+you, please. For attention, immediate action and compliance._” They had
+had a copy of _that_ slip in the Battalion Orderly Room--but no copy of
+the memo itself.
+
+Apparently they hadn’t at Divisional Headquarters either. It appears
+that the G.S.O. I or II who had issued the memo was sick too--had gone
+sick the night before and our elderly friend was deputizing for him.
+Of course, eventually, Gringoire got some sort of instructions from a
+drowsy, patronizing lance-corporal of the type that one usually finds
+around Divisional Headquarters, sleeping omnisciently under a table
+covered with typewriting machines in a Connaught hut. _He_ knew that
+some one answering to the description of my friend was to meet some one
+on the top of Mont Vedaigne at 11:00 A.M. for the purpose of explaining
+the positions. It was some General, the lance-corporal couldn’t
+remember the name--it was a name like Atkinson or Perry or McAlpine--an
+ordinary sort of name, the lance-corporal said contemptuously. He
+didn’t know what sort of General he was. The General Staff Officer
+Number Two ought to have taken him ’round, but he had gone sick; so
+also had Gringoire’s friend, who was a friend of G.S.O. II. So there he
+was.
+
+(“And,” said Gringoire when he recounted this incident, “it occurs to
+me at this moment this was intended as a friendly attention on the part
+of somebody. Either my friend--who was highly connected in an Army
+sense--or, failing him, I--was to wangle a soft job out of the General.
+But all I thought about was how to get to the top of Mont Vedaigne, set
+my map, get my field telescope into position ... Well, I am telling you
+what I thought about....”)
+
+He was indeed so concentrated in mind on the top of Mont Vedaigne and
+the map and the compass and the telescope that he hadn’t the faintest
+remembrance of the road thither from Dranoutre.[3] He said he could
+give you every object, estaminet, cottage, and Corps H.Q. from Locre to
+Dranoutre by the chaussée; or from Locre to Mont Rouge by second class
+road and field paths, Mont Rouge to Mont Noir, and Mont Vedaigne and
+so on. But of the road to Mont Vedaigne from Divisional Headquarters
+nothing remained--except that it was rather suburban, broad, white, and
+at that date, in good repair.
+
+So he came to the top of the hill, passed the cottage without looking
+at it, between the potatoes and the tobacco and the tobacco and the
+haricots, looked over the southern edge, and saw a great stretch of
+country, looked over the northern edge, and saw a great, silver-gray
+plain, looked away to the east, and saw hills like camels’ humps
+cutting still horizons; and the same on the west.
+
+He was, you understand, in a desperate hurry. For each point of the
+compass, he “set” his map, finding a convenient, flat piece of ground
+on which to lay it. And he saw, without seeing, and memorized without
+associations--just names attaching to dark patches in a great plain.
+Over a particularly large fir tree was Armentières; over an oak, lower
+down the slope and to the right were the slag heaps and Béthune;
+further to the right still Bailleul; the flash of gilt above a steeple
+meant the ten block letters _Poperinghe_; an immensely distant
+series of dull purple cubes against a long silver gleam was, in
+printed capitals DUNKIRK.... You see, his mind was just working in the
+watertight compartments of his immediate professional job. He wanted to
+make--and he did make by 11:00 A.M.--four cards, like the range cards
+one makes for musketry: a central point where one stood, and arrows,
+running out like rays from that center, toward Ypres, in capitals
+or Wytschaete in block letters. He wanted the general to be able to
+stand on each point, look down on the card, follow the direction of
+the arrow, and identify the place. I don’t know whether any other
+Intelligence Officer ever thought of that. Anyhow, he got it done by
+11:00 A.M.
+
+It was pleasant, the feeling when he had made his last fair copy. He
+went to each of the points of the compass, to make sure that he had
+registered positions truly. Returning from the west to the east, he
+noticed an immense plane, appearing in the firmament above Bailleul.
+She was escorted by eight or nine relatively little monoplanes--Bristol
+scouts, I should say. But, at that date, the poor bloody Infantry were
+not brought much in contact with the air force. So that, apart from
+their spectacular, picturesque, or dangerous aspects, they hardly came
+within the scope of Gringoire’s professional attentions. “Airmen,” he
+said, “were brilliant beings, who treated us with contempt and carried
+off the affections of our young women. Otherwise they lived in the
+air whilst we plodded amongst mud and barbed wire. Professionally,
+they rivaled the Cavalry; obtained information for the Artillery--but,
+as for cooperating with us, we were below their notice.” So that the
+great, beautiful machine--which was, I believe, the first Handley Page
+to reach France in safety--passed overhead without Gringoire’s thinking
+of more than that it was beautiful.
+
+But his time for consideration of the beautiful had not yet come. It
+being then eleven and his work as a man from Cook’s being accomplished,
+he had time to think of breakfast.
+
+He had noticed that a cottage existed behind the potatoes, the
+haricots, and the tobacco. His conscious mind had dismissed it, since
+it had obviously no topographical value as an object of interest for
+a General, name unknown. His subconscious mind--that of an Infantry
+Officer--had also dismissed it--as just a cottage; too frail to be of
+much use for cover, even against rifle fire. For you are to understand
+that whilst his surface mind was entirely and devotedly given to
+his immediate job, his secondary mind had certainly taken note of
+the values of Mont Vedaigne, the garden, the hedges, the copsewood,
+the timber, and the slopes; considering them as cover, as sites for
+trenches and noticing the fields of fire, the dead ground, the trees
+that would be dangerous in falling about if the place were shelled, the
+underwood that might be useful, supposing the Artillery had failed to
+knock it to bits or set fire to it--it was very dry still--before the
+Enemy Infantry tried to rush the position. All these little thoughts
+had flitted, like shadows, to be registered somewhere.--For our
+poet learned that, when, ten minutes later, he went over the ground
+again, for the definite purpose of considering it with conscious,
+infantry-eye, he had already noted and stored somewhere in the gray
+matter of his brain most of the details of dead ground, field of fire
+and sites for trenches, too ... and a good deal of the detail as to
+timber, underwood, and the like.
+
+That, however, was only after he had had some breakfast. For a little
+old Belgian woman with a pepper and salt face and a husband who wore a
+black cap with a shining leather eye shade, came out of the green door
+of the cottage, just as the lady does in a weatherhouse. To Gringoire’s
+request in Flemish for coffee, “_Hebt gii Kafe to verkoopen?_” she
+answered nothing, disappearing backwards behind the green door, which
+shut as if automatically. She was there again, however, in less than a
+minute, with a plate of ham, a bowl of coffee, and four bits of their
+gingerbread!
+
+The significance of this did not occur to our subsequent inhabitant
+of a gingerbread dwelling. He only noticed that it did not go so very
+well--nor yet so very badly--with the ham. He ate both, anyhow, in a
+hurry. It was a keen air up there. He secured some more ham and another
+cup of coffee and, with that in his hand, proceeded to the clearing in
+the east from which the best view of the Salient was obtainable.
+
+It was then that the Infantry Officer’s hitherto subconscious,
+professional mind rose to the surface and became the conscious one.
+In the four hours that he had waited in that frame of mind, he had
+noticed, of course, an infinite number of details--a great number of
+airplanes coming from the direction of Dunkirk; huge columns of smoke
+rising from far back in German-held Belgium, behind Brûges. A great
+number of signs of war in that clear, gray, sunlit space, in which
+every pollard willow appeared to be visible and like a candle flame
+burning in a windless air! Gringoire was looking through a telescope,
+of course. But I will trouble the reader only with two apparitions of
+those that he collected: they were apparently unconnected, since they
+took place, the one at Poperinghe, the other in front of Wytschaete.
+But very likely they had a grim connection.
+
+Whilst he was topographically employed, our Infantry Officer had
+noticed Poperinghe as a blue-gray smudge, in shape like an oval lozenge
+seen in perspective. From it rose several church towers--bulbous,
+Low-Country edifices. Now, whilst he was resting his eyes from the
+telescope, he saw, suddenly unfolding in the air above the towers,
+two great white swans. They extended laterally, dazzling, very slow.
+Then a trunk descended from each of them. After a time they resembled,
+exactly, immense torsos of Hercules, headless and armless statues,
+as solid-looking as brilliant white marble, new from the quarry. The
+Tommies called them Statue Shells.
+
+And then he noticed that there were statue shells over the observation
+post on Kemmel Hill. With his telescope, also, he began to see that
+shells were bursting on Poperinghe. I don’t know why, but he took them
+to be gas shells, bracketing.
+
+He rested his eyes again and looked at the gap between Mont Noir and
+Mont Kemmel. It was a symmetrical bit of landscape seen over what is
+called technically a saddle between two hills. Over the very center
+of the lowest part of the dip, Gringoire said, there appeared to be
+a whitish gray tooth stump, decayed, with one end-fragment rather
+high.[4] Extending, like a long string, above this, on rising ground,
+there was a brown rope--five miles, perhaps beyond the decayed tooth.
+Little white balls existed on the brown line, the landscape was pale
+yellow--as it might be the gold of corn fields. The red roofs of a
+village that he knew to be Wytschaete were brilliant and quiet in
+the sun--but, on the brown line beneath that ridge the little white
+balls went on coming into existence--one every half second. One to the
+right at the extreme end of the line; one on the extreme left; one in
+the middle; one between the extreme left and the center. Beautiful
+work. Have you ever seen a village cobbler nailing a sole? It goes
+so quickly that you hardly see the hammer. But a small brass nail is
+there--and another and another--a line of brass nails on the smooth
+leather. Well, they went like that, along the brown line--the little
+white balls! Beautiful! Beautiful work. “My mind,” Gringoire said,
+“was filled with joy and my soul exulted in the clear, still, autumn
+sunshine, looking over that tiny Kingdom of the Earth.
+
+“I said to myself: ‘Hurray! The guns are giving them hell. Some one’s
+ducking over there.’” Because, of course, the brown line was the Hun
+trenches on the Wytschaete ridge, and the little white balls were our
+shells, falling with an exact precision. They must have knocked the
+trenches pretty considerably already for the disturbed earth to show at
+all at that distance.
+
+At that moment--it was just gone three--a man in khaki made Gringoire
+jump by appearing at his elbow. He said that the General who had
+ordered Gringoire to report there at 1:00 P.M. was detained. Would he
+have some lunch and report again at the same spot at five?
+
+And, after that, it was just emotions. The landscape became landscape,
+with great shafts of light and shadows of clouds; the little white
+cottage with the green shutters, a little nook that should be
+inviolable; the haricots interesting as things that one might plant
+in a Kentish garden that sloped to the sea. The range of hills was no
+longer a strategical point or a tactical position. It was all that
+remained of one of the Kingdoms of the Earth; one could hardly look at
+the gray plains with the pollard willows marching like aligned candle
+flames toward the horizon--one avoided looking at it, because it was
+Lost Territory, held down, oppressed, as if it were ashamed. Poperinghe
+grew to appear pitiful, a little town where wretched civilians were
+being butchered by gas shells for the love of God. So the poet’s
+mind worked, at leisure, on personal matters, as neither the mind of
+Intelligence, or Infantry, Officer need work.
+
+“My mind,” the poet reports, “was indeed so much at leisure in that
+long two hours that I even wrote in my Field Pocket Book a preface to a
+volume whose proofs had that morning reached me. In that I recorded my
+emotions of the moment and there, in a printed volume, they stand. It
+does not alter their value as a record of emotions that I subsequently
+learned that the statue shells over Poperinghe were not gas shells but
+had been discharged so as to give the German Heavies the range, or
+that, upon reflection, it appears to me that the Germans were hardly
+shelling the town so profusely just for the love of God. They must
+either have heard that we had a considerable body of troops in the
+town, or else they were trying to stop, by that retaliation, our own
+artillery’s heavy shelling of their Wytschaete-Messines positions.”
+
+But at any rate, there the emotions came, crowding and irrepressible.
+So that, just before, in the dusk, at seven o’clock, Gringoire saw the
+bright red flash of a brass hat’s band in among dark fir trees, he
+noticed, with a sudden lift in the side, a light silver streak, behind
+the map of Dunkirk. It was the sea.
+
+“And suddenly,” he said, “there came upon me an intense longing to be
+beyond that sea.” It was a longing not for any humanity--but just for
+the green country, the mists, the secure nook at the end of a little
+valley, the small cottage whose chimneys just showed over the fruit
+trees--for the feelings and the circumstances of a sanctuary in which
+one could cross one’s second over one’s index finger and in the face of
+destiny cry: “Feignits.”
+
+It was, however, necessary to stand to attention, and through the
+falling twilight to point out hardly visible towns to a nearly
+invisible Senior Officer. And immediately the mind went back to its
+original position: Dunkirk and Ypres became circles named in large
+capitals; Wytschaete and Kemmel were again in block lettering. One
+said: “The sea is just visible in that direction,” and it was just a
+geographical fact.
+
+
+[Footnotes]
+
+[3] I am aware that D.H.Q. was not really at Dranoutre, which was a
+nice little place, built round a church square, rendered nasty by the
+Germans. But I call it Dranoutre out of reflex action caused by fear of
+the Censor--who once, at the end of 1918, struck out of one of my poems
+an allusion to the fact that I visited Cardiff early in 1915.
+
+[4] This would be the remains of the Cathedral and the Cloth Hall at
+Ypres.
+
+
+
+
+                                   V
+
+                              _Intermezzo_
+
+
+The day after peace was declared seemed to your compiler an excellent
+moment on which to remonstrate with our poet as to one of his
+characteristic locutions. The day was fine, cloudless, soft and still;
+some gardening operation of Gringoire’s had consummately succeeded. I
+forget what it was. I fancy some long-studied contrivance of his had
+checkmated the slugs in his strawberry beds. At any rate we sat in the
+long grass by the hedge under the damson trees at the bottom of the
+garden over a great blue china bowl of strawberries which Gringoire
+characteristically insisted on moistening with red wine and sugar. He
+said that taken that way they were less gross than with cream and I am
+bound to say that Mme. Sélysette shared his views with which I could
+never agree.
+
+In any case, it was with singular mildness that, lying on his side in
+the long grass, Gringoire answered my remonstrances.
+
+“Why, no,” he said, “I do not see why any one should object to the
+use of the term ‘Hun’ as applied to such members of the late Enemy
+nations as were not in arms against us. I do not care much about the
+matter and, if the word offends you, I will try, when I think about it,
+not to use it. But the fact is that I certainly never thought about
+it much at any time. It is a convenient phrase to use about what was
+evil in the people we were fighting against. I should not now--and
+I never did--call Brahms anything but a German composer nor should
+I ever think of calling Holbein a Hun painter or the Brothers Grimm
+of the fairy-tales, Boches. So that the word is a convenient one for
+differentiations. In effect for me the German musicians, painters,
+poets, working men, postmen and soldiers in the trenches or at their
+Headquarters were never Huns. I assert that categorically and I think
+it was true of the majority of my comrades--except that the majority of
+my comrades had never heard of Bach or Beethoven or Heine. But it was
+true that the majority of my comrades with whom I discussed the subject
+at all seriously, though they may have used the word you dislike,
+never--when talking seriously--used it as a term of hatred. Humanity
+will inevitably use a monosyllable in place of two sounds if it can
+get the chance and so will I.
+
+“But I don’t think many people in the trenches actually, and except at
+odd moments, ever felt active hatred against the men in the opposite
+lines or even those who militarily directed their operations. When
+they are not called on to be trustworthy or imaginative or to show
+human sympathy, men in the bulk are beasts fairly decent and fairly
+reasonable. We hated and objurgatively called ‘Huns,’ to the furthest
+extent of its Hunnish hideousness, not the poor bloody footsloggers
+who were immediately before us. No, the word applied itself to the
+professors, the prosaists, the publicists, the politicians who had sent
+those poor blighters to prevent our going home. For if you think of it,
+it was a topsy-turvy arrangement. They wanted to send us home and we
+wanted desperately to go; yet they pushed towards our home and we away
+from ours....
+
+“I am not much set to talk to you about the trenches or even about
+fighting. The point that I want to put into the spotlight of your mind
+is mostly the fact that if we do not economize in food there will be
+another war. Unlike you, my dear Compi, in that I regard the past with
+much greater equanimity. You remember that, when we were both writing
+propaganda I used to shock you by the mildness of mine. It will be long
+before I forget your emotions when I wrote an article suggesting that,
+instead of atrocity-mongering we were sufficiently advanced along the
+road of civilization to write--at least of the German troops--as ‘the
+gallant enemy.’
+
+“Today our positions have changed and you are shocked because I style
+certain of those who belong to the late Enemy nation by an epithet that
+you wish to forget having employed. The point is that I stand where I
+did whereas you have reacted against what now appear to have been your
+extravagances. My propaganda, as you remember, was almost entirely
+a matter of economics and of culture. I simply pointed out that the
+war was in effect a hunger war: Prussia being mostly composed of
+immense sand wastes--the Lüneburger Heide; of impenetrable forest--the
+Teutoberger Wald; and of the vast stretch of swamps where Hindenburg
+massacred the Russians on their own border. That being the condition of
+Prussia, the country would not produce enough food for the population
+which was also a population of the most prolific breeders in the
+world. I also pointed out--and I think I was almost the only person to
+do so--that the Enemy Empire instead of being the flourishing concern
+that she had bluffed the world into considering her was actually on the
+point of bankruptcy and losing trade after trade to foreign nations.
+That again was merely a matter of food. Germany had flourished on low
+wages and subsidies to manufacturers; but as food-prices rose the world
+over the wages of the German laborer had to go up so that, even with
+subsidies, the German manufacturer could no longer compete with us,
+the Italians, the French or even the South Americans. That Germany
+invaded Belgium may or may not have been the _triste nécessité_ that
+her statesmen alleged it to be, but that the war, regarded as a food
+war was in very truth a sad necessity for her you may be perfectly
+convinced. Prussia was starving, her population was increasing by leaps
+and bounds, emigration had been forbidden by the government....
+
+“Well, I do not propose to hate a starving population that seeks for
+bread, but I do propose to dislike and go on disliking the professors
+and publicists who preached that the only way to obtain bread was by
+invading Belgium and I do not think that the epithet you object to is
+any too strong. And indeed, if you use it merely to designate what was
+hateful in the late Enemy nation and if you employ the word ‘German’
+for everything that was and is ‘_gemütlich_’ for those who since
+yesterday have been our friends, you will be doing them a service by
+emphasizing what they have of the lovable in their compositions. Still
+... I do not much care about that.
+
+“I do not believe that there will ever be another war if you put it
+only on the baser ground that the great financiers who alone can make
+or stop wars got hideously frightened by the last one. And in addition
+to that you can consider the educative effect of the Armageddon that
+finished yesterday. It will take a good many decades before any human
+soul will again regard war as a means of enrichment and a good many
+centuries before any Great Power will again imagine that to have an
+aspect of bestriding the world in jackboots and with the saber rattling
+is of advantage to itself. It is a better world on the 29th of June,
+1919, than it was on August the 3rd, 1914. Bluff has got its deathblow.
+
+“Yes, the world is better and sweeter. We simple people are freed of
+an enormous incubus; we can sit still for a space and think, which
+we never could before in the history of the world. But of this I am
+certain--that what danger there is to the world and us is a food
+danger. I do not believe there will ever be another war: I believe our
+sufferings, great as they were, achieved that and were a small price to
+pay for that benefit. So, if you want to you may bless even the Huns as
+having been the occasion of our learning that lesson. But if there were
+ever another war it would be a war purely and simply for food.
+
+“The food-producing soil of the earth is already occupied; the
+population of our small planet increases by leaps and bounds. I know
+enough about agriculture--and scientific agriculture at that--to
+know that the pretensions of scientists to increase the production
+of food by improved culture is weary nonsense when set against the
+consideration of the increase in the numbers of mankind. The most
+honest scientist that I know refused to reveal a method of increasing
+the yield of wheat sixfold on a given plot of ground because he
+satisfied himself that to do so in one year rendered that plot of
+ground absolutely barren for ten years and the milder improvements of
+agricultural processes that are evolved each year do not suffice to
+provide enough food for the extra mouths that each year are produced by
+Prussia alone.
+
+“So that the position might seem pretty gloomy, but I remain an
+optimist, at least in the matter of war for if, as I think will prove
+the fact, there will be no war till the world is driven to it by
+starvation, then the coming of war may be so long delayed that, all
+races of the world being at last at much the same pitch of education,
+it will be obvious to them all that war is no way to increase the
+production of food. I heard, not a Hun, but a Swedish professor say the
+other day that it was terribly irksome and irritating to his countrymen
+to consider that, whilst they were overpopulated and cramped up on
+an infertile soil, down in the fertile south there was the nearly
+empty and extraordinarily fertile land known as France. And how, he
+asked, could France with her selfish inhabitants who regulated their
+birth-rate--or who at any rate selfishly refused to beget children to
+the limit of their capacity--how could France expect to enjoy immunity
+from invasion by the healthy, voracious and formidable Northern races
+who openheartedly and with splendid generosity begot children, to use
+his own phrase, by the bushel?
+
+“I did not, as you might imagine, because of my obvious Gallophilism
+try to bite off that blond beast’s head because what he said was, as to
+its premises, true enough. France _is_ sparsely populated and wealthy,
+Sweden _is_ overcrowded and infertile. But the remedy for that is not
+to be found in invasion: the solution is there, waiting. France which
+is the only country civilized enough not to overpopulate herself is at
+present the only country in the world that welcomes immigration and
+facilitates to the extreme the naturalization of immigrants.
+
+“The Swede went on grumbling that it was very hard that his compatriots
+must expatriate themselves in order to enjoy those _Südfrüchte_--fruits
+of the South. He said that his fellow countrymen loved their graynesses
+and contracted terrible melancholias beneath Southern suns.... So that
+the only thing was raiding!
+
+“I did not continue the discussion for I did not wish at the moment
+to hate a Swede. But that in essence shows the root of the matter.
+Wars will cease when nations and Northern Professors are sufficiently
+civilized to let nations be relatively nomadic and permit races to flow
+freely from inclement, overpopulated and infertile regions into those
+that are sparsely populated and fertile and not hyper-philoprogenitive.
+
+“You may put it that hatred and overpopulation go hand in hand, their
+destination being war, and you would not be far wrong. For it is not
+the hatreds begotten after wars are declared that matter; those die
+natural if slow deaths as soon as the not very protracted activities
+of warfare are over and done with, so that it is only the hatreds that
+precede wars that need much concern us.”
+
+He went on to say that pre-war hatreds, apart from those inculcated
+by hungers of one sort or another, arose largely from differences of
+manners. We used to hate the French because they ate frogs and were
+elegant; they hated us because we said “goddam” and ruled the seas. But
+manners tend to approximate the world over with the extension of means
+of intercourse. They jazz in Cambodia as in Coney Island today and
+tomorrow they will speak American in the county of Clackmannan even as
+in Monte Carlo.
+
+That Gringoire applauded. It was, he said, all to the good to have
+a dance that all could dance. Before the war the vigorous poor went
+to dogfights, cockfights, badgerfights: now they jazzed. It was a
+progress towards sweetness and light, part of what we had paid for
+with our sufferings....
+
+It was at this point that your Compiler became a little impatient.
+He had come to get war-reminiscences from a practising poet--but
+these colloquies resolved themselves into a continual struggle of
+wills, Gringoire persisting in dilating on the future as seen by the
+practising agriculturist and gastronome. And indeed, scenting that your
+Compiler was essaying to head him off from the topic on which his mind
+was fixed, he now went off upon a tirade about intensive horticulture
+and French cooking that lasted until dusk was well falling on his
+garden. And Madame Sélysette, raising her delicate eyebrows, intimated
+sufficiently plainly that, if we did not want a storm he had better not
+be interrupted.
+
+The main points of his harangue were to the effect that humanity would
+be saved--if it was to be saved--by good cooking, intensive horti-,
+as opposed to agriculture. And of course by abstract thinking and the
+arts. And the avoidance of waste. Above all by the avoidance of waste.
+
+To the pretensions of the scientific agriculturist he opposed the
+claims of hand-culture, to those of the popular restaurant upholder
+those of the meticulous chef. Hand culture whether of beasts, grain or
+vegetables gave a better product, the careful and intelligent cook gave
+you more appetizing food. The more appetizing your food the better you
+digested it and the less you needed to support you. He said--but that
+was on the question of waste--that in a French residence of the size
+of the Gingerbread Cottage you would not find enough waste to fatten a
+chicken with; in his own establishment, do all that he could, aided by
+Mme. Sélysette, they had waste enough to half fatten a pig....
+
+In short the world was to be saved by observing the precepts of the
+recipe for mutton chops with which your Compiler opened this little
+work. But all this seemed so apart from anything that his readers could
+be supposed to want from a book devoted to the war-reminiscences of a
+poet that your Compiler had long ceased to use his pencil and notebook
+before Gringoire had finished his sunset harangue, so that, having no
+notes of the arguments we may well, as to that matter, here inscribe
+the words: “_cetera desunt._”
+
+But, having eased his mind, Gringoire became good-natured, and,
+becoming good-natured he was awake to the outer world. So he observed
+that Mme. Sélysette and your servant had for a long time made neither
+objections to nor comments on the stuff of his harangues. His voice had
+gone on sounding alone save for the churnings of an early night-jar
+that sat upon the gatepost giving onto the rushy meadow. And suddenly
+he stopped and laughed maliciously.
+
+“Poor old Compi,” he said, “how extraordinarily this isn’t what you
+come for. But the stuff of war-reminiscences concerns itself almost as
+much with what war has made of a man as with the pictures that he saw.
+Still you are not the sort of person to see that and, in a minute I
+will reward your patience with a landscape that, though it has nothing
+to do with our main theme, may make a nice _bonne bouche_ for your
+little book.
+
+“But I do want to get in--just for the sake of pointing it out to the
+world--that the late hostilities, whilst they profoundly modified the
+manners of the world did, in their very nature, hold up to the world
+a moral that will be of infinite value as soon as the world is in any
+condition at all to notice it. That is to say it did teach us what a
+hell--what a hell!--of a lot we can do without.
+
+“Take my dear Sélysette there, with her upbringing amongst the suns
+and luxuries of the _haute bourgeoisie_ of the South. Do you suppose
+that if, before the 3rd of August, 1914 you had proposed to her to
+unite her destinies to the least pecunious of poets and take up her
+residence in a rat-ridden cottage beneath the usually lugubrious but at
+all times capricious skies of this septentrional land--do you suppose
+that, if you had then made that proposal she would not have crushed you
+to the earth with the mere weight of her scorn? Or take me. Would you,
+knowing me as you did in earlier but, I assure you, not half such happy
+days--would you have imagined me spending what till then, but not till
+now, were certainly my happiest hours in a bare hillside in a tent with
+absolutely no furnishings but an officer’s camp-bed? I had been used
+to a good deal of luxury, but there for the first time I found peace
+though the German artillery was actually at that moment shelling that
+spot and I was for the first time under fire.
+
+“That is one of the things that I remember most vividly, not because
+it was the first time I was under fire but because I felt that for
+the first time I had cut absolutely and finally loose from all the
+bedevilments of life at home--from the malices as from the luxuries.
+Afterwards, unused as I was to the artillery mind or its methods, I
+wondered a little that they should be so persistently shelling _us_ and
+that they should find us with such accuracy.
+
+“I was sitting on the side of my camp-bed talking to an extremely
+intoxicated and disheveled elderly officer who was nevertheless a
+man of no ordinary talent. That is to say that his harangues about
+everything under the sun were interspersed with a great number of
+classical quotations of singular aptness and he had also made several
+inventions that eventually proved very useful during the war and
+that saved him from a courtmartial for drunkenness. I was--as was
+so frequently my case--in charge of him and, although he was in no
+position to get away, I did not care to go into a dugout as did all my
+brother officers who had hitherto been in the tent with us. And indeed
+the fact was that that fellow’s boozy conversation interested me....
+
+“The German shells came in groups of three, doing obviously what we
+infantry were taught to call bracketing. That is to say that the first
+three shells whined wearily overhead and caused a considerable rumpus
+in our mule lines that were perhaps a hundred yards behind us, and
+immediately afterwards a rocket or something like it let itself down
+from the heavens. A few minutes later three more shells fell short of
+us by perhaps another hundred yards down the hill. There was an obvious
+German plane overhead and it was in the late evening, nearly dark in
+the tent and quite dusk in the calm light outside.
+
+“My elderly friend wagged his head sagely. He explained that the
+Germans were trying to find with their shells something that that plane
+thought it had seen--probably the great park of German captured guns
+that were just above us. They would fire three sets of three shells
+each. Then our heavy artillery would open on them as a gentle hint to
+them to be quiet and not disturb the serenity of the Sabbath evening.
+They might take the hint or they might not. If they did not a regular
+duel between the heavies would begin, and the earth would shake for
+miles ’round.
+
+“But, in any case, he said--and his air of wisdom convinced me as if
+Solomon were returned to earth and judging artillery--that we should be
+left in peace very shortly. And at that moment the next batch of three
+shells arrived right on us. That is to say that one landed right in the
+middle of the captured German guns, one in the fortunately soft ground
+of a spring about thirty yards from our tent and one in the middle of
+the canteen tent that was just next to ours; so that immediately after
+the immense concussions innumerable crepitations sounded from the
+canvas above us, the clay, gravel and mud falling from where it had
+been precipitated into the skies. And a tin of sardines, coming through
+the tent-flap, landed as if miraculously in my lap....
+
+“But that old fellow went on nodding his head as if he had been a
+Chinese bronze and exclaiming: ‘Don’t get up! Don’t get up! That will
+be the last of it!’
+
+“And, sure enough it was. Immediately afterwards Bloody Mary and two
+of her lady friends let off, enormous and august, breaking the quiet
+night. And I suppose the Germans were not in the mood for any extended
+artillery duel. They had probably satisfied themselves that the German
+guns parked above us were duds of sorts. The plane must have observed
+them earlier in the evening and had signaled their presence with
+rockets....
+
+“But the point that I want to make is that no matter how simple your
+surroundings or limited your income you can find happiness as long as
+you are also surrounded by a set of men with incomes similarly exiguous
+who are contented with their surroundings. The German shells were an
+added discomfort which I don’t adduce as part of my argument--as if it
+should be raining or indulging in any other eccentricity of weather
+that one cannot control.
+
+“Anyhow, I have been happier in a tent or a hut or even in a dugout
+than ever I was in a night-club before the war or in the sort of a
+hotel they call a Grand Palace, and I would rather inhabit a Connaught
+hut furnished exclusively with biscuit or beef boxes and sluice myself
+with cold water in the open on a freezing morning than dwell among
+Park Lane millionaires and take my ease in a hummums. And, if I can do
+that, all humanity can. I am no exception, and it is in that way that
+salvation lies and the extinction of wars.
+
+“Indeed, I can assure you that one of the most troubled moments of
+the war happened when, as I will later tell you, I was sent for to
+Paris by the French Government and by them lodged in circumstances
+of extreme luxury in a Palace on the Avenue de l’Opéra. For apart
+from the botherments of being asked to do propaganda that I did not
+want to do and the obvious hostility of the French officers with whom
+I mixed and momentary shortness of cash I had, as again I will tell
+you later, the extreme botherment of being introduced suddenly into
+the sequelæ of a very violent divorce case. A British cavalry officer
+had used a week’s leave in going to Switzerland and carrying off his
+little daughter who had been taken there by his wife on her elopement
+with a ‘fiddler-fellow.’ And, as I sat in the vestibule of the Hotel
+Splendide et de l’Orient the little girl, whom I like to think of as
+Maisie--that Maisie of Henry James’ book--came and without a word of
+any introduction, settled herself in my lap and went to sleep. She was
+bothered because she could not find the tram to Heaven. Because they
+said her mother had gone to Heaven.
+
+“You would say that such things do not happen in war. But they _do_....
+And the distracted cavalry officer having left me in charge of his
+sleeping daughter went on some business that he had at the Embassy. But
+before he went he pointed to the swinging doors of the hotel giving
+into the streets and told me that at any moment he expected his wife
+to rush in and use a revolver.... And I was due at the French Foreign
+Office for an interview upon which my future in the service and the
+world might turn.
+
+“Eventually my publisher came in and I dropped the sleeping Maisie into
+his lap. He was to have accompanied me to the Ministry but I thought he
+would be more useful to me there, so I left him.... But I assure you I
+was much more frightened of the idea of Maisie’s mother whom I pictured
+as a sort of infuriated Carmen than ever I was of any German shells.
+It was she, with her revolver, who typified for me real hatred--the
+woman robbed of her child. Whereas, as for the only man that I actually
+and consciously shot at and who actually and consciously shot at me, I
+never felt the ghost of an emotion of hatred. I was aware of imbecilely
+grinning when he missed me--as if it were any other sport--and of
+saying to myself: ‘That’s the sort of dud _you_ are,’ when I--and
+repeatedly--missed him. And I believe I felt regret when some one else
+killed him. At any rate I am glad that I cannot remember his face....
+
+“But Maisie’s mother would have been a different affair. _She_ would
+have been filled with hatred--as I don’t believe that other fellow
+was--and I should have been paralyzed.... Why, even at this moment I
+can almost feel her revolver bullet entering my stomach. And I should
+have deserved it. One should not connive at the carrying off of a
+woman’s child however righteous the case of the husband. It is perhaps
+a worse crime than crossing the Belgian frontier, ‘near a place called
+Gemmenich.’
+
+“To die thus would be to die in a bad cause. And I daresay that why
+I don’t believe that any great hatred existed between the actual
+combatants in the late war--and why I don’t, when I think about it,
+stigmatize the fellows who lately stood armed over against us as
+‘Huns’--is simply that we thought we had a good cause and that we knew
+that they also thought that they had a good cause. They thought that we
+endangered their homes as much as we thought that they endangered ours.
+
+“So that I simply do not believe in atrocities. The worst fellow that
+I ever came across on our own side--an enormous Scot whose principal
+conversation was taken up with the topic of the prisoners he had
+murdered--I have seen become lachrymosely sentimental over a German
+prisoner who was in a lamentable state of funk at having to undergo a
+medical examination. That Scot almost blubbered over that Hun in his
+efforts to assure him that the doctor would not operate on him against
+his will....
+
+“No, I don’t believe in atrocities. Or at the most I half believe
+in one. It is asserted--the Huns asserted it themselves but I found
+it difficult to believe--that they filmed the _Lusitania_ whilst
+she was sinking. That I find atrocious. It is bad enough with
+premeditation--and the presence of a film operator would seem to prove
+premeditation--it is bad enough, then, with premeditation to sink a
+ship loaded with sleeping women and children. But if we concede that
+those responsible believed--as they may have done--that the _Lusitania_
+carried munitions of war even that may be nearly condoned. But that
+you should take a cinema machine to represent, for the gloating of
+others, the ruin and disappearance of a tall ship--that seems to me
+the most horrible of crimes. _Spurlos_ is in itself a suspect word,
+a part of the vocabulary of ruthlessness that lost the Huns--not the
+fighting men--the war. But the real lives of men are enshrined in
+their products. To kill a poet is a small thing; to destroy his work
+is an irremediable offense.... And the most beautiful of all the
+handiwork of men is the tall ship. It is horrible to see houses go down
+in ruin under artillery fire; it is horrible to see fields mutilated
+and rendered unfertile or merely humiliated by the heels of alien
+conquerors. But to see a ship, its heart broken, its bows appealing
+to the heavens, slowly and mutely disappear. That is horrible. The
+sea shudders a little where it was. Only a little. But still the sea
+shudders.
+
+“Obviously in wars you must sink ships. And I suppose you may make
+records of the sinking of ships if it be done pitifully. But, in a
+spirit of gloating, to represent for the purpose of affrighting others
+or making yet others gloat in turn--to make cold-bloodedly the record
+of the disappearance of the proudest ship in the world, that seems to
+me the most horrible of ... _Schrecklichkeiten_.... But perhaps they
+never did it. Perhaps they only said that they did. That would be a
+queer way to make yourself popular!
+
+“But there was a landscape that I wanted to tell you about.
+
+“A little in front of Kemmel Hill we had some trenches--horrible
+trenches because of the nature of the ground. You could not dig
+down three feet because you came to water so the parapets were
+merely sandbags and the parados nothing at all. They must have been
+responsible for the loss of more lives than any other position of
+the whole war. In addition, when it rained, all the flood-water of
+the uplands poured down into them. Why I have seen them filled with
+cigarette packets washed down from our always luckless canteen--after
+the great storm in September ’16.
+
+“Well, it was just before then that we had been set to occupy those
+lines. If they had been retired a hundred and fifty yards they
+would have been on the slope of the hill and dry and safe. But the
+staff--or some bellicose individual on the staff--in spite of every
+representation preferred to lose a third of my battalion, let alone
+thirds of all the other battalions that occupied them, rather than
+to lose the little bit of prestige that it would have meant, by a
+retirement. Of a hundred and fifty yards! Think of that!
+
+“Anyhow, there we came down in the early hours of a September
+moonlight--into a world of beautiful, bluish and misty calm. There
+were those calms in the line when the vengeful activities of seven or
+so million men had exhausted themselves and their imaginations had
+just gone to sleep. You would have long periods of quiet. They would
+be broken by sudden bursts of machine gun fire and flares of Verey
+lights when some bemused sentry had taken it into his head that half
+a dozen corpses in No Man’s Land were stealing upon him. One’s nerves
+did that in quiet, moonlit moments. You would look at a corpse, or some
+sacking, or some sandbags until you could swear they were creeping upon
+you. Then in a crisis, ‘bang’ would go your hipe, and off would go the
+machine guns, and up would flare the Verey lights. The guns too might
+come in and some poor devil or another lose his life. But as a rule
+silence would settle down again for another long period.... I wrote a
+poem about that, in French. But I never heard of any one having read
+it.”
+
+It was at that moment that your Compiler burst in with the words:
+
+“Oh, it begins with: ‘I should like to imagine a moonlight in which
+there will be no machine guns.’ I heard my friend Mrs. Carmody recite
+it only yesterday. Recite, not read it!”
+
+Gringoire grunted slightly.
+
+“The point was that it was most beautiful moonlight, before a blue,
+silent mountain with mists dim all up its flanks. And the other point
+was that we, as you may remember, were a flying division. We were used
+for reinforcing threatened points or for resting overtired troops.
+And, facing us, the Germans had similar divisions that they called
+‘_Sturmtruppen_.’ The curious thing was that either their Intelligence
+was so good or ours was so good that whenever we were moved up or
+down the line we found the same regiments in front of us so that when
+we were on the Somme we fought the Second Brandenburgers, and when
+we moved up to the Salient there we found the Second Brandenburgers
+in front of us and after we had been in front of Armentières for a
+little, there sure enough were the famous Second Brandenburgers. The
+Cockchafers, they were nicknamed. After that they began to desert to us
+a good deal and they were replaced by the Würtembergers whom we used to
+consider better fellows, I don’t know why, for we never, in the nature
+of the case, consorted much with either.
+
+“On the occasion of that moonlight night the Brandenburgers had got in
+before us and displayed a natural curiosity to know who we were when
+we got in. The German--or rather the Hun--method of trying to unmask
+the identity of opponents was to sing national anthems. I use the word
+‘Hun’ here because only a Delbrueck or a Bethmann-Hollweg--a professor
+or a politician--would have thought of anything so ingeniously
+imbecile. For naturally we did not fall in with that little idea....
+The idea, by the bye, was that if we were Scots and they sang ‘Scots
+Wha Hae’ or Irish and they sang ‘The Wearin’ of the Green,’ or for us
+‘Hen Wlad Wy Nadhau’ we should, in a burst of patriotic emotion either
+cheer or join in the chorus. We didn’t. I remember that once when,
+no doubt suspecting who we were, they had tried singing “Ap Jenkin,”
+which is our quickstep, our men replied by singing the imperial Chorus
+from the ‘Mikado’ as if to show that we were Japanese. That irritated
+them so much that they pounded our trench for an hour and a half with
+everything they could think of.
+
+“On this occasion they tried everything from ‘Rule Britannia’ to
+‘Australia, Australia,’ and elicited no reply. And then they suddenly
+touched off an immense gramophone that sang, through the still
+moonlight ... the ‘Hymn of Hate.’ And in English!
+
+“It was curious and eerie to hear that passionless machine let off
+those dire words devoted solely to ourselves, for they never evolved
+anything like it for the French or the Belgians or the Italians or
+Annamites or Cochin Chinese or Brazilians. Now it screamed and brayed:
+
+ “Hate of the head and hate of the hand,
+  Hate of the breed and hate of the land
+  ENGLAND
+  Hate of the standing and hate of the lying,
+  Hate of the living and hate of the dying
+  ENGLAND ... ENGLAND”
+
+(“And as a detail I may add that they had to get an English
+renegade--for there was one!--to make that translation.)
+
+“I am bound to say that it made one shiver a little. There were the
+moonlight, and the mists, and the lights of poor Wytschaete far away
+on the ridge. And those words creeping towards us. It is perhaps more
+disagreeable to think of being prayed to death than of being shelled.
+One shivered.
+
+“And when it fell silent one wondered if anything in the war or in the
+world could surpass it for drama. But one was wrong. You don’t know the
+Welsh. They are the incomparable singers of four-part music in the open
+air.
+
+“I remember, years ago, being on the side of a Welsh mountain on a
+Saturday evening at sunset and far below a Welsh miners’ beanfeast was
+going along a thread of a road in char-à-bancs. And as each filled car
+passed there came up the sounds of four-part songs, incredibly sweet
+and incredibly mournful in the falling darkness. They are a conquered
+people, the Welsh, and their music is the music of a conquered people.
+
+“But on that occasion the Germans had delivered themselves into their
+hands in the endless struggle between Saxon and Celt. For suddenly a
+single voice in ‘B’ Company began to sing with extraordinary clearness:
+
+ ‘Maxwelton braes are bonnie
+  When earlie fa’s the dew....’
+
+“And extraordinarily, before the singer had come to ‘there that Annie
+Laurie,’ the whole of ‘B’ Company was crooning out the other parts of
+the song. Beneath the moon. And then the whole Battalion, along a front
+of a mile. Crooning, you know, rather softly, not shouting....
+
+  “And for Bonnie Annie Laurie ...”
+
+“It was a good answer.
+
+“They were forbidden of course to sing Welsh songs, or it might have
+been ‘Land of My Fathers’ or the ‘Men of Harlech.’ As it was, it was
+better.
+
+“But there was not much hatred about that. And you will observe that
+even the Huns had had to get a machine to do their hating.”
+
+
+
+
+                                   VI
+
+                             _Just Country_
+
+
+It is one of the burdens of advancing age--as it is one of the
+penalties of having been unreasonably prolific--that one is always
+haunted by a vague dread of repeating one’s self. One’s mind,
+presumably, progresses, one touches and retouches one’s ideas; hammers
+at the wording; seeks after a final clarity of expression. It is all
+one that one may have already printed the matter of the theme; the mind
+continues to work at the phraseology until one, finally, isn’t certain
+that one has or hasn’t sought the crystallization of the press. So it
+happens that I cannot be certain whether I have or haven’t printed
+already what I am about to write. It can’t, however, in the nature of
+things, have been more than a shortish article; so that if I have to
+apologize to any readers, the apology can’t be for any great fault.
+
+I fancy that what I then tried to put on paper was suggested by a
+letter that our poet wrote, having another moment of leisure, at
+about the time of his long wait for the General on Mont Vedaigne. I
+wrote an article, and certainly it was suggested by a passage in one
+of Gringoire’s letters to a friend, at some one’s request, for the
+journal called the N--. And that journal called the N-- refused to
+print the article because it was too militarist. I don’t myself see
+where the militarism can have come into the expression of what was pure
+speculation of a psychological kind--but censors, whether military or
+anti-military, are queer people, and I presume that their main job,
+as it presents itself to their minds, is the suppression of ideas....
+The more I think about it now, the more the thought hardens and takes
+shape; some one--connected with the propaganda-ministry--_did_ ask me
+to write an article for the N-- and the N-- did refuse to print it. I
+daresay the journal had quarreled with the department in between whiles.
+
+Anyhow, the psychological speculation wasn’t very profound, or, as
+far as I can see, very likely to render conscription a permanent
+institution in these islands. Stated in its baldest terms, it merely
+amounted to saying that when you are very busy with a job, you do not
+much notice what is going on around you. You don’t, of course.
+
+And, in the end, that is the basic idea that underlies these records
+of four landscapes. Gringoire was simply trying to state--or rather
+to illustrate--the fact that, during the whole of the period from the
+4/8/’14 till the date when the German plenipotentiaries appended, in
+the Salle des Glaces, their signatures to the peace treaty, he only
+four times achieved a sufficient aloofness of mind to notice the
+landscape that surrounded him.
+
+“I don’t mean to say,” our poet summed the matter up, “that I didn’t
+have ‘leaves,’ but, for one cause and another, my leaves weren’t ever
+pensive or leisurely. One was snatched into the civilian frame of
+mind--but into a civilian frame of mind that was always preoccupied
+with ‘The War’--that was, indeed, in odd ways, far more preoccupied
+with the war than were one’s self and one’s friends. Thus I remember
+that, on the occasion of my first return from France, being in a
+Tommy’s tunic, before I had arrived at the barrier of Viltona, I was
+stopped by an Assistant Provost Marshal and told that if I didn’t
+immediately procure leather gloves, another sort of hat, a collar,
+a tie, and get rid of my divisional mark, I should be put under
+arrest and returned to my battalion. In the booking office, I found
+a telephone--which cost thruppence, instead of tuppence--and when I
+remonstrated with a lady who three times gave me a wrong number, I was
+told to remember that there was a war going on. When, there being no
+one in my own house, I tried to go by omnibus to my club for lunch, I
+being in mufti and a little lame, a lady conductor put her hand on my
+chest, exclaimed: ‘There’s a war on,’ and very neatly threw me back
+into the road.
+
+“When I got to my club, a civilian of an eminently moral appearance
+was lunching at my table. He addressed me condescendingly--as no doubt
+one would address a Tommy if one were a civilian at a club. I had the
+feeling that he was about to offer me a glass of beer--therefore I
+hurriedly began to talk of peace. I wanted, you see, to consider peace
+and to avoid at once the offer of a free drink and the remembrance of
+my comrades who were still in danger of their lives. I admit that my
+words were inconsiderate, for I simply said:
+
+“‘Won’t there be a high old fortnight’s drunk after that day!’
+
+“My table companion drew himself up, pursed dry lips, and as it were
+hissed:
+
+“‘I think we have taken very good steps to prevent that.’
+
+“He wouldn’t, you see, let me forget my poor comrades who were still in
+the trenches. I do not remember what I said then; but only his attitude
+as with his napkin very white and crumpled in his hand, he removed
+to another table. Straight from that club I went to the house of an
+Eminent Reformer who told me that he would rather we lost the war than
+that the Cavalry should have a hand in winning it.[5] He couldn’t know
+that it wasn’t so very long since I had seen the empty saddles of the
+Deccan Horse, as, all intermingled with the men of some battalion of
+Gordons, they returned from an adventure in No Man’s Land, during the
+1916 Battle of the Somme. So I went and had tea with a lady who gave
+me three milk biscuits from a silver tray and said: ‘This _must_ be a
+change from your hardships over there!’
+
+“They _wouldn’t_, you see, let me forget the poor dear fellows who
+were still in the trenches. So I passed the night in a Y.M.C.A. hut,
+discussing Mametz Wood of the 14/7/’16 with an officer of the 38th
+Division.”
+
+That, of course, was rather a special day, Gringoire said--though
+it was nothing out of the common. Given his age, former career, and
+surroundings, he couldn’t be expected to come in for any huge amount
+of the salutary dissipation or the healing hospitality which did so
+much to _remonter_ the _moral_ of the troops. Moving mostly amongst
+the Intelligentsia, he came a good deal in contact with Conscientious
+Objectors who abused him to his face for militarism or with literary
+civilians of military age who, after calling at his house, returned
+to their own and wrote him anonymous but easily recognizable letters,
+the purport of which was that he had never heard a shot fired and
+that the only gas he had ever smelled had been emitted by himself.
+To balance them, he received a number of letters from the German
+population of London, threatening to murder him on account of his
+propagandist writings, whilst one of the most frequent preoccupations
+of his military career arose from the anonymous letters addressed to
+the War Office, to his various Colonels, and to the officers and other
+ranks of his regiment by a professional man whom he had once employed
+and who, after he lost that particular job, found that his conscience
+as a patriot demanded that he should continuously but unsuccessfully
+denounce our poet as a German spy.
+
+That is all in the day’s journey. _Homo homini lupus._ But it is not to
+be wondered at that in his periods of leisure Gringoire was not in a
+position to pay what he would have called a hell of a lot of attention
+to landscapes--or, in the alternative, that the essential call, of the
+land, of the war, was not the humanity that England contained--but just
+the country.
+
+Possibly the idea of country--just country--postulates the idea of
+human companionship--but that is not the same thing as humanity.
+
+“When I was a boy,” as Gringoire put it, “every hedge and every turn
+of a white, long road, concealed a possible Princesse Lointaine.” In
+those days one walked on and on--from the North Foreland to the Land’s
+End; from Kensington to Winchelsea, from Minehead, by Porlock and
+Brendon, to Water’s Meet. Or one cycled from Calais to Beauvais, by way
+of Arras; from Paris to Tours and along the Loire, somehow ending at
+Houlgate and Caen. Or one went in a slow fiacre from Amiens to Albert,
+ostensibly to see the new brick and mosaic cathedral, with the Madonna
+atop. But, no doubt, whether one went to Mevagissy or Mentone; Port
+Scathow, Pontardulais, Château Gaillard, or Curt-yr-Ala, one was really
+chasing the Only Possible She.
+
+“Nowadays one sits in a green field--any green field--and longs for
+nothing more than just a little bit of loyalty. One longs, that is
+to say, that one may at last find the _hominem bonæ voluntatis_ that
+one has chased all one’s life. Possibly one desires that, resting
+one’s eyes in the green of the grass as--do you remember, old Dai
+Bach?--according to the maxims of Color-Sergeant Davis of Caerphilly,
+we used to rest our eyes from the targets by looking into the trampled
+green blades, one longs to discover some formula that shall make us
+ourselves forever loyal to some ideal or other....
+
+“Or perhaps it is just rest that one wants. Anyhow, one wants the
+country that is just country--not heaths, moors, crags, forests,
+passes, named rivers, or famous views. No--just fields, just dead
+ground, or fields of clover that have never heard and will never hear
+the crepitation of machine guns; hedgerows unwired and not too trim,
+with a spray or so of bramble just moving in a wind from which one is
+sheltered. That, until the other day, one so seldom saw in France--or
+in England either, for that matter.”
+
+“I remember,” Gringoire said in one of his anecdotes, “being in a
+wood--behind Tenby, I think, or near Manorbier or Pembroke, in 1915.
+It was very warm, and that part of Wales is a sleepy country. I had
+bicycled ahead of troops afoot to inspect some sort of position that,
+the day before, with my over-meticulousness, I had already spent hours
+in surveying, when I might have been listening to Pierrots. At any
+rate, I had three-quarters of an hour of entire leisure.
+
+“The sun beat down; I was just inside the edge of a wood. A little
+marsh--a reëntrant--ran right in under the trees. There was a mill
+where the insignificant valley opened out; a little dam where the
+road mounted an opposite slope. And then, though I had sketched, in
+a military sense, every clump of rushes, every contour, every bridge,
+every railway cutting and bit of embankment, many times--suddenly this
+place of greenery assumed--that too!--the aspect of being just country.
+
+“A little Welsh sheep poked its horns through the hedge and looked
+at me; a wren crept through a tangle of old thorns at my elbow, a
+nuthatch pursued a curious and intricate course amongst the netted,
+coarse fibers of ivy on a wild cherry-trunk. I lay still in the dappled
+sunlight and thought nothing, except that it was good to stretch out
+one’s limbs, recumbent. Because the level, green ground in front of
+me was so grown with rushes, I began to try to remember what were the
+provisions of the Field Drain Act of the middle of last century. Surely
+the farmer could obtain from the State, on easy terms, a loan with
+which to defray the expense of soil-pipes and labor for the draining
+of that land. And I began to think about the queer, stodgy, Victorian
+mind; and about Albert the Good, and the Crystal Palace, which in those
+days was known as the Temple of Peace; and I remembered John Brown and
+John Morley and John Bright and John Stuart Mill and Mr. Ruskin and
+the rest of them, and mahogany chairs with horsehair seats and Argand
+lamps and the smoke and steam that used to fill the underground at
+Gower Street station. And in those days I had a 13-hand New Forest pony
+and a very old governess car and went to market on a Tuesday....
+
+“And then, quite suddenly, I felt that, for thousands and thousands of
+miles, on the green fields and in the woodlands, stretching away under
+the high skies, in the August sunlight, millions, millions, millions of
+my fellow men were moving--like tumultuous mites in a cheese, training
+and training, as we there were training--all across a broad world to
+where the sun was setting and to where the sun was rising--training
+to live a little, short space of time in an immense long ribbon of
+territory, where, for a mile or so the earth was scarred, macerated,
+beaten to a pulp, and burnt by the sun till it was all dust.... The
+thought grew, became an immense feeling, became an obsession. Then
+Major Ward, on a bay with a white forehead, appeared on the little
+bridge that carried the waters of the marsh beneath the road. The
+others were coming!”
+
+
+[Footnotes]
+
+[5] Our friend is here venting a little of the bile that, as will be
+seen, at times obscures his outlook on life and makes him, elsewhere,
+appear ungenerous to the civilian population that so loyally did its
+bit. The train of thought of his friend the Eminent Reformer would seem
+to be as follows: (a) this is a war for liberty; (b) the Cavalry are
+officered mainly by the hereditary aristocracy; (c) if the hereditary
+aristocracy wins out in the war, liberty will suffer; (d) it would be
+preferable to lose the war. This seems logical. Our poet, however,
+refuses to see matters in this light. He says that he has never since
+spoken to that Eminent Reformer, who was once the closest of his
+friends--and that he never will again. This is lamentable. But is there
+not a tag beginning “_Irritabile genus_”...?
+
+
+
+
+                                  VII
+
+                           _Playing the Game_
+
+
+As will appear in my last chapter Gringoire insists that I shall
+include in this volume a specimen of his prose written under fire. As
+that was written in French your compiler flatly refused to insert it in
+the body of his book so that, since Gringoire flatly refused to let the
+book appear at all unless it _was_ included, it will be found elsewhere
+than in the body and what follows is his translation. I confess to
+regretting its inclusion for although I myself and a great number of my
+friends including even Mrs. Carmody who is the wife of the headmaster
+at the ancient grammar-school, a foundation of Edward VI’s in the XVI
+century at which I have the honor to teach English Literature--although
+I and my friends consider him a very great poet, if not the greatest
+poet in the world at the moment, poet’s prose is well known to be too
+florid for the real connoisseur of prose. And what follows is actually
+his own translation and Gringoire himself has asserted many times both
+in private and in public that he is entirely unable to translate his
+own prose. It does however present a picture of the poet under fire--a
+matter as to which he here refuses to say anything elsewhere under
+the plea that to talk about actual fighting disturbs his subsequent
+sleep with nightmares and also that he intends to treat of fighting
+subsequently himself when both the public bitterness and his own
+emotions shall have diminished. This decision I regret. For who in ten
+years’ time will be found to take an interest in the late struggle
+whereas enshrined here in the amber of my own prose the record of his
+emotions might well interest people who have such memories still vivid
+within them. I may say that I myself, a journalist of considerable
+pre-war practice, never went to the front though I served during the
+whole war in the depot of Gringoire’s regiment.
+
+Here then is Gringoire’s prose, the original French of which he says
+was written at Pont de Nieppe during September 1916 after his visit to
+the French Ministry which he will describe in my next chapter.
+
+                            A CRICKET MATCH
+
+            BEING A LETTER WRITTEN FROM THE LINES OF SUPPORT
+                IN FLANDERS TO CAPTAIN UN TEL IN PARIS.
+
+_Mon cher monsieur, camarade et confrère_ (Gringoire’s addressee was
+also a poet soldier):
+
+Behind Bécourt Wood, on a July evening, whilst the shells of the
+Germans were passing overhead, we were playing cricket. The heavy
+shells went over, seeming to cry in their passage the word “We;
+e; eary”; then, changing their minds farther on they exclaimed
+peremptorily: “Whack!” But when one plays cricket one forgets the
+Hun orchestra; one does not even hear the shells that pass overhead.
+We were running about; we were cursing the butterfingered fool who
+dropped a catch; we even argued about points of play, because the
+rules of such cricket as one plays with a tennis-ball, two axe-helves
+for bats and bully-beef-cases for wicket--those rules are apt to be
+elastically interpreted. But no match England v. Australia at Lords’
+itself was ever so full of incident nor so moving as our game behind
+Bécourt Wood. The turf was of clay, baked porcelain-hard by the almost
+tropical sun; for grass there was only an expanse of immense thistles;
+boundaries and spectators at once were provided by the transport mules
+in their lines. But we cheered, we gesticulated, we rushed about, we
+disputed, we roared ... we--British infantry officers who are said to
+be phlegmatic, cold and taciturn.
+
+I present the considerations that follow in the form of a letter to
+you, my dear Un Tel, though I would rather have written a balanced,
+careful and long-thought-out essay. But I cannot chisel at my prose
+today. “Ker wooley woo,” as our Tommies say, “say la gair!” I have
+passed twenty-five years of my life in trying to find new cadences; in
+chasing assonances out of my prose, with an enraged meticulousness that
+might have been that of Uncle Flaubert himself. But today I only write
+letters--long, diffuse, and in banal phrases. The other demands too
+much time, too much peace of mind.... Ah, and too much luck!
+
+Well, then, we were playing cricket when I saw passing close to us a
+French officer of my acquaintance--an officer of one of those admirable
+batteries of seventy-fives whose voices were so comforting to hear by
+day and so let us sleep at night. For when they spoke in their level
+and interrupted roll, hour on hour, at a few furlongs behind our
+backs--when _they_ spoke, no Hun barked. And they were at that time
+aligned wheel to wheel from Albert to Verdun. The man was a gray-blue
+Colossus, his eyes brown and somber, his mustache heavy and dark.
+He stayed there, planted on his legs and his heavy stick, like some
+instrument of war, three-legged, silent and of steel. And when I left
+the game and went to talk to him he said to me in English:
+
+“I find that a little shocking. _Very_ shocking!”
+
+And he continued to look at the players who went on gesticulating and
+running about amongst the giant thistles and the dangerous legs of the
+mules. I exclaimed vehemently:
+
+“_Au nom du bon Dieu, pourquoi?_”
+
+He did not take his eyes from the players and reflected for a long time
+before answering. And I, getting impatient, went on talking vehemently
+and even indulged in gesticulations. I said in French:
+
+“_Nous sortons des tranchées_.... We are only just out of the
+trenches.” This game made you fit, _remettait le moral_, made you
+forget the war.... What do I know of what I said? He kept on reflecting
+and I talking French. At last he said:
+
+“I find”--he was still talking English--“that this war should be a
+religion. On coming out of the trenches one should sit ... and reflect.
+Perhaps one should even pray a little....”
+
+And I ... I went on arguing with him for a long time without his
+answering anything but:
+
+“I find it, all the same.”
+
+And suddenly I burst out laughing. The situation seemed suddenly
+allegorical. And if you think of it, my dear friend, you will see how
+it was that I laughed. It was because it was he, the descendant of
+Cyrano de Bergerac, who spoke English in the monosyllables of a stage
+Lord Kitchener whilst I, the representative of so many officers and
+gentlemen who for many centuries have never found anything more to
+say than “O ... ah!”--I who ought to have been wearing an eyeglass
+and blond whiskers was engaged in waving my arms and shouting a
+French that was rendered almost incoherent by emotion. And all
+my comrades--officers as well as other ranks--went on shouting,
+gesticulating, running about, cursing and laughing like children of
+Tarascon in the French South.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+And in truth the change is astonishing and a little moving. We have
+always had the idea--even the French have had the idea--that the French
+people, and above all the French soldiers and French officers, were
+gay, debonnair, loquacious, pawky--“Swordsmen and tricksters without
+remorse or scruples,” as Cyrano sings.
+
+Well, the other day I went on service from Steenewerck to Paris--a
+journey which lasted seventeen hours. And during the whole of those
+seventeen hours although there were always French officers in my
+railway carriage or standing in the corridors of the train, the journey
+was the most silent of my whole life. No one talked. But no one! There
+were colonels, commandants, captains, marine officers, gunner officers.
+And I cannot believe that my presence was responsible for this
+taciturnity. It is true that in every suitable spot in the train were
+inscribed the words: “Be silent; be on your guard”--and the fact that
+enemy ears might be listening to you. But it was impossible that _all_
+those gentlemen attributed such ears to me. I was wearing the uniform
+of my sovereign. And they none of them addressed the others.
+
+No, certainly the voyage lacked incident. I will tell you the
+incidents there were: from Hazebrouck to Calais five French officers
+did not exchange two words; from Calais to Abbéville thirty who did not
+speak. I spoke to an artillery captain, grumbling at the slow progress
+of the train. He answered in English:
+
+“Many troops moving!”
+
+Then silence.
+
+At Amiens there entered a civilian. It was on a Saturday towards eight
+o’clock in the morning and the train had the air of not wishing to
+reach Paris until after three. As I had business in Paris and should
+have to leave early on the Monday I asked this gentleman if I should
+find the banks shut, and the ministries and shops. He answered that he
+did not know. He was not a Parisian. He was going to Jersey to take
+possession of the body of a young girl who, having been drowned at
+Dieppe, had floated as far as that island.... As if there had not been
+enough deaths.
+
+He began crying very unobtrusively.
+
+But he, too, had spoken to me in English!
+
+And then ... silence. The officers regarded the civilian with eyes that
+said nothing at all.... I assure you that it was not gay.
+
+At Creil there got in two ladies. They were pretty and very
+well-dressed. _They_ talked enough, those two.... Red Cross, charitable
+activities, colonels, families. But the officers never looked at them.
+Not one raised his eyes although the girls were young, very pretty and
+well-dressed!
+
+But, when _we_ had been going up to the Front from Rouen to Albert--and
+we were not going on leave like all these silent officers--we sang, we
+joked with young women whom we saw on the railway platforms; we kicked
+footballs along the corridors of the train; we climbed on the roofs of
+the carriages. You would have thought we were going to the Derby.
+
+I naturally exaggerate these differences a little. This is not an
+article but a letter. But I am nevertheless telling you what my eyes
+have seen and my ears heard. And how is it to be explained?
+
+It is not enough to say--as has been said so often--that if in England,
+the Germans had been established between York and Manchester, if they
+had seized the factories, pillaged the downs, and indulged in whatever
+the Hun Practices may be, we also should be gloomy, sad, taciturn. I
+am not talking of the civilian population of my country; I am speaking
+of us people out here whose life is not gay, who are expatriated,
+far from our homes and who suffer, I assure you, from a very real
+nostalgia. For, _là-bas_ ... on the Somme or in Flanders one feels
+one’s self very forgotten, very deserted, and very, very isolated
+with an isolation like the isolation that is felt by ... Oh, well,
+it is as if we were suspended--we, seven million men--on a carpet in
+the infinitudes of space. The roads which stretch out before us cease
+suddenly at a few furlongs from our faces--in No Man’s Land. And it
+is very saddening to contemplate roads which suddenly end. And then
+the roads and paths that we have taken to get here--and which lie
+between ourselves and our _pays_--the nooks where we were born--are
+roads which we may not travel.... And I assure you that, just like any
+other men, we love our wives, our houses, our children, our parents,
+our ingle-nooks, our fields, our cattle and our dung-heaps. The French
+soldier has at least that to his advantage, that he fights at home.
+That is something for him, as individual. When he steps out of the
+trenches he is at least in the land that bore him.... But we ...
+
+I suppose that it is in order to forget, not only the Hun shells
+but also those other things that are dear to us, the chimney corner
+beside which we have so often sat chatting, the fields upon which we
+have labored, the herds and the woods--it is in search of the herb
+oblivion, that we play cricket behind Bécourt wood and go over the top
+kicking footballs across No Man’s Land--footballs which pass over the
+corpses of the fallen, towards the Huns.... And crying “Stick it, the
+Welsh!”--is that weakness? Is it the source from which we draw--such as
+they are--what we have of tenacity and courage? I do not know.
+
+Like myself, my dear confrère, you have known the difficulty of
+exactly defining the shades of differences that distinguish differing
+peoples. We commence by theorizing and we theorize much too soon, or
+else we take the opposite view to theories that have been accepted for
+centuries. We have had in England the nineteenth century caricaturists
+of the French during the Napoleonic wars which showed us the Frenchman
+as he was in the British popular imagination. He was a meager, famished
+barber who lived exclusively on frogs. And on your side you had your
+John Bull, as big as an ox, his belly as big as the belly of an ox, and
+devouring whole oxen. And you had the figure of the milord with his
+millions, his spleen which drove him to be suicidal. They were stupid,
+those caricatures, but it is impossible to allege that they were not
+sincere. The English who fought in France in 1815 sought for what they
+saw--but they found it. And the same with the French.
+
+The same perhaps with myself. I have always considered the French a
+grave people, and when I came from an excited England, covered from
+the Isle of Anglesey to the North Foreland with patriotic and colorful
+placards and then found, from the Belgian frontier to Paris, a France
+quite without colored placards and gray, silent and preoccupied, it
+was natural that I should look for grave people and find them. But for
+me there was nothing new in finding France preoccupied, because for me
+France always was the France of fields, villages, woods and peasants.
+And the France of the peasants is a very laborious and pensive place
+where men labor incessantly between wood and pond or beneath the olive
+trees of the Midi.
+
+For me, on the other hand the population of Great Britain has always
+been a town people. Well, it is the inhabitants of great cities who,
+work as they may, have need from time to time to go, as our saying
+is, on a spree--each according to his nature. And that is perhaps the
+reason of the differences that have so struck me, between the French
+Army and ourselves. The British Forces are made up preponderatingly
+of townsmen, the French army is an army preponderatingly peasant--for
+even the famous Parigots are mostly country born and bred. And the
+peasantry of all countries, but particularly the French peasant, is
+inured to confronting the harshness and the inevitable necessities
+of Nature. They meet them without ceasing for weeks, for months, for
+years--for their lifetimes. They can never escape from hardships and
+the contemplation of the evils of life, the bitter winds, the worms
+that devour the buds of whole harvests; their thoughts can never be
+diverted by taking a day’s leave, in making puns or by that humor which
+is acrid and rather sad and which is yet the sovereign quality of the
+British Tommy. For to inscribe on an immense gray shell that is about
+to be fired at the Hun lines--to inscribe on that in huge whitewash
+letters “Love to Little Willie” may seem stupid and shocking to folk
+who were never _là-bas_. But human psychology is very complicated and
+it is certain that the reading of such inscriptions on the great shells
+by the stacks of which we pass along the highroads of France much
+lightens our hearts when we advance from Albert to La Boisselle.
+
+Why? It is difficult to say. It is perhaps because, the shells being
+terrible and threatening, here is a shell that has been rendered
+ridiculous, a cause for joy--or even merely human. For we are all
+anthropomorphic--and that one sole shell can suffer itself to become
+the vehicle for humor, that is sufficient to give to superstitious
+minds the idea that shells may be a little less superhuman than
+they seem. They are the messengers of gods athirst for blood, who
+proclaim their gigantic weariness but nevertheless destroy in a minute
+dungheaps, whole fields or all the houses of a village. But they have
+become a little humanized.
+
+And it is the same for our game of cricket which we played behind
+Bécourt Wood amongst the giant thistles, hidden in thick dust and
+concealing in turn the bodies of so many of our dead. But I assure
+you, my dear comrade, that landscape--of Bécourt, Fricourt, Mametz,
+Martinpuich and the rest--was not gay. It was July and the sun let down
+its rays upon those broad valleys, upon the dust and the smoke that
+mounted to the heavens and upon the black and naked woods. And it did
+not smile, that territory. No; Nature herself there seemed terrible and
+threatening--in that domain where Destiny who is blind and implacable,
+must manifest herself to several million human souls.... And then
+we played cricket there--and, all of a sudden that threatening and
+superhuman landscape became ... just a cricket field.
+
+For an Intellectual a field will be always just a field whether there
+descend upon it shells, thunderbolts--or merely tennis balls. But for
+us a countryside where we have played cricket becomes less affrighting
+and we shall there pass our days more contentedly in spite of the bones
+that there lie hidden amongst the thistles. It is stupid; it is even,
+if you will, sacrilege. But that is how we are made--we others who are
+not the intelligentsia and who issue forth from the great cities to go
+upon bloody wars. I, I have felt like that, down there, behind Bécourt
+Wood of a July evening during the Somme push in 1916.
+
+And I remain always yours affectionately
+
+                                                                  G.
+
+And I beg you to observe that all the persons who spoke to me between
+Steenewerck and Paris used English. That is already something.
+
+  And _I_ beg you to observe that when Gringoire is moving his prose
+  up to its most emotional pitch he employs a ‘Hun’ expression. For
+  the phrase ‘the herb oblivion’ is merely the literal translation of
+  the almost hackneyed German expression: “_Das Kraut Vergessenheit_.”
+
+                                             --_Note by the Compiler._
+
+
+
+
+                                PART TWO
+
+                           CERTAIN INTERIORS
+
+
+
+
+  The old houses of Flanders,
+  They watch by the high cathedrals;
+  They overtop the high town halls;
+  They have eyes, mournful, tolerant and sardonic for the ways of men
+  In the high, white, tiled gables.
+
+  The rain and the night have settled down on Flanders;
+  It is all wet darkness, you can see nothing.
+
+  Then those old eyes, mournful, tolerant and sardonic,
+  Look at great sudden red lights,
+  Look upon the shades of the cathedrals,
+  And the golden rods of the illuminated rain.
+
+  And those old eyes,
+  Very old eyes that have watched the ways of men for generations,
+  Close for ever.
+  The high, white shoulders of the gables
+  Slouch together for a consultation,
+  Slant drunkenly over in the lea of the flaming cathedrals.
+
+  They are no more the old houses of Flanders.
+
+
+
+
+                                  VIII
+
+                               _“Maisie”_
+
+
+[It has occurred to the writer--or let us rather say, “the compiler,”
+that, as concerns this section of this work, it would be safe to let
+Gringoire speak for himself. The paraphernalia of inverted commas
+interspersed with indirect speech is apt to be wearisome to a reader.
+It is difficult--nay, it might even prove dangerous--to the compiler.
+For who shall say what powerful enemies the present writer might not
+make by omitting inverted commas and appearing to speak for himself? So
+it seems more just to let the rather testy poet speak for himself.
+
+For undoubtedly, when speaking of certain matters, Gringoire was--nay,
+he is!--apt to become testy. Let us excuse him by saying that he bore a
+good deal of strain during the late war--as was apt to be the position
+of any public, or quasi-public man, caught between the attentions of
+the cheap press and what he considered to be his duty to the State.
+
+Of course, this section is a rendering. It does not pretend to
+record words exactly as Gringoire spoke. It is, rather, a résumé
+of conversations of an evening when the writer--or rather the
+compiler--was privileged to be housed by Gringoire. It was, by then,
+late summer or early autumn.
+
+The Gingerbread Cottage by that date resembled less one of the ruins of
+the Flanders front that Gringoire so feelingly describes. For to tell
+the truth, that was what it had very nearly resembled at the time of
+our Easter visit. When Gringoire had entered it in the early spring,
+there had been certainly the wave-marks of inundations and half-inches
+of mud on the brick floors. He had come down with his valise contents,
+his camp-bed, a knife and fork, a paraffin stove, and a gallon of oil,
+determined, as he puts it, to dig himself in in the face of destiny. At
+Easter we had seen him a little too early in the process for people who
+had not for the last four or five years lived with furniture made of
+bully-beef cases or whatever they are called.
+
+But by mid-September, when the greater portion of the following section
+was compiled, either Gringoire’s views as to the æsthetic value of
+bully-beef chairs and tables had changed as he got further from the
+atmosphere of camps, or Mme. Sélysette had softened the asperities of
+his nature in the matter of preference of dugouts to drawing rooms--or
+else, truly, he was acting up to his ideals. That one hesitates to
+believe: for who can believe that any human soul can act up to his
+professed ideals--or that the ideals which he professes have any
+relation to his motives?
+
+Still, Gringoire was a poet. And the writer remembers remonstrating
+with him as to the amount of work he was putting into the Gingerbread
+Cottage and the garden. Said the writer: Gringoire should remember that
+all this whitewashing, papering, glazing the windows, digging out of
+foundations, and fertilizing an abandoned and ill-treated garden would,
+in the end, profit only the landlord--who was a very bad landlord, even
+as bad landlords go. For, as would be the case with poets, Gringoire
+had no lease of any kind....
+
+But Gringoire only looked at the writer with that vague and unseeing
+glance that is one of the properties of some poets. And he answered:
+though of course it was not an answer: He was not a small hatter, a
+market-gardener, a farmer, a tradesman, or any sort of profit-and-loss
+person. He was intent simply on making his sanctuary smile a little
+in the sunlight and on comforting an old building that had been very
+shabbily used by evil sorts of men....
+
+At any rate, they had scrambled together some old and rather attractive
+“bits,” a grandfather’s chair or so, carpets for the sitting room,
+colored rush mats for the floor of the sleeping apartments. They had
+painted and polished with beeswax and turpentine, and there would, as
+like as not, be some flowers on the dining table which was of rough
+oak--and coffee after a full dinner.
+
+The primitive “note” remained, of course, about the establishment, and
+it was hardly the place to which you would have asked for a week-end
+a delicate city madam; a Guards’ Major; or a young actress about to
+become famous. But on bright days the garden smiles in the sun, and
+the Gingerbread Cottage has a colored and--as Gringoire would say--a
+_soigné_ aspect. Yes, certainly it appeared to be cared for, poor
+battered old thing, as old people sometimes appear to be cared for in
+almshouses.
+
+So Gringoire affronts the winter. And, if during that season the wolf
+does not get him; or if his patience does not give out--as is the case
+with poets; or if the bad landlord does not eject him in order to reap
+the profits of his improvements--for he has no lease!--he will continue
+his patchings, his experiments with unusual manures, and his attempts
+to ameliorate the breed of potatoes. And that is all the writer will
+say about him.
+
+For the rest, he speaks for himself, much as he spoke of an evening,
+with his mild but occasionally bitter and furious eyes; with his
+usually tranquil, but occasionally furiously gesticulating hands. For,
+the writer, or rather the compiler, having compared notes with Mme.
+Sélysette, who has heard Gringoire’s stories very, very often, the
+compiler is satisfied that it is a fair rendering of the poet-warrior’s
+conversation. It will be found to be disfigured, even in this, as it
+were, censored version, by unfortunate attacks on many persons and
+institutions that are usually considered exempt from--or at any rate
+dangerous to--assault. But what it contains is not half as violent as
+what Gringoire wished the compiler to set down as his opinions. The
+compiler, however, has friends who can be grieved; a pocket that can
+be affected by the law of libel; a position with reviewers that is his
+stock in trade. So Gringoire, who could not write prose but wished
+to air his opinions, and the compiler, who wished to air the poet’s
+opinions but did not wish to lose friends, money, or position in the
+process, agreed upon the autobiographical passages that follow.]
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gringoire speaks:
+
+At some period of the war, I found myself in a certain interior. It was
+August--hushed by the presence at the doors of functionaries, elderly,
+gray, like bishops, wearing evening dress. And one had the sense that,
+standing at ease, on the steps of great portals, opening onto immense
+staircases, that one had ascended in stony twilights, past bistre-blue
+frescoes. Suisses, in cocked hats with great white gloves and silver
+swords, symbolized the military ideals of Ministries, just as, in the
+Vatican, obsolete artillerymen, hussars, pikemen, symbolize a vanished
+temporal power. For, what would the Suisses do if the Enemy or a
+Revolution should chance to pay a call on them?
+
+I presume they would extend enormous, cotton-gloved fingers for
+visiting cards, which they would hand to commissionaires in glass
+boxes; the cards would be sent by pages, upstairs to the episcopal
+butlers, who, after meditating for forty minutes, would warily
+convey them, over the soft State carpets, past the decorous but rich,
+State-purchased pictures suspended over the blue-gray, State-woven
+tapestries, to the high door of polished mahogany. There the
+bishop-butlers would pause, with the air of priests listening outside
+shrines, with a hand on the engraved, polished, mounted, ormolu
+door-handles....
+
+But what, during those sixty-four minutes would be the proceedings of
+the lieutenant of Uhlans, with his twenty men behind him; or the leader
+of the sans-culottes, communards, syndicalists...? The lances might
+be dripping with blood; bread, dripping too, might be decorating the
+points of pikes, or paraffin from the oil cans. Probably they would
+not wait until the blood or the oil dried on the sarcophagus-tiles of
+the Ministerial Salle des Pas Perdus or until the great hotel slowly
+and resignedly disappeared in flames with that curious air of weary
+acquiescence that buildings have when, having borne for many years with
+human follies, wisdoms, or labors, they fall to the ground before human
+madness. Probably they would not wait--the Uhlans, the sans-culottes,
+or the Pétroleuses. They are an impatient people.
+
+But, of course, the reader will say, in the great courtyard before
+the Ministry, are many, many gendarmes, standing about with their
+hands behind their backs and slightly protuberant bellies. (Otherwise
+they would be _là bas!_) But they have good eyes. They would know a
+Lieutenant of Uhlans by his uniform, and they know how to use their
+revolvers. And amongst the gendarmes lounge several civilian men of
+queer, specialized miens. Their pockets bulge just slightly, in odd
+ways, and brushing their legs are the _chiens de bergers Alsaciens_
+(it used to be _Allemands_) the large, elegant dogs with brown fur,
+like ladies’ sable coats and the intelligent pointed ears.... It is
+the business of these apparently civilian agents to know the leaders
+of sans-culottes, syndicalists, communards, and _Actions_ this or
+that. The pretty, friendly, high-stepping dogs with their sable coats
+would be at the sans-culottes’ throats at the merest chirrup of their
+masters’ lips, and from the so very slightly bulging pockets light
+handcuffs would whip out. The revolvers also would go off....
+
+And, still more, the reader will say, in the little, painted, upright
+boxes stand little men with red trousers and blue coats and tricolored
+worsted galloons, and long, dull-looking rifles, and very, very
+long Rosalies.... They are probably just the very newest recruits
+with sad, boyish faces. But they know enough to say the French for
+“Halt, who are you?” in Breton accents, and to let off the old, long
+guns, and to stick Rosalie, with a grunt, through the entrails of a
+Uhlan lieutenant, and to call out the Guard.... And, too, there is a
+half-battalion of the 101st Regiment, whose accent reeks of garlic,
+olive oil, and the meridional sun, passing along the boulevard before
+the tricolor that droops over the porte-cochère....
+
+So--like the very heart of an onion, under many, many wrappings,
+in sanctuary, how very, very far from the mud of the onion-trench,
+bearded, in a dark coat, with a bright spot of a button; with sharp,
+apprehending nods coming as quickly as winks and silences as quickly
+as either; behind the polished mahogany door with the gilt handle and
+the ormolu finger-plates; at a Buhl table, with a glass vase full of
+Malmaison carnations, a bronze reproduction of the Winged Victory, and
+two great pictures of Norman peasants, the one by Bastien Lepage and
+the other by Jean François Millet--sits the Minister whose mere wink to
+some one, whose whisper to some one else, whose instruction to another,
+whose order--and so on--has brought one from green fields littered
+with bully beef-tins, wire, mud-trodden cartridge cases, rat runs--and
+the rest of it! He will thank you for past services; tactfully suggest
+that it might reinforce some department of the _moral_ of some
+department or other of humanity if M. le Capitaine would suspend his
+military ardors in order to write so and so and so and so in such and
+such an organ or to say this and that in a certain quarter. And one
+can also produce not truly a great effect but some, by talking in a
+certain way, in the mess of one’s regiment even. Certainly in Quartiers
+Généraux ...
+
+He will listen deferentially whilst you voice certain objections: to
+write so and so one must have leave--leave in both the English and
+the French sense of “permission.” And leaves are difficult things to
+obtain. Besides, one does not want leave. For certain reasons!... One
+is like that. _L’on est poète_: cranky, unreasonable. An all-powerful
+Minister cannot get into the soul of a crank. Not his Seneschals, or
+the Suisses, or the Gendarmes, or the Agents, or the Sentinels can
+help him to that. _Quand on est poète_ one requires--one requires a
+little reëntrant, with water--a little stream, indicated by a wavy
+line in blue pencil; copses, indicated by dotted-in round o’s with
+tails to them; rushes, indicated by hieroglyphs like the section of a
+hairbrush; a gingerbread cottage, for which the symbol is a hatched in
+square.--One requires those. And also one requires a temporary respite
+from the attentions of one’s friends and of destiny. For that, as far
+as I know, military topography has no symbol--unless it be a white
+handkerchief on the end of Rosalie.
+
+His Excellency remains polite--deferential even. Still, it could no
+doubt be arranged, he will remark. It is important to get certain
+things said.... And who could say it better than ...
+
+For myself--on the occasion which I am adumbrating, I was thinking
+of ferrets. So that, by a concentration of ideas, at a given point
+I once said to such a Minister: Of course there is the First Line
+Transport.... And, in my mind’s eye, against the gilt frame of the
+immense Bastien Lepage--or it may have been on this occasion a Marie
+Bashkirtseff--arose the image of a Connaught Hut, with the rain beating
+on the roof and the autumn wind reaching the flames of candles stuck
+in bottles and bearing in the odor of stable hartshorn from the long
+horse standings. And the Welsh Rabbit made of cheese, onions, Flemish
+beer, and herrings straight from Bailleul--though God knows when they
+came from the autumnal sea. And hooch. And several obese, tranquil,
+entirely capable officers with feet for the moment in carpet slippers.
+And the table utensils borrowed from the Y.M.C.A. pushed aside on a
+corner of the trestle table; and a cheap pad of letter paper, a copying
+ink pencil, and the mind of the poet functioning in the flicker of
+the guttering candles at the dictates of the Minister seated beneath
+the Jean François Millet picture at the Buhl table with the Malmaison
+carnations in a smoked glass vase and the miniature reproduction of
+the Winged Victory in bronze with a delicate, artificially produced
+patina. And the lower part of the poet is wedged into a bully-beef
+case that has had one side taken out and that has been wire-nailed
+into an egg-box to form an armchair. And, in the dim gloom, at one
+elbow stands a dripping Divisional runner with a buff memo from
+ordnance to say that Mills Bombs for the ---- Battalion are on the
+Scherpenberg and must be taken down to Kemmel Château by four ack
+emma; and at the other elbow stands a Divisional Orderly with a
+copy of orders on which in red ink is marked the information that
+Division will move down the line by the road by Dranoutre--Neuve
+Eglise--Westoutre-Plugstreet--Pont-de-Nieppe--Armentières. In full
+sight of the Hun trenches, by God!--beginning with one’s own battalion,
+of which A. Company will march from such and such a spot at 5:30 to be
+followed by D, C, and B boys at half-hour intervals. And to be shelled
+to Hell!
+
+And the transport officer, whose business it is to manage these
+matters, is away for thirty-six hours to arrange for a Divisional
+Horse Show in the field behind the Convent! And your poet is A. O. I.
+C. (Acting Officer in Charge of) Transport, and Billeting officer for
+the Battalion and O. I. C. (Officer in Charge of) Divisional Canteen
+and God knows what all. And Officer in Charge of _moral_ of a certain
+section of humanity to whom it would be a good thing if certain things
+would be said in polished prose! And when the poet springing up
+exclaims to the night:
+
+“To H---- with the b----y Mills Bombs and the bumph and the b----rs and
+all the whole execrable show,” the Battalion Orderly, a fair, cheeky
+boy who knows one, exclaims:
+
+“Ker wooly woo, sir, say la Gair!”
+
+And indeed, the interiors of _la guerre_ were much like that. But how
+is His Excellency the Minister of this or that department to know what
+is passing in your mind? He will just write on a note pad, look up,
+exclaim, “Que dîtes-vous? First Line?... But is it tranquil, that?”[6]
+
+I don’t know what I answered. I believe I must have screamed with
+laughter--because I really wanted some ferrets very badly, and because,
+in the vestibule of an immense hotel I had left my publisher in
+charge of a little girl with dark curls tied with pale blue ribbons,
+singularly self-possessed manners, and rather prominent underclothing
+that appeared to be an inverted bouquet of lace. That is to say I had
+left my publisher--who is deaf--with the little girl. And I was in
+charge of the little girl, who, just before my having to hurry to the
+Ministry, had devoured thirteen oysters, half a cantaloupe melon with a
+quarter of a pound of sugar, and a _Coupe Jacques_. So I was, really,
+wondering what Maisie would be like when I returned to the Hotel de
+l’Opéra. It sounds mad--but it is just the true truth.
+
+I know that, at that stage, I did not please His Excellency. He frowned
+twice. Once when I laughed because he asked if a Connaught hut at the
+base of the Salient was a tranquil place in which to write poems. He
+also frowned when--as I have, I know, elsewhere related, but I do not
+know where--he having asked me, “_En quoi il me pouvait être utile?_” I
+answered, “_Si Votre Excellence me pourrait trouver des furets!_”
+
+You see, I had been carefully instructed by friends with one eye to my
+commercial future. The Minister was sure to ask in what way he could
+be of service to me. I was to reply--to hint ever so delicately--that
+if I had a ribbon to stick on my coat, writing poems, even in a
+Connaught hut, would be easy. But I couldn’t do it. Even if I had not
+been concerned with ferrets that I couldn’t get and with Maisie, who
+had been far too easy to come by, I couldn’t have done it. I had been
+instructed that the ribbon awaited me; I had only to stretch out a hand
+to become an Officer of Something or Other. I don’t know whether I ever
+have. I suppose not.
+
+Anyhow, His Excellency frowned when I asked for ferrets. He might have
+been more sympathetic if I had asked him to take off my hands a little
+girl of eight, with the American manners appropriate to the age of
+thirteen, who, half an hour before had eaten thirteen oysters, half
+a melon, and a quarter of a pound of sugar that had come from Geneva
+in her _malles_, and a _Coupe Jacques_; who had been kidnapped by the
+lake in a carriage and pair, the night before, or perhaps two nights
+before; and whose father, the kidnapper, had left her in my charge just
+after breakfast and had then disappeared. There was also a very French
+maid--in hysterics. And I didn’t even know their names.
+
+Yes; H. E. might have been more sympathetic if I had mentioned the
+child alone in the vestibule--or possibly with the publisher. But at
+the mention of the ferrets, he became positively glacial: “_Quoi_,” he
+asked. “What is a ferret?”
+
+I said that _ferrets sont des petits animaux qui mangent les rats_. But
+his face remained like a dead wall. I _know_ he thought I was drunk.
+I was so certain of it, then, that I stammered, and the interview
+dissolved in the embarrassed emotions passing from him to me and from
+me to him. He touched a button and said he would telephone to the
+Jardin des Plantes. But I don’t suppose he did.
+
+You see: it was almost a drop too much in my cup--to be plunged
+straight into “What Maisie Knew,” which is a book by Henry James. It
+was too much bewilderment.... Supposing the--as I understood--too
+brilliant and vociferous mother who was understood to like a “violinist
+fellow”, should be bursting, with wide gestures, through the aperture
+frailly closed by glass hotel-doors that whirled bewilderingly whilst I
+was at the Ministry.... And it might, I understood, well be like that.
+
+How the incident ended, however, I cannot say, since, upon my return to
+the hotel, the child and her companion had disappeared. That is to say,
+they had left in the hotel bus for the _Gare du Nord_. So I hope they
+got safely to England. I never heard: and, since I have forgotten even
+the names, I suppose I never shall.
+
+It was, no doubt, the sort of thing that was happening all over the
+world just as usual, but it was queer--and intensely worrying--to
+be brought so violently and so much against one’s poor will into an
+atmosphere of international passions, excursions, lawsuits for the
+possession of children, and the like. And anyhow, the worry of it
+probably spoilt my career; which was no doubt a good thing. Anyhow,
+I hope that Maisie, in the custody of kind old aunts, somewhere in
+Sussex, is prattling to a benevolent but bewildered butler about Mamma,
+who went to heaven by the cog-wheel railway, via Montreux. Or I suppose
+it would be better for her if she had forgotten Mamma.
+
+Yes: I suppose it was all going on. And I rather fancy I found the
+going-on-ness of it all a little appalling. Paris, indeed, was so much
+more just Paris out of the season, than London, in those days, appeared
+to be London, either during or out of the season. It was in a way
+touching; it was also, in a way, disheartening. I remember--and I say
+“I remember” advisedly, since such an immense number of things blotted
+themselves out and only crop up in suddenly vivid pictures like that of
+Maisie whom I had completely forgotten until the day before yesterday,
+and who now again exists extraordinarily brightly in the hotel
+vestibule saying: “_Ils me disent que Maman est partie pour le ciel._
+It is very droll. But what tram do I take _pour le ciel?_” I remember,
+then, being on a balcony with an immense stone balustrade, in the black
+night with a number of French officers who were all polite--but cold.
+It was, certainly, during the _entr’acte_ of Délibes’ _Lakme_. I fancy
+the theater was the Comédie Française, but I don’t know, because I
+had been taken there by a staff officer, and in those days in France
+one was moved about so without volition of one’s own that one didn’t,
+necessarily, much notice where one went or how one got there. Where it
+was a duty to notice, one noticed--railway stations in their sequence,
+streams, contours. But it was rather a toss-up whether anything more
+than little bits, like etchings or vignettes, got through to one’s
+private psychology. I take this to have been the case with most men in
+our army. We were, as soldiers, both naïf and engrossed.
+
+With the French, it was different. They appeared to be so much older,
+in their work as in their leisures. They seemed to go to war, as they
+went to _Lakme_, so much more as connoisseurs. So, on that balcony,
+I had the feeling of a very definite frigidity. I could have talked
+rather floridly about _les gloires de la France_, the ultimate aims of
+the war. I doubt if the French officers could. They had exhausted the
+topic during forty menaced years.
+
+So they talked, as it happens, mostly of the fine work that had
+been done by their territorials--old men, fathers of families, and
+grandfathers who were patching away at the trenches, making roads
+under fire, laboriously laboring amidst great dangers and beyond their
+strength that the years had sapped.
+
+The balcony of the theater was a cube of blackness; down below there
+appeared to be an old, small, square market-place. Paris, of course,
+was in darkness, out of deference to Zeppelins and airplanes, so
+that it was all a heavy, velvety black beneath a pallid sky. Houses,
+squares, rose up on three sides; the immense black bulk of the theater
+seemed to press on one’s back as one is pressed upon, on narrow paths,
+by the walls of precipices in the night. One had a sense that the
+inside of this building was flooded with translucent rays, in which,
+over the light parquet of long floors, in the _salons de réception_,
+men moved quietly, with slightly outstretched hands emphasizing points
+in their discourse to the women on their arms. Theaters function with a
+sense of style in Paris. But the old, tall houses round the market gave
+the idea that they were solidly black throughout; only in the old empty
+rooms, over the creaking floors, mice would rustle in the pallid gleams
+from the old windows.
+
+I do not mean to say that the houses were really like that inside:
+for houses are queer things, and queerer still when they grow old,
+with malices, obstinacies, benevolences of their own. And, as is the
+case with men, their physiognomies are misleading. So, though one had
+the sense that below there was a market-place with carts and tilted
+hoods awaiting the day and that the houses were old and empty, it may
+have been all untrue to fact, though it is likely enough in Paris
+where there are so many old, moldering, and damp-streaked façades and
+courtyards.
+
+I wonder if most people have as strongly as I the feeling that houses
+have, not so much immortal souls, as tempers, queernesses, and the
+power to be malicious or benevolent. I daresay most people have that
+sense up to a point, for it is common enough to walk with a friend,
+more particularly at dawn, where there are few human beings about to
+detract from the spell, past, say, a terrace of houses not all alike.
+A blind will be up; another and another, half drawn down; four or
+five others, all green, will be at various heights behind the closed
+window-glasses. And your friend will say:
+
+“That house appears to be winking; that other is gnashing green
+teeth!” So that your friend will be attributing faces at least to the
+houses. No doubt he will also connote individualities.
+
+The effect of the coming of the war, for me, was to enhance the feeling
+until it became almost an obsession. Just as trees and fields appeared
+to dread the contamination of alien presences, so with buildings. Only
+with buildings--and more particularly with houses--the feeling was very
+much enhanced. They seemed to dread not only contaminations, but pains,
+violations, physical shames, and dissolution in fire.
+
+I do not mean that this feeling was new to me or came with the
+coming of the war. On the contrary, it was a feeling familiar enough
+in France. Long before the war it was difficult to go to Northern
+France--and it was impossible to visit Paris--without seeing, or having
+the attention drawn to, buildings that have been struck by shells, that
+have solid cannon balls embedded in their walls, to façades riddled by
+musketry or charred by one incendiarism or another. In Paris, there
+were mostly relics of 1870–71; elsewhere the solid cannon balls, as
+like as not, were once our own. But somehow that seemed normal: those
+were the danger zones of a race. If members of a civilized people, like
+the French, choose to occupy marches--zones set against barbarians,
+like ourselves and the Huns--the buildings they set up in those regions
+must suffer. They must suffer as children do who are taken into perils
+aboard ship; or like dogs whose masters adventure with them into fields
+of fire.
+
+It was, therefore, in the southern and central regions of France
+that, before the war, I had most strangely the feeling--that feeling
+of affrighted buildings. It came to me one day in a broad French
+landscape, somewhere, I imagine, just south of Lyons. Perhaps it was
+in Orange--or possibly in Tarascon. At any rate, it was just after the
+close of the Agadir “incident”.
+
+I don’t know that I had taken the Agadir incident very seriously. In
+fact, I hadn’t taken it seriously at all. The Prime Minister of today
+had made at the Guildhall a speech that one regarded as one regarded
+any other flamboyant speech--and that was the end of it. I never
+imagined that we should do our duty to civilization if it came to the
+point. I never imagined, indeed, that France herself would stand up.
+
+We came, at that date, of a generation that lived in the shadow of the
+ghosts of Bismarck, Moltke, and William I--in the shadow of memories
+of the siege of Paris. Prussia appeared no doubt detestable--but she
+was so omnipotent that we hardly cared to think about her even for the
+purpose of detesting her. Will you remember, oh Gringoire _fils_ that
+shall be?
+
+Probably Gringoire _fils_ will not remember: that is why I find it
+necessary to recapitulate at this point. Prussia, then, was there,
+like something ominous but irremovable. One might say that the world,
+like some stout old garment, was a good world--but it had upon it a
+grease-stain that neither petrol nor spirits would eradicate; just
+as you might say that your postal service or train system were good,
+ignoring the fact that officials were brutal in manner; or that your
+God was a good God, although He insisted on being fed with babies
+roasted alive. Something like that.
+
+On the day after Agadir, then, I had come through Lorraine--the two
+Lorraines, of which one was bubbling like a pot with men all in gray,
+the other pullulating like an over-ripe cheese with men all in blue,
+with baggy, scarlet breeches. One had been lost in an immense, pushing,
+silent crowd at the _Gare de l’Ouest_--an immense, silent, rather
+grim crowd in blue, with worsted adornments, long rifles slung over
+the backs, untidy haversacks. At the bureaux of the station were
+innumerable women. They gesticulated, waved to unseen units in that
+tired crowd; they cried out; they wept for joy.
+
+But that produced no particular effect. The French are an
+impressionable and a noisy people. So the women called out. The silent
+soldiery were no doubt tired after the autumn manoeuvres. That was
+perhaps why they were so grim.
+
+But somewhere, just after that, in some view near a Southern or Central
+town--as I have said, it may have been Lyons or Orange; no town that
+particularly mattered, near the Loire, perhaps, or the Rhone--amidst
+rolling country where the harvest was already in and there were
+stubble fields and new straw thatching--suddenly, out of all those
+hundreds of thousands of soldiery, I remembered one. He was a little
+recruit--“joining up” as we learned to say later. He was shoved into
+a first-class carriage somewhere near Meaux because the train was so
+full, and there, in a corner seat, with the blue-gray landscape going
+past, he sat, as if lifeless, the tears dropping down his cheeks. His
+rifle, haversack, packages, tin cans, slings, and things of which,
+then, one didn’t recognize the importance, had been thrown in after
+him by a guard, and, in among them, he sat desolate.
+
+In the carriage there had been besides myself two old French people--an
+old gentleman with a white Napoleon, and an old, feeble lady, in
+a rather queer black bonnet. I have an idea that they were French
+Protestants. There were also other people: but they formed only a
+chorus.
+
+For the old man, in kindly, but very thin tones, began to talk to the
+little recruit, the old lady echoing each of his speeches:
+
+“The beds for a poor little recruit are hard?”--“The beds are
+hard!”--“The haricot soup is thin?”--“Ah, yes, a very watery
+potage.”--“Ah! Ah! Yes,” said the listeners.--“The marchings are
+long; the drills difficult; the rifles heavy.”--“Yes: heavy are the
+rifles!”--“Ah! Ah! Yes ...”--“And the little recruit is away from
+home for three long years!”--“Yes, three years!”--“Ah! Ah! Ah! Three
+so very long years!”--“The little recruit comes from the Midi--the
+South!”--“The Midi! The South!”--“Ah! Ah! The South with sun and
+cypress hedges and the _champs d’oliviers_ and the Mistral.”--“From
+Orange! From quite near Orange ... Ah! Ah! Orange ...” And there he
+was, going to Lille.... In the northwest: over against the frontier....
+
+Being then “quite near Orange” a few days later--yes, it was
+Orange!--and looking out from the heights of the Roman Theater over the
+little town and the flat, commonplace country, I remembered suddenly
+the little recruit. I think that is how the mind really works, linking
+life together, for, later I shall tell you how, on the balcony of the
+Comédie Française, I remembered suddenly Private ----, an old, nearly
+toothless Tommy of a Kitchener’s battalion of the Lincolnshires in the
+baths which had been established in the old mill at Albert--and also
+Lt. Morgan of my own regiment, an officer who had spent a very hard
+life in Canada, and who was killed walking up a communication trench on
+his first day in the line.
+
+So, at Orange, before the war, I remembered suddenly the little recruit
+in his blue, with his worsted adornments, sitting like a statue of
+utter grief whilst the green-gray country, of northwest France, swept
+past behind him. The country over which his image suddenly superimposed
+itself was browner; in flat fields, the queer twigs of the vineyards
+appeared untidy. I fancy the Alps were in the distance. But there were
+stacks and roofs. And, it was, for me, just country. That is to say,
+I attached to that countryside no particular legends, traditions, or
+fables of story. It might be Provence--or it might not. But when I saw,
+as it were, through the image of the recruit, the stacks, the roofs,
+of the little farm buildings or of the little town, it seemed to me
+that they were all crouching down, motionless, but ready to tremble, as
+partridges crouch amid the stubble when beaten away over the ridge.
+
+I don’t want unduly to labor the point--but I am not yet certain that
+I have made it. You see, that queer and sinister feeling came to me
+just because of that carriageful of French people. It was not so much
+because the little recruit had wept. I daresay that, as a conscript,
+he was bad material. But it was because the old gentleman and all the
+others in the carriage had known the hard beds, the thin soups, the
+heavy rifles, and the drag of the pack-straps on the shoulders ... and
+the long absences from the little homes that seemed now to cower among
+the stubble fields. For there was no house in all that landscape whose
+women hadn’t known the suspense of absences; there was no stack whose
+builder hadn’t at one time gone, or come back. And there was not one,
+of all those objects, that did not dread--that, for forty long years
+had not dreaded--the hard footsteps, the shames, the violations, or the
+incendiary fires of conquerors who should come from “beyond Lille on
+the frontier”.
+
+And it was at that moment that, suddenly, it became a conscious
+proposition in my mind--definite and formulated--that, first and before
+everything else, we must have in the world assured nooks and houses
+that never cowered and trembled--houses of which one could never by any
+possibility think that they would cower and tremble.
+
+That, of course, is militarism. I am sorry that it has crept in.
+
+
+[Footnotes]
+
+[6] For the benefit of those curious in these matters, I ask our
+compiler to print in the Envoi some prose in my own original French.
+It will serve for a curiosity. It appeared in a Swiss Review during
+the war and was part of somewhat considerable, and generally agitated,
+labors. Some poems which I wrote in almost exactly the circumstances
+given above, for recitation to French troops, have been lost either
+by our own or the French ministry of propaganda. An article about
+Alsace-Lorraine was “lost in the post”; another, repeating it, was
+suppressed by our own Ministry of Information as being too favorable to
+the claims of one of our Allies. It is, of course, difficult to be a
+poet in times of war.
+
+
+
+
+                                   IX
+
+                            _The Water Mill_
+
+
+Said Gringoire on another day:
+
+During one of the innumerable periods of long waiting that seemed
+inseparable from our advances whether on the Somme or elsewhere, it
+occurred to me that that would be a good opportunity to see what books
+really would bear reading--would, that is to say, stand up against the
+facts of a life that was engrossing and perilous. I wrote, therefore,
+on the spur of the moment, a postcard, to a bookseller, since I had no
+friends on whose generosity I cared to trespass. I asked him to send
+me: Turgeniev’s “Fathers and Children”, Flaubert’s “Trois Contes”,
+Mallarmé’s “Après-Midi d’un Faune”, Anatole France’s “Histoire
+Comique”, or “Thaïs”, “Youth”, by Joseph Conrad, “What Maisie Knew”,
+by Henry James, and “Nature in Downland”, by W. H. Hudson. I received
+them all except the last, which was out of print, and I found that I
+could read them all with great engrossment except the book, whichever
+it was, by Anatole France. That one was so frail and tenuous in its
+appeal that it failed to hold my attention at all, and I have forgotten
+its name.--I hasten to add that I regarded M. France at that date as a
+Pro-German, so my impatience may not have been altogether because of
+its literary qualities.
+
+It was whilst I was reading “What Maisie Knew” that I got leave to go
+with another officer and have a bath in Albert. So I took the volume
+under my arm. It wasn’t really a coincidence--that I should be reading
+that book. I suppose it wasn’t really a coincidence that I should meet
+Maisie in the flesh.
+
+For, if one was to meet Maisie anywhere, it would be precisely in the
+white vestibule of a Paris hotel--and, if any one was to be confided
+in by one or other of her distracted parents, the episode being
+international, and the parent in possession British, the person to be
+confided in _would_ be one in the uniform of His Britannic Majesty,
+and of substantial appearance. “What Maisie Knew,” again, happened to
+be the first book by the late Mr. James that I ever read--and, if it
+hadn’t happened to be the first, it would still have remained--and it
+does still remain for me--the book by that very great writer that most
+“matters”. For your benefit, if you “don’t know your James,” I may as
+well say that this is the story of a child moving amongst elemental
+passions that are veiled. But, of course, elemental passions can never
+be veiled enough not to get through to the consciousness, if not to
+the intelligence of the child in the house. So, in an atmosphere of
+intrigues, divorces, prides, jealousies, litigations, conducted as
+these things are conducted in this country, by what it is convenient
+to call “the best people”, Maisie always “knows”. She knows all about
+concealed relationships, as she knows all about intrigues, processes,
+and the points of view of old family servants. It is, of course, a
+horrible book, but it is very triumphantly true....
+
+The Tommies’ bathing place at Albert was in an old mill under the
+shadow of a tall factory chimney at which the Huns were perpetually
+firing shells. As far as I know, they never hit it--but they made
+a nice desolation in the immediately adjacent houses. The mill,
+at the fork of a road, had been turned into a series of sheds and
+compartments, in which there were shower baths and baths with hot and
+cold water in very wet cubicles where you had duckboards underfoot.
+There were Neissen or other boilers somewhere under the ramshackle
+building, so that steam always filtered through and hung over the old
+tiles of the roof. The other ranks of various battalions had their
+bathing parades there at stated hours, so that officers could only get
+a bath in between whiles or after hours.
+
+It was a hot day, very dusty, with the clouds from the white rubble,
+which was all that there was of the center of the town, and after we
+had wandered, I and another officer, round about the rubbish heaps, and
+past long-closed shops that offered us, on metal placards, bicycles,
+chocolates, and furniture polish, by makers well-known in France, we
+decided to wait in the bath itself till the battalion in possession,
+which was the last of the day, should have finished its ablutions. In
+a tiny, shuttered shop we had bought, for A Company’s mess, a small
+melon, five lemons, and half a bushel of windfall apples. The shop
+was just to the east of the Cathedral, and we went over the empty
+Presbytery. One of the floors was a great litter of books--Latin
+texts mostly. One I noticed was a 17th century edition of Livy--1652,
+I think. Another was a copy of Voragine’s recension of the “Golden
+Legend”--but whether or no it was a valuable edition, I don’t know. We
+left the books on the floor--out of indifference, so as not to commit
+sacrilege and because we had already to carry a small, netted melon,
+six lemons, and half a bushel of apples between us. Under my arm,
+moreover, I had “What Maisie Knew” in the expensive, collected edition,
+and we had also towels and soap. So there, in the long, dark, but not
+cool room, just as they had been tumbled out of the shelves, probably
+by the Germans, the books lay with rays of sunlight from the closed
+_persiennes_ falling across broken backs, exposed leaves, half-turned
+title-pages....
+
+Whilst we were passing under the immense Madonna and Child that hung
+over the Cathedral steps, a Hun plane dropped a couple of bombs right
+into the body of the church. They made pretty loud pops, and overhead
+our own Archies were popping away too. But what was really interesting
+to hear was the sifting tinkle of broken stained-glass of the windows
+that went on rustling, tinkling, sifting, and rustling down into the
+rubble in the body of the church until we were out of earshot.
+
+I don’t mean to say that we hurried away. There was nowhere to hurry
+to. But the German heavy battery that had the town under its especial
+care was beginning to send in its evening group of shells. As far as I
+can remember, at that time they let off six 5–2’s at about 10:15 A.M.;
+six at 1:15 P.M., and six more just after 6:00 P.M. with an apparently
+unimaginative regularity, and usually at the same localities--the
+morning six falling about the desolated Place in front of the church,
+the lunchtime contribution in the houses along the main street. Our
+Second Battalion had thirty-two casualties in one room from one shell
+of the midday group. The evening six usually fell in the fields on the
+Ancre side of the town.
+
+So we desired to get under a roof--not that a roof is any particular
+protection against high-explosive shells, but simply to get something
+between one’s self and the sky. For at times, of an evening, when one
+was tired, a pellucid sky would be a disagreeable thing. You didn’t
+know what sort of iron shard would not be coming between the light bars
+of blue and the bars of light dove color. Your flesh, too, felt very
+soft to set itself up against iron shards. And, at the moment, we were
+tired with the walk over the thistles of the downland and the thin air
+and the heat and the chalk dust. And one wanted a read in one’s book!
+
+The by-streets were amazingly quiet; closed houses, shuttered
+shops, mostly unhurt; not a soul was in the blazing sunlight; not a
+cloud was in the sky; only, in the dust of the road three cats were
+motionlessly intent on love. We knocked on a closed door of the old
+mill. I found myself, having passed several darkish, steaming rooms
+in which the white nudity of many men showed against the blue-gray
+of flannel shirts, and the drab colors of steam-damped khaki in the
+shadow--I found myself in an armchair, in a very tall, quiet room.
+I had a sense that there was a tall, slim bookcase, a great table
+covered with dirty copies of English funny periodicals, and empty,
+cardboard fag-packets.... But I was sitting, really, in Kensington
+Gardens in the broad, open turfed way that slopes from the Round Point
+to the Serpentine. And there was a murmuring couple, by a tree trunk,
+upon green penny chairs. (I don’t know that I wasn’t one-half of the
+couple.) And Maisie was playing with Mrs. Wicks, three trees off, and
+Beale Farange, a little too florid, flaming and bearded, to be really
+one of the best people, was bearing down upon them--or was it us?--in
+the shadow of the well-behaved foliage under the polite skies.
+
+I was vaguely conscious of voices. My companion was talking to some one
+else--about some battalion of some regiment; about some division, not
+ours; about the nature of the trenches in front of _Bazentin-le-Petit_.
+But, at any rate, for the moment, the fictitious-real had got so
+much the upper hand of the real-real that I was as engrossed as any
+schoolboy reading Ivanhoe in the twilight. It is a good tribute to pay
+the master. He was dying then.
+
+But I was vaguely unhappy too--unhappy about it all. I don’t mean that
+I was unhappy with the ire of the moralist--for I never set up to be a
+moralist. Only I felt the queer uneasiness that, in those days, one was
+beginning to feel when one came in contact with civilians.
+
+One began to hear hollow voices, sounding portentous through closed
+shutters.
+
+“Fall in there! A Company on the right. Towels on the left arm.
+Number off!”--voices coming from the roadway. And one looked up from
+one’s book, thinking the time had come for one’s bath. There existed
+again the tall room, with grayish wallpaper; the atmosphere of
+steam; the tall window; the tall bookcase, whose panes, behind thin,
+curved mahogany divisions showed a faded, stretched curtain of torn
+green silk. The table was less littered than it had been. It had a
+dusty, red baize cover, much stained with ink. I suppose this was the
+miller’s office. I don’t know what had become of my companion. He was a
+restless, energetic boy, always on the jump. Whilst I had been in the
+broad avenue in Kensington, he had probably pressed until they had got
+him a bath-cubicle cleaned and ready. At any rate, a very old Tommy of
+the Lincolns, toothless, whitehaired, with tunic undone and tarnished
+buttons, told me I must still wait whilst my bath was preparing.
+
+He said I was mistaken in thinking that he was a noncombatant
+permanently in charge of the baths. He was just a Tommy of the
+Lincolns; he had come straight out of the trenches in front of
+_Bazentin-le-Petit_ the night before. Five days before that they had
+relieved us in the same trenches. Now another division had gone in.
+He had been put in charge of the baths that morning, so he hadn’t had
+time to clean his buttons, or even his rifle. He supposed he might get
+_strafed_ for that. Yes; it was trying, the life of the trenches for a
+man of his age. He was sixty-two--sixty-four--over sixty, at any rate.
+
+I told him to stand easy, and he sat down on the other side of the
+large table and reached for an old pipe. Then he folded his wrinkled
+hands before him on the cloth, looked at me hopefully, and exclaimed:
+“I suppose you know the firm of Bolsover & Jupp of Golden Square. The
+great solicitors.”
+
+I did not know them; but when I said I did not, he appeared so
+distressed: “What? Not the great solicitors? To the Mansion House, the
+Common Council, the Tilbury and Southend Railway!”--so distressed that
+I had to pretend at last that I did.
+
+“Well!” he said. “I was clerk in their office for twenty-four years!”
+
+Twenty----four----years! He seemed to think that the statement entitled
+him to feel an enormous pride. No doubt it did.
+
+He must have had a streak of the adventurous in his composition--but
+no one could have seemed less adventurous or more static. As he sat
+there, his hands, whitened by dabbling all that day in bath water, and
+folded before him on the dirty red baize, he looked as if he had sat
+there all his life and as if he would never move. He was so faded that
+you would not have given him credit even for the amount of sharpness
+necessary to a solicitor’s clerk; you would have said that he was an
+aged shepherd on a bench outside the workhouse door. I think he was the
+most memorable figure of the war, for me.
+
+Of course, one’s mind is capricious in these things--but this was
+his biography, of which I have forgotten nothing--though I have, of
+course, forgotten most of his exact words. For twenty-four years clerk
+to Messrs. Bolsover & Jupp, this man who now was mostly preoccupied
+with the fact that he would be “_strafed_” for not “cleanin’ ’is
+’ipe ... I mean rifle, sir!” had gone at the age of forty-eight--to
+Canada, to make his fortune, nothing less! He had left two sons,
+both married, in London. He and his “missus” worked in a factory--a
+“notions” factory, which was then engaged in adding to the beauty of
+the world by manufacturing colored and embossed tin-lids; later it made
+fancy brass buttons and can-openers. “_Et comme il était très fort,
+hardi, courageux et avisé_”--he soon obtained, not like St. Julian the
+Hospitalier, the command of a battalion--but a wage sufficient to let
+him save money. They saved money, he and his missus, and after eight
+years, they built themselves a frame house--“a proper, warm ’aouse for
+them frosty winters and we had one of those ’ere proper iron stoves.
+Proper!”
+
+On the first morning of the new house--I presume his missus had lit
+the proper stove--he was jest a-puttin’ on his collar, when he heard a
+crackling. He thought it was the frost in the apple trees, cracking the
+boughs. But, in forty minutes the house was gone.
+
+He had meant to insure that afternoon. So he and his missus--he never
+described her, but I think she must have been a gallant soul--aged
+fifty-six a-piece, went back to boarding-house life and work in the
+“notion” factory. Next autumn, coming back from work one evening, he
+noticed in a neighbor’s lot, a fine apple tree. Proper, with apples on
+it, these ’ere large coddlins! He offered the neighbor two dollars for
+the apples on the tree and peddled them round the town.
+
+In five years, at that trade, he had made enough to think of
+“retiring”. Then he see in the pipers that Hengland needed men. So he
+ses to his missus: “We’ve got money enough to do as we please. Let’s go
+and see what we can do to ’elp the ol’ gal....” As if Victoria had been
+still on the throne. They came to London, and he went to see the ol’
+firm. His sons said to him: No, they were married men with families.
+“So I says to the missus: ‘I ain’t got no family, I ain’t.’” And he
+bought her an ’aouse at ’Endon and an annuity, through the ol’ firm.
+That had taken till February, 1916. He was apologetic over the delay,
+but he had wanted to see the ol’ woman settled comfortable.
+
+February, 1916--it was then July. Thirteen weeks training, you see, and
+he had been two months in France, “mostly on this ’ere ol’ Somme.” He
+was sixty-one years and four months of age. And he said he felt tired.
+
+There was about his narration nothing of the “narquois” humor of the
+cockney; but, colorlessly, as tired farm-laborers talk, he went on
+talking--as if it was just the Will of God. I met some of his officers
+a couple of weeks later and asked about him, but his story grew rather
+hazy. They found a Company Sergeant-Major who said he had thought the
+old man was a bit too old for his job in the trenches. I daresay the
+old man had found rough gentlenesses and kindly helping hands from
+his mate and the noncommissioned officers of his battalion. He would
+have, of course. So the C.S.M. had detailed him for caretaker at the
+baths. The old man had enlisted as being thirty years and six months
+of age--just half his years. The C.S.M. remembered that; but he didn’t
+know what had become of the man. He rather thought he had been killed
+on the 24/7/’16 by a shell pitched in the battle, but perhaps he hadn’t.
+
+It was mostly his tired voice and his colorless narration that had
+impressed me with him. I didn’t think much about--I did not even
+realize--the rather stupendous Odyssey of a life he must have had until
+I stood on that balcony of the Paris theater, in the night, with the
+French officers. You see, it was anyhow such a tremendous Odyssey for
+every one there that a little more or less at the moment did not jump
+to the eye as mattering. But, underneath, in the subconscious mind, it
+mattered.
+
+I daresay--nay, I am sure--that it was that quality that mattered to
+me more than anything else of the whole cause for thought that the war
+gave one. For me--apart from Lord Kitchener and Sir Edward Grey--there
+were few great figures of those years. Sir Edward Grey went out of
+course once war was declared: then Kitchener went. There remained this
+Tommy of the Lincolns and I think Lt. Morgan of my own battalion was
+then still alive. Henri Gaudier was certainly dead--and he, in my
+mind, was united to the Lincolnshire Private and Morgan. They had, all
+three, a certain serenity.
+
+I wish I could remember Morgan’s initials. He had a brother, “I. H.”--a
+nice boy. I hope he is still alive.
+
+But the Morgan who is dead sounded, as it were, exactly the same note
+as the Lincolnshire man--the note of tired but continuous laboring
+after a very hard life. You know the sort of effect a violin has when
+its strings are muted. It was like that.
+
+I think Morgan must have had his last leave at the same time as
+myself when I went out the second time; but I don’t think we went
+out together. At any rate, we took together a very long railway
+journey--but I don’t remember why or where--probably because I spent it
+listening to the story of his life. I remember his tired movements as
+he took his knapsack down from the rack whilst the train was running
+into some terminus. And I remember it seemed to me to be a shame--on
+the part of destiny--that he should be going out at all. I met him next
+night in Coventry Street--and he did not seem to be getting much out of
+Coventry Street after dark. We stood talking for a minute, and then he
+disappeared among the prostitutes and the flash Jews. I expect we each
+said: “Good luck, old man,” for I believe he liked me, and I must have
+liked him very much.
+
+He was killed, as I have said, by a _minenwerfer_ as he was going up a
+communication-trench on his first night. He was buried so that, in the
+morning when they found him, only his feet and legs were showing. He
+was probably not buried alive, because the officer who found him said
+that he was smiling. I like to think of that.
+
+Because these were the men who needed--who _must_ have had if indeed
+there be a just God or even merely a deity who gives compensations--a
+period of sanctuary after their very hard labors. It doesn’t matter
+about you and me....
+
+But poor old Morgan ... I don’t know what age he was. I daresay he
+was no more than thirty-two, little and brown and persistent--his
+face was thin, aquiline, and as if hardened and sand-blasted by the
+perpetual confrontation of winds full of hail. For he too had gone out
+to Canada--but as a boy, apparently without much capital, to work for
+wheat-farmers.
+
+I suppose most people know something about working for Canadian
+farmers--the long solitudes, the distance of the towns, the protracted
+buggy rides over immense plains. Well, I seem to have an extraordinary
+sense of it--just from the way Morgan talked on that long train
+journey. I don’t know that I remember incidents. Perhaps I could. I
+remember that, knowing little about horses at the beginning, he was
+asked by the boss if he would take a helluva vicious team to the
+nearest township to fetch something, a plow, I think. And he had done
+it.
+
+But the main of the story was just the long strain--long hours merging
+into long years, with the muscles always a little overstrained. Not
+much, but a little. Because, though gallant, persistent, and showing
+it as the Welsh do, he was small for wrestling with tree trunks and
+immense plains. I remember his saying that when he had dug holes for
+the posts of wire fencing, he poured water in so that the posts should
+freeze solid in their places.
+
+Well, he too must have been “_hardi, courageux, et avisé_”--leading
+a long, uncolored life of sober chastity, without many visits to the
+townships even, let alone the towns. For, as he sat in the carriage, he
+said that he owned property--timber lots and other lots, bought out of
+the savings of a laborer.
+
+And he spoke of going back there, _après la guerre finie_--with the
+serene resignation of a man with no other imaginable destiny before
+him. It was to be more toil and more toil and more toil. He did not,
+apparently, ask for--certainly he did not imagine--any other future. So
+that resignation is not the right word. Serenity is....
+
+
+
+
+                                   X
+
+                            _From a Balcony_
+
+
+One of the French officers, on the balcony of the theater, during the
+_entr’acte_ of _Lakme_, was describing, with that depressed neatness of
+quiet diction that is at the disposal of every educated Frenchman, the
+sleep of a French territorial on an uncompleted traverse. The others
+had, as it were--and as if by preconcertion--capped stories in lauding
+and pitying the _territoriaux_. These troops, it may be as well to
+point out, were something like the Labor Battalions that subsequently
+we raised. I fancy we had nothing of the sort at that date and indeed,
+between Hélie and Corbie I had lately seen the Guards’ Brigade doing
+fatigue that, in French-France would have been performed by old fathers
+and grandfathers. That, of course, is nothing to the discredit of that
+great brigade. As soon as battalions, brigades, or divisions came out
+of the trenches for a “rest”, they were given the cheerful jobs of
+repairing rear-line trenches, digging drains, cleaning out latrines,
+and the like. When we came out from the Somme for a “month’s rest”,
+first A Company, then B, C, and D were given an all-night fatigue--of
+mending the Albert-Amiens road! And in August! Then we were moved up
+into the salient.
+
+At any rate, slowly, coldly, and without the shadow of a shade of
+cordiality, in the blackness of the Paris night, the French officers
+piled it up. We were not popular in France at that date, and I don’t
+know that, except as individuals, we deserved popularity. That does
+not matter. The fact remained that they were “out” to make one feel
+that from under every little cowering roof in France, from Orange
+as from the frontier by Mentone to the other frontier by Longwy,
+old, stiff men, with horny hands and faded eyes had marched over the
+endless roads with the poplars to their too-heavy labors amidst the
+bursting shells.... From under _every_ cowering roof of every township,
+town, hamlet, and parish; from every _arrondissement_; from every
+_subprefecture_; from every _departement_. Coldly, like inquisitors,
+in the darkness, they let me have that information. It was not really
+necessary. I knew it already. But I was too tired, harassed, dispirited
+to tell them so. I, too, was old for that job. _Atque ego_....
+
+For I couldn’t get away from the conviction that they were talking
+at me with a purpose--that they were, in indirect terms, telling me
+that it was a scandal that the Brigade of Guards should be employed in
+clearing out latrines, work which, in French-France, was performed by
+the fathers and the grandfathers--the guards being tired out and worn
+down by such employment when they were such splendid fighting material
+and should have been really rested. I daresay our own war office would
+have answered that that was part of our discipline and that “fatigues”
+when men were “resting” were good for their livers and kept them “fit”.
+There is such a school of thought. Anyhow, I am not writing a military
+treatise and do not ask that any attention should be paid to my views.
+I am only chronicling the psychology of an Infantry officer as he was
+affected by certain circumstances.
+
+And I _couldn’t_ get away from the conviction that the French officers
+were talking “officially”. In those days there had just been published
+in Paris a book of “official” propaganda by myself. It would not have
+been a different book if it had been unofficial or if there had been
+no war. It simply advanced the theory that in the world of letters and
+ideas, for personal industry and pride in work as work, it is only
+France that matters among the nations. I had said that when I was
+twenty; I resaid it then being over double that age; I resay it today;
+and I will resay it as my eyes close in death. No one in my country
+has ever paid any attention to one’s saying it, and no one ever will.
+Why should they? Letters and ideas have so little place in our body
+politic and the doctrine of pride in work as work; of engrossment and
+of serenity; of aloofness from the world and of introspection with no
+other purpose--is here anathema both with the Right which hates the
+doctrine of Art for Art’s sake and with the Left, which hates that of
+Labor for the sake of Labor. Yet I see no other lesson in life. That is
+why I have collected these notes upon sheepfolds--this long lay sermon.
+
+So this particular piece of official propaganda was, just then, being
+accorded an extraordinary amount of notoriety in France. The skill
+of our own propaganda people and the patriotism of distinguished
+Frenchmen accounted for that. It was reviewed at enormous length
+and with enormous headlines by Academicians, by assailants of the
+French Academy, and by the Mayors of Rouen, Lyons, and Toulouse. It
+was “communicated” to the Institute of France; publicly laid upon the
+shelves of the city library of Yvetot. And it was no doubt on that
+account that the French officers presented official views to me so
+carefully and so excruciatingly. They imagined that I had weight in
+the Councils of the Empire, as would have been the case in their own
+country.
+
+While they talked the black houses round the market had infinite depths
+of violet against the white stars. But all the same I was looking at
+the view from the top of the great brick Roman Theater at Orange--over
+the flats with the ragged, stunted vines, the stubble, and the thatched
+roofs. Yes, I knew that beside Orange the little houses cowered beside
+the furrows and that on the other frontier great, gaunt piles were
+subsiding under scrolls and tongues of flame, going down to a last rest
+as the very tired men of a platoon will fall out beside the road. And
+the great buildings never get up again.
+
+For I never feel that houses have souls. So that, when, out there, you
+saw a house go down as fire, it seemed to do it luxuriously almost.
+It was finished with men and their ways. It had no doubt borne for
+long with their cruelties, stupidities, imbecilities; with its windows
+for mournful eyes it had seen the generations flit past and fade. It
+had known cold that made its timbers crack and the great heat of the
+sun warping them. But beneath the flames, slowly, it would sink to
+the earth from which it had come. Yes, luxuriously, as men stretch
+themselves down for a long rest....
+
+The French officer was still talking about the old territorial who
+had fallen asleep. It seems that the old man had gone on working,
+after his mates had been taken off for a spell, on the inner face of
+the traverse--which is a sort of pillar of earth with a gangway round
+it, left in a trench to minimize the lateral spread of shell fire. He
+had gone on working--out of pure zeal, the officer said. The officer
+addressed me with hard bitterness. I suppose he thought I was some
+sort of noncombatant. The staff-captain told me afterward that this
+officer, being aide-de-camp to one of the most famous French generals
+of division of the day had, the night before, attended his chief to a
+dinner--given, I think, by the British A.P.M.--in the course of which
+the heroic doings of a great many British Regiments were extolled. And
+then, in a pause, an English lady had said to the French general: “And
+the French haven’t done so badly.”... I was being made to suffer for
+this.
+
+And I did suffer a good deal--more I think than I ever suffered.
+The officer went on and on about his old territorial. He was there,
+asleep, in the light of a single candle stuck in the clay. He was as
+it were spread-eagled against the earth. His legs apart he had raised
+his hammer to strike his chisel; both his arms were over his head,
+stretched out. And he was just asleep. It was touching; it was terrible
+in its simplicity, the officer said. He said the territorial came from
+Passy--as it might be Putney.
+
+It was just at this point that I remembered Morgan and the old man of
+the bath-mill. I daresay you will think it merely a literary trick,
+when I say that I saw them.
+
+But I _saw_ them: against an immense black mass fringed by flaming
+houses. I saw those two, tired faces; the two serene, honest, and
+simple souls, who had the Kingdom of God within them. And it seemed to
+me that they had died in vain.
+
+It was for me the most terrible moment of the war.
+
+I daresay that for many people it was the most horrible period of
+the war. For, by then it had become apparent that the Somme advance
+was a fiasco--a useless butchery. We knew we should never advance. I
+daresay the French knew it better than we. Certainly the voices of
+these officers drove it home: they spoke as if they were talking to a
+condemned criminal. And I think it was not right of them.
+
+We, at any rate, were the old voluntary army. We had come, aged or
+young, from the ends of the earth. I don’t know whether it is worse
+to be old or young in a great war--it was bad enough to be old! And I
+don’t know whether it was better or worse to have come from the ends
+of the earth--or from Passy. Or to have passed all one’s life beneath
+a roof that shuddered with fear.... If you had done that, you were
+more used to the idea, and to the discipline of the idea, of war. You
+discussed the moves, here and there, more _en connoisseur_.
+
+But I doubt if one of those men on the balcony felt the war as I
+did. We, after all, brought so many more emotions to it. You had
+only to contrast Paris, gray, sober, much as usual, with the roads
+under leisurely repair, and the old horses and the old _cochers_ and
+_voitures_ dawdling in the shadow of the plane-trees--with London,
+plastered with endless appeals in blue and scarlet and yellow--London,
+hurrying, exclaiming, clamoring.... The old territorial had lived
+all his life under the shadow--and it came. The old private of the
+Lincolnshires had never thought of such an end. But it came! And Europe
+flamed....
+
+And the worst of it all was that one was beginning to doubt. Until
+then one had been carried by the fine wave of enthusiasm. It seemed to
+embrace the whole country. And we in all the holes, valleys, over all
+the downlands of the Somme, where the sun shone with its chalky rays as
+it does by L----, had had a great singleness of purpose and had been
+confident that we had the support of a great singleness of purpose
+extending across a world. But doubt had begun to creep in....
+
+I wished, then, that I had not read “What Maisie Knew” in the bath
+at Albert. I wished that the daily papers would not reach us. The
+atmosphere shown so overwhelmingly in the book was beginning to be too
+close to the atmosphere reflected in the papers. And we were, truly,
+very lonely out there; truly we were some millions of men, suspended on
+a raft, in limitless space.
+
+And we were beginning to feel a curious dislike of the civilians whom
+up till then we had so trusted--a curious dislike that was never to
+die. I don’t know what was going on at home: political intrigues no
+doubt; strikes possibly. But there seemed to prevail a tenuous, misty
+struggle of schemes--just the atmosphere of “Maisie.” I don’t think
+that many of those who were one’s comrades _in illo die_ did not at
+times feel a certain hopelessness. It was as if at times we said: What
+are those people after? Aren’t they--aren’t they surely?--“out” to make
+huge profits from our poor Tommies; to cut down the rations of our
+poor Tommies; and to gain notoriety by forcing on a timorous central
+government their own schemes for the training of poor Tommies--schemes
+that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of our poor
+fine Tommies? And, when their own attractions were enhanced by the
+bringing off of this or that scheme, intrigue, or cabal, they would
+vote to themselves ribbons, orders, power, divorces, and the right to
+gallons of petrol. And so they would sit in the chairs of the lost and
+the forgotten amidst a world where the ideals which sent all those
+millions to destruction were lost too ... and forgotten. You will
+say that this is bitter. It is. It was bitter to have seen the 38th
+Division murdered in Mametz Wood--and to guess what underlay that!...
+
+And then the French officer said what I knew he would say: what I had
+known that, with all his cold lack of rhetoric, he was working up to.
+He said that the old, sleeping territorial looked like Our Lord on
+Calvary. I could have screamed. Upon my soul I could have screamed.
+And, if I hadn’t thought it just possible that his dislike attached to
+me personally, I daresay I should have talked to him as I talked to the
+other French officer as the reader may see in _Une Partie de Cricket_.
+But the faint hope that it was just myself that he despised and not
+poor Morgan and the others--all the poor others along that long front
+of ours--that faint hope that he was attacking only me and not the Army
+of the Somme just made me hold my peace until we went back into the
+theater. And in the theater I suddenly remembered--as clearly as I had
+remembered the others--Henri Gaudier. He, too, seemed to stand before
+me and to smile at me a little, as if he found me comic....
+
+I do not know why it is that now, when I think of Gaudier, the cadence
+that I hear in my mind should be one of sadness. For there was never
+any one further from sadness than Henri Gaudier, whether in his being
+or in his fate. He had youth; he had grace of person and of physique;
+he had a sense of the comic. He had friendships, associates in his
+work, loves, the hardships that help youth. He had genius, and he died
+a hero.
+
+He comes back to me best as he was at a function of which I remember
+most, except for Gaudier, disagreeable sensations--embarrassments. It
+was an “affair”--one of two--financed by a disagreeably obese Neutral
+whom I much disliked. That would be in late July, 1914. The Neutral
+was much concerned to get out of a country and a city which appeared
+to be in danger. Some one else--several some ones--were intensely
+anxious, each of them, to get money out of the very fat, very monied,
+disagreeably intelligent being. And I was ordered, by _Les Jeunes_,
+to be there. It was a parade, in fact. I suppose that even then I
+was regarded as a, I hope benevolent, grandfather, by a number of
+members of an advanced school.[7] Anyhow, that comes back to me as a
+disagreeable occasion of evil passions, evil people, of bad, flashy
+cooking in an underground haunt of pre-war smartness.
+
+I daresay it was not really as bad as all that--but when I am forced to
+receive the hospitality of persons whom I dislike, the food seems to
+go bad, and there is a bad taste in the mouth, symbol of a disturbed
+liver. So the band played in that cave and the head ached and there
+were nasty foreign waiters and bad, very expensive, champagne.
+
+There were also speeches--and one could not help knowing that the
+speeches were directed at the Neutral’s breeches pockets. The Neutral
+leaned heavily sideways at table, devouring the bad food at once
+with gluttony and nonchalance. It talked about its motor car, which
+apparently was at Liverpool or Southampton--somewhere where there were
+liners, quays, cordage, cranes; all ready to abandon a city which would
+be doomed should Armageddon become Armageddon. The speeches went on....
+
+Then Gaudier rose. It was suddenly like a silence that intervened
+during a distressing and ceaseless noise. I don’t know that I had
+ever noticed him before except as one amongst a crowd of dirtyish,
+bearded, slouch-hatted individuals, like conspirators; but, there,
+he seemed as if he stood amidst sunlight; as if indeed he floated in
+a ray of sunlight, like the dove in Early Italian pictures. In a life
+during which I have known thousands of people; thousands and thousands
+of people; during which I have grown sick and tired of “people” so
+that I prefer the society of cabbages, goats, and the flowers of the
+marrow plant; I have never otherwise known what it was to witness an
+appearance which symbolized so completely--aloofness. It was like the
+appearance of Apollo at a creditors’ meeting. It was supernatural.
+
+It was just that. One didn’t rub one’s eyes: one was too astounded.
+Only, something within one wondered what the devil he was doing there.
+If he hadn’t seemed so extraordinarily efficient, one would have
+thought he had strayed, from another age, from another world, from
+some Hesperides. One keeps wanting to say that he was Greek, but he
+wasn’t. He wasn’t of a type that strayed: and indeed I seem to feel
+his poor bones moving in the August dust of Neuville St. Vaast when
+I--though even only nearly!--apply to him a name that he would have
+hated. At any rate, it was amazing to see him there; since he seemed so
+entirely inspired by inward visions that one wondered what he could
+be after--certainly not the bad dinner, the attentions of the foreign
+waiters, a try at the Neutral’s money-bag strings. No, he spoke as if
+his eyes were fixed on a point within himself; and yet, with such humor
+and such good-humor--as if he found the whole thing so comic!
+
+One is glad of the comic in his career; it would otherwise have been
+too much an incident of the Elgin marble type. But even the heroism of
+his first, abortive “joining up” was heroico-comic. As I heard him tell
+the story, or at least as I remember it, it was like this:
+
+He had gone to France in the early days of the war--and one accepted
+his having gone as one accepted the closing of a door--of a tomb, if
+you like. Then, suddenly, he was once more there. It produced a queer
+effect; it was a little bewildering in a bewildering world. But it
+became comic. He had gone to Boulogne and presented himself to the
+Recruiting Officer--an N. C. O., or captain, of the old school, white
+moustachios, _cheveux en brosse_. Gaudier stated that he had left
+France without having performed his military duties, but, since _la
+patrie_ was in danger, he had returned like any other good little
+_piou-piou_. But the sergeant, martinet-wise, as became a veteran of
+1870, struck the table with his fist and exclaimed:
+
+“_Non, mon ami_, it is not _la patrie_, but you who are in danger. You
+are a deserter; you will be shot.” So Gaudier was conducted to a motor,
+in which, under the military escort of two files of men, a sergeant,
+a corporal, and a lieutenant, he was whirled off to Calais. In Calais
+Town he was placed in an empty room. Outside the door were stationed
+two men with large guns, and Gaudier was told that, if he opened the
+door, the guns would go off. That was his phrase. He did not open the
+door. He spent several hours reflecting that though they manage these
+things better in France, they don’t manage them so damn well. At the
+end of that time he pushed aside the window blind and looked out. The
+room was on the ground floor; there were no bars. Gaudier opened the
+window; stepped into the street, just like that--and walked back to
+Boulogne.
+
+He returned to London.
+
+He was drawn back again to France by the opening of the bombardment of
+Rheims Cathedral. This time he had a safe conduct from the Embassy. I
+do not know the date of his second joining up or the number of his
+regiment. At any rate, he took part in an attack on a Prussian outpost
+on Michaelmas Eve, so he had not much delayed, and his regiment was
+rendered illustrious, though it cannot have given him a deuce of a
+lot of training. He did not need it. He was as hard as nails and as
+intelligent as the devil. He was used to forging and grinding his own
+chisels. He was inured to the hardships of poverty in great cities; he
+was accustomed to hammer and chisel at his marble for hours and hours
+of day after day. He was a “fit” townsman--and it was “fit” townsmen
+who conducted the fighting of 1914 when the war was won: it was _les
+parigots_.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of his biography I have always had only the haziest of notions. I know
+that he was the son of a Meridional craftsman, a carpenter and joiner,
+who was a good workman and no man could have a better. His father was
+called Joseph Gaudier--so why he called himself B’jesker, I do not
+know. I prefer really to be hazy; because Gaudier will always remain
+for me something supernatural. He was for me a “message” at a difficult
+time of life. His death and the death at the same time of another
+boy--but quite a commonplace, nice boy--made a rather doubtful way
+quite plain to me.
+
+All my life I have been very much influenced by a Chinese proverb--to
+the effect that it would be hypocrisy to seek for the person of the
+Sacred Emperor in a low teahouse. It is a bad proverb, because it is so
+wise and so enervating. It has “ruined my career”.
+
+When, for instance, I founded a certain Review, losing, for me, immense
+sums of money on it, or when the contributors unanimously proclaimed
+that I had not paid them for their contributions--which was not true
+because they certainly had among them a quantity of my money in their
+pockets--or when a suffrage bill failed to pass in the Commons; or
+when some one’s really good book has not been well reviewed; or when
+I have been robbed, slandered, or abortively blackmailed--in all the
+vicissitudes of life, misquoted on it, I have always first shrugged
+my shoulders and murmured that it would be hypocrisy to seek for the
+person of the Sacred Emperor in a low tea-shop. It meant that it
+would be hypocrisy to expect a taste for the finer letters in a large
+public’s discernment in critics; honesty in æsthetes or literati;
+public spirit in lawgivers; accuracy in pundits; gratitude in those
+one has saved from beggary, and so on.
+
+So, when I first noticed Henri Gaudier--which was in an underground
+restaurant, the worst type of thieves’ kitchen--these words rose to my
+lips. I did not, you understand, believe that he would exist and be so
+wise, so old, so gentle, so humorous, such a genius. I did not really
+believe that he had shaved, washed, assumed garments that fitted his
+great personal beauty.
+
+For he had great personal beauty. If you looked at him casually,
+you imagined that you were looking at one of those dock-rats of the
+Marseilles quays, who will carry your baggage for you, pimp for you;
+garotte you and throw your body overboard--but who will do it all
+with an air, an ease, an exquisiteness of manners! They have, you
+see, the traditions and inherited knowledge of such ancient nations
+in Marseilles--of Etruscans, Phoenicians, Colonial Greeks, Late
+Romans, Troubadours, Late French--and that of those who first sang the
+Marseillaise! And many of them, whilst they are young, have the amazing
+beauty that Gaudier had. Later, absinthe spoils it--but for the time,
+they are like Arlésiennes.
+
+All those wisdoms, then, looked out of the eyes of Gaudier--and God
+only knows to what he threw back--to Etruscans or Phoenicians, no
+doubt, certainly not to the Greeks who colonized Marseilles, or the
+Late Romans who succeeded to them. He seemed, then, to have those
+wisdoms behind his eyes somewhere. And he had, certainly, an astounding
+erudition.
+
+I don’t know where he picked it up--but his conversation was
+overwhelming--and his little history of sculpture by itself will give
+you more flashes of inspiration than you will ever, otherwise, gather
+from the whole of your life. His sculpture itself affected me just as
+he did.
+
+In odd places--the sitting rooms of untidy and eccentric poets with no
+particular merits, in appalling exhibitions, in nasty night clubs, in
+dirty restaurants one would be stopped for a moment in the course of a
+sentence by the glimpse of a brutal chunk of rock that seemed to have
+lately fallen unwanted from a slate quarry, or, in the alternative, by
+a little piece of marble that seemed to have the tightened softness of
+the haunches of a fawn--of some young creature of the underwoods, an
+ancient, shyly-peopled, thicket.
+
+The brutalities would be the work of Mr. Epstein--the other, Gaudier.
+For Gaudier’s work had just his own, personal, impossible quality. And
+one did not pay much attention to it simply because one did not believe
+in it. It was too good to be true. Remembering the extraordinary rush
+that the season of 1914 was, it appears a miserable tragedy, but it is
+not astonishing, that one’s subliminal mind should whisper to me, every
+time we caught that glimpse of a line: “It is hypocrisy to search for
+the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low tea-house.” It was of course
+the devil who whispered that. So I never got the sensation I might
+have got from that line. Because one did not believe in that line. One
+thought: “It is just the angle at which one’s chair in the restaurant
+presents to one an accidental surface of one of these young men’s
+backs.”
+
+And then a day came when there was no doubt about it. Gaudier was a
+Lance Corporal in the 4th Section, 7th Company, 129th Regt. of Infantry
+of the Line.[8] Gaudier was given his three stripes for “gallantry in
+face of the enemy”. One read in a letter:
+
+“I am at rest for three weeks in a village, that is, I am undergoing
+a course of study to be promoted officer when necessary during an
+offensive.”
+
+Or in another letter:
+
+“I imagine a dull dawn, two lines of trenches, and in between explosion
+on explosion with clouds of black and yellow smoke, a ceaseless noise
+from the rifles, a few legs and heads flying, and me standing up
+among all this like to Mephisto--commanding: ‘_Feu par salves à 250
+mètres--joue--feu!_’
+
+“Today is magnificent, a fresh wind, clear sun, and larks singing
+cheerfully....”
+
+That was it!
+
+But just because it was so commonplace; so sordid, so within the scope
+of all our experiences, powers of observation, and recording, it all
+seemed impossible to believe that in _that_ particular low tea-house
+there were really Youth, Beauty, Erudition, Fortune, Genius--to believe
+in the existence of a Gaudier! The devil still whispered to me: “That
+would be hypocrisy!” For if you would not believe that genius could
+show itself during the season of 1914, how _could_ you believe that, of
+itself, inscrutable, noiseless, it would go out of our discreditable
+world where the literati and the æsthetes were sweating, harder than
+they ever, ever did after _le mot juste_ or the Line of Beauty, to
+find excuses that should keep them from the trenches--that, so quietly,
+the greatest genius of them all would go into that world of misery.
+
+And then I read:
+
+“_Mort pour la patrie._
+
+“After ten months of fighting and two promotions for gallantry, on the
+field, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, in a charge at Neuville St. Vaast. June
+5, 1915.”
+
+Alas, when it was too late, I had learned that, to this low tea-shop
+that the world is, from time to time the Sacred Emperor may pay visits.
+So I began to want to kill certain people. I still do--for the sake of
+Gaudier and those few who are like him.
+
+For the effect of reading that announcement was to make me remember
+with extraordinary vividness a whole crowd of the outlines of pieces of
+marble, of drawings, of tense and delicate lines at which, in the low
+tea-house of the year before’s season, I had only nonchalantly glanced.
+The Sacred Emperor, then, had been there. He seemed, at last, to be an
+extraordinarily real figure--as real as one of the other sculptor’s
+brutal chunks of granite. Only, because of the crowd one hadn’t seen
+him--the crowd of blackmailers,[9] sneak-thieves, suborners, pimps,
+reviewers, and the commonplace and the indifferent--the Huns of London.
+Well, it became--and it still more remains! one’s duty to try to kill
+them. There are probably several Sacred Emperors still at large--though
+the best of them will have been killed, as Gaudier was.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was whilst I was inside the theater that I registered, as the saying
+is, a mental vow that I would pay no attention any more to public
+affairs. To do so would drive one mad. I decided that I must put my
+head down under the cloth for the rest of the war. And I think I did
+so. Except for the occasional duty of writing propaganda--which from
+that time onwards I did in French--I paid no more attention to the
+politics of my country or the world. I just did the collar-work of
+the Infantry Officer until the 11/11/’17. After that, my views being
+too favorable to France, the Ministry of Information and the censor
+suppressed or lost in the post my rather excited writings on the Terms
+of Peace.... That would be about three years ago today. It seems a long
+while....
+
+The inside of the theater was brilliant, formal, a little shabby if you
+looked closely. Of the performance of _Lakme_--an opera that I love
+very much, since the music is soft, moving, and generous--I remember
+very little. So it must have been a good rendering with no performer
+in particular “sticking out”. The British naval officers were rather
+funny. And I think it is no left-handed compliment to the composer,
+Délibes--though it may be to the librettist--to say that my thoughts
+were elsewhere. The music was just sensuous pleasure; the aspect of
+the house, spreading round in great lines of polychromatic humanity,
+more regular than is the case with most theaters in London--more suave
+and more classical--soothed one after what was certainly an emotional
+crisis; an escaped danger. For it would have mortified me for the
+rest of my life if I had burst out under the goadings of the French
+officers. But, by the Grace of God and the skin of my teeth, I had
+retained, quite certainly, my aspect of insular phlegm.
+
+Still it had been exhausting--and I was enervated. And then, quite
+suddenly, it came to me to wonder what was going on outside the
+theater--what was going on under the black roof of the night, with
+the infinitely numerous population of leaves, blades, branches, reeds
+beside streams, great trees in the woodlands--and with the silent,
+watchful population of the thickets where the shadows are so extremely
+deep. I found myself wondering what time of year it was. And I said:
+the first weeks of September. For that morning I had recollected that,
+two years before on that day, the Germans had turned back from in front
+of Paris. Forty-six years before they had won the battle of Sedan.
+
+It was, then, during the first weeks of September. But what
+happened--in September? One forgot. One had repaired trenches; one had
+commanded fatigues digging drains round Bn.H.Q., to the left of Mount
+Kemmel. One had dug so efficiently that, during the first thunderstorm
+the repaired trenches below were neck-deep in water. All that had
+passed in “the Country”.
+
+But what happened in September? There were no doubt apples on the
+trees, and, certainly, it was the time of year when many cobwebs, frail
+nets across the tall grasses on commons or single, brilliant filaments,
+streamed out and glistened on still, bright days.
+
+There would be plums, too; but what about damsons? Wasn’t it early for
+them? And how about garden peas? Were they over? And field peas? And
+would there be an autumn feel in the air?
+
+It was twenty-one days to Michaelmas--and Michaelmas certainly brought
+the autumn feeling, with touches of vine in the shadow of yellowing
+plants and the leaves of sunflowers drooping straight down, like
+unfurled colors on windless days. But in copses, shaves, and spinneys
+were the leaves on forest trees yet turning? Were roads yet hard and
+frosty in the morning? And were horses yet sluggish and apt to stumble
+on roads as they do at the turn of the year and the fall of the
+leaf?... Time to give ’em a ball.
+
+The baffled mind seemed to stumble at all these questions. One was in
+the theater and having been forbidden by the will to think that what
+surrounded the great walls with their human lining was a vast black
+map fringed by conflagrations, the poor mind hung faltering.
+
+It fell suddenly back on contemplating the green nook that--on the down
+behind Albert--it had reserved for itself. Yes, the mind actually did
+that. And, across the gilding of the proscenium, across Lakme’s singing
+the great song of yearning, there hung a slight shimmer of green that
+intensified itself and took shape like a recumbent oval.... And there
+began to become visible the yellowing, grayish rows of broad beans; a
+rather ragged hedge and a little stream beyond, level with the grass
+and fringed with the glistening stems of clumps of rushes that had been
+cut for thatching stacks. Because it was indeed September.
+
+
+[Footnotes]
+
+[7] For the benefit of the uninstructed reader, I may say that new
+Schools of Art, like new commercial enterprises, need both backers with
+purses and backers of a certain solid personal appearance or weight
+in the world. And it is sometimes disagreeable, though it is always a
+duty, to be such an individual.
+
+[8] The knowledgeable reader will observe that here Gringoire has
+consulted the monograph on Gaudier by Mr. Pound--the best piece of
+craftsmanship that Mr. Pound has put together; or at least the best
+this writer has read of that author’s.
+
+[9] Gringoire is too fond of this word--which he uses in a special
+sense to indicate persons--mostly reviewers--who do not appreciate
+the work of himself and his school. In his conversation he introduced
+at this point a long denunciation of the ---- Literary Supplement,
+principally because, whilst purporting to be a literary paper, it
+devotes, according to him, 112/113ths of its space to books about
+facts, at the expense of works of the imagination. So he calls that
+respectable journal a blackmailing organ. Since, however, this is a
+topic that can hardly interest the non-literary, and since the literary
+are hardly likely to read these pages, the compiler has taken the
+liberty of not reporting these sallies. It may be true that Pontius
+Pilate is more criminal than the crucified thieves--but it is _never_
+politic to say so.
+
+
+
+
+                                   XI
+
+                          _“Rosalie Prudent”_
+
+
+One evening the compiler addressed Gringoire, who was making notes in a
+seed catalogue, somewhat as follows:
+
+“Do you remember, oh Gringoire, what it is to awake of a September
+morning at dawn? Being _horticulteur_, your first thought will be for
+the weather: being _poète_, your first thought will be for your new
+volume. And the two first thoughts will overlay the one the other,
+according as chance wills. But the still mist is so reassuring as to
+the weather that you can put that aside and think only of your volume.
+The goodly fruits of the earth in the late summer season, the plums,
+the apples, the quinces; the maize, the marrows, the melons, have
+yet another day, for sure, of bright, warm sun, of gorgeous, mellow
+downward shavers of sun. They, surely, shall stand motionless in the
+warmth.
+
+“But the poems ... oh my poor Gringoire of the dawn: the great,
+half-finished epic! Ah that! that seemed so glowing too when last night
+in the golden light of the two candles, in your poor little, rickety
+salon that yet has a style of its own ... you read them to Madame
+Sélysette ... the poor verses that you read so famously to little
+Madame!... In the dawn, ah, the wolf of the night that says: ‘Hou ...
+hou’ from the mountains has not gone home! Almost you hear his sniffing
+round the little green door that, because yours is a land of idylls
+and the innocent, you have left open. One day the wolf with the great,
+cocked hairy ears, with the long white teeth like razors for their
+sharpness shall come in. You will hear upon the uncarpeted stairway the
+pad of the feet; the little thin door will push open, and raised at the
+foot of your small white bed, you will see the great beast; the huge
+head; the bloodshot eyes.... And Madame, in the other little white bed
+across the small white room will moan a little in her sleep....
+
+“All the poor verses: the little lines! How shall they be the barbed
+wire fence that shall keep the wolf from the door of the cottage?
+Why, he could push the poor, tindery old walls down with his snout!
+The poor verses! They halt ... or no, they do not halt. We are too
+good a craftsman for that! But assuredly they do not run. And the
+publisher! What shall he say? And Madame with such a need of a new
+gown: it should have been of velvet, puffed in the arms, and slashed
+to show an undercoat of crushed rose silk. And to tell the truth--your
+_pantalons?_ How they shine in the seat, like a mirror! And the public!
+Ah, the grim public that has no taste but for dominoes in the cafés of
+an evening! How shall they care for the savor of lavender and rosemary
+in your smaller verses? What, to them, are Melpomene and Mélisande and
+Maleine and Musidore of your epic! And the cursed ‘machinery’ of the
+enormous poem! What has become of your great device that was to take
+the story forward from line 1100 to line 1424? Forgotten! O Apollo! O
+Euterpe! Forgotten--gone--your brain is failing. Your diet of oatmeal
+and junket is not enough to water your gray matter with rich red blood.
+It is all over ... and the great wolf says ‘Hou!... hou!’ upon the
+mountains, though the mists are rising. And Madame, you can see, is
+smiling in her sleep! Ah! When you are suspended by your cravat from
+the old thorn tree, she will marry the rich son of the apothecary....
+
+“And then ... suddenly you remember! Maleine became a rose tree, and
+the slipper of glass was hidden in a bath.... Yes: it was like that.
+The device has come back to you. Hurray! Hurray! And the verses shall
+glow and sparkle. And damn the public and damn and damn the publisher,
+and Madame is a sweet, plump angel.
+
+“And you spring from your bed, oh Gringoire, but with the footfall of a
+panther for fear the creaking of the very old oak floor boards should
+awaken your own Sélysette. And quick and quick to your dressing room,
+which is on state occasions the spare bedroom. Then you wash in the
+brick-floored kitchen. And how crisp and reviving is the cold water on
+the skin--just as it used to be when you came out of the tent or the
+dugout or the hut, down before Péronne in the old days. And there is no
+war.
+
+“No war to awaken the birds that are still sleeping in the massed
+shadows of trees all unmoving in the deep mists. A noble, long,
+quiet, warm day of September is before you. A day of _moissons_ and
+_vendanges_, ripening securely, still; with line added to line in
+the morning; and nothing to do in that rich little garden of yours;
+and line added to line of the epic all the afternoon. And a stroll
+in the level, sinking rays of the sun with Madame Sélysette, like a
+mysterious _jeune fille_ once more, to sing to you, in the carefreedom
+of her heart, the song of the raggle-taggle gipsies, oh....
+
+ ‘Oh what care I for my goose-feather-bed
+  The sheets turned down so bravely oh!
+  Tonight I’ll sleep on a cold open heath
+  Along with the raggle-taggle gipsies, oh!’
+
+as she was used to sing it in the days when she left the roof of her
+father, the so very rich goldsmith of Toulouse, to take up with you, oh
+my so very poor poet. _Vogue la galère!_ I hear you say. For are there
+not fine cabbages in the garden; and the haricots and the tomatoes
+all a-ripening! And does not Madame make an incomparable _potage
+bonne femme_ with these things and a few little bones! A fig for the
+wolf! And if she cannot have her gown of velvet--when do her dark
+eyes sparkle more vivaciously than when in her black hair she wears a
+coronal of the scarlet berries of bryony? And if the _pantalons_ shine
+in the seat, let them shine till they wear through! And then there will
+be a piece of sacking to insert, whose remainder shall stuff up the
+holes of the so very old roof. And Melpomene and Mélisande and Musidore
+shall dance to the tune of green sleeves round the rose tree that was
+Maleine! Aye, they shall dance in the sun till the crystal slipper
+falls out of the bath of dew. And already Phœbus Apollo has chased into
+the farthest recesses of the Alpilles the craven old wolf....
+
+“And, fastening your collar, you rush into the room where Madame is
+asleep, and you shout out:
+
+“‘I have it! We will put Sweet Williams, and behind them Canterbury
+Bells, and behind them Hollyhocks, in the bed along the path. And
+tulips before the door!’
+
+“It is true that the Hollyhocks will then be to the south of
+the Canterbury Bells, and they again to the south of the Sweet
+Williams--the tall plants standing in the light of the short ones,
+which is against the maxims of safe gardeners. But we must chance
+something, as we chance life when we are so very poor and so very
+simple and have to adventure down the years with no stores of gold,
+under a very old roof with half the tiles off. And besides: maybe next
+summer will be a very dry summer, and then the shade of the Hollyhock
+on the Canterbury Bells, and of the Canterbury Bells on the Sweet
+Williams will be a positive benefit....
+
+“And, truly, in all the gardening year--which is all pleasure except
+for such lets and hindrances as God decrees to you in order that
+you may remember that you are human--there is no pleasure to equal
+the pleasures of a mid-September day. For there is promise in the
+chrysanthemums; the asters, petunias, and geraniums are still bright;
+marrows, pumpkins, gourds, maize, plums, apples, pears, damsons are
+drinking in the sun and turning all the colors from rich green to
+orange and tomato-scarlet. There are still flowers on the roses and on
+the sweet-pea hedge. And, if those foliages are thinning, through their
+silver and yellow haze you can see the bright mosaic of next summer’s
+beds! Ah, brave mid-September!”
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+To this Gringoire answered--a little grimly:
+
+In a mid-September twilight, the rain poured down on Pont-de-Nieppe.
+Depressed Highlanders lounged along the street in front of the row
+of villas that ran from the church to the rear of the town--taking
+our own lines as the front. One’s horse and one’s orderly’s horse
+slipped disagreeably on the wet granite setts of the pavé, and one
+seemed to have gone backwards and forwards, in a deluge over greasy
+roads for hours and hours--for a whole lifetime. One seemed never
+to have done anything else. It was a billeting job that we had been
+sent upon. And, when we had billeted everything we could think of,
+there still remained some disreputable other ranks connected with the
+divisional canteen, for whom we had not found holes, corners, and a
+shop. And the division we were relieving had apparently vanished and
+so had the Town Marshal, whilst the _Maire_ was so obliging that he
+placed the whole, empty town at our disposal. It would have helped
+us more if he had been less obliging and had dictatorially provided
+us with one shop into which to stick the canteen and its confounded
+sutlers. And it poured, and we continued to wander about the empty
+streets. And it poured--and, in the most unexpected places, the
+disreputable Acting Lance Corporal in charge of Divisional Canteen
+would bob up, touch his cap like a London cab-runner and exclaim,
+always in three breaths: “Xcusemesir; may-I-speak-to-you-sir;
+have-you-found-a-billet-for-the-Divisional-Canteen-sir?” He was a
+most annoying person, a London music hall “turn” in peace time. He
+occupied his leisure moments behind the Canteen Counter in writing
+“sketches” for London Halls, like the Hoxton Empire, at fifty pounds a
+time. Sometimes he would appear alone or would emerge alone from the
+chalk-rubbish and festoons of wallpaper of an empty shop. Sometimes he
+would have behind him a disreputable French country cart loaded with
+sardine tins, sticks of shaving soap, cigarette packets, cratesful of
+wet dates, writing tablets--God knows what. And the horse--or it may
+have been a mule--seemed to be a hundred years old. And rain dripped
+from its ears. And rain poured on the disagreeable objects in the tilt
+cart and on the three impossible Tommies who went with it. And they
+would have backgrounds of black, wet houses, without roofs, but with
+lace window curtains dripping in all the empty window spaces; and wet,
+smashed chairs and commodes and wardrobes hung drunkenly over holes
+in the floors of houses that had no front walls. And it poured. And
+twilight deepened.
+
+Then a battalion came in along the Bailleul road; a poor, smashed
+battalion, with men limping and men under whose tin hats there gleamed
+white bandages, very conspicuous in the rain and the mud and the dark,
+wet khaki. And a battalion looks grim indeed when it has been hammered
+by artillery, on a Macadam road without chance of retaliation--owing
+to a blunder of a staff officer. They had, I think, 160 men killed in
+one company--pretty well the whole strength as battalions were in those
+days. I don’t like to think of it, much.
+
+And yet, such is poor human nature, that both I and my companion
+said, “Thank God!”--as we had never said, “Thank God” in our lives
+before. At least I know that I said “Thank God” as I had never in my
+life said it before--and as I never shall again. For it wasn’t our
+battalion that had been smashed by direct shell-fire on the Macadam
+road--Loire--Dranoutre--Neuve Eglise--Plugstreet--Nieppe. Imagine
+such a route--in full view of the Hun trenches! Why, riding that
+way the day before, to prospect next day’s billets, I and another
+officer had had three shells directed to us alone by the German
+artillery--between Dranoutre and Neuve Eglise! So imagine what it
+would be for a battalion. And we had seen orders which said that _our_
+people were to leave Loire at such and such an hour and to march by
+Companies--presumably in column of route!--in the Dranoutre-Neuve
+Eglise-Plugstreet road! And the Divisional Transport Officer had told
+us early in the afternoon that, as we had _known_ would be the case,
+our battalion had been hammered to pieces. A whole Company had been
+wiped out on that road--marching in column of route.[10] “A” Company,
+he had said, our own company!
+
+Half the time during the afternoon, the other officer and
+myself--soaked to the skin and pestered by the farcical Lance-Corporal
+in Charge of Canteens--who, poor devil, was only doing his duty--had
+said, from horse to horse: “I wonder if Johnny A-- has gone west! I
+wonder if Fred B-- has copped it!...” It is horrible, that!
+
+And then, in the rain, under the castle wall, we heard from a very
+bleeding man of the other Battalion that our own people, after all
+those of the W-- Regiment had been murdered, had been diverted from the
+Dranoutre-Neuve Eglise road to the Locre-Bailleul-Armentières highway,
+which was, in those days, as safe as a church.
+
+So we two, watching the men of the other Battalion march resentfully
+by, could say “Thank God” to ourselves.
+
+Relief, naturally, manifested itself in the two of us, according to our
+separate temperaments. My friend--he was an Irish Nationalist, almost
+a Sinn Feiner--said:
+
+“G ..., old dear. You’re Division. I’m only Battalion. The canteen is
+your job. I think I’ll get to my digs.” He added, a bit bashfully, that
+in his digs there was a French girl who was going to give him lessons
+in her difficult tongue. I said, “All right. ’Op it.” [I remembered
+saying ‘’Op it!’ in an intense weariness.] But, as I turned my tired
+old horse once more down the road to find a billet for that accursed
+corporal of Divisional Canteen, I was, I remember, thinking innumerable
+things, all at once.
+
+Firstly: my shirtcuffs were very frayed, and the rain had made them
+more diabolically wet and cold than you can imagine. Then I was
+actually bothering about the wretched staff officer who had murdered
+all those men. I was worried about him. You see, it would be such
+a trifling thing to do--as easy as forgetting--as every human soul
+has done in its day--to post a letter. He would have an ordnance map
+and a pencil. The map would show the contours, but probably it would
+not show the German trenches or the German artillery emplacements.
+He would rule a pencil line from Locre to Armentières, he would see
+that the Dranoutre-Neuve Eglise road was nearly level, running
+indeed along the flat at the edge of Flanders. On the other hand the
+Locre-Bailleul-Armentières road went up steeply from the Belgian
+frontier to Bailleul--a road in the dusty sunlight, the rough
+unshaded country, between tobacco and grain fields. And it was 1500
+yards longer. So, in the kindness of his heart, he had saved the
+men the extra distance, the shadelessness, and the dust of a road
+over the foothills bordering Flanders. He had forgotten the Hun
+artillery--_just_ as you or I might forget to post a letter!
+
+And, as I rode past the workmen’s villas, for the hundredth time, I
+was imagining that poor Acting Assistant Brigade Major, with his pink
+cheeks and his red hat, being strafed to hell by our frightful General
+of Division. He might almost cry!... But I daresay it wasn’t at all
+like that, really.
+
+Anyhow, I was being dreadfully sorry for him. At the same time, I was
+trying--if I may use a professional novelist’s word--to psychologize
+the German gunner. He wouldn’t believe his luck. He _couldn’t_
+believe his luck. He would believe it was some accursed scheme of the
+diabolically cunning English to discover his position. There, through
+his telescope, he would see a solid cube of wet-brown, moving slowly
+along a perfectly visible road. He would see it with his naked eye--a
+cubical caterpillar as large as a whole range of farm buildings. It
+would be incredible to him. No doubt he would ring up his immediate
+superior, and they would confer over the telephone. He would tremble
+for his battery. The English were no doubt drawing some sort of
+canvas wind-screen, camouflaged to look like a company, along that
+Macadam road. They would be trying to draw his fire so as to discover
+his position. Then they would blow his battery to hell with new,
+unimaginable High Explosive Shells, or mines, or anything. So he would
+fire--and see 160 men killed. “Drum fire,” I think the Germans called
+it. The complete Company would be wiped out--a mark such as a German
+gunner would hardly dare to pray for in his dreams. And nothing would
+happen to him. Nothing. He would wait. But nothing!
+
+Then he would thank the Creator....
+
+I don’t know really what happened to me then. I have said that that
+deluge of a twilight seemed to last a thousand years. I was wrong: it
+seemed to last two thousand years. I remember meeting the Divisional
+Transport Officer out in an immense expanse of mud near an incredibly
+dirty farmhouse--in a sea of brown liquid that was supposed to
+be the Station Road. And I know that the field stank. It smelled
+unimaginably--though I don’t know why a field should smell. I can still
+smell it.
+
+The Transport Officer said that that was the field allotted to him by
+Division. He said to hell with the lake of mud. _He_ was going to put
+the Transport on the Bailleul-Steenewerck road. He gave the number on
+the map, “R. 14,” I think it was. I said I should take the field for
+the Divisional Canteen. There were, scattered--possibly floating--about
+it some Connaught huts that resembled Noah’s Arks adrift in a sewage
+farm. The Transport Officer said all right. I fancy he was not
+interested in the Divisional Canteen.
+
+As we rode slowly, again past the workers’ villas, the Lance-Corporal
+in Charge of Divisional Canteen again waylaid me, springing up
+apparently out of the mud. He said: “Xcusemesir, may I speak to you,
+sir ... I’ve fahnd a ’ouse be’ind the Ch’ch for the D’vish’n’l C’nteen.”
+
+I think I went mad at that point, and the Transport Officer rode slowly
+away. I don’t remember what I said to the Lance-Corporal. I hope I
+never shall.
+
+The trouble was that, in that town, there was a danger zone. For the
+last four days, the Germans had been shelling the church. From 6:00
+P.M. until midnight, in their methodical manner, every quarter of an
+hour they had dropped a 5–9 shell into the sacred edifice. The danger
+zone was therefore perfectly circumscribed and perfectly definite.
+But, unfortunately for me, though I had been warned that there _was_
+an official danger zone, no one that I met knew where it was. The
+town marshal had gone; the Divisional Police who were already working
+typewriters in his office were our Divisional Police, not those of the
+Division that had gone too. They knew nothing about the dangerous area.
+And some Australian humorist had removed all the cautionary boards that
+should have surrounded the church and had grouped them round a large
+iron public convenience which was the chief architectural adornment of
+the main street. There they looked alarming but improbable.
+
+It was therefore not to be thought of that the L. C. and his men should
+remain in a house just under the shadow of the church--for it was plain
+that, however big or however circumscribed the official danger zone
+might be, what the Huns were shelling was the church. We had been
+in the church in the course of the afternoon. It was a commonplace
+building, as far as I can remember, Byzantine of an eighteenth century
+type. But it was, in a way, rendered gracious by the enormous heaps of
+plaster and stone-dust that piled against the walls in drifts, so that
+it was as if sand dunes had invaded the roofless edifice. And, in the
+course of the dusk, shells had landed in all that rubble, constantly,
+no doubt regularly, whilst we were pursued by the L. C. round the
+church square, in the rain that had begun to fall just as the Huns
+began to shell....
+
+I daresay the reader will by now be tired of the Lance-Corporal in
+Charge of Canteens. I know _I_ was. And I am uncertain what became of
+him. I daresay I could remember if I made an effort--but it hardly
+seems worth while. I know that four days later he was safely writing
+a music-hall sketch, in a tent, under a counter made of soap boxes,
+in a field just beyond the turning where the Plugstreet road leaves
+the chaussée from Bailleul to Nieppe; and I know that next night I got
+out of my flea-bag at about 2:00 A.M. and wearily walked for miles
+and miles in search of him and his sardine tins. The Huns had started
+regularly bombarding the town at that inconsiderate hour, and I know
+too that, when I did find him, by chance, wandering about with his
+disreputable cart and his four disreputable men, he said that a shell
+had gone clean through the upper story of the shop that they had
+commandeered. So I suppose that that night he had slept in the town. I
+can’t remember.
+
+I can remember interviewing the _Maire_ a second time and that, because
+he was busy with some French staff officers, I had to wait some
+minutes--in a dentist’s waiting-room, with aspidistras, black walnut
+furniture, and innumerable copies of the illustrated paper called
+_Excelsior_ on the lace table-cover. For the _Maire_ was a dentist.
+He was also a brave man. I can remember, too, being in a shop just
+under the church where a young, stout Belgian Jewess was standing
+waist deep in remnants and rags of black satin. She was nonchalantly
+packing this away in sacks whilst I tried to make sense out of her
+middle-aged, frightened father. I think I was telling him that seven
+francs a day was too much to expect the Division to pay for the rent
+of a rag and bone shop. Something hit the roof at that moment and an
+avalanche of bones, old iron, and satin petticoats poured down the
+stairs from the upper floors. The father disappeared, exclaiming “Oi!
+Oi!” and elevating his hands above his bared head. But the daughter,
+with a large face, chalk-white with powder, heavy blue-black hair,
+and an opulent inscrutability--she had on her large white fingers a
+great collection of fat-looking wedding rings--went on nonchalantly
+examining black satin petticoats, rejecting some, folding others
+slowly, and packing them away in sacks. She seemed to regard the thing
+that had passed through the upper story with enigmatic indifference,
+as if shells and iron hail were just part of the silly vanity of the
+male sex. Her business was to pack up for transport on a barrow to
+Armentières all the black satin that she and her father had collected
+and that had once belonged to the inhabitants of the empty town.
+
+That attitude seemed to be common enough in the women of those parts. I
+remember looking, five minutes later, through the bull’s-eye glass of a
+cottage window so low that you would say every shell must pass over it.
+The interior was candle-lit and quite tranquil.
+
+At trestle tables, gesticulating although they had their elbows on
+the boards, sat eight Tommies of the battalion whose entry we had
+witnessed. Five had bandages, and three had not. Between their elbows
+they had tinplatesful of fish and chips. And there were two women,
+standing. One, middle-aged and stout, had her hands on her hips, and
+her elbows back. Her blouse was well open at the neck, as if it had
+been hot work cooking the fish and chips. She stood against a trestle
+table and seemed to be giving back-chat to all the eight Tommies at
+once. The other was a young girl--of the Flemish Madonna type. Her
+yellow hair was tightly braided round her head; she leaned back against
+the mildew-stained wall, and on her bare, crossed arms she had a tabby
+kitten. It was biting her finger, and she stood entirely quiet, as if
+on her hands she had all the safety and all the time in the world.
+
+I daresay it was safe enough for the moment. But, some days later, I
+noticed that there was no cottage there. There was not even a lace
+curtain.
+
+I walked along--for I had got rid of my tired horse--a long way, under
+the dripping trees that were black above the wall of the château, and
+out onto the Bailleul road, a long way beyond the Plugstreet turning,
+I persuaded myself that I was going to ask the Divisional Transport
+Officer to house my friends of the Canteen in tents in his field.
+
+I found him in the W---- lines. They were eating Welsh rabbit and
+herrings in a Connaught hut. They were not pleased to see me. There was
+an old Quartermaster from Stratford-on-Avon--a butcher by profession,
+think of that!--who sat with his hands crossed over a large stomach and
+spectacles well down on his nose. Also he wore carpet slippers. He told
+me in a most businesslike way that they had only herrings enough for
+three. I was welcome to any amount of Welsh rabbit--but there were only
+herrings enough for three. And they were three already.
+
+Then I realized that what I was really concerned about was to see my
+own Battalion come in. It was symptomatic. My friend the Sinn Feiner
+had been perfectly content, as soon as he had seen the W----’s come in
+and knew that our own people had been diverted, to go and take lessons
+in the language of the country from the French young lady whom he had
+unearthed. But, as for me, I wanted to _see_ the Battalion. I had no
+particular reason to love the C.O. or the Sergeant Major. But I wanted
+to be absolutely _sure_ that they were safe.
+
+And, just as I got back to the crossroads near the church, the
+Battalion came in. There was the C.O. riding, the Sergeant Major
+walking ahead of him. And then “A” Company. I called out to Captain
+Gardiner, after I had saluted the Colonel: “A Company all right?” And
+the young man answered: “Cheerie Oh, old bird, as right as rain.” The
+last dregs of light were fading under the elms; the Huns were putting
+in some extraordinarily heavy stuff just behind them. And suddenly I
+remembered that I had not billeted myself. God knows whom we hadn’t
+billeted, the Sinn Feiner and I between us. Certainly three sets of
+battalion headquarters, transport, officers’ messes, sanitary squads,
+and the men of a whole brigade. But I had nowhere to lay my head. And
+my frayed shirt-cuffs were streaming with rain and it had grown pitch
+dark....
+
+You say I am a poet. Certainly I am a poet!
+
+And these eyes of mine that, when I have any leisure, see always not
+only the things that surround me, but many other things--these eyes of
+mine were busy. Certainly they saw what, in the darkness, was visible
+of the wet and stricken town. Against the sky the roof lines or the
+silhouettes of charred beams; the red glow of the candles in the
+fried-fish cottage; the red glow that slowly danced inside the church
+as if a black mass were going forward. I suppose the last shell had set
+fire to some woodwork. Then another came and put it out, so that it was
+darker.
+
+But these eyes of mine that, with their attention, were looking at a
+bright landscape, had also registered in their memory a white, as if
+triangular patch, in a dark window of a house just behind the church,
+nearly opposite, but a little this side of the _Mairie_, a house that
+we had passed again and again. The eyes had noted that white luminosity
+and now made for it, though the thinking mind was differently intent.
+This sort of definition is a little difficult to make. Try to
+follow me. The department of my eyes that led me--the Intelligence
+Department--saw the roofs and the black streets; the department which
+was influenced by my desires--for a meal, for warmth, for a bed, and
+above all for dry shirt-cuffs--was leading my steps toward the house
+that had the pale luminosity in the dark window. And, what I suppose
+you would call my mind’s eye was occupied by a bright landscape. That
+is to say, I was definitely thinking about an August landscape.
+
+You will say that it was the landscape I have mentioned so often--the
+landscape with the stream and the trees and the gingerbread cottage.
+But it wasn’t. That came later. I suppose that at that time I wasn’t
+tired enough to see it. Besides, I never saw that as if in bright
+sunshine or in the weather of any accentuated season--but always as
+just English country in just English weather, green earth in a diffused
+light under a July sky.... No, I was thinking of a billeting scheme.
+For, in the long ago--thousands and thousands of years ago--we used to
+do billeting schemes, round Manorbier and Penhally. And I think the one
+I was then thinking of with--as the prose writers say--laughter mixed
+with rain, took place at Penhally. It appeared an idealized Penhally,
+mostly hollyhocks and thatch, so wilful is the mind, though I remember
+every house of Penhally! Well: a great many of us went in the August
+weather to work a billeting scheme there. And an officer representing
+Division drove up in a Rolls-Royce and pretended to “confer” with
+us. He had a red hat-band and a golden lion and the beautifullest
+moustaches and the beautifullest white whip-cord breeches and _such_
+spurs! And such ladies in the Rolls-Royce, awaited him!
+
+And he gave us the loveliest hints in a clear voice, with the far-away
+expression of one who knows his job but lectures in it too often.
+Certainly he knew his job--and he was a fine fellow!
+
+We were to get hold of the civil power at once, or at least as soon as
+we had conferred with the divisional billeting officer. The first thing
+to do was to find out about the water supply. Then we were to group
+our companies round the pump if we could. If there were only one, we
+were to call a conference of Company Quartermaster Sergeants and give
+out the time when each Company was to draw water. That would then go
+into Battalion Orders. He said, with a little smile, that we were to
+remember to put Battalion Headquarters into the best billet--because
+C.O.’s liked that--and Company messes must be lodged in public houses
+or places where there was liquor. So that the men shouldn’t get at the
+alcohol! Transport should, as a rule, be as far from fire as could be
+arranged, to avoid stampeding of horses; similarly with the Doctor’s
+cart and the Battalion cookers. And, as a rule, the Company detailed
+for the Advance Guard next day should have the advanced billets if
+there were no likelihood of a night attack. But they should not be
+exposed to disturbance in the night, if possible, because they would
+have a hard time next day. Similarly the Advanced Guard of that day
+should be halted first and be in the rear, so as to get a good night’s
+rest. He told us to remember those splendid words which used to be the
+shibboleth of every British officer--to the effect that the comfort and
+convenience of the men should be considered before every exigency save
+the necessities of actual warfare.
+
+Yes: he was a fine young fellow--one of the Old Contemptibles, as he
+modestly, clearly, and rather absentmindedly, enunciated all that
+sound, commonsensible, old-fashioned lore of the Army. And I remember
+every word of it. For instance, men of separate units or even of
+separate Companies of the same Battalion should not be billeted on
+opposite sides of the same street; the street should be divided in
+half, and one-half allotted to each Company or unit. (I remember
+pointing that out to my Sinn Fein friend in one of the miserable,
+battered streets of workmen’s hovels in Pont-de-Nieppe that afternoon.)
+
+But, though I had listened with all my ears to the Staff Officer at
+Penhally, my eyes, even then had been playing the trick of showing me
+Pont-de-Nieppe--just as at Nieppe in France they insisted on showing me
+Penhally in Wales. For, whilst I listened to him, I was seeing the time
+when I should represent Division and be, in the sunlight, young, with
+a beautiful moustache and a red hat-band and white whip-cord breeches,
+very full. And with _such_ spurs!
+
+So there I was, representing Division.
+
+It hadn’t been very like what I had pictured--and I had not had to
+bother about water supply.[11] I had enough water in the wretched,
+frayed wristbands of my shirt, as it seemed, to water a whole Battalion
+and the mules of the Transport! But, otherwise, the traditions of the
+Old Army had prevailed. Rudimentarily, no doubt, but still, they had
+prevailed. I had reminded the Battalion Billeting Officers to see
+that Battalion Headquarters had convenient buildings, that officers
+had charge of any civilian liquor depots; that Company cooker-cars
+had emplacements convenient for their men, and that latrines were not
+located near water supplies. Also, we had got into touch with the
+civil power.... Only, there were no ladies in my Rolls-Royce--and my
+Rolls-Royce was two very wet-kneed legs! And as for my shirt-cuffs ...
+
+I suppose they were most in my mind. For it is the most horrible of
+human afflictions to have wet shirtcuffs! So that, when I found my
+orderly, not where I had told him to be--in comparative safety in front
+of the workmen’s villas but in the shadow of the door of the shop where
+the Jewess had packed up the black satin petticoats, waiting devotedly,
+though the shells that missed the church went close overhead--he said:
+
+“She’s took all them petticoats on a barrer in sacks to
+Armentières,”[12] I answered:
+
+“You can fall out. Tell my batman that I’ve gone somewhere to get my
+d--d shirt-cuffs dried.”
+
+Nevertheless, he followed me. It was, you see, the pride of _métier_.
+Alas, that there should be no English for those words. He was my
+orderly for the day--just any orderly from headquarters. But I was his
+charge. If I had ordered him to fall out, no doubt he would have gone,
+against his personal will but in obedience to orders, to some sort of
+comfort that his pals would have prepared for him. I, however, had
+said, “You _can_ fall out.” It was permissive and left the falling out
+optional. But he saw before him an obviously eccentric and probably
+benevolent officer--and it was his job to be able to tell my batman
+where I lodged myself. Also, it was contrary to King’s Regulations for
+officers to go anywhere alone where there is any danger at all from
+shell or other fire. So, though he must have been uncommonly wet and
+hungry and tired, he followed me to the door of the house in whose dark
+windows I had seen the luminous patch--the forehead of Rosalie Prudent
+as she sat sewing, her head bent forward, in the twilight.
+
+I don’t know how it is: but from the moment when I first saw that
+highlight--and it had been certainly three hours before--I had been
+perfectly sure that that was what it was--the forehead of a quiet woman
+bending her head forward to have more light from the high window whilst
+she sewed in the dusk. In a way it was not what one expected: the town
+had been evacuated of its civilian population the Sunday before, when
+the Huns--as it seemed, for the love of God--started shelling the
+church just as it had emptied after benediction. And they had shelled
+from six o’clock till midnight; and every night since then, from six
+o’clock till midnight they had shelled the church. And they were
+shelling it now--eighty yards away. It was a desolate, and it seemed
+a stupid business. But no doubt they had their purpose, though it was
+difficult to see what it was.
+
+That was how Rosalie Prudent put it, as she sat sewing my wristbands
+by the stove, in the wash-house. I sat nearer the stove, naked to
+the waist, the red glow and the warmth that came from the red-hot
+iron of the circular furnace being, I can tell you, very agreeable to
+my shivering skin. Opposite me sat the orderly drinking a bottle of
+Burgundy--which he had richly deserved. The steam went up from his wet
+clothes and was tinged red by the light of the coke....
+
+In the extremely clean _salle-à-manger_, with a high faïence stove of
+blue and white tiles, a colza lamp with a white globe, a buffet in
+the Nouvel Art style, of yellow Austrian oak with brass insertions;
+at a yellow oak table covered with a green velvet table-cover fringed
+with lace, sat my friend the Sinn Feiner learning the French that is
+spoken in Plugstreet from the niece, Beatrice Prudent. She was teaching
+him French by selling him handkerchiefs edged with lace in whose
+corners she had embroidered multicolored initials. In two very clean,
+lavender-papered bedrooms, upstairs, with white bedsteads, strips
+of carpet beside them on the waxed floors, with valises opened and
+showing works of devotion, altar vases, empty biscuit tins containing
+unconsecrated wafers of the sacrament, trench boots, gas helmets, tin
+hats--sat two padres composing their sermons for the next day. The
+Roman Catholic--for I heard him preach on it next day--was meditating
+on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. I don’t know what the
+Presbyterian was writing about.
+
+But there the house was, large, quiet but for the shells, kept
+spotless by the labors of Rosalie and her niece Beatrice, and, as yet
+untouched--just as it had been evacuated by the factory manager and
+his family, who had fled on the Sunday after benediction. In one of
+the roomy, very tall parlors there was, over the fireplace, a gigantic
+figure of the Saviour, standing in robes of blue, white, and scarlet
+plaster of paris, holding on his left arm a great sheaf of white lilies
+and resting one hand on the head of a very thin plaster sheep of, I
+should think, a Rhineland breed. That was perhaps why the owner of the
+house had not trusted to its miraculous intervention in favor of his
+dwelling. He might have--for I heard the other day that the house
+remained intact until the 11/11/’18.
+
+Rosalie profited--for, when the French inhabitants fled, the British
+authorities allowed Belgian refugees to take their places on condition
+that they billeted the troops. So perhaps it had been to protect her
+that the immense Bon Dieu waited! She deserved it.
+
+She came from Plugstreet, of which town she had been one of the richest
+bourgeoises, her husband being the miller. She had had a large, roomy
+house, a great yard with stables and carts; she had had a wealthy,
+goodish, but possibly too jovial husband, two affectionate, dutiful,
+and industrious sons, and two obedient daughters. On Sundays she
+had gone to mass wearing a black satin gown, and, on her breast, a
+gold-framed cameo as large as a saucer. It represented a very classical
+Paris, seated, I don’t know why, apparently between the horns of a lyre
+and stretching out one hand--which no doubt contained the apple--toward
+three grouped Goddesses in rather respectable Flemish _déshabille_.
+Mme. Prudent retained this work of art, but her wardrobe was reduced to
+two blue cotton dresses.
+
+I gathered all this, whilst I dozed by the black iron stove, from her
+conversation with the orderly. She spoke Flemish, and he, Wiltshire,
+but they understood each other. Of course, they used signs and facial
+expressions. The flames through the interstices of the stove poured
+upward to the dim rafters of the wash-house roof, and, by its light,
+Mme. Rosalie sewed as if she had no other pride and no other purpose
+in the world. For she told of the fate of her men and her womenfolk
+abstractedly and passionlessly; pride only showed itself when she
+talked of the state of the house in which she had found a refuge.
+From time to time she would say that if Mm. the Proprietors returned,
+they would find the floors waxed; the stair-rods shining, the windows
+polished; woodruff and sweet herbs amongst the bed linen in the
+presses, and not a speck of dust on the plaster-robes of the great Bon
+Dieu in the _salon de réception_. That was her pride....
+
+As for the rest ... On the 18th of August, 1914, her man had been
+killed in the Belgian Reserve somewhere near Liège; on the 20th of the
+same month her eldest son had been killed in the Belgian regiment of
+the Guides. He had expected to have an excellent career in the office
+of an _avocat_--in Brûges, I think. On the 8th of November, 1914, her
+remaining son had been killed in the 76th French Regiment of Infantry
+of the Line. He had been chief clerk to an architect of Paris. Her
+daughters had been, one apprentice and the other chief saleswoman of a
+celebrated _couturière_ of Liège. She had heard of them once since the
+Germans had entered the city. A Belgian priest had written to her from
+the Isle of Wight in December, 1914, to say that some nuns had taken in
+Aimée and Félicité. Those were the names of her two daughters....
+
+And at the moment she started up. She remembered that she had forgotten
+the potatoes for Monsieur--Monsieur being myself. So out she went into
+the black garden and returned with a tin platter of potatoes.
+
+On it were ten tubers of which she weighed each in her hand inscribing
+what they came to on a slate--so that she might account to Messieurs
+the owners, on their return, for the potatoes that she had dug from
+the garden. Then she called her niece from the dining room to wash and
+slice the potatoes. She was going to give me an omelette with bacon and
+fried potatoes for my supper. She sat down again and went on, sewing
+and talking to the orderly.
+
+She began talking of the interior of her house in Plugstreet; she
+described minutely all the furniture in all the apartments. In each
+of the bedrooms there was a night commode in mahogany and a statue of
+the Virgin, also one of the Blessed Saints, and a _prie-dieu_, also
+in mahogany.... And now there was nothing. Every fortnight she was
+permitted by the British military police to visit her house--and she
+stayed there, in Nieppe, so that every fortnight she might revisit her
+house--which now, she said, contained nothing. The shells were shaking
+it to pieces. The tiles were all gone; the rain was soaking into the
+upper floors. The furniture was all gone--the great presses with her
+linen, the wardrobes--_en acajou_--which had contained her black satin
+dress and her husband’s Sunday clothes....
+
+But she continued to catalogue to the orderly the contents of her
+residence. I don’t know why it should interest him, but it did; for he
+nodded sagely when she talked of the _bahûts en bois de chêne_, and the
+immortels in vases on the piano....
+
+Suddenly she turned her head to me and said to me, where I sat writing
+with my tablet on my knee:
+
+“And I ask you, _M. l’officier_, for what purpose is it that one brings
+men children into the world if this is to be the end? They cause great
+pain in their entry, greater than at the entry of little girl children.
+It is difficult to keep them alive so that they reach men’s estate. And
+then it is difficult to keep them in the paths of virtue. And then they
+are gone.”
+
+
+[Footnotes]
+
+[10] This would mean that the Company presented, as a target to the
+German artillery, a solid and slow-moving cube of human flesh 240 ft. x
+8 ft. x 6 ft. _No_ gunner could miss it.
+
+[11] It is odd to think that Nieppe at that date was still supplied
+with electric power by underground cables that the Huns had not yet
+discovered, from Lille.
+
+[12] His name was Private Partridge of, I think, the 6th Wilts.--a fine
+fellow, but not to be confused with Private Phillips of the 9th Welsh,
+who was my wonderfully good batman: (Note by Gringoire).
+
+
+
+
+                                  XII
+
+                            _The Movies_[13]
+
+
+I was a little bewildered when Mme. Prudent so addressed me. For, to
+tell the truth, I had not been listening to her very attentively. She
+seemed to accept the war--this war, states of war, any operations
+that washed and disintegrated the interiors of the world--she seemed
+to accept them so tacitly as being part of the child’s madness of the
+male that, in the warmth I had just dozed, not thinking much of her
+immense losses and not knowing at all that she would have anything very
+striking to say about the war. Besides, it was unusual to be beside a
+stove, under a roof.
+
+And, when she had come in with the potatoes, out of the darkness, I
+had suddenly seen again that vision in green--of the sanctuary! And
+I remembered, extraordinarily, how once, years and years and years
+before, I had gone digging potatoes at night. I suppose some visitor
+had come to my cottage late. And I had put my hand into the ground to
+take out a potato, and I found the earth quite warm. The air cools
+off quicker than the sod, you see, after a hot day. It had astonished
+me then--and, in that house, the remembrance came again, vivid and
+astonishing, for it had produced exactly the effect of one’s having
+thrust one’s hand into the breast of a woman....
+
+Well, I had been thinking of that and looking at that green landscape.
+And then, suddenly, I had pulled myself together. For it had occurred
+to me that I was not doing my duty. I had it in my head that I had got
+that soft, wet undangerous job of billeting, at the request of the
+bearded gentleman in the frock coat, who had sat under the picture by
+Bastien Lepage--or was it by Marie Bashkirtseff?--in front of the great
+table with the carnations and the miniature _Niké_. I daresay it was
+not the fact: or it may have been. There is no knowing. In France you
+were taken up, like a brown paper parcel, and deposited here or there
+at the behest of two obscure lines of smudged typewriting in some one’s
+Orders. And you did not know why; you had no will.
+
+So I felt that I ought to be writing. It would not be fair to have a
+soft job for the purpose of wooing the Muse and then not to woo her. So
+I had pulled out from my wet tunic which hung over the chair back, my
+disreputable and sodden tablet of writing paper, which I had purchased
+two days before from that miserable Canteen Lance-Corporal and had
+begun, with a wet stump of pencil, to write the article called “_Une
+Partie de Cricket_” which, if only because it is a souvenir, I hope
+will be printed as an appendix to these remembrances. I know I wrote
+the first ten sentences, because I remember them and also because, the
+other day, I turned out the repulsive flap of my camp bed, and there,
+along with a damp sock and some mildewed straps, was the mouldering
+tablet with three scrawled pages....
+
+But I couldn’t keep on writing. I was obsessed with the idea of a
+country, _patrie_, republic, body politic, call it what you will--that
+the recollection of that minister had called up in me. Yes: I had a
+vision of a country.
+
+In the center was the Ministry--like the heart of an onion--and all
+the others that I had seen in the last week went round about it. Mind
+you, I have nothing to say against that Minister. I may have appeared
+to speak of him sardonically: that is a habit I have. But he, or
+something like him, was indispensable to the higher strategy of his
+nation:[14] and this man knew his job. What he wanted was perfectly
+the right thing: and if he did not know that the First Line Transport
+of a Battalion in the trenches was not exactly the happiest place in
+which to write lofty prose--well, it is certainly hypocrisy to seek,
+in the heart of the Sacred Emperor, for a knowledge of low tea-shops.
+He did not, obviously, like me but I have not the slightest doubt
+that I appeared drunk to him. Only a drunkard, really, would seek for
+ferrets in the palace of the Sacred Emperor. Yet I had my excuse. First
+of everything in the world--of everything in the whole world!--comes
+your battalion. And the ferrets of my battalion had all died suddenly;
+and the last thing they had said to me had been: Don’t forget to get
+us some ferrets. If you had seen the rats of Locre you would have
+understood.
+
+But the Minister had not seen the rats of Locre so he had not
+understood....
+
+No: he was a good man, in the right place. And very properly he sat
+amongst the gracious products of a State art--the pictures, the
+tapestries, the ormolu, the august building, the frescoes, the great
+staircases. And attendants who looked like bishops must be there
+to answer his bell; and Suisses with their great cocked hats and
+immense white gloves and their sabres with silver scabbards. There
+must be symbols of the Temporal Power of the State, which is august,
+ancient, and fit to be upheld. And, in disturbed times, there must
+be Civil Police in the courtyard, for strange visitors will come.
+And sentries there must be in the tricolored sentry-boxes beside the
+_porte-cochère_; sentries to call out the guard. And famous battalions
+must pass the door, along the boulevard, now and again.
+
+And, round the Palace of the Sacred Emperor, there must be the Great
+City, and round the Great City must be La Grande Nation--stretching
+away and away, for miles and miles and miles....
+
+It presented itself to me as twenty-seven hours of railway
+journey--past Etaples where I had spent, years before, long days in
+_châlets_ amongst the pine wood; past Calais where my grandfather
+was born; to Hazebrouck where, during the war, we had found the
+worst billiard table in the world and where, whilst we waited for a
+connection, a German plane was dropping bombs on the goods line and
+Cochin-Chinese in furred silk hoods were working as plate-layers. And
+so to Steenewerck, where the great farm carts and tilburies and berlins
+were mixed up with artillery horses, with timber wagons, with immense
+guns.
+
+And so the land stretched out to Nieppe and the wash-house and Rosalie
+Prudent sewing in the light of the circular cast-iron stove that had
+become red hot. And on the stove there were bubbling the pots which
+contained supper for me and coffee for my friend the Sinn Feiner. And
+whilst Rosalie sewed, ever and again, the pots lifted themselves an
+inch off the dully red-hot disk and then sat down again. Shells, you
+see, were falling in the church.
+
+So the land stretched out--yes, like a gramophone disk!--till it came
+to the wash-house that was intact amidst all the smashed houses with
+their forlorn lace window curtains. And all that edge of the disk was
+smashed houses inhabited by steadfast souls who sat sewing whilst the
+pots jumped on the hobs. They were the caretakers of _Messieurs les
+Propriétaires_ who had fled. There was a whole population of them:
+I came myself across a whole population of these quiet people, who
+considered only their duties to absent proprietors amongst the _rain_
+of shells. I remember when I went to have lunch with the officers of
+our 2nd Battalion--all dead, the officers that I had lunch with!--in
+Albert, there sat and read the _Libre Parole_, such a very old
+caretaker. He had gray side-whiskers, a white apron, a yellow and black
+striped waistcoat, a square black alpaca cap or _bêret_--for all the
+world like an old domestic of a Paris nobleman’s hotel. He sat there,
+his legs crossed, his head thrown back, reading the paper, through
+silver-rimmed spectacles at the end of his nose. On the table beside
+him were a bullfinch in a gilt cage constructed like a pagoda and his
+black leather spectacle case. He had nothing to communicate about the
+war, except, I am glad to say, that the officers of the battalion were
+careful of the furniture, but he was so busy that he could not keep
+the floors as cleanly waxed as he desired. He asked me if I could not
+speak to Colonel Partridge about it. The Germans were putting in their
+usual lunch-time shells into that street; he was sitting reading in a
+glass-roofed passage between the kitchen and the _salle à manger_....
+
+Yes: a host of such people came into my mind as I sat beside the stove.
+I am not going to talk about the war any more. By the grace of God,
+I will never talk about the war again whilst I live. As you say: the
+people who did not take part hate to be reminded of that part; and the
+people who did take part have had enough of it. Yes; you are right.
+I made the mistake of my life, professionally, _quand je m’en allais
+en guerre_. It got me disliked by the critics, and it is bad to be
+disliked by the critics--for a poet.[15] So you see, I too have my
+prudences.
+
+And indeed I have my prudences--though they are not the prudences of
+other people. I do not desire money, glory, the praise of my kind
+whom I distrust, nor yet to dominate humanity, which is a beast that
+I dislike. I do not desire friends; I do not desire broad lands. So,
+thinking about things in the wash-house of Mme. Rosalie, I said: “I
+must dig myself in.” I said, indeed, twice: “I must dig myself in....”
+
+I must have a dugout, as proof as possible against the shells launched
+against me by blind and august destiny; round about it there must be
+the strong barbed wire of solitude and, within the entanglements,
+space for a kitchen garden. Do you remember, Mr. Compiler, the redoubt
+our regiment made once--Montgomery’s Folly? There was the redoubt, a
+circular piece of engineering. Round about it there was a level space
+of fifty yards, to give a field of fire, surrounded by the apron of
+wire. And, in that level space, you remember, we made the Regimental
+Gardens.... Well, in the wash-house, I said to myself that, _appry la
+gair finny_, I must make for myself, in space and time, an affair like
+that, or as like it as possible. If I could afford a cottage, I would
+have a cottage: if not, any sort of shelter made of old tins filled
+with clay with a bit of corrugated iron for a roof, a door of sacking,
+a groundsheet for carpet. As for furniture, aren’t there bully-beef
+cases still?... _You_ remember!
+
+Lord! the interiors we have constructed out of such materials and the
+fun we had. And how they vanished like a drift of leaves when we were
+drafted away. And how solid they seemed and work we did in them whilst
+they lasted, those interiors! So, I said to myself, in Mme. Rosalie’s
+wash-house, I shall get along somehow. And then, said I to myself:
+There is the question of food.
+
+Well, there is gardening! As you know, I am not _le dernier venu_ when
+it comes to gardening. I will back myself to get twice as much off any
+given piece of ground as any ordinary man--if you will give me some
+seeds and a bit of old iron and a stick capable of being tied together
+into some semblance of a hoe....
+
+So the war finished for me, looking at Mme. Rosalie as she sat entirely
+engrossed in her work whilst the shells made the pots jump alive off
+the red-hot iron plate.... The war was finished, since my line was
+taken for _appry la gair finny_. That we should win I had no doubt,
+for, though the horrible scalawags who wangle themselves into notoriety
+had too much to say in the world, our heart was in it, and the heart of
+the other side was not. I knew enough to know that. If God were good to
+one, for one’s self personally, it would finish there. I did not even
+want to stay to see the finish: I was so certain that we should win.
+But I had been worrying a little about myself. I couldn’t, you see,
+see anything but the workhouse for me, if I lived through. And, at my
+age, the workhouse is not a pleasant thought. I am just too old, and
+just too young for the workhouse.
+
+But the spectacle of Madame Rosalie, fetching in the potatoes, saved
+me.... I will tell you an odd thing. I have spoken of the recumbent
+oval of green light that now and again had appeared to me, to turn
+into a picture of a green valley. I will confess that, hitherto, I had
+feared it. It had come into my head that it might be a symptom of a
+seizure, an epileptic fit perhaps, or of some obscure but disastrous
+nervous disease. _Ker vooly voo? Say la gair._ That region of the world
+had its trials for the nerves of people of my age. One might well be on
+the edge of something.
+
+But looking at Mme. Rosalie--so extremely centered in the work in hand,
+so oblivious to the very real danger, so brave and so tranquil, I said
+to myself:
+
+“What the devil! If she can stick it, I too can!”
+
+For what had she to look forward to? She had said that, on the last
+occasion when the British authorities had permitted her to visit her
+house at Plugstreet they had not allowed her to enter it. The front
+wall of the upper part had fallen inward and for her sole possession
+she could see that on the wall of Félicité’s bedroom that was exposed
+to the sky, there hung a gilt-framed Souvenir of her daughter’s First
+Communion. Nothing else! Nothing! That was her sole possession in the
+world except for two gowns of blue Manchester goods and the cameo that
+represented the judgment of Paris....
+
+And suddenly I was convinced that the apparition of that recumbent
+green oval was, not a visitation, but a sign. If from that time onward
+I just carried on, if I persevered--as I was truly minded to persevere,
+in my duties as a poor bloody footslogger--the Almighty would give
+to me at least sufficient space in the quiet earth that was just
+country--to dig myself in. Well, God has been good to me, as you see.
+
+And, mind you, I consider and consider proudly, that I am doing, most
+of all, my duty to the State. I have always considered myself a member
+of the governing classes, with the privileges and the duties. And I
+abate nothing of that opinion. It seems to me to be my duty to govern,
+if not by directing, then at least by guiding, through the superiority
+of my insight. I am not fitted for the intrigues of what is called
+Public Life. No doubt that is no worse today than it was in the time
+of Alcibiades or the late Mr. Gladstone. But it is very bad; very vile.
+
+You say: how do I presume to speculate on public matters who cut
+myself deliberately off from the consideration of public matters on
+the 8/9/’16? My friend, I have considered the public matters of the
+8/9/1816; of the 4/9/1870; 1770; 1470; of the 8/9/’16 of B.C. 1070. And
+there is no difference. If it is not an hypocrisy, it remains still a
+very wearisome matter to search for the person of the Sacred Emperor in
+a low teahouse. Well, I have done my share of searching and am too old
+for any more.
+
+I have said that there is no difference between the public matters
+of today and those of the day of Alcibiades. But there is one very
+great difference: there is the difference that today--and it was
+never the case before--all the ground of the world that is capable of
+growing wheat is occupied by wheat and the population of the world is
+increasing by leaps and bounds. I will tell you: Some years before the
+war I was in a little town on the coast of France not far from Dunkirk.
+And my hotel was full of affrighted women; of nuns whose convents had
+been burned over their heads; and of ruined, wounded, and despairing
+men from the Low Countries. St. Quentin had been sacked; other towns
+were afire. A year before you could read in the papers the despatches
+of intrepid war correspondents in the South of France. They wrote from
+hotels--just as they did a year or so ago--how towns were flaming,
+streets running with wine, how the 5–9 shells soared and the naval
+howitzers raised their muzzles and coughed. You know the sort of thing!
+
+Well! Those were the fingers on the wall. They were merely food-riots
+but they predicted Armageddon for those that can read--and still they
+predict an Armageddon beside which that in which we all took part was
+one of Gilbert White’s rush candles against the searchlights of a
+battleship. Those were food riots, caused by the determination of town
+dwellers to enforce prices on peasants. The last war was a food riot:
+the next war will be a food riot beyond the imagination of the sons of
+men.
+
+Nothing can prevent it or much delay it unless there should come a
+change in the hearts of humanity. And I do not perceive much change
+in the hearts of man--and all the wheat-land of the world is occupied
+by wheat and the population of the world is increasing by leaps
+and bounds. _Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!_ You say that there are
+revolutions on foot. There always have been. But they have always been
+_révolutions de palais_ and _révolutions de palais_ they will always
+remain. What does it matter to me or to any sane man whether it is
+the Duke of Omnium or Mr. Evans of Llanfair-Rhaiado, or Mr. Hicks of
+Poplar who sits in the seats once occupied by Sir Robert Walpole or
+Mr. Jonkinsen or Colbert or Caius Julius Cæsar? None of those departed
+statesmen had to face the problem of a globe whose wheat-land was all
+occupied and whose population was increasing by leaps and bounds. In
+consequence they were not so greedy for money, or for the jazz bands of
+excitement that may make them forget tomorrow. For that is what it all
+comes to.
+
+So I go out of public life of that type.
+
+But don’t believe that I, Gringoire, Hippolyte, de l’Institut de
+France, go out of public life! No, I go into it. For I go to prove
+that a decent life, clean, contemplative, intent, skilful, and with
+its little luxuries, may yet be lived by the Gringoires of the
+world--_hominibus bonæ voluntatis_. For, though I am a poet, it is thus
+that I interpret the message of the angel. For it is thus that I see
+the world--as a world of a few Gringoires and of infinite millions
+that are the stuff to fill graveyards. I can’t see it any other way.
+
+And I said to myself in the wash-house of Madame Rosalie whilst
+some fragments of iron and rubble pattered down on the tiles of the
+pent-roof from the nearby church that, for the rest of my life I would
+be what I will call self-supporting--at any rate after the war was
+finished--and I will govern!
+
+For I will be dependent on the profits of no man’s labor, and I will
+produce more food than I eat and more thought than I take from the
+world. So, to the measure of the light vouchsafed, shall some fragment
+of the world be dependent on me. It is the only way to govern.
+
+All this wangling for power in newspapers, meetings, market-places,
+and drawing-rooms is a weariness--and when you have it, what is it? A
+handful of dried leaves that crumble under the touch. If you have a
+platoon you can make it smart; if you have a garden, you may make it
+fine, luxuriant, producing marrows as large as barrels. Or if you write
+a poem, you must make it beautiful. Everything else is vanity.
+
+I ... I who speak to you ... can house myself, clothe myself,
+discipline, entertain, and think for myself--and I can feed more than
+myself. As the old saying went: I can build a house, plant a tree,
+write a book, and beget a son. No man who cannot do all these things is
+fit to govern. He cannot govern--for I and the men who are with me, of
+good will, shall withhold his food, his clothing, his thoughts for his
+mind.
+
+You may say, Mr. Compiler, that you who write falsehoods for the
+newspapers, who organize in offices the carrying of things on wheels,
+who dig in the bowels of the earth, and hammer on iron plates--or who
+take the profits of those who do these things--that you will govern, or
+inherit, the earth and the civilization of the earth. You cannot. If
+you withhold the labor of your hands or your minds--the world goes on.
+If I should--you would starve in body and soul--and in jazz noises!
+
+In the end, I think, the world will be driven to become a great
+beehive: there will be the workers who think of nothing but their work.
+They will think nothing of the profits. And there will be the drones
+who provide the jazz noises and the wheels--and who will be killed off
+from time to time.
+
+That is what I have gathered from the ruined houses in Flanders and
+from the aloof quality of the faces that came back to me whilst I
+sat dozing and Rosalie Prudent sewed. The faces were those of the
+Lincolnshire Private, of Lieutenant Morgan, of Henri Gaudier, and of
+the caretaker in the house at Albert--and of the Quartermaster of the
+Wiltshires.[16] But, so that you may not think that I limit myself to
+one class of society, I will add the faces of Lord Kitchener, of Sir
+Edward Grey, and of the French Minister, whose name I have forgotten. I
+did not need to see in imagination the faces of the orderly or of Mme.
+Rosalie, for they were with me.
+
+You will object that I single out for salvation in Gomorrah only those
+of whom I have talked. Certainly, it is only those that I single
+out--those of that type, for those, for me, are the _homines bonæ
+voluntatis_ who must be preserved if the State is to continue. They
+have rather abstracted expressions since they think only of their
+work; they have aspects of fatigue, since the salvation of a world
+is a large order, and they bear on their backs the burden of the
+whole world; but they look at you directly, and in their glance is no
+expression of pride, ambition, profit, or renown. They have expressions
+of responsibility, for they are the governing classes. Others will have
+that title in the newspapers--but they govern only those who make the
+noises of jazz-bands. The food supply and the supply of poetry is in
+the hands of the Gringoires.
+
+Buzzing noises make the world pleasant; it would be a grim and
+silent world without them. I should not like it, nor would the
+other Gringoires like it. It was in Coventry Street that I last met
+Lieutenant Morgan-Gringoire. But, from time to time the buzzers must
+be killed off. Destiny is remorseless: either those who buzz must die
+in occasional crowds or those who live to give food and poetry must go
+starve and the others with them. Destiny is remorseless.
+
+But destiny is also just. The drones of the hive have a good time--and
+give a good time. Moreover they make splendid soldiers of the type of
+the Cockney or the Parigot. That, perhaps, is how destiny means them to
+get killed off. So they will have their good times; and they will also
+have glory, the glory of finding the person of the Sacred Emperor in
+some such low teahouse as was the Bois de Mametz on the 14/7/’16 when
+the 38th Division was murdered.
+
+And maybe that is the best glory of all. God forbid that I should say
+it is not. And I like to think that, along with the good time that they
+had and the glory of standing in the presence of the Sacred Emperor,
+they found also--sanctuary. For I like very much to remember the smile
+that was on the face of Lt. Morgan when they dug him out from under the
+dirt of the communication-trench.
+
+Do you remember the old Catholic idea that a man may find salvation
+between the saddle and the ground? Well, we know little of
+death--nothing of death. So I hope it is not a heresy to think that,
+as the eyelids of those who fell closed on their glory, they had long,
+long visions, like that green vision that came to me from time to
+time. For time is a very relative thing; and may they not well have
+had long, long illusions, seeming to last for years and years?--to the
+effect that they had found, each his imagined sanctuary, where there
+was the gingerbread cottage that, hand in hand, on tiptoe with some
+Gretel, they explored, crossing their fingers and crying “_Feignits_”
+in the face of destiny--and where the Hou-Hou-oo of the wolf upon
+the Montagne Noire shall sound so very distantly as to be only the
+comforting reminder of the Grimm we knew as children.
+
+----Something like that.
+
+That is all I have to say about the war, here and now. But you have
+poked your sardonic fun at me from time to time, Mr. Compiler, and
+though bargaining is no part of my nature, a determination to have my
+own way was born in me as pawkiness was in you. And now, I say this:
+
+“You have poked your fun at me as writer and as cook, and decorated
+with only those attributions of yours--as if each of those little,
+half-concealed smiles were a rag and tatter on my shining-seated
+_pantalons_, you propose to exhibit me to your public. Well, you shan’t
+except on my own terms. The first is that, as you have spoken of me as
+writer you should enshrine--like a shining fly in amber--in the gum
+of your lucubrations a specimen of my own writing as it came to me,
+precisely, in Nieppe. And the second is that, since you began this
+compilation with what purports to be an account of my entertainment of
+the guests who honor this lowly roof of ours, you shall, as truthfully
+entertain your readers--as truthfully as you can, for God gives to
+some of us vision and to some the gift of recounting things askew for
+the entertainment of those wider of mouth than of intelligence--you
+shall then entertain your readers with an account of the dishes which
+since early morning I have been preparing for the evening degustation
+of yourself, of my dear Sélysette and your friend Mrs. Carmody. For I
+observe that, though you poke fun at my hospitality you are not averse
+from begging your dimity madams to share what you have called, I think,
+our rough oaken board.”
+
+Mrs. Carmody was no more than the wife of the Headmaster of the King
+Edward VI Grammar School where your Compiler gives lessons in the
+English language and drill, in the neighboring town. She had expressed
+an urgent curiosity to witness the domestic felicities and the
+supposedly eccentric habits of my friends. For it is not to be imagined
+that a figure so marked as that of our poet could conceal itself in an
+isolated dingle of a Home County without setting a considerable part
+of that county agog with curiosity--any more than it is to be imagined
+that an usher in a diminutive but immensely ancient public school
+could forever stave off from contact with his most intimate friends
+the young and agreeable but still imperious wife of his Head.
+
+But to the alarmed, but only half-expressed remonstrances of your
+Compiler--for what, he wondered would Gringoire insist on inserting
+into his pages; and wouldn’t his patiently prosecuted work when, if
+ever, it saw the light, wouldn’t it have the aspect of a mere rag-bag?
+To these alarmed, if only half-expressed remonstrances, Gringoire,
+arising to his lean, gray height, announced his immutable programme for
+the day. It was by then towards four of a very hot, but fast cooling,
+July afternoon. The sunflowers drooped on their stalks, flycatchers
+made their curious, interrupted flights into the shining air and back
+to the old roof. The cows from the meadow had crowded to the other side
+of the quickset hedge, and, rubbing themselves unceasingly to get rid
+of flies from their backs made a curious sound like the tearing of thin
+paper interspersed with the deep, tranquil sighings of their breaths.
+It was in short an English July afternoon--a time when, if ever, men
+should sit and ruminate in quiet.
+
+But there was such a clamor! You would have said that the itch of all
+the authors and all the regimental sergeants major had entered into
+our friend. Quick, the boy, dozing behind the house, must put in the
+mare and go to the station and see if the Bombay duck had come for
+the curry. Quick, the maid must bring tea half an hour before that
+diminutive creature was accustomed to bring it. Or, no.... She must put
+back tea an hour and Madame Sélysette must with her own incomparable
+fingers blow three quarts of shandygaff and not forget the lime-juice.
+And Madame Sélysette must find the article he had written at Nieppe,
+and must put out paper and pens and cut two quills just as he liked
+them and come down and entertain Compi--your humble servant the
+compiler--and see that no wasps had got under the cabbage-leaves that
+covered the syllabubs in the spring and see that the boy did not take
+the traces up two holes too short and ...
+
+Madame Sélysette put her charming and provocative bust out of the
+little square window space above and to the left of the porch.
+
+“You propose to write, my friend?” she asked. “But you swore this
+morning that you would send me to Coventry for a week if I did not goad
+you into picking the greengages....”
+
+Gringoire made a sound like “Grrh”, as if the Wolf of the Mountains had
+humorously snarled. He said:
+
+“You have no soul!” She made at him a little grimace and disappeared.
+But I could hear their endearments as they met on the sounding little
+wooden stairs and felt all the summer regrets of the nearly old
+bachelor.
+
+There was however no rest that afternoon. It was well to have the great
+blue three-quart jug of shandygaff on the seat in the porch; it was
+agreeable to have Madame Sélysette to one’s self whilst she dotted a
+few of the ‘i’s’ and crossed the ‘t’s’ as to the entangled career and
+theories of her great man--and there is no better drink of an English
+July afternoon than shandygaff that has a little edge of lime-juice
+given to it and that since dawn has had all its ingredients cooled
+in an ice-cold spring. And there is no pleasanter topic in the mouth
+of a gay and tranquil young woman assured of the adoration of her
+mate than her expressions of her humorous adoration for Himself and
+his crotchets. You reply that the adoration of a lively young woman
+expressed to yourself would be more agreeable, but that is not the
+case. For lively young women do not express adoration to the faces of
+their males; but, failing and replacing that, it is pleasant to sit
+in a porch and hearken to adoration of a roaring genius overhead. For
+it causes you to have daydreams of a time when you in revenge may sit
+in an upper room, with a lively young woman expressing to a third the
+adoration that she feels for yourself....
+
+But continuously our Gringoire’s voice rumbled from inside his upper
+room. Then coming to the window he would shout:
+
+“Sélysette Sé ... ly ... _sette_.... What is the colloquial English for
+...” Some phrase that I did not catch. Or:
+
+“Sé ... ly ... sette.... _Est-ce que_ ...” And again something that
+I did not catch for my French is none of the strongest. But I should
+gather that it had something to do with his pots that were on the
+stove in the disreputable shanty that he called his cookhouse. For
+Madame would enter that erection like Eurydice disappearing into Orcus.
+Immediately would come the thunder of Gringoire descending the stairs
+as if he had fallen. He too would enter the cookhouse and there would
+be the sound of impassioned and farcical altercations. Then Gringoire
+would approach the porch with a face that resembled a beet root with
+the heat. He would drink a pint of shandygaff at a swallow, exclaim:
+
+“The stuff’s bilge.... No, I don’t mean the shandygaff. There is no one
+like Sélysette for compounding cold drinks. I trained her. I mean my
+prose. My prose is bilge....” And he would thunder up the stairs whilst
+Madame tranquilly resumed her place.
+
+Once she asked some questions about Mrs. Carmody and when I said that
+lady had the greatest possible admiration for Gringoire and even had
+some of his verses by heart she expressed amused relief. “For,” said
+she, “there are going to be great storms and dinner won’t be ready till
+ten.”
+
+It wasn’t.
+
+For, you understand, in the sometimes tranquil, sometimes tempestuous
+but always complex nature of my friend, the pride of authorship had
+for the moment come uppermost and he was determined to get _his_ prose
+into his compiler’s volume. But of late he had only written in French
+as he has told you. So he would come to the window and shout to me
+the question whether he would be allowed to insert his French prose.
+Without waiting for me to answer his question he would shout: “No, of
+course you won’t!” and disappear. Then he would shout:
+
+“But I can’t translate my own damned stuff. In heaven’s name what’s the
+English for ... The beastly colloquial English....”
+
+Towards seven, just when I was thinking that I must go and tidy myself
+for the approach of Mrs. Carmody, he appeared before me, dishevelled
+and with a mess of written papers dangling from his hands.
+
+“Here, you,” he exclaimed, “get your reporter’s notebook and come with
+me!”
+
+And, at the bottom of the garden, under the hedge beneath the damson
+trees he made me lie down in the grass which was there long and began
+to dictate to me. He couldn’t, as he said, translate his own French
+prose because his own French was near his heart and his English much
+less. You might say that his passions were for English countrysides
+and for French prose and here the two met to his confusion. Perhaps it
+is impossible to interpret French prose in the long grass beneath an
+English quickset hedge.
+
+In any case Gringoire was distracted as he dictated and I was
+distracted, using a shorthand that I almost never employ to take
+down his words that he whispered or shouted or intermingled with
+ejaculations that I was not intended to record.... And I was the more
+distracted because at the top of the garden I could see Mrs. Carmody
+and Madame Sélysette carrying implements and provisions for the dinner
+from the house door to the little platform beneath the enormous oak
+that overshadowed the spring. Those gay young things laughed over their
+burdens--for Mrs. Carmody, out of her School House, was at least as gay
+as Madame Sélysette. And every time that they laughed Gringoire, lying
+in the long grass, groaned and writhed with the whole of his immense
+length. I have relegated his French, for which he gave me the copy from
+some Swiss magazine, to an appendix. I can only hope that his French is
+better than his English version of it. But as to that I am no judge. I
+only wish that he had not insisted on my presenting an untidy book to
+the world, for in common, I believe, with most readers, I much dislike
+appendices. For when on a bookstall I see a book and, examining it,
+find appendices at the end, I think either that that is a learned work
+for which I am seldom in the mood, having studies enough of my own to
+pursue, or that the author is an untidy-minded fellow who has not given
+himself the pains to digest and put into his own phraseology matter
+that will almost certainly be tedious to read.
+
+But in this case I have no alternative. The rages of Gringoire are
+things that I have no mind to face. Print his lucubrations I must or
+there would be the devil to pay. I am not certain that there won’t be
+at least a minor fiend to propitiate as it is--I mean when Gringoire
+comes to look for his prose and finds it at the end of the volume.
+
+There certainly was a tremendous row when he discovered that he had
+kept the ladies waiting. He howled with rage, sprang to his feet,
+rushed into his cookhouse....
+
+And the first view that Mrs. Carmody had of a poet for whom, as you
+shall discover, she had a real veneration, was rushing along the face
+of the house towards the dinner-table beneath the oak. He was hatless,
+coatless, his shirt-collar was widely unbuttoned and he was bearing a
+huge tray covered with little saucersful of the piquant messes that he
+calls _hors d’œuvres_.
+
+We dined.
+
+I am, alas, no Brillat Savarin and Gringoire as cook is to say the
+least inarticulate. When he is not that he is profane. We had his
+_hors d’œuvres_. Then we had his curried lobster. What shall I say
+about his curry?
+
+Do you know the sensation of suddenly leaving the level and swooping
+downwards on the little railways you get at Exhibitions or in
+fairgrounds? It is like that. You take your first forkful of one of
+Gringoire’s inventions with misgivings mingled with anticipations. Then
+you are reassured. You say:
+
+“This is at least supportable. I shall survive this.”
+
+You take a sip of his white wine. After that it flies.
+
+But you can’t _believe_ in Gringoire as cook.... I sometimes wonder
+if even he believes in himself. I mean, I asked him the other day for
+the recipe for his curry, just as, at the beginning of this book, as I
+have reported, I tried to extract from him his directions for household
+management. The results were even more inarticulate. He said:
+
+“Oh, you take any old thing--tinned lobster, bully beef, cold
+mutton.... And of course you fry ... But curry powder is good for
+any dish.... Because of the garlic in it.... And which curry are you
+talking about? There are hundreds. The only thing that unites them is
+that the curry must be cooked. Don’t you understand? The curry--the
+powder--itself must be cooked. For hours and hours. Do you see? No,
+you don’t see. How can I remember what I put into the curry for your
+friend? Any old thing....”
+
+I know he hadn’t put in any old thing, though it is probably true that
+the chief ingredient of his dish is his fine frenzy. But I remember the
+energy he had put into securing the fresh lobsters for that particular
+effort--and the special brand of French preserved oysters that he
+had had to have for his beefsteak, kidney and oyster pudding which
+on that menu followed the curry. The boy had been sent on a bicycle
+in one direction, Madame Sélysette and I in the dogcart to Ulpeston,
+he himself had borrowed a lift in the baker’s cart and gone to
+Storrinton.... No, surely, not any old thing--though he surely believed
+what he said....
+
+At any rate towards eleven we were contented and he, appeased, sat back
+in his chair and talked about poultry foods to Mrs. Carmody, that being
+the first time that he had paid her any attention.
+
+The great boughs of the oak in which there now hung three Chinese
+lanthorns--Madame Sélysette loves Chinese lanthorns--the great boughs
+of the oak towered quietly up towards the planets, great white moths
+appearing and disappearing again into the blackness around the glow
+of the lanthorns. The Dog-star hung low on the horizon before us and
+the owls called at ten-yard intervals as they flew along the little
+stream in the meadow. When they were silent the night-jar churned
+intermittently. When we too were silent the little tinkle of the stream
+from the spring made itself heard.
+
+I think that Mrs. Carmody did not much want to talk about poultry
+though her white Leghorns had taken many prizes at County or even more
+important shows. I think she let the conversation drag purposely. For
+suddenly, when we had all been pensive for a minute or two, her voice
+said from the shadows:
+
+“‘I should like to imagine a night...!’”
+
+Gringoire exclaimed sharply:
+
+“What? What’s that? Don’t!”
+
+But Mrs. Carmody said defiantly:
+
+“I will. Just to pay you.... To show you....” And she began again:
+
+ “‘I should like to imagine
+   A moonlight in which there would be no machine guns!
+   For it is possible
+   To come out of a trench or a hut or a tent or a church all in ruins;
+   To see the black perspective of long avenues
+   All silent;
+   The white strips of sky
+   At the sides, cut by the poplar trunks;
+   The white strips of sky
+   Above, diminishing--
+   The silence and blackness of the avenue
+   Enclosed by immensities of space
+   Spreading away
+   Over No Man’s Land....
+
+   For a minute ...
+   For ten....
+   There will be no star-shells
+   But the light of the untroubled stars;
+   There will be no Verey light,
+   But the light of the quiet moon
+   Like a swan.
+   And silence!...’”
+
+The moon was at that moment just tipping over the ridge of trees before
+us. Mrs. Carmody hesitated.
+
+“‘Then ... a long way ...’”
+
+The voice of Madame Sélysette said slowly:
+
+“‘Then far away to the right ...’”
+
+Mrs. Carmody said: “Thank you!” and continued:
+
+ “‘Then far away to the right thro’ the moonbeams
+   _Wukka Wukka_ will go the machine guns,
+   And, far away to the left
+   _Wukka Wukka_
+   And sharply
+   _Wuk_ ... _Wuk_ ... and then silence
+   For a space in the clear of the moon.’”
+
+The impassive face of Gringoire that the moonlight just showed worked
+suddenly, the mouth just moving--oh, rather like a rabbit munching. He
+said:
+
+“I wrote that in Nieppe in September ’sixteen....” He added:
+
+“And it’s pleasant ... you two remembering....”
+
+He reached out his right hand and took Mrs. Carmody’s left, and his
+left and took Madame Sélysette’s right.
+
+“‘Rest,’” he said with his heavy tired voice, “‘after toil, port after
+stormy seas ...’” He paused and added after a moment: “‘Do greatly
+please!’”
+
+
+[Footnotes]
+
+[13] Gringoire particularly asks me to style this chapter as above
+because the Eminent Reformer, mentioned in Part I, Chapter VI, once
+said that the Writing on the Wall at Belshazzar’s Feast was the first
+recorded instance of a Kinematographic production. It seems stupid: but
+our friend insists. He also asks me to say that Mme. Prudent’s name was
+really _Dutoit_.
+
+[14] It should be remembered that the military description of “tactics”
+is the direction of troops when in contact with the enemy. “Strategy”
+includes the direction of all movements that take place outside the
+immediate firing line. The conversion of neutral nations into allies
+or the cementing of bonds between allies by literary manifestations is
+specifically and according to the textbooks a branch of strategy, so
+that Gringoire is using the correct military word.
+
+[15] As far as the compiler has been able to discover, the poet’s
+only ground for this diatribe is a review that his last volume of
+poems received from the ---- Literary Supplement. In this the reviewer
+devotes one line to saying that the volume of poems is the best that
+was published during the war and the rest to personal abuse of our
+friend--and that is all. Our friend says that this is not cricket. It
+probably is not; but one should never say so.
+
+[16] _Note by Gringoire._ I do not know why I am haunted by the
+remembrance of this man. He was killed by the direct hit of a shell.
+When I last saw him, he was reading a paper with the spectacles at
+the end of his nose like the caretaker at Albert. His tunic--with ten
+ribbons!--was open over his fat stomach, and he wore carpet slippers.
+He was as brave as a lion and as simple as a sheep: no soul then alive
+knew his job better. He was a butcher of Stratford-on-Avon. If he have
+left a young son, may the shade of the Divine William guide that young
+son’s footsteps gently and humorously through the ways of life!
+
+
+
+
+                                 ENVOI
+
+                         UNE PARTIE DE CRICKET
+
+            BEING A LETTER WRITTEN FROM THE LINES OF SUPPORT
+                     TO CAPITAINE UN TEL AT PARIS.
+
+
+Mon cher Monsieur, Camarade et Confrère,
+
+C’était derrière le bois de Bécourt, un soir de juillet, et nous étions
+en train de jouer au cricket tandis que les obus allemands passaient
+au-dessus de nos têtes. Les obus allemands arrivaient, semblant vouloir
+crier le mot anglais _weary_,--qui veut dire fatigué,--puis changeant
+d’avis, ils disaient--et péremptoirement--_whack_. Mais en jouant au
+cricket, on oublie l’orchestre boche: on n’entend plus les obus qui
+passent. Nous courions; nous adressions des objurgations au malheureux
+qui n’attrapait pas la balle; nous discutions même, parce que les
+règles du jeu de cricket--qu’on joue avec une balle de tennis, deux
+marteaux et deux caisses de _bully-beef_--sont un peu élastiques. La
+pelouse est d’argile, dure et cuite par le soleil presque tropical; en
+fait d’herbe nous n’avons que des chardons, pour spectateurs et pour
+barrières à la fois, les mulets de transport, alignés. Mais jamais
+le cricket international qu’on joue sur le terrain des Lords, dans
+le bois de Saint-Jean, n’a été si accidenté ni si émouvant que notre
+partie de cricket derrière le bois de Bécourt, ce soir de juillet. Nous
+avons crié, gesticulé, discuté, hurlé ... nous, les officiers anglais,
+mornes, taciturnes!
+
+Je vous présente ces considérations en forme de lettre, mon cher ...
+j’aurais voulu plutôt écrire un essai, soigné, balancé, bien pensant.
+Mais il m’est impossible de ciseler de la prose ces jours-ci. “Que
+voulez-vous,”--comme disent nos Tommies,--“c’est la guerre!” J’ai passé
+vingt-cinq ans à chercher des cadences, à chasser des assonances, avec
+une rage acharnée, comme celle du bon père Flaubert. Mais aujourd’hui
+je n’écris que des lettres,--longues, diffuses, banales. L’autre
+affaire demande trop de temps, de loisir,--de chance!
+
+Donc, nous étions en train de jouer au cricket, quand je vis passer
+tout près de nous un officier français de ma connaissance,--officier
+d’une de ces batteries de 75, admirables, et que, la nuit surtout,
+nous avons trouvées tellement réconfortantes, à cause de leur voix
+qui roulait sans cesse, à peu de mètres derrière notre dos. C’était
+un colosse gris-bleu, aux yeux bruns et sombres, à la moustache brune
+et lourde. Il restait là, campé sur ses jambes et sur sa canne, comme
+quelque instrument de guerre à trois jambes, silencieux et d’acier. Et
+quand je m’approchai de lui, il me dit:
+
+--_I find that a little shocking. Very shocking!_ (Je trouve ça un peu
+shocking. Même très shocking.)
+
+Il regardait les joueurs de cricket qui continuaient à crier, à
+gesticuler et à courir entre les chardons gigantesques et les jambes
+des mulets dangereux. Je m’écriai:
+
+--Au nom du bon Dieu, pourquoi?
+
+Il ne cessait pas de regarder les joueurs, et réfléchit longtemps avant
+de répondre. Et ce fut moi qui, m’impatientant, commençai à parler, et
+même à gesticuler. Je disais que nous étions nouvellement sortis des
+tranchées; que le jeu donnait la santé, remettait le moral, faisait
+oublier la guerre ... que sais-je? Il réfléchissait toujours, et moi je
+parlais toujours. Puis enfin, il dit:
+
+--_I find that this war should be a religion. On coming out the
+trenches one should sit--and reflect. Perhaps one should pray_ ...
+(Je trouve que cette guerre devrait être conduite en religion. En
+sortant des tranchées l’on devrait s’asseoir--et réfléchir. Peut-être
+devrait-on prier.)
+
+Et puis ... je parlai encore longuement sans qu’il répondît autre chose
+que:
+
+--_I find that, all the same._
+
+Alors j’éclatai de rire. Car la situation me semblait tout d’un coup
+allégorique. Et si vous y pensez, mon cher, vous verrez pourquoi je
+riais. C’est parce que c’était lui, le représentant de Cyrano de
+Bergerac, qui parlait l’anglais et employait les monosyllabes d’un
+lord Kitchener de théâtre; tandis que moi, le représentant de tant de
+milords et officiers qui pendant tant de siècles n’ont rien trouvé
+de plus à dire que les deux syllabes “O ... ah”,--moi, qui aurais dû
+porter monocle et favoris jaunes, j’étais occupé à hurler et à mimer
+des phrases d’un français assez incohérent, comme un vrai Tartarin. Et
+tous les autres--officiers et O. R.--de mon régiment continuaient à
+sauter, à crier et à rire comme des enfants méridionaux.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Et, en vérité, le changement est étonnant et quelque peu émouvant.
+Nous avons toujours eu l’idée--tout le monde, même le Français a eu
+l’idée--que le peuple français, et surtout les officiers et soldats
+français étaient gais, débonnaires, loquaces, goguenards,--“bretteurs
+et hâbleurs sans vergogne.” Eh bien, j’ai voyagé en permission de
+Steenewerck à Paris,--voyage qui dura dix-sept heures. Et, pendant
+ces dix-sept heures, quoiqu’il y eût toujours des officiers français
+assis dans les voitures, ou debout dans les couloirs du train, le
+voyage a été le plus silencieux que j’aie fait de ma vie. Personne ne
+parlait. Mais personne! Il y avait des colonels, des commandants, des
+capitaines. Et je ne puis croire que ce fût tout à fait de ma faute.
+Il est vrai que, partout dans le train, on lisait: “Taisez-vous;
+méfiez-vous”,--et le reste. Mais c’eût été impossible que _tous_ ces
+messieurs gris-bleus m’eussent attribué les oreilles ennemies dont
+parle l’affiche. Je portais l’uniforme khaki.
+
+Non, certainement, le voyage n’a pas été accidenté. Je vais vous en
+raconter les incidents: de Hazebrouck à Calais cinq officiers français,
+qui n’échangèrent pas deux mots; de Calais à Abbeville, trente
+officiers. Je m’adressai à un capitaine d’artillerie, en grognant que
+le train marchait très lentement. Il me répondit en anglais:
+
+--_Many troops moving!_
+
+Et puis, silence!
+
+A Amiens entre un monsieur en civil. C’était un samedi vers huit
+heures du matin, et le train avait l’air de ne vouloir arriver à Paris
+qu’après trois heures de l’après-midi. Comme j’avais des affaires à
+Paris et que je devais partir le lundi avant six heures, je demandai à
+ce monsieur si je trouverais les banques fermées, et les ministères, et
+les magasins. Il me répondit qu’il n’en savait rien, qu’il n’était pas
+chez lui à Paris. Il allait à Jersey pour prendre possession du corps
+d’une jeune fille qui, ayant été noyée à Dieppe, avait flotté jusqu’à
+Jersey. _Et lui aussi me répondit en anglais._
+
+Il commençait à pleurer tout doucement.
+
+Et puis ... silence; les officiers regardaient ce monsieur avec des
+yeux qui ne disaient rien. Mais ce n’était pas gai!
+
+A Creil montent deux dames, jolies et bien mises. Elles ont assez
+parlé, ces deux-là. Croix-Rouge, œuvres de charité, colonels, familles!
+Mais les officiers ne les regardaient jamais. Pas un ne levait les
+yeux, quoiqu’elles fussent jeunes, jolies, bien mises....
+
+Tandis que, pendant le trajet de Rouen à Albert, nous autres--qui
+n’allions pas en permission!--nous avons chanté, parlé aux demoiselles
+qu’on voyait sur les perrons; joué au football le long du train; grimpé
+sur le toit des voitures.
+
+J’exagère un peu, naturellement, ces différences. Ce n’est pas un
+article que je suis en train d’écrire, c’est une lettre. Mais je
+reconte quand même ce que mes yeux ont vu et mes oreilles entendu....
+Et comment l’expliquer? Parce que ce n’est pas assez de dire--comme on
+me l’a dit assez souvent--que si, en Angleterre, les Allemands étaient
+établis entre York et Manchester, s’ils avaient saisi les industries,
+pillé les villes,--et fait ce que font les Boches!--nous aussi, nous
+serions tristes, mornes, silencieux. Je ne parle pas de la population
+civile de mon pays; je parle de gens dont la vie n’est pas gaie,
+qui sont expatriés, loin de leur patrie, et qui souffrent, je vous
+l’assure, d’une nostalgie très sincère. Car là-bas, sur la Somme ou
+en Belgique, l’on se sent bien oublié, bien abandonné, et très, très
+isolé, d’un isolement semblable à l’isolement de ... Eh bien! c’est
+comme si l’on était suspendu--nous, quelques millions d’hommes!--sur
+un tapis, dans les infinitudes de l’espace. Les routes qui s’étendent
+devant nous cessent tout d’un coup, à quelques mètres, dans le _No
+Man’s Land_. Et c’est bien triste à contempler, des grand’routes qui
+cessent tout d’un coup. Et puis les sentiers par lesquels on est
+venu--et qui s’étendent entre soi et son pays--sont des chemins que
+l’on ne doit pas traverser.... Et, tout comme un autre, l’on aime
+sa femme, sa maison, ses enfants, ses parents, son coin du feu, ses
+champs, ses fumiers, ses bœufs et ses bois.... Le soldat français a
+cela, au moins, qu’il se bat chez soi! Et c’est quelque chose pour lui,
+comme individu.
+
+Je suppose que c’est pour oublier, non seulement les obus allemands,
+mais aussi celles qui nous sont si chères, le coin du feu où nous
+avons si souvent devisé, les champs, les fumiers, les bœufs et les
+bois,--c’est pour trouver “l’herbe qui s’appelle l’oubli”, que nous
+jouons au cricket près de Bécourt, et sortons des tranchées en donnant
+des coups de pied à un football qui saute à travers les corps des
+hommes tombés, vers les Allemands. Est-ce faiblesse? Est-ce la source
+dont nous tirons ce que nous avons de fermeté, de hardiesse, de
+courage? Je n’en sais rien.
+
+Aussi bien que moi, mon cher, vous avez connu la difficulté de
+définir exactement et en termes justes les différences, les nuances
+des différences, qu’il y a entre des nations. Nous commençons par
+développer une théorie--et nous théorisons beaucoup trop tôt; ou bien
+nous prenons le contre-pied d’une théorie admise depuis des siècles.
+Nous avons eu en Angleterre les caricatures du dix-neuvième siècle,
+des guerres de Napoléon I^{er}, qui nous montraient le Français selon
+l’imagination populaire anglaise. C’était un coiffeur, mince et affamé,
+qui ne mangeait que des grenouilles. Et vous autres, vous aviez votre
+John Bull, gros comme un bœuf, le ventre grand comme le ventre d’un
+bœuf, et qui dévorait des bœufs entiers. Ou vous aviez le milord qui
+se suicidait par pur spleen. Elles étaient stupides, ces caricatures,
+mais il m’est impossible de croire qu’elles ne fussent pas sincères.
+Les Anglais qui s’étaient battus en France en 1815 avaient cherché ce
+qu’ils voyaient--mais ils l’avaient vu. De même pour les Français.
+
+De même, peut-être, pour moi. J’étais venu d’une Angleterre
+émotionnée, couverte, de l’île d’Anglesey jusqu’à North Foreland,
+d’affiches patriotiques et coloriées, et puis, de la frontière belge
+jusqu’à Paris, j’ai vu une France sans affiches, grise, silencieuse,
+préoccupée. Mais pour moi il n’y avait rien de neuf à trouver la France
+préoccupée--parce que, pour moi, la France a toujours été la France des
+champs, des villages, des bois et des paysans. Et la France des paysans
+est une France bien laborieuse, qui travaille sans cesse entre bois et
+étangs ou sous les oliviers du Midi.
+
+Et pour moi la population anglaise a toujours été un peuple des villes.
+Or, ce sont les habitants des grandes-villes qui, tout en travaillant
+aussi bien que vous voudrez, ont besoin de faire de temps en temps
+la noce--chacun selon sa nature. Et c’est peut-être là la raison--la
+_causa causans_--des différences entre l’armée française et nous
+autres. L’armée anglaise est une armée ouvrière, l’armée française
+est une armée plutôt paysanne. Des paysans, et surtout des paysans
+français, ont l’habitude de mesurer les sévérités, les nécessités
+implacables de la nature. Ils les confrontent sans cesse, pendant
+des semaines, des mois, des années. Ils ne peuvent y échapper,--ils
+ne peuvent pas s’évader de la contemplation des maux de la vie, des
+vents et des vers qui détruisent les récoltes, en prenant des jours
+de permission, en faisant des calembours, ou par cet “humour” âcre
+et plutôt triste qui est, peut-être, la qualité souveraine du Tommy
+anglais. Car inscrire sur un obus qu’on va lancer contre les Boches
+les mots “_Love to little Willie_” peut paraître stupide, shocking
+à des gens qui n’ont jamais été là-bas. Mais la psychologie humaine
+est très compliquée, et il est certain que la lecture d’inscriptions
+de ce genre sur les grands obus à côté desquels on passe le long des
+chaussées a beaucoup fait pour nous encourager quand nous avons avancé
+d’Albert vers La Boisselle. Pourquoi? C’est difficile à dire. C’est
+peut-être parce que, les obus étant terribles et funestes, voici un
+obus qui est devenu ridicule, joyeux, ou même humain. Car nous sommes
+tous anthropomorphistes--et qu’un seul obus puisse se commettre à être
+le véhicule d’un jeu d’esprit, cela suffit pour donner à des coeurs
+superstitieux l’idée que tous les obus peuvent être un peu moins
+surhumains qu’ils n’en ont l’air. Car on a peur des obus. Ce sont les
+messagers des dieux qui ont soif, qui se manifestent en sifflant, qui
+disent qu’ils sont fatigués, mais qui détruisent, en deux minutes, des
+villages, des fumiers, des champs entiers. De même pour la partie de
+cricket que nous avons jouée parmi des chardons couverts de poussière
+et qui cachaient les ossements des soldats tombés. C’était peut-être
+sacrilège, peut-être stupide.
+
+Mais je vous assure, mon cher, que ce paysage de Bécourt, Fricourt,
+Mametz n’était pas joyeux. C’était en juillet, et le soleil laissait
+tomber ses rayons sur les vallées larges, sur la poussière qui montait
+au ciel, sur les pentes, sur les bois noirs. Mais cette terre ne
+riait pas! Elle s’étendait loin, loin; et sous l’horizon bleu-gris
+se trouvaient les terrains auxquels personne ne voulait penser. Non,
+la nature, là, semblait terrible et funeste--territoire où le Destin
+aveugle et implacable devait se manifester à des millions d’êtres. Et
+puis nous y avons joué au cricket--et tout de suite ce paysage funeste
+et surhumain est devenu ... est devenu un champ de cricket!
+
+Pour un intellectuel, un terrain restera un terrain, qu’on y voie
+en l’air des bombes, des obus ou une balle de tennis. Mais pour
+nous autres, un terrain où nous avons joué au cricket devient moins
+terrible, et nous y passerons nos jours avec plus de contentement,
+malgré les ossements des tombés qui se cachent sous la poussière des
+chardons énormes. C’est stupide, c’est sacrilège, si vous voulez. Mais
+nous sommes ainsi faits, nous autres qui sortons des grandes villes
+pour faire la guerre. Moi, je suis comme cela, j’ai senti comme cela,
+là-bas, derrière le bois de Bécourt, par un soir de juillet 1916.
+
+                           Et je reste toujours votre affectionné,
+                                                            G.
+
+P.S. Et je vous prie de remarquer que toutes les personnes que j’ai
+rencontrées entre Steenewerck et Paris parlaient l’anglais. C’est déjà
+quelque chose.
+
+
+                                 THE END
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77802 ***
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+      No Enemy | Project Gutenberg
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+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77802 ***</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[1]</span></p>
+
+
+<h1 style="font-size:3em;">
+No Enemy
+</h1>
+
+<p class="center">
+<span class="large">A TALE OF<br>
+RECONSTRUCTION</span><br>
+<br>
+<span class="larger"><i>by</i> Ford Madox Ford</span><br>
+<br>
+<i>Author of</i><br>
+NO MORE PARADES<br>
+SOME DO NOT<br>
+<i>etc.</i><br>
+<br>
+<i>New York, 1929</i><br>
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[2]</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="center">
+COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY<br>
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY<br>
+<br>
+PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
+</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[3]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="To">
+    <i>To</i><br>
+    ESTHER JULIA MADOX FORD
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><i lang="fr">Très, très chère petite Princesse</i>,</p>
+
+<p>When you shall come to read English—which I hope will
+not be too soon—you shall find here adumbrated what the
+world seemed like to me just when you were preparing to
+enter it ..... a confused old world which your coming rendered
+so much clearer and dearer. And as these pages were
+written in the expectation of you—and for you!—I have
+thought better to leave them exactly as they were, bearing as
+they obviously do the traces of sufferings that, thank God,
+you never knew. And so, when you come to read them, give
+a tender thought to him to whom you have so often written—<span lang="fr"
+title="[sic]; printed the same in a later edition">quitoubliejamé
+et qui t’aime de tou son coeur et encore beaucoupluss!</span></p>
+
+<p class="right">
+  F. M. F.
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">New York</span>, 21st June, 1929</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[4]</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">What is love of one’s land?....</div>
+      <div class="verse indent20">I don’t know very well.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">It is something that sleeps</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">For a year, for a day,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">For a month—something that keeps</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Very hidden and quiet and still</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And then takes</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The quiet heart like a wave,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The quiet brain like a spell,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The quiet will</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Like a tornado—and that shakes</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The whole of the soul.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[5]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">
+    CONTENTS
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<table>
+  <tbody>
+
+    <tr>
+      <td colspan="3" class="tdc smcap large">Part One—Four Landscapes</td>
+    </tr>
+    <tr style="font-size: x-small">
+      <td class="tdr">CHAPTER</td>
+      <td class="tdl"></td>
+      <td class="tdr">PAGE</td>
+    </tr>
+
+    <tr>
+      <td class="tdr">I</td>
+      <td class="tdl">TO INTRODUCE GRINGOIRE</td>
+      <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_9">9</a></td>
+    </tr>
+
+    <tr>
+      <td class="tdr">II</td>
+      <td class="tdl">GARDENS AND FLATS</td>
+      <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_19">19</a></td>
+    </tr>
+
+    <tr>
+      <td class="tdr">III</td>
+      <td class="tdl">BLUE OF SWALLOWS’ BACKS</td>
+      <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_39">39</a></td>
+    </tr>
+
+    <tr>
+      <td class="tdr">IV</td>
+      <td class="tdl">THE KINGDOMS OF THE EARTH</td>
+      <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_47">47</a></td>
+    </tr>
+
+    <tr>
+      <td class="tdr">V</td>
+      <td class="tdl">INTERMEZZO</td>
+      <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_88">88</a></td>
+    </tr>
+
+    <tr>
+      <td class="tdr">VI</td>
+      <td class="tdl">JUST COUNTRY</td>
+      <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td>
+    </tr>
+
+    <tr>
+      <td class="tdr">VII</td>
+      <td class="tdl">PLAYING THE GAME</td>
+      <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_129">129</a></td>
+    </tr>
+
+    <tr>
+      <td colspan="3" class="tdc smcap large">Part Two—Certain Interiors</td>
+    </tr>
+
+    <tr>
+      <td class="tdr">VIII</td>
+      <td class="tdl">“MAISIE”</td>
+      <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_147">147</a></td>
+    </tr>
+
+    <tr>
+      <td class="tdr">IX</td>
+      <td class="tdl">THE WATER MILL</td>
+      <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_176">176</a></td>
+    </tr>
+
+    <tr>
+      <td class="tdr">X</td>
+      <td class="tdl">FROM A BALCONY</td>
+      <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_194">194</a></td>
+    </tr>
+
+    <tr>
+      <td class="tdr">XI</td>
+      <td class="tdl">“ROSALIE PRUDENT”</td>
+      <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_222">222</a></td>
+    </tr>
+
+    <tr>
+      <td class="tdr">XII</td>
+      <td class="tdl">THE MOVIES</td>
+      <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_258">258</a></td>
+    </tr>
+
+    <tr>
+      <td class="tdr"></td>
+      <td class="tdl">ENVOI</td>
+      <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_293">293</a></td>
+    </tr>
+
+  </tbody>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_6"></a><a id="Page_7"></a>[7]</span></p>
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="PART_ONE">
+    PART ONE
+    <br>
+    FOUR LANDSCAPES
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_8"></a><a id="Page_9"></a>[9]</span></p>
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h3 class="nobreak" id="I">
+    I
+    <br>
+    <i>To Introduce Gringoire</i>
+  </h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>The writer’s friend Gringoire, originally a poet and
+Gallophile, went to the war. Long, gray, lean, unreasonably
+boastful as a man and unreasonably modest as
+a poet, he was probably not too disciplined as an infantry
+officer, but he has survived to inhabit in tranquillity
+with the most charming of companions a rural
+habitation so ancient, frail and unreal that it is impossible
+to think of it otherwise than as the Gingerbread
+Cottage you may have read of in the tale of
+“Haensel and Gretel.”</p>
+
+<p>This book, then, is the story of Gringoire just after
+... Armageddon. For it struck the writer that you
+hear of the men that went, and you hear of what they
+did when they were There. But you never hear how
+It left them. You hear how things were destroyed, but
+seldom of the painful processes of Reconstruction.</p>
+
+<p>So that your Compiler, taking pencils, tablets and
+erasers and availing himself of the singularly open
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[10]</span>hospitality of the poet and his charming meridional
+partner, came on many successive Saturday afternoons
+from the little old Grammar School where he instructs
+classes in English Literature and Physical Development,
+to sit in the garden at the feet of Gringoire,
+Gallophile, Veteran, Gardener and, above all, Economist,
+if not above all Poet.</p>
+
+<p>We would sit about on rude benches whilst Mme.
+Sélysette would bring us shandygaff brewed after a
+recipe of Gringoire himself. Then he would talk and
+your Compiler make furtive shorthand notes. Above
+all Gringoire loved to talk about cooking for he boasted
+that he was not only the best but the most economical
+cook in the world. How that may be your Compiler
+hesitates to say. To eat a meal prepared by Gringoire
+was certainly an adventure and when you felt adventurous
+had its titillations. But only Mme. Sélysette
+who had accompanied him into his English wilds from
+the distant South could have told you whether Gringoire
+was as economical in his cuisine as he professed
+to be. For he swore that the saviour of society in the
+end would be the good but excellently economical
+cook.</p>
+
+<p>But Mme. Sélysette, dark, alert and with exquisitely
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[11]</span>pencilled brows and as loyal as she was goodhumored,
+never got beyond saying that in his culinary furies
+Gringoire needed at least three persons—whom I took
+to be herself, the diminutive maid and the almost more
+diminutive stable boy—to clear up after he had boiled
+an egg.</p>
+
+<p>How Gringoire proposed to save the world by intensive
+kitchen gardening and exquisite but economical
+cookery may appear hereafter. His years in the trenches
+had taught him one thing—to be an eccentric economist,
+<i lang="it">in petto</i>, since he regarded himself as an extinct
+poet and proposed to live on his minute army pension.
+And I think his ambition really was to teach persons
+forced to live on minute incomes how to lead graceful,
+poetic and pleasant lives and so to save the world.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it would perhaps have been better could your
+Compiler have provided you with a work useful to
+young couples contemplating matrimony on ten shillings
+a week ... or a month ... or a year. That
+would have been an enterprise certainly to gladden
+the heart of Gringoire. Or it might have been better
+had it taken the form of a Cottager Cookery Book or
+a Cottager’s Guide to Gardening or the Keeping of
+Goats instead of the war-reminiscences of a contemplative
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[12]</span>and sensitive soul. Yes, to be sure that would have
+been better. One can only console one’s self that when
+it comes to war-reminiscences the contemplative and
+sensitive soul has been little represented. So, for the
+matter of that, has the poetic but economical chef.</p>
+
+<p>But the present writer, alas, has not the excellent—but
+<em>so</em> meticulous!—mind that will let him sit down
+and write <em>many</em> paragraphs such as that following this
+one. Neither has Gringoire the patience to dictate to
+the writer details of his methods. The most he has
+done is to let his Boswell into his frame of mind. We
+once, together, got as far as this:</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Chops, Mutton, to deal with.</i></p>
+
+<p>“<i>Fritto Misto</i>: Stock: Mixed Meats <i lang="fr">en casserole</i>.</p>
+
+<p>“Take two chops. Pare off <em>all</em> the fat till you have
+two <i lang="fr">noisettes de mouton</i>. Save each particle of meat
+and each particle of fat from the tail ends of the chops,
+separate, but as zealously as you preserve every memory
+of your well-beloved. You will then have four little
+divisions: two <i lang="fr">noisettes</i> for the <i>Fritto Misto</i>; two chop
+bones for stock; a little pile of fat for rendering down;
+a little pile of fragments of meat. Place the bones immediately
+in a small casserole of water, with salt, two
+bay leaves, pepper, one leaf of sage, and rice if you
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[13]</span>like. It will help you if you tie the bones together with
+a piece of string having a long end so that you may
+pull them out. Let this simmer for thirty-six hours.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_1_1" href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>
+Have ready also six roots of salsify; one-half pound of
+French beans; one-half pound of cooked peas; and one
+pound of potatoes, cut into slices. (All these vegetables
+should be cooked ready. It will improve matters if the
+peas are <em>very</em> young and boiled in syrup.) Also two
+tomatoes sliced in halves, the meat of two rashers of
+bacon, and a few mushrooms, and half a dozen sprigs
+of parsley. (The bacon fat must be saved for rendering
+down.) Also two slices of bread half an inch thick.
+Have ready also a large pie dish half filled with water.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_1_1" href="#FNanchor_1_1" class="label">[1]</a> This is the result of the Army. I do not believe that Gringoire ever
+simmers his bones for thirty-six hours. But in the Army it was woe to
+the Colonel whose bones did not simmer for thirty-six hours or who did
+not say so when an apoplectic gentleman with a blue hat-band came
+around. The Colonel would lose his battalion, his D.S.O., and the esteem
+of his fellow men.</p></div>
+
+<p>“Now take an earthenware frying pan with a white
+glazed lining. Put in sufficient frying fat to fill this to
+three-quarters of its depth when boiling. Set this on
+the fire and bring the fat to the boil. (Boiling fat will
+be absolutely still—stiller than any waters at even; as
+still as is Madame Sélysette when, in the same room,
+Gringoire is writing. It will have ceased to bubble, and,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[14]</span>above its surface, will float a filmy wreath of bluish
+vapor. You may test it by dropping in a piece of bread
+crumb. If this becomes crisp in sixty seconds, your fat
+will be ready for what follows.)</p>
+
+<p>“As soon as the fat boils, drop in your two slices of
+bread, which will be large enough later to support the
+<i lang="fr">noisettes</i> and which will be trimmed to improve
+their appearance. During that minute, place in a frying
+basket your two <i lang="fr">noisettes</i> of mutton and the sliced
+cold potatoes. (Gringoire likes his fried potatoes not
+too crisp. Those who like them biscuit-wise should fry
+them in the basket for a quarter of an hour longer than
+the mutton.) Take out from the frying fat the slices
+of bread, let them drip into the fat, place them handy
+on a clean plate ... <em>D—n it, that’s enough!</em>”</p>
+
+<p>The reader will understand that at this point my
+friend Gringoire ceased dictating and ceased violently.
+Thus a Gringoire cookery book cannot be compiled.
+For, though Gringoire will cook for hours and hours
+if visitors are expected, and though he will talk, equally
+for hours and hours, about eating, about digestion,
+about French, Italian, and even German cookery as
+they affect the emotions, he finds it tiresome to tie
+down his mind to the recording of processes.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[15]</span></p>
+
+<p>It is the same with gardening; the keeping of goats,
+ducks, chickens; the training of dogs, cats, and horses.
+He will spend hours in meditating over his onion
+bed.</p>
+
+<p>And then Madame Sélysette will call from the bedroom
+window of the Gingerbread Cottage:</p>
+
+<p>“I do <em>love</em> to see you, Gringoire, pottering about and
+pretending to be busy.” For Gringoire will have risen
+at 6:30 and will have done something with hoes,
+spades, trowels, lines, and other paraphernalia. But he
+will have thought more. For the rotation of crops on
+a quarter of an acre of sandy soil that has to be at
+once a formal garden and the main food supply of a
+couple, of the tiniest income—that is a subject for endless
+thought.</p>
+
+<p>It is a subject also for endless economies, schemes,
+calculations. The calculations concern manure—for the
+accounts of agriculture are the most complicated of
+accounts. You may show a loss on the fattening of an
+ox, a chicken, a goat, a duck, or a pig—and yet its
+droppings may so enrich your land as to give you
+actually a handsome balance of profit. Or again a crop
+may appear superabundant, little palatable, or unattractive—but,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[16]</span>fed to one animal or another, it will beautifully
+adorn your board on Christmas day.</p>
+
+<p>So in the Gingerbread Cottage—and it is, in all but
+looks, a very bad cottage, with a roof that leaks, walls
+that used to drip with damp, cupboards that, till the
+advent of Gringoire, smelled of mold and bred the
+very largest spiders that can be imagined—Gringoire
+pursues at once his economies, his meditations, and his
+career as a poet.</p>
+
+<p>But he is only able to be communicative as to his
+meditations. If Madame Sélysette asks him how to
+make <i lang="fr">potage</i> this or that, he says: “Oh, throw in any
+old thing.” Or again! This spring the writer overheard
+the following dialogue between him and a small boy
+who was weeding whilst he dug.</p>
+
+<p>“What is the most important thing in gardening,
+boy?”</p>
+
+<p>“Manure, sir.”</p>
+
+<p>“What is the next most important thing?”</p>
+
+<p>“Tools, sir.”</p>
+
+<p>“And the next?”</p>
+
+<p>“Money to buy seeds, sir.”</p>
+
+<p>“Wrong in every particular,” said Gringoire in a
+terrible voice. “The first thing is brains; and the second
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[17]</span>thing is brains; and the third thing is brains. Do
+you understand?”</p>
+
+<p>The boy said, “Yes, sir.” But one may doubt if he
+was really much wiser. And Gringoire continued somewhat
+as follows: “I have no manure, no tools, and no
+money—but you will see in the autumn that I shall
+have the most productive garden in the country!”</p>
+
+<p>From which it will appear that Gringoire has some
+of the characteristics of a Southern origin. Today his
+garden would not at all points impress a French gardener—but
+in some it would. For, in his youth Gringoire
+sat under the great Professor Gressent, Professor
+of the Potager Moderne, at the Sorbonne in Paris.
+From him he learned that thought, devotion to the
+task, and any bit of metal on the end of a stick shaped
+like a hoe will take the place of manure, tools, and
+money. For Professor Gressent, during one session,
+used to commence every lecture by ordering his pupils
+to inscribe on their tablets the mystical sentence: “<i lang="fr">Trois
+fois biner vaut deux fois engraisser.</i>”</p>
+
+<p>And when his Boswell, the writer, asked him the
+other day how he got his results, he answered:</p>
+
+<p>“By trying to establish what that old fool Tolstoi
+called the Kingdom of God within me!”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[18]</span></p>
+
+<p>The writer took him to mean that it is the spirit in
+which a job is attacked that alone can sanctify the job—and
+that, in that way, the godly grow fat at the
+expense of the unrighteous. Before the war Gringoire
+was an ordinary poet, such as you might see in Soho
+or in various foreign underground haunts by the
+baker’s dozen, eating nasty meats, drinking nasty
+wines, usually in nasty company. How the war
+changed his heart is here recorded.</p>
+
+<p>This is therefore a Reconstructionary Tale.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[19]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h3 class="nobreak" id="II">
+    II
+    <br>
+    <i>Gardens and Flats</i>
+  </h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>“I wonder,” Gringoire&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_2_2" href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> began one evening, “if my experience
+of landscape during the war has been that of
+many people....”</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_2_2" href="#FNanchor_2_2" class="label">[2]</a> “Gringoire.” This is not of course, our poet’s name, but a nickname
+earned actually at school. There is a story by Alphonse Daudet,
+in “Lettres de Mon Moulin,” called the “Chèvre de M. Séguin,” which
+relates how in the end the wolf ate Mr. Séguin’s goat. This story, in
+the form of a letter, is addressed to a poet, one Gringoire, and is meant
+to show that though a poet may struggle all his life against poverty, in
+the end the wolf, starvation, will get him. At Gringoire’s school the
+Sixth Form were studying French from the “Lettres de Mon Moulin,”
+and since even at that date Gringoire wrote poems, his kindly schoolmates
+learned the name and so bestowed it upon him—as it has been
+bestowed on many out-at-elbowed literati.</p></div>
+
+<p>It was an evening in spring. Gringoire had not been
+very long established in his cottage—which, because
+of the nature of the poet himself and of the poet’s
+adventurous establishment, the writer automatically
+styles in his mind the Gingerbread Cottage. Gringoire,
+with a spirit of hospitality that was large and open
+rather than either considered or calculating, had invited
+a party of London friends to share his Easter
+with him. During the day he rushed about a great
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[20]</span>deal, cooking highly flavored dishes of a ragout type,
+on paraffin stoves, washing up, sweeping, gardening,
+gathering unusual wild herbs for salads, so that he was
+busy, and we of the party saw little of him.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately it was fine. For at that date the Gingerbread
+Cottage let in water like a sieve through the roof,
+the floor, the rough walls. Great holes indeed gaped
+in the plaster of the ceilings. But he had whitewashed
+the walls, stuck pots on shelves, improvised a couch
+out of his camp bed, and lit fires of sticks in the sitting
+room. So in the evenings we sat and listened to his
+talking.</p>
+
+<p>For Gringoire was a conversationalist. Like most
+dynamic, overwhelming, and energetic poets, he had
+not the patience to listen to the remarks of his fellows
+or to answer. He would be silent most of the day. But
+toward evening, as like as not, he would suddenly
+suspend all his activities, and with very possibly a hair-sieve
+or a trowel in his hand, gesticulating too, he
+would begin to talk.</p>
+
+<p>As a house party the Easter experiment was not a
+success for all of us. Gringoire had hardened himself
+in Flanders; the rest had not. But since, as a byproduct
+of the experience, Madame Sélysette had consented
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[21]</span>to share and adorn his lot, Gringoire had his reward.
+And the writer secured these records of his
+monologues:</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder,” then, he asked on one of these evenings,
+“if my experience of landscape during the war has
+been that of many people.” And without waiting he
+continued much as follows: “For I may say that before
+August, 1914, I lived more through my eyes than
+through any other sense, and in consequence certain
+corners of the earth had, singularly, the power to stir
+me.” But from the moment when, on the 4th of
+August, 1914, the Germans crossed the Belgian frontier
+“near a place called Gemmenich,” aspects of the earth
+no longer existed for him.</p>
+
+<p>The earth existed, of course. Extending to immense
+distances of field-gray; dimly colored in singularly
+shaped masses, as if the colors on Mercator’s projection
+had been nearly washed out by a wet brush. Stretching
+away, very flat, silenced, in suspense, the earth—<i lang="la">orbis
+terrarum veteribus notus</i>—seemed to await the oncoming
+legions, gray too, but with the shimmer of gold
+standards that should pour out from that little gap,
+“near a place called Gemmenich,” and should obscure
+and put to shame all the green champaign lands of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[22]</span>world, as the green grass of meadows is put to shame
+and obscured by clay, water pouring through a gap in
+a dike. That was the earth.</p>
+
+<p>There were no nooks, no little, sweet corners; there
+were no assured homes, countries, provinces, kingdoms,
+or races. All the earth held its breath and waited.</p>
+
+<p>“And it is only today,” my friend went on, “that I
+see again a little nook of the earth; it forms the tiniest
+of hidden valleys, with a little red stream that buries
+itself in the red earth beneath the tall green of the
+grass and the pink and purple haze of campions, the
+occasional gold of buttercups, the cream of meadowsweet.
+The plants in the garden wave in stiffness like
+a battalion on parade—the platoons of lettuce, the
+headquarters’ staff, all sweet peas, and the color company,
+which is of scarlet runners. The little old cottage
+is under a cliff of rock, like a gingerbread house from
+a Grimm’s fairy tale; the silver birches and the tall
+pines confront it; the sunlight lies warmer than you
+could imagine in the hollow, and a nightingale is running
+in and out of the bean-stalks. Yes, a nightingale
+of midsummer that has abandoned the deep woodland
+and runs through the garden, a princess turned housekeeper,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[23]</span>because it has young to feed. Think of noticing
+that!”</p>
+
+<p>During the four years that the consciousness of the
+war lasted, he had noticed only four landscapes and
+birds only once—to know that he was noticing them—for
+themselves. Of course, one has memories of aspects
+of the world—but of a world that was only a background
+for emotions.</p>
+
+<p>Even, for instance, when one saw poor Albert, by
+some trick of mnemonics, from the lettering of the
+huge word “Estaminet” across the front of a battered
+house in the Place where, in the blinding sunlight,
+some Australian transport men were watering their
+mules, and one recognized it for a place one had visited
+twenty years before and had forgotten—even when
+one saw the remains of the garden where, twenty years
+before, we had waited whilst our lunch of omelette,
+cutlets, and salad was prepared, or even when one saw
+the immense placard with “Caution” erected in the
+center of the white rubbish and white rubble of the
+Place, or the desecrated statue of the Madonna, leaning
+in an abandoned attitude from the church tower—even
+then one was so preoccupied, so shut in on one’s self,
+that these things were not objects that one looked at
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[24]</span>for themselves. They were merely landmarks. Divisional
+Headquarters, one had been told, was behind the
+N.E. corner of the Place, the notice-board was to the
+N.E. of one’s self, therefore one must pass it to reach
+Divisional Headquarters. It was Headquarters one
+wanted, not the storing of the mind with observed
+aspects.</p>
+
+<p>So Gringoire had four landscapes, which represent
+four moments in four years when, for very short intervals,
+the strain of the war lifted itself from the
+mind. They were, those intermissions of the spirit,
+exactly like gazing through rifts in a mist. Do you
+know what it is to be on a Welsh mountain side when
+a heavy mist comes on? Nothing remains. You are
+there by yourself.... And the only preoccupation
+you have with the solid, invisible world is the boulders
+over which you stumble and the tufts of herbage that
+you try to recognize as your path. Then suddenly the
+mist is riven perpendicularly, and for a moment you
+see a pallid, flat plain stretching to infinity beneath
+your feet and running palely to a sea horizon on a
+level with your eyes. There will be pale churches, pale
+fields, and on a ghostly channel the wraiths of scattered
+islands. Then it will be all gone.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[25]</span></p>
+
+<p>It was just so with the three or four landscapes that
+my friend saw during the war. There was the day in
+1915 when Kensington Gardens suddenly grew visible.
+There were Guardsmen turning in fours, with some
+Guardee form of drill that is not usual to the Infantry.
+There were motor transport wagons going cautiously
+down the Broad Walk—parts of the familiar train of
+the war. And then, suddenly, there were great motionless
+trees, heavy in their summer foliage, blue-gray,
+beneath a very high sky; there was the long, quiet part
+of the palace; the red brick, glowing in the sun, the
+shadows of the windows very precise and blue. And
+Gringoire thought that old, stiff marionettes, rather
+homely courtiers and royalties, might step out of the
+tall windows onto the lawns and, holding tasseled
+canes to their lips, bow, pirouette and make legs, till
+the long chestnut wigs brushed the stiff rosebushes.
+Not <em>very</em> gallant; not <em>very</em> royal. No Rois Soleils or
+Princesses Lointaines but a Court nevertheless, whispering
+mercilessly, intriguing, smiling, betraying,
+much as in Versailles, only a little more rustically, in
+front of the old, homely Dutch orangery.</p>
+
+<p>Then the curtain closed again; the weight once more
+settled down. The trees again became the foreground
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[26]</span>and there was the feeling that Gringoire could never
+get away from—that they would be personally humiliated,
+shamed, abashed; as if they would wrathfully
+bow or avert their heads if ever field-gray troops passed
+down the Broad Walk, or the park keeper at the gates
+wore a Uhlan uniform! That was in the early days of
+the war—August, 1915, I think. The feeling that there
+might be an invasion was still, and was strong, in the
+air. There was no knowing, still, where the dam might
+give way and the mud-colored tide pour toward
+us. And somehow Gringoire figured it coming from
+the W. by S.W. from the direction of Kew and Fulham:
+high, gray, reaching from the legions on the
+ground to the gray airships towering on high—a solid,
+perpendicular wave of humiliation like the tidal wave
+of which one reads—of humiliation for the trees and
+the very grass.</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder,” Gringoire asked again that evening, “if
+other people had, like myself, that feeling that what
+one feared for was the land—not the people but the
+menaced earth with its familiar aspect. And I wonder
+why one had the feeling. I dare say it was just want of
+imagination: one couldn’t perhaps figure the feelings
+of ruined, fleeing and martyred populations. And yet,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[27]</span>when I had seen enough of those, the feeling did not
+alter. I remember that what struck me most in ruined
+Pont de Nieppe, by Armentières, was still the feeling
+of abashment that seemed to attach to furniture and
+wall-paper exposed to the sky—not the sufferings of
+the civilian population, who seemed to be jolly enough—or
+at any rate sufficiently nonchalant—with booths
+erected under ruined walls or in still whole cottages,
+selling fried fish to the tanneries. No! what struck me
+as infinitely pathetic was lace curtains: for there were
+innumerable lace curtains, that had shaded vanished
+windows, fluttering from all the unroofed walls in the
+glassless window-frames. They seemed to me to be
+more forlornly ashamed than any human beings I
+have ever seen. Only brute beasts ever approach that:
+old and weary horses, in nettle-grown fields; or dogs
+when they go away into bushes to die.”</p>
+
+<p>He went on to say that perhaps prisoners of war had
+it too. The Germans certainly seemed to. But he had,
+naturally, never seen any of our own people in that
+condition. They are represented to us as remaining
+erect and keeping most of their <i lang="fr">esprit de corps</i>. That
+may be why, in August, 1915, it was difficult to think
+of the sufferings of our possibly invaded peoples but
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[28]</span>only of the humiliation of desecrated herbage and
+downlands.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know.” And Gringoire meditated as if
+neither I nor Mme. Sélysette were in the room. “Perhaps
+I am lacking in human sympathy or have no
+particular cause to love my fellow men. But at any
+rate, at that moment, the feeling of dread that those
+gray-blue, motionless trees under the high sky might,
+under heavens more lowering, feel that final humiliation—that
+feeling was so strong that I remember it still
+as a pain. Nay, in the remembrance, I feel it so strongly
+that it is still a pain, like that of an old, deep cicatrized
+wound. For of course, it would have connoted that the
+broad and the small fields, copses, spinneys, streams,
+and heaths, stretching away to the quiet downs and
+the ultimate sea, would have felt that tread of mailed
+and alien heels.” He remembered looking up to the
+sky in an agony. And then he became again interested
+in the Guards at drill beneath the trees—whose dressing
+never altered. Why did they turn in fours at the
+command “Left turn” when they were in column of
+route? Why didn’t they form two deep? They were
+not doing sentry drill or any form of ceremonial that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[29]</span>the ordinary Infantry practice. The command was not:
+“In fours: left turn.”</p>
+
+<p>So the workaday frame of mind came back—and
+we carried on.</p>
+
+<p>On hearing of the death of Lord Kitchener, he had
+another short moment. “I don’t know,” he wrote this
+in a letter, “whether the news had anything to do
+with it. I suppose it had. I will tell you. I was being
+motored to Dunmow Station, and when the car arrived
+at that little shanty, the stationmaster, whom I
+remember as quite an old man, came to the car-stop
+and just said: ‘Lord Kitchener has been drowned.’ He
+appeared quite expressionless, and I remember that
+both my companion and I laughed. I should say that
+I even laughed loudly. In those days and frames of
+mind, one reached, as it were, down to jokes obtaining
+only amongst rather simple people—and the joke underlying
+the idea of the drowning at sea of a man so
+supported by a whole land might have been quite
+ingenious in idea—like some joke of the reign of
+Queen Anne involving the raising of the sea above the
+dome of St. Paul’s.</p>
+
+<p>“But he succeeded in assuring us that Lord Kitchener
+had been drowned. ‘The Field Marshal Commanding
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[30]</span>in Chief had been last seen on the nearly
+vertical deck, following a member of his staff.’—A
+good death for the man who had saved his land—and
+Europe.</p>
+
+<p>“For speaking not as an expert speaks but still as a
+student of the temper of war and the <i lang="fr">moral</i> of what
+in the Army is called ‘the men’ I have no hesitation in
+saying—and I don’t apologize for saying here—that
+without the figure of Lord Kitchener the British Army
+would have remained negligible in numbers and would
+have taken a very small part in the war. And I suppose
+that, without the British Army, the war could hardly
+have been maintained to a successful conclusion.”</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, that was the way in which it appeared
+to Gringoire with a mind suddenly jumped into attending
+to this shocking fact from the designing of an
+aiming card for the Ross Rifle. For in those days it
+was his province to instruct in the use of that weapon
+nine hundred returned British Expeditionary Force, all
+time-serving men, and in consequence the toughest
+customers you could imagine. Indeed, it is difficult to
+imagine them.</p>
+
+<p>They had every guile from a military point of view.
+They were adepts in absences, swingings of the lead,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[31]</span>drunks, excuses, barrack-breakings, cheerful lies, and
+a desperate determination not to exhibit any glimmerings
+of intelligence, let alone any proficiency, in the
+use of any kind of weapon, let alone the Ross Rifle,
+which was a gimcrack concern at the best, with aperture
+sights and fittings like watch springs and innumerable
+ways of being put out of order. And you could
+put your nose in half and get yet another month in
+hospital as easy as winking by pulling back the bolt in
+any sort of rapid practice.</p>
+
+<p>They lived—these desperadoes—in a tumble-down
+skating rink, and they exercised amongst the backyards
+and dust-bins of a great city, and such was the moral
+atmosphere of the shadowy and stifling vault in which
+this kind of khaki lived that when, at Easter, Gringoire
+proposed to bring in a priest to hear the confessions of
+the Roman Catholics with more convenience to them,
+the men sent three R.C. sergeants as a deputation to
+him. They said the rink was not a fitting place for a
+priest to see. And every one of them promised to walk
+three miles to confession and to perform all his Easter
+duties faithfully sooner than that a priest should see
+them as they lived.</p>
+
+<p>A great cavern of a place that was, laid out in stalls
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[32]</span>like a cattle market, where the officers labored intolerably
+filling up innumerable forms with an immense
+sense of pressure and of striving with tough
+men. A great sense of pressure. And he would walk
+up and down in front of the worst-dressed line that
+had ever been imagined—a fantastic line, for not one
+of the nine hundred professed to be able to stand
+straight on his legs—and Gringoire would exclaim
+gloomily and in alternation: “Thank God we’ve got a
+Navy” or: “Lord Kitchener says the war’s going to last
+another three years; hang me if you blighters will
+wangle out of going back to France.” Whereupon there
+would be groans down the line and a near-drunk man
+would whisper: “Good ol’ Kitchener!”</p>
+
+<p>It was out of that horseshoe-cavern of gloom in
+whose shafts of vaporous and disinfectant-colored lights
+moved these troublesome green-brown shapes that he
+had come for a very brief period of leave in a world
+that, again, included lawns, afternoon teas, standard
+roses, tall rooms, servants—not batmen, but with caps
+and aprons—pianolas—and no one, really, to clean
+one’s belt; as well as discussions of that higher, wilder,
+finer strategy, in which, in one’s capacity of a more or
+less professional student of tactics, one was so decidedly
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[33]</span>at a loss. Or perhaps it wasn’t immediately from the
+cavern that he had come; perhaps it was from the
+Chelsea Course. But there, amongst the Guards, the
+Kitchener “note” rang truer and cleaner and more
+insistently. And at any rate, he was certainly going
+back to that atmosphere of strain and rush; into the
+desperate effort to teach thousands and thousands
+bayonet fighting, gas tactics, measures against venereal
+disease, sentry drill, dugout building, why they were
+going to fight, how to manufacture grenades out of
+jam-tins, the history of the regiment, and <i lang="fr">esprit de
+corps</i>—and doing it all in desperate and bewildered
+haste, with the aid of sacks, hairpins, can-openers and
+Japanese rifles with the wrong sort of bayonets, under
+the auspices of an orderly room driven mad by endless
+reproofs from brigades, divisions, the War Office, the
+civilian police, Boards of Agriculture, county asylums,
+parents whose sons had enlisted too young, and young
+women who had married privates too often married
+already.... But coming from it or not, Gringoire
+was certainly going back to it and, in its desperate and
+fleeting atmosphere, the idea of Lord Kitchener was
+the one solid thing onto which our poor poet could
+catch.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[34]</span></p>
+
+<p>So the stationmaster made it plain that Lord
+Kitchener was dead.</p>
+
+<p>It was just one of those situations in which one
+thinks nothing—a change in the beat of the clock.
+Gringoire was sitting in the little open shed of a waiting-room,
+the only idea present in his mind being
+that his crossed legs were stuck stiffly out in front of
+him, their weight upon his left heel and both hands
+in his breeches pockets. Nothing whatever! Absolutely
+nothing! No war: an empty mind; a little open shed
+with benches; a hatchway in one plank wall where
+they served out tickets; a bit of platform; a high, brick
+signal-box with clocks or things ticking; a brick house,
+no doubt the stationmaster’s.... The whole world,
+that was! And noiseless; and immobile. There was no
+France on the horizon; no English Channel. There
+was no awaiting of Zeppelins; there was no Right or
+Wrong.</p>
+
+<p>And so the veil lifted for a second. The flat lands of
+Essex were there, stretching out; flat fields; undistinguished
+beneath a dull sky. He speculated on the
+crops; on the labor it took to the acre to put in those
+cabbages; on the winds that must sweep across the
+comparatively hedgeless spaces. The ground looked
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[35]</span>like a good clay. Plenty of heart in it, no doubt they
+would say in auctioneer’s advertisements. But, on the
+whole, an unsmiling, foreign land. Not Kent or Sussex,
+but “the Sheeres.” If one settled down here, one
+wouldn’t know the postman, the tax collector, the old
+standers, the way they trimmed the hedge rows, the
+habits of the soil, or the course of the months, the
+brooks, the birds, the breed of sheep, the gossip, the
+local history—or the dead. A friendless, foreign country,
+the Essex Flats....</p>
+
+<p>And the southeastern saying came up into Gringoire’s
+mind: “You see yon man: he cooms from Sussex.
+He sucked in silliness with his mother’s milk and
+’s been silly ever since. But never you trust a man from
+the Sheeres!”... It is Kent and Sussex against the
+world—just as no doubt it is Essex and Hertford; and
+Somerset and Devon; the North and East Riding and
+Durham and Cumberland and Denbigh and Flint,
+against the world—and it’s <em>never</em> safe to put long straw
+under potatoes when you dig them in, trusting to the
+wet to rot it. At that point Gringoire remembered in
+1899 buying some special seed, called, I think, “1900,”
+out of compliment to the coming century. He paid a
+big price; one hundred twenty shillings the hundredweight,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[36]</span>I think. And he dunged them beautifully with
+rather long straw and artificial manure. But a long,
+long dry season came, and the Kentish land sloped to
+the south, and the straw dried, and the artificial
+manure never soaked down. He didn’t get a quarter of
+a ton to the quarter acre.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, under maize, if you can water
+heavily once or twice, long straw arranged in trenches,
+like pipes, is rather a good wheeze. It holds the water
+to the roots and maize will do with a topsoil like fire
+if the roots are cool. In 1899 Gringoire got some wonderful
+ears of sweet corn. And, toasted on the cob and
+buttered after toasting...!</p>
+
+<p>He changed heels under the puttees and considered
+his garden in Kent. He was going to try growing
+potatoes from seeds—not from seed-potatoes, but from
+the little seeds that form in the green berries. And he
+was going to put a light, whitewashed paling behind
+the sweet corn, on the north—to reflect the rays of the
+sun. It should ripen the cob three weeks earlier!...</p>
+
+<p>The Essex flats became again, slowly, visible land,
+planted with war-food. An airplane was going toward
+Bishop Stortford; the train was overdue because a unit
+was entraining up the line—once again every fact in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[37]</span>the world was just a part, just a side light of the
+immense problem. Once again nothing existed just for
+itself. Trains were carriers of men and munitions.
+Stretched-out legs were encased in puttees, put in
+military boots; servant girls travelling with horn-handled
+black umbrellas and elastic boots were going
+to see their boys off at Waterloo; old farmers with
+white side whiskers were explaining why they had
+kept all six sons at home—in defiance of the gaze of
+Lord Kitchener that looked at them six times in that
+wee small station. And railway fares were going to be
+increased for civilians!</p>
+
+<p>I have little doubt that what, at that moment and
+for that minute space of time, had set our poet intent
+on planting potatoes and seed corn—perfectly certain
+that he was going straight down into Kent to plant
+potatoes in rows and sweet corn in hills—was that his
+unconscious mind was certain that the war was done
+and over with that death in the North Sea. I do not
+mean to say that he thought it—or even that he was
+conscious that something inside thought it for him.
+His surface-mind thought certainly of Essex, of Kent
+and Sussex; the subconscious mind seemed to be aware
+that his puttees were badly put on, that he had mislaid
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[38]</span>his warrant in one of several pockets—he had a vague
+consciousness of South Wales, blue mountains, like
+Japanese clouds. But some deeper center still was
+probably appalled and benumbed and was saying:</p>
+
+<p>“Now the war is finished and lost. Now, ‘<i>appry la
+gair finny</i>’ as the Tommies say, <i lang="fr">je vais planter mes
+choux comme un maître d’école</i>.” There seemed to be
+nothing left but to plant out a kitchen garden.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[39]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h3 class="nobreak" id="III">
+    III
+    <br>
+    <i>Blue of Swallows’ Backs</i>
+  </h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Well, by the evening of his next monologue, Gringoire
+had planted out his kitchen garden; the onions,
+the lettuces, the carrots, the kohl-rabi, the spinach were
+aligned; that battalion was parading in full strength.
+Moreover, in a bed from which he had just removed
+spinach and onions, there were twenty little potato
+plants, grown from little seeds: under a twenty-foot
+quick-set hedge, beautiful and close like a wall, the
+sweet corn was already up to the hips. The long straws,
+like pipes, ran in a trench under the corn hills; the
+deluge of water, warmed because it comes from a dip
+on which the sun blazes all day, washed the deep roots;
+the nightingale was running in and out of the beanstalks;
+the swallows were throwing themselves through
+the air; over the low brick the sun was setting on the
+longest day of the year, and, D.S.G., the war was over
+and done. No longer D.H.Q., Bn.H.Q., M.L.E.,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[40]</span>T.M.B.—but just D.S.G.! To God alone be the glory
+in the quiet garden evening.</p>
+
+<p>“I will tell you a curious thing,” said Gringoire in
+June, “but in gardens amongst woods, beside streams,
+there are so many curious things to tell of that I don’t
+know where to begin! I am like a child with the
+largest coin it has ever possessed outside a hundred entrancing
+shops. I began talking the other day with the
+idea of describing four landscapes—the great guns
+from Portsmouth now remind me, though I have
+written of only two, of yet a fifth.”</p>
+
+<p>We—Gringoire and the writer—had been for a slow
+walk, round three sides of a patch of heath. A man,
+leaning over a white gate, with a thin, red face, a blue
+suit and some very bright regimental tie, just said:
+“The telegram’s up in the post office. It’s official!” And,
+speaking of it that evening in the warmth of the
+garden beside the hammock of Mme. Sélysette,
+Gringoire said:</p>
+
+<p>“I assure you, on my honor, that the whole landscape,
+the commonplace, friendly landscape of elms,
+rather backward wheat, heather, gorse, and park-wall
+suddenly changed. It was as if the focus of the camera
+had suddenly clicked, readjusted itself—as if it grew—though
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[41]</span>before one hadn’t known it for anything but
+all that was possible of tranquillity, breadth, security,
+and peace—grew quieter, calmer, broader, more utterly
+secure and inviolable. English country!</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know: there’s nothing to it, really. A spray
+of dog-roses; a whitethroat dropping over the hedge;
+some gorse; the long, rolling land; the high skies and
+clouds above the downs.... Well, it is one stage more
+toward a forever of security, of that being forever inviolable
+that one prays may be its portion. A great
+stage forward.”</p>
+
+<p>For coming home and sitting behind irregular, all
+but too old lattice, giving onto a deep wall of verdure,
+we had heard suddenly the heavy guns through the
+voices of birds.... And Gringoire said later that, at
+the sound of those distant guns through the overwhelming
+orchestra of birds, he had seen distinctly,
+against the warm brick of the house-wall, a tin hat....
+But many tin hats dim in the blue-gray light, and
+a lot of Scotch Jocks, their kilts covered with khaki
+aprons, and an immense long train with innumerable
+shapes dropping out of it, their cries muted by
+the twilight: the crunch of feet on the gravel, before
+the tin sheds of the station. That had been Railhead
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[42]</span>behind the Somme. And then suddenly you were conscious
+of the innumerable voices of birds singing the
+sun down. And then through them the uninterrupted
+heavy discourse of the great guns at a distance came
+over the little hills and darkling trees of that downland
+country. It continued.... Incessant, engrossed, almost
+as it were tranquil, almost like the bubbling of water
+in a pot, boiling up, dying down, going on and on,
+not penetrating but enveloping the cries of Tommy to
+Tommy or of footsteps to footsteps—and, rising
+through it, as if lances of sound were protruding upward
+through something soft and vaporous, the voices
+of thrushes. A great many thrushes: and the down
+getting whiter; and the “Fall In There’s” and the
+men moving off ...</p>
+
+<p>So that he said he half wished the Portsmouth guns
+would stop—five-point nines; ninety-eight pounders;
+fifteen-inch guns—whatever they are. One doesn’t want
+to hear them again, or again to feel them—dully on
+the air. Not at any rate in peace time.</p>
+
+<p>The nightingale amongst the bean-stalks; the
+thrushes in the shaw on the opposite hillsides; the
+swallows throwing themselves through the air! He did
+not remember any nightingale during the war; but he
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[43]</span>remembered those thrushes of Rébimont-Méricourt on
+a date in July ’16. And he remembered some swallows—an
+immense sea of the blue of swallows’ backs. And
+he said that the Portsmouth guns of the 28/6/’19
+sounding through the birds’ voices from the hill opposite
+the Gingerbread Cottage brought it all back. Poets
+are like that and have these visions.</p>
+
+<p>It sounds, of course, queer—but it was like that. Up
+on a hillside that was covered mostly with thistles
+there was an Artillery Observation Post which consisted
+of a Lombardy poplar—though one did not see
+how the gunners got up it. At any rate, there was a
+pile of dud Hun shells on the roadside bank at the
+foot of the tree and beneath the O.P. was a pretty
+rotten dugout with a corrugated iron roof. The Battalion
+Trench Mortar officer lived there. Below him he
+had a view of a battery of French 75’s, of the chalky
+line of trenches; Martinpuich looked down on him,
+which wasn’t overly comfortable, and the Ancre wound
+away—to No Man’s Land. From time to time a field-gun
+wheel going along the road would catch its spokes
+in the corrugated iron of his roof—lift a corner and
+drop it again. I don’t know why the Trench Mortar
+officer lived in that dugout, but a gunwheel lifted his
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[44]</span>roof and dropped it again whilst Gringoire was dozing
+in it. He thought the bottom of hell had dropped out.
+It was his worst shock of the war. I shouldn’t wonder
+if it were not the worst shock any one ever had between
+the 4/8/’14 and the 28/6/’19. He mentioned it,
+he said, because it probably accounted for his immediately
+subsequent exultation; it was, I suppose, so
+good to be just alive after that.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, after the Trench Mortar officer had
+come in—Gringoire had been waiting to give him a
+message—downhill through the thistles, dusty in the
+hot sunlight, Gringoire went with immense, joyful
+strides. He said that he was extraordinarily fit in those
+days! And an innumerable company of swallows flew
+round him, waist high, just brushing the thistledown.
+“They were so near,” Gringoire said, “that they
+brushed my hands, and they extended so far that I
+could see nothing else. It is one of the five things of
+the war that I really see, for it was like walking, buoyantly,
+in the pellucid sunlight, waist-high through a
+sea of unsurpassed and unsurpassable azure. I felt as
+if I were a Greek god. It was like a miracle.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, I see swallows from below, their rust-stained
+breasts against high, blotted, gray clouds—and I wonder
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[45]</span>if they are thinking of the near rising mayfly. I
+remember thinking on the other occasion that there
+were a good many dead amongst the thistles and that
+I must be putting up a huge number of flies. But that,
+again, was the thought of my subconscious mind. On
+the surface I just felt myself to be a Greek god, immortal,
+young forever, forever buoyant, amongst the
+eddies of a dark blue and eternal sea.”</p>
+
+<p>The feeling lasted until he got to the mule-lines of
+somebody’s First Line Transport, where he borrowed
+a terrible old brute of a horse, to take him to Divisional
+H.Q.</p>
+
+<p>It would be interesting to know what that class of
+feeling comes from—possibly from some sort of atavistic
+throwback to days when the gods were nearer. You
+get them now and again in action—but not so often
+as you get the reverse type of feeling when you are
+engaged in agriculture. That is perhaps why farmers
+are so often passionately disagreeable and apparently
+unreasonable men. For there is nothing that so much
+resembles contact with, wrestling with, a personal devil
+as to awaken one morning and to find that a whole
+crop of seedlings has vanished before myriads of slugs.
+That happens. If you don’t believe it, read White’s
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[46]</span>“Selborne.” It is loss, ruin perhaps. It is like a death:
+a profound and unforeseen disaster. And your mind
+personifies the slug as intelligent, malignant, a being
+with a will for evil directed against you in person. I
+think that, whilst it lasts, it is the worst feeling in the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>Drought is nearly as bad.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[47]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h3 class="nobreak" id="IV">
+    IV
+    <br>
+    <i>The Kingdoms of the Earth</i>
+  </h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>It was after Gringoire had speculated on slugs, without,
+you will observe, suggesting a remedy, that he
+continued:</p>
+
+<p>“I have given you, so far, three of the landscapes
+that remain real to me—for the detraining in the dawn
+at Rébimont-Méricourt is not one of those that are just
+always in my mind. I have to remember back to—to
+be reminded of it. It was the sounds of Peace Guns
+pierced by the multitudinous voices of thrushes that
+brought back to me that first-heard, unintermittent
+thudding and throb of the engines of war through
+which, like spears, thrust the voices of innumerable
+birds. But, just, I suppose, because one’s mind was preoccupied
+with the job of seeing that one’s valise was
+all right, that the men had all their kit and equipment
+at least potentially there—and no doubt with the job
+of seeing to it that one’s composure appeared absolute—one
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[48]</span>recorded less of visible objects, so that fewer
+visible objects return, and they return less vividly.”</p>
+
+<p>He remembered—and he knew that he remembered,
+accurately and exactly—every detail of Kensington
+Gardens on that day of August, 1915; of the Essex
+Railway Station he said that he could tell you what
+advertisements were on the walls and how many
+people awaited the train as well as every word of the
+conversation he had had whilst driving to the station.
+And he remembered with an extreme clearness, as in
+the little paintings of Van Eyck on the Chasse de Ste.
+Ursule at Brûges, the swallows and the thistles of the
+ridge going down in the clear July weather behind
+Bécourt Wood in 1916. He had a job then, it is true—but
+not one calling for any immediate or complicated
+action. Besides, at that moment he had felt himself to
+be immune from danger and proof against death. So
+that those three landscapes became part of his immediate
+self.</p>
+
+<p>“They will probably remain part of myself to the
+end of my life: my grandchildren will probably be
+tired of them and, when I am quite aged, so probably
+will guests and casual strangers.” But—did you ever
+take a walking tour, or just a long walk and, in bed
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[49]</span>at the end of the day, perhaps in order to put yourself
+to sleep, did you ever try to remember every inch of
+the roads you had covered? Gringoire claimed that in
+that way he could remember a great many of the
+roads both of England and France of his boyhood when
+one walked or cycled a good deal for walking or
+cycling’s sake. Corners of roads, bridges, highways
+climbing over the forehead of downs—the road out
+of Bridport, down into Winchester, from Minehead to
+Lynton; from Calais over the flats to Arras, from
+Arras to Beauvais; from Blois to Tours; from Amiens
+to Albert in 1892.... By shutting his eyes, or by
+looking at something blank, like a sheet of paper, or
+by not really looking at anything at all, he could, he
+said, evoke a panorama of any of those roads, or say
+from the North Foreland to Land’s End. Perhaps he
+couldn’t really, but he could have a pretty good try
+and get a lot right. “Well, in that way, I can evoke
+most of the roads ’round Albert, or Locre and the
+base of the Salient, or Bailleul, or Steenewerck, or
+Armentières; and plenty of other places of the Lines
+of Communication like Hazebrouck and Abbéville and
+St. Omer. But I daresay I should get some of it incorrect.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[50]</span></p>
+
+<p>For instance, as to the detraining at Railhead in that
+dawn: he had distinctly the feeling that there was a
+woody, dark bank and a plantation of trees in which
+the thrushes sang, right up against the flat of the line.
+There wasn’t really. He found later, on coming out of
+Corbie and there entraining to rejoin his battalion,
+that there were only high elms against flat, champaign
+country with a muddy stream. However, there
+was a high farm-building just behind the elms, so, no
+doubt, the effect on the inattentive eye was that. And
+the thrushes had certainly sung.</p>
+
+<p>But he could evoke the rest of the road to the front
+line fairly well. On the right of the station, in the
+elms, was a brown Y.M.C.A. hut, where the officers
+got very greasy bread and rather black fried eggs and
+coffee. There were innumerable, old, dog’s-eared magazines
+on the mess tables in amongst the breakfast
+utensils. Twenty or thirty numbers of the “English Review,”
+like the dominoes, of a date when our writer
+used to own that periodical. It seemed an odd thing
+to see; an odd, queer thing to have owned. Near—too
+near—the hut were the men’s latrines; a little further,
+the officers’. On the left, then, as the Draft passed, was
+the station. A very fat old gendarme was standing,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[51]</span>well back on his heels, his legs wide apart; about him
+were four market women, with bundles, and baskets
+containing fowls. They were grouped around the gendarme
+like pullets around chanticleer, as he watched
+the sunrise. A lot of Royal Field Artillery horses and
+riders came over the dust into the station yard; a company
+of Jocks was waiting outside the office of the
+Railway Transport Officer. The ground was soft dust,
+so that the reinforcement might have been marching
+in sandals.</p>
+
+<p>They continued their march parallel with the railway
+line, along a soft road, beside the little stream,
+between osier-bushes and elms—for about fifty yards.
+There were some stray mules belonging to a Kitchener’s
+battalion, Wiltshires or Cheshires—Nineteenth
+Division anyhow. There didn’t appear to be any
+drivers. There was a good deal of shouting; the Draft
+about-turned. The guide was taking them wrong. But
+who ever knew a guide take any one right anywhere?
+It was rather like a dream—not at all a bad dream—but,
+anyhow, a numbness.</p>
+
+<p>Or no: really it was more like being in the hands of
+doctors, on the way to an operation. Probably the
+anaesthetic would be all right; it wouldn’t hurt. At any
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[52]</span>rate, we had no volition; one’s feet moved; one’s
+haversack was a bit heavy—not very. One went on, one
+didn’t know where.</p>
+
+<p>In the same way you may remember the anteroom
+of your dentist. There is a big table in the center of
+the room; on the table some writing materials—and
+old periodicals, like the “English Reviews” amongst
+the solid Y.M.C.A. cups and plates.... But, on the
+one hand there is, solid and real, say, Mandeville Place:
+taxis drive about in it; the faces of the houses are of
+black-gray Portland cement, imitating granite. The
+street, then, is real: and the operating room will soon
+feel as real, even while one is waiting in the outer
+room. But the anteroom itself is a dream-landscape.</p>
+
+<p>So it was with the Rébimont-Méricourt road.</p>
+
+<p>When you come out of the station yard, on the right
+there is a high, white-walled, tile-roofed estaminet-farm.
+Australian First Line Transport men were
+watering their mules there, lounging on the steps with
+their tunics off. The road began to mount; on the left,
+on top of a high bank was an orchard. It reminded
+our poet of the nutwalk, on a high bank, belonging
+to a certain farm in Kent—at the bottom of Aldington
+Knoll, where the marsh begins. Mounting the slope,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[53]</span>on the right, he came to a closed, empty, butcher’s
+shop. A superior butcher’s shop with grilles, green
+paint, gone of course dusty, marble slabs, and a gilded
+copper sign.</p>
+
+<p>The road opened out suddenly. It was a dusty expanse
+between houses: in England it would have been
+a village green. There were house walls, windows,
+archways in the dusty white plaster, giving onto farmyards
+or stables. Two men were harnessing a black
+mare into a hooded, two-wheeled, dusty cart. Four
+black Percheron stallions were standing in a string in
+front of a long cottage. “They reminded me,” Gringoire
+said, “of four black stallions I had seen, years
+before, outside the blacksmith’s at Beaumont-le-Roger.
+In those days it had seemed to be odd that stallions
+could be left unattended in a village-street. But in
+1916, I was used to that idea; what intrigued me, then,
+was that any civilian should have four stallions at his
+disposal. For they certainly were not French cavalry,
+or divisional or other transport.”</p>
+
+<p>The civilians seemed extraordinarily—not unreal—but,
+as it were, super-real! North French peasants,
+slow, ungainly, with heavy legs and feet. They were
+just the peasants one had always seen; hard, like
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[54]</span>granite—not comparatively soft and comparatively
+gray, like our own old peasants, who, when they look
+hard have the aspect not of wrinkled stone but of old,
+crannied, oak-tree boles. It was Sussex downland, that
+country—but like the people, harder, unsmiling.</p>
+
+<p>To the left of the Place—if you can call a flat space
+of dust a Place—there was a narrow street, high, mud
+walls; archways, semi-circular topped, gray wooden
+doors. On one of these was nailed a large white
+placard: headquarters of the 4th Army Veterinary
+Corps. (I hope this is no longer a staff secret.) The
+reinforcement had to drop some men of the Draft they
+had brought out—men for the poor 38th Division that
+was to be wiped out in Mametz Wood—at some other
+sort of headquarters at the end of the street; that was
+why some of us penetrated it. Yes: it was very narrow
+and high-walled—more Wiltshire than Sussex! There
+must have been vegetation on the top of some of the
+mud-walls. Opposite the Farriers’ H.Q. there was a
+little, thatched, sweet-shop sort of a place, and irises
+were growing on the thatch. I daresay they would not
+be there in peace time: you would say it was more
+Irish than French.</p>
+
+<p>In the sweet-shop they sold dates, clay pipes, picture
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[55]</span>postcards with English regimental badges, picture postcards
+with views of Albert and the toppling Madonna;
+silk-worked postcards of bright reds, whites, and bright
+blues, and postcards showing smiling ladies dusted
+with spangles. The women behind the low counter
+were very unreal: a motionless old witch with black
+eyes, a brown face, and dead white, parted hair; she
+stood, and only her eyes moved, and she appeared, not
+malignant, but grotesquely like a brown wooden image
+with moving eyes; an untidy dark girl, without even
+looking at us or at a perplexed Tommy who was pricing
+postcards, stood, her face sideways and repeated:
+“Ten ... a penny: ten ... a penny”—patiently, and
+as if from a great distance. She said: “Ten” very fast,
+then paused and added “a penny” slowly and as if with
+boredom. The Tommy grasped ten postcards and held
+out a penny, but she continued to say: “Ten ...
+a penny, ten ... a penny,” without either movement
+or expression.</p>
+
+<p>“So I could continue,” our poet went on, “to recall
+this itinerary, for many pages and for many hours: past
+the farm on the right, with the great dung heap, past
+the pond overshadowed by crab-apples; past another
+crossroads on the right, where, at a tent, facing a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[56]</span>great, dull-brick aggregation of ruins, rafters, and
+fallen chimneys, which was once a sugar factory—the
+timekeeper’s office and the iron gates were still intact—we
+delivered up the remaining other Ranks of the
+Draft and went on, up the bare downland road, officers
+only, between the bearded wheat on the left and the
+immense field of thin oats to the right—upward to the
+Officers’ Distributing Center; tents just put up that
+day, on a bare, downland field, very white and with
+the long down-grass still untramped in their
+interiors....</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I could keep it up for many of your pages and
+for many hours,” Gringoire said, “but I am not so
+much concerned to describe these landscapes, or to
+prove the quality of my memory, as to establish the
+psychological facts about the other four landscapes.”
+He had just gone back into memory, without any particular
+effort—without indeed any effort at all, and the
+roads were there, like a string unwinding from a ball.
+His eyes must have been at work but not his registering
+brain. The mind was working otherwise.</p>
+
+<p>“I have purposely omitted to mention,” he said later,
+“that, all the way, on all the roads, proceeding generally
+with caution because of the worn <i lang="fr">pavés</i>, but
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[57]</span>sometimes getting a swift run for a couple of hundred
+or so of yards, sometimes one at a time, sometimes
+four together, at times in as thick a stream as motor
+traffic in Piccadilly—the ambulances passed us, on the
+left.”</p>
+
+<p>That was a detail of the mind rather than of the
+eyes. Gringoire knew in 1919 that they were there,
+because he remembered that several of the officers had
+to count them for a time. But they appeared to be
+rather symbols than concrete objects. They stood for
+BLIGHTIES—going home! They were part of what
+made the skin of the forehead over the eyes feel always
+a little drawn, part of the preoccupation that, always,
+turned one’s thoughts inward. I don’t suppose it was
+fear—or perhaps that is how fear really manifests itself.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, is another landscape. It was up at the
+Officers’ Distributing Center. Or perhaps it wasn’t
+officially called that, though that was what it was. It
+may have been an Officers’ Rest Camp—which it certainly
+was not. At any rate, there it was on an open,
+sloping downland field—seven new tents pitched, two
+more being pitched: cook-houses, wash-houses, latrines,
+batmen’s quarters, and the rest of it, down to the incinerator,
+were all, also, in process of being erected.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[58]</span>The Senior Officer in charge of our party interviewed
+the Camp Commandant and the officers sprawled
+about on the bare hillside with the downland winds
+running over the grasses just as they do in Sussex on a
+cloudless day.</p>
+
+<p>“I have always thought,” Gringoire said, “ever since
+I was a small boy and used to ride on the downs
+behind Folkestone that the sun has a peculiar quality
+in the sky over downlands, as if chalk dust in the air
+whitened the rays. But that is probably nonsense.”
+Anyhow, the field sloped downwards; there was a
+white cart—or plow—track; then up went a great
+shoulder of the downs in a field all purple sections. I
+suppose cultivation for the time ended in the huge
+field of thin oats between the camp and the destroyed
+sugar factory. There was a very old man in a short
+blue blouse, with immensely long bow-legs—doing
+something with a scythe. It didn’t appear to be
+mowing.</p>
+
+<p>The down rising over against them appeared—so
+unable is the eye to measure these swelling distances—quite
+a small affair. But, halfway up it, seeming to
+tight-rope along a white thread, with an extreme slowness
+in passing from point to point, went transport
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[59]</span>wagons, incredibly tiny. So it was an immense, august,
+shoulder. A near-mountain!</p>
+
+<p>Gringoire said he could not just remember where
+the sun was: he ought to be able to work it out by
+the place and time. But I daresay it doesn’t really matter.
+At any rate, over the shoulder of the down—not
+in the least like a moon or an astral body but illuminated
+by the sun—silver and French gray, very slowly,
+a great body began to rise. One hadn’t much—one
+hadn’t indeed any—sense of proportion. It seemed immense—and
+alive as mushrooms are alive. Then, induced
+as the eye was to look into the pellucid sky,
+there became visible a number—some one counted
+fourteen—of tiny, shining globes. They appeared to
+be globes, because there was a fresh wind blowing
+straight from them and they turned end on. So,
+but slowly and incessantly heaving, did the immense
+one close at hand; a spider’s network of cordage went
+with its movements. Tiny and incredibly pretty, like
+films of gold dust floating in blue water and like peach
+blossom leaves—yes, incredibly pretty in the sunlight—airplanes
+were there. Because the—just as pretty—little
+mushrooms that existed suddenly in the sky, beside
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[60]</span>the sunlit dragonflies and peach blossoms, were pearly
+white, one officer said:</p>
+
+<p>“Hun planes!”</p>
+
+<p>The German shrapnel made black bursts. The officers
+were lounging in a group of six or seven. Another
+said: “<em>Their</em> sausages too ... Out there! Fourteen!”</p>
+
+<p>The slow ascent of our own sausage took the mind
+into the sky. A broad-faced, slow, brown, very sympathetic
+young officer—he had a rich voice, a slight stutter,
+and one eye that frequently winked—said:</p>
+
+<p>“He showed Him the Kingdoms of the Earth.”
+Then: “From a high place, you know, old dear,” he
+explained, rather apologetically to Gringoire. “His
+career,” Gringoire said, “was constantly interlaced with
+mine; in the stream that carried us along, we bobbed
+together—at Cardiff, in Rouen twice on June afternoons,
+and even after the Armistice, once in Coventry
+Street, and once in York. Yet, though we were quite
+intimate, he calling me ‘Old Dear,’ or ‘Old Preserved
+Equanimity,’ as my last Colonel nicknamed me, and
+though I called him ‘Old Dear,’ and later, as the
+fashion became, ‘Old Bean,’ I never knew his name.
+He would be there, in Orderly Room, in an officers’
+club armchair, at mess, dropping usually some single,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[61]</span>rather apposite, slightly literary remark—with just the
+trace of a stutter and always in an extraordinarily
+sympathetic voice—a deep, modest, affecting being....
+I wish I knew who he was—but I suppose I never
+shall.</p>
+
+<p>“He sh-showed Him the Kingdoms of th-the Earth,”
+this officer said—and his voice just seemed homelike.</p>
+
+<p>Some one else said, “Let’s go up that mountain,” in
+the true Welsh tone and accent, and several: “Yes,
+yes, let’s.... Surely we’d see everything.... Surely
+to goodness, let’s not miss it....”</p>
+
+<p>And they figured to themselves a glorious run down,
+and a glorious run up, the shoulder and then a great,
+flat gray view—of everything, and of all who mattered—of
+the Kingdoms of the Earth. But the usual voice—Conscience,
+Caution, Fear of Broad Views, maybe
+said: “We’d have to get leave.... The Camp Commandant,
+you know.... Eh, what, you fellows?...”</p>
+
+<p>The Camp Commandant, a small, extraordinarily
+excited Highlander, voiceless with gas and gesticulating
+because of shell-shock—threw papers about, threw
+off his Glengarry cap, shrieked, wheezed, croaked. “I
+knew him quite well,” Gringoire said, “and, since he
+once hauled me out of bed at four o’clock of a freezing
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[62]</span>morning because some sort of Scots Brigadier wanted
+some one to play ‘Annie Laurie’ and the ‘Banks of
+Loch Lomond’ to forty drunken Scots officers in another
+hut, I permit myself to talk of him as he was,
+capless, exacerbated, grasping a telephone and throwing
+things about.”</p>
+
+<p>He didn’t know whether he could or could not give
+them leave to go up the brae; he didn’t care if they
+went and drowned themselves. Couldn’t they see he’d
+only been there forty meen-its and there were two
+hundred contradictory memoranda awaiting him?
+And oh to hell, and oh to hell....</p>
+
+<p>They loafed once more; they fell back into that
+eternal “waiting to report” that takes up 112/113ths
+of one’s time during war. They contemplated and
+made remarks about the veering of the sausage.</p>
+
+<p>It was then that Gringoire related a psychological
+anecdote that gives the note of this book. “I suppose
+it was my friend’s sympathetic and suggestive voice
+that did it ... for I suddenly began to see bits of a
+landscape that has pursued me ever since—until now
+here I sit in it. Not quite a landscape; a nook, rather;
+the full extent of the view about one hundred seventy
+yards by two hundred seventy—the closed up end of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[63]</span>a valley; closed up by trees—willows, silver birches,
+oaks, and Scotch pines; deep, among banks; with a
+little stream, just a trickle, level with the grass of the
+bottom. You understand the idea—a sanctuary.”</p>
+
+<p>There were, in those days, you will remember, no
+more sanctuaries. All nooks of the world were threatened
+by the tide of blue-gray mud. We were out there
+to hold it back on the Somme. But could we?</p>
+
+<p>So that was a little nook, sanctuary; where you said
+“Feignits” to destiny—with a gingerbread cottage out
+of Grimm. You were a Haensel, holding some Gretel’s
+hand, tiptoeing, whispering, craning forward the
+neck.... A castle in Spain in fact, only that it was in
+a southern country—the English country.</p>
+
+<p>“I ask to be believed in what I am now saying,”
+Gringoire uttered the words slowly. “It is just the
+truth. If I wanted to tell fairy tales, I’d do better than
+this. Fairy tales to be all about the Earth shaking, and
+the wire, and the crumps, and the beef-tins.... You
+know. And that would be true too. Anyway this
+is....”</p>
+
+<p>He said that he didn’t pretend that he was gay at
+that moment: calm, no doubt; contemplative certainly—and
+certainly gently ironic. So many officers were
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[64]</span>fussy about things—air pillows, hooch, mislaid movement
+cards, how to post picture-cards, where their
+battalions were, and so on. The place no doubt brought
+it out. It left a good deal to be desired. So that, if he
+could smile gently, he didn’t pretend to have been
+without apprehensions. They hung vaguely at the back
+of the skull; they oppressed, a little, the breathing.</p>
+
+<p>And yet—ever since he had been a tiny child—he
+had, he said, been so much a creature of dreads that
+this was, in a sense, much less than dreads to which
+he had been well accustomed. The dreads of original
+sin, of poverty, of bankruptcy, of incredible shyness,
+of insults, misunderstandings, of disease, of death, of
+succumbing to blackmailers, forgers, brain-troubles,
+punishments, undeserved ingratitudes, betrayals.—There
+was nothing, Gringoire said, that he hadn’t
+dreaded in a sufficiently long life “which had been,
+mostly, a matter of one dread knocking out another.”
+So that, on the whole, the dread of what lay over
+the hill was less than most and limited itself, pretty
+well, to how one’s self would behave—except of course
+that one was damned afraid of being taken prisoner.
+Oh, damned afraid....</p>
+
+<p>Still it was on the whole such a relief to be out
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[65]</span>of contact with one’s civilian friends at home—for, as
+far as the Army was concerned, Gringoire said he
+never had one single moment’s cause for bitterness, but
+just contentment and making allowances—it was on
+the whole such a relief that he was more contented
+than perturbed. Nevertheless, the strain was a long
+strain, even if it was impersonal, since it was a strain
+concerning itself with the English Country and not
+at all with one’s regiment or one’s self. One’s regiment
+would go out, if things went wrong. It would
+go out, disappear, as sands disappear under great
+waves. One’s self too, probably, or it wouldn’t matter
+anyhow ... But the contaminated fields, the ashamed
+elms—that was the long strain. And suddenly, at that
+point it came—the castle in the air; the simulacrum;
+the vision of the inviolable corner of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>I don’t mean to say that it came with great exactness
+at that time—but it came, no doubt as a progression
+from the train of thought in Dunmow Station.
+There, you may remember, Gringoire thought
+that he would have a garden in a southeastern county—and
+his thoughts had connoted that it would be
+a garden on a hillside that sloped to the south and
+that looked over a not very distant sea—a great view,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[66]</span>showing on the horizon, during clear days, the coast
+of France; a view, as it were, from which one could
+see the Kingdoms of the Earth. “For there have,” said
+Gringoire, “always been only two Kingdoms of the
+Earth that mattered for me—our own land for its
+country and France for her people, her arts, her point
+of view.” Yes, undoubtedly it was to be a garden with
+a great view, and it should contain potatoes grown
+from seeds and sweet corn—also several rows of beans
+for which, whether for the flowers or the aligned
+stalks, Gringoire always had a great affection.</p>
+
+<p>In Dunmow station it had been merely an intellectual
+idea: as who should say, “After the war, we
+will take a cottage in the country and grow things
+and have a great view. At any rate, we will have a
+rest.” But, on the downside behind the Somme, it
+came differently. It came like one of these visions that
+one’s eyes, when tired, will see just before one falls
+asleep. There was a rhomboid of deeper, brighter green,
+of a green that was really alive, beyond the gray-green
+of the field they were in. It existed in front of the
+purple of scabrous flowers on the great shoulder that
+masked the battlefield. It wavered, precisely as you
+will see the colored image cast on a sheet by a magic
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[67]</span>lantern, then slowly, it hardened and brightened, took
+shape as a recumbent oval, like eighteenth century
+vignettes. Gringoire said that it became perfectly definite—“The
+little view that I shall see at this moment
+if I raise my eyes. And it didn’t connote any locality:
+it didn’t, I mean, suggest itself as being in the
+vicinity of the Trossachs, of Tintern, of Matlock, of
+Dungeness.... It was just country—but perfectly
+definite, rather an untrimmed and a rather hidden spot
+without a hard road going to it ... and with the
+feeling that many birds were lurking in bushes and
+watching me, as birds watch. You see the idea—sanctuary!”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t mean to say,” he went on, “that I wanted
+to get out of the battle of the Somme. I certainly
+didn’t, either consciously, subconsciously, or with any
+plane of my mind. I will lay claim to so much militarism.
+But my subconscious mind was trying to assure
+itself that ‘appry la gair finny’ there would be a
+sanctuary where I would cross my second and my
+index fingers in the face of destiny and cry ‘Feignits’
+as we used to do as children at Prisoner’s Base. I daresay
+that has been the main desire of my life. I daresay
+it has been the main desire of the lives of all men
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[68]</span>since recorded time began. Unrecorded time too, no
+doubt. It was no doubt the basic desire that has given
+to the world in succeeding ages, the Kingdom of
+God, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of Thule,
+the Cassiterides, the Garden of the Hesperides, the
+land of Cockaigne where hot mutton pies ran about
+in the street asking to be eaten—the peace of God
+which passes all understanding.”</p>
+
+<p>And you see it was mostly for the sake of the little
+threatened nooks of the earth that Gringoire found
+himself on that hillside. For, then, as on the 4/8/’14,
+when the Huns crossed the Belgian frontier, “near a
+place called Gemmenich,” it was mainly the idea
+that a field-gray tide of mud was seeking to overwhelm
+the small, verdure-masked homes, the long, white,
+thatched farms of the world that forced Gringoire into
+political action. “All my life,” as he put it, “I have
+been fighting German scholarships, German modes of
+learning, of instruction, of collectivism.” But, before
+that date he hadn’t much imagined—or imagined at
+all—that he would ever indulge in political polemics.
+He had always had a dreamy contempt for politics:
+one is an artist, one is a poet, one is a builder of castles
+in the air, one is a gentleman, a farrier, a grocer, a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[69]</span>miller—what you will—but a politician! “<i lang="fr">Ah, mais
+non.</i> That one should prostitute one’s pen!...”</p>
+
+<p>But the field-gray tide threatened—not only the
+Kingdoms of the Earth that mattered, but the little,
+sacred homes of artists, poets, gentry, farriers, grocers,
+millers—menaced then the subjects of one’s pen,
+the objects of meditation of one’s heart. So one wrote
+endless, interminable propaganda; until the brain
+reeled and the fingers stiffened.</p>
+
+<p>Then the Germans killed Henri Gaudier and Teddy
+Jewell. Or perhaps it was only that Teddy Jewell went.
+Certainly he was killed sooner or later. “Such nice,
+good boys both—though I didn’t know either of them
+well.” So there had not seemed anything else to do.
+And indeed there was not anything else to do....</p>
+
+<p>Up there, on the hillside, that ran down to the
+battered sugar factory, he had the feeling that, if they
+could have had leave and have looked over the rim
+of that brown-purple slope, they would have seen
+the Huns, a white, tumultuous line, like advancing
+surf or like gnashing teeth. That was, of course, a
+feeling, not an intellectual idea. He knew that the
+German lines didn’t look like that—though, indeed,
+at times they did, when our gunners really got onto
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[70]</span>them in a chalky country. Then it was rather like
+surf—the smoke of shells and chalk dust going up
+together in the sunlight.... Still ...</p>
+
+<p>And anyhow that was a moment of complete idleness—a
+moment of the completest idleness that those
+officers had known for many, many months. They
+were just there, with nothing to do. Nothing: nothing
+whatever. If they had been allowed to look over the
+hill-brow, that would have been something, but, with
+the Camp Commandant’s refusal of leave, complete
+idleness settled down. In ten minutes, in an hour, perhaps;
+certainly before the passage of four or five hours,
+they would get the order to report that would take
+them beyond that hill past the battered sugar factory....</p>
+
+<p>Possibly that little vision of English country, coming
+then, was really a prayer, as if the depths of one’s
+mind were murmuring: “Blessed Mary, ask your kind
+Son that we may have the peace of God that passes
+all understanding, one day, for a little while in a little
+nook, all green, with silver birches, and a trickle of
+a stream through a meadow, and the chimneys of a
+gingerbread cottage out of Grimm just peeping over
+the fruit trees.” I suppose that is the burden of most
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[71]</span>prayers before battle. And of course that would mean
+that the Allies had won out and that the band would
+have played in the last war parade, with the white
+goat and its silver plaque between the horns, and sunlight,
+and even the Adjutant smiling—and all the
+Welsh dead appeased, and all the country nooks of
+the world assured sanctuaries, and every Englishman’s
+house an inviolable castle, and every Frenchman free
+to potter off to his café in the cool of the evening.
+No doubt it was a prayer of the unconscious, tired
+mind.</p>
+
+<p>“But even that isn’t my fourth landscape,” our poet-host
+went on, “since my fourth landscape took in
+very nearly the whole, if not quite the whole, of one
+of the Kingdoms of the Earth—and that the smallest
+that I ever hope to see.” It dissociates itself sharply
+from the others in that the observing of it happened
+to be Gringoire’s job of the moment. He had been
+sent up to Mont Vedaigne to mark down and be ready
+to point out to a number of senior officers all that
+immense prospect.</p>
+
+<p>And the tip of Mt. Vedaigne formed, oddly enough,
+one of those little, commonplace, rustic, idyllic spots
+that, months before, had formed itself for his eyes
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[72]</span>behind the Somme. There, in a small enclosed space,
+shut in by trees that just grew up to the edge of
+the steep escarpments of the hill, was, precisely, a
+little, gingerbread cottage out of Grimm. In front of
+it was a small, flat garden—not an acre in extent; in
+the garden grew potatoes already yellowed; beanstalks
+were aligned, already yellowed too; and there may
+have been three or four rods of tobacco plants and as
+many of haricots, yellowing too, for the fringes of
+autumn were upon the land. On the southern side of
+the garden were some plum trees in a hedge. If you
+looked over the hedge you saw Bailleul, Armentières,
+away to queer, conical, gray mountains that were the
+slag-heaps near Béthune, and away, farther, toward
+the Somme itself.</p>
+
+<p>On the northern side of the garden was a tall, dark
+plantation of birches and firs so that the gingerbread
+cottage—of white plaster, with little green shutters
+and a bright red roof of those S-shaped tiles that
+lock one into another, with a gutter painted bright
+green, like the shutters, and dependent from the gutter,
+right along the face of the cottage, bunches of
+haricot plants, hung up so that the white beans should
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[73]</span>dry in the rattling pods—the little cottage, then, had
+the air of being beneath a high, dark bank.</p>
+
+<p>But it was only trees, so that, if you went between
+their trunks you saw another great view. A flat, almost
+incredibly immense, silver-gray plain ran right
+to the foot of the waving descent, below. There was
+an oval—poor Poperinghe—with an immense column
+of snow-white smoke, descending upon it from a great
+height, and then little plumes of smoke here and there—and
+then, away, away, pollarded flats, windmills,
+church towers—and a gray, menacing, incredibly distant
+skyline, illuminated under drifts of smoke....
+One imagined that one was seeing into Germany!</p>
+
+<p>I suppose Gringoire didn’t really see so far.</p>
+
+<p>On the east and the west, the views were cut into
+by “mountains”—the peaks of that little range of hills
+that formed practically all that remained of a Kingdom
+of the Earth—of the Low Countries! There was
+the Mont Noir with its windmill atop; the Mont
+Rouge with its windmill atop; the Scharpenberg, with
+its windmill, Mount Kemmel with its ruined tower,
+from high above which, in the pellucid autumn air,
+the sighting shells continuously let down their clouds
+like torsos of flawless, white marble.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[74]</span></p>
+
+<p>Gringoire had emotions up there! And he had a
+long time to wait. You may not know it—but, if a
+senior officer tells you to await him at a given point
+at 10:00 A.M., you arrive at 9:45 whilst he saunters
+in at 11:00 A.M., 12:30 P.M., 2:00 P.M., or 4:30 P.M.,
+according to his rank.</p>
+
+<p>On this occasion, Gringoire was Acting Intelligence
+Officer, and, having to familiarize himself with a landscape
+in which his division had only just arrived, he
+came on the ground at 8:45 A.M., having left Locre
+at 7:00 A.M., riding round by way of Dranoutre to
+receive his final instructions from Headquarters. He
+did not think that at Divisional Headquarters his zeal
+was appreciated. A sleepy, but eminently indignant,
+General Staff Officer I or II, something elderly, in
+pajamas, made various insulting remarks about early
+rising. These, his eyesight improving as sleep departed,
+he modified somewhat, because he could not tell who
+the devil Gringoire was. (I may say that, two nights
+before, our poet had been court-martialed for being
+in unlawful possession of a Field Officer’s Figure.)
+But the Major would not modify his statement that
+he had only been in bed half an hour. He stuck to it.
+I daresay, poor man, that he was telling the truth.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[75]</span>He was wearing khaki-silk pajamas with purple cords.
+Gringoire, on the other hand, stuck with equal firmness
+to the fact that he was deputizing for a brother
+officer who was sick—so sick that he had mislaid his
+orders. Orderly Room had sent them to him with a
+slip attached: “<i>Passed to you, please. For attention, immediate
+action and compliance.</i>” They had had a copy
+of <em>that</em> slip in the Battalion Orderly Room—but no
+copy of the memo itself.</p>
+
+<p>Apparently they hadn’t at Divisional Headquarters
+either. It appears that the G.S.O. I or II who had issued
+the memo was sick too—had gone sick the night
+before and our elderly friend was deputizing for him.
+Of course, eventually, Gringoire got some sort of instructions
+from a drowsy, patronizing lance-corporal
+of the type that one usually finds around Divisional
+Headquarters, sleeping omnisciently under a table covered
+with typewriting machines in a Connaught hut.
+<em>He</em> knew that some one answering to the description
+of my friend was to meet some one on the top of Mont
+Vedaigne at 11:00 A.M. for the purpose of explaining
+the positions. It was some General, the lance-corporal
+couldn’t remember the name—it was a name
+like Atkinson or Perry or McAlpine—an ordinary
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[76]</span>sort of name, the lance-corporal said contemptuously.
+He didn’t know what sort of General he was. The
+General Staff Officer Number Two ought to have
+taken him ’round, but he had gone sick; so also had
+Gringoire’s friend, who was a friend of G.S.O. II.
+So there he was.</p>
+
+<p>(“And,” said Gringoire when he recounted this incident,
+“it occurs to me at this moment this was intended
+as a friendly attention on the part of somebody.
+Either my friend—who was highly connected in
+an Army sense—or, failing him, I—was to wangle a
+soft job out of the General. But all I thought about
+was how to get to the top of Mont Vedaigne, set
+my map, get my field telescope into position ...
+Well, I am telling you what I thought about....”)</p>
+
+<p>He was indeed so concentrated in mind on the top
+of Mont Vedaigne and the map and the compass and
+the telescope that he hadn’t the faintest remembrance
+of the road thither from Dranoutre.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_3_3" href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> He said he could
+give you every object, estaminet, cottage, and Corps
+H.Q. from Locre to Dranoutre by the chaussée; or
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[77]</span>from Locre to Mont Rouge by second class road and
+field paths, Mont Rouge to Mont Noir, and Mont Vedaigne
+and so on. But of the road to Mont Vedaigne
+from Divisional Headquarters nothing remained—except
+that it was rather suburban, broad, white, and at
+that date, in good repair.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_3_3" href="#FNanchor_3_3" class="label">[3]</a> I am aware that D.H.Q. was not really at Dranoutre, which was a
+nice little place, built round a church square, rendered nasty by the
+Germans. But I call it Dranoutre out of reflex action caused by fear of
+the Censor—who once, at the end of 1918, struck out of one of my
+poems an allusion to the fact that I visited Cardiff early in 1915.</p></div>
+
+<p>So he came to the top of the hill, passed the cottage
+without looking at it, between the potatoes and the
+tobacco and the tobacco and the haricots, looked over
+the southern edge, and saw a great stretch of country,
+looked over the northern edge, and saw a great, silver-gray
+plain, looked away to the east, and saw hills like
+camels’ humps cutting still horizons; and the same
+on the west.</p>
+
+<p>He was, you understand, in a desperate hurry. For
+each point of the compass, he “set” his map, finding
+a convenient, flat piece of ground on which to lay it.
+And he saw, without seeing, and memorized without
+associations—just names attaching to dark patches in
+a great plain. Over a particularly large fir tree was
+Armentières; over an oak, lower down the slope and
+to the right were the slag heaps and Béthune; further
+to the right still Bailleul; the flash of gilt above a
+steeple meant the ten block letters <i>Poperinghe</i>; an immensely
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[78]</span>distant series of dull purple cubes against a
+long silver gleam was, in printed capitals DUNKIRK....
+You see, his mind was just working in the watertight
+compartments of his immediate professional job.
+He wanted to make—and he did make by 11:00 A.M.—four
+cards, like the range cards one makes for musketry:
+a central point where one stood, and arrows,
+running out like rays from that center, toward Ypres,
+in capitals or Wytschaete in block letters. He wanted
+the general to be able to stand on each point, look
+down on the card, follow the direction of the arrow,
+and identify the place. I don’t know whether any
+other Intelligence Officer ever thought of that. Anyhow,
+he got it done by 11:00 A.M.</p>
+
+<p>It was pleasant, the feeling when he had made his
+last fair copy. He went to each of the points of the
+compass, to make sure that he had registered positions
+truly. Returning from the west to the east, he noticed
+an immense plane, appearing in the firmament above
+Bailleul. She was escorted by eight or nine relatively
+little monoplanes—Bristol scouts, I should say. But,
+at that date, the poor bloody Infantry were not brought
+much in contact with the air force. So that, apart from
+their spectacular, picturesque, or dangerous aspects,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[79]</span>they hardly came within the scope of Gringoire’s professional
+attentions. “Airmen,” he said, “were brilliant
+beings, who treated us with contempt and carried off
+the affections of our young women. Otherwise they
+lived in the air whilst we plodded amongst mud and
+barbed wire. Professionally, they rivaled the Cavalry;
+obtained information for the Artillery—but, as for cooperating
+with us, we were below their notice.” So
+that the great, beautiful machine—which was, I believe,
+the first Handley Page to reach France in safety—passed
+overhead without Gringoire’s thinking of
+more than that it was beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>But his time for consideration of the beautiful had
+not yet come. It being then eleven and his work as
+a man from Cook’s being accomplished, he had time
+to think of breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>He had noticed that a cottage existed behind the
+potatoes, the haricots, and the tobacco. His conscious
+mind had dismissed it, since it had obviously no topographical
+value as an object of interest for a General,
+name unknown. His subconscious mind—that of an
+Infantry Officer—had also dismissed it—as just a cottage;
+too frail to be of much use for cover, even against
+rifle fire. For you are to understand that whilst his
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[80]</span>surface mind was entirely and devotedly given to his
+immediate job, his secondary mind had certainly taken
+note of the values of Mont Vedaigne, the garden, the
+hedges, the copsewood, the timber, and the slopes;
+considering them as cover, as sites for trenches and
+noticing the fields of fire, the dead ground, the trees
+that would be dangerous in falling about if the place
+were shelled, the underwood that might be useful,
+supposing the Artillery had failed to knock it to bits
+or set fire to it—it was very dry still—before the Enemy
+Infantry tried to rush the position. All these little
+thoughts had flitted, like shadows, to be registered
+somewhere.—For our poet learned that, when, ten
+minutes later, he went over the ground again, for the
+definite purpose of considering it with conscious, infantry-eye,
+he had already noted and stored somewhere
+in the gray matter of his brain most of the details of
+dead ground, field of fire and sites for trenches, too
+... and a good deal of the detail as to timber, underwood,
+and the like.</p>
+
+<p>That, however, was only after he had had some
+breakfast. For a little old Belgian woman with a
+pepper and salt face and a husband who wore a black
+cap with a shining leather eye shade, came out of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[81]</span>the green door of the cottage, just as the lady does
+in a weatherhouse. To Gringoire’s request in Flemish
+for coffee, “<i lang="nl">Hebt gii Kafe to verkoopen?</i>” she answered
+nothing, disappearing backwards behind the
+green door, which shut as if automatically. She was
+there again, however, in less than a minute, with a
+plate of ham, a bowl of coffee, and four bits of their
+gingerbread!</p>
+
+<p>The significance of this did not occur to our subsequent
+inhabitant of a gingerbread dwelling. He only
+noticed that it did not go so very well—nor yet so very
+badly—with the ham. He ate both, anyhow, in a hurry.
+It was a keen air up there. He secured some more
+ham and another cup of coffee and, with that in his
+hand, proceeded to the clearing in the east from which
+the best view of the Salient was obtainable.</p>
+
+<p>It was then that the Infantry Officer’s hitherto subconscious,
+professional mind rose to the surface and
+became the conscious one. In the four hours that he
+had waited in that frame of mind, he had noticed, of
+course, an infinite number of details—a great number
+of airplanes coming from the direction of Dunkirk;
+huge columns of smoke rising from far back in German-held
+Belgium, behind Brûges. A great number of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[82]</span>signs of war in that clear, gray, sunlit space, in which
+every pollard willow appeared to be visible and like
+a candle flame burning in a windless air! Gringoire
+was looking through a telescope, of course. But I will
+trouble the reader only with two apparitions of those
+that he collected: they were apparently unconnected,
+since they took place, the one at Poperinghe, the other
+in front of Wytschaete. But very likely they had a
+grim connection.</p>
+
+<p>Whilst he was topographically employed, our Infantry
+Officer had noticed Poperinghe as a blue-gray
+smudge, in shape like an oval lozenge seen in perspective.
+From it rose several church towers—bulbous,
+Low-Country edifices. Now, whilst he was resting his
+eyes from the telescope, he saw, suddenly unfolding
+in the air above the towers, two great white swans.
+They extended laterally, dazzling, very slow. Then a
+trunk descended from each of them. After a time
+they resembled, exactly, immense torsos of Hercules,
+headless and armless statues, as solid-looking as brilliant
+white marble, new from the quarry. The Tommies
+called them Statue Shells.</p>
+
+<p>And then he noticed that there were statue shells
+over the observation post on Kemmel Hill. With his
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[83]</span>telescope, also, he began to see that shells were bursting
+on Poperinghe. I don’t know why, but he took
+them to be gas shells, bracketing.</p>
+
+<p>He rested his eyes again and looked at the gap
+between Mont Noir and Mont Kemmel. It was a symmetrical
+bit of landscape seen over what is called technically
+a saddle between two hills. Over the very center
+of the lowest part of the dip, Gringoire said, there
+appeared to be a whitish gray tooth stump, decayed,
+with one end-fragment rather high.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_4_4" href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> Extending, like
+a long string, above this, on rising ground, there was
+a brown rope—five miles, perhaps beyond the decayed
+tooth. Little white balls existed on the brown line, the
+landscape was pale yellow—as it might be the gold of
+corn fields. The red roofs of a village that he knew
+to be Wytschaete were brilliant and quiet in the sun—but,
+on the brown line beneath that ridge the little
+white balls went on coming into existence—one every
+half second. One to the right at the extreme end of
+the line; one on the extreme left; one in the middle;
+one between the extreme left and the center. Beautiful
+work. Have you ever seen a village cobbler nailing a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[84]</span>sole? It goes so quickly that you hardly see the hammer.
+But a small brass nail is there—and another and
+another—a line of brass nails on the smooth leather.
+Well, they went like that, along the brown line—the
+little white balls! Beautiful! Beautiful work. “My
+mind,” Gringoire said, “was filled with joy and my
+soul exulted in the clear, still, autumn sunshine, looking
+over that tiny Kingdom of the Earth.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_4_4" href="#FNanchor_4_4" class="label">[4]</a> This would be the remains of the Cathedral and the Cloth Hall
+at Ypres.</p></div>
+
+<p>“I said to myself: ‘Hurray! The guns are giving
+them hell. Some one’s ducking over there.’” Because,
+of course, the brown line was the Hun trenches on the
+Wytschaete ridge, and the little white balls were our
+shells, falling with an exact precision. They must have
+knocked the trenches pretty considerably already for
+the disturbed earth to show at all at that distance.</p>
+
+<p>At that moment—it was just gone three—a man in
+khaki made Gringoire jump by appearing at his elbow.
+He said that the General who had ordered Gringoire
+to report there at 1:00 P.M. was detained. Would he
+have some lunch and report again at the same spot
+at five?</p>
+
+<p>And, after that, it was just emotions. The landscape
+became landscape, with great shafts of light and
+shadows of clouds; the little white cottage with the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[85]</span>green shutters, a little nook that should be inviolable;
+the haricots interesting as things that one might plant
+in a Kentish garden that sloped to the sea. The range
+of hills was no longer a strategical point or a tactical
+position. It was all that remained of one of the Kingdoms
+of the Earth; one could hardly look at the gray
+plains with the pollard willows marching like aligned
+candle flames toward the horizon—one avoided looking
+at it, because it was Lost Territory, held down,
+oppressed, as if it were ashamed. Poperinghe grew to
+appear pitiful, a little town where wretched civilians
+were being butchered by gas shells for the love of God.
+So the poet’s mind worked, at leisure, on personal matters,
+as neither the mind of Intelligence, or Infantry,
+Officer need work.</p>
+
+<p>“My mind,” the poet reports, “was indeed so much at
+leisure in that long two hours that I even wrote in
+my Field Pocket Book a preface to a volume whose
+proofs had that morning reached me. In that I recorded
+my emotions of the moment and there, in a
+printed volume, they stand. It does not alter their
+value as a record of emotions that I subsequently
+learned that the statue shells over Poperinghe were not
+gas shells but had been discharged so as to give the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[86]</span>German Heavies the range, or that, upon reflection,
+it appears to me that the Germans were hardly shelling
+the town so profusely just for the love of God.
+They must either have heard that we had a considerable
+body of troops in the town, or else they were
+trying to stop, by that retaliation, our own artillery’s
+heavy shelling of their Wytschaete-Messines positions.”</p>
+
+<p>But at any rate, there the emotions came, crowding
+and irrepressible. So that, just before, in the dusk, at
+seven o’clock, Gringoire saw the bright red flash of
+a brass hat’s band in among dark fir trees, he noticed,
+with a sudden lift in the side, a light silver streak,
+behind the map of Dunkirk. It was the sea.</p>
+
+<p>“And suddenly,” he said, “there came upon me
+an intense longing to be beyond that sea.” It was a
+longing not for any humanity—but just for the green
+country, the mists, the secure nook at the end of a
+little valley, the small cottage whose chimneys just
+showed over the fruit trees—for the feelings and the
+circumstances of a sanctuary in which one could cross
+one’s second over one’s index finger and in the face
+of destiny cry: “Feignits.”</p>
+
+<p>It was, however, necessary to stand to attention, and
+through the falling twilight to point out hardly visible
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[87]</span>towns to a nearly invisible Senior Officer. And immediately
+the mind went back to its original position:
+Dunkirk and Ypres became circles named in large capitals;
+Wytschaete and Kemmel were again in block
+lettering. One said: “The sea is just visible in that direction,”
+and it was just a geographical fact.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[88]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h3 class="nobreak" id="V">
+    V
+    <br>
+    <i>Intermezzo</i>
+  </h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>The day after peace was declared seemed to your compiler
+an excellent moment on which to remonstrate
+with our poet as to one of his characteristic locutions.
+The day was fine, cloudless, soft and still; some gardening
+operation of Gringoire’s had consummately
+succeeded. I forget what it was. I fancy some long-studied
+contrivance of his had checkmated the slugs
+in his strawberry beds. At any rate we sat in the long
+grass by the hedge under the damson trees at the
+bottom of the garden over a great blue china bowl of
+strawberries which Gringoire characteristically insisted
+on moistening with red wine and sugar. He said that
+taken that way they were less gross than with cream
+and I am bound to say that Mme. Sélysette shared
+his views with which I could never agree.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, it was with singular mildness that, lying
+on his side in the long grass, Gringoire answered my
+remonstrances.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[89]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Why, no,” he said, “I do not see why any one
+should object to the use of the term ‘Hun’ as applied
+to such members of the late Enemy nations as were
+not in arms against us. I do not care much about the
+matter and, if the word offends you, I will try, when I
+think about it, not to use it. But the fact is that I certainly
+never thought about it much at any time. It is
+a convenient phrase to use about what was evil in the
+people we were fighting against. I should not now—and
+I never did—call Brahms anything but a German
+composer nor should I ever think of calling Holbein
+a Hun painter or the Brothers Grimm of the fairy-tales,
+Boches. So that the word is a convenient one for
+differentiations. In effect for me the German musicians,
+painters, poets, working men, postmen and soldiers
+in the trenches or at their Headquarters were
+never Huns. I assert that categorically and I think
+it was true of the majority of my comrades—except
+that the majority of my comrades had never heard of
+Bach or Beethoven or Heine. But it was true that the
+majority of my comrades with whom I discussed the
+subject at all seriously, though they may have used
+the word you dislike, never—when talking seriously—used
+it as a term of hatred. Humanity will inevitably
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[90]</span>use a monosyllable in place of two sounds if it can
+get the chance and so will I.</p>
+
+<p>“But I don’t think many people in the trenches actually,
+and except at odd moments, ever felt active
+hatred against the men in the opposite lines or even
+those who militarily directed their operations. When
+they are not called on to be trustworthy or imaginative
+or to show human sympathy, men in the bulk are
+beasts fairly decent and fairly reasonable. We hated
+and objurgatively called ‘Huns,’ to the furthest extent
+of its Hunnish hideousness, not the poor bloody footsloggers
+who were immediately before us. No, the
+word applied itself to the professors, the prosaists, the
+publicists, the politicians who had sent those poor
+blighters to prevent our going home. For if you think
+of it, it was a topsy-turvy arrangement. They wanted
+to send us home and we wanted desperately to go;
+yet they pushed towards our home and we away from
+ours....</p>
+
+<p>“I am not much set to talk to you about the trenches
+or even about fighting. The point that I want to put
+into the spotlight of your mind is mostly the fact
+that if we do not economize in food there will be another
+war. Unlike you, my dear Compi, in that I
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[91]</span>regard the past with much greater equanimity. You
+remember that, when we were both writing propaganda
+I used to shock you by the mildness of mine. It
+will be long before I forget your emotions when I
+wrote an article suggesting that, instead of atrocity-mongering
+we were sufficiently advanced along the
+road of civilization to write—at least of the German
+troops—as ‘the gallant enemy.’</p>
+
+<p>“Today our positions have changed and you are
+shocked because I style certain of those who belong
+to the late Enemy nation by an epithet that you wish
+to forget having employed. The point is that I stand
+where I did whereas you have reacted against what
+now appear to have been your extravagances. My
+propaganda, as you remember, was almost entirely a
+matter of economics and of culture. I simply pointed
+out that the war was in effect a hunger war: Prussia
+being mostly composed of immense sand wastes—the
+Lüneburger Heide; of impenetrable forest—the Teutoberger
+Wald; and of the vast stretch of swamps where
+Hindenburg massacred the Russians on their own
+border. That being the condition of Prussia, the country
+would not produce enough food for the population
+which was also a population of the most prolific
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[92]</span>breeders in the world. I also pointed out—and I think
+I was almost the only person to do so—that the Enemy
+Empire instead of being the flourishing concern that
+she had bluffed the world into considering her was
+actually on the point of bankruptcy and losing trade
+after trade to foreign nations. That again was merely
+a matter of food. Germany had flourished on low
+wages and subsidies to manufacturers; but as food-prices
+rose the world over the wages of the German
+laborer had to go up so that, even with subsidies, the
+German manufacturer could no longer compete with
+us, the Italians, the French or even the South Americans.
+That Germany invaded Belgium may or may not
+have been the <i lang="fr">triste nécessité</i> that her statesmen alleged
+it to be, but that the war, regarded as a food
+war was in very truth a sad necessity for her you may
+be perfectly convinced. Prussia was starving, her population
+was increasing by leaps and bounds, emigration
+had been forbidden by the government....</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I do not propose to hate a starving population
+that seeks for bread, but I do propose to dislike
+and go on disliking the professors and publicists who
+preached that the only way to obtain bread was by
+invading Belgium and I do not think that the epithet
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[93]</span>you object to is any too strong. And indeed, if you
+use it merely to designate what was hateful in the
+late Enemy nation and if you employ the word ‘German’
+for everything that was and is ‘<i lang="de">gemütlich</i>’ for
+those who since yesterday have been our friends,
+you will be doing them a service by emphasizing what
+they have of the lovable in their compositions. Still
+... I do not much care about that.</p>
+
+<p>“I do not believe that there will ever be another war
+if you put it only on the baser ground that the great
+financiers who alone can make or stop wars got hideously
+frightened by the last one. And in addition to
+that you can consider the educative effect of the Armageddon
+that finished yesterday. It will take a good
+many decades before any human soul will again regard
+war as a means of enrichment and a good many
+centuries before any Great Power will again imagine
+that to have an aspect of bestriding the world in jackboots
+and with the saber rattling is of advantage to
+itself. It is a better world on the 29th of June, 1919,
+than it was on August the 3rd, 1914. Bluff has got its
+deathblow.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, the world is better and sweeter. We simple
+people are freed of an enormous incubus; we can sit
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[94]</span>still for a space and think, which we never could before
+in the history of the world. But of this I am certain—that
+what danger there is to the world and us
+is a food danger. I do not believe there will ever be
+another war: I believe our sufferings, great as they
+were, achieved that and were a small price to pay
+for that benefit. So, if you want to you may bless even
+the Huns as having been the occasion of our learning
+that lesson. But if there were ever another war it would
+be a war purely and simply for food.</p>
+
+<p>“The food-producing soil of the earth is already
+occupied; the population of our small planet increases
+by leaps and bounds. I know enough about agriculture—and
+scientific agriculture at that—to know that
+the pretensions of scientists to increase the production
+of food by improved culture is weary nonsense when
+set against the consideration of the increase in the
+numbers of mankind. The most honest scientist that
+I know refused to reveal a method of increasing the
+yield of wheat sixfold on a given plot of ground because
+he satisfied himself that to do so in one year
+rendered that plot of ground absolutely barren for
+ten years and the milder improvements of agricultural
+processes that are evolved each year do not suffice
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[95]</span>to provide enough food for the extra mouths that each
+year are produced by Prussia alone.</p>
+
+<p>“So that the position might seem pretty gloomy, but
+I remain an optimist, at least in the matter of war
+for if, as I think will prove the fact, there will be
+no war till the world is driven to it by starvation,
+then the coming of war may be so long delayed that,
+all races of the world being at last at much the same
+pitch of education, it will be obvious to them all that
+war is no way to increase the production of food. I
+heard, not a Hun, but a Swedish professor say the
+other day that it was terribly irksome and irritating
+to his countrymen to consider that, whilst they were
+overpopulated and cramped up on an infertile soil,
+down in the fertile south there was the nearly empty
+and extraordinarily fertile land known as France. And
+how, he asked, could France with her selfish inhabitants
+who regulated their birth-rate—or who at any
+rate selfishly refused to beget children to the limit
+of their capacity—how could France expect to enjoy
+immunity from invasion by the healthy, voracious and
+formidable Northern races who openheartedly and
+with splendid generosity begot children, to use his own
+phrase, by the bushel?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[96]</span></p>
+
+<p>“I did not, as you might imagine, because of my
+obvious Gallophilism try to bite off that blond beast’s
+head because what he said was, as to its premises, true
+enough. France <em>is</em> sparsely populated and wealthy,
+Sweden <em>is</em> overcrowded and infertile. But the remedy
+for that is not to be found in invasion: the solution
+is there, waiting. France which is the only country
+civilized enough not to overpopulate herself is at present
+the only country in the world that welcomes immigration
+and facilitates to the extreme the naturalization
+of immigrants.</p>
+
+<p>“The Swede went on grumbling that it was very
+hard that his compatriots must expatriate themselves
+in order to enjoy those <i lang="de">Südfrüchte</i>—fruits of the
+South. He said that his fellow countrymen loved their
+graynesses and contracted terrible melancholias beneath
+Southern suns.... So that the only thing was
+raiding!</p>
+
+<p>“I did not continue the discussion for I did not wish
+at the moment to hate a Swede. But that in essence
+shows the root of the matter. Wars will cease when
+nations and Northern Professors are sufficiently civilized
+to let nations be relatively nomadic and permit
+races to flow freely from inclement, overpopulated and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[97]</span>infertile regions into those that are sparsely populated
+and fertile and not hyper-philoprogenitive.</p>
+
+<p>“You may put it that hatred and overpopulation
+go hand in hand, their destination being war, and
+you would not be far wrong. For it is not the hatreds
+begotten after wars are declared that matter; those
+die natural if slow deaths as soon as the not very protracted
+activities of warfare are over and done with,
+so that it is only the hatreds that precede wars that
+need much concern us.”</p>
+
+<p>He went on to say that pre-war hatreds, apart from
+those inculcated by hungers of one sort or another,
+arose largely from differences of manners. We used
+to hate the French because they ate frogs and were
+elegant; they hated us because we said “goddam” and
+ruled the seas. But manners tend to approximate the
+world over with the extension of means of intercourse.
+They jazz in Cambodia as in Coney Island today
+and tomorrow they will speak American in the
+county of Clackmannan even as in Monte Carlo.</p>
+
+<p>That Gringoire applauded. It was, he said, all to
+the good to have a dance that all could dance. Before
+the war the vigorous poor went to dogfights, cockfights,
+badgerfights: now they jazzed. It was a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[98]</span>progress towards sweetness and light, part of what
+we had paid for with our sufferings....</p>
+
+<p>It was at this point that your Compiler became a
+little impatient. He had come to get war-reminiscences
+from a practising poet—but these colloquies resolved
+themselves into a continual struggle of wills, Gringoire
+persisting in dilating on the future as seen by
+the practising agriculturist and gastronome. And indeed,
+scenting that your Compiler was essaying to head
+him off from the topic on which his mind was fixed,
+he now went off upon a tirade about intensive horticulture
+and French cooking that lasted until dusk
+was well falling on his garden. And Madame Sélysette,
+raising her delicate eyebrows, intimated sufficiently
+plainly that, if we did not want a storm he had
+better not be interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>The main points of his harangue were to the effect
+that humanity would be saved—if it was to be saved—by
+good cooking, intensive horti-, as opposed to agriculture.
+And of course by abstract thinking and the
+arts. And the avoidance of waste. Above all by the
+avoidance of waste.</p>
+
+<p>To the pretensions of the scientific agriculturist he
+opposed the claims of hand-culture, to those of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[99]</span>popular restaurant upholder those of the meticulous
+chef. Hand culture whether of beasts, grain or vegetables
+gave a better product, the careful and intelligent
+cook gave you more appetizing food. The more
+appetizing your food the better you digested it and
+the less you needed to support you. He said—but that
+was on the question of waste—that in a French residence
+of the size of the Gingerbread Cottage you
+would not find enough waste to fatten a chicken with;
+in his own establishment, do all that he could, aided
+by Mme. Sélysette, they had waste enough to half
+fatten a pig....</p>
+
+<p>In short the world was to be saved by observing
+the precepts of the recipe for mutton chops with which
+your Compiler opened this little work. But all this
+seemed so apart from anything that his readers could
+be supposed to want from a book devoted to the
+war-reminiscences of a poet that your Compiler had
+long ceased to use his pencil and notebook before
+Gringoire had finished his sunset harangue, so that,
+having no notes of the arguments we may well, as to
+that matter, here inscribe the words: “<i lang="la">cetera desunt.</i>”</p>
+
+<p>But, having eased his mind, Gringoire became good-natured,
+and, becoming good-natured he was awake
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[100]</span>to the outer world. So he observed that Mme. Sélysette
+and your servant had for a long time made neither
+objections to nor comments on the stuff of his harangues.
+His voice had gone on sounding alone save
+for the churnings of an early night-jar that sat upon
+the gatepost giving onto the rushy meadow. And suddenly
+he stopped and laughed maliciously.</p>
+
+<p>“Poor old Compi,” he said, “how extraordinarily
+this isn’t what you come for. But the stuff of war-reminiscences
+concerns itself almost as much with
+what war has made of a man as with the pictures that
+he saw. Still you are not the sort of person to see
+that and, in a minute I will reward your patience with
+a landscape that, though it has nothing to do with our
+main theme, may make a nice <i lang="fr">bonne bouche</i> for your
+little book.</p>
+
+<p>“But I do want to get in—just for the sake of pointing
+it out to the world—that the late hostilities, whilst
+they profoundly modified the manners of the world
+did, in their very nature, hold up to the world a moral
+that will be of infinite value as soon as the world is
+in any condition at all to notice it. That is to say it
+did teach us what a hell—what a hell!—of a lot we
+can do without.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[101]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Take my dear Sélysette there, with her upbringing
+amongst the suns and luxuries of the <i lang="fr">haute bourgeoisie</i>
+of the South. Do you suppose that if, before the 3rd
+of August, 1914 you had proposed to her to unite her
+destinies to the least pecunious of poets and take up
+her residence in a rat-ridden cottage beneath the usually
+lugubrious but at all times capricious skies of this
+septentrional land—do you suppose that, if you had
+then made that proposal she would not have crushed
+you to the earth with the mere weight of her scorn?
+Or take me. Would you, knowing me as you did in
+earlier but, I assure you, not half such happy days—would
+you have imagined me spending what till then,
+but not till now, were certainly my happiest hours in
+a bare hillside in a tent with absolutely no furnishings
+but an officer’s camp-bed? I had been used to a good
+deal of luxury, but there for the first time I found
+peace though the German artillery was actually at
+that moment shelling that spot and I was for the first
+time under fire.</p>
+
+<p>“That is one of the things that I remember most
+vividly, not because it was the first time I was under
+fire but because I felt that for the first time I had cut
+absolutely and finally loose from all the bedevilments
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[102]</span>of life at home—from the malices as from the luxuries.
+Afterwards, unused as I was to the artillery mind or
+its methods, I wondered a little that they should be
+so persistently shelling <em>us</em> and that they should find
+us with such accuracy.</p>
+
+<p>“I was sitting on the side of my camp-bed talking
+to an extremely intoxicated and disheveled elderly officer
+who was nevertheless a man of no ordinary talent.
+That is to say that his harangues about everything
+under the sun were interspersed with a great number
+of classical quotations of singular aptness and he had
+also made several inventions that eventually proved
+very useful during the war and that saved him from
+a courtmartial for drunkenness. I was—as was so frequently
+my case—in charge of him and, although he
+was in no position to get away, I did not care to go
+into a dugout as did all my brother officers who had
+hitherto been in the tent with us. And indeed the
+fact was that that fellow’s boozy conversation interested
+me....</p>
+
+<p>“The German shells came in groups of three, doing
+obviously what we infantry were taught to call bracketing.
+That is to say that the first three shells whined
+wearily overhead and caused a considerable rumpus in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[103]</span>our mule lines that were perhaps a hundred yards behind
+us, and immediately afterwards a rocket or something
+like it let itself down from the heavens. A few
+minutes later three more shells fell short of us by
+perhaps another hundred yards down the hill. There
+was an obvious German plane overhead and it was in
+the late evening, nearly dark in the tent and quite
+dusk in the calm light outside.</p>
+
+<p>“My elderly friend wagged his head sagely. He explained
+that the Germans were trying to find with
+their shells something that that plane thought it had
+seen—probably the great park of German captured
+guns that were just above us. They would fire three
+sets of three shells each. Then our heavy artillery
+would open on them as a gentle hint to them to be
+quiet and not disturb the serenity of the Sabbath evening.
+They might take the hint or they might not.
+If they did not a regular duel between the heavies
+would begin, and the earth would shake for miles
+’round.</p>
+
+<p>“But, in any case, he said—and his air of wisdom
+convinced me as if Solomon were returned to earth
+and judging artillery—that we should be left in peace
+very shortly. And at that moment the next batch of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[104]</span>three shells arrived right on us. That is to say that
+one landed right in the middle of the captured German
+guns, one in the fortunately soft ground of a
+spring about thirty yards from our tent and one in
+the middle of the canteen tent that was just next to
+ours; so that immediately after the immense concussions
+innumerable crepitations sounded from the canvas
+above us, the clay, gravel and mud falling from
+where it had been precipitated into the skies. And
+a tin of sardines, coming through the tent-flap, landed
+as if miraculously in my lap....</p>
+
+<p>“But that old fellow went on nodding his head as
+if he had been a Chinese bronze and exclaiming:
+‘Don’t get up! Don’t get up! That will be the last
+of it!’</p>
+
+<p>“And, sure enough it was. Immediately afterwards
+Bloody Mary and two of her lady friends let off, enormous
+and august, breaking the quiet night. And I
+suppose the Germans were not in the mood for any
+extended artillery duel. They had probably satisfied
+themselves that the German guns parked above us
+were duds of sorts. The plane must have observed them
+earlier in the evening and had signaled their presence
+with rockets....</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[105]</span></p>
+
+<p>“But the point that I want to make is that no
+matter how simple your surroundings or limited your
+income you can find happiness as long as you are also
+surrounded by a set of men with incomes similarly
+exiguous who are contented with their surroundings.
+The German shells were an added discomfort which
+I don’t adduce as part of my argument—as if it should
+be raining or indulging in any other eccentricity of
+weather that one cannot control.</p>
+
+<p>“Anyhow, I have been happier in a tent or a hut
+or even in a dugout than ever I was in a night-club
+before the war or in the sort of a hotel they call a
+Grand Palace, and I would rather inhabit a Connaught
+hut furnished exclusively with biscuit or beef
+boxes and sluice myself with cold water in the open
+on a freezing morning than dwell among Park Lane
+millionaires and take my ease in a hummums. And, if
+I can do that, all humanity can. I am no exception,
+and it is in that way that salvation lies and the extinction
+of wars.</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed, I can assure you that one of the most
+troubled moments of the war happened when, as I
+will later tell you, I was sent for to Paris by the
+French Government and by them lodged in circumstances
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[106]</span>of extreme luxury in a Palace on the Avenue
+de l’Opéra. For apart from the botherments of being
+asked to do propaganda that I did not want to do and
+the obvious hostility of the French officers with whom
+I mixed and momentary shortness of cash I had, as
+again I will tell you later, the extreme botherment
+of being introduced suddenly into the sequelæ of a very
+violent divorce case. A British cavalry officer had used
+a week’s leave in going to Switzerland and carrying
+off his little daughter who had been taken there by
+his wife on her elopement with a ‘fiddler-fellow.’
+And, as I sat in the vestibule of the Hotel Splendide
+et de l’Orient the little girl, whom I like to think of
+as Maisie—that Maisie of Henry James’ book—came
+and without a word of any introduction, settled herself
+in my lap and went to sleep. She was bothered because
+she could not find the tram to Heaven. Because they
+said her mother had gone to Heaven.</p>
+
+<p>“You would say that such things do not happen in
+war. But they <em>do</em>.... And the distracted cavalry officer
+having left me in charge of his sleeping daughter
+went on some business that he had at the Embassy.
+But before he went he pointed to the swinging doors
+of the hotel giving into the streets and told me that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[107]</span>at any moment he expected his wife to rush in and
+use a revolver.... And I was due at the French Foreign
+Office for an interview upon which my future in
+the service and the world might turn.</p>
+
+<p>“Eventually my publisher came in and I dropped
+the sleeping Maisie into his lap. He was to have accompanied
+me to the Ministry but I thought he would be
+more useful to me there, so I left him.... But I
+assure you I was much more frightened of the idea of
+Maisie’s mother whom I pictured as a sort of infuriated
+Carmen than ever I was of any German shells.
+It was she, with her revolver, who typified for me
+real hatred—the woman robbed of her child. Whereas,
+as for the only man that I actually and consciously
+shot at and who actually and consciously shot at me, I
+never felt the ghost of an emotion of hatred. I was
+aware of imbecilely grinning when he missed me—as
+if it were any other sport—and of saying to myself:
+‘That’s the sort of dud <em>you</em> are,’ when I—and repeatedly—missed
+him. And I believe I felt regret when
+some one else killed him. At any rate I am glad that
+I cannot remember his face....</p>
+
+<p>“But Maisie’s mother would have been a different
+affair. <em>She</em> would have been filled with hatred—as I
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[108]</span>don’t believe that other fellow was—and I should have
+been paralyzed.... Why, even at this moment I can
+almost feel her revolver bullet entering my stomach.
+And I should have deserved it. One should not connive
+at the carrying off of a woman’s child however
+righteous the case of the husband. It is perhaps a
+worse crime than crossing the Belgian frontier, ‘near
+a place called Gemmenich.’</p>
+
+<p>“To die thus would be to die in a bad cause. And
+I daresay that why I don’t believe that any great hatred
+existed between the actual combatants in the late war—and
+why I don’t, when I think about it, stigmatize
+the fellows who lately stood armed over against us
+as ‘Huns’—is simply that we thought we had a good
+cause and that we knew that they also thought that
+they had a good cause. They thought that we endangered
+their homes as much as we thought that they
+endangered ours.</p>
+
+<p>“So that I simply do not believe in atrocities. The
+worst fellow that I ever came across on our own
+side—an enormous Scot whose principal conversation
+was taken up with the topic of the prisoners he had
+murdered—I have seen become lachrymosely sentimental
+over a German prisoner who was in a lamentable
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[109]</span>state of funk at having to undergo a medical
+examination. That Scot almost blubbered over that
+Hun in his efforts to assure him that the doctor would
+not operate on him against his will....</p>
+
+<p>“No, I don’t believe in atrocities. Or at the most I
+half believe in one. It is asserted—the Huns asserted it
+themselves but I found it difficult to believe—that they
+filmed the <i>Lusitania</i> whilst she was sinking. That I
+find atrocious. It is bad enough with premeditation—and
+the presence of a film operator would seem to
+prove premeditation—it is bad enough, then, with
+premeditation to sink a ship loaded with sleeping
+women and children. But if we concede that those
+responsible believed—as they may have done—that
+the <i>Lusitania</i> carried munitions of war even that may
+be nearly condoned. But that you should take a cinema
+machine to represent, for the gloating of others, the
+ruin and disappearance of a tall ship—that seems to
+me the most horrible of crimes. <i>Spurlos</i> is in itself
+a suspect word, a part of the vocabulary of ruthlessness
+that lost the Huns—not the fighting men—the war.
+But the real lives of men are enshrined in their products.
+To kill a poet is a small thing; to destroy his
+work is an irremediable offense.... And the most
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[110]</span>beautiful of all the handiwork of men is the tall ship.
+It is horrible to see houses go down in ruin under
+artillery fire; it is horrible to see fields mutilated and
+rendered unfertile or merely humiliated by the heels
+of alien conquerors. But to see a ship, its heart broken,
+its bows appealing to the heavens, slowly and mutely
+disappear. That is horrible. The sea shudders a little
+where it was. Only a little. But still the sea shudders.</p>
+
+<p>“Obviously in wars you must sink ships. And I
+suppose you may make records of the sinking of ships
+if it be done pitifully. But, in a spirit of gloating,
+to represent for the purpose of affrighting others or
+making yet others gloat in turn—to make cold-bloodedly
+the record of the disappearance of the proudest
+ship in the world, that seems to me the most horrible
+of ... <i lang="de">Schrecklichkeiten</i>.... But perhaps they never
+did it. Perhaps they only said that they did. That
+would be a queer way to make yourself popular!</p>
+
+<p>“But there was a landscape that I wanted to tell
+you about.</p>
+
+<p>“A little in front of Kemmel Hill we had some
+trenches—horrible trenches because of the nature of
+the ground. You could not dig down three feet because
+you came to water so the parapets were merely sandbags
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[111]</span>and the parados nothing at all. They must have
+been responsible for the loss of more lives than any
+other position of the whole war. In addition, when it
+rained, all the flood-water of the uplands poured down
+into them. Why I have seen them filled with cigarette
+packets washed down from our always luckless
+canteen—after the great storm in September ’16.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, it was just before then that we had been
+set to occupy those lines. If they had been retired a
+hundred and fifty yards they would have been on the
+slope of the hill and dry and safe. But the staff—or
+some bellicose individual on the staff—in spite of every
+representation preferred to lose a third of my battalion,
+let alone thirds of all the other battalions that occupied
+them, rather than to lose the little bit of prestige
+that it would have meant, by a retirement. Of a
+hundred and fifty yards! Think of that!</p>
+
+<p>“Anyhow, there we came down in the early hours
+of a September moonlight—into a world of beautiful,
+bluish and misty calm. There were those calms in the
+line when the vengeful activities of seven or so million
+men had exhausted themselves and their imaginations
+had just gone to sleep. You would have long
+periods of quiet. They would be broken by sudden
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[112]</span>bursts of machine gun fire and flares of Verey lights
+when some bemused sentry had taken it into his head
+that half a dozen corpses in No Man’s Land were stealing
+upon him. One’s nerves did that in quiet, moonlit
+moments. You would look at a corpse, or some sacking,
+or some sandbags until you could swear they were
+creeping upon you. Then in a crisis, ‘bang’ would go
+your hipe, and off would go the machine guns, and up
+would flare the Verey lights. The guns too might
+come in and some poor devil or another lose his life.
+But as a rule silence would settle down again for
+another long period.... I wrote a poem about that,
+in French. But I never heard of any one having read
+it.”</p>
+
+<p>It was at that moment that your Compiler burst
+in with the words:</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, it begins with: ‘I should like to imagine a
+moonlight in which there will be no machine guns.’
+I heard my friend Mrs. Carmody recite it only yesterday.
+Recite, not read it!”</p>
+
+<p>Gringoire grunted slightly.</p>
+
+<p>“The point was that it was most beautiful moonlight,
+before a blue, silent mountain with mists dim
+all up its flanks. And the other point was that we,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[113]</span>as you may remember, were a flying division. We were
+used for reinforcing threatened points or for resting
+overtired troops. And, facing us, the Germans had
+similar divisions that they called ‘<i lang="de">Sturmtruppen</i>.’ The
+curious thing was that either their Intelligence was
+so good or ours was so good that whenever we were
+moved up or down the line we found the same regiments
+in front of us so that when we were on the
+Somme we fought the Second Brandenburgers, and
+when we moved up to the Salient there we found the
+Second Brandenburgers in front of us and after we
+had been in front of Armentières for a little, there sure
+enough were the famous Second Brandenburgers. The
+Cockchafers, they were nicknamed. After that they
+began to desert to us a good deal and they were replaced
+by the Würtembergers whom we used to consider
+better fellows, I don’t know why, for we never,
+in the nature of the case, consorted much with either.</p>
+
+<p>“On the occasion of that moonlight night the Brandenburgers
+had got in before us and displayed a natural
+curiosity to know who we were when we got in.
+The German—or rather the Hun—method of trying to
+unmask the identity of opponents was to sing national
+anthems. I use the word ‘Hun’ here because only a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[114]</span>Delbrueck or a Bethmann-Hollweg—a professor or a
+politician—would have thought of anything so ingeniously
+imbecile. For naturally we did not fall in with
+that little idea.... The idea, by the bye, was that if
+we were Scots and they sang ‘Scots Wha Hae’ or
+Irish and they sang ‘The Wearin’ of the Green,’ or
+for us ‘Hen Wlad Wy Nadhau’ we should, in a burst
+of patriotic emotion either cheer or join in the chorus.
+We didn’t. I remember that once when, no doubt suspecting
+who we were, they had tried singing “Ap
+Jenkin,” which is our quickstep, our men replied by
+singing the imperial Chorus from the ‘Mikado’ as if
+to show that we were Japanese. That irritated them
+so much that they pounded our trench for an hour
+and a half with everything they could think of.</p>
+
+<p>“On this occasion they tried everything from ‘Rule
+Britannia’ to ‘Australia, Australia,’ and elicited no
+reply. And then they suddenly touched off an immense
+gramophone that sang, through the still moonlight
+... the ‘Hymn of Hate.’ And in English!</p>
+
+<p>“It was curious and eerie to hear that passionless
+machine let off those dire words devoted solely to ourselves,
+for they never evolved anything like it for the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[115]</span>French or the Belgians or the Italians or Annamites or
+Cochin Chinese or Brazilians. Now it screamed and
+brayed:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“Hate of the head and hate of the hand,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Hate of the breed and hate of the land</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">ENGLAND</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Hate of the standing and hate of the lying,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Hate of the living and hate of the dying</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">ENGLAND ... ENGLAND”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>(“And as a detail I may add that they had to get an
+English renegade—for there was one!—to make that
+translation.)</p>
+
+<p>“I am bound to say that it made one shiver a little.
+There were the moonlight, and the mists, and the
+lights of poor Wytschaete far away on the ridge. And
+those words creeping towards us. It is perhaps more
+disagreeable to think of being prayed to death than
+of being shelled. One shivered.</p>
+
+<p>“And when it fell silent one wondered if anything
+in the war or in the world could surpass it for drama.
+But one was wrong. You don’t know the Welsh. They
+are the incomparable singers of four-part music in the
+open air.</p>
+
+<p>“I remember, years ago, being on the side of a
+Welsh mountain on a Saturday evening at sunset and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[116]</span>far below a Welsh miners’ beanfeast was going along
+a thread of a road in char-à-bancs. And as each filled
+car passed there came up the sounds of four-part songs,
+incredibly sweet and incredibly mournful in the falling
+darkness. They are a conquered people, the Welsh,
+and their music is the music of a conquered people.</p>
+
+<p>“But on that occasion the Germans had delivered
+themselves into their hands in the endless struggle between
+Saxon and Celt. For suddenly a single voice in
+‘B’ Company began to sing with extraordinary clearness:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">‘Maxwelton braes are bonnie</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">When earlie fa’s the dew....’</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“And extraordinarily, before the singer had come
+to ‘there that Annie Laurie,’ the whole of ‘B’ Company
+was crooning out the other parts of the song.
+Beneath the moon. And then the whole Battalion,
+along a front of a mile. Crooning, you know, rather
+softly, not shouting....</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“And for Bonnie Annie Laurie ...”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“It was a good answer.</p>
+
+<p>“They were forbidden of course to sing Welsh songs,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[117]</span>or it might have been ‘Land of My Fathers’ or the
+‘Men of Harlech.’ As it was, it was better.</p>
+
+<p>“But there was not much hatred about that. And
+you will observe that even the Huns had had to get
+a machine to do their hating.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[118]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h3 class="nobreak" id="VI">
+    VI
+    <br>
+    <i>Just Country</i>
+  </h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>It is one of the burdens of advancing age—as it is
+one of the penalties of having been unreasonably prolific—that
+one is always haunted by a vague dread
+of repeating one’s self. One’s mind, presumably, progresses,
+one touches and retouches one’s ideas; hammers
+at the wording; seeks after a final clarity of expression.
+It is all one that one may have already printed
+the matter of the theme; the mind continues to work
+at the phraseology until one, finally, isn’t certain that
+one has or hasn’t sought the crystallization of the
+press. So it happens that I cannot be certain whether
+I have or haven’t printed already what I am about to
+write. It can’t, however, in the nature of things, have
+been more than a shortish article; so that if I have
+to apologize to any readers, the apology can’t be for
+any great fault.</p>
+
+<p>I fancy that what I then tried to put on paper was
+suggested by a letter that our poet wrote, having another
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[119]</span>moment of leisure, at about the time of his long
+wait for the General on Mont Vedaigne. I wrote an
+article, and certainly it was suggested by a passage in
+one of Gringoire’s letters to a friend, at some one’s
+request, for the journal called the N—. And that journal
+called the N— refused to print the article because
+it was too militarist. I don’t myself see where
+the militarism can have come into the expression of
+what was pure speculation of a psychological kind—but
+censors, whether military or anti-military, are
+queer people, and I presume that their main job, as it
+presents itself to their minds, is the suppression of
+ideas.... The more I think about it now, the more
+the thought hardens and takes shape; some one—connected
+with the propaganda-ministry—<em>did</em> ask me to
+write an article for the N— and the N— did refuse to
+print it. I daresay the journal had quarreled with the
+department in between whiles.</p>
+
+<p>Anyhow, the psychological speculation wasn’t very
+profound, or, as far as I can see, very likely to render
+conscription a permanent institution in these islands.
+Stated in its baldest terms, it merely amounted to
+saying that when you are very busy with a job, you
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[120]</span>do not much notice what is going on around you. You
+don’t, of course.</p>
+
+<p>And, in the end, that is the basic idea that underlies
+these records of four landscapes. Gringoire was
+simply trying to state—or rather to illustrate—the fact
+that, during the whole of the period from the
+4/8/’14 till the date when the German plenipotentiaries
+appended, in the Salle des Glaces, their signatures
+to the peace treaty, he only four times achieved
+a sufficient aloofness of mind to notice the landscape
+that surrounded him.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t mean to say,” our poet summed the matter
+up, “that I didn’t have ‘leaves,’ but, for one cause and
+another, my leaves weren’t ever pensive or leisurely.
+One was snatched into the civilian frame of mind—but
+into a civilian frame of mind that was always preoccupied
+with ‘The War’—that was, indeed, in odd
+ways, far more preoccupied with the war than were
+one’s self and one’s friends. Thus I remember that,
+on the occasion of my first return from France, being
+in a Tommy’s tunic, before I had arrived at the barrier
+of Viltona, I was stopped by an Assistant Provost
+Marshal and told that if I didn’t immediately procure
+leather gloves, another sort of hat, a collar, a tie, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[121]</span>get rid of my divisional mark, I should be put under
+arrest and returned to my battalion. In the booking
+office, I found a telephone—which cost thruppence, instead
+of tuppence—and when I remonstrated with a
+lady who three times gave me a wrong number, I was
+told to remember that there was a war going on.
+When, there being no one in my own house, I tried
+to go by omnibus to my club for lunch, I being in
+mufti and a little lame, a lady conductor put her
+hand on my chest, exclaimed: ‘There’s a war on,’ and
+very neatly threw me back into the road.</p>
+
+<p>“When I got to my club, a civilian of an eminently
+moral appearance was lunching at my table. He addressed
+me condescendingly—as no doubt one would
+address a Tommy if one were a civilian at a club. I
+had the feeling that he was about to offer me a glass
+of beer—therefore I hurriedly began to talk of peace.
+I wanted, you see, to consider peace and to avoid at
+once the offer of a free drink and the remembrance
+of my comrades who were still in danger of their
+lives. I admit that my words were inconsiderate, for
+I simply said:</p>
+
+<p>“‘Won’t there be a high old fortnight’s drunk after
+that day!’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[122]</span></p>
+
+<p>“My table companion drew himself up, pursed dry
+lips, and as it were hissed:</p>
+
+<p>“‘I think we have taken very good steps to prevent
+that.’</p>
+
+<p>“He wouldn’t, you see, let me forget my poor comrades
+who were still in the trenches. I do not remember
+what I said then; but only his attitude as with his
+napkin very white and crumpled in his hand, he removed
+to another table. Straight from that club I went
+to the house of an Eminent Reformer who told me
+that he would rather we lost the war than that the
+Cavalry should have a hand in winning it.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_5_5" href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> He
+couldn’t know that it wasn’t so very long since I had
+seen the empty saddles of the Deccan Horse, as, all
+intermingled with the men of some battalion of Gordons,
+they returned from an adventure in No Man’s
+Land, during the 1916 Battle of the Somme. So I went
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[123]</span>and had tea with a lady who gave me three milk biscuits
+from a silver tray and said: ‘This <em>must</em> be a
+change from your hardships over there!’</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_5_5" href="#FNanchor_5_5" class="label">[5]</a> Our friend is here venting a little of the bile that, as will be seen,
+at times obscures his outlook on life and makes him, elsewhere, appear
+ungenerous to the civilian population that so loyally did its bit. The
+train of thought of his friend the Eminent Reformer would seem to be
+as follows: (a) this is a war for liberty; (b) the Cavalry are officered
+mainly by the hereditary aristocracy; (c) if the hereditary aristocracy wins
+out in the war, liberty will suffer; (d) it would be preferable to lose the
+war. This seems logical. Our poet, however, refuses to see matters in
+this light. He says that he has never since spoken to that Eminent Reformer,
+who was once the closest of his friends—and that he never will
+again. This is lamentable. But is there not a tag beginning “<i>Irritabile
+genus</i>”...?</p></div>
+
+<p>“They <em>wouldn’t</em>, you see, let me forget the poor
+dear fellows who were still in the trenches. So I
+passed the night in a Y.M.C.A. hut, discussing Mametz
+Wood of the 14/7/’16 with an officer of the
+38th Division.”</p>
+
+<p>That, of course, was rather a special day, Gringoire
+said—though it was nothing out of the common. Given
+his age, former career, and surroundings, he couldn’t
+be expected to come in for any huge amount of the
+salutary dissipation or the healing hospitality which
+did so much to <i lang="fr">remonter</i> the <i lang="fr">moral</i> of the troops.
+Moving mostly amongst the Intelligentsia, he came a
+good deal in contact with Conscientious Objectors who
+abused him to his face for militarism or with literary
+civilians of military age who, after calling at his house,
+returned to their own and wrote him anonymous but
+easily recognizable letters, the purport of which was
+that he had never heard a shot fired and that the
+only gas he had ever smelled had been emitted by
+himself. To balance them, he received a number of
+letters from the German population of London,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[124]</span>threatening to murder him on account of his propagandist
+writings, whilst one of the most frequent preoccupations
+of his military career arose from the anonymous
+letters addressed to the War Office, to his various
+Colonels, and to the officers and other ranks of
+his regiment by a professional man whom he had
+once employed and who, after he lost that particular
+job, found that his conscience as a patriot demanded
+that he should continuously but unsuccessfully denounce
+our poet as a German spy.</p>
+
+<p>That is all in the day’s journey. <i lang="la">Homo homini lupus.</i>
+But it is not to be wondered at that in his periods of
+leisure Gringoire was not in a position to pay what
+he would have called a hell of a lot of attention to
+landscapes—or, in the alternative, that the essential
+call, of the land, of the war, was not the humanity
+that England contained—but just the country.</p>
+
+<p>Possibly the idea of country—just country—postulates
+the idea of human companionship—but that is
+not the same thing as humanity.</p>
+
+<p>“When I was a boy,” as Gringoire put it, “every
+hedge and every turn of a white, long road, concealed
+a possible Princesse Lointaine.” In those days
+one walked on and on—from the North Foreland to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[125]</span>the Land’s End; from Kensington to Winchelsea,
+from Minehead, by Porlock and Brendon, to Water’s
+Meet. Or one cycled from Calais to Beauvais, by way
+of Arras; from Paris to Tours and along the Loire,
+somehow ending at Houlgate and Caen. Or one went
+in a slow fiacre from Amiens to Albert, ostensibly to
+see the new brick and mosaic cathedral, with the Madonna
+atop. But, no doubt, whether one went to Mevagissy
+or Mentone; Port Scathow, Pontardulais, Château
+Gaillard, or Curt-yr-Ala, one was really chasing the
+Only Possible She.</p>
+
+<p>“Nowadays one sits in a green field—any green
+field—and longs for nothing more than just a little
+bit of loyalty. One longs, that is to say, that one may
+at last find the <i lang="la">hominem bonæ voluntatis</i> that one
+has chased all one’s life. Possibly one desires that,
+resting one’s eyes in the green of the grass as—do you
+remember, old Dai Bach?—according to the maxims
+of Color-Sergeant Davis of Caerphilly, we used to
+rest our eyes from the targets by looking into the
+trampled green blades, one longs to discover some
+formula that shall make us ourselves forever loyal to
+some ideal or other....</p>
+
+<p>“Or perhaps it is just rest that one wants. Anyhow,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[126]</span>one wants the country that is just country—not
+heaths, moors, crags, forests, passes, named rivers,
+or famous views. No—just fields, just dead ground, or
+fields of clover that have never heard and will never
+hear the crepitation of machine guns; hedgerows unwired
+and not too trim, with a spray or so of bramble
+just moving in a wind from which one is sheltered.
+That, until the other day, one so seldom saw in France—or
+in England either, for that matter.”</p>
+
+<p>“I remember,” Gringoire said in one of his anecdotes,
+“being in a wood—behind Tenby, I think, or
+near Manorbier or Pembroke, in 1915. It was very
+warm, and that part of Wales is a sleepy country. I
+had bicycled ahead of troops afoot to inspect some
+sort of position that, the day before, with my over-meticulousness,
+I had already spent hours in surveying,
+when I might have been listening to Pierrots. At
+any rate, I had three-quarters of an hour of entire
+leisure.</p>
+
+<p>“The sun beat down; I was just inside the edge of
+a wood. A little marsh—a reëntrant—ran right in under
+the trees. There was a mill where the insignificant
+valley opened out; a little dam where the road
+mounted an opposite slope. And then, though I had
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[127]</span>sketched, in a military sense, every clump of rushes,
+every contour, every bridge, every railway cutting and
+bit of embankment, many times—suddenly this place
+of greenery assumed—that too!—the aspect of being
+just country.</p>
+
+<p>“A little Welsh sheep poked its horns through the
+hedge and looked at me; a wren crept through a
+tangle of old thorns at my elbow, a nuthatch pursued
+a curious and intricate course amongst the netted,
+coarse fibers of ivy on a wild cherry-trunk. I lay
+still in the dappled sunlight and thought nothing,
+except that it was good to stretch out one’s limbs,
+recumbent. Because the level, green ground in front
+of me was so grown with rushes, I began to try to
+remember what were the provisions of the Field Drain
+Act of the middle of last century. Surely the farmer
+could obtain from the State, on easy terms, a loan
+with which to defray the expense of soil-pipes and
+labor for the draining of that land. And I began to
+think about the queer, stodgy, Victorian mind; and
+about Albert the Good, and the Crystal Palace, which
+in those days was known as the Temple of Peace; and
+I remembered John Brown and John Morley and John
+Bright and John Stuart Mill and Mr. Ruskin and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[128]</span>the rest of them, and mahogany chairs with horsehair
+seats and Argand lamps and the smoke and steam
+that used to fill the underground at Gower Street
+station. And in those days I had a 13-hand New Forest
+pony and a very old governess car and went to market
+on a Tuesday....</p>
+
+<p>“And then, quite suddenly, I felt that, for thousands
+and thousands of miles, on the green fields and
+in the woodlands, stretching away under the high
+skies, in the August sunlight, millions, millions, millions
+of my fellow men were moving—like tumultuous
+mites in a cheese, training and training, as we there
+were training—all across a broad world to where the
+sun was setting and to where the sun was rising—training
+to live a little, short space of time in an
+immense long ribbon of territory, where, for a mile
+or so the earth was scarred, macerated, beaten to
+a pulp, and burnt by the sun till it was all dust....
+The thought grew, became an immense feeling, became
+an obsession. Then Major Ward, on a bay with
+a white forehead, appeared on the little bridge that
+carried the waters of the marsh beneath the road. The
+others were coming!”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[129]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h3 class="nobreak" id="VII">
+    VII
+    <br>
+    <i>Playing the Game</i>
+  </h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>As will appear in my last chapter Gringoire insists
+that I shall include in this volume a specimen of his
+prose written under fire. As that was written in French
+your compiler flatly refused to insert it in the body
+of his book so that, since Gringoire flatly refused to
+let the book appear at all unless it <em>was</em> included, it
+will be found elsewhere than in the body and what
+follows is his translation. I confess to regretting its
+inclusion for although I myself and a great number of
+my friends including even Mrs. Carmody who is the
+wife of the headmaster at the ancient grammar-school,
+a foundation of Edward VI’s in the XVI century at
+which I have the honor to teach English Literature—although
+I and my friends consider him a very great
+poet, if not the greatest poet in the world at the moment,
+poet’s prose is well known to be too florid for
+the real connoisseur of prose. And what follows is actually
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[130]</span>his own translation and Gringoire himself has
+asserted many times both in private and in public
+that he is entirely unable to translate his own prose.
+It does however present a picture of the poet under
+fire—a matter as to which he here refuses to say anything
+elsewhere under the plea that to talk about actual
+fighting disturbs his subsequent sleep with nightmares
+and also that he intends to treat of fighting
+subsequently himself when both the public bitterness
+and his own emotions shall have diminished. This decision
+I regret. For who in ten years’ time will be
+found to take an interest in the late struggle whereas
+enshrined here in the amber of my own prose the
+record of his emotions might well interest people who
+have such memories still vivid within them. I may
+say that I myself, a journalist of considerable pre-war
+practice, never went to the front though I served
+during the whole war in the depot of Gringoire’s
+regiment.</p>
+
+<p>Here then is Gringoire’s prose, the original French
+of which he says was written at Pont de Nieppe during
+September 1916 after his visit to the French Ministry
+which he will describe in my next chapter.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[131]</span></p>
+
+      <h3>A CRICKET MATCH</h3>
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">BEING A LETTER WRITTEN FROM THE LINES</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">OF SUPPORT IN FLANDERS TO CAPTAIN UN</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">TEL IN PARIS.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p><i lang="fr">Mon cher monsieur, camarade et confrère</i> (Gringoire’s
+addressee was also a poet soldier):</p>
+
+<p>Behind Bécourt Wood, on a July evening, whilst
+the shells of the Germans were passing overhead,
+we were playing cricket. The heavy shells went over,
+seeming to cry in their passage the word “We; e; eary”;
+then, changing their minds farther on they exclaimed
+peremptorily: “Whack!” But when one plays cricket
+one forgets the Hun orchestra; one does not even hear
+the shells that pass overhead. We were running about;
+we were cursing the butterfingered fool who dropped
+a catch; we even argued about points of play, because
+the rules of such cricket as one plays with a
+tennis-ball, two axe-helves for bats and bully-beef-cases
+for wicket—those rules are apt to be elastically
+interpreted. But no match England v. Australia at
+Lords’ itself was ever so full of incident nor so moving
+as our game behind Bécourt Wood. The turf was of
+clay, baked porcelain-hard by the almost tropical sun;
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[132]</span>for grass there was only an expanse of immense
+thistles; boundaries and spectators at once were provided
+by the transport mules in their lines. But we
+cheered, we gesticulated, we rushed about, we disputed,
+we roared ... we—British infantry officers
+who are said to be phlegmatic, cold and taciturn.</p>
+
+<p>I present the considerations that follow in the form
+of a letter to you, my dear Un Tel, though I would
+rather have written a balanced, careful and long-thought-out
+essay. But I cannot chisel at my prose today.
+“Ker wooley woo,” as our Tommies say, “say
+la gair!” I have passed twenty-five years of my life
+in trying to find new cadences; in chasing assonances
+out of my prose, with an enraged meticulousness that
+might have been that of Uncle Flaubert himself. But
+today I only write letters—long, diffuse, and in banal
+phrases. The other demands too much time, too much
+peace of mind.... Ah, and too much luck!</p>
+
+<p>Well, then, we were playing cricket when I saw
+passing close to us a French officer of my acquaintance—an
+officer of one of those admirable batteries of seventy-fives
+whose voices were so comforting to hear
+by day and so let us sleep at night. For when they
+spoke in their level and interrupted roll, hour on
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[133]</span>hour, at a few furlongs behind our backs—when <em>they</em>
+spoke, no Hun barked. And they were at that time
+aligned wheel to wheel from Albert to Verdun. The
+man was a gray-blue Colossus, his eyes brown and
+somber, his mustache heavy and dark. He stayed
+there, planted on his legs and his heavy stick, like
+some instrument of war, three-legged, silent and of
+steel. And when I left the game and went to talk to
+him he said to me in English:</p>
+
+<p>“I find that a little shocking. <em>Very</em> shocking!”</p>
+
+<p>And he continued to look at the players who went
+on gesticulating and running about amongst the giant
+thistles and the dangerous legs of the mules. I exclaimed
+vehemently:</p>
+
+<p>“<i lang="fr">Au nom du bon Dieu, pourquoi?</i>”</p>
+
+<p>He did not take his eyes from the players and reflected
+for a long time before answering. And I, getting
+impatient, went on talking vehemently and even
+indulged in gesticulations. I said in French:</p>
+
+<p>“<i lang="fr">Nous sortons des tranchées</i>.... We are only just
+out of the trenches.” This game made you fit, <i lang="fr">remettait
+le moral</i>, made you forget the war.... What
+do I know of what I said? He kept on reflecting and
+I talking French. At last he said:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[134]</span></p>
+
+<p>“I find”—he was still talking English—“that this
+war should be a religion. On coming out of the
+trenches one should sit ... and reflect. Perhaps one
+should even pray a little....”</p>
+
+<p>And I ... I went on arguing with him for a long
+time without his answering anything but:</p>
+
+<p>“I find it, all the same.”</p>
+
+<p>And suddenly I burst out laughing. The situation
+seemed suddenly allegorical. And if you think of it,
+my dear friend, you will see how it was that I laughed.
+It was because it was he, the descendant of Cyrano
+de Bergerac, who spoke English in the monosyllables
+of a stage Lord Kitchener whilst I, the representative
+of so many officers and gentlemen who for many
+centuries have never found anything more to say than
+“O ... ah!”—I who ought to have been wearing an
+eyeglass and blond whiskers was engaged in waving
+my arms and shouting a French that was rendered
+almost incoherent by emotion. And all my comrades—officers
+as well as other ranks—went on shouting, gesticulating,
+running about, cursing and laughing like
+children of Tarascon in the French South.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[135]</span></p>
+
+<p>And in truth the change is astonishing and a little
+moving. We have always had the idea—even the
+French have had the idea—that the French people,
+and above all the French soldiers and French officers,
+were gay, debonnair, loquacious, pawky—“Swordsmen
+and tricksters without remorse or scruples,” as
+Cyrano sings.</p>
+
+<p>Well, the other day I went on service from Steenewerck
+to Paris—a journey which lasted seventeen
+hours. And during the whole of those seventeen hours
+although there were always French officers in my
+railway carriage or standing in the corridors of the
+train, the journey was the most silent of my whole
+life. No one talked. But no one! There were colonels,
+commandants, captains, marine officers, gunner officers.
+And I cannot believe that my presence was responsible
+for this taciturnity. It is true that in every
+suitable spot in the train were inscribed the words:
+“Be silent; be on your guard”—and the fact that
+enemy ears might be listening to you. But it was impossible
+that <em>all</em> those gentlemen attributed such ears
+to me. I was wearing the uniform of my sovereign.
+And they none of them addressed the others.</p>
+
+<p>No, certainly the voyage lacked incident. I will tell
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[136]</span>you the incidents there were: from Hazebrouck to
+Calais five French officers did not exchange two words;
+from Calais to Abbéville thirty who did not speak.
+I spoke to an artillery captain, grumbling at the slow
+progress of the train. He answered in English:</p>
+
+<p>“Many troops moving!”</p>
+
+<p>Then silence.</p>
+
+<p>At Amiens there entered a civilian. It was on a Saturday
+towards eight o’clock in the morning and the
+train had the air of not wishing to reach Paris until
+after three. As I had business in Paris and should
+have to leave early on the Monday I asked this gentleman
+if I should find the banks shut, and the ministries
+and shops. He answered that he did not know.
+He was not a Parisian. He was going to Jersey to
+take possession of the body of a young girl who, having
+been drowned at Dieppe, had floated as far as that
+island.... As if there had not been enough deaths.</p>
+
+<p>He began crying very unobtrusively.</p>
+
+<p>But he, too, had spoken to me in English!</p>
+
+<p>And then ... silence. The officers regarded the
+civilian with eyes that said nothing at all.... I assure
+you that it was not gay.</p>
+
+<p>At Creil there got in two ladies. They were pretty
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[137]</span>and very well-dressed. <em>They</em> talked enough, those two....
+Red Cross, charitable activities, colonels, families.
+But the officers never looked at them. Not one raised
+his eyes although the girls were young, very pretty
+and well-dressed!</p>
+
+<p>But, when <em>we</em> had been going up to the Front from
+Rouen to Albert—and we were not going on leave
+like all these silent officers—we sang, we joked with
+young women whom we saw on the railway platforms;
+we kicked footballs along the corridors of the train;
+we climbed on the roofs of the carriages. You would
+have thought we were going to the Derby.</p>
+
+<p>I naturally exaggerate these differences a little. This
+is not an article but a letter. But I am nevertheless
+telling you what my eyes have seen and my ears
+heard. And how is it to be explained?</p>
+
+<p>It is not enough to say—as has been said so often—that
+if in England, the Germans had been established
+between York and Manchester, if they had seized the
+factories, pillaged the downs, and indulged in whatever
+the Hun Practices may be, we also should be
+gloomy, sad, taciturn. I am not talking of the civilian
+population of my country; I am speaking of us people
+out here whose life is not gay, who are expatriated,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[138]</span>far from our homes and who suffer, I assure you, from
+a very real nostalgia. For, <i lang="fr">là-bas</i> ... on the Somme
+or in Flanders one feels one’s self very forgotten, very
+deserted, and very, very isolated with an isolation like
+the isolation that is felt by ... Oh, well, it is as if
+we were suspended—we, seven million men—on a
+carpet in the infinitudes of space. The roads which
+stretch out before us cease suddenly at a few furlongs
+from our faces—in No Man’s Land. And it is
+very saddening to contemplate roads which suddenly
+end. And then the roads and paths that we have
+taken to get here—and which lie between ourselves
+and our <i lang="fr">pays</i>—the nooks where we were born—are
+roads which we may not travel.... And I assure you
+that, just like any other men, we love our wives, our
+houses, our children, our parents, our ingle-nooks, our
+fields, our cattle and our dung-heaps. The French
+soldier has at least that to his advantage, that he
+fights at home. That is something for him, as individual.
+When he steps out of the trenches he is at least
+in the land that bore him.... But we ...</p>
+
+<p>I suppose that it is in order to forget, not only
+the Hun shells but also those other things that are
+dear to us, the chimney corner beside which we have
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[139]</span>so often sat chatting, the fields upon which we have
+labored, the herds and the woods—it is in search of
+the herb oblivion, that we play cricket behind Bécourt
+wood and go over the top kicking footballs across
+No Man’s Land—footballs which pass over the corpses
+of the fallen, towards the Huns.... And crying
+“Stick it, the Welsh!”—is that weakness? Is it the
+source from which we draw—such as they are—what
+we have of tenacity and courage? I do not know.</p>
+
+<p>Like myself, my dear confrère, you have known the
+difficulty of exactly defining the shades of differences
+that distinguish differing peoples. We commence by
+theorizing and we theorize much too soon, or else
+we take the opposite view to theories that have been
+accepted for centuries. We have had in England the
+nineteenth century caricaturists of the French during
+the Napoleonic wars which showed us the Frenchman
+as he was in the British popular imagination. He was
+a meager, famished barber who lived exclusively on
+frogs. And on your side you had your John Bull, as
+big as an ox, his belly as big as the belly of an ox, and
+devouring whole oxen. And you had the figure of the
+milord with his millions, his spleen which drove him
+to be suicidal. They were stupid, those caricatures, but
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[140]</span>it is impossible to allege that they were not sincere.
+The English who fought in France in 1815 sought for
+what they saw—but they found it. And the same with
+the French.</p>
+
+<p>The same perhaps with myself. I have always considered
+the French a grave people, and when I came
+from an excited England, covered from the Isle of
+Anglesey to the North Foreland with patriotic and
+colorful placards and then found, from the Belgian
+frontier to Paris, a France quite without colored
+placards and gray, silent and preoccupied, it was natural
+that I should look for grave people and find
+them. But for me there was nothing new in finding
+France preoccupied, because for me France always was
+the France of fields, villages, woods and peasants. And
+the France of the peasants is a very laborious and
+pensive place where men labor incessantly between
+wood and pond or beneath the olive trees of the Midi.</p>
+
+<p>For me, on the other hand the population of Great
+Britain has always been a town people. Well, it is
+the inhabitants of great cities who, work as they may,
+have need from time to time to go, as our saying is,
+on a spree—each according to his nature. And that is
+perhaps the reason of the differences that have so
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[141]</span>struck me, between the French Army and ourselves.
+The British Forces are made up preponderatingly of
+townsmen, the French army is an army preponderatingly
+peasant—for even the famous Parigots are mostly
+country born and bred. And the peasantry of all countries,
+but particularly the French peasant, is inured
+to confronting the harshness and the inevitable necessities
+of Nature. They meet them without ceasing for
+weeks, for months, for years—for their lifetimes. They
+can never escape from hardships and the contemplation
+of the evils of life, the bitter winds, the worms
+that devour the buds of whole harvests; their thoughts
+can never be diverted by taking a day’s leave, in making
+puns or by that humor which is acrid and rather
+sad and which is yet the sovereign quality of the British
+Tommy. For to inscribe on an immense gray shell that
+is about to be fired at the Hun lines—to inscribe on
+that in huge whitewash letters “Love to Little Willie”
+may seem stupid and shocking to folk who were never
+<i lang="fr">là-bas</i>. But human psychology is very complicated and
+it is certain that the reading of such inscriptions on
+the great shells by the stacks of which we pass along
+the highroads of France much lightens our hearts
+when we advance from Albert to La Boisselle.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[142]</span></p>
+
+<p>Why? It is difficult to say. It is perhaps because,
+the shells being terrible and threatening, here is a
+shell that has been rendered ridiculous, a cause for
+joy—or even merely human. For we are all anthropomorphic—and
+that one sole shell can suffer itself to
+become the vehicle for humor, that is sufficient to give
+to superstitious minds the idea that shells may be a
+little less superhuman than they seem. They are the
+messengers of gods athirst for blood, who proclaim
+their gigantic weariness but nevertheless destroy in a
+minute dungheaps, whole fields or all the houses of
+a village. But they have become a little humanized.</p>
+
+<p>And it is the same for our game of cricket which
+we played behind Bécourt Wood amongst the giant
+thistles, hidden in thick dust and concealing in turn
+the bodies of so many of our dead. But I assure you,
+my dear comrade, that landscape—of Bécourt, Fricourt,
+Mametz, Martinpuich and the rest—was not gay.
+It was July and the sun let down its rays upon those
+broad valleys, upon the dust and the smoke that
+mounted to the heavens and upon the black and naked
+woods. And it did not smile, that territory. No; Nature
+herself there seemed terrible and threatening—in that
+domain where Destiny who is blind and implacable,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[143]</span>must manifest herself to several million human souls....
+And then we played cricket there—and, all of a
+sudden that threatening and superhuman landscape
+became ... just a cricket field.</p>
+
+<p>For an Intellectual a field will be always just a
+field whether there descend upon it shells, thunderbolts—or
+merely tennis balls. But for us a countryside
+where we have played cricket becomes less affrighting
+and we shall there pass our days more contentedly
+in spite of the bones that there lie hidden
+amongst the thistles. It is stupid; it is even, if you
+will, sacrilege. But that is how we are made—we others
+who are not the intelligentsia and who issue forth
+from the great cities to go upon bloody wars. I, I have
+felt like that, down there, behind Bécourt Wood of
+a July evening during the Somme push in 1916.</p>
+
+<p>And I remain always yours affectionately</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+  G.
+</p>
+
+<p>And I beg you to observe that all the persons who
+spoke to me between Steenewerck and Paris used English.
+That is already something.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>And <em>I</em> beg you to observe that when Gringoire is moving his prose
+up to its most emotional pitch he employs a ‘Hun’ expression. For the
+phrase ‘the herb oblivion’ is merely the literal translation of the almost
+hackneyed German expression: “<i lang="de">Das Kraut Vergessenheit</i>.”</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+  —<i>Note by the Compiler.</i>
+</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_144"></a><a id="Page_145"></a>[145]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="PART_TWO">
+    PART TWO
+    <br>
+    CERTAIN INTERIORS
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[146]</span></p>
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">The old houses of Flanders,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">They watch by the high cathedrals;</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">They overtop the high town halls;</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">They have eyes, mournful, tolerant and sardonic for the ways of men</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">In the high, white, tiled gables.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">The rain and the night have settled down on Flanders;</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">It is all wet darkness, you can see nothing.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">Then those old eyes, mournful, tolerant and sardonic,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Look at great sudden red lights,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Look upon the shades of the cathedrals,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And the golden rods of the illuminated rain.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">And those old eyes,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Very old eyes that have watched the ways of men for generations,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Close for ever.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The high, white shoulders of the gables</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Slouch together for a consultation,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Slant drunkenly over in the lea of the flaming cathedrals.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">They are no more the old houses of Flanders.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[147]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h3 class="nobreak" id="VIII">
+    VIII
+    <br>
+    <i>“Maisie”</i>
+  </h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>[It has occurred to the writer—or let us rather say, “the
+compiler,” that, as concerns this section of this work,
+it would be safe to let Gringoire speak for himself.
+The paraphernalia of inverted commas interspersed
+with indirect speech is apt to be wearisome to a reader.
+It is difficult—nay, it might even prove dangerous—to
+the compiler. For who shall say what powerful
+enemies the present writer might not make by omitting
+inverted commas and appearing to speak for himself?
+So it seems more just to let the rather testy poet
+speak for himself.</p>
+
+<p>For undoubtedly, when speaking of certain matters,
+Gringoire was—nay, he is!—apt to become testy. Let
+us excuse him by saying that he bore a good deal of
+strain during the late war—as was apt to be the position
+of any public, or quasi-public man, caught between
+the attentions of the cheap press and what he
+considered to be his duty to the State.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[148]</span></p>
+
+<p>Of course, this section is a rendering. It does not
+pretend to record words exactly as Gringoire spoke. It
+is, rather, a résumé of conversations of an evening
+when the writer—or rather the compiler—was privileged
+to be housed by Gringoire. It was, by then, late
+summer or early autumn.</p>
+
+<p>The Gingerbread Cottage by that date resembled less
+one of the ruins of the Flanders front that Gringoire
+so feelingly describes. For to tell the truth, that was
+what it had very nearly resembled at the time of our
+Easter visit. When Gringoire had entered it in the
+early spring, there had been certainly the wave-marks
+of inundations and half-inches of mud on the brick
+floors. He had come down with his valise contents, his
+camp-bed, a knife and fork, a paraffin stove, and a
+gallon of oil, determined, as he puts it, to dig himself
+in in the face of destiny. At Easter we had seen him
+a little too early in the process for people who had not
+for the last four or five years lived with furniture
+made of bully-beef cases or whatever they are called.</p>
+
+<p>But by mid-September, when the greater portion
+of the following section was compiled, either Gringoire’s
+views as to the æsthetic value of bully-beef
+chairs and tables had changed as he got further from
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[149]</span>the atmosphere of camps, or Mme. Sélysette had softened
+the asperities of his nature in the matter of preference
+of dugouts to drawing rooms—or else, truly,
+he was acting up to his ideals. That one hesitates to
+believe: for who can believe that any human soul can
+act up to his professed ideals—or that the ideals which
+he professes have any relation to his motives?</p>
+
+<p>Still, Gringoire was a poet. And the writer remembers
+remonstrating with him as to the amount of
+work he was putting into the Gingerbread Cottage
+and the garden. Said the writer: Gringoire should remember
+that all this whitewashing, papering, glazing
+the windows, digging out of foundations, and fertilizing
+an abandoned and ill-treated garden would, in
+the end, profit only the landlord—who was a very
+bad landlord, even as bad landlords go. For, as would
+be the case with poets, Gringoire had no lease of any
+kind....</p>
+
+<p>But Gringoire only looked at the writer with that
+vague and unseeing glance that is one of the properties
+of some poets. And he answered: though of course
+it was not an answer: He was not a small hatter, a
+market-gardener, a farmer, a tradesman, or any sort
+of profit-and-loss person. He was intent simply on
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">[150]</span>making his sanctuary smile a little in the sunlight and
+on comforting an old building that had been very
+shabbily used by evil sorts of men....</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, they had scrambled together some old
+and rather attractive “bits,” a grandfather’s chair or
+so, carpets for the sitting room, colored rush mats for
+the floor of the sleeping apartments. They had painted
+and polished with beeswax and turpentine, and there
+would, as like as not, be some flowers on the dining
+table which was of rough oak—and coffee after a full
+dinner.</p>
+
+<p>The primitive “note” remained, of course, about the
+establishment, and it was hardly the place to which
+you would have asked for a week-end a delicate city
+madam; a Guards’ Major; or a young actress about to
+become famous. But on bright days the garden smiles
+in the sun, and the Gingerbread Cottage has a colored
+and—as Gringoire would say—a <i lang="fr">soigné</i> aspect.
+Yes, certainly it appeared to be cared for, poor battered
+old thing, as old people sometimes appear to be
+cared for in almshouses.</p>
+
+<p>So Gringoire affronts the winter. And, if during
+that season the wolf does not get him; or if his patience
+does not give out—as is the case with poets; or
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[151]</span>if the bad landlord does not eject him in order to reap
+the profits of his improvements—for he has no lease!—he
+will continue his patchings, his experiments with
+unusual manures, and his attempts to ameliorate the
+breed of potatoes. And that is all the writer will say
+about him.</p>
+
+<p>For the rest, he speaks for himself, much as he
+spoke of an evening, with his mild but occasionally
+bitter and furious eyes; with his usually tranquil, but
+occasionally furiously gesticulating hands. For, the
+writer, or rather the compiler, having compared notes
+with Mme. Sélysette, who has heard Gringoire’s stories
+very, very often, the compiler is satisfied that it is a
+fair rendering of the poet-warrior’s conversation. It
+will be found to be disfigured, even in this, as it were,
+censored version, by unfortunate attacks on many persons
+and institutions that are usually considered exempt
+from—or at any rate dangerous to—assault. But
+what it contains is not half as violent as what Gringoire
+wished the compiler to set down as his opinions.
+The compiler, however, has friends who can be
+grieved; a pocket that can be affected by the law of
+libel; a position with reviewers that is his stock in
+trade. So Gringoire, who could not write prose but
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[152]</span>wished to air his opinions, and the compiler, who
+wished to air the poet’s opinions but did not wish to
+lose friends, money, or position in the process, agreed
+upon the autobiographical passages that follow.]</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Gringoire speaks:</p>
+
+<p>At some period of the war, I found myself in a
+certain interior. It was August—hushed by the presence
+at the doors of functionaries, elderly, gray, like bishops,
+wearing evening dress. And one had the sense that,
+standing at ease, on the steps of great portals, opening
+onto immense staircases, that one had ascended in
+stony twilights, past bistre-blue frescoes. Suisses, in
+cocked hats with great white gloves and silver swords,
+symbolized the military ideals of Ministries, just as, in
+the Vatican, obsolete artillerymen, hussars, pikemen,
+symbolize a vanished temporal power. For, what
+would the Suisses do if the Enemy or a Revolution
+should chance to pay a call on them?</p>
+
+<p>I presume they would extend enormous, cotton-gloved
+fingers for visiting cards, which they would
+hand to commissionaires in glass boxes; the cards
+would be sent by pages, upstairs to the episcopal butlers,
+who, after meditating for forty minutes, would
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">[153]</span>warily convey them, over the soft State carpets, past
+the decorous but rich, State-purchased pictures suspended
+over the blue-gray, State-woven tapestries, to
+the high door of polished mahogany. There the bishop-butlers
+would pause, with the air of priests listening
+outside shrines, with a hand on the engraved, polished,
+mounted, ormolu door-handles....</p>
+
+<p>But what, during those sixty-four minutes would be
+the proceedings of the lieutenant of Uhlans, with his
+twenty men behind him; or the leader of the sans-culottes,
+communards, syndicalists...? The lances
+might be dripping with blood; bread, dripping too,
+might be decorating the points of pikes, or paraffin
+from the oil cans. Probably they would not wait until
+the blood or the oil dried on the sarcophagus-tiles of
+the Ministerial Salle des Pas Perdus or until the great
+hotel slowly and resignedly disappeared in flames with
+that curious air of weary acquiescence that buildings
+have when, having borne for many years with human
+follies, wisdoms, or labors, they fall to the ground
+before human madness. Probably they would not wait—the
+Uhlans, the sans-culottes, or the Pétroleuses.
+They are an impatient people.</p>
+
+<p>But, of course, the reader will say, in the great courtyard
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">[154]</span>before the Ministry, are many, many gendarmes,
+standing about with their hands behind their backs
+and slightly protuberant bellies. (Otherwise they
+would be <i lang="fr">là bas!</i>) But they have good eyes. They
+would know a Lieutenant of Uhlans by his uniform,
+and they know how to use their revolvers. And
+amongst the gendarmes lounge several civilian men of
+queer, specialized miens. Their pockets bulge just
+slightly, in odd ways, and brushing their legs are the
+<i lang="fr">chiens de bergers Alsaciens</i> (it used to be <i lang="fr">Allemands</i>)
+the large, elegant dogs with brown fur, like ladies’
+sable coats and the intelligent pointed ears.... It is
+the business of these apparently civilian agents to know
+the leaders of sans-culottes, syndicalists, communards,
+and <i lang="fr">Actions</i> this or that. The pretty, friendly, high-stepping
+dogs with their sable coats would be at the
+sans-culottes’ throats at the merest chirrup of their
+masters’ lips, and from the so very slightly bulging
+pockets light handcuffs would whip out. The revolvers
+also would go off....</p>
+
+<p>And, still more, the reader will say, in the little,
+painted, upright boxes stand little men with red
+trousers and blue coats and tricolored worsted galloons,
+and long, dull-looking rifles, and very, very long
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[155]</span>Rosalies.... They are probably just the very newest
+recruits with sad, boyish faces. But they know enough
+to say the French for “Halt, who are you?” in Breton
+accents, and to let off the old, long guns, and to stick
+Rosalie, with a grunt, through the entrails of a Uhlan
+lieutenant, and to call out the Guard.... And, too,
+there is a half-battalion of the 101st Regiment, whose
+accent reeks of garlic, olive oil, and the meridional sun,
+passing along the boulevard before the tricolor that
+droops over the porte-cochère....</p>
+
+<p>So—like the very heart of an onion, under many,
+many wrappings, in sanctuary, how very, very far
+from the mud of the onion-trench, bearded, in a dark
+coat, with a bright spot of a button; with sharp, apprehending
+nods coming as quickly as winks and silences
+as quickly as either; behind the polished mahogany
+door with the gilt handle and the ormolu
+finger-plates; at a Buhl table, with a glass vase full
+of Malmaison carnations, a bronze reproduction of
+the Winged Victory, and two great pictures of Norman
+peasants, the one by Bastien Lepage and the other
+by Jean François Millet—sits the Minister whose mere
+wink to some one, whose whisper to some one else,
+whose instruction to another, whose order—and so on—has
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[156]</span>brought one from green fields littered with bully
+beef-tins, wire, mud-trodden cartridge cases, rat runs—and
+the rest of it! He will thank you for past services;
+tactfully suggest that it might reinforce some department
+of the <i lang="fr">moral</i> of some department or other of
+humanity if M. le Capitaine would suspend his military
+ardors in order to write so and so and so and so
+in such and such an organ or to say this and that in
+a certain quarter. And one can also produce not truly
+a great effect but some, by talking in a certain way,
+in the mess of one’s regiment even. Certainly in Quartiers
+Généraux ...</p>
+
+<p>He will listen deferentially whilst you voice certain
+objections: to write so and so one must have leave—leave
+in both the English and the French sense of “permission.”
+And leaves are difficult things to obtain. Besides,
+one does not want leave. For certain reasons!...
+One is like that. <i lang="fr">L’on est poète</i>: cranky, unreasonable.
+An all-powerful Minister cannot get into the
+soul of a crank. Not his Seneschals, or the Suisses, or
+the Gendarmes, or the Agents, or the Sentinels can
+help him to that. <i lang="fr">Quand on est poète</i> one requires—one
+requires a little reëntrant, with water—a little
+stream, indicated by a wavy line in blue pencil; copses,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">[157]</span>indicated by dotted-in round o’s with tails to them;
+rushes, indicated by hieroglyphs like the section of a
+hairbrush; a gingerbread cottage, for which the symbol
+is a hatched in square.—One requires those. And
+also one requires a temporary respite from the attentions
+of one’s friends and of destiny. For that, as far
+as I know, military topography has no symbol—unless
+it be a white handkerchief on the end of Rosalie.</p>
+
+<p>His Excellency remains polite—deferential even.
+Still, it could no doubt be arranged, he will remark.
+It is important to get certain things said.... And
+who could say it better than ...</p>
+
+<p>For myself—on the occasion which I am adumbrating,
+I was thinking of ferrets. So that, by a concentration
+of ideas, at a given point I once said to such
+a Minister: Of course there is the First Line Transport....
+And, in my mind’s eye, against the gilt
+frame of the immense Bastien Lepage—or it may
+have been on this occasion a Marie Bashkirtseff—arose
+the image of a Connaught Hut, with the rain beating
+on the roof and the autumn wind reaching the flames
+of candles stuck in bottles and bearing in the odor of
+stable hartshorn from the long horse standings. And
+the Welsh Rabbit made of cheese, onions, Flemish
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[158]</span>beer, and herrings straight from Bailleul—though God
+knows when they came from the autumnal sea. And
+hooch. And several obese, tranquil, entirely capable
+officers with feet for the moment in carpet slippers.
+And the table utensils borrowed from the Y.M.C.A.
+pushed aside on a corner of the trestle table; and a
+cheap pad of letter paper, a copying ink pencil, and
+the mind of the poet functioning in the flicker of the
+guttering candles at the dictates of the Minister seated
+beneath the Jean François Millet picture at the Buhl
+table with the Malmaison carnations in a smoked glass
+vase and the miniature reproduction of the Winged
+Victory in bronze with a delicate, artificially produced
+patina. And the lower part of the poet is wedged into
+a bully-beef case that has had one side taken out and
+that has been wire-nailed into an egg-box to form an
+armchair. And, in the dim gloom, at one elbow stands
+a dripping Divisional runner with a buff memo from
+ordnance to say that Mills Bombs for the —— Battalion
+are on the Scherpenberg and must be taken
+down to Kemmel Château by four ack emma; and at
+the other elbow stands a Divisional Orderly with a
+copy of orders on which in red ink is marked the
+information that Division will move down the line by
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[159]</span>the road by Dranoutre—Neuve Eglise—Westoutre-Plugstreet—Pont-de-Nieppe—Armentières.
+In full sight
+of the Hun trenches, by God!—beginning with one’s
+own battalion, of which A. Company will march
+from such and such a spot at 5:30 to be followed by
+D, C, and B boys at half-hour intervals. And to be
+shelled to Hell!</p>
+
+<p>And the transport officer, whose business it is to
+manage these matters, is away for thirty-six hours to
+arrange for a Divisional Horse Show in the field behind
+the Convent! And your poet is A. O. I. C. (Acting
+Officer in Charge of) Transport, and Billeting officer
+for the Battalion and O. I. C. (Officer in Charge of)
+Divisional Canteen and God knows what all. And Officer
+in Charge of <i lang="fr">moral</i> of a certain section of humanity
+to whom it would be a good thing if certain
+things would be said in polished prose! And when the
+poet springing up exclaims to the night:</p>
+
+<p>“To H—— with the b——y Mills Bombs and the
+bumph and the b——rs and all the whole execrable
+show,” the Battalion Orderly, a fair, cheeky boy who
+knows one, exclaims:</p>
+
+<p>“Ker wooly woo, sir, say la Gair!”</p>
+
+<p>And indeed, the interiors of <i lang="fr">la guerre</i> were much
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[160]</span>like that. But how is His Excellency the Minister
+of this or that department to know what is passing in
+your mind? He will just write on a note pad, look up,
+exclaim, “<span lang="fr">Que dîtes-vous?</span> First Line?... But is it
+tranquil, that?”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_6_6" href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_6_6" href="#FNanchor_6_6" class="label">[6]</a> For the benefit of those curious in these matters, I ask our compiler
+to print in the Envoi some prose in my own original French. It will
+serve for a curiosity. It appeared in a Swiss Review during the war and
+was part of somewhat considerable, and generally agitated, labors. Some
+poems which I wrote in almost exactly the circumstances given above,
+for recitation to French troops, have been lost either by our own or the
+French ministry of propaganda. An article about Alsace-Lorraine was
+“lost in the post”; another, repeating it, was suppressed by our own
+Ministry of Information as being too favorable to the claims of one of
+our Allies. It is, of course, difficult to be a poet in times of war.</p></div>
+
+<p>I don’t know what I answered. I believe I must have
+screamed with laughter—because I really wanted some
+ferrets very badly, and because, in the vestibule of an
+immense hotel I had left my publisher in charge of
+a little girl with dark curls tied with pale blue ribbons,
+singularly self-possessed manners, and rather prominent
+underclothing that appeared to be an inverted
+bouquet of lace. That is to say I had left my publisher—who
+is deaf—with the little girl. And I was in
+charge of the little girl, who, just before my having
+to hurry to the Ministry, had devoured thirteen oysters,
+half a cantaloupe melon with a quarter of a pound of
+sugar, and a <i lang="fr">Coupe Jacques</i>. So I was, really, wondering
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">[161]</span>what Maisie would be like when I returned to the
+Hotel de l’Opéra. It sounds mad—but it is just the
+true truth.</p>
+
+<p>I know that, at that stage, I did not please His Excellency.
+He frowned twice. Once when I laughed because
+he asked if a Connaught hut at the base of the
+Salient was a tranquil place in which to write poems.
+He also frowned when—as I have, I know, elsewhere
+related, but I do not know where—he having asked
+me, “<i lang="fr">En quoi il me pouvait être utile?</i>” I answered,
+“<i lang="fr">Si Votre Excellence me pourrait trouver des furets!</i>”</p>
+
+<p>You see, I had been carefully instructed by friends
+with one eye to my commercial future. The Minister
+was sure to ask in what way he could be of service
+to me. I was to reply—to hint ever so delicately—that
+if I had a ribbon to stick on my coat, writing poems,
+even in a Connaught hut, would be easy. But I couldn’t
+do it. Even if I had not been concerned with ferrets
+that I couldn’t get and with Maisie, who had been
+far too easy to come by, I couldn’t have done it. I had
+been instructed that the ribbon awaited me; I had
+only to stretch out a hand to become an Officer of
+Something or Other. I don’t know whether I ever
+have. I suppose not.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">[162]</span></p>
+
+<p>Anyhow, His Excellency frowned when I asked for
+ferrets. He might have been more sympathetic if I
+had asked him to take off my hands a little girl of
+eight, with the American manners appropriate to the
+age of thirteen, who, half an hour before had eaten
+thirteen oysters, half a melon, and a quarter of a
+pound of sugar that had come from Geneva in her
+<i lang="fr">malles</i>, and a <i lang="fr">Coupe Jacques</i>; who had been kidnapped
+by the lake in a carriage and pair, the night before,
+or perhaps two nights before; and whose father, the
+kidnapper, had left her in my charge just after breakfast
+and had then disappeared. There was also a very
+French maid—in hysterics. And I didn’t even know
+their names.</p>
+
+<p>Yes; H. E. might have been more sympathetic if I
+had mentioned the child alone in the vestibule—or
+possibly with the publisher. But at the mention of the
+ferrets, he became positively glacial: “<i lang="fr">Quoi</i>,” he asked.
+“What is a ferret?”</p>
+
+<p>I said that <i lang="fr">ferrets sont des petits animaux qui mangent
+les rats</i>. But his face remained like a dead wall.
+I <em>know</em> he thought I was drunk. I was so certain of it,
+then, that I stammered, and the interview dissolved
+in the embarrassed emotions passing from him to me
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[163]</span>and from me to him. He touched a button and said he
+would telephone to the Jardin des Plantes. But I don’t
+suppose he did.</p>
+
+<p>You see: it was almost a drop too much in my cup—to
+be plunged straight into “What Maisie Knew,”
+which is a book by Henry James. It was too much bewilderment....
+Supposing the—as I understood—too
+brilliant and vociferous mother who was understood
+to like a “violinist fellow”, should be bursting, with
+wide gestures, through the aperture frailly closed by
+glass hotel-doors that whirled bewilderingly whilst I
+was at the Ministry.... And it might, I understood,
+well be like that.</p>
+
+<p>How the incident ended, however, I cannot say,
+since, upon my return to the hotel, the child and her
+companion had disappeared. That is to say, they had
+left in the hotel bus for the <i lang="fr">Gare du Nord</i>. So I hope
+they got safely to England. I never heard: and, since I
+have forgotten even the names, I suppose I never shall.</p>
+
+<p>It was, no doubt, the sort of thing that was happening
+all over the world just as usual, but it was queer—and
+intensely worrying—to be brought so violently
+and so much against one’s poor will into an atmosphere
+of international passions, excursions, lawsuits for the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[164]</span>possession of children, and the like. And anyhow, the
+worry of it probably spoilt my career; which was no
+doubt a good thing. Anyhow, I hope that Maisie, in the
+custody of kind old aunts, somewhere in Sussex, is
+prattling to a benevolent but bewildered butler about
+Mamma, who went to heaven by the cog-wheel railway,
+via Montreux. Or I suppose it would be better for
+her if she had forgotten Mamma.</p>
+
+<p>Yes: I suppose it was all going on. And I rather
+fancy I found the going-on-ness of it all a little appalling.
+Paris, indeed, was so much more just Paris out
+of the season, than London, in those days, appeared to
+be London, either during or out of the season. It was
+in a way touching; it was also, in a way, disheartening.
+I remember—and I say “I remember” advisedly, since
+such an immense number of things blotted themselves
+out and only crop up in suddenly vivid pictures like
+that of Maisie whom I had completely forgotten until
+the day before yesterday, and who now again exists extraordinarily
+brightly in the hotel vestibule saying:
+“<i lang="fr">Ils me disent que Maman est partie pour le ciel.</i>
+It is very droll. But what tram do I take <i lang="fr">pour le ciel?</i>”
+I remember, then, being on a balcony with an immense
+stone balustrade, in the black night with a number of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">[165]</span>French officers who were all polite—but cold. It was,
+certainly, during the <i lang="fr">entr’acte</i> of Délibes’ <i>Lakme</i>. I
+fancy the theater was the Comédie Française, but I
+don’t know, because I had been taken there by a staff
+officer, and in those days in France one was moved
+about so without volition of one’s own that one didn’t,
+necessarily, much notice where one went or how one
+got there. Where it was a duty to notice, one noticed—railway
+stations in their sequence, streams, contours.
+But it was rather a toss-up whether anything more
+than little bits, like etchings or vignettes, got through
+to one’s private psychology. I take this to have been the
+case with most men in our army. We were, as soldiers,
+both naïf and engrossed.</p>
+
+<p>With the French, it was different. They appeared
+to be so much older, in their work as in their leisures.
+They seemed to go to war, as they went to <i>Lakme</i>,
+so much more as connoisseurs. So, on that balcony, I
+had the feeling of a very definite frigidity. I could
+have talked rather floridly about <i lang="fr">les gloires de la
+France</i>, the ultimate aims of the war. I doubt if the
+French officers could. They had exhausted the topic
+during forty menaced years.</p>
+
+<p>So they talked, as it happens, mostly of the fine
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">[166]</span>work that had been done by their territorials—old men,
+fathers of families, and grandfathers who were patching
+away at the trenches, making roads under fire,
+laboriously laboring amidst great dangers and beyond
+their strength that the years had sapped.</p>
+
+<p>The balcony of the theater was a cube of blackness;
+down below there appeared to be an old, small, square
+market-place. Paris, of course, was in darkness, out of
+deference to Zeppelins and airplanes, so that it was
+all a heavy, velvety black beneath a pallid sky. Houses,
+squares, rose up on three sides; the immense black
+bulk of the theater seemed to press on one’s back as
+one is pressed upon, on narrow paths, by the walls of
+precipices in the night. One had a sense that the inside
+of this building was flooded with translucent rays, in
+which, over the light parquet of long floors, in the
+<i lang="fr">salons de réception</i>, men moved quietly, with slightly
+outstretched hands emphasizing points in their discourse
+to the women on their arms. Theaters function
+with a sense of style in Paris. But the old, tall houses
+round the market gave the idea that they were solidly
+black throughout; only in the old empty rooms, over
+the creaking floors, mice would rustle in the pallid
+gleams from the old windows.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[167]</span></p>
+
+<p>I do not mean to say that the houses were really like
+that inside: for houses are queer things, and queerer
+still when they grow old, with malices, obstinacies,
+benevolences of their own. And, as is the case with
+men, their physiognomies are misleading. So, though
+one had the sense that below there was a market-place
+with carts and tilted hoods awaiting the day and that
+the houses were old and empty, it may have been all
+untrue to fact, though it is likely enough in Paris
+where there are so many old, moldering, and damp-streaked
+façades and courtyards.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder if most people have as strongly as I the
+feeling that houses have, not so much immortal souls,
+as tempers, queernesses, and the power to be malicious
+or benevolent. I daresay most people have that sense
+up to a point, for it is common enough to walk with
+a friend, more particularly at dawn, where there are
+few human beings about to detract from the spell,
+past, say, a terrace of houses not all alike. A blind
+will be up; another and another, half drawn down;
+four or five others, all green, will be at various heights
+behind the closed window-glasses. And your friend
+will say:</p>
+
+<p>“That house appears to be winking; that other is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[168]</span>gnashing green teeth!” So that your friend will be
+attributing faces at least to the houses. No doubt he
+will also connote individualities.</p>
+
+<p>The effect of the coming of the war, for me, was to
+enhance the feeling until it became almost an obsession.
+Just as trees and fields appeared to dread the contamination
+of alien presences, so with buildings. Only
+with buildings—and more particularly with houses—the
+feeling was very much enhanced. They seemed
+to dread not only contaminations, but pains, violations,
+physical shames, and dissolution in fire.</p>
+
+<p>I do not mean that this feeling was new to me or
+came with the coming of the war. On the contrary, it
+was a feeling familiar enough in France. Long before
+the war it was difficult to go to Northern France—and
+it was impossible to visit Paris—without seeing, or
+having the attention drawn to, buildings that have
+been struck by shells, that have solid cannon balls embedded
+in their walls, to façades riddled by musketry
+or charred by one incendiarism or another. In Paris,
+there were mostly relics of 1870-71; elsewhere the solid
+cannon balls, as like as not, were once our own. But
+somehow that seemed normal: those were the danger
+zones of a race. If members of a civilized people, like
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">[169]</span>the French, choose to occupy marches—zones set
+against barbarians, like ourselves and the Huns—the
+buildings they set up in those regions must suffer.
+They must suffer as children do who are taken into
+perils aboard ship; or like dogs whose masters adventure
+with them into fields of fire.</p>
+
+<p>It was, therefore, in the southern and central regions
+of France that, before the war, I had most
+strangely the feeling—that feeling of affrighted buildings.
+It came to me one day in a broad French landscape,
+somewhere, I imagine, just south of Lyons.
+Perhaps it was in Orange—or possibly in Tarascon. At
+any rate, it was just after the close of the Agadir “incident”.</p>
+
+<p>I don’t know that I had taken the Agadir incident
+very seriously. In fact, I hadn’t taken it seriously at
+all. The Prime Minister of today had made at the
+Guildhall a speech that one regarded as one regarded
+any other flamboyant speech—and that was the end
+of it. I never imagined that we should do our duty to
+civilization if it came to the point. I never imagined,
+indeed, that France herself would stand up.</p>
+
+<p>We came, at that date, of a generation that lived in
+the shadow of the ghosts of Bismarck, Moltke, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">[170]</span>William I—in the shadow of memories of the siege of
+Paris. Prussia appeared no doubt detestable—but she
+was so omnipotent that we hardly cared to think about
+her even for the purpose of detesting her. Will you
+remember, oh Gringoire <i lang="fr">fils</i> that shall be?</p>
+
+<p>Probably Gringoire <i lang="fr">fils</i> will not remember: that is
+why I find it necessary to recapitulate at this point.
+Prussia, then, was there, like something ominous but
+irremovable. One might say that the world, like some
+stout old garment, was a good world—but it had upon
+it a grease-stain that neither petrol nor spirits would
+eradicate; just as you might say that your postal service
+or train system were good, ignoring the fact that officials
+were brutal in manner; or that your God was a
+good God, although He insisted on being fed with
+babies roasted alive. Something like that.</p>
+
+<p>On the day after Agadir, then, I had come through
+Lorraine—the two Lorraines, of which one was bubbling
+like a pot with men all in gray, the other pullulating
+like an over-ripe cheese with men all in blue,
+with baggy, scarlet breeches. One had been lost in an
+immense, pushing, silent crowd at the <i lang="fr">Gare de l’Ouest</i>—an
+immense, silent, rather grim crowd in blue, with
+worsted adornments, long rifles slung over the backs,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[171]</span>untidy haversacks. At the bureaux of the station were
+innumerable women. They gesticulated, waved to unseen
+units in that tired crowd; they cried out; they
+wept for joy.</p>
+
+<p>But that produced no particular effect. The French
+are an impressionable and a noisy people. So the
+women called out. The silent soldiery were no doubt
+tired after the autumn manoeuvres. That was perhaps
+why they were so grim.</p>
+
+<p>But somewhere, just after that, in some view near
+a Southern or Central town—as I have said, it may
+have been Lyons or Orange; no town that particularly
+mattered, near the Loire, perhaps, or the Rhone—amidst
+rolling country where the harvest was already
+in and there were stubble fields and new straw thatching—suddenly,
+out of all those hundreds of thousands
+of soldiery, I remembered one. He was a little recruit—“joining
+up” as we learned to say later. He was shoved
+into a first-class carriage somewhere near Meaux because
+the train was so full, and there, in a corner seat,
+with the blue-gray landscape going past, he sat, as
+if lifeless, the tears dropping down his cheeks. His
+rifle, haversack, packages, tin cans, slings, and things
+of which, then, one didn’t recognize the importance,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">[172]</span>had been thrown in after him by a guard, and, in
+among them, he sat desolate.</p>
+
+<p>In the carriage there had been besides myself two
+old French people—an old gentleman with a white
+Napoleon, and an old, feeble lady, in a rather queer
+black bonnet. I have an idea that they were French
+Protestants. There were also other people: but they
+formed only a chorus.</p>
+
+<p>For the old man, in kindly, but very thin tones,
+began to talk to the little recruit, the old lady echoing
+each of his speeches:</p>
+
+<p>“The beds for a poor little recruit are hard?”—“The
+beds are hard!”—“The haricot soup is thin?”—“Ah,
+yes, a very watery potage.”—“Ah! Ah! Yes,” said the
+listeners.—“The marchings are long; the drills difficult;
+the rifles heavy.”—“Yes: heavy are the rifles!”—“Ah!
+Ah! Yes ...”—“And the little recruit is away from
+home for three long years!”—“Yes, three years!”—“Ah!
+Ah! Ah! Three so very long years!”—“The little
+recruit comes from the Midi—the South!”—“The
+Midi! The South!”—“Ah! Ah! The South with sun
+and cypress hedges and the <i lang="fr">champs d’oliviers</i> and the
+Mistral.”—“From Orange! From quite near Orange
+... Ah! Ah! Orange ...” And there he was, going
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">[173]</span>to Lille.... In the northwest: over against the
+frontier....</p>
+
+<p>Being then “quite near Orange” a few days later—yes,
+it was Orange!—and looking out from the heights
+of the Roman Theater over the little town and the
+flat, commonplace country, I remembered suddenly
+the little recruit. I think that is how the mind really
+works, linking life together, for, later I shall tell you
+how, on the balcony of the Comédie Française, I remembered
+suddenly Private ——, an old, nearly toothless
+Tommy of a Kitchener’s battalion of the Lincolnshires
+in the baths which had been established in the
+old mill at Albert—and also Lt. Morgan of my own
+regiment, an officer who had spent a very hard life
+in Canada, and who was killed walking up a communication
+trench on his first day in the line.</p>
+
+<p>So, at Orange, before the war, I remembered suddenly
+the little recruit in his blue, with his worsted
+adornments, sitting like a statue of utter grief whilst
+the green-gray country, of northwest France, swept
+past behind him. The country over which his image
+suddenly superimposed itself was browner; in flat
+fields, the queer twigs of the vineyards appeared untidy.
+I fancy the Alps were in the distance. But there
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">[174]</span>were stacks and roofs. And, it was, for me, just country.
+That is to say, I attached to that countryside no
+particular legends, traditions, or fables of story. It
+might be Provence—or it might not. But when I saw,
+as it were, through the image of the recruit, the stacks,
+the roofs, of the little farm buildings or of the little
+town, it seemed to me that they were all crouching
+down, motionless, but ready to tremble, as partridges
+crouch amid the stubble when beaten away over the
+ridge.</p>
+
+<p>I don’t want unduly to labor the point—but I am not
+yet certain that I have made it. You see, that queer and
+sinister feeling came to me just because of that carriageful
+of French people. It was not so much because
+the little recruit had wept. I daresay that, as a conscript,
+he was bad material. But it was because the old
+gentleman and all the others in the carriage had known
+the hard beds, the thin soups, the heavy rifles, and
+the drag of the pack-straps on the shoulders ... and
+the long absences from the little homes that seemed
+now to cower among the stubble fields. For there was
+no house in all that landscape whose women hadn’t
+known the suspense of absences; there was no stack
+whose builder hadn’t at one time gone, or come back.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">[175]</span>And there was not one, of all those objects, that did
+not dread—that, for forty long years had not dreaded—the
+hard footsteps, the shames, the violations, or the
+incendiary fires of conquerors who should come from
+“beyond Lille on the frontier”.</p>
+
+<p>And it was at that moment that, suddenly, it became
+a conscious proposition in my mind—definite
+and formulated—that, first and before everything else,
+we must have in the world assured nooks and houses
+that never cowered and trembled—houses of which
+one could never by any possibility think that they
+would cower and tremble.</p>
+
+<p>That, of course, is militarism. I am sorry that it has
+crept in.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">[176]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h3 class="nobreak" id="IX">
+    IX
+    <br>
+    <i>The Water Mill</i>
+  </h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Said Gringoire on another day:</p>
+
+<p>During one of the innumerable periods of long waiting
+that seemed inseparable from our advances
+whether on the Somme or elsewhere, it occurred to
+me that that would be a good opportunity to see what
+books really would bear reading—would, that is to
+say, stand up against the facts of a life that was engrossing
+and perilous. I wrote, therefore, on the spur
+of the moment, a postcard, to a bookseller, since I
+had no friends on whose generosity I cared to trespass.
+I asked him to send me: Turgeniev’s “Fathers and
+Children”, Flaubert’s “Trois Contes”, Mallarmé’s
+“Après-Midi d’un Faune”, Anatole France’s “Histoire
+Comique”, or “Thaïs”, “Youth”, by Joseph Conrad,
+“What Maisie Knew”, by Henry James, and “Nature
+in Downland”, by W. H. Hudson. I received them
+all except the last, which was out of print, and I found
+that I could read them all with great engrossment except
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[177]</span>the book, whichever it was, by Anatole France.
+That one was so frail and tenuous in its appeal that
+it failed to hold my attention at all, and I have forgotten
+its name.—I hasten to add that I regarded M.
+France at that date as a Pro-German, so my impatience
+may not have been altogether because of its literary
+qualities.</p>
+
+<p>It was whilst I was reading “What Maisie Knew”
+that I got leave to go with another officer and have a
+bath in Albert. So I took the volume under my arm.
+It wasn’t really a coincidence—that I should be reading
+that book. I suppose it wasn’t really a coincidence that
+I should meet Maisie in the flesh.</p>
+
+<p>For, if one was to meet Maisie anywhere, it would
+be precisely in the white vestibule of a Paris hotel—and,
+if any one was to be confided in by one or other of
+her distracted parents, the episode being international,
+and the parent in possession British, the person to be
+confided in <em>would</em> be one in the uniform of His
+Britannic Majesty, and of substantial appearance.
+“What Maisie Knew,” again, happened to be the first
+book by the late Mr. James that I ever read—and,
+if it hadn’t happened to be the first, it would still
+have remained—and it does still remain for me—the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[178]</span>book by that very great writer that most “matters”.
+For your benefit, if you “don’t know your
+James,” I may as well say that this is the story of a
+child moving amongst elemental passions that are
+veiled. But, of course, elemental passions can never be
+veiled enough not to get through to the consciousness,
+if not to the intelligence of the child in the house. So,
+in an atmosphere of intrigues, divorces, prides, jealousies,
+litigations, conducted as these things are conducted
+in this country, by what it is convenient to call
+“the best people”, Maisie always “knows”. She knows
+all about concealed relationships, as she knows all
+about intrigues, processes, and the points of view of old
+family servants. It is, of course, a horrible book, but
+it is very triumphantly true....</p>
+
+<p>The Tommies’ bathing place at Albert was in an
+old mill under the shadow of a tall factory chimney
+at which the Huns were perpetually firing shells. As
+far as I know, they never hit it—but they made a nice
+desolation in the immediately adjacent houses. The
+mill, at the fork of a road, had been turned into a
+series of sheds and compartments, in which there
+were shower baths and baths with hot and cold water
+in very wet cubicles where you had duckboards underfoot.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">[179]</span>There were Neissen or other boilers somewhere
+under the ramshackle building, so that steam always
+filtered through and hung over the old tiles of the
+roof. The other ranks of various battalions had their
+bathing parades there at stated hours, so that officers
+could only get a bath in between whiles or after
+hours.</p>
+
+<p>It was a hot day, very dusty, with the clouds from
+the white rubble, which was all that there was of the
+center of the town, and after we had wandered, I
+and another officer, round about the rubbish heaps,
+and past long-closed shops that offered us, on metal
+placards, bicycles, chocolates, and furniture polish, by
+makers well-known in France, we decided to wait in
+the bath itself till the battalion in possession, which
+was the last of the day, should have finished its ablutions.
+In a tiny, shuttered shop we had bought, for A
+Company’s mess, a small melon, five lemons, and half
+a bushel of windfall apples. The shop was just to the
+east of the Cathedral, and we went over the empty
+Presbytery. One of the floors was a great litter of
+books—Latin texts mostly. One I noticed was a 17th
+century edition of Livy—1652, I think. Another was
+a copy of Voragine’s recension of the “Golden Legend”—but
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">[180]</span>whether or no it was a valuable edition,
+I don’t know. We left the books on the floor—out of
+indifference, so as not to commit sacrilege and because
+we had already to carry a small, netted melon,
+six lemons, and half a bushel of apples between us.
+Under my arm, moreover, I had “What Maisie Knew”
+in the expensive, collected edition, and we had also
+towels and soap. So there, in the long, dark, but not
+cool room, just as they had been tumbled out of the
+shelves, probably by the Germans, the books lay with
+rays of sunlight from the closed <i lang="fr">persiennes</i> falling
+across broken backs, exposed leaves, half-turned title-pages....</p>
+
+<p>Whilst we were passing under the immense Madonna
+and Child that hung over the Cathedral steps,
+a Hun plane dropped a couple of bombs right into
+the body of the church. They made pretty loud pops,
+and overhead our own Archies were popping away too.
+But what was really interesting to hear was the sifting
+tinkle of broken stained-glass of the windows that
+went on rustling, tinkling, sifting, and rustling down
+into the rubble in the body of the church until we were
+out of earshot.</p>
+
+<p>I don’t mean to say that we hurried away. There
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">[181]</span>was nowhere to hurry to. But the German heavy battery
+that had the town under its especial care was beginning
+to send in its evening group of shells. As far
+as I can remember, at that time they let off six 5-2’s
+at about 10:15 A.M.; six at 1:15 P.M., and six more
+just after 6:00 P.M. with an apparently unimaginative
+regularity, and usually at the same localities—the
+morning six falling about the desolated Place in
+front of the church, the lunchtime contribution in the
+houses along the main street. Our Second Battalion
+had thirty-two casualties in one room from one shell
+of the midday group. The evening six usually fell in
+the fields on the Ancre side of the town.</p>
+
+<p>So we desired to get under a roof—not that a roof
+is any particular protection against high-explosive
+shells, but simply to get something between one’s
+self and the sky. For at times, of an evening, when one
+was tired, a pellucid sky would be a disagreeable
+thing. You didn’t know what sort of iron shard would
+not be coming between the light bars of blue and the
+bars of light dove color. Your flesh, too, felt very soft
+to set itself up against iron shards. And, at the moment,
+we were tired with the walk over the thistles of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">[182]</span>the downland and the thin air and the heat and the
+chalk dust. And one wanted a read in one’s book!</p>
+
+<p>The by-streets were amazingly quiet; closed houses,
+shuttered shops, mostly unhurt; not a soul was in the
+blazing sunlight; not a cloud was in the sky; only, in
+the dust of the road three cats were motionlessly intent
+on love. We knocked on a closed door of the old mill.
+I found myself, having passed several darkish, steaming
+rooms in which the white nudity of many men
+showed against the blue-gray of flannel shirts, and the
+drab colors of steam-damped khaki in the shadow—I
+found myself in an armchair, in a very tall, quiet
+room. I had a sense that there was a tall, slim bookcase,
+a great table covered with dirty copies of English funny
+periodicals, and empty, cardboard fag-packets....
+But I was sitting, really, in Kensington Gardens in
+the broad, open turfed way that slopes from the
+Round Point to the Serpentine. And there was a murmuring
+couple, by a tree trunk, upon green penny
+chairs. (I don’t know that I wasn’t one-half of the
+couple.) And Maisie was playing with Mrs. Wicks,
+three trees off, and Beale Farange, a little too florid,
+flaming and bearded, to be really one of the best
+people, was bearing down upon them—or was it us?—in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[183]</span>the shadow of the well-behaved foliage under
+the polite skies.</p>
+
+<p>I was vaguely conscious of voices. My companion
+was talking to some one else—about some battalion
+of some regiment; about some division, not ours;
+about the nature of the trenches in front of <i lang="fr">Bazentin-le-Petit</i>.
+But, at any rate, for the moment, the fictitious-real
+had got so much the upper hand of the real-real
+that I was as engrossed as any schoolboy reading Ivanhoe
+in the twilight. It is a good tribute to pay the
+master. He was dying then.</p>
+
+<p>But I was vaguely unhappy too—unhappy about it
+all. I don’t mean that I was unhappy with the ire of
+the moralist—for I never set up to be a moralist. Only
+I felt the queer uneasiness that, in those days, one was
+beginning to feel when one came in contact with
+civilians.</p>
+
+<p>One began to hear hollow voices, sounding portentous
+through closed shutters.</p>
+
+<p>“Fall in there! A Company on the right. Towels
+on the left arm. Number off!”—voices coming from
+the roadway. And one looked up from one’s book,
+thinking the time had come for one’s bath. There
+existed again the tall room, with grayish wallpaper;
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[184]</span>the atmosphere of steam; the tall window; the tall
+bookcase, whose panes, behind thin, curved mahogany
+divisions showed a faded, stretched curtain of torn
+green silk. The table was less littered than it had
+been. It had a dusty, red baize cover, much stained
+with ink. I suppose this was the miller’s office. I don’t
+know what had become of my companion. He was a
+restless, energetic boy, always on the jump. Whilst
+I had been in the broad avenue in Kensington, he had
+probably pressed until they had got him a bath-cubicle
+cleaned and ready. At any rate, a very old Tommy
+of the Lincolns, toothless, whitehaired, with tunic undone
+and tarnished buttons, told me I must still wait
+whilst my bath was preparing.</p>
+
+<p>He said I was mistaken in thinking that he was a
+noncombatant permanently in charge of the baths. He
+was just a Tommy of the Lincolns; he had come
+straight out of the trenches in front of <i lang="fr">Bazentin-le-Petit</i>
+the night before. Five days before that they had
+relieved us in the same trenches. Now another division
+had gone in. He had been put in charge of the baths
+that morning, so he hadn’t had time to clean his buttons,
+or even his rifle. He supposed he might get
+<i>strafed</i> for that. Yes; it was trying, the life of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">[185]</span>trenches for a man of his age. He was sixty-two—sixty-four—over
+sixty, at any rate.</p>
+
+<p>I told him to stand easy, and he sat down on the
+other side of the large table and reached for an old
+pipe. Then he folded his wrinkled hands before him
+on the cloth, looked at me hopefully, and exclaimed:
+“I suppose you know the firm of Bolsover &amp; Jupp of
+Golden Square. The great solicitors.”</p>
+
+<p>I did not know them; but when I said I did not,
+he appeared so distressed: “What? Not the great
+solicitors? To the Mansion House, the Common Council,
+the Tilbury and Southend Railway!”—so distressed
+that I had to pretend at last that I did.</p>
+
+<p>“Well!” he said. “I was clerk in their office for
+twenty-four years!”</p>
+
+<p>Twenty——four——years! He seemed to think that
+the statement entitled him to feel an enormous pride.
+No doubt it did.</p>
+
+<p>He must have had a streak of the adventurous in
+his composition—but no one could have seemed less
+adventurous or more static. As he sat there, his hands,
+whitened by dabbling all that day in bath water, and
+folded before him on the dirty red baize, he looked
+as if he had sat there all his life and as if he would
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">[186]</span>never move. He was so faded that you would not have
+given him credit even for the amount of sharpness
+necessary to a solicitor’s clerk; you would have said
+that he was an aged shepherd on a bench outside the
+workhouse door. I think he was the most memorable
+figure of the war, for me.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, one’s mind is capricious in these things—but
+this was his biography, of which I have forgotten
+nothing—though I have, of course, forgotten most of
+his exact words. For twenty-four years clerk to
+Messrs. Bolsover &amp; Jupp, this man who now was mostly
+preoccupied with the fact that he would be “<i>strafed</i>”
+for not “cleanin’ ’is ’ipe ... I mean rifle, sir!” had
+gone at the age of forty-eight—to Canada, to make his
+fortune, nothing less! He had left two sons, both married,
+in London. He and his “missus” worked in a factory—a
+“notions” factory, which was then engaged in
+adding to the beauty of the world by manufacturing
+colored and embossed tin-lids; later it made fancy
+brass buttons and can-openers. “<i lang="fr">Et comme il était très
+fort, hardi, courageux et avisé</i>”—he soon obtained, not
+like St. Julian the Hospitalier, the command of a battalion—but
+a wage sufficient to let him save money.
+They saved money, he and his missus, and after eight
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[187]</span>years, they built themselves a frame house—“a proper,
+warm ’aouse for them frosty winters and we had one
+of those ’ere proper iron stoves. Proper!”</p>
+
+<p>On the first morning of the new house—I presume
+his missus had lit the proper stove—he was jest
+a-puttin’ on his collar, when he heard a crackling. He
+thought it was the frost in the apple trees, cracking
+the boughs. But, in forty minutes the house was gone.</p>
+
+<p>He had meant to insure that afternoon. So he and his
+missus—he never described her, but I think she must
+have been a gallant soul—aged fifty-six a-piece, went
+back to boarding-house life and work in the “notion”
+factory. Next autumn, coming back from work one
+evening, he noticed in a neighbor’s lot, a fine apple
+tree. Proper, with apples on it, these ’ere large coddlins!
+He offered the neighbor two dollars for the
+apples on the tree and peddled them round the town.</p>
+
+<p>In five years, at that trade, he had made enough to
+think of “retiring”. Then he see in the pipers that
+Hengland needed men. So he ses to his missus: “We’ve
+got money enough to do as we please. Let’s go and see
+what we can do to ’elp the ol’ gal....” As if Victoria
+had been still on the throne. They came to London,
+and he went to see the ol’ firm. His sons said to him:
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[188]</span>No, they were married men with families. “So I says
+to the missus: ‘I ain’t got no family, I ain’t.’” And he
+bought her an ’aouse at ’Endon and an annuity,
+through the ol’ firm. That had taken till February,
+1916. He was apologetic over the delay, but he had
+wanted to see the ol’ woman settled comfortable.</p>
+
+<p>February, 1916—it was then July. Thirteen weeks
+training, you see, and he had been two months in
+France, “mostly on this ’ere ol’ Somme.” He was sixty-one
+years and four months of age. And he said he felt
+tired.</p>
+
+<p>There was about his narration nothing of the “narquois”
+humor of the cockney; but, colorlessly, as tired
+farm-laborers talk, he went on talking—as if it was
+just the Will of God. I met some of his officers a
+couple of weeks later and asked about him, but his
+story grew rather hazy. They found a Company Sergeant-Major
+who said he had thought the old man was
+a bit too old for his job in the trenches. I daresay the
+old man had found rough gentlenesses and kindly
+helping hands from his mate and the noncommissioned
+officers of his battalion. He would have, of
+course. So the C.S.M. had detailed him for caretaker
+at the baths. The old man had enlisted as being
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">[189]</span>thirty years and six months of age—just half his years.
+The C.S.M. remembered that; but he didn’t know
+what had become of the man. He rather thought he
+had been killed on the 24/7/’16 by a shell pitched in
+the battle, but perhaps he hadn’t.</p>
+
+<p>It was mostly his tired voice and his colorless narration
+that had impressed me with him. I didn’t think
+much about—I did not even realize—the rather stupendous
+Odyssey of a life he must have had until I
+stood on that balcony of the Paris theater, in the night,
+with the French officers. You see, it was anyhow such
+a tremendous Odyssey for every one there that a little
+more or less at the moment did not jump to the eye
+as mattering. But, underneath, in the subconscious
+mind, it mattered.</p>
+
+<p>I daresay—nay, I am sure—that it was that quality
+that mattered to me more than anything else of the
+whole cause for thought that the war gave one. For
+me—apart from Lord Kitchener and Sir Edward Grey—there
+were few great figures of those years. Sir Edward
+Grey went out of course once war was declared:
+then Kitchener went. There remained this Tommy of
+the Lincolns and I think Lt. Morgan of my own battalion
+was then still alive. Henri Gaudier was certainly
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">[190]</span>dead—and he, in my mind, was united to the Lincolnshire
+Private and Morgan. They had, all three, a certain
+serenity.</p>
+
+<p>I wish I could remember Morgan’s initials. He had a
+brother, “I. H.”—a nice boy. I hope he is still alive.</p>
+
+<p>But the Morgan who is dead sounded, as it were,
+exactly the same note as the Lincolnshire man—the
+note of tired but continuous laboring after a very hard
+life. You know the sort of effect a violin has when its
+strings are muted. It was like that.</p>
+
+<p>I think Morgan must have had his last leave at the
+same time as myself when I went out the second time;
+but I don’t think we went out together. At any rate,
+we took together a very long railway journey—but I
+don’t remember why or where—probably because I
+spent it listening to the story of his life. I remember his
+tired movements as he took his knapsack down from
+the rack whilst the train was running into some
+terminus. And I remember it seemed to me to be a
+shame—on the part of destiny—that he should be going
+out at all. I met him next night in Coventry Street—and
+he did not seem to be getting much out of Coventry
+Street after dark. We stood talking for a minute,
+and then he disappeared among the prostitutes and the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">[191]</span>flash Jews. I expect we each said: “Good luck, old
+man,” for I believe he liked me, and I must have liked
+him very much.</p>
+
+<p>He was killed, as I have said, by a <i lang="de">minenwerfer</i> as
+he was going up a communication-trench on his first
+night. He was buried so that, in the morning when
+they found him, only his feet and legs were showing.
+He was probably not buried alive, because the officer
+who found him said that he was smiling. I like to think
+of that.</p>
+
+<p>Because these were the men who needed—who <em>must</em>
+have had if indeed there be a just God or even merely
+a deity who gives compensations—a period of sanctuary
+after their very hard labors. It doesn’t matter about
+you and me....</p>
+
+<p>But poor old Morgan ... I don’t know what age
+he was. I daresay he was no more than thirty-two, little
+and brown and persistent—his face was thin, aquiline,
+and as if hardened and sand-blasted by the perpetual
+confrontation of winds full of hail. For he too had
+gone out to Canada—but as a boy, apparently without
+much capital, to work for wheat-farmers.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose most people know something about working
+for Canadian farmers—the long solitudes, the distance
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">[192]</span>of the towns, the protracted buggy rides over
+immense plains. Well, I seem to have an extraordinary
+sense of it—just from the way Morgan talked on that
+long train journey. I don’t know that I remember incidents.
+Perhaps I could. I remember that, knowing
+little about horses at the beginning, he was asked by
+the boss if he would take a helluva vicious team to the
+nearest township to fetch something, a plow, I think.
+And he had done it.</p>
+
+<p>But the main of the story was just the long strain—long
+hours merging into long years, with the muscles
+always a little overstrained. Not much, but a little.
+Because, though gallant, persistent, and showing it as
+the Welsh do, he was small for wrestling with tree
+trunks and immense plains. I remember his saying that
+when he had dug holes for the posts of wire fencing,
+he poured water in so that the posts should freeze solid
+in their places.</p>
+
+<p>Well, he too must have been “<i lang="fr">hardi, courageux, et
+avisé</i>”—leading a long, uncolored life of sober chastity,
+without many visits to the townships even, let alone
+the towns. For, as he sat in the carriage, he said that
+he owned property—timber lots and other lots, bought
+out of the savings of a laborer.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[193]</span></p>
+
+<p>And he spoke of going back there, <i lang="fr">après la guerre
+finie</i>—with the serene resignation of a man with no
+other imaginable destiny before him. It was to be more
+toil and more toil and more toil. He did not, apparently,
+ask for—certainly he did not imagine—any
+other future. So that resignation is not the right word.
+Serenity is....</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[194]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h3 class="nobreak" id="X">
+    X
+    <br>
+    <i>From a Balcony</i>
+  </h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>One of the French officers, on the balcony of the
+theater, during the <i lang="fr">entr’acte</i> of <i>Lakme</i>, was describing,
+with that depressed neatness of quiet diction that is
+at the disposal of every educated Frenchman, the sleep
+of a French territorial on an uncompleted traverse.
+The others had, as it were—and as if by preconcertion—capped
+stories in lauding and pitying the <i lang="fr">territoriaux</i>.
+These troops, it may be as well to point out, were
+something like the Labor Battalions that subsequently
+we raised. I fancy we had nothing of the sort at that
+date and indeed, between Hélie and Corbie I had lately
+seen the Guards’ Brigade doing fatigue that, in French-France
+would have been performed by old fathers and
+grandfathers. That, of course, is nothing to the discredit
+of that great brigade. As soon as battalions,
+brigades, or divisions came out of the trenches for a
+“rest”, they were given the cheerful jobs of repairing
+rear-line trenches, digging drains, cleaning out latrines,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">[195]</span>and the like. When we came out from the Somme
+for a “month’s rest”, first A Company, then B, C,
+and D were given an all-night fatigue—of mending
+the Albert-Amiens road! And in August! Then we
+were moved up into the salient.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, slowly, coldly, and without the shadow
+of a shade of cordiality, in the blackness of the Paris
+night, the French officers piled it up. We were not
+popular in France at that date, and I don’t know that,
+except as individuals, we deserved popularity. That
+does not matter. The fact remained that they were
+“out” to make one feel that from under every little
+cowering roof in France, from Orange as from the
+frontier by Mentone to the other frontier by Longwy,
+old, stiff men, with horny hands and faded eyes had
+marched over the endless roads with the poplars to
+their too-heavy labors amidst the bursting shells....
+From under <em>every</em> cowering roof of every township,
+town, hamlet, and parish; from every <i lang="fr">arrondissement</i>;
+from every <i lang="fr">subprefecture</i>; from every <i lang="fr">departement</i>.
+Coldly, like inquisitors, in the darkness, they let me
+have that information. It was not really necessary. I
+knew it already. But I was too tired, harassed, dispirited
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">[196]</span>to tell them so. I, too, was old for that job.
+<i lang="la">Atque ego</i>....</p>
+
+<p>For I couldn’t get away from the conviction that
+they were talking at me with a purpose—that they
+were, in indirect terms, telling me that it was a scandal
+that the Brigade of Guards should be employed in
+clearing out latrines, work which, in French-France,
+was performed by the fathers and the grandfathers—the
+guards being tired out and worn down by such employment
+when they were such splendid fighting material
+and should have been really rested. I daresay
+our own war office would have answered that that was
+part of our discipline and that “fatigues” when men
+were “resting” were good for their livers and kept
+them “fit”. There is such a school of thought. Anyhow,
+I am not writing a military treatise and do not ask
+that any attention should be paid to my views. I am
+only chronicling the psychology of an Infantry officer
+as he was affected by certain circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>And I <em>couldn’t</em> get away from the conviction that
+the French officers were talking “officially”. In those
+days there had just been published in Paris a book of
+“official” propaganda by myself. It would not have
+been a different book if it had been unofficial or if
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">[197]</span>there had been no war. It simply advanced the theory
+that in the world of letters and ideas, for personal industry
+and pride in work as work, it is only France
+that matters among the nations. I had said that when I
+was twenty; I resaid it then being over double that
+age; I resay it today; and I will resay it as my eyes
+close in death. No one in my country has ever paid
+any attention to one’s saying it, and no one ever will.
+Why should they? Letters and ideas have so little
+place in our body politic and the doctrine of pride in
+work as work; of engrossment and of serenity; of
+aloofness from the world and of introspection with no
+other purpose—is here anathema both with the Right
+which hates the doctrine of Art for Art’s sake and with
+the Left, which hates that of Labor for the sake of
+Labor. Yet I see no other lesson in life. That is why I
+have collected these notes upon sheepfolds—this long
+lay sermon.</p>
+
+<p>So this particular piece of official propaganda was,
+just then, being accorded an extraordinary amount of
+notoriety in France. The skill of our own propaganda
+people and the patriotism of distinguished Frenchmen
+accounted for that. It was reviewed at enormous
+length and with enormous headlines by Academicians,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">[198]</span>by assailants of the French Academy, and by the
+Mayors of Rouen, Lyons, and Toulouse. It was “communicated”
+to the Institute of France; publicly laid
+upon the shelves of the city library of Yvetot. And
+it was no doubt on that account that the French officers
+presented official views to me so carefully and so excruciatingly.
+They imagined that I had weight in the
+Councils of the Empire, as would have been the case
+in their own country.</p>
+
+<p>While they talked the black houses round the market
+had infinite depths of violet against the white stars.
+But all the same I was looking at the view from the
+top of the great brick Roman Theater at Orange—over
+the flats with the ragged, stunted vines, the
+stubble, and the thatched roofs. Yes, I knew that beside
+Orange the little houses cowered beside the furrows
+and that on the other frontier great, gaunt piles
+were subsiding under scrolls and tongues of flame,
+going down to a last rest as the very tired men of a
+platoon will fall out beside the road. And the great
+buildings never get up again.</p>
+
+<p>For I never feel that houses have souls. So that,
+when, out there, you saw a house go down as fire, it
+seemed to do it luxuriously almost. It was finished
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">[199]</span>with men and their ways. It had no doubt borne for
+long with their cruelties, stupidities, imbecilities; with
+its windows for mournful eyes it had seen the generations
+flit past and fade. It had known cold that made
+its timbers crack and the great heat of the sun warping
+them. But beneath the flames, slowly, it would sink
+to the earth from which it had come. Yes, luxuriously,
+as men stretch themselves down for a long rest....</p>
+
+<p>The French officer was still talking about the old
+territorial who had fallen asleep. It seems that the old
+man had gone on working, after his mates had been
+taken off for a spell, on the inner face of the traverse—which
+is a sort of pillar of earth with a gangway
+round it, left in a trench to minimize the lateral spread
+of shell fire. He had gone on working—out of pure
+zeal, the officer said. The officer addressed me with
+hard bitterness. I suppose he thought I was some sort
+of noncombatant. The staff-captain told me afterward
+that this officer, being aide-de-camp to one of the most
+famous French generals of division of the day had,
+the night before, attended his chief to a dinner—given,
+I think, by the British A.P.M.—in the course of which
+the heroic doings of a great many British Regiments
+were extolled. And then, in a pause, an English lady
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">[200]</span>had said to the French general: “And the French
+haven’t done so badly.”... I was being made to
+suffer for this.</p>
+
+<p>And I did suffer a good deal—more I think than I
+ever suffered. The officer went on and on about his old
+territorial. He was there, asleep, in the light of a single
+candle stuck in the clay. He was as it were spread-eagled
+against the earth. His legs apart he had raised
+his hammer to strike his chisel; both his arms were
+over his head, stretched out. And he was just asleep.
+It was touching; it was terrible in its simplicity, the
+officer said. He said the territorial came from Passy—as
+it might be Putney.</p>
+
+<p>It was just at this point that I remembered Morgan
+and the old man of the bath-mill. I daresay you will
+think it merely a literary trick, when I say that I saw
+them.</p>
+
+<p>But I <em>saw</em> them: against an immense black mass
+fringed by flaming houses. I saw those two, tired faces;
+the two serene, honest, and simple souls, who had the
+Kingdom of God within them. And it seemed to me
+that they had died in vain.</p>
+
+<p>It was for me the most terrible moment of the war.</p>
+
+<p>I daresay that for many people it was the most horrible
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">[201]</span>period of the war. For, by then it had become
+apparent that the Somme advance was a fiasco—a useless
+butchery. We knew we should never advance. I
+daresay the French knew it better than we. Certainly
+the voices of these officers drove it home: they spoke as
+if they were talking to a condemned criminal. And I
+think it was not right of them.</p>
+
+<p>We, at any rate, were the old voluntary army. We
+had come, aged or young, from the ends of the earth.
+I don’t know whether it is worse to be old or young
+in a great war—it was bad enough to be old! And I
+don’t know whether it was better or worse to have
+come from the ends of the earth—or from Passy. Or to
+have passed all one’s life beneath a roof that shuddered
+with fear.... If you had done that, you were
+more used to the idea, and to the discipline of the
+idea, of war. You discussed the moves, here and there,
+more <i lang="fr">en connoisseur</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But I doubt if one of those men on the balcony felt
+the war as I did. We, after all, brought so many more
+emotions to it. You had only to contrast Paris, gray,
+sober, much as usual, with the roads under leisurely
+repair, and the old horses and the old <i lang="fr">cochers</i> and
+<i lang="fr">voitures</i> dawdling in the shadow of the plane-trees—with
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">[202]</span>London, plastered with endless appeals in blue
+and scarlet and yellow—London, hurrying, exclaiming,
+clamoring.... The old territorial had lived all his
+life under the shadow—and it came. The old private
+of the Lincolnshires had never thought of such an end.
+But it came! And Europe flamed....</p>
+
+<p>And the worst of it all was that one was beginning
+to doubt. Until then one had been carried by the fine
+wave of enthusiasm. It seemed to embrace the whole
+country. And we in all the holes, valleys, over all the
+downlands of the Somme, where the sun shone with its
+chalky rays as it does by L——, had had a great singleness
+of purpose and had been confident that we had
+the support of a great singleness of purpose extending
+across a world. But doubt had begun to creep
+in....</p>
+
+<p>I wished, then, that I had not read “What Maisie
+Knew” in the bath at Albert. I wished that the daily
+papers would not reach us. The atmosphere shown so
+overwhelmingly in the book was beginning to be too
+close to the atmosphere reflected in the papers. And
+we were, truly, very lonely out there; truly we were
+some millions of men, suspended on a raft, in limitless
+space.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">[203]</span></p>
+
+<p>And we were beginning to feel a curious dislike
+of the civilians whom up till then we had so trusted—a
+curious dislike that was never to die. I don’t know
+what was going on at home: political intrigues no
+doubt; strikes possibly. But there seemed to prevail a
+tenuous, misty struggle of schemes—just the atmosphere
+of “Maisie.” I don’t think that many of those
+who were one’s comrades <i lang="la">in illo die</i> did not at times
+feel a certain hopelessness. It was as if at times we
+said: What are those people after? Aren’t they—aren’t
+they surely?—“out” to make huge profits from
+our poor Tommies; to cut down the rations of our poor
+Tommies; and to gain notoriety by forcing on a
+timorous central government their own schemes for
+the training of poor Tommies—schemes that have
+resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of
+our poor fine Tommies? And, when their own attractions
+were enhanced by the bringing off of this or that
+scheme, intrigue, or cabal, they would vote to themselves
+ribbons, orders, power, divorces, and the right
+to gallons of petrol. And so they would sit in the chairs
+of the lost and the forgotten amidst a world where
+the ideals which sent all those millions to destruction
+were lost too ... and forgotten. You will say that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">[204]</span>this is bitter. It is. It was bitter to have seen the 38th
+Division murdered in Mametz Wood—and to guess
+what underlay that!...</p>
+
+<p>And then the French officer said what I knew he
+would say: what I had known that, with all his cold
+lack of rhetoric, he was working up to. He said that
+the old, sleeping territorial looked like Our Lord on
+Calvary. I could have screamed. Upon my soul I could
+have screamed. And, if I hadn’t thought it just possible
+that his dislike attached to me personally, I daresay
+I should have talked to him as I talked to the other
+French officer as the reader may see in <i lang="fr">Une Partie de
+Cricket</i>. But the faint hope that it was just myself that
+he despised and not poor Morgan and the others—all
+the poor others along that long front of ours—that
+faint hope that he was attacking only me and not the
+Army of the Somme just made me hold my peace until
+we went back into the theater. And in the theater I
+suddenly remembered—as clearly as I had remembered
+the others—Henri Gaudier. He, too, seemed to stand
+before me and to smile at me a little, as if he found
+me comic....</p>
+
+<p>I do not know why it is that now, when I think
+of Gaudier, the cadence that I hear in my mind should
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">[205]</span>be one of sadness. For there was never any one further
+from sadness than Henri Gaudier, whether in his being
+or in his fate. He had youth; he had grace of
+person and of physique; he had a sense of the comic.
+He had friendships, associates in his work, loves, the
+hardships that help youth. He had genius, and he died
+a hero.</p>
+
+<p>He comes back to me best as he was at a function of
+which I remember most, except for Gaudier, disagreeable
+sensations—embarrassments. It was an “affair”—one
+of two—financed by a disagreeably obese Neutral
+whom I much disliked. That would be in late July,
+1914. The Neutral was much concerned to get out of
+a country and a city which appeared to be in danger.
+Some one else—several some ones—were intensely anxious,
+each of them, to get money out of the very fat,
+very monied, disagreeably intelligent being. And I
+was ordered, by <i lang="fr">Les Jeunes</i>, to be there. It was a parade,
+in fact. I suppose that even then I was regarded as a,
+I hope benevolent, grandfather, by a number of members
+of an advanced school.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_7_7" href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> Anyhow, that comes back
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">[206]</span>to me as a disagreeable occasion of evil passions, evil
+people, of bad, flashy cooking in an underground
+haunt of pre-war smartness.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_7_7" href="#FNanchor_7_7" class="label">[7]</a> For the benefit of the uninstructed reader, I may say that new Schools
+of Art, like new commercial enterprises, need both backers with purses
+and backers of a certain solid personal appearance or weight in the world.
+And it is sometimes disagreeable, though it is always a duty, to be such
+an individual.</p></div>
+
+<p>I daresay it was not really as bad as all that—but
+when I am forced to receive the hospitality of persons
+whom I dislike, the food seems to go bad, and there
+is a bad taste in the mouth, symbol of a disturbed liver.
+So the band played in that cave and the head ached
+and there were nasty foreign waiters and bad, very
+expensive, champagne.</p>
+
+<p>There were also speeches—and one could not help
+knowing that the speeches were directed at the Neutral’s
+breeches pockets. The Neutral leaned heavily
+sideways at table, devouring the bad food at once with
+gluttony and nonchalance. It talked about its motor
+car, which apparently was at Liverpool or Southampton—somewhere
+where there were liners, quays, cordage,
+cranes; all ready to abandon a city which would
+be doomed should Armageddon become Armageddon.
+The speeches went on....</p>
+
+<p>Then Gaudier rose. It was suddenly like a silence
+that intervened during a distressing and ceaseless noise.
+I don’t know that I had ever noticed him before except
+as one amongst a crowd of dirtyish, bearded,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">[207]</span>slouch-hatted individuals, like conspirators; but, there,
+he seemed as if he stood amidst sunlight; as if indeed
+he floated in a ray of sunlight, like the dove in Early
+Italian pictures. In a life during which I have known
+thousands of people; thousands and thousands of
+people; during which I have grown sick and tired of
+“people” so that I prefer the society of cabbages, goats,
+and the flowers of the marrow plant; I have never
+otherwise known what it was to witness an appearance
+which symbolized so completely—aloofness. It was like
+the appearance of Apollo at a creditors’ meeting. It
+was supernatural.</p>
+
+<p>It was just that. One didn’t rub one’s eyes: one
+was too astounded. Only, something within one wondered
+what the devil he was doing there. If he hadn’t
+seemed so extraordinarily efficient, one would have
+thought he had strayed, from another age, from another
+world, from some Hesperides. One keeps wanting
+to say that he was Greek, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t
+of a type that strayed: and indeed I seem to feel his
+poor bones moving in the August dust of Neuville St.
+Vaast when I—though even only nearly!—apply to
+him a name that he would have hated. At any rate, it
+was amazing to see him there; since he seemed so entirely
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">[208]</span>inspired by inward visions that one wondered
+what he could be after—certainly not the bad dinner,
+the attentions of the foreign waiters, a try at the Neutral’s
+money-bag strings. No, he spoke as if his eyes
+were fixed on a point within himself; and yet, with
+such humor and such good-humor—as if he found the
+whole thing so comic!</p>
+
+<p>One is glad of the comic in his career; it would
+otherwise have been too much an incident of the Elgin
+marble type. But even the heroism of his first, abortive
+“joining up” was heroico-comic. As I heard him
+tell the story, or at least as I remember it, it was like
+this:</p>
+
+<p>He had gone to France in the early days of the war—and
+one accepted his having gone as one accepted
+the closing of a door—of a tomb, if you like. Then,
+suddenly, he was once more there. It produced a queer
+effect; it was a little bewildering in a bewildering
+world. But it became comic. He had gone to Boulogne
+and presented himself to the Recruiting Officer—an N.
+C. O., or captain, of the old school, white moustachios,
+<i lang="fr">cheveux en brosse</i>. Gaudier stated that he had left
+France without having performed his military duties,
+but, since <i lang="fr">la patrie</i> was in danger, he had returned like
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">[209]</span>any other good little <i lang="fr">piou-piou</i>. But the sergeant, martinet-wise,
+as became a veteran of 1870, struck the table
+with his fist and exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>“<i lang="fr">Non, mon ami</i>, it is not <i lang="fr">la patrie</i>, but you who are
+in danger. You are a deserter; you will be shot.” So
+Gaudier was conducted to a motor, in which, under
+the military escort of two files of men, a sergeant, a
+corporal, and a lieutenant, he was whirled off to Calais.
+In Calais Town he was placed in an empty room. Outside
+the door were stationed two men with large guns,
+and Gaudier was told that, if he opened the door, the
+guns would go off. That was his phrase. He did not
+open the door. He spent several hours reflecting that
+though they manage these things better in France, they
+don’t manage them so damn well. At the end of that
+time he pushed aside the window blind and looked
+out. The room was on the ground floor; there were no
+bars. Gaudier opened the window; stepped into the
+street, just like that—and walked back to Boulogne.</p>
+
+<p>He returned to London.</p>
+
+<p>He was drawn back again to France by the opening
+of the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral. This time
+he had a safe conduct from the Embassy. I do not
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">[210]</span>know the date of his second joining up or the number
+of his regiment. At any rate, he took part in an attack
+on a Prussian outpost on Michaelmas Eve, so he had
+not much delayed, and his regiment was rendered illustrious,
+though it cannot have given him a deuce of a
+lot of training. He did not need it. He was as hard as
+nails and as intelligent as the devil. He was used to
+forging and grinding his own chisels. He was inured
+to the hardships of poverty in great cities; he was accustomed
+to hammer and chisel at his marble for
+hours and hours of day after day. He was a “fit” townsman—and
+it was “fit” townsmen who conducted the
+fighting of 1914 when the war was won: it was <i lang="fr">les
+parigots</i>.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Of his biography I have always had only the haziest
+of notions. I know that he was the son of a Meridional
+craftsman, a carpenter and joiner, who was a good
+workman and no man could have a better. His father
+was called Joseph Gaudier—so why he called himself
+B’jesker, I do not know. I prefer really to be hazy; because
+Gaudier will always remain for me something
+supernatural. He was for me a “message” at a difficult
+time of life. His death and the death at the same time
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">[211]</span>of another boy—but quite a commonplace, nice boy—made
+a rather doubtful way quite plain to me.</p>
+
+<p>All my life I have been very much influenced by a
+Chinese proverb—to the effect that it would be hypocrisy
+to seek for the person of the Sacred Emperor
+in a low teahouse. It is a bad proverb, because it is so
+wise and so enervating. It has “ruined my career”.</p>
+
+<p>When, for instance, I founded a certain Review, losing,
+for me, immense sums of money on it, or when the
+contributors unanimously proclaimed that I had not
+paid them for their contributions—which was not true
+because they certainly had among them a quantity of
+my money in their pockets—or when a suffrage bill
+failed to pass in the Commons; or when some one’s
+really good book has not been well reviewed; or when
+I have been robbed, slandered, or abortively blackmailed—in
+all the vicissitudes of life, misquoted on
+it, I have always first shrugged my shoulders and murmured
+that it would be hypocrisy to seek for the person
+of the Sacred Emperor in a low tea-shop. It meant
+that it would be hypocrisy to expect a taste for the finer
+letters in a large public’s discernment in critics; honesty
+in æsthetes or literati; public spirit in lawgivers; accuracy
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">[212]</span>in pundits; gratitude in those one has saved
+from beggary, and so on.</p>
+
+<p>So, when I first noticed Henri Gaudier—which was
+in an underground restaurant, the worst type of
+thieves’ kitchen—these words rose to my lips. I did not,
+you understand, believe that he would exist and be
+so wise, so old, so gentle, so humorous, such a genius.
+I did not really believe that he had shaved, washed,
+assumed garments that fitted his great personal beauty.</p>
+
+<p>For he had great personal beauty. If you looked at
+him casually, you imagined that you were looking at
+one of those dock-rats of the Marseilles quays, who will
+carry your baggage for you, pimp for you; garotte you
+and throw your body overboard—but who will do it all
+with an air, an ease, an exquisiteness of manners! They
+have, you see, the traditions and inherited knowledge
+of such ancient nations in Marseilles—of Etruscans,
+Phoenicians, Colonial Greeks, Late Romans, Troubadours,
+Late French—and that of those who first sang
+the Marseillaise! And many of them, whilst they are
+young, have the amazing beauty that Gaudier had.
+Later, absinthe spoils it—but for the time, they are like
+Arlésiennes.</p>
+
+<p>All those wisdoms, then, looked out of the eyes of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">[213]</span>Gaudier—and God only knows to what he threw back—to
+Etruscans or Phoenicians, no doubt, certainly not
+to the Greeks who colonized Marseilles, or the Late Romans
+who succeeded to them. He seemed, then, to have
+those wisdoms behind his eyes somewhere. And he had,
+certainly, an astounding erudition.</p>
+
+<p>I don’t know where he picked it up—but his conversation
+was overwhelming—and his little history of
+sculpture by itself will give you more flashes of inspiration
+than you will ever, otherwise, gather from
+the whole of your life. His sculpture itself affected me
+just as he did.</p>
+
+<p>In odd places—the sitting rooms of untidy and eccentric
+poets with no particular merits, in appalling exhibitions,
+in nasty night clubs, in dirty restaurants one
+would be stopped for a moment in the course of a sentence
+by the glimpse of a brutal chunk of rock that
+seemed to have lately fallen unwanted from a slate
+quarry, or, in the alternative, by a little piece of marble
+that seemed to have the tightened softness of the
+haunches of a fawn—of some young creature of the
+underwoods, an ancient, shyly-peopled, thicket.</p>
+
+<p>The brutalities would be the work of Mr. Epstein—the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">[214]</span>other, Gaudier. For Gaudier’s work had just his
+own, personal, impossible quality. And one did not
+pay much attention to it simply because one did not
+believe in it. It was too good to be true. Remembering
+the extraordinary rush that the season of 1914 was, it
+appears a miserable tragedy, but it is not astonishing,
+that one’s subliminal mind should whisper to me, every
+time we caught that glimpse of a line: “It is hypocrisy
+to search for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a
+low tea-house.” It was of course the devil who whispered
+that. So I never got the sensation I might have
+got from that line. Because one did not believe in that
+line. One thought: “It is just the angle at which one’s
+chair in the restaurant presents to one an accidental
+surface of one of these young men’s backs.”</p>
+
+<p>And then a day came when there was no doubt
+about it. Gaudier was a Lance Corporal in the 4th
+Section, 7th Company, 129th Regt. of Infantry of the
+Line.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_8_8" href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> Gaudier was given his three stripes for “gallantry
+in face of the enemy”. One read in a letter:</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_8_8" href="#FNanchor_8_8" class="label">[8]</a> The knowledgeable reader will observe that here Gringoire has consulted
+the monograph on Gaudier by Mr. Pound—the best piece of craftsmanship
+that Mr. Pound has put together; or at least the best this
+writer has read of that author’s.</p></div>
+
+<p>“I am at rest for three weeks in a village, that is, I
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">[215]</span>am undergoing a course of study to be promoted officer
+when necessary during an offensive.”</p>
+
+<p>Or in another letter:</p>
+
+<p>“I imagine a dull dawn, two lines of trenches, and in
+between explosion on explosion with clouds of black
+and yellow smoke, a ceaseless noise from the rifles, a
+few legs and heads flying, and me standing up among
+all this like to Mephisto—commanding: ‘<i lang="fr">Feu par salves
+à 250 mètres—joue—feu!</i>’</p>
+
+<p>“Today is magnificent, a fresh wind, clear sun, and
+larks singing cheerfully....”</p>
+
+<p>That was it!</p>
+
+<p>But just because it was so commonplace; so sordid,
+so within the scope of all our experiences, powers of
+observation, and recording, it all seemed impossible to
+believe that in <em>that</em> particular low tea-house there were
+really Youth, Beauty, Erudition, Fortune, Genius—to
+believe in the existence of a Gaudier! The devil still
+whispered to me: “That would be hypocrisy!” For if
+you would not believe that genius could show itself
+during the season of 1914, how <em>could</em> you believe that,
+of itself, inscrutable, noiseless, it would go out of our
+discreditable world where the literati and the æsthetes
+were sweating, harder than they ever, ever did after <i lang="fr">le
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">[216]</span>mot juste</i> or the Line of Beauty, to find excuses that
+should keep them from the trenches—that, so quietly,
+the greatest genius of them all would go into that
+world of misery.</p>
+
+<p>And then I read:</p>
+
+<p>“<i lang="fr">Mort pour la patrie.</i></p>
+
+<p>“After ten months of fighting and two promotions
+for gallantry, on the field, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, in
+a charge at Neuville St. Vaast. June 5, 1915.”</p>
+
+<p>Alas, when it was too late, I had learned that, to
+this low tea-shop that the world is, from time to time
+the Sacred Emperor may pay visits. So I began to want
+to kill certain people. I still do—for the sake of Gaudier
+and those few who are like him.</p>
+
+<p>For the effect of reading that announcement was to
+make me remember with extraordinary vividness a
+whole crowd of the outlines of pieces of marble, of
+drawings, of tense and delicate lines at which, in the
+low tea-house of the year before’s season, I had only
+nonchalantly glanced. The Sacred Emperor, then, had
+been there. He seemed, at last, to be an extraordinarily
+real figure—as real as one of the other sculptor’s brutal
+chunks of granite. Only, because of the crowd one
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">[217]</span>hadn’t seen him—the crowd of blackmailers,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_9_9" href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> sneak-thieves,
+suborners, pimps, reviewers, and the commonplace
+and the indifferent—the Huns of London. Well,
+it became—and it still more remains! one’s duty to try
+to kill them. There are probably several Sacred Emperors
+still at large—though the best of them will have
+been killed, as Gaudier was.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_9_9" href="#FNanchor_9_9" class="label">[9]</a> Gringoire is too fond of this word—which he uses in a special sense
+to indicate persons—mostly reviewers—who do not appreciate the work
+of himself and his school. In his conversation he introduced at this point
+a long denunciation of the —— Literary Supplement, principally because,
+whilst purporting to be a literary paper, it devotes, according to him,
+112/113ths of its space to books about facts, at the expense of works of
+the imagination. So he calls that respectable journal a blackmailing organ.
+Since, however, this is a topic that can hardly interest the non-literary,
+and since the literary are hardly likely to read these pages, the compiler
+has taken the liberty of not reporting these sallies. It may be true that
+Pontius Pilate is more criminal than the crucified thieves—but it is <em>never</em>
+politic to say so.</p></div>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was whilst I was inside the theater that I registered,
+as the saying is, a mental vow that I would pay
+no attention any more to public affairs. To do so would
+drive one mad. I decided that I must put my head
+down under the cloth for the rest of the war. And I
+think I did so. Except for the occasional duty of writing
+propaganda—which from that time onwards I
+did in French—I paid no more attention to the politics
+of my country or the world. I just did the collar-work
+of the Infantry Officer until the 11/11/’17. After
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">[218]</span>that, my views being too favorable to France, the Ministry
+of Information and the censor suppressed or lost
+in the post my rather excited writings on the Terms
+of Peace.... That would be about three years ago
+today. It seems a long while....</p>
+
+<p>The inside of the theater was brilliant, formal, a little
+shabby if you looked closely. Of the performance of
+<i>Lakme</i>—an opera that I love very much, since the
+music is soft, moving, and generous—I remember very
+little. So it must have been a good rendering with no
+performer in particular “sticking out”. The British
+naval officers were rather funny. And I think it is no
+left-handed compliment to the composer, Délibes—though
+it may be to the librettist—to say that my
+thoughts were elsewhere. The music was just sensuous
+pleasure; the aspect of the house, spreading round in
+great lines of polychromatic humanity, more regular
+than is the case with most theaters in London—more
+suave and more classical—soothed one after what was
+certainly an emotional crisis; an escaped danger. For
+it would have mortified me for the rest of my life
+if I had burst out under the goadings of the French
+officers. But, by the Grace of God and the skin of my
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">[219]</span>teeth, I had retained, quite certainly, my aspect of
+insular phlegm.</p>
+
+<p>Still it had been exhausting—and I was enervated.
+And then, quite suddenly, it came to me to wonder
+what was going on outside the theater—what was going
+on under the black roof of the night, with the
+infinitely numerous population of leaves, blades,
+branches, reeds beside streams, great trees in the woodlands—and
+with the silent, watchful population of the
+thickets where the shadows are so extremely deep. I
+found myself wondering what time of year it was.
+And I said: the first weeks of September. For that
+morning I had recollected that, two years before on
+that day, the Germans had turned back from in front
+of Paris. Forty-six years before they had won the
+battle of Sedan.</p>
+
+<p>It was, then, during the first weeks of September.
+But what happened—in September? One forgot. One
+had repaired trenches; one had commanded fatigues
+digging drains round Bn.H.Q., to the left of Mount
+Kemmel. One had dug so efficiently that, during the
+first thunderstorm the repaired trenches below were
+neck-deep in water. All that had passed in “the Country”.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">[220]</span></p>
+
+<p>But what happened in September? There were no
+doubt apples on the trees, and, certainly, it was the
+time of year when many cobwebs, frail nets across the
+tall grasses on commons or single, brilliant filaments,
+streamed out and glistened on still, bright days.</p>
+
+<p>There would be plums, too; but what about damsons?
+Wasn’t it early for them? And how about garden
+peas? Were they over? And field peas? And would
+there be an autumn feel in the air?</p>
+
+<p>It was twenty-one days to Michaelmas—and Michaelmas
+certainly brought the autumn feeling, with touches
+of vine in the shadow of yellowing plants and the
+leaves of sunflowers drooping straight down, like unfurled
+colors on windless days. But in copses, shaves,
+and spinneys were the leaves on forest trees yet turning?
+Were roads yet hard and frosty in the morning?
+And were horses yet sluggish and apt to stumble on
+roads as they do at the turn of the year and the fall of
+the leaf?... Time to give ’em a ball.</p>
+
+<p>The baffled mind seemed to stumble at all these questions.
+One was in the theater and having been forbidden
+by the will to think that what surrounded the
+great walls with their human lining was a vast black
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">[221]</span>map fringed by conflagrations, the poor mind hung
+faltering.</p>
+
+<p>It fell suddenly back on contemplating the green
+nook that—on the down behind Albert—it had reserved
+for itself. Yes, the mind actually did that. And,
+across the gilding of the proscenium, across Lakme’s
+singing the great song of yearning, there hung a slight
+shimmer of green that intensified itself and took shape
+like a recumbent oval.... And there began to become
+visible the yellowing, grayish rows of broad beans; a
+rather ragged hedge and a little stream beyond, level
+with the grass and fringed with the glistening stems of
+clumps of rushes that had been cut for thatching stacks.
+Because it was indeed September.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">[222]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h3 class="nobreak" id="XI">
+    XI
+    <br>
+    <i>“Rosalie Prudent”</i>
+  </h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>One evening the compiler addressed Gringoire, who
+was making notes in a seed catalogue, somewhat as
+follows:</p>
+
+<p>“Do you remember, oh Gringoire, what it is to
+awake of a September morning at dawn? Being <i lang="fr">horticulteur</i>,
+your first thought will be for the weather:
+being <i lang="fr">poète</i>, your first thought will be for your new
+volume. And the two first thoughts will overlay the
+one the other, according as chance wills. But the still
+mist is so reassuring as to the weather that you can
+put that aside and think only of your volume. The
+goodly fruits of the earth in the late summer season,
+the plums, the apples, the quinces; the maize, the marrows,
+the melons, have yet another day, for sure, of
+bright, warm sun, of gorgeous, mellow downward
+shavers of sun. They, surely, shall stand motionless in
+the warmth.</p>
+
+<p>“But the poems ... oh my poor Gringoire of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">[223]</span>dawn: the great, half-finished epic! Ah that! that
+seemed so glowing too when last night in the golden
+light of the two candles, in your poor little, rickety
+salon that yet has a style of its own ... you read them
+to Madame Sélysette ... the poor verses that you read
+so famously to little Madame!... In the dawn, ah,
+the wolf of the night that says: ‘Hou ... hou’ from
+the mountains has not gone home! Almost you hear
+his sniffing round the little green door that, because
+yours is a land of idylls and the innocent, you have
+left open. One day the wolf with the great, cocked
+hairy ears, with the long white teeth like razors for
+their sharpness shall come in. You will hear upon the
+uncarpeted stairway the pad of the feet; the little thin
+door will push open, and raised at the foot of your
+small white bed, you will see the great beast; the huge
+head; the bloodshot eyes.... And Madame, in the
+other little white bed across the small white room will
+moan a little in her sleep....</p>
+
+<p>“All the poor verses: the little lines! How shall they
+be the barbed wire fence that shall keep the wolf from
+the door of the cottage? Why, he could push the poor,
+tindery old walls down with his snout! The poor
+verses! They halt ... or no, they do not halt. We are
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">[224]</span>too good a craftsman for that! But assuredly they do
+not run. And the publisher! What shall he say? And
+Madame with such a need of a new gown: it should
+have been of velvet, puffed in the arms, and slashed to
+show an undercoat of crushed rose silk. And to tell the
+truth—your <i lang="fr">pantalons?</i> How they shine in the seat,
+like a mirror! And the public! Ah, the grim public
+that has no taste but for dominoes in the cafés of an
+evening! How shall they care for the savor of lavender
+and rosemary in your smaller verses? What, to them,
+are Melpomene and Mélisande and Maleine and Musidore
+of your epic! And the cursed ‘machinery’ of the
+enormous poem! What has become of your great device
+that was to take the story forward from line 1100
+to line 1424? Forgotten! O Apollo! O Euterpe!
+Forgotten—gone—your brain is failing. Your diet of
+oatmeal and junket is not enough to water your gray
+matter with rich red blood. It is all over ... and the
+great wolf says ‘Hou!... hou!’ upon the mountains,
+though the mists are rising. And Madame, you can
+see, is smiling in her sleep! Ah! When you are suspended
+by your cravat from the old thorn tree, she
+will marry the rich son of the apothecary....</p>
+
+<p>“And then ... suddenly you remember! Maleine
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">[225]</span>became a rose tree, and the slipper of glass was hidden
+in a bath.... Yes: it was like that. The device has
+come back to you. Hurray! Hurray! And the verses
+shall glow and sparkle. And damn the public and
+damn and damn the publisher, and Madame is a sweet,
+plump angel.</p>
+
+<p>“And you spring from your bed, oh Gringoire, but
+with the footfall of a panther for fear the creaking of
+the very old oak floor boards should awaken your own
+Sélysette. And quick and quick to your dressing room,
+which is on state occasions the spare bedroom. Then
+you wash in the brick-floored kitchen. And how crisp
+and reviving is the cold water on the skin—just as it
+used to be when you came out of the tent or the dugout
+or the hut, down before Péronne in the old days. And
+there is no war.</p>
+
+<p>“No war to awaken the birds that are still sleeping
+in the massed shadows of trees all unmoving in the
+deep mists. A noble, long, quiet, warm day of September
+is before you. A day of <i lang="fr">moissons</i> and <i lang="fr">vendanges</i>,
+ripening securely, still; with line added to
+line in the morning; and nothing to do in that rich
+little garden of yours; and line added to line of the
+epic all the afternoon. And a stroll in the level, sinking
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">[226]</span>rays of the sun with Madame Sélysette, like a mysterious
+<i lang="fr">jeune fille</i> once more, to sing to you, in the carefreedom
+of her heart, the song of the raggle-taggle
+gipsies, oh....</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">‘Oh what care I for my goose-feather-bed</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The sheets turned down so bravely oh!</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Tonight I’ll sleep on a cold open heath</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Along with the raggle-taggle gipsies, oh!’</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>as she was used to sing it in the days when she left the
+roof of her father, the so very rich goldsmith of Toulouse,
+to take up with you, oh my so very poor poet.
+<i lang="fr">Vogue la galère!</i> I hear you say. For are there not fine
+cabbages in the garden; and the haricots and the tomatoes
+all a-ripening! And does not Madame make an
+incomparable <i lang="fr">potage bonne femme</i> with these things
+and a few little bones! A fig for the wolf! And if she
+cannot have her gown of velvet—when do her dark
+eyes sparkle more vivaciously than when in her black
+hair she wears a coronal of the scarlet berries of bryony?
+And if the <i lang="fr">pantalons</i> shine in the seat, let them
+shine till they wear through! And then there will be
+a piece of sacking to insert, whose remainder shall
+stuff up the holes of the so very old roof. And Melpomene
+and Mélisande and Musidore shall dance to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">[227]</span>the tune of green sleeves round the rose tree that was
+Maleine! Aye, they shall dance in the sun till the crystal
+slipper falls out of the bath of dew. And already Phœbus
+Apollo has chased into the farthest recesses of the
+Alpilles the craven old wolf....</p>
+
+<p>“And, fastening your collar, you rush into the room
+where Madame is asleep, and you shout out:</p>
+
+<p>“‘I have it! We will put Sweet Williams, and behind
+them Canterbury Bells, and behind them Hollyhocks,
+in the bed along the path. And tulips before the
+door!’</p>
+
+<p>“It is true that the Hollyhocks will then be to the
+south of the Canterbury Bells, and they again to the
+south of the Sweet Williams—the tall plants standing
+in the light of the short ones, which is against the
+maxims of safe gardeners. But we must chance something,
+as we chance life when we are so very poor and
+so very simple and have to adventure down the years
+with no stores of gold, under a very old roof with half
+the tiles off. And besides: maybe next summer will
+be a very dry summer, and then the shade of the
+Hollyhock on the Canterbury Bells, and of the Canterbury
+Bells on the Sweet Williams will be a positive
+benefit....</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">[228]</span></p>
+
+<p>“And, truly, in all the gardening year—which is all
+pleasure except for such lets and hindrances as God
+decrees to you in order that you may remember that
+you are human—there is no pleasure to equal the
+pleasures of a mid-September day. For there is promise
+in the chrysanthemums; the asters, petunias, and geraniums
+are still bright; marrows, pumpkins, gourds,
+maize, plums, apples, pears, damsons are drinking in
+the sun and turning all the colors from rich green to
+orange and tomato-scarlet. There are still flowers on
+the roses and on the sweet-pea hedge. And, if those
+foliages are thinning, through their silver and yellow
+haze you can see the bright mosaic of next summer’s
+beds! Ah, brave mid-September!”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>To this Gringoire answered—a little grimly:</p>
+
+<p>In a mid-September twilight, the rain poured down
+on Pont-de-Nieppe. Depressed Highlanders lounged
+along the street in front of the row of villas that ran
+from the church to the rear of the town—taking our
+own lines as the front. One’s horse and one’s orderly’s
+horse slipped disagreeably on the wet granite setts of
+the pavé, and one seemed to have gone backwards and
+forwards, in a deluge over greasy roads for hours and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">[229]</span>hours—for a whole lifetime. One seemed never to have
+done anything else. It was a billeting job that we had
+been sent upon. And, when we had billeted everything
+we could think of, there still remained some disreputable
+other ranks connected with the divisional canteen,
+for whom we had not found holes, corners, and
+a shop. And the division we were relieving had apparently
+vanished and so had the Town Marshal, whilst
+the <i lang="fr">Maire</i> was so obliging that he placed the whole,
+empty town at our disposal. It would have helped us
+more if he had been less obliging and had dictatorially
+provided us with one shop into which to stick the
+canteen and its confounded sutlers. And it poured, and
+we continued to wander about the empty streets. And
+it poured—and, in the most unexpected places, the disreputable
+Acting Lance Corporal in charge of Divisional
+Canteen would bob up, touch his cap like a
+London cab-runner and exclaim, always in three
+breaths: “Xcusemesir; may-I-speak-to-you-sir; have-you-found-a-billet-for-the-Divisional-Canteen-sir?”
+He was
+a most annoying person, a London music hall “turn”
+in peace time. He occupied his leisure moments behind
+the Canteen Counter in writing “sketches” for London
+Halls, like the Hoxton Empire, at fifty pounds a time.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_230">[230]</span>Sometimes he would appear alone or would emerge
+alone from the chalk-rubbish and festoons of wallpaper
+of an empty shop. Sometimes he would have
+behind him a disreputable French country cart loaded
+with sardine tins, sticks of shaving soap, cigarette
+packets, cratesful of wet dates, writing tablets—God
+knows what. And the horse—or it may have been a
+mule—seemed to be a hundred years old. And rain
+dripped from its ears. And rain poured on the disagreeable
+objects in the tilt cart and on the three impossible
+Tommies who went with it. And they would
+have backgrounds of black, wet houses, without roofs,
+but with lace window curtains dripping in all the
+empty window spaces; and wet, smashed chairs and
+commodes and wardrobes hung drunkenly over holes
+in the floors of houses that had no front walls. And it
+poured. And twilight deepened.</p>
+
+<p>Then a battalion came in along the Bailleul road;
+a poor, smashed battalion, with men limping and men
+under whose tin hats there gleamed white bandages,
+very conspicuous in the rain and the mud and the dark,
+wet khaki. And a battalion looks grim indeed when
+it has been hammered by artillery, on a Macadam road
+without chance of retaliation—owing to a blunder of a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">[231]</span>staff officer. They had, I think, 160 men killed in one
+company—pretty well the whole strength as battalions
+were in those days. I don’t like to think of it, much.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, such is poor human nature, that both I
+and my companion said, “Thank God!”—as we had
+never said, “Thank God” in our lives before. At least
+I know that I said “Thank God” as I had never in my
+life said it before—and as I never shall again. For it
+wasn’t our battalion that had been smashed by direct
+shell-fire on the Macadam road—Loire—Dranoutre—Neuve
+Eglise—Plugstreet—Nieppe. Imagine such a
+route—in full view of the Hun trenches! Why, riding
+that way the day before, to prospect next day’s billets,
+I and another officer had had three shells directed to
+us alone by the German artillery—between Dranoutre
+and Neuve Eglise! So imagine what it would be for a
+battalion. And we had seen orders which said that
+<em>our</em> people were to leave Loire at such and such an
+hour and to march by Companies—presumably in
+column of route!—in the Dranoutre-Neuve Eglise-Plugstreet
+road! And the Divisional Transport Officer
+had told us early in the afternoon that, as we had
+<em>known</em> would be the case, our battalion had been hammered
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">[232]</span>to pieces. A whole Company had been wiped
+out on that road—marching in column of route.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_10_10" href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a>
+“A” Company, he had said, our own company!</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_10_10" href="#FNanchor_10_10" class="label">[10]</a> This would mean that the Company presented, as a target to the
+German artillery, a solid and slow-moving cube of human flesh 240 ft.
+x 8 ft. x 6 ft. <em>No</em> gunner could miss it.</p></div>
+
+<p>Half the time during the afternoon, the other officer
+and myself—soaked to the skin and pestered by the
+farcical Lance-Corporal in Charge of Canteens—who,
+poor devil, was only doing his duty—had said, from
+horse to horse: “I wonder if Johnny A— has gone
+west! I wonder if Fred B— has copped it!...” It is
+horrible, that!</p>
+
+<p>And then, in the rain, under the castle wall, we
+heard from a very bleeding man of the other Battalion
+that our own people, after all those of the W—
+Regiment had been murdered, had been diverted from
+the Dranoutre-Neuve Eglise road to the Locre-Bailleul-Armentières
+highway, which was, in those days,
+as safe as a church.</p>
+
+<p>So we two, watching the men of the other Battalion
+march resentfully by, could say “Thank God” to
+ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>Relief, naturally, manifested itself in the two of us,
+according to our separate temperaments. My friend—he
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">[233]</span>was an Irish Nationalist, almost a Sinn Feiner—said:</p>
+
+<p>“G ..., old dear. You’re Division. I’m only Battalion.
+The canteen is your job. I think I’ll get to my
+digs.” He added, a bit bashfully, that in his digs there
+was a French girl who was going to give him lessons in
+her difficult tongue. I said, “All right. ’Op it.” [I remembered
+saying ‘’Op it!’ in an intense weariness.]
+But, as I turned my tired old horse once more down
+the road to find a billet for that accursed corporal of
+Divisional Canteen, I was, I remember, thinking
+innumerable things, all at once.</p>
+
+<p>Firstly: my shirtcuffs were very frayed, and the rain
+had made them more diabolically wet and cold than
+you can imagine. Then I was actually bothering about
+the wretched staff officer who had murdered all those
+men. I was worried about him. You see, it would be
+such a trifling thing to do—as easy as forgetting—as
+every human soul has done in its day—to post a letter.
+He would have an ordnance map and a pencil. The
+map would show the contours, but probably it would
+not show the German trenches or the German artillery
+emplacements. He would rule a pencil line from Locre
+to Armentières, he would see that the Dranoutre-Neuve
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">[234]</span>Eglise road was nearly level, running indeed
+along the flat at the edge of Flanders. On the other
+hand the Locre-Bailleul-Armentières road went up
+steeply from the Belgian frontier to Bailleul—a road
+in the dusty sunlight, the rough unshaded country, between
+tobacco and grain fields. And it was 1500 yards
+longer. So, in the kindness of his heart, he had saved
+the men the extra distance, the shadelessness, and the
+dust of a road over the foothills bordering Flanders.
+He had forgotten the Hun artillery—<em>just</em> as you or
+I might forget to post a letter!</p>
+
+<p>And, as I rode past the workmen’s villas, for the
+hundredth time, I was imagining that poor Acting
+Assistant Brigade Major, with his pink cheeks and his
+red hat, being strafed to hell by our frightful General
+of Division. He might almost cry!... But I daresay
+it wasn’t at all like that, really.</p>
+
+<p>Anyhow, I was being dreadfully sorry for him. At
+the same time, I was trying—if I may use a professional
+novelist’s word—to psychologize the German gunner.
+He wouldn’t believe his luck. He <em>couldn’t</em> believe his
+luck. He would believe it was some accursed scheme
+of the diabolically cunning English to discover his
+position. There, through his telescope, he would see a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_235">[235]</span>solid cube of wet-brown, moving slowly along a perfectly
+visible road. He would see it with his naked eye—a
+cubical caterpillar as large as a whole range of farm
+buildings. It would be incredible to him. No doubt he
+would ring up his immediate superior, and they would
+confer over the telephone. He would tremble for his
+battery. The English were no doubt drawing some
+sort of canvas wind-screen, camouflaged to look like
+a company, along that Macadam road. They would be
+trying to draw his fire so as to discover his position.
+Then they would blow his battery to hell with new,
+unimaginable High Explosive Shells, or mines, or anything.
+So he would fire—and see 160 men killed.
+“Drum fire,” I think the Germans called it. The complete
+Company would be wiped out—a mark such as a
+German gunner would hardly dare to pray for in his
+dreams. And nothing would happen to him. Nothing.
+He would wait. But nothing!</p>
+
+<p>Then he would thank the Creator....</p>
+
+<p>I don’t know really what happened to me then. I
+have said that that deluge of a twilight seemed to last
+a thousand years. I was wrong: it seemed to last two
+thousand years. I remember meeting the Divisional
+Transport Officer out in an immense expanse of mud
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_236">[236]</span>near an incredibly dirty farmhouse—in a sea of brown
+liquid that was supposed to be the Station Road. And
+I know that the field stank. It smelled unimaginably—though
+I don’t know why a field should smell. I can
+still smell it.</p>
+
+<p>The Transport Officer said that that was the field
+allotted to him by Division. He said to hell with the
+lake of mud. <em>He</em> was going to put the Transport on
+the Bailleul-Steenewerck road. He gave the number on
+the map, “R. 14,” I think it was. I said I should take
+the field for the Divisional Canteen. There were, scattered—possibly
+floating—about it some Connaught huts
+that resembled Noah’s Arks adrift in a sewage farm.
+The Transport Officer said all right. I fancy he was not
+interested in the Divisional Canteen.</p>
+
+<p>As we rode slowly, again past the workers’ villas,
+the Lance-Corporal in Charge of Divisional Canteen
+again waylaid me, springing up apparently out of the
+mud. He said: “Xcusemesir, may I speak to you, sir
+... I’ve fahnd a ’ouse be’ind the Ch’ch for the
+D’vish’n’l C’nteen.”</p>
+
+<p>I think I went mad at that point, and the Transport
+Officer rode slowly away. I don’t remember what I
+said to the Lance-Corporal. I hope I never shall.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">[237]</span></p>
+
+<p>The trouble was that, in that town, there was a
+danger zone. For the last four days, the Germans had
+been shelling the church. From 6:00 P.M. until midnight,
+in their methodical manner, every quarter of an
+hour they had dropped a 5-9 shell into the sacred edifice.
+The danger zone was therefore perfectly circumscribed
+and perfectly definite. But, unfortunately for
+me, though I had been warned that there <em>was</em> an official
+danger zone, no one that I met knew where it
+was. The town marshal had gone; the Divisional
+Police who were already working typewriters in his
+office were our Divisional Police, not those of the Division
+that had gone too. They knew nothing about
+the dangerous area. And some Australian humorist
+had removed all the cautionary boards that should
+have surrounded the church and had grouped them
+round a large iron public convenience which was the
+chief architectural adornment of the main street.
+There they looked alarming but improbable.</p>
+
+<p>It was therefore not to be thought of that the L. C.
+and his men should remain in a house just under the
+shadow of the church—for it was plain that, however
+big or however circumscribed the official danger zone
+might be, what the Huns were shelling was the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">[238]</span>church. We had been in the church in the course of
+the afternoon. It was a commonplace building, as far
+as I can remember, Byzantine of an eighteenth century
+type. But it was, in a way, rendered gracious by the
+enormous heaps of plaster and stone-dust that piled
+against the walls in drifts, so that it was as if sand
+dunes had invaded the roofless edifice. And, in the
+course of the dusk, shells had landed in all that rubble,
+constantly, no doubt regularly, whilst we were pursued
+by the L. C. round the church square, in the rain
+that had begun to fall just as the Huns began to
+shell....</p>
+
+<p>I daresay the reader will by now be tired of the
+Lance-Corporal in Charge of Canteens. I know <em>I</em> was.
+And I am uncertain what became of him. I daresay
+I could remember if I made an effort—but it hardly
+seems worth while. I know that four days later he was
+safely writing a music-hall sketch, in a tent, under a
+counter made of soap boxes, in a field just beyond the
+turning where the Plugstreet road leaves the chaussée
+from Bailleul to Nieppe; and I know that next night
+I got out of my flea-bag at about 2:00 A.M. and wearily
+walked for miles and miles in search of him and his
+sardine tins. The Huns had started regularly bombarding
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">[239]</span>the town at that inconsiderate hour, and I
+know too that, when I did find him, by chance, wandering
+about with his disreputable cart and his four
+disreputable men, he said that a shell had gone clean
+through the upper story of the shop that they had
+commandeered. So I suppose that that night he had
+slept in the town. I can’t remember.</p>
+
+<p>I can remember interviewing the <i lang="fr">Maire</i> a second
+time and that, because he was busy with some French
+staff officers, I had to wait some minutes—in a dentist’s
+waiting-room, with aspidistras, black walnut
+furniture, and innumerable copies of the illustrated
+paper called <i>Excelsior</i> on the lace table-cover. For the
+<i lang="fr">Maire</i> was a dentist. He was also a brave man. I can
+remember, too, being in a shop just under the church
+where a young, stout Belgian Jewess was standing
+waist deep in remnants and rags of black satin. She
+was nonchalantly packing this away in sacks whilst I
+tried to make sense out of her middle-aged, frightened
+father. I think I was telling him that seven francs a
+day was too much to expect the Division to pay for
+the rent of a rag and bone shop. Something hit the
+roof at that moment and an avalanche of bones, old
+iron, and satin petticoats poured down the stairs from
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">[240]</span>the upper floors. The father disappeared, exclaiming
+“Oi! Oi!” and elevating his hands above his bared
+head. But the daughter, with a large face, chalk-white
+with powder, heavy blue-black hair, and an opulent inscrutability—she
+had on her large white fingers a great
+collection of fat-looking wedding rings—went on nonchalantly
+examining black satin petticoats, rejecting
+some, folding others slowly, and packing them away
+in sacks. She seemed to regard the thing that had
+passed through the upper story with enigmatic indifference,
+as if shells and iron hail were just part of the
+silly vanity of the male sex. Her business was to pack
+up for transport on a barrow to Armentières all the
+black satin that she and her father had collected and
+that had once belonged to the inhabitants of the empty
+town.</p>
+
+<p>That attitude seemed to be common enough in the
+women of those parts. I remember looking, five minutes
+later, through the bull’s-eye glass of a cottage
+window so low that you would say every shell must
+pass over it. The interior was candle-lit and quite
+tranquil.</p>
+
+<p>At trestle tables, gesticulating although they had
+their elbows on the boards, sat eight Tommies of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_241">[241]</span>battalion whose entry we had witnessed. Five had
+bandages, and three had not. Between their elbows
+they had tinplatesful of fish and chips. And there were
+two women, standing. One, middle-aged and stout,
+had her hands on her hips, and her elbows back. Her
+blouse was well open at the neck, as if it had been hot
+work cooking the fish and chips. She stood against a
+trestle table and seemed to be giving back-chat to all
+the eight Tommies at once. The other was a young
+girl—of the Flemish Madonna type. Her yellow hair
+was tightly braided round her head; she leaned back
+against the mildew-stained wall, and on her bare,
+crossed arms she had a tabby kitten. It was biting her
+finger, and she stood entirely quiet, as if on her hands
+she had all the safety and all the time in the world.</p>
+
+<p>I daresay it was safe enough for the moment. But,
+some days later, I noticed that there was no cottage
+there. There was not even a lace curtain.</p>
+
+<p>I walked along—for I had got rid of my tired horse—a
+long way, under the dripping trees that were black
+above the wall of the château, and out onto the Bailleul
+road, a long way beyond the Plugstreet turning, I persuaded
+myself that I was going to ask the Divisional
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_242">[242]</span>Transport Officer to house my friends of the Canteen
+in tents in his field.</p>
+
+<p>I found him in the W—— lines. They were eating
+Welsh rabbit and herrings in a Connaught hut. They
+were not pleased to see me. There was an old Quartermaster
+from Stratford-on-Avon—a butcher by profession,
+think of that!—who sat with his hands crossed
+over a large stomach and spectacles well down on his
+nose. Also he wore carpet slippers. He told me in a
+most businesslike way that they had only herrings
+enough for three. I was welcome to any amount of
+Welsh rabbit—but there were only herrings enough
+for three. And they were three already.</p>
+
+<p>Then I realized that what I was really concerned
+about was to see my own Battalion come in. It was
+symptomatic. My friend the Sinn Feiner had been perfectly
+content, as soon as he had seen the W——’s come
+in and knew that our own people had been diverted,
+to go and take lessons in the language of the country
+from the French young lady whom he had unearthed.
+But, as for me, I wanted to <em>see</em> the Battalion. I had no
+particular reason to love the C.O. or the Sergeant
+Major. But I wanted to be absolutely <em>sure</em> that they
+were safe.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">[243]</span></p>
+
+<p>And, just as I got back to the crossroads near the
+church, the Battalion came in. There was the C.O.
+riding, the Sergeant Major walking ahead of him.
+And then “A” Company. I called out to Captain
+Gardiner, after I had saluted the Colonel: “A Company
+all right?” And the young man answered: “Cheerie
+Oh, old bird, as right as rain.” The last dregs of light
+were fading under the elms; the Huns were putting
+in some extraordinarily heavy stuff just behind them.
+And suddenly I remembered that I had not billeted
+myself. God knows whom we hadn’t billeted, the Sinn
+Feiner and I between us. Certainly three sets of battalion
+headquarters, transport, officers’ messes, sanitary
+squads, and the men of a whole brigade. But I had
+nowhere to lay my head. And my frayed shirt-cuffs
+were streaming with rain and it had grown pitch
+dark....</p>
+
+<p>You say I am a poet. Certainly I am a poet!</p>
+
+<p>And these eyes of mine that, when I have any leisure,
+see always not only the things that surround me, but
+many other things—these eyes of mine were busy.
+Certainly they saw what, in the darkness, was visible
+of the wet and stricken town. Against the sky the
+roof lines or the silhouettes of charred beams; the red
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">[244]</span>glow of the candles in the fried-fish cottage; the red
+glow that slowly danced inside the church as if a black
+mass were going forward. I suppose the last shell had
+set fire to some woodwork. Then another came and
+put it out, so that it was darker.</p>
+
+<p>But these eyes of mine that, with their attention,
+were looking at a bright landscape, had also registered
+in their memory a white, as if triangular patch, in a
+dark window of a house just behind the church, nearly
+opposite, but a little this side of the <i lang="fr">Mairie</i>, a house
+that we had passed again and again. The eyes had
+noted that white luminosity and now made for it,
+though the thinking mind was differently intent. This
+sort of definition is a little difficult to make. Try to
+follow me. The department of my eyes that led me—the
+Intelligence Department—saw the roofs and the
+black streets; the department which was influenced by
+my desires—for a meal, for warmth, for a bed, and
+above all for dry shirt-cuffs—was leading my steps
+toward the house that had the pale luminosity in the
+dark window. And, what I suppose you would call
+my mind’s eye was occupied by a bright landscape.
+That is to say, I was definitely thinking about an
+August landscape.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_245">[245]</span></p>
+
+<p>You will say that it was the landscape I have mentioned
+so often—the landscape with the stream and
+the trees and the gingerbread cottage. But it wasn’t.
+That came later. I suppose that at that time I wasn’t
+tired enough to see it. Besides, I never saw that as if
+in bright sunshine or in the weather of any accentuated
+season—but always as just English country in
+just English weather, green earth in a diffused light
+under a July sky.... No, I was thinking of a billeting
+scheme. For, in the long ago—thousands and thousands
+of years ago—we used to do billeting schemes,
+round Manorbier and Penhally. And I think the one
+I was then thinking of with—as the prose writers say—laughter
+mixed with rain, took place at Penhally.
+It appeared an idealized Penhally, mostly hollyhocks
+and thatch, so wilful is the mind, though I remember
+every house of Penhally! Well: a great many of us
+went in the August weather to work a billeting scheme
+there. And an officer representing Division drove up
+in a Rolls-Royce and pretended to “confer” with us.
+He had a red hat-band and a golden lion and the
+beautifullest moustaches and the beautifullest white
+whip-cord breeches and <em>such</em> spurs! And such ladies
+in the Rolls-Royce, awaited him!</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_246">[246]</span></p>
+
+<p>And he gave us the loveliest hints in a clear voice,
+with the far-away expression of one who knows his
+job but lectures in it too often. Certainly he knew his
+job—and he was a fine fellow!</p>
+
+<p>We were to get hold of the civil power at once, or
+at least as soon as we had conferred with the divisional
+billeting officer. The first thing to do was to find out
+about the water supply. Then we were to group our
+companies round the pump if we could. If there were
+only one, we were to call a conference of Company
+Quartermaster Sergeants and give out the time when
+each Company was to draw water. That would then
+go into Battalion Orders. He said, with a little smile,
+that we were to remember to put Battalion Headquarters
+into the best billet—because C.O.’s liked that—and
+Company messes must be lodged in public houses
+or places where there was liquor. So that the men
+shouldn’t get at the alcohol! Transport should, as a
+rule, be as far from fire as could be arranged, to avoid
+stampeding of horses; similarly with the Doctor’s cart
+and the Battalion cookers. And, as a rule, the Company
+detailed for the Advance Guard next day should
+have the advanced billets if there were no likelihood
+of a night attack. But they should not be exposed to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">[247]</span>disturbance in the night, if possible, because they would
+have a hard time next day. Similarly the Advanced
+Guard of that day should be halted first and be in the
+rear, so as to get a good night’s rest. He told us to
+remember those splendid words which used to be the
+shibboleth of every British officer—to the effect that
+the comfort and convenience of the men should be considered
+before every exigency save the necessities of
+actual warfare.</p>
+
+<p>Yes: he was a fine young fellow—one of the Old
+Contemptibles, as he modestly, clearly, and rather absentmindedly,
+enunciated all that sound, commonsensible,
+old-fashioned lore of the Army. And I remember
+every word of it. For instance, men of separate
+units or even of separate Companies of the same Battalion
+should not be billeted on opposite sides of the
+same street; the street should be divided in half, and
+one-half allotted to each Company or unit. (I remember
+pointing that out to my Sinn Fein friend in one of
+the miserable, battered streets of workmen’s hovels in
+Pont-de-Nieppe that afternoon.)</p>
+
+<p>But, though I had listened with all my ears to the
+Staff Officer at Penhally, my eyes, even then had been
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_248">[248]</span>playing the trick of showing me Pont-de-Nieppe—just
+as at Nieppe in France they insisted on showing
+me Penhally in Wales. For, whilst I listened to him, I
+was seeing the time when I should represent Division
+and be, in the sunlight, young, with a beautiful moustache
+and a red hat-band and white whip-cord
+breeches, very full. And with <em>such</em> spurs!</p>
+
+<p>So there I was, representing Division.</p>
+
+<p>It hadn’t been very like what I had pictured—and I
+had not had to bother about water supply.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_11_11" href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> I had
+enough water in the wretched, frayed wristbands of
+my shirt, as it seemed, to water a whole Battalion and
+the mules of the Transport! But, otherwise, the traditions
+of the Old Army had prevailed. Rudimentarily,
+no doubt, but still, they had prevailed. I had reminded
+the Battalion Billeting Officers to see that Battalion
+Headquarters had convenient buildings, that officers
+had charge of any civilian liquor depots; that Company
+cooker-cars had emplacements convenient for
+their men, and that latrines were not located near
+water supplies. Also, we had got into touch with the
+civil power.... Only, there were no ladies in my
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_249">[249]</span>Rolls-Royce—and my Rolls-Royce was two very wet-kneed
+legs! And as for my shirt-cuffs ...</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_11_11" href="#FNanchor_11_11" class="label">[11]</a> It is odd to think that Nieppe at that date was still supplied with
+electric power by underground cables that the Huns had not yet discovered,
+from Lille.</p></div>
+
+<p>I suppose they were most in my mind. For it is the
+most horrible of human afflictions to have wet shirtcuffs!
+So that, when I found my orderly, not where I
+had told him to be—in comparative safety in front of
+the workmen’s villas but in the shadow of the door of
+the shop where the Jewess had packed up the black
+satin petticoats, waiting devotedly, though the shells
+that missed the church went close overhead—he said:</p>
+
+<p>“She’s took all them petticoats on a barrer in sacks to
+Armentières,”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_12_12" href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> I answered:</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_12_12" href="#FNanchor_12_12" class="label">[12]</a> His name was Private Partridge of, I think, the 6th Wilts.—a fine
+fellow, but not to be confused with Private Phillips of the 9th Welsh,
+who was my wonderfully good batman: (Note by Gringoire).</p></div>
+
+<p>“You can fall out. Tell my batman that I’ve gone
+somewhere to get my d—d shirt-cuffs dried.”</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, he followed me. It was, you see, the
+pride of <i lang="fr">métier</i>. Alas, that there should be no English
+for those words. He was my orderly for the day—just
+any orderly from headquarters. But I was his charge.
+If I had ordered him to fall out, no doubt he would
+have gone, against his personal will but in obedience
+to orders, to some sort of comfort that his pals would
+have prepared for him. I, however, had said, “You <em>can</em>
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_250">[250]</span>fall out.” It was permissive and left the falling out
+optional. But he saw before him an obviously eccentric
+and probably benevolent officer—and it was his job to
+be able to tell my batman where I lodged myself. Also,
+it was contrary to King’s Regulations for officers to go
+anywhere alone where there is any danger at all from
+shell or other fire. So, though he must have been uncommonly
+wet and hungry and tired, he followed me
+to the door of the house in whose dark windows I
+had seen the luminous patch—the forehead of Rosalie
+Prudent as she sat sewing, her head bent forward, in
+the twilight.</p>
+
+<p>I don’t know how it is: but from the moment when
+I first saw that highlight—and it had been certainly
+three hours before—I had been perfectly sure that that
+was what it was—the forehead of a quiet woman bending
+her head forward to have more light from the
+high window whilst she sewed in the dusk. In a way it
+was not what one expected: the town had been evacuated
+of its civilian population the Sunday before, when
+the Huns—as it seemed, for the love of God—started
+shelling the church just as it had emptied after benediction.
+And they had shelled from six o’clock till
+midnight; and every night since then, from six o’clock
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_251">[251]</span>till midnight they had shelled the church. And they
+were shelling it now—eighty yards away. It was a desolate,
+and it seemed a stupid business. But no doubt
+they had their purpose, though it was difficult to see
+what it was.</p>
+
+<p>That was how Rosalie Prudent put it, as she sat sewing
+my wristbands by the stove, in the wash-house. I
+sat nearer the stove, naked to the waist, the red glow
+and the warmth that came from the red-hot iron of the
+circular furnace being, I can tell you, very agreeable
+to my shivering skin. Opposite me sat the orderly
+drinking a bottle of Burgundy—which he had richly
+deserved. The steam went up from his wet clothes and
+was tinged red by the light of the coke....</p>
+
+<p>In the extremely clean <i lang="fr">salle-à-manger</i>, with a high
+faïence stove of blue and white tiles, a colza lamp with
+a white globe, a buffet in the Nouvel Art style, of yellow
+Austrian oak with brass insertions; at a yellow oak
+table covered with a green velvet table-cover fringed
+with lace, sat my friend the Sinn Feiner learning the
+French that is spoken in Plugstreet from the niece,
+Beatrice Prudent. She was teaching him French by
+selling him handkerchiefs edged with lace in whose
+corners she had embroidered multicolored initials. In
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_252">[252]</span>two very clean, lavender-papered bedrooms, upstairs,
+with white bedsteads, strips of carpet beside them on
+the waxed floors, with valises opened and showing
+works of devotion, altar vases, empty biscuit tins containing
+unconsecrated wafers of the sacrament, trench
+boots, gas helmets, tin hats—sat two padres composing
+their sermons for the next day. The Roman
+Catholic—for I heard him preach on it next day—was
+meditating on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.
+I don’t know what the Presbyterian was writing
+about.</p>
+
+<p>But there the house was, large, quiet but for the
+shells, kept spotless by the labors of Rosalie and her
+niece Beatrice, and, as yet untouched—just as it had
+been evacuated by the factory manager and his family,
+who had fled on the Sunday after benediction. In
+one of the roomy, very tall parlors there was, over the
+fireplace, a gigantic figure of the Saviour, standing in
+robes of blue, white, and scarlet plaster of paris, holding
+on his left arm a great sheaf of white lilies and
+resting one hand on the head of a very thin plaster
+sheep of, I should think, a Rhineland breed. That was
+perhaps why the owner of the house had not trusted to
+its miraculous intervention in favor of his dwelling.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_253">[253]</span>He might have—for I heard the other day that the
+house remained intact until the 11/11/’18.</p>
+
+<p>Rosalie profited—for, when the French inhabitants
+fled, the British authorities allowed Belgian refugees
+to take their places on condition that they billeted
+the troops. So perhaps it had been to protect her that
+the immense Bon Dieu waited! She deserved it.</p>
+
+<p>She came from Plugstreet, of which town she had
+been one of the richest bourgeoises, her husband being
+the miller. She had had a large, roomy house, a great
+yard with stables and carts; she had had a wealthy,
+goodish, but possibly too jovial husband, two affectionate,
+dutiful, and industrious sons, and two obedient
+daughters. On Sundays she had gone to mass wearing a
+black satin gown, and, on her breast, a gold-framed
+cameo as large as a saucer. It represented a very classical
+Paris, seated, I don’t know why, apparently between
+the horns of a lyre and stretching out one hand—which
+no doubt contained the apple—toward three
+grouped Goddesses in rather respectable Flemish
+<i lang="fr">déshabille</i>. Mme. Prudent retained this work of art,
+but her wardrobe was reduced to two blue cotton
+dresses.</p>
+
+<p>I gathered all this, whilst I dozed by the black iron
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_254">[254]</span>stove, from her conversation with the orderly. She
+spoke Flemish, and he, Wiltshire, but they understood
+each other. Of course, they used signs and facial expressions.
+The flames through the interstices of the
+stove poured upward to the dim rafters of the wash-house
+roof, and, by its light, Mme. Rosalie sewed as
+if she had no other pride and no other purpose in the
+world. For she told of the fate of her men and her
+womenfolk abstractedly and passionlessly; pride only
+showed itself when she talked of the state of the
+house in which she had found a refuge. From time to
+time she would say that if Mm. the Proprietors returned,
+they would find the floors waxed; the stair-rods
+shining, the windows polished; woodruff and
+sweet herbs amongst the bed linen in the presses,
+and not a speck of dust on the plaster-robes of the great
+Bon Dieu in the <i lang="fr">salon de réception</i>. That was her
+pride....</p>
+
+<p>As for the rest ... On the 18th of August, 1914,
+her man had been killed in the Belgian Reserve somewhere
+near Liège; on the 20th of the same month her
+eldest son had been killed in the Belgian regiment of
+the Guides. He had expected to have an excellent
+career in the office of an <i lang="fr">avocat</i>—in Brûges, I think. On
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_255">[255]</span>the 8th of November, 1914, her remaining son had
+been killed in the 76th French Regiment of Infantry
+of the Line. He had been chief clerk to an architect of
+Paris. Her daughters had been, one apprentice and the
+other chief saleswoman of a celebrated <i lang="fr">couturière</i> of
+Liège. She had heard of them once since the Germans
+had entered the city. A Belgian priest had written to
+her from the Isle of Wight in December, 1914, to say
+that some nuns had taken in Aimée and Félicité.
+Those were the names of her two daughters....</p>
+
+<p>And at the moment she started up. She remembered
+that she had forgotten the potatoes for Monsieur—Monsieur
+being myself. So out she went into the black
+garden and returned with a tin platter of potatoes.</p>
+
+<p>On it were ten tubers of which she weighed each in
+her hand inscribing what they came to on a slate—so
+that she might account to Messieurs the owners, on
+their return, for the potatoes that she had dug from
+the garden. Then she called her niece from the dining
+room to wash and slice the potatoes. She was going
+to give me an omelette with bacon and fried potatoes
+for my supper. She sat down again and went on, sewing
+and talking to the orderly.</p>
+
+<p>She began talking of the interior of her house in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_256">[256]</span>Plugstreet; she described minutely all the furniture
+in all the apartments. In each of the bedrooms there
+was a night commode in mahogany and a statue of
+the Virgin, also one of the Blessed Saints, and a <i lang="fr">prie-dieu</i>,
+also in mahogany.... And now there was
+nothing. Every fortnight she was permitted by the
+British military police to visit her house—and she
+stayed there, in Nieppe, so that every fortnight she
+might revisit her house—which now, she said, contained
+nothing. The shells were shaking it to pieces.
+The tiles were all gone; the rain was soaking into the
+upper floors. The furniture was all gone—the great
+presses with her linen, the wardrobes—<i lang="fr">en acajou</i>—which
+had contained her black satin dress and her husband’s
+Sunday clothes....</p>
+
+<p>But she continued to catalogue to the orderly the
+contents of her residence. I don’t know why it should
+interest him, but it did; for he nodded sagely when
+she talked of the <i lang="fr">bahûts en bois de chêne</i>, and the immortels
+in vases on the piano....</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly she turned her head to me and said to me,
+where I sat writing with my tablet on my knee:</p>
+
+<p>“And I ask you, <i lang="fr">M. l’officier</i>, for what purpose is it
+that one brings men children into the world if this
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_257">[257]</span>is to be the end? They cause great pain in their entry,
+greater than at the entry of little girl children. It is
+difficult to keep them alive so that they reach men’s
+estate. And then it is difficult to keep them in the paths
+of virtue. And then they are gone.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_258">[258]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h3 class="nobreak" id="XII">
+    XII
+    <br>
+    <i>The Movies</i>&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_13_13" href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a>
+  </h3>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_13_13" href="#FNanchor_13_13" class="label">[13]</a> Gringoire particularly asks me to style this chapter as above because
+the Eminent Reformer, mentioned in Part I, Chapter VI, once said that
+the Writing on the Wall at Belshazzar’s Feast was the first recorded
+instance of a Kinematographic production. It seems stupid: but our friend
+insists. He also asks me to say that Mme. Prudent’s name was really
+<i lang="fr">Dutoit</i>.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>I was a little bewildered when Mme. Prudent so addressed
+me. For, to tell the truth, I had not been listening
+to her very attentively. She seemed to accept the
+war—this war, states of war, any operations that
+washed and disintegrated the interiors of the world—she
+seemed to accept them so tacitly as being part of
+the child’s madness of the male that, in the warmth I
+had just dozed, not thinking much of her immense
+losses and not knowing at all that she would have anything
+very striking to say about the war. Besides, it was
+unusual to be beside a stove, under a roof.</p>
+
+<p>And, when she had come in with the potatoes, out
+of the darkness, I had suddenly seen again that vision
+in green—of the sanctuary! And I remembered, extraordinarily,
+how once, years and years and years before,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_259">[259]</span>I had gone digging potatoes at night. I suppose
+some visitor had come to my cottage late. And I had
+put my hand into the ground to take out a potato,
+and I found the earth quite warm. The air cools off
+quicker than the sod, you see, after a hot day. It had
+astonished me then—and, in that house, the remembrance
+came again, vivid and astonishing, for it had
+produced exactly the effect of one’s having thrust one’s
+hand into the breast of a woman....</p>
+
+<p>Well, I had been thinking of that and looking at
+that green landscape. And then, suddenly, I had pulled
+myself together. For it had occurred to me that I was
+not doing my duty. I had it in my head that I had
+got that soft, wet undangerous job of billeting, at the
+request of the bearded gentleman in the frock coat,
+who had sat under the picture by Bastien Lepage—or
+was it by Marie Bashkirtseff?—in front of the great
+table with the carnations and the miniature <i>Niké</i>. I
+daresay it was not the fact: or it may have been. There
+is no knowing. In France you were taken up, like a
+brown paper parcel, and deposited here or there at the
+behest of two obscure lines of smudged typewriting in
+some one’s Orders. And you did not know why; you
+had no will.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_260">[260]</span></p>
+
+<p>So I felt that I ought to be writing. It would not be
+fair to have a soft job for the purpose of wooing the
+Muse and then not to woo her. So I had pulled out
+from my wet tunic which hung over the chair back,
+my disreputable and sodden tablet of writing paper,
+which I had purchased two days before from that
+miserable Canteen Lance-Corporal and had begun,
+with a wet stump of pencil, to write the article called
+“<i lang="fr">Une Partie de Cricket</i>” which, if only because it is
+a souvenir, I hope will be printed as an appendix to
+these remembrances. I know I wrote the first ten
+sentences, because I remember them and also because,
+the other day, I turned out the repulsive flap of my
+camp bed, and there, along with a damp sock and some
+mildewed straps, was the mouldering tablet with three
+scrawled pages....</p>
+
+<p>But I couldn’t keep on writing. I was obsessed with
+the idea of a country, <i lang="fr">patrie</i>, republic, body politic, call
+it what you will—that the recollection of that minister
+had called up in me. Yes: I had a vision of a country.</p>
+
+<p>In the center was the Ministry—like the heart of an
+onion—and all the others that I had seen in the last
+week went round about it. Mind you, I have nothing
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_261">[261]</span>to say against that Minister. I may have appeared to
+speak of him sardonically: that is a habit I have. But
+he, or something like him, was indispensable to the
+higher strategy of his nation:&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_14_14" href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> and this man knew his
+job. What he wanted was perfectly the right thing:
+and if he did not know that the First Line Transport
+of a Battalion in the trenches was not exactly the happiest
+place in which to write lofty prose—well, it is
+certainly hypocrisy to seek, in the heart of the Sacred
+Emperor, for a knowledge of low tea-shops. He did
+not, obviously, like me but I have not the slightest
+doubt that I appeared drunk to him. Only a drunkard,
+really, would seek for ferrets in the palace of the
+Sacred Emperor. Yet I had my excuse. First of everything
+in the world—of everything in the whole world!—comes
+your battalion. And the ferrets of my battalion
+had all died suddenly; and the last thing they had said
+to me had been: Don’t forget to get us some ferrets.
+If you had seen the rats of Locre you would have understood.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_14_14" href="#FNanchor_14_14" class="label">[14]</a> It should be remembered that the military description of “tactics” is
+the direction of troops when in contact with the enemy. “Strategy” includes
+the direction of all movements that take place outside the immediate
+firing line. The conversion of neutral nations into allies or the
+cementing of bonds between allies by literary manifestations is specifically
+and according to the textbooks a branch of strategy, so that Gringoire
+is using the correct military word.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_262">[262]</span></p>
+
+<p>But the Minister had not seen the rats of Locre so
+he had not understood....</p>
+
+<p>No: he was a good man, in the right place. And
+very properly he sat amongst the gracious products
+of a State art—the pictures, the tapestries, the ormolu,
+the august building, the frescoes, the great staircases.
+And attendants who looked like bishops must be there
+to answer his bell; and Suisses with their great cocked
+hats and immense white gloves and their sabres with
+silver scabbards. There must be symbols of the Temporal
+Power of the State, which is august, ancient, and
+fit to be upheld. And, in disturbed times, there must
+be Civil Police in the courtyard, for strange visitors
+will come. And sentries there must be in the tricolored
+sentry-boxes beside the <i lang="fr">porte-cochère</i>; sentries
+to call out the guard. And famous battalions must pass
+the door, along the boulevard, now and again.</p>
+
+<p>And, round the Palace of the Sacred Emperor, there
+must be the Great City, and round the Great City must
+be La Grande Nation—stretching away and away, for
+miles and miles and miles....</p>
+
+<p>It presented itself to me as twenty-seven hours of
+railway journey—past Etaples where I had spent, years
+before, long days in <i lang="fr">châlets</i> amongst the pine wood;
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_263">[263]</span>past Calais where my grandfather was born; to Hazebrouck
+where, during the war, we had found the worst
+billiard table in the world and where, whilst we waited
+for a connection, a German plane was dropping bombs
+on the goods line and Cochin-Chinese in furred silk
+hoods were working as plate-layers. And so to Steenewerck,
+where the great farm carts and tilburies and
+berlins were mixed up with artillery horses, with timber
+wagons, with immense guns.</p>
+
+<p>And so the land stretched out to Nieppe and the
+wash-house and Rosalie Prudent sewing in the light
+of the circular cast-iron stove that had become red hot.
+And on the stove there were bubbling the pots which
+contained supper for me and coffee for my friend the
+Sinn Feiner. And whilst Rosalie sewed, ever and again,
+the pots lifted themselves an inch off the dully red-hot
+disk and then sat down again. Shells, you see, were
+falling in the church.</p>
+
+<p>So the land stretched out—yes, like a gramophone
+disk!—till it came to the wash-house that was intact
+amidst all the smashed houses with their forlorn lace
+window curtains. And all that edge of the disk was
+smashed houses inhabited by steadfast souls who sat
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_264">[264]</span>sewing whilst the pots jumped on the hobs. They were
+the caretakers of <i lang="fr">Messieurs les Propriétaires</i> who had
+fled. There was a whole population of them: I came
+myself across a whole population of these quiet people,
+who considered only their duties to absent proprietors
+amongst the <em>rain</em> of shells. I remember when I went to
+have lunch with the officers of our 2nd Battalion—all
+dead, the officers that I had lunch with!—in Albert,
+there sat and read the <i lang="fr">Libre Parole</i>, such a very old
+caretaker. He had gray side-whiskers, a white apron, a
+yellow and black striped waistcoat, a square black
+alpaca cap or <i lang="fr">bêret</i>—for all the world like an old
+domestic of a Paris nobleman’s hotel. He sat there, his
+legs crossed, his head thrown back, reading the paper,
+through silver-rimmed spectacles at the end of his
+nose. On the table beside him were a bullfinch in a
+gilt cage constructed like a pagoda and his black
+leather spectacle case. He had nothing to communicate
+about the war, except, I am glad to say, that the
+officers of the battalion were careful of the furniture,
+but he was so busy that he could not keep the floors
+as cleanly waxed as he desired. He asked me if I could
+not speak to Colonel Partridge about it. The Germans
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_265">[265]</span>were putting in their usual lunch-time shells into that
+street; he was sitting reading in a glass-roofed passage
+between the kitchen and the <i lang="fr">salle à manger</i>....</p>
+
+<p>Yes: a host of such people came into my mind as I
+sat beside the stove. I am not going to talk about the
+war any more. By the grace of God, I will never talk
+about the war again whilst I live. As you say: the
+people who did not take part hate to be reminded of
+that part; and the people who did take part have had
+enough of it. Yes; you are right. I made the mistake
+of my life, professionally, <i lang="fr">quand je m’en allais en
+guerre</i>. It got me disliked by the critics, and it is bad
+to be disliked by the critics—for a poet.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_15_15" href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> So you see, I
+too have my prudences.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_15_15" href="#FNanchor_15_15" class="label">[15]</a> As far as the compiler has been able to discover, the poet’s only
+ground for this diatribe is a review that his last volume of poems received
+from the —— Literary Supplement. In this the reviewer devotes
+one line to saying that the volume of poems is the best that was published
+during the war and the rest to personal abuse of our friend—and that is
+all. Our friend says that this is not cricket. It probably is not; but one
+should never say so.</p></div>
+
+<p>And indeed I have my prudences—though they are
+not the prudences of other people. I do not desire
+money, glory, the praise of my kind whom I distrust,
+nor yet to dominate humanity, which is a beast that I
+dislike. I do not desire friends; I do not desire broad
+lands. So, thinking about things in the wash-house of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_266">[266]</span>Mme. Rosalie, I said: “I must dig myself in.” I said,
+indeed, twice: “I must dig myself in....”</p>
+
+<p>I must have a dugout, as proof as possible against the
+shells launched against me by blind and august destiny;
+round about it there must be the strong barbed
+wire of solitude and, within the entanglements, space
+for a kitchen garden. Do you remember, Mr. Compiler,
+the redoubt our regiment made once—Montgomery’s
+Folly? There was the redoubt, a circular piece of engineering.
+Round about it there was a level space of
+fifty yards, to give a field of fire, surrounded by the
+apron of wire. And, in that level space, you remember,
+we made the Regimental Gardens.... Well, in the
+wash-house, I said to myself that, <i>appry la gair finny</i>,
+I must make for myself, in space and time, an affair
+like that, or as like it as possible. If I could afford a
+cottage, I would have a cottage: if not, any sort of
+shelter made of old tins filled with clay with a bit of
+corrugated iron for a roof, a door of sacking, a groundsheet
+for carpet. As for furniture, aren’t there bully-beef
+cases still?... <em>You</em> remember!</p>
+
+<p>Lord! the interiors we have constructed out of such
+materials and the fun we had. And how they vanished
+like a drift of leaves when we were drafted away.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_267">[267]</span>And how solid they seemed and work we did in them
+whilst they lasted, those interiors! So, I said to myself,
+in Mme. Rosalie’s wash-house, I shall get along somehow.
+And then, said I to myself: There is the question
+of food.</p>
+
+<p>Well, there is gardening! As you know, I am not <i lang="fr">le
+dernier venu</i> when it comes to gardening. I will back
+myself to get twice as much off any given piece of
+ground as any ordinary man—if you will give me some
+seeds and a bit of old iron and a stick capable of being
+tied together into some semblance of a hoe....</p>
+
+<p>So the war finished for me, looking at Mme. Rosalie
+as she sat entirely engrossed in her work whilst the
+shells made the pots jump alive off the red-hot iron
+plate.... The war was finished, since my line was
+taken for <i>appry la gair finny</i>. That we should win I
+had no doubt, for, though the horrible scalawags who
+wangle themselves into notoriety had too much to say
+in the world, our heart was in it, and the heart of the
+other side was not. I knew enough to know that. If
+God were good to one, for one’s self personally, it
+would finish there. I did not even want to stay to see
+the finish: I was so certain that we should win. But I
+had been worrying a little about myself. I couldn’t,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_268">[268]</span>you see, see anything but the workhouse for me, if
+I lived through. And, at my age, the workhouse is not
+a pleasant thought. I am just too old, and just too
+young for the workhouse.</p>
+
+<p>But the spectacle of Madame Rosalie, fetching in
+the potatoes, saved me.... I will tell you an odd
+thing. I have spoken of the recumbent oval of green
+light that now and again had appeared to me, to turn
+into a picture of a green valley. I will confess that,
+hitherto, I had feared it. It had come into my head that
+it might be a symptom of a seizure, an epileptic fit
+perhaps, or of some obscure but disastrous nervous
+disease. <i>Ker vooly voo? Say la gair.</i> That region of the
+world had its trials for the nerves of people of my
+age. One might well be on the edge of something.</p>
+
+<p>But looking at Mme. Rosalie—so extremely centered
+in the work in hand, so oblivious to the very real
+danger, so brave and so tranquil, I said to myself:</p>
+
+<p>“What the devil! If she can stick it, I too can!”</p>
+
+<p>For what had she to look forward to? She had said
+that, on the last occasion when the British authorities
+had permitted her to visit her house at Plugstreet they
+had not allowed her to enter it. The front wall of
+the upper part had fallen inward and for her sole
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_269">[269]</span>possession she could see that on the wall of Félicité’s
+bedroom that was exposed to the sky, there hung a gilt-framed
+Souvenir of her daughter’s First Communion.
+Nothing else! Nothing! That was her sole possession
+in the world except for two gowns of blue Manchester
+goods and the cameo that represented the judgment of
+Paris....</p>
+
+<p>And suddenly I was convinced that the apparition
+of that recumbent green oval was, not a visitation, but
+a sign. If from that time onward I just carried on, if
+I persevered—as I was truly minded to persevere, in
+my duties as a poor bloody footslogger—the Almighty
+would give to me at least sufficient space in the quiet
+earth that was just country—to dig myself in. Well,
+God has been good to me, as you see.</p>
+
+<p>And, mind you, I consider and consider proudly,
+that I am doing, most of all, my duty to the State. I
+have always considered myself a member of the governing
+classes, with the privileges and the duties. And
+I abate nothing of that opinion. It seems to me to be
+my duty to govern, if not by directing, then at least by
+guiding, through the superiority of my insight. I am
+not fitted for the intrigues of what is called Public Life.
+No doubt that is no worse today than it was in the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_270">[270]</span>time of Alcibiades or the late Mr. Gladstone. But it is
+very bad; very vile.</p>
+
+<p>You say: how do I presume to speculate on public
+matters who cut myself deliberately off from the consideration
+of public matters on the 8/9/’16? My friend,
+I have considered the public matters of the 8/9/1816;
+of the 4/9/1870; 1770; 1470; of the 8/9/’16 of B.C.
+1070. And there is no difference. If it is not an hypocrisy,
+it remains still a very wearisome matter to search
+for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low teahouse.
+Well, I have done my share of searching and
+am too old for any more.</p>
+
+<p>I have said that there is no difference between the
+public matters of today and those of the day of Alcibiades.
+But there is one very great difference: there is
+the difference that today—and it was never the case
+before—all the ground of the world that is capable of
+growing wheat is occupied by wheat and the population
+of the world is increasing by leaps and bounds.
+I will tell you: Some years before the war I was in
+a little town on the coast of France not far from Dunkirk.
+And my hotel was full of affrighted women; of
+nuns whose convents had been burned over their
+heads; and of ruined, wounded, and despairing men
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_271">[271]</span>from the Low Countries. St. Quentin had been sacked;
+other towns were afire. A year before you could read
+in the papers the despatches of intrepid war correspondents
+in the South of France. They wrote from
+hotels—just as they did a year or so ago—how towns
+were flaming, streets running with wine, how the 5-9
+shells soared and the naval howitzers raised their
+muzzles and coughed. You know the sort of thing!</p>
+
+<p>Well! Those were the fingers on the wall. They
+were merely food-riots but they predicted Armageddon
+for those that can read—and still they predict an Armageddon
+beside which that in which we all took part
+was one of Gilbert White’s rush candles against the
+searchlights of a battleship. Those were food riots,
+caused by the determination of town dwellers to enforce
+prices on peasants. The last war was a food riot:
+the next war will be a food riot beyond the imagination
+of the sons of men.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing can prevent it or much delay it unless there
+should come a change in the hearts of humanity. And
+I do not perceive much change in the hearts of man—and
+all the wheat-land of the world is occupied by
+wheat and the population of the world is increasing
+by leaps and bounds. <i>Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!</i>
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_272">[272]</span>You say that there are revolutions on foot. There always
+have been. But they have always been <i lang="fr">révolutions
+de palais</i> and <i lang="fr">révolutions de palais</i> they will always
+remain. What does it matter to me or to any sane man
+whether it is the Duke of Omnium or Mr. Evans of
+Llanfair-Rhaiado, or Mr. Hicks of Poplar who sits in
+the seats once occupied by Sir Robert Walpole or Mr.
+Jonkinsen or Colbert or Caius Julius Cæsar? None of
+those departed statesmen had to face the problem of a
+globe whose wheat-land was all occupied and whose
+population was increasing by leaps and bounds. In
+consequence they were not so greedy for money, or
+for the jazz bands of excitement that may make them
+forget tomorrow. For that is what it all comes to.</p>
+
+<p>So I go out of public life of that type.</p>
+
+<p>But don’t believe that I, Gringoire, Hippolyte, de
+l’Institut de France, go out of public life! No, I go
+into it. For I go to prove that a decent life, clean, contemplative,
+intent, skilful, and with its little luxuries,
+may yet be lived by the Gringoires of the world—<i lang="la">hominibus
+bonæ voluntatis</i>. For, though I am a poet,
+it is thus that I interpret the message of the angel. For
+it is thus that I see the world—as a world of a few
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_273">[273]</span>Gringoires and of infinite millions that are the stuff
+to fill graveyards. I can’t see it any other way.</p>
+
+<p>And I said to myself in the wash-house of Madame
+Rosalie whilst some fragments of iron and rubble pattered
+down on the tiles of the pent-roof from the nearby
+church that, for the rest of my life I would be what I
+will call self-supporting—at any rate after the war was
+finished—and I will govern!</p>
+
+<p>For I will be dependent on the profits of no man’s
+labor, and I will produce more food than I eat and
+more thought than I take from the world. So, to the
+measure of the light vouchsafed, shall some fragment
+of the world be dependent on me. It is the only way to
+govern.</p>
+
+<p>All this wangling for power in newspapers, meetings,
+market-places, and drawing-rooms is a weariness—and
+when you have it, what is it? A handful of
+dried leaves that crumble under the touch. If you have
+a platoon you can make it smart; if you have a garden,
+you may make it fine, luxuriant, producing marrows
+as large as barrels. Or if you write a poem, you must
+make it beautiful. Everything else is vanity.</p>
+
+<p>I ... I who speak to you ... can house myself,
+clothe myself, discipline, entertain, and think for myself—and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_274">[274]</span>I can feed more than myself. As the old
+saying went: I can build a house, plant a tree, write a
+book, and beget a son. No man who cannot do all these
+things is fit to govern. He cannot govern—for I and
+the men who are with me, of good will, shall withhold
+his food, his clothing, his thoughts for his mind.</p>
+
+<p>You may say, Mr. Compiler, that you who write
+falsehoods for the newspapers, who organize in offices
+the carrying of things on wheels, who dig in the bowels
+of the earth, and hammer on iron plates—or who take
+the profits of those who do these things—that you
+will govern, or inherit, the earth and the civilization
+of the earth. You cannot. If you withhold the labor of
+your hands or your minds—the world goes on. If I
+should—you would starve in body and soul—and in
+jazz noises!</p>
+
+<p>In the end, I think, the world will be driven to
+become a great beehive: there will be the workers
+who think of nothing but their work. They will think
+nothing of the profits. And there will be the drones
+who provide the jazz noises and the wheels—and who
+will be killed off from time to time.</p>
+
+<p>That is what I have gathered from the ruined houses
+in Flanders and from the aloof quality of the faces
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_275">[275]</span>that came back to me whilst I sat dozing and Rosalie
+Prudent sewed. The faces were those of the Lincolnshire
+Private, of Lieutenant Morgan, of Henri Gaudier,
+and of the caretaker in the house at Albert—and of the
+Quartermaster of the Wiltshires.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_16_16" href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> But, so that you may
+not think that I limit myself to one class of society, I
+will add the faces of Lord Kitchener, of Sir Edward
+Grey, and of the French Minister, whose name I have
+forgotten. I did not need to see in imagination the
+faces of the orderly or of Mme. Rosalie, for they were
+with me.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_16_16" href="#FNanchor_16_16" class="label">[16]</a> <i>Note by Gringoire.</i> I do not know why I am haunted by the remembrance
+of this man. He was killed by the direct hit of a shell.
+When I last saw him, he was reading a paper with the spectacles at
+the end of his nose like the caretaker at Albert. His tunic—with ten
+ribbons!—was open over his fat stomach, and he wore carpet slippers.
+He was as brave as a lion and as simple as a sheep: no soul then alive
+knew his job better. He was a butcher of Stratford-on-Avon. If he have
+left a young son, may the shade of the Divine William guide that young
+son’s footsteps gently and humorously through the ways of life!</p></div>
+
+<p>You will object that I single out for salvation in
+Gomorrah only those of whom I have talked. Certainly,
+it is only those that I single out—those of that
+type, for those, for me, are the <i lang="la">homines bonæ voluntatis</i>
+who must be preserved if the State is to continue.
+They have rather abstracted expressions since they
+think only of their work; they have aspects of fatigue,
+since the salvation of a world is a large order, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_276">[276]</span>they bear on their backs the burden of the whole
+world; but they look at you directly, and in their
+glance is no expression of pride, ambition, profit, or
+renown. They have expressions of responsibility, for
+they are the governing classes. Others will have that
+title in the newspapers—but they govern only those
+who make the noises of jazz-bands. The food supply
+and the supply of poetry is in the hands of the Gringoires.</p>
+
+<p>Buzzing noises make the world pleasant; it would
+be a grim and silent world without them. I should not
+like it, nor would the other Gringoires like it. It was
+in Coventry Street that I last met Lieutenant Morgan-Gringoire.
+But, from time to time the buzzers must
+be killed off. Destiny is remorseless: either those who
+buzz must die in occasional crowds or those who live
+to give food and poetry must go starve and the others
+with them. Destiny is remorseless.</p>
+
+<p>But destiny is also just. The drones of the hive have
+a good time—and give a good time. Moreover they
+make splendid soldiers of the type of the Cockney or
+the Parigot. That, perhaps, is how destiny means them
+to get killed off. So they will have their good times;
+and they will also have glory, the glory of finding the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_277">[277]</span>person of the Sacred Emperor in some such low teahouse
+as was the Bois de Mametz on the 14/7/’16 when
+the 38th Division was murdered.</p>
+
+<p>And maybe that is the best glory of all. God forbid
+that I should say it is not. And I like to think that,
+along with the good time that they had and the glory
+of standing in the presence of the Sacred Emperor,
+they found also—sanctuary. For I like very much to
+remember the smile that was on the face of Lt. Morgan
+when they dug him out from under the dirt of the
+communication-trench.</p>
+
+<p>Do you remember the old Catholic idea that a man
+may find salvation between the saddle and the ground?
+Well, we know little of death—nothing of death. So
+I hope it is not a heresy to think that, as the eyelids
+of those who fell closed on their glory, they had long,
+long visions, like that green vision that came to me
+from time to time. For time is a very relative thing;
+and may they not well have had long, long illusions,
+seeming to last for years and years?—to the effect
+that they had found, each his imagined sanctuary,
+where there was the gingerbread cottage that, hand in
+hand, on tiptoe with some Gretel, they explored, crossing
+their fingers and crying “<i lang="fr">Feignits</i>” in the face of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_278">[278]</span>destiny—and where the Hou-Hou-oo of the wolf upon
+the Montagne Noire shall sound so very distantly as
+to be only the comforting reminder of the Grimm we
+knew as children.</p>
+
+<p>——Something like that.</p>
+
+<p>That is all I have to say about the war, here and
+now. But you have poked your sardonic fun at me
+from time to time, Mr. Compiler, and though bargaining
+is no part of my nature, a determination to have
+my own way was born in me as pawkiness was in you.
+And now, I say this:</p>
+
+<p>“You have poked your fun at me as writer and as
+cook, and decorated with only those attributions of
+yours—as if each of those little, half-concealed smiles
+were a rag and tatter on my shining-seated <i lang="fr">pantalons</i>,
+you propose to exhibit me to your public. Well, you
+shan’t except on my own terms. The first is that, as
+you have spoken of me as writer you should enshrine—like
+a shining fly in amber—in the gum of your
+lucubrations a specimen of my own writing as it came
+to me, precisely, in Nieppe. And the second is that,
+since you began this compilation with what purports
+to be an account of my entertainment of the guests
+who honor this lowly roof of ours, you shall, as
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_279">[279]</span>truthfully entertain your readers—as truthfully as you
+can, for God gives to some of us vision and to some
+the gift of recounting things askew for the entertainment
+of those wider of mouth than of intelligence—you
+shall then entertain your readers with an account
+of the dishes which since early morning I have been
+preparing for the evening degustation of yourself, of
+my dear Sélysette and your friend Mrs. Carmody. For
+I observe that, though you poke fun at my hospitality
+you are not averse from begging your dimity madams
+to share what you have called, I think, our rough oaken
+board.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Carmody was no more than the wife of the
+Headmaster of the King Edward VI Grammar School
+where your Compiler gives lessons in the English language
+and drill, in the neighboring town. She had expressed
+an urgent curiosity to witness the domestic
+felicities and the supposedly eccentric habits of my
+friends. For it is not to be imagined that a figure so
+marked as that of our poet could conceal itself in an
+isolated dingle of a Home County without setting a
+considerable part of that county agog with curiosity—any
+more than it is to be imagined that an usher in
+a diminutive but immensely ancient public school
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_280">[280]</span>could forever stave off from contact with his most
+intimate friends the young and agreeable but still imperious
+wife of his Head.</p>
+
+<p>But to the alarmed, but only half-expressed remonstrances
+of your Compiler—for what, he wondered
+would Gringoire insist on inserting into his pages; and
+wouldn’t his patiently prosecuted work when, if ever,
+it saw the light, wouldn’t it have the aspect of a mere
+rag-bag? To these alarmed, if only half-expressed remonstrances,
+Gringoire, arising to his lean, gray height,
+announced his immutable programme for the day. It
+was by then towards four of a very hot, but fast cooling,
+July afternoon. The sunflowers drooped on their
+stalks, flycatchers made their curious, interrupted
+flights into the shining air and back to the old roof.
+The cows from the meadow had crowded to the other
+side of the quickset hedge, and, rubbing themselves unceasingly
+to get rid of flies from their backs made a
+curious sound like the tearing of thin paper interspersed
+with the deep, tranquil sighings of their
+breaths. It was in short an English July afternoon—a
+time when, if ever, men should sit and ruminate in
+quiet.</p>
+
+<p>But there was such a clamor! You would have said
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_281">[281]</span>that the itch of all the authors and all the regimental
+sergeants major had entered into our friend. Quick,
+the boy, dozing behind the house, must put in the mare
+and go to the station and see if the Bombay duck had
+come for the curry. Quick, the maid must bring tea
+half an hour before that diminutive creature was accustomed
+to bring it. Or, no.... She must put back tea
+an hour and Madame Sélysette must with her own incomparable
+fingers blow three quarts of shandygaff
+and not forget the lime-juice. And Madame Sélysette
+must find the article he had written at Nieppe, and
+must put out paper and pens and cut two quills just as
+he liked them and come down and entertain Compi—your
+humble servant the compiler—and see that no
+wasps had got under the cabbage-leaves that covered
+the syllabubs in the spring and see that the boy did
+not take the traces up two holes too short and ...</p>
+
+<p>Madame Sélysette put her charming and provocative
+bust out of the little square window space above
+and to the left of the porch.</p>
+
+<p>“You propose to write, my friend?” she asked. “But
+you swore this morning that you would send me to
+Coventry for a week if I did not goad you into picking
+the greengages....”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_282">[282]</span></p>
+
+<p>Gringoire made a sound like “Grrh”, as if the Wolf
+of the Mountains had humorously snarled. He said:</p>
+
+<p>“You have no soul!” She made at him a little grimace
+and disappeared. But I could hear their endearments
+as they met on the sounding little wooden stairs
+and felt all the summer regrets of the nearly old
+bachelor.</p>
+
+<p>There was however no rest that afternoon. It was
+well to have the great blue three-quart jug of shandygaff
+on the seat in the porch; it was agreeable to have
+Madame Sélysette to one’s self whilst she dotted a few
+of the ‘i’s’ and crossed the ‘t’s’ as to the entangled career
+and theories of her great man—and there is no better
+drink of an English July afternoon than shandygaff
+that has a little edge of lime-juice given to it and that
+since dawn has had all its ingredients cooled in an ice-cold
+spring. And there is no pleasanter topic in the
+mouth of a gay and tranquil young woman assured of
+the adoration of her mate than her expressions of her
+humorous adoration for Himself and his crotchets.
+You reply that the adoration of a lively young woman
+expressed to yourself would be more agreeable, but that
+is not the case. For lively young women do not express
+adoration to the faces of their males; but, failing and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_283">[283]</span>replacing that, it is pleasant to sit in a porch and
+hearken to adoration of a roaring genius overhead. For
+it causes you to have daydreams of a time when you
+in revenge may sit in an upper room, with a lively
+young woman expressing to a third the adoration that
+she feels for yourself....</p>
+
+<p>But continuously our Gringoire’s voice rumbled
+from inside his upper room. Then coming to the window
+he would shout:</p>
+
+<p>“Sélysette Sé ... ly ... <i>sette</i>.... What is the
+colloquial English for ...” Some phrase that I did not
+catch. Or:</p>
+
+<p>“Sé ... ly ... sette.... <i lang="fr">Est-ce que</i> ...” And
+again something that I did not catch for my French is
+none of the strongest. But I should gather that it had
+something to do with his pots that were on the stove
+in the disreputable shanty that he called his cookhouse.
+For Madame would enter that erection like Eurydice
+disappearing into Orcus. Immediately would come the
+thunder of Gringoire descending the stairs as if he had
+fallen. He too would enter the cookhouse and there
+would be the sound of impassioned and farcical altercations.
+Then Gringoire would approach the porch
+with a face that resembled a beet root with the heat.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_284">[284]</span>He would drink a pint of shandygaff at a swallow, exclaim:</p>
+
+<p>“The stuff’s bilge.... No, I don’t mean the shandygaff.
+There is no one like Sélysette for compounding
+cold drinks. I trained her. I mean my prose. My prose
+is bilge....” And he would thunder up the stairs
+whilst Madame tranquilly resumed her place.</p>
+
+<p>Once she asked some questions about Mrs. Carmody
+and when I said that lady had the greatest possible admiration
+for Gringoire and even had some of his verses
+by heart she expressed amused relief. “For,” said she,
+“there are going to be great storms and dinner won’t
+be ready till ten.”</p>
+
+<p>It wasn’t.</p>
+
+<p>For, you understand, in the sometimes tranquil,
+sometimes tempestuous but always complex nature of
+my friend, the pride of authorship had for the moment
+come uppermost and he was determined to get <em>his</em>
+prose into his compiler’s volume. But of late he had
+only written in French as he has told you. So he
+would come to the window and shout to me the question
+whether he would be allowed to insert his French
+prose. Without waiting for me to answer his question
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_285">[285]</span>he would shout: “No, of course you won’t!” and disappear.
+Then he would shout:</p>
+
+<p>“But I can’t translate my own damned stuff. In
+heaven’s name what’s the English for ... The beastly
+colloquial English....”</p>
+
+<p>Towards seven, just when I was thinking that I
+must go and tidy myself for the approach of Mrs. Carmody,
+he appeared before me, dishevelled and with a
+mess of written papers dangling from his hands.</p>
+
+<p>“Here, you,” he exclaimed, “get your reporter’s notebook
+and come with me!”</p>
+
+<p>And, at the bottom of the garden, under the hedge
+beneath the damson trees he made me lie down in the
+grass which was there long and began to dictate to me.
+He couldn’t, as he said, translate his own French prose
+because his own French was near his heart and his
+English much less. You might say that his passions
+were for English countrysides and for French prose
+and here the two met to his confusion. Perhaps it is
+impossible to interpret French prose in the long grass
+beneath an English quickset hedge.</p>
+
+<p>In any case Gringoire was distracted as he dictated
+and I was distracted, using a shorthand that I almost
+never employ to take down his words that he whispered
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_286">[286]</span>or shouted or intermingled with ejaculations
+that I was not intended to record.... And I was the
+more distracted because at the top of the garden I
+could see Mrs. Carmody and Madame Sélysette carrying
+implements and provisions for the dinner from the
+house door to the little platform beneath the enormous
+oak that overshadowed the spring. Those gay young
+things laughed over their burdens—for Mrs. Carmody,
+out of her School House, was at least as gay as Madame
+Sélysette. And every time that they laughed Gringoire,
+lying in the long grass, groaned and writhed with the
+whole of his immense length. I have relegated his
+French, for which he gave me the copy from some
+Swiss magazine, to an appendix. I can only hope that
+his French is better than his English version of it.
+But as to that I am no judge. I only wish that he had
+not insisted on my presenting an untidy book to the
+world, for in common, I believe, with most readers, I
+much dislike appendices. For when on a bookstall I
+see a book and, examining it, find appendices at the
+end, I think either that that is a learned work for
+which I am seldom in the mood, having studies enough
+of my own to pursue, or that the author is an untidy-minded
+fellow who has not given himself the pains
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_287">[287]</span>to digest and put into his own phraseology matter that
+will almost certainly be tedious to read.</p>
+
+<p>But in this case I have no alternative. The rages of
+Gringoire are things that I have no mind to face.
+Print his lucubrations I must or there would be the
+devil to pay. I am not certain that there won’t be at
+least a minor fiend to propitiate as it is—I mean when
+Gringoire comes to look for his prose and finds it at
+the end of the volume.</p>
+
+<p>There certainly was a tremendous row when he discovered
+that he had kept the ladies waiting. He howled
+with rage, sprang to his feet, rushed into his cookhouse....</p>
+
+<p>And the first view that Mrs. Carmody had of a poet
+for whom, as you shall discover, she had a real veneration,
+was rushing along the face of the house towards
+the dinner-table beneath the oak. He was hatless, coatless,
+his shirt-collar was widely unbuttoned and he was
+bearing a huge tray covered with little saucersful of the
+piquant messes that he calls <i lang="fr">hors d’œuvres</i>.</p>
+
+<p>We dined.</p>
+
+<p>I am, alas, no Brillat Savarin and Gringoire as cook
+is to say the least inarticulate. When he is not that he
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_288">[288]</span>is profane. We had his <i lang="fr">hors d’œuvres</i>. Then we had his
+curried lobster. What shall I say about his curry?</p>
+
+<p>Do you know the sensation of suddenly leaving the
+level and swooping downwards on the little railways
+you get at Exhibitions or in fairgrounds? It is like that.
+You take your first forkful of one of Gringoire’s inventions
+with misgivings mingled with anticipations.
+Then you are reassured. You say:</p>
+
+<p>“This is at least supportable. I shall survive this.”</p>
+
+<p>You take a sip of his white wine. After that it flies.</p>
+
+<p>But you can’t <em>believe</em> in Gringoire as cook.... I
+sometimes wonder if even he believes in himself. I
+mean, I asked him the other day for the recipe for his
+curry, just as, at the beginning of this book, as I have
+reported, I tried to extract from him his directions for
+household management. The results were even more
+inarticulate. He said:</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, you take any old thing—tinned lobster, bully
+beef, cold mutton.... And of course you fry ...
+But curry powder is good for any dish.... Because
+of the garlic in it.... And which curry are you
+talking about? There are hundreds. The only thing
+that unites them is that the curry must be cooked.
+Don’t you understand? The curry—the powder—itself
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_289">[289]</span>must be cooked. For hours and hours. Do you see?
+No, you don’t see. How can I remember what I put
+into the curry for your friend? Any old thing....”</p>
+
+<p>I know he hadn’t put in any old thing, though it is
+probably true that the chief ingredient of his dish is
+his fine frenzy. But I remember the energy he had put
+into securing the fresh lobsters for that particular effort—and
+the special brand of French preserved oysters
+that he had had to have for his beefsteak, kidney and
+oyster pudding which on that menu followed the
+curry. The boy had been sent on a bicycle in one direction,
+Madame Sélysette and I in the dogcart to Ulpeston,
+he himself had borrowed a lift in the baker’s cart
+and gone to Storrinton.... No, surely, not any old
+thing—though he surely believed what he said....</p>
+
+<p>At any rate towards eleven we were contented and
+he, appeased, sat back in his chair and talked about
+poultry foods to Mrs. Carmody, that being the first
+time that he had paid her any attention.</p>
+
+<p>The great boughs of the oak in which there now
+hung three Chinese lanthorns—Madame Sélysette
+loves Chinese lanthorns—the great boughs of the oak
+towered quietly up towards the planets, great white
+moths appearing and disappearing again into the blackness
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_290">[290]</span>around the glow of the lanthorns. The Dog-star
+hung low on the horizon before us and the owls called
+at ten-yard intervals as they flew along the little stream
+in the meadow. When they were silent the night-jar
+churned intermittently. When we too were silent the
+little tinkle of the stream from the spring made itself
+heard.</p>
+
+<p>I think that Mrs. Carmody did not much want to
+talk about poultry though her white Leghorns had
+taken many prizes at County or even more important
+shows. I think she let the conversation drag purposely.
+For suddenly, when we had all been pensive for a
+minute or two, her voice said from the shadows:</p>
+
+<p>“‘I should like to imagine a night...!’”</p>
+
+<p>Gringoire exclaimed sharply:</p>
+
+<p>“What? What’s that? Don’t!”</p>
+
+<p>But Mrs. Carmody said defiantly:</p>
+
+<p>“I will. Just to pay you.... To show you....”
+And she began again:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“‘I should like to imagine</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">A moonlight in which there would be no machine guns!</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">For it is possible</div>
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_291">[291]</span>      <div class="verse indent0">To come out of a trench or a hut or a tent or a church all in ruins;</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">To see the black perspective of long avenues</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">All silent;</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The white strips of sky</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">At the sides, cut by the poplar trunks;</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The white strips of sky</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Above, diminishing—</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The silence and blackness of the avenue</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Enclosed by immensities of space</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Spreading away</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Over No Man’s Land....</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">For a minute ...</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">For ten....</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">There will be no star-shells</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">But the light of the untroubled stars;</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">There will be no Verey light,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">But the light of the quiet moon</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Like a swan.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And silence!...’”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The moon was at that moment just tipping over the
+ridge of trees before us. Mrs. Carmody hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>“‘Then ... a long way ...’”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_292">[292]</span></p>
+
+<p>The voice of Madame Sélysette said slowly:</p>
+
+<p>“‘Then far away to the right ...’”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Carmody said: “Thank you!” and continued:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“‘Then far away to the right thro’ the moonbeams</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0"><i>Wukka Wukka</i> will go the machine guns,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And, far away to the left</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0"><i>Wukka Wukka</i></div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And sharply</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0"><i>Wuk</i> ... <i>Wuk</i> ... and then silence</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">For a space in the clear of the moon.’”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The impassive face of Gringoire that the moonlight
+just showed worked suddenly, the mouth just moving—oh,
+rather like a rabbit munching. He said:</p>
+
+<p>“I wrote that in Nieppe in September ’sixteen....”
+He added:</p>
+
+<p>“And it’s pleasant ... you two remembering....”</p>
+
+<p>He reached out his right hand and took Mrs. Carmody’s
+left, and his left and took Madame Sélysette’s
+right.</p>
+
+<p>“‘Rest,’” he said with his heavy tired voice, “‘after
+toil, port after stormy seas ...’” He paused and
+added after a moment: “‘Do greatly please!’”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_293">[293]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h3 class="nobreak" id="ENVOI">
+    <span lang="fr">ENVOI</span>
+    <br>
+    <span lang="fr">UNE PARTIE DE CRICKET</span>
+    <br>
+    BEING A LETTER WRITTEN FROM THE LINES OF SUPPORT TO
+    CAPITAINE UN TEL AT PARIS.
+  </h3>
+</div>
+
+
+<p lang="fr">Mon cher Monsieur, Camarade et Confrère,</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">C’était derrière le bois de Bécourt, un soir de juillet, et
+nous étions en train de jouer au cricket tandis que les obus
+allemands passaient au-dessus de nos têtes. Les obus allemands
+arrivaient, semblant vouloir crier le mot anglais
+<i lang="en">weary</i>,—qui veut dire fatigué,—puis changeant d’avis, ils
+disaient—et péremptoirement—<i>whack</i>. Mais en jouant au
+cricket, on oublie l’orchestre boche: on n’entend plus les
+obus qui passent. Nous courions; nous adressions des objurgations
+au malheureux qui n’attrapait pas la balle; nous
+discutions même, parce que les règles du jeu de cricket—qu’on
+joue avec une balle de tennis, deux marteaux et
+deux caisses de <i lang="en">bully-beef</i>—sont un peu élastiques. La
+pelouse est d’argile, dure et cuite par le soleil presque tropical;
+en fait d’herbe nous n’avons que des chardons, pour
+spectateurs et pour barrières à la fois, les mulets de transport,
+alignés. Mais jamais le cricket international qu’on
+joue sur le terrain des Lords, dans le bois de Saint-Jean,
+n’a été si accidenté ni si émouvant que notre partie de
+cricket derrière le bois de Bécourt, ce soir de juillet. Nous
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_294">[294]</span>avons crié, gesticulé, discuté, hurlé ... nous, les officiers
+anglais, mornes, taciturnes!</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">Je vous présente ces considérations en forme de lettre,
+mon cher ... j’aurais voulu plutôt écrire un essai, soigné,
+balancé, bien pensant. Mais il m’est impossible de ciseler
+de la prose ces jours-ci. “Que voulez-vous,”—comme disent
+nos Tommies,—“c’est la guerre!” J’ai passé vingt-cinq ans
+à chercher des cadences, à chasser des assonances, avec
+une rage acharnée, comme celle du bon père Flaubert.
+Mais aujourd’hui je n’écris que des lettres,—longues, diffuses,
+banales. L’autre affaire demande trop de temps, de
+loisir,—de chance!</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">Donc, nous étions en train de jouer au cricket, quand
+je vis passer tout près de nous un officier français de ma
+connaissance,—officier d’une de ces batteries de 75, admirables,
+et que, la nuit surtout, nous avons trouvées tellement
+réconfortantes, à cause de leur voix qui roulait sans
+cesse, à peu de mètres derrière notre dos. C’était un colosse
+gris-bleu, aux yeux bruns et sombres, à la moustache brune
+et lourde. Il restait là, campé sur ses jambes et sur sa canne,
+comme quelque instrument de guerre à trois jambes,
+silencieux et d’acier. Et quand je m’approchai de lui, il me
+dit:</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">—<i lang="en">I find that a little shocking. Very shocking!</i> (Je trouve
+ça un peu shocking. Même très shocking.)</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">Il regardait les joueurs de cricket qui continuaient à
+crier, à gesticuler et à courir entre les chardons gigantesques
+et les jambes des mulets dangereux. Je m’écriai:</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">—Au nom du bon Dieu, pourquoi?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_295">[295]</span></p>
+
+<p lang="fr">Il ne cessait pas de regarder les joueurs, et réfléchit longtemps
+avant de répondre. Et ce fut moi qui, m’impatientant,
+commençai à parler, et même à gesticuler. Je disais que
+nous étions nouvellement sortis des tranchées; que le jeu
+donnait la santé, remettait le moral, faisait oublier la guerre
+... que sais-je? Il réfléchissait toujours, et moi je parlais
+toujours. Puis enfin, il dit:</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">—<i lang="en">I find that this war should be a religion. On coming
+out the trenches one should sit—and reflect. Perhaps one
+should pray</i> ... (Je trouve que cette guerre devrait être
+conduite en religion. En sortant des tranchées l’on devrait
+s’asseoir—et réfléchir. Peut-être devrait-on prier.)</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">Et puis ... je parlai encore longuement sans qu’il répondît
+autre chose que:</p>
+
+<p>—<i lang="en">I find that, all the same.</i></p>
+
+<p lang="fr">Alors j’éclatai de rire. Car la situation me semblait tout
+d’un coup allégorique. Et si vous y pensez, mon cher, vous
+verrez pourquoi je riais. C’est parce que c’était lui, le
+représentant de Cyrano de Bergerac, qui parlait l’anglais
+et employait les monosyllabes d’un lord Kitchener de
+théâtre; tandis que moi, le représentant de tant de milords
+et officiers qui pendant tant de siècles n’ont rien trouvé de
+plus à dire que les deux syllabes “O ... ah”,—moi, qui
+aurais dû porter monocle et favoris jaunes, j’étais occupé à
+hurler et à mimer des phrases d’un français assez incohérent,
+comme un vrai Tartarin. Et tous les autres—officiers
+et O. R.—de mon régiment continuaient à sauter, à crier
+et à rire comme des enfants méridionaux.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_296">[296]</span></p>
+
+<p lang="fr">Et, en vérité, le changement est étonnant et quelque peu
+émouvant. Nous avons toujours eu l’idée—tout le monde,
+même le Français a eu l’idée—que le peuple français, et
+surtout les officiers et soldats français étaient gais, débonnaires,
+loquaces, goguenards,—“bretteurs et hâbleurs sans
+vergogne.” Eh bien, j’ai voyagé en permission de Steenewerck
+à Paris,—voyage qui dura dix-sept heures. Et, pendant
+ces dix-sept heures, quoiqu’il y eût toujours des officiers
+français assis dans les voitures, ou debout dans les couloirs
+du train, le voyage a été le plus silencieux que j’aie fait
+de ma vie. Personne ne parlait. Mais personne! Il y avait
+des colonels, des commandants, des capitaines. Et je ne
+puis croire que ce fût tout à fait de ma faute. Il est vrai
+que, partout dans le train, on lisait: “Taisez-vous; méfiez-vous”,—et
+le reste. Mais c’eût été impossible que <em>tous</em> ces
+messieurs gris-bleus m’eussent attribué les oreilles ennemies
+dont parle l’affiche. Je portais l’uniforme khaki.</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">Non, certainement, le voyage n’a pas été accidenté. Je
+vais vous en raconter les incidents: de Hazebrouck à Calais
+cinq officiers français, qui n’échangèrent pas deux mots; de
+Calais à Abbeville, trente officiers. Je m’adressai à un capitaine
+d’artillerie, en grognant que le train marchait très
+lentement. Il me répondit en anglais:</p>
+
+<p>—<i lang="en">Many troops moving!</i></p>
+
+<p lang="fr">Et puis, silence!</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">A Amiens entre un monsieur en civil. C’était un samedi
+vers huit heures du matin, et le train avait l’air de ne
+vouloir arriver à Paris qu’après trois heures de l’après-midi.
+Comme j’avais des affaires à Paris et que je devais partir le
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_297">[297]</span>lundi avant six heures, je demandai à ce monsieur si je
+trouverais les banques fermées, et les ministères, et les
+magasins. Il me répondit qu’il n’en savait rien, qu’il n’était
+pas chez lui à Paris. Il allait à Jersey pour prendre possession
+du corps d’une jeune fille qui, ayant été noyée à
+Dieppe, avait flotté jusqu’à Jersey. <em>Et lui aussi me répondit
+en anglais.</em></p>
+
+<p lang="fr">Il commençait à pleurer tout doucement.</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">Et puis ... silence; les officiers regardaient ce monsieur
+avec des yeux qui ne disaient rien. Mais ce n’était pas gai!</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">A Creil montent deux dames, jolies et bien mises. Elles
+ont assez parlé, ces deux-là. Croix-Rouge, œuvres de charité,
+colonels, familles! Mais les officiers ne les regardaient
+jamais. Pas un ne levait les yeux, quoiqu’elles fussent
+jeunes, jolies, bien mises....</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">Tandis que, pendant le trajet de Rouen à Albert, nous
+autres—qui n’allions pas en permission!—nous avons
+chanté, parlé aux demoiselles qu’on voyait sur les perrons;
+joué au football le long du train; grimpé sur le toit des
+voitures.</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">J’exagère un peu, naturellement, ces différences. Ce n’est
+pas un article que je suis en train d’écrire, c’est une lettre.
+Mais je reconte quand même ce que mes yeux ont vu et
+mes oreilles entendu.... Et comment l’expliquer? Parce
+que ce n’est pas assez de dire—comme on me l’a dit assez
+souvent—que si, en Angleterre, les Allemands étaient
+établis entre York et Manchester, s’ils avaient saisi les industries,
+pillé les villes,—et fait ce que font les Boches!—nous
+aussi, nous serions tristes, mornes, silencieux. Je ne
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_298">[298]</span>parle pas de la population civile de mon pays; je parle de
+gens dont la vie n’est pas gaie, qui sont expatriés, loin de
+leur patrie, et qui souffrent, je vous l’assure, d’une nostalgie
+très sincère. Car là-bas, sur la Somme ou en Belgique, l’on
+se sent bien oublié, bien abandonné, et très, très isolé, d’un
+isolement semblable à l’isolement de ... Eh bien! c’est
+comme si l’on était suspendu—nous, quelques millions
+d’hommes!—sur un tapis, dans les infinitudes de l’espace.
+Les routes qui s’étendent devant nous cessent tout d’un
+coup, à quelques mètres, dans le <i lang="en">No Man’s Land</i>. Et c’est
+bien triste à contempler, des grand’routes qui cessent tout
+d’un coup. Et puis les sentiers par lesquels on est venu—et
+qui s’étendent entre soi et son pays—sont des chemins que
+l’on ne doit pas traverser.... Et, tout comme un autre,
+l’on aime sa femme, sa maison, ses enfants, ses parents,
+son coin du feu, ses champs, ses fumiers, ses bœufs et ses
+bois.... Le soldat français a cela, au moins, qu’il se bat
+chez soi! Et c’est quelque chose pour lui, comme individu.</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">Je suppose que c’est pour oublier, non seulement les obus
+allemands, mais aussi celles qui nous sont si chères, le coin
+du feu où nous avons si souvent devisé, les champs, les
+fumiers, les bœufs et les bois,—c’est pour trouver “l’herbe
+qui s’appelle l’oubli”, que nous jouons au cricket près de
+Bécourt, et sortons des tranchées en donnant des coups de
+pied à un football qui saute à travers les corps des hommes
+tombés, vers les Allemands. Est-ce faiblesse? Est-ce la
+source dont nous tirons ce que nous avons de fermeté, de
+hardiesse, de courage? Je n’en sais rien.</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">Aussi bien que moi, mon cher, vous avez connu la
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_299">[299]</span>difficulté de définir exactement et en termes justes les différences,
+les nuances des différences, qu’il y a entre des nations.
+Nous commençons par développer une théorie—et
+nous théorisons beaucoup trop tôt; ou bien nous prenons le
+contre-pied d’une théorie admise depuis des siècles. Nous
+avons eu en Angleterre les caricatures du dix-neuvième
+siècle, des guerres de Napoléon I<sup>er</sup>, qui nous montraient
+le Français selon l’imagination populaire anglaise. C’était
+un coiffeur, mince et affamé, qui ne mangeait que des
+grenouilles. Et vous autres, vous aviez votre John Bull,
+gros comme un bœuf, le ventre grand comme le ventre
+d’un bœuf, et qui dévorait des bœufs entiers. Ou vous
+aviez le milord qui se suicidait par pur spleen. Elles étaient
+stupides, ces caricatures, mais il m’est impossible de croire
+qu’elles ne fussent pas sincères. Les Anglais qui s’étaient
+battus en France en 1815 avaient cherché ce qu’ils voyaient—mais
+ils l’avaient vu. De même pour les Français.</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">De même, peut-être, pour moi. J’étais venu d’une Angleterre
+émotionnée, couverte, de l’île d’Anglesey jusqu’à
+North Foreland, d’affiches patriotiques et coloriées, et puis,
+de la frontière belge jusqu’à Paris, j’ai vu une France sans
+affiches, grise, silencieuse, préoccupée. Mais pour moi il n’y
+avait rien de neuf à trouver la France préoccupée—parce
+que, pour moi, la France a toujours été la France des
+champs, des villages, des bois et des paysans. Et la France
+des paysans est une France bien laborieuse, qui travaille
+sans cesse entre bois et étangs ou sous les oliviers du Midi.</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">Et pour moi la population anglaise a toujours été un
+peuple des villes. Or, ce sont les habitants des grandes-villes
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_300">[300]</span>qui, tout en travaillant aussi bien que vous voudrez,
+ont besoin de faire de temps en temps la noce—chacun
+selon sa nature. Et c’est peut-être là la raison—la <i>causa
+causans</i>—des différences entre l’armée française et nous
+autres. L’armée anglaise est une armée ouvrière, l’armée
+française est une armée plutôt paysanne. Des paysans, et
+surtout des paysans français, ont l’habitude de mesurer les
+sévérités, les nécessités implacables de la nature. Ils les
+confrontent sans cesse, pendant des semaines, des mois,
+des années. Ils ne peuvent y échapper,—ils ne peuvent pas
+s’évader de la contemplation des maux de la vie, des vents
+et des vers qui détruisent les récoltes, en prenant des jours
+de permission, en faisant des calembours, ou par cet
+“humour” âcre et plutôt triste qui est, peut-être, la qualité
+souveraine du Tommy anglais. Car inscrire sur un obus
+qu’on va lancer contre les Boches les mots “<i lang="en">Love to little
+Willie</i>” peut paraître stupide, shocking à des gens qui
+n’ont jamais été là-bas. Mais la psychologie humaine est
+très compliquée, et il est certain que la lecture d’inscriptions
+de ce genre sur les grands obus à côté desquels on passe le
+long des chaussées a beaucoup fait pour nous encourager
+quand nous avons avancé d’Albert vers La Boisselle.
+Pourquoi? C’est difficile à dire. C’est peut-être parce que,
+les obus étant terribles et funestes, voici un obus qui est
+devenu ridicule, joyeux, ou même humain. Car nous
+sommes tous anthropomorphistes—et qu’un seul obus
+puisse se commettre à être le véhicule d’un jeu d’esprit,
+cela suffit pour donner à des coeurs superstitieux l’idée que
+tous les obus peuvent être un peu moins surhumains qu’ils
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_301">[301]</span>n’en ont l’air. Car on a peur des obus. Ce sont les messagers
+des dieux qui ont soif, qui se manifestent en sifflant, qui
+disent qu’ils sont fatigués, mais qui détruisent, en deux
+minutes, des villages, des fumiers, des champs entiers. De
+même pour la partie de cricket que nous avons jouée parmi
+des chardons couverts de poussière et qui cachaient les
+ossements des soldats tombés. C’était peut-être sacrilège,
+peut-être stupide.</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">Mais je vous assure, mon cher, que ce paysage de Bécourt,
+Fricourt, Mametz n’était pas joyeux. C’était en juillet, et
+le soleil laissait tomber ses rayons sur les vallées larges,
+sur la poussière qui montait au ciel, sur les pentes, sur les
+bois noirs. Mais cette terre ne riait pas! Elle s’étendait loin,
+loin; et sous l’horizon bleu-gris se trouvaient les terrains
+auxquels personne ne voulait penser. Non, la nature, là,
+semblait terrible et funeste—territoire où le Destin aveugle
+et implacable devait se manifester à des millions d’êtres.
+Et puis nous y avons joué au cricket—et tout de suite ce
+paysage funeste et surhumain est devenu ... est devenu
+un champ de cricket!</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">Pour un intellectuel, un terrain restera un terrain, qu’on
+y voie en l’air des bombes, des obus ou une balle de tennis.
+Mais pour nous autres, un terrain où nous avons joué au
+cricket devient moins terrible, et nous y passerons nos
+jours avec plus de contentement, malgré les ossements des
+tombés qui se cachent sous la poussière des chardons
+énormes. C’est stupide, c’est sacrilège, si vous voulez. Mais
+nous sommes ainsi faits, nous autres qui sortons des grandes
+villes pour faire la guerre. Moi, je suis comme cela, j’ai
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_302">[302]</span>senti comme cela, là-bas, derrière le bois de Bécourt, par
+un soir de juillet 1916.</p>
+
+<p class="right" lang="fr">
+  Et je reste toujours votre affectionné,<br>
+  <span style="margin-right: 2em;">G.</span>
+</p>
+
+<p lang="fr">P.S. Et je vous prie de remarquer que toutes les personnes
+que j’ai rencontrées entre Steenewerck et Paris
+parlaient l’anglais. C’est déjà quelque chose.</p>
+
+<p class="center large" style="margin:2em" lang="en">
+THE END
+</p>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77802 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook #77802
+(https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77802)