ON EVERYTHING
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
PARIS
HILLS AND THE SEA
EMMANUEL BURDEN, MERCHANT
A CHANGE IN THE CABINET
ON NOTHING AND KINDRED SUBJECTS
THE PYRENEES
MARIE ANTOINETTE
ON EVERYTHING
BY
H. BELLOC
SECOND EDITION
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
_First Published_ _November 4th 1909_
_Second Edition_ _1910_
_To
Madame Antoine Pescatore_
CONTENTS
PAGE
ON SONG 1
ON AN EMPTY HOUSE 7
THE LANDFALL 16
THE LITTLE OLD MAN 22
THE LONG MARCH 29
ON SATURNALIA 38
A LITTLE CONVERSATION IN HEREFORDSHIRE 45
ON THE RIGHTS OF PROPERTY 53
THE ECONOMIST 60
A LITTLE CONVERSATION IN CARTHAGE 68
THE STRANGE COMPANION 74
THE VISITOR 81
A RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PAST 90
THE REASONABLE PRESS 97
ASMODEUS 104
THE DEATH OF THE COMIC AUTHOR 113
ON CERTAIN MANNERS AND CUSTOMS 121
THE STATESMAN 130
THE DUEL 138
ON A BATTLE, OR “JOURNALISM,” OR “POINTS OF VIEW” 148
A DESCENDANT OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 159
ON THE APPROACH TO WESTERN ENGLAND 167
THE WEALD 174
ON LONDON AND THE HOUSES IN IT 180
ON OLD TOWNS 187
A CROSSING OF THE HILLS 194
THE BARBER 201
ON HIGH PLACES 209
ON SOME LITTLE HORSES 217
ON STREAMS AND RIVERS 223
ON TWO MANUALS 230
ON FANTASTIC BOOKS 238
THE UNFORTUNATE MAN 244
THE CONTENTED MAN 253
THE MISSIONER 261
THE DREAM 270
THE SILENCE OF THE BATTLEFIELDS 276
NOVISSIMA HORA 283
ON REST 289
These essays appeared for the most part in _The Morning Post_, and are
here reprinted by the courtesy of the Editor.
ON EVERYTHING
On Song
Some say that when that box was opened wherein lay ready the evils of
the world (and a woman opened it) Hope flew out at last.
That is a Pagan thing to say and a hopeless one, for the true comfort
that remained for men, and that embodied and gave reality to their
conquering struggle against every despair, was surely Song.
If you would ask what society is imperilled of death, go to one
in which song is extinguished. If you would ask in what society a
permanent sickness oppresses all, and the wealthy alone are permitted
to make the laws, go to one in which song is a fine art and treated
with criticism and used charily, and ceases to be a human thing. But if
you would discover where men are men, take for your test whether songs
are always and loudly sung.
Sailors sing. They have a song for work and songs for every part of
their work, and they have songs of reminiscence and of tragedy, and
many farcical songs; some brutal songs, songs of repose, and songs in
which is packed the desire for a distant home.
Soldiers also sing, at least in those Armies where soldiers are still
soldiers. And the Line, which is the core and body of any army, is the
most singing of them all. The Cavalry hardly sing, at least until they
get indoors, for it would be a bumping sort of singing, and gunners
cannot sing for noise, while the drivers are busy riding and leading
as well. But the Line sings; and if you will consider quickly, all
the great armies of the world, and consider them justly, not as the
pedants do, but as men do who really feel the past, you would hear
mounting from them always continual song. Those men who marched behind
Cæsar in his triumph sang a song, and the words of it still remain (so
I am told); the armies of Louis XIV and of Napoleon, of the Republic,
and even of Algiers, made songs of their own which have passed into
the great treasury of European letters. And though it is difficult to
believe it, it is true, the little troops of the Parliament marching
down the river made a song about Mother Bunch, coupled with the name of
the Dorchester Hills; but I may be wrong. I was told it by a friend; he
may have been a false friend.
They sang in the Barons’ wars; they sang on the way to Lewes. They sang
in that march which led men to the assault at Hastings, for it was
written by those who saw the column of knights advancing to the foot of
the hill that Taillefer was chosen for his great voice and rode before
the host, tossing his sword into the air and catching it again by the
hilt (a difficult thing to do), and singing of Charlemagne and of the
vassals who had died under Roncesvalles.
Song also illuminates and strengthens and vivifies all common life, and
on this account what is left of our peasantry have harvest songs, and
there are songs for mowing and songs for the midwinter rest, and there
is even a song in the south of England for the gathering of honey,
which song, if you have not heard it, though it is commonly known, runs
thus:--
_Bees of bees of Paradise,
Do the work of Jesus Christ,
Do the work which no man can.
God made man, and man made money,
God made bees and bees made honey.
God made big men to plough, to reap, and to sow,
God made little boys to keep off the rook and the crow._
This song is sung for pleasure, and, by the way of singing it, it is
made to scan.
Indeed, all men sing at their labour, or would so sing did not dead
convention forbid them. You will say there are exceptions, as lawyers,
usurers, and others; but there are no exceptions to this rule where all
the man is working and is working well, and is producing and is not
ashamed.
Rowers sing, and their song is called a Barcarolle; and even men
holding the tiller who have nothing to do but hold it tend to sing a
song. And I will swear to this that I have heard stokers when they
were hard pressed starting a sort of crooning chorus together, which
shows that there is hope for us all.
The great Poets who are chiefly this, men capable of perfect expression
(though of no more feeling than any other of their kind), are dignified
by Song, much more than by any others of their forms of power. Consider
that song of Du Bellay’s which he translated out of the Italian, and in
which he has the winnower singing as he turns the winnowing fan. That
is great expression, because no man can read it without feeling that if
ever he had to do the hard work of winnowing this is the song he would
like to sing.
Song also is the mistress of memory, and though a scent is more
powerful, a song is more general, as an instrument for the resurrection
of lost things. Thus exiles who of all men on earth suffer most deeply,
most permanently, and most fruitfully, are great makers of songs. The
chief character in songs--that almost any man can write them, that any
man at all can sing them, and that the greatest are anonymous--is never
better proved than in this quality of the songs of exiles. There is a
Highland song of which I have been told, written in the Celtic dialect
and translated again into English by I know not whom, which, for all
its unknown authorship (and I believe its authorship to be unknown)
enshrines that radiantly beautiful line:
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.
The last anonymous piece of silver that was struck in the mint of the
Roman language has that same poignant quality.
Exul quid vis canere?
All the songs that men make (and they are powerful ones) regretting
youth are songs of exile, and in a sense (it is a high and true sense)
the mighty hymns are songs of exile also.
Qui vitam sine termino
Nobis donet in patria,
that is the pure note of exile, and so is the
Coheredes et sodales
In terra viventium,
and in this last glorious thing comes in the note of marching and of
soldiers as well as the note of separation and of longing. But after
all the mention of religion is in itself a proof of song, for what
spell could there ever be without incantation, or what ritual could
lack its chaunt?
If any man wonders why these two, Religion and Song, are connected, or
thinks it impious that they should so be, let him do this: if he is an
old man let him cover his face with his hand and remember at evening
what occasions stand out of the long past, full of a complete life, and
of an acute observation and intelligence of all that was around: how
many were occasions for song! There are pictures a man will remember
all his life only because he watched them for a pastime, because he
heard a woman singing as he watched them, and there are landscapes
which remain in the mind long after other things have faded, but so
remain because one went at morning with other men along the road
singing a walking song. And if it is a young man who wishes to make
trial of this truth, he also has his test. For he will note as the
years continue how, while all other pleasures lose their value and
gradation, Song remains, until at last the notes of singing become like
a sort of sacrament outside time, not subject to decay, but always
nourishing men, for Song gives a permanent sense of futurity and a
permanent sense of the presence of Divine things. Nor is there any
pleasure which you will take away from middle age and leave it more
lonely, than this pleasure of hearing Song.
It is that immortal quality in the business which makes it of a
different kind from the other efforts of men. Write a good song and
the tune leaps up to meet it out of nothingness. It clothes itself
with tune, and once so clothed it continues on through generations,
eternally young, always smiling, and always ready with strong hands
for mankind. On this account every man who has written a song can be
certain that he has done good; any man who has continually sung them
can be certain that he has lived and has communicated life to others.
It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to
sing them.
On an Empty House
A man a little over forty years of age had desired to take a house in
London. He had lived hitherto between a cottage in the country, where
he had stables and where he made it his pleasure to ride, and rooms in
town off St. James’s Street. He had also two clubs, one of which he
continually visited. From his thirtieth year onward he had come more
often to town; he was heavier in build; he rode with less pleasure.
He had taken to writing and had published more than one little study,
chiefly upon the creative work of other men. He was under no compulsion
to write or to do any other thing, for he had a private fortune of
about £3000 a year. This he managed with some ability so that it
neither increased nor diminished, and like many other Englishmen, he
had wisely invested abroad, from the year 1897 onwards. Now, I say,
that middle age was upon him, London controlled him more and more. He
was in sympathy with the maturity of the great town, which responded
to his own maturity. He could find a leisure in it which he had never
found in youth. The multitude of the books and the easy access to
them, the sensible and varied conversation of men of his own rank and
age, and that sort of peopled quiet which supports the nights of men
living in London--all these had become a sort of food to him; they
greatly pleased him. So also did the physical food of London. He took
an increasing pleasure in changing the choice of his wine, which (an
invariable effect of age) he now distinguished. His rooms in London had
thus become for now some years past more and more his home; but he had
begun to feel that rooms could not be a home; and he would set up for
himself; he would be a master. He would feel again and in a greater way
that comfortable consciousness of self and of surroundings fitting one
which a man has in early youth every time he enters his father’s house.
With this purpose the man of whom I speak looked at several houses,
going first to agents, but finding himself disappointed in all. He
soon learned a wiser way, which was to ask friends of what houses they
had heard, and then to see for himself whether he liked them, and to
do this before even he knew what rent was asked. Also he would wander
up and down the streets, his heavy, well-dressed figure ponderous and
moving at a measured pace, and as he so wandered he would cast his eyes
over houses.
London, like all great things, has about it a quality for which I do
not know the word, but when I was at school there was a Greek word for
it. “Manifold” is too vague; “multitudinous” would not explain the idea
at all. What I mean is a quality by which one thing contains several
(not many) parts, each individual, each with a separate life and
colour of its own, and yet each living by a common spirit which builds
up the whole. Thus London, a great town, is also a number (not a large
number) of towns within. And to this man, who had cultivation and so
often wrote upon the creative work of other men, the spirit and the
delight of each quarter was well known. The words “Chelsea,” “Soho,”
“Mayfair,” “Westminster,” “Bloomsbury”--all meant to him things as
actual as colours or as chords of music, and each represented to him
not measurable advantages or drawbacks, but separate kinds of pleasure.
He loved them all, but he gravitated, as it is right and natural that
a man of his wealth and sort should do, to the houses north of Oxford
Street and south of the Marylebone Road. He had no territorial blood,
nor had his ancestry engaged in commerce; he was European in every
ramification of his descent. He came of doctors, of soldiers, of
lawyers, and in a word, of that middle class which has now disappeared
as a body and remains among us only in a few examples whose tradition,
though we respect it, is no longer a corporate tradition. For three
hundred years his people had had Greek, Latin, and French, and had in
alternate generations experienced ease or constraint according to the
circumstances of English life. He was the first to enjoy so complete a
leisure.
To this part of London, therefore, he naturally turned at last, and
following the sound rule that a man’s rent should be one-tenth of
his income--if that income is moderate--he looked about for a large
and comfortable house. The very streets had separate atmospheres for
him. He fixed at last upon what seemed a very nice house indeed in
Queen Anne Street. First he looked at it well from without, admired
the ironwork and the old places for lanterns, and the extinguishers;
he looked at the solid brick, and at that expression which all houses
have from the position of their windows. It was a house such as his
own people might have built or lived in under George III, and in
the earlier part of the reign of that unfortunate, though virtuous,
monarch. In a little while he had gone so far as to get his ticket from
the agent, and he would view the house. He came one day and another; he
was very much taken with the arrangement of it and with the quiet rooms
at the back, and he was pleased to see that the second staircase was
so arranged that there would be little noise of service. He remembered
with a sort of sentimental but pleasing feeling his childhood passed in
such a house, for his father had been a surgeon, somewhat famous, and
they lived in such rooms and in such a neighbourhood. He was pleased
with the old-fashioned arrangements for heating the water; he did not
propose to change them. But he was glad that electric light had taken
the place of gas, and he did propose to change the disposition of this
light made by the last tenants.
With every day that he visited the place it pleased him more. It
became a daily occupation of his, and it took up most of his thoughts.
The agents were gentle and kind; no mention of competitors was made,
and the reason for this would have been plain to any other but himself,
for he was offering a larger rent than the house was worth. But his
offer was not yet confirmed. Many years of successful investment, in
which, as I have said, he had neither increased nor diminished his
fortune, had given him a just measure of prudence in these affairs,
and he would not sign in a definite way until the whole scheme was
quite clear in his mind. For a week he visited and revisited, until the
caretaker, an elderly woman of rich humour, began to count upon the
conversation which she enjoyed at his daily appearances.
* * * * *
In the wealthier part of London--next door to the modern abomination of
some new man or other who was destined to no succession, to no honour,
and whose fate in the future would probably prove to be some gamble
or other upon the Continent--next door to such a house, just round
the corner, so that you could only see the Park sideways, lived an
admirable woman. She was the wife of a Peer and the mother of numerous
children, of whom the eldest now served as a soldier and was an expense
to them, as was the youngest, from the traditions of his school, which
was also expensive. It was her husband’s business, when that half
of the politicians to which he belonged was not in office, to speak
at meetings and to write lithographed letters imploring aid of the
financial kind for institutions designed to relieve the necessities of
the poor. He also shot both on his own land and on that of friends,
and he would fish in Scotland, but as he had no land there, he had to
hire the fishing. The same was true of his sport with the birds in that
Northern Kingdom; so one way and another they were not rich for their
position, and this admirable woman it was who made all things go well.
She was strong in body, handsome in face, and of a clear, vivacious
temper, which pleased all the world about her, and made it the better
for her presence. But none of these attributes were so worthy, nor gave
her so general an admiration, as the splendid and evident virtue of her
soul. There was in her very gesture, and in every tone of her voice
when she chose to be serious, that fundamental character of goodness
which is at once the chief gift to mortals from Almighty God, and the
chief glory and merit of those recipients who have used it well. She
had done so, and the whole of her life was a sacrament and a support to
all who were blessed with her acquaintance.
Among these was the Man who was taking the House, for he had known her
brother very well at college. She was much of the same rank as himself,
though a little older. During many years of his youth he had so taken
for granted her perfections and her companionship, that these had,
as it were, made his world for him; he had judged the world by that
standard. Now that he knew the world, he used that standard no more.
It would not be just to say that at her early marriage he had felt any
pain save a necessary loss of some companionship. He had never had a
sister; he continued to receive her advice and to enter her house as
a relative, for though he was not a relative, the very children would
have been startled had they ever chosen to remember that he was not
one, and his Christian name came as commonly upon their lips, upon
hers, and upon her husband’s as any name under their own roof. He would
not, of course, finally take this house until she had seen it.
He was waiting, therefore, in the hall one morning of that winter a
little impatiently to show her his choice, and to take her verdict upon
certain details of it before he should write the last letter which
should bind him to the place. He heard a motor-car come up, looked out
and saw that it was hers, and met her upon the steps and led her in.
She also was pleased with everything she saw, and her pleasure suddenly
put light into the house, so that if you had seen her there, moving and
speaking and laughing, you would have had an illusion that the sun had
come shining in all the windows; a true physical illusion. You would
have remembered the place as sunlit. She noted the panelling, she
approved of one carved fireplace, she disapproved of another; she said
the house was too large for him; she was sure it would suit him. She
showed him where his many books would go, and warned him on a hundred
little things which he had never guessed at, in the arrangement of a
home. She was but half an hour in his company, and still smiling, still
full of words, she went away. He was to see her again in a very short
time; he was to lunch at their house, and he stood for a moment after
the door had shut in the silence of the big place, as though wondering
how he should pass his time. The hall in which he lingered was surely
very desolate; the bare boards he was sure he would remember, however
well they were covered; he never could make those cold walls look
warm.... Anyhow, one didn’t live in one’s hall. He just plodded
upstairs slowly to what had been the drawing-room of the house, and the
big brass curtain rods offended him; the rings were still upon them. He
would move them away, but still they offended him. The lines were too
regular, and there was too little to appeal to him. He hesitated for a
moment as to whether he would go up farther and look again at the upper
rooms which they had discussed together, but the great well of the
staircase looked emptier than all the rest; the great mournful windows,
filled with a grey northern sky, lit it, but gave it no light. And he
noticed, as he trod the bare wood of the last flight, how dismally his
footsteps echoed. Then he called up the caretaker and gave her the key,
surprised her with a considerable fee, and said he would communicate
that day with the agents, and left.
When he got to lunch at his friends’ house he told them that he would
not take the Empty House after all, whereat they all buzzed with
excitement, and asked him what he had found at the last moment. And he
said, in a silly sort of way, that it was not haunted enough for him.
But anyhow he did not take it: he went back to live in his rooms, and
he lives there still.
The Landfall
It was in Oxford Street and upon the top of an omnibus during one of
those despairing winter days, the light just gone, and an air rising
which was neither vigorous nor cold, but sodden like the hearts of all
around, that I fell wondering whether there were some ultimate goal for
men, and whether these adventures of ours, which grow tamer and so much
tamer as the years proceed, are lost at last in a blank nothingness,
or whether there are revelations and discoveries to come. This debate
in the mind is very old; every man revolves it, none has affirmed a
solution, though all the wisest of men have accepted a received answer
from authority external to themselves. I was not on that murky evening
concerned with authority, but with the old problem or rather mood of
wonder upon the fate of the soul.
As I so mused to the jolting of the bus I began unconsciously to
compare the keenness of early living with the satiety or weariness
of later years; and so from one thing to another, I know not how, I
thought of horses first, and then of summer rivers, and then of a
harbour, and then of the open sea, and then of the sea at night, till
this vague train took on the form of an exact picture, and my mind
lived in an unforgotten day.
* * * * *
In my little boat, with my companion asleep in the bows, I steered at
the end of darkness eastward over a warm and easy sea.
It was August: the roll was lazy, and the stars were few and distant
all around, because the sky, though clear, was softened by the pleasant
air of summer at its close; moreover, an arch of the sky before me was
paling and the sea-breeze smelt of dawn.
My little boat went easy, as the sea was easy. There was just enough
of a following wind dead west to keep her steady and to keep the
boom square in its place right out a-lee, nor did she shake or swing
(as boats so often will before a following wind), but went on with a
purpose gently, like a young woman just grown used to her husband and
her home. So she sailed, and aft we left a little, bubbling wake, which
in the darkness had glimmered with evanescent and magic fires, but now,
as the morning broadened, could be seen to be white foam. The stars
paled for an hour and then soon vanished; although the sun had not yet
risen, it was day.
The line of the horizon before me was fresh and sharp, clear tops
of swell showed hard against the faint blue of the lowest sky, and
for some time we were thus alone together in the united and living
immensity of the sea: my sleeping companion, my boat, and I. Then it
was that I perceived a little northward and to the left of the rising
glow a fixed appearance very far away beyond the edge of the world; it
was grey and watery like a smoke, yet fixed in outline and unchanging;
it did not waver but stood, and so standing confirmed its presence. It
was land; and this dim but certain vision which now fixed my gaze was
one of the mighty headlands of holy Ireland.
The noble hill lifted its mass upon the extreme limits of sight, almost
dissolved by distance and yet clear; its summit was high and plain, and
in the moment it was perceived the sea became a new thing. It was no
longer void or absorbing, but became familiar water neighbourly to men;
and was now that ocean, whose duty and meaning it is to stream around
and guard the shores on which are founded cities and armies, families
and enduring homes. The little boat sailed on, now in the mood for
companions and for friends.
My companion stirred and woke; he raised himself upon his arm, and,
looking forward to the left and right, at last said, “Land!” I told him
the name of the headland. But I did not know that there lay beyond it
a long and narrow bay, nor how, at the foot of this land-locked water,
a group of small white houses stood, and behind it a very venerable
tower.
It was not long before the sun came up out of a sea more clear and into
a sky more vivid than you will see within the soundings of the Channel.
It poured upon all the hills an enlivening new light quite different
from the dawn, and this was especially noticeable upon the swell and
the little ridges of it, which danced and shone so that one thought of
music.
Meanwhile the land grew longer before us and this one headland merged
into the general line, and inland heights could be seen; a little later
again it first became possible to distinguish the divisions of the
fields and the separate colours of rocks and of grassland and of trees.
A little while later again the white thread showed all along that coast
where the water broke at the meeting of the rocks and the sea; the tide
was at the flood.
We had, perhaps, three miles between us and the land (where every
detail now stood out quite sharp and clear) when the wind freshened
suddenly and, after the boat had heeled as suddenly and run for a
moment with the scuppers under, she recovered and bounded forward. It
was like obedience to a call, or like the look that comes suddenly into
men’s eyes when they hear unexpectedly a familiar name. She lifted at
it and she took the sea, for the sea began to rise.
Then there began that dance of vigour which is almost a combat, when
men sail with skill and under some stress of attention and of danger.
I would not take in an inch because of the pleasure of it, but she
was over-canvased all the same, and I put her ever so little round for
fear of a gybe, but the pleasure of it was greater than the fear, and
the cordage sang, and it gave me delight to glance over my shoulder at
that following rush which chases a small boat always when she presses
before a breeze and might poop her if her rider did not know his game.
That which had been a long, long sail through the night with an almost
silent wake and the bursting of but few bubbles, and next a steady
approach before the strong and easy wind, had now become something
inspired and exultant, a course which resembled a charge; and the more
the sea rose the larger everything became--the boat’s career, the land
upon which she was determined, and our own minds, while all about us as
we urged and raced for shore were the loud noises of the sea.
We ran straight for a point where could be seen the gate to the inland
bay; we rounded it, and our entry completed all, for when once we had
rounded the point all fell together; the wind, the heaving of the
water, the sounds and the straining of the sheets. In a moment, and
less than a moment, we had cut out from us the vision of the sea, a
barrier of cliff and hill stood between us and the large horizon. The
very lonely slopes of these western mountains rose solemn and enormous
all around, and the bay on which we floated, with only just that way
which remained after our sharp turning, was quite lucid and clear,
like the seas by southern beaches where one can look down and see a
world underneath our own. The boom swung inboard, the canvas hung
in folds, and my companion forward cut loose the little anchor from
its tie, the chain went rattling down, and so silent was that sacred
place that one could hear an echo from the cliffs close by returning
the clanking of the links; the chain ran out and slowly tautened as
she fell back and rode to it. Then we let go the halyards, and when
the slight creaking of the blocks had ceased there was no more noise.
Everything was still.
* * * * *
There was the vision that returned to me.
I was in the midst of it, I was almost present, I had forgotten the
streets of the treacherous and evil town, when suddenly, I know not
what, a cry, or some sharp movement near me, brought me back from such
a place and day, from such an experience, such a parallel and such a
security.
With that return to the common business of living the thought on which
my mind had begun its travel also returned, but in spite of the mood I
had so recently enjoyed my doubts were not resolved.
The Little Old Man
It was in the year 1888 (“O noctes coenasque deum!”--a tag) that, upon
one of the southern hills of England, I came quite unexpectedly across
a little old man who sat upon a bench that was there and looked out to
sea.
Now you will ask me why a bench was there, since benches are not
commonly found upon the high slopes of our southern hills, of which the
poet has well said, the writer has well written, and the singer has
well sung:--
The Southern Hills and the South Sea
They blow such gladness into me
That when I get to Burton Sands
And smell the smell of the home lands,
My heart is all renewed, and fills
With the Southern Sea and the South Hills.
True, benches are not common there. I know of but one, all the way from
the meeting place of England, which is upon Salisbury Plain, to that
detestable suburb of Eastbourne by Beachy Head. Nay, even that one of
which I speak has disappeared. For an honest man being weary of labour
and yet desiring firewood one day took it away, and the stumps only now
remain at the edge of a wood, a little to the south of No Man’s Land.
Well, at any rate, upon this bench there sat in the year 1888 a little
old man, and he was looking out to sea; for from this place the English
Channel spreads out in a vast band 600 ft. below one, and the shore
perhaps five miles away; it looks broader than any sea in the world,
broader than the Mediterranean from the hills of Alba Longa, and
broader than the Irish Sea from the summit of the Welsh Mountains:
though why this is so I cannot tell. The little old man treated my
coming as though it was an expected thing, and before I had spoken to
him long assured me that this view gave him complete content.
“I could sit here,” he said, “and look at the Channel and consider the
nature of this land for ever and for ever.” Now though words like this
meant nothing in so early a year as the year 1888, yet I was willing
to pursue them because there was, in the eyes of the little old man, a
look of such wisdom, kindness, and cunning as seemed to me a marriage
between those things native to the earth and those things which are
divine. I mean, that he seemed to me to have all that the good animals
have, which wander about in the brushwood and are happy all their
lives, and also all that we have, of whom it has been well said that
of every thing which runs or creeps upon earth, man is the fullest
of sorrow. For this little old man seemed to have (at least such was
my fantastic thought in that early year) a complete acquiescence in
the soil and the air that had bred him, and yet something common to
mankind and a full foreknowledge of death.
His face was of the sort which you will only see in England, being
quizzical and vivacious, a little pinched together, and the hair on
his head was a close mass of grey curls. His eyes were as bright as
are harbour lights when they are first lit towards the closing of our
winter evenings: they shone upon the daylight. His mouth was firm, but
even in repose it permanently, though very slightly, smiled.
I asked him why he took such pleasure in the view. He said it was
because everything he saw was a part of his own country, and that just
as some holy men said that to be united with God, our Author, was the
end and summit of man’s effort, so to him who was not very holy, to
mix, and have communion, with his own sky and earth was the one banquet
that he knew: he also told me (which cheered me greatly) that alone of
all the appetites this large affection for one’s own land does not grow
less with age, but rather increases and occupies the soul. He then made
me a discourse as old men will, which ran somewhat thus:--
“Each thing differs from all others, and the more you know, the more
you desire or worship one thing, the more does that stand separate: and
this is a mystery, for in spite of so much individuality all things are
one.... How greatly out of all the world stands out this object of my
adoration and of my content! you will not find the like of it in all
the world! It is England, and in the love of it I forget all enmities
and all despairs.”
He then bade me look at a number of little things around, and see how
particular they were: the way in which the homes of Englishmen hid
themselves, and how, although a great town lay somewhat to our right
not half a march away, there was all about us silence, self-possession,
and repose. He bade me also note the wind-blown thorns, and the
yew-trees, bent over from centuries of the south-west wind, and the
short, sweet grass of the Downs, unfilled and unenclosed, and the long
waves of woods which rich men had stolen and owned, and which yet in a
way were property for us all.
“There is more than one,” said I in anger, “who so little understands
his land that he will fence the woods about and prevent the people from
coming and going: making a show of them, like some dirty town-bred
fellow who thinks that the Downs and the woods are his villa-garden,
bought with gold.”
The little old man wagged his crooked forefinger in front of his face
and looked exceedingly knowing with his bright eyes, and said: “Time
will tame all that! Not they can digest the county, but the county
them. Their palings shall be burnt upon cottage hearths, and their sons
shall go back to be lackeys as their fathers were. But this landscape
shall always remain.”
Then he bade me note the tides and the many harbours; and how there was
an inner and an outer tide, and the great change between neaps and
springs, and how there were no great rivers, but every harbour stood
right upon the sea, and how for the knowledge of each of these harbours
even the life of a man was too short. There was no other country, he
said, which was thus held and embraced by the mastery of the Atlantic
tide. For the patient Dutch have their towns inland upon broad rivers
and ships sail up to quays between houses or between green fields;
and the Spaniards and the French (he said) are, for half their nature
and tradition, taught by a tideless sea, but we all around have the
tide everywhere, and with the tide there comes to character salt and
variety, adventure, peril, and change.
“But this,” I said, “is truer of the Irish.”
He answered: “Yes, but I am talking of my own soil.”
Then when he had been silent for a little while he began talking of the
roads, which fitted into the folds of the hills, and of the low long
window panes of men’s homes, of the deep thatch which covered them, and
of that savour of fullness and inheritance which lay fruitfully over
all the land. It gave him the pleasure to talk of these things which it
gives men who know particular wines to talk of those wines, or men who
have enjoyed some great risk together to talk together of their dangers
overcome.
It gave him the same pleasure to talk of England and of his corner of
England that it gives some venerable people sometimes to talk of those
whom they have loved in youth, or that it gives the true poets to
mouth the lines of their immortal peers. It was a satisfaction to hear
him say the things he said, because one knew that as he said them his
soul was filled.
He spoke also of horses and of the birds native to our Downs, but not
of pheasants, which he hated and would not speak to me about at all.
He spoke of dogs, and told me how the dogs of one countryside were the
fruits of it, just as its climate and its contours were; notably the
spaniel, which was designed or bred by the mighty power of Amberley
Wildbrook, which breeds all watery things. He showed me how the plover
went with the waste flats of Arun and of Adur and of Ouse, and he
showed me why the sheep were white and why they bunched together in a
herd. “Because,” he said, “the chalk pits and the clouds behind the
Down are wide patches of white; so must the sheep be also.” For a
little he would have told me that the very names of places, nay, the
religion itself, were grown right out of the sacred earth which was our
Mother.
* * * * *
These truths and many more I should have learned from him, these
extravagences and some few others I should have whimsically heard, had
I not (since I was young) attempted argument and said to him: “But all
these things change, and what we love so much is, after all, only what
we have known in our short time, and it is our souls within that lend
divinity to any place, for, save within the soul, all is subject to
time.”
He shook his head determinedly and like one who knows. He did assure
me that in a subtle mastering manner the land that bore us made us
ourselves, and was the major and the dominant power which moulded, as
with firm hands, the clay of our being and which designed and gave us,
and continued in us, all the form in which we are.
“You cannot tell this,” I said, “and neither can I; it is all guesswork
to the brevity of man.”
“You are wrong,” he answered quietly. “I have watched these things for
quite 3000 years.” And before I had time to gasp at that word he had
disappeared.
The Long March
The French Service, by some superstition of theirs which is probably
connected with clear thinking and with decision, have perpetually in
mind two things where Infantry is (or are) concerned; these two things
are, marching power and carrying weight.
It is their thesis, or rather it is their general opinion, that of
all things in which civilised armies may differ the power of trained
endurance is the most variable, and that the elements in which this
endurance is most usefully manifested are the elements of bearing a
weight for long and of marching for long and far between a sleep and a
sleep.
There is no Service in the world but would agree that rapidity of
movement (other things being equal) is to the advantage of an army.
Not even the Blue Water School (for which school armies are distant
and vague things) would deny that. It is even true that most men
(though by no means all) who have to do with thinking out military
problems would admit that, other things again being equal, the power
of carrying weight was an advantage to an army. But the French Service
differs from its rivals in this, that it regards these two factors in
a sort of fundamental way, testing the whole Army by them and keeping
them perpetually present before the whole of that Army, so that the
stupidest driver in front of the guns is worrying in a muddled way
as to whether the Line have not too much to do, and the cleverest
young captain on the staff is wondering whether the strain put upon
a particular regiment has not been too great that day. The exercise
is continual, and is made as much a part of the men’s mode of thought
as cricket is made a part of the mode of thought of a boy at school,
or as the daily paper is made a part of the mode of thought of a man
who comes in daily from the suburbs to gamble in the City of London.
And the French Service shows its permeation in the matter of these
two ideas by this very characteristic test, that not only are the
supporters of either element in the power of Infantry numerous and
enthusiastic, but also that those (and I believe for a moment Negrier)
who think these theories have been overdone recognise at the back of
their minds the general importance of them; while the great neutral
mass that sometimes discuss, but hardly ever think originally, take
them as it were for granted in all their discussions.
It would be possible to continue for some time the exposition of
this most interesting thing; it would be possible to show how this
point of view was connected with the conservatism of the French mind.
It would be possible and fascinating perhaps to show the relation
of such theories with the mentality which is convinced upon the
retention of private property and upon the subdivision of it, upon the
all-importance of agriculture to a State, upon the possession at no
matter what sacrifice of a vast amount of vaulted, tangible, material
gold. But my business in these lines is not to argue whether the French
are right or wrong in this military aspect of their philosophy, nor to
show them wise or unwise in regarding even the railways of a modern
State as being only supplementary to marching power, and even the vast
and mobile modern methods of road carriage as being only supplementary
to the knapsack, which can go across ploughed fields or climb a tree.
My business is not to discuss the philosophy of the thing, though I am
grievously tempted to do so, but to speak of one particular thing I saw.
I saw the beginning, the middle, and the end of it. Had I myself been
in the Line such things might have been so familiar to me that they
would not in the long run have stood out in my imagination, and I might
not have been as fascinated as I now am by the recollections of that
strange experience.
The Infantry that was the support of our pieces (for we were
Divisionary Artillery) was quartered near to us in a little village
of what is called “the Champagne Pouilleuse,” that is, “the lousy,”
or “the dusty” Champagne, to distinguish it from the chalky range of
the mountain of Rheims, those hot slopes whereon is grown the grape
producing the most northern and the most exhilarating of wines.
In this little village were we side by side, and very far off along the
horizon we had seen the night before, to the north, guns and linesmen
together, the goal of our journey, which was that roll in the ground
upon the summit of which the very tall spire of a famous shrine led the
eye on toward the larger mass of the Cathedral. The Road was straight
both upon the map and in our weary minds. It crossed the fields on
which had been decided the fate of Christendom in the defeat of Attila
and again in the cannonade of Valmy. Little we cared for these things.
What we cared about, or rather what the fellows on foot cared about,
was a distance of nearly thirty miles with fifty pound and more upon
one’s back.
I lay in the straw of the stable near my horses, whose names were Pacte
and Basilique--Basilique was the elder one and was ridden, and Pacte
was the led horse--when I heard the sound of a bugle. I was already
awake, I cannot tell why, I had no duties; I strolled out from the
stable into the square and watched the Line assembling. They were of
all sorts and sizes in the dark morning, for the French are profoundly
indifferent to making a squad look neat. Some shuffled, others ran,
others affected to saunter to where the sergeant, with the roll in his
hand and a lantern held above it, stood ready to call out the names. As
they gathered to fall in I heard their comments, which were familiar
enough, for they did not differ from the comments we also made when
any effort was required of us. They cursed all order and discipline.
Some boasted that the thing was not tolerable, and that they were the
men to make the system impossible. Others cunningly hinted that they
would deceive the doctor and fall out, and in general it would have
been conceded by any man listening to them that this march could never
be accomplished.
With the usual oaths, dreadful to an intellectual ear, but to us a sort
of atmosphere, they fell in, and all over the village square were other
companies falling in and other sergeants holding other rolls. Then
the names were called, with no trappings, in a rather low voice, and
rapidly.
One man was missing, and the sergeant looked round, saw me leaning
against my stable door, and told me to go for the guard; but when I had
got four men from the guard the missing man had come up. He was a very
little man, in a hurry; he was not punished, he was warned. Hardly had
I returned and hardly had the four men of the guard (who that day of
the march were Cavalry) gone back straggling when the various companies
shuffled into place, formed fours, and began the marching column. No
drums rolled, no bugle inspirited them. The little village was now more
clearly seen under a growing light, and there were bands of colour
above the distant ridge of the Argonne. It was not quite four in the
morning, and there was a mist from the meadows beside the road.
They went out silently. There was a sort of step kept, but it was very
loose. They sang no songs, they were a most unfortunate crowd.
* * * * *
We had been for two hours upon our horses, we who had started long
after sunrise after our horses had been groomed and fed and watered,
and treated like Christian men--for it was a saying of ours that the
Republic was kinder to a horse than to a man, because a horse cost
money. We had gone, I said, two hours also along the road, trotting and
walking alternately, with the interminable clatter-clank-clank of the
limber and the pieces behind us, and with the occasional oath of the
sergeant or the corporal when a trace went loose or when a bit of bad
riding on the part of some leader checked the column of guns; we had so
pounded along into the heat of the day; the sun was beginning to offend
us--we were more in a sweat than our horses--when we heard a long way
off upon the road before us the faint noise of a song, and soon we saw
from one of those recurring summits of the arrow-like French road, the
jolly fellows of the Line. They were not more than a thousand yards
before us; they made a little dust as they went, and as they went
their rifles swinging on the shoulder gave them a false appearance
of unity--for unity they were not caring at all. Somewhat before we
reached them we saw their cohesion break, they became a doubled mob
upon either side of the road, and we knew that they were making the
regulation halt of five minutes, which is ordered at the end of every
hour; but probably their commanding officer had somewhat advanced or
retarded this in order to make a coincidence with the going by of the
guns.
We saw them as we approached lying in all attitudes upon either side
of the road, some few munching bread from the haversack, and some
few drinking from their gourds. As we came up they were compelled to
rise to salute another arm upon its passage, and their faces, all
their double hedge of faces, were full of insolence and of merriment,
for they had recently sung and eaten, and the march had done them
good--they had covered about eighteen miles.
So we went by, and when we had left them some few hundred yards we
again heard faintly behind us the beginning of a new song, the tune of
which was known among us as “The Washerwoman.” It is a good marching
song. But shortly after this we heard no more, for first the noise of
the horse hoofs extinguished the singing, and later distance swallowed
it up altogether.
* * * * *
We had come into quarters early in the afternoon, we had groomed our
horses and fed them, and watered them at the chalkiest stream, we had
brought them back to their stables, and the stable guard was set; those
who were not on duty went off about the village, and several, of
whom I was one, gathered in the house of a man whose relative in the
regiment had led us thither.
He received us well, for he was a farmer in a large way; he gave us
wine, bread, and eggs, and a little bacon. He said he hoped that no
more troops would come into the little village that day. We told him
that the Line would come, so far as we knew, but he answered that he
had heard from his brother, who was mayor of the adjoining commune,
that the Line were to be quartered in that neighbouring parish, that
they would march through the village in which we were, and sleep in the
houses about a mile ahead of us upon the road to Rheims.
While he was speaking thus we heard again, but much louder than before
(for it came upon us round the corner of the village street), the noise
of a marching song. They were singing at the top of their voices--they
were in a sort of fury of singing.