landscape or of influence is also played there. The town hides itself
in a little hollow upon the farther flank of a hill, and though the
right of Edward’s line reposed upon it, and though it was within a
bowshot of the houses that the boy his son was pressed so hard, yet
Creçy hides away from the battlefield. And as you come in by the
eastern road, which takes you all along the crest of the English
position, there is nothing before you but a naked and a silent land,
falling in a dip to where the first of the French charge failed, and
rising in long empty lengths of fallow and of grass to where you can
see, a single mark for the eye in so much loneliness, the rude cross
standing on the place where the blind King of Bohemia fell.
Loneliest of all, with a loneliness which perpetually haunts me
whenever I write of it, is that battlefield which I know best and have
most closely studied. It is the battlefield on which, as I believe,
more was done to affect both military and general history than on any
other--the battlefield of Wattignies. Here the Revolution certainly
stood, to go under with the fall of Maubeuge, which was at the last
gasp for food, or, with the raising of that siege, to go forward. By
the success at Wattignies the siege was raised. In military history
also it is of great account, for at Wattignies for the first time the
great mind of Carnot, the darting, aquiline mind of that man whose
school of tactics produced Napoleon, first dealt with an army. At
Wattignies for the first time the concentration at the fullest expense
of fatigue, of overwhelming force upon one point of the objective,
came into play and was successful. Such tactics needed the Infantry
which as a fact were used in their development. Still, they were new.
Now, Wattignies, where so much was done to change the art of war and
to transform Europe, is as lonely as anything on earth. Lines of high
trees, a wood almost uncultivated (a rare thing in France), a swept,
wintry upland without a house or a barn, a little huddled group of poor
steadings round a tiny church, and against it all the while rain and
hard weather driving from the French plains below: that is Wattignies.
Up through those sunken ways by which Duquesnoy’s division charged
you will not meet a single human being, and that heath over which the
emigrant nobles countercharged for the last time under the white flag
is similarly bereft of men. Nowhere do you more feel the unnatural
loneliness of those haunted places of honour than in this which I
believe to be the chief one of all the European fields.
Novissima Hora
Time, which is to the mind a function of the mind, stretches and
contracts, as all men know, when the mind impelled by forces not its
own demands the expansion or the lessening of time. Thus in a moment,
as the foolish physicists can prove, long experiences of dreams are
held; and thus hours upon hours of other men’s lives are lost to us
for ever when we lie in profound sleep; and I knew a man who, sleeping
through a morning upon the grassy side of a hill many years ago, slept
through news that seemed to have ruined him and his, and slept on to a
later moment when the news proved false and the threat of disaster was
lifted; during those hours of agony there had been for him no time.
They say that with men approaching dissolution some trick of time is
played, or at least that when death is very near indeed the whole scale
and structure of thought changes, just as some have imagined (and it is
a reasonable suspicion) that the common laws governing matter do not
apply to it in some last stage of tenuity, so the ordered sequence of
the mind takes on something fantastic and moves during such moments in
a void.
So must it have been with that which I will now describe.
A man lay upon a bed of a common sort in a room which was bare of
ornament. But he had forgotten the room. He was a man of middle age,
corpulent, and one whose flesh and the skin of whose flesh had sagged
under disease. His eyes were closed, his mouth, which was very fine,
delicate, and firm, alone of his features preserved its rigour. Those
features had been square and massive, their squareness and their
strength the more emphasised by the high forehead with its one wisp of
hair. But though the strength of character remained behind the face,
the muscular strength had left it, for that body had suffered agony.
The man so lying was conscious of little; the external world was
already beyond his reach. He knew that somehow he was not suffering
pain, and the mortal fatigue that oppressed him had, in that unexpected
absence of pain, some opportunity for repose. Neither his room nor what
was left of companionship round him, nor the voices that he knew and
loved, nor those others that he knew too well and despised, reached his
senses. For many years the air in which he had lived and in which he
was now perishing had been to him in his captivity a mournful delight.
It was a tropical air, but enlivened by the freshness of the sea and
continually impelled in great sea winds above him. Now he felt that
air no longer, and might have been so many thousand miles away in
the place where he had been born, or many thousand miles more, in the
snows of a great campaign, or under the violent desert sun of certain
remembered battles; it was all one to him, for he only held to life by
one thread within, and outer things had already left him.
Within, however, his mind in that last weakness still busily turned;
no longer considering as it had considered during the activity of a
marvellous life what answers the great questions propounded to the soul
of man should receive, still less noting practical and immediate needs
or considering set problems. His mind for once, almost for the first
time, was this last time seeing things go by.
First he saw dull pageantries which had been the common stuff of his
life, and he was confused by half-remembered, half-restored, faint
cheers of distant crowds, colours, and gold, and the twin flashes
of gems and of steel. And through it now and then strains of solemn
music, and now and then the tearing cry of bronze: the bugles. All
these sensations, confused and blurred, re-arose, and as they re-arose,
welling up into him like a mist, there re-arose those permanent
concomitants of such things. He felt again the nervous dread of folly
and mishap, wondered upon the correctness of his conduct, whether he
had not given offence somewhere to someone ... whether he had not been
the subject of criticism by some tongue he feared. And as all that part
of his great life returned to him, his face even in that extremity
showed some faint traces of concern such as it had borne when in truth
and in the body he had moved in the midst of a Court.
Next, like shadows disappearing, all that ghostly hubbub passed, but
before he could be alone another picture succeeded, and he thought to
feel beneath him the rolling of the sea. He was a young man looking
for land, with others standing behind upon the deck, watching him
in envy because of the miracles he was to do with armed men when he
should touch the shore. And yet he was not a young man. He was a man
already weighted with disappointment and with loss of love, and with
some confused conception of breaking under an immense strain; and those
who were on the deck behind him watching him, watched him with awe and
with pity, and with a sort of dread that did not relieve his spirit.
So young and old in the same moment, he felt in the brain the swinging
of a ship’s deck. So he strained for land, a land where he should
conquer, and at the same time it was a land where he should be utterly
alone, and utterly forget, and be filled with nothing but defeat. The
contradiction held him altogether.
Then this movement also steadied and changed, and he had the sensation
of a man walking up some steep hill, some hill too steep. He was
leading a horse and the horse stumbled. It was bitterly cold, but he
did not feel the cold: the roaring and the driving round him in the
snow. Next he was in the saddle; there was a little eminence from
which he saw a plain. Slight as the beast was his seat galled him. He
sat his mount badly, and he dreaded lest it should start with him as it
had started the day before. But even as he so worried himself on his
bad horsemanship, all his mind changed at quite another sight.
For in the plain below that little height the great battalions went
forward, rank upon rank upon rank; it was a review and it was a
battle and it was a campaign. Mad imagery! the uniforms were the
uniforms of gala, the drum-majors went before the companies of the
Guard, gigantic, twirling their gigantic staves; the lifted trumpets
of the Cuirassiers sounded as though upon some great stage, for the
mere glory of the sound. And mass upon mass, regular, instinct with
purpose, innumerable, the army passed below. There was no end to it.
He knew, he was certain, as he strained his eyes, that it would never
end. It was afoot, and it would march for ever. Far off, beyond the
line, upon the flank of it, distant and terrible went the packed mass
of the guns, and you could hear faintly amid the other noises of the
advance the clatter-clank-clank of the limber. And from so far off he
saw the leading sabres of commanders saluting him from his old arm.
Here again was a mixture for him of things that do not mix in the true
world: Glory and Despair. This endless army was his, and yet would go
on beyond him. It was his and not his. There was room upon the colours
for a million names of victories, but every victory in some way carried
the stamp of defeat. And yet seeing all that pageant as the precursor
of failure, he saw it also as something constructive. He thought of
wood that burns and is consumed, but is the fuel of a flame of fire and
all that fire can do.
As he so thought, like a wind and a spirit blowing through the whole
came some vast conception of a God. And once again the mixed, the
dual feeling seized him, more greatly than before. It was a God that
drove them all, and him. And that God was in his childhood, and he
remembered his childhood very clearly. It was something of which he had
been convinced in childhood, a security of good.... Look how the army
moved!...
And now it had halted.
Here his mind failed, and he had died. It was Napoleon.
On Rest
There was a priest once who preached a sermon to the text of “Abba,
Father.” On that text one might preach anything, but the matter that he
chose was “Rest.” He was not yet in middle age, and those who heard him
were not yet even young. They could not understand at all the moment
of his ardent speech, and even the older men, seeing him to be but in
the central part of life, wondered that he should speak so. His eyes
were illuminated by the vision of something distant; his heart was not
ill at ease, but, as it were, fixedly expectant, and he preached from
his little pulpit in that little chapel of the Downs, with rising and
deeper powers of the voice, so that he shook the air; yet all this
energy was but the praise or the demand for the surcease of energy, and
all this sound was but the demand for silence.
It is a thing, I say, incomprehensible to the young, but gradually
comprehended as the years go droning by, that in all things (and in
proportion to the intensity of the life of each) there comes this
appetite for dissolution and for repose: I do not mean that repose
beyond which further effort is demanded, but something final and
supreme.
This priest, a year or so after he had appealed with his sermon before
that little country audience in the emptiness of the Downs, died. He
had that which he desired, Rest. But what is it? What is the nature of
this thing?
Note you how great soldiers, when their long campaigns are done, are
indifferent to further wars, and look largely upon the nature of
fighting men, their objects, their failures, their victories, their
rallying, their momentary cheers. Not that they grow indifferent to
that great trade which is the chief business of a State, the defence or
the extension of the common weal; but that after so much expense of all
the senses our God gave them, a sort of charity and justice fills their
minds. I have often remarked how men who had most lost and won, even in
arms, would turn the leisured part of their lives to the study of the
details of struggle, and seemed equally content to be describing the
noble fortunes of an army, whether it were upon the crest of advancing
victory, or in the agony of a surrender. This was because the writers
had found Rest. And throughout the history of Letters--of Civilisation,
and of contemporary friends, one may say that in proportion to the
largeness of their action is this largeness and security of vision at
the end.
Now, note another thing: that, when we speak of an end, by that very
word we mean two things. For first we mean the cessation of Form, and
perhaps of Idea; but also we mean a goal, or object, to which the
Form and the Idea perpetually tended, without which they would have
had neither meaning nor existence, and in which they were at last
fulfilled. Aristotle could give no summing up but this to all his
philosophy, that there was a nature, not only of all, but of each,
and that the end determined what that nature might be; which is also
what we Christians mean when we say that God made the world; and
great Rabelais, when his great books were ending, could but conclude
that all things tended to their end. Tennyson also, before he died,
having written for so many years a poetry which one must be excused in
believing considerable, felt, as how many have felt it, the thrumming
of the ebb tide when the sea calls back the feudal allegiance of the
rivers. I know it upon Arun bar. The Flood, when the sea heaves up
and pours itself into the inland channels, bears itself creatively,
and is like the manhood of a man--first tentative, then gathering
itself for action, then sweeping suddenly at the charge. It carries
with it the wind from the open horizon, it determines suddenly, it
spurs, and sweeps, and is victorious; the current races; the harbour is
immediately full.
But the ebb tide is of another kind. With a long, slow power, whose
motive is at once downward steadily towards its authority and its
obedience and desire, it pushes as with shoulders, home; and for many
hours the stream goes darkly, swiftly, and steadily. It is intent,
direct, and level. It is a thing for evenings, and it is under an
evening when there is little wind, that you may best observe the symbol
thus presented by material things. For everything in nature has in
it something sacramental, teaching the soul of man; and nothing more
possesses that high quality than the motion of a river when it meets
the sea. The water at last hangs dully, the work is done; and those
who have permitted the lesson to instruct their minds are aware of
consummation.
Men living in cities have often wondered how it was that the men in the
open who knew horses and the earth or ships and the salt water risk so
much--and for what reward? It is an error in the very question they
ask, rather than in the logical puzzle they approach, which falsifies
their wonder. There is no reward. To die in battle, to break one’s
neck at a hedge, to sink or to be swamped are not rewards. But action
demands an end; there is a fruit to things; and everything we do (here
at least, and within the bonds of time) may not exceed the little
limits of a nature which it neither made nor acquired for itself, but
was granted.
Some say that old men fear death. It is the theme of the debased and
the vulgar. It is not true. Those who have imperfectly served are ready
enough; those who have served more perfectly are glad--as though there
stood before them a natural transition and a condition of their being.
So it says in a book “all good endings are but shining transitions.”
And, again, there is a sonnet which says:
We will not whisper: we have found the place
Of silence and the ancient halls of sleep,
And that which breathes alone throughout the deep
The end and the beginning; and the face
Between the level brows of whose blind eyes
Lie plenary contentment, full surcease
Of violence, and the ultimate great peace
Wherein we lose our human lullabies.
Look up and tell the immeasurable height
Between the vault of the world and your dear head;
That’s Death, my little sister, and the Night
That was our Mother beckons us to bed:
Where large oblivion in her house is laid
For us tired children now our games are played.
Indeed, one might quote the poets (who are the teachers of mankind)
indefinitely in this regard. They are all agreed. What did Sleep and
Death to the body of Sarpedon? They took it home. And every one who
dies in all the Epics is better for the dying. Some complain of it
afterwards I will admit; but they are hard to please. Roland took it as
the end of battle; and there was a Scandinavian fellow caught on the
north-east coast, I think, who in dying thanked God for all the joy he
had had in his life--as you may have heard before. And St. Anthony of
Assisi (not of Padua) said, “Welcome, little sister Death!” as was his
way. And one who stands right up above most men who write or speak said
it was the only port after the tide-streams and bar-handling of this
journey.
So it is; let us be off to the hills. The silence and the immensity
that inhabit them are the simulacra of such things.
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD.
PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Mr. H. Abrahims, of Eastcheap and The Firs, Guildford, Surrey.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.