there just the same. I was not far from Ypres and the line of the Yser
during the first battle for the Channel ports. Do you know how near we
were to the edge of the precipice not long before that Christmas? We
were on the verge. We were nearly over. I knew it then. So when, later
still, I used to meet in France an enigmatic, clay-coloured figure with
a visage seamed with humorous dolours, loaded with pioneering and
warlike implements, rifles, knives, tin hats, and gas masks, I always
felt I ought to get down and walk. Instead of which he used to salute
me as smartly as he could. He will never know how cheap and embarrassed
he used to make me feel. I wish I knew enough to do him some justice.
And here once more is the leave boat, and this is another Christmas
Eve. It was a still twilight, with a calm sea and a swell on our
starboard beam. We rolled. We looked back on England sinking in the
night. A black smudge of a destroyer followed us over with its eye on
us. The main deck was crowded with soldiers--you could not get along
there--singing in their lifebelts; at times the chorus, if approved,
became a unanimous roar. They didn't want to be there. They didn't want
to die. They wanted to go home. But they sang with dolorous joy. The
chorus died; and we heard again the deep monody of the sea, like the
admonitory voice of fate. The battles of the Somme were to come before
the next Christmas; though none of us on that boat knew it then. And
where is the young officer who went ashore under the electric glare of
the base port, singing also, and bearing a Christmas tree? Where is
that wild lieutenant of the Black Watch--he had a splendid eye, and a
voice for a Burns midnight--who cried rollicking answers from the back
of the crowd to the peremptory megaphone of the landing officer, till
the ship was loud and gay, and the authorities got really wild? And the
boy of a new draft, whose face, as I passed him where he had fallen
in,--the light dropped to it,--was pale and nervous, and his teeth
chattering! Ah, the men we met in France, and the faces we saw briefly,
but remember, that were before the Somme! Shadows, shadows.
It rained next morning. This was Christmas Day. We were going to the
trenches. Christians awake, salute the happy morn. There was a prospect
of straight road with an avenue of diminishing poplars going east, in
an inky smear, to the Germans and infinity. The rain lashed into my
northerly ear, and the A.S.C. motor-car driver, who was mad, kept
missing three-ton lorries and gun-limbers by the width of the paint.
One transport mule, who pretended to be frightened of us, but whose
father was the devil and his mother an ass, plunged into a pond of
black Flanders mud as we passed, and raked us with solvent filth. We
wiped it off our mouths. God rest you merry, gentlemen. A land so
inundated that it inverted the raw and alien sky was on either hand.
The mud clung to the horses and mules like dangling walnuts and bunches
of earthy and glistening grapes. The men humped themselves in soddened
khaki. The noise of the wheels bearing guns was like the sound of doom.
The rain it rained. O come, all ye faithful!
We got to a place where there was no more wheeled traffic. There was
nothing moving, nothing alive. That country was apparently abandoned.
To our front and left, for no apparent reason, three little dirty
yellow clouds burst simultaneously over a copse, with a smash which
made you feel you ought to be tolerant to men with shell-shock. On our
right was an empty field. Short momentary flames leaped constantly from
its farthermost hedge, with a noise like the rapid slamming of a row of
iron doors. Heavy eruptions, as though subterranean, were going on all
the time, the Lord knew where. But not a man was in sight till we got
to a village which looked like Gomorrah the day after it happened. Some
smoke and red dust were just settling by one of the ruins, and a man
lay there motionless with his face in the rubbish....
There was a habitation where sacking kept the wind and rain from
unlucky holes, with holly behind pictures tacked to its walls, and a
special piece of inviting mistletoe over a saucy lady from _La Vie
Parisienne_. There was an elderly and serious colonel, who had an
ancestor at Chevy Chase, but himself held independent views on war; and
a bunch of modest boys with sparkling eyes and blithe and ironic
comments. They also did not discuss the war in the way it is discussed
where war is but lowered street lights. We had bully beef, the right
sort of pudding,--those boys must have had very nice sisters,--and
frosted cake. There were noises without, as the book of the play has
it, and plenty of laughter within, and I enjoyed myself with a sort of
veiled, subconscious misery; for I liked those lads; and we are so
transitory today.
Then one of them took me for a Christmas walk in his country. "Have you
got your gas helmet?" he said. "That's right. It makes your eyes stream
with tears, and you look such a silly ass." On we went. I began
Christmas Day in the trenches by discovering the bottom of the mud too
late; though you never can tell, when a noise like the collapse of an
iron roof goes off behind you, where you are going to put your feet at
that moment. We went through a little wood, where the trees were like
broken poles with chewed ends. Over our heads were invisible things
which moaned, shrieked, and roared in flight. It was astonishing that
they were invisible. Sometimes the bottom of the mud of that
communication trench was close, and sometimes not; you knew when you
had tried. And as the parapets usually had dissolved at the more
dubious places, and I was told and heard that Fritz had machine guns
trained on them, I did not waste much time experimenting.
I found the firing-line, as one usually does, with surprise. There was
a barrier of sandbags, oozing grey slime, and below, in a sort of
little cave, with his body partly resting in a pool of water, a soldier
asleep. Just beyond was a figure so merged in the environment of
aqueous muck and slime that I did not see him till he moved, and his
boots squelched. He lifted a wet rag in the grey wall and got
surprisingly rapid with a rifle which was thrust through the hole and
went off; and then turned to look at us. "That fellow opposite is a
nuisance," said my officer. "He's always potting at this corner." "Yes,
sir," said the figure of mud, darkly louring under its tin hat, "but I
know where the blighter is now, and I'll get the beggar yet." With a
sudden recollection he then touched iron, and grinned.
Slithering above the ankles in well-worked paste, and leaning against a
wall of slime, I tried to find "the nuisance opposite" with a
periscope; but before me was only a tangle of rusty wire, a number of
raw holes in shabby green grass, some objects lying about which looked
like tailors' dummies discarded to the weather, and an awe-inspiring
stillness.
There were some interchanges with serious men, who did not sing, but
who sat about in mud, or leaned against it, and were covered with it,
or who were waiting with rifles ready, or looking through periscopes,
or doing things over fires which smoked till the eyes were red. "Come
and see our mine crater," said my guide. "It's a topper. Fritz made it,
but we've got it."
I knew where that crater would be, and I thought the less of it as a
spectacle. But "out there" one must follow one's leader wherever he
goes. He was going to make me crawl after him in "No Man's Land," and
it was not dark yet. So I acquired that sinking sensation described in
the pill advertisements. The mud got down our collars; but we arrived,
though I don't know how, because I was thinking too much. It was only a
deep yellow hole in the ground, too, that crater, with barbed wire
spilled into it and round it; and you were warned to breathe gently in
it, for Fritz might lob a bomb over. He was six yards off.
In the forlorn and dying light of that Christmas Day I then noticed a
muffled youngster beside me, who might have been your son, alone,
gripping a rifle with a fixed bayonet, his thoughts Heaven knows where,
a box of bombs ready to hand in the filth; and his charge was to give
first warning of movement in that stillness beyond. As we crawled away,
leaving him there, I turned to look at that boy of yours, and his eyes
met mine....
_December 1916._
XX. The Ruins
For more than two years this town could not have been more remote from
us if it had been in another planet. We were but a few miles from it,
but the hills hid it, and the enemy was between us and the hills. This
town was but a name, a legend.
Now the enemy had left it. When going into it for the first time you
had the feeling that either you or the town was bewitched. Were you
really there? Were time and space abolished? Or perhaps the town itself
was supernatural; it was spectral, projected by unknowable evil. And
for what purpose? Suspicious of its silence, of its solitude, of all
its aspects, you verified its stones by touching them, and looked about
for signs that men had once been there.
Such a town, which has long been in the zone of fire, and is then
uncovered by the foe, gives a wayfarer who early ventures into it the
feeling that this is the day after the Last Day, and that he has been
overlooked. Somehow he did not hear Gabriel's trumpet; everybody else
has gone on. There is not a sound but the subdued crackling of flames
hidden somewhere in the overthrown and abandoned. There is no movement
but where faint smoke is wreathing slowly across the deserted streets.
The unexpected collapse of a wall or cornice is frightful. So is the
silence which follows. A starved kitten, which shapes out of nothing
and is there complete and instantaneous at your feet--ginger stripes,
and a mew which is weak, but a veritable voice of the living--is first
a great surprise, and then a ridiculous comfort. It follows you about.
When you miss it, you go back to look for it--to find the miserable
object racing frantically to meet you. Lonely? The Poles are not more
desolate. There is no place as forlorn as that where man once was
established and busy, where the patient work of his hands is all round,
but where silence has fallen like a secret so dense that you feel that
if it were not also so desperately invisible you could grasp a corner
of it, lift the dark veil, and learn a little of what was the doom of
those who have vanished. What happened to them?
It cannot be guessed. House fronts have collapsed in rubble across the
road. There is a smell of opened vaults. All the homes are blind. Their
eyes have been put out. Many of the buildings are without roofs, and
their walls have come down to raw serrations. Slates and tiles have
avalanched into the street, or the roof itself is entire, but has
dropped sideways over the ruin below as a drunken cap over the
dissolute. The lower floors are heaps of damp mortar and bricks. Very
rarely a solitary picture hangs awry on the wall of a house where there
is no other sign that it was ever inhabited. I saw in such a room the
portrait of a child who in some moment long ago laughed while it
clasped a dog in a garden. You continue to gaze at a sign like that,
you don't know why, as though something you cannot name might be
divined, if you could but hit upon the key to the spell. What is the
name of the evil that has fallen on mankind?
The gardens beyond are to be seen through the thin and gaping walls of
the streets, and there, overturned and defaced by shell-bursts and the
crude subsoil thrown out from dug-outs, a few ragged shrubs survive. A
rustic bower is lumbered with empty bottles, meat tins, a bird-cage,
and ugly litter and fragments. It is the flies which find these gardens
pleasant. Theirs is now the only voice of Summer, as though they were
loathly in the mouth of Summer's carcase. It is perplexing to find how
little remains of the common things of the household: a broken doll, a
child's boot, a trampled bonnet. Once in such a town I found a
corn-chandler's ledger.
It was lying open in the muck of the roadway, wet and discoloured. Till
that moment I had not come to the point of believing the place. The
town was not humane. It was not credible. It might have been, for all I
could tell, a simulacrum of the work of men. Perhaps it was the patient
and particular mimicry of us by an unknown power, a power which was
alarmingly interested in our doings; and in a frenzy over its partial
failure it had attempted to demolish its laborious semblance of what we
do. Was this power still observant of its work, and conscious of
intruders? All this was a sinister warning of something invisible and
malign, which brooded over our affairs, knew us too well, though
omitting the heart of us, and it was mocking us now by defiling in an
inhuman rage its own caricature of our appearance.
But there, lying in the road, was that corn-chandler's ledger. It was
the first understandable thing I had seen that day. I began to believe
these abandoned and silent ruins had lived and flourished, had once a
warm kindred life moving in their empty chambers; enclosed a
comfortable community, like placid Casterbridge. Men did stand here on
sunny market days, and sorted wheat in the hollows of their hands. And
with all that wide and hideous disaster of the Somme around it was
suddenly understood (as when an essential light at home, but a light
that has been casually valued, goes out, and leaves you to the dark)
that an elderly farmer, looking for the best seed corn in the
market-place, while his daughter the dairymaid is flirting with his
neighbour's son, are more to us than all the Importances and the Great
Ones who in all history till now have proudly and expertly tended their
culture of discords.
I don't know that I ever read a book with more interest than that
corn-chandler's ledger; though at one time, when it was merely a
commonplace record of the common life which circulated there,
testifying to its industry and the response of earth, it would have
been no matter to me. Not for such successes are our flags displayed
and our bells set pealing. It named customers at Thiepval, Martinpuich,
Courcelette, Combles, Longueval, Contalmaison, Pozieres, Guillemont,
Montauban. It was not easy to understand it, my knowledge of those
places being what it was. Those villages did not exist, except as
corruption in a land that was tumbled into waves of glistening clay
where the bodies of men were rotting disregarded like those of dogs
sprawled on a midden. My knowledge of that country, got with some
fatigue, anxiety, fright and on certain days dull contempt for the
worst that could happen, because it seemed that nothing could matter
any more, my idea of that country was such that the contrast of those
ledger accounts was uncanny and unbelievable. Yet amid all the misery
and horror of the Somme, with its shattering reminder of finality and
futility at every step whichever way you turned, that ledger in the
road, with none to read it, was the gospel promising that life should
rise again; the suggestion of a forgotten but surviving virtue which
would return, and cover the dread we knew, till a ploughman of the
future would stop at rare relics, holding them up to the sun, and dimly
recall ancient tales of woe.
_Spring 1917._
XXI. Lent, 1918
It was Meredith's country, and Atlantic weather in Lent. The downs were
dilated and clear as though seen through crystal. A far company of
pines on the high skyline were magnified into delicate inky figures.
The vacant sward below them was as lucent as the slope of a vast
approaching wave. A blackbird was fluting after a shower, for the sky
was transient blue with the dark rags of the squall flying fast over
the hill towards London. The thatched roof of a cottage in the valley
suddenly flamed with a light of no earthly fire, as though a god had
arrived, and that was the sign. Miss Muffet, whose profile, having the
breeze and the surprise of the sun in her hair, was dedicated with a
quivering and aureate nimbus, pulled aside the brush of a small yew,
and exclaimed; for there, neatly set in the angle of the bough, was a
brown cup with three blue eggs in it. I saw all this, and tried my best
to get back to it; but I was not there. I saw it clearly--the late
shower glittered on my coat and on the yew with the nest in it--but it
was a scene remote as a memorable hour of a Surrey April of years ago.
I could not approach; so I went back into the house.
But there was no escape. For I freely own that I am one of those who
refused to believe there would be "a great offensive." (Curse such
trite and sounding words, which put measureless misery through the mind
as unconsciously as a boy repeats something of Euclid.) I believe that
no man would now dare to order it. The soldiers, I knew, with all the
signs before them, still could not credit that it would be done. The
futile wickedness of these slaughters had been proved too often. They
get nowhere. They settle nothing. This last, if it came, would be worse
than all the rest in its magnitude and horror; it would deprive Europe
of a multitude more of our diminishing youth, and end, in the
exhaustion of its impetus, with peace no nearer than before. The old
and indurated Importances in authority, safe far behind the lines,
would shrink from squandering humanity's remaining gold of its life,
even though their ignoble ends were yet unachieved. But it had been
ordered. Age, its blind jealousy for control now stark mad, impotent in
all but the will and the power to command and punish, ignoring every
obvious lesson of the past, the appeal of the tortured for the sun
again and leisure even to weep, and the untimely bones of the young as
usual now as flints in the earth of Europe, had deliberately put out
the glimmer of dawn.
Well for those who may read the papers without personal knowledge of
what happens when such a combat has begun; but to know, and to be
useless; to be looking with that knowledge at Meredith's country in
radiant April! There are occasions, though luckily they come but once
or twice in life, when the mind is shocked by the basal verities
apparently moving as though they were fugitive; thought becomes dizzy
at the daylight earth suddenly falling away at one's feet to the
vacuity of the night. Some choice had to be made. I recalled another
such mental convulsion: by Amiens Cathedral, near midnight, nearly four
years ago, with the French guns rumbling through the city in retreat,
and the certainty that the enemy would be there by morning on his way
to Paris. One thing a campaigner learns: that matters are rarely quite
so bad or so good as they seem. Saying this to my friend, the farmer
(who replied that, in any case, he must go and look to the cows), I
turned to some books.
Yet resolution is needed to get the thoughts indoors at such a time.
They are out of command. A fire is necessary. You must sit beside a
company of flames leaping from a solidly established fire, flames
curling out of the lambent craters of a deep centre; and steadily look
into that. After a while your hand goes out slowly for the book. It has
become acceptable. You have got your thoughts home. They were of no use
in France, dwelling upon those villages and cross-roads you once knew,
now spouting smoke and flames, where good friends are waiting, having
had their last look on earth, as the doomed rearguards.
The best books for refuge in times of stress are of the "notebook" and
"table-talk" kind. Poetry I have tried, but could not approach it. It
is too distant. Romance, which many found good, would never hold my
attention. But I had Samuel Butler's _Note Books_ with me for two years
in France, and found that the right sort of thing. You may begin
anywhere. There are no threads to look for. And you may stop for a
time, while some strange notion of the author's is in contest for the
command of the intelligence with your dark, resurgent thoughts; but
Butler always won. His mental activity is too fibrous, masculine, and
unexpected for any nonsense. But I had to keep a sharp eye on Butler.
His singular merits were discovered by others who had no more than
heard of him, but found he was exactly what they wanted. If his volume
of _Note Books_ is not the best example of its sort we have, then I
should be glad to learn the name of the best. This Lent I tried
Coleridge again. But surely one's mind must be curiously at random to
go to such woolgathering. I found him what I fear Lamb and his friends
knew him to be--a tireless and heavy preacher through the murk of whose
nebulous scholarship and philosophy the revealing gleams of wisdom are
so rare that you are almost too weary to open the eyes to them when
they flash. Selden is better, but abstract, legal, and dry.
Hazlitt compelled a renewal of an old respect; his humanity, his
instinct for essentials, his cool detection of pretence and cant,
however finely disguised, and his English with its frank love for the
embodying noun and the active verb, make reading very like the clear,
hard, bright, vigorous weather of the downs when the wind is
up-Channel. It is bracing. But I discovered another notebook, of which
I have heard so little that it shows what good things may be lost in
war; for this book was published in 1914. It is the _Impressions and
Comments_ of Havelock Ellis. There have been in the past critics of
life and the things men do who have been observers as acute, as
well-equipped in knowledge, and have had a command of English as free
and accurate, as the author of "Impressions and Comments"; but not
many. Yet such judgments of men, their affairs and their circumstances,
could have been written in no other time than the years just before the
war--the first note is dated July, 1912. The reflections are often
chill and exposed; but so is a faithful mirror bleak, though polished
and gleaming, when held up to grey affairs in the light of a day which
is ominous. You seem to feel in this book the cold draught moving
before the storm which has not come--the author knew of no storm to
come, and does not even hint at it; but the portents, and the look of
the minds of his fellows, make him feel uncomfortable, and he asks what
ails us. Now we know. It is strange that a book so wise and enlivening,
whether it is picturing the Cornish coast in spring, the weakness of
peace propaganda, Bianca Stella, Rabelais, the Rules of Art, the Bayeux
Tapestry, or Spanish cathedrals, should have been mislaid and
forgotten....
The fire is dying. It is grey, fallen, and cold. The house is late and
silent. There is no sound but the ghostly creaking of a stair; our
thoughts are stealing away again. We creep out after them to the outer
gate. What are books and opinions? The creakings of an old house uneasy
with the heavy remembrances and the melancholy of antiquity, and with
some midnight presage of its finality.
The wind and rain have passed. There is now but the icy stillness and
quiet of outer space. The earth is Limbo, the penumbra of a dark and
partial recollection; the shadow, vague and dawnless, over a vast stage
from which the consequential pageant has gone, and is almost forgotten,
the memory of many events merged now into formless night itself, and
foundered profoundly beneath the glacial brilliance of a clear heaven
alive with stars. Only the stars live, and only the stars overlook the
place that was ours. The war--was there a war? It must have been long
ago. Perhaps the shades are troubled with vestiges of an old and
dreadful sin. If once there were men who heard certain words and became
spellbound, and in the impulse of that madness forgot that their earth
was good, but very brief, and turned from their children and women and
the cherished work of their hands to slay each other and destroy their
communities, it all happened just as the leaves of an autumn that is
gone once fell before the sudden mania of a wind, and are resolved.
What year was that? The leaves of an autumn that is long past are
beyond time. The night is their place, and only the unknowing stars
look down to the little blot of midnight which was us, and our pride,
and our wisdom, and our heroics.
_April 1918._
THE END