various systems of Hun and British trenches, for we’re plumb in the heart of
an old battlefield. The only landmarks left to guide one are the craters as
big as churches—records of mines that have been sprung—and little rows of
lonely graves. At night when the moon is up, this country creates the curious
ghostly illusion of being an endless alkali desert, beaten into billows by the
wind. The shells go shrieking over it and wreaths of mist wander here and
there like phantoms. Destruction can create a terrible pretence and caricature
of beauty. I wish you might visit such a place just once so as to get an idea
of where our lives are spent.
Your letters apropos of the latest German offensive bring home to me very
vividly the emotional terror which war excites in the minds of civilians. You
picture us as standing with our backs to the wall, desperately pushing death
from off our breasts with naked hands. The truth is so immensely different.
We’re having a thoroughly bang-up time, and we’re as amused by the Hun as
ever. He may force us to fall back; but while we fall back we laugh at him.
That is the attitude of every British soldier that I’ve met. We’re as happy
and unconcerned as children. There’s one chap here who’s typical of this
spirit of treating war as an immensely sporting event. He’s the raiding
officer of a certain battalion, and is known as “Battling Brown”—though Brown
is not his real name. He has a little company of his own, consisting of
seventy men. He’s been in over a hundred raids on the Hun Front line and has
only had two of his men killed in a year. A short while ago he went across
with his raiders and captured three Germans; on the return journey across No
Man’s Land something happened, and he lined up his prisoners and shot them. He
led his men safely back to our lines and then set out again alone on a private
excursion into the Boche territory. By dawn he once more returned, bringing
back four prisoners single-handed. You might picture such a man as a kind of
Hercules, but he isn’t. He’s thin, and tall, and fair, and high strung. His
age, I should guess, is about twenty-two.
Far away in the distance I can hear the pipers playing. It always makes me
think of Loch Lomond and when we were little tads. How green and quiet and
cool those days seem now—the long rides across the moors and down the glens,
the bathing in little mountain streams, the walks in the sad twilights. There
are so many happy memories I have to thank you for. You were very wise and
generous in the way you planned my childhood. I’m less than a fortnight back
at the Front, but I’m already falling into the old habit of happy retrospect.
We don’t live here really. Our souls are in France only for brief and glorious
and intense intervals—during the moments of attack and repulse. The rest of
the time we’re away in the green valleys of remembered places, watching the
ghosts who are the shadows of what we were.
My groom is a boy named Gilpin. The name has proved his downfall. He galloped
my horse on the hard road the other day, which is forbidden. A colonel caught
him going full tilt, stopped him and took his name. When the severities seemed
ended this innocent young party asked the colonel to hold his horse while he
mounted—so now he’s up on an extra charge of insolence.
Army discipline is in many ways silly and old maidish. Here’s a chap who’s
faithful, well conducted, and honest. He’s likely to get a heavier punishment
for asking a superior officer to hold his horse than if he’d been drunk and
uproarious.
XLI
France April 28, 1918
It’s funny to recall the different graveyards among the shell-holes that I’ve
learnt to call home. Once life was so definitely focused—much too definitely
for my patience. It seemed as though I was rooted and planted for all
eternity. It never seemed to me then that I should ever find the sacrificial
opportunity or be stirred to any prophetic exaltations. It’s wonderful the way
the angel of Death, as discovered in war, can give one visions of limitless
nobilities, each one of which is attainable and accessible.
I’m by myself at the Battery. It’s late afternoon, and a thunderstorm is
brewing. The room is dark (I mean the dug-out); I feel as though it were
November instead of April. What a queer life this is. In one way I have not
had so much idleness since I was in hospital—then comes a burst of physical
strenuosity out of all proportion to one’s strength. Things happen by fits and
starts; you never know what is going to happen next.
It’s intensely still. The stillness is made more noticeable by the booming of
an occasional gun.
The whole hope and talk of our chaps is the Americans—what they’re going to
do, when they’re going to start doing it, and what kind of a moral they will
have. I hear the wildest rumours of the numbers they have in France—rumours
which I know to be untrue since my tour along the American lines. You will
have read the manuscript of Out to Win long before this letter reaches you. I
wonder what you all think of it and whether you like it. It was written in a
breathless, racing sort of fashion. I sat at it from morning till last thing
at night. All my desire was to do my duty as regards the Americans and then to
get out here before the big show started. I managed things just in time. I
don’t remember much of what I wrote—only a picture of Domremy and another of
Evian and Nancy. I hope it was as good as you expected.
There are things one lives through and sees now which seem ordinary but which
to future ages will figure as stupendous. If one can record them now in just
that spirit of ordinariness which constitutes their real wonder, they will
together give an accurate portrait of Armageddon. My nine months out of the
line began to give me a little perspective—I began to see the awful
marvellousness of some of the scenes that I had lived through. Now, like the
mist which I see hanging above the Hun Front line, a curtain of normality is
blotting out the sharp abnormal edges of my landscape.
This war, at the distance which removes you from it, must seem a filthy and
brutal kind of game. It is all of that. But it’s more than that. The game was
not of our inventing—it was thrust on us. We are not responsible for the game;
but we are responsible for the spirit in which we play it. The fine, clear,
visionary attitude of our chaps redeems for us the horror and pathos of the
undertaking.
It will be towards the end of May when this arrives and you’ll be off to the
lakes and the mountains. I wonder where. I suppose we’ll still be plugging
along, sending death over into Fritz’s lines and receiving it back.
XLII
France May 2, 1918
Here I am up forward again on my shift. I’m sitting in a hole sunk beneath the
level of the ground, with a slit that just peeps out across the dandelions to
the Hun Front line. From here I can catch any movement in the enemy
back-country without being seen myself. Below my O.P. there is a deep dug-out
to which I can retire in the event of enemy shelling; if one exit gets blown
in, there’s a second from which I can make good my escape. On each fresh trip
to this place I find a new gem of literature left behind by one or other of
the telephonists. Last time it was a priceless kitchen masterpiece by Charles
Garvice, entitled The Triumphant Lover; this time it’s an exceedingly purple
effort by Victoria Cross, entitled Five Nights. So you see I do not allow my
interest in matters intellectual to rust.
There are many things of interest that I should like to tell you, but the
consciousness that the censor is for ever at my elbow prevents. Did I ever
tell you the story of the censor whom I met on the train from Boulogne, when I
was returning to the line in January 1917? If I happened to tell it to you,
the gentleman who uninvited shares all my letters with you hasn’t heard it,
and I’m sure his curiosity must be pricked by this time—so here goes.
It was after that splendid leave in London which you came over from America to
share with me. The train from Boulogne to the Front was the usual draughty
affair, half the windows out, no heating system, no means of getting anything
to eat for goodness knows how many hours. I picked out the least disreputable
carriage and found that a gunner colonel was snuggled up in one corner and a
pile of rugs, pillows, hot-water bottles, eatables, etc., in another. Just as
the train was starting the owner of all these effeminate luxuries hopped in
and commenced to make himself comfortable. He was nearer fifty than forty. His
nose was inflamed and heavily veined, either from drink, dyspepsia, or both.
His rank was that of a lieutenant. His social grade that of a post-office
assistant, I should fancy. His uniform fitted abominably, and his appearance
was as unsoldierly as can well be imagined. He looked like a loose-living
spider.
We hadn’t been moving very long when he started to unwrap his packages and to
gorge himself. He ate steadily like one whose life depended on it. The colonel
and I had forgotten to bring anything, so we had the joy of watching.
In our chilly misery we became human and began to talk. The conversation
became reminiscent of the numerous offensives. The sloppy lieutenant with the
drooping walrus moustaches who sat opposite to us, persistently laid claim to
a more thorough knowledge of attacks that we had been in than we did
ourselves. He puzzled us; we couldn’t picture him as a combatant. Quite
haphazard one of us—I think it was the colonel—commenced to damn censors as
chaps who sat safely behind the lines and spied on fighting-men’s private
affairs. The lieutenant became very hot in the censors’ defence. He tried to
prove the necessity for them by quoting the case of a lieutenant named N., who
had sent back captured aeroplane photos to his friends. I happened to know N.
and that he was going to be tried by court-martial for his indiscretion, so
grew loud in proclaiming my contempt for the fellow safely behind the lines
who had caught him. We were particularly annoyed, because N. was a plucky
soldier.
Our friend in the corner took my remarks extremely personally. To show his
resentment of me, he pointedly offered the colonel some of his fodder. At last
he said very haughtily, “It may interest you to know that I am the censor and
am at present going up the line to give evidence against Lieutenant N. at his
trial.” Just at that moment the train stopped at a station. He blinked through
the window with his shortsighted eyes, trying to read the name “This is M., I
think,” he said; “if it is, we stop here ten minutes and get time to stretch
our legs.”
I looked out of the window helpfully. “It is M.,” I told him. It wasn’t. He
got out and commenced to walk up the platform. Almost immediately the train
started to pull out. He made a wild crab-wise dash for the carriage-door, but
the colonel and I were hanging to it on the inside. When we were safely on our
journey, we shared up his pillows, rugs, hot-water bottles, and eatables
between us, and had a comparatively pleasant journey. For once we thanked God
for the censor.
It’s tea-time at home. You’ve probably come in from a walk and are smoking a
cigar at the family oak-table. I wish I could pop in on you.
Oh, our latest excitement! We received our new gramophone last night with
about thirty of the latest records!
You’ll be glad to know that I now have my old batman back. He’s the man who
took me out when I was wounded and was so tender to me on the way to the
hospital. That memory of his tenderness is rather embarrassing, for I can’t
bring myself to strafe him the way I ought to. I can always see the fellow’s
concern when he thought that I was done for. Now that he’s got me back he acts
as though I were still a very weak and indiscreet person who had to be coaxed
and managed. I have the feeling in his presence of being perpetually in
pyjamas and in bed. He has the advantage of me, to put it in a nutshell.
XLIII
France May 3, 1918
It’s early morning. I’m still sitting in the little dug-out with the slit that
looks towards the Hun Front line. Everything but the immediate foreground is
blanketed in heavy mist at present. I can hear bombing going on somewhere—but
I can also hear a lark singing near to the sun, high overhead. The clumps of
dandelions are still sleeping. They haven’t opened—they’re green instead of
yellow. The grass sparkles with little drops of dew, more beautiful than the
most costly diamonds. With the first of the dawn I read a story by Tolstoy;
since then I’ve been sitting thinking—thinking of you and of the sleeping
house in Newark, which will soon be disturbed by your bath-water running, if
you still rise early; and thinking how strange it is that I should be here in
the greatest war in history. We planned to do such different things with our
lives. My first dream was to become extremely wise. At Oxford there seemed no
limit to the amount of knowledge I could acquire; it seemed only a matter of
patience and perseverance. Then that dream went, and I wanted to save the
world. I’m afraid one has to be a little aristocratic towards the world before
he can conceive of himself as capable of saving it or of the world as
requiring saving. The aristocratic touch grew on me and I decided to do my
saving not by touching people, but by writing poetry for the few who would
understand. It wasn’t half such good poetry as I thought it was at the time,
and it never could have re-made anything. Disappointed in that and because I
had now committed myself to a literary way of life, I took to writing novels,
which nobody wanted to publish, read, or buy. Then, because I had to live
somehow, I entered into the commercial end of publishing. There was always the
shadow of a dream which I pursued even then in my spare hours; it was the
dream that saved me and led me on to write The Garden Without Walls. But the
shadow was growing fainter when this war commenced. And here I am, human at
last, all touch of false aristocracy gone, peeping out across the grass wet
with the dew of May, beneath which lie the common clay heroes who have died
for democracy. How noiselessly these men gave up their lives and with how
little consciousness of self-appreciation. They rather put us to shame—we
privileged dawdlers in our haunted minds. They recognized the one straight
thing to do when the opportunity presented itself; they did it swiftly and
unreasoningly with their might. They didn’t write about what they did; for
them the doing was sufficient. I think I shall always be a humble man after
such companionship, if I survive. I see life in courageous vistas of actions
now; formerly I was like Hamlet—I thought myself into a green sickness.
Marriage and children, a home and family love are the best that anyone can
extract from life. There have been years when I didn’t like my kind.
Out of the many things that have come to me in the past six months I am
particularly glad of little Tinker’s friendship—P.’. baby. She’s not two yet,
but we were real pals. She would never go to sleep until I had kissed her in
her cot “Good-night.” First thing in the morning she would be beside my bed,
tugging at the clothes and ordering me to “Det up.” Since I’ve been gone
they’ve had to ring the bell and pretend that I’m just entering the hall, so
that they may make her go to sleep contented. When they ask her, “Where’s
Con?” she reaches up to the window and points. “Dorn walk in park,” she says.
They talk about the love of a woman keeping a man straight, but I don’t think
it’s to be compared with the love of a little child. You can’t lie to them.
The sharp rat-a-tat of the machine guns has started; but the mist is too thick
for me to see what is happening——It’s nothing; it’s died down.
In an hour I shall be relieved, and shall return to the guns and post this
letter. It will reach you when? Sometime in June, I expect, when the summer is
really come and you’re wearing your cool dresses. I can see you going out in
the early morning to do your shopping.
XLIV
France May 7, 1918
I am sitting in my bed—my sleeping-sack, I mean—which is spread out on the
red-tiled floor of a funny little cottage. There isn’t much of the floor left,
as four of the other officers are sharing the room with me. Coming in through
the window is the smell of sweet myrtle, old-fashioned and quiet; from far
away drifts in the continual pounding of the guns and, strangely muddled up
with the gunfire, the multitudinous croaking of frogs. I’m having an
extraordinary May month of it in lovely country, marching through the showers,
getting drenched and drying when the sun deigns to make an appearance. After
being off a horse for so long, I’m in the saddle for many hours every day.
I am glad that you all feel the way you do about my returning to the Front. I
was sure you wouldn’t want me to be out of these great happenings. My fear,
when I was in England this spring, was the same as I had when I first
joined—that fighting would all-be ended before I got into the line. No fear of
that; I think we’re in for another two years of it. There’s hot work ahead—the
hottest of the entire war. Oddly enough my spirits rise as the struggle
promises to grow fiercer. I don’t know why, unless it is that as the action
quickens one has a chance of giving more. There’s nothing sad about being
wounded or dying for one’s country. In this war one does so much more than
that—he dies for the whole of humanity.
Outside my window a stretch of hedges runs down to a little brook. Ducks,
geese, cocks and hens make farmyard noises from dawn till last thing at night.
Above all the peace and quiet, the distant guns keep up their incessant
murmur. What a variety of places are likely to shelter me before the summer is
ended—woods, ditches, open fields, trenches. It’s all in the game and is
romance of a sort. I’m sunburnt and hard. I feel tremendously alive.
Once again all the striving and ambition of literary success has vanished. I’m
only a subaltern—and far prouder to be that than a writer. I’m estimated by
none but my soldiering qualities and power to show guts. We were lawyers,
engineers, business-men—now we’re soldiers and inquire nothing of each other’s
past.
A thrush has started singing; he’s in the willows that stand by the brookside.
The planes go purring overhead, but he doesn’t care. He goes on singing
towards the evening sun as though his heart knew nothing but joy. He will be
here singing long after we have passed upon our way.
Don’t get worrying about my safety. You’re sure to be feeling nervous at the
wrong times, when I’m perfectly safe. Just feel glad that I’m allowed to be
here, and don’t look ahead.
XLV
France May 14, 1918
I’m afraid you’ll be feeling that I’ve neglected you. Whenever I miss a mail I
have the reproachful picture of the disappointed faces of you three at the
early morning breakfast—so it isn’t wilful neglect. I’ve had no time, for
reasons which I can’t explain. In this way of life one has to snatch the odd
moments for those he loves best and to break off when the sterner obligations
intrude themselves.
I’m in a beautiful part of the country at present—it must be beautiful, for it
is providing us with three ducks for dinner to-night. I doubt whether you
could get three all at once in Newark. Moreover, we can get all the fresh
cream and butter that we like. Of course this won’t last. Any morning we may
wake up to find ourselves back on iron rations—bully-beef and hard tack. But
while it lasts we make the most of it. The most ripping attraction to me is
something that you’ll scarcely credit. The willow-groves are full of
nightingales. As you go back to your billets after midnight and the guns make
lightning through the grill-work of the trees, you see the little brown
fellows with their throats quivering, pouring out their song of love and
spring. When you’ve crept into your sleeping-sack, you lie awake
listening—thinking of another world where love and life were once so certain.
XLVI
France May 18, 1918
This is the third day that I have planned to write you. Perhaps I may be able
to do so this time.
I have just been reading a letter from a nurse out in Palestine describing the
little wooden crosses above fallen British soldiers which now star the Mount
of Olives. The poetry of the ordinary crops out everywhere to-day; we are
living on higher levels than we realize. For hundreds of years the future
generations will weave legends round us, making us appear titanic
spirit-people, just as we have clothed with almost unearthly splendour the
Crusaders of the Dark Ages.
This is a pleasant May evening. The fields are golden with buttercups. Above
the singing of the birds I can hear a low droning as of bees among flowers;
but the droning is of homing aeroplanes. This is the kind of weather and
country in which it would not be unbeautiful to die.
When I went down this morning to the barn in which my section is stationed, I
found notice printed on the door, on either side a British and American
flag-and underneath a luridly illustrated Sunday magazine selection of
extracts from The Glory of the Trenches. A small world, isn’t it?
I have been reading a book lately that would interest you; it’s by Ford Madox
Hueffer and is called On Heaven. It consists of a number of poems written
while on active service. He’s managed to put down in a rough and tumble of
words a good many of our hungers and adorations. I hadn’t realized before I
read him how very much of the conversation of our soldiers is an exchange of
confidences about the women they love or have loved. I believe every man at
the Front has a hope of the girl he will be true to some day, and a fear
lest——
One of Hueffer’s poems on the subject is very beautiful. It starts this way:
“In Chepstow stands a castle;
My love and I went there;
The foxgloves on the wall all heard
Her footsteps on the stair.
The sun was high in heaven
And the perfume in the air
Came from purple cat’s valerian—
But her footsteps on the stair
Made a sound like silver music
Thro’ the perfume in the air.”
The last verse sums up the dread of many a fighting-man—that all his dreams
are only dreams, and that a return to reality may disappoint him:
“And another soldier fellow
Shall come courting of my dear.
And it’s I shall not be with her
With my lip beside her ear.
For it’s he shall walk beside her
In the perfume of the air
To the silver, silver music
Of her footstep on the stair.”
All the world’s idealists are in the trenches by now. What a shining cloud of
imaginings must rise up to the Soul which lies behind the world. God must be
amazed to find that horror can make His obstinate creations so simple and
childlike. Here are millions of us who once thought only of our social and
individual bellies, now thinking only of the unborn children and the things of
the spirit. All the fond and dear accepted affections have become a kind of
heaven that lies in the past instead of the future. If we die we don’t want
any heaven that isn’t a re-living of the old happy memories.
I find that Hueffer expresses a feeling that many of us have secretly, but
which I have never heard any man acknowledge—the feeling that all the
remainder of his days he will have to be explaining if he comes to the end of
the war alive—almost the feeling that he will have lost his great chance of
nobility by not dying. Hueffer’s poem is called One Day’s List; it’s a list of
three officers and 270 other ranks of his regiment who were killed in action.
It commences:
“My dears,
The rain drips down on Rouen Town,
The leaves drip down
And so the mud
Turns orange brown.”
And it has for its refrain
“But you—at least—are out of it.”
It goes on to tell of the officers who fell, and repeats the reflection which
we all have when we gaze on the dead at the end of an attack and know that we
ourselves have escaped:
“One wonders why you died.”
And then,
“We never talked of glory,
And each thought a lot of one girl
And waited most days for hours in the rain
Till she came:
But we never talked of Fame——”
And lastly, addressing the dead,
“But we who remain shall grow old,
We shall know the cold
Of cheerless
Winter and the rain of Autumn and the sting
Of poverty, of love despised and of disgraces,
And mirrors showing stained and ageing faces,
And the long ranges of comfortless years
And the long gamut of human fears—
But, for you, it shall be for ever Spring,
And only you shall be for ever fearless,
And only you have white, straight, tireless limbs,
And only you, where the water-lily swims
Shall walk along the pathways, thro’ the willows
Of your west.
You who went west,
And only you on silvery twilight pillows
Shall take your rest
In the soft sweet glooms,
Of twilight rooms——”
There’s the whole of our one and only cowardice in a nut-shell—that we, who
have posed as conquerors for a while, will, if we survive, return to the
normal things of life to find our spirits unexalted and the commonplace still
commonplace.