there is most competition in any officers' mess are _La Vie Parisienne_
and New York _Life_. The impudent periodical from Paris is universal on
our front. The work of its artists decorates every dug-out. I should say
almost every mess subscribes for it. It is true it is usual to account
for this as being naughty chance. Youth has been separated from the sober
influence of its English home, is away from the mild and tranquil light
of Oxford Street feminity, is given to death, and therefore snatches in
abandon at amusement which otherwise would not amuse. Do not believe it.
_La Vie Parisienne_, it is true, is certainly not a paper for the English
family. I should be embarrassed if my respected aunts found it on my
table, pointed to its drawings, and asked me what I saw in them. What
makes it popular with young Englishmen in France is not the audacity of
its abbreviated underclothing, for there are English prints which
specialize in those in a more leering way, and they are not widely
popular like the French print. But _La Vie_ is produced by intelligent
men. It is not a heavy lump of stupid or snobbish photographs. It does
not leer. There is nothing clownish and furtive about it. It is the gay
and frank expression of artists whose humour is too broad for the
general; but, as a rule, there is no doubt about the fine quality of
their drawings and the deftness of their wit. That is what makes the
French print so liked by our men.
New York _Life_ proves that, it seems to me. The American periodical is
very popular in France, and the demand for it has now reached London. The
chemise is not its oriflamme. It properly recognizes much else in life.
But its usual survey of the world's affairs has a merry expansiveness
which would make the editorial mind common to London as giddy as grandma
in an aeroplane. It is not written in a walled enclosure of ideas. It is
not darkened and circumscribed by the dusty notions of the clubs. It does
not draw poor people as sub-species of the human. It does not recognize
class distinctions at all, except for comic purposes. It is brighter,
better-informed, bolder, and more humane than anything on this side, and
our men in France find its spirit in accord with theirs. One of the
results of the War will be that they will want something like it when
they come back, though I don't see how they are to get it unless it is
imported, or unless they emigrate to a country where to feel that way
about things is normal and not peculiar.
IX. The Marne
AUGUST 3, 1918. The holy angels were at Mons; British soldiers saw them
there. A Russian army was in England in 1914; everybody knew someone who
had seen it. And Joan of Arc, in shining armour, has returned to the aid
of the French. These and even graver symptoms warn us that we may not be
in that state of equanimity which is useful when examining evidence. Only
this week, in the significant absence of the house-dog, a mysterious hand
thrust through my letter-box a document which proved, as only propaganda
may, that this war was thoroughly explored in the Book of Daniel. Why
were we not told so before? Why was Lord Haldane reading Hegel when there
was Daniel? What did we pay him for? And that very same night I stood at
the outer gate with one who asked me why, when there were stacks of jam
in our grocer's shop, we could not buy any because the Food Controller
had omitted to put up the price. I had no time to reason this out,
because at that moment we heard a loud buzzing in the sky. We gazed up
into the velvet black night, that was like a skull-cap over the world.
The buzzing continued. "Perhaps," said my companion, "what we can hear is
our great big Bee."
That buzzing overhead did not develop. It merely waned and increased. It
was remarkable but inconsequential. It alarmed while giving no good cause
for alarm. In the invisible heavens there might have been One who was
playing Bogie to frighten poor mortals for fun. I went in to continue my
reading of Charles le Goffic's book, _General Foch at the Marne_. This
was all in accord with the Book of Daniel, and the jam that was uneatable
because it was not dear enough. My reading continued, as it were, the
mysterious buzzing.
I can give, as a rule, but a slack attention to military history, and my
interest in war itself is, fundamentally, the same as for cretinism and
bad drains. I merely wonder why it is, and wish it were not. But the
Marne, I regret to say, holds me in wonder still; for this there is
nothing to say excepting that, from near Meaux, I heard the guns of the
Marne. I saw some of its pomp and circumstance. I had been hearing the
guns of the War for some weeks then, but the guns of the Marne were
different. They who listened knew that those foreboding sounds were of
the crisis, with all its import. If that thundering drew nearer....
The Marne holds me still, as would a ghost story which, by chance, had me
within its weird. I want to know all that can be told of it. And if there
is one subject of the War more than another which needs a careful sorting
of the mixed straws in our beards, it is the Battle of the Marne. In the
case of my own beard, one of the straws is the Russian myth. In France,
as in England, everybody knew someone who had seen those Russians. One
huge camp, I was told, was near Chartres, and in Paris I was shown
Cossack caps which had come from there. That was on the day Manoury's
soldiers went east in their historic sortie of taxicabs against von
Kluck. I could not then go to Chartres to confirm that camp of Cossacks;
nor--and this is my straw--could the German Intelligence Staff. I did not
believe that the Russians were in France, but I could not prove they were
not, nor could the German generals, who, naturally, had heard about those
Russians. Now the rapid sweep of the German right wing under von Kluck
had given the enemy a vulnerable flank which, in a certain situation,
might admit disaster. The peril of his western flank must have made the
enemy sensitive to the least draught coming from there.
It is on such frailties as this that the issue of battle depends, and the
fate of empires. War, as a means of deciding our luck, is no more
scientific than dicing for it. The first battle of the Marne holds a
mystery which will intrigue historians, separate friends, cause hot
debate, spawn learned treatises, help to fill the libraries, and assist
in keeping not a few asylums occupied, for ages. If you would measure it
as a cause for lunacy, read Belloc's convincing exposition of the battle,
and compare that with le Goffic's story of the fighting of the Ninth
Army, under General Foch, by Fere Champenoise and the Marshes of St.
Gond. Le Goffic was there.
Why did fate tip the beam in the way we know? Why, for a wonder, did the
sound of gunfire recede from Paris, and not approach still nearer? I
myself at the time held to an unreasonable faith that the enemy would
never enter Paris, in spite of what Kitchener thought and the French
Government feared. Yet when challenged I could not explain why, for I was
ill, and the days seemed to be biassed to the German side. To have heard
the guns of the Marne was as though once one had listened to the high
gods contending over our destiny.
Historians of the future will spell out le Goffic on the fighting round
the Tower on the Marshes at Mondement. It was the key of the swamp of St.
Gond, the French centre. The Tower was held by the French when, by every
military rule, they should have given it up. At length they lost it. They
won it again, but because of sheer unreason, so far as the evidence
shows, for at the moment they regained it Mondement had ceased to be
anything but a key to a door which had been burst wide open. Foch, by the
books, was beaten. But Foch as we know was fond of quoting Joseph de
Maistre: "A battle lost is a battle which one had expected to lose." In
this faith, while his battalions were reduced to thin companies without
officers, and the Prussian Guard and the Saxons were driving back his
whole line, Foch, who had sent to borrow the 42nd Division from the
general on his left, kept reporting to Headquarters: "The situation is
excellent." But the 42nd had not yet arrived, and he continued to
retire.
Contradicting Belloc and the usual explanations, M. le Goffic says that
Foch was unaware of any gap in the German line. What he did was to
thrust in a bleak venture the borrowed division against the flank of the
advancing Prussians, who were in superior force. The Prussians retired.
But had they not been preparing to retire? Yet for what reason? When all
seemed lost, Foch won on the centre.
On the extreme French left, where Manoury was himself being outflanked by
von Kluck, the fatigued and outnumbered French soldiers were resigned to
the worst. They had done all that was possible, and it seemed of no
avail. They did not know that at that time the locomotives in the rear of
the German armies were reversed; were heading to the north. What happened
in the minds of the directing German generals--for that is where the
defeat began--is not clear; but the sudden and prolonged resistance of
the French at the Marne may have disrupted with a violent doubt minds
that had been taut with over-confidence. The fear to which the doubt
increased when Manoury attacked and persisted, the baffling audacity in
the centre of the defeated Foch, who did everything no well-bred
militarist would expect from another gentleman, and the common fervour of
the French soldiers who fought for a week like men possessed, at last
caused something to give way in the brain of the enemy. He could not
understand it. This was not according to his plan. He could not find it
in his books. He did not know what more he could do, except to retire
into safety and think it over afresh. The unexpected fury of the human
spirit, outraged into desperation after it was assumed to be subdued, and
bursting suddenly, and regardless of consequences, against the calm and
haughty front of material science assured of its power, checked and
deflected the processes of the German intelligence. I have seen an
indignant rooster produce the same effect on a bull.
X. Carlyle
AUGUST 17, 1918. Having something on the mind may lead one to salvation,
but it seems just as likely to lead one to the asylum. The Germans, who
are necessarily in the power of an argument which shows them we are
devils, are yet compelled to admit that Shakespeare is worth reasoned
consideration, and so they avoid the implied difficulty by explaining
that as Shakespeare was a genius therefore he was a German. What we
should do if it could be proved a grandfather of the poet was a Prussian
probably only our Home Secretary could tell us, after he had made quite
sure he would not be overheard by a white and tense believer in the
Hidden Hand. Thank God Heine was a Jew, though even so there are rumours
that a London memorial to him is to be removed. And last night I heard it
expounded very seriously, by a clever man of letters, that Carlyle's day
is done. Few people read Carlyle to-day--and it may be supposed that as
they read they hold his volumes with a Hidden Hand--and fewer still love
him, for at heart he was a Prussian. He was, indeed, slain in our
affections by Frederick the Great. His shrine at Chelsea is no longer
visited. It is all for the best, because in any case he wrote only a
gnarled and involved bastard stuff of partly Teutonic origin. While this
appeal was being made to me, I watched the face of a cat, which got up
and stretched itself during the discourse, with some hope; but that
animal looked as though it were thinking of its drowned kittens. It was
the last chance, and the cat did not laugh. On my way home, thinking of
that grave man of letters and of his serious and attentive listeners, I
noticed even the street lights were lowered or doused, and remembered
that every wine-shop was shut. London is enough to break one's heart. If
only by some carelessness one of the angels failed to smother his great
laughter over us, and we heard it, we might, in awakening embarrassment,
the first streak of dawn, put a stop to what had been until that moment
an unconscious performance.
XI. Holiday Reading
AUGUST 31, 1918. I make the same mistake whenever the chance of a holiday
broadens and brightens. A small library, reduced by a process of natural
selection, helps to make weighty the bag. But I do not at once close the
bag; a doubt keeps it open; I take out the books again and consider them.
When the problem of carrying those volumes about faces me, it is a relief
to discover how many of them lose their vital importance. Yet a depraved
sense of duty, perhaps the residue of what such writers as Marcus
Aurelius have done for me, refuses to allow every volume to be
jettisoned. It imposes, as a hair shirt, several new and serious books
which there has been no time to examine. They are books that require a
close focus, a long and steady concentration, a silent immobility hardly
distinguishable from sleep. This year for instance I notice Jung's
_Analytical Psychology_ confidently expecting to go for a holiday with
me. I feel I ought to take some such stern reminder of mortality, and, in
addition, out of a sentimental regard for the past, a few old books, for
my faith is not dead that they may put a new light on the wonderful
strangeness of these latter days. I take these, too.
And that is why I find them at the journey's end. But why did I bring
them? For now they seem to be exactly what I would avoid--they look like
toil. And work, as these years have taught the observant, is but for
slaves and the conscripted. It is never admired, except with a distant
and haughty sententiousness, by the best people.
Nor is it easy, by this west-country quay, to profit by a conscience
which is willing to allow some shameless idleness. I began talking,
before the books were even unpacked, with some old acquaintances by the
water-side. Most disquieting souls! But I cannot blame them. They have
been obliged to add gunnery to their knowledge of seamanship and
navigation. They were silent, they shook their heads, following some
thoughtless enquiries of mine after the wellbeing of other men I used to
meet here. Worse than all, I was forced to listen to the quiet recitals
of stranded cripples, once good craftsmen in the place, and these dimmed
the blessed sun even where in other years it was unusually bright. That
is what put holiday thoughts and literature away. I felt I had been very
unfairly treated, especially as the mutilated, being young men, were
unpleasantly noticeable in so small a village on fine mornings. It is not
right that the calm of our well-earned leisure should be so savagely
ruined. There was one morning on the quay when, watching the incoming
tide, two of us were discussing Mametz Wood and some matters relating to
it which will never be published, and the young man who was instructing
me was approached by an older man, who beamed, and held in his hand a
news-sheet. "Splendid news this morning," said the elderly man to the
young soldier. He wanted the opinion of one who had fought on that
ground, and I regret to say he got it. The soldier indifferently handed
back the glorious news, without inspecting it, with words which youth
should never address to age.
So how can I stay by the quay all the golden day long? I have not come
here prepared to endure the sudden Arctic shadows which fall, even in
summer, from such clouds. The society of our fellows was never so
uncertain, so likely to be stormy, as in these days. And the opinions of
none of our fellow-men can be so disturbing as those of the rebel from
the trenches, who appears, too, to expect us to agree with him at once,
as though he had a special claim on our sympathetic attention. While
considering him and his views of society, of peace and war, I see what
might come upon us as the logical consequence of such a philosophy, and
the dread vision does not accord with the high serenity of this Atlantic
coast, where the wind, like the hilarious vivacity of a luminous globe
spinning through the blue, is mocking these very sheets as I write them,
and is trying to blow them, a little before their time, into vacuity.
It is not easy, and perhaps this summer it would not be right, to find
the exact mood for a holiday. In the frame of mind which is more usual
with us, I put Ecclesiastes--forsaken by a previous visitor, and used to
lengthen a short leg of the dressing-table--in my pocket, and leave the
quay to its harsh new thoughts, and to the devices by which it gets a
bare sustenance out of the tides, the seasons, and the winds, complicated
now with high explosives in cunning ambush; and go out to the headland,
where wild goats among the rocks which litter the steep are the only life
to blatter critical comment to high heaven. I left that holiday quay and
its folk, and took with me a prayer which might go far to brace me to
support the blattering of goats, if that, too, should be my luck even
when in solitude. I passed at the hill-top the last whitewashed wall of
the village, where the open Atlantic is sighted, and stopped to glance at
the latest official poster on the wall. That explained to me, while the
west wind blew, what the penalties are for young men who are in the wrong
because they are young, not having attained the middle-age which brings
with it immunity for the holding of heroic notions. Yet how if those
young men are not bellicose like their wise seniors? Why should they get
the evil which their elders, who will it, take so much care to avoid?
The dust of official lorries in a hurry no longer made the wayside hedges
appear aged. The wind was newly arrived from mid-ocean. I met it coming
ashore. It knew nothing about us, so far. In the distance, the village
with its shipping was a faint blur, already a faded impress on earth, as
though more than half forgotten in spite of its important problems. It
was hardly more than a discoloration, and suggested nothing of
consequence. The sun on the grey rocks was giving a hint that, should
ever it be required, there was heat enough left to begin things anew. I
realized in alarm that such a morning of re-birth might be beautiful; for
I might not be there to sing _Laus Deo_. I might miss that fine morning.
There was a suggestion of leisure in the pattern of the lichen on the
granite; it gave the idea of prolonged yet still merely tentative efforts
at design. The lichen seemed to have complete assurance that there was
time enough for new work. The tough stems of the heather, into which I
put my hand, felt like the sinews of a body that was as ancient as the
other stars, but still so young that it was tranquilly fixed in the joy
of its first awakening, knowing very little yet, guessing nothing of its
beginning nor of its end; still infantile, with all life before it, its
voice merely the tiny shrilling of a grasshopper. The rocks were poised
so precariously above the quivering plain of the sea that they appeared
to tremble in mid-air, being things of no weight, in the rush of the
planet. The distant headlands and moors dilated under the generating sun.
It was then that I pulled Ecclesiastes out of my pocket, leaned against
the granite, and began:
"Vanity of vanities..."
I looked up again. There was a voice above me. An old goat, the
venerable image of all-knowledge, of sneering and bearded sin, was
contemplating me. It was a critical comment of his that I had heard.
Embarrassed, I put away my book.
XII. An Autumn Morning
SEPTEMBER 28, 1918. The way to my suburban station and the morning train
admonishes me sadly with its stream of season-ticket holders carrying
dispatch-cases, and all of them anxious, their resolute pace makes it
evident, for work. This morning two aeroplanes were over us in the blue,
in mimic combat; they were, of course, getting into trim for the raid
to-night, because the barometer is beautifully high and steady. But the
people on their way to the 9.30 did not look up at the flight. Life is
real, life is earnest. When I doubt that humanity knows what it is doing,
I get comfort from watching our local brigadiers and Whitehall ladies on
their way these tranquil Autumn mornings to give our planet another good
shove towards the millennium. Progress, progress! I hear their feet
overtaking me, brisk and resolute, as though a revelation had come to
them overnight, and so now they know what to do, undiverted by any doubt.
There is a brief glimpse of a downcast face looking as though it had just
chanted the Dies Irae through the mouthfuls of a hurried breakfast; and
once more this laggard is passed in the day's race towards the higher
peak. The reproof goes home. It justly humiliates. But the weather is
only a little west of south for one of the last fair days of the year;
and the gloom of the yew in the churchyard--which stands over the obscure
headstone of a man named Puplett--that yew which seems the residue of the
dark past, has its antiquity full of little smouldering embers of new
life again; and so a lazy man has reasons to doubt whether the millennium
is worth all this hurry. As it is, we seem to have as much trouble as
there is time to classify before supper; by which time, from the look of
the weather, there will be more. Then why hurry over it? The tombstone
says Puplett was a "thrifty and industrious parent," and I can see what
happened to him in 1727. What would I not give, I ask myself, as I pause
by the yew, and listen to the aeroplanes overhead, for a few words from
this Puplett on thrift, industry, and progress! Does he now know more
than brigadiers?
It may be that what Europe is suffering from in our time is the
consequence of having worked too hard, since that unlucky day when Watt
gave too much thought to a boiling kettle. We have worked too hard
without knowing why we were doing it, or what our work would do with us.
We were never wise enough to loaf properly, to stop and glance casually
around for our bearings. We went blindly on. Consider the newspapers, as
they are now! A casual inspection of the mixture of their hard and
congested sentences is enough to show that what is wanted by our writers
famous for their virility, their power of "graphic description" as their
outpour is called by their disciples, and their knowledge of what
everybody ought to be doing, is perhaps no more than an occasional
bromide. They would feel better for a long sleep. This direction by them
of our destiny is an intoxicating pursuit, but it is as exhausting as
would be any other indulgence. We might do quite well if they would only
leave it to us. But they will never believe it. Ah! the Great Men of
Action! What the world has suffered from their inspired efforts to
shepherd humanity into worried flocks hurrying nobody knew whither, every
schoolboy reads; and our strong men to-day, without whose names and
portraits no periodical is considered attractive, would surely have been
of greater benefit to us if they had remained absorbed in their earlier
skittles. If the famous magician, who, with several others, is winning
the war by suggestion, and that true soldier, General FitzChutney, and
that earnest and eloquent publicist, Mr. Blufflerlow, had been persuaded
to stick to marbles, what misleading excitement and unprofitable anxiety
would have been spared to the commonweal! Boys should be warned against
and protected from Great Careers. Better still if embryologists could
discover something which would enable midwives unfailingly to recognize
Strong Men at birth. It would be easy then to issue to those ladies
secret but specific instructions.
There is a street which turns abruptly from my straight road to the
station. It goes like a sudden resolution to get out of this daily hurry
and excitement. It is a pre-war street. It is an ancient thoroughfare of
ours, a rambling and unfrequented by-way. It is more than four years
since it was a habit of mine to loiter through it, with a man with whom I
shall do no more pleasant idling. We enjoyed its old and ruinous shops
and its stalls, where all things could be bought at second-hand,
excepting young doves, ferrets, and dogs. I saw it again this morning,
and felt, somehow, that it was the first time I had noticed it since the
world suddenly changed. Where had it been in the meantime? It was empty
this morning, it was still, it was luminous. It might have been waiting,
a place that was, for the return of what can never return. Its sunlight
was different from the glare in the hurrying road to the station. It was
the apparition of a light which has gone out. I stopped, and was a little
fearful. Was that street really there? I thought its illumination might
be a ghostly sunlight haunting an avenue leading only to the nowhere of
the memory. Did the others who were passing see that by-way? I do not
think so. They never paused. They did not glance sideways in surprise,
stare in an expectancy which changed almost at once into regret for what
was good, but is not.