possible? (What a weakness!) Retrospection was once a way of escape for
those who had not the vitality to face their own fine day with its
exacting demands. Yet who now can look squarely at the present, except
officials, armament shareholders, and those in perambulators? This
side-turning offered me a chance to dodge the calendar and enter the
light of day not ours. The morning train of the day I saw in that street
went before the War. I decided to lose it, and visit the shop at the top
of the street, where once you could buy anything from a toddy glass to
an emu's egg having a cameo on it of a ship in full sail. It was also a
second-hand bookshop. Most lovers of such books would have despised it.
It was of little use to go there for valuable editions, or even for such
works as Sowerby's _Botany_. But when last the other man and myself
rummaged in it we found the first volume of the _Boy's Own Paper_, and an
excellent lens for our landscape camera. An alligator, sadly in need of
upholstering, stood at the door, holding old umbrellas and walking-sticks
in its arms. The proprietor, with a sombre nature and a black beard so
like the established shadows of his lumbered premises that he could have
been overlooked for part of the unsalable stock, read Swedenborg, Plato,
Plutarch, and Young's _Night Thoughts_--the latter an edition of the
eighteenth century in which an Edinburgh parson had made frail marginal
comments, yellow and barely discernible, such as: "How True!" This dealer
in lumber read through large goggles, and when he had decided to admit he
knew you were in his shop he bent his head, and questioned you steadily
but without a word over the top of his spectacles. If you showed no real
interest in what you proposed to buy he would refuse to sell it.
There I found him again, still reading--Swedenborg this time--with most
of the old things about him, including the Duck-billed Platypus; for
nobody, apparently, had shown sufficient interest in them. The shop,
therefore, was as I have always known it. There was a spark of a summer's
day of 1914 still burning in the heart of a necromancer's crystal ball on
the upper shelf by the window.
The curio there which was really animated put down his book after I had
been in the shop for some minutes, regarded me deliberately as though
looking to see what change had come to me in four such years, and then
glanced up and nodded to the soothsayer's crystal. "It's a pity," he
said, "that those things won't really work." He asked no questions. He
did not inquire after my friend. He did not refer to those problems which
the crowds in the morning trains were eagerly discussing at that moment.
He sat on a heap of forgotten magazines, and remained apart with
Swedenborg. I loafed in the fertile dust and quiet among old prints,
geological specimens, antlers, pewter, bed-warmers, amphorae, and books.
The proprietor presided over the dim litter of his world, bowed, pensive,
and silent, suggesting in his aloofness not indifference but a retired
sadness for those for whom the mysteries could be made plain, but who are
wilful in their blindness, and so cannot be helped.
I came upon a copy of _Walden_, in its earliest Camelot dress (price
sixpence), and remembered that one who was not there had once said he was
looking for it in that edition. I turned to the last page and read: "Only
that day dawns to which we are awake..."
I reserved the book for him at once, though knowing I could not give it
to him. But what is the good of cold reason? Are we awake in such dawns
as we now witness? Or has there been no dawn yet because we are only
restless in our sleep? It might be either way, and in such a perplexity
reason cannot help us. I thought that perhaps I might now be stirring, on
the point of actually rousing. There, in any case, was the evidence of
that fugitive spark of the early summer of 1914 still imprisoned in its
crystal, proof that the world had experienced a dawn or two. An entirely
unreasonable serenity possessed me--perhaps because I was not fully
roused--because of the indestructibility of those few voiceless hopes we
cherish that seem as fugitive as the glint in the crystal ball, hopes
without which our existence would have no meaning, for if we lost them we
should know the universe was a witless jest, with nobody to laugh at it.
"I want this book," I said to the shopman.
"I know," he answered, without looking up. "I've kept it for you."
XIII. News from the Front
OCTOBER 12, 1918. My remembrance of the man, when I got his letter from
France--and it was approved, apparently, by one of his regimental
officers, for a censorial signature, was upon its envelope--was a
regrettable and embarrassing check to my impulse to cry Victory. I found
it hard, nevertheless, in the moment when victory was near, to forgive
the curious lapse that letter betrayed in a fellow who did not try for
exemption but volunteered for the infantry, and afterwards declined a
post which would have saved him from the trenches. He was the sort of
curious soldier that we civilians will never understand. He aided the
enemy he was fighting. His platoon officer reported that fact as
characteristic and admirable. He had gone out under fire to hold up a
wounded German and give him water. He did not die then, but soon after,
on the Hindenburg Line, because, chosen as a good man who was expert in
killing others with a deadly mechanism, he was leading in an attack. This
last letter of his, which arrived after the telegram warning us, in
effect, that there could be no more correspondence with him, alluded in
contempt to his noble profession and task, and ended with a quotation
from Drum Taps which he prayed I would understand.
His prayer was in vain. I did not understand. I read that quotation at
breakfast, just after finishing my fierce and terrible _Daily Dustpan_,
and the quotation, therefore, was at once repugnant and unfortunate. For
clearly the leader-writer of the _Dustpan_ was a bolder and more martial
man. It is but fair to assume, however, that as that journalist in the
normal routine of a day devoted to his country had not had the good
fortune to run up against the machine guns of the Hindenburg trenches,
naturally he was better able to speak than a soldier who was idly
swinging in the wire there. The quotation, strange for a Guardsman to
make, is worth examining as an example of the baleful influence war has
upon those who must do the fighting which journalists have the hard fate
merely to indicate is the duty of others. The verse actually is called
Reconciliation. After a partial recovery from the shame of the revelation
of my correspondent's unsoldierly spirit, a shame which was a little
softened by the thought that anyhow he was dead, I went to _Leaves of
Grass_ for the first time for some years, to see whether Drum Taps
accorded with war as we know it.
And now I am forced to confess that we may no longer accuse the Americans
of coming late into the War. They appear to have been in it, if the date
of Drum Taps is ignored, longer even than Fleet Street. I cannot see that
we have contributed anything out of our experiences of battle which can
compare with Whitman's poems. He appears to have known of war in
essential episodes and incidents, as well as from a high vision of it, in
a measure which the literature of our own tragedy does not compass.
A minor poet told me once that he could not read Whitman. He declared it
was like chewing glass. When we criticize others, the instant penalty is
that we unwittingly confess what we are ourselves. We know the reception
of _Leaves of Grass_ was of the kind which not seldom greets the
appearance of an exceptional book, though Emerson recognized its worth.
So when occasionally we admit, shyly and apologetically, as is our habit
(in the way we confess that once we enjoyed sugar candy), that long ago
we used to read Emerson, it would do our superior culture no harm to
remember that Emerson was at least the first of the world of letters to
tell the new poet that his _Leaves_ was "the most extraordinary piece of
wit and wisdom America has yet produced." Nothing in all his writing
proves the quality of Emerson's mind so well as his instant and full
knowledge of Whitman, when others felt that what Whitman was really
inviting was laughter and abuse. I suppose what the young poet meant when
he said reading Whitman was like a mouthful of glass was that Whitman has
no music, and so cannot be read aloud. There is always a fair quantity of
any poet's work which would do much to make this world a cold and
unfriendly place if we persevered in reading it aloud. In some
circumstances even Shakespeare might cause blasphemy. Perhaps he has. And
Whitman, like summer-time, and all of us, is not always at his best. But
I think it is possible that many people to-day will know the music and
the solace of the great dirge beginning "When lilacs last in the dooryard
bloom'd." And again, if capturing with words those surmises which
intermittently and faintly show in the darkness of our speculations and
are at once gone, if the making of a fixed star of such wayward glints is
the mark of a poet, then Whitman gave us "On the beach at night."
I had never thought Whitman so good till that soldier's letter
accidentally discovered it to me. If Whitman had been through the
campaign across the narrow straits, if Ypres, Vimy, and Cambrai had been
in his own experience, he could have added little to Drum Taps. For there
is nothing that is new in war. It is only the campaign that is new, and
the men who are young. Yet all has happened before. But each young
soldier in a new campaign feels that his experience is strangely
personal. He will have the truth revealed to him, and will think that it
is an intimacy for his soul alone; yet others, too, have seen it, but are
dead. The survivors of this War will imagine their experiences unique,
admonitory, terrible, and that if they had the words to tell us their
knowledge they would not be believed or understood. That is why the
succeeding generation, too, gets caught. Yet there is enough of this War
in Drum Taps to have stopped it more than two years ago if only one
European in ten had had so much imagination and enterprise as would take
a man through a strange field gate when he was convinced it was in that
direction he should go, and enough of charity in his heart to stay him
from throwing stones at the sheep while on his way.
XIV. Authors and Soldiers
OCTOBER 26, 1918. If a man who knew no books, but who became serious when
told of his emptiness, and showed eagerness to begin to fill it, were
confronted with the awful strata in the library of the British Museum,
and were told that that was his task, he might fall unconscious. But what
cruelty! He could be warned that the threat has little in it; that the
massed legions of books could do him no harm, if he did not disturb them.
It could be whispered to the illiterate man--whose wisdom, it might
chance, was better than much scholarship--that it is possible to read the
best of the world's drama in a few months, and that in the remainder of
the year he could read its finest poetry, history, and philosophy. I am
but paraphrasing what was said recently by an Oxford professor. I would
not dare to give it as my own opinion, within hearing of the high
priests.
Yet the professor's declaration may be not only outrageous, but right.
It is a terrible thought, except to those who are merely bibliophiles
just as some little boys are lovers of old postage stamps. I think he may
be right, for I have a catalogue of all the books and documents prompted
by the War and published before June, 1916. It runs to 180 pages of small
type. It contains the names of about 3500 books and pamphlets. Now, let
us suppose a student wished to know the truth about the War, for perhaps
a very youthful student could imagine it was possible to get the truth
about it. The truth may be somewhere in that catalogue; but I know, for I
have tried, that it has no significant name to betray its pure gold, no
strange brilliance to make the type dance on that page as one turns the
leaves with a hopeless eye. There are, however, two certainties about the
catalogue. One is that it would require a long life, a buoyant
disposition, and a freedom from domestic cares, to read every book in it.
And the other is that there are no more books in it--which we ought to
count as books--than one evening would see us through, interruptions and
all. The books in that mass are as dead as the leaves of their June of
the War.
I must confess, though, that I am a bibliophile with War books. Any book
about the Great War is good enough for me. I am to that class of
literature what little boys are to stamps. Yes; I know well the dread
implication. I am aware of the worm in the mind; that I probe a wound;
that I surrender to an impulse to peer into the darkness of the pit; that
I encourage a thought which steals in with the quiet of midnight, and
that it keeps me awake while the household sleeps. I know I consort with
ghosts in a region of evil. I get the horrors, and I do not repel them.
For some reason I like those ghosts. Most of them have no names for me,
but I count them as old friends of mine; and where should I meet them
again, at night, but amid the scenes we knew?
And what do I look for in these War books? It is not easy to say. It is a
private matter. Songs the soldiers used to sing on French roads are often
in my head. I am like the man who was once bewitched, and saw and heard
things in another place which nobody will believe, and who goes aside,
therefore, unsociable and morose, to brood on what is not of this world.
I am confessing this but to those who themselves have been lost in the
dark, and are now awake again. The others will not know. They will only
answer something about "Cheering up," or--and this is the strangest thing
to hear--"to forget it." I don't want to forget it. So if in a book I see
names like Chateau Thierry, Crepy-en-Valois, Dickebusch, Hooge,
Vermelles, Hulluch, Festubert, Notre Dame de Lorette, Ligny-Tilloy,
Sailly-Saillisel, Croiselles, Thiepval, Contalmaison, Dompierre, then I
am caught. I do not try to escape.
Yet these books rarely satisfy me. Is it not remarkable that soldiers who
could face the shells with an excellent imitation of indifference should
falter in their books, intimidated by the opinions of those who stayed at
home? They rarely summon the courage to attack those heroic dummies which
are not soldiers but idols set up in a glorious battlefield that never
existed except as a romance among the unimaginative; the fine figures and
the splendid war that were air-built of a rapture. These authors who were
soldiers faced the real War, but they dare not deride the noble and
popular figments which lived but in the transports of the exalted. They
write in whispers, as it were, embarrassed by a knowledge which they
would communicate, but fear they may not. To shatter a cherished
illusion, to expose the truth to a proud memory, that, I will confess,
is always a task before which a sensitive man will hesitate. Yet it is
also part of the test of a writer's courage; by his hesitation a
soldier-author may know that he is in danger of failing in his duty. Yet
the opinion of the public, which intimidates us, is no mere bugbear. It
is very serious. People do not enjoy the destruction of their cherished
illusions. They do not crown the defamers of their idols. What is it that
balks a soldier's judgment when he begins to write about the War? He is
astonished by the reflection that if he were to reproduce with enjoyment
the talk of the heroes which was usual in France, then many excellent
ladies might denounce it indignantly as unmanly. Unmanly! But he is
right. They not only might, but they would. How often have I listened to
the cool and haughty contralto of ladies of education and refinement who
were clearly unaware that what they were encouraging, what to them
afforded so much pride, what deepened their conviction of righteous
sacrifice, was but an obscene outrage on the souls and bodies of young
men. How is one to convey that to ladies? All that a timid writer may do
is to regret the awful need to challenge the pious assurance of
Christians which is sure to be turned to anger by the realities.
I have read in very few books anything that was as good as the gossip one
could hear by chance in France. The intimate yarn of the observant
soldier home on leave, who could trust his listener, is superior to much
one sees in print. In that way I heard the best story of the War. If it
could be put down as it was given to me it would be a masterpiece. But it
cannot be reproduced. It came as I heard it because, remembering his
incredible experience, the narrator found himself in secure and familiar
circumstances again, was confident of his audience, and was thinking only
of his story. His mind was released, he was comfortable, and he was
looking backward in a grim humour which did not quite disguise his
sadness. His smile was comical, but it could move no answering smile.
These intelligent soldiers, who tell us the stories we never see in
print, are not thinking about their style, or of the way the other men
have told such tales, but only of what happened to themselves. They are
as artless as the child who at breakfast so tells its dream of the night
before that one wants to listen, and Tolstoy says that is art. The child
has heard nothing of the apocalyptic visions, and does not know Poe,
Ambrose Bierce, or Kipling. He is concerned only with his own sensations,
and you listen to him because you have had such dreams, and he recalls a
dark adventure you had forgotten.
But the difficulty in the writing of such stories is that the narrator,
as soon as he begins, becomes conscious of the successful methods of
other men. I have been reading a number of War stories published
recently, and it was painful to see how many were ruined by Kipling
before this War began. Kipling was original, and his tricks of manner,
often irritating, and his deplorable views of human society, were usually
carried off by his genius for observation, and the spontaneity of the
drama of his stories. But when his story was thin, and he was wandering
in an excursion with his childish philosophy, he was usually facetious.
As an obvious and easily imitable trick for dull evenings, this elaborate
jocularity seems to have been more enjoyed by his disciples than his
genius for narrative when he was happy, and his material was full and
sound. Yet his false and vulgar fun has spoiled many of these volumes
pollinated from India. They have another defect, too, though it would be
unfair to blame Kipling for that when it may be seen blossoming with the
unassuming modesty of a tulip in any number of _Punch_. I mean that
amusing gravity of the snob who is sure of the exclusive superiority of
his caste mark, with not the trace of a smile on his face, and at a time
when all Europe is awakening to the fact that it sentenced itself to ruin
when it gave great privileges to his kind of folk in return for the
guidance of what it thought was a finer culture, but was no more than a
different accent. It was, we are now aware, the mere Nobodies who won the
War for us; and yet we still meekly accept as the artistic representation
of the British soldier or sailor an embarrassing guy that would disgrace
pantomime. And how the men who won must enjoy it!
XV. Waiting for Daylight
NOVEMBER 9, 1918. I read again my friend's last field service postcard,
brief and enigmatic, and now six weeks old. I could find in it no more
than when it first came. Midnight struck, and I went to the outer gate.
The midnight had nothing to tell me. Not that it was silent; we would not
call it mere silence, that brooding and impenetrable darkness charged
with doom unrevealed, which is now our silent night, unrelenting to
lonely watchers.
Near my gate is a laburnum tree. Once upon a time, on nights of rain such
as this, the shower caught in it would turn to stars, and somehow from
the brightness of that transient constellation I could get my bearings. I
knew where I was. One noticed those small matters in the past, and was
innocently thankful for them. Those lights sufficed us. There was
something companionable even in the street lamp. But what is it now? You
see it, when you are accustomed to the midnight gloom of war, shrouded, a
funeral smear of purple in a black world. No bearing can be got from it
now. What one looks into is the lightless unknown. I peer into the night
and rain for some familiar and reasonable shape to loom--I am permitted
to do this, for so far the police do not object to a citizen cherishing a
hopeful though fatuous disposition--but my usual reward is but the sound
of unseen drainage, as though I were listening to my old landmarks in
dissolution. I feel I should not be surprised, when daylight came, to
find that the appearance of my neighbourhood had become like
Spitzbergen's.
That is why I soon retreat now from my gate, no wiser, bringing in with
me on these nights of rain little more than the certainty that we need
expect no maroons or bombs; and then, because the act is most unpatriotic
in a time of shortage, put on more coal with my fingers, as this makes
less noise than a shovel. I choose a pipe, the one I bought in a hurry at
Amiens. I choose it for that reason, and because it holds more tobacco
than the others; watch the flames, and take stock.
In the winter, as we know, it never rains. It is merely wet weather.
Still, that means only a retirement into winter quarters, into those long
evenings against which we have hoarded our books, light and warmth in
store. Perhaps in the case of the more idle there may be the
consideration, pleasant and prolonged, of that other book, known to no
other man, not yet written, and perhaps destined to perish, a secret
dream. But what are now these books? What now is even that book which is
perfect and unwritten? It, too, has lost its light. I am left staring
into the fire. The newspapers tell us of a common joy at the coming of
Peace. Peace? If she is coming, then we are much obliged to her. I
remember during an earlier and wasted joy at a word in France of the
coming of Peace agreeing with several young soldiers that Brussels would
be the place to meet, to hail there with flagons the arrival of the Dove.
But I do not want to be reminded of what has happened since that day.
That festival could now have but one celebrant. Then, in another year of
the War, in a mood of contrition and dismay, some people began to feel
that on the day Peace arrived it would be seemly if she found them on
their knees in church. Since that day, too, much has happened; and when
Peace does come I suppose most of us will make reasonably certain the
bird resembles a dove, and go to bed early--taking another look at the
long-lost creature next morning, in the presence of a competent witness,
to confirm that we have not been deceived again by another turkey
buzzard; and, if that is certain, then let the matter drop.