are not certain about our bearings, it is useless to pretend that the
darkness which once made us content with a book is now a worse kind of
darkness only because intensified by a private shadow. The shadow of a
personal grief does not wholly explain its sinister intensity. The night
itself is different. It hides a world unknown. If a sun is to rise on
that world, then not even a false dawn yet shows. When we stand peering
into our night, where the sound of rain and wind is like nothing the
memory knows, and may be even the dark tumult portending a day of wrath,
we may turn again in solitude to what is left to us, to our books; but
not with quiet content. To-morrow we may pull ourselves together.
Curiosity about our new world may awaken. We may become adventurous, and
make an effort towards greeting the unknown with a cheer, to show it
there is no settled ill-feeling. But it has been my experience that when
leaving port in dark weather, though the voyage to come was to be novel
and interesting, one heard very little cheering from the glum figures
working about the deck. The ship is sea-worthy, but she is bleak and
foreign. In a week all will be well. We shall have cleared these icy
latitudes. The sky will be fairer. We shall have more sun. We shall have
become accustomed to our shipmates' unfamiliar faces and ways. It is only
the start that is sullen and unpropitious.
And here is Peace coming, and a new world, and there are my books; yet
though this pipe after midnight is nearly done, and the fire too, I have
not been able to settle on a book. The books are like the ashes on the
hearth. And listen to the wind, with its unpromising sounds from the wide
and empty desert places! What does any of these old books know about me,
in the midst of those portents of a new age? We are all outward bound,
and this is the first night of a long voyage, its port unknown.
Even my bookshelves seem strange to-night. They look remarkably like a
library I saw once in a house in Richbourg S. Vaast, which, you may
remember, was a village near Neuve Chapelle. Those French volumes also
survived from circumstances that had passed. They were litter. They had
been left behind. I doubted whether, if I tried, I could touch them. They
were not within my time. That was on a day more than three years ago--it
was July, 1915--and Richbourg had then only just left this world. There
was a road without a sign of life; not a movement, except in one house.
The front of that house had gone, exposing the hollow inside, the
collapsed floors and hanging beams, and showing also a doll with a
foolish smirk caught in a wire and dangling from a rafter. The doll
danced in hysteric merriment whenever hidden guns were fired. That was
the only movement in Richbourg S. Vaast, and the guns made the only
sound. I was a survivor from the past, venturing at peril among the
wreckage and hardly remembered relics of what used to be familiar.
Richbourg was possessed by the power which had overwhelmed it, and which
was re-forming it in a changing world. To what was the world changing?
There was no clue, except the oppression of my mind, the shock of the
guns, and the ecstatic mockery of mirth over ruin by that little idiot
doll.
Beyond the sloughing and leprous tower of Richbourg Church, where the
ancient dead in the graveyard had been brought to light again, there was
a house which seemed in being. I entered it, for I was told by a soldier
companion that from a displaced tile in its roof I might see La Bassee. I
looked through that gap, and saw La Bassee. It was very near. It was a
terracotta smudge. It might have been a brickfield. But it was the
Enemy.
What I chiefly remember to-day is only the floor of that upper room from
which, through a gap in its wall, I saw the ambush of the enemy. On the
floor were scattered, mixed with lumps of plaster, a child's alphabetical
blocks. A shoe of the child was among them. There was a window where we
dared not show ourselves, though the day was fair without, and by it was
an old bureau, open, with its pad of blotting-paper, and some letters,
all smothered with fragments of glass and new dust. A few drawers of the
desk were open, and the contents had been spilled. Round the walls of the
room were bookcases with leaded diamond panes. Whoever was last in the
room had left sections of the bookcases open, and there were gaps in the
rows of books. Volumes had been taken out, had been dropped on the floor,
put on the mantelpiece, or, as I had noticed when coming up to the room,
left on the stairs. One volume, still open face upwards, was on the
bureau.
I barely glanced at those books. What could they tell me? What did they
know about it? Just as they were, open on the floor, tumbled on the
stairs, they were telling me all they could. Was there more to be said?
Sitting on a bracket in the shadow of a corner, a little bust of Rousseau
overlooked the scene with me. In such a place, at such a time, you must
make your own interpretation of the change, receiving out of the silence,
which is not altered in nature by occasional abominable noises, just
whatever your mind wishes to take. There the books are, and the dust on
them is of an era which abruptly fell; is still falling.
XVI. The Nobodies
NOVEMBER 11, 1918. The newspapers tell us that to-day the signal to
"cease fire" will be given. This news is called "Official," to give us
assurance in the fog of myth. Maroons will explode above the City. Then
we shall know it is the end of the War. We ought to believe it, because
They tell us this; They who do everything for us--who order us what to
think and how to act, arrange for our potatoes, settle the coming up and
the going down of the sun, and who for years have been taking away our
friends to make heroes of them, and worse. They have kept the War going,
but now They are going to stop it. We shall know it is stopped when the
rockets burst.
Yet "The War" has become a lethargic state of mind for us. We accepted it
from the beginning with green-fly, influenza, margarine, calling-up
notices, and death. It is as much outside our control as the precession
of the equinoxes. We believed confidently in the tumultuous first weeks
of the affair that mankind could not stand that strain for more than a
few months; but we have learned it is possible to habituate humanity to
the long elaboration of any folly, and for men to endure uncomplainingly
racking by any cruelty that is devised by society, and for women to
support any grief, however senselessly caused. Folly and cruelty become
accepted as normal conditions of human existence. They continue superior
to criticism, which is frequent enough though seldom overheard. The
bitter mockery of the satirists, and even the groans of the victims, are
unnoticed by genuine patriots. There seems no reason why those signal
rockets should ever burst, no reason why the mornings which waken us to
face an old dread, and the nights which contract about us like the
strangle of despair, should ever end. We remember the friends we have
lost, and cannot see why we should not share with them, in our turn, the
punishment imposed by solemn and approved dementia. Why should not the
War go on till the earth in final victory turns to the moon the
pock-scarred and pallid mask which the moon turns to us?
I was looking, later this morning, at Charing Cross Bridge. It was, as
usual, going south to the War. More than four years ago I crossed it on a
memorable journey to France. It seemed no different to-day. It was still
a Via Dolorosa projecting straight and black over a chasm. While I gazed
at it, my mind in the past, a rocket exploded above it. Yes, I saw a
burst of black smoke. The guns had ceased?
A tug passing under the bridge began a continuous hooting. Locomotives
began to answer the tug deliriously. I could hear a low muttering, the
beginning of a tempest, the distant but increasing shouting of a great
storm. Two men met in the thoroughfare below my outlook, waved their
hats, and each cheered into the face of the other.
Out in the street a stream of men and women poured from every door, and
went to swell the main cataract which had risen suddenly in full flood in
the Strand. The donkey-barrow of a costermonger passed me, loaded with a
bluejacket, a flower-girl, several soldiers, and a Staff captain whose
spurred boots wagged joyously over the stern of the barrow. A motor cab
followed, two Australian troopers on the roof of that, with a hospital
nurse, her cap awry, sitting across the knees of one of them. A girl on
the kerb, continuously springing a rattle in a sort of trance, shrieked
with laughter at the nurse. Lines of people with linked arms chanted and
surged along, bare-headed, or with hats turned into jokes. A private car,
a beautiful little saloon in which a lady was solitary, stopped near me,
and the lady beckoned with a smile to a Canadian soldier who was close.
He first stared in surprise at this fashionable stranger, and then got in
beside her with obviously genuine alacrity. The hubbub swelled and rolled
in increasing delirium. Out of the upper windows of the Hotel Cecil, a
headquarters of the Air Force, a confetti of official forms fell in
spasmodic clouds. I returned soon to the empty room of an office where I
was likely to be alone; because, now the War was over, while listening to
the jollity of Peace which had just arrived, I could not get my thoughts
home from France, and what they were I cannot tell.
But there were some other memories, more easily borne. There was that
night, for instance, late in the August of 1914, when three of us were
getting away from Creil. It was time to go. We were not soldiers. Lying
on the floor of a railway carriage I tried to sleep, pillowed
involuntarily on someone's boot. I never knew to whom that foot
belonged, for the compartment was chaos, like the world. The carriage
light was feeble, and the faces I saw above me drooped under the glim,
wilted and dingy. The eyes of the dishevelled were shut, and this
traveller, counting the pulse of the wheels beneath, presently forgot
everything ... there was a crash, and my heart bounded me to my feet.
There had been a fortnight of excitements of this kind. A bag fell and
struck me back to the floor. Unseen people trampled over me, shouting.
Somebody cried: "Here they are!" A cascade of passengers and luggage
tumbled over to a station platform.
It was a chilly morning. And where were we? A clock in a tower said it
was five. People hurried without apparent reason in all directions. So
the world may appear to us if some day we find, to our surprise, that we
have returned from the dead. I leaned against a lamppost, my mind
gravel-rashed, and waited for something that could be understood. The
Germans would do. We heard the enemy was close, and that the railway
officials would get us away if they could. The morning became no warmer,
there was no coffee, and our tobacco pouches were empty. But at least we
were favoured with the chance of watching the French railwaymen at work.
This was a junction, and the men moved about as though they were only
busy on holiday traffic. They were easy and deliberate. I could see they
would hold that line to the last pull of cotton-waste, and would run
their trains while there was a mile of track. So we learned gradually
that confident invaders are baffled by railwaymen and other common
people, such as old women insistent on their cows, almost as much as they
are by bayonets. A country's readiness for war may be slight, yet the
settled habits of the peaceful Nobodies, which are not reckoned by
Imperialists when they are calculating the length of the road to
conquest, are strangely tough and obstinate. You could go to a girl at
the pigeon-hole of a booking-office in France, demand a ticket for a
place which by all the signs might then have fallen behind the van of the
German Army, and she would hand the ticket to you as though she had never
heard of the War. Then the engine-driver would go on towards the sound of
the guns till you wondered, made uneasy by the signs without, whether he
was phrenetic and intended to run the enemy down. The train would stop,
and while the passengers were listening to the shells the guard would
come along and give some advice as to the best thing to do.
A little ahead of the Germans, a train came into that junction and took
us away. I fell asleep again, and presently awoke to see a sombre orchard
outside my window of our stationary train. It was a group of trees
entranced, like a scene before the stage is occupied. The grass in the
twilight beneath the trees was rank. My sight fell drowsily to an
abandoned _kepi_, and, while wondering what had become of the man who
used to wear it, I saw a bright eye slyly shut at me. A wink in the
grass! A bearded face was laughing up at me from under the _kepi_. A
rifle with a fixed bayonet slid forward. Then I saw the orchard had a
secret crop of eyes, which smiled at us from the ground. We moved on, and
farewell kisses were blown to us.
Among the laurels of a garden beyond field batteries were in position. We
crossed a bridge over a lower road and a stream. Infantry were waiting
below for something, and from their attitudes seemed to expect it soon.
My fellow-passengers were now awake to these omens. Broad streams of
cattle undulated past our train going south, but west. "My poor Paris!"
exclaimed a French lady. It was not for themselves these people were
sorry. The common sort of people in the train were sorry for Paris, for
all their unlucky fellows. The train moved with hesitancy for hours.
During one long pause we listened to a cannonade. One burst of sound
seemed very close. A young English girl, sitting in a corner with her
infant, abruptly handed the child to her husband. She rummaged in a
travelling case with the haste of incipient panic. She produced a
spirit-lamp, a bowl, and a tin. She had suddenly remembered it was past
her baby's feeding time.
Who won the War for us? It was such folk. They turned in docility, with
no more than a pause, a pause of ignorance and wonder, of dismay they
could hardly conceal, from the accustomed order of their days to form
vast armies, to populate innumerable factories for the making of
munitions of war, and, while their households came everywhere to ruin,
they held stubbornly to the task fate had thrust upon them; yet their
august governors and popular guides, frantic and afraid through the dire
retribution which had fallen on that monstrous European society which so
many of us had thought eternal, abjured and abused the common sort whose
efforts were all that could save us. What did they call the Nobodies?
Slackers, cowards, rabbits, and field vermin; mean creatures unable to
leave their football and their drink. I recall one sombre winter's day of
the first November of the War, when a column of wounded Belgian soldiers
shambled by me, coming out of the Yser line, on the way to succour which
I knew they would not find. The doctors and the hospitals were few. These
fellows were in rags which were plastered to their limbs with mud. Their
eyes had the vacant look of men who had returned from the grave and who
had forgotten this world. The bare feet of some of them left bloody
trails on the road. Others clutched their bodies, and the blood drained
between their fingers. One dropped dead at my feet. I came home with that
in my mind; and the next sunrise, hearing unusual sounds outside, I
lifted the blind to a dawn which was cold and ominously scarlet behind
skeleton trees. I saw beneath the trees a company of my young neighbours,
already in khaki, getting used to the harshness of sergeants, and to the
routine of those implacable circumstances which would take them to Neuve
Chapelle, to Gallipoli, to Loos, to the Somme; names that had no meaning
for us then.
That serious company of young Englishmen making soldiers of themselves
in a day with so unpropitious an opening light did not look like national
indifference. Those innocents getting used to rifles were as affecting as
that single line of bodies I saw across a mile of stubble near Compiegne,
where a rearguard of the "Contemptibles" had sacrificed themselves to
their comrades. But one could not be sure. I went to find one who could
tell me whether England was awake to what confronted it. I remembered he
was a quiet observer, that he knew what allowance to make for those
patriotic newspapers which so early were holding up in ruinous caricature
their country and their countrymen for the world to see and to scorn. He
was a scholar, he was a Socialist and a pacifist, he had a sense of
humour to keep him balanced. But he had gone. He had enlisted; and he is
dead.
It was a common experience. From the day the Germans entered Belgium a
dumb resolution settled on our Nobodies. They did not demonstrate. They
made long silent queues at the recruiting offices. It is true those
offices were not ready for them and turned them away; and when by sheer
obstinacy they got into the Army they were put into concentration camps
that were as deadly as battle. That did not daunt them, nor turn them
from their purpose, whatever that was, for they never said; and the
newspapers, by tradition, had no time to find out, being devoted to the
words and activities of the Highly Important. We therefore knew nothing
of the munition factories that were springing up magically, as in a
night, like toadstools, all over the country, and were barely aware that
for some mysterious reason the hosts of the enemy were stopped dead on
the road to Calais. Whose work was all this? But how should we know? Who
can chronicle what Nobody does?
Sometimes there was a hint. Once again, when I returned from France in
1916, unhappy with a guess at what the future would be like, I learned
that our workers were not working. They were drinking. They had been
passionately denounced by the Great and Popular, and our Press was forced
to admit this disastrous crime to the world, for fidelity to the truth is
a national quality. I went to an engineer who would know the worst, and
would not be afraid to tell me what it was. I found him asleep in his
overalls, where he had dropped after thirty-six hours of continuous duty.
Afterwards, when his blasphemous indignation over profiteers,
politicians, and newspapers had worn itself out, he told me. His men,
using dimmed lights while working on the decks of urgent ships, often
forced to work in cramped positions and in all weathers, and while the
ship was under way to a loading berth, with no refreshment provided
aboard, and dropped at any hour long distances from home, were still
regarded by employers in the old way, not as defenders of their country's
life, but as a means to quick profits, against whom the usual debasing
tricks of economy could be devised. A battleship in the north had been
completed five months under contract time. Working girls, determined to
make a record output of ammunition, persisted twenty-two hours at a
stretch, topped their machines with Union Jacks, and fainted next morning
while waiting for the factory gates to open. The spirit of the English!
What virtue there is in bread and tea! Yet we might have guessed it. And
again we might have remembered, as a corrective, how many grave speeches,
which have surprised, shocked, and directed the nation, have been made by
Great Men too soon after a noble dinner, words winged by the Press
without an accompanying and explanatory wine list.
But the Nobodies are light-minded, casual, and good-hearted. Their great
labour over, and their sacrifices buried, they have come out this day to
celebrate the occasion with hilarious and ironic gaiety. They have won
the Greatest of Wars, so they ride in motor-lorries and make delirious
noises with comic instruments. Their heroic thoughts are blattering
through penny trumpets. They have accomplished what had been declared
impossible, and now they rejoice with an inconsequential clatter on
tea-trays and tin cans.
Yet some of us who watched their behaviour saw the fantastic brightness
in the streets on Armistice Day only as a momentary veiling of the
spectres of a shadow land which now will never pass. Who that heard
"Tipperary" sung by careless men marching in France in a summer which
seems a century gone will hear that foolish tune again without a sudden
fear that he will be unable to control his emotion? And those Nobodies of
Mons, the Marne, and the Aisne, what were they? The "hungry squad," the
men shut outside the factory gates, the useless surplus of the labour
market so necessary for a great nation's commercial prosperity. Their
need kept the wages of their neighbours at an economic level. The men of
Mons were of that other old rearguard, the hope of the captains of
industry when there are revolts against the common lot of our industrial
cities where the death-rates of young Nobodies, casualty lists of those
who fall to keep us prosperous, are as ruinous as open war; a mutilation
of life, a drainage of the nation's body that is easily borne by
Christian folk who are moved to grief and action at the thought of
Polynesians without Bibles.
Yet the Nobodies stood to it at Mons. They bore us no resentment. We will
say they fought for an England that is not us, an England that is nobler
than common report and common speech. Think of the contempt and anger of
the better end of London just before the War, when, at the other end, the
people of Dockland revolted and defied their masters! I knew one mother
in that obscure host of ignorant humanity in revolt. Two of her infants
were slowly fading, and she herself was dying of starvation, yet she
refused the entrance of charity at her door, and dared her man to
surrender. He died later at Ypres. He died because of that very quality
of his which moved his masters and superiors to anger; he refused at
Ypres, as he did in Dockland, like those who were with him and were of
his kind, to do more than mock defeat when it faced him.
That figure of Nobody in sodden khaki, cumbered with ugly gear, its
precious rifle wrapped in rags, no brightness anywhere about it except
the light of its eyes (did those eyes mock us, did they reproach us, when
they looked into ours in Flanders?), its face seamed with lines which
might have been dolorous, which might have been ironic, with the sweat
running from under its steel casque, looms now in the memory, huge,
statuesque, silent but questioning, like an overshadowing challenge, like
a gigantic legendary form charged with tragedy and drama; and its eyes,
seen in memory again, search us in privacy. Yet that figure was the
"Cuthbert." It was derided by those onlookers who were not fit to kneel
and touch its muddy boots. It broke the Hindenburg Line. Its body was
thrown to fill the trenches it had won, and was the bridge across which
our impatient guns drove in pursuit of the enemy.
What is that figure now? An unspoken thought, which charges such names as
Bullecourt, Cambrai, Bapaume, Croiselles, Hooge, and a hundred more, with
the sound and premonition of a vision of midnight and all unutterable
things. We see it in a desolation of the mind, a shape forlorn against
the alien light of the setting of a day of dread, the ghost of what was
fair, but was broken, and is lost.
XVII. Bookworms
JANUARY 18, 1919. In Fleet Street yesterday there was at lunch with us an
American Army officer who discoursed heartily about a certain literary
public-house. He quoted a long passage from Dickens showing how somebody
took various turnings near Fetter Lane, easily to be recognized, till
they arrived at this very tavern. Such enthusiasm is admirable, yet
embarrassing. In return, I inquired after several young American poets,
whose work, seldom seen here, interests me, and I named their books. He
had never heard of them. This enthusiast did not even appear to have the
beginning of an idea that his was unforgivable ignorance seeing that he
knew more than a native ought to know about some of our taverns. Had he
been an Englishman and a friend of mine I should have told him that I
thought his love of letters was as spurious as the morality of the curate
who speaks in a trembling baritone about changes in the divorce laws,
but who accepts murder without altering the statutory smile of
benediction.