Not all Hugh's letters were concerned with these grim technicalities. It
was not always that news and gossip came along; it was rare that a young
man with a commission would condescend to talk shop to two young men
without one; there were few newspapers and fewer maps, and even in
France and within sound of guns, Hugh could presently find warfare
almost as much a bore as it had been at times in England. But his
criticism of military methods died away. "Things are done better out
here," he remarked, and "We're nearer reality here. I begin to respect
my Captain. Who is developing a sense of locality. Happily for our
prospects." And in another place he speculated in an oddly
characteristic manner whether he was getting used to the army way,
whether he was beginning to see the sense of the army way, or whether
it really was that the army way braced up nearer and nearer to
efficiency as it got nearer to the enemy. "And here one hasn't the
haunting feeling that war is after all an hallucination. It's already
common sense and the business of life....
"In England I always had a sneaking idea that I had 'dressed up' in my
uniform....
"I never dreamt before I came here how much war is a business of waiting
about and going through duties and exercises that were only too
obviously a means of preventing our discovering just how much waiting
about we were doing. I suppose there is no great harm in describing the
place I am in here; it's a kind of scenery that is somehow all of a
piece with the life we lead day by day. It is a village that has been
only partly smashed up; it has never been fought through, indeed the
Germans were never within two miles of it, but it was shelled
intermittently for months before we made our advance. Almost all the
houses are still standing, but there is not a window left with a square
foot of glass in the place. One or two houses have been burnt out, and
one or two are just as though they had been kicked to pieces by a
lunatic giant. We sleep in batches of four or five on the floors of the
rooms; there are very few inhabitants about, but the village inn still
goes on. It has one poor weary billiard-table, very small with very big
balls, and the cues are without tops; it is The Amusement of the place.
Ortheris does miracles at it. When he leaves the army he says he's going
to be a marker, 'a b----y marker.' The country about us is
flat--featureless--desolate. How I long for hills, even for Essex mud
hills. Then the road runs on towards the front, a brick road frightfully
worn, lined with poplars. Just at the end of the village mechanical
transport ends and there is a kind of depot from which all the stuff
goes up by mules or men or bicycles to the trenches. It is the only
movement in the place, and I have spent hours watching men shift grub or
ammunition or lending them a hand. All day one hears guns, a kind of
thud at the stomach, and now and then one sees an aeroplane, very high
and small. Just beyond this point there is a group of poplars which have
been punished by a German shell. They are broken off and splintered in
the most astonishing way; all split and ravelled out like the end of a
cane that has been broken and twisted to get the ends apart. The choice
of one's leisure is to watch the A.S.C. or play football, twenty a side,
or sit about indoors, or stand in the doorway, or walk down to the
Estaminet and wait five or six deep for the billiard-table. Ultimately
one sits. And so you get these unconscionable letters."
"Unconscionable," said Mr. Britling. "Of course--he will grow out of
that sort of thing.
"And he'll write some day, sure enough. He'll write."
He went on reading the letter.
"We read, of course. But there never could be a library here big enough
to keep us going. We can do with all sorts of books, but I don't think
the ordinary sensational novel is quite the catch it was for a lot of
them in peace time. Some break towards serious reading in the oddest
fashion. Old Park, for example, says he wants books you can chew; he is
reading a cheap edition of 'The Origin of Species.' He used to regard
Florence Warden and William le Queux as the supreme delights of print. I
wish you could send him Metchnikoff's 'Nature of Man' or Pearson's
'Ethics of Freethought.' I feel I am building up his tender mind. Not
for me though, Daddy. Nothing of that sort for me. These things take
people differently. What I want here is literary opium. I want something
about fauns and nymphs in broad low glades. I would like to read
Spenser's 'Faerie Queen.' I don't think I have read it, and yet I have a
very distinct impression of knights and dragons and sorcerers and wicked
magic ladies moving through a sort of Pre-Raphaelite tapestry
scenery--only with a light on them. I could do with some Hewlett of the
'Forest Lovers' kind. Or with Joseph Conrad in his Kew Palm-house mood.
And there is a book, I once looked into it at a man's room in London; I
don't know the title, but it was by Richard Garnett, and it was all
about gods who were in reduced circumstances but amidst sunny
picturesque scenery. Scenery without steel or poles or wire. A thing
after the manner of Heine's 'Florentine Nights.' Any book about Greek
gods would be welcome, anything about temples of ivory-coloured stone
and purple seas, red caps, chests of jewels, and lizards in the sun. I
wish there was another 'Thais.' The men here are getting a kind of
newspaper sheet of literature scraps called _The Times_ Broadsheets.
Snippets, but mostly from good stuff. They're small enough to stir the
appetite, but not to satisfy it. Rather an irritant--and one wants no
irritant.... I used to imagine reading was meant to be a stimulant. Out
here it has to be an anodyne....
"Have you heard of a book called 'Tom Cringle's Log'?
"War is an exciting game--that I never wanted to play. It excites once
in a couple of months. And the rest of it is dirt and muddle and
boredom, and smashed houses and spoilt roads and muddy scenery and
boredom, and the lumbering along of supplies and the lumbering back of
the wounded and weary--and boredom, and continual vague guessing of how
it will end and boredom and boredom and boredom, and thinking of the
work you were going to do and the travel you were going to have, and the
waste of life and the waste of days and boredom, and splintered poplars
and stink, everywhere stink and dirt and boredom.... And all because
these accursed Prussians were too stupid to understand what a boredom
they were getting ready when they pranced and stuck their chests out and
earnt the praises of Mr. Thomas Carlyle.... _Gott strafe
Deutschland_.... So send me some books, books of dreams, books about
China and the willow-pattern plate and the golden age and fairyland. And
send them soon and address them very carefully...."