We spread our lunch on the crown of one of those great billows of the downs
that stand along the sea. Down in the hollows tiny villages or farmsteads
stood in the midst of clumps of trees, and the cultivated lands looked like
squares of many-coloured carpets, brown carpets and yellow carpets and
green carpets, with the cloud shadows passing over them and moving like
battalions up the gracious slopes of the downs beyond. A gleam of white in
the midst of one of the brown fields caught the eye. It seemed like a patch
of snow that had survived the rigours of the English summer, but suddenly
it rose as if blown by the wind and came towards us in tiny flakes of white
that turned to seagulls. They sailed high above us uttering that querulous
cry that seems to have in it all the unsatisfied hunger of the sea.
In this splendid spaciousness the familiar forms seem incredibly
diminutive. That little speck moving across one of the brown carpets is a
ploughman and his team. That white stream that looks like milk flowing over
the green carpet is a flock of sheep running before the sheep-dog to
another pasture. And the ear no less than the eye learns to translate the
faint suggestions into known terms. At first it seems that, save for the
larks that spring up here and there with their cascades of song, the whole
of this immense vacancy is soundless. But listen. There is "the wind on the
heath, brother." And below that, and only audible when you have attuned
your ear to the silence, is the low murmur of the sea.
You begin to grow interested in probing the secrecies of this great
stillness. That? Ah, that was the rumble of some distant railway train
going to Brighton or Eastbourne. But what was that? Through the voices of
the wind and the sea that we have learned to distinguish we catch another
sound, curiously hollow and infinitely remote, not vaguely pervasive like
the murmur of the sea, but round and precise like the beating of a drum
somewhere on the confines of the earth.
"The guns!"
Yes, the guns. Across fifty miles of sea and fifty miles of land the sound
is borne to us as we sit in the midst of this great peace of earth and sky.
When once detached, as it were, from the vague murmurs of the breathing air
it becomes curiously insistent. It throbs on the ear almost like the
beating of a pulse--baleful, sepulchral, like the strokes of doom. We begin
counting them, wondering whether they are the guns of the enemy or our own,
speculating as to the course of the battle.
We have become spectators of the great tragedy, and the throb of the guns
touches the scene with new suggestions. Those cloud shadows drifting across
the valley and up the slopes of the downs on the other side take on the
shapes of massed battalions. The apparent solitude does not destroy the
impression. There is no solitude so complete to the outward eye as that
which broods over the country when the armies face each other in the grips
of death. I have looked from the mountain of Rheims across just such a
valley as this. Twenty miles of battle front lay before me, and in all that
great field of vision there was not a moving thing visible. There were no
cattle in the fields and no ploughmen following their teams. Roads marched
across the landscape, but they were empty roads. It was as though life had
vanished from the earth. Yet I knew that all over that great valley the
earth was crawling with life and full of immense and sinister
secrecies--the galleries of the sappers, the trenches and redoubts, the
hiding-places of great guns, the concealed observations of the watchers.
Yes, it was just such a scene as this. The only difference was that you had
not to put your ear to the ground to catch the thunder of the guns.
But the voice of war that has broken in upon our peace fades when we are
once more on the move over the downs, and the visions it has brought with
it seem unreal and phantasmal in their serene and sunlit world. The shadows
turn to mere shadows again, and we tread the wild thyme and watch the
spiral of the lark with careless rapture. We dip down into a valley to a
village hidden among the trees, without fear or thought of bomb-proof
shelters and masked batteries, and there in a cottage with the roses over
the porch we take rest and counsel over the teacups. Then once more on to
the downs. The evening shadows are stretching across the valleys, but on
these spacious heights the sunshine still rests. Some one starts singing
that jolly old song, "The Farmer's Boy," and soon the air resounds to the
chorus:
"To plough and sow, to reap and mow,
And be a farmer's boy-o-o-o-oy,
And be a farmer's boy."
No one recalls the throbbing of the guns or stops to catch it from amidst
the murmurs of the air. This--this is the reality. That was only an echo
from a bad dream from which we have awakened.
And when an hour or two later we reach the little village by the sea we
rush for the letters that await us with eager curiosity. There is silence
in the room as each of us devours the budget of news awaiting us. I am
vaguely conscious as I read that some one has left the room with a sense of
haste. I go up to my bedroom, and when I return the sitting-room is empty
save for one figure. I see at a glance that something has happened.
"Robert has been killed in battle," he says. How near the sound of the guns
had come!