No Enemy
A TALE OF
RECONSTRUCTION
_by_ Ford Madox Ford
_Author of_
NO MORE PARADES
SOME DO NOT
_etc._
_New York, 1929_
THE MACAULAY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY
THE MACAULAY COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
_To_
ESTHER JULIA MADOX FORD
_Très, très chère petite Princesse_,
When you shall come to read English--which I hope will not be too
soon--you shall find here adumbrated what the world seemed like to me
just when you were preparing to enter it ..... a confused old world
which your coming rendered so much clearer and dearer. And as these
pages were written in the expectation of you--and for you!--I have
thought better to leave them exactly as they were, bearing as they
obviously do the traces of sufferings that, thank God, you never knew.
And so, when you come to read them, give a tender thought to him to
whom you have so often written--quitoubliejamé et qui t’aime de tou son
coeur et encore beaucoupluss!
F. M. F.
New York, 21st June, 1929
What is love of one’s land?....
I don’t know very well.
It is something that sleeps
For a year, for a day,
For a month--something that keeps
Very hidden and quiet and still
And then takes
The quiet heart like a wave,
The quiet brain like a spell,
The quiet will
Like a tornado--and that shakes
The whole of the soul.
CONTENTS
Part One--Four Landscapes
CHAPTER PAGE
I TO INTRODUCE GRINGOIRE 9
II GARDENS AND FLATS 19
III BLUE OF SWALLOWS’ BACKS 39
IV THE KINGDOMS OF THE EARTH 47
V INTERMEZZO 88
VI JUST COUNTRY 118
VII PLAYING THE GAME 129
Part Two--Certain Interiors
VIII “MAISIE” 147
IX THE WATER MILL 176
X FROM A BALCONY 194
XI “ROSALIE PRUDENT” 222
XII THE MOVIES 258
ENVOI 293
PART ONE
FOUR LANDSCAPES
I
_To Introduce Gringoire_
The writer’s friend Gringoire, originally a poet and Gallophile, went
to the war. Long, gray, lean, unreasonably boastful as a man and
unreasonably modest as a poet, he was probably not too disciplined as
an infantry officer, but he has survived to inhabit in tranquillity
with the most charming of companions a rural habitation so ancient,
frail and unreal that it is impossible to think of it otherwise than as
the Gingerbread Cottage you may have read of in the tale of “Haensel
and Gretel.”
This book, then, is the story of Gringoire just after ... Armageddon.
For it struck the writer that you hear of the men that went, and you
hear of what they did when they were There. But you never hear how
It left them. You hear how things were destroyed, but seldom of the
painful processes of Reconstruction.
So that your Compiler, taking pencils, tablets and erasers and
availing himself of the singularly open hospitality of the poet and
his charming meridional partner, came on many successive Saturday
afternoons from the little old Grammar School where he instructs
classes in English Literature and Physical Development, to sit in the
garden at the feet of Gringoire, Gallophile, Veteran, Gardener and,
above all, Economist, if not above all Poet.
We would sit about on rude benches whilst Mme. Sélysette would bring
us shandygaff brewed after a recipe of Gringoire himself. Then he
would talk and your Compiler make furtive shorthand notes. Above all
Gringoire loved to talk about cooking for he boasted that he was not
only the best but the most economical cook in the world. How that may
be your Compiler hesitates to say. To eat a meal prepared by Gringoire
was certainly an adventure and when you felt adventurous had its
titillations. But only Mme. Sélysette who had accompanied him into
his English wilds from the distant South could have told you whether
Gringoire was as economical in his cuisine as he professed to be. For
he swore that the saviour of society in the end would be the good but
excellently economical cook.
But Mme. Sélysette, dark, alert and with exquisitely pencilled brows
and as loyal as she was goodhumored, never got beyond saying that in
his culinary furies Gringoire needed at least three persons--whom I
took to be herself, the diminutive maid and the almost more diminutive
stable boy--to clear up after he had boiled an egg.
How Gringoire proposed to save the world by intensive kitchen gardening
and exquisite but economical cookery may appear hereafter. His years in
the trenches had taught him one thing--to be an eccentric economist,
_in petto_, since he regarded himself as an extinct poet and proposed
to live on his minute army pension. And I think his ambition really was
to teach persons forced to live on minute incomes how to lead graceful,
poetic and pleasant lives and so to save the world.
Thus it would perhaps have been better could your Compiler have
provided you with a work useful to young couples contemplating
matrimony on ten shillings a week ... or a month ... or a year. That
would have been an enterprise certainly to gladden the heart of
Gringoire. Or it might have been better had it taken the form of a
Cottager Cookery Book or a Cottager’s Guide to Gardening or the Keeping
of Goats instead of the war-reminiscences of a contemplative and
sensitive soul. Yes, to be sure that would have been better. One can
only console one’s self that when it comes to war-reminiscences the
contemplative and sensitive soul has been little represented. So, for
the matter of that, has the poetic but economical chef.
But the present writer, alas, has not the excellent--but _so_
meticulous!--mind that will let him sit down and write _many_
paragraphs such as that following this one. Neither has Gringoire the
patience to dictate to the writer details of his methods. The most
he has done is to let his Boswell into his frame of mind. We once,
together, got as far as this:
“_Chops, Mutton, to deal with._
“_Fritto Misto_: Stock: Mixed Meats _en casserole_.
“Take two chops. Pare off _all_ the fat till you have two _noisettes
de mouton_. Save each particle of meat and each particle of fat from
the tail ends of the chops, separate, but as zealously as you preserve
every memory of your well-beloved. You will then have four little
divisions: two _noisettes_ for the _Fritto Misto_; two chop bones
for stock; a little pile of fat for rendering down; a little pile of
fragments of meat. Place the bones immediately in a small casserole of
water, with salt, two bay leaves, pepper, one leaf of sage, and rice if
you like. It will help you if you tie the bones together with a piece
of string having a long end so that you may pull them out. Let this
simmer for thirty-six hours.[1] Have ready also six roots of salsify;
one-half pound of French beans; one-half pound of cooked peas; and
one pound of potatoes, cut into slices. (All these vegetables should
be cooked ready. It will improve matters if the peas are _very_ young
and boiled in syrup.) Also two tomatoes sliced in halves, the meat of
two rashers of bacon, and a few mushrooms, and half a dozen sprigs of
parsley. (The bacon fat must be saved for rendering down.) Also two
slices of bread half an inch thick. Have ready also a large pie dish
half filled with water.
“Now take an earthenware frying pan with a white glazed lining. Put in
sufficient frying fat to fill this to three-quarters of its depth when
boiling. Set this on the fire and bring the fat to the boil. (Boiling
fat will be absolutely still--stiller than any waters at even; as still
as is Madame Sélysette when, in the same room, Gringoire is writing. It
will have ceased to bubble, and, above its surface, will float a filmy
wreath of bluish vapor. You may test it by dropping in a piece of bread
crumb. If this becomes crisp in sixty seconds, your fat will be ready
for what follows.)
“As soon as the fat boils, drop in your two slices of bread, which
will be large enough later to support the _noisettes_ and which will
be trimmed to improve their appearance. During that minute, place in
a frying basket your two _noisettes_ of mutton and the sliced cold
potatoes. (Gringoire likes his fried potatoes not too crisp. Those who
like them biscuit-wise should fry them in the basket for a quarter
of an hour longer than the mutton.) Take out from the frying fat the
slices of bread, let them drip into the fat, place them handy on a
clean plate ... _D--n it, that’s enough!_”
The reader will understand that at this point my friend Gringoire
ceased dictating and ceased violently. Thus a Gringoire cookery book
cannot be compiled. For, though Gringoire will cook for hours and hours
if visitors are expected, and though he will talk, equally for hours
and hours, about eating, about digestion, about French, Italian, and
even German cookery as they affect the emotions, he finds it tiresome
to tie down his mind to the recording of processes.
It is the same with gardening; the keeping of goats, ducks, chickens;
the training of dogs, cats, and horses. He will spend hours in
meditating over his onion bed.
And then Madame Sélysette will call from the bedroom window of the
Gingerbread Cottage:
“I do _love_ to see you, Gringoire, pottering about and pretending to
be busy.” For Gringoire will have risen at 6:30 and will have done
something with hoes, spades, trowels, lines, and other paraphernalia.
But he will have thought more. For the rotation of crops on a quarter
of an acre of sandy soil that has to be at once a formal garden and the
main food supply of a couple, of the tiniest income--that is a subject
for endless thought.
It is a subject also for endless economies, schemes, calculations. The
calculations concern manure--for the accounts of agriculture are the
most complicated of accounts. You may show a loss on the fattening
of an ox, a chicken, a goat, a duck, or a pig--and yet its droppings
may so enrich your land as to give you actually a handsome balance of
profit. Or again a crop may appear superabundant, little palatable, or
unattractive--but, fed to one animal or another, it will beautifully
adorn your board on Christmas day.
So in the Gingerbread Cottage--and it is, in all but looks, a very bad
cottage, with a roof that leaks, walls that used to drip with damp,
cupboards that, till the advent of Gringoire, smelled of mold and bred
the very largest spiders that can be imagined--Gringoire pursues at
once his economies, his meditations, and his career as a poet.
But he is only able to be communicative as to his meditations. If
Madame Sélysette asks him how to make _potage_ this or that, he
says: “Oh, throw in any old thing.” Or again! This spring the writer
overheard the following dialogue between him and a small boy who was
weeding whilst he dug.
“What is the most important thing in gardening, boy?”
“Manure, sir.”
“What is the next most important thing?”
“Tools, sir.”
“And the next?”
“Money to buy seeds, sir.”
“Wrong in every particular,” said Gringoire in a terrible voice. “The
first thing is brains; and the second thing is brains; and the third
thing is brains. Do you understand?”
The boy said, “Yes, sir.” But one may doubt if he was really much
wiser. And Gringoire continued somewhat as follows: “I have no manure,
no tools, and no money--but you will see in the autumn that I shall
have the most productive garden in the country!”
From which it will appear that Gringoire has some of the
characteristics of a Southern origin. Today his garden would not at
all points impress a French gardener--but in some it would. For, in
his youth Gringoire sat under the great Professor Gressent, Professor
of the Potager Moderne, at the Sorbonne in Paris. From him he learned
that thought, devotion to the task, and any bit of metal on the end of
a stick shaped like a hoe will take the place of manure, tools, and
money. For Professor Gressent, during one session, used to commence
every lecture by ordering his pupils to inscribe on their tablets the
mystical sentence: “_Trois fois biner vaut deux fois engraisser._”
And when his Boswell, the writer, asked him the other day how he got
his results, he answered:
“By trying to establish what that old fool Tolstoi called the Kingdom
of God within me!”
The writer took him to mean that it is the spirit in which a job is
attacked that alone can sanctify the job--and that, in that way, the
godly grow fat at the expense of the unrighteous. Before the war
Gringoire was an ordinary poet, such as you might see in Soho or in
various foreign underground haunts by the baker’s dozen, eating nasty
meats, drinking nasty wines, usually in nasty company. How the war
changed his heart is here recorded.
This is therefore a Reconstructionary Tale.
[Footnotes]
[1] This is the result of the Army. I do not believe that Gringoire
ever simmers his bones for thirty-six hours. But in the Army it was
woe to the Colonel whose bones did not simmer for thirty-six hours or
who did not say so when an apoplectic gentleman with a blue hat-band
came around. The Colonel would lose his battalion, his D.S.O., and the
esteem of his fellow men.
II
_Gardens and Flats_
“I wonder,” Gringoire[2] began one evening, “if my experience of
landscape during the war has been that of many people....”
It was an evening in spring. Gringoire had not been very long
established in his cottage--which, because of the nature of the poet
himself and of the poet’s adventurous establishment, the writer
automatically styles in his mind the Gingerbread Cottage. Gringoire,
with a spirit of hospitality that was large and open rather than either
considered or calculating, had invited a party of London friends to
share his Easter with him. During the day he rushed about a great
deal, cooking highly flavored dishes of a ragout type, on paraffin
stoves, washing up, sweeping, gardening, gathering unusual wild herbs
for salads, so that he was busy, and we of the party saw little of him.
Fortunately it was fine. For at that date the Gingerbread Cottage let
in water like a sieve through the roof, the floor, the rough walls.
Great holes indeed gaped in the plaster of the ceilings. But he had
whitewashed the walls, stuck pots on shelves, improvised a couch out of
his camp bed, and lit fires of sticks in the sitting room. So in the
evenings we sat and listened to his talking.
For Gringoire was a conversationalist. Like most dynamic, overwhelming,
and energetic poets, he had not the patience to listen to the remarks
of his fellows or to answer. He would be silent most of the day. But
toward evening, as like as not, he would suddenly suspend all his
activities, and with very possibly a hair-sieve or a trowel in his
hand, gesticulating too, he would begin to talk.
As a house party the Easter experiment was not a success for all of
us. Gringoire had hardened himself in Flanders; the rest had not. But
since, as a byproduct of the experience, Madame Sélysette had consented
to share and adorn his lot, Gringoire had his reward. And the writer
secured these records of his monologues:
“I wonder,” then, he asked on one of these evenings, “if my experience
of landscape during the war has been that of many people.” And without
waiting he continued much as follows: “For I may say that before
August, 1914, I lived more through my eyes than through any other
sense, and in consequence certain corners of the earth had, singularly,
the power to stir me.” But from the moment when, on the 4th of August,
1914, the Germans crossed the Belgian frontier “near a place called
Gemmenich,” aspects of the earth no longer existed for him.
The earth existed, of course. Extending to immense distances of
field-gray; dimly colored in singularly shaped masses, as if the colors
on Mercator’s projection had been nearly washed out by a wet brush.
Stretching away, very flat, silenced, in suspense, the earth--_orbis
terrarum veteribus notus_--seemed to await the oncoming legions, gray
too, but with the shimmer of gold standards that should pour out from
that little gap, “near a place called Gemmenich,” and should obscure
and put to shame all the green champaign lands of the world, as the
green grass of meadows is put to shame and obscured by clay, water
pouring through a gap in a dike. That was the earth.
There were no nooks, no little, sweet corners; there were no assured
homes, countries, provinces, kingdoms, or races. All the earth held its
breath and waited.
“And it is only today,” my friend went on, “that I see again a little
nook of the earth; it forms the tiniest of hidden valleys, with a
little red stream that buries itself in the red earth beneath the
tall green of the grass and the pink and purple haze of campions, the
occasional gold of buttercups, the cream of meadowsweet. The plants in
the garden wave in stiffness like a battalion on parade--the platoons
of lettuce, the headquarters’ staff, all sweet peas, and the color
company, which is of scarlet runners. The little old cottage is under a
cliff of rock, like a gingerbread house from a Grimm’s fairy tale; the
silver birches and the tall pines confront it; the sunlight lies warmer
than you could imagine in the hollow, and a nightingale is running in
and out of the bean-stalks. Yes, a nightingale of midsummer that has
abandoned the deep woodland and runs through the garden, a princess
turned housekeeper, because it has young to feed. Think of noticing
that!”
During the four years that the consciousness of the war lasted, he had
noticed only four landscapes and birds only once--to know that he was
noticing them--for themselves. Of course, one has memories of aspects
of the world--but of a world that was only a background for emotions.
Even, for instance, when one saw poor Albert, by some trick of
mnemonics, from the lettering of the huge word “Estaminet” across the
front of a battered house in the Place where, in the blinding sunlight,
some Australian transport men were watering their mules, and one
recognized it for a place one had visited twenty years before and had
forgotten--even when one saw the remains of the garden where, twenty
years before, we had waited whilst our lunch of omelette, cutlets,
and salad was prepared, or even when one saw the immense placard
with “Caution” erected in the center of the white rubbish and white
rubble of the Place, or the desecrated statue of the Madonna, leaning
in an abandoned attitude from the church tower--even then one was so
preoccupied, so shut in on one’s self, that these things were not
objects that one looked at for themselves. They were merely landmarks.
Divisional Headquarters, one had been told, was behind the N.E. corner
of the Place, the notice-board was to the N.E. of one’s self, therefore
one must pass it to reach Divisional Headquarters. It was Headquarters
one wanted, not the storing of the mind with observed aspects.
So Gringoire had four landscapes, which represent four moments in four
years when, for very short intervals, the strain of the war lifted
itself from the mind. They were, those intermissions of the spirit,
exactly like gazing through rifts in a mist. Do you know what it is
to be on a Welsh mountain side when a heavy mist comes on? Nothing
remains. You are there by yourself.... And the only preoccupation you
have with the solid, invisible world is the boulders over which you
stumble and the tufts of herbage that you try to recognize as your
path. Then suddenly the mist is riven perpendicularly, and for a moment
you see a pallid, flat plain stretching to infinity beneath your feet
and running palely to a sea horizon on a level with your eyes. There
will be pale churches, pale fields, and on a ghostly channel the
wraiths of scattered islands. Then it will be all gone.
It was just so with the three or four landscapes that my friend saw
during the war. There was the day in 1915 when Kensington Gardens
suddenly grew visible. There were Guardsmen turning in fours, with some
Guardee form of drill that is not usual to the Infantry. There were
motor transport wagons going cautiously down the Broad Walk--parts of
the familiar train of the war. And then, suddenly, there were great
motionless trees, heavy in their summer foliage, blue-gray, beneath a
very high sky; there was the long, quiet part of the palace; the red
brick, glowing in the sun, the shadows of the windows very precise
and blue. And Gringoire thought that old, stiff marionettes, rather
homely courtiers and royalties, might step out of the tall windows
onto the lawns and, holding tasseled canes to their lips, bow,
pirouette and make legs, till the long chestnut wigs brushed the stiff
rosebushes. Not _very_ gallant; not _very_ royal. No Rois Soleils or
Princesses Lointaines but a Court nevertheless, whispering mercilessly,
intriguing, smiling, betraying, much as in Versailles, only a little
more rustically, in front of the old, homely Dutch orangery.
Then the curtain closed again; the weight once more settled down. The
trees again became the foreground and there was the feeling that
Gringoire could never get away from--that they would be personally
humiliated, shamed, abashed; as if they would wrathfully bow or avert
their heads if ever field-gray troops passed down the Broad Walk, or
the park keeper at the gates wore a Uhlan uniform! That was in the
early days of the war--August, 1915, I think. The feeling that there
might be an invasion was still, and was strong, in the air. There was
no knowing, still, where the dam might give way and the mud-colored
tide pour toward us. And somehow Gringoire figured it coming from the
W. by S.W. from the direction of Kew and Fulham: high, gray, reaching
from the legions on the ground to the gray airships towering on high--a
solid, perpendicular wave of humiliation like the tidal wave of which
one reads--of humiliation for the trees and the very grass.
“I wonder,” Gringoire asked again that evening, “if other people
had, like myself, that feeling that what one feared for was the
land--not the people but the menaced earth with its familiar aspect.
And I wonder why one had the feeling. I dare say it was just want
of imagination: one couldn’t perhaps figure the feelings of ruined,
fleeing and martyred populations. And yet, when I had seen enough of
those, the feeling did not alter. I remember that what struck me most
in ruined Pont de Nieppe, by Armentières, was still the feeling of
abashment that seemed to attach to furniture and wall-paper exposed to
the sky--not the sufferings of the civilian population, who seemed to
be jolly enough--or at any rate sufficiently nonchalant--with booths
erected under ruined walls or in still whole cottages, selling fried
fish to the tanneries. No! what struck me as infinitely pathetic was
lace curtains: for there were innumerable lace curtains, that had
shaded vanished windows, fluttering from all the unroofed walls in the
glassless window-frames. They seemed to me to be more forlornly ashamed
than any human beings I have ever seen. Only brute beasts ever approach
that: old and weary horses, in nettle-grown fields; or dogs when they
go away into bushes to die.”
He went on to say that perhaps prisoners of war had it too. The Germans
certainly seemed to. But he had, naturally, never seen any of our own
people in that condition. They are represented to us as remaining
erect and keeping most of their _esprit de corps_. That may be why,
in August, 1915, it was difficult to think of the sufferings of our
possibly invaded peoples but only of the humiliation of desecrated
herbage and downlands.
“I don’t know.” And Gringoire meditated as if neither I nor Mme.
Sélysette were in the room. “Perhaps I am lacking in human sympathy
or have no particular cause to love my fellow men. But at any rate,
at that moment, the feeling of dread that those gray-blue, motionless
trees under the high sky might, under heavens more lowering, feel
that final humiliation--that feeling was so strong that I remember it
still as a pain. Nay, in the remembrance, I feel it so strongly that
it is still a pain, like that of an old, deep cicatrized wound. For of
course, it would have connoted that the broad and the small fields,
copses, spinneys, streams, and heaths, stretching away to the quiet
downs and the ultimate sea, would have felt that tread of mailed and
alien heels.” He remembered looking up to the sky in an agony. And
then he became again interested in the Guards at drill beneath the
trees--whose dressing never altered. Why did they turn in fours at
the command “Left turn” when they were in column of route? Why didn’t
they form two deep? They were not doing sentry drill or any form of
ceremonial that the ordinary Infantry practice. The command was not:
“In fours: left turn.”
So the workaday frame of mind came back--and we carried on.
On hearing of the death of Lord Kitchener, he had another short moment.
“I don’t know,” he wrote this in a letter, “whether the news had
anything to do with it. I suppose it had. I will tell you. I was being
motored to Dunmow Station, and when the car arrived at that little
shanty, the stationmaster, whom I remember as quite an old man, came
to the car-stop and just said: ‘Lord Kitchener has been drowned.’ He
appeared quite expressionless, and I remember that both my companion
and I laughed. I should say that I even laughed loudly. In those days
and frames of mind, one reached, as it were, down to jokes obtaining
only amongst rather simple people--and the joke underlying the idea of
the drowning at sea of a man so supported by a whole land might have
been quite ingenious in idea--like some joke of the reign of Queen Anne
involving the raising of the sea above the dome of St. Paul’s.
“But he succeeded in assuring us that Lord Kitchener had been drowned.
‘The Field Marshal Commanding in Chief had been last seen on the
nearly vertical deck, following a member of his staff.’--A good death
for the man who had saved his land--and Europe.
“For speaking not as an expert speaks but still as a student of the
temper of war and the _moral_ of what in the Army is called ‘the men’
I have no hesitation in saying--and I don’t apologize for saying
here--that without the figure of Lord Kitchener the British Army would
have remained negligible in numbers and would have taken a very small
part in the war. And I suppose that, without the British Army, the war
could hardly have been maintained to a successful conclusion.”
At any rate, that was the way in which it appeared to Gringoire with
a mind suddenly jumped into attending to this shocking fact from the
designing of an aiming card for the Ross Rifle. For in those days it
was his province to instruct in the use of that weapon nine hundred
returned British Expeditionary Force, all time-serving men, and in
consequence the toughest customers you could imagine. Indeed, it is
difficult to imagine them.
They had every guile from a military point of view. They were adepts in
absences, swingings of the lead, drunks, excuses, barrack-breakings,
cheerful lies, and a desperate determination not to exhibit any
glimmerings of intelligence, let alone any proficiency, in the use of
any kind of weapon, let alone the Ross Rifle, which was a gimcrack
concern at the best, with aperture sights and fittings like watch
springs and innumerable ways of being put out of order. And you could
put your nose in half and get yet another month in hospital as easy as
winking by pulling back the bolt in any sort of rapid practice.
They lived--these desperadoes--in a tumble-down skating rink, and they
exercised amongst the backyards and dust-bins of a great city, and
such was the moral atmosphere of the shadowy and stifling vault in
which this kind of khaki lived that when, at Easter, Gringoire proposed
to bring in a priest to hear the confessions of the Roman Catholics
with more convenience to them, the men sent three R.C. sergeants as a
deputation to him. They said the rink was not a fitting place for a
priest to see. And every one of them promised to walk three miles to
confession and to perform all his Easter duties faithfully sooner than
that a priest should see them as they lived.
A great cavern of a place that was, laid out in stalls like a cattle
market, where the officers labored intolerably filling up innumerable
forms with an immense sense of pressure and of striving with tough men.
A great sense of pressure. And he would walk up and down in front of
the worst-dressed line that had ever been imagined--a fantastic line,
for not one of the nine hundred professed to be able to stand straight
on his legs--and Gringoire would exclaim gloomily and in alternation:
“Thank God we’ve got a Navy” or: “Lord Kitchener says the war’s going
to last another three years; hang me if you blighters will wangle out
of going back to France.” Whereupon there would be groans down the line
and a near-drunk man would whisper: “Good ol’ Kitchener!”
It was out of that horseshoe-cavern of gloom in whose shafts of
vaporous and disinfectant-colored lights moved these troublesome
green-brown shapes that he had come for a very brief period of
leave in a world that, again, included lawns, afternoon teas,
standard roses, tall rooms, servants--not batmen, but with caps and
aprons--pianolas--and no one, really, to clean one’s belt; as well as
discussions of that higher, wilder, finer strategy, in which, in one’s
capacity of a more or less professional student of tactics, one was
so decidedly at a loss. Or perhaps it wasn’t immediately from the
cavern that he had come; perhaps it was from the Chelsea Course. But
there, amongst the Guards, the Kitchener “note” rang truer and cleaner
and more insistently. And at any rate, he was certainly going back to
that atmosphere of strain and rush; into the desperate effort to teach
thousands and thousands bayonet fighting, gas tactics, measures against
venereal disease, sentry drill, dugout building, why they were going
to fight, how to manufacture grenades out of jam-tins, the history of
the regiment, and _esprit de corps_--and doing it all in desperate and
bewildered haste, with the aid of sacks, hairpins, can-openers and
Japanese rifles with the wrong sort of bayonets, under the auspices
of an orderly room driven mad by endless reproofs from brigades,
divisions, the War Office, the civilian police, Boards of Agriculture,
county asylums, parents whose sons had enlisted too young, and young
women who had married privates too often married already.... But coming
from it or not, Gringoire was certainly going back to it and, in its
desperate and fleeting atmosphere, the idea of Lord Kitchener was the
one solid thing onto which our poor poet could catch.
So the stationmaster made it plain that Lord Kitchener was dead.
It was just one of those situations in which one thinks nothing--a
change in the beat of the clock. Gringoire was sitting in the little
open shed of a waiting-room, the only idea present in his mind being
that his crossed legs were stuck stiffly out in front of him, their
weight upon his left heel and both hands in his breeches pockets.
Nothing whatever! Absolutely nothing! No war: an empty mind; a little
open shed with benches; a hatchway in one plank wall where they served
out tickets; a bit of platform; a high, brick signal-box with clocks
or things ticking; a brick house, no doubt the stationmaster’s.... The
whole world, that was! And noiseless; and immobile. There was no France
on the horizon; no English Channel. There was no awaiting of Zeppelins;
there was no Right or Wrong.
And so the veil lifted for a second. The flat lands of Essex were
there, stretching out; flat fields; undistinguished beneath a dull sky.
He speculated on the crops; on the labor it took to the acre to put in
those cabbages; on the winds that must sweep across the comparatively
hedgeless spaces. The ground looked like a good clay. Plenty of heart
in it, no doubt they would say in auctioneer’s advertisements. But, on
the whole, an unsmiling, foreign land. Not Kent or Sussex, but “the
Sheeres.” If one settled down here, one wouldn’t know the postman, the
tax collector, the old standers, the way they trimmed the hedge rows,
the habits of the soil, or the course of the months, the brooks, the
birds, the breed of sheep, the gossip, the local history--or the dead.
A friendless, foreign country, the Essex Flats....
And the southeastern saying came up into Gringoire’s mind: “You see yon
man: he cooms from Sussex. He sucked in silliness with his mother’s
milk and ’s been silly ever since. But never you trust a man from the
Sheeres!”... It is Kent and Sussex against the world--just as no doubt
it is Essex and Hertford; and Somerset and Devon; the North and East
Riding and Durham and Cumberland and Denbigh and Flint, against the
world--and it’s _never_ safe to put long straw under potatoes when you
dig them in, trusting to the wet to rot it. At that point Gringoire
remembered in 1899 buying some special seed, called, I think, “1900,”
out of compliment to the coming century. He paid a big price; one
hundred twenty shillings the hundredweight, I think. And he dunged
them beautifully with rather long straw and artificial manure. But a
long, long dry season came, and the Kentish land sloped to the south,
and the straw dried, and the artificial manure never soaked down. He
didn’t get a quarter of a ton to the quarter acre.
On the other hand, under maize, if you can water heavily once or twice,
long straw arranged in trenches, like pipes, is rather a good wheeze.
It holds the water to the roots and maize will do with a topsoil like
fire if the roots are cool. In 1899 Gringoire got some wonderful ears
of sweet corn. And, toasted on the cob and buttered after toasting...!
He changed heels under the puttees and considered his garden in
Kent. He was going to try growing potatoes from seeds--not from
seed-potatoes, but from the little seeds that form in the green
berries. And he was going to put a light, whitewashed paling behind the
sweet corn, on the north--to reflect the rays of the sun. It should
ripen the cob three weeks earlier!...
The Essex flats became again, slowly, visible land, planted with
war-food. An airplane was going toward Bishop Stortford; the train
was overdue because a unit was entraining up the line--once again
every fact in the world was just a part, just a side light of the
immense problem. Once again nothing existed just for itself. Trains
were carriers of men and munitions. Stretched-out legs were encased
in puttees, put in military boots; servant girls travelling with
horn-handled black umbrellas and elastic boots were going to see
their boys off at Waterloo; old farmers with white side whiskers were
explaining why they had kept all six sons at home--in defiance of the
gaze of Lord Kitchener that looked at them six times in that wee small
station. And railway fares were going to be increased for civilians!
I have little doubt that what, at that moment and for that minute
space of time, had set our poet intent on planting potatoes and seed
corn--perfectly certain that he was going straight down into Kent
to plant potatoes in rows and sweet corn in hills--was that his
unconscious mind was certain that the war was done and over with that
death in the North Sea. I do not mean to say that he thought it--or
even that he was conscious that something inside thought it for him.
His surface-mind thought certainly of Essex, of Kent and Sussex; the
subconscious mind seemed to be aware that his puttees were badly put
on, that he had mislaid his warrant in one of several pockets--he had
a vague consciousness of South Wales, blue mountains, like Japanese
clouds. But some deeper center still was probably appalled and benumbed
and was saying:
“Now the war is finished and lost. Now, ‘_appry la gair finny_’ as the
Tommies say, _je vais planter mes choux comme un maître d’école_.”
There seemed to be nothing left but to plant out a kitchen garden.
[Footnotes]
[2] “Gringoire.” This is not of course, our poet’s name, but a nickname
earned actually at school. There is a story by Alphonse Daudet, in
“Lettres de Mon Moulin,” called the “Chèvre de M. Séguin,” which
relates how in the end the wolf ate Mr. Séguin’s goat. This story, in
the form of a letter, is addressed to a poet, one Gringoire, and is
meant to show that though a poet may struggle all his life against
poverty, in the end the wolf, starvation, will get him. At Gringoire’s
school the Sixth Form were studying French from the “Lettres de Mon
Moulin,” and since even at that date Gringoire wrote poems, his kindly
schoolmates learned the name and so bestowed it upon him--as it has
been bestowed on many out-at-elbowed literati.
III
_Blue of Swallows’ Backs_
Well, by the evening of his next monologue, Gringoire had planted
out his kitchen garden; the onions, the lettuces, the carrots, the
kohl-rabi, the spinach were aligned; that battalion was parading in
full strength. Moreover, in a bed from which he had just removed
spinach and onions, there were twenty little potato plants, grown
from little seeds: under a twenty-foot quick-set hedge, beautiful and
close like a wall, the sweet corn was already up to the hips. The long
straws, like pipes, ran in a trench under the corn hills; the deluge of
water, warmed because it comes from a dip on which the sun blazes all
day, washed the deep roots; the nightingale was running in and out of
the beanstalks; the swallows were throwing themselves through the air;
over the low brick the sun was setting on the longest day of the year,
and, D.S.G., the war was over and done. No longer D.H.Q., Bn.H.Q.,
M.L.E., T.M.B.--but just D.S.G.! To God alone be the glory in the
quiet garden evening.
“I will tell you a curious thing,” said Gringoire in June, “but in
gardens amongst woods, beside streams, there are so many curious things
to tell of that I don’t know where to begin! I am like a child with
the largest coin it has ever possessed outside a hundred entrancing
shops. I began talking the other day with the idea of describing four
landscapes--the great guns from Portsmouth now remind me, though I have
written of only two, of yet a fifth.”
We--Gringoire and the writer--had been for a slow walk, round three
sides of a patch of heath. A man, leaning over a white gate, with a
thin, red face, a blue suit and some very bright regimental tie, just
said: “The telegram’s up in the post office. It’s official!” And,
speaking of it that evening in the warmth of the garden beside the
hammock of Mme. Sélysette, Gringoire said:
“I assure you, on my honor, that the whole landscape, the commonplace,
friendly landscape of elms, rather backward wheat, heather, gorse, and
park-wall suddenly changed. It was as if the focus of the camera had
suddenly clicked, readjusted itself--as if it grew--though before one
hadn’t known it for anything but all that was possible of tranquillity,
breadth, security, and peace--grew quieter, calmer, broader, more
utterly secure and inviolable. English country!
“I don’t know: there’s nothing to it, really. A spray of dog-roses;
a whitethroat dropping over the hedge; some gorse; the long, rolling
land; the high skies and clouds above the downs.... Well, it is
one stage more toward a forever of security, of that being forever
inviolable that one prays may be its portion. A great stage forward.”
For coming home and sitting behind irregular, all but too old lattice,
giving onto a deep wall of verdure, we had heard suddenly the heavy
guns through the voices of birds.... And Gringoire said later that,
at the sound of those distant guns through the overwhelming orchestra
of birds, he had seen distinctly, against the warm brick of the
house-wall, a tin hat.... But many tin hats dim in the blue-gray light,
and a lot of Scotch Jocks, their kilts covered with khaki aprons, and
an immense long train with innumerable shapes dropping out of it,
their cries muted by the twilight: the crunch of feet on the gravel,
before the tin sheds of the station. That had been Railhead behind the
Somme. And then suddenly you were conscious of the innumerable voices
of birds singing the sun down. And then through them the uninterrupted
heavy discourse of the great guns at a distance came over the little
hills and darkling trees of that downland country. It continued....
Incessant, engrossed, almost as it were tranquil, almost like the
bubbling of water in a pot, boiling up, dying down, going on and on,
not penetrating but enveloping the cries of Tommy to Tommy or of
footsteps to footsteps--and, rising through it, as if lances of sound
were protruding upward through something soft and vaporous, the voices
of thrushes. A great many thrushes: and the down getting whiter; and
the “Fall In There’s” and the men moving off ...
So that he said he half wished the Portsmouth guns would
stop--five-point nines; ninety-eight pounders; fifteen-inch
guns--whatever they are. One doesn’t want to hear them again, or again
to feel them--dully on the air. Not at any rate in peace time.
The nightingale amongst the bean-stalks; the thrushes in the shaw
on the opposite hillsides; the swallows throwing themselves through
the air! He did not remember any nightingale during the war; but he
remembered those thrushes of Rébimont-Méricourt on a date in July
’16. And he remembered some swallows--an immense sea of the blue
of swallows’ backs. And he said that the Portsmouth guns of the
28/6/’19 sounding through the birds’ voices from the hill opposite the
Gingerbread Cottage brought it all back. Poets are like that and have
these visions.
It sounds, of course, queer--but it was like that. Up on a hillside
that was covered mostly with thistles there was an Artillery
Observation Post which consisted of a Lombardy poplar--though one did
not see how the gunners got up it. At any rate, there was a pile of dud
Hun shells on the roadside bank at the foot of the tree and beneath
the O.P. was a pretty rotten dugout with a corrugated iron roof. The
Battalion Trench Mortar officer lived there. Below him he had a view of
a battery of French 75’s, of the chalky line of trenches; Martinpuich
looked down on him, which wasn’t overly comfortable, and the Ancre
wound away--to No Man’s Land. From time to time a field-gun wheel going
along the road would catch its spokes in the corrugated iron of his
roof--lift a corner and drop it again. I don’t know why the Trench
Mortar officer lived in that dugout, but a gunwheel lifted his roof
and dropped it again whilst Gringoire was dozing in it. He thought the
bottom of hell had dropped out. It was his worst shock of the war.
I shouldn’t wonder if it were not the worst shock any one ever had
between the 4/8/’14 and the 28/6/’19. He mentioned it, he said, because
it probably accounted for his immediately subsequent exultation; it
was, I suppose, so good to be just alive after that.
At any rate, after the Trench Mortar officer had come in--Gringoire
had been waiting to give him a message--downhill through the thistles,
dusty in the hot sunlight, Gringoire went with immense, joyful
strides. He said that he was extraordinarily fit in those days! And
an innumerable company of swallows flew round him, waist high, just
brushing the thistledown. “They were so near,” Gringoire said, “that
they brushed my hands, and they extended so far that I could see
nothing else. It is one of the five things of the war that I really
see, for it was like walking, buoyantly, in the pellucid sunlight,
waist-high through a sea of unsurpassed and unsurpassable azure. I felt
as if I were a Greek god. It was like a miracle.
“Now, I see swallows from below, their rust-stained breasts against
high, blotted, gray clouds--and I wonder if they are thinking of the
near rising mayfly. I remember thinking on the other occasion that
there were a good many dead amongst the thistles and that I must be
putting up a huge number of flies. But that, again, was the thought of
my subconscious mind. On the surface I just felt myself to be a Greek
god, immortal, young forever, forever buoyant, amongst the eddies of a
dark blue and eternal sea.”
The feeling lasted until he got to the mule-lines of somebody’s First
Line Transport, where he borrowed a terrible old brute of a horse, to
take him to Divisional H.Q.
It would be interesting to know what that class of feeling comes
from--possibly from some sort of atavistic throwback to days when the
gods were nearer. You get them now and again in action--but not so
often as you get the reverse type of feeling when you are engaged in
agriculture. That is perhaps why farmers are so often passionately
disagreeable and apparently unreasonable men. For there is nothing that
so much resembles contact with, wrestling with, a personal devil as
to awaken one morning and to find that a whole crop of seedlings has
vanished before myriads of slugs. That happens. If you don’t believe
it, read White’s “Selborne.” It is loss, ruin perhaps. It is like a
death: a profound and unforeseen disaster. And your mind personifies
the slug as intelligent, malignant, a being with a will for evil
directed against you in person. I think that, whilst it lasts, it is
the worst feeling in the world.
Drought is nearly as bad.
IV
_The Kingdoms of the Earth_
It was after Gringoire had speculated on slugs, without, you will
observe, suggesting a remedy, that he continued:
“I have given you, so far, three of the landscapes that remain real
to me--for the detraining in the dawn at Rébimont-Méricourt is not
one of those that are just always in my mind. I have to remember back
to--to be reminded of it. It was the sounds of Peace Guns pierced by
the multitudinous voices of thrushes that brought back to me that
first-heard, unintermittent thudding and throb of the engines of war
through which, like spears, thrust the voices of innumerable birds.
But, just, I suppose, because one’s mind was preoccupied with the job
of seeing that one’s valise was all right, that the men had all their
kit and equipment at least potentially there--and no doubt with the job
of seeing to it that one’s composure appeared absolute--one recorded
less of visible objects, so that fewer visible objects return, and they
return less vividly.”
He remembered--and he knew that he remembered, accurately and
exactly--every detail of Kensington Gardens on that day of August,
1915; of the Essex Railway Station he said that he could tell you what
advertisements were on the walls and how many people awaited the train
as well as every word of the conversation he had had whilst driving to
the station. And he remembered with an extreme clearness, as in the
little paintings of Van Eyck on the Chasse de Ste. Ursule at Brûges,
the swallows and the thistles of the ridge going down in the clear July
weather behind Bécourt Wood in 1916. He had a job then, it is true--but
not one calling for any immediate or complicated action. Besides, at
that moment he had felt himself to be immune from danger and proof
against death. So that those three landscapes became part of his
immediate self.
“They will probably remain part of myself to the end of my life: my
grandchildren will probably be tired of them and, when I am quite aged,
so probably will guests and casual strangers.” But--did you ever take a
walking tour, or just a long walk and, in bed at the end of the day,
perhaps in order to put yourself to sleep, did you ever try to remember
every inch of the roads you had covered? Gringoire claimed that in that
way he could remember a great many of the roads both of England and
France of his boyhood when one walked or cycled a good deal for walking
or cycling’s sake. Corners of roads, bridges, highways climbing over
the forehead of downs--the road out of Bridport, down into Winchester,
from Minehead to Lynton; from Calais over the flats to Arras, from
Arras to Beauvais; from Blois to Tours; from Amiens to Albert in
1892.... By shutting his eyes, or by looking at something blank, like a
sheet of paper, or by not really looking at anything at all, he could,
he said, evoke a panorama of any of those roads, or say from the North
Foreland to Land’s End. Perhaps he couldn’t really, but he could have
a pretty good try and get a lot right. “Well, in that way, I can evoke
most of the roads ’round Albert, or Locre and the base of the Salient,
or Bailleul, or Steenewerck, or Armentières; and plenty of other places
of the Lines of Communication like Hazebrouck and Abbéville and St.
Omer. But I daresay I should get some of it incorrect.”