had distinctly the feeling that there was a woody, dark bank and a
plantation of trees in which the thrushes sang, right up against the
flat of the line. There wasn’t really. He found later, on coming out of
Corbie and there entraining to rejoin his battalion, that there were
only high elms against flat, champaign country with a muddy stream.
However, there was a high farm-building just behind the elms, so, no
doubt, the effect on the inattentive eye was that. And the thrushes had
certainly sung.
But he could evoke the rest of the road to the front line fairly well.
On the right of the station, in the elms, was a brown Y.M.C.A. hut,
where the officers got very greasy bread and rather black fried eggs
and coffee. There were innumerable, old, dog’s-eared magazines on
the mess tables in amongst the breakfast utensils. Twenty or thirty
numbers of the “English Review,” like the dominoes, of a date when
our writer used to own that periodical. It seemed an odd thing to
see; an odd, queer thing to have owned. Near--too near--the hut were
the men’s latrines; a little further, the officers’. On the left,
then, as the Draft passed, was the station. A very fat old gendarme
was standing, well back on his heels, his legs wide apart; about him
were four market women, with bundles, and baskets containing fowls.
They were grouped around the gendarme like pullets around chanticleer,
as he watched the sunrise. A lot of Royal Field Artillery horses and
riders came over the dust into the station yard; a company of Jocks was
waiting outside the office of the Railway Transport Officer. The ground
was soft dust, so that the reinforcement might have been marching in
sandals.
They continued their march parallel with the railway line, along
a soft road, beside the little stream, between osier-bushes and
elms--for about fifty yards. There were some stray mules belonging to
a Kitchener’s battalion, Wiltshires or Cheshires--Nineteenth Division
anyhow. There didn’t appear to be any drivers. There was a good deal of
shouting; the Draft about-turned. The guide was taking them wrong. But
who ever knew a guide take any one right anywhere? It was rather like a
dream--not at all a bad dream--but, anyhow, a numbness.
Or no: really it was more like being in the hands of doctors, on the
way to an operation. Probably the anaesthetic would be all right; it
wouldn’t hurt. At any rate, we had no volition; one’s feet moved;
one’s haversack was a bit heavy--not very. One went on, one didn’t know
where.
In the same way you may remember the anteroom of your dentist. There
is a big table in the center of the room; on the table some writing
materials--and old periodicals, like the “English Reviews” amongst the
solid Y.M.C.A. cups and plates.... But, on the one hand there is, solid
and real, say, Mandeville Place: taxis drive about in it; the faces of
the houses are of black-gray Portland cement, imitating granite. The
street, then, is real: and the operating room will soon feel as real,
even while one is waiting in the outer room. But the anteroom itself is
a dream-landscape.
So it was with the Rébimont-Méricourt road.
When you come out of the station yard, on the right there is a high,
white-walled, tile-roofed estaminet-farm. Australian First Line
Transport men were watering their mules there, lounging on the steps
with their tunics off. The road began to mount; on the left, on top
of a high bank was an orchard. It reminded our poet of the nutwalk,
on a high bank, belonging to a certain farm in Kent--at the bottom of
Aldington Knoll, where the marsh begins. Mounting the slope, on the
right, he came to a closed, empty, butcher’s shop. A superior butcher’s
shop with grilles, green paint, gone of course dusty, marble slabs, and
a gilded copper sign.
The road opened out suddenly. It was a dusty expanse between houses:
in England it would have been a village green. There were house walls,
windows, archways in the dusty white plaster, giving onto farmyards
or stables. Two men were harnessing a black mare into a hooded,
two-wheeled, dusty cart. Four black Percheron stallions were standing
in a string in front of a long cottage. “They reminded me,” Gringoire
said, “of four black stallions I had seen, years before, outside the
blacksmith’s at Beaumont-le-Roger. In those days it had seemed to be
odd that stallions could be left unattended in a village-street. But in
1916, I was used to that idea; what intrigued me, then, was that any
civilian should have four stallions at his disposal. For they certainly
were not French cavalry, or divisional or other transport.”
The civilians seemed extraordinarily--not unreal--but, as it were,
super-real! North French peasants, slow, ungainly, with heavy legs
and feet. They were just the peasants one had always seen; hard, like
granite--not comparatively soft and comparatively gray, like our own
old peasants, who, when they look hard have the aspect not of wrinkled
stone but of old, crannied, oak-tree boles. It was Sussex downland,
that country--but like the people, harder, unsmiling.
To the left of the Place--if you can call a flat space of dust
a Place--there was a narrow street, high, mud walls; archways,
semi-circular topped, gray wooden doors. On one of these was nailed a
large white placard: headquarters of the 4th Army Veterinary Corps.
(I hope this is no longer a staff secret.) The reinforcement had to
drop some men of the Draft they had brought out--men for the poor 38th
Division that was to be wiped out in Mametz Wood--at some other sort
of headquarters at the end of the street; that was why some of us
penetrated it. Yes: it was very narrow and high-walled--more Wiltshire
than Sussex! There must have been vegetation on the top of some of the
mud-walls. Opposite the Farriers’ H.Q. there was a little, thatched,
sweet-shop sort of a place, and irises were growing on the thatch. I
daresay they would not be there in peace time: you would say it was
more Irish than French.
In the sweet-shop they sold dates, clay pipes, picture postcards with
English regimental badges, picture postcards with views of Albert
and the toppling Madonna; silk-worked postcards of bright reds,
whites, and bright blues, and postcards showing smiling ladies dusted
with spangles. The women behind the low counter were very unreal: a
motionless old witch with black eyes, a brown face, and dead white,
parted hair; she stood, and only her eyes moved, and she appeared,
not malignant, but grotesquely like a brown wooden image with moving
eyes; an untidy dark girl, without even looking at us or at a perplexed
Tommy who was pricing postcards, stood, her face sideways and repeated:
“Ten ... a penny: ten ... a penny”--patiently, and as if from a great
distance. She said: “Ten” very fast, then paused and added “a penny”
slowly and as if with boredom. The Tommy grasped ten postcards and held
out a penny, but she continued to say: “Ten ... a penny, ten ... a
penny,” without either movement or expression.
“So I could continue,” our poet went on, “to recall this itinerary,
for many pages and for many hours: past the farm on the right, with
the great dung heap, past the pond overshadowed by crab-apples; past
another crossroads on the right, where, at a tent, facing a great,
dull-brick aggregation of ruins, rafters, and fallen chimneys, which
was once a sugar factory--the timekeeper’s office and the iron gates
were still intact--we delivered up the remaining other Ranks of the
Draft and went on, up the bare downland road, officers only, between
the bearded wheat on the left and the immense field of thin oats to
the right--upward to the Officers’ Distributing Center; tents just put
up that day, on a bare, downland field, very white and with the long
down-grass still untramped in their interiors....
“Yes, I could keep it up for many of your pages and for many hours,”
Gringoire said, “but I am not so much concerned to describe these
landscapes, or to prove the quality of my memory, as to establish the
psychological facts about the other four landscapes.” He had just gone
back into memory, without any particular effort--without indeed any
effort at all, and the roads were there, like a string unwinding from
a ball. His eyes must have been at work but not his registering brain.
The mind was working otherwise.
“I have purposely omitted to mention,” he said later, “that, all the
way, on all the roads, proceeding generally with caution because of
the worn _pavés_, but sometimes getting a swift run for a couple
of hundred or so of yards, sometimes one at a time, sometimes
four together, at times in as thick a stream as motor traffic in
Piccadilly--the ambulances passed us, on the left.”
That was a detail of the mind rather than of the eyes. Gringoire knew
in 1919 that they were there, because he remembered that several of the
officers had to count them for a time. But they appeared to be rather
symbols than concrete objects. They stood for BLIGHTIES--going home!
They were part of what made the skin of the forehead over the eyes feel
always a little drawn, part of the preoccupation that, always, turned
one’s thoughts inward. I don’t suppose it was fear--or perhaps that is
how fear really manifests itself.
Here, then, is another landscape. It was up at the Officers’
Distributing Center. Or perhaps it wasn’t officially called that,
though that was what it was. It may have been an Officers’ Rest
Camp--which it certainly was not. At any rate, there it was on an
open, sloping downland field--seven new tents pitched, two more being
pitched: cook-houses, wash-houses, latrines, batmen’s quarters, and
the rest of it, down to the incinerator, were all, also, in process of
being erected. The Senior Officer in charge of our party interviewed
the Camp Commandant and the officers sprawled about on the bare
hillside with the downland winds running over the grasses just as they
do in Sussex on a cloudless day.
“I have always thought,” Gringoire said, “ever since I was a small boy
and used to ride on the downs behind Folkestone that the sun has a
peculiar quality in the sky over downlands, as if chalk dust in the air
whitened the rays. But that is probably nonsense.” Anyhow, the field
sloped downwards; there was a white cart--or plow--track; then up went
a great shoulder of the downs in a field all purple sections. I suppose
cultivation for the time ended in the huge field of thin oats between
the camp and the destroyed sugar factory. There was a very old man in a
short blue blouse, with immensely long bow-legs--doing something with a
scythe. It didn’t appear to be mowing.
The down rising over against them appeared--so unable is the eye
to measure these swelling distances--quite a small affair. But,
halfway up it, seeming to tight-rope along a white thread, with an
extreme slowness in passing from point to point, went transport
wagons, incredibly tiny. So it was an immense, august, shoulder. A
near-mountain!
Gringoire said he could not just remember where the sun was: he ought
to be able to work it out by the place and time. But I daresay it
doesn’t really matter. At any rate, over the shoulder of the down--not
in the least like a moon or an astral body but illuminated by the
sun--silver and French gray, very slowly, a great body began to rise.
One hadn’t much--one hadn’t indeed any--sense of proportion. It seemed
immense--and alive as mushrooms are alive. Then, induced as the eye
was to look into the pellucid sky, there became visible a number--some
one counted fourteen--of tiny, shining globes. They appeared to be
globes, because there was a fresh wind blowing straight from them and
they turned end on. So, but slowly and incessantly heaving, did the
immense one close at hand; a spider’s network of cordage went with its
movements. Tiny and incredibly pretty, like films of gold dust floating
in blue water and like peach blossom leaves--yes, incredibly pretty in
the sunlight--airplanes were there. Because the--just as pretty--little
mushrooms that existed suddenly in the sky, beside the sunlit
dragonflies and peach blossoms, were pearly white, one officer said:
“Hun planes!”
The German shrapnel made black bursts. The officers were lounging in
a group of six or seven. Another said: “_Their_ sausages too ... Out
there! Fourteen!”
The slow ascent of our own sausage took the mind into the sky. A
broad-faced, slow, brown, very sympathetic young officer--he had a rich
voice, a slight stutter, and one eye that frequently winked--said:
“He showed Him the Kingdoms of the Earth.” Then: “From a high place,
you know, old dear,” he explained, rather apologetically to Gringoire.
“His career,” Gringoire said, “was constantly interlaced with mine;
in the stream that carried us along, we bobbed together--at Cardiff,
in Rouen twice on June afternoons, and even after the Armistice,
once in Coventry Street, and once in York. Yet, though we were quite
intimate, he calling me ‘Old Dear,’ or ‘Old Preserved Equanimity,’
as my last Colonel nicknamed me, and though I called him ‘Old Dear,’
and later, as the fashion became, ‘Old Bean,’ I never knew his name.
He would be there, in Orderly Room, in an officers’ club armchair,
at mess, dropping usually some single, rather apposite, slightly
literary remark--with just the trace of a stutter and always in an
extraordinarily sympathetic voice--a deep, modest, affecting being....
I wish I knew who he was--but I suppose I never shall.
“He sh-showed Him the Kingdoms of th-the Earth,” this officer said--and
his voice just seemed homelike.
Some one else said, “Let’s go up that mountain,” in the true Welsh
tone and accent, and several: “Yes, yes, let’s.... Surely we’d see
everything.... Surely to goodness, let’s not miss it....”
And they figured to themselves a glorious run down, and a glorious
run up, the shoulder and then a great, flat gray view--of everything,
and of all who mattered--of the Kingdoms of the Earth. But the usual
voice--Conscience, Caution, Fear of Broad Views, maybe said: “We’d
have to get leave.... The Camp Commandant, you know.... Eh, what, you
fellows?...”
The Camp Commandant, a small, extraordinarily excited Highlander,
voiceless with gas and gesticulating because of shell-shock--threw
papers about, threw off his Glengarry cap, shrieked, wheezed, croaked.
“I knew him quite well,” Gringoire said, “and, since he once hauled me
out of bed at four o’clock of a freezing morning because some sort of
Scots Brigadier wanted some one to play ‘Annie Laurie’ and the ‘Banks
of Loch Lomond’ to forty drunken Scots officers in another hut, I
permit myself to talk of him as he was, capless, exacerbated, grasping
a telephone and throwing things about.”
He didn’t know whether he could or could not give them leave to go up
the brae; he didn’t care if they went and drowned themselves. Couldn’t
they see he’d only been there forty meen-its and there were two hundred
contradictory memoranda awaiting him? And oh to hell, and oh to hell....
They loafed once more; they fell back into that eternal “waiting
to report” that takes up 112/113ths of one’s time during war. They
contemplated and made remarks about the veering of the sausage.
It was then that Gringoire related a psychological anecdote that gives
the note of this book. “I suppose it was my friend’s sympathetic and
suggestive voice that did it ... for I suddenly began to see bits of
a landscape that has pursued me ever since--until now here I sit in
it. Not quite a landscape; a nook, rather; the full extent of the view
about one hundred seventy yards by two hundred seventy--the closed up
end of a valley; closed up by trees--willows, silver birches, oaks,
and Scotch pines; deep, among banks; with a little stream, just a
trickle, level with the grass of the bottom. You understand the idea--a
sanctuary.”
There were, in those days, you will remember, no more sanctuaries. All
nooks of the world were threatened by the tide of blue-gray mud. We
were out there to hold it back on the Somme. But could we?
So that was a little nook, sanctuary; where you said “Feignits” to
destiny--with a gingerbread cottage out of Grimm. You were a Haensel,
holding some Gretel’s hand, tiptoeing, whispering, craning forward the
neck.... A castle in Spain in fact, only that it was in a southern
country--the English country.
“I ask to be believed in what I am now saying,” Gringoire uttered the
words slowly. “It is just the truth. If I wanted to tell fairy tales,
I’d do better than this. Fairy tales to be all about the Earth shaking,
and the wire, and the crumps, and the beef-tins.... You know. And that
would be true too. Anyway this is....”
He said that he didn’t pretend that he was gay at that moment: calm, no
doubt; contemplative certainly--and certainly gently ironic. So many
officers were fussy about things--air pillows, hooch, mislaid movement
cards, how to post picture-cards, where their battalions were, and
so on. The place no doubt brought it out. It left a good deal to be
desired. So that, if he could smile gently, he didn’t pretend to have
been without apprehensions. They hung vaguely at the back of the skull;
they oppressed, a little, the breathing.
And yet--ever since he had been a tiny child--he had, he said, been so
much a creature of dreads that this was, in a sense, much less than
dreads to which he had been well accustomed. The dreads of original
sin, of poverty, of bankruptcy, of incredible shyness, of insults,
misunderstandings, of disease, of death, of succumbing to blackmailers,
forgers, brain-troubles, punishments, undeserved ingratitudes,
betrayals.--There was nothing, Gringoire said, that he hadn’t dreaded
in a sufficiently long life “which had been, mostly, a matter of one
dread knocking out another.” So that, on the whole, the dread of what
lay over the hill was less than most and limited itself, pretty well,
to how one’s self would behave--except of course that one was damned
afraid of being taken prisoner. Oh, damned afraid....
Still it was on the whole such a relief to be out of contact with
one’s civilian friends at home--for, as far as the Army was concerned,
Gringoire said he never had one single moment’s cause for bitterness,
but just contentment and making allowances--it was on the whole such
a relief that he was more contented than perturbed. Nevertheless, the
strain was a long strain, even if it was impersonal, since it was a
strain concerning itself with the English Country and not at all with
one’s regiment or one’s self. One’s regiment would go out, if things
went wrong. It would go out, disappear, as sands disappear under
great waves. One’s self too, probably, or it wouldn’t matter anyhow
... But the contaminated fields, the ashamed elms--that was the long
strain. And suddenly, at that point it came--the castle in the air; the
simulacrum; the vision of the inviolable corner of the earth.
I don’t mean to say that it came with great exactness at that time--but
it came, no doubt as a progression from the train of thought in Dunmow
Station. There, you may remember, Gringoire thought that he would
have a garden in a southeastern county--and his thoughts had connoted
that it would be a garden on a hillside that sloped to the south and
that looked over a not very distant sea--a great view, showing on
the horizon, during clear days, the coast of France; a view, as it
were, from which one could see the Kingdoms of the Earth. “For there
have,” said Gringoire, “always been only two Kingdoms of the Earth
that mattered for me--our own land for its country and France for her
people, her arts, her point of view.” Yes, undoubtedly it was to be a
garden with a great view, and it should contain potatoes grown from
seeds and sweet corn--also several rows of beans for which, whether
for the flowers or the aligned stalks, Gringoire always had a great
affection.
In Dunmow station it had been merely an intellectual idea: as who
should say, “After the war, we will take a cottage in the country and
grow things and have a great view. At any rate, we will have a rest.”
But, on the downside behind the Somme, it came differently. It came
like one of these visions that one’s eyes, when tired, will see just
before one falls asleep. There was a rhomboid of deeper, brighter
green, of a green that was really alive, beyond the gray-green of the
field they were in. It existed in front of the purple of scabrous
flowers on the great shoulder that masked the battlefield. It wavered,
precisely as you will see the colored image cast on a sheet by a
magic lantern, then slowly, it hardened and brightened, took shape
as a recumbent oval, like eighteenth century vignettes. Gringoire
said that it became perfectly definite--“The little view that I shall
see at this moment if I raise my eyes. And it didn’t connote any
locality: it didn’t, I mean, suggest itself as being in the vicinity
of the Trossachs, of Tintern, of Matlock, of Dungeness.... It was just
country--but perfectly definite, rather an untrimmed and a rather
hidden spot without a hard road going to it ... and with the feeling
that many birds were lurking in bushes and watching me, as birds watch.
You see the idea--sanctuary!”
“I don’t mean to say,” he went on, “that I wanted to get out of
the battle of the Somme. I certainly didn’t, either consciously,
subconsciously, or with any plane of my mind. I will lay claim to so
much militarism. But my subconscious mind was trying to assure itself
that ‘appry la gair finny’ there would be a sanctuary where I would
cross my second and my index fingers in the face of destiny and cry
‘Feignits’ as we used to do as children at Prisoner’s Base. I daresay
that has been the main desire of my life. I daresay it has been the
main desire of the lives of all men since recorded time began.
Unrecorded time too, no doubt. It was no doubt the basic desire that
has given to the world in succeeding ages, the Kingdom of God, the
Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of Thule, the Cassiterides, the Garden
of the Hesperides, the land of Cockaigne where hot mutton pies ran
about in the street asking to be eaten--the peace of God which passes
all understanding.”
And you see it was mostly for the sake of the little threatened nooks
of the earth that Gringoire found himself on that hillside. For, then,
as on the 4/8/’14, when the Huns crossed the Belgian frontier, “near
a place called Gemmenich,” it was mainly the idea that a field-gray
tide of mud was seeking to overwhelm the small, verdure-masked homes,
the long, white, thatched farms of the world that forced Gringoire
into political action. “All my life,” as he put it, “I have been
fighting German scholarships, German modes of learning, of instruction,
of collectivism.” But, before that date he hadn’t much imagined--or
imagined at all--that he would ever indulge in political polemics. He
had always had a dreamy contempt for politics: one is an artist, one
is a poet, one is a builder of castles in the air, one is a gentleman,
a farrier, a grocer, a miller--what you will--but a politician! “_Ah,
mais non._ That one should prostitute one’s pen!...”
But the field-gray tide threatened--not only the Kingdoms of the
Earth that mattered, but the little, sacred homes of artists, poets,
gentry, farriers, grocers, millers--menaced then the subjects of one’s
pen, the objects of meditation of one’s heart. So one wrote endless,
interminable propaganda; until the brain reeled and the fingers
stiffened.
Then the Germans killed Henri Gaudier and Teddy Jewell. Or perhaps it
was only that Teddy Jewell went. Certainly he was killed sooner or
later. “Such nice, good boys both--though I didn’t know either of them
well.” So there had not seemed anything else to do. And indeed there
was not anything else to do....
Up there, on the hillside, that ran down to the battered sugar factory,
he had the feeling that, if they could have had leave and have looked
over the rim of that brown-purple slope, they would have seen the Huns,
a white, tumultuous line, like advancing surf or like gnashing teeth.
That was, of course, a feeling, not an intellectual idea. He knew that
the German lines didn’t look like that--though, indeed, at times they
did, when our gunners really got onto them in a chalky country. Then
it was rather like surf--the smoke of shells and chalk dust going up
together in the sunlight.... Still ...