completest idleness that those officers had known for many, many
months. They were just there, with nothing to do. Nothing: nothing
whatever. If they had been allowed to look over the hill-brow, that
would have been something, but, with the Camp Commandant’s refusal of
leave, complete idleness settled down. In ten minutes, in an hour,
perhaps; certainly before the passage of four or five hours, they would
get the order to report that would take them beyond that hill past the
battered sugar factory....
Possibly that little vision of English country, coming then, was really
a prayer, as if the depths of one’s mind were murmuring: “Blessed Mary,
ask your kind Son that we may have the peace of God that passes all
understanding, one day, for a little while in a little nook, all green,
with silver birches, and a trickle of a stream through a meadow, and
the chimneys of a gingerbread cottage out of Grimm just peeping over
the fruit trees.” I suppose that is the burden of most prayers before
battle. And of course that would mean that the Allies had won out and
that the band would have played in the last war parade, with the white
goat and its silver plaque between the horns, and sunlight, and even
the Adjutant smiling--and all the Welsh dead appeased, and all the
country nooks of the world assured sanctuaries, and every Englishman’s
house an inviolable castle, and every Frenchman free to potter off to
his café in the cool of the evening. No doubt it was a prayer of the
unconscious, tired mind.
“But even that isn’t my fourth landscape,” our poet-host went on,
“since my fourth landscape took in very nearly the whole, if not quite
the whole, of one of the Kingdoms of the Earth--and that the smallest
that I ever hope to see.” It dissociates itself sharply from the others
in that the observing of it happened to be Gringoire’s job of the
moment. He had been sent up to Mont Vedaigne to mark down and be ready
to point out to a number of senior officers all that immense prospect.
And the tip of Mt. Vedaigne formed, oddly enough, one of those little,
commonplace, rustic, idyllic spots that, months before, had formed
itself for his eyes behind the Somme. There, in a small enclosed
space, shut in by trees that just grew up to the edge of the steep
escarpments of the hill, was, precisely, a little, gingerbread cottage
out of Grimm. In front of it was a small, flat garden--not an acre in
extent; in the garden grew potatoes already yellowed; beanstalks were
aligned, already yellowed too; and there may have been three or four
rods of tobacco plants and as many of haricots, yellowing too, for
the fringes of autumn were upon the land. On the southern side of the
garden were some plum trees in a hedge. If you looked over the hedge
you saw Bailleul, Armentières, away to queer, conical, gray mountains
that were the slag-heaps near Béthune, and away, farther, toward the
Somme itself.
On the northern side of the garden was a tall, dark plantation of
birches and firs so that the gingerbread cottage--of white plaster,
with little green shutters and a bright red roof of those S-shaped
tiles that lock one into another, with a gutter painted bright green,
like the shutters, and dependent from the gutter, right along the face
of the cottage, bunches of haricot plants, hung up so that the white
beans should dry in the rattling pods--the little cottage, then, had
the air of being beneath a high, dark bank.
But it was only trees, so that, if you went between their trunks you
saw another great view. A flat, almost incredibly immense, silver-gray
plain ran right to the foot of the waving descent, below. There was
an oval--poor Poperinghe--with an immense column of snow-white smoke,
descending upon it from a great height, and then little plumes of smoke
here and there--and then, away, away, pollarded flats, windmills,
church towers--and a gray, menacing, incredibly distant skyline,
illuminated under drifts of smoke.... One imagined that one was seeing
into Germany!
I suppose Gringoire didn’t really see so far.
On the east and the west, the views were cut into by “mountains”--the
peaks of that little range of hills that formed practically all that
remained of a Kingdom of the Earth--of the Low Countries! There was
the Mont Noir with its windmill atop; the Mont Rouge with its windmill
atop; the Scharpenberg, with its windmill, Mount Kemmel with its ruined
tower, from high above which, in the pellucid autumn air, the sighting
shells continuously let down their clouds like torsos of flawless,
white marble.
Gringoire had emotions up there! And he had a long time to wait. You
may not know it--but, if a senior officer tells you to await him at a
given point at 10:00 A.M., you arrive at 9:45 whilst he saunters in at
11:00 A.M., 12:30 P.M., 2:00 P.M., or 4:30 P.M., according to his rank.
On this occasion, Gringoire was Acting Intelligence Officer, and,
having to familiarize himself with a landscape in which his division
had only just arrived, he came on the ground at 8:45 A.M., having
left Locre at 7:00 A.M., riding round by way of Dranoutre to receive
his final instructions from Headquarters. He did not think that at
Divisional Headquarters his zeal was appreciated. A sleepy, but
eminently indignant, General Staff Officer I or II, something elderly,
in pajamas, made various insulting remarks about early rising. These,
his eyesight improving as sleep departed, he modified somewhat, because
he could not tell who the devil Gringoire was. (I may say that, two
nights before, our poet had been court-martialed for being in unlawful
possession of a Field Officer’s Figure.) But the Major would not modify
his statement that he had only been in bed half an hour. He stuck to
it. I daresay, poor man, that he was telling the truth. He was wearing
khaki-silk pajamas with purple cords. Gringoire, on the other hand,
stuck with equal firmness to the fact that he was deputizing for a
brother officer who was sick--so sick that he had mislaid his orders.
Orderly Room had sent them to him with a slip attached: “_Passed to
you, please. For attention, immediate action and compliance._” They had
had a copy of _that_ slip in the Battalion Orderly Room--but no copy of
the memo itself.
Apparently they hadn’t at Divisional Headquarters either. It appears
that the G.S.O. I or II who had issued the memo was sick too--had gone
sick the night before and our elderly friend was deputizing for him.
Of course, eventually, Gringoire got some sort of instructions from a
drowsy, patronizing lance-corporal of the type that one usually finds
around Divisional Headquarters, sleeping omnisciently under a table
covered with typewriting machines in a Connaught hut. _He_ knew that
some one answering to the description of my friend was to meet some one
on the top of Mont Vedaigne at 11:00 A.M. for the purpose of explaining
the positions. It was some General, the lance-corporal couldn’t
remember the name--it was a name like Atkinson or Perry or McAlpine--an
ordinary sort of name, the lance-corporal said contemptuously. He
didn’t know what sort of General he was. The General Staff Officer
Number Two ought to have taken him ’round, but he had gone sick; so
also had Gringoire’s friend, who was a friend of G.S.O. II. So there he
was.
(“And,” said Gringoire when he recounted this incident, “it occurs to
me at this moment this was intended as a friendly attention on the part
of somebody. Either my friend--who was highly connected in an Army
sense--or, failing him, I--was to wangle a soft job out of the General.
But all I thought about was how to get to the top of Mont Vedaigne, set
my map, get my field telescope into position ... Well, I am telling you
what I thought about....”)
He was indeed so concentrated in mind on the top of Mont Vedaigne and
the map and the compass and the telescope that he hadn’t the faintest
remembrance of the road thither from Dranoutre.[3] He said he could
give you every object, estaminet, cottage, and Corps H.Q. from Locre to
Dranoutre by the chaussée; or from Locre to Mont Rouge by second class
road and field paths, Mont Rouge to Mont Noir, and Mont Vedaigne and
so on. But of the road to Mont Vedaigne from Divisional Headquarters
nothing remained--except that it was rather suburban, broad, white, and
at that date, in good repair.
So he came to the top of the hill, passed the cottage without looking
at it, between the potatoes and the tobacco and the tobacco and the
haricots, looked over the southern edge, and saw a great stretch of
country, looked over the northern edge, and saw a great, silver-gray
plain, looked away to the east, and saw hills like camels’ humps
cutting still horizons; and the same on the west.
He was, you understand, in a desperate hurry. For each point of the
compass, he “set” his map, finding a convenient, flat piece of ground
on which to lay it. And he saw, without seeing, and memorized without
associations--just names attaching to dark patches in a great plain.
Over a particularly large fir tree was Armentières; over an oak, lower
down the slope and to the right were the slag heaps and Béthune;
further to the right still Bailleul; the flash of gilt above a steeple
meant the ten block letters _Poperinghe_; an immensely distant
series of dull purple cubes against a long silver gleam was, in
printed capitals DUNKIRK.... You see, his mind was just working in the
watertight compartments of his immediate professional job. He wanted to
make--and he did make by 11:00 A.M.--four cards, like the range cards
one makes for musketry: a central point where one stood, and arrows,
running out like rays from that center, toward Ypres, in capitals
or Wytschaete in block letters. He wanted the general to be able to
stand on each point, look down on the card, follow the direction of
the arrow, and identify the place. I don’t know whether any other
Intelligence Officer ever thought of that. Anyhow, he got it done by
11:00 A.M.
It was pleasant, the feeling when he had made his last fair copy. He
went to each of the points of the compass, to make sure that he had
registered positions truly. Returning from the west to the east, he
noticed an immense plane, appearing in the firmament above Bailleul.
She was escorted by eight or nine relatively little monoplanes--Bristol
scouts, I should say. But, at that date, the poor bloody Infantry were
not brought much in contact with the air force. So that, apart from
their spectacular, picturesque, or dangerous aspects, they hardly came
within the scope of Gringoire’s professional attentions. “Airmen,” he
said, “were brilliant beings, who treated us with contempt and carried
off the affections of our young women. Otherwise they lived in the
air whilst we plodded amongst mud and barbed wire. Professionally,
they rivaled the Cavalry; obtained information for the Artillery--but,
as for cooperating with us, we were below their notice.” So that the
great, beautiful machine--which was, I believe, the first Handley Page
to reach France in safety--passed overhead without Gringoire’s thinking
of more than that it was beautiful.
But his time for consideration of the beautiful had not yet come. It
being then eleven and his work as a man from Cook’s being accomplished,
he had time to think of breakfast.
He had noticed that a cottage existed behind the potatoes, the
haricots, and the tobacco. His conscious mind had dismissed it, since
it had obviously no topographical value as an object of interest for
a General, name unknown. His subconscious mind--that of an Infantry
Officer--had also dismissed it--as just a cottage; too frail to be of
much use for cover, even against rifle fire. For you are to understand
that whilst his surface mind was entirely and devotedly given to
his immediate job, his secondary mind had certainly taken note of
the values of Mont Vedaigne, the garden, the hedges, the copsewood,
the timber, and the slopes; considering them as cover, as sites for
trenches and noticing the fields of fire, the dead ground, the trees
that would be dangerous in falling about if the place were shelled, the
underwood that might be useful, supposing the Artillery had failed to
knock it to bits or set fire to it--it was very dry still--before the
Enemy Infantry tried to rush the position. All these little thoughts
had flitted, like shadows, to be registered somewhere.--For our
poet learned that, when, ten minutes later, he went over the ground
again, for the definite purpose of considering it with conscious,
infantry-eye, he had already noted and stored somewhere in the gray
matter of his brain most of the details of dead ground, field of fire
and sites for trenches, too ... and a good deal of the detail as to
timber, underwood, and the like.
That, however, was only after he had had some breakfast. For a little
old Belgian woman with a pepper and salt face and a husband who wore a
black cap with a shining leather eye shade, came out of the green door
of the cottage, just as the lady does in a weatherhouse. To Gringoire’s
request in Flemish for coffee, “_Hebt gii Kafe to verkoopen?_” she
answered nothing, disappearing backwards behind the green door, which
shut as if automatically. She was there again, however, in less than a
minute, with a plate of ham, a bowl of coffee, and four bits of their
gingerbread!
The significance of this did not occur to our subsequent inhabitant
of a gingerbread dwelling. He only noticed that it did not go so very
well--nor yet so very badly--with the ham. He ate both, anyhow, in a
hurry. It was a keen air up there. He secured some more ham and another
cup of coffee and, with that in his hand, proceeded to the clearing in
the east from which the best view of the Salient was obtainable.
It was then that the Infantry Officer’s hitherto subconscious,
professional mind rose to the surface and became the conscious one.
In the four hours that he had waited in that frame of mind, he had
noticed, of course, an infinite number of details--a great number of
airplanes coming from the direction of Dunkirk; huge columns of smoke
rising from far back in German-held Belgium, behind Brûges. A great
number of signs of war in that clear, gray, sunlit space, in which
every pollard willow appeared to be visible and like a candle flame
burning in a windless air! Gringoire was looking through a telescope,
of course. But I will trouble the reader only with two apparitions of
those that he collected: they were apparently unconnected, since they
took place, the one at Poperinghe, the other in front of Wytschaete.
But very likely they had a grim connection.
Whilst he was topographically employed, our Infantry Officer had
noticed Poperinghe as a blue-gray smudge, in shape like an oval lozenge
seen in perspective. From it rose several church towers--bulbous,
Low-Country edifices. Now, whilst he was resting his eyes from the
telescope, he saw, suddenly unfolding in the air above the towers,
two great white swans. They extended laterally, dazzling, very slow.
Then a trunk descended from each of them. After a time they resembled,
exactly, immense torsos of Hercules, headless and armless statues,
as solid-looking as brilliant white marble, new from the quarry. The
Tommies called them Statue Shells.
And then he noticed that there were statue shells over the observation
post on Kemmel Hill. With his telescope, also, he began to see that
shells were bursting on Poperinghe. I don’t know why, but he took them
to be gas shells, bracketing.
He rested his eyes again and looked at the gap between Mont Noir and
Mont Kemmel. It was a symmetrical bit of landscape seen over what is
called technically a saddle between two hills. Over the very center
of the lowest part of the dip, Gringoire said, there appeared to be
a whitish gray tooth stump, decayed, with one end-fragment rather
high.[4] Extending, like a long string, above this, on rising ground,
there was a brown rope--five miles, perhaps beyond the decayed tooth.
Little white balls existed on the brown line, the landscape was pale
yellow--as it might be the gold of corn fields. The red roofs of a
village that he knew to be Wytschaete were brilliant and quiet in
the sun--but, on the brown line beneath that ridge the little white
balls went on coming into existence--one every half second. One to the
right at the extreme end of the line; one on the extreme left; one in
the middle; one between the extreme left and the center. Beautiful
work. Have you ever seen a village cobbler nailing a sole? It goes
so quickly that you hardly see the hammer. But a small brass nail is
there--and another and another--a line of brass nails on the smooth
leather. Well, they went like that, along the brown line--the little
white balls! Beautiful! Beautiful work. “My mind,” Gringoire said,
“was filled with joy and my soul exulted in the clear, still, autumn
sunshine, looking over that tiny Kingdom of the Earth.
“I said to myself: ‘Hurray! The guns are giving them hell. Some one’s
ducking over there.’” Because, of course, the brown line was the Hun
trenches on the Wytschaete ridge, and the little white balls were our
shells, falling with an exact precision. They must have knocked the
trenches pretty considerably already for the disturbed earth to show at
all at that distance.
At that moment--it was just gone three--a man in khaki made Gringoire
jump by appearing at his elbow. He said that the General who had
ordered Gringoire to report there at 1:00 P.M. was detained. Would he
have some lunch and report again at the same spot at five?
And, after that, it was just emotions. The landscape became landscape,
with great shafts of light and shadows of clouds; the little white
cottage with the green shutters, a little nook that should be
inviolable; the haricots interesting as things that one might plant
in a Kentish garden that sloped to the sea. The range of hills was no
longer a strategical point or a tactical position. It was all that
remained of one of the Kingdoms of the Earth; one could hardly look at
the gray plains with the pollard willows marching like aligned candle
flames toward the horizon--one avoided looking at it, because it was
Lost Territory, held down, oppressed, as if it were ashamed. Poperinghe
grew to appear pitiful, a little town where wretched civilians were
being butchered by gas shells for the love of God. So the poet’s
mind worked, at leisure, on personal matters, as neither the mind of
Intelligence, or Infantry, Officer need work.
“My mind,” the poet reports, “was indeed so much at leisure in that
long two hours that I even wrote in my Field Pocket Book a preface to a
volume whose proofs had that morning reached me. In that I recorded my
emotions of the moment and there, in a printed volume, they stand. It
does not alter their value as a record of emotions that I subsequently
learned that the statue shells over Poperinghe were not gas shells but
had been discharged so as to give the German Heavies the range, or
that, upon reflection, it appears to me that the Germans were hardly
shelling the town so profusely just for the love of God. They must
either have heard that we had a considerable body of troops in the
town, or else they were trying to stop, by that retaliation, our own
artillery’s heavy shelling of their Wytschaete-Messines positions.”
But at any rate, there the emotions came, crowding and irrepressible.
So that, just before, in the dusk, at seven o’clock, Gringoire saw the
bright red flash of a brass hat’s band in among dark fir trees, he
noticed, with a sudden lift in the side, a light silver streak, behind
the map of Dunkirk. It was the sea.
“And suddenly,” he said, “there came upon me an intense longing to be
beyond that sea.” It was a longing not for any humanity--but just for
the green country, the mists, the secure nook at the end of a little
valley, the small cottage whose chimneys just showed over the fruit
trees--for the feelings and the circumstances of a sanctuary in which
one could cross one’s second over one’s index finger and in the face of
destiny cry: “Feignits.”
It was, however, necessary to stand to attention, and through the
falling twilight to point out hardly visible towns to a nearly
invisible Senior Officer. And immediately the mind went back to its
original position: Dunkirk and Ypres became circles named in large
capitals; Wytschaete and Kemmel were again in block lettering. One
said: “The sea is just visible in that direction,” and it was just a
geographical fact.
[Footnotes]
[3] I am aware that D.H.Q. was not really at Dranoutre, which was a
nice little place, built round a church square, rendered nasty by the
Germans. But I call it Dranoutre out of reflex action caused by fear of
the Censor--who once, at the end of 1918, struck out of one of my poems
an allusion to the fact that I visited Cardiff early in 1915.
[4] This would be the remains of the Cathedral and the Cloth Hall at
Ypres.
V
_Intermezzo_
The day after peace was declared seemed to your compiler an excellent
moment on which to remonstrate with our poet as to one of his
characteristic locutions. The day was fine, cloudless, soft and still;
some gardening operation of Gringoire’s had consummately succeeded. I
forget what it was. I fancy some long-studied contrivance of his had
checkmated the slugs in his strawberry beds. At any rate we sat in the
long grass by the hedge under the damson trees at the bottom of the
garden over a great blue china bowl of strawberries which Gringoire
characteristically insisted on moistening with red wine and sugar. He
said that taken that way they were less gross than with cream and I am
bound to say that Mme. Sélysette shared his views with which I could
never agree.
In any case, it was with singular mildness that, lying on his side in
the long grass, Gringoire answered my remonstrances.
“Why, no,” he said, “I do not see why any one should object to the
use of the term ‘Hun’ as applied to such members of the late Enemy
nations as were not in arms against us. I do not care much about the
matter and, if the word offends you, I will try, when I think about it,
not to use it. But the fact is that I certainly never thought about
it much at any time. It is a convenient phrase to use about what was
evil in the people we were fighting against. I should not now--and
I never did--call Brahms anything but a German composer nor should
I ever think of calling Holbein a Hun painter or the Brothers Grimm
of the fairy-tales, Boches. So that the word is a convenient one for
differentiations. In effect for me the German musicians, painters,
poets, working men, postmen and soldiers in the trenches or at their
Headquarters were never Huns. I assert that categorically and I think
it was true of the majority of my comrades--except that the majority of
my comrades had never heard of Bach or Beethoven or Heine. But it was
true that the majority of my comrades with whom I discussed the subject
at all seriously, though they may have used the word you dislike,
never--when talking seriously--used it as a term of hatred. Humanity
will inevitably use a monosyllable in place of two sounds if it can
get the chance and so will I.
“But I don’t think many people in the trenches actually, and except at
odd moments, ever felt active hatred against the men in the opposite
lines or even those who militarily directed their operations. When
they are not called on to be trustworthy or imaginative or to show
human sympathy, men in the bulk are beasts fairly decent and fairly
reasonable. We hated and objurgatively called ‘Huns,’ to the furthest
extent of its Hunnish hideousness, not the poor bloody footsloggers
who were immediately before us. No, the word applied itself to the
professors, the prosaists, the publicists, the politicians who had sent
those poor blighters to prevent our going home. For if you think of it,
it was a topsy-turvy arrangement. They wanted to send us home and we
wanted desperately to go; yet they pushed towards our home and we away
from ours....