fighting. The point that I want to put into the spotlight of your mind
is mostly the fact that if we do not economize in food there will be
another war. Unlike you, my dear Compi, in that I regard the past with
much greater equanimity. You remember that, when we were both writing
propaganda I used to shock you by the mildness of mine. It will be long
before I forget your emotions when I wrote an article suggesting that,
instead of atrocity-mongering we were sufficiently advanced along the
road of civilization to write--at least of the German troops--as ‘the
gallant enemy.’
“Today our positions have changed and you are shocked because I style
certain of those who belong to the late Enemy nation by an epithet that
you wish to forget having employed. The point is that I stand where I
did whereas you have reacted against what now appear to have been your
extravagances. My propaganda, as you remember, was almost entirely
a matter of economics and of culture. I simply pointed out that the
war was in effect a hunger war: Prussia being mostly composed of
immense sand wastes--the Lüneburger Heide; of impenetrable forest--the
Teutoberger Wald; and of the vast stretch of swamps where Hindenburg
massacred the Russians on their own border. That being the condition of
Prussia, the country would not produce enough food for the population
which was also a population of the most prolific breeders in the
world. I also pointed out--and I think I was almost the only person to
do so--that the Enemy Empire instead of being the flourishing concern
that she had bluffed the world into considering her was actually on the
point of bankruptcy and losing trade after trade to foreign nations.
That again was merely a matter of food. Germany had flourished on low
wages and subsidies to manufacturers; but as food-prices rose the world
over the wages of the German laborer had to go up so that, even with
subsidies, the German manufacturer could no longer compete with us,
the Italians, the French or even the South Americans. That Germany
invaded Belgium may or may not have been the _triste nécessité_ that
her statesmen alleged it to be, but that the war, regarded as a food
war was in very truth a sad necessity for her you may be perfectly
convinced. Prussia was starving, her population was increasing by leaps
and bounds, emigration had been forbidden by the government....
“Well, I do not propose to hate a starving population that seeks for
bread, but I do propose to dislike and go on disliking the professors
and publicists who preached that the only way to obtain bread was by
invading Belgium and I do not think that the epithet you object to is
any too strong. And indeed, if you use it merely to designate what was
hateful in the late Enemy nation and if you employ the word ‘German’
for everything that was and is ‘_gemütlich_’ for those who since
yesterday have been our friends, you will be doing them a service by
emphasizing what they have of the lovable in their compositions. Still
... I do not much care about that.
“I do not believe that there will ever be another war if you put it
only on the baser ground that the great financiers who alone can make
or stop wars got hideously frightened by the last one. And in addition
to that you can consider the educative effect of the Armageddon that
finished yesterday. It will take a good many decades before any human
soul will again regard war as a means of enrichment and a good many
centuries before any Great Power will again imagine that to have an
aspect of bestriding the world in jackboots and with the saber rattling
is of advantage to itself. It is a better world on the 29th of June,
1919, than it was on August the 3rd, 1914. Bluff has got its deathblow.
“Yes, the world is better and sweeter. We simple people are freed of
an enormous incubus; we can sit still for a space and think, which
we never could before in the history of the world. But of this I am
certain--that what danger there is to the world and us is a food
danger. I do not believe there will ever be another war: I believe our
sufferings, great as they were, achieved that and were a small price to
pay for that benefit. So, if you want to you may bless even the Huns as
having been the occasion of our learning that lesson. But if there were
ever another war it would be a war purely and simply for food.
“The food-producing soil of the earth is already occupied; the
population of our small planet increases by leaps and bounds. I know
enough about agriculture--and scientific agriculture at that--to
know that the pretensions of scientists to increase the production
of food by improved culture is weary nonsense when set against the
consideration of the increase in the numbers of mankind. The most
honest scientist that I know refused to reveal a method of increasing
the yield of wheat sixfold on a given plot of ground because he
satisfied himself that to do so in one year rendered that plot of
ground absolutely barren for ten years and the milder improvements of
agricultural processes that are evolved each year do not suffice to
provide enough food for the extra mouths that each year are produced by
Prussia alone.
“So that the position might seem pretty gloomy, but I remain an
optimist, at least in the matter of war for if, as I think will prove
the fact, there will be no war till the world is driven to it by
starvation, then the coming of war may be so long delayed that, all
races of the world being at last at much the same pitch of education,
it will be obvious to them all that war is no way to increase the
production of food. I heard, not a Hun, but a Swedish professor say the
other day that it was terribly irksome and irritating to his countrymen
to consider that, whilst they were overpopulated and cramped up on
an infertile soil, down in the fertile south there was the nearly
empty and extraordinarily fertile land known as France. And how, he
asked, could France with her selfish inhabitants who regulated their
birth-rate--or who at any rate selfishly refused to beget children to
the limit of their capacity--how could France expect to enjoy immunity
from invasion by the healthy, voracious and formidable Northern races
who openheartedly and with splendid generosity begot children, to use
his own phrase, by the bushel?
“I did not, as you might imagine, because of my obvious Gallophilism
try to bite off that blond beast’s head because what he said was, as to
its premises, true enough. France _is_ sparsely populated and wealthy,
Sweden _is_ overcrowded and infertile. But the remedy for that is not
to be found in invasion: the solution is there, waiting. France which
is the only country civilized enough not to overpopulate herself is at
present the only country in the world that welcomes immigration and
facilitates to the extreme the naturalization of immigrants.
“The Swede went on grumbling that it was very hard that his compatriots
must expatriate themselves in order to enjoy those _Südfrüchte_--fruits
of the South. He said that his fellow countrymen loved their graynesses
and contracted terrible melancholias beneath Southern suns.... So that
the only thing was raiding!
“I did not continue the discussion for I did not wish at the moment
to hate a Swede. But that in essence shows the root of the matter.
Wars will cease when nations and Northern Professors are sufficiently
civilized to let nations be relatively nomadic and permit races to flow
freely from inclement, overpopulated and infertile regions into those
that are sparsely populated and fertile and not hyper-philoprogenitive.
“You may put it that hatred and overpopulation go hand in hand, their
destination being war, and you would not be far wrong. For it is not
the hatreds begotten after wars are declared that matter; those die
natural if slow deaths as soon as the not very protracted activities
of warfare are over and done with, so that it is only the hatreds that
precede wars that need much concern us.”
He went on to say that pre-war hatreds, apart from those inculcated
by hungers of one sort or another, arose largely from differences of
manners. We used to hate the French because they ate frogs and were
elegant; they hated us because we said “goddam” and ruled the seas. But
manners tend to approximate the world over with the extension of means
of intercourse. They jazz in Cambodia as in Coney Island today and
tomorrow they will speak American in the county of Clackmannan even as
in Monte Carlo.
That Gringoire applauded. It was, he said, all to the good to have
a dance that all could dance. Before the war the vigorous poor went
to dogfights, cockfights, badgerfights: now they jazzed. It was a
progress towards sweetness and light, part of what we had paid for
with our sufferings....
It was at this point that your Compiler became a little impatient.
He had come to get war-reminiscences from a practising poet--but
these colloquies resolved themselves into a continual struggle of
wills, Gringoire persisting in dilating on the future as seen by the
practising agriculturist and gastronome. And indeed, scenting that your
Compiler was essaying to head him off from the topic on which his mind
was fixed, he now went off upon a tirade about intensive horticulture
and French cooking that lasted until dusk was well falling on his
garden. And Madame Sélysette, raising her delicate eyebrows, intimated
sufficiently plainly that, if we did not want a storm he had better not
be interrupted.
The main points of his harangue were to the effect that humanity would
be saved--if it was to be saved--by good cooking, intensive horti-,
as opposed to agriculture. And of course by abstract thinking and the
arts. And the avoidance of waste. Above all by the avoidance of waste.
To the pretensions of the scientific agriculturist he opposed the
claims of hand-culture, to those of the popular restaurant upholder
those of the meticulous chef. Hand culture whether of beasts, grain or
vegetables gave a better product, the careful and intelligent cook gave
you more appetizing food. The more appetizing your food the better you
digested it and the less you needed to support you. He said--but that
was on the question of waste--that in a French residence of the size
of the Gingerbread Cottage you would not find enough waste to fatten a
chicken with; in his own establishment, do all that he could, aided by
Mme. Sélysette, they had waste enough to half fatten a pig....
In short the world was to be saved by observing the precepts of the
recipe for mutton chops with which your Compiler opened this little
work. But all this seemed so apart from anything that his readers could
be supposed to want from a book devoted to the war-reminiscences of a
poet that your Compiler had long ceased to use his pencil and notebook
before Gringoire had finished his sunset harangue, so that, having no
notes of the arguments we may well, as to that matter, here inscribe
the words: “_cetera desunt._”
But, having eased his mind, Gringoire became good-natured, and,
becoming good-natured he was awake to the outer world. So he observed
that Mme. Sélysette and your servant had for a long time made neither
objections to nor comments on the stuff of his harangues. His voice had
gone on sounding alone save for the churnings of an early night-jar
that sat upon the gatepost giving onto the rushy meadow. And suddenly
he stopped and laughed maliciously.
“Poor old Compi,” he said, “how extraordinarily this isn’t what you
come for. But the stuff of war-reminiscences concerns itself almost as
much with what war has made of a man as with the pictures that he saw.
Still you are not the sort of person to see that and, in a minute I
will reward your patience with a landscape that, though it has nothing
to do with our main theme, may make a nice _bonne bouche_ for your
little book.
“But I do want to get in--just for the sake of pointing it out to the
world--that the late hostilities, whilst they profoundly modified the
manners of the world did, in their very nature, hold up to the world
a moral that will be of infinite value as soon as the world is in any
condition at all to notice it. That is to say it did teach us what a
hell--what a hell!--of a lot we can do without.
“Take my dear Sélysette there, with her upbringing amongst the suns
and luxuries of the _haute bourgeoisie_ of the South. Do you suppose
that if, before the 3rd of August, 1914 you had proposed to her to
unite her destinies to the least pecunious of poets and take up her
residence in a rat-ridden cottage beneath the usually lugubrious but at
all times capricious skies of this septentrional land--do you suppose
that, if you had then made that proposal she would not have crushed you
to the earth with the mere weight of her scorn? Or take me. Would you,
knowing me as you did in earlier but, I assure you, not half such happy
days--would you have imagined me spending what till then, but not till
now, were certainly my happiest hours in a bare hillside in a tent with
absolutely no furnishings but an officer’s camp-bed? I had been used
to a good deal of luxury, but there for the first time I found peace
though the German artillery was actually at that moment shelling that
spot and I was for the first time under fire.
“That is one of the things that I remember most vividly, not because
it was the first time I was under fire but because I felt that for
the first time I had cut absolutely and finally loose from all the
bedevilments of life at home--from the malices as from the luxuries.
Afterwards, unused as I was to the artillery mind or its methods, I
wondered a little that they should be so persistently shelling _us_ and
that they should find us with such accuracy.
“I was sitting on the side of my camp-bed talking to an extremely
intoxicated and disheveled elderly officer who was nevertheless a
man of no ordinary talent. That is to say that his harangues about
everything under the sun were interspersed with a great number of
classical quotations of singular aptness and he had also made several
inventions that eventually proved very useful during the war and
that saved him from a courtmartial for drunkenness. I was--as was
so frequently my case--in charge of him and, although he was in no
position to get away, I did not care to go into a dugout as did all my
brother officers who had hitherto been in the tent with us. And indeed
the fact was that that fellow’s boozy conversation interested me....
“The German shells came in groups of three, doing obviously what we
infantry were taught to call bracketing. That is to say that the first
three shells whined wearily overhead and caused a considerable rumpus
in our mule lines that were perhaps a hundred yards behind us, and
immediately afterwards a rocket or something like it let itself down
from the heavens. A few minutes later three more shells fell short of
us by perhaps another hundred yards down the hill. There was an obvious
German plane overhead and it was in the late evening, nearly dark in
the tent and quite dusk in the calm light outside.
“My elderly friend wagged his head sagely. He explained that the
Germans were trying to find with their shells something that that plane
thought it had seen--probably the great park of German captured guns
that were just above us. They would fire three sets of three shells
each. Then our heavy artillery would open on them as a gentle hint to
them to be quiet and not disturb the serenity of the Sabbath evening.
They might take the hint or they might not. If they did not a regular
duel between the heavies would begin, and the earth would shake for
miles ’round.
“But, in any case, he said--and his air of wisdom convinced me as if
Solomon were returned to earth and judging artillery--that we should be
left in peace very shortly. And at that moment the next batch of three
shells arrived right on us. That is to say that one landed right in the
middle of the captured German guns, one in the fortunately soft ground
of a spring about thirty yards from our tent and one in the middle of
the canteen tent that was just next to ours; so that immediately after
the immense concussions innumerable crepitations sounded from the
canvas above us, the clay, gravel and mud falling from where it had
been precipitated into the skies. And a tin of sardines, coming through
the tent-flap, landed as if miraculously in my lap....
“But that old fellow went on nodding his head as if he had been a
Chinese bronze and exclaiming: ‘Don’t get up! Don’t get up! That will
be the last of it!’
“And, sure enough it was. Immediately afterwards Bloody Mary and two
of her lady friends let off, enormous and august, breaking the quiet
night. And I suppose the Germans were not in the mood for any extended
artillery duel. They had probably satisfied themselves that the German
guns parked above us were duds of sorts. The plane must have observed
them earlier in the evening and had signaled their presence with
rockets....
“But the point that I want to make is that no matter how simple your
surroundings or limited your income you can find happiness as long as
you are also surrounded by a set of men with incomes similarly exiguous
who are contented with their surroundings. The German shells were an
added discomfort which I don’t adduce as part of my argument--as if it
should be raining or indulging in any other eccentricity of weather
that one cannot control.
“Anyhow, I have been happier in a tent or a hut or even in a dugout
than ever I was in a night-club before the war or in the sort of a
hotel they call a Grand Palace, and I would rather inhabit a Connaught
hut furnished exclusively with biscuit or beef boxes and sluice myself
with cold water in the open on a freezing morning than dwell among
Park Lane millionaires and take my ease in a hummums. And, if I can do
that, all humanity can. I am no exception, and it is in that way that
salvation lies and the extinction of wars.
“Indeed, I can assure you that one of the most troubled moments of
the war happened when, as I will later tell you, I was sent for to
Paris by the French Government and by them lodged in circumstances
of extreme luxury in a Palace on the Avenue de l’Opéra. For apart
from the botherments of being asked to do propaganda that I did not
want to do and the obvious hostility of the French officers with whom
I mixed and momentary shortness of cash I had, as again I will tell
you later, the extreme botherment of being introduced suddenly into
the sequelæ of a very violent divorce case. A British cavalry officer
had used a week’s leave in going to Switzerland and carrying off his
little daughter who had been taken there by his wife on her elopement
with a ‘fiddler-fellow.’ And, as I sat in the vestibule of the Hotel
Splendide et de l’Orient the little girl, whom I like to think of as
Maisie--that Maisie of Henry James’ book--came and without a word of
any introduction, settled herself in my lap and went to sleep. She was
bothered because she could not find the tram to Heaven. Because they
said her mother had gone to Heaven.
“You would say that such things do not happen in war. But they _do_....
And the distracted cavalry officer having left me in charge of his
sleeping daughter went on some business that he had at the Embassy. But
before he went he pointed to the swinging doors of the hotel giving
into the streets and told me that at any moment he expected his wife
to rush in and use a revolver.... And I was due at the French Foreign
Office for an interview upon which my future in the service and the
world might turn.
“Eventually my publisher came in and I dropped the sleeping Maisie into
his lap. He was to have accompanied me to the Ministry but I thought he
would be more useful to me there, so I left him.... But I assure you I
was much more frightened of the idea of Maisie’s mother whom I pictured
as a sort of infuriated Carmen than ever I was of any German shells.
It was she, with her revolver, who typified for me real hatred--the
woman robbed of her child. Whereas, as for the only man that I actually
and consciously shot at and who actually and consciously shot at me, I
never felt the ghost of an emotion of hatred. I was aware of imbecilely
grinning when he missed me--as if it were any other sport--and of
saying to myself: ‘That’s the sort of dud _you_ are,’ when I--and
repeatedly--missed him. And I believe I felt regret when some one else
killed him. At any rate I am glad that I cannot remember his face....
“But Maisie’s mother would have been a different affair. _She_ would
have been filled with hatred--as I don’t believe that other fellow
was--and I should have been paralyzed.... Why, even at this moment I
can almost feel her revolver bullet entering my stomach. And I should
have deserved it. One should not connive at the carrying off of a
woman’s child however righteous the case of the husband. It is perhaps
a worse crime than crossing the Belgian frontier, ‘near a place called
Gemmenich.’
“To die thus would be to die in a bad cause. And I daresay that why
I don’t believe that any great hatred existed between the actual
combatants in the late war--and why I don’t, when I think about it,
stigmatize the fellows who lately stood armed over against us as
‘Huns’--is simply that we thought we had a good cause and that we knew
that they also thought that they had a good cause. They thought that we
endangered their homes as much as we thought that they endangered ours.
“So that I simply do not believe in atrocities. The worst fellow that
I ever came across on our own side--an enormous Scot whose principal
conversation was taken up with the topic of the prisoners he had
murdered--I have seen become lachrymosely sentimental over a German
prisoner who was in a lamentable state of funk at having to undergo a
medical examination. That Scot almost blubbered over that Hun in his
efforts to assure him that the doctor would not operate on him against
his will....
“No, I don’t believe in atrocities. Or at the most I half believe
in one. It is asserted--the Huns asserted it themselves but I found
it difficult to believe--that they filmed the _Lusitania_ whilst
she was sinking. That I find atrocious. It is bad enough with
premeditation--and the presence of a film operator would seem to prove
premeditation--it is bad enough, then, with premeditation to sink a
ship loaded with sleeping women and children. But if we concede that
those responsible believed--as they may have done--that the _Lusitania_
carried munitions of war even that may be nearly condoned. But that
you should take a cinema machine to represent, for the gloating of
others, the ruin and disappearance of a tall ship--that seems to me
the most horrible of crimes. _Spurlos_ is in itself a suspect word,
a part of the vocabulary of ruthlessness that lost the Huns--not the
fighting men--the war. But the real lives of men are enshrined in
their products. To kill a poet is a small thing; to destroy his work
is an irremediable offense.... And the most beautiful of all the
handiwork of men is the tall ship. It is horrible to see houses go down
in ruin under artillery fire; it is horrible to see fields mutilated
and rendered unfertile or merely humiliated by the heels of alien
conquerors. But to see a ship, its heart broken, its bows appealing
to the heavens, slowly and mutely disappear. That is horrible. The
sea shudders a little where it was. Only a little. But still the sea
shudders.
“Obviously in wars you must sink ships. And I suppose you may make
records of the sinking of ships if it be done pitifully. But, in a
spirit of gloating, to represent for the purpose of affrighting others
or making yet others gloat in turn--to make cold-bloodedly the record
of the disappearance of the proudest ship in the world, that seems to
me the most horrible of ... _Schrecklichkeiten_.... But perhaps they
never did it. Perhaps they only said that they did. That would be a
queer way to make yourself popular!
“But there was a landscape that I wanted to tell you about.
“A little in front of Kemmel Hill we had some trenches--horrible
trenches because of the nature of the ground. You could not dig
down three feet because you came to water so the parapets were
merely sandbags and the parados nothing at all. They must have been
responsible for the loss of more lives than any other position of
the whole war. In addition, when it rained, all the flood-water of
the uplands poured down into them. Why I have seen them filled with
cigarette packets washed down from our always luckless canteen--after
the great storm in September ’16.