lines. If they had been retired a hundred and fifty yards they
would have been on the slope of the hill and dry and safe. But the
staff--or some bellicose individual on the staff--in spite of every
representation preferred to lose a third of my battalion, let alone
thirds of all the other battalions that occupied them, rather than
to lose the little bit of prestige that it would have meant, by a
retirement. Of a hundred and fifty yards! Think of that!
“Anyhow, there we came down in the early hours of a September
moonlight--into a world of beautiful, bluish and misty calm. There
were those calms in the line when the vengeful activities of seven or
so million men had exhausted themselves and their imaginations had
just gone to sleep. You would have long periods of quiet. They would
be broken by sudden bursts of machine gun fire and flares of Verey
lights when some bemused sentry had taken it into his head that half
a dozen corpses in No Man’s Land were stealing upon him. One’s nerves
did that in quiet, moonlit moments. You would look at a corpse, or some
sacking, or some sandbags until you could swear they were creeping upon
you. Then in a crisis, ‘bang’ would go your hipe, and off would go the
machine guns, and up would flare the Verey lights. The guns too might
come in and some poor devil or another lose his life. But as a rule
silence would settle down again for another long period.... I wrote a
poem about that, in French. But I never heard of any one having read
it.”
It was at that moment that your Compiler burst in with the words:
“Oh, it begins with: ‘I should like to imagine a moonlight in which
there will be no machine guns.’ I heard my friend Mrs. Carmody recite
it only yesterday. Recite, not read it!”
Gringoire grunted slightly.
“The point was that it was most beautiful moonlight, before a blue,
silent mountain with mists dim all up its flanks. And the other point
was that we, as you may remember, were a flying division. We were used
for reinforcing threatened points or for resting overtired troops.
And, facing us, the Germans had similar divisions that they called
‘_Sturmtruppen_.’ The curious thing was that either their Intelligence
was so good or ours was so good that whenever we were moved up or
down the line we found the same regiments in front of us so that when
we were on the Somme we fought the Second Brandenburgers, and when
we moved up to the Salient there we found the Second Brandenburgers
in front of us and after we had been in front of Armentières for a
little, there sure enough were the famous Second Brandenburgers. The
Cockchafers, they were nicknamed. After that they began to desert to us
a good deal and they were replaced by the Würtembergers whom we used to
consider better fellows, I don’t know why, for we never, in the nature
of the case, consorted much with either.
“On the occasion of that moonlight night the Brandenburgers had got in
before us and displayed a natural curiosity to know who we were when
we got in. The German--or rather the Hun--method of trying to unmask
the identity of opponents was to sing national anthems. I use the word
‘Hun’ here because only a Delbrueck or a Bethmann-Hollweg--a professor
or a politician--would have thought of anything so ingeniously
imbecile. For naturally we did not fall in with that little idea....
The idea, by the bye, was that if we were Scots and they sang ‘Scots
Wha Hae’ or Irish and they sang ‘The Wearin’ of the Green,’ or for us
‘Hen Wlad Wy Nadhau’ we should, in a burst of patriotic emotion either
cheer or join in the chorus. We didn’t. I remember that once when,
no doubt suspecting who we were, they had tried singing “Ap Jenkin,”
which is our quickstep, our men replied by singing the imperial Chorus
from the ‘Mikado’ as if to show that we were Japanese. That irritated
them so much that they pounded our trench for an hour and a half with
everything they could think of.
“On this occasion they tried everything from ‘Rule Britannia’ to
‘Australia, Australia,’ and elicited no reply. And then they suddenly
touched off an immense gramophone that sang, through the still
moonlight ... the ‘Hymn of Hate.’ And in English!
“It was curious and eerie to hear that passionless machine let off
those dire words devoted solely to ourselves, for they never evolved
anything like it for the French or the Belgians or the Italians or
Annamites or Cochin Chinese or Brazilians. Now it screamed and brayed:
“Hate of the head and hate of the hand,
Hate of the breed and hate of the land
ENGLAND
Hate of the standing and hate of the lying,
Hate of the living and hate of the dying
ENGLAND ... ENGLAND”
(“And as a detail I may add that they had to get an English
renegade--for there was one!--to make that translation.)
“I am bound to say that it made one shiver a little. There were the
moonlight, and the mists, and the lights of poor Wytschaete far away
on the ridge. And those words creeping towards us. It is perhaps more
disagreeable to think of being prayed to death than of being shelled.
One shivered.
“And when it fell silent one wondered if anything in the war or in the
world could surpass it for drama. But one was wrong. You don’t know the
Welsh. They are the incomparable singers of four-part music in the open
air.
“I remember, years ago, being on the side of a Welsh mountain on a
Saturday evening at sunset and far below a Welsh miners’ beanfeast was
going along a thread of a road in char-à-bancs. And as each filled car
passed there came up the sounds of four-part songs, incredibly sweet
and incredibly mournful in the falling darkness. They are a conquered
people, the Welsh, and their music is the music of a conquered people.
“But on that occasion the Germans had delivered themselves into their
hands in the endless struggle between Saxon and Celt. For suddenly a
single voice in ‘B’ Company began to sing with extraordinary clearness:
‘Maxwelton braes are bonnie
When earlie fa’s the dew....’
“And extraordinarily, before the singer had come to ‘there that Annie
Laurie,’ the whole of ‘B’ Company was crooning out the other parts of
the song. Beneath the moon. And then the whole Battalion, along a front
of a mile. Crooning, you know, rather softly, not shouting....
“And for Bonnie Annie Laurie ...”
“It was a good answer.
“They were forbidden of course to sing Welsh songs, or it might have
been ‘Land of My Fathers’ or the ‘Men of Harlech.’ As it was, it was
better.
“But there was not much hatred about that. And you will observe that
even the Huns had had to get a machine to do their hating.”
VI
_Just Country_
It is one of the burdens of advancing age--as it is one of the
penalties of having been unreasonably prolific--that one is always
haunted by a vague dread of repeating one’s self. One’s mind,
presumably, progresses, one touches and retouches one’s ideas; hammers
at the wording; seeks after a final clarity of expression. It is all
one that one may have already printed the matter of the theme; the mind
continues to work at the phraseology until one, finally, isn’t certain
that one has or hasn’t sought the crystallization of the press. So it
happens that I cannot be certain whether I have or haven’t printed
already what I am about to write. It can’t, however, in the nature of
things, have been more than a shortish article; so that if I have to
apologize to any readers, the apology can’t be for any great fault.
I fancy that what I then tried to put on paper was suggested by a
letter that our poet wrote, having another moment of leisure, at
about the time of his long wait for the General on Mont Vedaigne. I
wrote an article, and certainly it was suggested by a passage in one
of Gringoire’s letters to a friend, at some one’s request, for the
journal called the N--. And that journal called the N-- refused to
print the article because it was too militarist. I don’t myself see
where the militarism can have come into the expression of what was pure
speculation of a psychological kind--but censors, whether military or
anti-military, are queer people, and I presume that their main job,
as it presents itself to their minds, is the suppression of ideas....
The more I think about it now, the more the thought hardens and takes
shape; some one--connected with the propaganda-ministry--_did_ ask me
to write an article for the N-- and the N-- did refuse to print it. I
daresay the journal had quarreled with the department in between whiles.
Anyhow, the psychological speculation wasn’t very profound, or, as
far as I can see, very likely to render conscription a permanent
institution in these islands. Stated in its baldest terms, it merely
amounted to saying that when you are very busy with a job, you do not
much notice what is going on around you. You don’t, of course.
And, in the end, that is the basic idea that underlies these records
of four landscapes. Gringoire was simply trying to state--or rather
to illustrate--the fact that, during the whole of the period from the
4/8/’14 till the date when the German plenipotentiaries appended, in
the Salle des Glaces, their signatures to the peace treaty, he only
four times achieved a sufficient aloofness of mind to notice the
landscape that surrounded him.
“I don’t mean to say,” our poet summed the matter up, “that I didn’t
have ‘leaves,’ but, for one cause and another, my leaves weren’t ever
pensive or leisurely. One was snatched into the civilian frame of
mind--but into a civilian frame of mind that was always preoccupied
with ‘The War’--that was, indeed, in odd ways, far more preoccupied
with the war than were one’s self and one’s friends. Thus I remember
that, on the occasion of my first return from France, being in a
Tommy’s tunic, before I had arrived at the barrier of Viltona, I was
stopped by an Assistant Provost Marshal and told that if I didn’t
immediately procure leather gloves, another sort of hat, a collar,
a tie, and get rid of my divisional mark, I should be put under
arrest and returned to my battalion. In the booking office, I found
a telephone--which cost thruppence, instead of tuppence--and when I
remonstrated with a lady who three times gave me a wrong number, I was
told to remember that there was a war going on. When, there being no
one in my own house, I tried to go by omnibus to my club for lunch, I
being in mufti and a little lame, a lady conductor put her hand on my
chest, exclaimed: ‘There’s a war on,’ and very neatly threw me back
into the road.
“When I got to my club, a civilian of an eminently moral appearance
was lunching at my table. He addressed me condescendingly--as no doubt
one would address a Tommy if one were a civilian at a club. I had the
feeling that he was about to offer me a glass of beer--therefore I
hurriedly began to talk of peace. I wanted, you see, to consider peace
and to avoid at once the offer of a free drink and the remembrance of
my comrades who were still in danger of their lives. I admit that my
words were inconsiderate, for I simply said:
“‘Won’t there be a high old fortnight’s drunk after that day!’
“My table companion drew himself up, pursed dry lips, and as it were
hissed:
“‘I think we have taken very good steps to prevent that.’
“He wouldn’t, you see, let me forget my poor comrades who were still in
the trenches. I do not remember what I said then; but only his attitude
as with his napkin very white and crumpled in his hand, he removed
to another table. Straight from that club I went to the house of an
Eminent Reformer who told me that he would rather we lost the war than
that the Cavalry should have a hand in winning it.[5] He couldn’t know
that it wasn’t so very long since I had seen the empty saddles of the
Deccan Horse, as, all intermingled with the men of some battalion of
Gordons, they returned from an adventure in No Man’s Land, during the
1916 Battle of the Somme. So I went and had tea with a lady who gave
me three milk biscuits from a silver tray and said: ‘This _must_ be a
change from your hardships over there!’
“They _wouldn’t_, you see, let me forget the poor dear fellows who
were still in the trenches. So I passed the night in a Y.M.C.A. hut,
discussing Mametz Wood of the 14/7/’16 with an officer of the 38th
Division.”
That, of course, was rather a special day, Gringoire said--though
it was nothing out of the common. Given his age, former career, and
surroundings, he couldn’t be expected to come in for any huge amount
of the salutary dissipation or the healing hospitality which did so
much to _remonter_ the _moral_ of the troops. Moving mostly amongst
the Intelligentsia, he came a good deal in contact with Conscientious
Objectors who abused him to his face for militarism or with literary
civilians of military age who, after calling at his house, returned
to their own and wrote him anonymous but easily recognizable letters,
the purport of which was that he had never heard a shot fired and
that the only gas he had ever smelled had been emitted by himself.
To balance them, he received a number of letters from the German
population of London, threatening to murder him on account of his
propagandist writings, whilst one of the most frequent preoccupations
of his military career arose from the anonymous letters addressed to
the War Office, to his various Colonels, and to the officers and other
ranks of his regiment by a professional man whom he had once employed
and who, after he lost that particular job, found that his conscience
as a patriot demanded that he should continuously but unsuccessfully
denounce our poet as a German spy.
That is all in the day’s journey. _Homo homini lupus._ But it is not to
be wondered at that in his periods of leisure Gringoire was not in a
position to pay what he would have called a hell of a lot of attention
to landscapes--or, in the alternative, that the essential call, of the
land, of the war, was not the humanity that England contained--but just
the country.
Possibly the idea of country--just country--postulates the idea of
human companionship--but that is not the same thing as humanity.
“When I was a boy,” as Gringoire put it, “every hedge and every turn
of a white, long road, concealed a possible Princesse Lointaine.” In
those days one walked on and on--from the North Foreland to the Land’s
End; from Kensington to Winchelsea, from Minehead, by Porlock and
Brendon, to Water’s Meet. Or one cycled from Calais to Beauvais, by way
of Arras; from Paris to Tours and along the Loire, somehow ending at
Houlgate and Caen. Or one went in a slow fiacre from Amiens to Albert,
ostensibly to see the new brick and mosaic cathedral, with the Madonna
atop. But, no doubt, whether one went to Mevagissy or Mentone; Port
Scathow, Pontardulais, Château Gaillard, or Curt-yr-Ala, one was really
chasing the Only Possible She.
“Nowadays one sits in a green field--any green field--and longs for
nothing more than just a little bit of loyalty. One longs, that is
to say, that one may at last find the _hominem bonæ voluntatis_ that
one has chased all one’s life. Possibly one desires that, resting
one’s eyes in the green of the grass as--do you remember, old Dai
Bach?--according to the maxims of Color-Sergeant Davis of Caerphilly,
we used to rest our eyes from the targets by looking into the trampled
green blades, one longs to discover some formula that shall make us
ourselves forever loyal to some ideal or other....
“Or perhaps it is just rest that one wants. Anyhow, one wants the
country that is just country--not heaths, moors, crags, forests,
passes, named rivers, or famous views. No--just fields, just dead
ground, or fields of clover that have never heard and will never hear
the crepitation of machine guns; hedgerows unwired and not too trim,
with a spray or so of bramble just moving in a wind from which one is
sheltered. That, until the other day, one so seldom saw in France--or
in England either, for that matter.”
“I remember,” Gringoire said in one of his anecdotes, “being in a
wood--behind Tenby, I think, or near Manorbier or Pembroke, in 1915.
It was very warm, and that part of Wales is a sleepy country. I had
bicycled ahead of troops afoot to inspect some sort of position that,
the day before, with my over-meticulousness, I had already spent hours
in surveying, when I might have been listening to Pierrots. At any
rate, I had three-quarters of an hour of entire leisure.
“The sun beat down; I was just inside the edge of a wood. A little
marsh--a reëntrant--ran right in under the trees. There was a mill
where the insignificant valley opened out; a little dam where the
road mounted an opposite slope. And then, though I had sketched, in
a military sense, every clump of rushes, every contour, every bridge,
every railway cutting and bit of embankment, many times--suddenly this
place of greenery assumed--that too!--the aspect of being just country.
“A little Welsh sheep poked its horns through the hedge and looked
at me; a wren crept through a tangle of old thorns at my elbow, a
nuthatch pursued a curious and intricate course amongst the netted,
coarse fibers of ivy on a wild cherry-trunk. I lay still in the dappled
sunlight and thought nothing, except that it was good to stretch out
one’s limbs, recumbent. Because the level, green ground in front of
me was so grown with rushes, I began to try to remember what were the
provisions of the Field Drain Act of the middle of last century. Surely
the farmer could obtain from the State, on easy terms, a loan with
which to defray the expense of soil-pipes and labor for the draining
of that land. And I began to think about the queer, stodgy, Victorian
mind; and about Albert the Good, and the Crystal Palace, which in those
days was known as the Temple of Peace; and I remembered John Brown and
John Morley and John Bright and John Stuart Mill and Mr. Ruskin and
the rest of them, and mahogany chairs with horsehair seats and Argand
lamps and the smoke and steam that used to fill the underground at
Gower Street station. And in those days I had a 13-hand New Forest pony
and a very old governess car and went to market on a Tuesday....
“And then, quite suddenly, I felt that, for thousands and thousands of
miles, on the green fields and in the woodlands, stretching away under
the high skies, in the August sunlight, millions, millions, millions of
my fellow men were moving--like tumultuous mites in a cheese, training
and training, as we there were training--all across a broad world to
where the sun was setting and to where the sun was rising--training
to live a little, short space of time in an immense long ribbon of
territory, where, for a mile or so the earth was scarred, macerated,
beaten to a pulp, and burnt by the sun till it was all dust.... The
thought grew, became an immense feeling, became an obsession. Then
Major Ward, on a bay with a white forehead, appeared on the little
bridge that carried the waters of the marsh beneath the road. The
others were coming!”
[Footnotes]
[5] Our friend is here venting a little of the bile that, as will be
seen, at times obscures his outlook on life and makes him, elsewhere,
appear ungenerous to the civilian population that so loyally did its
bit. The train of thought of his friend the Eminent Reformer would seem
to be as follows: (a) this is a war for liberty; (b) the Cavalry are
officered mainly by the hereditary aristocracy; (c) if the hereditary
aristocracy wins out in the war, liberty will suffer; (d) it would be
preferable to lose the war. This seems logical. Our poet, however,
refuses to see matters in this light. He says that he has never since
spoken to that Eminent Reformer, who was once the closest of his
friends--and that he never will again. This is lamentable. But is there
not a tag beginning “_Irritabile genus_”...?
VII
_Playing the Game_
As will appear in my last chapter Gringoire insists that I shall
include in this volume a specimen of his prose written under fire. As
that was written in French your compiler flatly refused to insert it in
the body of his book so that, since Gringoire flatly refused to let the
book appear at all unless it _was_ included, it will be found elsewhere
than in the body and what follows is his translation. I confess to
regretting its inclusion for although I myself and a great number of my
friends including even Mrs. Carmody who is the wife of the headmaster
at the ancient grammar-school, a foundation of Edward VI’s in the XVI
century at which I have the honor to teach English Literature--although
I and my friends consider him a very great poet, if not the greatest
poet in the world at the moment, poet’s prose is well known to be too
florid for the real connoisseur of prose. And what follows is actually
his own translation and Gringoire himself has asserted many times both
in private and in public that he is entirely unable to translate his
own prose. It does however present a picture of the poet under fire--a
matter as to which he here refuses to say anything elsewhere under
the plea that to talk about actual fighting disturbs his subsequent
sleep with nightmares and also that he intends to treat of fighting
subsequently himself when both the public bitterness and his own
emotions shall have diminished. This decision I regret. For who in ten
years’ time will be found to take an interest in the late struggle
whereas enshrined here in the amber of my own prose the record of his
emotions might well interest people who have such memories still vivid
within them. I may say that I myself, a journalist of considerable
pre-war practice, never went to the front though I served during the
whole war in the depot of Gringoire’s regiment.
Here then is Gringoire’s prose, the original French of which he says
was written at Pont de Nieppe during September 1916 after his visit to
the French Ministry which he will describe in my next chapter.
A CRICKET MATCH
BEING A LETTER WRITTEN FROM THE LINES OF SUPPORT
IN FLANDERS TO CAPTAIN UN TEL IN PARIS.
_Mon cher monsieur, camarade et confrère_ (Gringoire’s addressee was
also a poet soldier):
Behind Bécourt Wood, on a July evening, whilst the shells of the
Germans were passing overhead, we were playing cricket. The heavy
shells went over, seeming to cry in their passage the word “We;
e; eary”; then, changing their minds farther on they exclaimed
peremptorily: “Whack!” But when one plays cricket one forgets the
Hun orchestra; one does not even hear the shells that pass overhead.
We were running about; we were cursing the butterfingered fool who
dropped a catch; we even argued about points of play, because the
rules of such cricket as one plays with a tennis-ball, two axe-helves
for bats and bully-beef-cases for wicket--those rules are apt to be
elastically interpreted. But no match England v. Australia at Lords’
itself was ever so full of incident nor so moving as our game behind
Bécourt Wood. The turf was of clay, baked porcelain-hard by the almost
tropical sun; for grass there was only an expanse of immense thistles;
boundaries and spectators at once were provided by the transport mules
in their lines. But we cheered, we gesticulated, we rushed about, we
disputed, we roared ... we--British infantry officers who are said to
be phlegmatic, cold and taciturn.
I present the considerations that follow in the form of a letter to
you, my dear Un Tel, though I would rather have written a balanced,
careful and long-thought-out essay. But I cannot chisel at my prose
today. “Ker wooley woo,” as our Tommies say, “say la gair!” I have
passed twenty-five years of my life in trying to find new cadences; in
chasing assonances out of my prose, with an enraged meticulousness that
might have been that of Uncle Flaubert himself. But today I only write
letters--long, diffuse, and in banal phrases. The other demands too
much time, too much peace of mind.... Ah, and too much luck!