French officer of my acquaintance--an officer of one of those admirable
batteries of seventy-fives whose voices were so comforting to hear by
day and so let us sleep at night. For when they spoke in their level
and interrupted roll, hour on hour, at a few furlongs behind our
backs--when _they_ spoke, no Hun barked. And they were at that time
aligned wheel to wheel from Albert to Verdun. The man was a gray-blue
Colossus, his eyes brown and somber, his mustache heavy and dark.
He stayed there, planted on his legs and his heavy stick, like some
instrument of war, three-legged, silent and of steel. And when I left
the game and went to talk to him he said to me in English:
“I find that a little shocking. _Very_ shocking!”
And he continued to look at the players who went on gesticulating and
running about amongst the giant thistles and the dangerous legs of the
mules. I exclaimed vehemently:
“_Au nom du bon Dieu, pourquoi?_”
He did not take his eyes from the players and reflected for a long time
before answering. And I, getting impatient, went on talking vehemently
and even indulged in gesticulations. I said in French:
“_Nous sortons des tranchées_.... We are only just out of the
trenches.” This game made you fit, _remettait le moral_, made you
forget the war.... What do I know of what I said? He kept on reflecting
and I talking French. At last he said:
“I find”--he was still talking English--“that this war should be a
religion. On coming out of the trenches one should sit ... and reflect.
Perhaps one should even pray a little....”
And I ... I went on arguing with him for a long time without his
answering anything but:
“I find it, all the same.”
And suddenly I burst out laughing. The situation seemed suddenly
allegorical. And if you think of it, my dear friend, you will see how
it was that I laughed. It was because it was he, the descendant of
Cyrano de Bergerac, who spoke English in the monosyllables of a stage
Lord Kitchener whilst I, the representative of so many officers and
gentlemen who for many centuries have never found anything more to
say than “O ... ah!”--I who ought to have been wearing an eyeglass
and blond whiskers was engaged in waving my arms and shouting a
French that was rendered almost incoherent by emotion. And all
my comrades--officers as well as other ranks--went on shouting,
gesticulating, running about, cursing and laughing like children of
Tarascon in the French South.
* * * * *
And in truth the change is astonishing and a little moving. We have
always had the idea--even the French have had the idea--that the French
people, and above all the French soldiers and French officers, were
gay, debonnair, loquacious, pawky--“Swordsmen and tricksters without
remorse or scruples,” as Cyrano sings.
Well, the other day I went on service from Steenewerck to Paris--a
journey which lasted seventeen hours. And during the whole of those
seventeen hours although there were always French officers in my
railway carriage or standing in the corridors of the train, the journey
was the most silent of my whole life. No one talked. But no one! There
were colonels, commandants, captains, marine officers, gunner officers.
And I cannot believe that my presence was responsible for this
taciturnity. It is true that in every suitable spot in the train were
inscribed the words: “Be silent; be on your guard”--and the fact that
enemy ears might be listening to you. But it was impossible that _all_
those gentlemen attributed such ears to me. I was wearing the uniform
of my sovereign. And they none of them addressed the others.
No, certainly the voyage lacked incident. I will tell you the
incidents there were: from Hazebrouck to Calais five French officers
did not exchange two words; from Calais to Abbéville thirty who did not
speak. I spoke to an artillery captain, grumbling at the slow progress
of the train. He answered in English:
“Many troops moving!”
Then silence.
At Amiens there entered a civilian. It was on a Saturday towards eight
o’clock in the morning and the train had the air of not wishing to
reach Paris until after three. As I had business in Paris and should
have to leave early on the Monday I asked this gentleman if I should
find the banks shut, and the ministries and shops. He answered that he
did not know. He was not a Parisian. He was going to Jersey to take
possession of the body of a young girl who, having been drowned at
Dieppe, had floated as far as that island.... As if there had not been
enough deaths.
He began crying very unobtrusively.
But he, too, had spoken to me in English!
And then ... silence. The officers regarded the civilian with eyes that
said nothing at all.... I assure you that it was not gay.
At Creil there got in two ladies. They were pretty and very
well-dressed. _They_ talked enough, those two.... Red Cross, charitable
activities, colonels, families. But the officers never looked at them.
Not one raised his eyes although the girls were young, very pretty and
well-dressed!
But, when _we_ had been going up to the Front from Rouen to Albert--and
we were not going on leave like all these silent officers--we sang, we
joked with young women whom we saw on the railway platforms; we kicked
footballs along the corridors of the train; we climbed on the roofs of
the carriages. You would have thought we were going to the Derby.
I naturally exaggerate these differences a little. This is not an
article but a letter. But I am nevertheless telling you what my eyes
have seen and my ears heard. And how is it to be explained?
It is not enough to say--as has been said so often--that if in England,
the Germans had been established between York and Manchester, if they
had seized the factories, pillaged the downs, and indulged in whatever
the Hun Practices may be, we also should be gloomy, sad, taciturn. I
am not talking of the civilian population of my country; I am speaking
of us people out here whose life is not gay, who are expatriated,
far from our homes and who suffer, I assure you, from a very real
nostalgia. For, _là-bas_ ... on the Somme or in Flanders one feels
one’s self very forgotten, very deserted, and very, very isolated
with an isolation like the isolation that is felt by ... Oh, well,
it is as if we were suspended--we, seven million men--on a carpet in
the infinitudes of space. The roads which stretch out before us cease
suddenly at a few furlongs from our faces--in No Man’s Land. And it
is very saddening to contemplate roads which suddenly end. And then
the roads and paths that we have taken to get here--and which lie
between ourselves and our _pays_--the nooks where we were born--are
roads which we may not travel.... And I assure you that, just like any
other men, we love our wives, our houses, our children, our parents,
our ingle-nooks, our fields, our cattle and our dung-heaps. The French
soldier has at least that to his advantage, that he fights at home.
That is something for him, as individual. When he steps out of the
trenches he is at least in the land that bore him.... But we ...
I suppose that it is in order to forget, not only the Hun shells
but also those other things that are dear to us, the chimney corner
beside which we have so often sat chatting, the fields upon which we
have labored, the herds and the woods--it is in search of the herb
oblivion, that we play cricket behind Bécourt wood and go over the top
kicking footballs across No Man’s Land--footballs which pass over the
corpses of the fallen, towards the Huns.... And crying “Stick it, the
Welsh!”--is that weakness? Is it the source from which we draw--such as
they are--what we have of tenacity and courage? I do not know.
Like myself, my dear confrère, you have known the difficulty of
exactly defining the shades of differences that distinguish differing
peoples. We commence by theorizing and we theorize much too soon, or
else we take the opposite view to theories that have been accepted for
centuries. We have had in England the nineteenth century caricaturists
of the French during the Napoleonic wars which showed us the Frenchman
as he was in the British popular imagination. He was a meager, famished
barber who lived exclusively on frogs. And on your side you had your
John Bull, as big as an ox, his belly as big as the belly of an ox, and
devouring whole oxen. And you had the figure of the milord with his
millions, his spleen which drove him to be suicidal. They were stupid,
those caricatures, but it is impossible to allege that they were not
sincere. The English who fought in France in 1815 sought for what they
saw--but they found it. And the same with the French.
The same perhaps with myself. I have always considered the French a
grave people, and when I came from an excited England, covered from
the Isle of Anglesey to the North Foreland with patriotic and colorful
placards and then found, from the Belgian frontier to Paris, a France
quite without colored placards and gray, silent and preoccupied, it
was natural that I should look for grave people and find them. But for
me there was nothing new in finding France preoccupied, because for me
France always was the France of fields, villages, woods and peasants.
And the France of the peasants is a very laborious and pensive place
where men labor incessantly between wood and pond or beneath the olive
trees of the Midi.
For me, on the other hand the population of Great Britain has always
been a town people. Well, it is the inhabitants of great cities who,
work as they may, have need from time to time to go, as our saying
is, on a spree--each according to his nature. And that is perhaps the
reason of the differences that have so struck me, between the French
Army and ourselves. The British Forces are made up preponderatingly
of townsmen, the French army is an army preponderatingly peasant--for
even the famous Parigots are mostly country born and bred. And the
peasantry of all countries, but particularly the French peasant, is
inured to confronting the harshness and the inevitable necessities
of Nature. They meet them without ceasing for weeks, for months, for
years--for their lifetimes. They can never escape from hardships and
the contemplation of the evils of life, the bitter winds, the worms
that devour the buds of whole harvests; their thoughts can never be
diverted by taking a day’s leave, in making puns or by that humor which
is acrid and rather sad and which is yet the sovereign quality of the
British Tommy. For to inscribe on an immense gray shell that is about
to be fired at the Hun lines--to inscribe on that in huge whitewash
letters “Love to Little Willie” may seem stupid and shocking to folk
who were never _là-bas_. But human psychology is very complicated and
it is certain that the reading of such inscriptions on the great shells
by the stacks of which we pass along the highroads of France much
lightens our hearts when we advance from Albert to La Boisselle.
Why? It is difficult to say. It is perhaps because, the shells being
terrible and threatening, here is a shell that has been rendered
ridiculous, a cause for joy--or even merely human. For we are all
anthropomorphic--and that one sole shell can suffer itself to become
the vehicle for humor, that is sufficient to give to superstitious
minds the idea that shells may be a little less superhuman than
they seem. They are the messengers of gods athirst for blood, who
proclaim their gigantic weariness but nevertheless destroy in a minute
dungheaps, whole fields or all the houses of a village. But they have
become a little humanized.
And it is the same for our game of cricket which we played behind
Bécourt Wood amongst the giant thistles, hidden in thick dust and
concealing in turn the bodies of so many of our dead. But I assure
you, my dear comrade, that landscape--of Bécourt, Fricourt, Mametz,
Martinpuich and the rest--was not gay. It was July and the sun let down
its rays upon those broad valleys, upon the dust and the smoke that
mounted to the heavens and upon the black and naked woods. And it did
not smile, that territory. No; Nature herself there seemed terrible and
threatening--in that domain where Destiny who is blind and implacable,
must manifest herself to several million human souls.... And then
we played cricket there--and, all of a sudden that threatening and
superhuman landscape became ... just a cricket field.
For an Intellectual a field will be always just a field whether there
descend upon it shells, thunderbolts--or merely tennis balls. But for
us a countryside where we have played cricket becomes less affrighting
and we shall there pass our days more contentedly in spite of the bones
that there lie hidden amongst the thistles. It is stupid; it is even,
if you will, sacrilege. But that is how we are made--we others who are
not the intelligentsia and who issue forth from the great cities to go
upon bloody wars. I, I have felt like that, down there, behind Bécourt
Wood of a July evening during the Somme push in 1916.
And I remain always yours affectionately
G.
And I beg you to observe that all the persons who spoke to me between
Steenewerck and Paris used English. That is already something.
And _I_ beg you to observe that when Gringoire is moving his prose
up to its most emotional pitch he employs a ‘Hun’ expression. For
the phrase ‘the herb oblivion’ is merely the literal translation of
the almost hackneyed German expression: “_Das Kraut Vergessenheit_.”
--_Note by the Compiler._
PART TWO
CERTAIN INTERIORS
The old houses of Flanders,
They watch by the high cathedrals;
They overtop the high town halls;
They have eyes, mournful, tolerant and sardonic for the ways of men
In the high, white, tiled gables.
The rain and the night have settled down on Flanders;
It is all wet darkness, you can see nothing.
Then those old eyes, mournful, tolerant and sardonic,
Look at great sudden red lights,
Look upon the shades of the cathedrals,
And the golden rods of the illuminated rain.
And those old eyes,
Very old eyes that have watched the ways of men for generations,
Close for ever.
The high, white shoulders of the gables
Slouch together for a consultation,
Slant drunkenly over in the lea of the flaming cathedrals.
They are no more the old houses of Flanders.
VIII
_“Maisie”_
[It has occurred to the writer--or let us rather say, “the compiler,”
that, as concerns this section of this work, it would be safe to let
Gringoire speak for himself. The paraphernalia of inverted commas
interspersed with indirect speech is apt to be wearisome to a reader.
It is difficult--nay, it might even prove dangerous--to the compiler.
For who shall say what powerful enemies the present writer might not
make by omitting inverted commas and appearing to speak for himself? So
it seems more just to let the rather testy poet speak for himself.
For undoubtedly, when speaking of certain matters, Gringoire was--nay,
he is!--apt to become testy. Let us excuse him by saying that he bore a
good deal of strain during the late war--as was apt to be the position
of any public, or quasi-public man, caught between the attentions of
the cheap press and what he considered to be his duty to the State.
Of course, this section is a rendering. It does not pretend to
record words exactly as Gringoire spoke. It is, rather, a résumé
of conversations of an evening when the writer--or rather the
compiler--was privileged to be housed by Gringoire. It was, by then,
late summer or early autumn.
The Gingerbread Cottage by that date resembled less one of the ruins of
the Flanders front that Gringoire so feelingly describes. For to tell
the truth, that was what it had very nearly resembled at the time of
our Easter visit. When Gringoire had entered it in the early spring,
there had been certainly the wave-marks of inundations and half-inches
of mud on the brick floors. He had come down with his valise contents,
his camp-bed, a knife and fork, a paraffin stove, and a gallon of oil,
determined, as he puts it, to dig himself in in the face of destiny. At
Easter we had seen him a little too early in the process for people who
had not for the last four or five years lived with furniture made of
bully-beef cases or whatever they are called.
But by mid-September, when the greater portion of the following section
was compiled, either Gringoire’s views as to the æsthetic value of
bully-beef chairs and tables had changed as he got further from the
atmosphere of camps, or Mme. Sélysette had softened the asperities of
his nature in the matter of preference of dugouts to drawing rooms--or
else, truly, he was acting up to his ideals. That one hesitates to
believe: for who can believe that any human soul can act up to his
professed ideals--or that the ideals which he professes have any
relation to his motives?
Still, Gringoire was a poet. And the writer remembers remonstrating
with him as to the amount of work he was putting into the Gingerbread
Cottage and the garden. Said the writer: Gringoire should remember that
all this whitewashing, papering, glazing the windows, digging out of
foundations, and fertilizing an abandoned and ill-treated garden would,
in the end, profit only the landlord--who was a very bad landlord, even
as bad landlords go. For, as would be the case with poets, Gringoire
had no lease of any kind....
But Gringoire only looked at the writer with that vague and unseeing
glance that is one of the properties of some poets. And he answered:
though of course it was not an answer: He was not a small hatter, a
market-gardener, a farmer, a tradesman, or any sort of profit-and-loss
person. He was intent simply on making his sanctuary smile a little
in the sunlight and on comforting an old building that had been very
shabbily used by evil sorts of men....
At any rate, they had scrambled together some old and rather attractive
“bits,” a grandfather’s chair or so, carpets for the sitting room,
colored rush mats for the floor of the sleeping apartments. They had
painted and polished with beeswax and turpentine, and there would, as
like as not, be some flowers on the dining table which was of rough
oak--and coffee after a full dinner.
The primitive “note” remained, of course, about the establishment, and
it was hardly the place to which you would have asked for a week-end
a delicate city madam; a Guards’ Major; or a young actress about to
become famous. But on bright days the garden smiles in the sun, and
the Gingerbread Cottage has a colored and--as Gringoire would say--a
_soigné_ aspect. Yes, certainly it appeared to be cared for, poor
battered old thing, as old people sometimes appear to be cared for in
almshouses.
So Gringoire affronts the winter. And, if during that season the wolf
does not get him; or if his patience does not give out--as is the case
with poets; or if the bad landlord does not eject him in order to reap
the profits of his improvements--for he has no lease!--he will continue
his patchings, his experiments with unusual manures, and his attempts
to ameliorate the breed of potatoes. And that is all the writer will
say about him.
For the rest, he speaks for himself, much as he spoke of an evening,
with his mild but occasionally bitter and furious eyes; with his
usually tranquil, but occasionally furiously gesticulating hands. For,
the writer, or rather the compiler, having compared notes with Mme.
Sélysette, who has heard Gringoire’s stories very, very often, the
compiler is satisfied that it is a fair rendering of the poet-warrior’s
conversation. It will be found to be disfigured, even in this, as it
were, censored version, by unfortunate attacks on many persons and
institutions that are usually considered exempt from--or at any rate
dangerous to--assault. But what it contains is not half as violent as
what Gringoire wished the compiler to set down as his opinions. The
compiler, however, has friends who can be grieved; a pocket that can
be affected by the law of libel; a position with reviewers that is his
stock in trade. So Gringoire, who could not write prose but wished
to air his opinions, and the compiler, who wished to air the poet’s
opinions but did not wish to lose friends, money, or position in the
process, agreed upon the autobiographical passages that follow.]
* * * * *
Gringoire speaks:
At some period of the war, I found myself in a certain interior. It was
August--hushed by the presence at the doors of functionaries, elderly,
gray, like bishops, wearing evening dress. And one had the sense that,
standing at ease, on the steps of great portals, opening onto immense
staircases, that one had ascended in stony twilights, past bistre-blue
frescoes. Suisses, in cocked hats with great white gloves and silver
swords, symbolized the military ideals of Ministries, just as, in the
Vatican, obsolete artillerymen, hussars, pikemen, symbolize a vanished
temporal power. For, what would the Suisses do if the Enemy or a
Revolution should chance to pay a call on them?
I presume they would extend enormous, cotton-gloved fingers for
visiting cards, which they would hand to commissionaires in glass
boxes; the cards would be sent by pages, upstairs to the episcopal
butlers, who, after meditating for forty minutes, would warily
convey them, over the soft State carpets, past the decorous but rich,
State-purchased pictures suspended over the blue-gray, State-woven
tapestries, to the high door of polished mahogany. There the
bishop-butlers would pause, with the air of priests listening outside
shrines, with a hand on the engraved, polished, mounted, ormolu
door-handles....
But what, during those sixty-four minutes would be the proceedings of
the lieutenant of Uhlans, with his twenty men behind him; or the leader
of the sans-culottes, communards, syndicalists...? The lances might
be dripping with blood; bread, dripping too, might be decorating the
points of pikes, or paraffin from the oil cans. Probably they would
not wait until the blood or the oil dried on the sarcophagus-tiles of
the Ministerial Salle des Pas Perdus or until the great hotel slowly
and resignedly disappeared in flames with that curious air of weary
acquiescence that buildings have when, having borne for many years with
human follies, wisdoms, or labors, they fall to the ground before human
madness. Probably they would not wait--the Uhlans, the sans-culottes,
or the Pétroleuses. They are an impatient people.
But, of course, the reader will say, in the great courtyard before
the Ministry, are many, many gendarmes, standing about with their
hands behind their backs and slightly protuberant bellies. (Otherwise
they would be _là bas!_) But they have good eyes. They would know a
Lieutenant of Uhlans by his uniform, and they know how to use their
revolvers. And amongst the gendarmes lounge several civilian men of
queer, specialized miens. Their pockets bulge just slightly, in odd
ways, and brushing their legs are the _chiens de bergers Alsaciens_
(it used to be _Allemands_) the large, elegant dogs with brown fur,
like ladies’ sable coats and the intelligent pointed ears.... It is
the business of these apparently civilian agents to know the leaders
of sans-culottes, syndicalists, communards, and _Actions_ this or
that. The pretty, friendly, high-stepping dogs with their sable coats
would be at the sans-culottes’ throats at the merest chirrup of their
masters’ lips, and from the so very slightly bulging pockets light
handcuffs would whip out. The revolvers also would go off....
And, still more, the reader will say, in the little, painted, upright
boxes stand little men with red trousers and blue coats and tricolored
worsted galloons, and long, dull-looking rifles, and very, very
long Rosalies.... They are probably just the very newest recruits
with sad, boyish faces. But they know enough to say the French for
“Halt, who are you?” in Breton accents, and to let off the old, long
guns, and to stick Rosalie, with a grunt, through the entrails of a
Uhlan lieutenant, and to call out the Guard.... And, too, there is a
half-battalion of the 101st Regiment, whose accent reeks of garlic,
olive oil, and the meridional sun, passing along the boulevard before
the tricolor that droops over the porte-cochère....