in sanctuary, how very, very far from the mud of the onion-trench,
bearded, in a dark coat, with a bright spot of a button; with sharp,
apprehending nods coming as quickly as winks and silences as quickly
as either; behind the polished mahogany door with the gilt handle and
the ormolu finger-plates; at a Buhl table, with a glass vase full of
Malmaison carnations, a bronze reproduction of the Winged Victory, and
two great pictures of Norman peasants, the one by Bastien Lepage and
the other by Jean François Millet--sits the Minister whose mere wink to
some one, whose whisper to some one else, whose instruction to another,
whose order--and so on--has brought one from green fields littered
with bully beef-tins, wire, mud-trodden cartridge cases, rat runs--and
the rest of it! He will thank you for past services; tactfully suggest
that it might reinforce some department of the _moral_ of some
department or other of humanity if M. le Capitaine would suspend his
military ardors in order to write so and so and so and so in such and
such an organ or to say this and that in a certain quarter. And one
can also produce not truly a great effect but some, by talking in a
certain way, in the mess of one’s regiment even. Certainly in Quartiers
Généraux ...
He will listen deferentially whilst you voice certain objections: to
write so and so one must have leave--leave in both the English and
the French sense of “permission.” And leaves are difficult things to
obtain. Besides, one does not want leave. For certain reasons!... One
is like that. _L’on est poète_: cranky, unreasonable. An all-powerful
Minister cannot get into the soul of a crank. Not his Seneschals, or
the Suisses, or the Gendarmes, or the Agents, or the Sentinels can
help him to that. _Quand on est poète_ one requires--one requires a
little reëntrant, with water--a little stream, indicated by a wavy
line in blue pencil; copses, indicated by dotted-in round o’s with
tails to them; rushes, indicated by hieroglyphs like the section of a
hairbrush; a gingerbread cottage, for which the symbol is a hatched in
square.--One requires those. And also one requires a temporary respite
from the attentions of one’s friends and of destiny. For that, as far
as I know, military topography has no symbol--unless it be a white
handkerchief on the end of Rosalie.
His Excellency remains polite--deferential even. Still, it could no
doubt be arranged, he will remark. It is important to get certain
things said.... And who could say it better than ...
For myself--on the occasion which I am adumbrating, I was thinking
of ferrets. So that, by a concentration of ideas, at a given point
I once said to such a Minister: Of course there is the First Line
Transport.... And, in my mind’s eye, against the gilt frame of the
immense Bastien Lepage--or it may have been on this occasion a Marie
Bashkirtseff--arose the image of a Connaught Hut, with the rain beating
on the roof and the autumn wind reaching the flames of candles stuck
in bottles and bearing in the odor of stable hartshorn from the long
horse standings. And the Welsh Rabbit made of cheese, onions, Flemish
beer, and herrings straight from Bailleul--though God knows when they
came from the autumnal sea. And hooch. And several obese, tranquil,
entirely capable officers with feet for the moment in carpet slippers.
And the table utensils borrowed from the Y.M.C.A. pushed aside on a
corner of the trestle table; and a cheap pad of letter paper, a copying
ink pencil, and the mind of the poet functioning in the flicker of
the guttering candles at the dictates of the Minister seated beneath
the Jean François Millet picture at the Buhl table with the Malmaison
carnations in a smoked glass vase and the miniature reproduction of
the Winged Victory in bronze with a delicate, artificially produced
patina. And the lower part of the poet is wedged into a bully-beef
case that has had one side taken out and that has been wire-nailed
into an egg-box to form an armchair. And, in the dim gloom, at one
elbow stands a dripping Divisional runner with a buff memo from
ordnance to say that Mills Bombs for the ---- Battalion are on the
Scherpenberg and must be taken down to Kemmel Château by four ack
emma; and at the other elbow stands a Divisional Orderly with a
copy of orders on which in red ink is marked the information that
Division will move down the line by the road by Dranoutre--Neuve
Eglise--Westoutre-Plugstreet--Pont-de-Nieppe--Armentières. In full
sight of the Hun trenches, by God!--beginning with one’s own battalion,
of which A. Company will march from such and such a spot at 5:30 to be
followed by D, C, and B boys at half-hour intervals. And to be shelled
to Hell!
And the transport officer, whose business it is to manage these
matters, is away for thirty-six hours to arrange for a Divisional
Horse Show in the field behind the Convent! And your poet is A. O. I.
C. (Acting Officer in Charge of) Transport, and Billeting officer for
the Battalion and O. I. C. (Officer in Charge of) Divisional Canteen
and God knows what all. And Officer in Charge of _moral_ of a certain
section of humanity to whom it would be a good thing if certain things
would be said in polished prose! And when the poet springing up
exclaims to the night:
“To H---- with the b----y Mills Bombs and the bumph and the b----rs and
all the whole execrable show,” the Battalion Orderly, a fair, cheeky
boy who knows one, exclaims:
“Ker wooly woo, sir, say la Gair!”
And indeed, the interiors of _la guerre_ were much like that. But how
is His Excellency the Minister of this or that department to know what
is passing in your mind? He will just write on a note pad, look up,
exclaim, “Que dîtes-vous? First Line?... But is it tranquil, that?”[6]
I don’t know what I answered. I believe I must have screamed with
laughter--because I really wanted some ferrets very badly, and because,
in the vestibule of an immense hotel I had left my publisher in
charge of a little girl with dark curls tied with pale blue ribbons,
singularly self-possessed manners, and rather prominent underclothing
that appeared to be an inverted bouquet of lace. That is to say I had
left my publisher--who is deaf--with the little girl. And I was in
charge of the little girl, who, just before my having to hurry to the
Ministry, had devoured thirteen oysters, half a cantaloupe melon with a
quarter of a pound of sugar, and a _Coupe Jacques_. So I was, really,
wondering what Maisie would be like when I returned to the Hotel de
l’Opéra. It sounds mad--but it is just the true truth.
I know that, at that stage, I did not please His Excellency. He frowned
twice. Once when I laughed because he asked if a Connaught hut at the
base of the Salient was a tranquil place in which to write poems. He
also frowned when--as I have, I know, elsewhere related, but I do not
know where--he having asked me, “_En quoi il me pouvait être utile?_” I
answered, “_Si Votre Excellence me pourrait trouver des furets!_”
You see, I had been carefully instructed by friends with one eye to my
commercial future. The Minister was sure to ask in what way he could
be of service to me. I was to reply--to hint ever so delicately--that
if I had a ribbon to stick on my coat, writing poems, even in a
Connaught hut, would be easy. But I couldn’t do it. Even if I had not
been concerned with ferrets that I couldn’t get and with Maisie, who
had been far too easy to come by, I couldn’t have done it. I had been
instructed that the ribbon awaited me; I had only to stretch out a hand
to become an Officer of Something or Other. I don’t know whether I ever
have. I suppose not.
Anyhow, His Excellency frowned when I asked for ferrets. He might have
been more sympathetic if I had asked him to take off my hands a little
girl of eight, with the American manners appropriate to the age of
thirteen, who, half an hour before had eaten thirteen oysters, half
a melon, and a quarter of a pound of sugar that had come from Geneva
in her _malles_, and a _Coupe Jacques_; who had been kidnapped by the
lake in a carriage and pair, the night before, or perhaps two nights
before; and whose father, the kidnapper, had left her in my charge just
after breakfast and had then disappeared. There was also a very French
maid--in hysterics. And I didn’t even know their names.
Yes; H. E. might have been more sympathetic if I had mentioned the
child alone in the vestibule--or possibly with the publisher. But at
the mention of the ferrets, he became positively glacial: “_Quoi_,” he
asked. “What is a ferret?”
I said that _ferrets sont des petits animaux qui mangent les rats_. But
his face remained like a dead wall. I _know_ he thought I was drunk.
I was so certain of it, then, that I stammered, and the interview
dissolved in the embarrassed emotions passing from him to me and from
me to him. He touched a button and said he would telephone to the
Jardin des Plantes. But I don’t suppose he did.
You see: it was almost a drop too much in my cup--to be plunged
straight into “What Maisie Knew,” which is a book by Henry James. It
was too much bewilderment.... Supposing the--as I understood--too
brilliant and vociferous mother who was understood to like a “violinist
fellow”, should be bursting, with wide gestures, through the aperture
frailly closed by glass hotel-doors that whirled bewilderingly whilst I
was at the Ministry.... And it might, I understood, well be like that.
How the incident ended, however, I cannot say, since, upon my return to
the hotel, the child and her companion had disappeared. That is to say,
they had left in the hotel bus for the _Gare du Nord_. So I hope they
got safely to England. I never heard: and, since I have forgotten even
the names, I suppose I never shall.
It was, no doubt, the sort of thing that was happening all over the
world just as usual, but it was queer--and intensely worrying--to
be brought so violently and so much against one’s poor will into an
atmosphere of international passions, excursions, lawsuits for the
possession of children, and the like. And anyhow, the worry of it
probably spoilt my career; which was no doubt a good thing. Anyhow,
I hope that Maisie, in the custody of kind old aunts, somewhere in
Sussex, is prattling to a benevolent but bewildered butler about Mamma,
who went to heaven by the cog-wheel railway, via Montreux. Or I suppose
it would be better for her if she had forgotten Mamma.
Yes: I suppose it was all going on. And I rather fancy I found the
going-on-ness of it all a little appalling. Paris, indeed, was so much
more just Paris out of the season, than London, in those days, appeared
to be London, either during or out of the season. It was in a way
touching; it was also, in a way, disheartening. I remember--and I say
“I remember” advisedly, since such an immense number of things blotted
themselves out and only crop up in suddenly vivid pictures like that of
Maisie whom I had completely forgotten until the day before yesterday,
and who now again exists extraordinarily brightly in the hotel
vestibule saying: “_Ils me disent que Maman est partie pour le ciel._
It is very droll. But what tram do I take _pour le ciel?_” I remember,
then, being on a balcony with an immense stone balustrade, in the black
night with a number of French officers who were all polite--but cold.
It was, certainly, during the _entr’acte_ of Délibes’ _Lakme_. I fancy
the theater was the Comédie Française, but I don’t know, because I
had been taken there by a staff officer, and in those days in France
one was moved about so without volition of one’s own that one didn’t,
necessarily, much notice where one went or how one got there. Where it
was a duty to notice, one noticed--railway stations in their sequence,
streams, contours. But it was rather a toss-up whether anything more
than little bits, like etchings or vignettes, got through to one’s
private psychology. I take this to have been the case with most men in
our army. We were, as soldiers, both naïf and engrossed.
With the French, it was different. They appeared to be so much older,
in their work as in their leisures. They seemed to go to war, as they
went to _Lakme_, so much more as connoisseurs. So, on that balcony,
I had the feeling of a very definite frigidity. I could have talked
rather floridly about _les gloires de la France_, the ultimate aims of
the war. I doubt if the French officers could. They had exhausted the
topic during forty menaced years.
So they talked, as it happens, mostly of the fine work that had
been done by their territorials--old men, fathers of families, and
grandfathers who were patching away at the trenches, making roads
under fire, laboriously laboring amidst great dangers and beyond their
strength that the years had sapped.
The balcony of the theater was a cube of blackness; down below there
appeared to be an old, small, square market-place. Paris, of course,
was in darkness, out of deference to Zeppelins and airplanes, so
that it was all a heavy, velvety black beneath a pallid sky. Houses,
squares, rose up on three sides; the immense black bulk of the theater
seemed to press on one’s back as one is pressed upon, on narrow paths,
by the walls of precipices in the night. One had a sense that the
inside of this building was flooded with translucent rays, in which,
over the light parquet of long floors, in the _salons de réception_,
men moved quietly, with slightly outstretched hands emphasizing points
in their discourse to the women on their arms. Theaters function with a
sense of style in Paris. But the old, tall houses round the market gave
the idea that they were solidly black throughout; only in the old empty
rooms, over the creaking floors, mice would rustle in the pallid gleams
from the old windows.
I do not mean to say that the houses were really like that inside:
for houses are queer things, and queerer still when they grow old,
with malices, obstinacies, benevolences of their own. And, as is the
case with men, their physiognomies are misleading. So, though one had
the sense that below there was a market-place with carts and tilted
hoods awaiting the day and that the houses were old and empty, it may
have been all untrue to fact, though it is likely enough in Paris
where there are so many old, moldering, and damp-streaked façades and
courtyards.
I wonder if most people have as strongly as I the feeling that houses
have, not so much immortal souls, as tempers, queernesses, and the
power to be malicious or benevolent. I daresay most people have that
sense up to a point, for it is common enough to walk with a friend,
more particularly at dawn, where there are few human beings about to
detract from the spell, past, say, a terrace of houses not all alike.
A blind will be up; another and another, half drawn down; four or
five others, all green, will be at various heights behind the closed
window-glasses. And your friend will say:
“That house appears to be winking; that other is gnashing green
teeth!” So that your friend will be attributing faces at least to the
houses. No doubt he will also connote individualities.
The effect of the coming of the war, for me, was to enhance the feeling
until it became almost an obsession. Just as trees and fields appeared
to dread the contamination of alien presences, so with buildings. Only
with buildings--and more particularly with houses--the feeling was very
much enhanced. They seemed to dread not only contaminations, but pains,
violations, physical shames, and dissolution in fire.
I do not mean that this feeling was new to me or came with the
coming of the war. On the contrary, it was a feeling familiar enough
in France. Long before the war it was difficult to go to Northern
France--and it was impossible to visit Paris--without seeing, or having
the attention drawn to, buildings that have been struck by shells, that
have solid cannon balls embedded in their walls, to façades riddled by
musketry or charred by one incendiarism or another. In Paris, there
were mostly relics of 1870–71; elsewhere the solid cannon balls, as
like as not, were once our own. But somehow that seemed normal: those
were the danger zones of a race. If members of a civilized people, like
the French, choose to occupy marches--zones set against barbarians,
like ourselves and the Huns--the buildings they set up in those regions
must suffer. They must suffer as children do who are taken into perils
aboard ship; or like dogs whose masters adventure with them into fields
of fire.
It was, therefore, in the southern and central regions of France
that, before the war, I had most strangely the feeling--that feeling
of affrighted buildings. It came to me one day in a broad French
landscape, somewhere, I imagine, just south of Lyons. Perhaps it was
in Orange--or possibly in Tarascon. At any rate, it was just after the
close of the Agadir “incident”.
I don’t know that I had taken the Agadir incident very seriously. In
fact, I hadn’t taken it seriously at all. The Prime Minister of today
had made at the Guildhall a speech that one regarded as one regarded
any other flamboyant speech--and that was the end of it. I never
imagined that we should do our duty to civilization if it came to the
point. I never imagined, indeed, that France herself would stand up.
We came, at that date, of a generation that lived in the shadow of the
ghosts of Bismarck, Moltke, and William I--in the shadow of memories
of the siege of Paris. Prussia appeared no doubt detestable--but she
was so omnipotent that we hardly cared to think about her even for the
purpose of detesting her. Will you remember, oh Gringoire _fils_ that
shall be?
Probably Gringoire _fils_ will not remember: that is why I find it
necessary to recapitulate at this point. Prussia, then, was there,
like something ominous but irremovable. One might say that the world,
like some stout old garment, was a good world--but it had upon it a
grease-stain that neither petrol nor spirits would eradicate; just
as you might say that your postal service or train system were good,
ignoring the fact that officials were brutal in manner; or that your
God was a good God, although He insisted on being fed with babies
roasted alive. Something like that.
On the day after Agadir, then, I had come through Lorraine--the two
Lorraines, of which one was bubbling like a pot with men all in gray,
the other pullulating like an over-ripe cheese with men all in blue,
with baggy, scarlet breeches. One had been lost in an immense, pushing,
silent crowd at the _Gare de l’Ouest_--an immense, silent, rather
grim crowd in blue, with worsted adornments, long rifles slung over
the backs, untidy haversacks. At the bureaux of the station were
innumerable women. They gesticulated, waved to unseen units in that
tired crowd; they cried out; they wept for joy.
But that produced no particular effect. The French are an
impressionable and a noisy people. So the women called out. The silent
soldiery were no doubt tired after the autumn manoeuvres. That was
perhaps why they were so grim.
But somewhere, just after that, in some view near a Southern or Central
town--as I have said, it may have been Lyons or Orange; no town that
particularly mattered, near the Loire, perhaps, or the Rhone--amidst
rolling country where the harvest was already in and there were
stubble fields and new straw thatching--suddenly, out of all those
hundreds of thousands of soldiery, I remembered one. He was a little
recruit--“joining up” as we learned to say later. He was shoved into
a first-class carriage somewhere near Meaux because the train was so
full, and there, in a corner seat, with the blue-gray landscape going
past, he sat, as if lifeless, the tears dropping down his cheeks. His
rifle, haversack, packages, tin cans, slings, and things of which,
then, one didn’t recognize the importance, had been thrown in after
him by a guard, and, in among them, he sat desolate.
In the carriage there had been besides myself two old French people--an
old gentleman with a white Napoleon, and an old, feeble lady, in
a rather queer black bonnet. I have an idea that they were French
Protestants. There were also other people: but they formed only a
chorus.
For the old man, in kindly, but very thin tones, began to talk to the
little recruit, the old lady echoing each of his speeches:
“The beds for a poor little recruit are hard?”--“The beds are
hard!”--“The haricot soup is thin?”--“Ah, yes, a very watery
potage.”--“Ah! Ah! Yes,” said the listeners.--“The marchings are
long; the drills difficult; the rifles heavy.”--“Yes: heavy are the
rifles!”--“Ah! Ah! Yes ...”--“And the little recruit is away from
home for three long years!”--“Yes, three years!”--“Ah! Ah! Ah! Three
so very long years!”--“The little recruit comes from the Midi--the
South!”--“The Midi! The South!”--“Ah! Ah! The South with sun and
cypress hedges and the _champs d’oliviers_ and the Mistral.”--“From
Orange! From quite near Orange ... Ah! Ah! Orange ...” And there he
was, going to Lille.... In the northwest: over against the frontier....
Being then “quite near Orange” a few days later--yes, it was
Orange!--and looking out from the heights of the Roman Theater over the
little town and the flat, commonplace country, I remembered suddenly
the little recruit. I think that is how the mind really works, linking
life together, for, later I shall tell you how, on the balcony of the
Comédie Française, I remembered suddenly Private ----, an old, nearly
toothless Tommy of a Kitchener’s battalion of the Lincolnshires in the
baths which had been established in the old mill at Albert--and also
Lt. Morgan of my own regiment, an officer who had spent a very hard
life in Canada, and who was killed walking up a communication trench on
his first day in the line.
So, at Orange, before the war, I remembered suddenly the little recruit
in his blue, with his worsted adornments, sitting like a statue of
utter grief whilst the green-gray country, of northwest France, swept
past behind him. The country over which his image suddenly superimposed
itself was browner; in flat fields, the queer twigs of the vineyards
appeared untidy. I fancy the Alps were in the distance. But there were
stacks and roofs. And, it was, for me, just country. That is to say,
I attached to that countryside no particular legends, traditions, or
fables of story. It might be Provence--or it might not. But when I saw,
as it were, through the image of the recruit, the stacks, the roofs,
of the little farm buildings or of the little town, it seemed to me
that they were all crouching down, motionless, but ready to tremble, as
partridges crouch amid the stubble when beaten away over the ridge.
I don’t want unduly to labor the point--but I am not yet certain that
I have made it. You see, that queer and sinister feeling came to me
just because of that carriageful of French people. It was not so much
because the little recruit had wept. I daresay that, as a conscript,
he was bad material. But it was because the old gentleman and all the
others in the carriage had known the hard beds, the thin soups, the
heavy rifles, and the drag of the pack-straps on the shoulders ... and
the long absences from the little homes that seemed now to cower among
the stubble fields. For there was no house in all that landscape whose
women hadn’t known the suspense of absences; there was no stack whose
builder hadn’t at one time gone, or come back. And there was not one,
of all those objects, that did not dread--that, for forty long years
had not dreaded--the hard footsteps, the shames, the violations, or the
incendiary fires of conquerors who should come from “beyond Lille on
the frontier”.
And it was at that moment that, suddenly, it became a conscious
proposition in my mind--definite and formulated--that, first and before
everything else, we must have in the world assured nooks and houses
that never cowered and trembled--houses of which one could never by any
possibility think that they would cower and tremble.
That, of course, is militarism. I am sorry that it has crept in.
[Footnotes]
[6] For the benefit of those curious in these matters, I ask our
compiler to print in the Envoi some prose in my own original French.
It will serve for a curiosity. It appeared in a Swiss Review during
the war and was part of somewhat considerable, and generally agitated,
labors. Some poems which I wrote in almost exactly the circumstances
given above, for recitation to French troops, have been lost either
by our own or the French ministry of propaganda. An article about
Alsace-Lorraine was “lost in the post”; another, repeating it, was
suppressed by our own Ministry of Information as being too favorable to
the claims of one of our Allies. It is, of course, difficult to be a
poet in times of war.
IX
_The Water Mill_