During one of the innumerable periods of long waiting that seemed
inseparable from our advances whether on the Somme or elsewhere, it
occurred to me that that would be a good opportunity to see what books
really would bear reading--would, that is to say, stand up against the
facts of a life that was engrossing and perilous. I wrote, therefore,
on the spur of the moment, a postcard, to a bookseller, since I had no
friends on whose generosity I cared to trespass. I asked him to send
me: Turgeniev’s “Fathers and Children”, Flaubert’s “Trois Contes”,
Mallarmé’s “Après-Midi d’un Faune”, Anatole France’s “Histoire
Comique”, or “Thaïs”, “Youth”, by Joseph Conrad, “What Maisie Knew”,
by Henry James, and “Nature in Downland”, by W. H. Hudson. I received
them all except the last, which was out of print, and I found that I
could read them all with great engrossment except the book, whichever
it was, by Anatole France. That one was so frail and tenuous in its
appeal that it failed to hold my attention at all, and I have forgotten
its name.--I hasten to add that I regarded M. France at that date as a
Pro-German, so my impatience may not have been altogether because of
its literary qualities.
It was whilst I was reading “What Maisie Knew” that I got leave to go
with another officer and have a bath in Albert. So I took the volume
under my arm. It wasn’t really a coincidence--that I should be reading
that book. I suppose it wasn’t really a coincidence that I should meet
Maisie in the flesh.
For, if one was to meet Maisie anywhere, it would be precisely in the
white vestibule of a Paris hotel--and, if any one was to be confided
in by one or other of her distracted parents, the episode being
international, and the parent in possession British, the person to be
confided in _would_ be one in the uniform of His Britannic Majesty,
and of substantial appearance. “What Maisie Knew,” again, happened to
be the first book by the late Mr. James that I ever read--and, if it
hadn’t happened to be the first, it would still have remained--and it
does still remain for me--the book by that very great writer that most
“matters”. For your benefit, if you “don’t know your James,” I may as
well say that this is the story of a child moving amongst elemental
passions that are veiled. But, of course, elemental passions can never
be veiled enough not to get through to the consciousness, if not to
the intelligence of the child in the house. So, in an atmosphere of
intrigues, divorces, prides, jealousies, litigations, conducted as
these things are conducted in this country, by what it is convenient
to call “the best people”, Maisie always “knows”. She knows all about
concealed relationships, as she knows all about intrigues, processes,
and the points of view of old family servants. It is, of course, a
horrible book, but it is very triumphantly true....
The Tommies’ bathing place at Albert was in an old mill under the
shadow of a tall factory chimney at which the Huns were perpetually
firing shells. As far as I know, they never hit it--but they made
a nice desolation in the immediately adjacent houses. The mill,
at the fork of a road, had been turned into a series of sheds and
compartments, in which there were shower baths and baths with hot and
cold water in very wet cubicles where you had duckboards underfoot.
There were Neissen or other boilers somewhere under the ramshackle
building, so that steam always filtered through and hung over the old
tiles of the roof. The other ranks of various battalions had their
bathing parades there at stated hours, so that officers could only get
a bath in between whiles or after hours.
It was a hot day, very dusty, with the clouds from the white rubble,
which was all that there was of the center of the town, and after we
had wandered, I and another officer, round about the rubbish heaps, and
past long-closed shops that offered us, on metal placards, bicycles,
chocolates, and furniture polish, by makers well-known in France, we
decided to wait in the bath itself till the battalion in possession,
which was the last of the day, should have finished its ablutions. In
a tiny, shuttered shop we had bought, for A Company’s mess, a small
melon, five lemons, and half a bushel of windfall apples. The shop
was just to the east of the Cathedral, and we went over the empty
Presbytery. One of the floors was a great litter of books--Latin
texts mostly. One I noticed was a 17th century edition of Livy--1652,
I think. Another was a copy of Voragine’s recension of the “Golden
Legend”--but whether or no it was a valuable edition, I don’t know. We
left the books on the floor--out of indifference, so as not to commit
sacrilege and because we had already to carry a small, netted melon,
six lemons, and half a bushel of apples between us. Under my arm,
moreover, I had “What Maisie Knew” in the expensive, collected edition,
and we had also towels and soap. So there, in the long, dark, but not
cool room, just as they had been tumbled out of the shelves, probably
by the Germans, the books lay with rays of sunlight from the closed
_persiennes_ falling across broken backs, exposed leaves, half-turned
title-pages....
Whilst we were passing under the immense Madonna and Child that hung
over the Cathedral steps, a Hun plane dropped a couple of bombs right
into the body of the church. They made pretty loud pops, and overhead
our own Archies were popping away too. But what was really interesting
to hear was the sifting tinkle of broken stained-glass of the windows
that went on rustling, tinkling, sifting, and rustling down into the
rubble in the body of the church until we were out of earshot.
I don’t mean to say that we hurried away. There was nowhere to hurry
to. But the German heavy battery that had the town under its especial
care was beginning to send in its evening group of shells. As far as I
can remember, at that time they let off six 5–2’s at about 10:15 A.M.;
six at 1:15 P.M., and six more just after 6:00 P.M. with an apparently
unimaginative regularity, and usually at the same localities--the
morning six falling about the desolated Place in front of the church,
the lunchtime contribution in the houses along the main street. Our
Second Battalion had thirty-two casualties in one room from one shell
of the midday group. The evening six usually fell in the fields on the
Ancre side of the town.
So we desired to get under a roof--not that a roof is any particular
protection against high-explosive shells, but simply to get something
between one’s self and the sky. For at times, of an evening, when one
was tired, a pellucid sky would be a disagreeable thing. You didn’t
know what sort of iron shard would not be coming between the light bars
of blue and the bars of light dove color. Your flesh, too, felt very
soft to set itself up against iron shards. And, at the moment, we were
tired with the walk over the thistles of the downland and the thin air
and the heat and the chalk dust. And one wanted a read in one’s book!
The by-streets were amazingly quiet; closed houses, shuttered
shops, mostly unhurt; not a soul was in the blazing sunlight; not a
cloud was in the sky; only, in the dust of the road three cats were
motionlessly intent on love. We knocked on a closed door of the old
mill. I found myself, having passed several darkish, steaming rooms
in which the white nudity of many men showed against the blue-gray
of flannel shirts, and the drab colors of steam-damped khaki in the
shadow--I found myself in an armchair, in a very tall, quiet room.
I had a sense that there was a tall, slim bookcase, a great table
covered with dirty copies of English funny periodicals, and empty,
cardboard fag-packets.... But I was sitting, really, in Kensington
Gardens in the broad, open turfed way that slopes from the Round Point
to the Serpentine. And there was a murmuring couple, by a tree trunk,
upon green penny chairs. (I don’t know that I wasn’t one-half of the
couple.) And Maisie was playing with Mrs. Wicks, three trees off, and
Beale Farange, a little too florid, flaming and bearded, to be really
one of the best people, was bearing down upon them--or was it us?--in
the shadow of the well-behaved foliage under the polite skies.
I was vaguely conscious of voices. My companion was talking to some one
else--about some battalion of some regiment; about some division, not
ours; about the nature of the trenches in front of _Bazentin-le-Petit_.
But, at any rate, for the moment, the fictitious-real had got so
much the upper hand of the real-real that I was as engrossed as any
schoolboy reading Ivanhoe in the twilight. It is a good tribute to pay
the master. He was dying then.
But I was vaguely unhappy too--unhappy about it all. I don’t mean that
I was unhappy with the ire of the moralist--for I never set up to be a
moralist. Only I felt the queer uneasiness that, in those days, one was
beginning to feel when one came in contact with civilians.
One began to hear hollow voices, sounding portentous through closed
shutters.
“Fall in there! A Company on the right. Towels on the left arm.
Number off!”--voices coming from the roadway. And one looked up from
one’s book, thinking the time had come for one’s bath. There existed
again the tall room, with grayish wallpaper; the atmosphere of
steam; the tall window; the tall bookcase, whose panes, behind thin,
curved mahogany divisions showed a faded, stretched curtain of torn
green silk. The table was less littered than it had been. It had a
dusty, red baize cover, much stained with ink. I suppose this was the
miller’s office. I don’t know what had become of my companion. He was a
restless, energetic boy, always on the jump. Whilst I had been in the
broad avenue in Kensington, he had probably pressed until they had got
him a bath-cubicle cleaned and ready. At any rate, a very old Tommy of
the Lincolns, toothless, whitehaired, with tunic undone and tarnished
buttons, told me I must still wait whilst my bath was preparing.
He said I was mistaken in thinking that he was a noncombatant
permanently in charge of the baths. He was just a Tommy of the
Lincolns; he had come straight out of the trenches in front of
_Bazentin-le-Petit_ the night before. Five days before that they had
relieved us in the same trenches. Now another division had gone in.
He had been put in charge of the baths that morning, so he hadn’t had
time to clean his buttons, or even his rifle. He supposed he might get
_strafed_ for that. Yes; it was trying, the life of the trenches for a
man of his age. He was sixty-two--sixty-four--over sixty, at any rate.
I told him to stand easy, and he sat down on the other side of the
large table and reached for an old pipe. Then he folded his wrinkled
hands before him on the cloth, looked at me hopefully, and exclaimed:
“I suppose you know the firm of Bolsover & Jupp of Golden Square. The
great solicitors.”
I did not know them; but when I said I did not, he appeared so
distressed: “What? Not the great solicitors? To the Mansion House, the
Common Council, the Tilbury and Southend Railway!”--so distressed that
I had to pretend at last that I did.
“Well!” he said. “I was clerk in their office for twenty-four years!”
Twenty----four----years! He seemed to think that the statement entitled
him to feel an enormous pride. No doubt it did.
He must have had a streak of the adventurous in his composition--but
no one could have seemed less adventurous or more static. As he sat
there, his hands, whitened by dabbling all that day in bath water, and
folded before him on the dirty red baize, he looked as if he had sat
there all his life and as if he would never move. He was so faded that
you would not have given him credit even for the amount of sharpness
necessary to a solicitor’s clerk; you would have said that he was an
aged shepherd on a bench outside the workhouse door. I think he was the
most memorable figure of the war, for me.
Of course, one’s mind is capricious in these things--but this was
his biography, of which I have forgotten nothing--though I have, of
course, forgotten most of his exact words. For twenty-four years clerk
to Messrs. Bolsover & Jupp, this man who now was mostly preoccupied
with the fact that he would be “_strafed_” for not “cleanin’ ’is
’ipe ... I mean rifle, sir!” had gone at the age of forty-eight--to
Canada, to make his fortune, nothing less! He had left two sons,
both married, in London. He and his “missus” worked in a factory--a
“notions” factory, which was then engaged in adding to the beauty of
the world by manufacturing colored and embossed tin-lids; later it made
fancy brass buttons and can-openers. “_Et comme il était très fort,
hardi, courageux et avisé_”--he soon obtained, not like St. Julian the
Hospitalier, the command of a battalion--but a wage sufficient to let
him save money. They saved money, he and his missus, and after eight
years, they built themselves a frame house--“a proper, warm ’aouse for
them frosty winters and we had one of those ’ere proper iron stoves.
Proper!”
On the first morning of the new house--I presume his missus had lit
the proper stove--he was jest a-puttin’ on his collar, when he heard a
crackling. He thought it was the frost in the apple trees, cracking the
boughs. But, in forty minutes the house was gone.
He had meant to insure that afternoon. So he and his missus--he never
described her, but I think she must have been a gallant soul--aged
fifty-six a-piece, went back to boarding-house life and work in the
“notion” factory. Next autumn, coming back from work one evening, he
noticed in a neighbor’s lot, a fine apple tree. Proper, with apples on
it, these ’ere large coddlins! He offered the neighbor two dollars for
the apples on the tree and peddled them round the town.
In five years, at that trade, he had made enough to think of
“retiring”. Then he see in the pipers that Hengland needed men. So he
ses to his missus: “We’ve got money enough to do as we please. Let’s go
and see what we can do to ’elp the ol’ gal....” As if Victoria had been
still on the throne. They came to London, and he went to see the ol’
firm. His sons said to him: No, they were married men with families.
“So I says to the missus: ‘I ain’t got no family, I ain’t.’” And he
bought her an ’aouse at ’Endon and an annuity, through the ol’ firm.
That had taken till February, 1916. He was apologetic over the delay,
but he had wanted to see the ol’ woman settled comfortable.
February, 1916--it was then July. Thirteen weeks training, you see, and
he had been two months in France, “mostly on this ’ere ol’ Somme.” He
was sixty-one years and four months of age. And he said he felt tired.
There was about his narration nothing of the “narquois” humor of the
cockney; but, colorlessly, as tired farm-laborers talk, he went on
talking--as if it was just the Will of God. I met some of his officers
a couple of weeks later and asked about him, but his story grew rather
hazy. They found a Company Sergeant-Major who said he had thought the
old man was a bit too old for his job in the trenches. I daresay the
old man had found rough gentlenesses and kindly helping hands from
his mate and the noncommissioned officers of his battalion. He would
have, of course. So the C.S.M. had detailed him for caretaker at the
baths. The old man had enlisted as being thirty years and six months
of age--just half his years. The C.S.M. remembered that; but he didn’t
know what had become of the man. He rather thought he had been killed
on the 24/7/’16 by a shell pitched in the battle, but perhaps he hadn’t.
It was mostly his tired voice and his colorless narration that had
impressed me with him. I didn’t think much about--I did not even
realize--the rather stupendous Odyssey of a life he must have had until
I stood on that balcony of the Paris theater, in the night, with the
French officers. You see, it was anyhow such a tremendous Odyssey for
every one there that a little more or less at the moment did not jump
to the eye as mattering. But, underneath, in the subconscious mind, it
mattered.
I daresay--nay, I am sure--that it was that quality that mattered to
me more than anything else of the whole cause for thought that the war
gave one. For me--apart from Lord Kitchener and Sir Edward Grey--there
were few great figures of those years. Sir Edward Grey went out of
course once war was declared: then Kitchener went. There remained this
Tommy of the Lincolns and I think Lt. Morgan of my own battalion was
then still alive. Henri Gaudier was certainly dead--and he, in my
mind, was united to the Lincolnshire Private and Morgan. They had, all
three, a certain serenity.
I wish I could remember Morgan’s initials. He had a brother, “I. H.”--a
nice boy. I hope he is still alive.
But the Morgan who is dead sounded, as it were, exactly the same note
as the Lincolnshire man--the note of tired but continuous laboring
after a very hard life. You know the sort of effect a violin has when
its strings are muted. It was like that.
I think Morgan must have had his last leave at the same time as
myself when I went out the second time; but I don’t think we went
out together. At any rate, we took together a very long railway
journey--but I don’t remember why or where--probably because I spent it
listening to the story of his life. I remember his tired movements as
he took his knapsack down from the rack whilst the train was running
into some terminus. And I remember it seemed to me to be a shame--on
the part of destiny--that he should be going out at all. I met him next
night in Coventry Street--and he did not seem to be getting much out of
Coventry Street after dark. We stood talking for a minute, and then he
disappeared among the prostitutes and the flash Jews. I expect we each
said: “Good luck, old man,” for I believe he liked me, and I must have
liked him very much.
He was killed, as I have said, by a _minenwerfer_ as he was going up a
communication-trench on his first night. He was buried so that, in the
morning when they found him, only his feet and legs were showing. He
was probably not buried alive, because the officer who found him said
that he was smiling. I like to think of that.
Because these were the men who needed--who _must_ have had if indeed
there be a just God or even merely a deity who gives compensations--a
period of sanctuary after their very hard labors. It doesn’t matter
about you and me....
But poor old Morgan ... I don’t know what age he was. I daresay he
was no more than thirty-two, little and brown and persistent--his
face was thin, aquiline, and as if hardened and sand-blasted by the
perpetual confrontation of winds full of hail. For he too had gone out
to Canada--but as a boy, apparently without much capital, to work for
wheat-farmers.
I suppose most people know something about working for Canadian
farmers--the long solitudes, the distance of the towns, the protracted
buggy rides over immense plains. Well, I seem to have an extraordinary
sense of it--just from the way Morgan talked on that long train
journey. I don’t know that I remember incidents. Perhaps I could. I
remember that, knowing little about horses at the beginning, he was
asked by the boss if he would take a helluva vicious team to the
nearest township to fetch something, a plow, I think. And he had done
it.
But the main of the story was just the long strain--long hours merging
into long years, with the muscles always a little overstrained. Not
much, but a little. Because, though gallant, persistent, and showing
it as the Welsh do, he was small for wrestling with tree trunks and
immense plains. I remember his saying that when he had dug holes for
the posts of wire fencing, he poured water in so that the posts should
freeze solid in their places.
Well, he too must have been “_hardi, courageux, et avisé_”--leading
a long, uncolored life of sober chastity, without many visits to the
townships even, let alone the towns. For, as he sat in the carriage, he
said that he owned property--timber lots and other lots, bought out of
the savings of a laborer.
And he spoke of going back there, _après la guerre finie_--with the
serene resignation of a man with no other imaginable destiny before
him. It was to be more toil and more toil and more toil. He did not,
apparently, ask for--certainly he did not imagine--any other future. So
that resignation is not the right word. Serenity is....
X
_From a Balcony_
One of the French officers, on the balcony of the theater, during the
_entr’acte_ of _Lakme_, was describing, with that depressed neatness of
quiet diction that is at the disposal of every educated Frenchman, the
sleep of a French territorial on an uncompleted traverse. The others
had, as it were--and as if by preconcertion--capped stories in lauding
and pitying the _territoriaux_. These troops, it may be as well to
point out, were something like the Labor Battalions that subsequently
we raised. I fancy we had nothing of the sort at that date and indeed,
between Hélie and Corbie I had lately seen the Guards’ Brigade doing
fatigue that, in French-France would have been performed by old fathers
and grandfathers. That, of course, is nothing to the discredit of that
great brigade. As soon as battalions, brigades, or divisions came out
of the trenches for a “rest”, they were given the cheerful jobs of
repairing rear-line trenches, digging drains, cleaning out latrines,
and the like. When we came out from the Somme for a “month’s rest”,
first A Company, then B, C, and D were given an all-night fatigue--of
mending the Albert-Amiens road! And in August! Then we were moved up
into the salient.
At any rate, slowly, coldly, and without the shadow of a shade of
cordiality, in the blackness of the Paris night, the French officers
piled it up. We were not popular in France at that date, and I don’t
know that, except as individuals, we deserved popularity. That does
not matter. The fact remained that they were “out” to make one feel
that from under every little cowering roof in France, from Orange
as from the frontier by Mentone to the other frontier by Longwy,
old, stiff men, with horny hands and faded eyes had marched over the
endless roads with the poplars to their too-heavy labors amidst the
bursting shells.... From under _every_ cowering roof of every township,
town, hamlet, and parish; from every _arrondissement_; from every
_subprefecture_; from every _departement_. Coldly, like inquisitors,
in the darkness, they let me have that information. It was not really
necessary. I knew it already. But I was too tired, harassed, dispirited
to tell them so. I, too, was old for that job. _Atque ego_....
For I couldn’t get away from the conviction that they were talking
at me with a purpose--that they were, in indirect terms, telling me
that it was a scandal that the Brigade of Guards should be employed in
clearing out latrines, work which, in French-France, was performed by
the fathers and the grandfathers--the guards being tired out and worn
down by such employment when they were such splendid fighting material
and should have been really rested. I daresay our own war office would
have answered that that was part of our discipline and that “fatigues”
when men were “resting” were good for their livers and kept them “fit”.
There is such a school of thought. Anyhow, I am not writing a military
treatise and do not ask that any attention should be paid to my views.
I am only chronicling the psychology of an Infantry officer as he was
affected by certain circumstances.