were talking “officially”. In those days there had just been published
in Paris a book of “official” propaganda by myself. It would not have
been a different book if it had been unofficial or if there had been
no war. It simply advanced the theory that in the world of letters and
ideas, for personal industry and pride in work as work, it is only
France that matters among the nations. I had said that when I was
twenty; I resaid it then being over double that age; I resay it today;
and I will resay it as my eyes close in death. No one in my country
has ever paid any attention to one’s saying it, and no one ever will.
Why should they? Letters and ideas have so little place in our body
politic and the doctrine of pride in work as work; of engrossment and
of serenity; of aloofness from the world and of introspection with no
other purpose--is here anathema both with the Right which hates the
doctrine of Art for Art’s sake and with the Left, which hates that of
Labor for the sake of Labor. Yet I see no other lesson in life. That is
why I have collected these notes upon sheepfolds--this long lay sermon.
So this particular piece of official propaganda was, just then, being
accorded an extraordinary amount of notoriety in France. The skill
of our own propaganda people and the patriotism of distinguished
Frenchmen accounted for that. It was reviewed at enormous length
and with enormous headlines by Academicians, by assailants of the
French Academy, and by the Mayors of Rouen, Lyons, and Toulouse. It
was “communicated” to the Institute of France; publicly laid upon the
shelves of the city library of Yvetot. And it was no doubt on that
account that the French officers presented official views to me so
carefully and so excruciatingly. They imagined that I had weight in
the Councils of the Empire, as would have been the case in their own
country.
While they talked the black houses round the market had infinite depths
of violet against the white stars. But all the same I was looking at
the view from the top of the great brick Roman Theater at Orange--over
the flats with the ragged, stunted vines, the stubble, and the thatched
roofs. Yes, I knew that beside Orange the little houses cowered beside
the furrows and that on the other frontier great, gaunt piles were
subsiding under scrolls and tongues of flame, going down to a last rest
as the very tired men of a platoon will fall out beside the road. And
the great buildings never get up again.
For I never feel that houses have souls. So that, when, out there, you
saw a house go down as fire, it seemed to do it luxuriously almost.
It was finished with men and their ways. It had no doubt borne for
long with their cruelties, stupidities, imbecilities; with its windows
for mournful eyes it had seen the generations flit past and fade. It
had known cold that made its timbers crack and the great heat of the
sun warping them. But beneath the flames, slowly, it would sink to
the earth from which it had come. Yes, luxuriously, as men stretch
themselves down for a long rest....
The French officer was still talking about the old territorial who
had fallen asleep. It seems that the old man had gone on working,
after his mates had been taken off for a spell, on the inner face of
the traverse--which is a sort of pillar of earth with a gangway round
it, left in a trench to minimize the lateral spread of shell fire. He
had gone on working--out of pure zeal, the officer said. The officer
addressed me with hard bitterness. I suppose he thought I was some
sort of noncombatant. The staff-captain told me afterward that this
officer, being aide-de-camp to one of the most famous French generals
of division of the day had, the night before, attended his chief to a
dinner--given, I think, by the British A.P.M.--in the course of which
the heroic doings of a great many British Regiments were extolled. And
then, in a pause, an English lady had said to the French general: “And
the French haven’t done so badly.”... I was being made to suffer for
this.
And I did suffer a good deal--more I think than I ever suffered.
The officer went on and on about his old territorial. He was there,
asleep, in the light of a single candle stuck in the clay. He was as
it were spread-eagled against the earth. His legs apart he had raised
his hammer to strike his chisel; both his arms were over his head,
stretched out. And he was just asleep. It was touching; it was terrible
in its simplicity, the officer said. He said the territorial came from
Passy--as it might be Putney.
It was just at this point that I remembered Morgan and the old man of
the bath-mill. I daresay you will think it merely a literary trick,
when I say that I saw them.
But I _saw_ them: against an immense black mass fringed by flaming
houses. I saw those two, tired faces; the two serene, honest, and
simple souls, who had the Kingdom of God within them. And it seemed to
me that they had died in vain.
It was for me the most terrible moment of the war.
I daresay that for many people it was the most horrible period of
the war. For, by then it had become apparent that the Somme advance
was a fiasco--a useless butchery. We knew we should never advance. I
daresay the French knew it better than we. Certainly the voices of
these officers drove it home: they spoke as if they were talking to a
condemned criminal. And I think it was not right of them.
We, at any rate, were the old voluntary army. We had come, aged or
young, from the ends of the earth. I don’t know whether it is worse
to be old or young in a great war--it was bad enough to be old! And I
don’t know whether it was better or worse to have come from the ends
of the earth--or from Passy. Or to have passed all one’s life beneath
a roof that shuddered with fear.... If you had done that, you were
more used to the idea, and to the discipline of the idea, of war. You
discussed the moves, here and there, more _en connoisseur_.
But I doubt if one of those men on the balcony felt the war as I
did. We, after all, brought so many more emotions to it. You had
only to contrast Paris, gray, sober, much as usual, with the roads
under leisurely repair, and the old horses and the old _cochers_ and
_voitures_ dawdling in the shadow of the plane-trees--with London,
plastered with endless appeals in blue and scarlet and yellow--London,
hurrying, exclaiming, clamoring.... The old territorial had lived
all his life under the shadow--and it came. The old private of the
Lincolnshires had never thought of such an end. But it came! And Europe
flamed....
And the worst of it all was that one was beginning to doubt. Until
then one had been carried by the fine wave of enthusiasm. It seemed to
embrace the whole country. And we in all the holes, valleys, over all
the downlands of the Somme, where the sun shone with its chalky rays as
it does by L----, had had a great singleness of purpose and had been
confident that we had the support of a great singleness of purpose
extending across a world. But doubt had begun to creep in....
I wished, then, that I had not read “What Maisie Knew” in the bath
at Albert. I wished that the daily papers would not reach us. The
atmosphere shown so overwhelmingly in the book was beginning to be too
close to the atmosphere reflected in the papers. And we were, truly,
very lonely out there; truly we were some millions of men, suspended on
a raft, in limitless space.
And we were beginning to feel a curious dislike of the civilians whom
up till then we had so trusted--a curious dislike that was never to
die. I don’t know what was going on at home: political intrigues no
doubt; strikes possibly. But there seemed to prevail a tenuous, misty
struggle of schemes--just the atmosphere of “Maisie.” I don’t think
that many of those who were one’s comrades _in illo die_ did not at
times feel a certain hopelessness. It was as if at times we said: What
are those people after? Aren’t they--aren’t they surely?--“out” to make
huge profits from our poor Tommies; to cut down the rations of our
poor Tommies; and to gain notoriety by forcing on a timorous central
government their own schemes for the training of poor Tommies--schemes
that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of our poor
fine Tommies? And, when their own attractions were enhanced by the
bringing off of this or that scheme, intrigue, or cabal, they would
vote to themselves ribbons, orders, power, divorces, and the right to
gallons of petrol. And so they would sit in the chairs of the lost and
the forgotten amidst a world where the ideals which sent all those
millions to destruction were lost too ... and forgotten. You will
say that this is bitter. It is. It was bitter to have seen the 38th
Division murdered in Mametz Wood--and to guess what underlay that!...
And then the French officer said what I knew he would say: what I had
known that, with all his cold lack of rhetoric, he was working up to.
He said that the old, sleeping territorial looked like Our Lord on
Calvary. I could have screamed. Upon my soul I could have screamed.
And, if I hadn’t thought it just possible that his dislike attached to
me personally, I daresay I should have talked to him as I talked to the
other French officer as the reader may see in _Une Partie de Cricket_.
But the faint hope that it was just myself that he despised and not
poor Morgan and the others--all the poor others along that long front
of ours--that faint hope that he was attacking only me and not the Army
of the Somme just made me hold my peace until we went back into the
theater. And in the theater I suddenly remembered--as clearly as I had
remembered the others--Henri Gaudier. He, too, seemed to stand before
me and to smile at me a little, as if he found me comic....
I do not know why it is that now, when I think of Gaudier, the cadence
that I hear in my mind should be one of sadness. For there was never
any one further from sadness than Henri Gaudier, whether in his being
or in his fate. He had youth; he had grace of person and of physique;
he had a sense of the comic. He had friendships, associates in his
work, loves, the hardships that help youth. He had genius, and he died
a hero.
He comes back to me best as he was at a function of which I remember
most, except for Gaudier, disagreeable sensations--embarrassments. It
was an “affair”--one of two--financed by a disagreeably obese Neutral
whom I much disliked. That would be in late July, 1914. The Neutral
was much concerned to get out of a country and a city which appeared
to be in danger. Some one else--several some ones--were intensely
anxious, each of them, to get money out of the very fat, very monied,
disagreeably intelligent being. And I was ordered, by _Les Jeunes_,
to be there. It was a parade, in fact. I suppose that even then I
was regarded as a, I hope benevolent, grandfather, by a number of
members of an advanced school.[7] Anyhow, that comes back to me as a
disagreeable occasion of evil passions, evil people, of bad, flashy
cooking in an underground haunt of pre-war smartness.
I daresay it was not really as bad as all that--but when I am forced to
receive the hospitality of persons whom I dislike, the food seems to
go bad, and there is a bad taste in the mouth, symbol of a disturbed
liver. So the band played in that cave and the head ached and there
were nasty foreign waiters and bad, very expensive, champagne.
There were also speeches--and one could not help knowing that the
speeches were directed at the Neutral’s breeches pockets. The Neutral
leaned heavily sideways at table, devouring the bad food at once
with gluttony and nonchalance. It talked about its motor car, which
apparently was at Liverpool or Southampton--somewhere where there were
liners, quays, cordage, cranes; all ready to abandon a city which would
be doomed should Armageddon become Armageddon. The speeches went on....
Then Gaudier rose. It was suddenly like a silence that intervened
during a distressing and ceaseless noise. I don’t know that I had
ever noticed him before except as one amongst a crowd of dirtyish,
bearded, slouch-hatted individuals, like conspirators; but, there,
he seemed as if he stood amidst sunlight; as if indeed he floated in
a ray of sunlight, like the dove in Early Italian pictures. In a life
during which I have known thousands of people; thousands and thousands
of people; during which I have grown sick and tired of “people” so
that I prefer the society of cabbages, goats, and the flowers of the
marrow plant; I have never otherwise known what it was to witness an
appearance which symbolized so completely--aloofness. It was like the
appearance of Apollo at a creditors’ meeting. It was supernatural.
It was just that. One didn’t rub one’s eyes: one was too astounded.
Only, something within one wondered what the devil he was doing there.
If he hadn’t seemed so extraordinarily efficient, one would have
thought he had strayed, from another age, from another world, from
some Hesperides. One keeps wanting to say that he was Greek, but he
wasn’t. He wasn’t of a type that strayed: and indeed I seem to feel
his poor bones moving in the August dust of Neuville St. Vaast when
I--though even only nearly!--apply to him a name that he would have
hated. At any rate, it was amazing to see him there; since he seemed so
entirely inspired by inward visions that one wondered what he could
be after--certainly not the bad dinner, the attentions of the foreign
waiters, a try at the Neutral’s money-bag strings. No, he spoke as if
his eyes were fixed on a point within himself; and yet, with such humor
and such good-humor--as if he found the whole thing so comic!
One is glad of the comic in his career; it would otherwise have been
too much an incident of the Elgin marble type. But even the heroism of
his first, abortive “joining up” was heroico-comic. As I heard him tell
the story, or at least as I remember it, it was like this:
He had gone to France in the early days of the war--and one accepted
his having gone as one accepted the closing of a door--of a tomb, if
you like. Then, suddenly, he was once more there. It produced a queer
effect; it was a little bewildering in a bewildering world. But it
became comic. He had gone to Boulogne and presented himself to the
Recruiting Officer--an N. C. O., or captain, of the old school, white
moustachios, _cheveux en brosse_. Gaudier stated that he had left
France without having performed his military duties, but, since _la
patrie_ was in danger, he had returned like any other good little
_piou-piou_. But the sergeant, martinet-wise, as became a veteran of
1870, struck the table with his fist and exclaimed:
“_Non, mon ami_, it is not _la patrie_, but you who are in danger. You
are a deserter; you will be shot.” So Gaudier was conducted to a motor,
in which, under the military escort of two files of men, a sergeant,
a corporal, and a lieutenant, he was whirled off to Calais. In Calais
Town he was placed in an empty room. Outside the door were stationed
two men with large guns, and Gaudier was told that, if he opened the
door, the guns would go off. That was his phrase. He did not open the
door. He spent several hours reflecting that though they manage these
things better in France, they don’t manage them so damn well. At the
end of that time he pushed aside the window blind and looked out. The
room was on the ground floor; there were no bars. Gaudier opened the
window; stepped into the street, just like that--and walked back to
Boulogne.
He returned to London.
He was drawn back again to France by the opening of the bombardment of
Rheims Cathedral. This time he had a safe conduct from the Embassy. I
do not know the date of his second joining up or the number of his
regiment. At any rate, he took part in an attack on a Prussian outpost
on Michaelmas Eve, so he had not much delayed, and his regiment was
rendered illustrious, though it cannot have given him a deuce of a
lot of training. He did not need it. He was as hard as nails and as
intelligent as the devil. He was used to forging and grinding his own
chisels. He was inured to the hardships of poverty in great cities; he
was accustomed to hammer and chisel at his marble for hours and hours
of day after day. He was a “fit” townsman--and it was “fit” townsmen
who conducted the fighting of 1914 when the war was won: it was _les
parigots_.
* * * * *
Of his biography I have always had only the haziest of notions. I know
that he was the son of a Meridional craftsman, a carpenter and joiner,
who was a good workman and no man could have a better. His father was
called Joseph Gaudier--so why he called himself B’jesker, I do not
know. I prefer really to be hazy; because Gaudier will always remain
for me something supernatural. He was for me a “message” at a difficult
time of life. His death and the death at the same time of another
boy--but quite a commonplace, nice boy--made a rather doubtful way
quite plain to me.
All my life I have been very much influenced by a Chinese proverb--to
the effect that it would be hypocrisy to seek for the person of the
Sacred Emperor in a low teahouse. It is a bad proverb, because it is so
wise and so enervating. It has “ruined my career”.
When, for instance, I founded a certain Review, losing, for me, immense
sums of money on it, or when the contributors unanimously proclaimed
that I had not paid them for their contributions--which was not true
because they certainly had among them a quantity of my money in their
pockets--or when a suffrage bill failed to pass in the Commons; or
when some one’s really good book has not been well reviewed; or when
I have been robbed, slandered, or abortively blackmailed--in all the
vicissitudes of life, misquoted on it, I have always first shrugged
my shoulders and murmured that it would be hypocrisy to seek for the
person of the Sacred Emperor in a low tea-shop. It meant that it
would be hypocrisy to expect a taste for the finer letters in a large
public’s discernment in critics; honesty in æsthetes or literati;
public spirit in lawgivers; accuracy in pundits; gratitude in those
one has saved from beggary, and so on.
So, when I first noticed Henri Gaudier--which was in an underground
restaurant, the worst type of thieves’ kitchen--these words rose to my
lips. I did not, you understand, believe that he would exist and be so
wise, so old, so gentle, so humorous, such a genius. I did not really
believe that he had shaved, washed, assumed garments that fitted his
great personal beauty.
For he had great personal beauty. If you looked at him casually,
you imagined that you were looking at one of those dock-rats of the
Marseilles quays, who will carry your baggage for you, pimp for you;
garotte you and throw your body overboard--but who will do it all
with an air, an ease, an exquisiteness of manners! They have, you
see, the traditions and inherited knowledge of such ancient nations
in Marseilles--of Etruscans, Phoenicians, Colonial Greeks, Late
Romans, Troubadours, Late French--and that of those who first sang the
Marseillaise! And many of them, whilst they are young, have the amazing
beauty that Gaudier had. Later, absinthe spoils it--but for the time,
they are like Arlésiennes.
All those wisdoms, then, looked out of the eyes of Gaudier--and God
only knows to what he threw back--to Etruscans or Phoenicians, no
doubt, certainly not to the Greeks who colonized Marseilles, or the
Late Romans who succeeded to them. He seemed, then, to have those
wisdoms behind his eyes somewhere. And he had, certainly, an astounding
erudition.
I don’t know where he picked it up--but his conversation was
overwhelming--and his little history of sculpture by itself will give
you more flashes of inspiration than you will ever, otherwise, gather
from the whole of your life. His sculpture itself affected me just as
he did.
In odd places--the sitting rooms of untidy and eccentric poets with no
particular merits, in appalling exhibitions, in nasty night clubs, in
dirty restaurants one would be stopped for a moment in the course of a
sentence by the glimpse of a brutal chunk of rock that seemed to have
lately fallen unwanted from a slate quarry, or, in the alternative, by
a little piece of marble that seemed to have the tightened softness of
the haunches of a fawn--of some young creature of the underwoods, an
ancient, shyly-peopled, thicket.
The brutalities would be the work of Mr. Epstein--the other, Gaudier.
For Gaudier’s work had just his own, personal, impossible quality. And
one did not pay much attention to it simply because one did not believe
in it. It was too good to be true. Remembering the extraordinary rush
that the season of 1914 was, it appears a miserable tragedy, but it is
not astonishing, that one’s subliminal mind should whisper to me, every
time we caught that glimpse of a line: “It is hypocrisy to search for
the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low tea-house.” It was of course
the devil who whispered that. So I never got the sensation I might
have got from that line. Because one did not believe in that line. One
thought: “It is just the angle at which one’s chair in the restaurant
presents to one an accidental surface of one of these young men’s
backs.”
And then a day came when there was no doubt about it. Gaudier was a
Lance Corporal in the 4th Section, 7th Company, 129th Regt. of Infantry
of the Line.[8] Gaudier was given his three stripes for “gallantry in
face of the enemy”. One read in a letter:
“I am at rest for three weeks in a village, that is, I am undergoing
a course of study to be promoted officer when necessary during an
offensive.”
Or in another letter:
“I imagine a dull dawn, two lines of trenches, and in between explosion
on explosion with clouds of black and yellow smoke, a ceaseless noise
from the rifles, a few legs and heads flying, and me standing up
among all this like to Mephisto--commanding: ‘_Feu par salves à 250
mètres--joue--feu!_’
“Today is magnificent, a fresh wind, clear sun, and larks singing
cheerfully....”
That was it!
But just because it was so commonplace; so sordid, so within the scope
of all our experiences, powers of observation, and recording, it all
seemed impossible to believe that in _that_ particular low tea-house
there were really Youth, Beauty, Erudition, Fortune, Genius--to believe
in the existence of a Gaudier! The devil still whispered to me: “That
would be hypocrisy!” For if you would not believe that genius could
show itself during the season of 1914, how _could_ you believe that, of
itself, inscrutable, noiseless, it would go out of our discreditable
world where the literati and the æsthetes were sweating, harder than
they ever, ever did after _le mot juste_ or the Line of Beauty, to
find excuses that should keep them from the trenches--that, so quietly,
the greatest genius of them all would go into that world of misery.
And then I read:
“_Mort pour la patrie._
“After ten months of fighting and two promotions for gallantry, on the
field, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, in a charge at Neuville St. Vaast. June
5, 1915.”
Alas, when it was too late, I had learned that, to this low tea-shop
that the world is, from time to time the Sacred Emperor may pay visits.
So I began to want to kill certain people. I still do--for the sake of
Gaudier and those few who are like him.
For the effect of reading that announcement was to make me remember
with extraordinary vividness a whole crowd of the outlines of pieces of
marble, of drawings, of tense and delicate lines at which, in the low
tea-house of the year before’s season, I had only nonchalantly glanced.
The Sacred Emperor, then, had been there. He seemed, at last, to be an
extraordinarily real figure--as real as one of the other sculptor’s
brutal chunks of granite. Only, because of the crowd one hadn’t seen
him--the crowd of blackmailers,[9] sneak-thieves, suborners, pimps,
reviewers, and the commonplace and the indifferent--the Huns of London.
Well, it became--and it still more remains! one’s duty to try to kill
them. There are probably several Sacred Emperors still at large--though
the best of them will have been killed, as Gaudier was.
* * * * *
It was whilst I was inside the theater that I registered, as the saying
is, a mental vow that I would pay no attention any more to public
affairs. To do so would drive one mad. I decided that I must put my
head down under the cloth for the rest of the war. And I think I did
so. Except for the occasional duty of writing propaganda--which from
that time onwards I did in French--I paid no more attention to the
politics of my country or the world. I just did the collar-work of
the Infantry Officer until the 11/11/’17. After that, my views being
too favorable to France, the Ministry of Information and the censor
suppressed or lost in the post my rather excited writings on the Terms
of Peace.... That would be about three years ago today. It seems a long
while....