remain in a house just under the shadow of the church--for it was plain
that, however big or however circumscribed the official danger zone
might be, what the Huns were shelling was the church. We had been
in the church in the course of the afternoon. It was a commonplace
building, as far as I can remember, Byzantine of an eighteenth century
type. But it was, in a way, rendered gracious by the enormous heaps of
plaster and stone-dust that piled against the walls in drifts, so that
it was as if sand dunes had invaded the roofless edifice. And, in the
course of the dusk, shells had landed in all that rubble, constantly,
no doubt regularly, whilst we were pursued by the L. C. round the
church square, in the rain that had begun to fall just as the Huns
began to shell....
I daresay the reader will by now be tired of the Lance-Corporal in
Charge of Canteens. I know _I_ was. And I am uncertain what became of
him. I daresay I could remember if I made an effort--but it hardly
seems worth while. I know that four days later he was safely writing
a music-hall sketch, in a tent, under a counter made of soap boxes,
in a field just beyond the turning where the Plugstreet road leaves
the chaussée from Bailleul to Nieppe; and I know that next night I got
out of my flea-bag at about 2:00 A.M. and wearily walked for miles
and miles in search of him and his sardine tins. The Huns had started
regularly bombarding the town at that inconsiderate hour, and I know
too that, when I did find him, by chance, wandering about with his
disreputable cart and his four disreputable men, he said that a shell
had gone clean through the upper story of the shop that they had
commandeered. So I suppose that that night he had slept in the town. I
can’t remember.
I can remember interviewing the _Maire_ a second time and that, because
he was busy with some French staff officers, I had to wait some
minutes--in a dentist’s waiting-room, with aspidistras, black walnut
furniture, and innumerable copies of the illustrated paper called
_Excelsior_ on the lace table-cover. For the _Maire_ was a dentist.
He was also a brave man. I can remember, too, being in a shop just
under the church where a young, stout Belgian Jewess was standing
waist deep in remnants and rags of black satin. She was nonchalantly
packing this away in sacks whilst I tried to make sense out of her
middle-aged, frightened father. I think I was telling him that seven
francs a day was too much to expect the Division to pay for the rent
of a rag and bone shop. Something hit the roof at that moment and an
avalanche of bones, old iron, and satin petticoats poured down the
stairs from the upper floors. The father disappeared, exclaiming “Oi!
Oi!” and elevating his hands above his bared head. But the daughter,
with a large face, chalk-white with powder, heavy blue-black hair,
and an opulent inscrutability--she had on her large white fingers a
great collection of fat-looking wedding rings--went on nonchalantly
examining black satin petticoats, rejecting some, folding others
slowly, and packing them away in sacks. She seemed to regard the thing
that had passed through the upper story with enigmatic indifference,
as if shells and iron hail were just part of the silly vanity of the
male sex. Her business was to pack up for transport on a barrow to
Armentières all the black satin that she and her father had collected
and that had once belonged to the inhabitants of the empty town.
That attitude seemed to be common enough in the women of those parts. I
remember looking, five minutes later, through the bull’s-eye glass of a
cottage window so low that you would say every shell must pass over it.
The interior was candle-lit and quite tranquil.
At trestle tables, gesticulating although they had their elbows on
the boards, sat eight Tommies of the battalion whose entry we had
witnessed. Five had bandages, and three had not. Between their elbows
they had tinplatesful of fish and chips. And there were two women,
standing. One, middle-aged and stout, had her hands on her hips, and
her elbows back. Her blouse was well open at the neck, as if it had
been hot work cooking the fish and chips. She stood against a trestle
table and seemed to be giving back-chat to all the eight Tommies at
once. The other was a young girl--of the Flemish Madonna type. Her
yellow hair was tightly braided round her head; she leaned back against
the mildew-stained wall, and on her bare, crossed arms she had a tabby
kitten. It was biting her finger, and she stood entirely quiet, as if
on her hands she had all the safety and all the time in the world.
I daresay it was safe enough for the moment. But, some days later, I
noticed that there was no cottage there. There was not even a lace
curtain.
I walked along--for I had got rid of my tired horse--a long way, under
the dripping trees that were black above the wall of the château, and
out onto the Bailleul road, a long way beyond the Plugstreet turning,
I persuaded myself that I was going to ask the Divisional Transport
Officer to house my friends of the Canteen in tents in his field.
I found him in the W---- lines. They were eating Welsh rabbit and
herrings in a Connaught hut. They were not pleased to see me. There was
an old Quartermaster from Stratford-on-Avon--a butcher by profession,
think of that!--who sat with his hands crossed over a large stomach and
spectacles well down on his nose. Also he wore carpet slippers. He told
me in a most businesslike way that they had only herrings enough for
three. I was welcome to any amount of Welsh rabbit--but there were only
herrings enough for three. And they were three already.
Then I realized that what I was really concerned about was to see my
own Battalion come in. It was symptomatic. My friend the Sinn Feiner
had been perfectly content, as soon as he had seen the W----’s come in
and knew that our own people had been diverted, to go and take lessons
in the language of the country from the French young lady whom he had
unearthed. But, as for me, I wanted to _see_ the Battalion. I had no
particular reason to love the C.O. or the Sergeant Major. But I wanted
to be absolutely _sure_ that they were safe.
And, just as I got back to the crossroads near the church, the
Battalion came in. There was the C.O. riding, the Sergeant Major
walking ahead of him. And then “A” Company. I called out to Captain
Gardiner, after I had saluted the Colonel: “A Company all right?” And
the young man answered: “Cheerie Oh, old bird, as right as rain.” The
last dregs of light were fading under the elms; the Huns were putting
in some extraordinarily heavy stuff just behind them. And suddenly I
remembered that I had not billeted myself. God knows whom we hadn’t
billeted, the Sinn Feiner and I between us. Certainly three sets of
battalion headquarters, transport, officers’ messes, sanitary squads,
and the men of a whole brigade. But I had nowhere to lay my head. And
my frayed shirt-cuffs were streaming with rain and it had grown pitch
dark....
You say I am a poet. Certainly I am a poet!
And these eyes of mine that, when I have any leisure, see always not
only the things that surround me, but many other things--these eyes of
mine were busy. Certainly they saw what, in the darkness, was visible
of the wet and stricken town. Against the sky the roof lines or the
silhouettes of charred beams; the red glow of the candles in the
fried-fish cottage; the red glow that slowly danced inside the church
as if a black mass were going forward. I suppose the last shell had set
fire to some woodwork. Then another came and put it out, so that it was
darker.
But these eyes of mine that, with their attention, were looking at a
bright landscape, had also registered in their memory a white, as if
triangular patch, in a dark window of a house just behind the church,
nearly opposite, but a little this side of the _Mairie_, a house that
we had passed again and again. The eyes had noted that white luminosity
and now made for it, though the thinking mind was differently intent.
This sort of definition is a little difficult to make. Try to
follow me. The department of my eyes that led me--the Intelligence
Department--saw the roofs and the black streets; the department which
was influenced by my desires--for a meal, for warmth, for a bed, and
above all for dry shirt-cuffs--was leading my steps toward the house
that had the pale luminosity in the dark window. And, what I suppose
you would call my mind’s eye was occupied by a bright landscape. That
is to say, I was definitely thinking about an August landscape.
You will say that it was the landscape I have mentioned so often--the
landscape with the stream and the trees and the gingerbread cottage.
But it wasn’t. That came later. I suppose that at that time I wasn’t
tired enough to see it. Besides, I never saw that as if in bright
sunshine or in the weather of any accentuated season--but always as
just English country in just English weather, green earth in a diffused
light under a July sky.... No, I was thinking of a billeting scheme.
For, in the long ago--thousands and thousands of years ago--we used to
do billeting schemes, round Manorbier and Penhally. And I think the one
I was then thinking of with--as the prose writers say--laughter mixed
with rain, took place at Penhally. It appeared an idealized Penhally,
mostly hollyhocks and thatch, so wilful is the mind, though I remember
every house of Penhally! Well: a great many of us went in the August
weather to work a billeting scheme there. And an officer representing
Division drove up in a Rolls-Royce and pretended to “confer” with
us. He had a red hat-band and a golden lion and the beautifullest
moustaches and the beautifullest white whip-cord breeches and _such_
spurs! And such ladies in the Rolls-Royce, awaited him!
And he gave us the loveliest hints in a clear voice, with the far-away
expression of one who knows his job but lectures in it too often.
Certainly he knew his job--and he was a fine fellow!
We were to get hold of the civil power at once, or at least as soon as
we had conferred with the divisional billeting officer. The first thing
to do was to find out about the water supply. Then we were to group
our companies round the pump if we could. If there were only one, we
were to call a conference of Company Quartermaster Sergeants and give
out the time when each Company was to draw water. That would then go
into Battalion Orders. He said, with a little smile, that we were to
remember to put Battalion Headquarters into the best billet--because
C.O.’s liked that--and Company messes must be lodged in public houses
or places where there was liquor. So that the men shouldn’t get at the
alcohol! Transport should, as a rule, be as far from fire as could be
arranged, to avoid stampeding of horses; similarly with the Doctor’s
cart and the Battalion cookers. And, as a rule, the Company detailed
for the Advance Guard next day should have the advanced billets if
there were no likelihood of a night attack. But they should not be
exposed to disturbance in the night, if possible, because they would
have a hard time next day. Similarly the Advanced Guard of that day
should be halted first and be in the rear, so as to get a good night’s
rest. He told us to remember those splendid words which used to be the
shibboleth of every British officer--to the effect that the comfort and
convenience of the men should be considered before every exigency save
the necessities of actual warfare.
Yes: he was a fine young fellow--one of the Old Contemptibles, as he
modestly, clearly, and rather absentmindedly, enunciated all that
sound, commonsensible, old-fashioned lore of the Army. And I remember
every word of it. For instance, men of separate units or even of
separate Companies of the same Battalion should not be billeted on
opposite sides of the same street; the street should be divided in
half, and one-half allotted to each Company or unit. (I remember
pointing that out to my Sinn Fein friend in one of the miserable,
battered streets of workmen’s hovels in Pont-de-Nieppe that afternoon.)
But, though I had listened with all my ears to the Staff Officer at
Penhally, my eyes, even then had been playing the trick of showing me
Pont-de-Nieppe--just as at Nieppe in France they insisted on showing me
Penhally in Wales. For, whilst I listened to him, I was seeing the time
when I should represent Division and be, in the sunlight, young, with
a beautiful moustache and a red hat-band and white whip-cord breeches,
very full. And with _such_ spurs!
So there I was, representing Division.
It hadn’t been very like what I had pictured--and I had not had to
bother about water supply.[11] I had enough water in the wretched,
frayed wristbands of my shirt, as it seemed, to water a whole Battalion
and the mules of the Transport! But, otherwise, the traditions of the
Old Army had prevailed. Rudimentarily, no doubt, but still, they had
prevailed. I had reminded the Battalion Billeting Officers to see
that Battalion Headquarters had convenient buildings, that officers
had charge of any civilian liquor depots; that Company cooker-cars
had emplacements convenient for their men, and that latrines were not
located near water supplies. Also, we had got into touch with the
civil power.... Only, there were no ladies in my Rolls-Royce--and my
Rolls-Royce was two very wet-kneed legs! And as for my shirt-cuffs ...
I suppose they were most in my mind. For it is the most horrible of
human afflictions to have wet shirtcuffs! So that, when I found my
orderly, not where I had told him to be--in comparative safety in front
of the workmen’s villas but in the shadow of the door of the shop where
the Jewess had packed up the black satin petticoats, waiting devotedly,
though the shells that missed the church went close overhead--he said:
“She’s took all them petticoats on a barrer in sacks to
Armentières,”[12] I answered:
“You can fall out. Tell my batman that I’ve gone somewhere to get my
d--d shirt-cuffs dried.”
Nevertheless, he followed me. It was, you see, the pride of _métier_.
Alas, that there should be no English for those words. He was my
orderly for the day--just any orderly from headquarters. But I was his
charge. If I had ordered him to fall out, no doubt he would have gone,
against his personal will but in obedience to orders, to some sort of
comfort that his pals would have prepared for him. I, however, had
said, “You _can_ fall out.” It was permissive and left the falling out
optional. But he saw before him an obviously eccentric and probably
benevolent officer--and it was his job to be able to tell my batman
where I lodged myself. Also, it was contrary to King’s Regulations for
officers to go anywhere alone where there is any danger at all from
shell or other fire. So, though he must have been uncommonly wet and
hungry and tired, he followed me to the door of the house in whose dark
windows I had seen the luminous patch--the forehead of Rosalie Prudent
as she sat sewing, her head bent forward, in the twilight.
I don’t know how it is: but from the moment when I first saw that
highlight--and it had been certainly three hours before--I had been
perfectly sure that that was what it was--the forehead of a quiet woman
bending her head forward to have more light from the high window whilst
she sewed in the dusk. In a way it was not what one expected: the town
had been evacuated of its civilian population the Sunday before, when
the Huns--as it seemed, for the love of God--started shelling the
church just as it had emptied after benediction. And they had shelled
from six o’clock till midnight; and every night since then, from six
o’clock till midnight they had shelled the church. And they were
shelling it now--eighty yards away. It was a desolate, and it seemed
a stupid business. But no doubt they had their purpose, though it was
difficult to see what it was.
That was how Rosalie Prudent put it, as she sat sewing my wristbands
by the stove, in the wash-house. I sat nearer the stove, naked to
the waist, the red glow and the warmth that came from the red-hot
iron of the circular furnace being, I can tell you, very agreeable to
my shivering skin. Opposite me sat the orderly drinking a bottle of
Burgundy--which he had richly deserved. The steam went up from his wet
clothes and was tinged red by the light of the coke....
In the extremely clean _salle-à-manger_, with a high faïence stove of
blue and white tiles, a colza lamp with a white globe, a buffet in
the Nouvel Art style, of yellow Austrian oak with brass insertions;
at a yellow oak table covered with a green velvet table-cover fringed
with lace, sat my friend the Sinn Feiner learning the French that is
spoken in Plugstreet from the niece, Beatrice Prudent. She was teaching
him French by selling him handkerchiefs edged with lace in whose
corners she had embroidered multicolored initials. In two very clean,
lavender-papered bedrooms, upstairs, with white bedsteads, strips
of carpet beside them on the waxed floors, with valises opened and
showing works of devotion, altar vases, empty biscuit tins containing
unconsecrated wafers of the sacrament, trench boots, gas helmets, tin
hats--sat two padres composing their sermons for the next day. The
Roman Catholic--for I heard him preach on it next day--was meditating
on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. I don’t know what the
Presbyterian was writing about.
But there the house was, large, quiet but for the shells, kept
spotless by the labors of Rosalie and her niece Beatrice, and, as yet
untouched--just as it had been evacuated by the factory manager and
his family, who had fled on the Sunday after benediction. In one of
the roomy, very tall parlors there was, over the fireplace, a gigantic
figure of the Saviour, standing in robes of blue, white, and scarlet
plaster of paris, holding on his left arm a great sheaf of white lilies
and resting one hand on the head of a very thin plaster sheep of, I
should think, a Rhineland breed. That was perhaps why the owner of the
house had not trusted to its miraculous intervention in favor of his
dwelling. He might have--for I heard the other day that the house
remained intact until the 11/11/’18.
Rosalie profited--for, when the French inhabitants fled, the British
authorities allowed Belgian refugees to take their places on condition
that they billeted the troops. So perhaps it had been to protect her
that the immense Bon Dieu waited! She deserved it.
She came from Plugstreet, of which town she had been one of the richest
bourgeoises, her husband being the miller. She had had a large, roomy
house, a great yard with stables and carts; she had had a wealthy,
goodish, but possibly too jovial husband, two affectionate, dutiful,
and industrious sons, and two obedient daughters. On Sundays she
had gone to mass wearing a black satin gown, and, on her breast, a
gold-framed cameo as large as a saucer. It represented a very classical
Paris, seated, I don’t know why, apparently between the horns of a lyre
and stretching out one hand--which no doubt contained the apple--toward
three grouped Goddesses in rather respectable Flemish _déshabille_.
Mme. Prudent retained this work of art, but her wardrobe was reduced to
two blue cotton dresses.
I gathered all this, whilst I dozed by the black iron stove, from her
conversation with the orderly. She spoke Flemish, and he, Wiltshire,
but they understood each other. Of course, they used signs and facial
expressions. The flames through the interstices of the stove poured
upward to the dim rafters of the wash-house roof, and, by its light,
Mme. Rosalie sewed as if she had no other pride and no other purpose
in the world. For she told of the fate of her men and her womenfolk
abstractedly and passionlessly; pride only showed itself when she
talked of the state of the house in which she had found a refuge.
From time to time she would say that if Mm. the Proprietors returned,
they would find the floors waxed; the stair-rods shining, the windows
polished; woodruff and sweet herbs amongst the bed linen in the
presses, and not a speck of dust on the plaster-robes of the great Bon
Dieu in the _salon de réception_. That was her pride....
As for the rest ... On the 18th of August, 1914, her man had been
killed in the Belgian Reserve somewhere near Liège; on the 20th of the
same month her eldest son had been killed in the Belgian regiment of
the Guides. He had expected to have an excellent career in the office
of an _avocat_--in Brûges, I think. On the 8th of November, 1914, her
remaining son had been killed in the 76th French Regiment of Infantry
of the Line. He had been chief clerk to an architect of Paris. Her
daughters had been, one apprentice and the other chief saleswoman of a
celebrated _couturière_ of Liège. She had heard of them once since the
Germans had entered the city. A Belgian priest had written to her from
the Isle of Wight in December, 1914, to say that some nuns had taken in
Aimée and Félicité. Those were the names of her two daughters....
And at the moment she started up. She remembered that she had forgotten
the potatoes for Monsieur--Monsieur being myself. So out she went into
the black garden and returned with a tin platter of potatoes.
On it were ten tubers of which she weighed each in her hand inscribing
what they came to on a slate--so that she might account to Messieurs
the owners, on their return, for the potatoes that she had dug from
the garden. Then she called her niece from the dining room to wash and
slice the potatoes. She was going to give me an omelette with bacon and
fried potatoes for my supper. She sat down again and went on, sewing
and talking to the orderly.
She began talking of the interior of her house in Plugstreet; she
described minutely all the furniture in all the apartments. In each
of the bedrooms there was a night commode in mahogany and a statue of
the Virgin, also one of the Blessed Saints, and a _prie-dieu_, also
in mahogany.... And now there was nothing. Every fortnight she was
permitted by the British military police to visit her house--and she
stayed there, in Nieppe, so that every fortnight she might revisit her
house--which now, she said, contained nothing. The shells were shaking
it to pieces. The tiles were all gone; the rain was soaking into the
upper floors. The furniture was all gone--the great presses with her
linen, the wardrobes--_en acajou_--which had contained her black satin
dress and her husband’s Sunday clothes....
But she continued to catalogue to the orderly the contents of her
residence. I don’t know why it should interest him, but it did; for he
nodded sagely when she talked of the _bahûts en bois de chêne_, and the
immortels in vases on the piano....
Suddenly she turned her head to me and said to me, where I sat writing
with my tablet on my knee:
“And I ask you, _M. l’officier_, for what purpose is it that one brings
men children into the world if this is to be the end? They cause great
pain in their entry, greater than at the entry of little girl children.
It is difficult to keep them alive so that they reach men’s estate. And
then it is difficult to keep them in the paths of virtue. And then they
are gone.”
[Footnotes]
[10] This would mean that the Company presented, as a target to the
German artillery, a solid and slow-moving cube of human flesh 240 ft. x
8 ft. x 6 ft. _No_ gunner could miss it.
[11] It is odd to think that Nieppe at that date was still supplied
with electric power by underground cables that the Huns had not yet
discovered, from Lille.
[12] His name was Private Partridge of, I think, the 6th Wilts.--a fine
fellow, but not to be confused with Private Phillips of the 9th Welsh,
who was my wonderfully good batman: (Note by Gringoire).
XII
_The Movies_[13]
I was a little bewildered when Mme. Prudent so addressed me. For, to
tell the truth, I had not been listening to her very attentively. She
seemed to accept the war--this war, states of war, any operations
that washed and disintegrated the interiors of the world--she seemed
to accept them so tacitly as being part of the child’s madness of the
male that, in the warmth I had just dozed, not thinking much of her
immense losses and not knowing at all that she would have anything very
striking to say about the war. Besides, it was unusual to be beside a
stove, under a roof.
And, when she had come in with the potatoes, out of the darkness, I
had suddenly seen again that vision in green--of the sanctuary! And
I remembered, extraordinarily, how once, years and years and years
before, I had gone digging potatoes at night. I suppose some visitor
had come to my cottage late. And I had put my hand into the ground to
take out a potato, and I found the earth quite warm. The air cools
off quicker than the sod, you see, after a hot day. It had astonished
me then--and, in that house, the remembrance came again, vivid and
astonishing, for it had produced exactly the effect of one’s having
thrust one’s hand into the breast of a woman....