And then, suddenly, I had pulled myself together. For it had occurred
to me that I was not doing my duty. I had it in my head that I had got
that soft, wet undangerous job of billeting, at the request of the
bearded gentleman in the frock coat, who had sat under the picture by
Bastien Lepage--or was it by Marie Bashkirtseff?--in front of the great
table with the carnations and the miniature _Niké_. I daresay it was
not the fact: or it may have been. There is no knowing. In France you
were taken up, like a brown paper parcel, and deposited here or there
at the behest of two obscure lines of smudged typewriting in some one’s
Orders. And you did not know why; you had no will.
So I felt that I ought to be writing. It would not be fair to have a
soft job for the purpose of wooing the Muse and then not to woo her. So
I had pulled out from my wet tunic which hung over the chair back, my
disreputable and sodden tablet of writing paper, which I had purchased
two days before from that miserable Canteen Lance-Corporal and had
begun, with a wet stump of pencil, to write the article called “_Une
Partie de Cricket_” which, if only because it is a souvenir, I hope
will be printed as an appendix to these remembrances. I know I wrote
the first ten sentences, because I remember them and also because, the
other day, I turned out the repulsive flap of my camp bed, and there,
along with a damp sock and some mildewed straps, was the mouldering
tablet with three scrawled pages....
But I couldn’t keep on writing. I was obsessed with the idea of a
country, _patrie_, republic, body politic, call it what you will--that
the recollection of that minister had called up in me. Yes: I had a
vision of a country.
In the center was the Ministry--like the heart of an onion--and all
the others that I had seen in the last week went round about it. Mind
you, I have nothing to say against that Minister. I may have appeared
to speak of him sardonically: that is a habit I have. But he, or
something like him, was indispensable to the higher strategy of his
nation:[14] and this man knew his job. What he wanted was perfectly
the right thing: and if he did not know that the First Line Transport
of a Battalion in the trenches was not exactly the happiest place in
which to write lofty prose--well, it is certainly hypocrisy to seek,
in the heart of the Sacred Emperor, for a knowledge of low tea-shops.
He did not, obviously, like me but I have not the slightest doubt
that I appeared drunk to him. Only a drunkard, really, would seek for
ferrets in the palace of the Sacred Emperor. Yet I had my excuse. First
of everything in the world--of everything in the whole world!--comes
your battalion. And the ferrets of my battalion had all died suddenly;
and the last thing they had said to me had been: Don’t forget to get
us some ferrets. If you had seen the rats of Locre you would have
understood.
But the Minister had not seen the rats of Locre so he had not
understood....
No: he was a good man, in the right place. And very properly he sat
amongst the gracious products of a State art--the pictures, the
tapestries, the ormolu, the august building, the frescoes, the great
staircases. And attendants who looked like bishops must be there
to answer his bell; and Suisses with their great cocked hats and
immense white gloves and their sabres with silver scabbards. There
must be symbols of the Temporal Power of the State, which is august,
ancient, and fit to be upheld. And, in disturbed times, there must
be Civil Police in the courtyard, for strange visitors will come.
And sentries there must be in the tricolored sentry-boxes beside the
_porte-cochère_; sentries to call out the guard. And famous battalions
must pass the door, along the boulevard, now and again.
And, round the Palace of the Sacred Emperor, there must be the Great
City, and round the Great City must be La Grande Nation--stretching
away and away, for miles and miles and miles....
It presented itself to me as twenty-seven hours of railway
journey--past Etaples where I had spent, years before, long days in
_châlets_ amongst the pine wood; past Calais where my grandfather
was born; to Hazebrouck where, during the war, we had found the
worst billiard table in the world and where, whilst we waited for a
connection, a German plane was dropping bombs on the goods line and
Cochin-Chinese in furred silk hoods were working as plate-layers. And
so to Steenewerck, where the great farm carts and tilburies and berlins
were mixed up with artillery horses, with timber wagons, with immense
guns.
And so the land stretched out to Nieppe and the wash-house and Rosalie
Prudent sewing in the light of the circular cast-iron stove that had
become red hot. And on the stove there were bubbling the pots which
contained supper for me and coffee for my friend the Sinn Feiner. And
whilst Rosalie sewed, ever and again, the pots lifted themselves an
inch off the dully red-hot disk and then sat down again. Shells, you
see, were falling in the church.
So the land stretched out--yes, like a gramophone disk!--till it came
to the wash-house that was intact amidst all the smashed houses with
their forlorn lace window curtains. And all that edge of the disk was
smashed houses inhabited by steadfast souls who sat sewing whilst the
pots jumped on the hobs. They were the caretakers of _Messieurs les
Propriétaires_ who had fled. There was a whole population of them:
I came myself across a whole population of these quiet people, who
considered only their duties to absent proprietors amongst the _rain_
of shells. I remember when I went to have lunch with the officers of
our 2nd Battalion--all dead, the officers that I had lunch with!--in
Albert, there sat and read the _Libre Parole_, such a very old
caretaker. He had gray side-whiskers, a white apron, a yellow and black
striped waistcoat, a square black alpaca cap or _bêret_--for all the
world like an old domestic of a Paris nobleman’s hotel. He sat there,
his legs crossed, his head thrown back, reading the paper, through
silver-rimmed spectacles at the end of his nose. On the table beside
him were a bullfinch in a gilt cage constructed like a pagoda and his
black leather spectacle case. He had nothing to communicate about the
war, except, I am glad to say, that the officers of the battalion were
careful of the furniture, but he was so busy that he could not keep
the floors as cleanly waxed as he desired. He asked me if I could not
speak to Colonel Partridge about it. The Germans were putting in their
usual lunch-time shells into that street; he was sitting reading in a
glass-roofed passage between the kitchen and the _salle à manger_....
Yes: a host of such people came into my mind as I sat beside the stove.
I am not going to talk about the war any more. By the grace of God,
I will never talk about the war again whilst I live. As you say: the
people who did not take part hate to be reminded of that part; and the
people who did take part have had enough of it. Yes; you are right.
I made the mistake of my life, professionally, _quand je m’en allais
en guerre_. It got me disliked by the critics, and it is bad to be
disliked by the critics--for a poet.[15] So you see, I too have my
prudences.
And indeed I have my prudences--though they are not the prudences of
other people. I do not desire money, glory, the praise of my kind
whom I distrust, nor yet to dominate humanity, which is a beast that
I dislike. I do not desire friends; I do not desire broad lands. So,
thinking about things in the wash-house of Mme. Rosalie, I said: “I
must dig myself in.” I said, indeed, twice: “I must dig myself in....”
I must have a dugout, as proof as possible against the shells launched
against me by blind and august destiny; round about it there must be
the strong barbed wire of solitude and, within the entanglements,
space for a kitchen garden. Do you remember, Mr. Compiler, the redoubt
our regiment made once--Montgomery’s Folly? There was the redoubt, a
circular piece of engineering. Round about it there was a level space
of fifty yards, to give a field of fire, surrounded by the apron of
wire. And, in that level space, you remember, we made the Regimental
Gardens.... Well, in the wash-house, I said to myself that, _appry la
gair finny_, I must make for myself, in space and time, an affair like
that, or as like it as possible. If I could afford a cottage, I would
have a cottage: if not, any sort of shelter made of old tins filled
with clay with a bit of corrugated iron for a roof, a door of sacking,
a groundsheet for carpet. As for furniture, aren’t there bully-beef
cases still?... _You_ remember!
Lord! the interiors we have constructed out of such materials and the
fun we had. And how they vanished like a drift of leaves when we were
drafted away. And how solid they seemed and work we did in them whilst
they lasted, those interiors! So, I said to myself, in Mme. Rosalie’s
wash-house, I shall get along somehow. And then, said I to myself:
There is the question of food.
Well, there is gardening! As you know, I am not _le dernier venu_ when
it comes to gardening. I will back myself to get twice as much off any
given piece of ground as any ordinary man--if you will give me some
seeds and a bit of old iron and a stick capable of being tied together
into some semblance of a hoe....
So the war finished for me, looking at Mme. Rosalie as she sat entirely
engrossed in her work whilst the shells made the pots jump alive off
the red-hot iron plate.... The war was finished, since my line was
taken for _appry la gair finny_. That we should win I had no doubt,
for, though the horrible scalawags who wangle themselves into notoriety
had too much to say in the world, our heart was in it, and the heart of
the other side was not. I knew enough to know that. If God were good to
one, for one’s self personally, it would finish there. I did not even
want to stay to see the finish: I was so certain that we should win.
But I had been worrying a little about myself. I couldn’t, you see,
see anything but the workhouse for me, if I lived through. And, at my
age, the workhouse is not a pleasant thought. I am just too old, and
just too young for the workhouse.
But the spectacle of Madame Rosalie, fetching in the potatoes, saved
me.... I will tell you an odd thing. I have spoken of the recumbent
oval of green light that now and again had appeared to me, to turn
into a picture of a green valley. I will confess that, hitherto, I had
feared it. It had come into my head that it might be a symptom of a
seizure, an epileptic fit perhaps, or of some obscure but disastrous
nervous disease. _Ker vooly voo? Say la gair._ That region of the world
had its trials for the nerves of people of my age. One might well be on
the edge of something.
But looking at Mme. Rosalie--so extremely centered in the work in hand,
so oblivious to the very real danger, so brave and so tranquil, I said
to myself:
“What the devil! If she can stick it, I too can!”
For what had she to look forward to? She had said that, on the last
occasion when the British authorities had permitted her to visit her
house at Plugstreet they had not allowed her to enter it. The front
wall of the upper part had fallen inward and for her sole possession
she could see that on the wall of Félicité’s bedroom that was exposed
to the sky, there hung a gilt-framed Souvenir of her daughter’s First
Communion. Nothing else! Nothing! That was her sole possession in the
world except for two gowns of blue Manchester goods and the cameo that
represented the judgment of Paris....
And suddenly I was convinced that the apparition of that recumbent
green oval was, not a visitation, but a sign. If from that time onward
I just carried on, if I persevered--as I was truly minded to persevere,
in my duties as a poor bloody footslogger--the Almighty would give
to me at least sufficient space in the quiet earth that was just
country--to dig myself in. Well, God has been good to me, as you see.
And, mind you, I consider and consider proudly, that I am doing, most
of all, my duty to the State. I have always considered myself a member
of the governing classes, with the privileges and the duties. And I
abate nothing of that opinion. It seems to me to be my duty to govern,
if not by directing, then at least by guiding, through the superiority
of my insight. I am not fitted for the intrigues of what is called
Public Life. No doubt that is no worse today than it was in the time
of Alcibiades or the late Mr. Gladstone. But it is very bad; very vile.
You say: how do I presume to speculate on public matters who cut
myself deliberately off from the consideration of public matters on
the 8/9/’16? My friend, I have considered the public matters of the
8/9/1816; of the 4/9/1870; 1770; 1470; of the 8/9/’16 of B.C. 1070. And
there is no difference. If it is not an hypocrisy, it remains still a
very wearisome matter to search for the person of the Sacred Emperor in
a low teahouse. Well, I have done my share of searching and am too old
for any more.
I have said that there is no difference between the public matters
of today and those of the day of Alcibiades. But there is one very
great difference: there is the difference that today--and it was
never the case before--all the ground of the world that is capable of
growing wheat is occupied by wheat and the population of the world is
increasing by leaps and bounds. I will tell you: Some years before the
war I was in a little town on the coast of France not far from Dunkirk.
And my hotel was full of affrighted women; of nuns whose convents had
been burned over their heads; and of ruined, wounded, and despairing
men from the Low Countries. St. Quentin had been sacked; other towns
were afire. A year before you could read in the papers the despatches
of intrepid war correspondents in the South of France. They wrote from
hotels--just as they did a year or so ago--how towns were flaming,
streets running with wine, how the 5–9 shells soared and the naval
howitzers raised their muzzles and coughed. You know the sort of thing!
Well! Those were the fingers on the wall. They were merely food-riots
but they predicted Armageddon for those that can read--and still they
predict an Armageddon beside which that in which we all took part was
one of Gilbert White’s rush candles against the searchlights of a
battleship. Those were food riots, caused by the determination of town
dwellers to enforce prices on peasants. The last war was a food riot:
the next war will be a food riot beyond the imagination of the sons of
men.
Nothing can prevent it or much delay it unless there should come a
change in the hearts of humanity. And I do not perceive much change
in the hearts of man--and all the wheat-land of the world is occupied
by wheat and the population of the world is increasing by leaps
and bounds. _Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!_ You say that there are
revolutions on foot. There always have been. But they have always been
_révolutions de palais_ and _révolutions de palais_ they will always
remain. What does it matter to me or to any sane man whether it is
the Duke of Omnium or Mr. Evans of Llanfair-Rhaiado, or Mr. Hicks of
Poplar who sits in the seats once occupied by Sir Robert Walpole or
Mr. Jonkinsen or Colbert or Caius Julius Cæsar? None of those departed
statesmen had to face the problem of a globe whose wheat-land was all
occupied and whose population was increasing by leaps and bounds. In
consequence they were not so greedy for money, or for the jazz bands of
excitement that may make them forget tomorrow. For that is what it all
comes to.
So I go out of public life of that type.
But don’t believe that I, Gringoire, Hippolyte, de l’Institut de
France, go out of public life! No, I go into it. For I go to prove
that a decent life, clean, contemplative, intent, skilful, and with
its little luxuries, may yet be lived by the Gringoires of the
world--_hominibus bonæ voluntatis_. For, though I am a poet, it is thus
that I interpret the message of the angel. For it is thus that I see
the world--as a world of a few Gringoires and of infinite millions
that are the stuff to fill graveyards. I can’t see it any other way.
And I said to myself in the wash-house of Madame Rosalie whilst
some fragments of iron and rubble pattered down on the tiles of the
pent-roof from the nearby church that, for the rest of my life I would
be what I will call self-supporting--at any rate after the war was
finished--and I will govern!
For I will be dependent on the profits of no man’s labor, and I will
produce more food than I eat and more thought than I take from the
world. So, to the measure of the light vouchsafed, shall some fragment
of the world be dependent on me. It is the only way to govern.
All this wangling for power in newspapers, meetings, market-places,
and drawing-rooms is a weariness--and when you have it, what is it? A
handful of dried leaves that crumble under the touch. If you have a
platoon you can make it smart; if you have a garden, you may make it
fine, luxuriant, producing marrows as large as barrels. Or if you write
a poem, you must make it beautiful. Everything else is vanity.
I ... I who speak to you ... can house myself, clothe myself,
discipline, entertain, and think for myself--and I can feed more than
myself. As the old saying went: I can build a house, plant a tree,
write a book, and beget a son. No man who cannot do all these things is
fit to govern. He cannot govern--for I and the men who are with me, of
good will, shall withhold his food, his clothing, his thoughts for his
mind.
You may say, Mr. Compiler, that you who write falsehoods for the
newspapers, who organize in offices the carrying of things on wheels,
who dig in the bowels of the earth, and hammer on iron plates--or who
take the profits of those who do these things--that you will govern, or
inherit, the earth and the civilization of the earth. You cannot. If
you withhold the labor of your hands or your minds--the world goes on.
If I should--you would starve in body and soul--and in jazz noises!
In the end, I think, the world will be driven to become a great
beehive: there will be the workers who think of nothing but their work.
They will think nothing of the profits. And there will be the drones
who provide the jazz noises and the wheels--and who will be killed off
from time to time.
That is what I have gathered from the ruined houses in Flanders and
from the aloof quality of the faces that came back to me whilst I
sat dozing and Rosalie Prudent sewed. The faces were those of the
Lincolnshire Private, of Lieutenant Morgan, of Henri Gaudier, and of
the caretaker in the house at Albert--and of the Quartermaster of the
Wiltshires.[16] But, so that you may not think that I limit myself to
one class of society, I will add the faces of Lord Kitchener, of Sir
Edward Grey, and of the French Minister, whose name I have forgotten. I
did not need to see in imagination the faces of the orderly or of Mme.
Rosalie, for they were with me.
You will object that I single out for salvation in Gomorrah only those
of whom I have talked. Certainly, it is only those that I single
out--those of that type, for those, for me, are the _homines bonæ
voluntatis_ who must be preserved if the State is to continue. They
have rather abstracted expressions since they think only of their
work; they have aspects of fatigue, since the salvation of a world
is a large order, and they bear on their backs the burden of the
whole world; but they look at you directly, and in their glance is no
expression of pride, ambition, profit, or renown. They have expressions
of responsibility, for they are the governing classes. Others will have
that title in the newspapers--but they govern only those who make the
noises of jazz-bands. The food supply and the supply of poetry is in
the hands of the Gringoires.
Buzzing noises make the world pleasant; it would be a grim and
silent world without them. I should not like it, nor would the
other Gringoires like it. It was in Coventry Street that I last met
Lieutenant Morgan-Gringoire. But, from time to time the buzzers must
be killed off. Destiny is remorseless: either those who buzz must die
in occasional crowds or those who live to give food and poetry must go
starve and the others with them. Destiny is remorseless.
But destiny is also just. The drones of the hive have a good time--and
give a good time. Moreover they make splendid soldiers of the type of
the Cockney or the Parigot. That, perhaps, is how destiny means them to
get killed off. So they will have their good times; and they will also
have glory, the glory of finding the person of the Sacred Emperor in
some such low teahouse as was the Bois de Mametz on the 14/7/’16 when
the 38th Division was murdered.
And maybe that is the best glory of all. God forbid that I should say
it is not. And I like to think that, along with the good time that they
had and the glory of standing in the presence of the Sacred Emperor,
they found also--sanctuary. For I like very much to remember the smile
that was on the face of Lt. Morgan when they dug him out from under the
dirt of the communication-trench.
Do you remember the old Catholic idea that a man may find salvation
between the saddle and the ground? Well, we know little of
death--nothing of death. So I hope it is not a heresy to think that,
as the eyelids of those who fell closed on their glory, they had long,
long visions, like that green vision that came to me from time to
time. For time is a very relative thing; and may they not well have
had long, long illusions, seeming to last for years and years?--to the
effect that they had found, each his imagined sanctuary, where there
was the gingerbread cottage that, hand in hand, on tiptoe with some
Gretel, they explored, crossing their fingers and crying “_Feignits_”
in the face of destiny--and where the Hou-Hou-oo of the wolf upon
the Montagne Noire shall sound so very distantly as to be only the
comforting reminder of the Grimm we knew as children.
----Something like that.
That is all I have to say about the war, here and now. But you have
poked your sardonic fun at me from time to time, Mr. Compiler, and
though bargaining is no part of my nature, a determination to have my
own way was born in me as pawkiness was in you. And now, I say this:
“You have poked your fun at me as writer and as cook, and decorated
with only those attributions of yours--as if each of those little,
half-concealed smiles were a rag and tatter on my shining-seated
_pantalons_, you propose to exhibit me to your public. Well, you shan’t
except on my own terms. The first is that, as you have spoken of me as
writer you should enshrine--like a shining fly in amber--in the gum
of your lucubrations a specimen of my own writing as it came to me,
precisely, in Nieppe. And the second is that, since you began this
compilation with what purports to be an account of my entertainment of
the guests who honor this lowly roof of ours, you shall, as truthfully
entertain your readers--as truthfully as you can, for God gives to
some of us vision and to some the gift of recounting things askew for
the entertainment of those wider of mouth than of intelligence--you
shall then entertain your readers with an account of the dishes which
since early morning I have been preparing for the evening degustation
of yourself, of my dear Sélysette and your friend Mrs. Carmody. For I
observe that, though you poke fun at my hospitality you are not averse
from begging your dimity madams to share what you have called, I think,
our rough oaken board.”
Mrs. Carmody was no more than the wife of the Headmaster of the King
Edward VI Grammar School where your Compiler gives lessons in the
English language and drill, in the neighboring town. She had expressed
an urgent curiosity to witness the domestic felicities and the
supposedly eccentric habits of my friends. For it is not to be imagined
that a figure so marked as that of our poet could conceal itself in an
isolated dingle of a Home County without setting a considerable part
of that county agog with curiosity--any more than it is to be imagined
that an usher in a diminutive but immensely ancient public school
could forever stave off from contact with his most intimate friends
the young and agreeable but still imperious wife of his Head.