BELATED BOONS
I
There is no one day of which you can say: "My youth ended then. On the
Monday the ball of my vision had eagles that flew unabashed to the sun.
On the Tuesday it hadn't." The season of rapture goes out like a tide
that has turned; a time has come when the mud flats are bare; but, long
after the ebb has set in, any wave that has taken a special strength of
its own from some combination of flukes out at sea may cover them up for
a moment--may even throw itself far up the beach, making as if to
recapture the lost high-water mark. So the youth of our war had its
feints at renewal, hours of Indian summer when there was wine again in
the air; in the "bare, ruined choirs" a lated golden auriole would
strike up once more for a while, before leaving.
Because hope does spring eternal the evening before a great battle must
always make fires leap up in the mind. The calm before Thermopylæ, the
rival camps on the night before Agincourt, the ball before Waterloo--not
without reason have writers of genius, searching for glimpses of life in
its most fugitive acme of bloom, the poised and just breaking crest of
the wave, gone to places and times of the kind. For there the wits and
the heart may be really astir and at gaze, and the common man may have,
for the hour, the artist's vision of life as an adventure and challenge,
lovely, harsh, fleeting, and strange. The great throw, the new age's
impending nativity, Fate with her fingers approaching the veil, about to
lift--a sense of these things is a drug as strong as strychnine to
quicken the failing pulse of the most heart-weary of moribund raptures.
We all had the dope in our wine on the night of August 7, 1918. At
daybreak our troops to the east of Amiens would second the first blow of
Foch at the German salient towards Paris, the giant arm that was now
left sticking out into the air to be hit; its own smashing blow had been
struck without killing; its first strength was spent; the spirit behind
it was cracking; now, in its moment of check, of lost momentum, of risky
extension, now to have at it and smash it. The bull had rushed right on
to gore us and missed; we had his flank to stab now.
Someone who dined at the mess had just motored from Paris, through white
dust and sunshine and, everywhere, quickly turned heads and eager faces.
He had been in the streets all the night of the enemy's last mighty
lunge at the city. He spoke of the silent crowds blackening the
boulevards through the few hours of midsummer darkness; other crowds on
the sky-line of roofs, all black and immobile, the whole city hushed to
hear the bombardment, and staring, staring fixedly east at the flame
that incessantly winked in the sky above Château-Thierry--history come
to life, still enigmatic, but audible, visible, galloping through the
night. Poor old France, tormented and stoical, what could not the world
forgive her? Then he had seen the news come the next day to these that
had thus watched as the non-combatants watched from the high walls of
Troy; and how an American had broken down uncontrollably on hearing how
his country's Third Division had bundled the Germans back into the
Marne: "We _are_ all right! By God, we _are_ all right!" he had cried, a
whole new nation's secret self-distrust before a supercilious ancient
world changing into a younger boy's ecstasy of relief in the thought
that now he has jolly well given his proofs and the older boys will not
sneer at him now, and he never need bluff any more. Good fellows really,
the Yanks; most simple and human as soon as you knew them. One seemed to
know everyone then, for that evening.
II
Night came on cloudless and windless and braced with autumn's first
astringent tang of coolness. Above, as I lay on my back in the meadow,
the whole dome had a stir of life in its shimmering fresco, stars
flashing and winking with that eager air of having great things to
impart--they have it on frosty nights in the Alps, over a high bivouac.
We were all worked up, you see. Could it be coming at last, I thought as
I went to sleep--the battle unlike other battles? How many I had seen
outlive their little youth of groundless hope, from the approach along
darkened roads through summer nights, the eastern sky pulsating with its
crimson flush, the wild glow always leaping up and always drawing in,
and the waiting cavalry's lances upright, black and multitudinous in
road-side fields, impaling the blenching sky just above the horizon; and
then, in the bald dawn, the backward trickles of wastage swelling into
great streams or rather endless friezes seen in silhouette across the
fields, the trailing processions of wounded, English and German, on foot
and on stretchers, dripping so much blood that some of the tracks were
flamboyantly marked for miles across country; and then the evening's
reports, with their anxious efforts to show that we had gained something
worth having. Was it to be only Loos and the Somme and Arras and
Flanders and Cambrai, all over again?
Thought must have passed into dream when I was awakened by some bird
that may have had a dream too and had fallen right off its perch in a
bush near my head, with a disconcerted squeak and a scuffling sound
among dry leaves. Opening my eyes, I found that a thickish veil was
drawn over the stars. When I sat up the veil was gone; my eyes were
above it; a quilt of white mist, about a foot thick, had spread itself
over the meadow. Good! Let it thicken away and be shoes of silence and
armour of darkness at dawn for our men. Soon night's habitual sounds
brought on sleep again. An owl in the wood by the little chalk stream
would hoot, patiently wait for the answering call that should come, and
then hoot again, and listen again. The low, dry, continuous buzz of an
aeroplane engine, more evenly humming than any of ours, droned itself
into hearing and softly ascended the scale of audibility; overhead, as
the enemy passed, was slowly drawn across the sky from east to west a
line of momentarily obscured stars, each coming back into sight as the
next one was deleted. In the east the low, slow grumbling sound of a few
guns from fifty miles of front seemed, in its approach to quietude, like
the audible breath of a sleeper. The war was taking its rest.
Some sort of musing half-dream about summer heaths, buzzing with bees,
was jarred by the big blunted sound, distant and dull, of wooden boxes
tumbling down wooden stairs, "off," as they do in a farce. Of
course--that night-bomber unloading on St. Omer, Abbeville, Etaples,
some one of the usual marks. But now there was something to wake for.
Not a star to be seen. I jumped up and found the mist thick to my
armpits, and rising. Oh, good, good! Our men would walk safe as the
attacking Germans had walked in the mist of that lovely and fatal
morning in March. I slept hard till two o'clock came--time to get up for
work. The mist was doing its best; it seemed to fill the whole wide
vessel of the universe.
III
Ten miles to the east of Amiens a steep-sided ridge divides the
converging rivers of Ancre and Somme. They meet where it sinks, at its
western end, into the plain. From the ridge there was, in pre-war days,
a beautiful view. On the south the ground fell from your feet abruptly,
a kind of earth cliff, to the north bank of the Somme, about a hundred
feet below. Southwards, beyond the river, stretched, as far as eye could
see, the expanse of the level Santerre, one of France's best cornlands.
South-eastward you looked up the Somme valley, mile after mile, towards
Bray and Péronne--a shining valley of poplars and stream and linked
ponds and red-roofed villages among the poplars. But now the Santerre
lay untilled, gone back to heath of a faded fawn-grey. The red roofs had
been shelled; the Germans possessed them; the Germans held the blasted
heath, across the river; other Germans held most of the ridge on this
side to a mile or so east of the point to which I was posted that
morning. English troops were to carry the eastern end of the ridge and
the tricky low ground between it and the Somme. Australian and Canadian
troops were to attack on a broad front, out on the level Santerre,
across the river and under our eyes.
But there was no seeing. The mist, in billowy, bolster-like masses,
wallowed and rolled about at the touch of light airs; at one moment a
figure some thirty yards off could be seen and then a thickened
whiteness would rub it out; down the earth cliff we looked into a
cauldron of that seething milky opaqueness. Of what might go on in that
pit of enigma the eye could tell nothing; the mind hung on what news
might come through the ear. We knew that there was to be no prior
bombardment; the men would start with the barrage and go for five miles
across the Santerre if they could, pushing the enemy off it. The stage
was set, the play of plays was about to begin on the broad stage below;
only, between our eyes and the boards there was hung a white curtain.
Up the cliff, fumbling and muted, came the first burst of the barrage,
suggesting, as barrages usually do, a race between sounds, a piece
bangingly played against time on a keyboard. Now the men would be rising
full length above earth and walking out with smoking breath and
bejewelled eyebrows into the infested mist. Then our guns, for an
interval, fell almost silent--first lift of the barrage--a chance for
hungry ears to assess the weight of the enemy's answering gunfire.
Surely, surely it had not all the volume it had had at Arras and Ypres
last year. And then down came our barrage again, like one rifle-bolt
banging home, and all thought was again with the friends before whose
faces the wall of splashing metal, earth, and flame had just risen and
moved on ahead like the pillars of fire and cloud.
Hours passed, bringing the usual changes of sounds in battles. The piece
that had started so rapidly on the piano slowed down; the notes spaced
themselves out; the first continuous barking of many guns slackened off
irregularly into isolated barks and groups of barks--just what you hear
from a dog whose temper is subsiding, with occasional returns. That, in
itself, told nothing. Troops might only have gained a few hundred yards
in the old Flanders way, and then flopped down to dig and be murdered.
Or--but one kept a tight hand on hope. One had hoped too often since
Loos. And then the mist lifted. It rolled right up into the sky in one
piece, like a theatre curtain, almost suddenly taking its white quilted
thickness away from between our eyes and the vision so much longed for
during four years. Beyond the river a miracle--_the_ miracle--had begun.
It was going on fast. Remember that all previous advances had gained us
little more than freedom to skulk up communication trenches a mile or
two further eastward, if that. But now! Across the level Santerre, which
the sun was beginning to fill with a mist-filtered lustre, two endless
columns of British guns, wagons, and troops were marching steadily east,
unshelled, over the ground that the Germans had held until dawn.
Nothing like it had ever been seen in the war. Above, on our cliff, we
turned and stared at each other. We must have looked rather like Cortes'
men agape on their peak. The marvel seemed real; the road lay open and
dry across the Red Sea. Far off, six thousand yards off in the shining
south-east, tanks and cavalry were at work, shifting and gleaming and
looking huge on the sky-line of some little rumpled fold of the Santerre
plateau. Nearer, the glass could make out an enemy battery, captured
complete, caught with the leather caps still on the muzzles of guns. The
British dead on the plain, horses and men, lay scattered thinly over
wide spaces; scarcely a foundered tank could be seen; the ground had
turf on it still; it was only speckled with shell-holes, not
disembowelled or flayed. The war had put on a sort of benignity, coming
out gallantly on the top of the earth and moving about in the air and
the sun; the warm heath, with so few dead upon it, looked almost clement
and kind, almost gay after the scabrous mud wastes and the stink of the
captured dug-outs of the Salient, piled up to ground-level with corpses,
some feet uppermost, some heads, like fish in a basket, making you think
what wonderful numbers there are of mankind. For a moment, the object of
all dream and desire seemed to have come; the flaming sword was gone,
and the gate of the garden open.
Too late, as you know. We awoke from delight, and remembered. Four years
ago, three years ago, even two years ago, a lasting repose of beatitude
might have come with that regaining of paradise! Now! The control of our
armies, jealously hugged for so long and used, on the whole, to so
little purpose, had passed from us, thrown up in a moment of failure,
dissension and dread. While still outnumbered by the enemy we had not
won; while on even terms with him we had not won; only under a foreign
Commander-in-Chief, and with America's inexhaustible numbers crowding
behind to hold up our old arms, had our just cause begun to prevail. And
now the marred triumph would leave us jaded and disillusioned, divided,
half bankrupt; sneerers at lofty endeavour, and yet not the men for the
plodding of busy and orderly peace; bilious with faiths and enthusiasms
gone sour in the stomach. That very night I was to hear the old
Australian sneer again. The British corps on their left, at work in the
twisty valley and knucklesome banks of the Somme, had failed to get on
quite as fast as they and the Canadian troops on their right. "The
Canadians were all right of course, but the Tommies! Well, we might have
known!" They had got rid, they chuckingly said, of their own last "Tommy
officers" now; they wanted to have it quite clear that in England's war
record they were not involved except as our saviours from our sorry
selves.
IV
There were other days, during the following months of worm-eaten
success, when some mirage of the greater joys which we had forfeited
hung for a few moments over the sand. It must be always a strange
delight to an infantryman to explore at his ease, in security, ground
that to him has been almost as unimaginable as events after death. There
is no describing the vesture of enigmatic remoteness enfolding a
long-watched enemy line. Tolstoy has tried, but even he does not come up
to it. Virgil alone has expressed one sensation of the British overflow
over Lille and Cambria, Menin (even the Menin Road had an end) and
Bruges and Ostend, Le Câteau and Landrecies, Liège and Namur--
Juvat ire et Dorica castra
Desertosque videre locos, litusque relictum.
Classibus hic locus, hic acie certare solebant,
Hic Dolopum manus, hic sævus tendebat Achilles.
And then, wherever you went, till the frontier was reached, everyone was
your host and your friend; all the relations of strangers to one another
had been transfigured into the sum of all kindness and courtesy. In one
mining village in Flanders, quitted that day by the Germans, a woman
rushed out of a house to give me a lump of bread, thinking that we must
all be as hungry as she and her neighbours. Late one night in Brussels,
just after the Germans had gone, I was walking with another officer down
the chief street of the city, then densely crowded with radiant
citizens. My friend had a wooden stump leg and could not walk very well;
and this figure of a khaki-clad man, maimed in the discharge of an
Allied obligation to Belgium, seemed suddenly and almost simultaneously
to be seen by the whole of that great crowd in all its symbolic value,
so that the crowd fell silent and opened out spontaneously along the
whole length of the street and my friend had to hobble down the middle
of a long avenue of bare-headed men and bowing women.
Finally--last happy thrill of the war--the first stroke of eleven
o'clock, on the morning of Armistice Day, on the town clock of Mons,
only captured that morning; Belgian civilians and British soldiers
crowding together into the square, shaking each other's hands and
singing each other's national anthems; a little toy-like peal of bells
in the church contriving to tinkle out "Tipperary" for our welcome,
while our airmen, released from their labours, tumbled and romped
overhead like boys turning cartwheels with ecstasy.
What a victory it might have been--the real, the Winged Victory,
chivalric, whole and unstained! The bride that our feckless wooing had
sought and not won in the generous youth of the war had come to us now:
an old woman, or dead, she no longer refused us. We had arrived, like
the prince in the poem--
Too late for love, too late for joy,
Too late, too late!
You loitered on the road too long,
You trifled at the gate:
The enchanted dove upon her branch
Died without a mate;
The enchanted princess in her tower
Slept, died behind the grate:
Her heart was starving all this while
You made it wait.