I had got as far as the position described above, when down swept the
war upon Europe, and everything had to be postponed in favour of the
immediate need of filling the ranks of the nation's army and teaching
the men how to fight our enemies. As the war went on, however, the
demand for rapid, cheap, and temporary building became very great, and I
felt I should be justified in trying some experiments with Pise de
terre, even in spite of the difficulty of obtaining labour.
I think I can best illustrate the nature of Pise and what it can do, and
I believe will do, if I shortly recount in chronological order these
humble pioneer efforts.
In the summer of 1915 I found that it was necessary in the interests of
the hospital established in my house to find a place in which to store
apples, for the men in blue consumed them in incredible quantities.
I thought I would try Pise. Accordingly, I had some shuttering made on
the Australian model--not splendid scientific shuttering such as is
described in the body of this work, but still shuttering quite
sufficient for the purpose. With great rapidity a little fruit-house was
put up, roofed with boards, and covered with blocks of compressed peat
in order to make a roof which would be both vermin-proof and also keep
out the heat and the frost. In my ignorance and my hurry, I now find
that I violated every sound rule of Pise construction. I built the walls
during a week of rain, when the earth was wet, which was a great
mistake; and I did not clear out the stones, which was another error
that prevented the walls from being homogeneous. Worst of all, as soon
as the walls were built (and very pretty walls they were, looking
something like soft brown marble), I painted them over with tar, which
of course would not enter the wet wall, but only made a skin, which in a
few months peeled off exactly like the bark off a plane tree. Yet in
spite of this ignorant mishandling of my material, the little
fruit-house is still standing and sheltered till January the few apples
Nature allowed us to gather last autumn. It looks disreputable, but
there has been no structural collapse, nor will there be.
[Headnote: Rammed Chalk, "Pise de Craie"]
No sooner was the fruit-house finished than I was met by the demand of
my wife, the commandant of the hospital, to add to my house a patients'
dining-room, which would be bright, dry, airy, warm, and comfortable,
and be large enough for forty men to have their meals in, and to use as
a sitting-room during the rest of the day. The local builder said that
it was impossible to make a wooden addition, for there was no wood to be
procured, or to build in bricks, since my house stands 600 ft. above the
sea on an isolated chalk down. Croesus would have found it difficult at
that time to build on my site, and for the ordinary economic
man--"L'homme a quarantes ecus"--it was quite impossible. But the room
had got to be built, for the men were there, and built at once, since
the out-of-door life of July and August could not continue. There was
nothing to do but to fall back upon Pise. I decided to be ambitious and
to experiment, not merely in Pise de terre, but in what I then
thought--and perhaps rightly--was a new form of Pise, _i.e._ Pise de
craie or compressed chalk. My shuttering therefore was put up. A hole
not very far off was dug in the earth, the chalk which was almost at the
surface was quarried out, and we began to build the wall, candid and
contemptuous friends telling us of course that the chalk wall would
never stand the frosts in so exposed a position, and that the wall, if
made, would certainly explode! Everyone worked at that wall; the nursing
staff, the coachman, an occasional visitor, a schoolboy, a couple of boy
scouts, members of the National Reserve who were guarding a "vulnerable
point" close by, and even some of the patients. Patients as a rule will
endure any toil with the utmost good temper if it is for the purposes of
sport. If the task is useful it does not interest them. Still, a wall
which might explode offered a certain attraction. We worked with more
zeal than discretion, but happily I had it in my mind that homogeneity
was the essential, and therefore the hard nuggets of chalk as they were
thrown into the shuttering to be compressed by the rammers were first
chopped up with spades, much as one minces meat. The wall had no
foundations. In Pise you can make your foundations, so to speak, as you
go, through the simple process of ramming. Anyway, and to cut a long
story short, the wall was made, was able to receive the roof, for which
happily the local builder found some material, and not only did the wall
stand, but showed a very creditable exterior. Its weight was of course
enormous, for there were some twenty tons of chalk put into it. In spite
of the irregularity of the labour it did not take more than ten or
twelve days to build. To prevent the wet and frost getting into it,
I painted the main front with a patent liquid material for rendering
walls damp-proof. The Chalk Pise wall not only served its purpose, but
served it very well. The room proved extraordinarily warm and
comfortable, largely owing no doubt to the fact of a solid, very dry,
18-in. wall on the north-east side.