Chapter II: Part ONE: Four Landscapes (1)

I

_To Introduce Gringoire_

The writer’s friend Gringoire, originally a poet and Gallophile, went to the war. Long, gray, lean, unreasonably boastful as a man and unreasonably modest as a poet, he was probably not too disciplined as an infantry officer, but he has survived to inhabit in tranquillity with the most charming of companions a rural habitation so ancient, frail and unreal that it is impossible to think of it otherwise than as the Gingerbread Cottage you may have read of in the tale of “Haensel and Gretel.”

This book, then, is the story of Gringoire just after ... Armageddon. For it struck the writer that you hear of the men that went, and you hear of what they did when they were There. But you never hear how It left them. You hear how things were destroyed, but seldom of the painful processes of Reconstruction.

So that your Compiler, taking pencils, tablets and erasers and availing himself of the singularly open hospitality of the poet and his charming meridional partner, came on many successive Saturday afternoons from the little old Grammar School where he instructs classes in English Literature and Physical Development, to sit in the garden at the feet of Gringoire, Gallophile, Veteran, Gardener and, above all, Economist, if not above all Poet.

We would sit about on rude benches whilst Mme. Sélysette would bring us shandygaff brewed after a recipe of Gringoire himself. Then he would talk and your Compiler make furtive shorthand notes. Above all Gringoire loved to talk about cooking for he boasted that he was not only the best but the most economical cook in the world. How that may be your Compiler hesitates to say. To eat a meal prepared by Gringoire was certainly an adventure and when you felt adventurous had its titillations. But only Mme. Sélysette who had accompanied him into his English wilds from the distant South could have told you whether Gringoire was as economical in his cuisine as he professed to be. For he swore that the saviour of society in the end would be the good but excellently economical cook.

But Mme. Sélysette, dark, alert and with exquisitely pencilled brows and as loyal as she was goodhumored, never got beyond saying that in his culinary furies Gringoire needed at least three persons--whom I took to be herself, the diminutive maid and the almost more diminutive stable boy--to clear up after he had boiled an egg.

How Gringoire proposed to save the world by intensive kitchen gardening and exquisite but economical cookery may appear hereafter. His years in the trenches had taught him one thing--to be an eccentric economist, _in petto_, since he regarded himself as an extinct poet and proposed to live on his minute army pension. And I think his ambition really was to teach persons forced to live on minute incomes how to lead graceful, poetic and pleasant lives and so to save the world.

Thus it would perhaps have been better could your Compiler have provided you with a work useful to young couples contemplating matrimony on ten shillings a week ... or a month ... or a year. That would have been an enterprise certainly to gladden the heart of Gringoire. Or it might have been better had it taken the form of a Cottager Cookery Book or a Cottager’s Guide to Gardening or the Keeping of Goats instead of the war-reminiscences of a contemplative and sensitive soul. Yes, to be sure that would have been better. One can only console one’s self that when it comes to war-reminiscences the contemplative and sensitive soul has been little represented. So, for the matter of that, has the poetic but economical chef.

But the present writer, alas, has not the excellent--but _so_ meticulous!--mind that will let him sit down and write _many_ paragraphs such as that following this one. Neither has Gringoire the patience to dictate to the writer details of his methods. The most he has done is to let his Boswell into his frame of mind. We once, together, got as far as this:

“_Chops, Mutton, to deal with._

“_Fritto Misto_: Stock: Mixed Meats _en casserole_.

“Take two chops. Pare off _all_ the fat till you have two _noisettes de mouton_. Save each particle of meat and each particle of fat from the tail ends of the chops, separate, but as zealously as you preserve every memory of your well-beloved. You will then have four little divisions: two _noisettes_ for the _Fritto Misto_; two chop bones for stock; a little pile of fat for rendering down; a little pile of fragments of meat. Place the bones immediately in a small casserole of water, with salt, two bay leaves, pepper, one leaf of sage, and rice if you like. It will help you if you tie the bones together with a piece of string having a long end so that you may pull them out. Let this simmer for thirty-six hours.[1] Have ready also six roots of salsify; one-half pound of French beans; one-half pound of cooked peas; and one pound of potatoes, cut into slices. (All these vegetables should be cooked ready. It will improve matters if the peas are _very_ young and boiled in syrup.) Also two tomatoes sliced in halves, the meat of two rashers of bacon, and a few mushrooms, and half a dozen sprigs of parsley. (The bacon fat must be saved for rendering down.) Also two slices of bread half an inch thick. Have ready also a large pie dish half filled with water.

“Now take an earthenware frying pan with a white glazed lining. Put in sufficient frying fat to fill this to three-quarters of its depth when boiling. Set this on the fire and bring the fat to the boil. (Boiling fat will be absolutely still--stiller than any waters at even; as still as is Madame Sélysette when, in the same room, Gringoire is writing. It will have ceased to bubble, and, above its surface, will float a filmy wreath of bluish vapor. You may test it by dropping in a piece of bread crumb. If this becomes crisp in sixty seconds, your fat will be ready for what follows.)

“As soon as the fat boils, drop in your two slices of bread, which will be large enough later to support the _noisettes_ and which will be trimmed to improve their appearance. During that minute, place in a frying basket your two _noisettes_ of mutton and the sliced cold potatoes. (Gringoire likes his fried potatoes not too crisp. Those who like them biscuit-wise should fry them in the basket for a quarter of an hour longer than the mutton.) Take out from the frying fat the slices of bread, let them drip into the fat, place them handy on a clean plate ... _D--n it, that’s enough!_”

The reader will understand that at this point my friend Gringoire ceased dictating and ceased violently. Thus a Gringoire cookery book cannot be compiled. For, though Gringoire will cook for hours and hours if visitors are expected, and though he will talk, equally for hours and hours, about eating, about digestion, about French, Italian, and even German cookery as they affect the emotions, he finds it tiresome to tie down his mind to the recording of processes.

It is the same with gardening; the keeping of goats, ducks, chickens; the training of dogs, cats, and horses. He will spend hours in meditating over his onion bed.

And then Madame Sélysette will call from the bedroom window of the Gingerbread Cottage:

“I do _love_ to see you, Gringoire, pottering about and pretending to be busy.” For Gringoire will have risen at 6:30 and will have done something with hoes, spades, trowels, lines, and other paraphernalia. But he will have thought more. For the rotation of crops on a quarter of an acre of sandy soil that has to be at once a formal garden and the main food supply of a couple, of the tiniest income--that is a subject for endless thought.

It is a subject also for endless economies, schemes, calculations. The calculations concern manure--for the accounts of agriculture are the most complicated of accounts. You may show a loss on the fattening of an ox, a chicken, a goat, a duck, or a pig--and yet its droppings may so enrich your land as to give you actually a handsome balance of profit. Or again a crop may appear superabundant, little palatable, or unattractive--but, fed to one animal or another, it will beautifully adorn your board on Christmas day.

So in the Gingerbread Cottage--and it is, in all but looks, a very bad cottage, with a roof that leaks, walls that used to drip with damp, cupboards that, till the advent of Gringoire, smelled of mold and bred the very largest spiders that can be imagined--Gringoire pursues at once his economies, his meditations, and his career as a poet.

But he is only able to be communicative as to his meditations. If Madame Sélysette asks him how to make _potage_ this or that, he says: “Oh, throw in any old thing.” Or again! This spring the writer overheard the following dialogue between him and a small boy who was weeding whilst he dug.

“What is the most important thing in gardening, boy?”

“Manure, sir.”

“What is the next most important thing?”

“Tools, sir.”

“And the next?”

“Money to buy seeds, sir.”

“Wrong in every particular,” said Gringoire in a terrible voice. “The first thing is brains; and the second thing is brains; and the third thing is brains. Do you understand?”

The boy said, “Yes, sir.” But one may doubt if he was really much wiser. And Gringoire continued somewhat as follows: “I have no manure, no tools, and no money--but you will see in the autumn that I shall have the most productive garden in the country!”

From which it will appear that Gringoire has some of the characteristics of a Southern origin. Today his garden would not at all points impress a French gardener--but in some it would. For, in his youth Gringoire sat under the great Professor Gressent, Professor of the Potager Moderne, at the Sorbonne in Paris. From him he learned that thought, devotion to the task, and any bit of metal on the end of a stick shaped like a hoe will take the place of manure, tools, and money. For Professor Gressent, during one session, used to commence every lecture by ordering his pupils to inscribe on their tablets the mystical sentence: “_Trois fois biner vaut deux fois engraisser._”

And when his Boswell, the writer, asked him the other day how he got his results, he answered:

“By trying to establish what that old fool Tolstoi called the Kingdom of God within me!”

The writer took him to mean that it is the spirit in which a job is attacked that alone can sanctify the job--and that, in that way, the godly grow fat at the expense of the unrighteous. Before the war Gringoire was an ordinary poet, such as you might see in Soho or in various foreign underground haunts by the baker’s dozen, eating nasty meats, drinking nasty wines, usually in nasty company. How the war changed his heart is here recorded.

This is therefore a Reconstructionary Tale.

[Footnotes]

[1] This is the result of the Army. I do not believe that Gringoire ever simmers his bones for thirty-six hours. But in the Army it was woe to the Colonel whose bones did not simmer for thirty-six hours or who did not say so when an apoplectic gentleman with a blue hat-band came around. The Colonel would lose his battalion, his D.S.O., and the esteem of his fellow men.

II

_Gardens and Flats_

“I wonder,” Gringoire[2] began one evening, “if my experience of landscape during the war has been that of many people....”

It was an evening in spring. Gringoire had not been very long established in his cottage--which, because of the nature of the poet himself and of the poet’s adventurous establishment, the writer automatically styles in his mind the Gingerbread Cottage. Gringoire, with a spirit of hospitality that was large and open rather than either considered or calculating, had invited a party of London friends to share his Easter with him. During the day he rushed about a great deal, cooking highly flavored dishes of a ragout type, on paraffin stoves, washing up, sweeping, gardening, gathering unusual wild herbs for salads, so that he was busy, and we of the party saw little of him.

Fortunately it was fine. For at that date the Gingerbread Cottage let in water like a sieve through the roof, the floor, the rough walls. Great holes indeed gaped in the plaster of the ceilings. But he had whitewashed the walls, stuck pots on shelves, improvised a couch out of his camp bed, and lit fires of sticks in the sitting room. So in the evenings we sat and listened to his talking.

For Gringoire was a conversationalist. Like most dynamic, overwhelming, and energetic poets, he had not the patience to listen to the remarks of his fellows or to answer. He would be silent most of the day. But toward evening, as like as not, he would suddenly suspend all his activities, and with very possibly a hair-sieve or a trowel in his hand, gesticulating too, he would begin to talk.

As a house party the Easter experiment was not a success for all of us. Gringoire had hardened himself in Flanders; the rest had not. But since, as a byproduct of the experience, Madame Sélysette had consented to share and adorn his lot, Gringoire had his reward. And the writer secured these records of his monologues:

“I wonder,” then, he asked on one of these evenings, “if my experience of landscape during the war has been that of many people.” And without waiting he continued much as follows: “For I may say that before August, 1914, I lived more through my eyes than through any other sense, and in consequence certain corners of the earth had, singularly, the power to stir me.” But from the moment when, on the 4th of August, 1914, the Germans crossed the Belgian frontier “near a place called Gemmenich,” aspects of the earth no longer existed for him.

The earth existed, of course. Extending to immense distances of field-gray; dimly colored in singularly shaped masses, as if the colors on Mercator’s projection had been nearly washed out by a wet brush. Stretching away, very flat, silenced, in suspense, the earth--_orbis terrarum veteribus notus_--seemed to await the oncoming legions, gray too, but with the shimmer of gold standards that should pour out from that little gap, “near a place called Gemmenich,” and should obscure and put to shame all the green champaign lands of the world, as the green grass of meadows is put to shame and obscured by clay, water pouring through a gap in a dike. That was the earth.

There were no nooks, no little, sweet corners; there were no assured homes, countries, provinces, kingdoms, or races. All the earth held its breath and waited.

“And it is only today,” my friend went on, “that I see again a little nook of the earth; it forms the tiniest of hidden valleys, with a little red stream that buries itself in the red earth beneath the tall green of the grass and the pink and purple haze of campions, the occasional gold of buttercups, the cream of meadowsweet. The plants in the garden wave in stiffness like a battalion on parade--the platoons of lettuce, the headquarters’ staff, all sweet peas, and the color company, which is of scarlet runners. The little old cottage is under a cliff of rock, like a gingerbread house from a Grimm’s fairy tale; the silver birches and the tall pines confront it; the sunlight lies warmer than you could imagine in the hollow, and a nightingale is running in and out of the bean-stalks. Yes, a nightingale of midsummer that has abandoned the deep woodland and runs through the garden, a princess turned housekeeper, because it has young to feed. Think of noticing that!”

During the four years that the consciousness of the war lasted, he had noticed only four landscapes and birds only once--to know that he was noticing them--for themselves. Of course, one has memories of aspects of the world--but of a world that was only a background for emotions.

Even, for instance, when one saw poor Albert, by some trick of mnemonics, from the lettering of the huge word “Estaminet” across the front of a battered house in the Place where, in the blinding sunlight, some Australian transport men were watering their mules, and one recognized it for a place one had visited twenty years before and had forgotten--even when one saw the remains of the garden where, twenty years before, we had waited whilst our lunch of omelette, cutlets, and salad was prepared, or even when one saw the immense placard with “Caution” erected in the center of the white rubbish and white rubble of the Place, or the desecrated statue of the Madonna, leaning in an abandoned attitude from the church tower--even then one was so preoccupied, so shut in on one’s self, that these things were not objects that one looked at for themselves. They were merely landmarks. Divisional Headquarters, one had been told, was behind the N.E. corner of the Place, the notice-board was to the N.E. of one’s self, therefore one must pass it to reach Divisional Headquarters. It was Headquarters one wanted, not the storing of the mind with observed aspects.

So Gringoire had four landscapes, which represent four moments in four years when, for very short intervals, the strain of the war lifted itself from the mind. They were, those intermissions of the spirit, exactly like gazing through rifts in a mist. Do you know what it is to be on a Welsh mountain side when a heavy mist comes on? Nothing remains. You are there by yourself.... And the only preoccupation you have with the solid, invisible world is the boulders over which you stumble and the tufts of herbage that you try to recognize as your path. Then suddenly the mist is riven perpendicularly, and for a moment you see a pallid, flat plain stretching to infinity beneath your feet and running palely to a sea horizon on a level with your eyes. There will be pale churches, pale fields, and on a ghostly channel the wraiths of scattered islands. Then it will be all gone.

It was just so with the three or four landscapes that my friend saw during the war. There was the day in 1915 when Kensington Gardens suddenly grew visible. There were Guardsmen turning in fours, with some Guardee form of drill that is not usual to the Infantry. There were motor transport wagons going cautiously down the Broad Walk--parts of the familiar train of the war. And then, suddenly, there were great motionless trees, heavy in their summer foliage, blue-gray, beneath a very high sky; there was the long, quiet part of the palace; the red brick, glowing in the sun, the shadows of the windows very precise and blue. And Gringoire thought that old, stiff marionettes, rather homely courtiers and royalties, might step out of the tall windows onto the lawns and, holding tasseled canes to their lips, bow, pirouette and make legs, till the long chestnut wigs brushed the stiff rosebushes. Not _very_ gallant; not _very_ royal. No Rois Soleils or Princesses Lointaines but a Court nevertheless, whispering mercilessly, intriguing, smiling, betraying, much as in Versailles, only a little more rustically, in front of the old, homely Dutch orangery.

Then the curtain closed again; the weight once more settled down. The trees again became the foreground and there was the feeling that Gringoire could never get away from--that they would be personally humiliated, shamed, abashed; as if they would wrathfully bow or avert their heads if ever field-gray troops passed down the Broad Walk, or the park keeper at the gates wore a Uhlan uniform! That was in the early days of the war--August, 1915, I think. The feeling that there might be an invasion was still, and was strong, in the air. There was no knowing, still, where the dam might give way and the mud-colored tide pour toward us. And somehow Gringoire figured it coming from the W. by S.W. from the direction of Kew and Fulham: high, gray, reaching from the legions on the ground to the gray airships towering on high--a solid, perpendicular wave of humiliation like the tidal wave of which one reads--of humiliation for the trees and the very grass.

“I wonder,” Gringoire asked again that evening, “if other people had, like myself, that feeling that what one feared for was the land--not the people but the menaced earth with its familiar aspect. And I wonder why one had the feeling. I dare say it was just want of imagination: one couldn’t perhaps figure the feelings of ruined, fleeing and martyred populations. And yet, when I had seen enough of those, the feeling did not alter. I remember that what struck me most in ruined Pont de Nieppe, by Armentières, was still the feeling of abashment that seemed to attach to furniture and wall-paper exposed to the sky--not the sufferings of the civilian population, who seemed to be jolly enough--or at any rate sufficiently nonchalant--with booths erected under ruined walls or in still whole cottages, selling fried fish to the tanneries. No! what struck me as infinitely pathetic was lace curtains: for there were innumerable lace curtains, that had shaded vanished windows, fluttering from all the unroofed walls in the glassless window-frames. They seemed to me to be more forlornly ashamed than any human beings I have ever seen. Only brute beasts ever approach that: old and weary horses, in nettle-grown fields; or dogs when they go away into bushes to die.”

He went on to say that perhaps prisoners of war had it too. The Germans certainly seemed to. But he had, naturally, never seen any of our own people in that condition. They are represented to us as remaining erect and keeping most of their _esprit de corps_. That may be why, in August, 1915, it was difficult to think of the sufferings of our possibly invaded peoples but only of the humiliation of desecrated herbage and downlands.

“I don’t know.” And Gringoire meditated as if neither I nor Mme. Sélysette were in the room. “Perhaps I am lacking in human sympathy or have no particular cause to love my fellow men. But at any rate, at that moment, the feeling of dread that those gray-blue, motionless trees under the high sky might, under heavens more lowering, feel that final humiliation--that feeling was so strong that I remember it still as a pain. Nay, in the remembrance, I feel it so strongly that it is still a pain, like that of an old, deep cicatrized wound. For of course, it would have connoted that the broad and the small fields, copses, spinneys, streams, and heaths, stretching away to the quiet downs and the ultimate sea, would have felt that tread of mailed and alien heels.” He remembered looking up to the sky in an agony. And then he became again interested in the Guards at drill beneath the trees--whose dressing never altered. Why did they turn in fours at the command “Left turn” when they were in column of route? Why didn’t they form two deep? They were not doing sentry drill or any form of ceremonial that the ordinary Infantry practice. The command was not: “In fours: left turn.”

So the workaday frame of mind came back--and we carried on.

On hearing of the death of Lord Kitchener, he had another short moment. “I don’t know,” he wrote this in a letter, “whether the news had anything to do with it. I suppose it had. I will tell you. I was being motored to Dunmow Station, and when the car arrived at that little shanty, the stationmaster, whom I remember as quite an old man, came to the car-stop and just said: ‘Lord Kitchener has been drowned.’ He appeared quite expressionless, and I remember that both my companion and I laughed. I should say that I even laughed loudly. In those days and frames of mind, one reached, as it were, down to jokes obtaining only amongst rather simple people--and the joke underlying the idea of the drowning at sea of a man so supported by a whole land might have been quite ingenious in idea--like some joke of the reign of Queen Anne involving the raising of the sea above the dome of St. Paul’s.

“But he succeeded in assuring us that Lord Kitchener had been drowned. ‘The Field Marshal Commanding in Chief had been last seen on the nearly vertical deck, following a member of his staff.’--A good death for the man who had saved his land--and Europe.

“For speaking not as an expert speaks but still as a student of the temper of war and the _moral_ of what in the Army is called ‘the men’ I have no hesitation in saying--and I don’t apologize for saying here--that without the figure of Lord Kitchener the British Army would have remained negligible in numbers and would have taken a very small part in the war. And I suppose that, without the British Army, the war could hardly have been maintained to a successful conclusion.”

At any rate, that was the way in which it appeared to Gringoire with a mind suddenly jumped into attending to this shocking fact from the designing of an aiming card for the Ross Rifle. For in those days it was his province to instruct in the use of that weapon nine hundred returned British Expeditionary Force, all time-serving men, and in consequence the toughest customers you could imagine. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine them.

They had every guile from a military point of view. They were adepts in absences, swingings of the lead, drunks, excuses, barrack-breakings, cheerful lies, and a desperate determination not to exhibit any glimmerings of intelligence, let alone any proficiency, in the use of any kind of weapon, let alone the Ross Rifle, which was a gimcrack concern at the best, with aperture sights and fittings like watch springs and innumerable ways of being put out of order. And you could put your nose in half and get yet another month in hospital as easy as winking by pulling back the bolt in any sort of rapid practice.

They lived--these desperadoes--in a tumble-down skating rink, and they exercised amongst the backyards and dust-bins of a great city, and such was the moral atmosphere of the shadowy and stifling vault in which this kind of khaki lived that when, at Easter, Gringoire proposed to bring in a priest to hear the confessions of the Roman Catholics with more convenience to them, the men sent three R.C. sergeants as a deputation to him. They said the rink was not a fitting place for a priest to see. And every one of them promised to walk three miles to confession and to perform all his Easter duties faithfully sooner than that a priest should see them as they lived.

A great cavern of a place that was, laid out in stalls like a cattle market, where the officers labored intolerably filling up innumerable forms with an immense sense of pressure and of striving with tough men. A great sense of pressure. And he would walk up and down in front of the worst-dressed line that had ever been imagined--a fantastic line, for not one of the nine hundred professed to be able to stand straight on his legs--and Gringoire would exclaim gloomily and in alternation: “Thank God we’ve got a Navy” or: “Lord Kitchener says the war’s going to last another three years; hang me if you blighters will wangle out of going back to France.” Whereupon there would be groans down the line and a near-drunk man would whisper: “Good ol’ Kitchener!”

It was out of that horseshoe-cavern of gloom in whose shafts of vaporous and disinfectant-colored lights moved these troublesome green-brown shapes that he had come for a very brief period of leave in a world that, again, included lawns, afternoon teas, standard roses, tall rooms, servants--not batmen, but with caps and aprons--pianolas--and no one, really, to clean one’s belt; as well as discussions of that higher, wilder, finer strategy, in which, in one’s capacity of a more or less professional student of tactics, one was so decidedly at a loss. Or perhaps it wasn’t immediately from the cavern that he had come; perhaps it was from the Chelsea Course. But there, amongst the Guards, the Kitchener “note” rang truer and cleaner and more insistently. And at any rate, he was certainly going back to that atmosphere of strain and rush; into the desperate effort to teach thousands and thousands bayonet fighting, gas tactics, measures against venereal disease, sentry drill, dugout building, why they were going to fight, how to manufacture grenades out of jam-tins, the history of the regiment, and _esprit de corps_--and doing it all in desperate and bewildered haste, with the aid of sacks, hairpins, can-openers and Japanese rifles with the wrong sort of bayonets, under the auspices of an orderly room driven mad by endless reproofs from brigades, divisions, the War Office, the civilian police, Boards of Agriculture, county asylums, parents whose sons had enlisted too young, and young women who had married privates too often married already.... But coming from it or not, Gringoire was certainly going back to it and, in its desperate and fleeting atmosphere, the idea of Lord Kitchener was the one solid thing onto which our poor poet could catch.

So the stationmaster made it plain that Lord Kitchener was dead.

It was just one of those situations in which one thinks nothing--a change in the beat of the clock. Gringoire was sitting in the little open shed of a waiting-room, the only idea present in his mind being that his crossed legs were stuck stiffly out in front of him, their weight upon his left heel and both hands in his breeches pockets. Nothing whatever! Absolutely nothing! No war: an empty mind; a little open shed with benches; a hatchway in one plank wall where they served out tickets; a bit of platform; a high, brick signal-box with clocks or things ticking; a brick house, no doubt the stationmaster’s.... The whole world, that was! And noiseless; and immobile. There was no France on the horizon; no English Channel. There was no awaiting of Zeppelins; there was no Right or Wrong.

And so the veil lifted for a second. The flat lands of Essex were there, stretching out; flat fields; undistinguished beneath a dull sky. He speculated on the crops; on the labor it took to the acre to put in those cabbages; on the winds that must sweep across the comparatively hedgeless spaces. The ground looked like a good clay. Plenty of heart in it, no doubt they would say in auctioneer’s advertisements. But, on the whole, an unsmiling, foreign land. Not Kent or Sussex, but “the Sheeres.” If one settled down here, one wouldn’t know the postman, the tax collector, the old standers, the way they trimmed the hedge rows, the habits of the soil, or the course of the months, the brooks, the birds, the breed of sheep, the gossip, the local history--or the dead. A friendless, foreign country, the Essex Flats....

And the southeastern saying came up into Gringoire’s mind: “You see yon man: he cooms from Sussex. He sucked in silliness with his mother’s milk and ’s been silly ever since. But never you trust a man from the Sheeres!”... It is Kent and Sussex against the world--just as no doubt it is Essex and Hertford; and Somerset and Devon; the North and East Riding and Durham and Cumberland and Denbigh and Flint, against the world--and it’s _never_ safe to put long straw under potatoes when you dig them in, trusting to the wet to rot it. At that point Gringoire remembered in 1899 buying some special seed, called, I think, “1900,” out of compliment to the coming century. He paid a big price; one hundred twenty shillings the hundredweight, I think. And he dunged them beautifully with rather long straw and artificial manure. But a long, long dry season came, and the Kentish land sloped to the south, and the straw dried, and the artificial manure never soaked down. He didn’t get a quarter of a ton to the quarter acre.

On the other hand, under maize, if you can water heavily once or twice, long straw arranged in trenches, like pipes, is rather a good wheeze. It holds the water to the roots and maize will do with a topsoil like fire if the roots are cool. In 1899 Gringoire got some wonderful ears of sweet corn. And, toasted on the cob and buttered after toasting...!

He changed heels under the puttees and considered his garden in Kent. He was going to try growing potatoes from seeds--not from seed-potatoes, but from the little seeds that form in the green berries. And he was going to put a light, whitewashed paling behind the sweet corn, on the north--to reflect the rays of the sun. It should ripen the cob three weeks earlier!...

The Essex flats became again, slowly, visible land, planted with war-food. An airplane was going toward Bishop Stortford; the train was overdue because a unit was entraining up the line--once again every fact in the world was just a part, just a side light of the immense problem. Once again nothing existed just for itself. Trains were carriers of men and munitions. Stretched-out legs were encased in puttees, put in military boots; servant girls travelling with horn-handled black umbrellas and elastic boots were going to see their boys off at Waterloo; old farmers with white side whiskers were explaining why they had kept all six sons at home--in defiance of the gaze of Lord Kitchener that looked at them six times in that wee small station. And railway fares were going to be increased for civilians!

I have little doubt that what, at that moment and for that minute space of time, had set our poet intent on planting potatoes and seed corn--perfectly certain that he was going straight down into Kent to plant potatoes in rows and sweet corn in hills--was that his unconscious mind was certain that the war was done and over with that death in the North Sea. I do not mean to say that he thought it--or even that he was conscious that something inside thought it for him. His surface-mind thought certainly of Essex, of Kent and Sussex; the subconscious mind seemed to be aware that his puttees were badly put on, that he had mislaid his warrant in one of several pockets--he had a vague consciousness of South Wales, blue mountains, like Japanese clouds. But some deeper center still was probably appalled and benumbed and was saying:

“Now the war is finished and lost. Now, ‘_appry la gair finny_’ as the Tommies say, _je vais planter mes choux comme un maître d’école_.” There seemed to be nothing left but to plant out a kitchen garden.

[Footnotes]

[2] “Gringoire.” This is not of course, our poet’s name, but a nickname earned actually at school. There is a story by Alphonse Daudet, in “Lettres de Mon Moulin,” called the “Chèvre de M. Séguin,” which relates how in the end the wolf ate Mr. Séguin’s goat. This story, in the form of a letter, is addressed to a poet, one Gringoire, and is meant to show that though a poet may struggle all his life against poverty, in the end the wolf, starvation, will get him. At Gringoire’s school the Sixth Form were studying French from the “Lettres de Mon Moulin,” and since even at that date Gringoire wrote poems, his kindly schoolmates learned the name and so bestowed it upon him--as it has been bestowed on many out-at-elbowed literati.

III

_Blue of Swallows’ Backs_

Well, by the evening of his next monologue, Gringoire had planted out his kitchen garden; the onions, the lettuces, the carrots, the kohl-rabi, the spinach were aligned; that battalion was parading in full strength. Moreover, in a bed from which he had just removed spinach and onions, there were twenty little potato plants, grown from little seeds: under a twenty-foot quick-set hedge, beautiful and close like a wall, the sweet corn was already up to the hips. The long straws, like pipes, ran in a trench under the corn hills; the deluge of water, warmed because it comes from a dip on which the sun blazes all day, washed the deep roots; the nightingale was running in and out of the beanstalks; the swallows were throwing themselves through the air; over the low brick the sun was setting on the longest day of the year, and, D.S.G., the war was over and done. No longer D.H.Q., Bn.H.Q., M.L.E., T.M.B.--but just D.S.G.! To God alone be the glory in the quiet garden evening.

“I will tell you a curious thing,” said Gringoire in June, “but in gardens amongst woods, beside streams, there are so many curious things to tell of that I don’t know where to begin! I am like a child with the largest coin it has ever possessed outside a hundred entrancing shops. I began talking the other day with the idea of describing four landscapes--the great guns from Portsmouth now remind me, though I have written of only two, of yet a fifth.”

We--Gringoire and the writer--had been for a slow walk, round three sides of a patch of heath. A man, leaning over a white gate, with a thin, red face, a blue suit and some very bright regimental tie, just said: “The telegram’s up in the post office. It’s official!” And, speaking of it that evening in the warmth of the garden beside the hammock of Mme. Sélysette, Gringoire said:

“I assure you, on my honor, that the whole landscape, the commonplace, friendly landscape of elms, rather backward wheat, heather, gorse, and park-wall suddenly changed. It was as if the focus of the camera had suddenly clicked, readjusted itself--as if it grew--though before one hadn’t known it for anything but all that was possible of tranquillity, breadth, security, and peace--grew quieter, calmer, broader, more utterly secure and inviolable. English country!

“I don’t know: there’s nothing to it, really. A spray of dog-roses; a whitethroat dropping over the hedge; some gorse; the long, rolling land; the high skies and clouds above the downs.... Well, it is one stage more toward a forever of security, of that being forever inviolable that one prays may be its portion. A great stage forward.”

For coming home and sitting behind irregular, all but too old lattice, giving onto a deep wall of verdure, we had heard suddenly the heavy guns through the voices of birds.... And Gringoire said later that, at the sound of those distant guns through the overwhelming orchestra of birds, he had seen distinctly, against the warm brick of the house-wall, a tin hat.... But many tin hats dim in the blue-gray light, and a lot of Scotch Jocks, their kilts covered with khaki aprons, and an immense long train with innumerable shapes dropping out of it, their cries muted by the twilight: the crunch of feet on the gravel, before the tin sheds of the station. That had been Railhead behind the Somme. And then suddenly you were conscious of the innumerable voices of birds singing the sun down. And then through them the uninterrupted heavy discourse of the great guns at a distance came over the little hills and darkling trees of that downland country. It continued.... Incessant, engrossed, almost as it were tranquil, almost like the bubbling of water in a pot, boiling up, dying down, going on and on, not penetrating but enveloping the cries of Tommy to Tommy or of footsteps to footsteps--and, rising through it, as if lances of sound were protruding upward through something soft and vaporous, the voices of thrushes. A great many thrushes: and the down getting whiter; and the “Fall In There’s” and the men moving off ...

So that he said he half wished the Portsmouth guns would stop--five-point nines; ninety-eight pounders; fifteen-inch guns--whatever they are. One doesn’t want to hear them again, or again to feel them--dully on the air. Not at any rate in peace time.

The nightingale amongst the bean-stalks; the thrushes in the shaw on the opposite hillsides; the swallows throwing themselves through the air! He did not remember any nightingale during the war; but he remembered those thrushes of Rébimont-Méricourt on a date in July ’16. And he remembered some swallows--an immense sea of the blue of swallows’ backs. And he said that the Portsmouth guns of the 28/6/’19 sounding through the birds’ voices from the hill opposite the Gingerbread Cottage brought it all back. Poets are like that and have these visions.

It sounds, of course, queer--but it was like that. Up on a hillside that was covered mostly with thistles there was an Artillery Observation Post which consisted of a Lombardy poplar--though one did not see how the gunners got up it. At any rate, there was a pile of dud Hun shells on the roadside bank at the foot of the tree and beneath the O.P. was a pretty rotten dugout with a corrugated iron roof. The Battalion Trench Mortar officer lived there. Below him he had a view of a battery of French 75’s, of the chalky line of trenches; Martinpuich looked down on him, which wasn’t overly comfortable, and the Ancre wound away--to No Man’s Land. From time to time a field-gun wheel going along the road would catch its spokes in the corrugated iron of his roof--lift a corner and drop it again. I don’t know why the Trench Mortar officer lived in that dugout, but a gunwheel lifted his roof and dropped it again whilst Gringoire was dozing in it. He thought the bottom of hell had dropped out. It was his worst shock of the war. I shouldn’t wonder if it were not the worst shock any one ever had between the 4/8/’14 and the 28/6/’19. He mentioned it, he said, because it probably accounted for his immediately subsequent exultation; it was, I suppose, so good to be just alive after that.

At any rate, after the Trench Mortar officer had come in--Gringoire had been waiting to give him a message--downhill through the thistles, dusty in the hot sunlight, Gringoire went with immense, joyful strides. He said that he was extraordinarily fit in those days! And an innumerable company of swallows flew round him, waist high, just brushing the thistledown. “They were so near,” Gringoire said, “that they brushed my hands, and they extended so far that I could see nothing else. It is one of the five things of the war that I really see, for it was like walking, buoyantly, in the pellucid sunlight, waist-high through a sea of unsurpassed and unsurpassable azure. I felt as if I were a Greek god. It was like a miracle.

“Now, I see swallows from below, their rust-stained breasts against high, blotted, gray clouds--and I wonder if they are thinking of the near rising mayfly. I remember thinking on the other occasion that there were a good many dead amongst the thistles and that I must be putting up a huge number of flies. But that, again, was the thought of my subconscious mind. On the surface I just felt myself to be a Greek god, immortal, young forever, forever buoyant, amongst the eddies of a dark blue and eternal sea.”

The feeling lasted until he got to the mule-lines of somebody’s First Line Transport, where he borrowed a terrible old brute of a horse, to take him to Divisional H.Q.

It would be interesting to know what that class of feeling comes from--possibly from some sort of atavistic throwback to days when the gods were nearer. You get them now and again in action--but not so often as you get the reverse type of feeling when you are engaged in agriculture. That is perhaps why farmers are so often passionately disagreeable and apparently unreasonable men. For there is nothing that so much resembles contact with, wrestling with, a personal devil as to awaken one morning and to find that a whole crop of seedlings has vanished before myriads of slugs. That happens. If you don’t believe it, read White’s “Selborne.” It is loss, ruin perhaps. It is like a death: a profound and unforeseen disaster. And your mind personifies the slug as intelligent, malignant, a being with a will for evil directed against you in person. I think that, whilst it lasts, it is the worst feeling in the world.

Drought is nearly as bad.

IV

_The Kingdoms of the Earth_

It was after Gringoire had speculated on slugs, without, you will observe, suggesting a remedy, that he continued:

“I have given you, so far, three of the landscapes that remain real to me--for the detraining in the dawn at Rébimont-Méricourt is not one of those that are just always in my mind. I have to remember back to--to be reminded of it. It was the sounds of Peace Guns pierced by the multitudinous voices of thrushes that brought back to me that first-heard, unintermittent thudding and throb of the engines of war through which, like spears, thrust the voices of innumerable birds. But, just, I suppose, because one’s mind was preoccupied with the job of seeing that one’s valise was all right, that the men had all their kit and equipment at least potentially there--and no doubt with the job of seeing to it that one’s composure appeared absolute--one recorded less of visible objects, so that fewer visible objects return, and they return less vividly.”

He remembered--and he knew that he remembered, accurately and exactly--every detail of Kensington Gardens on that day of August, 1915; of the Essex Railway Station he said that he could tell you what advertisements were on the walls and how many people awaited the train as well as every word of the conversation he had had whilst driving to the station. And he remembered with an extreme clearness, as in the little paintings of Van Eyck on the Chasse de Ste. Ursule at Brûges, the swallows and the thistles of the ridge going down in the clear July weather behind Bécourt Wood in 1916. He had a job then, it is true--but not one calling for any immediate or complicated action. Besides, at that moment he had felt himself to be immune from danger and proof against death. So that those three landscapes became part of his immediate self.

“They will probably remain part of myself to the end of my life: my grandchildren will probably be tired of them and, when I am quite aged, so probably will guests and casual strangers.” But--did you ever take a walking tour, or just a long walk and, in bed at the end of the day, perhaps in order to put yourself to sleep, did you ever try to remember every inch of the roads you had covered? Gringoire claimed that in that way he could remember a great many of the roads both of England and France of his boyhood when one walked or cycled a good deal for walking or cycling’s sake. Corners of roads, bridges, highways climbing over the forehead of downs--the road out of Bridport, down into Winchester, from Minehead to Lynton; from Calais over the flats to Arras, from Arras to Beauvais; from Blois to Tours; from Amiens to Albert in 1892.... By shutting his eyes, or by looking at something blank, like a sheet of paper, or by not really looking at anything at all, he could, he said, evoke a panorama of any of those roads, or say from the North Foreland to Land’s End. Perhaps he couldn’t really, but he could have a pretty good try and get a lot right. “Well, in that way, I can evoke most of the roads ’round Albert, or Locre and the base of the Salient, or Bailleul, or Steenewerck, or Armentières; and plenty of other places of the Lines of Communication like Hazebrouck and Abbéville and St. Omer. But I daresay I should get some of it incorrect.”

For instance, as to the detraining at Railhead in that dawn: he had distinctly the feeling that there was a woody, dark bank and a plantation of trees in which the thrushes sang, right up against the flat of the line. There wasn’t really. He found later, on coming out of Corbie and there entraining to rejoin his battalion, that there were only high elms against flat, champaign country with a muddy stream. However, there was a high farm-building just behind the elms, so, no doubt, the effect on the inattentive eye was that. And the thrushes had certainly sung.

But he could evoke the rest of the road to the front line fairly well. On the right of the station, in the elms, was a brown Y.M.C.A. hut, where the officers got very greasy bread and rather black fried eggs and coffee. There were innumerable, old, dog’s-eared magazines on the mess tables in amongst the breakfast utensils. Twenty or thirty numbers of the “English Review,” like the dominoes, of a date when our writer used to own that periodical. It seemed an odd thing to see; an odd, queer thing to have owned. Near--too near--the hut were the men’s latrines; a little further, the officers’. On the left, then, as the Draft passed, was the station. A very fat old gendarme was standing, well back on his heels, his legs wide apart; about him were four market women, with bundles, and baskets containing fowls. They were grouped around the gendarme like pullets around chanticleer, as he watched the sunrise. A lot of Royal Field Artillery horses and riders came over the dust into the station yard; a company of Jocks was waiting outside the office of the Railway Transport Officer. The ground was soft dust, so that the reinforcement might have been marching in sandals.

They continued their march parallel with the railway line, along a soft road, beside the little stream, between osier-bushes and elms--for about fifty yards. There were some stray mules belonging to a Kitchener’s battalion, Wiltshires or Cheshires--Nineteenth Division anyhow. There didn’t appear to be any drivers. There was a good deal of shouting; the Draft about-turned. The guide was taking them wrong. But who ever knew a guide take any one right anywhere? It was rather like a dream--not at all a bad dream--but, anyhow, a numbness.

Or no: really it was more like being in the hands of doctors, on the way to an operation. Probably the anaesthetic would be all right; it wouldn’t hurt. At any rate, we had no volition; one’s feet moved; one’s haversack was a bit heavy--not very. One went on, one didn’t know where.

In the same way you may remember the anteroom of your dentist. There is a big table in the center of the room; on the table some writing materials--and old periodicals, like the “English Reviews” amongst the solid Y.M.C.A. cups and plates.... But, on the one hand there is, solid and real, say, Mandeville Place: taxis drive about in it; the faces of the houses are of black-gray Portland cement, imitating granite. The street, then, is real: and the operating room will soon feel as real, even while one is waiting in the outer room. But the anteroom itself is a dream-landscape.

So it was with the Rébimont-Méricourt road.

When you come out of the station yard, on the right there is a high, white-walled, tile-roofed estaminet-farm. Australian First Line Transport men were watering their mules there, lounging on the steps with their tunics off. The road began to mount; on the left, on top of a high bank was an orchard. It reminded our poet of the nutwalk, on a high bank, belonging to a certain farm in Kent--at the bottom of Aldington Knoll, where the marsh begins. Mounting the slope, on the right, he came to a closed, empty, butcher’s shop. A superior butcher’s shop with grilles, green paint, gone of course dusty, marble slabs, and a gilded copper sign.

The road opened out suddenly. It was a dusty expanse between houses: in England it would have been a village green. There were house walls, windows, archways in the dusty white plaster, giving onto farmyards or stables. Two men were harnessing a black mare into a hooded, two-wheeled, dusty cart. Four black Percheron stallions were standing in a string in front of a long cottage. “They reminded me,” Gringoire said, “of four black stallions I had seen, years before, outside the blacksmith’s at Beaumont-le-Roger. In those days it had seemed to be odd that stallions could be left unattended in a village-street. But in 1916, I was used to that idea; what intrigued me, then, was that any civilian should have four stallions at his disposal. For they certainly were not French cavalry, or divisional or other transport.”