Chapter III: Part ONE: Four Landscapes (2)

The civilians seemed extraordinarily--not unreal--but, as it were, super-real! North French peasants, slow, ungainly, with heavy legs and feet. They were just the peasants one had always seen; hard, like granite--not comparatively soft and comparatively gray, like our own old peasants, who, when they look hard have the aspect not of wrinkled stone but of old, crannied, oak-tree boles. It was Sussex downland, that country--but like the people, harder, unsmiling.

To the left of the Place--if you can call a flat space of dust a Place--there was a narrow street, high, mud walls; archways, semi-circular topped, gray wooden doors. On one of these was nailed a large white placard: headquarters of the 4th Army Veterinary Corps. (I hope this is no longer a staff secret.) The reinforcement had to drop some men of the Draft they had brought out--men for the poor 38th Division that was to be wiped out in Mametz Wood--at some other sort of headquarters at the end of the street; that was why some of us penetrated it. Yes: it was very narrow and high-walled--more Wiltshire than Sussex! There must have been vegetation on the top of some of the mud-walls. Opposite the Farriers’ H.Q. there was a little, thatched, sweet-shop sort of a place, and irises were growing on the thatch. I daresay they would not be there in peace time: you would say it was more Irish than French.

In the sweet-shop they sold dates, clay pipes, picture postcards with English regimental badges, picture postcards with views of Albert and the toppling Madonna; silk-worked postcards of bright reds, whites, and bright blues, and postcards showing smiling ladies dusted with spangles. The women behind the low counter were very unreal: a motionless old witch with black eyes, a brown face, and dead white, parted hair; she stood, and only her eyes moved, and she appeared, not malignant, but grotesquely like a brown wooden image with moving eyes; an untidy dark girl, without even looking at us or at a perplexed Tommy who was pricing postcards, stood, her face sideways and repeated: “Ten ... a penny: ten ... a penny”--patiently, and as if from a great distance. She said: “Ten” very fast, then paused and added “a penny” slowly and as if with boredom. The Tommy grasped ten postcards and held out a penny, but she continued to say: “Ten ... a penny, ten ... a penny,” without either movement or expression.

“So I could continue,” our poet went on, “to recall this itinerary, for many pages and for many hours: past the farm on the right, with the great dung heap, past the pond overshadowed by crab-apples; past another crossroads on the right, where, at a tent, facing a great, dull-brick aggregation of ruins, rafters, and fallen chimneys, which was once a sugar factory--the timekeeper’s office and the iron gates were still intact--we delivered up the remaining other Ranks of the Draft and went on, up the bare downland road, officers only, between the bearded wheat on the left and the immense field of thin oats to the right--upward to the Officers’ Distributing Center; tents just put up that day, on a bare, downland field, very white and with the long down-grass still untramped in their interiors....

“Yes, I could keep it up for many of your pages and for many hours,” Gringoire said, “but I am not so much concerned to describe these landscapes, or to prove the quality of my memory, as to establish the psychological facts about the other four landscapes.” He had just gone back into memory, without any particular effort--without indeed any effort at all, and the roads were there, like a string unwinding from a ball. His eyes must have been at work but not his registering brain. The mind was working otherwise.

“I have purposely omitted to mention,” he said later, “that, all the way, on all the roads, proceeding generally with caution because of the worn _pavés_, but sometimes getting a swift run for a couple of hundred or so of yards, sometimes one at a time, sometimes four together, at times in as thick a stream as motor traffic in Piccadilly--the ambulances passed us, on the left.”

That was a detail of the mind rather than of the eyes. Gringoire knew in 1919 that they were there, because he remembered that several of the officers had to count them for a time. But they appeared to be rather symbols than concrete objects. They stood for BLIGHTIES--going home! They were part of what made the skin of the forehead over the eyes feel always a little drawn, part of the preoccupation that, always, turned one’s thoughts inward. I don’t suppose it was fear--or perhaps that is how fear really manifests itself.

Here, then, is another landscape. It was up at the Officers’ Distributing Center. Or perhaps it wasn’t officially called that, though that was what it was. It may have been an Officers’ Rest Camp--which it certainly was not. At any rate, there it was on an open, sloping downland field--seven new tents pitched, two more being pitched: cook-houses, wash-houses, latrines, batmen’s quarters, and the rest of it, down to the incinerator, were all, also, in process of being erected. The Senior Officer in charge of our party interviewed the Camp Commandant and the officers sprawled about on the bare hillside with the downland winds running over the grasses just as they do in Sussex on a cloudless day.

“I have always thought,” Gringoire said, “ever since I was a small boy and used to ride on the downs behind Folkestone that the sun has a peculiar quality in the sky over downlands, as if chalk dust in the air whitened the rays. But that is probably nonsense.” Anyhow, the field sloped downwards; there was a white cart--or plow--track; then up went a great shoulder of the downs in a field all purple sections. I suppose cultivation for the time ended in the huge field of thin oats between the camp and the destroyed sugar factory. There was a very old man in a short blue blouse, with immensely long bow-legs--doing something with a scythe. It didn’t appear to be mowing.

The down rising over against them appeared--so unable is the eye to measure these swelling distances--quite a small affair. But, halfway up it, seeming to tight-rope along a white thread, with an extreme slowness in passing from point to point, went transport wagons, incredibly tiny. So it was an immense, august, shoulder. A near-mountain!

Gringoire said he could not just remember where the sun was: he ought to be able to work it out by the place and time. But I daresay it doesn’t really matter. At any rate, over the shoulder of the down--not in the least like a moon or an astral body but illuminated by the sun--silver and French gray, very slowly, a great body began to rise. One hadn’t much--one hadn’t indeed any--sense of proportion. It seemed immense--and alive as mushrooms are alive. Then, induced as the eye was to look into the pellucid sky, there became visible a number--some one counted fourteen--of tiny, shining globes. They appeared to be globes, because there was a fresh wind blowing straight from them and they turned end on. So, but slowly and incessantly heaving, did the immense one close at hand; a spider’s network of cordage went with its movements. Tiny and incredibly pretty, like films of gold dust floating in blue water and like peach blossom leaves--yes, incredibly pretty in the sunlight--airplanes were there. Because the--just as pretty--little mushrooms that existed suddenly in the sky, beside the sunlit dragonflies and peach blossoms, were pearly white, one officer said:

“Hun planes!”

The German shrapnel made black bursts. The officers were lounging in a group of six or seven. Another said: “_Their_ sausages too ... Out there! Fourteen!”

The slow ascent of our own sausage took the mind into the sky. A broad-faced, slow, brown, very sympathetic young officer--he had a rich voice, a slight stutter, and one eye that frequently winked--said:

“He showed Him the Kingdoms of the Earth.” Then: “From a high place, you know, old dear,” he explained, rather apologetically to Gringoire. “His career,” Gringoire said, “was constantly interlaced with mine; in the stream that carried us along, we bobbed together--at Cardiff, in Rouen twice on June afternoons, and even after the Armistice, once in Coventry Street, and once in York. Yet, though we were quite intimate, he calling me ‘Old Dear,’ or ‘Old Preserved Equanimity,’ as my last Colonel nicknamed me, and though I called him ‘Old Dear,’ and later, as the fashion became, ‘Old Bean,’ I never knew his name. He would be there, in Orderly Room, in an officers’ club armchair, at mess, dropping usually some single, rather apposite, slightly literary remark--with just the trace of a stutter and always in an extraordinarily sympathetic voice--a deep, modest, affecting being.... I wish I knew who he was--but I suppose I never shall.

“He sh-showed Him the Kingdoms of th-the Earth,” this officer said--and his voice just seemed homelike.

Some one else said, “Let’s go up that mountain,” in the true Welsh tone and accent, and several: “Yes, yes, let’s.... Surely we’d see everything.... Surely to goodness, let’s not miss it....”

And they figured to themselves a glorious run down, and a glorious run up, the shoulder and then a great, flat gray view--of everything, and of all who mattered--of the Kingdoms of the Earth. But the usual voice--Conscience, Caution, Fear of Broad Views, maybe said: “We’d have to get leave.... The Camp Commandant, you know.... Eh, what, you fellows?...”

The Camp Commandant, a small, extraordinarily excited Highlander, voiceless with gas and gesticulating because of shell-shock--threw papers about, threw off his Glengarry cap, shrieked, wheezed, croaked. “I knew him quite well,” Gringoire said, “and, since he once hauled me out of bed at four o’clock of a freezing morning because some sort of Scots Brigadier wanted some one to play ‘Annie Laurie’ and the ‘Banks of Loch Lomond’ to forty drunken Scots officers in another hut, I permit myself to talk of him as he was, capless, exacerbated, grasping a telephone and throwing things about.”

He didn’t know whether he could or could not give them leave to go up the brae; he didn’t care if they went and drowned themselves. Couldn’t they see he’d only been there forty meen-its and there were two hundred contradictory memoranda awaiting him? And oh to hell, and oh to hell....

They loafed once more; they fell back into that eternal “waiting to report” that takes up 112/113ths of one’s time during war. They contemplated and made remarks about the veering of the sausage.

It was then that Gringoire related a psychological anecdote that gives the note of this book. “I suppose it was my friend’s sympathetic and suggestive voice that did it ... for I suddenly began to see bits of a landscape that has pursued me ever since--until now here I sit in it. Not quite a landscape; a nook, rather; the full extent of the view about one hundred seventy yards by two hundred seventy--the closed up end of a valley; closed up by trees--willows, silver birches, oaks, and Scotch pines; deep, among banks; with a little stream, just a trickle, level with the grass of the bottom. You understand the idea--a sanctuary.”

There were, in those days, you will remember, no more sanctuaries. All nooks of the world were threatened by the tide of blue-gray mud. We were out there to hold it back on the Somme. But could we?

So that was a little nook, sanctuary; where you said “Feignits” to destiny--with a gingerbread cottage out of Grimm. You were a Haensel, holding some Gretel’s hand, tiptoeing, whispering, craning forward the neck.... A castle in Spain in fact, only that it was in a southern country--the English country.

“I ask to be believed in what I am now saying,” Gringoire uttered the words slowly. “It is just the truth. If I wanted to tell fairy tales, I’d do better than this. Fairy tales to be all about the Earth shaking, and the wire, and the crumps, and the beef-tins.... You know. And that would be true too. Anyway this is....”

He said that he didn’t pretend that he was gay at that moment: calm, no doubt; contemplative certainly--and certainly gently ironic. So many officers were fussy about things--air pillows, hooch, mislaid movement cards, how to post picture-cards, where their battalions were, and so on. The place no doubt brought it out. It left a good deal to be desired. So that, if he could smile gently, he didn’t pretend to have been without apprehensions. They hung vaguely at the back of the skull; they oppressed, a little, the breathing.

And yet--ever since he had been a tiny child--he had, he said, been so much a creature of dreads that this was, in a sense, much less than dreads to which he had been well accustomed. The dreads of original sin, of poverty, of bankruptcy, of incredible shyness, of insults, misunderstandings, of disease, of death, of succumbing to blackmailers, forgers, brain-troubles, punishments, undeserved ingratitudes, betrayals.--There was nothing, Gringoire said, that he hadn’t dreaded in a sufficiently long life “which had been, mostly, a matter of one dread knocking out another.” So that, on the whole, the dread of what lay over the hill was less than most and limited itself, pretty well, to how one’s self would behave--except of course that one was damned afraid of being taken prisoner. Oh, damned afraid....

Still it was on the whole such a relief to be out of contact with one’s civilian friends at home--for, as far as the Army was concerned, Gringoire said he never had one single moment’s cause for bitterness, but just contentment and making allowances--it was on the whole such a relief that he was more contented than perturbed. Nevertheless, the strain was a long strain, even if it was impersonal, since it was a strain concerning itself with the English Country and not at all with one’s regiment or one’s self. One’s regiment would go out, if things went wrong. It would go out, disappear, as sands disappear under great waves. One’s self too, probably, or it wouldn’t matter anyhow ... But the contaminated fields, the ashamed elms--that was the long strain. And suddenly, at that point it came--the castle in the air; the simulacrum; the vision of the inviolable corner of the earth.

I don’t mean to say that it came with great exactness at that time--but it came, no doubt as a progression from the train of thought in Dunmow Station. There, you may remember, Gringoire thought that he would have a garden in a southeastern county--and his thoughts had connoted that it would be a garden on a hillside that sloped to the south and that looked over a not very distant sea--a great view, showing on the horizon, during clear days, the coast of France; a view, as it were, from which one could see the Kingdoms of the Earth. “For there have,” said Gringoire, “always been only two Kingdoms of the Earth that mattered for me--our own land for its country and France for her people, her arts, her point of view.” Yes, undoubtedly it was to be a garden with a great view, and it should contain potatoes grown from seeds and sweet corn--also several rows of beans for which, whether for the flowers or the aligned stalks, Gringoire always had a great affection.

In Dunmow station it had been merely an intellectual idea: as who should say, “After the war, we will take a cottage in the country and grow things and have a great view. At any rate, we will have a rest.” But, on the downside behind the Somme, it came differently. It came like one of these visions that one’s eyes, when tired, will see just before one falls asleep. There was a rhomboid of deeper, brighter green, of a green that was really alive, beyond the gray-green of the field they were in. It existed in front of the purple of scabrous flowers on the great shoulder that masked the battlefield. It wavered, precisely as you will see the colored image cast on a sheet by a magic lantern, then slowly, it hardened and brightened, took shape as a recumbent oval, like eighteenth century vignettes. Gringoire said that it became perfectly definite--“The little view that I shall see at this moment if I raise my eyes. And it didn’t connote any locality: it didn’t, I mean, suggest itself as being in the vicinity of the Trossachs, of Tintern, of Matlock, of Dungeness.... It was just country--but perfectly definite, rather an untrimmed and a rather hidden spot without a hard road going to it ... and with the feeling that many birds were lurking in bushes and watching me, as birds watch. You see the idea--sanctuary!”

“I don’t mean to say,” he went on, “that I wanted to get out of the battle of the Somme. I certainly didn’t, either consciously, subconsciously, or with any plane of my mind. I will lay claim to so much militarism. But my subconscious mind was trying to assure itself that ‘appry la gair finny’ there would be a sanctuary where I would cross my second and my index fingers in the face of destiny and cry ‘Feignits’ as we used to do as children at Prisoner’s Base. I daresay that has been the main desire of my life. I daresay it has been the main desire of the lives of all men since recorded time began. Unrecorded time too, no doubt. It was no doubt the basic desire that has given to the world in succeeding ages, the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of Thule, the Cassiterides, the Garden of the Hesperides, the land of Cockaigne where hot mutton pies ran about in the street asking to be eaten--the peace of God which passes all understanding.”

And you see it was mostly for the sake of the little threatened nooks of the earth that Gringoire found himself on that hillside. For, then, as on the 4/8/’14, when the Huns crossed the Belgian frontier, “near a place called Gemmenich,” it was mainly the idea that a field-gray tide of mud was seeking to overwhelm the small, verdure-masked homes, the long, white, thatched farms of the world that forced Gringoire into political action. “All my life,” as he put it, “I have been fighting German scholarships, German modes of learning, of instruction, of collectivism.” But, before that date he hadn’t much imagined--or imagined at all--that he would ever indulge in political polemics. He had always had a dreamy contempt for politics: one is an artist, one is a poet, one is a builder of castles in the air, one is a gentleman, a farrier, a grocer, a miller--what you will--but a politician! “_Ah, mais non._ That one should prostitute one’s pen!...”

But the field-gray tide threatened--not only the Kingdoms of the Earth that mattered, but the little, sacred homes of artists, poets, gentry, farriers, grocers, millers--menaced then the subjects of one’s pen, the objects of meditation of one’s heart. So one wrote endless, interminable propaganda; until the brain reeled and the fingers stiffened.

Then the Germans killed Henri Gaudier and Teddy Jewell. Or perhaps it was only that Teddy Jewell went. Certainly he was killed sooner or later. “Such nice, good boys both--though I didn’t know either of them well.” So there had not seemed anything else to do. And indeed there was not anything else to do....

Up there, on the hillside, that ran down to the battered sugar factory, he had the feeling that, if they could have had leave and have looked over the rim of that brown-purple slope, they would have seen the Huns, a white, tumultuous line, like advancing surf or like gnashing teeth. That was, of course, a feeling, not an intellectual idea. He knew that the German lines didn’t look like that--though, indeed, at times they did, when our gunners really got onto them in a chalky country. Then it was rather like surf--the smoke of shells and chalk dust going up together in the sunlight.... Still ...

And anyhow that was a moment of complete idleness--a moment of the completest idleness that those officers had known for many, many months. They were just there, with nothing to do. Nothing: nothing whatever. If they had been allowed to look over the hill-brow, that would have been something, but, with the Camp Commandant’s refusal of leave, complete idleness settled down. In ten minutes, in an hour, perhaps; certainly before the passage of four or five hours, they would get the order to report that would take them beyond that hill past the battered sugar factory....

Possibly that little vision of English country, coming then, was really a prayer, as if the depths of one’s mind were murmuring: “Blessed Mary, ask your kind Son that we may have the peace of God that passes all understanding, one day, for a little while in a little nook, all green, with silver birches, and a trickle of a stream through a meadow, and the chimneys of a gingerbread cottage out of Grimm just peeping over the fruit trees.” I suppose that is the burden of most prayers before battle. And of course that would mean that the Allies had won out and that the band would have played in the last war parade, with the white goat and its silver plaque between the horns, and sunlight, and even the Adjutant smiling--and all the Welsh dead appeased, and all the country nooks of the world assured sanctuaries, and every Englishman’s house an inviolable castle, and every Frenchman free to potter off to his café in the cool of the evening. No doubt it was a prayer of the unconscious, tired mind.

“But even that isn’t my fourth landscape,” our poet-host went on, “since my fourth landscape took in very nearly the whole, if not quite the whole, of one of the Kingdoms of the Earth--and that the smallest that I ever hope to see.” It dissociates itself sharply from the others in that the observing of it happened to be Gringoire’s job of the moment. He had been sent up to Mont Vedaigne to mark down and be ready to point out to a number of senior officers all that immense prospect.

And the tip of Mt. Vedaigne formed, oddly enough, one of those little, commonplace, rustic, idyllic spots that, months before, had formed itself for his eyes behind the Somme. There, in a small enclosed space, shut in by trees that just grew up to the edge of the steep escarpments of the hill, was, precisely, a little, gingerbread cottage out of Grimm. In front of it was a small, flat garden--not an acre in extent; in the garden grew potatoes already yellowed; beanstalks were aligned, already yellowed too; and there may have been three or four rods of tobacco plants and as many of haricots, yellowing too, for the fringes of autumn were upon the land. On the southern side of the garden were some plum trees in a hedge. If you looked over the hedge you saw Bailleul, Armentières, away to queer, conical, gray mountains that were the slag-heaps near Béthune, and away, farther, toward the Somme itself.

On the northern side of the garden was a tall, dark plantation of birches and firs so that the gingerbread cottage--of white plaster, with little green shutters and a bright red roof of those S-shaped tiles that lock one into another, with a gutter painted bright green, like the shutters, and dependent from the gutter, right along the face of the cottage, bunches of haricot plants, hung up so that the white beans should dry in the rattling pods--the little cottage, then, had the air of being beneath a high, dark bank.

But it was only trees, so that, if you went between their trunks you saw another great view. A flat, almost incredibly immense, silver-gray plain ran right to the foot of the waving descent, below. There was an oval--poor Poperinghe--with an immense column of snow-white smoke, descending upon it from a great height, and then little plumes of smoke here and there--and then, away, away, pollarded flats, windmills, church towers--and a gray, menacing, incredibly distant skyline, illuminated under drifts of smoke.... One imagined that one was seeing into Germany!

I suppose Gringoire didn’t really see so far.

On the east and the west, the views were cut into by “mountains”--the peaks of that little range of hills that formed practically all that remained of a Kingdom of the Earth--of the Low Countries! There was the Mont Noir with its windmill atop; the Mont Rouge with its windmill atop; the Scharpenberg, with its windmill, Mount Kemmel with its ruined tower, from high above which, in the pellucid autumn air, the sighting shells continuously let down their clouds like torsos of flawless, white marble.

Gringoire had emotions up there! And he had a long time to wait. You may not know it--but, if a senior officer tells you to await him at a given point at 10:00 A.M., you arrive at 9:45 whilst he saunters in at 11:00 A.M., 12:30 P.M., 2:00 P.M., or 4:30 P.M., according to his rank.

On this occasion, Gringoire was Acting Intelligence Officer, and, having to familiarize himself with a landscape in which his division had only just arrived, he came on the ground at 8:45 A.M., having left Locre at 7:00 A.M., riding round by way of Dranoutre to receive his final instructions from Headquarters. He did not think that at Divisional Headquarters his zeal was appreciated. A sleepy, but eminently indignant, General Staff Officer I or II, something elderly, in pajamas, made various insulting remarks about early rising. These, his eyesight improving as sleep departed, he modified somewhat, because he could not tell who the devil Gringoire was. (I may say that, two nights before, our poet had been court-martialed for being in unlawful possession of a Field Officer’s Figure.) But the Major would not modify his statement that he had only been in bed half an hour. He stuck to it. I daresay, poor man, that he was telling the truth. He was wearing khaki-silk pajamas with purple cords. Gringoire, on the other hand, stuck with equal firmness to the fact that he was deputizing for a brother officer who was sick--so sick that he had mislaid his orders. Orderly Room had sent them to him with a slip attached: “_Passed to you, please. For attention, immediate action and compliance._” They had had a copy of _that_ slip in the Battalion Orderly Room--but no copy of the memo itself.

Apparently they hadn’t at Divisional Headquarters either. It appears that the G.S.O. I or II who had issued the memo was sick too--had gone sick the night before and our elderly friend was deputizing for him. Of course, eventually, Gringoire got some sort of instructions from a drowsy, patronizing lance-corporal of the type that one usually finds around Divisional Headquarters, sleeping omnisciently under a table covered with typewriting machines in a Connaught hut. _He_ knew that some one answering to the description of my friend was to meet some one on the top of Mont Vedaigne at 11:00 A.M. for the purpose of explaining the positions. It was some General, the lance-corporal couldn’t remember the name--it was a name like Atkinson or Perry or McAlpine--an ordinary sort of name, the lance-corporal said contemptuously. He didn’t know what sort of General he was. The General Staff Officer Number Two ought to have taken him ’round, but he had gone sick; so also had Gringoire’s friend, who was a friend of G.S.O. II. So there he was.

(“And,” said Gringoire when he recounted this incident, “it occurs to me at this moment this was intended as a friendly attention on the part of somebody. Either my friend--who was highly connected in an Army sense--or, failing him, I--was to wangle a soft job out of the General. But all I thought about was how to get to the top of Mont Vedaigne, set my map, get my field telescope into position ... Well, I am telling you what I thought about....”)

He was indeed so concentrated in mind on the top of Mont Vedaigne and the map and the compass and the telescope that he hadn’t the faintest remembrance of the road thither from Dranoutre.[3] He said he could give you every object, estaminet, cottage, and Corps H.Q. from Locre to Dranoutre by the chaussée; or from Locre to Mont Rouge by second class road and field paths, Mont Rouge to Mont Noir, and Mont Vedaigne and so on. But of the road to Mont Vedaigne from Divisional Headquarters nothing remained--except that it was rather suburban, broad, white, and at that date, in good repair.

So he came to the top of the hill, passed the cottage without looking at it, between the potatoes and the tobacco and the tobacco and the haricots, looked over the southern edge, and saw a great stretch of country, looked over the northern edge, and saw a great, silver-gray plain, looked away to the east, and saw hills like camels’ humps cutting still horizons; and the same on the west.

He was, you understand, in a desperate hurry. For each point of the compass, he “set” his map, finding a convenient, flat piece of ground on which to lay it. And he saw, without seeing, and memorized without associations--just names attaching to dark patches in a great plain. Over a particularly large fir tree was Armentières; over an oak, lower down the slope and to the right were the slag heaps and Béthune; further to the right still Bailleul; the flash of gilt above a steeple meant the ten block letters _Poperinghe_; an immensely distant series of dull purple cubes against a long silver gleam was, in printed capitals DUNKIRK.... You see, his mind was just working in the watertight compartments of his immediate professional job. He wanted to make--and he did make by 11:00 A.M.--four cards, like the range cards one makes for musketry: a central point where one stood, and arrows, running out like rays from that center, toward Ypres, in capitals or Wytschaete in block letters. He wanted the general to be able to stand on each point, look down on the card, follow the direction of the arrow, and identify the place. I don’t know whether any other Intelligence Officer ever thought of that. Anyhow, he got it done by 11:00 A.M.

It was pleasant, the feeling when he had made his last fair copy. He went to each of the points of the compass, to make sure that he had registered positions truly. Returning from the west to the east, he noticed an immense plane, appearing in the firmament above Bailleul. She was escorted by eight or nine relatively little monoplanes--Bristol scouts, I should say. But, at that date, the poor bloody Infantry were not brought much in contact with the air force. So that, apart from their spectacular, picturesque, or dangerous aspects, they hardly came within the scope of Gringoire’s professional attentions. “Airmen,” he said, “were brilliant beings, who treated us with contempt and carried off the affections of our young women. Otherwise they lived in the air whilst we plodded amongst mud and barbed wire. Professionally, they rivaled the Cavalry; obtained information for the Artillery--but, as for cooperating with us, we were below their notice.” So that the great, beautiful machine--which was, I believe, the first Handley Page to reach France in safety--passed overhead without Gringoire’s thinking of more than that it was beautiful.

But his time for consideration of the beautiful had not yet come. It being then eleven and his work as a man from Cook’s being accomplished, he had time to think of breakfast.

He had noticed that a cottage existed behind the potatoes, the haricots, and the tobacco. His conscious mind had dismissed it, since it had obviously no topographical value as an object of interest for a General, name unknown. His subconscious mind--that of an Infantry Officer--had also dismissed it--as just a cottage; too frail to be of much use for cover, even against rifle fire. For you are to understand that whilst his surface mind was entirely and devotedly given to his immediate job, his secondary mind had certainly taken note of the values of Mont Vedaigne, the garden, the hedges, the copsewood, the timber, and the slopes; considering them as cover, as sites for trenches and noticing the fields of fire, the dead ground, the trees that would be dangerous in falling about if the place were shelled, the underwood that might be useful, supposing the Artillery had failed to knock it to bits or set fire to it--it was very dry still--before the Enemy Infantry tried to rush the position. All these little thoughts had flitted, like shadows, to be registered somewhere.--For our poet learned that, when, ten minutes later, he went over the ground again, for the definite purpose of considering it with conscious, infantry-eye, he had already noted and stored somewhere in the gray matter of his brain most of the details of dead ground, field of fire and sites for trenches, too ... and a good deal of the detail as to timber, underwood, and the like.

That, however, was only after he had had some breakfast. For a little old Belgian woman with a pepper and salt face and a husband who wore a black cap with a shining leather eye shade, came out of the green door of the cottage, just as the lady does in a weatherhouse. To Gringoire’s request in Flemish for coffee, “_Hebt gii Kafe to verkoopen?_” she answered nothing, disappearing backwards behind the green door, which shut as if automatically. She was there again, however, in less than a minute, with a plate of ham, a bowl of coffee, and four bits of their gingerbread!

The significance of this did not occur to our subsequent inhabitant of a gingerbread dwelling. He only noticed that it did not go so very well--nor yet so very badly--with the ham. He ate both, anyhow, in a hurry. It was a keen air up there. He secured some more ham and another cup of coffee and, with that in his hand, proceeded to the clearing in the east from which the best view of the Salient was obtainable.

It was then that the Infantry Officer’s hitherto subconscious, professional mind rose to the surface and became the conscious one. In the four hours that he had waited in that frame of mind, he had noticed, of course, an infinite number of details--a great number of airplanes coming from the direction of Dunkirk; huge columns of smoke rising from far back in German-held Belgium, behind Brûges. A great number of signs of war in that clear, gray, sunlit space, in which every pollard willow appeared to be visible and like a candle flame burning in a windless air! Gringoire was looking through a telescope, of course. But I will trouble the reader only with two apparitions of those that he collected: they were apparently unconnected, since they took place, the one at Poperinghe, the other in front of Wytschaete. But very likely they had a grim connection.

Whilst he was topographically employed, our Infantry Officer had noticed Poperinghe as a blue-gray smudge, in shape like an oval lozenge seen in perspective. From it rose several church towers--bulbous, Low-Country edifices. Now, whilst he was resting his eyes from the telescope, he saw, suddenly unfolding in the air above the towers, two great white swans. They extended laterally, dazzling, very slow. Then a trunk descended from each of them. After a time they resembled, exactly, immense torsos of Hercules, headless and armless statues, as solid-looking as brilliant white marble, new from the quarry. The Tommies called them Statue Shells.

And then he noticed that there were statue shells over the observation post on Kemmel Hill. With his telescope, also, he began to see that shells were bursting on Poperinghe. I don’t know why, but he took them to be gas shells, bracketing.

He rested his eyes again and looked at the gap between Mont Noir and Mont Kemmel. It was a symmetrical bit of landscape seen over what is called technically a saddle between two hills. Over the very center of the lowest part of the dip, Gringoire said, there appeared to be a whitish gray tooth stump, decayed, with one end-fragment rather high.[4] Extending, like a long string, above this, on rising ground, there was a brown rope--five miles, perhaps beyond the decayed tooth. Little white balls existed on the brown line, the landscape was pale yellow--as it might be the gold of corn fields. The red roofs of a village that he knew to be Wytschaete were brilliant and quiet in the sun--but, on the brown line beneath that ridge the little white balls went on coming into existence--one every half second. One to the right at the extreme end of the line; one on the extreme left; one in the middle; one between the extreme left and the center. Beautiful work. Have you ever seen a village cobbler nailing a sole? It goes so quickly that you hardly see the hammer. But a small brass nail is there--and another and another--a line of brass nails on the smooth leather. Well, they went like that, along the brown line--the little white balls! Beautiful! Beautiful work. “My mind,” Gringoire said, “was filled with joy and my soul exulted in the clear, still, autumn sunshine, looking over that tiny Kingdom of the Earth.

“I said to myself: ‘Hurray! The guns are giving them hell. Some one’s ducking over there.’” Because, of course, the brown line was the Hun trenches on the Wytschaete ridge, and the little white balls were our shells, falling with an exact precision. They must have knocked the trenches pretty considerably already for the disturbed earth to show at all at that distance.

At that moment--it was just gone three--a man in khaki made Gringoire jump by appearing at his elbow. He said that the General who had ordered Gringoire to report there at 1:00 P.M. was detained. Would he have some lunch and report again at the same spot at five?

And, after that, it was just emotions. The landscape became landscape, with great shafts of light and shadows of clouds; the little white cottage with the green shutters, a little nook that should be inviolable; the haricots interesting as things that one might plant in a Kentish garden that sloped to the sea. The range of hills was no longer a strategical point or a tactical position. It was all that remained of one of the Kingdoms of the Earth; one could hardly look at the gray plains with the pollard willows marching like aligned candle flames toward the horizon--one avoided looking at it, because it was Lost Territory, held down, oppressed, as if it were ashamed. Poperinghe grew to appear pitiful, a little town where wretched civilians were being butchered by gas shells for the love of God. So the poet’s mind worked, at leisure, on personal matters, as neither the mind of Intelligence, or Infantry, Officer need work.

“My mind,” the poet reports, “was indeed so much at leisure in that long two hours that I even wrote in my Field Pocket Book a preface to a volume whose proofs had that morning reached me. In that I recorded my emotions of the moment and there, in a printed volume, they stand. It does not alter their value as a record of emotions that I subsequently learned that the statue shells over Poperinghe were not gas shells but had been discharged so as to give the German Heavies the range, or that, upon reflection, it appears to me that the Germans were hardly shelling the town so profusely just for the love of God. They must either have heard that we had a considerable body of troops in the town, or else they were trying to stop, by that retaliation, our own artillery’s heavy shelling of their Wytschaete-Messines positions.”

But at any rate, there the emotions came, crowding and irrepressible. So that, just before, in the dusk, at seven o’clock, Gringoire saw the bright red flash of a brass hat’s band in among dark fir trees, he noticed, with a sudden lift in the side, a light silver streak, behind the map of Dunkirk. It was the sea.

“And suddenly,” he said, “there came upon me an intense longing to be beyond that sea.” It was a longing not for any humanity--but just for the green country, the mists, the secure nook at the end of a little valley, the small cottage whose chimneys just showed over the fruit trees--for the feelings and the circumstances of a sanctuary in which one could cross one’s second over one’s index finger and in the face of destiny cry: “Feignits.”

It was, however, necessary to stand to attention, and through the falling twilight to point out hardly visible towns to a nearly invisible Senior Officer. And immediately the mind went back to its original position: Dunkirk and Ypres became circles named in large capitals; Wytschaete and Kemmel were again in block lettering. One said: “The sea is just visible in that direction,” and it was just a geographical fact.

[Footnotes]

[3] I am aware that D.H.Q. was not really at Dranoutre, which was a nice little place, built round a church square, rendered nasty by the Germans. But I call it Dranoutre out of reflex action caused by fear of the Censor--who once, at the end of 1918, struck out of one of my poems an allusion to the fact that I visited Cardiff early in 1915.

[4] This would be the remains of the Cathedral and the Cloth Hall at Ypres.

V

_Intermezzo_

The day after peace was declared seemed to your compiler an excellent moment on which to remonstrate with our poet as to one of his characteristic locutions. The day was fine, cloudless, soft and still; some gardening operation of Gringoire’s had consummately succeeded. I forget what it was. I fancy some long-studied contrivance of his had checkmated the slugs in his strawberry beds. At any rate we sat in the long grass by the hedge under the damson trees at the bottom of the garden over a great blue china bowl of strawberries which Gringoire characteristically insisted on moistening with red wine and sugar. He said that taken that way they were less gross than with cream and I am bound to say that Mme. Sélysette shared his views with which I could never agree.

In any case, it was with singular mildness that, lying on his side in the long grass, Gringoire answered my remonstrances.

“Why, no,” he said, “I do not see why any one should object to the use of the term ‘Hun’ as applied to such members of the late Enemy nations as were not in arms against us. I do not care much about the matter and, if the word offends you, I will try, when I think about it, not to use it. But the fact is that I certainly never thought about it much at any time. It is a convenient phrase to use about what was evil in the people we were fighting against. I should not now--and I never did--call Brahms anything but a German composer nor should I ever think of calling Holbein a Hun painter or the Brothers Grimm of the fairy-tales, Boches. So that the word is a convenient one for differentiations. In effect for me the German musicians, painters, poets, working men, postmen and soldiers in the trenches or at their Headquarters were never Huns. I assert that categorically and I think it was true of the majority of my comrades--except that the majority of my comrades had never heard of Bach or Beethoven or Heine. But it was true that the majority of my comrades with whom I discussed the subject at all seriously, though they may have used the word you dislike, never--when talking seriously--used it as a term of hatred. Humanity will inevitably use a monosyllable in place of two sounds if it can get the chance and so will I.

“But I don’t think many people in the trenches actually, and except at odd moments, ever felt active hatred against the men in the opposite lines or even those who militarily directed their operations. When they are not called on to be trustworthy or imaginative or to show human sympathy, men in the bulk are beasts fairly decent and fairly reasonable. We hated and objurgatively called ‘Huns,’ to the furthest extent of its Hunnish hideousness, not the poor bloody footsloggers who were immediately before us. No, the word applied itself to the professors, the prosaists, the publicists, the politicians who had sent those poor blighters to prevent our going home. For if you think of it, it was a topsy-turvy arrangement. They wanted to send us home and we wanted desperately to go; yet they pushed towards our home and we away from ours....

“I am not much set to talk to you about the trenches or even about fighting. The point that I want to put into the spotlight of your mind is mostly the fact that if we do not economize in food there will be another war. Unlike you, my dear Compi, in that I regard the past with much greater equanimity. You remember that, when we were both writing propaganda I used to shock you by the mildness of mine. It will be long before I forget your emotions when I wrote an article suggesting that, instead of atrocity-mongering we were sufficiently advanced along the road of civilization to write--at least of the German troops--as ‘the gallant enemy.’

“Today our positions have changed and you are shocked because I style certain of those who belong to the late Enemy nation by an epithet that you wish to forget having employed. The point is that I stand where I did whereas you have reacted against what now appear to have been your extravagances. My propaganda, as you remember, was almost entirely a matter of economics and of culture. I simply pointed out that the war was in effect a hunger war: Prussia being mostly composed of immense sand wastes--the Lüneburger Heide; of impenetrable forest--the Teutoberger Wald; and of the vast stretch of swamps where Hindenburg massacred the Russians on their own border. That being the condition of Prussia, the country would not produce enough food for the population which was also a population of the most prolific breeders in the world. I also pointed out--and I think I was almost the only person to do so--that the Enemy Empire instead of being the flourishing concern that she had bluffed the world into considering her was actually on the point of bankruptcy and losing trade after trade to foreign nations. That again was merely a matter of food. Germany had flourished on low wages and subsidies to manufacturers; but as food-prices rose the world over the wages of the German laborer had to go up so that, even with subsidies, the German manufacturer could no longer compete with us, the Italians, the French or even the South Americans. That Germany invaded Belgium may or may not have been the _triste nécessité_ that her statesmen alleged it to be, but that the war, regarded as a food war was in very truth a sad necessity for her you may be perfectly convinced. Prussia was starving, her population was increasing by leaps and bounds, emigration had been forbidden by the government....

“Well, I do not propose to hate a starving population that seeks for bread, but I do propose to dislike and go on disliking the professors and publicists who preached that the only way to obtain bread was by invading Belgium and I do not think that the epithet you object to is any too strong. And indeed, if you use it merely to designate what was hateful in the late Enemy nation and if you employ the word ‘German’ for everything that was and is ‘_gemütlich_’ for those who since yesterday have been our friends, you will be doing them a service by emphasizing what they have of the lovable in their compositions. Still ... I do not much care about that.

“I do not believe that there will ever be another war if you put it only on the baser ground that the great financiers who alone can make or stop wars got hideously frightened by the last one. And in addition to that you can consider the educative effect of the Armageddon that finished yesterday. It will take a good many decades before any human soul will again regard war as a means of enrichment and a good many centuries before any Great Power will again imagine that to have an aspect of bestriding the world in jackboots and with the saber rattling is of advantage to itself. It is a better world on the 29th of June, 1919, than it was on August the 3rd, 1914. Bluff has got its deathblow.

“Yes, the world is better and sweeter. We simple people are freed of an enormous incubus; we can sit still for a space and think, which we never could before in the history of the world. But of this I am certain--that what danger there is to the world and us is a food danger. I do not believe there will ever be another war: I believe our sufferings, great as they were, achieved that and were a small price to pay for that benefit. So, if you want to you may bless even the Huns as having been the occasion of our learning that lesson. But if there were ever another war it would be a war purely and simply for food.

“The food-producing soil of the earth is already occupied; the population of our small planet increases by leaps and bounds. I know enough about agriculture--and scientific agriculture at that--to know that the pretensions of scientists to increase the production of food by improved culture is weary nonsense when set against the consideration of the increase in the numbers of mankind. The most honest scientist that I know refused to reveal a method of increasing the yield of wheat sixfold on a given plot of ground because he satisfied himself that to do so in one year rendered that plot of ground absolutely barren for ten years and the milder improvements of agricultural processes that are evolved each year do not suffice to provide enough food for the extra mouths that each year are produced by Prussia alone.

“So that the position might seem pretty gloomy, but I remain an optimist, at least in the matter of war for if, as I think will prove the fact, there will be no war till the world is driven to it by starvation, then the coming of war may be so long delayed that, all races of the world being at last at much the same pitch of education, it will be obvious to them all that war is no way to increase the production of food. I heard, not a Hun, but a Swedish professor say the other day that it was terribly irksome and irritating to his countrymen to consider that, whilst they were overpopulated and cramped up on an infertile soil, down in the fertile south there was the nearly empty and extraordinarily fertile land known as France. And how, he asked, could France with her selfish inhabitants who regulated their birth-rate--or who at any rate selfishly refused to beget children to the limit of their capacity--how could France expect to enjoy immunity from invasion by the healthy, voracious and formidable Northern races who openheartedly and with splendid generosity begot children, to use his own phrase, by the bushel?

“I did not, as you might imagine, because of my obvious Gallophilism try to bite off that blond beast’s head because what he said was, as to its premises, true enough. France _is_ sparsely populated and wealthy, Sweden _is_ overcrowded and infertile. But the remedy for that is not to be found in invasion: the solution is there, waiting. France which is the only country civilized enough not to overpopulate herself is at present the only country in the world that welcomes immigration and facilitates to the extreme the naturalization of immigrants.

“The Swede went on grumbling that it was very hard that his compatriots must expatriate themselves in order to enjoy those _Südfrüchte_--fruits of the South. He said that his fellow countrymen loved their graynesses and contracted terrible melancholias beneath Southern suns.... So that the only thing was raiding!

“I did not continue the discussion for I did not wish at the moment to hate a Swede. But that in essence shows the root of the matter. Wars will cease when nations and Northern Professors are sufficiently civilized to let nations be relatively nomadic and permit races to flow freely from inclement, overpopulated and infertile regions into those that are sparsely populated and fertile and not hyper-philoprogenitive.