Chapter IV: Part ONE: Four Landscapes (3)

“You may put it that hatred and overpopulation go hand in hand, their destination being war, and you would not be far wrong. For it is not the hatreds begotten after wars are declared that matter; those die natural if slow deaths as soon as the not very protracted activities of warfare are over and done with, so that it is only the hatreds that precede wars that need much concern us.”

He went on to say that pre-war hatreds, apart from those inculcated by hungers of one sort or another, arose largely from differences of manners. We used to hate the French because they ate frogs and were elegant; they hated us because we said “goddam” and ruled the seas. But manners tend to approximate the world over with the extension of means of intercourse. They jazz in Cambodia as in Coney Island today and tomorrow they will speak American in the county of Clackmannan even as in Monte Carlo.

That Gringoire applauded. It was, he said, all to the good to have a dance that all could dance. Before the war the vigorous poor went to dogfights, cockfights, badgerfights: now they jazzed. It was a progress towards sweetness and light, part of what we had paid for with our sufferings....

It was at this point that your Compiler became a little impatient. He had come to get war-reminiscences from a practising poet--but these colloquies resolved themselves into a continual struggle of wills, Gringoire persisting in dilating on the future as seen by the practising agriculturist and gastronome. And indeed, scenting that your Compiler was essaying to head him off from the topic on which his mind was fixed, he now went off upon a tirade about intensive horticulture and French cooking that lasted until dusk was well falling on his garden. And Madame Sélysette, raising her delicate eyebrows, intimated sufficiently plainly that, if we did not want a storm he had better not be interrupted.

The main points of his harangue were to the effect that humanity would be saved--if it was to be saved--by good cooking, intensive horti-, as opposed to agriculture. And of course by abstract thinking and the arts. And the avoidance of waste. Above all by the avoidance of waste.

To the pretensions of the scientific agriculturist he opposed the claims of hand-culture, to those of the popular restaurant upholder those of the meticulous chef. Hand culture whether of beasts, grain or vegetables gave a better product, the careful and intelligent cook gave you more appetizing food. The more appetizing your food the better you digested it and the less you needed to support you. He said--but that was on the question of waste--that in a French residence of the size of the Gingerbread Cottage you would not find enough waste to fatten a chicken with; in his own establishment, do all that he could, aided by Mme. Sélysette, they had waste enough to half fatten a pig....

In short the world was to be saved by observing the precepts of the recipe for mutton chops with which your Compiler opened this little work. But all this seemed so apart from anything that his readers could be supposed to want from a book devoted to the war-reminiscences of a poet that your Compiler had long ceased to use his pencil and notebook before Gringoire had finished his sunset harangue, so that, having no notes of the arguments we may well, as to that matter, here inscribe the words: “_cetera desunt._”

But, having eased his mind, Gringoire became good-natured, and, becoming good-natured he was awake to the outer world. So he observed that Mme. Sélysette and your servant had for a long time made neither objections to nor comments on the stuff of his harangues. His voice had gone on sounding alone save for the churnings of an early night-jar that sat upon the gatepost giving onto the rushy meadow. And suddenly he stopped and laughed maliciously.

“Poor old Compi,” he said, “how extraordinarily this isn’t what you come for. But the stuff of war-reminiscences concerns itself almost as much with what war has made of a man as with the pictures that he saw. Still you are not the sort of person to see that and, in a minute I will reward your patience with a landscape that, though it has nothing to do with our main theme, may make a nice _bonne bouche_ for your little book.

“But I do want to get in--just for the sake of pointing it out to the world--that the late hostilities, whilst they profoundly modified the manners of the world did, in their very nature, hold up to the world a moral that will be of infinite value as soon as the world is in any condition at all to notice it. That is to say it did teach us what a hell--what a hell!--of a lot we can do without.

“Take my dear Sélysette there, with her upbringing amongst the suns and luxuries of the _haute bourgeoisie_ of the South. Do you suppose that if, before the 3rd of August, 1914 you had proposed to her to unite her destinies to the least pecunious of poets and take up her residence in a rat-ridden cottage beneath the usually lugubrious but at all times capricious skies of this septentrional land--do you suppose that, if you had then made that proposal she would not have crushed you to the earth with the mere weight of her scorn? Or take me. Would you, knowing me as you did in earlier but, I assure you, not half such happy days--would you have imagined me spending what till then, but not till now, were certainly my happiest hours in a bare hillside in a tent with absolutely no furnishings but an officer’s camp-bed? I had been used to a good deal of luxury, but there for the first time I found peace though the German artillery was actually at that moment shelling that spot and I was for the first time under fire.

“That is one of the things that I remember most vividly, not because it was the first time I was under fire but because I felt that for the first time I had cut absolutely and finally loose from all the bedevilments of life at home--from the malices as from the luxuries. Afterwards, unused as I was to the artillery mind or its methods, I wondered a little that they should be so persistently shelling _us_ and that they should find us with such accuracy.

“I was sitting on the side of my camp-bed talking to an extremely intoxicated and disheveled elderly officer who was nevertheless a man of no ordinary talent. That is to say that his harangues about everything under the sun were interspersed with a great number of classical quotations of singular aptness and he had also made several inventions that eventually proved very useful during the war and that saved him from a courtmartial for drunkenness. I was--as was so frequently my case--in charge of him and, although he was in no position to get away, I did not care to go into a dugout as did all my brother officers who had hitherto been in the tent with us. And indeed the fact was that that fellow’s boozy conversation interested me....

“The German shells came in groups of three, doing obviously what we infantry were taught to call bracketing. That is to say that the first three shells whined wearily overhead and caused a considerable rumpus in our mule lines that were perhaps a hundred yards behind us, and immediately afterwards a rocket or something like it let itself down from the heavens. A few minutes later three more shells fell short of us by perhaps another hundred yards down the hill. There was an obvious German plane overhead and it was in the late evening, nearly dark in the tent and quite dusk in the calm light outside.

“My elderly friend wagged his head sagely. He explained that the Germans were trying to find with their shells something that that plane thought it had seen--probably the great park of German captured guns that were just above us. They would fire three sets of three shells each. Then our heavy artillery would open on them as a gentle hint to them to be quiet and not disturb the serenity of the Sabbath evening. They might take the hint or they might not. If they did not a regular duel between the heavies would begin, and the earth would shake for miles ’round.

“But, in any case, he said--and his air of wisdom convinced me as if Solomon were returned to earth and judging artillery--that we should be left in peace very shortly. And at that moment the next batch of three shells arrived right on us. That is to say that one landed right in the middle of the captured German guns, one in the fortunately soft ground of a spring about thirty yards from our tent and one in the middle of the canteen tent that was just next to ours; so that immediately after the immense concussions innumerable crepitations sounded from the canvas above us, the clay, gravel and mud falling from where it had been precipitated into the skies. And a tin of sardines, coming through the tent-flap, landed as if miraculously in my lap....

“But that old fellow went on nodding his head as if he had been a Chinese bronze and exclaiming: ‘Don’t get up! Don’t get up! That will be the last of it!’

“And, sure enough it was. Immediately afterwards Bloody Mary and two of her lady friends let off, enormous and august, breaking the quiet night. And I suppose the Germans were not in the mood for any extended artillery duel. They had probably satisfied themselves that the German guns parked above us were duds of sorts. The plane must have observed them earlier in the evening and had signaled their presence with rockets....

“But the point that I want to make is that no matter how simple your surroundings or limited your income you can find happiness as long as you are also surrounded by a set of men with incomes similarly exiguous who are contented with their surroundings. The German shells were an added discomfort which I don’t adduce as part of my argument--as if it should be raining or indulging in any other eccentricity of weather that one cannot control.

“Anyhow, I have been happier in a tent or a hut or even in a dugout than ever I was in a night-club before the war or in the sort of a hotel they call a Grand Palace, and I would rather inhabit a Connaught hut furnished exclusively with biscuit or beef boxes and sluice myself with cold water in the open on a freezing morning than dwell among Park Lane millionaires and take my ease in a hummums. And, if I can do that, all humanity can. I am no exception, and it is in that way that salvation lies and the extinction of wars.

“Indeed, I can assure you that one of the most troubled moments of the war happened when, as I will later tell you, I was sent for to Paris by the French Government and by them lodged in circumstances of extreme luxury in a Palace on the Avenue de l’Opéra. For apart from the botherments of being asked to do propaganda that I did not want to do and the obvious hostility of the French officers with whom I mixed and momentary shortness of cash I had, as again I will tell you later, the extreme botherment of being introduced suddenly into the sequelæ of a very violent divorce case. A British cavalry officer had used a week’s leave in going to Switzerland and carrying off his little daughter who had been taken there by his wife on her elopement with a ‘fiddler-fellow.’ And, as I sat in the vestibule of the Hotel Splendide et de l’Orient the little girl, whom I like to think of as Maisie--that Maisie of Henry James’ book--came and without a word of any introduction, settled herself in my lap and went to sleep. She was bothered because she could not find the tram to Heaven. Because they said her mother had gone to Heaven.

“You would say that such things do not happen in war. But they _do_.... And the distracted cavalry officer having left me in charge of his sleeping daughter went on some business that he had at the Embassy. But before he went he pointed to the swinging doors of the hotel giving into the streets and told me that at any moment he expected his wife to rush in and use a revolver.... And I was due at the French Foreign Office for an interview upon which my future in the service and the world might turn.

“Eventually my publisher came in and I dropped the sleeping Maisie into his lap. He was to have accompanied me to the Ministry but I thought he would be more useful to me there, so I left him.... But I assure you I was much more frightened of the idea of Maisie’s mother whom I pictured as a sort of infuriated Carmen than ever I was of any German shells. It was she, with her revolver, who typified for me real hatred--the woman robbed of her child. Whereas, as for the only man that I actually and consciously shot at and who actually and consciously shot at me, I never felt the ghost of an emotion of hatred. I was aware of imbecilely grinning when he missed me--as if it were any other sport--and of saying to myself: ‘That’s the sort of dud _you_ are,’ when I--and repeatedly--missed him. And I believe I felt regret when some one else killed him. At any rate I am glad that I cannot remember his face....

“But Maisie’s mother would have been a different affair. _She_ would have been filled with hatred--as I don’t believe that other fellow was--and I should have been paralyzed.... Why, even at this moment I can almost feel her revolver bullet entering my stomach. And I should have deserved it. One should not connive at the carrying off of a woman’s child however righteous the case of the husband. It is perhaps a worse crime than crossing the Belgian frontier, ‘near a place called Gemmenich.’

“To die thus would be to die in a bad cause. And I daresay that why I don’t believe that any great hatred existed between the actual combatants in the late war--and why I don’t, when I think about it, stigmatize the fellows who lately stood armed over against us as ‘Huns’--is simply that we thought we had a good cause and that we knew that they also thought that they had a good cause. They thought that we endangered their homes as much as we thought that they endangered ours.

“So that I simply do not believe in atrocities. The worst fellow that I ever came across on our own side--an enormous Scot whose principal conversation was taken up with the topic of the prisoners he had murdered--I have seen become lachrymosely sentimental over a German prisoner who was in a lamentable state of funk at having to undergo a medical examination. That Scot almost blubbered over that Hun in his efforts to assure him that the doctor would not operate on him against his will....

“No, I don’t believe in atrocities. Or at the most I half believe in one. It is asserted--the Huns asserted it themselves but I found it difficult to believe--that they filmed the _Lusitania_ whilst she was sinking. That I find atrocious. It is bad enough with premeditation--and the presence of a film operator would seem to prove premeditation--it is bad enough, then, with premeditation to sink a ship loaded with sleeping women and children. But if we concede that those responsible believed--as they may have done--that the _Lusitania_ carried munitions of war even that may be nearly condoned. But that you should take a cinema machine to represent, for the gloating of others, the ruin and disappearance of a tall ship--that seems to me the most horrible of crimes. _Spurlos_ is in itself a suspect word, a part of the vocabulary of ruthlessness that lost the Huns--not the fighting men--the war. But the real lives of men are enshrined in their products. To kill a poet is a small thing; to destroy his work is an irremediable offense.... And the most beautiful of all the handiwork of men is the tall ship. It is horrible to see houses go down in ruin under artillery fire; it is horrible to see fields mutilated and rendered unfertile or merely humiliated by the heels of alien conquerors. But to see a ship, its heart broken, its bows appealing to the heavens, slowly and mutely disappear. That is horrible. The sea shudders a little where it was. Only a little. But still the sea shudders.

“Obviously in wars you must sink ships. And I suppose you may make records of the sinking of ships if it be done pitifully. But, in a spirit of gloating, to represent for the purpose of affrighting others or making yet others gloat in turn--to make cold-bloodedly the record of the disappearance of the proudest ship in the world, that seems to me the most horrible of ... _Schrecklichkeiten_.... But perhaps they never did it. Perhaps they only said that they did. That would be a queer way to make yourself popular!

“But there was a landscape that I wanted to tell you about.

“A little in front of Kemmel Hill we had some trenches--horrible trenches because of the nature of the ground. You could not dig down three feet because you came to water so the parapets were merely sandbags and the parados nothing at all. They must have been responsible for the loss of more lives than any other position of the whole war. In addition, when it rained, all the flood-water of the uplands poured down into them. Why I have seen them filled with cigarette packets washed down from our always luckless canteen--after the great storm in September ’16.

“Well, it was just before then that we had been set to occupy those lines. If they had been retired a hundred and fifty yards they would have been on the slope of the hill and dry and safe. But the staff--or some bellicose individual on the staff--in spite of every representation preferred to lose a third of my battalion, let alone thirds of all the other battalions that occupied them, rather than to lose the little bit of prestige that it would have meant, by a retirement. Of a hundred and fifty yards! Think of that!

“Anyhow, there we came down in the early hours of a September moonlight--into a world of beautiful, bluish and misty calm. There were those calms in the line when the vengeful activities of seven or so million men had exhausted themselves and their imaginations had just gone to sleep. You would have long periods of quiet. They would be broken by sudden bursts of machine gun fire and flares of Verey lights when some bemused sentry had taken it into his head that half a dozen corpses in No Man’s Land were stealing upon him. One’s nerves did that in quiet, moonlit moments. You would look at a corpse, or some sacking, or some sandbags until you could swear they were creeping upon you. Then in a crisis, ‘bang’ would go your hipe, and off would go the machine guns, and up would flare the Verey lights. The guns too might come in and some poor devil or another lose his life. But as a rule silence would settle down again for another long period.... I wrote a poem about that, in French. But I never heard of any one having read it.”

It was at that moment that your Compiler burst in with the words:

“Oh, it begins with: ‘I should like to imagine a moonlight in which there will be no machine guns.’ I heard my friend Mrs. Carmody recite it only yesterday. Recite, not read it!”

Gringoire grunted slightly.

“The point was that it was most beautiful moonlight, before a blue, silent mountain with mists dim all up its flanks. And the other point was that we, as you may remember, were a flying division. We were used for reinforcing threatened points or for resting overtired troops. And, facing us, the Germans had similar divisions that they called ‘_Sturmtruppen_.’ The curious thing was that either their Intelligence was so good or ours was so good that whenever we were moved up or down the line we found the same regiments in front of us so that when we were on the Somme we fought the Second Brandenburgers, and when we moved up to the Salient there we found the Second Brandenburgers in front of us and after we had been in front of Armentières for a little, there sure enough were the famous Second Brandenburgers. The Cockchafers, they were nicknamed. After that they began to desert to us a good deal and they were replaced by the Würtembergers whom we used to consider better fellows, I don’t know why, for we never, in the nature of the case, consorted much with either.

“On the occasion of that moonlight night the Brandenburgers had got in before us and displayed a natural curiosity to know who we were when we got in. The German--or rather the Hun--method of trying to unmask the identity of opponents was to sing national anthems. I use the word ‘Hun’ here because only a Delbrueck or a Bethmann-Hollweg--a professor or a politician--would have thought of anything so ingeniously imbecile. For naturally we did not fall in with that little idea.... The idea, by the bye, was that if we were Scots and they sang ‘Scots Wha Hae’ or Irish and they sang ‘The Wearin’ of the Green,’ or for us ‘Hen Wlad Wy Nadhau’ we should, in a burst of patriotic emotion either cheer or join in the chorus. We didn’t. I remember that once when, no doubt suspecting who we were, they had tried singing “Ap Jenkin,” which is our quickstep, our men replied by singing the imperial Chorus from the ‘Mikado’ as if to show that we were Japanese. That irritated them so much that they pounded our trench for an hour and a half with everything they could think of.

“On this occasion they tried everything from ‘Rule Britannia’ to ‘Australia, Australia,’ and elicited no reply. And then they suddenly touched off an immense gramophone that sang, through the still moonlight ... the ‘Hymn of Hate.’ And in English!

“It was curious and eerie to hear that passionless machine let off those dire words devoted solely to ourselves, for they never evolved anything like it for the French or the Belgians or the Italians or Annamites or Cochin Chinese or Brazilians. Now it screamed and brayed:

“Hate of the head and hate of the hand,
Hate of the breed and hate of the land
ENGLAND
Hate of the standing and hate of the lying,
Hate of the living and hate of the dying
ENGLAND ... ENGLAND”

(“And as a detail I may add that they had to get an English renegade--for there was one!--to make that translation.)

“I am bound to say that it made one shiver a little. There were the moonlight, and the mists, and the lights of poor Wytschaete far away on the ridge. And those words creeping towards us. It is perhaps more disagreeable to think of being prayed to death than of being shelled. One shivered.

“And when it fell silent one wondered if anything in the war or in the world could surpass it for drama. But one was wrong. You don’t know the Welsh. They are the incomparable singers of four-part music in the open air.

“I remember, years ago, being on the side of a Welsh mountain on a Saturday evening at sunset and far below a Welsh miners’ beanfeast was going along a thread of a road in char-à-bancs. And as each filled car passed there came up the sounds of four-part songs, incredibly sweet and incredibly mournful in the falling darkness. They are a conquered people, the Welsh, and their music is the music of a conquered people.

“But on that occasion the Germans had delivered themselves into their hands in the endless struggle between Saxon and Celt. For suddenly a single voice in ‘B’ Company began to sing with extraordinary clearness:

‘Maxwelton braes are bonnie
When earlie fa’s the dew....’

“And extraordinarily, before the singer had come to ‘there that Annie Laurie,’ the whole of ‘B’ Company was crooning out the other parts of the song. Beneath the moon. And then the whole Battalion, along a front of a mile. Crooning, you know, rather softly, not shouting....

“And for Bonnie Annie Laurie ...”

“It was a good answer.

“They were forbidden of course to sing Welsh songs, or it might have been ‘Land of My Fathers’ or the ‘Men of Harlech.’ As it was, it was better.

“But there was not much hatred about that. And you will observe that even the Huns had had to get a machine to do their hating.”

VI

_Just Country_

It is one of the burdens of advancing age--as it is one of the penalties of having been unreasonably prolific--that one is always haunted by a vague dread of repeating one’s self. One’s mind, presumably, progresses, one touches and retouches one’s ideas; hammers at the wording; seeks after a final clarity of expression. It is all one that one may have already printed the matter of the theme; the mind continues to work at the phraseology until one, finally, isn’t certain that one has or hasn’t sought the crystallization of the press. So it happens that I cannot be certain whether I have or haven’t printed already what I am about to write. It can’t, however, in the nature of things, have been more than a shortish article; so that if I have to apologize to any readers, the apology can’t be for any great fault.

I fancy that what I then tried to put on paper was suggested by a letter that our poet wrote, having another moment of leisure, at about the time of his long wait for the General on Mont Vedaigne. I wrote an article, and certainly it was suggested by a passage in one of Gringoire’s letters to a friend, at some one’s request, for the journal called the N--. And that journal called the N-- refused to print the article because it was too militarist. I don’t myself see where the militarism can have come into the expression of what was pure speculation of a psychological kind--but censors, whether military or anti-military, are queer people, and I presume that their main job, as it presents itself to their minds, is the suppression of ideas.... The more I think about it now, the more the thought hardens and takes shape; some one--connected with the propaganda-ministry--_did_ ask me to write an article for the N-- and the N-- did refuse to print it. I daresay the journal had quarreled with the department in between whiles.

Anyhow, the psychological speculation wasn’t very profound, or, as far as I can see, very likely to render conscription a permanent institution in these islands. Stated in its baldest terms, it merely amounted to saying that when you are very busy with a job, you do not much notice what is going on around you. You don’t, of course.

And, in the end, that is the basic idea that underlies these records of four landscapes. Gringoire was simply trying to state--or rather to illustrate--the fact that, during the whole of the period from the 4/8/’14 till the date when the German plenipotentiaries appended, in the Salle des Glaces, their signatures to the peace treaty, he only four times achieved a sufficient aloofness of mind to notice the landscape that surrounded him.

“I don’t mean to say,” our poet summed the matter up, “that I didn’t have ‘leaves,’ but, for one cause and another, my leaves weren’t ever pensive or leisurely. One was snatched into the civilian frame of mind--but into a civilian frame of mind that was always preoccupied with ‘The War’--that was, indeed, in odd ways, far more preoccupied with the war than were one’s self and one’s friends. Thus I remember that, on the occasion of my first return from France, being in a Tommy’s tunic, before I had arrived at the barrier of Viltona, I was stopped by an Assistant Provost Marshal and told that if I didn’t immediately procure leather gloves, another sort of hat, a collar, a tie, and get rid of my divisional mark, I should be put under arrest and returned to my battalion. In the booking office, I found a telephone--which cost thruppence, instead of tuppence--and when I remonstrated with a lady who three times gave me a wrong number, I was told to remember that there was a war going on. When, there being no one in my own house, I tried to go by omnibus to my club for lunch, I being in mufti and a little lame, a lady conductor put her hand on my chest, exclaimed: ‘There’s a war on,’ and very neatly threw me back into the road.

“When I got to my club, a civilian of an eminently moral appearance was lunching at my table. He addressed me condescendingly--as no doubt one would address a Tommy if one were a civilian at a club. I had the feeling that he was about to offer me a glass of beer--therefore I hurriedly began to talk of peace. I wanted, you see, to consider peace and to avoid at once the offer of a free drink and the remembrance of my comrades who were still in danger of their lives. I admit that my words were inconsiderate, for I simply said:

“‘Won’t there be a high old fortnight’s drunk after that day!’

“My table companion drew himself up, pursed dry lips, and as it were hissed:

“‘I think we have taken very good steps to prevent that.’

“He wouldn’t, you see, let me forget my poor comrades who were still in the trenches. I do not remember what I said then; but only his attitude as with his napkin very white and crumpled in his hand, he removed to another table. Straight from that club I went to the house of an Eminent Reformer who told me that he would rather we lost the war than that the Cavalry should have a hand in winning it.[5] He couldn’t know that it wasn’t so very long since I had seen the empty saddles of the Deccan Horse, as, all intermingled with the men of some battalion of Gordons, they returned from an adventure in No Man’s Land, during the 1916 Battle of the Somme. So I went and had tea with a lady who gave me three milk biscuits from a silver tray and said: ‘This _must_ be a change from your hardships over there!’

“They _wouldn’t_, you see, let me forget the poor dear fellows who were still in the trenches. So I passed the night in a Y.M.C.A. hut, discussing Mametz Wood of the 14/7/’16 with an officer of the 38th Division.”

That, of course, was rather a special day, Gringoire said--though it was nothing out of the common. Given his age, former career, and surroundings, he couldn’t be expected to come in for any huge amount of the salutary dissipation or the healing hospitality which did so much to _remonter_ the _moral_ of the troops. Moving mostly amongst the Intelligentsia, he came a good deal in contact with Conscientious Objectors who abused him to his face for militarism or with literary civilians of military age who, after calling at his house, returned to their own and wrote him anonymous but easily recognizable letters, the purport of which was that he had never heard a shot fired and that the only gas he had ever smelled had been emitted by himself. To balance them, he received a number of letters from the German population of London, threatening to murder him on account of his propagandist writings, whilst one of the most frequent preoccupations of his military career arose from the anonymous letters addressed to the War Office, to his various Colonels, and to the officers and other ranks of his regiment by a professional man whom he had once employed and who, after he lost that particular job, found that his conscience as a patriot demanded that he should continuously but unsuccessfully denounce our poet as a German spy.

That is all in the day’s journey. _Homo homini lupus._ But it is not to be wondered at that in his periods of leisure Gringoire was not in a position to pay what he would have called a hell of a lot of attention to landscapes--or, in the alternative, that the essential call, of the land, of the war, was not the humanity that England contained--but just the country.

Possibly the idea of country--just country--postulates the idea of human companionship--but that is not the same thing as humanity.

“When I was a boy,” as Gringoire put it, “every hedge and every turn of a white, long road, concealed a possible Princesse Lointaine.” In those days one walked on and on--from the North Foreland to the Land’s End; from Kensington to Winchelsea, from Minehead, by Porlock and Brendon, to Water’s Meet. Or one cycled from Calais to Beauvais, by way of Arras; from Paris to Tours and along the Loire, somehow ending at Houlgate and Caen. Or one went in a slow fiacre from Amiens to Albert, ostensibly to see the new brick and mosaic cathedral, with the Madonna atop. But, no doubt, whether one went to Mevagissy or Mentone; Port Scathow, Pontardulais, Château Gaillard, or Curt-yr-Ala, one was really chasing the Only Possible She.

“Nowadays one sits in a green field--any green field--and longs for nothing more than just a little bit of loyalty. One longs, that is to say, that one may at last find the _hominem bonæ voluntatis_ that one has chased all one’s life. Possibly one desires that, resting one’s eyes in the green of the grass as--do you remember, old Dai Bach?--according to the maxims of Color-Sergeant Davis of Caerphilly, we used to rest our eyes from the targets by looking into the trampled green blades, one longs to discover some formula that shall make us ourselves forever loyal to some ideal or other....

“Or perhaps it is just rest that one wants. Anyhow, one wants the country that is just country--not heaths, moors, crags, forests, passes, named rivers, or famous views. No--just fields, just dead ground, or fields of clover that have never heard and will never hear the crepitation of machine guns; hedgerows unwired and not too trim, with a spray or so of bramble just moving in a wind from which one is sheltered. That, until the other day, one so seldom saw in France--or in England either, for that matter.”

“I remember,” Gringoire said in one of his anecdotes, “being in a wood--behind Tenby, I think, or near Manorbier or Pembroke, in 1915. It was very warm, and that part of Wales is a sleepy country. I had bicycled ahead of troops afoot to inspect some sort of position that, the day before, with my over-meticulousness, I had already spent hours in surveying, when I might have been listening to Pierrots. At any rate, I had three-quarters of an hour of entire leisure.

“The sun beat down; I was just inside the edge of a wood. A little marsh--a reëntrant--ran right in under the trees. There was a mill where the insignificant valley opened out; a little dam where the road mounted an opposite slope. And then, though I had sketched, in a military sense, every clump of rushes, every contour, every bridge, every railway cutting and bit of embankment, many times--suddenly this place of greenery assumed--that too!--the aspect of being just country.

“A little Welsh sheep poked its horns through the hedge and looked at me; a wren crept through a tangle of old thorns at my elbow, a nuthatch pursued a curious and intricate course amongst the netted, coarse fibers of ivy on a wild cherry-trunk. I lay still in the dappled sunlight and thought nothing, except that it was good to stretch out one’s limbs, recumbent. Because the level, green ground in front of me was so grown with rushes, I began to try to remember what were the provisions of the Field Drain Act of the middle of last century. Surely the farmer could obtain from the State, on easy terms, a loan with which to defray the expense of soil-pipes and labor for the draining of that land. And I began to think about the queer, stodgy, Victorian mind; and about Albert the Good, and the Crystal Palace, which in those days was known as the Temple of Peace; and I remembered John Brown and John Morley and John Bright and John Stuart Mill and Mr. Ruskin and the rest of them, and mahogany chairs with horsehair seats and Argand lamps and the smoke and steam that used to fill the underground at Gower Street station. And in those days I had a 13-hand New Forest pony and a very old governess car and went to market on a Tuesday....

“And then, quite suddenly, I felt that, for thousands and thousands of miles, on the green fields and in the woodlands, stretching away under the high skies, in the August sunlight, millions, millions, millions of my fellow men were moving--like tumultuous mites in a cheese, training and training, as we there were training--all across a broad world to where the sun was setting and to where the sun was rising--training to live a little, short space of time in an immense long ribbon of territory, where, for a mile or so the earth was scarred, macerated, beaten to a pulp, and burnt by the sun till it was all dust.... The thought grew, became an immense feeling, became an obsession. Then Major Ward, on a bay with a white forehead, appeared on the little bridge that carried the waters of the marsh beneath the road. The others were coming!”

[Footnotes]

[5] Our friend is here venting a little of the bile that, as will be seen, at times obscures his outlook on life and makes him, elsewhere, appear ungenerous to the civilian population that so loyally did its bit. The train of thought of his friend the Eminent Reformer would seem to be as follows: (a) this is a war for liberty; (b) the Cavalry are officered mainly by the hereditary aristocracy; (c) if the hereditary aristocracy wins out in the war, liberty will suffer; (d) it would be preferable to lose the war. This seems logical. Our poet, however, refuses to see matters in this light. He says that he has never since spoken to that Eminent Reformer, who was once the closest of his friends--and that he never will again. This is lamentable. But is there not a tag beginning “_Irritabile genus_”...?

VII

_Playing the Game_

As will appear in my last chapter Gringoire insists that I shall include in this volume a specimen of his prose written under fire. As that was written in French your compiler flatly refused to insert it in the body of his book so that, since Gringoire flatly refused to let the book appear at all unless it _was_ included, it will be found elsewhere than in the body and what follows is his translation. I confess to regretting its inclusion for although I myself and a great number of my friends including even Mrs. Carmody who is the wife of the headmaster at the ancient grammar-school, a foundation of Edward VI’s in the XVI century at which I have the honor to teach English Literature--although I and my friends consider him a very great poet, if not the greatest poet in the world at the moment, poet’s prose is well known to be too florid for the real connoisseur of prose. And what follows is actually his own translation and Gringoire himself has asserted many times both in private and in public that he is entirely unable to translate his own prose. It does however present a picture of the poet under fire--a matter as to which he here refuses to say anything elsewhere under the plea that to talk about actual fighting disturbs his subsequent sleep with nightmares and also that he intends to treat of fighting subsequently himself when both the public bitterness and his own emotions shall have diminished. This decision I regret. For who in ten years’ time will be found to take an interest in the late struggle whereas enshrined here in the amber of my own prose the record of his emotions might well interest people who have such memories still vivid within them. I may say that I myself, a journalist of considerable pre-war practice, never went to the front though I served during the whole war in the depot of Gringoire’s regiment.

Here then is Gringoire’s prose, the original French of which he says was written at Pont de Nieppe during September 1916 after his visit to the French Ministry which he will describe in my next chapter.

A CRICKET MATCH

BEING A LETTER WRITTEN FROM THE LINES OF SUPPORT
IN FLANDERS TO CAPTAIN UN TEL IN PARIS.

_Mon cher monsieur, camarade et confrère_ (Gringoire’s addressee was also a poet soldier):

Behind Bécourt Wood, on a July evening, whilst the shells of the Germans were passing overhead, we were playing cricket. The heavy shells went over, seeming to cry in their passage the word “We; e; eary”; then, changing their minds farther on they exclaimed peremptorily: “Whack!” But when one plays cricket one forgets the Hun orchestra; one does not even hear the shells that pass overhead. We were running about; we were cursing the butterfingered fool who dropped a catch; we even argued about points of play, because the rules of such cricket as one plays with a tennis-ball, two axe-helves for bats and bully-beef-cases for wicket--those rules are apt to be elastically interpreted. But no match England v. Australia at Lords’ itself was ever so full of incident nor so moving as our game behind Bécourt Wood. The turf was of clay, baked porcelain-hard by the almost tropical sun; for grass there was only an expanse of immense thistles; boundaries and spectators at once were provided by the transport mules in their lines. But we cheered, we gesticulated, we rushed about, we disputed, we roared ... we--British infantry officers who are said to be phlegmatic, cold and taciturn.

I present the considerations that follow in the form of a letter to you, my dear Un Tel, though I would rather have written a balanced, careful and long-thought-out essay. But I cannot chisel at my prose today. “Ker wooley woo,” as our Tommies say, “say la gair!” I have passed twenty-five years of my life in trying to find new cadences; in chasing assonances out of my prose, with an enraged meticulousness that might have been that of Uncle Flaubert himself. But today I only write letters--long, diffuse, and in banal phrases. The other demands too much time, too much peace of mind.... Ah, and too much luck!

Well, then, we were playing cricket when I saw passing close to us a French officer of my acquaintance--an officer of one of those admirable batteries of seventy-fives whose voices were so comforting to hear by day and so let us sleep at night. For when they spoke in their level and interrupted roll, hour on hour, at a few furlongs behind our backs--when _they_ spoke, no Hun barked. And they were at that time aligned wheel to wheel from Albert to Verdun. The man was a gray-blue Colossus, his eyes brown and somber, his mustache heavy and dark. He stayed there, planted on his legs and his heavy stick, like some instrument of war, three-legged, silent and of steel. And when I left the game and went to talk to him he said to me in English:

“I find that a little shocking. _Very_ shocking!”

And he continued to look at the players who went on gesticulating and running about amongst the giant thistles and the dangerous legs of the mules. I exclaimed vehemently:

“_Au nom du bon Dieu, pourquoi?_”

He did not take his eyes from the players and reflected for a long time before answering. And I, getting impatient, went on talking vehemently and even indulged in gesticulations. I said in French:

“_Nous sortons des tranchées_.... We are only just out of the trenches.” This game made you fit, _remettait le moral_, made you forget the war.... What do I know of what I said? He kept on reflecting and I talking French. At last he said:

“I find”--he was still talking English--“that this war should be a religion. On coming out of the trenches one should sit ... and reflect. Perhaps one should even pray a little....”

And I ... I went on arguing with him for a long time without his answering anything but:

“I find it, all the same.”

And suddenly I burst out laughing. The situation seemed suddenly allegorical. And if you think of it, my dear friend, you will see how it was that I laughed. It was because it was he, the descendant of Cyrano de Bergerac, who spoke English in the monosyllables of a stage Lord Kitchener whilst I, the representative of so many officers and gentlemen who for many centuries have never found anything more to say than “O ... ah!”--I who ought to have been wearing an eyeglass and blond whiskers was engaged in waving my arms and shouting a French that was rendered almost incoherent by emotion. And all my comrades--officers as well as other ranks--went on shouting, gesticulating, running about, cursing and laughing like children of Tarascon in the French South.

* * * * *

And in truth the change is astonishing and a little moving. We have always had the idea--even the French have had the idea--that the French people, and above all the French soldiers and French officers, were gay, debonnair, loquacious, pawky--“Swordsmen and tricksters without remorse or scruples,” as Cyrano sings.

Well, the other day I went on service from Steenewerck to Paris--a journey which lasted seventeen hours. And during the whole of those seventeen hours although there were always French officers in my railway carriage or standing in the corridors of the train, the journey was the most silent of my whole life. No one talked. But no one! There were colonels, commandants, captains, marine officers, gunner officers. And I cannot believe that my presence was responsible for this taciturnity. It is true that in every suitable spot in the train were inscribed the words: “Be silent; be on your guard”--and the fact that enemy ears might be listening to you. But it was impossible that _all_ those gentlemen attributed such ears to me. I was wearing the uniform of my sovereign. And they none of them addressed the others.

No, certainly the voyage lacked incident. I will tell you the incidents there were: from Hazebrouck to Calais five French officers did not exchange two words; from Calais to Abbéville thirty who did not speak. I spoke to an artillery captain, grumbling at the slow progress of the train. He answered in English:

“Many troops moving!”

Then silence.

At Amiens there entered a civilian. It was on a Saturday towards eight o’clock in the morning and the train had the air of not wishing to reach Paris until after three. As I had business in Paris and should have to leave early on the Monday I asked this gentleman if I should find the banks shut, and the ministries and shops. He answered that he did not know. He was not a Parisian. He was going to Jersey to take possession of the body of a young girl who, having been drowned at Dieppe, had floated as far as that island.... As if there had not been enough deaths.

He began crying very unobtrusively.

But he, too, had spoken to me in English!

And then ... silence. The officers regarded the civilian with eyes that said nothing at all.... I assure you that it was not gay.

At Creil there got in two ladies. They were pretty and very well-dressed. _They_ talked enough, those two.... Red Cross, charitable activities, colonels, families. But the officers never looked at them. Not one raised his eyes although the girls were young, very pretty and well-dressed!

But, when _we_ had been going up to the Front from Rouen to Albert--and we were not going on leave like all these silent officers--we sang, we joked with young women whom we saw on the railway platforms; we kicked footballs along the corridors of the train; we climbed on the roofs of the carriages. You would have thought we were going to the Derby.

I naturally exaggerate these differences a little. This is not an article but a letter. But I am nevertheless telling you what my eyes have seen and my ears heard. And how is it to be explained?

It is not enough to say--as has been said so often--that if in England, the Germans had been established between York and Manchester, if they had seized the factories, pillaged the downs, and indulged in whatever the Hun Practices may be, we also should be gloomy, sad, taciturn. I am not talking of the civilian population of my country; I am speaking of us people out here whose life is not gay, who are expatriated, far from our homes and who suffer, I assure you, from a very real nostalgia. For, _là-bas_ ... on the Somme or in Flanders one feels one’s self very forgotten, very deserted, and very, very isolated with an isolation like the isolation that is felt by ... Oh, well, it is as if we were suspended--we, seven million men--on a carpet in the infinitudes of space. The roads which stretch out before us cease suddenly at a few furlongs from our faces--in No Man’s Land. And it is very saddening to contemplate roads which suddenly end. And then the roads and paths that we have taken to get here--and which lie between ourselves and our _pays_--the nooks where we were born--are roads which we may not travel.... And I assure you that, just like any other men, we love our wives, our houses, our children, our parents, our ingle-nooks, our fields, our cattle and our dung-heaps. The French soldier has at least that to his advantage, that he fights at home. That is something for him, as individual. When he steps out of the trenches he is at least in the land that bore him.... But we ...

I suppose that it is in order to forget, not only the Hun shells but also those other things that are dear to us, the chimney corner beside which we have so often sat chatting, the fields upon which we have labored, the herds and the woods--it is in search of the herb oblivion, that we play cricket behind Bécourt wood and go over the top kicking footballs across No Man’s Land--footballs which pass over the corpses of the fallen, towards the Huns.... And crying “Stick it, the Welsh!”--is that weakness? Is it the source from which we draw--such as they are--what we have of tenacity and courage? I do not know.

Like myself, my dear confrère, you have known the difficulty of exactly defining the shades of differences that distinguish differing peoples. We commence by theorizing and we theorize much too soon, or else we take the opposite view to theories that have been accepted for centuries. We have had in England the nineteenth century caricaturists of the French during the Napoleonic wars which showed us the Frenchman as he was in the British popular imagination. He was a meager, famished barber who lived exclusively on frogs. And on your side you had your John Bull, as big as an ox, his belly as big as the belly of an ox, and devouring whole oxen. And you had the figure of the milord with his millions, his spleen which drove him to be suicidal. They were stupid, those caricatures, but it is impossible to allege that they were not sincere. The English who fought in France in 1815 sought for what they saw--but they found it. And the same with the French.