Chapter V: Part ONE: Four Landscapes (4)

The same perhaps with myself. I have always considered the French a grave people, and when I came from an excited England, covered from the Isle of Anglesey to the North Foreland with patriotic and colorful placards and then found, from the Belgian frontier to Paris, a France quite without colored placards and gray, silent and preoccupied, it was natural that I should look for grave people and find them. But for me there was nothing new in finding France preoccupied, because for me France always was the France of fields, villages, woods and peasants. And the France of the peasants is a very laborious and pensive place where men labor incessantly between wood and pond or beneath the olive trees of the Midi.

For me, on the other hand the population of Great Britain has always been a town people. Well, it is the inhabitants of great cities who, work as they may, have need from time to time to go, as our saying is, on a spree--each according to his nature. And that is perhaps the reason of the differences that have so struck me, between the French Army and ourselves. The British Forces are made up preponderatingly of townsmen, the French army is an army preponderatingly peasant--for even the famous Parigots are mostly country born and bred. And the peasantry of all countries, but particularly the French peasant, is inured to confronting the harshness and the inevitable necessities of Nature. They meet them without ceasing for weeks, for months, for years--for their lifetimes. They can never escape from hardships and the contemplation of the evils of life, the bitter winds, the worms that devour the buds of whole harvests; their thoughts can never be diverted by taking a day’s leave, in making puns or by that humor which is acrid and rather sad and which is yet the sovereign quality of the British Tommy. For to inscribe on an immense gray shell that is about to be fired at the Hun lines--to inscribe on that in huge whitewash letters “Love to Little Willie” may seem stupid and shocking to folk who were never _là-bas_. But human psychology is very complicated and it is certain that the reading of such inscriptions on the great shells by the stacks of which we pass along the highroads of France much lightens our hearts when we advance from Albert to La Boisselle.

Why? It is difficult to say. It is perhaps because, the shells being terrible and threatening, here is a shell that has been rendered ridiculous, a cause for joy--or even merely human. For we are all anthropomorphic--and that one sole shell can suffer itself to become the vehicle for humor, that is sufficient to give to superstitious minds the idea that shells may be a little less superhuman than they seem. They are the messengers of gods athirst for blood, who proclaim their gigantic weariness but nevertheless destroy in a minute dungheaps, whole fields or all the houses of a village. But they have become a little humanized.

And it is the same for our game of cricket which we played behind Bécourt Wood amongst the giant thistles, hidden in thick dust and concealing in turn the bodies of so many of our dead. But I assure you, my dear comrade, that landscape--of Bécourt, Fricourt, Mametz, Martinpuich and the rest--was not gay. It was July and the sun let down its rays upon those broad valleys, upon the dust and the smoke that mounted to the heavens and upon the black and naked woods. And it did not smile, that territory. No; Nature herself there seemed terrible and threatening--in that domain where Destiny who is blind and implacable, must manifest herself to several million human souls.... And then we played cricket there--and, all of a sudden that threatening and superhuman landscape became ... just a cricket field.

For an Intellectual a field will be always just a field whether there descend upon it shells, thunderbolts--or merely tennis balls. But for us a countryside where we have played cricket becomes less affrighting and we shall there pass our days more contentedly in spite of the bones that there lie hidden amongst the thistles. It is stupid; it is even, if you will, sacrilege. But that is how we are made--we others who are not the intelligentsia and who issue forth from the great cities to go upon bloody wars. I, I have felt like that, down there, behind Bécourt Wood of a July evening during the Somme push in 1916.

And I remain always yours affectionately

G.

And I beg you to observe that all the persons who spoke to me between Steenewerck and Paris used English. That is already something.

And _I_ beg you to observe that when Gringoire is moving his prose
up to its most emotional pitch he employs a ‘Hun’ expression. For
the phrase ‘the herb oblivion’ is merely the literal translation of
the almost hackneyed German expression: “_Das Kraut Vergessenheit_.”

--_Note by the Compiler._