Chapter VIII: Part TWO: Certain Interiors (3)

Half the time during the afternoon, the other officer and myself--soaked to the skin and pestered by the farcical Lance-Corporal in Charge of Canteens--who, poor devil, was only doing his duty--had said, from horse to horse: “I wonder if Johnny A-- has gone west! I wonder if Fred B-- has copped it!...” It is horrible, that!

And then, in the rain, under the castle wall, we heard from a very bleeding man of the other Battalion that our own people, after all those of the W-- Regiment had been murdered, had been diverted from the Dranoutre-Neuve Eglise road to the Locre-Bailleul-Armentières highway, which was, in those days, as safe as a church.

So we two, watching the men of the other Battalion march resentfully by, could say “Thank God” to ourselves.

Relief, naturally, manifested itself in the two of us, according to our separate temperaments. My friend--he was an Irish Nationalist, almost a Sinn Feiner--said:

“G ..., old dear. You’re Division. I’m only Battalion. The canteen is your job. I think I’ll get to my digs.” He added, a bit bashfully, that in his digs there was a French girl who was going to give him lessons in her difficult tongue. I said, “All right. ’Op it.” [I remembered saying ‘’Op it!’ in an intense weariness.] But, as I turned my tired old horse once more down the road to find a billet for that accursed corporal of Divisional Canteen, I was, I remember, thinking innumerable things, all at once.

Firstly: my shirtcuffs were very frayed, and the rain had made them more diabolically wet and cold than you can imagine. Then I was actually bothering about the wretched staff officer who had murdered all those men. I was worried about him. You see, it would be such a trifling thing to do--as easy as forgetting--as every human soul has done in its day--to post a letter. He would have an ordnance map and a pencil. The map would show the contours, but probably it would not show the German trenches or the German artillery emplacements. He would rule a pencil line from Locre to Armentières, he would see that the Dranoutre-Neuve Eglise road was nearly level, running indeed along the flat at the edge of Flanders. On the other hand the Locre-Bailleul-Armentières road went up steeply from the Belgian frontier to Bailleul--a road in the dusty sunlight, the rough unshaded country, between tobacco and grain fields. And it was 1500 yards longer. So, in the kindness of his heart, he had saved the men the extra distance, the shadelessness, and the dust of a road over the foothills bordering Flanders. He had forgotten the Hun artillery--_just_ as you or I might forget to post a letter!

And, as I rode past the workmen’s villas, for the hundredth time, I was imagining that poor Acting Assistant Brigade Major, with his pink cheeks and his red hat, being strafed to hell by our frightful General of Division. He might almost cry!... But I daresay it wasn’t at all like that, really.

Anyhow, I was being dreadfully sorry for him. At the same time, I was trying--if I may use a professional novelist’s word--to psychologize the German gunner. He wouldn’t believe his luck. He _couldn’t_ believe his luck. He would believe it was some accursed scheme of the diabolically cunning English to discover his position. There, through his telescope, he would see a solid cube of wet-brown, moving slowly along a perfectly visible road. He would see it with his naked eye--a cubical caterpillar as large as a whole range of farm buildings. It would be incredible to him. No doubt he would ring up his immediate superior, and they would confer over the telephone. He would tremble for his battery. The English were no doubt drawing some sort of canvas wind-screen, camouflaged to look like a company, along that Macadam road. They would be trying to draw his fire so as to discover his position. Then they would blow his battery to hell with new, unimaginable High Explosive Shells, or mines, or anything. So he would fire--and see 160 men killed. “Drum fire,” I think the Germans called it. The complete Company would be wiped out--a mark such as a German gunner would hardly dare to pray for in his dreams. And nothing would happen to him. Nothing. He would wait. But nothing!

Then he would thank the Creator....

I don’t know really what happened to me then. I have said that that deluge of a twilight seemed to last a thousand years. I was wrong: it seemed to last two thousand years. I remember meeting the Divisional Transport Officer out in an immense expanse of mud near an incredibly dirty farmhouse--in a sea of brown liquid that was supposed to be the Station Road. And I know that the field stank. It smelled unimaginably--though I don’t know why a field should smell. I can still smell it.

The Transport Officer said that that was the field allotted to him by Division. He said to hell with the lake of mud. _He_ was going to put the Transport on the Bailleul-Steenewerck road. He gave the number on the map, “R. 14,” I think it was. I said I should take the field for the Divisional Canteen. There were, scattered--possibly floating--about it some Connaught huts that resembled Noah’s Arks adrift in a sewage farm. The Transport Officer said all right. I fancy he was not interested in the Divisional Canteen.

As we rode slowly, again past the workers’ villas, the Lance-Corporal in Charge of Divisional Canteen again waylaid me, springing up apparently out of the mud. He said: “Xcusemesir, may I speak to you, sir ... I’ve fahnd a ’ouse be’ind the Ch’ch for the D’vish’n’l C’nteen.”

I think I went mad at that point, and the Transport Officer rode slowly away. I don’t remember what I said to the Lance-Corporal. I hope I never shall.

The trouble was that, in that town, there was a danger zone. For the last four days, the Germans had been shelling the church. From 6:00 P.M. until midnight, in their methodical manner, every quarter of an hour they had dropped a 5–9 shell into the sacred edifice. The danger zone was therefore perfectly circumscribed and perfectly definite. But, unfortunately for me, though I had been warned that there _was_ an official danger zone, no one that I met knew where it was. The town marshal had gone; the Divisional Police who were already working typewriters in his office were our Divisional Police, not those of the Division that had gone too. They knew nothing about the dangerous area. And some Australian humorist had removed all the cautionary boards that should have surrounded the church and had grouped them round a large iron public convenience which was the chief architectural adornment of the main street. There they looked alarming but improbable.

It was therefore not to be thought of that the L. C. and his men should remain in a house just under the shadow of the church--for it was plain that, however big or however circumscribed the official danger zone might be, what the Huns were shelling was the church. We had been in the church in the course of the afternoon. It was a commonplace building, as far as I can remember, Byzantine of an eighteenth century type. But it was, in a way, rendered gracious by the enormous heaps of plaster and stone-dust that piled against the walls in drifts, so that it was as if sand dunes had invaded the roofless edifice. And, in the course of the dusk, shells had landed in all that rubble, constantly, no doubt regularly, whilst we were pursued by the L. C. round the church square, in the rain that had begun to fall just as the Huns began to shell....

I daresay the reader will by now be tired of the Lance-Corporal in Charge of Canteens. I know _I_ was. And I am uncertain what became of him. I daresay I could remember if I made an effort--but it hardly seems worth while. I know that four days later he was safely writing a music-hall sketch, in a tent, under a counter made of soap boxes, in a field just beyond the turning where the Plugstreet road leaves the chaussée from Bailleul to Nieppe; and I know that next night I got out of my flea-bag at about 2:00 A.M. and wearily walked for miles and miles in search of him and his sardine tins. The Huns had started regularly bombarding the town at that inconsiderate hour, and I know too that, when I did find him, by chance, wandering about with his disreputable cart and his four disreputable men, he said that a shell had gone clean through the upper story of the shop that they had commandeered. So I suppose that that night he had slept in the town. I can’t remember.

I can remember interviewing the _Maire_ a second time and that, because he was busy with some French staff officers, I had to wait some minutes--in a dentist’s waiting-room, with aspidistras, black walnut furniture, and innumerable copies of the illustrated paper called _Excelsior_ on the lace table-cover. For the _Maire_ was a dentist. He was also a brave man. I can remember, too, being in a shop just under the church where a young, stout Belgian Jewess was standing waist deep in remnants and rags of black satin. She was nonchalantly packing this away in sacks whilst I tried to make sense out of her middle-aged, frightened father. I think I was telling him that seven francs a day was too much to expect the Division to pay for the rent of a rag and bone shop. Something hit the roof at that moment and an avalanche of bones, old iron, and satin petticoats poured down the stairs from the upper floors. The father disappeared, exclaiming “Oi! Oi!” and elevating his hands above his bared head. But the daughter, with a large face, chalk-white with powder, heavy blue-black hair, and an opulent inscrutability--she had on her large white fingers a great collection of fat-looking wedding rings--went on nonchalantly examining black satin petticoats, rejecting some, folding others slowly, and packing them away in sacks. She seemed to regard the thing that had passed through the upper story with enigmatic indifference, as if shells and iron hail were just part of the silly vanity of the male sex. Her business was to pack up for transport on a barrow to Armentières all the black satin that she and her father had collected and that had once belonged to the inhabitants of the empty town.

That attitude seemed to be common enough in the women of those parts. I remember looking, five minutes later, through the bull’s-eye glass of a cottage window so low that you would say every shell must pass over it. The interior was candle-lit and quite tranquil.

At trestle tables, gesticulating although they had their elbows on the boards, sat eight Tommies of the battalion whose entry we had witnessed. Five had bandages, and three had not. Between their elbows they had tinplatesful of fish and chips. And there were two women, standing. One, middle-aged and stout, had her hands on her hips, and her elbows back. Her blouse was well open at the neck, as if it had been hot work cooking the fish and chips. She stood against a trestle table and seemed to be giving back-chat to all the eight Tommies at once. The other was a young girl--of the Flemish Madonna type. Her yellow hair was tightly braided round her head; she leaned back against the mildew-stained wall, and on her bare, crossed arms she had a tabby kitten. It was biting her finger, and she stood entirely quiet, as if on her hands she had all the safety and all the time in the world.

I daresay it was safe enough for the moment. But, some days later, I noticed that there was no cottage there. There was not even a lace curtain.

I walked along--for I had got rid of my tired horse--a long way, under the dripping trees that were black above the wall of the château, and out onto the Bailleul road, a long way beyond the Plugstreet turning, I persuaded myself that I was going to ask the Divisional Transport Officer to house my friends of the Canteen in tents in his field.

I found him in the W---- lines. They were eating Welsh rabbit and herrings in a Connaught hut. They were not pleased to see me. There was an old Quartermaster from Stratford-on-Avon--a butcher by profession, think of that!--who sat with his hands crossed over a large stomach and spectacles well down on his nose. Also he wore carpet slippers. He told me in a most businesslike way that they had only herrings enough for three. I was welcome to any amount of Welsh rabbit--but there were only herrings enough for three. And they were three already.

Then I realized that what I was really concerned about was to see my own Battalion come in. It was symptomatic. My friend the Sinn Feiner had been perfectly content, as soon as he had seen the W----’s come in and knew that our own people had been diverted, to go and take lessons in the language of the country from the French young lady whom he had unearthed. But, as for me, I wanted to _see_ the Battalion. I had no particular reason to love the C.O. or the Sergeant Major. But I wanted to be absolutely _sure_ that they were safe.

And, just as I got back to the crossroads near the church, the Battalion came in. There was the C.O. riding, the Sergeant Major walking ahead of him. And then “A” Company. I called out to Captain Gardiner, after I had saluted the Colonel: “A Company all right?” And the young man answered: “Cheerie Oh, old bird, as right as rain.” The last dregs of light were fading under the elms; the Huns were putting in some extraordinarily heavy stuff just behind them. And suddenly I remembered that I had not billeted myself. God knows whom we hadn’t billeted, the Sinn Feiner and I between us. Certainly three sets of battalion headquarters, transport, officers’ messes, sanitary squads, and the men of a whole brigade. But I had nowhere to lay my head. And my frayed shirt-cuffs were streaming with rain and it had grown pitch dark....

You say I am a poet. Certainly I am a poet!

And these eyes of mine that, when I have any leisure, see always not only the things that surround me, but many other things--these eyes of mine were busy. Certainly they saw what, in the darkness, was visible of the wet and stricken town. Against the sky the roof lines or the silhouettes of charred beams; the red glow of the candles in the fried-fish cottage; the red glow that slowly danced inside the church as if a black mass were going forward. I suppose the last shell had set fire to some woodwork. Then another came and put it out, so that it was darker.

But these eyes of mine that, with their attention, were looking at a bright landscape, had also registered in their memory a white, as if triangular patch, in a dark window of a house just behind the church, nearly opposite, but a little this side of the _Mairie_, a house that we had passed again and again. The eyes had noted that white luminosity and now made for it, though the thinking mind was differently intent. This sort of definition is a little difficult to make. Try to follow me. The department of my eyes that led me--the Intelligence Department--saw the roofs and the black streets; the department which was influenced by my desires--for a meal, for warmth, for a bed, and above all for dry shirt-cuffs--was leading my steps toward the house that had the pale luminosity in the dark window. And, what I suppose you would call my mind’s eye was occupied by a bright landscape. That is to say, I was definitely thinking about an August landscape.

You will say that it was the landscape I have mentioned so often--the landscape with the stream and the trees and the gingerbread cottage. But it wasn’t. That came later. I suppose that at that time I wasn’t tired enough to see it. Besides, I never saw that as if in bright sunshine or in the weather of any accentuated season--but always as just English country in just English weather, green earth in a diffused light under a July sky.... No, I was thinking of a billeting scheme. For, in the long ago--thousands and thousands of years ago--we used to do billeting schemes, round Manorbier and Penhally. And I think the one I was then thinking of with--as the prose writers say--laughter mixed with rain, took place at Penhally. It appeared an idealized Penhally, mostly hollyhocks and thatch, so wilful is the mind, though I remember every house of Penhally! Well: a great many of us went in the August weather to work a billeting scheme there. And an officer representing Division drove up in a Rolls-Royce and pretended to “confer” with us. He had a red hat-band and a golden lion and the beautifullest moustaches and the beautifullest white whip-cord breeches and _such_ spurs! And such ladies in the Rolls-Royce, awaited him!

And he gave us the loveliest hints in a clear voice, with the far-away expression of one who knows his job but lectures in it too often. Certainly he knew his job--and he was a fine fellow!

We were to get hold of the civil power at once, or at least as soon as we had conferred with the divisional billeting officer. The first thing to do was to find out about the water supply. Then we were to group our companies round the pump if we could. If there were only one, we were to call a conference of Company Quartermaster Sergeants and give out the time when each Company was to draw water. That would then go into Battalion Orders. He said, with a little smile, that we were to remember to put Battalion Headquarters into the best billet--because C.O.’s liked that--and Company messes must be lodged in public houses or places where there was liquor. So that the men shouldn’t get at the alcohol! Transport should, as a rule, be as far from fire as could be arranged, to avoid stampeding of horses; similarly with the Doctor’s cart and the Battalion cookers. And, as a rule, the Company detailed for the Advance Guard next day should have the advanced billets if there were no likelihood of a night attack. But they should not be exposed to disturbance in the night, if possible, because they would have a hard time next day. Similarly the Advanced Guard of that day should be halted first and be in the rear, so as to get a good night’s rest. He told us to remember those splendid words which used to be the shibboleth of every British officer--to the effect that the comfort and convenience of the men should be considered before every exigency save the necessities of actual warfare.

Yes: he was a fine young fellow--one of the Old Contemptibles, as he modestly, clearly, and rather absentmindedly, enunciated all that sound, commonsensible, old-fashioned lore of the Army. And I remember every word of it. For instance, men of separate units or even of separate Companies of the same Battalion should not be billeted on opposite sides of the same street; the street should be divided in half, and one-half allotted to each Company or unit. (I remember pointing that out to my Sinn Fein friend in one of the miserable, battered streets of workmen’s hovels in Pont-de-Nieppe that afternoon.)

But, though I had listened with all my ears to the Staff Officer at Penhally, my eyes, even then had been playing the trick of showing me Pont-de-Nieppe--just as at Nieppe in France they insisted on showing me Penhally in Wales. For, whilst I listened to him, I was seeing the time when I should represent Division and be, in the sunlight, young, with a beautiful moustache and a red hat-band and white whip-cord breeches, very full. And with _such_ spurs!

So there I was, representing Division.

It hadn’t been very like what I had pictured--and I had not had to bother about water supply.[11] I had enough water in the wretched, frayed wristbands of my shirt, as it seemed, to water a whole Battalion and the mules of the Transport! But, otherwise, the traditions of the Old Army had prevailed. Rudimentarily, no doubt, but still, they had prevailed. I had reminded the Battalion Billeting Officers to see that Battalion Headquarters had convenient buildings, that officers had charge of any civilian liquor depots; that Company cooker-cars had emplacements convenient for their men, and that latrines were not located near water supplies. Also, we had got into touch with the civil power.... Only, there were no ladies in my Rolls-Royce--and my Rolls-Royce was two very wet-kneed legs! And as for my shirt-cuffs ...

I suppose they were most in my mind. For it is the most horrible of human afflictions to have wet shirtcuffs! So that, when I found my orderly, not where I had told him to be--in comparative safety in front of the workmen’s villas but in the shadow of the door of the shop where the Jewess had packed up the black satin petticoats, waiting devotedly, though the shells that missed the church went close overhead--he said:

“She’s took all them petticoats on a barrer in sacks to Armentières,”[12] I answered:

“You can fall out. Tell my batman that I’ve gone somewhere to get my d--d shirt-cuffs dried.”

Nevertheless, he followed me. It was, you see, the pride of _métier_. Alas, that there should be no English for those words. He was my orderly for the day--just any orderly from headquarters. But I was his charge. If I had ordered him to fall out, no doubt he would have gone, against his personal will but in obedience to orders, to some sort of comfort that his pals would have prepared for him. I, however, had said, “You _can_ fall out.” It was permissive and left the falling out optional. But he saw before him an obviously eccentric and probably benevolent officer--and it was his job to be able to tell my batman where I lodged myself. Also, it was contrary to King’s Regulations for officers to go anywhere alone where there is any danger at all from shell or other fire. So, though he must have been uncommonly wet and hungry and tired, he followed me to the door of the house in whose dark windows I had seen the luminous patch--the forehead of Rosalie Prudent as she sat sewing, her head bent forward, in the twilight.

I don’t know how it is: but from the moment when I first saw that highlight--and it had been certainly three hours before--I had been perfectly sure that that was what it was--the forehead of a quiet woman bending her head forward to have more light from the high window whilst she sewed in the dusk. In a way it was not what one expected: the town had been evacuated of its civilian population the Sunday before, when the Huns--as it seemed, for the love of God--started shelling the church just as it had emptied after benediction. And they had shelled from six o’clock till midnight; and every night since then, from six o’clock till midnight they had shelled the church. And they were shelling it now--eighty yards away. It was a desolate, and it seemed a stupid business. But no doubt they had their purpose, though it was difficult to see what it was.

That was how Rosalie Prudent put it, as she sat sewing my wristbands by the stove, in the wash-house. I sat nearer the stove, naked to the waist, the red glow and the warmth that came from the red-hot iron of the circular furnace being, I can tell you, very agreeable to my shivering skin. Opposite me sat the orderly drinking a bottle of Burgundy--which he had richly deserved. The steam went up from his wet clothes and was tinged red by the light of the coke....

In the extremely clean _salle-à-manger_, with a high faïence stove of blue and white tiles, a colza lamp with a white globe, a buffet in the Nouvel Art style, of yellow Austrian oak with brass insertions; at a yellow oak table covered with a green velvet table-cover fringed with lace, sat my friend the Sinn Feiner learning the French that is spoken in Plugstreet from the niece, Beatrice Prudent. She was teaching him French by selling him handkerchiefs edged with lace in whose corners she had embroidered multicolored initials. In two very clean, lavender-papered bedrooms, upstairs, with white bedsteads, strips of carpet beside them on the waxed floors, with valises opened and showing works of devotion, altar vases, empty biscuit tins containing unconsecrated wafers of the sacrament, trench boots, gas helmets, tin hats--sat two padres composing their sermons for the next day. The Roman Catholic--for I heard him preach on it next day--was meditating on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. I don’t know what the Presbyterian was writing about.

But there the house was, large, quiet but for the shells, kept spotless by the labors of Rosalie and her niece Beatrice, and, as yet untouched--just as it had been evacuated by the factory manager and his family, who had fled on the Sunday after benediction. In one of the roomy, very tall parlors there was, over the fireplace, a gigantic figure of the Saviour, standing in robes of blue, white, and scarlet plaster of paris, holding on his left arm a great sheaf of white lilies and resting one hand on the head of a very thin plaster sheep of, I should think, a Rhineland breed. That was perhaps why the owner of the house had not trusted to its miraculous intervention in favor of his dwelling. He might have--for I heard the other day that the house remained intact until the 11/11/’18.

Rosalie profited--for, when the French inhabitants fled, the British authorities allowed Belgian refugees to take their places on condition that they billeted the troops. So perhaps it had been to protect her that the immense Bon Dieu waited! She deserved it.

She came from Plugstreet, of which town she had been one of the richest bourgeoises, her husband being the miller. She had had a large, roomy house, a great yard with stables and carts; she had had a wealthy, goodish, but possibly too jovial husband, two affectionate, dutiful, and industrious sons, and two obedient daughters. On Sundays she had gone to mass wearing a black satin gown, and, on her breast, a gold-framed cameo as large as a saucer. It represented a very classical Paris, seated, I don’t know why, apparently between the horns of a lyre and stretching out one hand--which no doubt contained the apple--toward three grouped Goddesses in rather respectable Flemish _déshabille_. Mme. Prudent retained this work of art, but her wardrobe was reduced to two blue cotton dresses.

I gathered all this, whilst I dozed by the black iron stove, from her conversation with the orderly. She spoke Flemish, and he, Wiltshire, but they understood each other. Of course, they used signs and facial expressions. The flames through the interstices of the stove poured upward to the dim rafters of the wash-house roof, and, by its light, Mme. Rosalie sewed as if she had no other pride and no other purpose in the world. For she told of the fate of her men and her womenfolk abstractedly and passionlessly; pride only showed itself when she talked of the state of the house in which she had found a refuge. From time to time she would say that if Mm. the Proprietors returned, they would find the floors waxed; the stair-rods shining, the windows polished; woodruff and sweet herbs amongst the bed linen in the presses, and not a speck of dust on the plaster-robes of the great Bon Dieu in the _salon de réception_. That was her pride....

As for the rest ... On the 18th of August, 1914, her man had been killed in the Belgian Reserve somewhere near Liège; on the 20th of the same month her eldest son had been killed in the Belgian regiment of the Guides. He had expected to have an excellent career in the office of an _avocat_--in Brûges, I think. On the 8th of November, 1914, her remaining son had been killed in the 76th French Regiment of Infantry of the Line. He had been chief clerk to an architect of Paris. Her daughters had been, one apprentice and the other chief saleswoman of a celebrated _couturière_ of Liège. She had heard of them once since the Germans had entered the city. A Belgian priest had written to her from the Isle of Wight in December, 1914, to say that some nuns had taken in Aimée and Félicité. Those were the names of her two daughters....

And at the moment she started up. She remembered that she had forgotten the potatoes for Monsieur--Monsieur being myself. So out she went into the black garden and returned with a tin platter of potatoes.

On it were ten tubers of which she weighed each in her hand inscribing what they came to on a slate--so that she might account to Messieurs the owners, on their return, for the potatoes that she had dug from the garden. Then she called her niece from the dining room to wash and slice the potatoes. She was going to give me an omelette with bacon and fried potatoes for my supper. She sat down again and went on, sewing and talking to the orderly.

She began talking of the interior of her house in Plugstreet; she described minutely all the furniture in all the apartments. In each of the bedrooms there was a night commode in mahogany and a statue of the Virgin, also one of the Blessed Saints, and a _prie-dieu_, also in mahogany.... And now there was nothing. Every fortnight she was permitted by the British military police to visit her house--and she stayed there, in Nieppe, so that every fortnight she might revisit her house--which now, she said, contained nothing. The shells were shaking it to pieces. The tiles were all gone; the rain was soaking into the upper floors. The furniture was all gone--the great presses with her linen, the wardrobes--_en acajou_--which had contained her black satin dress and her husband’s Sunday clothes....

But she continued to catalogue to the orderly the contents of her residence. I don’t know why it should interest him, but it did; for he nodded sagely when she talked of the _bahûts en bois de chêne_, and the immortels in vases on the piano....

Suddenly she turned her head to me and said to me, where I sat writing with my tablet on my knee:

“And I ask you, _M. l’officier_, for what purpose is it that one brings men children into the world if this is to be the end? They cause great pain in their entry, greater than at the entry of little girl children. It is difficult to keep them alive so that they reach men’s estate. And then it is difficult to keep them in the paths of virtue. And then they are gone.”

[Footnotes]

[10] This would mean that the Company presented, as a target to the German artillery, a solid and slow-moving cube of human flesh 240 ft. x 8 ft. x 6 ft. _No_ gunner could miss it.

[11] It is odd to think that Nieppe at that date was still supplied with electric power by underground cables that the Huns had not yet discovered, from Lille.

[12] His name was Private Partridge of, I think, the 6th Wilts.--a fine fellow, but not to be confused with Private Phillips of the 9th Welsh, who was my wonderfully good batman: (Note by Gringoire).

XII

_The Movies_[13]

I was a little bewildered when Mme. Prudent so addressed me. For, to tell the truth, I had not been listening to her very attentively. She seemed to accept the war--this war, states of war, any operations that washed and disintegrated the interiors of the world--she seemed to accept them so tacitly as being part of the child’s madness of the male that, in the warmth I had just dozed, not thinking much of her immense losses and not knowing at all that she would have anything very striking to say about the war. Besides, it was unusual to be beside a stove, under a roof.

And, when she had come in with the potatoes, out of the darkness, I had suddenly seen again that vision in green--of the sanctuary! And I remembered, extraordinarily, how once, years and years and years before, I had gone digging potatoes at night. I suppose some visitor had come to my cottage late. And I had put my hand into the ground to take out a potato, and I found the earth quite warm. The air cools off quicker than the sod, you see, after a hot day. It had astonished me then--and, in that house, the remembrance came again, vivid and astonishing, for it had produced exactly the effect of one’s having thrust one’s hand into the breast of a woman....

Well, I had been thinking of that and looking at that green landscape. And then, suddenly, I had pulled myself together. For it had occurred to me that I was not doing my duty. I had it in my head that I had got that soft, wet undangerous job of billeting, at the request of the bearded gentleman in the frock coat, who had sat under the picture by Bastien Lepage--or was it by Marie Bashkirtseff?--in front of the great table with the carnations and the miniature _Niké_. I daresay it was not the fact: or it may have been. There is no knowing. In France you were taken up, like a brown paper parcel, and deposited here or there at the behest of two obscure lines of smudged typewriting in some one’s Orders. And you did not know why; you had no will.

So I felt that I ought to be writing. It would not be fair to have a soft job for the purpose of wooing the Muse and then not to woo her. So I had pulled out from my wet tunic which hung over the chair back, my disreputable and sodden tablet of writing paper, which I had purchased two days before from that miserable Canteen Lance-Corporal and had begun, with a wet stump of pencil, to write the article called “_Une Partie de Cricket_” which, if only because it is a souvenir, I hope will be printed as an appendix to these remembrances. I know I wrote the first ten sentences, because I remember them and also because, the other day, I turned out the repulsive flap of my camp bed, and there, along with a damp sock and some mildewed straps, was the mouldering tablet with three scrawled pages....

But I couldn’t keep on writing. I was obsessed with the idea of a country, _patrie_, republic, body politic, call it what you will--that the recollection of that minister had called up in me. Yes: I had a vision of a country.

In the center was the Ministry--like the heart of an onion--and all the others that I had seen in the last week went round about it. Mind you, I have nothing to say against that Minister. I may have appeared to speak of him sardonically: that is a habit I have. But he, or something like him, was indispensable to the higher strategy of his nation:[14] and this man knew his job. What he wanted was perfectly the right thing: and if he did not know that the First Line Transport of a Battalion in the trenches was not exactly the happiest place in which to write lofty prose--well, it is certainly hypocrisy to seek, in the heart of the Sacred Emperor, for a knowledge of low tea-shops. He did not, obviously, like me but I have not the slightest doubt that I appeared drunk to him. Only a drunkard, really, would seek for ferrets in the palace of the Sacred Emperor. Yet I had my excuse. First of everything in the world--of everything in the whole world!--comes your battalion. And the ferrets of my battalion had all died suddenly; and the last thing they had said to me had been: Don’t forget to get us some ferrets. If you had seen the rats of Locre you would have understood.

But the Minister had not seen the rats of Locre so he had not understood....

No: he was a good man, in the right place. And very properly he sat amongst the gracious products of a State art--the pictures, the tapestries, the ormolu, the august building, the frescoes, the great staircases. And attendants who looked like bishops must be there to answer his bell; and Suisses with their great cocked hats and immense white gloves and their sabres with silver scabbards. There must be symbols of the Temporal Power of the State, which is august, ancient, and fit to be upheld. And, in disturbed times, there must be Civil Police in the courtyard, for strange visitors will come. And sentries there must be in the tricolored sentry-boxes beside the _porte-cochère_; sentries to call out the guard. And famous battalions must pass the door, along the boulevard, now and again.

And, round the Palace of the Sacred Emperor, there must be the Great City, and round the Great City must be La Grande Nation--stretching away and away, for miles and miles and miles....

It presented itself to me as twenty-seven hours of railway journey--past Etaples where I had spent, years before, long days in _châlets_ amongst the pine wood; past Calais where my grandfather was born; to Hazebrouck where, during the war, we had found the worst billiard table in the world and where, whilst we waited for a connection, a German plane was dropping bombs on the goods line and Cochin-Chinese in furred silk hoods were working as plate-layers. And so to Steenewerck, where the great farm carts and tilburies and berlins were mixed up with artillery horses, with timber wagons, with immense guns.

And so the land stretched out to Nieppe and the wash-house and Rosalie Prudent sewing in the light of the circular cast-iron stove that had become red hot. And on the stove there were bubbling the pots which contained supper for me and coffee for my friend the Sinn Feiner. And whilst Rosalie sewed, ever and again, the pots lifted themselves an inch off the dully red-hot disk and then sat down again. Shells, you see, were falling in the church.

So the land stretched out--yes, like a gramophone disk!--till it came to the wash-house that was intact amidst all the smashed houses with their forlorn lace window curtains. And all that edge of the disk was smashed houses inhabited by steadfast souls who sat sewing whilst the pots jumped on the hobs. They were the caretakers of _Messieurs les Propriétaires_ who had fled. There was a whole population of them: I came myself across a whole population of these quiet people, who considered only their duties to absent proprietors amongst the _rain_ of shells. I remember when I went to have lunch with the officers of our 2nd Battalion--all dead, the officers that I had lunch with!--in Albert, there sat and read the _Libre Parole_, such a very old caretaker. He had gray side-whiskers, a white apron, a yellow and black striped waistcoat, a square black alpaca cap or _bêret_--for all the world like an old domestic of a Paris nobleman’s hotel. He sat there, his legs crossed, his head thrown back, reading the paper, through silver-rimmed spectacles at the end of his nose. On the table beside him were a bullfinch in a gilt cage constructed like a pagoda and his black leather spectacle case. He had nothing to communicate about the war, except, I am glad to say, that the officers of the battalion were careful of the furniture, but he was so busy that he could not keep the floors as cleanly waxed as he desired. He asked me if I could not speak to Colonel Partridge about it. The Germans were putting in their usual lunch-time shells into that street; he was sitting reading in a glass-roofed passage between the kitchen and the _salle à manger_....

Yes: a host of such people came into my mind as I sat beside the stove. I am not going to talk about the war any more. By the grace of God, I will never talk about the war again whilst I live. As you say: the people who did not take part hate to be reminded of that part; and the people who did take part have had enough of it. Yes; you are right. I made the mistake of my life, professionally, _quand je m’en allais en guerre_. It got me disliked by the critics, and it is bad to be disliked by the critics--for a poet.[15] So you see, I too have my prudences.

And indeed I have my prudences--though they are not the prudences of other people. I do not desire money, glory, the praise of my kind whom I distrust, nor yet to dominate humanity, which is a beast that I dislike. I do not desire friends; I do not desire broad lands. So, thinking about things in the wash-house of Mme. Rosalie, I said: “I must dig myself in.” I said, indeed, twice: “I must dig myself in....”

I must have a dugout, as proof as possible against the shells launched against me by blind and august destiny; round about it there must be the strong barbed wire of solitude and, within the entanglements, space for a kitchen garden. Do you remember, Mr. Compiler, the redoubt our regiment made once--Montgomery’s Folly? There was the redoubt, a circular piece of engineering. Round about it there was a level space of fifty yards, to give a field of fire, surrounded by the apron of wire. And, in that level space, you remember, we made the Regimental Gardens.... Well, in the wash-house, I said to myself that, _appry la gair finny_, I must make for myself, in space and time, an affair like that, or as like it as possible. If I could afford a cottage, I would have a cottage: if not, any sort of shelter made of old tins filled with clay with a bit of corrugated iron for a roof, a door of sacking, a groundsheet for carpet. As for furniture, aren’t there bully-beef cases still?... _You_ remember!

Lord! the interiors we have constructed out of such materials and the fun we had. And how they vanished like a drift of leaves when we were drafted away. And how solid they seemed and work we did in them whilst they lasted, those interiors! So, I said to myself, in Mme. Rosalie’s wash-house, I shall get along somehow. And then, said I to myself: There is the question of food.

Well, there is gardening! As you know, I am not _le dernier venu_ when it comes to gardening. I will back myself to get twice as much off any given piece of ground as any ordinary man--if you will give me some seeds and a bit of old iron and a stick capable of being tied together into some semblance of a hoe....

So the war finished for me, looking at Mme. Rosalie as she sat entirely engrossed in her work whilst the shells made the pots jump alive off the red-hot iron plate.... The war was finished, since my line was taken for _appry la gair finny_. That we should win I had no doubt, for, though the horrible scalawags who wangle themselves into notoriety had too much to say in the world, our heart was in it, and the heart of the other side was not. I knew enough to know that. If God were good to one, for one’s self personally, it would finish there. I did not even want to stay to see the finish: I was so certain that we should win. But I had been worrying a little about myself. I couldn’t, you see, see anything but the workhouse for me, if I lived through. And, at my age, the workhouse is not a pleasant thought. I am just too old, and just too young for the workhouse.

But the spectacle of Madame Rosalie, fetching in the potatoes, saved me.... I will tell you an odd thing. I have spoken of the recumbent oval of green light that now and again had appeared to me, to turn into a picture of a green valley. I will confess that, hitherto, I had feared it. It had come into my head that it might be a symptom of a seizure, an epileptic fit perhaps, or of some obscure but disastrous nervous disease. _Ker vooly voo? Say la gair._ That region of the world had its trials for the nerves of people of my age. One might well be on the edge of something.

But looking at Mme. Rosalie--so extremely centered in the work in hand, so oblivious to the very real danger, so brave and so tranquil, I said to myself:

“What the devil! If she can stick it, I too can!”

For what had she to look forward to? She had said that, on the last occasion when the British authorities had permitted her to visit her house at Plugstreet they had not allowed her to enter it. The front wall of the upper part had fallen inward and for her sole possession she could see that on the wall of Félicité’s bedroom that was exposed to the sky, there hung a gilt-framed Souvenir of her daughter’s First Communion. Nothing else! Nothing! That was her sole possession in the world except for two gowns of blue Manchester goods and the cameo that represented the judgment of Paris....

And suddenly I was convinced that the apparition of that recumbent green oval was, not a visitation, but a sign. If from that time onward I just carried on, if I persevered--as I was truly minded to persevere, in my duties as a poor bloody footslogger--the Almighty would give to me at least sufficient space in the quiet earth that was just country--to dig myself in. Well, God has been good to me, as you see.

And, mind you, I consider and consider proudly, that I am doing, most of all, my duty to the State. I have always considered myself a member of the governing classes, with the privileges and the duties. And I abate nothing of that opinion. It seems to me to be my duty to govern, if not by directing, then at least by guiding, through the superiority of my insight. I am not fitted for the intrigues of what is called Public Life. No doubt that is no worse today than it was in the time of Alcibiades or the late Mr. Gladstone. But it is very bad; very vile.

You say: how do I presume to speculate on public matters who cut myself deliberately off from the consideration of public matters on the 8/9/’16? My friend, I have considered the public matters of the 8/9/1816; of the 4/9/1870; 1770; 1470; of the 8/9/’16 of B.C. 1070. And there is no difference. If it is not an hypocrisy, it remains still a very wearisome matter to search for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low teahouse. Well, I have done my share of searching and am too old for any more.

I have said that there is no difference between the public matters of today and those of the day of Alcibiades. But there is one very great difference: there is the difference that today--and it was never the case before--all the ground of the world that is capable of growing wheat is occupied by wheat and the population of the world is increasing by leaps and bounds. I will tell you: Some years before the war I was in a little town on the coast of France not far from Dunkirk. And my hotel was full of affrighted women; of nuns whose convents had been burned over their heads; and of ruined, wounded, and despairing men from the Low Countries. St. Quentin had been sacked; other towns were afire. A year before you could read in the papers the despatches of intrepid war correspondents in the South of France. They wrote from hotels--just as they did a year or so ago--how towns were flaming, streets running with wine, how the 5–9 shells soared and the naval howitzers raised their muzzles and coughed. You know the sort of thing!

Well! Those were the fingers on the wall. They were merely food-riots but they predicted Armageddon for those that can read--and still they predict an Armageddon beside which that in which we all took part was one of Gilbert White’s rush candles against the searchlights of a battleship. Those were food riots, caused by the determination of town dwellers to enforce prices on peasants. The last war was a food riot: the next war will be a food riot beyond the imagination of the sons of men.

Nothing can prevent it or much delay it unless there should come a change in the hearts of humanity. And I do not perceive much change in the hearts of man--and all the wheat-land of the world is occupied by wheat and the population of the world is increasing by leaps and bounds. _Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!_ You say that there are revolutions on foot. There always have been. But they have always been _révolutions de palais_ and _révolutions de palais_ they will always remain. What does it matter to me or to any sane man whether it is the Duke of Omnium or Mr. Evans of Llanfair-Rhaiado, or Mr. Hicks of Poplar who sits in the seats once occupied by Sir Robert Walpole or Mr. Jonkinsen or Colbert or Caius Julius Cæsar? None of those departed statesmen had to face the problem of a globe whose wheat-land was all occupied and whose population was increasing by leaps and bounds. In consequence they were not so greedy for money, or for the jazz bands of excitement that may make them forget tomorrow. For that is what it all comes to.

So I go out of public life of that type.

But don’t believe that I, Gringoire, Hippolyte, de l’Institut de France, go out of public life! No, I go into it. For I go to prove that a decent life, clean, contemplative, intent, skilful, and with its little luxuries, may yet be lived by the Gringoires of the world--_hominibus bonæ voluntatis_. For, though I am a poet, it is thus that I interpret the message of the angel. For it is thus that I see the world--as a world of a few Gringoires and of infinite millions that are the stuff to fill graveyards. I can’t see it any other way.

And I said to myself in the wash-house of Madame Rosalie whilst some fragments of iron and rubble pattered down on the tiles of the pent-roof from the nearby church that, for the rest of my life I would be what I will call self-supporting--at any rate after the war was finished--and I will govern!

For I will be dependent on the profits of no man’s labor, and I will produce more food than I eat and more thought than I take from the world. So, to the measure of the light vouchsafed, shall some fragment of the world be dependent on me. It is the only way to govern.

All this wangling for power in newspapers, meetings, market-places, and drawing-rooms is a weariness--and when you have it, what is it? A handful of dried leaves that crumble under the touch. If you have a platoon you can make it smart; if you have a garden, you may make it fine, luxuriant, producing marrows as large as barrels. Or if you write a poem, you must make it beautiful. Everything else is vanity.

I ... I who speak to you ... can house myself, clothe myself, discipline, entertain, and think for myself--and I can feed more than myself. As the old saying went: I can build a house, plant a tree, write a book, and beget a son. No man who cannot do all these things is fit to govern. He cannot govern--for I and the men who are with me, of good will, shall withhold his food, his clothing, his thoughts for his mind.

You may say, Mr. Compiler, that you who write falsehoods for the newspapers, who organize in offices the carrying of things on wheels, who dig in the bowels of the earth, and hammer on iron plates--or who take the profits of those who do these things--that you will govern, or inherit, the earth and the civilization of the earth. You cannot. If you withhold the labor of your hands or your minds--the world goes on. If I should--you would starve in body and soul--and in jazz noises!