Chapter III: The Book

I said just now that when we founded our two refugee charities we were confident of getting money enough to carry them on. So we were; and so we had a right to be; for at the end of the first twelvemonth we are still alive and solvent.

But we never dreamed, at the start, that the work would last longer than a year, or that its demands would be so complex and increasing. And when we saw before us the certainty of having to carry this poor burden of humanity for another twelve months, we began to wonder how we should get the help to do it.

Then the thought of this Book occurred to me. I appealed to my friends who write and paint and compose, and they to other friends of theirs, writers, painters, composers, statesmen and dramatic artists; and so the Book gradually built itself up, page by page and picture by picture.

You will see from the names of the builders what a gallant piece of architecture it is, what delightful pictures hang on its walls, and what noble music echoes through them. But what I should have liked to show is the readiness, the kindliness, the eagerness, with which all the collaborators, from first to last, have lent a hand to the building. Perhaps you will guess it for yourselves when you read their names and see the beauty and variety of what they have given. So I efface myself from the threshold and ask you to walk in.

EDITH WHARTON

_Paris, November, 1915_

Gifts of money for the American Hostels for Refugees, and the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee should be addressed to Mrs. Wharton, 53 rue de Varenne, Paris, or to Henry W. Munroe, Treasurer, care of Mrs. Cadwalader Jones, 21 East Eleventh Street, New York.

Gifts in kind should be forwarded to the American War Relief Clearing House, 5 rue François Iᵉʳ, Paris (_with Mrs. Wharton’s name in the left-hand corner_), _via_ the American offices of the Clearing House, 15 Broad Street, New York.

POETRY]

CONTRIBUTORS OF POETRY AND MUSIC

LAURENCE BINYON
RUPERT BROOKE
PAUL CLAUDEL
JEAN COCTEAU
ROBERT GRANT
THOMAS HARDY
W. D. HOWELLS
FRANCIS JAMMES
ALICE MEYNELL
COMTESSE DE NOAILLES
JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY
LILLA CABOT PERRY
HENRI DE RÉGNIER
EDMOND ROSTAND
GEORGE SANTAYANA
EDITH M. THOMAS
HERBERT TRENCH
ÉMILE VERHAEREN
BARRETT WENDELL
EDITH WHARTON
MARGARET L. WOODS
W. B. YEATS

* * * * *

IGOR STRAVINSKY VINCENT D’INDY

THE ORPHANS OF FLANDERS

Where is the land that fathered, nourished, poured
The sap of a strong race into your veins,--
Land of wide tilth, of farms and granaries stored,
And old towers chiming over peaceful plains?

It is become a vision, barred away
Like light in cloud, a memory, a belief.
On those lost plains the Glory of yesterday
Builds her dark towers for the bells of Grief.

It is become a splendour-circled name
For all the world. A torch against the skies
Burns from that blood-spot, the unpardoned shame
Of them that conquered: but your homeless eyes

See rather some brown pond by a white wall,
Red cattle crowding in the rutty lane,
Some garden where the hollyhocks were tall
In the Augusts that shall never be again.

There your thoughts cling as the long-thrusting root
Clings in the ground; your orphaned hearts are there.
O mates of sunburnt earth, your love is mute
But strong like thirst and deeper than despair.

You have endured what pity can but grope
To feel; into that darkness enters none.
We have but hands to help: yours is the hope
Whose silent courage rises with the sun.
LAURENCE BINYON

THE DANCE

A SONG

As the Wind and as the Wind
In a corner of the way,
Goes stepping, stands twirling,
Invisibly, comes whirling,
Bows before and skips behind
In a grave, an endless play--

So my Heart and so my Heart
Following where your feet have gone,
Stirs dust of old dreams there;
He turns a toe; he gleams there,
Treading you a dance apart.
But you see not. You pass on.
RUPERT BROOKE

PORTRAIT OF ANDRÉ GIDE

FROM A PENCIL DRAWING]

_PAUL CLAUDEL_

LE PRÉCIEUX SANG

--Seigneur, qui pour un verre d’eau nous avez promis la mer illimitée,
Qui sait si vous n’avez pas soif aussi?
Et que ce sang qui est tout ce que nous avons soit propre
à vous désaltérer,
C’est vrai, puisque vous l’avez dit!
Si vraiment il y a une source en nous, eh bien, c’est ce que nous
allons voir!
Si ce vin a quelque vertu
Et si notre sang est rouge, comme vous le dites, comment le savoir
Autrement que quand il est répandu?
Si notre sang est vraiment précieux, comme vous le dites, si vraiment
il est comme de l’or,
S’il sert, pourquoi le garder?
Et sans savoir ce qu’on peut acheter avec, pourquoi le réserver
comme un trésor,
Mon Dieu, quand vous nous le demandez?
Nos péchés sont grands, nous le savons, et qu’il faut absolument
faire pénitence,
Mais il est difficile pour un homme de pleurer.
Voici notre sang au lieu de larmes que nous avons répandu pour
la France:
Faites-en ce que vous voudrez.
Prenez-le, nous vous le donnons, tirez-en vous-même usage et
bénéfice,
Nous ne vous faisons point de demande
Mais si vous avez besoin de notre amour autant que nous avons
besoin de votre justice,
Alors c’est que votre soif est grande!
P. CLAUDEL

_Juillet 1915_

THE PRECIOUS BLOOD

[TRANSLATION]

Oh, what if Thou, that for a cup of water promisest
The illimitable sea,
Thou, Lord, dost also thirst?
Hast Thou not said, our blood shall quench Thee best
And first
Of any drink there be?

If then there be such virtue in it, Lord,
Ah, let us prove it now!
And, save by seeing it at Thy footstool poured,
How, Lord--oh, how?

If it indeed be precious and like gold,
As Thou hast taught,
Why hoard it? There’s no wealth in gems unsold,
Nor joy in gems unbought.

Our sins are great, we know it; and we know
We must redeem our guilt;
Even so.

But tears are difficult for a man to shed,
And here is our blood poured out for France instead,
To do with as Thou wilt!

Take it, O Lord! And make it Thine indeed,
Void of all lien and fee.
Nought else we ask of Thee;
But if Thou needst our Love as we Thy Justice need,
Great must Thine hunger be!
PAUL CLAUDEL

PORTRAIT OF JEAN COCTEAU

FROM AN UNPUBLISHED CRAYON SKETCH]

LA MORT DES JEUNES GENS DE LA DIVINE HELLADE

FRAGMENT

Antigone criant et marchant au supplice
N’avait pas de la mort leur sublime respect;
Ce n’était pas pour eux une funeste paix,
C’était un ordre auquel il faut qu’on obéisse.

Ils ne subissaient pas l’offense qu’il fît beau
Que le soleil mûrît les grappes de glycine;
Ils étaient souriant en face du tombeau,
Les rossignols élus que la rose assassine.

Ils ne regrettaient pas les tendres soirs futurs,
Les conversations sur les places d’Athènes,
Où, le col altéré de poussière et d’azur,
Pallas, comme un pigeon, pleure au bord des fontaines.

Ils ne regrettaient pas les gradins découverts
Où le public trépigne, insiste,
Pour regarder, avant qu’ils montent sur la piste,
Les cochers bleus riant avec les cochers verts.

Ils ne regrettaient pas ce loisir disparate
D’une ville qui semble un sordide palais,
Où l’on se réunit pour entendre Socrate
Et pour jouer aux osselets.

Ils étaient éblouis de tumulte et de risque,
Mais, si la fourbe mort les désignait soudain,
Ils laissaient sans gémir sur l’herbe du jardin
Les livres et le disque.

Ce n’était pas pour eux l’insupportable affront,
Ils se couchaient sans choc, sans lutte, sans tapage,
Comme on voit, ayant bien remué sous le front,
Un vers définitif s’étendre sur la page.

Ils étaient résignés, vêtus, rigides, prêts
Pour cette expérience étrange,
Comme Hyacinthe en fleur indolemment se change
Et comme Cyparis se transforme en cyprès.

Ils ne regrettaient rien de vivre en Ionie,
D’être libres, d’avoir des mères et des sœurs,
Et de sentir ce lourd sommeil envahisseur
Après une courte insomnie.

Ils rentraient au séjour qui n’a plus de saison,
Où notre faible orgueil se refuse à descendre,
Sachant que l’urne étroite où gît un peu de cendre
Sera tout le jardin et toute la maison.

Jadis j’ai vu mourir des frères de mon âge,
J’ai vu monter en eux l’indicible torpeur.
Ils avaient tous si mal! Ils avaient tous si peur!
Ils se prenaient la tête avec des mains en nage.

Ils ne pouvaient pas croire, ayant si soif, si faim,
Un tel désir de tout avec un cœur si jeune,
A ce désert sans source, à cet immense jeûne,
A ce terme confus qui n’a jamais de fin.

Ils n’attendaient plus rien de la tendresse humaine
Et cherchaient à chasser d’un effort douloureux
L’Ange noir qui se couche à plat ventre sur eux
Et qui les considère avant qu’il les emmène.
JEAN COCTEAU

HOW THE YOUNG MEN DIED IN HELLAS

A FRAGMENT

[TRANSLATION]

Antigone went wailing to the dust.
She reverenced not the face of Death like these
To whom it came as no enfeebling peace
But a command relentless and august.

These grieved not at the beauty of the morn,
Nor that the sun was on the ripening flower;
Smiling they faced the sacrificial hour,
Blithe nightingales against the fatal thorn.

They grieved not that their feet no more should rove
The Athenian porticoes in twilight leisure,
Where Pallas, drunk with summer’s gold and azure,
Brooded above the fountains like a dove.

They grieved not for the theatre’s high-banked tiers,
Where restlessly the noisy crowd leans over,
With laughter and with jostling, to discover
The blue and green of chaffing charioteers.

Nor for the fluted shafts, the carven stones
Of that sole city, bright above the seas,
Where young men met to talk with Socrates
Or toss the ivory bones.

Their eyes were lit with tumult and with risk,
But when they felt Death touch their hands and pass
They followed, dropping on the garden grass
The parchment and the disk.

It seemed no wrong to them that they must go.
They laid their lives down as the poet lays
On the white page the poem that shall praise
His memory when the hand that wrote is low.

Erect they stood and, festally arrayed,
Serenely waited the transforming hour,
Softly as Hyacinth slid from youth to flower,
Or the shade of Cyparis to a cypress shade.

They wept not for the lost Ionian days,
Nor liberty, nor household love and laughter,
Nor the long leaden slumber that comes after
Life’s little wakefulness.

Fearless they sought the land no sunsets see,
Whence our weak pride shrinks back, and would return,
Knowing a pinch of ashes in an urn
Henceforth our garden and our house shall be.

Young men, my brothers, you whose morning skies
I have seen the deathly lassitude invade,
Oh, how you suffered! How you were afraid!
What death-damp hands you locked about your eyes!

You, so insatiably athirst to spend
The young desires in your hearts abloom,
How could you think the desert was your doom,
The waterless fountain and the endless end?

You yearned not for the face of love, grown dim,
But only fought your anguished bones to wrest
From the Black Angel crouched upon your breast,
Who scanned you ere he led you down with him.
JEAN COCTEAU

A MESSAGE

This is our gift to the Homeless.
What shall it bear from me
Safe in a land that prospers
Girded by leagues of sea?--
Tear moistened words of pity,
Bountiful sympathy.

Clearly we see the picture,
Horror has fixed our eyes.
Fighting to guard its hearthstones
A nation mangled lies.
Fire has charred its beauty,
Murder has stilled its cries;

And truths we love and cherish
Hang in the trembling scale.
If you win, we win by proxy,
If you fail, we are doomed to fail.
The world is beset by a monster,
Yet we watch to see who shall prevail.

Our souls are racked and quickened,
But prudence counsels no.
So we lavish our gold and pity
And wait to see how it will go,--
This pivotal war of the ages
With its heartrending ebb and flow.

For ever there comes the moment
When destiny bids “choose.”
By the edge of the sword men perish,
By selfishness all they lose.
So Belgium stands transfigured
As the one who did not refuse.
ROBERT GRANT

CRY OF THE HOMELESS

Instigator of the ruin--
Whichsoever thou mayst be
Of the mastering minds of Europe
That contrived our misery--
Hear the wormwood-worded greeting
From each city, shore, and lea
Of thy victims:
“Enemy, all hail to thee!”

Yea: “All hail!” we grimly shout thee
That wast author, fount, and head
Of these wounds, whoever proven
When our times are throughly read.
“May thy dearest ones be blighted
And forsaken,” be it said
By thy victims,
“And thy children beg their bread!”

Nay: too much the malediction.--
Rather let this thing befall
In the unfurling of the future,
On the night when comes thy call:
That compassion dew thy pillow
And absorb thy senses all
For thy victims,
Till death dark thee with his pall.
THOMAS HARDY

_August, 1915_

PORTRAIT OF THOMAS HARDY

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE ORIGINAL PAINTING]

THE LITTLE CHILDREN

“Suffer little children to come unto me,”
Christ said, and answering with infernal glee,
“Take them!” the arch-fiend scoffed, and from the tottering walls
Of their wrecked homes, and from the cattle’s stalls,
And the dogs’ kennels, and the cold
Of the waste fields, and from the hapless hold
Of their dead mothers’ arms, famished and bare,
And maimed by shot and shell,
The master-spirit of hell
Caught them up, and through the shuddering air
Of the hope-forsaken world
The little ones he hurled,
Mocking that Pity in his pitiless might--
The Anti-Christ of Schrecklickeit.
W. D. HOWELLS

ÉPITAPHE

Ci-gît un tel, mort pour la France et qui, vivant,
Poussait sa voiturette à travers les villages
Pour vendre un peu de fil, de sel ou de fromage,
Sous les portails d’azur aux feuillages mouvants.

Il a gagné son pain comme au Commandement
Que donne aux hommes Dieu dans le beau Livre sage.
Puis, un jour, sur sa tête a crevé le nuage
Que lance l’orageux canon de l’Allemand.

Ce héros, dans l’éclair qui délivra son âme,
Aura vu tout en noir ses enfants et sa femme
Contemplants anxieux son pauvre gagne-pain:

Ce chariot plus beau que n’est celui de l’Ourse
Et qu’il a fait rouler pendant la dure course
Qui sur terre commence un céleste destin.
FRANCIS JAMMES

_Orthez, 29 Juillet 1915_

AN EPITAPH

[TRANSLATION]

Here such an one lies dead for France. His trade
To push a barrow stocked with thread, cheese, salt
From town to town, under the azure vault,
Through endless corridors of rustling shade.
True to the sacred law of toil, he made
His humble living as the Book commands,
Till suddenly there burst upon his lands
The thunder of the German cannonade.

Poor hero! In the flash that smote him dead
He saw his wife and children all in black
Weeping about the cart that earned their bread--
The cart that, by his passionate impulse sped
On immortality’s celestial track,
Shone brighter than the Wain above his head.
FRANCIS JAMMES

IN SLEEP

I dreamt (no “dream” awake--a dream indeed)
A wrathful man was talking in the Park:
“Where are the Higher Powers who know our need,
Yet leave us in the dark?

“There are no Higher Powers; there is no heart
In God, no love”--his oratory here,
Taking the paupers’ and the cripples’ part,
Was broken by a tear.

And next it seemed that One who did invent
Compassion, who alone created pity,
Walked, as though called, and hastened as He went
Out from the muttering city;

Threaded the little crowd, trod the brown grass,
Bent o’er the speaker close, saw the tear rise,
And saw Himself, as one looks in a glass,
In those impassioned eyes.
ALICE MEYNELL

NOS MORTS

Astres qui regardez les mondes où nous sommes,
Pure armée au repos dans la hauteur des cieux,
Campement éternel, léger, silencieux,
Que pensez-vous de voir s’anéantir les hommes?
A n’être pas sublime aucun ne condescend,
Comme un cri vers la nue on voit jaillir leur sang
Qui sur nos cœurs contrits lentement se rabaisse.
--Morts divins, portez-nous un plausible secours!
Notre douleur n’est pas la sœur de votre ivresse.
Vous mourez! Concevez que c’est un poids trop lourd
Pour ceux qui dans leur grave et brûlante tristesse
Ont toujours confondu la Vie avec l’Amour.
COMTESSE DE NOAILLES

OUR DEAD

[TRANSLATION]

Stars that behold our world upon its way,
Pure legions camped upon the plains of night,
Mute watchful hosts of heaven, what must you say
When men destroy each other in their might?
Upon their deadly race each runner starts,
Nor one but will his brothers all outrun!
Ah, see their blood jet upward to the sun
Like living fountains refluent on our hearts!
O dead divinely for so great a faith,
Help us, whose agony is but begun,
For bitterly we yield you up to death,
We who had dreamed that Life and Love were one.
COMTESSE DE NOAILLES

LANDSCAPE

FROM AN EARLY COLOURED PASTEL]

TWO SONGS OF A YEAR

1914-1915