Chapter II: A Raid Night (4)

MAY 9, 1919. The Treaty of Peace is published. Compared with what the innocent in 1915 called the "objects of the War," this treaty is as the aims of Captain Morgan's ruffians to those of the Twelve Apostles. The truth is, some time ago the Versailles drama fell to the level of an overworked newspaper story which shrewd editors saw was past its day. Those headlines, Humiliate the Hun, Hang the Kaiser, and Make Germany Pay, had become no more interesting than a copy of last week's _Morning Mischief_ in a horse-pond. The subject was old and wet. Because five months ago we thoughtfully elected men of the counting-house to the work of governing the State, of late we have been too indignant over the cost and difficulty of living to spare a thought for the beauty of Peace; that is why we are now examining the clauses of the famous Treaty with about as much care for what they may mean to us as if they concerned the movements of the Asteroids. A year ago the German attacks seemed near to making guns the deciding voice in the affairs of unhappy humanity. On the chill and overcast spring morning when the Treaty was published, it was significant that those very few men to whom we could go for courage a year ago were the only people dismayed by the terms of the Peace Treaty. And the timid, who once went to those stout hearts for assurance--to have, as the soldiers used to say, their cold feet massaged--were the bright and cheerful souls. It was ominous. Yet those careless and happy hearts are not so trying to me as the amiable but otherwise sensible men who were sure our statesmen would not betray the dead, and who are incredulous over the Treaty now they see what it clearly intends to convey. They cannot believe that the War, which they thought began as a war of liberation, a struggle of Europe to free itself from the intolerable bonds of its past, continues in the Peace Treaty as a force malignantly deflected to the support of the very evils out of which August, 1914, arose. Then did they imagine the well-meaning leopard would oblige by changing his spots if spoken to kindly while he was eating the baby?

XXV. Great Statesmen

MAY, 31, 1919. What is wrong with our statesmen? I think the answer is simple. Success in a political career can be understood by all of us. It attracts the attention which applauds the owner of a Derby winner, or the Bishop who began as a poor, industrious, but tactful child. John the Baptist failed to attract the publicity he desired; and Christ drew it as a criminal, for the religious and political leaders of his day recognized what his teaching would lead to as easily as would any magistrate to-day who had before him a carpenter accused of persuading soldiers that killing is murder. Politicians move on the level of the common intelligence, and compete there with each other in charging the ignorance of the commonalty with emotion. A politician need be no more than something between a curate and a card-sharper. If he knows anything of the arts, of history, of economics, or of science, he had better forget it, or else use it as a forestaller would a knowledge of the time when prices should be raised. A confident man with a blood-shot voice and a gift for repartee is sure to make a success of politics, especially if he is not too particular. This did not matter once, perhaps, when politics merely afforded excitement for taverns and a career for the avid and meddlesome. The country was prosperous, and so it was difficult to do it serious harm.

But to-day, just when we must have the leading of moral, judicious, and well-informed minds, or perish, we have only our statesmen. It never occurs to the crowd that its business would be more successfully transacted by a chance group, say of headmasters of elementary schools, than by the statesmen who, at Versailles recently, dared not face the shocking realities because these could not be squared with a Treaty which had to frame the figments of the hustings. The trouble with our statesmen is that they have been concerned hitherto merely to attend to the machinery, running freely and with little friction, of industrial society. They did not create that machinery. They but took it over. They knew nothing of the principles which motived it. Our statesmen were only practical politicians and business men. They held in contempt the fine abstract theories of physics, mechanics, and dynamics. It was safe for them to do so. The machinery went on running, apparently of its own volition. All went well until the War. Now the propeller-shaft of industrial society is fractured, our ship is wallowing in the trough of the seas, and the men who should put things right for us do not even know that it is the main shaft on which they should concentrate. They are irritating the passengers by changing the cabins, confiscating luggage, insisting on higher fares, cutting down the rations, and instructing the sailors in the goose-step; but the ship has no way on her, and the sound of breakers grows louder from a sombre, precipitous, and unknown coast.

XXVI. Joy

JULY 19, 1919. It has come. This is the great day of the English. Many have doubted whether we should ever have it, for faith had been weak and the mind weary while the enemy was still fixed in his fanatic resolution. But here it is, half my window-blind already bright with its first light. To-day we celebrate our return to peace, to an earth made the fairer for children, fit for the habitation of free men, safe for quiet folk ... the day that once had seemed as remote as truth, as inaccessible as good fortune; a day, so we used to think in France, more distant even than those incredible years of the past that were undervalued by us, when we were happy in our ignorance of the glory men could distil from misery and filth; when we had not guessed what wealth could be got from the needs of a public anxious for its life; nor that sleeping children could be bombed in a noble cause. Yes, it had seemed to us even farther off than our memories of the happy past. Yet here it is, its coffee-cups tinkling below, and I welcome its early shafts of gold like the fortune they are. The fortune seems innocent and unaware of its nature. It does not know what it means to us. I had often been with soldier friends across the water when with mock rapture they had planned an itinerary for this day. They spoke of it where their surroundings made the thought of secure leisure or unremarkable toil only a painful reminder of what was beatific, but might never be. This day had not come to them. But it had come to me.

I was luckier than they. Yet when luck comes to us, does it ever look quite as we had imagined it when it was not ours? I lift the curtain on this luck, and look out. From an upper window of the house opposite the national emblem of the American Republic is hanging like an apron. Next door to it a man is decorating his windowsills with fairy lamps, and from his demeanour he might be devising a taboo against evil. I see no other sign that the new and better place of our planet was being acknowledged. The street is as the milkman and the postman have always known it on a quiet morning.

A cock crowed. It was then I knew that, though the morning was like all good sunrises, which are the same for the unjust and the righteous, I, somehow, was different. Chanticleer was quite near, but his confident and defiant voice, I recognized with a start, was a call from some other morning. It was the remembered voice of life at sunrise, as old as the jungle, alert, glad, and brave. Then why did it not sound as if it were meant for me? Why did it not accord, as once it did, with the coming of a new day, when the renewed and waiting earth was veritably waiting for us? Yet the morning seemed the same, its sounds the familiar confidences, its light the virgin innocence of a right beginning. Was this new light ours? While looking at it I thought that perhaps there is another light, an aura of something early and rare, which, once it is doused, cannot be re-kindled, even by the sun which rises to shine on a great victory.

I began to feel that this early confusion of thought, over even so plain a cause for joy as morning, might be a private hint that it would be as hard to tell the truth about peace as it used to be about battle. And how difficult it is to tell the truth about war, and even how improper, some of us know. For what a base traitor even truth may be to good patriots, when she insists that her mirror cannot help reflecting what is there! Why should the best instincts of loyal folk be thus embarrassed? If they do not wish to know what is there, when that is what it is like, is it right, is it gentlemanly, to show them?

How easy it would be to write of peace in the Capital, where the old highways have been decorated for many kings, marshals, and admirals, and the flags have been hung for victories since England first bore arms. So why should one be dubious of a few unimportant suburban byways, where the truth is plain, and is not charged with many emotions through the presence of an emperor and his statesmen and soldiers, all of them great, all of them ready for our superlatives to add to their splendour?

But perhaps the more you know of a place, the greater is your perplexity. That old vicarage wall, lower down my street, is merely attractive in the sun of Peace Day. A stranger, if he noticed it, might at the most admire its warm tones, and the tufts of hawkweed and snapdragon which are scattered on its ledges. But from this same window, on a winter morning, when affairs were urgent in France, I have seen youth assembled by that wall. Youth was silent. There was only a sergeant's voice in all the street. I think I hear now the diminishing trampling of quick feet marching away; and see a boy's face as he turned near the top of the rise to wave his hand. But look now, and say where are the shades on a bright morning!

I went out, a dutiful citizen, to celebrate. No joy can be truthfully reported till just this side of the High Street, where there were three girls with linked arms dancing in lax and cheerful oblivion, one of them quite drunk. Near them stood a cart with a man, a woman, and a monkey in it. The superior animals were clothed in red, white, and blue, and the monkey was wearing a Union Jack for a ruff. The ape was humping himself on the tail-board, and from his expression he might have been wondering how long all this would last. His gay companions were rosily chanting that if they caught some one bending it would be of no advantage to him. The main thoroughfare was sanded, and was waiting for the official procession. Quiet citizens were strolling about with their children, and what they were thinking is as great a mystery as what the populace at Memphis thought when the completion of the Great Pyramid was celebrated by the order of Cheops. In a room of an upper storey near the town hall a choir was singing the Hallelujah Chorus, and below, on the pavement, a hospital nurse, in a red wig, stood gravely listening, swaying to and fro, holding her skirts high, so that we saw beneath the broad slacks of an able seaman.

The chorus ceased, and in gratitude for the music the nurse embraced a Highland soldier, who was standing near and who was secretly amused, I believe, by the nurse's trousers. Then we heard the bands of the military procession in the distance, and it was in that moment I saw a young officer I knew, who was out as early as Neuve Chapelle, gazing, like everybody else, in the direction of the martial sounds. Before I could reach him through the press he had turned, and was walking hurriedly down a side street, as though in flight. I could not follow him. I wanted to see the soldiers. My reason was no better than some sentimental emotion; for I saw the original Contemptibles march off for Mons; and was with a battalion of the 9th Division, the first of Kitchener's men to go into the line; and saw the Derby men come out and begin; and at the last discovered that the conscripts were as good as the rest. Some of the survivors were marching towards me.

But I did not recognize them. Many were elderly men who were displaying proud tunics of volunteer regiments as old as Hyde Park Parades by Queen Victoria. One looked then for the sections from the local lodges of the Druids, Oddfellows, Buffaloes, and the He-Goats. There was the band of the local cadets, spontaneous in its enthusiasm, its zest for martial music no different, of course. Just behind these lads a strange figure walked in the procession, a bent and misshapen old man, whose face had no expression but a fixed and hypnotic stare. He was keeping time to the measure of the boys' music by snapping the spring of a mouse-trap which he held aloft. I could not find him in the program. Was he also drunk? Or was he a terrible jest? Most of our triumphant display followed this figure. If our illusions go, what is left to us? Ah, our memories of the Somme! That young officer who turned away when he saw Triumph approaching acted on a right instinct.

There is a hilltop near us. It looks to other hills over a great space of southern England, and at night on the far promontories of the Downs bonfires were to be lighted. I have no doubt signals flared from them when the Romans were baffled. Again to-night they would signal that the latest enemy had been vanquished.

It was raining gently, and from our own crest the lower and outer night was void. A touch of distant phosphorescence that waned, and intensified again to a strong white glow, presently gave the void one far and lonely hilltop. A cloud elsewhere appeared out of nothing, and persisted, a lenticular spectre of dull fire. These aerial spectres became a host; some were so far away that they were faint smears of orange, and others so near and great that they pulsed and revealed the shapes of the clouds. It was all impersonal, it was England itself that was reflected, the hills that had awakened. It was the emanation of a worthy tradition, older than ourselves, that was re-kindled and was glowing, and that would be here when we are not. It was so receptive, it was so spacious, that our gravest memories could abide there, as if night were kind to the secrets we dare not voice, and understood folly and remorse, and could protect our better visions, and had sanctuary and consolation for that grief which looks to what might have been, but now can never be.

A spark glittered near, a spark that towered and hovered overhead, and burst into coiling volumes of lurid smoke with a moving heart of flame. Light broke on a neighbouring hill that had been unseen and forgotten; the hill was crowned with fantastic trees that danced, and a wavering tower. From our own valley below there came a vicious tearing that gave me a momentary chill (so sounds a stream of machine-gun lead, going over), and a group of coloured stars expanded over us. Their bright light showed the night reticulated with thin lines of smoke, like veins of calcite in a canopy of black marble. Our immediate country, pallid and tremulous, faded again, but in that brief prospect of a shadow land I glimpsed a road, the presentment of the long road to Bapaume. So the Bapaume road showed at night by inconsequential and unexpected lights. That hill-crest of leaping trees could be the ridge of Loupart with its wood, and Achete in flames beyond. The notion gave me enough of our hill top. I descended from it.

There is a public-house at the foot of the hill, and a lane of harsh noises and a beam of light projected together from its open door across the road. Beyond it I turned into a house, for I knew I should find there an aged and solitary man who would have his own thoughts on such a night as this; for he had a son, and the spectre of the Bapaume road had reminded me where that boy was celebrating whatever peace he knew. His father was not communicative; and what could I say? He sat, answering me distantly and austerely, and he might have been a bearded sage seeing in retrospect a world he had long known, and who at last had made up his mind about it, though he would not tell me what that was. Outside we could hear revellers approaching. They paused at our door; their feet began to shuffle, and they sang:

"If I catch you bending,
I'll turn you upside down,
Knees up, knees up,
Knees up, knees up,
Knees up, Father Brown."

XXVII. The Real Thing

JANUARY 9, 1920. There was a country town of which we heard wonderful tales as children. But it was as far as Cathay. It had many of the qualities that once made Cathay desirable and almost unbelievable. We heard of it at the time when we heard of the cities of Vanity Fair and Baghdad, and all from a man with a beard, who once sat by a London fire, just before bedtime, smoking a pipe and telling those who were below him on the rug about the past, and of more fortunate times, and of cities that were fair and far. Nothing was easier for us then than to believe fair reports. Good dreams must be true, for they are good. Some day, he said, he would take us to Torhaven; but he did not, for his luck was not like that.

Nothing like that; so instead we used to look westward to where Torhaven would be, whenever the sunset appeared the right splendour for the sky that was over what was delectable and elsewhere. We made that do for years. Torhaven existed, there was no doubt, for once we made a journey to Paddington Station--a long walk--and saw the very name on a railway carriage. It was a surprising and a happy thought that that carriage would go into such a town that very day. What is more confident than the innocence of youth? Where, if not with youth, could be found such willing and generous reliance in noble legend?

And how enduring is its faith! Long after, but not too long after, for fine appearances to us still meant fine prospects, we arrived one morning bodily in the haven of good report. Its genius was as bright as we expected. It had a shining face. It was the equal of the morning. Its folk could not be the same as those who lived within dark walls under a heaven that was usually but murk. It lost nothing because we could examine its streets. We went from it with a memory even warmer and more comforting. What would happen to us if youth did not more than merely believe the pleasant tales that are told, if it did not loyally desire to believe that things are what they are said to be?

This country town is of the Southern kind which, with satisfaction, we show to strangers as something peculiarly of our country. It is ancient and luminous in an amphitheatre of hills, and schooners and barques come right among its gables. It is wealthy, but it is not of the common sort, for it never shows haste. It knows, of course, that wealth is cheap, until it has matured and has attained that dignity which only leisure and the indifference of usage can confer. The country around has a long history of well-sounding family names as native as its hills--they arrived together, or thereabouts--and the lodge gates on its highways, with their weathered and mossy heraldic devices, have a way of acquainting you with the measure of your inconsequence as you pass them when walking. Torhaven has no poverty. It tolerates some clean and obscure but very profitable manufactures. But its shipping is venerable, and is really not an industry at all, being as proper as the owning of deer-parks. On market day you would think you were in a French town, so many are the agriculturists, and so quiet and solid the evidence of their wellbeing. They own their farms, they love good horses, their wagons are built like ships, and their cattle, as aboriginal as the county families, might be the embodiment of the sleek genius of those hills and meadows, so famous are they for cream. The people of that country live well. They know their worth and the substance which they add to the strength of the British community. And they pride themselves on the legends, peculiarly theirs, which tell of their independence of mind, of their love of freedom, of their liberal opinions and the nonconformity of their religious views. They are stout folk, kind and companionable, and they do not love masters.

It was the summer following the end of the War, and we were back again in Torhaven. The recollection of its ancient peace, of its stillness and light, of the refuge it offered, had enticed us there. Its very name had been the hope of escape. Where should we find people more likely to be quick and responsive? They would be among the first to understand the nature of the calamity which had overtaken us. They would know, long before amorphous and alien London, what that new world should be like which we owed to the young, a world in which might grow a garden for the bruised souls of the disillusioned.

Its light was the same. It was not only untarnished by such knowledge as we brought with us, it was radiant. Yet it was not without its memory of the disaster. We went into the church, whose porch had been restored; symbolical, perhaps, of our entry into a world from which, happily, the old things had passed. The church was empty, for this was market day. Through its gloom, as through the penumbra of antiquity, shone faintly the pale forms of a few recumbent knights, and the permanent appeal of their upturned hands and faces kept the roof aware of human contrition. Above one of the figures was a new Union Jack, crowned with laurels. The sun made too vivid a scarlet patch of one of its folds.

Just below the church was the theatre, now a cinema hall. This was market day, and the house was full. A poster outside pictured a bridge blowing up, and a motor-car falling into space. The midday sun was looking full at Torhaven's High Street, which runs south and downhill steeply to the quay; a schooner filled the bottom of the street that day. Anything a not too unreasonable man could desire was offered in the shops of that thoroughfare. This being a time of change, when our thoughts are all unfixed and we have had rumours of the New Jerusalem, the side window of a fashionable jeweller's was devoted to tiny jade pigs, minute dolls, silver acorns, and other propitiators of luck which time and experience have tested. Next door to the jeweller's was a studio supporting the arts, with local pottery shaped as etiolated blue cats and yellow puppies; and there one could get picture postcards of the London favourites in revue, and some water-colour paintings of the local coast which an advertisement affirmed were real.

That was not all. Opposite was the one bookshop of the town. Its famous bay front and old diamond panes frankly presented the new day with ladies' handbags, ludo and other games, fountain pens, mounted texts from Ella Wilcox, local guide books, and apparently a complete series--as much as the length of the window would hold, at least--of Hall Caine's works; and in one corner prayer-books in a variety of bindings.

Down on the quay, sitting on a bollard, with one leg stretched stiffly before him, was a young native I had not met since one day on the Menin Road. I had known him, before that strange occasion, as an ardent student of life and letters. He had entered a profession in which sound learning is essential, though the reward is slight, just when the War began. Then he believed, in high seriousness, as young and enthusiastic students did, all he was told in that August; and his professional career is now over.

He pointed out to me mildly, and with a little reproach, that I was wrong in supposing Torhaven had not changed. I learned that the War had made a great change there. Motor-cars were now as commonly owned as bicycles used to be, though he admitted that it did not seem that the queue waiting to buy books, our sort of books, was in need of control by the police. But farmers who had been tenants when Germany violated the independence of Belgium were now freeholders. Men who were in essential industries, and so could not be spared for the guns, were now shipowners. We could see for ourselves how free and encouraging was the new wealth in this new world; true, the size of his pension did not fairly reflect the new and more liberal ideas of a better world, but we must admit he had no need to travel to Bond Street to spend it. "Why fear," he asked me, pointing with his crutch up the busy High Street behind us, "that what our pals in France learned was wrong with that old Europe which made the War, will not be known there? Have you seen," he said, "our bookshop, our cinema, and the new memorial porch of our church?"

Near us was waiting a resplendent motor-car, in which reposed a young lady whose face decorates the covers of the popular magazines every month, and as the wounded soldier finished speaking it moved away with a raucous hoot.

XXVIII. Literary Critics

MARCH 27, 1920. The last number of the _Chapbook_, containing "Three Critical Essays on Modern English Poetry," by three well-known critics of literature, I read with suspiciously eager attention, for I will confess that I have no handy rule, not one that I can describe, which can be run over new work in poetry or prose with unfailing confidence. My credentials as a literary critic would not, I fear, bear five minutes' scrutiny; but I never cease to look for that defined and adequate equipment, such as even a carpenter calls his tool-chest, full of cryptic instruments, each designed for some particular task, and every implement named. It is sad to have to admit it, but I know I possess only a home-made gimlet to test for dry-rot, and another implement, a very ancient heirloom, snatched at only on blind instinct, a stone ax. But these are poor tools, and sooner or later I shall be found out.

There was a time when I was very hopeful about discovering a book on literary criticism which would make the rough places plain for me, and encourage me to feel less embarrassed when present where literary folk were estimating poetry and prose. I am such a simple on these occasions. If one could only discover the means to attain to that rather easy assurance and emphasis when making literary comparisons! Yet though this interesting number of the _Chapbook_ said much that I could agree with at once, it left me as isolated and as helpless as before. One writer said: "There is but one art of writing, and that is the art of poetry. The test of poetry is sincerity. The test of sincerity is style; and the test of style is personality." Excellent, I exclaimed immediately; and then slowly I began to suspect a trap somewhere in it. Of course, does not the test for sunlight distinguish it at once from insincere limelight? But what is the test, and would it be of any use to those likely to mistake limelight for daylight?

I cannot say I have ever been greatly helped by what I have read concerning the standards for literary criticism. Of the many wise and learned critics to whose works I have gone for light, I can remember only Aristotle, Longinus, Tolstoy, and Anatole France--probably because it is easy for the innocent to agree with dominating men. Of the moderns I enjoy reading anything "Q" has to say about books; useless pleasure again, for what does one get but "Q's" full, friendly, ironic, and humorous mind? Lately, too, the critics have been unanimously recommending to us--and that shows the genuine value to the community of mere book reviewers--the _Letters of Tchehov_, as noble a document as we have had for a very long time. But I thought they did not praise Tchehov enough as a critic, for that wise and lovable author, among his letters, made many casual asides about art that were pleasing and therefore right to me. I begin to fear that most of the good things said about literature are said in casual asides.

If I were asked to say why I preferred Christabel or Keats's odes to Tennyson's Revenge or the _Barrack-Room Ballads_, I should find it hard to explain satisfactorily to anyone who preferred to read Tennyson or Kipling. Where are the criteria? Can a Chinaman talk to an Arab? The difference, we see at once, is even deeper than that of language. It is a difference in nature; and we may set up any criterion of literature we like, but it will never carry across such a chasm. Our only consolation is that we may tell the other man he is on the wrong side of it, but he will not care, because he will not see it. The means by which we are able to separate what is precious in books from the matrix is not a process, and is nothing measurable. It is instinctive, and not only differs from age to age, but changes in the life of each of us. It is as indefinable as beauty itself. An artist may know how to create a beautiful thing, but he cannot communicate his knowledge except by that creation. That is all he can tell us of beauty, and, indeed, he may be innocent of the measure of his effort; and the next generation may ridicule the very thing which gave us so much pleasure, pleasure we proved to our own satisfaction to be legitimate and well founded by many sound generalizations about art. The canons of criticism are no more than the apology for our personal preferences, no matter how gravely we back them. Sometimes it has happened that a book or a poem has succeeded in winning the approval of many generations, and so we may call it a classic. Yet what is the virtue of a classic, or of the deliberate and stately billows going with the wind when the world has sweep and is fair, or of a child with a flower, or of the little smile on the face of the dead boy in the muck when the guns were filling us with fear and horror of mankind? I don't know; but something in us appears to save us from the punishing comet of Zeus.

XXI. The South Downs

MAY 22, 1920. The southern face of the hill fell, an abrupt promontory, to the woods of the plain. Its face was scored by the weather, and the dry drainage channels were headlong cascades of grey pebbles. Clumps of heather, sparse oak scrub with young leaves of bronze, contorted birch, and this year's croziers of the bracken (heaven knows their secret for getting lush aromatic sap out of such stony poverty), all made a tough life which held up the hill, steep as it was; though the hill was going, for the roots of some of the oaks were exposed, empty coils of rope from which the burden had slipped. In that sea of trees whose billows came to the foot of our headland, and out of sight beneath its waves, children were walking, gathering bluebells. We knew they were there, for we could hear their voices. But there was no other sign of our form of life except a neolithic flint scraper one of us had picked up on the hilltop. The marks of the man who made it were as clear as the voices below. It had been lost since yesterday, it might be--anyhow, about the day the first Pyramid was finished. It depends on how one looks at the almanac. For you could feel the sun fire was young. It had not been long kindled. Its heat in the herbage was moist. One of the youngsters with me, bruising the bracken and snuffing it, said it smelt of almond and cucumber. Another said the crushed birch leaves smelt of sour apples. We could not say what the oak leaves smelt like. Then another grabbed a handful of leafmould, damp and brown and full of fibre. What did that smell of? They were not sure that they liked it. Perhaps it was the smell of the hill. They admitted that it wasn't a bad smell. They seemed a little afraid of that odour.

But I was trying to read, and neolithic times and the bluebell gatherers had run together. They were in the same day. My book had made of that May morning in Surrey an apparition without time and place. We hear ourselves laughing now, intent, for instance, on confirming the almond and cucumber in bruised bracken, or catch the sound of our serious voices raised in a dispute over literature or politics. But these things are not really in our minds. We would not betray our secret thoughts to bluebell gatherers and boys snuffing the bracken. This book I was reading, and a fancied resemblance in that hill and its prospect, moved the shadows again--they are so readily moved--and I saw two of us in France on such a hill, gazing intently and innocently over just such a prospect, in the summer of 1915, without in the least guessing what, in that landscape before us, was latent for us both. Those downs across the way would be Beaumont Hamel and Thiepval. Bluebells! The publishers may send out what advice they choose to authors concerning the unpopularity of books about the War--always excepting, of course, the important reminiscences, the soft and heavy masses of words of the great leaders of the nations in the War, which merely reveal that they never knew what they were doing. Certainly we could spare that kind of war book, though it continues to arrive in abundance; a volume by a famous soldier explaining why affairs went strangely wrong is about the last place where we should look for anything but folly solemnly pondering unrealities. But whatever the publishers may say, we do want books about the War by men who were in it. Some of us have learned by now that France is a memory of such a nature that, though it is not often we dare stop to look directly at it, for the day's work must be done, yet it looms through the importance of each of these latter days as though the event of our lives were past, and we were at present merely watching the clock. The shadow of what once was in France is an abiding presence for us. We know nothing can happen again which will release us from it. And yet how much has been written of it? That is the measure of its vastness and its mystery--it possesses the minds of many men, but they are silent on what they know. They rarely speak of it, except to one of the fraternity. But where are their thoughts? Wandering, viewless and uneasy wraiths, over Flanders, in Artois and Picardy. Those thoughts will never come home again to stay.

It is strange to me that publishers should suppose that books, intimate about the invisible but abiding shadow which is often more potent than present May sunshine, should not be wanted. Take for example this book I was reading, _The Squadroon_, by Ardern Beaman. To induce readers to buy it it has a picture on its dust-cover which kept me from reading it for weeks. This wrapper shows a ghostly knight in armour leading a charge of British cavalry in this War. I should have thought we had had enough of that romantic nonsense during the actual events. The War was written for the benefit of readers who made a luxury of the sigh, and who were told and no doubt preferred to believe that the young soldier went into battle with the look we so admire in the picture called The Soul's Awakening. He was going to glory. There are no dead. There are only memorial crosses for heroes and the Last Post. The opinions of most civilians on the War were as agreeable as stained-glass windows. The thought of a tangle of a boy's inside festooned on rusty wire would naturally have spoiled the soul's awakening and the luxury of the sigh. I heard of a civilian official, on his way to Paris after the Armistice, who was just saved by rapid explanations from the drastic attention of a crowd of Tommies who mistook him for a War Correspondent.

But Mr. Beaman's book is not like war correspondence. It can be commended to those who were not there, but who wish to hear a true word or two. Mr. Beaman as a good-natured man remembers how squeamish we are, and being also shy and dainty indicates some matters but briefly. I wish, for one thing, that when describing the doings of his cavalry squadron after the disaster on the Fifth Army front--the author enables you to feel how slender was the line of resolute men which then saved the Army from downfall--he had ventured to record with more courage the things which it shamed him to see. Why should only such as he know of those shocks to affability? But all he says about some unpleasant matters is: "During those days we saw things of which it is not good to speak--of which afterwards we never did speak, except late at nights, in the privacy of our own mess."

Mr. Beaman's simple narrative, however, with its humanity and easy humour, often lets in light on strange affairs, as though he had forgotten what had been locked up, and had carelessly opened a forbidden door. He shuts it again at once, like a gentlemen, and we follow him round hoping that presently he will do the same again. Ambrose Bierce could have made something of what is suggested in such a passage as this:

"On the borders of this horrid desolation (the Somme) we met a
Salvage Company at work. That warren of trenches and dugouts
extended for untold miles.... They warned us, if we insisted on
going further in, not to let any man go singly, but only in strong
parties, as the Golgotha was peopled with wild men, British,
French, Australian, German deserters, who lived there underground,
like ghouls among the mouldering dead, and who came out at nights
to plunder and kill. In the night, an officer said, mingled with
the snarling of carrion dogs, they often heard inhuman cries and
rifle-shots coming from that awful wilderness. Once they (the
Salvage Company) had put out, as a trap, a basket containing food,
tobacco, and a bottle of whisky. But the following morning they
found the bait untouched, and a note in the basket, 'Nothing
doing!'"

XXX. Kipling

JUNE 5, 1920. One day, when I did not know Kipling's name, I found in a cabin of a ship from Rangoon two paper-covered books, with a Calcutta imprint, smelling of something, whatever it was, that did not exist in England. The books were _Plain Tales from the Hills_ and _Soldiers Three_. It was high summer, and in that cabin of a ship in the Albert Dock, with its mixed odour of tea, teak, and cheroots, I read through all. The force in those stories went nearer to capturing me completely than anything I have read since. I can believe now that I just escaped taking a path which would have given me a world totally different from the one I know, and the narrowness of the escape makes me feel tolerant towards the young people who give up typewriting and book-keeping, and go out into an unfriendly world determined to be Mary Pickfords and Charlie Chaplins. A boy boards a ship merely to get a parrot, and his friend, who brought it from Burma, has gone to Leadenhall Street; there is a long interval, with those books lying in a bunk. Such a trivial incident--something like it happening every week to everybody--and to-day that boy, but for the Grace of God, might be reading the leaders of the _Morning Post_ as the sole relief to a congested mind, going every week to the cartoon of _Punch_ as to barley water for chronic prickly heat, and talking of dealing with the heterodox as the Holy Office used to deal with unbaptized Indian babies for the good of their little souls.

I have recovered from those astonishing adventures with Kipling. I may read him to-day with enjoyment, but safe from excitation. This is due, perhaps, to a stringy constitution, subject to bilious doubts, which loves to see lusty Youth cock its hat when most nervous, swagger with merry insolence to hide the uncertainty which comes of self-conscious inexperience, assume a cynical shrewdness to protect its credulity, and imitate the abandon of the hard fellow who has been to Hong Kong, Tal Tal, and Delagoa Bay. We enjoy seeing Youth act thus; but one learns in time that a visit to Rhodesia, worse luck, makes one no more intelligent than a week-end at Brighton. Well, it doesn't matter. What ingrates we should be now to turn on Kipling because we disagree with the politics he prefers, those loud opinions of his which, when we get too much of them, remain in the ears for a while like the echoes of a brass tray which a hearty child banged for a drum. Though we hold the British Constitution as sacred as the family vault we do not think the less of Dickens because the awful spectacle of our assembled legislators made him laugh, nor do we leave the room when Beethoven is played because his careless regard for a monarch's divine right is painful to us. If Kipling had not given us _My Sunday at Home_ and _The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney_, how should we have got them?

I have just read Kipling's book, _Letters of Travel_. Its attractive title drew me to it, and is to blame. Kipling has an uncanny gift of sight. It prompts no divination in him, but its curiosity misses nothing that is superficial. If he had watched the Crucifixion, and had been its sole recorder, we should have had a perfect representation of the soldiers, the crowds, the weather, the smells, the colours, and the three uplifted figures; so lively a record that it would be immortal for the fidelity and commonness of its physical experience. But we should never have known more about the central figure than that He was a cool and courageous rebel. Kipling can make a picture of an indifferent huddle of fishing boats in a stagnant harbour which is more enjoyable than being there. Letters from such a traveller would attract one directly across the bookshop. But these letters of his were addressed to his friends the Imperialists before the War, and one may guess the rest. Such an exposure moves one to sorrow over a writer whose omniscience used to make the timorous believe that arrogance, if lively enough, had some advantage over reason.

Yet there is in a few of the letters enough to show what we missed because they were not addressed to himself, or to anybody but a Composite Portrait of The Breed. There are passages in the chapter called "Half a Dozen Pictures" which clear all irritation from the mind (for many of the author's insults are studied and gratuitous) and leave nothing but respect for the artist. These come when the artist sees only a riot of Oriental deck passengers, bears, and macaws, in the tropics; or a steamer coming round, exposed by a clarity like crystal in the trough of immense seas somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Auckland Islands at dayfall. We get such impressions when Kipling has, for the moment, forgotten the need to make a genuflection towards the Absolute and Everlasting Chutney, and is a man and brother delighting in his craft.

The rest of the book has, one must admit, a value, but it is an undesigned value; indeed, its value is that it was designed to prove, at the time it was written, something quite different. From this book, with its recurring contempt for England, you may see what value we need have attached to much that the assured and the violent ever had to tell us about our Empire. If this publication is, indeed, an act of contrition for words unwisely written, then it should be read as a warning by all who write. Materialists naturally attach to transient circumstances a value which the less patriotic of us might think not really material. "We discussed, first of all, under the lee of a wet deck-house in mid-Atlantic; man after man cutting in and out of the talk as he sucked at his damp tobacco." There is no doubt Kipling supposes that the wet deck-house adds a value to the words spoken under its lee-side. Yet the words he reports are what one may hear, with grief, any day in any tavern in the hurry and excitement of ten minutes before closing time. But Kipling always thought an opinion gained in value if expressed elsewhere than in England. His ideal government would be a polo-player from Simla leading the crew of the _Bolivar_.

Every horror in the world, the author of these letters tells us, has its fitting ritual. How easily, too, one realizes it, when feeling again the fanatic heat and force of this maker of old magic with the tom-tom; the vicious mockery, certain of popular applause, of ideas that are not marketable; the abrupt rancour whenever the common folk must be mentioned; the spite felt for England--"in England ... you see where the rot starts"; the sly suspicion of other countries, and the consequent jealousy and fear; here it all is, convulsive, uncertain, inflammable. The prophet of Empire! But the prophecy was wrong. England, "where the rot starts," bore most of the heat and burden of the day, and saved the Empire for the money-mongers. And what of the British youngsters who did that, who were not materialists in the least, but many of them the idealists for whom no abuse once could be too vicious? The corruption of the Somme! That faceless and nameless horror was the apotheosis of the Imperialist.