Old Junk Part 9

XIX. Holly-Ho!

In the train bound for the leave boat, just before Christmas, the Knight-Errant, who also was returning to the front, re-wrote the well-known hymn of Phillips Brooks for me, to make the time pa.s.s. It began:

"Oh little town of Bethlehem, To thee we give the lie."

So you may guess, though I shan't tell you, how it continued. For the iron was in the soul of the Knight and misery was twisting it. I cannot pretend it was a pleasure trip. This was to be our third Christmas in Flanders. Is it any good trying to pa.s.s on the emotion common to men who go to that place because they must? No, it is not. Yet, throughout the journey to the boat, I was not astonished at the loud gaiety of many of our pa.s.sengers. I have got used to it; for they were like that when they landed at Boulogne in August 1914; and they will be no different when they come back for good, to comfortable observers who prefer to be satisfied easily.

There was a noise of musical instruments and untractable boots on the floor-boards. While waiting in the nervous queue on the Day of Judgment one of those fellows will address a mouth organ to the responsive feet of a pal, and the others will look on with intent approval, indifferent to Gabriel. Having watched disaster experiment variously with my countrymen for three years, I begin to understand why once the French hated us, why lately they have learned to admire us and to be amused by us, why the blunders of our governing cla.s.ses don't damage us vitally (which seems miraculous unless you know the reason); and, indeed, why that blessed flag has braved a thousand years the battle and the breeze.

It is because the quality of our n.o.bodies (about whom a great epic will get written when a poet is born good enough and big enough to receive the inspiration), it is because any average n.o.body has a cool impregnability to the worst bad luck can do which is supernal. That gives the affair something of the comic. That is what makes the humour of the front. And after the first silent pause of respect and wonder at one more story of the sort a journalist knows so well who knows but a little of railway men and miners, seamstresses and the mothers in mean streets, and ships and the sea, one cannot help chuckling. Again, the sons of Smith and Jones and Robin! The well-born, the clever, the haughty, and the greedy, in their fear, pride, and wilfulness, and the perplexity of their scheming, make a general mess of the world.

Forthwith in a panic they cry, "Calamity cometh!"

Then out from their obscurity, where they dwelt because of their low worth, arise the n.o.bodies; because theirs is the historic job of restoring again the upset balance of affairs. They make no fuss about it. Theirs is always the hard and dirty work. They have always done it.

If they don't do it, it will not be done. They fall with a will and without complaint upon the wreckage wilfully made of generations of such labour as theirs, to get the world right again, to make it habitable again, though not for themselves; for them, they must spend the rest of their lives recreating order out of chaos. A hopeless task; but they continue at it unmurmuring, giving their bodies without stint, as once they gave their labour, to the fields and the sea. And some day the planet will get back to its old place under the sun; but not for them, not for them.

A n.o.body never seems to know anything, but by the grace of G.o.d he gets there just the same. I was not far from Ypres and the line of the Yser during the first battle for the Channel ports. Do you know how near we were to the edge of the precipice not long before that Christmas? We were on the verge. We were nearly over. I knew it then. So when, later still, I used to meet in France an enigmatic, clay-coloured figure with a visage seamed with humorous dolours, loaded with pioneering and warlike implements, rifles, knives, tin hats, and gas masks, I always felt I ought to get down and walk. Instead of which he used to salute me as smartly as he could. He will never know how cheap and embarra.s.sed he used to make me feel. I wish I knew enough to do him some justice.

And here once more is the leave boat, and this is another Christmas Eve. It was a still twilight, with a calm sea and a swell on our starboard beam. We rolled. We looked back on England sinking in the night. A black smudge of a destroyer followed us over with its eye on us. The main deck was crowded with soldiers--you could not get along there--singing in their lifebelts; at times the chorus, if approved, became a unanimous roar. They didn't want to be there. They didn't want to die. They wanted to go home. But they sang with dolorous joy. The chorus died; and we heard again the deep monody of the sea, like the admonitory voice of fate. The battles of the Somme were to come before the next Christmas; though none of us on that boat knew it then. And where is the young officer who went ash.o.r.e under the electric glare of the base port, singing also, and bearing a Christmas tree? Where is that wild lieutenant of the Black Watch--he had a splendid eye, and a voice for a Burns midnight--who cried rollicking answers from the back of the crowd to the peremptory megaphone of the landing officer, till the ship was loud and gay, and the authorities got really wild? And the boy of a new draft, whose face, as I pa.s.sed him where he had fallen in,--the light dropped to it,--was pale and nervous, and his teeth chattering! Ah, the men we met in France, and the faces we saw briefly, but remember, that were before the Somme! Shadows, shadows.

It rained next morning. This was Christmas Day. We were going to the trenches. Christians awake, salute the happy morn. There was a prospect of straight road with an avenue of diminishing poplars going east, in an inky smear, to the Germans and infinity. The rain lashed into my northerly ear, and the A.S.C. motor-car driver, who was mad, kept missing three-ton lorries and gun-limbers by the width of the paint.

One transport mule, who pretended to be frightened of us, but whose father was the devil and his mother an a.s.s, plunged into a pond of black Flanders mud as we pa.s.sed, and raked us with solvent filth. We wiped it off our mouths. G.o.d rest you merry, gentlemen. A land so inundated that it inverted the raw and alien sky was on either hand.

The mud clung to the horses and mules like dangling walnuts and bunches of earthy and glistening grapes. The men humped themselves in soddened khaki. The noise of the wheels bearing guns was like the sound of doom.

The rain it rained. O come, all ye faithful!

We got to a place where there was no more wheeled traffic. There was nothing moving, nothing alive. That country was apparently abandoned.

To our front and left, for no apparent reason, three little dirty yellow clouds burst simultaneously over a copse, with a smash which made you feel you ought to be tolerant to men with sh.e.l.l-shock. On our right was an empty field. Short momentary flames leaped constantly from its farthermost hedge, with a noise like the rapid slamming of a row of iron doors. Heavy eruptions, as though subterranean, were going on all the time, the Lord knew where. But not a man was in sight till we got to a village which looked like Gomorrah the day after it happened. Some smoke and red dust were just settling by one of the ruins, and a man lay there motionless with his face in the rubbish....

There was a habitation where sacking kept the wind and rain from unlucky holes, with holly behind pictures tacked to its walls, and a special piece of inviting mistletoe over a saucy lady from _La Vie Parisienne_. There was an elderly and serious colonel, who had an ancestor at Chevy Chase, but himself held independent views on war; and a bunch of modest boys with sparkling eyes and blithe and ironic comments. They also did not discuss the war in the way it is discussed where war is but lowered street lights. We had bully beef, the right sort of pudding,--those boys must have had very nice sisters,--and frosted cake. There were noises without, as the book of the play has it, and plenty of laughter within, and I enjoyed myself with a sort of veiled, subconscious misery; for I liked those lads; and we are so transitory today.

Then one of them took me for a Christmas walk in his country. "Have you got your gas helmet?" he said. "That's right. It makes your eyes stream with tears, and you look such a silly a.s.s." On we went. I began Christmas Day in the trenches by discovering the bottom of the mud too late; though you never can tell, when a noise like the collapse of an iron roof goes off behind you, where you are going to put your feet at that moment. We went through a little wood, where the trees were like broken poles with chewed ends. Over our heads were invisible things which moaned, shrieked, and roared in flight. It was astonishing that they were invisible. Sometimes the bottom of the mud of that communication trench was close, and sometimes not; you knew when you had tried. And as the parapets usually had dissolved at the more dubious places, and I was told and heard that Fritz had machine guns trained on them, I did not waste much time experimenting.

I found the firing-line, as one usually does, with surprise. There was a barrier of sandbags, oozing grey slime, and below, in a sort of little cave, with his body partly resting in a pool of water, a soldier asleep. Just beyond was a figure so merged in the environment of aqueous muck and slime that I did not see him till he moved, and his boots squelched. He lifted a wet rag in the grey wall and got surprisingly rapid with a rifle which was thrust through the hole and went off; and then turned to look at us. "That fellow opposite is a nuisance," said my officer. "He's always potting at this corner." "Yes, sir," said the figure of mud, darkly louring under its tin hat, "but I know where the blighter is now, and I'll get the beggar yet." With a sudden recollection he then touched iron, and grinned.

Slithering above the ankles in well-worked paste, and leaning against a wall of slime, I tried to find "the nuisance opposite" with a periscope; but before me was only a tangle of rusty wire, a number of raw holes in shabby green gra.s.s, some objects lying about which looked like tailors' dummies discarded to the weather, and an awe-inspiring stillness.

There were some interchanges with serious men, who did not sing, but who sat about in mud, or leaned against it, and were covered with it, or who were waiting with rifles ready, or looking through periscopes, or doing things over fires which smoked till the eyes were red. "Come and see our mine crater," said my guide. "It's a topper. Fritz made it, but we've got it."

I knew where that crater would be, and I thought the less of it as a spectacle. But "out there" one must follow one's leader wherever he goes. He was going to make me crawl after him in "No Man's Land," and it was not dark yet. So I acquired that sinking sensation described in the pill advertis.e.m.e.nts. The mud got down our collars; but we arrived, though I don't know how, because I was thinking too much. It was only a deep yellow hole in the ground, too, that crater, with barbed wire spilled into it and round it; and you were warned to breathe gently in it, for Fritz might lob a bomb over. He was six yards off.

In the forlorn and dying light of that Christmas Day I then noticed a m.u.f.fled youngster beside me, who might have been your son, alone, gripping a rifle with a fixed bayonet, his thoughts Heaven knows where, a box of bombs ready to hand in the filth; and his charge was to give first warning of movement in that stillness beyond. As we crawled away, leaving him there, I turned to look at that boy of yours, and his eyes met mine....

_December 1916._

XX. The Ruins

For more than two years this town could not have been more remote from us if it had been in another planet. We were but a few miles from it, but the hills hid it, and the enemy was between us and the hills. This town was but a name, a legend.

Now the enemy had left it. When going into it for the first time you had the feeling that either you or the town was bewitched. Were you really there? Were time and s.p.a.ce abolished? Or perhaps the town itself was supernatural; it was spectral, projected by unknowable evil. And for what purpose? Suspicious of its silence, of its solitude, of all its aspects, you verified its stones by touching them, and looked about for signs that men had once been there.

Such a town, which has long been in the zone of fire, and is then uncovered by the foe, gives a wayfarer who early ventures into it the feeling that this is the day after the Last Day, and that he has been overlooked. Somehow he did not hear Gabriel's trumpet; everybody else has gone on. There is not a sound but the subdued crackling of flames hidden somewhere in the overthrown and abandoned. There is no movement but where faint smoke is wreathing slowly across the deserted streets.

The unexpected collapse of a wall or cornice is frightful. So is the silence which follows. A starved kitten, which shapes out of nothing and is there complete and instantaneous at your feet--ginger stripes, and a mew which is weak, but a veritable voice of the living--is first a great surprise, and then a ridiculous comfort. It follows you about.

When you miss it, you go back to look for it--to find the miserable object racing frantically to meet you. Lonely? The Poles are not more desolate. There is no place as forlorn as that where man once was established and busy, where the patient work of his hands is all round, but where silence has fallen like a secret so dense that you feel that if it were not also so desperately invisible you could grasp a corner of it, lift the dark veil, and learn a little of what was the doom of those who have vanished. What happened to them?

It cannot be guessed. House fronts have collapsed in rubble across the road. There is a smell of opened vaults. All the homes are blind. Their eyes have been put out. Many of the buildings are without roofs, and their walls have come down to raw serrations. Slates and tiles have avalanched into the street, or the roof itself is entire, but has dropped sideways over the ruin below as a drunken cap over the dissolute. The lower floors are heaps of damp mortar and bricks. Very rarely a solitary picture hangs awry on the wall of a house where there is no other sign that it was ever inhabited. I saw in such a room the portrait of a child who in some moment long ago laughed while it clasped a dog in a garden. You continue to gaze at a sign like that, you don't know why, as though something you cannot name might be divined, if you could but hit upon the key to the spell. What is the name of the evil that has fallen on mankind?

The gardens beyond are to be seen through the thin and gaping walls of the streets, and there, overturned and defaced by sh.e.l.l-bursts and the crude subsoil thrown out from dug-outs, a few ragged shrubs survive. A rustic bower is lumbered with empty bottles, meat tins, a bird-cage, and ugly litter and fragments. It is the flies which find these gardens pleasant. Theirs is now the only voice of Summer, as though they were loathly in the mouth of Summer's carcase. It is perplexing to find how little remains of the common things of the household: a broken doll, a child's boot, a trampled bonnet. Once in such a town I found a corn-chandler's ledger.

It was lying open in the muck of the roadway, wet and discoloured. Till that moment I had not come to the point of believing the place. The town was not humane. It was not credible. It might have been, for all I could tell, a simulacrum of the work of men. Perhaps it was the patient and particular mimicry of us by an unknown power, a power which was alarmingly interested in our doings; and in a frenzy over its partial failure it had attempted to demolish its laborious semblance of what we do. Was this power still observant of its work, and conscious of intruders? All this was a sinister warning of something invisible and malign, which brooded over our affairs, knew us too well, though omitting the heart of us, and it was mocking us now by defiling in an inhuman rage its own caricature of our appearance.

But there, lying in the road, was that corn-chandler's ledger. It was the first understandable thing I had seen that day. I began to believe these abandoned and silent ruins had lived and flourished, had once a warm kindred life moving in their empty chambers; enclosed a comfortable community, like placid Casterbridge. Men did stand here on sunny market days, and sorted wheat in the hollows of their hands. And with all that wide and hideous disaster of the Somme around it was suddenly understood (as when an essential light at home, but a light that has been casually valued, goes out, and leaves you to the dark) that an elderly farmer, looking for the best seed corn in the market-place, while his daughter the dairymaid is flirting with his neighbour's son, are more to us than all the Importances and the Great Ones who in all history till now have proudly and expertly tended their culture of discords.

I don't know that I ever read a book with more interest than that corn-chandler's ledger; though at one time, when it was merely a commonplace record of the common life which circulated there, testifying to its industry and the response of earth, it would have been no matter to me. Not for such successes are our flags displayed and our bells set pealing. It named customers at Thiepval, Martinpuich, Courcelette, Combles, Longueval, Contalmaison, Pozieres, Guillemont, Montauban. It was not easy to understand it, my knowledge of those places being what it was. Those villages did not exist, except as corruption in a land that was tumbled into waves of glistening clay where the bodies of men were rotting disregarded like those of dogs sprawled on a midden. My knowledge of that country, got with some fatigue, anxiety, fright and on certain days dull contempt for the worst that could happen, because it seemed that nothing could matter any more, my idea of that country was such that the contrast of those ledger accounts was uncanny and unbelievable. Yet amid all the misery and horror of the Somme, with its shattering reminder of finality and futility at every step whichever way you turned, that ledger in the road, with none to read it, was the gospel promising that life should rise again; the suggestion of a forgotten but surviving virtue which would return, and cover the dread we knew, till a ploughman of the future would stop at rare relics, holding them up to the sun, and dimly recall ancient tales of woe.

_Spring 1917._

XXI. Lent, 1918

It was Meredith's country, and Atlantic weather in Lent. The downs were dilated and clear as though seen through crystal. A far company of pines on the high skyline were magnified into delicate inky figures.

The vacant sward below them was as lucent as the slope of a vast approaching wave. A blackbird was fluting after a shower, for the sky was transient blue with the dark rags of the squall flying fast over the hill towards London. The thatched roof of a cottage in the valley suddenly flamed with a light of no earthly fire, as though a G.o.d had arrived, and that was the sign. Miss m.u.f.fet, whose profile, having the breeze and the surprise of the sun in her hair, was dedicated with a quivering and aureate nimbus, pulled aside the brush of a small yew, and exclaimed; for there, neatly set in the angle of the bough, was a brown cup with three blue eggs in it. I saw all this, and tried my best to get back to it; but I was not there. I saw it clearly--the late shower glittered on my coat and on the yew with the nest in it--but it was a scene remote as a memorable hour of a Surrey April of years ago.

I could not approach; so I went back into the house.

But there was no escape. For I freely own that I am one of those who refused to believe there would be "a great offensive." (Curse such trite and sounding words, which put measureless misery through the mind as unconsciously as a boy repeats something of Euclid.) I believe that no man would now dare to order it. The soldiers, I knew, with all the signs before them, still could not credit that it would be done. The futile wickedness of these slaughters had been proved too often. They get nowhere. They settle nothing. This last, if it came, would be worse than all the rest in its magnitude and horror; it would deprive Europe of a mult.i.tude more of our diminishing youth, and end, in the exhaustion of its impetus, with peace no nearer than before. The old and indurated Importances in authority, safe far behind the lines, would shrink from squandering humanity's remaining gold of its life, even though their ign.o.ble ends were yet unachieved. But it had been ordered. Age, its blind jealousy for control now stark mad, impotent in all but the will and the power to command and punish, ignoring every obvious lesson of the past, the appeal of the tortured for the sun again and leisure even to weep, and the untimely bones of the young as usual now as flints in the earth of Europe, had deliberately put out the glimmer of dawn.

Well for those who may read the papers without personal knowledge of what happens when such a combat has begun; but to know, and to be useless; to be looking with that knowledge at Meredith's country in radiant April! There are occasions, though luckily they come but once or twice in life, when the mind is shocked by the basal verities apparently moving as though they were fugitive; thought becomes dizzy at the daylight earth suddenly falling away at one's feet to the vacuity of the night. Some choice had to be made. I recalled another such mental convulsion: by Amiens Cathedral, near midnight, nearly four years ago, with the French guns rumbling through the city in retreat, and the certainty that the enemy would be there by morning on his way to Paris. One thing a campaigner learns: that matters are rarely quite so bad or so good as they seem. Saying this to my friend, the farmer (who replied that, in any case, he must go and look to the cows), I turned to some books.

Yet resolution is needed to get the thoughts indoors at such a time.

They are out of command. A fire is necessary. You must sit beside a company of flames leaping from a solidly established fire, flames curling out of the lambent craters of a deep centre; and steadily look into that. After a while your hand goes out slowly for the book. It has become acceptable. You have got your thoughts home. They were of no use in France, dwelling upon those villages and cross-roads you once knew, now spouting smoke and flames, where good friends are waiting, having had their last look on earth, as the doomed rearguards.

The best books for refuge in times of stress are of the "notebook" and "table-talk" kind. Poetry I have tried, but could not approach it. It is too distant. Romance, which many found good, would never hold my attention. But I had Samuel Butler's _Note Books_ with me for two years in France, and found that the right sort of thing. You may begin anywhere. There are no threads to look for. And you may stop for a time, while some strange notion of the author's is in contest for the command of the intelligence with your dark, resurgent thoughts; but Butler always won. His mental activity is too fibrous, masculine, and unexpected for any nonsense. But I had to keep a sharp eye on Butler.

His singular merits were discovered by others who had no more than heard of him, but found he was exactly what they wanted. If his volume of _Note Books_ is not the best example of its sort we have, then I should be glad to learn the name of the best. This Lent I tried Coleridge again. But surely one's mind must be curiously at random to go to such woolgathering. I found him what I fear Lamb and his friends knew him to be--a tireless and heavy preacher through the murk of whose nebulous scholarship and philosophy the revealing gleams of wisdom are so rare that you are almost too weary to open the eyes to them when they flash. Selden is better, but abstract, legal, and dry.

Hazlitt compelled a renewal of an old respect; his humanity, his instinct for essentials, his cool detection of pretence and cant, however finely disguised, and his English with its frank love for the embodying noun and the active verb, make reading very like the clear, hard, bright, vigorous weather of the downs when the wind is up-Channel. It is bracing. But I discovered another notebook, of which I have heard so little that it shows what good things may be lost in war; for this book was published in 1914. It is the _Impressions and Comments_ of Havelock Ellis. There have been in the past critics of life and the things men do who have been observers as acute, as well-equipped in knowledge, and have had a command of English as free and accurate, as the author of "Impressions and Comments"; but not many. Yet such judgments of men, their affairs and their circ.u.mstances, could have been written in no other time than the years just before the war--the first note is dated July, 1912. The reflections are often chill and exposed; but so is a faithful mirror bleak, though polished and gleaming, when held up to grey affairs in the light of a day which is ominous. You seem to feel in this book the cold draught moving before the storm which has not come--the author knew of no storm to come, and does not even hint at it; but the portents, and the look of the minds of his fellows, make him feel uncomfortable, and he asks what ails us. Now we know. It is strange that a book so wise and enlivening, whether it is picturing the Cornish coast in spring, the weakness of peace propaganda, Bianca Stella, Rabelais, the Rules of Art, the Bayeux Tapestry, or Spanish cathedrals, should have been mislaid and forgotten....

The fire is dying. It is grey, fallen, and cold. The house is late and silent. There is no sound but the ghostly creaking of a stair; our thoughts are stealing away again. We creep out after them to the outer gate. What are books and opinions? The creakings of an old house uneasy with the heavy remembrances and the melancholy of antiquity, and with some midnight presage of its finality.

The wind and rain have pa.s.sed. There is now but the icy stillness and quiet of outer s.p.a.ce. The earth is Limbo, the penumbra of a dark and partial recollection; the shadow, vague and dawnless, over a vast stage from which the consequential pageant has gone, and is almost forgotten, the memory of many events merged now into formless night itself, and foundered profoundly beneath the glacial brilliance of a clear heaven alive with stars. Only the stars live, and only the stars overlook the place that was ours. The war--was there a war? It must have been long ago. Perhaps the shades are troubled with vestiges of an old and dreadful sin. If once there were men who heard certain words and became spellbound, and in the impulse of that madness forgot that their earth was good, but very brief, and turned from their children and women and the cherished work of their hands to slay each other and destroy their communities, it all happened just as the leaves of an autumn that is gone once fell before the sudden mania of a wind, and are resolved.

What year was that? The leaves of an autumn that is long past are beyond time. The night is their place, and only the unknowing stars look down to the little blot of midnight which was us, and our pride, and our wisdom, and our heroics.