Tales of War Part 4

"No, said the platoon commander."

"I thought not," he said. "Hadn't you better take a look at the map?"

"I suppose so," said the platoon commander, and he smoothed out his map and wearily got to the business of finding out where he was.

"Good Lord!" he said. "Ville-en-Bois!"

Spring in England and Flanders

Very soon the earliest primroses will be coming out in woods wherever they have been sheltered from the north. They will grow bolder as the days go by, and spread and come all down the slopes of sunny hills.

Then the anemones will come, like a shy pale people, one of the tribes of the elves, who dare not leave the innermost deeps of the wood: in those days all the trees will be in leaf, the bluebells will follow, and certain fortunate woods will shelter such myriads of them that the bright fresh green of the beech trees will flash between two blues, the blue of the sky and the deeper blue of the bluebells. Later the violets come, and such a time as this is the perfect time to see England: when the cuckoo is heard and he surprises his hearers; when evenings are lengthening out and the bat is abroad again; and all the flowers are out and all the birds sing. At such a time not only Nature smiles but our quiet villages and grave old spires wake up from winter in the mellow air and wear their centuries lightly. At such a time you might come just at evening on one of those old villages in a valley and find it in the mood to tell you the secret of the ages that it hid and treasured there before the Normans came. Who knows? For they are very old, very wise, very friendly; they might speak to you one warm evening. If you went to them after great suffering they might speak to you; after nights and nights of sh.e.l.ling over in France, they might speak to you and you might hear them clearly.

It would be a long, long story that they would tell, all about the ages; and it would vary wonderfully little, much less perhaps than we think; and the repet.i.tions rambling on and on in the evening, as the old belfry spoke and the cottages gathered below it, might sound so soothing after the boom of sh.e.l.ls that perhaps you would nearly sleep.

And then with one's memory tired out by the war one might never remember the long story they told, when the belfry and the brown-roofed houses all murmured at evening, might never remember even that they had spoken all through that warm spring and evening. We may have heard them speak and forgotten that they have spoken. Who knows?

We are at war, and see so many strange things: some we must forget, some we must remember; and we cannot choose which.

To turn from Kent to Flanders is to turn to a time of mourning through all seasons alike. Spring there brings out no leaf on myriad oaks, nor the haze of green that floats like a halo above the heads of the birch trees, that stand with their fairylike trunks haunting the deeps of the woods. For miles and miles and miles summer ripens no crops, leads out no maidens laughing in the moonlight, and brings no harvest home.

When Autumn looks on orchards in all that region of mourning he looks upon barren trees that will never blossom again. Winter drives in no st.u.r.dy farmers at evening to sit before cheery fires, families meet not at Christmas, and the bells are dumb in belfries; for all by which a man might remember his home has been utterly swept away: has been swept away to make a maniacal dancing ground on which a murderous people dance to their death led by a shallow, clever, callous, imperial clown.

There they dance to their doom till their feet shall find the precipice that was prepared for them on the day that they planned the evil things they have done.

The Nightmare Countries

There are certain lands in the darker dreams of poetry that stand out in the memory of generations. There is for instance Poe's "Dark tarn of Auber, the ghoul-haunted region of Weir"; there are some queer twists in the river Alph as imagined by Coleridge; two lines of Swinburne:

By the tideless dolorous inland sea In a land of sand and ruin and gold

are as haunting as any. There are in literature certain regions of gloom, so splendid that whenever you come on them they leave in the mind a sort of nightmare country which one's thoughts revisit on hearing the lines quoted.

It is pleasant to picture such countries sometimes when sitting before the fire. It is pleasant because you can banish them by the closing of a book; a puff of smoke from a pipe will hide them altogether, and back come the pleasant, wholesome, familiar things. But in France they are there always. In France the nightmare countries stand all night in the starlight; dawn comes and they still are there. The dead are buried out of sight and others take their places among men; but the lost lands lie unburied gazing up at the winds; and the lost woods stand like skeletons all grotesque in the solitude; the very seasons have fled from them. The very seasons have fled; so that if you look up to see whether summer has turned to autumn, or if autumn has turned to winter yet, nothing remains to show you. It is like the eccentric dream of some strange man, very arresting and mysterious, but lacking certain things that should be there before you can recognize it as earthly. It is a mad, mad landscape. There are miles and miles and miles of it. It is the biggest thing man has done. It looks as though man in his pride, with all his clever inventions, had made for himself a sorry attempt at creation.

Indeed when we trace it all back to its origin we find at the beginning of this unhappy story a man who was only an emperor and wished to be something more. He would have ruled the world but has only meddled with it; and his folly has brought misery to millions, and there lies his broken dream on the broken earth. He will never take Paris now. He will never be crowned at Versailles as Emperor of Europe; and after that, most secret dream of all, did not the Caesars proclaim themselves divine? Was it not whispered among Macedonian courtiers that Alexander was the child of G.o.d? And was the Hohenzollern less than these?

What might not force accomplish? All gone now, that dream and the Hohenzollern line broken. A maniacal dream and broken farms all mixed up together: they make a pretty nightmare and the clouds still gleam at night with the flashes of sh.e.l.ls, and the sky is still troubled by day with uncouth balloons and the black bursts of the German sh.e.l.ls and the white of our anti-aircraft.

And below there lies this wonderful waste land where no girls sing, and where no birds come but starlings; where no hedgerows stand, and no lanes with wild roses, and where no pathways run through fields of wheat, and there are no fields at all and no farms and no farmers; and two haystacks stand on a hill I know, undestroyed in the desolation, and n.o.body touches them for they know the Germans too well; and the tops have been blown off hills down to the chalk. And men say of this place that it is Pozieres and of that place that it is Ginchy; nothing remains to show that hamlets stood there at all, and a brown, brown weed grows over it all for ever; and a mighty spirit has arisen in man, and no one bows to the War Lord though many die. And Liberty is she who sang her songs of old, and is fair as she ever was, when men see her in visions, at night in No Man's Land when they have the strength to crawl in: still she walks of a night in Pozieres and in Ginchy.

A fanciful man once called himself the Emperor of the Sahara: the German Kaiser has stolen into a fair land and holds with weakening hands a land of craters and weed, and wire and wild cabbages and old German bones.

Spring and the Kaiser

While all the world is waiting for Spring there lie great s.p.a.ces in one of the pleasantest lands to which Spring cannot come.

Pear trees and cherry and orchards flash over other lands, blossoming as abundantly as though their wonder were new, with a beauty as fresh and surprising as though nothing like it before had ever adorned countless centuries. Now with the larch and soon with the beech trees and hazel, a bright green blazes forth to illumine the year. The slopes are covered with violets. Those who have gardens are beginning to be proud of them and to point them out to their neighbours. Almond and peach in blossom peep over old brick walls. The land dreams of summer all in the youth of the year.

But better than all this the Germans have found war. The simple content of a people at peace in pleasant countries counted for nothing with them. Their Kaiser prepared for war, made speeches about war, and, when he was ready, made war. And now the hills that should be covered with violets are full of murderous holes, and the holes are half full of empty meat tins, and the garden walls have gone and the gardens with them, and there are no woods left to shelter anemones.

Boundless ma.s.ses of brown barbed wire straggle over the landscape. All the orchards there are cut down out of ruthless spite to hurt France whom they cannot conquer. All the little trees that grow near gardens are gone, aspen, laburnum and lilac. It is like this for hundreds of miles. Hundreds of ruined towns gaze at it with vacant windows and see a land from which even Spring is banished. And not a ruined house in all the hundred towns but mourns for some one, man, woman or child; for the Germans make war equally on all in the land where Spring comes no more.

Some day Spring will come back; some day she will shine all April in Picardy again, for Nature is never driven utterly forth, but comes back with her seasons to cover up even the vilest things.

She shall hide the raw earth of the sh.e.l.l holes till the violets come again; she shall bring back even the orchards for Spring to walk in once more; the woods will grow tall again above the southern anemones; and the great abandoned guns of the Germans will rust by the rivers of France. Forgotten like them, the memory of the War Lord will pa.s.s with his evil deeds.

Two Songs

Over slopes of English hills looking south in the time of violets, evening was falling.

Shadows at edges of woods moved, and then merged in the gloaming.

The bat, like a shadow himself, finding that spring was come, slipped from the dark of the wood as far as a clump of beech trees and fluttered back again on his wonderful quiet wings.

Pairing pigeons were home.

Very young rabbits stole out to gaze at the calm still world. They came out as the stars come. At one time they were not there, and then you saw them, but you did not see them come.

Towering clouds to the west built palaces, cities and mountains; bastions of rose and precipices of gold; giants went home over them draped in mauve by steep rose-pink ravines into emerald-green empires.

Turbulences of colour broke out above the departed sun; giants merged into mountains, and cities became seas, and new processions of other fantastic things sailed by. But the chalk slopes facing south smiled on with the same calm light, as though every blade of gra.s.s gathered a ray from the gloaming. All the hills faced the evening with that same quiet glow, which faded softly as the air grew colder; and the first star appeared.

Voices came up in the hush, clear from the valley, and ceased. A light was lit, like a spark, in a distant window: more stars appeared and the woods were all dark now, and shapes even on the hill slopes began to grow indistinct.

Home by a laneway in the dim, still evening a girl was going, singing the Ma.r.s.eillaise.

In France where the downs in the north roll away without hedges, as though they were great free giants that man had never confined, as though they were stretching their vast free limbs in the evening, the same light was smiling and glimmering softly away.

A road wound over the downs and away round one of their shoulders. A hush lay over them as though the giants slept, or as though they guarded in silence their ancient, wonderful history.

The stillness deepened and the dimness of twilight; and just before colours fade, while shapes can still be distinguished, there came by the road a farmer leading his Norman horse. High over the horse's withers his collar pointed with bra.s.s made him fantastic and huge and strange to see in the evening.

They moved together through that mellow light towards where unseen among the cl.u.s.tered downs the old French farmer's house was sheltered away.

He was going home at evening humming "G.o.d Save the King."