PART ONE FOUR LANDSCAPES

I To Introduce Gringoire

The writer’s friend Gringoire, originally a poet and Gallophile, went to the war. Long, gray, lean, unreasonably boastful as a man and unreasonably modest as a poet, he was probably not too disciplined as an infantry officer, but he has survived to inhabit in tranquillity with the most charming of companions a rural habitation so ancient, frail and unreal that it is impossible to think of it otherwise than as the Gingerbread Cottage you may have read of in the tale of “Haensel and Gretel.”

This book, then, is the story of Gringoire just after ... Armageddon. For it struck the writer that you hear of the men that went, and you hear of what they did when they were There. But you never hear how It left them. You hear how things were destroyed, but seldom of the painful processes of Reconstruction.

So that your Compiler, taking pencils, tablets and erasers and availing himself of the singularly open hospitality of the poet and his charming meridional partner, came on many successive Saturday afternoons from the little old Grammar School where he instructs classes in English Literature and Physical Development, to sit in the garden at the feet of Gringoire, Gallophile, Veteran, Gardener and, above all, Economist, if not above all Poet.

We would sit about on rude benches whilst Mme. Sélysette would bring us shandygaff brewed after a recipe of Gringoire himself. Then he would talk and your Compiler make furtive shorthand notes. Above all Gringoire loved to talk about cooking for he boasted that he was not only the best but the most economical cook in the world. How that may be your Compiler hesitates to say. To eat a meal prepared by Gringoire was certainly an adventure and when you felt adventurous had its titillations. But only Mme. Sélysette who had accompanied him into his English wilds from the distant South could have told you whether Gringoire was as economical in his cuisine as he professed to be. For he swore that the saviour of society in the end would be the good but excellently economical cook.

But Mme. Sélysette, dark, alert and with exquisitely pencilled brows and as loyal as she was goodhumored, never got beyond saying that in his culinary furies Gringoire needed at least three persons—whom I took to be herself, the diminutive maid and the almost more diminutive stable boy—to clear up after he had boiled an egg.

How Gringoire proposed to save the world by intensive kitchen gardening and exquisite but economical cookery may appear hereafter. His years in the trenches had taught him one thing—to be an eccentric economist, in petto, since he regarded himself as an extinct poet and proposed to live on his minute army pension. And I think his ambition really was to teach persons forced to live on minute incomes how to lead graceful, poetic and pleasant lives and so to save the world.

Thus it would perhaps have been better could your Compiler have provided you with a work useful to young couples contemplating matrimony on ten shillings a week ... or a month ... or a year. That would have been an enterprise certainly to gladden the heart of Gringoire. Or it might have been better had it taken the form of a Cottager Cookery Book or a Cottager’s Guide to Gardening or the Keeping of Goats instead of the war-reminiscences of a contemplative and sensitive soul. Yes, to be sure that would have been better. One can only console one’s self that when it comes to war-reminiscences the contemplative and sensitive soul has been little represented. So, for the matter of that, has the poetic but economical chef.

But the present writer, alas, has not the excellent—but so meticulous!—mind that will let him sit down and write many paragraphs such as that following this one. Neither has Gringoire the patience to dictate to the writer details of his methods. The most he has done is to let his Boswell into his frame of mind. We once, together, got as far as this:

“Chops, Mutton, to deal with.

“Fritto Misto: Stock: Mixed Meats en casserole.

“Take two chops. Pare off all the fat till you have two noisettes de mouton. Save each particle of meat and each particle of fat from the tail ends of the chops, separate, but as zealously as you preserve every memory of your well-beloved. You will then have four little divisions: two noisettes for the Fritto Misto; two chop bones for stock; a little pile of fat for rendering down; a little pile of fragments of meat. Place the bones immediately in a small casserole of water, with salt, two bay leaves, pepper, one leaf of sage, and rice if you like. It will help you if you tie the bones together with a piece of string having a long end so that you may pull them out. Let this simmer for thirty-six hours.⁠[1] Have ready also six roots of salsify; one-half pound of French beans; one-half pound of cooked peas; and one pound of potatoes, cut into slices. (All these vegetables should be cooked ready. It will improve matters if the peas are very young and boiled in syrup.) Also two tomatoes sliced in halves, the meat of two rashers of bacon, and a few mushrooms, and half a dozen sprigs of parsley. (The bacon fat must be saved for rendering down.) Also two slices of bread half an inch thick. Have ready also a large pie dish half filled with water.

“Now take an earthenware frying pan with a white glazed lining. Put in sufficient frying fat to fill this to three-quarters of its depth when boiling. Set this on the fire and bring the fat to the boil. (Boiling fat will be absolutely still—stiller than any waters at even; as still as is Madame Sélysette when, in the same room, Gringoire is writing. It will have ceased to bubble, and, above its surface, will float a filmy wreath of bluish vapor. You may test it by dropping in a piece of bread crumb. If this becomes crisp in sixty seconds, your fat will be ready for what follows.)

“As soon as the fat boils, drop in your two slices of bread, which will be large enough later to support the noisettes and which will be trimmed to improve their appearance. During that minute, place in a frying basket your two noisettes of mutton and the sliced cold potatoes. (Gringoire likes his fried potatoes not too crisp. Those who like them biscuit-wise should fry them in the basket for a quarter of an hour longer than the mutton.) Take out from the frying fat the slices of bread, let them drip into the fat, place them handy on a clean plate ... D—n it, that’s enough!”

The reader will understand that at this point my friend Gringoire ceased dictating and ceased violently. Thus a Gringoire cookery book cannot be compiled. For, though Gringoire will cook for hours and hours if visitors are expected, and though he will talk, equally for hours and hours, about eating, about digestion, about French, Italian, and even German cookery as they affect the emotions, he finds it tiresome to tie down his mind to the recording of processes.

It is the same with gardening; the keeping of goats, ducks, chickens; the training of dogs, cats, and horses. He will spend hours in meditating over his onion bed.

And then Madame Sélysette will call from the bedroom window of the Gingerbread Cottage:

“I do love to see you, Gringoire, pottering about and pretending to be busy.” For Gringoire will have risen at 6:30 and will have done something with hoes, spades, trowels, lines, and other paraphernalia. But he will have thought more. For the rotation of crops on a quarter of an acre of sandy soil that has to be at once a formal garden and the main food supply of a couple, of the tiniest income—that is a subject for endless thought.

It is a subject also for endless economies, schemes, calculations. The calculations concern manure—for the accounts of agriculture are the most complicated of accounts. You may show a loss on the fattening of an ox, a chicken, a goat, a duck, or a pig—and yet its droppings may so enrich your land as to give you actually a handsome balance of profit. Or again a crop may appear superabundant, little palatable, or unattractive—but, fed to one animal or another, it will beautifully adorn your board on Christmas day.

So in the Gingerbread Cottage—and it is, in all but looks, a very bad cottage, with a roof that leaks, walls that used to drip with damp, cupboards that, till the advent of Gringoire, smelled of mold and bred the very largest spiders that can be imagined—Gringoire pursues at once his economies, his meditations, and his career as a poet.

But he is only able to be communicative as to his meditations. If Madame Sélysette asks him how to make potage this or that, he says: “Oh, throw in any old thing.” Or again! This spring the writer overheard the following dialogue between him and a small boy who was weeding whilst he dug.

“What is the most important thing in gardening, boy?”

“Manure, sir.”

“What is the next most important thing?”

“Tools, sir.”

“And the next?”

“Money to buy seeds, sir.”

“Wrong in every particular,” said Gringoire in a terrible voice. “The first thing is brains; and the second thing is brains; and the third thing is brains. Do you understand?”

The boy said, “Yes, sir.” But one may doubt if he was really much wiser. And Gringoire continued somewhat as follows: “I have no manure, no tools, and no money—but you will see in the autumn that I shall have the most productive garden in the country!”

From which it will appear that Gringoire has some of the characteristics of a Southern origin. Today his garden would not at all points impress a French gardener—but in some it would. For, in his youth Gringoire sat under the great Professor Gressent, Professor of the Potager Moderne, at the Sorbonne in Paris. From him he learned that thought, devotion to the task, and any bit of metal on the end of a stick shaped like a hoe will take the place of manure, tools, and money. For Professor Gressent, during one session, used to commence every lecture by ordering his pupils to inscribe on their tablets the mystical sentence: “Trois fois biner vaut deux fois engraisser.”

And when his Boswell, the writer, asked him the other day how he got his results, he answered:

“By trying to establish what that old fool Tolstoi called the Kingdom of God within me!”

The writer took him to mean that it is the spirit in which a job is attacked that alone can sanctify the job—and that, in that way, the godly grow fat at the expense of the unrighteous. Before the war Gringoire was an ordinary poet, such as you might see in Soho or in various foreign underground haunts by the baker’s dozen, eating nasty meats, drinking nasty wines, usually in nasty company. How the war changed his heart is here recorded.

This is therefore a Reconstructionary Tale.

II Gardens and Flats

“I wonder,” Gringoire⁠[2] began one evening, “if my experience of landscape during the war has been that of many people....”

It was an evening in spring. Gringoire had not been very long established in his cottage—which, because of the nature of the poet himself and of the poet’s adventurous establishment, the writer automatically styles in his mind the Gingerbread Cottage. Gringoire, with a spirit of hospitality that was large and open rather than either considered or calculating, had invited a party of London friends to share his Easter with him. During the day he rushed about a great deal, cooking highly flavored dishes of a ragout type, on paraffin stoves, washing up, sweeping, gardening, gathering unusual wild herbs for salads, so that he was busy, and we of the party saw little of him.

Fortunately it was fine. For at that date the Gingerbread Cottage let in water like a sieve through the roof, the floor, the rough walls. Great holes indeed gaped in the plaster of the ceilings. But he had whitewashed the walls, stuck pots on shelves, improvised a couch out of his camp bed, and lit fires of sticks in the sitting room. So in the evenings we sat and listened to his talking.

For Gringoire was a conversationalist. Like most dynamic, overwhelming, and energetic poets, he had not the patience to listen to the remarks of his fellows or to answer. He would be silent most of the day. But toward evening, as like as not, he would suddenly suspend all his activities, and with very possibly a hair-sieve or a trowel in his hand, gesticulating too, he would begin to talk.

As a house party the Easter experiment was not a success for all of us. Gringoire had hardened himself in Flanders; the rest had not. But since, as a byproduct of the experience, Madame Sélysette had consented to share and adorn his lot, Gringoire had his reward. And the writer secured these records of his monologues:

“I wonder,” then, he asked on one of these evenings, “if my experience of landscape during the war has been that of many people.” And without waiting he continued much as follows: “For I may say that before August, 1914, I lived more through my eyes than through any other sense, and in consequence certain corners of the earth had, singularly, the power to stir me.” But from the moment when, on the 4th of August, 1914, the Germans crossed the Belgian frontier “near a place called Gemmenich,” aspects of the earth no longer existed for him.

The earth existed, of course. Extending to immense distances of field-gray; dimly colored in singularly shaped masses, as if the colors on Mercator’s projection had been nearly washed out by a wet brush. Stretching away, very flat, silenced, in suspense, the earth—orbis terrarum veteribus notus—seemed to await the oncoming legions, gray too, but with the shimmer of gold standards that should pour out from that little gap, “near a place called Gemmenich,” and should obscure and put to shame all the green champaign lands of the world, as the green grass of meadows is put to shame and obscured by clay, water pouring through a gap in a dike. That was the earth.

There were no nooks, no little, sweet corners; there were no assured homes, countries, provinces, kingdoms, or races. All the earth held its breath and waited.

“And it is only today,” my friend went on, “that I see again a little nook of the earth; it forms the tiniest of hidden valleys, with a little red stream that buries itself in the red earth beneath the tall green of the grass and the pink and purple haze of campions, the occasional gold of buttercups, the cream of meadowsweet. The plants in the garden wave in stiffness like a battalion on parade—the platoons of lettuce, the headquarters’ staff, all sweet peas, and the color company, which is of scarlet runners. The little old cottage is under a cliff of rock, like a gingerbread house from a Grimm’s fairy tale; the silver birches and the tall pines confront it; the sunlight lies warmer than you could imagine in the hollow, and a nightingale is running in and out of the bean-stalks. Yes, a nightingale of midsummer that has abandoned the deep woodland and runs through the garden, a princess turned housekeeper, because it has young to feed. Think of noticing that!”

During the four years that the consciousness of the war lasted, he had noticed only four landscapes and birds only once—to know that he was noticing them—for themselves. Of course, one has memories of aspects of the world—but of a world that was only a background for emotions.

Even, for instance, when one saw poor Albert, by some trick of mnemonics, from the lettering of the huge word “Estaminet” across the front of a battered house in the Place where, in the blinding sunlight, some Australian transport men were watering their mules, and one recognized it for a place one had visited twenty years before and had forgotten—even when one saw the remains of the garden where, twenty years before, we had waited whilst our lunch of omelette, cutlets, and salad was prepared, or even when one saw the immense placard with “Caution” erected in the center of the white rubbish and white rubble of the Place, or the desecrated statue of the Madonna, leaning in an abandoned attitude from the church tower—even then one was so preoccupied, so shut in on one’s self, that these things were not objects that one looked at for themselves. They were merely landmarks. Divisional Headquarters, one had been told, was behind the N.E. corner of the Place, the notice-board was to the N.E. of one’s self, therefore one must pass it to reach Divisional Headquarters. It was Headquarters one wanted, not the storing of the mind with observed aspects.

So Gringoire had four landscapes, which represent four moments in four years when, for very short intervals, the strain of the war lifted itself from the mind. They were, those intermissions of the spirit, exactly like gazing through rifts in a mist. Do you know what it is to be on a Welsh mountain side when a heavy mist comes on? Nothing remains. You are there by yourself.... And the only preoccupation you have with the solid, invisible world is the boulders over which you stumble and the tufts of herbage that you try to recognize as your path. Then suddenly the mist is riven perpendicularly, and for a moment you see a pallid, flat plain stretching to infinity beneath your feet and running palely to a sea horizon on a level with your eyes. There will be pale churches, pale fields, and on a ghostly channel the wraiths of scattered islands. Then it will be all gone.

It was just so with the three or four landscapes that my friend saw during the war. There was the day in 1915 when Kensington Gardens suddenly grew visible. There were Guardsmen turning in fours, with some Guardee form of drill that is not usual to the Infantry. There were motor transport wagons going cautiously down the Broad Walk—parts of the familiar train of the war. And then, suddenly, there were great motionless trees, heavy in their summer foliage, blue-gray, beneath a very high sky; there was the long, quiet part of the palace; the red brick, glowing in the sun, the shadows of the windows very precise and blue. And Gringoire thought that old, stiff marionettes, rather homely courtiers and royalties, might step out of the tall windows onto the lawns and, holding tasseled canes to their lips, bow, pirouette and make legs, till the long chestnut wigs brushed the stiff rosebushes. Not very gallant; not very royal. No Rois Soleils or Princesses Lointaines but a Court nevertheless, whispering mercilessly, intriguing, smiling, betraying, much as in Versailles, only a little more rustically, in front of the old, homely Dutch orangery.

Then the curtain closed again; the weight once more settled down. The trees again became the foreground and there was the feeling that Gringoire could never get away from—that they would be personally humiliated, shamed, abashed; as if they would wrathfully bow or avert their heads if ever field-gray troops passed down the Broad Walk, or the park keeper at the gates wore a Uhlan uniform! That was in the early days of the war—August, 1915, I think. The feeling that there might be an invasion was still, and was strong, in the air. There was no knowing, still, where the dam might give way and the mud-colored tide pour toward us. And somehow Gringoire figured it coming from the W. by S.W. from the direction of Kew and Fulham: high, gray, reaching from the legions on the ground to the gray airships towering on high—a solid, perpendicular wave of humiliation like the tidal wave of which one reads—of humiliation for the trees and the very grass.

“I wonder,” Gringoire asked again that evening, “if other people had, like myself, that feeling that what one feared for was the land—not the people but the menaced earth with its familiar aspect. And I wonder why one had the feeling. I dare say it was just want of imagination: one couldn’t perhaps figure the feelings of ruined, fleeing and martyred populations. And yet, when I had seen enough of those, the feeling did not alter. I remember that what struck me most in ruined Pont de Nieppe, by Armentières, was still the feeling of abashment that seemed to attach to furniture and wall-paper exposed to the sky—not the sufferings of the civilian population, who seemed to be jolly enough—or at any rate sufficiently nonchalant—with booths erected under ruined walls or in still whole cottages, selling fried fish to the tanneries. No! what struck me as infinitely pathetic was lace curtains: for there were innumerable lace curtains, that had shaded vanished windows, fluttering from all the unroofed walls in the glassless window-frames. They seemed to me to be more forlornly ashamed than any human beings I have ever seen. Only brute beasts ever approach that: old and weary horses, in nettle-grown fields; or dogs when they go away into bushes to die.”

He went on to say that perhaps prisoners of war had it too. The Germans certainly seemed to. But he had, naturally, never seen any of our own people in that condition. They are represented to us as remaining erect and keeping most of their esprit de corps. That may be why, in August, 1915, it was difficult to think of the sufferings of our possibly invaded peoples but only of the humiliation of desecrated herbage and downlands.

“I don’t know.” And Gringoire meditated as if neither I nor Mme. Sélysette were in the room. “Perhaps I am lacking in human sympathy or have no particular cause to love my fellow men. But at any rate, at that moment, the feeling of dread that those gray-blue, motionless trees under the high sky might, under heavens more lowering, feel that final humiliation—that feeling was so strong that I remember it still as a pain. Nay, in the remembrance, I feel it so strongly that it is still a pain, like that of an old, deep cicatrized wound. For of course, it would have connoted that the broad and the small fields, copses, spinneys, streams, and heaths, stretching away to the quiet downs and the ultimate sea, would have felt that tread of mailed and alien heels.” He remembered looking up to the sky in an agony. And then he became again interested in the Guards at drill beneath the trees—whose dressing never altered. Why did they turn in fours at the command “Left turn” when they were in column of route? Why didn’t they form two deep? They were not doing sentry drill or any form of ceremonial that the ordinary Infantry practice. The command was not: “In fours: left turn.”

So the workaday frame of mind came back—and we carried on.

On hearing of the death of Lord Kitchener, he had another short moment. “I don’t know,” he wrote this in a letter, “whether the news had anything to do with it. I suppose it had. I will tell you. I was being motored to Dunmow Station, and when the car arrived at that little shanty, the stationmaster, whom I remember as quite an old man, came to the car-stop and just said: ‘Lord Kitchener has been drowned.’ He appeared quite expressionless, and I remember that both my companion and I laughed. I should say that I even laughed loudly. In those days and frames of mind, one reached, as it were, down to jokes obtaining only amongst rather simple people—and the joke underlying the idea of the drowning at sea of a man so supported by a whole land might have been quite ingenious in idea—like some joke of the reign of Queen Anne involving the raising of the sea above the dome of St. Paul’s.

“But he succeeded in assuring us that Lord Kitchener had been drowned. ‘The Field Marshal Commanding in Chief had been last seen on the nearly vertical deck, following a member of his staff.’—A good death for the man who had saved his land—and Europe.

“For speaking not as an expert speaks but still as a student of the temper of war and the moral of what in the Army is called ‘the men’ I have no hesitation in saying—and I don’t apologize for saying here—that without the figure of Lord Kitchener the British Army would have remained negligible in numbers and would have taken a very small part in the war. And I suppose that, without the British Army, the war could hardly have been maintained to a successful conclusion.”

At any rate, that was the way in which it appeared to Gringoire with a mind suddenly jumped into attending to this shocking fact from the designing of an aiming card for the Ross Rifle. For in those days it was his province to instruct in the use of that weapon nine hundred returned British Expeditionary Force, all time-serving men, and in consequence the toughest customers you could imagine. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine them.

They had every guile from a military point of view. They were adepts in absences, swingings of the lead, drunks, excuses, barrack-breakings, cheerful lies, and a desperate determination not to exhibit any glimmerings of intelligence, let alone any proficiency, in the use of any kind of weapon, let alone the Ross Rifle, which was a gimcrack concern at the best, with aperture sights and fittings like watch springs and innumerable ways of being put out of order. And you could put your nose in half and get yet another month in hospital as easy as winking by pulling back the bolt in any sort of rapid practice.

They lived—these desperadoes—in a tumble-down skating rink, and they exercised amongst the backyards and dust-bins of a great city, and such was the moral atmosphere of the shadowy and stifling vault in which this kind of khaki lived that when, at Easter, Gringoire proposed to bring in a priest to hear the confessions of the Roman Catholics with more convenience to them, the men sent three R.C. sergeants as a deputation to him. They said the rink was not a fitting place for a priest to see. And every one of them promised to walk three miles to confession and to perform all his Easter duties faithfully sooner than that a priest should see them as they lived.

A great cavern of a place that was, laid out in stalls like a cattle market, where the officers labored intolerably filling up innumerable forms with an immense sense of pressure and of striving with tough men. A great sense of pressure. And he would walk up and down in front of the worst-dressed line that had ever been imagined—a fantastic line, for not one of the nine hundred professed to be able to stand straight on his legs—and Gringoire would exclaim gloomily and in alternation: “Thank God we’ve got a Navy” or: “Lord Kitchener says the war’s going to last another three years; hang me if you blighters will wangle out of going back to France.” Whereupon there would be groans down the line and a near-drunk man would whisper: “Good ol’ Kitchener!”

It was out of that horseshoe-cavern of gloom in whose shafts of vaporous and disinfectant-colored lights moved these troublesome green-brown shapes that he had come for a very brief period of leave in a world that, again, included lawns, afternoon teas, standard roses, tall rooms, servants—not batmen, but with caps and aprons—pianolas—and no one, really, to clean one’s belt; as well as discussions of that higher, wilder, finer strategy, in which, in one’s capacity of a more or less professional student of tactics, one was so decidedly at a loss. Or perhaps it wasn’t immediately from the cavern that he had come; perhaps it was from the Chelsea Course. But there, amongst the Guards, the Kitchener “note” rang truer and cleaner and more insistently. And at any rate, he was certainly going back to that atmosphere of strain and rush; into the desperate effort to teach thousands and thousands bayonet fighting, gas tactics, measures against venereal disease, sentry drill, dugout building, why they were going to fight, how to manufacture grenades out of jam-tins, the history of the regiment, and esprit de corps—and doing it all in desperate and bewildered haste, with the aid of sacks, hairpins, can-openers and Japanese rifles with the wrong sort of bayonets, under the auspices of an orderly room driven mad by endless reproofs from brigades, divisions, the War Office, the civilian police, Boards of Agriculture, county asylums, parents whose sons had enlisted too young, and young women who had married privates too often married already.... But coming from it or not, Gringoire was certainly going back to it and, in its desperate and fleeting atmosphere, the idea of Lord Kitchener was the one solid thing onto which our poor poet could catch.

So the stationmaster made it plain that Lord Kitchener was dead.

It was just one of those situations in which one thinks nothing—a change in the beat of the clock. Gringoire was sitting in the little open shed of a waiting-room, the only idea present in his mind being that his crossed legs were stuck stiffly out in front of him, their weight upon his left heel and both hands in his breeches pockets. Nothing whatever! Absolutely nothing! No war: an empty mind; a little open shed with benches; a hatchway in one plank wall where they served out tickets; a bit of platform; a high, brick signal-box with clocks or things ticking; a brick house, no doubt the stationmaster’s.... The whole world, that was! And noiseless; and immobile. There was no France on the horizon; no English Channel. There was no awaiting of Zeppelins; there was no Right or Wrong.

And so the veil lifted for a second. The flat lands of Essex were there, stretching out; flat fields; undistinguished beneath a dull sky. He speculated on the crops; on the labor it took to the acre to put in those cabbages; on the winds that must sweep across the comparatively hedgeless spaces. The ground looked like a good clay. Plenty of heart in it, no doubt they would say in auctioneer’s advertisements. But, on the whole, an unsmiling, foreign land. Not Kent or Sussex, but “the Sheeres.” If one settled down here, one wouldn’t know the postman, the tax collector, the old standers, the way they trimmed the hedge rows, the habits of the soil, or the course of the months, the brooks, the birds, the breed of sheep, the gossip, the local history—or the dead. A friendless, foreign country, the Essex Flats....

And the southeastern saying came up into Gringoire’s mind: “You see yon man: he cooms from Sussex. He sucked in silliness with his mother’s milk and ’s been silly ever since. But never you trust a man from the Sheeres!”... It is Kent and Sussex against the world—just as no doubt it is Essex and Hertford; and Somerset and Devon; the North and East Riding and Durham and Cumberland and Denbigh and Flint, against the world—and it’s never safe to put long straw under potatoes when you dig them in, trusting to the wet to rot it. At that point Gringoire remembered in 1899 buying some special seed, called, I think, “1900,” out of compliment to the coming century. He paid a big price; one hundred twenty shillings the hundredweight, I think. And he dunged them beautifully with rather long straw and artificial manure. But a long, long dry season came, and the Kentish land sloped to the south, and the straw dried, and the artificial manure never soaked down. He didn’t get a quarter of a ton to the quarter acre.

On the other hand, under maize, if you can water heavily once or twice, long straw arranged in trenches, like pipes, is rather a good wheeze. It holds the water to the roots and maize will do with a topsoil like fire if the roots are cool. In 1899 Gringoire got some wonderful ears of sweet corn. And, toasted on the cob and buttered after toasting...!

He changed heels under the puttees and considered his garden in Kent. He was going to try growing potatoes from seeds—not from seed-potatoes, but from the little seeds that form in the green berries. And he was going to put a light, whitewashed paling behind the sweet corn, on the north—to reflect the rays of the sun. It should ripen the cob three weeks earlier!...

The Essex flats became again, slowly, visible land, planted with war-food. An airplane was going toward Bishop Stortford; the train was overdue because a unit was entraining up the line—once again every fact in the world was just a part, just a side light of the immense problem. Once again nothing existed just for itself. Trains were carriers of men and munitions. Stretched-out legs were encased in puttees, put in military boots; servant girls travelling with horn-handled black umbrellas and elastic boots were going to see their boys off at Waterloo; old farmers with white side whiskers were explaining why they had kept all six sons at home—in defiance of the gaze of Lord Kitchener that looked at them six times in that wee small station. And railway fares were going to be increased for civilians!

I have little doubt that what, at that moment and for that minute space of time, had set our poet intent on planting potatoes and seed corn—perfectly certain that he was going straight down into Kent to plant potatoes in rows and sweet corn in hills—was that his unconscious mind was certain that the war was done and over with that death in the North Sea. I do not mean to say that he thought it—or even that he was conscious that something inside thought it for him. His surface-mind thought certainly of Essex, of Kent and Sussex; the subconscious mind seemed to be aware that his puttees were badly put on, that he had mislaid his warrant in one of several pockets—he had a vague consciousness of South Wales, blue mountains, like Japanese clouds. But some deeper center still was probably appalled and benumbed and was saying:

“Now the war is finished and lost. Now, ‘appry la gair finny’ as the Tommies say, je vais planter mes choux comme un maître d’école.” There seemed to be nothing left but to plant out a kitchen garden.

III Blue of Swallows’ Backs

Well, by the evening of his next monologue, Gringoire had planted out his kitchen garden; the onions, the lettuces, the carrots, the kohl-rabi, the spinach were aligned; that battalion was parading in full strength. Moreover, in a bed from which he had just removed spinach and onions, there were twenty little potato plants, grown from little seeds: under a twenty-foot quick-set hedge, beautiful and close like a wall, the sweet corn was already up to the hips. The long straws, like pipes, ran in a trench under the corn hills; the deluge of water, warmed because it comes from a dip on which the sun blazes all day, washed the deep roots; the nightingale was running in and out of the beanstalks; the swallows were throwing themselves through the air; over the low brick the sun was setting on the longest day of the year, and, D.S.G., the war was over and done. No longer D.H.Q., Bn.H.Q., M.L.E., T.M.B.—but just D.S.G.! To God alone be the glory in the quiet garden evening.

“I will tell you a curious thing,” said Gringoire in June, “but in gardens amongst woods, beside streams, there are so many curious things to tell of that I don’t know where to begin! I am like a child with the largest coin it has ever possessed outside a hundred entrancing shops. I began talking the other day with the idea of describing four landscapes—the great guns from Portsmouth now remind me, though I have written of only two, of yet a fifth.”

We—Gringoire and the writer—had been for a slow walk, round three sides of a patch of heath. A man, leaning over a white gate, with a thin, red face, a blue suit and some very bright regimental tie, just said: “The telegram’s up in the post office. It’s official!” And, speaking of it that evening in the warmth of the garden beside the hammock of Mme. Sélysette, Gringoire said:

“I assure you, on my honor, that the whole landscape, the commonplace, friendly landscape of elms, rather backward wheat, heather, gorse, and park-wall suddenly changed. It was as if the focus of the camera had suddenly clicked, readjusted itself—as if it grew—though before one hadn’t known it for anything but all that was possible of tranquillity, breadth, security, and peace—grew quieter, calmer, broader, more utterly secure and inviolable. English country!

“I don’t know: there’s nothing to it, really. A spray of dog-roses; a whitethroat dropping over the hedge; some gorse; the long, rolling land; the high skies and clouds above the downs.... Well, it is one stage more toward a forever of security, of that being forever inviolable that one prays may be its portion. A great stage forward.”

For coming home and sitting behind irregular, all but too old lattice, giving onto a deep wall of verdure, we had heard suddenly the heavy guns through the voices of birds.... And Gringoire said later that, at the sound of those distant guns through the overwhelming orchestra of birds, he had seen distinctly, against the warm brick of the house-wall, a tin hat.... But many tin hats dim in the blue-gray light, and a lot of Scotch Jocks, their kilts covered with khaki aprons, and an immense long train with innumerable shapes dropping out of it, their cries muted by the twilight: the crunch of feet on the gravel, before the tin sheds of the station. That had been Railhead behind the Somme. And then suddenly you were conscious of the innumerable voices of birds singing the sun down. And then through them the uninterrupted heavy discourse of the great guns at a distance came over the little hills and darkling trees of that downland country. It continued.... Incessant, engrossed, almost as it were tranquil, almost like the bubbling of water in a pot, boiling up, dying down, going on and on, not penetrating but enveloping the cries of Tommy to Tommy or of footsteps to footsteps—and, rising through it, as if lances of sound were protruding upward through something soft and vaporous, the voices of thrushes. A great many thrushes: and the down getting whiter; and the “Fall In There’s” and the men moving off ...

So that he said he half wished the Portsmouth guns would stop—five-point nines; ninety-eight pounders; fifteen-inch guns—whatever they are. One doesn’t want to hear them again, or again to feel them—dully on the air. Not at any rate in peace time.

The nightingale amongst the bean-stalks; the thrushes in the shaw on the opposite hillsides; the swallows throwing themselves through the air! He did not remember any nightingale during the war; but he remembered those thrushes of Rébimont-Méricourt on a date in July ’16. And he remembered some swallows—an immense sea of the blue of swallows’ backs. And he said that the Portsmouth guns of the 28/6/’19 sounding through the birds’ voices from the hill opposite the Gingerbread Cottage brought it all back. Poets are like that and have these visions.

It sounds, of course, queer—but it was like that. Up on a hillside that was covered mostly with thistles there was an Artillery Observation Post which consisted of a Lombardy poplar—though one did not see how the gunners got up it. At any rate, there was a pile of dud Hun shells on the roadside bank at the foot of the tree and beneath the O.P. was a pretty rotten dugout with a corrugated iron roof. The Battalion Trench Mortar officer lived there. Below him he had a view of a battery of French 75’s, of the chalky line of trenches; Martinpuich looked down on him, which wasn’t overly comfortable, and the Ancre wound away—to No Man’s Land. From time to time a field-gun wheel going along the road would catch its spokes in the corrugated iron of his roof—lift a corner and drop it again. I don’t know why the Trench Mortar officer lived in that dugout, but a gunwheel lifted his roof and dropped it again whilst Gringoire was dozing in it. He thought the bottom of hell had dropped out. It was his worst shock of the war. I shouldn’t wonder if it were not the worst shock any one ever had between the 4/8/’14 and the 28/6/’19. He mentioned it, he said, because it probably accounted for his immediately subsequent exultation; it was, I suppose, so good to be just alive after that.

At any rate, after the Trench Mortar officer had come in—Gringoire had been waiting to give him a message—downhill through the thistles, dusty in the hot sunlight, Gringoire went with immense, joyful strides. He said that he was extraordinarily fit in those days! And an innumerable company of swallows flew round him, waist high, just brushing the thistledown. “They were so near,” Gringoire said, “that they brushed my hands, and they extended so far that I could see nothing else. It is one of the five things of the war that I really see, for it was like walking, buoyantly, in the pellucid sunlight, waist-high through a sea of unsurpassed and unsurpassable azure. I felt as if I were a Greek god. It was like a miracle.

“Now, I see swallows from below, their rust-stained breasts against high, blotted, gray clouds—and I wonder if they are thinking of the near rising mayfly. I remember thinking on the other occasion that there were a good many dead amongst the thistles and that I must be putting up a huge number of flies. But that, again, was the thought of my subconscious mind. On the surface I just felt myself to be a Greek god, immortal, young forever, forever buoyant, amongst the eddies of a dark blue and eternal sea.”

The feeling lasted until he got to the mule-lines of somebody’s First Line Transport, where he borrowed a terrible old brute of a horse, to take him to Divisional H.Q.

It would be interesting to know what that class of feeling comes from—possibly from some sort of atavistic throwback to days when the gods were nearer. You get them now and again in action—but not so often as you get the reverse type of feeling when you are engaged in agriculture. That is perhaps why farmers are so often passionately disagreeable and apparently unreasonable men. For there is nothing that so much resembles contact with, wrestling with, a personal devil as to awaken one morning and to find that a whole crop of seedlings has vanished before myriads of slugs. That happens. If you don’t believe it, read White’s “Selborne.” It is loss, ruin perhaps. It is like a death: a profound and unforeseen disaster. And your mind personifies the slug as intelligent, malignant, a being with a will for evil directed against you in person. I think that, whilst it lasts, it is the worst feeling in the world.

Drought is nearly as bad.

IV The Kingdoms of the Earth

It was after Gringoire had speculated on slugs, without, you will observe, suggesting a remedy, that he continued:

“I have given you, so far, three of the landscapes that remain real to me—for the detraining in the dawn at Rébimont-Méricourt is not one of those that are just always in my mind. I have to remember back to—to be reminded of it. It was the sounds of Peace Guns pierced by the multitudinous voices of thrushes that brought back to me that first-heard, unintermittent thudding and throb of the engines of war through which, like spears, thrust the voices of innumerable birds. But, just, I suppose, because one’s mind was preoccupied with the job of seeing that one’s valise was all right, that the men had all their kit and equipment at least potentially there—and no doubt with the job of seeing to it that one’s composure appeared absolute—one recorded less of visible objects, so that fewer visible objects return, and they return less vividly.”

He remembered—and he knew that he remembered, accurately and exactly—every detail of Kensington Gardens on that day of August, 1915; of the Essex Railway Station he said that he could tell you what advertisements were on the walls and how many people awaited the train as well as every word of the conversation he had had whilst driving to the station. And he remembered with an extreme clearness, as in the little paintings of Van Eyck on the Chasse de Ste. Ursule at Brûges, the swallows and the thistles of the ridge going down in the clear July weather behind Bécourt Wood in 1916. He had a job then, it is true—but not one calling for any immediate or complicated action. Besides, at that moment he had felt himself to be immune from danger and proof against death. So that those three landscapes became part of his immediate self.

“They will probably remain part of myself to the end of my life: my grandchildren will probably be tired of them and, when I am quite aged, so probably will guests and casual strangers.” But—did you ever take a walking tour, or just a long walk and, in bed at the end of the day, perhaps in order to put yourself to sleep, did you ever try to remember every inch of the roads you had covered? Gringoire claimed that in that way he could remember a great many of the roads both of England and France of his boyhood when one walked or cycled a good deal for walking or cycling’s sake. Corners of roads, bridges, highways climbing over the forehead of downs—the road out of Bridport, down into Winchester, from Minehead to Lynton; from Calais over the flats to Arras, from Arras to Beauvais; from Blois to Tours; from Amiens to Albert in 1892.... By shutting his eyes, or by looking at something blank, like a sheet of paper, or by not really looking at anything at all, he could, he said, evoke a panorama of any of those roads, or say from the North Foreland to Land’s End. Perhaps he couldn’t really, but he could have a pretty good try and get a lot right. “Well, in that way, I can evoke most of the roads ’round Albert, or Locre and the base of the Salient, or Bailleul, or Steenewerck, or Armentières; and plenty of other places of the Lines of Communication like Hazebrouck and Abbéville and St. Omer. But I daresay I should get some of it incorrect.”

For instance, as to the detraining at Railhead in that dawn: he had distinctly the feeling that there was a woody, dark bank and a plantation of trees in which the thrushes sang, right up against the flat of the line. There wasn’t really. He found later, on coming out of Corbie and there entraining to rejoin his battalion, that there were only high elms against flat, champaign country with a muddy stream. However, there was a high farm-building just behind the elms, so, no doubt, the effect on the inattentive eye was that. And the thrushes had certainly sung.

But he could evoke the rest of the road to the front line fairly well. On the right of the station, in the elms, was a brown Y.M.C.A. hut, where the officers got very greasy bread and rather black fried eggs and coffee. There were innumerable, old, dog’s-eared magazines on the mess tables in amongst the breakfast utensils. Twenty or thirty numbers of the “English Review,” like the dominoes, of a date when our writer used to own that periodical. It seemed an odd thing to see; an odd, queer thing to have owned. Near—too near—the hut were the men’s latrines; a little further, the officers’. On the left, then, as the Draft passed, was the station. A very fat old gendarme was standing, well back on his heels, his legs wide apart; about him were four market women, with bundles, and baskets containing fowls. They were grouped around the gendarme like pullets around chanticleer, as he watched the sunrise. A lot of Royal Field Artillery horses and riders came over the dust into the station yard; a company of Jocks was waiting outside the office of the Railway Transport Officer. The ground was soft dust, so that the reinforcement might have been marching in sandals.

They continued their march parallel with the railway line, along a soft road, beside the little stream, between osier-bushes and elms—for about fifty yards. There were some stray mules belonging to a Kitchener’s battalion, Wiltshires or Cheshires—Nineteenth Division anyhow. There didn’t appear to be any drivers. There was a good deal of shouting; the Draft about-turned. The guide was taking them wrong. But who ever knew a guide take any one right anywhere? It was rather like a dream—not at all a bad dream—but, anyhow, a numbness.

Or no: really it was more like being in the hands of doctors, on the way to an operation. Probably the anaesthetic would be all right; it wouldn’t hurt. At any rate, we had no volition; one’s feet moved; one’s haversack was a bit heavy—not very. One went on, one didn’t know where.

In the same way you may remember the anteroom of your dentist. There is a big table in the center of the room; on the table some writing materials—and old periodicals, like the “English Reviews” amongst the solid Y.M.C.A. cups and plates.... But, on the one hand there is, solid and real, say, Mandeville Place: taxis drive about in it; the faces of the houses are of black-gray Portland cement, imitating granite. The street, then, is real: and the operating room will soon feel as real, even while one is waiting in the outer room. But the anteroom itself is a dream-landscape.

So it was with the Rébimont-Méricourt road.

When you come out of the station yard, on the right there is a high, white-walled, tile-roofed estaminet-farm. Australian First Line Transport men were watering their mules there, lounging on the steps with their tunics off. The road began to mount; on the left, on top of a high bank was an orchard. It reminded our poet of the nutwalk, on a high bank, belonging to a certain farm in Kent—at the bottom of Aldington Knoll, where the marsh begins. Mounting the slope, on the right, he came to a closed, empty, butcher’s shop. A superior butcher’s shop with grilles, green paint, gone of course dusty, marble slabs, and a gilded copper sign.

The road opened out suddenly. It was a dusty expanse between houses: in England it would have been a village green. There were house walls, windows, archways in the dusty white plaster, giving onto farmyards or stables. Two men were harnessing a black mare into a hooded, two-wheeled, dusty cart. Four black Percheron stallions were standing in a string in front of a long cottage. “They reminded me,” Gringoire said, “of four black stallions I had seen, years before, outside the blacksmith’s at Beaumont-le-Roger. In those days it had seemed to be odd that stallions could be left unattended in a village-street. But in 1916, I was used to that idea; what intrigued me, then, was that any civilian should have four stallions at his disposal. For they certainly were not French cavalry, or divisional or other transport.”

The civilians seemed extraordinarily—not unreal—but, as it were, super-real! North French peasants, slow, ungainly, with heavy legs and feet. They were just the peasants one had always seen; hard, like granite—not comparatively soft and comparatively gray, like our own old peasants, who, when they look hard have the aspect not of wrinkled stone but of old, crannied, oak-tree boles. It was Sussex downland, that country—but like the people, harder, unsmiling.

To the left of the Place—if you can call a flat space of dust a Place—there was a narrow street, high, mud walls; archways, semi-circular topped, gray wooden doors. On one of these was nailed a large white placard: headquarters of the 4th Army Veterinary Corps. (I hope this is no longer a staff secret.) The reinforcement had to drop some men of the Draft they had brought out—men for the poor 38th Division that was to be wiped out in Mametz Wood—at some other sort of headquarters at the end of the street; that was why some of us penetrated it. Yes: it was very narrow and high-walled—more Wiltshire than Sussex! There must have been vegetation on the top of some of the mud-walls. Opposite the Farriers’ H.Q. there was a little, thatched, sweet-shop sort of a place, and irises were growing on the thatch. I daresay they would not be there in peace time: you would say it was more Irish than French.

In the sweet-shop they sold dates, clay pipes, picture postcards with English regimental badges, picture postcards with views of Albert and the toppling Madonna; silk-worked postcards of bright reds, whites, and bright blues, and postcards showing smiling ladies dusted with spangles. The women behind the low counter were very unreal: a motionless old witch with black eyes, a brown face, and dead white, parted hair; she stood, and only her eyes moved, and she appeared, not malignant, but grotesquely like a brown wooden image with moving eyes; an untidy dark girl, without even looking at us or at a perplexed Tommy who was pricing postcards, stood, her face sideways and repeated: “Ten ... a penny: ten ... a penny”—patiently, and as if from a great distance. She said: “Ten” very fast, then paused and added “a penny” slowly and as if with boredom. The Tommy grasped ten postcards and held out a penny, but she continued to say: “Ten ... a penny, ten ... a penny,” without either movement or expression.

“So I could continue,” our poet went on, “to recall this itinerary, for many pages and for many hours: past the farm on the right, with the great dung heap, past the pond overshadowed by crab-apples; past another crossroads on the right, where, at a tent, facing a great, dull-brick aggregation of ruins, rafters, and fallen chimneys, which was once a sugar factory—the timekeeper’s office and the iron gates were still intact—we delivered up the remaining other Ranks of the Draft and went on, up the bare downland road, officers only, between the bearded wheat on the left and the immense field of thin oats to the right—upward to the Officers’ Distributing Center; tents just put up that day, on a bare, downland field, very white and with the long down-grass still untramped in their interiors....

“Yes, I could keep it up for many of your pages and for many hours,” Gringoire said, “but I am not so much concerned to describe these landscapes, or to prove the quality of my memory, as to establish the psychological facts about the other four landscapes.” He had just gone back into memory, without any particular effort—without indeed any effort at all, and the roads were there, like a string unwinding from a ball. His eyes must have been at work but not his registering brain. The mind was working otherwise.

“I have purposely omitted to mention,” he said later, “that, all the way, on all the roads, proceeding generally with caution because of the worn pavés, but sometimes getting a swift run for a couple of hundred or so of yards, sometimes one at a time, sometimes four together, at times in as thick a stream as motor traffic in Piccadilly—the ambulances passed us, on the left.”

That was a detail of the mind rather than of the eyes. Gringoire knew in 1919 that they were there, because he remembered that several of the officers had to count them for a time. But they appeared to be rather symbols than concrete objects. They stood for BLIGHTIES—going home! They were part of what made the skin of the forehead over the eyes feel always a little drawn, part of the preoccupation that, always, turned one’s thoughts inward. I don’t suppose it was fear—or perhaps that is how fear really manifests itself.

Here, then, is another landscape. It was up at the Officers’ Distributing Center. Or perhaps it wasn’t officially called that, though that was what it was. It may have been an Officers’ Rest Camp—which it certainly was not. At any rate, there it was on an open, sloping downland field—seven new tents pitched, two more being pitched: cook-houses, wash-houses, latrines, batmen’s quarters, and the rest of it, down to the incinerator, were all, also, in process of being erected. The Senior Officer in charge of our party interviewed the Camp Commandant and the officers sprawled about on the bare hillside with the downland winds running over the grasses just as they do in Sussex on a cloudless day.

“I have always thought,” Gringoire said, “ever since I was a small boy and used to ride on the downs behind Folkestone that the sun has a peculiar quality in the sky over downlands, as if chalk dust in the air whitened the rays. But that is probably nonsense.” Anyhow, the field sloped downwards; there was a white cart—or plow—track; then up went a great shoulder of the downs in a field all purple sections. I suppose cultivation for the time ended in the huge field of thin oats between the camp and the destroyed sugar factory. There was a very old man in a short blue blouse, with immensely long bow-legs—doing something with a scythe. It didn’t appear to be mowing.

The down rising over against them appeared—so unable is the eye to measure these swelling distances—quite a small affair. But, halfway up it, seeming to tight-rope along a white thread, with an extreme slowness in passing from point to point, went transport wagons, incredibly tiny. So it was an immense, august, shoulder. A near-mountain!

Gringoire said he could not just remember where the sun was: he ought to be able to work it out by the place and time. But I daresay it doesn’t really matter. At any rate, over the shoulder of the down—not in the least like a moon or an astral body but illuminated by the sun—silver and French gray, very slowly, a great body began to rise. One hadn’t much—one hadn’t indeed any—sense of proportion. It seemed immense—and alive as mushrooms are alive. Then, induced as the eye was to look into the pellucid sky, there became visible a number—some one counted fourteen—of tiny, shining globes. They appeared to be globes, because there was a fresh wind blowing straight from them and they turned end on. So, but slowly and incessantly heaving, did the immense one close at hand; a spider’s network of cordage went with its movements. Tiny and incredibly pretty, like films of gold dust floating in blue water and like peach blossom leaves—yes, incredibly pretty in the sunlight—airplanes were there. Because the—just as pretty—little mushrooms that existed suddenly in the sky, beside the sunlit dragonflies and peach blossoms, were pearly white, one officer said:

“Hun planes!”

The German shrapnel made black bursts. The officers were lounging in a group of six or seven. Another said: “Their sausages too ... Out there! Fourteen!”

The slow ascent of our own sausage took the mind into the sky. A broad-faced, slow, brown, very sympathetic young officer—he had a rich voice, a slight stutter, and one eye that frequently winked—said:

“He showed Him the Kingdoms of the Earth.” Then: “From a high place, you know, old dear,” he explained, rather apologetically to Gringoire. “His career,” Gringoire said, “was constantly interlaced with mine; in the stream that carried us along, we bobbed together—at Cardiff, in Rouen twice on June afternoons, and even after the Armistice, once in Coventry Street, and once in York. Yet, though we were quite intimate, he calling me ‘Old Dear,’ or ‘Old Preserved Equanimity,’ as my last Colonel nicknamed me, and though I called him ‘Old Dear,’ and later, as the fashion became, ‘Old Bean,’ I never knew his name. He would be there, in Orderly Room, in an officers’ club armchair, at mess, dropping usually some single, rather apposite, slightly literary remark—with just the trace of a stutter and always in an extraordinarily sympathetic voice—a deep, modest, affecting being.... I wish I knew who he was—but I suppose I never shall.

“He sh-showed Him the Kingdoms of th-the Earth,” this officer said—and his voice just seemed homelike.

Some one else said, “Let’s go up that mountain,” in the true Welsh tone and accent, and several: “Yes, yes, let’s.... Surely we’d see everything.... Surely to goodness, let’s not miss it....”

And they figured to themselves a glorious run down, and a glorious run up, the shoulder and then a great, flat gray view—of everything, and of all who mattered—of the Kingdoms of the Earth. But the usual voice—Conscience, Caution, Fear of Broad Views, maybe said: “We’d have to get leave.... The Camp Commandant, you know.... Eh, what, you fellows?...”

The Camp Commandant, a small, extraordinarily excited Highlander, voiceless with gas and gesticulating because of shell-shock—threw papers about, threw off his Glengarry cap, shrieked, wheezed, croaked. “I knew him quite well,” Gringoire said, “and, since he once hauled me out of bed at four o’clock of a freezing morning because some sort of Scots Brigadier wanted some one to play ‘Annie Laurie’ and the ‘Banks of Loch Lomond’ to forty drunken Scots officers in another hut, I permit myself to talk of him as he was, capless, exacerbated, grasping a telephone and throwing things about.”

He didn’t know whether he could or could not give them leave to go up the brae; he didn’t care if they went and drowned themselves. Couldn’t they see he’d only been there forty meen-its and there were two hundred contradictory memoranda awaiting him? And oh to hell, and oh to hell....

They loafed once more; they fell back into that eternal “waiting to report” that takes up 112/113ths of one’s time during war. They contemplated and made remarks about the veering of the sausage.

It was then that Gringoire related a psychological anecdote that gives the note of this book. “I suppose it was my friend’s sympathetic and suggestive voice that did it ... for I suddenly began to see bits of a landscape that has pursued me ever since—until now here I sit in it. Not quite a landscape; a nook, rather; the full extent of the view about one hundred seventy yards by two hundred seventy—the closed up end of a valley; closed up by trees—willows, silver birches, oaks, and Scotch pines; deep, among banks; with a little stream, just a trickle, level with the grass of the bottom. You understand the idea—a sanctuary.”

There were, in those days, you will remember, no more sanctuaries. All nooks of the world were threatened by the tide of blue-gray mud. We were out there to hold it back on the Somme. But could we?

So that was a little nook, sanctuary; where you said “Feignits” to destiny—with a gingerbread cottage out of Grimm. You were a Haensel, holding some Gretel’s hand, tiptoeing, whispering, craning forward the neck.... A castle in Spain in fact, only that it was in a southern country—the English country.

“I ask to be believed in what I am now saying,” Gringoire uttered the words slowly. “It is just the truth. If I wanted to tell fairy tales, I’d do better than this. Fairy tales to be all about the Earth shaking, and the wire, and the crumps, and the beef-tins.... You know. And that would be true too. Anyway this is....”

He said that he didn’t pretend that he was gay at that moment: calm, no doubt; contemplative certainly—and certainly gently ironic. So many officers were fussy about things—air pillows, hooch, mislaid movement cards, how to post picture-cards, where their battalions were, and so on. The place no doubt brought it out. It left a good deal to be desired. So that, if he could smile gently, he didn’t pretend to have been without apprehensions. They hung vaguely at the back of the skull; they oppressed, a little, the breathing.

And yet—ever since he had been a tiny child—he had, he said, been so much a creature of dreads that this was, in a sense, much less than dreads to which he had been well accustomed. The dreads of original sin, of poverty, of bankruptcy, of incredible shyness, of insults, misunderstandings, of disease, of death, of succumbing to blackmailers, forgers, brain-troubles, punishments, undeserved ingratitudes, betrayals.—There was nothing, Gringoire said, that he hadn’t dreaded in a sufficiently long life “which had been, mostly, a matter of one dread knocking out another.” So that, on the whole, the dread of what lay over the hill was less than most and limited itself, pretty well, to how one’s self would behave—except of course that one was damned afraid of being taken prisoner. Oh, damned afraid....

Still it was on the whole such a relief to be out of contact with one’s civilian friends at home—for, as far as the Army was concerned, Gringoire said he never had one single moment’s cause for bitterness, but just contentment and making allowances—it was on the whole such a relief that he was more contented than perturbed. Nevertheless, the strain was a long strain, even if it was impersonal, since it was a strain concerning itself with the English Country and not at all with one’s regiment or one’s self. One’s regiment would go out, if things went wrong. It would go out, disappear, as sands disappear under great waves. One’s self too, probably, or it wouldn’t matter anyhow ... But the contaminated fields, the ashamed elms—that was the long strain. And suddenly, at that point it came—the castle in the air; the simulacrum; the vision of the inviolable corner of the earth.

I don’t mean to say that it came with great exactness at that time—but it came, no doubt as a progression from the train of thought in Dunmow Station. There, you may remember, Gringoire thought that he would have a garden in a southeastern county—and his thoughts had connoted that it would be a garden on a hillside that sloped to the south and that looked over a not very distant sea—a great view, showing on the horizon, during clear days, the coast of France; a view, as it were, from which one could see the Kingdoms of the Earth. “For there have,” said Gringoire, “always been only two Kingdoms of the Earth that mattered for me—our own land for its country and France for her people, her arts, her point of view.” Yes, undoubtedly it was to be a garden with a great view, and it should contain potatoes grown from seeds and sweet corn—also several rows of beans for which, whether for the flowers or the aligned stalks, Gringoire always had a great affection.

In Dunmow station it had been merely an intellectual idea: as who should say, “After the war, we will take a cottage in the country and grow things and have a great view. At any rate, we will have a rest.” But, on the downside behind the Somme, it came differently. It came like one of these visions that one’s eyes, when tired, will see just before one falls asleep. There was a rhomboid of deeper, brighter green, of a green that was really alive, beyond the gray-green of the field they were in. It existed in front of the purple of scabrous flowers on the great shoulder that masked the battlefield. It wavered, precisely as you will see the colored image cast on a sheet by a magic lantern, then slowly, it hardened and brightened, took shape as a recumbent oval, like eighteenth century vignettes. Gringoire said that it became perfectly definite—“The little view that I shall see at this moment if I raise my eyes. And it didn’t connote any locality: it didn’t, I mean, suggest itself as being in the vicinity of the Trossachs, of Tintern, of Matlock, of Dungeness.... It was just country—but perfectly definite, rather an untrimmed and a rather hidden spot without a hard road going to it ... and with the feeling that many birds were lurking in bushes and watching me, as birds watch. You see the idea—sanctuary!”

“I don’t mean to say,” he went on, “that I wanted to get out of the battle of the Somme. I certainly didn’t, either consciously, subconsciously, or with any plane of my mind. I will lay claim to so much militarism. But my subconscious mind was trying to assure itself that ‘appry la gair finny’ there would be a sanctuary where I would cross my second and my index fingers in the face of destiny and cry ‘Feignits’ as we used to do as children at Prisoner’s Base. I daresay that has been the main desire of my life. I daresay it has been the main desire of the lives of all men since recorded time began. Unrecorded time too, no doubt. It was no doubt the basic desire that has given to the world in succeeding ages, the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of Thule, the Cassiterides, the Garden of the Hesperides, the land of Cockaigne where hot mutton pies ran about in the street asking to be eaten—the peace of God which passes all understanding.”

And you see it was mostly for the sake of the little threatened nooks of the earth that Gringoire found himself on that hillside. For, then, as on the 4/8/’14, when the Huns crossed the Belgian frontier, “near a place called Gemmenich,” it was mainly the idea that a field-gray tide of mud was seeking to overwhelm the small, verdure-masked homes, the long, white, thatched farms of the world that forced Gringoire into political action. “All my life,” as he put it, “I have been fighting German scholarships, German modes of learning, of instruction, of collectivism.” But, before that date he hadn’t much imagined—or imagined at all—that he would ever indulge in political polemics. He had always had a dreamy contempt for politics: one is an artist, one is a poet, one is a builder of castles in the air, one is a gentleman, a farrier, a grocer, a miller—what you will—but a politician! “Ah, mais non. That one should prostitute one’s pen!...”

But the field-gray tide threatened—not only the Kingdoms of the Earth that mattered, but the little, sacred homes of artists, poets, gentry, farriers, grocers, millers—menaced then the subjects of one’s pen, the objects of meditation of one’s heart. So one wrote endless, interminable propaganda; until the brain reeled and the fingers stiffened.

Then the Germans killed Henri Gaudier and Teddy Jewell. Or perhaps it was only that Teddy Jewell went. Certainly he was killed sooner or later. “Such nice, good boys both—though I didn’t know either of them well.” So there had not seemed anything else to do. And indeed there was not anything else to do....

Up there, on the hillside, that ran down to the battered sugar factory, he had the feeling that, if they could have had leave and have looked over the rim of that brown-purple slope, they would have seen the Huns, a white, tumultuous line, like advancing surf or like gnashing teeth. That was, of course, a feeling, not an intellectual idea. He knew that the German lines didn’t look like that—though, indeed, at times they did, when our gunners really got onto them in a chalky country. Then it was rather like surf—the smoke of shells and chalk dust going up together in the sunlight.... Still ...

And anyhow that was a moment of complete idleness—a moment of the completest idleness that those officers had known for many, many months. They were just there, with nothing to do. Nothing: nothing whatever. If they had been allowed to look over the hill-brow, that would have been something, but, with the Camp Commandant’s refusal of leave, complete idleness settled down. In ten minutes, in an hour, perhaps; certainly before the passage of four or five hours, they would get the order to report that would take them beyond that hill past the battered sugar factory....

Possibly that little vision of English country, coming then, was really a prayer, as if the depths of one’s mind were murmuring: “Blessed Mary, ask your kind Son that we may have the peace of God that passes all understanding, one day, for a little while in a little nook, all green, with silver birches, and a trickle of a stream through a meadow, and the chimneys of a gingerbread cottage out of Grimm just peeping over the fruit trees.” I suppose that is the burden of most prayers before battle. And of course that would mean that the Allies had won out and that the band would have played in the last war parade, with the white goat and its silver plaque between the horns, and sunlight, and even the Adjutant smiling—and all the Welsh dead appeased, and all the country nooks of the world assured sanctuaries, and every Englishman’s house an inviolable castle, and every Frenchman free to potter off to his café in the cool of the evening. No doubt it was a prayer of the unconscious, tired mind.

“But even that isn’t my fourth landscape,” our poet-host went on, “since my fourth landscape took in very nearly the whole, if not quite the whole, of one of the Kingdoms of the Earth—and that the smallest that I ever hope to see.” It dissociates itself sharply from the others in that the observing of it happened to be Gringoire’s job of the moment. He had been sent up to Mont Vedaigne to mark down and be ready to point out to a number of senior officers all that immense prospect.

And the tip of Mt. Vedaigne formed, oddly enough, one of those little, commonplace, rustic, idyllic spots that, months before, had formed itself for his eyes behind the Somme. There, in a small enclosed space, shut in by trees that just grew up to the edge of the steep escarpments of the hill, was, precisely, a little, gingerbread cottage out of Grimm. In front of it was a small, flat garden—not an acre in extent; in the garden grew potatoes already yellowed; beanstalks were aligned, already yellowed too; and there may have been three or four rods of tobacco plants and as many of haricots, yellowing too, for the fringes of autumn were upon the land. On the southern side of the garden were some plum trees in a hedge. If you looked over the hedge you saw Bailleul, Armentières, away to queer, conical, gray mountains that were the slag-heaps near Béthune, and away, farther, toward the Somme itself.

On the northern side of the garden was a tall, dark plantation of birches and firs so that the gingerbread cottage—of white plaster, with little green shutters and a bright red roof of those S-shaped tiles that lock one into another, with a gutter painted bright green, like the shutters, and dependent from the gutter, right along the face of the cottage, bunches of haricot plants, hung up so that the white beans should dry in the rattling pods—the little cottage, then, had the air of being beneath a high, dark bank.

But it was only trees, so that, if you went between their trunks you saw another great view. A flat, almost incredibly immense, silver-gray plain ran right to the foot of the waving descent, below. There was an oval—poor Poperinghe—with an immense column of snow-white smoke, descending upon it from a great height, and then little plumes of smoke here and there—and then, away, away, pollarded flats, windmills, church towers—and a gray, menacing, incredibly distant skyline, illuminated under drifts of smoke.... One imagined that one was seeing into Germany!

I suppose Gringoire didn’t really see so far.

On the east and the west, the views were cut into by “mountains”—the peaks of that little range of hills that formed practically all that remained of a Kingdom of the Earth—of the Low Countries! There was the Mont Noir with its windmill atop; the Mont Rouge with its windmill atop; the Scharpenberg, with its windmill, Mount Kemmel with its ruined tower, from high above which, in the pellucid autumn air, the sighting shells continuously let down their clouds like torsos of flawless, white marble.

Gringoire had emotions up there! And he had a long time to wait. You may not know it—but, if a senior officer tells you to await him at a given point at 10:00 A.M., you arrive at 9:45 whilst he saunters in at 11:00 A.M., 12:30 P.M., 2:00 P.M., or 4:30 P.M., according to his rank.

On this occasion, Gringoire was Acting Intelligence Officer, and, having to familiarize himself with a landscape in which his division had only just arrived, he came on the ground at 8:45 A.M., having left Locre at 7:00 A.M., riding round by way of Dranoutre to receive his final instructions from Headquarters. He did not think that at Divisional Headquarters his zeal was appreciated. A sleepy, but eminently indignant, General Staff Officer I or II, something elderly, in pajamas, made various insulting remarks about early rising. These, his eyesight improving as sleep departed, he modified somewhat, because he could not tell who the devil Gringoire was. (I may say that, two nights before, our poet had been court-martialed for being in unlawful possession of a Field Officer’s Figure.) But the Major would not modify his statement that he had only been in bed half an hour. He stuck to it. I daresay, poor man, that he was telling the truth. He was wearing khaki-silk pajamas with purple cords. Gringoire, on the other hand, stuck with equal firmness to the fact that he was deputizing for a brother officer who was sick—so sick that he had mislaid his orders. Orderly Room had sent them to him with a slip attached: “Passed to you, please. For attention, immediate action and compliance.” They had had a copy of that slip in the Battalion Orderly Room—but no copy of the memo itself.

Apparently they hadn’t at Divisional Headquarters either. It appears that the G.S.O. I or II who had issued the memo was sick too—had gone sick the night before and our elderly friend was deputizing for him. Of course, eventually, Gringoire got some sort of instructions from a drowsy, patronizing lance-corporal of the type that one usually finds around Divisional Headquarters, sleeping omnisciently under a table covered with typewriting machines in a Connaught hut. He knew that some one answering to the description of my friend was to meet some one on the top of Mont Vedaigne at 11:00 A.M. for the purpose of explaining the positions. It was some General, the lance-corporal couldn’t remember the name—it was a name like Atkinson or Perry or McAlpine—an ordinary sort of name, the lance-corporal said contemptuously. He didn’t know what sort of General he was. The General Staff Officer Number Two ought to have taken him ’round, but he had gone sick; so also had Gringoire’s friend, who was a friend of G.S.O. II. So there he was.

(“And,” said Gringoire when he recounted this incident, “it occurs to me at this moment this was intended as a friendly attention on the part of somebody. Either my friend—who was highly connected in an Army sense—or, failing him, I—was to wangle a soft job out of the General. But all I thought about was how to get to the top of Mont Vedaigne, set my map, get my field telescope into position ... Well, I am telling you what I thought about....”)

He was indeed so concentrated in mind on the top of Mont Vedaigne and the map and the compass and the telescope that he hadn’t the faintest remembrance of the road thither from Dranoutre.⁠[3] He said he could give you every object, estaminet, cottage, and Corps H.Q. from Locre to Dranoutre by the chaussée; or from Locre to Mont Rouge by second class road and field paths, Mont Rouge to Mont Noir, and Mont Vedaigne and so on. But of the road to Mont Vedaigne from Divisional Headquarters nothing remained—except that it was rather suburban, broad, white, and at that date, in good repair.

So he came to the top of the hill, passed the cottage without looking at it, between the potatoes and the tobacco and the tobacco and the haricots, looked over the southern edge, and saw a great stretch of country, looked over the northern edge, and saw a great, silver-gray plain, looked away to the east, and saw hills like camels’ humps cutting still horizons; and the same on the west.

He was, you understand, in a desperate hurry. For each point of the compass, he “set” his map, finding a convenient, flat piece of ground on which to lay it. And he saw, without seeing, and memorized without associations—just names attaching to dark patches in a great plain. Over a particularly large fir tree was Armentières; over an oak, lower down the slope and to the right were the slag heaps and Béthune; further to the right still Bailleul; the flash of gilt above a steeple meant the ten block letters Poperinghe; an immensely distant series of dull purple cubes against a long silver gleam was, in printed capitals DUNKIRK.... You see, his mind was just working in the watertight compartments of his immediate professional job. He wanted to make—and he did make by 11:00 A.M.—four cards, like the range cards one makes for musketry: a central point where one stood, and arrows, running out like rays from that center, toward Ypres, in capitals or Wytschaete in block letters. He wanted the general to be able to stand on each point, look down on the card, follow the direction of the arrow, and identify the place. I don’t know whether any other Intelligence Officer ever thought of that. Anyhow, he got it done by 11:00 A.M.

It was pleasant, the feeling when he had made his last fair copy. He went to each of the points of the compass, to make sure that he had registered positions truly. Returning from the west to the east, he noticed an immense plane, appearing in the firmament above Bailleul. She was escorted by eight or nine relatively little monoplanes—Bristol scouts, I should say. But, at that date, the poor bloody Infantry were not brought much in contact with the air force. So that, apart from their spectacular, picturesque, or dangerous aspects, they hardly came within the scope of Gringoire’s professional attentions. “Airmen,” he said, “were brilliant beings, who treated us with contempt and carried off the affections of our young women. Otherwise they lived in the air whilst we plodded amongst mud and barbed wire. Professionally, they rivaled the Cavalry; obtained information for the Artillery—but, as for cooperating with us, we were below their notice.” So that the great, beautiful machine—which was, I believe, the first Handley Page to reach France in safety—passed overhead without Gringoire’s thinking of more than that it was beautiful.

But his time for consideration of the beautiful had not yet come. It being then eleven and his work as a man from Cook’s being accomplished, he had time to think of breakfast.

He had noticed that a cottage existed behind the potatoes, the haricots, and the tobacco. His conscious mind had dismissed it, since it had obviously no topographical value as an object of interest for a General, name unknown. His subconscious mind—that of an Infantry Officer—had also dismissed it—as just a cottage; too frail to be of much use for cover, even against rifle fire. For you are to understand that whilst his surface mind was entirely and devotedly given to his immediate job, his secondary mind had certainly taken note of the values of Mont Vedaigne, the garden, the hedges, the copsewood, the timber, and the slopes; considering them as cover, as sites for trenches and noticing the fields of fire, the dead ground, the trees that would be dangerous in falling about if the place were shelled, the underwood that might be useful, supposing the Artillery had failed to knock it to bits or set fire to it—it was very dry still—before the Enemy Infantry tried to rush the position. All these little thoughts had flitted, like shadows, to be registered somewhere.—For our poet learned that, when, ten minutes later, he went over the ground again, for the definite purpose of considering it with conscious, infantry-eye, he had already noted and stored somewhere in the gray matter of his brain most of the details of dead ground, field of fire and sites for trenches, too ... and a good deal of the detail as to timber, underwood, and the like.

That, however, was only after he had had some breakfast. For a little old Belgian woman with a pepper and salt face and a husband who wore a black cap with a shining leather eye shade, came out of the green door of the cottage, just as the lady does in a weatherhouse. To Gringoire’s request in Flemish for coffee, “Hebt gii Kafe to verkoopen?” she answered nothing, disappearing backwards behind the green door, which shut as if automatically. She was there again, however, in less than a minute, with a plate of ham, a bowl of coffee, and four bits of their gingerbread!

The significance of this did not occur to our subsequent inhabitant of a gingerbread dwelling. He only noticed that it did not go so very well—nor yet so very badly—with the ham. He ate both, anyhow, in a hurry. It was a keen air up there. He secured some more ham and another cup of coffee and, with that in his hand, proceeded to the clearing in the east from which the best view of the Salient was obtainable.

It was then that the Infantry Officer’s hitherto subconscious, professional mind rose to the surface and became the conscious one. In the four hours that he had waited in that frame of mind, he had noticed, of course, an infinite number of details—a great number of airplanes coming from the direction of Dunkirk; huge columns of smoke rising from far back in German-held Belgium, behind Brûges. A great number of signs of war in that clear, gray, sunlit space, in which every pollard willow appeared to be visible and like a candle flame burning in a windless air! Gringoire was looking through a telescope, of course. But I will trouble the reader only with two apparitions of those that he collected: they were apparently unconnected, since they took place, the one at Poperinghe, the other in front of Wytschaete. But very likely they had a grim connection.

Whilst he was topographically employed, our Infantry Officer had noticed Poperinghe as a blue-gray smudge, in shape like an oval lozenge seen in perspective. From it rose several church towers—bulbous, Low-Country edifices. Now, whilst he was resting his eyes from the telescope, he saw, suddenly unfolding in the air above the towers, two great white swans. They extended laterally, dazzling, very slow. Then a trunk descended from each of them. After a time they resembled, exactly, immense torsos of Hercules, headless and armless statues, as solid-looking as brilliant white marble, new from the quarry. The Tommies called them Statue Shells.

And then he noticed that there were statue shells over the observation post on Kemmel Hill. With his telescope, also, he began to see that shells were bursting on Poperinghe. I don’t know why, but he took them to be gas shells, bracketing.

He rested his eyes again and looked at the gap between Mont Noir and Mont Kemmel. It was a symmetrical bit of landscape seen over what is called technically a saddle between two hills. Over the very center of the lowest part of the dip, Gringoire said, there appeared to be a whitish gray tooth stump, decayed, with one end-fragment rather high.⁠[4] Extending, like a long string, above this, on rising ground, there was a brown rope—five miles, perhaps beyond the decayed tooth. Little white balls existed on the brown line, the landscape was pale yellow—as it might be the gold of corn fields. The red roofs of a village that he knew to be Wytschaete were brilliant and quiet in the sun—but, on the brown line beneath that ridge the little white balls went on coming into existence—one every half second. One to the right at the extreme end of the line; one on the extreme left; one in the middle; one between the extreme left and the center. Beautiful work. Have you ever seen a village cobbler nailing a sole? It goes so quickly that you hardly see the hammer. But a small brass nail is there—and another and another—a line of brass nails on the smooth leather. Well, they went like that, along the brown line—the little white balls! Beautiful! Beautiful work. “My mind,” Gringoire said, “was filled with joy and my soul exulted in the clear, still, autumn sunshine, looking over that tiny Kingdom of the Earth.

“I said to myself: ‘Hurray! The guns are giving them hell. Some one’s ducking over there.’” Because, of course, the brown line was the Hun trenches on the Wytschaete ridge, and the little white balls were our shells, falling with an exact precision. They must have knocked the trenches pretty considerably already for the disturbed earth to show at all at that distance.

At that moment—it was just gone three—a man in khaki made Gringoire jump by appearing at his elbow. He said that the General who had ordered Gringoire to report there at 1:00 P.M. was detained. Would he have some lunch and report again at the same spot at five?

And, after that, it was just emotions. The landscape became landscape, with great shafts of light and shadows of clouds; the little white cottage with the green shutters, a little nook that should be inviolable; the haricots interesting as things that one might plant in a Kentish garden that sloped to the sea. The range of hills was no longer a strategical point or a tactical position. It was all that remained of one of the Kingdoms of the Earth; one could hardly look at the gray plains with the pollard willows marching like aligned candle flames toward the horizon—one avoided looking at it, because it was Lost Territory, held down, oppressed, as if it were ashamed. Poperinghe grew to appear pitiful, a little town where wretched civilians were being butchered by gas shells for the love of God. So the poet’s mind worked, at leisure, on personal matters, as neither the mind of Intelligence, or Infantry, Officer need work.

“My mind,” the poet reports, “was indeed so much at leisure in that long two hours that I even wrote in my Field Pocket Book a preface to a volume whose proofs had that morning reached me. In that I recorded my emotions of the moment and there, in a printed volume, they stand. It does not alter their value as a record of emotions that I subsequently learned that the statue shells over Poperinghe were not gas shells but had been discharged so as to give the German Heavies the range, or that, upon reflection, it appears to me that the Germans were hardly shelling the town so profusely just for the love of God. They must either have heard that we had a considerable body of troops in the town, or else they were trying to stop, by that retaliation, our own artillery’s heavy shelling of their Wytschaete-Messines positions.”

But at any rate, there the emotions came, crowding and irrepressible. So that, just before, in the dusk, at seven o’clock, Gringoire saw the bright red flash of a brass hat’s band in among dark fir trees, he noticed, with a sudden lift in the side, a light silver streak, behind the map of Dunkirk. It was the sea.

“And suddenly,” he said, “there came upon me an intense longing to be beyond that sea.” It was a longing not for any humanity—but just for the green country, the mists, the secure nook at the end of a little valley, the small cottage whose chimneys just showed over the fruit trees—for the feelings and the circumstances of a sanctuary in which one could cross one’s second over one’s index finger and in the face of destiny cry: “Feignits.”

It was, however, necessary to stand to attention, and through the falling twilight to point out hardly visible towns to a nearly invisible Senior Officer. And immediately the mind went back to its original position: Dunkirk and Ypres became circles named in large capitals; Wytschaete and Kemmel were again in block lettering. One said: “The sea is just visible in that direction,” and it was just a geographical fact.

V Intermezzo

The day after peace was declared seemed to your compiler an excellent moment on which to remonstrate with our poet as to one of his characteristic locutions. The day was fine, cloudless, soft and still; some gardening operation of Gringoire’s had consummately succeeded. I forget what it was. I fancy some long-studied contrivance of his had checkmated the slugs in his strawberry beds. At any rate we sat in the long grass by the hedge under the damson trees at the bottom of the garden over a great blue china bowl of strawberries which Gringoire characteristically insisted on moistening with red wine and sugar. He said that taken that way they were less gross than with cream and I am bound to say that Mme. Sélysette shared his views with which I could never agree.

In any case, it was with singular mildness that, lying on his side in the long grass, Gringoire answered my remonstrances.

“Why, no,” he said, “I do not see why any one should object to the use of the term ‘Hun’ as applied to such members of the late Enemy nations as were not in arms against us. I do not care much about the matter and, if the word offends you, I will try, when I think about it, not to use it. But the fact is that I certainly never thought about it much at any time. It is a convenient phrase to use about what was evil in the people we were fighting against. I should not now—and I never did—call Brahms anything but a German composer nor should I ever think of calling Holbein a Hun painter or the Brothers Grimm of the fairy-tales, Boches. So that the word is a convenient one for differentiations. In effect for me the German musicians, painters, poets, working men, postmen and soldiers in the trenches or at their Headquarters were never Huns. I assert that categorically and I think it was true of the majority of my comrades—except that the majority of my comrades had never heard of Bach or Beethoven or Heine. But it was true that the majority of my comrades with whom I discussed the subject at all seriously, though they may have used the word you dislike, never—when talking seriously—used it as a term of hatred. Humanity will inevitably use a monosyllable in place of two sounds if it can get the chance and so will I.