PART TWO CERTAIN INTERIORS

VIII “Maisie”

[It has occurred to the writer—or let us rather say, “the compiler,” that, as concerns this section of this work, it would be safe to let Gringoire speak for himself. The paraphernalia of inverted commas interspersed with indirect speech is apt to be wearisome to a reader. It is difficult—nay, it might even prove dangerous—to the compiler. For who shall say what powerful enemies the present writer might not make by omitting inverted commas and appearing to speak for himself? So it seems more just to let the rather testy poet speak for himself.

For undoubtedly, when speaking of certain matters, Gringoire was—nay, he is!—apt to become testy. Let us excuse him by saying that he bore a good deal of strain during the late war—as was apt to be the position of any public, or quasi-public man, caught between the attentions of the cheap press and what he considered to be his duty to the State.

Of course, this section is a rendering. It does not pretend to record words exactly as Gringoire spoke. It is, rather, a résumé of conversations of an evening when the writer—or rather the compiler—was privileged to be housed by Gringoire. It was, by then, late summer or early autumn.

The Gingerbread Cottage by that date resembled less one of the ruins of the Flanders front that Gringoire so feelingly describes. For to tell the truth, that was what it had very nearly resembled at the time of our Easter visit. When Gringoire had entered it in the early spring, there had been certainly the wave-marks of inundations and half-inches of mud on the brick floors. He had come down with his valise contents, his camp-bed, a knife and fork, a paraffin stove, and a gallon of oil, determined, as he puts it, to dig himself in in the face of destiny. At Easter we had seen him a little too early in the process for people who had not for the last four or five years lived with furniture made of bully-beef cases or whatever they are called.

But by mid-September, when the greater portion of the following section was compiled, either Gringoire’s views as to the æsthetic value of bully-beef chairs and tables had changed as he got further from the atmosphere of camps, or Mme. Sélysette had softened the asperities of his nature in the matter of preference of dugouts to drawing rooms—or else, truly, he was acting up to his ideals. That one hesitates to believe: for who can believe that any human soul can act up to his professed ideals—or that the ideals which he professes have any relation to his motives?

Still, Gringoire was a poet. And the writer remembers remonstrating with him as to the amount of work he was putting into the Gingerbread Cottage and the garden. Said the writer: Gringoire should remember that all this whitewashing, papering, glazing the windows, digging out of foundations, and fertilizing an abandoned and ill-treated garden would, in the end, profit only the landlord—who was a very bad landlord, even as bad landlords go. For, as would be the case with poets, Gringoire had no lease of any kind....

But Gringoire only looked at the writer with that vague and unseeing glance that is one of the properties of some poets. And he answered: though of course it was not an answer: He was not a small hatter, a market-gardener, a farmer, a tradesman, or any sort of profit-and-loss person. He was intent simply on making his sanctuary smile a little in the sunlight and on comforting an old building that had been very shabbily used by evil sorts of men....

At any rate, they had scrambled together some old and rather attractive “bits,” a grandfather’s chair or so, carpets for the sitting room, colored rush mats for the floor of the sleeping apartments. They had painted and polished with beeswax and turpentine, and there would, as like as not, be some flowers on the dining table which was of rough oak—and coffee after a full dinner.

The primitive “note” remained, of course, about the establishment, and it was hardly the place to which you would have asked for a week-end a delicate city madam; a Guards’ Major; or a young actress about to become famous. But on bright days the garden smiles in the sun, and the Gingerbread Cottage has a colored and—as Gringoire would say—a soigné aspect. Yes, certainly it appeared to be cared for, poor battered old thing, as old people sometimes appear to be cared for in almshouses.

So Gringoire affronts the winter. And, if during that season the wolf does not get him; or if his patience does not give out—as is the case with poets; or if the bad landlord does not eject him in order to reap the profits of his improvements—for he has no lease!—he will continue his patchings, his experiments with unusual manures, and his attempts to ameliorate the breed of potatoes. And that is all the writer will say about him.

For the rest, he speaks for himself, much as he spoke of an evening, with his mild but occasionally bitter and furious eyes; with his usually tranquil, but occasionally furiously gesticulating hands. For, the writer, or rather the compiler, having compared notes with Mme. Sélysette, who has heard Gringoire’s stories very, very often, the compiler is satisfied that it is a fair rendering of the poet-warrior’s conversation. It will be found to be disfigured, even in this, as it were, censored version, by unfortunate attacks on many persons and institutions that are usually considered exempt from—or at any rate dangerous to—assault. But what it contains is not half as violent as what Gringoire wished the compiler to set down as his opinions. The compiler, however, has friends who can be grieved; a pocket that can be affected by the law of libel; a position with reviewers that is his stock in trade. So Gringoire, who could not write prose but wished to air his opinions, and the compiler, who wished to air the poet’s opinions but did not wish to lose friends, money, or position in the process, agreed upon the autobiographical passages that follow.]

Gringoire speaks:

At some period of the war, I found myself in a certain interior. It was August—hushed by the presence at the doors of functionaries, elderly, gray, like bishops, wearing evening dress. And one had the sense that, standing at ease, on the steps of great portals, opening onto immense staircases, that one had ascended in stony twilights, past bistre-blue frescoes. Suisses, in cocked hats with great white gloves and silver swords, symbolized the military ideals of Ministries, just as, in the Vatican, obsolete artillerymen, hussars, pikemen, symbolize a vanished temporal power. For, what would the Suisses do if the Enemy or a Revolution should chance to pay a call on them?

I presume they would extend enormous, cotton-gloved fingers for visiting cards, which they would hand to commissionaires in glass boxes; the cards would be sent by pages, upstairs to the episcopal butlers, who, after meditating for forty minutes, would warily convey them, over the soft State carpets, past the decorous but rich, State-purchased pictures suspended over the blue-gray, State-woven tapestries, to the high door of polished mahogany. There the bishop-butlers would pause, with the air of priests listening outside shrines, with a hand on the engraved, polished, mounted, ormolu door-handles....

But what, during those sixty-four minutes would be the proceedings of the lieutenant of Uhlans, with his twenty men behind him; or the leader of the sans-culottes, communards, syndicalists...? The lances might be dripping with blood; bread, dripping too, might be decorating the points of pikes, or paraffin from the oil cans. Probably they would not wait until the blood or the oil dried on the sarcophagus-tiles of the Ministerial Salle des Pas Perdus or until the great hotel slowly and resignedly disappeared in flames with that curious air of weary acquiescence that buildings have when, having borne for many years with human follies, wisdoms, or labors, they fall to the ground before human madness. Probably they would not wait—the Uhlans, the sans-culottes, or the Pétroleuses. They are an impatient people.

But, of course, the reader will say, in the great courtyard before the Ministry, are many, many gendarmes, standing about with their hands behind their backs and slightly protuberant bellies. (Otherwise they would be là bas!) But they have good eyes. They would know a Lieutenant of Uhlans by his uniform, and they know how to use their revolvers. And amongst the gendarmes lounge several civilian men of queer, specialized miens. Their pockets bulge just slightly, in odd ways, and brushing their legs are the chiens de bergers Alsaciens (it used to be Allemands) the large, elegant dogs with brown fur, like ladies’ sable coats and the intelligent pointed ears.... It is the business of these apparently civilian agents to know the leaders of sans-culottes, syndicalists, communards, and Actions this or that. The pretty, friendly, high-stepping dogs with their sable coats would be at the sans-culottes’ throats at the merest chirrup of their masters’ lips, and from the so very slightly bulging pockets light handcuffs would whip out. The revolvers also would go off....

And, still more, the reader will say, in the little, painted, upright boxes stand little men with red trousers and blue coats and tricolored worsted galloons, and long, dull-looking rifles, and very, very long Rosalies.... They are probably just the very newest recruits with sad, boyish faces. But they know enough to say the French for “Halt, who are you?” in Breton accents, and to let off the old, long guns, and to stick Rosalie, with a grunt, through the entrails of a Uhlan lieutenant, and to call out the Guard.... And, too, there is a half-battalion of the 101st Regiment, whose accent reeks of garlic, olive oil, and the meridional sun, passing along the boulevard before the tricolor that droops over the porte-cochère....

So—like the very heart of an onion, under many, many wrappings, in sanctuary, how very, very far from the mud of the onion-trench, bearded, in a dark coat, with a bright spot of a button; with sharp, apprehending nods coming as quickly as winks and silences as quickly as either; behind the polished mahogany door with the gilt handle and the ormolu finger-plates; at a Buhl table, with a glass vase full of Malmaison carnations, a bronze reproduction of the Winged Victory, and two great pictures of Norman peasants, the one by Bastien Lepage and the other by Jean François Millet—sits the Minister whose mere wink to some one, whose whisper to some one else, whose instruction to another, whose order—and so on—has brought one from green fields littered with bully beef-tins, wire, mud-trodden cartridge cases, rat runs—and the rest of it! He will thank you for past services; tactfully suggest that it might reinforce some department of the moral of some department or other of humanity if M. le Capitaine would suspend his military ardors in order to write so and so and so and so in such and such an organ or to say this and that in a certain quarter. And one can also produce not truly a great effect but some, by talking in a certain way, in the mess of one’s regiment even. Certainly in Quartiers Généraux ...

He will listen deferentially whilst you voice certain objections: to write so and so one must have leave—leave in both the English and the French sense of “permission.” And leaves are difficult things to obtain. Besides, one does not want leave. For certain reasons!... One is like that. L’on est poète: cranky, unreasonable. An all-powerful Minister cannot get into the soul of a crank. Not his Seneschals, or the Suisses, or the Gendarmes, or the Agents, or the Sentinels can help him to that. Quand on est poète one requires—one requires a little reëntrant, with water—a little stream, indicated by a wavy line in blue pencil; copses, indicated by dotted-in round o’s with tails to them; rushes, indicated by hieroglyphs like the section of a hairbrush; a gingerbread cottage, for which the symbol is a hatched in square.—One requires those. And also one requires a temporary respite from the attentions of one’s friends and of destiny. For that, as far as I know, military topography has no symbol—unless it be a white handkerchief on the end of Rosalie.

His Excellency remains polite—deferential even. Still, it could no doubt be arranged, he will remark. It is important to get certain things said.... And who could say it better than ...

For myself—on the occasion which I am adumbrating, I was thinking of ferrets. So that, by a concentration of ideas, at a given point I once said to such a Minister: Of course there is the First Line Transport.... And, in my mind’s eye, against the gilt frame of the immense Bastien Lepage—or it may have been on this occasion a Marie Bashkirtseff—arose the image of a Connaught Hut, with the rain beating on the roof and the autumn wind reaching the flames of candles stuck in bottles and bearing in the odor of stable hartshorn from the long horse standings. And the Welsh Rabbit made of cheese, onions, Flemish beer, and herrings straight from Bailleul—though God knows when they came from the autumnal sea. And hooch. And several obese, tranquil, entirely capable officers with feet for the moment in carpet slippers. And the table utensils borrowed from the Y.M.C.A. pushed aside on a corner of the trestle table; and a cheap pad of letter paper, a copying ink pencil, and the mind of the poet functioning in the flicker of the guttering candles at the dictates of the Minister seated beneath the Jean François Millet picture at the Buhl table with the Malmaison carnations in a smoked glass vase and the miniature reproduction of the Winged Victory in bronze with a delicate, artificially produced patina. And the lower part of the poet is wedged into a bully-beef case that has had one side taken out and that has been wire-nailed into an egg-box to form an armchair. And, in the dim gloom, at one elbow stands a dripping Divisional runner with a buff memo from ordnance to say that Mills Bombs for the —— Battalion are on the Scherpenberg and must be taken down to Kemmel Château by four ack emma; and at the other elbow stands a Divisional Orderly with a copy of orders on which in red ink is marked the information that Division will move down the line by the road by Dranoutre—Neuve Eglise—Westoutre-Plugstreet—Pont-de-Nieppe—Armentières. In full sight of the Hun trenches, by God!—beginning with one’s own battalion, of which A. Company will march from such and such a spot at 5:30 to be followed by D, C, and B boys at half-hour intervals. And to be shelled to Hell!

And the transport officer, whose business it is to manage these matters, is away for thirty-six hours to arrange for a Divisional Horse Show in the field behind the Convent! And your poet is A. O. I. C. (Acting Officer in Charge of) Transport, and Billeting officer for the Battalion and O. I. C. (Officer in Charge of) Divisional Canteen and God knows what all. And Officer in Charge of moral of a certain section of humanity to whom it would be a good thing if certain things would be said in polished prose! And when the poet springing up exclaims to the night:

“To H—— with the b——y Mills Bombs and the bumph and the b——rs and all the whole execrable show,” the Battalion Orderly, a fair, cheeky boy who knows one, exclaims:

“Ker wooly woo, sir, say la Gair!”

And indeed, the interiors of la guerre were much like that. But how is His Excellency the Minister of this or that department to know what is passing in your mind? He will just write on a note pad, look up, exclaim, “Que dîtes-vous? First Line?... But is it tranquil, that?”⁠[6]

I don’t know what I answered. I believe I must have screamed with laughter—because I really wanted some ferrets very badly, and because, in the vestibule of an immense hotel I had left my publisher in charge of a little girl with dark curls tied with pale blue ribbons, singularly self-possessed manners, and rather prominent underclothing that appeared to be an inverted bouquet of lace. That is to say I had left my publisher—who is deaf—with the little girl. And I was in charge of the little girl, who, just before my having to hurry to the Ministry, had devoured thirteen oysters, half a cantaloupe melon with a quarter of a pound of sugar, and a Coupe Jacques. So I was, really, wondering what Maisie would be like when I returned to the Hotel de l’Opéra. It sounds mad—but it is just the true truth.

I know that, at that stage, I did not please His Excellency. He frowned twice. Once when I laughed because he asked if a Connaught hut at the base of the Salient was a tranquil place in which to write poems. He also frowned when—as I have, I know, elsewhere related, but I do not know where—he having asked me, “En quoi il me pouvait être utile?” I answered, “Si Votre Excellence me pourrait trouver des furets!”

You see, I had been carefully instructed by friends with one eye to my commercial future. The Minister was sure to ask in what way he could be of service to me. I was to reply—to hint ever so delicately—that if I had a ribbon to stick on my coat, writing poems, even in a Connaught hut, would be easy. But I couldn’t do it. Even if I had not been concerned with ferrets that I couldn’t get and with Maisie, who had been far too easy to come by, I couldn’t have done it. I had been instructed that the ribbon awaited me; I had only to stretch out a hand to become an Officer of Something or Other. I don’t know whether I ever have. I suppose not.

Anyhow, His Excellency frowned when I asked for ferrets. He might have been more sympathetic if I had asked him to take off my hands a little girl of eight, with the American manners appropriate to the age of thirteen, who, half an hour before had eaten thirteen oysters, half a melon, and a quarter of a pound of sugar that had come from Geneva in her malles, and a Coupe Jacques; who had been kidnapped by the lake in a carriage and pair, the night before, or perhaps two nights before; and whose father, the kidnapper, had left her in my charge just after breakfast and had then disappeared. There was also a very French maid—in hysterics. And I didn’t even know their names.

Yes; H. E. might have been more sympathetic if I had mentioned the child alone in the vestibule—or possibly with the publisher. But at the mention of the ferrets, he became positively glacial: “Quoi,” he asked. “What is a ferret?”

I said that ferrets sont des petits animaux qui mangent les rats. But his face remained like a dead wall. I know he thought I was drunk. I was so certain of it, then, that I stammered, and the interview dissolved in the embarrassed emotions passing from him to me and from me to him. He touched a button and said he would telephone to the Jardin des Plantes. But I don’t suppose he did.

You see: it was almost a drop too much in my cup—to be plunged straight into “What Maisie Knew,” which is a book by Henry James. It was too much bewilderment.... Supposing the—as I understood—too brilliant and vociferous mother who was understood to like a “violinist fellow”, should be bursting, with wide gestures, through the aperture frailly closed by glass hotel-doors that whirled bewilderingly whilst I was at the Ministry.... And it might, I understood, well be like that.

How the incident ended, however, I cannot say, since, upon my return to the hotel, the child and her companion had disappeared. That is to say, they had left in the hotel bus for the Gare du Nord. So I hope they got safely to England. I never heard: and, since I have forgotten even the names, I suppose I never shall.

It was, no doubt, the sort of thing that was happening all over the world just as usual, but it was queer—and intensely worrying—to be brought so violently and so much against one’s poor will into an atmosphere of international passions, excursions, lawsuits for the possession of children, and the like. And anyhow, the worry of it probably spoilt my career; which was no doubt a good thing. Anyhow, I hope that Maisie, in the custody of kind old aunts, somewhere in Sussex, is prattling to a benevolent but bewildered butler about Mamma, who went to heaven by the cog-wheel railway, via Montreux. Or I suppose it would be better for her if she had forgotten Mamma.

Yes: I suppose it was all going on. And I rather fancy I found the going-on-ness of it all a little appalling. Paris, indeed, was so much more just Paris out of the season, than London, in those days, appeared to be London, either during or out of the season. It was in a way touching; it was also, in a way, disheartening. I remember—and I say “I remember” advisedly, since such an immense number of things blotted themselves out and only crop up in suddenly vivid pictures like that of Maisie whom I had completely forgotten until the day before yesterday, and who now again exists extraordinarily brightly in the hotel vestibule saying: “Ils me disent que Maman est partie pour le ciel. It is very droll. But what tram do I take pour le ciel?” I remember, then, being on a balcony with an immense stone balustrade, in the black night with a number of French officers who were all polite—but cold. It was, certainly, during the entr’acte of Délibes’ Lakme. I fancy the theater was the Comédie Française, but I don’t know, because I had been taken there by a staff officer, and in those days in France one was moved about so without volition of one’s own that one didn’t, necessarily, much notice where one went or how one got there. Where it was a duty to notice, one noticed—railway stations in their sequence, streams, contours. But it was rather a toss-up whether anything more than little bits, like etchings or vignettes, got through to one’s private psychology. I take this to have been the case with most men in our army. We were, as soldiers, both naïf and engrossed.

With the French, it was different. They appeared to be so much older, in their work as in their leisures. They seemed to go to war, as they went to Lakme, so much more as connoisseurs. So, on that balcony, I had the feeling of a very definite frigidity. I could have talked rather floridly about les gloires de la France, the ultimate aims of the war. I doubt if the French officers could. They had exhausted the topic during forty menaced years.

So they talked, as it happens, mostly of the fine work that had been done by their territorials—old men, fathers of families, and grandfathers who were patching away at the trenches, making roads under fire, laboriously laboring amidst great dangers and beyond their strength that the years had sapped.

The balcony of the theater was a cube of blackness; down below there appeared to be an old, small, square market-place. Paris, of course, was in darkness, out of deference to Zeppelins and airplanes, so that it was all a heavy, velvety black beneath a pallid sky. Houses, squares, rose up on three sides; the immense black bulk of the theater seemed to press on one’s back as one is pressed upon, on narrow paths, by the walls of precipices in the night. One had a sense that the inside of this building was flooded with translucent rays, in which, over the light parquet of long floors, in the salons de réception, men moved quietly, with slightly outstretched hands emphasizing points in their discourse to the women on their arms. Theaters function with a sense of style in Paris. But the old, tall houses round the market gave the idea that they were solidly black throughout; only in the old empty rooms, over the creaking floors, mice would rustle in the pallid gleams from the old windows.

I do not mean to say that the houses were really like that inside: for houses are queer things, and queerer still when they grow old, with malices, obstinacies, benevolences of their own. And, as is the case with men, their physiognomies are misleading. So, though one had the sense that below there was a market-place with carts and tilted hoods awaiting the day and that the houses were old and empty, it may have been all untrue to fact, though it is likely enough in Paris where there are so many old, moldering, and damp-streaked façades and courtyards.

I wonder if most people have as strongly as I the feeling that houses have, not so much immortal souls, as tempers, queernesses, and the power to be malicious or benevolent. I daresay most people have that sense up to a point, for it is common enough to walk with a friend, more particularly at dawn, where there are few human beings about to detract from the spell, past, say, a terrace of houses not all alike. A blind will be up; another and another, half drawn down; four or five others, all green, will be at various heights behind the closed window-glasses. And your friend will say:

“That house appears to be winking; that other is gnashing green teeth!” So that your friend will be attributing faces at least to the houses. No doubt he will also connote individualities.

The effect of the coming of the war, for me, was to enhance the feeling until it became almost an obsession. Just as trees and fields appeared to dread the contamination of alien presences, so with buildings. Only with buildings—and more particularly with houses—the feeling was very much enhanced. They seemed to dread not only contaminations, but pains, violations, physical shames, and dissolution in fire.

I do not mean that this feeling was new to me or came with the coming of the war. On the contrary, it was a feeling familiar enough in France. Long before the war it was difficult to go to Northern France—and it was impossible to visit Paris—without seeing, or having the attention drawn to, buildings that have been struck by shells, that have solid cannon balls embedded in their walls, to façades riddled by musketry or charred by one incendiarism or another. In Paris, there were mostly relics of 1870-71; elsewhere the solid cannon balls, as like as not, were once our own. But somehow that seemed normal: those were the danger zones of a race. If members of a civilized people, like the French, choose to occupy marches—zones set against barbarians, like ourselves and the Huns—the buildings they set up in those regions must suffer. They must suffer as children do who are taken into perils aboard ship; or like dogs whose masters adventure with them into fields of fire.

It was, therefore, in the southern and central regions of France that, before the war, I had most strangely the feeling—that feeling of affrighted buildings. It came to me one day in a broad French landscape, somewhere, I imagine, just south of Lyons. Perhaps it was in Orange—or possibly in Tarascon. At any rate, it was just after the close of the Agadir “incident”.

I don’t know that I had taken the Agadir incident very seriously. In fact, I hadn’t taken it seriously at all. The Prime Minister of today had made at the Guildhall a speech that one regarded as one regarded any other flamboyant speech—and that was the end of it. I never imagined that we should do our duty to civilization if it came to the point. I never imagined, indeed, that France herself would stand up.

We came, at that date, of a generation that lived in the shadow of the ghosts of Bismarck, Moltke, and William I—in the shadow of memories of the siege of Paris. Prussia appeared no doubt detestable—but she was so omnipotent that we hardly cared to think about her even for the purpose of detesting her. Will you remember, oh Gringoire fils that shall be?

Probably Gringoire fils will not remember: that is why I find it necessary to recapitulate at this point. Prussia, then, was there, like something ominous but irremovable. One might say that the world, like some stout old garment, was a good world—but it had upon it a grease-stain that neither petrol nor spirits would eradicate; just as you might say that your postal service or train system were good, ignoring the fact that officials were brutal in manner; or that your God was a good God, although He insisted on being fed with babies roasted alive. Something like that.

On the day after Agadir, then, I had come through Lorraine—the two Lorraines, of which one was bubbling like a pot with men all in gray, the other pullulating like an over-ripe cheese with men all in blue, with baggy, scarlet breeches. One had been lost in an immense, pushing, silent crowd at the Gare de l’Ouest—an immense, silent, rather grim crowd in blue, with worsted adornments, long rifles slung over the backs, untidy haversacks. At the bureaux of the station were innumerable women. They gesticulated, waved to unseen units in that tired crowd; they cried out; they wept for joy.

But that produced no particular effect. The French are an impressionable and a noisy people. So the women called out. The silent soldiery were no doubt tired after the autumn manoeuvres. That was perhaps why they were so grim.

But somewhere, just after that, in some view near a Southern or Central town—as I have said, it may have been Lyons or Orange; no town that particularly mattered, near the Loire, perhaps, or the Rhone—amidst rolling country where the harvest was already in and there were stubble fields and new straw thatching—suddenly, out of all those hundreds of thousands of soldiery, I remembered one. He was a little recruit—“joining up” as we learned to say later. He was shoved into a first-class carriage somewhere near Meaux because the train was so full, and there, in a corner seat, with the blue-gray landscape going past, he sat, as if lifeless, the tears dropping down his cheeks. His rifle, haversack, packages, tin cans, slings, and things of which, then, one didn’t recognize the importance, had been thrown in after him by a guard, and, in among them, he sat desolate.

In the carriage there had been besides myself two old French people—an old gentleman with a white Napoleon, and an old, feeble lady, in a rather queer black bonnet. I have an idea that they were French Protestants. There were also other people: but they formed only a chorus.

For the old man, in kindly, but very thin tones, began to talk to the little recruit, the old lady echoing each of his speeches:

“The beds for a poor little recruit are hard?”—“The beds are hard!”—“The haricot soup is thin?”—“Ah, yes, a very watery potage.”—“Ah! Ah! Yes,” said the listeners.—“The marchings are long; the drills difficult; the rifles heavy.”—“Yes: heavy are the rifles!”—“Ah! Ah! Yes ...”—“And the little recruit is away from home for three long years!”—“Yes, three years!”—“Ah! Ah! Ah! Three so very long years!”—“The little recruit comes from the Midi—the South!”—“The Midi! The South!”—“Ah! Ah! The South with sun and cypress hedges and the champs d’oliviers and the Mistral.”—“From Orange! From quite near Orange ... Ah! Ah! Orange ...” And there he was, going to Lille.... In the northwest: over against the frontier....

Being then “quite near Orange” a few days later—yes, it was Orange!—and looking out from the heights of the Roman Theater over the little town and the flat, commonplace country, I remembered suddenly the little recruit. I think that is how the mind really works, linking life together, for, later I shall tell you how, on the balcony of the Comédie Française, I remembered suddenly Private ——, an old, nearly toothless Tommy of a Kitchener’s battalion of the Lincolnshires in the baths which had been established in the old mill at Albert—and also Lt. Morgan of my own regiment, an officer who had spent a very hard life in Canada, and who was killed walking up a communication trench on his first day in the line.

So, at Orange, before the war, I remembered suddenly the little recruit in his blue, with his worsted adornments, sitting like a statue of utter grief whilst the green-gray country, of northwest France, swept past behind him. The country over which his image suddenly superimposed itself was browner; in flat fields, the queer twigs of the vineyards appeared untidy. I fancy the Alps were in the distance. But there were stacks and roofs. And, it was, for me, just country. That is to say, I attached to that countryside no particular legends, traditions, or fables of story. It might be Provence—or it might not. But when I saw, as it were, through the image of the recruit, the stacks, the roofs, of the little farm buildings or of the little town, it seemed to me that they were all crouching down, motionless, but ready to tremble, as partridges crouch amid the stubble when beaten away over the ridge.

I don’t want unduly to labor the point—but I am not yet certain that I have made it. You see, that queer and sinister feeling came to me just because of that carriageful of French people. It was not so much because the little recruit had wept. I daresay that, as a conscript, he was bad material. But it was because the old gentleman and all the others in the carriage had known the hard beds, the thin soups, the heavy rifles, and the drag of the pack-straps on the shoulders ... and the long absences from the little homes that seemed now to cower among the stubble fields. For there was no house in all that landscape whose women hadn’t known the suspense of absences; there was no stack whose builder hadn’t at one time gone, or come back. And there was not one, of all those objects, that did not dread—that, for forty long years had not dreaded—the hard footsteps, the shames, the violations, or the incendiary fires of conquerors who should come from “beyond Lille on the frontier”.

And it was at that moment that, suddenly, it became a conscious proposition in my mind—definite and formulated—that, first and before everything else, we must have in the world assured nooks and houses that never cowered and trembled—houses of which one could never by any possibility think that they would cower and tremble.

That, of course, is militarism. I am sorry that it has crept in.

IX The Water Mill

Said Gringoire on another day:

During one of the innumerable periods of long waiting that seemed inseparable from our advances whether on the Somme or elsewhere, it occurred to me that that would be a good opportunity to see what books really would bear reading—would, that is to say, stand up against the facts of a life that was engrossing and perilous. I wrote, therefore, on the spur of the moment, a postcard, to a bookseller, since I had no friends on whose generosity I cared to trespass. I asked him to send me: Turgeniev’s “Fathers and Children”, Flaubert’s “Trois Contes”, Mallarmé’s “Après-Midi d’un Faune”, Anatole France’s “Histoire Comique”, or “Thaïs”, “Youth”, by Joseph Conrad, “What Maisie Knew”, by Henry James, and “Nature in Downland”, by W. H. Hudson. I received them all except the last, which was out of print, and I found that I could read them all with great engrossment except the book, whichever it was, by Anatole France. That one was so frail and tenuous in its appeal that it failed to hold my attention at all, and I have forgotten its name.—I hasten to add that I regarded M. France at that date as a Pro-German, so my impatience may not have been altogether because of its literary qualities.

It was whilst I was reading “What Maisie Knew” that I got leave to go with another officer and have a bath in Albert. So I took the volume under my arm. It wasn’t really a coincidence—that I should be reading that book. I suppose it wasn’t really a coincidence that I should meet Maisie in the flesh.

For, if one was to meet Maisie anywhere, it would be precisely in the white vestibule of a Paris hotel—and, if any one was to be confided in by one or other of her distracted parents, the episode being international, and the parent in possession British, the person to be confided in would be one in the uniform of His Britannic Majesty, and of substantial appearance. “What Maisie Knew,” again, happened to be the first book by the late Mr. James that I ever read—and, if it hadn’t happened to be the first, it would still have remained—and it does still remain for me—the book by that very great writer that most “matters”. For your benefit, if you “don’t know your James,” I may as well say that this is the story of a child moving amongst elemental passions that are veiled. But, of course, elemental passions can never be veiled enough not to get through to the consciousness, if not to the intelligence of the child in the house. So, in an atmosphere of intrigues, divorces, prides, jealousies, litigations, conducted as these things are conducted in this country, by what it is convenient to call “the best people”, Maisie always “knows”. She knows all about concealed relationships, as she knows all about intrigues, processes, and the points of view of old family servants. It is, of course, a horrible book, but it is very triumphantly true....

The Tommies’ bathing place at Albert was in an old mill under the shadow of a tall factory chimney at which the Huns were perpetually firing shells. As far as I know, they never hit it—but they made a nice desolation in the immediately adjacent houses. The mill, at the fork of a road, had been turned into a series of sheds and compartments, in which there were shower baths and baths with hot and cold water in very wet cubicles where you had duckboards underfoot. There were Neissen or other boilers somewhere under the ramshackle building, so that steam always filtered through and hung over the old tiles of the roof. The other ranks of various battalions had their bathing parades there at stated hours, so that officers could only get a bath in between whiles or after hours.

It was a hot day, very dusty, with the clouds from the white rubble, which was all that there was of the center of the town, and after we had wandered, I and another officer, round about the rubbish heaps, and past long-closed shops that offered us, on metal placards, bicycles, chocolates, and furniture polish, by makers well-known in France, we decided to wait in the bath itself till the battalion in possession, which was the last of the day, should have finished its ablutions. In a tiny, shuttered shop we had bought, for A Company’s mess, a small melon, five lemons, and half a bushel of windfall apples. The shop was just to the east of the Cathedral, and we went over the empty Presbytery. One of the floors was a great litter of books—Latin texts mostly. One I noticed was a 17th century edition of Livy—1652, I think. Another was a copy of Voragine’s recension of the “Golden Legend”—but whether or no it was a valuable edition, I don’t know. We left the books on the floor—out of indifference, so as not to commit sacrilege and because we had already to carry a small, netted melon, six lemons, and half a bushel of apples between us. Under my arm, moreover, I had “What Maisie Knew” in the expensive, collected edition, and we had also towels and soap. So there, in the long, dark, but not cool room, just as they had been tumbled out of the shelves, probably by the Germans, the books lay with rays of sunlight from the closed persiennes falling across broken backs, exposed leaves, half-turned title-pages....

Whilst we were passing under the immense Madonna and Child that hung over the Cathedral steps, a Hun plane dropped a couple of bombs right into the body of the church. They made pretty loud pops, and overhead our own Archies were popping away too. But what was really interesting to hear was the sifting tinkle of broken stained-glass of the windows that went on rustling, tinkling, sifting, and rustling down into the rubble in the body of the church until we were out of earshot.

I don’t mean to say that we hurried away. There was nowhere to hurry to. But the German heavy battery that had the town under its especial care was beginning to send in its evening group of shells. As far as I can remember, at that time they let off six 5-2’s at about 10:15 A.M.; six at 1:15 P.M., and six more just after 6:00 P.M. with an apparently unimaginative regularity, and usually at the same localities—the morning six falling about the desolated Place in front of the church, the lunchtime contribution in the houses along the main street. Our Second Battalion had thirty-two casualties in one room from one shell of the midday group. The evening six usually fell in the fields on the Ancre side of the town.

So we desired to get under a roof—not that a roof is any particular protection against high-explosive shells, but simply to get something between one’s self and the sky. For at times, of an evening, when one was tired, a pellucid sky would be a disagreeable thing. You didn’t know what sort of iron shard would not be coming between the light bars of blue and the bars of light dove color. Your flesh, too, felt very soft to set itself up against iron shards. And, at the moment, we were tired with the walk over the thistles of the downland and the thin air and the heat and the chalk dust. And one wanted a read in one’s book!

The by-streets were amazingly quiet; closed houses, shuttered shops, mostly unhurt; not a soul was in the blazing sunlight; not a cloud was in the sky; only, in the dust of the road three cats were motionlessly intent on love. We knocked on a closed door of the old mill. I found myself, having passed several darkish, steaming rooms in which the white nudity of many men showed against the blue-gray of flannel shirts, and the drab colors of steam-damped khaki in the shadow—I found myself in an armchair, in a very tall, quiet room. I had a sense that there was a tall, slim bookcase, a great table covered with dirty copies of English funny periodicals, and empty, cardboard fag-packets.... But I was sitting, really, in Kensington Gardens in the broad, open turfed way that slopes from the Round Point to the Serpentine. And there was a murmuring couple, by a tree trunk, upon green penny chairs. (I don’t know that I wasn’t one-half of the couple.) And Maisie was playing with Mrs. Wicks, three trees off, and Beale Farange, a little too florid, flaming and bearded, to be really one of the best people, was bearing down upon them—or was it us?—in the shadow of the well-behaved foliage under the polite skies.

I was vaguely conscious of voices. My companion was talking to some one else—about some battalion of some regiment; about some division, not ours; about the nature of the trenches in front of Bazentin-le-Petit. But, at any rate, for the moment, the fictitious-real had got so much the upper hand of the real-real that I was as engrossed as any schoolboy reading Ivanhoe in the twilight. It is a good tribute to pay the master. He was dying then.

But I was vaguely unhappy too—unhappy about it all. I don’t mean that I was unhappy with the ire of the moralist—for I never set up to be a moralist. Only I felt the queer uneasiness that, in those days, one was beginning to feel when one came in contact with civilians.

One began to hear hollow voices, sounding portentous through closed shutters.

“Fall in there! A Company on the right. Towels on the left arm. Number off!”—voices coming from the roadway. And one looked up from one’s book, thinking the time had come for one’s bath. There existed again the tall room, with grayish wallpaper; the atmosphere of steam; the tall window; the tall bookcase, whose panes, behind thin, curved mahogany divisions showed a faded, stretched curtain of torn green silk. The table was less littered than it had been. It had a dusty, red baize cover, much stained with ink. I suppose this was the miller’s office. I don’t know what had become of my companion. He was a restless, energetic boy, always on the jump. Whilst I had been in the broad avenue in Kensington, he had probably pressed until they had got him a bath-cubicle cleaned and ready. At any rate, a very old Tommy of the Lincolns, toothless, whitehaired, with tunic undone and tarnished buttons, told me I must still wait whilst my bath was preparing.

He said I was mistaken in thinking that he was a noncombatant permanently in charge of the baths. He was just a Tommy of the Lincolns; he had come straight out of the trenches in front of Bazentin-le-Petit the night before. Five days before that they had relieved us in the same trenches. Now another division had gone in. He had been put in charge of the baths that morning, so he hadn’t had time to clean his buttons, or even his rifle. He supposed he might get strafed for that. Yes; it was trying, the life of the trenches for a man of his age. He was sixty-two—sixty-four—over sixty, at any rate.

I told him to stand easy, and he sat down on the other side of the large table and reached for an old pipe. Then he folded his wrinkled hands before him on the cloth, looked at me hopefully, and exclaimed: “I suppose you know the firm of Bolsover & Jupp of Golden Square. The great solicitors.”

I did not know them; but when I said I did not, he appeared so distressed: “What? Not the great solicitors? To the Mansion House, the Common Council, the Tilbury and Southend Railway!”—so distressed that I had to pretend at last that I did.

“Well!” he said. “I was clerk in their office for twenty-four years!”

Twenty——four——years! He seemed to think that the statement entitled him to feel an enormous pride. No doubt it did.

He must have had a streak of the adventurous in his composition—but no one could have seemed less adventurous or more static. As he sat there, his hands, whitened by dabbling all that day in bath water, and folded before him on the dirty red baize, he looked as if he had sat there all his life and as if he would never move. He was so faded that you would not have given him credit even for the amount of sharpness necessary to a solicitor’s clerk; you would have said that he was an aged shepherd on a bench outside the workhouse door. I think he was the most memorable figure of the war, for me.

Of course, one’s mind is capricious in these things—but this was his biography, of which I have forgotten nothing—though I have, of course, forgotten most of his exact words. For twenty-four years clerk to Messrs. Bolsover & Jupp, this man who now was mostly preoccupied with the fact that he would be “strafed” for not “cleanin’ ’is ’ipe ... I mean rifle, sir!” had gone at the age of forty-eight—to Canada, to make his fortune, nothing less! He had left two sons, both married, in London. He and his “missus” worked in a factory—a “notions” factory, which was then engaged in adding to the beauty of the world by manufacturing colored and embossed tin-lids; later it made fancy brass buttons and can-openers. “Et comme il était très fort, hardi, courageux et avisé”—he soon obtained, not like St. Julian the Hospitalier, the command of a battalion—but a wage sufficient to let him save money. They saved money, he and his missus, and after eight years, they built themselves a frame house—“a proper, warm ’aouse for them frosty winters and we had one of those ’ere proper iron stoves. Proper!”

On the first morning of the new house—I presume his missus had lit the proper stove—he was jest a-puttin’ on his collar, when he heard a crackling. He thought it was the frost in the apple trees, cracking the boughs. But, in forty minutes the house was gone.

He had meant to insure that afternoon. So he and his missus—he never described her, but I think she must have been a gallant soul—aged fifty-six a-piece, went back to boarding-house life and work in the “notion” factory. Next autumn, coming back from work one evening, he noticed in a neighbor’s lot, a fine apple tree. Proper, with apples on it, these ’ere large coddlins! He offered the neighbor two dollars for the apples on the tree and peddled them round the town.

In five years, at that trade, he had made enough to think of “retiring”. Then he see in the pipers that Hengland needed men. So he ses to his missus: “We’ve got money enough to do as we please. Let’s go and see what we can do to ’elp the ol’ gal....” As if Victoria had been still on the throne. They came to London, and he went to see the ol’ firm. His sons said to him: No, they were married men with families. “So I says to the missus: ‘I ain’t got no family, I ain’t.’” And he bought her an ’aouse at ’Endon and an annuity, through the ol’ firm. That had taken till February, 1916. He was apologetic over the delay, but he had wanted to see the ol’ woman settled comfortable.

February, 1916—it was then July. Thirteen weeks training, you see, and he had been two months in France, “mostly on this ’ere ol’ Somme.” He was sixty-one years and four months of age. And he said he felt tired.

There was about his narration nothing of the “narquois” humor of the cockney; but, colorlessly, as tired farm-laborers talk, he went on talking—as if it was just the Will of God. I met some of his officers a couple of weeks later and asked about him, but his story grew rather hazy. They found a Company Sergeant-Major who said he had thought the old man was a bit too old for his job in the trenches. I daresay the old man had found rough gentlenesses and kindly helping hands from his mate and the noncommissioned officers of his battalion. He would have, of course. So the C.S.M. had detailed him for caretaker at the baths. The old man had enlisted as being thirty years and six months of age—just half his years. The C.S.M. remembered that; but he didn’t know what had become of the man. He rather thought he had been killed on the 24/7/’16 by a shell pitched in the battle, but perhaps he hadn’t.

It was mostly his tired voice and his colorless narration that had impressed me with him. I didn’t think much about—I did not even realize—the rather stupendous Odyssey of a life he must have had until I stood on that balcony of the Paris theater, in the night, with the French officers. You see, it was anyhow such a tremendous Odyssey for every one there that a little more or less at the moment did not jump to the eye as mattering. But, underneath, in the subconscious mind, it mattered.

I daresay—nay, I am sure—that it was that quality that mattered to me more than anything else of the whole cause for thought that the war gave one. For me—apart from Lord Kitchener and Sir Edward Grey—there were few great figures of those years. Sir Edward Grey went out of course once war was declared: then Kitchener went. There remained this Tommy of the Lincolns and I think Lt. Morgan of my own battalion was then still alive. Henri Gaudier was certainly dead—and he, in my mind, was united to the Lincolnshire Private and Morgan. They had, all three, a certain serenity.

I wish I could remember Morgan’s initials. He had a brother, “I. H.”—a nice boy. I hope he is still alive.

But the Morgan who is dead sounded, as it were, exactly the same note as the Lincolnshire man—the note of tired but continuous laboring after a very hard life. You know the sort of effect a violin has when its strings are muted. It was like that.

I think Morgan must have had his last leave at the same time as myself when I went out the second time; but I don’t think we went out together. At any rate, we took together a very long railway journey—but I don’t remember why or where—probably because I spent it listening to the story of his life. I remember his tired movements as he took his knapsack down from the rack whilst the train was running into some terminus. And I remember it seemed to me to be a shame—on the part of destiny—that he should be going out at all. I met him next night in Coventry Street—and he did not seem to be getting much out of Coventry Street after dark. We stood talking for a minute, and then he disappeared among the prostitutes and the flash Jews. I expect we each said: “Good luck, old man,” for I believe he liked me, and I must have liked him very much.

He was killed, as I have said, by a minenwerfer as he was going up a communication-trench on his first night. He was buried so that, in the morning when they found him, only his feet and legs were showing. He was probably not buried alive, because the officer who found him said that he was smiling. I like to think of that.

Because these were the men who needed—who must have had if indeed there be a just God or even merely a deity who gives compensations—a period of sanctuary after their very hard labors. It doesn’t matter about you and me....

But poor old Morgan ... I don’t know what age he was. I daresay he was no more than thirty-two, little and brown and persistent—his face was thin, aquiline, and as if hardened and sand-blasted by the perpetual confrontation of winds full of hail. For he too had gone out to Canada—but as a boy, apparently without much capital, to work for wheat-farmers.

I suppose most people know something about working for Canadian farmers—the long solitudes, the distance of the towns, the protracted buggy rides over immense plains. Well, I seem to have an extraordinary sense of it—just from the way Morgan talked on that long train journey. I don’t know that I remember incidents. Perhaps I could. I remember that, knowing little about horses at the beginning, he was asked by the boss if he would take a helluva vicious team to the nearest township to fetch something, a plow, I think. And he had done it.

But the main of the story was just the long strain—long hours merging into long years, with the muscles always a little overstrained. Not much, but a little. Because, though gallant, persistent, and showing it as the Welsh do, he was small for wrestling with tree trunks and immense plains. I remember his saying that when he had dug holes for the posts of wire fencing, he poured water in so that the posts should freeze solid in their places.

Well, he too must have been “hardi, courageux, et avisé”—leading a long, uncolored life of sober chastity, without many visits to the townships even, let alone the towns. For, as he sat in the carriage, he said that he owned property—timber lots and other lots, bought out of the savings of a laborer.

And he spoke of going back there, après la guerre finie—with the serene resignation of a man with no other imaginable destiny before him. It was to be more toil and more toil and more toil. He did not, apparently, ask for—certainly he did not imagine—any other future. So that resignation is not the right word. Serenity is....

X From a Balcony

One of the French officers, on the balcony of the theater, during the entr’acte of Lakme, was describing, with that depressed neatness of quiet diction that is at the disposal of every educated Frenchman, the sleep of a French territorial on an uncompleted traverse. The others had, as it were—and as if by preconcertion—capped stories in lauding and pitying the territoriaux. These troops, it may be as well to point out, were something like the Labor Battalions that subsequently we raised. I fancy we had nothing of the sort at that date and indeed, between Hélie and Corbie I had lately seen the Guards’ Brigade doing fatigue that, in French-France would have been performed by old fathers and grandfathers. That, of course, is nothing to the discredit of that great brigade. As soon as battalions, brigades, or divisions came out of the trenches for a “rest”, they were given the cheerful jobs of repairing rear-line trenches, digging drains, cleaning out latrines, and the like. When we came out from the Somme for a “month’s rest”, first A Company, then B, C, and D were given an all-night fatigue—of mending the Albert-Amiens road! And in August! Then we were moved up into the salient.

At any rate, slowly, coldly, and without the shadow of a shade of cordiality, in the blackness of the Paris night, the French officers piled it up. We were not popular in France at that date, and I don’t know that, except as individuals, we deserved popularity. That does not matter. The fact remained that they were “out” to make one feel that from under every little cowering roof in France, from Orange as from the frontier by Mentone to the other frontier by Longwy, old, stiff men, with horny hands and faded eyes had marched over the endless roads with the poplars to their too-heavy labors amidst the bursting shells.... From under every cowering roof of every township, town, hamlet, and parish; from every arrondissement; from every subprefecture; from every departement. Coldly, like inquisitors, in the darkness, they let me have that information. It was not really necessary. I knew it already. But I was too tired, harassed, dispirited to tell them so. I, too, was old for that job. Atque ego....

For I couldn’t get away from the conviction that they were talking at me with a purpose—that they were, in indirect terms, telling me that it was a scandal that the Brigade of Guards should be employed in clearing out latrines, work which, in French-France, was performed by the fathers and the grandfathers—the guards being tired out and worn down by such employment when they were such splendid fighting material and should have been really rested. I daresay our own war office would have answered that that was part of our discipline and that “fatigues” when men were “resting” were good for their livers and kept them “fit”. There is such a school of thought. Anyhow, I am not writing a military treatise and do not ask that any attention should be paid to my views. I am only chronicling the psychology of an Infantry officer as he was affected by certain circumstances.

And I couldn’t get away from the conviction that the French officers were talking “officially”. In those days there had just been published in Paris a book of “official” propaganda by myself. It would not have been a different book if it had been unofficial or if there had been no war. It simply advanced the theory that in the world of letters and ideas, for personal industry and pride in work as work, it is only France that matters among the nations. I had said that when I was twenty; I resaid it then being over double that age; I resay it today; and I will resay it as my eyes close in death. No one in my country has ever paid any attention to one’s saying it, and no one ever will. Why should they? Letters and ideas have so little place in our body politic and the doctrine of pride in work as work; of engrossment and of serenity; of aloofness from the world and of introspection with no other purpose—is here anathema both with the Right which hates the doctrine of Art for Art’s sake and with the Left, which hates that of Labor for the sake of Labor. Yet I see no other lesson in life. That is why I have collected these notes upon sheepfolds—this long lay sermon.

So this particular piece of official propaganda was, just then, being accorded an extraordinary amount of notoriety in France. The skill of our own propaganda people and the patriotism of distinguished Frenchmen accounted for that. It was reviewed at enormous length and with enormous headlines by Academicians, by assailants of the French Academy, and by the Mayors of Rouen, Lyons, and Toulouse. It was “communicated” to the Institute of France; publicly laid upon the shelves of the city library of Yvetot. And it was no doubt on that account that the French officers presented official views to me so carefully and so excruciatingly. They imagined that I had weight in the Councils of the Empire, as would have been the case in their own country.

While they talked the black houses round the market had infinite depths of violet against the white stars. But all the same I was looking at the view from the top of the great brick Roman Theater at Orange—over the flats with the ragged, stunted vines, the stubble, and the thatched roofs. Yes, I knew that beside Orange the little houses cowered beside the furrows and that on the other frontier great, gaunt piles were subsiding under scrolls and tongues of flame, going down to a last rest as the very tired men of a platoon will fall out beside the road. And the great buildings never get up again.

For I never feel that houses have souls. So that, when, out there, you saw a house go down as fire, it seemed to do it luxuriously almost. It was finished with men and their ways. It had no doubt borne for long with their cruelties, stupidities, imbecilities; with its windows for mournful eyes it had seen the generations flit past and fade. It had known cold that made its timbers crack and the great heat of the sun warping them. But beneath the flames, slowly, it would sink to the earth from which it had come. Yes, luxuriously, as men stretch themselves down for a long rest....

The French officer was still talking about the old territorial who had fallen asleep. It seems that the old man had gone on working, after his mates had been taken off for a spell, on the inner face of the traverse—which is a sort of pillar of earth with a gangway round it, left in a trench to minimize the lateral spread of shell fire. He had gone on working—out of pure zeal, the officer said. The officer addressed me with hard bitterness. I suppose he thought I was some sort of noncombatant. The staff-captain told me afterward that this officer, being aide-de-camp to one of the most famous French generals of division of the day had, the night before, attended his chief to a dinner—given, I think, by the British A.P.M.—in the course of which the heroic doings of a great many British Regiments were extolled. And then, in a pause, an English lady had said to the French general: “And the French haven’t done so badly.”... I was being made to suffer for this.

And I did suffer a good deal—more I think than I ever suffered. The officer went on and on about his old territorial. He was there, asleep, in the light of a single candle stuck in the clay. He was as it were spread-eagled against the earth. His legs apart he had raised his hammer to strike his chisel; both his arms were over his head, stretched out. And he was just asleep. It was touching; it was terrible in its simplicity, the officer said. He said the territorial came from Passy—as it might be Putney.

It was just at this point that I remembered Morgan and the old man of the bath-mill. I daresay you will think it merely a literary trick, when I say that I saw them.

But I saw them: against an immense black mass fringed by flaming houses. I saw those two, tired faces; the two serene, honest, and simple souls, who had the Kingdom of God within them. And it seemed to me that they had died in vain.

It was for me the most terrible moment of the war.

I daresay that for many people it was the most horrible period of the war. For, by then it had become apparent that the Somme advance was a fiasco—a useless butchery. We knew we should never advance. I daresay the French knew it better than we. Certainly the voices of these officers drove it home: they spoke as if they were talking to a condemned criminal. And I think it was not right of them.

We, at any rate, were the old voluntary army. We had come, aged or young, from the ends of the earth. I don’t know whether it is worse to be old or young in a great war—it was bad enough to be old! And I don’t know whether it was better or worse to have come from the ends of the earth—or from Passy. Or to have passed all one’s life beneath a roof that shuddered with fear.... If you had done that, you were more used to the idea, and to the discipline of the idea, of war. You discussed the moves, here and there, more en connoisseur.

But I doubt if one of those men on the balcony felt the war as I did. We, after all, brought so many more emotions to it. You had only to contrast Paris, gray, sober, much as usual, with the roads under leisurely repair, and the old horses and the old cochers and voitures dawdling in the shadow of the plane-trees—with London, plastered with endless appeals in blue and scarlet and yellow—London, hurrying, exclaiming, clamoring.... The old territorial had lived all his life under the shadow—and it came. The old private of the Lincolnshires had never thought of such an end. But it came! And Europe flamed....

And the worst of it all was that one was beginning to doubt. Until then one had been carried by the fine wave of enthusiasm. It seemed to embrace the whole country. And we in all the holes, valleys, over all the downlands of the Somme, where the sun shone with its chalky rays as it does by L——, had had a great singleness of purpose and had been confident that we had the support of a great singleness of purpose extending across a world. But doubt had begun to creep in....

I wished, then, that I had not read “What Maisie Knew” in the bath at Albert. I wished that the daily papers would not reach us. The atmosphere shown so overwhelmingly in the book was beginning to be too close to the atmosphere reflected in the papers. And we were, truly, very lonely out there; truly we were some millions of men, suspended on a raft, in limitless space.

And we were beginning to feel a curious dislike of the civilians whom up till then we had so trusted—a curious dislike that was never to die. I don’t know what was going on at home: political intrigues no doubt; strikes possibly. But there seemed to prevail a tenuous, misty struggle of schemes—just the atmosphere of “Maisie.” I don’t think that many of those who were one’s comrades in illo die did not at times feel a certain hopelessness. It was as if at times we said: What are those people after? Aren’t they—aren’t they surely?—“out” to make huge profits from our poor Tommies; to cut down the rations of our poor Tommies; and to gain notoriety by forcing on a timorous central government their own schemes for the training of poor Tommies—schemes that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of our poor fine Tommies? And, when their own attractions were enhanced by the bringing off of this or that scheme, intrigue, or cabal, they would vote to themselves ribbons, orders, power, divorces, and the right to gallons of petrol. And so they would sit in the chairs of the lost and the forgotten amidst a world where the ideals which sent all those millions to destruction were lost too ... and forgotten. You will say that this is bitter. It is. It was bitter to have seen the 38th Division murdered in Mametz Wood—and to guess what underlay that!...

And then the French officer said what I knew he would say: what I had known that, with all his cold lack of rhetoric, he was working up to. He said that the old, sleeping territorial looked like Our Lord on Calvary. I could have screamed. Upon my soul I could have screamed. And, if I hadn’t thought it just possible that his dislike attached to me personally, I daresay I should have talked to him as I talked to the other French officer as the reader may see in Une Partie de Cricket. But the faint hope that it was just myself that he despised and not poor Morgan and the others—all the poor others along that long front of ours—that faint hope that he was attacking only me and not the Army of the Somme just made me hold my peace until we went back into the theater. And in the theater I suddenly remembered—as clearly as I had remembered the others—Henri Gaudier. He, too, seemed to stand before me and to smile at me a little, as if he found me comic....

I do not know why it is that now, when I think of Gaudier, the cadence that I hear in my mind should be one of sadness. For there was never any one further from sadness than Henri Gaudier, whether in his being or in his fate. He had youth; he had grace of person and of physique; he had a sense of the comic. He had friendships, associates in his work, loves, the hardships that help youth. He had genius, and he died a hero.

He comes back to me best as he was at a function of which I remember most, except for Gaudier, disagreeable sensations—embarrassments. It was an “affair”—one of two—financed by a disagreeably obese Neutral whom I much disliked. That would be in late July, 1914. The Neutral was much concerned to get out of a country and a city which appeared to be in danger. Some one else—several some ones—were intensely anxious, each of them, to get money out of the very fat, very monied, disagreeably intelligent being. And I was ordered, by Les Jeunes, to be there. It was a parade, in fact. I suppose that even then I was regarded as a, I hope benevolent, grandfather, by a number of members of an advanced school.⁠[7] Anyhow, that comes back to me as a disagreeable occasion of evil passions, evil people, of bad, flashy cooking in an underground haunt of pre-war smartness.

I daresay it was not really as bad as all that—but when I am forced to receive the hospitality of persons whom I dislike, the food seems to go bad, and there is a bad taste in the mouth, symbol of a disturbed liver. So the band played in that cave and the head ached and there were nasty foreign waiters and bad, very expensive, champagne.

There were also speeches—and one could not help knowing that the speeches were directed at the Neutral’s breeches pockets. The Neutral leaned heavily sideways at table, devouring the bad food at once with gluttony and nonchalance. It talked about its motor car, which apparently was at Liverpool or Southampton—somewhere where there were liners, quays, cordage, cranes; all ready to abandon a city which would be doomed should Armageddon become Armageddon. The speeches went on....

Then Gaudier rose. It was suddenly like a silence that intervened during a distressing and ceaseless noise. I don’t know that I had ever noticed him before except as one amongst a crowd of dirtyish, bearded, slouch-hatted individuals, like conspirators; but, there, he seemed as if he stood amidst sunlight; as if indeed he floated in a ray of sunlight, like the dove in Early Italian pictures. In a life during which I have known thousands of people; thousands and thousands of people; during which I have grown sick and tired of “people” so that I prefer the society of cabbages, goats, and the flowers of the marrow plant; I have never otherwise known what it was to witness an appearance which symbolized so completely—aloofness. It was like the appearance of Apollo at a creditors’ meeting. It was supernatural.

It was just that. One didn’t rub one’s eyes: one was too astounded. Only, something within one wondered what the devil he was doing there. If he hadn’t seemed so extraordinarily efficient, one would have thought he had strayed, from another age, from another world, from some Hesperides. One keeps wanting to say that he was Greek, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t of a type that strayed: and indeed I seem to feel his poor bones moving in the August dust of Neuville St. Vaast when I—though even only nearly!—apply to him a name that he would have hated. At any rate, it was amazing to see him there; since he seemed so entirely inspired by inward visions that one wondered what he could be after—certainly not the bad dinner, the attentions of the foreign waiters, a try at the Neutral’s money-bag strings. No, he spoke as if his eyes were fixed on a point within himself; and yet, with such humor and such good-humor—as if he found the whole thing so comic!

One is glad of the comic in his career; it would otherwise have been too much an incident of the Elgin marble type. But even the heroism of his first, abortive “joining up” was heroico-comic. As I heard him tell the story, or at least as I remember it, it was like this:

He had gone to France in the early days of the war—and one accepted his having gone as one accepted the closing of a door—of a tomb, if you like. Then, suddenly, he was once more there. It produced a queer effect; it was a little bewildering in a bewildering world. But it became comic. He had gone to Boulogne and presented himself to the Recruiting Officer—an N. C. O., or captain, of the old school, white moustachios, cheveux en brosse. Gaudier stated that he had left France without having performed his military duties, but, since la patrie was in danger, he had returned like any other good little piou-piou. But the sergeant, martinet-wise, as became a veteran of 1870, struck the table with his fist and exclaimed:

“Non, mon ami, it is not la patrie, but you who are in danger. You are a deserter; you will be shot.” So Gaudier was conducted to a motor, in which, under the military escort of two files of men, a sergeant, a corporal, and a lieutenant, he was whirled off to Calais. In Calais Town he was placed in an empty room. Outside the door were stationed two men with large guns, and Gaudier was told that, if he opened the door, the guns would go off. That was his phrase. He did not open the door. He spent several hours reflecting that though they manage these things better in France, they don’t manage them so damn well. At the end of that time he pushed aside the window blind and looked out. The room was on the ground floor; there were no bars. Gaudier opened the window; stepped into the street, just like that—and walked back to Boulogne.

He returned to London.

He was drawn back again to France by the opening of the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral. This time he had a safe conduct from the Embassy. I do not know the date of his second joining up or the number of his regiment. At any rate, he took part in an attack on a Prussian outpost on Michaelmas Eve, so he had not much delayed, and his regiment was rendered illustrious, though it cannot have given him a deuce of a lot of training. He did not need it. He was as hard as nails and as intelligent as the devil. He was used to forging and grinding his own chisels. He was inured to the hardships of poverty in great cities; he was accustomed to hammer and chisel at his marble for hours and hours of day after day. He was a “fit” townsman—and it was “fit” townsmen who conducted the fighting of 1914 when the war was won: it was les parigots.

Of his biography I have always had only the haziest of notions. I know that he was the son of a Meridional craftsman, a carpenter and joiner, who was a good workman and no man could have a better. His father was called Joseph Gaudier—so why he called himself B’jesker, I do not know. I prefer really to be hazy; because Gaudier will always remain for me something supernatural. He was for me a “message” at a difficult time of life. His death and the death at the same time of another boy—but quite a commonplace, nice boy—made a rather doubtful way quite plain to me.

All my life I have been very much influenced by a Chinese proverb—to the effect that it would be hypocrisy to seek for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low teahouse. It is a bad proverb, because it is so wise and so enervating. It has “ruined my career”.

When, for instance, I founded a certain Review, losing, for me, immense sums of money on it, or when the contributors unanimously proclaimed that I had not paid them for their contributions—which was not true because they certainly had among them a quantity of my money in their pockets—or when a suffrage bill failed to pass in the Commons; or when some one’s really good book has not been well reviewed; or when I have been robbed, slandered, or abortively blackmailed—in all the vicissitudes of life, misquoted on it, I have always first shrugged my shoulders and murmured that it would be hypocrisy to seek for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low tea-shop. It meant that it would be hypocrisy to expect a taste for the finer letters in a large public’s discernment in critics; honesty in æsthetes or literati; public spirit in lawgivers; accuracy in pundits; gratitude in those one has saved from beggary, and so on.

So, when I first noticed Henri Gaudier—which was in an underground restaurant, the worst type of thieves’ kitchen—these words rose to my lips. I did not, you understand, believe that he would exist and be so wise, so old, so gentle, so humorous, such a genius. I did not really believe that he had shaved, washed, assumed garments that fitted his great personal beauty.

For he had great personal beauty. If you looked at him casually, you imagined that you were looking at one of those dock-rats of the Marseilles quays, who will carry your baggage for you, pimp for you; garotte you and throw your body overboard—but who will do it all with an air, an ease, an exquisiteness of manners! They have, you see, the traditions and inherited knowledge of such ancient nations in Marseilles—of Etruscans, Phoenicians, Colonial Greeks, Late Romans, Troubadours, Late French—and that of those who first sang the Marseillaise! And many of them, whilst they are young, have the amazing beauty that Gaudier had. Later, absinthe spoils it—but for the time, they are like Arlésiennes.

All those wisdoms, then, looked out of the eyes of Gaudier—and God only knows to what he threw back—to Etruscans or Phoenicians, no doubt, certainly not to the Greeks who colonized Marseilles, or the Late Romans who succeeded to them. He seemed, then, to have those wisdoms behind his eyes somewhere. And he had, certainly, an astounding erudition.

I don’t know where he picked it up—but his conversation was overwhelming—and his little history of sculpture by itself will give you more flashes of inspiration than you will ever, otherwise, gather from the whole of your life. His sculpture itself affected me just as he did.

In odd places—the sitting rooms of untidy and eccentric poets with no particular merits, in appalling exhibitions, in nasty night clubs, in dirty restaurants one would be stopped for a moment in the course of a sentence by the glimpse of a brutal chunk of rock that seemed to have lately fallen unwanted from a slate quarry, or, in the alternative, by a little piece of marble that seemed to have the tightened softness of the haunches of a fawn—of some young creature of the underwoods, an ancient, shyly-peopled, thicket.

The brutalities would be the work of Mr. Epstein—the other, Gaudier. For Gaudier’s work had just his own, personal, impossible quality. And one did not pay much attention to it simply because one did not believe in it. It was too good to be true. Remembering the extraordinary rush that the season of 1914 was, it appears a miserable tragedy, but it is not astonishing, that one’s subliminal mind should whisper to me, every time we caught that glimpse of a line: “It is hypocrisy to search for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low tea-house.” It was of course the devil who whispered that. So I never got the sensation I might have got from that line. Because one did not believe in that line. One thought: “It is just the angle at which one’s chair in the restaurant presents to one an accidental surface of one of these young men’s backs.”

And then a day came when there was no doubt about it. Gaudier was a Lance Corporal in the 4th Section, 7th Company, 129th Regt. of Infantry of the Line.⁠[8] Gaudier was given his three stripes for “gallantry in face of the enemy”. One read in a letter:

“I am at rest for three weeks in a village, that is, I am undergoing a course of study to be promoted officer when necessary during an offensive.”

Or in another letter:

“I imagine a dull dawn, two lines of trenches, and in between explosion on explosion with clouds of black and yellow smoke, a ceaseless noise from the rifles, a few legs and heads flying, and me standing up among all this like to Mephisto—commanding: ‘Feu par salves à 250 mètres—joue—feu!’

“Today is magnificent, a fresh wind, clear sun, and larks singing cheerfully....”

That was it!

But just because it was so commonplace; so sordid, so within the scope of all our experiences, powers of observation, and recording, it all seemed impossible to believe that in that particular low tea-house there were really Youth, Beauty, Erudition, Fortune, Genius—to believe in the existence of a Gaudier! The devil still whispered to me: “That would be hypocrisy!” For if you would not believe that genius could show itself during the season of 1914, how could you believe that, of itself, inscrutable, noiseless, it would go out of our discreditable world where the literati and the æsthetes were sweating, harder than they ever, ever did after le mot juste or the Line of Beauty, to find excuses that should keep them from the trenches—that, so quietly, the greatest genius of them all would go into that world of misery.

And then I read:

“Mort pour la patrie.

“After ten months of fighting and two promotions for gallantry, on the field, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, in a charge at Neuville St. Vaast. June 5, 1915.”

Alas, when it was too late, I had learned that, to this low tea-shop that the world is, from time to time the Sacred Emperor may pay visits. So I began to want to kill certain people. I still do—for the sake of Gaudier and those few who are like him.

For the effect of reading that announcement was to make me remember with extraordinary vividness a whole crowd of the outlines of pieces of marble, of drawings, of tense and delicate lines at which, in the low tea-house of the year before’s season, I had only nonchalantly glanced. The Sacred Emperor, then, had been there. He seemed, at last, to be an extraordinarily real figure—as real as one of the other sculptor’s brutal chunks of granite. Only, because of the crowd one hadn’t seen him—the crowd of blackmailers,⁠[9] sneak-thieves, suborners, pimps, reviewers, and the commonplace and the indifferent—the Huns of London. Well, it became—and it still more remains! one’s duty to try to kill them. There are probably several Sacred Emperors still at large—though the best of them will have been killed, as Gaudier was.

It was whilst I was inside the theater that I registered, as the saying is, a mental vow that I would pay no attention any more to public affairs. To do so would drive one mad. I decided that I must put my head down under the cloth for the rest of the war. And I think I did so. Except for the occasional duty of writing propaganda—which from that time onwards I did in French—I paid no more attention to the politics of my country or the world. I just did the collar-work of the Infantry Officer until the 11/11/’17. After that, my views being too favorable to France, the Ministry of Information and the censor suppressed or lost in the post my rather excited writings on the Terms of Peace.... That would be about three years ago today. It seems a long while....

The inside of the theater was brilliant, formal, a little shabby if you looked closely. Of the performance of Lakme—an opera that I love very much, since the music is soft, moving, and generous—I remember very little. So it must have been a good rendering with no performer in particular “sticking out”. The British naval officers were rather funny. And I think it is no left-handed compliment to the composer, Délibes—though it may be to the librettist—to say that my thoughts were elsewhere. The music was just sensuous pleasure; the aspect of the house, spreading round in great lines of polychromatic humanity, more regular than is the case with most theaters in London—more suave and more classical—soothed one after what was certainly an emotional crisis; an escaped danger. For it would have mortified me for the rest of my life if I had burst out under the goadings of the French officers. But, by the Grace of God and the skin of my teeth, I had retained, quite certainly, my aspect of insular phlegm.

Still it had been exhausting—and I was enervated. And then, quite suddenly, it came to me to wonder what was going on outside the theater—what was going on under the black roof of the night, with the infinitely numerous population of leaves, blades, branches, reeds beside streams, great trees in the woodlands—and with the silent, watchful population of the thickets where the shadows are so extremely deep. I found myself wondering what time of year it was. And I said: the first weeks of September. For that morning I had recollected that, two years before on that day, the Germans had turned back from in front of Paris. Forty-six years before they had won the battle of Sedan.

It was, then, during the first weeks of September. But what happened—in September? One forgot. One had repaired trenches; one had commanded fatigues digging drains round Bn.H.Q., to the left of Mount Kemmel. One had dug so efficiently that, during the first thunderstorm the repaired trenches below were neck-deep in water. All that had passed in “the Country”.

But what happened in September? There were no doubt apples on the trees, and, certainly, it was the time of year when many cobwebs, frail nets across the tall grasses on commons or single, brilliant filaments, streamed out and glistened on still, bright days.

There would be plums, too; but what about damsons? Wasn’t it early for them? And how about garden peas? Were they over? And field peas? And would there be an autumn feel in the air?

It was twenty-one days to Michaelmas—and Michaelmas certainly brought the autumn feeling, with touches of vine in the shadow of yellowing plants and the leaves of sunflowers drooping straight down, like unfurled colors on windless days. But in copses, shaves, and spinneys were the leaves on forest trees yet turning? Were roads yet hard and frosty in the morning? And were horses yet sluggish and apt to stumble on roads as they do at the turn of the year and the fall of the leaf?... Time to give ’em a ball.

The baffled mind seemed to stumble at all these questions. One was in the theater and having been forbidden by the will to think that what surrounded the great walls with their human lining was a vast black map fringed by conflagrations, the poor mind hung faltering.

It fell suddenly back on contemplating the green nook that—on the down behind Albert—it had reserved for itself. Yes, the mind actually did that. And, across the gilding of the proscenium, across Lakme’s singing the great song of yearning, there hung a slight shimmer of green that intensified itself and took shape like a recumbent oval.... And there began to become visible the yellowing, grayish rows of broad beans; a rather ragged hedge and a little stream beyond, level with the grass and fringed with the glistening stems of clumps of rushes that had been cut for thatching stacks. Because it was indeed September.

XI “Rosalie Prudent”

One evening the compiler addressed Gringoire, who was making notes in a seed catalogue, somewhat as follows:

“Do you remember, oh Gringoire, what it is to awake of a September morning at dawn? Being horticulteur, your first thought will be for the weather: being poète, your first thought will be for your new volume. And the two first thoughts will overlay the one the other, according as chance wills. But the still mist is so reassuring as to the weather that you can put that aside and think only of your volume. The goodly fruits of the earth in the late summer season, the plums, the apples, the quinces; the maize, the marrows, the melons, have yet another day, for sure, of bright, warm sun, of gorgeous, mellow downward shavers of sun. They, surely, shall stand motionless in the warmth.

“But the poems ... oh my poor Gringoire of the dawn: the great, half-finished epic! Ah that! that seemed so glowing too when last night in the golden light of the two candles, in your poor little, rickety salon that yet has a style of its own ... you read them to Madame Sélysette ... the poor verses that you read so famously to little Madame!... In the dawn, ah, the wolf of the night that says: ‘Hou ... hou’ from the mountains has not gone home! Almost you hear his sniffing round the little green door that, because yours is a land of idylls and the innocent, you have left open. One day the wolf with the great, cocked hairy ears, with the long white teeth like razors for their sharpness shall come in. You will hear upon the uncarpeted stairway the pad of the feet; the little thin door will push open, and raised at the foot of your small white bed, you will see the great beast; the huge head; the bloodshot eyes.... And Madame, in the other little white bed across the small white room will moan a little in her sleep....

“All the poor verses: the little lines! How shall they be the barbed wire fence that shall keep the wolf from the door of the cottage? Why, he could push the poor, tindery old walls down with his snout! The poor verses! They halt ... or no, they do not halt. We are too good a craftsman for that! But assuredly they do not run. And the publisher! What shall he say? And Madame with such a need of a new gown: it should have been of velvet, puffed in the arms, and slashed to show an undercoat of crushed rose silk. And to tell the truth—your pantalons? How they shine in the seat, like a mirror! And the public! Ah, the grim public that has no taste but for dominoes in the cafés of an evening! How shall they care for the savor of lavender and rosemary in your smaller verses? What, to them, are Melpomene and Mélisande and Maleine and Musidore of your epic! And the cursed ‘machinery’ of the enormous poem! What has become of your great device that was to take the story forward from line 1100 to line 1424? Forgotten! O Apollo! O Euterpe! Forgotten—gone—your brain is failing. Your diet of oatmeal and junket is not enough to water your gray matter with rich red blood. It is all over ... and the great wolf says ‘Hou!... hou!’ upon the mountains, though the mists are rising. And Madame, you can see, is smiling in her sleep! Ah! When you are suspended by your cravat from the old thorn tree, she will marry the rich son of the apothecary....