Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 676
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 pyjamas, 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-martialled 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 pyjamas 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 someone 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.1 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-grey plain, looked away to the east, and saw hills like camels’ humps cutting still horizons; and the same on the west.
1 I am aware that D.H.Q. was not really at Dranoutre, which was a nice little place, built round a church square, rendered nasty by the Germans. But I call it Dranoutre out of reflex action caused by fear of the Censor — who once, at the end of 1918, struck out of one of my poems an allusion to the fact that I visited Cardiff early in 1915.
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 centre, towards 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 rivalled 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 grey 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 aeroplanes 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, grey, 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-grey 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 centre of the lowest part of the dip, Gringoire said, there appeared to be a whitish grey tooth stump, decayed, with one end-fragment rather high.1 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 centre. 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.
1 I am aware that D.H.Q. was not really at Dranoutre, which was a nice little place, built round a church square, rendered nasty by the Germans. But I call it Dranoutre out of reflex action caused by fear of the Censor — who once, at the end of 1918, struck out of one of my poems an allusion to the fact that I visited Cardiff early in 1915.
‘I said to myself: “Hurray! The guns are giving them hell. Someone’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 ringoire 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 grey plains with the pollard willows marching like aligned candle flames towards 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.
CHAPTER 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.
‘But I don’t think many people in the trenches actually, and except at odd moments, ever felt active hatred against the men in the opposite lines or even those who militarily directed their operations. When they are not called on to be trustworthy or imaginative or to show human sympathy, men in the bulk are beasts fairly decent and fairly reasonable. We hated and objurgatively called “Huns”, to the furthest extent of its Hunnish hideousness, not the poor bloody footsloggers who were immediately before us. No, the word applied itself to the professors, the prosaists, the publicists, the politicians who had sent those poor blighters to prevent our going home. For if you think of it, it was a topsy-turvy arrangement. They wanted to send us home and we wanted desperately to go; yet they pushed towards our home and we away from ours....
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 someone 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.1 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-grey plain, looked away to the east, and saw hills like camels’ humps cutting still horizons; and the same on the west.
1 I am aware that D.H.Q. was not really at Dranoutre, which was a nice little place, built round a church square, rendered nasty by the Germans. But I call it Dranoutre out of reflex action caused by fear of the Censor — who once, at the end of 1918, struck out of one of my poems an allusion to the fact that I visited Cardiff early in 1915.
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 centre, towards 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 rivalled 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 grey 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 aeroplanes 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, grey, 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-grey 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 centre of the lowest part of the dip, Gringoire said, there appeared to be a whitish grey tooth stump, decayed, with one end-fragment rather high.1 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 centre. 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.
1 I am aware that D.H.Q. was not really at Dranoutre, which was a nice little place, built round a church square, rendered nasty by the Germans. But I call it Dranoutre out of reflex action caused by fear of the Censor — who once, at the end of 1918, struck out of one of my poems an allusion to the fact that I visited Cardiff early in 1915.
‘I said to myself: “Hurray! The guns are giving them hell. Someone’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 ringoire 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 grey plains with the pollard willows marching like aligned candle flames towards 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.
CHAPTER 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.
‘But I don’t think many people in the trenches actually, and except at odd moments, ever felt active hatred against the men in the opposite lines or even those who militarily directed their operations. When they are not called on to be trustworthy or imaginative or to show human sympathy, men in the bulk are beasts fairly decent and fairly reasonable. We hated and objurgatively called “Huns”, to the furthest extent of its Hunnish hideousness, not the poor bloody footsloggers who were immediately before us. No, the word applied itself to the professors, the prosaists, the publicists, the politicians who had sent those poor blighters to prevent our going home. For if you think of it, it was a topsy-turvy arrangement. They wanted to send us home and we wanted desperately to go; yet they pushed towards our home and we away from ours....
