Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 677
‘I am not much set to talk to you about the trenches or even about fighting. The point that I want to put into the spotlight of your mind is mostly the fact that if we do not economize in food there will be another war. Unlike you, my dear Compi, in that I regard the past with much greater equanimity. Y ou remember that, when we were both writing propaganda I used to shock you by the mildness of mine. It will be long before I forget your emotions when I wrote an article suggesting that, instead of atrocity-mongering we were sufficiently advanced along the road of civilization to write — at least of the German troops — as “the gallant enemy”.
‘Today our positions have changed and you are shocked because I style certain of those who belong to the late Enemy nation by an epithet that you wish to forget having employed. The point is that I stand where I did whereas you have reacted against what now appear to have been your extravagances. My propaganda, as you remember, was almost entirely a matter of economics and of culture. I simply pointed out that the war was in effect a hunger war: Prussia being mostly composed of immense sand wastes — the Lüneburger Heide; of impenetrable forest — the T eutoberger Wald; and of the vast stretch of swamps where Hindenberg massacred the Russians on their own border. That being the condition of Prussia, the country would not produce enough food for the population which was also a population of the most prolific breeders in the world. I also pointed out — and I think I was almost the only person to do so — that the Enemy Empire instead of being the flourishing concern that she had bluffed the world into considering her was actually on the point of bankruptcy and losing trade after trade to foreign nations. That again was merely a matter of food. Germany had flourished on low wages and subsidies to manufacturers; but as food prices rose the world over the wages of the German labourer had to go up so that, even with subsidies, the German manufacturer could no longer compete with us, the Italians, the French or even the South Americans. That Germany invaded Belgium may or may not have been the triste nécessité that her statesmen alleged it to be, but that the war, regarded as a food war was in very truth a sad necessity for her you may be perfectly convinced. Prussia was starving, her population was increasing by leaps and bounds, emigration had been forbidden by the government —
‘Well, I do not propose to hate a starving population that seeks for bread, but I do propose to dislike and go on disliking the professors and publicists who preached that the only way to obtain bread was by invading Belgium and I do not think that the epithet you object to is any too strong. And indeed, if you use it merely to designate what was hateful in the late Enemy nation and if you employ the word “German” for everything that was and is “gemiitlich” for those who since yesterday have been our friends, you will be doing them a service by emphasizing what they have of the lovable in their compositions. Still...I do not much care about that.
‘I do not believe that there will ever be another war if you put it only on the baser ground that the great financiers who alone can make or stop wars got hideously frightened by the last one. And in addition to that you can consider the educative effort of the Armageddon that finished yesterday. It will take a good many decades before any human soul will again regard war as a means of enrichment and a good many centuries before any Great Power will again imagine that to have an aspect of bestriding the world in jackboots and with the sabre rattling is of advantage to itself. It is a better world on the 29th of June, 1919, that it was on August 3rd, 1914. Bluff has got its deathblow.
‘Yes, the world is better and sweeter. We simple people are freed of an enormous incubus; we can sit still for a space and think, which we never could before in the history of the world. But of this I am certain — that what danger there is to the world and us is a food danger. I do not believe there will ever be another war: I believe our sufferings, great as they were, achieved that and were a small price to pay for that benefit. So, if you want to you may bless even the Huns as having been the occasion of our learning that lesson. But if there were ever another war it would be a war purely and simply for food.
‘The food-producing soil of the earth is already occupied; the population of our small planet increases by leaps and bounds. I know enough about agriculture — and scientific agriculture at that —— to know that the pretensions of scientists to increase the production of food by improved culture is weary nonsense when set against the consideration of the increase in the numbers of mankind. The most honest scientist that I know refused to reveal a method of increasing the yield of wheat sixfold on a given plot of ground because he satisfied himself that to do so in one year rendered that plot of ground absolutely barren for ten years and the milder improvements of agricultural processes that are evolved each year do not suffice to provide enough food for the extra mouths that each year are produced by Prussia alone.
‘So that the position might seem pretty gloomy, but I remain an optimist, at least in the matter of war for if, as I think will prove the fact, there will be no war till the world is driven to it by starvation, then the coming of war may be so long delayed that, all races of the world being at last at much the same pitch of education, it will be obvious to them all that war is no way to increase the production of food. I heard, not a Hun, but a Swedish professor say the other day that it was terribly irksome and irritating to his countrymen to consider that, whilst they were overpopulated and cramped up on an infertile soil, down in the fertile south there was the nearly empty and extraordinarily fertile land known as France. And how, he asked, could France with her selfish inhabitants who regulated their birth-rate — or who at any rate selfishly refused to beget children to the limit of their capacity — how could France expect to enjoy immunity from invasion by the healthy, voracious and formidable Northern races who openheartedly and with splendid generosity begot children, to use his own phrase, by the bushel?
‘I did not, as you might imagine, because of my obvious Gallophilism try to bite off that blond beast’s head because what he said was, as to its premises, true enough. France is sparsely populated and wealthy, Sweden is overcrowded and infertile. But the remedy for that is not to be found in invasion: the solution is there, waiting. France which is the only country civilized enough not to overpopulate herself is at present the only country in the world that welcomes immigration and facilitates to the extreme the naturalization of immigrants.
‘The Swede went on grumbling that it was very hard that his compatriots must expatriate themselves in order to enjoy those Sudfriichte - fruits of the South. He said that his fellow countrymen loved their greynesses and contracted terrible melancholias beneath Southern suns....So that the only thing was raiding!
‘I did not continue the discussion for I did not wish at the moment to hate a Swede. But that in essence shows the root of the matter. Wars will cease when nations and Northern Professors are sufficiently civilized to let nations be relatively nomadic and permit races to flow freely from inclement, overpopulated and infertile regions into those that are sparsely populated and fertile and not hyper-philoprogenitive.
‘You may put it that hatred and overpopulation go hand in hand, their destination being war, and you would not be far wrong. For it is not the hatreds begotten after wars are declared that matter; those die natural if slow deaths as soon as the not very protracted activities of warfare are over and done with, so that it is only the hatreds that precede wars that need much concern us.’
He went on to say that pre-war hatreds, apart from those inculcated by hungers of one sort or another, arose largely from differences of manners. We used to hate the French because they ate frogs and were elegant; they hated us because we said ‘goddam’ and ruled the seas. But manners tend to approximate the world over with the extension of means of intercourse. They jazz in Cambodia as in Coney Island today and tomorrow they will speak American in the county of Clackmannan even as in Monte Carlo.
That Gringoire applauded. It was, he said, all to the good to have a dance that all could dance. Before the war the vigorous poor went to dogfights, cockfights, badgerfights: now they jazzed. It was a progress towards sweetness and light, part of what we had paid for with our sufferings —
It was at this point that your Compiler became a little impatient. He had come to get war-reminiscences from a practising poet — but these colloquies resolved themselves into a continual struggle of wills, Gringoire persisting in dilating on the future as seen by the practising agriculturist and gastronome. And indeed, scenting that your Compiler was essaying to head him off from the topic on which his mind was fixed, he now went off upon a tirade about intensive horticulture and French cooking that lasted until dusk was well falling on his garden. And Madame Sélysette, raising her delicate eyebrows, intimated sufficiently plainly that, if we did not want a storm he had better not be interrupted.
The main points of his harangue were to the effect that humanity would be saved — if it was to be saved — by good cooking, intensive horti-, as opposed to agri-culture. And of course by abstract thinking and the arts. And the avoidance of waste. Above all by the avoidance of waste.
To the pretensions of the scientific agriculturist he opposed the claims of hand-culture, to those of the popular restaurant upholder those of the meticulous chef. Hand culture whether of beasts, grain or vegetables gave a better product, the careful and intelligent cook gave you more appetizing food. The more appetizing your food the better you digested it and the less you needed to support you. He said — but that was on the question of waste — that in a French residence of the size of the Gingerbread Cottage you would not find enough waste to fatten a chicken with; in his own establishment, do all that he could, aided by Mme. Sélysette, they had waste enough to half fatten a pig....
In short the world was to be saved by observing the precepts of the recipe for mutton chops with which your Compiler opened this little work. But all this seemed so apart from anything that his readers could be supposed to want from a book devoted to the war-reminiscences of a poet that your Compiler had long ceased to use his pencil and notebook before Gringoire had finished his sunset harangue, so that, having no notes of the arguments we may well, as to that matter, here inscribe the words: ‘cetera desunt’.
But, having eased his mind, Gringoire became good-natured, and, becoming good-natured he was awake to the outer world. So he observed that Mme. Sélysette and your servant had for a long time made neither objections to nor comments on the stuff of his harangues. His voice had gone on sounding alone save for the churnings of an early night-jar that sat upon the gatepost giving onto the rushy meadow. And suddenly he stopped and laughed maliciously.
‘Poor old Compi,’ he said, ‘how extraordinarily this isn’t what you come for. But the stuff of war-reminiscences concerns itself almost as much with what war has made of a man as with the pictures that he saw. Still you are not the sort of person to see that and, in a minute I will reward your patience with a landscape that, though it has nothing to do with our main theme, may make a nice bonne bouche for your little book.
‘But I do want to get in — just for the sake of pointing it out to the world — that the late hostilities, whilst they profoundly modified the manners of the world did, in their very nature, hold up to the world a moral that will be of infinite value as soon as the world is in any condition at all to notice it. That is to say it did teach us what a hell — what a hell! — of a lot we can do without.
‘Take my dear Sélysette there, with her upbringing amongst the suns and luxuries of the haute bourgeoisie of the South. Do you suppose that if, before the 3rd August, 1914 you had proposed to her to unite her destinies to the least pecunious of poets and take up her residence in a rat-ridden cottage beneath the usually lugubrious but at all times capricious skies of this septentrional land —— do you suppose that, if you had then made that proposal she would not have crushed you to the earth with the mere weight of her scorn? Or take me. Would you, knowing me as you did in earlier but, I assure you, not half such happy days — would you have imagined me spending what till then, but not till now, were certainly my happiest hours on a bare hillside in a tent with absolutely no furnishings but an officer’s camp-bed? I had been used to a good deal of luxury, but there for the first time I found peace though the German artillery was actually at that moment shelling that spot and I was for the first time under fire.
‘That is one of the things that I remember most vividly, not because it was the first time I was under fire but because I felt that for the first time I had cut absolutely and finally loose from the all the bedevilments of life at home — from the malices as from the luxuries. Afterwards, unused as I was to the artillery mind or its methods, I wondered a little that they should be so persistently shelling us and that they should find us with such accuracy.
‘I was sitting on the side of my camp-bed talking to an extremely intoxicated and dishevelled elderly officer who was nevertheless a man of no ordinary talent. That is to say that his harangues about everything under the sun were interspersed with a great number of classical quotations of singular aptness and he had also made several inventions that eventually proved very useful during the war and that saved him from a court-martial for drunkenness. I was - as was so frequently my case — in charge of him and, although he was in no position to get away, I did not care to go into a dugout as did all my brother officers who had hitherto been in the tent with us. And indeed the fact was that that fellow’s boozy conversation interested me....
‘The German shells came in groups of three, doing obviously what we infantry were taught to call bracketing. That is to say that the first three shells whined wearily overhead and caused a considerable rumpus in our mule lines that were perhaps a hundred yards behind us, and immediately afterwards a rocket or something like it let itself down from the heavens. A few minutes later three more shells fell short of us by perhaps another hundred yards down the hill. There was an obvious German plane overhead and it was in the late evening, nearly dark in the tent and quite dusk in the calm light outside.
‘My elderly friend wagged his head sagely. He explained that the Germans were trying to find with their shells something that the plane thought it had seen — probably the great park of German captured guns that were just above us. They would fire three sets of three shells each. Then our heavy artillery would open on them as a gentle hint to them to be quiet and not disturb the serenity of the Sabbath evening. They might take the hint or they might not. If they did not a regular duel between the heavies would begin and the earth would shake for miles’ round.
‘But, in any case, he said — and his air of wisdom convinced me as if Solomon were returned to earth and judging artillery — that we should be left in peace very shortly. And at that moment the next batch of three shells arrived right on us. That is to say that one landed right in the middle of the captured German guns, one in the fortunately soft ground of a spring about thirty yards from our tent and one in the middle of the canteen tent that was just next to ours; so that immediately after the immense concussions innumerable crepitations sounded from the canvas above us, the clay, gravel and mud falling from where it had been precipitated into the skies. And a tin of sardines, coming through the tent-flap, landed as if miraculously in my lap —
‘But that old fellow went on nodding his head as if he had been a Chinese bronze and exclaiming: “Don’t get up! Don’t get up! That will be the last of it!”
‘And, sure enough it was. Immediately afterwards Bloody Mary and two of her lady friends let off, enormous and august, breaking the quiet night. And I suppose the Germans were not in the mood for any extended artillery duel. They had probably satisfied themselves that the German guns parked above us were duds of sorts. The plane must have observed them earlier in the evening and had signalled their presence with rockets —
‘But the point that I want to make is that no matter how simple your surroundings or limited your income you can find happiness as long as you are also surrounded by a set of men with incomes similarly exiguous who are contented with their surroundings. The German shells were an added discomfort which I don’t adduce as part of my argument - as if it should be raining or indulging in any other eccentricity of weather that one cannot control.
‘Anyhow, I have been happier in a tent or a hut or even in a dugout than ever I was in a night-club before the war or in the sort of a hotel they call a Grand Palace, and I would rather inhabit a Connaught hut furnished exclusively with biscuit or beef boxes and sluice myself with cold water in the open on a freezing morning than dwell among Park Lane millionaires and take my ease in a hummums. And, if I can do that, all humanity can. I am no exception, and it is in that way that salvation lies and the extinction of wars.
‘Indeed, I can assure you that one of the most troubled moments of the war happened when, as I will later tell you, I was sent for to Paris by the French Government and by them lodged in circumstances of extreme luxury in a Palace on the Avenue de l’Opéra. For apart from the botherments of being asked to do propaganda that I did not want to do and the obvious hostility of the French officers with whom I mixed and momentary shortness of cash I had, as again I will tell you later, the extreme botherment of being introduced suddenly into the sequelae of a very violent divorce case. A British cavalry officer had used a week’s leave in going to Switzerland and carrying off his little daughter who had been taken there by his wife on her elopement with a ‘fiddler-fellow’. And, as I sat in the vestibule of the Hotel Splendide et de l’Orient the little girl, whom I like to think of as Maisie - that Maisie of Henryjames’ book — came and without a word of any introduction, settled herself in my lap and went to sleep. She was bothered because she could not find the tram to Heaven. Because they said her mother had gone to Heaven.
