Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 683
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 labours. It doesn’t matter about you and me —
But poor old Morgan...1 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 plough, 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 avise — leading a long, uncoloured 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 labourer.
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....
CHAPTER X.
From a Balcony
One of the French officers, on the balcony of the theatre, 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 Labour 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 labours amidst the bursting shells — From under every cowering roof of every township, town, hamlet, and parish; from every arrondissement; from every subprefecture; from every département. Coldly, like inquisitors, in the darkness, they let me have that infor-mation. 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 cleaning 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 Labour for the sake of Labour. 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 Theatre 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, grey, 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, clamouring — 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, powers, 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 theatre. And in the theatre 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 anyone 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. Someone else —— several someones — 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. 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.
