Title: Tales of War
Author: Dunsany, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, 1878-1957
Language: English
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TALES OF WAR

By Lord Dunsany


1918



The Prayer of the Men of Daleswood


He said: "There were only twenty houses in Daleswood. A place you
would scarcely have heard of. A village up top of the hills.

"When the war came there was no more than thirty men there between
sixteen and forty-five. They all went.

"They all kept together; same battalion, same platoon. They was like
that in Daleswood. Used to call the hop pickers foreigners, the ones
that come from London. They used to go past Daleswood, some of them,
every year, on their way down to the hop fields. Foreigners they used
to call them. Kept very much to themselves, did the Daleswood people.
Big woods all round them.

"Very lucky they was, the Daleswood men. They'd lost no more than
five killed and a good sprinkling of wounded. But all the wounded was
back again with the platoon. This was up to March when the big
offensive started.

"It came very sudden. No bombardment to speak of. Just a burst of Tok
Emmas going off all together and lifting the front trench clean out of
it; then a barrage behind, and the Boche pouring over in thousands.
'Our luck is holding good,' the Daleswood men said, for their trench
wasn't getting it at all. But the platoon on their right got it. And
it sounded bad too a long way beyond that. No one could be quite sure.
But the platoon on their right was getting it: that was sure enough.

"And then the Boche got through them altogether. A message came to
say so. 'How are things on the right?' they said to the runner. 'Bad,'
said the runner, and he went back, though Lord knows what he went back
to. The Boche was through right enough. 'We'll have to make a
defensive flank,' said the platoon commander. He was a Daleswood man
too. Came from the big farm. He slipped down a communication trench
with a few men, mostly bombers. And they reckoned they wouldn't see
any of them any more, for the Boche was on the right, thick as
starlings.

"The bullets were snapping over thick to keep them down while the
Boche went on, on the right: machine guns, of course. The barrage was
screaming well over and dropping far back, and their wire was still
all right just in front of them, when they put up a head to look.
There was the left platoon of the battalion. One doesn't bother,
somehow, so much about another battalion as one's own. One's own gets
sort of homely. And there they were wondering how their own officer
was getting on, and the few fellows with them, on his defensive flank.
The bombs were going off thick. All the Daleswood men were firing half
right. It sounded from the noise as if it couldn't last long, as if it
would soon be decisive, and the battle be won, or lost, just there on
the right, and perhaps the war ended. They didn't notice the left.
Nothing to speak of.

"Then a runner came from the left. 'Hullo!' they said, 'How are
things over there?'

"'The Boche is through,' he said. 'Where's the officer?' 'Through!'
they said. It didn't seem possible. However did he do that? they
thought. And the runner went on to the right to look for the officer.

"And then the barrage shifted further back. The shells still screamed
over them, but the bursts were further away. That is always a relief.
Probably they felt it. But it was bad for all that. Very bad. It meant
the Boche was well past them. They realized it after a while.

"They and their bit of wire were somehow just between two waves of
attack. Like a bit of stone on the beach with the sea coming in. A
platoon was nothing to the Boche; nothing much perhaps just then to
anybody. But it was the whole of Daleswood for one long generation.

"The youngest full-grown man they had left behind was fifty, and some
one had heard that he had died since the war. There was no one else in
Daleswood but women and children, and boys up to seventeen.

"The bombing had stopped on their right; everything was quieter, and
the barrage further away. When they began to realize what that meant
they began to talk of Daleswood. And then they thought that when all
of them were gone there would be nobody who would remember Daleswood
just as it used to be. For places alter a little, woods grow, and
changes come, trees get cut down, old people die; new houses are built
now and then in place of a yew tree, or any old thing, that used to be
there before; and one way or another the old things go; and all the
time you have people thinking that the old times were best, and the
old ways when they were young. And the Daleswood men were beginning to
say, 'Who would there be to remember it just as it was?'

"There was no gas, the wind being wrong for it, so they were able to
talk, that is if they shouted, for the bullets alone made as much
noise as breaking up an old shed, crisper like, more like new timber
breaking; and the shells of course was howling all the time, that is
the barrage that was bursting far back. The trench still stank of
them.

"They said that one of them must go over and put his hands up, or run
away if he could, whichever he liked, and when the war was over he
would go to some writing fellow, one of those what makes a living by
it, and tell him all about Daleswood, just as it used to be, and he
would write it out proper and there it would be for always. They all
agreed to that. And then they talked a bit, as well as they could
above that awful screeching, to try and decide who it should be. The
eldest, they said, would know Daleswood best. But he said, and they
came to agree with him, that it would be a sort of waste to save the
life of a man what had had his good time, and they ought to send the
youngest, and they would tell him all they knew of Daleswood before
his time, and everything would be written down just the same and the
old time remembered.

"They had the idea somehow that the women thought more of their own
man and their children and the washing and what-not; and that the deep
woods and the great hills beyond, and the plowing and the harvest and
snaring rabbits in winter and the sports in the village in summer, and
the hundred things that pass the time of one generation in an old, old
place like Daleswood, meant less to them than the men. Anyhow they did
not quite seem to trust them with the past.

"The youngest of them was only just eighteen. That was Dick. They
told him to get out and put his hands up and be quick getting across,
as soon as they had told him one or two things about the old time in
Daleswood that a youngster like him wouldn't know.

"Well, Dick said he wasn't going, and was making trouble about it, so
they told Fred to go. Back, they told him, was best, and come up
behind the Boche with his hands up; they would be less likely to shoot
when it was back towards their own supports.

"Fred wouldn't go, and so on with the rest. Well, they didn't waste
time quarrelling, time being scarce, and they said what was to be
done? There was chalk where they were, low down in the trench, a
little brown clay on the top of it. There was a great block of it
loose near a shelter. They said they would carve with their knives on
the big bowlder of chalk all that they knew about Daleswood. They
would write where it was and just what it was like, and they would
write something of all those little things that pass with a
generation. They reckoned on having the time for it. It would take a
direct hit with something large, what they call big stuff, to do any
harm to that bowlder. They had no confidence in paper, it got so
messed up when you were hit; besides, the Boche had been using
thermite. Burns, that does.

"They'd one or two men that were handy at carving chalk; used to do
the regimental crest and pictures of Hindenburg, and all that. They
decided they'd do it in reliefs.

"They started smoothing the chalk. They had nothing more to do but
just to think what to write. It was a great big bowlder with plenty of
room on it. The Boche seemed not to know that they hadn't killed the
Daleswood men, just as the sea mightn't know that one stone stayed dry
at the coming in of the tide. A gap between two divisions probably.

"Harry wanted to tell of the woods more than anything. He was afraid
they might cut them down because of the war, and no one would know of
the larks they had had there as boys. Wonderful old woods they were,
with a lot of Spanish chestnut growing low, and tall old oaks over it.
Harry wanted them to write down what the foxgloves were like in the
wood at the end of summer, standing there in the evening, 'Great
solemn rows,' he said, 'all odd in the dusk. All odd in the evening,
going there after work; and makes you think of fairies.' There was
lots of things about those woods, he said, that ought to be put down
if people were to remember Daleswood as it used to be when they knew
it. What were the good old days without those woods? he said.

"But another wanted to tell of the time when they cut the hay with
scythes, working all those long days at the end of June; there would
be no more of that, he said, with machines come in and all.

"There was room to tell of all that and the woods too, said the
others, so long as they put it short like.

"And another wanted to tell of the valleys beyond the wood, far
afield where the men went working; the women would remember the hay.
The great valleys he'd tell of. It was they that made Daleswood. The
valleys beyond the wood and the twilight on them in summer. Slopes
covered with mint and thyme, all solemn at evening. A hare on them
perhaps, sitting as though they were his, then lolloping slowly away.
It didn't seem from the way he told of those old valleys that he
thought they could ever be to other folk what they were to the
Daleswood men in the days he remembered. He spoke of them as though
there were something in them, besides the mint and the thyme and the
twilight and hares, that would not stay after these men were gone,
though he did not say what it was. Scarcely hinted it even.

"And still the Boche did nothing to the Daleswood men. The bullets
had ceased altogether. That made it much quieter. The shells still
snarled over, bursting far, far away.

"And Bob said tell of Daleswood itself, the old village, with queer
chimneys, of red brick, in the wood. There weren't houses like that
nowadays. They'd be building new ones and spoiling it, likely, after
the war. And that was all he had to say.

"And nobody was for not putting down anything any one said. It was
all to go in on the chalk, as much as would go in the time. For they
all sort of understood that the Daleswood of what they called the good
old time was just the memories that those few men had of the days they
had spent there together. And that was the Daleswood they loved, and
wanted folks to remember. They were all agreed as to that. And then
they said how was they to write it down. And when it came to writing
there was so much to be said, not spread over a lot of paper I don't
mean, but going down so deep like, that it seemed to them how their
own talk wouldn't be good enough to say it. And they knew no other,
and didn't know what to do. I reckon they'd been reading magazines and
thought that writing had to be like that muck. Anyway, they didn't
know what to do. I reckon their talk would be good enough for
Daleswood when they loved Daleswood like that. But they didn't, and
they were puzzled.

"The Boche was miles away behind them now, and his barrage with him.
Still in front he did nothing.

"They talked it all over and over, did the Daleswood men. They tried
everything. But somehow or other they couldn't get near what they
wanted to say about old summer evenings. Time wore on. The bowlder was
smooth and ready, and that whole generation of Daleswood men could
find no words to say what was in their hearts about Daleswood. There
wasn't time to waste. And the only thing they thought of in the end
was 'Please, God, remember Daleswood just like it used to be.' And
Bill and Harry carved that on the chalk between them.

"What happened to the Daleswood men? Why, nothing. There come one of
them counter-attacks, a regular bastard for Jerry. The French made it
and did the Boche in proper. I got the story from a man with a hell of
a great big hammer, long afterwards when that trench was well behind
our line. He was smashing up a huge great chunk of chalk because he
said they all felt it was so damn silly."



The Road


The battery Sergeant-Major was practically asleep. He was all worn out
by the continuous roar of bombardments that had been shaking the
dugouts and dazing his brains for weeks. He was pretty well fed up.

The officer commanding the battery, a young man in a very neat uniform
and of particularly high birth, came up and spat in his face. The
Sergeant-Major sprang to attention, received an order, and took a
stick at once and beat up the tired men. For a message had come to the
battery that some English (God punish them!) were making a road at X.

The gun was fired. It was one of those unlucky shots that come on days
when our luck is out. The shell, a 5.9, lit in the midst of the British
working party. It did the Germans little good. It did not stop the
deluge of shells that was breaking up their guns and was driving
misery down like a wedge into their spirits. It did not improve the
temper of the officer commanding the battery, so that the men suffered
as acutely as ever under the Sergeant-Major. But it stopped the road
for that day.

I seemed to see that road going on in a dream.

Another working party came along next day, with clay pipes and got to
work; and next day and the day after. Shells came, but went short or
over; the shell holes were neatly patched up; the road went on. Here
and there a tree had to be cut, but not often, not many of them were
left; it was mostly digging and grubbing up roots, and pushing
wheelbarrows along planks and duck-boards, and filling up with stones.
Sometimes the engineers would come: that was when streams were
crossed. The engineers made their bridges, and the infantry working
party went on with the digging and laying down stones. It was
monotonous work. Contours altered, soil altered, even the rock beneath
it, but the desolation never; they always worked in desolation and
thunder. And so the road went on.

They came to a wide river. They went through a great forest. They
passed the ruins of what must have been quite fine towns, big
prosperous towns with universities in them. I saw the infantry working
party with their stumpy clay pipes, in my dream, a long way on from
where that shell had lit, which stopped the road for a day. And behind
them curious changes came over the road at X. You saw the infantry
going up to the trenches, and going back along it into reserve. They
marched at first, but in a few days they were going up in motors, grey
busses with shuttered windows. And then the guns came along it, miles
and miles of guns, following after the thunder which was further off
over the hills. And then one day the cavalry came by. Then stores in
wagons, the thunder muttering further and further away. I saw
farm-carts going down the road at X. And then one day all manner of
horses and traps and laughing people, farmers and women and boys all
going by to X. There was going to be a fair.

And far away the road was growing longer and longer amidst, as always,
desolation and thunder. And one day far away from X the road grew very
fine indeed. It was going proudly through a mighty city, sweeping in
like a river; you would not think that it ever remembered duck-boards.
There were great palaces there, with huge armorial eagles blazoned in
stone, and all along each side of the road was a row of statues of
kings. And going down the road towards the palace, past the statues of
the kings, a tired procession was riding, full of the flags of the
Allies. And I looked at the flags in my dream, out of national pride
to see whether we led, or whether France or America. America went
before us, but I could not see the Union Jack in the van nor the
Tricolour either, nor the Stars and Stripes: Belgium led and then
Serbia, they that had suffered most.

And before the flags, and before the generals, I saw marching along on
foot the ghosts of the working party that were killed at X, gazing
about them in admiration as they went, at the great city and at the
palaces. And one man, wondering at the Sièges Allée, turned round to
the Lance Corporal in charge of the party: "That is a fine road that
we made, Frank," he said.



An Imperial Monument


It is an early summer's morning: the dew is all over France: the train
is going eastwards. They are quite slow, those troop trains, and there
are few embankments or cuttings in those flat plains, so that you seem
to be meandering along through the very life of the people. The roads
come right down to the railways, and the sun is shining brightly over
the farms and the people going to work along the roads, so that you
can see their faces clearly as the slow train passes them by.

They are all women and boys that work on the farms; sometimes perhaps
you see a very old man, but nearly always women and boys; they are out
working early. They straighten up from their work as we go by and lift
their hands to bless us.

We pass by long rows of the tall French poplars, their branches cut
away all up the trunk, leaving only an odd round tuft at the top of
the tree; but little branches are growing all up the trunk now, and
the poplars are looking unkempt. It would be the young men who would
cut the branches of the poplars. They would cut them for some useful
thrifty purpose that I do not know; and then they would cut them
because they were always cut that way, as long ago as the times of the
old men's tales about France; but chiefly, I expect, because youth
likes to climb difficult trees; that is why they are clipped so very
high. And the trunks are all unkempt now.

We go on by many farms with their shapely red-roofed houses; they
stand there, having the air of the homes of an ancient people; they
would not be out of keeping with any romance that might come, or any
romance that has come in the long story of France, and the girls of
those red-roofed houses work all alone in the fields.

We pass by many willows and come to a great marsh. In a punt on some
open water an old man is angling. We come to fields again, and then to
a deep wood. France smiles about us in the open sunlight.

But towards evening we pass over the border of this pleasant country
into a tragical land of destruction and gloom. It is not only that
murder has walked here to and fro for years, until all the fields are
ominous with it, but the very fields themselves have been mutilated
until they are unlike fields, the woods have been shattered right down
to the anemones, and the houses have been piled in heaps of rubbish,
and the heaps of rubbish have been scattered by shells. We see no more
trees, no more houses, no more women, no cattle even now. We have come
to the abomination of desolation. And over it broods, and will
probably brood for ever, accursed by men and accursed by the very
fields, the hyena-like memory of the Kaiser, who has whitened so many
bones.

It may be some satisfaction to his selfishness to know that the
monument to it cannot pass away, to know that the shell holes go too
deep to be washed away by the healing rains of years, to know that the
wasted German generations will not in centuries gather up what has
been spilt on the Somme, or France recover in the sunshine of many
summers from all the misery that his devilish folly has caused. It is
likely to be to such as him a source of satisfaction, for the truly
vain care only to be talked of in many mouths; they hysterically love
to be thought of, and the notice of mankind is to them a mirror which
reflects their futile postures. The admiration of fools they love, and
the praise of a slavelike people, but they would sooner be hated by
mankind than be ignored and forgotten as is their due. And the truly
selfish care only for their imperial selves.

Let us leave him to pass in thought from ruin to ruin, from wasted
field to field, from crater to crater; let us leave his fancy haunting
cemeteries in the stricken lands of the world, to find what glee he
can in this huge manifestation of his imperial will.

We neither know to what punishment he moves nor can even guess what
fitting one is decreed. But the time is surely appointed and the
place. Poor trifler with Destiny, who ever had so much to dread?



A Walk to the Trenches


To stand at the beginning of a road is always wonderful; for on all
roads before they end experience lies, sometimes adventure. And a
trench, even as a road, has its beginnings somewhere. In the heart of
a very strange country you find them suddenly. A trench may begin in
the ruins of a house, may run up out of a ditch; may be cut into a
rise of ground sheltered under a hill, and is built in many ways by
many men. As to who is the best builder of trenches there can be
little doubt, and any British soldier would probably admit that for
painstaking work and excellence of construction there are few to rival
Von Hindenburg. His Hindenburg line is a model of neatness and
comfort, and it would be only a very ungrateful British soldier who
would deny it.

You come to the trenches out of strangely wasted lands, you come
perhaps to a wood in an agony of contortions, black, branchless,
sepulchral trees, and then no more trees at all. The country after
that is still called Picardy or Belgium, still has its old name on the
map as though it smiled there yet, sheltering cities and hamlet and
radiant with orchards and gardens, but the country named Belgium--or
whatever it be--is all gone away, and there stretches for miles
instead one of the world's great deserts, a thing to take its place no
longer with smiling lands, but with Sahara, Gobi, Kalahari, and the
Karoo; not to be thought of as Picardy, but more suitably to be named
the Desert of Wilhelm. Through these sad lands one goes to come to the
trenches. Overhead floats until it is chased away an aëroplane with
little black crosses, that you can scarcely see at his respectful
height, peering to see what more harm may be done in the desolation
and ruin. Little flashes sparkle near him, white puffs spread out
round the flashes: and he goes, and our airmen go away after him;
black puffs break out round our airmen. Up in the sky you hear a faint
tap-tapping. They have got their machine guns working.

You see many things there that are unusual in deserts: a good road, a
railway, perhaps a motor bus; you see what was obviously once a
village, and hear English songs, but no one who has not seen it can
imagine the country in which the trenches lie, unless he bear a desert
clearly in mind, a desert that has moved from its place on the map by
some enchantment of wizardry, and come down on a smiling country.
Would it not be glorious to be a Kaiser and be able to do things like
that?

Past all manner of men, past no trees, no hedges, no fields, but only
one field from skyline to skyline that has been harrowed by war, one
goes with companions that this event in our history has drawn from all
parts of the earth. On that road you may hear all in one walk where is
the best place to get lunch in the City; you may hear how they laid a
drag for some Irish pack, and what the Master said; you may hear a
farmer lamenting over the harm that rhinoceroses do to his coffee
crop; you may hear Shakespeare quoted and La vie Parisienne.

In the village you see a lot of German orders, with their silly notes
of exclamation after them, written up on notice boards among the
ruins. Ruins and German orders. That turning movement of Von Kluck's
near Paris in 1914 was a mistake. Had he not done it we might have had
ruins and German orders everywhere. And yet Von Kluck may comfort
himself with the thought that it is not by his mistakes that Destiny
shapes the world: such a nightmare as a world-wide German domination
can have had no place amongst the scheme of things.

Beyond the village the batteries are thick. A great howitzer near the
road lifts its huge muzzle slowly, fires and goes down again, and
lifts again and fires. It is as though Polyphemus had lifted his huge
shape slowly, leisurely, from the hillside where he was sitting, and
hurled the mountain top, and sat down again. If he is firing pretty
regularly you are sure to get the blast of one of them as you go by,
and it can be a very strong wind indeed. One's horse, if one is
riding, does not very much like it, but I have seen horses far more
frightened by a puddle on the road when coming home from hunting in
the evening: one 12-inch howitzer more or less in France calls for no
great attention from man or beast.

And so we come in sight of the support trenches where we are to dwell
for a week before we go on for another mile over the hills, where the
black fountains are rising.



A Walk in Picardy


Picture any village you know. In such a village as that the trench
begins. That is to say, there are duck-boards along a ditch, and the
ditch runs into a trench. Only the village is no longer there. It was
like some village you know, though perhaps a little merrier, because
it was further south and nearer the sun; but it is all gone now. And
the trench runs out of the ruins, and is called Windmill Avenue. There
must have been a windmill standing there once.

When you come from the ditch to the trench you leave the weeds and
soil and trunks of willows and see the bare chalk. At the top of those
two white walls is a foot or so of brown clay. The brown clay grows
deeper as you come to the hills, until the chalk has disappeared
altogether. Our alliance with France is new in the history of man, but
it is an old, old union in the history of the hills. White chalk with
brown clay on top has dipped and gone under the sea; and the hills of
Sussex and Kent are one with the hills of Picardy.

And so you may pass through the chalk that lies in that desolate lane
with memories of more silent and happier hills; it all depends on what
the chalk means to you: you may be unfamiliar with it and in that case
you will not notice it; or you may have been born among those
thyme-scented hills and yet have no errant fancies, so that you will
not think of the hills that watched you as a child, but only keep your
mind on the business in hand; that is probably best.

You come after a while to other trenches: notice boards guide you, and
you keep to Windmill Avenue. You go by Pear Lane, Cherry Lane, and
Plum Lane. Pear trees, cherry trees and plum trees must have grown
there. You are passing through either wild lanes banked with briar,
over which these various trees peered one by one and showered their
blossoms down at the end of spring, and girls would have gathered the
fruit when it ripened, with the help of tall young men; or else you
are passing through an old walled garden, and the pear and the cherry
and plum were growing against the wall, looking southwards all through
the summer. There is no way whatever of telling which it was; it is
all one in war; whatever was there is gone; there remain to-day, and
survive, the names of those three trees only. We come next to Apple
Lane. You must not think that an apple tree ever grew there, for we
trace here the hand of the wit, who by naming Plum Lane's neighbour
"Apple Lane" merely commemorates the inseparable connection that
plum has with apple forever in the minds of all who go to modern war.
For by mixing apple with plum the manufacturer sees the opportunity of
concealing more turnip in the jam, as it were, at the junction of the
two forces, than he might be able to do without this unholy alliance.

We come presently to the dens of those who trouble us (but only for
our own good), the dugouts of the trench mortar batteries. It is noisy
when they push up close to the front line and play for half an hour or
so with their rivals: the enemy sends stuff back, our artillery join
in; it is as though, while you were playing a game of croquet, giants
hundreds of feet high, some of them friendly, some unfriendly,
carnivorous and hungry, came and played football on your croquet lawn.

We go on past Battalion Headquarters, and past the dugouts and
shelters of various people having business with History, past stores
of bombs and the many other ingredients with which history is made,
past men coming down who are very hard to pass, for the width of two
men and two packs is the width of a communication trench and sometimes
an inch over; past two men carrying a flying pig slung on a pole
between them; by many turnings; and Windmill Avenue brings you at last
to Company Headquarters in a dugout that Hindenburg made with his
German thoroughness.

And there, after a while, descends the Tok Emma man, the officer
commanding a trench mortar battery, and is given perchance a whiskey
and water, and sits on the best empty box that we have to offer, and
lights one of our cigarettes.

"There's going to be a bit of a strafe at 5.30," he says.



What Happened on the Night of the Twenty-Seventh


The night of the twenty-seventh was Dick Cheeser's first night on
sentry. The night was far gone when he went on duty; in another hour
they would stand to. Dick Cheeser had camouflaged his age when he
enlisted: he was barely eighteen. A wonderfully short time ago he was
quite a little boy; now he was in a frontline trench. It hadn't seemed
that things were going to alter like that. Dick Cheeser was a plowboy:
long brown furrows over haughty, magnificent downs seemed to stretch
away into the future as far as his mind could see. No narrow outlook
either, for the life of nations depends upon those brown furrows. But
there are the bigger furrows that Mars makes, the long brown trenches
of war; the life of nations depends on these too; Dick Cheeser had
never pictured these. He had heard talk about a big navy and a lot of
Dreadnoughts; silly nonsense he called it. What did one want a big
navy for? To keep the Germans out, some people said. But the Germans
weren't coming. If they wanted to come, why didn't they come? Anybody
could see that they never did come. Some of Dick Cheeser's pals had
votes.

And so he had never pictured any change from plowing the great downs;
and here was war at last, and here was he. The Corporal showed him
where to stand, told him to keep a good lookout and left him.

And there was Dick Cheeser alone in the dark with an army in front of
him, eighty yards away: and, if all tales were true, a pretty horrible
army.

The night was awfully still. I use the adverb not as Dick Cheeser
would have used it. The stillness awed him. There had not been a shell
all night. He put his head up over the parapet and waited. Nobody
fired at him. He felt that the night was waiting for him. He heard
voices going along the trench: some one said it was a black night: the
voices died away. A mere phrase; the night wasn't black at all, it was
grey. Dick Cheeser was staring at it, and the night was staring back
at him, and seemed to be threatening him; it was grey, grey as an old
cat that they used to have at home, and as artful. Yes, thought Dick
Cheeser, it was an artful night; that was what was wrong with it. If
shells had come or the Germans, or anything at all, you would know how
to take it; but that quiet mist over huge valleys, and stillness!
Anything might happen. Dick waited and waited, and the night waited
too. He felt they were watching each other, the night and he. He felt
that each was crouching. His mind slipped back to the woods on hills
he knew. He was watching with eyes and ears and imagination to see
what would happen in No Man's Land under that ominous mist: but his
mind took a peep for all that at the old woods that he knew. He
pictured himself, he and a band of boys, chasing squirrels again in
the summer. They used to chase a squirrel from tree to tree, throwing
stones, till they tired it: and then they might hit it with a stone:
usually not. Sometimes the squirrel would hide, and a boy would have
to climb after it. It was great sport, thought Dick Cheeser. What a
pity he hadn't had a catapult in those days, he thought. Somehow the
years when he had not had a catapult seemed all to be wasted years.
With a catapult one might get the squirrel almost at once, with luck:
and what a great thing that would be. All the other boys would come
round to look at the squirrel, and to look at the catapult, and ask
him how he did it. He wouldn't have to say much, there would be the
squirrel; no boasting would be necessary with the squirrel lying dead.
It might spread to other things, even rabbits; almost anything, in
fact. He would certainly get a catapult first thing when he got home.
A little wind blew in the night, too cold for summer. It blew away, as
it were, the summer of Dick's memories; blew away hills and woods and
squirrel. It made for a moment a lane in the mist over No Man's Land.
Dick Cheeser peered down it, but it closed again. "No," Night seemed
to say, "you don't guess my secret." And the awful hush intensified.
"What would they do?" thought the sentry. "What were they planning
in all those miles of silence?" Even the Verys were few. When one
went up, far hills seemed to sit and brood over the valley: their
black shapes seemed to know what would happen in the mist and seemed
sworn not to say. The rocket faded, and the hills went back into
mystery again, and Dick Cheeser peered level again over the ominous
valley.

All the dangers and sinister shapes and evil destinies, lurking
between the armies in that mist, that the sentry faced that night
cannot be told until the history of the war is written by a historian
who can see the mind of the soldier. Not a shell fell all night, no
German stirred; Dick Cheeser was relieved at "Stand to" and his
comrades stood to beside him, and soon it was wide, golden, welcome
dawn.

And for all the threats of night the thing that happened was one that
the lonely sentry had never foreseen: in the hour of his watching Dick
Cheeser, though scarcely eighteen, became a full-grown man.



Standing To


One cannot say that one time in the trenches is any more tense than
another. One cannot take any one particular hour and call it, in
modern nonsensical talk, "typical hour in the trenches." The routine
of the trenches has gone on too long for that. The tensest hour ought
to be half an hour before dawn, the hour when attacks are expected and
men stand to. It is an old convention of war that that is the
dangerous hour, the hour when defenders are weakest and attack most to
be feared. For darkness favours the attackers then as night favours
the lion, and then dawn comes and they can hold their gains in the
light. Therefore in every trench in every war the garrison is prepared
in that menacing hour, watching in greater numbers than they do the
whole night through. As the first lark lifts from meadows they stand
there in the dark. Whenever there is any war in any part of the world
you may be sure that at that hour men crowd to their parapets: when
sleep is deepest in cities they are watching there.

When the dawn shimmers a little, and a grey light comes, and widens,
and all of a sudden figures become distinct, and the hour of the
attack that is always expected is gone, then perhaps some faint
feeling of gladness stirs the newest of the recruits; but chiefly the
hour passes like all the other hours there, an unnoticed fragment of
the long, long routine that is taken with resignation mingled with
jokes.

Dawn comes shy with a wind scarce felt, dawn faint and strangely
perceptible, feeble and faint in the east while men still watch the
darkness. When did the darkness go? When did the dawn grow golden? It
happened as in a moment, a moment you did not see. Guns flash no
longer: the sky is gold and serene; dawn stands there like Victory
that will shine, on one of these years when the Kaiser goes the way of
the older curses of earth. Dawn, and the men unfix bayonets as they
step down from the fire-step and clean their rifles with
pull-throughs. Not all together, but section by section, for it would
not do for a whole company to be caught cleaning their rifles at dawn,
or at any other time.

They rub off the mud or the rain that has come at night on their
rifles, they detach the magazine and see that its spring is working,
they take out the breechblock and oil it, and put back everything
clean: and another night is gone; it is one day nearer victory.



The Splendid Traveller


A traveller threw his cloak over his shoulder and came down slopes of
gold in El Dorado. From incredible heights he came. He came from where
the peaks of the pure gold mountain shone a little red with the
sunset; from crag to crag of gold he stepped down slowly. Sheer out of
romance he came through the golden evening.

It was only an incident of every day; the sun had set or was setting,
the air turned chill, and a battalion's bugles were playing
"Retreat" when this knightly stranger, a British aëroplane, dipped,
and went homeward over the infantry. That beautiful evening call, and
the golden cloud bank towering, and that adventurer coming home in the
cold, happening all together, revealed in a flash the fact (which
hours of thinking sometimes will not bring) that we live in such a
period of romance as the troubadours would have envied.

He came, that British airman, over the border, sheer over No Man's
Land and the heads of the enemy and the mysterious land behind,
snatching the secrets that the enemy would conceal. Either he had
defeated the German airmen who would have stopped his going, or they
had not dared to try. Who knows what he had done? He had been abroad
and was coming home in the evening, as he did every day.

Even when all its romance has been sifted from an age (as the
centuries sift) and set apart from the trivial, and when all has been
stored by the poets; even then what has any of them more romantic than
these adventurers in the evening air, coming home in the twilight with
the black shells bursting below?

The infantry look up with the same vague wonder with which children
look at dragon flies; sometimes they do not look at all, for all that
comes in France has its part with the wonder of a terrible story as
well as with the incidents of the day, incidents that recur year in
and year out, too often for us to notice them. If a part of the moon
were to fall off in the sky and come tumbling to earth, the comment on
the lips of the imperturbable British watchers that have seen so much
would be, "Hullo, what is Jerry up to now?"

And so the British aëroplane glides home in the evening, and the light
fades from the air, and what is left of the poplars grows dark against
the sky, and what is left of the houses grows more mournful in the
gloaming, and night comes, and with it the sounds of thunder, for the
airman has given his message to the artillery. It is as though Hermes
had gone abroad sailing upon his sandals, and had found some bad land
below those winged feet wherein men did evil and kept not the laws of
gods or men; and he had brought this message back and the gods were
angry.

For the wars we fight to-day are not like other wars, and the wonders
of them are unlike other wonders. If we do not see in them the saga
and epic, how shall we tell of them?

England

"And then we used to have sausages," said the Sergeant.

"And mashed?" said the Private.

"Yes," said the Sergeant, "and beer. And then we used to go home.
It was grand in the evenings. We used to go along a lane that was full
of them wild roses. And then we come to the road where the houses
were. They all had their bit of a garden, every house."

"Nice, I calls it, a garden," the Private said.

"Yes," said the Sergeant, "they all had their garden. It came right
down to the road. Wooden palings: none of that there wire."

"I hates wire," said the Private.

"They didn't have none of it," the N. C. O. went on. "The gardens
came right down to the road, looking lovely. Old Billy Weeks he had
them tall pale-blue flowers in his garden nearly as high as a man."

"Hollyhocks?" said the Private.

"No, they wasn't hollyhocks. Lovely they were. We used to stop and
look at them, going by every evening. He had a path up the middle of
his garden paved with red tiles, Billy Weeks had; and these tall blue
flowers growing the whole way along it, both sides like. They was a
wonder. Twenty gardens there must have been, counting them all; but
none to touch Billy Weeks with his pale-blue flowers. There was an old
windmill away to the left. Then there were the swifts sailing by
overhead and screeching: just about as high again as the houses. Lord,
how them birds did fly. And there was the other young fellows, what
were not out walking, standing about by the roadside, just doing
nothing at all. One of them had a flute: Jim Booker, he was. Those
were great days. The bats used to come out, flutter, flutter, flutter;
and then there'd be a star or two; and the smoke from the chimneys
going all grey; and a little cold wind going up and down like the
bats; and all the colour going out of things; and the woods looking
all strange, and a wonderful quiet in them, and a mist coming up from
the stream. It's a queer time that. It's always about that time, the
way I see it: the end of the evening in the long days, and a star or
two, and me and my girl going home.

"Wouldn't you like to talk about things for a bit the way you
remember them?"

"Oh, no, Sergeant," said the other, "you go on. You do bring it all
back so."

"I used to bring her home," the Sergeant said, "to her father's
house. Her father was keeper there, and they had a house in the wood.
A fine house with queer old tiles on it, and a lot of large friendly
dogs. I knew them all by name, same as they knew me. I used to walk
home then along the side of the wood. The owls would be about; you
could hear them yelling. They'd float out of the wood like, sometimes:
all large and white."

"I knows them," said the Private.

"I saw a fox once so close I could nearly touch him, walking like he
was on velvet. He just slipped out of the wood."

"Cunning old brute," said the Private.

"That's the time to be out," said the Sergeant. "Ten o'clock on a
summer's night, and the night full of noises, not many of them, but
what there is, strange, and coming from a great way off, through the
quiet, with nothing to stop them. Dogs barking, owls hooting, an old
cart; and then just once a sound that you couldn't account for at all,
not anyhow. I've heard sounds on nights like that that nobody 'ud
think you'd heard, nothing like the flute that young Booker had,
nothing like anything on earth."

"I know," said the Private.

"I never told any one before, because they wouldn't believe you. But
it doesn't matter now. There'd be a light in the window to guide me
when I got home. I'd walk up through the flowers of our garden. We had
a lovely garden. Wonderful white and strange the flowers looked of a
nighttime."

"You bring it all back wonderful," said the Private.

"It's a great thing to have lived," said the Sergeant.

"Yes, Sergeant," said the other, "I wouldn't have missed it, not
for anything."

For five days the barrage had rained down behind them: they were
utterly cut off and had no hope of rescue: their food was done, and
they did not know where they were.



Shells


When the aëroplanes are home and the sunset has flared away, and it is
cold, and night comes down over France, you notice the guns more than
you do by day, or else they are actually more active then, I do not
know which it is.

It is then as though a herd of giants, things of enormous height, came
out from lairs in the earth and began to play with the hills. It is as
though they picked up the tops of the hills in their hands and then
let them drop rather slowly. It is exactly like hills falling. You see
the flashes all along the sky, and then that lumping thump as though
the top of the hill had been let drop, not all in one piece, but
crumbled a little as it would drop from your hands if you were three
hundred feet high and were fooling about in the night, spoiling what
it had taken so long to make. That is heavy stuff bursting, a little
way off.

If you are anywhere near a shell that is bursting, you can hear in it
a curious metallic ring. That applies to the shells of either side,
provided that you are near enough, though usually of course it is the
hostile shell and not your own that you are nearest to, and so one
distinguishes them. It is curious, after such a colossal event as this
explosion must be in the life of a bar of steel, that anything should
remain at all of the old bell-like voice of the metal, but it appears
to, if you listen attentively; it is perhaps its last remonstrance
before leaving its shape and going back to rust in the earth again for
ages.

Another of the voices of the night is the whine the shell makes in
coming; it is not unlike the cry the hyena utters as soon as it's dark
in Africa: "How nice traveller would taste," the hyena seems to say,
and "I want dead White Man." It is the rising note of the shell as
it comes nearer, and its dying away when it has gone over, that make
it reminiscent of the hyena's method of diction. If it is not going
over then it has something quite different to say. It begins the same
as the other, it comes up, talking of the back areas with the same
long whine as the other. I have heard old hands say "That one is
going well over." "Whee-oo," says the shell; but just where the
"oo" should be long drawn out and turn into the hyena's final
syllable, it says something quite different. "Zarp," it says. That
is bad. Those are the shells that are looking for you.

And then of course there is the whizz-bang coming from close, along
his flat trajectory: he has little to say, but comes like a sudden
wind, and all that he has to do is done and over at once.

And then there is the gas shell, who goes over gurgling gluttonously,
probably in big herds, putting down a barrage. It is the liquid inside
that gurgles before it is turned to gas by the mild explosion; that is
the explanation of it; yet that does not prevent one picturing a tribe
of cannibals who have winded some nice juicy men and are smacking
their chops and dribbling in anticipation.

And a wonderful thing to see, even in those wonderful nights, is our
thermite bursting over the heads of the Germans. The shell breaks into
a shower of golden rain; one cannot judge easily at night how high
from the ground it breaks, but about as high as the tops of trees seen
at a hundred yards. It spreads out evenly all round and rains down
slowly; it is a bad shower to be out in, and for a long time after it
has fallen, the sodden grass of winter, and the mud and old bones
beneath it, burn quietly in a circle. On such a night as this, and in
such showers, the flying pigs will go over, which take two men to
carry each of them; they go over and root right down to the German
dugout, where the German has come in out of the golden rain, and they
fling it all up in the air.

These are such nights as Scheherazade with all her versatility never
dreamed of; or if such nightmares came she certainly never told of
them, or her august master, the Sultan, light of the age, would have
had her at once beheaded; and his people would have deemed that he did
well. It has been reserved for a modern autocrat to dream such a
nightmare, driven to it perhaps by the tales of a white-whiskered
Scheherazade, the Lord of the Kiel Canal; and being an autocrat he has
made the nightmare a reality for the world. But the nightmare is
stronger than its master, and grows mightier every night; and the
All-Highest War Lord learns that there are powers in Hell that are
easily summoned by the rulers of earth, but that go not easily home.



Two Degrees of Envy


It was night in the front line and no moon, or the moon was hidden.
There was a strafe going on. The Tok Emmas were angry. And the
artillery on both sides were looking for the Tok Emmas.

Tok Emma, I may explain for the blessed dwellers in whatever far happy
island there be that has not heard of these things, is the crude
language of Mars. He has not time to speak of a trunk mortar battery,
for he is always in a hurry, and so he calls them T. M.'s. But Bellona
might not hear him saying T. M., for all the din that she makes: might
think that he said D. N; and so he calls it Tok Emma. Ak, Beer, C,
Don: this is the alphabet of Mars.

And the huge minnies were throwing old limbs out of No Man's Land into
the frontline trench, and shells were rasping down through the air
that seemed to resist them until it was torn to pieces: they burst and
showers of mud came down from heaven. Aimlessly, as it seemed, shells
were bursting now and then in the air, with a flash intensely red: the
smell of them was drifting down the trenches.

In the middle of all this Bert Butterworth was hit. "Only in the
foot," his pals said. "Only!" said Bert. They put him on a
stretcher and carried him down the trench. They passed Bill
Britterling, standing in the mud, an old friend of Bert's. Bert's
face, twisted with pain, looked up to Bill for some sympathy.

"Lucky devil," said Bill.

Across the way on the other side of No Man's Land there was mud the
same as on Bill's side: only the mud over there stank; it didn't seem
to have been kept clean somehow. And the parapet was sliding away in
places, for working parties had not had much of a chance. They had
three Tok Emmas working in that battalion front line, and the British
batteries did not quite know where they were, and there were eight of
them looking.

Fritz Groedenschasser, standing in that unseemly mud, greatly yearned
for them to find soon what they were looking for. Eight batteries
searching for something they can't find, along a trench in which you
have to be, leaves the elephant hunter's most desperate tale a little
dull and insipid. Not that Fritz Groedenschasser knew anything about
elephant hunting: he hated all things sporting, and cordially approved
of the execution of Nurse Cavell. And there was thermite too.
Flammenwerfer was all very well, a good German weapon: it could burn a
man alive at twenty yards. But this accursed flaming English thermite
could catch you at four miles. It wasn't fair.

The three German trench mortars were all still firing. When would the
English batteries find what they were looking for, and this awful
thing stop? The night was cold and smelly.

Fritz shifted his feet in the foul mud, but no warmth came to him that
way.

A gust of shells was coming along the trench. Still they had not found
the minnewerfer! Fritz moved from his place altogether to see if he
could find some place where the parapet was not broken. And as he
moved along the sewerlike trench he came on a wooden cross that marked
the grave of a man he once had known, now buried some days in the
parapet, old Ritz Handelscheiner.

"Lucky devil," said Fritz.



The Master of No Man's Land


When the last dynasty has fallen and the last empire passed away, when
man himself has gone, there will probably still remain the swede. [The
rutabaga or Swedish turnip.]

There grew a swede in No Man's Land by Croisille near the Somme, and
it had grown there for a long while free from man.

It grew as you never saw a swede grow before. It grew tall and strong
and weedy. It lifted its green head and gazed round over No Man's
Land. Yes, man was gone, and it was the day of the swede.

The storms were tremendous. Sometimes pieces of iron sang through its
leaves. But man was gone and it was the day of the swede.

A man used to come there once, a great French farmer, an oppressor of
swedes. Legends were told of him and his herd of cattle, dark
traditions that passed down vegetable generations. It was somehow
known in those fields that the man ate swedes.

And now his house was gone and he would come no more.

The storms were terrible, but they were better than man. The swede
nodded to his companions: the years of freedom had come.

They had always known among them that these years would come. Man had
not been there always, but there had always been swedes. He would go
some day, suddenly, as he came. That was the faith of the swedes. And
when the trees went the swede believed that the day was come. When
hundreds of little weeds arrived that were never allowed before, and
grew unchecked, he knew it.

After that he grew without any care, in sunlight, moonlight and rain;
grew abundantly and luxuriantly in the freedom, and increased in
arrogance till he felt himself greater than man. And indeed in those
leaden storms that sang often over his foliage all living things
seemed equal.

There was little that the Germans left when they retreated from the
Somme that was higher than this swede. He grew the tallest thing for
miles and miles. He dominated the waste. Two cats slunk by him from a
shattered farm: he towered above them contemptuously.

A partridge ran by him once, far, far below his lofty leaves. The
night winds mourning in No Man's Land seemed to sing for him alone.

It was surely the hour of the swede. For him, it seemed, was No Man's
Land. And there I met him one night by the light of a German rocket
and brought him back to our company to cook.



Weeds and Wire


Things had been happening. Divisions were moving. There had been,
there was going to be, a stunt. A battalion marched over the hill and
sat down by the road. They had left the trenches three days march to
the north and had come to a new country. The officers pulled their
maps out; a mild breeze fluttered them; yesterday had been winter and
to-day was spring; but spring in a desolation so complete and
far-reaching that you only knew of it by that little wind. It was
early March by the calendar, but the wind was blowing out of the gates
of April. A platoon commander, feeling that mild wind blowing, forgot
his map and began to whistle a tune that suddenly came to him out of
the past with the wind. Out of the past it blew and out of the South,
a merry vernal tune of a Southern people. Perhaps only one of those
that noticed the tune had ever heard it before. An officer sitting
near had heard it sung; it reminded him of a holiday long ago in the
South.

"Where did you hear that tune?" he asked the platoon commander.

"Oh, the hell of a long way from here," the platoon commander said.

He did not remember quite where it was he had heard it, but he
remembered a sunny day in France and a hill all dark with pine woods,
and a man coming down at evening out of the woods, and down the slope
to the village, singing this song. Between the village and the slope
there were orchards in blossom. So that he came with his song for
hundreds of yards through orchards. "The hell of a way from here,"
he said.

For a long while then they sat silent.

"It mightn't have been so very far from here," said the platoon
commander. "It was in France, now I come to think of it. But it was a
lovely part of France, all woods and orchards. Nothing like this,
thank God." And he glanced with a tired look at the unutterable
desolation.

"Where was it?" said the other.

"In Picardy," he said.

"Aren't we in Picardy now?" said his friend.

"Are we?" he said.

"I don't know. The maps don't call it Picardy."

"It was a fine place, anyway," the platoon commander said. "There
seemed always to be a wonderful light on the hills. A kind of short
grass grew on them, and it shone in the sun at evening. There were
black woods above them. A man used to come out of them singing at
evening."

He looked wearily round at the brown desolation of weeds. As far as
the two officers could see there was nothing but brown weeds and bits
of brown barbed wire. He turned from the desolate scene back to his
reminiscences.

"He came singing through the orchards into the village," he said.
"A quaint old place with queer gables, called Ville-en-Bois."

"Do you know where we are?" said the other.

"No, said the platoon commander."

"I thought not," he said. "Hadn't you better take a look at the
map?"

"I suppose so," said the platoon commander, and he smoothed out his
map and wearily got to the business of finding out where he was.

"Good Lord!" he said. "Ville-en-Bois!"



Spring in England and Flanders


Very soon the earliest primroses will be coming out in woods wherever
they have been sheltered from the north. They will grow bolder as the
days go by, and spread and come all down the slopes of sunny hills.
Then the anemones will come, like a shy pale people, one of the tribes
of the elves, who dare not leave the innermost deeps of the wood: in
those days all the trees will be in leaf, the bluebells will follow,
and certain fortunate woods will shelter such myriads of them that the
bright fresh green of the beech trees will flash between two blues,
the blue of the sky and the deeper blue of the bluebells. Later the
violets come, and such a time as this is the perfect time to see
England: when the cuckoo is heard and he surprises his hearers; when
evenings are lengthening out and the bat is abroad again; and all the
flowers are out and all the birds sing. At such a time not only Nature
smiles but our quiet villages and grave old spires wake up from winter
in the mellow air and wear their centuries lightly. At such a time you
might come just at evening on one of those old villages in a valley
and find it in the mood to tell you the secret of the ages that it hid
and treasured there before the Normans came. Who knows? For they are
very old, very wise, very friendly; they might speak to you one warm
evening. If you went to them after great suffering they might speak to
you; after nights and nights of shelling over in France, they might
speak to you and you might hear them clearly.

It would be a long, long story that they would tell, all about the
ages; and it would vary wonderfully little, much less perhaps than we
think; and the repetitions rambling on and on in the evening, as the
old belfry spoke and the cottages gathered below it, might sound so
soothing after the boom of shells that perhaps you would nearly sleep.
And then with one's memory tired out by the war one might never
remember the long story they told, when the belfry and the
brown-roofed houses all murmured at evening, might never remember even
that they had spoken all through that warm spring and evening. We may
have heard them speak and forgotten that they have spoken. Who knows?
We are at war, and see so many strange things: some we must forget,
some we must remember; and we cannot choose which.

To turn from Kent to Flanders is to turn to a time of mourning through
all seasons alike. Spring there brings out no leaf on myriad oaks, nor
the haze of green that floats like a halo above the heads of the birch
trees, that stand with their fairylike trunks haunting the deeps of
the woods. For miles and miles and miles summer ripens no crops, leads
out no maidens laughing in the moonlight, and brings no harvest home.
When Autumn looks on orchards in all that region of mourning he looks
upon barren trees that will never blossom again. Winter drives in no
sturdy farmers at evening to sit before cheery fires, families meet
not at Christmas, and the bells are dumb in belfries; for all by which
a man might remember his home has been utterly swept away: has been
swept away to make a maniacal dancing ground on which a murderous
people dance to their death led by a shallow, clever, callous,
imperial clown.

There they dance to their doom till their feet shall find the
precipice that was prepared for them on the day that they planned the
evil things they have done.



The Nightmare Countries


There are certain lands in the darker dreams of poetry that stand out
in the memory of generations. There is for instance Poe's "Dark tarn
of Auber, the ghoul-haunted region of Weir"; there are some queer
twists in the river Alph as imagined by Coleridge; two lines of
Swinburne:

     By the tideless dolorous inland sea
     In a land of sand and ruin and gold

are as haunting as any. There are in literature certain regions of
gloom, so splendid that whenever you come on them they leave in the
mind a sort of nightmare country which one's thoughts revisit on
hearing the lines quoted.

It is pleasant to picture such countries sometimes when sitting before
the fire. It is pleasant because you can banish them by the closing of
a book; a puff of smoke from a pipe will hide them altogether, and
back come the pleasant, wholesome, familiar things. But in France they
are there always. In France the nightmare countries stand all night in
the starlight; dawn comes and they still are there. The dead are
buried out of sight and others take their places among men; but the
lost lands lie unburied gazing up at the winds; and the lost woods
stand like skeletons all grotesque in the solitude; the very seasons
have fled from them. The very seasons have fled; so that if you look
up to see whether summer has turned to autumn, or if autumn has turned
to winter yet, nothing remains to show you. It is like the eccentric
dream of some strange man, very arresting and mysterious, but lacking
certain things that should be there before you can recognize it as
earthly. It is a mad, mad landscape. There are miles and miles and
miles of it. It is the biggest thing man has done. It looks as though
man in his pride, with all his clever inventions, had made for himself
a sorry attempt at creation.

Indeed when we trace it all back to its origin we find at the
beginning of this unhappy story a man who was only an emperor and
wished to be something more. He would have ruled the world but has
only meddled with it; and his folly has brought misery to millions,
and there lies his broken dream on the broken earth. He will never
take Paris now. He will never be crowned at Versailles as Emperor of
Europe; and after that, most secret dream of all, did not the Cæsars
proclaim themselves divine? Was it not whispered among Macedonian
courtiers that Alexander was the child of God? And was the
Hohenzollern less than these?

What might not force accomplish? All gone now, that dream and the
Hohenzollern line broken. A maniacal dream and broken farms all mixed
up together: they make a pretty nightmare and the clouds still gleam
at night with the flashes of shells, and the sky is still troubled by
day with uncouth balloons and the black bursts of the German shells
and the white of our anti-aircraft.

And below there lies this wonderful waste land where no girls sing,
and where no birds come but starlings; where no hedgerows stand, and
no lanes with wild roses, and where no pathways run through fields of
wheat, and there are no fields at all and no farms and no farmers; and
two haystacks stand on a hill I know, undestroyed in the desolation,
and nobody touches them for they know the Germans too well; and the
tops have been blown off hills down to the chalk. And men say of this
place that it is Pozières and of that place that it is Ginchy; nothing
remains to show that hamlets stood there at all, and a brown, brown
weed grows over it all for ever; and a mighty spirit has arisen in
man, and no one bows to the War Lord though many die. And Liberty is
she who sang her songs of old, and is fair as she ever was, when men
see her in visions, at night in No Man's Land when they have the
strength to crawl in: still she walks of a night in Pozières and in
Ginchy.

A fanciful man once called himself the Emperor of the Sahara: the
German Kaiser has stolen into a fair land and holds with weakening
hands a land of craters and weed, and wire and wild cabbages and old
German bones.



Spring and the Kaiser


While all the world is waiting for Spring there lie great spaces in
one of the pleasantest lands to which Spring cannot come.

Pear trees and cherry and orchards flash over other lands, blossoming
as abundantly as though their wonder were new, with a beauty as fresh
and surprising as though nothing like it before had ever adorned
countless centuries. Now with the larch and soon with the beech trees
and hazel, a bright green blazes forth to illumine the year. The
slopes are covered with violets. Those who have gardens are beginning
to be proud of them and to point them out to their neighbours. Almond
and peach in blossom peep over old brick walls. The land dreams of
summer all in the youth of the year.

But better than all this the Germans have found war. The simple
content of a people at peace in pleasant countries counted for nothing
with them. Their Kaiser prepared for war, made speeches about war,
and, when he was ready, made war. And now the hills that should be
covered with violets are full of murderous holes, and the holes are
half full of empty meat tins, and the garden walls have gone and the
gardens with them, and there are no woods left to shelter anemones.
Boundless masses of brown barbed wire straggle over the landscape. All
the orchards there are cut down out of ruthless spite to hurt France
whom they cannot conquer. All the little trees that grow near gardens
are gone, aspen, laburnum and lilac. It is like this for hundreds of
miles. Hundreds of ruined towns gaze at it with vacant windows and see
a land from which even Spring is banished. And not a ruined house in
all the hundred towns but mourns for some one, man, woman or child;
for the Germans make war equally on all in the land where Spring comes
no more.

Some day Spring will come back; some day she will shine all April in
Picardy again, for Nature is never driven utterly forth, but comes
back with her seasons to cover up even the vilest things.

She shall hide the raw earth of the shell holes till the violets come
again; she shall bring back even the orchards for Spring to walk in
once more; the woods will grow tall again above the southern anemones;
and the great abandoned guns of the Germans will rust by the rivers of
France. Forgotten like them, the memory of the War Lord will pass with
his evil deeds.



Two Songs


Over slopes of English hills looking south in the time of violets,
evening was falling.

Shadows at edges of woods moved, and then merged in the gloaming.

The bat, like a shadow himself, finding that spring was come, slipped
from the dark of the wood as far as a clump of beech trees and
fluttered back again on his wonderful quiet wings.

Pairing pigeons were home.

Very young rabbits stole out to gaze at the calm still world. They
came out as the stars come. At one time they were not there, and then
you saw them, but you did not see them come.

Towering clouds to the west built palaces, cities and mountains;
bastions of rose and precipices of gold; giants went home over them
draped in mauve by steep rose-pink ravines into emerald-green empires.
Turbulences of colour broke out above the departed sun; giants merged
into mountains, and cities became seas, and new processions of other
fantastic things sailed by. But the chalk slopes facing south smiled
on with the same calm light, as though every blade of grass gathered a
ray from the gloaming. All the hills faced the evening with that same
quiet glow, which faded softly as the air grew colder; and the first
star appeared.

Voices came up in the hush, clear from the valley, and ceased. A light
was lit, like a spark, in a distant window: more stars appeared and
the woods were all dark now, and shapes even on the hill slopes began
to grow indistinct.

Home by a laneway in the dim, still evening a girl was going, singing
the Marseillaise.

In France where the downs in the north roll away without hedges, as
though they were great free giants that man had never confined, as
though they were stretching their vast free limbs in the evening, the
same light was smiling and glimmering softly away.

A road wound over the downs and away round one of their shoulders. A
hush lay over them as though the giants slept, or as though they
guarded in silence their ancient, wonderful history.

The stillness deepened and the dimness of twilight; and just before
colours fade, while shapes can still be distinguished, there came by
the road a farmer leading his Norman horse. High over the horse's
withers his collar pointed with brass made him fantastic and huge and
strange to see in the evening.

They moved together through that mellow light towards where unseen
among the clustered downs the old French farmer's house was sheltered
away.

He was going home at evening humming "God Save the King."



The Punishment


An exhalation arose, drawn up by the moon, from an old battlefield
after the passing of years. It came out of very old craters and
gathered from trenches, smoked up from No Man's Land, and the ruins of
farms; it rose from the rottenness of dead brigades, and lay for half
the night over two armies; but at midnight the moon drew it up all
into one phantom and it rose and trailed away eastwards.

It passed over men in grey that were weary of war; it passed over a
land once prosperous, happy and mighty, in which were a people that
were gradually starving; it passed by ancient belfries in which there
were no bells now; it passed over fear and misery and weeping, and so
came to the palace at Potsdam. It was the dead of the night between
midnight and dawn, and the palace was very still that the Emperor
might sleep, and sentries guarded it who made no noise and relieved
others in silence. Yet it was not so easy to sleep. Picture to
yourself a murderer who had killed a man. Would you sleep? Picture
yourself the man that planned this war! Yes, you sleep, but nightmares
come.

The phantom entered the chamber. "Come," it said.

The Kaiser leaped up at once as obediently as when he came to
attention on parade, years ago, as a subaltern in the Prussian Guard,
a man whom no woman or child as yet had ever cursed; he leaped up and
followed. They passed the silent sentries; none challenged and none
saluted; they were moving swiftly over the town as the felon Gothas
go; they came to a cottage in the country. They drifted over a little
garden gate, and there in a neat little garden the phantom halted like
a wind that has suddenly ceased. "Look," it said.

Should he look? Yet he must look. The Kaiser looked; and saw a window
shining and a neat room in the cottage: there was nothing dreadful
there; thank the good German God for that; it was all right, after
all. The Kaiser had had a fright, but it was all right; there was only
a woman with a baby sitting before the fire, and two small children
and a man. And it was quite a jolly room. And the man was a young
soldier; and, why, he was a Prussian Guardsman,--there was his
helmet hanging on the wall,--so everything was all right. They were
jolly German children; that was well. How nice and homely the room
was. There shone before him, and showed far off in the night, the
visible reward of German thrift and industry. It was all so tidy and
neat, and yet they were quite poor people. The man had done his work
for the Fatherland, and yet beyond all that had been able to afford
all those little knickknacks that make a home so pleasant and that in
their humble little way were luxury. And while the Kaiser looked the
two young children laughed as they played on the floor, not seeing
that face at the window.

Why! Look at the helmet. That was lucky. A bullet hole right through
the front of it. That must have gone very close to the man's head. How
ever did it get through? It must have glanced upwards as bullets
sometimes do. The hole was quite low in the helmet. It would be
dreadful to have bullets coming by close like that. The firelight
flickered, and the lamp shone on, and the children played on the
floor, and the man was smoking out of a china pipe; he was strong and
able and young, one of the wealth-winners of Germany.

"Have you seen?" said the phantom.

"Yes," said the Kaiser. It was well, he thought, that a Kaiser
should see how his people lived.

At once the fire went out and the lamp faded away, the room fell
sombrely into neglect and squalor, and the soldier and the children
faded away with the room; all disappeared phantasmally, and nothing
remained but the helmet in a kind of glow on the wall, and the woman
sitting all by herself in the darkness.

"It has all gone," said the Kaiser.

"It has never been," said the phantom.

The Kaiser looked again. Yes, there was nothing there, it was just a
vision. There were the grey walls all damp and uncared for, and that
helmet standing out solid and round, like the only real thing among
fancies. No, it had never been. It was just a vision.

"It might have been," said the phantom.

Might have been? How might it have been?

"Come," said the phantom.

They drifted away down a little lane that in summer would have had
roses, and came to an Uhlan's house; in times of peace a small farmer.
Farm buildings in good repair showed even in the night, and the black
shapes of haystacks; again a well-kept garden lay by the house. The
phantom and the Kaiser stood in the garden; before them a window
glowed in a lamplit room.

"Look," said the phantom.

The Kaiser looked again and saw a young couple; the woman played with
a baby, and all was prosperous in the merry room. Again the hard-won
wealth of Germany shone out for all to see, the cosy comfortable
furniture spoke of acres well cared for, spoke of victory in the
struggle with the seasons on which wealth of nations depends.

"It might have been," said the phantom. Again the fire died out and
the merry scene faded away, leaving a melancholy, ill-kept room, with
poverty and mourning haunting dusty corners and the woman sitting
alone.

"Why do you show me this?" said the Kaiser. "Why do you show me
these visions?"

"Come," said the phantom.

"What is it?" said the Kaiser. "Where are you bringing me?"

"Come," said the phantom.

They went from window to window, from land to land. You had seen, had
you been out that night in Germany, and able to see visions, an
imperious figure passing from place to place, looking on many scenes.
He looked on them, and families withered away, and happy scenes faded,
and the phantom said to him "Come." He expostulated but obeyed; and
so they went from window to window of hundreds of farms in Prussia,
till they came to the Prussian border and went on into Saxony; and
always you would have heard, could you hear spirits speak, "It might
have been," "It might have been," repeated from window to window.

They went down through Saxony, heading for Austria. And for long the
Kaiser kept that callous, imperious look. But at last he, even he, at
last he nearly wept. And the phantom turned then and swept him back
over Saxony, and into Prussia again and over the sentries' heads, back
to his comfortable bed where it was so hard to sleep.

And though they had seen thousands of merry homes, homes that can
never be merry now, shrines of perpetual mourning; though they had
seen thousands of smiling German children, who will never be born now,
but were only the visions of hopes blasted by him; for all the leagues
over which he had been so ruthlessly hurried, dawn was yet barely
breaking.

He had looked on the first few thousand homes of which he had robbed
all time, and which he must see with his eyes before he may go hence.
The first night of the Kaiser's punishment was accomplished.



The English Spirit


By the end of the South African war Sergeant Cane had got one thing
very well fixed in his mind, and that was that war was an overrated
amusement. He said he "was fed up with it," partly because that
misused metaphor was then new, partly because every one was saying it:
he felt it right down in his bones, and he had a long memory. So when
wonderful rumours came to the East Anglian village where he lived, on
August 1, 1914, Sergeant Cane said: "That means war," and decided
then and there to have nothing to do with it: it was somebody else's
turn; he felt he had done enough. Then came August 4th, and England
true to her destiny, and then Lord Kitchener's appeal for men.
Sergeant Cane had a family to look after and a nice little house: he
had left the army ten years.

In the next week all the men went who had been in the army before, all
that were young enough, and a good sprinkling of the young men too who
had never been in the army. Men asked Cane if he was going, and he
said straight out "No."

By the middle of August Cane was affecting the situation. He was a
little rallying point for men who did not want to go. "He knows what
it's like," they said.

In the smoking room of the Big House sat the Squire and his son, Arthur
Smith; and Sir Munion Boomer-Platt, the Member for the division. The
Squire's son had been in the last war as a boy, and like Sergeant Cane
had left the army since. All the morning he had been cursing an
imaginary general, seated in the War Office at an imaginary desk with
Smith's own letter before him, in full view but unopened. Why on earth
didn't he answer it, Smith thought. But he was calmer now, and the
Squire and Sir Munion were talking of Sergeant Cane.

"Leave him to me," said Sir Munion.

"Very well," said the Squire. So Sir Munion Boomer-Platt went off
and called on Sergeant Cane.

Mrs Cane knew what he had come for.

"Don't let him talk you over, Bill," she said.

"Not he," said Sergeant Cane.

Sir Munion came on Sergeant Cane in his garden.

"A fine day," said Sir Munion. And from that he went on to the war.
"If you enlist," he said, "they will make you a sergeant again at
once. You will get a sergeant's pay, and your wife will get the new
separation allowance."

"Sooner have Cane," said Mrs Cane.

"Yes, yes, of course," said Sir Munion. "But then there is the
medal, probably two or three medals, and the glory of it, and it is
such a splendid life."

Sir Munion did warm to a thing whenever he began to hear his own
words. He painted war as it has always been painted, one of the most
beautiful things you could imagine. And then it mustn't be supposed
that it was like those wars that there used to be, a long way off.
There would be houses where you would be billeted, and good food, and
shady trees and villages wherever you went. And it was such an
opportunity of seeing the Continent ("the Continent as it really
is," Sir Munion called it) as would never come again, and he only
wished he were younger. Sir Munion really did wish it, as he spoke,
for his own words stirred him profoundly; but somehow or other they
did not stir Sergeant Cane. No, he had done his share, and he had a
family to look after.

Sir Munion could not understand him: he went back to the Big House and
said so. He had told him all the advantages he could think of that
were there to be had for the asking, and Sergeant Cane merely
neglected them.

"Let me have a try," said Arthur Smith. "He soldiered with me
before."

Sir Munion shrugged his shoulders. He had all the advantages at his
fingers' ends, from pay to billeting: there was nothing more to be
said. Nevertheless young Smith went.

"Hullo, Sergeant Cane," said Smith.

"Hello, sir," said the sergeant.

"Do you remember that night at Reit River?"

"Don't I, sir," said Cane.

"One blanket each and no ground sheet?"

"I remember, sir," said Cane.

"Didn't it rain," said Smith.

"It rained that night, proper."

"Drowned a few of the lice, I suppose."

"Not many," said Cane.

"No, not many," Smith reflected. "The Boers had the range all right
that time."

"Gave it us proper," said Cane.

"We were hungry that night," said Smith. "I could have eaten
biltong."

"I did eat some of it," said Cane. "Not bad stuff, what there was
of it, only not enough."

"I don't think," said Smith, "that I've ever slept on the bare
earth since."

"No, sir?" said Cane. "It's hard. You get used to it. But it will
always be hard."

"Yes, it will always be hard," said Smith. "Do you remember the
time we were thirsty?"

"Oh, yes, sir," said Cane, "I remember that. One doesn't forget
that."

"No. I still dream of it sometimes," said Smith. "It makes a nasty
dream. I wake with my mouth all dry too, when I dream that."

"Yes," said Cane, "one doesn't forget being thirsty."

"Well," said Smith, "I suppose we're for it all over again?"

"I suppose so, sir," said Cane.

An Investigation Into the Causes and Origin of the War

The German imperial barber has been called up. He must have been
called up quite early in the war. I have seen photographs in papers
that leave no doubt of that. Who he is I do not know: I once read his
name in an article but have forgotten it; few even know if he still
lives. And yet what harm he has done! What vast evils he has
unwittingly originated! Many years ago he invented a frivolity, a jeu
d'esprit easily forgivable to an artist in the heyday of his youth, to
whom his art was new and even perhaps wonderful. A craft, of course,
rather than an art, and a humble craft at that; but then, the man was
young, and what will not seem wonderful to youth?

He must have taken the craft very seriously, but as youth takes things
seriously, fantastically and with laughter. He must have determined to
outshine rivals: he must have gone away and thought, burning candles
late perhaps, when all the palace was still. But how can youth think
seriously? And there had come to him this absurd, this fantastical
conceit. What else would have come? The more seriously he took the
tonsorial art, the more he studied its tricks and phrases and heard
old barbers lecture, the more sure were the imps of youth to prompt
him to laughter and urge him to something outrageous and ridiculous.
The background of the dull pomp of Potsdam must have made all this
more certain. It was bound to come.

And so one day, or, as I have suggested, suddenly late one night,
there came to the young artist bending over tonsorial books that
quaint, mad, odd, preposterous inspiration. Ah, what pleasure there is
in the madness of youth; it is not like the madness of age, clinging
to outworn formulæ; it is the madness of breaking away, of galloping
among precipices, of dallying with the impossible, of courting the
absurd. And this inspiration, it was in none of the books; the
lecturer barbers had not lectured on it, could not dream of it and did
not dare to; there was no tradition for it, no precedent; it was mad;
and to introduce it into the pomp of Potsdam, that was the daring of
madness. And this preposterous inspiration of the absurd young
barber-madman was nothing less than a moustache that without any curve
at all, or any suggestion of sanity, should go suddenly up at the ends
very nearly as high as the eyes!

He must have told his young fellow craftsmen first, for youth goes
first to youth with its hallucinations. And they, what could they have
said? You cannot say of madness that it is mad, you cannot call
absurdity absurd. To have criticized would have revealed jealousy; and
as for praise you could not praise a thing like that. They probably
shrugged, made gestures; and perhaps one friend warned him. But you
cannot warn a man against a madness; if the madness is in possession
it will not be warned away: why should it? And then perhaps he went to
the old barbers of the Court. You can picture their anger. Age does
not learn from youth in any case. But there was the insult to their
ancient craft, bad enough if only imagined, but here openly spoken of.
And what would come of it? They must have feared, on the one hand,
dishonour to their craft if this young barber were treated as his
levity deserved; and, on the other hand, could they have feared his
success? I think they could not have guessed it.

And then the young idiot with his preposterous inspiration must have
looked about to see where he could practise his new absurdity. It
should have been enough to have talked about it among his fellow
barbers; they would have gone with new zest to their work next day for
this delirious interlude, and no harm would have been done. "Fritz,"
(or Hans) they would have said, "was a bit on last night, a bit full
up," or whatever phrase they use to touch on drunkenness; and the
thing would have been forgotten. We all have our fancies. But this
young fool wanted to get his fancy mixed up with practice: that's
where he was mad. And in Potsdam, of all places.

He probably tried his friends first, young barbers at the Court and
others of his own standing. None of them were fools enough to be seen
going about like that. They had jobs to lose. A Court barber is one
thing, a man who cuts ordinary hair is quite another. Why should they
become outcasts because their friend chose to be mad?

He probably tried his inferiors then, but they would have been timid
folk; they must have seen the thing was absurd, and of course daren't
risk it. Again, why should they?

Did he try to get some noble then to patronize his invention? Probably
the first refusals he had soon inflamed his madness more, and he threw
caution insanely to the winds, and went straight to the Emperor.

It was probably about the time that the Emperor dismissed Bismarck;
certainly the drawings of that time show him still with a sane
moustache.

The young barber probably chanced on him in this period, finding him
bereft of an adviser, and ready to be swayed by whatever whim should
come. Perhaps he was attracted by the barber's hardihood, perhaps the
absurdity of his inspiration had some fascination for him, perhaps he
merely saw that the thing was new and, feeling jaded, let the barber
have his way. And so the frivolity became a fact, the absurdity became
visible, and honour and riches came the way of the barber.

A small thing, you might say, however fantastical. And yet I believe
the absurdity of that barber to be among the great evils that have
brought death nearer to man; whimsical and farcical as it was, yet a
thing deadlier than Helen's beauty or Tamerlane's love of skulls. For
just as character is outwardly shown so outward things react upon the
character; and who, with that daring barber's ludicrous fancy visible
always on his face, could quite go the sober way of beneficent
monarchs? The fantasy must be mitigated here, set off there; had you
such a figure to dress, say for amateur theatricals, you would realize
the difficulty. The heavy silver eagle to balance it; the glittering
cuirass lower down, preventing the eye from dwelling too long on the
barber's absurdity. And then the pose to go with the cuirass and to
carry off the wild conceit of that mad, mad barber. He has much to
answer for, that eccentric man whose name so few remember. For pose
led to actions; and just when Europe most needed a man of wise
counsels, restraining the passions of great empires, just then she had
ruling over Germany and, unhappily, dominating Austria, a man who
every year grew more akin to the folly of that silly barber's youthful
inspiration.

Let us forgive the barber. For long I have known from pictures that I
have seen of the Kaiser that he has gone to the trenches. Probably he
is dead. Let us forgive the barber. But let us bear in mind that the
futile fancies of youth may be deadly things, and that one of them
falling on a fickle mind may so stir its shallows as to urge it to
disturb and set in motion the avalanches of illimitable grief.

Lost

Describing a visit, say the papers of March 28th, which the Kaiser
paid incognito to Cologne Cathedral on March 18th before the great
battle, the Cologne correspondent of the Tyd says:

There were only a few persons in the building. Under high arches
and in spacious solitude the Kaiser sat, as if in deep thought,
before the priests' choir. Behind him his military staff stood
respectfully at a distance. Still musing as he rose, the monarch
resting both hands on his walking-stick remains standing immovable
for some minutes... I shall never forget this picture of the musing
monarch praying in Cologne Cathedral on the eve of the great
battle.

Probably he won't forget it. The German casualty lists will help to
remind him. But what is more to the point is that this expert
propagandist has presumably received orders that we are not to forget
it, and that the sinister originator of the then impending holocaust
should be toned down a little in the eyes at least of the Tyd to
something a little more amiable.

And no doubt the little piece of propaganda gave every satisfaction to
those who ordered it, or they would not have passed it out to the Tyd,
and the touching little scene would never have reached our eyes. At
the same time the little tale would have been better suited to the
psychology of other countries if he had made the War Lord kneel when
he prayed in Cologne Cathedral, and if he had represented the Military
Staff as standing out of respect to One who, outside Germany, is held
in greater respect than the All Highest.

And had the War Lord really knelt is it not possible that he might
have found pity, humility, or even contrition? Things easily
overlooked in so large a cathedral when sitting erect, as a War Lord,
before the priests' choir, but to be noticed perhaps with one's eyes
turned to the ground.

Perhaps he nearly found one of those things. Perhaps he felt (who
knows?) just for a moment, that in the dimness of those enormous
aisles was something he had lost a long, long while ago.

One is not mistaken to credit the very bad with feeling far, faint
appeals from things of glory like Cologne Cathedral; it is that the
appeals come to them too far and faint on their headlong descent to
ruin.

For what was the War Lord seeking? Did he know that pity for his poor
slaughtered people, huddled by him on to our ceaseless machine guns,
might be found by seeking there? Or was it only that the lost thing,
whatever it was, made that faint appeal to him, passing the door by
chance, and drew him in, as the scent of some herb or flower in a
moment draws us back years to look for something lost in our youth; we
gaze back, wondering, and do not find it.

And to think that perhaps he lost it by very little! That, but for
that proud attitude and the respectful staff, he might have seen what
was lost, and have come out bringing pity for his people. Might have
said to the crowd that gave him that ovation, as we read, outside the
door: "My pride has driven you to this needless war, my ambition has
made a sacrifice of millions, but it is over, and it shall be no more;
I will make no more conquests."

They would have killed him. But for that renunciation, perhaps,
however late, the curses of the widows of his people might have kept
away from his grave.

But he did not find it. He sat at prayer. Then he stood. Then he
marched out: and his staff marched out behind him. And in the gloom of
the floor of the vast Cologne Cathedral lie the things that the Kaiser
did not find and never will find now. Unnoticed thus, and in some
silent moment, passes a man's last chance.



The Last Mirage


The desolation that the German offensive has added to the dominions of
the Kaiser cannot easily be imagined by any one who has never seen a
desert. Look at it on the map and it is full of the names of towns and
villages; it is in Europe, where there are no deserts; it is a fertile
province among places of famous names. Surely it is a proud addition
to an ambitious monarch's possessions. Surely there is something there
that it is worth while to have conquered at the cost of army corps.
No, nothing. They are mirage towns. The farms grow Dead Sea fruit.
France recedes before the imperial clutch. France smiles, but not for
him. His new towns seem to be his because their names have not yet
been removed from any map, but they crumble at his approach because
France is not for him. His deadly ambition makes a waste before it as
it goes, clutching for cities. It comes to them and the cities are not
there.

I have seen mirages and have heard others told of, but the best
mirages of all we never hear described; the mirage that waterless
travellers see at the last. Those fountains rising out of onyx basins,
blue and straight into incredible heights, and falling and flooding
cool white marble; the haze of spray above their feathery heads
through which the pale green domes of weathered copper shimmer and
shake a little; mysterious temples, the tombs of unknown kings; the
cataracts coming down from rose-quartz cliffs, far off but seen quite
clearly, growing to rivers bearing curious barges to the golden courts
of Sahara. These things we never see; they are seen at the last by men
who die of thirst.

Even so has the Kaiser looked at the smiling plains of France. Even so
has he looked on her famous ancient cities and the farms and the
fertile fields and the woods and orchards of Picardy. With effort and
trouble he has moved towards them. As he comes near to them the cities
crumble, the woods shrivel and fall, the farms fade out of Picardy,
even the hedgerows go; it is bare, bare desert. He had been sure of
Paris, he had dreamed of Versailles and some monstrous coronation, he
had thought his insatiable avarice would be sated. For he had plotted
for conquest of the world, that boundless greed of his goading him on
as a man in the grip of thirst broods upon lakes.

He sees victory near him now. That also will fade in the desert of old
barbed wire and weeds. When will he see that a doom is over all his
ambitions? For his dreams of victory are like those last dreams that
come in deceptive deserts to dying men.

There is nothing good for him in the desert of the Somme. Bapaume is
not really there, though it be marked on his maps; it is only a
wilderness of slates and brick. Peronne looks like a city a long way
off, but when you come near it is only the shells of houses. Pozière,
Le Sars, Sapigny, are gone altogether.

And all is Dead Sea fruit in a visible desert. The reports of German
victories there are mirage like all the rest; they too will fade into
weeds and old barbed wire.

And the advances that look like victories, and the ruins that look
like cities, and the shell-beaten broken fields that look like
farms,--they and the dreams of conquest and all the plots and ambitions,
they are all the mirage of a dying dynasty in a desert it made for its
doom.

Bones lead up to the desert, bones are scattered about it, it is the
most menacing and calamitous waste of all the deadly places that have
been inclement to man. It flatters the Hohenzollerns with visions of
victory now because they are doomed by it and are about to die. When
their race has died the earth shall smile again, for their deadly
mirage shall oppress us no more. The cities shall rise again and the
farms come back; hedgerows and orchards shall be seen again; the woods
shall slowly lift their heads from the dust; and gardens shall come
again where the desert was, to bloom in happier ages that forget the
Hohenzollerns.



A Famous Man


Last winter a famous figure walked in Behagnies. Soldiers came to see
him from their billets all down the Arras road, from Ervillers and
from Sapigny, and from the ghosts of villages back from the road,
places that once were villages but are only names now. They would walk
three or four miles, those who could not get lorries, for his was one
of those names that all men know, not such a name as a soldier or poet
may win, but a name that all men know. They used to go there at
evening.

Four miles away on the left as you went from Ervillers, the guns
mumbled over the hills, low hills over which the Verys from the
trenches put up their heads and peered around,--greeny, yellowy
heads that turned the sky sickly, and the clouds lit up and went grey
again all the night long. As you got near to Behagnies you lost sight
of the Verys, but the guns mumbled on. A silly little train used to
run on one's left, which used to whistle loudly, as though it asked to
be shelled, but I never saw a shell coming its way; perhaps it knew
that the German gunners could not calculate how slow it went. It
crossed the road as you got down to Behagnies.

You passed the graves of two or three German soldiers with their names
on white wooden crosses,--men killed in 1914; and then a little
cemetery of a French cavalry regiment, where a big cross stood in the
middle with a wreath and a tricolor badge, and the names of the men.
And then one saw trees. That was always a wonder, whether one saw
their dark shapes in the evening, or whether one saw them by day, and
knew from the look of their leaves whether autumn had come yet, or
gone. In winter at evening one just saw the black bulk of them, but
that was no less marvellous than seeing them green in summer; trees by
the side of the Arras-Bapaume road, trees in mid-desert in the awful
region of Somme. There were not many of them, just a cluster, fewer
than the date palms in an oasis in Sahara, but an oasis is an oasis
wherever you find it, and a few trees make it. There are little places
here and there, few enough as the Arabs know, that the Sahara's deadly
sand has never been able to devastate; and there are places even in
the Somme that German malice, obeying the Kaiser as the sand of Sahara
obeys the accursed sirocco, has not been able to destroy quite to the
uttermost. That little cluster of trees at Behagnies is one of these;
Divisional Headquarters used to shelter beneath them; and near them
was a statue on a lawn which probably stood by the windows of some
fine house, though there is no trace of the house but the lawn and
that statue now.

And over the way on the left a little further on, just past the
officers' club, a large hall stood where one saw that famous figure,
whom officers and men alike would come so far to see.

The hall would hold perhaps four or five hundred seats in front of a
stage fitted up very simply with red, white and blue cloths, but
fitted up by some one that understood the job; and at the back of that
stage on those winter evenings walked on his flat and world-renowned
feet the figure of Charlie Chaplin.

When aëroplanes came over bombing, the dynamos used to stop for they
supplied light to other places besides the cinema, and the shade of
Charlie Chaplin would fade away. But the men would wait till the
aëroplanes had gone and that famous figure came waddling back to the
screen. There he amused tired men newly come from the trenches, there
he brought laughter to most of the twelve days that they had out of
the line.

He is gone from Behagnies now. He did not march in the retreat a
little apart from the troops, with head bent forward and hand thrust
in jacket, a flat-footed Napoleon: yet he is gone; for no one would
have left behind for the enemy so precious a thing as a Charlie
Chaplin film. He is gone but he will return. He will come with his
cane one day along that Arras road to the old hut in Behagnies; and
men dressed in brown will welcome him there again.

He will pass beyond it through those desolate plains, and over the
hills beyond them, beyond Bapaume. Far hamlets to the east will know
his antics.

And one day surely, in old familiar garb, without court dress, without
removing his hat, armed with that flexible cane, he will walk over the
faces of the Prussian Guard and, picking up the Kaiser by the collar,
with infinite nonchalance in finger and thumb, will place him neatly
in a prone position and solemnly sit on his chest.



The Oases of Death


While the German guns were pounding Amiens and the battle of dull
Prussianism against Liberty raged on, they buried Richthofen in the
British lines.

They had laid him in a large tent with his broken machine outside it.
Thence British airmen carried him to the quiet cemetery, and he was
buried among the cypresses in this old resting place of French
generations just as though he had come there bringing no harm to
France.

Five wreaths were on his coffin, placed there by those who had fought
against him up in the air. And under the wreaths on the coffin was
spread the German flag.

When the funeral service was over three volleys were fired by the
escort, and a hundred aviators paid their last respects to the grave
of their greatest enemy; for the chivalry that the Prussians have
driven from earth and sea lives on in the blue spaces of the air.

They buried Richthofen at evening, and the planes came droning home as
they buried him, and the German guns roared on and guns answered,
defending Amiens. And in spite of all, the cemetery had the air of
quiet, remaining calm and aloof, as all French graveyards are. For
they seem to have no part in the cataclysm that shakes all the world
but them; they seem to withdraw amongst memories and to be aloof from
time, and, above all, to be quite untroubled by the war that rages
to-day, upon which they appear to look out listlessly from among their
cypress and yew, and dimly, down a vista of centuries. They are very
strange, these little oases of death that remain unmoved and green
with their trees still growing, in the midst of a desolation as far as
the eye can see, in which cities and villages and trees and hedges and
farms and fields and churches are all gone, and where hugely broods a
desert. It is as though Death, stalking up and down through France for
four years, sparing nothing, had recognized for his own his little
gardens, and had spared only them.



Anglo-Saxon Tyranny


"We need a sea," says Big-Admiral von Tirpitz, "freed of
Anglo-Saxon tyranny." Unfortunately neither the British Admiralty nor
the American Navy permit us to know how much of the Anglo-Saxon
tyranny is done by American destroyers and how much by British ships
and even trawler. It would interest both countries to know, if it
could be known. But the Big-Admiral is unjust to France, for the
French navy exerts a tyranny at sea that can by no means be
overlooked, although naturally from her position in front of the mouth
of the Elbe England practises the culminating insupportable tyranny of
keeping the High Seas Fleet in the Kiel Canal.

It is not I, but the Big-Admiral, who chose the word tyranny as
descriptive of the activities of the Anglo-Saxon navies. He was making
a speech at Dusseldorf on May 25th and was reported in the
Dusseldorfer Nachrichten on May 27th.

Naturally it does not seem like tyranny to us, even the contrary; but
for an admiral, ein Grosse-Admiral, lately commanding a High Seas
Fleet, it must have been more galling than we perhaps can credit to be
confined in a canal. There was he, who should have been breasting the
blue, or at any rate doing something salty and nautical, far out in
the storms of that sea that the Germans call an Ocean, with the
hurricane raging angrily in his whiskers and now and then wafting
tufts of them aloft to white the halyards; there was he constrained to
a command the duties of which however nobly he did them could be
equally well carried out by any respectable bargee. He hoped for a
piracy of which the Lusitania was merely a beginning; he looked for
the bombardment of innumerable towns; he pictured slaughter in many a
hamlet of fishermen; he planned more than all those things of which
U-boat commanders are guilty; he saw himself a murderous old man,
terrible to seafarers, and a scourge of the coasts, and fancied
himself chronicled in after years by such as told dark tales of
Captain Kidd or the awful buccaneers; but he followed in the end no
more desperate courses than to sit and watch his ships on a wharf near
Kiel like one of Jacob's night watchmen.

No wonder that what appears to us no more than the necessary
protection of women and children in seacoast towns from murder should
be to him an intolerable tyranny. No wonder that the guarding of
travellers of the allied countries at sea, and even those of the
neutrals, should be a most galling thing to the Big-Admiral's thwarted
ambition, looking at it from the point of view of one who to
white-whiskered age has retained the schoolboy's natural love of the
black and yellow flag. A pirate, he would say, has as much right to
live as wasps or tigers. The Anglo-Saxon navies, he might argue, have
a certain code of rules for use at sea; they let women get first into
the boats, for instance, when ships are sinking, and they rescue
drowning mariners when they can: no actual harm in all this, he would
feel, though it would weaken you, as Hindenburg said of poetry; but if
all these little rules are tyrannously enforced on those who may think
them silly, what is to become of the pirate? Where, if people like
Beattie and Sims had always had their way, would be those rollicking
tales of the jolly Spanish Main, and men walking the plank into the
big blue sea, and long, low, rakish craft putting in to Indian
harbours with a cargo of men and women all hung from the yard-arm? A
melancholy has come over the spirit of Big-Admiral von Tirpitz in the
years he has spent in the marshes between the Elbe and Kiel, and in
that melancholy he sees romance crushed; he sees no more pearl
earrings and little gold rings in the hold, he sees British
battleships spoiling the Spanish Main, and hateful American cruisers
in the old Sargasso Sea; he sees himself, alas, the last of all the
pirates.

Let him take comfort. There were always pirates. And in spite of the
tyranny of England and America, and of France, which the poor old man
perplexed with his troubles forgot, there will be pirates still. Not
many perhaps, but enough U-boats will always be able to slip through
that tyrannous blockade to spread indiscriminate slaughter amongst the
travellers of any nation, enough to hand on the old traditions of
murder at sea. And one day Captain Kidd, with such a bow as they used
to make in ports of the Spanish Main, will take off his ancient hat,
sweeping it low in Hell, and be proud to clasp the hand of the Lord of
the Kiel Canal.



Memories


  ... far-off things
     And battles long ago.


Those who live in an old house are necessarily more concerned with
paying the plumber, should his art be required, or choosing wall paper
that does not clash with the chintzes, than with the traditions that
may haunt its corridors. In Ireland,--and no one knows how old that
is, for the gods that lived there before the Red Branch came wrote few
chronicles on the old grey Irish stones and wrote in their own
language,--in Ireland we are more concerned with working it so that
Tim Flanagan gets the job he does be looking for.

But in America those who remember Ireland remember her, very often,
from old generations; maybe their grandfather migrated, perhaps his
grandfather, and Ireland is remembered by old tales treasured among
them. Now Tim Flanagan will not be remembered in a year's time when he
has the job for which he has got us to agitate, and the jobberies that
stir us move not the pen of History.

But the tales that Irish generations hand down beyond the Atlantic
have to be tales that are worth remembering. They are tales that have
to stand the supreme test, tales that a child will listen to by the
fireside of an evening, so that they go down with those early
remembered evenings that are last of all to go of the memories of a
lifetime. A tale that a child will listen to must have much grandeur.
Any cheap stuff will do for us, bad journalism, and novels by girls
that could get no other jobs; but a child looks for those things in a
tale that are simple and noble and epic, the things that Earth
remembers. And so they tell, over there, tales of Sarsfield and of the
old Irish Brigade; they tell, of an evening, of Owen Roe O'Neill. And
into those tales come the plains of Flanders again and the ancient
towns of France, towns famous long ago and famous yet: let us rather
think of them as famous names and not as the sad ruins we have seen,
melancholy by day and monstrous in the moonlight.

Many an Irishman who sails from America for those historic lands knows
that the old trees that stand there have their roots far down in soil
once richened by Irish blood. When the Boyne was lost and won, and
Ireland had lost her King, many an Irishman with all his wealth in a
scabbard looked upon exile as his sovereign's court. And so they came
to the lands of foreign kings, with nothing to offer for the
hospitality that was given them but a sword; and it usually was a
sword with which kings were well content. Louis XV had many of them,
and was glad to have them at Fontenoy; the Spanish King admitted them
to the Golden Fleece; they defended Maria Theresa. Landen in Flanders
and Cremona knew them. A volume were needed to tell of all those
swords; more than one Muse has remembered them. It was not disloyalty
that drove them forth; their King was gone, they followed, the oak was
smitten and brown were the leaves of the tree.

But no such mournful metaphor applies to the men who march to-day
towards the plains where the "Wild Geese" were driven. They go with
no country mourning them, but their whole land cheers them on; they go
to the inherited battlefields. And there is this difference in their
attitude to kings, that those knightly Irishmen of old, driven
homeless over-sea, appeared as exiles suppliant for shelter before the
face of the Grand Monarch, and he, no doubt with exquisite French
grace, gave back to them all they had lost except what was lost
forever, salving so far as he could the injustice suffered by each.
But to-day when might, for its turn, is in the hands of democracies,
the men whose fathers built the Statue of Liberty have left their
country to bring back an exiled king to his home, and to right what
can be righted of the ghastly wrongs of Flanders.

And if men's prayers are heard, as many say, old saints will hear old
supplications going up by starlight with a certain wistful, musical
intonation that has linked the towns of Limerick and Cork with the
fields of Flanders before.



The Movement


For many years Eliphaz Griggs was comparatively silent. Not that he
did not talk on all occasions whenever he could find hearers, he did
that at great length; but for many years he addressed no public
meeting, and was no part of the normal life of the northeast end of
Hyde Park or Trafalgar Square. And then one day he was talking in a
public house where he had gone to talk on the only subject that was
dear to him. He waited, as was his custom, until five or six men were
present, and then he began. "Ye're all damned, I'm saying, damned
from the day you were born. Your portion is Tophet."

And on that day there happened what had never happened in his
experience before. Men used to listen in a tolerant way, and say
little over their beer, for that is the English custom; and that would
be all. But to-day a man rose up with flashing eyes and went over to
Eliphaz and gripped him by the hand: "They're all damned," said the
stranger.

That was the turning point in the life of Eliphaz. Up to that moment
he had been a lonely crank, and men thought he was queer; but now
there were two of them and he became a Movement. A Movement in England
may do what it likes: there was a Movement, before the War, for
spoiling tulips in Kew Gardens and breaking church windows; it had its
run like the rest.

The name of Eliphaz's new friend was Ezekiel Pim: and they drew up
rules for their Movement almost at once; and very soon country inns
knew Eliphaz no more. And for some while they missed him where he used
to drop in of an evening to tell them they were all damned: and then a
man proved one day that the earth was flat, and they all forgot
Eliphaz.

But Eliphaz went to Hyde Park and Ezekiel Pim went with him, and there
you would see them close to the Marble Arch on any fine Sunday
afternoon, preaching their Movement to the people of London. "You are
all damned," said Eliphaz. "Your portion shall be damnation for
everlasting."

"All damned," added Ezekiel.

Eliphaz was the orator. He would picture Hell to you as it really is.
He made you see pretty much what it will be like to wriggle and turn
and squirm, and never escape from burning. But Ezekiel Pim, though he
seldom said more than three words, uttered those words with such
alarming sincerity and had such a sure conviction shining in his eyes
that searched right in your face as he said them, and his long hair
waved so weirdly as his head shot forward when he said "You're all
damned," that Ezekiel Pim brought home to you that the vivid
descriptions of Eliphaz really applied to you.

People who lead bad lives get their sensibilities hardened. These did
not care very much what Eliphaz said. But girls at school, and several
governesses, and even some young clergy, were very much affected.
Eliphaz Griggs and Ezekiel Pim seemed to bring Hell so near to you.
You could almost feel it baking the Marble Arch from two to four on
Sundays. And at four o'clock the Surbiton Branch of the International
Anarchists used to come along, and Eliphaz Griggs and Ezekiel Pim
would pack up their flag and go, for the pitch belonged to the
Surbiton people till six; and the crank Movements punctiliously
recognize each other's rights. If they fought among themselves, which
is quite unthinkable, the police would run them in; it is the one
thing that an anarchist in England may never do.

When the War came the two speakers doubled their efforts. The way they
looked at it was that here was a counter-attraction taking people's
minds off the subject of their own damnation just as they had got them
to think about it. Eliphaz worked as he had never worked before; he
spared nobody; but it was still Ezekiel Pim who somehow brought it
most home to them.

One fine spring afternoon Eliphaz Griggs was speaking at his usual
place and time; he had wound himself up wonderfully. "You are
damned," he was saying, "for ever and ever and ever. Your sins have
found you out. Your filthy lives will be as fuel round you and shall
burn for ever and ever."

"Look here," said a Canadian soldier in the crowd, "we shouldn't
allow that in Ottawa."

"What?" asked an English girl.

"Why, telling us we're all damned like that," he said.

"Oh, this is England," she said. "They may all say what they like
here."

"You are all damned," said Ezekiel, jerking forward his head and
shoulders till his hair flapped out behind. "All, all, all damned."

"I'm damned if I am," said the Canadian soldier.

"Ah," said Ezekiel, and a sly look came into his face.

Eliphaz flamed on. "Your sins are remembered. Satan shall grin at
you. He shall heap cinders on you for ever and ever. Woe to you,
filthy livers. Woe to you, sinners. Hell is your portion. There shall
be none to grieve for you. You shall dwell in torment for ages. None
shall be spared, not one. Woe everlasting... Oh, I beg pardon,
gentlemen, I'm sure." For the Pacifists' League had been kept waiting
three minutes. It was their turn to-day at four.



Nature's Cad


The claim of Professor Grotius Jan Beek to have discovered, or
learned, the language of the greater apes has been demonstrated
clearly enough. He is not the original discoverer of the fact that
they have what may be said to correspond with a language; nor is he
the first man to have lived for some while in the jungle protected by
wooden bars, with a view to acquiring some knowledge of the meaning of
the various syllables that gorillas appear to utter. If so crude a
collection of sounds, amounting to less than a hundred words, if words
they are, may be called a language, it may be admitted that the
Professor has learned it, as his recent experiments show. What he has
not proved is his assertion that he has actually conversed with a
gorilla, or by signs, or grunts, or any means whatever obtained an
insight, as he put it, into its mentality, or, as we should put it,
its point of view. This Professor Beek claims to have done; and though
he gives us a certain plausible corroboration of a kind which makes
his story appear likely, it should be borne in mind that it is not of
the nature of proof.

The Professor's story is briefly that having acquired this language,
which nobody that has witnessed his experiments will call in question,
he went back to the jungle for a week, living all the time in the
ordinary explorer's cage of the Blik pattern. Towards the very end of
the week a big male gorilla came by, and the Professor attracted it by
the one word "Food." It came, he says, close to the cage, and seemed
prepared to talk but became very angry on seeing a man there, and beat
the cage and would say nothing. The Professor says that he asked it
why it was angry. He admits that he had learned no more than forty
words of this language, but believes that there are perhaps thirty
more. Much however is expressed, as he says, by mere intonation.
Anger, for instance; and scores of allied words, such as terrible,
frightful, kill, whether noun, verb or adjective, are expressed, he
says, by a mere growl. Nor is there any word for "Why," but queries
are signified by the inflexion of the voice.

When he asked it why it was angry the gorilla said that men killed
him, and added a noise that the professor said was evidently meant to
allude to guns. The only word used, he says, in this remark of the
gorilla's was the word that signified "man." The sentence as
understood by the professor amounted to "Man kill me. Guns." But the
word "kill" was represented simply by a snarl, "me" by slapping
its chest, and "guns" as I have explained was only represented by a
noise. The Professor believes that ultimately a word for guns may be
evolved out of that noise, but thinks that it will take many
centuries, and that if during that time guns should cease to be in
use, this stimulus being withdrawn, the word will never be evolved at
all, nor of course will it be needed.

The Professor tried, by evincing interest, ignorance, and incredulity,
and even indignation, to encourage the gorilla to say more; but to his
disappointment, all the more intense after having exchanged that one
word of conversation with one of the beasts, the gorilla only repeated
what it had said, and beat on the cage again. For half an hour this
went on, the Professor showing every sign of sympathy, the gorilla
raging and beating upon the cage.

It was half an hour of the most intense excitement to the Professor,
during which time he saw the realization of dreams that many
considered crazy, glittering as it were within his grasp, and all the
while this ridiculous gorilla would do nothing but repeat the mere
shred of a sentence and beat the cage with its great hands; and the
heat of course was intense. And by the end of the half hour the
excitement and the heat seem to have got the better of the Professor's
temper, and he waved the disgusting brute angrily away with a gesture
that probably was not much less impatient than the gorilla's own. And
at that the animal suddenly became voluble. He beat more furiously
than ever upon the cage and slipped his great fingers through the
bars, trying to reach the Professor, and poured out volumes of
ape-chatter.

Why, why did men shoot at him, he asked. He made himself terrible,
therefore men ought to love him. That was the whole burden of what the
Professor calls its argument. "Me, me terrible," two slaps on the
chest and then a growl. "Man love me." And then the emphatic
negative word, and the sound that meant guns, and sudden furious
rushes at the cage to try to get at the Professor.

The gorilla, Professor Beek explains, evidently admired only strength;
whenever he said "I make myself terrible to Man," a sentence he
often repeated, he drew himself up and thrust out his huge chest and
bared his frightful teeth; and certainly, the Professor says, there
was something terribly grand about the menacing brute. "Me
terrible," he repeated again and again, "Me terrible. Sky, sun,
stars with me. Man love me. Man love me. No?" It meant that all the
great forces of nature assisted him and his terrible teeth, which he
gnashed repeatedly, and that therefore man should love him, and he
opened his great jaws wide as he said this, showing all the brutal
force of them.

There was to my mind a genuine ring in Professor Beek's story, because
he was obviously so much more concerned, and really troubled, by the
dreadful depravity of this animal's point of view, or mentality as he
called it, than he was concerned with whether or not we believed what
he had said.

And I mentioned that there was a circumstance in his story of a
plausible and even corroborative nature. It is this. Professor Beek,
who noticed at the time a bullet wound in the tip of the gorilla's
left ear, by means of which it was luckily identified, put his
analysis of its mentality in writing and showed it to several others,
before he had any way of accounting for the beast having such a mind.

Long afterwards it was definitely ascertained that this animal had
been caught when young on the slopes of Kilimanjaro and trained and
even educated, so far as such things are possible, by an eminent
German Professor, a persona grata at the Court of Berlin.



The Home of Herr Schnitzelhaaser


The guns in the town of Greinstein were faintly audible. The family of
Schnitzelhaaser lived alone there in mourning, an old man and old
woman. They never went out or saw any one, for they knew they could
not speak as though they did not mourn. They feared that their secret
would escape them. They had never cared for the war that the War Lord
made. They no longer cared what he did with it. They never read his
speeches; they never hung out flags when he ordered flags: they hadn't
the heart to.

They had had four sons.

The lonely old couple would go as far as the shop for food. Hunger
stalked behind them. They just beat hunger every day, and so saw
evening: but there was nothing to spare. Otherwise they did not go out
at all. Hunger had been coming slowly nearer of late. They had nothing
but the ration, and the ration was growing smaller. They had one pig
of their own, but the law said you might not kill it. So the pig was
no good to them.

They used to go and look at that pig sometimes when hunger pinched.
But more than that they did not dare to contemplate.

Hunger came nearer and nearer. The war was going to end by the first
of July. The War Lord was going to take Paris on this day and that
would end the war at once. But then the war was always going to end.
It was going to end in 1914, and their four sons were to have come
home when the leaves fell. The War Lord had promised that. And even if
it did end, that would not bring their four sons home now. So what did
it matter what the War Lord said.

It was thoughts like these that they knew they had to conceal. It was
because of thoughts like these that they did not trust themselves to
go out and see other people, for they feared that by their looks if by
nothing else, or by their silence or perhaps their tears, they might
imply a blasphemy against the All Highest. And hunger made one so
hasty. What might one not say? And so they stayed indoors.

But now. What would happen now? The War Lord was coming to Greinstein
in order to hear the guns. One officer of the staff was to be billeted
in their house. And what would happen now?

They talked the whole thing over. They must struggle and make an
effort. The officer would be there for one evening. He would leave in
the morning quite early in order to make things ready for the return
to Potsdam: he had charge of the imperial car. So for one evening they
must be merry. They would suppose, it was Herr Schnitzelhaaser's
suggestion, they would think all the evening that Belgium and France
and Luxemburg all attacked the Fatherland, and that the Kaiser,
utterly unprepared, quite unprepared, called on the Germans to defend
their land against Belgium.

Yes, the old woman could imagine that; she could think it all the
evening.

And then,--it was no use not being cheerful altogether,--then one
must imagine a little more, just for the evening: it would come quite
easy; one must think that the four boys were alive.

Hans too? (Hans was the youngest).

Yes, all four. Just for the evening.

But if the officer asks?

He will not ask. What are four soldiers?

So it was all arranged; and at evening the officer came. He brought
his own rations, so hunger came no nearer. Hunger just lay down
outside the door and did not notice the officer.

A this supper the officer began to talk. The Kaiser himself, he said,
was at the Schartzhaus.

"So," said Herr Schnitzelhaaser; "just over the way." So close.
Such an honour.

And indeed the shadow of the Schartzhaus darkened their garden in the
morning.

It was such an honour, said Frau Schnitzelhaaser too. And they began
to praise the Kaiser. So great a War Lord, she said; the most glorious
war there had ever been.

Of course, said the officer, it would end on the first of July.

Of course, said Frau Schnitzelhaaser. And so great an admiral, too.
One must remember that also. And how fortunate we were to have him:
one must not forget that. Had it not been for him the crafty Belgians
would have attacked the Fatherland, but they were struck down before
they could do it. So much better to prevent a bad deed like that than
merely to punish after. So wise. And had it not been for him, if it
had not been for him...

The old man saw that she was breaking down and hastily he took up that
feverish praise. Feverish it was, for their hunger and bitter loss
affected their minds no less than illness does, and the things they
did they did hastily and intemperately. His praise of the War Lord
raced on as the officer ate. He spoke of him as of those that benefit
man, as of monarchs who bring happiness to their people. And now, he
said, he is here in the Schartzhaus beside us, listening to the guns
just like a common soldier.

Finally the guns, as he spoke, coughed beyond ominous hills.
Contentedly the officer went on eating. He suspected nothing of the
thoughts his host and hostess were hiding. At last he went upstairs to
bed.

As fierce exertion is easy to the fevered, so they had spoken; and it
wears them, so they were worn. The old woman wept when the officer
went out of hearing. But old Herr Schnitzelhaaser picked up a big
butcher's knife. "I will bear it no more," he said.

His wife watched him in silence as he went away with his knife. Out of
the house he went and into the night. Through the open door she saw
nothing; all was dark; even the Schartzhaus, where all was gay
to-night, stood dark for fear of aëroplanes. The old woman waited in
silence.

When Herr Schnitzelhaaser returned there was blood on his knife.

"What have you done?" the old woman asked him quite calmly. "I have
killed our pig," he said.

She broke out then, all the more recklessly for the long restraint of
the evening; the officer must have heard her.

"We are lost! We are lost!" she cried. "We may not kill our pig.
Hunger has made you mad. You have ruined us."

"I will bear it no longer," he said. "I have killed our pig."

"But they will never let us eat it," she cried. "Oh, you have
ruined us!"

"If you did not dare to kill our pig," he said, "why did you not
stop me when you saw me go? You saw me go with the knife?"

"I thought," she said, "you were going to kill the Kaiser."



A Deed of Mercy


As Hindenburg and the Kaiser came down, as we read, from Mont d'Hiver,
during the recent offensive, they saw on the edge of a crater two
wounded British soldiers. The Kaiser ordered that they should be cared
for: their wounds were bound up and they were given brandy, and
brought round from unconsciousness. That is the German account of it,
and it may well be true. It was a kindly act.

Probably had it not been for this the two men would have died among
those desolate craters; no one would have known, and no one could have
been blamed for it.

The contrast of this spark of imperial kindness against the gloom of
the background of the war that the Kaiser made is a pleasant thing to
see, even though it illuminates for only a moment the savage darkness
in which our days are plunged. It was a kindness that probably will
long be remembered to him. Even we, his enemies, will remember it. And
who knows but that when most he needs it his reward for the act will
be given him.

For Judas, they say, once in his youth, gave his cloak, out of
compassion, to a shivering beggar, who sat shaken with ague, in rags,
in bitter need. And the years went by and Judas forgot his deed. And
long after, in Hell, Judas they say was given one day's respite at the
end of every year because of this one kindness he had done so long
since in his youth. And every year he goes, they say, for a day and
cools himself among the Arctic bergs; once every year for century
after century.

Perhaps some sailor on watch on a misty evening blown far out of his
course away to the north saw something ghostly once on an iceberg
floating by, or heard some voice in the dimness that seemed like the
voice of man, and came home with this weird story. And perhaps, as the
story passed from lip to lip, men found enough justice in it to
believe it true. So it came down the centuries.

Will seafarers ages hence on dim October evenings, or on nights when
the moon is ominous through mist, red and huge and uncanny, see a
lonely figure sometimes on the loneliest part of the sea, far north of
where the Lusitania sank, gathering all the cold it can? Will they see
it hugging a crag of iceberg wan as itself, helmet, cuirass and ice
pale-blue in the mist together? Will it look towards them with
ice-blue eyes through the mist, and will they question it, meeting on
those bleak seas? Will it answer--or will the North wind howl like
voices? Will the cry of seals be heard, and ice floes grinding, and
strange birds lost upon the wind that night, or will it speak to them
in those distant years and tell them how it sinned, betraying man?

It will be a grim, dark story in that lonely part of the sea, when he
confesses to sailors, blown too far north, the dreadful thing he
plotted against man. The date on which he is seen will be told from
sailor to sailor. Queer taverns of distant harbours will know it well.
Not many will care to be at sea that day, and few will risk being
driven by stress of weather on the Kaiser's night to the bergs of the
haunted part of sea.

And yet for all the grimness of the pale-blue phantom, with cuirass
and helmet and eyes shimmering on deadly icebergs, and yet for all the
sorrow of the wrong he did against man, the women drowned and the
children, and all the good ships gone, yet will the horrified mariners
meeting him in the mist grudge him no moment of the day he has earned,
or the coolness he gains from the bergs, because of the kindness he
did to the wounded men. For the mariners in their hearts are kindly
men, and what a soul gains from kindness will seem to them well
deserved.



Last Scene of All


After John Calleron was hit he carried on in a kind of twilight of the
mind. Things grew dimmer and calmer; harsh outlines of events became
blurred; memories came to him; there was a singing in his ears like
far-off bells. Things seemed more beautiful than they had a while ago;
to him it was for all the world like evening after some quiet sunset,
when lawns and shrubs and woods and some old spire look lovely in the
late light, and one reflects on past days. Thus he carried on, seeing
things dimly. And what is sometimes called "the roar of battle,"
those aërial voices that snarl and moan and whine and rage at
soldiers, had grown dimmer too. It all seemed further away, and
littler, as far things are. He still heard the bullets: there is
something so violently and intensely sharp in the snap of passing
bullets at short ranges that you hear them in deepest thought, and
even in dreams. He heard them, tearing by, above all things else. The
rest seemed fainter and dimmer, and smaller and further away.

He did not think he was very badly hit, but nothing seemed to matter
as it did a while ago. Yet he carried on.

And then he opened his eyes very wide and found he was back in London
again in an underground train. He knew it at once by the look of it.
He had made hundreds of journeys, long ago, by those trains. He knew
by the dark, outside, that it had not yet left London; but what was
odder than that, if one stopped to think of it, was that he knew
exactly where it was going. It was the train that went away out into
the country where he used to live as a boy. He was sure of that
without thinking.

When he began to think how he came to be there he remembered the war
as a very far-off thing. He supposed he had been unconscious a very
long time. He was all right now.

Other people were sitting beside him on the same seat. They all seemed
like people he remembered a very long time ago. In the darkness
opposite, beyond the windows of the train, he could see their
reflections clearly. He looked at the reflections but could not quite
remember.

A woman was sitting on his left. She was quite young. She was more
like some one that he most deeply remembered than all the others were.
He gazed at her, and tried to clear his mind.

He did not turn and stare at her, but he quietly watched her
reflection before him in the dark. Every detail of her dress, her
young face, her hat, the little ornaments she wore, were minutely
clear before him, looking out of the dark. So contented she looked you
would say she was untouched by war.

As he gazed at the clear calm face and the dress that seemed neat
though old and, like all things, so faraway, his mind grew clearer and
clearer. It seemed to him certain it was the face of his mother, but
from thirty years ago, out of old memories and one picture. He felt
sure it was his mother as she had been when he was very small. And yet
after thirty years how could he know? He puzzled to try and be quite
sure. But how she came to be there, looking like that, out of those
oldest memories, he did not think of at all.

He seemed to be hugely tired by many things and did not want to think.
Yet he was very happy, more happy even than tired men just come home
all new to comfort.

He gazed and gazed at the face in the dark. And then he felt quite
sure.

He was about to speak. Was she looking at him? Was she watching him,
he wondered. He glanced for the first time to his own reflection in
that clear row of faces.

His own reflection was not there, but blank dark showed between his
two neighbours. And then he knew he was dead.



Old England


Towards winter's end on a high, big, bare down, in the south of
England, John Plowman was plowing. He was plowing the brown field at
the top of the hill, good soil of the clay; a few yards lower down was
nothing but chalk, with shallow flinty soil and steep to plow; so they
let briars grow there. For generations his forbears had plowed on the
top of that hill. John did not know how many. The hills were very old;
it might have been always.

He scarcely looked to see if his furrow was going straight. The work
he was doing was so much in his blood that he could almost feel if
furrows were straight or not. Year after year they moved on the same
old landmarks; thorn trees and briars mostly guided the plow, where
they stood on the untamed land beyond; the thorn trees grew old at
their guiding, and still the furrows varied not by the breadth of a
hoof-mark.

John, as he plowed, had leisure to meditate on much besides the crops;
he knew so much of the crops that his thoughts could easily run free
from them; he used to meditate on who they were that lived in briar
and thorn tree, and danced as folk said all through midsummer night,
and sometimes blessed and sometimes harmed the crops; for he knew that
in Old England were wonderful ancient things, odder and older things
than many folks knew. And his eyes had leisure to see much beside the
furrows, for he could almost feel the furrows going straight.

One day at his plowing, as he watched the thorn ahead, he saw the
whole big hill besides, looking south, and the lands below it; one day
he saw in the bright sun of late winter a horseman riding the road
through the wide lands below. The horseman shone as he rode, and wore
white linen over what was shining, and on the linen was a big red
cross. "One of them knights," John Plowman said to himself or his
horse, "going to them crusades." And he went on with his plowing all
that day satisfied, and remembered what he had seen for years, and
told his son.

For there is in England, and there always was, mixed with the needful
things that feed or shelter the race, the wanderer-feeling for
romantic causes that runs deep and strange through the other thoughts,
as the Gulf Stream runs through the sea. Sometimes generations of John
Plowman's family would go by and no high romantic cause would come to
sate that feeling. They would work on just the same though a little
sombrely, as though some good thing had been grudged them. And then
the Crusades had come, and John Plowman had seen the Red Cross knight
go by, riding towards the sea in the morning, and Jon Plowman was
satisfied.

Some generations later a man of the same name was plowing the same
hill. They still plowed the brown clay at the top and left the slope
wild, though there were many changes. And the furrows were wonderfully
straight still. And half he watched a thorn tree ahead as he plowed
and half he took in the whole hill sloping south and the wide lands
below it, far beyond which was the sea. They had a railway now down in
the valley. The sunlight glittering near the end of winter shone on a
train that was marked with great white squares and red crosses on
them.

John Plowman stopped his horses and looked at the train. "An
ambulance train," he said, "coming up from the coast." He thought
of the lads he knew and wondered if any were there. He pitied the men
in that train and envied them. And then there came to him the thought
of England's cause and of how those men had upheld it, at sea and in
crumbling cities. He thought of the battle whose echoes reached
sometimes to that field, whispering to furrows and thorn trees that
had never heard them before. He thought of the accursed tyrant's cruel
might, and of the lads that had faced it. He saw the romantic
splendour of England's cause. He was old but had seen the glamour for
which each generation looked. Satisfied in his heart and cheered with
a new content he went on with his age-old task in the business of man
with the hills.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Tales of War" ***

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