FranceApril26, 1918
IIt is now over a week since I have been back with my battery, and it seems as though all that trip along the American line and the rush back to New York had never happened. I'm sitting in a little “house” in a deep chalk trench. The house is made of half-circles of corrugated iron; there's an anti-gas blanket hanging at one end and at the other a window made of oiled calico. Up one corner are the maps, scales, and office papers; pinned on boards is a four-foot map of the entire English front. My sleeping bag is stretched on an old French spring mattress, which was brought here some time ago by the Huns. From the walls hang a higgledy-piggledy of trench coats, breeches, tunics. This is the place in which we work out our ranges, play cards, have our meals, and rest when we're back from doing forward work.
You can walk for miles where we are without ever being seen, if you follow the various systems of Hun and British trenches, for we're plumb in the heart of an old battlefield. The only landmarks left to guide one are the craters as big as churches—records of mines that have been sprung—and little rows of lonely graves. At night when the moon is up, this country creates the curious ghostly illusion of being an endless alkali desert, beaten into billows by the wind. The shells go shrieking over it and wreaths of mist wander here and there like phantoms. Destruction can create a terrible pretence and caricature of beauty. I wish you might visit such a place just once so as to get an idea of where our lives are spent.
Your letters apropos of the latest German offensive bring home to me very vividly the emotional terror which war excites in the minds of civilians. You picture us as standing with our backs to the wall, desperately pushing death from off our breasts with naked hands. The truth is so immensely different. We're having a thoroughly bang-up time, and we're as amused by the Hun as ever. He may force us to fall back; but while we fall back we laugh at him. That is the attitude of every British soldier that I've met. We're as happy and unconcerned as children. There's one chap here who's typical of this spirit of treating war as an immensely sporting event. He's the raiding officer of a certain battalion, and is known as “Battling Brown”—though Brown is not his real name. He has a little company of his own, consisting of seventy men. He's been in over a hundred raids on the Hun Front line and has only had two of his men killed in a year. A short while ago he went across with his raiders and captured three Germans; on the return journey across No Man's Land something happened, and he lined up his prisoners and shot them. He led his men safely back to our lines and then set out again alone on a private excursion into the Boche territory. By dawn he once more returned, bringing back four prisoners single-handed. You might picture such a man as a kind of Hercules, but he isn't. He's thin, and tall, and fair, and high strung. His age, I should guess, is about twenty-two.
Far away in the distance I can hear the pipers playing. It always makes me think of Loch Lomond and when we were little tads. How green and quiet and cool those days seem now—the long rides across the moors and down the glens, the bathing in little mountain streams, the walks in the sad twilights. There are so many happy memories I have to thank you for. You were very wise and generous in the way you planned my childhood. I'm less than a fortnight back at the Front, but I'm already falling into the old habit of happy retrospect. We don't live here really. Our souls are in France only for brief and glorious and intense intervals—during the moments of attack and repulse. The rest of the time we're away in the green valleys of remembered places, watching the ghosts who are the shadows of what we were.
My groom is a boy named Gilpin. The name has proved his downfall. He galloped my horse on the hard road the other day, which is forbidden. A colonel caught him going full tilt, stopped him and took his name. When the severities seemed ended this innocent young party asked the colonel to hold his horse while he mounted—so now he's up on an extra charge of insolence.
Army discipline is in many ways silly and old maidish. Here's a chap who's faithful, well conducted, and honest. He's likely to get a heavier punishment for asking a superior officer to hold his horse than if he'd been drunk and uproarious.
FranceApril28, 1918
It's funny to recall the different graveyards among the shell-holes that I've learnt to call home. Once life was so definitely focused—much too definitely for my patience. It seemed as though I was rooted and planted for all eternity. It never seemed to me then that I should ever find the sacrificial opportunity or be stirred to any prophetic exaltations. It's wonderful the way the angel of Death, as discovered in war, can give one visions of limitless nobilities, each one of which is attainable and accessible.
I'm by myself at the Battery. It's late afternoon, and a thunderstorm is brewing. The room is dark (I mean the dug-out); I feel as though it were November instead of April. What a queer life this is. In one way I have not had so much idleness since I was in hospital—then comes a burst of physical strenuosity out of all proportion to one's strength. Things happen by fits and starts; you never know what is going to happen next.
It's intensely still. The stillness is made more noticeable by the booming of an occasional gun.
The whole hope and talk of our chaps is the Americans—what they're going to do, when they're going to start doing it, and what kind of amoralthey will have. I hear the wildest rumours of the numbers they have in France—rumours which I know to be untrue since my tour along the American lines. You will have read the manuscript ofOut to Winlong before this letter reaches you. I wonder what you all think of it and whether you like it. It was written in a breathless, racing sort of fashion. I sat at it from morning till last thing at night. All my desire was to do my duty as regards the Americans and then to get out here before the big show started. I managed things just in time. I don't remember much of what I wrote—only a picture of Domremy and another of Evian and Nancy. I hope it was as good as you expected.
There are things one lives through and sees now which seem ordinary but which to future ages will figure as stupendous. If one can record them now in just that spirit of ordinariness which constitutes their real wonder, they will together give an accurate portrait of Armageddon. My nine months out of the line began to give me a little perspective—I began to see the awful marvellousness of some of the scenes that I had lived through. Now, like the mist which I see hanging above the Hun Front line, a curtain of normality is blotting out the sharp abnormal edges of my landscape.
This war, at the distance which removes you from it, must seem a filthy and brutal kind of game. It is all of that. But it's more than that. The game was not of our inventing—it was thrust on us. We are not responsible for the game; but we are responsible for the spirit in which we play it. The fine, clear, visionary attitude of our chaps redeems for us the horror and pathos of the undertaking.
It will be towards the end of May when this arrives and you'll be off to the lakes and the mountains. I wonder where. I suppose we'll still be plugging along, sending death over into Fritz's lines and receiving it back.
FranceMay2, 1918
Here I am up forward again on my shift. I'm sitting in a hole sunk beneath the level of the ground, with a slit that just peeps out across the dandelions to the Hun Front line. From here I can catch any movement in the enemy back-country without being seen myself. Below my O.P. there is a deep dug-out to which I can retire in the event of enemy shelling; if one exit gets blown in, there's a second from which I can make good my escape. On each fresh trip to this place I find a new gem of literature left behind by one or other of the telephonists. Last time it was a priceless kitchen masterpiece by Charles Garvice, entitledThe Triumphant Lover; this time it's an exceedingly purple effort by Victoria Cross, entitledFive Nights. So you see I do not allow my interest in matters intellectual to rust.
There are many things of interest that I should like to tell you, but the consciousness that the censor is for ever at my elbow prevents. Did I ever tell you the story of the censor whom I met on the train from Boulogne, when I was returning to the line in January 1917? If I happened to tell it to you, the gentleman who uninvited shares all my letters with you hasn't heard it, and I'm sure his curiosity must be pricked by this time—so here goes.
It was after that splendid leave in London which you came over from America to share with me. The train from Boulogne to the Front was the usual draughty affair, half the windows out, no heating system, no means of getting anything to eat for goodness knows how many hours. I picked out the least disreputable carriage and found that a gunner colonel was snuggled up in one corner and a pile of rugs, pillows, hot-water bottles, eatables, etc., in another. Just as the train was starting the owner of all these effeminate luxuries hopped in and commenced to make himself comfortable. He was nearer fifty than forty. His nose was inflamed and heavily veined, either from drink, dyspepsia, or both. His rank was that of a lieutenant. His social grade that of a post-office assistant, I should fancy. His uniform fitted abominably, and his appearance was as unsoldierly as can well be imagined. He looked like a loose-living spider.
We hadn't been moving very long when he started to unwrap his packages and to gorge himself. He ate steadily like one whose life depended on it. The colonel and I had forgotten to bring anything, so we had the joy of watching.
In our chilly misery we became human and began to talk. The conversation became reminiscent of the numerous offensives. The sloppy lieutenant with the drooping walrus moustaches who sat opposite to us, persistently laid claim to a more thorough knowledge of attacks that we had been in than we did ourselves. He puzzled us; we couldn't picture him as a combatant. Quite haphazard one of us—I think it was the colonel—commenced to damn censors as chaps who sat safely behind the lines and spied on fighting-men's private affairs. The lieutenant became very hot in the censors' defence. He tried to prove the necessity for them by quoting the case of a lieutenant named N., who had sent back captured aeroplane photos to his friends. I happened to know N. and that he was going to be tried by court-martial for his indiscretion, so grew loud in proclaiming my contempt for the fellow safely behind the lines who had caught him. We were particularly annoyed, because N. was a plucky soldier.
Our friend in the corner took my remarks extremely personally. To show his resentment of me, he pointedly offered the colonel some of his fodder. At last he said very haughtily, “It may interest you to know that I am the censor and am at present going up the line to give evidence against Lieutenant N. at his trial.” Just at that moment the train stopped at a station. He blinked through the window with his shortsighted eyes, trying to read the name “This is M., I think,” he said; “if it is, we stop here ten minutes and get time to stretch our legs.”
I looked out of the window helpfully. “It is M.,” I told him. It wasn't. He got out and commenced to walk up the platform. Almost immediately the train started to pull out. He made a wild crab-wise dash for the carriage-door, but the colonel and I were hanging to it on the inside. When we were safely on our journey, we shared up his pillows, rugs, hot-water bottles, and eatables between us, and had a comparatively pleasant journey. For once we thanked God for the censor.
It's tea-time at home. You've probably come in from a walk and are smoking a cigar at the family oak-table. I wish I could pop in on you.
Oh, our latest excitement! We received our new gramophone last night with about thirty of the latest records!
You'll be glad to know that I now have my old batman back. He's the man who took me out when I was wounded and was so tender to me on the way to the hospital. That memory of his tenderness is rather embarrassing, for I can't bring myself to strafe him the way I ought to. I can always see the fellow's concern when he thought that I was done for. Now that he's got me back he acts as though I were still a very weak and indiscreet person who had to be coaxed and managed. I have the feeling in his presence of being perpetually in pyjamas and in bed. He has the advantage of me, to put it in a nutshell.
FranceMay3, 1918
It's early morning. I'm still sitting in the little dug-out with the slit that looks towards the Hun Front line. Everything but the immediate foreground is blanketed in heavy mist at present. I can hear bombing going on somewhere—but I can also hear a lark singing near to the sun, high overhead. The clumps of dandelions are still sleeping. They haven't opened—they're green instead of yellow. The grass sparkles with little drops of dew, more beautiful than the most costly diamonds. With the first of the dawn I read a story by Tolstoy; since then I've been sitting thinking—thinking of you and of the sleeping house in Newark, which will soon be disturbed by your bath-water running, if you still rise early; and thinking how strange it is that I should be here in the greatest war in history. We planned to do such different things with our lives. My first dream was to become extremely wise. At Oxford there seemed no limit to the amount of knowledge I could acquire; it seemed only a matter of patience and perseverance. Then that dream went, and I wanted to save the world. I'm afraid one has to be a little aristocratic towards the world before he can conceive of himself as capable of saving it or of the world as requiring saving. The aristocratic touch grew on me and I decided to do my saving not by touching people, but by writing poetry for the few who would understand. It wasn't half such good poetry as I thought it was at the time, and it never could have re-made anything. Disappointed in that and because I had now committed myself to a literary way of life, I took to writing novels, which nobody wanted to publish, read, or buy. Then, because I had to live somehow, I entered into the commercial end of publishing. There was always the shadow of a dream which I pursued even then in my spare hours; it was the dream that saved me and led me on to writeThe Garden Without Walls. But the shadow was growing fainter when this war commenced. And here I am, human at last, all touch of false aristocracy gone, peeping out across the grass wet with the dew of May, beneath which lie the common clay heroes who have died for democracy. How noiselessly these men gave up their lives and with how little consciousness of self-appreciation. They rather put us to shame—we privileged dawdlers in our haunted minds. They recognized the one straight thing to do when the opportunity presented itself; they did it swiftly and unreasoningly with their might. They didn't write about what they did; for them the doing was sufficient. I think I shall always be a humble man after such companionship, if I survive. I see life in courageous vistas of actions now; formerly I was like Hamlet—I thought myself into a green sickness. Marriage and children, a home and family love are the best that anyone can extract from life. There have been years when I didn't like my kind.
Out of the many things that have come to me in the past six months I am particularly glad of little Tinker's friendship—P.'. baby. She's not two yet, but we were real pals. She would never go to sleep until I had kissed her in her cot “Good-night.” First thing in the morning she would be beside my bed, tugging at the clothes and ordering me to “Det up.” Since I've been gone they've had to ring the bell and pretend that I'm just entering the hall, so that they may make her go to sleep contented. When they ask her, “Where's Con?” she reaches up to the window and points. “Dorn walk in park,” she says. They talk about the love of a woman keeping a man straight, but I don't think it's to be compared with the love of a little child. You can't lie to them.
The sharp rat-a-tat of the machine guns has started; but the mist is too thick for me to see what is happening——It's nothing; it's died down.
In an hour I shall be relieved, and shall return to the guns and post this letter. It will reach you when? Sometime in June, I expect, when the summer is really come and you're wearing your cool dresses. I can see you going out in the early morning to do your shopping.
FranceMay7, 1918
Iam sitting in my bed—my sleeping-sack, I mean—which is spread out on the red-tiled floor of a funny little cottage. There isn't much of the floor left, as four of the other officers are sharing the room with me. Coming in through the window is the smell of sweet myrtle, old-fashioned and quiet; from far away drifts in the continual pounding of the guns and, strangely muddled up with the gunfire, the multitudinous croaking of frogs. I'm having an extraordinary May month of it in lovely country, marching through the showers, getting drenched and drying when the sun deigns to make an appearance. After being off a horse for so long, I'm in the saddle for many hours every day.
I am glad that you all feel the way you do about my returning to the Front. I was sure you wouldn't want me to be out of these great happenings. My fear, when I was in England this spring, was the same as I had when I first joined—that fighting would all-be ended before I got into the line. No fear of that; I think we're in for another two years of it. There's hot work ahead—the hottest of the entire war. Oddly enough my spirits rise as the struggle promises to grow fiercer. I don't know why, unless it is that as the action quickens one has a chance of giving more. There's nothing sad about being wounded or dying for one's country. In this war one does so much more than that—he dies for the whole of humanity.
Outside my window a stretch of hedges runs down to a little brook. Ducks, geese, cocks and hens make farmyard noises from dawn till last thing at night. Above all the peace and quiet, the distant guns keep up their incessant murmur. What a variety of places are likely to shelter me before the summer is ended—woods, ditches, open fields, trenches. It's all in the game and is romance of a sort. I'm sunburnt and hard. I feel tremendously alive.
Once again all the striving and ambition of literary success has vanished. I'm only a subaltern—and far prouder to be that than a writer. I'm estimated by none but my soldiering qualities and power to show guts. We were lawyers, engineers, business-men—now we're soldiers and inquire nothing of each other's past.
A thrush has started singing; he's in the willows that stand by the brookside. The planes go purring overhead, but he doesn't care. He goes on singing towards the evening sun as though his heart knew nothing but joy. He will be here singing long after we have passed upon our way.
Don't get worrying about my safety. You're sure to be feeling nervous at the wrong times, when I'm perfectly safe. Just feel glad that I'm allowed to be here, and don't look ahead.
FranceMay14, 1918
I'm afraid you'll be feeling that I've neglected you. Whenever I miss a mail I have the reproachful picture of the disappointed faces of you three at the early morning breakfast—so it isn't wilful neglect. I've had no time, for reasons which I can't explain. In this way of life one has to snatch the odd moments for those he loves best and to break off when the sterner obligations intrude themselves.
I'm in a beautiful part of the country at present—it must be beautiful, for it is providing us with three ducks for dinner to-night. I doubt whether you could get three all at once in Newark. Moreover, we can get all the fresh cream and butter that we like. Of course this won't last. Any morning we may wake up to find ourselves back on iron rations—bully-beef and hard tack. But while it lasts we make the most of it. The most ripping attraction to me is something that you'll scarcely credit. The willow-groves are full of nightingales. As you go back to your billets after midnight and the guns make lightning through the grill-work of the trees, you see the little brown fellows with their throats quivering, pouring out their song of love and spring. When you've crept into your sleeping-sack, you lie awake listening—thinking of another world where love and life were once so certain.
FranceMay18, 1918
This is the third day that I have planned to write you. Perhaps I may be able to do so this time.
I have just been reading a letter from a nurse out in Palestine describing the little wooden crosses above fallen British soldiers which now star the Mount of Olives. The poetry of the ordinary crops out everywhere to-day; we are living on higher levels than we realize. For hundreds of years the future generations will weave legends round us, making us appear titanic spirit-people, just as we have clothed with almost unearthly splendour the Crusaders of the Dark Ages.
This is a pleasant May evening. The fields are golden with buttercups. Above the singing of the birds I can hear a low droning as of bees among flowers; but the droning is of homing aeroplanes. This is the kind of weather and country in which it would not be unbeautiful to die.
When I went down this morning to the barn in which my section is stationed, I found notice printed on the door, on either side a British and American flag-and underneath a luridly illustrated Sunday magazine selection of extracts fromThe Glory of the Trenches. A small world, isn't it?
I have been reading a book lately that would interest you; it's by Ford Madox Hueffer and is calledOn Heaven. It consists of a number of poems written while on active service. He's managed to put down in a rough and tumble of words a good many of our hungers and adorations. I hadn't realized before I read him how very much of the conversation of our soldiers is an exchange of confidences about the women they love or have loved. I believe every man at the Front has a hope of the girl he will be true to some day, and a fear lest——
One of Hueffer's poems on the subject is very beautiful. It starts this way:
“In Chepstow stands a castle;
My love and I went there;
The foxgloves on the wall all heard
Her footsteps on the stair.
The sun was high in heaven
And the perfume in the air
Came from purple cat's valerian—
But her footsteps on the stair
Made a sound like silver music
Thro' the perfume in the air.”
The last verse sums up the dread of many a fighting-man—that all his dreams are only dreams, and that a return to reality may disappoint him:
“And another soldier fellow
Shall come courting of my dear.
And it's I shall not be with her
With my lip beside her ear.
For it's he shall walk beside her
In the perfume of the air
To the silver, silver music
Of her footstep on the stair.”
All the world's idealists are in the trenches by now. What a shining cloud of imaginings must rise up to the Soul which lies behind the world. God must be amazed to find that horror can make His obstinate creations so simple and childlike. Here are millions of us who once thought only of our social and individual bellies, now thinking only of the unborn children and the things of the spirit. All the fond and dear accepted affections have become a kind of heaven that lies in the past instead of the future. If we die we don't want any heaven that isn't a re-living of the old happy memories.
I find that Hueffer expresses a feeling that many of us have secretly, but which I have never heard any man acknowledge—the feeling that all the remainder of his days he will have to be explaining if he comes to the end of the war alive—almost the feeling that he will have lost his great chance of nobility by not dying. Hueffer's poem is calledOne Day's List; it's a list of three officers and 270 other ranks of his regiment who were killed in action. It commences:
“My dears,
The rain drips down on Rouen Town,
The leaves drip down
And so the mud
Turns orange brown.”
And it has for its refrain
“But you—at least—are out of it.”
It goes on to tell of the officers who fell, and repeats the reflection which we all have when we gaze on the dead at the end of an attack and know that we ourselves have escaped:
“One wonders why you died.”
And then,
“We never talked of glory,
And each thought a lot of one girl
And waited most days for hours in the rain
Till she came:
But we never talked of Fame——”
And lastly, addressing the dead,
“But we who remain shall grow old,
We shall know the cold
Of cheerless
Winter and the rain of Autumn and the sting
Of poverty, of love despised and of disgraces,
And mirrors showing stained and ageing faces,
And the long ranges of comfortless years
And the long gamut of human fears—
But, for you, it shall be for ever Spring,
And only you shall be for ever fearless,
And only you have white, straight, tireless limbs,
And only you, where the water-lily swims
Shall walk along the pathways, thro' the willows
Of your west.
You who went west,
And only you on silvery twilight pillows
Shall take your rest
In the soft sweet glooms,
Of twilight rooms——”
There's the whole of our one and only cowardice in a nut-shell—that we, who have posed as conquerors for a while, will, if we survive, return to the normal things of life to find our spirits unexalted and the commonplace still commonplace.
Out here, where there are corpses in the thistles and “the gas-shells burst like snow,” we can talk of “the silver, silver music of her footsteps on the stair,” but we're mortally afraid that in less exultant moments, when the heart is not so starved for affection, we shall discover that the “silver music” is only the irritating sound of squeaky shoes.
I can't hear from you again for at least six days—a long time to wait! I can't be bothered nowadays to let the mail-clerk sort out the letters: I grab the bag and go through it myself.
There may be an interval between this letter and those that follow. If there is, don't worry yourselves. It is not possible to find the time or place to write under all circumstances.
FranceJune1, 1918
Ican't remember when last I wrote you. It isn't always easy to get the time. Recently I've spent a good many hours in the saddle and have been up early in the morning; when work is done the fresh air leaves one too tired for anything but sleep. But you mustn't worry about me. I'm stronger than I've been for months, and tanned to the colour of an Indian.
I have recently met the doctor who did so much to pull me through at the Casualty Clearing Station when I was wounded last June. He's still the same tall, thin, silent man, with the kindest and sternest of faces. His brother, he tells me, is in America on the British Mission, and had informed him of America's immense preparations. Like all the men out here, I found him keenly eager to see the U.S.A. proportionately represented in the Front line. We are holding, and counting on the States to turn the tide dramatically in our favour. Our chaps are to calm and confident of success—out here there's none of the strain and nervousness which are felt by civilians. Our chaps are as philosophical and cheery as ever. “Good old Fritz,” they say, “so he's taken another fifteen miles! Well, it'll be our turn next.” Through defeat and success we carry on quite normally and unperturbed, confident of ultimate victory. The general opinion is that the Hun by his advances is only causing himself a lot of unnecessary trouble, as he'll have a longer distance to run back to Germany.
Here's the first of June and mid-summer approaching when so many pleasant things used to happen—flights to the country, the purchasing of bathing-suits, fishing-nets, maps—the planning of such quantities of family adventures. It would be happy to think that some of these old pleasures might return one day. The longer the war goes on the more impossible it is to conjure up the picture of civilian ways of life or to see oneself as again in the picture. Everything grows blurred except the present, with the early risings, routine, orders, marches, and attacks. To be given our freedom would leave us dazed.
This will probably reach you after you have left New York and settled down for the holidays in some quiet country place. There's only one spot which seems permanent in our family life—the little grey shack among the orchards in the Rockies. My thoughts fly to it very often these hot summer days. I see the lake like a blue mirror, reflecting the mountains and the clouds. I hear the throbbing of the launch. Bruce is barking on the wharf. Figures are moving about the boat-house. We climb the hill together where the brook sings through the flowers and the evening meal awaits us. And afterwards those long sleepy evenings when the dusk comes down and the flowers shine more vaguely, and we talk so endlessly, planning books, retraversing the past, mapping out a road to so many future El Dorados. I can remember these former happinesses without self-torture or regret. The present is so splendid that it outshines all former beauties. I go forward happily, believing that any bend of the future may bring the old kindnesses into view again.
The old haunting dream of Blighty is growing up in me once again—the Blighty we speak of, think of, worship and imagine every hour of the day. It's worth being wounded if only to wake up the first morning in the long white English ward, with the gold-green sunlight dripping in from the leaves through the open windows. These are the exquisite moments of peace and rest which come to one in the midst of warfare. Of such moments within the last year I have had my share; they are happy to remember.
And the war goes on and on. I was so afraid that it would be ended before ever I got back. The fear was needless. I shall be out here at least another year before peace is declared. There are times when I think that the Americans are not so far wrong in their guess when they give themselves “four years to do this job.” The Hun may be desperate; his very energy may be a proof of his exhaustion. But his death struggle is too vigorously successful to promise any very rapid end. Our hope is in America, with her high courage, her sacrifice, and her millions of men. If she had not joined us, we would still stand here chaffingly and be battered till not one of us was left. The last one would die with the smile of victory on his mouth. Whatever happens, they'll never catch any British fighting-man owning that his tail is down. But the thought of the American millions gives us confidence that, though we are wiped out, we shall not have lost. Like runners in a relay race, though we are spent, the pace we have set will enable those who come after us to win in the last lap.
But don't worry about me. I'm having a splendid run for my money, and am far more happy than I deserve.
FranceJune1, 1918
As per usual when I write to you, I have my nose up against a solitary candle, am hedged in by shadows, and have the stump of a cigarette in my mouth. For days I have been waiting for letters from home, but none has arrived as yet. Either the ship has gone down or some other calamity has happened. I now promise myself that to-morrow there will be a huge package of belated mail for me.
We're travelling very light at present. The first thing I did on my return was to cut down my kit to the barest necessities and send all the balance back to England. It's better to have it safe in London, if out of immediate reach, than to have to abandon it in a ditch or shell-hole. While the summer lasts there are a great number of things that one can do without.
What an unsportsmanly crowd the Germans are! I think more than anything else it will be their lack of fair play that we shall hold against them when war is ended. Yesterday at the Pope's request we were foolish enough to refrain from bombing Cologne, so the Hun took the opportunity to both bomb and shell the Catholics of Paris. It makes one itch to grab a bayonet and go over the top to do him as much damage as opportunity will allow. The Hun is educating us out of our good-humoured contempt into a very deep-seated hatred of him. The other day I was in a forward town recently evacuated by its population. You walked through silent, torn streets, the windows all broken by shells, the doors sagging from their hinges and open. You peered across the thresholds into the houses. In many cases meals were still on the tables, partly eaten and hastily left. A stray cat scurried out into the yard; nothing else stirred. Over the entire death-like silence the summer sun shone down and far away a cuckoo was calling. One gets accustomed to the outward symbols of such tragedies—the broken homes, abandoned security and foregone happiness. The people themselves get used to it. To-day I met a farm-wagon piled high with the household gods, while a peasant woman walked beside with her best hat carried in a paper-bag in her hand. That was very typical—in all the ruin that had befallen a home to still cling to the best hat.
I'm very happy and well, living almost entirely in the open and in the saddle a good part of the day. The part of France I have lived in since my return is by far the cleanest and most beautiful that I have seen on active service. The weather has been golden and glorious. There is none of that fear in our hearts that you must experience for us. We're as certain of victory as we were during the days of the big Vimy advance.
The Army is a nursery organization, full of annoying pomposities and amusing class distinctions. Just at present we're being pestered with continual inspections, when each battery tries to invent some new trick for making itself look smarter. Soldiers, on such occasions, are like a lot of old women at a spring cleaning. The men much prefer killing Boches to being inspected. Burnishing steel, chasing all over the country to buy Brasso, spending fortunes on polish for the harness all seem such a fruitless waste of time when the Huns are hammering our line. But, of course, cleanliness has a moral effect on men who have been long under shell-fire.
This is a discursive sort of letter, and doesn't contain much real news. It's just for remembrance.
FranceJune4, 1918
I've just left the gramophone shrilly declaring that “When he fancies he is past love, it is then he meets his last love and he loves her as he never loved before.” London comes with us to the Front. We hum the tunes of Piccadilly and Leicester Square, and we scheme such splendid times for our return. Leave has opened up again, but by a careful calculation I have discovered that it will take twenty-one years four months and three days till my turn comes round at the present rate of allotments.
Some New York papers have just arrived and an exceedingly ancient cake, but no letters. In the midst of a great offensive it is wonderful that anything gets to us at all. We're as far away from you both in reality and imagination as though we lived in a different world. Our standards of conduct, normality, right living are not your standards—our hopes and fears are all different. Again, as when I first came to the Front, everything civilian seems a tale I have read about. I cannot believe that that person who was in New York last October was really myself. I rather wonder at him and at his capacity for writing about the commonplace events of the present life. Now I couldn't write a line about the war if my life depended on it. I see nothing in perspective except the endless path of duty which leads on ahead as each day introduces itself. To what goal that path leads I sometimes try to guess—to something wonderful and unforeseen, I have no doubt.
I judge from what I read that the entire world which is not at the Front is anxious and depressed. We're just the same as ever—cheery and waiting whatever may befall with a stoicism born of confidence. Our belief in ourselves, our cause, and our ability to win, never wavers. How extraordinarily normal we are you could hardly imagine. The moment our men get out of the trenches they begin to play baseball, football, cricket, etc. There's a big lake near to where we are with red cliffs around it. Here every evening you can see the poised white figures of soldiermen. Last Sunday we held aquatic sports there, and had a fine display of swimming. It's wonderful to see the chaps so happy when you remember that nine-tenths of their companions of this time last year are either wounded or dead. As you may guess, we never in our conversation call attention to this fact, though there can be few, if any, who forget.
There are children where we are at present. It's amusing to see them making friends with our boys. They slip their little paws into the big brown hands and toddle along quite proudly.
I don't see how anyone could help loving our men—they're so simple. Their faults, when you know the hearts which they hide, become endearing. I think, especially when I see them with the French kiddies, “Of such are the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Please thank the donor of the cake which arrived to-day. We're eating it—don't tell her it was dry.
FranceJune7,1918
Here's a glorious summer evening—the end of a perfect day, during which I have done my share in capturing two German spies, who now repose unrestfully in our guard-room.
This morning, when I was leading a hundred mounted men along a road, a terrible thing happened. The road was narrow and on one side of it motor-lorries were standing; on the other side was a little unfenced river. Suddenly and without warning, tearing down the hill ahead of us, came the enemy. The enemy consisted of a pair of mules harnessed to a heavy iron roller. The roller caught my lead-driver and threw him and his two horses to the ground, then it charged on into the mass behind us. Miraculously no bones were broken; we all have nine lives. Those mokes have put us up to a new trick for dispersing enemy cavalry which ought to be effective. Believe me, two mad mules, going thirty miles an hour with an iron roller behind them, are utterly demoralizing. It is impossible for any cavalry in the world to withstand them.
You don't know, can't guess, how letters from home buck me up and keep the lamp of my ideals still burning. There are moments when the mere mechanical side of warfare fills one's mind with an infinite depression. One sees men doing splendid acts, day in day out, like automatons animated by the spring of duty. One almost forgets that there is any human element of choice in the matter, or a difference between fighting and fighting well. When your pages come, I remember—remember that just such affections and human ties bind the hearts of all who are out here to life. I begin to see my chaps as personalities again and not as only soldiers.
Outside the chaps are singing “O my, I don't want to die; I want to go home.” Now they've changed to “Take me Over to Blighty.”
FranceJune8, 1918
Last night I saw the old lady who nursed me up so that I was fit to come and meet you in London when you all came in 1917 from America. Seeing her again brought back all sorts of memories of the depressions and exaltations of other days. I think I have been both sadder and more happy since the war began than in all the other years of my life. And I used to write about the world not as it is, but about the world as I would have made it, had I been God. Now I'm trying to see things as they are, with the inevitable God shining through them. Here, at the Front, God is everywhere apparent—but not the cathedral God I had imagined—not the majestic God with sublime uplifted eyes which know nothing of finite terror. The God of the Front has brave eyes which have suffered; His mouth is a human mouth, which has known the pain of parting and kisses; His hands are roughened and burnt and bloody; there is the stoop of agony in His shoulders and the hint of a valiant jest in His splendid bearing of defiance. He is one of us. He is us entirely. He is no longer remote and eternal. For us He has again become flesh—He is our comrade; He is the man upon our left and our right hand, who goes into battle with us; He is our dead. We cannot escape Him; the pettinesses of our sins are forgotten in the resemblance of our neighbours to His majesty. Nowadays I cannot think of the poet's Christ, wandering through Galilean lilies in a woman's robes. It's His manly death, His white timeless body on the Cross that I remember. Without Calvary all His words would have been unconvincing and He Himself a dreamer's fancy. It was only on the Cross that Christ became flesh—all that went before is like a lovely legend gradually materializing in the atmosphere of tragedy. God save us from being always happy. It's the chance of being always happy that I dread most after the war. There's a terrible corpulence about happiness which borders very closely on physical grossness. To strive and keep on striving—that is what I want for the world when war is ended, and to have to pay with sacrifice for each advance. I don't think any of us who come back will covet virtue as our goal, save in as far as virtue embraces everything that is meant by manliness. To be virtuous in the original sense was just that—to be physically perfect.
Ah, how greedy I become out here to see some of the sudden qualities which war has called out, transplanted into the civilian world. I so fear that with peace those qualities may be debased and lost.
More than anything else the gramophone makes me remember the old days and the old aims and desires. It's the greatest miracle of the century that Caruso and Harry Lauder and George Robey, with all the best of music and laughter-makers, can step into our dug-out from the point of a needle. When we move, whatever else is left behind, the gramophone always goes. It travels in G.S. wagons, on the foot-board of limbers—in all sorts of ways. We're feeling sentimental; we crank up the canned music. Above the roar of the guns we hear, “All that I want is someone to love me, and to love me well.” We're feeling merry, so we dance to “Arizona.” All the world of forgotten pleasures can come to us through that needle-point. And I—whenever it starts—I see home pictures——
Then in an extraordinarily poignant way I feel earnest to have lived, loved, done something big before I die. Everything already done seems insignificant and worthless. It's the feeling which you once called “divine discontent.”
It's evening, as it always is when I write to you. Next door a little refugee child is chanting his prayers under the direction of his father. One can hear the humming of planes overhead. A funny world! How persistent the religious instinct is, that men should still credit God when their hearts are bankrupt!
Good-night, I'm going to bed now.
FranceJune12, 1918
With me it's 6.30 in the evening. I'm sitting in a farmhouse overlooking the usual French farmyard. The chickens fly in at the window—also the cats. The window is my own mode of entrance; I feel like a burglar when I enter my “bedroom” in this fashion after midnight. Two other officers share the floor with me—literally the floor, for we use our sleeping-sacks.
There's a little boy about three, with long hair, so that at first we mistook him for a girl, who has become the temporary mascot of the battery. He carries the broken remains of a toy rifle and falls in with the men on parades, holding one of the fellows' hands. He's picked up the detail for “'Shun!” and “Stand at Ease!” and carries out the orders as smartly as anyone, looking terrifically serious about it. The men call him “little sister” on account of his appearance, and make him a great pet. I left him sobbing his heart out to-day when I had to leave him behind after he had fallen in with a squad of riflemen.
There's a genuine little girl who is our friend, of whom I am even fonder. She's a refugee kiddy of about thirteen—slim and pretty as a fairy, with a long corn-gold plait of hair down her back.
As soon as we start the gramophone going she peeps noiselessly as a spirit through the window; then one of us lifts her across the sill and she sits on our knees with her face hidden shyly against our shoulders.
I'm at present readingGulliver's Travels. That I should be reading them in such different circumstances from any that Swift could have imagined, kindles the art of writing books into a new romance. To be remembered years after you yourself have forgotten, to have men prying into the workings of a brain which has been dust in a shell for two centuries, is a very definite kind of immortality. To be forgotten—that is what we most dread. Never to have happened would not matter; but to have happened, to have walked the world, laughed, loved, created, and then to be treated as though we had not happened, there lies the sting of death. The thought of extinction offends our vanity; we had thought that we were of more consequence to the universe. It doesn't comfort us to be recalled impersonally in the mass, as the men who captured Vimy or thrust the Hun back from some dangerous objective. In the mass we shall go down through history, no doubt, but not as human beings—only as heroes. We would rather be recalled by our weaknesses—as so-and-so who loved a certain girl, who played a good hand of poker, who overdrew his bank-account. Out here, from the moment a man places foot in France, the anonymity of death commences. No one cares who he was in a previous world, what he did for a living, whether he was a failure or a success. None of his former virtues stand to his credit except as they contribute to his soldier-life of the present. None of us talk about our past; if we did, our company would yawn at us. Only the mail arriving at irregular intervals keeps us in knowledge that we once had other personalities. Letters are like ghosts of a world abandoned, tiptoeing through the dream of a sleeper. Between you and us there is a great gulf fixed——Not that we resent it. Someone has to pay a price for the future safety of the world; out of all the ages we have been chosen as the persons. There is nothing to resent,—quite the contrary. Only, now and then creeps in the selfish longing that we may be remembered not as soldiers, but as what we were—in our weakness as well as in our strength.
You're in a country place where I have not been and which I cannot picture. I hope you're all enjoying yourselves. There's no need to worry on my account.
FranceJune20,1918
Here I am in the kind of place that William Morris wrote about. My room is in a monastery, from which all but two of the monks have long since fled. The nunnery, in which the rest of the officers are billeted, was long since vacated. A saint was born here, and there used to be pilgrimages to his shrine; now only the two monks remain to toll the bell, play the organ, and to go through all the religious observances. The walls of the room in which I am writing are covered with illuminated prayers. Pinned on the door outside is the list of all the duties for the day. From my window I can see the two faithful ones pacing in the overgrown garden, counting their beads, murmuring their prayers, and behaving in every way as though the war had not commenced. Such despising of external happenings, even though it be mistaken, calls for admiration of sorts.
The country is lovely and green now, all except the immediate battle-line. Birds sing, flowers bloom, and fleecy white clouds go drifting overhead. One takes chance baths in chance-found brooks, and the men spread their tents in the meadows. There's everything that life can offer to tempt us to go on living at present. There are moments so happy that I almost wish that you could be here to share them.
To-day I'm out of touch—no letters have arrived. Perhaps they will overtake us tomorrow. A thrush is singing in the monastery garden and the slow blue twilight is falling. Mingling as an accompaniment to the song of the thrush is the slow continual droning of a plane. The reminders of war are persistent and incessant. Nevertheless, in spite of war, I found a strawberry patch this afternoon and glutted myself.
I see by to-day's paper that a racket has started on the Italian front. The Central Powers are declaring their weakness by striking out in too many directions. We give and we give, but we never break. We're waiting for America and her millions. How long before we can count on them to help us to attack?
It's extraordinary how the belief in America has grown. First of all we said, “She has come in too late"; then, “She'll help us to win more quickly"; and now, “We need her.” If America has done nothing else, she has strengthened ourmoralall along the line; we fight better because we know that she is behind us.
You're somewhere where the world is intensely quiet. I shall think of you where the world is happy.
FranceJune20, 1918
I've just finished reading a big batch of mail, and have had dinner and now sit looking out on the drenched country which is covered with a shabby evening sky. In the church, which adjoins the monastery in which I stay, monks are chanting. They are always chanting. One wonders for what it is that they pray; deeds at any moment, let alone the present, are so much better. I can picture what would happen here if the Germans came. I have caught myself thinking of Marie Odelle; our scenery is similar to that pictured in the play. Strange how one goes to imagination in search of illustrations of reality!
You, at your end, seem to have been having some wildly exciting times with your processions in which the Kaiser has been publicly done away with. It's a phase which all countries go through, I suppose. England did at the beginning of the war. But now we entrain for the Front without bands playing, and do our best not to attract attention. We're a little ashamed of arousing other people's emotions on our behalf. All we want is a “Cheerio and God bless You,” for our good-bye. If we come back, it will be “jolly fine"; and if we don't, “C'est la guerre”—we shrug our shoulders. In either event we see no reason why the feelings should be harrowed of those who stop behind.
After a series of very early morning rises, I have been picturing to myself the day when I once again wake up at the Ritz, with a camouflaged foreigner to bring my breakfast to my pillow and then leave me in peace till twelve o'clock. I wonder now why I ever left my bed in peace times and find myself marvelling at my unnecessary energy. The French patriot who held receptions and did the business of the day while sitting in a bath of milk, had mastered the art of life. Unfortunately, if I remember rightly, he was made a glaring example of sloth by being “done in” while thus pleasurably occupied.
I'm off to do my rounds as orderly officer now. My sergeant is waiting, so, as the men say, “I must ring off.”
FranceJune23, 1918
Here I sit on a summer's evening in the red-tiled kitchen of an old farmhouse. Immediately under the open window to my right is the inevitable manure-heap—the size of which, they say, denotes the extent of the farmer's wealth. Barn-roofs, ochre-red, shine vividly in the pale gold of the sunset; at the end of the yard the walls fall away, giving the glimpse of an orchard with gnarled, lichen-covered fruit-trees. All kinds of birds are twittering and singing; house-swallows dart and dive across open spaces. In the distance the guns are booming. War affords one strange contrasts of sight and sound. Not many of the peasants have moved away; they have great faith in the Canadians. Every now and then a forlorn group will come trailing down the road between the hedges: an old tumbledown cart, drawn by an old tumble-down horse, piled and pyramided dangerously high with old tumble-down furniture. The people who accompany the vehicle are usually ancient and tumbledown as well. They make me recall someone's description of the Irish emigrants on the St. Lawrence, travelling with “ragged poverty on their backs.” In contrast with these few straggling fugitives, hounded by avaricious fear, is the calm of a country billowy with grain and sociable with the grinning contentment of quite-at-home British Tommies. Everything in their attitude seems to assure the French peasant, “Don't worry, old dear. We're here. Everything's all right.” From barns and houses and bivouacs come the sounds of gramophones, playing selections from quite the latest musical comedies. If you wander back into the fields you will find horsemen going over the jumps, men playing baseball and cricket, officers getting excited over tennis. We even held our Divisional Sports the other day—and this in the midst of the war's greatest offensive. This “'Arf a mo', Kaiser,” attitude of the Canadians would give you some idea of the esteem in which we hold the Hun. Our backs are not against the wall. We still have both the time and the inclination to be sportsmen and to laugh. I'm sure the enemy, grimly obsessed by the idea of breaking our line, never allows himself a moment for recreation, and I should think his balloon-observers, spying on us from the baskets of his distant sausages, must be very chagrined by our frivolity. The papers say, and very probably they're right, that German strategists are far ahead of those possessed by the Allies; but our men have learnt a trick worth all the strategy—they have learnt to laugh both in success and adversity. In this war, I believe we shall find that he who has acquired the habit of a light heart will do the laughing last. I should very much like to know how many gramophones travel with the German Tommies; hardly any, I'll bet. They have their bands with their patriotic music, keeping always before the men the singleness of their purpose. The singleness of their purpose tires them out. On our side of the line patriotism is the last thing you hear about. Thank God, we've got time to forget it.
Whenever I start trying to explain to you the psychology of our fighting-men I'm always conscious that, even while I'm telling you the absolute truth, with the same words I'm creating a wrong impression. Fighting-men aren't magnificent most of the time; they're not idealists; they're not heroic. Very often they're petty and cynical and cowards. They're only magnificent and idealistic and heroic in the decision that brought them here, and in the last supreme moment when they bring their decision to fulfilment.
In a letter I received from Paris the other day the puzzle of the modern soldier was very well expressed. “I don't believe,” it said, “I will ever get used to the courage of the men who go on and on with this terrible game. I'm thinking more now of the French and the British soldiers, who are mended up only to go at it again. I never can get used to it or take it as a matter of course. When I think for a minute how it hurts to have a tooth filled, I wonder that all the armies of the world don't get up and run away from each other of one accord—every one who isn't a hero or a fool, that's to say.”
When I think over the problem calmly I have the same wonder. The problem was so neatly expressed that I read the passage out to the mess. They stopped in a round of poker to listen. “Well, which are we,” I asked; “heroes or fools?” “Fools,” they said unanimously, and then went on playing their hands again. They're right; we are fools. We're certainly not heroes. We're fools for a kind of kingdom of heaven's sake—but we don't act like the heaven part of it any more than we talk about our patriotism. Any mention of either would make us shudder.
I wonder what motive brought the heathen Chinee to the Western Front. I've been told that he came that he might buy food for his family, because there's a famine in China. Maybe. His bronze face stares up into ours from out the green-gold of the standing wheat—stares up into ours with the inscrutable gaze of an age-old Buddha. He's the one human being on the Western Front who neither by acts nor words explains his nobility. Nobility there must have been to induce him to come; no reasoning creature would have jeopardized his body out of lust.
Last night I rode beneath a full white moon for miles through the standing crops. I only struck a road to cross it and say good-bye to it—then on and on with the soft swish of the swelling stalks against my stirrups. Shall we recall our old panics and delights if we live to reach normality again? Will normality satisfy? Shall we be content to know that all the hoard of the future years is ours? In a word, shall we ever again desire to be safe? Questions which none of us can answer!
FranceJune27, 1918
Here's a glorious June morning with a touch of chill in the air and a jolly gold sun shooting arrows into the wheatfields. The chief sound I hear is the rattling of head-chains, for the drivers are hard at work shining up their harness. These summer days go by very pleasantly, but they throw one's thoughts back a little wistfully to the Junes of other years—especially those in which the train came skidding down the mountains from Spokane to the ranch and the lake. All day, from first waking in the morning, we begin to gamble on our chances with the mail. It arrives any time between two and five o'clock; the evening passes in reading and re-reading our letters and concocting replies. I think some letters from you are nearly due again and I'm hoping for one this afternoon.
I think I mentioned that our battery has a French baby boy of three for its mascot, just at present. He has been christened Bully Beef, but for what reason I don't know. Bully Beef falls in beside the Sergeant-Major on all parades. During stables he inspects the horses, toddling round the lines and hanging on to the finger of an officer. The other day he fell into the river while the horses were watering. No one noticed his disappearance for a minute or two; then he was discovered standing nearly chin-deep, doing a very quiet cry. He was consoled with pennies, and I undertook to lead him up to his mother. There are many stories about Bully Beef's origin. Some say that his father is a rich Frenchman already married; others, a dead poilu; others, a sergeant of a Highland Division which was encamped in this neighbourhood. His mother is an exceedingly pretty French girl and she is not married. I can't help feeling that Bully Beef must be half British, for he isn't timid like a French child. On the contrary, he hides in the hedges and throws stones at us when he is offended, and has a finely exaggerated sense of his childish dignity. What memories he'll have when he's become a man.
There was another character I mentioned in a previous letter—I called him “Battling Brown “—the chap has D.S.O.'. and Military Crosses with bars to them and delights in putting on raids. I've since found that he cuts a notch in his revolver for every Hun he has killed with it. His present weapon has eighteen notches and the wooden handle of the first is notched to pieces.
It's refreshing to find a man on our side of the line who knows how to hate. If we had hated more at the first, the war would be ended. Personally I can only hate ideas and nations—not persons; I acknowledge this as a weakness in myself.
I don't think any of us realize quite how much war has changed us, particularly in our relations to sex. Women had grown discontented with being wives and mothers, and had proved that in many departments they could compete with men. This competition was responsible for a growing disrespect. Men were beginning to treat women in a way they demanded—as though they were men. Women were beginning to regard men with a quiet sex-contempt. It looked as if chivalry and all that made for knighthood were at an end. Then came war, calling men to a sacrifice in which women had no share—could not share because they were physically incapable of fighting—and women to the only contribution they could make, mercy and motherhood. We've been flung back on our primal differences and virtues. War has cut the knotted sex-emancipation; we stand up to-day as elementally male and female as when the Garden of Eden was depopulated. Amongst our fighting-men, women actually hold the place which was allotted to them by idealists in troubadour times.
Mothers and sisters and sweethearts, remembered at this distance, have made all women sacred. A new medievalism and asceticism have sprung out of our modern tragedy, enacted beneath the sea, on the land and in the clouds. The tragedy, while modern to us, is actually the oldest in the world—merely death.
It's evening now. No letter from home came this afternoon.