BELLOC-HILLS AND THE SEA - A FAMILY OF THE FENS
The other day as I was going out upon my travels, I came upon a plain so
broad that it greatly wearied me. This plain was grown in parts with
barley, but as it stood high in foreign mountains and was arid, very
little was grown. Small runnels, long run dry under the heat, made the
place look like a desert--almost like Africa; nor was there anything to
relieve my gaze except a huddle of small grey houses far away; but when
I reached them I found, to my inexpressible joy, a railway running by
and a station to receive me.
For those who complain of railways talk folly, and prove themselves
either rich or, more probably, the hangers-on of the rich. A railway is
an excellent thing; it takes one quickly through the world for next to
nothing, and if in many countries the people it takes are brutes, and
disfigure all they visit, that is not the fault of the railway, but of
the Government and religion of these people, which, between them, have
ruined the citizens of the State.
So was it not in this place of which I speak, for all the people were
industrious, wealthy, kind, amenable, and free.
I took a ticket for the only town on the railway list whose history I
knew, and then in a third-class carriage made entirely of wood I settled
down to a conversation with my kind; for though these people were not of
my blood--indeed, I am certain that for some hundreds of years not a
drop of their blood has mingled with my own--yet we understood each
other by a common tongue called Lingua Franca, of which I have spoken in
another place and am a past master.
As all the people round began their talk of cattle, land, and weather,
two men next me, or rather the one next me and the other opposite me,
began to talk of the election which had been held in that delightful
plain: by which, as I learnt, a dealer in herds had been defeated by a
somewhat usurious and perhaps insignificant attorney. In this election
more than half the voters--that is, a good third of the families in the
plain--had gone up to the little huts of wood and had made a mark upon a
bit of paper, some on one part, some on the other. About a sixth of the
families had desired the dealer in herds to make their laws, and about a
sixth the attorney. Of the rest some could not, some would not, go and
make the little mark of which I speak. Many more could by law make it,
and would have made it, if they had thought it useful to any possible
purpose under the sun. One-sixth, I say, had made their mark for the
aged and money-lending attorney, and one-sixth for the venerable but
avaricious dealer in herds, and since the first sixth was imperceptibly
larger than the second it was the lawyer, not the merchant, who stood to
make the laws for the people. But not only to make laws: he was also in
some mystic way the Persona and Representative of all the plain. The
long sun-lit fields; the infinite past--Carolingian, enormous; the
delicate fronds of young trees; the distant sight of the mountains,
which is the note of all that land; the invasions it had suffered, the
conquests it might yet achieve; its soul and its material self, were all
summed up in the solicitor, not in the farmer, and he was to vote on
peace or war, on wine or water, on God or no God in the schools. For the
people of the plain were self-governing; they had no lords.
Of my two companions, the one had voted for the cow-buyer, but the other
for the scribbler upon parchment, and they discussed their action
without heat, gently and with many reasons.
The one said: "It cannot be doubted that the solidarity of society
demands that the homogeneity of economic interests should be recognised
by the magistrate." The other said: "The first need is rather that the
historic continuity of society should be affirmed by the momentary
depositaries of the executive."
For these two men were of some education, and saw things from a higher
standpoint than the peasants around us, who continued to discourse, now
angrily, now merrily, but always loudly and rapidly, upon the
insignificant matter of their lives: that is, strong, red, bubbling
wine, healthy and well-fed beef, rich land and housing, the marriage of
daughters, and the putting forward of sons.
Then one of the two, who had long guessed by my dress and face from what
country I came, said to me: "And you, how is it in your country?" I told
him we met from time to time, upon occasions not less often than seven
years apart, and did just as they had done. That one-sixth of us voted
one way and one-sixth the other; the first, let us say, for a
moneylender, and the second for a man remarkable for motor-cars or
famous for the wealth of his mother; and whichever sixth was
imperceptibly larger than the other, that sixth carried its man, and he
stood for the flats of the Wash or for the clear hills of Cumberland, or
for Devon, which is all one great and lonely hill.
"This man," said I, "in some very mystic way is Ourselves--he is our
past and our great national memory. By his vote he decides what shall be
done; but he is controlled."
"By what is he controlled?" said my companions eagerly. Evidently they
had a sneaking love of seeing representatives controlled.
"By a committee of the rich," said I promptly.
At this they shrugged their shoulders and said: "It is a bad system!"
"And by what are yours?" said I.
At this the gravest and oldest of them, looking as it were far away with
his eyes, answered: "By the name of our country and a wholesome terror
of the people."
"Your system," said I, shrugging my shoulders in turn, but a little
awkwardly, "is different from ours."
After this, we were silent all three. We remembered, all three of us,
the times when no such things were done in Europe, and yet men hung
well together, and a nation was vaguer and yet more instinctive and
ready. We remembered also--for it was in our common faith--the gross,
permanent, and irremediable imperfection of human affairs. There arose
perhaps in their minds a sight of the man they had sent to be the spirit
and spokesman, or rather the very self, of that golden plateau which the
train was crawling through, and certainly in my mind there rose the
picture of a man--small, false, and vile--who was, by some fiction, the
voice of a certain valley in my own land.
Then I said to them as I left the train at the town I spoke of: "Days,
knights!"--for so one addresses strangers in that country. And they
answered: "Your grace, we commend you to God."
The use and the pleasure of travel are closely mingled, because the use
of it is fulfilment, and in fulfilling oneself a great pleasure is
enjoyed. Every man bears within him not only his own direct experience,
but all the past of his blood: the things his own race has done are part
of himself, and in him also is what his race will do when he is dead.
This is why men will always read records, and why, even when letters
are at their lowest, records still remain. Thus, if a diary be known
to be true, then it seems vivid and becomes famous where if it were
fiction no one would find any merit in it. History, therefore, once a
man has begun to know it, becomes a necessary food for the mind, without
which it cannot sustain its new dimension. It is an aggregate of
universal experience, nor, other things being equal, is any man's
judgment so thin and weak as the judgment of a man who knows nothing of
the past. But history, if it is to be kept just and true and not to
become a set of airy scenes, fantastically coloured by our later time,
must be continually corrected and moderated by the seeing and handling
of things.
If the West of Europe be one place and one people separate from all the
rest of the world, then that unity is of the last importance to us; and
that it is so, the wider our learning the more certain we are. All our
religion and custom and mode of thought are European. A European State
is only a State because it is a State of Europe; and the demarcations
between the ever-shifting States of Europe are only dotted lines, but
between the Christian and the non-Christian the boundary is hard and
full.
Now, a man who recognises this truth will ask, "Where could I find a
model of the past of that Europe? In what place could I find the best
single collection of all the forms which European energy has created,
and of all the outward symbols in which its soul has been made manifest?
To such a man the answer should be given, 'You will find these things
better in the town of Arles than in any other place.'" A man asking
such a question would mean to travel. He ought to travel to Arles.
Long before men could write, this hill (which was the first dry land at
the head of the Rhone delta, beyond the early mud-flats which the river
was pushing out into the sea) was inhabited by our ancestors. Their
barbaric huts were grouped round the shelving shore; their axes and
their spindles remain.
When thousands of years later the Greeks pushed northward from Massilia,
Arles was the first great corner in their road and the first
halting-place after the useless deserts that separated their port from
the highway of the Rhone valley.
At the close of Antiquity Rome came to Arles in the beginning of her
expansion, and the strong memories of Rome which Arles still holds are
famous. Every traveller has heard of the vast unbroken amphitheatre and
the ruined temple in a market square that is still called the Forum;
they are famous--but when you see them it seems to you that they should
be more famous still. They have something about them so familiar and yet
so unexpected that the centuries in which they were built come actively
before you.
* * * * *
The city of Arles is small and packed. A man may spend an hour in it
instead of a day or a year, but in that hour he can receive full
communion with antiquity. For as you walk along the tortuous lane
between high houses, passing on either hand as you go the ornaments of
every age, you turn some dirty little corner or other and come suddenly
upon the titanic arches of Rome. There are the huge stones which appal
you with the Roman weight and perpetuate in their arrangement an order
that has modelled the world. They lie exact and mighty; they are
unmoved, clamped with metal, a little worn, enduring. They are none the
less a domestic and native part of the living town in which they stand.
You pass from the garden of a house that was built in your grandfather's
time, and you see familiarly before you in the street a pedestal and a
column. They are two thousand years old. You read a placard idly upon
the wall; the placard interests you; it deals with the politics of the
place or with the army, but the wall might be meaningless. You look more
closely, and you see that that wall was raised in a fashion that has
been forgotten since the Antonines, and these realities still press upon
you, revealed and lost again with every few steps you walk within the
limited circuit of the town.
Rome slowly fell asleep. The sculpture lost its power; something
barbaric returned. You may see that decline in capitals and masks still
embedded in buildings of the fifth century. The sleep grew deeper. There
came five hundred years of which so little is left in Europe that Paris
has but one doubtful tower and London nothing. Arles still preserves its
relics. When Charlemagne was dead and Christendom almost extinguished
the barbarian and the Saracen alternately built, and broke against, a
keep that still stands and that is still so strong that one might still
defend it. It is unlit. It is a dungeon; a ponderous menace above the
main street of the city, blind and enormous. It is the very time it
comes from.
When all that fear and anarchy of the mind had passed, and when it was
discovered that the West still lived, a dawn broke. The medieval
civilisation began to sprout vigorously through the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, as an old tree sprouts before March is out. The memorials of
that transition are common enough. We have them here in England in great
quantity; we call them the "Norman" architecture. A peculiarly vivid
relic of that springtime remains at Arles. It is the door of what was
then the cathedral--the door of St. Trophimus. It perpetuates the
beginning of the civilisation of the Middle Ages. And of that
civilisation an accident which has all the force of a particular design
has preserved here, attached to this same church, another complete type.
The cloisters of this same Church of St. Trophimus are not only the
Middle Ages caught and made eternal, they are also a progression of that
great experiment from its youth to its sharp close.
You come into these cloisters from a little side street and a neglected
yard, which give you no hint of what you are going to see. You find
yourself cut off at once and put separately by. Silence inhabits the
place; you see nothing but the sky beyond the border of the low roofs.
One old man there, who cannot read or write and is all but blind, will
talk to you of the Rhone. Then as you go round the arches, "withershins"
against the sun (in which way lucky progression has always been made in
sacred places), there pass you one after the other the epochs of the
Middle Ages. For each group of arches come later than the last in the
order of sculpture, and the sculptors during those 300 years went
withershins as should you.
You have first the solemn purpose of the early work. This takes on
neatness of detail, then fineness; a great maturity dignifies all the
northern side. Upon the western you already see that spell beneath which
the Middle Ages died. The mystery of the fifteenth century; none of its
wickedness but all its final vitality is there. You see in fifty details
the last attempt of our race to grasp and permanently to retain the
beautiful.
When the circuit is completed the series ends abruptly--as the medieval
story itself ended.
There is no way of writing or of telling history which could be so true
as these visions are. Arles, at a corner of the great main road of the
Empire, never so strong as to destroy nor so insignificant as to cease
from building, catching the earliest Roman march into the north, the
Christian advance, the full experience of the invasions; retaining in a
vague legend the memory of St. Paul; drawing in, after the long trouble,
the new life that followed the Crusades, can show such visions better, I
think, than Rome herself can show them.
A specialist told me once in Ealing that no inn could compare with the
Griffin, a Fenland inn. "It is painted green" he said, "and stands in
the town of March. If you would enjoy the Griffin, you must ask your way
to that town, and as you go ask also for the Griffin, for many who may
not have heard of March will certainly have heard of the Griffin."
So I set out at once for the Fens and came at the very beginning of them
to a great ditch, which barred all further progress. I wandered up and
down the banks for an hour thinking of the inn, when I met a man who was
sadder and more silent even than the vast level and lonely land in which
he lived. I asked him how I should cross the great dyke. He shook his
head, and said he did not know. I asked him if he had heard of the
Griffin, but he said no. I broke away from him and went for miles along
the bank eastward, seeing the rare trees of the marshes dwindling in the
distance, and up against the horizon a distant spire, which I thought
might be the Spire of March. For March and the Griffin were not twenty
miles away. And still the great ditch stood between me and my
pilgrimage.
* * * * *
These dykes of the Fens are accursed things: they are the separation of
friends and lovers. Here is a man whose crony would come and sit by his
fireside at evening and drink with him, a custom perhaps of twenty
years' standing, when there comes another man from another part armed
with public power, and digs between them a trench too wide to leap and
too soft to ford. The Fens are full of such tragedies.
One may march up and down the banks all day without finding a boat, and
as for bridges there are none, except, indeed, the bridges which the
railway makes; for the railways have grown to be as powerful as the
landlords or the brewers, and can go across this country where they
choose. And here the Fens are typical, for it may be said that these
three monopolies--the landlords, the railways, and the brewers--govern
England.
* * * * *
But at last, at a place called Oxlode, I found a boat, and the news that
just beyond lay another dyke. I asked where that could be crossed, but
the ferryman of Oxlode did not know. He pointed two houses out, however,
standing close together out of the plain, and said they were called
"Purles' Bridge," and that I would do well to try there. But when I
reached them I found that the water was between me and them and, what is
more, that there was no bridge there and never had been one since the
beginning of time. Of these jests the Fens are full.
In half an hour a man came out of one of the houses and ferried me
across in silence. I asked him also if he had heard of the Griffin. He
laughed and shook his head as the first one had done, but he showed me a
little way off the village of Monea, saying that the people of that
place knew every house for a day's walk around. So I trudged to Monea,
which is a village on one of the old dry islands of the marsh; but no
one at Monea knew. There was, none the less, one old man who told me he
had heard the name, and his advice to me was to go to the cross roads
and past them towards March, and then to ask again. So I went outwards
to the cross roads, and from the cross roads outward again it seemed
without end, a similar land repeating itself for ever. There was the
same silence, the same completely even soil, the same deep little
trenches, the same rare distant and regular rows of trees.
* * * * *
Since it was useless to continue thus for you--one yard was as good as
twenty miles--and since you could know nothing more of these silences,
even if I were to give you every inch of the road, I will pass at once
to the moment in which I saw a baker's cart catching me up at great
speed. The man inside had an expression of irritable poverty. I did not
promise him money, but gave it him. Then he took me aboard and rattled
on, with me by his side.
I had by this time a suspicion that the Griffin was a claustral thing
and a mystery not to be blurted out. I knew that all the secrets of
Hermes may be reached by careful and long-drawn words, and that the
simplest of things will not be told one if one asks too precipitately;
so I began to lay siege to his mind by the method of dialogue. The words
were these:--
MYSELF: This land wanted draining, didn't it?
THE OTHER MAN: Ah!
MYSELF: It seems to be pretty well drained now.
THE OTHER MAN: Ugh!
MYSELF: I mean it seems dry enough.
THE OTHER MAN: It was drownded only last winter.
MYSELF: It looks to be good land.
THE OTHER MAN: It's lousy land; it's worth nowt.
MYSELF: Still, there are dark bits--black, you may say--and thereabouts
it will be good.
THE OTHER MAN: That's where you're wrong; the lighter it is the better
it is ... ah! that's where many of 'em go wrong. (Short silence.)
MYSELF: (cheerfully): A sort of loam?
THE OTHER MAN (calvinistically): Ugh!--sand!... (shaking his head).
It blaws away with a blast of wind. (A longer silence.)
MYSELF (as though full of interest): Then you set your drills to sow
deep about here?
THE OTHER MAN (with a gesture of fatigue): Shoal. (Here he sighed
deeply.)
After this we ceased to speak to each other for several miles. Then:
MYSELF: Who owns the land about here?
THE OTHER MAN: Some owns parts and some others.
MYSELF (angrily pointing to an enormous field with a little new house
in the middle): Who owns that?
THE OTHER MAN (startled by my tone): A Frenchman. He grows onions.
Now if you know little of England and of the temper of the English (I
mean of 0.999 of the English people and not of the 0.001 with which you
associate), if, I say, you know little or nothing of your
fellow-countrymen, you may imagine that all this conversation was
wasted. "It was not to the point," you say. "You got no nearer the
Griffin." You are wrong. Such conversation is like the kneading of dough
or the mixing of mortar; it mollifies and makes ready; it is
three-quarters of the work; for if you will let your fellow-citizen
curse you and grunt at you, and if you will but talk to him on matters
which he knows far better than you, then you have him ready at the end.
So had I this man, for I asked him point-blank at the end of all this:
"What about the Griffin?" He looked at me for a moment almost with
intelligence, and told me that he would hand me over in the next village
to a man who was going through March. So he did, and the horse of this
second man was even faster than that of the baker. The horses of the
Fens are like no horses in the world for speed.
* * * * *
This horse was twenty-three years old, yet it went as fast as though all
that tomfoolery men talk about progress were true, and as though things
got better by the process of time. It went so fast that one might
imagine it at forty-six winning many races, and at eighty standing
beyond all comparison or competition; and because it went so fast I went
hammering right through the town of March before I had time to learn its
name or to know whither I was driving; it whirled me past the houses and
out into the country beyond; only when I had pulled up two miles beyond
did I know what I had done and did I realise that I had missed for ever
one of those pleasures which, fleeting as they are, are all that is to
be discovered in human life. It went so fast, that before I knew what
had happened the Griffin had flashed by me and was gone.
* * * * *
Yet I will affirm with the tongue of faith that it is the noblest house
of call in the Fens.
* * * * *
It is better to believe than to handle or to see. I will affirm with the
tongue of faith that the Griffin is, as it were, the captain and chief
of these plains, and has just managed to touch perfection in all the
qualities that an inn should achieve. I am speaking not of what I know
by the doubtful light of physical experience, but of what I have seen
with the inward eye and felt by something that transcends gross taste
and touch.
Low rooms of my repose! Beams of comfort and great age; drowsy and
inhabiting fires; ingle-nooks made for companionship. You also, beer
much better, much more soft, than the beer of lesser towns; beans,
bacon, and chicken cooked to the very limit of excellence; port drawn
from barrels which the simple Portuguese had sent to Lynn over the
cloud-shadowed sea, and honourable Lynn without admixture had sent upon
a cart to you, port undefined, port homogeneous, entirely made of wine:
you also beds! Wooden beds with curtains around them, feathers for
sleeping on, and every decent thing which the accursed would attempt to
destroy; candles (I trust)--and trust is more perfect than proof--bread
made (if it be possible) out of English wheat; milk drawn most certainly
from English cows, and butter worthy of the pastures of England all
around. Oh, glory to the Fens, Griffin, it shall not be said that I have
not enjoyed you!
* * * * *
There is a modern habit, I know, of gloom, and men without faith upon
every side recount the things that they have not enjoyed. For my part I
will yield to no such habit. I will consider that I have more perfectly
tasted in the mind that which may have been denied to my mere body, and
I will produce for myself and others a greater pleasure than any
pleasure of the sense. I will do what the poets and the prophets have
always done, and satisfy myself with vision, and (who knows?) perhaps by
this the Griffin of the Idea has been made a better thing (if that were
possible!) than the Griffin as it is--as it materially stands in this
evil and uncertain world.
So let the old horse go by and snatch me from this chance of joy: he has
not taken everything in his flight, and there remains something in spite
of time, which eats us all up.
And yet ... what is that in me which makes me regret the Griffin, the
real Griffin at which they would not let me stay? The Griffin painted
green: the real rooms, the real fire ... the material beer? Alas for
mortality! Something in me still clings to affections temporal and
mundane. England, my desire, what have you not refused me!
I very well remember the spring breaking ten years ago in Lorraine. I
remember it better far than I shall ever remember another spring,
because one of those petty summits of emotion that seem in boyhood like
the peaks of the world was before me. We were going off to camp.
Since every man that fires guns or drives them in France--that is, some
hundred thousand and more at any one time, and taking in reserves, half
a million--must go to camp in his time, and that more than once, it
seems monstrous that a boy should make so much of it; but then to a boy
six months is a little lifetime, and for six months I had passed through
that great annealing fire of drill which stamps and moulds the French
people to-day, putting too much knowledge and bitterness into their
eyes, but a great determination into their gestures and a trained
tenacity into the methods of their thought.
To me also this fire seemed fiercer and more transforming because, until
the day when they had marched me up to barracks in the dark and the rain
with a batch of recruits, I had known nothing but the easy illusions and
the comfort of an English village, and had had but journeys or short
visits to teach me that enduring mystery of Europe, the French temper:
whose aims and reticence, whose hidden enthusiasms, great range of
effort, divisions, defeats, and resurrections must now remain the
principal problem before my mind; for the few who have seen this sight
know that the French mind is the pivot on which Europe turns.
I had come into the regiment faulty in my grammar and doubtful in
accent, ignorant especially of those things which in every civilisation
are taken for granted but never explained in full; I was ignorant,
therefore, of the key which alone can open that civilisation to a
stranger. Things irksome or a heavy burden to the young men of my age,
born and brought up in the French air, were to me, brought up with
Englishmen an Englishman, odious and bewildering. Orders that I but half
comprehended; simple phrases that seemed charged with menace; boasting
(a habit of which I knew little), coupled with a fierce and, as it were,
expected courage that seemed ill suited to boasting--and certainly
unknown outside this army; enormous powers of endurance in men whose
stature my English training had taught me to despise; a habit of
fighting with the fists, coupled with a curious contempt for the
accident of individual superiority--all these things amazed me and put
me into a topsy-turvy world where I was weeks in finding my feet.
But strangest of all, and (as I now especially believe) most pregnant
with meaning for the future, was to find the inherited experience in me
of so much teaching and careful habit--instinct of command, if you
will--all that goes to make what we call in Western Europe a
"gentleman," put at the orders and the occasional insult of a hierarchy
of office, many of whose functionaries were peasants and artisans.
Stripes on the arm, symbols, suddenly became of overwhelming value; what
I had been made with so much care in an English public school was here
thought nothing but a hindrance and an absurdity. This had seemed to me
first a miracle, then a grievous injustice, then most unpractical, and
at last, like one that sees the answer to a riddle, I saw (when I had
long lost my manners and ceased to care for refinements) that the French
were attempting, a generation before any others in the world, to
establish an army that should be a mere army, and in which a living man
counted only as one numbered man.
Whether that experiment will hold or not I cannot tell; it shocks the
refinement of the whole West of Europe; it seems monstrous to the
aristocratic organisation of Germany; it jars in France also with the
traditions of that decent elder class of whom so many still remain to
guide the Republic, and in whose social philosophy the segregation of a
"directing class" has been hitherto a dogma. But soon I cared little
whether that experiment was to succeed or no in its final effort, or
whether the French were to perfect a democracy where wealth has one vast
experience of its own artificiality, or to fail. The intellectual
interest of such an experiment, when once I seized it, drove out every
other feeling.
I became like a man who has thoroughly awaked from a long sleep and
finds that in sleep he has been taken overseas. I merged into the great
system whose wheels and grindings had at first astonished or disgusted
me, and I found that they had made of me what they meant to make. I
cared more for guns than for books; I now obeyed by instinct not men,
but symbols of authority. No comfortable fallacy remained; it no longer
seemed strange that my captain was a man promoted from the ranks; that
one of my lieutenants was an Alsatian charity boy and the other a rich
fellow mixed up with sugar-broking; that the sergeant of my piece should
be a poor young noble, the wheeler of No. 5 a wealthy and very vulgar
chemist's son, the man in the next bed ("my ancient," as they say in
that service) a cook of some skill, and my bombardier a mild young
farmer. I thought only in terms of the artillery: I could judge men from
their aptitude alone, and in me, I suppose, were accomplished many
things--one of Danton's dreams, one of St. Just's prophecies, the
fulfilment also of what a hundred brains had silently determined twenty
years before when the staff gave up their swords outside Metz; the army
and the kind of army of which Chanzy had said in the first breath of the
armistice, "A man who forgets it should be hanged, but a man who speaks
of it before its time should be shot with the honours of his rank."
All this had happened to me in especial in that melting-pot up in the
eastern hills, and to thirty thousand others that year in their separate
crucibles.
In the process things had passed which would seem to you incredible if I
wrote them all down. I cared little in what vessel I ate, or whether I
had to tear meat with my fingers. I could march in reserve more than
twenty miles a day for day upon day. I knew all about my horses; I could
sweep, wash, make a bed, clean kit, cook a little, tidy a stable, turn
to entrenching for emplacement, take a place at lifting a gun or
changing a wheel. I took change with a gunner, and could point well. And
all this was not learnt save under a grinding pressure of authority and
harshness, without which in one's whole life I suppose one would never
properly have learnt a half of these things--at least, not to do them so
readily, or in such unison, or on so definite a plan. But (what will
seem astonishing to our critics and verbalists), with all this there
increased the power, or perhaps it was but the desire, to express the
greatest thoughts--newer and keener things. I began to understand De
Vigny when he wrote, "If a man despairs of becoming a poet, let him
carry his pack and march in the ranks."
Thus the great hills that border the Moselle, the distant frontier, the
vast plain which is (they say) to be a battlefield, and which lay five
hundred feet sheer below me, the far guns when they were practising at
Metz, the awful strength of columns on the march moved me. The sky also
grew more wonderful, and I noticed living things. The Middle Ages, of
which till then I had had but troubling visions, rose up and took flesh
in the old town, on the rare winter evenings when I had purchased the
leisure to leave quarters by some excessive toil. A man could feel
France going by.
It was at the end of these six months, when there was no more darkness
at roll-call, and when the bitter cold (that had frozen us all winter)
was half forgotten, that the spring brought me this excellent news,
earlier than I had dared to expect it--the news that sounds to a recruit
half as good as active service. We were going to march and go off right
away westward over half a dozen horizons, till we could see the real
thing at Chalons, and with this news the world seemed recreated.
Seven times that winter we had been mobilised: four times in the dead of
the night; once at midday, once at evening, and once at dawn. Seven
times we had started down the wide Metz road, hoping in some vague way
that they would do something with us and give us at least some
manoeuvres, and seven times we had marched back to barracks to undo all
that serious packing and to return to routine.
Once, for a week in February, the French and German Governments, or,
more probably, two minor permanent officials, took it into their silly
heads that there was some danger of war. We packed our campaign saddles
every night and put them on the pegs behind the stalls; we had the
emergency rations served out, and for two days in the middle of that
time we had slept ready. But nothing came of it. Now at least we were
off to play a little at the game whose theory we had learnt so wearily.
And the way I first knew it would easily fill a book if it were told as
it should be, with every detail and its meaning unrolled and with every
joy described: as it is, I must put it in ten lines. Garnon (a
sergeant), three others, and I were sent out (one patrol out of fifty)
to go round and see the reserve horses on the farms. That was delight
enough, to have a vigorous windy morning with the clouds large and white
and in a clear sky, and to mix with the first grain of the year, "out of
the loose-box."
We took the round they gave us along the base of the high hills, we got
our papers signed at the different stables, we noted the hoofs of the
horses and their numbers; a good woman at a large farm gave us food of
eggs and onions, and at noon we turned to get back to quarters for the
grooming. Everything then was very well--to have ridden out alone
without the second horse and with no horrible great pole to crush one's
leg, and be free--though we missed it--of the clank of the guns. We felt
like gentlemen at ease, and were speaking grandly to each other, when I
heard Garnon say to the senior of us a word that made things seem better
still, for he pointed out to a long blue line beyond Domremy and
overhanging the house of Joan of Arc, saying that the town lay there.
"What town?" said I to my Ancient; and my Ancient, instead of answering
simply, took five minutes to explain to me how a recruit could not know
that the round of the reserve horses came next before camp, and that
this town away on the western ridge was the first halting-place upon the
road. Then my mind filled with distances, and I was overjoyed, saving
for this one thing, that I had but two francs and a few coppers left,
and that I was not in reach of more.
When we had ridden in, saluted, and reported at the guard, we saw the
guns drawn up in line at the end of the yard, and we went into grooming
and ate and slept, hardly waiting for the morning and the long
regimental call before the réveillé; the notes that always mean the high
road for an army, and that are as old as Fontenoy.
* * * * *
That next morning they woke us all before dawn--long before dawn. The
sky was still keen, and there was not even a promise of morning in the
air, nor the least faintness in the eastern stars. They twinkled right
on the edges of the world over the far woods of Lorraine, beyond the
hollow wherein lay the town; it was even cold like winter as we
harnessed; and I remember the night air catching me in the face as I
staggered from the harness-room, with my campaign saddle and the traces
and the girths and the saddle cloth, and all the great weight that I had
to put upon my horses.
We stood in the long stables all together, very hurriedly saddling and
bridling and knotting up the traces behind. A few lanterns gave us an
imperfect light. We hurried because it was a pride to be the first
battery, and in the French service, rightly or wrongly, everything in
the artillery is made for speed, and to speed everything is sacrificed.
So we made ready in the stable and brought our horses out in order
before the guns in the open square of quarters. The high plateau on
which the barracks stood was touched with a last late frost, and the
horses coming out of the warm stables bore the change ill, lifting their
heads and stamping. A man could not leave the leaders for a moment, and,
while the chains were hooked on, even my middle horses were restive and
had to be held. My hands stiffened at the reins, and I tried to soothe
both my beasts, as the lantern went up and down wherever the work was
being done. They quieted when the light was taken round behind by the
tumbrils, where two men were tying on the great sack of oats exactly as
though we were going on campaign.
These two horses of mine were called Pacte and Basilique. Basilique was
saddled; a slow beast, full of strength and sympathy, but stupid and
given to sudden fears. Pacte was the led horse, and had never heard
guns. It was prophesied that when first I should have to hold him in
camp when we were practising he would break everything near him, and
either kill me or get me cells. But I did not believe these prophecies,
having found my Ancient and all third-year men too often to be liars,
fond of frightening the younger recruits. Meanwhile Pacte stood in the
sharp night, impatient, and shook his harness. Everything had been
quickly ordered.
We filed out of quarters, passed the lamp of the guard, and saw huddled
there the dozen or so that were left behind while we were off to better
things. Then a drawn-out cry at the head of the column was caught up all
along its length, and we trotted; the metal of shoes and wheel-rims rang
upon the road, and I felt as a man feels on a ship when it leaves
harbour for great discoveries.
We had climbed the steep bank above St. Martin, and were on the highest
ridge of land dominating the plain, when the sky first felt the approach
of the sun. Our backs were to the east, but the horizon before us caught
a reflection of the dawn; the woods lost their mystery, and one found
oneself marching in a partly cultivated open space with a forest all
around. The road ran straight for miles like an arrow, and stretched
swarmingly along it was the interminable line of guns. But with the full
daylight, and after the sun had risen in a mist, they deployed us out of
column into a wide front on a great heath in the forest, and we halted.
There we brewed coffee, not by batteries, but gun by gun.
Warmed by this little meal, mere coffee without sugar or milk, but with
a hunk left over from yesterday's bread and drawn stale from one's
haversack (the armies of the Republic and of Napoleon often fought all
day upon such sustenance, and even now, as you will see, the French do
not really eat till a march is over--and this may be a great advantage
in warfare)--warmed, I say, by this little meal, and very much refreshed
by the sun and the increasing merriment of morning, we heard the first
trumpet-call and then the shouted order to mount.
We did not form one column again. We went off at intervals, by
batteries; and the reason of this was soon clear, for on getting to a
place where four roads met, some took one and some took another, the
object being to split up the unwieldy train of thirty-six guns, with all
their waggons and forges, into a number of smaller groups, marching by
ways more or less parallel towards the same goal; and my battery was
left separate, and went at last along a lane that ran through pasture
land in a valley.
The villages were already awake, and the mist was all but lifted from
the meadows when we heard men singing in chorus in front of us some way
off. These were the gunners that had left long before us and had gone on
forward afoot. For in the French artillery it is a maxim (for all I
know, common to all others--if other artilleries are wise) that you
should weight your limber (and therefore your horses) with useful things
alone; and as gunners are useful only to fire guns, they are not
carried, save into action or when some great rapidity of movement is
desired. I do, indeed, remember one case when it was thought necessary
to send a group of batteries during the manoeuvres right over from the
left to the right of a very long position which our division was
occupying on the crest of the Argonne. There was the greatest need for
haste, and we packed the gunners on to the limber (there were no seats
on the gun in the old type--there are now) and galloped all the way down
the road, and put the guns in action with the horses still panting and
exhausted by that extra weight carried at such a speed and for such a
distance. But on the march, I say again, we send the gunners forward,
and not only the gunners, but as you shall hear when we come to
Commercy, a reserve of drivers also. We send them forward an hour or
two before the guns start; we catch them up with the guns on the road;
they file up to let us pass, and commonly salute us by way of formality
and ceremony. Then they come into the town of the halt an hour or two
after we have reached it.
So here in this silent and delightful valley, through which ran a river,
which may have been the Meuse or may have been a tributary only, we
caught up our gunners. Their song ceased, they were lined up along the
road, and not till we were passed were they given a little halt and
repose. But when we had gone past with a huge clattering and dust, the
bombardier of my piece, who was a very kindly man, a young farmer, and
who happened to be riding abreast of my horses, pointed them out to me
behind us at a turning in the road. They were taking that five minutes'
rest which the French have borrowed from the Germans, and which comes at
the end of every hour on the march. They had thrown down their knapsacks
and were lying flat taking their ease, I could not long look backwards,
but a very little time after, when we had already gained nearly half a
mile upon them, we again heard the noise of their singing, and knew that
they had reshouldered their heavy packs. And this pack is the same in
every unmounted branch of the service, and is the heaviest thing, I
believe, that has been carried by infantry since the Romans.
It was not yet noon, and extremely hot for the time of year and for the
coldness of the preceding night, when they halted us at a place where
the road bent round in a curve and went down a little hollow. There we
dismounted and cleaned things up a little before getting into the town,
where we were to find what the French call an étape; that is, the town
at which one halts at the end of one's march, and the word is also used
for the length of a march itself. It is not in general orders to clean
up in this way before coming in, and there were some commanders who were
never more pleased than when they could bring their battery into town
covered with dust and the horses steaming and the men haggard, for this
they thought to be evidence of a workmanlike spirit. But our colonel had
given very contrary orders, to the annoyance of our captain, a man
risen from the ranks who loved the guns and hated finery.
Then we went at a walk, the two trumpets of the battery sounding the
call which is known among French gunners as "the eighty hunters,"
because the words to it are, "quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt,
quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt, chasseurs,"
which words, by their metallic noise and monotony, exactly express the
long call that announces the approach of guns. We went right through the
town, the name of which is Commercy, and the boys looked at us with
pride, not knowing how hateful they would find the service when once
they were in for its grind and hopelessness. But then, for that matter,
I did not know myself with what great pleasure I should look back upon
it ten years after. Moreover, nobody knows beforehand whether he will
like a thing or not; and there is the end of it.
We formed a park in the principal place of the town; there were
appointed two sentinels to do duty until the arrival of the gunners who
should relieve them and mount a proper guard, and then we were marched
off to be shown our various quarters. For before a French regiment
arrives at a town others have ridden forward and have marked in chalk
upon the doors how many men and how many horses are to be quartered here
or there, and my quarters were in a great barn with a very high roof;
but my Ancient, upon whom I depended for advice, was quartered in a
house, and I was therefore lonely.
We groomed our horses, ate our great midday meal, and were free for a
couple of hours to wander about the place. It is a garrison, and, at
that time, it was full of cavalry, with whom we fraternised; but the
experiment was a trifle dangerous, for there is always a risk of a
quarrel when regiments meet as there is with two dogs, or two of any
other kind of lively things.
Then came the evening, and very early, before it was dark, I was asleep
in my clothes in some straw, very warm; but I was so lazy that I had not
even taken off my belt or sword. And that was the end of the first day's
marching.
BELLOC-HILLS AND THE SEA - A FAMILY OF THE FENS