Waiting for daylight

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WAITING FOR
DAYLIGHT

BOOKS BY //. M. TOM LIN SON

THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE

OI.D JUNK

LONOON RlVliR

WAl riNC5 K(m DAYLIGHT

THE FIRST PRINTING OF THIS BOOK CON-
SISTS OF TWENTY-ONE HUNDRED COPIES,
OF WHICH TWO THOUSAND ARE FOR SALE.

THIS IS NUMBER

WAITING FOR
DAYLIGHT

By H. M. TOMLINSON

NEW YORK • ALFRED • A • KNOPF • MCMXXII

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.

Published May, lOSS

Set up, electrotvped. and printed hy Iko Foil-BoUoii Co., Binphamton, N. T.

Paper fiirnishtil by Itcnru Lindenmis/r d Sons, Atip York, .V. V.
Bound 6» tho H. Wolff Estate. New York, N. Y.

MANUFAOTUBBD IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMEEICA

JUN -5 1922

©CI.A661984

To
MY WIFE

CONTENTS

I. In Ypres 3

II. A Raid Night 12

III. Islands 24

IV. Travel Books 28
V. Signs of Spring 31

VI. Prose Writing 36

VII. The Modern Mind 40

VIII. Magazines 44

IX. The Marne 49

X. Carlyle 56

XI. Holiday Reading 58

XII. An Autumn Morning 65

XIII. News from the Front 74

XIV. Authors and Soldiers 80
XV. Waiting for Daylight 88

XVI. The Nobodies 96

XVII. Bookworms 112

XVIII. Sailor Language 115

XIX. Illusions 120

Contents

XX.

Figure-heads

127

XXI.

Economics

133

XXII.

Old Sunlight

135

XXIII.

RUSKIN

140

XXIV.

The Reward of Virtue

147

XXV.

Great Statesmen

149

XXVI.

Joy

152

XXVII.

The Real Thing

162

XXVIII.

Literary Critics

170

XXIX.

The South Downs

175

XXX.

Kjpling

182

XXXI.

A Devon Estuary

188

XXXII.

Barbellion

194

XXXIII.

Breaking the Spell

2CX)

WAITING FOR
DAYLIGHT

I. In Ypres

JULY, 19 1 5. My mouth does not get so
dry as once it did, I notice, when walking
in from Suicide Corner to the Cloth Hall.
There I was this summer day, in Ypres again, in
a silence like a threat, amid ruins which might
have been in Central Asia, and I, the last man
on earth, contemplating them. There was some-
thing bumping somewhere, but it was not in
Ypres, and no notice is taken in Flanders of what
does not bump near you. So I sat on the dis-
rupted pedestal of a forgotten building and
smoked, and wondered why I was in the city of
Ypres, and why there was a war, and why I was
a fool.

It was a lovely day, and looking up at the sky
over what used to be a school dedicated to the
gentle Jesus, which is just by the place where
one of the seventeen-inchers has blown a forty-
foot hole, I saw a little round cloud shape in the
blue, and then another, and then a cluster of
them; the kind of soft little cloudlets on which

[3]

Waiting for Daylight

Renaissance cherubs rest their chubby elbows
and with fat faces inclined on their hands con-
sider mortals from cemetery monuments. Then
dull concussions arrived from heaven, and right
overhead I made out two German 'planes. A
shell-case banged the pave and went on to make
a white scar on a wall. Some invisible things
were whizzing about. One's own shrapnel can
be tactless.

There was a cellar near and I got into it, and
while the intruders were overhead I smoked and
gazed at the contents of the cellar — the wreck-
age of a bicycle, a child's chemise, one old boot,
a jam-pot, and a dead cat. Owing to an unsatis-
factory smell of many things I climbed out as
soon as possible and sat on the pedestal again.

A figure in khaki came straight at me across
the Square, its boots sounding like the deliber-
ate approach of Fate in solitude. It stopped
and saluted, and said: "I shouldn't stay 'ere,
sir. They gen'ally begin about now. Sure to
drop some 'ere."

At that moment a mournful cry went over us,
followed by a crash in Sinister Street. My way
home! Some masonry fell in sympathy from
the Cloth Hall.

[4]

In Ypres

"Better come with me till it blows over, sir.
I've got a dug-out near."

We turned off into a part of the city unknown
to me. There were some unsettling noises,
worse, no doubt, because of the echoes behind us;
but it is not dignified to hurry when one looks
like an officer. One ought to fill a pipe. I
did so, and stopped to light it. I paused
while drawing at it, checked by the splitting open
of the earth in the first turning to the right and
the second to the left, or thereabouts.

"That's a big 'un, sir," said my soldier, taking
half a cigarette from behind his ear and a light
from my match; we then resumed our little
promenade. By an old motor 'bus having boards
for windows, and War Office neuter for its colour,
but bearing for memory's sake on its brow the
legend "Liverpool Street," my soldier hurried
slightly, and was then swallowed up. I was
alone. While looking about for possible open-
ings I heard his voice under the road, and then
saw a dark cavity, low in a broken wall, and
crawled in. Feeling my way by knocking on the
dark with my forehead and my shins, I descended
to a lower smell of graves which was hollowed by
a lighted candle in a bottle. And there was the

[5]

Waiting for Daylight

soldier, who provided me with an empty box, and
himself with another, and we had the candle be-
tween us. On the table were some official docu-
ments under a shell-nose, and a tin of condensed
milk suffering from shock. Pictures of partly clad
ladies began to appear on the walls through the
gloom. Now and then the cellar trembled.

"Where's that old 'bus come from?" I asked.

"Ah ! The pore old bitch, sir," said the sol-
dier sadly.

"Yes, of course, but what's the matter with
her?"

"She's done in, sir. But she's done her bit,
she has," said my soldier, changing the crossing
of his legs. "Ah! little did she think when I
used to take 'er acrorse Ludget Circus what a 'ell
of a time I'd 'ave to give 'er some day. She's a
good ole thing. She's done 'er bit. She won't
see Liverpool Street no more. If medals wasn't
so cheap she ought to 'ave one, she ought."

The cellar had a fit of the palsy, and the can-
dle-light shuddered and flattened.

"The ruddy swine are ruddy wild to-day.
Suthin's upset 'em. 'Ow long will this ruddy
war last, sir?" asked the soldier, slightly plain-
tive.

[6]

In Ypres

"I know," I said. "It's filthy. But what
about your old 'bus?"

"Ah! what about 'cr. She ain't 'arf 'ad a
time. She's seen enough war to make a general
want to go home and shell peas. What she
knows about it would make them clever fellers in
London who reckon they know all about it turn
green if they heard a door slam. Learned it ail
in one jolly old day, too. Learned it sudden,
like you gen'ally learn things you don't forget.
And I reckon I 'adn't anything to find out, either,
not after Antwerp. Don't tell me, sir, war
teaches you a lot. It only shows fools what they
didn't know but might 'ave guessed.

"You know Poperinghe? Well, my trip was
between there an' Wipers, gen'ally. The stones
on the road was enough to make 'er shed nuts
and bolts by the pint. But it was a quiet
journey, take it all round, and after a cup o' tea
at Wipers I used to roll home to the park.
It was easier than the Putney route. Wipers
was full of civilians. Shops all open. Estami-
nets and nice young things. I used to like war
better than a school-boy likes Sat'd'y after-
noons. It wasn't work and it wasn't play.
And there was no law you couldn't break if you

[7]

Waiting for Daylight

'ad sense enough to come to attention smart and
answer quick. Yes, sir.

"I knew so little about war then that I'm
sorry I never tried to be a military expert. But
my education was neglected. I can only write
picture postcards. It's a pity. Well, one day
it wasn't like that. It dropped on Wipers, and
it wasn't like that. It was bloody different. I
wasn't frightened, but my little inside was.

"First thing was the gassed soldiers coming
through. Their faces were green and blue, and
their uniform a funny colour. I didn't know
what was the matter with 'em, and that put the
wind up, for I didn't want to look like that. We
could hear a gaudy rumpus in the Salient. The
civvies were frightened, but they stuck to their
homes. Nothing was happening there then,
and while nothing is happening it's hard to be-
lieve it's going to. After seeing a Zouave crawl
by with his tongue hanging out, and his face the
colour of a mottled cucumber, I said good-bye to
the little girl where I was. It was time to see
about it.

"And fact is, I didn't 'ave much time to think
about it, what with gettin' men out and gettin*
reinforcements in. Trip after trip.

"But I shall never have a night again like that

[8]

In Ypres

one. Believe me, it was a howler. I steered
the old 'bus, but it was done right by accident.
It was certainly touch and go. I shouldn't 'avc
thought a country town, even in war, could look
like Wipers did that night.

"It was gettin' dark on my last trip, and we
barged into all the world gettin' out. And the
guns and reinforcements were comin' up behind
me. There's no other road out or in, as you
know. I forgot to tell you that night comin'
on didn't matter much, because the place was
alight. The sky was full of shrapnel, and the
high-explosives were falling in the houses on fire,
and spreading the red stuff like fireworks. The
gun ahead of me went over a child, but only its
mother and me saw that, and a house in flames
ahead of the gun got a shell inside it, and fell
on the crowd that was mixed up with the army
traffic.

"When I got to a side turning I 'opped off to
see how my little lady was getting on. A shell
had got 'er estamlnet. The curtains were flying
in little flames through the place where the win-
dows used to be. Inside, the counter was upside
down, and she was laying with glass and bottles
on the floor. I couldn't do anything for her.
And further up the street my headquarters was a

[9]

Waiting for Daylight

heap of bricks, and the houses on both sides of it
on fire. No good looking there for any more
orders.

"Being left to myself, I began to take notice.
While you're on the job you just do it, and don't
see much of anything else except out of the
corner of the eye. I've never 'eard such a
row — shells bursting, houses falling, and the
place was foggy with smoke, and men you
couldn't see were shouting, and the women and
children, wherever they were, turning you cold
to hear 'em.

"It was like the end of the world. Time for
me to 'op it. I backed the old 'bus and turned
'er, and started off — shells in front and behind
and overhead, and, thinks I, next time you're
bound to get caught in this shower. Then I
found my officer. 'E was smoking a cigarette,
and 'e told me my job. 'E gave me my cargo.
I just 'ad to take 'em out and dump 'em.

" 'Where shall I take 'em, sir?'

" 'Take 'em out of this,' says he. 'Take 'em
anywhere, take 'em where you like, Jones, take
'em to hell, but take 'em away,' says he.

"So I loaded up. Wounded Tommies, gassed
Arabs, some women and children, and a few
lunatics, genuine cock-eyed loonies from the
[10]

In Ypres

asylum. The shells chased us out. One biffed
us over on to the two rear wheels, but we dropped
back on four on the top speed. Several times I
bumped over soft things in the road and felt
rather sick. We got out o' the town with the
shrapnel a bit in front all the way. Then the
old 'bus jibbed for a bit. Every time a shell
burst near us the lunatics screamed and laughed
and clapped their hands, and trod on the
wounded, but I got 'er goin' again. I got 'er
to Poperinghe. Two soldiers died on the way,
and a lunatic had fallen out somewhere, and a
baby was born in the 'bus; and me with no con-
ductor and no midwife.

"I met our chaplain and says he : 'Jones, you
want a drink. Come with me and have a
Scotch.' That was a good drink. I 'ad the
best part of 'arf a bottle without water, and it
done me no 'arm. Next morning I found I'd
put in the night on the parson's bed in me boots,
and 'e was asleep on the floor."

["]

II. A Raid Night

SEPTEMER 17, 1915. I had crossed
from France to Fleet Street, and was
thankful at first to have about me the things
I had proved, with their suggestion of intimacy,
their look of security; but I found the once
familiar editorial rooms of that daily paper a
little more than estranged. I thought them
worse, if anything, than Ypres. Ypres is within
the region where, when soldiers enter it, they
abandon hope, because they have become sane at
last, and their minds have a temperature a little
below normal. In Ypres, whatever may have
been their heroic and exalted dreams, they awake,
see the world is mad, and surrender to the doom
from which they know a world bereft will give
them no reprieve.

There was a way in which the office of that
daily paper was familiar. I had not expected
it, and it came with a shock. Not only the com-
pulsion, but the bewildering inconsequence of
war was suggested by its activities. Reason was

[12]

A Raid Night

not there. It was ruled by a blind and fixed
idea. The glaring artificial light, the headlong
haste of the telegraph instruments, the wild
litter on the floor, the rapt attention of the men
scanning the news, their abrupt movements and
speed when they had to cross the room, still
with their gaze fixed, their expression that of
those who dreaded something worse to happen;
the suggestion of tension, as though the Last
Trump were expected at any moment, filled me
with vague alarm. The only place where that
incipient panic is not usual is the front line, be-
cause there the enemy is within hail, and is known
to be another unlucky fool. But I allayed my
anxiety. I leaned over one of the still figures
and scanned the fateful document which had
given its reader the aspect of one who was star-
ing at what the Moving Finger had done. Its
message was no more than the excited whisper
of a witness who had just left a keyhole. But
I realized in that moment of surprise that this
office was an essential feature of the War; with-
out it, the War might become Peace. It pro-
voked the emotions which assembled civilians in
ecstatic support of the sacrifices, just as the staff
of a corps headquarters, at some comfortable
leagues behind the trenches, maintains its fight-

[13]

Waiting for Daylight

ing men in the place where gas and shells tend to
engender common sense and irresolution.

I left the glare of that office, its heat and
half-hysterical activity, and went into the cool-
ness and quiet of the darkened street, and there
the dread left me that it could be a duty of mine
to keep hot pace with patriots in full stampede.
The stars were wonderful. It is such a tran-
quillizing surprise to discover there arc stars
over London. Until this War, when the street
illuminations were doused, we never knew it. It
strengthens one's faith to discover the Pleiades
over London; it is not true that their delicate
glimmer has been put out by the remarkable in-
candescent energy of our power stations. There
they are still. As I crossed London Bridge the
City was as silent as though it had come to the
end of its days, and the shapes I could just make
out under the stars were no more substantial
than the shadows of its past. Even the Thames
was a noiseless ghost. London at night gave me
the illusion that I was really hidden from the
monstrous trouble of Europe, and, at least for
one sleep, had got out of the War. I felt that
my suburban street, secluded in trees and un-
importance, was as remote from the evil I knew
of as though it were in Alaska. When I came

[14]

A Raid Night

to that street I could not see my neighbours'
homes. It was with some doubt that I found
my own. And there, with three hours to go to
midnight, and a book, and some circumstances
that certainly had not changed, I had retired
thankfully into a fragment of that world I had
feared we had completely lost.

"What a strange moaning the birds in the
shrubbery are making!" my companion said once.
I listened to it, and thought it was strange.
There was a long silence, and then she looked up
sharply. "What's that?" she asked. "Listen!"

I listened. My hearing is not good.

"Nothing!" I assured her.

"There it is again." She put down her book
with decision, and rose, I thought, in some alarm.

"Trains," I suggested. "The gas bubbling.
The dog next door. Your imagination." Then
I listened to the dogs. It was curious, but they
all seemed awake and excited.

"What is the noise like?" I asked, surrender-
ing my book on the antiquity of man.

She twisted her mouth in a comical way most
seriously, and tried to mimic a deep and solemn
note.

"Guns," I said to myself, and went to the
front door.

[15]

Waiting for Daylight

Beyond the vague opposite shadows of some
elms lights twinkled in the sky, incontinent
sparks, as though glow lamps on an invisible
pattern of wires were being switched on and
off by an idle child. That was shrapnel. I
walked along the empty street a little to get a
view between and beyond the villas. I turned
to say something to my companion, and saw then
my silent neighbours, shadowy groups about me,
as though they had not approached but had
materialized where they stood. We watched
those infernal sparks. A shadow lit its pipe
and offered me its match. I heard the guns
easily enough now, but they were miles away.

A slender finger of brilliant light moved
slowly across the sky, checked, and remained
pointing, firmly accusatory, at something It had
found in the heavens. A Zeppelin!

There it was, at first a wraith, a suggestion
on the point of vanishing, and then illuminated
and embodied, a celestial maggot stuck to the
round of a cloud like a caterpillar to the edge
of a leaf. We gazed at it silently, I cannot say
for how long. The beam of light might have
pinned the bright larva to the sky for the in-
spection of interested Londoners. Then some-
body spoke. "I think it is coming our way."

[i6]

A Raid Night

I thought so too. I went indoors, calling out
to the boy as I passed his room upstairs, and
went to where the girls were asleep. Three
miles, three minutes! It appears to be harder
to waken children when a Zeppelin is coming
your way. I got the elder girl awake, lifted her,
and sat her on the bed, for she had become
heavier, I noticed. Then I put her small sister
over my shoulder, as limp and indifferent as a
half-filled bag. By this time the elder one had
snuggled into the foot of her bed, resigned to
that place if the other end were disputed, and
was asleep again. I think I became annoyed,
and spoke sharply. We were in a hurry. The
boy was waiting for us at the top of the stairs.

"What's up?" he asked with merry interest,
hoisting his slacks.

"Come on down," I said.

We went into a central room, put coats round
them, answering eager and innocent questions
with inconsequence, had the cellar door and a
light ready, and then went out to inspect affairs.
There were more searchlights at work. Bright
diagonals made a living network on the over-
head dark. It was remarkable that those rigid
beams should not rest on the roof of night, but
that their ends should glide noiselessly about the

[17]

Waiting for Daylight

invisible dome. The nearest of them was fol-
lowed, when in the zenith, by a faint oval of
light. Sometimes it discovered and broke on
delicate films of high fair-weather clouds. The
shells were still twinkling brilliantly, and the
guns were making a rhythmless baying in the
distance, like a number of alert and indignant
hounds. But the Zeppelin had gone. The
firing diminished and stopped.

They went to bed again, and as I had become
acutely depressed, and the book now had no
value, I turned in myself, assuring everyone,
with the usual confidence of the military expert,
that the affair was over for the night. But once
in bed I found I could see there only the progress
humanity had made in its movement heavenwards.
That is the way with us; never to be con-
cerned with the newest clever trick of our enter-
prising fellow-men till a sudden turn of affairs
shows us, by the immediate threat to our own
existence, that that cleverness has added to the
peril of civilized society, whose house has been
built on the verge of the pit. War now would be
not only between soldiers. In future wars the
place of honour would be occupied by the infants,
in their cradles. For war is not murder. Starv-
ing children is war, and it is not murder. What

[i8]

A Raid Night

treacherous lying is all the heroic poetry of
battle ! Men will now creep up after dark, am-
bushed in safety behind the celestial curtains,
and drop bombs on sleepers beneath for the
greater glory of some fine figment or other. It
filled me, not with wrath at the work of Kaisers
and Kings, for we know what is possible with
them, but with dismay at the discovery that
one's fellows are so docile and credulous that
they will obey any order, however abominable.
The very heavens had been fouled by this ob-
scene and pallid worm, crawling over those
eternal verities to which eyes had been lifted for
light when night and trouble were over dark.
God was dethroned by science. One looked
startled at humanity, seeing not the accustomed
countenance, but, for a moment, glimpsing in-
stead the baleful lidless stare of the evil of the
slime, the unmentionable of a nightmare; . . .

A deafening crash brought us out of bed in
one movement. I must have been dozing. Some-
one cried, "My children!" Another rending up-
roar interrupted my effort to shepherd the flock
to a lower floor. There was a raucous avalanche
of glass. We muddled down somehow — I forget
how. I could not find the matches. Then in
the dark we lost the youngest for some eternal

[19]

Waiting for Daylight

seconds while yet another explosion shook the
house. We got to the cellar stairs, and at last
there they all were, their backs to the coals, sit-
ting on lumber.

A candle was on the floor. There were more
explosions, somewhat muffled. The candle-flame
showed a little tremulous excitement, as if it
were one of the party. It reached upwards
curiously in a long intent flame, and then shrank
flat with what it had learned. We were accom-
panied by grotesque shadows. They stood about
us on the white and unfamiliar walls. We
waited. Even the shadows seemed to listen with
us; they hardly moved, except when the candle-
flame was nervous. Then the shadows wavered
slightly. We waited. I caught the boy's eye,
and winked. He winked back. The youngest,
still with sleepy eyes, was trembling, though not
with cold, and this her sister noticed, and put her
arms about her. His mother had her hand on
her boy's shoulder.

There was no more noise outside. It was
time, perhaps, to go up to see what had hap-
pened. I put a raincoat over my pyjamas, and
went into the street. Some of my neighbours,
who were special constables, hurried by. The
enigmatic night, for a time, for five minutes, or

[20]

A Raid Night

five seconds (I do not know how long it was),
was remarkably still and usual. It might have
been pretending that we were all mistaken. It
was as though we had been merely dreaming our
recent excitements. Then, across a field, a villa
began to blaze. Perhaps it had been stunned
till then, and had suddenly jumped into a panic
of flames. It was wholly involved in one roll
of fire and smoke, a sudden furnace so consuming
that, when it as suddenly ceased, giving one or
two dying spasms, I had but an impression of
flames rolling out of windows and doors to per-
suade me that what I had seen was real. The
night engulfed what may have been an illusion, for
till then I had never noticed a house at that point.
Whispers began to pass of tragedies that
were incredible in their incidence and craziness.
Three children were dead in the rubble of one
near villa. The ambulance that was passing was
taking their father to the hospital. A woman
had been blown from her bed into the street.
She was unhurt, but she was insane. A long
row of humbler dwellings, over which the dust
was still hanging in a faint mist, had been de-
molished, and one could only hope the stories
about that place were far from true. We were
turned away when we would have assisted; all

[21]

Waiting for Daylight

the help that was wanted was there. A stranger
offered me his tobacco pouch, and it was then I
found my rainproof was a lady's, and therefore
had no pipe in its pocket.

The sky was suspect, and we watched it, but
saw only vacuity till one long beam shot into it,
searching slowly and deliberately the whole
mysterious ceiling, yet hesitating sometimes, and
going back on its path as though intelligently
suspicious of a matter which it had passed over
too quickly. It peered into the immense caverns
of a cloud to which it had returned, illuminating
to us unsuspected and horrifying possibilities of
hiding-places above us. We expected to see the
discovered enemy boldly emerge then. Nothing
came out. Other beams by now had joined the
pioneer, and the night became bewildering with
a dazzling mesh of light. Shells joined the wan-
dering beams, those sparks of orange and red.
A world of fantastic chimney-pots and black
rounds of trees leaped into being between us and
the sudden expansion of a fan of yellow flame.
A bomb! We just felt, but hardly heard, the
shock of it. A furious succession of such bursts
of light followed, a convulsive opening and shut-
ting of night. We saw that when midnight is
cleft asunder It has a fiery inside.

[22]

A Raid Night

The eruptions ceased. Idle and questioning,
not knowing wc had heard the last gun and
bomb of the affair, a little stunned by the mani-
acal rapidity and violence of this attack, we found
ourselves gazing at the familiar and shadowy
peace of our suburb as we have always known it.
It had returned to that aspect. But something
had gone from it for ever. It was not, and
never could be again, as once we had known it.
The security of our own place had been based
on the goodwill or indifference of our fellow-
creatures everywhere. To-night, over that ob-
scure and unimportant street, we had seen a
celestial portent illuminate briefly a little of the
future of mankind.

[23]

III. Islands

JANUARY 5, 1918. The editor of the
Hibhert Journal betrays a secret and
lawless passion for islands. They must be
small sanctuaries, of course, far and isolated; for
he shows quite rightly that places like the British
Isles are not islands in any just and poetic sense.
Our kingdom is earth, sour and worm-riddled
earth, with all its aboriginal lustre trampled out.
By islands he means those surprising landfalls,
Kerguelen, the Antarctic Shetlands, Timor, Am-
boyna, the Carolines, the Marquesas, and the
Galapagos. An island with a splendid name,
which I am sure he would have mentioned had
he thought of it, is Fernando de Noronha.

There must be a fair number of people to-day
who cherish that ridiculous dream of an oceanic
solitude. We remember that whenever a story-
teller wishes to make enchantment seem thor-
oughly genuine, he begins upon an island. One
might say, if in a hurry, that Defoe began it, but
in leisure recall the fearful spell of islands in
the Greek legends. It is easily understood. If

[24]

Islands

you have watched at sea an island shape, and
pass, forlorn in the waste, apparently lifeless,
and with no movement to be seen but the silent
fountains of the combers, then you know where
the Sirens were born, and why awful shapes grew
in the minds of the simple Greeks out of the
wonders in Crete devised by the wise and mys-
terious Minoans, who took yearly the tribute of
Greek youth — youth which never returned to
tell.

How easily the picture of one's first island in
foreign seas comes back! I had not expected
mine, and was surprised one morning, when
eastward-bound in the Mediterranean, to see a
pallid mass of rock two miles to port, when I
had imagined I knew the charts of that sea well
enough. It was a frail ghost of land on that
hard blue plain, and had a light of its own; but
it looked arid and forbidding, a place of seamen's
bones. Turning quickly to the mate I asked
for its name. "Alboran," he said, very quietly,
without looking at it, as though keeping some-
thing back. He said no more. But while that
strange glimmer was on the sea I watched it; I
have learned nothing since of Alboran; and so
the memory of that brief sight of a strange rock
is as though once I had blundered on a dreadful

[25]

Waiting for Daylight

secret which the men who knew it preferred to
keep.

But there is a West Indian Island which for
me is the best in the seas, because the memory of
it is but a reflection of my last glimpse of the
tropics. That landfall in the Spanish Main
was as soundless as a dream. It was but an
apparition of land. It might have been no more
than an unusually vivid recollection of a desire
which had once stirred the imagination of a boy.
Looking at it, I felt sceptical, quite unprepared
to believe that what once was a dream could be
coming true by any chance of my drift through
the years. Yet there it remained, right in our
course, on a floor of malachite which had stains
of orange drift-weed. It could have been a
mirage. It appeared diaphanous, something so
frail that a wind could have stirred it. Did it
belong to this earth? It grew higher, and the
waves could be seen exploding against its lower
rocks. It ivas a dream come true. Yet even
now, as I shall not have that landfall again, I
have a doubt that waters could be of the colours
which were radiant about that island, that rocks
could be of rose and white, that trees could be
so green and aromatic, and light — except of the
Hesperides, which are lost — so like the exhil-

[26]

Islands

arating life and breath of the prime. A doubt
indeed! For every whisper one hears to-day
deepens the loom of a gigantic German attack.

[27]

IV. Travel Books

JANUARY 19, 19 1 8. What long hours
at night we wait for sleep! Sleep will
not come. A friend, who grows more
like a sallow congestion of scorn than a comfort-
able companion, warned me yesterday, when I
spoke of the end of the War, that it might have
no end. He said that we could not escape our
fate. Our star, I gathered, was to receive a ce-
lestial spring-cleaning. There would be bonfires
of litter. We had become impeded with the
rubbish of centuries of wise and experienced
statecraft, and we had hardly more than begun
to get rid of it. A renaissance with a vengeance !
Youth was in revolt against the aged and the
dead.

But what an idea to look at when waiting
for sleep ! I turned over with another sigh, and
recalled that William James has advised us that
a deleterious thought may be exorcised by
willing another that is sunny. I tried to com-
mand a more enjoyable picture for eyes that were

[28]

Travel Books

closed but intent. Yet you never know where
the most promising image will transport you
through some inconsequential association. I
recalled a pleasing day in the Eastern Mediter-
ranean, and that brought Eothen into my mind,
by chance. And instantly, instead of seeing
Sfax in Tunis, I was looking down from a win-
dow on a black-edged day of rain, watching an
unending procession of moribund figures jolting
over the pave of a street in Flanders, in every
kind of conveyance, from the Yser. There I was,
back at the War, at two in the morning, and all
because I had read Eothen desperately in odd
moments while waiting for the signs which would
warn me that the enemy was about to enter that
village.

No escape yet! I could hear the old clock
slowly making its way towards another day. I
heard a belated wayfarer going home, his feet
muffled in snow. Anyhow, I never had much of
an opinion of Eothen, a book over which the
cymbals have been banged too loudly. Compare
it, as a travel book, for substance and style, with
A Week on the Concord; though that is a silly
thing to ask, if no sillier than literary criticism
usually is. But though all the lists the critics
make of our best travel books invariably give

[29]

Waiting for Daylight

Kinglake's a principal place, I have not once
seen Thoreau's narrative included.

What is the test for such a book? I should
ask it to be a trustworthy confidence of a king-
dom where the marches may be foreign to our
cheap and usual experience, though familiar
enough to our dreams. It may not offer, but it
must promise that Golden City which drew
Raleigh to the Orinoco, Thoreau to Walden
Pond, Doughty to Arabia, Livingstone to Tan-
ganyika, and Hudson to the Arctic. The fountain
of life is there. We hope to come to our own.

We never notice whether that country has good
corn-land, or whether it is rich enough in minerals
to arouse an interest in its future. But Its
prospects are lovely and of good report. It
is always a surprise to find the earth can look so
good, and behave so handsomely, on the quiet,
to a vagabond traveller like Thoreau, who has
no valid excuse for not being at honest work, as
though it reserved its finest mornings to show
to favoured children when really good people are
not about. The Sphinx has a secret only for
those who do not see her wink.

[30]

V. Signs of Spring

FEBRUARY i6, 1918. A catalogue of
second-hand books was sent to me yes-
terday. A raid warning, news of the
destruction of Parliament House, or a whisper
of the authentic ascent of Mr. Lloyd George in a
fiery chariot and of the flight of God, would do
no more to us than anothjer kick does to the dead.
But that catalogue had to be handled to be be-
lieved. It was an incredible survival from the
days before the light went out. Those minor
gratifications have gone. I had even forgotten
they were ever ours. Sometimes now one
wakes to a morning when the window is a golden
square, a fine greeting to a good earth, and the
whistle of a starling in the apple tree just outside
is as tenuous as a thread of silver; the smell of
coffee brings one up blithe as a boy about to begin
play again. Yet something we feel to be wrong
— a foggy memory of an ugly dream — ah, yes;
the War, the War. The damned remembrance
of things as they are drops its pall. The morn-

[31]

Waiting for Daylight

ing paper, too, I see, has the information that our
men are again cheerfully waiting for the spring
offensive.

Cheerfully! But, of course, the editor knows.
And the, spring offensive ! I have seen that kind
of vernal gladness. What an advent! When
you find the first blue egg in the shrubbery behind
your billet in Artois; when the G. S. O. 2 comes
into the mess with a violet in his fingqrs, and
shows it to every doubter, then you know the
time has come for the testing of the gas cyl-
inders, and you wonder whether this is the last
time you will be noteworthy because you had the
earliest news of the chiffchaff. The spring of-
fensive ! Guns are now converging by leagues
of roads to a new part of the Front, to try to
do there what they failed to do elsewhere.
The men, as all important editors know, are
happily waiting for the great brutes to begin
bellowing again in infernal concert. So there
accumulates at breakfast in these spring days all
that evidence which makes one proud to share
with one's fellows the divine gift of reason, in-
stead of a blind and miserable animal instinct.
No wonder the cuckoo has a merry note !

That is the way we idle and hapless civilians
now begin our day. I look up to the sky, and

[32]

Signs of Spring

wonder whether this inopportune spell of fine
weather means that some London children will
be killed in bed to-night. As I pass the queues
of women who have been waiting for hours for
potatoes, and probably won't get any, though
the earth doubtless is still abundant, if we had
but the sense and opportunity to try it, I can-
not help wondering whether it would not have
been better for us to have refused the gift of
reason from which could be devised the edify-
ing wonders of civilization, and have remained
in the treetops instead, so ignorant that we were
unaware we were lucky.

Another grave statement by a great states-
man, and, when we are fortunate, a field post-
card, are to-day our full literary deserts. Is it
surprising that catalogues of old books do not
come our way? We do not deserve them.
Hope faintly revives, when the postman cheers
us with an overdue field postcard, of a morning
to dawn when the abstraction we name the "aver-
age intelligence" and the "great heart of the
public" and the "herd mind," will not only regret
that it made a ruinous fool of itself the night
before, but solemnly resolve to end all dis-
ruptive and dirty habits. This wild hope was
born in me of such a postcard (all right so far!)

[33]

Waiting for Daylight

coinciding with the arrival of the list of old books.
It seemed at that moment that things could
be different and better. Then, when closing the
front door that morning — very gently — not
slamming it on the run — I saw something else.
The door noiselessly closed, an easy launch into a
tranquil day, as though I had come down through
the night with the natural process of the hours,
and so had commenced the day at the right mo-
ment, I noticed the twig of a lilac bush had
intruded into the porch. It directly indicated
me with a black finger. What did it want? I
looked intently, sure that an omen was here.
Aha ! So that was it ! The twig was showing
me that it had a green nail.

Four young officers of the Flying Corps
passed me, going ahead briskly, and I thought
that an elm under which they walked had kin-
dling in it a suggestion of coloured light. But it
was too delicate to be more than a hope. It
must be confessed that the men who fight in the
air were more distinct than that light. Then the
four officers parted, two to either side, when
marching past another figure. They went be-
yond it swiftly, taking no notice of it, turned
into the future, and vanished. I drew near the

[34]

Signs of Spring

bowed and leisurely being, which had a spade
over its shoulder.

It stopped to light a pipe, and I caught up to
it. The edge of the spade was like silver with
use, and the big hand which grasped it was
brown with dry earth. The lean neck of this
figure was tinctured with many summers, and
cross-hatched by the weather and mature male-
ness. I caught a smell of newly-turned earth.
The figure moved as though time were nothing.
It turned Its face as I drew level, and said it was
a good morning. The morning was better
than good; and somehow this object in an old hat
and clothes as rough as bark, with a face which
probably had the same expression when William
was momentous at Hastings, and when Pitt
solemnly ordered the map of Europe to be rolled
up, was In accord with the light in the elm, and
the superior and convincing Insolence of the
blackbirds. They all suggested the tantalizing
idea that solid ground Is near us. In this un-
reasonable world of anxious change, If only we
had intelligence enough to know where to look
for It.

[35]

VI. Prose Writing

MARCH i6, 1918. A critic has been
mourning because good prose is not
being written to-day. This surprised
him, and he asked why it was that when poetry,
which he pictured as "primroses and violets,"
found abundance of nourishment even in the un-
likely compost these latter days provide, yet
prose, which he saw as "cabbages and potatoes,"
made but miserable growth.

It is hard to explain it, for I must own that the
image of the potato confuses me. One has seen
modern verse which was, florally, very spud-like.
If those potatoes were meant for violets then
they suggest more than anything else a simple
penny guide-book for their gardeners. Here we
see at least the danger of using flowers of speech,
when violets and onions get muddled in the same
posy, and how ill botany is likely to serve the
writer who flies heedlessly to it for literary
symbols. Figures of speech are pregnant with
possibilities (I myself had better be very careful
here) , and those likely to show most distress over

[36]

Prose Writing

their progeny are the unlucky fathers. For the
first thing expected of any literary expression is
that it should be faithful to what is in the mind,
and if for the idea of good prose writing the
image of a potato is given, then it can but repre-
sent the features of the earthy lumps which are
common to the stalls of the market-place. What
is prose? Sodden and lumbering stuff, I suppose.
And what is poetry? That fortunate lighting of
an idea which delights us with the behef that we
have surprised truth, and have seen that it is
beautiful.

The difficulty with what the textbooks tell us
is prose is that many of us make it, not naturally
and unconsciously like the gentleman who dis-
covered he had been doing it all his life, but
professionally. Consider the immense output of
novels — but no, do not let us consider anything so
surprising and perplexing. The novel, that most
exacting problem in the sublimation of the history
of our kind, not to be solved with ease, it now
appears may be handled by children as a profit-
able pastime. Children, of course, should be
taught to express themselves in writing, and
simply, lucidly, and with sincerity. Yet all edi-
tors know the delusion is common with beginners
in journalism that the essay, a form in which per-

[37]

Waiting for Daylight

haps only six writers have been successful In the
history of English letters, is but a prelude to
serious work, a holiday before the realities have
begun. They all attempt it. Every editorial
letter-box is loaded with essays every morning.
Yet the love of learning, and wisdom and hu-
mour, are not usual, and the gods still more rarely
give with these gifts the ability to express them
in the written word; and how often may we count
on learning, wisdom, and humour being not only
reflected through a delightful and original char-
acter, but miraculously condensed into the con-
trolled display of a bright and revealing beam?
It is no wonder we have but six essayists !

There is no doubt about it. If we mean by
prose much more than the sincere and lucid
written expression of our desires and opinions,
it is because beyond that simplicity we know the
thrill which is sometimes given by a revelation of
beauty and significance in common words and
tidings. The best writing must come of a
gift for making magic out of what are but com-
modities to us, and that gift is not distributed by
the generous gods from barrows which go
the round of the neighbourhoods where many
babies are born, as are faith, hope, and credulity,
those virtues that cause the enormous circula-

[38]

Prose Writing

tions of the picture papers, and form the ready
material for the careers of statesmen and the
glory of famous soldiers. It is more unusual.
We see it as often as we do comets and signs in
the heavens, a John in the Wilderness again,
pastors who would die for their lambs, women
who contemn the ritual and splendour of man-
slaying, and a politician never moved by the entice-
ments of a successful career. It is therefore
likely that when we see great prose for the first
time we may not know it, and may not enjoy It.
It can be so disrespectful to what we think is good.
It may be even brightly innocent of it. And as
in addition our smaller minds will be overborne by
the startling activity and cool power of the prose
of such a writer as Swift, its superiority will only
enhance our complaining grief.

[39]

VII. The Modern Mind

JULY 6, 19 1 8. A Symphony in Verse has
just come to me from America. The
picture on its wrapper shows a man in
green tights, and whose hair Is blue, veiling his
eyes before a lady In a flame-coloured robe who
stares from a distance in a tessellated solitude.
As London two days ago celebrated Independ-
ence Day like an American city, and displayed the
Stars and Stripes so deliriously that the fact that
George III was ever a British king was lost in
a common acknowledgment that he was only an-
other violent fool, this Boston book invited at-
tention. For ladles in gowns of flame, with arms
raised In appeal, may be supposed to want more
than the vote; and American poets wearing
emerald tights who find themseh^es In abandoned
temples alone with such ladles, must clearly have
left Whittler with the nursery biscuits. Long-
fellow could never grow blue locks. Even Whit-
man dressed in flannel and ate oranges in public.
Nor did Poe at his best rise to assure us :

"This is the night for murder: give us knives:
We have long sought for this."

[40]

The Modem Mind

Well, not all of us. The truth is some of us
have not sought for knives with any zest, being
paltry and early Victorian in our murders. Yet
in this symphony in verse. The Jig of Forslin, by
Mr. Conrad Aiken, there are such lines as these:

"When the skies are pale and stars are cold,
Dew should rise from the grass in little bubbles,
And tinkle in music amid green leaves.
Something immortal lives in such air —
We breathe, we change.

Our bodies become as cold and bright as starlight.
Our Irearts grow young and strange.
Let us extend ourselves as evening shadows
And learn the nocturnal secrets of these meadows."

It is not all knives and murder. The Jig, in
fact, dances us through a world of ice lighted by
star gleams and Arctic streamers, where some-
times our chill loneliness is interrupted by a
woman whose "mouth is a sly carnivorous
flower"; where we escape the greenish light of a
vampire's eyes to enter a tavern where men strike
each other with bottles. Mermaids are there,
and Peter and Paul, and when at last Mr. Aiken
feels the reader may be released, it is as though
we groped in the dark, bewildered and alarmed,
for assurance that this was nothing but art.

One cannot help feeling, while reading this
product of the modern mind, that we are all a

[4']

Waiting for Daylight

little mad, and that the cleverest of us know it,
and indulge the vagaries and instability of in-
sanity. In an advertisement to Mr. Aiken's
poetry we are told that it is based on the Freudian
psychology. We are not seldom reminded to-day
of that base to the New Art. We are even
beginning to look on each^ other's simplest acts
with a new and grave suspicion. It causes a man
to wonder what obscure motive, probably hellish,
prompted his wife to brush his clothes, though
when he caught her at it she was doing it
in apparent kindness. Instead of the truth mak-
ing us free, its dread countenance, when we
glimpse it, only startles us into a pallid mimicry of
its sinister aspect. It is like the sardonic grin I
have seen on the face of an inteUigent soldier as
he strode over filth and corpses towards shell-fire.
Soldiers, when they are home again, delight in
watching the faces and the ways of children.
They want to play with the youngsters, eat buns
in the street, and join the haymakers. They do
not want the truth. Without knowing anything
of Freud, they can add to their new and dreadful
knowledge of this world all they want of the sub-
conscious by reading the warlike speeches of the
aged, one of the most obscene and shocking
features of the War. The soldiers who are home

[42]

The Modem Mind

on leave turn in revolt from that to hop-scotch.
Yes, the truth about our own day will hardly bear
looking at, whether it is reflected from common
speech, or from the minds of artists like Mr.
Conrad Aiken.

[43]

VIII. Magazines

JULY 1 6, 19 1 8. I was looking in a hurry
for something to read. One magazine on
the bookstall told me it was exactly what I
wanted for a railway journey. It had a picture
of a large gun to make its cover attractive. The
next advertised its claims in another way. A
girl's face was the decorative feature of its wrap-
per, and you could not imagine eyes and a simper
more likely to make a man feel holier than
Bernard of Cluny till your gaze wandered to the
face of the girl smirking from the magazine be-
yond. Is it possible that nobody reads current
English literature, as the magazines give it, except
the sort of men who collect golf balls and eat
green gooseberries? It seems like it. One
wonders what the editors of those magazines
read when they are on a railway journey. For it
would be interesting to know whether this sort of
thing is done purposely, like glass beads for
Africa, or whether it is the gift of heaven,
natural and unconscious, like chickweed.

[44]

Magazines

One would be grateful for direction in this.
The matter is of some importance, because either
the producers or the readers are in a bad way;
and.it would be disheartening to suppose it is the
readers, for probably there are more readers
than editors, and so less chance of a cure. I do
not want to believe it is the readers. It is more
comforting to suppose those poor people must put
up with what they can get in a hurry ten minutes
before the train starts, only to find, as they might
have guessed, that vacuity is behind the smirk of
a girl with a face like that. They are forced to
stuff their literature behind them, so that owner-
ship of it shall not openly shame them before
their fellow-passengers.

With several exceptions, the mass of English
magazines and reviews may be dismissed in a
few seconds. The exceptions usually are not out
yet, or one has seen them. It used not to be
so, and that is what makes me think it is the pro-
ducers, and not the readers, who require skilled
attention. It is startling to turn to the mag-
azines of twenty or thirty years ago, and to com
pare them with what is thought good enough for
us. I was looking through such a magazine re-
cently, and found a poem by Swinburne, a prose-
romance by William Morris, and much more work

[45]

Waiting for Daylight

of a quality you would no more expect to find in
a current magazine than you would palm trees in
Whitechapel.

Of all the periodicals which reach the British
front, the two for which there is most competi-
tion in any officers' mess are I. a Vic Pans'ienne
and New York Life. The impudent periodical
from Paris is universal on our front. The work
of its artists decorates every dug-out. I should
say almost every mess subscribes for it. It is true
it is usual to account for this as being naughty
chance. Youth has been separated from the
sober influence of its English home, is away
from the mild and tranquil light of Oxford Street
feminity, is given to death, and therefore snatches
in abandon at amusement which otherwise
would not amuse. Dp not believe it. La Vie
Parisienne, it is true, is certainly not a paper for
the English family. I should be embarrassed if my
respected aunts found it on my table, pointed to
its drawings, and asked me what I saw in them.
What makes it popular with young Englishmen
in France is not the audacity of its abbreviated
underclothing, for there are English prints which
specialize in those in a more leering way, and
they are not widely popular like the French print.
But La Vie is produced by intelligent men. It is

[46]

Magazines

not a heavy lump of stupid or snobbish photo-
graphs. It does not leer. There is nothing
clownish and furtive about it. It is the gay and
frank expression of artists whose humour is too
broad for the general; but, as a rule, there is no
doubt about the fine quality of their drawings and
the deftness of their wit. That is what makes
the French print so liked by our men.

New York Life proves that, it seems to me.
The American periodical is very popular in
France, and the demand for it has now reached
London. The chemise is not its oriflamme. It
properly recognizes much else in life. But its
usual survey of the world's affairs has a merry
expansiveness which would make the editorial
mind common to London as giddy as grandma
in an aeroplane. It is not written in a walled
enclosure of ideas. It is not darkened and cir-
cumscribed by the dusty notions of the clubs. It
does not draw poor people as sub-species of the
human. It does not recognize class distinctions
at all, except for comic purposes. It is brighter,
better-informed, bolder, and more humane than
anything on this side, and our men in France find
its spirit in accord with theirs. One of the results
of the War will be that they will want something
like it when they come back, though I don't see

[47]

Waiting for Daylight

how they are to get it unless it is imported, or
unless they emigrate to a country where to feel
that way about things is normal and not peculiar.

[48]

IX. TheMarne

AUGUST 3, 19 1 8. The holy angels
were at Mons; British soldiers saw
them there. A Russian army was in
England in 19 14; everybody knew someone who
had seen it. And Joan of Arc, in shining armour,
has returned to the aid of the French. These
and even graver symptoms warn us that we may
not be in that state of equanimity which is useful
when examining evidence. Only this week, in the
significant absence of the house-dog, a mysterious
hand thrust through my letter-box a document
which proved, as only propaganda may, that this
war was thoroughly explored in the Book of
Daniel. Why were we not told so before?
Why was Lord Haldane reading Hegel when
there was Daniel? What did we pay him for?
And that very same night I stood at the outer
gate with one who asked me why, when there
were stacks of jam in our grocer's shop, we could
not buy any because the Food Controller had
omitted to put up the price. I had no time to
reason this out, because at that moment we heard

[49]

Waiting for Daylight

a loud buzzing in the sky. We gazed up into the
velvet black night, that was like a skull-cap over
the world. The buzzing continued. "Perhaps,"
said my companion, "what we can hear is our
great big Bee."

That buzzing overhead did not develop. It
merely waned and increased. It was remarkable
but inconsequential. It alarmed while giving no
good cause for alarm. In the invisible heavens
there might have been One who was playing
Bogie to frighten poor mortals for fun. I went
in to continue my reading of Charles le Goffic's
book, General Foch at the Maine. This was all
in accord with the Book of Daniel, and the jam
that was uneatable because it was not dear enough.
My reading continued, as it were, the mysterious
buzzing.

I can give, as a rule, but a slack attention to
military history, and my interest in war itself is,
fundamentally, the same as for cretinism and bad
drains. I merely wonder why it is, and wish it
were not. But the Marne, I regret to say, holds
me in wonder still; for this there is nothing to
say excepting that, from near Meaux, I heard
the guns of the Marne. I saw some of its pomp
and circumstance. I had been hearing the guns
of the War for some weeks then, but the guns

[JO]

The Marne

of the Marne were different. They who listened
knew that those foreboding sounds were of the
crisis, with all its import. If that thundering
drew nearer . . .

The Marne holds me still, as would a ghost
story which, by chance, had me within its weird.
I want to know all that can be told of it. And
if there is one subject of the War more than
another which needs a careful sorting of the
mixed straws In our beards, it is the Battle of the
Marne. In the case of my own beard, one of
the straws is the Russian myth. In France, as
in England, everybody knew someone who had
seen those Russians. One huge camp, I was told,
was near Chartres, and in Paris I was shown
Cossack caps which had come from there. That
was on the day Manoury's soldiers went east
in their historic sortie of taxicabs against von
Kluck. I could not then go to Chartres to con-
firm that camp of Cossacks; nor — and this is my
straw — could the German Intelligence Staff. I
did not believe that the Russians were in France,
but I could not prove they were not, nor could
the German generals, who, naturally, had heard
about those Russians. Now the rapid sweep of
the German right wing under von Kluck had
given the enemy a vulnerable flank which, in a

[51]

Waiting for Daylight

certain situation, might admit disaster. The
peril of his western flank must have made the
enemy sensitive to the least draught coming from
there.

It is on such frailties as this that the issue of
battle depends, and the fate of empires. War,
as a means of deciding our luck, is no more scien-
tific than dicing for it. The first battle of the
Marne holds a mystery which will intrigue
historians, separate friends, cause hot debate,
spawn learned treatises, help to fill the libraries,
and assist in keeping not a few asylums occupied,
for ages. If you would measure it as a cause
for lunacy, read Belloc's convincing exposition
of the battle, and compare that with le Gofiic's
story of the fighting of the Ninth Army, under
General Foch, by Fere Champenoise and the
Marshes of St. Gond. Le Goffic was there.

Why did fate tip the beam in the way we
know? Why, for a wonder, did the sound of
gunfire recede from Paris, and not approach still
nearer? I myself at the time held to an unrea-
sonable faith that the enemy would never enter
Paris, in spite of what Kitchener thought and
the French Government feared. Yet when
challenged I could not explain why, for I was
ill, and the days seemed to be biassed to the Ger-

[52]

The Marne

man side. To have heard the guns of the Marne
was as though once one had listened to the high
gods contending over our destiny.

Historians of the future will spell out le Goffic
on the fighting round the Tower on the Marshes
at Mondement. It was the key of the swamp of
St. Gond, the French centre. The Tower was
held by the French when, by every military rule,
they should have given it up. At length they
lost it. They won it again, but because of sheer
unreason, so far as the evidence shows, for at
the moment they regained it Mondement had
ceased to be anything but a key to a door which
had been burst wide open. Foch, by the books,
was beaten. But Foch as we know was fond
of quoting Joseph de Maistre: "A battle lost
is a battle which one had expected to lose." In
this faith, while his battalions were reduced to
thin companies without officers, and the Prussian
Guard and the Saxons v/ere driving back his whole
line, Foch, who had sent to borrow the 42nd Divi-
sion from the general on his left, kept reporting
to Headquarters: "The situation is excellent."
But the 42nd had not yet arrived, and he con-
tinued to retire.

Contradicting Belloc and the usual explana-
tions, M. le Goffic says that Foch was unaware

[S3]

Waiting for Daylight

of any gap in the German line. What he did
was to thrust in a bleak venture the borrowed
division against the flank of the advancing Prus-
sians, who were in superior force. The Prus-
sians retired. But had they not been preparing
to retire? Yet for what reason? When all
seemed lost, Foch won on the centre.

On the extreme French left, where Manoury
was himself being outflanked by von Kluck, the
fatigued and outnumbered French soldiers were
resigned to the worst. They had done all that
was possible, and it seemed of no avail. They
did not know that at that time the locomotives
in the rear of the German armies were reversed;
were heading to the north. What happened
in the minds of the directing German generals —
for that is where the defeat began — is not clear;
but the sudden and prolonged resistance of the
French at the Marne may have disrupted with
a violent doubt minds that had been taut with
over-confidence. The fear to which the doubt in-
creased when Manoury attacked and persisted,
the baffling audacity in the centre of the defeated
Foch, who did everything no well-bred militarist
would expect from another gentleman, and the
common fervour of the French soldiers who
fought for a week like men possessed, at last

[S4]

The Marne

caused something to give way in the brain of the
enemy. He could not understand it. This was
not according to his plan. He could not find it
in his books. He did not know what more he
could do, except to retire Into safety and think
it over afresh. The unexpected fury of the
human spirit, outraged into desperation after it
was assumed to be subdued, and bursting sud-
denly, and regardless of consequences, against the
calm and haughty front of material science
assured of its power, checked and deflected the
processes of the German intelligence. I have
seen an indignant rooster produce the same effect
on a bull.

[ss]

X. Carlyle

AUGUST 17, 191 8. Having something
on the mind may lead one to salva-
tion, but it seems just as likely to lead
one to the asylum. The Germans, who are nec-
essarily in the power of an argument which shows
them we are devils, are yet compelled to admit
that Shakespeare is worth reasoned consideration,
and so they avoid the implied difficulty by explain-
ing that as Shakespeare was a genius therefore
he was a German. What we should do if it could
be proved a grandfather of the poet was a
Prussian probably only our Home Secretary
could tell us, after he had made quite sure
he would not be overheard by a white and tense
believer in the Hidden Hand. Thank God
Heine was a Jew, though even so there are
rumours that a London memorial to him is to
be removed. And last night I heard it expounded
very seriously, by a clever man of letters, that
Carlyle's day is done. Few people read Carlyle
to-day — and it may be supposed that as they read
they hold his volumes with a Hidden Hand —

[56]

Carlyle

and fewer still love him, for at heart he was a
Prussian. He was, indeed, slain in our affections
by Frederick the Great. His shrine at Chelsea is
no longer visited. It is all for the best, because
in any case he wrote only a gnarled and involved
bastard stuff of partly Teutonic origin. While
this appeal was being made to me, I watched the
face of a cat, which got up and stretched itself
during the discourse;, with some hope; but that
animal looked as though it were thinking of its
drowned kittens. It was the last chance, and the
cat did not laugh. On my way home, thinking
of that grave man of letters and of his serious
and attentive listeners, I noticed even the street
lights were lowered or doused, and remem-
bered that every wine-shop was shut. London
is enough to break one's heart. If only by some
carelessness one of the angels failed to smother
his great laughter over us, and we heard it,
we might, in awakening embarrassment, the first
streak of dawn, put a stop to what had been until
that moment an unconscious performance.

[57]

XL Holiday Reading

AUGUST 31, 19 1 8. I make the same
mistake whenever the chance of a holi-
day broadens and brightens. A small
library, reduced by a process of natural selection,
helps to make weighty the bag. But I do not at
once close the bag; a doubt keeps it open; I take
out the books again and consider them. When
the problem of carrying those volumes about faces
me, it is a relief to discover how many of them
lose their vital importance. Yet a depraved
sense of duty, perhaps the residue of what such
writers as Marcus Aurelius have done for me,
refuses to allow every volume to be jettisoned.
It imposes, as a hair shirt, several new and serious
books which there has been no time to examine.
They are books that require a close focus, a long
and steady concentration, a silent immobility
hardly distinguishable from sleep. This year
for instance I notice Jung's Analytical Psychol-
ogy confidently expecting to go for a holiday with
me. I feel I ought to take some such stem re-
minder of mortality, and, in addition, out of a

[58]

Holiday Reading

sentimental regard for the past, a few old books,
for my faith is not dead that they may put a new
light on the wonderful strangeness of these latter
days. I take these, too.

And that is why I find them at the journey's
end. But why did I bring them? For now they
seem to be exactly what I would avoid — they look
like toil. And work, as these years have taught
the observant, is but for slaves and the con-
scripted. It is never admired, except with a dis-
tant and haughty sententiousness, by the best
people.

Nor is it easy, by this west-country quay, to
profit by a conscience which is willing to allow
some shameless idleness. I began talking, before
the books were even unpacked, with some old ac-
quaintances by the water-side. Most disquiet-
ing souls! But I cannot blame them. They
have been obliged to add gunnery to their knowl-
edge of seamanship and navigation. They were
silent, they shook their heads, following some
thoughtless enquiries of mine after the wellbeing
of other men I used to meet here. Worse than
all, I was forced to listen to the quiet recitals of
stranded cripples, once good craftsmen in the
place, and these dimmed the blessed sun even
where in other years it was unusually bright.

[59]

Waiting for Daylight

That is what put holiday thoughts and literature
away. I felt I had been very unfairly treated,
especially as the mutilated, being young men, were
unpleasantly noticeable In so small a village on
fine mornings. It is not right that the calm of
our well-earned leisure should be so savagely
ruined. There was one morning on the quay
when, watching the incoming tide, two of us were
discussing Mametz Wood and some matters relat-
ing to It which will never be published, and the
young man who was instructing me was ap-
proached by an older man, who beamed, and held
in his hand a news-sheet. "Splendid news this
morning," said the elderly man to the young sol-
dier. He wanted the opinion of one who had
fought on that ground, and I regret to say he got
it. The soldier indifferently handed back, the
glorious news, without Inspecting It, with words
which youth should never address to age.

So how can I stay by the quay all the golden
day long? I have not come here prepared to
endure the sudden Arctic shadows which fall, even
in summer, from such clouds. The society of
our fellows was never so uncertain, so likely to be
stormy, as in these days. And the opinions of
none of our fellow-men can be so disturbing as
those of the rebel from the trenches, who appears,

[60]

Holiday Reading

too, to expect us to agree with him at once, as
though he had a special claim on our sympa-
thetic attention. While considering him and his
views of society, of peace and war, I see what
might come upon us as the logical consequence of
such a philosophy, and the dread vision does not
accord with the high serenity of this Atlantic
coast, where the wind, like the hilarious vivacity
of a luminous globe spinning through the blue,
is mocking these very sheets as I write them,
and is trying to blow them, a little before their
time, into vacuity.

It is not easy, and perhaps this summer it would
not be right, to find the exact mood for a holi-
day. In the frame of mind which is more usual
with us, I put Ecclesiastes — forsaken by a previ-
ous visitor, and used to lengthen a short leg
of the dressing-table — in my pocket, and leave
the quay to its harsh new thoughts, and to the
devices by which it gets a bare sustenance out
of the tides, the seasons, and the winds, compli-
cated now with high explosives in cunning am-
bush; and go out to the headland, where wild
goats among the rocks which litter the steep are
the only life to blatter critical comment to high
heaven. I left that holiday quay and its folk,
and took with me a prayer which might go far

[6i]

Waiting for Daylight

to brace me to support the blattering of goats,
if that, too, should be my luck even when in soli-
tude. I passed at the hill-top the last white-
washed wall of the village, where the open At-
lantic is sighted, and stopped to glance at the
latest official poster on the wall. That explained
to me, while the west wind blew, what the penal-
ties are for young men who are in the wrong
because they are young, not having attained the
middle-age which brings with it immunity for
the holding of heroic notions. Yet how if
those young men arc not bellicose like their wise
seniors? Why should they get the evil which
their elders, who will it, take so much care to
avoid?

The dust of official lorries in a hurry no longer
made the wayside hedges appear aged. The
wind was newly arrived from mid-ocean. I met
it coming ashore. It knew nothing about us, so
far. In the distance, the village with its shipping
was a faint blur, already a faded impress on
earth, as though more than half forgotten in
spite of its important problems. It was hardly
more than a discoloration, and suggested noth-
ing of consequence. The sun on the grey rocks
was giving a hint that, should ever it be required,

[62]

Holiday Reading

there was heat enough left to begin things anetw.
I realized in alarm that such a morning of re-birth
might be beautiful; for I might not be there to
sing Laus Deo. I might miss that fine morn-
ing. There was a suggestion of leisure in the
pattern of the lichen on the granite; it gave the
idea of prolonged yet still merely tentative efforts
at design. The lichen seemed to have complete
assurance that there was time enough for new
work. The tough stems of the heather, into
which I put my hand, felt like the sinews of a
body that was as ancient as the other stars, but
still so young that it was tranquilly fixed in the
joy of its first awakening, knowing very little yet,
guessing nothing of its beginning nor of its end;
still Infantile, with all life before It, Its voice
merely the tiny shrilling of a grasshopper. The
rocks were poised so precariously above the quiv-
ering plain of the sea that they appeared to trem-
ble in mId-aIr, being things of no weight, in the
rush of the planet. The distant headlands and
moors dilated under the generating sun. It was
then that I pulled Ecclesiastes out of my pocket,
leaned against the granite, and began:

"Vanity of vanities . . ."

I looked up again. There was a voice above

[63]

Waiting for Daylight

me. An old goat, the venerable image of all-
knowledge, of sneering and bearded sin, was con-
templating me. It was a critical comment of his
that I had heard. Embarrassed, I put away my
book.

[64]

XII. An Autumn Morning

SEPTEMBER 28, 19 18. The way to my
suburban station and the morning train
admonishes me sadly with its stream of
season-ticket holders carrying dispatch-cases, and
all of them anxious, their resolute pace makes it
evident, for work. This morning two aero-
planes were over us in the blue, in mimic com-
bat; they were, of course, getting into trim for
the raid to-night, because the barometer is beau-
tifully high and steady. But the people on their
way to the 9.30 did not look up at the flight.
Life is real, life is earnest. When I doubt that
humanity knows what it is doing, I get comfort
from watching our local brigadiers and Whitehall
ladies on their way these tranquil Autumn
mornings to give our planet another good shove
towards the millennium. Progress, progress!
I hear their feet overtaking me, brisk and reso-
lute, as though a revelation had come to them
overnight, and so now they know what to do, un-
diverted by any doubt. There is a brief glimpse
of a downcast face looking as though it had just

[65]

Waiting for Daylight

chanted the Dies Ira? through the mouthfuls of
a hurried breakfast; and once more this laggard
is passed in the day's race towards the higher
peak. The reproof goes home. It justly humil-
iates. But the weather is only a little west of
south for one of the last fair days of the year;
and the gloom of the yew in the churchyard —
which stands over the obscure headstone of a
man named Puplett — that yew which seems the
residue of the dark past, has its antiquity full
of little smouldering embers of new life
again; and so a lazy man has reasons to doubt
whether the millennium is worth all this hurry.
As it is, we seem to have as much trouble as there
is time to classify before supper; by which time,
from the look of the weather, there will be more.
Then why hurry over it? The tombstone says
Puplett was a "thrifty and industrious parent,"
and I can see what happened to him in 1727.
What would I not give, I ask myself, as I pause
by the yew, and listen to the aeroplanes overhead,
for a few words from this Puplett on thrift, in-
dustry, and progress ! Does he now know more
than brigadiers?

It may be that what Europe is suffering from
in our time is the consequence of having worked
too hard, since that unlucky day when Watt gave

[66]

An Autumn Morning

too much thought to a boiling kettle. We have
worked too hard without knowing why we were
doing it, or what our work would do with us. We
were never wise enough to loaf properly, to stop
and glance casually around for our bearings. We
went blindly on. Consider the newspapers, as
they are now! A casual inspection of the mix-
ture of their hard and congested sentences is
enough to show that what is wanted by our wri-
ters famous for their virility, their power of
"graphic description" as their outpour is called
by their disciples, and their knowledge of what
everybody ought to be doing, is perhaps no more
than an occasional bromide. They would feel
better for a long sleep. This direction by them
of our destiny is an intoxicating pursuit, but it is
as exhausting as would be any other indulgence.
We might do quite well if they would only leave
it to us. But they will never believe it. Ah ! the
Great Men of Action! What the world has
suffered from their inspired efforts to shepherd
humanity into worried flocks hurrying nobody
knew whither, every schoolboy reads; and our
strong men to-day, without whose names and por-
traits no periodical is considered attractive,
would surely have been of greater benefit to us if
they had remained absorbed in their earlier

[67]

Waiting for Daylight

skittles. If the famous magician, who, with sev-
eral others, Is winning the war by suggestion, and
that true soldier, General FItzChutney, and that
earnest and eloquent publicist, Mr. Blufflerlow,
had been persuaded to stick to marbles, what mis-
leading excitement and unprofitable anxiety
would have been spared to the commonweal!
Boys should be warned against and protected from
Great Careers. Better still if embryologists
could discover something which would enable mid-
wives unfailingly to recognize Strong Men at
birth. It would be easy then to issue to those
ladies secret but specific instructions.

There Is a street which turns abruptly from
my straight road to the station. It goes like a
sudden resolution to get out of this daily hurry
and excitement. It Is a pre-war street. It Is an
ancient thoroughfare of ours, a rambling and un-
frequented by-way. It Is more than four years
since it was a habit of mine to loiter through it,
with a man with whom I shall do no more pleasant
idling. Wc enjoyed Its old and ruinous shops
and its stalls, where all things could be bought at
second-hand, excepting young doves, ferrets, and
dogs. I saw It again this morning, and felt, some-
how, that It was the first time I had noticed It
since the world suddenly changed. Where had it

[68]

An Autumn Morning

been in the meantime? It was empty this morn-
ing, it was still, it was luminous. It might have
been waiting, a place that was, for the return of
what can never return. Its sunlight was different
from the glare in the hurrying road to the station.
It was the apparition of a light which has gone
out. I stopped, and was a little fearful. Was
that street really there? I thought its illumina-
tion might be a ghostly sunlight haunting an av-
enue leading only to the nowhere of the memory.
Did the others who were passing see that by-way?
I do not think so. They never paused. They
did not glance sideways in surprise, stare in an
expectancy which changed almost at once into
regret for what was good, but is not.

Who would not retire into the near past, and
stay there, if it were possible? (What a weak-
ness!) Retrospection was once a way of escape
for those who had not the vitality to face their
own fine day with its exacting demands. Yet
who now can look squarely at the present, except
officials, armament shareholders, and those in per-
ambulators? This side-turning offered me a
chance to dodge the calendar and enter the light
of day not ours. The morning train of the day I
saw in that street went before the War. I
decided to lose it, and visit the shop at the top

[69]

V

Waiting for Daylight

of the street, where once you could buy anything
from a toddy glass to an emu's egg having a
cameo on it of a ship in full sail. It was also a
second-hand bookshop. Most lovers of such
books would have despised it. It was of little
use to go there for valuable editions, or even for
such works as Sowerby's Botany. But when last
the other man and myself rummaged in it we
found the first volume of the Boy's Own Paper,
and an excellent lens for our landscape camera.
An alligator, sadly in need of upholstering, stood
at the door, holding old umbrellas and walking-
sticks in its arms. The proprietor, with a sombre
nature and a black beard so like the established
shadows of his lumbered premises that he could
have been overlooked for part of the unsalable
stock, read Swedenborg, Plato, Plutarch, and
Young's Night Thoughts — the latter an edition
of the eighteenth century in which an Edinburgh
parson had made frail marginal comments,
yellow and barely discernible, such as: "How
True !" This dealer in lumber read through
large goggles, and when he had decided to admit
he knew you were in his shop he bent his head,
and questioned you steadily but without a word
over the top of his spectacles. If you showed no

[70]

An Autumn Morning

real interest in wliat you proposed to buy he
would refuse to sell it.

There I found him again, still reading — Swe-
denborg this time — with most of the old things
about him, including the Duck-billed Platypus; for
nobody, apparently, had shown sufficient In-
terest in them. The shop, therefore, was as I
have always known it. There was a spark of a
summer's day of 19 14 still burning in the heart of
a necromancer's crystal ball on the upper shelf
by the window.

The curio there which was really animated
put down his book after I had been in the shop
for some minutes, regarded me deliberately as
though looking to see what change had come to
me in four such years, and then glanced up and
nodded to the soothsayer's crystal. "It's a pity,"
he said, "that those things won't really work."
He asked no questions. He did not inquire after
my friend. He did not refer to those problems
which the crowds in the morning trains were
eagerly discussing at that moment. He sat on a
heap of forgotten magazines, and remained apart
with Swedcnborg. I loafed in the fertile dust and
quiet among old prints, geological specimens,
antlers, pewter, bed-warmers, amphorae, and

[71]

Waiting for Daylight

books. The proprietor presided over the dim
litter of his world, bowed, pensive, and silent,
suggesting in his aloofness not indifference but a
retired sadness for those for whom the mysteries
could be made plain, but who are wilful in their
blindness, and so cannot be helped.

I came upon a copy of IValden, in its earliest
Camelot dress (price sixpence), and remembered
that one who was not there had once said he was
looking for it in that edition. I turned to the last
page and read: "Only that day dawns to which
we are awake . . ."

I reserved the book for him at once, though
knowing I could not give it to him. But what is
the good of cold reason? Are we awake in such
dawns as we now witness? Or has there been
no dawn yet because we are only restless in our
sleep? It might be either way, and in such a per-
plexity reason cannot help us. I thought that
perhaps I might now be stirring, on the point
of actually rousing. There, in any case, was the
evidence of that fugitive spark of the early sum-
mer of 19 14 still imprisoned in its crystal, proof
that the world had experienced a dawn or two.
An entirely unreasonable serenity possessed me
— perhaps because I was not fully roused — ^be-
cause of the indestructibility of those few voiceless

[72]

An Autumn Morning

hopes we cherish that seem as fugitive as the
glint in the crystal ball, hopes without which our
existence would have no meaning, for if we lost
them we should know the universe was a witless
jest, with nobody to laugh at it.

"I want this book," I said to the shopman.

"I know," he answered, without looking up.
"I've kept it for you."

[73]

XIII. News from the Front

OCTOBER 12, 1918. My remembrance
of the man, when I got his letter from
France — and it was approved, appar-
ently, by one of his regimental officers, for a cen-
sorial signature was upon its envelope — was a
regrettable and embarrassing check to my im-
pulse to cry Victory. I found it hard, neverthe-
less, in the moment when victory was near, to for-
give the curious lapse that letter betrayed in a
fellow who did not try for exemption but volun-
teered for the infantry, and afterwards declined
a post which would have saved him from the
trenches. He was the sort of curious soldier
that we civilians will never understand. He
aided the enemy he was fighting. His platoon
officer reported that fact as characteristic and ad-
mirable. He had gone out under fire to hold up
a wounded German and give him water. He did
not die then, but soon after, on the Hindenburg
Line, because, chosen as a good man who was ex-

[74]

News from the Front

pert in killing others with a deadly mechanism, he
was leading in an attack. This last letter of his,
which arrived after the telegram warning us, in
effect, that there could be no more correspondence
with him, alluded in contempt to his noble pro-
fession and task, and ended with a quotation from
Drum Taps which he prayed I would understand.
His prayer was in vain. I did not understand.
I read that quotation at breakfast, just after
finishing my fierce and terrible Daily Dustpan,
and the quotation, therefore, was at once repug-
nant and unfortunate. For clearly the leader-
writer of the Dustpan was a bolder and more
martial man. It is but fair to assume, however,
that as that journalist in the normal routine of a
day devoted to his country had not had the good
fortune to run up against the machine guns of the
Hindenburg trenches, naturally he was better
able to speak than a soldier who was idly swing-
ing in the wire there. The quotation, strange for
a Guardsman to make, is worth examining as an
example of the baleful influence war has upon
those who must do the fighting which journalists
have the hard fate merely to indicate is the duty
of others. The verse actually is called Recon-
ciliation. After a partial recovery from the
shame of the revelation of my correspondent's

[75]

Waiting for Daylight

unsoldlerly spirit, a shame which was a little
softened by the thought that anyhow he was dead,
I went to Leaves of Grass for the first time for
some years, to see whether Drum Taps accorded
with war as we know it.

And now I am forced to confess that we may
no longer accuse the Americans of coming late
into the War. They appear to have been in it,
if the date of Drum Taps is ignored, longer even
than Fleet Street. I cannot see that we have
contributed anything out of our experiences of
battle which can compare with Whitman's poems.
He appears to have known of war in essential
episodes and incidents, as well as from a high
vision of it, in a measure which the literature of
our own tragedy does not compass.

A minor poet told me once that he could not
read Whitman. He declared it was like chewing
glass. When we criticize others, the instant pen-
alty is that we unwittingly confess what we are
ourselves. We know the reception of Leaves of
Grass was of the kind which not seldom greets
the appearance of an exceptional book, though
Emerson recognized its worth. So when occa-
sionally we admit, shyly and apologetically, as
is our habit (in the way we confess that once we
enjoyed sugar candy), that long ago we used to

[76]

News from the Front

read Emerson, It would do our superior culture
no harm to remember that Emerson was at least
the first of the world of letters to tell the new poet
that his Leaves was "the most extraordinary piece
of wit and wisdom America has yet produced."
Nothing in all his writing proves the quality of
Emerson's mind so well as his instant and full
knowledge of Whitman, when others felt that
what Whitman was really inviting was laughter
and abuse. I suppose what the young poet meant
when he said reading Whitman was like a mouth-
ful of glass was that Whitman has no music, and
so cannot be read aloud. There is always a fair
quantity of any poet's work which would do much
to make this world a cold and unfriendly place
if v/e persevered in reading it aloud. In some
circumstances even Shakespeare might cause
blasphemy. Perhaps he has. And Whitman,
like summer-time, and all of us, is not always at
his best. But I think it is possible that many
people to-day will know the music and the solace
of the great dirge beginning "When lilacs last in
the dooryard bloom'd." And again, if capturing
with words those surmises which intermittently
and faintly show in the darkness of our specula-
tions and are at once gone, if the making of a
fixed star of such wayward glints is the mark of

[77]

Waiting for Daylight

a poet, then Whitman gave us "On the beach at
night."

I had never thought Whitman so good till that
soldier's letter accidentally discovered it to me.
If Whitman had been through the campaign
across the narrow straits, if Ypres, Vimy, and
Cambrai had been in his own experience, he could
have added little to Drum Taps. For there is
nothing that is new in war. It is only the cam-
paign that is new, and the men who are young.
Yet all has happened before. But each young
soldier in a new campaign feels that his experience
is strangely personal. He will have the truth re-
vealed to him, and will think that it is an intimacy
for his soul alone; yet others, too, have seen it,
but are dead. The survivors of this War will
imagine their experiences unique, admonitory,
terrible, and that if they had the words to tell
us their knowledge they would not be believed or
understood. That is why the succeeding genera-
tion, too, gets caught. Yet there is enough of
this War in Drum Taps to have stopped it more
than two years ago if only one European in ten
had had so much imagination and enterprise as
would take a man through a strange field gate
when he was convinced it was in that direction he

[78]

News from the Front

should go, and enough of charity in his heart to
stay him from throwing stones at the sheep while
on his way.

[79]

XIV. Authors and Soldiers

OCTOBER 26, 1918. If a man who
knew no books, but who became serious
when told of his emptiness, and showed
eagerness to begin to fill it, were confronted with
the awful strata in the library of the British
Museum, and were told that that was his task,
he might fall unconscious. But what cruelty!
He could be warned that the threat has little in
it; that the massed legions of books could do him
no harm, if he did not disturb them. It could
be whispered to the illiterate man — whose wis-
dom, it might chance, was better than much schol-
arship— that it is possible to read the best of
the world's drama in a few months, and that in
the remainder of the year he could read its finest
poetry, history, and philosophy. I am but para-
phrasing what was said recently by an Oxford
professor. I would not dare to give it as my
own opinion, within hearing of the high priests.
Yet the professor's declaration may be not only

[80]

Authors and Soldiers

outrageous, but right. It is a terrible thought,
except to those who are merely bibliophiles just as
some little boys are lovers of old postage stamps.
J think he may be right, for I have a catalogue
of all the books and documents prompted by the
War and published before June, 191 6. It runs
to 180 pages of small type. It contains the
names of about 3500 books and pamphlets.
Now, let us suppose a student wished to know
the truth about the War, for perhaps a very
youthful student could imagine it was possible to
get the truth about it. The truth may be some-
where in that catalogue; but I know, for I have
tried, that it has no significant name to betray its
pure gold, no strange brilliance to make the type
dance on that page as one turns the leaves with
a hopeless eye. There are, however, two cer-
tainties about the catalogue. One is that it would
require a long life, a buoyant disposition, and a
freedom from domestic cares, to read every book
in it. And the other is that there are no more
books in it — which we ought to count as books
— than one evening would see us through.
Interruptions and all. The books in that mass
are as dead as the leaves of their June of the
War.

I must confess, though, that I am a biblio-

[81]

Waiting for Daylight

phile with War books. Any book about the
Great War Is good enough for me. I am to
that class of literature what little boys are to
stamps. Yes; I know well the dread implica-
tion. I am aware of the worm in the mind;
that I probe a wound; that I surrender to an
impulse to peer into the darkness of the pit;
that I encourage a thought which steals in with
the quiet of midnight, and that it keeps me
awake while the household sleeps. I know
I consort with ghosts in a region of evil. I get
the horrors, and I do not repel them. For
some reason I like those ghosts. Most of
them have no names for me, but I count them
as old friends of mine; and where should I
meet them again, at night, but amid the scenes
we knew?

And what do I look for in these War books?
It is not easy to say. It is a private matter.
Songs the soldiers used to sing on French
roads are often in my head. I am like the
man who was once bewitched, and saw and heard
things in another place which nobody will be-
lieve, and who goes aside, therefore, unsociable
and morose, to brood on what is not of this
world. I am confessing this but to those who
themselves have been lost in the dark, and are

[82]

Authors and Soldiers

now awake again. The others will not know.
They will only answer something about "Cheer-
ing up," or — and this is the strangest thing to
hear — "to forget it." I don't want to forget
it. So if in a book I see names like Chateau
Thierry, Crepy-en-Valois, Dickebusch, Hooge,
Vermelles, Hulluch, Festubert, Notre Dame de
Lorette, Ligny-Tilloy, Sailly-Saillisel, Croiselles,
Thiepval, Contalmaison, Dompierre, then I am
caught. I do not try to escape.

Yet these books rarely satisfy me. Is it not
remarkable that soldiers who could face the
shells with an excellent imitation of indifference
should falter in their books, intimidated by the
opinions of those who stayed at home? They
rarely summon the courage to attack those heroic
dummies which are not soldiers but idols set up
In a glorious battlefield that never existed ex-
cept as a romance among the unimaginative; the
fine figures and the splendid war that were air-
built of a rapture. These authors who were
soldiers faced the real War, but they dare not
deride the noble and popular figments which
lived but in the transports of the exalted. They
write in whispers, as it were, embarrassed by a
knowledge which they would communicate, but
fear they may not. To shatter a cherished illu-

[83]

Waiting for Daylight

sion, to expose the truth to a proud memory,
that, I will confess, is always a task before
which a sensitive man will hesitate. Yet it is
also part of the test of a writer's courage; by
his hesitation a soldier-author may know that he
is in danger of failing in his duty. Yet the
opinion of the public, which Intimidates us, is
no mere bugbear. It is very serious. People
do not enjoy the destruction of their cherished
illusions. They do not crown the defamers of
their idols. What is it that balks a soldier's
judgment when he begins to write about the
War? He is astonished by the reflection that
if he were to reproduce with enjoyment the talk
of the heroes which was usual In France, then
many excellent ladies might denounce it Indig-
nantly as unmanly. Unmanly! But he Is
right. They not only might, but they would.
How often have I listened to the cool and haughty
contralto of ladies of education and refinement
who were clearly unaware that what they were
encouraging, what to them afforded so much
pride, what deepened their conviction of
righteous sacrifice, was but an obscene outrage
on the souls and bodies of young men. How is
one to convey that to ladies? All that a timid
writer may do Is to regret the awful need to

[84]

Authors and Soldiers

challenge the pious assurance of Christians which
is sure to be turned to anger by the realities.

I have read in very few books anything that was
as good as the gossip one could hear by chance
in France. The intimate yarn of the observant
soldier home on leave, who could trust his
listener, is superior to much one sees in print.
In that way I heard the best story of the War.
If it could be put down as it was given to me it
would be a masterpiece. But it cannot be
reproduced. It came as I heard it because, re-
membering his incredible experience, the narrator
found himself in secure and familiar circumstances
again, was confident of his audience, and was
thinking only of his story. His mind was re-
leased, he was comfortable, and he was looking
backward in a grim humour whith did not quite
disguise his sadness. His smile was comical,
but it could move no answering smile. These
intelligent soldiers, who tell us the stories we
never see in print, are not thinking about their
style, or of the way the' other men have told
such tales, but only of what happened to them-
selves. They are as artless as the child who at
breakfast so tells its dream of the night before
that one wants to listen, and Tolstoy says that
is art. The child has heard nothing of the

[85]

Waiting for Daylight

apocalyptic visions, and does not know Poe,
Ambrose Bierce, or Kipling. He is concerned
only with his own sensations, and you listen to
him because you have had such dreams, and he
recalls a dark adventure you had forgotten.

But the difficulty in the writing of such stories
is that the narrator, as soon as he begins, be-
comes conscious of the successful methods of
other men. I have been reading a number of
War stories published recently, and it was pain-
ful to see how many were ruined by Kipling be-
fore this War began. Kipling was original,
and his tricks of manner, often irritating, and his
deplorable views of human society, were usually
carried off by his genius for observation, and the
spontaneity of the drama of his stories. But
when his story was thin, and he was wandering
in an excursion with his childish philosophy, he
was usually facetious. As an obvious and easily
imitable trick for dull evenings, this elaborate
jocularity seems to have been more enjoyed by
his disciples than his genius for narrative when
he was happy, and his material was full and
sound. Yet his false and vulgar fun has spoiled
many of these volumes pollinated from India.
They have another defect, too, though it would
be unfair to blame Kipling for that when it may

[86]

Authors and Soldiers

be seen blossoming with the unassuming modesty
of a tulip in any number of Punch. I mean that
amusing gravity of the snob who is sure of the
exclusive superiority of his caste mark, with not
the trace of a smile on his face, and at a time
when all Europe is awakening to the fact that it
sentenced itself to ruin when it gave great
privileges to his kind of folk in return for the
guidance of what it thought was a finer culture,
but was no more than a different accent. It was,
we are now aware, the mere Nobodies who won
the War for us; and yet we still meekly accept
as the artistic representation of the British
soldier or sailor an embarrassing guy that would
disgrace pantomime. And how the men who
won must enjoy it!

[87]

XV. Waiting for Daylight

NOVEMBER 9, 1918. I read again my
friend's last field service postcard, brief
and enigmatic, and now six weeks old.
I could find in it no more than when it first came.
Midnight struck, and I went to the outer gate.
The midnight had nothing to tell me. Not that
it was silent; we would not call it mere silence,
that brooding and impenetrable darkness
charged with doom unrevealed, which is now
our silent night, unrelenting to lonely watchers.
Near my gate is a laburnum tree. Once upon
a time, on nights of rain such as this, the shower
caught in it would turn to stars, and somehow
from the brightness of that transient constella-
tion I could get my bearings. I knew where I
was. One noticed those small matters in the
past, and was innocently thankful for them.
Those lights sufliced us. There was something
companionable even in the street lamp. But

[88]

Waiting for Daylight

what is it now? You see it, when you are ac-
customed to the midnight gloom of war,
shrouded, a funeral smear of purple in a black
world. No bearing can be got from it now.
What one looks into is the lightless unknown.
I peer into the night and rain for some familiar
and reasonable shape to loom — I am permitted
to do this, for so far the police do not object to
a citizen cherishing a hopeful though fatuous
disposition — but my usual reward is but the
sound of unseen drainage, as though I were
listening to my old landmarks in dissolution.
I feel I should not be surprised, when daylight
came, to find that the appearance of my neigh-
bourhood had become like Spitzbergen's.

That is why I soon retreat now from my gate,
no wiser, bringing in with me on these nights of
rain little more than the certainty that we need
expect no maroons or bombs; and then, because
the act is most unpatriotic in a time of shortage,
put on more coal with my fingers, as this makes
less noise than a shovel. I choose a pipe, the
one I bought in a hurry at Amiens. I choose
it for that reason, and because It holds more to-
bacco than the others; watch the flames, and take
stock.

In the winter, as we know, it never rains.

[89]

Waiting for Daylight

It is merely wet weather. Still, that means only
a retirement into winter quarters, into those long
evenings against which we have hoarded our
books, light and warmth in store. Perhaps in
the case of the more idle there may be the con-
sideration, pleasant and prolonged, of that other
book, known to no other man, not yet written,
and perhaps destined to perish, a secret dream.
But what are now these books? What now is
even that book which is perfect and unwritten?
It, too, has lost its light. I am left staring into
the fire. The newspapers tell us of a common
joy at the coming of Peace. Peace? If she is
coming, then we are much obliged to her. I re-
member during an earlier and wasted joy at a
word in France of the coming of Peace agreeing
with several young soldiers that Brussels would
be the place to meet, to hail there with flagons
the arrival of the Dove. But I do not want to
be reminded of what has happened since that
day. That festival could now have but one
celebrant. Then, in another year of the War, in
a mood of contrition and dismay, some people
began to feel that on the day Peace arrived it
would be seemly If she found them on their knees
in church. Since that day, too, much has hap-
pened; and when Peace does come I suppose most

[90]

Waiting for Daylight

of us will make reasonably certain the bird re-
sembles a dove, and go to bed early — taking
another look at the long-lost creature next morn-
ing, in the presence of a competent witness, to
confirm that we have not been deceived again by
another turkey buzzard; and, if that is certain,
then let the matter drop.

For in these years, when heavy weather ob-
scures the fixed lights, and we are not certain
about our bearings, it is useless to pretend that
the darkness which once made us content with
a book is now a worse kind of darkness only be-
cause intensified by a private shadow. The
shadow of a personal grief does not wholly ex-
plain its sinister intensity. The night itself is
different. It hides a world unknown. If a sun
is to rise on that world, then not even a false
dawn yet shows. When we stand peering into
our night, where the sound of rain and wind is
like nothing the memory knows, and may be even
the dark tumult portending a day of wrath, we
may turn again in solitude to what is left to us,
to our books; but not with quiet content. To-
morrow we may pull ourselves together. Cu-
riosity about our new world may awaken. We
may become adventurous, and make an effort to-
wards greeting the unknown with a cheer, to show

[91]

Waiting for Daylight

it there is no settled ill-feeling. But it has been
my experience that when leaving port in dark
weather, though the voyage to come was to be
novel and interesting, one heard very little cheer-
ing from the glum figures working about the
deck. The ship is sea-worthy, but she is bleak
and foreign. In a week all will be well. We
shall have cleared these icy latitudes. The sky
will be fairer. We shall have more sun. We
shall have become accustomed to our shipmates'
unfamiliar faces and ways. It is only the start
that is sullen and unpropitious.

And here is Peace coming, and a new world,
and there are my books; yet though this pipe after
midnight is nearly done, and the fire too, I have
not been able to settle on a book. The books are
like the ashes on the hearth. And listen to the
wind, with its unpromising sounds from the wide
and empty desert places! What does any of
these old books know about me, in the midst of
those portents of a new age? We are all out-
ward bound, and this is the first night of a long
voyage, its port unknown.

Even my bookshelves seem strange to-night.
They look remarkably like a library I saw once
in a house in Richbourg S. Vaast, which, you may
remember, was a village near Neuve Chapelle.

[92]

Waiting for Daylight

Those French volumes also survived from cir-
cumstances that had passed. They were litter.
They had been left behind. I doubted whether,
if I tried, I could touch them. They were not
within my time. That was on a day more than
three years ago — it was July, 19 15 — and Rich-
bourg had then only just left this world. There
was a road without a sign of life; not a move-
ment, except in one house. The front of that
house had gone, exposing the hollow inside, the
collapsed floors and hanging beams, and showing
also a doll with a foolish smirk caught in a wire
and dangling from a rafter. The doll danced in
hysteric merriment whenever hidden guns were
fired. That was the only movement in Rlch-
bourg S. Vaast, and the guns made the only sound.
I was a survivor from the past, venturing at peril
among the wreckage and hardly remembered
relics of what used to be familiar. Richbourg
was possessed by the power which had over-
whelmed it, and which was re-forming it in a
changing world. To what was the world chang-
ing? There was no clue, except the oppression of
my mind, the shock of the guns, and the ecstatic
mockery of mirth over ruin by that little idiot
doll.

Beyond the sloughing and leprous tower of

[93]

Waiting for Daylight

Richbourg Church, where the ancient dead in
the graveyard had been brought to light again,
there was a house which seemed in being. I
entered it, for I was told by a soldier companion
that from a displaced tile in its roof I might see
La Bassee. I looked through that gap, and saw
La Bassee. It was very near. It was a terra-
cotta smudge. It might have been a brickfield.
But it was the Enemy.

What I chiefly remember to-day is only the
floor of that upper room from which, through a
gap in its wall, I saw the ambush of the enemy.
On the floor were scattered, mixed with lumps of
plaster, a child's alphabetical blocks. A shoe
of the child was among them. There was a
window where we dared not show ourselves,
though the day was fair without, and by it was
an old bureau, open, with its pad of blotting-
paper, and some letters, all smothered with frag-
ments of glass and new dust. A few drawers
of the desk were open, and the contents had been
spilled. Round the walls of the room were book-
cases with leaded diamond panes. Whoever was
last in the room had left sections of the book-
cases open, and there were gaps in the rows of
books. Volumes had been taken out, had been
dropped on the floor, put on the mantelpiece, or,

[94]

Waiting for Daylight

as I had noticed when coming up to the room,
left on the stairs. One volume, still open face
upwards, was on the bureau.

I barely glanced at those books. What could
they tell me? What did they know about it?
Just as they were, open on the floor, tumbled on
the stairs, they were telling me all they could.
Was there more to be said? Sitting on a bracket
in the shadow of a corner, a little bust of
Rousseau overlooked the scene with me. In such
a place, at such a time, you must make your own
interpretation of the change, receiving out of the
silence, which is not altered in nature by occa-
sional abominable noises, just whatever your mind
wishes to take. There the books are, and the
dust on them is of an era which abruptly fell;
is still falling.

[95]

XVI. The Nobodies

NOVEMBER II, 1918. The newspapers
tell us that to-day the signal to "cease
fire" will be given. This news is called
^'Official," to give us assurance in the fog of myth.
Maroons will explode above the City. Then we
shall know it is the end of the War. We ought
to believe it, because They tell us this; They who
do everything for us — who order us what to think
and how to act, arrange for our potatoes, settle
the coming up and the going down of the sun,
and who for years have been taking away our
friends to make heroes of them, and worse.
They have kept the War going, but now They are
going to stop it. We shall know it is stopped
when the rockets burst.

Yet "The War" has become a lethargic state
of mind for us. We accepted it from the be-
ginning with green-fly, influenza, margarine, call-
ing-up notices, and death. It is as much out-

[96]

The Nobodies

side our control as the precession of the equi-
noxes. We believed confidently in the tumultu-
ous first weeks of the affair that mankind could
not stand that strain for more than a few months;
but we have learned it is possible to habituate
humanity to the long elaboration of any folly,
and for men to endure uncomplainingly racking by
any cruelty that is devised by society, and for
women to support any grief, however senselessly
caused. Folly and cruelty become accepted as
normal conditions of human existence. They
continue superior to criticism, which is frequent
enough though seldom overheard. The bitter
mockery of the satirists, and even the groans of
the victims, are unnoticed by genuine patriots.
There seems no reason why those signal rockets
should ever burst, no reason why the mornings
which waken us to face an old dread, and the
nights which contract about us like the strangle of
despair, should ever end. We remember the
friends we have lost, and cannot see why we
should not share with them, in our turn, the pun-
ishment imposed by solemn and approved de-
mentia. Why should not the War go on till the
earth in final victory turns to the moon the pock-
scarred and pallid mask which the moon turns
to us?

[97]

Waiting for Daylight

I was looking, later this morning, at Charing
Cross Bridge. It was, as usual, going south to
the War. More than four years ago I crossed
it on a memorable journey to France. It seemed
no different to-day. It was still a Via Dolorosa
projecting straight and black over a chasm.
While I gazed at it, my mind in the past, a
rocket exploded above it. Yes, I saw a burst
of black smoke. The guns had ceasedj?

A tug passing under the bridge began a con-
tinuous hooting. Locomotives began to answer
the tug deliriously. I could hear a low mutter-
ing, the beginning of a tempest, the distant but
increasing shouting of a great storm. Two men
met in the thoroughfare below my outlook, waved
their hats, and each cheered into the face of the
other.

Out in the street a stream of men and women
poured from every door, and went to swell the
main cataract which had risen suddenly in full
flood in the Strand. The donkey-barrow of a
costermonger passed me, loaded with a blue-
jacket, a flower-girl, several soldiers, and a Staff
captain whose spurred boots wagged joyously
over the stern of the barrow. A motor cab fol-
lowed, two Australian troopers on the roof of
that, with a hospital nurse, her cap awry, sitting

[98]

The Nobodies

across the knees of one of them. A girl on the
kerb, continuously springing a rattle in a sort of
trance, shrieked with laughter at the nurse.
Lines of people with linked arms chanted and
surged along, bare-headed, or with hats turned
into jokes. A private car, a beautiful little
saloon In which a lady was solitary, stopped near
me, and the lady beckoned with a smile to a
Canadian soldier who was close. He first stared
in surprise at this fashionable stranger, and then
got In beside her with obviously genuine alacrity.
The hubbub swelled and rolled in Increasing de-
lirium. Out of the upper windows of the Hotel
Cecil, a headquarters of the Air Force, a con-
fetti of official forms fell in spasmodic clouds.
I returned soon to the empty room of an office
where I was likely to be alone; because, now the
War was over, while listening to the jollity of
Peace which had just arrived, I could not get
my thoughts home from France, and what they
were I cannot tell.

But there were some other memories, more
easily borne. There was that night, for instance,
late In the August of 19 14, when three of us were
getting away from Creil. It was time to go.
We were not soldiers. Lying on the floor of a
railway carriage I tried to sleep, pillowed Invol-

[99]

Waiting for Daylight

untarlly on someone's boot. I never knew to
whom that foot belonged, for the compartment
was chaos, like the world. The carriage light
was feeble, and the faces I saw above me drooped
under the glim, wilted and dingy. The eyes of
the dishevelled were shut, and this traveller,
counting the pulse of the wheels beneath, pres-
ently forgot everything . . . there was a crash,
and my heart bounded me to my feet. There
had been a fortnight of excitements of this kind.
A bag fell and struck me back to the floor. Un-
seen people trampled over me, shouting. Some-
body cried: "Here they are!" A cascade of
passengers and luggage tumbled over to a sta-
tion platform.

It was a chilly morning. And where were
we? A clock in a tower said it was five. Peo-
ple hurried without apparent reason in all di-
rections. So the world may appear to us if some
day we find, to our surprise, that we have re-
turned from the dead. I leaned against a lamp-
post, my mind gravel-rashed, and waited for
something that could be understood. The Ger-
mans would do. We heard the enemy was close,
and that the railway officials would get us away
if they could. The morning became no warmer,
there was no coffee, and our tobacco pouches were

[lOO]

The Nobodies

empty. But at least we were favoured with the
chance of watching the French railwaymen at
work. This was a junction, and the men moved
about as though they were only busy on holiday
traffic. They were easy and deliberate. I could
see they would hold that line to the last pull of
cotton-waste, and would run their trains while
there was a mile of track. So we learned grad-
ually that confident invaders are baffled by rail-
waymen and other common people, such as old
women insistent on their cows, almost as much
as they are by bayonets. A country's readiness
for war may be slight, yet the settled habits of
the peaceful Nobodies, which are not reckoned
by Imperialists when they are calculating the
length of the road to conquest, are strangely
tough and obstinate. You could go to a girl at
the pigeon-hole of a booking-office in France,
demand a ticket for a place which by all the signs
might then have fallen behind the van of the
German Army, and she would hand the ticket
to you as though she had never heard of the War.
Then the engine-driver would go on towards the
sound of the guns till you wondered, made un-
easy by the signs without, whether he was phre-
netic and intended to run the enemy down. The
train would stop, and while the passengers
[lOl]

Waiting for Daylight

were listening to the shells the guard would come
along and give some advice as to the best thing
to do.

A little ahead of the Germans, a train came
into that junction and took us away. I fell asleep
again, and presently awoke to see a sombre or-
chard outside my window of our stationary train.
It was a group of trees entranced, like a scene
before the stage is occupied. The grass in the
twilight beneath the trees was rank. My sight
fell drowsily to an abandoned kepi, and, while
wondering what had become of the man who used
to wear it, I saw a bright eye slyly shut at me.
A wink in the grass ! A bearded face was laugh-
ing up at me from under the kepi. A rifle with
a fixed bayonet slid foward. Then I saw the
orchard had a secret crop of eyes, which smiled
at us from the ground. We moved on, and fare-
well kisses were blown to us.

Among the laurels of a garden beyond field
batteries were in position. We crossed a bridge
over a lower road and a stream. Infantry were
waiting below for something, and from their atti-
tudes seemed to expect it soon. My fellow-pas-
sengers were now awake to these omens. Broad
streams of cattle undulated past our train going
south, but west. "My poor Paris!" exclaimed a
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The Nobodies

French lady. It was not for themselves these
people were sorry. The common sort of people
in the train were sorry for Paris, for all their
unlucky fellows. The train moved with hesitancy
for hours. During one long pause we listened
to a cannonade. One burst of sound seemed
very close. A young English girl, sitting in a
corner with her infant, abruptly handed the child
to her husband. She rummaged in a travelling
case with the haste of incipient panic. She pro-
duced a spirit-lamp, a bowl, and a tin. She had
suddenly remembered it was past her baby's feed-
ing time.

Who won the War for us? It was such folk.
They turned in docility, with no more than a
pause, a pause of ignorance and wonder, of dis-
may they could hardly conceal, from the accus-
tomed order of their days to form vast armies,
to populate innumerable factories for the making
of munitions of war, and, while their households
came everywhere to ruin, they held stubbornly
to the task fate had thrust upon them; yet their
august governors and popular guides, frantic and
afraid through the dire retribution which had
fallen on that monstrous European society which
so many of us had thought eternal, abjured and
abused the common sort whose efforts were all
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Waiting for Daylight

that could save us. What did they call the No-
bodies? Slackers, cowards, rabbits, and field
vermin; mean creatures unable to leave their foot-
ball and their drink. I recall one sombre win-
ter's day of the first November of the War, when
a column of wounded Belgian soldiers shambled
by me, coming out of the Yser line, on the way to
succour which I knew they would not find. The
doctors and the hospitals were few. These fel-
lows were in rags which were plastered to their
limbs with mud. Their eyes had the vacant look
of men who had returned from the grave and who
had forgotten this world. The bare feet of some
of them left bloody trails on the road. Others
clutched their bodies, and the blood drained be-
tween their fingers. One dropped dead at my
feet. I came home with that in my mind; and the
next sunrise, hearing unusual sounds outside, I
lifted the blind to a dawn which was cold and
ominously scarlet behind skeleton trees. I saw
beneath the trees a company of my young neigh-
bours, already in khaki, getting used to the harsh-
ness of sergeants, and to the routine of those
implacable circumstances which would take them
to Neuve Chapelle, to Gallipoli, to Loos, to the
Somme; names that had no meaning for us then.
That serious company of young Englishmen
[104]

The Nobodies

making soldiers of themselves in a day with so
unpropitious an opening light did not look like
national indifference. Those innocents getting
used to rifles were as affecting as that single line
of bodies I saw across a mile of stubble near
Compiegne, where a rearguard of the "Contempt-
ibles" had sacrificed themselves to their com-
rades. But one could not be sure. I went to
find one who could tell me whether England
was awake to what confronted it. I remembered
he was a quiet observer, that he knew what allow-
ance to make for those patriotic newspapers
which so early were holding up in ruinous cari-
cature their country and their countrymen for the
world to see and to scorn. He was a scholar,
he was a Socialist and a pacifist, he had a sense
of humour to keep him balanced. But he had
gone. He had enlisted; and he is dead.

It was a common experience. From the day
the Germans entered Belgium a dumb resolution
settled on our Nobodies. They did not demon-
strate. They made long silent queues at the
recruiting offices. It is true those offices were
not ready for them and turned them away; and
when by sheer obstinacy they got into the Army
they were put into concentration camps that were
as deadly as battle. That did not daunt them,

[105]

Waiting for Daylight

nor turn them from their purpose, whatever that
was, for they never said; and the newspapers, by
tradition, had no time to find out, being devoted
to the words and activities of the Highly Impor-
tant. We therefore knew nothing of the muni-
tion factories that were springing up magically, as
in a night, like toadstools, all over the country,
and were barely aware that for some mysterious
reason the hosts of the enemy were stopped dead
on the road to Calais. Whose work was all
this? But how should we know? Who can
chronicle what Nobody does?

Sometimes there was a hint. Once again,
when I returned from France in 191 6, unhappy
with a guess at what the future would be like, I
learned that our workers were not working.
They were drinking. They had been passion-
ately denounced by the Great and Popular, and
our Press was forced to admit this disastrous
crime to the world, for fidelity to the truth is a
national quality. I went to an engineer who
would know the worst, and would not be afraid
to tell me what it was. I found him asleep In
his overalls, where he had dropped after thirty-
six hours of continuous duty. Afterwards, when
his blasphemous indignation over profiteers,
politicians, and newspapers had worn itself out,

[106]

The Nobodies

he told me. His men, using dimmed lights while
working on the decks of urgent ships, often
forced to work in cramped positions and in all
weathers, and while the ship was under way to a
loading berth, with no refreshment provided
aboard, and dropped at any hour long distances
from home, were still regarded by employers in
the old way, not as defenders of their country's
life, but as a means to quick profits, against
whom the usual debasing tricks of economy could
be devised. A battleship in the north had been
completed five months under contract time.
Working girls, determined to make a record out-
put of ammunition, persisted twenty-two hours
at a stretch, topped their machines with Union
Jacks, and fainted next morning while waiting
for the factory gates to open. The spirit of
the English ! What virtue there is in bread and
tea ! Yet we might have guessed it. And again
we might have remembered, as a corrective, how
many grave speeches, which have surprised,
shocked, and directed the nation, have been made
by Great Men too soon after a noble dinner,
words winged by the Press without an accompany-
ing and explanatory wine list.

But the Nobodies are light-minded, casual,
and good-hearted. Their great labour over,
[107]

Waiting for Daylight

and their sacrifices buried, they have come out
this day to celebrate the occasion with hilarious
and ironic gaiety. They have won the Greatest
of Wars, so they ride in motor-lorries and make
delirious noises with comic instruments. Their
heroic thoughts are blattering through penny
trumpets. They have accomphshed what had
been declared impossible, and now they rejoice
with an inconsequential clatter on tea-trays and
tin cans.

Yet some of us who watched their behaviour
saw the fantastic brightness in the streets on Ar-
mistice Day only as a momentary veiling of the
spectres of a shadow land which now will never
pass. Who that heard "Tipperary" sung by
careless men marching in France in a summer
which seems a century gone will hear that foolish
tune again without a sudden fear that he will
be unable to control his emotion? And those
Nobodies of Mons, the Marne, and the Aisne,
what were they? The "hungry squad," the men
shut outside the factory gates, the useless surplus
of the labour market so necessary for a great
nation's commercial prosperity. Their need kept
the wages of their neighbours at an economic
level. The men of Mons were of that other old
[io8]

The Nobodies

rearguard, the hope of the captains of industry
when there are revolts against the common lot
of our industrial cities where the death-rates of
young Nobodies, casualty lists of those who fall
to keep us prosperous, are as ruinous as open
war; a mutilation of life, a drainage of the
nation's body that is easily borne by Christian
folk who are moved to grief and action at the
thought of Polynesians without Bibles.

Yet the Nobodies stood to it at Mons. They
bore us no resentment. We will say they fought
for an England that is not us, an England that
is nobler than common report and common
speech. Think of the contempt and anger of the
better end of London just before the War, when,
at the other end, the people of Dockland re-
volted and defied their masters! I knew one
mother in that obscure host of ignorant humanity
in revolt. Two of her infants were slowly fad-
ing, and she herself was dying of starvation, yet
she refused the entrance of charity at her door,
and dared her man to surrender. He died later
at Ypres. He died because of that very quality
of his which moved his masters and superiors to
anger; he refused at Ypres, as he did in Dockland,
like those who were with him and were of his
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Waiting for Daylight

kind, to do more than mock defeat when it
faced him.

That figure of Nobody in sodden khaki, cum-
bered with ugly gear, its precious rifle wrapped in
rags, no brightness anywhere about it except the
light of its eyes (did those eyes mock us, did they
reproach us, when they looked into ours in Flan-
ders?), its face seamed with lines which might
have been dolorous, which might have been ironic,
with the sweat running from under its steel
casque, looms now in the memory, huge, statu-
esque, silent but questioning, like an overshadow-
ing challenge, like a gigantic legendary form
charged with tragedy and drama ; and its eyes,
seen in memory again, search us in privacy. Yet
that figure was the "Cuthbert." It was derided
by those onlookers who were not fit to kneel and
touch its muddy boots. It broke the Hindenburg
Line. Its body was thrown to fill the trenches it
had won, and was the bridge across which our
impatient guns drove in pursuit of the enemy.

What is that figure now? An unspoken
thought, which charges such names as Bullecourt,
Cambrai, Bapaume, Croiselles, Hooge, and a
hundred more, with the sound and premonition
of a vision of midnight and all unutterable things.
We sec it in a desolation of the mind, a shape
[no]

The Nobodies

forlorn against the alien light of the setting of a
day of dread, the ghost of what was fair, but was
broken, and is lost.

[Ill]

XVII. Bookworms

JANUARY i8, 1919. In Fleet Street yes-
terday there was at lunch with us an Amer-
ican Army officer who discoursed heartily
about a certain literary public-house. He quoted
a long passage from Dickens showing how some-
body took various turnings near Fetter Lane, eas-
ily to be recognized, till they arrived at this very
tavern. Such enthusiasm is admirable, yet em-
barrassing. In return, I inquired after several
young American poets, whose work, seldom seen
here, interests me, and I named their books. He
had never heard of them. This enthusiast did
not even appear to have the beginning of an idea
that his was unforgivable ignorance seeing that he
knew more than a native ought to know about
some of our taverns. Had he been an English-
man and a friend of mine I should have told him
that I thought his love of letters was as spurious
as the morality of the curate who speaks in a trem-
bling baritone about changes in the divorce laws,

[112]

Bookworms

but who accepts murder without altering the stat-
utory smile of benediction.

Literature would be lighter without that scroll
work and top hamper. It has nothing to do with
its life. It Is as helpful to us as wall-texts and
those wonders we know as works of Pure
Thought. Let us remember all the noble vol-
umes of philosophy and metaphysics we ought to
have read, to learn how wonderfully far our
brains have taken us beyond the relic of Piltdown;
and then recall what Ypres was like, and buy a
teetotum instead. That much is saved. Now
we need not read them. If we feel ourselves
weakening towards such idleness, let us spin tops.
If we had to choose between Garvice and say
Hegel or Locke for a niche in the Temple of
Letters, we should make an unintelligible blunder
if we did not elect Mr. Garvice without discus-
sion. He is human, he is ingenuous and funny,
and the philosophers are only loosening with
the insinuations of moth and rust. The philos-
ophers are like the great statesmen and the great
soldiers^ — we should be happier without them. If
we are not happy and enjoying life, then we have
missed the only reason for it. If books do not
help us to this, if they even devise our thoughts
Into knots and put straws In our hair, then they

[113]

Waiting for Daylight

ought to be burned. It is true that some of us
may get pleasure from searching novels for sole-
cisms and collecting evidence by which shall be
guessed the originals of the novelist's characters,
just as others extract amusement from puzzle
pictures. But book-worming has the same rela-
tion to literature, even when it is done by a
learned doctor in the Bodleian, as flies in a dairy
with our milk supply. If most of the books in the
British Museum were destroyed, we might still
have a friend who would go with us to Amiens to
get one more dinner in a well-remembered room,
and drink to the shades; we might still, from the
top of Lundy at dusk, watch the dim seas break
into lilac around the Shutter Rock, while the un-
seen kittiwakes were voices from the past; and we
might still see Miss Muffet tiptoe on a June morn-
ing to smell the first rose. That is what we look
for in books, or something like it, and when it
Is not there they are not books to us.

[114]

XVIII. Sailor Language

FEBRUARY I, 1919. "What's in a
word?" asks Admiral W. H. Smyth, with
ironic intent, in his Sailors' fVord Book.
There are people who are derided because they
are inclined to hesitate over that unimportant
doubt, selecting their words with a waste of time
which is grievous, when the real value of the sov-
ereign is but nine and ninepence, in an uneco-
nomic desire to be as right as their knowledge will
allow. There is something to be said for them.
There is a case to be made for getting a task
finished as well as one knows how, if interest in
it was sufficient to prompt a beginning. A friend
of mine, who could write a thousand interesting
and popular words about an event, or even
about nothing in particular, while I was still won-
dering what I ought to do with it, once exclaimed
In indignation and contempt when I put in a plea
for Roget and his Thesaurus. He declared that
a writer who used such a reference-book ought to

[115]

Waiting for Daylight

be deprived of his paper and ink. He never used
even a dictionary. His argument and the force
of it humbled me, for I gathered that when he
wrote he had but to put his hand in his pocket
and pull out all the words he wanted by the fist-
ful. I envy him. I wish I could do it, but there
are times when every word I try seems opaque.
It is useless to pretend that Roget is of material
assistance then; for what remedy is there under
heaven for the slow and heavy mind? But to
me Roget is full of amusing suggestions, which
would really have been very helpful to me had I
wanted to use his words for any other purpose
than the one in hand. It is true he rarely gives
you the word you think you want, but not seldom
in his assorted heaps of unused ornaments you
are surprised by a glance of colour from an un-
suspected facet of a common word.

The Sailor^ s Word Book is no pamphlet; not
in the least the kind of pocket book which once
helped hurried British soldiers in a French shop
to get fried eggs. It weighs, I should think, seven
pounds, and it is packed with the vocabulary
which has been built into the British ship during
the thousand years and more of her growth. The
origin of very many of the words retires, often
beyond exact definition, into the cold mists of the
[ii6]

Sailor Language

prehistoric Baltic, and to the Greek Islands,
among the shadows of the men who first found
the courage to lose sight of the hills. Commonly
they are short words, smoothed by constant use
till they might be imagined to be born of the cir-
cumstances in which they are known, like the gulls
and the foam of the wake. They carry like detona-
tions in a gale. Yet quite often such words,
when they are verbs, were once of the common
stock of the language, as in the case of "belay,"
and it has happened that the sailor alone has been
left to keep them alive. Dr. Johnson seems not
to have known the meaning of the verb "to belay"
among the other things he did not know but was
very violent about. He thought it was a sea-
phrase for splicing a rope, just as he supposed
"main-sheet" was the largest sail of a ship.

The Sailors' Word Book would be much more
interesting than it is, though greatly heavier, if
the derivation of the words were given, or even
guessed at, a method which frequently makes the
livelier story. We begin to understand what a
long voyage our ship has come when we are told
that "starboard" is steer-board, the side to which
the steering-paddle was made fast before the mod-
ern rudder was invented in the fourteenth century.
Skcat informs us that both steor and bord are

[117]

Waiting for Daylight

Anglo-Saxon; in fact, the latter word is the same
in all the Celtic and Teutonic languages, so was
used by those who first cut trees in Western
Europe, and perhaps was here before they arrived
to make our civilization what we know it. The
opposite to starboard was larboard; but for good
reason the Admiralty substituted port for lar-
board in 1844. Why was the left side of a ship
called the port side ? That term was in use before
the Admiralty adopted it. It has been suggested
that, as the steering-paddle was on the right side
of a ship, it was good seamanship to have the har-
bour or port on the left hand when piloting
inwards. But it is doubtful if that reason was
devised by a sailor.

A few words in sea life — as fish, mere, and
row — are said to be so old that the philologists
refer them to the Aryans, or, as others might say,
give them up as a bad job. These words appear
to be common to all the sons of Adam who pre-
ferred adventurous change to security in monot-
ony, and so signed on as slaves to a galley. An-
chor we imported from the Greeks — it is de-
clared to be the oldest word from the Mediter-
ranean in the language of our ships; admiral
from the Arabs, and hammock and hurricane from
the Caribs, through the Spaniards. But other

[118]

Sailor Language

words of our seamen are as native to us as our
grey weather, for we brought them with other
habits overseas from the North — words like hail,
storm, sea, ship, sail, strand, cliff, shower, mast,
and flood.

To examine words in this manner is simply to
invite trouble, as did the man who assumed that
"bending a sail" was done as one would bend a
cane, not knowing that the sailor uses that word
in the original sense of "fastening." Once, in
my ignorance, I imagined "schooner" was of
Dutch origin, but was careful to refer to the inval-
uable Skeat. Only just in time, though. And
he says that the word was born on the Clyde,
grew up in New England, migrated to Holland,
and then came back to us again. Once upon a
time (17 13) at Gloucester, Massachusetts, a man
was witnessing a new fore-and-aft rigged vessel
glide away on a trial trip, and exclaimed "She
scoons!" So all her kind were christened. Sci-
ence of that kind is almost as good as romance.

[119]

XIX. Illusions

FEBRUARY 15, 1919. Southwark Street
is warehouses and railway bridges, and
at its best is not beautiful; but when at
night it Is 3. deep chasm through which whirl cata-
racts of snow, and the paving is sludge, then, if
you are at one end of it, the other end is as far
away as joy. I was at one end of it, and at the
other was my train, due to leave in ten minutes.
Yet as there was a strike, there might be no train,
and so I could not lose it; I had that consolation
while judging that, with more than half a mile of
snow and squall intervening from the north-east, I
could not do the length of the street in ten min-
utes. So I surrendered the train which might not
run to whoever was able to catch it, and in that
instant of renunciation the dark body of a motor
lorry skidded to the kerb and stopped beside me.
A voice that was as passionless as destiny told me
to hop up, if I were going towards the station.
The headlong lorry, the sombre masses of the
[120]

Illusions

buildings which were now looming through the
diminishing snow, and the winter's night, roused
a vision of another place, much like it, or else the
snow and the night made it seem like it, and so
my uppermost thought became too personal, un-
important, and curious for converse. All I said,
as I took my place beside the steering wheel, was:
"It's a wretched night," (But I might have
been alone in the lorry. There was no immedi-
ate answer.) I communed secretly with my
memory. Then the voice returned out of the
darkness. It startled me. "This corner," it re-
marked, "always reminds me of a bit of Armen-
tieres." The voice had answered my thought,
and not my words.

The lorry stopped and I got down. I never
saw the driver. I do not know whose voice it
was; if, indeed, there was with me in that lorry
more than a shadow and an impersonal voice.

Yet now the night could do its worst. I had
the illusion that I had seen through it. Were
these bleak and obdurate circumstances an im-
posture? They appeared to have me imprisoned
helplessly in time and snow; yet I had seen them
shaken, and by a mere thought. Did their ap-
pearance depend on the way we looked at them?
Perhaps it was that. We are compelled by out-
[121]

Waiting for Daylight

side things to their mould, and are mortified;
but occasionally they fail to hide the joke. The
laugh becomes ours, and circumstance must sub-
mit to the way we see it. If Time playfully im-
prisons us In a century we would rather have
missed, where only the stars are left undisturbed
to wink above the doings and noises of Bedlam,
and where to miss the last train — supposing it
runs at all — is the right end to a perfect day of
blizzards and social squalls, what does it matter
when we find that the whole of it is shaken by a
single Idea? Might it not vanish altogether if
enough of us could be found to laugh at it? This
dream assisted me to some warmth of mind
through the rest of the cold night till I arrived
on the station platform, after the train had left.

To help further in destroying my faith in the
permanence of our affairs and institutions, it then
appeared the platform was vacant because my
train was not yet in. It was coming in at that
moment — or so a porter told me. Our protean
enemy took his most fearful form in the War
when he became a Hidden Hand. Was this por-
ter an agent of the gods for whose eternal leisure
our daily confusion and bad temper make an
amusing diversion? Was he one of the mali-
cious familiars who are at work amongst us,
[122]

Illusions

disguised, and who playfully set us by the ears
with divine traps for boobies? This porter was
grinning. He went away with his hand over his
mouth, and at that moment a train stopped at
the platform. The engine was at the wrong end
of it.

One official told me its proper locomotive
was at East Grinstead, and that wc might not get
it. Perhaps its home was there. And yet
another official whose face was as mysterious as
that of the station clock, which was wearing a
paper mask, said that the engine of my train had,
in fact, gone. It had gone to Brighton. He did
not know why. It had gone alone. I turned
vacantly from this bewilderment and saw a man
with the sort of golden beard an immortal might
have worn standing under a station lamp, and
breaking now and then into peals of merriment,
occasioned, it seemed to me, by what the first
porter was telling him. Then both of them
looked towards me, and stopped. If in one more
gust of hearty laughter that hollow wilderness
of a station had vanished, gloom and dreary
echoes and frozen lights, and I had found my-
self blinking in a surprising sunlight at that fel-
low in the golden beard, while he continued to
laugh at me in another world than this, where he
[123]

Waiting for Daylight

was revealed for what he was, I was in the mind
for placid acceptance. Well, the miraculous
transformation was as likely as an engine for that
train.

The bearded one approached me. I did not
run away. I waited for the next thing. He had
a book under his arm, and it is likely that the
gods, who have no need to learn the truth, never
read books. "If," he told me, "you want to get
to Sheepwash, you had better take this other
train. It is going half the way. The engine for
the train for Sheepwash can't be found."

We both boarded the train for half the journey,
and it did not appear to have any other passen-
gers. Yet, reckless of the risks I was taking in
travelling alone with a suspected being at such a
time — for where might not he and the train go?
— I accepted the chance; and as I took my seat
and regarded that bright beard, the shadow of
my awful doubt became really serious, for it was
only this week that I have been reading The
TzviUght of the Gods. There was the disin-
tegrating recollection of that book, with its stories
of homeless immortals in search of new and more
profitable employ; and there had been a bodiless
voice in a motor lorry which ignored what I said
but spoke instead to an inconsequential memory

[124]

Illusions

of mine that was strictly private; and there was
the levity with which uniformed officials treated
the essential institutions of civilization. All this
gave me the sensation that even the fixed policy
of our strong government might, at any moment
now, roll up as a scroll.

Off we went. My fellow-traveller was silent,
though he was smiling at something which was
not in the carriage, to my knowledge. When he
spoke, his eyes were not fixed on me. He looked
into the air, and talked to whatever it was he saw.
He pointed a finger at the light of the city lying
beyond and below our carriage window. "All
they've built," he said, "stands only on a few
odd notions. Now they're changing their no-
tions, so down comes everything with a run. And
don't they look surprised and pained!" (I felt
like an eavesdropper, and thought I'd better show
him I was present.) I apologized for overhear-
ing him. He nodded shortly, a little condescend-
ingly. "We've accepted that" — he poked his stick
towards where stood our Imperial city in the
night — "as if it came by itself. We never knew
our city was like that just because we never
saw it in any other light. Now we're upset to
find the magic-lantern picture is fading. Got to
put up with it, though." His book had been on

Waiting for Daylight

the seat. It fell to the floor, and I picked it up
and handed it to him. It was The Twilight of
the Gods.

If I could hav^e remembered at that moment
one of the simple dodges for avertmg the evil
eye I should have used it. The laughing malice
of that book had so confused me for some days
that I had begun to feel that even St. Paul's, a
blue bubble floating over London on the stream
of Time, might v'anish, as bubbles will. The
Hidden Hand, I began to believe, had something
in it.

I intrigued a serious interview with my fellow-
passenger, hoping to find evidence; and then the
train stopped finally, six miles from home. At
that very instant of time the train which we had
previously rejected because it had no engine chose
to run express through the station where we stood.

[126]

XX. Figure-Heads

MARCH I, 19 19. When the car got to
the Board of Trade Office, which is
opposite the old chapel of ease where
the crews of John Company's ships "used to wor-
ship," as a local history tells us, I saw Uncle
Dave by the kerb, with time apparently on his
hands. I got down.

He told me old Jackson is dead. Jackson
was a mast and block maker, but his fame was the
excellence of his figure-heads. It is many years
since old Jackson made one, but If It is doubted
that he was an artist, there is a shop near
where he once lived which still displays three of
his images, the size of life, reputed to have been
conjured from baulks of timber with an ax. I
remember Jackson. He rarely answered you
when you questioned him about those ships to
which he had given personality and eyes that
looked sleeplessly overseas from their prows.
He regarded you, and only his whiskers moved in
[127]

Waiting for Daylight

silent indifference (he chewed), as though you
were wasting the time of a man and an artist.
Those images of his were all of women. He
would make no figure-head for a ship bearing the
name of a man, though it were that of a Greek
hero. And, of course, you dare not even think of
the trousered legs of a modern man stuck each
side of a ship's prow, boots and all; but the dra-
pery of a woman flows with grace there. She
would look indeed its vigilant guardian spirit. It
would be pleasing to write of some of the more
famous of those idols, as I remember them in re-
pose, above the quays of the docks.

Here we were joined by some young men who
knew Uncle Dave. They were looking for a ship.
But Uncle continued to tell me of the merits
of his friend the maker of figure-heads. A stoker
became a trifle irritated. "Well, what's the good
of 'em, anyway?" he interjected. "Lumber, I
call 'em. They can't be carried on straight
stems, and clipper-bows aren't wanted these days,
wasting good metal. Why, even Thompson's
White Star liners have chucked that sort of truck.
They're not built like it now. What's the good
of figger-'eds?"

This youth's casual blasphemy in the presence

[128]

Figu re-Heads

of Uncle Dave (who once was bo'sun of a China
clipper), extolling as he did his age of mere ma-
chines against the virtues of an age when ships
were expected to look good as well as do good
things, made us shrink in anticipation of the
storm. For Uncle Dave has a habit of listening
to a talk about ships in a deliberate and contemp-
tuous silence, with nothing to show of his inward
heat but a baleful light in the eye. He does not
like steamers. He does not think steamer-men
are seamen. He declares they can never be
seamen. And now we waited, dreading that his
anger, when it burst, would be quite incoherent
with force. There was really something of
hatred in his look as he gazed at the youngster,
his mouth a little open, his hand holding his
trembling pipe just away from his mouth, which
had forgotten it. The old sailor bent forward,
screwing his eyes at this young man as though
trying to believe it was real.

An older hand interposed. "Ah, come away
now! I've heard chaps make game of figger-
'eds, an' call 'em superstition. But I say let such
things alone. I know things that's happened to
funny fellows through making game of figger-'eds.
There was the Barbadian Lass. She was a brig-
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Waiting for Daylight

antine. She used to run to Trinidad. There
was something queer about her figger-'ed. It was
a half-breed woman. She was smiling. She had
bare breasts, and she used to wear earrings.
Her chaps used to keep a spare pair for her in a
box. She was always fresh and bright, but
I've heard say she was never painted — no, not
since the day the ship was launched. She kept
like that. And one day young Belfast MacCor-
mick slipped a tar-brush over her dial. Said it
was idolatry. And what happened to him?
You answer me that!"

"Yes, I know," broke in one of us. "But
you can't say it was along of that tar-brush . . ."

"You young chaps ain't got no sense," here
interrupted Uncle, his voice evidently under con-
trol, but shaky. "I'd like to know where you
were brought up. You learn it all wrong at them
schools of yours, and you never get it right after-
wards. You learn about the guts of engines and
'lectricity, and you mix it up with the tales
your grandmothers told you, and you get nothing
straight. What you've got is all science and
superstition. And then you wonder why you
make a mess of it. Listen 1 It don't matter
what you do to a figger-'ed, if you're fool enough

[130]

Figu re-Heads

to spoil it. It's having it that matters. It's
something to go by, and a ship you're glad to
work in."

He turned on the stoker. There was astonish-
ment and pity in his glance. "Look at you. In
and out of a ship, and you forget her name when
you've signed off. You don't care the leavings
in a Dago's mess-kit for any ship you work in, if
you can get a bit out of her and skip early."

"That's me, Uncle," muttered the stoker.

"Can you remember names, like some of us re-
member the Mermus, the Blackadder, and the
Titania? Not you. Your ships haven't got
names, properly speaking. They're just a run
out and home again for you, and a row about the
money and the grub."

"Sure to be a row about the grub," murmured
the stoker.

"What are ships nowadays?" he went on,
raising a shaking index finger. "Are they ships
at all? They're run by companies on the make,
and worked by factory hands who curse their
own house-flags. It's a dirty game, I call it.
Things are all wrong. I can't make them out.
You fellers take no pride in your work, and you've
got no work to take pride in. You don't know

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who you work for or what, and your ships got no
names. They might be damned goods vans.
No good in a figger-'ed! Then I'll tell you this.
Then rU tell you this. You'll get no good till
you learn better, my lad.''

[132]

XXI. Economics

MARCH 22, 1919. There is an aston-
ishing number of books on what is
called Reconstruction in the new publi-
cations of this spring. Reconstruction seems to
be as easy as conscription or destruction. We
have only to change our mind, and there we are,
as though nothing had happened. It is the
greatest wonder of the human brain that its
own accommodating ratiocination never affords
it any amusement. We use reason only to
make convincing disguises for our desires and
appetites. Perhaps it is fear of the wrath
to come that is partly responsible for the clam-
our of the economists and sociologists in the
publishers' announcements, almost drowning
there the drone of the cataract of new novels.
But it is too late now. The wrath will come.
After mischievously bungling with the magic
which imprisoned the Djinn, we may wish we had
not done it; but once he is out there is

[133]

Waiting for Daylight

nothing for it but to be surprised and sorry.
The lid is off; and it is useless for the clever re-
constructionists to press in upon us with their
little screw-drivers, chattering eagerly about locks
and hinges. When the crafty but ignorant Rus-
sian generals and courtiers got from the Czar the
order for mobilizing the armies, and issued it,
they did not know it, but that was when they re-
leased Lenin. And who on earth can now inveigle
that terrific portent safely under lid and lock
again?

[134]

XXII. Old Sunlight

APRIL 5, 19 19. I find the first signs of
this spring, now the War is over, al-
most unbelievable. I have watched
this advent with astonishment, as though it were
a phantom. The feeling is the same as when
waking from an ugly dream, and seeing in doubt
the familiar objects in a morning light. They
seem steadfast. Are they real, or is the dream?
The morning works slowly through the mind to
take the place of the night. Its brightness and
tranquillity do not seem right. And is it not
surprising to find the spring has come again to
this world? The almond tree might be an un-
timely, thoughtless, and happy stranger. What
does it want with us? That spiritual and tinted
fire with which its life burns touches and kindles
no responsive and volatile essence in us. I passed
a hedge-bank which looked south and was reviv-
ing. There were crumbs and nuggets of chalk in
it, and they were as remarkable to me this year

[13s]

Waiting for Daylight

as though I had once seen those flecks of white
showing through the herbage of another planet.
That crumbling earth with the grey matting
of old grass was as warm to the touch as
though some inner virtue had grown, all un-
suspected by us, in the heart of this glacial ball.
I picked up a lump of chalk with its cold greenish
shadows, and powdered it in my fingers, wonder-
ing why it looked so suddenly bright. Tt con-
firmed my existence. Its smell was better than
any news 1 have heard of late.

I saw suddenly the gleaming coast of a conti-
nent of dark cloud, and the blue ocean into which
it jutted its headlands; memory had suddenly re-
turned. At that moment the sun touched my
hand. All this was what we used to know in a
previous life. When I got home I took down
Sclbonic. Two photographs fell out of it, and
when I picked them up — they were those of a
young amateur and were yellow with age —
spring really began to penetrate the bark. But it
was not the spring of this year.

How often, like another tortoise, has the mind
come out of its winter to sun itself in the new
warmth of a long-gone Selborne April? Did
Gilbert White imagine he was bequeathing light
to us? Of course not. He lived quietly in the

[136]

Old Sunlight

obscure place where he was born, and did not
try to improve or influence anybody. It seems
he had no wish to be a great leader, or a great
thinker, or a great orator. The example of
Chatham did not fire him. He was friendly
with his neighbours, but went about his business.
When he died there did not appear to be any
reason whatever to keep him in memory. He
had harmed no man. He left us without having
improved gunpowder. Could a man have done
less?

Think of the events which were stirring men
while he was noting the coming and going of
swallows. While he lived, Clive began the con-
quest of India, and Canada was taken from the
French. White heard the news that our Ameri-
can colonists had turned Bolshevik because of the
traditional skill of the administrators of other
people's affairs at Whitehall. The world appears
to have been as full then of important uproar as
it is to-day. I suppose the younger Pitt, "the
youngest man ever appointed Prime Minister,"
had never heard of White. But Gilbert does not
seem to have heard of him; nor of Hargreaves'
spinning jenny, nor of the inventor of the steam
engine. "But I can show you some specimens
of my new mice," he remarks on March 30, 1768.

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Waiting for Daylight

That was the year in which the great Pitt re-
signed. His new mice !

Yet for all the stirring affairs and inventions
of his exciting time, with war making and break-
ing empires, and the foundations of this country's
wealth and power being nobly laid, it would not
be easy to show that we to-day are any the hap-
pier. Our own War was inherent in the inven-
tions of mechanical cotton-spinning and the steam-
engine — the need to compel foreign markets to
buy the goods we made beyond our own needs.
We know now what were the seeds the active and
clever fellows of Gilbert's day were sowing for
us. We were present at the harvesting. Why
did not those august people, absorbed in the mo-
mentous deeds which have made history so
sonorous, the powder shaking out of their wigs
with the awful gravity of their labours (while all
the world wondered), just stop doing such con-
sequential things, and accept Gilbert's invitation
to go and listen to him about those new mice?
The mice might have saved us, and the oppor-
tunity was lost.

Looking back at those times, of all the thun-
derous events which then loosened excited tongues,
caused by high-minded men of action expertly con-
juring crisis after crisis while their docile fol-

[138]

Old Sunlight

lowers scrambled out of one sublime trouble into
another, heated and exhausted, but still gaping
with obedience and respect, we can see that
nothing remains but the burial parties, whose
work is yet uncompleted in France. What good
does persist out of those days is the light in which
Gilbert's tortoise sunned itself. It is a light
which has not gone out. And it makes us wonder,
not how much of our work in these years will
survive to win the gratitude of those who will
follow us, but just what it is they will be grateful
for. Where is it, and what happy man is doing
it? And what are we thinking of him? Do we
even know his name?

[139]

XXIII. Ruskin

APRIL 19, 1 9 19. Some good people
have been celebrating Ruskin, whose
centenary it is. And to-day a little
friend of mine left her school books so that I
might wonder what they were when I saw them
on my table. One of them was The Crown of
Wild Olive. It put me in a reminiscent mood.
I looked at Ruskin's works on my shelves, and
tried to recall how long it was since they inter-
ested me. Nevertheless, I would not part with
them. In my youth Ruskin's works were only for
the wealthy, and I remember that my purchase of
those volumes was an act of temerity, and even
of sacrifice. And who but an ingrate would find
fault with Ruskin, or would treat him lightly?
With courage and eloquence he denounced dis-
honesty in the days when it was not supposed that
cheating could be wrong if it were successful.
He did that when minds were so dark that people
blinked with surprise at a light which showed as
[140]

Ruskin

a social iniquity naked children crawling with
chains about them in the galleries of coal-mines.
Was it really wrong to make children do that?
Or was Ruskin only an impossible idealist? They
were the happy years, radiant with the certain
knowledge of the British that the Holy Grail
would be recognized immediately It was seen,
for over It would be proudly floating the con-
firmatory Union Jack. We had not even begun
to suspect that our morals, manners, and laws
were fairly poor compared with the standards
of the Mohawks and Mohicans whom our set-
tlers had displaced in America a century before.
And Ruskin told that Victorian society it had an
ugly mind, and did ugly things. When Ruskin
said so, with considerable emotion, Thackeray
was so hurt that he answered as would any clever
editor to-day about a contribution which convinced
him that It would make readers angry; he told
Ruskin it would never do. Thackeray's readers,
of course, were assured they were the best people,
and that worldly cynic did well to reject Ruskin,
and preserve the Cornhill Magazine.

"Ruskin," It says In the introduction to The
Crown of IVild Olive which my little friend reads
at school, "is certainly one of the greatest masters
of English prose." That has often been declared.

[141]

Waiting for Daylight

But is he? Or is our tribute to Ruskin only a
show of gratitude to one who revealed to us the
unpleasant character of our national habits
when contrasted with a standard for gentlemen?
It ought not to have required much eloquence to
convince us that Widnes is unlovely; the smell of
It should have been enough. It is curious that
we needed festoons of chromatic sentences to
warn us that cruelty to children, even when profit
can be made of it, is not right. But I fear some
people really enjoy remorseful sobbing. It is half
the fun of doing wrong. Yet I would ask in hu-
mility— for it is a fearful thing to doubt Ruskin,
the literary divinity of so many right-thinking
people — whether English children who are learn-
ing the right way to use their language, and the
noblest ideas to express, should run the risk of
having Ruskin's example set before them by soft-
hearted teachers? I think that a parent who
knew a child of his, on a certain day, was to take
the example of Ruskin as a prose stylist on the
subject of war, would do well, on moral and aes-
thetic grounds, to keep his child away from school
on that day to practise a little roller-skating. For
humility and gratitude should not blind us to the
fact that few writers in English of Ruskin's rep-
utation have ever considered such a rosy cloud of
[142]

Ruskin

rhetoric as is his lecture on war, in which a
reasonable shape no sooner looms than it is lost
again, to be worth preserving. The subject of
war is of importance, inflammable humanity be-
ing what it is, and the results of war being what
we know; and the quality of the critical attention
we give to so great a matter is unfortunately
clear when we regard the list of distinguished
critics of letters who have accepted, apparently
without difBculty, as great prose, Ruskin's heed-
less rush of words upon it. Perhaps his lan-
guage appears noble because the rhythmic pour of
its sentences lulls reason into a comfortable and
benignant sleepiness.

I remember the solemn voice of a lecturer on
English literature, years ago, moving me to buy
The Crown of Wild Olive. Such obvious ignor-
ance as I knew mine to be could not be tolerated.
Whatever I went without, it could not be that
book. I put it in my hold-all when, as was my
duty, I went for my training with the artillery
volunteers. I read in camp the essay on war,
when bombardiers no longer claimed my atten-
tion, and the knightly words of sergeant instruct-
ors were taking a needed rest. I pondered
over that essay, and concluded that though plainly
I was very young and very wrong to feel puzzled

[143]

Waiting for Daylight

and even derisive over English prose which fasci-
nated a learned lecturer into solemnity, yet I
would sooner learn to make imitation flowers of
wool than read that essay to a critical audience,
especially if I had written it myself.

Ruskin, in fact, with no more experience of
war than a bishop's wife, did not know what he
was talking about. Throughout the essay, too,
he is in two minds. One is that of a gentleman
who knows that war is the same phenomenon, ar-
tistically, ethically, and socially, as a public-house
riot with broken bottles caused by a dispute over
one of those fundamental principles which are
often challenged in such a place. Those riots are
natural enough. They are caused by the nature of
man. They continue to happen, for it has taken
the Church longer to improve our manners than
it has taken stock-raisers to improve the milking
qualities of kine. And Ruskin's other mind is
still in the comical Tennysonian stage about war,
dwelling with awe on swords and shields, glory,
honour, patriotism, courage, spurs, pennants, and
tearful but resolute ladies who wave their hand-
kerchiefs in the intervals of sobbing over their
"loved ones."

He calls war "noble play." He scorns cricket.
As for his "style" and his "thought": "I use,"

[144]

Ruskin

says Ruskin, "in such a question, the test which I
have adopted, of the connexion of war with other
arts, and I reflect how, as a sculptor, I should feel
if I were asked to design a monument for West-
minster Abbey, with a carving of a bat at one end
and a ball at the other. It may be there remains
in me only a savage Gothic prejudice; but I had
rather carve it with a shield at one end and a
sword at the other."

I cannot tell whether Ruskin reflected so be-
cause of a savage Gothic prejudice, but I am cer-
tain he wrote like that moved by what we feel —
the feeling goes deeper into time even than the
Goths — about the victim for sacrifice. We must
justify that sacrifice, and so we give It a ceremo-
nial ritual and dignity. Otherwise, I think, Rus-
kin would not have suggested the shield and
sword as the symbolic decorations. He felt in-
stinctively and because of a long-accepted tradi-
tion that those antique symbols were the only way
to hide the ugly look of the truth. For certainly
he could have used a ball at one end — a cannon-
ball — and a mortar at the other. Just as we
might use an aerial torpedo at one end, and the
image of a mutilated child at the other; or a gas
cylinder at one end, and a gas-mask at the other.
But the artist is not going to be deprived of his

[145]

Waiting for Daylight

romance through a touch of the actual, any more
than the lady with the handkerchief can be ex-
pected to forego her anguished sob over her hero
as he goes forth to battle.

We saw that in our Great War. The ancient
appeal of the patriots rushed us away from reason
with *'last stands," and the shot-riddled banners
wavering in the engulfing waves of barbarians,
till an irresistable cavalry charge scattered the
hordes. All this replaced the plumes, the shin-
ing armour, and the chivalrous knights. Ruskin,
however, was a subtle improvement even on the
last stand with the shot-riddled banner. He an-
ticipated those who have been most popular be-
cause they made our War entrancing and endur-
able. He went to the heart of the matter. He
knew that the audience which would the more
readily agree with him when he made an emo-
tional case for the ennobling nature of war would
be mainly of reclused women. He addressed
them. So did, of late, some of our most suc-
cessful writers on war. They, like Ruskin, made
their appeal to that type of mind which obtains a
real satisfaction, a sensuous pleasure, from con-
templating the unseen sufferings of the young and
vicarious victim sobbing, and feeling noble and
enduring.

[.46]

XXIV.The Reward of Virtue

MAY 9, 19 19. The Treaty of Peace is
published. Compared with what the
innocent in 19 15 called the "objects of
the War," this treaty is as the aims of Captain
Morgan's ruffians to those of the Twelve Apos-
tles. The truth is, some time ago the Versailles
drama fell to the level of an overworked news-
paper story which shrewd editors saw was past
its day. Those headlines. Humiliate the Hun,
Hang the Kaiser, and Make Germany Pay, had
become no more interesting than a copy of last
week's Morning Mischief in a horse-pond. The
subject was old and wet. Because five months
ago we thoughtfully elected men of the counting-
house to the work of governing the State, of late
we have been too indignant over the cost and dif-
ficulty of living to spare a thought for the beauty
of Peace; that is why we are now examining the
clauses of the famous Treaty with about as much
care for what they may mean to us a,s if they con-

[147]

Waiting for Daylight

cerned the movements of the Asteroids. A year
ago the German attacks seemed near to making
guns the deciding voice in the affairs of unhappy
humanity. On the chill and overcast spring
morning when the Treaty was published, it was
significant that those very few men to whom we
could go for courage a year ago were the only
people dismayed by the terms of the Peace
Treaty. And the timid, who once went to those
stout hearts for assurance — to have, as the sol-
diers used to say, their cold feet massaged — were
the bright and cheerful souls. It was ominous.
Yet those careless and happy hearts are not so
trying to me as the amiable but otherwise sensible
men who were sure our statesmen would not be-
tray the dead, and who are incredulous over the
Treaty now they see what it clearly intends to
convey. They cannot believe that the War,
which they thought began as a war of liberation,
a struggle of Europe to free itself from the intol-
erable bonds of its past, continues In the Peace
Treaty as a force malignantly deflected to the
support of the very evils out of which August,
19 14, arose. Then did they imagine the well-
meaning leopard would oblige by changing his
spots if spoken to kindly while he was eating the
baby?

[148]

XXV. Great Statesmen

MAY,3i,i9i9. What Is wrong with our
statesmen? I think the answer is
simple. Success in a political career
can be understood by all of us. It attracts the
attention which applauds the owner of a Derby
winner, or the Bishop who began as a poor, indus-
trious, but tactful child. John the Baptist failed
to attract the publicity he desired; and Christ
drew it as a criminal, for the religious and politi-
cal leaders of his day recognized what his teach-
ing would lead to as easily as would any magis-
trate to-day who had before him a carpenter ac-
cused of persuading soldiers that killing Is mur-
der. Politicians move on the level of the com-
mon intelligence, and compete there with each
other in charging the ignorance of the common-
alty with emotion. A politician need be no more
than something between a curate and a card-
sharper. If he knows anything of the arts, of
history, of economics, or of science, he had better

[149]

Waiting for Daylight

forget it, or else use it as a forestallcr would a
knowledge of the time when prices should be
raised. A confident man with a blood-shot voice
and a gift for repartee is sure to make a success of
politics, especially if he is not too particular.
This did not matter once, perhaps, when politics
merely afforded excitement for taverns and a ca-
reer for the avid and meddlesome. The
country was prosperous, and so it was difficult to
do it serious harm.

But to-day, just when we must have the leading
of moral, judicious, and well-informed minds, or
perish, we have only our statesmen. It never
occurs to the crowd that its business would be
more successfully transacted by a chance group,
say of headmasters of elementary schools, than
by the statesmen who, at Versailles recently,
dared not face the shocking realities because
these could not be squared with a Treaty which
had to frame the figments of the hustings. The
trouble with our statesmen is that they have been
concerned hitherto merely to attend to the ma-
chinery, running freely and with little friction, of
industrial society. They did not create that ma-
chinery. They but took it over. They knew
nothing of the principles which motived it. Our
statesmen were only practical politicians and

[150]

Great Statesmen

business men. They held in contempt the fine
abstract theories of physics, mechanics, and dy-
namics. It was safe for them to do so. The ma-
chinery went on running, apparently of its own
volition. All went well until the War. Now
the propeller-shaft of industrial society is frac-
tured, our ship is wallowing in the trough of the
seas, and the men who should put things right for
us do not even know that it is the main shaft on
which they should concentrate. They are irritat-
ing the passengers by changing the cabins, confis-
cating luggage, insisting on higher fares, cutting
down the rations, and instructing the sailors in
the goose-step; but the ship has no way on her,
and the sound of breakers grows louder from a
sombre, precipitous, and unknown coast.

[151]

XXVI. Joy

JULY 19, 19 19. It has come. This is the
great day of the English. Many have
doubted whether we should ever have it,
for faith had been weak and the mind weary
while the enemy was still fixed in his fanatic reso-
lution. But here it is, half my window-blind
already bright with its first light. To-day we
celebrate our return to peace, to an earth made
the fairer for children, fit for the habitation of
free men, safe for quiet folk . . . the day that
once had seemed as remote as truth, as in-
accessible as good fortune; a day, so we used to
think in France, more distant even than those in-
credible years of the past that were undervalued
by us, when we were happy in our ignorance of
the glory men could distil from misery and filth;
when we had not guessed what wealth could be
got from the needs of a public anxious for its
life; nor that sleeping children could be bombed
in a noble cause. Yes, it had seemed to us even

[152]

Joy

farther off than our memories of the happy past.
Yet here it Is, Its coffee-cups tinkling below, and I
welcome Its early shafts of gold like the fortune
they are. The fortune seems innocent and una-
ware of its nature. It does not know what it
means to us. I had often been with soldier
friends across the water when with mock rapture
they had planned an itinerary for this day.
They spoke of it where their surroundings made
the thought of secure leisure or unremarkable
toil only a painful reminder of what was beatific,
but might never be. This day had not come to
them. But it had come to me.

I was luckier than they. Yet when luck comes
to us, does it ever look quite as we had Imagined
it when it was not ours? I lift the curtain on this
luck, and look out. From an upper window of
the house opposite the national emblem of the
American Republic Is hanging like an apron.
Next door to It a man is decorating his window-
sills with fairy lamps, and from his demeanour he
might be devising a taboo against evil. I see no
other sign that the new and better place of our
planet was bding acknowledged. The street Is as
the milkman and the postman have always known
it on a quiet morning.

A cock crowed. It was then I knew that,

[IS3]

Waiting for Daylight

though the morning was like all good sunrises,
which are the same for the unjust and the right-
eous, I, somehow, was different. Chanticleer
was quite near, but his confident and defiant voice,
I recognized with a start, was a call from some
other morning. It was the remembered voice of
life at sunrise, as old as the jungle, alert, glad,
and brave. Then why did it not sound as if it
were meant for me? Why did it not accord, as
once it did, with the coming of a new day, when
the renewed and waiting earth was veritably
waiting for us? Yet the morning seemed the
same, its sounds the familiar confidences, its light
the virgin innocence of a right beginning. Was
this new light ours? While looking at it I
thought that perhaps there is another light, an
aura of something early and rare, which, once it
is doused, cannot be re-kindled, even by the sun
which rises to shine on a great victory.

I began to feel that this early confusion of
thought, over even so plain a cause for joy as
morning, might be a private hint that it would be
as hard to tell the truth about peace as it used to
be about battle. And how diflicult it is to
tell the truth about war, and even how improper,
some of us know. For what a base traitor even
truth may be> to good patriots, when she insists

[154]

Joy

that her mirror cannot help reflecting what is
there! Why should the best instincts of loyal
folk be thus embarrassed? If they do not wish
to know what is there, when that is what it is like,
is it right, lis it gentlemanly, to show them?

How easy it would be to write of peace in the
Capital, where the old highways have been dec-
orated for many kings, marshals, and admirals,
and the flags have been hung for victories since
England first bore arms. So why should one be
dubious of a few unimportant suburban byways,
where the truth is plain, and is not charged with
many emotions through the presence of an em-
peror and his statesmen and soldiers, all of them
great, all of them ready for our superlatives to
add to their splendour?

But perhaps the more you know of a place, the
greater is your perplexity. That old vicarage
wall, lower down my street, is merely attractive
in the sun of Peace Day. A stranger, if he
noticed it, might at the most admire its warm
tones, and the tufts of hawkweed and snapdragon
which arc scattered on its ledges. But from this
same window, on a winter morning, when affairs
were urgent in France, I have seen youth assem-
bled by that wall. Youth was silent. There
was only a sergeant's voice in all the street. I

Waiting for Daylight

think I hear now the diminishing trampling of
quick feet marching away; and see a boy's face
as he turned near the top of the rise to wave his
hand. But look now, and say where are the
shades on a bright morning!

I went out, a dutiful citizen, to celebrate. No
joy can be truthfully reported till just this side of
the High Street, where there were three girls with
linked arms dancing In lax and cheerful oblivion,
one of them quite drunk. Near them stood a
cart with a man, a woman, and a monkey in It.
The superior animals were clothed in red, white,
and blue, and the monkey was wearing a Union
Jack for a ruff. The ape was humping himself
on the tail-board, and from his expression he
might have been wondering how long all this
would last. His gay companions were rosily
chanting that if they caught some one bending It
would be of no advantage to him. The main
thoroughfare was sanded, and was waiting for
the official procession. Quiet citizens were stroll-
ing about with their children, and what they were
thinking is as great a mystery as what the popu-
lace at Memphis thought when the completion of
the Great Pyramid was celebrated by the order of
Cheops. In a room of an upper storey near the
town hall a choir was singing the Hallelujah
[iS6]

Joy

Chorus, and below, on the pavement, a hospital
nurse, In a red wig, stood gravely listening, sway-
ing to and fro, holding her skirts high, so that we
saw beneath the broad slacks of an able seaman.

The chorus ceased, and In gratitude for the
music the nurse embraced a Highland soldier,
who was standing near and who was secretly
amused, I believe, by the nurse's trousers. Then
we heard the bands of the military procession in
the distance, and It was In that moment I saw a
young officer I knew, who was out as early as
Neuve Chapelle, gazing, like everybody else. In
the direction of the martial sounds. Before I
could reach him through the press he had turned,
and was walking hurriedly down a side street, as
though In flight. I could not follow him. I
wanted to see the soldiers. My reason was no
better than some sentimental emotion; for I saw
the original Contemptibles march off for Mons;
and was with a battalion of the 9th Division, the
first of Kitchener's men to go Into the line; and
saw the Derby men come out and begin; and at
the last discovered that the conscripts were as
good as the rest. Some of the survivors were
marching towards me.

But I did not recognize them. Many were
elderly men who were displaying proud tunics of

[157]

Waiting for Daylight

volunteer regiments as old as Hyde Park Parades
by Queen Victoria. One looked then for the
sections from the local lodges of the Druids,
Oddfellows, Buffaloes, and the He-Goats.
There was the band of the local cadets, sponta-
neous In its enthusiasm, its zest for martial music
no different, of course. Just behind these lads a
strange figure walked in the procession, a bent
and misshapen old man, whose face had no ex-
pression but a fixed and hypnotic stare. He was
keeping time to the measure of the boys' music
by snapping the spring of a mouse-trap which he
held aloft. I could not find him in the program.
Was he also drunk? Or was he a terrible jest?
Most of our triumphant display followed this
figure. If our illusions go, what is left to us?
Ah, our memories of the Somme ! That young
oflSccr who turned away when he saw Triumph
approaching acted on a right instinct.

There Is a hilltop near us. It looks to other
hills over a great space of southern England, and
at night on the far promontories of the Downs
bonfires were to be lighted. I have no doubt
signals flared from them when the Romans were
baffled. Again to-night they would signal that
the latest enemy had been vanquished.

It was raining gently, and from our own crest

[■58]

Joy

the lower and outer night was void. ~K touch of
distant phosphorescence that waned, and inten-
sified again to a strong white glow, presently gave
the void one far and lonely hilltop. A cloud else-
where appeared out of nothing, and persisted, a
lenticular spectre of dull fire. These aerial
spectres became a host; some were so far away
that they were faint smears of orange, and others
so near and great that they pulsed and revealed
the shapes of the clouds. It was all impersonal,
it was England itself that was reflected, the hills
that had awakened. It was the emanation of a
worthy tradition, older than ourselves, that was
re-kindled and was glowing, and that would be
here when we are not. It was so receptive, it
was so spacious, that our gravest memories could
abide there, as if night were kind to the secrets
we dare not voice, and understood folly and re-
morse, and could protect our better visions, and
had sanctuary and consolation for that grief
which looks to what might have been, but now
can never be.

A spark glittered near, a spark that towered
and hovered overhead, and burst into coiling vol-
umes of lurid smoke with a moving heart of flame.
Light broke on a neighbouring hill that had been
unseen and forgotten; the hill was crowned with

[159]

Waiting for Daylight

fantastic trees that danced, and a wavering tower.
From our own valley below there came a vicious
tearing that gave me a momentary chill (so
sounds a stream of machine-gun lead, going
over), and a group of coloured stars expanded
over us. Their bright light showed the night re-
ticulated with thin lines of smoke, like veins of
calcite in a canopy of black marble. Our imme-
diate country, pallid and tremulous, fade^ again,
but in that brief prospect of a shadow land I
glimpsed a road, the presentment of the long
road to Bapaume. So the Bapaume road showed
at night by inconsequential and unexpected lights.
That hill-crest of leaping trees could be the ridge
of Loupart with its wood, and Achete in flames
beyond. The notion gave me enough of our hill
top. I descended from it.

There is a public-house at the foot of the hill,
and a lane of harsh noises and a beam of light
projected together from its open door across the
road. Beyond it I turned into a house, for I
knew I should find there an aged and solitary man
who would have his own thoughts on such a night
as this; for he had a son, and the spectre of the
Bapaume road had reminded me where that boy
was celebrating whatever peace he knew. His
father was not communicative; and what could I
[i6o]

Joy

say? He sat, answering me distantly and aus-
terely, and he might have been a bearded sage see-
ing in retrospect a world he had long known, and
who at last had made up his mind about It, though
he would not tell me what that was. Outside we
could hear revellers approaching. They paused
at our door; their feet began to shuffle, and they
sang:

"If I catch you bending,
I'll turn you upside down,
Knees up, knees up,
Knees up, knees up,
Knees up, Father Brown."

[i6i]

XXVII. The Real Thing

JANUARY 9, 1920. There was a country
town of which we heard wonderful tales
as children. But it was as far as Cathay.
It had many of the qualities that once made Ca-
thay desirable and almost unbelievable. We
heard of it at the time when we heard of the cities
of Vanity Fair and Baghdad, and all from a man
with a beard, who once sat by a London fire, just
before bedtime, smoking a pipe and telling those
who were below him on the rug about the past,
and of more fortunate times, and of cities that
were fair and far. Nothing was easier for us
then than to believe fair reports. Good dreams
must be true, for they are good. Some day, he
said, he would take us to Torhaven; but he did
not, for his luck was not like that.

Nothing like that; so instead we used to look

westward to where Torhaven would be, whenever

the sunset appeared the right splendour for the

sky that was over what was delectable and else-

[162]

The Real Thing

where. We made that do for years. Torhaven
existed, there was no doubt, for once we made a
journey to Paddington Station — a long walk —
and saw the very name on a railway carriage. It
was a surprising and a happy thought that that
carriage would go into such a town that very day.
What is more confident than the innocence of
youth? Where, if not with youth, could be
found such willing and generous reliance in noble
legend?

And how enduring is its faith ! Long after,
but not too long after, for fine appearances to us
still meant fine prospects, wc arrived one morning
bodily in the haven of good report. Its genius
was as bright as we expected. It had a shining
face. It was the equal of the morning. Its folk
could not be the same as those who lived within
dark walls under a heaven that was usually but
murk. It lost nothing because we could examine
its streets. We went from it with a memory
even warmer and more comforting. What
would happen to us if youth did not more than
merely believe the pleasant tales that are told, if
it did not loyally desire to believe that things are
what they are said to be?

This country town is of the Southern kind
which, with satisfaction, we show to strangers as

['63]

Waiting for Daylight

something peculiarly of our country. It is an-
cient and luminous In an amphitheatre of hills,
and schooners and barques come right among its
gables. It Is wealthy, but it Is not of the common
sort, for it never shows haste. It knows, of
course, that wealth Is cheap, until It has matured
and has attained that dignity which only leisure
and the indifference of usage can confer. The
country around has a long history of well-sound-
ing family names as native as its hills — they ar-
rived together, or thereabouts — and the lodge
gates on its highways, with their weathered and
mossy heraldic devices, have a way of acquaint-
ing you with the measure of your inconsequence
as you pass them when walking. Torhaven has
no poverty. It tolerates some clean and obscure
but very profitable manufactures. But Its ship-
ping is venerable, and is really not an industry
at all, being as proper as the owning of deer-
parks. On market day you would think you were
in a French town, so many are the agriculturists,
and so quiet and solid the evidence of their well-
being. They own their farms, they love good
horses, their wagons are built like ships, and their
cattle, as aboriginal as the county families, might
be the embodiment of the sleek genius of those

[164]

The Real Thing

hills and meadows, so famous are they for cream.
The people of that country live well. They
know their worth and the substance which they
add to the strength of the British community.
And they pride themselves on the legends, pecu-
liarly theirs, which tell of their independence of
mind, of their love of freedom, of their liberal
opinions and the nonconformity of their religious
views. They are stout folk, kind and compan-
ionable, and they do not love masters.

It was the summer following the end of the
War, and we were back again in Torhaven. The
recollection of its ancient peace, of its stillness
and light, of the refuge it offered, had enticed us
there. Its very name had been the hope of
escape. Where should we find people more
likely to be quick and responsive? They would
be among the first to understand the nature of the
calamity which had overtaken us. They would
know, long before amorphous and alien London,
what that new world should be like which we
owed to the young, a world in which might grow
a garden for the bruised souls of the disillu-
sioned.

Its light was the same. It was not only un-
tarnished by such knowledge as we brought with
[i6s]

Waiting for Daylight

us, it was radiant. Yet it was not without its
memory of the disaster. We went into the
church, whose porch had been restored; symboli-
cal, perhaps, of our entry into a world from
which, happily, the old things had passed. The
church was empty, for this was market day.
Through its gloom, as through the penumbra of
antiquity, shone faintly the pale forms of a few
recumbent knights, and the permanent appeal of
their upturned hands and faces kept the roof
aware of human contrition. Above one of the
figures was a new Union Jack, crowned with
laurels. The sun made too vivid a scarlet patch
of one of its folds.

Just below the church was the theatre, now a
cinema hall. This was market day, and the
house was full. A poster outside pictured a
bridge blowing up, and a motor-car falling into
space. The midday sun was looking full at Tor-
haven's High Street, which runs south and down-
hill steeply to the quay; a schooner filled the bot-
tom of the street that day. Anything a not too
unreasonable man could desire was offered in
the shops of that thoroughfare. This being a
time of change, when our thoughts are all unfixed
and we have had rumours of the New Jerusalem,
the side window of a fashionable jeweller's was
[1 66]

The Real Thing

devoted to tiny jade pigs, minute dolls, silver
acorns, and other propitiators of luck which time
and experience have tested. Next door to the
jeweller's was a studio supporting the arts, with
local pottery shaped as etiolated blue cats and
yellow puppies; and there one could get picture
postcards of the London favourites in revue, and
some water-colour paintings of the local coast
which an advertisement affirmed were real.

That was not all. Opposite was the one book-
shop of the town. Its famous bay front and old
diamond panes frankly presented the new day
with ladies' handbags, ludo and other games,
fountain pens, mounted texts from Ella Wilcox,
local guide books, and apparently a complete
series — as much as the length of the window
would hold, at least — of Hall Caine's works ; and
in one corner prayer-books in a variety of bind-
ings.

Down on the quay, sitting on a bollard, with
one leg stretched stiffly before him, was a young
native I had not met since one day on the Menin
Road. I had known him, before that strange
occasion, as an ardent student of life and letters.
He had entered a profession in which sound
learning is essential, though the reward is slight,
just when the War began. Then he believed, in

[167]

Waiting for Daylight

high seriousness, as young and enthusiastic stu-
dents did, all he was told in that August: and his
professional career is now over.

He pointed out to me mildly, and with a little
reproach, that I was wrong in supposing Tor-
haven had not changed. I learned that the War
had made a great change there. Motor-cars
were now as commonly owned as bicycles used to
be, though he admitted that it did not seem that
the queue waiting to buy books, our sort of books,
was in need of control by the police. But farm-
ers who had been tenants when Germany violated
the independence of Belgium were now freehold-
ers. Men who were in essential industries, and
so could not be spared for the guns, were now
shipowners. We could see for ourselves how
free and encouraging was the new wealth in this
new world; true, the size of his pension did not
fairly reflect the new and more liberal ideas of a
better world, but we must admit he had no need
to travel to Bond Street to spend it. "Why
fear," he asked me, pointing with his crutch up
the busy High Street behind us, "that what our
pals in France learned was wrong with that old
Europe which made the War, will not be known
there? Have you seen," he said, "our book-

[168]

The Real Thing

shop, our cinema, and the new memorial porch
of our church?"

Near us was waiting a resplendent motor-car,
in which reposed a young lady whose face deco-
rates the covers of the popular magazines every
month, and as the wounded soldier finished
speaking it moved away with a raucous hoot.

[169]

XXVIII. Literary Critics

MARCH 27, 1920. The last number of
the Chaphook, containing "Three Crit-
ical Essays on Modern English Po-
etry," by three well-known critics of literature, I
read with suspiciously eager attention, for I will
confess that I have no handy rule, not one that I
can describe, which can be run over new work in
poetry or prose with unfailing confidence. My
credentials as a literary critic would not, I fear,
bear five minutes' scrutiny; but I never cease to
look for that defined and adequate equipment,
such as even a carpenter calls his tool-chest, full
of cryptic instruments, each designed for some
particular task, and ev^ery implement named. It
is sad to have to admit it, but I know I possess
only a home-made gimlet to test for dry-rot, and
another implement, a very ancient heirloom,
snatched at only on blind instinct, a stone ax.
But these are poor tools, and sooner or later I
shall be found out.

There was a time when I was very hopeful
[170]

Literary Critics

about discovering a book on literary criticism
which would make the rough places plain for me,
and encourage me to feel less embarrassed when
present where literary folk were estimating
poetry and prose. I am such a simple on these
occasions. If one could only discover the means
to attain to that rather easy assurance and
emphasis when making literary comparisons!
Yet though this interesting number of the Chap-
book said much that I could agree with at once,
it left me as isolated and as helpless as before.
One writer said: "There is but one art of writing,
and that is the art of poetry. The test of poetry
is sincerity. The test of sincerity is style; and
the test of style is personality." Excellent, I
exclaimed immediately; and then slowly I began
to suspect a trap somewhere in it. Of course,
does not the test for sunlight distinguish it at
once from insincere limelight? But what is the
test, and would it be of any use to those likely
to mistake limelight for daylight?

I cannot say I have ever been greatly helped
by what I have read concerning the standards
for literary criticism. Of the many wise and
learned critics to whose works I have gone for
light, I can remember only Aristotle, Longinus,
Tolstoy, and Anatole France — probably because

Waiting for Daylight

it is easy for the innocent to agree with dominat-
ing men. Of the moderns I enjoy reading any-
thing "Q" has to say about books; useless
pleasure again, for what does one get but "Q's"
full, friendly, ironic, and humorous mind?
Lately, too, the critics have been unanimously
recommending to us — and that shows the genuine
value to the community of mere book reviewers
— the Letters of Tchehov, as noble a document as
we have had for a very long time. But I thought
they did not praise Tchehov enough as a critic,
for that wise and lovable author, among his let-
ters, made many casual asides about art that were
pleasing and therefore right to me. I begin to
fear that most of the good things said about
literature are said in casual asides.

If I were asked to say why I preferred Chris-
tabel or Keats's odes to Tennyson's Revenge or
the Barrack-Room Ballads, I should find it hard
to explain satisfactorily to anyone who preferred
to read Tennyson or Kipling. Where are the
criteria? Can a Chinaman talk to an Arab?
The difference, we see at once, is even deeper
than that of language. It is a difference in na-
ture ; and we may set up any criterion of literature
we like, but it will never carry across such a
chasm. Our only consolation is that we may tell
[172]

Literary Critics

the other man he is on the wrong side of it, but
he will not care, because he will not see it. The
means by which we are able to separate what is
precious in books from the matrix is not a proc-
ess, and is nothing measurable. It is instinctive,
and not only differs from age to age, but changes
in the life of each of us. It is as indefinable as
beauty itself. An artist may know how to create
a beautiful thing, but he cannot communicate his
knowledge except by that creation. That is all
he can tell us of beauty, and, indeed, he may be
innocent of the measure of his effort; and the
next generation may ridicule the very thing which
gave us so much pleasure, pleasure we proved to
our own satisfaction to be legitimate and well
founded by many sound generalizations about
art. The canons of criticism are no more than
the apology for our personal preferences, no mat-
ter how gravely we back them. Sometimes it
has happened that a book or a poem has suc-
ceeded in winning the approval of many genera-
tions, and so we may call it a classic. Yet what
is the virtue of a classic, or of the deliberate and
stately billows going with the wind when the
world has sweep and is fair, or of a child with a
flower, or of the little smile on the face of the
dead boy in the muck when the guns were filling

[173]

Waiting for Daylight

us with fear and horror of .mankind? I don't
know; but something in us appears to save us
from the punishing comet of Zeus.

[174]

XXL The South Downs

MAY 22, 1920. The southern face of
the hill fell, an abrupt promontory, to
the woods of the plain. Its face was
scored by the weather, and the dry drainage chan-
nels were headlong cascades of grey pebbles.
Clumps of heather, sparse oak scrub with young
leaves of bronze, contorted birch, and this year's
croziers of the bracken (heaven knows their
secret for getting lush aromatic sap out of such
stony poverty), all made a tough life which held
up the hill, steep as it was; though the hill was
going, for the roots of some of the oaks were
exposed, empty coils of rope from which the bur-
den had slipped. In that sea of trees whose bil-
lows came to the foot of our headland, and out
of sight beneath its waves, children were walking,
gathering bluebells. We knew they were there,
for we could hear their voices. But there was
no other sign of our form of life except a neolithic
flint scraper one of us had picked up on the hill-
top. The marks of the man who made it were
as clear as the voices below. It had been lost

[175]

Waiting for Daylight

since yesterday, it might be — anyhow, about the
day the first Pyramid was finished. It depends
on how one looks at the almanac. For you could
feel the sun fire was young. It had not been
long kindled. Its heat in the herbage was moist.
One of the youngsters with me, bruising the
bracken and snufiing it, said it smelt of almond
and cucumber. Another said the crushed birch
leaves smelt of sour apples. We could not say
what the oak leaves smelt like. Then another
grabbed a handful of leafmould, damp and brown
and full of fibre. What did that smell of?
They were not sure that they liked it. Perhaps
it was the smell of the hill. They admitted that
it wasn't a bad smell. They seemed a little
afraid of that odour.

But I was trying to read, and neolithic times
and the bluebell gatherers had run together.
They were in the same day. My book had made
of that May morning in Surrey an apparition
without time and place. We hear ourselves
laughing now, intent, for instance, on confirming
the almond and cucumber in bruised bracken, or
catch the sound of our serious voices raised in a
dispute over literature or politics. But these
things are not really in our minds. We would
not betray our secret thoughts to bluebell gath-

[176]

The South Downs

ercrs and boys snuffing the bracken. This book
I was reading, and a fancied resemblance in that
hill and its prospect, moved the shadows again —
they are so readily moved — and I saw two of us
in France on such a hill, gazing intently and in-
nocently over just such a prospect, in the summer
of 19 1 5, without in the least guessing what, in
that landscape before us, was latent for us both.
Those downs across the way would be Beaumont
Hamel and Thiepval, Bluebells ! The pub-
lishers may send out what advice they choose to
authors concerning the unpopularity of books
about the War — always excepting, of course, the
important reminiscences, the soft and heavy
masses of words of the great leaders of the na-
tions in the War, which merely reveal that they
never knew what they were doing. Certainly we
could spare that kind of war book, though it con-
tinues to arrive in abundance; a volume by a
famous soldier explaining why affairs went
strangely wrong is about the last place where we
should look for anything but folly solemnly pon-
dering unrealities. But whatever the publishers
may say, we do want books about the War
by men who were in it. Some of us have learned
by now that France is a memory of such a nature
that, though it is not often we dare stop to look

[177]

Waiting for Daylight

directly at it, for the day's work must be done, yet
it looms through the importance of each of these
latter days as though the event of our lives were
past, and we were at present merely watching the
clock. The shadow of what once was in France
is an abiding presence for us. We know nothing
can happen again which will release us from it.
And yet how much has been written of it? That
is the measure of its vastness and its mystery —
it possesses the minds of many men, but they are
silent on what they know. They rarely speak of
it, except to one of the fraternity. But where are
their thoughts? Wandering, viewless and un-
easy wraiths, over Flanders, in Artois and
Picardy. Those thoughts will never come home
again to stay.

It is strange to me that publishers should sup-
pose that books, intimate about the invisible but
abiding shadow which is often more potent than
present May sunshine, should not be wanted.
Take for example this book I was reading, The
Sqiiadroon, by Ardern Beaman. To induce
readers to buy it it has a picture on its dust-cover
which kept me from reading it for weeks. This
wrapper shows a ghostly knight in armour lead-
ing a charge of British cavalry in this War. I
should have thought we had had enough of that

[178]

The South Downs

romantic nonsense during the actual events. The
War was written for the benefit of readers who
made a hixury of the sigh, and who were told
and no doubt preferred to believe that the young
soldier went into battle with the look we so ad-
mire in the picture called The Soul's Awakening.
He was going to glory. There are no dead.
There are only memorial crosses for heroes and
the Last Post. The opinions of most civilians on
the War were as agreeable as stained-glass win-
dows. The thought of a tangle of a boy's in-
side festooned on rusty wire would naturally have
spoiled the soul's awakening and the luxury of the
sigh. I heard of a civilian official, on his way to
Paris after the Armistice, who was just saved by
rapid explanations from the drastic attention of a
crowd of Tommies who mistook him for a War
Correspondent.

But Mr. Beaman's book is not like war cor-
respondence. It can be commended to those who
were not there, but who wish to hear a true word
or two. Mr. Beaman as a good-natured man re-
members how squeamish wc are, and being also
shy and dainty indicates some matters but briefly.
I wish, for one thing, that when describing the
doings of his cavalry squadron after the disaster
on the Fifth Army front — the author enables you

[■79]

Waiting for Daylight

to feel how slender was the line of resolute men
which then saved the Army from downfall — he
had ventured to record with more courage the
things which it shamed him to see. Why should
only such as he know of those shocks to affability?
But all he says about some unpleasant matters is:
"During those days we saw things of which it is
not good to speak — of which afterwards we
never did speak, except late at nights, in the
privacy of our own mess."

Mr. Beaman's simple narrative, however, with
its humanity and easy humour, often lets in light
on strange affairs, as though he had forgotten
what had been locked up, and had carelessly
opened a forbidden door. He shuts it again at
once, like a gentlemen, and we follow him round
hoping that presently he will do the same again.
Ambrose Bierce could have made something of
what is suggested in such a passage as this :

"On the borders of this horrid desolation (the Somme)
we met a Salvage Company at work. That warren of
trenches and dugouts extended for untold miles. . . .
They warned us, if we insisted on going further in, not
to let any man go singly, but only in strong parties, as
the Golgotha was peopled with wild men, British,
French, Australian, German deserters, who lived there
underground, like ghouls among the mouldering dead,
and who came out at nights to plunder and kill. In

[1 80]

The South Downs

the night, an officer said, mingled with the snarling of
carrion dogs, they often heard inhuman cries and rifle-
shots coming from that awful wilderness. Once they
(the Salvage Company) had put out, as a trap, a basket
containing food, tobacco, and a bottle of whisky. But
the following morning they found the bait untouched,
and a note in the basket, 'Nothing doing!'"

[i8i]

XXX. Kipling

JUNE 5, 1920. One day, when I did not
know Kipling's name, I found in a cabin
of a ship from Rangoon two paper-cov-
ered books, with a Calcutta imprint, smelling of
something, whatever it was, that did not exist in
England. The books were Plain Tales from the
Hills and Soldiers Three. It was high summer,
and in that cabin of a ship in the Albert Dock,
with its mixed odour of tea, teak, and cheroots, I
read through all. The force in those stories
went nearer to capturing me completely than any-
thing I have read since. I can believe now that
I just escaped taking a path which would have
given me a world totally different from the one I
know, and the narrowness of the escape makes
me feel tolerant towards the young people who
give up typewriting and book-keeping, and go out
into an unfriendly world determined to be Mary
Pickfords and Charlie Chaplins. A boy boards
a ship merely to get a parrot, and his friend, who
brought it from Burma, has gone to Leadenhall
Street; there is a long interval, with those books

[1821

Kipling

lying in a bunk. Such a trivial incident — some-
thing like it happening every week to everybody
— and to-day that boy, but for the Grace of God,
might be reading the leaders of the Morning
Post as the sole relief to a congested mind, going
every week to the cartoon of Punch as to barley
water for chronic prickly heat, and talking of
dealing with the heterodox as the Holy Office
used to deal with unbaptized Indian babies for
the good of their little souls.

I have recovered from those astonishing ad-
ventures with Kipling. I may read him to-day
with enjoyment, but safe from excitation. This
is due, perhaps, to a stringy constitution, subject
to bilious doubts, which loves to see lusty Youth
cock its hat when most nervous, swagger with
merry insolence to hide the uncertainty which
comes of self-conscious inexperience, assume a
cynical shrewdness to protect its credulity, and
imitate the abandon of the hard fellow who has
been to Hong, Kong, Tal Tal, and Delagoa Bay.
We enjoy seeing Youth act thus; but one learns
in time that a visit to Rhodesia, worse luck, makes
one no more intelligent than a week-end at
Brighton. Well, it doesn't matter. What in-
grates we should be now to turn on Kiphng be-
cause we disagree with the politics he prefers,

[183]

Waiting for Daylight

those loud opinions of his which, when we get too
much of them, remain in the ears for a while like
the echoes of a brass tray which a hearty child
banged for a drum. Though we hold the British
Constitution as sacred as the family vault we do
not think the less of Dickens because the awful
spectacle of our assembled legislators made him
laugh, nor do we leave the room when Beethoven
is played because his careless regard for a mon-
arch's divine right is painful to us. If Kipling
had not given us My Sunday at Home and The
Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney, how should
we have got them?

I have just read Kipling's book. Letters of
Travel. Its attractive title drew me to it, and is
to blame. Kipling has an uncanny gift of sight.
It prompts no divination in him, but its curiosity
misses nothing that is superficial. If he had
watched the Crucifixion, and had been its sole
recorder, we should have had a perfect repre-
sentation of the soldiers, the crowds, the weather,
the smells, the colours, and the three uplifted
figures; so lively a record that it would be im-
mortal for the fidelity and commonness of Its
physical experience. But we should never have
known more about the central figure than that
He was a cool and courageous rebel. Kipling

[184]

Kipling

can make a picture of an indifferent huddle of
fishing boats in a stagnant harbour which is more
enjoyable than being there. Letters from such a
traveller would attract one directly across the
bookshop. But these letters of his were ad-
dressed to his friends the Imperialists before the
War, and one may guess the rest. Such an ex-
posure moves one to sorrow over a writer whose
omniscience used to make the timorous believe
that arrogance, if lively enough, had some advan-
tage over reason.

Yet there is in a few of the letters enough to
show what we missed because they were not ad-
dressed to himself, or to anybody but a Com-
posite Portrait of The Breed. There are pas-
sages in the chapter called "Half a Dozen Pic-
tures" which clear all irritation from the mind
(for many of the author's insults are studied and
gratuitous) and leave nothing but respect for the
artist. These come when the artist sees only a
riot of Oriental deck passengers, bears, and ma-
caws, in the tropics; or a steamer coming round,
exposed by a clarity like crystal in the trough of
immense seas somewhere in the neighbourhood
of the Auckland Islands at dayfall. We get
such impressions when Kipling has, for the mo-
ment, forgotten the need to make a genuflection

[185]

Waiting for Daylight

towards the Absolute and Everlasting Chutney,
and Is a man and brother delighting in his craft.
The rest of the book has, one must admit, a
value, but it is an undesigned value; indeed, its
value is that it was designed to prove, at the time
it was written, something quite different. From
this book, with its recurring contempt for Eng-
land, you may sec what value we need have at-
tached to much that the assured and the violent
ever had to tell us about our Empire. If this
publication is, indeed, an act of contrition for
words unwisely written, then it should be read as
a warning by all who write. Materialists natur-
ally attach to transient circumstances a value
which the less patriotic of us might think not
really material. "We discussed, first of all, un-
der the lee of a wet deck-house in mid-Atlantic;
man after man cutting in and out of the talk as
he sucked at his damp tobacco." There is no
doubt Kipling supposes that the wet deck-house
adds a value to the words spoken under its lee-
side. Yet the words he reports are what one
may hear, with grief, any day in any tavern in the
hurry and excitement of ten minutes before clos-
ing time. But Kipling always thought an opin-
ion gained in value if expressed elsewhere than in
England. His ideal government would be a
[1 86]

Kipling

polo-player from Simla leading the crew of the
Bolivar.

Every horror in the world, the author of these
letters tells us, has its fitting ritual. How
easily, too, one realizes it, when feeling again the
fanatic heat and force of this maker of old magic
with the tom-tom; the vicious mockery, certain of
popular applause, of ideas that are not market-
able; the abrupt rancour whenever the common
folk must be mentioned; the spite felt for Eng-
land— "in England . . . you see where the
rot starts"; the sly suspicion of other countries,
and the consequent jealousy and fear; here it all
is, convulsive, uncertain, inflammable. The
prophet of Empire ! But the prophecy was
wrong. England, "where the rot starts," bore
most of the heat and burden of the day, and
saved the Empire for the money-mongers. And
what of the British youngsters who did that, who
were not materialists in the least, but many of
them the idealists for whom no abuse once could
be too vicious? The corruption of the Somme!
That faceless and nameless horror was the apo-
theosis of the Imperialist.

[187]

XXXI. A Devon Estuary

SEPTEMBER 1 1, 1920. "This areary ex-
panse," the guide-book explains, "will not
attract the tourist." The guide was
right. I was alone to that degree beyond mere
solitude when you feel you are not alone,
but that the place itself is observing you. Yet
only five miles away long lines of motor-cars
were waiting to take tourists, at ruinous prices,
to the authentic and admitted beauty spots.
There was not, as the polite convention would
put it, a soul about. It was certainly a dreary
expanse, but the sunlight there seemed strangely
brilliant, I thought, and, what was more curious,
appeared to be alive. It was quivering. The
transient glittering of some seagulls remote in
the blue was as if you could glimpse, now and
then, fleeting hints of what is immaculate in
heaven. Nothing of our business was In sight
anywhere except the white stalk of a lighthouse,
and that, I knew, was miles away across the es-
tuary whose waters were then invisible, for It
was not only low tide, but I was descending to the

[188]

A Devon Estuary-
saltings, having left the turf of the upper salt
marshes.

You felt that here in the saltings you were be-
yond human associations. The very vegetation
was unfamiliar. The thrift, sea lavender,
rocket, sea campion, and maritime spurge did not
descend so low as this. They came no nearer
than where the highest tidal marks left lines of
driftwood and bleached shells, just below the
break of the upper marshes. Here it was an-
other kingdom, neither sea nor land, but each al-
ternately during the spring tides. At first the
sandy mud was reticulated with sun-cracks, not
being daily touched by the sea, and the crevasses
gave a refuge for algae. There was a smell,
neither pleasant nor unpleasant, which reminded
you of something so deep in the memory that you
could not give it a name. But it was sound and
good. Beyond that dry flat the smooth mud
glistened as if earth were growing a new skin,
which yet was very tender. It was spongy, but
it did not break when I trod on it, though the
earth complained as I went. It was thinly sprin-
kled with a plant like little fingers of green glass,
the maritime samphire, and in the distance this
samphire gave the marsh a sheen of continuous
and vivid emerald.

[189]

Waiting for Daylight

The saltings looked level and unbroken. But
on walking seaward I was continually surprised
by drainage channels. These channels serpen-
tined everywhere, and were deep and wide.
Sometimes they contained nothing but silt, and
sometimes they were salt-water rivers. I came
upon each canyon unexpectedly. The first warn-
ing was a sudden eruption from it, a flock of dun-
lin, a flock which then passed seawards In a regi-
mented flight that was an alternate flash of light
and a swift shadow. Dunlin, curlew, oyster-
catchers, or gulls, left a gully just before I knew
I was headed off again. In one of these creeks,
however, the birds left me more than their deli-
cate footprints to examine. They left there a
small craft whose mast I had long taken to be a
stump projecting from the mud. A young man
In a brown beard, a brown shirt, and a pair of
khaki trousers was sitting on its skylight. He
hailed, and showed me how I could get to him
without sinking up to more than the knees In this
dreary spot.

"Stay here If you like," he said, when I was
with him. "When the tide is full I'll pull you
round to the village." It was a little cutter of
about fifteen tons, moored to the last huge links
of a cable, the rest of which had long been cov-
[190]

A Devon Estuary

ered up. I thought he was making holiday in
a novel way. "No," he replied, "I'm living
here."

It seems (I am but paraphrasing his apology)
that he returned from Cambrai, bringing back
from France, as a young officer, some wounds and
other decorations, but also his youthful credulity
and a remembrance of society's noble promises to
its young saviours. But not long after his re-
turn to us the sight of us made him feel disap-
pointed. He "stuck it," he said, as long as he
could. But the more he observed us the worse he
felt. That was why he gave up a good position
a second time on our account. "What was the
good of the money? The profiteers took most
of it. I worked hard, and had to give up what I
earned to every kind of parasite. London was
more disagreeable than ever was Flanders. Yet
I think I would not object to sweep the roads for
a community of good people. Yes, I thought
nothing could be worse than the dead in the mud.
But I found something worse. The minds of the
living who did not know what I knew in France
were worse to me. I couldn't remember the
friends I'd lost and remain where I was with
those people about me. It was more awful than
that German — did you ever meet him? — who lay

[191]

Waiting for Daylight

just the other side of the parapet for weeks and
weeks."

His only companion now is a paraffin stove,
which does not, perhaps, require a gas-mask to.
aid in its companionship, though about that I
won't be sure. The only conversation he hears
is that of the curlews ; subdued, cheerful, and very
intimate voices, having just that touch of melan-
choly which intimacy, when it is secure and genu-
ine, is sure to give, however jolly the intimacy
may be. He said that at first he was afraid he
could not live on what little money he had, and
must earn casually, after buying the boat, but "it's
easier to live than I thought. There's not nearly
as much worry needed as I used to suppose. It is
surprising how much one can do without. I was
rather scared at first when I got rid of my sense
of duty. But, after all, it is not so hard to be
free. Perhaps the world already has more soft
and easy people than is good for it. I find one
benefit of this life is that, being free of the crowd,
I feel indifferent about the way the crowd chooses
to go. I don't care now what the public does — •
that's its own affair, and I hope it will enjoy it."
After a silence he said: "That sounds selfish, I
know. And I'm not sure yet that it isn't. Any-
[192]

A Devon Estuary

how, if one could help one's fellows one would.
But is it possible to help them? When did they
last listen to reason? The only guides they will
listen to are frauds obvious enough to make an ass
lay back his ears. Well, I think I'll wait here
till the crowd knows enough to stop before it gets
to the edge of the steep place — if it can stop now."
I asked him what he read. "Very little. I
fish more than I read. You'd think It would take
only a week to learn all there is here. I should
have thought so once. I see now that I shall
never thoroughly know this estuary. It's a won-
derful place. Every tide is a new experience. I
am beginning to feel right again." In the boat,
going round to the village, he learned I was a
writer, rested on his oars, and drifted with the
tide. "I'll give you a job," he said. "Write a
book that will make people hate the idea that the
State is God as Moloch was at last hated. Turn
the young against it. The latest priest is the
politician. No ritual in any religion was worse
than this new worship of the State. If men don't
wake up to that then they are doomed." He be-
gan then to pull me towards humanity again.

[193]

XXXII. Barbellion

DECEMBER i8, 1920. When posterity
feels curious to discover what may have
caused the disaster to our community it
win get a little light from the merry confessions
of our contemporary great folk. Let It read
Colonel Replngton's Diary^ Mrs. Asqulth's book,
and the memoirs of General French. The gen-
eral, of course, Implies that he was so puzzled by
the neutrality of time and space, and by the fact
that the treacherous enemy was In trenches and
used big guns. Our descendants may learn from
these innocent revelations what quality of knowl-
edge and temper, to be found only In a superior
caste, guided the poor and lowly, and shaped our
fate for us. They will know why wars and fam-
ines were Inevitable for us, and why nothing could
avert doom from the youth of our Europe.
There is no disputing the Importance of these
confessions. But their relationship to literature?
For that matter they might be linoleum. Yet

[194]

Barbellion

there has been a book of confessions published
recently which may be read as literature when the
important gossip with the vast sales is merely
curious evidence for historians equipped for psy-
chological analysis. I mean Barbellion's Jour-
nal of a Disappointed Man.

It will interest our descendants to learn that
outside the circle which Colonel Repington re-
ports at its dinner-tables where the ladies were so
diverting, the fare usually excellent, and the gen-
tlemen discussed the "combing out" of mere men
for places hke Ypres, there was genuine knowl-
edge and warm understanding. Beyond those
cheerful dinner-tables, and in that outer darkness
of which the best people knew nothing except that
it was possible to rake it fruitfully with a comb,
there was a host of young men from which could
be manifested the courageous intellectual curios-
ity, the ardour for truth, the gusto for life, and
the love of earth, which we see in Kecling's letters
and Barbellion's diary. All Is shown in these
two books in an exceptional degree, and. In Bar-
bellion's diary, is expressed with a remarkable
wit and acuteness, and not seldom, as in the
description of a quarry, of a Beethoven Sym-
phony, of a rock-pool of the Devon coast, with a
beauty that is startling.

[195]

Waiting for Daylight

Keeling was killed In the War. Barbclllon
(who, as we know now, was Bruce Cummings)
never went to France, for he was dying, though
he did not know it, when he presented himself for
medical examination. But It is clear that though
secluded from the turmoil In a country cottage,
paralyzed, and his trunk already dead. Barbel-
lion's sensitive mind and imaginative sympathy
knew more of what was happening to his fellows
In France, and what it meant for us all, than the
combined Cabinet in Downing Street. That
spark of dying light was aware when the lumi-
naries on whom we depended were blind and igno-
rant. In his Last Diary, and within a day or two
of his death, he wrote of the Peace Treaty (May,
1 919) : "After all the bright hopes of last au-
tumn, justice will be done only when all the power
Is vested in the people. Every liberal-minded
man must feel the shame of it." But did such
men feel the shame of It? Refer to what the
popular writers, often liberal-minded, said about
the shame they felt at the time, and compare.
To Barbelllon, by the light of his expiring lamp,
was revealed what was hidden from nearly all ex-
perienced and active publicists. Is there any
doubt still of the superiority of imagination over
hard-headedness ?

[196]

Barbellion

Imagination instantly responds. Percolation
is a slow process in the hard head of the worldly-
wise. When we know that in the elderly, the
shrewd, and the practical, the desire for material
power and safety, qualified only by fear, served
as their substitute for the City of God during the
War, it is heartening to remember that there were
select though unknown young men, mere subjects
for "combing" like Barbellion, who made articu-
late an immense rebellious protest that was in the
best of our boys; who showed a mocking intui-
tion into us and our motives, as though we were
a species apart; a scorn of the world we had made
for them, a cruel knowledge of the cowardice and
meanness at the back of our warlike minds, and a
yearning for that world of beauty which might
have been, but which the acts of the clever and the
practical have turned into carrion among the
ruins. Would it matter now if we were bank-
rupt, and our Empire among the things that were,
if only we were turning to sackcloth and ashes be-
cause of that dousing of the glim in the heart of
the young?

This last diary of Bruce Cummings is sad
enough, for he could but lie inert, listen to the last
news of the War, and wonder incidentally who
would come to him first — the postman bringing

[197]

Waiting for Daylight

the reviews of his first book, or the bony old gen-
tleman bringing the scythe. He felt, of course,
the mockery of this frustration of his powers.
He thought — and, it seemed, with good reason —
that he was a tragic failure. But was he? Read
his books, and admit that he accomplished a little
that is beautiful and enduring, and that he did it
obscurely at a time when they who held most of
the fearful attention of the world were but work-
ing gravely on what their children would execrate.
Some critics find in the diary of Barbellion's
last days evidence that he remembered he was
writing for an audience. It may be there, but it
is not plain to me. It is likely that if we were
writing a paragraph while doubtful whether the
hair which held the sword over us would last till
we had finished, we might find we were not so joy-
ously abandoned to pure art as we used to be.
The interest of the book is that it is some more of
Bruce Cummings when we could not have ex-
pected another line from him. Apart even from
their literary value, it seems to me that some day
his three volumes may prove to bear historic
witness as important as that of Colonel Reping-
ton's diary. It was just such minds as Barbel-
lion's, not uncommon in the youth of our war
time — though in his case the unusual intuitions

[198]

Barbellion

and adventurous aspirations were defined by
genius — it was such minds that the war-mongers
condemned and destroyed. Those men were
selected for sarcifice because they had the very
qualities which, when lost to the community, then
it dies in its soul. They were candid with them-
selves, and questioned our warranty with the
same candour, but were modest and reticent;
they were kindly to us when they knew we were
wooden and wrong, and did our bidding, judg-
ing it was evil. In France they subdued their in-
surgent thoughts — -and what that sacrifice meant
to them in the lonely night watches I have been
privileged to learn — and surrendered, often in
terrible derision, to our will; and then in
cool and calculated audacity devised the very
tasks in which the bravest and most intelligent
would be the first to die.

[199]

XXXIII. Breaking the Spell

APRIL 8, 1 92 1. My seat by the Serpen-
tine was under a small and almost impal-
pable cloud of almond petals. The
babbling of ducks somewhere in the place where
the water seemed a pale and wavering fire was
like the sound of the upwelling of the hidden
spring of life. This was the spot where I could
sit and there quietly match the darker shades of
trouble in the afternoon papers, the time being
April in England, and the sky ineffable. There
was not a trace of mourning in the sky; not a
black-edged cloud. But human life, being an ur-
gent and serious affair, and not a bright blue emp-
tiness like Heaven; human life being a state of
trial in which, as favoured beings, we are "heated
hot with burning fears and dipped in baths of hiss-
ing tears" for our own good, could not be ex-
pected to look as pleasant, during so severe a
necessary process, as almond trees in blossom.
So I sat down and prepared to measure, from the
[200]

Breaking the Spell

news in the papers, the depth of the present bor-
der on our daily memorial card.

The black border was rather a deep one, when
measured. The fears were fairly hot. There
were no noticeable signs of any tears in the
papers, so far, but one could guess there would be
a deep extinguishing bath of them ready to hiss
presently, if all went well, and our affairs had un-
interrupted development under the usual clever
guides. And we had the guides. I could see
that. The papers were loud with the inspira-
tions of friends of ours who had not missed a
single lesson of the War for those who were not
in it; who were still resolute in that last and in-
dispensable ditch which no foe is ever likely to
reach. But by now the almond's cloud had van-
ished. I no longer heard the bubbling of the
well of life.

I finished reading the papers. Now I knew
our current fate, and felt as if I heard again the
gas gong going continuously. I had the feeling
in April, unknown to any snail on the thorn, that
the park was deafening with the clangour of pal-
lid, tense, and contending lunatics. The Serpen-
tine had receded from this tumult. Its tranquil
shimmering was now fatuous and unbelievable.
It was but half seen; its glittering was a distant
[201]

Waiting for Daylight

grimacing and mockery at my troubled human in-
telligence. It was nothing to do with me, and
showed it in that impertinent way. Two ducks,
two absurd ducks, suddenly appeared before me
on the polished water. They were bowing
politely to each other — only I was looking at
them — and were making soothing noises in im-
becile ignorance of the fate overhanging us all.
There was a boy not far away. He stood as still
as a thought entranced. He was watching a boat
with a paper sail. He was as intent as if he were
God observing the progress of Columbus, know-
ing now that America is about to be found.

If that boy had but guessed what I knew!
But he had not read the latest news. It is the
privilege of knowledge to be superior and grave;
to be able to smile sadly at the dream of a Golden
Galleon which childhood sees in April by the
Serpentine; for knov/ledge is aware of the truth,
the tumult surrounding us of contentious lunatics,
endless, inexplicable; the noise of mankind in its
upward journey towards the eclipse, or some
other heavenly mystery.

Presently that tinted mist which was a tree in

flower began to shine again through the dark

noise which the papers had made. The uproar

cleared a little. The water came nearer, its

[202]

Breaking the Spell

glittering growing stronger, Its fire burning to-
wards me. I saw In surprise through the gloom
in my mind that the fire had touched the elms;
their dark masses were faintly luminous. And
the mallard drake, riding on the outer pulses of
that radiation, was purple and emerald. But
would the beauty of the spring surprise us, I
wonder; would it still give the mind a twinge,
sadden us with a nameless disquiet, shoot through
us so keen an anguish when the almond tree is
there again on a bright day, if we were decent,
healthy, and happy creatures? Perhaps not. It
is hard to say. It is a great while since our skin-
less and touchy crowds of the wonderful indus-
trial era, moving as one man to the words of the
daily papers, were such creatures. Perhaps we
should merely yawn and stretch ourselves, feel re-
vived with the sun a little warmer on our backs,
and snuff up a pleasant smell which we remem-
bered; begin to whistle, and grope for an adze.

But we cannot have it so. The spring is not
for us. We have been so inventive. We have
desired other things, and we have got them. We
have cleverly made a way of life that exacts so
close an attention, if we would save it from dis-
aster, that we are now its prisoners. Peace and
freedom have become but a vision which the im-
[203]

Waiting for Daylight

prisoned view through the bars they themselves
have made. The spring we see now is in a world
not ours, a world we have left, which is still close
to us, but is unapproachable. The children are
in it, and even, apparently, the ducks. It is a
world we see sometimes, as a reminder — once a
year or so — of what we could have made of life,
and what we have.

Which is the real world? I worried over that
as I was leaving the park. I seemed to be getting
nearer to reality near Rotten Row. A reassuring
policeman was in sight. Motor-cars that were
humiliating with their enamel and crystal were
threading about. The fashionable ladies and
their consorts seemed to be in no doubt about the
world they were in. I began to feel mean and
actual. While thus composing my mind I chanced
to look backwards. A miniature glade was
there, where the tree-trunks were the columns in
an aisle. Was it a sward between them? I
doubt whether we could walk It. I call it green.
I know of no other word. Perhaps the sun was
playing tricks with it. It may not have been
there. As I kept my eye on it, disbelieving that
light — desirous to believe it, but unable to, faith
being weak — a rabbit moved into the aisle. I
call it a rabbit, for I know no other word. But I
[204]

Breaking the Spell

declare now that I do not accept that creature.
It sat up, and watched me. I don't say it was
there. As far as I know, any rabbit would have
been terrified with all those people about. But
not this apparition, its back to the sunset, with an
aura and radiant whiskers of gold. It regarded
me steadfastly. I looked around to see if I were
alone in this.

The policeman was unconscious of it. The
lady who sat on the chair opposite, the lady with
the noticeable yellow legs, was talking in anima-
tion, but I doubt it was about this rabbit. The
saunterers were passing without a sign. But one
little girl stood, her hands behind her, oblivious of
all but that admonitory creature In an unearthly
light, and was smiling at It. It was the only con-
firmation I had. I have no recollection now of
what I saw in the day's paper. I have later and
better news.

THE . END

[205]

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