^i^sj^^
J
THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
RIVERSIDE
y Ex Libris A
r ISAAC FOOT 1
TALES OF WAR
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
PLAYS OF GODS 6? MEN
DUBLIN : THE TALBOT PRESS LIMITED
LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN LIMITED
TALES OF WAR
BY
LORD DUNSANY BJu,3ra
HI
r trie tj>l6or pi;g««7j
DUBLIN
THE TALBOT PRESS LTD.
89 TALBOT STREET
LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN LTD.
1 ADELPHI TERRACE
FK&OOT
US7T3C:
First published in igi8
{All rights reserved)
CONTENTS
I
PAGE
THE PRAYER OF THE MEN OF DALESWOOD . . 9
II
THE ROAD . . . . . .21
III
AN IMPERIAL MONUMENT . . . • ^S
IV
A WALK TO THE TRENCHES . . . • ^g
V
A WALK IN PICARDY . . ... -34
VI
WHAT HAPPENED ON THE NIGHT OF THE TWENTY-
SEVENTH , . . . . -3^
VII
STANDING TO . * . . . . -43
VIII
THE HOMING PLANE . . . . • 4^
5
CONTENTS
IX
PAGE
ENGLAND . . . . . -49
X
SHELLS . . . . . . -54
XI
TWO DEGREES OF ENVY . . . . -59
XII
THE MASTER OF NOMAN's LAND . . -63
XIII
WEEDS AND WIRE . . . • .66
XIV
SPRING IN ENGLAND AND FLANDERS . . -70
XV
THE NIGHTMARE COUNTRIES . . . -74
XVI
SPRING AND THE KAISER . . . -7^
XVII
TWO SONGS
8i
XVIII
THE PUNISHMENT . . . . .84
XIX
THE ENGLISH SPIRIT . . . • • 9^
CONTENTS
XX
PAQE
AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE CAUSES AND ORIGIN OF
THE WAR . . . . . .96
XXI
LOST ....... 103
XXII
THE LAST MIRAGE ..... IO7
XXIII
A FAMOUS MAN . . . . • .III
XXIV
THE OASES OF DEATH . . . . II6
XXV
ANGLO-SAXON TYRANNY .
118
XXVI
MEMORIES ...... 123
XXVII
THE MOVEMENT ...... I27
XXVIII
nature's cad . . . ... . 132
XXIX
THE HOME OF HERR SCHNITZELHAASER . . I38
CONTENTS
XXX
A DEED OF MERCY
XXXI
LAST SCENE OF ALL
XXXII
OLD ENGLAND . .
PAex
149
153
8
I
THE PRAYER OF THE
MEN OF DALESWOOD
HE said: "There were only twenty houses in
Daleswood. A place you would scarcely
have heard of. A village up top of the hills.
" When the war came there was no more
than thirty men there between sixteen and
forty-five. They all went.
" They all kept together .- same battalion,
same platoon. They was like that in Dales-
wood. Used to call the hop-pickers foreigners,
the ones that come from London. They used
to go past Daleswood, some of them, every
year, on their way down to the hop-fields.
Foreigners they used to call them. Kept very
much to themselves did the Daleswood people.
Big woods all round them.
" Very lucky they was, the Daleswood men.
They'd lost no more than five killed and a
good sprinkHng of wounded. But all the
TALES OF WAR
wounded was back again with the platoon.
This was up to March, when the big offensive
started.
" It came very sudden. No bombardment
to speak of. Just a burst of Tok Emmas going
off all together and lifting the front trench
clean out of it ; then a barrage behind, and
the Boche pouring over in thousands. * Our
luck is holding good,' the Daleswood men
said, for their trench wasn't getting it at all.
But the platoon on their right got it. And it
sounded bad, too, a long way beyond that.
No one could be quite sure. But the platoon
on their right was getting it : that was sure
enough.
" And then the Boche got through them
altogether. A message came to say so. ' How
are things on the right ? ' they said to the
runner. * Bad,' said the runner ; and he
went back, though Lord knows what he went
back to. The Boche was through right enough.
" ' We'll have to make a defensive flank,'
said the platoon commander. He was a Dales-
wood man, too. Came from the big farm.
He slipped down a communication trench
with a few men, mostly bombers. And they
reckoned they wouldn't see any of them any
10
THE MEN OF DALESWOOD
more, for the Boche was on the right, thick as
starHngs.
"The bullets were snapping over thick to
keep them down while the Boche went on
on the right : machine guns, of course. The
barrage was screaming well over and dropping
far back, and their wire was still all right
just in front of them when they put up a head
to look. They was the left platoon of the
battalion. One doesn't bother, somehow, so
much about another battalion as one's own.
One's own gets sort of homely. And there
they were wondering how their own officer
was getting on, and the few fellows with him,
on his defensive flank. The bombs were going
off thick. All the Daleswood men were firing
half -right. It sounded from the noise as if
it couldn't last long, as if it would soon be
decisive, and the battle be won, or lost, just
there on the right, and perhaps the war ended.
They didn't notice the left. Nothing to
speak of.
" Then a runner came from the left. * Hullo ! '
they said. * How are things over there ? '
" ' The Boche is through,' he said. ' Where's
the officer ? '
" ' Through I ' they said. It didn't seem
II
TALES OF WAR
possible. However did he do that ? they
thought. And the runner went on to the right
to look for the officer.
" And then the barrage shifted farther back.
The shells still screamed over them, but the
bursts were farther away. That is always a
relief. Probably they felt it. But it was
bad, for all that. Very bad. It meant the
Boche was well past them. They realized it
after a while.
" They and their bit of wire were some-
how just between two waves of attack. Like a
bit of stone on the beach with the sea coming
in. A platoon was nothing to the Boche ;
nothing much perhaps just then to anybody.
But it was the whole of Daleswood for one
long generation.
" The youngest full-grown man they had
left behind was fifty, and someone had heard
that he had died since the war. There was'
no one else in Daleswood but women and
children, and boys up to seventeen.
" The bombing had stopped on their right,
everything was quieter, and the barrage
farther away. When they began to realize
what that meant, they began to talk of Dales-
wood. And then they thought that when all
12
THE MEN OF DALESWOOD
of them were gone there would be nobody
who would remember Daleswood just as it
used to be. For places alter a little, woods
grow, and changes come : trees get cut down,
old people die ; new houses are built now and
then in place of a yew-tree, or any old thing,
that used to be there before ; and one way
or another the old things go ; and all the time
you have people thinking that the old times
were best, and the old ways when they were
young. And the Daleswood men were begin-
ning to say : ' Who would there be to re-
member it just as it was ? '
"There was no gas, the wind being wrong
for it, so they were able to talk — that is, if
they shouted, for the bullets alone made as
much noise as breaking up an old shed, crisper
like, more like new timber breaking ; and
the shells, of course, was howling all the time,
that is the barrage that was bursting far
back. The trench still stank of them.
*' They said that one of them must go over
and put his hands up, or run away if he could,
whichever he liked, and when the war was
over he would go to some writing fellow, one
of those what makes a Hving by it, and tell
him all about Daleswood, just as it used to
13
TALES OF WAR
be, and he would write it out proper, and there
it would be for always. They all agreed to
that. And then they talked a bit, as well
as they could above that awful screeching, to
try and decide who it should be. The eldest,
they said, would know Daleswood best. But
he said, and they came to agree with him,
that it would be a sort of waste to save the
life of a man what had had his good time,
and they ought to send the youngest, and they
would tell him all they knew of Daleswood
before his time, and everything would be
written down just the same, and the old time
remembered.
" They had the idea, somehow, that the
women thought more of their own man and
their children and the washing and what-not,
and that the deep woods and the great hills
beyond, and the ploughing and the harvest and
snaring rabbits in winter, and the sports in the
village in summer, and the hundred things that
pass the time of one generation in an old old
place like Daleswood, meant less to them
than the men. Anyhow, they did not quite
seem to trust them with the past. The
youngest of them was only just eighteen.
That was Dick. They told him to get out
14
THE MEN OF DALESWOOD
and put his hands up, and be quick getting
across, as soon as they had told him one or
two things about the old time in Daleswood
that a youngster like him wouldn't know.
" Well, Dick said he wasn't going, and was
making trouble about it ; so they told Fred
to go. Back, they told him, was best, and
come up behind the Boche with his hands up ;
they would be less likely to shoot when it
was back towards their own supports.
" Fred wouldn't go, and so on with the rest.
Well, they didn't waste time quarrelling, time
being scarce, and they said : What was to
be done ?
" There was chalk where they were, low
down in the trench, a little brown clay
on the top of it. There was a great block
of it loose near a shelter. They said they
would carve with their knives on the big
boulder of chalk all that they knew about
Daleswood. They would write where it was
and just what it was hke, and they would
write something of all those Httle things that
pass with a generation. They reckoned on
having the time for it. It would take a direct
hit with something large, what they call big
stuff, to do any harm to that boulder. They
i5
TALES OF WAR
had no confidence in paper, it got so messed
up when you were hit ; besides, the Boche
had been using thermite. Burns, that does.
" They'd one or two men that were handy
at carving chalk ; used to do the regimental
crest and pictures of Hindenburg, and all that.
They decided they'd do it in reliefs.
" They started smoothing the chalk. They
had nothing more to do but just to think
what to write. It was a great big boulder
with plenty of room on it. The Boche seemed
not to know that they hadn't killed the Dales-
wood men, just as the sea mightn't know that
one stone stayed dry at the coming in of the
tide. A gap between two divisions, probably.
^ " Harry wanted to tell of the woods more
than anything. He was afraid they might
cut them down because of the war, and no
one would know of the larks they had had
there as boys. Wonderful old woods they
were, with a lot of Spanish chestnut growing
low, and tall old oaks over it. Harry wanted
them to write down what the foxgloves were
like in the wood at the end of summer, standing
there in the evening, * Great solemn rows,'
he said, * all odd in the dusk. All odd in
the evening, going there after work, and
i6
THE MEN OF DALESWOOD
makes you think of fairies/ There was lots
of things about those woods, he said, that
ought to be put down if people were to
remember Daleswood as it used to be when
they knew it. What were the good old days
without those woods ? he said.
"But another wanted to tell of the time
when they cut the hay with scythes, working all
those long days at the end of June ; there
would be no more of that, he said, with
machines come in and all.
" There was room to tell of all that, and the
woods too, said the others, so long as they
put it short like.
" And another wanted to tell of the valleys
beyond the wood, far afield, where the men
went working ; the women would remember
the hay. The great valleys he'd tell of. It
was they that made Daleswood. The valleys
beyond the wood, and the twihght on them in
summer. Slopes covered with mint and thyme,
all solemn at evening. A hare on them per-
haps, sitting as though they were his, then
lolloping slowly away. It didn't seem, from
the way he told of those old valleys, that he
thought they could ever be to other folk what
they were to the Daleswood men in the days
B 17
TALES OF WAR
he remembered. He spoke of them as though
there were something in them, besides the
mint and the thyme and the twihght and
hares, that would not stay after these men
were gone, though he did not say what it
was. Scarcely hinted it, even.
" And still the Boche did nothing to the
Daleswood men. The bullets had ceased alto-
gether. That made it much quieter. The
shells still snarled over, bursting far, far away.
" And Bob said tell of Daleswood itself, the
old village, with queer chimneys, of red brick,
in the wood. There weren't houses like that
nowadays. They'd be building new ones and
spoiling it, likely, after the war. And that
was all he had to say.
" And nobody was for not putting down
anything anyone said. It was all to go in on
the chalk, as much as would go in the time.
For they all sort of understood that the Dales-
wood of what they called the good old time
was just the memories that those few men
had of the days they had spent there together.
And that was the Daleswood they loved, and
wanted folks to remember. They were all
agreed as to that. And then they said how
was they to write it down. And when it
i8
THE MEN OF DALESWOOD
came to writing there was so much to be said,
not spread over a lot of paper I don't mean,
but going down so deep Uke, that it seemed to
them how their own talk wouldn't be good
enough to say it. And they knew no other,
and didn't know what to do. I reckon they'd
been reading magazines, and thought that
writing had to be like that muck. Anyway
they didn't know what to do. I reckon their
talk would be good enough for Daleswood
when they loved Daleswood like that. But
they didn't, and they were puzzled.
'^The Boche was miles away behind them
now, and his barrage with him. Still in front
he did nothing.
" They talked it all over and over did the
Daleswood men. They tried everything. But
somehow or other they couldn't get near what
they wanted to say about old summer evenings.
Time wore on. The boulder was smooth and
ready, and that whole generation of Daleswood
men could find no words to say what was in
their hearts about Daleswood. There wasn't
time to waste. And the only thing they thought
of in the end was : ' Please, God, remember
Daleswood just like it used to be.' And Bill and
Harry carved that on the chalk between them.
19
TALES OF WAR
" What happened to the Dales wood men ?
Why, nothing. There come one of them
counter-attacks, a regular bastard for Jerry.
The French made it, and did the Boche in
proper. I got the story from a man with a
hell of a great big hammer, long afterwards,
when that trench was well behind our line.
He was smashing up a huge great chunk of
chalk because he said they all felt it was so
dam silly."
20
v'm
II
THE ROAD
'TT^HE Battery Sergeant-Major was practi-
-■- cally asleep. He was all worn-out by the
continuous roar of bombardments that had
been shaking the dug-outs and dazing his
brains for weeks. He was pretty well fed up.
The Officer commanding the battery, a young
man in a very neat uniform and of particularly
high birth, came up and spat in his face. The
Sergeant-Major sprang to attention, received
an order, and took a stick at once and beat
up the tired men. For a message had come
to the battery that some English (God punish
them !) were making a road at X.
The gun was fired. It was one of those
unlucky shots that come on days when our
luck is out. The shell, a 5*9, lit in the midst
of the British working-party. It did the
Germans little good. It did not stop the deluge
of shells that was breaking up their guns
21
TALES OF WAR
and was driving misery down like a wedge
into their spirits. It did not improve the
temper of the officer commanding the battery,
so that the men suffered as acutely as ever
under the Sergeant-Major. But it stopped
the road for that day.
I seemed to see that road going on in a
dream.
Another working-party came along next
day, with clay-pipes, and got to work : and
next day and the day after. Shells came,
but went short or over : the shell-holes were
neatly patched up : the road went on. Here
and there a tree had to be cut, but not often ;
not many of them were left ; it was mostly
digging and grubbing up roots, and pushing
wheelbarrows along planks and duck-boards,
and filling up with stones. Sometimes the
Engineers would come ; that was when streams
were crossed. The Engineers made their
bridges, and the infantry working-party went
on with the digging and laying down stones.
It was monotonous work. Contours altered,
soil altered, even the rock beneath it, but the
desolation never ; they always worked in
desolation and thunder. And so the road
went on.
22
THE ROAD
They came to a wide river. They went
through a great forest. They passed the ruins
of what must have been quite fine towns — big
prosperous towns, with universities in them.
I saw the infantry working-party, with their
stumpy clay-pipes, in my dream, a long way
on from where that shell had lit, which stopped
the road for a day. And behind them curious
changes came over the road at X. You saw
the infantry going up to the trenches, and
going back along it into reserve. They marched
at first, but in a few days they were going up
in motors — grey buses with shuttered windows.
And then the guns came along it — miles and
miles of guns, following after the thunder,
which was further off over the hills. And then
one day the cavalry came by. Then stores
in wagons, the thunder muttering further
and further away. I saw farm-carts going
down the road at X. And then one day all
manner of horses and traps and laughing
people, farmers and women and boys, all
going up to X. There was going to be a fair.
And far away the road was growing longer
and longer, amidst, as always, desolation and
thunder. And one day, far away from X, the
road grew very fine indeed. It was going
23
TALES OF WAR
proudly through a mighty city, sweeping in
like a river ; you would not think that it
ever remembered duck-boards. There were
great palaces there, with huge armorial eagles
blazoned in stone, and all along each side of
the road was a row of statues of kings. And
going down the road towards the palace, past
the statues of the kings, a tired procession was
riding, full of the flags of the AlUes. And I
looked at the flags in my dream, out of national
pride to see whether we led, or whether France
or America went before us ; but I could not
see the Union Jack in the van, nor the Tri-
colour either, or the Stars and Stripes : Belgium
led, and then Serbia, they that had suffered
most.
And before the flags, and before the generals,
I saw marching along on foot the ghosts of
the working-party that were killed at X, gazing
about them in admiration as they went, at
the great city and at the palaces. And one
man, wondering at the Sieges Alice, turned
round to the lance-corporal in charge of the
party : " That is a fine road that we made,
Frank ! " he said.
24
Ill
AN IMPERIAL
MONUMENT
IT is an early summer's morning : the dew
is all over France : the train is going
eastwards. They are quite slow, those troop-
trains, and there are few embankments or
cuttings in those flat plains, so that you seem
to be meandering along through the very life
of the people. The roads come right down to
the railways, and the sun is shining brightly
over the farms and the people going to work
along the roads, so that you can see their
faces clearly as the slow train passes them by.
They are all women and boys that work
on the farms, sometimes perhaps you see
a very old man, but nearly always women
and boys ; they are out working early. They
straighten up from their work as we go by,
and lift their hands to bless us.
We pass by long rows of the tall French
25
TALES OF WAR
poplars, their branches cut away all up the
trunk, leaving only an odd round tuft at the
top of the tree : but little branches are grow-
ing all up the trunk now, and the poplars
are looking unkempt. It would be the young
men who would cut the branches of the poplars.
They would cut them for some useful thrifty
purpose that I do not know ; and then they
would cut them because they were always
cut that way, as long ago as the times of the
old men's tales about France ; but chiefly,
I expect, because youth likes to climb difficult
trees ; that is why they are clipped so very
high. And the trunks are all unkempt now.
We go on by many farms with their shapely
red-roofed houses : they stand there having
the air of the homes of an ancient people :
they would not be out of keeping with any
romance that might come, or any romance
that has come in the long story of France ;
and the girls of those red-roofed houses
work all alone in the fields.
We pass by many willows and come to a
great marsh. In a punt on some open water
an old man is angling. We come to fields
again, and then to a deep wood. France
smiles about us in the morning sunlight.
26
AN IMPERIAL MONUMENT
But towards evening we pass over the border
of this pleasant country into a tragical land of
destruction and gloom. It is not only that
murder has walked here to and fro for years,
until all the fields are ominous with it, but the
very fields themselves have been mutilated
until they are unlike fields ; the woods have
been shattered right down to the anemonies,
and the houses have been piled in heaps of
rubbish, and the heaps of rubbish have been
scattered by shells. We see no more trees,
no more houses, no more women, no cattle
even, now. We have come to the abomination
of desolation. And over it broods and will
probably brood for ever, accursed by men
and accursed by the very fields, the hyena-like
memory of the Kaiser, who has whitened so
many bones.
It may be some satisfaction to his selfishness
to know that the monument to it cannot pass
away ; to know that the shell-holes go too
deep to be washed away by the healing rains
of years ; to know that the wasted German
generations will not in centuries gather up
what has been spilt on the Somme, or France
recover in the sunshine of many summers
from all the misery that his devilish folly has
27
X
TALES OF WAR
«»
caused. It is likely to be to such as him a
source of satisfaction, for the truly vain care
only to be talked of in many mouths : they
hysterically love to be thought of, and the
notice of mankind is to them a mirror which
reflects their futile postures. The admiration
of fools they love, and the praise of a slave-like
people, but they would sooner be hated by
mankind than to be ignored and forgotten
as is their due. And the truly selfish care
only for their imperial selves.
Let us leave him to pass in thought from
ruin to ruin, from wasted field to field, from
crater to crater ; let us leave his fancy
haunting cemeteries in the stricken lands of
the world, to find what glee he can in this
huge manifestation of his imperial will.
We neither know to what punishment he
moves nor can even guess what fitting one is
decreed. But the time is surely appointed
and the place. Poor trifler with Destiny,
who ever had so much to dread ?
28
IV
A WALK TO
THE TRENCHES
TO stand at the beginning of a road is
always wonderful ; for on all roads, before
they end, experience lies, sometimes adventure.
And a trench, even as a road, has its beginnings
somewhere. In the heart of a very strange
country you find them suddenly. A trench
may begin in the ruins of a house, may run
up out of a ditch ; may be cut into a rise of
ground sheltered under a hill, and is built
in many ways by many men. As to who is
the best builder of trenches there can be little
doubt, and any British soldier would probably
admit that for painstaking work and excellence
of construction there are few to rival von
Hindenburg. His Hindenburg Line is a model
of neatness and comfort, and it would be only
a very ungrateful British soldier who would
deny it.
29
TALES OF WAR
You come to the trenches out of strangely
wasted lands ; you come perhaps to a wood
in an agony of contortions — black, branchless,
sepulchral trees, and then no more trees at all.
The country after that is still called Belgium
or Picardy, still has its old name on the map,
as though it smiled there still, sheltering
cities and hamlets and radiant with orchards
and gardens ; but the country named Picardy,
or whatever it be, is all gone away, and there
stretches for miles instead one of the world's
great deserts, a thing to take its place no longer
with smiling lands, but with Sahara, Gobi,
Kalahari, and the Karoo ; not to be thought
of as Picardy, but more suitably to be named
the Desert of Wilhelm. Through these sad
lands one goes to come to the trenches. Over-
head floats, until it is chased away, an aeroplane
with little black crosses, that you can scarcely
see at his respectful height, peering to see
what more harm may be done in the desolation
and ruin. Little flashes sparkle near him,
white puffs spread out round the flashes : and
he goes, and our airmen go away after him ;
black puffs break out round our airmen. Up
in the sky you hear a faint tap-tapping. They
have got their machine guns working.
30
A WALK TO THE TRENCHES
You see many things there that are unusual
in deserts — a good road, a railway, perhaps a
motor-bus ; you see what was obviously once
a village, and hear English songs, but no one
who has not seen it can imagine the country
in which the trenches lie, unless he bear a
desert clearly in mind — a desert that has
moved from its place on the map, by some
enchantment of wizardry, and come down
on a smiling country. Would it not be
glorious to be a Kaiser and be able to do
things like that ?
Past all manner of men, past no trees, no
hedges, no fields, but only one field from sky-
line to skyline that has been harrowed by war,
one goes with companions that this event in
our history has drawn from all parts of the
earth. On that road you may hear, all in one
walk, where is the best place to get lunch in
the City ; you may hear how they laid a drag
for some Irish pack, and what the Master said ;
you may hear a farmer lamenting over the
harm that rhinoceroses do to his coffee crop ;
you may hear Shakespeare quoted and "La
Vie Parisienne."
In the village you see a lot of German orders,
with their silly notes of exclamation after
31
TALES OF WAR
them, written up on notice-boards among
the ruins. Ruins and German orders. That
turning movement of von Kluck's near Paris
in 1914 was a mistake. Had he not done it,
we might have had ruins and German orders
everywhere. And yet von Kluck may comfort
himself with the thought that it is not by his
mistakes that Destiny shapes the world ; such
a nightmare as a world-wide German domina-
tion can have had no place amongst the scheme
of things.
Beyond the village the batteries are thick.
A great howitzer near the road lifts its huge
muzzle, slowly fires and goes down again, and
lifts again and fires. It is as though Poly-
phemus had lifted his huge shape slowly,
leisurely, from the hillside where he was sitting,
and hurled the mountain-top, and sat down
again. If he is firing pretty regularly, you
are sure to get the blast of one of them as you
go by, and it can be a very strong wind indeed.
One's horse, if one is riding, does not very
much like it ; but I have seen horses far more
frightened by a puddle on the road when
coming home from hunting in the evening :
one 12-inch howitzer more or less in France
calls for no great attention from man or beast.
32
A WALK TO THE TRENCHES
And so we come in sight of the support
trenches where we are to dwell for a week,
before we go on for another mile over the hills
where the black fountains are rising.
33
A WALK IN
PIGARDY
PICTURE any village you know. In such a
village as that the trench begins. That is
to say, there are duck-boards along a ditch, and
the ditch runs into a trench. Only the village
is no longer there. It was like some village you
know, though perhaps a little merrier, because
it was further south and nearer the sun ; but
it is all gone now. And the trench runs out
of the ruins and is called Windmill Avenue.
There must have been a windmill standing
there once.
When you come from the ditch to the trench
you leave the weeds and soil and trunks of
willows and see the bare chalk. At the top
of those two white walls is a foot or so of brown
clay. The brown clay grows deeper as you
come to the hills, until the chalk has disappeared
altogether. Our alliance with France is new
34
A WALK IN PICARDY
in the history of man, but it is an old, old
union in the history of the hills. White chalk
with brovv^n clay on top has dipped and gone
under the sea ; and the hills of Sussex and
Kent are one with the hills of Picardy.
And so you may pass through the chalk
that lies in that desolate lane with memories
of more silent and happier hills ; it all depends
what the chalk means to you. You may be
unfamiliar with it, and in that case you will
not notice it. Or you may have been born
among those thyme-scented hills, and yet
have no errant fancies, so that you will not
think of the hills that watched you as a child^
but only keep your mind on the business in
hand ; that is probably best.
You come after a while to other trenches :
notice-boards guide you, and you keep to
Windmill Avenue. You go by Pear Lane,
Cherry Lane, and Plum Lane. Pear-trees,
cherry-trees and plum-trees must have grown
there. You are passing either through wild
lanes banked with briar, over which these
various trees peered one by one and showered
their blossoms down at the end of spring,
and girls would have gathered the fruit when
it ripened, with the help of tall young men.
35
TALES OF WAR
or else you are passing through an old walled
garden, and the pear and the cherry and plum
were growing against the wall, looking south-
wards all through the summer. There is no
way whatever of telling which it was ; it is
all one in war. Whatever was there is gone ;
there remain to-day, and survive, the names
of those three trees only. We come next
to Apple Lane. You must not think that an
apple-tree ever grew there, for we trace here
the hand of the wit, who by naming Plum
Lane's neighbour " Apple Lane " merely com-
memorates the inseparable connection that
plum has with apple for ever in the minds of
all who go to modern war. For by mixing
apple with plum the manufacturer sees the
opportunity of concealing more turnip in the
jam, as it were at the junction of the two
forces, than he might be able to do without
this unholy alliance.
We come presently to the dens of those
who trouble us, but only for our own good —
the dug-outs of the trench mortar batteries.
It is noisy when they push up close to the
front line and play for half an hour or so with
their rivals. The enemy sends stuff back ;
our artillery join in. It is as though, while
36
A WALK IN PICARDY
you were playing a game of croquet, giants
hundreds of feet high, some of them friendly,
some unfriendly, carnivorous and hungry,
came and played football on your croquet
lawn.
We go on past Battalion Headquarters, and
past the dug-outs and shelters of various
people having business with history ; past
stores of bombs and the many other ingredi-
ents with which history is made ; past men
coming down who are very hard to pass, for
the width of two men and two packs is the
width of a communication trench, and some-
times an inch over ; past two men carrying
a flying pig slung on a pole between them ;
by many turnings ; and Windmill Avenue brings
you at last to Company Headquarters, in a
dug-out that Hindenburg made with his
German thoroughness.
And there after a while descends the Tok
Emma man, the officer commanding a trench
mortar battery, and is given perchance a
whisky and water, and sits on the best empty
box that we have to offer, and lights one. of
our cigarettes.
" There's going to be a bit of a strafe at
5.30," he says.
'^7
VI
WHAT HAPPENED ON
THE NIGHT OF THE
TWENTY-SEVENTH ■
THE night of the twenty-seventh was Dick
Cheeser's first night on sentry. The night
was far gone when he went on duty ; in
another hour they would stand to. Dick Cheeser
had camouflaged his age when he enlisted;
he was barely eighteen. A wonderfully short
time ago he was quite a little boy ; now he
was in a front-line trench. It hadn't seemed
that things were going to alter like that.
Dick Cheeser was a ploughboy : long brown
furrows over haughty, magnificent downs
seemed to stretch away into the future as far
as his mind could see. No narrow outlook
either, for the life of nations depends upon
those brown furrows. But there are the bigger
furrows that Mars makes, the long brown
trenches of war ; the life of nations depends
38
NIGHT OF THE TWENTY-SEVENTH
on these too ; Dick Cheeser had never
pictured these. He had heard talk about
a big Navy and a lot of Dreadnoughts, silly
nonsense he called it. What did one want
a big Navy for ? To keep the Germans out,
some people said. But the Germans weren't
coming. If they wanted to come, why didn't
they come ? Anybody could see that they
never did come. Some of Dick Cheeser's
pals had votes.
And so he had never pictured any change
from ploughing the great downs ; and here
was war at last, and here was he. The
corporal showed him where to stand, told
him to keep a good look out, and left him.
And there was Dick Cheeser alone in the
dark with an army in front of him, eighty
yards away ; and, if all tales were true, a
pretty horrible army.
The night was awfully still. I use the
adverb not as Dick Cheeser would have used
it. The stillness awed him. There had not
been a shell all night. He put his head up
over the parapet and waited. Nobody fired
at him. He felt that the night was waiting
for him. He heard voices going along the
trench : someone said it was a black night :
39
TALES OF WAR
the voices died away. A mere phrase ; the
night wasn't black at all ; it was grey ; Dick
Cheeser was staring at it, and the night was
staring back at him and seemed to be threaten-
ing him. It was grey, grey as an old cat
that they used to have at home, and as artful.
Yes, thought Dick Cheeser, it was an artful
night ;, that was what was wrong with it. If
shells had come or the Germans, or anything
at all, you Would know how to take it ; but
that quiet mist over huge valleys, and stillness !
Anything might happen. Dick waited and
waited, and the night waited too. He felt
they were watching each other, the night and
he. He felt that each was crouching. His
mind slipped back to the woods on hills he
knew. He was watching with eyes and ears
and imagination to see what would happen
in Noman's Land under that ominous mist :
but his mind took a peep, for all that, at the
old woods that he knew. He pictured himself,
he and a band of boys, chasing squirrels again
in the summer. They used to chase a squirrel^
from tree to tree, throwing stones, till they
tired it ; and then they might hit it with a
stone : usually not. Sometimes the squirrel
would hide, and a boy would have to climb
40
NIGHT OF THE TWENTY-SEVENTH
after it. It was great sport, thought Dick
Cheeser. What a pity he hadn't had a catapult
in those days, he thought. Somehow the
years when he had not had a catapult seemed
all to be wasted years. With a catapult
one might get the squirrel almost at once,
with luck : and what a great thing that would
be 1 All the other boys would come round
to look at the squirrel, and to look at the
catapult, and ask him how he did it. He
wouldn't have to say much : there would be
the squirrel ; no boasting would be neces-
sary with the squirrel lying dead. It might
spread to other things, even rabbits, almost
anything in fact. He would certainly get a
catapult first thing when he got home. A little
wind blew in the night, too cold for summer.
It blew away, as it were, the summer of Dick's
memories ; blew away hills and woods and
squirrel. It made for a moment a lane in the
mist over Noman's Land. Dick Cheeser
peered down it, but it closed again. " No,"
Night seemed to say. " You don't guess my
secret." And the awful hush intensified.
" What would they do ? " thought the sentry.
" What were they planning in all those miles
of silence ? " Even the Verys were few. When
41
TALES OF WAR
one went up, far hills seemed to sit and brood
over the valley. But their black shapes seemed
to know what would happen in the mist,
and seemed sworn not to say. The rocket
faded and the hills went back into mystery
again, and Dick Cheeser peered level again
over the ominous valley.
All the dangers and sinister shapes and evil
destinies, lurking between the armies in that
mist, that the sentry faced that night cannot
be told until the history of the war is written
by a historian who can see the mind of the
soldier. Not a shell fell all night, no German
stirred ; Dick Cheeser was relieved at " Stand
to " and his comrades stood to beside him,
and soon it was wide, golden, welcome dawn.
And for all the threats of night the thing
that happened was one that the lonely sentry
had never foreseen : in the hour of his watching
Dick Cheeser, though scarcely eighteen, became
a full-grown man.
42
VII
STANDING TO
ONE cannot say that one time in the
trenches is any more tense than another.
One cannot take any one particular hour and
call it, in modern nonsensical talk, " typical
hour in the trenches." The routine of the
trenches has gone on too long for that. The
tensest hour ought to be half an hour before
dawn, the hour when attacks are expected and
men stand to. It is an old convention of war
that that is the dangerous hour, the hour
when defenders are weakest and attack most
to be feared. For darkness favours the
attackers then as night favours the lion, and
then dawn comes and they can hold their
gains in the light. Therefore in every trench
in every war the garrison is prepared in that
menacing hour, watching in greater numbers
than they do the whole night through. As the
first lark lifts from meadows they stand there
43
TALES OF WAR
in the dark. Whenever there is any war in
any part of the world you may be sure that at
that hour men crowd to their parapets : when
sleep is deepest in cities they are watching
there.
When the dawn shimmers a little and a
grey light comes, and widens, and all of a
sudden figures become distinct, and the hour of
the attack that is always expected is gone, then
perhaps some faint feeling of gladness stirs
the newest of the recruits ; but chiefly the
hour passes like all the other hours there — an
unnoticed fragment of the long, long routine
that is taken with resignation mingled with
jokes.
Dawn comes shy, with a wind scarce felt,
dawn faint and strangely perceptible, feeble
and faint in the East while men still watch
the darkness. When did the darkness go ?
When did the dawn grow golden ? It happened
as in a moment, a moment you did not see.
Guns flash no longer : the sky is gold and serene.
Dawn stands there like Victory, that will shine
on one of these years when the Kaiser goes
the way of the older curses of earth. Dawn,
and the men unfix bayonets as they step
down from the fire-step, and clean their rifles
STANDING TO
with pull-throughs. Not all together, but
section by section, for it would not do for a
whole company to be caught cleaning their
rifles at dawn, or at any other time.
They rub off the mud or the rain that has
come at night on their rifles ; they detach
the magazine and see that its spring is
working ; they take out the breech-block and
oil it, and put back everything clean : and
another night is gone, it is one day nearer
victory.
45
VIII
THE HOMING PLANE
A TRAVELLER threw his cloak over his
shoulder and came down slopes of gold
in El Dorado. From incredible heights he
came. He came from where the peaks of the
pure gold mountain shone a little red with
the sunset ; from crag to crag of gold he
stepped down slowly. Sheer out of romance
he came through the golden evening.
It was only an incident of every day ; the
sun had set or was setting, the air turned
chill, and a battalion's bugles were playing
" Retreat," when this knightly stranger, a
British aeroplane, dipped and went homeward
over the infantry. That beautiful evening
call, and the golden cloud-bank towering,
and that adventurer coming home in the
cold, happening all together, revealed in a
flash the fact (which hours of thinking some-
times will not bring) that we live in such a
46
THE HOMING PLANE
period of romance as the troubadours would
have envied.
He came, that British airman, over the
border, sheer over Noman's Land and the
heads of the enemy and the mysterious land
behind, snatching the secrets that the enemy
would conceal. Either he had defeated the
German airmen that would have stopped him
going, or they had not dared to try. Who
knows what he had done ? He had been
abroad, and was coming home in the evening,
as he did every day.
Even when all its romance has been sifted
from an age (as the centuries sift) and set
apart from the trivial, and when all has been
stored b}^ the poets — even then what has
any of them more romantic than these adven-
tures in the evening air, coming home in the
twilight with the black shells bursting below ?
The infantry look up with the same vague
wonder with which children look at dragon-
flies ; sometimes they do not look at all, for
all that comes in France has its part with
the wonder of a terrible story as well as with
the incidents of the day — incidents that recur
year in and year out, too often for us to notice
them. If a part of the moon were to fall off
47
TALES OF WAR
in the sky and come tumbling to earth, the
comment on the lips of the imperturbable
British watchers that have seen so much
would be : "Hullo! What is Jerry up to
now ? "
And so the British aeroplane glides home
in the evening, and the light fades from the
air, and what is left of the poplars grows dark
against the sky, and what is left of the houses
grows more mournful in the gloaming ; and
night comes, and with it the sounds of thunder,
for the airman has given his message to the
artillery. It is as though Hermes had gone
abroad sailing upon his sandals, and had
found some bad land below those winged feet
wherein men did evil and kept not the laws
of gods or men, and he had brought his
message back and the gods were angry.
For the wars we fight to-day are not like
other wars, and the wonders of them are unlike
other wonders. If we do not see in them the
saga and epic, how shall we tell of them ?
48-
IX
ENGLAND
" A ND then we used to have sausages,"
-^"^ said the Sergeant.
" And mashed ? " said the Private.
" Yes," said the Sergeant, " and beer. And
then we used to go home. It was grand in
the evenings. We used to go along a lane
that was full of them wild roses. And then
we came to the road where the houses were.
They all had their bit of a garden, every
house."
" Nice, I calls it, a garden," the Private
said.
" Yes," said the Sergeant ; " they all had
their garden. It came right down to the
road. Wooden palings ; none of that there
wire."
" I hates wire," said the Private.
" They didn't have none of it," the N.C.O.
went on. " The gardens came right down to
D 49
TALES OF WAR
the road, looking lovely. Old Billy Weeks
he had them tall pale blue flowers in his
garden, nearly as high as a man."
" Hollyhocks ? " said the Private.
" No, they wasn't hollyhocks. Lovely they
were. We used to stop and look at them,
going by every evening. He had a path up
the middle of his garden paved with red tiles,
Billy Weeks had ; and these tall blue flowers
growing the whole way along it, both sides
like. They was a wonder. Twenty gardens
there must have been, counting them all ;
but none to touch Billy Weeks with his pale-
blue flowers. There was an old windmill away
to the left. Then there were the swifts sailing
by overhead and screeching : just about as
high again as the houses. Lord how them
birds did fly. And there was the other young
fellows, what were not out walking, standing
about by the roadside, just doing nothing at
all. One of them had a flute : Jim Booker
he was. Those were great days. The bats
used to come out, flutter, flutter, flutter : and
then there'd be a star or two ; and the smoke
from the chimneys going all grey ; and a little
cold wind going up and down like the bats ;
and all the colour going out of things ; and the
50
ENGLAND
woods looking all strange and a wonderful
quiet in them, and a mist coming up from
the stream. It's a queer time that. It's
always about that time, the way I see it :
the end of the evening in the long days,
and a star or two, and me and my girl going
home. Wouldn't you like to talk about things
for a bit the way you remember them ? "
"O no, Sergeant," said the other; "you
go on. You do bring it all back so."
"I used to bring her home," the Sergeant
said, " to her father's house. Her father was
keeper there and they had a house in the wood.
A fine house with queer old tiles on it, and a
lot of large, friendly dogs. I knew them all
by name, same as they knew me. I used
to walk home then along the side of the
wood. The owls would be about, you
could hear them yelling. They'd float out
of the wood like, sometimes : all large and
white."
*' I knows them," said the Private.
** I saw a fox once so close I could nearly
touch him, walking like he was on velvet.
He just slipped out of the wood."
" Cunning old brute," said the Private.
"That's the time to be out," said the
51
TALES OF WAR
Sergeant. " Ten o'clock on a summer's night,
and the night full of noises : not many of
them ; but, what there is, strange : and coming
from a great way off, through the quiet, with
nothing to stop them. Dogs barking, owls
hooting, an old cart ; and then just once a
sound that you couldn't account for at all,
not anyhow. I've heard sounds on nights
like that that nobody 'ud think you'd
heard, nothing like the flute that young
Booker had, nothing like anything on
earth."
" 1 know," said the Private.
" I never told anyone before, because they
wouldn't believe you. But it doesn't matter
now.
"There'd be a light in the window to
guide me when I got home. I'd walk up
through the flowers of our garden. We had
a lovely garden. Wonderful white and strange
the flowers looked of a night-time."
" You bring it all back wonderful," said
the Private.
" It's a great thing to have lived," said the
Sergeant.
" Yes, Sergeant," said the other, ** I wouldn't
have missed it, not for anything."
52
ENGLAND
For five days the barrage had rained down
behind them : they were utterly cut off
and had no hope of rescue : their food was
done and they did not know where they
were.
53
X
SHELLS
WHEN the aeroplanes are home and the
sunset has flared away, and it is cold
and night comes down over France, you notice
the guns more than you do by day ; or else
they are actually more active then, I do not
know which it is.
It is then as though a herd of giants, things
of enormous height, came out from lairs in
the earth and began to play with the hills. It
is as though they picked up the tops of the
hills in their hands, and then let them drop
rather slowly. It is exactly like hills falling.
You see the flashes all along the sky, and then
that lumping thump, as though the top of the
hill had been let drop — not all in one piece,
but crumbled a little, as it would drop from
your hands if you were three hundred feet
high and were fooling about in the night,
spoiling what it had taken so long to make.
54
SHELLS
That is heavy stuff bursting a little way off.
If you are anywhere near a shell that is bursting
you can hear in it a curious metallic ring.
That applies to the shells of either side pro-
vided that you are near enough, though usually
of course it is the hostile shell and not your
own that you are nearest to, and so one dis-
tinguishes them. It is curious after such a
colossal event as this explosion must be in the
life of a bar of steel, that anything should
remain at all of the old bell-like voice of the
metal, but it appears to, if you listen atten-
tively ; it is perhaps its last remonstrance
before leaving its shape and going back to
rust in the earth again for ages.
Another of the voices of the night is the
whine the shell makes in coming ; it is not
unlike the cry the hyena utters as soon as it's
dark in Africa : " How nice traveller would
taste," the hyena seems to say, and " I
want dead White Man." It is the rising note
of the shell as it comes nearer, and its dying
away when it has gone over, that make it
reminiscent of the hyena's method of diction.
If it is not going over, then it has something
quite different to say. It begins the same as
the other ; it comes up talking of the back
55
TALES OF WAR
areas with the same long whine as the other.
I have heard old hands say : " That one is
going well over."
" Whee-oo," says the shell ; but just where
the " 00 " should be long drawn out and turn
into the hyena's final syllable it says some-
thing quite different. " Zarp I " it says.
That is bad. Those are the shells that are
looking for you.
And then of course there is the whizz-bang
coming from close, along his flat trajectory :
he has little to sav, but comes like a sudden
wind, and all that he has to do is done and
over at once.
And then there is the gas shell, who goes
over gurgling gluttonously, probably in big
herds, putting down a barrage. It is the.
liquid inside that gurgles before it is turned to
gas bj^ the mild explosion, that is the explana-
tion of it ; yet that does not prevent one
picturing a tribe of cannibals who have winded
some nice juicy men and are smacking their
chops and dribbling in anticipation.
And a wonderful thing to see, even in those
wonderful nights, is our thermite bursting
over the heads of the Germans. The shell
breaks into a shower of golden rain ; one
56
SHELLS
cannot judge easily at night how high from
the ground it breaks, but about as high as
the tops of trees seen at a hundred yards;
it spreads out evenly all round and rains down
slowly ; it is a bad shower to be out in ;
and for a long time after it has fallen the sodden
grass of winter and the mud and old bones
beneath it burn quietly in a circle. On such
a night as this, and in such showers, the flying
pigs will go over, which take two men to carry
each of them ; they go over and root right
down to the German dug-out, where the
German has come in out of the golden rain,
and they fling it all up in the air.
These are such nights as Sheherazade, with
all her versatility, never dreamed of, or if
such nightmares came, she certainly never told
of them ; or her august master, the Sultan,
light of the age, would have had her at once
beheaded ; and his people would have deemed
that he did well. It has been reserved for
a modern autocrat to dream such a nightmare,
driven to it perhaps by the tales of a white-
whiskered Sheherazade, the Lord of the Kiel
Canal ; and being an autocrat he has made
the nightmare a reaUty for the world. But
the nightmare is stronger than its master,
57
TALES OF WAR
and grows mightier every night ; and the
All Highest War Lord learns that there
are powers in Hell that are easily summoned
by the rulers of earth, but that go not
easily home.
58
XI
TWO DEGREES
OF ENVY
IT was night in the front line, and no moon,
or the moon was hidden. There was a
strafe going on : the Tok Emmas were angry.
And the artillery on both sides were looking
for the Tok Emmas.
Tok Emma, I may explain for the blessed
dwellers in whatever far happy island there
be that has not heard of these things, is the
crude language of Mars. He has not time to
speak of a trench mortar battery for he is
always in a hurry, and so he calls them T.M.'s.
But Bellona might not hear him saying T.M.,
for all the din that she makes : might think
that he said D.N. : and so he calls it Tok
Emma. Ak, Beer, C, Don : this is the alphabet
of Mars.
And the huge minnies were throwing old
limbs out of Noman's Land into the front-line
59
TALES OF W"A R
trench, and shells were rasping down through
the air, that seemed to resist them until it
was torn to pieces : they burst and showers
of mud came down from heaven. Aimlessly,
as it seemed, shells were bursting now and
then in the air, with a flash intensely red : the
smell of them was drifting down the trenches.
In the middle of all this Bert Butterworth
was hit. *' Only in the foot," his pals said.
" Only ! " said Bert. They put him on a
stretcher and carried him down the trench.
They passed Bill Britterling standing in the
mud, an old friend of Bert's. Bert's face,
twisted with pain, looked up to Bill for some
sympathy.
" Lucky devil," said Bill.
Across the way on the other side of
Noman's Land there was mud the same as on
Bill's side : only the mud over there stank ;
it didn't seem to have been kept clean some-
how. And the parapet was sliding in in
places, for working-parties had not had much
of a chance. They had three Tok Emmas
working in that battalion front line, and the
British batteries did not quite know where
they were, and there were eight of them
looking.
60
TWO DEGREES OF ENVY
Fritz Groedenschasser, standing in that
unseemly mud, greatly yearned for them to
find soon what they were looking for. Eight
batteries searching for something they can't
find, along a trench in which you have to be,
leaves the elephant-hunter's most desperate
tale a little dull and insipid. Not that Fritz
Groedenschasser knew anything about elephant-
hunting : he hated all things sporting and
cordially approved of the execution of Nurse
Cavell. And there was thermite too. Flam-
menwerfer was all very well — a good German
weapon : it could burn a man alive at twenty
yards. But this accursed flaming English
thermite could catch you at four miles. It
wasn't fair.
The three German trench-mortars were all
still firing. When would the English batteries
find what they were looking for, and this
awful thing stop ? The night was cold and
smelly. »
Fritz shifted his feet in the foul mud, but
no warmth came to him that way.
A gust of shells was coming along the trench.
Still they had not found the minenwerfer !
Fritz moved from his place altogether to see
if he could find some place where the parapet
6i
TALES OF WAR
was not broken. And as he moved along the
sewer-like trench he came on a wooden cross
that marked the grave of a man he once had
known, now buried some days in the parapet —
old Ritz Handelscheiner.
" Lucky devil," said Fritz.
62
XII
THE MASTER OF
NOMAN'S LAND
WHEN the last dynasty has fallen and
the last empire passed away, when man
himself has gone, there will probably still
remain the swede.
There grew a swede in Neman's Land by
Croisille near the Somme, and it had grown
there for a long while free from man.
It grew as you never saw a swede grow
before. It grew tall and strong and weedy.
It lifted its green head and gazed round
over Noman's Land. Yes, man was gone,
and it was the day of the swede.
The storms were tremendous. Sometimes
pieces of iron sang through its leaves. But
man was gone and it was the day of the swede.
A man used to come there once, a great
French farmer, an oppressor of swedes. Legends
were told of him and his herd of cattle, dark
63
TALES OF WAR
traditions that passed down vegetable genera-
tions. It was somehow known in those fields
that the man ate swedes.
And now his house was gone and he would
come no more.
The storms were terrible but they were
better than man. The swede nodded to his
companions : the years of freedom had come.
They had always known among them that
these years would come. Man had not been
there always, but there had always been swedes.
He would go some day, suddenly, as he came.
That was the faith of the swedes. And when
the trees went the swede believed that the day
was come. When hundreds of little weeds
arrived that were never allowed before, and
grew unchecked, he knew it.
After that he grew without any care in
sunlight, moonlight and rain ; grew abund-
antly and luxuriantly in the freedom, and
increased in arrogance till he felt himself
greater than man. And indeed in those
leaden storms that sang often over his foliage
all living things seemed equal.
There was little that the Germans left when
they retreated from the Somme that was higher
than this swede. He grew the tallest thing
64
MASTER OF NOMAN'S LAND
for miles and miles. He dominated the waste.
Two cats slunk by him from a shattered farm :
he towered above them contemptuously.
A partridge ran by him once, far far below
his lofty leaves. The night-winds mourning
in Noman's Land seemed to sing for him alone.
It was surely the hour of the swede. For
him, it seemed, was Noman's Land. And
there I met him one night by the light of a
German rocket and brought him back to our
company dug-out to cook.
E 65
XIII
WEEDS AND WIRE
THINGS had been happening. Divisions
were moving. There had been, or there
was going to be, a stunt. A battahon marched
over the hill and sat down by the road. They
had left the trenches three days' march to the
north and had come to a new country. The
officers pulled their maps out ; a mild breeze
fluttered them. Yesterday had been winter
and to-day was spring ; but spring in a desola-
tion so complete and far-reaching that you
only knew of it by that little wind. It was
early March by the calendar but the wind
was blowing out of the gates of April. A
platoon commander, feeling that mild wind
blowing, forgot his map and began to whistle
a tune that suddenly came to him out of the
past with the wind. Out of the past it blew
and out of the south, a merry vernal tune
of a southern people. Perhaps only one of
66
WEEDS AND WIRE
those that noticed the tune had ever heard it
before. An officer sitting near had heard it
sung ; it reminded him of a hohday long ago
in the south.
" Where did you hear that tune ? " he asked
the platoon commander.
" Oh, the hell of a long way from here,"
the platoon commander said.
He did not remember quite where it was he
had heard it, but he remembered a sunny day
in France and a hill all dark with pine-woods,
and a man coming down at evening out of
the woods and down the slope to the village
singing this song. Between the village and
the slope there were orchards in blossom. So
that he came with his song for hundreds of
yards through orchards. " The hell of a way
from here," he said.
For a long while then they sat silent.
" It mightn't have been so very far from
here," said the platoon commander. " It was
in France now I come to think of it. But it
was a lovely part of France, all woods and
orchards. Nothing hke this, thank God ! "
And he glanced with a tired look at the
unutterable desolation.
" Where was it ? " said the other.
67
TALES OF WAR
" In Picardy," he said.
" Aren't we in Picardy now ? " said his
friend.
" Are we ? " he said.
" I don't 'know. The maps don't call it
Picardy."
" It was a fine place anyway," the platoon
commander said. " There seemed always to be
a wonderful light on the hills. A kind of short
grass grew on them and it shone in the sun
at evening. There were black woods above
it. A man used to come out of them singing
at evening."
He looked wearily round at the brown
desolation of weeds. As far as the two officers
could see there was nothing but brown
weeds and bits of brown barbed wire. He
turned from the desolate scene back to his
reminiscence.
" He came singing through the orchards
into the village," he said. " A quaint old
place with queer gables, called Ville-en-Bois."
" Do you know where we are ? " said the
other.
" No," said the platoon commander
" I thought not," he said. " Hadn't you
better take a look at the map ? "
66
WEEDS AND WIRE
tt
I suppose so," said the platoon com-
mander, and he smoothed out his map and
wearily got to the business of finding out
where he was. " Good Lord ! " he said.
" Ville-en-Bois."
69
XIV
SPRING IN ENGLAND
AN D FLAN DERS
February, 1918
VERY soon the earliest primroses will be
coming out in woods wherever they are
sheltered from the north. They will grow
bolder as the days go by, and spread and
come all down the slopes of sunny hills.
Then the anemones will come, like a shy
pale people, one of the tribes of the elves,
who dare not leave the innermost deeps of
the wood : in those days all the trees will
be in leaf, the bluebells will follow, and
certain fortunate woods will shelter such
myriads of them that the bright fresh green
of the beech-trees will flash between two
blues, the blue of the sky and the deeper blue
of the bluebells. Later the cowslips come.
Such a time as this is the perfect time to see
70
SPRING IN ENGLAND AND FLANDERS
England : when the cuckoo is heard and he
surprises his hearers ; when evenings are
lengthening out and the bat is abroad again ;
and all the flowers are out and all the birds
sing. At such a time not only Nature smiles,
but our quiet villages and grave old spires
wake up from winter in the mellow air and
wear their centuries lightly. At such a time
you might come just at evening on one of
those old villages in a valley, and find it in
the mood to tell you the secret of the ages
that it had and treasured there before the
Normans came. Who knows ? For they are
very old, very wise, very friendly ; they might
speak to you one warm evening. If you went
to them after great suffering they might speak
to you, after nights and nights of shelling over
in France ; they might speak to you and
you might hear them clearly.
It would be a long long story that they
would tell, all about the ages ; and it would
vary wonderfully little, much less, perhaps,
than we think ; and the repetitions rambling on
and on in the evening, as the old belfry spoke
and the cottages gathered below it, might
sound so soothing after the boom of shells
that perhaps you would nearly sleep. And
71
TALES OF WAR
then, with one's memory tired out by the
war, one might never remember -the long
story they told, when the belfry and the
brown-roofed houses all murmured at even-
ing, might never remember even that th,ey
had spoken all through that warm spring
evening. We may have heard them speak,
and forgotten that they have spoken. Who
knows ? We are at war, and see so many
strange things : some we must forget, some
we must remember ; and we cannot choose
which.
To turn from Kent to Picardy is to turn to
a time of mourning through all seasons alike.
Spring there brings out no leaf on a myriad
oaks, nor the haze of green that floats like a
halo above the heads of the birch-trees that
stand with their fairy-like trunks haunting the
deeps of the wood. For miles and miles and
miles summer ripens no crops, leads out no
maidens laughing in the moonlight, and brings
no harvest home. When Autumn looks on
orchards in all that region of mourning, he looks
upon barren trees that will never blossom again-
Winter drives in no sturdy farmers at evening
to sit before cheery fires, families meet not at
Christmas, and the bells are dumb in belfries ;
72
SPRING IN ENGLAND AND FLANDERS
for all by which a man might remember his
home there has been utterly swept away :
has been swept away to make a maniacal
dancing-ground on which a murderous people
dance to their death, led by a shallow, clever,
callous imperial clown.
There they dance to their doom till their feet
shall find the precipice that was prepared for
them on the day that they planned the evil
things they have done.
73
XV
THE NIGHTMARE
COUNTRIES
THERE are certain lands in the darker
dreams of poetry that stand out in the
memory of generations. There is, for instance,
Poe's " Dank tarn of Auber the ghoul-haunted
region of Weir " : there are some queer twists
in the river Alph as imagined by Coleridge :
two lines of Swinburne are as haunting
as any :
By the tideless, dolorous inland sea.
In a land of sand and ruin and gold.
There are in literature certain regions of gloom,
so splendid that whenever you come on them
they leave in the mind a sort of nightmare
country which one's thoughts revisit on hearing
the lines quoted.
It is pleasant to picture such countries
sometimes, sitting before the lire. It is pleasant
74
THE NIGHTMARE COUNTRIES
because you can banish them by the closing of
a book ; a puff of smoke from a pipe will hide
them altogether, and back come the pleasant,
wholesome, familiar things. But in France
they are there always. In France the night-
mare countries stand all night in the starlight ;
dawn comes and they still are there. The
dead are buried out of sight, and others take
their places among men ; but the lost lands
lie unburied, gazing up at the winds ; and the
lost woods stand like skeletons all grotesque
in the solitude ; the very seasons have fled
from them. The verv seasons have fled ; so
that if you look up to see whether summer has
turned to autumn, or if autumn has turned to
winter 3^et, nothing remains to show you. It
is like the eccentric dream of some strange
man, very arresting and mysterious, but
lacking certain things that should be there
before you can recognize it as earthly. It is
a mad, mad landscape. There are miles and
miles and miles of it. It is the biggest thing
man has done. It looks as though man in
his pride, with all his clever inventions had
made for himself a sorry attempt at creation.
Indeed when we trace it all back to its origin,
we find at the beginning of this unhappy story
75
TALES OF WAR
a man who was only an emperor, and wished
to be something more. He would have ruled
the world but has only meddled with it, and
his folly has brought misery to millions : and
there lies his broken dream on the broken
earth. He will never take Paris now. He will
never be crowned at Versailles as Emperor
of Europe : and after that, most secret dream
of all, did not the Caesars proclaim themselves
divine ? Was it not whispered among Mace-
donian courtiers that Alexander was the child
of God ? And was the HohenzoUern less
than these ?
What might not force accomplish ? All
gone now, that dream, and the Hindenburg
Line broken. A maniacal dream and broken
farms all mixed up together : they make a
pretty nightmare. And the clouds still gleam
all night with the flashes of shells, and the
sky is still troubled by day with uncouth
balloons, and the black bursts of the German
shells and the white of our anti-aircraft ; and
below there lies this wonderful wasted land
where no girls sing and where no birds come
but starlings ; where no hedgerows stand,
and no lanes with wild roses, and where no
pathways run through fields of wheat ; and
76
THE NIGHTMARE COUNTRIES
there are no fields at all and no farms or
farmers ; and two haystacks stand on a hill
I know, undestroyed in the desolation, and
nobody touches them for they know the
Germans too well ; and the tops have been
blown off hills down to the chalk ; and men
say of this place that it is Pozieres, and of
that place that it is Ginchy ; nothing remains
to show that hamlets stood there at all. And
a brown, brown weed grows over it all for
ever. And a mighty spirit has arisen in man :
and no one bows to the War Lord though
many die : and Liberty is she who sang her
songs of old, and is fair as she ever was, when
men see her in visions, at night in Noman's
Land when they have not the strength to
crawl in : still she walks of a night in Pozieres
and in Ginchy.
A fanciful man once called himself the
Emperor of the Sahara. The German Kaiser
has stolen into a fair land, and holds with
weakening hands a land of craters and weeds,
and wire and wild cabbages, and old German
bones.
11
XVI
SPRING AND
THE KAISER
WHILE all the world is waiting for the
Spring, there lie great spaces in one of
the pleasantest lands to which Spring cannot
come.
Pear-trees and cherry and orchards flash
over other lands, blossoming as abundantly
as though their wonder was new, with a beauty
as fresh and surprising as though nothing like
it before had ever adorned countless centuries.
Now with the larch, and soon with the beech-
trees and hazel, a bright green blazes forth to
illumine the year. The slopes are covered
with violets. Those who have gardens are
beginning to be proud of them and to point
them out to their neighbours. Almond and
peach in blossom peep over old brick walls.
The land dreams of summer all in the youth
of the year.
78
SPRING AND THE KAISER
But better than all this the Germans have
found war. The simple content of a people
at peace in pleasant countries counted for
nothing with them. Their Kaiser prepared
for war, made speeches about war, and, when
he was ready, made war. And now the hills
that should be covered with violets are full
of murderous holes, and the holes are half-full
of empty meat-tins, and the garden walls
have gone, and the gardens with them, and
there are no woods left to shelter anemones.
Boundless masses of brown barbed wire straggle
over the landscape. All the orchards there
are cut down out of ruthless spite, to hurt
France whom they cannot conquer. All the
little trees that grow near gardens are gone,
aspen, laburnum and lilac. It is like this
for hundreds of miles. Hundreds of ruined
towns gaze at it with vacant windows and
see a land from which even spring is banished.
And not a ruined house in all the hundred
towns but mourns for someone, man, woman
or child ; for the Germans make war equally
on all in the land where Spring comes no more.
Some day Spring will come back ; some day
she will shine all April in Picardy again, for
Nature is never driven utterly forth, but comes
79
TALES OF WAR
back with her seasons to cover up even the
vilest things.
She shall hide the raw earth of the shell-
holes till the violets come again ; she shall
bring back even the orchards for Spring to
walk in once more ; the woods will grow tall
again above the southern anemones ; and
the great abandoned guns of the Germans
will rust by the Fivers of France. Forgotten
like them the memory of the War Lord will
pass with his evil deeds.
80
XVII
TWO SONGS
OVER slopes of English hills looking
south, in the time of violets, evening
was falling.
Shadows at edges of woods moved, and
then merged in the gloaming.
The bat, Hke a shadow himself, finding
that spring was come, shpped from the dark
of the wood as far as a clump of beech-trees,
and fluttered back again on his wonderful
quiet wings.
Pairing pigeons were home.
Very young rabbits stole out to gaze at
the calm, still world. They came out as the
stars come. At one time they were not there,
and then you saw them, but you did not see
them come.
Towering clouds to the west built palaces,
cities and mountains ; bastions of rose and
precipices of gold ; giants went home over
F 8i
TALES OF WAR
them draped in mauve by steep rose-pink
ravines into emerald-green empires. Turbu-
lences of colour broke out above the departed
sun ; giants merged into mountains, and
cities became seas, and new processions of
other fantastic things sailed by. But the
chalk slopes facing south smiled on with the
same calm light, as though every blade of
grass gathered a ray from the gloaming. All
the hills faced the evening with that same
quiet glow, which faded softly as the air
grew colder ; and the first star appeared.
Voices came up in the hush clear from the
valley, and ceased. A light was lit, like a
spark, in a distant window. More stars ap-
peared, and the woods were all dark now,
and shapes even on the hill-slopes began to
grow indistinct.
Home by a laneway in the dim, still evening
a girl was going, singing the Marseillaise.
In France where the downs in the north
roll away without hedges, as though they
were great free giants that man had never
confined, as though they were stretching their
vast free limbs in the evening, the same light
was smiling and glimmering softly away.
A road wound over the downs and away
82
TWO SONGS
round one of their shoulders. A hush lay
over them as though the giants slept, or as
though they guarded in silence their ancient,
wonderful history.
The stillness deepened and the dimness of
twilight ; and just before colours fade, while
shapes can still be distinguished, there came
by the road a, farmer leading his Norman
horse. High over the horse's withers his
collar, pointed with brass, made him fantastic
and huge, and strange to see in the evening.
They moved together through that mellow
light towards where unseen among the clus-
tered downs the old French farmer's house
was sheltered away.
He was going home at evening humming
" God save the King."
83
XVIII
THE PUNISHMENT
AN exhalation arose, drawn up by the
moon, from an old battlefield after the
passing of years. It came out of very old
craters and gathered from trenches, smoked
up from Neman's Land and the ruins of
farms ; it rose from the rottenness of dead
brigades, and lay for half the night over two
armies, but at midnight the moon drew it
up all into one phantom, and it rose and
trailed away eastwards.
It passed over men in grey that were weary
of war, it passed over a land once prosper-
ous, happy and mighty, in which were a
people that were gradually starving, it passed
by ancient belfries in which there were no
bells now, it passed over fear and misery
and weeping, and so came to the Palace at
Potsdam. It was the dead of the night,
between midnight and dawn, and the Palace
84
THE PUNISHMENT
was very still that the emperor might sleep,
and sentries guarded it who made no noise
and relieved others in silence. Yet it was
not so eas}^ to sleep. Picture yourself a
murderer who had killed a man. Would
you sleep ? Picture yourself the man who
made this war. Yes, you sleep, but night-
mares come.
The phantom entered the chamber.
" Come," it said.
The Kaiser leaped up at once as obediently
as when he came to attention on parade,
years ago, as a subaltern in the Prussian
Guard, a man whom no woman or child as yet
had ever cursed ; he leaped up and followed.
They passed the silent sentries, none chal-
lenged and none saluted ; they were moving
swiftly over the town as the felon Gothas go ;
they came to a cottage in the country. They
drifted over a little garden gate, and there
in a neat little garden the phantom halted,
like a . wind that has suddenly ceased.
" Look," it said.
Should he look ? Yet he must look. The
Kaiser looked, and saw a window shining
and a neat room in the cottage : there
was nothing dreadful there : thank the good
TALES OF WAR
German God for that ; it was all right, after
all. The Kaiser had had a fright, but it was
all right, there was only a woman with a
baby sitting before the fire ; and two small
children and a man. And it was quite a
jolly room. And the man was a young soldier ;
and, why, he was a Prussian Guardsman ;
there was his helmet hanging on the wall ;
so everything was all right. They were jolly
German children, that was well. How nice
and homely the room was. There shone
before him, and showed far off in the night,
the visible reward of German thrift and in-
dustry. It was all so tidy and neat, and yet
they were quite poor people. The man had
done his work for the Fatherland and yet
beyond all that had been able to afford all
those little knick-knacks that make a home
so pleasant and that in their humble little
way were luxury. And while the Kaiser
looked the two young children laughed as
they played on the floor, not seeing that face
at the window.
Why ! look at the helmet. That was
lucky. A bullet-hole right through the front
of it. That must have gone very close to
the man's head. How ever did it get through ?
86
THE PUNISHMENT
It must have glanced upwards, as bullets
sometimes do. The hole was quite low in
the helmet. It would be dreadful to have
bullets coming by close like that.
The firelight flickered, and the lamp shone
on, and the children played on the floor, and
the man was smoking out of a china pipe ;
he was strong and able and young, one of
the wealth-winners of Germany.
" Have you seen ? " said the phantom.
" Yes," said the Kaiser. It was well, he
thought, that a Kaiser should see how his
people lived.
At once the fire went out and the lamp
faded awa}/, the room fell sombrely into
neglect and squalor, and the soldier and the
children faded away with the room ; all dis-
appeared phantasmally, and nothing remained
but the helmet in a kind of glow on the wall,
and the woman sitting all by herself in the
darkness.
" It has all gone," said the Kaiser.
" It has never been," said the phantom.
The Kaiser looked again. Yes, there was
nothing there, it was just a vision. There
were the grey walls all damp and uncared
for, and that helmet standing out soUd and
87
TALES OF WAR
round, like the only real thing among fancies.
No, it had never been. It was just a vision.
" It might have been," said the phantom.
Might have been ? How might it have
been ?
" Come," said the phantom.
They drifted away down a little lane that
in summer would have had roses, and came
to an Uhlan's house, in times of peace a small
farmer. Farm buildings in good repair showed
even in the night, and the black shapes of
haystacks : again a well-kept garden lay by
the house. The phantom and the Kaiser
stood in the garden ; before them a window
glowed in a lamp-lit room.
" Look," said the phantom.
The Kaiser looked again and saw a young
couple, the woman played with a baby,
and all was prosperous in the merry room.
Again the hard-won wealth of Germany shone
out for all to see ; the cosy, comfortable
furniture spoke of acres well cared for, spoke
of victory in the struggle with the seasons,
on which wealth of nations depends.
" It might have been," said the phantom.
Again the fire died out and the merry scene
faded away, leaving a melancholy ill-kept
88
THE PUNISHMENT
room with poverty and mourning haunting
dusty corners and the woman sitting alone.
" Why do you show me this ? '* said the
Kaiser. " Why do you show me these
visions ? "
" Come," said the phantom.
" What is it ? " said the Kaiser. " Where
are you bringing me ? "
" Come," said the phantom.
They went from window to window, from
land to land. You had seen, had you been
out that night in Germany, and able to see
visions, an imperious figure passing from place
to place looking on many scenes. He looked
on them, and families withered away, and
happy scenes faded ; and the phantom said
to him : " Come." He expostulated, but
obeyed ; and so they went from window to
window of hundreds of farms in Prussia, till
they came to the Prussian border and went
on into Saxony ; and always you would have
heard, could you hear spirits speak, " It
might have been," " It might have been,"
repeated from window to window.
They went down through Saxony heading
for Austria.
And for long the Kaiser kept that callous
89
TALES OF WAR
imperious look. But at last he, even he, at last
he nearly wept. And the phantom turned
then and swept him back over Saxony, and
into Prussia again and over the sentries'
heads, back to his comfortable bed where it
was so hard to sleep. And though they had
seen thousands of merry homes, homes that
can never be merry now, shrines of perpetual
mourning ; though they had seen thousands
of smiling German children, who will never
be born now, but were only the visions of
hopes blasted by him ; for all the leagues
over which he had been so ruthlessly hurried,
dawn was yet barely breaking.
He had looked on the first few thousand
homes of which he had robbed all time, and
which he must see with his eyes before he
may go hence. The first night of the Kaiser's
punishment was accomplished.
90
XIX
THE ENGLISH SPIRIT
BY the end of the South African war
Sergeant Cane had got one thing very
well fixed in his mind, and that was that
war was an overrated amusement. He said
" he was fed up with it," partly because that
misused metaphor was then new, partly
because everyone was sa3dng it : he felt it
right down in his bones, and he had a long
memory. So when wonderful rumours came
to the East Anglian village where he lived
on August I, 1914, Sergeant Cane said, " That
means war," and decided then and there to
have nothing to do with it : it was some-
body else's turn, he felt he had done
enough. Then came August 4th and England
true to her destiny, and then Lord Kitchener's
appeal for men. Sergeant Cane had a family
to look after and a nice little house : he
had left the Army ten years.
91
TALES OF WAR
In the next week all the men went who had
been in the Army before, all that were young
enough, and a good sprinkling of the young
men, too, who had never been in the Army.
Men asked Cane if he was going and he said
straight out, "No."
By the middle of August Cane was affecting
the situation. He was a little rallying-point
for men who did not want to go. " He knows
what it's like," they said.
In the smoking-room of the Big House sat
the Squire and his son, Arthur Smith, and
Sir Munion Boomer-Platt, the member for
the division. The Squire's son had been in
the last war as a boy, and, like Sergeant Cane,
had left the Army since. All the morning
he had been cursing an imaginary general,
seated in the War Ofhce at an imaginary
desk with Smith's own letter before him in
full view but unopened. Why on earth
didn't he answer it? Smith thought. But
he was calmer now, and the Squire and Sir
Munion were talking of Sergeant Cane.
" Leave him to me," said Sir Munion.
" Very well," said the Squire.
So Sir Munion Boomer-Platt went off and
called on Sergeant Cane.
92
THE ENGLISH SPIRIT
Mrs. Cane knew what he had come for.
" Don't let him talk you over, Bill," she
said.
" Not he ! " said Sergeant Cane.
Sir Munion came on Sergeant Cane in his
garden.
" A fine day," said Sir Munion. And from
that he went on to the war. " If you enlist,"
he said, " they will make you a sergeant
again at once. You will get a sergeant's
pay, and your wife will get the new separa-
tion allowance."
" Sooner have Cane," said Mrs. Cane.
" Yes, yes, of course," said Sir Munion.
" But then there is the medal, probably two
or three medals, and the glory of it, and it
is such a splendid life."
Sir Munion did warm to a thing whenever
he began to hear his own words. He painted
war as it has always been painted, one of
the most beautiful things you could imagine.
And then it mustn't be supposed that it was
like those wars that there used to be, a long
way off. There would be houses where you
would be billeted, and good food, and shady
trees and villages wherever you went. And
it was such an opportunity of seeing the
93
TALES OF WAR
Continent (" the Continent as it really is "
Sir Munion called it) as would never come
again, and he only wished he were younger.
Sir Munion really did wish it as he spoke,
for his own words stirred him profoundly ;
but somehow or other they did not stir Ser-
geant Cane. No ; he had done his share, and
he had a family to look after.
Sir Munion could not understand him : he
went back to the Big House and said so.
He had told him all the advantages he could
think of that were to be had for the asking
and Sergeant Cane merely neglected them.
" Let me have a try," said Arthur Smith.
" He soldiered with me before."
Sir Munion shrugged his shoulders. He
had all the advantages at his fingers' ends,
from pay to billeting : there was nothing more
to be said. Nevertheless, young Smith went.
" Hullo, Sergeant Cane," said Smith.
" Hullo, sir," said the sergeant.
" Do you remember that night at Reit
River ? "
" Don't I, sir," said Cane.
" One blanket each and no ground-sheet ? "
" I remember, sir," said Cane.
" Didn't it rain ! " said Smith.
94
THE ENGLISH SPIRIT
** It rained that night proper."
" Drowned a few of the lice, I suppose."
" Not many," said Cane.
" No, not many," Smith reflected. " The
Boers had the range all right that time."
" Gave it us proper," said Cane.
" We were hungry that night," said Smith.
" I could have eaten biltong."
" I did eat some of it," said Cane. " Not
bad stuff, what there was of it, only not
enough."
" I don't think," said Smith, " that I've
ever slept on the bare earth since."
" No, sir ? " said Cane. " It's hard. You
get used to it. But it will always be hard."
" Yes, it will always be hard," said Smith.
" Do you remember the time we were thirsty? "
" O yes, sir," said Cane. " I remember
that. One doesn't forget that."
" No. I still dream of it sometimes," said
Smith. " It makes a nasty dream. I wake with
my mouth all dry too, when I dream that."
" Yes," said Cane. " One doesn't forget
being thirsty."
" Well," said Smith, " I suppose we're for
it all over again ? "
" I suppose so, sir," said Cane.
95
XX
AN INVESTIGATION INTO
THE CAUSES AND
ORIGIN OF THE WAR
THE German Imperial barber has been
called up. He must have been called
up quite early in the war. I have seen photo-
graphs in papers that leave no doubt of that.
Who he is I do not know : I once read his
name in an article but have forgotten it ;
few even know if he still lives. And yet
what harm he has done ! What vast evils
he has unwittingly originated I Many years
ago he invented a frivolity, a jeu d'esprit
easily forgivable to an artist in the heyday
of his youth, to whom his art was new and
even perhaps wonderful. A craft, of course,
rather than an art, and a humble craft at
that ; but then the man was young, and
what will not seem wonderful to youth ?
96
AN INVESTIGATION
He must have taken the craft very seriously ;
but as youth takes things seriously, fantas-
tically and with laughter. He must have
determined to outshine rivals ; he must have
gone away and thought, burning candles late,
perhaps, when all the Palace was still. But
how can youth think seriously ? And there
had come to him this absurd, this fantastical
conceit. What else would have come ? The
more seriously he took the tonsorial art, the
more he studied its tricks and phrases and
heard old barbers lecture, the more sure
were the imps of youth to prompt him to
laughter, and urge him to something out-
rageous and ridiculous. The background of
the dull pomp of Potsdam must have made
all this more certain. It was bound to come.
And so one day, or, as I have suggested,
suddenly, late one night, there came to the
young artist, bending over tonsorial books,
that quaint, mad, odd, preposterous inspiration.
Ah, what pleasure there is in the madness of
youth ; it is not like the madness of age,
clinging to outworn formulae ; it is the madness
of breaking away, of galloping among preci-
pices, of dallying with the impossible. And
this inspiration : it was in none of the books,
G 97
TALES OF WAR
the. lecturer-barbers had not lectured on it,
could not dream of it and did not dare to ;
there was no tradition for it, no precedent ;
it was mad ; and to introduce it into the
pomp of Potsdam, that was the daring of
madness. And this preposterous inspiration
of the absurd young barber-madman was
nothing less than a moustache that without
any curve at all, or any suggestion of sanity,
should go suddenly up at the ends very nearly
as high as the eyes !
He must have told his young fellow-crafts-
men first, for youth goes first to youth with
its hallucinations. And they, what could they
have said ? You cannot say of madness that
it is mad, you cannot call absurdity absurd.
To have criticized would have revealed
jealousy ; and as for praise, you could not
praise a thing like that. They probably
shrugged, made gestures ; and perhaps one
friend warned him. But 5/ou cannot warn a
man against a madness ; if the madness is
in possession it will not be warned away :
why should it ? And then, perhaps, he went
to the old barbers of the Court. You can
picture their anger. Age does not learn from
youth in any case. But there was the insult
98
AN INVESTIGATION
to their ancient craft, bad enough if only
imagined, but here openly spoken of. And
what would come of it ? They must have
feared on the one hand dishonour to their
craft if this young barber were treated as his
levity deserved ; and on the other hand
could they have feared his success ? I think
they could not have guessed it.
And then the young idiot with his prepos-
terous inspiration must have looked about to
see where he could practise his new absurdity.
It should have been enough to have talked
about it among his fellow-barbers ; they would
have gone with new zest to their work next
day for this delirious interlude, and no harm
would have been done. " Fritz " (or Hans)
they would have said, " was a bit on last
night, a bit full up," or whatever phrase they
use to touch on drunkenness, and the thing
would have been forgotten. We all have our
fancies. But this young fool wanted to get
his fancy mixed up with practice : that's
where he was mad. And in Potsdam of all
places.
He probably tried his friends first, young
barbers at the Court and others of his own
standing. None of them were fools enough
99
TALES OF WAR
to be seen going about like that. They had
jobs to lose. A Court barber is one thing, a
man who cuts ordinary hair is quite another.
Wh}^ should they become outcasts because
their friend chose to be mad ?
He probably tried his inferiors then, but
they would have been timid folk ; they must
have seen the thing was absurd, and, of course,
daren't risk it. Again, why should they ?
Did he try to get some noble, then, to
patronize his invention ? Probably the first
refusals he had soon inflamed his madness
more, and he threw caution insanely to the
winds and went straight to the Emperor.
It was probably about the time that the
Emperor dismissed Bismarck ; certainly the
drawings of that time show him still with a
sane moustache.
The young barber probably chanced on
him in this period, finding him bereft of an
adviser, and ready to be swayed by whatever
whim should come. Perhaps he was attracted
by the barber's hardihood, perhaps the ab-
surdity of his inspiration had some fascination
for him, perhaps he merely saw that the
thing was new and, feeling jaded, let the
barber have his way. And so the frivolity
100
AN INVESTIGATION
became a fact, the absurdity became visible,
and honour and riches came the way of the
barber.
A small thing, you might say, however
fantastical. And yet I believe the absurdity
of that barber to be among the great evils
that have brought death nearer to man ;
whimsical and farcical as it was, yet a thing
deadlier than Helen's beauty or Tamerlane's
love of skulls. For just as character is out-
wardl}/ shown, so outward things react upon
the character ; and who, with that daring
barber's ludicrous fancy visible always on
his face, could quite go the sober way of
beneficent monarchs ? The fantasy must be
mitigated here, set off there : had you such
a figure to dress, say for amateur theatricals,
you would realize the difficulty. The heavy
silver eagle to balance it ; the ghttering
cuirass lower down, preventing the eye from
dwelhng too long on the barber's absurdity-
And then the pose to go with the cuirass and
to carry off the wild conceit of that mad,
mad barber. He has much to answer for,
that eccentric man whose name so few remem-
ber. For pose led to actions, and just when
Europe most needed a man of wise counsels
lOI
TALES OF WAR
restraining the passions of great empires, just
then she had ruHng over Germany and, un-
happily, dominating Austria, a man who every
year grew more akin to the folly of that silly
barber's youthful inspiration.
Let us forgive the barber. For long I have
known from pictures that I have seen of the
Kaiser that he has gone to the trenches.
Probably he is dead. Let us forgive the
barber. But let us bear in mind that the
futile fancies of youth may be deadly things,
and that one of them falling on a fickle mind
may so stir its shallows as to urge it to dis-
turb and set in motion the avalanches of
illimitable grief.
102
m
XXI
LOST
DESCRIBING a visit, say the papers of
March 28th, which the Kaiser paid in-
cognito to Cologne Cathedral on March i8th,
before the great battle, the Cologne corre-
spondent of the Tyd says : —
There were only a few persons in the building. Under
high arches and in spacious solitude the Kaiser sat, as if
in deep thought, before the priests' choir. Behind him
his Military Staff stood respectfully at a distance. Still
musing as he rose the monarch, resting both hands on
his walking-stick, remained standing immovable for some
minutes. ... I shall never forget this picture of the
musing monarch praying in Cologne Cathedral on the eve
of the great battle.
Probably he won't forget it. The German
casualty lists will help to remind him. But
what is more to the point is that this expert
propagandist has presumably received orders
that we are not to forget it, and that the
103
TALES OF WAR
sinister originator of the then impending
holocaust should be toned down a little in
the eyes, at least, of the Tyd to something
a little more amiable.
And no doubt the little piece of propagandum
gave every satisfaction to those who ordered
it, or they would not have passed it out to
the Tyd, and the touching little scene would
never have reached our eyes. At the same
time the little tale would have been better
suited to the psychology of other countries
if he had made the War Lord kneel when he
prayed in Cologne Cathedral, and if he had
represented the Military Staff as standing
out of respect to One who, outside Germany,
is held in greater respect than the All
Highest.
And had the War Lord really knelt, is it
not possible that he might have found pity,
humility, or even contrition ? — things easily
overlooked in so large a cathedral when sit-
ting erect as a War Lord before the priests'
choir, but to be noticed, perhaps, with one's
eyes turned to the ground.
Perhaps he nearly found one of those things.
Perhaps he felt (who knows ?) just for a
moment, that in the dimness of those enor-
104
LOST
mous aisles was something he had lost a
long, long while ago.
One is not mistaken to credit the very bad
with feeling far faint appeals from things of
glory like Cologne Cathedral ; it is that the
appeals come to them too far and faint on
their headlong descent to ruin.
For what was the War Lord seeking ? Did
he know that pity for his poor slaughtered
people, huddled by him on to our ceaseless
machine guns, might be found by seeking
there ? Or was it only that the lost thing,
whatever it was, made that faint appeal to
him, passing the door by chance, and drew
him in ; as the scent of some herb or flower
in a moment draws us back years to look
for something lost in our youth ? — we gaze
back wondering and do not find it.
And to think that perhaps he lost it by
very little ! That but for that proud attitude
and the respectful Staff he might have seen
what was lost, and have come out bringing
pity for his people. Might have said to the
crowd that gave him that ovation, as we
read, outside the door : " My pride has driven
you to this needless war, my ambition has
made a sacrifice of millions, but it is over,
105
TALES OF WAR
and it shall be no more; I will make no
more conquests."
They would have killed him. But for that
renunciation, perhaps, however late, the
curses of the widows of his people might
have kept away from his grave.
But he did not find it. He sat at prayer.
Then he stood. Then he marched out : and
his Staff marched out behind him. And in
the gloom of the floor of the vast Cologne
Cathedral lie the things that the Kaiser did
not find, and never will find now. Unnoticed
thus, and in some silent moment, passes a
man's last chance.
io6
XXII
THE LAST MIRAGE
THE desolation that the German offensive
has added to the dominions of the
Kaiser cannot easily be imagined by anyone
who has never seen a desert. Look at it on
the map, and it is full of the names of towns
and villages : it is in Europe, where there
are no deserts : it is a fertile province among
places of famous names. Surely it is a proad
addition to an ambitious monarch's posses-
sions. Surely there is something there that
it is worth while to have conquered at the
cost of Army Corps. No, nothing. They are
mirage towns. The farms grow Dead Sea
fruit. France recedes before the imperial
clutch. France smiles, but not for him. His
new towns seem to be his because their names
have not yet been removed from any map,
but they crumble at his approach because
France is not for him. His deadly ambition
107
TALES OF WAR
makes a waste before it as it goes clutching
for cities. It comes to them and the cities
are not there.
I have seen mirages and have heard others
told of, but the best mirages of all we never
hear described : the mirage that waterless
travellers see at the last — those fountains
rising out of onyx basins, blue and straight
into incredible heights, and falling and flooding
cool white marble ; the haze of spray above
their feathery heads through which the pale
green domes of weathered copper shimmer
and shake a little ; mysterious temples, the
tombs of unknown kings ; the cataracts
coming down from rose-quartz cliffs, far off
but seen quite clearly, growing to rivers
bearing, curious barges to the golden .Courts
of Sahara. These things we never see ; they
are seen at the last by men who die of thirst.
Even so has the Kaiser looked at the
smiling plains of France. Even so has he
looked on her famous ancient cities, and the
farms and the fertile fields and the woods
and orchards of Picardy. With effort and
trouble he has moved towards them. As he
comes near to them the cities crumble, the
woods shrivel and fall, the farms fade out
io8
THE LAST MIRAGE
of Picardy, even the hedgerows go ; it is
bare, bare desert. He had been sure of Paris,
he had dreamed of Versailles and some mon-
strous coronation, he had thought his insati-
able avarice would be sated. For he had
plotted for conquest of the world, that bound-
less greed of his goading him on as a man in
the grip of thirst broods upon lakes.
He sees victory near him now. That also
will fade in the desert of old barbed wire
and weeds. When will he see that a doom is
over all his ambitions ? For his dreams of
victory are like those last dreams that come
in deceptive deserts to dying men.
There is nothing good for him in the desert
of the Somme. Bapaume is not really there,
though it be marked on his maps ; it is only
a wilderness of slates and brick. Peronne
looks like a city a long way off, but when
you come near it is only the shells of houses.
Poziferes, Le Sars, Sapigny, are gone altogether.
And all is Dead vSea fruit in a visible desert.
The reports of German victories there are
mirage, like all the rest ; they, too, will fade
into weeds and old barbed wire.
And the advances that look like victories,
and the ruins that look like cities, and the
109
TALES OF WAR
shell-beaten broken fields that look like farms,
they and the dreams of conquest and all the
plots and ambitions, they are all the mirage
of a dying dynasty in a desert it made for
its doom.
Bones lead up to the desert, bones are
scattered about it ; it is the most menacing
and calamitous waste of all the deadly places
that have been inclement to man. It flatters
the HohenzoUerns with visions of victory
now, because they are doomed by it and are
about to die. When their race has died the
earth shall smile again, for their deadly mirage
shall oppress us no more. The cities shall
rise again and the farms come back ; hedge-
rows and orchards shall be seen again ; the
woods shall slowly lift their heads from the
dust ; and gardens shall come again where
the desert was, to bloom in happier ages
that forget the HohenzoUerns.
no
XXIII
A FAMOUS MAN
LAST winter a famous figure walked in
Behagnies. Soldiers came to see him
from their billets all down the Arras road
from Ervillers and from Sapigny, and from
the ghosts of villages back from the road,
places that once were villages, but are only
names now. They would walk three or four
miles, those who could not get lorries, for his
was one of those names that all men know —
not such a name as a soldier or poet may win,
but a name that all men know. They used
to go there at evening. Four miles away on
the left as you went from Ervillers the guns
mumbled over the hills, low hills over which
the Verys from the trenches put up their
heads and peered round, greeny yellowy heads
that turned the sky sickly, and the clouds
lit up and went grey again all the night long.
As you got near to Behagnies you lost sight
III
TALES OF WAR
of the Verys, but the guns mumbled on. A
silly little train used to run on one's left,
which used to whistle loudly, as though it
asked to be shelled ; but I never saw a shell
coming its way. Perhaps it knew that the
German gunners could not calculate how
slow it went. It crossed the road as you
got down to Behagnies.
You passed the graves • of two or three
German soldiers, with their names on white
wooden crosses — men killed in 1914 ; and
then a little cemetery of a French cavalry
regiment. A big cross stood in the middle,
with a wreath and a tricolour badge, and the
names of the men. And then one saw trees.
That was always a wonder, whether one saw
their dark shapes in the evening, or whether
one saw them by day and knew from the
look of their leaves whether autumn had
come yet, or gone. In winter at evening
one just saw the black bulk of them, but that
was no less marvellous then seeing them
green in summer : trees by the side of the
Arras-Bapaume road, trees in mid-desert in
the awful region of Somme. There were not
many of them, just a cluster, fewer than the
date-palms in an oasis in Sahara ; but an oasis
112
A FAMOUS MAN
is an oasis wherever you find it, and a few
trees make it. There are little places here
and there — few enough, as the Arabs know
— that the Sahara's deadly sand has never
been able to devastate ; and there are places
even in the Somme that German malice,
obeying the Kaiser as the sand of Sahara
obeys the accursed Siroc, has not been able
to destroy quite to the uttermost. That
little cluster of trees at Behagnies is one
of these : Divisional Headquarters used to
shelter beneath them ; and near them was
a statue on a lawn, which probably stood by
the windows of some fine house, though there
is no trace of the house but the lawn and
that statue now.
And over the way on the left, a little farther
on, just past the officers' club, a large hall
stood, where one saw that famous figure
whom officers and men alike would come so
far to see.
The hall would hold perhaps four or five
hundred seats, in front of a stage fitted up
very simply with red, white and blue cloths,
but fitted up by someone that understood
the job ; and at the back of that stage on
those winter evenings walked on his flat and
H 113
TALES OF WAR
world-renowned feet the figure of Charlie
Chaplin.
When aeroplanes came over bombing, the
dynamos used to stop, for they suppUed light
to other places besides the cinema, and the
shade of Charlie Chaplin would fade away.
But the men would wait till the aeroplanes
had gone and that famous figure came
waddhng back to the screen. There he amused
tired men newly come from the trenches ;
there he brought laughter to most of the
twelve days that they had out of the line.
He is gone from Behagnies now. He did
not march in the retreat a little apart from
the troops, with head bent forward and hand
thrust in jacket, a flat-footed Napoleon : yet
he is gone ; for no one would have left behind
for the enemy so precious a thing as a Charlie
Chaplin film. He is gone, but he will return.
He will come with his cane one day along
that Arras road to the old hut in Behagnies ;
and men dressed in brown will welcome him
there again.
He will pass beyond it through those deso-
late plains, and over the hills beyond them,
beyond Bapaume. Far hamlets to the east
will know his antics.
114
I
A FAMOUS MAN
And one day, surely, in his old familiar
garb, without Court dress, without removing
his hat, armed with that flexible cane, ha
will walk over the faces of the Prussian Guard,
and, picking up the Kaiser by the collar with
infinite nonchalance in finger and thumb,
will place him neatly in a prone position and
solemnly sit on his chest.
115
XXIV
THE OASES
OF DEATH
WHILE the German guns were pound-
ing Amiens and the battle of dull
Prussianism against Liberty raged on, they
buried Richthofen in the British lines.
They had laid him in a large tent, with
his broken machine outside it. Thence British
airmen carried him to the quiet cemetery,
and he was buried among the cypresses in
this old resting-place of French generations, J
just as though he had come there bringing
no harm to France.
Five wreaths were on his cofftn, placed
there by those who had fought against him
up in the air. And under the wreaths on
the coffin was spread the German flag.
When the funeral service was over three
volleys were fired by the escort and a hundred
aviators paid their last respects to the grave
of their greatest enemy ; for the chivalry
Ii6
THE OASES OF DEATH
that the Prussians have driven from earth
and sea Hves on in the blue spaces of the air.
They buried Richthofen at evening, and the
planes came droning home as they buried
him, and the German guns roared on, and
guns answered, defending Amiens. And in
spite of all, the cemetery had the air of quiet,
remaining calm and aloof as all French grave-
yards are. For they seem to have no part
in the cataclysm that shakes all the world
but them ; they seem to withdraw amongst
memories and to be aloof from time, and
above all to be quite untroubled by the war
that rages to-day, upon which they appear
to look out listlessly from among their cypress
and yew, and dimly, down a vista of centuries.
They are very strange, these little oases of
death that remain unmoved and green with
their trees still growing, in the midst of a
desolation as far as the eye can see, in which
cities and villages and trees and hedges, and
farms and fields and churches, are all gone,
and there hugely broods a desert. It is as
though Death, stalking up and down through
France, for four years, sparing nothing, had
recognized for his own his little gardens, and
had spared only them.
117
XXV
ANGLO-SAXON
TYRANNY
"TTTE need a sea," says Big-Admiral
W von Tirpitz, "freed of Anglo-Saxon
tyranny." Unfortunately, neither the British
Admiralty nor the American War Department
permit us to know how much of the Anglo-
Saxon tyranny is done by American destroyers
and how much by British ships and even «
trawlers. It would interest both countries
to know, if it could be known. But the
Big- Admiral is unjust to France for the
French navy exerts a tyranny at sea that
can by no means be overlooked ; although
naturally, from her position in front of
the mouth of the Elbe, England practises
the culminating insupportable tyranny of
keeping the High Seas Fleet in the Kiel
Canal.
It is not I, but the Big-Admiral, who
Ii8
ANGLO-SAXON TYRANNY
chose the word "tyranny" as descriptive of
the activities of the Anglo-Saxon navies. He
was making a speech at Diisseldorf on May
25th and was reported in the D'usseldorfer
Nachrichten on May 27th.
Naturally, it does not seem like tyranny
to us, even the contrary; but for an admiral,
ein Grosse- Admiral, lately commanding a High
Seas Fleet, it must have been more galling
than we perhaps can credit to be confined
in a canal. There was he, who should have
been breasting the blue, or at any rate
doing something salty and nautical, far out
in the storms of that sea that the Germans
call an Ocean, with the hurricane raging
angrily in his whiskers and now and then
wafting tufts of them aloft to whiten the
halyards ; there was he constrained to a
command the duties of which, however nobly
he did them, could be equally well carried
out by any respectable bargee. He hoped
for a piracy of which the Lusitania was
merely a beginning ; he looked for the
bombardment of innumerable towns ; he pic-
tured slaughter in many a hamlet of fisher-
men ; he planned more than all those things
of which U-boat commanders are guilty ;
119
TALES OF WAR
he saw himself a murderous old man,
terrible to seafarers and a scourge of the
coasts, and fancied himself chronicled in after-
years by such as told dark tales of Captain
Kidd or the awful buccaneers ; but he
followed in the end no more desperate
courses than to sit and watch his ships on
a wharf near Kiel, like one of Jacobs's night-
watchmen.
No wonder that what appears to us no
more than the necessary protection of women
and children in sea-coast towns from murder
should be to him an intolerable tyranny ;
no wonder that the guarding of travellers
of the allied countries at sea, and even
those of the neutrals, should be a most
galling thing to the Big-Admiral's thwarted
ambition. For, looking at it from the point
of view of one who to white-whiskered age
has retained the schoolboy's natural love
of the black-and-yellow flag, a pirate, he
would say, has as much right to live as
wasps or tigers. The Anglo-Saxon navies,
he might argue, have a certain code of
rules for use at sea ; they let women get
first into the boats for instance, when ships
are sinking, and they rescue drowning
lao
ANGLO-SAXON TYRANNY
mariners when they can : no actual harm
in all this, he would feel, though it would
weaken you, as Hindenburg said of poetry ;
but if all these little rules are tyrannously
enforced on those who may think them silly,
what is to become of the pirate ? Where,
if people like Beattie and Sims had always
had their way, would be those rollicking tales
of the jolly Spanish Main, and men walking
the plank into the big blue sea, and long,
low, rakish craft putting in to Indian harbours
with a cargo of men and women all hung from
the yard-arm ? A melancholy has come over
the spirit of Big-Admiral von Tirpitz in the
years he has spent in the marshes between the
Elbe and Kiel, and in that melancholy he sees
romance crushed; he sees no more pearl ear-
rings and little gold rings in the hold ; he sees
British battleships spoiling the Spanish Main,
and hateful American cruisers in the old
Sargasso Sea ; he sees himself, alas ! the last
of all the pirates.
Let him take comfort. There were always
pirates. And in spite of the tyranny of
England and America, and of France which
the poor old man perplexed with his troubles
forgot, there will be pirates still. Not many,
121
TALES OF WAR
perhaps, but enough U-boats will always be
able to slip through that tyrannous blockade
to spread indiscriminate slaughter amongst
the travellers of any nation, enough to hand
on the old traditions of murder at sea. And
one day Captain Kidd, with such a bow as
they used to make in ports of the Spanish
Main, will take off his ancient hat, sweeping
it low in hell, and be proud to clasp the hand
of the Lord of the Kiel Canal.
122
XXVI
MEMORIES
Far-off things
And battles long ago
THOSE who live in an old house are
necessarily more concerned with paying
the plumber, should his art be required, or
choosing wall-paper that does not clash with
the chintzes, than with the traditions that
may haunt its corridors. In Ireland — and
no one knows how old that is, for the gods
that hved there before the Red Branch came
wrote few chronicles on the old grey Irish
stones and wrote in their own language —
in Ireland we are more concerned with working
it so that Tim Flanagan gets the job he does
be looking for.
But in America those who remember Ireland
remember her, very often, from old genera-
tions ; maybe their grandfather migrated,
perhaps his grandfather, and Ireland is remem-
123
TALES OF WAR
bered by old tales treasured among them.
Now, Tim Flanagan will not be remembered
in a year's time, when he has the job for which
he has got us to agitate, and the jobberies
that stir us move not the pen of History.
But the tales that Irish generations hand down
beyond the Atlantic have to be tales that
are worth remembering. They are tales that
have to stand the supreme test, tales that a
child will listen to by the fireside of an evening,
so that it goes down with those early remem-
bered evenings that are last of all to go of
the memories of a lifetime. A tale that a
child will listen to must have much grandeur.
Any cheap stuff will do for us, bad journalism
and novels by girls that could get no other
jobs ; but a child looks for those things in
a tale that are simple and noble and epic,
the things that Earth remembers. And so
they tell, over there, tales of Sarsfield and of
the old Irish Brigade ; they tell, of an evening,
of Owen Roe O'Neill. And into those tales
come the plains of Flanders again and the
ancient towns of France, towns famous long
ago and famous yet : let us rather think of
them as famous names and not as the sad
ruins we have seen, melancholy by day and
124
MEMORIES
monstrous in the moonlight. Many an Irish-
man who sails from America for those historic
lands knows that the old trees that stand
there have their roots far down in soil once
richened by Irish blood. When the Boyne
was lost and won, and Ireland had lost her
King, many an Irishman with all his wealth
in a scabbard looked upon exile as his Sover-
eign's Court. And so they came to the lands
of foreign kings, with nothing to offer for
the hospitality that was given them but a
sword ; and it usually was a sword with which
kings were well content. Louis XV had many
of them, and was glad to have them at Fon-
tenoy ; the Spanish king admitted them to
the Golden Fleece ; they defended Maria
Theresa. Landen in Flanders and Cremona
knew them ; a volume were needed to tell
of all those swords ; more than one Muse
has remembered them. It was not disloyalty
that drove them forth ; their King was
gone ; they followed ; the oak was smitten,
and. brown were the leaves of the tree.
But no such mournful metaphor applies to
the men who march to-day towards the plains
where the " Wild Geese " were driven. They
go with no country mourning them, but their
125
TALES OF WAR
whole land cheers them on ; they go to
inherited battlefields ; and there is this differ-
ence in their attitude to kings, that those
knightly Irishmen of old, driven homeless
oversea, appeared as exiles suppliant for
shelter before the face df the Grand Monarch ;
and he, no doubt with exquisite French grace,
gave back to them all they had lost except
*what was lost for ever, salving so far as he
could the injustice suffered by each. But
to-day, when might, for its turn, is in the
hands of democracies, the men whose fathers
built the statue of Liberty have left their
country to bring back an exiled king to his
home, and to right what can be righted of
the ghastly wrongs of Flanders.
And if men's prayers are heard, as many
say, old saints will hear old supplications
going up by starlight, with a certain wistful,
musical intonation that has linked the towns
of Limerick and Cork with the fields of
Flanders before.
126
XXVII
THE MOVEMENT
FOR many years Eliphaz Griggs was com-
paratively silent. Not that he did not
talk on all occasions whenever he could find
hearers ; he did that at great length ; but
for many years he addressed no public meeting,
and was no part of the normal life of the
north-east end of Hyde Park or Trafalgar
Square. And then one day he was talking
in a public-house, where he had gone to talk
on the only subject that was dear to him.
He waited, as was his custom, until five or
six men were present, and then he began :
" Ye're all damned, I'm saying, damned from
the day you were born. Your- portion is
Tophet."
And on that day there happened what had
never happened in his experience before.
Men used to listen in a tolerant way, and
say little over their beer, for that is the
127
TALES OF WAR
English custom ; and that would be all. But
to-day a man rose up with flashing eyes and
went over to EHphaz and gripped him by
the hand : " They're all damned," said the
stranger.
That was the turning-point in the life of
Eliphaz. Up to that moment he had been a
lonely crank, men thought he was queer ;
but now there were two of them, and he
became a Movement. A Movement in Eng-
land may do what it likes : there was a
Movement, before the War, for spoiling tulips
in Kew Gardens and breaking church windows ;
it had its run like the rest.
The name of EHphaz 's new friend was
Ezekiel Pim : and they drew up rules for
their movement almost at once ; and very
soon country inns knew Eliphaz no more.
And for some while they missed him where
he used to drop in of an evening to tell them
they were all damned ; and then a man proved
one day that the earth was flat, and they all
forgot Eliphaz.
But Eliphaz went to Hyde Park and
Ezekiel Pim went with him, and there you
would see them close to the Marble Arch on
any fine Sunday afternoon, preaching their
128
i
THE IM O V E M E N T
movement to the people of London. " You
are all damned," said Eliphaz. " Your por-
tion shall be damnation for everlasting."
" All damned," added Ezekiel.
Eliphaz was the orator. He would picture
hell to you as it really is. He made you
see pretty much what it will be like to wriggle
and turn and squirm, and never escape from
burning. But Ezekiel Pim, though he seldom
said more than three words, uttered those
words with such alarming sincerit}' and had
such a sure conviction shining in his eyes
that searched right in your face as he said
them, and his long hair waved so weirdly
as his head shot forward when he said
" You're all damned," that Ezekiel Pim
brought home to you that the vivid descriptions
of Eliphaz realh' applied to you.
People who lead bad lives get their sensi-
bilities hardened. These did not care very
much what Eliphaz said. But girls at school
and several governesses, and even some young
clergy, were very much affected. Eliphaz
Griggs and Ezekiel Pim seemed to bring hell
so near to you. You could almost feel it
baking the Marble Arch from two to four on
Sundays. And at four o'clock the Surbiton
I 129
TALES OF WAR
Branch of the International Anarchists used
to come along, and Eliphaz Griggs and
Ezekiel Pirn would pack up their flag and
go, for the pitch belonged to the Surbiton
people till six ; and the crank movements
punctiliously recognized each other's rights.
If they fought among themselves, which is
quite unthinkable, the police would run them
in ; it is the one thing that an anarchist in
England may never do.
When the war came the two speakers
doubled their efforts. The way they looked
at it was that here was a counter-attraction
taking people's minds off the subject of their
own damnation just as thej^ had got them to
think about it. Eliphaz worked as he had
never worked before : he spared nobody ; but
it was still Ezekiel Pim who somehow brought
it most home to them.
One fine spring afternoon Eliphaz Griggs
was speaking at his usual place and time ;
lie had wound himself up wonderfully. " You
are damned," he was saying, " for ever and
-ever and ever. Your sins have found yom
out. Your filthy lives will be as fuel round
you, and shall burn for ever and ever."
" Look here," said a Canadian soldier in
130
THE MOVEMENT
the crowd, " we shouldn't allow that in
Ottawa."
" What ? " said an English girl.
" Why, telling us we're all damned like
that," he said.
" O this is England," she said. " They
may all say what they like here."
" You are all damned," said Ezekiel, jerking
forward his head and shoulders till his hair
flapped out behind. "All, all, all damned."
"I'm damned if I am," said the Canadian
soldier.
" Ah," said Ezekiel, and a sly look came
into his face.
Eliphaz flamed on: " Your sins are remem-
bered. Satan shall grin at you. He shall
heap cinders on you for ever and ever. Woe
to you, filthy livers ! Woe to you, sinners !
Hell is your portion. There shall be none to
grieve for you. You shall dwell in torment
for ages. None shall be spared, not one.
Woe everlasting . . . O, I beg pardon,
/gentlemen, I'm sure." For the Pacifists'
League had been kept waiting three minutes.
It was their turn to-day at four.
131
XXVIII
NATURE'S GAD
THE claim of Professor Grotius Jan
Beek to have discovered or learned
the language of the greater apes has been
demonstrated clearly enough. He is not the
original discoverer of the fact that they have
what may be said to correspond to a lan-
guage ; nor is he the first man to have lived
for some while in the jungle protected by
wooden bars, with a view to acquiring some
knowledge of the meaning of the various
syllables that gorillas appear to utter. If so
crude a collection of sounds, amounting to less
than a hundred words, if words they are,
may be called a language, it may be admitted
that the Professor has learned it, as his recent
experiments show. What he has not proved
is his assertion that he has actually conversed
with a gorilla, or by signs or grunts or any
means whatever obtained an insight, as he
132
NATURE'S CAD
put it, into its mentality or, as we should
put it, its point of view. This Professor
Beek claims to have done ; and though he
gives us a certain plausible corroboration of
a kind, which makes his story appear likely,
it should be borne in mind that it is not of
the nature of proof.
The Professor's story is, briefly, that, having
acquired this language, which nobody that
has witnessed his experiments will call in
question, he went back to the jungle for a
week, living all the time in the ordinary
explorer's cage of the Blik pattern. Towards
the very end of the week a big male gorilla
came by, and the Professor attracted it by
the one word " food." It came, he says,
close to the cage, and seemed prepared to
talk, but became very angry on seeing a man
there, and beat the cage and would say
nothing. The Professor says that he asked
it why it was angry. He admits that he had
learned no more than forty words of this
language, but believes that there are perhaps
thirty more. Much, however, is expressed,
as he says, by mere intonation. Anger, for
instance ; and scores of allied words such as
terrible, frightful, kill, whether noun, verb, or
133
TALES OF WAR
adjective, are expressed, he says, by a mere
growl. Nor is there any word for "why,"
but queries are signified by the inflection of
the voice. When he asked it why it was
angry, the gorilla said men kill him, and
added a noise that the Professor said was
evidently meant to allude to guns. The only
word used, he says, in this remark of the
gorilla's was the word that signified "man."
The sentence as understood by the Professor
amounted to, " Man kill me. Guns." But
the word " kill " was represented simpl}^ by
a snarl, " me " by slapping its chest, and
"guns," as I have explained, was onty
represented by a noise. The Professor believes
that ultimately a word for guns ma}' be
evolved out of that noise, but thinks that it
will take many centuries, and that if during
that time guns should cease to be in use, the
stimulus being withdrawn, the word will never
be evolved at all ; nor, of course, will it be
needed.
The Professor tried, by evincing interest,
ignorance and incredulity, and even indig-
nation, to encourage the gorilla to say more ;
but to his disappointment, all the more in-
tense after having exchanged that one word
134
N A T U R E '■ S CAD
of conversation with one of the beasts, the
gorilla onty repeated what it had said, and
beat on the cage again. For half an hour
this went on, the Professor showing every
sigu of sympathy, the gorilla raging and
beating upon the cage. It v/as half an hour
of the most intense excitement to the Professor,
during which tim.e he savv^ the realization of
dreams that many considered crazy, as it were
glittering within his grasp, and all the while
this ridiculous gorilla would do nothing but
repeat the mere shred of a sentence and beat
the cage with its great hands ; and the heat,
of course, was intense. And by the end
of the half-hour the excitement and the
heat seem to have got the better of the Pro-
fessor's temper, and he waved the disgusting
brute angrily away with a gesture that prob-
ably was not much less impatient than the
gorilla's ovvn. And at that the animal suddenly
became voluble. He beat more furiously than
ever upon the cage and slipped his great
fingers through the bars, trying to reach the
Professor, and poured out volumics of ape-
chatter. Why, why did men shoot at him ?
he asked. He made him.self terrible, therefore
men ought to love him. That was the whole
135
TALES OF WAR
burden of what the Professor calls its argument.
" Me, me terrible," two slaps on the chest
and then a growl. " Man love me." And
then the emphatic negative word, and the
sound that meant guns, and sudden furious
rushes at the cage to try and get at the
Professor.
The gorilla. Professor Beek explains, evi-
dently admired only strength ; whenever he
said, " I make myself terrible to man," a
sentence he often repeated, he drew himself
up and thrust out his huge chest and bared
his frightful teeth ; and certainly, the Professor
says, there was something terribty grand about
the menacing brute. " Me terrible," he
repeated again and again. " Me terrible.
Sky, sun, stars with me. Man love me.
Man love me. No ? " It meant that all
the great forces of nature assisted him and
his terrible teeth, which he gnashed repeatedly,
and that therefore man should love him ;
and he opened his great jaws wide as he said
this, showing all the brutal force of them.
There was to my mind a genuine ring in
Professor Beek's story, because he was obvi-
ously so much more concerned, and really
troubled, by the dreadful depravity of this
"136
NATURE'S CAD
animal's point of view, or mentality as he
called it, than he was concerned with whether
or not we believed what he had to say.
And I mentioned that there was a circum-
stance in his story of a plausible and even
corroborative nature. It is this. Professor
Beek, who noticed at the time a bullet wound
in the tip of the gorilla's left ear, by means
of which it was luckily identified, put his
analysis of its mentality in writing, and
showed it to several others before he had any
way of accounting for the beast having such
a mind.
Long afterwards it was definitely ascertained
that this animal had been caught when young
on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, and trained and
even educated, so far as such things are
possible, by an eminent German Professor, a
persona grata at the Court of Berlin.
137
XXIX
THE HOiME OF HERR
SGHNITZELHAASER
THE guns in the town of Greinstein were
faintly audible. The family of Schnit-
zelhaaser lived alone there in mourning, an
old man and old woman. They never went
out or saw any one, for the}^ knew they could
not speak as though they did not mourn.
They feared that their secret would escape
them. They had never cared for the war f
that the War Lord made. They no longer ^
cared what he did with it. They never read |
his speeches ; they never hung out flags when
he ordered flags : they hadn't the heart to.
They had had four sons. ^'
The lonely old couple would go as far as
the shop for food. Hunger stalked behind
them. They just beat hunger every day,
and so saw evening, but there was nothing
to spare. Otherwise thev did not go out
138
HERR SCHNITZELHAASER
at all. Hunger had been coming slowly
nearer of late. They had nothing but the
ration, and 'the ration was growing smaller.
They had one pig of their own but the law
said you might not kill it. So the pig was
no good to them.
They used to go and look at that pig some-
times, when hunger pinched. But more than
that they did not dare to contemplate.
Hunger came nearer and nearer. The war
was going to end by the ist of July. The
War Lord was going to take Paris on this
day and that would end the war at once.
But then the war was always going to end.
It was going to end in* 19 14, and their four
sons were to have come home when the leaves
fell. The War Lord had promised that.
And even if it did end, that would not bring
their four sons home now. So what did it
matter what the War Lord said ?
It was thoughts like these that the}- knew
they had to conceal. It was because of
thoughts . Uke these that they did not trust
themselves to go out and see other people,
for they feared that by their looks, if by
nothing else, or by their silence or perhaps
their tears, they might imply a blasphemy
139
TALES OF WAR
against the All Highest. And hunger made
one so hasty. What might one not say ?
And so they stayed indoors.
But now. What would happen now? The
War Lord was coming to Greinstein in order
to hear the guns. One officer of the Staff
was to be billeted in their house. And what
would happen now ?
They talked the whole thing over. They
must struggle and make an effort. The
officer would be there for one evening. He
would leave in the morning quite early in
order to make things ready for the return
to Potsdam : he had charge of the imperial
car. So for one evening they must be merry.
They would suppose— it was Herr Schnitzel-
haaser's suggestion— they would think all the
evening that Belgium and France and Luxem-
burg all attacked the Fatherland, and that,
the Kaiser, utterly unprepared, quite unpre-
pared, called on the Germans to defend their
land against Belgium.
Yes, the old woman could imagine that ;
she could think it all the evening.
And then, then it was no use not being
cheerful altogether ; then one must imagine
a little more, just for the evening : it would
140
HERR SCHNITZELHAASER
come quite easy ; one must think that the
four boys were aUve.
" Hans, too ? " (Hans was the youngest.)
" Yes, all four. Just for the evening."
"But if the officer asks? "
'' He will not ask. What are four soldiers ? "
So it was all arranged ; and at evening
the officer came. He brought his own rations,
so hunger came no nearer. Hunger just
lay down outside the door, and did not
notice the officer. At his supper the officer
began to talk. The Kaiser himself, he said,
was at the Schartzhaus. "So!" said Herr
Schnitzelhaaser ; " just over the way. So
close. Such an honour."
And, indeed, the shadow of the Schartzhaus
darkened their garden in the morning.
It was such an honour, said Frau Schnitzel-
haaser, too. And they began to praise the
Kaiser. So great a War Lord she said ;
the most glorious war there had ever been.
Of course, said the officer, it would end
on the ist of July.
" Of course," said Frau Schnitzelhaaser.
" And so great an admiral, too. One must
remember that also. And how fortunate we
were to have him : one must not forget
141
T A L E ^ O F WAR
that. Had it not been for him the crafty
Belgians would have attacked the Fatherland,
but they were struck down before they could
do it. So much better to prevent a bad
deed like that than merely to punish after.
So wise. And had it not been for him,
if it had not been for him ..."
The old man saw that she was breaking
down and hastily he took up that feverish
praise. Feverish it was, for their hunger and
bitter loss affected their minds no less than
illness does ; and the things they did, they
did hastily and intemperately. His praise of
the War Lord raced on as the officer ate.
He spoke of him as of those that benefit
man, as of monarchs who bring happiness
to their people. " And now," he said, "he is
here in the Schartzhaus beside us, listening
to the guns just like a common soldier."
Faintly the guns, as he spoke, coughed
beyond ominous hills. Contentedly the officer
went on eating. He suspected nothing of
the thoughts his host and hostess were hiding.
At last he went upstairs to bed.
As fierce exertion is easy to the fevered,-
so they had spoken ; as it wears them, so
they were worn. The old woman wept when
142
HERR SCHNITZELHAASER
the officer went out of hearing. But old
Herr Schnitzelhaaser picked up a big butcher's
knife. " I will bear it no more," he said.
His wife watched him in silence as he
went away with his knife; Out of the
house he went and into the night. Through
the open door she saw nothing ; all was
dark ; even the Schartzhaus, where all
was gay to-night, stood dark for fear of
aeroplanes. The old woman waited in
silence.
When Herr Schnitzelhaaser returned, there
was blood on his knife.
" What have you done ? " the old woman
asked him quite calmly.
" I have killed our pig," he said.
She broke out then, all the more recklessly
for the long restraint of the evening ; the
officer must have heard her.
" We are lost ! We are lost ! " she cried.
** We may not kill our pig. Hunger has
made you mad. You have ruined us."
" I will bear it no longer," he said. " I
have killed our pig."
" But they will never let us eat it," she
cried. " Oh, you have ruined us ! "
" If you did not dare to kill our pig," he
14
TALES OF WAR
said, " why did you not stop me when you
saw me go ? You saw me go with the
knife."
" I thought," she said, " you were going
to kill the Kaiser."
144
XXX
A DEED OF MERCY
AS Hindenburg and the Kaiser came down,
as we read, from Mont d'Hiver, during
the recent offensive, they saw on the edge
of a crater two wounded British soldiers.
The Kaiser ordered that they should be
cared for : their wounds were bound up
and they were given brandy, and brought
round from unconsciousness. That is the
German account of it and it may well be
true. It was a kindly act.
Probably, had it not been for this, the two
men would have died among those desolate
craters ; no one would have known and no
one could have been blamed for it.
The contrast of this spark of imperial
kindness against the gloom of the background
of the war that the Kaiser made is a
pleasant thing to see, even though it illumin-
ates for only a moment the savage darkness
K 145
TALES OF WAR
in which our days are plunged. It was a
kindness that probably will long be remem-
bered to him. Even we, his enemies, will
remember it. And who knows but that
when most he needs it his reward for it will
be given him ? For Judas, they say, once
gave his cloak in his youth, out of compassion,
to a shivering beggar, who sat shaken with
ague, in rags, in bitter need. And the years
went by and Judas forgot his deed. And
long after, in hell, Judas, they sa}^ was
given one day's respite at the end of every
year because of this one kindness he had
done so long since in his youth. And every
year he goes, they say, for a day and cools
himself among the Arctic bergs ; once every
year for century after century.
Perhaps some sailor on watch on a misty
evening, blown far out of his course away
to the North, saw something ghostly once
on an iceberg floating by or heard some
voice in the dimness that seemed like the
voice of man, and came home with this
weird story. And perhaps as the story
passed from lip to lip men found enough
justice in it to believe it true. So it came
down the centuries.
146
1
A DEED OF MERCY
Will seafarers ages hence on dim October
evenings, or on nights when the moon is
ominous through mist, red and huge and
uncanny, see a lonely figure sometimes, on
the loneliest part of the sea, far north of
where the Lusitania sank, gathering all the
cold it can ? Will they see it hugging a
crag of iceberg wan as itself ; helmet, cuirass
and ice pale blue in the mist together ? Will
it look towards them with ice-blue eyes
throu'gh the mist, and will they question it,
meeting on those bleak seas ? Will it answer,
or will the north wind howl like voices ?
Will the cry of seals be heard, and ice-floes
grinding, and strange birds lost upon the
wind that night ? or will it speak to them
in those distant years and tell them how it
sinned, betraying man ?
It will be a grim, dark story in that lonely
part of the sea, when he confesses to sailors
blown too far north the dreadful thing he
plotted against man. The date on which
he is seen will be told from sailor to sailor.
Queer taverns of distant harbours will know
it well. Not many will care to be at sea
that day and few will risk being driven by
stress of weather on the Kaiser's night to
147
TALES OF WAR
among the bergs of the haunted part of
the sea.
And yet, for all the grimness of the pale-
blue phantom, with cuirass and helmet and
eyes shimmering on deadly icebergs ; and
yet, for all the sorrow of the wrong he did
against man, the women drowned and the
children, and all the good ships gone — yet
will the horrified mariners meeting him in
the mist grudge him no moment of the day
he has earned, or the coolness he gains from
the bergs, because of the kindness he did
to the wounded men. For the mariners
in their hearts are kindly men, and what
a soul gains from kindness will seem to them
well deserved.
148
XXXI
LAST SCENE OF ALL
A
FTER John Calleron was hit he carried
on in a kind of twiUght of the mind.
Things grew dimmer and calmer ; harsh
outHnes of events became blurred ; memories
came to him ; there was a singing in his
ears like far-off bells. Things seemed more
beautiful than the}' had a while ago ; to
him it was for all the world like evening
after some quiet sunset, when lawns and
shrubs and woods and some old spire look
lovely in the late light and one reflects on
past da3^s. Thus he carried on, seeing
things dimly. And what is sometimes called
" the roar of battle," those aerial voices
that snarl and moan and whine and rage
at soldiers, had grown dimmer too. It all
seemed farther away, and littler, as far things
are. He still heard the bullets : there is
something so violently and intensely sharp
149
TALES OF WAR
in the snap of passing bullets at short ranges
that you hear them in deepest thought, and
even in dreams. He heard them, tearing
by, above all things else. The rest seemed
fainter and dimmer, and smaller and farther
away.
He did not think he was very badly hit,
but nothing seemed to matter as it did a
while ago. Yet he carried on.
And then he opened his eyes very wide
and found he was back in London again
in an Underground train. He knew it at
once by the look of it. He had made
hundreds of journeys long ago by those
trains. He knew by the dark, outside, that^^
it had not yet left London ; but what was ^
odder than that, if one stopped to think of
it, was that he knew exactly where it was
going. It was the train that went away
out into the country where he used to live
as a boy. He was sure of that without
thinking.
When he began to think how he came to
be there he remembered the war as a very
far-off thing. He supposed he had been un-
conscious a very long time, He was all
right now.
150
LAST SCENE OF ALL
Other people were sitting beside him on
the same seat. They all seemed like people
he remembered a very long time ago. In
the darkness opposite, beyond the windows
of the train, he could see their reflections
clearly. He looked at the reflections, but
could not quite remember.
A woman was sitting on his left. She
was quite young. She was more like some
one that he most deeply remembered than
all the others were. He gazed at her, and
tried to clear his mind.
He did not turn and stare at her, but
he quietly watched her reflection before him
in the dark. Every detail of her dress,
her young face, her hat, the little ornaments
she wore, were minutely clear before him,
looking out of the dark. So contented she
looked you would say she was untouched
by war.
As he gazed at the clear, calm face and the
dress that seemed neat though old and,
like all things, so far away, his mind grew
clearer and clearer. It seemed to him cer-
tain it was the face of his mother, but from
thirty years ago, out of old memories and
one picture. He felt sure it was his mother
151
TALES OF WAR
as she had been when he was very small.
And yet after thh'ty years how could he
know ? He puzzled to try and be quite
sure. But how she came to be there lookmg
like that, out of those oldest memories, he
did not think of at all.
He seemed to be hugely tired by many
things, and did not want to think. Yet he
was very happy — more happy even than
tired men just come home all new to comfort.
He gazed and gazed at the face in the
dark. And then he felt quite sure.
He was about to speak. Was she look-
ing at him ? Was she watching him ? he
wondered. He glanced for the first time
to his own reflection in that clear row of
faces.
His own reflection was not there, but blank
dark between his two neighbours. And then
he knew he was dead.
152
XXXil
OLD ENGLAND
TOWARDS winter's end, on a high, big,
bare down in the South of England,
John Plowman was ploughing. He was
ploughing the brown field at the top of the
hill, good soil of the clay ; a few yards
lower down was nothing but chalk, with
shallow flinty soil and steep to plough ; so
they let briars grow there. For generations
his forebears had ploughed on the top of
that hill. John did not know how many.
The hills were very old ; it might have been
always.
He scarcely looked to see if his furrow
was going straight. The work he was doing
was so much in his blood that he could almost
feel if furrows were straight or not. Year
after year they moved on the same old land-
marks ; thorn-trees and briars mostly guided
the plough, where they stood on the untamed
L 153;
TALES OF WAR
land beyond ; the thorn-trees grew old at
their guiding, and still the furrows varied
not by the breadth of a hoof-mark. John
as he ploughed had leisure to meditate on
much beside the crops ; he knew so much
of the crops that his thoughts could easily
run free from them ; he used to meditate
on who they were that lived in briar and
thorn-tree, and danced, as folk said, all
through midsummer night, and sometimes
blessed and sometimes harmed the crops ;
for he knew that in old England were wonder-
ful ancient things, odder and older things
than many folks knew. And his eyes had
leisure to see much beside the furrows, for he
could almost feel the furrows going straight.
One day at his ploughing, as he watched
the thorn ahead, he saw the whole big hill
besides looking south, and the lands below
it, one day he saw in the bright sun
of late winter a horseman riding the road
through the wide lands below. The horse-
man shone as he rode, and wore white linen
over what was shining, and on the linen was
a big red cross " One of them knights,"
John Plowman said to himself or his horse,
"going to them crusades.'^ And he went on
154
OLD ENGLAND
with his ploughing all that day satisfied, and
remembered what he had seen for years,
and told his son. For there is in England,
and there always was, mixed with the needful
things that feed or shelter the race, the
wanderer-feeUng for romantic causes that runs
deep and strange through the other thoughts,
as the Gulf Stream runs through the sea.
Sometimes generations of John Plowman's
family would go by, and no high romantic
cause would come to sate that feeling. They
would work on just the same, though a little
sombrely, as though some good thing had
been grudged them. And then the Crusades
had come, and John Plowman had seen the
Red Cross knight go by, riding towards the
sea in the morning, and John Plowman was
satisfied.
Some generations later a man of the same
name was ploughing the same hill. They
still ploughed the brown clay at the top
and left the slope wild, though there were
many changes. And the furrows were won-
derfully straight still. And half he watched
a thorn-tree ahead as he ploughed, and half
he took in the whole hill sloping south and
the wide lands below it, far beyond which
155
TALES OF WAR
was, the sea. They had a railway now down
in the valley. The sunlight glittering near
the end of winter shone on a train that was
marked with great white squares and red
crosses on them. John Plowman stopped
his horses and looked at the train. " An
ambulance train/' he said, " coming up from
the coast.'* He thought of the lads he
knew and wondered if any were there. He
pitied the men in that train and envied them.
And then there came to him the thought
of England's cause and of how those men
had upheld it, at sea and in crumbling cities.
He thought of the battle whose echoes
reached sometimes to that field, whispering
to furrows and thorn-trees that had never
heard them before. He thought of the
accursed tyrant's cruel might, and of the
lads that had faced it. He saw the romantic
splendour of England's cause. He was old,
but had seen the glamour for which each
generation looked. Satisfied in his heart and
cheered with a new content he went on
with his age-old task in the business of man
with the hills.'
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UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON
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