Part 10 (2/2)

The guns disappeared into the mist of rain, and we went on through more hours of miserable tramping, seeing no spire ahead of us, and unable to count on a long halt.

Still, as we went, I noticed that we were on some great division, between provinces perhaps, or between river valleys, for in France there are many bare upland plateaus dividing separate districts; and it is a feature of the country that the districts so divided have either formed separate provinces in the past or, at any rate (even if they have not had political recognition), have stood, and do still stand, for separate units in French society. It was more apparent with every mile as we went on that we were approaching new things. The plain was naked save for rare planted trees, and here and there, a long way off (on the horizon, it seemed) a farm or two, unprotected and alone.

The rain ceased, and the steady grey sky broke a little as we marched on, still in silence, and by this time thirsty and a little dazed. A ravine opened in a bare plateau, and we saw that it held a little village. They led us into it, down a short steep bit of road, and lined us up by a great basin of sparkling water, and every man was mad to break ranks and drink; but no one dared. The children of the village gathered in a little group and looked at us, and we envied their freedom. When we had stood thus for a quarter of an hour or so, an orderly came riding in all splashed, and his horse's coat rough with the rain and steaming up into the air. He came up to the lieutenant in command and delivered an order; then he rode away fast northward along the ravine and out of the village. The lieutenant, when he had gone, formed us into a little column, and we, who had expected to dismiss at any moment, were full of anger, and were sullen to find that by some wretched order or other we had to take another hour of the road: first we had to go back four miles along the road we had already come, and then to branch off perpendicular to our general line of march, and (as it seemed to us) quite out of our way.

It is a difficult thing to move a great ma.s.s of men through a desolate country by small units and leave them dependent on the country, and it is rather wonderful that they do it so neatly and effect the junctions so well; but the private soldier, who stands for those little black blocks on the military map, has a boy's impatience in him; and a very wise man, if he wishes to keep an army in spirit, will avoid counter-marching as much as he can, for--I cannot tell why--nothing takes the heart out of a man like having to plod over again the very way he has just come. So, when we had come to a very small village in the waste and halted there, finding our guns and drivers already long arrived, we made an end of a dull and meaningless day--very difficult to tell of, because the story is merely a record of fatigue. But in a diary of route everything must be set down faithfully; and so I have set down all this sodden and empty day.

That night I sat at a peasant's table and heard my four stable-companions understanding everything, and evidently in their world and at home, although they were conscripts. This turned me silent, and I sat away from the light, looking at the fire and drying myself by its logs. As I heard their laughter I remembered Suss.e.x and the woods above Arun, and I felt myself to be in exile. Then we slept in beds, and the goodwife had our tunics dry by morning, for she also had a son in the service, who was a long way off at Lyons, and was not to return for two years.

There are days in a long march when a man is made to do too much, and others when he is made to do what seems meaningless, doubling backward on his road, as we had done; there are days when he seems to advance very little; but they are not days of repose, for they are full of halting and doubts and special bits of work. Such a day had come to us with the next dawn.

The reason of all these things--I mean, of the over-long marches, of the counter-marches, and of the short days--was the complexity of the only plan by which a great number of men and guns can be taken from one large place to another without confusion by the way--living, as they must do, upon the country, and finding at the end of every march water and hay for the horses, food and some kind of shelter for the men. And this plan, as I have said before, consists (in a European country) in dividing your force, marching by roads more or less parallel, and converging, after some days, on the object of the march.

It is evident that in a somewhat desolate region of small and distant hamlets the front will be broader and the columns smaller, but when a large town stands in the line of march, advantage will be taken of it to ma.s.s one's men.

Such a town was Bar-le-Duc, and it was because our battery was so near to it that this fourth day was a short march of less than eight miles.

They sent the gunners in early; we drivers started later than usual, and the pace was smart at first under a happy morning sun, but still around us were the bare fields, all but treeless, and the road was part of the plain, not divided by hedges. The bombardier trotted by my side and told me of the glories of Rheims, which was his native town. He was a mild man, genial and good, and little apt for promotion. He interlarded his conversation with official remarks to show a zeal he never felt, telling one man that his tracks were slack, and another that his led-horse was s.h.i.+rking, and after each official remark he returned up abeam of me to tell me more of the riches and splendour of Rheims. He chose me out for this favour because I already knew the countryside of the upper Champagne, and had twice seen his city. He promised me that when we got our first leave from camp he would show me many sights in the town; but this he said hoping that I would pay for the entertainment, as indeed I did.

We did not halt, nor did we pa.s.s the gunners that morning; but when we had gone about four miles or so the road began to descend through a wide gully, and we saw before us the secluded and fruitful valley of the Meuse. It is here of an even width for miles, bounded by regular low hills. We were coming down the eastern wall of that valley, and on the parallel western side a similar height, with similar ravines and gullies leading down to the river, bounded our narrow view. I caught the distant sound of trumpets up there beyond us, and nearer was the unmistakable rumble of the guns. The clatter of horses below in the valley road and the shouting of commands were the signs that the regiment was meeting. The road turned. On a kind of platform, just before it joined the main highway, a few feet above it, we halted to wait our order--and we saw the guns go by!

Only half the regiment was to halt at Bar-le-Duc. But six batteries, thirty-six guns, their men, horses, apparatus, forges, and waggons occupying and advancing in streams over a valley are a wonderful sight.

Clouds of dust and the noise of the metal woke the silent places of the Meuse, and sometimes river birds would rise and wheel in the air as the clamour neared them. Far off a lonely battery was coming down the western slope to join the throng in its order, and for some reason their two trumpets were still playing the march and lending to this great display the unity of music. We dismounted and watched from the turf of the roadside a pageant which the accident of an ordered and servile life afforded us; for it is true of armies that the compensation of their drudgery and miserable subjection is the continual opportunity of these large emotions; and not only by their vastness and arrangement, but by the very fact that they merge us into themselves, do armies widen the spirit of a man and give it communion with the majesty of great numbers.

One becomes a part of many men.

The seventh battery, with which we had little to do (for in quarters they belonged to the furthest corner from our own), first came by and pa.s.sed us, with that interminable repet.i.tion of similar things which is the note of a force on the march, and makes it seem like a river flowing. We recognised it by the figure of one Chevalier, a major attached to them. He was an absent-minded man of whom many stories were told--kindly, with a round face; and he wore eyegla.s.ses, either for the distinction they afforded or because he was short of sight. The seventh pa.s.sed us, and their forge and waggon ended the long train. A regulation s.p.a.ce between them and the next allowed the dust to lie a little, and then the ninth came by; we knew them well, because in quarters they were our neighbours. At their head was their captain, whose name was Levy. He was a Jew, small, very sharp-featured, and a man who worked astonis.h.i.+ngly hard. He was very popular with his men, and his battery was happy and boasted. He cared especially for their food, and would go into their kitchen daily to taste the soup. He was also a silent man. He sat his horse badly, bent and crouched, but his eyes were very keen; and he again was a character of whom the men talked and told stories. I believe he was something of a mathematician; but we knew little of such things where our superiors were concerned.

As the ninth battery pa.s.sed us we were given the order to mount, and knew that our place came next. The long-drawn _Ha-a-lte!_ and the lifted swords down the road contained for a while the batteries that were to follow, and we filed out of our side road into the long gap they had left us. Then, taking up the trot, ourselves, we heard the order pa.s.sing down infinitely till it was lost in the length of the road; the trumpets galloped past us and formed at the head of the column; a much more triumphant noise of bra.s.s than we had yet heard heralded us with a kind of insolence, and the whole train with its two miles and more of noisy power gloried into the old town of Bar-le-Duc, to the great joy of its young men and women at the windows, to the annoyance of the householders, to the stupefaction of the old, and doubtless to the ultimate advantage of the Republic.

When we had formed park in the grey market-square, ridden our horses off to water at the river and to their quarters, cleaned kit and harness, and at last were free--that is, when it was already evening--Matthieu, a friend of mine who had come by another road with his battery, met me strolling on the bridge. Matthieu was of my kind, he had such a lineage as I had and such an education. We were glad to meet. He told me of his last halting-place--Pagny--hidden on the upper river. It is the place where the houses of Luxembourg were buried, and some also of the great men who fell when Henry V of England was fighting in the North, and when on this flank the Eastern dukes were waging the Burgundian wars. It was not the first time that the tumult of men in arms had made echoes along the valley. Matthieu and I went off together to dine. He lent me a pin of his, a pin with a worked head, to pin my tunic with where it was torn, and he begged me to give it back to him. But I have it still, for I have never seen him since; nor shall I see him, nor he me, till the Great Day.

THE LOOE STREAM

Of the complexity of the sea, and of how it is manifold, and of how it mixes up with a man, and may broaden or perfect him, it would be very tempting to write; but if one once began on this, one would be immeshed and drowned in the metaphysic, which never yet did good to man nor beast. For no one can eat or drink the metaphysic, or take any sustenance out of it, and it has no movement or colour, and it does not give one joy or sorrow; one cannot paint it or hear it, and it is too thin to swim about in. Leaving, then, all these general things, though they haunt me and tempt me, at least I can deal little by little and picture by picture with that sea which is perpetually in my mind, and let those who will draw what philosophies they choose. And the first thing I would like to describe is that of a place called the Looe Stream, through which in a boat only the other day I sailed for the first time, noticing many things. When St. Wilfrid went through those bare heaths and coppices, which were called the forest of Anderida, and which lay all along under the Surrey Downs, and through which there was a long, deserted Roman road, and on this road a number of little brutish farms and settlements (for this was twelve hundred years ago), he came out into the open under the South Downs, and crossed my hills and came to the sea plain, and there he found a kind of Englishman more savage than the rest, though Heaven knows there were none of them particularly refined or gay. From these Englishmen the n.o.ble people of Suss.e.x are descended.

Already the rest of England had been Christian a hundred years when St.

Wilfrid came down into the sea plain, and found, to his astonishment, this spa.r.s.e and ignorant tribe. They were living in the ruins of the Roman palaces; they were too stupid to be able to use any one of the Roman things they had destroyed. They had kept, perhaps, some few of the Roman women, certainly all the Roman slaves. They had, therefore, vague memories of how the Romans tilled the land.

But those memories were getting worse and worse, for it was nearly two hundred years since the s.h.i.+ps of Aella had sailed into Sh.o.r.eham (which showed him to be a man of immense determination, for it is a most difficult harbour, and there were then no piers and lights)--it was nearly two hundred years, and there was only the least little glimmering twilight left of the old day. These barbarians were going utterly to pieces, as barbarians ever will when they are cut off from the life and splendour of the south. They had become so cretinous and idiotic, that when St. Wilfrid came wandering among them they did not know how to get food. There was a famine, and as their miserable religion, such as it was (probably it was very like these little twopenny-halfpenny modern heresies of their cousins, the German pessimists)--their religion, I say, not giving them the jolly energy which all decent Western religion gives a man, they being also by the wrath of G.o.d deprived of the use of wine (though tuns upon tuns of it were waiting for them over the sea a little way off, but probably they thought their horizon was the end of the world)--their religion, I say, being of this nature, they had determined, under the pressure of that famine which drove them so hard, to put an end to themselves, and St. Wilfrid saw them tying themselves together in bands (which shows that they knew at least how to make rope) and jumping off the cliffs into the sea. This practice he determined to oppose.

He went to their King--who lived in Chichester, I suppose, or possibly at Bramber--and asked him why the people were going on in this fas.h.i.+on, who said to him: ”It is because of the famine.”

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