the Morning Bulletins, pinned on every door, referred to the ignorance of Bloom as a sportsman. Bloom could not retort; he took the snubs and suffered. “Well, the Chief’s like that. He’s also overworked,” said Phillip, feeling sorry for Bloom.
“It’s because Bloom’s a Jew,” said North. “But he’s a kind man. He’s helped people in various ways, always unobtrusively. He helped me once, after making me swear I’d not tell anyone.”
At 9 o’clock one Saturday night the office boy—also the Art Critic for the weekly Children’s Painting Competitions—came to tell Phillip that a gentleman was waiting to see him downstairs.
“Willie!”
His cousin looked to be very thin and nervous, as though he had had a bad time: he explained that it had been a rough Channelcrossing. Hardly waiting for greetings he begged Phillip to urge his Editor to publish an article he had written.
“Here it is. Please read it.”
War is made by the bodies of young men. There has been no change in the minds of the old since the Armistice. A European war will arise again unless there is a change of thought in all men. For blood calls to blood; and the only justice is through forgiveness, and love.
I am a soldier of 1914, one of the early volunteers. I went through the war, I was wounded, and decorated by H.M. the King. Now I am working at the Concentration German Graveyard in Artois. I have been helping to dig up dead German soldiers, or their bones and scraps of uniform black as fragments of old mushrooms but more fragile, and relay them, in their thousands, in the Concentration Graveyard at The Labyrinthe, which was a German redoubt of great and terrible strength commanding the Arras-Bethune road.
The war was Europe’s tragedy; the causes of that tragedy have still not been resolved. New and tender thoughts of youth have appeared among the Wandervogel—free-wandering German boys and girls borne on the lyricism of their countryside—but these are hesitant, a nascent flux based on hope and faith that one’s neighbour is oneself. Against these ideas the old crystallised European thought has, in the manner of crystals forming, striven to suppress, by cracking, other patterns.
At the German Concentration Graveyard the dark spirit of revenge is made manifest.
Elsewhere in this rolling downland country the barren white chalk thrown up by the bombardments has been partly plowed in, or covered by grass: on the Labyrinthe it remains white, a wide expanse of chalk darkened when the sun shines with the shadows of crosses; but one does not notice the shadows. For, packed close together, and in pairs, back to back, the crosses that are planted in the bare chalk are a vast and terrible sight. Acres of black crosses, acres of blackness, nearly 100,000 tall black symbols of crucifixion, each with a name and number and regiment stencilled on it in ragged letters of white paint. I have marked many of these crosses, nearly as tall as a man, for hour after hour, day after day. I have seen, now and then, a motor-car stop on the road beyond, and someone—usually it is a woman alone—walk steadily through the gate with an expressionless face, and pause, as though hopelessly, before beginning a search in the immense silence of charred human hopes. This German Concentration Graveyard has been designed deliberately and made by order of the French Government, in a spirit of hate.
Black, black, black, vast and terrible, the charred forest sweeps over the horizon. In the waste ground adjoining there are concrete machine-gun shelters burst open, their iron rods rusty and clawingheaven. The grass is long and rank there. Larks sing above in the free sky; the larks have always sung. Now they sing above the monuments, black as charred thistles, to the dead, these tarred wooden crosses pressed together, unloved by flowers (none grow on chalk), stark, the graves of the hated invaders! They burnt and laid waste, and now their bones lie in a burnt waste
“It’s because Bloom’s a Jew,” said North. “But he’s a kind man. He’s helped people in various ways, always unobtrusively. He helped me once, after making me swear I’d not tell anyone.”
At 9 o’clock one Saturday night the office boy—also the Art Critic for the weekly Children’s Painting Competitions—came to tell Phillip that a gentleman was waiting to see him downstairs.
“Willie!”
His cousin looked to be very thin and nervous, as though he had had a bad time: he explained that it had been a rough Channelcrossing. Hardly waiting for greetings he begged Phillip to urge his Editor to publish an article he had written.
“Here it is. Please read it.”
War is made by the bodies of young men. There has been no change in the minds of the old since the Armistice. A European war will arise again unless there is a change of thought in all men. For blood calls to blood; and the only justice is through forgiveness, and love.
I am a soldier of 1914, one of the early volunteers. I went through the war, I was wounded, and decorated by H.M. the King. Now I am working at the Concentration German Graveyard in Artois. I have been helping to dig up dead German soldiers, or their bones and scraps of uniform black as fragments of old mushrooms but more fragile, and relay them, in their thousands, in the Concentration Graveyard at The Labyrinthe, which was a German redoubt of great and terrible strength commanding the Arras-Bethune road.
The war was Europe’s tragedy; the causes of that tragedy have still not been resolved. New and tender thoughts of youth have appeared among the Wandervogel—free-wandering German boys and girls borne on the lyricism of their countryside—but these are hesitant, a nascent flux based on hope and faith that one’s neighbour is oneself. Against these ideas the old crystallised European thought has, in the manner of crystals forming, striven to suppress, by cracking, other patterns.
At the German Concentration Graveyard the dark spirit of revenge is made manifest.
Elsewhere in this rolling downland country the barren white chalk thrown up by the bombardments has been partly plowed in, or covered by grass: on the Labyrinthe it remains white, a wide expanse of chalk darkened when the sun shines with the shadows of crosses; but one does not notice the shadows. For, packed close together, and in pairs, back to back, the crosses that are planted in the bare chalk are a vast and terrible sight. Acres of black crosses, acres of blackness, nearly 100,000 tall black symbols of crucifixion, each with a name and number and regiment stencilled on it in ragged letters of white paint. I have marked many of these crosses, nearly as tall as a man, for hour after hour, day after day. I have seen, now and then, a motor-car stop on the road beyond, and someone—usually it is a woman alone—walk steadily through the gate with an expressionless face, and pause, as though hopelessly, before beginning a search in the immense silence of charred human hopes. This German Concentration Graveyard has been designed deliberately and made by order of the French Government, in a spirit of hate.
Black, black, black, vast and terrible, the charred forest sweeps over the horizon. In the waste ground adjoining there are concrete machine-gun shelters burst open, their iron rods rusty and clawingheaven. The grass is long and rank there. Larks sing above in the free sky; the larks have always sung. Now they sing above the monuments, black as charred thistles, to the dead, these tarred wooden crosses pressed together, unloved by flowers (none grow on chalk), stark, the graves of the hated invaders! They burnt and laid waste, and now their bones lie in a burnt waste
Similar Books
