… but that is a facile thought of the old crystal-pattern of a competitive civilisation: for the hated invaders were men taken away from their homes, men who must go where they are told, men who must believe that the infamy of war is virtue, and that God loves men to crucify and kill one another.
Here is the spirit of revenge, which will call forth equal revenge, so that men will march again, and fall once more upon the fields of Europe.
I have helped to dig up those German bones and black fragments of uniform, and to shovel them into boxes, roughly in the shape of coffins, but very narrow, for the bodies are no more, having wasted away; I have helped tall blond Flemish labourers to toss in the bones with what remains of leather equipment and uniform black and brittle as old mushroom fragments dried by the sun.
It is my duty to supervise with a French gendarme. I am there to see that no British bones are taken by mistake, for in war-time friend and foe were often buried together. But not in peace-time—that time when the nations (or those minding the business of lesser people) practise war, and invent new ways of death.
The bones of the slain, of the laughing boys and the earnest fathers of families, may lie side-by-side at peace in war-time; but in peace-time they are religiously separated into nations again, each to its place: the British to the beautiful cemeteries, fragrant with green turf and flowers one sees in cottage gardens, ‘that are forever England’, and the others to—the Labyrinthe.
The Labyrinthe! Black as thistles—the unwanted thistles that the farmer and his wife unroot through the long spring days. One sees them in the corn, while an entire family—grandmother, mother and children—on their knees advance in line across a levelled field sown with wheat, a field which reveals the past by the scatter of subsoil chalk in the brown loam, and sometimes a bone or a piece of iron, or a useless concrete building, low and square in the springing wheat.
They are happy as they move slowly across their fields among the plants of wheat; while on the rising ground beyond stands a darkness in the midst of the noonday sun, black as a burned place, bitter and black as a frost or fire, a frost of silence among the black crosses.
Once these were men who, having marched where they were ordered, and having done what they were commanded, after endurance and suffering, fell, and were lost.
I, an old soldier, have found truth and beauty in this waste land; I would declare it to be a true miracle; for near La Folie Farm standsa single cross of poplar made of a living stick pushed into the ground. Below lies a legbone, a rib, a skull. A plowman has done this act for some unknown German soldier left, perhaps, in the final retreat. Now the stick is a little tree, with many rustling leaves, a shivering poplar; the wilderness has blossomed.
If all had been as wide-minded as the plowman in his field! Then the German people might have been given the ground wherein their dead lie, as a perpetual gift equal with that ground given for the English dead. It might have cost as much as one submarine: and the heart of the people would have been moved.
I sit in the long grass at the edge of the field, and wonder, can it still be done? A gesture that might mean, for the moment, personal loss for its maker; a gesture that has a precedent in Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago. A letter to the German people, saying that the French land was broken and many of the people had suffered (as all suffer in all wars) and are still suffering grievously; and that the German people must help to restore the dwelling-places and to make the land fair as before.
Such a letter would be within the experience of all to feel and to understand; and if it is sent now, it might give another direction to the history of Europe. For I have been in Germany, and I have seen brutal things done by the conquerors to the conquered: I have seen, too, the dark
Here is the spirit of revenge, which will call forth equal revenge, so that men will march again, and fall once more upon the fields of Europe.
I have helped to dig up those German bones and black fragments of uniform, and to shovel them into boxes, roughly in the shape of coffins, but very narrow, for the bodies are no more, having wasted away; I have helped tall blond Flemish labourers to toss in the bones with what remains of leather equipment and uniform black and brittle as old mushroom fragments dried by the sun.
It is my duty to supervise with a French gendarme. I am there to see that no British bones are taken by mistake, for in war-time friend and foe were often buried together. But not in peace-time—that time when the nations (or those minding the business of lesser people) practise war, and invent new ways of death.
The bones of the slain, of the laughing boys and the earnest fathers of families, may lie side-by-side at peace in war-time; but in peace-time they are religiously separated into nations again, each to its place: the British to the beautiful cemeteries, fragrant with green turf and flowers one sees in cottage gardens, ‘that are forever England’, and the others to—the Labyrinthe.
The Labyrinthe! Black as thistles—the unwanted thistles that the farmer and his wife unroot through the long spring days. One sees them in the corn, while an entire family—grandmother, mother and children—on their knees advance in line across a levelled field sown with wheat, a field which reveals the past by the scatter of subsoil chalk in the brown loam, and sometimes a bone or a piece of iron, or a useless concrete building, low and square in the springing wheat.
They are happy as they move slowly across their fields among the plants of wheat; while on the rising ground beyond stands a darkness in the midst of the noonday sun, black as a burned place, bitter and black as a frost or fire, a frost of silence among the black crosses.
Once these were men who, having marched where they were ordered, and having done what they were commanded, after endurance and suffering, fell, and were lost.
I, an old soldier, have found truth and beauty in this waste land; I would declare it to be a true miracle; for near La Folie Farm standsa single cross of poplar made of a living stick pushed into the ground. Below lies a legbone, a rib, a skull. A plowman has done this act for some unknown German soldier left, perhaps, in the final retreat. Now the stick is a little tree, with many rustling leaves, a shivering poplar; the wilderness has blossomed.
If all had been as wide-minded as the plowman in his field! Then the German people might have been given the ground wherein their dead lie, as a perpetual gift equal with that ground given for the English dead. It might have cost as much as one submarine: and the heart of the people would have been moved.
I sit in the long grass at the edge of the field, and wonder, can it still be done? A gesture that might mean, for the moment, personal loss for its maker; a gesture that has a precedent in Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago. A letter to the German people, saying that the French land was broken and many of the people had suffered (as all suffer in all wars) and are still suffering grievously; and that the German people must help to restore the dwelling-places and to make the land fair as before.
Such a letter would be within the experience of all to feel and to understand; and if it is sent now, it might give another direction to the history of Europe. For I have been in Germany, and I have seen brutal things done by the conquerors to the conquered: I have seen, too, the dark
Similar Books
