the other, puffing out their glittering breasts. He breathed deep of the
smell of hay and manure and cows and of unpolluted farms.
From the yard came a riotous cackling of chickens and quacking of
ducks, mingled with the peeping of the little broods. In the middle a girl
in blue gingham, sleeves rolled up as far as possible on her brown arms, a
girl with a mass of dark hair loosely coiled above the nape of her neck, was
throwing to the fowls handfuls of grain with a wide gesture.
"And to think that only yesterday . . ." said Martin to himself. He
listened carefully for some time. "Wonderful! You can't even hear the guns."
THE evening was pearl-grey when they left the village; in their
nostrils was the smell of the leisurely death of the year, of leaves drying
and falling, of ripened fruit and bursting seed-pods.
"The fall's a maddening sort o' time for me," said Tom Randolph. "It
makes me itch to get up on ma hind legs an' do things, go places."
"I suppose it's that the earth has such a feel of accomplishment," said
Howe.
"You do feel as if Nature had pulled off her part of the job and was
restin'."
They stopped a second and looked about them, breathing deep. On one
side of the road were woods where in long alleys the mists deepened into
purple darkness.
"There's the moon."
"God! it looks like a pumpkin."
"I wish those guns'd shut up 'way off there to the north."
"They're sort of irrelevant, aren't they?"
They walked on, silent, listening to the guns throbbing far away, like
muffled drums beaten in nervous haste.
"Sounds almost like a barrage."
Martin for some reason was thinking of the last verses of Shelley's
Hellas. He wished he knew them so that he could recite them.
"Faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks in a dissolving dream."
The purple trunks of saplings passed slowly across the broad face of
the moon as they walked along. How beautiful the world was!
"Look, Tom." Martin put his arm about Randolph's shoulder and nodded
towards the moon. "It might be a ship with puffed-out pumpkin-coloured
sails, the way the trees make it look now."
"Wouldn't it be great to go to sea?" said Randolph, looking straight
into the moon, "an' get out of this slaughter-house. It's nice to see the
war, but I have no intention of taking up butchery as a profession. There is
too much else to do in the world."
They walked slowly along the road talking of the sea, and Martin told
how when he was a little kid he'd had an uncle who used to tell him about
the Vikings and the Swan Path, and how one of the great moments of his life
had been when he and a friend had looked out of their window in a little inn
on Cape Cod one morning and seen the sea and the swaying gold path of the
sun on it, stretching away, beyond the horizon.
"Poor old life," he said. "I'd expected to do so much with you." And
they both laughed, a little bitterly.
They were strolling past a large farmhouse that stood like a hen among
chicks in a crowd of little outbuildings. A man in the road lit a cigarette
and Martin recognised him in the orange glare of the match.
"Monsieur Merrier!" He held out his hand. It was the aspirant he had
drunk beer with weeks ago at Brocourt.
"Hah! It's you!"
"So you are en repos here, too?"
"Yes, indeed. But you two come in and see us; we are dying of the
blues."
"We'd love to stop in for a second."
A fire smouldered in the big hearth of the farmhouse kitchen, sending a
little irregular fringe of red light out over the tiled floor. At the end of
the room towards the door three men were seated round a table, smoking. A
candle threw their huge and grotesque shadows on the floor and on the
whitewashed walls, and lit up the dark beams of that part of the ceiling.
The three men got up and everyone shook hands, filling the room with swaying
giant shadows. Champagne was brought and tin cups and more candles, and the
Americans were given the two most comfortable chairs.
"It's such a find to have Americans who speak French," said a bearded
man with unusually large brilliant eyes. He had been introduced as Andrй
Dubois, "a very terrible person," had added Merrier, laughing. The cork
popped out of the bottle he had been struggling with.
"You see, we never can find out what you think about things. . . . All
we can do is to be sympathetically inane, and vive les braves alliйs and
that sort of stuff."
"I doubt if we Americans do think," said Martin.
"Cigarettes, who wants some cigarettes?" cried Lully, a small man with
a very brown oval face to which long eyelashes and a little bit of silky
black moustache gave almost a winsomeness. When he laughed he showed
brilliant, very regular teeth. As he handed the cigarettes about he looked
searchingly at Martin with eyes disconcertingly intense. "Merrier has told
us about you," he said. "You seem to be the first American we'd met who
agreed with us."
"What about?"
"About the war, of course."
"Yes," took up the fourth man, a blonde Norman with an impressive,
rather majestic face, "we were very interested. You see, we bore each other,
talking always among ourselves. . . . I hope you won't be offended if I
agree with you in saying that Americans never think. I've been in Texas, you
see."
"Really?"
"Yes, I went to a Jesuit College in Dallas. I was preparing to enter
the Society of Jesus."
"How long have you been in the war?" asked Andrй Dubois, passing his
hand across his beard.
"We've both been in the same length of time--about six months."
"Do you like it?"
"I don't have a bad time. . . . But the people in Boccaccio managed to
enjoy themselves while the plague was at Florence. That seems to me the only
way to take the war."
"We have no villa to take refuge in, though," said Dubois, "and we have
forgotten all our amusing stories."
"And in America--they like the war?"
"They don't know what it is. They are like children. They believe
everything they are told, you see; they have had no experience in
international affairs, like you Europeans. To me our entrance into the war
is a tragedy."
"It's sort of goin' back on our only excuse for existing," put in
Randolph.
"In exchange for all the quiet and the civilisation and the beauty of
ordered lives that Europeans gave up in going to the new world we gave them
opportunity to earn luxury, and, infinitely more important, freedom from the
past, that gangrened ghost of the past that is killing Europe to-day with
its infection of hate and greed of murder.
"America has turned traitor to all that, you see; that's the way we
look at it. Now we're a military nation, an organised pirate like France and
England and Germany."
"But American idealism? The speeches, the notes?" cried Lully, catching
the edge of the table with his two brown hands.
"Camouflage," said Martin.
"You mean it's insincere?"
"The best camouflage is always sincere."
Dubois ran his hands through his hair.
"Of course, why should there be any difference?" he said.
"Oh, we're all dupes, we're all dupes. Look, Lully, old man, fill up
the Americans' glasses."
"Thanks."
"And I used to believe in liberty," said Martin. He raised his tumbler
and looked at the candle through the pale yellow champagne. On the wall
behind him, his arm and hand and the tumbler were shadowed huge in dusky
lavender blue. He noticed that his was the only tumbler.
"I am honoured," he said; "mine is the only glass."
"And that's looted," said Merrier.
"It's funny . . ." Martin suddenly felt himself filled with a desire to
talk. "All my life I've struggled for my own liberty in my small way. Now I
hardly know if the thing exists."
"Exists? Of course it does, or people wouldn't hate it so," cried
Lully.
"I used to think," went on Martin, "that it was my family I must escape
from to be free; I mean all the conventional ties, the worship of success
and the respect-abilities that is drummed into you when you're young."
"I suppose everyone has thought that. . . ."
"How stupid we were before the war, how we prated of small revolts, how
we sniggered over little jokes at religion and government. And all the
while, in the infinite greed, in the infinite stupidity of men, this was
being prepared." Andrй Dubois was speaking, puffing nervously at a cigarette
between phrases, now and then pulling at his beard with a long, sinewy hand.
"What terrifies me rather is their power to enslave our minds," Martin
went on, his voice growing louder and surer as his idea carried him along.
"I shall never forget the flags, the menacing, exultant flags along all the
streets before we went to war, the gradual unbaring of teeth, gradual
lulling to sleep of people's humanity and sense by the phrases, the phrases.
. . . America, as you know, is ruled by the press. And the press is ruled by
whom? Who shall ever know what dark forces bought and bought until we should
be ready to go blinded and gagged to war? . . . People seem to so love to be
fooled. Intellect used to mean freedom, a light struggling against darkness.
Now the darkness is using the light for its own purposes. . . . We are
slaves of bought intellect, willing slaves."
"But, Howe, the minute you see that and laugh at it, you're not a
slave. Laugh and be individually as decent as you can, and don't worry your
head about the rest of the world; and have a good time in spite of the
God-damned scoundrels," broke out Randolph in English. "No use worrying
yourself into the grave over a thing you can't help."
"There is one solution and one only, my friends," said the blonde
Norman; "the Church. . . ." He sat up straight in his chair, speaking slowly
with expressionless face. "People are too weak and too kindly to shift for
themselves. Government of some sort there must be. Lay Government has proved
through all the tragic years of history to be merely a ruse of the strong to
oppress the weak, of the wicked to fool the confiding. There remains only
religion. In the organisation of religion lies the natural and suitable
arrangement for the happiness of man. The Church will govern not through
physical force but through spiritual force."
"The force of fear." Lully jumped to his feet impatiently, making the
bottles sway on the table.
"The force of love. . . . I once thought as you do, my friend," said
the Norman, pulling Lully back into his chair with a smile.
Lully drank a glass of champagne greedily and undid the buttons of his
blue jacket.
"Go on," he said; "it's madness."
"All the evil of the Church," went on the Norman's even voice, "comes
from her struggles to attain supremacy. Once assured of triumph, established
as the rule of the world, it becomes the natural channel through which the
wise rule and direct the stupid, not for their own interest, not for
ambition for worldly things, but for the love that is in them. The freedom
the Church offers is the only true freedom. It denies the world, and the
slaveries and rewards of it. It gives the love of God as the only aim of
life."
"But think of the Church to-day, the cardinals at Rome, the Church
turned everywhere to the worship of tribal gods. . . ."
"Yes, but admit that that can be changed. The Church has been supreme
in the past; can it not again be supreme? All the evil comes from the
struggle, from the compromise. Picture to yourself for a moment a world
conquered by the Church, ruled through the soul and mind, where force will
not exist, where instead of all the multitudinous tyrannies man has choked
his life with in organising against other men, will exist the one supreme
thing, the Church of God. Instead of many hatreds, one love. Instead of many
slaveries, one freedom."
"A single tyranny, instead of a million. What's the choice?" cried
Lully.
"But you are both violent, my children." Merrier got to his feet and
smilingly filled the glasses all round. "You go at the matter too much from
the heroic point of view. All this sermonising does no good. We are very
simple people who want to live quietly and have plenty to eat and have no
one worry us or hurt us in the little span of sunlight before we die. All we
have now is the same war between the classes: those that exploit and those
that are exploited. The cunning, unscrupulous people control the humane,
kindly people. This war that has smashed our little European world in which
order was so painfully taking the place of chaos, seems to me merely a
gigantic battle fought over the plunder of the world by the pirates who have
grown fat to the point of madness on the work of their own people, on the
work of the millions in Africa, in India, in America, who have come directly
or indirectly under the yoke of the insane greed of the white races. Well,
our edifice is ruined. Let's think no more of it. Ours is now the duty of
rebuilding, reorganising. I have not faith enough in human nature to be an
anarchist. . . . We are too like sheep; we must go in flocks, and a flock to
live must organise. There is plenty for everyone, even with the huge growth
in population all over the world. What we want is organisation from the
bottom, organisation by the ungreedy, by the humane, by the uncunning,
socialism of the masses that shall spring from the natural need of men to
help one another; not socialism from the top to the ends of the governors,
that they may clamp us tighter in their fetters. We must stop the economic
war, the war for existence of man against man. That will be the first step
in the long climb to civilisation. They must co-operate, they must learn
that it is saner and more advantageous to help one another than to hinder
one another in the great war against nature. And the tyranny of the feudal
money lords, the unspeakable misery of this war is driving men closer
together into fraternity, co-operation. It is the lower classes, therefore,
that the new world must be founded on. The rich must be extinguished; with
them wars will die. First between rich and poor, between the exploiter and
the exploited. . . ."
"They have one thing in common," interrupted the blonde Norman,
smiling.
"What's that?"
"Humanity. . . . That is, feebleness, cowardice."
"No, indeed. All through the world's history there has been one law for
the lord and another for the slave, one humanity for the lord and another
humanity for the slave. What we must strive for is a true universal
humanity."
"True," cried Lully, "but why take the longest, the most difficult
road? You say that people are sheep; they must be driven. I say that you and
I and our American friends here are not sheep. We are capable of standing
alone, of judging all for ourselves, and we are just ordinary people like
anyone else."
"Oh, but look at us, Lully!" interrupted Merrier. "We are too weak and
too cowardly . . ."
"An example," said Martin, excitedly leaning across the table. "We none
of us believe that war is right or useful or anything but a hideous method
of mutual suicide. Have we the courage of our own faith?"
"As I said," Merrier took up again, "I have too little faith to be an
anarchist, but I have too much to believe in religion." His tin cup rapped
sharply on the table as he set it down.
"No," Lully continued, after a pause, "it is better for man to worship
God, His image on the clouds, the creation of his fancy, than to worship the
vulgar apparatus of organised life, government. Better sacrifice his
children to Moloch than to that society for the propagation and protection
of commerce, the nation. Oh, think of the cost of government in all the ages
since men stopped living in marauding tribes! Think of the great men
martyred. Think of the thought trodden into the dust. . . . Give man a
chance for once. Government should be purely utilitarian, like the electric
light wires in a house. It is a method for attaining peace and comfort--a
bad one, I think, at that; not a thing to be worshipped as God. The one
reason for it is the protection of property. Why should we have property?
That is the central evil of the world. . . . That is the cancer that has
made life a hell of misery until now; the inflated greed of it has spurred
on our nations of the West to throw themselves back, for ever, perhaps, into
the depths of savagery. . . . Oh, if people would only trust their own
fundamental kindliness, the fraternity, the love that is the strongest thing
in life. Abolish property, and the disease of the desire for it, the desire
to grasp and have, and you'll need no government to protect you. The
vividness and resiliency of the life of man is being fast crushed under
organisation, tabulation. Overorganisation is death. It is disorganisation,
not organisation, that is the aim of life."
"I grant that what all of you say is true, but why say it over and over
again?" Andrй Dubois talked, striding back and forth beside the table, his
arms gesticulating. His compound shadow thrown by the candles on the white
wall followed him back and forth, mocking him with huge blurred gestures.
"The Greek philosophers said it and the Indian sages. Our descendants
thousands of years from now will say it and wring their hands as we do. Has
not someone on earth the courage to act? . . ." The men at the table turned
towards him, watching his tall figure move back and forth.
"We are slaves. We are blind. We are deaf. Why should we argue, we who
have no experience of different things to go on? It has always been the
same: man the slave of property or religion, of his own shadow. . . First we
must burst our bonds, open our eyes, clear our ears. Now we know nothing but
what we are told by the rulers. Oh, the lies, the lies, the lies, the lies
that life is smothered in! We must strike once more for freedom, for the
sake of the dignity of man. Hopelessly, cynically, ruthlessly we must rise
and show at least that we are not taken in; that we are slaves but not
willing slaves. Oh, they have deceived us so many times. We have been such
dupes, we have been such dupes!"
"You are right," said the blonde Norman sullenly; "we have all been
dupes."
A sudden self-consciousness chilled them all to silence for a while.
Without wanting to, they strained their ears to hear the guns. There they
were, throbbing loud, unceasing, towards the north, like hasty muffled
drum-beating.
"Cease; drain not to its dregs the wine,
Of bitter Prophecy.
The world is weary of its past.
Oh, might it die or rest at last."
All through the talk snatches from Hellas had been running through
Howe's head.
After a long pause he turned to Merrier and asked him how he had fared
in the attack.
"Oh, not so badly. I brought my skin back," said Merrier, laughing. "It
was a dull business. After waiting eight hours under gas bombardment we got
orders to advance, and so over we went with the barrage way ahead of us.
There was no resistance where we were. We took a lot of prisoners and blew
up some dugouts and I had the good luck to find a lot of German chocolate.
It came in handy, I can tell you, as no ravitaillement came for two days. We
just had biscuits and I toasted the biscuits and chocolate together and had
quite good meals, though I nearly died of thirst afterwards. . . . We lost
heavily, though, when they started counterattacking."
"An' no one of you were touched?"
"Luck. . . . But we lost many dear friends. Oh, it's always like that."
"Look what I brought back--a German gun," said Andrй Dubois, going to
the corner of the room.
"That's some souvenir," said Tom Randolph, sitting up suddenly, shaking
himself out of the reverie he had been sunk in all through the talk of the
evening.
"And I have three hundred rounds. They'll come in handy some day."
"When?"
"In the revolution--after the war."
"That's the stuff I like to hear," cried Randolph, getting to his feet.
"Why wait for the war to end?"
"Why? Because we have not the courage. . . . But it is impossible until
after the war."
"And then you think it is possible?"
"Yes."
"Will it accomplish anything?"
"God knows."
"One last bottle of champagne," cried Merrier.
They seated themselves round the table again. Martin took in at a
glance the eager sunburned faces, the eyes burning with hope, with
determination, and a sudden joy flared through him.
"Oh, there is hope," he said, drinking down his glass. "We are too
young, too needed to fail. We must find a way, find the first step of a way
to freedom, or life is a hollow mockery."
"To Revolution, to Anarchy, to the Socialist state," they all cried,
drinking down the last of the champagne. All the candles but one had
guttered out. Their shadows swayed and darted in long arms and changing,
grotesque limbs about the room.
"But first there must be peace," said the Norman, Jean Chenier,
twisting his mouth into a faintly bitter smile.
"Oh, indeed, there must be peace."
"Of all slaveries, the slavery of war, of armies, is the bitterest, the
most hopeless slavery." Lully was speaking, his smooth brown face in a
grimace of excitement and loathing. "War is our first enemy."
"But oh, my friend," said Merrier, "we will win in the end. All the
people in all the armies of the world believe as we do. In all the minds the
seed is sprouting."
"Before long the day will come. The tocsin will ring."
"Do you really believe that?" cried Martin. "Have we the courage, have
we the energy, have we the power? Are we the men our ancestors were?"
"No," said Dubois, crashing down on the table with his fist; "we are
merely intellectuals. We cling to a mummified world. But they have the power
and the nerve."
"Who?"
"The stupid average working-people."
"We only can combat the lies," said Lully; "they are so easily duped.
After the war that is what we must do."
"Oh, but we are all such dupes," cried Dubois. "First we must fight the
lies. It is the lies that choke us."
It was very late. Howe and Tom Randolph were walking home under a cold
white moon already well sunk in the west; northward was a little flickering
glare above the tops of the low hills and a sound of firing as of muffled
drums beaten hastily.
"With people like that we needn't despair of civilisation," said Howe.
"With people who are young and aren't scared you can do lots."
"We must come over and see those fellows again. It's such a relief to
be able to talk."
"And they give you the idea that something's really going on in the
world, don't they?"
"Oh, it's wonderful! Think that the awakening may come soon."
"We might wake up to-morrow and . . ."
"It's too important to joke about; don't be an ass, Tom."
They rolled up in their blankets in the silent barn and listened to the
drum-fire in the distance. Martin saw again, as he lay on his side with his
eyes closed, the group of men in blue uniforms, men with eager brown faces
and eyes gleaming with hope, and saw their full red lips moving as they
talked.
The candle threw the shadows of their heads, huge, fantastic, and of
their gesticulating arms on the white walls of the kitchen. And it seemed to
Martin Howe that all his friends were gathered in that room.
"THEY say you sell shoe-laces," said Martin, his eyes blinking in the
faint candlelight.
Crouched in the end of the dugout was a man with a brown skin like
wrinkled leather, and white eyebrows and moustaches. All about him were
piles of old boots, rotten with wear and mud, holding fantastically the
imprints of the toes and ankle-bones of the feet that had worn them. The
candle cast flitting shadows over them so that they seemed to move back and
forth faintly, as do the feet of wounded men laid out on the floor of the
dressing-station.
"I'm a cobbler by profession," said the man. He made a gesture with the
blade of his knife in the direction of a huge bundle of leather laces that
hung from a beam above his head. "I've done all those since yesterday. I cut
up old boots into laces."
"Helps out the five sous a bit," said Martin, laughing.
"This post is convenient for my trade," went on the cobbler, as he
picked out another boot to be cut into laces, and started hacking the upper
part off the worn sole. "At the little hut, where they pile up the stiffs
before they bury them--you know, just to the left outside the abri--they
leave lots of their boots around. I can pick up any number I want." With a
clasp-knife he was cutting the leather in a spiral, paring off a thin lace.
He contracted his bushy eyebrows as he bent over his work. The candlelight
glinted on the knife blade as he twisted it about dexterously.
"Yes, many a good copain of mine has had his poor feet in those boots.
What of it? Some day another fellow will be making laces out of mine, eh?"
He gave a wheezy, coughing laugh.
"I guess I'll take a pair. How much are they?"
"Six sous."
"Good."
The coins glinted in the light of the candle as they clinked in the
man's leather-blackened palm.
"Good-bye," said Martin. He walked past men sleeping in the bunks on
either side as he went towards the steps.
At the end of the dugout the man crouched on his pile of old leather,
with his knife that glinted in the candlelight dexterously carving laces out
of the boots of those who no longer needed them.
THERE is no sound in the poste de secours. A faint greenish light
filters down from the quiet woods outside. Martin is kneeling beside a
stretcher where lies a mass of torn blue uniform crossed in several places
by strips of white bandages clotted with dark blood. The massive face,
grimed with mud, is very waxy and grey. The light hair hangs in clots about
the forehead. The nose is sharp, but there is a faint smile about the lips
made thin by pain.
"Is there anything I can get you?" asks Martin softly. "Nothing."
Slowly the blue eyelids uncover hazel eyes that burn feverishly.
"But you haven't told me yet, how's Merrier?"
"A shell . . . dead . . . poor chap."
"And the anarchist, Lully?"
"Dead."
"And Dubois?"
"Why ask?" came the faint rustling voice peevishly. "Everybody's dead.
You're dead, aren't you?"
"No, I'm alive, and you. A little courage. . . . We must be cheerful."
"It's not for long. To-morrow, the next day. . . ." The blue eyelids
slip back over the crazy burning eyes and the face takes on again the waxen
look of death.
smell of hay and manure and cows and of unpolluted farms.
From the yard came a riotous cackling of chickens and quacking of
ducks, mingled with the peeping of the little broods. In the middle a girl
in blue gingham, sleeves rolled up as far as possible on her brown arms, a
girl with a mass of dark hair loosely coiled above the nape of her neck, was
throwing to the fowls handfuls of grain with a wide gesture.
"And to think that only yesterday . . ." said Martin to himself. He
listened carefully for some time. "Wonderful! You can't even hear the guns."
THE evening was pearl-grey when they left the village; in their
nostrils was the smell of the leisurely death of the year, of leaves drying
and falling, of ripened fruit and bursting seed-pods.
"The fall's a maddening sort o' time for me," said Tom Randolph. "It
makes me itch to get up on ma hind legs an' do things, go places."
"I suppose it's that the earth has such a feel of accomplishment," said
Howe.
"You do feel as if Nature had pulled off her part of the job and was
restin'."
They stopped a second and looked about them, breathing deep. On one
side of the road were woods where in long alleys the mists deepened into
purple darkness.
"There's the moon."
"God! it looks like a pumpkin."
"I wish those guns'd shut up 'way off there to the north."
"They're sort of irrelevant, aren't they?"
They walked on, silent, listening to the guns throbbing far away, like
muffled drums beaten in nervous haste.
"Sounds almost like a barrage."
Martin for some reason was thinking of the last verses of Shelley's
Hellas. He wished he knew them so that he could recite them.
"Faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks in a dissolving dream."
The purple trunks of saplings passed slowly across the broad face of
the moon as they walked along. How beautiful the world was!
"Look, Tom." Martin put his arm about Randolph's shoulder and nodded
towards the moon. "It might be a ship with puffed-out pumpkin-coloured
sails, the way the trees make it look now."
"Wouldn't it be great to go to sea?" said Randolph, looking straight
into the moon, "an' get out of this slaughter-house. It's nice to see the
war, but I have no intention of taking up butchery as a profession. There is
too much else to do in the world."
They walked slowly along the road talking of the sea, and Martin told
how when he was a little kid he'd had an uncle who used to tell him about
the Vikings and the Swan Path, and how one of the great moments of his life
had been when he and a friend had looked out of their window in a little inn
on Cape Cod one morning and seen the sea and the swaying gold path of the
sun on it, stretching away, beyond the horizon.
"Poor old life," he said. "I'd expected to do so much with you." And
they both laughed, a little bitterly.
They were strolling past a large farmhouse that stood like a hen among
chicks in a crowd of little outbuildings. A man in the road lit a cigarette
and Martin recognised him in the orange glare of the match.
"Monsieur Merrier!" He held out his hand. It was the aspirant he had
drunk beer with weeks ago at Brocourt.
"Hah! It's you!"
"So you are en repos here, too?"
"Yes, indeed. But you two come in and see us; we are dying of the
blues."
"We'd love to stop in for a second."
A fire smouldered in the big hearth of the farmhouse kitchen, sending a
little irregular fringe of red light out over the tiled floor. At the end of
the room towards the door three men were seated round a table, smoking. A
candle threw their huge and grotesque shadows on the floor and on the
whitewashed walls, and lit up the dark beams of that part of the ceiling.
The three men got up and everyone shook hands, filling the room with swaying
giant shadows. Champagne was brought and tin cups and more candles, and the
Americans were given the two most comfortable chairs.
"It's such a find to have Americans who speak French," said a bearded
man with unusually large brilliant eyes. He had been introduced as Andrй
Dubois, "a very terrible person," had added Merrier, laughing. The cork
popped out of the bottle he had been struggling with.
"You see, we never can find out what you think about things. . . . All
we can do is to be sympathetically inane, and vive les braves alliйs and
that sort of stuff."
"I doubt if we Americans do think," said Martin.
"Cigarettes, who wants some cigarettes?" cried Lully, a small man with
a very brown oval face to which long eyelashes and a little bit of silky
black moustache gave almost a winsomeness. When he laughed he showed
brilliant, very regular teeth. As he handed the cigarettes about he looked
searchingly at Martin with eyes disconcertingly intense. "Merrier has told
us about you," he said. "You seem to be the first American we'd met who
agreed with us."
"What about?"
"About the war, of course."
"Yes," took up the fourth man, a blonde Norman with an impressive,
rather majestic face, "we were very interested. You see, we bore each other,
talking always among ourselves. . . . I hope you won't be offended if I
agree with you in saying that Americans never think. I've been in Texas, you
see."
"Really?"
"Yes, I went to a Jesuit College in Dallas. I was preparing to enter
the Society of Jesus."
"How long have you been in the war?" asked Andrй Dubois, passing his
hand across his beard.
"We've both been in the same length of time--about six months."
"Do you like it?"
"I don't have a bad time. . . . But the people in Boccaccio managed to
enjoy themselves while the plague was at Florence. That seems to me the only
way to take the war."
"We have no villa to take refuge in, though," said Dubois, "and we have
forgotten all our amusing stories."
"And in America--they like the war?"
"They don't know what it is. They are like children. They believe
everything they are told, you see; they have had no experience in
international affairs, like you Europeans. To me our entrance into the war
is a tragedy."
"It's sort of goin' back on our only excuse for existing," put in
Randolph.
"In exchange for all the quiet and the civilisation and the beauty of
ordered lives that Europeans gave up in going to the new world we gave them
opportunity to earn luxury, and, infinitely more important, freedom from the
past, that gangrened ghost of the past that is killing Europe to-day with
its infection of hate and greed of murder.
"America has turned traitor to all that, you see; that's the way we
look at it. Now we're a military nation, an organised pirate like France and
England and Germany."
"But American idealism? The speeches, the notes?" cried Lully, catching
the edge of the table with his two brown hands.
"Camouflage," said Martin.
"You mean it's insincere?"
"The best camouflage is always sincere."
Dubois ran his hands through his hair.
"Of course, why should there be any difference?" he said.
"Oh, we're all dupes, we're all dupes. Look, Lully, old man, fill up
the Americans' glasses."
"Thanks."
"And I used to believe in liberty," said Martin. He raised his tumbler
and looked at the candle through the pale yellow champagne. On the wall
behind him, his arm and hand and the tumbler were shadowed huge in dusky
lavender blue. He noticed that his was the only tumbler.
"I am honoured," he said; "mine is the only glass."
"And that's looted," said Merrier.
"It's funny . . ." Martin suddenly felt himself filled with a desire to
talk. "All my life I've struggled for my own liberty in my small way. Now I
hardly know if the thing exists."
"Exists? Of course it does, or people wouldn't hate it so," cried
Lully.
"I used to think," went on Martin, "that it was my family I must escape
from to be free; I mean all the conventional ties, the worship of success
and the respect-abilities that is drummed into you when you're young."
"I suppose everyone has thought that. . . ."
"How stupid we were before the war, how we prated of small revolts, how
we sniggered over little jokes at religion and government. And all the
while, in the infinite greed, in the infinite stupidity of men, this was
being prepared." Andrй Dubois was speaking, puffing nervously at a cigarette
between phrases, now and then pulling at his beard with a long, sinewy hand.
"What terrifies me rather is their power to enslave our minds," Martin
went on, his voice growing louder and surer as his idea carried him along.
"I shall never forget the flags, the menacing, exultant flags along all the
streets before we went to war, the gradual unbaring of teeth, gradual
lulling to sleep of people's humanity and sense by the phrases, the phrases.
. . . America, as you know, is ruled by the press. And the press is ruled by
whom? Who shall ever know what dark forces bought and bought until we should
be ready to go blinded and gagged to war? . . . People seem to so love to be
fooled. Intellect used to mean freedom, a light struggling against darkness.
Now the darkness is using the light for its own purposes. . . . We are
slaves of bought intellect, willing slaves."
"But, Howe, the minute you see that and laugh at it, you're not a
slave. Laugh and be individually as decent as you can, and don't worry your
head about the rest of the world; and have a good time in spite of the
God-damned scoundrels," broke out Randolph in English. "No use worrying
yourself into the grave over a thing you can't help."
"There is one solution and one only, my friends," said the blonde
Norman; "the Church. . . ." He sat up straight in his chair, speaking slowly
with expressionless face. "People are too weak and too kindly to shift for
themselves. Government of some sort there must be. Lay Government has proved
through all the tragic years of history to be merely a ruse of the strong to
oppress the weak, of the wicked to fool the confiding. There remains only
religion. In the organisation of religion lies the natural and suitable
arrangement for the happiness of man. The Church will govern not through
physical force but through spiritual force."
"The force of fear." Lully jumped to his feet impatiently, making the
bottles sway on the table.
"The force of love. . . . I once thought as you do, my friend," said
the Norman, pulling Lully back into his chair with a smile.
Lully drank a glass of champagne greedily and undid the buttons of his
blue jacket.
"Go on," he said; "it's madness."
"All the evil of the Church," went on the Norman's even voice, "comes
from her struggles to attain supremacy. Once assured of triumph, established
as the rule of the world, it becomes the natural channel through which the
wise rule and direct the stupid, not for their own interest, not for
ambition for worldly things, but for the love that is in them. The freedom
the Church offers is the only true freedom. It denies the world, and the
slaveries and rewards of it. It gives the love of God as the only aim of
life."
"But think of the Church to-day, the cardinals at Rome, the Church
turned everywhere to the worship of tribal gods. . . ."
"Yes, but admit that that can be changed. The Church has been supreme
in the past; can it not again be supreme? All the evil comes from the
struggle, from the compromise. Picture to yourself for a moment a world
conquered by the Church, ruled through the soul and mind, where force will
not exist, where instead of all the multitudinous tyrannies man has choked
his life with in organising against other men, will exist the one supreme
thing, the Church of God. Instead of many hatreds, one love. Instead of many
slaveries, one freedom."
"A single tyranny, instead of a million. What's the choice?" cried
Lully.
"But you are both violent, my children." Merrier got to his feet and
smilingly filled the glasses all round. "You go at the matter too much from
the heroic point of view. All this sermonising does no good. We are very
simple people who want to live quietly and have plenty to eat and have no
one worry us or hurt us in the little span of sunlight before we die. All we
have now is the same war between the classes: those that exploit and those
that are exploited. The cunning, unscrupulous people control the humane,
kindly people. This war that has smashed our little European world in which
order was so painfully taking the place of chaos, seems to me merely a
gigantic battle fought over the plunder of the world by the pirates who have
grown fat to the point of madness on the work of their own people, on the
work of the millions in Africa, in India, in America, who have come directly
or indirectly under the yoke of the insane greed of the white races. Well,
our edifice is ruined. Let's think no more of it. Ours is now the duty of
rebuilding, reorganising. I have not faith enough in human nature to be an
anarchist. . . . We are too like sheep; we must go in flocks, and a flock to
live must organise. There is plenty for everyone, even with the huge growth
in population all over the world. What we want is organisation from the
bottom, organisation by the ungreedy, by the humane, by the uncunning,
socialism of the masses that shall spring from the natural need of men to
help one another; not socialism from the top to the ends of the governors,
that they may clamp us tighter in their fetters. We must stop the economic
war, the war for existence of man against man. That will be the first step
in the long climb to civilisation. They must co-operate, they must learn
that it is saner and more advantageous to help one another than to hinder
one another in the great war against nature. And the tyranny of the feudal
money lords, the unspeakable misery of this war is driving men closer
together into fraternity, co-operation. It is the lower classes, therefore,
that the new world must be founded on. The rich must be extinguished; with
them wars will die. First between rich and poor, between the exploiter and
the exploited. . . ."
"They have one thing in common," interrupted the blonde Norman,
smiling.
"What's that?"
"Humanity. . . . That is, feebleness, cowardice."
"No, indeed. All through the world's history there has been one law for
the lord and another for the slave, one humanity for the lord and another
humanity for the slave. What we must strive for is a true universal
humanity."
"True," cried Lully, "but why take the longest, the most difficult
road? You say that people are sheep; they must be driven. I say that you and
I and our American friends here are not sheep. We are capable of standing
alone, of judging all for ourselves, and we are just ordinary people like
anyone else."
"Oh, but look at us, Lully!" interrupted Merrier. "We are too weak and
too cowardly . . ."
"An example," said Martin, excitedly leaning across the table. "We none
of us believe that war is right or useful or anything but a hideous method
of mutual suicide. Have we the courage of our own faith?"
"As I said," Merrier took up again, "I have too little faith to be an
anarchist, but I have too much to believe in religion." His tin cup rapped
sharply on the table as he set it down.
"No," Lully continued, after a pause, "it is better for man to worship
God, His image on the clouds, the creation of his fancy, than to worship the
vulgar apparatus of organised life, government. Better sacrifice his
children to Moloch than to that society for the propagation and protection
of commerce, the nation. Oh, think of the cost of government in all the ages
since men stopped living in marauding tribes! Think of the great men
martyred. Think of the thought trodden into the dust. . . . Give man a
chance for once. Government should be purely utilitarian, like the electric
light wires in a house. It is a method for attaining peace and comfort--a
bad one, I think, at that; not a thing to be worshipped as God. The one
reason for it is the protection of property. Why should we have property?
That is the central evil of the world. . . . That is the cancer that has
made life a hell of misery until now; the inflated greed of it has spurred
on our nations of the West to throw themselves back, for ever, perhaps, into
the depths of savagery. . . . Oh, if people would only trust their own
fundamental kindliness, the fraternity, the love that is the strongest thing
in life. Abolish property, and the disease of the desire for it, the desire
to grasp and have, and you'll need no government to protect you. The
vividness and resiliency of the life of man is being fast crushed under
organisation, tabulation. Overorganisation is death. It is disorganisation,
not organisation, that is the aim of life."
"I grant that what all of you say is true, but why say it over and over
again?" Andrй Dubois talked, striding back and forth beside the table, his
arms gesticulating. His compound shadow thrown by the candles on the white
wall followed him back and forth, mocking him with huge blurred gestures.
"The Greek philosophers said it and the Indian sages. Our descendants
thousands of years from now will say it and wring their hands as we do. Has
not someone on earth the courage to act? . . ." The men at the table turned
towards him, watching his tall figure move back and forth.
"We are slaves. We are blind. We are deaf. Why should we argue, we who
have no experience of different things to go on? It has always been the
same: man the slave of property or religion, of his own shadow. . . First we
must burst our bonds, open our eyes, clear our ears. Now we know nothing but
what we are told by the rulers. Oh, the lies, the lies, the lies, the lies
that life is smothered in! We must strike once more for freedom, for the
sake of the dignity of man. Hopelessly, cynically, ruthlessly we must rise
and show at least that we are not taken in; that we are slaves but not
willing slaves. Oh, they have deceived us so many times. We have been such
dupes, we have been such dupes!"
"You are right," said the blonde Norman sullenly; "we have all been
dupes."
A sudden self-consciousness chilled them all to silence for a while.
Without wanting to, they strained their ears to hear the guns. There they
were, throbbing loud, unceasing, towards the north, like hasty muffled
drum-beating.
"Cease; drain not to its dregs the wine,
Of bitter Prophecy.
The world is weary of its past.
Oh, might it die or rest at last."
All through the talk snatches from Hellas had been running through
Howe's head.
After a long pause he turned to Merrier and asked him how he had fared
in the attack.
"Oh, not so badly. I brought my skin back," said Merrier, laughing. "It
was a dull business. After waiting eight hours under gas bombardment we got
orders to advance, and so over we went with the barrage way ahead of us.
There was no resistance where we were. We took a lot of prisoners and blew
up some dugouts and I had the good luck to find a lot of German chocolate.
It came in handy, I can tell you, as no ravitaillement came for two days. We
just had biscuits and I toasted the biscuits and chocolate together and had
quite good meals, though I nearly died of thirst afterwards. . . . We lost
heavily, though, when they started counterattacking."
"An' no one of you were touched?"
"Luck. . . . But we lost many dear friends. Oh, it's always like that."
"Look what I brought back--a German gun," said Andrй Dubois, going to
the corner of the room.
"That's some souvenir," said Tom Randolph, sitting up suddenly, shaking
himself out of the reverie he had been sunk in all through the talk of the
evening.
"And I have three hundred rounds. They'll come in handy some day."
"When?"
"In the revolution--after the war."
"That's the stuff I like to hear," cried Randolph, getting to his feet.
"Why wait for the war to end?"
"Why? Because we have not the courage. . . . But it is impossible until
after the war."
"And then you think it is possible?"
"Yes."
"Will it accomplish anything?"
"God knows."
"One last bottle of champagne," cried Merrier.
They seated themselves round the table again. Martin took in at a
glance the eager sunburned faces, the eyes burning with hope, with
determination, and a sudden joy flared through him.
"Oh, there is hope," he said, drinking down his glass. "We are too
young, too needed to fail. We must find a way, find the first step of a way
to freedom, or life is a hollow mockery."
"To Revolution, to Anarchy, to the Socialist state," they all cried,
drinking down the last of the champagne. All the candles but one had
guttered out. Their shadows swayed and darted in long arms and changing,
grotesque limbs about the room.
"But first there must be peace," said the Norman, Jean Chenier,
twisting his mouth into a faintly bitter smile.
"Oh, indeed, there must be peace."
"Of all slaveries, the slavery of war, of armies, is the bitterest, the
most hopeless slavery." Lully was speaking, his smooth brown face in a
grimace of excitement and loathing. "War is our first enemy."
"But oh, my friend," said Merrier, "we will win in the end. All the
people in all the armies of the world believe as we do. In all the minds the
seed is sprouting."
"Before long the day will come. The tocsin will ring."
"Do you really believe that?" cried Martin. "Have we the courage, have
we the energy, have we the power? Are we the men our ancestors were?"
"No," said Dubois, crashing down on the table with his fist; "we are
merely intellectuals. We cling to a mummified world. But they have the power
and the nerve."
"Who?"
"The stupid average working-people."
"We only can combat the lies," said Lully; "they are so easily duped.
After the war that is what we must do."
"Oh, but we are all such dupes," cried Dubois. "First we must fight the
lies. It is the lies that choke us."
It was very late. Howe and Tom Randolph were walking home under a cold
white moon already well sunk in the west; northward was a little flickering
glare above the tops of the low hills and a sound of firing as of muffled
drums beaten hastily.
"With people like that we needn't despair of civilisation," said Howe.
"With people who are young and aren't scared you can do lots."
"We must come over and see those fellows again. It's such a relief to
be able to talk."
"And they give you the idea that something's really going on in the
world, don't they?"
"Oh, it's wonderful! Think that the awakening may come soon."
"We might wake up to-morrow and . . ."
"It's too important to joke about; don't be an ass, Tom."
They rolled up in their blankets in the silent barn and listened to the
drum-fire in the distance. Martin saw again, as he lay on his side with his
eyes closed, the group of men in blue uniforms, men with eager brown faces
and eyes gleaming with hope, and saw their full red lips moving as they
talked.
The candle threw the shadows of their heads, huge, fantastic, and of
their gesticulating arms on the white walls of the kitchen. And it seemed to
Martin Howe that all his friends were gathered in that room.
"THEY say you sell shoe-laces," said Martin, his eyes blinking in the
faint candlelight.
Crouched in the end of the dugout was a man with a brown skin like
wrinkled leather, and white eyebrows and moustaches. All about him were
piles of old boots, rotten with wear and mud, holding fantastically the
imprints of the toes and ankle-bones of the feet that had worn them. The
candle cast flitting shadows over them so that they seemed to move back and
forth faintly, as do the feet of wounded men laid out on the floor of the
dressing-station.
"I'm a cobbler by profession," said the man. He made a gesture with the
blade of his knife in the direction of a huge bundle of leather laces that
hung from a beam above his head. "I've done all those since yesterday. I cut
up old boots into laces."
"Helps out the five sous a bit," said Martin, laughing.
"This post is convenient for my trade," went on the cobbler, as he
picked out another boot to be cut into laces, and started hacking the upper
part off the worn sole. "At the little hut, where they pile up the stiffs
before they bury them--you know, just to the left outside the abri--they
leave lots of their boots around. I can pick up any number I want." With a
clasp-knife he was cutting the leather in a spiral, paring off a thin lace.
He contracted his bushy eyebrows as he bent over his work. The candlelight
glinted on the knife blade as he twisted it about dexterously.
"Yes, many a good copain of mine has had his poor feet in those boots.
What of it? Some day another fellow will be making laces out of mine, eh?"
He gave a wheezy, coughing laugh.
"I guess I'll take a pair. How much are they?"
"Six sous."
"Good."
The coins glinted in the light of the candle as they clinked in the
man's leather-blackened palm.
"Good-bye," said Martin. He walked past men sleeping in the bunks on
either side as he went towards the steps.
At the end of the dugout the man crouched on his pile of old leather,
with his knife that glinted in the candlelight dexterously carving laces out
of the boots of those who no longer needed them.
THERE is no sound in the poste de secours. A faint greenish light
filters down from the quiet woods outside. Martin is kneeling beside a
stretcher where lies a mass of torn blue uniform crossed in several places
by strips of white bandages clotted with dark blood. The massive face,
grimed with mud, is very waxy and grey. The light hair hangs in clots about
the forehead. The nose is sharp, but there is a faint smile about the lips
made thin by pain.
"Is there anything I can get you?" asks Martin softly. "Nothing."
Slowly the blue eyelids uncover hazel eyes that burn feverishly.
"But you haven't told me yet, how's Merrier?"
"A shell . . . dead . . . poor chap."
"And the anarchist, Lully?"
"Dead."
"And Dubois?"
"Why ask?" came the faint rustling voice peevishly. "Everybody's dead.
You're dead, aren't you?"
"No, I'm alive, and you. A little courage. . . . We must be cheerful."
"It's not for long. To-morrow, the next day. . . ." The blue eyelids
slip back over the crazy burning eyes and the face takes on again the waxen
look of death.