Lord Dunsany

“ 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.
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 country after that is still called Picardy or Belgium, still has its old name on the map as though it smiled there yet, sheltering cities and hamlet and radiant with orchards and gardens, but the country named Belgium—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. ”

“ 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 the bergs of the haunted part of 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 where 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. ”

“ And below there lies this wonderful waste 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 there are no fields at all and no farms and no 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. ”

“ 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 weed, and wire and wild cabbages and old German bones.
Spring and the Kaiser
While all the world is waiting for 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 were new, with a beauty as fresh and surprising as though nothing like it before had ever adorned countless centuries. ”

“ To turn from Kent to Flanders is to turn to a time of mourning through all seasons alike. Spring there brings out no leaf on myriad oaks, nor the haze of green that floats like a halo above the heads of the birch trees, that stand with their fairylike trunks haunting the deeps of the woods. 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. ”

“ 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 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 rivers of France. ”

“ 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 anemones, 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. ”

“ 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 monstrous in the moonlight. ”

“ 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 No Man’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 one went up, far hills seemed to sit and brood over the valley: their black shapes seemed to know what would happen in the mist and seemed sworn not to say. ”

“ 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 dugout, where the German has come in out of the golden rain, and they fling it all up in the air. ”

“ The desolation that the German offensive has added to the dominions of the Kaiser cannot easily be imagined by any one 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 proud addition to an ambitious monarch’s possessions. 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. ”

“ And men say of this place that it is Pozières 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 No Man’s Land when they have the strength to crawl in: still she walks of a night in Pozières and in Ginchy. ”

“ 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 craftsmen 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. ”

“ He was watching with eyes and ears and imagination to see what would happen in No Man’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 after it. It was great sport, thought Dick Cheeser. What a pity he hadn’t had a catapult in those days, he thought. ”

“ 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 violets come, and such a time as this is the perfect time to see England: when the cuckoo is heard and he surprises his hearers ”

“ 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 open sunlight. ”

“ 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 hid and treasured there before the Normans came. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 slavelike people, but they would sooner be hated by mankind than 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 ”

“ 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 in the dark. ”

“ 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 plowing 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. ”

“ 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; hedgerows 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 Hohenzollerns. ”

“ 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. ”