|
|
|
|
Tales of War
L >> Lord Dunsany >> Tales of War Pages: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 Tales of War
by Lord Dunsany
Tales of War was first published in 1918 and the text is in the
public domain. The transcription was done by William McClain
, 2002.
A printed version of this book is available from Sattre Press,
http://tow.sattre-press.com. It includes a new introduction and
photographs of the author.
The Prayer of the Men of Daleswood
He said: ``There were only twenty houses in Daleswood. A place you
would scarcely have heard of. A village up top of the hills.
``When the war came there was no more than thirty men there between
sixteen and forty-five. They all went.
``They all kept together; same battalion, same platoon. They was like
that in Daleswood. Used to call the hop pickers foreigners, the ones
that come from London. They used to go past Daleswood, some of them,
every year, on their way down to the hop fields. Foreigners they used
to call them. Kept very much to themselves, did the Daleswood people.
Big woods all round them.
``Very lucky they was, the Daleswood men. They'd lost no more than
five killed and a good sprinkling of wounded. But all the wounded was
back again with the platoon. This was up to March when the big
offensive started.
``It came very sudden. No bombardment to speak of. Just a burst of Tok
Emmas going off all together and lifting the front trench clean out of
it; then a barrage behind, and the Boche pouring over in thousands.
`Our luck is holding good,' the Daleswood men said, for their trench
wasn't getting it at all. But the platoon on their right got it. And
it sounded bad too a long way beyond that. No one could be quite sure.
But the platoon on their right was getting it: that was sure enough.
``And then the Boche got through them altogether. A message came to
say so. `How are things on the right?' they said to the runner. `Bad,'
said the runner, and he went back, though Lord knows what he went back
to. The Boche was through right enough. `We'll have to make a
defensive flank,' said the platoon commander. He was a Daleswood man
too. Came from the big farm. He slipped down a communication trench
with a few men, mostly bombers. And they reckoned they wouldn't see
any of them any more, for the Boche was on the right, thick as
starlings.
``The bullets were snapping over thick to keep them down while the
Boche went on, on the right: machine guns, of course. The barrage was
screaming well over and dropping far back, and their wire was still
all right just in front of them, when they put up a head to look.
There was the left platoon of the battalion. One doesn't bother,
somehow, so much about another battalion as one's own. One's own gets
sort of homely. And there they were wondering how their own officer
was getting on, and the few fellows with them, on his defensive flank.
The bombs were going off thick. All the Daleswood men were firing half
right. It sounded from the noise as if it couldn't last long, as if it
would soon be decisive, and the battle be won, or lost, just there on
the right, and perhaps the war ended. They didn't notice the left.
Nothing to speak of.
``Then a runner came from the left. `Hullo!' they said, `How are
things over there?'
```The Boche is through,' he said. `Where's the officer?' `Through!'
they said. It didn't seem possible. However did he do that? they
thought. And the runner went on to the right to look for the officer.
``And then the barrage shifted further back. The shells still screamed
over them, but the bursts were further away. That is always a relief.
Probably they felt it. But it was bad for all that. Very bad. It meant
the Boche was well past them. They realized it after a while.
``They and their bit of wire were somehow just between two waves of
attack. Like a bit of stone on the beach with the sea coming in. A
platoon was nothing to the Boche; nothing much perhaps just then to
anybody. But it was the whole of Daleswood for one long generation.
``The youngest full-grown man they had left behind was fifty, and some
one had heard that he had died since the war. There was no one else in
Daleswood but women and children, and boys up to seventeen.
``The bombing had stopped on their right; everything was quieter, and
the barrage further away. When they began to realize what that meant
they began to talk of Daleswood. And then they thought that when all
of them were gone there would be nobody who would remember Daleswood
just as it used to be. For places alter a little, woods grow, and
changes come, trees get cut down, old people die; new houses are built
now and then in place of a yew tree, or any old thing, that used to be
there before; and one way or another the old things go; and all the
time you have people thinking that the old times were best, and the
old ways when they were young. And the Daleswood men were beginning to
say, `Who would there be to remember it just as it was?'
``There was no gas, the wind being wrong for it, so they were able to
talk, that is if they shouted, for the bullets alone made as much
noise as breaking up an old shed, crisper like, more like new timber
breaking; and the shells of course was howling all the time, that is
the barrage that was bursting far back. The trench still stank of
them.
``They said that one of them must go over and put his hands up, or run
away if he could, whichever he liked, and when the war was over he
would go to some writing fellow, one of those what makes a living by
it, and tell him all about Daleswood, just as it used to be, and he
would write it out proper and there it would be for always. They all
agreed to that. And then they talked a bit, as well as they could
above that awful screeching, to try and decide who it should be. The
eldest, they said, would know Daleswood best. But he said, and they
came to agree with him, that it would be a sort of waste to save the
life of a man what had had his good time, and they ought to send the
youngest, and they would tell him all they knew of Daleswood before
his time, and everything would be written down just the same and the
old time remembered.
``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. Anyhow they did
not quite seem to trust them with the past.
``The youngest of them was only just eighteen. That was Dick. They
told him to get out and put his hands up and be quick getting across,
as soon as they had told him one or two things about the old time in
Daleswood that a youngster like him wouldn't know.
``Well, Dick said he wasn't going, and was making trouble about it, so
they told Fred to go. Back, they told him, was best, and come up
behind the Boche with his hands up; they would be less likely to shoot
when it was back towards their own supports.
``Fred wouldn't go, and so on with the rest. Well, they didn't waste
time quarrelling, time being scarce, and they said what was to be
done? There was chalk where they were, low down in the trench, a
little brown clay on the top of it. There was a great block of it
loose near a shelter. They said they would carve with their knives on
the big bowlder of chalk all that they knew about Daleswood. They
would write where it was and just what it was like, and they would
write something of all those little things that pass with a
generation. They reckoned on having the time for it. It would take a
direct hit with something large, what they call big stuff, to do any
harm to that bowlder. They had no confidence in paper, it got so
messed up when you were hit; besides, the Boche had been using
thermite. Burns, that does.
``They'd one or two men that were handy at carving chalk; used to do
the regimental crest and pictures of Hindenburg, and all that. They
decided they'd do it in reliefs.
``They started smoothing the chalk. They had nothing more to do but
just to think what to write. It was a great big bowlder with plenty of
room on it. The Boche seemed not to know that they hadn't killed the
Daleswood men, just as the sea mightn't know that one stone stayed dry
at the coming in of the tide. A gap between two divisions probably.
``Harry wanted to tell of the woods more than anything. He was afraid
they might cut them down because of the war, and no one would know of
the larks they had had there as boys. Wonderful old woods they were,
with a lot of Spanish chestnut growing low, and tall old oaks over it.
Harry wanted them to write down what the foxgloves were like in the
wood at the end of summer, standing there in the evening, `Great
solemn rows,' he said, `all odd in the dusk. All odd in the evening,
going there after work; and makes you think of fairies.' There was
lots of things about those woods, he said, that ought to be put down
if people were to remember Daleswood as it used to be when they knew
it. What were the good old days without those woods? he said.
``But another wanted to tell of the time when they cut the hay with
scythes, working all those long days at the end of June; there would
be no more of that, he said, with machines come in and all.
``There was room to tell of all that and the woods too, said the
others, so long as they put it short like.
``And another wanted to tell of the valleys beyond the wood, far
afield where the men went working; the women would remember the hay.
The great valleys he'd tell of. It was they that made Daleswood. The
valleys beyond the wood and the twilight on them in summer. Slopes
covered with mint and thyme, all solemn at evening. A hare on them
perhaps, sitting as though they were his, then lolloping slowly away.
It didn't seem from the way he told of those old valleys that he
thought they could ever be to other folk what they were to the
Daleswood men in the days he remembered. He spoke of them as though
there were something in them, besides the mint and the thyme and the
twilight and hares, that would not stay after these men were gone,
though he did not say what it was. Scarcely hinted it even.
``And still the Boche did nothing to the Daleswood men. The bullets
had ceased altogether. That made it much quieter. The shells still
snarled over, bursting far, far away.
``And Bob said tell of Daleswood itself, the old village, with queer
chimneys, of red brick, in the wood. There weren't houses like that
nowadays. They'd be building new ones and spoiling it, likely, after
the war. And that was all he had to say.
``And nobody was for not putting down anything any one said. It was
all to go in on the chalk, as much as would go in the time. For they
all sort of understood that the Daleswood of what they called the good
old time was just the memories that those few men had of the days they
had spent there together. And that was the Daleswood they loved, and
wanted folks to remember. They were all agreed as to that. And then
they said how was they to write it down. And when it came to writing
there was so much to be said, not spread over a lot of paper I don't
mean, but going down so deep like, that it seemed to them how their
own talk wouldn't be good enough to say it. And they knew no other,
and didn't know what to do. I reckon they'd been reading magazines and
thought that writing had to be like that muck. Anyway, they didn't
know what to do. I reckon their talk would be good enough for
Daleswood when they loved Daleswood like that. But they didn't, and
they were puzzled.
``The Boche was miles away behind them now, and his barrage with him.
Still in front he did nothing.
``They talked it all over and over, did the Daleswood men. They tried
everything. But somehow or other they couldn't get near what they
wanted to say about old summer evenings. Time wore on. The bowlder was
smooth and ready, and that whole generation of Daleswood men could
find no words to say what was in their hearts about Daleswood. There
wasn't time to waste. And the only thing they thought of in the end
was `Please, God, remember Daleswood just like it used to be.' And
Bill and Harry carved that on the chalk between them.
``What happened to the Daleswood men? Why, nothing. There come one of
them counter-attacks, a regular bastard for Jerry. The French made it
and did the Boche in proper. I got the story from a man with a hell of
a great big hammer, long afterwards when that trench was well behind
our line. He was smashing up a huge great chunk of chalk because he
said they all felt it was so damn silly.''
The Road
The battery Sergeant-Major was practically asleep. He was all worn out
by the continuous roar of bombardments that had been shaking the
dugouts and dazing his brains for weeks. He was pretty well fed up.
The officer commanding the battery, a young man in a very neat uniform
and of particularly high birth, came up and spat in his face. The
Sergeant-Major sprang to attention, received an order, and took a
stick at once and beat up the tired men. For a message had come to the
battery that some English (God punish them!) were making a road at X.
The gun was fired. It was one of those unlucky shots that come on days
when our luck is out. The shell, a 5.9, lit in the midst of the British
working party. It did the Germans little good. It did not stop the
deluge of shells that was breaking up their guns and was driving
misery down like a wedge into their spirits. It did not improve the
temper of the officer commanding the battery, so that the men suffered
as acutely as ever under the Sergeant-Major. But it stopped the road
for that day.
I seemed to see that road going on in a dream.
Another working party came along next day, with clay pipes and got to
work; and next day and the day after. Shells came, but went short or
over; the shell holes were neatly patched up; the road went on. Here
and there a tree had to be cut, but not often, not many of them were
left; it was mostly digging and grubbing up roots, and pushing
wheelbarrows along planks and duck-boards, and filling up with stones.
Sometimes the engineers would come: that was when streams were
crossed. The engineers made their bridges, and the infantry working
party went on with the digging and laying down stones. It was
monotonous work. Contours altered, soil altered, even the rock beneath
it, but the desolation never; they always worked in desolation and
thunder. And so the road went on.
They came to a wide river. They went through a great forest. They
passed the ruins of what must have been quite fine towns, big
prosperous towns with universities in them. I saw the infantry working
party with their stumpy clay pipes, in my dream, a long way on from
where that shell had lit, which stopped the road for a day. And behind
them curious changes came over the road at X. You saw the infantry
going up to the trenches, and going back along it into reserve. They
marched at first, but in a few days they were going up in motors, grey
busses with shuttered windows. And then the guns came along it, miles
and miles of guns, following after the thunder which was further off
over the hills. And then one day the cavalry came by. Then stores in
wagons, the thunder muttering further and further away. I saw
farm-carts going down the road at X. And then one day all manner of
horses and traps and laughing people, farmers and women and boys all
going by to X. There was going to be a fair.
And far away the road was growing longer and longer amidst, as always,
desolation and thunder. And one day far away from X the road grew very
fine indeed. It was going proudly through a mighty city, sweeping in
like a river; you would not think that it ever remembered duck-boards.
There were great palaces there, with huge armorial eagles blazoned in
stone, and all along each side of the road was a row of statues of
kings. And going down the road towards the palace, past the statues of
the kings, a tired procession was riding, full of the flags of the
Allies. And I looked at the flags in my dream, out of national pride
to see whether we led, or whether France or America. America went
before us, but I could not see the Union Jack in the van nor the
Tricolour either, nor the Stars and Stripes: Belgium led and then
Serbia, they that had suffered most.
And before the flags, and before the generals, I saw marching along on
foot the ghosts of the working party that were killed at X, gazing
about them in admiration as they went, at the great city and at the
palaces. And one man, wondering at the Sièges Allée, turned round to
the Lance Corporal in charge of the party: ``That is a fine road that
we made, Frank,'' he said.
An Imperial Monument
It is an early summer's morning: the dew is all over France: the train
is going eastwards. They are quite slow, those troop trains, and there
are few embankments or cuttings in those flat plains, so that you seem
to be meandering along through the very life of the people. The roads
come right down to the railways, and the sun is shining brightly over
the farms and the people going to work along the roads, so that you
can see their faces clearly as the slow train passes them by.
They are all women and boys that work on the farms; sometimes perhaps
you see a very old man, but nearly always women and boys; they are out
working early. They straighten up from their work as we go by and lift
their hands to bless us.
We pass by long rows of the tall French poplars, their branches cut
away all up the trunk, leaving only an odd round tuft at the top of
the tree; but little branches are growing all up the trunk now, and
the poplars are looking unkempt. It would be the young men who would
cut the branches of the poplars. They would cut them for some useful
thrifty purpose that I do not know; and then they would cut them
because they were always cut that way, as long ago as the times of the
old men's tales about France; but chiefly, I expect, because youth
likes to climb difficult trees; that is why they are clipped so very
high. And the trunks are all unkempt now.
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.
But towards evening we pass over the border of this pleasant country
into a tragical land of destruction and gloom. 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. And over it broods, and will
probably brood for ever, accursed by men and accursed by the very
fields, the hyena-like memory of the Kaiser, who has whitened so many
bones.
It may be some satisfaction to his selfishness to know that the
monument to it cannot pass away, to know that the shell holes go too
deep to be washed away by the healing rains of years, to know that the
wasted German generations will not in centuries gather up what has
been spilt on the Somme, or France recover in the sunshine of many
summers from all the misery that his devilish folly has caused. 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; let us leave his fancy haunting
cemeteries in the stricken lands of the world, to find what glee he
can in this huge manifestation of his imperial will.
We neither know to what punishment he moves nor can even guess what
fitting one is decreed. But the time is surely appointed and the
place. Poor trifler with Destiny, who ever had so much to dread?
A Walk to the Trenches
To stand at the beginning of a road is always wonderful; for on all
roads before they end experience lies, sometimes adventure. And a
trench, even as a road, has its beginnings somewhere. In the heart of
a very strange country you find them suddenly. A trench may begin in
the ruins of a house, may run up out of a ditch; may be cut into a
rise of ground sheltered under a hill, and is built in many ways by
many men. As to who is the best builder of trenches there can be
little doubt, and any British soldier would probably admit that for
painstaking work and excellence of construction there are few to rival
Von Hindenburg. His Hindenburg line is a model of neatness and
comfort, and it would be only a very ungrateful British soldier who
would deny it.
You come to the trenches out of strangely wasted lands, you come
perhaps to a wood in an agony of contortions, black, branchless,
sepulchral trees, and then no more trees at all. 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. Overhead floats until it is chased away an aëroplane with
little black crosses, that you can scarcely see at his respectful
height, peering to see what more harm may be done in the desolation
and ruin. Little flashes sparkle near him, white puffs spread out
round the flashes: and he goes, and our airmen go away after him;
black puffs break out round our airmen. Up in the sky you hear a faint
tap-tapping. They have got their machine guns working.
You see many things there that are unusual in deserts: a good road, a
railway, perhaps a motor bus; you see what was obviously once a
village, and hear English songs, but no one who has not seen it can
imagine the country in which the trenches lie, unless he bear a desert
clearly in mind, a desert that has moved from its place on the map by
some enchantment of wizardry, and come down on a smiling country.
Would it not be glorious to be a Kaiser and be able to do things like
that?
Past all manner of men, past no trees, no hedges, no fields, but only
one field from skyline to skyline that has been harrowed by war, one
goes with companions that this event in our history has drawn from all
parts of the earth. On that road you may hear all in one walk where is
the best place to get lunch in the City; you may hear how they laid a
drag for some Irish pack, and what the Master said; you may hear a
farmer lamenting over the harm that rhinoceroses do to his coffee
crop; you may hear Shakespeare quoted and La vie Parisienne.
In the village you see a lot of German orders, with their silly notes
of exclamation after them, written up on notice boards among the
ruins. Ruins and German orders. That turning movement of Von Kluck's
near Paris in 1914 was a mistake. Had he not done it we might have had
ruins and German orders everywhere. And yet Von Kluck may comfort
himself with the thought that it is not by his mistakes that Destiny
shapes the world: such a nightmare as a world-wide German domination
can have had no place amongst the scheme of things.
Beyond the village the batteries are thick. A great howitzer near the
road lifts its huge muzzle slowly, fires and goes down again, and
lifts again and fires. It is as though Polyphemus had lifted his huge
shape slowly, leisurely, from the hillside where he was sitting, and
hurled the mountain top, and sat down again. If he is firing pretty
regularly you are sure to get the blast of one of them as you go by,
and it can be a very strong wind indeed. One's horse, if one is
riding, does not very much like it, but I have seen horses far more
frightened by a puddle on the road when coming home from hunting in
the evening: one 12-inch howitzer more or less in France calls for no
great attention from man or beast.
Pages: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|