I have seen the deathly lassitude invade,
Oh, how you suffered! How you were afraid!
What death-damp hands you locked about your eyes!
You, so insatiably athirst to spend
The young desires in your hearts abloom,
How could you think the desert was your doom,
The waterless fountain and the endless end?
You yearned not for the face of love, grown dim,
But only fought your anguished bones to wrest
From the Black Angel crouched upon your breast,
Who scanned you ere he led you down with him.
From The Book of the Homeless, edited by Edith Wharton; translated by Edith Wharton; Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1916.
Drop Drop Drop of Blood
—Henry Beston
Montauville was the last habitable village of the region. The dirty, mud-spattered village was caught between the leathery sweep of two wooded ridges. Though less than a mile from the first German line, the village, because of its protection from shells by a spur of the Bois-le-Pretre, was in remarkably good condition; the only building to show conspicuous damage being the church, whose steeple had been twice struck. Here and there, among the uncultivated fields of those who had fled, were the green fields of some one who had stayed. A woman of seventy still kept open her grocery shop; it was extraordinarily dirty, full of buzzing flies, and smelled of spilt wine.
“Why did you stay?” I asked her.
“Because I did not want to leave the village. Of course, my daughter wanted me to come to Dijon. Imagine me in Dijon, I, who have been to Nancy only once! A fine figure I should make in Dijon in my sabots!”
“And you are not afraid of the shells?”
“Oh, I should be afraid of them if I ever went out in the street. But I never leave my shop.”
And so she stayed, selling the three staples of the French front, Camembert cheese, Norwegian sardines, and cakes of chocolate. But Montauville was far from safe. It was there that I first saw a man killed. I had been talking to a sentry, a small young fellow of twenty-one or two, with yellow hair and gray-blue eyes full of weariness. He complained of a touch of jaundice, and wished heartily that the whole affair—meaning the war in general—was finished. He was very anxious to know if the Americans thought the Boches were going to win. Some vague idea of winning the war just to get even with the Boches seemed to be in his mind. I assured him that American opinion was optimistic in regard to the chances of the Allies, and strolled away.
Hardly had I gone ten feet, when a “seventy-seven” shell, arriving without warning, went Zip-bang, and, turning to crouch to the wall, I saw the sentry crumple up in the mud. It was as if he were a rubber effigy of a man blown up with air, and some one had suddenly ripped the envelope. His rifle fell from him, and he, bending from the waist, leaned faced down into the mud. I was the first to get to him. The young, discontented face was full of the gray street mud, there was mud in the hollows of the eyes, in the mouth, in the fluffy mustache. A chunk of the shell had ripped open the left breast to the heart. Down his sleeve, as down a pipe, flowed a hasty drop, drop, drop of blood that mixed with the mire.
From A Volunteer Poilu, by Henry Beston; Houghton Mifflin; Boston, 1916.
Of All the Days in My Life the Most Terrible
—Harry Lauder
I did not go to sleep for a long time. It was New Year’s, and I lay thinking of my boy, and wondering what this year would bring him. It was early in the morning before I slept. And it seemed to me that I had scarce been asleep at all when there came a pounding at the door, loud enough to rouse the heaviest sleeper there ever was.
My heart almost stopped. There must be something serious indeed for them to be rousing me so early. I rushed to the door, and there was a porter, holding out a telegram. I took it and tore it open. And I knew why I had felt as I had the day before. I shall never forget what I read:
“Captain John Lauder killed in action, December 28. Official. War Office.”
He had been killed four days before I knew it! And yet—I had known. Let no one ever tell me again that there is nothing in presentment. Why else had I been so sad and uneasy in my mind? Why else, all through that Sunday, had it been so impossible for me to take comfort in what was said to cheer me? Some warning had come to me, some sense that all was not well.
Realization came to me slowly. I sat and stared at that slip of paper, that had come to me like the breath of doom. Dead! Dead these four days! I was never to see the light of his eyes again. I was never to hear that laugh of his. I had looked on my boy for the last time. Could it be true? Ah, I knew it was! And it was for this moment that I had been waiting, that we had all been waiting, ever since we sent John away to fight for his country and do his part. I think we had all felt that it must come. We had all known that it was too much to hope that he should be one of those to be spared.
The black despair that had been hovering over me for hours closed down now and enveloped all my senses. Everything was unreal. For a time I was quite numb. For then, as I began to realize and to visualize what it was to mean in my life that my boy was dead there came a great pain. The iron of realization slowly seared every word of that curt telegram upon my heart. I said it to myself, over and over again. And I whispered to myself, as my thoughts took form, over and over, the one terrible word: “Dead!”
I felt that for me everything had come to an end with the reading of that dire message. It seemed to me that for me the board of life was black and blank. For me there was no past and there could be no future. Everything had been swept away, erased, by one sweep of the hand of a cruel fate. Oh, there was a past though! And it was in that past that I began to delve. It was made up of every memory I had of my boy. I fell at once to remembering him. I clutched at every memory, as if I must grasp them and make sure of them, lest they be taken from me as well as the hope of seeing him again that the telegram had forever snatched away.
I would have been destitute indeed then. It was as if I must fix in my mind the way he had been wont to look, and recall to my ears every tone of his voice, every trick of his speech. There was something left of him that I must keep, I knew, even then, at all costs, if I was to be able to bear his loss at all.
There was a vision of him before my eyes. My bonnie Highland laddie, brave and strong in his kilt and the uniform of his country, going out to his death with a smile on his face. And there was another vision that came up now, unbidden. It was a vision of him lying stark and cold upon the battlefield, the mud on his uniform. And when I saw that vision I was like a man gone mad.
But God came to me, and slowly His peace entered my soul. And He made me see, as in a vision, that some things that I had said and that I had believed, were not so. He made me know, and I learned, straight from Him, that our boy has not been taken from us forever as I had said to myself so often since that telegram had come.
He is gone from this life, but he is waiting for us beyond this life. He is waiting beyond this life and this world of wicked war and wanton cruelty and slaughter. And we shall come, some day, his mother and I, to the place where he is waiting for us, and we shall all be as happy there as we were on this earth in the happy days before the war.
My eyes will rest upon his face. I will hear his fresh young voice again as he sees me and cries out his greeting. I know what he will say. He will spy me, and his voice will ring out as it used to do. “Hello, Dad!” he will call, as he sees me. And I will feel the grip of his young, strong arms about me, just as in the happy days before that day that is of all the days in my life the most terrible and the most hateful in my memory—the day when they told me he had been killed.
From A Minstrel in France, by Harry Lauder; Hearst’s International Library; New York, 1918.
He Wanted Me to Write
—Katherine Mansfield
November, Bandol, France. Brother. I think I have known for a long time that life was over for me, but I never realized it or acknowl
edged it until my brother died. Yes, though he is lying in the middle of a little wood in France and I am still walking upright and feeling the sun and the wind from the sea, I am just as much dead as he is. The only possible value that anything can have for me is that it should put me in mind of something that happened or was when he was alive.
“Do you remember, Katie?” I hear his voice in the trees and flowers, in scents and light and shadow. I feel I have a duty to perform to the lovely time when we were both alive. I want to write about it, and he wanted me to. We talked it over in my little top room in London. I said: I will put on the front page: To my brother, Leslie Heron Beauchamp. Very well: it shall be done …
Wednesday. (December.) To-day I am hardening my heart. I am walking all around my heart and building up the defences. I do not mean to leave a loophole even for a tuft of violets to grow in. Give me a hard heart, O Lord! Lord, harden thou my heart!
February 14. Dear brother, as I jot these notes, I am speaking to you. Yes, it is to you. Each time I take up my pen you are with me. You are mine. You are my playfellow, my brother, and we shall range all over our country together. You are more vividly with me now this moment than if you were alive and I were writing to you from a short distance away. As you speak my name, the name you call me by that I love so—“Katie!”—your lip lifts in a smile—you believe in me, you know. In every word I write and in every place I visit I carry you with me.
February 15. Love, I will not fail. If I write every day faithfully a little record of how I have kept faith with you—that is what I must do. Now you are back with me. You are stepping forward, one hand in your pocket. My brother, my little boy brother! He never, never must be unhappy. Now I will come quite close to you, take your hand, and we shall tell this story to each other.
From Journal of Katherine Mansfield, by Katherine Mansfield; Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1926.
A Girl in a Pinafore
—H. G. Wells
And then as if it were something that every one in the Dower House had been waiting for, came the message that Hugh had been killed.
The telegram was brought up by a girl in a pinafore instead of the boy of the old dispensation, for boys now were doing the work of youths and youths the work of the men who had gone to the war.
Mr. Britling was standing at the front door; he had been surveying the late October foliage, touched by the warm light of the afternoon, when the messenger appeared. He opened the telegram, hoping as he had hoped when he opened any telegram since Hugh had gone to the front that it would not contain the exact words he read; that it would say wounded, that at the worst it would say “missing,” that perhaps it might even tell of some pleasant surprise, a brief return to home such as the last letter had foreshadowed. He read the final, unqualified statement, the terse regrets. He stood quite still for a moment or so, staring at the words …
He had an absurd conviction that this ought to be a sixpenny telegram. The thing worried him. He wanted to give the brat sixpence, and he had only threepence and a shilling, and he didn’t know what to do and his brain couldn’t think. It would be a shocking thing to give her a shilling, and he couldn’t somehow give just coppers for so important a thing as Hugh’s death.
She stared at him, inquiring, incredulous. “Is there a reply, Sir, please?”
“No,” he said, “that’s for you. All of it … This is a peculiar sort of telegram … It’s news of importance …”
As he said this he met her eyes, and had a sudden persuasion that she knew exactly what it was the telegram had told him, and that she was shocked at the gala-like treatment of such terrible news. He hesitated, feeling that he had to say something else, that he was socially inadequate, and then he decided that at any cost he must get his face away from her staring eyes. She made no movement to turn away. She seemed to be taking him in, recording him, for repetition, greedily, with every fibre of her being.
He stepped past her into the garden, and instantly forgot about her existence …
He had been thinking of this possibility for the last few weeks almost continuously, and yet now that it had come to him he felt that he had never thought about it before, that he must go off alone by himself to envisage this monstrous and terrible fact, without distraction or interruption.
He saw his wife coming down the alley between the roses.
He was wrenched by emotions as odd and unaccountable as the emotions of adolescence. He had exactly the same feeling now that he had had when in his boyhood some unpleasant admission had to be made to his parents. He felt he could not go through a scene with her yet, that he could not endure the task of telling her, of being observed. He turned abruptly to his left. He walked away as if he had not seen her, across his lawn toward the little summer-house upon a knoll that commanded a high road. She called to him, but he did not answer …
He would not look towards her, but for a time all his senses were alert to hear whether she followed him. Safe in the summer-house he could glance back.
It was all right. She was going into the house.
He drew the telegram from his pocket again furtively, almost guiltily, and re-read it. He turned it over and read it again …
Killed.
Then his own voice, hoarse and strange to his ears, spoke his thoughts.
“My God! how unutterably silly … Why did I let him go? Why did I let him go?”
Suddenly his boy was all about him, playing, climbing the cedars, twisting miraculously about the lawn on a bicycle, discoursing gravely upon his future, lying on the grass, breathing very hard and drawing preposterous caricatures. Once again they walked side by side up and down—it was athwart this very spot—talking gravely but rather shyly …
And here they had stood a little awkwardly, before the boy went in to say good-bye to his stepmother and go off with his father to the station …
“I will work to-morrow again,” whispered Mr. Britling, “but to-night—to-night … To-night is yours … Can you hear me, can you hear? Your father … who had counted on you …”
He went into the far corner of the hockey paddock, and there he moved about for a while and then stood for a long time holding the fence with both hands and staring blankly into the darkness. At last he turned away, and went stumbling and blundering towards the rose garden. A spray of creeper tore his face and distressed him. He thrust it aside fretfully, and it scratched his hand. He made his way to the seat in the arbour, and sat down and whispered to himself, and then became very still with his arm upon the back of the seat and his head upon his arm.
From Mr. Britling Sees It Through, by H. G. Wells; Macmillan; New York, 1917.
Tears are Difficult for a Man to Shed
—Paul Claudel
The Precious Blood
Oh, what if Thou, that a cup of water promisest
The illimitable sea,
Thou, Lord, dost also thirst?
Hast Thou not said, our blood shall quench Thee best
And first
Of any drink there be?
If then there be such virtue in it, Lord,
Ah, let us prove it now!
And, save by seeing it at Thy footstool poured,
How, Lord—oh, how?
If it indeed be precious and like gold,
As Thou has taught,
Why hoard it? There’s no wealth in gems unsold,
Nor joy in gems unbought.
Our sins are great, we know it; and we know
We must redeem our guilt;
Even so.
But tears are difficult for a man to shed,
And here is our blood poured out for France instead
To do with as Thou will!
Take it, O Lord! And make it Thine indeed,
Void of all lien and fee,
Nought else we ask of Thee;
But if Thou needst our Love as we Thy Justice need,
Great must Thine hunger be!
From The Book of the Homeless, edited by Edith Wharton; translate
d by Edith Wharton; Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1916.
I Lay On that Brown Mound
—Harry Lauder
One of the officers at Albert was looking at me in a curiously intent fashion. I noticed that. And so on he came over to me.
“Where do you go next, Harry?” he asked me. His voice was keenly sympathetic, and his eyes and his manner were very grave.
“To a place called Ovilliers,” I said.
“So I thought,” he said. He put out his hand, and I gripped it hard. “I know, Harry. I know exactly where you are going, and I will send a man with you to act as your guide, who knows the spot you want to reach.”
I couldn’t answer him. I was too deeply moved. For Ovilliers is the spot where my son, Captain John Lauder, lies in his soldier’s grave. That grave had been, of course, from the very first, the final, the ultimate object of my journey.
And so a private soldier joined our party as guide, and we took to the road again. The Bapaume road it was—a famous highway, bitterly contested, savagely fought for. There was no talking in our car. I certainly was not disposed to chat, and I suppose that sympathy for my feelings, and my glumness, stilled the tongues of my companions. And, at any rate, we had not traveled far when the car ahead of us stopped, and the soldier from Albert stepped into the road and waited for me.
“I will show you the place now, Mr. Lauder,” he said, quietly. So we left the cars standing in the road, and set out across a field that, like all the fields in that vicinity, had been ripped and torn by shell-fire. All about us were little brown mounds, each with a white wooden cross upon it. June was out that day in full bloom. All over the valley, thickly sown with white crosses, wild flowers in rare profusion, and thickly matted, luxuriant grasses, and all the little shrubs that God Himself looks after were growing bravely in the sunlight.
It was a mournful journey, but, in some strange way, the peaceful beauty of the day brought comfort to me. And my own grief was altered by the vision of the grief that had come to so many others. Those crosses, stretching away as far as my eye could reach, attested to the fact that it was not I alone who had suffered and lost. And, in the presence of so many evidences of grief and desolation a private grief sank into its true proportions. It was no less keen, the agony of thought of my boy was as sharp as ever. But I knew that he was only one, and that I was only one father. And there were so many like him—and so many like me, God help us all!
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