Lucifer Before Sunrise

by Henry Williamson

  Linseed was a conditioner of stock. Most of its oil and substance was dropped with an animal’s dung: thus to feed plants of corn in due season.

  The yellow soil had been only lightly mucked twice in eight years, and it had done no good, except temporarily on the Lower Hanger. When had the twenty-two acres been mucked before that? Probably in the Great War, nearly thirty years ago. And yet a cash crop of corn had been taken out of that field for twenty years in succession before he took the farm in hand.

  For the last five years British farmers had had no linseed or ground-nut cake with which to fatten bullocks, which would have dropped on the straw they trod half the value of the cake. However, Phillip had to use the straw up there for the making of some sort of muck. Also bullocks did better on high ground than in the cold, damp yards of the premises below. Wooden railings and posts lasted longer, too. So did the thatch of haystacks. Up there were drying winds. The noon sun of a winter morning shone upon their animals in the snug shelter. The frosts were healthy frosts.

  Down in the valley winter frosts lay all day in the shadows of trees. Most of the woodwork and doors of the premises were green and sodden for five months of the year. Up here the yard-rails and elm planks of the new root-house were wind-dry within a few hours of the most prolonged and driving rain.

  To cart straw down from these higher fields, even along the New Cut to the premises nearly a mile away, and then haul it up again as muck six months later was a tedious and costly business, so the ruinous yard was rebuilt. He waited four years to give the twenty-two acres of the Hanger fields their first coat in more than two decades. That dour yellow soil cried upon him every time he was up there. It set brick-hard in summer, and in areas the corn grew so sparse and slow that rabbits were lords of the land.

  He rebuilt part of the yard before the war, and then had to leave the work for all of those four years, after hauling up posts and rails, a 400-gallon tank, ‘bings’ (bins), and racks, all the wood having been pressure-creosoted. And now, at last, the bullock yard gave him pleasure.

  Jack the Jackdaw had for some time been working for a smallholder in the village. His master was a butcher who was also the night-cart contractor. His fields were regularly ‘dressed’ with human excreta in creosote, with coal-ashes and the contents of dustbins. To have to farm land like that was spiritual death.

  Poppy had left working for Phillip. Poor old Jack the Jackdaw, all his mutterings and tearful pleading to Poppy had been as vain as her own secret cries to Bert Close, who had, in her words, ‘cast her off’. So Poppy had joined the W.R.A.F., to make a new life for herself.

  *

  Phillip sat on the lower rail, his behind pushed into a sort of cave made by bullocks pulling straws from the stack through the second and third rail from the top. It was warm there. With chin on hand and body doubled, he was in a position akin to Rodin’s Thinker; but without the thought. He let the feeling of the contented animals in their shelter enter into him. The Red Poll heifers with Rufus their lord stood or lay upon the dry litter, their bellies filled with sugar-beet tops and just-palatable barley straw. They were gentle, innocent, thoughtless.

  Their sugar-beet tops came from the field adjoining the searchlight camp. Upon that field twenty-four Italian prisoners, as a rest from the tedium of crouching over their cooking fires, were to be seen occasionally topping the parsnip-shaped roots before tossing them into tumbrils. The crowns, or tops, after wilting for a week made excellent food. Thus the farmer had a dual-purpose crop, part of which fed the stock after the yellow parsnip-shaped roots had gone to the factory for sugar.

  The twenty-four Italians, all converted from bad Nazi Collaborators to good Allied Co-operators, together did the work of about one proper man. It was useless for a farmer to speak of frost coming, or to complain of the slowness and deliberate laziness of the Co-operators. If one did so, the khaki-clad Co-operators ceased to operate. They were masters, and they knew it. They were also poachers, and the farmer could do nothing about that. It was a condition of the general decadence of war which had to be accepted. These Co-operators shared and trapped small birds, big birds, and game birds; they dug out rabbits and ran down hares approaching from a diminishing circle. All went into their cooking pots. They insisted on a hot midday meal before they would think of going to work; while British labourers munched bread and jam and perhaps a slice of cheese—sick-making food, day after day—and drank cold watery tea out of a bottle.

  However, Phillip was learning to put unpleasant facts out of mind. The sporting on the farm was spoiled. Charles Box had taken another farm for himself near Fenton and the shooting partnership had ended. Since the previous spring egg-thieves and R.A.F. types with guns had searched the woods and hedgerows almost as a right. Before the war these coverts held two hundred wild pheasants. During the last autumn, when Phillip had had two sportsmen from his London Club to share the shoot with him, they had not bagged a score. He had thereupon returned their subscriptions.

  *

  During the recent rains all the compost-mould they had scattered on the Hanger was washed out of the yellow soil. In parts the subsoil chalk was exposed. Gullies were carved a foot and more wide and several inches deep. Farther along the ridge the exposed subsoil was hard and barren. He was compelled by law to grow corn there again next season, but planned to under-sow the corn with a five-year layer of clover and grasses. Permission to do this had been granted by the War Agricultural Committee. With an electric fence to prevent stock straying, the idea was to let the herd wander up from the re-sown meadows to graze the Lower Hanger in the afternoons, coming from summer-heavy heats below to cooling airs above. When he was gone, and perhaps his four sons were working their own farm, the pedigree beasts would come up to rest and drop their dung, thus transferring some of that rich fertility below to the eroded arable: horn helping corn.

  During the war Phillip had had an occasional letter from Hereward Birkin, who had been detained in Brixton prison since his arrest under 18b in June 1940. They were in Birkin’s usual stalky writing; but the letters clear and carefully formed. Knowing that he was allowed to send only one letter a month, Phillip felt honoured to get such a letter. But Birkin was too generous, praising him for steady courage! It did not need courage to be loyal to such a man.

  One postcard, after his release from Brixton prison, came to Phillip, revealing the writer’s vision and patriotism. It ended, Trust Churchill: he knows. It was in reference to the Prime Minister’s recent flight, just after pneumonia. Churchill had flown to Greece, where Greek partisans were fighting the Government troops. Even The Times had, in a leader, deplored Churchill’s attitude: but the Greek partisans were Stalinists and this was to be Asia’s thrust into Europe, ready for the struggle for Europe after Hitler was brought down. Birkin foresaw it, even as Churchill. Trust Churchill: he knows. And Churchill knew, too, the quality of Birkin … but Churchill was of the old order.

  On Christmas Day, to give ‘poor little Peter’ (as David called him) a spell, Phillip fed the stock in the Woodland Yard. Then he walked down to the Studio, and re-read Birkin’s letter.

  From where he sat the evening star was shining over the hill. A wood fire burned before him. Among the logs a length of elm was singing a wavering high song in the flames. He had, on coming in, switched on the radio, with its news of what was probably the last planned German attack of the war, in the snows and the frozen fogs of the Ardennes.

  Outside in the valley a mist made the shapes of trees as though drowned in time. Everything was quiet; people indoors by their firesides in the old and deep countryside.

  To the older ones, who have seen so much come and pass, Christmas is a symbol that gentleness and kindliness are still realities in the world; although, when faith sinks, it seems at times that the world is turning away from the sun, unable to sustain its human life any longer.

  In holes in the damp ground, amidst ruins and swamped fields, perhaps far from mother and father, in houses with the roofs broken
—maybe with little food, worn-out boots, thin clothing—refugee European children are hiding. Yet it is Christmas, and Christmas is for the children. It is their miracle, their manifestation of hope and joy and beauty of life.

  Through a small window above the open brick hearth, I see the moon hanging in the west. Near the moon shines a small bright point of light—Venus, the Evening Star, the Star of Love, which is also the Morning Star, Lucifer the lightbringer, This bright and glowing planet led the sun out of darkness, to shine on the living; and then it shrinks, its lustre shed.

  The ancient poets called the most hopeful planet in the sky the Lightbringer, which for them was also the Prince of Darkness. If I repeat this in my testament, I ask forgiveness. The imagery has haunted me since I was a youth. Then as I developed, and as it were crystallisation came to what before had been hyalin, the dual function of the myth became plain to me as my own nature. And now the ancient truth has never before been so plain to me.

  The small window above the hearth is open. I see moon and star in the clear, and not through a glass darkly.

  I have seen the Morning Star as ‘a white-gold ball of fire’ rising in the East over a broken and frosted landscape, as I crouched in a trench with water and ice to my knees. I have heard the singing of carols where but a few hours before shells were whining and machine-gun bullets cutting human flesh and bone.

  For a few blessed hours the bitterness and nihilism of war gave way, with the rising of the sun, to friendliness and benevolence upon the battlefield. Within me a great hope arose that forever the power and blessing of peace would spread far and wide in the truth that, to quote the words of Adolf Hitler—‘It may even happen that in a case of dispute between two peoples—both may be in the right.’

  A long time ago—thirty years—that Christmas Day of 1914 under Messines hill. Many times the patient plough has turned and returned the dust of those who, of that miraculous time, the Linz Regiment in feld grau, the London Regiment in khaki, were hopeful beside me.

  The elm-log in the fire is crying as the flames consume it: the flames that are the heat of the sun which created leaf and twig and bough of the elm-tree which now as wood gives winter warmth to the old soldier and his children. Nothing is lost of earth and air; the smiles of my companions of No Man’s Land, the hopes of the interior heart are living now, this moment. Never can they be lost to me.

  As Lucifer, Prince of Darkness, is also the Morning Star of hope leading up the sun to shine on the living, so this hard and terrible age, when at times the heart seems frozen in its contemplation of the terrors that spring from the mind of humanity—desperate-striving humanity—is a preparation for clear and unequivocal living. That, since I learned to think for myself thirty Christmas-tides ago, I have never doubted.

  Now it is time to go into the farmhouse parlour for tea, to be with the children. Billy has come unexpectedly for Christmas, full of tales of his training as an air-gunner. He is the splendid eldest brother, hero to all the children, who have been winter-sporting on the Home Hills, after lugging on the sledge, amidst spills and laughter, the four-bushel skep of logs to my Studio door.

  The small boys are as proud of Billy as they are of their new braces, which they wear over their jerseys. For his other present Jonny has pencil, ruler, rubber, and a pad of drawing paper. His eyes still shine with joy at his good luck, for he likes nothing better than to sit at the table after his day’s work and draw tractors, ploughs, aircraft, birds, animals. Rosamund has a rose-briar walking stick, cut from the hedge, and a leather purse with five shillings in it. Such little things in an age of dearth and death, such pleasure for the innocent.

  Part Three

  DEATH OF THE DOPPELGANGER

  ‘Then I have ploughed my last furrow.’

  Hotspur, before his death at Berwick.

  ‘Finis coronat opus, or rather finis declarat opus. The world order in 1945 and after is the finis which lights up the opus of the preceding forty years. Let us concentrate on this glorious triumph and see, not in general terms but in statistical form, what the policy of blood, sweat and tears has in a generation yielded.

  The International Review of Diplomatic Political Science, Geneva, stated the following as the cost of World War II:

  21 million men killed in action;

  29¼ million wounded, mutilated, or incapacitated;

  21¼ million evacuated, deported, interned or otherwise removed from their homes;

  30 million homes reduced to ashes;

  150 million left without shelter, a prey to famine and disease.

  Up to 1946 World War II cost … enough to provide a house costing £12,000, furniture worth £4,000, a cash present of £20,000 for every family in the U.S.A., Canada, Austria, Britain, France, Germany, U.S.S.R. and Belgium. In addition each town of over 200,000 population could have been allotted a cash donation of £25 million for libraries, £25 million for schools, and £25 million for hospitals.

  —Thomas Callander, 1961.

  Chapter 32

  ICARIAN WAY

  When Phillip was making seed-beds in March, Billy was about to go on his first operational flight. As the tractor moved monotonously slowly over the land, the thought came again and again—should he offer to Billy the talisman locked in his desk …

  Nearly nineteen years had gone by since that morning in the cottage at Malandine when Billy’s mother had broken one of the laces of her sand-shoes at the moment her labour pains overcame her.

  Doubt weakened him. The half-lace lay within a gold locket. Such an object might embarrass Billy among the young and untried members of his crew. But no experienced pilot, navigator, wireless operator or tail-gunner would remark on it: prolonged strain made a man superstitious the more his courage had been leached away by the detonations of battle.

  And yet …

  Billy’s attitude to him, his resistance, was caused by his manner towards Lucy; and anything about his unknown mother might be resented. No: he must not ask Billy again.

  So Phillip followed the shadow of fear instead of the bright ray of his true self. For he believed that inanimate objects had within their forms an essence of personality, or love, of those who had cared for them. Men and women with a high degree of sensibility felt this, although it had not yet been proved on the laboratory bench.

  He spoke to the wind. “The base of such feelings is love, even if that love has been so damaged or disprized as to become hate! Barley was all love behind an unsentimental manner which was guard to her personality. And the essence of the dead remain in the psychic envelope of this planet. Then surely Barley, in spirit, will be near Billy, to protect him, by means of those sad relics which in my weakness I dare not reveal to him?”

  He began to shout against himself, “Coward! Fool! Weakling!” The wind carried his voice over the meadows to where Josiah Harn was unloading 40-gallon drums of swill beside his pig-styes, for Powerful Dick to boil before feeding.

  “He won’t last long!” said Josiah Harn, with satisfaction. Powerful Dick grunted. He didn’t like Harn.

  *

  Billy came back from his first op. and told Lucy—he could not speak easily with his father—details of the raid. It had been a long flight to East Germany, taking ten hours to fly there and back. The crew members had been issued with civvy suits to take with them if they had to bail out, to put on after burying their uniforms and to try to make their way back as displaced persons before the advancing Russians.

  Billy said that the target had been Dresden and most of the bombs dropped had been phosphorus and incendiaries. The German radio, to which Phillip had listened, claimed that over two hundred thousand civilians, many old people and children coming from East Prussia, had been burned alive in that raid which served no military purpose, since there were no war installations or dumps or marshalling yards there. Nor were there any anti-aircraft batteries or searchlights. It was very cold weather, below zero, and Billy’s chilblains broke raw, despite gloves. There were two waves of bombe
rs, preceded by Mosquitos dropping green markers, followed by red flares upon the city, the chief target of which was the Central Station, beside which was a large hospital full of wounded.

  “We also dropped a lot of bull, Mum, propaganda leaflets saying the Nazi Party Leaders had deserted Dresden.” Lucy showed Phillip a copy Billy had kept for a souvenir, it was in German, Nachrichten für die Truppen. It was dated February 13, 1945. Billy said the weight of bombs dropped was four thousand tons, and three quarters of a million incendiaries.

  “Sir Stafford Cripps gave us a lecture the day before we took off, on ‘God is my co-pilot’, Mum. The boys didn’t care for that, saying it was worse than flannel. Then at briefing there wasn’t any target map, which no-one liked, because it meant a free for all. The first raid was incendiary, and when the fires were put out, the second raid, which was ours, was to catch the rescue squads. When we got over the target we had to go down from twenty thousand feet to get under the cloud-base at two thousand. We made our run-in at 1.30 hours, when the city was well alight. The next morning at 10.30 hours there was a third raid by the U.S.A. Army Air Force, and Mustangs flew in low and machine-gunned lorries, Red Cross vans, and crowds of civilians on the banks of the Elbe. The idea was to cause confusion among the Jerry refugees.”

  *

  Lucy did not tell Phillip this until some time after Billy had gone back to his station. He had, by then, heard from another R.A.F. man that all the animals and birds of the Dresden Zoo had escaped, and lions were feeding on corpses, so were vultures. There were monkeys, too, among the ruins.