The Gale of the World

by Henry Williamson

  ‘Usually in that place a magazine soon lost its attractiveness; indeed, it was likely to be soiled within a few hours, for most of the old men, I noticed, were preparing, while reading laboriously down a page, to turn it over, by rolling its lower corner between an occasionally licked finger and thumb. By the afternoon of the day of its first appearance a magazine or journal was in a repulsive state. To my critical self it was a detail of that state of unselfconsciousness of which Somme and Passchendaele were the apotheosis.

  ‘There was one weekly lying on the long oaken table that was usually clean, seldom if ever picked up: an old-fashioned sixpenny called The Athenaeum. I had heard the editor spoken of with reverence by a literary acquaintance, who declared that the finest literary critic in England wrote in it every week. So I sought it; and the first thing I read has remained in my mind ever since: an essay with the title of The Lost Legions, by John Middleton Murry.

  ‘Fortunately I bought a copy of that number, which lies beside me on the table as I write. I quote:—

  One day, we believe, a great book will be written, informed by the breath which moves the Spirits of Pity in Mr. Hardy’s Dynasts. It will be a delicate, yet undeviating record of the spiritual awareness of the generation that perished in the war. It will be a work of genius, for the essence which must be captured within it is volatile beyond belief, almost beyond imagination. We know of its existence by signs hardly more material than a dream-memory of beating wings or an instinctive, yet all but inexplicable refusal of that which has been offered us in its stead. The autobiographer-novelists have been legion, yet we turn from them all with a slow shake of the head. “No, it was not that. Had we lost only that we could have forgotten. It was not that!”

  No, it was the spirit that troubled, as in a dream, the waters of the pool, some influence which trembled between a silence and a sound, a precarious confidence, an unavowed quest, a wisdom that came not of years or experience, a dissatisfaction, a doubt, a devotion, some strange presentiment, it may have been, of the bitter years in store … a visible seal on the forehead of a generation.

  ‘The above passage is the beginning of a review of The Letters of Charles Sorley, who, a captain of 19 years, was killed on the Somme. Sorley had begun to write when at Marlborough. It was the breath of life to him, and with the oxygen of newly-discovered writers—Masefield, Hardy, Goethe, Jefferies—his mind shone with the brilliance of a magnesium ribbon in flare.

  ‘It was about three years after that review in The Athenaeum that The New Horizon appeared on the London literary scene. I bought it eagerly: H. M. Tomlinson writing of a Devon estuary in prose that was the reality of the place itself—the haze of summer heat upon the sand-dunes and the level forsaken shore, the white crinkle of Atlantic rollers upon the sand-bars of the estuarial mouth, the North and South Tails, dreaded ‘white water’ of sailors; D. H. Lawrence, always a little wry, seldom serene, in his descriptions of elemental human nature and the life beyond his eyes; Wallington Christie, a scholar-critic whose ‘gods’ were Shakespeare and Hardy; Arnold Bennett, penetrating but urban in outlook; H. G. Wells, praising Lady Into Fox, by a young writer, as a great book; Middleton Murry, editor of The Adelphi, whose writings seemed to change after the death of his wife, Katherine Mansfield.

  ‘I met one of those famous contributors during the recent war. Wallington Christie had instituted a community farm where nearly all the communiteers, as they called themselves, had conscientious objection to war—young men and women who went to work on the land within the Island Fortress, as Churchill called Britain in the early period of the war.

  ‘Often I wondered how they were affected by the spirit of those dark days. Were they able to live the more serenely because of the expenditure of others? For some people of the first war had changed their ideas in middle-age, and recanted from the ideals of their own youth; some indeed in my presence declared with pride that in that war soldiers and civilians were in it together. The 8th British Army in Africa and the 14th in Burma must have been amused at that idea.

  ‘During hostilities, and shortages everywhere, The New Horizon inevitably got thinner, but still kept its platform from which a man might proclaim his faith. And recently, after nearly quarter of a century since he brought it to being, Christie decided to ‘bring it to a tidy end’. It so happened that I was with him just after the time of this decision, and hearing it, I begged him to let me carry it on.

  ‘For what the lost legions of another generation died for must not be lost. They died, in all armies, for the brotherhood of Europe; for the true, the constructive resurgence of the European spirit. ‘The grass grows green again on the battlefield; but on the scaffold, never’.’

  *

  Here the unfed editor’s energy petered out. The doldrums of depression succeeded. I might be in Valerian Cottage all over again, the year nineteen twenty one, on the south coast of Devon, only cups of weak tea for breakfast. Yes, I am still the same pattern.

  Bodger growled. At the same time Phillip heard the slop of horse-feet on the cobbled pattern outside the cottage, saw a shadow across the casement followed by a brown slouch hat and recognised Molly Bucentaur.

  “How glad I am to see you!”

  “I’m on my way to Lynmouth, and smelled your wood-smoke, and had to drop in to see how you were getting on. Do tell me to go away if I am disturbing you.”

  “Not at all! It was time to stop. Have you had lunch? I can offer you eggs, cheese, tomatoes—”

  Two shirts, part buttonless and torn, hung inside the open hearth. He lifted them off their nails, and put them away.

  “Do let me make you an omelette, Phillip. I don’t eat lunch as a rule, but rules are meant to be broken. Thank you so much for your letter after our little party. Is this the little dog Miranda and Fred Riversmill told me about?”

  “Yes. He belonged to a somewhat odd smallholder, who hangs out in the next coomb.”

  “That must be the odd creature I passed, with a half-load of dead salmon in a ricketty old butt. I asked him where you lived and he eyed me as though I was something out of The News of the World.”

  “He reads that in conjunction with the Old Testament, I expect.”

  “Is this the frying pan? How clean you keep it. Now leave things to me, my dear, and carry on with your writing. Would you prefer tea or coffee?”

  “I’ve only got tea.”

  “Much better for you. Oh, before I forget it, ‘Buster’ asked me to lend you Hereward Birkin’s book. He sends greetings, and you are to regard it as a review copy. That is, should you want to mention it, of course. Now you return to your table, and I’ll make you an omelette.”

  Jubilantly Philiip returned to the table to read the preface.

  This book is written by a man without a Party, as an offering to the new thought of Europe. Deliberately, I refrained from forming again a political movement in Great Britain; in order to serve a new European Idea. At this time, no other is in a position to state any real alternative to the present condition of Europe. The existing rulers of one country, because it has been heard before. The past has imposed stand on the graves of their opponents to confront the Communist power of their own creation. No alternative can come from the architects of chaos: all others have been silenced. So, I must give myself to this task. My life striving in the politics of Britain made known my name and character: my voice can now reach beyond the confines of the earth are responsible for this darkness of humanity; they the duty of the future: I must do this thing because no other can.

  “It’s just what I wanted for the magazine, Molly!”, he cried. “I am so glad you brought me this book.”

  It was a most succulent cheese-omelette in the thick, cast-iron pan.

  “I’m in touch with life again, Molly! No, I’ll wash up. I know exactly where everything is.”

  “I’ll be able to do some typing for you, if you bring it over. Come any time, we are nearly always there, and make yourself at home if we’re out, won’t you? Oh, y
our shirts, my dear. Do let me repair them for you. May I take them? I’ll let you have them back very soon.”

  And so saying, Molly rode away; and Phillip continued typing his Editorial.

  *

  ‘I have just received for review a book by Sir Hereward Birkin, called The Alternative. It was prepared during the war, while the author was in prison, and written after his release in November, 1943. He was then held under house arrest. Sir Hereward and I both served as young soldiers with the British Expeditionary Force in Flanders in 1914, during the battle for Ypres and the Channel ports

  ‘One day it will be widely known that Birkin’s political career began with original thinking at least two generations before his time. Some of my older readers may remember that he was the youngest member of Parliament soon after the Great War ended; that he left the Tory party because they represented the old order of Europe which crumbled into war in 1914, and faced the post-war period with the same ideas, and attitudes. So he joined the Labour Party. Many perceptive men recognised him for a young man of outstanding brilliance, industry, and courage. Now let the author of this book speak for himself:–

  We were divided and we are conquered. That is the tragic epitaph of two war generations. That was the fate of my generation in 1914, and that was the doom of a new generation of young soldiers in 1939. The youth of Europe shed the blood of their own family, and the jackals of the world grew fat. Those who fought are in the position of the conquered, whatever their country. Those who did not fight, but merely profited, alone are victorious.

  ‘There follows an analysis of failure, due to ‘the split mind of Europe’. Fascism failed because it deserved to fail; it was too national. Its opponent of a financial democracy failed, too. It could only frustrate those who would build a New Order. And the New Order failed because of its own inherent weakness. The author examines the odd behaviour of Hitler, when the British Expeditionary Force was routed in May 1940, and nothing was done, at the time, to follow up the victory by Germany.

  Why the first principle of the pursuit was not applied in these circumstances remained one of the mysteries of History. Now it appears that it was not only not attempted but it was not even seriously contemplated … Was it some extraordinary idea existed that all could be settled by political skill alone when passion had reached such a point? Was the illusion nurtured that the British mind in such circumstances would move as logically as the Continental mind, which knew something of military matters? If so, both the invincible courage and the yet more invincible ignorance of the English were profoundly underrated. Did some extraordinary sentimental consideration traverse the mind of German leadership to the destruction of every realistic consideration? It is almost unbelievable that any such feeling should have influenced so far: but it is one of the tear-laden paradoxes of History that the man, whom the mass of the English learned to regard as their greatest enemy, cherished a sentimental illusion toward a ‘sister nation’ which, in the eyes of historic realism, must border on the irrational, and, in the test of fact, was pregnant with the doom of all he loved …

  It is clear that in the German conduct of the war at this point every rule of real policy was broken …

  In all real things which concern the clash of body, mind and will the same eternal reality holds: when the big fellow staggers—attack——attack—attack-–no other thought until it is done. If it was not contemplated that the attack on the French front in 1940 would succeed, it should never have been undertaken. If it was considered, as must have been the case, that it would succeed, the pursuit to the conclusion of the war, which could only mean the invasion of Britain, should have been prepared in advance by express and urgent instructions of political leadership. Nothing should ever be put into execution which has no chance of success; if success is won the opportunity which it presents should never be neglected, particularly if that opportunity is the chance of a final decision …

  What strange enchantment brought the long pause on the German side after the fall of France until they again violated every principle of real policy by turning their back on an undefeated enemy to advance upon Russia? They turned their back, too, on an enemy still resolute. He was mortally weak, it is true, but he had vast latent resources available to him for slow building into effective operation, and a long array of friends and relations—including the potentially strongest country in the world—who could gradually be cajoled and manoeuvred by a great traditional political skill, in alliance with the incessant intrigues of the Money Power, into a world coalition of overwhelming force. Did the tomb of Napolean, enshrined in the vast bitterness of that same, and then, ineluctable experience, never whisper again in the Paris of late 1940, “ask me anything but time”.

  The wounds of Europe must be healed before the work of construction can begin. They are wounds of the spirit, and they are kept open by animosities and memories of atavistic savagery. These old things have no interest to the creative mind, but they impede our work. That is why we ask Europe not to look back, but to stride forward. In these pages I have attempted to describe some possibilities which beckon us onward in the march of the European spirit. They are worth that effort of the living mind and will, which forgets the past and, thus, achieves the future. Division is death, but Union is life.’

  At this point Phillip felt a return of exhaustion; his left eye was aching; and pulling himself upstairs, fell upon the bed. Soon there was the tip-tip of claws on wood, as Bodger walked up, to curl beside the bed-frame. The dog was shivering. Phillip took off his jacket and laid it over the dog so that only the nose was visible. And there the two lay curled, man on bed and dog on floor, while the room lost light and the moor beyond the window dissolved in mist.

  Early in the morning he wandered down to the village to buy food for Bodger and himself. The appearance of a man fishing from the shore was somehow familiar: that sturdy frame, yellow-grey unbrushed hair, was surely of Osgood Nilsson, fellow Brother Barbarian? With an expert flick of a short steel rod he sent soaring a leaded silver spoon to fall into jostling white of waves breaking as though irritably away from the tide flowing fast up the Channel. Phillip had had a good breakfast of tinned herrings in tomato sauce, with brown bread-and-butter, and felt optimistic. He could see the glint on the metal spoon just before it went into the water. And the leap of a bass which had taken it, shaking head in air before falling back to dash seaward to the screeching of the reel-check.

  “See that?” cried the fisherman, half turning his head. Yes, it was Osgood. How glad he was to see the dear old fellow!

  After the fishing they went to the Rising Sun, an inn aptly named: its windows caught the first light of morning above the Severn sea. One had to watch old ‘Goody’, of course, and break away as conveniently as possible after he had pulled up one trouser to show a suppurating wound from the First War … sign that he was about to go on the bottle.

  Carrying a 4-pound bass, and some dried bay-leaves for seasoning, Phillip set off for home, knapsack filled. And as he was walking across the common to Shep Cot a mounted figure appeared on the skyline, an arm waved: horse and rider lost definition as they sunk the hill, until a white speck made it plain that the rider was Miranda, followed by her goat.

  Phillip was surgingly happy; alarmed; querulous for the breakage in his writing. These contrary feelings left him void yet elevated; and pretending not to have seen her, he went into the cot and sat down at the table, picking up and strewing about various foolscap envelopes containing contributions.

  “Lie down, Bodger. Quiet now!”

  At last a knock on the door, which he had left half open. “Good afternoon, Cousin Phillip. Am I disturbing you? I’ve brought over one of your shirts.”

  “How kind of your mother to send you, Miranda. Let me tie your cob to the Silver Eagle, and so provide my worn-out old engine with more horse-power! Hullo, Capella! I see you know Bodger,” as the animals touched noses.

  “Cousin Phillip, what I’d like to say is that it would e
xtend my education if you’d allow me to help you with your magazine. Addressing envelopes—anything at all. It’s my half-term.” She was nervous, she lost colour. He put an arm on her shoulder, and kissed her lightly on the forehead. “What a kind family you Bucentaurs are!”

  “Well, you see—,” she went on, her vitality returning, “I want to be a writer when I leave school. Meanwhile, if I can be of help to you, I shall be getting some idea about technique. I can more or less type, Cousin Phillip, would you mind if I answer letters for you on your portable Royal?”

  “Well, I certainly need help, Miranda—someone to pick out the best of the contributions sent in. There’s a score and more envelopes on this table, most of them unopened. The first number ought to be going to the printer—and I haven’t yet found a printer!”

  “Mr. Riversmill told me there’s one in Minehead who has some good type faces which might suit you. So I got his trade card yesterday. Here it is. May I put it on the chimney shelf, for when you may want it?”

  “Wonderful girl!” He wanted to kiss her. She knew this, and was a little disturbed.

  “The printer said he might be able to get local advertisements, if they don’t cost too much.”

  “Hurray! I’ve got a business manager, as well as an assistant editor! One other thing: Do you know how to cook a bass?”

  “Well, as you haven’t a grill, Cousin Phillip, it might be broiled in your crock, gently, with bay leaves, and fennel.”

  “I’ve got some bay-leaves. And potatoes. I’ll do that, Miranda. It would help more if you’d look through these contributions.”

  She drew up a stool beside the hearth, and began to read. Bodger and Capella curled side by side on the corn sack. Phillip, sitting at the table, glanced at the girl, so intently reading on the three-legged milking stool, which he had bought for half-a-crown from the farmer’s wife across the common. Cinderella: all but one ear and tip of nose hidden by dark hanging hair.