They’re cowards—like myself.
12. GO HOME
I REACHED THE CAMP. THE POTATOES WERE peeled and in the pot, the soup was ready steaming. The regiment was back. The boys were in high spirits, though the sergeant complained of a headache. He’d rather overdone it, but he wasn’t the one to give in.
“How old d’you think I am, sir?” he asked me.
“Round the fifty mark.”
“I’m sixty-three,” he smiled, flattered. “Why! I was one of the last reserve way back in the war!”
I was afraid he was going to embark on a long recital of his experiences, but I needn’t have been.
“We’ll keep the war out of it,” he muttered. “I’ve got three grown-up sons.”
His eyes were far away as he spoke—they gazed at the mountain horizon. He took an aspirin for his headache.
A decent fellow, the sergeant.
I told him about the robber band. He sprang up, called the boys together and gave them instructions. A guard must be kept at night, four boys, changed every two hours. On all sides. The camp must be defended to the last man!
“Hurrah!” cried the youngsters, fired with enthusiasm.
“Funny,” muttered the sergeant. “Headache’s gone.”
After our midday meal, I went down to the little town again. I had to see the mayor on a few small matters—and we had to settle the question of supplies, for a regiment can’t train on an empty stomach.
With the mayor, I found the priest. He insisted on my going along with him for a glass of wine. A congenial soul, the priest; and I’m fond of a glass.
The peasants greeted him as we walked to the rectory. He was taking the shortest way, and it led through one of the meaner streets. There were no peasants here.
“This is where the piece-workers live,” I learned.
The priest perhaps glanced up at the sky.
The grey houses were wedged in rows. Children painting dolls sat in the open windows—children with old, blanched faces, and darkness behind them.
“They have to save on light,” said the priest.
Then:
“I get no greeting here. They’ve no love for me!”
He doubled his pace, and I mine.
The children were staring strangely at me. I thought of Julius Caesar and the face of the Fish. But this was different. There was no scorn on these faces, only hate. And behind that hate, the dreary darkness reigned. They had no light. They were saving light.
The rectory was next to the church—a very substantial church. Around it lay the cemetery. Around the rectory a garden. Bells clanged in the church tower. Blue smoke trailed upwards from the rectory chimneys.
In that garden of death the white stones rose like petals. In the rectory garden, cabbages and vegetables. Tombstones there: little stone dwarfs here where we walked, and a reclining fawn, and a stone mushroom.
Everything was neat and tidy in the rectory. Not a particle of dust in the air. While in the cemetery, nothing but dust.
The priest showed me into his charming study.
“Sit down. I’ll get the wine.”
He left me while he made his way to the cellar.
A picture on the wall attracted my notice. I had seen it before. My parents have a copy of it—my parents are very pious. It was not until the war that I abandoned God. It was asking too much of a youngster to understand that God could allow a war like that. I looked at the picture. God hung nailed to a cross, dead. Mary cried, and John was comforting her. Lightning played across the dark sky. In the foreground stood a warrior in helmet and armour—the Roman Captain.
I felt a longing for my home as I saw this.
I wished I were a boy again. I remember how I used to gaze out of the window in a storm—watching the low, rain-piled clouds, the lightning and the hailstones.
I thought of my first love-affair. I shouldn’t want to see her now.
Go home!
I saw another scene: myself, sitting on a seat, and wondering which I would be, a teacher or a doctor?
I’m glad I became a teacher. Rather than heal the sick, I wanted to impart something to the living and the healthy. I wanted to help lay the foundation stone of a happier and lovelier age.
Go home!
Home, where you were born. What are you searching for outside the boundaries of home? I’m a teacher now—it means no delight to me. Go home!
13. HUMAN IDEALS
THE SUN ITSELF TINGLED IN THE PRIEST’S WINE. But his cakes tasted of incense. We were sitting in a corner of his study. He had shown me over his house. He’d got quite a fat cook—she must be a good one.
“I’m not a big eater,” the priest said suddenly—could he have guessed my thoughts?
“But I drink to make up for it.” He laughed.
I couldn’t bring myself to laugh with him. This wine was so good, and yet I wasn’t enjoying it. I wasn’t talking very fluently. Why was I so shy?
“You’re busy with your thoughts,” came the priest’s voice. “Aren’t you? The children sitting in the windows painting dolls—the children who never say a word to me.”
Yes, he was right.
“You’re surprised that I should hear your thoughts, eh? It isn’t difficult for me. The teacher here in the town is always going about with pictures of those children in his mind. We have a talk whenever we meet. You can talk in peace and comfort with me. I’m not one of those priests who turn a deaf ear, and I’m not one to grow angry. I’m at one with St. Ignatius when he said: ‘I go with such a man through his door, to lead him out by mine.’ ”
I smiled silently while he emptied his glass. I looked at him expectantly, doubting myself.
“The cause of the distress,” he continued, “doesn’t lie in my taste for wine, but in the fact that the saw-mill lies idle. Our teacher here is of the opinion that with technical developments so speeded up we need new methods of production, and a totally different system of property ownership. He’s right—why d’you look so surprised?”
“May I say something—rather—”
“Please.”
“I think the Church always takes the side of the rich.”
“Of course. The Church must.”
“Must?”
“Do you know of a single state where it isn’t the rich who rule? And to be rich isn’t just the same thing as having money—if there were no more stock-holders in the saw-mill business, then others of the rich would rule, for a man doesn’t need shares to be rich. There’ll always be values, and there’ll always be a few people with their hands on more of them than all the others combined. More decorations, perhaps, round their necks, more orders on their chests—whether they’re on view or not—for there’ll always be rich and poor, just as there’ll always be the clever and the foolish. And to the Church, my dear fellow, it is not given to direct how a state should be ruled. It is the Church’s duty to remain always on the side of the state—and the state, most unfortunately, will always be ruled by the rich.”
“And that’s the Church’s duty?”
“Man is born a social animal, and so we assign him to a family, to a community or a state. The state is a man-made institution, and it only has the one goal—to produce the greatest happiness for our temporal existence. It is a necessity of nature and it is willed by God. To obey its laws is a duty to our higher selves.”
“You don’t wish to claim that the state we know to-day, for example, will produce the greatest happiness for all?”
“I don’t claim that, for the whole of human society rests on egotism, hypocrisy, and brute force. How does Pascal put it? ‘We long for the truth, and within ourselves find only uncertainty. We seek for happiness: we find misery and death.’ Perhaps you are wondering how a simple country priest comes to quote Pascal. You needn’t, my friend, for I can put your mind at rest there. I’m not a simple country priest: I’ve only been given this parish for a short time. A punitive transfer as they call it.”
He smiled.
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“Only very seldom,” he went on, “does a man become a saint if he has never been wicked. Only very seldom do we find wisdom in one who has never been foolish. And if it weren’t for the little stupidities of life, we shouldn’t find ourselves in the world at all.”
He laughed, with these last words—a very soft, gentle laugh, in which I couldn’t bring myself to join him.
He emptied his glass once more.
“If the structure of the state is willed by God—” I began suddenly.
“Wrong. The state is a necessity of nature, and willed by God. But not the structure of the state.”
“But it’s the same thing!”
“No, it isn’t the same thing. God created nature: what is a necessity of nature must therefore be part of the will of God. But the consequences which follow upon that creation—and here we’re referring to one of them, the form of the state—is a product of man’s free will. So that the state is part of the will of God, but not the structure of the state.”
“And if a state collapses?”
“A state never collapses. It loses its social structure, but that only yields before another. The state itself remains, even though the people that built it may die. Another people succeeds them.”
“So that the collapse of a state’s structure is not a necessity of nature?”
My observation was greeted with a smile.
“Very often such a collapse is the will of God.”
“Then why does the Church, when the social structure of a state is collapsing—why does the Church always take the side of the rich? To-day, for example—why is the Church always to be found supporting the share-holders in the saw-mills and not the children painting dolls in the windows?”
“Because the rich always win.”
I couldn’t control myself.
“A fine teaching!” I cried.
The priest went on as quietly as ever.
“Right thinking is the principle of all morality.” Then, after draining his glass once again: “Yes, the rich will always win, you see they’re more brutal, they’re a lower type, they’re more unscrupulous. We read in the Bible that a camel may pass more easily through the eye of a needle than a rich man enter the kingdom of heaven.”
“And the Church? What about the Church? Will the Church pass through the eye of a needle?”
“No,” came the answer—and again the smile. “That wouldn’t be quite possible. For the Church is the eye of the needle.”
Devilish clever, this priest, I thought to myself. But he isn’t right. He isn’t right.
“So the Church serves the rich, and doesn’t think of fighting for the poor.”
“She fights for the poor, but on another front.”
“A secret front, perhaps?”
“A man may fall there too.”
“Who has fallen there?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“But He was God! And after Him?”
He filled my glass, pensive for a moment.
“It’s a good thing,” he said, “that things today in many countries, aren’t going too well for the Church. It’s a good thing for the Church!”
“Possibly it is,” I answered abruptly, noticing how excited I had grown. “And so we come back to the children in the windows again. Didn’t you say, as we were going through those streets, ‘They never greet me, they hate me?’ Well, you’re a clever man, you ought to know that those children don’t hate you at all—it’s just that they’ve got nothing to eat.”
“I think they hate me,” he told me, slowly, “because they’ve abandoned their belief in God.”
“How can you ask that of them—to believe in God?”
“God goes through every street.”
“How can God go through every street—seeing those children, and doing nothing to help?”
Silently he put his glass to his lips. Then, with a grave look, he turned to me.
“God is the most terrible thing in the world.”
I stared at him. I couldn’t believe my ears. The most terrible?
He rose, went across to the window and looked down into the graveyard. I heard his voice again.
“God punishes,” he said.
He strode up and down the room.
“We should not forget God. Even though we may not know why he is punishing us. If only we had never had our free will!”
“You mean—the doctrine of original sin?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe it.”
He stopped in front of me.
“Then you can’t believe in God.”
“You’re right. I don’t believe in God.”
A pause followed. I broke it, feeling I had to speak.
“Listen, I teach history, and I know that before the birth of our Lord, another world existed, the antique world—Hellas—a world without original sin—”
“I think you’re in error,” he murmured, going up to his book-case. He took a volume down and turned over the pages. “You’re a teacher of history, so that I needn’t recall to you the name of the first Greek philosopher—I mean the eldest—”
“Thales of Miletus.”
“Yes. But he’s a half-mythical figure, we know nothing definite about him. The first evidence of Greek philosophy that has come down to us in writing is from the hand of Anaximander—he too came from Miletus. Born 610, died 547 B.C. It amounts to only a sentence …”
He crossed to the window again to read it, for the room was growing dark.
“ ‘To that from which things arise must they return in the end. In pain and penance must they make good their debt for their existence, according to the universal law.’ ”
14. THE ROMAN CAPTAIN
WE’D BEEN FOUR DAYS IN CAMP. THE SERGEANT had given the boys instruction in the mechanism of firearms, and explained how to keep them in good working order. To-day they spent oiling and polishing the guns ready for target practice to-morrow.
The wooden soldiers stood ready to be hit.
The boys were in the highest spirits, though the sergeant wasn’t quite so exuberant. These four days had put ten years on his age. Another four, and he would look more aged still. Moreover, he strained his foot, and perhaps pulled a tendon, for he limped. However, he could grin and bear it. I was the only one to see another side of him—before we went to sleep the other night, he told me he’d like to see a skittle-alley again or have a game of cards—he’d like to be lying down in a decent bed, he’d like to hold a buxom barmaid by the hand, he’d like—well, to be back home. Then he went off to sleep, snoring.
He dreamed he’d become a general and won a battle. The King had taken off all his own orders and pinned them on his chest. And on his back. And the Queen had kissed his feet.
“What can that mean?” he asked me next morning.
“Perhaps it was a wish-fulfilment dream.” I laughed.
He told me that never in his life had he wished to have his feet kissed by the Queen.
“I’ll write to my old woman,” he mused. “She’s got a dream-book. She can look ’em up—General, King, Decorations, Battle, Chest, and Back. We’ll find out!”
While he was writing his letter, outside the tent, up came one of the boys. It was L, and he was highly excited.
“Well, what is it?” I asked.
“I’ve had something stolen.”
“Stolen?”
“My camera, sir—somebody’s taken it.”
He was quite beside himself.
The sergeant glanced up at me. He seemed to be wondering what course to take.
“Assemble everybody,” I suggested. I couldn’t think of anything else.
He nodded, limped to the foot of the flagpole in the centre of the camp, and bellowed the order like an old bull.
I turned to L.
“D’you suspect anybody?”
“No.”
The regiment lined up. I questioned them. No one had anything to say. The sergeant and I had a look at the te
nt where L slept. His sleeping-bag lay just to the left of the tent flaps. We found nothing to help here.
“It seems to be out of the question,” I reassured the sergeant, “that one of our own boys is the thief—in that case, we’d already have had something like this happen at school. It seems to me that the watch we’ve set up hasn’t been too vigilant and some of that robber band have slipped through.”
The sergeant thought I might be right. We decided to spend the next night supervising the sentries ourselves.
About a hundred yards away from the camp stood a haystack. We intended to spend the night there and make it our point of vantage. The sergeant was to watch from nine till one, and I from one till six.
We slipped off after supper, escaping the notice of any of the boys. I made myself quite comfortable in the hay.
At one o’clock or thereabouts, the sergeant woke me.
“All in order so far,” he whispered.
I clambered out of the hay and posted myself at the side of the rick.
The full moon cast deep shadows.
A wonderful night.
I could see the tents and distinguish the sentries. They were just changing.
To and fro, to and fro, they went; they covered the four points of the compass. Guarding their cameras!
As I sat there, I saw before me the picture in the priest’s study—and in my own home.
The hours went by …
My school subjects are history and geography. The form of the earth, and the story of the earth—these are my province. The earth is round, but history—it struck me then—history has become a four-cornered affair …
I daren’t smoke, for I was keeping a secret watch over the sentries …
My profession doesn’t interest me any longer, I thought.
Why was that picture still before my mind? Was I haunted by the Crucified One? No. Or by the face of His mother? No. It was the warrior, the armed and helmeted warrior, the Roman Captain, whose face haunted me.
Why?
He conducted the execution of a Jew. And as the Jew died, he must have murmured: “There dies no man.”
He had come to know God. What followed his discovery? What was his next act? He stood quiet beneath the cross. Lightning pierced the night, the curtain in the Temple was rent, the earth shuddered—the Roman Captain stood on, acknowledging the new God as the man died upon the cross—knowing that the world—his world—was condemned to death.
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