On Something (Dodo Press) (18 page)

There is a place where the valley of the Allier escapes from the central
mountains of France and broadens out into a fertile plain.

Here is a march or boundary between two things, the one familiar to most
English travellers, the other unfamiliar. The familiar thing is the rich
alluvium and gravel of the Northern French countrysides, the poplar trees,
the full and quiet rivers, the many towns and villages of stone, the broad
white roads interminable and intersecting the very fat of prosperity,
and over it all a mild air. The unfamiliar is the mass of the Avernian
Mountains, which mass is the core and centre of Gaul and of Gaulish
history, and of the unseen power that lies behind the whole of that
business.

The plains are before one, the mountains behind one, and one stands in
that borderland. I know it well.

I have said that in the Avernian Mountains was the centre of Gaul and the
power upon which the history of Gaul depends. Upon the Margeride, which is
one of their uttermost ridges, du Guesclin was wounded to death. One may
see the huge stones piled up on the place where he fell. In the heart of
those mountains, at Puy, religion has effects that are eerie; it uses odd
high peaks for shrines—needles of rock; and a long way off all round is a
circle of hills of a black-blue in the distance, and they and the rivers
have magical names—the river Red Cap and Chaise Dieu, "God's Chair."
In these mountains Julius Caesar lost (the story says) his sword; and
in these mountains the Roman armies were staved off by the Avernians.
They are as full of wonder as anything in Europe can be, and they are
complicated and tumbled all about, so that those who travel in them with
difficulty remember where they have been, unless indeed they have that
general eye for a countryside which is rare nowadays among men.

Just at the place where the mountain land and the plain land meet, where
the shallow valleys get rounder and less abrupt, I went last September,
following the directions of a soldier who had told me how I might find
where the centre of the manoeuvres lay. The manoeuvres, attempting to
reproduce the conditions of war, made a drifting scheme of men upon either
side of the River Sioule. One could never be certain where one would find
the guns.

I had come up off the main road from Vichy, walking vaguely towards the
sound of the firing. It was unfamiliar. The old and terrible rumble has
been lost for a generation; even the plain noise of the field-piece which
used to be called "90" is forgotten by the young men now. The new little
guns pop and ring. And when you are walking towards them from a long way
off you do not seem to be marching towards anything great, but rather
towards something clever. Nevertheless it is as easy to-day as ever it
was to walk towards the sound of cannon.

Two valleys absolutely lonely had I trudged-through since the sun rose,
and it was perhaps eight o'clock when I came upon one of those lonely
walled parks set in bare fields which the French gentry seem to find
homelike enough. I asked a man at the lodge about how far the position
was. He said he did not know, and looked upon me with suspicion.

I went down into the depth of the valley, and there I met a priest who was
reading his Breviary and erroneously believed me (if I might judge his
looks) to be of a different religion, for he tested philosophy by clothes;
and this, by the way, is unalterably necessary for all mankind. When,
however, he found by my method of address that I knew his language and
was of his own faith, he became very courteous, and when I told him that
I wanted to find the position he became as lively as a linesman, making
little maps with his stick in the earth, and waving his arms, and making
great sweeps with his hand to show the way in which the army had been
drifting all morning, northward and eastward, above the Sioule, with the
other division on the opposite bank, and how, whenever there was a bridge
to be fought for, the game had been to pretend that one or the other had
got hold of it. Of this priest it might truly be said, as was said of
the priest of Thiers in the Forez, that chance had made him a choir-boy,
but destiny had designed him for the profession of arms; and upon this
one could build an interesting comedy of how chance and destiny are
perpetually at issue, and how chance, having more initiative and not
being so bound to routine, gets the better of destiny upon all occasions
whatsoever.

Well, the priest showed me in this manner whither I should walk, and so I
came out of the valley on to a great upland, and there a small boy (who
was bullying a few geese near a pond) showed much the same excitement as
the priest when he told me at what village I should find the guns.

That village was a few miles further on. As I went along the straight,
bare road, with stubble upon either side, I thought the sound of firing
got louder; but then, again, it would diminish, as the batteries took a
further and a further position in their advance. It was great fun, this
sham action, with its crescent of advancing fire and one's self in the
centre of the curve. At the next village I had come across the arteries
of the movement. By one road provisionment was going off to the right;
by another two men with messages, one a Hussar on horseback, the other a
Reservist upon a bicycle, went by me very quickly. Then from behind some
high trees in a churchyard there popped out a lot of little Engineers, who
were rolling a great roll of wire along. So I went onwards; and at last
I came to a cleft just before the left bank of the Sioule. This cleft
appeared deserted: there was brushwood on its sides and a tiny stream
running through it. On the ridge beyond were the roofs of a village. The
firing of the pieces was now quite close and near. They were a little
further than the houses of the hamlet, doubtless in some flat field where
the position was favourable to them. Down that cleft I went, and in its
hollow I saw the first post, but as yet nothing more. Then when I got to
the top of the opposing ridge I found the whole of the 38th lolling under
the cover of the road bank. From below you would have said there were no
men at all. The guns were right up beyond the line, firing away. I went up
past the linesmen till I found the guns.

And what a pretty sight! They were so small and light and delicate! There
was no clanking, and no shouting, and to fire them a man pulled a mere
trigger. I thought to myself: "How simple and easy our civilization
becomes. Think of the motor-cars, and how they purr. Think of the simple
telephone, and all the other little things." And with this thought in my
mind I continued to watch the guns. Without yells or worry a man spoke
gently to other men, and they all limbered up, quite easily. The weight
seemed to have gone since my time. They trotted off with the pieces, and
when they crossed the little ditch at the edge of the field I waited for
the heavy clank-clank and the jog that ought to go with that well-known
episode; but I did not hear it, and I saw no shock. They got off the
field with its little ditch on to the high road as a light cart with good
springs might have done. And when they massed themselves under the cover
of a roll of land it was all done again without noise. I thought a little
sadly that the world had changed. But it was all so pretty and sensible
that I hardly regretted the change. There was a stretch of road in front
where nothing on earth could have given cover. The line was on its
stomach, firing away, and it was getting fired at apparently, in the sham
of the manoeuvre from the other side of the Sioule. As it covered this
open space the line edged forward and upward. When a certain number of the
38th had worked up like this, the whole bunch of them, from half a mile
down the road, right through the village, were moved along, and the head
of the column was scattered to follow up the firing. It was like spraying
water out of a tap. The guns still stood massed, and then at a sudden
order which was passed along as though in the tones of a conversation
(and again I thought to myself, "Surely the world is turning upside down
since I was a boy") they started off at a sharp gallop and leapt, as it
were, the two or three hundred yards of open road between cover and cover.
They were very well driven. The middle horses and the wheelers were doing
their work: it was not only the leaders that kept the traces taut. It was
wonderfully pretty to see them go by: not like a storm but like a smoke.
No one could have hit those gunners or those teams. Whether they were on
the sky-line or not I could not tell, but at any rate they could have been
seen just for that moment from beyond the Sioule. And when they massed up
again, beyond—some seconds afterwards—one heard the pop-pop from over
the valley, which showed they had been seen just too late.

Hours and hours after that I went on with the young fellows. The guns I
could not keep with: I walked with the line. And all the while as I walked
I kept on wondering at the change that comes over European things. This
army of young men doing two years, with its odd silence and its sharp
twittering movements, and the sense of eyes all round one, of men glancing
and appreciating: individual men catching an opportunity for cover; and
commanding men catching the whole countryside…. Then, in the early
afternoon, the bugles and the trumpets sounded that long-drawn call which
has attended victories and capitulations, and which is also sounded every
night to tell people to put out the lights in the barrack-rooms. It is the
French "Cease fire." And whether from the national irony or the national
economy, I know not, but the stopping of either kind of fire has the
same call attached to it, and you must turn out a light in a French
barrack-room to the same notes as you must by command stop shooting at the
other people.

The game was over. I faced the fourteen miles back to Gannat very stiff.
All during those hours I had been wondering at the novelty of Europe, and
at all these young men now so different, at the silence and the cover, and
the hefty, disposable little guns. But when I had my face turned southward
again to get back to a meal, that other aspect of Europe, its eternity,
was pictured all abroad. For there right before me stood the immutable
mountains, which stand enormous and sullen, but also vague at the base,
and, therefore, in their summits, unearthly, above the Limagne. There was
that upper valley of the Allier down which Cæsar had retreated, gathering
his legions into the North, and there was that silent and menacing sky
which everywhere broods over Auvergne, and even in its clearest days seems
to lend the granite and the lava land a sort of doomed hardness, as though
Heaven in this country commanded and did not allure. Never had I seen a
landscape more mysterious than those hills, nor at the same time anything
more enduring.

There is a river called the Eure which runs between low hills often
wooded, with a flat meadow floor in between. It so runs for many miles.
The towns that are set upon it are for the most part small and rare,
and though the river is well known by name, and though one of the chief
cathedrals of Europe stands near its source, for the most part it is not
visited by strangers.

In this valley one day as I was drawing a picture of the woods I found a
wandering Englishman who was in the oddest way. He seemed by the slight
bend at his knees and the leaning forward of his head to have no very
great care how much further he might go. He was in the clothes of an
English tourist, which looked odd in such a place, as, for that matter,
they do anywhere. He had upon his head a pork-pie hat which was of the
same colour and texture as his clothes, a speckly brown. He carried a
thick stick. He was a man over fifty years of age; his face was rather
hollow and worn; his eyes were very simple and pale; he was bearded with a
weak beard, and in his expression there appeared a constrained but kindly
weariness. This was the man who came up to me as I was drawing my picture.
I had heard him scrambling in the undergrowth of the woods just behind me.

He came out and walked to me across the few yards of meadow. The haying
was over, so he did the grass no harm. He came and stood near me,
irresolutely, looking vaguely up and across the valley towards the further
woods, and then gently towards what I was drawing. When he had so stood
still and so looked for a moment he asked me in French the name of the
great house whose roof showed above the more ordered trees beyond the
river, where a park emerged from and mixed with the forest. I told him the
name of the house, whereupon he shook his head and said that he had once
more come to the wrong place.

I asked him what he meant, and he told me, sitting down slowly and
carefully upon the grass, this adventure:

"First," said he, "are you always quite sure whether a thing is really
there or not?"

"I am always quite sure," said I; "I am always positive."

He sighed, and added: "Could you understand how a man might feel that
things were really there when they were not?"

"Only," said I, "in some very vivid dream, and even then I think a man
knows pretty well inside his own mind that he is dreaming." I said that it
seemed to me rather like the question of the cunning of lunatics; most of
them know at the bottom of their silly minds that they are cracked, as you
may see by the way they plot and pretend.

"You are not sympathetic with me," he said slowly, "but I will
nevertheless tell you what I want to tell you, for it will relieve me, and
it will explain to you why I have again come into this valley." "Why do
you say 'again'?" said I.

"Because," he answered gently, "whenever my work gives me the opportunity
I do the same thing. I go up the valley of the Seine by train from Dieppe;
I get out at the station at which I got out on that day, and I walk across
these low hills, hoping that I may strike just the path and just the
mood—but I never do."