Unhappy Far Off Things written by Lord Dunsany
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Lord Dunsany >> Unhappy Far Off Things
UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS
by Lord Dunsany
1916
Preface
I have chosen a title that shall show that I make no claim for this
book to be "up-to-date." As the first title indicates, I hoped to
show, to as many as might to read my words, something of the extent
of the wrongs that the people of France had suffered. There is no
such need any longer. The tales, so far as they went, I gather
together here for the few that seem to read my books in England.
Dunsany.
A Dirge Of Victory (Sonnet)
Lift not thy trumpet, Victory, to the sky,
Nor through battalions nor by batteries blow,
But over hollows full of old wire go,
Where among dregs of war the long-dead lie
With wasted iron that the guns passed by.
When they went eastwards like a tide at flow;
There blow thy trumpet that the dead may know,
Who waited for thy coming, Victory.
It is not we that have deserved thy wreath,
They waited there among the towering weeds.
The deep mud burned under the thermite's breath,
And winter cracked the bones that no man heeds:
Hundreds of nights flamed by: the seasons passed.
And thou last come to them at last, at last!
The Cathedral Of Arras
On the great steps of Arras Cathedral I saw a procession, in silence,
standing still.
They were in orderly and perfect lines, stirring or swaying slightly:
sometimes they bent their heads, sometimes two leaned together, but
for the most part they were motionless. It was the time when the
fashion is just changing and some were newly all in shining yellow,
while others still wore green.
I went up the steps amongst them, the only human thing, for men and
women worship no more in Arras Cathedral, and the trees have come
instead; little humble things, all less than four years old, in great
numbers thronging the steps processionally, and growing in perfect
rows just where step meets step. They have come to Arras with the
wind and the rain; which enter the aisles together whenever they
will, and go wherever man went; they have such a reverent air, the
young limes on the three flights of steps, that you would say they
did not know that Arras Cathedral was fallen on evil days, that they
did not know they looked on ruin and vast disaster, but thought that
these great walls open to stars and sun were the natural and fitting
place for the worship of little weeds.
Behind them the shattered houses of Arras seemed to cluster about the
cathedral as, one might fancy easily, hurt and frightened children,
so wistful are their gaping windows and old, grey empty gables, so
melancholy and puzzled. They are more like a little old people come
upon trouble, gazing at their great elder companion and not knowing
what to do.
But the facts of Arras are sadder than a poet's most tragic fancies.
In the western front of Arras Cathedral stand eight pillars rising
from the ground; above them stood four more. Of the four upper
pillars the two on the left are gone, swept away by shells from the
north: and a shell has passed through the neck of one of the two that
is left, just as a bullet might go through a daffodil's stem.
The left-hand corner of that western wall has been caught from the
north, by some tremendous shell which has torn the whole corner down
in a mound of stone: and still the walls have stood.
I went in through the western doorway. All along the nave lay a long
heap of white stones, with grass and weeds on the top, and a little
trodden path over the grass and weeds. This is all that remained of
the roof of Arras Cathedral and of any chairs or pews there may have
been in the nave, or anything that may have hung above them. It was
all down but one slender arch that crossed the nave just at the
transept; it stood out against the sky, and all who saw it wondered
how it stood.
In the southern aisle panes of green glass, in twisted frame of lead,
here and there lingered, like lonely leaves on an apple-tree-after a
hailstorm in spring. The aisles still had their roofs over them which
those stout old walls held up in spite of all.
Where the nave joins the transept the ruin is most enormous. Perhaps
there was more to bring down there, so the Germans brought it down:
there may have been a tower there, for all I know, or a spire.
I stood on the heap and looked towards the altar. To my left all was
ruin. To my right two old saints in stone stood by the southern door.
The door had been forced open long ago, and stood as it was opened,
partly broken. A great round hole gaped in the ground outside; it was
this that had opened the door.
Just beyond the big heap, on the left of the chancel, stood something
made of wood, which almost certainly had been the organ.
As I looked at these things there passed through the desolate
sanctuaries, and down an aisle past pillars pitted with shrapnel, a
sad old woman, sad even for a woman of North-East France. She seemed
to be looking after the mounds and stones that had once been the
cathedral; perhaps she had once been the Bishop's servant, or the
wife of one of the vergers; she only remained of all who had been
there in other days, she and the pigeons and jackdaws. I spoke to
her. All Arras, she said, was ruined. The great cathedral was ruined,
her own family were ruined utterly, and she pointed to where the sad
houses gazed from forlorn dead windows. Absolute ruin, she said; but
there must be no armistice. No armistice. No. It was necessary that
there should be no armistice at all. No armistice with Germans.
She passed on, resolute and sad, and the guns boomed on beyond Arras.
A French interpreter, with the Sphinxes' heads on his collar, showed
me a picture postcard with a photograph of the chancel as it was five
years ago. It was the very chancel before which I was standing. To
see that photograph astonished me, and to know that the camera that
took it must have stood where I was standing, only a little lower
down, under the great heap. Though one knew there had been an altar
there, and candles and roof and carpet, and all the solemnity of a
cathedral's interior, yet to see that photograph and to stand on that
weedy heap, in the wind, under the jackdaws, was a contrast with
which the mind fumbled.
I walked a little with the French interpreter. We came to a little
shrine in the southern aisle. It had been all paved with marble, and
the marble was broken into hundreds of pieces, and someone had
carefully picked up all the bits, and laid them together on the
altar.
And this pathetic heap that was gathered of broken bits had drawn
many to stop and gaze at it; and idly, as soldiers will, they had
written their names on them: every bit had a name on it, with but a
touch of irony the Frenchman said, "All that is necessary to bring
your name to posterity is to write it on one of these stones.", "No,"
I said, "I will do it by describing all this." And we both laughed.
I have not done it yet: there is more to say of Arras. As I begin the
tale of ruin and wrong, the man who did it totters. His gaudy power
begins to stream away like the leaves of autumn. Soon his throne will
be bare, and I shall have but begun to say what I have to say of
calamity in cathedral and little gardens of Arras.
The winter of the Hohenzollerns will come; sceptre, uniforms, stars
and courtiers all gone; still the world will not know half of the
bitter wrongs of Arras. And spring will bring a new time and cover
the trenches with green, and the pigeons will preen themselves on the
shattered towers, and the lime-trees along the steps will grow taller
and brighter, and happier men will sing in the streets untroubled by
any War Lord; by then, perhaps, I may have told, to such as care to
read, what such a war did in an ancient town, already romantic when
romance was young, when war came suddenly without mercy, without
pity, out of the north and east, on little houses, carved galleries,
and gardens; churches, cathedrals and the jackdaws' nests.
A Good War
Nietsche said, "You have heard that a good cause justifies any war,
but I say unto you that a good war justifies any cause."
A man was walking alone over a plain so desolate that, if you have
never seen it, the mere word desolation could never convey to you the
melancholy surroundings that mourned about this man on his lonely
walk. Far off a vista of trees followed a cheerless road all dead as
mourners suddenly stricken dead in some funereal procession. By this
road he had come; but when he had reached a certain point he turned
from the road at once, branching away to the left, led by a line of
bushes that may once have been a lane. For some while his feet had
rustled through long neglected grass; sometimes he lifted them up to
step over a telephone wire that lolled over old entanglements and
bushes; often he came to rusty strands of barbed wire and walked
through them where they had been cut, perhaps years ago, by huge
shells; then his feet hissed on through the grass again, dead grass
that had hissed about his boots all through the afternoon.
Once he sat down to rest on the edge of a crater, weary with such
walking as he had never seen before; and after he had stayed there a
little while a cat that seemed to have its home in that wild place
started suddenly up and leaped away over the weeds. It seemed an
animal totally wild, and utterly afraid of man.
Grey bare hills surrounded the waste: a partridge called far off:
evening was drawing in. He rose wearily, and yet with a certain
fervour, as one that pursues With devotion a lamentable quest.
Looking round him as he left his resting-place he saw a cabbage or
two that after some while had come back to what was a field and had
sprouted on the edge of a shell-hole. A yellowing convolvulus climbed
up a dead weed. Weeds, grass and tumbled earth were all about him. It
would be no better when he went on. Still he went on. A flower or two
peeped up among the weeds. He stood up and looked at the landscape
and drew no hope from that, the shattered trunk of a stricken tree
leered near him, white trenches scarred the hillside. He followed an
old trench through a hedge of elder, passed under more wire, by a
great rusty shell that had not burst, passed by a dug-out where
something grey seemed to lie down at the bottom of many steps. Black
fungi grew near the entrance. He went on and on over shell-holes,
passing round them where they were deep, stepping into or over the
small ones. Little burrs clutched at him; he went rustling on, the
only sound in the waste but the clicking of shattered iron. Now he
was among nettles. He came by many small unnatural valleys. He passed
more trenches only guarded by fungi. While it was light he followed
little paths, marvelling who made them. Once he got into a trench.
Dandelions leaned across it as though to bar his way, believing man
to have gone and to have no right to return. Weeds thronged, in
thousands here. It was the day of the weeds. It was only they that
seemed to triumph in those fields deserted of man. He passed on down
the trench and never knew whose trench it once had been. Frightful
shells had smashed it here and there, and had twisted iron as though
round gigantic fingers that had twiddled it idly a moment and let it
drop to lie in the rain for ever. He passed more dug-outs and black
fungi, watching them; and then he left the trench, going straight on
over the open: again dead grasses hissed about his feet, sometimes
small wire sang faintly He passed through a belt of nettles and
thence to dead grass again. And now the light of the afternoon was
beginning to dwindle away. He had intended to reach his journey's end
by daylight, for he was past the time of life when one wanders after
dark, but he had not contemplated the difficulty of walking over that
road, or dreamed that lanes he knew could be so foundered and merged,
in that mournful desolate moor.
Evening was filling fast, still he kept on. It was the time when the
cornstacks would once have begun to grow indistinct, and slowly turn
grey in the greyness, and homesteads one by one would have lit their
innumerable lights. But evening now came down on a dreary desolation:
and a cold wind arose; and the traveller heard the mournful sound of
iron flapping on broken things, and knew that this was the sound that
would haunt the waste for ever.
And evening settled down, a huge grey canvas waiting for sombre
pictures; a setting for all the dark tales of the world, haunted
forever a grizzly place was haunted ever, in any century, in any
land; but not by mere ghosts from all those thousands of graves and
half-buried bodies and sepulchral shell-holes; haunted by things
huger and more disastrous than that; haunted by wailing ambitions,
under the stars or moon, drifting across the rubbish that once was
villages, which strews the lonely plain; the lost ambitions of two
Emperors and a Sultan wailing from wind to wind and whimpering for
dominion of the world.
The cold wind blew over the blasted heath and bits of broken iron
flapped on and on.
And now the traveller hurried, for night was falling, and such a
night as three witches might have brewed in a cauldron. He went on
eagerly but with infinite sadness. Over the sky-line strange rockets
went up from the war, peered oddly over the earth and went down
again. Very far off a few soldiers lit a little fire of their own.
The night grew colder; tap, tap, went broken iron.
And at last the traveller stopped in the lonely night and looked
round him attentively, and appeared to be satisfied that he had come
within sight of his journey's end, although to ordinary eyes the spot
to which he had come differed in no way from the rest of the waste.
He went no further, but turned round and round, peering piece by
piece at that weedy and cratered earth.
He was looking for the village where he was born.
The House With Two Storeys
I came again to Croisilles.
I looked for the sunken road that we used to hold in support, with
its row of little shelters in the bank and the carved oak saints
above them here and there that had survived the church in Croisilles.
I could have found it with my eyes shut. With my eyes open I could
not find it. I did not recognize the lonely metalled road down which
lorries were rushing for the little lane so full of life, whose
wheel-ruts were three years old.
As I gazed about me looking for our line, I passed an old French
civilian looking down at a slight mound of white stone that rose a
little higher than the road. He was walking about uncertainly, when
first I noticed him, as though he was not sure where he was. But now
he stood quite still looking down at the mound.
"Voila ma maison," he said.
He said no more than that: this astounding remark, this gesture that
indicated such calamity, were quite simply made. There was nothing
whatever of theatrical pose that we wrongly associate with the
French, because they conceal their emotions less secretly than we;
there were no tragic tones in his voice: only a trace of deep
affection showed in one of the words he used. He spoke as a woman
might say of her only child, "Look at _my_ baby."
"Voila ma maison," he said.
I tried to say in his language what I felt; and after my attempt he
spoke of his house.
It was very old. Down underneath, he said, it dated from feudal
times; though I did not quite make out whether all that lay under
that mound had been so old or whether he only meant the cellars of
his house. It was a fine high house, he said, as much as two storeys
high. No one that is familiar with houses of fifty storeys, none even
that has known palaces, will smile at this old man's efforts to tell
of his high house, and to make me believe that it rose to two storeys
high, as we stood together by that sad white mound. He told me that
his son was killed. And that disaster strangely did not move me so
much as the white mound that had been a house and had had two
storeys, for it seems to be common to every French family with whose
fathers I have chanced to speak in ruined cities or on busy roads of
France.
He pointed to a huge white mound beyond on the top of which someone
had stuck a small cross of wood. "The church," he said. And that I
knew already.
In very inadequate French I tried to comfort him. I told him that
surely France would build his house again. Perhaps even the allies;
for I could not believe that we shall have done enough if we merely
drive the Germans out of France and leave this poor old man still
wandering homeless. I told him that surely in the future Croisilles
would stand again.
He took no interest in anything that I said. His house of two storeys
was down, his son was dead, the little village of Croisilles had gone
away; he had only one hope from the future. When I had finished
speaking of the future, he raised a knobbed stick that he carried, up
to the level of his throat, surely his son's old trench stick, and
there he let it dangle from a piece of string in the handle, which he
held against his neck. He watched me shrewdly and attentively
meanwhile, for I was a stranger and was to be taught something I
might not know--a thing that it was necessary for all men to learn.
"Le Kaiser," he said. "Yes;" I said, "the Kaiser." But I pronounced
the word Kaiser differently from him, and he repeated again "Le
Kaiser," and watched me closely to be sure that I understood. And
then he said "Pendu," and made the stick quiver a little as it
dangled from its string. "Oui," I said, "Pendu."
Did I understand? He was not yet quite sure. It was important that
this thing should be quite decided between us as we stood on this
road through what had been Croisilles, where he had lived through
many sunny years and I had dwelt for a season amongst rats. "Pendu"
he said. Yes, I agreed.
It was all right. The old man almost smiled.
I offered him a cigarette and we lit two from an apparatus of flint
and steel and petrol that the old man had in his pocket.
He showed me a photograph of himself and a passport to prove, I
suppose, that he was not a spy. One could not recognize the likeness,
for it must have been taken on some happier day, before he had seen
his house of two storeys lying there by the road. But he was no spy,
for there were tears in his eyes; and Prussians I think have no tears
for what we saw across the village of Croisilles.
I spoke of the rebuilding of his house no more, I spoke no more of
the new Croisilles shining through future years; for these were not
the things that he saw in the future, and these were not the hopes of
the poor old man. He had one dark hope of the future, and no others.
He hoped to see the Kaiser hung for the wrong he had done to
Croisilles. It was for this hope he lived.
Madame or senor of whatever far country, who may chance to see these
words, blame not this old man for the fierce hope he cherished. It
was the only hope he had. You, Madame, with your garden, your house,
your church, the village where all know you, you may hope as a
Christian should, there is wide room for hope in your future. You
shall see the seasons move over your garden, you shall busy yourself
with your home, and speak and share with your neighbours innumerable
small joys, and find consolation and beauty, and at last rest, in and
around the church whose spire you see from your home. You, senor,
with your son perhaps growing up, perhaps wearing already some sword
that you wore once, you can turn back to your memories or look with
hope to the future with equal ease.
The man that I met in Croisilles had none of these things at all. He
had that one hope only.
Do not, I pray you, by your voice or vote, or by any power or
influence that you have, do anything to take away from this poor old
Frenchman the only little hope he has left. The more trivial his odd
hope appears to you compared with your own high hopes that come so
easily to you amongst all your fields and houses, the more cruel a
thing must it be to take it from him.
I learned many things in Croisilles, and the last of them is this
strange one the old man taught me. I turned and shook hands with him
and said good-bye, for I wished to see again our old front line that
we used to hold over the hill, now empty, silent at last. "The Boche
is defeated," I said.
"Vaincu, vaincu," he repeated. And I left him with something almost
like happiness looking out of his tearful eyes.
Bermondsey _versus_ Wurtemburg
The trees grew thinner and thinner along the road, then ceased
altogether, and suddenly we saw Albert in the wood of the ghosts of
murdered trees, all grey and deserted.
Descending into Albert past trees in their agony we came all at once
on the houses. You did not see them far off as in other cities; we
came on them all at once as you come on a corpse in the grass.
We stopped and stood by a house that was covered with plaster marked
off to look like great stones, its pitiful pretence laid bare, the
slates gone and the rooms gone, the plaster all pitted with shrapnel.
Near it lay an iron railing, a hand-rail blown there from the railway
bridge; a shrapnel bullet had passed through its twisted stem as
though it had gone through butter. And beside the hand-rail lay one
of the great steel supports of the bridge that had floated there upon
some flaming draught; the end of it bent and splayed as though it had
been a slender cane that someone had shoved too hard into the earth.
There had been a force abroad in Albert that could do these things,
an iron force that had no mercy for iron, a mighty mechanical
contrivance that could take machinery and pull it all to pieces in a
moment as a child takes a flower to pieces petal by petal.
When such a force was abroad what chance had man? It had come down
upon Albert suddenly, and railway lines and bridges had drooped and
withered and the houses had stooped down in the blasting heat, and in
that attitude I found them still, worn-out, melancholy heaps overcome
by disaster.
Pieces of paper rustled about like footsteps, dirt covered the ruins,
fragments of rusty shells lay as unsightly and dirty as that which
they had destroyed. Cleaned up and polished, and priced at half a
crown apiece, these fragments may look romantic some day in a London
shop, but to-day in Albert they look unclean and untidy, like a cheap
knife sticking up from a murdered woman's ribs, whose dress is long
out of fashion.
The stale smell of war arose from the desolation.
A British helmet dinted in like an old bowler, but tragic not absurd,
lay near a barrel and a teapot.
On a wall that rose above a heap of dirty and smashed rafters was
written in red paint KOMPe I.M.B.K. 184. The red paint had dripped
down the wall from every letter. Verily we stood upon the scene of
the murder.
Opposite those red letters across the road was a house with traces of
a pleasant ornament below the sills of the windows, a design of
grapes and vine. Someone had stuck up a wooden boot on a peg outside
the door.
Perhaps the cheery design on the wall attracted me. I entered the
house and looked round.
A chunk of shell lay on the floor, and a little decanter, only
chipped at the lip, and part of a haversack of horse-skin. There were
pretty tiles on the floor, but dry mud buried them deep: it was like
the age-old dirt that gathers in temples in Africa. A man's waistcoat
lay on the mud and part of a woman's stays: the waistcoat was black
and was probably kept for Sundays. That was all that there was to see
on the ground floor, no more flotsam than that had come down to these
days from peace.
A forlorn stairway tried still to wind upstairs. It went up out of a
corner of the room. It seemed still to believe that there was an
upper storey, still to feel that this was a house, there seemed a
hope in the twists of that battered staircase that men would yet come
again and seek sleep at evening by way of those broken steps; the
hand-rail and the banisters streamed down from the top, a woman's
dress lolled down from the upper room above those aimless steps, the
laths of the ceiling gaped, the plaster was gone; of all the hopes
men hope that can never be fulfilled, of all desires that ever come
too late, most futile was the hope expressed by that stairway's
posture that ever a family would come home there again or tread those
steps once more. And, if in some far country one should hope, who has
not seen Albert, out of compassion for these poor people of France,
that where a staircase still remains there may be enough of a house
to shelter those who called it home again, I will tell one thing
more: there blew inside that house the same wind that blew outside,
the wind that wandered free over miles of plains wandered unchecked
through that house; there was no indoors or outdoors any more.
And on the wall of the room in which I stood, someone had proudly
written his regiment's name, The 156th Wurtemburgers. It was written
in chalk; and another man had come and had written two words before
it and had recorded the name of his own regiment too. And the writing
remains after these two men are gone, and the lonely house is silent
but for the wind and the things that creak as it blows, the only
message of this deserted house, is this mighty record, this rare line
of history, ill-written: "Lost by the 156th Wurtemburgers, retaken by
the Bermondsey Butterflies."