Read Lucifer Before Sunrise Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
Lucifer Before Sunrise (42 page)
Butterflies with tiger’s teeth. Tiger swelling to a great
black-flickering
monster of pain. Door opening like a shell-burst. Face swimming, expanding, great glaring doll of pink wax. Flames. Nausea. White chalk parapet rising up to choke frothing mouth. Drowning in nausea. Flares stabbing eyeballs. Flinching, sinking, drowning in shell-burst ears. (The door being closed quietly by nurse; light switched on, and off again, nurse departing. Thus the exaggeration of pain.)
And slowly, as the hours dripped away, he shrunk back into his body and realised he was in a hospital ward, and how cushy it all was after the Somme … despite strokes of pain from pressure of wind against stitches.
And, as water drips on stone, If only I had not come back, to grow old, as we who are left grow old, to drag away our lives in night…
*
A Luftwaffe pilot, who had been shot down off the coast in the night, was brought to the bed next to Phillip’s. The pilot was badly wounded in chest and stomach. Both his legs were broken. A sentry with fixed bayonet stood inside the screens. Phillip could hear the occasional mutterings of the prisoner. The nurse told him that the German had refused a blood transfusion. He preferred to die rather than have his Aryan blood possibly polluted by an alien strain. He was dying for a Führer who could do no wrong. There were whiffs of chloroform to quieten groans. Phillip sank into sleep under the uneasy, sickly waves, and dreamed the first dream he had dreamed for years. So strong was the impression of reality of the scene he had witnessed that as soon as he awoke he felt he must write it down. It was more than a dream, or dreams as he had occasionally known them in those days before it seemed that the subconscious mind had come to the fore of his living, and he dreamed with his eyes awake, thus to be what people declared
vulnerable. This, his one sleep-dream during a decade, was like a surrealistic film-sequence.
In the dream I was a mind only, in the sense of being without emotion, and bodyless, waiting in the hall of a forest lodge of varnished pitch-pine. The door was half open. The large hall was empty of
everything
. Sunlight slanted in through the doorway. Then a figure was standing before me. It had come in past me without sound, without shadow. It stopped in front of me, unaware of my presence, in the attitude of an animal listening as though to noises of pursuit. Only there were no noises. The figure was about a yard from me. I knew it for a wood spirit which had gotten somehow into the wrong clothes. The figure was about four feet high, with a sharpness of face that was a clear and intuitive natural force, and nothing else. It had the suggestion of a human face, with painted cheeks like those of a wooden doll. The eyes showed no fear at all, only a sort of impersonal animal alertness of all senses, this spirit of the pine-woods dressed in a sort of uniform; patent-leather belt of thin and cheap quality, as though it had been bought from a toy-shop on a card with trailing tin sword and childish uniform. Most noticeable were the boots of buckskin with soft soles and long pointed toes turned up like those worn by the Fool in a
Shakespeare
play. The dark straight hair was smoothed on the head by water, as a small boy’s when going to a suburban party of a generation before.
Then with only the slightest rustle on the parquet floor the figure had gone without my knowing how across to open stairs leading up to a gallery extending along the far end of the lodge. It moved noiselessly across the gallery behind a large empty desk; and was coming down the pitch-pine stairs at the other end of the gallery when a man came out from under the open stairs and with rapier thrusting upwards pierced the descending figure which without cry or protest (but with what I sensed to be a natural acceptance of death) bowed its painted
doll-head
and was dead.
The scene changed. Still as though suspended in air, I saw men on the bank of a wide river. Fishing nets were being dipped for tanning in oak-bark liquid steaming within an immense black iron cauldron. In the fire, half-burnt out at the base of the cauldron, lay the
wood-spirit’s
head, eyes staring with a sort of serenity, as of acceptance that all was over, and now it could be what it was originally before the uniform was, unnaturally,
intagliated
with a spirit of the woods. (I don’t know if this is a proper word, but that was the word printed on my mind at the time—a blackthorn word, a black piercing of the mind as of thorns.) The fishermen standing by were wholly indifferent to the charred head with its eyes now closed by fire, one arm folded on its chest and holding a photograph of a woman, whose features I could not discern.
What was this dream—had it any significance—was it a portent of
the future? Had I moved out of the flow of material time into a wider stream where, in Jefferies’ words, ‘eternity is now, it is all about me in the sunshine’? Was it an allegory of the death of Hitler? Certainly I had for some time past believed that he was by nature an artist who through circumstances of an estranged childhood—not altogether dissimilar from those of D. H. Lawrence, and in a way, my own—followed by the desperate nihilism of the Western Front, had become a sort of self-built
alter
ego,
which had driven him to assume a task which no man could achieve alone among men, and then only indirectly. Impelled by an up-welling sense of injustice; at other times glowing with the dream-quality of Venus—the ambisexual planet which after the dark night becomes Lucifer. In putting this idea on paper I must add that it is not an original idea: but one arising from ancient poets, and from self-knowledge of the defects of qualities. I must also add that all that day, and night following, when the dream had possessed me, I was in some pain and nausea, with a number of stitches in my abdomen after part of my insides had been cut away; even so, when I saw the bed next to mine was empty, the brave youth having died for his ideas of loyalty in the night, such was my state that I wept on and off all the forenoon, and later was taken to a private room where I spent the following week, having asked that no one from the farm should visit me.
“Someone to see you, Mr. Maddison!” said smiling Matron.
Lucy and a young officer from Eastern Command. Hanging back while Lucy spoke to Phillip. “How are you, my man? Poor you—but there, everyone is now on your side.” She turned to the young officer, who came forward. A guardee salute.
“My name is Cloudesley, sir. I’ve come on behalf of my General to offer apologies. I do assure you that no one had any idea that you or any of your men would be in your woods by the meadows, sir. A recce was made first, I understand.”
Phillip, liking the look of the young major, decided to play the part of a cardboard hero.
“Oh, they may have been after a spy, but it is no matter, as Hamlet said. But I owe you an apology for joining their party somewhat late, and without an invitation I’m afraid. So I cannot really blame anyone but myself.”
Lucy had moved away, to talk with Matron.
The visitor smiled. “Be that as it may, sir, it was damnable carelessness on the part of those bloody fools not giving you proper notice.”
“Oh, my own carelessness, Major! I should have remembered that I wasn’t on the Western Front, where no one,
in
khaki,
ever shot at me and my footsloggers.”
“I’m glad to know that you take it in such good heart, sir. My General feels that the least he can do is to ask you to be his guest while you are here, apart from the compensation due to you for your cow.”
“Do please give your General my thanks; but I rather fancy I come under the family sixpence-a-week contributary scheme. Please let him know I am most grateful for his kindness. The bullet, by the way, wasn’t found in me, so I can’t be prosecuted for pinching government property.”
Major Cloudesley laughed. “Well, sir, if there’s anything else I can do to help, I beg that you will let me know.”
“It would be a help if someone could find time to let us know about the next visit of your recruits, Major. And they might be briefed that a farmer—any farmer—is doing his damnedest to produce food for the Island Fortress.”
“I most certainly shall, sir!”
*
Wireless headphones were plugged in at bed-heads. One night there was the choice, after the nine o’clock news—battles in Russia, and Sicily—of listening to a North Country novelist on the Home Front, or hearing a popular actor-playwright singing and reciting his own lyrics on the Forces wavelength. The novelist was announced by his own name; while the actor-playwright was a ‘National Figure’. Phillip hesitated: there was not much to choose between them. Both were voices of what Arnold Bennett once called
le
bloc.
It is sometimes asked in the correspondence column of a certain Sunday newspaper, at this period of the war, Why are there no
war-poets
among the soldiers? I suppose the correspondents haven’t heard of Wilfred Owen, the poet who ended all ‘war poetry’ in 1918. To be sure, there is a Foreign Office Peer of the Realm, whose verses appear now and then in the Sunday newspaper; but as a judge of civilian
war-poets
, or poetasters, I am prejudiced. Old soldiers do not care for Home Front civilians who ‘kill Germans with their mouths’. This prejudice derives from the ancient battlefields of Somme and Ypres, whereon soldiers generally were antagonistic to the utterances and writings of the National Figures of those days. The chasm between the worlds of those who made the war with their bodies and those who, safe at home, talked and wrote and lectured and lied and preached in heroic or sentimental vein about the righteousness of the war fought for
Christianity
, was too wide and deep and dark to be bridged. The civilians’ truth is never the soldiers’.
I remember a National Figure of those days called Horatio Bottomley. Mr. Bottomley made grand speeches which surely today would have earned him a Knighthood of the British Empire if he had not also been too interested in piling up money (belonging to other people) to establish himself as the squire of a Sussex village.
Such types usually appear and disappear long before the old soldiers fade away into the town’s end. The war-correspondents, knighted after the Armistice of 1918, did their best, but they didn’t always know, they weren’t allowed to go upon active battlefields. Then there were the stage-patriots, such figures as those painted by Richard Channerson called
Revue
Patriots,
as well as his horrific figures, slain, mutilated and in hell, in French field-ambulance marquees, or walking wounded wandering back across the crater-zones of Frezenberg Ridge and Poelcapelle.
These were the young men whose minds and bodies suffered the clash of war, in an almost-forgotten soldier-poet’s verse,
Whose world is but the trembling of a flare,
And heaven but as the highway for a shell.
Many men, many minds.
Under
each
gravestone
a
world
lies
buried
wrote the Jewish poet Heine, whose grave was descerated by some stupid Nazi lout of the type found in all countries. Whose world, then, shall it be? My world is the world of iron which has vanished under the plough. Has that lost world any links with the soldiers’ world of today? Often I wonder; and as often I am lost. Does history repeat itself? We know that people change their ideas, but not their natures; perhaps that is why history is said to repeat itself.
Ideas change. Who would have thought, in 1917, that a young and obscure conscientious objector in the War-to-end-War would rise to the rank of Cabinet Minister and become, in safe middle age, an ardent prosecutor of this War-to-end-War? And who in 1918 would have imagined that a discredited and pacifist member of Parliament, expelled from a local golf club for his supposed traitorous attitude to his country at war, whose meetings were broken up by roughs hired by that national figure, Mr. Horatio Bottomley, would in less than six years become the hope of the populace, the very populace which had
forgotten
by then that once it had parrot-shrieked that he ought to be put up against a wall and shot; but which made him Prime Minister of Great Britain instead?
People, who are ideas, change; but there is at least one historical instance of a man being true to himself: a Figure greater than that of any national proportions, around whom many thousands had pressed, crying
Hosannah!
; those same multitudes which in a few short days were crying for his death, to the distress of the Roman procurator who had begged the silent rebel to make some defence, and thereby enable him,
whose wife had recognised Truth when she saw it, to save innocence from the propagated fury of the mob.
Moods of human beings change. The pendulum of a generation swings from left to right, from right to left again. The pacifist becomes the supporter of a war; the ‘slacker’ of 1914–18 is righteously imbued with spy-mania in 1940. These phenomena are merely obverse aspects of the same character. There is no tragedy or even irony in this, for the change or alteration is superficial. These characters, whether of parochial or national size, are soon forgotten.
It is when men of authentic genius change that the spirit of Man is wounded, when they cease ‘to fulfil the law and the prophets’, and become a law unto themselves; when the still small voice becomes a shout, when the divine spark of clairvoyance is transmitted into the sword-flash, and thereafter the bright star burns sultry, then black. Did I see the end of such a man, in my dream?
I recall words from one of Hitler’s earliest speeches.
‘So all had been vain. In vain the sacrifices and privations, in vain the hunger and thirst for endless months, in vain those hours when the fear of death gripped our souls, and in vain the deaths of two millions who fell in the fulfilment of their duty….. Was it for this that the volunteer regiments followed the old comrades in the autumn of
nineteen
fourteen? Was it for this that those boys of seventeen years of age mingled with the soil of Flanders? Did all this happen so that a gang of despicable criminals might lay their hands on the Fatherland?’
I know that Flanders soil, for the English battalion in which I served as a young volunteer clashed ‘in the autumn of nineteen fourteen’ with the Linz battalion in which the author of that quotation was serving as a volunteer soldier. His genius, or clairvoyance, led him to the highest place in the respect and love of millions of youths. Did he, in that place, forget the authentic truth of the battlefields; will history endorse that what he wrote of others in 1919 was to be his own indictment a quarter of a century later?
And had I foreseen in my dream the death of what Evelyn Waugh in one of his novels calls ‘that creature of the conifers’?
