The Gale of the World (22 page)
Read The Gale of the World Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
There were two tons—twelve loads brought in the box-body of the Silver Eagle—of five-foot long oak poles standing against the outside walls of the cottage.
Safe until Christmas. Now he must write his second Editorial for
The
New
Horizon.
He walked about, picking up odd objects—sea-shells, an acorn, smooth red half-brick from the sea-shore, a stag’s-horn …
waitting
for an idea to drift, seed-like under parachute, from his mind.
Upon plain wooden shelves fixed to the kitchen wall stood lines of books, pick of his library of the 1914–18 war—British, German, French records, memoirs, personal accounts—together with a file of letters from the ghosts of that time—Desmond Neville, Lily Cornford, his parents, Grandfather Thomas Turney, ‘Spectre’ West and others of the Regiment; and his own letters from the Front, which Elizabeth had allowed him to take away after Father’s death, together with his trench maps: large-scale sheets red-threaded, like veins in the human body, with German trench-lines and serrated obstacles; simple blue lines, without particulars, for the British front positions. The Germans built to hold; the British to push forward from. Germany blockaded: Great Britain ruled the waves. Only a question of time—
Map sheets backed by linen, stained by rain, dog-eared, marked with indelible pencil for particular objectives—behind them the transport routes, locations of canvas horse-watering troughs, ration dumps of tools, wire, and ammunition; drinking water points where petrol-cans were filled; first-aid posts.
Ordnance Survey sheets of the 1916 battlefield of the Somme giving way to more Ordnance Survey sheets with trench-free, green and brown contours—virgin land—chalk downlands happily reached after the German retreat to the
Siegfried
Stellung
in March 1917, all the muck and the shell-holes and the dead left behind and forgotten … until the Spring battles—Arras and Bullecourt, Monchy-le-Preux. And in June all the heavy stuff, the howitzers and great railway guns going north to Flanders. Map of battle objectives—green, red, blue, yellow lines, July 31st opening battle,
Pilckem Ridge—the rain, rain, rain, all August, dry in September, the swamps of October in the Salient … that wonderful walk with ‘Spectre’ West up the duckboards past the Steenbeke and the line of 18-pounder field-guns sinking into the mud, to Kansas Cross and on up to the Gravenstafel ridge hidden from the German observation posts on the higher Passchendaele ridge. Then to the Roulers railway embankment, to find themselves through a gap in the German lines and the way open to the Passchendaele ridge! Then ‘Spectre’ was hit, and he had to make the return journey alone with a message for G.H.Q. as darkness came on. The exhilaration of four thousand British, French and German guns firing all together, the battlefield one vast cauldron of light, making you feel you were floating on sound-light forever and ever lost to the old pre-war world. And more by luck than judgment he found the way to the Menin Road and so down to Ypres.
*
Phillip, lying in bed, began to toss and turn, to mutter, and curse!—himself: shocked by his own weak conduct, as the mindcells revealed visual-oral pictures of Hell. Self-hate, self-pity no good. The
artist
must rule in life. If he died the life of his days would never be re-created, for now the Salient was all farm-land again—
19 July, 1919. Versailles.
La
Revanche.
Clemenceau and the slogan,
Germany
is
a
lemon
which
must
be
squeezed
until
the
pips
squeaked.
The blockade of starvation still on, German bread half-sawdust. French colonial troops in the Rhineland, rape of little Hans and Gretchen, child prostitutes asking for—soap. Civilians pushed from pavements, hats knocked off. Poles with a few hundred roubles coming from the ghettoes of Warsaw, becoming mark-millionaires almost overnight.
Phillip, wet with sweat, shouting, “And the pips squeaked! Reparations took all the lemon juice! The victors loaned money to be repaid as further reparation! The pips screamed in
halle
and
platz
and
burgerkeller
and over the radio, and it all blew up again for lack of green-grass thoughts!” For God had not been allowed to come down from the scaffold to lay a healing touch upon the self-enslaved spirit of Western Man.
*
It was as though a blackthorn spine had pierced his left eye. So sharp was the pain that when he half-rose he upset the table. This was much worse than any former pain. Had the
retina become clouded by the burst of a blood vessel? He tried to open his eye but it was held in stabbing pain. I am done for. While he sat there the dog’s cold nose touched his hand. It was reassuring; dear, dear Bodger!
He bathed the eye, after much flinching from raising the lid, in an eye-bath holding glycerine and rose-water. He could just see his way upstairs. But sleep was broken by perilous thoughts, so he got up; and having connected a long lead from the car battery to a 12-volt bulb suspended from the ceiling, began to scribble rapidly.
If there be any young writer, survivor of the Second World War, who aspires to write a
War
and
Peace
for this age, to him I send my thoughts this frozen January night.
Will you, eager writer of genius, with nothing to sustain you but the wings of your own spirit, to whom these thoughts go out this night, in your vision unimpeded and unimpaired by contemporary massed emotions, show truly the luminous personality of Adolf Hitler in a room with those who believe in him, who have faith that his clear commonsense will avoid a war which they know, and he knows, the Fatherland cannot sustain? And will you show this Lucifer, this
light-bringer
, in a scene of Tolstoyan scope and sweep, as one in those early years of the ’thirties possessed harmoniously by the highest spiritual force, gentle and magnanimous, yet also the man of cool calculation, of immense patience and understanding of all problems when he is talking with a young Englishwoman whose sensibility matches her physical grace, who is clear in the sense that, like Shelley, she saw him plain?
Will you relate this trait of feminine sensibility in Lucifer, making him vulnerable outside the artists’ world, to the moods which arose from a weak or diffident inner-core, so dangerous to itself and to others, whence arose those terrible ragings and cries of contempt and hate that mortified the feelings of those who loved him so that they were as pillars of salt while he was so possessed, since in those moods all hopes seemed purposeless and void, as a black polar wind blasts all life?
If you write justly, that is, truly, you will reveal that the rare quality which accompanies genius has its fatal defect or weakness: you will bring upon your pages the spirit that believed with all the passion of a levitated being in the glories of the freed soul of man at peace in the resurgent Western world, inspired by the spirit of Hellas, and show also this same vehicle being swept in contortion more and more by forces beyond self-control to effects which were the antithesis of all he believed, as evil is the antithesis of good, and fear the absence of love.
To write with divination and truth, without admiration or
contempt
, and above all
without
moral
judgment
,
of the causes
and effects of the tragic split in the mind of European man, from which arose this war, will require in a writer, besides the gift of seeing with paradise-clearness, an immense patience and sustaining power.
Let me illustrate this with a mechanical analogy. In theory the perfect racing-car carries in its engine and chassis not a gramme of metal that does not work to win the race, to break the record, to surpass the old with the new. In theory it is built to endure until the chequered flag is passed, when, completely used in every gramme of metal it carries, and all its power expended, it disintegrates. All is used by the spirit of the design to achieve what lesser men declare to be impossible: a new form. The car has broken a record, but also its engine: its bearings clank, it is smoking as it stands in a pool of oil, its tyres are stripped of their rubber treads, its driver is quiescent, trembling, his face blackened around the white patches where his goggles have been pushed back.
Likewise the creator of a work of art which will reveal the truth of this age—holding in balance the forces and counter-forces which led to the disintegration of the West—must with devotion to such an immense task willingly, unwillingly, see himself as one born to lose his natural happiness of life, even life itself, in the fulfilment of his task.
All the poet can do today is to roam in spirit the world’s seas, viewing men in open boats bowed over oars they are too weak to pull, sustained by less than the blood of the albatross; to lie prostrate beside them on rafts awash with the grey nihilism of waves; with them he drowns in the blue twilight of submarine death.
Above the piled majesty of cumulus, in the clear infinity of space, under the metallic blue of the troposphere, he streams with vapour trails through the skies; and falls without curiosity or emotion that he has had it at last; and as the earth comes larger and recognisable, so does the moment of truth, and in curious detachment he wonders if he will hear himself screaming in the black-billowing and
impenetrable
bright flames.
From the heat that breaks as with phoenix-claws the small
clearness
of self from the charred diminished body, the poet moves instantly to the sleet of the steppes, to lie with limbs gangrenous in frost and eyelids crusted with pus, the army in dissolution; and what are his thoughts of his Führer: are they no more than, in the slogan of youthful days, ‘We are born to die for Germany?’
Thence to the stars shining sightlessly in the bitter North African night, to men of his own kin lying prostrate under winds that rave with the dust and sand of the desert, while the sky leaps alight, and what are his thoughts before the barrage: are they as of those on the battlefields of Somme and Ypres—or is it clearer this war? And do men die the easier because they have an ideal beyond themselves,
beyond the ‘little ego’? And are the thoughts of lost men the thoughts of children betrayed?
From simple soldiers to the good generals and the tired generals; from the inner hopes of the Light-bringer distorted by power to the inner hopes of the Jew purified by powerlessness.
Of the identity of fear and frenzy, of love and hate, and how nearly related are they in the same man. Did not the ancient Iranian poet believe that God had two sons—both sons of genius—Eosphoros the brilliant illuminator in the darkness of men’s minds; and Kristos the compassionate?
The mind of the poet must traverse without sentiment or bias but always with detachment and clarity, assessing a fatal magnanimous gesture towards an admired ‘sister nation’ when the life of that nation hung by a thread in the early summer of 1940 (and the thread was not cut) thus exposing the West to a greater ruin from the East, but not altering the fate of the world; even as it assessed the dismissal, eleven months later, of a messenger of peace, by a leader with four centuries of calculated power-balance in British history behind his judgments: and how far thereby was endorsed the further decline of the West?
The artist must know why an Englishman, expressing the character of the nation in fear, did not express the feelings of that nation freed of fear. And what shall be written of the soul of Britain? That it had no soul, since it was not a race of men but a mixture of many races, of many ‘little egos’—of Gaul, Teuton, Celt, Anglo-Saxon, Phoenician, Roman, Jew, Dane and Viking—so for soul it has only a disruptive determination, arising from its insular position as a land of coal and iron, and because of that position and wealth from trading, its policy for four hundred years has been to rule by Money, thus keeping in division the continent of Europe, as Winston Churchill has written in an early autobiography. And will history decide that this European of great talent and emotion felt it to be his crowning purpose in life to baulk and destroy a fellow European of genius—who could build only because he had forced out Money for money’s sake?
And that Great Britain and the Empire fell from a supreme position because the majority failed to perceive that another survivor of the battlefields of 1914–18 had a vision to build, but was denied by Money in the hands of those who could only frustrate.
The thorn in the eye seemed to have withdrawn itself during sleep. Could the cause, after all, be nervous strain? Result of psychological depression? At times he could focus with clear definition.
Bodger rejoiced with him, running in circles and occasionally barking when they walked to the village to post to the printer the ‘copy’ for the Spring number of the magazine.
The next job was to clean Shep Cot. The bookshelves were collecting dust as befitted the hush of an age gone by. Dear Walter de la Mare. There was the book of poems, found in a shell-hole by cousin Willie, and brought home; later to be handed over by Uncle John with others of the books of drowned Willie. Rows and rows of Wilfred Owen’s Greater Love War. I must leave my country books to Jonnie. He will be the writer in the family if it be my fate to die soon.
East wind blowing; little sudden moans across chimney tun; timid retreat of smoke into room by day; sharp stars by night, wheeling past window. Little gentle crystals of sleet greeting his face peering at the open door, in hopeless hope that someone might be coming …
By day all the landscape looked pinched, seeming lifeless. Icicles under waterfalls, green sponge-moss all frozen tears, amber water running silent under ice-plates whereon skittered vacuous sleet. Wild red deer gone down into warmer oakwood coombes. Once, through the small casement upper window, a quartet of hinds looking up at his face before galloping away.
In the tattered shed, between wooden walls of 18-inch oak logs, stood Silver Eagle, water drained from radiator, engine block
and
that yellow-metal pipe connecting both from below their bases. No more local boils and cracked cylinder block! O God what a bloody awful life I am leading. Will there be a letter from Corfu today? How can I earn, replace the hundred pounds I gave Laura, to last her until March, when I am to join her in Corfu: she with her book finished by then, I with first volume completedâmy series conceived nearly thirty years ago, carried in the womb of my time ever since; and now powerless to be born? I am too old, my time has run out. He went to see Molly to tell her that he would have to work steadily for a period, and so would not be able to see them all at half-term.
“Well, do come over, and stay, whenever you feel like a change, won't you, dear Phillip?”
*
Every day he walked down to the village, staff in hand, army valise on back, guarded by skirmishing Bodger. One morning he met Osgood Nilsson, fellow member of the Barbarian Club, with his rosy-faced wife. When her husband had gone into the Lyndale hotel bar, she remained outside with Phillip.
“I hear you're writing a book, Phillipâmay I call you Phillip? Do come and see us whenever you feel free to do soâwe live up in the woods near that odd recluse, Lord Cloudesley. Seems stiff and stilted to me. Oh, you know him, do you? What's he really like? And that girl, with the rather fey look, what's she doing
there, d'you know, besides helping him to write a biography of his father, Osgood was telling me. He flew the Atlantic, didn't he, and was never seen again.”
“I met the present Lord Cloudesley briefly, when I was
farming
, in East Anglia. Well, I must get back before it snows. Au revoir!”
It was too cold for snow, bitter frost-wind was still pouring down the glen. Thank God his old Army packââvalise' of those days, had carried back enough tinned off-the-ration provisions for a week, and a 7-lb bag of puppy biscuit-meal. This had to be soaked (for Bodger had half-decayed teeth). What had seemed to be little more than a puppy had turned out to be an old dogâeleven years of age. Yet Bodger was still lively, due to exceptional intelligence: an innocent, ageless manner that often went with high perception. Whom the gods love remain young.
If the snow came and drifts blocked all the lanes, at least he had his pair of skis. So far, no sign of snow: but wait: it was in the air. At night the stars burned bright in a sky of dark ice. From frozen horizon to frozen horizon was the 1916/1917
battlefield
of the Somme: an area as wide as Exmoor iron-hard between lip-to-lip shell-craters brittle-white with ice powdered by
moonlight
. How everyone was apprehensive of high explosive shells bursting on impact, splinters flying! That would catch the files of donks going up the line nightly, with rations and ammunition, it was said. But, strangely, the German shelling was desultory. It ceased. Hard ground gave the old Hun his chance to pull out his heavy stuff north to Arras, to meet the British and Canadian push known to be coming in the spring. And in March the old Hun went back to his new immensely powerful line built twenty miles away by two-hundred thousand Russian prisoners during the past six months. So the Somme was left behind, forgotten as the battle of Waterloo: except for little gangs of international deserters, who waged war it was said for gold in the teeth of skullsâamong themselves in the underground catacombs. Distant
hand-grenades
bursting at nightâcompetitive civilisation starting up in the wilderness â¦
The east wind faltered. The chimney smoke veered to the south-west. Now for snow, if it went round to the north-east! But the dragging ocean-clouds fell as rain until water was running
everywhere
upon the moor.
One morning he thought to call on Pistonâthat dark, furtive clown of 1916 at the Lynton Convalescent HomeâMad
Piston and his perforated fire-pail filled with driftwood from the boulders of the shore. Wig of sea-weed on head, simpleton
playing
with children; adopting Aunt Dora as âAuntie'âPiston
working
his ticket, and getting his discharge and a disability pension, the sprucer!
A white-haired figure, with gentle face, welcomed him with, “Well, Masson old boy, how goes it? âAuntie' told me you were here. I was going to look you upâpay the old callâbut Mamma and I have been rather busy. Come and meet my motherâyou'll like herâshe's almost completely etherialised. Lives entirely on the Seventh Plane. She's also a vegetarian, like me and âAuntie'. Mamma, this is Phillip, my old chum, author of
The
Water
Wanderer
.”
Phillip saw a small alert woman with shrivelled skin of face and neck. She had the dark eyes and look of a Romany gipsy. If her son seemed softly foolish, she had a shrewd look. The eyes were intelligent.
“That's a dear little dog you've got,” she said, while the animal looked up and gave one wag of its stump. She knelt to pat it. “I see he's been badly treated,” as she felt the lumpy ribs.
“I know where he came from,” said Piston. “I know that
smallholder
, Aaron Kedd.”
“Seems to be a distracted man.”
“He's a local preacher, of the hell-fire sort.”
“Poor man, he's obsessed by carnal sin,” said Mrs Piston, gently. “He must be prone to ruined hopes, without self-knowledge.”
“We all reveal ourselves by our fixed ideas, Mrs. Piston.”
“Yes,” she replied, softly. The eyes were now reflective, she looked young when she smiled up at him. “Your
Water
Wanderer
is clairvoyant, Mr. Maddison. I think the elemental spirits of the moor helped you to write it.”
There was bone beauty in the small face. Phillip saw a
resemblance
to his own mother: true, sensitive, child-like in a hard world. He liked Mrs. Piston, felt warm towards her. Piston too. Perhaps it was for his mother, he the only child, that he had swung the lead in the Casualty Clearing Station below Albert, pretending to be shell-shocked, and rushing about after imaginary Germans. Anyhow, he'd worked his ticket.
“Sit you down, Masson old lad. Mamma will bring some coffee. âAuntie' told me you haven't been to see her, you naughty man. The poor old gel lives all alone, you know. Remarkable old lady âgreat Greek scholar, too, into the bargain.” His voice dropped.
“Between ourselves, we're on the verge of an entirely new
dimension
. Mamma has great psychic forces coming through her. She helps people in Oldstone Castle to become clear about themselves, and their blockages. What stops them from being clear and happy, Masson. She's also in touch with the dead. I mean the dead
persons
or person in every living man or woman. Shelley probably lives again in you. I feel it. This place is full of his aura. You must, if you're interested, come to one of our séances. You're a good man, Masson.” Tears formed in his eyes. “I knew that when I read that book about Lutra, your otter. It's got elemental life in it, it reveals the unseen world, too. I can feel it coming through the printed page. You did, too, I reckon, when it was writing itself. Do you know what I mean?”
“I certainly do. It wrote itself at times.”
“All good books seep through from the unseen world, Masson. This cottage is saturated with Shelley's personality. He lived here all one season, you know. Yes, the place is alive with him. He used to sail paper boats in the river outside, when it was low in summer. A true mystic.”
“The whole of the Universe is run by God, which is one vast Imagination, struggling against the almost irresistible brute forces of the cosmos.”
“Yes! And that's why this cottage is full of it. Scientists are only at the beginning. Look at radio waves. Simple, you say. Well, they were there before scientists uncovered them. The rocks glow with power, I've felt the power. But science has gone wrong, as Caspar Schwenkfelder says, you know the one who teaches at Oldstone Castle. He got his ideas originally from Richard Jefferies'
Story
of
my
Heart.
We've got to begin again from the beginning, or we're done for. Look at the atom bombâa terrible discovery, or uncovery. But you know all about that.”
“Do you believe the dead help the living?”
“Of course they do. We're all part of the dead. The dead live in our bloodâthat's obvious, it's a simple law of heredity. As for the dead haunting a particular place, it's only a hangover of inharmonious vibrations which have impregnated the furniture, part of the walls, or other matter. Science is able to get personality on to celluloid by means of vibrations, and celluloid's only matter, after all.”
“Piston, may I ask a very personal question?”
“Anything you like, Masson my dear.”
“You know when the Lynton convalescent home went up in
flames in August, nineteen-sixteen. Did you start the fire? You always had a fire-bucket, and collected driftwood, didn't you?”
“I don't know, Masson. I was ill in those days. My mind was haunted. By what I'd been. As a child, I was always terrified of a steel engraving we had in my father's house, Wellington greeting Blücher at Waterloo. The dead and wounded, Masson. Then the war came, and wellâyou know the rest. I was a coward, I was driven to get out of the Somme, and the war, I simply could not face the
idea
of battle. I was a sort of lead-swinger, I suppose, and then I wasn't. I was the lead itself, old boy. Gone phut. Dead. Heavy. My body like lead, killed inside me. Beyond despair. All my blokes killed in no-man's-land in the first minute after Zero Hour. Didn't know what I was doing. Not altogether. Was
aware
of myself, mark you. But had no reciprocity with or for others. I was mad. I felt life screaming through me, and my picture of myself was lying dead just by the horses of Wellington and Blücher. I must have been killed at Waterloo.”
He looked like a sad little boy, appealing for help to Phillip as he went on, “I let my men down. I pretended I was knocked out by a shell, and lay doggo in no-man's-land. Then I didn't know if I had been shell-shocked or not. The next phase was a sort of madness I couldn't control, I saw myself rushing about the ward, which was deep like the Jerry first line, you may remember.”
“You were obviously shocked.” Were Piston's theories but a sublimation of shock?
“When I was invalided out, I got a job with Munitions, bowler hat and umbrella, bogus retired temporary officer and temporary gentâacting captain, then major. All very bogus, like making the manager of the Great Eastern Railway a temporary major-general, Sir Guy Somebody or other, in the war. To give some sort of authority among civilians. Lloyd George's idea, I believe. Any more questions, old lad?”
“No, Piston,” and Phillip put an arm round the trembling man.
“People think I'm part of a motorcar,” went on Piston, suddenly happy. “They forget that just as shrapnel was invented by a Major Shrapnel of the Gunners, so the piston was invented by a bloke called Piston. Oh, I know I used to say my name came from Pistor, some old Roman god, but that was camouflage, Masson. All nature is more or less camouflaged, ever thought of that?”
“Your mind is full of baffles, like a new silencer of a motorcar. I suppose we all baffle ourselves, one way or another, old chum.”
“Caspar Schwenkfelder removed all mine, Masson. I'm now clarified. I can let myself go right out of the body into the ether, laddie! Like a yogi. My mother's been up to the Seventh Plane. The transference took place on Oldstone Down.” Piston's voice was low. “I thought she was dead. She did die, I think. She had a message to go up there, so we went up in the car. She stood up in the heather, on a little mound she said was the remains of a Roman fort. Archeologists say the Romans never got so far west of Exeter. But Mummy saw them, the Romans, she was quite close to them. She could almost touch them, her hands were bound, she was terrified they were going to kill her. It was a wooden fort, a look-out place above the sea, to look out for Welsh raiders on their shipping going up the Channel. Mark my words, Masson, one day they'll dig there and find Roman
remains
, pottery, perhaps coins. You'll see, I'm right!”
“I did hear about some sort of flying saucer.”
“A ring of pure light, Masson. Saul saw it on the way to
Damascus
. Mummy was âout', her heart scarcely beating, for over an hour. When she came back, her face was young and beautiful.” Piston breathed deeply. He had gone pale, he spoke in a low voice. “She had seen Jesus. She took my book with her. Not the actual paper and bindingâthat's of the letter of realityâbut the spirit of my words. What's so strange about that? They can send pictures through space, by television, can't they? Mummy saw Jesusâ” His eyes ran tears again. He took Phillip's hand. “Masson, old boy, she says you are one of the chosen ones. She does, honestly. She says you have an aura about you, only it's dim at the moment. You've not come properly through yet.”
“I've been through, but come backâto nothing.”
“We all do, old boy.”
“Tell me about Schwenkfelder.”
“He's a pioneer. He started as a psychologist, but found fault with Freud's findings. Then he saw it was a growing racketâpsychiatry, I mean. So he started at the beginning. Reading Blake, who saw an angel on a tree. A true poet, Masson, he sees like Jefferies, into the unseen world, which is the true world. Schwenk, as we call him, fought in the late war, as an airman. He had a little cash, and bought Oldstone, where his pupils come and learn the procedures of Ideopraxitism. That's Greek forâwell, ideas. Ideas are cart-horses; it's what's in the cart that matters. Then he changed the name to Diaphany. It means Light. I'd like you come to one of Ma's séances, and see for yourself.”
