Leaves in the Wind

by A. G. Gardiner

The truth is expressed somewhere in Hardy's works, where he says that the soul's specific gravity is always less than that of the sea of circumstances into which it is cast, and rises unfailingly to the surface. There comes to my mind as illustrating this truth a passage in that great and moving book "Under Fire"—the most tremendous picture of the horror and squalor of war ever painted by man. One of the squad of French soldiers with whom the book deals is in the trenches near Souchez and the Vimy Ridge. It is before the English had taken over that part of the line. There is a quiet time and some of the men get on companionable terms with the enemy. This man's wife and child are in Lens, just behind the German lines. He has not seen them for eighteen months, and out of sheer good nature the German soldiers lend him a uniform and smuggle him into a coal fatigue which is going into Lens. He passes in the disguise among his enemy companions by his own house and sees through the open door his wife and the widow of a comrade sitting at their work. In the room with them are two German non-commissioned officers, and his child is on the knee of one of them.

But the thing that strikes him to the heart is the fact that his wife is smiling as she talks to the non-coms.—"Not a forced smile, not a debtor's smile, non, a real smile that came from her, that she gave." He did not doubt her affection or her loyalty, and when the bitterness had passed and he was back in his lines and telling his comrade of the adventure, he defended her from the criticism of his own mind in words of extraordinary beauty:

"She's quite young, you know; she's twenty-six. She can't hold her youth in, it's coming out of her all over, and when she's resting in the lamplight and the warmth, she's got to smile; and even if she burst out laughing, it would just simply be her youth singing in her throat. It isn't on account of others, if truth were told; it's on account of herself. It's life. She lives. Ah, yes, she lives and that's all. It isn't her fault if she lives. You wouldn't have her die? Very well, what do you want her to do? Cry all day on account of me and the Boches? Grouse? One can't cry all the time, nor grouse for eighteen months. Can't be done. It's too long, I tell you. That's all there is to it."

In that poignant story we touch the root of the matter. We live. And, living, the light and shadow of life play across the surface of ourselves, though deep down in our hearts there is the sense of the unspeakable tragedy of things. We may wonder that we can be happy and may be rather ashamed of it, but "we live" and we cannot deny our natures. We may, like Miss Havisham, draw down the blinds, shut out the world, and dwell in darkness, but then we cease to live and become mad. We must laugh if only to keep our sanity, and nature arranges that we shall laugh even in the face of terrible things. There was a good deal of truth in the remark of the French lady to Boswell that "Our happiness depends on the circulation of the blood." The wild current of affairs sweeps us on whithersoever it will, but in our separate little eddies we whirl around and find relief in private distractions and pleasures that seem independent of the great march of events. Jane Austen wrote her novels in the midst of the Napoleonic wars, yet I cannot recall one hint in them of that world-shaking event. She mentioned a battle in one of her letters, but then only a little callously. And a friend of mine told me the other day that he had had the curiosity to turn up the newspaper files of the time of Austerlitz and found that the public were apparently all agog, not about the battle that had changed the current of the world, but about the merits of the Infant Roscius. It is well that we have this faculty of detachment and independent life. If there were no private relief for this public tragedy the world would have gone mad. But perhaps you will say it has gone mad....

Let me recall by way of envoi that fine story in Montaigne. When the town of Nola was destroyed by the barbarians, Paulinus, the bishop, was stripped of all he possessed and taken prisoner. And as he was led away he prayed, "O Lord, make me to bear this loss, for Thou knowest that they have taken nothing that is mine: the riches that made me rich and the treasures that made me worthy are still mine in their fullness."

ON WORD-MAGIC

I see that a discussion has arisen in the Spectator on the "Canadian Boat Song." It appeared in Blackwood's nearly a century ago, and ever since its authorship has been the subject of recurrent controversy. The author may have been "Christopher North," or his brother, Tom Wilson, or Gait, or the Ettrick Shepherd, or the Earl of Eglinton, or none of these. We shall never know. It is one of those pleasant mysteries of the past, like the authorship of the Junius Letters (if, indeed, that can be called a mystery), which can never be exhausted because they can never be solved. I am not going to offer an opinion; for I have none, and I refer to the subject only to illustrate the magic of a word. The poem lives by virtue of the famous stanza:

From the lone shieling of the misty island
Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas—
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland.
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.

It would be an insensible heart that did not feel the surge of this strong music. The yearning of the exile for the motherland has never been uttered with more poignant beauty, though Stevenson came near the same note of tender anguish in the lines written in far Samoa and ending: