Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough

by A. G. Gardiner

This common failing of indecision is not necessarily due to intellectual laziness. It may be due, as in the case of Goschen, to too clear a vision of all the aspects of a subject. "Goschen," said a famous First Sea Lord, "was the cleverest man we ever had at the Admiralty, and the worst administrator. He saw so many sides to a question that we could never get anything done." A sense of responsibility, too, is a severe check on action. I doubt whether any one who has dealt with affairs ever made up his mind with more painful questionings than Lord Morley. I have heard him say how burdensome he found the India Office, because day by day he had to make irrevocable decisions. A certain adventurous recklessness is necessary for the man of affairs. Joseph Chamberlain had that quality. Mr. Churchill has it to-day. If it is controlled by high motives and a wide vision it is an incomparable gift. If it is a mere passion for having one's own way it is only the gift of the gambler.

But, you ask, what has this to do with putting on my boots? It is a reasonable question. I will tell you. For an hour I had paced my room in my slippers in search of a subject. I had looked out of the window over the sunlit valley, watched the smoke of a distant train vanishing towards the west, observed the activities of the rooks in a neighbouring elm. I had pared my nails several times with absent-minded industry, and sharpened every pencil I had on me with elaborate care. But the more I pared my nails and the more I sharpened my pencils the more perplexed I grew as to the theme for an article. Subjects crowded on me, "not single spies, but in battalions." They jostled each other for preference, they clamoured for notice as I have seen the dock labourers clamouring for a job at the London docks. They held out their hands and cried, "Here am I: take me." And, distracted by their importunities and starving in the midst of plenty, I fished in my pocket for a pencil I had not sharpened. There wasn't one left.

It was at this moment that I remembered my boots. Yes, I would certainly put on my boots. There was nothing like putting on one's boots for helping one to make up one's mind. The act of stooping changed the current of the blood. You saw things in a new light—like the man who looked between his legs at Bolton Abbey, and cried to his friend: "Oh, look this way; it's extraordinary what a fresh view you get." So I fetched my boots and sat down to put them on.

The thing worked like a charm. For in my preoccupied condition I picked up my right boot first. Then mechanically I put it down and seized the left boot. "Now why," said I, "did I do that?" And then the fact flashed on me that all my life I had been putting on my left boot first. If you had asked me five minutes before which boot I put on first, I should have said that there was no first about it; yet now I found I was in the grip of a habit so fixed that the attempt to put on my right boot first affected me like the scraping of a harsh pencil on a slate. The thing couldn't be done. The whole rhythm of habit would be put out of joint. I became interested. How, I wondered, do I put on my jacket? I rose, took it off, found that my right arm slipped automatically into its sleeve, tried the reverse process, discovered that it was as difficult as an unfamiliar gymnastic operation. Why, said I, I am a mere bundle of little habits of which I am unconscious. This thing must be looked into. And then came into my mind that fascinating book of Samuel Butler's on Life and Habit. Yes, certainly, here was a subject that would "go." I dismissed all the importunate beggars who had been clamouring in my mind, took out a pencil, seized a writing pad, and sat down to write on "The Force of Habit."

And here I am. I have got to the end of my article without reaching my subject. I have looked up and down the street so long that it is time to go indoors.

ON A CITY THAT WAS

I saw in a newspaper a few days ago some pictures of the ruins of the Cloth Hall and the Cathedral at Ypres. They were excellent photographs, but the impression they left on my mind was of the futility even of photography to convey any real sense of that astonishing scene of desolation which was once the beautiful city of Ypres. We talk of Ypres as if it were still a city in being, in which men trade, and children play, and women go about their household duties. In a vague way we feel that it is so. In a vague way I felt that it was so myself until I entered it and found myself in the presence of the ghost of a city.

How wonderful is the solitude and the silence in the midst of which it stands like the ruin of some ancient and forgotten civilisation. Far behind you have left the hurry and tumult of the great armies—every village seething with a strange and tumultuous life, soldiers bargaining with the women for potatoes and cabbages in the marketplace, boiling their pots in the fields, playing football by the way side, mending the roads, marching, camping, feeding, sleeping; officers flying along the roads on horseback or in motorcars, vast processions of lorries coiling their way over the landscape, or standing at rest with their death-dealing burdens while the men take their mid-day meal; giant "caterpillars" dragging great guns along the highway. Everywhere the sense of a fearful urgency, everywhere the feeling of a brooding and awful presence that overshadows the heavens with a cosmic menace. It is as though you are living on the slopes of some vast volcano whose eruptions may at any moment submerge all this phantasmal life in a sea of molten lava. And, hark! through the sounds of the roads and the streets, the chaffering of the market-place, the rush of motor-cars, the rhythmic tramp of men, there comes a dull, hollow roar, as from the mouth of a volcano itself.

As you advance the scene changes. The movement becomes more feverish, more intense. The very breath of the volcano seems to fan your cheek, and the hollow roar has become near and plangent. It is no longer like the breaking of great seas on a distant shore: it is like thunder rending the sky above you. A little further, and another subtle change is observable. On either hand the land has become solitary and unkempt. All the life of the fields has vanished and the soldiers are in undisputed possession. Then even the soldiers seem left behind, and you enter the strange solitude where the war is waged. Before you rises the great mound of Ypres. In the distance it looks like a living city with quaintly broken skyline, but as you approach you see that it is only the tomb of a city standing there desolate and shattered in the midst of a universal desolation.

It is midday as you pass through its streets, but there is no moving thing visible amidst the ruins. The very spirit of loneliness is about you—not the invigorating loneliness of the mountain tops, but the sad loneliness of the grave. I have stood upon the ruins of Carthage, but even there I did not feel the same sense of solitude that I felt as I walked the streets of Ypres. There, at least, the birds were singing above you, and the Arab sat beside his camel on the grass in the sunshine. Here nature itself seems blasted by some dreadful flame of death. The streets preserve their contours, but on either side the houses stand like gaunt skeletons, roofless and shattered, fronts knocked out, floors smashed through or hanging in fragments, bedsteads tumbling down through the broken ceiling of the sitting-room, pictures askew on the tottering walls, household treasures a forlorn wreckage, hats still hanging on the hat-pegs, the table-cloth still laid, the fireplace lustreless with the ashes of the last fire.