I said, I will take heed to my ways: that I offend not in my tongue....
I held my tongue, and spake nothing. I kept silence, yea, even from good words; but it was pain and grief to me.
One has not to follow him very long in that.
My heart was hot within me, and while I was thus musing the fire kindled: and at the last I spake with my tongue.
One wonders, though, how the Psalmist himself, had he been one of us, would have found means to communicate his strange undertones of experience, according to their significance for himself? To whom would it be of interest, if he described such a particle as St. Vaast Keep on the Richebourg road, though he saw daily again in some odd way its sandbagged posts with the fine wood panels from the shell-like house beside built in?–seen once, for a lifetime. Or Port Arthur, that wreckage of a brewery near Neuve Chapelle–why should every yard of its flimsy fortification be coexistent with me? I could lead the hearer through its observation-posts, its emplacements, its warrens for human beings, its relics of other days, with practical and geographical accuracy; but the words would not contain my own sense of the place, which from the very first I never needed nor endeavoured to put into words. And yet it is intense and instant. The reflection of the crazy stronghold as it was, and with what it meant for me, comes in a second when my thoughts lie that way, and it is but one of a series of equal insistency. It is no question, this, of looking back on such a past as in any degree glorious, of shirking the anguish that overcast any adventurous gleam that these scenes awakened. Their memory is as sombre and as frightening as they were themselves in their aspect and their annals.
They come unbidden,
and when they will come, the mind is led by them as birds are said to be lured by the serpent’s eye. A tune, a breath of sighing air, an odour–and there goes the foolish ghost back to Flanders.
Even here, I suppose, in the Atlantic’s healthy blue, I am at the mercy of a coincidence in lime-juice.