On arriving here we all hoped to get away within a few weeks, as there was rumour of an advance in the West. At present, however, the indications are, at any rate, for a winter campaign.
CHAPTER X
WINTER—OUR "SELF-MADE" ORCHESTRA
February 1st, 1917.—Four months have gone. As I write the earth is white with feet of snow. It is a white world, the roofs no longer brown, the trees no longer green, for even those few trees, like pines that have not shed their verdure, have donned the white raiment of winter's carnival. Snow! This pure and godly element, silent and secretive, the avant-courrier of the Ultimate, of Things doomed, one day to be reclaimed by the once again triumphant elements when, from the dome of the universe, the last white great snow sheets shall fall, fall, fall—and this universe, once again locked in the ice-grip of the Snow God, shall drive forward mysteriously on its lonely way—lonely for it shall have been separated from Life, and the Spirit, Man, will have gone.
As I look out on the undulating expanse terraced down to me from the mountain horizon to the northward, I am for a minute tempted to believe that the Great Snow Deluge has really come, and I alone am awake to behold it. But looking still closer I see tiny windows peeping out from their white frames, and I know the bees within that human hive are having their winter sleep. With an effort I trace among the smothered definition of the buildings, the snowed-up roads and alleys, and rising above it all I see, scattered over the town, the white upright minarets of the mosques. Kastamuni in wintertime is a picturesque Turkish town, and has a character all its own. The streets are deserted, but on the hill-path white-mottled figures move slowly upwards. It is the hour of prayer, and the muezzin has just begun to swell out in icy circles from the minarets, reaching out to the hearts of the prayerful, and calling them to communion with Allah. La illaha, illa la. There is but one God, and that is God. From how many thousands of mosques, and for how many millions of the followers of the prophet does the muezzin cry at this hour?
And so I, too, find my silence unlocked after all these months and am at last persuaded to throw off the coma that has been stealing over us body and soul, that has buried beneath its snow-drift our intentions one by one, and I am tempted to jot down a few more notes to my reminiscences.
Sometimes, as the other day, we are allowed to take down the bob-sleighs we have made to a hill about a mile away, and pretend we are schoolboys again. After snowballing the starters and getting snowballed ourselves, we shot down the slope or over the bank, as the case occurred, and once or twice we collided, but no one got seriously hurt. The hard toiling uphill again, pulling the sleigh, proved how unfit we were. On the way home we religiously snowballed every fowl we passed, and the roads are full of them. The days are dreadfully dreary, and it is only these events that seem to lighten the monotonous gloom. Firewood is very scarce and expensive, and only on rare occasions do we have a fire worth anything. If we do by chance have wood it is often wet, and the wretched tin stoves choke the place with smoke. I half decided to have a stove in my bedroom, but, besides that being fearfully small, the trouble is to get wood, which comes in tiny donkey loads at fictitious prices. So we lie in bed under the clothes, and with the intense cold sleep steals over us. There is the same difficulty in getting kerosene, now five shillings a bottle, and what one gets either goes out, or splutters until you kick it out. We hibernate, therefore. Once or twice it has been so cold that I have gone down to the kitchen and sat by the smoke heap there. This is very popular these days.
Letters are turning up more regularly. I am delighted to have at last heard from home and several friends all over the world, including the brilliant author of "Problems of Philosophy." He has very kindly sent me some books and recommends me to see Schiller on "Grumps." I also heard from Wallace, from whom I have not heard for years and years, and to whom I wrote in Kut along with people in the neglected recesses of my memory, but the letter, of course, was never sent. It must be eleven years since he and I sat on the golden sand of a green-vestured island in that silvery sea around Auckland—smoking our pipes as we lay on our backs, and filling in with a wish what we wanted to complete the scene. I remember wanting the suitable girl, but he wanted books and debate. In between are my world travels, and Cambridge, and Germany, and now I've been running about in a war, and he, since a professor in Princetown, writes to condole with me at being out of the war so early! He ought to congratulate me on my luck in staying in it so long. But then, of course, he can't know anything about Kut yet.