And I come, for this night at least, to my room. On the wall is a tiny silver Christ on a crucifix; and above that the portrait of a child, who fixes me in the surprise of innocence, questioning and loveable, the very look of warm April and timid but confiding light. I sleep with the knowledge of that over me, an assurance greater than that of all the guns of all the hosts. It is a promise. I may wake to the earth I used to know in the morning.
Winter 1917.
XIX. Holly-Ho!
In the train bound for the leave boat, just before Christmas, the Knight-Errant, who also was returning to the front, re-wrote the well-known hymn of Phillips Brooks for me, to make the time pass. It began:
"Oh little town of Bethlehem,
To thee we give the lie."
So you may guess, though I shan't tell you, how it continued. For the iron was in the soul of the Knight and misery was twisting it. I cannot pretend it was a pleasure trip. This was to be our third Christmas in Flanders. Is it any good trying to pass on the emotion common to men who go to that place because they must? No, it is not. Yet, throughout the journey to the boat, I was not astonished at the loud gaiety of many of our passengers. I have got used to it; for they were like that when they landed at Boulogne in August 1914; and they will be no different when they come back for good, to comfortable observers who prefer to be satisfied easily.
There was a noise of musical instruments and untractable boots on the floor-boards. While waiting in the nervous queue on the Day of Judgment one of those fellows will address a mouth organ to the responsive feet of a pal, and the others will look on with intent approval, indifferent to Gabriel. Having watched disaster experiment variously with my countrymen for three years, I begin to understand why once the French hated us, why lately they have learned to admire us and to be amused by us, why the blunders of our governing classes don't damage us vitally (which seems miraculous unless you know the reason); and, indeed, why that blessed flag has braved a thousand years the battle and the breeze.
It is because the quality of our Nobodies (about whom a great epic will get written when a poet is born good enough and big enough to receive the inspiration), it is because any average Nobody has a cool impregnability to the worst bad luck can do which is supernal. That gives the affair something of the comic. That is what makes the humour of the front. And after the first silent pause of respect and wonder at one more story of the sort a journalist knows so well who knows but a little of railway men and miners, seamstresses and the mothers in mean streets, and ships and the sea, one cannot help chuckling. Again, the sons of Smith and Jones and Robin! The well-born, the clever, the haughty, and the greedy, in their fear, pride, and wilfulness, and the perplexity of their scheming, make a general mess of the world. Forthwith in a panic they cry, "Calamity cometh!"