To ESTHER JULIA MADOX FORD

Très, très chère petite Princesse,

When you shall come to read English—which I hope will not be too soon—you shall find here adumbrated what the world seemed like to me just when you were preparing to enter it ..... a confused old world which your coming rendered so much clearer and dearer. And as these pages were written in the expectation of you—and for you!—I have thought better to leave them exactly as they were, bearing as they obviously do the traces of sufferings that, thank God, you never knew. And so, when you come to read them, give a tender thought to him to whom you have so often written—quitoubliejamé et qui t’aime de tou son coeur et encore beaucoupluss!

F. M. F.

New York, 21st June, 1929

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[5]

PART ONE FOUR LANDSCAPES

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I To Introduce Gringoire

The writer’s friend Gringoire, originally a poet and Gallophile, went to the war. Long, gray, lean, unreasonably boastful as a man and unreasonably modest as a poet, he was probably not too disciplined as an infantry officer, but he has survived to inhabit in tranquillity with the most charming of companions a rural habitation so ancient, frail and unreal that it is impossible to think of it otherwise than as the Gingerbread Cottage you may have read of in the tale of “Haensel and Gretel.”

This book, then, is the story of Gringoire just after ... Armageddon. For it struck the writer that you hear of the men that went, and you hear of what they did when they were There. But you never hear how It left them. You hear how things were destroyed, but seldom of the painful processes of Reconstruction.

So that your Compiler, taking pencils, tablets and erasers and availing himself of the singularly open [10]hospitality of the poet and his charming meridional partner, came on many successive Saturday afternoons from the little old Grammar School where he instructs classes in English Literature and Physical Development, to sit in the garden at the feet of Gringoire, Gallophile, Veteran, Gardener and, above all, Economist, if not above all Poet.

We would sit about on rude benches whilst Mme. Sélysette would bring us shandygaff brewed after a recipe of Gringoire himself. Then he would talk and your Compiler make furtive shorthand notes. Above all Gringoire loved to talk about cooking for he boasted that he was not only the best but the most economical cook in the world. How that may be your Compiler hesitates to say. To eat a meal prepared by Gringoire was certainly an adventure and when you felt adventurous had its titillations. But only Mme. Sélysette who had accompanied him into his English wilds from the distant South could have told you whether Gringoire was as economical in his cuisine as he professed to be. For he swore that the saviour of society in the end would be the good but excellently economical cook.

But Mme. Sélysette, dark, alert and with exquisitely [11]pencilled brows and as loyal as she was goodhumored, never got beyond saying that in his culinary furies Gringoire needed at least three persons—whom I took to be herself, the diminutive maid and the almost more diminutive stable boy—to clear up after he had boiled an egg.

How Gringoire proposed to save the world by intensive kitchen gardening and exquisite but economical cookery may appear hereafter. His years in the trenches had taught him one thing—to be an eccentric economist, in petto, since he regarded himself as an extinct poet and proposed to live on his minute army pension. And I think his ambition really was to teach persons forced to live on minute incomes how to lead graceful, poetic and pleasant lives and so to save the world.

Thus it would perhaps have been better could your Compiler have provided you with a work useful to young couples contemplating matrimony on ten shillings a week ... or a month ... or a year. That would have been an enterprise certainly to gladden the heart of Gringoire. Or it might have been better had it taken the form of a Cottager Cookery Book or a Cottager’s Guide to Gardening or the Keeping of Goats instead of the war-reminiscences of a contemplative [12]and sensitive soul. Yes, to be sure that would have been better. One can only console one’s self that when it comes to war-reminiscences the contemplative and sensitive soul has been little represented. So, for the matter of that, has the poetic but economical chef.

But the present writer, alas, has not the excellent—but so meticulous!—mind that will let him sit down and write many paragraphs such as that following this one. Neither has Gringoire the patience to dictate to the writer details of his methods. The most he has done is to let his Boswell into his frame of mind. We once, together, got as far as this:

“Chops, Mutton, to deal with.

“Fritto Misto: Stock: Mixed Meats en casserole.

“Take two chops. Pare off all the fat till you have two noisettes de mouton. Save each particle of meat and each particle of fat from the tail ends of the chops, separate, but as zealously as you preserve every memory of your well-beloved. You will then have four little divisions: two noisettes for the Fritto Misto; two chop bones for stock; a little pile of fat for rendering down; a little pile of fragments of meat. Place the bones immediately in a small casserole of water, with salt, two bay leaves, pepper, one leaf of sage, and rice if you [13]like. It will help you if you tie the bones together with a piece of string having a long end so that you may pull them out. Let this simmer for thirty-six hours.⁠[1] Have ready also six roots of salsify; one-half pound of French beans; one-half pound of cooked peas; and one pound of potatoes, cut into slices. (All these vegetables should be cooked ready. It will improve matters if the peas are very young and boiled in syrup.) Also two tomatoes sliced in halves, the meat of two rashers of

bacon, and a few mushrooms, and half a dozen sprigs of parsley. (The bacon fat must be saved for rendering down.) Also two slices of bread half an inch thick. Have ready also a large pie dish half filled with water.

[1] This is the result of the Army. I do not believe that Gringoire ever simmers his bones for thirty-six hours. But in the Army it was woe to the Colonel whose bones did not simmer for thirty-six hours or who did not say so when an apoplectic gentleman with a blue hat-band came around. The Colonel would lose his battalion, his D.S.O., and the esteem of his fellow men.

“Now take an earthenware frying pan with a white glazed lining. Put in sufficient frying fat to fill this to three-quarters of its depth when boiling. Set this on the fire and bring the fat to the boil. (Boiling fat will be absolutely still—stiller than any waters at even; as still as is Madame Sélysette when, in the same room, Gringoire is writing. It will have ceased to bubble, and, [14]above its surface, will float a filmy wreath of bluish vapor. You may test it by dropping in a piece of bread crumb. If this becomes crisp in sixty seconds, your fat will be ready for what follows.)

“As soon as the fat boils, drop in your two slices of bread, which will be large enough later to support the noisettes and which will be trimmed to improve their appearance. During that minute, place in a frying basket your two noisettes of mutton and the sliced cold potatoes. (Gringoire likes his fried potatoes not too crisp. Those who like them biscuit-wise should fry them in the basket for a quarter of an hour longer than the mutton.) Take out from the frying fat the slices of bread, let them drip into the fat, place them handy on a clean plate ... D—n it, that’s enough!”

The reader will understand that at this point my friend Gringoire ceased dictating and ceased violently. Thus a Gringoire cookery book cannot be compiled. For, though Gringoire will cook for hours and hours if visitors are expected, and though he will talk, equally for hours and hours, about eating, about digestion, about French, Italian, and even German cookery as they affect the emotions, he finds it tiresome to tie down his mind to the recording of processes.

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It is the same with gardening; the keeping of goats, ducks, chickens; the training of dogs, cats, and horses. He will spend hours in meditating over his onion bed.

And then Madame Sélysette will call from the bedroom window of the Gingerbread Cottage:

“I do love to see you, Gringoire, pottering about and pretending to be busy.” For Gringoire will have risen at 6:30 and will have done something with hoes, spades, trowels, lines, and other paraphernalia. But he will have thought more. For the rotation of crops on a quarter of an acre of sandy soil that has to be at once a formal garden and the main food supply of a couple, of the tiniest income—that is a subject for endless thought.

It is a subject also for endless economies, schemes, calculations. The calculations concern manure—for the accounts of agriculture are the most complicated of accounts. You may show a loss on the fattening of an ox, a chicken, a goat, a duck, or a pig—and yet its droppings may so enrich your land as to give you actually a handsome balance of profit. Or again a crop may appear superabundant, little palatable, or unattractive—but, [16]fed to one animal or another, it will beautifully adorn your board on Christmas day.

So in the Gingerbread Cottage—and it is, in all but looks, a very bad cottage, with a roof that leaks, walls that used to drip with damp, cupboards that, till the advent of Gringoire, smelled of mold and bred the very largest spiders that can be imagined—Gringoire pursues at once his economies, his meditations, and his career as a poet.

But he is only able to be communicative as to his meditations. If Madame Sélysette asks him how to make potage this or that, he says: “Oh, throw in any old thing.” Or again! This spring the writer overheard the following dialogue between him and a small boy who was weeding whilst he dug.

“What is the most important thing in gardening, boy?”

“Manure, sir.”

“What is the next most important thing?”

“Tools, sir.”

“And the next?”

“Money to buy seeds, sir.”

“Wrong in every particular,” said Gringoire in a terrible voice. “The first thing is brains; and the second [17]thing is brains; and the third thing is brains. Do you understand?”

The boy said, “Yes, sir.” But one may doubt if he was really much wiser. And Gringoire continued somewhat as follows: “I have no manure, no tools, and no money—but you will see in the autumn that I shall have the most productive garden in the country!”

From which it will appear that Gringoire has some of the characteristics of a Southern origin. Today his garden would not at all points impress a French gardener—but in some it would. For, in his youth Gringoire sat under the great Professor Gressent, Professor of the Potager Moderne, at the Sorbonne in Paris. From him he learned that thought, devotion to the task, and any bit of metal on the end of a stick shaped like a hoe will take the place of manure, tools, and money. For Professor Gressent, during one session, used to commence every lecture by ordering his pupils to inscribe on their tablets the mystical sentence: “Trois fois biner vaut deux fois engraisser.”

And when his Boswell, the writer, asked him the other day how he got his results, he answered:

“By trying to establish what that old fool Tolstoi called the Kingdom of God within me!”

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The writer took him to mean that it is the spirit in which a job is attacked that alone can sanctify the job—and that, in that way, the godly grow fat at the expense of the unrighteous. Before the war Gringoire was an ordinary poet, such as you might see in Soho or in various foreign underground haunts by the baker’s dozen, eating nasty meats, drinking nasty wines, usually in nasty company. How the war changed his heart is here recorded.

This is therefore a Reconstructionary Tale.

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II Gardens and Flats

“I wonder,” Gringoire⁠[2] began one evening, “if my experience of landscape during the war has been that of many people....”

[2] “Gringoire.” This is not of course, our poet’s name, but a nickname earned actually at school. There is a story by Alphonse Daudet, in “Lettres de Mon Moulin,” called the “Chèvre de M. Séguin,” which relates how in the end the wolf ate Mr. Séguin’s goat. This story, in the form of a letter, is addressed to a poet, one Gringoire, and is meant to show that though a poet may struggle all his life against poverty, in the end the wolf, starvation, will get him. At Gringoire’s school the Sixth Form were studying French from the “Lettres de Mon Moulin,” and since even at that date Gringoire wrote poems, his kindly schoolmates learned the name and so bestowed it upon him—as it has been bestowed on many out-at-elbowed literati.

It was an evening in spring. Gringoire had not been very long established in his cottage—which, because of the nature of the poet himself and of the poet’s adventurous establishment, the writer automatically styles in his mind the Gingerbread Cottage. Gringoire, with a spirit of hospitality that was large and open rather than either considered or calculating, had invited a party of London friends to share his Easter with him. During the day he rushed about a great [20]deal, cooking highly flavored dishes of a ragout type, on paraffin stoves, washing up, sweeping, gardening, gathering unusual wild herbs for salads, so that he was busy, and we of the party saw little of him.

Fortunately it was fine. For at that date the Gingerbread Cottage let in water like a sieve through the roof, the floor, the rough walls. Great holes indeed gaped in the plaster of the ceilings. But he had whitewashed the walls, stuck pots on shelves, improvised a couch out of his camp bed, and lit fires of sticks in the sitting room. So in the evenings we sat and listened to his talking.

For Gringoire was a conversationalist. Like most dynamic, overwhelming, and energetic poets, he had not the patience to listen to the remarks of his fellows or to answer. He would be silent most of the day. But toward evening, as like as not, he would suddenly suspend all his activities, and with very possibly a hair-sieve or a trowel in his hand, gesticulating too, he would begin to talk.

As a house party the Easter experiment was not a success for all of us. Gringoire had hardened himself in Flanders; the rest had not. But since, as a byproduct of the experience, Madame Sélysette had consented [21]to share and adorn his lot, Gringoire had his reward. And the writer secured these records of his monologues:

“I wonder,” then, he asked on one of these evenings, “if my experience of landscape during the war has been that of many people.” And without waiting he continued much as follows: “For I may say that before August, 1914, I lived more through my eyes than through any other sense, and in consequence certain corners of the earth had, singularly, the power to stir me.” But from the moment when, on the 4th of August, 1914, the Germans crossed the Belgian frontier “near a place called Gemmenich,” aspects of the earth no longer existed for him.

The earth existed, of course. Extending to immense distances of field-gray; dimly colored in singularly shaped masses, as if the colors on Mercator’s projection had been nearly washed out by a wet brush. Stretching away, very flat, silenced, in suspense, the earth—orbis terrarum veteribus notus—seemed to await the oncoming legions, gray too, but with the shimmer of gold standards that should pour out from that little gap, “near a place called Gemmenich,” and should obscure and put to shame all the green champaign lands of the [22]world, as the green grass of meadows is put to shame and obscured by clay, water pouring through a gap in a dike. That was the earth.

There were no nooks, no little, sweet corners; there were no assured homes, countries, provinces, kingdoms, or races. All the earth held its breath and waited.

“And it is only today,” my friend went on, “that I see again a little nook of the earth; it forms the tiniest of hidden valleys, with a little red stream that buries itself in the red earth beneath the tall green of the grass and the pink and purple haze of campions, the occasional gold of buttercups, the cream of meadowsweet. The plants in the garden wave in stiffness like a battalion on parade—the platoons of lettuce, the headquarters’ staff, all sweet peas, and the color company, which is of scarlet runners. The little old cottage is under a cliff of rock, like a gingerbread house from a Grimm’s fairy tale; the silver birches and the tall pines confront it; the sunlight lies warmer than you could imagine in the hollow, and a nightingale is running in and out of the bean-stalks. Yes, a nightingale of midsummer that has abandoned the deep woodland and runs through the garden, a princess turned housekeeper, [23]because it has young to feed. Think of noticing that!”

During the four years that the consciousness of the war lasted, he had noticed only four landscapes and birds only once—to know that he was noticing them—for themselves. Of course, one has memories of aspects of the world—but of a world that was only a background for emotions.

Even, for instance, when one saw poor Albert, by some trick of mnemonics, from the lettering of the huge word “Estaminet” across the front of a battered house in the Place where, in the blinding sunlight, some Australian transport men were watering their mules, and one recognized it for a place one had visited twenty years before and had forgotten—even when one saw the remains of the garden where, twenty years before, we had waited whilst our lunch of omelette, cutlets, and salad was prepared, or even when one saw the immense placard with “Caution” erected in the center of the white rubbish and white rubble of the Place, or the desecrated statue of the Madonna, leaning in an abandoned attitude from the church tower—even then one was so preoccupied, so shut in on one’s self, that these things were not objects that one looked at [24]for themselves. They were merely landmarks. Divisional Headquarters, one had been told, was behind the N.E. corner of the Place, the notice-board was to the N.E. of one’s self, therefore one must pass it to reach

Divisional Headquarters. It was Headquarters one wanted, not the storing of the mind with observed aspects.

So Gringoire had four landscapes, which represent four moments in four years when, for very short intervals, the strain of the war lifted itself from the mind. They were, those intermissions of the spirit, exactly like gazing through rifts in a mist. Do you know what it is to be on a Welsh mountain side when a heavy mist comes on? Nothing remains. You are there by yourself.... And the only preoccupation you have with the solid, invisible world is the boulders over which you stumble and the tufts of herbage that you try to recognize as your path. Then suddenly the mist is riven perpendicularly, and for a moment you see a pallid, flat plain stretching to infinity beneath your feet and running palely to a sea horizon on a level with your eyes. There will be pale churches, pale fields, and on a ghostly channel the wraiths of scattered islands. Then it will be all gone.

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