Blasting and Bomardiering Read online

  And to these misunderstandings, which I believe I detected; Mr. Pound, now, he may have been preoccupied with Platonic ideologies, with Fourrierism, or the proto-fascist arguments of Sorel. He may have exchanged letters in code with Lenin in Switzerland, for all I know. But for my part I was an artist, first and last. I was concerned with the externals of life, in conformity with my innate habit of mind, not with its mechanics. I was the expert who had been called in by the Caliph (as is described in my Caliph's Design)—or who had called himself in. But the Prime Minister of England in 1914 could not be expected to accept this simple explanation. For the destruction of a capital city is a highly political operation. And these blasting operations, so clamorously advocated, suggested dissatisfaction with the regime as well as with the architecture of the houses. And 'Kill John Bull With Art!' The title of one of my most notorious articles—there was a jolly piece of sansculottism. What could that mean, if it did not point to tumbril and tocsin?

  Subsequently I had other conversations with Mr. Asquith, all of which followed the same lines. He would sight me, at a party or reception, an expression of polite intelligence would light up his face, he would come up to me with a flattering purposefulness, he would make a few discreet inquiries about my activities, as if these had been a little secret between the

  Prime Minister and myself. Although what he mentioned was mere painted 'futurist' absurdities, this was as it were a code. We were in fact discussing matters of far more import. I might almost have been the member of a powerful secret society. I could not have had bestowed upon me a more attentive regard if I had been. It is probably a fact that Prime Ministers never quite know to whom they may not be talking—if half is true what they tell us about these subterranean sects. He may even have thought that I was an Arch-dragon, of the Kahal or something, who can say? Anyhow, it was very agreeable.

  Not very long before the War I went to lunch at 10 Downing Street. It was in the room decorated under instructions from Disraeli, I believe. All I remember is that there were a great number of Asquiths present. It was perhaps some family celebration. Elizabeth Asquith, now Princess Bibesco (not the Paris one) was very dark and handsome, reminding me of Mr. Augustus John's more aristocratic gypsies, very solemn and upright at the luncheon table.

  The last occasion upon which I saw Lord Oxford was in the latter part of the War. I was on leave from the Front, and was invited to be one of a great dinner-party given by Lady Cunard at Claridges Hotel. There was no one there but myself who was not a great political or social luminary, and I was the only one of the guests in uniform—the only one of military age, or not of cabinet or viceregal rank. This was a very great honour, and an occasion from which I drew a great deal of instruction. Lord Curzon, Lord Oxford, Lord Hardinge, were there: Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, the Minister of Education, next to whose very amiable wife I sat.

  After dinner all these miscellaneous magnates moved about and talked with one another. Lord Oxford observed me, and crossed the room to greet me and have his usual chat. This time I was a soldier. Unquestionably a suspicious circumstance! What could I be next? And then my rank. A second Lieutenant? Curiouser and curiouser! One star upon the shoulder? Oddly modest!—for one with so many opportunities of pulling strings and getting influence exerted!

  I thought I detected a new inquisitiveness. Of course I may have been entirely wrong, all this is pure conjecture. What was I in? Ah, yes, the Artillery. A pause. (There was much phantom snuff-taking.)—Been at the Front, or was I perhaps—? Yes, at the Front.—Ah, at the Front.—A pause.—Just back from the Front? Yes just back. From the real Front (I forget how this was put).—Ay, from the real Front, where shells were bursting all the time and where Death stood at everybody's elbow! (Though I did not say that—that was how the 'non-combatant' who had not 'been there' would think of it.)—Having informed himself as to that, and established the fact that for some reason best known to myself I had gone to live in the Valley of the Shadow, he hastily changed the subject. The most talented of his own sons had been killed in action and death was everywhere. The 'Front' was not a subject upon which one dwelt. One turned one's back on war, upon this unspeakable scandal. And Lord Oxford, though he had got into a war, was not the man to continue in it happily, or to see others 'winning' it with complacency. But I feel sure that there was something about all this that planted the seeds of further inquisitive, idle, question-marks in the capacious recesses of his mind. What was I doing here? What had I been doing as an obscure second loot in 'the Trenches' over there? That I was alone, in this hand-picked throng of great personages, in humblest khaki, masquerading as a simple 'gunner'—a sort of Unknown Soldier decorated with one star, no more, representing no great interest, social or political, was an eccentricity of 'Maud's' perhaps. Or perhaps I was not what I seemed, on the other hand. Perhaps I was the Boojum!

  Lord Curzon I observed at one time sitting by himself on a sofa, with the twisted grimace of painful, staring, rumination which seemed characteristic of him. Afterwards, when this very able administrator and ambitious statesman, with all the typical virtues of the artistocrat, was passed over for Earl Baldwin, I called to mind the pessimistic figure upon the sofa at the party at Claridges. Certainly whenever I saw Lord Curzon he had a fixed look that bordered on distress, as if he had pre-figured what was in store for him. Doubtless he knew all along that the dice were loaded against him. He understood that men of his open and unbending stamp in England are never allowed to reach the highest offices of state. Those are reserved for birds of another and duller feather. Such men are too proud, they are not sufficiently pliant: they do not make ideal servants, and are from the start suspect in the Bankers Olympus. 'Power!' he burst out on one occasion, when some individual who wanted something done reminded him that he had the necessary power at least to put it through, if he wanted to: 'Why, I have not the power to send an office boy across Whitehall!' And that was before he was excluded from the supreme office of state, when everyone expected he would receive it, when everything pointed to him as the appropriate person to occupy it.

  CHAPTER VI

  In Berwickshire, August, 1914

  There is one great exception, to everything disobliging that must be said regarding Mayfair. That exception is the embodiment of it in a sense. And yet she is the great exception that proves the rule. I refer to Lady Cunard.

  I shall have occasion to return to this celebrated 'hostess' later on. Great last-ditcher that she is, there she bravely holds out, in a corner of Grosvenor Square—in spite of fires, supertax, more and more derelict conditions, in this decaying landscape, with TO LET boards and dusty shutters all about her. Lady Cunard is not only intelligent, of superlative party-wit, a live wire in the realm of music, a keen politician, but a very good-hearted person—a 'classless' virtue. No grim sensations of bored foreboding assail you when you receive an invitation to her house. Credit to whom credit is due! Since I am engaged in such a chronicle as this, I had better effect this little piece of social salvage!

  Amongst the people I came across immediately before the War, who were not of Mayfair, or in any case not the standard fashionable article, was a very attractive American, of the name of Mrs. Turner. Since then she has become the wife of General Spears, and is best known as Mary Borden, which was her maiden name. The attractive freshness of the New World, and of a classless community, cut her out in the bogus Eighteenth Century Mayfair decor, as a vivid silhouette.

  It was at the house of Mrs. Turner, under the shadow of Westminster Abbey, that I met for the first time Mr. Bernard Shaw. I went with Mr. and Mrs. Shaw to the Opera, I recollect though I cannot for the life of me recall a single utterance for which Mr. Shaw was accountable, to make the meeting other than a dry fact. I just met Mr. Shaw at luncheon. He asked me or Mrs. Shaw asked me to go to the Opera. I went. That is all. We undoubtedly conversed. We must have done so. But he did not say 'Britannia's hard on the lions', or anything striking of that order. He seemed a very faded figure to me. Perhaps at
the time he was not well, for I met him later on and he was much more lively. And I suppose, realizing that I took no interest, he took no interest. It must have been as it were a mutual blank.

  Some weeks or so before the War appeared on the horizon, I went up to Berwickshire to stay with Mary Borden, or Mrs. Turner, who had rented a country-house across the Border where a large house-party was in progress. Her husband, a Scottish missionary of great charm, was with her, and Mr. and Mrs. Ford Madox Hueffer. Mrs. Hueffer was Violet Hunt, the once famous author of White Rose of Weary Leaf.

  I do not know when I first became conscious of the possibility of such an immense contretemps as a General War. Not at all, I think, until the war was well under way.

  In any case, when I first began to notice that that War, that Dreadnoughts meant—England and Germany building ship for ship, against each other—that the effect of that cause was about to declare itself, I felt but a slight tremor of interest. What it portended for me, to go no farther, I had not the remotest idea. 'War', was a word for me only. It was a history-book word/

  However farseeing I had been, though, and competent in assessing war-risk, I could not have foreseen the great social revolution in Russia, which lurked behind the 'Great War', as a yet more furibund shadow, and which made even of the European War a bagatelle. And as to the Peace—unless the Peace was all plotted and planned beforehand, too, as we are assured the War was, that surely no one could have prefigured. No one—here I feel I must be on certain ground—could have foreseen the vindictive dismemberment of Hungary for instance— the deliberate political annihilation of a strong state to provide an artificial volume for a weak state—everywhere a starving of the healthy organism, and a gorging of the sick, so as to put a premium on the second-rate. The insane attempt to stultify and hamstring forever all that was robust, industrious, intelligent, in Europe, and put in the place of the real the unreal. These barbarous triumphs of 'democracy' I should have been a seer indeed to imagine. In short, had I been able to see Armageddon Number one, I could at least not have foreseen Armageddon Number two, which is now bearing down on us; a coming home to roost of all the Peace Treaties.

  Gradually I became aware, by the greater attentiveness with which everyone read the papers in the morning, and in the evening, too, when they came in from Duns, that something was happening. Without much perserverance, I began looking at the papers, too. And then came the first yard-high newspaper headlines, announcing the first ULTIMATUM.

  A conversation occurred at breakfast between Mrs. Turner and Ford Madox Hueffer, to which I listened with surprise, Mrs. Turner was emphatic; she seemed very sure of her ground. I remember admiring her political sagacity.

  'There won't be any war, Ford. Not here. England won't go into a war.'

  Ford thrust his mouth out, fish-fashion, as if about to gasp for breath. He goggled his eyes and waggled one eyelid about. He just moved his lips a little and we heard him say, in a breathless sotto voce—

  'England will.' He had said that already. He passed his large protruding blue eyes impassively over the faces of these children—absorbed in their self-satisfied eras of sheltered peace.

  'England will! But Ford,' said Mrs. Turner, 'England has a Liberal Government. A Liberal Government cannot declare war.'

  'Of course it can't,' I said, frowning at Ford. 'Liberal Governments can't go to war. That would not be liberal. That would be conservative.'

  Ford sneered very faindy and inoffensively: he was sneering at the British Government, rather than at us. He was being omniscient, bored, sleepy Ford, sunk in his tank of sloth. From his prolonged sleep he was staring out at us with his fish-blue eyes—kind, wise, but bored. Or some such idea. His mask was only just touched with derision at our childishness.

  'Well, Ford,' said Mrs. Turner, bantering the wise old elephant. 'You don't agree!'

  T don't agree,' Ford answered, in his faintest voice, with consummate indifference, 'because it has always been the Liberals who have gone to war. It is because it is a Liberal Government that it will declare war.'

  And of course, as we all know, a Liberal Government did declare it. Within a few days of the period of those country house conversations Great Britain was at war, within a year or so Britain had become so many Heartbreak Houses; and the British Empire, covered in blood, was gasping its way through an immense and disastrous war, upon which it should never have entered.

  But I understood as little about all that as the peacocks at the Zoo. Only slowly it dawned on me that something overwhelmingly unsuitable had come to pass; and that my friend, Life, was somehow treacherous and not at all the good sport and 'square-shooter' I had supposed him to be.

  After breakfast Ford read the other papers in the Hall. Coming down from my room and going towards the main house-door, Ford put down his paper and held out his hand.

  'Help me up, there's a good chap,' he panted, with a pained discomfort. He liked being helped up from chairs by people over whom he exercised any authority, by nobodies or juniors. He got on his feet with a limp, as though he had stuck together. He shook. He stood still, his feet pointing flatly to the right and left.

  'When will the car be ready?' he asked, in his soft-panting 'diplomatic' nasal undertone.

  'I'm just going to see.'

  'I'll come with you,' said Ford.

  The car was just outside the door. Ford lit one eye, his teeth appeared through his walrus moustache, he nodded, and went and had a jolly companionable talk with the chauffeur. Soon the guests had collected. They went to play golf: I left them near the town, and went into it alone to get the latest papers.

  1

  I Hand Over my Self-Portrait to my Colleague of 'Blast'

  My life as an artist and my life as a soldier intertwine, in this unaffected narrative. I show, too, going from the particular to the general, how War and Art in those days mingled, the features of the latter as stern as—if not sterner than—the former. This book is Art—War—Art, in three panels. War is the centre panel. But for me it was only a part of Art: my sort of life—the life of the 'intellect'—come to life. A disappointing imitation. I preferred the real thing: namely Art.

  So we have, at the end of the last chapter, a breakfast table in Scotland, a few days off war, with a political ignoramus (myself) being instructed by Ford Madox Hueffer in the paradoxical necessity of war, just because a liberal government was there, and it is always a liberal government that makes war. In consulting my boxfuls of letters, laundry bills, sketchbooks and articles, dating from this period, in order to get a bit of local colour into this self-portrait, I remarked (with astonishment) that I was by no means a fool. I did see a thing or two that I shouldn't have expected myself to see. Here and there I am staggered by my clairvoyance.

  Is it not remarkable how a couple of psyches can inhabit the same body? Have you ever noticed that? I mean, you can be, at the same time, quite acute and quite obtuse. It is possible, for instance, to be perfectly aware that a man is untrustworthy, and yet trust him implicitly. You trust him: and he rifles your drawer and makes off with the fiver you have dropped into it (while he was observing you). You are very surprised. Looking back on it, however, you realize that you never, in fact, trusted him at all. As you popped the fiver into the drawer, you knew he would take it. It's odd isn't it?

  Life was good and easy, and I called Life 'friend'. I'd never hidden anything from him, and he'd never hidden anything from me. Or so I thought. I knew everything. He was an awfully intelligent companion, we had the same tastes (apparently) and he was awfully fond of me. And all the time he was plotting up a mass-murder. I had been on terms of intimacy with Crippen or Nana Sahib.

  It took me some to realize this fully. But from the very beginning of the War I got wise to it, in fits and starts. I saw I'd got into rather shady company the moment he pulled out his gun and started shooting.

  In the first months of the War I attempted to keep the home fires burning. With the sublimest misunderstanding of the sort of
situation I was confronted with I decided on 'business as usual'—along with the Daily Mail. I brought out a Number Two of my paper Blast. But that, even, was surprisingly intelligent considering. And everyone else being as stupid as I was, it went quite well. It was a 'war number'.

  The observations in this War Number were shrewd, considering. In reading it over just now, I rubbed my eyes. And I cannot improve on the account given there of 'how the war came' and how we all took it.

  The only trouble about it is that for such an autobiography as the present, it is somewhat highbrow. This is not a potboiling self-portrait. But it is meant to be pretty plain-sailing. And no more highbrow publication ever saw the light in England than Blast.

  Still, to do a true self-portrait one must put in the highbrow, mustn't one, being of that ilk? It's no use cutting down those towering temples to an ape-like shallowness of brow. To get a likeness must be our constant endeavour. And since this is a portrait of a great highbrow, at a certain moment of his life, we must not shrink from writing a bit over the head of the Clubman on occasion.

  Besides, what I have dug up in Blast does register with surprising sharpness first-hand impressions of the opening stages of a great war. You ought to know about the opening stages of a great war. It is a first-hand impression, of butcher-like directness, but translated into what may seem to you horrid language. It makes a dream and a lullaby of those dark happenings, which plunged us like a school of pet gold fish, out of our immaculate 'pre-war' tank, into the raging ocean.

  Up in Scotland there was an Olympiad, it seems. Macbeth's witches had gathered at Sarajevo, to preside at a diabolical brew beside which the plots of Shakespeare were storms-in-teacups. Scotland was free of all such presences at the moment, Morpeth living in the golden age.

  Meanwhile I watched the papers coming in from London with their crashing headlines. Also I saw the flaming posters of the great Morpeth sporting event. Here, in a sort of diary form, with a fictional character to be the diarist, is my contemporary account of these events.