第38章 THE CONSCRIPT AND THE CRISIS(2)

The children kicked their little legs,wriggled about the seats,and gaped at the arched roof while their mothers were on their knees praying their own prayers,and here and there crying.The gray clouds of rain outside gathered,I suppose,more and more;for the deep church continuously darkened.The lads in front began to sing a military hymn in odd,rather strained voices;I could not disentangle the words,but only one perpetual refrain;so that it sounded like Sacrarterumbrrar pour la patrie,Valdarkararump pour la patrie.

Then this ceased;and silence continued,the coloured windows growing gloomier and gloomier with the clouds.In the dead stillness a child started crying suddenly and incoherently.In a city far to the north a French diplomatist and a German aristocrat were talking.

I will not make any commentary on the thing that could blur the outline of its almost cruel actuality.I will not talk nor allow any one else to talk about "clericalism"and "militarism."Those who talk like that are made of the same mud as those who call all the angers of the unfortunate "Socialism."The women who were calling in the gloom around me on God and the Mother of God were not "clericalists ";or,if they were,they had forgotten it.And I will bet my boots the young men were not "militarists"--quite the other way just then.The priest made a short speech;he did not utter any priestly dogmas (whatever they are),he uttered platitudes.In such circumstances platitudes are the only possible things to say;because they are true.He began by saying that he supposed a large number of them would be uncommonly glad not to go.

They seemed to assent to this particular priestly dogma with even more than their alleged superstitious credulity.He said that war was hateful,and that we all hated it;but that "in all things reasonable"the law of one's own commonwealth was the voice of God.He spoke about Joan of Arc;and how she had managed to be a bold and successful soldier while still preserving her virtue and practising her religion;then he gave them each a little paper book.To which they replied (after a brief interval for reflection):

Pongprongperesklang pour la patrie,Tambraugtararronc pour la patrie.

which I feel sure was the best and most pointed reply.

While all this was happening feelings quite indescribable crowded about my own darkening brain,as the clouds crowded above the darkening church.

They were so entirely of the elements and the passions that I cannot utter them in an idea,but only in an image.It seemed to me that we were barricaded in this church,but we could not tell what was happening outside the church.The monstrous and terrible jewels of the windows darkened or glistened under moving shadow or light,but the nature of that light and the shapes of those shadows we did not know and hardly dared to guess.The dream began,I think,with a dim fancy that enemies were already in the town,and that the enormous oaken doors were groaning under their hammers.Then I seemed to suppose that the town itself had been destroyed by fire,and effaced,as it may be thousands of years hence,and that if I opened the door I should come out on a wilderness as flat and sterile as the sea.Then the vision behind the veil of stone and slate grew wilder with earthquakes.I seemed to see chasms cloven to the foundations of all things,and letting up an infernal dawn.Huge things happily hidden from us had climbed out of the abyss,and were striding about taller than the clouds.And when the darkness crept from the sapphires of Mary to the sanguine garments of St.John I fancied that some hideous giant was walking round the church and looking in at each window in turn.

Sometimes,again,I thought of that church with coloured windows as a ship carrying many lanterns struggling in a high sea at night.Sometimes I thought of it as a great coloured lantern itself,hung on an iron chain out of heaven and tossed and swung to and fro by strong wings,the wings of the princes of the air.But I never thought of it or the young men inside it save as something precious and in peril,or of the things outside but as something barbaric and enormous.

I know there are some who cannot sympathise with such sentiments of limitation;I know there are some who would feel no touch of the heroic tenderness if some day a young man,with red hair,large ears,and his mother's lozenges in his pocket,were found dead in uniform in the passes of the Vosges.But on this subject I have heard many philosophies and thought a good deal for myself;and the conclusion I have come to is Sacrarterumbrrar pour la Pattie,and it is not likely that I shall alter it now.

But when I came out of the church there were none of these things,but only a lot of Shops,including a paper-shop,on which the posters announced that the negotiations were proceeding satisfactorily.