In The Regiment We
Used To Drink Black Coffee Without Sugar, And Cut Off A Great Hunk Of
Stale Crust, And Eat Nothing More Till The Halt:
For the matter of
that, the great victories of '93 were fought upon such unsubstantial
meals; for the Republicans fought first and ate afterwards, being in
this quite unlike the Ten Thousand.
Sailors I know eat nothing for
some hours - I mean those who turn out at four in the morning; I could
give the name of the watch, but that I forget it and will not be
plagued to look up technicalities. Dogs eat the first thing they come
across, cats take a little milk, and gentlemen are accustomed to get
up at nine and eat eggs, bacon, kidneys, ham, cold pheasant, toast,
coffee, tea, scones, and honey, after which they will boast that their
race is the hardiest in the world and ready to bear every fatigue in
the pursuit of Empire. But what rule governs all this? Why is
breakfast different from all other things, so that the Greeks called
it the best thing in the world, and so that each of us in a vague way
knows that he would eat at breakfast nothing but one special kind of
food, and that he could not imagine breakfast at any other hour in the
day?
The provocation to this inquiry (which I have here no time to pursue)
lies in the extraordinary distaste that I conceived that morning for
Brule wine. My ham and bread and chocolate I had consumed overnight.
I thought, in my folly, that I could break my fast on a swig of what
had seemed to me, only the night before, the best revivifier and
sustenance possible. In the harsh dawn it turned out to be nothing but
a bitter and intolerable vinegar. I make no attempt to explain this,
nor to say why the very same wine that had seemed so good in the
forest (and was to seem so good again later on by the canal) should
now repel me. I can only tell you that this heavy disappointment
convinced me of a great truth that a Politician once let slip in my
hearing, and that I have never since forgotten. _'Man,'_ said the
Director of the State, _'man is but the creature of circumstance.'_
As it was, I lit a pipe of tobacco and hobbled blindly along for miles
under and towards the brightening east. Just before the sun rose I
turned and looked backward from a high bridge that recrossed the
river. The long effort of the night had taken me well on my way. I was
out of the familiar region of the garrison. The great forest-hills
that I had traversed stood up opposite the dawn, catching the new
light; heavy, drifting, but white clouds, rare at such an hour, sailed
above them. The valley of the Moselle, which I had never thought of
save as a half mountainous region, had fallen, to become a kind of
long garden, whose walls were regular, low, and cultivated slopes.
The main waterway of the valley was now not the river but the canal
that fed from it.
The tall grasses, the leaves, and poplars bordering the river and the
canal seemed dark close to me, but the valley as a whole was vague, a
mass of trees with one Lorraine church-tower showing, and the delicate
slopes bounding it on either side.
Descending from this bridge I found a sign-post, that told me I had
walked thirty-two kilometres - which is twenty miles - from Toul; that
it was one kilometre to Flavigny, and heaven knows how much to a place
called Charmes. The sun rose in the mist that lay up the long even
trends of the vale, between the low and level hills, and I pushed on
my thousand yards towards Flavigny. There, by a special providence, I
found the entertainment and companionship whose lack had left me
wrecked all these early hours.
As I came into Flavigny I saw at once that it was a place on which a
book might easily be written, for it had a church built in the
seventeenth century, when few churches were built outside great towns,
a convent, and a general air of importance that made of it that grand
and noble thing, that primary cell of the organism of Europe, that
best of all Christian associations - a large village.
I say a book might be written upon it, and there is no doubt that a
great many articles and pamphlets must have been written upon it, for
the French are furiously given to local research and reviews, and to
glorifying their native places: and when they cannot discover folklore
they enrich their beloved homes by inventing it.
There was even a man (I forget his name) who wrote a delightful book
called _Popular and Traditional Songs of my Province,_ which book,
after he was dead, was discovered to be entirely his own invention,
and not a word of it familiar to the inhabitants of the soil. He was a
large, laughing man that smoked enormously, had great masses of hair,
and worked by night; also he delighted in the society of friends, and
talked continuously. I wish he had a statue somewhere, and that they
would pull down to make room for it any one of those useless bronzes
that are to be found even in the little villages, and that commemorate
solemn, whiskered men, pillars of the state. For surely this is the
habit of the true poet, and marks the vigour and recurrent origin of
poetry, that a man should get his head full of rhythms and catches,
and that they should jumble up somehow into short songs of his own.
What could more suggest (for instance) a whole troop of dancing words
and lovely thoughts than this refrain from the Tourdenoise -
... Son beau corps est en terre
Son ame en Paradis.
Tu ris?
Et ris, tu ris, ma Bergere,
Ris, ma Bergere, tu ris.
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