Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (985 page)

Occasionally Russian officers wandered through our part of Northern India who spoke admirable French and explained disarmingly their innocent missions. And there was an annually recurrent native theatrical troupe that presented Indian plays in the bazaar, whose elderly and unshaven German scene-painter had been, he told me, “out on the barricades in ‘48”. He revealed to me a France I have never imagined.

In the Anglo-Indian life of those days were no theatres; no picture-galleries; no cinemas; no transport other than the horse; and no society. Every one was either an official or a soldier, with his work to do. Our community numbered in the hot weather perhaps seventy whites in all. At the big Christmas dances, when the outlying stations came in, four hundred might be present for a week! The climate, through half the year, forbade exercise after seven in the morning and before six in the evening. There was time, then, to read — anything and everything one could find — from Scarron’s dreary
Roman Comique
to Gyp, as well as that ponderous
Novoe Vremya
and the French papers. The journals in our office came in from Paris to Pekin; each wonderfully preserving its own national smell, so that one could identify it in the dark. At that time — ’83 to ‘88 — the French Press was not nationally enamoured of England. I answered some of their criticisms by what I then conceived to be parodies of Victor Hugo’s more extravagant prose. The peace of Europe, however, was not seriously endangered by these exercises; my illustrious contemporaries must have known that newspapers have to be filled daily.

After these happy years, I found myself again in Paris at the Exhibition of 1889–90. My city was much as I had left it, except for an edifice called the Eiffel Tower, but it was still ignorant of wireless and automobiles. I used to establish myself at a small hotel in the Batignolles, dominated by a fat elderly landlady who brought me unequalled
café au lait
in big bowls. I must have made other friendships also — else how did I come to assist at that moonlight
pas de quatre
in front of the Sorbonne? A glance into the future would have shown me that I was to be a Doctor of that learned Institute, but I needed all my eyes at the time to watch a
gendarme
who desired to attach himself to our company merely because we sang to him that Love was an infant of Bohemia ignorant of the Code Napoléon.

Those times passed also, and life became more varied. It included a certain amount of travel — to South Africa for example, where at a town called Johannesburg I had the honour of meeting some German officers, unnecessarily interested in the future political relations and armaments, which last their country supplied, of the Boers. They talked too loudly. Personally, I have always liked the Boer, and it occurred to me, as to some others, at the time that he might not be our most serious opponent.

During the Boer War (1899-1902) what should have enlightened us all as to the future was the thoroughness of the anti-British propaganda, much of which rebounded mainly from the United States by way of what was vaguely called “The Continent”. Some of it was of French provenance — grossly impolite and playing into the Boches’ hands. But the specific charges of our “atrocities” during the war revealed, though we had not sense enough to profit by it, the Boche mentality. For example, there was a statement that on a certain day, at a certain place, some English officers entered a Boer farmhouse which was flying the white flag. Names and dates were entirely true. (I was with the party and shared the “honours” of the action.) It went on to say that we had dragged out two or three Boer men and women from under the beds there; had given them a hundred yards’ allowance and shot them down as they ran! In other words, it prefigured absolutely the technique of Louvain and Termonde and the villages of the Border in ‘14, etc., etc.; the touch about the “hundred yards’ allowance” being a sporting attempt to dress the dish
à l’anglaise
. Another announcement — a telegraphic “extra” — picked up on the floor of a newspaper office at Bloemfontein the day after we had entered that town, affirmed that our Brigade of Guards had, two days previously, been driven on to the attack in one of the “battles” of those days, by the fire of their own Corps Artillery! Even so, we were not enlightened; and when later we came across very deep trenches, undercut, on the shrapnel side, no one realised we were looking at the forerunner of the “dug-out” and a new type of war. But how could we guess?

The Boer wisely did not care to sit in trenches as the German experts had recommended. He preferred to lie behind a boulder in the open and shoot his picked man at eight hundred or a thousand yards. When he had expended his cartridges he retired towards the Equator on his indefatigable little pony. The uniformed foreign volunteers of his forces (there was no uniform among the Boers) had been trained in an older school. Consequently they were sometimes captured or even killed in action. Among our “captives” was a charming Frenchman who had fought because he intensely loathed the English. He was master of a pleasant literary style, and in his account, later, of his adventures referred to me (surely Hate is more observant even than love!) by the one title to which I most objected. If he be still alive I would make him my compliments across the years and assure him that his thrust went home.

But I go forward too quickly. The business of Fashoda in ‘98 was — after the French Press had been very rude, very stupid, and very short-sighted in beating us to help “the King of Prussia” — the opening of the inevitable
entente cordiale
. At the time the French Government, I think, purchased a quantity of military stores which were duly expended sixteen years later in quite another direction. And in 1915, in a vast hollow of the Argonne, I beheld an army of forty thousand men and a hundred and twenty Seventy-Fives reviewed by Joffre and Kitchener, and felt the
frisson
run through its ranks when Kitchener shook hands with and talked to General Marchand in the face of the line. Then the bank of horizon-blue and the clanking guns rolled forward to the unsatisfied thunders beyond the horizon.

After the Boer War, but the precise date has escaped me, there visited Cape Town, where I used to spend my winters, the triplescrew cruiser
Dupleix
(Admiral Rivet) which was thrown open to all the world for “inspections”. There are two ways of “inspecting” ships. The first is to go round the ship before taking
déjeuner
on board. The second is to sit quite still after
déjeuner
on board, and let the ship go round you. Since the lighter guns of the
Dupleix
were mounted by threes in little cupolas, the impression of her revolving armament was prodigious. Cape Town, in turn, invited all her officers to “inspect” the vineyards of Constantia, where they make not too weak wines. My charge, on that occasion, was a young Breton lieutenant. He returned, his head on his companion’s shoulder, sleeping like an angel. You must understand I had several times drunk to the
entente cordiale
in sweet champagne at eleven in the morning on the deck of the
Dupleix
; temperature beneath her awnings about 85° F. Thus honour was satisfied

But in all those years I knew little of France beyond an occasional trip to Paris. The coming of the automobile broke the spell, and, year after year, in the cars of the period when motorists were as much pioneers of travel as are now airmen, we explored France. (“But, Monsieur, we cannot accommodate
that
here. It will frighten the horses!” That was at the old hotel in Avignon.)

Then was revealed to us, season after season, the immense and amazing beauty of France; the laborious thrift of her people, and a little of their hard philosophy; the excellence of her agriculture and the forethought and system of her forestry. Some of our Indian forestry officials had had their training at Nancy, and had always told me about it.

But at first one paid for one’s knowledge with one’s skin. Neither men nor beasts were prepared for this visitation of ferocious and exacting vehicles; and part of the tourists’ equipment used to be a whip with a long lash, to save the temperamental dogs of France from committing suicide. The soft roads of the astonished departments went to pieces beneath our very bad tyres, and we broke our strongest springs on hump-backed little bridges in secluded towns of one street, where the old women knitted at the fountains. (That was the Rhone Road. Route 7.) Worst of all, we were so ignorant that we did not know that one always finds a good
déjeuner
if one falls in behind the French Army at half-past eleven.

But matters adjusted themselves with the years and, from the point of view of the early motorists, civilisation now horribly overruns France and one eats, instead of dines, at “hotels of all the luxuries”.

There is a certain little meadow by the sea, under Mount Canigou, which Spring fills with narcissi when she first sets foot in Europe. For years in succession we went down to that meadow, spread our maps among the flowers, and began our travels — all France to play with, and our auto to convey us. From the tourists’ point of view March is not a good season. Winds blow; there may be snow-drifts on the low passes that a month later would be clear. Yet, for those who love the land and its people, March is the month above all; for then France, who never stops working, begins her spring cleanings, loppings, and prunings. The roadmen are out taking stock of winter damages; the happy, dirty gipsy-vans are out too; the barges along a thousand miles of canals refit and repaint under the eye of the barge-dogs, who allow no liberties; the roads are made interesting by the dung-carts, the huge bundles of new vine-stocks, and the freshly ordered bright-painted agricultural implements. The working year renews its pulse with the roar almost of a tide.

One blemish remains. No motorist can foresee what any citizen of the Republic on foot will do. He is generally at work in the fields, but when he walks the roads he is a flickering, wanton mystery.

I have seen him absorbed in dreams, with expanded chest and radiant eye, advance well on the wrong side of the road, till our horn made him leap sideways and call us “Assassin!”

But a people who work as unrelentingly as the French, must have great dreams to salt their lives with. When a man has spent the long day leading pannier loads of manure, a donkey-load at a time, up the terraced hillside to his hanging vineyard; when he has hand-dealt each knotted vine-stock its own portion of the good dark muck, it is then he wants to straighten his back on the way home, and to plunge into the life of events and prodigies — such as lecturing his wife or being President of the Republic.

I tried to explain to a companion of one of our tours that these “play-acting people”, as he called them, have lived through devastating dramas of their own, the consequences of which lie heavy on every aspect of their lives. We had gone astray one evening in a wild plain of heath and rock, darkened by olive trees and lit by the flare of a windy sunset. We came into a village where a line of young men, linking hands, swept the public square dancing. Their faces were very clear in that unearthly light, and the tricolour ribbons in their caps rattled in the mistral. An infantry soldier leaned against a shop door and watched them with an elder brother’s instructed smile.

“What’s this circus?” said my friend as they shouted round us.

“Those are conscripts,” I replied. “Young men drawn for service in the Army for the next three years.” But he was frankly contemptuous, and the lounging infantryman only impressed him as slovenly and ungroomed.

“But there are three-quarters of a million of them,” I said. “They have to take over each other’s clothes and equipment and wear them out — like monks. Very little is wasted in this country.” All the English in him revolted at the apparent meanness, but the splendour of the sacrifice was hid. As a Frenchman once said to me: “We Continentals are more separated from your world by our compulsory service than by anything else. How can you English understand our minds if you do not realise those years of service — those years of service for us all? When we come to talk to you about life it is like talking about death to children.”

Again — at a cosmopolitan dinner-party — an Italian youth, but so English-trained that the young Englishman he was talking to looked on him as a brother, said, all of a sudden, “Yes, it
was
rather a bore! I had got my House colours and I had got my Boats. I’d have given
anything
for another year at Eton. But I had to come away for my service. ‘Get up at three in the morning and groom your own horse, you know, and all that sort of thing. The pay is a penny a day and the food — you can’t live on it! . . . ”

The Englishman stared — it was having to give up the Boats that impressed him, but a young Frenchman who had done his time merely nodded. I have been privileged also to hear a foreign professor of some ideal or other explain to a rather prominent philosopher that he “guessed France lacked a certain seriousness of moral purpose”. To whom the philosopher, looking back across the years: “Ye-es. I did my service with the Artillery”. Who would more surely extract fun, irony, and their true taste out of things as they pass, than one who had been forced to live under bodily stress in the face of fact, to sweat and pant and cast him down in the mud, dust, and heat of manœuvres — a unit among many thousands?

And as one came to know France more intimately one gathered memories and pictures of people and things which became part of one’s accepted life, destined to grow more significant through the years.