Lucifer Before Sunrise (27 page)

As he sat alone before the fire he told himself, as he had during innumerable meditations, that he must strive to stop thinking of the rights and wrongs of the war: that he must, for his own sake and for the sake of the family, try to accept the bloody tragedy of youth and middle-aged subliminal resentment of youth as historical phenomena: that if he were not to deteriorate further and perhaps die he must think and feel impartially: and to achieve this he must calm himself by relaxation, by deep-breathing, lest schism part the two sides of his mind, and in the words of a poem his cousin Willie once read to him, twenty years before:

And Phillip repeated to himself the phrase attributed to Marshal Pètain as, when all but he had fled, ‘the hero of Verdun' strove to find surety for a France in division—‘
la
balance
,
toujours
la
balance
.'

The reading of Tolstoi's novel had suggested that no one man or set of men or group or system of financial interests were wholly to blame, but that the causes of war were incalculable in Time; whereas Phillip believed that everyone living was but a reflection of his or her environment, which was an effect of
calculable
causes in Time. This was his earliest theory, or belief, which he had shared with his cousin Willie soon after the Armistice of 1918, and held until faith was worn away by loneliness; when Birkin's realistic view of the financial-economic causes of war replaced Willie's poetic conception that all so-called evil arose from un-understanding.

Too tired to make the effort to go to bed, he sat in the leather armchair, listening to the grandfather clock preparing to strike with whirr of brass wheels and jerk of chains holding the weights which had bumped into the case as they descended during nearly two centuries. It was almost midnight. The kettle simmered, issuing steam rosy with the embers of the thorn logs. He was glad that Boy Billy was away, on his tractor-course. Phillip had seen his error in taking him away from school on the outbreak of war in the belief that, since the old civilisation was about to collapse, he would be better learning to farm land that one day would be his. He had hoped that, should anything happen to him, Boy Billy would be sufficiently trained to farm for Lucy and his
half-brothers
and sister. He had believed that he would be able to give him a better education for living than that of the classroom and compulsory games. And now he had to face the effect of having been wrong.

For what he had not foreseen was that Boy Billy would exchange the ordered discipline of school for the disordered environment of
a rural community where the best elements, the younger and abler men, had gone away to war, leaving others who saw in war's opportunity only a chance to get money, and more money. And, as Charles Box said to him once, about a farmer's son being sent as a pupil on another farm, “A boy learns nothing at home from his father.”

*

Now it was 1942. What of the farming scene? Nearly eighty airfields in the county alone were offering high wages to all available labour; it was the chief subject of talk among the boys who had left school and had some time to go before being called-up. That was their dawning world; and during the eager talk by the bridge at night, Billy often thought of how he had to remain on the
unknown
‘little grey donkey', while of the tractor drivers he knew, one and all had faster, larger machines—Oliver, Case,
Massey-Harris,
and even magnificent Caterpillar crawlers. Phillip knew that Billy felt ashamed that his tractor went so slowly, and was of so uncommon a design. That this ‘patent' had a great future Phillip was sure; but what he had said, in so many aspects, having been already proved wrong, Boy Billy was by now sceptical of all his father said. He had no cause or reason to be other than ashamed of his father, judged by the standards of the world about him.

*

Phillip wanted to go to bed, but knew his mind would not rest. Sitting there in the armchair, turning over the cracking embers with a 3-foot fire-pic forged by the blacksmith to his pattern, he told himself that the only thing to do was to hold on, to wait for clarity to come to one's fellows, to cease girding against the slow-moving glacier of negation.

Of course it was difficult for ordinary people to see themselves as the historian would see them: as some writer of genius, perhaps as yet unborn, would re-create the miseries and hopes of the times as did Tolstoi, with varying clairvoyance, of another age, in his great novel. That Russian nobleman shut himself away for over five years and with infinite care and patience, while sustaining within himself the power to endure, set his mind to bring alive within the pages of his story the peasants and the landowners, the ministers and the priests, the battles and the sufferings, the lovers and deaths and joys and tragedies of an entire Russian generation: more, of an entire European age. There was Napoleon with his new order for Europe, directing battles and regarding the dead and the wounded—all in
War
and
Peace.
Napoleon, who failed in Africa, frustrated
by the British Navy; who, turning to the East to smite an
opportunist
and treacherous ally-enemy, King Alexander of Russia, found the grave of his Army—and of his hopes—in the snows and ice of the steppes.

No wonder the book was out of print in England in the winter of 1941/2, and being sought eagerly in secondhand shops, for the parallel with the Hitlerian war was apparent. Napoleon massed his cannon at one point and made a lightning break-through, pouring in his heavy yet mobile troops, and turned the flanks of his opponents by a pincer-movement. He was successful in battle after battle, beating the Allies who did not understand this new way of fighting. His men rode over bridges, a general or two at first, smiling and dismounting, and talking with the enemy,
declaring
that the war was over, a truce had been made, and peace would shortly be signed. The astonished Allied sentries then watched a French regiment marching over the bridge. They did not understand it. They watched the ‘correct' French gunners spiking their guns. Thus Napoleon crossed the Danube, the war still on, and not a shot fired to stop him.

Was that how Hitler had crossed the Maas in May 1940, and so turned the Maginot Line? It was all done before by the Ogre of Europe, who was said to eat infant human flesh for breakfast, who won battle after battle and defeated nation after nation until in the end his armies were spread out all over the conquered Continent, and far into Russia; so far into the Steppes that his Armies' lines of communication were extended to the point of collapse. The
nouveau
logistique
of moving armies, originated by this military genius, the cause of his victories, was also the cause of his failure. The illimitable Russian invasion was the beginning of the end. Napoleon went too far. When he lost Africa, he lost the war; he cracked his teeth on Russia, where they learned, by retreating and and leaving
partisans
behind, to counter the encircling movements, the lightning assaults which an Austrian general of those times called Napoleon's
blitzen
tactics.

What was the war about? Readers, said Phillip to himself, will learn nothing from
War
and
Peace.
But had Tolstoi read the memoirs of de las Casas, surely he would have been struck by Napoleon's remark at St. Helena that the war might be summed up as a deadly quarrel over the price of a barrel of sugar?

A bankrupt France torn by internal dissension and revolution was unable to pay world prices, which meant the prices of the bankers of Lombard and Threadneedle Streets, for the raw
materials that France needed. So Napoleon set about building a national organisation which would dispense with the gold of the commanding agents who had created the system of usury by which European trade was dominated. If Napoleon's system were
successful
in Europe, it meant the end of the great banking houses of London. Napoleon by his system tried to dissolve in Europe the hold of the money-lenders on an economically-dominated Europe. He was blockaded. He retorted by counter-blockade. He tried to starve out England. He closed the Baltic, and stopped Russian wheat going to Britain. The price in Britain promptly rose to one hundred and eighty shillings a quarter of two sacks. (Heavens, wheat was sixteen shillings a quarter in 1939!)

Napoleon offered a prize for a substitute to replace the
sugarcane
from Jamaica, and out of Poland came a wild plant from which was bred the first beet-sugar. He offered another prize of one hundred thousand francs to any chemist in Europe who found a process of making bicarbonate of soda out of common salt. Somebody won it. He started silk mills at Lyons and Lille to make a substitute for cotton, which could only come to Europe from the ex-British colony of America by way of British bottoms, or ships. And in 1815, when his power was finally broken, and he was prisoner in the hands of his enemies, Napoleon made this prophecy: he said, in effect, to las Casas, ‘These British will come to rue the day that they did not co-operate with my system. In a hundred years they will be at war with a great European power, arising from the valley of the Rhine.' Napoleon was a year out in his prophecy; for 1914 was ninety-nine years later.

*

So Phillip communed with himself as the minute hand of the clock crept to the top of the painted flower face.

The parallel was there—everywhere the same. Hitler crying, ‘
The
British
will
come
to
rue
the
day
if
Germany
should
be
defeated
' … for that would mean Asia over the Elbe, and perhaps to the Channel.

As he sat there before an embered fire he knew finally that the farm would never become any different for him, even as he knew that he was unable to give in, to surrender what he had
undertaken
. And yet, if he were to wear himself out as Matt had prophesied; if he were to cease to be, who else could create such a novel for the age? If he made his synopsis now, would some
unknown
young man of genius find his notes of use? Would he light
upon its pages with that joy which only young artists know when they recognise, like falcons, the authentic wing-flicker in the upper air in which they are supremely true to themselves? Would love and compassion spring from his dead self and live for the unknown poet as once it seemed that Richard Jefferies was a living presence beside Willie in those days and nights of loneliness after the first war? And now of himself?