Autumn XVIII. Flawless day + The Old Contemptibles

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Autumn XVII. After they've seen Paree

I cannot close my eyes upon this day without setting down some record of it;  yet the foolish insufficiency of words!  At sunrise I looked forth;  nowhere could I discern a cloud the size of a man’s hand;  the leaves quivered gently, as if with joy in the divine morning which glistened upon their dew. At sunset I stood in the meadow above my house, and watched the red orb sink into purple mist, whilst in the violet heaven behind me rose the perfect moon. All between, was loveliness and quiet unutterable... From stubble fields sounded the long caw of rooks;  a sleepy crowing ever and anon told of the neighbour farm;  my doves cooed above their cot. Was it for five minutes, or was it for an hour, that I watched the yellow butterfly wafted as by an insensible tremor of the air amid the garden glintings?  In every autumn there comes one such flawless day....

Alpha.

What especially attracts me in this passage is the line “All between, was loveliness and quiet unutterable.” From the perspective of Jane Austen’s perpetually rambling heroines, Gissing’s world was already comparatively noisy with the (now nostalgic) roar of steam locomotives and the like, but to contrast it with today’s world of jets and helicopters and cars everywhere -- of power (noisy) everything -- it was a blessed world of silence.

There has always been a connection between the sacred and silence -- think of Medieval cathedrals, monasteries, cemeteries. One of the prices we pay for the Mephistophelean world of technology we live in is the toll of near perpetual din. The “infernal racket” of the modern age. Anyone filming a movie or TV episode outdoors, can tell you how hard it is to avoid the roar of planes and helicopters. Every time I see a news piece about the latest attempt to give us personal flying cars, I pray that this desire will continue to be thwarted. People have many romantic misconceptions about the past but the thing I would go there (let’s say the 17th or 18th centuries) to savor, if I could, would be the general quiet of that world.

The Old Contemptibles.

In both the Great War and in World War II, the British began fighting on the European continent with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). In WWI this army came to be known as “The Old Contemptibles” because the Germans had so little regard for it. Consisting of what few regular divisions the British Army fielded, before the Territorials ventured abroad and before the mass enlistment that followed the outbreak of war, the BEF engaged the German army in a prolonged fighting withdrawal from Mons (August) to the 1st Battles of the Marne and of the Aisne (September). It then again pitted itself against the Germans in the Race to the Sea where it all but expended itself in finally stopping the German advance at the 1st Battle of Ypres.

By 22 November 1914, at the end of that series of battles, what little remained of the divisions that started the war were pulled out of the line and returned to Britain to be reconstituted -- with fresh men and equipment. The British lines were then held by Territorial units and then volunteer units (the Pals) and in 1916 conscription was instituted and for the remainder of the war the British had conscript armies like everyone else. What Ryecroft had feared had come to pass.

Something similar happened in 1939 when the few regular British divisions, again known as the BEF, went to Belgium to hold the left flank against the German onslaught. This time French and BEF forces were overwhelmed by the new German Blitzkrieg tactics, and the BEF had to be evacuated off the beach at Dunkirk. It would be four years before a Western Front against the Germans would be recreated. Dunkirk and the Battle of France are usually viewed as a disaster, but the British government, in it's most reflective moments, must have acknowledge that they had dodged a bullet by not having to maintain a section of a Western Front for four years as they had done in the Great War. Far better to throw in a few armies at the end.

Next: Autumn XIX. Italy.