YES, WE HAVE NO BANANAS
I WRITE OF A WORLD AND OF A TIME IN WHICH THE POSSIBILITY OF BEING without bananas was merely funny, and was a source of one of its most whimsical jokes. I write from a place in which it is easy to remember such a world, such a time and such a joke. I lived in that world; it was really true. Others too have lived in it, but few of them now have leisure to contemplate that period, calm but for a rather uneasy watchfulness towards the future, and an occasional wonder awaking to guess what might happen, too soon lulled into sleep; and many must even be doubting if such days could really have been. For them, who have not the leisure to do it for themselves, I turn to the past, to point to a few things seen when sheep-bells were commoner on the Kentish downs than sirens; as though the cover of the book that I now begin were a small door opening a very little way, to give a glimpse of skies whose travellers were mostly birds and whose clouds were all natural.
To write of oneself is to work like a goldsmith using the maximum quantity of alloy: dreams and time are the precious metals. But one cannot pass through twenty-five years without seeing something upon the way, and if my reader will pick out the things I have dreamed and seen, and forget the rest, he may be able to refine from this story some specks to keep in his memory.
Through the partly open door of which I spoke I see glimpses of nth November, 1918, when I think that a sudden thought came to everyone in England who had been too preoccupied with the thought of victory to have time for other reflections; but now victory had come and, with the need to look forward to it no longer, thoughts turned backwards and counted the cost. The rejoicing one might have expected was all absent, and a very sober mood came down upon England. I do not think any rioting need have been feared, but someone set going a rumour that the Kaiser had been seen talking to officers of the Dutch air-force. So unlikely a story must have been invented, and I suppose that the reason of the invention was to quieten a London crowd by the hint of the possibility of an air-raid even yet. And though such a reminder was useless, it was not silly, for no-one could have foreseen the quiet and solemn mood that came down over most of London. Rows of captured guns ornamented the Mall in those days, and I remember the boastful inscriptions at one end of those guns, and the hollows worn in the gravel under the other end, which were made by boys playing see-saw. How clear those inscriptions and those hollows were, and the little heaps of gravel thrown up from the hollows; and yet the Kaiser could only see the inscription, and never dreamed of the London boys playing seesaw. This observation may seem tritely commonplace; and so it is; and yet remember that the whole of German policy denies my simple thought, that man cannot see the future: the whole of German policy is based on such careful foresight that nothing is unforeseen, and on such careful preparation that their battle is won before we wake from our sleep. I cannot feel that Hitler is a great man, but I think he is very likely the cleverest man in Europe. What a lesson for all the copy-books of the future, showing what cleverness cannot accomplish.
The great light shining before us was gone; there was no longer something for every man to strive for, and a feeling of depression succeeded the war, such as follows all exaltations. And in that depression the wings of the angel of death that had screamed for more than four years so shrilly through the air, and had sailed over us with such pomp, moved soundlessly and with no splendour amongst us, unrecorded by history, and slew more than the guns had slain, with influenza. We who had been in such places as Plugstreet Wood where this particular angel of death was bred, were partially immune and, when we got this influenza, we most of us recovered; but it went by the name of the Spanish influenza, and I imagine that the reason of this was that it was not until it left the lands that were familiar with it and blew over the Pyrennees, its deadliness became really effective. From Spain it blew over the world, devastating Indians and Eskimos, seemingly growing deadlier the further it got from home.
A few days after the Armistice the department of the War Office in which I had served for much of 1918 was disbanded, as is recorded by R. F. W. Rees, who was one of us, in a ballade that may not seem to the world so good as it did to us, and so I will only quote parts of it:
The Curtain Falls
The tabs that made my tunic look so gay,
The band around my cap, so chastely green,
The hasty knife has rudely cut away,
And khaki shows where loftier hues have been.
No more is Colvile ‘mid his bookshelves seen,
And Morton’s song of poor Ozanne is done.
Stelling no more thumps at his type machine:
The curtain falls on M.I.7.B.(I).
No longer Pollard pins upon the screen,
To praise Dunsany, his poetic lay;
Major Pollard, I may explain, was our principal satirist.
And the ballade ends with the envoi:
So, some immensely sad, some very gay,
From Street to street we go — our work is done.
Miss Wheatley’s packed the last fair screed away:
The curtain falls on M.I.7.B.(I).
We of M.I.7.B.(I) never quite forgot each other, though meetings grew fewer and fewer and then ceased, until one day in 1936 Sir Reginald Rowe invited us all to lunch with him at Lincoln’s Inn, of which he was now Under Treasurer. J. B. Morton walked in where we were all gathered, remarking “What a nasty-looking lot we are,” though he tried to tone it down by adding “compared with the smart officers that I remember.” But one can’t tone down increased girth and patches of grey hair and a bit of a stoop. It was a delightful reunion that we owed to Sir Reginald Rowe, and through it all rippled on the conversation of J. B. Morton as brightly as ever. I walked away with Ozanne and we parted at the entrance to the Tube in Trafalgar Square. Our parting was so cheery that a policeman turned and watched him as he went away down the steps. Could this cheery greeting have come from a venerable archdeacon? he evidently wondered. And Ozanne does look very venerable now; but the more venerable he looked, the more some suspicion of disguise arose in the mind of the man whose melancholy job it is to harbour suspicions. Had the old soldier flashed out in his face for a moment as we said good-bye? Probably that was what happened. And the policeman had said to himself, “An archdeacon in gaiters, a soldier. A soldier, an archdeacon in gaiters.” And could not make head or tail of it. He had started off with that little bit of insight, but he had been able to get no further, for his suspicions had led him all wrong.
When M.I.7.B.(I) was disbanded I went to the 3rd Battalion of the Inniskillings at Tregantle Fort in Cornwall, where we guarded the coast, without knowing against whom. The fort was evidently built against the French, and there were some very big guns, but they were muzzle-loaders and had been rolled down the hill, where they lay amongst the heather, imposing pieces of scrap. But however obsolete Tregantle Fort had become, it had been a real fortress, and there was a splendid air about the vast strength of my bedroom there, and I was very glad to have slept in an atmosphere that drew from those great walls something that I knew would enrich my imagination long afterwards. Later we moved to Devonport and into North Raglan Barracks, where there was very little to do and a great number of officers to do it; but it was like living in an extremely pleasant club. There Colonel McClintock retired, to everybody’s regret, and was succeeded by Colonel Crawford. I remember a subaltern coming into my room there one night, long after I had gone to bed, and saying that he had been told to ask me if I had read a book called Tales of War. I said Yes I had. He said: “But there must be something more in it than that. Why did they tell me to ask you?”
It was a bitterly cold night and I did not want to have to get up to shut the door if he left it open. So I said: “Will you promise to shut the door if I tell you?”
“Yes, of course,” he said.
“Do you swear to do it?” I asked.
And this I got him to do. Then I told him, “I wrote it.”
He left hurriedly, as I thought he would when he found they had been pulling his leg; but he kept his word and shut the door.
In June 1919 I was attached for a short time to the American 3rd Army on the Rhine, first joining them in camp at Beaune, whence all the way to Dijon the most famous vineyards of France shelter under the Cote d’Or. Major George S. Heilman and Major Norton Northrop were very kind to me there, the former showing me the lovely countryside, old towns and little villages, where children were doing their lessons at tables under the lime-trees. I have a book here that he wrote about Washington Irving and gave me in 1926, which brings back memories of that time with one of its sentences, where he says: “I remember how Lord Dunsany (at that time Captain Dunsany of the British Army) said to me as we were driving together, during the armistice period, past a cemetery in Burgundy where French soldiers lay buried, that the difficulty in building one’s life after the experience of the Great War was that the war was a brick greater than the building.” I may perhaps be pardoned for lifting lines from another man’s book when some of the words were my own; and I write them here because they express a feeling I had about the grandeur of that time, such as has now blazed out at us again, and of which the history will no doubt be worthily written but not for a hundred years.
From Beaune they sent me after a few days to Luxembourg by car, with a corporal and a private to look after the car and me, both of which they did very well. I remember the great Roman arch at Treves, but not well enough to bring it before the inner eye of my reader, which is a writer’s principal duty. Major Northrop came with me some of the way, but how far I no longer remember. We came to Metz, where I remember an American artillery officer looking rather wistfully at one of the forts, and saying to me, “That is the place I had to destroy, if the war had gone on.”
Among all the things I forget, one scene stands out in my memory still very clearly, and this was a really typical red-faced Prussian officer, unmistakable though in plain clothes, walking with two ladies, to whom he spoke with effusive gestures as our car drew near. I could not hear what he said, and I do not know Prussian, but his copious gestures with his arms and his whole body showed me clearly what he was saying, which was, “Out of the way, my dears, to let these two excellent officers pass, these most worthy gentlemen. Do not incommode them in any way by your presence.” I could not have been mistaken; that was what he was saying as he bowed and swept them out of the way, although they were never even in it. Afterwards on the Rhine I saw the same attitude everywhere. It is no doubt the correct attitude to display in time of defeat. We have not been defeated and do not know. It was surprising, but evidently correct. In Metz we enquired of some French soldiers the way to Luxembourg. They told us, and one of them asked if we could give him a lift. He stepped into our car with the most intense delight and repeated over and over again to us “Permission, permission,” evidently for fear that we might think he was deserting. And we came to that silvery land through hundreds of square miles of rye. And there we met what any child would have recognized as a soldier, but a soldier such as has been lost to the world for many years: he was in scarlet tunic and white breeches, looking like what soldiers used to look before the modern rifle taught them to imitate mud or dry grass as closely as it could be done. Not that many a Luxembourger did not don dimmer clothes and fight for France. At Esch the Corps Commander most hospitably entertained me at his house, which was spacious enough to have been, a little while before, the headquarters of him whom the world knew as Little Willy. Later he took me to see a game with which England is now familiar, but which I had never seen before, the great American game of baseball; though I had joined in practice at Beaune in catching the ball, which I was luckily able to do easily enough, on account of its resemblance to fielding at cricket, but I should not have been able to have made any hand at pitching or striking. It occurred to me there that an English crowd watching cricket must appear very dull and stolid to the American visitor, as I heard an American major say “Well, well, well,” as every ball was bowled: it was not the actual words said, but the tone of contempt with which each of them rang, that made me realize that the audience take a real part in this game.
I need hardly say I heard very interesting stories in those evenings, for one does not often have the opportunity of talk with a corps commander fresh from his recent victories. The Germans had put about some sort of propaganda implying that the Americans would deal mildly with them, and some leaflets had been issued to American troops with the object of stimulating hatred. “I put them all in the waste-paper basket,” said the General. “My men didn’t need to be taught to hate the Germans.”
I heard a story there of coloured troops among the American forces: some of them had rested a coffee-pot on a couple of unexploded German shells and lit a fire under it to boil the coffee, and before the coffee boiled the shells had exploded. Later one of these men saw an officer warming up his coffee over a stove and rushed up saying “O Colonel, don’t drink that stuff. It’s already killed five men.”
From Esch I went on towards the Rhine and crossed the frontier, which I recognized because all American soldiers, when asked if we were on the right road, had invariably answered out, and now they all said ja. We passed by a fine forest: I remember seeing a roe-deer beside the road. And we saw old castles, very nests of Bellona, their loopholes all scarred by bullets. And one cunning fellow had built all his loopholes slanting, which meant that his neighbours had to get not only their direction exact, but also their elevation. But they seemed to have done their best. In Coblenz I was very hospitably entertained, and I was taken out on the other side of the Rhine as far as there were any American troops. The castle of Ehrenbreitstein stood on its shining precipice, and over it floated the American flag, splendid against the sky. And in those days the white ensign was to be seen on the Rhine, on little, armed motor-boats; a sight that might have been thought to be unique in history, but it will soon be seen again. By the bank of the river, I think where the two rivers join, Kaiser Wilhelm I rides on a bronze horse, with Victory running along beside him. Close to that statue I saw a young German slash at a butterfly with a cane, and miss. My imagination, stimulated perhaps by the great effigies beside me, saw something symbolical in this. One day a young German boy, of fifteen or sixteen, scowled at me. The scowl was horrible, and his face was ugly to start with, and yet I felt with relief that, after all the smirking Germans that I had seen, this was at last the right attitude. There is a pedestal in Coblenz, set up by Napoleon to commemorate the invasion of Russia in 1812. And under these carved words is another carving to say that it had been inspected in 1813 by the Russian general commanding in Coblenz, and approved.
When I got back to England I took off my uniform, and had my tonsils out next day: there was too much of Plugstreet Wood in them, and I had kept them in much too long, thinking that it would be better to have them taken out after the war, but I should have been far fitter if I had got rid of them earlier. Perhaps with depression that may have come from this source, or that may have been part of the depression I have already mentioned which troubled the whole world after its orgy, I was oppressed at my house in Kent with the thought that I might not do as much work as I felt ought to be done by anyone who had survived the war. For a poet can no more make ideas than an entomologist can make butterflies; he can only wait for the idea, and try to catch it if it comes. I read in a paper of a clergyman who had said: “It is a great responsibility to have survived the war.” And I cut out these stirring words and pasted them into a blank book in which I hoped to write. Luckily the ideas came; slowly at first, but with a rush when I wrote my play IF, which I did in eight days, all except one scene which I added, in two days, later, on the advice of Mr. Arthur Hopkins of New York. I find that a play moves quicker than anything else one writes, because the characters seem almost to speak to one, and much of it therefore goes with the speed of dictation. Of course a play must move forward all the time to the height of some great event or the deep of some catastrophe: in some of the other arts it may loiter by the way, but not in the drama. I think there is a tendency nowadays to write dialogue for the sake of dialogue, which is like making a road for the sake of mud or stone, not leading anywhere in particular. This is a digression, so let me return to the topic with which the chapter began: only the other day Miss Mary Lavin told me that she saw a small boy being hurried across a Dublin street, at considerable risk through the traffic, up to a shop-window, to be shown a dozen bananas (at ninepence each). “That’s them,” he was told.