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LAND & WATER July 5, 1917 
Le Garcon Le Plus Brave du Village 
By Isabel Savory 
LE garcjon Ic plus brave . . ." 
The woman who spoke was not his mother, nor 
any relation of his. She stood near the fire ; her 
hands that had laboured long around the same 
hearth, hung down on her apron : her eyes looked out across 
the room : 
Le garcon le plus brave du village . . . il a He Imijours 
si Iranqiiil . . . c'etait le modele de la jeunesse. II y en 
a heaucotip, beaiicoup] qui sont moris, mais il y en a qut 
impressionneni plus que d'autres. Quand on a appris sa 
mort tout le monde pleuraient. 
• * * * • 
His little village. A handful of houses outlined from afar 
against the sky : stone-built, ragged, worn, sad-coloured : 
leaning each to each, cHnging together on the rock, much as 
their few inhabitants clung together, lived a life common 
tu all. yet intimate to each, precious to its own fireside. 
Standing over the tumbled roofs, looking down on their 
bleached tiles, the church belfry, a gaunt fossilized figure, 
shepherded its little flock. Now and again the bell would 
speak, one voice for all, heard by all, regulating the times 
and the ways of all. A harsh voice, some of the rock in its 
clang, that men and women born to rock would understand : 
not loud, meant but for a small village, the sound felt to be 
quickly lost and to become part of the quiet airs to whose 
keeping all sound and all life is finally committed. 
In front of Verdun, in the stunning reveille of sleepless 
guns, was there ever amoment when he, the tranquil Youth, 
tliought of the clear, quick call, breaking and sealing again 
the silence ? 
A silence of mountains, far and apart. The village stands 
as the goal of a long pilgrimage towards the clouds, its little 
rocky path clambers and twists upon itself, solitary, knowing 
the tap sometimes of the hoofs of a laden mule; that is all. 
The cjTpress trees he can never have forgotten, that climb 
with the higher track, sharp, beautiful spears cut dark against 
the light, nondescript hills, set on slim shafts and tapering 
to the sky. A tree that has shed all superfluity and become 
the selection and significance of a tree. 
It is a definite country. In the steep gorges between the 
mountain lies a crumbling moraine shed by the bare heights, 
a grey and brown moraine that whitens to the tone of its 
colourless grass, the softness of it seamed and carved by 
rivulets. On the lower slopes of the mountains the same 
moraine is belted and held in leash by low stone walls, set 
back and stepped one above the other, the broad steps green 
in April with grass and barley. Lifted above them stands 
the skeleton of the mountains, bony, white against the sky, 
a sky oftenest blue, washed cold. Definite as this country, 
it would seem, was the life of the Youth himself, so little did 
it deviate from the simplest existence, content to see others 
set off while he sentinelled the sheep or reaped the ribbons of 
barley up the Borrigo : to listen to their tales on their return. 
He can have known little of the sound of wheels : of the 
associations of most villages and towns: Jiis little village, for 
the lack of these, perhaps, grips tighter to its few individual 
necessities, provoking before dawn the voice of its forge, the 
soft thud of hammer on heated iron. 
\ Three tracks only for him to have known ; links with 
villages scarcely less remote : tracks that snake and are 
lost in the folds of the mountains. The one he must have used 
most often, because it leads to the high grazing lands, is also 
the steepest, working criss-cross up the wall of mountain, 
grooved-out and polished and narrowed to the strict com- 
pass of the feet of flocks passing in single file. At last it 
knows no further lift, comes to the sky, to a world beyond, 
underneath the sky, comes out upon a flat-topped saddle 
of silvered, stoic grass, learned in all lessons of wind and sun. 
Hereabouts is first heard the sound of sheep and goat bells : 
alluring, stabbing sound. 
Not that life can have been poignant, nor a riddle to the 
tranquil Youth, who must have built his own short life too 
simply to admit complexities of light and shade, and knew 
nothing of an unessential, troubled existence. 
He had his one permission from the lines in front of Verdun 
and was with his people. Did he leave for the last time 
without question ? Did he perhaps, with the second spell 
of tumult and horror, take it that Death might be well the 
gift of his silent and sure country, its most precious gift ? 
It came to him in the Spring. At the time amongst the 
mountains of the change of the wind and the melting of the 
snows : of the music of a thousand torrents : of pale, lit 
faces of primroses. -There is no grave, marked, for his parents 
to find, in the torn and aghast land before Verdun. La 
Jeunesse of France left there but names and memories, less 
connected with Death than Victory : but his abiding memory 
is elsewhere than on a battlefield. 
One soft evening in late March, of south wind, after the 
Angelus had rung, when white cloud folded itself round the 
little village and waited on its sleep, the bell spoke of him : 
and next morning at dawn the Oiflce was read. The moon 
had not left the sky. The sun came up and laid his scarlet 
over the mountains. A thrush sang. 
I'"nU day was born. And the flocks went out upon the 
hill-sides. 
The Music of the Poets 
WHILE Professors trouble their souls over 
phonetics, poets — a "more humble folk — are glad 
to make melody with such sounds as we possess. 
And it is wonderful how well some succeed. Very 
difficult is it to analyse the music of a poem ; to tell how 
much is owing to the selection of words and how much to 
the ideas that lie behind the words. Does a rhythm of sound 
prepare the brain for the picture which the sense of the words 
is intended to create, and does the nice correlation between 
these two functions cause that harmony which imparts 
sensuous delight ? To anyone interested in this line of 
argument we would commend Mr. J. G. Squire's new volume 
of poems. The Lily of Malnd (Martin Seeker, is. net.). Mr. 
Squire, whose writings are now well-known to readers of 
Land & Water, has to a high degree the gift of melody ; 
indeed his verse sometimes seems to have the very quality 
of music. Take the following eight lines — a poem complete 
in itself— entitled " Behind the Lines." The curious 
repetitive has the same haunting suggestion which is dis- 
tinctive of a striking phrase in a sonata or other musical work ; 
The wind of evening cried along the darkening trees, 
Along tlie darkening trees. Iieavy with ancient pain, 
Heavy witli ancient pain from faded centuries, 
From faded centuries . . . O foolish thought and vain 1 
O foolish thought and vain to think the wind could know; 
To think the wind could know the griefs of men who died. 
The griefs of men who died and mouldered long ago : 
" And mouldered long ago," the wind of evening cried. 
Tlie Lily of Malnd, the long poem which gives its title^o the 
volume, tells the legend of the lily that blooms only once 
and for an hour at midnight in the heart of the jungle. It is 
visible only to women, and to them only once in a life-time ; 
it has to be sought through the blind jungle and the black- 
ness of the night. In this legend of a beatific vision, as 
imagined by the poet, there is a beautiful parable of life. 
Mr. Squire goes to Nature for his philosophy, wherein 
in the opinion of this writer, he shows wsdom. Tlie best 
illustration of it in this volume is" Acacia Tree," a psalm 
and a parable to teach man patience and endurance — lessons 
which we all stand in need of in these days. And in the 
last poem of the book he warns his fellow-beings from seeking 
to discover " The Stronghold" from which pain, hate, and 
all the unpleasant things of this world ai'e excluded, and 
where peace only reigns : 
But, O, if you find that castle, 
Draw back your foot from the gateway, 
Let not its peace invite you. 
Let not its offerings tempt you. 
For faded and decayed like a garment. 
Love to a dust will have fallen, 
And song and laughter will have gone with sorrow, 
And hops will have gone with pain ; 
And of all the throbbing heart's high courage 
Nothing will remain. 
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