D.ecember 20, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
■I'i 
iltfe anti letters 
By J. C. Squire 
The Somme in Retrospect 
MR, JOHN MASEFI ELD'S The Old front Line 
(Hcinemann, 4s. Od. net) is an account, not of 
ilie whole of one of uur successive fronts in France 
but of that section upon which was opened 
the struggle which we know as the battle of the Soinme. 
He has been recently over the ground from the neighbourhood 
of Hebuterne southward to the Somme River, and he con- 
scientiously -takes us along it, describing every important 
position in detail aiKi giving a brief account of the fighting at 
each spot. At the beginning of the struggle "the enemy 
liad the lookout posts, with the fine views o\-er France and 
the sense of domination," whilst our men looked almost 
invariably upliill with, often enough, a German parapet or 
some great redoubt as a sky line. The country is a country 
of chalk hills and terraces and little valleys with the famihar 
chalk streams in them. It is difficult to describe a series of 
chalk ridges, and avoid monotony ; chalk is chalk, and there 
is no passable synonym for it, a hill is a hill, and it is no good 
hunting for a hundred different ways of naming it ; but 
Mr. Masefield has a good eye for the lie of land and succeeds 
remarkably well in differentiating the respective positions. 
In so far as it is a survey of the ground, with a view to formu- 
lating the various natural and artificial obstacles that the 
British Army had to overcome, the book is very well done. 
if if * * * 
So vast were these obstacles and the endeavour which 
overcame them, so tremendous the scale of the fighting, and 
of the issue involved, that even the baldest account must be 
impressive. Mr. Masefield is usually content to be bald, and 
liis plainest descriptions — though they have not that final grip 
which is achievecl by a man to whom a simple bare style is 
completely natural — are remarkably well done. Where he 
lavs himself out for a purple patch — though, in this book, 
there is nothing, perhaps, of that unbridled luxuriance which 
demands the term " purple " — he is less sure of his effect. 
T'lrqnently there is a little phrase of the vivid journalistic 
kind done with more than ordinary force. " At the top of 
the hill, in the middle of a filthy big pool, is a ruined enemy 
trench-mortar, sitting up like a swollen toad " ; we are 
vaguely conscious of having seen it before, but it is done this 
time bv a genuine artist. The same may be said of his grue- 
some description of the mine crater of Beaumont Hamel : 
It is like the crater of a volcano, vast, ragged and irregular' 
about one hundred and fifty yards long, one hundred yards 
across, and twenty-five yards deep. It is crusted and 
scarred with yellowish tetter, like sulphur or the rancid fat 
on meat. The inside has rather the look of meat, for it is 
reddish and all streaked and scarred with this pox and with 
discoloured chalk. A lot of it trickles and oozes like sores 
discharging pus, and this liquid gathers in holes near the 
bottom, and is greenish and foul, and has the look of dead 
eyes staring upwards. 
His accounts of Redan Ridge and the Schwaben Redoubt, too 
lon.g to quote, are the best one has seen, and could not easily 
be bettered ; and he has a very effective peroration describ- 
ing the opening of the battle and the nerve strain of the 
enemy under that bombardment that seemed never to be 
going to end. But though the book is far above the average of 
such it lias a fault which goes far to spoil it. One can see the 
author deliberately assuming a literary attitude at the start 
and deliberately employing artifices — without that art which 
conceals them — to play on one's sentiments. That, even 
civilians who were safe and warm all the time, mutrt dislike. 
Mr. Masefield was no doubt unconscious of what he was doing.. 
He was merely an.xious no doubt to " rist- to the height of his 
great argument," and he has obviously expended great pains 
upon his language. But the most violent bombast would 
have been less out of place than the prettifications which have 
lomctimes successfully whispered in his ear, 
***** 
" All wars end," Mr. Masefield observes, " even this war 
111 some day end " : 
The ruins will be rebuilt and the field full of death will grow 
fixxl. and all this frontier of trouble will be forgotten. \Vhcn 
the trenches are filled in, and the plough has gone over them, 
the ground will not long keep the look of war. One summer 
with its flowers will cover most of the ruin (hat man can make, 
and then these places, from which the driving back of the 
enemy began will be hard indeed to trace, even with ma^is. 
It is said that even now in some places the wire has been 
removed, the explosive salved, the trenches filled, and the 
ground ploughed w-ith tractors. In a few years' time, when 
this war is a romance in mcmorj-, the soldier l<x)king for his 
battlcfielM will find his marks gone. Centre Way, Peel 
'i'rencil\. \riinstf'r AMf 
:iTi(! 1 Iifsp rifhf.i- mnl-i*; it\ frlorv win 
deep under the corn, and gleaners will sing at Dead Mule 
Corner. 
The passage illustrates some of the merits of I\Ir. Maseficld's 
now much chastened style ; and especially his real efforts to 
be straightforward and simple. Look for the adjectives in 
it and you will have to look liard. It also illustrates some of 
its defects, a faint aroma of false sentiment and an inclination 
to the easy picturesque ; for one cannot but suppose that to 
this rapidly passing official tourist Dead Mule Corner was no 
more than other places, and that the name's forccfulness and 
rhythmical suitability for a sentence's end alone determined 
its selection as a place where gleaners would sing— if, indeed, 
they do sing, and if gleaning is encouraged in that locality. 
•f* V 'F 3|s . *1* 
Affectation of language — cold-blooded use of " poetic " 
phraseology in a dehberate and accurate narrative of facts 
and in places where the emotion that may compel and carry 
home such phraselogy is not communicated — is the chief 
fault of the book, lake, for instance, the end of this : 
Then, too often, to many of them, the grass that they were 
crossing flew up in shards and sods and gleams of fire irom 
the enemy shells, and those runners never reached the wire, 
but saw, perhaps, a Hash, and the earth rushing nearer, and 
grasses against the sky, and then saw nothing more at all, 
for ever and for ever and for ever. 
" The genius of prose," says Stevenson, in his Elements of 
Style, " rejects the cheville no less emphatically than the laws 
of verse ; and the cheville, I should perhaps explain to some 
of my readers, is any meaningless or very watered phrase, 
employed to strike a "balance in the sound/' Here it is the 
last "for ever "—you may even add the other two, "for 
evers " — that gives the show away. In adding those woixls, 
Mr. Masefield was not thinking of rendering with accuracy 
the event he was describing, or his own emotions about it 
— with either or both of which the artist may properly be con- 
cerned — but merely of the rather minor tunc he was playing. 
You find a! kindred falseness in his use of certain plirases 
which might came naturally from another but do not come 
naturally from him.. " On all four roads many men of our 
race were killed " ; " men of our race died in our cause in 
every village within five miles of the front " ; " All through 
that day little rushes of the men of our race went towards that 
No Man's Land " — and so on. The locution comes in quite 
properly elsewhere, tlK>ugh most jieople would incline to say 
" Enghshmen " or " British soldiers." Frequently there are 
touches that suggest too recent — if the adjective may \x'. 
excused—reading of Mr. Belloc's prose. One would not, of 
course, labour these small points were one dealing with the 
work of an ordinary war-correspondent ; and one is not 
forgetting that the Battle of the Somme was the Battle of the 
Somme, and that a weak sentence is merely a weak sentence. 
But Mr. Masefield is a serious artist ; he set out a year after 
the events he records to write a narrative which would be of 
more than ephemeral interest ; and it is right that one should 
indicate those defects in his temper and in liis approach — 
his tone throughout, I may add, is rather that of one who 
writes of " old unhappy far-off things " — which make his 
book less good than it should be. Whether ariyone at all 
could, at this date, go over the ground of the Somme with a 
notebook, determined to produce a mastei"picce of reminiscent 
description, and succeed, may be left an open question — 
though, to my ear, only one answer comes. Bookmaking 
is bookmaking, even when the author is a serious and sensitive 
artist, and even wlien the subject which he selects is one in 
which his deepest fe(>lings are involved. After a generation 
or two, when the war really is what Mr. Masefield calls " a 
romance in memory," some stray traveller, striking the old 
Somme line by accident, may be tempted to follow it u|), to 
reconstruct scene by scene what happened there, to let his 
imagination lead him wherever it likes and formulate what 
contrasts and comparisons it may. Drawn into the thing in 
this way he may write an immortal book. The man who 
goes out to do it now, whatever his qualifications, will not. 
THE CHRISTMAS NUMBER 
of Land and Water contains among 
other features a remarkable story called 
THE SOUL BOX 
By JAN GORDON 
If you have i^ot already got a cojjy, vou should 
<jrder it nt once. 
