December 28, 1917 
/.AND ik WATER 
17 
Literature in War Time 
By James Milne 
" Give us the Book that flowers and flames, 
. With Io\-e and youth and noble tears," 
THAT i-^ the book, iievv or old, on vvhicli the war, with 
its ordeal of simple living and high thinking, has 
made the greatest demand. People, in these tragic 
but heroic days, look to books for resolution and com- 
forting. They turn to them alike in moments of upliftiri,,:: 
anl moments of heart-breaking, as to triea friends who will 
survive the furnace. So the book of discomfort, the book of 
nndue ( uriosity which we knew so well before the war ; in 
fine, the Ixiok concentrated in the " problem novel," has 
practically disappeared amid the fires of the war. 
If literature be true and great, it is life als<j, or, it may be, 
death ; and that is seen in the relationship of the new books 
which succeed, to the conditions of this long, searching war. 
There has been a .-hcdding of what was fleshly— dii not 
Rol)ert Buchanan once sjieak of the " fleshly school of 
hction " ?— in current literature, and a growth of what is 
spiritual. That note has Iseen constantly ascen iing as the 
tumult has gone forward, and it is very noticeable during 
the past publishing season. You did not meet the frivolous, 
trifling br)ok as often as before, the book of which you. say, 
"Whence comcst thou and why"? You did not see it 
Isecause, like the Spanish fleet of the ballad, it is not in 
sight. When Arm?.geddon broke it lookod as if the 
l^n were to be broken by the sword ; certainly the pen 
of the average author, historian, novelist essayist or poet. 
Kut gradually that shadow cleared, as it was bound to 
clear, when the true business of the written literary word is 
considered. The situation, therefore, is that the pen never 
I)layed such a great part in a war ; only its influence las 
tiuned new books into certain main channels. Soine, like 
the " problem novel " it lias thrown aside ; otherj-, like bio- 
graphy, it has stimulated, perhaps on the principle, " lives of 
gi"eat men, they remind us, we c?ji makqour Uves sublime." 
'Ihofte are simple words, homely like mucli of Longfellow, 
but it is the simple things, the common touches of nature, that 
are settling the big things at this epoch of history-making. 
We are too near the events and personalities of the conflict 
to see them fully ; to understand them as thev will be unveiled 
by histor\-. The mountain ilarkens, but the past is an oj^en 
lX)ok which we can consult, and in what better wav can this lie 
done than through the pages of a biography ? You may if 
\ou are a good reader by nature and habit, have set yourself 
a particular course of reading as a war distraction. You arc 
sure to have one or two friends-who have done so. Biography 
is pretty certain to come into that readint, old biographies the 
backlx)ne, with worthy new ones that arise. Bpsiie bio- 
.yraphies, of course, one marshals autobiographies, which, as 
old lights in new editions, or as new lights given to us, are 
equally ill deman I, not alone with the good reader, but with 
the other fellow, the general reader. v 
The truth is, we arc living a page of the world's history 
wlien fact is stranger, far stranger, than fiction. Run over 
the bare titles of books gathered outof the fighting line, in 
recent months, and you will be convinced. The soUlier 
writer, first of the Old Army, then of the New Army, has 
achieved wonders in prose. He has done so because he has 
written simply of what he has met in warfare, given us plain 
tales from the hills of Flanders, from the scarred rocks of 
'^rallipoh, from the scorched sands of Mesopotamia, ot from 
tlie yellow lagoons of East Africa. The soldier wrifer has 
written from his fullness of feeling and hazard, and therefore 
he has written lasting things. They are all jumbled up as yet, 
in the heap of what we easily call " war books," but the day 
will arrive for their sorting out, and fine will lie the array. 
The British infantryman is not only making history-, but he 
IS recording its making with a nearness which you may feel 
on the shelves of any London library or book shop. 
You may. in those same quarters. Jiear what may surprise 
you a little, that the essay, the long neglected essay, has come 
up again on the tempest of the war. Perhaps the initial 
>timuhis to that is traceable to a few prose war books like 
IXjnald Hankey's Student in Anns, and Charles Lister's 
letters. Thi re you haVe the thoughtful temperament in 
action for '^iiprcmc stakes. That temjierament senses it all. 
groups it all. gives it all to us in a form whieh it finds natural. 
t he essay. Serious minds have v\'elcomed it and bereaved hearts 
liave found it a solace, for just so, perhaps, were the thoughts 
of bom<; one, near and dear, who did not write. A similar 
(■motion leads to the volumes we have had on life and death, 
the here and the hereafter, the possibility, howcyer unstable. 
ihat tl^ose who have gone gloriously " over tlie top " in the 
war. never to return, phvsically, may, in soul, survive in 
another Iv-unic. 
Christmas Morning, 1915 
By An Eye Witness 
IT may live, this episode, as lives yet the legend of the 
French and British soldiers' fraternising over that com- 
mon .stream and washing-place in the Peninsula. The 
grey, early Christmas morning ; grey sky, and grey world 
of the trenches. The winter mist lingering here and then', 
moist and vapoury, making everything look big. The frost 
still clinging to the ground. And the two long, irregular 
lines of trenches facing each other. 
The drab landscape of which every feature, every rise or 
fall in the ground, every knoll, every hideous skeleton cf 
shattered buildings, almost every tree, had its storv'. They 
were consecrated for ever to the memory df the English race. 
The Aubers Ridge opposite — that very inconsiderable, scarcely 
noticeable rise in the ground — was con.'ccrated to the memory 
of Englishmen. So were the very ordinary-looking trees 
and hedgerows and fields that fringed its summit, that climbed 
its slope. So were the bright-red and dark-red roofs of 
buildings that clustered half-way up the slope •and the tall 
factory chimney in their midst. Thev were Aubers itself. 
A short distance to the left was a village— absolutely 
sheltered. You could just see its brown roofs, its stark 
walls, and vari-colourcd ruins, amid the trees. There was 
the church — a ghostly shell dominating the flat scene. It 
marked Gougli 's Corner. And immediately behind the trenches 
at a distance of about 200 paces, there was a row of tall elms 
and poplars, looking monstrous in the mist. They marked 
the line of the road. Immediately in front of them was a 
big farmstead with its courtyard and square little home- 
field — an untidv heap of red bricks amid four naked walls. 
Between the long irregular lines of trenches, with their 
jumbled white sandbags and their untidy earth parapets, 
was a stream marked by a line of twisted brown willows 
bent to every conceivable grotesque shape. It ran down 
the middle of No Man's Land. It was a place of coarse 
grasses hiding little mouldering heaps of grey and khaki 
(heaps of old clothes or fallen scarecrows, they looked like), 
of knobs and unexpected pits, of" earthly holes and water- 
logged ditches. Here British and Germans met. 
As soon as it grew light that Christmas morning, they started 
peeping at each other over the top of the parapet .... calling 
across to each other. And away there on the right th.e 
Bochc stood up openly on hjs parapet and waved his arms. 
And then they came out all down the line, stood up on the 
parapet, waved, shouted, and finaily swarmed out of their 
trenches on either side. 
A British sergeant had been shot dead almost at the oiitset, 
as he stood on the parapet. But this made no difference. 
It must have been an accident. The supreme craving of 
humanity, the irresistible, spontaneous impulse born of a 
common faith and a common fear, fully triumphed. 
And so the grey and khaki figures surged towards each 
other as one man. They met ar the willow-lined stream ; 
they even crossed it and mingled together in a haphazard 
throng. They talked and gesticulated, and shook hands 
over and over again. They patted each other on the shoulder 
and laughed like schoolboys, and leapt across the little stream 
for fun. And when an Englishman fell in and a Boche helped 
him out there was a shout of laughter that echoed back to the 
trenches. They exchanged cigars and pieces of sausages, 
and sauerkraut and concentrated coffee for cigarettes and 
bully-beef and ration- biscuits and tobacco. They e.vpressed 
mutual admiration by pointing and signs. It was our leather 
waistcoats and trench-coats that attracted their attention ; 
it was their trench-overalls, made of coarse canvas, that 
attracted ours. Even confidences were exchanged in broken 
English ! 
" What sort of billets have you?" 
■•Rotten!" 
" Aren't you sick of the war ? We are ! " 
" Not a bit of it. We shall fight for years yet." 
And the information was even vouchsafed that the Christmas 
Eve bombardment jiad caused the Germans a lot of casualties. 
So for ten brief — all too brief — minutes there was peace 
and good will among the trenches that Christmas Day. 
Then two officers came out, and they were for taking 
photographs of the Tommies, offering them cigars. And 
presently they saici : -" You will have five minutes to get 
back to your trenches before our artillery will open fire." 
.And it did. And two or three men were wounded almost 
at once. But for twenty-four hours not a shot was fired 
on either side. A common brotherhood of suffering — or 
was it an act of God or just human curiosity 'i — had united 
Englishman and Bavarian. on the battlefield one grey Christ- 
mas morning which no oho on either side who had taken 
part in that cjuaint scene will ever forget. 
