If work were being done in the No Man's Land, they still saw little save by these lights that floated and fell from the enemy and from ourselves. They could see only an array of stakes tangled with wire, and something distant and dark which might be similar stakes, or bushes, or men, in front of 5 what could only be the enemy line. When the night passed, and those working outside the trench had to take shelter, they could see nothing, even at a loophole or periscope, but the greenish strip of ground, pitted with shell-holes and fenced with wire, running up to the enemy line. There was 10 little else for them to see, looking to the front, for miles and miles, up hill and down dale. The soldiers who held this old front line of ours saw this grass and wire day after day, perhaps, for many months. It was the limit of their world, the horizon of their landscape, 15 the boundary. What interest there was in their life was the speculation, what lay beyond that wire, and what the enemy was doing there. They seldom saw an enemy. They heard his songs and they were stricken by his missiles, but seldom saw more than, perhaps, a swiftly moving cap at a gap in the 20 broken parapet, or a grey figure flitting from the light of a starshell. Aëroplanes brought back photographs of those unseen lines. Sometimes, in raids in the night, our men visited them and brought back prisoners; but they remained mysteries and unknown. 25 The tumult of these days and nights cannot be described nor imagined. The air was without wind yet it seemed in a hurry with the passing of death. Men knew not which they heard, a roaring that was behind and in front, like a presence, or a screaming that never ceased to shriek in the air. No 30 thunder was ever so terrible as that tumult. It broke the drums of the ears when it came singly, but when it rose up along the front and gave tongue together in full cry it humbled the soul. In our trenches after seven o'clock on that morning, our men waited under a heavy fire for the signal to attack. Just before half-past seven, the mines at half a dozen points went up with a roar that shook the earth and brought down the 5 parapets in our lines. Before the blackness of their burst had thinned or fallen the hand of Time rested on the halfhour mark, and along all that old front line of the English there came a whistling and a crying. The men of the first wave climbed up the parapets, in tumult, darkness, and the 10 presence of death, and having done with all pleasant things, advanced across the No Man's Land to begin the Battle of the Somme. 15 20 25 HERBERT ASQUITH THE VOLUNTEER1 Here lies a clerk who half his life had spent Thinking that so his days would drift away And now those waiting dreams are satisfied Who found his battle in the last resort; 1 Reprinted by permission of Sidgwick and Jackson, Ltd., publishers. NOTES Heavy-faced figures refer to pages, and regular figures refer to lines. For diacritical marks see Key to Pronunciation preceding the Index 2 13 Wedergeats: Weather Geats, a tribe of the southern part of the Scandinavian peninsula. 3 15 kinsman of Ecgtheow: Beowulf was Ecgtheow's son.-31 The yellow wood: The shields of the Geats were regularly of wood. In preparation for his battle with the dragon Beowulf had made an iron shield. 12 21 monks . . . after the rule of St. Benedict: St. Benedict of Nursia (480-544) reformed abuses in the monastic life of his time. Members of the order of monks which he founded, named from him Benedictines, are sometimes called Black Monks from their dress.-24 Pentecost: Whitsunday, a church festival celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles, the seventh Sunday after Easter. 13 8 hide: a measure of land, variously defined, as the amount necessary to support one free household, the amount one ox can plow in a year; in Domesday Book it was 120 acres, Domesday Book being the register mentioned here.-13 mark: a weight for gold or silver, formerly in common use in various parts of Europe, usually about eight ounces.-17 hart . . . hind: the male and female of the red deer. 15 17 canvass our compact: restate our agreement. The Green Knight, who had entered Arthur's banqueting-hall without armor, had proposed, as a Christmas game, to give his gisarme, or battle-ax, to one of the assembled knights who should agree to strike him a blow with it and a year and a day later receive from the Green Knight a blow in return. 19 13 Cornwall: in the southwest of England, now a county.—15 Modred (mō'dred): Arthur's nephew and a Knight of the Round Table, who rebelled against the king.-21 Camelford: today a town in Cornwall, which claims to be the ancient Camelot, King Arthur's capital. (See page 248.) It is not, however, "by the river Tamar," which forms the boundary between Cornwall and Devonshire. Tradition has associated Camelot with other places in Wales, in Somersetshire, and near Winchester. 22 2 Uther: king of Britain, father of Arthur.-26 Merlin: the magician, poet, and prophet. (See Tennyson's poem "Merlin" and the "Idylls of the King.") Old Welsh poems, attributed to Merlin, have come down to the present day. 24 9 Alisaundre: Alexandria in Egypt, taken in 1365, by the King of Cyprus, Pierre de Lusignan, who, however, immediately abandoned it.— 15 Algezir: Algeciras, a seaport of southern Spain, near Gibraltar, held by the Moors 713-1344, when Alphonso XI of Castile, after besieging it for twenty months with the help of crusaders from all over Europe, captured and destroyed it. In 1704 Spanish colonists from Granada began to resettle the place.-16 Lyeys, Satalye: now Ayas and Adalia, in Armenia and Asia Minor respectively. They were taken from the Turks by Pierre de Lusignan. 26 26 Cristofre: St. Christopher was the patron saint of forests. Brooches of this sort were valued as charms against accidents. 27 2 outridere: the officer of the monastery whose duty it was to ride out to look after the estates belonging to the monastery.-23 Austyn: Augustine. St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (354-430), wrote a long letter to some nuns, advising them about the regulation of their life. In the eleventh century, on the basis of this letter and other writings by St. Augustine, there was formulated the Rule of St. Augustine, followed by the Augustinian monks and nuns. St. Augustine, the missionary to England and first archbishop of Canterbury, was a Benedictine monk. He died about 613. 28 21 Middelburgh... Orewelle: an island port off the Dutch coast . . . the English port of Orwell, now Harwich. From 1384 to 1388 Middelburg was the wholesale wool market. Today it is the capital of the province of Zeeland. 29 1 Clerk: During the Dark Ages only the clergy could read and write. -13 philosophre . . . gold in cofre: In the Middle Ages "philosophy" meant all the liberal arts and sciences, including the search for the philosophers' stone, which was supposed to have the power of turning baser metals into gold and silver. Chaucer is poking fun at a popular superstition. 30 12 sooty: Until the time of Queen Elizabeth chimneys were rare in England. Probably the smoke from the widow's fire had no outlet except a hole in the roof and cracks in the walls.-bour: bower, sleeping-place, private apartments. Chaucer humorously applies to the two rooms of the hut (which the family doubtless shared with the animals) the names of the principal apartments of a castle, hall and bower, as we in a similar case might speak of the drawing-room and boudoir. 31 5 Malvern hillside: a chain of hills ten miles long, forming the watershed between the Severn and Wye rivers, in the west of England. 32 12 What Paul preacheth: in the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians: "Because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience."-21 St. James's: the shrine of St. James of Compostella in the province of Galicia, northwestern Spain. It was a popular resort of pilgrims.-25 pestilence season: 1349. The black death (bubonic plague) carried off about half the population of England at this time. 33 8 King's Bench: the highest court of common law, consisting of the chief justice (originally the king himself) and four junior judges. 34 3 Merlin: see note on 22 26.-4 Canterbury: a city in the southeast of England. It was the capital of Ethelbert, fourth Saxon king of Kent, in 597, when Augustine and his monks entered there on the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. The Archbishop of Canterbury, known as the Primate of all England, still officiates at the coronation of an English sovereign. 37 16 seneschal, constable, chamberlain, warden: high officials under the crown. These titles show something of the various origins of the English language. Seneschal (from the Teutonic by way of the French) originally meant old servant; constable (from the Low Latin comes stabuli), count of the stable, master of the horse; the chamberlain (similar words are found in both German and French) originally had charge of the king's private apartments, then he became steward of the royal household and the court, then receiver of the public funds; a warden (found in Middle English and Old French) was a watchman or guard. Cf. the warder of the cliffs in Beowulf and the Warden of the Cinque Ports. 38 11 domination of the moon: faith in astrology was still lively in Caxton's day. 44 Agincourt (ăj’în kōrt, French á'zhăn'koor'): a village in northern France where on St. Crispin's Day, October 25, 1415, Henry V of England was victor over the French. The French outnumbered the English more than four to one, but were unable, because of the nature of the ground with woods on each side, to extend their front, and they were hampered by their heavy armor in miry ground. The English lost 13 men at arms and 100 foot; the French lost 5000 of the nobility killed and 1000 more taken prisoner. Sir Thomas Erpingham commanded the archers. See also page 225. 45 17 Poitiers (pwå tyā'): a town of western France, 61 miles from Tours. The battle here between King John of France and Edward the Black Prince on September 19, 1356, was the second of three great English victories in the Hundred Years' War, the others being Crécy and Agincourt. -Cressy: Crécy, a town of northern France, where on August 26, 1346, the English under Edward III, great grandfather of Henry V, won a decisive victory over the French under King Philip of Valois. King Edward himself took no active part in the battle, and held his division in reserve, wishing to give the honor of the victory to his young son, called the Black Prince from the color of his armor. When word was brought him that the prince was in serious danger, he sent only a few knights as reinforcement, saying, "Let the boy win his spurs." At Crécy the English archers with their long bows not only defeated the French cross-bowmen but withstood successive attacks by the French knights and kept most of them from even reaching the English line. Feudal warfare placed its main reliance on the mounted, mail-clad knight. Because the common footsoldiers were the decisive element in the English victory, Crécy sometimes is spoken of as marking, on the military side, the beginning of the decay of feudalism. |