A Night on Salisbury Plain

UNSEEN peewits were crying their wild cries in the mist somewhere. The sounds were part of the gray silence of the Plain. I could hear the last of the hot oil dripping into the engine sump, from the overhead camshaft gear. Ten yards away, the long low length of the black car was part dissolved. I could feel mist condensing on my eyelashes.

It was late afternoon. The last twenty miles had taken me two hours and a quarter. Foolishly I had relied on my petrol gauge, although I had known it was faulty; and now I was on my reserve tank, enough for sixteen miles in ordinary traveling, but only one half or a third of that distance in second or low gear. One could not see more than five yards ahead.

By the ruins of brickwork and concrete overgrown by grasses I recognized my whereabouts: I was close to Stonehenge. This place had been an encampment for airmen and their craft during the war. Afterward there had been what is called an agitation in the press for the removal of the buildings. They were demolished; and once again the great circle of Stonehenge was seen from the road in outline against the northern sky, relict from the age of mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers, and skin-clad men of small stature, short age, inferior teeth, and ideas of salvation through the blood sacrifice of men other than themselves.

Stonehenge was seen clearly again, but no longer in solitude, for the hutments and hangars were broken down at the time when motor cars were beginning to increase almost in geometrical progression. A barbed-wire fence was erected with a tea house, and approach to the Sun Temple cost each visitor one shilling.

It was no use going on; the night must be spent here. Fortunately I wore my black leather flying coat, and there was a rug in the car. It was pleasant to sit down, to suspend oneself in the silence of Hardy’s Great Plain.

What was Stonehenge? Men asked one another. How came it to be built here? And whence these mighty slabs of stone, weighing hundreds of tons? And why were they set thus and thus?

Likewise, when the sunshine and starlight of centuries have rolled away from this age and civilization, which may indeed become traceless like other civilizations save for things such as bones, shards, fragments of walling, aluminium pistons, and phosphorbronze carburetor floats, men may wonder on the scars in the chalk of Salisbury Plain which were practice trenches for firing, bombing, and bayonet fighting; on the curious traces in the distant downs of designs which probably had some religious significance, possibly connected with the thenuniversally sanctified idea or ideal of blood sacrifice.

Night shut down through the grayness, and the peewits ceased to call. My footfalls among the flattened heaps of broken bricks and iron and rotting wood seemed strange and unreal to me. I felt myself to be another person. I determined to prolong the strange feeling of being strangely alone in a silent world. I collected fragments of deal wood which had been doorposts, lintels, and window frames, and made a fire. My car was off the main road, and I could sleep under its tonneau cover when so I wished. I had food and a vacuum flask of hot coffee. There was enough wood for the fires of a bivouacking battalion.

Flames speared the mist, which gave way before the bright thrusts. I ate, drank, took strength and comfort from the fire. A mouse ran over the cracked concrete whereon I sat. It took a crumb, fled away, returned for more, fled away, came back, sat upright, stared at me, and then crouched to a more serious feeding. It looked to be a very old mouse, and I wondered if it could possibly have known the time when the soldiers were here. No; but it was strange how it accepted me and the fire.

All over England were memorials to men who had not come home from the war, most of them made to the ideas of elderly noncombatants. Will the antiquarians of the future deduce from these memorials, with their chaste and sometimes angelic figures holding aloft righteous swords, torches, and lamps, that what to soldiers of the line was generally tedium was to the memorial builders generally Te Deum? That the memorials had no relation, even symbolically, to reality? That they helped by the fostering of illusion to perpetuate things as they were?

The mouse departed with a swelled belly, probably to sleep in its slightly mouldy bed of gnawn grasses under a pile of bricks somewhere. I threw more wood on the fire.

What of those designs, their regimental badges, cut by soldiers in the swarded slopes of the downs near Shaftesbury? Have the grasses, the trefoils, the cinquefoils, and other wild flowers — dove’s-foot, crane’s-bill, harebell — have they crept over the chalk again ?

The White Horse, Its origin lost beyond memory, is still the White Horse, for all to see and meditate; but where are the badges of those Australians, Londoners, County men, and the keen youths from the North? Of those youths who went from the Great Plain to the rolling chalk lands of the Somme, after cutting their own memorials in the English sunshine of 1915 and early 1916 (such things could only be done before idealism was shattered by reality, before July the First, 1916, when the New Army found its grave in Picardy) — of those singing, cheering, single-minded civilian-soldiers none returned; not one of the returning survivors was the same man. What would the future antiquarian see, then, as their true memorial, I wondered to myself, lying on my back, wrapped in the leather flying coat and strangely serene to feel the ancient gray earth beneath me. Which would the unborn antiquarian accept — the idealistic interpretation of those who stayed at home and imagined vain things, or these old scars and cuts and brick heaps in the chalk?

I lay there, between dozing and waking, until the sun peered red just above the road winding over the eastern plain. The fog was gone, the plovers were calling one to another forlornly, and a laden milk van was rolling along toward London. It was very cold. As I walked away there was a small shrill screeching, and a weasel bounded over the rubble, a large mouse in its jaws.