Courcelles and Bus by Frederic Manning

 

Battalion headquarters in Courcelles was in a small chateau, which stood, with its farm buildings, on a little hill practically encircled by a road. On their first morning there, Bourne and Shem, coming from the barn in which they had slept, to get their breakfast from the dixie a few yards away, could see some distance beyond the road the men of a Scots battalion, which was brigaded with them, lined up with their mess-tins waiting for breakfast. As Bourne and Shem were returning to their barn, leaving behind Martlow, who had followed them out, they heard a shell coming, and, as they dived for cover, a terrific explosion. There was a instant’s stillness; and then from across the road shouts and cries. Again a shell whined overhead, and exploded; and then a third. That was apparently the ration. The next moment Martlow, with a white face, appeared in the doorway.

‘Them poor, bloody Jocks,’ he said in a slow, pitiful whisper.

What the casualties were they did not know, though various rumors gave precise, and different, details; one shell did all the damage, the others exploding in an empty field. The sympathy they felt with the Scotsmen was very real; the same thing might so easily have happened to themselves; and as they talked about it, the feeling turned gradually into resentment against an authority which regulated, so strictly, every detail of their daily lives. The shell falling where it did, at that particular time, would probably have caused a certain number of casualties, even if the men had been moving about freely; but this kind of discipline, excusable enough when men have to be kept under control, as with a carrying party lined up at a dump, was unnecessary on this occasion. After all, the place was liable to be shelled at any moment; and for that reason alone, it was wiser to avoid assembling a large number of men at any point. They remembered their own experience at Philosophe.

‘Bloody swank. They don’t care a fuck what ‘appens to us’ns.’ They were angry and restive, as men are who expect that they may be ordered to make an attack at any time. That kind of feeling is not without value as a military asset, provided that behind the discipline against which it is a natural reaction, there is sufficient intelligence and foresight to avoid mistakes. It does a man no harm to know that he may be sacrificed with some definite object in view, it was the kind of hazard which man Lewis-gunners faced continually, with great courage; but no man likes to think that his life may be thrown away wantonly, through stupidity or mere incompetence. Officers and men alike grew careless as they became accustomed to danger, and then an incident of this kind, and event almost inevitable, filled them with surprise.

Whether it was justified or not, however, the sense of being at the disposal of some inscrutable power, using them for its own ends, and utterly indifferent to them as individuals, was perhaps the most tragic element in the men’s present situation. It was not much use telling them that war was only the ultimate problem of human life stated barely, and pressing for immediate solution. When each individual conscience cried out for its freedom, that implacable thing said: ‘Peace, peace: your freedom is only in me!’ Men recognized the truth intuitively, even with the their reason checking at a fault. There was no man of them unaware of the mystery which encompassed him, for he was part of it; he could neither separate himself entirely from it, nor identify himself with it completely. A man might rave against war; but war, from, among its myriad faces, could always turn towards him one which was his own. All this resentment against officers, against authority, meant very little, even to the men themselves. It fell away from them in words .  .  .


They moved back to Bus in the afternoon, marching through fine, steady rain. Days passed, and the weather showed no signs of mending: as they settled down to the routine of a battalion holding the line, the attack, without fading from their minds, no longer seemed and imminent trial, becoming only a vague probability of the future. It had certainly been delayed. The colors with which they had been so gaily bedecked became a little dingy. Their life was now one un-resting struggle against the encroaching mud, which threated to engulf roads and trenches in liquid ruin. Daily, when out of the line, they were sent off with shovels and brooms to sweep it off  the roadway, and shovel it up as a kind of embankment against the barns and stables bordering the road. What was too liquid to heap up, they trapped in sumps. A man pushing a broom through it would find two converging streams closing behind him. A train of limbers or lorries passing seemed to squeeze it up out of the road-metaling. Earth extrude mud. Most of it had the consistency of thin cream, and threatened, if it were neglected for a moment, to become tidal. They had to scrape it from their puttees and trousers with their jack-knives, and what was left hardened the serge to cardboard. When they became dry they were beaten against the corner of a hut, and dust flew from them; but that was seldom. In the line there were trenches tat could only be kept clear by pumping. Sometimes the frost would congeal the mud, and then a quick thaw would cause part of the trench to slide in, and it had to be built up again: sand-bagged and revetted.  They became almost indistinguishable from the mud in which they lived.

The weather grew colder too, and they wore their cardigans; then leather jerkins, lined with fleeces or thick serge, were issued to them, and in the resulting warmth the lice increased and multiplied beyond imagining. It was some weeks before they could get a bath; and then necessarily it was makeshift. Half a company stood under trickling showers, while the other half-company pumped up water outside, and when the men were covered with a lather of soap the water invariably failed.

The strange thing was that the greater the hardships they had to endure, for wet and cold bring all kinds of attendant miseries in their train, the less they grumbled. They became a lot quieter and more reserved in themselves, and yet the estaminets would be swept by roaring storms of song. It may have been a merely subjective impression, but it seemed that once they were in the front line, men lost a great deal of their individuality; their characters, even their faces, seemed to become more uniform; they worked better, the work seeming to take some of the strain off their minds, the strain of waiting. It was perhaps that they withdrew more into themselves, and became a little more diffident in the matter of showing their feelings.

Actually, though the pressure of external circumstances seemed to wipe out individuality, leaving little if any distinction between man and man, in himself each man became conscious of his own personality as of something very hard, and sharply defined against a background of other men, who remained merely generalized  as ‘the others.’ The mystery of his own being increased for him enormously; and he had to explore that doubtful darkness alone, finding a foothold here, and hand hold there, grasping one support after another and relinquishing it when it yielded, crumbling; the sudden menace of ruin, as it slid into an insubstantial past, calling forth another effort, to gain another precarious respite. If a man could not be certain of himself, he could be certain of nothing.

The problem which confronted them all equally, though some were unable or unwilling to define it, did not concern death so much as the affirmation of their own will in the face of death; and once the nature of the problem was clearly stated, they realized that its solution was continuous, and could never be final. Death set the limit to the continuance of one factor in the problem, and peace to that of the of another; but neither of them really affected the nature of the problem itself.

                               .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Bourne sometimes wondered how far a battalion recruited mainly from London, or from one of the provincial cities, differed from his own, the men of which came from farms, and, in lesser measure, from mining villages of no great importance. The simplicity of their outlook on life gave them a certain dignity, because it was free from irrelevances. Certainly they had all the appetites of men, and, in the aggregate, probably embodied most of the vices to which flesh is prone; but they were not preoccupied with their vices and appetites, they could master them with rather splendid indifference; and even sensuality has is aspects of tenderness. These apparently rude and brutal natures comforted, encouraged and reconciled each other  to fate, with a tenderness and tact which was more moving than anything in life. They had nothing; not even their own bodies, which had become the mere implements of warfare. They turned from the wreckage and misery of life to an empty heaven, and from an empty heaven to the silence of their own hearts. They had been brought to the last extremity of hope, and yet they put their hands on each other’s shoulders and said with passionate conviction that it would be all right, though they had faith in nothing but in themselves and each other.

Introduction to Warriors by Max Hastings

 

In civil life, people with a penchant for fighting are deemed at best an embarrassment, at worst a menace. Warriors are unfashionable people in democratic societies during times of peace. Major-General John Pope of the Army of Tennessee asserted: ‘The well-being of the people equally with the well-being of the Army requires a common sympathy and a common interest between them.’ Yet this proposition is far more honored in the breach than in the observance. ‘Much more could be done if the women in America would praise their heroes,’ said George Patton. Nelson liked to quote Thomas Jordan’s epigram:

Our God and sailor we adore,
In time of danger, not before;

The danger past, both are alike acquitted,

God is forgotten, and the sailor slighted.

Yet all nations need warriors to pursue their interests  in conflict, to create disciplined violence within the harness of uniform. In times of war, fighting men are suddenly cherished and become celebrities – or at least did so until very recently. Few of those who experience battle emerge as heroes. Most, even if they have volunteered for military service, discover amid mortal peril that they prefer to act in a fashion likely to enable them to see home again, rather than to perform the sorts of feats which win medals. This does not mean they are cowards. The majority do their duty conscientiously. They are reluctant, however, to take those strides beyond duty which mark out the men who win battles for their countries . . . Stan Hollis’s[1] colonel said: ‘I think Hollis was the only man I met between 1939 and 1945 who felt winning the war was his personal responsibility. Everybody else, when they heard there was a bloody awful job on, used to to mutter: ‘Please God some other poor soul can be found to do it.’’

Every army, in order to prevail on the battlefield, needs a certain number of people capable of courage, initiative of leadership beyond the norm,. What is the norm? It has changed through the course of history, dramatically so since the mid-twentieth century, with the advance of what passes for civilization. Western democracies have not become more merciful towards enemies, Indeed they use ever more terrible weapons to encompass their destruction. Western warriors, however, have become progressively more sensitive to risk and hardship, in a fashion which reflects sentiment in the societies from which they are drawn. A Greek or Roman soldier was required to engage in hours of close-quarter combat with edged weapons which hacked through flesh, muscle, bone and entrails. Modern firearms inflict terrible wounds, but by a much less intimate process. “Was this fighting? mused World War I fighter pilot V. M. Yeates. ‘There is no anger, no red lust, no struggle, no straining muscles and sobbing breath; only slight movement of levers and the rattle of machine-guns.’

In the past . . .the acceptance of possible death – of a multitude of deaths on one’s own side, win or lose – was part of the contract, in a fashion that has vanished today. Low-intensity engagement with guerillas continues to inflict painful losses on Western armies, conspicuously in Iraq after 2003. If matters go according to plan in such set piece operations as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, or the bombing of Kosovo, however, military objectives are achieved are negligible cost to the technological master–power . . .

The American civil war required from combatants the same submission to mass fire as Bonaparte’s and Wellington’s soldiers experienced, the ordeals of Gettysburg and the Wilderness being rendered more terrible by improvements in weapon technology. Although the clash of the states was much shorter in duration than the the great European wars  earlier in the nineteenth century, it exacted by far the highest casualties of any conflict in the history of the United States, albeit many of them by disease…A relatively small number of people enjoyed the conflicts of the twentieth century as much as Churchill had revelled in his adventurers with the Malakand Field Force in 1900. … .Few 1939-45 citizen soldiers wrote home from North Africa or the Pacific with Churchill’s enthusiastic delight.

The most dramatic foreshortening of Western democratic man’s assumed quotient of courage, his expected tolerance of the circumstances of conflict, took place between the two world wars. . . .However ghastly were some individual Western Allied experiences of World War II, only in the Japanese, Russian and German armies were demands routinely made compared to earlier centuries. It  might be observe that ‘fanatical’ enemy behavior which roused the dismay, even revulsion, of 1939-45 American and British soldiers was no more than had been asked as commonplace of their own forebears: a willingness to carry out orders likely to precipitate their own deaths. After 1918, the soldiers of the Western democracies in World WAR II were deemed to have grown more ‘civilized,’ a cause of lamentation among their commanders, Senior officers such as Patton, Brooke and Alexander, not to mention Churchill, bewailed the fact that the men whom they led possessed less capacity for suffering than their fathers who bore arms in the Kaiser’s war. Norms have changed.. .

Yet in every society one earth, the most durable convention, from ancient times until very recently, has held physical courage to be the highest human attribute. For thousands of years, in nations dominated by the warrior ethic, this quality was valued more highly than intellectual achievement and moral worth. . . .  One consequence of mankind’s exaggerated regard for courage is that some remarkably stupid men, their only virtue a willingness to expose their own persons to risk, have been granted positions of responsibility on the battlefield, where their follies cost lives. Bonaparte often over-promoted officers of high courage and small intelligence, whose headlong assaults upon the enemy cost the imperial army gratuitous slaughter. General Sir Harold Alexander’s bravery, patrician manners and dashing appearance made him Churchill’s favorite general. ‘Alex’ looked the ideal  warrior. The prime minister was content to overlook the hero’s notorious laziness and lack of intellect.

A less-exalted officer who showed himself ‘brave as a lion’, to quote a comrade, leading a battalion in northwest Europe in 1944-45 had to be relieved of brigade command in Korea in 1951. His subordinates formally protested to the divisional commander when this committed warrior proposed to launch his men in a frontal assault upon the Chinese. He failed to comprehend the new terms of limited war.

Ambrose Bierce advised the ambitious American professional soldier: “Always try to get yourself killed.” Many of those who display the willingness to pursue this objective are, however, fools by the normal yards tricks of humanity. ‘Valor without wisdom is insufficient,’ said Frederick the Great. Cavalry and its senior officers were flawed through most of their history, up to and including World War II, by an instinctive compulsion to charge. No warrior should be promoted to higher command merely because he is brave. Two thousand five hundred years ago, the Chinese warrior Wu Ch’i noted: ‘When people discuss a general they always pay attention to his courage. As far as a general is concerned, courage is but one quality. A valiant general will be certain to enter an engagement recklessly.’ A skilled and eager fighter is best rewarded with decorations rather than promotion. He should be retained in a role in which he can make himself useful in personal combat, rather than advanced beyond the merits of that rather limited gift – even for a soldier –of being good at killing people. . .

In the tranquil times in which we are fortunate enough to live- with or without Al Q’aeda -  our ancestors would consider our era uniquely privileged – there is a public yearning to make life safe. A corollary of this is a diminution of enthusiasm for those who embrace risk. Most of the people whose stories feature in this book would find our society’s quest for existence without peril incomprehensible, unmanly, absurd. They would be amazed by the childlike and increasingly widespread belief that if governments do their business properly,  a soldier in war  can be protected from harm.

It is welcome that popular perceptions of courage no longer embrace only, or even chiefly, achievement in battle. But it seems dismaying that the public today blurs the distinction between a victim, who suffers terrible experiences, and a hero. A true hero must consciously consent to risk his or her life for a higher purpose. The media for instance, will describe a pilot who safely lands a crippled plan full of passengers as ‘a hero’. A party trapped for hours on a cable car which returns to terra firma without betraying  visible moral collapse may well be dubbed heroic. In truth, of course, these people are merely prisoners of misfortune. If they behave well, they are doing so to save their own skins, and only incidentally those of other people. Anyone who has served in a theater of war, even in a non-combatant capacity and even in as a perfunctory affair- from the Allied point of view- as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, may be described in any subsequent media report of a divorce, car crash or fatality as a ‘war hero’. This is a travesty. Such a word as ‘hero’ deserves to be cherished as carefully as any other endangered species.

Physical bravery is found more often than the spiritual variety. Moral courage is rare. A willingness to defy peril comes remarkably easily to some people but the warrior deserving highest praise is he who demonstrates fortitude alone, without the stimulus of comradeship. .  .  The highest form of courage is that of a man, or woman, who surrenders his or her life without hope of recognition. There have been innumerable such instances throughout history, which by their nature are unknown to us. By contrast many acts of heroism, some recorded in this book, have been committed in the active hope of advancement or glory. Eager warriors, aspiring heroes, ‘gong chasers,’ are generally disliked and mistrusted by those of more commonplace disposition who are obliged to serve with them. Many soldiers display a baleful attitude towards officers who are perceived to be excessively aggressive. ‘It’s all right for him if he wants to win a Congressional Medal,’ they mutter, ‘but what about us?’ Audie Murphy, that hero of heroes of whom I write about in this book, was not well like by his comrades. General Ian Hamilton wrote  ‘If  a British officer wishes to make his men shy of taking the lead from him, let him stand up under fire whilst they lie in their trenches . . .Our fellows are not in the least impressed by such bravado. All they say is:  ‘This fellow is a fool. If he are so little for his own life, how much less will he care about ours.’’

‘How can man die better than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers and the temple of his gods?’

From a Western commander’s perspective, however, a distressingly small number of men share  [Macaulay’s] Horatio’s sanguine point of view. There is an element of hypocrisy about the manner in which democracies deplore ‘fanatical’ or ‘suicidal’ behavior in battles by foes such as the wartime Japanese and Germans, even the modern terrorist. Western armies have awarded their highest decorations, often posthumously, in recognition of behavior in action which was more likely that not to result on the death of the warrior concerned. It is because it is so difficult to persuade sensible Western soldiers to perform acts likely to cause their own deaths that democratic societies become alarmed when they perceive hostile races capable of more aggressive behavior than their own. This observation is not intended to applaud fanaticism ,but merely to recognized our double standard. A modern Islamic suicide bomber might assert that his actions would have won Western applause, if it had been performed sixty years ago against the Nazi oppressors of Europe. A host of Allied medal citations in two world wars including the approving words; ‘Without regards for his own safety.’[2]


The tales recounted in this book are designed to reflect a variety of manifestations of leadership, courage, heroic folly and the warrior ethic. Some are romantic, others painfully melancholy .Some of those portrayed were notably successful in their undertakings. Others were not. I am fascinated by warriors, but try to perceive their triumphs and tragedies without illusion. A touch of skepticism does these remarkable men – and two women- no disservice, nor does the acknowledgement that few were people with who one would care to share a desert island, My subjects represent a range of nationalities, but are chiefly Anglo-Saxon, for this is my own culture. Three rose to lead large forces, most did not. This is a study of fighters, not commanders.




[1] On D-Day and in the battles that followed  he attacked German positions which were holding up his battalion’s advance three times with a Sten gun and grenades, killing or taking the defenders prisoner. Miraculously, he lived to receive a Victoria Cross and keep a pub in his old age.

[2] he does not cite the self-consciously suicidal mission of the  torpedo bomber squadron at the Battle of Midway. https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2016/07/suicide-bombers-by-james-jones.html

Chapter 10 , ‘The Dam Buster’ covers the question of civilian casualties vs sound strategy. The busting of the Ruhr dams caused 13,000 civilian drownings, a majority of whom were Nazi slave laborers but ultimately did not deny the Nazis an adequate supply of water. He also discusses the bombing of German Cities in a similar frame, ‘Heroes’ and our desire to honor them in disregard of the practical efficacy of their actions.

The Baser Types by Henry James

 [After that Saturday afternoon at the theater] I was happily to find, at all events, that I had not, on that occasion, done with the Bowery, or with its neighborhood – as how could one not rejoice to return to an air which such infinite suggestion might flower? The season had advanced, though the summer night was no more than genial, and the question, for this second visit, was of a ‘look-in,’ with two or three friends, at three or four of the most ‘characteristic’ evening resorts (for reflection and conversation) of the dwellers of the East side.

It was definitely not, the question, of any gaping view of the policed underworld –unanimously pronounced an imposture, in general, at the best, and essentially less interesting than an exhibition of public manners.

I found on the spot, in harmony with this preference, that nothing better could have been desired, in the way of a presentable picture, subject always to the swinging lantern-light of the individual imagination, than the first (as I think it was, for the roaming hour) of our penetrated ‘haunts’ – a large semi-subterranean establishment, a beer-cellar rich in the sporting note, adorned with images of strong men and lovely women, prize-fighters and ballerines, and finding space in its deep bosom for a billiard-room and a bowling alley, all sociably squeezed together; finding space, above all for a collection of extraordinarily equivocal types of consumers: an intensity of equivocation indeed planted, just as if to await direct and convenient study, in the most typical face of the collection, a face which happened, by good fortune, to be that of the most officious presence.

When the element of the equivocal in personal character and history takes on, in New York, an addition from all the rest of the swarming ambiguity and fugacity of race and tongue, the result becomes, for the picture seeker, indescribably, luridly strong. There always comes up, at a view of the ‘low’ physiognomy shown in conditions that denote a measure of impunity and ease, the question –than which few, I think, are more interesting to the psychologist –of the forms of ability consistent with lowness; the question of the quality of intellect, the subtlety of character, the mastery of the art of life, with which the extremity of baseness may yet be associated. That question held me, I confess, so under its spell during those almost first steps of our ingenious  enquete, that I would gladly have prolonged, just there, the opportunity to sound it.

The fascination was of course in the perfection of the baseness, and the puzzle in the fact that it could be subject, without fatally muddling, without tearing and rending them, to those arts of life, those quantities of conformity, the numerous involved accommodations and patience, that are not in the repertory of the wolf and the snake. Extraordinary, we say to ourselves on such occasions, the amount of formal tribute that civilization is after all able to gouge out of apparently hopeless stuff; extraordinary that it can make a presentable sheath for such fangs and claws. The mystery is in the how of the process, in the wonderful little wavering borderland between nature and art, the place of the crooked seam where, if psychology had the adequate lens, the white stitches would show.

All this played through one’s thought, to the infinite extension of the sufficiently close and thoroughly banal beer-cellar. There happened to be reasons, not to be shaded over, why one of my companions should cause a particular chord of recognition to vibrate, and the very convergence of hushed looks, in the so ‘loud’ general medium, seemed to lay bare, from table to table, the secret common countenance (common to that place) put off its guard by curiosity, almost by amiability. The secret was doubtless in many cases but the poor familiar human secret of the vulgar mind, of the soul unfurnished, so to speak, in respect to delicacy, probity, pity, with a social decoration of the mere blank walls of instinct; but it was the unforgettable little personality that I have referred to as the presiding spirit, it was the spokesman of our welcome, the master of the scene himself, who struck me as presenting my question in its finest form.

To conduct a successful establishment, to be a spokesman, an administrator, an employer of labor and converser on subjects, let alone a citizen and tax-payer, was to have an existence abounding in relations and to be subject to  the law that a relation, however imperfectly human or social, is at worst a matter that can only be described as delicate. Well,  in the presence of the abysmal obliquity of such a face, of the abysmal absence of traceability or coherency in such antecedents, where did the different delicacies involved come it at all?- how did intercourse emerge at all, and, much more, emerge so brilliantly, as it were, from its dangers? The answer had to be, for the moment, no doubt, that if there be such a state as that of misrepresenting your value and use, there is also the rare condition of being so sunk beneath the level of appearance as not to be able to represent them at all. Appearance, in you, has not only no notes, no language, no authority, but is literally condemned to operate as the treacherous sum of your poverties.

The jump was straight, after this, to a medium so different that I seem to see, as one drawback of evoking it again, however briefly, the circumstance that it stated the speculative hare for an even longer and straighter run.

This irrepressible animal covered here, however, a much goodlier country, covered it in the interest of happy generalization – the bold truth that even when apparently done to death by that property of the American  air which reduces so many aspects to a common denominator, certain finer shades of saliency and consistency do often, by means know to themselves, recover their rights. They are like swimmers who have had to plunge, to come round and under water, but who pop out a panting head and shine for a moment in the sun.

My image is perhaps extravagant, for the question is only of the kept recollection of a café pure and simple, particularly simple in fact, inasmuch as it dispensed none but ‘soft’ drinks and presented itself thus  in the light, the quiet, tempered, intensely individual light, of a beerhouse innocent of beer. I have indeed no other excuse for calling it a beerhouse than the fact that it offered to every sense such a deep Germanic peace as abides, for the most part (though not always even then), where the deep-lidded tankard balances with the scarce shallower bowl of the meditative pipe.

This modest asylum had its tone, which I found myself, after a few minutes, ready to take for exquisite, if on no other ground than its almost touching suggestion of discriminations made and preserved in the face of no small difficulty. That is what I meant just now by my tribute to the occasional patience of unquenched individualism – the practical subtlety of the spirit unashamed of its preference for the minor key, clinging, through thick and thin, to its conception of decency and dignity, and finding means to make good even to the exact true shade. These are the real triumphs of art- the discriminations in favor of taste produced not by the gilded and guarded ‘private room,’ but by making publicity itself delicate, making your barrier against vulgarity consist but in a few tables and chairs, a few coffee-cups and boxes of dominoes.

Money in quantities can always create a tone, but it has been created here by mere un-buyable instinct. The charm of the place in short was that its note of the exclusive had been arrived at with such a beautifully fine economy. I try, in memory, and for the value of the lesson, to analyze, as it were, the elements, and seem to recall as the most obvious the contemplative stillness in which the faint click of the moved domino could be heard, and into which the placid attention of the quiet,  honest men who were thus testifying for the exquisite could be read. The exquisite, yes, was the triumphs, those of the course and common, making it but stick the faster, like a well-inserted wedge. And fully to catch this was to catch by the same stroke the main ground of effect, to see that it came most of all from the felicity of suppression and omission.

There was so visibly too much every where else of everything vulgar, that there reigned here, for the difference, the learned lesson that there could scarce be in such an air of infection little enough, in quantity and mass, of anything. The felicity had its climax in the type, or rather the individual character, of our host, who, officiating alone, had apparently suppressed all aids to service and succeeded, as by an inspiration of genius, in omitting, for all his years, to learn the current American. He spoke but a dozen words of it, and that was doubtless how he best kept the key of the old Germanic peace – of the friendly stillness in which, while the East side roared, a new metaphysic might have been thought out or the scheme of a new war intellectualized. . .

After this there were other places, mostly higher in scale, and but a couple of which my memory recovers; our adventure was so far from closing that, late though the hour, it presently opened into a vast and complicated picture which I find myself thinking of, after an interval, as the splendid crown of the evening. Here we were still on the East side, but we had moved up, by stages artfully inspired, into the higher walks, into a pavilion of light and sound and savory science that struck one as vaguely vast,  as possibly gardened about, and that, blazing into the stillness of the small hours, dazzled one with the show of its copious and various activity.

The whole vision was less intimate than elsewhere, but it was a world of custom quite away from any mere Delmonico tradition of one’s earlier time, and rich, as one might reckon it, in its own queer marks, marks probably never yet reduced – inspiring thought! – to literary notation; with which it would seem better to form a point of departure for fresh exploration than serve as a tail-piece to the end of a chapter.

Who were all the people, and whence and whither and why, in the good New York small hours? Where was the place after all, and what might it, or might it not, truly, represent to the slightly-fatigued feasters who, in a recess like a private opera box at a bal masque, and still communing with polyglot waiters, looking down from their gallery at multitudinous supper, a booming orchestra, an elegance of disposed plants and flowers, a perfect organization and an abyss of mystery?

Was it ‘on’ Third Avenue, on Second, on fabulous un-attempted First? Nothing would induce me to cut down the romance of it, in remembrance, to a mere address, least of all to an awful New York one; New York addresses falling so below the grace of a city where the very restaurants may on occasion, under restless analysis, flash back the likeness of Venetian places flaring with the old carnival. The ambiguity is the element in which the whole thing swims for me – so nocturnal, so bacchanal, so hugely hatted and feathered and flounced, yet apparently so innocent, almost so patriarchal again, and matching, in its mixture, with nothing one had elsewhere known. It breathed its simple ‘New York! New York!’ at every impulse of inquiry; so that I can only echo contentedly, with analysis for once agreeably baffled, ‘Remarkable, unspeakable New York!’