Waiting for Daylight. H. M. Tomlinson

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      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4057664611697

Table of Contents

       WAITING FOR DAYLIGHT

       I. In Ypres

       II. A Raid Night

       III. Islands

       IV. Travel Books

       V. Signs of Spring

       VI. Prose Writing

       VII. The Modern Mind

       VIII. Magazines

       IX. The Marne

       X. Carlyle

       XI. Holiday Reading

       XII. An Autumn Morning

       XIII. News from the Front

       XIV. Authors and Soldiers

       XV. Waiting for Daylight

       XVI. The Nobodies

       XVII. Bookworms

       XVIII. Sailor Language

       XIX. Illusions

       XX. Figure-Heads

       XXI. Economics

       XXII. Old Sunlight

       XXIII. Ruskin

       XXIV. The Reward of Virtue

       XXV. Great Statesmen

       XXVI. Joy

       XXVII. The Real Thing

       XXVIII. Literary Critics

       XXI. The South Downs

       XXX. Kipling

       XXXI. A Devon Estuary

       XXXII. Barbellion

       XXXIII. Breaking the Spell

WAITING FOR

       DAYLIGHT

       Table of Contents

I. In Ypres

       Table of Contents

      JULY, 1915. My mouth does not get so dry as once it did, I notice, when walking in from Suicide Corner to the Cloth Hall. There I was this summer day, in Ypres again, in a silence like a threat, amid ruins which might have been in Central Asia, and I, the last man on earth, contemplating them. There was something bumping somewhere, but it was not in Ypres, and no notice is taken in Flanders of what does not bump near you. So I sat on the disrupted pedestal of a forgotten building and smoked, and wondered why I was in the city of Ypres, and why there was a war, and why I was a fool.

      It was a lovely day, and looking up at the sky over what used to be a school dedicated to the gentle Jesus, which is just by the place where one of the seventeen-inchers has blown a forty-foot hole, I saw a little round cloud shape in the blue, and then another, and then a cluster of them; the kind of soft little cloudlets on which Renaissance cherubs rest their chubby elbows and with fat faces inclined on their hands consider mortals from cemetery monuments. Then dull concussions arrived from heaven, and right overhead I made out two German ’planes. A shell-case banged the pavé and went on to make a white scar on a wall. Some invisible things were whizzing about. One’s own shrapnel can be tactless.

      There was a cellar near and I got into it, and while the intruders were overhead I smoked and gazed at the contents of the cellar—the wreckage of a bicycle, a child’s chemise, one old boot, a jam-pot, and a dead cat. Owing to an unsatisfactory smell of many things I climbed out as soon as possible СКАЧАТЬ