MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IT is said that the modern generation has no sense of wonder. In 1843, for instance, the Vicar's little boy at Market Harborough would have thought of the ocean as some silver cloth patterned with golden crowns, and of the Lord Mayor of London as some- thing super-human ; as a large turtle, in fact, dressed entirely in fur. The same little boy in 1943 would be subject to no such visions ; at the local Odeon or Regal he would have seen the north seas curling in dark rage, or the south seas shimmering with flying fish and dolphins ; and on Sunday evenings, sitting by the vicarage fire, he would have heard the Lord Mayor proclaiming the Week's Good Cause. It is inevitable, I suppose, that the imagina- tion of the young must today be much diluted ; they have seen the fingers of Papuan fishermen drying their nets under the palm- trees ; they have watched the sappers in the Libyan desert auscultat- ing for land-mines with the gestures of a housemaid working the electrolux ; for them nothing is so remote as to be unfamiliar, nothing so unusual as to be unexpected, nothing so impossible as to be improbable ; there exists for them no lovely barrier between the known and the unknown. The war itself invades their privacy ; what did the Vicar's little boy know of Liao-Yang, or Magersfontein or even of Gheluvelt? Today his bed will make a little leap on the linoleum, and next morning he will find the cucumber-frame a shatter of broken glass. We have become accustomed during this war to the intrusion of the extraordinary upon the ordinary, and we read without surprise of the destruction of rooms or buildings of which from childhood we have known the very feel and smell. It was not always like that. Even in the last war we were startled when the flame of battle came to scorch areas within our own orbit of familiarity. It was so different from the Modder River ; so different from Omdurman.
* * I remember in the early days of the last war travelling up from Sevenoaks with a man in a 'brown suit. He sat down heavily, adjusted the pink rose in his buttonhole, rose again to put his grey hat in the rack above him, and opened his newspaper. A few seconds later he gave a loud snort of anger and surprise. "But it's incredible," he exclaimed, " I cannot believe it " ; I glanced across at him in patient, and I hope polite, enquiry. "Did you see that? " he asked, in outraged astonishment. "The Germans have occupied Namur. Why only last Easter my wife and I were bicycling irf Belgium and we went to Namur. I cannot believe it." He pushed the paper angrily into the cushion behind him. " In- credible," he murmured again with flushed cheeks. The train entered the tunnel, and he sat there with a perplexed and insulted expression on his face. " You see," he began again, " I remember it as if it were yesterday. There were cliffs and a river, and a little inn by the water-side, with a striped awning, and shrubs in green wooden boxes. Why, there may be Uhlans sitting in the very seat . . . at the very table, where we had our coffee ; I cannot believe it. It seems incredible to me." Until that morning War had meant to him something purely transoceanic ; suddenly it had become con- tinental; he was still panting slightly when the train reached London Bridge. Within a few hours the Uhlans swept onwards to other areas of familiarity ; Louvain and Brussels, and then Ostend. I never saw my friend with the pink buttonhole again; I suppose that he joined Kitchenees army ; he may well have been killed upon the Somme. But his indignation that morning has often recurred to me. I pass the ruins of the Temple Church, I pass the ruins of Crown Office Row, and I murmur to myself, " It is incredible,- I do not believe it," even as the man in the brown suit murmured twenty-nine years ago.
* * * We have by now come to accept this mingling of the extra- ordinary with the familiar. When I see photographs of Hitler grinning his moron grin within the Madeleine, or gazing dramatically from the terrace of the Trocadero upon the vast legs of the Eiffel Tower, I am filled with acute distaste, but not with astonishment. I have come to take it for granted that Italian carabinieri should guard the entrance to the Acropolis, nor am I really startled when I see photographs of German sentries in the Place Vendome. We have become inured to these insults to the dignity of Europe. Yet suddenly something happens which shakes one out of this mood of patient acceptance, some combination occurs between the familiar and the extraordinary which sets one panting with indignation even as my man in the brown suit panted on that August morning in 1914. Such a moment came to me when I heard that the Germans had occupied the Vieux-Port at Marseilles, and driven the inhabitants from their homes. The voice of Monsieur Paul Creysell, a propagandist of the Croix de Feu, came over the wire- less from Radio-Paris. He sought to justify the German action. " Even," he said, "if the German military authorities had not en- forced this evacuation, for reasons which it is not our business to examine, die French Government would have ordered the civil population to leave the neighbourhood of the harbour. This area of Marseilles is so densely populated that in the event of attack from the air many thousands of civilians would have lost their lives." I can understand that the Germans may wish to construct in the Vieux-Port a concrete kennel for their submarines. I can understand that they may think it necessary to remove the civilian population from the proximity of this intended nest. But to hear a French citizen seeking to justify this action, and the brutality by which it was accompanied, makes my gorge rise with nausea.
* *
" This area of Marseilles . .," says Monsieur Paul Creysell, as if he were speaking of the Bassin d'Arenc, or the Bassin de la Joliette, where the great liners moor. The Vieux-Port is something more than seventy acres of harbour-water enclosed by quays and enlivened by the spars of little ships. It is something more than the sunniest spot in Europe, with the women at the windows singing each to each. Does Monsieur Creysell realise the blasphemy that he utters when he refers to those historic acres as "cate region de la ville"? The Vieux-Port was a haven of merchandise and com- merce in the days when London and Paris were unknown. It is older than three thousand years. It was to this harbour that the Phocaeans came after the Persian conquest of Ionia. They cast an iron bar into the sea, and vowed that they would not return to Asia until that bar floated on the waves. They did not return. They made of the Vieux-Port an outpost of Greek civilisation among the western barbarians. They built temples, treasure-houses and gymnasiums. They established minor colonies at Nicaea and Anti- polis, at Nice and Antibes. The famous street which leads to the Vieux-Port from the heart of Marseilles is still called by its old Greek name. Surely Monsieur Creysell has heard of the Canne- biere, and respects the antiquity which that name enshrines? The old Phocaean colony, the area of the Vieux-Port, survived even its destruction by Julius Caesarb who was enraged because the Mar- seillais took the side of Pompey. It remained a centre of Greek culture when the rest of Gallia Narbonensis was plunged in bar- barism. It was to Marseilles thereafter that the young Agricola, father-in-law-of Tacitus, came to learn the Greek language. He did not go to Athens, he went to the schools and the gymnasium of the Vieux-Port, still known in Roman days by the lovely name of Alycidon. And now, in the hour of shame, Monsieur Creysell of Radio-Paris, and the Croix de Feu; speaks lightly of Alycidon as " cette region de la ville."
At such moments, when the noble past is mired by the ignoble present, the imagination 'is stirred to angered astonishment. The Germans, I am glad to say, did not find it easy to evacuate Alycidon. They were obliged to bring up artillery before the men would move. The women, screaming loudly, were dragged from their houses by the Gestapo ; dragged one by one from the water-front and along the Cannebiere. "Massili," if I may misquote the oldest of Roman poets, "portabant juvenes de litore tans." Did no word of Ennius' prophecy echdtila the ears of Monsieur Creysell? Such ears are blind.
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