The Skeptical Romancer: Selected Travel Writing

by W. Somerset Maugham

I made acquaintance with them with just the degree of intimacy that suited me. It was an intimacy born on their side of ennui or loneliness, that withheld few secrets, but one that separation irrevocably broke. It was close because its limits were settled in advance. Looking back on that long procession I cannot think of anyone who had not something to tell me that I was glad to know. I seemed to myself to develop the sensitiveness of a photographic plate. It did not matter to me if the picture I formed was true; what mattered was that with the help of my imagination I could make of each person I met a plausible harmony. It was the most entrancing game in which I had ever engaged.

  One reads that no one exactly resembles anyone else, and that every man is unique, and in a way this is true, but it is a truth easy to exaggerate: in practice men are very much alike. They are divided into comparatively few types. The same circumstances mould them in the same way. Certain characteristics infer certain others. You can, like the palæontologist, reconstruct the animal from a single bone. The “characters” which have been a popular form of letters since Theophrastus, and the “humours” of the seventeenth century, prove that men sort themselves into a few marked categories. Indeed this is the foundation of realism, which depends for its attractiveness on recognition. The romantic method turns its attention to the exceptional; the realistic to the usual. The slightly abnormal circumstances in which men live in the countries where life is primitive or the environment alien to them, emphasize their ordinariness so that it gains a character of its own; and when they are in themselves extraordinary, which of course they sometimes are, the want of the usual restraints permits them to develop their kinks with a freedom that in more civilized communities can be but hardly won. Then you have creatures that realism can hardly cope with. I used to stay away till my receptivity was exhausted and I found that when I met people I had no longer the power to make the imaginative effort to give them shape and coherence; then I returned to England to sort out my impressions and rest till I felt my powers of assimilation restored. At last, after seven, I think, of these long journeys I found a certain sameness in people. I met more and more often types that I had met before. They ceased to interest me so much. I concluded that I had come to the end of my capacity for seeing with passion and individuality the people I went so far to find, for I had never doubted that it was I who gave them the idiosyncrasy that I discovered in them, and so I decided that there was no further profit for me in travel. I had twice nearly died of fever, I had been nearly drowned, I had been shot by bandits. I was glad to resume a more ordered way of life.

  I came back from each of my journeys a little different. In my youth I had read a great deal, not because I supposed that it would benefit me, but from curiosity and the desire to learn; I travelled because it amused me, and to get material that would be of use to me: it never occurred to me that my new experiences were having an effect on me, and it was not till long afterwards that I saw how they had formed my character. In contact with all these strange people I lost the smoothness that I had acquired when, leading the humdrum life of a man of letters, I was one of the stones in a bag. I got back my jagged edges. I was at last myself. I ceased to travel because I felt that travel could give me nothing more. I was capable of no new development. I had sloughed the arrogance of culture. My mood was complete acceptance. I asked from nobody more than he could give me. I had learnt toleration. I was pleased with the goodness of my fellows; I was not distressed by their badness. I had acquired independence of spirit. I had learnt to go my own way without bothering with what others thought about it. I demanded freedom for myself and I was prepared to give freedom to others. It is easy to laugh and shrug your shoulders when people act badly to others; it is much more difficult when they act badly to you. I have not found it impossible. The conclusion I came to about men I put into the mouth of a man I met on board ship in the China Seas. “I’ll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell, brother,” I made him say. “Their heart’s in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ.”

  CAPRI

  CAPRI. I WANDER about alone, forever asking myself the same questions: What is the meaning of life? Has it any object or end? Is there such a thing as morality? How ought one to conduct oneself in life? What guide is there? Is there one road better than another? And a hundred more of the same sort. The other afternoon I was scrambling among the rocks and boulders up the hill behind the villa. Above me was the blue sky and all around the sea. Hazy in the distance was Vesuvius. I remember the brown earth, the ragged olive trees, and here and there a pine. And I stopped suddenly, in confusion, my head buzzing with all the thoughts that seethed in it. I could make nothing out of it all; it seemed to me one big tangle. In desperation, I cried out: I can’t understand it. I don’t know, I don’t know.

  AT WAR

  I MET A CURIOUS man while I was having breakfast. He was a hussar and had ridden ahead of his regiment. While he breakfasted an orderly held his horse under the trees in the square. He told me he was a Cossack, born in Siberia, and for eleven years had been fighting Chinese brigands on the frontier. He was thin, with strongly marked features and large, very prominent blue eyes. He had been in Switzerland for the summer and three days before war broke out received orders to go to France at once. On the declaration he found himself unable to get back to Russia and was given a commission in a French cavalry regiment. He was talkative, vivacious and boastful. He told me that, having taken a German officer prisoner, he took him to his quarters. There he said to him: “Now I will show you how we treat prisoners and gentlemen,” and gave him a cup of chocolate; when he had drunk it he said: “Now I will show you how you treat them.” And he smacked his face. “What did he say?” I asked. “Nothing, he knew that if he had opened his mouth I would have killed him.” He talked to me about the Senegalese. They insist on cutting off the Germans’ heads: “Then you’re sure they’re dead – et ça fait une bonne soupe.” He described the shells: “They go zzz, and until they fall you don’t know if you’re going to be killed or not.”

  Fighting is going on within twenty-five kilometres. While waiting for luncheon I talked to a sharp lad of thirteen. He told me that the other day two prisoners were brought through; the boy added that he had his cap full of hot chestnuts, and he threw them one by one in the wretched men’s faces. When I told him that was very wrong he laughed and said: “Why? Everybody else was hitting them.” Some Germans came in afterwards to get a car that they had requisitioned and drove with the mayor to the house where it was. The gendarmes, ten of them, heard of this and followed. When they arrived the officer was passing into the house with the mayor, and one of the Germans was under the car doing something to it. The officer stepped to one side to let the mayor precede him: “It showed that he had good manners,” said the old lady with whom I am billeted; and as he did so the gendarmes shot him; then they shot the man who was under the car. The others held up their hands in surrender, but they shot them all.

  I am billeted in a small, queer house with an elderly retired shopman and his wife; they have three sons mobilized; they are very cordial, glad to have an officer in their house, and anxious to do all they can for me. They offer me hot milk before I go to bed and say I shall be a son to them all the time I am there. It is a tiny room with a large wooden bed with a canopy, and looks out on a courtyard and a great sloping red roof.

  All the morning I worked in a school turned into a hospital. There must have been between two and three hundred wounded. The whole place stank of pus, no windows were open, the floors were unswept, and it was incredibly dingy and melancholy. There seemed not to be more than two doctors in charge, and they were assisted by a couple of dressers and a number of women from the town who had no knowledge of nursing. There was one German prisoner with whom I talked a little. He had had his leg cut off and was under the impression that it would not have been amputated if he had been French. The dresser asked me to explain to him that it was necessary to save his life, and with graphic d
etail explained to me in what a state the leg was. The prisoner was sullen and silent. He was suffering from home-sickness. He lay there, yellow, a straggly beard growing over his face, with wild, miserable eyes. In order to help him the doctor had put beside him a Frenchman whose leg had been amputated to show that this was done to the French too; and the Frenchman lay in his bed cheery and gay. I had done no work of this kind for many years and at first felt embarrassed and awkward, but soon I found I could do the little that it was possible to do – clean up the wounds, paint with iodine, and bandage. I have never seen such wounds. There are great wounds of the shoulder, the bone all shattered, running with pus, stinking; there are gaping wounds in the back; there are the wounds where a bullet has passed through the lungs; there are shattered feet so that you wonder if the limb can possibly be saved.

  After luncheon we were asked to take a hundred wounded to the station because all efforts were being made to evacuate the temporary hospitals at Doullens in expectation of the large number of patients who must come when the great battle begins for which troops have been pouring along the road every day since we came here. Some could walk and some were carried out to the cars on stretchers. Just as the first stretchers were being brought out, there was a sound of chanting and the stretcher-bearers put down their burdens. A cracked bell began to tinkle with a melancholy sound. A priest, a big fat fellow, in a cassock and short surplice, came out preceded by a blind man, the beadle, I suppose, led by a little boy, and they chanted the beginning of the service for the dead. Then came, borne by four men, a coffin covered with poor black cloth, and lying on it was a little wooden cross of unstained deal tacked on to which was the indication tablet of the dead soldier. They were followed by four soldiers and a nurse. They went a few steps, then the priest stopped, looked round and peevishly shrugged his shoulders. They waited. At last another coffin came, then a third and a fourth; the procession started again, the cracked bell tinkled; they passed out of the courtyard into the road; the civilians took off their hats, the military saluted; and they went their way slowly to the cemetery. I wondered what the dying in the hospital felt each time they heard the ghastly tinkling of the little cracked bell.

  It was in a château of white stone, a dignified building, with the date 1726 over the door, and it combined the solid grandeur of the age of Louis XIV with the beginnings of a lighter, daintier style. It had been hastily turned into a hospital. Wounded men were lying on straw mattresses on the floor in the hall and in the dining-room; the drawing-room had been made into a casualty ward – in the hurry the furniture had not been removed, but only pushed against the wall – and it was odd to see basins, dressings and drugs on the grand piano; the patient on his stretcher, waiting to be dressed, was placed on a Buhl writing-table. An attempt had been made the night before by the French to take the village of Andechy; the French had advanced before their artillery had properly prepared the way for them, one regiment had seized the enemy’s trenches, but another regiment, territorials, had wavered and then fled, so that the regiment already in possession of the German trenches had to retreat, and in retreating was terribly cut up. There were three hundred dead and sixteen hundred wounded. We took our stretchers out of the ambulances and waited for them to be loaded with those whom it was possible to move. The circular bit of lawn in front of the house, which one could imagine under usual circumstances neat and trim, was muddy like a field after a football match in the rain, and cut up by the stretcher-bearers who had walked over it through the night, and the heavy wheels of motor ambulances. In an outhouse by the side were piled the dead, those who were found to be dead when they reached the hospital and those who had died in the night. They were packed close together in every kind of grotesque attitude, their uniforms filthy with mud and blood, some were strangely contorted as though they had died in agony, one had his arms outstretched as though he were playing the harp, some were flung down shapelessly like clothes without a body in them; but in death their bloodless hands, the rough, dirty hands of private soldiers, had acquired an extraordinary delicacy and distinction. We made two or three journeys to this hospital and then went to the church of the village. It stood, a bare, weather-beaten village church, on the crest of a steep little hill. The chairs had been piled up in one of the chapels and the floor covered with straw. On this lay the wounded all round the wall and in long rows, so that there was scarcely room to thread one’s way between them. In the emergency there had been no time to take away any of the emblems of religion, and from the high altar looked down a Virgin in plaster, with staring eyes and painted cheeks: on each side were candlesticks and gilded jars containing paper flowers. Everyone who was not too ill smoked cigarettes. It was a singular scene. Round the doorway was a group of soldiers, smoking and chatting, while they glanced now and then gravely at the wounded; here and there others wandered around, looking for wounded comrades and stopping now and then to ask one about his wounds; hospital orderlies passed among the stricken with water or soup; stretcher-bearers stepped gingerly through the crowd, bearing their load to the ambulance. Conversation mingled with groans of pain and the cries of the dying; some, less wounded than their fellows, joked and laughed because they were glad to be alive. By a column a priest was giving the last sacrament to one who was dying. He muttered his prayers hurriedly in a low voice. Most of them seemed badly wounded, and they lay already in the shapeless confusion which I had seen in the dead. Propped up against the central door of the church, by an accident apart from the others, lay a man with an ashy face, bearded, thin and haggard; he made no sound or movement, but stared sullenly in front of him as though, realizing death was inevitable, he was filled only with anger. He had a horrible wound in the belly, and nothing could be done for him; he waited for death. I saw another, quite a boy, round-faced and ugly, with a yellow skin and narrow eyes, so that he had almost the look of a Japanese, who was desperately wounded; he knew he was dying too, but he was horribly afraid. Three soldiers were standing at his head, leaning over him, and he clung to the hands of one of them, crying out: “Oh God, I’m going to die.” He sobbed heartrendingly and heavy tears rolled over his dirty, ugly face, and he kept saying: “I’m so unhappy, oh God, I’m so unhappy.” The soldiers tried to comfort him, and the one whose hand he held caressingly passed his other hand over the boy’s face. “Mais non, mon vieux, tu guériras.” Another sat against the chancel steps smoking a cigarette and coolly watched; his cheeks were rosy, he did not look ill; he smiled gaily as I went up to him. I saw his arm was bandaged and I asked him if the wound was severe. He laughed a little. “Oh, that’s nothing, if I had no more than that! I’ve got a bullet in my spine, my legs are paralysed.”

  A billet at Montdidier. I found my way into the library. The neighbouring gentry before the French Revolution had town houses at Montdidier, to which they used to come in winter for society, but their mansions have now been divided into two or three houses for the bourgeoisie who have taken their place; that in which I am billeted gives one the impression of having been part of a much larger one, and the library is a little room on the ground floor which you reach by what may once have been a back staircase. It is a panelled room and the whole of one side is taken up by a bookcase built into the wall, and the books are protected by a wire network; the doors are locked, and it is impossible to get a book, but I amused myself by looking at their titles. They seem for the most part to have been collected in the eighteenth century. They are bound in calf decorated with gold tooling. On the upper shelves are devotional works, but among them, tucked away modestly, I found the picaresque novel Don Guzman de Alfarache and immediately below the Mémoires d’un Homme de Qualité; then there are the complete works of Bossuet, the sermons of Massillon, and the works in a dozen volumes of a writer I have never heard of. I am curious to know who he was and how he deserved this splendid edition. I should like also to dip into the four quarto volumes which contain the Histoire de Montdidier. Rousseau is represented only by the Confessions. On a lower shelf I f
ound the identical edition of Buffon’s works which amused my own childhood. The collector of these books was of a serious turn of mind, for I found the works of Descartes and an imposing history of the world, a history of France in many volumes, and a translation of Hume’s History of England. There was a large edition of Scott’s novels, full octavo, bound in black leather and very depressing to look at; and there was an edition of the works of Lord Byron that looked most unsuitably solemn. Soon I did not want to read any of the books I saw; it seemed to me much more entertaining to look at their titles behind their prison of gilt wicker; they had a magic thus which was greater far than I should have found if I had been able to take hold of them and turn their musty pages.

  Amiens. There are nearly as many English people here as in Boulogne, and great ladies drive about in huge motor-cars and visit the sick and conduct hospitals. I was told an agreeable story of one of them. A train-load of wounded had just come from the front and the wounded were placed temporarily in the hospital at the station. A lady went round giving them hot soup. Presently she came to a man who had been shot through the gullet and the lungs; she was just about to give him soup when the doctor in charge told her that if she did she would drown him. “What do you mean?” she said. “Of course he must have soup. It can’t possibly do him any harm.” “I’ve been in practice a great many years and through three campaigns,” answered the doctor, “and my professional opinion is that if you give that man soup he’ll die.” The lady grew very impatient. “What nonsense,” she said. “You give him soup on your own responsibility,” said the doctor. She held a cup to the man’s mouth, who tried to swallow, and promptly died. The lady was furious with the doctor: “You’ve killed that man,” she said. “Pardon me,” he answered, “you killed him. I told you what would happen.”