The Weekly Machen
Though he never served as a war correspondent, Arthur Machen often traveled over Great Britain to cover the home front as in the following initial article of a two-part series. However, by the time we read to the end of this installment, it seems as if he hasn’t even begun to write on the purported topic. Instead, we find a wonderfully discursive description of the landscape and a short meditation on Wuthering Heights, a novel of genius as considered by Machen. Though the broad corpus of Machen’s newspaper work as been described as hackery, a conclusion which is hard to defend after reading such a fine example.
The appended cartoon was published on the same page as Machen’s article. The second part of the article will posted in the future.
A Journey Through Khaki-Land:
Making the Robe of Victory
by
Arthur Machen
February 4, 1915
The Yorkshire woollen mills are working day and night and Sundays making cloth for our new armies and for the armies of our Allies.
Our special commissioner, Mr. Arthur Machen, has travelled to the heart of this khaki country, and has written two articles, describing what he has seen and heard in Huddersfield and Bradford and the adjoining districts.
There is a great cloud over the North of England. It is grey and dun, and it deepens in to heavy black. It is pierced by white jets of panting steam, from the depths of it glare out red tongues of angry flame. The blast of ten thousand furnaces and again ten thousand comes from the cloud and the flame; from the thick smoke sound the whirr and hum and racket of innumerable looms; the giant wheels stay not, day nor night.
For beneath the cloud they are making the robe and panoply and ordnance of Victory. Keen cutting steel, steel hard and tough; warm wool and stout leather; that is their work from Leicester up to Leeds.
Sheffield I can only call a terrific spectacle. It was a grey day of lowering clouds when I went up into the khaki country, and at Sheffield the grey cloud from above came down and mingled with the black cloud from the multitude of chimneys below; and the two were one gloom, one horror of thick darkness. The high places were like shadowy mountains of the underworld; the valleys were black as the very pit. And the train, leaving Sheffield, went on through a region of gloomy enchantment.
It skirted the side of a shadowy valley, passing through a deep, wintry wood. The earth was brown with dead bracken, scattered over it were huge boulders of rock, far below a grey stream rushed and foamed on its way; beyond, there rose again the steep wintry wood.
Every Valley Its Mill
Out from the depths of the wood into more open, still wilder country. There is a great swell and lift, as it were, about the land. It rises up from inclosed valleys, and goes climbing, field after field, wood by wood, height by height, till it surges up far and far away into wild moorland summits, one would say into utter desolation. Yet almost every valley has its great mill; a huge square building, with tier after tier of windows, and a rushing stream foaming past it, and perhaps a coil of grey smoke coming from the tall chimney. Near the mill there are or four or five or six rows of workpeople’s houses. This is the beginning of the khaki-making country.
The mills and the houses are built of a grey stone, grim enough, and yet with a warm gleam of colour glowing in it. Where there are many chimneys this yellow undertone has been blackened; but this is not so with the lonely farms on the heights, far above the mills. These stand, remote from one another and from all the world, isolated, ancient, solitary places in that wild, high land. As it seemed to me, I passed half a dozen of such farms on the journey from Sheffield to Huddersfield, and any one of them might have been the model for “Wuthering Heights.” Emily Brontë pined and sickened away from the moors. After seeing those moors one understands how they had passed into her soul and had become heart of her heart. Her book, with its amazement of great horror, is not so difficult an enigma now that I have seen the region in which it was conceived; it is the translation of that region into the terms of literature.
Do you remember how at the end of the book a frightened boy comes running and says he has just seen Heathcliff and a woman walking together? Heathcliff and the woman were dead, but I saw many places well-fitted for these companions, many black, twisted trees beneath which they might well pace, bearing their flames with them. For those two figures always stand out black; against a background of fire.
The Smoke Thickens
And, all the while, be it remembered, this is the land where they are making the cloth that is clothing and is to clothe our vast armies, and the armies of our Allies. One may forget it easily; a turn of the line may take you through a part of the country that is without a sign of industrialism. The solemn woods darken the steep slopes, the bare fields climb to the uplands, these uplands, ever surging higher, fade into the distant, unearthly summits of the moor; sparse and remote the ancient farms stand with their walls of golden grey. You are beholding a landscape that is almost mediæval, that can have changed little since the sixteenth century.
And then, another turn, and you are looking down on a swarming industrial settlement, on clustered chimneys, on a cloud of black smoke, on the big storied mills, and the streets of the workers mounting the hillside. And again; this is all blotted out as though it had not been; and a little stream rushes violently down a lonely glen, foaming white over the rocks, tracked all the way into a valley once more still and solitary by a-winding procession of gnarled and twisted trees. And you may see the sources of these streams; a greener place on the slope and the water bubbling up into a well, and so setting forth down to the valley.
But as we go northward the mills are set closer and closer together, one settlement runs into another, the smoke darkens and thickens, the grove of chimneys become a forest, and now stand thick on the hills as in the valleys. And so we run into Huddersfield, the heart of the khaki country.
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Machen takes a rather grim series of sights and makes them strange and even intriguing by associating them with one of his literary touchstones and by projecting national pride. It seems to me a skillful composition.
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I agree – vivid and fascinating in its selection and details of depiction and reflection! Natural grimness – and its appeal, and industrial grimness – in context of “the robe and panoply and ordnance of Victory”! How, I wonder, has martial demand expanded that industrial grimness? There is an intriguing contrast with what Tolkien works out decades later in Shire, Isengard, Mordor, Sharky-ized Shire and scouring – which also leaves me wishing for an analogous description of the routes to and between and the environs round Tolkien’s postings in England during the Great War.
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