Waiting for Daylight Part 4

In the winter, as we know, it never rains. It is merely wet weather.

Still, that means only a retirement into winter quarters, into those long evenings against which we have h.o.a.rded our books, light and warmth in store. Perhaps in the case of the more idle there may be the consideration, pleasant and prolonged, of that other book, known to no other man, not yet written, and perhaps destined to perish, a secret dream. But what are now these books? What now is even that book which is perfect and unwritten? It, too, has lost its light. I am left staring into the fire. The newspapers tell us of a common joy at the coming of Peace. Peace? If she is coming, then we are much obliged to her. I remember during an earlier and wasted joy at a word in France of the coming of Peace agreeing with several young soldiers that Brussels would be the place to meet, to hail there with flagons the arrival of the Dove.

But I do not want to be reminded of what has happened since that day.

That festival could now have but one celebrant. Then, in another year of the War, in a mood of contrition and dismay, some people began to feel that on the day Peace arrived it would be seemly if she found them on their knees in church. Since that day, too, much has happened; and when Peace does come I suppose most of us will make reasonably certain the bird resembles a dove, and go to bed early--taking another look at the long-lost creature next morning, in the presence of a competent witness, to confirm that we have not been deceived again by another turkey buzzard; and, if that is certain, then let the matter drop.

For in these years, when heavy weather obscures the fixed lights, and we are not certain about our bearings, it is useless to pretend that the darkness which once made us content with a book is now a worse kind of darkness only because intensified by a private shadow. The shadow of a personal grief does not wholly explain its sinister intensity. The night itself is different. It hides a world unknown. If a sun is to rise on that world, then not even a false dawn yet shows. When we stand peering into our night, where the sound of rain and wind is like nothing the memory knows, and may be even the dark tumult portending a day of wrath, we may turn again in solitude to what is left to us, to our books; but not with quiet content. To-morrow we may pull ourselves together.

Curiosity about our new world may awaken. We may become adventurous, and make an effort towards greeting the unknown with a cheer, to show it there is no settled ill-feeling. But it has been my experience that when leaving port in dark weather, though the voyage to come was to be novel and interesting, one heard very little cheering from the glum figures working about the deck. The s.h.i.+p is sea-worthy, but she is bleak and foreign. In a week all will be well. We shall have cleared these icy lat.i.tudes. The sky will be fairer. We shall have more sun. We shall have become accustomed to our s.h.i.+pmates' unfamiliar faces and ways. It is only the start that is sullen and unpropitious.

And here is Peace coming, and a new world, and there are my books; yet though this pipe after midnight is nearly done, and the fire too, I have not been able to settle on a book. The books are like the ashes on the hearth. And listen to the wind, with its unpromising sounds from the wide and empty desert places! What does any of these old books know about me, in the midst of those portents of a new age? We are all outward bound, and this is the first night of a long voyage, its port unknown.

Even my bookshelves seem strange to-night. They look remarkably like a library I saw once in a house in Richbourg S. Vaast, which, you may remember, was a village near Neuve Chapelle. Those French volumes also survived from circ.u.mstances that had pa.s.sed. They were litter. They had been left behind. I doubted whether, if I tried, I could touch them. They were not within my time. That was on a day more than three years ago--it was July, 1915--and Richbourg had then only just left this world. There was a road without a sign of life; not a movement, except in one house.

The front of that house had gone, exposing the hollow inside, the collapsed floors and hanging beams, and showing also a doll with a foolish smirk caught in a wire and dangling from a rafter. The doll danced in hysteric merriment whenever hidden guns were fired. That was the only movement in Richbourg S. Vaast, and the guns made the only sound. I was a survivor from the past, venturing at peril among the wreckage and hardly remembered relics of what used to be familiar.

Richbourg was possessed by the power which had overwhelmed it, and which was re-forming it in a changing world. To what was the world changing?

There was no clue, except the oppression of my mind, the shock of the guns, and the ecstatic mockery of mirth over ruin by that little idiot doll.

Beyond the sloughing and leprous tower of Richbourg Church, where the ancient dead in the graveyard had been brought to light again, there was a house which seemed in being. I entered it, for I was told by a soldier companion that from a displaced tile in its roof I might see La Ba.s.see. I looked through that gap, and saw La Ba.s.see. It was very near. It was a terracotta smudge. It might have been a brickfield. But it was the Enemy.

What I chiefly remember to-day is only the floor of that upper room from which, through a gap in its wall, I saw the ambush of the enemy. On the floor were scattered, mixed with lumps of plaster, a child's alphabetical blocks. A shoe of the child was among them. There was a window where we dared not show ourselves, though the day was fair without, and by it was an old bureau, open, with its pad of blotting-paper, and some letters, all smothered with fragments of gla.s.s and new dust. A few drawers of the desk were open, and the contents had been spilled. Round the walls of the room were bookcases with leaded diamond panes. Whoever was last in the room had left sections of the bookcases open, and there were gaps in the rows of books. Volumes had been taken out, had been dropped on the floor, put on the mantelpiece, or, as I had noticed when coming up to the room, left on the stairs. One volume, still open face upwards, was on the bureau.

I barely glanced at those books. What could they tell me? What did they know about it? Just as they were, open on the floor, tumbled on the stairs, they were telling me all they could. Was there more to be said?

Sitting on a bracket in the shadow of a corner, a little bust of Rousseau overlooked the scene with me. In such a place, at such a time, you must make your own interpretation of the change, receiving out of the silence, which is not altered in nature by occasional abominable noises, just whatever your mind wishes to take. There the books are, and the dust on them is of an era which abruptly fell; is still falling.

XVI. The n.o.bodies

NOVEMBER 11, 1918. The newspapers tell us that to-day the signal to "cease fire" will be given. This news is called "Official," to give us a.s.surance in the fog of myth. Maroons will explode above the City. Then we shall know it is the end of the War. We ought to believe it, because They tell us this; They who do everything for us--who order us what to think and how to act, arrange for our potatoes, settle the coming up and the going down of the sun, and who for years have been taking away our friends to make heroes of them, and worse. They have kept the War going, but now They are going to stop it. We shall know it is stopped when the rockets burst.

Yet "The War" has become a lethargic state of mind for us. We accepted it from the beginning with green-fly, influenza, margarine, calling-up notices, and death. It is as much outside our control as the precession of the equinoxes. We believed confidently in the tumultuous first weeks of the affair that mankind could not stand that strain for more than a few months; but we have learned it is possible to habituate humanity to the long elaboration of any folly, and for men to endure uncomplainingly racking by any cruelty that is devised by society, and for women to support any grief, however senselessly caused. Folly and cruelty become accepted as normal conditions of human existence. They continue superior to criticism, which is frequent enough though seldom overheard. The bitter mockery of the satirists, and even the groans of the victims, are unnoticed by genuine patriots. There seems no reason why those signal rockets should ever burst, no reason why the mornings which waken us to face an old dread, and the nights which contract about us like the strangle of despair, should ever end. We remember the friends we have lost, and cannot see why we should not share with them, in our turn, the punishment imposed by solemn and approved dementia. Why should not the War go on till the earth in final victory turns to the moon the pock-scarred and pallid mask which the moon turns to us?

I was looking, later this morning, at Charing Cross Bridge. It was, as usual, going south to the War. More than four years ago I crossed it on a memorable journey to France. It seemed no different to-day. It was still a Via Dolorosa projecting straight and black over a chasm. While I gazed at it, my mind in the past, a rocket exploded above it. Yes, I saw a burst of black smoke. The guns had ceased?

A tug pa.s.sing under the bridge began a continuous hooting. Locomotives began to answer the tug deliriously. I could hear a low muttering, the beginning of a tempest, the distant but increasing shouting of a great storm. Two men met in the thoroughfare below my outlook, waved their hats, and each cheered into the face of the other.

Out in the street a stream of men and women poured from every door, and went to swell the main cataract which had risen suddenly in full flood in the Strand. The donkey-barrow of a costermonger pa.s.sed me, loaded with a bluejacket, a flower-girl, several soldiers, and a Staff captain whose spurred boots wagged joyously over the stern of the barrow. A motor cab followed, two Australian troopers on the roof of that, with a hospital nurse, her cap awry, sitting across the knees of one of them. A girl on the kerb, continuously springing a rattle in a sort of trance, shrieked with laughter at the nurse. Lines of people with linked arms chanted and surged along, bare-headed, or with hats turned into jokes. A private car, a beautiful little saloon in which a lady was solitary, stopped near me, and the lady beckoned with a smile to a Canadian soldier who was close.

He first stared in surprise at this fas.h.i.+onable stranger, and then got in beside her with obviously genuine alacrity. The hubbub swelled and rolled in increasing delirium. Out of the upper windows of the Hotel Cecil, a headquarters of the Air Force, a confetti of official forms fell in spasmodic clouds. I returned soon to the empty room of an office where I was likely to be alone; because, now the War was over, while listening to the jollity of Peace which had just arrived, I could not get my thoughts home from France, and what they were I cannot tell.

But there were some other memories, more easily borne. There was that night, for instance, late in the August of 1914, when three of us were getting away from Creil. It was time to go. We were not soldiers. Lying on the floor of a railway carriage I tried to sleep, pillowed involuntarily on someone's boot. I never knew to whom that foot belonged, for the compartment was chaos, like the world. The carriage light was feeble, and the faces I saw above me drooped under the glim, wilted and dingy. The eyes of the dishevelled were shut, and this traveller, counting the pulse of the wheels beneath, presently forgot everything ... there was a crash, and my heart bounded me to my feet.

There had been a fortnight of excitements of this kind. A bag fell and struck me back to the floor. Unseen people trampled over me, shouting.

Somebody cried: "Here they are!" A cascade of pa.s.sengers and luggage tumbled over to a station platform.

It was a chilly morning. And where were we? A clock in a tower said it was five. People hurried without apparent reason in all directions. So the world may appear to us if some day we find, to our surprise, that we have returned from the dead. I leaned against a lamppost, my mind gravel-rashed, and waited for something that could be understood. The Germans would do. We heard the enemy was close, and that the railway officials would get us away if they could. The morning became no warmer, there was no coffee, and our tobacco pouches were empty. But at least we were favoured with the chance of watching the French railwaymen at work.

This was a junction, and the men moved about as though they were only busy on holiday traffic. They were easy and deliberate. I could see they would hold that line to the last pull of cotton-waste, and would run their trains while there was a mile of track. So we learned gradually that confident invaders are baffled by railwaymen and other common people, such as old women insistent on their cows, almost as much as they are by bayonets. A country's readiness for war may be slight, yet the settled habits of the peaceful n.o.bodies, which are not reckoned by Imperialists when they are calculating the length of the road to conquest, are strangely tough and obstinate. You could go to a girl at the pigeon-hole of a booking-office in France, demand a ticket for a place which by all the signs might then have fallen behind the van of the German Army, and she would hand the ticket to you as though she had never heard of the War. Then the engine-driver would go on towards the sound of the guns till you wondered, made uneasy by the signs without, whether he was phrenetic and intended to run the enemy down. The train would stop, and while the pa.s.sengers were listening to the sh.e.l.ls the guard would come along and give some advice as to the best thing to do.

A little ahead of the Germans, a train came into that junction and took us away. I fell asleep again, and presently awoke to see a sombre orchard outside my window of our stationary train. It was a group of trees entranced, like a scene before the stage is occupied. The gra.s.s in the twilight beneath the trees was rank. My sight fell drowsily to an abandoned _kepi_, and, while wondering what had become of the man who used to wear it, I saw a bright eye slyly shut at me. A wink in the gra.s.s! A bearded face was laughing up at me from under the _kepi_. A rifle with a fixed bayonet slid forward. Then I saw the orchard had a secret crop of eyes, which smiled at us from the ground. We moved on, and farewell kisses were blown to us.

Among the laurels of a garden beyond field batteries were in position. We crossed a bridge over a lower road and a stream. Infantry were waiting below for something, and from their att.i.tudes seemed to expect it soon.

My fellow-pa.s.sengers were now awake to these omens. Broad streams of cattle undulated past our train going south, but west. "My poor Paris!"

exclaimed a French lady. It was not for themselves these people were sorry. The common sort of people in the train were sorry for Paris, for all their unlucky fellows. The train moved with hesitancy for hours.

During one long pause we listened to a cannonade. One burst of sound seemed very close. A young English girl, sitting in a corner with her infant, abruptly handed the child to her husband. She rummaged in a travelling case with the haste of incipient panic. She produced a spirit-lamp, a bowl, and a tin. She had suddenly remembered it was past her baby's feeding time.

Who won the War for us? It was such folk. They turned in docility, with no more than a pause, a pause of ignorance and wonder, of dismay they could hardly conceal, from the accustomed order of their days to form vast armies, to populate innumerable factories for the making of munitions of war, and, while their households came everywhere to ruin, they held stubbornly to the task fate had thrust upon them; yet their august governors and popular guides, frantic and afraid through the dire retribution which had fallen on that monstrous European society which so many of us had thought eternal, abjured and abused the common sort whose efforts were all that could save us. What did they call the n.o.bodies?

Slackers, cowards, rabbits, and field vermin; mean creatures unable to leave their football and their drink. I recall one sombre winter's day of the first November of the War, when a column of wounded Belgian soldiers shambled by me, coming out of the Yser line, on the way to succour which I knew they would not find. The doctors and the hospitals were few. These fellows were in rags which were plastered to their limbs with mud. Their eyes had the vacant look of men who had returned from the grave and who had forgotten this world. The bare feet of some of them left b.l.o.o.d.y trails on the road. Others clutched their bodies, and the blood drained between their fingers. One dropped dead at my feet. I came home with that in my mind; and the next sunrise, hearing unusual sounds outside, I lifted the blind to a dawn which was cold and ominously scarlet behind skeleton trees. I saw beneath the trees a company of my young neighbours, already in khaki, getting used to the harshness of sergeants, and to the routine of those implacable circ.u.mstances which would take them to Neuve Chapelle, to Gallipoli, to Loos, to the Somme; names that had no meaning for us then.

That serious company of young Englishmen making soldiers of themselves in a day with so unpropitious an opening light did not look like national indifference. Those innocents getting used to rifles were as affecting as that single line of bodies I saw across a mile of stubble near Compiegne, where a rearguard of the "Contemptibles" had sacrificed themselves to their comrades. But one could not be sure. I went to find one who could tell me whether England was awake to what confronted it. I remembered he was a quiet observer, that he knew what allowance to make for those patriotic newspapers which so early were holding up in ruinous caricature their country and their countrymen for the world to see and to scorn. He was a scholar, he was a Socialist and a pacifist, he had a sense of humour to keep him balanced. But he had gone. He had enlisted; and he is dead.

It was a common experience. From the day the Germans entered Belgium a dumb resolution settled on our n.o.bodies. They did not demonstrate. They made long silent queues at the recruiting offices. It is true those offices were not ready for them and turned them away; and when by sheer obstinacy they got into the Army they were put into concentration camps that were as deadly as battle. That did not daunt them, nor turn them from their purpose, whatever that was, for they never said; and the newspapers, by tradition, had no time to find out, being devoted to the words and activities of the Highly Important. We therefore knew nothing of the munition factories that were springing up magically, as in a night, like toadstools, all over the country, and were barely aware that for some mysterious reason the hosts of the enemy were stopped dead on the road to Calais. Whose work was all this? But how should we know? Who can chronicle what n.o.body does?

Sometimes there was a hint. Once again, when I returned from France in 1916, unhappy with a guess at what the future would be like, I learned that our workers were not working. They were drinking. They had been pa.s.sionately denounced by the Great and Popular, and our Press was forced to admit this disastrous crime to the world, for fidelity to the truth is a national quality. I went to an engineer who would know the worst, and would not be afraid to tell me what it was. I found him asleep in his overalls, where he had dropped after thirty-six hours of continuous duty.

Afterwards, when his blasphemous indignation over profiteers, politicians, and newspapers had worn itself out, he told me. His men, using dimmed lights while working on the decks of urgent s.h.i.+ps, often forced to work in cramped positions and in all weathers, and while the s.h.i.+p was under way to a loading berth, with no refreshment provided aboard, and dropped at any hour long distances from home, were still regarded by employers in the old way, not as defenders of their country's life, but as a means to quick profits, against whom the usual debasing tricks of economy could be devised. A battles.h.i.+p in the north had been completed five months under contract time. Working girls, determined to make a record output of ammunition, persisted twenty-two hours at a stretch, topped their machines with Union Jacks, and fainted next morning while waiting for the factory gates to open. The spirit of the Englis.h.!.+

What virtue there is in bread and tea! Yet we might have guessed it. And again we might have remembered, as a corrective, how many grave speeches, which have surprised, shocked, and directed the nation, have been made by Great Men too soon after a n.o.ble dinner, words winged by the Press without an accompanying and explanatory wine list.

But the n.o.bodies are light-minded, casual, and good-hearted. Their great labour over, and their sacrifices buried, they have come out this day to celebrate the occasion with hilarious and ironic gaiety. They have won the Greatest of Wars, so they ride in motor-lorries and make delirious noises with comic instruments. Their heroic thoughts are blattering through penny trumpets. They have accomplished what had been declared impossible, and now they rejoice with an inconsequential clatter on tea-trays and tin cans.

Yet some of us who watched their behaviour saw the fantastic brightness in the streets on Armistice Day only as a momentary veiling of the spectres of a shadow land which now will never pa.s.s. Who that heard "Tipperary" sung by careless men marching in France in a summer which seems a century gone will hear that foolish tune again without a sudden fear that he will be unable to control his emotion? And those n.o.bodies of Mons, the Marne, and the Aisne, what were they? The "hungry squad," the men shut outside the factory gates, the useless surplus of the labour market so necessary for a great nation's commercial prosperity. Their need kept the wages of their neighbours at an economic level. The men of Mons were of that other old rearguard, the hope of the captains of industry when there are revolts against the common lot of our industrial cities where the death-rates of young n.o.bodies, casualty lists of those who fall to keep us prosperous, are as ruinous as open war; a mutilation of life, a drainage of the nation's body that is easily borne by Christian folk who are moved to grief and action at the thought of Polynesians without Bibles.

Yet the n.o.bodies stood to it at Mons. They bore us no resentment. We will say they fought for an England that is not us, an England that is n.o.bler than common report and common speech. Think of the contempt and anger of the better end of London just before the War, when, at the other end, the people of Dockland revolted and defied their masters! I knew one mother in that obscure host of ignorant humanity in revolt. Two of her infants were slowly fading, and she herself was dying of starvation, yet she refused the entrance of charity at her door, and dared her man to surrender. He died later at Ypres. He died because of that very quality of his which moved his masters and superiors to anger; he refused at Ypres, as he did in Dockland, like those who were with him and were of his kind, to do more than mock defeat when it faced him.

That figure of n.o.body in sodden khaki, c.u.mbered with ugly gear, its precious rifle wrapped in rags, no brightness anywhere about it except the light of its eyes (did those eyes mock us, did they reproach us, when they looked into ours in Flanders?), its face seamed with lines which might have been dolorous, which might have been ironic, with the sweat running from under its steel casque, looms now in the memory, huge, statuesque, silent but questioning, like an overshadowing challenge, like a gigantic legendary form charged with tragedy and drama; and its eyes, seen in memory again, search us in privacy. Yet that figure was the "Cuthbert." It was derided by those onlookers who were not fit to kneel and touch its muddy boots. It broke the Hindenburg Line. Its body was thrown to fill the trenches it had won, and was the bridge across which our impatient guns drove in pursuit of the enemy.

What is that figure now? An unspoken thought, which charges such names as Bullecourt, Cambrai, Bapaume, Croiselles, Hooge, and a hundred more, with the sound and premonition of a vision of midnight and all unutterable things. We see it in a desolation of the mind, a shape forlorn against the alien light of the setting of a day of dread, the ghost of what was fair, but was broken, and is lost.

XVII. Bookworms

JANUARY 18, 1919. In Fleet Street yesterday there was at lunch with us an American Army officer who discoursed heartily about a certain literary public-house. He quoted a long pa.s.sage from d.i.c.kens showing how somebody took various turnings near Fetter Lane, easily to be recognized, till they arrived at this very tavern. Such enthusiasm is admirable, yet embarra.s.sing. In return, I inquired after several young American poets, whose work, seldom seen here, interests me, and I named their books. He had never heard of them. This enthusiast did not even appear to have the beginning of an idea that his was unforgivable ignorance seeing that he knew more than a native ought to know about some of our taverns. Had he been an Englishman and a friend of mine I should have told him that I thought his love of letters was as spurious as the morality of the curate who speaks in a trembling baritone about changes in the divorce laws, but who accepts murder without altering the statutory smile of benediction.

Literature would be lighter without that scroll work and top hamper. It has nothing to do with its life. It is as helpful to us as wall-texts and those wonders we know as works of Pure Thought. Let us remember all the n.o.ble volumes of philosophy and metaphysics we ought to have read, to learn how wonderfully far our brains have taken us beyond the relic of Piltdown; and then recall what Ypres was like, and buy a teetotum instead. That much is saved. Now we need not read them. If we feel ourselves weakening towards such idleness, let us spin tops. If we had to choose between Garvice and say Hegel or Locke for a niche in the Temple of Letters, we should make an unintelligible blunder if we did not elect Mr. Garvice without discussion. He is human, he is ingenuous and funny, and the philosophers are only loosening with the insinuations of moth and rust. The philosophers are like the great statesmen and the great soldiers--we should be happier without them. If we are not happy and enjoying life, then we have missed the only reason for it. If books do not help us to this, if they even devise our thoughts into knots and put straws in our hair, then they ought to be burned. It is true that some of us may get pleasure from searching novels for solecisms and collecting evidence by which shall be guessed the originals of the novelist's characters, just as others extract amus.e.m.e.nt from puzzle pictures. But book-worming has the same relation to literature, even when it is done by a learned doctor in the Bodleian, as flies in a dairy with our milk supply. If most of the books in the British Museum were destroyed, we might still have a friend who would go with us to Amiens to get one more dinner in a well-remembered room, and drink to the shades; we might still, from the top of Lundy at dusk, watch the dim seas break into lilac around the Shutter Rock, while the unseen kittiwakes were voices from the past; and we might still see Miss m.u.f.fet tiptoe on a June morning to smell the first rose. That is what we look for in books, or something like it, and when it is not there they are not books to us.

XVIII. Sailor Language

FEBRUARY 1, 1919. "What's in a word?" asks Admiral W. H. Smyth, with ironic intent, in his _Sailors' Word Book_. There are people who are derided because they are inclined to hesitate over that unimportant doubt, selecting their words with a waste of time which is grievous, when the real value of the sovereign is but nine and ninepence, in an uneconomic desire to be as right as their knowledge will allow. There is something to be said for them. There is a case to be made for getting a task finished as well as one knows how, if interest in it was sufficient to prompt a beginning. A friend of mine, who could write a thousand interesting and popular words about an event, or even about nothing in particular, while I was still wondering what I ought to do with it, once exclaimed in indignation and contempt when I put in a plea for Roget and his _Thesaurus_. He declared that a writer who used such a reference-book ought to be deprived of his paper and ink. _He_ never used even a dictionary. His argument and the force of it humbled me, for I gathered that when he wrote he had but to put his hand in his pocket and pull out all the words he wanted by the fistful. I envy him. I wish I could do it, but there are times when every word I try seems opaque. It is useless to pretend that Roget is of material a.s.sistance then; for what remedy is there under heaven for the slow and heavy mind? But to me Roget is full of amusing suggestions, which would really have been very helpful to me had I wanted to use his words for any other purpose than the one in hand.

It is true he rarely gives you the word you think you want, but not seldom in his a.s.sorted heaps of unused ornaments you are surprised by a glance of colour from an unsuspected facet of a common word.

The _Sailor's Word Book_ is no pamphlet; not in the least the kind of pocket book which once helped hurried British soldiers in a French shop to get fried eggs. It weighs, I should think, seven pounds, and it is packed with the vocabulary which has been built into the British s.h.i.+p during the thousand years and more of her growth. The origin of very many of the words retires, often beyond exact definition, into the cold mists of the prehistoric Baltic, and to the Greek Islands, among the shadows of the men who first found the courage to lose sight of the hills.

Commonly they are short words, smoothed by constant use till they might be imagined to be born of the circ.u.mstances in which they are known, like the gulls and the foam of the wake. They carry like detonations in a gale. Yet quite often such words, when they are verbs, were once of the common stock of the language, as in the case of "belay," and it has happened that the sailor alone has been left to keep them alive. Dr.

Johnson seems not to have known the meaning of the verb "to belay" among the other things he did not know but was very violent about. He thought it was a sea-phrase for splicing a rope, just as he supposed "main-sheet"

was the largest sail of a s.h.i.+p.

The _Sailors' Word Book_ would be much more interesting than it is, though greatly heavier, if the derivation of the words were given, or even guessed at, a method which frequently makes the livelier story. We begin to understand what a long voyage our s.h.i.+p has come when we are told that "starboard" is steer-board, the side to which the steering-paddle was made fast before the modern rudder was invented in the fourteenth century. Skeat informs us that both steor and bord are Anglo-Saxon; in fact, the latter word is the same in all the Celtic and Teutonic languages, so was used by those who first cut trees in Western Europe, and perhaps was here before they arrived to make our civilization what we know it. The opposite to starboard was larboard; but for good reason the Admiralty subst.i.tuted port for larboard in 1844. Why was the left side of a s.h.i.+p called the port side? That term was in use before the Admiralty adopted it. It has been suggested that, as the steering-paddle was on the right side of a s.h.i.+p, it was good seamans.h.i.+p to have the harbour or port on the left hand when piloting inwards. But it is doubtful if that reason was devised by a sailor.