THE SILENCE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20716, 8 November 1930, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE SILENCE.

BY MONTE HOLCnOFT.

CONTACT WITH REALITY.

There are strange qualities in silence. I can remember standing alone at the edge of the Sahara Desert. There was nothing but, sunshine over sand, and yet, as an hour deepened, thero grew upon me a feeling as of vast, wings beating over the drifts. On another day I loitered near the ruins of Carthage. It was dusk, and all I could see was a glimmer of little white houses rapidly fading, and the broken rim of the Coloseum wall, reaching above earth mounds like a prisoned creature seeking starlight. Here, I had believed, would be a stillness too deep for thought. This may have been true, for there are times when feeling goes deeper than thought, and that night the silence seemed to be merely a shelter for a strange, psychic activity. I saw the walls of the city, wealthy and intact, and grave merchant princes with the high, careful faces of Phoenician fathers. I caught the faint din of old battles, and felt an uneasiness from the long agony of the siege. The flame of burning houses came momentarily between the starlight. . . . It may be said that these moods belong not so much to the silence as to the effect of background on a brain no longer hampered by sound. It may be that a man who does not carry the memory of early readings of the Punic Wars will find a silence of Carthage a mere pulseless period in which he may stand unheeding, attentive only to an abba vanishing toward a village, or the white beauty of the new cathedral rising among the shadows. But even if memory is unresponsive, there is a subtle value in silence that every man has experiehced. It can become a still surface in which, to a startling degree, he may see himself reflected. He looks inwards with a clearness belonging to no other time. And if he is of sensitive mould he may be able to reach a heightened feeling —a sharpening, as it were, of the outlines of life, a rare harmony of ego and earth that belongs chiefly to poets. This is the silence of solitary moments. But stranger and deeper is the silence that must be shared. And when I think of this I am no longer in the desert or among the ruins of an ancient coast. I am back twelve months in time to a day in November in London.

Armistice Day. The broad surface of Whitehall was packed with thousands of waiting people. Overhead was a grey sky; and all London was grey, and a little grim. The Cenotaph, that severely beautiful shape rising above the crowds—its flags fluttering as they always seem to flutter, even on the most breathless day—was losing its earlier purity of white stone. The fog and the smoke had received and prepared it for a place in the living London that endures beyond all change. Armistice Day, and eleven o'clock: I had worked my way toward the centre of this vast crowd, but I was still only a hundred yards from Big Ben, rising above the Parliament Buildings. I could see his face and the pointing hands as a roll of artillery came across the green spaces of the parks.- Big Ben was chiming, and as it ended a deep silence was already over the crowd. There was tho pause of seconds, and T knew that presently Big Ben would strike the first of eleven notes. Somehow I dreaded it.

The first note boomed out, and I could sense a, start of surprise through the crowd. It is difficult to hear Big Ben in the full grandeur of his voice. Usually there is the surge of the London traffic, breaking in waves about the grey walls of Westminster. But now the traffic had ceased, and there was a stillness so deep that each note throbbed into it with a shock almost painfully physical. I heard the second note, and wondered if I could bear to hear a third. The sound seemed to enter unexplored depths of my being, so that my limbs became weak, and it was difficult to keep my face in the rigid lines of faces all around me.. Four, five six: on spoke Big Ben, steadily, mercilessly. I could feel undercurrents of emotions. But it was over at last; and then—silence. The Stillness.

There were thousands of people standing closely packed in Whitehall; and in other centres of the city they were gathered together in large numbers. All London was hushed.

What did I think ? Ido not know. At first, I am afraid, I was concerned chiefly with the effort to remain calm, an involuntary resistance to the rising emotion of the crowd. Later my thoughts grew confused and submerged. It was a moment for feeling. It was afterwards that the full strength of the silence came to me. I stood through the two minutes somewhat anxiously, a little afraid of myself; but in spite of that I took away with me something that kept me thoughtful through the rest of that day. I waited for the bugles and the Last Post, and with it tho first raindrbps pattering against the Cenotaph; so that it could be said: " Even the skies mourned."

And then, as I turned away, the thought came to me: What of the young people ? All aTound me had been people who were thinking of the war, and of their own sacrifices, and of loved ones lost in the struggle. But many of those waiting had been young. What did they think of it? Had they looked on this gathering merely as a show 1 Were they content to put up with two minutes of stillness as long as they could see tho military parade afterwards; the Guards and the blue-clad Air Force men swinging along behind their bands ?

It mav have been their careless thought in the first place; but if so they woujd take from the Silence far more than they had brought to it. I watched their faces, and I knew that they were impressed. They had made brief and stirring contact with something dark and dreadful their parents had suffered—war! Memory lives in silence; and it may be that on a future day the young people who knew the war only through this annual homage to the dead will havo to face another world-crisis. It may be, then, that the decisions which rest fundamentally with tho men in the street will be steadied by something that has come wistfully down through tho years, reaching its strongest pulse on Armistice Day knowledge of tho bitter futility of war, the agony and dread. . . I turned away with the drifting crowds, and the Silence went with me.