The Two Noises

For three days and three nights the sea had charged England
as Napoleon charged her at Waterloo. The phrase is instinctive,
because away to the last grey line of the sea there was only the look
of galloping squadrons, impetuous, but with a common purpose.
The sea came on like cavalry, and when it touched the shore it
opened the blazing eyes and deafening tongues of the artillery.
I saw the worst assault at night on a seaside parade where the sea
smote on the doors of England with the hammers of earthquake,
and a white smoke went up into the black heavens. There one
could thoroughly realise what an awful thing a wave really is.
I talk like other people about the rushing swiftness of a wave.
But the horrible thing about a wave is its hideous slowness.
It lifts its load of water laboriously: in that style at once
slow and slippery in which a Titan might lift a load of rock
and then let it slip at last to be shattered into shock of dust.
In front of me that night the waves were not like water:
they were like falling city walls. The breaker rose first as if it
did not wish to attack the earth; it wished only to attack the stars.
For a time it stood up in the air as naturally as a tower; then it went
a little wrong in its outline, like a tower that might some day fall.
When it fell it was as if a powder magazine blew up.

. . . . .

I have never seen such a sea. All the time there blew across
the land one of those stiff and throttling winds that one can
lean up against like a wall. One expected anything to be blown
out of shape at any instant; the lamp-post to be snapped
like a green stalk, the tree to be whirled away like a straw.
I myself should certainly have been blown out of shape if I had
possessed any shape to be blown out of; for I walked along the edge
of the stone embankment above the black and battering sea and could
not rid myself of the idea that it was an invasion of England.
But as I walked along this edge I was somewhat surprised
to find that as I neared a certain spot another noise mingled
with the ceaseless cannonade of the sea.

Somewhere at the back, in some pleasure ground or casino
or place of entertainment, an undaunted brass band was playing
against the cosmic uproar. I do not know what band it was.
Judging from the boisterous British Imperialism of most
of the airs it played, I should think it was a German band.
But there was no doubt about its energy, and when I came quite
close under it it really drowned the storm. It was playing such
things as "Tommy Atkins" and "You Can Depend on Young Australia,"
and many others of which I do not know the words, but I should
think they would be "John, Pat, and Mac, With the Union Jack,"