A Soldier Experiences a Tree

Source: SS Leitheft, Year 8, Issue 3, 1942

During a field exercise, a soldier noticed an oak, which he decided to draw due to its distinctive growth.

His next off-duty Sunday he set off, sketch pad under arm, drawing pencil in pocket.

It was still early in the day. The soldier’s boots clattered hard on the pavement of the quiet morning road. Soon the stone desert of the big city garrison was behind him. Just a few more green-filled suburb roads, and he stood before the forest, the wide, silent forest.

The man hesitated to enter. A wave of fragrant pine scent struck him. That was a different world than the one from which he had just come. He held his breath. - And while he exhaled whistling, he at the same time cast off from himself the haste of the big city. His breast inflated large and sank. Calmly, he strode into the festive hall.

He felt in harmony with himself and with the world around him. He knew both to be moved from the same centre, himself and nature surrounding him.

Now he no longer needed to arm himself against anything outside himself. For here, everything belonged to him. The rustling and the whispering in the branches and depths, it was in his breast. The flood and glistening of colours, of light and shadows, he had it as a picture within himself. The strong and tender forms of the trees and grasses, he did not need to make the effort to observe them. The law by which they existed was his own. His eyes and ears were directed inward. And yet everything found admittance, the nearest and the farthest, the grasses and the trees, the birds and the squirrels, the lake and the sky, the fog and the morning sun, the chirping and the rustling, an entire magical world of sounds and shapes.

And that was the deeply joyous thing for the soldier: clearly and consciously, he experienced everything as an unalterable order.

 Old Oak / Pencil Drawing

A singing and clinging awoke in the distance, came closer, swelled to thunderous chords. Did it start in the whispering of the branches, in the song of the birds or in the breast of the man?

Figures rose from the ground, as if chiselled by artist hand, worthy of a world full of beauty.

Picture boards filled the plains of a space, which was not to be surpassed in simple form and was yet so rich in forms as the forest.

There stood the soldier’s oak, which he wanted to attempt to capture with pencil on paper. Now he knew how he must draw it, not as a play of lines, such as he saw before, no, as he today, now, experienced it, as the law of the creator, which law was his own. With pencil on paper? Yes, with pencil on paper, that was his firm will, he wanted to write down God’s law in the tree.

Halt, my dear fellow, called God, you don’t get me that easily - and he withdrew from him precisely at the moment when the soldier was about to put the first line on the paper.

Here stood the oak, a tree like all others, of trunk, branches and leaves, with scarred bark, grey and green, a jumble of light and shadows. Where was the divine it?

There sat the poor man, a king, who had lost his kingdom.

Now he had to decide. Would he take up the fight or give up? He decided as a soldier. He took up the fight, the fight with God. He would not stop the struggle until he had forced God to accept him as tool. It was not arrogance that made him act so. He just wanted to serve, to write down the eternal law for the brothers, so that they would better find the path to their own experience. That was his religious service on this Sunday.

After he had accounted to himself for his action, he went to work. He employed all weapons, will and imagination, conception and conscious reason. He concentrated everything at one point, at the point, where the tip of his pencil touched the paper. With all of his harnessed energies he now started to create the oak. He performed its creation anew. Strong from the roots, he had them grow into the trunk, the limbs, the branches and leaves. And when he awakened them to life, he experienced with it through the hundreds of years. He was with it in the jubilation in the sun, in the struggle with the wind, in the years of rich nourishment and in the years of hunger.

With finest senses, he felt that the limb had to here bend backward, held up in the most beautiful curve, whether it wanted to or not. It had to renounce itself in order to - after desperate to and fro - to fit into the whole even more beautifully. Nothing could grow like it wanted to. One had to accommodate the other. It often got rough. Many a twig would have preferred to move in a different direction. No, to serve the whole, demanded the law of the tree.

Ever deeper did the soldier penetrate into the essence of his creating. He could have now just as well sat on a bare rock in the sea or in a quiet room. For a long time he had no longer looked at the tree before him. He created it from out of himself. Was he himself still the creating one? Or did that, which is common in the eternal law of creations, create in him and out of him? Yes, overcome by the desire of the soldier, it had entered the breast of the man. Man and God had become one, one in the work that was now completed.

H.K.