THE REGISTER OF PROGRESS

Being a Full and Encouraging Account of the Draining of the Great Slough and the Steady Conquest of the Water, Year Upon Year.

Kept, with mounting satisfaction, by Cornelius Sump, Fen-Reeve, Warden of the Drains and Sworn Enemy of Standing Water — who is, he is pleased to confirm, winning.

The Water Is in Retreat

There is only one war in this realm worth the name, and it is not the one Captain Quail sits up nights for. It is the war between the land and the water, and it has been going since before the Bastables, and I am the general of the land.

And we are winning.

I know the water looks, to the untrained eye, to be everywhere — under the fields, up the lanes, in the very cellars — but that is the look of an enemy in retreat, spread thin, giving ground. Every year I dig the ditches deeper, set the sluices truer, reclaim another acre of good black earth from the mire, and file the report, and every year the map is drier than the last. I am quite certain of it. One day the Great Slough will be a meadow, and they will graze cattle where the Delvers drowned, and they will name the meadow, I should think, after me.

Each entry: The Works · The Result · The Progress — the Progress being total, cumulative, and beyond dispute.

1 · The New Cut

The Works. A ditch, dug straight and deep across the low meadow, to carry the standing water off to the river. The Result. It carried the water off beautifully. For a fortnight the meadow was firm enough to walk. The Progress. Immense. (The meadow is, at time of writing, a pond, but that is a separate matter, and seasonal, and not to be confused with the Progress.)

2 · The Great Sluice

The Works. A sluice-gate at the neck of the fen, to hold the flood at bay and let it out at my command. The Result. It holds the flood magnificently, at my command. The Progress. The flood, I will admit, does not always wait for my command, being an ill-disciplined body of water; but the principle is sound, and the principle is Progress.

3 · The Reclaimed Acre

The Works. A whole acre of the Slough's edge, ditched, drained, dunged and declared dry land. The Result. Declared. Signed. Entered in the Register as reclaimed. The Progress. It went back under by Candlemas, but a thing once declared dry is, in the Register, dry, and the Register is what we are here to keep, and the Register says dry, and I stand by the Register.

4 · The Requisition

The Works. A petition to the Committee for more men, more spades, and a great quantity of line. The Result. Granted, on the strength of the Progress. The Progress. More men make more Progress. This is not complicated. I have asked for a thousand feet of line and a winch, and expect, with them, to conclude the war by a Michaelmas not too far off.

5 · The Adversary

The Works. — The Result. — The Progress. I will say this for the Water: it is a worthy foe. Patient. Tireless. It does not tire, it does not sleep, it does not, so far as I have observed, ever actually stop coming — but neither does it win, exactly, and a foe that cannot win is a foe already beaten, and I sleep sound on that, on the nights the bedroom is dry.

6 · The Annual Report

The Works. One report, per annum, to the Committee, headed, as always: The Water Is in Retreat. The Result. Filed. Never once queried. The Progress. Nobody checks. That is the beauty of a report. The Slough could be at the door — the Slough is, some springs, at the door — and the report says Retreat, and the report is the record, and the record is the truth, and I have twenty-nine of them, all saying Retreat, which is twenty-nine years of unbroken victory, in writing.

7 · The State of the War

The Works. All of them, summed. The Result. Cumulative and rising. The Progress. The Great Slough shrinks. I have the figures. They are my figures, taken by my own line, entered in my own hand, and they show, beyond any doubt a reasonable man could raise, a steady and glorious drying of the realm, and I am proud of them, and I stand in them to about the ankle as I write.

8 · What My Grandfather's Ditch Comes To

The Works. The first cut, dug by my grandfather, that I have maintained man and boy. The Result. — The Progress. The water always wins. There. It is not in the Register and it never shall be, but a man may write a true thing once, in his own book, and burn it. The water is patient and I am not; it has all the time there is and I have spent thirty years of mine; and every ditch I cut fills, and every sluice silts, and every acre I declare dry goes quietly back under, and the Great Slough is the very size it was when my grandfather dug the first cut, and larger, some springs, and it is not in retreat, and it never was, and it was never even fighting me — a thing does not fight that merely, patiently, is — and the truth of my life's work is that I have spent it gloriously, valiantly, and to the last ounce of me, losing to a body of water that never once knew I was there. And I cannot write that in the Register. So I write Progress. And I mean it. It keeps me warm, which is more, God knows, than the drains have ever managed.