The letters in this volume were not written for publication. They are
intimate and personal in a high degree. They would not now be published
by those to whom they are addressed, had they not come to feel that the
spirit and temper of the writer might do something to strengthen and
invigorate those who, like himself, are called on to make great
sacrifices for high causes and solemn duties.
They do not profess to give any new information about the military
operations of the Allies; this is the task of the publicist, and at all
times is forbidden to the soldier in the field. Here and there some
striking or significant fact has been allowed to pass the censor; but
the value of the letters does not lie in these things. It is found
rather in the record of how the dreadful yet heroic realities of war
affect an unusually sensitive mind, long trained in moral and romantic
idealism; the process by which this mind adapts itself to unanticipated
and incredible conditions, to acts and duties which lie close to horror,
and are only saved from being horrible by the efficacy of the spiritual
effort which they evoke. Hating the brutalities of War, clearly
perceiving the wide range of its cruelties, yet the heart of the writer
is never hardened by its daily commerce with death; it is purified by
pity and terror, by heroism and sacrifice, until the whole nature seems
fresh annealed into a finer strength.
The intimate nature of these letters makes it necessary to say something
about the writer.
Coningsby Dawson graduated with honours in history from Oxford in 1905,
and in the same year came to the United States with the intention of
taking a theological course at Union Seminary. After a year at the
Seminary he reached the conclusion that his true lifework lay in
literature, and he at once began to fit himself for his vocation. In the
meantime his family left England, and we had made our home in Taunton,
Massachusetts. Here, in a quiet house, amid lawns and leafy elms, he
gave himself with indefatigable ardour to the art of writing. He wrote
from seven to ten hours a day, producing many poems, short stories, and
three novels. Few writers have ever worked harder to attain literary
excellence, or have practised a more austere devotion to their art. I
often marvelled how a young man, fresh from a brilliant career at the
greatest of English Universities, could be content with a life that was
so widely separated from association with men and affairs. I wondered
still more at the patience with which he endured the rebuffs that always
await the beginner in literature, and the humility with which he was
willing to learn the hard lessons of his apprenticeship in literary
form. The secret lay, no doubt, in his secure sense of a vocation, and
his belief that good work could not fail in the end to justify itself.
But, not the less, these four years of obscure drudgery wore upon his
spirit, and hence some of the references in these letters to his days of
self-despising. The period of waiting came to an end at last with the
publication in 1913 of his _Garden Without Walls_, which attained
immediate success. When he speaks in these letters of his brief burst of
fame, he refers to those crowded months in the Fall of 1913, when his
novel was being discussed on every hand, and, for the first time, he met
many writers of established reputation as an equal.
Another novel, _The Raft_, followed _The Garden Without Walls_. The
nature of his life now seemed fixed. To the task of novel-writing he had
brought a temperament highly idealistic and romantic, a fresh and vivid
imagination, and a thorough literary equipment. His life, as he planned
it, held but one purpose for him, outside the warmth and tenacity of
its affections--the triumph of the efficient purpose in the adequate
expression of his mind in literature. The austerity of his long years of
preparation had left him relatively indifferent to the common prizes of
life, though they had done nothing to lessen his intense joy in life.
His whole mind was concentrated on his art. His adventures would be the
adventures of the mind in search of ampler modes of expression. His
crusades would be the crusades of the spirit in search of the realities
of truth. He had received the public recognition which gave him faith in
himself and faith in his ability to achieve the reputation of the true
artist, whose work is not cheapened but dignified and broadened by
success. So he read the future, and so his critics read it for him. And
then, sudden and unheralded, there broke on this quiet life of
intellectual devotion the great storm of 1914. The guns that roared
along the Marne shattered all his purposes, and left him face to face
with a solemn spiritual exigency which admitted no equivocation.
At first, in common with multitudes more experienced than himself, he
did not fully comprehend the true measure of the cataclysm which had
overwhelmed the world. There had been wars before, and they had been
fought out by standing armies. It was incredible that any war should
last more than a few months. Again and again the world had been assured
that war would break down with its own weight, that no war could be
financed beyond a certain brief period, that the very nature of modern
warfare, with its terrible engines of destruction, made swift decisions
a necessity. The conception of a British War which involved the entire
manhood of the nation was new, and unparalleled in past history. And the
further conception of a war so vast in its issues that it really
threatened the very existence of the nation was new too. Alarmists had
sometimes predicted these things, but they had been disbelieved.
Historians had used such phrases of long past struggles, but often as a
mode of rhetoric rather than as the expression of exact truth. Yet, in a
very few weeks, it became evident that not alone England, but the entire
fabric of liberal civilisation was threatened by a power that knew no
honour, no restraints of either caution or magnanimity, no ethic but the
armed might that trampled under blood-stained feet all the things which
the common sanction of centuries held dearest and fairest.
Perhaps, if Coningsby had been resident in England, these realities of
the situation would have been immediately apparent. Residing in
America, the real outlines of the struggle were a little dimmed by
distance. Nevertheless, from the very first he saw clearly where his
duty lay. He could not enlist immediately. He was bound in honour to
fulfil various literary obligations. His latest book, _Slaves of
Freedom_, was in process of being adapted for serial use, and its
publication would follow. He set the completion of this work as the
period when he must enlist; working on with difficult self-restraint
toward the appointed hour. If he had regrets for a career broken at the
very point where it had reached success and was assured of more than
competence, he never expressed them. His one regret was the effect of
his enlistment on those most closely bound to him by affections which
had been deepened and made more tender by the sense of common exile. At
last the hour came when he was free to follow the imperative call of
patriotic duty. He went to Ottawa, saw Sir Sam Hughes, and was offered a
commission in the Canadian Field Artillery on the completion of his
training at the Royal Military College, at Kingston, Ontario. The last
weeks of his training were passed at the military camp of Petewawa on
the Ottawa River. There his family was able to meet him in the July of
1916. While we were with him he was selected, with twenty-four other
officers, for immediate service in France; and at the same time his two
younger brothers enlisted in the Naval Patrol, then being recruited in
Canada by Commander Armstrong.
The letters in this volume commence with his departure from Ottawa. Week
by week they have come, with occasional interruptions; mud stained
epistles, written in pencil, in dug-outs by the light of a single
candle, in the brief moments snatched from hard and perilous duties.
They give no hint of where he was on the far-flung battle-line. We know
now that he was at Albert, at Thiepval, at Courcelette, and at the
taking of the Regina trench, where, unknown to him, one of his cousins
fell in the heroic charge of the Canadian infantry. His constant
thoughtfulness for those who were left at home is manifest in all he
writes. It has been expressed also in other ways, dear and precious to
remember: in flowers delivered by his order from the battlefield each
Sabbath morning at our house in Newark, in cables of birthday
congratulations, which arrived on the exact date. Nothing has been
forgotten that could alleviate the loneliness of our separation, or
stimulate our courage, or make us conscious of the unbroken bond of
love.
The general point of view in these letters is, I think, adequately
expressed in the phrase "_Carry On_," which I have used as the title of
this book. It was our happy lot to meet Coningsby in London in the
January of the present year, when he was granted ten days' leave. In the
course of conversation one night he laid emphasis on the fact that he,
and those who served with him, were, after all, not professional
soldiers, but civilians at war. They did not love war, and when the war
was ended not five per cent of them would remain in the army. They were
men who had left professions and vocations which still engaged the best
parts of their minds, and would return to them when the hour came. War
was for them an occupation, not a vocation. Yet they had proved
themselves, one and all, splendid soldiers, bearing the greatest
hardships without complaint, and facing wounds and death with a gay
courage which had made the Canadian forces famous even among a host of
men, equally brave and heroic. The secret of their fortitude lay in the
one brief phrase, "Carry On." Their fortitude was of the spirit rather
than the nerves. They were aware of the solemn ideals of justice,
liberty, and righteousness for which they fought, and would never give
up till they were won. In the completeness of their surrender to a great
cause they had been lifted out of themselves to a new plane of living
by the transformation of their spirit. It was the dogged indomitable
drive of spiritual forces controlling bodily forces. Living or dying
those forces would prevail. They would carry on to the end, however long
the war, and would count no sacrifice too great to assure its triumph.
This is the spirit which breathes through these letters. The splendour
of war, as my son puts it, is in nothing external; it is all in the
souls of the men. "There's a marvellous grandeur about all this carnage
and desolation--men's souls rise above the distress--they have to, in
order to survive." "Every man I have met out here has the amazing guts
to wear his crown of thorns as though it were a cap-and-bells." They
have shredded off their weaknesses, and attained that "corporate
stout-heartedness" which is "the acme of what Aristotle meant by
virtue." For himself, he discovers that the plague of his former modes
of life lay in self-distrust. It was the disease of the age. The doubt
of many things which it were wisdom to believe had ended in the doubt of
one's own capacity for heroism. All those doubts and self-despisings had
vanished in the supreme surrender to sacrificial duty. The doors of the
Kingdom of Heroism were flung so wide that the meanest might enter in,
and in that act the humblest became comrades of Drake's men, who could
jest as they died. No one knows his real strength till it is put to the
test; the highest joy of life is to discover that the soul can meet the
test, and survive it.
The Somme battlefield, from which all these letters were despatched, is
an Inferno much more terrible than any Dante pictured. It is a vast sea
of mud, full of the unburied dead, pitted and pock-marked by
shell-holes, treeless and horseless, "the abomination of desolation."
And the men who toil across it look more like outcasts of the London
Embankment than soldiers. "They're loaded down like pack-animals, their
shoulders are rounded, they're wearied to death, but they go on and go
on.... There's no flash of sword or splendour of uniforms. They're only
very tired men determined to carry on. The war will be won by tired men
who can never again pass an insurance test." Yet they carry on--the
"broken counter-jumper, the ragged ex-plumber," the clerk from the
office, the man from the farm; Londoner, Canadian, Australian, New
Zealander, men drawn from every quarter of the Empire, who daily justify
their manhood by devotion to an ideal and by contempt of death. And in
the heart of each there is a settled conviction that the cause for which
they have sacrificed so much must triumph. They have no illusions about
an early peace. They see their comrades fall, and say quietly, "He's
gone West." They do heroic things daily, which in a lesser war would
have won the Victoria Cross, but in this war are commonplaces. They know
themselves re-born in soul, and are dimly aware that the world is
travailing toward new birth with them. They are still very human, men
who end their letters with a row of crosses which stand for kisses. They
are not dehumanised by war; the kindliness and tenderness of their
natures are unspoiled by all their daily traffic in horror. But they
have won their souls; and when the days of peace return these men will
take with them to the civilian life a tonic strength and nobleness which
will arrest and extirpate the decadence of society with the saving salt
of valour and of faith.
It may be said also that they do not hate their foe, although they hate
the things for which he fights. They are fighting a clean fight, with
men whose courage they respect. A German prisoner who comes into the
British camp is sure of good treatment. He is neither starved nor
insulted. His captors share with him cheerfully their rations and their
little luxuries. Sometimes a sullen brute will spit in the face of his
captor when he offers him a cigarette; he is always an officer, never a
private. And occasionally between these fighting hosts there are acts of
magnanimity which stand out illumined against the dark background of
death and suffering. One of the stories told me by my son illustrates
this. During one fierce engagement a British officer saw a German
officer impaled on the barbed wire, writhing in anguish. The fire was
dreadful, yet he still hung there unscathed. At length the British
officer could stand it no longer. He said quietly, "I can't bear to look
at that poor chap any longer." So he went out under the hail of shell,
released him, took him on his shoulders and carried him to the German
trench. The firing ceased. Both sides watched the act with wonder. Then
the Commander in the German trench came forward, took from his own bosom
the Iron Cross, and pinned it on the breast of the British officer. Such
an episode is true to the holiest ideals of chivalry; and it is all the
more welcome because the German record is stained by so many acts of
barbarism, which the world cannot forgive.
This magnanimous attitude toward the enemy is very apparent in these
letters. The man whose mind is filled with great ideals of sacrifice and
duty has no room for the narrowness of hate. He can pity a foe whose
sufferings exceed his own, and the more so because he knows that his
foe is doomed. The British troops do know this to-day by many infallible
signs. In the early days of the war untrained men, poorly equipped with
guns, were pitted against the best trained troops in Europe. The first
Canadian armies were sacrificed, as was that immortal army of Imperial
troops who saved the day at Mons. The Canadians often perished in that
early fighting by the excess of their own reckless bravery. They are
still the most daring fighters in the British army, but they have
profited by the hard discipline of the past. They know now that they
have not only the will to conquer, but the means of conquest. Their,
artillery has become conspicuous for its efficiency. It is the ceaseless
artillery fire which has turned the issue of the war for the British
forces. The work of the infantry is beyond praise. They "go over the
top" with superb courage, and all who have seen them are ready to say
with my son, "I'm hats off to the infantry." And in this final
efficiency, surpassing all that could have been thought possible in the
earlier stages of the war, the British forces read the clear augury of
victory. The war will be won by the Allied armies; not only because they
fight for the better cause, which counts for much, in spite of
Napoleon's cynical saying that "God is on the side of the strongest
battalions"; but because at last they have superiority in equipment,
discipline and efficiency. Upon that shell-torn Western front, amid the
mud and carnage of the Somme, there has been slowly forged the weapon
which will drive the Teuton enemy across the Rhine, and give back to
Europe and the world unhindered liberty and enduring peace.