Your picture of the black days when no letter comes from me sets me off
scribbling to you at this late hour. All to-day I've been having a cold
but amusing time at the O.P. (Forward Observation Post). It seems brutal
to say it, but taking potshots at the enemy when they present themselves
is rather fun. When you watch them scattering like ants before the
shell whose direction you have ordered, you somehow forget to think of
them as individuals, any more than the bear-hunter thinks of the cubs
that will be left motherless. You watch your victims through your
glasses as God might watch his mad universe. Your skill in directing
fire makes you what in peace times would be called a murderer. Curious!
You're glad, and yet at close quarters only in hot blood would you hurt
a man.
I'd been back for a little over an hour when I had to go forward again
to guide in some guns. The country was dazzlingly white in the
moonlight. As far as eye could see every yard was an old battlefield;
beneath the soft white fleece of snow lay countless unburied bodies.
Like frantic fingers tearing at the sky, all along the horizon, Hun
lights were shooting up and drifting across our front. Tap-tap-tappity
went the machine-guns; whoo-oo went the heavies, and they always stamp
like angry bulls. I had to come back by myself across the heroic
corruption which the snow had covered. All the way I asked myself why
was I not frightened. What has happened to me? Ghosts should walk here
if anywhere. Moreover, I know that I shall be frightened again when the
war is ended. Do you remember how you once offered me money to walk
through the Forest of Dean after dark, and I wouldn't? I wouldn't if
you offered it to me now. You remember Meredith's lines in "The Woods of
Westermain":
"All the eyeballs under hoods
Shroud you in their glare;
Enter these enchanted woods
You who dare."
Maybe what re-creates one for the moment is the British officer's
uniform, and even more the fact that you are not asked, but expected, to
do your duty. So I came back quite unruffled across battered trenches
and silent mounds to write this letter to you.
My dear father, I'm over thirty, and yet just as much a little boy as
ever. I still feel overwhelmingly dependent on your good opinion and
love. I'm glad that they are black days when you have no letters from
me. I love to think of the rush to the door when the postman rings and
the excited shouting up the stairs, "Quick, one from Con."
February 2nd.
You see by the writing how tired I was when I reached this point. It's
nearly twenty-four hours later and again night. The gramophone is
playing an air from _La Tosca_ to which the guns beat out a bass
accompaniment. I close my eyes and picture the many times I have heard
the (probably) German orchestras of Broadway Joy Palaces play that same
music. How incongruous that I should be listening to it here and under
these circumstances! It must have been listened to so often by gay
crowds in the beauty places of the world. A romantic picture grows up in
my mind of a blue night, the laughter of youth in evening dress, lamps
twinkling through trees, far off the velvety shadow of water and
mountains, and as a voice to it all, that air from _La Tosca_. I can
believe that the silent people near by raise themselves up in their
snow-beds to listen, each one recalling some ecstatic moment before the
dream of life was shattered.
There's a picture in the Pantheon at Paris, I remember; I believe it's
called _To Glory_. One sees all the armies of the ages charging out of
the middle distance with Death riding at their head. The only glory that
I have discovered in this war is in men's hearts--it's not external.
Were one to paint the spirit of this war he would depict a mud
landscape, blasted trees, an iron sky; wading through the slush and
shell-holes would come a file of bowed figures, more like outcasts from
the 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 "To Glory" about what we're doing out here;
there's no flash of swords or splendour of uniforms. There are only very
tired men determined to carry on. The war will be won by tired men who
could never again pass an insurance test, a mob of broken
counter-jumpers, ragged ex-plumbers and quite unheroic persons. We're
civilians in khaki, but because of the ideals for which we fight we've
managed to acquire soldiers' hearts.
My flow of thought was interrupted by a burst of song in which I was
compelled to join. We're all writing letters around one candle; suddenly
the O.C. looked up and began, God Be With You Till We Meet Again. We
sang it in parts. It was in Southport, when I was about nine years old,
that I first heard that sung. You had gone for your first trip to
America, leaving a very lonely family behind you. We children were
scared to death that you'd be drowned. One evening, coming back from a
walk on the sand-hills, we heard voices singing in a garden, God Be With
You Till We Meet Again. The words and the soft dusk, and the vague
figures in the English summer garden, seemed to typify the terror of all
partings. We've said good-bye so often since, and God has been with us.
I don't think any parting was more hard than our last at the prosaic
dock-gates with the cold wind of duty blowing, and the sentry barring
your entrance, and your path leading back to America while mine led on
to France. But you three were regular soldiers--just as much soldiers as
we chaps who were embarking. One talks of our armies in the field, but
there are the other armies, millions strong, of mothers and fathers and
sisters, who keep their eyes dry, treasure muddy letters beneath their
pillows, offer up prayers and wait, wait, wait so eternally for God to
open another door.
To-morrow I again go forward, which means rising early and taking a long
plod through the snows; that's one reason for not writing any more, and
another is that our one poor candle is literally on its last legs.
Your poem, written years ago when the poor were marching in London, is
often in my mind:
"Yesterday and to-day
Have been heavy with labour and sorrow;
I should faint if I did not see
The day that is after to-morrow."
And there's that last verse which prophesied utterly the spirit in which
we men at the Front are fighting to-day:
"And for me, with spirit elate
The mire and the fog I press thorough,
For Heaven shines under the cloud
Of the day that is after to-morrow."
We civilians who have been taught so long to love our enemies and do
good to them who hate us--much too long ever to make professional
soldiers--are watching with our hearts in our eyes for that day which
conies after to-morrow. Meanwhile we plod on determinedly, hoping for
the hidden glory.
Yours very lovingly,
Con.