your processions in which the Kaiser has been publicly done away with. It’s a
phase which all countries go through, I suppose. England did at the beginning
of the war. But now we entrain for the Front without bands playing, and do our
best not to attract attention. We’re a little ashamed of arousing other
people’s emotions on our behalf. All we want is a “Cheerio and God bless You,”
for our good-bye. If we come back, it will be “jolly fine”; and if we don’t,
“C’est la guerre”—we shrug our shoulders. In either event we see no reason why
the feelings should be harrowed of those who stop behind.
After a series of very early morning rises, I have been picturing to myself
the day when I once again wake up at the Ritz, with a camouflaged foreigner to
bring my breakfast to my pillow and then leave me in peace till twelve
o’clock. I wonder now why I ever left my bed in peace times and find myself
marvelling at my unnecessary energy. The French patriot who held receptions
and did the business of the day while sitting in a bath of milk, had mastered
the art of life. Unfortunately, if I remember rightly, he was made a glaring
example of sloth by being “done in” while thus pleasurably occupied.
I’m off to do my rounds as orderly officer now. My sergeant is waiting, so, as
the men say, “I must ring off.”
LV
France June 23, 1918
Here I sit on a summer’s evening in the red-tiled kitchen of an old farmhouse.
Immediately under the open window to my right is the inevitable
manure-heap—the size of which, they say, denotes the extent of the farmer’s
wealth. Barn-roofs, ochre-red, shine vividly in the pale gold of the sunset;
at the end of the yard the walls fall away, giving the glimpse of an orchard
with gnarled, lichen-covered fruit-trees. All kinds of birds are twittering
and singing; house-swallows dart and dive across open spaces. In the distance
the guns are booming. War affords one strange contrasts of sight and sound.
Not many of the peasants have moved away; they have great faith in the
Canadians. Every now and then a forlorn group will come trailing down the road
between the hedges: an old tumbledown cart, drawn by an old tumble-down horse,
piled and pyramided dangerously high with old tumble-down furniture. The
people who accompany the vehicle are usually ancient and tumbledown as well.
They make me recall someone’s description of the Irish emigrants on the St.
Lawrence, travelling with “ragged poverty on their backs.” In contrast with
these few straggling fugitives, hounded by avaricious fear, is the calm of a
country billowy with grain and sociable with the grinning contentment of
quite-at-home British Tommies. Everything in their attitude seems to assure
the French peasant, “Don’t worry, old dear. We’re here. Everything’s all
right.” From barns and houses and bivouacs come the sounds of gramophones,
playing selections from quite the latest musical comedies. If you wander back
into the fields you will find horsemen going over the jumps, men playing
baseball and cricket, officers getting excited over tennis. We even held our
Divisional Sports the other day—and this in the midst of the war’s greatest
offensive. This “'Arf a mo’, Kaiser,” attitude of the Canadians would give you
some idea of the esteem in which we hold the Hun. Our backs are not against
the wall. We still have both the time and the inclination to be sportsmen and
to laugh. I’m sure the enemy, grimly obsessed by the idea of breaking our
line, never allows himself a moment for recreation, and I should think his
balloon-observers, spying on us from the baskets of his distant sausages, must
be very chagrined by our frivolity. The papers say, and very probably they’re
right, that German strategists are far ahead of those possessed by the Allies;
but our men have learnt a trick worth all the strategy—they have learnt to
laugh both in success and adversity. In this war, I believe we shall find that
he who has acquired the habit of a light heart will do the laughing last. I
should very much like to know how many gramophones travel with the German
Tommies; hardly any, I’ll bet. They have their bands with their patriotic
music, keeping always before the men the singleness of their purpose. The
singleness of their purpose tires them out. On our side of the line patriotism
is the last thing you hear about. Thank God, we’ve got time to forget it.
Whenever I start trying to explain to you the psychology of our fighting-men
I’m always conscious that, even while I’m telling you the absolute truth, with
the same words I’m creating a wrong impression. Fighting-men aren’t
magnificent most of the time; they’re not idealists; they’re not heroic. Very
often they’re petty and cynical and cowards. They’re only magnificent and
idealistic and heroic in the decision that brought them here, and in the last
supreme moment when they bring their decision to fulfilment.
In a letter I received from Paris the other day the puzzle of the modern
soldier was very well expressed. “I don’t believe,” it said, “I will ever get
used to the courage of the men who go on and on with this terrible game. I’m
thinking more now of the French and the British soldiers, who are mended up
only to go at it again. I never can get used to it or take it as a matter of
course. When I think for a minute how it hurts to have a tooth filled, I
wonder that all the armies of the world don’t get up and run away from each
other of one accord—every one who isn’t a hero or a fool, that’s to say.”
When I think over the problem calmly I have the same wonder. The problem was
so neatly expressed that I read the passage out to the mess. They stopped in a
round of poker to listen. “Well, which are we,” I asked; “heroes or fools?”
“Fools,” they said unanimously, and then went on playing their hands again.
They’re right; we are fools. We’re certainly not heroes. We’re fools for a
kind of kingdom of heaven’s sake—but we don’t act like the heaven part of it
any more than we talk about our patriotism. Any mention of either would make
us shudder.
I wonder what motive brought the heathen Chinee to the Western Front. I’ve
been told that he came that he might buy food for his family, because there’s
a famine in China. Maybe. His bronze face stares up into ours from out the
green-gold of the standing wheat—stares up into ours with the inscrutable gaze
of an age-old Buddha. He’s the one human being on the Western Front who
neither by acts nor words explains his nobility. Nobility there must have been
to induce him to come; no reasoning creature would have jeopardized his body
out of lust.
Last night I rode beneath a full white moon for miles through the standing
crops. I only struck a road to cross it and say good-bye to it—then on and on
with the soft swish of the swelling stalks against my stirrups. Shall we
recall our old panics and delights if we live to reach normality again? Will
normality satisfy? Shall we be content to know that all the hoard of the
future years is ours? In a word, shall we ever again desire to be safe?
Questions which none of us can answer!
LVI
France June 27, 1918
Here’s a glorious June morning with a touch of chill in the air and a jolly
gold sun shooting arrows into the wheatfields. The chief sound I hear is the
rattling of head-chains, for the drivers are hard at work shining up their
harness. These summer days go by very pleasantly, but they throw one’s
thoughts back a little wistfully to the Junes of other years—especially those
in which the train came skidding down the mountains from Spokane to the ranch
and the lake. All day, from first waking in the morning, we begin to gamble on
our chances with the mail. It arrives any time between two and five o’clock;
the evening passes in reading and re-reading our letters and concocting
replies. I think some letters from you are nearly due again and I’m hoping for
one this afternoon.
I think I mentioned that our battery has a French baby boy of three for its
mascot, just at present. He has been christened Bully Beef, but for what
reason I don’t know. Bully Beef falls in beside the Sergeant-Major on all
parades. During stables he inspects the horses, toddling round the lines and
hanging on to the finger of an officer. The other day he fell into the river
while the horses were watering. No one noticed his disappearance for a minute
or two; then he was discovered standing nearly chin-deep, doing a very quiet
cry. He was consoled with pennies, and I undertook to lead him up to his
mother. There are many stories about Bully Beef’s origin. Some say that his
father is a rich Frenchman already married; others, a dead poilu; others, a
sergeant of a Highland Division which was encamped in this neighbourhood. His
mother is an exceedingly pretty French girl and she is not married. I can’t
help feeling that Bully Beef must be half British, for he isn’t timid like a
French child. On the contrary, he hides in the hedges and throws stones at us
when he is offended, and has a finely exaggerated sense of his childish
dignity. What memories he’ll have when he’s become a man.
There was another character I mentioned in a previous letter—I called him
“Battling Brown”—the chap has D.S.O. and Military Crosses with bars to them
and delights in putting on raids. I’ve since found that he cuts a notch in his
revolver for every Hun he has killed with it. His present weapon has eighteen
notches and the wooden handle of the first is notched to pieces.
It’s refreshing to find a man on our side of the line who knows how to hate.
If we had hated more at the first, the war would be ended. Personally I can
only hate ideas and nations—not persons; I acknowledge this as a weakness in
myself.
I don’t think any of us realize quite how much war has changed us,
particularly in our relations to sex. Women had grown discontented with being
wives and mothers, and had proved that in many departments they could compete
with men. This competition was responsible for a growing disrespect. Men were
beginning to treat women in a way they demanded—as though they were men. Women
were beginning to regard men with a quiet sex-contempt. It looked as if
chivalry and all that made for knighthood were at an end. Then came war,
calling men to a sacrifice in which women had no share—could not share because
they were physically incapable of fighting—and women to the only contribution
they could make, mercy and motherhood. We’ve been flung back on our primal
differences and virtues. War has cut the knotted sex-emancipation; we stand up
to-day as elementally male and female as when the Garden of Eden was
depopulated. Amongst our fighting-men, women actually hold the place which was
allotted to them by idealists in troubadour times.
Mothers and sisters and sweethearts, remembered at this distance, have made
all women sacred. A new medievalism and asceticism have sprung out of our
modern tragedy, enacted beneath the sea, on the land and in the clouds. The
tragedy, while modern to us, is actually the oldest in the world—merely death.
It’s evening now. No letter from home came this afternoon.
LVII
France July 4, 1918
I am now attached with two guns to the infantry on a special job. I live with
the battalion—speak about “our battalion,” in fact—and share quarters with the
Trench Mortar officer. The country is green and fragrant with dog-roses. The
dead have been gathered up and lie in little scattered graveyards. Our living
men spread their blankets between the mounds and at night hang their equipment
on the crosses. War robs men of all fear of the supernatural—or is it that the
dead have become our brothers?
One writes a description of battlefields to-day and it is untrue to-morrow.
Everything has changed in the past year. Siege warfare, with deep trenches and
guns in positions of observation, is becoming more rare; we are more mobile
now and see more of the country. I believe, before many months are out, the
dream of every gunner along the Western Front will have come true, and we
shall be firing at the enemy over open sights and coming into action on the
gallop. It will be far more sporting and exciting. The Trench Mortar officer
with whom I am living remembers that kind of work in the early days, when my
battery was still firing on the enemy while the Hun was bayoneting the
batteries behind. He has a great tale of how he came right through the enemy
without knowing, bringing up with him a precious load of small-arms ammunition
to his General, who was cut off by the enemy. He and his five men were given
rifles, and together with the waifs and strays of many broken regiments held
the line against the advance on Calais. Experiences such as that are worth
living for; I’m hopeful that before I take off khaki I may be in something of
the kind.
You needn’t think of me any more—at least for the present—as living in
beastliness and corruption. I daresay the country where I am is almost as
beautiful as where you are spending your holidays. The Hun did the Allies a
good turn when he advanced, for he shoved us back out of the filth of three
years’ fighting into cleanness. One can see deserted cottages with their
gardens full of flowers, and green woods shaking their plumes against blue
skies. At one of our halts the men did themselves very well with baskets of
trout; they caught the trout by the simple expedient of flinging bombs into
the river. The concussion killed the fish and they floated to the surface.
For the present that is all my news.
LVIII
France July 10, 1918
I am delighted to see that every day the prophecies I made in Out to Win are
coming true. The attack that the Americans put on on 4th July is, to my mind,
one of the most significant things that has happened yet. Their battle-cry,
“Lusitania,” says everything in one word concerning their purpose in coming to
France. If I were a Hun I should find it more terrifying than the most
astounding statements of armaments and men. I can picture the enemy in those
old shell-holes of the Somme that I know so well. It’s early morning, and a
low white mist steals ghost-like over that vast graveyard, where crumbling
trenches and broken entanglements mark the resting-places of the dead. The
enemy would be sleepy-eyed with his long vigil, but with the vanishing of
night he would fancy himself safe. Suddenly, hurled through the dawn, comes
the cry, “Lusitania!” It must have sounded like the voice of conscience—the
old and boasted sin for which medals were struck, the infamy of which was worn
as a decoration, rising out of the past to exact suffering for suffering,
panic for panic, blood for blood. Whoever chose that battle-cry was a poet—he
said everything in the shortest and most rememberable way. America is in
France to act as the revenge of God. She has suffered in the spirit what
France has suffered in the flesh; through being in France she has learnt from
the French the justice of passionate, punishing hate. I can think that
somewhere beneath the Atlantic the bodies of murdered children sat up at that
cry; I can believe that the souls of their mothers went over the top with
those American boys. “Lusitania!” The white-hot anger of chivalry was in the
cry.
Yes, and we, too, are learning to hate. For years we have hesitated to
dogmatize as to which side God favours; but now, since hospitals have been
bombed and the women who came to nurse us have been slaughtered, Cromwell’s
religious arrogance has taken possession of our hearts—“Let God arise, and let
His enemies be scattered.” When it was only we men who were wounded and killed
by the Hun we could afford to regard him with an amused tolerance, but
now——This is how we have changed: we should welcome our chance to kill at
close quarters and to forget mercy. This time last year we were proud to say
that we had no personal animosity for the individual German; it sounded so
strong and impartial. We don’t feel that way now; can’t feel that way. At
last, because of our women who are dead, we have learnt the magnanimity of
hatred. Germany has entered a new phase of the war—a phase which her
persistent brutality has created. She will find no more smiling faces on our
side of No Man’s Land when she lifts up her hands, shouting “Kamerad!” We are
not her comrades; we never shall be again so long as our race-memory lasts.
Like Cain, the brand of murder is on her forehead and the hand of every living
creature is against her. When she pleads with us her common humanity, we will
answer “Lusitania!” and charge across the Golgotlias and the mists of the
dawn, driving her into oblivion with the bayonet. No truth of the spirit which
her voice utters will ever be truth for us again. It has taken four years to
teach us our lesson; we were slow; we gave quarter; but we have learnt.
LIX
France July 11, 1918
I’ve returned from being with the infantry and am back with my battery now.
For the next few days I shall probably be out of touch with my incoming mail.
I have spoken several times to you about the test of war; how it acknowledges
one chief virtue—courage. A man may be a poet, painter, may speak with the
tongue of angels; but, if he has not courage, he is as sounding brass or a
tinkling cymbal. The other day I was accidentally the witness to the
promulgation of a court-martial. The man was an officer; he had been sentenced
to be shot, but the order had been changed to cashiering. There, in the
sunlight, all his brother officers were drawn up at attention. Across the
fields the men whom he had commanded were playing baseball. He was led out
bareheaded. The sentence and the crime for which he had been sentenced were
read aloud to him in an unsteady voice. When that was ended, an officer
stepped forward and stripped the buttons and the badges of rank from his
uniform. It was like a funeral at which his honour was buried. Under an
escort, he was given “Right turn,” and marched away to meet the balance of
life that remained. In peace times he’d have been reckoned a decent-looking
chap, a little smart, but handsome—the kind of fellow of whom some mother must
have been proud and whom probably at least one girl loved. A tall chap,
too—six foot at least. I see him standing in the strong sunlight, white-faced
and dumb—better dead—despised. His fate was the fate which many of us feared
before we put on khaki when the call first came. We had feared that we might
not be able to stand the test and might be shot behind the lines. How and why
we can stand it we ourselves cannot say. It was all a gamble at the start.
Here was one man who had failed. The arithmetic of his spiritual values was at
fault: he had chosen bitter life when death would have been splendid.
This must all sound very strange to you in your environment, where your honour
and life are safe. Perhaps I should not intrude such scenes upon you.
LX
France July 15, 1918
The mail has just come up to us. The runner stuck his head into the hole in
the trench where I live and shoved in a pile of letters. “How many for me?” I
asked. “All of them,” he said.
I’m all alone at the battery, the major having gone forward to reconnoitre a
position and all the other subalterns being away on duties—so I’ve had a quiet
time browsing through my correspondence. A Hun cat sits at the top of the
dug-out across the trench and blinks at me. We found him on the position. He’s
fat and sleek and plausible-looking. I can’t get it out of my mind that he’s
kept up his strength by battening on the corpses of his former owners. Between
the guns there are two graves; one to an unknown British and the other to an
unknown German soldier.
The battlefield itself stretches away all billowy with hay for miles and
miles. When a puff of wind blows across it, it rustles like fire. The sides of
the trenches are gay with poppies and cornflowers. The larks sing
industriously overhead, and above them, like the hum of a swarm of bees, pass
the fighting planes. Miles to the rear I can hear the strife of bands, playing
their battalions up to the fine. A brave, queer, battling world! If one lives
to be old, he will talk about these days and persuade himself that he longs to
be back, if the time ever comes when life has lost its challenge.
The Hun doesn’t seem to be so frisky as he was in March and April. Now that
he’s quieting down, we begin to lose our hatred and to speak of him more
tolerantly again. But whatever may be said in his defence, he’s a nasty
fellow.
Since I started this letter I’ve dined, done a lot of work, watched a
marvellous sunset, and received orders to push up forward very early in the
morning. I shall probably send you a line from the O.P. The mystery of night
has settled down. Round the western rim of the horizon there is still a stain
of red. Under the dusk, limbers and pack horses crawl along mud trails and
sunken roads. We become populous when night has fallen.
LXI
France July 17, 1918
To-night brought a great wad of American papers. What a time America is
having—all shouting and anticipation of glory without any suspicion of the
cost. War’s fine when it’s khaki and drums on Fifth Avenue—if it wasn’t
tortured bodies, broken hearts, and blinded eyes. Where I am the dead lie
thick beneath the sod; poppies pour like blood across the landscape, and
cornflowers stand tall in sockets empty of eyes. The inscription “Unknown
Soldier” is written on many crosses that grow like weeds from the shell-holes.
All the feet that marched away with shouting now lie silent; their owners have
even lost their names. Could death do more? Where I live at present everything
is blasted, stagnant, decayed, morose. War’s a fine spectacle for those who
only cheer from the pavement.
It isn’t that I’m angry with people for seizing life and being gay. We’re gay
out here—but we’ve earned the right. Many of us are happier than we ever were
in our lives. Why not? For the first time we’re quite sure every minute of the
day that we’re doing right. And that certainty is the only excuse for being
happy while the Front line is suffering the tortures of the damned.
I came down this morning from doing forward work; it had been raining in
torrents and the trenches were awash. I sleep to-night at the battery and
to-morrow I go forward again. It’s really great fun forward when it’s fine.
All day you watch the Hun country for signs of movement and snipe his
support-trenches and back-country. Far away on the horizon you watch plumes of
smoke trail from the chimneys of his towns, and try to guess his intentions
and plans. War’s the greatest game of the intellect yet invented; very little
of its success to-day is due to brute strength.
It’s night now. I’m sitting in my shirt-sleeves, writing by the light of a
candle in an empty bottle. A row is going on outside as of “armed men falling
downstairs,” to borrow Stevenson’s phrase. It’s really more like a dozen
celestial cats with kettles tied to their tails. I wonder what God thinks of
it all; of all the kings, He alone is silent and takes no sides,
notwithstanding the Kaiser’s “Me und Gott.”
My jolly little major has just looked up to suggest that the war won’t be
ended until all the world is under arms. He’s an optimist.
LXII
France July 18, 1918
I’m up forward, sitting on a bank, looking at the Hun country through a hedge.
I know you’d give anything to be with me. In front there’s a big curtain of
sea-grey sky, against which planes crawl like flies. A beautiful half-moon
looks down at me with the tragic face of Harlequin. Far away across a plain
furrowed by shell-fire the spires and domes of cities in the captured
territory shine. Like all forbidden lands, there are times when the Hun
country looks exquisitely and unreally beautiful, as though it were tempting
us to cross the line.
I’ve just left off to watch a squadron of enemy planes which have been
attempting to get across to our side. Everything has opened up on them;
machine guns are spouting their luminous trails of tracer bullets; archies are
bursting little cotton-wool clouds of death between them and their desire.
They evidently belong to a circus, for they’re slipping and tumbling and
looping like great gulls to whom the air is native. Ah, now they’ve given it
up and are going home thwarted. I wonder what the poor old moon thinks of all
these antics and turmoils in the domain which has been hers absolutely for so
many æons of nights.