There were times during his illness and depression when we sat about
Boon very much after the fashion of Job's Comforters. And I remember
an occasion when Wilkins took upon himself the responsibility for a
hopeful view. There was about Wilkins's realistic sentimentality
something at once akin and repugnant to Boon's intellectual mysticism,
so that for a time Boon listened resentfully, and then was moved to
spirited contradiction. Wilkins declared that the war was like one of
those great illnesses that purge the system of a multitude of minor
ills. It was changing the spirit of life about us; it would end a vast
amount of mere pleasure-seeking and aimless extravagance; it was
giving people a sterner sense of duty and a more vivid apprehension of
human brotherhood. This ineffective triviality in so much of our
literary life of which Boon complained would give place to a sense of
urgent purpose....
"War," said Boon, turning his face towards Wilkins, "does nothing but
destroy."
"All making is destructive," said Wilkins, while Boon moved
impatiently; "the sculptor destroys a block of marble, the painter
scatters a tube of paint...."
Boon's eye had something of the expression of a man who watches
another ride his favourite horse.
"See already the new gravity in people's faces, the generosities, the
pacification of a thousand stupid squabbles----"
"If you mean Carsonism," said Boon, "it's only sulking until it can
cut in again."
"I deny it," said Wilkins, warming to his faith. "This is the firing
of the clay of Western European life. It stops our little arts
perhaps--but see the new beauty that comes.... We can well spare our
professional books and professional writing for a time to get such
humour and wonder as one can find in the soldiers' letters from the
front. Think of all the people whose lives would have been slack and
ignoble from the cradle to the grave, who are being twisted up now to
the stern question of enlistment; think of the tragedies of separation
and danger and suffering that are throwing a stern bright light upon
ten thousand obscure existences...."
"And the noble procession of poor devils tramping through the slush
from their burning homes, God knows whither! And the light of fire
appearing through the cracks of falling walls, and charred bits of old
people in the slush of the roadside, and the screams of men
disembowelled, and the crying of a dying baby, in a wet shed full of
starving refugees who do not know whither to go. Go on, Wilkins."
"Oh, if you choose to dwell on the horrors----!"
"The one decent thing that we men who sit at home in the warm can do
is to dwell on the horrors and do our little best to make sure that
never, never shall this thing happen again. And that won't be done,
Wilkins, by leaving War alone. War, war with modern machines, is a
damned great horrible trampling monster, a filthy thing, an indecency;
we aren't doing anything heroic, we are trying to lift a foul
stupidity off the earth, we are engaged in a colossal sanitary job.
These men who go for us into the trenches, they come back with no
illusions. They know how dirty and monstrous it is. They are like men
who have gone down for the sake of the people they love to clear out a
choked drain. They have no illusions about being glorified. They only
hope they aren't blood-poisoned and their bodies altogether ruined.
And as for the bracing stir of it, they tell me, Wilkins, that their
favourite song now in the trenches is--
"'Nobody knows how bored we are,
Bored we are,
Bored we are,
Nobody knows how bored we are,
And nobody seems to care.'