(From _The Observer_, 1916.)
If I were that! Not as one getting into the yellow leaf, but with all
the Spring-running in me. If I lay, just turning my eyes here and there!
How should I feel?
How do _they_ feel—those helpless soldiers and sailors already lying in
the old ball-room of the “Star and Garter”?
In that hospital ward, a ghostly officer is ever crying:
“Stick it, men! Stick it! Only for life! Stick it!”
Only for life—how many years! In the year only three hundred and
sixty-five awakenings; only all those returns from merciful sleep!
“Stick it, men! Stick it!”
Totally disabled—incurably helpless! No! One can’t realize what it
feels like to be caught young and strong in such a net; to be
caught—not for your own folly and excesses, not through accident or
heredity, but as reward for giving yourself body and soul to your
country. Better so, more easily borne; and yet how much more ironically
tragic!
Who knows what the freedom of limbs means, till he has lost it? Who can
measure the ecstasy of vigour, till every power of movement has been cut
off? Who really grasps what it’s like to lie like a log dependent for
everything on others, save those who have to? Think of the trout in the
streams, of the birds of the air, the winged creatures innumerable,
think of each beast and creeping thing—can one even imagine them
without movement? Men, also, are meant to be free of their world,
masters of their limbs and senses.
They who lie helpless are no longer quite bodies, for the essence of
body is movement; already they are almost spirits. It is as if, in
passing, one looked at minds, nearly all in the heyday of consciousness
and will.
Sometimes I vaguely fancy that after violent death a man’s spirit may go
on clinging above the earth just so long as his normal life would have
run; that a spirit rived before its time wanders till such date as
consciousness would have worn itself out in the body’s natural death. If
that random fancy were true, we to-day would all be passing among unseen
crowds of these rived spirits, watching us, without envy perhaps, being
freer than ourselves. But those who lie hopelessly disabled, having just
missed that enfranchisement, are tied to what still exists, and yet in
truth has died already. Of all men they have the chance to prove the
mettle of the human soul—that mysterious consciousness capable of such
heights and depths; no, not a greater chance than men tortured by long
solitary confinement, or even than those who through excess or through
heredity lie for ever helpless—but yet so great a chance that they are
haloed for all of us happier ones, who are free of our limbs and our
lives. Some among those prisoned spirits must needs shrink and droop,
and become atrophied in the long helplessness of a broken body. But many
will grow finer; according to their natures—some pursuing the ideal of
recompense in another world; some, in the stoic belief that serenity and
fortitude are the fine flowers of life, unconsciously following the
artist’s creed—that to make a perfect thing, even if it be only of his
own spirit, is in itself all the reward.
Whichever it be, slow decay or slow perfecting, we others approach them
with heads bowed, in as great reverence as we give to the green graves
of our brave dead. And if pity—that pity which to some, it seems, is
but ignoble weakness—be not driven from this earth, then with pity we
shall nerve our resolve that never shall anything be lacking to support
or comfort those who gave all for us and are so broken by their
sacrifice.
As I write the sun is hot for the first time this year, and above the
snow spring is in the air. Under Richmond Hill the river will be very
bright, winding among trees not yet green. And the helpless who are
lying there already will be thinking “I shall never walk under trees
again—nor by a riverside.”
If one dwells too much on the miseries this world contains, there must
come a moment when one will say: “Life’s not worth living; I will end
it!” But by some dispensation few of us reach that point—too sanely
selfish, or saved by the thought that we must work to reduce the sum of
misery.
For these greatest of all sufferers—these helpless and incurable—can
we do too much, ever reach the word: Enough?
To you, women of Great and Greater Britain, it has fallen to raise on
Richmond Hill this refuge and home for our soldiers and sailors totally
disabled. Where thirty-two are now lying there will soon be two hundred
more. Nearly all my life I have known the spot on which this home will
stand; and truly, no happier choice could have been made. If beauty
consoles—and it can, a little—it is there in all the seasons; a benign
English beauty of fields and trees and water spread below, under a wide
sky.
One hundred thousand pounds you need to raise this monument of mercy in
tribute to the brave. If it were five hundred thousand you would give
it; for is not this monument to be the record and token of your
gratitude, your love, and your pity? Each one of you, I think, however
poor, must wish to lay one brick or stone of the house that is to prove
your ministering.
If the misery through this war could be balanced in scales, I do not
think men’s suffering would pull down that of wives, and mothers,
sisters, daughters; but this special suffering of incurable
disablement—this has been spared you, who yet by nature are better at
enduring than men. It has been spared you; and in return you have vowed
this home for the helpless; a more sacred place than any church, for
within it every hour of day and night pain will be assuaged, despair be
overcome, actual living tenderness be lavished.
When you have built this refuge for the prisoners of Fate—when you have
led them there to make out the rest of their lives as best they
can—remember this: Men who are cut off in their youth from life and
love will prize beyond all things woman’s sympathy, and the sight of
woman’s beauty. Give—your money to build, your hands to lead them home;
and, when they are there, take them your sympathy, take them your
beauty!