THE WOMEN AND--THE MEN
When Jim Denver told Lady Alice Conway that he was sane again, he spoke
no more than the truth. A few weeks in France, and then a shattered arm
had brought him back to England with more understanding than he had ever
possessed before. He had gone out the ordinary Englishman--casual,
sporting, easy going, somewhat apathetic; he had come back a thinker as
well, at times almost a dreamer. It affects different men in different
ways--but none escape. And that is what those others cannot
understand--those others who have not been across. Even the man who
comes back on short leave hardly grasps how the thing has changed him:
hardly realises that the madness is still in his soul. He has not time;
his leave is just an interlude. He is back again in France almost before
he realises he has left it. In mind he has never left it.
There is humour there in plenty--farce even; boredom, excitement,
passion, hatred. Every human emotion runs its full gamut in the Land of
Topsy Turvy; in the place where the life of a man is no longer
three-score years and ten, but just so long as the Great Reaper may
decide and no more. And you are caught in the whirl--you are tossed here
and there by a life of artificiality, a life not of one's own seeking,
but a life which, having once caught you, you are loath to let go.
Which is a hard saying, and one impossible of comprehension to those who
wait behind--to the wives, to the mothers, to the women. To them the
leave-train pulling slowly out of Victoria Station, with their man
waving a last adieu from the carriage window, means the ringing down of
the curtain once again. The unknown has swallowed him up--the unknown
into which they cannot follow him. Be he in a Staff office at the base
or with his battalion in the trenches, he has gone where the woman to
whom he counts as all the world cannot even picture him in her mind. To
her Flanders is Flanders and war is war--and there are casualty lists.
What matter that his battalion is resting; what matter that he is going
through a course somewhere at the back of beyond? He has gone into the
Unknown; the whistle of the train steaming slowly out is the voice of
the call-boy at the drop curtain. And now the train has passed out of
sight--or is it only that her eyes are dim with the tears she kept back
while he was with her?
At last she turns and goes blindly back to the room where they had
breakfast; she sees once more the chair he used, the crumpled morning
paper, the discarded cigarette. And there let us leave her with
tear-stained face and a pathetic little sodden handkerchief clutched in
one hand. "O God! dear God! send him back to me." Our women do not show
us this side very much when we are on leave; perhaps it is as well, for
the ground on which we stand is holy....
* * * * *
And what of the man? The train is grinding through Herne Hill when he
puts down his _Times_ and catches sight of another man in his brigade
also returning from leave.
"Hullo, old man! What sort of a time have you had?"
"Top-hole. How's yourself? Was that your memsahib at the station?"
"Yes. Dislike women at these partings as a general rule--but she's
wonderful."
"They're pulling the brigade out to rest, I hear."
"So I believe. Anyway, I hope they've buried that dead Hun just in front
of us. He was getting beyond a joke...."
He is back in the life over the water again; there is nothing
incongruous to him in his sequence of remarks; the time of his leave has
been too short for the contrast to strike him. In fact, the whirl of
gaiety in which he has passed his seven days seems more unreal than his
other life--than the dead German. And it is only when a man is wounded
and comes home to get fit, when he idles away the day in the home of his
fathers, with a rod or a gun to help him back to convalescence, when the
soothing balm of utter peace and contentment creeps slowly through his
veins, that he looks back on the past few months as a runner on a race
just over. He has given of his best; he is ready to give of his best
again; but at the moment he is exhausted; panting, but at rest For the
time the madness has left him; he is sane. But it is only for the
time....
* * * * *
He is able to think coherently; he is able to look on things in their
proper perspective. He knows. The bits in the kaleidoscope begin to
group coherently, to take definite form, and he views the picture from
the standpoint of a rational man. To him the leave-train contains no
illusions; the territory is not unknown. No longer does a dead Hun dwarf
his horizon to the exclusion of all else. He has looked on the thing
from close quarters; he has been mad with passion and shaking with
fright; he has been cold and wet, he has been hot and thirsty. Like a
blaze of tropical vegetation from which individual colours refuse to be
separated, so does the jumble of his life in Flanders strike him as he
looks back on it. Isolated occurrences seem unreal, hard to identify.
The little things which then meant so much now seem so paltry; the
things he hardly noticed now loom big. Above all, the grim absurdity of
the whole thing strikes him; civilisation has at last been defined....
He marvels that men can be such wonderful, such super-human fools; his
philosophy changes. He recalls grimly the particular night on which he
crept over a dirty ploughed field and scrambled into a shell-hole as he
saw the thin green streak of a German flare like a bar of light against
the blackness; then the burst--the ghostly light flooding the desolate
landscape--the crack of a solitary rifle away to his left. And as the
flare came slowly hissing down, a ball of fire, he saw the other
occupant of his hiding-place--a man's leg, just that, nothing more. And
he laughs; the thing is too absurd.
It is; it is absurd; it is monstrous, farcical. The realisation has come
to him; he is sane--for a time.
Sane: but for how long? It varies with the type. There are some who love
the game--who love it for itself alone. They sit on the steps of the War
Office, and drive their C.O.'s mad: they pull strings both male and
female, until the powers that be rise in their wrath, and consign them
to perdition and--France.
There are others who do not take it quite like that. They do not _want_
to go back particularly--and if they were given an important job in
England, a job for which they had special aptitude, in which they knew
they were invaluable, they would take it without regret. But though they
may not seek earnestly for France--neither do they seek for home. Their
wants do not matter; their private interests do not count: it is only
England to-day....
And lastly there is a third class, the class to whom that accursed
catch-phrase, "Doing his bit," means everything. There are some who
consider they have done their bit--that they need do no more. They draw
comparisons and become self-righteous. "Behold I am not as other men
are," they murmur complacently; "have not I kept the home fires burning,
and amassed money making munitions?" "I am doing my bit." "I have been
out; I have been hit--and _he_ has not. Why should I go again? I have
done my bit." Well, friend, it may be as you say. But methinks there is
only one question worth putting and answering to-day. Don't bother about
having done your bit. Are you doing your _all_? Let us leave it at
that.