I
A soldier, whom I met in the train the other day, said that the most
unpleasant thing in his experience of the war was the bodies which got
caught in the barbed wire in No Man's Land, and had to be left
corrupting in the sun. "It isn't healthy," he said. There was no
affectation of bravado in the remark. He made it quite simply, as if
he were commenting on the inclemency of the weather or the overheating
of the carriage. It was not the tragedy of the thing that affected
him, but its insanitariness. Yet he was obviously a kindly and humane
man, and he talked of his home with the yearning of an exile. "It
makes you think something of your home," he said, speaking of the war.
"I shan't never want to leave my home when I get out of this, and I
shan't never grumble at the missus again," he added, as though
recalling the past.
I suppose everyone who has talked to soldiers back from the war has
been struck by this attitude of mind towards death. I remember a
friend of mine, who was afterwards killed in the first battle of the
Somme while trying to save one of his men who had been wounded, telling
me of the horror of the first days of his experience of war, and of the
subsequent calm with which he saw a man who had been his friend blown
to pieces by his side. "It is as though war develops another
integument," he said. "Your sensibilities are atrophied. Your nerve
ends are deadened. Your normal feelings perish, and you become a part
of a machine that has no feelings--only functions."
In some measure the same phenomenon is apparent in the minds of most of
us. There has not been since the Great Plague swept Europe 250 years
ago such a harvesting of untimely death as we have witnessed during the
last two and a half years. If the ghostly army of the slain were to
file before you, passing in a rank of four for every minute that
elapsed, you could sit and watch it day and night for five years
without pause before the last of the phantom host had gone by. And if
behind the dead there followed the maimed, blind, and mentally
shattered, you could sit on for twenty years and still the end of the
vast procession would not be in sight. If we had been asked three
years ago whether the human mind could endure such a deliberate orgy of
death in its most terrible form, we should have said the thing was
incredible. Yet we live through it without revolt, clamour about the
shortage of potatoes, crowd the cinemas to see the latest extravagance
of Charlie Chaplin, and have forgotten to glance at the daily tale of
dead that fills the obscure columns of the newspapers--such of them as
trouble any longer to give that tale at all.
It is not merely that we avert our eyes from the facts. That is
certainly done. You may go to see the "war pictures" at the cinema and
come away without supposing that they represent anything more than a
skilfully arranged entertainment--in which one attractive "turn"
follows another in swift succession. Once they actually showed a man
falling dead, and there was a cry of indignation at such an outrage.
Ten millions have fallen dead, but we must not look on one to remind us
of the reality behind this pictured imposture. There has never been a
lie on the scale of these "war pictures" that leave out the war and all
its sprawling ugliness, monotony, mutilation, and death.
But it is not this fact that explains our apparent indifference to the
Red Harvest. We are like the dyer's hand. We are subdued to what we
work in. Even those who have been directly stricken find that they
bear the blow with a calm that astonishes themselves. We have got into
a new habit of thought about death--in a sense a truer habit of
thought. It used to be screened from the light of day, talked of in
hushed voices, surrounded with the mystery and aloofness of a terrible
divinity. It has come into the open, brutal, naked, violent. We
accept it as the commonplace it is, instead of enveloping it in a cloud
of tragic fear and strangeness. The heart seems steeled to the blows
of fate, looks death steadily in the face, understands that the
individual life is merged in issues more vast than this little tale of
years that, at the most, is soon told.
It may be that, like the soldiers, our senses are only numbed by
events, and that when we come out of the nightmare the old feelings
will resume their sway. But it will be long before they recover their
former tyranny over the mind. This generation has companioned Death
too closely to see him again quite as the hooded terror of old. And
that, I think, is a gain. I have always felt that Johnson's morbid
attitude towards death was the weakest trait in a fine character, and
that George Selwyn's perpetual absorption in the subject was a form of
mental disease. Montaigne, too, lived with the constant thought of the
imminence of death, so much so that if, when out walking, he remembered
something he wanted done, he wrote down the request at once, lest he
should not reach home alive. But he was quite healthy in his thought.
It was not that he feared death, but that he did not want to be caught
unawares.
In this, as in most things, Caesar shone with that grand sanity that
makes him one of the most illuminated secular minds in history. He
neither sought death nor shunned it. When Hirtius and Pansa
remonstrated with him for going unprotected by a bodyguard, he
answered, "It is better to die once than always to go in fear of
death." That is the common-sense attitude--as remote from the spirit
of the miser as from that of the spendthrift. And that other comment
of his on death is equally deserving of recall. He was dining the
night before his murder at the house of Decimus Brutus, who had joined
the conspiracy against him. As he sat dispatching his letters, the
others talked of death and of that form of death which was preferable.
One of the group asked Caesar what death he would prefer. He looked up
from his papers and said, "That which is least expected." This was not
an old man's weariness of life such as that which made Lord Holland,
the father of Charles James Fox, write to Selwyn: "And yet the man I
envy most is the late Lord Chamberlain, for he is dead and he died
suddenly." It was just the Roman courage that accepted death as an
incident of the journey.
Of that high courage the end of Antoninus Pius is an immortal memory.
As the Emperor lay dying in his tent the tribune of the night-watch
entered to ask the watchword. "AEquanimitas," said Antoninus Pius, and
with that last word he, in the language of the historian, "turned his
face to the everlasting shadow."
With that grave calm the philosophy of the ancient world touched its
noblest expression. It faced the shadow without illusions and without
fear. It met death neither as an enemy, nor as a friend, but as an
implacable fact to be faced implacably. Sir Thomas More met it like a
bridegroom. In all the literature of death there is nothing comparable
with Roper's story of those last days in the Tower. Who can read that
moving description of the farewell with his daughter Margaret (Roper's
wife) without catching its pity and its glory? "In good faythe,
Maister Roper," said stout Sir William Kingstone, the gaoler, "I was
ashamed of myself that at my departing from your father I found my
harte soe feeble and his soe stronge, that he was fayne to comfort me
that should rather have comforted him." And when Sir Thomas Pope comes
early on St. Thomas' Even with the news that he is to die at nine
o'clock that morning and falls weeping at his own tidings--"Quiet
yourselfe, Good Maister Pope," says More, "and be not discomforted; for
I trust that we shall once in heaven see eche other full merily, where
we shalbe sure to live and love togeather, in joy full blisse
eternally." And then, Pope being gone, More "as one that had beene
invited to some solempne feaste, chaunged himself into his beste
apparrell; which Maister Leiftenante espyinge, advised him to put it
off, sayinge that he that should have it was but a javill (a common
fellow: the executioner). What, Maister Leiftenante, quothe he, shall
I accompte him a javill that shall doe me this day so singular a
benefitt? Nay, I assure you, were it clothe of goulde, I would
accompte it well bestowed upon him, as St. Ciprian did, who gave his
executyoner thirtye peeces of golde.... And soe was he by Maister
Leiftenante brought out of the Tower and from thence led towardes the
place of execution. Wher, goinge up the scaffold, which was so weake
that it was readye to fall, he said merilye to Maister Leiftenante, I
praye you, Maister Leiftenante, see me safe uppe and for my cominge
down let me shift for myselfe. Then desired he all the people there
aboute to pray for him, and to bare witnes with him that he should now
there suffer deathe, in and for the faith of the Holy Catholicke
Churche. Which donne, he kneeled downe; and after his prayers sayed,
turned to the executioner, and with a cheerfull countenance spake thus
unto him: 'Plucke uppe thy spiritts, manne, and be not affrayde to doe
thine office; my necke is very shorte, take heede, therfore, thou
strike not awrye for savinge of thine honesty.' So passed Sir Thomas
More out of this worlde to God, upon the very same daye (the Ntas. of
St. Peter) in which himself had most desired."
The saint of the pagan world and the saint of the Christian world may
be left to share the crown of noble dying.