LIKE THE PROMISE OF MAY
We have turned off the main road, and have to march over a field of
stubble. A battle was fought here yesterday, for the field is sown with
dead bodies. They have picked up the wounded. But as yet they have had
no time to bury those who died where they fell.
The first dead man we saw struck us dumb. At first we hardly realized
what it meant--this lifeless new uniform spread out there--from the way
he was lying you could hardly believe he was really dead. It gave you a
prickly feeling on the tongue. It seemed as if you were on manoeuvres,
and the fellow lying there in a ditch had got a touch of the sun. A
rough soldierly jest, a cheery shout was all that was wanted to raise
him to his ramshackle legs.
"Hullo, you! Got a head? Keep a stiff neck."
But the words froze in our throat, for an icy breath was wafted to us
from the dead man, and a chill hand clutched at our terror-stricken
hearts.
So that was Death! We knew all about it now. That is what it looks like,
and we turned our heads back and shuddered.
But then there came more and more of them.
And by this time we have become accustomed to them.
Strange! I gaze at these silent faces that seem to laugh at us, at these
wounds that seem to mouth at us fantastically, as if they had I nothing
to do with me. It strikes me all as so remote, so indifferent. As if all
these dead bodies were lying in glass cases, as if I were in an
anatomical museum, and were staring with dispassionately curious eyes at
some scientific exhibits.
Sometimes no wounds at all are visible. The bullets have passed through
the uniforms somewhere, and have gone clean through the softer parts of
the bodies.
They have grown rigid in death in grotesque postures as if Death had
been trying to pose figures here. There are certain schemes of Death
that are always recurring. Hands out-stretched--fingers clawing the
grass--fallen forward on to the face--that fellow over there lying on
his back is holding his hand pressed tight against his abdomen, as if he
were trying to staunch the wound.
In the country I was once watching them killing sheep. There a beast
lay, and was waiting for the butcher, and as the short knife cut through
its windpipe and jugular vein, and the blood leaped hot from its neck, I
could see nothing but the big eye, how it enlarged in its head to a
fearsome stare, until at last it turned to a dull glass.
All the bodies lying about here, as if bleating up to heaven, have got
these glazed eyes, they are lying as if they were outstretched in the
abattoir. Well, to be hit and to fall down dead, there's nothing to make
a fuss about that! But to be shot through the chest, to be shot through
the belly, to burn for hours in the fever of your wounds, to cool your
mangled body in the wet grass, and to stare up into the pitiless blue
heavens because your accursed eyes go on refusing to glaze over yet----
I turn away from them. I force myself to look past these mocking,
grotesque _posés plastiques_ of Death.
And I am already spirited far away, and am sitting in my little study at
home. My coffee cup is standing snugly to my hand. My book-case is
beaming down on me. My well-loved books invite me, and in front of me my
book of books, "Faust," lies open. And so I read, and feel the wonderful
relaxation that comes after work stealing through my longing blood.
The door opens. A little girl, and a boy who has just learned the use of
his legs, put their noses in at the door.
"Daddy, may we?"
I nod consent. Then they spread out their little arms, and rush at me.
"Daddy!"
They are climbing on to my knees now, and I give them a ride--"this is
how we ride to war."
But they twine their soft arms round my neck until at length I put them
down on the floor: "Now go to Mummy--"
And now----
A new picture. How very plainly I see it. We have gone out of a Sunday
afternoon beyond the suburbs, gone out with bag and baggage. I see the
green fields bright and fair, and see the two kiddies bright and fair.
They are rolling about in the grass and chasing the butterflies, and
laughing up at me, and crowing with delight as they run after the ball I
have thrown down for them to play with. And the sky stretches above us
in its Sabbath blue, and so confidently as if it all could never come to
an end. And Dora smiles at me with quiet eyes.
Then I come back with a start--I feel my knapsack chafing my back--I
feel my rifle--I see the dead at my feet again--
My God! how can these things be? How can these two worlds be so terribly
close to each other?...
And we pass on through this first spring crop of dead bodies. No one
says a word. No one has a joke. How surreptitiously the others glance
aside when some corpse, all too grotesquely mangled, meets their eyes.
I wonder what is passing through their brains?
Working men, tradesmen, artisans, and agricultural laborers, that's what
they are for the most part. They themselves have as yet never smelled
powder, nor ever been under fire. That, I suppose, is the reason why
they have suddenly become so dumb.
Then a voice beside me says something abruptly, and it seems as if the
voice rebounded hollow from the silence.
"The stuff is laying about here same as muck."
That was my yokel beside me. Then he, too, relapses into silence, and I
feel as if I could read behind their shy eyes, as if all that is going
on in these dull brains had suddenly become clear as daylight.
They're all drawn from that other world, where Life kissed us and
cozened caressingly round our bodies. You have brought us up as human
beings. That we have been human no longer counts. Life and love no
longer count; flesh and blood no longer count; only gore and corpses
count for anything now. How we used to tremble in that other world, when
a naked human life was even in danger. How we rushed into the burning
house to drive away the death for which some poor old paralyzed woman
craved. How we plunged into the wintry river to snatch a starved beggar
brat from the quiet waters. We would not even suffer a man to creep away
out of Life by stealth while we looked on. We cut down suicides at
their last sob, and hustled them back into life. Of our mercy we set up
half-rotted wastrels with new bodies; with pills, elixirs and medicines,
with herbalists, professors and surgeons, with cauteries, amputations
and electrotherapy, we fanned the flickering life and fed the sunken
flame with oxygen and radium and all the elements. There was nothing
greater, nothing more sacred than Life. Life was everything to us, was
for us the most precious possession on earth.
And here lies that most precious of possessions--here it is lying wasted
and used up--spurned as the dust by the roadside--and we are marching
along over it as over dust and stones.