perhaps I shall soon. They make perfect cider in this valley: still,
like them. There are clouds of dust along the roads, and in the leaves:
but the dust here is native and caressing and pure, not like the dust of
Aldershot, gritted and fouled by motors and thousands of feet. ’Tis a
very Limbo lake: set between the tireless railways behind and twenty
miles in front the fighting. Drink its cider and paddle in its rushy
streams: and see if you care whether you die to-morrow. It brings out a
new part of oneself, the loiterer, neither scorning nor desiring
delights, gliding listlessly through the minutes from meal-time to
meal-time, like the stream through the rushes: or stagnant and smooth
like their cider, unfathomably gold: beautiful and calm without mental
fear. And in four-score hours we will pull up our braces and fight.
These hours will have slipt over me, and I shall march hotly to the
firing-line, by turn critic, actor, hero, coward, and soldier of
fortune: perhaps even for a moment Christian, humble, with “Thy will be
done.” Then shock, combustion, the emergence of one of these: death or
life: and then return to the old rigmarole. I imagine that this, while
it may or may not knock about your body, will make very little
difference to you otherwise.
A speedy relief from Chatham. There is vibration in the air when you
hear “The Battalion will move across the water on....”
The moon won’t rise till late, but there is such placid weariness in all
the bearing earth, that I must go out to see. I have not been “auf dem
Lande” for many years: man muss den Augenblick geniessen. (_1 June
1915._)
* * * * *
Your letter arrived and awoke the now drifting ME to consciousness. I
had understood and acquiesced in your silence. The re-creation of that
self which one is to a friend is an effort: repaying if it succeeds,
but not to be forced. Wherefore, were it not for the dangers dancing
attendance on the adjourning type of mind--which a year’s military
training has not been able to efface from me--I should not be writing to
you now. For it is just after breakfast--and you know what breakfast is:
putter to sleep of all mental energy and discontent: charmer, sedative,
leveller: maker of Britons. I should wait till after tea when the
undiscriminating sun has shown his back--a fine back--on the world, and
oneself by the aid of tea has thrown off the mental sleep of heat. But
after tea I am on duty. So with bacon in my throat and my brain like a
poached egg I will try to do you justice....
I wonder how long it takes the King’s Pawn, who so proudly initiates the
game of chess, to realize that he is a pawn. Same with us. We are
finding out that we play the unimportant if necessary part. At present a
dam, untested, whose presence not whose action stops the stream from
approaching: and then--a mere handle to steel: dealers of death which we
are not allowed to plan. But I have complained enough before of the
minion state of the “damned foot.” It is something to have no
responsibility--an inglorious ease of mind....
Health--and I don’t know what ill-health is--invites you so much to
smooth and shallow ways: where a happiness may only be found by
renouncing the other happiness of which one set out in search. Yet here
there is enough to stay the bubbling surface stream. Looking into the
future one sees a holocaust somewhere: and at present there is--thank
God--enough of “experience” to keep the wits edged (a callous way of
putting it, perhaps). But out in front at night in that no-man’s land
and long graveyard there is a freedom and a spur. Rustling of the
grasses and grave tap-tapping of distant workers: the tension and
silence of encounter, when one struggles in the dark for moral victory
over the enemy patrol: the wail of the exploded bomb and the animal
cries of wounded men. Then death and the horrible thankfulness when one
sees that the next man is dead: “We won’t have to _carry_ him in under
fire, thank God; dragging will do”: hauling in of the great resistless
body in the dark: the smashed head rattling: the relief, the relief that
the thing has ceased to groan: that the bullet or bomb that made the man
an animal has now made the animal a corpse. One is hardened by now:
purged of all false pity: perhaps more selfish than before. The
spiritual and the animal get so much more sharply divided in hours of
encounter, taking possession of the body by swift turns. (_26 August
1915._)
* * * * *
The chess players are no longer waiting so infernal long between their
moves. And the patient pawns are all in movement, hourly expecting
further advances--whether to be taken or reach the back lines and be
queened. ’Tis sweet, this pawn-being: there are no cares, no doubts:
wherefore no regrets. The burden which I am sure is the parent of
ill-temper drunkenness and premature old age--to wit, the making up of
one’s own mind--is lifted from our shoulders. I can now understand the
value of dogma, which is the General Commander-in-chief of the mind. I
am now beginning to think that free thinkers should give their minds
into subjection, for we who have given our actions and volitions into
subjection gain such marvellous rest thereby. Only of course it is the
subjecting of their powers of will and deed to a wrong master on the
part of a great nation that has led Europe into war. Perhaps afterwards,
I and my likes will again become indiscriminate rebels. For the present
we find high relief in making ourselves soldiers. (_5 October 1915._)
X
“PERHAPS THE ROAD UP ILSLEY WAY,
THE OLD RIDGE-TRACK, WILL BE MY WAY” (p. 76)
When I next come down to Marlborough it shall be an entry worthy of the
place and of the enterer. Not in khaki, with gloves and a little cane,
with creased trousers from Aldershot--“dyed garments from Bozrah”--but
in grey bags, an old coat and a knapsack, coming over the downland from
Chiseldon, putting up at the Sun! Then after a night there and a
tattered stroll through the High Street, feeling perhaps the minor
inconveniences of complete communion with Nature, I should put on a
gentlemanly suit and crave admittance at your door, talk old scandal,
search old Housebooks, swank in Court and sing in Chapel and be a
regular O.M.: retaining always the right on Monday afternoon (it always
rains on Mondays in Marlborough) to sweat round Barbury and Totter Down,
what time you dealt out nasty little oblong unseens to the Upper VI.
This would be my Odyssey. At present I am too cornered by my uniform for
any such luxuries. (_May 1915._)
* * * * *
There is really very little to say about the life here. Change of
circumstance, I find, means little compared to change of company. And as
one has gone out and is still with the same officers with whom one had
rubbed shoulders unceasingly for the last nine months, and of whom one
had acquired that extraordinarily intimate knowledge which comes of
constant συυουσία, one does not notice the change: until one or two or
three drop off. And one wonders why.
They are extraordinarily close, really, these friendships of
circumstance, distinct as they remain from friendships of choice....
Only, I think, once or twice does one stumble across that person into
whom one fits at once: to whom one can stand naked, all disclosed. But
circumstance provides the second best: and I’m sure that any gathering
of men will in time lead to a very very close half-friendship between
them all (I only say half-friendship because I wish to distinguish it
from the other). So there has really been no change in coming over here:
the change is to come when half of this improvised “band of brothers”
are wiped away in a day. We are learning to be soldiers slowly--that is
to say, adopting the soldierly attitude of complete disconnection with
our job during odd hours. No shop. So when I think I should tell you
“something about the trenches,” I find I have neither the inclination
nor the power.
This however. On our weekly march from the trenches back to our old
farmhouse a mile or two behind, we leave the communication-trench for a
road, hedged on one side only, with open ploughland to the right. It
runs a little down hill till the road branches. Then half left up over
open country goes our track, with the ground shelving away to the right
of us. Can you see it? The Toll House to the First Post on Trainers Down
on a small scale. There is something in the way that at the end of the
hedge the road leaps up to the left into the beyond that puts me in mind
of Trainers Down. It is what that turn into unhedged country and that
leap promises, not what it achieves, that makes the likeness. It is
nothing when you get up, no wildness, no openness. But there it remains
to cheer me on each relief....
I hear that a _very_ select group of public schools will by this time be
enjoying the Camp “somewhere in England.” May they not take it too
seriously! Seein’ as ’ow all training is washed out as soon as you turn
that narrow street corner at Boulogne, where some watcher with a lantern
is always up for the English troops arriving, with a “Bon courage” for
every man.
A year ago to-day--but that way madness lies. (_4 August 1915._)
CAMBRIDGE:
PRINTED BY J. B. PEACE, M. A., AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Odyssey_, IV, 193, 194.
[2] _Odyssey_, IV, 193, 194.
[3] _Ibid._, IX, 27, 28.
[4] _Faust_, II, 6820-3.
[5] _Faust_, II, 6944-7, 6820-3.
[6] _Iliad_, XXI, 107.