Note: Images of the original pages are available through
Internet Archive. See
https://archive.org/details/disenchantment00mont
Transcriber's note:
Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
DISENCHANTMENT
by
CHARLES EDWARD MONTAGUE
New York
Brentano's
Publishers
1922
_To_
AUBREY MONTAGUE
OF LAUTOKA, FIJI
"We twa hae paidlet i' the burn"
CONTENTS
I. The Vision 1
II. Misgiving 16
III. At Agincourt and Ypres 35
IV. Tedium 62
V. The Sheep that were not Fed 84
VI. 'Ware Politicians 103
VII. "Can't Believe a Word" 114
VIII. The Duty of Lying 127
IX. Autumn Comes 157
X. Autumn Tints in Chivalry 173
XI. Stars in their Courses 189
XII. Belated Boons 205
XIII. The Old Age of the War 219
XIV. Our Moderate Satanists 232
XV. Any Cure? 252
XVI. Fair warning 266
CHAPTER I
THE VISION
I
Now that most of our men in the prime of life have been in the army we
seem to be in for a goodly literature of disappointment. All the
ungifted young people came back from the war to tell us that they were
"fed up." That was their ailment, in outline. The gifted ones are now
coming down to detail. They say that a web has been woven over the sky,
or that something or other has made a goblin of the sun--about as full
details of a pain as you can fairly expect a gifted person to give,
although he really may feel it.
No doubt disenchantment has flourished before. About the year 1880
nearly all the best art was wan and querulous; that of Burne-Jones was
always in trouble; Matthew Arnold's verse was a well-bred, melodious
whine; Rossetti was all disenamourment and displacement. Yet you could
feel that their broken-toy view of the world was only their nice little
way with the public. Burne-Jones in his home was a red, jovial man;
Arnold a diner-out of the first lustre; Rossetti a sworn friend to bacon
and eggs and other plain pleasures. The young melancholiasts of to-day
are less good at their craft, and yet they do give you a notion that
some sort of silver cord really seems to them to have come loose in
their insides, or some golden bowl, which mattered to them, to have been
more or less broken, and that they are feeling honestly sour about it.
If they do not know how to take it out of mankind by writing desolatory
verses about ashes and dust in the _English Review_, at least they can,
if they be workmen, vote for a strike: they thus achieve the same good
end and put it beyond any doubt that they don't think all is well with
the world.
II
The higher the wall or the horse from which you have tumbled, the
larger, under Nature's iron law, are your bruises and consequent
crossness likely to be. Before we try shaking or cuffing the
disenraptured young Solomons in our magazines and our pits it would be
humane to reflect that some five millions of these, in their turns, have
fallen off an extremely high horse. Of course, we have all fallen off
something since 1914. Even owners of ships and vendors of heavy woollens
might, if all hearts were laid bare, be found to have fallen, not
perhaps off a high horse, but at least off some minute metaphysical
pony. Still, the record in length of vertical fall, and of proportionate
severity of incidence upon an inelastic earth, is probably held by
ex-soldiers and, among these, by the volunteers of the first year of the
war. We were all, of course, volunteers then, undiluted by indispensable
Harry's later success in getting dispensable Johnnie forced to join us
in the Low Countries.
Most of those volunteers of the prime were men of handsome and boundless
illusions. Each of them quite seriously thought of himself as a molecule
in the body of a nation that was really, and not just figuratively,
"straining every nerve" to discharge an obligation of honour. Honestly,
there was about them as little as there could humanly be of the
coxcombry of self-devotion. They only felt that they had got themselves
happily placed on a rope at which everyone else, in some way or other,
was tugging his best as well as they. All the air was ringing with
rousing assurances. France to be saved, Belgium righted, freedom and
civilization re-won, a sour, soiled, crooked old world to be rid of
bullies and crooks and reclaimed for straightness, decency, good-nature,
the ways of common men dealing with common men. What a chance! The plain
recruit who had not the gift of a style said to himself that for once he
had got right in on the ground-floor of a topping good thing, and he
blessed the luck that had made him neither too old nor too young. Rupert
Brooke, meaning exactly the same thing, was writing:
Now, God be thank'd who has match'd us with His hour,
And caught our youth and waken'd us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpen'd power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary....
Of course, it is easy to say to any such simpleton now: "Well, if you
were like that, what could you expect? _Vous l'avez voulu, George
Dandin._ You were rushing upon disillusionment." Of course he was. If
each recruit in 1914 had been an à Kempis, or even a Rochefoucauld, he
would have known that if you are to love mankind you must not expect too
much from it. But he was not, as a rule, a philosopher. He was a common
man, not much inclined to think evil of people. It no more occurred to
him at that time that he was the natural prey of seventy-seven separate
breeds of profiteers than it did that presently he would be overrun by
less figurative lice. When Garibaldi led an infantry attack against the
Austrians it was said that he never looked round to see if his men were
following; he knew to a dead certainty that at the moment when he
reached the enemy he would feel his men's breath hot on the back of his
neck. The early volunteer in his blindness imagined that there was
between all Englishmen then that oneness of faith, love, and courage.
III
Everything helped, for a time, to keep him the child that he was. Except
in the matter of separation from civilian friends his daily life was
pretty well that of the happiest children. The men knew nothing and
hoped for wonderful things. Drill, to the average recruit, was like some
curious game or new dance, various and rhythmic, and not very hard: it
was rather fun for adults to be able to play at such things without
being laughed at. Their lives had undergone an immense simplification.
Of course, an immense simplification of life is not certain to be a
wholly good thing. A Zulu's life may be simpler than Einstein's and yet
the estate of Einstein may be the more gracious. If a boatload of men
holding the Order of Merit were cast away on a desert island they might,
on the whole, think the life as beastly as Touchstone found the life in
the Forest of Arden. Yet some of those eminent men might find a soul of
good in that evil. They might grill all the day and shiver all night,
and be half-starved the whole of the time. But their minds would get a
rest cure. While they were there they would have to settle no
heartrending questions of patronage, nor to decree the superannuation of
elderly worthies. The brutal instancy of physical wants might be trying;
but they would at least be spared, until they were rescued, the solving
of any stiff conundrums of professional ethics.
Moulding the pet recreations of civilized men you find their craving to
have something simple to do for a change, to be given an easy one after
so many twisters. People whose work is the making of calculations or the
manipulation of thoughts have been known to find a curiously restful
pleasure in chopping firewood or painting tool-sheds till their backs
ache. It soothes them with a flattering sense of getting something
useful done straight off. So much of their "real" work is a taking of
some minute or indirect means to some end remote, dimly and doubtfully
visible, possibly--for the dread thought will intrude--not worth
attaining. The pile of chopped wood is at least a spice of the ultimate
good: visible, palpable, it is success; and the advanced and complex
man, the statesman or sociologist who has chopped it, escapes for the
moment from all his own advancement and complication, and savours in
quiet ecstasy one of the sane primeval satisfactions.
A country fellow at the pleugh,
His acre's tilled, he's right eneugh;
A country girl at her wheel,
Her dizzen's done, she's unco weel.
The climber of mountains seeks a similar rapture by going to places
where he is, in full exertion, the sum of his physical faculties, little
more. Here all his hopes are for things close at hand: ambition lives
along one arm stretched out to grasp a rock eighteen inches away; his
sole aim in life may be simply the top of a thirty-foot cleft in a steep
face of stone. At home, in the thick of his work, he had seemed to be
everlastingly threading mazes that no one could thread right to the end;
here, on the crags, it is all divinely simplified; who would trouble his
head with subtle questionings about what human life will, might, or
ought to be when every muscle and nerve are tautly engaged in the primal
job of sticking to life as it is?
To have for his work these raptures of play was the joy of the new
recruit who had common health and good-humour. All his maturity's
worries and burdens seemed, by some magical change, to have dropped from
him; no difficult choices had to be made any longer; hardly a moral
chart to be conned; no one had any finances to mind; nobody else's fate
was put in his hands, and not even his own. All was fixed from above,
down to the time of his going to bed and the way he must lace up his
boots. His vow of willing self-enslavement for a season had brought him
the peace of the soldier, which passeth understanding as wholly as that
of the saint, the blitheness of heart that comes to both with their
clarifying, tranquillizing acquiescence in some mystic will outside
their own. Immersed in that Dantean repose of utter obedience the men
slept like babies, ate like hunters, and rediscovered the joy of infancy
in getting some rather elementary bodily movement to come right. They
saw everything that God had made, and behold! it was very good. That was
the vision.
IV
The mental peace, the physical joy, the divinely simplified sense of
having one clear aim, the remoteness from all the rest of the world, all
favoured a tropical growth of illusion. A man, says Tennyson, "imputes
himself." If he be decent he readily thinks other people are decent.
Here were hundreds of thousands of quite commonplace persons rendered,
by comradeship in an enthusiasm, self-denying, cheerful, unexacting,
sanely exalted, substantially good. To get the more fit to be quickly
used men would give up even the little darling vices which are nearest
to many simple hearts. Men who had entertained an almost reasoned
passion for whisky, men who in civil life had messed up careers for it
and left all and followed it, would cut off their whisky lest it should
spoil their marching. Little white, prim clerks from Putney--men whose
souls were saturated with the consciousness of class--would abdicate
freely and wholeheartedly their sense of the wide, unplumbed, estranging
seas that ought to roar between themselves and Covent Garden market
porters. Many men who had never been dangerous rivals to St. Anthony
kept an unwonted hold on themselves during the months when hundreds of
reputable women and girls round every camp seemed to have been suddenly
smitten with a Bacchantic frenzy. Real, constitutional lazy fellows
would buy little cram-books of drill out of their pay and sweat them up
at night so as to get on the faster. Men warned for a guard next day
would agree among themselves to get up an hour before the pre-dawn
winter Réveillé to practise among themselves the beautiful symbolic
ritual of mounting guard in the hope of approaching the far-off,
longed-for ideal of smartness, the passport to France. Men were known to
subscribe in order to get some dummy bombs made with which to practise
bomb-throwing by themselves on summer nights after drilling and marching
from six in the morning till five in the evening. How could they not
have the illusion that the whole nation's sense of comradeship went as
far as their own?
Who of all those who were in camp at that time, and still are alive,
will not remember until he dies the second boyhood that he had in the
late frosts and then in the swiftly filling and bursting spring and
early summer of 1915? The awakening bird-notes of Réveillé at dawn, the
two-mile run through auroral mists breaking over a still inviolate
England, the men's smoking breath and the swish of their feet brushing
the dew from the tips of the June grass and printing their track of
darker green on the pearly-grey turf; the long, intent morning parades
under the gummy shine of chestnut buds in the deepening meadows; the
peace of the tranquil hours on guard at some sequestered post, alone
with the sylvester midnight, the wheeling stars and the quiet breathing
of the earth in its sleep, when time, to the sentry's sense, fleets on
unexpectedly fast and life seems much too short because day has slipped
into day without the night-long sleeper's false sense of a pause; and
then jocund days of marching and digging trenches in the sun; the silly
little songs on the road that seemed, then, to have tunes most human,
pretty, and jolly; the dinners of haversack rations you ate as you sat
on the roadmakers' heaps of chopped stones or lay back among buttercups.
When you think of the youth that you have lost, the times when it seems
to you now that life was most poignantly good may not be the ones when
everything seemed at the time to go well with your plans, and the world,
as they say, to be at your feet; rather some few unaccountable moments
when nothing took place that was out of the way and yet some word of a
friend's, or a look on the face of the sky, the taste of a glass of
spring water, the plash of laughter and oars heard across midsummer
meadows at night raised the soul of enjoyment within you to strangely
higher powers of itself. That spirit bloweth and is still: it will not
rise for our whistling nor keep a time-table; no wine that we know can
give us anything more than a fugitive caricature of its ecstasies. When
it has blown free we remember it always, and know, without proof, that
while the rapture was there we were not drunk, but wise; that for a
moment some intervening darkness had thinned and we were seeing further
than we can see now into the heart of life.
To one recollection at least it has seemed that the New Army's
spring-tide of faith and joyous illusion came to its height on a night
late in the most beautiful May of 1915, in a hut where thirty men slept
near a forest in Essex. Nothing particular happened; the night was like
others. Yet in the times that came after, when half of the thirty were
dead and most of the others jaded and soured, the feel of that night
would come back with the strange distinctness of those picked,
remembered mornings and evenings of boyhood when everything that there
was became everlastingly memorable as though it had been the morning or
evening of the first day. Ten o'clock came and Lights Out, but a kind of
luminous bloom still on the air and a bugle blowing Last Post in some
far-away camp that kept worse hours than we. I believe the whole hut
held its breath to hear the notes better. Who wouldn't, to listen to
that most lovely and melancholy of calls, the noble death of each day's
life, a sound moving about hither and thither, like a veiled figure
making gestures both stately and tender, among the dim thoughts that we
have about death the approaching extinguisher--resignation and sadness
and unfulfilment and triumph all coming back to the overbearing sense of
extinction in those two recurrent notes of "Lights Out"? One listens as
if with bowed mind, as though saying "Yes; out, out, brief candle." A
moment's silence to let it sink in and the chaffing and laughter broke
out like a splash of cool water in summer again. That hut always went to
bed laughing and chaffing all round, and, though there was no wit among
us, the stories tasted of life, the inexhaustible game and adventure.
Looker, ex-marine turned soldier, told us how he had once gone down in a
diving-suit to find a lost anchor and struck on the old tin lining out
of a crate, from which some octopian beast with long feelers had reached
out at him, and the feelers had come nearer and nearer through the dim
water. "What did you do, Filthy?" somebody asked (we called Looker
"Filthy" with friendly jocoseness). "I 'opped it," the good fellow said,
and the sane anti-climax of real life seemed twice as good as the climax
that any Hugo or Verne could have put to the yarn. Another described the
great life he had lived as an old racing "hen," or minor sutler of the
sport of kings. Hard work, of course. "All day down at Epsom openin'
doors an' brushin' coats and shiftin' truck for bookies till you'd make,
perhaps, two dollars an' speculate it on the las' race and off back 'ome
to London 'ungry, on your 'oofs." Once a friend of his, who had had a
bad day, had not walked--had slipped into the London train, and at
Vauxhall, where tickets were taken, had gone to earth under the seat
with a brief appeal to his fellow travellers: "Gents, I rely on your
honour." The stout narrator could see no joke at all in the phrase. He
was rather scandalized by our great roar of laughter. "'Is honour! And
'im robbin' the comp'ny! 'nough to take away a man's kerrikter!" said
the patient walker-home in emergency. It made life seem too wonderful to
end; such were the untold reserves that we had in this nation of men
with a hold on themselves, of hardly uprightness; even this unhelped son
of the gutter, living from hand to mouth in the common lodging-houses of
slums, a parasite upon parasites, poor little animalcule doing odd jobs
for the caterpillars of the commonwealth--even he could persist in
carrying steadily, clear of the dirt, the full vase of his private
honour. What, then, must be the unused stores of greedless and fearless
straightness in others above us, generals and statesmen, men in whom, as
in bank-porters, character is three parts of the trade! The world seemed
clean that night; such a lovely unreason of optimist faith was astir in
us all,
We felt for that time ravish'd above earth
And possess'd joys not promised at our birth.
It seemed hardly credible now, in this soured and quarrelsome country
and time, that so many men of different classes and kinds, thrown
together at random, should ever have been so simply and happily
friendly, trustful, and keen. But they were, and they imagined that all
their betters were too. That was the paradise that the bottom fell out
of.