I found myself murmuring: "Get the proportions of things, get the
proportions of things!" I had an absurd impression of a duel between
myself and the cavernous antagonism of the huge black spaces below me. I
argued that all this pain and waste was no more than the selvedge of a
proportionately limitless fabric of sane, interested, impassioned and
joyous living. These stiff still memories seemed to refute me. But why
us? they seemed to insist. In some way it's essential,--this margin. I
stopped at that.
"If all this pain, waste, violence, anguish is essential to life, why
does my spirit rise against it? What is wrong with me?" I got from that
into a corner of self-examination. Did I respond overmuch to these
painful aspects in life? When I was a boy I had never had the spirit
even to kill rats. Siddons came into the meditation, Siddons, the
essential Englishman, a little scornful, throwing out contemptuous
phrases. Soft! Was I a soft? What was a soft? Something not rough, not
hearty and bloody! I felt I had to own to the word--after years of
resistance. A dreadful thing it is when a great empire has to rely upon
soft soldiers.
Was civilization breeding a type of human being too tender to go on
living? I stuck for a time as one does on these nocturnal occasions at
the word "hypersensitive," going round it and about it....
I do not know now how it was that I passed from a mood so darkened and
sunless to one of exceptional exaltation, but I recall very clearly that
I did. I believe that I made a crowning effort against this despair and
horror that had found me out in the darkness and overcome. I cried in
my heart for help, as a lost child cries, to God. I seem to remember a
rush of impassioned prayer, not only for myself, not chiefly for myself,
but for all those smashed and soiled and spoilt and battered residues of
men whose memories tormented me. I prayed to God that they had not lived
in vain, that particularly those poor Kaffir scouts might not have lived
in vain. "They are like children," I said. "It was a murder of
children.... _By children!_"
My horror passed insensibly. I have to feel the dreadfulness of these
things, I told myself, because it is good for such a creature as I to
feel them dreadful, but if one understood it would all be simple. Not
dreadful at all. I clung to that and repeated it,--"it would all be
perfectly simple." It would come out no more horrible than the things
that used to frighten me as a child,--the shadow on the stairs, the
white moonrise reflected on a barked and withered tree, a peculiar dream
of moving geometrical forms, an ugly illustration in the "Arabian
Nights." ...
I do not know how long I wrestled with God and prayed that night, but
abruptly the shadows broke; and very suddenly and swiftly my spirit
seemed to flame up into space like some white beacon that is set alight.
Everything became light and clear and confident. I was assured that all
was well with us, with us who lived and fought and with the dead who
rotted now in fifty thousand hasty graves....
For a long time it seemed I was repeating again and again with soundless
lips and finding the deepest comfort in my words:--"And out of our
agonies comes victory, out of our agonies comes victory! Have pity on
us, God our Father!"
I think that mood passed quite insensibly from waking to a kind of
clear dreaming. I have an impression that I fell asleep and was aroused
by a gun. Yet I was certainly still sitting up when I heard that gun.
I was astonished to find things darkly visible about me. I had not noted
that the stars were growing pale until the sound of this gun very far
away called my mind back to the grooves in which it was now accustomed
to move. I started into absolute wakefulness. A gun?...