SECOND THOUGHTS ON THIS WAR
(FromScribner’s Magazine, 1915.)
I went out into the wind—the first south-west wind after many days of easterly drought. All the morning it had rained, but now the gray sky was torn; the sun shone, and long white clouds were driven over pools of blue, or piled up into heavenly mountains. The land of moor and valley, the hills and fields and woods gleamed in the sunlight, or were shadowed dark by the drifting clouds. Moss on the top of the old gray walls was wet, but warm to the touch; the birds—daws, pigeons, hawks—flung themselves at the wind. And the scent! Every frond of the bracken, each sprig of the gorse and the heather, all the soughing boughs of young pine-tree and oak, and the grass, gray-powdered with rain, were exhaling their fragrance so that each breath drawn was a draught of wild perfume.
And in one’s heart rose an ecstasy of love for this wind-sweetened earth, for the sun, and the clouds, the rain, and the wind, the trees and the flowering plants, for the streams and the rocks—for this earth which breeds us all, and into which we reabsorb, a passion as untutored, wild, and natural as the love of life in the merest dumb thing that knows nothing of ideals, of country, realms and policies, nothing of war.
Germany calls the war “this English war;” we English as fervently believe it a Prussian war, having deep root in Prussian will, and history. One thing is certain: At the last moment the world, desperately balancing, was thrust over the edge of the abyss by a sudden swoop of the Prussian war party.
“Pourtales (German Ambassador to Russia) called Sazonoff’s attention in the most serious manner to the fact that nowadays measures of mobilization would be a highly dangerous form of diplomatic pressure; for in that event the purely military consideration of the question by the General Staffs would find expression, and thatif that button were once touched in Germanythe situation would get out of control.” (Count Szapary, Austrian Ambassador to Russia. Austrian Book, No. 28.)[8]
“Pourtales (German Ambassador to Russia) called Sazonoff’s attention in the most serious manner to the fact that nowadays measures of mobilization would be a highly dangerous form of diplomatic pressure; for in that event the purely military consideration of the question by the General Staffs would find expression, and thatif that button were once touched in Germanythe situation would get out of control.” (Count Szapary, Austrian Ambassador to Russia. Austrian Book, No. 28.)[8]
In a Europe teeming with mutual fears a few men, perhaps not a score in all, have had the power to strip from millions their meed of life on this wind-sweetened earth! For myths conceived in a few ambitious brains, and the “strike-first” theory of a knot of strategists, the whole world must pay with grief and agony! What can we do, when this war is over, to insure that we shall not again be stampeded by professional soldiers, and those—in whatever country—who dream paper dreams of territory, trade, and glory, caring nothing for the lives of the simple, knowing nothing of the beauty of the earth which is their heritage.
[8]Since this was written Maximilian Harden in his paperZukunfthas used these words: “Germany is calumniated when it is said that she wanted war, not to defend herself, but in order to conquer. But it is equally false to suppose that England, France, or Russia, who were either not armed at all, or only half ready . . . deliberately planned an attack. The outbreak of the war could not be arrested; because at the decisive momentthe Will of the Strategists was stronger than the Will of the Statesmen.”
[8]
Since this was written Maximilian Harden in his paperZukunfthas used these words: “Germany is calumniated when it is said that she wanted war, not to defend herself, but in order to conquer. But it is equally false to suppose that England, France, or Russia, who were either not armed at all, or only half ready . . . deliberately planned an attack. The outbreak of the war could not be arrested; because at the decisive momentthe Will of the Strategists was stronger than the Will of the Statesmen.”
“No corn planted, more men wanted!”—words of the Old Dalmatian song!
It is no use crying over spilt milk, and no good throwing down the instruments in the middle of an operation. But there is every use in keeping before oneself perpetually the thought that this warisan operation to excise the trampling instinct; for there are many among us willing to speak of an operation while it serves their purpose, who unconsciously believe in that which they profess to be cutting out. Human nature is much the same all the world over. The Prussian Junker is but a specially favoured variety of a well-marked type that grows in every land. And the business of other men is to keep circumstances from being favourable to its development and ascendancy.
When we talk of safeguarding democracy, liberty, and the rights of small nations, we really only mean the muzzling of the Junkerism in human nature—the restraint of this trampling instinct. Who would give a rush for the immunity of any nation from the resurgence within itself of that instinct, unless it watches with lynx eyes? I cannot but think that, when peace comes and Prussian Junkerism is held harmless for a span, Junkerism in general will have a better chance of pushing up its hydra heads than it had before this war. Times will be very hard—the “have nots” and “they who have” will be very nakedly set over against each other. Circumstances will be favourable to civil strife; and civil strife, whichever side wins, fosters despotic leaderships and the trampling instinct. Those not merely hoping and meaning to try for a better world, after the war, but expecting one almost as a matter of course, forget that the devotion and unity, which men display under the shadow of a great fear and the stimulus of that most powerful and universal emotion, patriotism, will slip away from them when the fear and the emotion are removed. If before the war men were incapable of rising to great and united effort for their own betterment out of sheer desire for perfection, are they even as likely to be able when, after the war, economic stress puts a greater strain on each individual’s good-will?
The words of a certain prophet, “Literature, Art, Industry, Commerce, Politics, Statesmanship will, when this fighting day is over, come into a new and better era,” are soothing syrup. Let us by all means hope for and intend the best, but let us set ourselves to face the worst.
Because pens lie unused, or are but feebly wielded over the war, they would have us believe that modern literature has been found wanting. “Look,” they say, “how nobly the Greek and the Elizabethan pens rhymed the epic struggles of their ages. What a degenerate, nerveless creature is this modern pen! See how it fails when put to the touchstone of great events and the thrilling realities of war!” I think this is nonsense. The greatest pens of the past were strangers to the glamour of war. Euripides made it the subject of a dirge; Shakespeare of casual treatment; Cervantes of his irony. They were in advance of the feeling of their day about war; but now their feeling has become that of mankind at large; and the modern pen, good, bad, or indifferent, follows—longo intervallo—their prevision of war’s downfalling glory. In the words of a certain officer, war is now “damn dull, damn dirty, and damn dangerous.” The people of Britain, and no doubt of the other countries—however bravely they may fight—are fighting not because they love it, not because it is natural to them, but because—alas!—they must. This makes them the more heroic since the romance of war for them is past, belonging to cruder stages of the world’s journey.
In our consciousness to-day there is a violent divorce between our admiration for the fine deeds, the sacrifices, and heroisms of this war, and our feeling about war itself. A shadowy sense of awful waste hangs over it all in the mind of the simplest soldier as in that of the subtlest penman. It may be real that we fight for our conceptions of liberty and justice; but we feel all the time that we ought not to have had to fight, that these things should be respected of the nations; that we have grown out of such savagery; that the whole business is a kind of monstrous madness suddenly let loose on the world. Such feelings were never in the souls of ordinary men, whether soldiers or civilians, in the days of Elizabeth or Themistocles. They fought, then, as a matter of course. In those so-called heroic ages “the thrilling realities of war” were truly the realities of life and feeling. To-day they are but a long nightmare. We have discovered that man is a creature slowly, by means of thought and life and art, evolving from the animal he was into the human being he will be some day, and in that desperately slow progression sloughing off the craving for physical combat and the destruction of his fellow-man. This process does not apparently mean the loss of stoicism and courage, but rather the increase thereof, as millions in this war, after the most peaceful century in the world’s history, have proved. But we are a few paces farther on toward the fully evolved human being than were the compatriots of Themistocles or Elizabeth.
The true realities of to-day lie in peace. The great epic of our time is the expression of man’s slow emergence from the blood-loving animal he was. To that great epic the modern pen has long been consecrate, and is not likely to betray its trust.
One day we read in our journals how an enemy Socialist or Pacifist has raised his voice against the mob passions and war spite of his country, and we think: “What an enlightened man!” And the next day, in the same journals, we read that So-and-so has done the same thing in our own country, and we think: “My God! He ought to be hung!” To-day we listen with enthusiasm to orations of our statesmen about the last drop of our blood, and the last pennies in our purses, and we think: “That is patriotism!” To-morrow we read utterance by enemy notables about arming the cats and dogs, and exclaim: “What truculent insanity!” We learn on Monday that some disguised fellow-countryman has risked his life to secure information from the heart of the enemy’s country, and we think: “That was real courage!” And on Tuesday our bile rises at discovering that an enemy has been arrested in our midst for espionage, and we think: “The dirty spy!” Our blood boils on Wednesday at hearing of the scurvy treatment of one of ourselves resident in the enemy’s country. And on Thursday we read of the wrecking by our mob of aliens’ shops, and think: “Well, what could they expect, belonging to that nation!” When one of our regiments has defended itself with exceptional bravery, and inflicted great loss on the enemy, we justly call itheroism. When some enemy regiment has done the same, we use the wordferocity. The comic papers of the enemy guy us, and we think: “How childish!” Ours guy the enemy, and we cry: “Ah! that’s good!” Our enemies use a hymn of hate, and we despise them for it. We do our hate in silence, and feel ourselves the better for the practice.
Shall we not rather fight our fight, and win it, without these little ironies?
The first thing he does when he comes down each morning is to read his paper, and the moment he has finished breakfast he sticks the necessary flags into his big map. He began to do that very soon after the war broke out, and has never missed a day. It would seem to him almost as if peace had been declared, and the universe were suddenly unbottomed, if any morning he omitted to alter slightly three flags at least. What will he do when the end at last is reached, and he can no longer tear the paper open with a kind of trembling avidity; no longer debate within himself the questions of strategy, and the absorbing chances of the field, when he has, in fact, to sweep his flags into a drawer and forget they ever were? It would haunt him, if he thought of it. But sufficient unto his day is the good thereof. Yes! It has almost come to that with him; though he will still talk to you of “this dreadful war,” and never alludes to the days as “great” or to the times as “stirring” as some folk do. No, he sincerely believes that he is distressed beyond measure by the continuance of “the abominable business,” and would not confess for worlds that he would miss it, that it has become for him a daily “cocktail” to his appetite for life. It is not he, after all, who is being skinned; to the skinning of other eels the individual eel is soon accustomed. By proxy to be “making history,” to be witnessing the “greatest drama” known to man since the beginning of the world—after all it is something! He will never have such a chance again. He still remembers with a shudder how he felt the first weeks after war was declared; and the mere fact that he shudders shows that his present feelings are by no means what they were. After all, one cannot remain for ever prepossessed with suffering that is not one’s own, or with fears of invasion indefinitely postponed. True, he has lost a nephew, a second cousin, the sons of several friends. He has been duly sorry, duly sympathetic, but then, he was not dangerously fond of any of them. His own son is playing his part, and he is proud of it. If the boy should be killed he will feel poignant grief, but even then there is revenge to be considered. His pocket is suffering, but it is for the Country; and that almost makes it a pleasure. And he goes on sticking in his flags in spots where the earth is a mush of mangled flesh, and the air shrill with the whir of shells, the moans of dying men, and the screams of horses.
Is this pure fantasy, or does it hold a grain of truth?
The war brings up with ever greater insistence the two antagonistic feelings of which one was always conscious: That men are radically alike. And that there are two kinds of men, subtly but hopelessly divided from each other.
Men are radically alike in the way they meet danger and death, in their sentiment and in their laughter, in their endurance, their passions, their self-sacrifice, their selfishness, their superstitions, and their gratitude. They are radically divided by possession, or not, of that extra sensitiveness to proportion, form, colour, sound, which we call the sense of beauty. Would there still be war in a world the most of whose dwellers had the sense of beauty? I think not. And they who have it, so few by comparison, are tragically compelled to live and bear their part in this hell, created by a world of which they are not.
These two kinds of men shade subtly the one into the other; but the division is real, for all that—the bristles on the backs of each true specimen on either side of the line rise at sight of the other sort.
And the war with its toil and hardships, its common humanity, deaths and dangers and sacrifices shared, will not bring them one jot nearer one to the other. Is there evidence for thinking that a sense of beauty is more common than it was? I am not sure. But there is certainly no chance that the sense of beauty can increase within measurable time, so as to give its possessors a majority. No chance that wars will cease from that reason. The little world of beauty-lovers will for many ages yet, perhaps always, be pitifully in tow, half-drowned by the following surge of the big insensitive world when it loses for a time what little feeling for harmony it has, and goes full speed ahead.
Some argue earnestly that what really restrains and regulates the conduct of individuals is not force, but the general sense of decency, the public opinion of the community; and that the same rule applies to nations. In other words, that there is no reason why inter-State morality should be different from that prevailing amongst the individuals within a State.
This argument neglects to perceive, first: That the public opinion of a community is, in reality, latent force; that in a real community “Right is Might,” up to a certain point. And, secondly: That there is as yet no community within which the nations dwell.
An individual cannot pursue rank egotism to the complete overriding of his neighbours without knowing that those neighbours can and will give concrete expression to their resentment and suppress him. This latent force is at the back of all State-law, and of all public opinion, which is but State-law unwritten. The essence of its efficacy is the fact that individuals do live in community, each one perceiving with the non-rampant part of him that the rest are right in squashing his rampancy, since life in community would soon be impossible if they did not. He consents, subconsciously, to being squashed when he is rampant, because he recognizes himself to be part of a whole.
Until nations have come to be parts of communities, or group-States, there will be no really effective analogy between individual morality and State morality. There is, of course, a growing international decency, a reaching out toward co-operation, a recognition that certain things are “not done”; but it is liable to be violated, as we have seen, at any moment by any State which is, or thinks itself, strong enough to override laws which have no adequate latent force behind them. To create this latent controlling force we have paramount need of a system of group-States, leading on by slow degrees, through the linking of one group with another, to a United States of the world. The necessary line of progression is sufficiently disclosed by the violation of Belgian neutrality and other matters in this war. Public opinion not backed by latent force has been proved useless. There is no such thing, I fear, as public opinion worth the name except within a definite community. The task of statesmen when peace comes is the formation of a United States of Europe—linked if possible with the countries of America—the creation of a real public opinion backed by a real, if latent, force.
Nietzsche was an individualist, a hater of the State and of the Prussians, a sick man, a great artist in words to be read with delight and—your tongue in your cheek. By quaint irony his central idea, “the ego-rampant,” was temperamentally suited to those Prussians whom he hated. The Neo-German conception of the State, (if one may fairly judge it out of the mouths of certain Germans) as a law unto itself, demanding all from the individuals who compose it, and taking all it can get from the world at large, may be inverted Nietzscheism, but it is the creature of Prussian history, and of very different men. It is based on what we others, and I should imagine many Germans, think is a transient and false notion of what States should be. We say they should not roam the earth considering only their own strength. True that, in the absence as yet of the system of group-States, States still can seize here or seize there, if they be strong enough, but we emphatically deny that they should do soon principle, as the new German philosophy seems to teach, and set the robber’s ideal, the robber’s fashion of morality, for the individuals who compose those States. The philosophy, not only of the rest of Europe, but of Germany, before all, in the days of Kant and Hegel, presumed that the hard-won morality of individuals amongst themselves would ultimately become the morality of States.
“The fact that the sense of community among the peoples of the earth has gone so far that the violation of right in one place is felt everywhere, has made the idea of a Citizenship of the world no fantastic dream, but a necessary extension of the unwritten Code of States and Peoples.” (Kant.)“The binding cord is not force, but the deep-seated feeling of order that is possessed by us all.” (Hegel.)
“The fact that the sense of community among the peoples of the earth has gone so far that the violation of right in one place is felt everywhere, has made the idea of a Citizenship of the world no fantastic dream, but a necessary extension of the unwritten Code of States and Peoples.” (Kant.)
“The binding cord is not force, but the deep-seated feeling of order that is possessed by us all.” (Hegel.)
The new German philosophy has anointed the present immorality of States and thereby fixed it as the morality for individuals. I think these philosophers in their characteristic German exuberance, with its habit of over-statement, have been hard on Germany. For the German people at large have presumably been acquiring throughout the ages some such instincts toward altruism as the peoples of other countries. The new German philosophy has succeeded to a dismal extent in its inoculation of the German people, but it cannot in the long run impose its logical ideal of the wild man in the forest, though never so gorgeously decked out, on the Germans, any more than the old German philosophy made the Germans replicas of Christ.
Man never attains to his philosophical ideal; but it is just as well that he should see clearly its apotheosis before he tries too hard to reach it.
Our enemy now proclaims that his objective is the crushing of Britain’s world-power in the interests of mankind.
Are we justified in retaining if we can what, in a by no means unstained past, we have acquired, or should we hand over our position, well and ill-gotten, to this new claimant, with his new culture, for the benefit of the world?
Man has a somewhat incurable belief that he can manage his own affairs, and we Britons hold the faith that our character, ideals, and experience fit us to control our own lives and property for the general good of mankind, side by side with other nations of like mind. The fortunate possessors of the greater Empire and the greater trade are not perhaps the most convincing advocates of the principle “Live and let live.” For all that, we find it impossible to admit the right of any nation to an aggressive policy toward us. Germany, after being petrified with surprise at our intervention, now accuses us of having planned the war and deliberately attacked her. It is divinely easy to claim things both ways when you are at war. We all see just now rather as in a glass darkly. And yet, with an immense Empire, an immense trade, and nothing that we wanted anywhere, with a crop of serious social and political troubles on hand, “a contemptible little army,” a tradition of abstention from European quarrels, a Free Trade policy, a democratic system of government, a Foreign Minister remarkable up to then for his services to peace, and a “degenerate, wealth-rotted, huckstering” population, it still seems to us (always excepting our handful of pre-war Jingoes) as improbable as it once seemed to Germany that we hatched and set on foot such a wildcat enterprise.
“A war of exhaustion.” How often we use those words! They are current in all the belligerent countries, and in all they are unreally used, as yet. But they are, I fear, literally true. It is a war which—save for some happy chance—can hardly end till one group or the other have no longer the men to hold their lines. The sway of the fighting is of no great moment; it does not seem to matter where precisely the killing, maiming, and capturing go on, so long as they do go on with a certain mathematical regularity. A year or so hence, when the total disablement is nearer twenty than ten millions, the meaning of the words will be a little clearer, and they will probably only then be used by the side whose united population is still more than twice that of the other side. Two years hence they will be seen to have meant exactly what they said. All the swinging from optimism to pessimism and back again, the cock-a-hoop of the Press one day, the dirge of the Press the next; the alarms and excursions about the failure of this or that—they are all storms in teacups. The wills of the nations fighting are equally engaged, and will not break; the energies will not break; the food will probably not quite fail; the money will be found somehow; but the human flesh will give out, in time—that is all; on which side it will give out first may be left to the child who can count up to two. No glory about this business—just ding-dong shambles!
If one believed, with a certain Englishman, that there was no real struggle of ideals involved, these words “a war of exhaustion,” meaning what they really do, would be too intolerable even to think of. He who denies this to be a struggle of ideals may have a brilliant intellect, but he can surely have none of that instinctive perception of the essence and atmosphere of things, which is a so much surer guide than reason. He has perceived doubtless that autocratists and force-worshippers in England, in Russia, in Italy (there are but few in France) are fighting against the Central Empires as furiously as if they were the most ardent lovers of liberty; and that the democrats and humanists in Central Europe are fighting for their countries as devotedly as their force-worshipping rulers, and he has thought: “This is a mere blind game of ‘kill your neighbour,’ with nothing real at stake save the aggrandizement of one group of countries or the other.” But behind all this is the psychological heart of the matter—the states of mind in the belligerent countries before they began to fight. There are racial temperaments to which certain ideals are fatal. The Teuton of all men requires the Christian, or shall we say the humanistic, ethic, to modify something science-ridden, overbearing, and heady in his soul. The Teuton, before the new philosophy of self-expansion at all costs laid hold on him, was welcome, from his many great qualities, in a world of other men. But his was the last nature that could afford to succumb wholesale to the faith that his race was the only race that mattered. If he could see himself he would realize that the very thoroughness and over-exaltation of his nature made it ruinous for him to tamper with this particular ideal, for he was bound sooner or later to run it to death, to the danger and alarm of all other races. No one outside Germany, unless his mind was warped, could miss this latter-day Teutonic absorption in self; the Teuton has dinned it into every ear, and forgotten, in so doing, that we should not take off discount for temperamental extravagance of diction. The German imperialistic patriot has done an incalculable, perhaps fatal, harm to the country he loves so passionately. But even discounting for rhodomontade, no observer who has feelers, can fail to be aware of the spiritual change in Germany. I remember one tiny instance out of many—a mere straw showing the direction of the wind. The winter before the war there were in a certain hotel in Egypt four Teutons. A quiet, dignified old man, his tiny, quiet, dignified wife, and their two big sons. The difference between the two generations was distressing. In the older, such an air of unassuming goodness, in the younger a demeanour so intolerant, and domineering; those two sons were respectful and good to their father and mother; but toward the rest of the world—to natives, English, Americans, and other small fry—they displayed an astounding contempt.
The Berlin Concordia has just issued maxims of conduct to the German people, in a little book called “Let Germany Learn.” I cull two of them: “The soft corner in your heart for the foreigner will never give you his affection, but only his contempt!” And: “Everything depends on your own strength.”
It would be easy to make out some sort of case against any of the belligerent nations. It would not be easy to show that any nation save Germany was in that peculiar state of full-blooded self-confidence which upholds the Will to Power, and denies the Will to Equity.
It seems certain that the practice of doping soldiers with ether or other spirit before an attack has been largely resorted to by certain nations in this war. Nothing that is happening so illuminates the nature of modern warfare; illustrates more utterly the absorption of human bodies and souls into the Machines that are crashing into each other. Men have become mere lumps of coal to be converted into driving power. And in supreme moments, lest the bewildered spirit, brought up to peace, should move hand or foot in protest or recoil, that spirit is first stolen away. The usage is not prompted by motives of mercy, yet has in it a kind of awful humanity. Granted the premises, who dare grudge this anodyne to the doomed?
Verily on every man who in time of peace speaks or writes one word to foster bad spirit between nations a curse should rest; he is part and parcel of that malevolence which at last sets these great Engines, fed by lumps of human coal, to crash along, and pile up against each other, in splintered wreckage. Only too well he plays the game of those grim schemers to whose account lie the death, the dehumanization, the despair of millions of their brother men.
A wonderful night to-night, so that the spirit goes forth a little, enters the harmony of things, drinks the magic of the world. How beauty moves the heart! And war cannot destroy it, cannot take from us the feeling that—living or dead—we belong to such perfection. It cannot take the voice from the streams, remove the flight of small wings in the darkness, the gleam of moonlight, the whisper of night about us, nor that bright star. It cannot take from within us the soul that vibrates to loveliness, to the universal rhythm round us.
If in this war the figures of cruelty and death have surpassed themselves in darkness, the figure of Humanity has never been so radiant and so lovely. Perhaps we do not know enough what man was really like in past ages to compare him with man to-day. But it does seem as if he had grown in power for evil, and even more in power for good. Or perhaps it is only that, being more sensitive and highly strung, the story of his doings is altogether more poignant.
From the letters of a young French painter, who, after months in the trenches, disappeared in an engagement on April 7th, 1915, I quote these sayings:
“You know what I call religion—that which binds together in man all his thoughts of the universal and of the eternal, those two forms of God! . . . Don’t let’s lose hope; the trials of hope are many, but all beauty lives for ever. . . . The dead won’t hurt the Spring! . . . Did you see yesterday’s sun? How noble the country is, and how good Nature! She seems to say to him who listens that nothing will be lost. . . . We know not whether all this violence and disorder may not be leading us toward a crowning good. . . . Out of this torment we shall be left with one great aspiration toward pity, fraternity, and goodness. . . . Never has life brought me such abundance of noble feelings;—never, perhaps, have I had such freshness of sensibility for their recording; such a sensation of safety in my spirit. . . . We spend the days like children. . . . And the good from this war will be the making young again the hearts of those who have been through it.”
And his last written words: “Beloved mother, I send you all my love. Whatever happens, life will have been beautiful.”
Not to many is given so clear a soul as this, so fine a spirit. Peace and loveliness be with him, and with all who die like him before their time, following the light within them. And with all who live on in this world of beauty, where the Dead harm not the Spring, may there be—in his words—the longing for pity, fraternity, and goodness!
TOTALLY DISABLED
(FromThe Observer, 1916.)
If I were that! Not as one getting into the yellow leaf, but with all the Spring-running in me. If I lay, just turning my eyes here and there! How should I feel?
How dotheyfeel—those helpless soldiers and sailors already lying in the old ball-room of the “Star and Garter”?
In that hospital ward, a ghostly officer is ever crying:
“Stick it, men! Stick it! Only for life! Stick it!”
Only for life—how many years! In the year only three hundred and sixty-five awakenings; only all those returns from merciful sleep!
“Stick it, men! Stick it!”
Totally disabled—incurably helpless! No! One can’t realize what it feels like to be caught young and strong in such a net; to be caught—not for your own folly and excesses, not through accident or heredity, but as reward for giving yourself body and soul to your country. Better so, more easily borne; and yet how much more ironically tragic!
Who knows what the freedom of limbs means, till he has lost it? Who can measure the ecstasy of vigour, till every power of movement has been cut off? Who really grasps what it’s like to lie like a log dependent for everything on others, save those who have to? Think of the trout in the streams, of the birds of the air, the winged creatures innumerable, think of each beast and creeping thing—can one even imagine them without movement? Men, also, are meant to be free of their world, masters of their limbs and senses.
They who lie helpless are no longer quite bodies, for the essence of body is movement; already they are almost spirits. It is as if, in passing, one looked at minds, nearly all in the heyday of consciousness and will.
Sometimes I vaguely fancy that after violent death a man’s spirit may go on clinging above the earth just so long as his normal life would have run; that a spirit rived before its time wanders till such date as consciousness would have worn itself out in the body’s natural death. If that random fancy were true, we to-day would all be passing among unseen crowds of these rived spirits, watching us, without envy perhaps, being freer than ourselves. But those who lie hopelessly disabled, having just missed that enfranchisement, are tied to what still exists, and yet in truth has died already. Of all men they have the chance to prove the mettle of the human soul—that mysterious consciousness capable of such heights and depths; no, not a greater chance than men tortured by long solitary confinement, or even than those who through excess or through heredity lie for ever helpless—but yet so great a chance that they are haloed for all of us happier ones, who are free of our limbs and our lives. Some among those prisoned spirits must needs shrink and droop, and become atrophied in the long helplessness of a broken body. But many will grow finer; according to their natures—some pursuing the ideal of recompense in another world; some, in the stoic belief that serenity and fortitude are the fine flowers of life, unconsciously following the artist’s creed—that to make a perfect thing, even if it be only of his own spirit, is in itself all the reward.
Whichever it be, slow decay or slow perfecting, we others approach them with heads bowed, in as great reverence as we give to the green graves of our brave dead. And if pity—that pity which to some, it seems, is but ignoble weakness—be not driven from this earth, then with pity we shall nerve our resolve that never shall anything be lacking to support or comfort those who gave all for us and are so broken by their sacrifice.
As I write the sun is hot for the first time this year, and above the snow spring is in the air. Under Richmond Hill the river will be very bright, winding among trees not yet green. And the helpless who are lying there already will be thinking “I shall never walk under trees again—nor by a riverside.”
If one dwells too much on the miseries this world contains, there must come a moment when one will say: “Life’s not worth living; I will end it!” But by some dispensation few of us reach that point—too sanely selfish, or saved by the thought that we must work to reduce the sum of misery.
For these greatest of all sufferers—these helpless and incurable—can we do too much, ever reach the word: Enough?
To you, women of Great and Greater Britain, it has fallen to raise on Richmond Hill this refuge and home for our soldiers and sailors totally disabled. Where thirty-two are now lying there will soon be two hundred more. Nearly all my life I have known the spot on which this home will stand; and truly, no happier choice could have been made. If beauty consoles—and it can, a little—it is there in all the seasons; a benign English beauty of fields and trees and water spread below, under a wide sky.
One hundred thousand pounds you need to raise this monument of mercy in tribute to the brave. If it were five hundred thousand you would give it; for is not this monument to be the record and token of your gratitude, your love, and your pity? Each one of you, I think, however poor, must wish to lay one brick or stone of the house that is to prove your ministering.
If the misery through this war could be balanced in scales, I do not think men’s suffering would pull down that of wives, and mothers, sisters, daughters; but this special suffering of incurable disablement—this has been spared you, who yet by nature are better at enduring than men. It has been spared you; and in return you have vowed this home for the helpless; a more sacred place than any church, for within it every hour of day and night pain will be assuaged, despair be overcome, actual living tenderness be lavished.
When you have built this refuge for the prisoners of Fate—when you have led them there to make out the rest of their lives as best they can—remember this: Men who are cut off in their youth from life and love will prize beyond all things woman’s sympathy, and the sight of woman’s beauty. Give—your money to build, your hands to lead them home; and, when they are there, take them your sympathy, take them your beauty!
CARTOON
(FromThe Nation, 1916.)
. . . I cannot describe the street I turned into, then, like no street I have ever been in; so long, so narrow, so regular, yet somehow so unsubstantial; one had continually a feeling that, walking at the gray houses on either side, one would pass through them. I must have gone miles down it without meeting even the shadow of a human being; till, just as it was growing dusk, I saw a young man come silently out, as I suppose, from a door, though none was opened. I can depict neither his dress nor figure; like the street he looked unsubstantial, and the expression on his shadowy face haunted me, it was so like that of a starving man before whom one has set a meal, then snatched it away. And now, in the deepening dusk, out of every house, young men like him were starting forth in the same mysterious manner, all with that hungry look on their almost invisible faces.
Peering at one of them, I said:
“What is it—whom do you want?”
But he gave me no answer. It was too dark now to see any face; and I had only the feeling of passing between presences as I went along, without getting to any turning out of that endless street. Presently, in desperation, I doubled in my tracks.
A lamplighter must have been following me, for every lamp was lighted, giving a faint flickering greenish glare, as might lumps of phosphorescent matter hung out in the dark. The hungry, phantom-like young men had all vanished, and I was wondering where they could have gone, when I saw—some distance ahead—a sort of grayish whirlpool stretching across the street, under one of those flickering marsh-light looking lamps. A noise was coming from that swirl, which seemed to be raised above the ground—a ghostly swishing, as of feet among dry leaves, broken by the gruntings of some deep sense gratified. I went on till I could see that it was formed of human figures slowly whirling round the lamp. And suddenly I stood still in horror. Every other figure was a skeleton, and between danced a young girl in white—the whole swirling ring was formed alternately of skeletons and gray-white girls. Creeping a little nearer still, I could tell that these skeletons were the young men I had seen starting out of the houses as I passed, having the same look of awful hunger on their faces. And the girls who danced between them had a wan, wistful beauty, turning their eyes to their partners whose bony hands grasped theirs, as though begging them to return to the flesh. Not one noticed me, so deeply were they all absorbed in their mystic revel. And then I saw what it was they were dancing round. Above their heads, below the greenish lamp, a dark thing was dangling. It swung and turned there, never still, like a joint of meat roasting before a fire—the clothed body of an elderly man. The greenish lamp-light glinted on his gray hair, and on his features, every time the face came athwart the light. He swung slowly from right to left, and the dancers whirled from left to right, always meeting that revolving face, as though to enjoy the sight of it. What did it mean—these sad shapes rustling round the obscene thing suspended there! What strange and awful rite was I watching by the lamp’s ghostly phosphorescence? More haunting even than those hungry skeletons and wan gray girls, more haunting and gruesome, was that dead face up there with the impress still on it of bloated life; how it gripped and horrified me, with its pale, fishy eyes, and its neck thick-rolled with flabby flesh, turning and turning on its invisible spit, to the sound of that weird swishing of dead leaves, and those grunting sighs! Who was it they had caught and swung up there, like some dead crow, to sway in the winds? This gibbeted figure, which yet had a look of cold and fattened power—what awful crime towards these skeleton youths and bereaved gray-wan maidens could it be expiating?
Then with a shudder I seemed to recognize that grisly thing—suddenly I knew: I was watching the execution of the Past! There it swung! Gibbeted by the Future, whom, through its manifold lusts it had done to death! And seized with panic I ran forward through the fabric of my dream, that swayed and rustled to left and right of me. . . .
HARVEST
(From theBook of the Homeless, 1916.)
The sky to-night looks as if a million bright angels were passing—a gleaming cloud-mesh drawn across the heaven. One star, very clear, shines beside a full moon white as the globe-campion flower. The hills and valleys, the corn-stooks, casting each its shadow, the grey boles of the beeches—all have the remoteness of an ineffable peace. And the past day was so soft, so glamorous; such a hum, such brightness, and the harvest going on. . . .
These last years millions have died with energy but one third spent; millions more unripe for death will yet herald us into the long shades before these shambles cease—boys born just to be the meat of war, spitted on each other’s reddened bayonets, without inkling of guilt or knowledge. To what shall we turn that we may keep sane, watching this green, unripe corn, field on field, being scythed by Death for none to eat? There is no solace in the thought that death is nothing!—save for those who still believe they go straight to Paradise. To us who dare not know the workings of the Unknowable, and in our heart of hearts cannot tell what, if anything, becomes of us—to us, the great majority of the modern world—life is valuable, good, a thing worth living out for its natural span. For, if it were not, long ere this we should have sat with folded arms, lifting no hand till the last sighing breath of the human race had whispered itself out into the wind, and a final darkness come; sat, like the Hindu Yogi, watching the sun and moon a little, and expired. The moon would be as white, and the sun as golden, if we were gone, the hills and valleys as mysterious, the beech-trees just as they are, only the stooks of corn would vanish with those who garner them. If life were not good we should make of ourselves dust indifferently—we human beings; quietly, peacefully; not in murderous horror reaped by the curving volleys, mown off by rains of shrapnel, and the long yellow scythe of the foul gases. But lifeisgood, and no living thing wishes to die; even they who kill themselves, despairing, resign out of sheer love of life, out of craving for what they have found too mutilated and starved, out of yearning for their meed of joy cruelly frustrated. And they who die that others may live are but those in whom the life-flame burns so hot and bright that they can feel the life and the longing to live in others as if it were their own—more than their own. Yes, life carries with it a very passion for existence.
To what, then, shall we turn that we may keep sane, watching this harvest of too young deaths, the harvest of the brave, whose stooks are raised before us, casting each its shadow in the ironic moonlight? Green corn!
If, having watched those unripe blades reaped off and stacked so pitifully, watched the great dark Wagoner clear those unmellowed fields, we let their sacrifice be vain; if we sow not, hereafter, in a peaceful Earth that which shall become harvest more golden than the world has seen—then Shame on us, unending, in whatever land we dwell. . . .
This harvest night is still. And yet, up there, the bright angels are passing. One Star!