In the Tunnel—Hill 60.
In the Tunnel—Hill 60.
“. . . . The fatalist is born not made. The growing strain of the game is not producing more fatalists if ducking under shell fire is a proof of an absence of fatalism. For many who never ducked are now ducking, whether from wisdom or war strain they are taking this instinctive precaution. But there is a hardihood that persists through it all—there is a grim fatalist who is not fatalist born but is made it by a sort of savage irritation with the grossly incalculable element in the mischance of death. He does not scorn to duck out of sheer pride—to show he has not the wind up, but because he has his back up. He can’t prevent the ‘whiz-bangs’ and the ‘five-nines’ but he can defy them. He invests them with a personality, a malignancy of personal enmity directed against himself, . . . and he defies them. As though he were to say, ‘If you are going to hit me, you swine, you will hit me, but you can’t stop me calling you bastard while you are doing it!’”
Fatalist.
Fatalist.
“. . . . Men of the Company that had been in occupation of the Pill Box awaiting in no very amiable frame of mind the completion of some detail of the relief . . . . I could not tell what they had to be discontented with in that happy land. Around them was all the pomp and pageantry of war—a landscape the like of which man has never gazed upon since early chaos brooded over all. For Westhoek and Flers—the Somme and the Salient—as they were when they were war areas and it was winter—were landscapes that betrayed to the observant all the material content of war. They were the finished product—the perfection towards which that vast Teutonised industry of war is working. Landscapes without colour as of an evil earth in the throes of its dissolution—an earth torn and mangled with its ghost half given up and hanging over-head like a palpable emanation, half agony, half guilt . . . .”
Outside the Pill Box.
Outside the Pill Box.
“Little groups of men burdened with the appliances of their trades file slowly across the hummocks of Flanders mud. They come out of endless holes and go into endless holes like lonely ants bent on some ant-like service. . . . . Ant-like in the distance, they loom upon a nearer vision things elemental and Homeric, big with destiny. They are merely soldiers at the base, perhaps shopmen at Brisbane, but they are things of mystery in the line. I feel that here all soldiers of all ranks tend to have the baffling profundity of the peasant, that sense of the nearness to the beginning of things which makes the artist see in the peasant the simple, unsolvable mystery of life reduced to its least common multiple—man shorn of all his vast cultures, which are not mysterious, and left simple man, which is.”
Coming out at Hill 60.
Coming out at Hill 60.
“One so often sees them—these seemingly purposeless groups, awaiting events with the grim immobility of Sioux braves . . . . doing nothing in places where no man would be for choice. Stretcher bearers they may be, or runners, or a company that has left the sickly foetid odours of the dug outs—reminiscent of fowl houses and tramps in summer—to make room for the relief, and is now standing by in all the taciturn boredom of that condition—silent men whom you pass, with all their taciturnity, with the feeling that they have passed a verdict on you annihilating in its justice. . . . .
“It is men like myself—timid peepers into forbidden places, who look and go, who keep their virginal wonderment at what are the commonplaces of the trenches. And these silent watchers are such a commonplace. . . . Perhaps the men familiar with it are unimpressed by the statuesque quietism of these men in places of risk and great events. . . . with their perpetual air of prisoners innocent and awaiting an unjust sentence. . . . They lounge there awaiting something that will send them into the glare of that limelight again like supers in a tragedy in which the supers are greater tragedians than the heroes.”
“Hanging About.”
“Hanging About.”
“. . . . and Brigades of the —— English division came down, fresh from those quagmires in front of Passchaendael. Officers and men, they were in the last stage of exhaustion—in that condition where every forward step is a battleground on which the desire not to take it has to be met and conquered before that step is taken. They had foot slogged it all the way from C——. W——., and had only stayed there an hour—they looked what they were, men really dead but that their hearts would not let them lie down and die . . . . They spoke with that level exhausted voice of overdone men—if they spoke at all . . . . The little subaltern to whom we told the distance to S——, groaned aloud—but refused the drink we offered—I think it was that he would not allow himself in their extremity something the men could not get . . . . It was a division against which Luck had set its face. Fortune has her favourites among the divisions, and others she pursues with the vindictiveness of an evil step-mother. Every ill circumstance contrivable by collusion between the weather, the enemy, and something we will call Mischance seems to lay in wait for the Brigades upon which the disfavour of Fate has fallen. Poor ——, it was one of them, unlucky on going in, unlucky while in, and unlucky on coming out. . . .”
Down from the Ridge.
Down from the Ridge.