CIVILISATION
I must know first what you mean by civilisation. That is a question I can well put to a man of understanding and intelligence like yourself; and then, too, you are always boasting of this famous civilisation.
Before the war I was an assistant in a commercial laboratory; but now I swear that, if ever I have the doubtful privilege of surviving this horror, I will never take up the work again. The country—the pure, fresh country for me! Anywhere away from these filthy factories—far from the roar of your aeroplanes and all the machinery in which formerly I took an interest when I did not understand things; but which horrify me now because I see in them the very spirit of the war—the principle and the cause of the war.
I hate the twentieth century as I hate this degenerate Europe—as I hate the world which Europe has polluted. I know it may seem ridiculous—this high talk. But what do I care! I’m not speaking to thecrowd, and besides I might as well be laughed at for this as for anything else. I repeat, I shall fly to the hills, and I shall see to it that I am as much alone as I possibly can be. I had thought of escaping among the savages, but there are no real savages now.Theyare all riding bicycles and clamouring for medals and honours.... I am not going to live with the savages—we have done our best to corrupt them: I have seen it done too well at Soissons.
In the spring of this year I was at Soissons with the G.B.C. I see that G.B.C.[2]rather mystifies you, but you must blame civilisation for that: the Tower of Babel is being rebuilt by it, and soon we shall have so debased our mother tongue that it will be nothing more than a telegraphic code, ugly and colourless.
The retreat of the Germans had taken the line back towards Vauxaillon and Laffaux, and there fighting went on pretty vigorously. In one sector there was a spot—theLaffaux mill—which was a veritable thorn in a wound, keeping it always inflamed. About the beginning of May a great attack was launched on the mill, and nearly the whole of my division had to turn out on field duty.
“You, sergeant,” said one officer to me—“you will remain at the hospital and take charge of the A.C.A.[3]section. I’ll send a number of men to help you.”
I was by this time thoroughly conversant with the subtleties of military speech. When I was told that a number of men were to be put under my charge, I understood perfectly that there would be no one; and in point of fact I was given four miserable outcasts—weak, half-imbecile creatures of no use to any one.
From Saturday onwards the wounded arrived in batches of a hundred. I got them arranged as methodically as I could in the wards of the A.C.A.
But the work was not going on at allwell. My absurd stretcher-bearers, unable to fall in with each other’s movements, stumbled like broken-kneed, miserable nags, causing the wounded to scream with pain. In a nibbling, haphazard sort of way, they tried to deal with the waiting masses of the injured, and the whole A.C.A. seemed to stamp with impatience. The effect was rather like a human meat factory which has its machinery going at full strength without being fed with oil and materials.
I must really describe the A.C.A. to you. In war slang it means an automatic hospital (“autochir”)—the latest thing in surgical invention. It’s the last word in science, just like our 400 m.m. calibre guns which run on metal rails: it follows the armies with motors, steam-driven machinery, microscopes, laboratories, the complete equipment of a modern hospital. It is the first great repair depôt which the wounded man enters on coming out of the destructive, grinding mill on the extreme front. Here are brought the parts of the military machine that are most spoiled. Skilled workmentake them in hand at once, loosen them quickly, and with a practised eye examine them, as one would a hydro-pneumatic break, an ignition chamber or a collimator. If the part is seriously damaged, it goes through the usual routine of being scrapped; but if the “human material” is not irretrievably ruined, it is patched up ready to be used again at the first opportunity, and that is called “preserving the effectives.”
My stretcher-bearers, with the jolting clumsiness of drunken dockers, were bringing to the A.C.A. a few of the injured, who were at once swallowed up and eliminated. And the factory continued to growl, like some Moloch whose appetite has been whetted by the fumes of the first sacrifice.
I had picked up a stretcher. Helped by a gunner who had been wounded in the neck, and whose only desire was to be of some use while awaiting his operation, I led my crew in amongst the heap of men that lay on the ground. It was then that I saw some one passing along wearing a high-grade officer’s hat—a sensible sortof man who smiled in spite of his solicitous bearing.
“There is something wrong with your ambulance work,” he said. “I’ll send you eight negroes. They are excellent stretcher men, these fellows from Madagascar.”
Ten minutes afterwards the negroes had come.
To be exact, they were not all natives of Madagascar: they were types selected from the 1st Colonial Corps which was at that very moment strenuously fighting before Laffaux. There were a few natives of the Soudan, whose age was difficult to tell, sombre and wrinkled, and concealing under their regimental tunics charms that were coated with dirt, and smelling with leather, sweat and exotic oils. The negroes of Madagascar were of medium height, looking like embryos, very dark and silent.
They slipped on the straps, and at my command began carrying the wounded with quiet unconcern, as if they were unloading bales of cotton at the docks.
I was content, or rather reassured. TheA.C.A., surfeited at last, worked at high pressure, and hummed like well-tended machines that drip with oil, shining and flashing from every point.
Flash! The word is not too strong. I was dazzled on entering the operating hut. Night had just fallen—one of those warm beautiful nights of this brutal spring. The gunfire came and went in short spasms, like a sick giant. The wards of the hospital overflowed with a heaving mass of pain, and death was trying to restore order there. I breathed in deeply the night air of the garden and, as I was saying, I entered the operating hut.
It had been partitioned off into several rooms. The one I suddenly stepped into made a bulge in the side of the building. It was as hot as a puddling-oven. Men were cleaning, scrubbing, and polishing, with scrupulous care, a mass of shining instruments, while others were stoking fires which gave out the white heat of soldering lamps. With never a pause, orderlies were coming and going, carrying trays held out ratherstiffly at arm’s length, like hotel-keepers devoted to the ceremonious rites of the table.
“It’s warm here,” I murmured, in order to say something.
“Come over here: you’ll find it all right,” said a grinning little chap as hairy as a kobold.
I lifted a lid, feeling I was opening the breast of some monster. In front of me steps led to a kind of throne on which, seated like a king, the heart of the thing was to be found. It was a steriliser—an immense pot in which a calf could easily have been cooked whole. It lay on its stomach and emitted a jet of steam that stupefied one, and its weary monotony made one hardly conscious of time and space. But suddenly the infernal noise stopped, and it was like the end of eternity. On the back of the machine a load of kettles continued to spit and gurgle. A man looking like a ship’s pilot was turning a large heavy wheel, and the lid of the cauldron, suddenly unbolted, rose, exposing to view its red-hot bowels, from which all sorts of boxes andpackages were taken out. The heat of the furnace had given way to the damp, crushing atmosphere of a drying-stove.
“But where do they operate on the wounded?” I asked a boy who was washing a pair of rubber gloves in a big copper tub.
“Over there, in the operating-room, of course. But don’t go in that way.”
I went out again into the freshness of the night, and proceeded to the waiting-room to find my stretcher-bearers.
At that moment it was the turn of the cuirassiers to be brought in. A division of “foot cavalry” had been fighting since morning. Hundreds of the finest men in France had fallen, and they waited there like broken statues which are still beautiful in their ruins. Their limbs were so strong, and their chests so solid, that they could not believe in death, and as they felt their rich healthy blood dripping from their wounds, they held at bay, with curses and laughter, the weakness of their broken flesh.
“They can do what they like with this flesh of mine,” said one of the two;“but to make me unconscious, damn me! I’m not having any.”
“Yes, whatever they like,” said another, “but not amputation! I want my paw; even done to the world, I want it!”
These two men were coming out of the X-ray ward. They lay naked under a sheet, and carried, pinned to their bandages, papers of different sizes and shapes, rough sketches, formulæ, and something like an algebraical statement of their wounds, the expression in numbers of their misery and disordered organs.
They spoke of this their first visit to the laboratory like clever children who realise that the modern world would not know how to live or die without the meticulous discipline of the sciences.
“What did he say, the X-rays major?”
“He said it was an antero-posterior axis.”
“Just what I feared.”
“It’s in my belly. I heard him sayabdomen. But I am sure it’s in my belly. Ah, damn it! but I’m not going to be put to sleep. That I won’t stand!”
The door of the operating theatre opened at this point, and the waiting-room was flooded with light. A voice cried:
“The next lot! And the belly chap first!”
The black bearers adjusted their straps, and the two talkers were carried off. I followed the stretchers.
Imagine a shining rectangular block set in sheer night like a jewel in coal. The door closed again, and I found myself imprisoned in that light, which was reflected from the spotless canvas of the ceiling. The floor, level and springy, was strewn with red soaked linen which the orderlies picked up quickly with forceps. Between the floor and the ceiling, four strange forms that were men. They were dressed completely in white, their faces hidden behind masks which, like those of Touareg, only admit the eyes to view. Like Chinese dancers, they held in the air their hands covered with rubber, and the perspiration streamed from their brows.
You could hear the muffled vibrationsof the motor which generated the light. Filled up again to overflowing, the steriliser disturbed the world with its piercing lament. Small radiators were snorting like animals when they are stroked the wrong way. It all made a savage, flamboyant music, and the men who were moving about seemed to perform rhythmically a religious dance—a kind of austere and mysterious ballet.
The stretchers glided in between the tables like canoes in an archipelago. The instruments were set out on spotless linen and sparkled like jewels in glass cases; and the little Madagascar negroes, alert and obedient, took great care in handling their burden. They stopped on the word of command, and waited. Their dark slender necks yoked with the straps, and their fingers clutching the handles of the stretchers, reminded one of sacred apes trained to carry idols. The heads and feet of the two wan and enormous cuirassiers stuck out beyond the limits of the stretchers.
A few gestures that were almost ritualistic, and the wounded men were placed on the operating-tables.
At that moment I caught the eye of one of the negroes, and I experienced a feeling of extreme discomfort. It was the calm deep look of a child or a young dog. The savage was slowly turning his head from left to right and looked at the extraordinary men and the extraordinary things all around him. His dark eyes stopped lightly on all the wonderful parts of this workshop devoted to repairing the human machine. And those eyes, which betrayed no thought, were on that account even more disquieting. For one second I was fool enough to think “How astonished he must be!” But the absurd thought soon left me, and I was overwhelmed with unutterable shame.
The four negroes left the room. That afforded me a little comfort. The wounded looked dazed and bewildered. The ambulance men hastened to bind their hands and feet and rub them with alcohol. The masked men were giving orders and moving about the tables with the deliberate gestures of officiating priests.
“Who is the head here?” I whispered to some one.
He was pointed out to me. He was a man of medium height and was sitting down, with his gloved hands held up, dictating something to a clerk.
Fatigue, the blinding light, the booming of the guns, the rumble of the machinery acted as a sort of lucid drug on my brain. I remained fixed where I was, in a veritable whirl of thought. Everything here worked for one’s good ... it was civilisation finding within itself the supreme reply, the corrective to its destructive excesses; nothing less than this complex organism would suffice to reduce by the smallest degree the immense evil creation of the machine age. I thought again of the indecipherable look of the savage, and my emotion was a mixture of pity, anger and loathing....
The man who, as I had learnt, was in charge of the operating theatre had finished dictating. He remained fixed in the position of a heraldic messenger and seemed to be absorbed in thought. I noticed that behind his spectacles gleamed a look that was solemn, tranquil and sad, though fullof purpose. Scarcely anything of his face was visible, the mask hiding his mouth and beard; but on his temples could be seen a few fresh grey hairs, and a large swollen vein marked his forehead, betraying the strained efforts of a tense will.
“The man’s unconscious,” said some one.
The surgeon approached the table. The man had indeed lost consciousness; and I saw it was the very one who swore he would not take the anæsthetic. The poor man had not dared even to make a protest. Caught, as it were, in the cogs of the wheel, he was at once overpowered, and he delivered himself up to the hungry machine, like pig-iron devoured by the rolling-mills. And then, too, he must have known it was for his good, because this is all the good that is left to us in these days.
“Sergeant,” some one remarked, “you are not allowed to remain in the operating theatre without a cap.”
On going out, I looked once again at the surgeon. He hung over his work with an assiduity in which, despite his overalls,his mask and his gloves, a feeling of tenderness was plainly marked.
I thought with conviction: “No! No! He, at least, has no illusions!”
And I found myself once more in the waiting-room, that smelt of blood, like a wild beast’s lair.
A dim light came from a veiled lamp. Some wounded were moaning; others chatted in low voices.
“Who said tank?” said one of them. “Why, I was wounded in a tank.”
There was silence, brief and respectful. The man, who was buried in bandages, added:
“Our petrol-tank burst: my legs are broken and I am burnt in the face. Oh! I know all about tanks!”
He said that with a queer emphasis in which I recognised the age-long torment of humanity—pride.
I went out into the night to enjoy a smoke. The world seemed to be dazed,bewildered, tragic; and I think that in reality....
Believe me, sir, when I speak of civilisation and regret it, I quite know what I am saying; and it is not wireless telegraphy that will alter my opinion. It is all the more tragic because we are helpless; we cannot reverse the course which the world is taking. And yet!
Civilisation—the true civilisation—exists. I think often of it. In my mind it is the harmony of a choir chanting a hymn; it is a marble statue on an arid, burnt-up hillside; it is the Man who said, “Love one another,” or “Return good for evil.” But for two thousand years these phrases have been merely repeated, and the chief priests have too much vested interest in temporal things to conceive anything of the kind.
We are mistaken about happiness and about good. The noblest natures have also been mistaken, for silence and solitude are too often denied them. I have seen the monstrous steriliser on its throne. I tellyou, of a truth, civilisation is not to be found there any more than in the shining forceps of the surgeon. Civilisation is not in this terrible trumpery; and if it is not in the heart of man, then it exists nowhere.
THE END
Printed bySpottiswoode, Ballantyne & Co. Ltd.Colchester, London & Eton, England