LI
France June 8, 1918
Last night I saw the old lady who nursed me up so that I was fit to come and meet you in London when you all came in 1917 from America. Seeing her again brought back all sorts of memories of the depressions and exaltations of other days. I think I have been both sadder and more happy since the war began than in all the other years of my life. And I used to write about the world not as it is, but about the world as I would have made it, had I been God. Now I'm trying to see things as they are, with the inevitable God shining through them. Here, at the Front, God is everywhere apparent—but not the cathedral God I had imagined—not the majestic God with sublime uplifted eyes which know nothing of finite terror. The God of the Front has brave eyes which have suffered; His mouth is a human mouth, which has known the pain of parting and kisses; His hands are roughened and burnt and bloody; there is the stoop of agony in His shoulders and the hint of a valiant jest in His splendid bearing of defiance. He is one of us. He is us entirely. He is no longer remote and eternal. For us He has again become flesh—He is our comrade; He is the man upon our left and our right hand, who goes into battle with us; He is our dead. We cannot escape Him; the pettinesses of our sins are forgotten in the resemblance of our neighbours to His majesty. Nowadays I cannot think of the poet's Christ, wandering through Galilean lilies in a woman's robes. It's His manly death, His white timeless body on the Cross that I remember. Without Calvary all His words would have been unconvincing and He Himself a dreamer's fancy. It was only on the Cross that Christ became flesh—all that went before is like a lovely legend gradually materializing in the atmosphere of tragedy. God save us from being always happy. It's the chance of being always happy that I dread most after the war. There's a terrible corpulence about happiness which borders very closely on physical grossness. To strive and keep on striving—that is what I want for the world when war is ended, and to have to pay with sacrifice for each advance. I don't think any of us who come back will covet virtue as our goal, save in as far as virtue embraces everything that is meant by manliness. To be virtuous in the original sense was just that—to be physically perfect.
Ah, how greedy I become out here to see some of the sudden qualities which war has called out, transplanted into the civilian world. I so fear that with peace those qualities may be debased and lost.
More than anything else the gramophone makes me remember the old days and the old aims and desires. It's the greatest miracle of the century that Caruso and Harry Lauder and George Robey, with all the best of music and laughter-makers, can step into our dug-out from the point of a needle. When we move, whatever else is left behind, the gramophone always goes. It travels in G.S. wagons, on the foot-board of limbers—in all sorts of ways. We're feeling sentimental; we crank up the canned music. Above the roar of the guns we hear, “All that I want is someone to love me, and to love me well.” We're feeling merry, so we dance to “Arizona.” All the world of forgotten pleasures can come to us through that needle-point. And I—whenever it starts—I see home pictures——
Then in an extraordinarily poignant way I feel earnest to have lived, loved, done something big before I die. Everything already done seems insignificant and worthless. It's the feeling which you once called “divine discontent.”
It's evening, as it always is when I write to you. Next door a little refugee child is chanting his prayers under the direction of his father. One can hear the humming of planes overhead. A funny world! How persistent the religious instinct is, that men should still credit God when their hearts are bankrupt!
Good-night, I'm going to bed now.