Living Bayonets: A Record of the Last Push

by Coningsby Dawson

LII

France June 12, 1918

With me it's 6.30 in the evening. I'm sitting in a farmhouse overlooking the usual French farmyard. The chickens fly in at the window—also the cats. The window is my own mode of entrance; I feel like a burglar when I enter my “bedroom” in this fashion after midnight. Two other officers share the floor with me—literally the floor, for we use our sleeping-sacks.

There's a little boy about three, with long hair, so that at first we mistook him for a girl, who has become the temporary mascot of the battery. He carries the broken remains of a toy rifle and falls in with the men on parades, holding one of the fellows' hands. He's picked up the detail for “'Shun!” and “Stand at Ease!” and carries out the orders as smartly as anyone, looking terrifically serious about it. The men call him “little sister” on account of his appearance, and make him a great pet. I left him sobbing his heart out to-day when I had to leave him behind after he had fallen in with a squad of riflemen.

There's a genuine little girl who is our friend, of whom I am even fonder. She's a refugee kiddy of about thirteen—slim and pretty as a fairy, with a long corn-gold plait of hair down her back.

As soon as we start the gramophone going she peeps noiselessly as a spirit through the window; then one of us lifts her across the sill and she sits on our knees with her face hidden shyly against our shoulders.

I'm at present reading Gulliver's Travels. That I should be reading them in such different circumstances from any that Swift could have imagined, kindles the art of writing books into a new romance. To be remembered years after you yourself have forgotten, to have men prying into the workings of a brain which has been dust in a shell for two centuries, is a very definite kind of immortality. To be forgotten—that is what we most dread. Never to have happened would not matter; but to have happened, to have walked the world, laughed, loved, created, and then to be treated as though we had not happened, there lies the sting of death. The thought of extinction offends our vanity; we had thought that we were of more consequence to the universe. It doesn't comfort us to be recalled impersonally in the mass, as the men who captured Vimy or thrust the Hun back from some dangerous objective. In the mass we shall go down through history, no doubt, but not as human beings—only as heroes. We would rather be recalled by our weaknesses—as so-and-so who loved a certain girl, who played a good hand of poker, who overdrew his bank-account. Out here, from the moment a man places foot in France, the anonymity of death commences. No one cares who he was in a previous world, what he did for a living, whether he was a failure or a success. None of his former virtues stand to his credit except as they contribute to his soldier-life of the present. None of us talk about our past; if we did, our company would yawn at us. Only the mail arriving at irregular intervals keeps us in knowledge that we once had other personalities. Letters are like ghosts of a world abandoned, tiptoeing through the dream of a sleeper. Between you and us there is a great gulf fixed——Not that we resent it. Someone has to pay a price for the future safety of the world; out of all the ages we have been chosen as the persons. There is nothing to resent,—quite the contrary. Only, now and then creeps in the selfish longing that we may be remembered not as soldiers, but as what we were—in our weakness as well as in our strength.

You're in a country place where I have not been and which I cannot picture. I hope you're all enjoying yourselves. There's no need to worry on my account.