Living Bayonets: A Record of the Last Push

by Coningsby Dawson

LV

France June 23, 1918

Here I sit on a summer's evening in the red-tiled kitchen of an old farmhouse. Immediately under the open window to my right is the inevitable manure-heap—the size of which, they say, denotes the extent of the farmer's wealth. Barn-roofs, ochre-red, shine vividly in the pale gold of the sunset; at the end of the yard the walls fall away, giving the glimpse of an orchard with gnarled, lichen-covered fruit-trees. All kinds of birds are twittering and singing; house-swallows dart and dive across open spaces. In the distance the guns are booming. War affords one strange contrasts of sight and sound. Not many of the peasants have moved away; they have great faith in the Canadians. Every now and then a forlorn group will come trailing down the road between the hedges: an old tumbledown cart, drawn by an old tumble-down horse, piled and pyramided dangerously high with old tumble-down furniture. The people who accompany the vehicle are usually ancient and tumbledown as well. They make me recall someone's description of the Irish emigrants on the St. Lawrence, travelling with “ragged poverty on their backs.” In contrast with these few straggling fugitives, hounded by avaricious fear, is the calm of a country billowy with grain and sociable with the grinning contentment of quite-at-home British Tommies. Everything in their attitude seems to assure the French peasant, “Don't worry, old dear. We're here. Everything's all right.” From barns and houses and bivouacs come the sounds of gramophones, playing selections from quite the latest musical comedies. If you wander back into the fields you will find horsemen going over the jumps, men playing baseball and cricket, officers getting excited over tennis. We even held our Divisional Sports the other day—and this in the midst of the war's greatest offensive. This “'Arf a mo', Kaiser,” attitude of the Canadians would give you some idea of the esteem in which we hold the Hun. Our backs are not against the wall. We still have both the time and the inclination to be sportsmen and to laugh. I'm sure the enemy, grimly obsessed by the idea of breaking our line, never allows himself a moment for recreation, and I should think his balloon-observers, spying on us from the baskets of his distant sausages, must be very chagrined by our frivolity. The papers say, and very probably they're right, that German strategists are far ahead of those possessed by the Allies; but our men have learnt a trick worth all the strategy—they have learnt to laugh both in success and adversity. In this war, I believe we shall find that he who has acquired the habit of a light heart will do the laughing last. I should very much like to know how many gramophones travel with the German Tommies; hardly any, I'll bet. They have their bands with their patriotic music, keeping always before the men the singleness of their purpose. The singleness of their purpose tires them out. On our side of the line patriotism is the last thing you hear about. Thank God, we've got time to forget it.

Whenever I start trying to explain to you the psychology of our fighting-men I'm always conscious that, even while I'm telling you the absolute truth, with the same words I'm creating a wrong impression. Fighting-men aren't magnificent most of the time; they're not idealists; they're not heroic. Very often they're petty and cynical and cowards. They're only magnificent and idealistic and heroic in the decision that brought them here, and in the last supreme moment when they bring their decision to fulfilment.

In a letter I received from Paris the other day the puzzle of the modern soldier was very well expressed. “I don't believe,” it said, “I will ever get used to the courage of the men who go on and on with this terrible game. I'm thinking more now of the French and the British soldiers, who are mended up only to go at it again. I never can get used to it or take it as a matter of course. When I think for a minute how it hurts to have a tooth filled, I wonder that all the armies of the world don't get up and run away from each other of one accord—every one who isn't a hero or a fool, that's to say.”

When I think over the problem calmly I have the same wonder. The problem was so neatly expressed that I read the passage out to the mess. They stopped in a round of poker to listen. “Well, which are we,” I asked; “heroes or fools?” “Fools,” they said unanimously, and then went on playing their hands again. They're right; we are fools. We're certainly not heroes. We're fools for a kind of kingdom of heaven's sake—but we don't act like the heaven part of it any more than we talk about our patriotism. Any mention of either would make us shudder.

I wonder what motive brought the heathen Chinee to the Western Front. I've been told that he came that he might buy food for his family, because there's a famine in China. Maybe. His bronze face stares up into ours from out the green-gold of the standing wheat—stares up into ours with the inscrutable gaze of an age-old Buddha. He's the one human being on the Western Front who neither by acts nor words explains his nobility. Nobility there must have been to induce him to come; no reasoning creature would have jeopardized his body out of lust.

Last night I rode beneath a full white moon for miles through the standing crops. I only struck a road to cross it and say good-bye to it—then on and on with the soft swish of the swelling stalks against my stirrups. Shall we recall our old panics and delights if we live to reach normality again? Will normality satisfy? Shall we be content to know that all the hoard of the future years is ours? In a word, shall we ever again desire to be safe? Questions which none of us can answer!