Living Bayonets: A Record of the Last Push

by Coningsby Dawson

XLVI

France May 18, 1918

This is the third day that I have planned to write you. Perhaps I may be able to do so this time.

I have just been reading a letter from a nurse out in Palestine describing the little wooden crosses above fallen British soldiers which now star the Mount of Olives. The poetry of the ordinary crops out everywhere to-day; we are living on higher levels than we realize. For hundreds of years the future generations will weave legends round us, making us appear titanic spirit-people, just as we have clothed with almost unearthly splendour the Crusaders of the Dark Ages.

This is a pleasant May evening. The fields are golden with buttercups. Above the singing of the birds I can hear a low droning as of bees among flowers; but the droning is of homing aeroplanes. This is the kind of weather and country in which it would not be unbeautiful to die.

When I went down this morning to the barn in which my section is stationed, I found notice printed on the door, on either side a British and American flag-and underneath a luridly illustrated Sunday magazine selection of extracts from The Glory of the Trenches. A small world, isn't it?

I have been reading a book lately that would interest you; it's by Ford Madox Hueffer and is called On Heaven. It consists of a number of poems written while on active service. He's managed to put down in a rough and tumble of words a good many of our hungers and adorations. I hadn't realized before I read him how very much of the conversation of our soldiers is an exchange of confidences about the women they love or have loved. I believe every man at the Front has a hope of the girl he will be true to some day, and a fear lest——

One of Hueffer's poems on the subject is very beautiful. It starts this way:

“In Chepstow stands a castle;

My love and I went there;

The foxgloves on the wall all heard

Her footsteps on the stair.

The sun was high in heaven

And the perfume in the air

Came from purple cat's valerian—

But her footsteps on the stair

Made a sound like silver music

Thro' the perfume in the air.”

The last verse sums up the dread of many a fighting-man—that all his dreams are only dreams, and that a return to reality may disappoint him:

“And another soldier fellow

Shall come courting of my dear.

And it's I shall not be with her

With my lip beside her ear.

For it's he shall walk beside her

In the perfume of the air

To the silver, silver music

Of her footstep on the stair.”

All the world's idealists are in the trenches by now. What a shining cloud of imaginings must rise up to the Soul which lies behind the world. God must be amazed to find that horror can make His obstinate creations so simple and childlike. Here are millions of us who once thought only of our social and individual bellies, now thinking only of the unborn children and the things of the spirit. All the fond and dear accepted affections have become a kind of heaven that lies in the past instead of the future. If we die we don't want any heaven that isn't a re-living of the old happy memories.

I find that Hueffer expresses a feeling that many of us have secretly, but which I have never heard any man acknowledge—the feeling that all the remainder of his days he will have to be explaining if he comes to the end of the war alive—almost the feeling that he will have lost his great chance of nobility by not dying. Hueffer's poem is called One Day's List; it's a list of three officers and 270 other ranks of his regiment who were killed in action. It commences:

“My dears,

The rain drips down on Rouen Town,

The leaves drip down

And so the mud

Turns orange brown.”

And it has for its refrain

“But you—at least—are out of it.”

It goes on to tell of the officers who fell, and repeats the reflection which we all have when we gaze on the dead at the end of an attack and know that we ourselves have escaped:

“One wonders why you died.”

And then,

“We never talked of glory,

And each thought a lot of one girl

And waited most days for hours in the rain

Till she came:

But we never talked of Fame——”

And lastly, addressing the dead,

“But we who remain shall grow old,

We shall know the cold

Of cheerless

Winter and the rain of Autumn and the sting

Of poverty, of love despised and of disgraces,

And mirrors showing stained and ageing faces,

And the long ranges of comfortless years

And the long gamut of human fears—

But, for you, it shall be for ever Spring,

And only you shall be for ever fearless,

And only you have white, straight, tireless limbs,

And only you, where the water-lily swims

Shall walk along the pathways, thro' the willows

Of your west.

You who went west,

And only you on silvery twilight pillows

Shall take your rest

In the soft sweet glooms,

Of twilight rooms——”

There's the whole of our one and only cowardice in a nut-shell—that we, who have posed as conquerors for a while, will, if we survive, return to the normal things of life to find our spirits unexalted and the commonplace still commonplace.

Out here, where there are corpses in the thistles and “the gas-shells burst like snow,” we can talk of “the silver, silver music of her footsteps on the stair,” but we're mortally afraid that in less exultant moments, when the heart is not so starved for affection, we shall discover that the “silver music” is only the irritating sound of squeaky shoes.

I can't hear from you again for at least six days—a long time to wait! I can't be bothered nowadays to let the mail-clerk sort out the letters: I grab the bag and go through it myself.

There may be an interval between this letter and those that follow. If there is, don't worry yourselves. It is not possible to find the time or place to write under all circumstances.