Leaves in the Wind

by A. G. Gardiner

VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME

I

A soldier, whom I met in the train the other day, said that the most unpleasant thing in his experience of the war was the bodies which got caught in the barbed wire in No Man's Land, and had to be left corrupting in the sun. "It isn't healthy," he said. There was no affectation of bravado in the remark. He made it quite simply, as if he were commenting on the inclemency of the weather or the overheating of the carriage. It was not the tragedy of the thing that affected him, but its insanitariness. Yet he was obviously a kindly and humane man, and he talked of his home with the yearning of an exile. "It makes you think something of your home," he said, speaking of the war. "I shan't never want to leave my home when I get out of this, and I shan't never grumble at the missus again," he added, as though recalling the past.

I suppose everyone who has talked to soldiers back from the war has been struck by this attitude of mind towards death. I remember a friend of mine, who was afterwards killed in the first battle of the Somme while trying to save one of his men who had been wounded, telling me of the horror of the first days of his experience of war, and of the subsequent calm with which he saw a man who had been his friend blown to pieces by his side. "It is as though war develops another integument," he said. "Your sensibilities are atrophied. Your nerve ends are deadened. Your normal feelings perish, and you become a part of a machine that has no feelings—only functions."

In some measure the same phenomenon is apparent in the minds of most of us. There has not been since the Great Plague swept Europe 250 years ago such a harvesting of untimely death as we have witnessed during the last two and a half years. If the ghostly army of the slain were to file before you, passing in a rank of four for every minute that elapsed, you could sit and watch it day and night for five years without pause before the last of the phantom host had gone by. And if behind the dead there followed the maimed, blind, and mentally shattered, you could sit on for twenty years and still the end of the vast procession would not be in sight. If we had been asked three years ago whether the human mind could endure such a deliberate orgy of death in its most terrible form, we should have said the thing was incredible. Yet we live through it without revolt, clamour about the shortage of potatoes, crowd the cinemas to see the latest extravagance of Charlie Chaplin, and have forgotten to glance at the daily tale of dead that fills the obscure columns of the newspapers—such of them as trouble any longer to give that tale at all.

It is not merely that we avert our eyes from the facts. That is certainly done. You may go to see the "war pictures" at the cinema and come away without supposing that they represent anything more than a skilfully arranged entertainment—in which one attractive "turn" follows another in swift succession. Once they actually showed a man falling dead, and there was a cry of indignation at such an outrage. Ten millions have fallen dead, but we must not look on one to remind us of the reality behind this pictured imposture. There has never been a lie on the scale of these "war pictures" that leave out the war and all its sprawling ugliness, monotony, mutilation, and death.

But it is not this fact that explains our apparent indifference to the Red Harvest. We are like the dyer's hand. We are subdued to what we work in. Even those who have been directly stricken find that they bear the blow with a calm that astonishes themselves. We have got into a new habit of thought about death—in a sense a truer habit of thought. It used to be screened from the light of day, talked of in hushed voices, surrounded with the mystery and aloofness of a terrible divinity. It has come into the open, brutal, naked, violent. We accept it as the commonplace it is, instead of enveloping it in a cloud of tragic fear and strangeness. The heart seems steeled to the blows of fate, looks death steadily in the face, understands that the individual life is merged in issues more vast than this little tale of years that, at the most, is soon told.

It may be that, like the soldiers, our senses are only numbed by events, and that when we come out of the nightmare the old feelings will resume their sway. But it will be long before they recover their former tyranny over the mind. This generation has companioned Death too closely to see him again quite as the hooded terror of old. And that, I think, is a gain. I have always felt that Johnson's morbid attitude towards death was the weakest trait in a fine character, and that George Selwyn's perpetual absorption in the subject was a form of mental disease. Montaigne, too, lived with the constant thought of the imminence of death, so much so that if, when out walking, he remembered something he wanted done, he wrote down the request at once, lest he should not reach home alive. But he was quite healthy in his thought. It was not that he feared death, but that he did not want to be caught unawares.

In this, as in most things, Cæsar shone with that grand sanity that makes him one of the most illuminated secular minds in history. He neither sought death nor shunned it. When Hirtius and Pansa remonstrated with him for going unprotected by a bodyguard, he answered, "It is better to die once than always to go in fear of death." That is the common-sense attitude—as remote from the spirit of the miser as from that of the spendthrift. And that other comment of his on death is equally deserving of recall. He was dining the night before his murder at the house of Decimus Brutus, who had joined the conspiracy against him. As he sat dispatching his letters, the others talked of death and of that form of death which was preferable. One of the group asked Cæsar what death he would prefer. He looked up from his papers and said, "That which is least expected." This was not an old man's weariness of life such as that which made Lord Holland, the father of Charles James Fox, write to Selwyn: "And yet the man I envy most is the late Lord Chamberlain, for he is dead and he died suddenly." It was just the Roman courage that accepted death as an incident of the journey.

Of that high courage the end of Antoninus Pius is an immortal memory. As the Emperor lay dying in his tent the tribune of the night-watch entered to ask the watchword. "Æquanimitas," said Antoninus Pius, and with that last word he, in the language of the historian, "turned his face to the everlasting shadow."