The City of Comrades

by Basil King

But all my personal desire was not to be of their number. Had I been married before the war I should have been as they; but since I was free to espouse the cause which had become mistress of everything I was I wanted to espouse it.

I thought I had espoused it. I had considered myself bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. During my months of fighting it had been a satisfaction to think of myself as at liberty to make any sacrifice of limb or life, and leave no heart to bewail me, no eye to shed a tear, and no care to spring up behind me. My family would be content to say, “Poor old Frank, he did his duty!” Further than that, I should bring no regret to any heart but Lovey’s; and of him I was persuaded that if I went he wouldn’t wait long after me. Moreover, I had guarded against any too great misfortune overtaking him by providing for him in my will.

I must own, furthermore, to another misgiving: I was not too sure of myself from the point of view of the old failing.

Things had happened in the trenches—they had dosed me with brandy, whisky, rum, any restorative that came handy, on a number of occasions—and there had been something within me as ready to be waked as a tiger to the taste of blood. I can say truthfully enough that I had never yielded to the desire of my own deliberate act; but I must also say truthfully that I was by no means sure that one day I might not do so. We had talked often enough, as men with men, of what we called a moral moratorium—and the talk haunted me with all manner of suggestions. The ban on what is commonly called sin was to be lifted for the period of the war; and we who had to deny ourselves so much were not to deny ourselves anything that came easily within our grasp. It seemed an alluring condition, and one which, without waiting for the license of supreme war councils or the permission of the Church, each of us was tempted to inaugurate for himself. In a situation in which that which is born of the flesh is flauntingly before one’s eyes, and millions of men are thrown together as flesh and little more, appetite has its mouth wide open. That man was strong indeed who could ignore this yearning of the body; and that man was not I.

So again the consciousness of freedom was like a reserve fund to a corporation. It was something on which to fall back if everything else was swept away. I didn’t want to go to the devil; but if I went no one would suffer but myself, as no one would suffer but myself if a German sniper were to blow the top off my head. Mind you, I am not saying that I came back morally weakened from the war; I only came back with a sense that one man’s life or death—one man’s ruin or salvation—was of no more account than the fate of a roadside bit of jewel-weed amid the infinite seed-time and harvest of the year. I was inured to loss of all kinds on a stupendous scale. I had seen thousands blown to pieces beside me, and my mind had not turned aside to regret them; thousands would see me blown to pieces with the same indifference as to whether I lived or died. Callousness as to the life and death of others induces callousness as to one’s own; and compared to life and death, what is the control of a mere appetite? No; I was not morally weakened; but I was morally benumbed. There was a kind of moral moratorium in my consciousness. I repeat that I wasn’t practically making use of it; but I was in a period of suspense in which I admitted to myself that it might depend on circumstances whether I made use of it or not.

And if I did, and if I was married....

From the sheer possibility my mind turned in dismay. To the celibacy made urgent by a purpose I added the celibacy necessitated by a curse. As the one counseled me not to involve myself with anybody else, so the other warned me not to involve anybody else with me. Through warning and counsel I had kept myself in something like a state of serenity till now.

It was a state of serenity with just one dominating impulse—to get back among the comrades with whom I had already found shelter. Whatever I had that could be called a homing instinct was bound for the house in Vandiver Street. There had been times when I thought I had outlived that phase, times when what seemed like a new and higher companionship, with a new and higher place in the world and in men’s esteem, half persuaded me that I was so little the waster in fact and the criminal in possibility that the Down and Out was no more to me than a sloughed skin to the creature that has thrown it off. But I always waked from this pleasant fancy to see myself as in essentials the same gaunt, tattered, hungry fellow who had come with his buddy to beg a meal and a bed of the Poor Brothers of the Order of Pity, who never refused any homeless, besotted man. No matter what battles I fought, what medals I won, what banquets I was asked to sit down at, my place was among them; and among them I hoped to do my work. They were all American citizens, with as much weight, when it came to the franchise, as the moneyed potentates of Wall Street. As being not only my brethren, but a nucleus of public opinion as well, I had had no other vision before me for my return than that of sharing their humble refreshments and talk, together with that blind, desperate, devoted fraternity which made a city of refuge of the home that had once been Miss Smedley’s.

And since coming on board that vision was threatened by another—one in which I saw myself moving amid compliments and flowers and polite conventions, in all the entangling convolutions of the silken net. Whether it would be with or without love was, in my state of mind, beside the mark. Love had ceased to be, for the time being, at any rate, the ruling factor in a man’s decisions about himself. There was a moratorium of love, let there be one of morals or not. “I’ve got to,” had been the reply to love made by twenty millions of men all over the world, either under compulsion or of their own free will; and women had accepted the answer valiantly.