The City of Comrades

by Basil King

As a matter of fact, self-consciousness had hardly embarrassed us through the night. There had been too much to think about and to do. The minute I had got Lovey into the living-room and on the couch I had run for Cantyre, and he had run back with me. In the stress of watching the old man’s struggle between life and death we felt toward our personal relations what one feels of an exciting play after returning to realities. We were back on the old terms; we called each other Stephen and Frank. Only now and then, when for a half-hour there was nothing to do but to sit by the bed and watch, did our minds revert to the actual between us.

That is, mine reverted to it, and I suppose his did the same. How he thought of it I cannot tell you; but to me it seemed infinitely trifling. Here was a dying man whose half-lighted spirit was standing on the threshold of a fully lighted world. One might have said that the radiance of the life on which he was entering already shone in the tenderness that began to dawn in the delicate old face. It was a face growing younger, as for two or three years it had grown more spiritual. I saw that now and did justice to it as something big. It was on the level of big things; and love-affairs between men and women were only on the level of the small.

And all over the world big things of the same sort were taking place, some in the sharp flash of an instant, and some as the slow result of years. I had seen so much of it with my own eyes that I could call up vision after vision as I sat alone in the gray morning, watching the soft, sweet pall settle on the old man’s countenance, while Cantyre took his bath.

Queerly, out of the unrecorded, or out of what I didn’t suppose I had recorded, there flashed a succession of pictures, all of them of the big, the splendid, the worth while. They came inconsequently, without connection with each other, without connection that I could see with the moment I was living through, beyond the fact that they were all on the scale of the big.

There was the recollection of a khaki-clad figure lying face downward on a hillside. I approached him from below, catching sight first of the soles of the huge boots on which he would never walk again. Coming nearer, I saw his arms outstretched above his head and his nails dug into the earth. He was bleeding from the ears. But when I bent over him to see if he was still alive he said, almost roughly:

“Leave me alone! I can get along all right. Jephson’s over there.”

I left him alone because there was nothing I could do for him, but when I went to Jephson he was lying on his back, his knees drawn up, and his face twisted into the strangest, most agonized, most heavenly and ecstatic smile you can imagine on a human face.

Then there was a young fellow running at the head of his platoon, a slim young fellow with flaxen hair and a face like a bright angel’s, who had been a crack sprinter at McGill. He was long after my time, of course; but I had known his family, and since being in the neighborhood of Ypres I had seen him from time to time. He was not made for a soldier, but a brave young soldier he had become, surmounting fear, repulsion, and all that was hideous to a sensitive soul like his, and establishing those relations with his men that are dearer in many ways than ties of blood. The picture I retain, and which came back to me now, is of his running while his men followed him. It was so common a sight that I would hardly have watched it if it had been any one but him. And then, for no reason evident to me, just as if it was part of the order of the day, he threw up his arms, tottered on a few steps, and went tumbling in the mud, face downward.

With the rapidity of a cinema the scene changed to something else I had witnessed. It was the day I got my dose of shrapnel in the foot. Lying near me was a colonel named Blenkins. Farther off there lay a sergeant in his regiment named Day. Day had for Blenkins the kind of admiration that often exists between man and officer for which there is no other name than worship. Slowly, painfully, dying, the non-com. dragged himself over the scarred ground and laid his head on the dying colonel’s heart. Painfully, slowly, the dying colonel’s hand stole across the dying non-com.’s breast; and in this embrace they slept.

Other memories of the same sort came back to me, disconnected, having no reference to Lovey, or Cantyre, or Regina, or the present, beyond the fact that they came out of the great life of which comradeship was a token and the watchwords rang with generosity.