I was not reading: I was listening to the incessant murmur that came from far away across the Medway, across the garden of England, and across the Channel and the flats of Flanders. That sound came from Picardy. All day the insistent throb had been in the air; sometimes faint bumps were clearly distinguishable, at other times it was nothing but one steady vibration. But always it was there, that distant growl, that insistent mutter. Even in this perfect peace, I could not escape the War.
To-day I felt completely well; the lassitude and inertness of convalescence were gone—at any rate, for the moment. My mind was very clear, and I could think surely and rapidly. The cats reminded me of the lusty family that lived in the cellar in the Cuinchy trenches, and the murmur of the guns drew my thoughts across the Channel. I tried to imagine trenches running across the lawn, with communication trenches running back to a support line through the meadow; a few feet of brick wall would be all that would be left of the house, and this would conceal my snipers; the mulberry tree would long ago have been razed to the ground, and every scrap of it used as firewood in our dug-outs; this deck chair of mine might possibly be in use in Company Headquarters in one of the cellars. No, it was not easy to imagine war without seeing it.
I picked up the paper that had fallen at my side. There had been more terrible fighting on the Somme, and it had seemed very marvellous to a journalist as he lay on a hill some two miles back, and watched through his field-glasses: it was wonderful that the men advancing (if indeed he could really see them at all in the smoke of a heavy artillery barrage) still went on, although their comrades dropped all round them. Yet I wondered what else anyone could do but go on? Run back, with just as much likelihood of being shot in doing so? Or, even if he did get back, to certain death as a deserter? Everyone knows the safest place is in a trench; and it is a trench you are making for. Lower down on the page came a description of the wounded; he had talked to so many of them, and they were all smiling, all so cheerful; smoking cigarettes and laughing. They shook their fists, and shouted that the only thing they wanted to do was to get back into it! Pah! I threw the paper down in disgust. Surely no one wants to read such stuff, I thought. Of course the men who were not silent, in a dull stupefied agony, were smiling: what need to say that a man with a slight wound was laughing at his luck, just as I had smiled that early morning when the trolley took me down from Maple Redoubt? And who does not volunteer for an unpleasant task, when he knows he cannot possibly get it? Want to get back into it, indeed! Ask Tommy ten years hence whether he wants to be back in the middle of it again!
I wondered why people endured such cheap journalism. What right had men who have never seen war at all, who creep up on bicycles to get a glimpse of it through telescopes, who pester wounded men, and then out of their pictorial imagination work up a vivid description—what right have they to insult heroes by saying that “their wonderful spirit makes up for it all,” that “the paramount impression is one of glory”? Are not our people able to bear the truth, that war is utterly hellish, that we do not enjoy it, that we hate it, hate it, hate it all? And then it struck me how ignorant people still were; how uncertainly they spoke, these people at home: it was as though they dared not think things out, lest what they held most dear should be an image shattered by another point of view.
Somehow people were amazed at the cheerfulness, the doggedness, the endurance under pain, the indifference to death, shown every minute during this war. I thought of the men whom I had seen in hospital. One man had had his right foot amputated; it used to give me agony to see his stump dressed every day. Another man had both legs amputated above the knees. Yet they were so wonderfully cheerful, so apparently content with life! As though alone in the blackness of night they did not long for the activity denied them for the rest of their life. As though their cheerfulness—(do not think I belittle its heroism)—as though their cheerfulness justified the thing!
Another thing I had noticed. An old man told me he was so struck with the heroism, the courage, the indifference to death, shown by the ordinary unromantic man. Some men had been converted, too, their whole lives changed, their vices eradicated, by this war. So much good was coming from it. People, too, at home were so changed, so sobered; they were looking into the selfishness of their lives at last. Again I thought, as though all that justified the thing!
Oh! you men and women who did not know before the capabilities of human nature, I thought, please take note of it now; and after the war do not underestimate the quality of mankind. Did it need a war to tell you that a man can be heroic, resolute, courageous, cheerful, and capable of sacrifice? There were those who could have told you that before this war.
There was a lull in the vibration. I turned in my chair, and listened. Then it began again.
“People are afraid to think it out,” I said. “I have not seen the Somme fighting, but I know what war is. Its quality is not altered by multiplication or intensity. The colour of life-blood is a constant red. Let us look into this business; let us face all the facts. Let us not flinch from any aspect of the truth.”
And my thoughts ran somewhat as follows: