South of Peronne, hardly a week ago, we gave a lift to four refugee peasant-women, trudging heavily back to their homes. Two weeks before some German cavalry had swept suddenly into their small village. Ten men had been ordered to go with them, the husbands of two of the women, the sons of two others. They had disappeared in the shadow, and not one had returned. We reached the outlying cottage of the first. Some small skirmish had raged there. The house was half destroyed, and three or four dead horses lay grotesquely rotting on the field. The woman stood for a moment unmoved, and then turned to a neighbour: "War has taken my sons, and has left me these."
Four days ago a French soldier of the line stopped me just south of Vic-sur-Aisnes. He was hobbling back from the trenches, wounded in the knee. He was clearly half stupid with fatigue and the detonation of the days of firing. He kept repeating to himself, over and over again: "I cannot remember: there were five, all killed near me; and three said to tell somebody a message, before they died. I cannot remember what it was, or who they were. I cannot remember: there were five——" and so over again. These were the last messages out of the edge of the shadow, and they were lost. But there would always be the discs. Better that the details should not come. There would then be still the chance of imagining some heroic setting of death.
We may well remember that such death is heroic, whatever its loneliness or its revolting circumstances. But let us borrow no false colour from an imaginary pomp and circumstance in war itself. It is dissolution and the end of hope that is hidden in the cloud. In England we are happily still free to interpret the obscurity according to our fancy, to picture death in battle as somehow not death. For those who have moved by the edge of the shadow there is no illusion left. The cloud shifts from village to village, from week to week, only to let us see in its track nature outraged, emotion degraded, humanity defaced.
We have chosen war, and must follow it to its undiscriminating end. Let us see to it that it is for the last time.
Arms and the Man
There must be no misunderstanding. We may condemn the futility of the appeal to arms as the ultimate method of arbitriment between civilised beings; we can have nothing but whole-hearted admiration for the man who has answered the appeal.
Civilisation, if it means anything, has meant the development of the sense of humour. It was the gradual realisation of an absurd disconnection between seeing a man scowling, and clubbing the life out of him so that he should see no more, and between hearing his insults, and depriving him for all time of hearing, that brought primitive man out of savagery. The same discovery, of its incongruity put an end to the duel among us. Our German opponents have always been behind us in this, in civilisation, in the sense of humour. It is with a feeling of disgust as much as of anger that we find our civilisation cannot save us from being dragged down to the level of savage brawling.