A Sheaf

by John Galsworthy

§ 3.

Because pens lie unused, or are but feebly wielded over the war, they would have us believe that modern literature has been found wanting. “Look,” they say, “how nobly the Greek and the Elizabethan pens rhymed the epic struggles of their ages. What a degenerate, nerveless creature is this modern pen! See how it fails when put to the touchstone of great events and the thrilling realities of war!” I think this is nonsense. The greatest pens of the past were strangers to the glamour of war. Euripides made it the subject of a dirge; Shakespeare of casual treatment; Cervantes of his irony. They were in advance of the feeling of their day about war; but now their feeling has become that of mankind at large; and the modern pen, good, bad, or indifferent, follows—longo intervallo—their prevision of war’s downfalling glory. In the words of a certain officer, war is now “damn dull, damn dirty, and damn dangerous.” The people of Britain, and no doubt of the other countries—however bravely they may fight—are fighting not because they love it, not because it is natural to them, but because—alas!—they must. This makes them the more heroic since the romance of war for them is past, belonging to cruder stages of the world’s journey.

In our consciousness to-day there is a violent divorce between our admiration for the fine deeds, the sacrifices, and heroisms of this war, and our feeling about war itself. A shadowy sense of awful waste hangs over it all in the mind of the simplest soldier as in that of the subtlest penman. It may be real that we fight for our conceptions of liberty and justice; but we feel all the time that we ought not to have had to fight, that these things should be respected of the nations; that we have grown out of such savagery; that the whole business is a kind of monstrous madness suddenly let loose on the world. Such feelings were never in the souls of ordinary men, whether soldiers or civilians, in the days of Elizabeth or Themistocles. They fought, then, as a matter of course. In those so-called heroic ages “the thrilling realities of war” were truly the realities of life and feeling. To-day they are but a long nightmare. We have discovered that man is a creature slowly, by means of thought and life and art, evolving from the animal he was into the human being he will be some day, and in that desperately slow progression sloughing off the craving for physical combat and the destruction of his fellow-man. This process does not apparently mean the loss of stoicism and courage, but rather the increase thereof, as millions in this war, after the most peaceful century in the world’s history, have proved. But we are a few paces farther on toward the fully evolved human being than were the compatriots of Themistocles or Elizabeth.

The true realities of to-day lie in peace. The great epic of our time is the expression of man’s slow emergence from the blood-loving animal he was. To that great epic the modern pen has long been consecrate, and is not likely to betray its trust.

§ 4.

One day we read in our journals how an enemy Socialist or Pacifist has raised his voice against the mob passions and war spite of his country, and we think: “What an enlightened man!” And the next day, in the same journals, we read that So-and-so has done the same thing in our own country, and we think: “My God! He ought to be hung!” To-day we listen with enthusiasm to orations of our statesmen about the last drop of our blood, and the last pennies in our purses, and we think: “That is patriotism!” To-morrow we read utterance by enemy notables about arming the cats and dogs, and exclaim: “What truculent insanity!” We learn on Monday that some disguised fellow-countryman has risked his life to secure information from the heart of the enemy’s country, and we think: “That was real courage!” And on Tuesday our bile rises at discovering that an enemy has been arrested in our midst for espionage, and we think: “The dirty spy!” Our blood boils on Wednesday at hearing of the scurvy treatment of one of ourselves resident in the enemy’s country. And on Thursday we read of the wrecking by our mob of aliens’ shops, and think: “Well, what could they expect, belonging to that nation!” When one of our regiments has defended itself with exceptional bravery, and inflicted great loss on the enemy, we justly call it heroism. When some enemy regiment has done the same, we use the word ferocity. The comic papers of the enemy guy us, and we think: “How childish!” Ours guy the enemy, and we cry: “Ah! that’s good!” Our enemies use a hymn of hate, and we despise them for it. We do our hate in silence, and feel ourselves the better for the practice.

Shall we not rather fight our fight, and win it, without these little ironies?

§ 5.

The first thing he does when he comes down each morning is to read his paper, and the moment he has finished breakfast he sticks the necessary flags into his big map. He began to do that very soon after the war broke out, and has never missed a day. It would seem to him almost as if peace had been declared, and the universe were suddenly unbottomed, if any morning he omitted to alter slightly three flags at least. What will he do when the end at last is reached, and he can no longer tear the paper open with a kind of trembling avidity; no longer debate within himself the questions of strategy, and the absorbing chances of the field, when he has, in fact, to sweep his flags into a drawer and forget they ever were? It would haunt him, if he thought of it. But sufficient unto his day is the good thereof. Yes! It has almost come to that with him; though he will still talk to you of “this dreadful war,” and never alludes to the days as “great” or to the times as “stirring” as some folk do. No, he sincerely believes that he is distressed beyond measure by the continuance of “the abominable business,” and would not confess for worlds that he would miss it, that it has become for him a daily “cocktail” to his appetite for life. It is not he, after all, who is being skinned; to the skinning of other eels the individual eel is soon accustomed. By proxy to be “making history,” to be witnessing the “greatest drama” known to man since the beginning of the world—after all it is something! He will never have such a chance again. He still remembers with a shudder how he felt the first weeks after war was declared; and the mere fact that he shudders shows that his present feelings are by no means what they were. After all, one cannot remain for ever prepossessed with suffering that is not one’s own, or with fears of invasion indefinitely postponed. True, he has lost a nephew, a second cousin, the sons of several friends. He has been duly sorry, duly sympathetic, but then, he was not dangerously fond of any of them. His own son is playing his part, and he is proud of it. If the boy should be killed he will feel poignant grief, but even then there is revenge to be considered. His pocket is suffering, but it is for the Country; and that almost makes it a pleasure. And he goes on sticking in his flags in spots where the earth is a mush of mangled flesh, and the air shrill with the whir of shells, the moans of dying men, and the screams of horses.

Is this pure fantasy, or does it hold a grain of truth?