“Stick it, men! Stick it! Only for life! Stick it!”
Only for life—how many years! In the year only three hundred and sixty-five awakenings; only all those returns from merciful sleep!
“Stick it, men! Stick it!”
Totally disabled—incurably helpless! No! One can’t realize what it feels like to be caught young and strong in such a net; to be caught—not for your own folly and excesses, not through accident or heredity, but as reward for giving yourself body and soul to your country. Better so, more easily borne; and yet how much more ironically tragic!
Who knows what the freedom of limbs means, till he has lost it? Who can measure the ecstasy of vigour, till every power of movement has been cut off? Who really grasps what it’s like to lie like a log dependent for everything on others, save those who have to? Think of the trout in the streams, of the birds of the air, the winged creatures innumerable, think of each beast and creeping thing—can one even imagine them without movement? Men, also, are meant to be free of their world, masters of their limbs and senses.
They who lie helpless are no longer quite bodies, for the essence of body is movement; already they are almost spirits. It is as if, in passing, one looked at minds, nearly all in the heyday of consciousness and will.
Sometimes I vaguely fancy that after violent death a man’s spirit may go on clinging above the earth just so long as his normal life would have run; that a spirit rived before its time wanders till such date as consciousness would have worn itself out in the body’s natural death. If that random fancy were true, we to-day would all be passing among unseen crowds of these rived spirits, watching us, without envy perhaps, being freer than ourselves. But those who lie hopelessly disabled, having just missed that enfranchisement, are tied to what still exists, and yet in truth has died already. Of all men they have the chance to prove the mettle of the human soul—that mysterious consciousness capable of such heights and depths; no, not a greater chance than men tortured by long solitary confinement, or even than those who through excess or through heredity lie for ever helpless—but yet so great a chance that they are haloed for all of us happier ones, who are free of our limbs and our lives. Some among those prisoned spirits must needs shrink and droop, and become atrophied in the long helplessness of a broken body. But many will grow finer; according to their natures—some pursuing the ideal of recompense in another world; some, in the stoic belief that serenity and fortitude are the fine flowers of life, unconsciously following the artist’s creed—that to make a perfect thing, even if it be only of his own spirit, is in itself all the reward.
Whichever it be, slow decay or slow perfecting, we others approach them with heads bowed, in as great reverence as we give to the green graves of our brave dead. And if pity—that pity which to some, it seems, is but ignoble weakness—be not driven from this earth, then with pity we shall nerve our resolve that never shall anything be lacking to support or comfort those who gave all for us and are so broken by their sacrifice.
As I write the sun is hot for the first time this year, and above the snow spring is in the air. Under Richmond Hill the river will be very bright, winding among trees not yet green. And the helpless who are lying there already will be thinking “I shall never walk under trees again—nor by a riverside.”
If one dwells too much on the miseries this world contains, there must come a moment when one will say: “Life’s not worth living; I will end it!” But by some dispensation few of us reach that point—too sanely selfish, or saved by the thought that we must work to reduce the sum of misery.