Changing Winds / A Novel

by St. John G. Ervine

He planned a group of Young Irishmen, as he named them, to do for Ireland what Roger's Improved Tories had hoped to do for England. They could study the conditions of Irish elementary education; they could try to make a survey of Irish wealth in the hope of discovering the incidence of its distribution; they could make an enquiry into work and wages, and try to stimulate the growth of Trades Unionism. He could help to make opinion, to create a social consciousness, to establish a tradition of honourable service to the community.... There were a host of things he could do, valuable things, for Ireland, things that were not now being done by any one. He knew people in Dublin, Crews and Jordan and Saxon and men like them, who were of his mind and would work patiently at dull things in the hope of getting an ordered community. Railways! One had to get the Irish railways reorganised and grouped. If one could solve the problem of traffic, so that the East and West and North and South of Ireland would be as accessible to each other as the East and West and North and South of England, one would have made a large movement towards a better state....

That was what he would do. He would help to construct things, not to destroy them. He was not afraid to go to the war ... that was not the reason why he was resolving that he would refuse to be a soldier. It was because he could do better, finer work by living for Ireland than by dying for England. People throughout Europe were already perturbed at the waste of potential men in war ... wondering whether, after all, it was a wise thing to let rare men, men of unique gifts go to war. Was it really wise of England to let such a man as Gilbert Farlow, with the rare gift of comedy, be lost in that haphazard manner? Ninian had had the potentialities of a great engineer. Would it not have been wiser to have kept him to his railway-building than to have let him fall, as he fell, to the bullet of a sniper?... Already people were asking such questions as these. If he were to go out, and were to be killed, would they not say, "This man had gifts that marked him out from other men. We ought not to have wasted him!" Well, why should he be wasted? He was not afraid. He insisted that he was not afraid. It needed high courage to stand up and say, "I am a man of special gift and I will not let that gift be wasted in war!" That, in effect, was what he was preparing to do. People would speak behind his back ... speak even to his face ... and call him a coward! Well, let them do so....

3

But in his heart, he knew that he was afraid to go. Almost he deceived himself into believing that he was behaving well in refusing to join the Army so that he might devote himself more assiduously to Ireland and his work ... but not completely did he persuade himself. The fear of death was in him and he could not allay it. The fear of mutilation, of madness, of blindness, of shattered nerves sent him shuddering from the thought of offering himself as a soldier ... and mixed up with this devastating fear was a queer vanity that almost conquered the fear.

"If I were to go in, I might do something ... something distinguished!"

There were times when he gave himself up to dreams of glory, saw himself decorated with high awards for bravery. He would imagine himself performing some impossible act of courage ... saving an Army Corps from destruction ... showing resource in a period of crisis, and so bringing salvation where utter loss had seemed inevitable. But these times of glory were few and brief: he saw himself most often, killed ingloriously, inconspicuously, one of a crowd, blown, perhaps, to pieces or buried in bombarded earthworks; and through his dreams of glory and his plans for work in Ireland, there stubbornly thrust itself this accusation: I'm a coward! I'm a coward! I'm a coward!

In England, men were charging the queer people who called themselves Conscientious Objectors with cowardice, but the charge seemed a baseless one to Henry. He did not believe that he could endure the odium and obloquy which some of the Conscientious Objectors had borne. There was courage in the man who said, "I will fight for my country!" but that courage might be less than that of the man who said, "I will not fight for my country!" Henry was not a Conscientious Objector, nor could he understand the state of mind of the man who was. He was a coward. Inside him, he knew that he was a coward. Inside him, he accused himself of cowardice. Everything in his life showed that he was a coward, that he shrank from physical combats, from tests of courage, that sometimes he shrank from spiritual contests....

"I ought to tell Mary," he said to himself. "I can't marry her without telling her that I'm ... a funk!"

But he temporised even in this. "I'll wait a little while longer," he said. "Perhaps later on!..."

Always he wanted to thrust the unpleasant thing a little further off; It was as if he had said to himself, "I won't deal with it just yet ... and perhaps it won't need to be dealt with!"