Death of a Hero (3 page)

Apart from diplomatic and journalistic bunk, has anyone a clear idea of why the War was fought, and what issues were settled by it?

July 1914 saw a crisis of international fear of the most abject kind. Everybody was afraid of everybody else, and plunged into War as a refuge from ignominious fear. Each group thought it was defending itself from the aggression of the other group.

“La Patrie est en danger”, said the French. “That beleaguered fortress, our Fatherland”, said the Germans. “British honour”, said the English.

What really has been proved? The utter absurdity of the nationalist idea – largely an English creation. The serious deterioration of civil liberty. The Russian Revolution. The shattering of the prestige of the white races. Immense economic disorders. The shifting of war to the
economic plane, with tariffs as the weapon. And further, the disappearance of the British hegemony.

Thus, the War of 1914-18 was not a mere episode, but a gigantically important event which influences everyone's life. To ignore it is simply playing the giddy ostrich.

The War was not a sudden misfortune sprung upon an innocent world. I am convinced that it was the inevitable result of the life which preceded it. The same sort of life still goes on. Inevitably that must lead to another similar contest – despite peace conferences, which are mostly blague – and, with modern weapons, that means mutual destruction. Napoo, fini. And that means you as well as me and the Class of 1920.

If these things are thus, it is not surprising that people should take an interest in records of those years.

Finally – this is perhaps specious – it was “our” little war. There won't be another one like it. The next one will be much worse. Although the young are powerfully bored by the subject, it seems an elementary duty to give warning of what may be expected by them if they do not immediately dispose of any government which meditates a similar display of heroism, in others.

II

However, perhaps this is too elevated for human nature's daily food. One may consider more fruitfully, perhaps,
how
those experiences may be organised into works of art.

My own feeling is that the War books are not works of art at all, and that is why they are and will be read. In literature you have the pure work of art (Mallarmé) and the “document” (war diaries,
fails divers
, archives). Both remain the province of specialists. What survives is journalism– i.e. the written word intended for a special and temporary purpose, which continues to interest people either by its universal application or by some special excellence in expression. Nobody writes for posterity if he can interest his own time. Conversely, those who fail
to interest their own time generally stand a poor chance with posterity. (There are always exceptions.) I think of “Homer”, composed by indigent rhapsodists for stewed goat and turpentine—flavoured wine; Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, butchered to make an Athenian holiday; Virgil, flattering Augustus for a farm; Lucretius, explaining the “new” philosophy; the Gospels, penny tracts for social revolutionaries; St. Augustine, masturbating in public; the troubadours, after someone else's wife; the trouvères, after someone else's money; Mr. William Shakespeare, popular dramatist and theatrical impresario; Dean Swift, pamphleteer; Monsieur de Voltaire, pamphleteer; J.J. Rousseau, citizen of Geneva, pamphleteer; Dr. Samuel Johnson, gasbag; The Reverend Lawrence Sterne, getting away from the barbarity of a Yorkshire prebendary. “Art” is a 19th century superstition. A bas Flaubert, and his faithless Achates, Ford Madox Ford,
né
Hueffer. The writers for posterity, the “great artists,” were Callimachus, Lycophron, Ausonius, Guido Cavalcanti, Andrea Navagero, the “Arcadians,” Voiture, Philothée O'Neddy and Mr. Walter Pater…

There was, however, a man called Charles Dickens, who began life by sticking labels on tins of blacking, was promoted to junior reporting, and discovered he had a knack of observing the life of his times.

Twenty-four hours of Dublin in June, 1904, have made James Joyce immortal. So to speak.

Remarque and Markovits have put down something of the life of their time.

III

The great danger for the “War novelists” is not their literary inexperience, but the influence of the professional novelists. I have read “No More Parades.” It is poppycock, pure bunk, told with superb virtuosity. A man who can write as brilliantly as that should be put into an Artists' Aquarium. But the matter of the book is false and silly egotism. Contrast it with Herbert Read's “In Retreat,” a magnificently sincere work, written before he became involved in Bloomsbury
foolery and writing for posterity and one hypothetical intelligent reader. The last page of “In Retreat” is terrific, unforgettable, masterly. I have read it twenty times, and always with respect and admiration. Well, “In Retreat” was written as a sort of report of the March defeat. I shall be immensely surprised if Read, on his present track, ever does anything one half as good. A potentially great writer gone phut, through self-consciousness.

But contemporary English “intelligentsia” are a rotten influence on anyone.

What I am struggling to express is this. The “War writer,” if he is sincere, is trying to convey essential experiences, essential human nature as revealed in those experiences, without references to the “artistic” standards of the writers for posterity. Put it he is a mere reporter. But the War “document,” the diaries, the note-books, the field-service messages, are only intelligible to those who were in the experience, and can interpret it. Recently, in clearing out old papers, I found a Field Service Message book with duplicates of my messages during a battle. Most of them were merely map references: M 2 a 35 72. M 2 b 20 35. Incomprehensible even to me after ten years. Others were: “Intense gas and H. E. bombardment on Hop and Hokey ack ack ack sending casualties via Hurdle.” Or: “Tell those bloody batteries to get off Hop M 2 c 35 75 – M 2 c 95 15.” Or: “Half water ration sent up in uncleaned petrol tins ack ack ack undrinkable ack ack ack please inform immediately if other tins available ack ack ack urgent end of message.”

Obviously, this sort of thing is unintelligible unless interpreted. The danger is that the interpretation may be in terms of the professional novelists. The “War writers” should utterly ignore the technique of the professional novelists, and (to parody one of them) “write of the War in terms of the War.” If only you can put down a fraction of what really happened, you have got something which knocks the professional novelists endways. Because, what matters is human life and human experience and human nature stripped of footling conventions… There is still an immense future for the “War book.”

Another difficulty is this. What everyone remembers is the exceptional; whereas, what is important in literature is the ordinary made vivid and interesting. As Osbert Sitwell points out, the “ordinary” is in fact so amazing that when it is accurately recorded everybody shouts: “Exaggerated, untrue, blatant cynicism, bad temper, send him to Coventry.”

Let me give a rather dull example.

After the defeat of the British Army in March, 1918, all sorts of new, imposing Regulations were enforced. Life became quite unlivable to anyone who remembered the go-as-you-please days of '16 and '17. I'm not sure that the unfortunate men didn't have to clean their buttons in the line.

Well, on a relief day, I went up the line ahead of the rest with my servant and a few details. I must have been on Battalion Headquarters at the time, and I suppose the Colonel sent me on ahead to look round the positions in daylight and help the Companies to find their way in strange trenches.

I had just come back from a Company Officers Course, where we had been violently impressed with the importance of “Discipline.” And, among a million other things, trench sanitation. I should explain that two-thirds of the Division were raw recruits from England, aged about eighteen and singularly windy. The Company officers were nearly off their heads with it. These recruits were always piddling in the trenches – a most heinous military offence. We had been specially warned to treat it severely.

Going up the communication trench, what should I see in a branch trench, but a man in a brand new overcoat urinating. Filled with
zeal
, I went up to him, followed of course by my dutiful escort, and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing? He turned round, hastily fumbling himself into decency. I was just about to order him into arrest, and to tell my Corporal to take his name, number and regiment, when I saw he was a Battery Sergeant-Major. The artillery only wore their badges on one arm, and that arm had been turned away from me. Of course, I couldn't arrest a Battery Sergeant-Major, who was doubtless the apple of the eye of some Battery Commander, who would blow us to hell if we annoyed him. So I had sort of meekly to get out of the situation with a feeble discourse on trench discipline, sanitation, and setting a good example to the troops. The man had the Military Medal and the Distinguished Conduct Medal.

Now, all that is utterly futile. But I remember it with complete vividness. I could make quite a long story out of it, and its effect on me and the men with me and the Battery Sergeant-Major. But obviously it is quite unimportant compared with the “ordinary” things going on – the aeroplane battle over somewhere else, the corpse being carried down from the sniper's post, the preparations for the relief, the plans
for the patrols in No Man's Land that night, the Colonel's attack of constipation which would make him more than usually intolerable at the Front Line inspection next morning… But all those things were “ordinary,” and are forgotten. What I remember, with pain even at this moment, is the idiocy of mistaking for a recruit a Battery Sergeant-Major who was unlawfully piddling in a trench.

So there you are.

I suppose the War will die with us. When we have been successful in kicking the bucket, nobody will really care about “The Great War” any more than we care for Austerlitz or the charge of the Fusiliers at Albuera. It will all be a matter of history and history-books. Young men will go to see “Journey's End” and will leave the theatre with a determination to emulate the beautiful young Public Schoolboy. And “ce que nous avons fait” will be a bumble of war-bores.

Every boy under twenty whom I talk with is not only utterly ignorant of “our” War, but is eagerly or resignedly prepared to take part in the Next Great Push for civilisation. Over you go, boys, and the best of luck.

“See how we trifle! but one can't pass one's youth too amusingly; for one must grow old, and that in England; two most serious circumstances, either of which makes people grey in the twinkling of a bedstaff; for know you, there is not a country upon earth where there are so many old fools and so few young ones.”

HORACE WALPOLE.

To
HALCOTT GLOVER

MY DEAR HAL, — Remembering George Moore's denunciation of prefaces, I felt that what I wanted to say here could be best expressed in a letter to you. Although you are a little older than I, you belong essentially to the same generation — those who spent their childhood and adolescence struggling, like young Samsons, in the toils of the Victorians; whose early manhood coincided, with the European War. A great humber of the men of our generation died prematurely. We are unlucky or lucky enough to remain.