Why should I not write it?
I know that the experience to be sketched in it is very local, limited, incoherent; that it is almost useless, in the sense that no one will read it who is not already aware of all the intimations and discoveries in it, and many more, by reason of having gone the same journey. No one? Some, I am sure; but not many. Neither will they understand – that will not be all my fault.
I know that memory has her little ways, and by now she has concealed precisely that look, that word, that coincidence of nature without and nature within which I long to remember. Within the space of even one year, this divinity seems to me to take a perverse pleasure in playing with her votaries; ‘you’d like to see this, my friend’ (she shows for the second time the veiled but seemingly perfect novocreation of some heart-throbbing scene – she slides it into secrecy) ‘wouldn’t you?’ But I am inclined to think that her playfulness has been growing rather more trying latterly: and perhaps I am gradually becoming colder in my enthusiasm to win a few games. If these things are so, it is now or never for the rendering, however discoloured and lacunary, which I propose.
I tried once before. True, when the events were not yet ended, and I was drifted into a backwater. But what I then wrote, and little enough I completed, although in its details not much affected by the perplexities of distancing memory, was noisy with a depressing forced gaiety then very much the rage. To call a fellow creature ‘old bean’ may be well and good; but to approach in the beanish style such mysteries as Mr Hardy forthshadowed in The Dynasts is to have misunderstood, and to pull Truth’s nose.
And I have been attempting ‘the image and horror of it,’ with some other personations, in poetry. Even so, when the main sheaves appeared fine enough to my flattering eye, it was impossible not to look again, and to descry the ground, how thickly and innumerably yet it was strewn with the facts or notions of war experience.
I must go over the ground again.
A voice, perhaps not my own, answers within me. You will be going over the ground again, it says, until that hour when agony’s clawed face softens into the smilingness of a young spring day; when you, like Hamlet, your prince of peaceful war-makers, give the ghost a ‘Hic et ubique? then we’ll change our ground,’ and not that time in vain; when it shall be the simplest thing to take in your hands and hands of companions like E. W. T., and W. J. C., and A. G. V., in whose recaptured gentleness no sign of death’s astonishment or time’s separation shall be imaginable.
Tokyo, 1924.
E. B.
Among the poems now printed, only one, ‘Third Ypres,’ is taken from the author’s book of verse called The Shepherd, it being one of his most comprehensive and particular attempts to render war experience poetically. Through The Shepherd and The Waggoner are scattered other war poems, which the author has taken the liberty of indicating to those interested, as a genuine supplement to the present work, although to reprint them now was considered to be too much like bookmaking in view of their being already easily accessible.