In the trenches one night near Vimy Ridge I heard a newcomer ask our veteran sergeant, “Where is the war – what is it?”
The sergeant led his questioner to a firestep, and pointed over the parapet. Some yards in front, half hidden by the grass and weeds, was a skeleton, with the uniform rotted until it was indefinite. No one could say whether the shrivelled corpse were friend or foe. “That,” he said, “is war.”
The newcomer, a mere youth, looked startled. He stepped down hastily to the trench floor, swallowed hard, then asked. “How long have you been out here?”
“Sixteen months,” said the sergeant.
The youth smiled and flung back his shoulders. Sixteen months! “Then,” he said, “I guess I don’t need to worry yet. We’ve all got the same chances, haven’t we?”
It was quiet, one of those strange lulls in the shelling. The sergeant stood there in the gloom, looking into no man’s land, and recited softly.
The Ball no question makes of Ayes or Noes,
But Right or Left as strikes the Player goes;
And He that tossed you down into the Field,
He knows about it all – HE knows – HE knows!
The youth looked up at him. “I don’t know anything about poetry,” he said, “but I had a queer feeling all the time we were marching up here. It seemed as if I was going to bump into something before I saw it …”
Ping!
We buried him before it was light. The chance bullet had come from some distant point, skimming the bags, missing the wire and the burly sergeant, and dropping, with the trajectory of a spent missile, just enough to strike the temple of the boy who had been two hours in the line. And as we went to our dugout after stand-down the old sergeant repeated more of his favourite poem.
And many a Knot unravel’d by the Road;
But not the Master Knot of Human Fate.
This story is an effort to reveal a side of the war that has not been given much attention, the psychic effect it had on its participants. There existed before all battles and even in the calms of the trench routine, a condition before which all natural explanations failed, and no supernatural explanations were established.
Every human emotion ran its full gamut in that land of topsy turvy, and prolonged tensity of feeling wrought strange psychological changes which warped the soul itself. Never on earth was there a like place where a man’s support, often his sole support, was his faith in some mighty Power. All intervening thoughts were swept aside. Unconsciously there were born faiths that carried men through critical moments, and tortured minds grasped fantasies that served in place of more solid creeds. The trench at zero hour was a crucible that dissolved all insincerity and the superficial, and it did more. It drew from even dulled and uncouth natures a perception that was attributed to the mystic and supernal.
Men glimpsed, or thought they glimpsed, that grim crossroads we all must pass. It was as if for them a voice had spoken, a hand beckoned them on. And at once there fell from them all frenzy and confusion. White-faced, unsmiling, filled with a strange courage, they greeted that which waited them. Was it all phenomena produced by war-strained imaginations?
I have another reason for writing. We are being deluged now, a decade after the war, by books that are putrid with so-called “realism.” They portray the soldier as a coarse-minded, profane creature, seeking only the solace of loose women or the courage of strong liquor. Vulgar language and indelicacy of incident are often their substitute for lack of knowledge, and their distorted pictures of battle action are especially repugnant. On the whole, such literature, offered to our avid youth, is an irrevocable insult to those gallant men who lie in French or Belgian graves.
This narrative is an attempt to give a balanced perspective; to show that the private in the trenches had other thoughts than of the flesh, had often finer vision and strength of soul than those who would fit him to their sordid, sensation-seeking fiction. It is but a personal view, I know, yet I only ask pardon for my crudity of diction.
My diary is not infallible. There were lapses in its compiling which I could not prevent, but as I am striving for a correct picture as well as accuracy of detail, those who discover any debatable point will please bear it in mind. Every case of premonition I have described is actual fact; each of my own psychic experiences were exactly as recorded. The reader may term them fantasies, the results of overstrained emotion, what he will; there are many who know he cannot explain them.