Chapter Five:

Pity

Probably no war before and certainly no war after has brought civilian novelists, poets, and dramatists into such close proximity to wounded soldiers as did World War I. The Civil War saw Whitman nursing dying Union soldiers in Washington, but it would be hard to think of another nineteenth-century poet demonstrating this kind of hands-on compassion; in World War II, ambulance services and hospitals were militarized, and no amateurs would be allowed as close to the fighting as they were in the Great War. As the terrible year of 1916 gave way to the even more horrible year of 1917, writers would turn from writing diatribes, analyses, and exhortations, to focus on individual soldiers caught up in the tragedy, needing all the sympathy and pity a nurse—or a novelist—could bring them.

More and more it’s not the “Hun” that’s the enemy, but the war itself, so, in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in 1914, writers begin moving away from abstractions and “great issues”—the wounded are individualized and made vivid, if only in brief vignettes; out of the millions who served in the war, these are the ones we see up close and remember, thanks to the writers sitting beside them, tending their wounds—and going back to their huts at night to write about them.

Changes in writing style and tone that began to emerge as writers witnessed the war in person now intensify; after a writer tended a soldier whose gangrenous leg had just been cut off, there was no going back to a florid nineteenth-century writing style or a cheery way of looking at things.

The more ironic, harder sensibility is very much of the twentieth century. A writer like Mrs. Humphrey Ward writes of 1917 from the vantage point of 1878, but Enid Bagnold and May Sinclair, with their striking mix of pity for the wounded and fretful self-absorption (they focus again and again, not only on what the soldiers feel, but on what they feel themselves) read like writers of the 1920s or, for that matter, of 2016. Even Henry James, whom we saw earlier torturing his way to a baroquely phrased understanding of what the war meant, now finds enough pity to get past his own circumlocutions to his simple and tender point: the wounded boys he nurses in the London hospital are “the very flowers of the human race.”

Another change: more and more the writers worth remembering and reading today are female. Many of them served as nurses—the traditional role for women in war, though hardly a passive one, not with what was demanded of them in the surgical wards of station hospitals. And even women waiting at home like the Jenny of Rebecca West’s novel The Return of the Soldier—their role was a lot more wrenching than merely “waiting” would imply.

The literary historian Samuel Hynes points out how significant a change this represented—women at home being able to picture how horrible the war truly was.

“Jenny, the narrator, can picture these things because Rebecca West could, because any English civilian could by 1916. From the war’s beginning its terrible particulars were brought home continually to England and into the lives and minds of the people there. The First World War was the first English war to be reported and photographed in the daily newspapers, and the first to be filmed and shown to the public in cinemas. Jenny doesn’t know the whole story of the war, but she knows the worst of it—the horror stories that we all have in our heads, and visualize as the reality of the Western Front. Such knowledge would not have been available to a sheltered woman like Jenny during any previous English war; this was the first war that women could imagine, and so it was the first that a woman could write into a novel.”

(Jane Austen, writing exactly 100 years before West, famously could not imagine the Napoleonic Wars she and her characters lived through, and so could not or would not write about them.)

Pity was the response that moved many women to write—a great, all-embracing pity that can still move us today. It’s a word they use often, wondering whether they feel too much of it or not anywhere near enough. Vera Brittain, whose Testament of Youth became one of the war’s best-known memoirs, worried that nursing in front-line hospitals would eventually turn her compassion into ice; she prayed to be spared “the bright immunity from pity which the highly trained nurse seems so often to possess.”

Brittain, as writer and nurse, never lost this pity—or the anger that ran just beneath.

“I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy war could see a case of mustard gas in its early stages—could see the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great mustard-colored suppurating blisters, with blind eyes all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke.”

Male writers, of course, felt pity too. Wells’s Mr. Britling nurses a very different kind of victim—his own aunt, who has been wounded in a German Zeppelin raid on the English coast; a particularly heinous crime, in Britling’s view, because England hasn’t been attacked on her own soil for so many centuries, let alone had bombs rained down from the air on its innocent civilians. He—and the other writers included here—would have to get used to this kind of barbarity very fast if they wished to stay relevant, to find a way to write about what, when it first happened, must have seemed like the modern age announcing its appearance in one high-explosive burst.

The pity writers brought to their writing was not evoked only by the wounded. Many describe the simple, long-suffering, “ordinary” men caught up in the fighting through no fault of their own, and in particular the wrenching disparity between what they experienced on the battlefield and what civilians at home thought the war was like.

May Sinclair joined the Munro Ambulance Corps when war broke out, and spent seventeen days in Belgium during the early retreats; not a young woman (she was fifty-one), her nerves quickly broke under the strain and she was sent back to England. Her book on the experience, A Journal of Impressions in Belgium, was one of the very first books written and published by a woman on the war. Rebecca West, soon to write her own war book, called it “This gallant, humiliated book,” and its complicated mix of irony, pity, and self-doubt can only be termed “Modern.”

“This country is formed for the very expression of peace,” Sinclair writes, as her ambulance carries her toward the fighting,

“It is all unspeakably beautiful and it comes to me with the natural, inevitable shock and ecstasy of beauty. I am going straight into the horror of war. For all I know it may be anywhere, here, behind this sentry; or there, beyond that line of willows. I don’t know. I don’t care. I cannot realize it. All that I can see or feel at the moment is this beauty. I look and look, so that I may remember. All your past is soaking in the vivid dye of these days … I would rather die than go back to England.”

Her novel, The Tree of Heaven, became a bestseller later in the war; an influential critic, she is given credit for inventing the term “stream of consciousness” in 1918 to describe the latest literary innovation.

Enid Bagnold, with her writing career already well launched in England, volunteered as a nurse when the war broke out and was stationed at a hospital in Woolrich. Her A Diary Without Dates was so frank and critical of the hospital administration that she was fired; still wanting to serve, she went on to drive an ambulance in France, and got from the experience her second wartime book, The Happy Foreigner. She was twenty-five.

She achieved popular success after the war with her novel about horse racing, National Velvet, the film version of which made Elizabeth Taylor a star. Her play The Chalk Garden is still performed; when it appeared on Broadway in 1956, Arthur Miller wrote, “It is the most steadily interesting, deeply felt, and civilized piece of work I have seen in a very long time.”

Diary Without Dates, published in 1917, shows a modern sensibility fully at work. She writes on the title page, “I apologize to those I may hurt. Can I soothe them by pleading that one may only write what is true for oneself?”

Hugh Walpole was thirty when the war broke out and was already a highly successful English novelist. Like so many writers, he volunteered for Red Cross ambulance work, but unlike most, who were sent to France, he ended up on the eastern front in Russia, which gave him a unique perspective and the material for two wartime novels, The Dark Forest and The Secret City. He won the Russian “Cross of Saint George” for rescuing a wounded soldier under fire.

While in Russia, he helped establish the Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau in Petrograd and witnessed the first stages of the Revolution; returning to England, he wrote more propaganda for John Buchan’s wartime bureau.

His close friend Henry James was terrible impressed by Walpole’s bravery, writing that he was showing “the last magnificence of pluck, the finest strain of resolution.”

Rebecca West first made her literary reputation by publishing an attack on the old school of English writers, particularly Mrs. Humphrey Ward; this brought her to the attention of, among others, H. G. Wells. She and Wells became lovers just before the war broke out (West was twenty-one), never mind that West had referred to him in print as “the Old Maid among novelists.” They had a son together, and West was supported by Wells throughout the war years. Wells wrote of being struck by her “curious mix of maturity and infantilism; I had never met anything quite like her before, and I doubt if there was anything like her before.”

Her novel, The Return of the Soldier, published in 1918, examines the relationship between three women and a soldier suffering shell shock. Samuel Hynes (the soldier/writer who was one of the most astute students of the war’s literature) called it “an extraordinary book, a perfect small work of art, a war novel that makes its perfection out of its limitations; a novel of an enclosed world invaded by public events, a private novel containing history.”

West herself didn’t have to go to war—it came to her, when in 1918 German Gotha aircraft bombed the village on the Thames where she was staying with her son; one incendiary bomb dropped only a few yards away. Wells may have had this in mind when he wrote the scene excerpted at this chapter’s end.

H. M. Tomlinson is mostly forgotten now, but in 1914 he was an essayist and travel writer who was often compared to Thoreau and/or Conrad; his classic account of a trip up the Amazon on a tramp steamer, The Sea and the Jungle, is still in print.

He was an official correspondent with the British troops in France (he was forty-five), but managed to rise above the restrictions and censorship to produce some of the most sensitive civilian writing about the war, showing a real fellow feeling for soldiers and what they had to deal with.

Tomlinson blames the well-born, the clever, the haughty, and the greedy for making the war out of “the perplexity of their scheming”—and then, panicking when it breaks out, calling upon the masses to save them.

“Then out from their obscurity, where they dwelt because of their own worth, arise the Nobodies; because theirs is the historic job of restoring again the upset balance of affairs. They make no fuss about it. Theirs is always the hard and dirty work. They have always done it. If they don’t do it, it will not be done. They fall with a will and without complaint upon the wreckage willfully made of generations of such labor as theirs, to get the world right again, to make it habitable again, though not for themselves; for them, they must spend the rest of their lives recreating order out of chaos.”

In the 1920s, Tomlinson became one of the first critics to write intelligently and movingly of the literature produced by the war.

G. M. Trevelyan, born into the aristocracy, was forty by the time the war broke out. He was one of Britain’s most highly regarded literary historians, especially for his Garibaldi Trilogy on the famous Italian patriot. His brother Charles Trevelyan resigned from Asquith’s government to protest the war, and was vilified, but George, exempted from the army because of his eyesight, led the first Red Cross ambulance unit to Italy and spent three years close to the front lines.

He was caught up in the disastrous retreat at Caporetto, but, as the excerpt makes clear, was a long way from blaming Italian cowardice for the disaster, as other commentators were (and are) quick to do.

My copy of Scenes from Italy’s War has an elegant bookplate pasted in front—John Hampton Barnes is the owner’s name—and the pages, a hundred years old now, have edges that seem freshly cut. Like many books included here, it includes a few token photographs, including one stirring shot of a tattered Italian flag flying defiantly over Monte Santo on the Isonzo River that saw so much fighting. Pasted on the title page is a little one-by-three insert of “Errata,” making sure the reader knows to correct “October” for “November” on page 222, line 5, “six and nine” for “eight and twelve” on page 183, line 4, and—italics being important—“Bersaglieri ciclisti” for “Bersaglieri ciclisti” on page 84, line 8.

Some World War I literature is forgotten because, having written one book on the war that received little attention, the author went on to write another on the same experience that became famous, thereby condemning the earlier book to extinction.

John Dos Passos’s novel Three Soldiers is firmly within what would become, in the 1920s and 30s, the “official” literary canon of the war, but, as a young volunteer (he was twenty-two), he wrote a totally forgotten novel while the war was still being fought: One Man’s Initiation: 1917, a title he later changed to First Encounter; it is drawn from his experience in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps on the front lines with the French.

Dos Passos had the book republished in 1942, when another war was in progress, writing, in his preface:

“I think the brutalities of war and oppression come as less of a shock to people who grew up in the Thirties than they did to Americans of my generation, raised as we were during the quiet afterglow of the nineteenth century, among comfortably situated people who were confident that industrial progress meant an improved civilization, more of the good things of life, more freedom, a more human and peaceful society. To us, the European war of 1914–18 seemed a horrible monstrosity, something outside of the normal order of things, like an epidemic of yellow fever in some place where yellow fever had never been heard of before. Now these things are more familiar.”

In writing One Man’s Initiation, Dos Passos admits to having been heavily influenced by the recently published novel Under Fire (Le Feu) by Henri Barbusse, which appeared in 1916 and became an immediate sensation (my copy is the twelfth printing from 1918) with its graphic, searing account of life on the western front as seen by a disillusioned Poilu. After Barbusse’s book, civilian writers—except for the hacks—would find it hard to cling to any last romantic illusions about the war.

All That This War Has Annihilated

—May Sinclair

I don’t want to describe that ward, or the effect of those rows upon rows of beds, those rows upon rows of bound and bandaged bodies, the intensity of their physical anguish suggested by sheer force of multiplication, by the diminishing perspective of the beds, by the clear light and nakedness of the great hall that sets these repeated units of torture in a world apart, a world of insufferable space and agonizing time, ruled by some inhuman mathematics and given over to pure transcendent pain. A sufficiently large ward full of wounded really does leave an impression very like that. But the one true thing about this impression is its transcendence. It is utterly removed from and unlike anything that you have experienced before. From the moment that the doors have closed behind you, you are in another world, and under its strange impact you are given new senses and a new soul. If there is horror here you are not aware of it as horror. Before these multiplied forms of anguish what you feel—if there is anything of you left to feel—is not pity, because it is so near to adoration.

If you are tired of the burden and malady of self, go into one of these great wards and you will find instant release. You and the sum of your little consciousness are not things that matter any more. The lowest and least of these wounded is of supreme importance and significance. You, who were once afraid of them and of their wounds, may think that you would suffer for them now, gladly; but you are not allowed to suffer; you are marvellously and mercilessly let off. In this sudden deliverance from yourself you have received the ultimate absolution, and their torment is your peace …

I am to look after Mr.______. He has the pick of the Belgian Red Cross women to nurse him, and they are angelically kind and very skillful, but he is not very happy with them. He says: “These dear people are so good to me, but I can’t make out what they say. I can’t tell them what I want.” He is pathetically glad to have any English people with him.

I sat with him all morning. The French boy has gone and he is alone in his room now. The morning went like half an hour, while it was going, but when it was over I felt as if I had been nursing for weeks on end. There were so many little things to be done, and so much that you mustn’t do, and the anxiety was appalling. I don’t suppose there is a worse case in the Hospital. He is perhaps a shade better to-day, but none of the medical staff think that he can live.

Madame E______ and Dr. Bird have shown me what to do, and what not to do. I must keep him all the time in the same position. I must give him sips of iced broth, and little pieces of ice to suck every now and then. I must not let him try to raise himself in bed. I must not try to lift him myself. If we do lift him we must keep his body tilted at the same angle. I must not give him any hot drinks and not too much cold drink.

And then he is six foot high, so tall that his feet come through the blankets at the bottom of the bed; and he keeps sinking down it all the time and wanting to raise himself up again. He must be kept very quiet. I must not let him talk more than is necessary to tell me what he wants, or he will die of exhaustion. And what he wants is to talk every minute that he is awake.

He drops off to sleep, breathing in jerks and with a terrible rapidity. And I think it will be all right as long as he sleeps. But his sleep only lasts for a few minutes. I hear the rhythm of his breathing alter; it slackens and goes slow; then it jerks again, and I know that he is awake.

And then he begins. He says things that tear at your heart. He has looks and gestures that break it—the adorable, willful smile of a child that knows that it is being watched when you find his hand groping too often for the glass of iced water that stands beside his bed; a still more adorable and utterly gentle submission when you take the glass from him; when you tell him not to say anything more just yet but to go to sleep again. You feel as if you were guilty of act after act of nameless and abominable cruelty.

He sticks to it that he has seen me before, that he has heard of me, that his people know me. And he wants to know what I do and where I live and where it was that he saw me. Once, when I thought he had gone to sleep, I heard him begin again: “Where did you say you lived?”

I tell him. And I tell him to go to sleep again.

He closes his eyes obediently and opens them the next instant.

“I say, may I come and call on you when we get back to England?”

You can only say: “Yes. Of course,” and tell him to go to sleep.

His voice is so strong and clear that I could almost believe that he will get back and that some day I shall look up and see him standing at my garden gate.

Mercifully, when I tell him to go to sleep again, he does go to sleep. And his voice is a little clearer and stronger every time he wakes.

And so the morning goes on. The only thing he wants you to do for him is to sponge his hands and face with iced water and give him little bits of ice to suck. Over and over again I do these things. And over and over again he asks me, “Do you mind?”

He wears a little grey woolen cord round his neck. Something has gone from it. Whatever he has lost, they have left him his little woolen cord, as if some immense importance attached to it.

He has fallen into a long doze. And at the end of the morning I left him sleeping.

Some of the Corps have brought in trophies from the battlefield—a fine grey cloak with a scarlet collar, a spiked helmet, a cuff with three buttons cut from the coat of a dead German.

These things make me sick. I see the body under the cloak, the head under the helmet, and the dead hand under the cuff.

We shall never know all that the War has annihilated.

From A Journal of Impressions in Belgium, by May Sinclair; Macmillan; New York, 1915.

A Bit of Metal Turned Them for Home

—Enid Bagnold

When one shoots at a wooden figure it makes a hole. When one shoots at a man it makes a hole, and the doctor must make seven others.

I heard a blackbird sing in the middle of the night last night—two bars, and then another. I thought at first it might be a burglar whistling to his mate in the black and rustling garden.

But it was a blackbird in a nightmare.

Those distant guns again to-night …

Now a lull and now a bombardment; again a lull, and then batter, batter, and the windows tremble. Is the lull when they go over the top?

I can only think of death to-night. I tried to think just now, “What is it, after all! Death comes anyway; this only hastens it.” But that won’t do; no philosophy helps the pain of death. It is pity, pity, pity, that I feel, and sometimes a sort of shame that I am here to write at all …

Waker had a birthday yesterday and got ten post cards and a telegram. But that is as nothing to another anniversary.

“A year to-morrow I got my wound—two o’clock to-morrow morning.”

“Shall you be awake, Waker?”

“Yes.”

How will he celebrate it? I would give a lot to know what will pass in his mind. For I don’t yet understand this importance they attach to such an anniversary. One and all, they know the exact hour and minute on which their bit of metal turned them for home.

Sometimes a man will whisper, “Nurse …” as I go by the bed; and when I stop I hear, “In ten minutes it will be a twelvemonth!” and he fixes his eyes on me.

What does he want me to respond? I don’t know whether I should be glad or sorry that he got it. I can’t imagine what he thinks of as the minute ticks. For I can see by his words that the scene is blurred and no longer brings back any picture. “Did you crawl back or walk?”

“I … walked.” He is hardly sure.

I know that for Waker that moment at two o’clock in the morning changed his whole career. From that moment his arm was paralysed, the nerves severed; from that moment football was off, and with it his particular ambition. And football, governing a kingdom, or painting a picture—a man’s ambition is his ambition, and when it is wiped out his life is changed.

But he knows all that, he has had time to think of all that. What, then, does this particular minute bring him?

They think I know; for when they tell me in that earnest voice that the minute is approaching they take for granted that I too will share some sacrament with them.

Waker is not everything a man should be: he isn’t clever. But he is so very brave.

From A Diary Without Dates, by Enid Bagnold; William Heinemann; London, 1918.

The Very Flower of the Human Race

—Henry James

It would be the essence of these remarks, could I give them within my space all the particular applications naturally awaiting them, that they pretend to refer here to the British soldier only—generalisation about his officers would take us so considerably further and so much enlarge our view. The high average of the beauty and modesty of these, in the stricken state, causes them to affect me, I frankly confess, as probably the very flower of the human race. One’s apprehension “Tommy”—and I scarce know whether more to dislike the liberty this mode of reference takes with him, or to incline to retain it for the tenderness really latent in it—is in itself a theme for fine notation, but it has brought me thus only to the door of the boundless hospital ward in which, these many months, I have seen the successive and the so strangely quiet tides of his presence ebb and flow, and it stays me there before the incalculable vista. The perspective stretches away, in its mild order, after the fashion of a tunnel boring into the very character of the people, and so going on forever—never arriving or coming out, that is, at anything in the nature of a station, a junction or a terminus. So it draws off through the infinite of the common personal life, but planted and bordered, all along its passage, with the thick-growing flower of the individual illustration, this sometimes vivid enough and sometimes pathetically pale. The great fact, to my now so informed vision, is that it undiscourageably continues and that an unceasing repetition of its testifying particulars seems never either to exhaust its sense or to satisfy that of the beholder. Its sense indeed, if I may so far simplify, is pretty well always the same, that of the jolly fatalism above-mentioned, a state of moral hospitality to the practices of fortune, however outrageous, that may at times fairly be felt as providing amusement, providing a new and thereby a refreshing turn of the personal situation, for the most interested party. It is true that one may be sometimes moved to wonder which is the most interested party, the stricken subject in his numbered bed or the friendly, the unsated inquirer who has tried to forearm himself against such a measure of the “criticism of life” as might well be expected to break upon him from the couch in question, and who yet, a thousand occasions for it having been, all round him, inevitably neglected, finds this ingenious provision quite left on his hands. He may well ask himself what he is to do with people who so consistently and so comfortably content themselves with being—for the most part incuriously and instinctively admirable—that nothing whatever is left of them for reflection as distinguished from their own practice; but the only answer that comes is the reproduction of the note. He may, in the interest of appreciation, try the experiment of lending them some scrap of a complaint or a curse in order that they shall meet him on congruous ground, the ground of encouragement to his own participating impulse. They are imaged, under that possibility, after the manner of those unfortunates, the very poor, the victims of a fire or shipwreck, to whom you have to lend something to wear before they can come to thank you for helping them. The inmates of the long wards, however, have no use for any imputed or derivative sentiments or reasons; they feel in their own way, they feel a great deal, they don’t at all conceal from you that to have seen what they have seen is to have seen things horrible and monstrous—but there is no estimate of them for which they seek to be indebted to you, and nothing they less invite from you than to show them that such visions must have poisoned their world. Their world isn’t in the least poisoned; they have assimilated their experience by a process scarce at all to be distinguished from their having healthily gotten rid of it.

The case thus becomes for you that they consist wholly of their applied virtue, which is accompanied with no waste of consciousness whatsoever. The virtue may strike you as having been, and as still being, greater in some examples than others, but it has throughout the same sign of differing at almost no point from a supreme amiability. How can creatures so amiable, you allow yourself vaguely to wonder, have welcomed even for five minutes the stress of carnage? and how can the stress of carnage, the murderous impulse at its highest pitch, have left so little distortion of the moral nature? It has left none at all that one has at the end of many months been able to discover; so that perhaps the most steadying and refreshing effect of intercourse with these hospital friends is through the almost complete rest from the facing of generalisations to which it treats you.

From The Book of the Homeless, edited by Edith Wharton; Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1916.

With the Wounded I was at Home

—Hugh Walpole

There comes now a difficult matter. During the later months when I was to reflect on the whole affair I saw quite clearly that the hour between our leaving the wooden house and arriving in the trenches bridged quite clearly for me the division between imagination and reality: that is, I was never after this to speak of war as I would have spoken of it an hour before. I was never again to regard the paraphernalia of it with the curiosity of a stranger—I had become part of it. This hour then may be regarded as in some ways the most important of all my experiences. It is certainly the occasion to which if I were using my invention I should make the most. Here then is my difficulty.

I have nothing to say about it. There’s nothing at all to be made of it.

I may say at once there was no atom of drama in it. At one moment I was standing with Maria Ivanovna under the sunrise, at another I was standing behind a trench in the heart of the forest with a battery to my left and a battery to my right, a cuckoo somewhere not very far away, and a dead man with his feet sticking out from beneath a tree at my side. There had, of course, been that drive in the wagons, bumping over the uneven road while the sun rose gallantly in the heavens and the clanging of the iron door grew, with every roll of our wheels, louder and louder. But it was rather as though I had been lifted in a sheet from one life—a life of speculation, of viewing war from a superior and safe distance, of viewing indeed all catastrophe and reality from the same distance—into the other. I had been caught up, had hung for a moment in mid-air, had been “planted” in this new experience. For all of us there must have been at this moment something of this passing from an old life into a new one, and yet I dare swear that not for any one of us was there any drama, any thrill, any excitement. We stood, a rather lonely little group, in the forest clearing whilst the soldiers in the trench flung us a careless glance, then turned back to their business of the day with an indifference that showed how ordinary and drab a thing custom had made it …

A dream, I know, yesterday’s experiences seemed to me as I settled down to the business that had filled so much of my earlier period at the war. Here, with the wounded, I was at home—the bare little room, the table with the bottles and bandages and scissors, the basins and dishes, the air even thicker and thicker with that smell of dried blood, unwashed bodies, and iodine that is like no other smell in the world. The room would be crowded, the sanitars supporting legs and arms and heads, nurses dashing to the table for bandages or iodine or scissors, three or four stretchers occupying the floor of the room with the soldiers who were too severely wounded to sit or stand, these soldiers often utterly quiet, dying perhaps, or watching with eyes that realised only dreams and shadows, the little window square, the strip of sky, the changing colours of the day; then the sitting soldiers, on ordinary of a marvellous and most simple patience, watching the bandaging of their arms and hands and legs, whispering sometimes “Boje moi! Boje moi!” dragging themselves up from their desperate struggle for endurance to answer the sanitars who asked their name, their regiments, the nature of their wounds. Sometimes they would talk, telling how the thing had happened to them:

“And there, your Honour, before I could move, she had come—such a noise—eh, eh, a terrible thing—I called out ‘Zemliac. Here it is!’ I said, and he …”

But as a rule they were very quiet, starting perhaps at the sting of iodine, asking for a bandage to be tighter or not so tight, suddenly slipping in a faint to the ground, and then apologising afterwards. And in their eyes always that look as though, very shortly, they would hear some story so marvellous that it would compensate for all their present pain and distress.

And these wounded knew something that we did not. In the first moments of their agony when we met them their souls had not recovered from the shock of their encounter. It was, with many of them, more than the mere physical pain. They were still held by some discovery at whose very doors they had been. The discovery itself had not been made by them, but they had been so near to it that many of them would never be the same man again. “No, your Honour,” one soldier said to me. “It isn’t my arm … That is nothing, Slava Bogu … but life isn’t so real now. It is half gone.” He would explain no more.

In the early morning, when the light was so cold and inhuman, when the candles stuck in bottles on the window-sills shivered and quavered in the little breeze, when the big basin on the floor seemed to swell ever larger and larger, with its burden of bloody rags and soiled bandages and filthy fragments of dirty clothes, when the air was weighted down with the smell of blood and human flesh, when the sighs and groans and cries kept up a perpetual undercurrent that one did not notice and yet faltered before, when again and again bodies, torn almost in half, legs hanging almost by a thread, rose before one, passed and rose again in endless procession, then, in those early hours, some fantastic world was about one. The poplar trees beyond the window, the little beechwood on the hill, the pond across the road, a round grey sheet of ruffled water, these things in the half-light seemed to wait for our defeat. One instant on our part and it seemed that all the pain and torture would rise in a flood and overwhelm one … in those early morning hours the enemy crept very close indeed. We could almost hear his hot breath behind the bars of our fastened doors.

There was a peculiar little headache that I have felt nowhere else, before or since, that attacked on those early mornings. It was not a headache that afflicted one with definite physical pain. It was like a cold hand pressed upon the brow, a hand that touched the eyes, the nose, the mouth, then remained, a chill weight upon the head; the blood seemed to stop in its course, one’s heart beat feebly and things were dim before one’s eyes. One was stupid and chose one’s words slowly, looking at people closely to see whether one really knew them, even unsure about oneself, one’s history, neither sad nor joyful, neither excited nor dull, only with the cold hand upon one’s brow, catching the beating of one’s heart.

While there was work to do nothing mattered, but now in the silence the whole world seemed as empty and foul as a drained and stinking tub.

From The Dark Forest, by Hugh Walpole; George M. Doran Co., New York, 1916.

The Boche Bread is Bad

—Henry Beston

That night we were given orders to be ready to evacuate the chateau in case the Boches advanced from Verdun. The drivers slept in the ambulances, rising at intervals through the night to warm their engines. The buzz of the motors sounded through the pines of the chateau park, drowning out the rumbling of the bombardment and then the monotonous roaring of the flood. Now and then a trench light, rising like a spectral star over the lines on the Hauts de Meuse, would shine reflected in the river. At intervals attendants carried down the swampy paths to the chapel the bodies of soldiers who had died during the night. The cannon flashing was terrific. Just before dawn, half a dozen batteries of seventy-fives came in a swift trot down the shelled road; the men leaned over on their steaming horses, the harnesses rattled and jingled, and the cavalcade swept on, outlined a splendid instant against the motor flashes and the streaks of day.

On my morning trip a soldier with bandaged arm was put beside me on the front seat. He was about forty years old; a wiry black beard gave a certain fullness to his thin face, and his hands were pudgy and short of finger. When he removed his helmet, I saw that he was bald. A bad cold caused him to speak in a curious whispering tone, giving to everything he said the character of a grotesque confidence.

“What do you do en civil?” he asked.

I told him.

“I am a pastry cook,” he went on. “My speciality is Saint-Denis apple tarts. Have you ever had one? They are very good when made with fresh cream.”

“How did you get wounded?”

“Eclat d’obus,” he replied, as if that were the whole story. After a pause he added, “Douamont—yesterday.”

I thought of the shells I had seen bursting over that fort.

“Do you put salt in chocolate?” he asked professionally.

“Not as a rule,” I replied.

“It improves it,” he pursued, as if he were revealing a confidential dogma. “The Boche bread is bad, very bad, much worse than a year ago. Full of crumbles and lumps. Degoutant!”

The ambulance rolled up to the evacuation station, and my pastry cook alighted.

“When the war is over, come to my shop,” he whispered benevolently, “and you shall have some tartes aux pommes a la mode de Saint-Denis with my wife and me.”

“With fresh cream?” I asked.

“Of course,” he replied seriously.

I accepted gratefully, and the good old soul gave me his address.

Two weeks later, when the back of the attack had been broken and the organization of the defense had developed into a trusted routine, I went again to Verdun. The snow was falling heavily, covering the piles of debris and sifting into the black skeletons of the burned houses. Untrodden in the narrow streets lay the white snow. Above the Meuse, above the ugly burned areas in the old town on the slope, rose the shell-spattered walls of the citadel and the cathedral towers of the still, tragic town. The drumming of the bombardment had died away. The river was again in flood. In a deserted wine-shop on a side street well protected from shells by a wall of sandbags was a post of territorials.

To the tragedy of Verdun, these men were the chorus; there was something Sophoclean in this group of older men alone in the silence and ruin of the beleaguered city. A stove filled with wood from the wrecked houses gave out a comfortable heat, and in an alley-way, under cover, stood a two-wheeled hose cart, and an old-fashioned seesaw fire pump. There were old clerks and bookkeepers among the soldier firemen—retired gendarmes who had volunteered, a country schoolmaster, and a shrewd peasant from Lyonnais. Watch was kept from the heights of the citadel, and the outbreak of fire in any part of the city was telephoned to the shop. On that day only a few explosive shells had fallen.

“Do you want to see something odd, mon vieux?” said one of the pompiers to me; and he led me through a labyrinth of cellars to a cold, deserted house. The snow had blown through the shell-splintered window-panes. In the dining-room stood a table, the cloth was laid and the silver spread; but a green feathery fungus had grown in a dish of food and broken straws of dust floated on the wine in the glasses. The territorial took my arm, his eyes showing the pleasure of my responding curiosity, and whispered,—

“There were officers quartered here who were called very suddenly. I saw the servant of one of them yesterday; they have all been killed.”

Outside there was not a flash from the batteries on the moor. The snow continued to fall, and darkness, coming on the swift wings of the storm, fell like a mantle over the desolation of the city.

From A Volunteer Poilu, by Henry Beston; Houghton Mifflin; Boston, 1916.

I Was Wishing for the Return of a Soldier

—Rebecca West

The house lies on the crest of Harroweald, and from its windows the eye drops to miles of emerald pastureland lying wet and brilliant under a westward line of sleek hills blue with distance and distant woods, while nearer it ranges the suave decorum of the lawn and the Lebanon cedar whose branches are like darkness made palpable, and the minatory gauntness of the topmost pines in the wood that break downwards, its bare boughs a close texture of browns and purple, from the pond on the hill’s edge.

That day in its beauty was an affront to me, because like most Englishwomen of my time I was wishing for the return of a soldier. Disregarding the national interest and everything except the prehensile gesture of our hearts toward him, I wanted to snatch my cousin Christopher from the wars and seal him in this green pleasantness his wife and I now looked upon. Of late I had had bad dreams about him. By night I saw Chris running across the brown rottenness of No Man’s Land, starting back here because he trod upon a hand, not even looking there because of the awfulness of an unburied head, and not till my dream was packed full of horror did I see him pitch forward on his knees as he reached safety—if it was that. For on the war-films I have seen men slip down as softly from the trench parapet, and none but the grimmer philosophers would say that they had reached safety by their fall. And when I escaped into wakefulness it was only to lie stiff and think of stories I had heard in the boyish voice, that rings indomitable yet has most of its gay notes flattened, of the modern subaltern.

“We were all of us in a barn one night, and a shell came along. My pal sang out, ‘Help me, old man I’ve got no legs!’ and I had to answer, ‘I can’t, old man, I’ve got no hands!’”

Well, such are the dreams of Englishwomen today; I could not complain. But I wished for the return of our soldier.

(From The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West; The Century Co.; New York, 1918.)

On Leave

—H. M. Tomlinson

Coming out of Victoria Station into the stir of London again, on leave from Flanders, must give as near the sensation of being thrust suddenly into life from the beyond and the dead as mortal man may expect to know. It is a surprising and providential wakening into a world which long ago went dark. That world is strangely loud, bright and alive. Plainly it did not stop when, somehow, it vanished once upon a time. There its vivid circulation moves, and the buses are so usual, the people so brisk and intent on their own concerns, the signs so startlingly familiar, that the man who is home again begins to doubt that he has been absent, that he has been dead. But his uniform must surely mean something, and its stains something more!

And there can be no doubt about it, as you stand there a trifle dizzy in London once more. You really have come back from another world; and you have the curious idea that you may be invisible in this old world in a sense you know you are unseen. These people will never know what you know. There they gossip in the hall, and leisurely survey the bookstall, and they would never guess it, but you have just returned from hell. What could they say if you told them? They would be embarrassed, polite, forbearing, kindly, and smiling, and they would mention the matter afterwards as a queer adventure with a poor devil who was evidently a little overwrought; shell shock, of course. Beastly thing, shell shock. Seems to affect the nerves.

They would not understand. They will never understand. What is the use of standing in veritable daylight, and telling the living, who have never been dead, of the other place?

The man who comes back from the line has lost more than years. He has lost his original self. People failed to recognize Rip Van Winkle because they did not know his beard. Our friends do recognize us when they greet us on our return from the front, but they do not know us because we are not the men they remember. They are the same as ever; but when they address us, they talk to a mind which is not there, though the eyes betray nothing of the difference. They talk to those who have come back to life to see them again, but who cannot tell them what has happened, and dare not try …

The youngster who is home on leave, though he may not have reasoned it out, knows that what he wants to say, often prompted by indignation, cannot be said. He feels intuitively that this is beyond his power to express. Besides, if he were to begin, where would he end? He cannot trust himself. What would happen if he uncovered, in a sunny and innocent breakfast-room, the horror he knows? If he spoke out? His people would not understand him. They would think he was mad. They would be sorry, dammit. Sorry for him! Why, he is not sorry for himself. He can stand it now he knows what it is like. He can stand it—if they can. And he realizes they can stand it, and are merely anxious about his welfare, the welfare which does not trouble him in the least, for he has looked into the depth of evil, and for him the earth has changed; and he rather despises it. He has seen all he wants to see of it. Let it go, dammit. If they don’t mind the change, and don’t kick, why should he? What a hell of a world to be born into; and once it did look so jolly good, too! He is shy, cheery, but inexorably silent on what he knows. Some old fool said to him once, “It must be pretty bad out there?” Pretty bad? What a lark!

It is difficult for him to endure hearing the home folk speak with the confidence of special revelation of the war they have not seen, when he, who has been in it, has contradictory minds about it. They are so assured that they think there can be no other view and they bear out their mathematical arguments with maps and figures. It might be a chess tournament. He feels at last his anger beginning to smoulder. He feels a bleak and impalpable alienation from those who are all the world to him. He understands at last that they also are in the mirror, projected from his world that was, and that now he cannot come near them. Yet though he knows, they do not. The greatest evil of war—that is what staggers you when you come home, feeling you know the worst of it—is the unconscious indifference to war’s obscene blasphemy against life of the men and women who have the assurance that they will never be called on to experience it. Out there, comrades in a common and unlightened affliction shake a fist humorously at the disregarding stars, and mock them. Let the Fates do their worst. The sooner it is over, the better; and, while waiting, they will take it out of Old Jerry. He is the only one out of whom they can take it. They are to throw away their world and die, so they must take it out on somebody.

But what is the matter with London? The men on leave, when they meet each other, always ask that question without hope, in the seclusion of their confidence and special knowledge. They feel perversely they would sooner be amid the hated filth and smells of the battle-ground than at home. Out there, though possibly mischance may suddenly extinguish the day for them, they will be with those who understand, with comrades who rarely discuss the war except obliquely and with quiet and bitter jesting. Seeing the world has gone wrong, how much better and easier it is to take the likelihood of extinction with men who have the same mental disgust as your own, and can endure it till they die, but who, while they live in the same torment with you, have the unspoken but certain conviction that Europe is a decadent old beast eating her young with insatiable appetite, than to sit in sunny breakfast-rooms with the newspaper maps and positive arguments of the unsaved!

From Old Junk, by H. M. Tomlinson; Alfred A. Knopf; New York, 1923.

Andiamo a Casa

—G. M. Trevelyan

Let us take the case of an imaginary “Giuseppe,” and try to reconstruct in his person a type of the povero fante. Giuseppe comes from a farm in the Appenines, where, in the summer of 1915, he left a wife and five small children. His simple and intensely human thoughts and affections are all centred upon them, and upon his farm and a village made up of persons like himself. Outside that circle he has no experience, no knowledge, nor much interest in life beyond a good-natured but uninstructed curiosity in whatever may be going on under his eyes. Of politics he knows nothing. No one has attempted to instruct him in them, except the priest, who told him not to vote because the State was wicked, and the Socialist, who exhorted him to seize the land. He is silently suspicious, both of priest and of Socialist, as he is of every one pretending to authority. But their combined exhortations can have done little to fortify his sense of patriotism or of civic duty, which must in his case be instinctive, since they have never been inculcated. He has, indeed, heard of Garibaldi and knows that the Austrians are brutte bestie. Giuseppe can read, which is more than can be said of a quarter of his regiment, chiefly coming from the south. But he sets little store by the newspapers—they do not talk about things that interest him; besides, he regards them as being part of the system of authority, and, therefore, their statements are to be regarded with the respectful skepticism that he accords to all things official.

Between battles there is little drill, training, or discipline. The life of the soldier seems to Giuseppe dull and purposeless. His officers, who expose themselves well in battle, are patriotic, and know all the reasons for the war, but they live by themselves. Sometimes the Colonel reads the regiment a manifesto about the Italian eagle perching on the highest summit of the Alps, but some of Giuseppe’s companions say under their breaths, “Porca Madonna! Vogliamo andare a casa.” The trenches are very wet and cold when they are not very hot, and they are always terribly dull; several times he has been left in them two months on end by some Staff muddle. And even when he is in riposo life is wet, dirty and dull. But “Pazienza,” Giuseppe says; that is his greatest peasant virtue, on which the ungrateful State is built.

There are several Socialists in the regiment who conduct most of the discussions. Some of them are patriots, but Aristodemo talks them all down. Giuseppe does not understand all that Aristodemo says; it is vague, distant talk coming from the world outside the village. But it seems to have some relation to things that are real to him; the chief of these are his wife’s letters, saying that prices are so high that she can no longer feed the children on the separation allowance. She also writes that the priest says the Pope has declared there will be peace in a month, but that the chemist says they must go on fighting for another three months and then they will win. Giuseppe has just come off San Gabriele, and knows they will not win in three months. Half the regiment was killed there. He doubts if they will ever win at all. Russia has given in; he understands that much about world politics; also that the Inglesi are very stubborn.

Aristodemo says the Russians are sensible fellows. Porca miseria! he says, what are we doing shivering and starving and dying here to win these barren mountains where no one lives at all except a few barbarians who cannot even talk Italian? What are we fighting for? The Inglesi pay our masters to go on with the war, says Aristodemo, but none of it comes our way, except fivepence a day in the front line and threepence behind! Giuseppe has had two leaves of ten days each since he joined in 1915, and each time he went back his wife was more depressed and thinner, and every one in the village had turned against the war except the chemist—but he is always against the aging priest anyhow.

Oh yes, says Aristodemo, the Russians have got liberty, and so they have all gone home to their farms, and taken the land in the bargain! They have had a revolution, and so should we. All the “great guns,” he says, keep their sons and nephews imboscati; they sit in the retrovie, eating beefsteak, and give us poor soldiers in the trenches dry chestnuts. Giuseppe laughs at that, and sings a song about it, a forbidden song. One verse says—

“A Cividale e Udine ci sono imboscati;

Hanno le scarpe lucide e capelli profumati.”

(“At Cividale and Udine the embuches live.

They have shining boots and perfumed hair.”)

Giuseppe has been two and a half years away from home, and here is a third winter coming on. When he gets away from Aristodemo he wishes he could talk about things to the young sub-lieutenant as he did one day last year, when the sub-lieutenant made it all so clear to him, and talked about Italia. But now the sub-lieutenant has gone. His arm was blown right off him on that accursed mountain, and he just said, “Viva l’Italia!” and then his skin grew like wax. But Giuseppe carried him away so that the brutte bestie never got him.

On the top of all this came the news of Caporetto, and Cardona’s orders to retreat. So they trudged off, sad at first that it had all come to nothing, and sad to leave behind so many dead comrades on those barren hills. But as they went on they began to feel they were going home. The roads in the plain were so crowded that they soon began to pass the artillery and cars standing blocked in rows. It was raining like ruin. No one gave orders or made them keep rank. They just splashed on, getting more and more like a mob, in the mood of children coming back from school. “Andiamo a casa,” they said. Evidently Cardona had given it up, and the war was over. As there is going to be peace now, said Aristodemo, let us throw away our rifles, and then no fool of an officer can turn us back to fight when it is of no use. Well, says Giuseppe, the rifles are very heavy, and we have not eaten for two days.

To me the thing that needs explaining is not why the Retreat occurred, but why it did not occur long before.

From Scenes from Italy’s War, by G. M. Trevelyan; Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1919.

What Manner of Man

—John Dos Passos

The woods all about him were a vast rubble-heap; the jagged, splintered boles of leafless trees rose in every direction from heaps of brass shell-cases, of tin cans, of bits of uniform and equipment. The wind came in puffs laden with an odor as of dead rats in an attic. And this was what all the centuries of civilization had struggled for. For this had generations worn away their lives in mines and factories and forges, in fields and workshops, toiling, screwing higher and higher the tension of their minds and muscles, polishing brighter and brighter the mirror of their intelligence. For this!

The German prisoner and another man had appeared in the road again, carrying a stretcher between them, walking with the slow, meticulous steps of great fatigue. A series of shells came in, like three cracks of a whip along the road. Martin followed the stretcher-bearers into the dugout.

The prisoner wiped the sweat from his grime-streaked forehead, and started up the step of the dugout again, a closed stretcher on his shoulder. Something made Martin look after him as he strolled down the rutted road. He wished he knew German so that he might call after the man and ask him what manner of man he was.

Again, like snapping of a whip, three shells flashed yellow as they exploded in the brilliant sunlight of the road. The slender figure of the prisoner bent suddenly double, like a pocket-knife closing, and lay still. Martin ran out, stumbling in the hard ruts. In a soft child’s voice the prisoner was babbling endlessly, contentedly. Martin kneeled beside him and tried to lift him, clasping him round the chest under the arms. He was very hard to lift, for his legs dragged limply in their soaked trousers, where the blood was beginning to saturate the muddy cloth. Sweat dripped from Martin’s face on the man’s face, and he felt the arm-muscles and the ribs pressed against his body as he clutched the wounded man tightly to him in the effort of carrying him toward the dugout. The effort gave Martin a strange contentment. It was as if his body were taking part in the agony of the man’s body. At last they were washed out, all the hatreds, all the lies, in blood and sweat. Nothing was left but the quiet friendliness of beings alike in every part, eternally alike.

Two men with a stretcher came from the dugout, and Martin laid the man’s body, fast growing limper, less animated, down very carefully.

As he stood by the car, wiping the blood off his hands with an oily rag, he could still feel the man’s ribs and the muscles of the man’s arm against his side. It made him strangely happy.

From One Man’s Initiation: 1917, by John Dos Passos; George H. Doran; New York, 1922.

Smashed in Some Complicated Manner

—H. G. Wells

Abruptly and shockingly, this malignity of warfare, which had been so far only a festering cluster of reports and stories and rumours and suspicions, stretched out its arms to Essex and struck a barb of grotesque cruelty into the very heart of Mr. Britling. Late one afternoon came a telegram from Filmington-on-Sea, where Aunt Wilshire had been recovering her temper in a boarding-house after a round of visits in Yorkshire and the moorlands. And she had been “very seriously” injured by an overnight Zeppelin air raid. It was a raid that had not been even mentioned in the morning’s papers. She had asked to see him.

It was, ran the compressed telegraphic phrase, “advisable to come at once.”

Hugh found her in the hospital very much hurt indeed. She had been smashed in some complicated manner that left the upper part of her body intact, and lying slantingly upon pillows. Over the horror of bandaged broken limbs and tormented flesh below sheets and a counterpane were drawn. Morphia had been injected, he understood, to save her from pain, but presently it might be necessary for her to suffer. She lay up in her bed with an effect of being enthroned, very white and still; her strong profile with its big nose and her straggling hair and a certain dignity gave her the appearance of some very important, very old man, of an aged pope for instance, rather than of an old woman.

He was not sure at first that she knew of his presence.

“Here I am, Aunt Wilshire,” he said. “Your nephew Hugh.”

“Mean and preposterous,” she said very distinctly.

But she was not thinking of Mr. Britling. She was talking of something else.

She was saying: “It should not have been known I was here. There are spies everywhere. Everywhere. There is a spy now—or a lump very like a spy. They pretend it is a hot-water bottle. Pretext … Oh yes! I admit—absurd. But I have been pursued by spies. Endless spies. Endless, endless spies. Their devices are almost incredible … He has never forgiven me … All this on account of a carpet. A palace carpet. Over which I had no control. I spoke my mind. He knew I knew of it. I never concealed it. So I was hunted. For years he had mediated revenge. Now he has it. But at what cost! And they call him Emperor. Emperor! … His arm is withered; his son—imbecile. He will die—without dignity …”

The story was like a page from some fantastic romance of Jules Verne’s; the peace of the little old town, the people going to bed, the quiet streets, the quiet starry sky, and then for ten minutes an uproar of breaking glass, and then a fire here, a fire there, a child’s voice pitched high by pain and terror, scared people going to and fro with lanterns, and the sky empty again, the Zeppelin raiders gone.

Five minutes before, Aunt Wilshire had been sitting in the boarding-house playing Patience. Five minutes later she was a thing of elemental terror and agony, bleeding wounds and shattered bones, plunging about in the darkness amidst a heap of wreckage. And already the German airmen were buzzing away to sea like boys who have thrown a stone through a window.

Her voice weakened, but it was evident she wanted to say something more.

“I’m here,” said Mr. Britling. “Your nephew Hughie.”

She listened.

“Can you understand me?”

She became suddenly an earnest, tender human being. “My dear!” she said and seemed to search for something in her mind and failed to find it.

“You have always understood me,” she tried.

“You have always been a good boy to me, Hughie,” she said, rather vacantly, and added after some moments of still reflection, “au fond.”

After that she was silent for some minutes, and took no notice of his whispers.

Then she recollected what had been in her mind. She put out a hand that sought for Mr. Britling’s sleeve.

“Hughie!”

“I’m here, Auntie,” said Mr. Britling. “I’m here.”

“Don’t let him get at your Hughie … Too good for it, dear. Oh! much—much too good … People let these wars and excitements run away with them … They put too much into them … They aren’t—they aren’t worth it. Don’t let him get at your Hughie.”

“No.”

“You understand me, Hughie?”

“Perfectly, Auntie.”

“Then don’t forget it. Ever.”

She had said what she wanted to say. She had made her testament. He was amazed to find this grotesque old creature had suddenly become beautiful, in that silvery vein of beauty one sometimes finds in very old men. She was exalted as great artists will sometimes exalt the portraits of the aged. He was moved to kiss her forehead.

At about seven o’clock that evening she died.

From Mr. Britling Sees It Through, by H. G. Wells; Macmillan; New York, 1917.