Chapter Seven:

Mourn

Writers, along with the inarticulate and illiterate, would have mourning, deep mourning, thrust upon them during the war; talent with words brought no immunity when it came to loss. At least ten million soldiers died in the trenches; boys from the combatant nations born between 1892 and 1895, ages 19–22 when the fighting started, had their ranks reduced by over 35 percent. Their survivors would mourn them the rest of their lives. “Every day one meets saddened women, with haggard faces and lethargic movements, and one dare not ask about their husband or son,” Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary in 1918. Writers, even the most illustrious, joined the ranks of the bereaved, having lost sons, brothers, nephews, colleagues, students, protégés, lovers, friends.

It’s surprising then, reading the books they wrote while the war was still in progress, how few did their mourning in print. They wrote of tanks, trenches, cannon, strategy and tactics, political ramifications, moral issues, even the sick and wounded, but few wrote descriptions of the dead, especially their dead, and hardly any could bring themselves to describe their feelings of loss while the blow was still fresh. It seems, looking back on this now, as if they suffered a reversal of the usual order of things; they could write movingly of the larger tragedy, murder en masse, but the death of a single individual was too much for them to bear.

This reticence, in a confessional age like ours, can be hard to understand. Was the death of a friend or relation too painful for words, straining the limits of what even a Nobel Prize winner could do with language? Was it better, literarily speaking, to wait until later, when the war ended and perspective could be gained? Better to keep a stiff literary upper lip while everyone else suffered in silence? Had the long years of peace and security, writers’ own privileged status, ill equipped them to write of sorrow?

When the dead appear, it’s often as nameless bodies that move the writers to pity, but are too anonymous to mourn. Those going on VIP tours of the trenches did not often see corpses, and when they did, their reactions could be coldly impersonal. Edith Wharton, allowed farther into the front lines than ordinary visitors, spots “halfway between cliff and cliff, a gray uniform huddled in a dead heap,” and feels, not sadness, not grief, but “relief to find it was after all a tangible enemy hidden over there across the meadow.”

The ambulance drivers and war correspondents, writers like Henry Beston and Richard Harding Davis, saw more of death, and wrote about it with more specificity. Poets like Jean Cocteau, trying to make sense of the massacre, retreated (and, reading it now, it can seem like retreat) to the formalism of classic poetry. Writers like Katherine Mansfield, unable to deal with their losses publicly, wrote about them movingly in the privacy of their diaries, which were published only once the war was over.

In the end, their reactions were like those of everyone else whose loved ones died. Shock, horror, incomprehension, sadness, anger, fantasies of revenge. Wells’s Mr. Britling experiences them all in one overwhelming wave when his son is killed, and whatever emotions he is spared are left for his young widowed friend Letty to express with a passion and intensity that can still burn when you read it today.

There is one aspect of the mourning writers did do in print that is striking, particularly among the British writers. The dead in their books that are actually named, mourned with specificity, are all upper-class officers, or, at the minimum, brilliant young graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. John Buchan, in his long bestselling book on the Somme, gives the specific name of only one of the dead hundred thousands, the son of the prime minister and his friend.

This kind of discrimination, while not particularly praiseworthy, is at least understandable. Writers, often enjoying a privileged position inside the elite, would know mostly officers, their prewar friends, or students; and with the war being particularly dangerous for junior officers, many of these would die. Enlisted men from Glasgow or York would not have novelist friends to mourn them, at least not until the 1920s, when the soldier-writers published their own memoirs and talked about the men they led.

You get the feeling, reading those elegies we do have, that writers were waiting for the war to end to do their serious mourning, until they had time—if they would ever have time—to make sense of it all. For now, the pain was too raw, the suffering too enormous. “The scarlet doom,” Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren called this mood, while the war was yet in progress, “the scarlet doom hurled over a grave-strewn world.” Few writers could lift it.

George Santayana’s Spanish-Catholic background made him an outsider at prewar Harvard, and he left for Europe before the war started. He was fifty-two, and had a reputation as an urbane, skeptical philosopher and novelist, enhanced by his widely praised The Last Puritan. He’s in Bartlett’s for his quote, “Only the dead have seen the last of war,” and, more famously, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Bertrand Russell, in his autobiography, remembered Santayana’s wartime attitude: “He had not enough respect for the human race to care whether it destroyed itself or not.”

When Edith Wharton sent out invitations to the leading authors of the day to contribute to her fund-raising The Book of the Homeless, Jean Cocteau, at twenty-three, was by far the youngest writer asked. By the time the war started, his reputation for a genius kind of self-absorption was already immense, though it wasn’t until after the Armistice that his novels, poems, paintings, and films made him one of the leading lights of the French avant-garde. Today he’s remembered mostly for his movie La Belle et la Bete, and his play La Voix Humaine.

A portrait of him is included in The Book of the Homeless, an “unpublished crayon sketch” by the Russian artist and Diaghilev set designer Leon Bakst. No less military figure could be imagined, with his finely chiseled yet delicate features, the open neck of his tunic, and his doe-like, curiously cold eyes, topped off by a Bohemian shock of wavy hair. A recruiting board would have taken one look at him and thrown up their hands; though, like so many other writers, he put in a shift, a short shift, as an ambulance driver in Belgium. (He was soon dismissed and sent home in disgrace, though biographies are vague on exactly why.) “How the Young Men died in Hellas” is very typical of his output at this stage of his career, with his intense interest in all things Greek.

There were few accounts written by a father about his son’s death actually published while the war was being fought, which makes Harry Lauder’s, taken from his A Minstrel in France, so moving. Lauder was in his fifties when the war started, at the height of his reputation as a beloved Scottish music hall comedian and singer, famous for his kilt, his crooked walking stick, his broad Scots dialect, and songs like “Roamin’ in the Gloamin’.”

If you go online, you can see an eight-minute film clip of Lauder and Charlie Chaplin hamming it up before the cameras in Hollywood during the war—Lauder more than holds his own with the Little Tramp.

Lauder’s son John was a captain in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, wounded twice, and twice sent back to France, only to die on the Somme in 1916.

Lauder all but collapsed under the pain of this, and it was only by devoting himself to entertaining the troops in France that he was able to find solace. (He was knighted for this after the war.) He performed close to the trenches and, when given the chance, took a measure of revenge.

“I was swept by an almost irresistible desire to be fighting myself. If I could only play my part! If I could fire even a single shot—if I, with my own hands, could do that much against those who had killed my boy! And then, incredulously, I heard the words in my ear. It was the major.”

‘Would you like to try a shot, Harry?’ he asked.

They showed me my place. After all, it was the simplest of matters to fire even the biggest of guns. I had but to pull a lever. I was thrilled and excited as I had never been in all my life before.

‘All ready? Fire!’

It pleases me to think that the long snouted engine of war propelled that shell, under my guiding hand, with unwonted accuracy and effectiveness! Perhaps I was childish, to feel as I did; indeed, I have no doubt that was so. But I dinna care!”

It wasn’t just soldiers who suffered in France during the war. Katherine Mansfield, the talented New Zealand short-story writer, had gone there, of all places, for her health; her description of her lonely, desperate battle against tuberculosis and crushing solitude makes for grim reading even today. She wasn’t yet thirty, but already life was proving too much for her, and the last blow was the death of her beloved younger brother Leslie, who died while serving in the trenches as a British officer. It was his death that turned her fiction to reminiscences of their idyllic childhood together back in New Zealand. Her diary wasn’t published until after the war, but includes these poignant passages taken from 1915.

Paul Claudel was one of those characteristically French figures who combined literature with a career in the foreign service. Forty-six when war broke out, he was assigned to a diplomatic post in South America and helped ensure the delivery of vital foodstuffs to France; after the war, he briefly served as ambassador to the United States. His literary reputation was analogous to T. S. Eliot’s in England—a politically conservative poet whose conversion to Catholicism is commemorated by a bronze plaque set in the floor of Notre Dame in Paris.

W. H. Auden would later take Claudel to task for his militaristic opinions in a famous stanza, though one suspects it was less for reasons of politics than it was for convenience of rhyme.

“Time that with this strange excuse

Pardoned Kipling and his views,

And will pardon Paul Claudel,

Pardons him for writing well.”

And the Bullet Won

—Richard Harding Davis

The waste of human life in this war is so enormous, so far beyond our daily experience, that disasters less appalling are much easier to understand. The loss of three people in an automobile accident comes nearer home than the fact that at the battle of Sézanne thirty thousand men were killed. Few of us are trained to think of men in such numbers—certainly not of dead men in such numbers. We have seen thirty thousand men together only during the world’s series or at the championship football matches. To get an idea of the waste of this war we must imagine all of the spectators at a football match between Yale and Harvard suddenly stricken dead. We must think of all the wives, children, friends affected by the loss of those thirty thousand, and we must multiply those thirty thousand by hundreds and imagine these hundreds of thousands lying dead in Belgium, in Alsace-Lorraine, and within ten miles of Paris. After the Germans were repulsed at Meaux and at Sézanne the dead of both armies were so many that they lay intermingled in layers three and four deep. They were buried in long pits and piled on top of each other like cigars in a box. Lines of fresh earth so long that you mistook them for trenches were in reality graves. Some bodies lay for days uncovered until they lost all human semblance. They were so many you ceased to regard them even as corpses. They had become just a part of the waste, a part of the shattered walls, uprooted trees, and fields ploughed by shells. What once had been your fellow men were only bundles of clothes, swollen and shapeless, like scarecrows stuffed with rags, polluting the air.

Each one had once been physically fit or he would not have been passed to the front; and those among them who are officers are finely bred, finely educated, or they would not be officers. But each matched his good health, his good breeding, and knowledge against a broken piece of shell or steel bullet, and the shell or bullet won.

From With the Allies, by Richard Harding Davis; Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1918.

He Loved His Youth

—John Buchan

In the Guards’ advance, among many other gallant and distinguished officers, there fell one whose death was, in a peculiar sense, a loss to his country and the future. Lieutenant Raymond Asquith, of the Grenadier Guards, the eldest son of the British Prime Minister, died while leading his men through the fatal enfilading fire from the corner of Ginchy village. In this war the gods took toll of every rank and class. Few generals and statesmen in the Allied nations but had to mourn intimate bereavements. But the death of Raymond Asquith had a poignancy apart from his birth and position, and it may be permitted to one of his oldest friends to pay his tribute to a heroic memory.

A scholar of the ripe Elizabethan type, a brilliant wit, an accomplished poet, a sound lawyer—these things were borne lightly, for his greatness was not in his attainments but in himself. He had always a curious aloofness towards mere worldly success. He loved the things of the mind for their own sake—good books, good talk, the company of old friends—and the rewards of common ambition seemed to him too trivial for a man’s care. He was of the spending type in life, giving freely of the riches of his nature, but asking nothing in return. His carelessness of personal gain, his inability to trim or truckle, and his aloofness from the facile acquaintances of the modern world made him incomprehensible to many, and his high fastidiousness gave him a certain air of coldness. Most noble in presence, and with every grace of voice and manner, he moved among men like a being of another race, scornfully detached from the common struggle; and only his friends knew the warmth and loyalty of his soul.

At the outbreak of war he joined a Territorial battalion, from which he was later transferred to the Grenadiers. More than most men he hated the loud bellicosities of politics, and he had never done homage to the deities of the crowd. His critical sense made him chary of enthusiasm, and it was no sudden sentimental fervour that swept him into the Army. He saw his duty, and, though it meant the shattering of every taste and interest, he did it joyfully, and did it to the full. For a little he had a post on the Staff, but applied to be sent back to his battalion, since he wished no privilege. In the Guards he was extraordinarily happy, finding the same kind of light-hearted and high-spirited companionship which had made Oxford for him a place of delectable memories. He was an admirable battalion officer, and thought seriously of taking up the Army as a profession after the war, for he had all the qualities which go to the making of a good soldier.

In our long roll of honour no nobler figure will find a place. He was a type of his country at its best—shy of rhetorical professions, austerely self-respecting, one who hid his devotion under a mask of indifference, and, when the hour came, revealed it only in deeds. Many gave their all for the cause, but few, if any, had so much to give. He loved his youth, and his youth has become eternal.

From The Battle of the Somme, by John Buchan; Grosset & Dunlap; New York, 1917.

Demons of the Whirlwind

—George Santayana

The Undergraduate Killed In Battle

Sweet as the lawn beneath his sandalled tread

Or the scarce rippled stream beneath his oar,

For its still, channelled current constant more,

His life was, and the few blithe words he said.

One or two poets read he, and reread;

One or two friends in boyish ardour wore

Next to his heart, incurious of the lore

Dodonian woods might murmur o’er his head.

Ah, demons of the whirlwind, have a care

What, trumpeting your triumphs, ye undo!

The earth once won, begins your long despair

That never, never is his bliss for you.

He breathed betimes this clement island air

And in unwitting lordship saw the blue.

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

All Four Lie Buried on the Western Front

—Gilbert Murray

Four New College scholars of exceptional intellect and character entered the university in 1905—Arthur Heath, Leslie Hunter, R. C. Woodhead, and Phillip Brown. And now all four lie buried on the Western Front. Each had his special character and ways and aims; but to one who knew them well, there comes from all of them a certain uniform impression, the impression of an extraordinary and yet unconscious high-mindedness. It is not merely that they were clever, hard-working, conscientious, honourable, lovers of poetry and beauty; the sort of men who could never be suspected of evading a duty, or, say, voting for their own interest rather than the common good. It was, I think, that the standards which had become the normal guides of life to them were as a matter of plain fact spiritual standards, and not of the world nor the flesh.

Such language may sound strained as applied to a group of men who were earning their living among us in perfectly ordinary ways, as teachers, writers, doctors, civil servants, some of them in the law or in business; but it implies nothing strained or specially high-strung in the quality of their daily lives. There is always a religion of some sort at the root of every man’s living. Every man is either willing or not willing to sacrifice himself to something which he feels to be higher than himself, though if he is sensible, he will probably not talk much about it. And men of conscience and self-mastery are fully as human, as varied, and as interesting as any weaklings or picturesque scoundrels are.

Perhaps the first thing that struck one about Arthur Heath was his gentleness and modesty. “It was fine,” says one of his superior officers, “to see a first-rate intellect such as his applied to a practical matter that was strange of him. And he was so modest about himself, and never dreams how we all admired him.” The last words strike one as exactly true. Another quality was his affectionateness, or rather the large space that affection occupied in his mind. Affection, indeed, is too weak a term to describe the feeling that seems to glow behind the words of his letters home; for instance, the beautiful letter to his mother, written on July 11, about the prospect of death. He was a devoted son and brother, interested in every detail of home life, and not forgetting family birthdays. And the same quality pervaded much of his relations towards friends and acquaintances. He was the sort of man whom people confide in, and consult in their troubles.

Heath was a bold thinker; he held clear opinions of his own on all sorts of subjects. He often differed from other people, especially people in authority. Yet he was never for a moment bitter or conceited or anxious to contradict. There was no scorn about him; and his irrepressible sense of fun, so far from being unkind, had an element of positive affection in it.

In comparing him with other men who have fought and fallen in the war, I feel that one of his most marked characteristics was his instinct for understanding. In the midst of strong feeling and intense action his quiet, penetrating intelligence was always at work. Even at the front, where most men become absorbed in their immediate job, he was full of strategical problems, of the war as a whole. His courage was like that of the Brave Man in Aristotle, who knows that a danger is dangerous, and fears it, but goes through with it because he knows that he ought. He liked to understand what he was doing. He was ready, of course, to obey without question, but he would then know that he was obeying without question. He was ready to give his life and all the things that he valued in life, his reading and music and philosophy, but he liked to know what he was giving them for.

After his first wound: “Fear is a very odd thing. When I was up in the trenches about thirty yards from the enemy, I got over the parapet and crawled out to examine a mine-crater without anything worse than a certain amount of excitement. But when we are back here in Brigade Reserve and the shells start screaming over, I feel thoroughly afraid and there is no denying it.”

He never groused about hardships, nor yet about the evils of war. The war was something he had to carry through, and he would make the best of it until it killed him.

On October 8, the end came. It was Heath’s twenty-eighth birthday. The battalion held a series of trenches in front of Vermelles, across the Hulluch road, in that stretch of ghastly and shell-tortured black country which we now think of as the Loos Salient. For the whole day there had been an intense German bombardment, tearing and breaking the trenches, and presumably intended to lead up to a general infantry attack. It was decided, in order to prevent this plan developing, that the Sixth Battalion should attempt an attack on the enemy at “Gun Trench.” This was a very difficult enterprise in itself, and doubly so to troops already worn by a long and fierce bombardment. The charge was made by “A” Company about 6:30 and beaten back. It was followed by a series of bombing attacks, for which a constant supply of bombs had to be kept up across the open. It was during this work that Arthur Heath fell, shot through the neck. He spoke once, to say “Don’t trouble about me,” and died almost immediately.

His platoon sergeant wrote to his parents: “It will console you to know that a braver man never existed.”

One after another, a sacrifice greater than can be counted, they go; and will go until the due end is won.

At the close of the Michaelmas Term of 1914 there was a memorial service at New College, as in other colleges, for members who had fallen in the war. It seemed a long list even then, though it was scarcely at its beginning. And those who attended the service will not forget the sight of the white-haired warden, full of blameless years, kneeling before the altar on the bare stones, and praying that it might be granted to us, the survivors, to live such lives as these young men who had gone before us. His words interpreted, I think, the unconscious feeling of most of those who heard him. It certainly changes the whole aspect of the world, even to a man whose life is advanced and his character somewhat set, when the men who were his intimate friends are proved to have in them, not merely the ordinary virtues and pleasantnesses of common life, but something high and resplendent which one associates with the stories of old saints or heroes; still more when there is burned into him the unforgettable knowledge that men whom he loved have died for him.

From Faith, War, and Policy, by Gilbert Murray; Houghton Mifflin; Boston, 1917.

Eyes Lit with Risk

—Jean Cocteau

How the Young Men Died in Hellas

Antigone went wailing to the dust

She reverenced not the face of Death like these

To who it came as no enfeebling peace

But a command relentless and august.

These grieved not the beauty of the morn,

Nor that the sun was on the ripening flower;

Smiling they faced the sacrificial hour,

Blithe nightingales against the fatal thorn.

They grieved not for the theatre’s high-banked tiers,

Where restlessly the noisy crowd leans over,

With laughter and with jostling, to discover

The blue and green of chaffing charioteers.

Nor for the fluted shafts, the carven stones

Of that sole city, bright above the seas,

Where young men met to talk with Socrates

Or toss the ivory bones.

Their eyes were lit with tumult and with risk,

But when they felt Death touch their hands and pass

They followed, dropping on the garden grass

The parchment and the disk.

It seemed no wrong to them that they just go.

They laid their lives down as the poet lays

On the white page the poem that shall praise

His memory when the hand that wrote is low.

Erect they stood and, festally arrayed,

Serenely waited the transforming hour,

Softly as Hyacinth slid from youth to flower,

Or the shade of Cyparis to a cypress shade.

They wept not for the lost Ionian days,

Nor liberty, nor household love and laughter,

Nor the long leaden slumber that comes after

Life’s little wakefulness.

Fearless they sought the land no sunsets see,

Whence our weak pride shrinks back, and would return,

Knowing a pinch of ashes in an urn

Henceforth our garden and our house shall be.

Young men, my brothers, you whose morning skies

I have seen the deathly lassitude invade,

Oh, how you suffered! How you were afraid!

What death-damp hands you locked about your eyes!

You, so insatiably athirst to spend

The young desires in your hearts abloom,

How could you think the desert was your doom,

The waterless fountain and the endless end?

You yearned not for the face of love, grown dim,

But only fought your anguished bones to wrest

From the Black Angel crouched upon your breast,

Who scanned you ere he led you down with him.

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

Drop Drop Drop of Blood

—Henry Beston

Montauville was the last habitable village of the region. The dirty, mud-spattered village was caught between the leathery sweep of two wooded ridges. Though less than a mile from the first German line, the village, because of its protection from shells by a spur of the Bois-le-Pretre, was in remarkably good condition; the only building to show conspicuous damage being the church, whose steeple had been twice struck. Here and there, among the uncultivated fields of those who had fled, were the green fields of some one who had stayed. A woman of seventy still kept open her grocery shop; it was extraordinarily dirty, full of buzzing flies, and smelled of spilt wine.

“Why did you stay?” I asked her.

“Because I did not want to leave the village. Of course, my daughter wanted me to come to Dijon. Imagine me in Dijon, I, who have been to Nancy only once! A fine figure I should make in Dijon in my sabots!”

“And you are not afraid of the shells?”

“Oh, I should be afraid of them if I ever went out in the street. But I never leave my shop.”

And so she stayed, selling the three staples of the French front, Camembert cheese, Norwegian sardines, and cakes of chocolate. But Montauville was far from safe. It was there that I first saw a man killed. I had been talking to a sentry, a small young fellow of twenty-one or two, with yellow hair and gray-blue eyes full of weariness. He complained of a touch of jaundice, and wished heartily that the whole affair—meaning the war in general—was finished. He was very anxious to know if the Americans thought the Boches were going to win. Some vague idea of winning the war just to get even with the Boches seemed to be in his mind. I assured him that American opinion was optimistic in regard to the chances of the Allies, and strolled away.

Hardly had I gone ten feet, when a “seventy-seven” shell, arriving without warning, went Zip-bang, and, turning to crouch to the wall, I saw the sentry crumple up in the mud. It was as if he were a rubber effigy of a man blown up with air, and some one had suddenly ripped the envelope. His rifle fell from him, and he, bending from the waist, leaned faced down into the mud. I was the first to get to him. The young, discontented face was full of the gray street mud, there was mud in the hollows of the eyes, in the mouth, in the fluffy mustache. A chunk of the shell had ripped open the left breast to the heart. Down his sleeve, as down a pipe, flowed a hasty drop, drop, drop of blood that mixed with the mire.

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

Of All the Days in My Life the Most Terrible

—Harry Lauder

I did not go to sleep for a long time. It was New Year’s, and I lay thinking of my boy, and wondering what this year would bring him. It was early in the morning before I slept. And it seemed to me that I had scarce been asleep at all when there came a pounding at the door, loud enough to rouse the heaviest sleeper there ever was.

My heart almost stopped. There must be something serious indeed for them to be rousing me so early. I rushed to the door, and there was a porter, holding out a telegram. I took it and tore it open. And I knew why I had felt as I had the day before. I shall never forget what I read:

“Captain John Lauder killed in action, December 28. Official. War Office.”

He had been killed four days before I knew it! And yet—I had known. Let no one ever tell me again that there is nothing in presentment. Why else had I been so sad and uneasy in my mind? Why else, all through that Sunday, had it been so impossible for me to take comfort in what was said to cheer me? Some warning had come to me, some sense that all was not well.

Realization came to me slowly. I sat and stared at that slip of paper, that had come to me like the breath of doom. Dead! Dead these four days! I was never to see the light of his eyes again. I was never to hear that laugh of his. I had looked on my boy for the last time. Could it be true? Ah, I knew it was! And it was for this moment that I had been waiting, that we had all been waiting, ever since we sent John away to fight for his country and do his part. I think we had all felt that it must come. We had all known that it was too much to hope that he should be one of those to be spared.

The black despair that had been hovering over me for hours closed down now and enveloped all my senses. Everything was unreal. For a time I was quite numb. For then, as I began to realize and to visualize what it was to mean in my life that my boy was dead there came a great pain. The iron of realization slowly seared every word of that curt telegram upon my heart. I said it to myself, over and over again. And I whispered to myself, as my thoughts took form, over and over, the one terrible word: “Dead!”

I felt that for me everything had come to an end with the reading of that dire message. It seemed to me that for me the board of life was black and blank. For me there was no past and there could be no future. Everything had been swept away, erased, by one sweep of the hand of a cruel fate. Oh, there was a past though! And it was in that past that I began to delve. It was made up of every memory I had of my boy. I fell at once to remembering him. I clutched at every memory, as if I must grasp them and make sure of them, lest they be taken from me as well as the hope of seeing him again that the telegram had forever snatched away.

I would have been destitute indeed then. It was as if I must fix in my mind the way he had been wont to look, and recall to my ears every tone of his voice, every trick of his speech. There was something left of him that I must keep, I knew, even then, at all costs, if I was to be able to bear his loss at all.

There was a vision of him before my eyes. My bonnie Highland laddie, brave and strong in his kilt and the uniform of his country, going out to his death with a smile on his face. And there was another vision that came up now, unbidden. It was a vision of him lying stark and cold upon the battlefield, the mud on his uniform. And when I saw that vision I was like a man gone mad.

But God came to me, and slowly His peace entered my soul. And He made me see, as in a vision, that some things that I had said and that I had believed, were not so. He made me know, and I learned, straight from Him, that our boy has not been taken from us forever as I had said to myself so often since that telegram had come.

He is gone from this life, but he is waiting for us beyond this life. He is waiting beyond this life and this world of wicked war and wanton cruelty and slaughter. And we shall come, some day, his mother and I, to the place where he is waiting for us, and we shall all be as happy there as we were on this earth in the happy days before the war.

My eyes will rest upon his face. I will hear his fresh young voice again as he sees me and cries out his greeting. I know what he will say. He will spy me, and his voice will ring out as it used to do. “Hello, Dad!” he will call, as he sees me. And I will feel the grip of his young, strong arms about me, just as in the happy days before that day that is of all the days in my life the most terrible and the most hateful in my memory—the day when they told me he had been killed.

From A Minstrel in France, by Harry Lauder; Hearst’s International Library; New York, 1918.

He Wanted Me to Write

—Katherine Mansfield

November, Bandol, France. Brother. I think I have known for a long time that life was over for me, but I never realized it or acknowledged it until my brother died. Yes, though he is lying in the middle of a little wood in France and I am still walking upright and feeling the sun and the wind from the sea, I am just as much dead as he is. The only possible value that anything can have for me is that it should put me in mind of something that happened or was when he was alive.

“Do you remember, Katie?” I hear his voice in the trees and flowers, in scents and light and shadow. I feel I have a duty to perform to the lovely time when we were both alive. I want to write about it, and he wanted me to. We talked it over in my little top room in London. I said: I will put on the front page: To my brother, Leslie Heron Beauchamp. Very well: it shall be done …

Wednesday. (December.) To-day I am hardening my heart. I am walking all around my heart and building up the defences. I do not mean to leave a loophole even for a tuft of violets to grow in. Give me a hard heart, O Lord! Lord, harden thou my heart!

February 14. Dear brother, as I jot these notes, I am speaking to you. Yes, it is to you. Each time I take up my pen you are with me. You are mine. You are my playfellow, my brother, and we shall range all over our country together. You are more vividly with me now this moment than if you were alive and I were writing to you from a short distance away. As you speak my name, the name you call me by that I love so—“Katie!”—your lip lifts in a smile—you believe in me, you know. In every word I write and in every place I visit I carry you with me.

February 15. Love, I will not fail. If I write every day faithfully a little record of how I have kept faith with you—that is what I must do. Now you are back with me. You are stepping forward, one hand in your pocket. My brother, my little boy brother! He never, never must be unhappy. Now I will come quite close to you, take your hand, and we shall tell this story to each other.

From Journal of Katherine Mansfield, by Katherine Mansfield; Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1926.

A Girl in a Pinafore

—H. G. Wells

And then as if it were something that every one in the Dower House had been waiting for, came the message that Hugh had been killed.

The telegram was brought up by a girl in a pinafore instead of the boy of the old dispensation, for boys now were doing the work of youths and youths the work of the men who had gone to the war.

Mr. Britling was standing at the front door; he had been surveying the late October foliage, touched by the warm light of the afternoon, when the messenger appeared. He opened the telegram, hoping as he had hoped when he opened any telegram since Hugh had gone to the front that it would not contain the exact words he read; that it would say wounded, that at the worst it would say “missing,” that perhaps it might even tell of some pleasant surprise, a brief return to home such as the last letter had foreshadowed. He read the final, unqualified statement, the terse regrets. He stood quite still for a moment or so, staring at the words …

He had an absurd conviction that this ought to be a sixpenny telegram. The thing worried him. He wanted to give the brat sixpence, and he had only threepence and a shilling, and he didn’t know what to do and his brain couldn’t think. It would be a shocking thing to give her a shilling, and he couldn’t somehow give just coppers for so important a thing as Hugh’s death.

She stared at him, inquiring, incredulous. “Is there a reply, Sir, please?”

“No,” he said, “that’s for you. All of it … This is a peculiar sort of telegram … It’s news of importance …”

As he said this he met her eyes, and had a sudden persuasion that she knew exactly what it was the telegram had told him, and that she was shocked at the gala-like treatment of such terrible news. He hesitated, feeling that he had to say something else, that he was socially inadequate, and then he decided that at any cost he must get his face away from her staring eyes. She made no movement to turn away. She seemed to be taking him in, recording him, for repetition, greedily, with every fibre of her being.

He stepped past her into the garden, and instantly forgot about her existence …

He had been thinking of this possibility for the last few weeks almost continuously, and yet now that it had come to him he felt that he had never thought about it before, that he must go off alone by himself to envisage this monstrous and terrible fact, without distraction or interruption.

He saw his wife coming down the alley between the roses.

He was wrenched by emotions as odd and unaccountable as the emotions of adolescence. He had exactly the same feeling now that he had had when in his boyhood some unpleasant admission had to be made to his parents. He felt he could not go through a scene with her yet, that he could not endure the task of telling her, of being observed. He turned abruptly to his left. He walked away as if he had not seen her, across his lawn toward the little summer-house upon a knoll that commanded a high road. She called to him, but he did not answer …

He would not look towards her, but for a time all his senses were alert to hear whether she followed him. Safe in the summer-house he could glance back.

It was all right. She was going into the house.

He drew the telegram from his pocket again furtively, almost guiltily, and re-read it. He turned it over and read it again …

Killed.

Then his own voice, hoarse and strange to his ears, spoke his thoughts.

“My God! how unutterably silly … Why did I let him go? Why did I let him go?”

Suddenly his boy was all about him, playing, climbing the cedars, twisting miraculously about the lawn on a bicycle, discoursing gravely upon his future, lying on the grass, breathing very hard and drawing preposterous caricatures. Once again they walked side by side up and down—it was athwart this very spot—talking gravely but rather shyly …

And here they had stood a little awkwardly, before the boy went in to say good-bye to his stepmother and go off with his father to the station …

“I will work to-morrow again,” whispered Mr. Britling, “but to-night—to-night … To-night is yours … Can you hear me, can you hear? Your father … who had counted on you …”

He went into the far corner of the hockey paddock, and there he moved about for a while and then stood for a long time holding the fence with both hands and staring blankly into the darkness. At last he turned away, and went stumbling and blundering towards the rose garden. A spray of creeper tore his face and distressed him. He thrust it aside fretfully, and it scratched his hand. He made his way to the seat in the arbour, and sat down and whispered to himself, and then became very still with his arm upon the back of the seat and his head upon his arm.

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

Tears are Difficult for a Man to Shed

—Paul Claudel

The Precious Blood

Oh, what if Thou, that a cup of water promisest

The illimitable sea,

Thou, Lord, dost also thirst?

Hast Thou not said, our blood shall quench Thee best

And first

Of any drink there be?

If then there be such virtue in it, Lord,

Ah, let us prove it now!

And, save by seeing it at Thy footstool poured,

How, Lord—oh, how?

If it indeed be precious and like gold,

As Thou has taught,

Why hoard it? There’s no wealth in gems unsold,

Nor joy in gems unbought.

Our sins are great, we know it; and we know

We must redeem our guilt;

Even so.

But tears are difficult for a man to shed,

And here is our blood poured out for France instead

To do with as Thou will!

Take it, O Lord! And make it Thine indeed,

Void of all lien and fee,

Nought else we ask of Thee;

But if Thou needst our Love as we Thy Justice need,

Great must Thine hunger be!

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

I Lay On that Brown Mound

—Harry Lauder

One of the officers at Albert was looking at me in a curiously intent fashion. I noticed that. And so on he came over to me.

“Where do you go next, Harry?” he asked me. His voice was keenly sympathetic, and his eyes and his manner were very grave.

“To a place called Ovilliers,” I said.

“So I thought,” he said. He put out his hand, and I gripped it hard. “I know, Harry. I know exactly where you are going, and I will send a man with you to act as your guide, who knows the spot you want to reach.”

I couldn’t answer him. I was too deeply moved. For Ovilliers is the spot where my son, Captain John Lauder, lies in his soldier’s grave. That grave had been, of course, from the very first, the final, the ultimate object of my journey.

And so a private soldier joined our party as guide, and we took to the road again. The Bapaume road it was—a famous highway, bitterly contested, savagely fought for. There was no talking in our car. I certainly was not disposed to chat, and I suppose that sympathy for my feelings, and my glumness, stilled the tongues of my companions. And, at any rate, we had not traveled far when the car ahead of us stopped, and the soldier from Albert stepped into the road and waited for me.

“I will show you the place now, Mr. Lauder,” he said, quietly. So we left the cars standing in the road, and set out across a field that, like all the fields in that vicinity, had been ripped and torn by shell-fire. All about us were little brown mounds, each with a white wooden cross upon it. June was out that day in full bloom. All over the valley, thickly sown with white crosses, wild flowers in rare profusion, and thickly matted, luxuriant grasses, and all the little shrubs that God Himself looks after were growing bravely in the sunlight.

It was a mournful journey, but, in some strange way, the peaceful beauty of the day brought comfort to me. And my own grief was altered by the vision of the grief that had come to so many others. Those crosses, stretching away as far as my eye could reach, attested to the fact that it was not I alone who had suffered and lost. And, in the presence of so many evidences of grief and desolation a private grief sank into its true proportions. It was no less keen, the agony of thought of my boy was as sharp as ever. But I knew that he was only one, and that I was only one father. And there were so many like him—and so many like me, God help us all!

I do not think we exchanged a word as we crossed that field. So we came, when we were, perhaps, half a mile from the Bapaume road, to a slight eminence, a tiny hill that rose from the field. A little military cemetery crowned it. Here the graves were set in ordered rows, and there was a fence around them, to keep them apart, and to mark that spot as holy ground, until the end of time. Five hundred British boys lie sleeping in that small acre of silence, and among them is my own laddie. There the fondest hopes of my life, the hopes that sustained and cheered me through many years, lie buried.

The soldier pointed to one brown mound in a row of brown mounds that looked alike, each like the other. Then he drew away. And so I went alone to my boy’s grave, and flung myself down upon the warm, friendly earth. My memories of that moment are not very clear, but I think that for a few minutes I was utterly spent, that my collapse was complete.

He was such a good boy!

As I lay there on that brown mound, under the June sun, all that he had been, and all that he had meant to me and to his mother came rushing back afresh to my memory, opening anew my wounds of grief. I thought of him as a baby, and as a wee laddie, beginning to run around and talk to us. I thought of him in every phase and bit of his life, and of the friends that we had been, he and I!

And as I lay there, as I look back on it now, I can think of but the one desire that ruled and moved me. I wanted to reach my arms down into the dark grave, and clasp my boy tightly to my breast, and kiss him.

How long did I lie there? I do not know. And how I found the strength at last to drag myself to my feet and away from that spot, the dearest and the saddest spot on earth to me, God only knows. But I am going back to France to visit again and again that grave where he lies buried. And meanwhile the wild flowers and the long grasses and all the little shrubs will keep watch and ward over him there, and over all the other brave soldiers who lie hard by.

From A Minstrel in France, by Harry Lauder; Hearst’s International Library; New York, 1918.

And I Will Murder Some German

—H. G. Wells

Cissie and Letty had been sitting in silence before the fire. She had been knitting—she knitted very badly—and Cissie had been pretending to read, and had been watching her furtively. Cissie eyed the slow, toilsome growth of the slack woolwork for a time, and the touch of angry effort in every stroke of the knitting needles.

“Poor Letty!” she said very softly. “Suppose after all he is dead?”

Letty met her with a pitiless stare.

“He is a prisoner,” she said. “Isn’t that enough? Why do you jab at me by saying that? A wounded prisoner. Isn’t that enough despicable trickery for God even to play on Teddy—our Teddy? To the very last moment he shall not be dead. Until the war is over. Until six months after the war …

“I will tell you why, Cissie …”

She leant across the table and pointed her remarks with her knitting needles, speaking in a tone of reasonable remonstrance. “You see,” she said, “if people like Teddy are to be killed, then all our ideas that life is meant for honesty and sweetness and happiness are wrong, and this world is just a place of devils; just a dirty cruel hell. Getting born would be getting damned. And so one must not give way to that idea, however much it may seem likely that he is dead …

“You see, if he is dead, then Cruelty is the Law, and some one must pay me for his death … Some one must pay me … I shall wait for six months after the war, dear, and then I shall go off to Germany and learn my way about there. And I will murder some German. Not just a common German, but a German who belongs to the guilty kind. A sacrifice. It ought, for instance, to be comparatively easy to kill some of the children of the Crown Prince or some of the Bavarian princes. I shall prefer German children. I shall sacrifice them to Teddy. It ought not to be difficult to find people who can be made directly responsible, the people who invented the poison gas, for instance, and kill them, or to kill people who are dear to them. Or necessary to them … Women can do that so much more easily than men …

“That perhaps is the only way in which wars of this kind will ever be brought to an end. By women insisting on killing the kind of people who make them. Rooting them out. By a campaign of pursuit and assassination that will go on for years and years after the war itself is over … Murder is such a little gentle punishment for the crime of war … It would hardly be more than a reproach for what has happened. Falling like snow. Death after death. Flake by flake. This prince. That statesman. The count who writes so fiercely for war. The Kaiser and his sons and his sons’ sons would know nothing but fear now for all their lives. Fear by sea, fear by land, for the vessel he sailed in, the train he traveled in, fear when he slept for the death in his dreams, fear when he walked for the death in every shadow; fear in every crowd, fear whenever he was alone. Fear would stalk him through the trees, hide in the corner of the staircase; make all his food taste perplexingly, so that he would want to spit it out … I shall get just as close to the particular Germans who made this war as I can, and I shall kill them and theirs …

“That is what I am going to do. If Teddy is really dead …”

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