Ellis was capable of taking the long view, morally and historically, but was this possible in the midst of total war? He would do his best to try.
William Butler Yeats, fifty-eight years old in 1914, had a complicated attitude toward the war. “He saw the conflict as a battle between the ideas of the New and Old Testament (Germany represented the latter), and, more concretely, was struck by the incompetence and ‘useless heroism’ of British officers.”
He wrote to a friend, “England is paying the price for having despised intellect. The war will end in a draw and everybody too poor to fight for another hundred years.”
Much of his ambivalence came from his Irish nationalism. When it came time for him to write his great poem about the war, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” he was very careful to make him an Irish volunteer; “Those that I fight I do not hate/Those who I guard I do not love.”
Yeats won the Nobel Prize in 1923, cited “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.” No one had to explain that the nation was Ireland, not Britain.
When Edith Wharton called upon him to make a contribution to The Book of the Homeless, he responded with wry humor, managing to suggest that writers might have better things to do than comment on war.
The Big Guns at Work
—Joseph Conrad
I have never believed in political assassination as a means to an end, and least of all if the assassination is of the dynastic order. I don’t know how far murder can ever approach the efficiency of a fine art, but looked upon with the cold eye of reason it seems but a crude expedient either of impatient hope or hurried despair. There are few men whose premature death could influence human affairs more than on the surface. The deeper stream of causes depends not on individualities which, like the mass of mankind, are carried on by the destiny which no murder had ever been able to placate, divert or arrest.
In July of 1914, I was a stranger in a strange city and particularly out of touch with the world’s politics. Never a very diligent reader of newspapers, there were at that time reasons of a private order which caused me to be even less informed than usual on public affairs as presented from day to day in that particular atmosphere-less, perspective-lessness of the daily paper which somehow for a man with some historic sense robs them of all real interest. I don’t think I had looked at a daily paper for a month past.
It was a friend who one morning at breakfast informed me of the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand.
The impression was mediocre. I was barely aware that such a man existed. I remembered only that not long before he had visited London, but that memory was lost in a cloud of insignificant printed words his presence in this country provoked. Various opinions had been expressed of him, but his importance had been archducal, dynastic, purely accidental. Can there be in the world of real men anything more shadowy than an archduke? And now he was no more, and with a certain atrocity of circumstance which made one more sensible of his humanity than when he was in life. I knew nothing of his journey. I did not connect that crime with Balkanic plots and aspirations. I asked where it had happened. My friend told me it was in Sarajevo, and wondered what would be the consequence of that grave event. He asked me what I thought would happen next.
It was with perfect sincerity that I said “Nothing,” and I dismissed the subject, having a great repugnance to consider murder as an engine of politics ….
We had received an invitation to spend some weeks in Poland in a country house in the neighborhood of Cracow. The first of the third week in July, while the telegraph wires hummed with the words of enormous import which were to fill blue-books, yellow-books, white-books and rouse the wonder of the world, was taken up with light-hearted preparations for the journey. What was it but just a rush through Germany to get over as quickly as possible?
It is the part of the earth’s solid surface of which I know the least. In my life I had been across it only twice. I may well say of it, “Vidi tantum,” and that very little I saw through the window of a railway carriage at express speed. Those journeys were more like pilgrimages when one hurries on to the goal without looking to the right or left for the satisfaction of deeper need than curiosity.
Yet in truth, as many others have done, I had “sensed it,” that promised land of steel, of chemical dyes, of method, of efficiency; that race planted in the middle of Europe, assuming in grotesque vanity the attitude of Europeans among effete Asiatics or mere niggers, and with a feeling of superiority freeing their hands of all moral bonds and anxious to take up, if I may express myself so, the “perfect man’s burden.” Meantime in a clearing of the Teutonic forest their sages were rearing a Tree of cynical wisdom, a sort of Upas tree, whose shade may be seen lying now over the prostrate body of Belgium. It must be said that they laboured open enough, watering it from the most authentic sources of all evil, and watching with bespectacled eyes the slow ripening of the glorious blood-red fruit. The sincerest words of peace, words of menace, and I verily believe, words of abasement even, if there had been a voice vile enough to utter them, would have been wasted on their ecstasy. For when a fruit ripens on a branch, it must fall. There is nothing on earth that can prevent it ….
I let myself be carried through Germany as if it were pure space, without sights, without sounds. No whispers of the war reached my voluntary abstractions. And perhaps not so very voluntary after all! Each of us is a fascinating spectacle to himself, and I had to watch my own personality returning from another world, as it were, to revisit the glimpses of old moons. Considering the condition of humanity, I am, perhaps, not so much to blame for giving myself up to that occupation. We prize the sensation of our continuity, and we can only capture it that way. By watching ….
And there we remained among the Poles from all parts of Poland, not officially interned, but simply unable to obtain permission to travel by train or road. It was a wonderful, a poignant two months. This is not the time, and perhaps not the place, to enlarge upon the tragic character of the situation; a whole people seeing the culmination of its misfortunes in a final catastrophe, unable to trust any one, to appeal to any one, to look for help from any quarter; deprived of all hope, and even of its last illusions, and unable in the trouble of minds and the unrest of consciences to take refuge in stoical acceptance. I have seen all this. And I am glad I have not so many years left to me to remember that feeling of inexorable Fate, tangible, palpable, come after so many cruel years, a figure of dread, murmuring with iron lips the final words: “Ruin—and Extinction.”
But enough of this. For our little band there was the awful anguish of incertitude as to the real nature of events in the West. It is difficult to give an idea how ugly and dangerous things looked to us over there. Belgium knocked down and trampled out of existence. France giving in under repeated blows, a military collapse like that of 1870, and England involved in that disastrous alliance, her army sacrificed, her people in a panic! Polish papers, of course, had no other than German sources of information. Naturally, we did not believe all we heard, but it was sometimes excessively difficult to react with sufficient firmness. We used to shut our door, and there, away from everybody, we sat weighing the news, hunting up discrepancies, scenting lies, finding reason for hopefulness and generally cheering each other up ….
But enough of this, too. Through the unremitting efforts of Polish friends we obtained at last the permission to travel to Vienna. Once there, the wing of the American eagle was extended over our uneasy heads. We cannot be sufficiently grateful to the American Ambassador for his exertions on our behalf. We effected our hair’s-breadth escape into Italy, and, reaching Genoa, took passage in a Dutch mail-steamer, homeward bound from Java, with London as a port of call.
On that sea route I might have picked up a memory at every mile if the past had not been eclipsed by the tremendous actuality. We saw the signs of it in the emptiness of the Mediterranean, the aspect of Gibraltar, the misty glimpses in the
Bay of Biscay of an outward-bound convoy of transports, in the presence of British submarines in the Channel. Innumerable drifters flying the naval flag dotted the narrow waters, and two naval officers coming on board off the South Foreland piloted the ship through the Downs.
The Downs! There they were, thick with memories of my sea life. But what were to me now the futilities of individual past! As our ship’s head swung into the estuary of the Thames a deep, yet faint, concussion passed through the air, a shock rather than a sound, which, missing my ear, found its way straight into my heart. Turning instinctively to look at my boys, I happened to meet my wife’s eyes. She also had felt profoundly, coming from far away across the grey distances of the sea, the faint boom of the big guns at work on the coast of Flanders—shaping the future.
From The Book of the Homeless, edited by Edith Wharton; Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1916.
The Abyss of Our Past Delusion
—Henry James
There comes back to me out of the distant past an impression of the citizen soldiers at once in his collective grouping and in his impaired, his more or less war-worn state, which was to serve me for long years as the most intimate vision of him that my span of life was likely to disclose. This was a limited affair indeed, I recognise as I try to recover it, but I mention it because I was to find at the end of time that I had kept it in reserve, left it lurking deep down in my sense of things, however shyly and dimly, however confusedly even, as a term of comparison, a glimpse of something by the loss of which I should have been the poorer; such a residuary possession of the spirit, in fine, as only needed darkness to close round it a little from without in order to give forth a vague phosphorescent light. It was early, it must have been very early, in our Civil war, yet not so early but that a large number of those who had answered President Lincoln’s first call for an army had had time to put in their short period and reappear again in camp, one of those of their small New England State, under what seemed to me at the hour, that of a splendid autumn afternoon, the thickest mantle of heroic history. If I speak of the impression as confused I certainly justify that mark of it by my failure to be clear at this moment as to how much they were in general the worse for wear—since they can’t have been exhibited to me, through their waterside settlement of tents and improvised shanties, in anything like hospital conditions. However, I cherish the rich ambiguity, and have always cherished it, for the sake alone of the general note exhaled, the thing that has most kept remembrance unbroken. I carried away from the place the impression, the one that not only was never to fade, but was to show itself susceptible to extraordinary mutual enrichment. I may not pretend now to refer it to the most particular sources it drew upon at that summer’s end of 1861, or to say why my repatriated warriors were, if not somehow definitely stricken, so largely either lying in apparent helplessness or moving about in confessed languor: it suffices me that I have always thought of them as expressing in themselves at almost every point in the minor key, and that this has been the reason of their interest. What I call the note therefore is the characteristic the most of the essence and the most inspiring—inspiring I mean for consideration of the admirable sincerity that we thus catch in the act: the note of the quite abysmal softness, the exemplary genius for accommodation, that forms the alternative aspect, the passive as distinguished from the active, of the fighting man whose business is in the first instance formidably to bristle. This aspect has been produced, I of course recognise, amid the horrors that the German powers had, up to a twelvemonth ago, been for years conspiring to let loose upon the world by such appalling engines and agencies as mankind had never before dreamed of; but just that is the lively interest of the fact unfolded to us now on a scale beside which, and though save indeed for a single restriction, the whole previous illustration of history turns pale. Even if I catch but in a generalising blur that exhibition of the first American levies as a measure of experience had stamped and harrowed them, the signally attaching mark that I refer to is what I most recall; so that if I didn’t fear, for the connection, to appear to compare the slighter things with the so much greater, the diminished shadow with the far-spread substance, I should speak of my small old scrap of truth, miserably small in contrast with the immense evidence even then to have been gathered, but in respect to which latter occasion didn’t come to me, as having contained possibilities of development that I must have languished well-nigh during a lifetime to crown it with ….
The degree was to alter by swift shades, just as one’s comprehension of the change grew and grew with it; and thus it was that, to cut short the record of our steps and stages, we have left immeasurably behind us here the question of what might or what should have been. That belonged, with whatever beguiled or amused ways of looking at it, to the abyss of our past delusion, a collective state of mind in which it had literally been possible to certain sophists to argue that, so far from not having soldiers enough, we had more than we were likely to know any respectable public call for. It was in the very fewest weeks that we replaced a pettifogging consciousness by the most splendidly liberal, and, having swept through all the first phases of anxiety and suspense, found no small part of our measure of the matter settle down to an almost luxurious study of our multiplied defenders after the fact, as I may call it, or in the light of that acquaintance with them as products supremely tried and tested which I began by speaking of. We were up to our necks in this relation before we could turn round, and what upwards of a year’s experience of it has done in the contributive and enriching way may now well be imagined. I might feel that my marked generalisation, the main hospital impression, steeps the case in too strong or too stupid a synthesis, were it not that to consult my memory, a recollection of countless associative contacts, is to see the emphasis almost absurdly thrown on my quasi-paradox …
We after this fashion score our very highest on behalf of a conclusion, I think, in feeling that whether or no the British warrior’s good nature has much range of fancy, his imagination, whatever there may be of it, is at least so goodnatured as to show absolutely everything it touches, everything without exception, even the worst machinations of the enemy, in that colour. Variety and diversity of exhibition, in a world virtually divided as now into hospitals and the preparation of subjects for them, are, I accordingly conceive, to be looked for quite away from the question of physical patience, of the general consent to suffering and mutilation, and, instead of that, in this connection of the sort of mind and thought, the sort of moral attitude, that are born of the sufferer’s other relations; which I like to think of as being different from country to country, from class to class, and as having their fullest national and circumstantial play.
It would be of 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 private soldier only—generalisation about his officers would take us so considerably further and so much enlarge our view ….
From The Book of the Homeless, edited by Edith Wharton; Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1916.
The Unfurling of the Future
—Thomas Hardy
Cry of the Homeless
Instigator of the ruin—
Whichsoever thou mayst be
Of the mastering minds of Europe
That contrived our misery—
Hear the wormwood-worded greeting
From each city, shore, and lea
Of thy victims:
“Enemy, all hail to thee!”
Yea: “All hail!” we grimly shout thee
That wast author, fount and head
Of these wounds, whoever proven
When our times are thoroughly read
“May thy dearest ones be blighted
And forsaken,” be it said
By thy victims,
“And thy children beg their bread!”
Nay: too much the malediction—
Rather let this thing befa
ll
In the unfurling of the future,
On the night when comes thy call:
That compassion dew thy pillow
And absorb thy senses all
For thy victims,
Till death dark thee with his pall.
From The Book of the Homeless, edited by Edith Wharton; Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY, 1916.
Let Loose These Evil Powers
—Gilbert Murray
Thucydides did his best two thousand years ago to explain it to us—that war is not an instrument that can be directed with precision to a perfectly definite aim and turned off and on like a garden hose. It is a flood on which, when once the flood-gates are opened, those who have opened them will be borne away. In August 1914, for the sake of our own rights, of justice and of humanity, we appealed to Force. Force entered and took the centre of the stage. It became a struggle, not of Right against Force, but of one Force against another. The struggle deepened, became closer, more terrible, more fraught with anxiety. It became very nearly a struggle for existence. We gave all our minds to it. Gradually, inevitably, increasingly, the fight began to absorb us. And while the men who guided England and expressed the spirit of England in the early days of the war were men of lofty spirit and a profound sense of responsibility, as the war proceeded, there came a change. England ceased to be occupied with questions of right and wrong; she became occupied with questions of fighting and killing. We turned, so to speak, from the men who could give wise counsel; we called on all who could fight, and we liked best those who could fight hardest.
Do you remember how Sir Francis Drake once had to hang one of his officers; and how before executing the sentence he passed some time in prayer, and then shook hands with the offender? That is the sort of spirit, perhaps the only spirit in which any man of conscience can without inward misery approach the killing and torturing of his fellow creatures. He is ready, if need be, to shed blood; but he must know that he does it for the Right, and because he must. It would sicken him to think that while doing it, he was secretly paying off old scores, or making money out of it, or, still worse, enjoying the cruelty. The slaying of men, if you do it for the right motive, may be a high and austere duty; if you admit any wrong motive, it begins to be murder—and hypocritical murder.
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