by Pete Ayrton
I had no sentimental aversion to war. A violent person, who likes the taste of blood, as another does the taste of wine, likes war. I was indifferent. But this organized breakdown in our civilized manners must have a rationale, in a civilized age. You must supply the civilized man with a reason, much as he has to have his cocktail, flytox, and ice-water.
I, along with millions of others, was standing up to be killed. Very well: but who in fact was it, who was proposing to kill or maim me? I developed a certain inquisitiveness upon that point. I saw clearly that it was not my German opposite number. He, like myself, was an instrument. That we were all on a fool’s errand had become plain to many of us, for, beyond a certain point, victory becomes at the best a Pyrrhic victory, and that point had been reached before Passchendaele started.
The scapegoat-on-the-spot did not appeal to me. So I had not even the consolation of ‘blaming the Staff’, after the manner of Mr. Sassoon – of cursing the poor little general-officers.
‘Good morning, good morning,’ the General said,
As we passed him one day as we went up the line.
But the lads that he spoke to are most of them dead
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
‘He’s a cheery old sport!’ muttered Harry to Jack.
‘But he’s done for them both with his plan of attack.’
That was too easy and obvious. It amazes me that so many people should accept that as satisfactory. The incompetent general was clearly such a very secondary thing compared with the incompetent, or unscrupulous, politician, that this conventional ‘grouse’ against the imperfect strategy of the military gentleman directing operations in the field seemed not only unintelligent but dangerously misleading. ‘Harry and Jack’ were killed, not by the General, but by the people, whoever they were, responsible for the war.
Nor could I obtain much comfort from cursing my mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, as Mr. Aldington or the Sitwells did. For it was not quite certain that we were not just as big fools as our not very farsighted forebears. There was not much sense in blaming the ancestors of the community to which I belonged for the murderous nonsense in which I found myself, up to the neck, it seemed to me.
On the other hand, as it was not war per se that I objected to, I was not forgetful of the fact that most wars had been stupid, and had only benefited a handful of people. No one objects to being killed, if the society to which he belongs, and its institutions, are threatened, we can assume. But any intelligent man objects to being killed (or bankrupted) for nothing. That is insulting.
Where was I then? If you have a little politics you will say, perhaps, is any society worth being killed, or ruined, for? Is the Sovereign State to be taken seriously? Are any merely national institutions so valuable, so morally or intellectually valid, that we should lay down our lives for them, as a matter of course?
I could not answer that question by a mere yes or no. Naturally I can imagine a State that it would be your duty to die for. There are many principles also, which might find themselves incarnated in a State, which I personally consider matters of life and death. But whether the machine-age has left any State intact in such a way as to put men under a moral or emotional compulsion to die for it, is a matter I am unable to discuss. That would ‘take us too far,’ as the valuable cliché has it.
And too far I am not going upon those tortuous roads. This is a plain tale of mere surface events. I am not out to do more than limn the action. I am keeping out the pale cast of thought as far as possible.
Wyndham Lewis was born in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1882. He died in London in 1957. Already an influential artist before the war, Lewis served on the Western Front from 1916 to 1918 as a battery officer. After the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917, he was appointed official war artist for both the Canadian and British governments. He wrote the autobiographical Blasting and Bombardiering in 1937. Like many of the modernist artists of the time, he was enamoured with the speed and noise of war. The Futurists and Marinetti wanted ‘words to explode like shells, or ache like wounds’ and, like them, Lewis was seduced by the ‘romance of war’:
In the middle of the monotonous percussion, which had never slackened for a moment, the tom-toming of interminable artillery, for miles around, going on in the darkness, it was as if someone had exclaimed in your ear, or something you had supposed inanimate had come to life, when the battery whose presence we had not suspected went into action.
Although he was fully aware of the horrors of battle, it was the revolutionary aesthetic of war which Lewis sought to convey in his writing and painting. Warts and all, he was an artist of his time.
RICHARD ALDINGTON
CANNON-FODDER
from Death of a Hero
I DON’T KNOW IF GEORGE was aware of all this, because we never discussed it. There were numbers of things you prudently didn’t discuss in those days; you never knew who might be listening and ‘report’. I myself was twice arrested, as a civilian, for wearing a cloak and looking foreign, and for laughing in the street; I was under acute suspicion for weeks in one battalion because I had a copy of Heine’s poems and admitted that I had been abroad; in another I was suspected of not being myself, God knows why. That was nothing compared with the persecution endured by D. H. Lawrence, probably the greatest living English novelist, and a man of whom – in spite of his failings – England should be proud.
I do know that George suffered profoundly from the first day of the War until his death at the end of it. He must have realised the awfulness of the Cant and degradation, for he occasionally talked about the yahoos of the world having got loose and seized control, and, by Jove! he was right. I shan’t attempt to describe the sinister degradation of English life in the last two years of the War: for one thing, I was mostly out of England; and for another, Lawrence has done it once and for all in the chapter called ‘The Nightmare’ in his book Kangaroo.*
In George’s case, the suffering which was common to all decent men and women was increased and complicated and rendered more torturing by his personal problems, which somehow became related to the War. You must remember that he did not believe in the alleged causes for which the War was fought. He looked upon the War as a ghastly calamity, or a more ghastly crime. They might talk about their idealism, but it wasn’t convincing. There wasn’t the élan, the conviction, the burning idealism which carried the ragged untrained armies of the First French Republic so dramatically to Victory over the hostile coalitions of the Kings. There was always the suspicion of dupery and humbug. Therefore, he could not take part in the War with any enthusiasm or conviction. On the other hand, he saw the intolerable egotism of setting up oneself as a notable exception or courting a facile martyrdom of rouspétance. Going meant one more little brand in the conflagration; staying out meant that some other, probably physically weaker, brand was substituted. His conscience was troubled before he was in the Army, and equally troubled afterwards. The only consolation he felt was in the fact that you certainly had a worse and a more dangerous time in the line than out of it.
As a matter of fact, I never really ‘got’ George’s position. He hated talking about the subject, and he had thought about it and worried about it so much that he was quite muddle-headed. It seemed to involve the whole universe, and his attempts to express his point of view would wander off into discussions about the Greek city-states or the principles of Machiavelli. He was frankly incoherent, which meant a considerable inner conflict. From the very beginning of the War he had got into the habit of worrying, and this developed with alarming rapidity. He worried about the War, about his own attitude to it, about his relations with Elizabeth and Fanny, about his military duties, about everything. Now, ‘worry’ is not ‘caused’ by an event; it is a state which seizes upon any event to ‘worry’ over. It is a form of neurasthenia, which may be induced in a perfectly healthy mind by shock and strain. And for months and months he just worried and drifted.
When Eliza
beth decided, somewhere towards the end of 1914, that the time had come when the principles of Freedom must be put into practice in the case of herself and Reggie, and duly informed George, he acquiesced at once. Perhaps he was so sick at heart that he was indifferent; perhaps he was only loyally carrying out the agreement. What surprised me was that he did not take that opportunity of telling her about Fanny. But he was apparently quite convinced that she knew. It was therefore an additional shock when he found out that she didn’t know, and a still greater shock to see how she behaved. He suffered an obnubilation of the intellect in dealing with women. He idealised them too much. When I told him with a certain amount of bitterness that Fanny was probably a trollop who talked ‘freedom’ as an excuse, and that Elizabeth was probably a conventional-minded woman who talked ‘freedom’ as in the former generation she would have talked Ruskin and Morris politico-aestheticism, he simply got angry. He said I was a fool. He said the War had induced in me a peculiar resentment against women – which was probably true. He said I did not understand either Elizabeth or Fanny – how could I possibly understand two people I had never seen and have the cheek to try to explain them to him, who knew them so well? He said I was far too downright, over-simplified, and tranchant in my judgments, and that I didn’t – probably couldn’t – understand the finer complexities of people’s psychology. He said a great deal more, which I have forgotten. But we came as near to a quarrel as two lonely men could, when they knew they had no other companion. This was in the Officers’ Training Camp in 1917, when George was already in a peculiar and exacerbated state of nerves. After that, I made no effort at any sort of ruthless directness, but just allowed him to go on talking. There was nothing else to do. He was living in a sort of double nightmare – the nightmare of the War and the nightmare of his own life. Each seemed inextricably interwoven. His personal life became intolerable because of the War, and the War became intolerable because of his own life. The strain imposed on him – or which he imposed on himself – must have been terrific. A sort of pride kept him silent. Once when it was my turn to act as commander of the other cadets, I was taking them in company drill. George was right-hand man in the front rank of No. 1 Platoon, and I glanced at him to see that he was keeping direction properly. I was startled by the expression on his face – so hard, so fixed, so despairing, so defiantly agonised. At mess – we ate at tables in sixes – he hardly ever spoke except to utter some banality in an effort to be amiable, or some veiled sarcasm which sped harmlessly over the heads of those for whom it was intended. He sneered a little too openly at the coarse, obscene talk about tarts and square-pushing, and was too obviously revolted by water-closet wit. However, he wasn’t openly disliked. The others just thought him a rum bloke, and left him pretty much alone.
Probably what had distressed him most was the row between Elizabeth and Fanny. With the whole world collapsing about him, it seemed quite logical that the Triumphal Scheme for the Perfect Sex Relation should collapse too. He did not feel the peevish disgust of the reforming idealist who makes a failure. But in the general disintegration of all things he had clung very closely to those two women; too closely, of course. But they had acquired a sort of mythical and symbolical meaning for him. They resented and deplored the War, but they were admirably detached from it. For George they represented what hope of humanity he had left; in them alone civilisation seemed to survive. All the rest was blood and brutality and persecution and humbug. In them alone the thread of life remained continuous. They were two small havens of civilised existence, and alone gave him any hope for the future. They had escaped the vindictive destructiveness which so horribly possessed the spirits of all right-thinking people. Of course, they were persecuted; that was inevitable. But they remained detached, and alive. Unfortunately, they did not quite realise the strain under which he was living, and did not perceive the widening gulf which was separating the men of that generation from the women. How could they? The friends of a person with cancer haven’t got cancer. They sympathise, but they aren’t in the horrid category of the doomed. Even before the Elizabeth–Fanny row he was subtly drifting apart from them against his will, against his desperate efforts to remain at one with them. Over the men of that generation hung a doom which was admirably if somewhat ruthlessly expressed by a British Staff Officer in an address to subalterns in France: ‘You are the War generation. You were born to fight this War, and it’s got to be won – we’re determined you shall win it. So far as you are concerned as individuals, it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn whether you are killed or not. Most probably you will be killed, most of you. So make up your minds to it.’
That extension of the Kiplingesque or kicked-backside-of-the-Empire principle was something for which George was not prepared. He resented it, resented it bitterly, but the doom was on him as on all the young men. When ‘we’ had determined that they should be killed, it was impious to demur.
After the row, the gap widened, and when once George had entered the army it became complete. He still clung desperately to Elizabeth and Fanny, of course. He wrote long letters to them trying to explain himself, and they replied sympathetically. They were the only persons he wanted to see when on leave, and they met him sympathetically. But it was useless. They were gesticulating across an abyss. The women were still human beings; he was merely a unit, a murder-robot, a wisp of cannon-fodder. And he knew it. They didn’t. But they felt the difference, felt it as a degradation in him, a sort of failure. Elizabeth and Fanny occasionally met after the row, and made acid-sweet remarks to each other. But on one point they were in agreement – George had degenerated terribly since joining the army, and there was no knowing to what preposterous depths of Tommydom he might fall.
‘It’s quite useless,’ said Elizabeth; ‘he’s done for. He’ll never be able to recover. So we may as well accept it. What was rare and beautiful in him is as much dead now as if he were lying under the ground in France.’
And Fanny agreed…
*See pp 32–41 in this volume.
RICHARD ALDINGTON
A TIMELESS CONFUSION
from Death of a Hero
FOR WINTERBOURNE THE BATTLE was a timeless confusion, a chaos of noise, fatigue, anxiety, and horror. He did not know how many days and nights it lasted, lost completely the sequence of events, found great gaps in his conscious memory. He did know that he was profoundly affected by it, that it made a cut in his life and personality. You couldn’t say there was anything melodramatically startling, no hair going grey in a night, or never smiling again. He looked unaltered; he behaved in exactly the same way. But, in fact, he was a little mad. We talk of shell-shock, but who wasn’t shell-shocked, more or less? The change in him was psychological, and showed itself in two ways. He was left with an anxiety complex, a sense of fear he had never experienced, the necessity to use great and greater efforts to force himself to face artillery, anything explosive. Curiously enough, he scarcely minded machine-gun fire, which was really more deadly, and completely disregarded rifle-fire. And he was also left with a profound and cynical discouragement, a shrinking horror of the human race…
A timeless confusion. The runners scattered outside their billet and made for the officers’ cellar through the falling shells, dodging from one broken house or shell-hole to another. Winterbourne, not yet unnerved, calmly walked straight across and arrived first. Evans took him aside:
‘We’re going up as a company, with orders to support and co-operate with the Infantry. Try to nab me a rifle and bayonet before we go over.’
‘Very good, sir.’
Outside was an open box of S. A. A., and they each drew two extra bandoliers of cartridges, which they slung around their necks.
They moved off in sections, filing along the village filled with fresh debris and ruins re-ruined. It was snowing. They came on two freshly-killed horses. Their close-cropped necks were bent under them, with great glassy eyeballs starting with agony. A little further on was a smashed limber with the driver dead b
eside it.
In the trench they passed a batch of about forty German unarmed, in steel helmets. They looked green-pale and were trembling. They shrank against the side of the trench as the English soldiers passed, but not a word was said to them.
The snowstorm and the smoke drifting back from the barrage made the air as murky as a November fog in London. They saw little, did not know where they were going, what they were doing or why. They lined a trench and waited. Nothing happened. They saw nothing but wire and snowflakes and drifting smoke, heard only the roar of the guns and the now sharper rattle of machine-guns. Shells dropped around them. Evans was looking through his glasses, and cursing the lack of visibility. Winterbourne stood beside him, with his rifle still slung on his left shoulder.
They waited. Then Major Thorpe’s runner came with a message. Apparently he had mistaken a map reference and brought them to the wrong place.
They plodged off through the mud, and lined another trench. They waited.
Winterbourne found himself following Evans across what had been No Man’s Land for months. He noticed a skeleton in British uniform, caught sprawling in the German wire. The skull still wore a sodden cap and not a steel helmet. They passed the bodies of British soldiers killed that morning. Their faces were strangely pale, their limbs oddly bulging with strange fractures. One had vomited blood.
They were in the German trenches, with many dead bodies in field grey. Winterbourne and Evans went down into a German dug-out. Nobody was there, but it was littered with straw, torn paper, portable cookers, oddments of forgotten equipment, and cigars. There were French tables and chairs with human excrement on them.