by Will R Bird
In The Communication Trench, Bird noted that, of the seven translations he had read of German war books, he found Jünger’s The Storm of Steel to be “the best,” while the “poorest of all, I think, [is] All Quiet on the Western Front.” What Bird liked most about Jünger’s work was its emphasis on soldierly agency; what he found so very dishonest in All Quiet and Generals Die in Bed was the utter passivity of the soldiers. As the historian Modris Eksteins comments in an essay entitled “All Quiet on the Western Front and the Fate of a War,” the characters of Remarque’s brutalized generation “do not act, they are merely victims.” By contrast, Bird writes, “Action helped me in the Salient. It was the deadly waiting, helpless waiting, that was unnerving, for always it seemed as if swooping Death were just above us, hovering, or reaching tentacles from dark corners” (79). He even admits that “I liked patrol work, loved crawling near the Hun wire … In the dark of no man’s land you had all the elements of surprise in your favour, it was your wits against the other fellow’s, your cunning against his” (115). His recognition of the contrasting aspects of war makes it easier for armchair moralists – who know little of the inescapable paradoxes of warfare, or who fail to think about the moral complexity of doing a job for which you signed up, as Sassoon is often reminded by Dr. W.H.R. Rivers in Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration (1991) – to carp and moan.
In taking responsibility for his own life and those of his men, in pitting his wits against those who would take his life, in fighting to the death and describing it poetically, Bird is closer to Siegfried Sassoon than to any other writer in the English tradition. In a Hobbesean world of war where life reverts to its primordial state – “nasty, brutish and short” – Bird, like Sassoon, is obliged to lead two lives simultaneously. Sassoon, at the end of Sherston’s Progress (1936), comes to realize that the soldier-writer “really needs two lives; one for experiencing and another for thinking it over. Knowing that I need two lives and am only allowed one, I do my best to lead two lives” (104). In fact, “Siegfried had always coped,” as Pat Barker remarks in her Great War novel The Eye in the Door (1993), “by being two people: the anti-war poet and pacifist; the bloodthirsty, efficient company commander” (233). Bird’s work, like Sassoon’s, is made from the same dichotomies: a keen eye for beauty, whether in a sunset or a reflecting pool reeking of death, and a sharp eye, focused on the instinct for survival, on night patrol through enemy territory. These give Bird’s writing a psychological and ideological complexity mostly lacking in All Quiet and in Generals, which are both founded on pretence – Remarque’s private pretence of having been a true veteran of combat, and Harrison’s outright lie that Canadians had committed a war crime at Amiens to revenge a hospital ship that had been sunk by Germans for carrying munitions. The “judgment” meted out by Canadian troops was not without cause – the hospital ship had not carried munitions and the “surrendering” foe at Amiens had in fact led the 14th Battalion, in which Harrison served, into a deadly ambush in which they responded by annihilating the “surrendering” Germans to a man.
Contrary to Bird and Sassoon, Remarque and Harrison made the dehumanization and the bestializing of men at war central to their work. In Generals, to take a single example: “We fight among ourselves” when the rations arrive: “Cleary is sharing it out. Broadbent suspects that his piece is smaller than the rest. An oath is spat out … In a moment they are at each other’s throats like hungry, snarling animals … Cleary wipes the blood from his face. He scowls and holds this hunk of bread in his hands like an animal” (49–50). By contrast, Bird sees an inherent dignity in men who, as if by some sixth sense, glimpse their deaths, and yet respond not as victims but as seers and visionaries, even when, “White-faced, unsmiling, filled with a strange courage, they greeted that which waited them” (4). A man named Freddy is the first of Bird’s comrades to dream of “a woman in white” passing through the wall of their tent and pointing, he said, “‘at you, and you, and you.’ He jerked a thumb toward six of the men who were in their blankets. ‘And I know,’ he went on, ‘that I’m going to get mine – I’ll never see Canada again’” (6). The truth of Freddy’s premonition is soon confirmed at the Battle of Vimy Ridge. In the moment, Bird is enough of a rationalist to say, “Long after all the others were snoring I lay there in the dark and thought about Freddy’s dream. Was there anything in dreams? Why had he seemed so certain?” (4). Later on, a man named Gordon, who “was quiet, thoughtful, kind in manner” insisted that he was “going to his death … and would meet it like a soldier, and there was that in his voice that told me any argument of mine would be futile. My skin was pricked with goose flesh as he talked” (74).
At least eight times in And We Go On, privates and officers approach Bird to take their leave of him before they die. Perhaps the most interesting of these is the atheist Christensen who has always refused to go on church parade and is “crimed” for it. All the same, he tells Will of his premonitions of death just before the Battle of Amiens:
“Good-bye, Bird,” he said. “I’m going to find out to-day which of us is right.”
He and I had argued about the hereafter, and I had tried hard to convince him everything, even to a blade of grass, cried out that there was a God who governed creation. … “What’s got into you,” I said. “You’ll not get hit.”
“I’ll be killed,” he said, smiling in a way that startled me. He didn’t seem the least frightened, but was matter-of-fact as if his leave had come through. “An hour ago,” he said, “something came to me. It was as if every sound in the world was stilled at once, as if there was nothing more for me to hear, and I knew what it meant. I’m not the least bit afraid, and I’ll be satisfied if it comes quick.” It was useless to try to console him, he didn’t want sympathy. Not one man who had mentioned the same thing to me had acted the same as he did. He almost seemed glad, and when I pointed out that, if he were right, there was some power beyond the visible that imparted information, he partially admitted it. (143)
Even in the face of death, the atheist remains open to other possibilities. But the outcome is both unsettling and ennobling. When Bird sees Christensen “hit in the arm by a piece of shrapnel,” he tells him “you were wrong … You’re away for Blighty” (a word derived from Urdu, and long used by British soldiers in India to refer to home). To which Christensen replies, “By night I’ll be a corpse. Remember what I tell you” (148). The next day, their Sergeant-major comes to inquire of Bird, “Wasn’t it funny about Christensen?” Well back of the line, “a shell came, and he was killed by shrapnel. He was away back there and one would have thought him safe for Blighty” (150).
While this is the most uncanny of the eight stories of premonitory deaths, each works to undermine the position of the “passivists,” or so-called “realists,” who claim, as even Owen had done in “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” that “these die as cattle.” For Bird, the truth is quite different: the war “drew from even dulled and uncouth natures a perception that was attributed to the mystic and supernal.” And it prompts him to one of his most fierce expressions of egalitarianism among the men: “the private in the trenches had other thoughts than of the flesh, had often finer vision and strength of soul than those who would fit him to their sordid, sensation-seeking fiction” (5).
Bird sees himself and his fellows as actors in a great tragedy, one similar to that of the ancient Greeks: “Men glimpsed, or thought they glimpsed, that grim cross roads we all must pass. It was as if for them a voice had spoken, a hand beckoned them on. And at once there fell from them all frenzy and confusion” (4). Whether he realized it or not, such recognition is Aristotelian, describing a moment of anagnorisis, realization and acceptance of one’s fate, that ennobles dying heroes, whether in myth, on the stage, or at the Front. Bird’s vision is essentially tragic: both the worst and the best of which human life is capable is written on his pages in blood. Hence Bird’s anger, often palpable, at the “irrevocable insult” given by “passivists” to “those gallant
men who lie in French or Belgian graves” (5). This sentiment is expressed far less aggressively at the end of another scene: “Privates in a dirty, wind-blown, rain-soaked tent, unshaven, strangers to each other … discussing topics that cause any man to sober. I think of Spike and that 7th man every time I read of the ‘sodden cattle’ of the dugouts” (44). Bird has an unwavering respect for the courage and dignity of men facing what they see as certain death.
This respect explains why his work is so often filled with what Owen, in his famous “Preface,” had called “the pity of War”: “It was the Professor, riddled with bullets, dead,” whose body Bird came upon at Passchendaele: “He was covered with mud, had lost his steel helmet, had evidently got lost in the darkness, and there he lay, after years of study and culture, with glassy eyes and face upturned to the sky, a smashed cog of the war machine, with not a hope of burial excepting by a chance shell” (81–2). At war’s end, Bird’s friend Tommy, dying of the Spanish Flu and wanting only to “join the Boys” beneath the sod, will pity the poor survivor: “As long as I have memory I’ll not forget Tommy’s look as he watched me go from his ward. It was almost as if he pitied me, were sorry that I could not share his joy” (228).
Just as often, fraternal pity extends beyond Bird’s band of brothers, for instance when he expresses empathy for the German officer he had let go at Vimy, or a German youth still in uniform and hiding in the closet of Bird’s billet at Mons: “‘Kamerad?’ he whimpered. I shook my head, motioned him to be still. No use to put him out on the street for that crazed bunch of celebrators. Even the Belgians would kill him” (221). So he scrounges civilian clothing to disguise the defeated “enemy” and lets him escape: “The change was effective. He appeared a young Belgian and would never draw a second glance” (221). At the same time, Bird can’t forget what the invaders have done to ordinary French folk: “We saw refugees with great, sweat-dried Percherons drawing farm carts heaped with mattresses and furniture, with lean cows tethered to the rear, and old men following with barrows and push carts piled with other possessions, nearly everyone dressed in his or her Sunday best, usually black, and very tired, foot sore and pathetic” (198). These are a type of victim rarely seen in All Quiet or in Generals Die in Bed. For good or ill, Bird acknowledges, if he does not condone, the thirst of non-combatants for reprisal: “The Frenchman stamped on the battered face [of a German officer] until we spoke sharply to him and walked away” (198). In Mons, he watches a German officer trying to escape: “He had to pass a big gate to get outside the yard and as he did a burly Belgian rose from where he had been waiting and struck with a sledge, crashing [sic] the German’s head like an eggshell. No one rebuked him or went near the body” (218).
Turnabout is also fair play. When the pursuing Canadians came upon a German soldier in grey-green field dress resting from flight in Raismes Forest, one of Bird’s men, Giger, crept “up behind the unsuspecting Hun like a great, blood-thirsty tiger,” showing no mercy to the surrendering prisoner as he stood up with raised arms. Giger, who had always been disappointed in his failure “to kill a Hun,” viciously drove his bayonet into his prisoner’s belly:
It was a ghastly, merciless thing, and I shuddered. Tommy stood, white-faced, and looked around for an officer. Giger grinned back at us. “How’s that?” he called. “I …”
A second German shot up from some hiding place at the far end of the logs. He had not his bayonet but the woodman’s axe that had been left there, and before Giger could jump from danger or withdraw his bayonet he was cut down by a fearful blow on the neck and shoulder. Then the German ran like a deer – and no one fired a shot at him. (206–7)
This representation of war seems less one-sided, less ideological, and more honest than those other narratives of passivity. It is also a vision of war that is less blinkered and far more complicated in terms of the moral dilemmas that individuals face in the field. And yet one cannot doubt the moral decency of the memoirist himself. Here is a man whose senses might have been dulled but were certainly not erased by war, and whose canvas thus holds a much broader picture than the one too often mistaken for a “true” portrait of war. Even Bird’s title, And We Go On, reveals more than the bare futility of war, since it valorizes the courage and doggedness of infantrymen who have no choice but to “go on.” It also hints at the idea of continuity of the self, in spite of all the depredations of war and the lasting changes wrought in the psyche. With equal force, it evokes a sense of historical continuity. On occasion, Bird’s fellows appear to be astonished and even annoyed at what he tells them about the various villages and towns and battlefields where they are deployed:
As we passed Mount St. Eloi and its twin towers I dug up a little more history for Tommy. …
He looked at me. “Where did you get all that dope?” he asked.
“In a little French guide book I bought in London,” I said. “I’ve got it with me. What’s the use of coming over here on a trip if you don’t know what you’re looking at?” (13)
It is a telling comment about the desire of common soldiers to go on the Grand Tour, that cultural phenomenon familiar to readers tracking young English aristocrats on their yearlong excursions to the Continent. To Bird, the outbreak of war permits men from the lower classes to share in the “finishing school” tradition of their social “betters.” On occasion something of the dilettante’s optimism even shines from the pages of his memoir. During one of the Professor’s rants about the war as “a ghastly paroxysm of civilization,” Bird tries “to ease the condemnation” for the sake of young Mickey, who “stared at him, wide-eyed.” Since Mickey’s courage has begun to flicker like a guttering candle, Bird points out “that war was not new, had always been. I got out my little guide book and tried to divert Mickey’s thoughts as I read about the history of the country. Arras, Boulogne, Cambrai, Verdun, had all been towns under the reign of Julius Caesar, and a German invasion was nothing new. Attila and his heathen Huns had poured into France when it was Gaul, burning and plundering and had lost 160,000 men before they were driven away” (72).
Bird next tells about “King Edward at Crecy with his expeditionary force,” recounting how “Thirty thousand men of France fell in that battle, twelve hundred knights and eight princes, so why should we consider we were entangled in an original catastrophe.” At which Tommy sneers, “How many knights and princes are going to be killed up in Passchendale?” and begins to rave once again “about the officers, the gilded staff in fine chateaus and billets, waited on hand and foot, living like lords, travelling in cushioned cars, stroking away – with careless pens – thousands of lives. The Professor and Mickey did not speak” (73).
Although the long view is often beyond Tommy’s comprehension – his very name suggests the working-class British infantryman, resentful of class injustice and social inequality – it is the soul of Bird’s method, forming part of the mental equipment by which he is able to keep his balance, rarely descending into self-pity or a “sodden” obsession with his own sufferings. While Harrison and Remarque speak fairly and truly in the first-person plural for the “we” in ranks, the plural first person of And We Go On speaks the “we” of all sides of the conflict, not just those in uniforms of grey or blue or khaki but mothers and fathers and other civilians who have to endure the catastrophe. For example, there is the French mother who introduces Will and Tommy to her white-haired, twenty-three-year-old son. He fought, she says, “at Verdun. His mind is what you call at the halt – it cannot get past Verdun. He was wounded there, with dead men on him, and could not move. A day and a night he was like that and now, in his mind, he is still there.” Bird admits that, “We expected to hear her breathe maledictions on the boche, as some of the French did, but she did not utter a word of hate … He would never, his mother said, go out into the fields or gardens, and his face was the waxen colour of death. For days after I could visualize his ghastly features and those awful staring eyes” (125). Contrary to Remarque and Harrison, Bird’s awareness transc
ends the temporal and spatial horizons of his own, and even the enemy’s, trenches. He never forgets the humanity of those around him, and what it will mean for this poor woman to care for her “only living son” for the rest of her life. And yet “we go on,” both she and her wreck of a son, and everyone living, if only because “we” must.
Above all else, what distinguishes And We Go On from other Great War writings is the support it gives to the idea of personal continuity. Throughout the years 1914–18, a sense of the uncanny was widespread among the combatants and citizens of every nation. Setting this phenomenon in the context of the Spiritualist movement of late Victorian times, the cultural historian Jay Winter remarks in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995) on how the loss of so many millions in the Great War had led to a revival of Victorian and Edwardian spiritualism that supplemented where it did not rival orthodox religion. Given the grief of so many millions in Britain and its dominions, as well as in France and other countries, it would be surprising if mourners had not tried to contact their lost loved ones, or at the very least had not yearned for proof of life after death. Winter remarks how “Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor of Physics at Liverpool and later Principal of Birmingham University,” had already served as president of the Society for Psychical Research in 1901–03; the loss of his son Raymond in the Ypres Salient would lead him to publish a book which was “both a personal memorial and a scientific exposition” of the evidence for his son’s survival after death.
If Lodge put the stamp of scientific credibility on spiritualism, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave it emotional and imaginative force. “Conan Doyle’s fame as the creator of the ultimate rationalist, Sherlock Holmes, as well as his writings” and his overseas tours promoting the spiritualist movement, “ensured that other parents in mourning would consult him” (Winter 58). Conan Doyle had lost a son, a brother, and a brother-in-law in the Great War, and his grief overcame his innate scepticism to make him an evangelist of the spiritualist movement on his world tour in 1919. In 1923, he visited the legendary Dr. T.G. Hamilton, Canada’s leading researcher in parapsychology, to attend séances held in his Winnipeg home and examine his spirit photography. At the time, Hamilton was immediate past-president of the Manitoba Medical Association (1921–22), and member of the Dominion Council of the Canadian Medical Association. His scientific prestige provided Conan Doyle with further support for his attempt “to create a new synthesis between Darwinian evolution and humanistic Christianity” (Winter 59). In The History of Spiritualism (1926), the detective novelist, speaking in the third person, says about the ultimate mystery: “Evidence of the presence of the dead appeared in his own household, and the relief afforded by posthumous messages taught him how great a solace it would be to a tortured world if it could share in the knowledge which had become clear to himself” (vol. 1:226).