No Man's Land (30 page)

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':

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 Elizabeth 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