No Man's Land (21 page)

*

My Pink Form just received amazes me! To be a soldier? C'est incroyable, ma foi! The possibility even is distracting! To send me a notice requesting me to prepare myself for killing men! Why I should feel no more astonished to receive a War Office injunction under dire penalties to perform miracles, to move mountains, to raise from the dead: My reply would be: ‘I cannot.' I should sit still and watch the whole universe pass to its destruction rather than raise a hand to knife a fellow. This may be poor, anaemic; but there it is, a positive fact.

*

There are moments when I have awful misgivings:Is this blessed Journal worthwhile? I really don't know, and that's the harassing fact of the matter. If only I were sure of myself, if only I were capable of an impartial view! But I am too fond of myself to be able to see myself objectively. I wish I knew for certain what I am and how much I am worth. There are such possibilities about the situation: it may turn out tremendously, or else explode in a soap bubble. It is the torture of Tantalus to be so uncertain. I should be relieved to know even the worst. I would almost gladly burn my MSS. in the pleasure of having my curiosity satisfied. I go from the nadir of disappointment to the zenith of hope and back several times a week, and all the time I am additionally harassed by the perfect consciousness that it is all petty and pusillanimous to desire to be known and appreciated, that my ambition is a morbid diathesis of the mind. I am not such a fool either as not to see that there is but little satisfaction in posthumous fame, and I am not such a fool as not to realise that all fame is fleeting, and that the whole world itself is passing away.

*

I smile with sardonic amusement when I reflect how the War has changed my status. Before the War I was an interesting invalid. Now I am a lucky dog. Then, I was a star turn in tragedy; now I am drowned and ignored in an overcrowded chorus. No valetudinarian was ever more unpleasantly jostled out of his self-compassion. It is difficult to accustom myself to the new role all at once: I had begun to lose the faculty for sympathising in others' griefs. It is hard to have to realise that in all this slaughter, my own superfluous life has become negligible and scarcely anyone's concern but my own. In this colossal
sauve-qui-peut
which is developing, who can stay to consider a useless mouth? Am I not a comfortable parasite? And, God forgive me, an Egotist to boot?

The War is searching out everyone, concentrating a beam of inquisitive light upon everyone's mind and character and publishing it for all the world to see. And the consequence to many honest folk has been a keen personal disappointment. We ignoble persons had thought we were better than we really are. We scarcely anticipated that the War was going to discover for us our emotions so despicably small by comparison, or our hearts so riddled with selfish motives. In the wild race for security during these dangerous times, men and women have all been sailing so closehauled to the wind that their eyes have been glued to their own forepeaks with never a thought for others: fathers have vied with one another in procuring safe jobs for their sons, wives have been bitter and recriminating at the security of other wives' husbands. The men themselves plot constantly for staff appointments, and everyone is pulling strings who can. Bereavement has brought bitterness and immunity indifference.

And how pathetically some of us cling still to fragments of the old regime that has already passed – like ship-wrecked mariners to floating wreckage, to the manner of the conservatoire amid the thunder of all Europe being broken up, to our newspaper gossip and parish teas, to our cherished aims – wealth, fame, success – in spite of all,
ruat coelum!
Mr A. C. Benson and his trickling, comfortable Essays, Mr Shaw and his Scintillations – they are all there as before, revolving like haggard windmills in a devastated landscape! A little while ago, I read in the local newspaper which I get up from the country two columns concerning the accidental death of an old woman, while two lines were used to record the death of a townsman at the front from an aerial dart. Behold this poor rag! staggering along under the burden of the War in a passionate endeavour to preserve the old-time interest in an old woman's decease. Yet more or less we are all in the same case: I still write my Journal and play Patience of an evening, and an old lady I know still reads as before the short items of gossip in the papers, neglecting articles and leaders… We are like a nest of frightened ants when someone lifts the stone. That is the world just now.

September 5

…I was so ashamed of having to fall back upon such ignominious publications for my literary efforts that on presenting him with two copies, I told the following lie to save my face:

‘They were two essays of mine left over at the beginning of the War, you know. My usual channel became blocked so I had to have recourse to these.'

‘Where do you publish as a rule?' he innocently asked.

‘Oh! several in the
Manchester Guardian
,' I told him out of vanity. ‘But of course every respectable journal now has closed down to extra-war topics.'

I lie out of vanity. And then I confess to lying – out of vanity too. So that one way or another I am determined to make kudos out of myself. Even this last reflection is written down with an excessive appreciation of its wit and the intention that it shall raise a smile.

September 9

Still nothing to report. The anxiety is telling on us all. The nurse has another case on the 22nd.

*

I looked at myself in the mirror this morning – nude, a most revolting picture. An emaciated human being is the most unlovely thing in creation. Some time ago a smart errand boy called out ‘Bovril' after me in the street.

On my way to the Station met two robust, brawny curates on the way to the daily weekday service – which is attended only by two decrepit old women in black, each with her prayer-book caught up to her breast as if she were afraid it might gallop off. That means a parson apiece – and in war time too.

Bruce Frederick Cummings
was born in Barnstaple, Devon, in 1889. He attempted to enlist in the Army in November 1915 but was turned down by the medical board – a letter from his doctor said that he was suffering from the disease now known as multiple sclerosis and had less than five years to live. He published his diaries in 1917 under the title
The Journal of a Disappointed Man
and chose the pseudonym W. N. P. Barbellion – the forenames ‘Wilhelm', ‘Nero' and ‘Pilate' were for him those of the most wretched men ever to have lived. The book had been turned down by Collins, who had originally agreed to publish it, on account of its ‘lack of morals'. Barbellion's voice in the diaries is delightfully self-deprecating and self-aware:

The Journal of a Disappointed Man
is a wonderful antidote to the dominant bombast and boasting. It conveys without melodrama the sense of disorientation felt by many as they saw their world cascade out of control. Cummings died in October 1919 having just finished a second volume of memoirs, ‘Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains'. As he says in the diaries, ‘Death can do no more than kill you'.

MARY BORDEN

THE SQUARE

from
The Forbidden Zone

B
ElOW MY WINDOW
in the big bright square a struggle is going on between the machines of war and the people of the town. There are the motor cars of the army, the limousines, and the touring cars and the motor lorries and the ambulances; and there are the little bare-headed women of the town with baskets on their arms who try to push the monsters out of their way.

The motors come in and go out of the four corners of the square, and they stand panting and snorting in the middle of it. The limousines are full of smart men in uniforms with silver hair and gold braid on their round red hats. The touring cars, too, are full of uniforms, but on the faces of the young men who drive them is a look of exhaustion and excitement. The motors make a great noise and a great smell and a great dust. They come into the square, hooting and shrieking; they draw up in the square with grinding brakes. The men in them get out with a flourish of capes: they stamp on the pavement with heavy boots; they salute one another stiffly like wooden toys, then disappear into the buildings where they hold murderous conferences and make elaborate plans of massacre.

The motor cars have all gone wrong. They are queer. They are not doing what they were designed to do when they were turned out of the factories. The limousines were made to carry ladies to places of amusement: they are carrying generals to places of killing. The limousines and the touring cars and the motor lorries are all debauched; they have a depraved look; their springs sag, their wheels waver; their bodies lean to one side. The elegant limousines that carry the generals are crusted with old mud; the leather cushions of the touring cars are in tatters; the great motor lorries crouch under vast burdens. They crouch in the square ashamed, deformed, very weary; their unspeakable burdens bulge under canvas coverings. Only the snobbish ambulances with the red crosses on their sides have assurance. They have the self-assurance of amateurs.

The business of killing and the business of living go on together in the square beneath the many windows, jostling each other.

The little women of the town are busy; they are dressed in black; they have children with them. Some lead children by the hand, others are big with children yet unborn. But all the women are busy. They ignore the motors; they do not see the fine scowling generals, nor the strained excited faces in the fast touring cars, nor the provisions of war under their lumpy coverings. They do not even wonder what is in the ambulances. They are too busy. They scurry across to the shops, instinctively dodging, and come out again with bundles; they talk to each other a little without smiling; they stare in front of them; they are staring at life; they are thinking about the business of living.

On Saturdays they put up their booths on the cobble stones and hold their market. The motors have to go round another way on market days. There is no room in the square for the generals, nor for the dying men in the ambulances. The women are there. They buy and sell their saucepans and their linen and their spools of thread and their fowls and their flowers; they bargain and they chatter; they provide for their houses and their children; they give oranges to their children, and put away their coppers in their deep pockets.

As for the men on the stretchers inside the smart ambulances with the bright red crosses, they do not know about the women in the square. They cannot hear their chattering, nor see the children sucking oranges; they can see nothing and hear nothing of the life that is going on in the square; they are lying on their backs in the dark canvas bellies of the ambulances, staring at death. They do not know that on Saturday mornings their road does not lie through the big bright square because the little women of the town are busy with their market.

MARY BORDEN

THE BEACH