What’s done we partly may compute,
But know not what’s resisted.
Who shall say what efforts it may have cost some of those poor custom-ridden souls not to veto, for good and all, an engine of war so far from “smart” as the tank, or to accept any help at all from such folk as the newfangled, untraditional airmen, some of whom took no shame to go forth to the fray in pyjamas. Not they alone, but all of ourselves, with our boastful chatter about the “public school spirit,” our gallant, robust contempt for “swats” and “smugs” and all who invented new means to new ends and who trained and used their brains with a will—we had arranged for these easy battues of thousands of Englishmen, who, for their part, did not fail. Tomorrow you would see it all again—a few hundred square yards of ground gained by the deaths, perhaps, of twenty thousand men who would
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain.
So it would go on, week after week, sitting after sitting of the dismal court that liquidated in the Flanders mud our ruling classes’ wasted decades, until we either lost the war outright or were saved from utter disaster by clutching at aid from French brains and American numbers. Like Lucifer when he was confronted with the sky at night, you “looked and sank.”
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.
What had we done, when we could, that the stars in their courses should fight for us now? Or left undone, of all that could provoke this methodical universe of swinging and returning forces to shake off such dust from its constant wheels?
V
“I planted a set of blind hopes in their minds,” said Prometheus, making it out to be quite a good turn that he had done to mankind. And the Dr. Relling of Ibsen, a kind of Prometheus in general practice, kept at hand a whole medicine-chest of assorted illusions to dope his patients with. “Illusion, you know,” said this sage, “is the tonic to give ’em.” It may be. But even illusions cost something. The bill, as Hotspur said of the river Trent, “comes me cranking in” presently, nature’s iron law laying it down that the more superb your state of inflation the deeper shall the dumps occasioned by a puncture be. The Promethean gift of Mr. Dunlop to our race undoubtedly lifted the pastime of cycling out of a somewhat bumpy order of prose into a lyric heaven. And yet the stoutest of all nails could plunge itself into the solid tyre of old without compelling you to walk a foundered Pegasus from the top of the Honister Pass the whole way to Keswick, enjoying en route neither the blessing of a bicycle nor that of the unhampered use of Shanks’ Mare.
So War, who keeps such a pump to blow you up with, and also such thorns for your puncturing, had to leave us the “poor shrunken things” that we are, anyhow. It is as if the average man had been passing himself off on himself, in a dream, as the youthful hero of some popular drama, and, in a rousing last act, had departed, in 1914, on excellent terms with himself and the audience, bands playing and flags flying, to start a noble and happy new life on the virgin soil of the “golden West.” And now he awakes in the “golden West” on a slobbery and a dirty farm, with all the purchase money still to pay, and tools and manures remarkably dear, and no flag visible, nor instrument of music audible, and dismal reports coming in from neighbouring farmers, and cause and effect as abominably linked one to another as ever, and all the time his mind full of a sour surmise that many sorts of less credulous men have “made a bit” of inordinate size out of the bit that he did rather than made, during the raging and tearing run of the drama now taken off and, as far as may be, forgotten.
XII
Belated Boons
I
There is no one day of which you can say: “My youth ended then. On the Monday the ball of my vision had eagles that flew unabashed to the sun. On the Tuesday it hadn’t.” The season of rapture goes out like a tide that has turned; a time has come when the mud flats are bare; but, long after the ebb has set in, any wave that has taken a special strength of its own from some combination of flukes out at sea may cover them up for a moment—may even throw itself far up the beach, making as if to recapture the lost high-water mark. So the youth of our war had its feints at renewal, hours of Indian summer when there was wine again in the air; in the “bare, ruined choirs” a lated golden auriole would strike up once more for a while, before leaving.
Because hope does spring eternal the evening before a great battle must always make fires leap up in the mind. The calm before Thermopylae, the rival camps on the night before Agincourt, the ball before Waterloo—not without reason have writers of genius, searching for glimpses of life in its most fugitive acme of bloom, the poised and just breaking crest of the wave, gone to places and times of the kind. For there the wits and the heart may be really astir and at gaze, and the common man may
