sitting with a reading lamp at his elbow. My first impression was that he looked exactly like a philosopher. He was small, clean-shaven, with longish grey hair brushed neatly above a fine forehead. He had a long upper lip, a powerful ironic mouth, and large earnest eyes. I observed that the book which he put aside was called
The Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin, and I wondered what on earth it could be about. He put me at my ease by lighting a large pipe, saying as he did so, “Well, I gather from Markington’s letter that you’ve been experiencing a change of heart about the War.” He asked for details of my career in the Army, and soon I was rambling on in my naturally inconsequent style. Tyrrell said very little, his object being to size me up. Having got my mind warmed up, I began to give him a few of my notions about the larger aspects of the War. But he interrupted my “and after what Markington told me the other day, I must say,” with, “Never mind about what Markington told you. It amounts to this, doesn’t it—that you have ceased to believe what you are told about the objects for which you supposed yourself to be fighting?” I replied that it did boil down to something like that, and it seemed to me a bloody shame, the troops getting killed all the time while people at home humbugged themselves into believing that everyone in the trenches enjoyed it. Tyrrell poured me out a second cup of tea and suggested that I should write out a short personal statement based on my conviction that the War was being unnecessarily prolonged by the refusal of the Allies to publish their war aims. When I had done this we could discuss the next step to be taken. “Naturally I should help you in every way possible,” he said. “I have always regarded all wars as acts of criminal folly, and my hatred of this one has often made life seem almost unendurable. But hatred makes one vital, and without it one loses energy. ‘Keep vital’ is a more important axiom than ‘love your neighbour.’ This act of yours, if you stick to it, will probably land you in prison. Don’t let that discourage you. You will be more alive in prison than you would be in the trenches.” Mistaking this last remark for a joke, I laughed, rather half-heartedly. “No; I mean that seriously,” he said. “By thinking independently and acting fearlessly on your moral convictions you are serving the world better than you would do by marching with the unthinking majority who are suffering and dying at the front because they believe what they have been told to believe. Now that you have lost your faith in what you enlisted for, I am certain that you should go on and let the consequences take care of themselves. Of course your action would be welcomed by people like myself who are violently opposed to the War. We should print and circulate as many copies of your statement as possible. … But I hadn’t intended to speak as definitely as this. You must decide by your own feeling and not by what anyone else says.” I promised to send him my statement when it was written and walked home with my head full of exalted and disorderly thoughts. I had taken a strong liking for Tyrrell, who probably smiled rather grimly while he was reading a few more pages of Kropotkin’s
Conquest of Bread before going upstairs to his philosophic slumbers.
Although Tyrrell had told me that my statement needn’t be more than 200 words long, it took me several days to formulate. At first I felt that I had so much to say that I didn’t know where to begin. But after several verbose failures it seemed as though the essence of my manifesto could be stated in a single sentence: “I say this War ought to stop.” During the struggle to put my unfusilierish opinions into some sort of shape, my confidence often diminished. But there was no relaxation of my inmost resolve, since I was in the throes of a species of conversion which made the prospect of persecution stimulating and almost enjoyable. No; my loss of confidence was in the same category as my diffidence when first confronted by a Vickers Machine-Gun and its Instructor. While he reeled off the names of its numerous component parts, I used to despair of ever being able to remember them or understand their workings. “And unless I know all about the Vickers Gun I’ll never get sent out to the front,” I used to think. Now, sitting late at night in an expensive but dismal bedroom in Jermyn Street, I internally exclaimed, “I’ll never be able to write out a decent statement and the whole blasted protest will be a washout! Tyrrell thinks I’m quite brainy, but when he reads this stuff he’ll realize what a dud I am.”
What could I do if Tyrrell decided to discourage my candidature for a court martial? Chuck up the whole idea and go out again and get myself killed as quick as possible? “Yes,” I thought, working myself up into a tantrum, “I’d get killed just to show them all I don’t care a damn.” (I didn’t stop to specify the identity of “them all”; such details could be dispensed with when one had lost one’s temper with the Great War.) But common sense warned me that getting sent back was a slow business, and getting killed on purpose an irrelevant gesture for a platoon commander. One couldn’t choose one’s own conditions out in France. … Tyrrell had talked about “serving the world by thinking independently.” I must hang on to that idea and remember the men for whom I believed myself to be interceding. I tried to think internationally; the poor old Boches must be hating it just as much as
