Philip Gibbs

“ Some day one of our soldiers now fighting—some young man with a gift of words—will write for all time the story of all this: the beauty and the ugliness and the agony of it, the colour and the smell and the movement of it, with intimate and passionate remembrance. It is a memorable battle-picture in modern history, and in the mass of hundreds of thousands of men, obedient to the high command, which uses them as parts of the great war machine, is the individual with his own separate experience and initiative, with his sense of humour and his suffering, and his courage and his fear. ”

“ Boyhood survived, with its laughter, its quarrels, its passionate excitement, its game of life. Survived, in spite of war’s massacre! Many of those kids must have lost fathers and brothers. The shadow of the War had been over their childhood. They’d seen women weeping at the news of death. But it had not spoilt the spirit of youth. They’d forgotten the shadow. Bertram wondered if any of them would live to see another Great War, would live to die, as fathers and brothers had died, in the same old battlefields, blown to bits, sliced by flying steel, gassed, plugged with machine-gun bullets. ”

“ By a young journalist, or an old one, there is always an adventure to be found in London, as in any great city of the world where the passions of men and women, the conflict of life, the heroism and crimes of human nature, its dreams, its madness, and its faith, are but thinly masked behind the commonplace aspect of modern streets, and beneath the drab cloak of dullness of modern civilization.
It was my hobby in those early Fleet Street days to explore the underworld of London and to get behind the scenes of its monstrous puppet show. ”

“ Crowded behind the gun carriage in one long vista was an immense column of men of all branches of the navy and army, moving up slowly before coming to a halt, and behind again other men in civil clothes, and everywhere among them and above them were flowers in the form of wreaths and crosses. Then all was still, and the picture was complete, framing in that coffin, where the steel hat and the King's sword lay upon the flag which draped it. The soul of the nation at its best, purified at this moment by this emotion, was there, in silence, about the dust of that Unknown. ”

“ I do not believe in a great Empire or a luxurious civilisation built on the wreckage of men’s lives, on slave labour, on the killing of souls, as the British Empire was built during the industrial period after the Napoleonic Wars, when the manufacturers of Great Britain grew rich out of sweated labour in factories and homes before the Trades Unions, the Factory Acts, and democratic reform blotted out the black shame of 1830 to 1850. I think it good and right that men who help to save their country should be given the reward of good wages for good work and some chance of joy in life. ”

“ She startles her husband by laughing in a queer shrill way when he expresses some serious opinions, or gives vent to some of his conventional philosophy, about women, and the duties of married life, and the abomination of the Suffragettes. But he does not see her tears. He does not see her one day, when suddenly, after she has been reading a Mudie’s novel, page after page, without understanding one word, tears well up into her eyes, and fall upon the pages, until she bends her head down and puts her hands up to her face, and sobs as though all her heart had turned to tears. ”

“ They desired to taste the fine flavour of civilization in its ultra- refinement, to dine delicately, to have the fragrance of flowers about them, to sit in the glamour of shaded lights, to watch a woman's beauty through the haze of cigarette-smoke, and to listen to the music of her voice. There was always a woman by the soldier's side, propping her chin in her hands and smiling into the depths of his eyes. For the soul of a Frenchman demands the help of women, and the love of women, however strong his courage or his self-reliance. ”

“ Guns had to be moved, not far, but moved, and out of one bog into another bog—those monsters of enormous weight, which settle deeply into the slime. To be in time for this morning's barrage, gunners, already worn, craving sleep and silence, dog-weary of mud and noise after weeks and months of great battles, had to work like Trojans divinely inspired to win another day's victory, and they spurred themselves harder than their horses in this endeavour. They were often under shell-fire. Not only the gunners, but all the transport men, all the pioneers and working parties have done their utmost. ”

“ They lay piled up on sacks and bags, and across each other’s legs and arms, in a tangled mass of sheepskins, rags, and mangy fur, all brown with mud and dirt as though they had been dipped in the slime of Flanders, as Bertram had known it in war-time winters. It was nightfall, and they were settling down to sleep, restlessly, so that there was a heaving of bodies, and a tossing of arms. Some slept with stertorous breathing. Children wailed. Girls who were almost women lay in the arms of bearded men. One man lay dead among the living, as Bertram saw at a glance, not unfamiliar with death. ”

“ It is only by that hope that one may look back upon the war with anything but despair. All the lives of those boys whom I saw go marching up the roads of France and Flanders to the fields of death, so splendid, so lovely in their youth, will have been laid down in vain if by their sacrifice the world is not uplifted to some plane a little higher than the barbarity which was let loose in Europe. They will have been betrayed if the agony they suffered is forgotten and “the war to end war” leads to preparations for new, more monstrous conflict. ”

“ It is in the Eighth Year, or thereabouts, that there is the tug-of-war between two temperaments, mated by the law, but not mated, perhaps, in ideals, in ambitions, or in qualities of character. The man and woman pull against each other, tugging at each other’s heartstrings. The Eighth Year is the fatal year, when if there is no give-and-take, no working compromise, no new pledges of loyalty and comradeship, the foundations of the home are shattered, and the hopes with which it was first built lie in ruins like a house of cards knocked down by a gust of wind. ”

“ At a distance of forty miles a platoon of men might be wiped out by a casual shell loosed from a fifteen-inch howitzer. What was the value of discipline, ardour, human strength, centuries of character building to produce the fine flower of civilisation, in the face of that explosive force which tore men’s bodies to bits far from the sight of their enemy, without means of resistance on their part, with no more defence than if a thunderbolt had struck them? That is not war between human forces. It is war with engines constructed by men but overpowering. ”

“ This had happened! The gift of words—the greatest gift in the world, if a man pledged his soul to truth.
He hoped Joyce would like his book. It would be fine if she said, “Well done!” when he read it to her. She would be critical. She would hate some of the things he had written, brutal, some of them, but she would acknowledge the truth of it, the bigness of his achievement. For it was going to be big, with the spirit of the greatest war in the world, and of England’s manhood.
He was telling it all, nothing left out, nothing shirked, in horror, courage, boredom, fear, filth, laughter, madness. ”

“ I have written many words about the courage of Paris, courage as fine and noble as anything in history, and in a later chapter of this book I hope to reveal the strength as well as the weakness in the soul of Paris. But if there is any truth in my pen it must describe that exodus by one and a half millions of people who, under the impulse of a great fear—what else was it?—fled by any means and any road from the capital which they love better than any city in the world because their homes are there and their pride and all that has given beauty to their ideals. ”

“ The scene of war since Thursday, when our troops went away in the wet mist for the great battle up the slopes of the Passchendaele Ridge, has been dark and grim and overcast with a brooding sky, where storm-clouds are blown into wild and fantastic shapes. Yesterday over the country round Ypres, which still in its ruins holds the soul of all the monstrous tragedy hereabouts, white cloud-mountains were piled up against black, sullen peaks and were shot through with a greenish light, very ghastly in its revelation of the litter and the wreckage of the great arena of human slaughter. ”

“ It was only when one spoke to the individual, some friend who bared his soul a second, or some soldier-ant in the multitude, with whom one talked with truth, that one saw the hatred of a man for his job, the sense of doom upon him, the weakness that was in his strength, the bitterness of his grudge against a fate that forced him to go on in this way of life, the remembrance of a life more beautiful which he had abandoned—all mingled with those other qualities of pride and comradeship, and that illogical sense of humor which made up the strange complexity of his psychology. ”

“ Ten years after.... The memory of the war days is fading from the mind of the world. The ten million dead lie in their graves, but life goes marching on. Self-preservation, vital interests, new and exciting problems, the human whirligig, are too absorbing for a continual hark-back to the thought of that mortality. We are no longer conscious of any gap in the ranks of youth, torn out by the machinery of destruction. We do not realise the loss of all that spirit, genius, activity and blood, except in private remembrance of some dead boy whose portrait in uniform stands on the mantelshelf. ”

“ That day, on the way to a place which was very close to the German lines, children were playing on the roadside, and old women in black gowns trudged down the long, straight high roads, with their endless sentinels of trees.
In a furrowed field a peasant was sowing the seed for an autumn harvesting, and I watched his swinging gestures from left to right which seem symbolical of all that peace means and of all nature's life and beauty. The seed is scattered and God does the rest, though men may kill each other and invent new ways of death... ”

“ It was divided into a number of box-like cattletrucks, from which, as they drew near, came a pestilential stench through half-opened doors. In the dirty straw of each of the trucks squatted a group of human beings, men, women, and children. They were hunting vermin in their rags. Some of them lay curled up in the straw, sleeping, or dying. Perhaps dying, thought Bertram, for even those who were sitting up had a grey, haggard, deathly look, as they stared out at him with deep-sunk eyes, in which there was no interest, no life, no spirit. ”