Coningsby Dawson

“ I can think of no one braver than the man who stays behind with a machine gun, fighting a rearguard action and covering his comrades' road to freedom. He knows that he will receive no quarter from our people and will never live to be thanked by his own. His lot is to die alone, hated by the last human being who watches him. They're brave men; they cease fighting only when they're dead.
What a contrast between love and hatred—dreaming of our mothers to the last and smashing the sons of other mothers. ”

“ France April 22, 1918
You would hardly believe our peaceful state of mind unless you could drop in on us for an hour. You, in America, are evidently very worked up about us, and picture us as in desperate conditions. Don't worry, we've got our tails up and are happy as sand-boys. There's nothing of the grimly set faces about our attitude such as you imagine. We're too confident to be grim; war is actually, from our point of view, a gigantic lark. It must sound silly to you, I know, but I love to hear the screaming of the shells in the darkness and the baying of the guns. ”

“ The battlefield itself stretches away all billowy with hay for miles and miles. When a puff of wind blows across it, it rustles like fire. The sides of the trenches are gay with poppies and cornflowers. The larks sing industriously overhead, and above them, like the hum of a swarm of bees, pass the fighting planes. Miles to the rear I can hear the strife of bands, playing their battalions up to the fine. A brave, queer, battling world! If one lives to be old, he will talk about these days and persuade himself that he longs to be back, if the time ever comes when life has lost its challenge. ”

“ But in these places where horrors have been committed, the birds still flit about their nests. When the tanks and the cavalry and the guns have pushed forward, Nature returns to her task of beautifying the world.
How I would like to sit down and talk with you all. When the war is over I can see us going away to some quiet place and re-living the past and re-building the future with words. I may see you sooner than either of us expect; there's always the chance of a Blighty. So far, beyond an attack of trench-fever from which I've almost recovered, I've come through scatheless. ”

“ War has cut the knotted sex-emancipation; we stand up to-day as elementally male and female as when the Garden of Eden was depopulated. Amongst our fighting-men, women actually hold the place which was allotted to them by idealists in troubadour times.
Mothers and sisters and sweethearts, remembered at this distance, have made all women sacred. A new medievalism and asceticism have sprung out of our modern tragedy, enacted beneath the sea, on the land and in the clouds. The tragedy, while modern to us, is actually the oldest in the world—merely death. ”

“ The babies are all dressed in red and the Tommies in the usual hospital blue. Each day the shell-shocked chaps go up to visit the children; the moment the door opens and the blue figures appear, the little red crowd stretch out their arms and cry, “My soldier! My soldier!” for each Tommy has his own particular pet. When a child gets a nervous attack, it is often only the one particular soldier who can do the soothing. Who'd think that men fresh from the carnage could be so tender! And people say that war makes men brutal. ”

“ I learnt that Germany had always been keen on the League of Nations: that she was anxious, as she had always been anxious, to rehabilitate Belgium; that her armies were still invincible, and that the Western Front was still unbroken; that the Kaiser was God's latest revelation of His own perfection and His magnanimous shadow upon earth.
Liars! Blasphemous liars! How can one treat with a nation which has not even the sense to make its shamming decent and plausible? On the Western Front to-day in their ignominious retreat the Germans are showing their ancient ferocity for destruction. ”

“ Going out of sight is sad, as are all partings. But I can bear to part now in a way that I could not before I saw the heavens open in the horror of war. I have ceased to be afraid of the unguess-able, and better still, I have lost my desire to guess. Not to stand still—to press onwards like soldiers—that is all that is required of us. I have heard men talk about world-sorrows, but if you trace them back, our sorrows are all for ourselves—they are a personal equation. To develop one's personality in the remembering of others seems to me to be the only road to happiness. ”

“ They know now that the breath of every individual German is tainted with the odour of carnage. What makes our anger more bitter is the shame that Germany should have forced us to stoop to hatred as a weapon. But there is only one safe principle upon which to act in dealing with Germany, whether in fighting her or making peace with her: With whatever measure she metes, it should be measured to her again. Brute force is the only reasoning she understands. ”

“ Far away across a plain furrowed by shell-fire the spires and domes of cities in the captured territory shine. Like all forbidden lands, there are times when the Hun country looks exquisitely and unreally beautiful, as though it were tempting us to cross the line.
I've just left off to watch a squadron of enemy planes which have been attempting to get across to our side. Everything has opened up on them; machine guns are spouting their luminous trails of tracer bullets; archies are bursting little cotton-wool clouds of death between them and their desire. ”

“ I don't know why, unless it is that as the action quickens one has a chance of giving more. There's nothing sad about being wounded or dying for one's country. In this war one does so much more than that—he dies for the whole of humanity.
Outside my window a stretch of hedges runs down to a little brook. Ducks, geese, cocks and hens make farmyard noises from dawn till last thing at night. Above all the peace and quiet, the distant guns keep up their incessant murmur. What a variety of places are likely to shelter me before the summer is ended—woods, ditches, open fields, trenches. ”

“ To be remembered years after you yourself have forgotten, to have men prying into the workings of a brain which has been dust in a shell for two centuries, is a very definite kind of immortality. To be forgotten—that is what we most dread. Never to have happened would not matter; but to have happened, to have walked the world, laughed, loved, created, and then to be treated as though we had not happened, there lies the sting of death. ”

“ It is impossible for any cavalry in the world to withstand them.
You don't know, can't guess, how letters from home buck me up and keep the lamp of my ideals still burning. There are moments when the mere mechanical side of warfare fills one's mind with an infinite depression. One sees men doing splendid acts, day in day out, like automatons animated by the spring of duty. One almost forgets that there is any human element of choice in the matter, or a difference between fighting and fighting well. ”

“ It must have sounded like the voice of conscience—the old and boasted sin for which medals were struck, the infamy of which was worn as a decoration, rising out of the past to exact suffering for suffering, panic for panic, blood for blood. Whoever chose that battle-cry was a poet—he said everything in the shortest and most rememberable way. America is in France to act as the revenge of God. She has suffered in the spirit what France has suffered in the flesh; through being in France she has learnt from the French the justice of passionate, punishing hate. ”

“ All the world's idealists are in the trenches by now. What a shining cloud of imaginings must rise up to the Soul which lies behind the world. God must be amazed to find that horror can make His obstinate creations so simple and childlike. Here are millions of us who once thought only of our social and individual bellies, now thinking only of the unborn children and the things of the spirit. All the fond and dear accepted affections have become a kind of heaven that lies in the past instead of the future. If we die we don't want any heaven that isn't a re-living of the old happy memories. ”

“ England has set out to behave as if there was no death; she's jolly nearly succeeded in eliminating it from her thoughts. She's learnt the lesson of the chaps in the front-line trenches, and she's like a mother—like our mother—who has sons at the war—she's going to keep on smiling so as not to let her fellows down.
All the streets are full of girls in khaki—girls with the neatest, trimmest little ankles. The smartest of all are the Flying Corps girls, many of whom drive the army cars in the most daring manner. When you think of what they are and were, the war hasn't done so badly for them. ”

“ I want to be “out there” so badly. What does it matter that there's mud in the trenches, and death round every traverse, and danger in each step? It's the hour of glorious life I long for; for such an hour I would exchange all the sheeted beds and running bath-taps, not to mention the æons of Cathay. I can see those gunners forcing up their guns through the mire, and can hear the machine guns clicking away like infuriated typewriters. The whole gigantic pageant of death and endeavour moves before me—and I'm sick of clubs and safety. ”

“ One and all were seizing this jolly moment before they again caught sight of the trenches and carried on with pounding the Hun. They weren't going to spoil their leisure by discussing the perturbations of a German Chancellor.
Peace! For the Hun there shall be no peace. For him, for the next hundred years, whether we fight him or guard the wall which we shall build about him, there will be no peace. We, who have seen the mud of France grow red with blood as if with poppy petals, will never forget. That we die is nothing, provided always that two German lives pay for our death. ”

“ Only the mail arriving at irregular intervals keeps us in knowledge that we once had other personalities. Letters are like ghosts of a world abandoned, tiptoeing through the dream of a sleeper. Between you and us there is a great gulf fixed——Not that we resent it. Someone has to pay a price for the future safety of the world; out of all the ages we have been chosen as the persons. There is nothing to resent,—quite the contrary. Only, now and then creeps in the selfish longing that we may be remembered not as soldiers, but as what we were—in our weakness as well as in our strength. ”

“ And yet how one suffers for the suffering he witnesses—the suffering of horses and Huns, as well as of the men on our own side. The silent, smashed forms carried past on the stretchers; the little groups of busy men among whom a shell bursts, leaving those who do not rise. And overhead the sky is blue and the wind blows happily through the sunshine. “Gone west”—that's all, to the land of departing suns. Some of us will stay to sleep among the gentlemen of France. In either event we are fortunate in having been given the privilege to serve our kind. ”

“ He is us entirely. He is no longer remote and eternal. For us He has again become flesh—He is our comrade; He is the man upon our left and our right hand, who goes into battle with us; He is our dead. We cannot escape Him; the pettinesses of our sins are forgotten in the resemblance of our neighbours to His majesty. Nowadays I cannot think of the poet's Christ, wandering through Galilean lilies in a woman's robes. It's His manly death, His white timeless body on the Cross that I remember. Without Calvary all His words would have been unconvincing and He Himself a dreamer's fancy. ”

“ Your letters apropos of the latest German offensive bring home to me very vividly the emotional terror which war excites in the minds of civilians. You picture us as standing with our backs to the wall, desperately pushing death from off our breasts with naked hands. The truth is so immensely different. We're having a thoroughly bang-up time, and we're as amused by the Hun as ever. He may force us to fall back; but while we fall back we laugh at him. That is the attitude of every British soldier that I've met. We're as happy and unconcerned as children. ”

“ Boys—juvenile cannon-fodder—went whistling along the streets; housemaids leant shyly out of upstairs windows, shaking dusters to attract their attention. In the square by the Chelsea Pensioners, soldiers, all spit and polish, were going through their foot-drill; they didn't look too earnest about it—not at all as if in two months they would be in the trenches. It's the same with the men on leave—they live their fourteen days with cheery common sense as though they were going to live for ever. It's impossible, even when you meet the wounded, to discover any signs of tragedy in London. ”

“ Men were beginning to treat women in a way they demanded—as though they were men. Women were beginning to regard men with a quiet sex-contempt. It looked as if chivalry and all that made for knighthood were at an end. Then came war, calling men to a sacrifice in which women had no share—could not share because they were physically incapable of fighting—and women to the only contribution they could make, mercy and motherhood. ”