John Masefield

“ Then if you go on, you come to a landscape where there is no visible living thing; nothing but a blasted bedevilled sea of mud, gouged into great holes and gashed into great trenches, and blown into immense pits, and all littered and heaped with broken iron, and broken leather, and rags and boots and jars and tins, and old barbed wire by the ton and unexploded shells and bombs by the hundred ton, and where there is no building and no road, and no tree and no grass, nothing but desolation and mud and death. ”

“ On your way up to the front you are struck by the number of soldiers sitting on the doorsteps of ruined houses studying the tails of their shirts as though they were precious manuscripts. When you are at the front you notice that the men have an uneasy way with their shoulders as though they wished to be scraping along brick walls, and when you have slept one night at the front you realize what the soldier meant when he wrote home to say: "This war isn't a very bloody war, so far as I've seen it, but it does tickle at night." ”

“ But all the fever of their wars, multiplied ten-fold, would be as nothing to the fever of arrogance, blindness, wild and bloody thinking, and impious dealing, with which another irresponsible autocrat prepared the present war. No former autocrat took such pains to organize armed force, and to make the evil blood in his nation to run so hotly. No former autocrat had such skill or such clever servants to prepare and direct the outburst. And no former autocrat has reaped such a crop of bloodshed, massacre and destruction. ”

“ And nations are only great when they are true to that soul. Men can only be great when they are true to the best they have imagined. And I believe that in times of stress, in national danger, in calamity, the soul behind a nation kindles and quickens and is alive and enters into men, and the men of the nation get strength and power from it.
I believe that that great soul, made by the courage and beauty and wisdom of the millions of the race, is the god of the race, to protect it and guide it and to lead it into safety. ”

“ Then comes war, which goes on, like a fever, till the nation is dead or cured.
That may not be how all wars begin, but that is how the greatest and longest and most evil wars have begun, in modern times. A nation has caught a fever, run up a temperature, gone mad and bitten, been a danger and a scourge to the world, and has gradually sickened itself out into exhaustion, peace and wisdom. Spain had such a fever three hundred years ago, when her motto was the proud boast, "The world does not suffice for us." France had such a fever a century later. ”

“ I am for the common man and woman, whose tears and blood pay for war. And in that matter of payment, the poor German pays, equally with the poor Belgian. He pays with all he has. On the battlefields of this war I have seen the men who paid. I have seen enemy dead, and Turk dead, and French dead, and English dead, and every dead man meant some woman with a broken heart.
Those men had no quarrel with each other. They lie there in the mud, because man, who has conquered the black death and typhus and smallpox, and the yellow fever, has not conquered the war fever. ”

“ Art is nothing but complete understanding of something. All writers long to understand the spirit of their race.
Let me say now, that 25 years ago, it would have been difficult for an Englishman to speak here, about the spirit of England, and to claim that it is something of the spirit of St. George, a manly and beautiful spirit, ready to help some one weaker, and something of the spirit of Shakespeare, a just and tender spirit, fond of fun and kindness and of the rough and busy life of men. That delicate, shy, gentle, humorous and most manly soul is the soul of England. ”

“ It ought to be possible for the mind of man, which made the steam engine, the submarine and the aeroplane, and conquered the Black Death and yellow fever and typhus fever, to devise some means of living, nation with nation, without this periodical slaughter known as war. It won't be easy to devise any such means, men being what they are, with the instincts for war deeply rooted in their hearts, or easily put there by their rulers; yet the mind of man can do most things, if he can only get the will to do them. ”

“ There is no need to lie about a nation any more than there is any need to lie about a man. The truth emerges above any lie.
I know my nation's faults as well as I know my own. They are the faults of a set and of a system. They are faults of head, they are not faults of heart. When I think of those faults I think of a long graveyard in France, a hundred miles long, where simple, good, kind, ignorant Englishmen by the thousand and the hundred thousand lie in every attitude of rest and agony, for ever and for ever and for ever. ”

“ I said some time ago, that the only things which matter in war are courage and the love of your comrades. When this war ends, we shall need all our courage and all our comrades, in that re-making of the world, which will follow this destruction. And I hope that when that time comes, you will not think of us again, as cold, or contemptuous, or oppressive, but as a race of men who went down to the death for a friend in trouble, as St. George did, on this day, so many centuries ago. ”

“ The nation was drunken, and that was looked on with apathy, the nation had ceased to care, as it once had cared, with a most noble, intense, and passionate pride, for things of beauty and of style, in life, and art and music and the means of living. And this deadness and apathy and stupidity were become even matters of pride to some. Then the nation, with all its wealth, was an ill-taught, an ill-fed, and an ill-clad nation, so that in every city in the land a vast number of souls were ignorant, and a vast number of bodies had not enough to eat nor enough to put on. ”

“ A few minutes ago, I said that the greatest minds among men looked upon war as nearly (but not quite) the last, greatest and completest evil that can come into human life. Nearly, but not quite. There is one completer evil, that of letting proud, bloody and devilish men to rule this world. While proud, bloody and devilish men strike for power here, free men, who had rather die than serve them, will strike against them. ”

“ We in Europe will be beggared by it for years to come; only we want the world to profit by it, by a change of heart, by an understanding among the nations, and by the knowledge which we in Europe needed this war to teach us, that human life is the precious thing on this earth, and that we are here truly linked man to man, and not divided up nation by nation. We are one body of humanity. ”

“ You were, as we were, not expecting war, seeing the threat and the preparation of war, but believing, just as we believed, that commonsense, or ordinary human sense, and one-thousandth part of goodwill in human intercourse would make war impossible. War to you, as to us, seemed to be out of date in a century which cut the Panama Canal and discovered Radium and the wireless telegraph. But it came none the less, and all our ten millions of adults had suddenly to put by their old lives and take on new and dangerous and terrible lives. ”

“ Presently he forgets that the State is anything except himself. He cries out that the State is himself, since he is the head of the Army and the Army is the State. He subordinates everything to the army. He tolerates schools only in so far as they teach military maxims, and women only because they produce cannon fodder. He encourages bad manners in his officers, because he thinks that it teaches them to dominate; he preaches about duty and his own magnificence in his churches and schools, because he thinks that it teaches people to obey. ”

“ All the things needed in the front line are heavy and awkward to carry, and all have to be carried up, on the shoulders of men. The image left on the minds of most men by this war is not an image of fighting, nor of men standing in the trenches, nor of attacks, nor even of the gunners at the guns; it is the image of little parties of men plodding along in single file through the mud, carrying up the things needed in the front trenches; barbed wire, trench gratings, trench pumps, machine guns, machine gun ammunition, bombs, Stokes shells, tins of bully beef and tins of water. ”

“ You go elsewhere, and you see miles of chimneys spouting fire, where every known force is pressing every known metal into every known kind of engine of death.
You see the nimblest brains and hands and all the finest courage perfecting our control of the air. You see men gathering and packing food, breaking stones for roads and shaping sleepers for railways. You see men by the million about whom nobody cared, in the old days, in peace, suddenly taken up, and fed and clad and taught, and made much of. ”

“ I'm afraid that the memory of those old wrongs may never pass, for nations, like people, do not forget their childhood. Yet I hope for the sake of the world, that it may be set aside, so that your country and mine, which have one great key to understanding, which other nations have not, the same language, may, after this time of war work like friends together, to make wars to cease upon this earth. ”

“ If you consider the thought and the voices of that time, you can see that the soul of the land was under a cloud. The thought and the voices of that time are things divorced from the body of the people. The thought is the possession of a few leisured men. It is not the joy of a great body of men. The voices are the voices of a few men crying in the wilderness that things are evil. ”

“ The infected nation becomes, first of all, arrogant. It gets what we call swelled-head. It thinks itself, possibly with reason, the finest nation in the world. As the poison takes hold and the germs multiply, this arrogance leads to a spiritual blindness to whatever may be good or right in any other nation in the world. This blindness leads to an indifference to whatever any other nation may do or care. This indifference leads to the bloody theory, that it is a duty to subjugate any other nation. ”

“ Well, you will agree with me perhaps that war comes into the world, in much such a way. The body of a nation does not want it, though it may think about it often and much, the body of a nation is normally busy with its own life. Then, in times of overstrain, of restlessness, or of excitement, or even of busy and pleasant well-being, the poison is introduced, wilfully, by kings and their ministers, and the nation sickens. ”

“ I am among civilized men because they are doing it so savagely." And when the smoke and dust of the shells clear away, you see no men, civilized or savage, nothing but a vast expanse of mud, with a dead mule or two, and great black and white devils of smoke where shells are bursting.
In parts of that strip of France, especially in the broadest part, you come upon places where the ground is almost unmarked with shell-fire. There are no traces of fighting, no graves, no litter of broken men or broken equipment, the fields are green and there is no noise of war. ”

“ Any soldier on the Western front will tell you that the mud is the real enemy. The task of carrying up supplies across that mud, becomes by much the most difficult task which soldiers are called upon to do.
In spite of the danger and the occasional mud, the life at the front is lived with cheerfulness. There is much joking, though many of the jokes are about death and the dead. Very strange and romantic things happen continually, and there are strange escapes. I have not seen any escape quite so wonderful as that escape vouched for during your Civil War. ”

“ Then in September, 1914, that great calm soldier Marshal Joffre wrote those words which will be remembered as long as this war is remembered: "The time has come for going back no further, but to die where you stand if you cannot advance." ”

“ Yet nations, like men, sometimes turn away from their true selves to follow false selves, and to serve false gods. All the old Bible is full of stories of a little nation sometimes true, sometimes false to its soul, and falling into calamity, and then being quickened and helped, and returning to the truth and coming to marvellous things, to the green pastures, where goodness and loving kindness follow men all the days of their life. ”

“ We can build up behind those men a great wall of love and admiration and courage, so that they can feel it, and rest their backs against it when they are hard pressed.
It is as well to face the facts of the battle. We have lost a tract of France, and our old graveyards of the Somme, our huts and waterpipes, some guns and dumps of stores and a great many men.
Fortune is like that in war. When Cortes had burnt his ships, and was marching into Mexico, his men growled that they had a hard time, with little food and no rest and bloody fighting. ”

“ But for the fact that all the power and blind obedience of a nation may be flung anywhere at the caprice of one man, there is much to be said for the military state. But that fact damns it, and the world has never allowed it to continue. The gunman who may be drunk or mad or savage at any minute is too dangerous to be allowed in the house. Rome, who had nobly held the idea of law, became that kind of State and fell. France, who had nobly held the idea of liberty, became that kind of State, and fell; and the savage Zulus, who made themselves a people and then an exterminating scourge also fell ”