Philip Gibbs

“ Bertram flung it into a drawer of the little old desk where, as a boy in his father’s house, he had written secret verses, youthful essays about London life, and, later, love-letters to Joyce Bellairs.
An immense gloom closed down upon his spirit. What was the use of anything? He had tried hard, and failed utterly, in every way. He had made a frightful mucker of life. His luck was out. Why kick against it? Why not face up to the futility of life—for him, anyhow? He hadn’t even had the decent luck of going out with the men who had met a bullet or a bit of shell. ”

“ Not as an ardent boy, but as a man who’s seen the brutality of life, and come through agony, and perhaps has a better understanding of himself and of human nature. But what love I have in my heart, and a comradeship of utter loyalty, devotion, and humility, shall be yours until I die, if you’ll let me live with you so long.”
“We shall arrange our life together,” she said, using the words he had spoken. “Our loving comradeship has no ignorance. We have both seen life’s misery and been touched by it. We shall have the wisdom of love, so that it is more precious.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ These Sinn Feiners would stab a man in the back who held out his hand in friendship and forgiveness.”
“You’re Irish of the Irish!” said Bertram. “Your Irish blood is in my veins. We of all people should understand the passion of our race for liberty, their remembrance of old crimes against their faith and land, their frightful heritage of memory. I loathe this guerrilla warfare, but I understand its motives and impulses. In their spirit it’s as much a fight for liberty as that of any people who strive to free themselves from a foreign yoke. ”

“ The Tartar type was striking, in its contrast to the blue-eyed, yellow-bearded peasants amidst whom they dwelt, and Bertram, staring at the tall, lean men with Mongolian cheekbones, leathery skin, and straight black hair, thought of Ghengis Khan and his hordes of men like this, who had swept across Europe in the Middle Ages to the very gates of Vienna.
Kazan was now on the edge of the famine. Hunger was creeping about the city itself, though even here there was meat to be had in the market for those who had money to buy it. ”

“ It’s like seeing the end of the world—the death of civilisation. It’s absurd for the individual to whine about the loss of a collar-stud, or a pretty wife, in the midst of an Empire’s ruin.”
“A nice cheerful way of looking at things!” said Christy, with his usual irony. “Heaven knows how gay you’ll be by the time you get to the Volga Valley.”
“These people seem to be down to the bed-rock of primitive existence,” said Bertram. “Nothing matters except food and shelter, and escape from death. All the rest is so much ‘jam,’ as my batman used to say. It simplifies things, as war does.” ”

“ No man or woman went in. None came out.
Along the Nevski Prospekt once, as Bertram knew, the greatest highway of luxury in Europe, most of the shops were boarded up like those in Moscow, and nothing was being sold or bought. But there were people there, a sense of life, in contrast to the deadly quietude in other streets. With fur caps pulled down, and sheepskin coats tucked up about their ears, and with snow-shoes over their boots, they were dragging hand sledges over pavements covered with frozen snow so slippery that Bertram found it hard to walk without staggering or falling. ”

“ It was Eugène Lajeunesse, and Bertram felt a thrill at being in the presence of a man whose books, so wise, so witty, so wicked, so full of tenderness to humanity, and yet so cruel in tearing down the faith of simple folk, had made him famous throughout the world. Alone in France during the War, he had maintained his faith as an international pacifist, and not all the outrages of Les Boches, nor all the agony of France had made him swerve from the belief that the war was only one more proof of human stupidity. ”

“ I have seen the beauty of their mother, France, blasted, as in those fields outside. I have seen our women outraged by the brutality of the enemy. It is because of these things, and because I believe in the justice of God that I demand the full punishment of an infamous people. I warn you, sir, that if Great Britain endeavours to thwart that divine justice, France will regard her also as an enemy.”
“The dead listen to us, mon père,” said Bertram, simply. “Outside this window their bodies lie together. It is too soon for any Frenchman to speak of England as an enemy.” ”

“ She said Bertram had no idea of the amount of human courage in a city like London. The heroism of fighting men in war was nothing to the grim, enduring heroism of husbands nagged by their wives, wives bullied by their husbands, men struggling to keep on this side of destitution, women fighting with all the strength of their souls to keep “respectable” in underpaid jobs, young girls starving themselves on milk and buns in order to dress well enough for a chance in the marriage market, and all looking on the best side of things, refusing to surrender, holding on gamely. ”

“ What was life, anyhow, to the individual soul? Not much of a game, except for a little laughter, some moments of love, some years of illusion! Here he was, sitting by the bedside of this mother whose children had gone from her—all but himself—and whose heart was broken by the death of her last-born in a foul kind of civil war. Susan’s husband had been hanged. Bertram’s wife had left him. A cheerful kind of family record! Not worse than in millions of other families in civilised Europe. Not so bad as in Russia, or Austria, or Poland, according to reports. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Bertram thought he saw. He believed that Huggett knew the truth of things about the spirit of the men. He marvelled at this fellow’s commonsense, his soundness of judgment, his sense of humour, his patience. Those had been the qualities of the men in the war. They were still there. If all the men were like Huggett, or most of them, England was safe. The menace was only in the minds of men like Bernard Hall of The New World—intellectually morbid—and in the minds of Joyce’s crowd, who were obsessed by the bogey of Bolshevism—that strange foreign growth, so alien to English ideas. ”

“ The question that came into his brain seemed to him like a kind of blasphemy—a treachery to his own code, and to all the crowd who had fought for England. If that sacrifice had not been worth while, and so many men had died for false beliefs and hopes, then nothing in the world was right, and all that men were taught in faith was just a lie. Christy had said it was a lie, the whole make-up of civilisation, the code of his sort of people, patriotism itself. They had argued over that, almost savagely, and he had told Christy to shut up or clear out. ”

“ Bertram sat with him on a hummock of earth, shared some sandwiches with him, and tried, in simple phrases, with an emotion that he felt, to assure this peasant who had been a poilu of France, that England had a soul above shop-keeping, that her share in the war had been not only enormous in sacrifice, but heroic in ideal.
The man listened to him with patience, but also with amusement.
“Monsieur is an idealist! After experience of war?” That was strange. He himself was a realist. Nations, like individuals, would fight for self-interest, to save their skins, their land, their women. ”

“ We’ll never stop War as long as women like that think their noblest duty is to breed sons for the shambles; as long as they rejoice in the death of their well-beloved for England’s sake, or Germany’s. It’s making a religion of the foulest stupidity in human life. It’s upholding the tradition of war—right or wrong—as the supreme test of virtue in a noble caste, and its blood sacrifice as a necessary, inevitable and sacred duty. ”

“ For ever, if you like.”
“I want comradeship,” he told her. “I’m lonely, and I hate loneliness. I think we could do good work together, for children, for peace, for ourselves. I’ll be a faithful servant to you, Princess!”
“Not mine,” she said, smiling. “I’m no Princess, but a serving wench. I’m Communist enough to believe in equality between a man and his woman. We will serve God together!”
“I don’t know much about God,” said Bertram. “I’m a hopeless infidel. But I’m spiritual enough to adore the goodness in you. Your courage! ”

“ He needed it enormously, from a woman, as well as from Christy. Why from a woman? Why had Janet Welford’s comradeship been so much better than any man’s? Perhaps women understood better, with more tenderness for the weakness of men. Or was it just the lure of sex? Impossible to tell. Why bother to find out? Why not accept life without analysis, as simply as Nadia’s offer of love? It was the second time he had been offered woman’s love since Joyce had gone from him. The pretty German girl had wanted to go with him, and he had laughed at her, and played the prig. ”

“ Now I want to get deeper and deeper into the misery of the people. I want to be with them in their pain and their filth. I want to share their worst agony. It is to pay back to them by the suffering of my body and spirit for all the cruelties of my ancestors. If you will read Russian history, you will find my father’s name—though not my father—attached to acts which kept the peasants enslaved, and brutalised them. The old régime is suffering now for the sins of its fathers. It is right that we should be punished.”
“I don’t believe in that doctrine,” said Bertram. ”

“ He told her only of the things that had happened, the war, his marriage, the death of the child, Digby’s murder in Ireland, his mother’s death, his separation from Joyce. He was not good at self-analysis, and too much of an Englishman to attempt it. Yet she seemed to understand more than he told her.
“Russia does not hold all the unhappiness of life,” she said. “You have crowded too much suffering into a few years. It has wounded your spirit. You feel broken, and perhaps a little resentful of Fate. So much bad luck after the strain of war!”
“I’m not whining,” said Bertram. ”

“ Bertram had said, stubbornly, and that confession of faith, which he would never have stated in Joyce’s “set,” because it was taken for granted as the very air they breathed, seemed to astonish and amuse some of Christy’s friends, as though he had uttered some ancient heresy in an outworn creed.
“Patriotism has been the curse of the human race,” said Henry Carvell, the war correspondent, who had seen more of wars, big and little, than any man in England, and had been a knight-errant of the pen in most countries of the world. ”

“ Four and a half years of war had intervened, awaking Bertram and the world out of false dreams and beatific visions. Four and a half murderous years, crammed with death, and horror, and heroism, and laughter, and boredom, and fear, and filth. Then a year of marriage—worse than war. More difficult than the technique of war, more nerve-racking, and more terrifying than death in the results of failure.
Here he was, after complete failure, back in his bachelor room, as Joyce was in hers! ”

“ Young girls, beautiful as all the peasant girls in the Volga valley, lay dying in cottages and barns. Lads on the threshold of youth’s adventure, waited patiently and quietly for death, with those who were old enough to die. The children did not even wail in their hunger, but crawled about the floors with swollen heads and grave wondering eyes. In some of the barns where once rich stores of grain had been, now lay unburied bodies. . . .
“I can’t stand much more of this,” said Bertram. “War is a merry game to famine!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Were they now likely to be the victims of a “secret cult,” urging them to overthrow civilisation? Were they in dark conspiracy, as the dupes of German Jews, to play Hell and Satan-worship in the country they had saved by the valour of their souls? They were restless, discontented, bitter. What wonder, when prices were rising high against them, and wages were going down, and unemployment was creeping up like a dark tide of misery into millions of little homes? This lecture of Lady Ottery’s was an outrage to the men who had fought for England, though she had no idea of that. ”

“ Peace with Joyce? Joyce’s love and favour? It would be worth while to surrender a good deal for that—everything in the world, but a man’s honour to himself.
These people, Bellasis, and Alban, and Kenneth Murless, and all their kind, extremists in reaction, were asking him to betray his sympathy with the men who had been his comrades in the lousy trenches. To go right over to the Bellasis side—one day to give an order to shoot, perhaps—would be to break faith with Bill Huggett and all poor devils like him. ”

“ In the heart of man, and especially in the heart of Germany, is hatred, evil, greed, brutality, fear, rivalry. So it has been. So it will always be, despite the grace of God, and the teaching of Jesus Christ. We have to guard against these natural passions. We have to uphold justice by force. We must never be weakened by a craven fear of war. Worse than war is cowardice or dishonour. Worse than hatred is the betrayal of friendship. May England be true to France!”
“May France remember England’s sacrifice!” said Bertram, “and our dead that lie in her soil.” ”

“ Bertram stared out of the window for hundreds of versts, at the flat, dreary, monotonous panorama of Russia. It seemed lifeless and abandoned, except at wayside stations where groups of peasants stood about the wooden sheds, staring at the train as though it were a miraculous advent. Away from these stations there was but little sign of human life. Now and then Bertram saw a droschke driving along a road which led to some distant village of wooden houses with a white-washed church rising above them. ”