No Man's Land

“ You are half through the middle chapters before you realize how steadily all that has seemed careless and overdone is carrying on toward an overwhelming sense of the kind of soldier who is doing the fighting and paying the price. ‘No man’s land’ is a strange, ill-written, confused and vivid book, pulled out of the frightful turmoil of the present. ”

“ Into No Man's Land have gone alike, the wheat of honest endeavour and hardship well borne, and the tares of class hatred and selfishness. Had ever reaper nobler task in front of him than the burning of those tares and the gathering of that wheat into the nation's barn? ”

“ There are fine towns and villages containing non-combatants on the other side of No Man's Land. It would be but to mock their hopes to advance unless we could sweep on everywhere. Nor do we wish to conquer in such a way that every village is left in ruins. Here and there at strategic points we may have to do that. It is not so much that we want to break through as that we want the whole line to break. ”

“ No Man's Land, with all its pathos and sorrow, the grave of unknown heroes, the battle-ground on which many a brave exploit is enacted which is unnoticed and 65unrecognized, is still the pledge and prophecy of our final victory. ”

“ The world is my birthplace.... Men had wandered, drifted, flung themselves down in alien places. Why not? The subconscious trust in the brotherhood of nations had urged them to such courses.
And Internationalism had failed them. Each country was tightly puckered again to self-sufficiency. Internationalism had no country to give her devotees during a European war. No country but No Man’s Land ... desolate sodden track without end or beginning, neither land nor sea ... to Richard, almost asleep, came a vision of the estuary echoed somewhere in space and in deeper shadow ... ”

“ To the batches of prisoners coming back—just a casualty; to the reinforcements coming up—just a casualty. To the boy himself—the great price.
And so, in the shell-ploughed, gun-furrowed No Man's Land is the seed of Britain sown. ”

“ When the explorer has once begun to think and wonder about the great unseen, unknown countries, where man has never journeyed, the whisper comes again and again: “Something hidden. Go and find it.”
People sometimes say to the explorer, “There is no sense of going to those strange lands where you cannot live. No good nor gold ever yet came from No-Man’s Land.” ”

“ Probably the British press will announce to-morrow, 'All calm on the Western Front'; but we know that every night No Man's Land is the scene of deeds of valour and self-sacrifice, proving that our men have the fighting spirit of their fathers; and that apart from the clash of material forces, in the great battle of spirits which is the ultimate basis upon which a decision in war depends, we need not doubt the 'will to victory' of our men. ”

“ But out in No Man's Land, of course, the dominant factor is the swift, death-dealing bullet, and the endless mass of barbed-wire entanglements which divides Boches from Britons and Frenchmen for so many hundreds of miles. There are plenty of dead things out there, but, barring the rats, when you get any other movement in No Man's Land you may reckon it's enemy movement: creeping men with bombs and daggers, who may have been stalking you or may not have seen you. ”

“ As a matter of fact, things have quietened down a lot now, and we have virtual possession of No Man's Land; the Huns have hidden. They are satisfied to sprinkle our sector with shells in the hope of getting returning men. But our stretcher-bearers are indignant at the idea of my attempting to get the lost man. Securing my information, they go into No Man's Land and find him. We still have a number of less seriously wounded men behind the parapets. ”

“ Between the confronting lines lies that tragic strip of No Man's Land, which has been and is the scene of so much tragedy. No Man's Land is of fixed length but of varying width. There are places where it is very narrow, so narrow that it is possible to throw across a hand grenade or a box of cigarettes, depending on the nearness of an officer whose business is war. Again it is wide, so that friendly relations are impossible, and sniping becomes a pleasure as well as an art. ”

“ Children of No Man’s Land—of Denmark and Norway and Sweden and Spain and Holland, entangled haphazard in one belligerent country or another, condemned haphazard as pro-German, pro-English.... Their bewildered avowals disbelieved and mocked.... “Who are the neutrals? there are no neutrals—the world is at war....” Born in one place, reared in another, married in a third—“which is your country?” No Man’s Land is their country ... we shall meet them in No Man’s Land.... ”

“ No—like two lines of trenches.... A scramble apart to either trench—lucky beggars who know quite distinctly where they belong. And No Man’s Land between. And some stranded in No Man’s Land....
“To be officially of No Man’s Land—that’s one thing; can’t be helped; penalty of carelessness beforehand. But is [85] it possible, I wonder, to feel yourself not for one country nor another? neither mattering? neither victory mattering?
“Socialism—international socialism. But then one must care principally for all humanity—in a lump. And that’s patriotism too, on the largest scale of all. ”

“ Had land extended around the globe, it had been a belt of desolation encircling the globe. Corn fields, vineyards, trampled under foot of man and horse,—villages, towns, and great cities, reeking with conflagration, like the smoke ascending from some enormous altar of abomination to offend the nostrils of heaven—armed hosts lying trampled in their blood—the unarmed lying scattered every where in theirs; for man has trodden the earth in his rage, and before him was as the garden of Eden, behind him is the desolate wilderness. ”

“ Behind him he leaves the desert, a deformed and ruined land; for childish desire of destruction, or thoughtless squandering of vegetable treasures, has destroyed the character of nature; and, terrified, man himself flies from the arena of his actions, leaving the impoverished earth to barbarous races or to animals, so long as yet another spot in virgin beauty smiles before him. ”

“ Yet think not Earth is blind to human woes— Man has more friends and helpers than he knows; And when a patient people are oppressed, The land that bore them feels it in her breast. Spirits of field and flood, of heath and hill, Are grieved and angry at the spreading ill; The trees complain together in the night, Voices of wrath are heard along the height, And secret vows are sworn, by stream and strand, To bring the tyrant low and liberate the land. ”

“ While upon land, man has continued working out his mission in the same persistent, unconscious manner.
O Maker of lands' ends, O Sea, when will man be formed? When will the conflicts among men cease? They have tried to curb one another and to subject one another to slavish uses, even and kempt. ”

“ And so far it has not made one great poem, one great drama, one great novel!
It was the furnace-fire in which this land was forged—this land which holds in its womb the future of the world—this land that is to give laws to the nations and teach mankind its destiny. I search the ages, and I find no struggle so fraught with meaning, with the woe and the terror and the agony of a desperate hope.
It must be all put into an art-work, I say! There is no theme that could thrill the men of this country more, that could lift them more, that could do more to make their hearts throb with pride. ”

“ Would they not long ago have disappeared as a nation from the face of the earth, had they not, after they were driven out of their own land, created out of the confines of their own life, a sacred territory for their existence and a soil on which they could thrive? ”

“ It may be barren and rugged, swept by the storms, and overshadowed by the frozen hills, of narrow boundary, and poor in resources, where life is but one continued struggle for existence with an inhospitable climate, unpropitious seasons, and an unwilling soil; but it is his own land, it is his father-land, and sooner than he will see its soil invaded, or its name dishonored, he will shed the last drop of blood in its defence. ”

“ When the Creator banished from his sight
Frail man to dark mortality's abode,
And granted him a late return to light,
Only by treading reason's arduous road,—
When each immortal turned his face away,
She, the compassionate, alone
Took up her dwelling in that house of clay,
With the deserted, banished one.
With drooping wing she hovers here
Around her darling, near the senses' land,
And on his prison-walls so drear
Elysium paints with fond deceptive hand.
While soft humanity still lay at rest,
Within her tender arms extended,
No flame was stirred by bigots' murderous zest,
No guiltless blood on high ascended. ”

“ Even although they had now overpassed that dreary region covered with coarse gravel, black flints, and drifting sand, "the great and terrible wilderness," what hope was there that northward they should reach a land of olives, vineyards, and flowing streams? The report of the spies would answer this question.
Now in like manner the future state of existence may seem dim and unreal, scarcely credible, to many. Our life is like a series of marches hither and thither through the desert. Neither as individuals nor as communities do we seem to approach any state of blessedness and rest. ”

“ Because we have no country, and hence are set apart in all countries. But a country we must and shall have. The fact that we still dream of our land shows that it is to be ours again. Without a country we are dead. Without us the land is dead. ”

“ Not he whose view is bounded by his soil— Not he whose narrow heart can only shrine The land, the people that he calleth mine— Not he who, to set up that land on high, Will make whole nations bleed, whole nations die— Not he who, calling that land's rights his pride, Trampleth the rights of all the earth beside. ”

“ And all down through the centuries that cry of “Land in sight!” has been sounded in the ears of generations of exiles chasing each other across the waste to the new land of hope and promise. It would be a dull soul who could see that land shaping itself on the horizon without a sense of the great drama of the ages. ”

“ And, at last, as he walked there with his bent head, his soul passed down the steps of contemplation into that vast land where there is always peace; that land where the soul, gazing long, loses all consciousness of its little self, and almost feels its hand on the old mystery of Universal unity that surrounds it.
“No death, no death,” he muttered; “there is that which never dies—which abides. It is but the individual that perishes, the whole remains. It is the organism that vanishes, the atoms are there. ”

“ It was not as if an outraged divinity had seared the land with withering breaths of hate, annihilating everything that possessed or gave promise of life, and leaving only the scorched desert as a fearsome reminder of celestial vengeance. But if the land appeared forsaken, the ocean teemed with life. ”

“ There are the same seven hills now, the same soil, the same natural resources; the nature is the same, but what a ruin of human greatness meets the eye of the traveler throughout the length and breadth of that most down-trodden land! why have not the People of that Heaven-favored clime, the spirit that animated their fathers? ”

“ I tell you this land will never be civilized, this land will never lead mankind, it will never be anything but the torture-house that I have found it, until it makes some provision for its men of Genius! ”

“ Protect our land? We who are dispossessed,
And own not space to sleep in when we die!
"Our" land is held by haughty thieves on high—
The brood of vipers sheltered at thy breast.
Our "liberty" is but a loathsome lie ”

“ And All of Us, and many of this company, shared each other’s lives for one bright, sunny year, away Behind the Back of Beyond, in the Land of the Never-Never; in that elusive land with an elusive name—a land of dangers and hardships and privations yet loved as few lands are loved—a land that bewitches her people with strange spells and mysteries, until they call sweet bitter, and bitter sweet. ”

“ Where is the race who are their natural successors, and who must have continued to live after them in that sheltered and happy land, where they knew no human and scarcely any animal enemies? Why would any people have altogether left such a home? Why, when their civilization had spread to the ends of the earth, did it cease to exist in the peaceful region where it originated? ”

“ And the centre of equilibrium around which every happening in his soul oscillates, that is the land which bore him, the land with its sadness and its quiet melancholy rapture, its sombre tragicness and its blood-red destiny, the land, an isle yearned for with the greater anguish, as it slipped away in ever remoter perspectives and began to vanish from the gaze, the promised land upon which all yearning and striving centred, and which might never again be viewed with one's own eyes—the land, not as an ordinary reality, but rather as a Platonic anamnesis ”

“ And the soil where we fight is our own native land.
I shun not the combat, but grieve at the cause,
That ever our freedom, our faith, and our laws,
Our heritage old, that for ages has stood,
Should need the dark sanction and cement of blood. ”

“ But after the homecoming—when the confused echoes of a swarming, blind humanity are lost in the exalted quiet of wide spaces—the vast impersonality of woods and plains, swamps, hills, and sea, takes on a tenderness more deep than lies in human gift and a glorious hostility that calls to combat without grudge or motive, ennobling because it gives no mercy; challenges alike the craft of man and the strength of the hills. ”

“ Only Biblical lamentation can convey a vision of this life-drained land. "Your country is desolate; your cities are burned with fire; your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers." ”