The Glory of the Trenches
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Coningsby Dawson >> The Glory of the Trenches
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THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES
AN INTERPRETATION
by
CONINGSBY DAWSON
Author of "CARRY ON: LETTERS IN WARTIME," etc.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HIS FATHER, W. J. DAWSON
"The glory is all in the souls of the men--it's nothing external."
--From "Carry On"
1917
[Illustration: LIEUTENANT CONINGSBY DAWSON]
TO YOU AT HOME
Each night we panted till the runners came,
Bearing your letters through the battle-smoke.
Their path lay up Death Valley spouting flame,
Across the ridge where the Hun's anger spoke
In bursting shells and cataracts of pain;
Then down the road where no one goes by day,
And so into the tortured, pockmarked plain
Where dead men clasp their wounds and point the way.
Here gas lurks treacherously and the wire
Of old defences tangles up the feet;
Faces and hands strain upward through the mire,
Speaking the anguish of the Hun's retreat.
Sometimes no letters came; the evening hate
Dragged on till dawn. The ridge in flying spray
Of hissing shrapnel told the runners' fate;
We knew we should not hear from you that day--
From you, who from the trenches of the mind
Hurl back despair, smiling with sobbing breath,
Writing your souls on paper to be kind,
That you for us may take the sting from Death.
CONTENTS
TO YOU AT HOME. (Poem)
HOW THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN
IN HOSPITAL. (Poem)
THE ROAD TO BLIGHTY
THE LADS AWAY. (Poem)
THE GROWING OF THE VISION
THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES. (Poem)
GOD AS WE SEE HIM
HOW THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN
In my book, _The Father of a Soldier_, I have already stated the
conditions under which this book of my son's was produced.
He was wounded in the end of June, 1917, in the fierce struggle before
Lens. He was at once removed to a base-hospital, and later on to a
military hospital in London. There was grave danger of amputation of
the right arm, but this was happily avoided. As soon as he could use
his hand he was commandeered by the Lord High Commissioner of Canada
to write an important paper, detailing the history of the Canadian
forces in France and Flanders. This task kept him busy until the end
of August, when he obtained a leave of two months to come home. He
arrived in New York in September, and returned again to London in the
end of October.
The plan of the book grew out of his conversations with us and the
three public addresses which he made. The idea had already been
suggested to him by his London publisher, Mr. John Lane. He had
written a few hundred words, but had no very keen sense of the value
of the experiences he had been invited to relate. He had not even read
his own published letters in _Carry On_. He said he had begun to read
them when the book reached him in the trenches, but they made him
homesick, and he was also afraid that his own estimate of their value
might not coincide with ours, or with the verdict which the public has
since passed upon them. He regarded his own experiences, which we
found so thrilling, in the same spirit of modest depreciation. They
were the commonplaces of the life which he had led, and he was
sensitive lest they should be regarded as improperly heroic. No one
was more astonished than he when he found great throngs eager to hear
him speak. The people assembled an hour before the advertised time,
they stormed the building as soon as the doors were open, and when
every inch of room was packed they found a way in by the windows and a
fire-escape. This public appreciation of his message indicated a value
in it which he had not suspected, and led him to recognise that what
he had to say was worthy of more than a fugitive utterance on a public
platform. He at once took up the task of writing this book, with a
genuine and delighted surprise that he had not lost his love of
authorship. He had but a month to devote to it, but by dint of daily
diligence, amid many interruptions of a social nature, he finished his
task before he left. The concluding lines were actually written on the
last night before he sailed for England.
We discussed several titles for the book. _The Religion of Heroism_
was the title suggested by Mr. John Lane, but this appeared too
didactic and restrictive. I suggested _Souls in Khaki_, but this
admirable title had already been appropriated. Lastly, we decided on
_The Glory of the Trenches_, as the most expressive of his aim. He
felt that a great deal too much had been said about the squalor,
filth, discomfort and suffering of the trenches. He pointed out that a
very popular war-book which we were then reading had six paragraphs in
the first sixty pages which described in unpleasant detail the
verminous condition of the men, as if this were the chief thing to be
remarked concerning them. He held that it was a mistake for a writer
to lay too much stress on the horrors of war. The effect was bad
physiologically--it frightened the parents of soldiers; it was equally
bad for the enlisted man himself, for it created a false impression in
his mind. We all knew that war was horrible, but as a rule the soldier
thought little of this feature in his lot. It bulked large to the
civilian who resented inconvenience and discomfort, because he had
only known their opposites; but the soldier's real thoughts were
concerned with other things. He was engaged in spiritual acts. He was
accomplishing spiritual purposes as truly as the martyr of faith and
religion. He was moved by spiritual impulses, the evocation of duty,
the loyal dependence of comradeship, the spirit of sacrifice, the
complete surrender of the body to the will of the soul. This was the
side of war which men needed most to recognise. They needed it not
only because it was the true side, but because nothing else could
kindle and sustain the enduring flame of heroism in men's hearts.
While some erred in exhibiting nothing but the brutalities of war,
others erred by sentimentalising war. He admitted that it was
perfectly possible to paint a portrait of a soldier with the aureole
of a saint, but it would not be a representative portrait. It would be
eclectic, the result of selection elimination. It would be as unlike
the common average as Rupert Brooke, with his poet's face and poet's
heart, was unlike the ordinary naval officers with whom he sailed to
the AEgean.
The ordinary soldier is an intensely human creature, with an
"endearing blend of faults and virtues." The romantic method of
portraying him not only misrepresented him, but its result is far less
impressive than a portrait painted in the firm lines of reality. There
is an austere grandeur in the reality of what he is and does which
needs no fine gilding from the sentimentalist. To depict him as a Sir
Galahad in holy armour is as serious an offence as to exhibit him as a
Caliban of marred clay; each method fails of truth, and all that the
soldier needs to be known about him, that men should honour him, is
the truth.
What my son aimed at in writing this book was to tell the truth about
the men who were his comrades, in so far as it was given him to see
it. He was in haste to write while the impression was fresh in his
mind, for he knew how soon the fine edge of these impressions grew
dull as they receded from the immediate area of vision. "If I wait
till the war is over, I shan't be able to write of it at all," he
said. "You've noticed that old soldiers are very often silent men.
They've had their crowded hours of glorious life, but they rarely tell
you much about them. I remember you used to tell me that you once knew
a man who sailed with Napoleon to St Helena, but all he could tell you
was that Napoleon had a fine leg and wore white silk stockings. If
he'd written down his impressions of Napoleon day by day as he watched
him walking the deck of the _Bellerophon_, he'd have told you a great
deal more about him than that he wore white silk stockings. If I wait
till the war is over before I write about it, it's very likely I shall
recollect only trivial details, and the big heroic spirit of the thing
will escape me. There's only one way of recording an impression--catch
it while it's fresh, vivid, vital; shoot it on the wing. If you wait
too long it will vanish." It was because he felt in this way that he
wrote in red-hot haste, sacrificing his brief leave to the task, and
concentrating all his mind upon it.
There was one impression that he was particularly anxious to
record,--his sense of the spiritual processes which worked behind the
grim offence of war, the new birth of religious ideas, which was one
of its most wonderful results. He had both witnessed and shared this
renascence. It was too indefinite, too immature to be chronicled with
scientific accuracy, but it was authentic and indubitable. It was
atmospheric, a new air which men breathed, producing new energies and
forms of thought. Men were rediscovering themselves, their own
forgotten nobilities, the latent nobilities in all men. Bound together
in the daily obedience of self-surrender, urged by the conditions of
their task to regard duty as inexorable, confronted by the pitiless
destruction of the body, they were forced into a new recognition of
the spiritual values of life. In the common conventional use of the
term these men were not religious. There was much in their speech and
in their conduct which would outrage the standards of a narrow
pietism. Traditional creeds and forms of faith had scant authority for
them. But they had made their own a surer faith than lives in
creeds. It was expressed not in words but acts. They had freed their
souls from the tyrannies of time and the fear of death. They had
accomplished indeed that very emancipation of the soul which is the
essential evangel of all religions, which all religions urge on men,
but which few men really achieve, however earnestly they profess the
forms of pious faith.
This was the true Glory of the Trenches. They were the Calvaries of a
new redemption being wrought out for men by soiled unconscious
Christs. And, as from that ancient Calvary, with all its agony of
shame, torture and dereliction, there flowed a flood of light which
made a new dawn for the world, so from these obscure crucifixions
there would come to men a new revelation of the splendour of the human
soul, the true divinity that dwells in man, the God made manifest in
the flesh by acts of valour, heroism, and self-sacrifice which
transcend the instincts and promptings of the flesh, and bear witness
to the indestructible life of the spirit.
It is to express these thoughts and convictions that this book was
written. It is a record of things deeply felt, seen and
experienced--this, first of all and chiefly. The lesson of what is
recorded is incidental and implicit. It is left to the discovery of
the reader, and yet is so plainly indicated that he cannot fail to
discover it. We shall all see this war quite wrongly, and shall
interpret it by imperfect and base equivalents, if we see it only as a
human struggle for human ends. We shall err yet more miserably if all
our thoughts and sensations about it are drawn from its physical
horror, "the deformations of our common manhood" on the battlefield,
the hopeless waste and havoc of it all. We shall only view it in its
real perspective when we recognise the spiritual impulses which direct
it, and the strange spiritual efficacy that is in it to burn out the
deep-fibred cancer of doubt and decadence which has long threatened
civilisation with a slow corrupt death. Seventy-five years ago Mrs.
Browning, writing on _The Greek Christian Poets_, used a striking
sentence to which the condition of human thought to-day lends a new
emphasis. "We want," she said, "the touch of Christ's hand upon our
literature, as it touched other dead things--we want the sense of the
saturation of Christ's blood upon the souls of our poets that it may
cry through them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the Sphinx of our
humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Something of this has been
perceived in art when its glory was at the fullest." It is this glory
of divine sacrifice which is the Glory of the Trenches. It is because
the writer recognises this that he is able to walk undismayed among
things terrible and dismaying, and to expound agony into renovation.
W. J. DAWSON.
February, 1918.
IN HOSPITAL
Hushed and happy whiteness,
Miles on miles of cots,
The glad contented brightness
Where sunlight falls in spots.
Sisters swift and saintly
Seem to tread on grass;
Like flowers stirring faintly,
Heads turn to watch them pass.
Beauty, blood, and sorrow,
Blending in a trance--
Eternity's to-morrow
In this half-way house of France.
Sounds of whispered talking,
Laboured indrawn breath;
Then like a young girl walking
The dear familiar Death.
I
THE ROAD TO BLIGHTY
I am in hospital in London, lying between clean white sheets and
feeling, for the first time in months, clean all over. At the end of
the ward there is a swinging door; if I listen intently in the
intervals when the gramophone isn't playing, I can hear the sound of
bath-water running--running in a reckless kind of fashion as if it
didn't care how much was wasted. To me, so recently out of the
fighting and so short a time in Blighty, it seems the finest music in
the world. For the sheer luxury of the contrast I close my eyes
against the July sunlight and imagine myself back in one of those
narrow dug-outs where it isn't the thing to undress because the row
may start at any minute.
Out there in France we used to tell one another fairy-tales of how we
would spend the first year of life when war was ended. One man had a
baby whom he'd never seen; another a girl whom he was anxious to
marry. My dream was more prosaic, but no less ecstatic--it began and
ended with a large white bed and a large white bath. For the first
three hundred and sixty-five mornings after peace had been declared I
was to be wakened by the sound of my bath being filled; water was to
be so plentiful that I could tumble off to sleep again without even
troubling to turn off the tap. In France one has to go dirty so often
that the dream of being always clean seems as unrealisable as
romance. Our drinking-water is frequently brought up to us at the risk
of men's lives, carried through the mud in petrol-cans strapped on to
packhorses. To use it carelessly would be like washing in men's
blood----
And here, most marvellously, with my dream come true, I lie in the
whitest of white beds. The sunlight filters through trees outside the
window and weaves patterns on the floor. Most wonderful of all is the
sound of the water so luxuriously running. Some one hops out of bed
and re-starts the gramophone. The music of the bath-room tap is lost.
Up and down the ward, with swift precision, nurses move softly. They
have the unanxious eyes of those whose days are mapped out with
duties. They rarely notice us as individuals. They ask no questions,
show no curiosity. Their deeds of persistent kindness are all
performed impersonally. It's the same with the doctors. This is a
military hospital where discipline is firmly enforced; any natural
recognition of common fineness is discouraged. These women who have
pledged themselves to live among suffering, never allow themselves for
a moment to guess what the sight of them means to us chaps in the
cots. Perhaps that also is a part of their sacrifice. But we follow
them with our eyes, and we wish that they would allow themselves to
guess. For so many months we have not seen a woman; there have been so
many hours when we expected never again to see a woman. We're
Lazaruses exhumed and restored to normal ways of life by the fluke of
having collected a bit of shrapnel--we haven't yet got used to normal
ways. The mere rustle of a woman's skirt fills us with unreasonable
delight and makes the eyes smart with memories of old longings. Those
childish longings of the trenches! No one can understand them who has
not been there, where all personal aims are a wash-out and the courage
to endure remains one's sole possession.
The sisters at the Casualty Clearing Station--they understood. The
Casualty Clearing Station is the first hospital behind the line to
which the wounded are brought down straight from the Dressing-Stations.
All day and all night ambulances come lurching along shell-torn roads
to their doors. The men on the stretchers are still in their bloody
tunics, rain-soaked, pain-silent, splashed with the corruption of
fighting--their bodies so obviously smashed and their spirits so
obviously unbroken. The nurses at the Casualty Clearing Station can
scarcely help but understand. They can afford to be feminine to men
who are so weak. Moreover, they are near enough the Front to share in
the sublime exaltation of those who march out to die. They know when a
big offensive is expected, and prepare for it. They are warned the
moment it has commenced by the distant thunder of the guns. Then comes
the ceaseless stream of lorries and ambulances bringing that which has
been broken so quickly to them to be patched up in months. They work
day and night with a forgetfulness of self which equals the devotion
of the soldiers they are tending. Despite their orderliness they seem
almost fanatical in their desire to spend themselves. They are always
doing, but they can never do enough. It's the same with the surgeons.
I know of one who during a great attack operated for forty-eight hours
on end and finally went to sleep where he stood from utter weariness.
The picture that forms in my mind of these women is absurd, Arthurian
and exact; I see them as great ladies, mediaeval in their saintliness,
sharing the pollution of the battle with their champions.
Lying here with nothing to worry about in the green serenity of an
English summer, I realize that no man can grasp the splendour of this
war until he has made the trip to Blighty on a stretcher. What I mean
is this: so long as a fighting man keeps well, his experience of the
war consists of muddy roads leading up through a desolated country to
holes in the ground, in which he spends most of his time watching
other holes in the ground, which people tell him are the Hun
front-line. This experience is punctuated by periods during which the
earth shoots up about him like corn popping in a pan, and he
experiences the insanest fear, if he's made that way, or the most
satisfying kind of joy. About once a year something happens which,
when it's over, he scarcely believes has happened: he's told that he
can run away to England and pretend that there isn't any war on for
ten days. For those ten days, so far as he's concerned, hostilities
are suspended. He rides post-haste through ravaged villages to the
point from which the train starts. Up to the very last moment until
the engine pulls out, he's quite panicky lest some one shall come and
snatch his warrant from him, telling him that leave has been
cancelled. He makes his journey in a carriage in which all the windows
are smashed. Probably it either snows or rains. During the night
while he stamps his feet to keep warm, he remembers that in his hurry
to escape he's left all his Hun souvenirs behind. During his time in
London he visits his tailor at least twice a day, buys a vast amount
of unnecessary kit, sleeps late, does most of his resting in
taxi-cabs, eats innumerable meals at restaurants, laughs at a great
many plays in which life at the Front is depicted as a joke. He feels
dazed and half suspects that he isn't in London at all, but only
dreaming in his dug-out. Some days later he does actually wake up in
his dug-out; the only proof he has that he's been on leave is that he
can't pay his mess-bill and is minus a hundred pounds. Until a man is
wounded he only sees the war from the point of view of the front-line
and consequently, as I say, misses half its splendour, for he is
ignorant of the greatness of the heart that beats behind him all along
the lines of communication. Here in brief is how I found this out.
The dressing-station to which I went was underneath a ruined house,
under full observation of the Hun and in an area which was heavily
shelled. On account of the shelling and the fact that any movement
about the place would attract attention, the wounded were only carried
out by night. Moreover, to get back from the dressing-station to the
collecting point in rear of the lines, the ambulances had to traverse
a white road over a ridge full in view of the enemy. The Huns kept
guns trained on this road and opened fire at the least sign of
traffic. When I presented myself I didn't think that there was
anything seriously the matter; my arm had swelled and was painful from
a wound of three days' standing. The doctor, however, recognised that
septic poisoning had set in and that to save the arm an operation was
necessary without loss of time. He called a sergeant and sent him out
to consult with an ambulance-driver. "This officer ought to go out at
once. Are you willing to take a chance?" asked the sergeant. The
ambulance-driver took a look at the chalk road gleaming white in the
sun where it climbed the ridge. "Sure, Mike," he said, and ran off to
crank his engine and back his car out of its place of concealment.
"Sure, Mike,"--that was all. He'd have said the same if he'd been
asked whether he'd care to take a chance at Hell.
I have three vivid memories of that drive. The first, my own uneasy
sense that I was deserting. Frankly I didn't want to go out; few men
do when it comes to the point. The Front has its own peculiar
exhilaration, like big game-hunting, discovering the North Pole, or
anything that's dangerous; and it has its own peculiar reward--the
peace of mind that comes of doing something beyond dispute unselfish
and superlatively worth while. It's odd, but it's true that in the
front-line many a man experiences peace of mind for the first time and
grows a little afraid of a return to normal ways of life. My second
memory is of the wistful faces of the chaps whom we passed along the
road. At the unaccustomed sound of a car travelling in broad daylight
the Tommies poked their heads out of hiding-places like rabbits. Such
dirty Tommies! How could they be otherwise living forever on old
battlefields? If they were given time for reflection they wouldn't
want to go out; they'd choose to stay with the game till the war was
ended. But we caught them unaware, and as they gazed after us down the
first part of the long trail that leads back from the trenches to
Blighty, there was hunger in their eyes. My third memory is of
kindness.
You wouldn't think that men would go to war to learn how to be
kind--but they do. There's no kinder creature in the whole wide world
than the average Tommy. He makes a friend of any stray animal he can
find. He shares his last franc with a chap who isn't his pal. He risks
his life quite inconsequently to rescue any one who's wounded. When
he's gone over the top with bomb and bayonet for the express purpose
of "doing in" the Hun, he makes a comrade of the Fritzie he
captures. You'll see him coming down the battered trenches with some
scared lad of a German at his side. He's gabbling away making
throat-noises and signs, smiling and doing his inarticulate best to be
intelligible. He pats the Hun on the back, hands him chocolate and
cigarettes, exchanges souvenirs and shares with him his last
luxury. If any one interferes with his Fritzie he's willing to
fight. When they come to the cage where the prisoner has to be handed
over, the farewells of these companions whose acquaintance has been
made at the bayonet-point are often as absurd as they are affecting. I
suppose one only learns the value of kindness when he feels the need
of it himself. The men out there have said "Good-bye" to everything
they loved, but they've got to love some one--so they give their
affections to captured Fritzies, stray dogs, fellows who've collected
a piece of a shell--in fact to any one who's a little worse off than
themselves. My ambulance-driver was like that with his "Sure, Mike."
He was like it during the entire drive. When he came to the white road
which climbs the ridge with all the enemy country staring at it, it
would have been excusable in him to have hurried. The Hun barrage
might descend at any minute. All the way, in the ditches on either
side, dead pack animals lay; in the dug-outs there were other unseen
dead making the air foul. But he drove slowly and gently, skirting the
shell-holes with diligent care so as to spare us every unnecessary
jolting. I don't know his name, shouldn't recognise his face, but I
shall always remember the almost womanly tenderness of his driving.
After two changes into other ambulances at different distributing
points, I arrived about nine on a summer's evening at the Casualty
Clearing Station. In something less than an hour I was undressed and
on the operating table.
You might suppose that when for three interminable years such a stream
of tragedy has flowed through a hospital, it would be easy for
surgeons and nurses to treat mutilation and death perfunctorily. They
don't. They show no emotion. They are even cheerful; but their
strained faces tell the story and their hands have an immense
compassion.
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