IV
The testimonies that might have ensued were foreclosed by a shell that buried him alive in Oppy Wood, under the Vimy Ridge, where he was engaged in diverting the energies of the Central Powers from the prostrate army of Nivelle. He had by then been two years in France, and had told a few friends about various “queer feels” and “rum goes” which he would not have known by name if you had called them spiritual experiences. One of his points—though he did not put it in that way—was that in war a lot of raw material for making some sort of religion was lying about, but that war also made some of the finished doctrinal products now extant look pretty poor, especially, as he said, “all the damning department.” Rightly or wrongly, no men who have been close friends for a year, and who know that in the next few hours they are nearly as likely as not to be killed together in doing what they all hold to be right, will entertain on any terms the idea of any closing of gates of divine mercy, open to themselves, in the face of any comrade in the business.
The sunshine of one of the first clement days of 1916 drew him about as far as I heard him go on the positive side. “You know what it is,” he said in the course of one of the endless trench talks, “when you got to make up your mind to do as you oughter. Worry and fuss and oh, ain’t it too hard, and why the ’ell can’t I let myself off!—that’s how it is. Folla me?”
The audience grunted assent. “Some other time,” he pursued, “perhaps once in ten years, it’s all t’other way. You’re set free like. Kind of a miracle. Don’t even have to think what you’re going to get by it. All you know is that there’s just the one thing, in all the whole world, good enough. Doing it ain’t even hard. All the sport there ever was has been took out of everything else and put into that. Kind of a miracle. Folla me?”
“That’s right,” another man confirmed. “You’ll see it at fires when people are like to be burnt. Men’ll go fair mad to help them. Don’t think. Don’t feel it if they’re hurt. Fair off it to get at them—same as a dog when you throw a stick in a pond.”
“Ah, then,” contributed somebody else, “you’ve only to hear a man with a grand tenor voice in a song till you’ll feel a coolness blowing softly and swif’ly over your face and then gone, the way you’d have died on a cross with all the pleasure in life while it lasted.”
“Aye, and you’ll get it from whisky,” another put in. “Isn’t it just what more men’ll get drunk for than anything else? And why the rum’s double before you go over?”
No doubt you know all about it from books, and you may prefer the wording of that tentative approach made by the most spiritually-minded of modern philosophers to a definition of God—“Something that is in and about me, in the consciousness of which I am free from fear and desire—something which would make it easy to do the most (otherwise) difficult thing without any other motive except that it was the one thing worth doing.” And William James has, of course, shown more skill in explaining what mystic ecstasy is and what is its place in religion, and what its relations to such mirages of itself as the mock inspirations of Antony’s lust and Burns’ drunkenness.
And yet the clumsy fumblings of uninstructed people among things of the spirit might, one imagines, be just such stuff as a skilled teacher and leader in this field might have delighted to come upon and to inspirit and marshal. With tongues unwontedly loosened men would set to and dig out of themselves, not knowing what it was, the clay of which the bricks are made with which religions are built. One man, with infinite exertions of disentanglement, would struggle up to some expression of the fugitive trance of realization into which he had found he could throw himself by letting his mind go, for all it was worth, on the thought of his own self, his “I-ness” until for some few seconds of poised exaltation he had thought self clean away and was free. “It first came by a fluke when I was a kiddy. If I’d lie in my cot, very still, and look hard a long time at the candle, and think very hard—‘I,’ ‘I,’ ‘I,’ what’s ‘I?’ I could work myself up to that state I’d be right outside o’ myself, and seeing the queer little body I’d been, with my thought about ‘I’ doing this and ‘I’ getting that, and the way that I’d thought it was natural I should, and no such a thing as any ‘I’ there all the time, or only one to the whole set of us. Hard I’d try, every time, to hold the thing on. Seemed as if there was no end to what I might get to know if I could make it last out, that sort of rum start. But the thing went to bits every time, next moment after I’d got it worked up, and there I’d be left on the mat like, and thinking ‘Gosh! what a pitch I got up to that time!’ and how I’d screw it up higher, next go.”
Then somebody else would bring up the way he had been taken by that queer little rent in the veil of common experience—the sudden rush of certainty that something which is happening now has all happened before, or that some place, when first we see it, has really been known to us of old and is only being revisited now, not discovered. You know how you seem, when that sudden light comes, to escape for a while from your common thoughts about time, as if out of a prison in which you have been shut up so long that you had almost forgotten what it is to be free: it flashes into your mind that immortality, for all you know, may exist within one moment; that life, for all you know, may draw out into state after state, and that all that you are conscious of at common times might be merely a drop or two lipping over the edge of the full vessel of some vast consciousness animating the whole world.
Another man would bring into the common stock a recollection of the kind of poignant portrait dream that sometimes comes: not a dream of any incident, but only the face of a friend, more living than life, with all the secret kindness and loneliness of his mind suddenly visible in the face, so that you think of him as you think of your mother when she is dead and the stabbing insight of remorse begins.
Thus would these inexpert people hang unconsciously about the uncrossed threshold of religion. With minds which had recovered in some degree the penetrative simplicity of a child’s, they disinterred this or that unidentified bone of the buried God from under the monumental piles of debris which the learned, the cunning, and the proud, priests and kings, churches and chapels, had heaped up over the ideas of perfect love, of faith that would leave all to follow that love, and of the faithful spirit’s release from mean fears of extinction. In talk they could bring each other up to the point of feeling that little rifts had opened here and there in the screens which are hung round the life of man on the earth, and that they had peeped through into some large outer world that was strange only because they were used to a small and dim one. They were prepared and expectant. If any official religion could ever refine the gold out of all that rich alluvial drift of “obstinate questionings of sense and outward things,” now was its time. No figure of speech, among all these that I have mixed, can give the measure of the greatness of that opportunity.