VI
The war had more obvious disagreeables, too; you have heard all about them: the quelling coldness of frosty nights spent in soaked clothes—for no blankets were brought up to the trenches; the ubiquitous dust and stench of corpses and buzzing of millions of corpse-fed flies on summer battlefields; and so on, and so on—no need to go over the list. But these annoyances seemed to me to do less in the way of moulding the men’s cast of mind than that general, chronic weariness, different from all the common fatigues of peace, inasmuch as each instalment of this course of exhaustion was not sandwiched in between heavenly contrasts of utter rest before and after—divine sleeps in a bed and dry clothes, and meals on a table, with a white tablecloth on it and shiny glasses. It raised some serious thoughts in professional football-players and boxers who had believed they were strong, and in navvies and tough mountaineers. You need to know this in order to understand the redoubled ardour with which that capital soldier, the Lancashire miner, has sought the off-day and ensued it since he came back from campaigning abroad.
You need, too, to know it in order to chart out the general postwar condition of mind with its symptoms of apathy, callousness, and lassitude. Something has gone to come of it if you have lain for a time in the garden of Proserpine, where the great values decline and faith and high impulse fall in like soufflés grown tepid, and fatalistic indifference comes out of long flat expanses of tiring sameness.
I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving,
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Heaven forbid that I should impute any melodious Swinburnian melancholy, or any other form of luxurious self-pity, to millions of good fellows still fighting the good fight against circumstance. They would hoot at the notion. But in nearly all of them hope has, at some time or other, lost her first innocence. Time and place came when the spirit, although unbroken, went numb: the dull mind came to feel as if its business with ardour and choric spheres and quests of Holy Grails, and everything but rest, had been done quite a long while ago. Well chained to an oar in the galley, closely kept to a job in the mine, men caught a touch of the recklessness of the slave—if the world were so foul, let it go where it chose; they would snatch what they could, when they could; drink, and let the world go round.
It is not sense to hope to reattain at will that deflowered virginity of faith. Others who have it may come in good time to be a majority of us all. Already three yearly “classes” of men who did not suffer that immense loss of experience which came with war service have come of age since the war; the new skin grows over the wounds. But we cannot write off as mere dream, with no after effects, the time when it was a kind of trench fashion to meet the demoded oaths of a friend with the dogma that “There is no ⸻ God.”