One might say, in ranting against the awful waste and slaughter, that the officers and members of the government, the priests, scholars, and authors who promoted the enterprise, are no longer alive and here to listen, so why shout? And if they were, it would make no difference, because they would not hear.
Yet people exactly like them are still here today and would do the same again — conditions permitting — in different ways, using other means, if given the chance. Every time it happens it seems as if it has never happened before. The same people are still either crushing or perverting the people. One must resist all authority, regimentation, law, and dehumanizing sameness — whether it comes from a government itself, or the backside of its soul called the silent majority. One can never say: ‘All that sort of thing is finished’—because nothing is ever finished without eternal vigilance and united action when the ugly head of unthinking patriotism is raised.
45
The loud voices of the birds told me it would soon be light, but I hadn’t really been asleep, due to an unexplained sharp click from the dashboard of the car that disturbed my brain every few minutes of the short and chilly night.
I thought it came from the clock but couldn’t be sure. It was a coma rather than good slumber. Huge lorries roared along the motorway by which I was parked, going to Lille or Paris, and taking a few minutes to cross the battlefield of the Somme, some of whose acres were now buried under this broad, swathing highway.
Stirring myself, I took a gulp of brandy. It was half past three, with a faint light in the east, and I thought that a dawn attack at this time of the summer would have meant no rest at all, men dying in a half dream as they stumbled forward, or only waking to the pain of being wounded.
I drove along the empty road to Bapaume, and then southeast up to Flers and Longueval, where the outlines of hedges and fields were sharply enough etched for me to switch off the car lights. It was four o’clock, and no one was yet awake, all shutters being closed. Heavy mist lay in the hollows, but the land was wide open and rolling, high against the sky, with intensely dark patches of wood here and there. Faint scars showed where fighting took place, particularly on the edges of Delville Wood, in which thousands perished on both sides.
The same could be said of High Wood, and I drove to it slowly from Longueval, the sky leaden and the birds still noisy, but the half-kilometre flank of packed trees facing south was formidable up the gentle slope, stolid and uninviting even now in the dawn. The British, led for once by the cavalry, captured it on July 14th, 1916, but, owing to the failure to take it several hours earlier than they did, when it was empty, and to get up reinforcements to hold it properly, they were thrown out. Waves of attacking infantry passed through it, or stayed in it, and it was not finally taken till after two months of the most dogged and costly fighting of the war.
I walked up the lane hoping to enter the wood, but it was fenced off and, as of old, one needed wire-cutters to get into it. Words on a board stated that trespassers would be prosecuted. Perhaps similar notices had been there in 1916 when the British unexpectedly broke through to it. Had the soldiers wondered, in any case, when they were launched in attack after attack, what had been the name of the man who owned the wood? Where was he at the time? Did he know that British soldiers were being mown down in hundreds because they were trying to get his wood back from the Germans?
Did he realize, wherever he was and whoever he was, that they were being bled and mangled for the sake of his half-kilometre square of tree-covered land? If he had seen them dying outside the wood, and burning to death inside, would he have wanted them to go on trying to get it back for him? What property was worth so much? Surely it would have been better to have gone up to the Germans under a flag of truce and made some attempt at paying them to get out.
And when those British battalions at last captured that bit of smoking, tree-ruined land, considering the price they had had to pay, who would it belong to then? It was the sort of awkward question my Uncle Frederick liked to put. Should it not have been theirs? It could surely be nobody else’s after that big shindig. But they’d been brought up to respect other peoples’ property, even to die for it in thousands, which was a somewhat unfathomable passion since none of them had any of their own. The most they’d say perhaps is that if anybody deserved High Wood it was the dead, but that was a trick, because since the dead were dead and had no say, and in any case couldn’t read notices saying that trespassers would be prosecuted, then it must go back to its private owner, waiting to claim its few charred trunks. One might say that a notice such as faced me is better than a hail of bullets, but either way, one can’t get in, which makes one wonder what it was all for.
Even a man who had allowed himself to become a soldier should never do anything unless he first asks himself: ‘Why?’—and tries to square the action he is about to take with his own conscience. To disobey orders is a virtue, and if one is then alone after taking the responsibility of it, one exists in a state of grace, and becomes a hero of humanity.
46
I thought of walking in the field where my Uncle Edgar had lain while waiting to be captured, but I didn’t want to disturb his shadow which must still have been on it. So at a later hour on Sunday morning I went into Aveluy Wood, in the valley of the Ancre.
The trees were grown up again, but not to any great stature, though inside it was dark enough to keep out the light. The pitted ground had no recognizable paths among the livid summer greenery, whereas the pre-1914 maps showed many. Banks of earth were piled above shallow yet distinct trenches. Bits of rusty wire and iron spikes, pieces of shovel and decaying steel were scattered under the leaves. If I dug I would have found bones, but I walked over ground that four battalions of West Yorkshire men had taken cover in before making their futile attack against Thiepval on July 1st, 1916.
Like other belligerent nations of the Great War the British have no defence against the charge of internal slaughter, of self-indulgent flag-waving, of a national patriotic suicidal lemming-rush, of the right hand smashing the left with such unfeeling brutality that both arms are still crippled more than half a century later. These are the unstated views of people I grew up among, of Frederick and his brother Edgar, the composite reactions to catastrophe of those whose words are not supposed to matter as far as history is concerned. But these myths have soaked themselves into the backbone of the country, and such unwritten emotional history will take generations to defuse.
The wood was defended by London battalions of the 47th Division when the British front swung away from the Germans at the beginning of April 1918, and there was savage hand-to-hand fighting with heavy loss of life on both sides. Undoubtedly there were many bones under the soil. Northern France is a vast bone-yard — British, German, and native French — and four million corpses rotted there. Why had they left their wives, children, and parents to fight and die in this patch of wood? Were they so bored that they became belligerent and patriotic to cure it? Or was it true, as many said, that war was invented to keep massacre away from the homely fireside?
England, for so long the balcony from which one observed European revolutions, was dragged into an unnecessary revolution in 1914 by the scruff of its own neck, off with a wave and a smiling cheerio to help gallant little Belgium and clamorous Gaul. The upper classes were bored after late-Victorian stagnation and Edwardian good living, and wanted at the same time to cup the stirring body of the oppressed country. It seemed to fit in so well, everything coming together with such force that it almost makes one believe in God, in order to think that the Devil got into them.