Now, all that is utterly futile. But I remember it with complete vividness. I could make quite a long story out of it, and its effect on me and the men with me and the Battery Sergeant-Major. But obviously it is quite unimportant compared with the “ordinary” things going on – the aeroplane battle over somewhere else, the corpse being carried down from the sniper’s post, the preparations for the relief, the plans for the patrols in No Man’s Land that night, the Colonel’s attack of constipation which would make him more than usually intolerable at the Front Line inspection next morning… But all those things were “ordinary,” and are forgotten. What I remember, with pain even at this moment, is the idiocy of mistaking for a recruit a Battery Sergeant-Major who was unlawfully piddling in a trench.
So there you are.
I suppose the War will die with us. When we have been successful in kicking the bucket, nobody will really care about “The Great War” any more than we care for Austerlitz or the charge of the Fusiliers at Albuera. It will all be a matter of history and history-books. Young men will go to see “Journey’s End” and will leave the theatre with a determination to emulate the beautiful young Public Schoolboy. And “ce que nous avons fait” will be a bumble of war-bores.
Every boy under twenty whom I talk with is not only utterly ignorant of “our” War, but is eagerly or resignedly prepared to take part in the Next Great Push for civilisation. Over you go, boys, and the best of luck.
“See how we trifle! but one can’t pass one’s youth too amusingly; for one must grow old, and that in England; two most serious circumstances, either of which makes people grey in the twinkling of a bedstaff; for know you, there is not a country upon earth where there are so many old fools and so few young ones.”
HORACE WALPOLE.
To HALCOTT GLOVER
MY DEAR HAL, — Remembering George Moore’s denunciation of prefaces, I felt that what I wanted to say here could be best expressed in a letter to you. Although you are a little older than I, you belong essentially to the same generation — those who spent their childhood and adolescence struggling, like young Samsons, in the toils of the Victorians; whose early manhood coincided, with the European War. A great humber of the men of our generation died prematurely. We are unlucky or lucky enough to remain.
I began this book almost immediately after the Armistice, in a little Belgian cottage — my billet. I remember the landscape was buried deep in snow, and that we had very little fuel. Then came demobilization, and the effort of readjustment cost my manuscript its life. I threw it aside, and never picked it up again. The attempt was premature. Then, ten years later, almost day for day, I felt the impulse return, and began this book. You, I know, will read it sympathetically for many reasons. But I cannot expect the same favour from others.
This book is not the work of a professional novelist. It is, apparently, not a novel at all. Certain conventions of form and method in the novel have been erected, I gather, into immutable laws, and are looked upon with quite superstitious reverence. They are entirely disregarded here. To me the excuse for the novel is that one can do any damn thing one pleases. I am told I have done things as terrible as if you produced asides and soliloquies into your plays, and came on to the stage in the middle of a scene to take part in the action. You know how much I should be interested if you did that — I am all for disregarding artistic rules of thumb. I dislike standardized art as much as standardized life. Whether I have been guilty of Expressionism or Super-realism or not, I don’t and don’t care. I knew what I wanted to say, and said it. And I know I have not tried to be “original”.
The technique of this book, if it can be said to have one, is that which I evolved for myself in writing a longish modern poem (which you liked) called “A Fool i’ th’ Forest”. Some people said that was “jazz priate that is to the theme.
I believe you at least will be sympathetic to the implied or expressed idealism of this book. Through a good many doubts and hesitations and changes I have always preserved a certain idealism. I believe in men, I believe in a certain fundamental integrity and comradeship, without which society could not endure. How often that integrity is perverted, how often that comradeship betrayed, there is no need to tell you. I disbelieve in bunk and despotism, even in a dictatorship of the intelligentsia. I think you and I are not wholly unacquainted with the intelligentsia?
Some of the young, they who will “do the noble things that we forgot”, think differently. According to them, bunk must be parried by super-bunk. Sincerity is superannuated. It doesn’t matter what you have to say; what matters is whether you can put it across successfully. And the only hope is to forbid everybody to read except a few privileged persons (chosen how and by whom?) who will autocratically tell the rest of us what to do. Well, do we believe that? I answer on your behalf as well as my own that we emphatically do not. Of course, these young men may be Swiftian ironists.
But, as you will see, this book is really a threnody, a memorial in its ineffective way to a generation which hoped much, strove honestly, and suffered deeply. Others, of course, may see it all very differently. Why should they not? I believe that all we claim is that we try to say what appears to be the truth, and that we are not afraid either to contradict ourselves or to retract an error.
Always yours,
RICHARD ALDINGTON
Paris, 1929
PROLOGUE
MORTE D’UN ERÖE
allegretto
THE casualty lists went on appearing for a long time after the Armistice – last spasms of Europe’s severed arteries. Of course, nobody much bothered to read the lists. Why should they? The living must protect themselves from the dead, especially the intrusive dead. But the twentieth century had lost its Spring with a vengeance. So a good deal of forgetting had to be done.
Under the heading “Killed in Action,” one of these later lists contained the words:
“Winterbourne, Edward Frederick George, A/Capt., 2/9 Battn. R. Foddershire Regt.”
The small interest created by this item of news and the rapidity with which he was forgotten would have surprised even George Winterbourne; and he had that bottomless cynicism of the infantry subaltern which veiled itself in imbecile cheerfulness, and thereby misled a good many not very acute people. Winterbourne had rather hoped he would be killed, and knew that his premature demise in the middle twenties would be borne with easy stoicism by those who survived him. But his vanity would have been a little shocked by what actually happened.
A life, they say, may be considered as a point of light which suddenly appears from nowhere, out of the blue. The point describes a luminous geometrical figure in space-time; and then just as suddenly disappears. (Interesting to have seen the lights disappearing from Space-Time during one of the big battles – Death dowses the glims.) Well it happens to us all; but our vanity is interested by the hope that the rather tangled and not very luminous track we made will continue to shine for a few people for a few years. I suppose Winterbourne’s name does appear on some War Memorial, probably in the Chapel of his Public School; and, of course, he’s got his neat ration of headstone in France. But that’s about all. Nobody much minded that he was killed. Unassertive people with no money have few friends; and Winterbourne hadn’t counted much on his scanty flock, least of all on me. But I know – because he told me himself – that he had rather relied on four people to take some interest in him and his fate. They were his father and mother, his wife and his mistress. If he had known