From The Nation, June 23rd, 1917
WAR Sir
I enclose herewith an extract from a letter lately
received from a young officer which I hope may interest
some of your readers. I may add that the officer in
question entered the Army directly from a public school,
and began his service in the trenches before he was
nineteen. -Yours &c., In the case of the vast majority, however, this is an attitude, a screen I speak of educated thinking men and it is not granted to many who have not shared the same experiences to see behind the screen. The reason for this, as the article points out, is the practical impossibility for the uninitiated to realize or imagine even dimly the actual conditions of war. And a man who has been through it and seen and taken part in the unspeakable tragedies that are the ordinary routine, feels that he has something, possesses something, which others can never possess. It is morally impossible for him to talk seriously of these things to people who cannot even approach comprehension. It is hideously exasperating to hear people talking the glib commonplaces about the war and distributing cheap sympathy to its victims. Perhaps you are tempted to give them a picture of a leprous earth, scattered with the swollen and blackening corpses of hundreds of young men. The appalling stench of rotting carrion, mingled with the sickening smell of exploded lyddite and ammonal. Mud like porridge, trenches like shallow and sloping cracks in the porridge porridge that stinks in the sun. Swarms of flies and bluebottles clustering on pits of offal. Wounded men lying in the shell holes among the decaying corpses: helpless under the scorching sun and bitter nights, under repeated shelling. Men with bowels dropping out, lungs shot away, with blinded smashed faces, or limbs blown into space. Men screaming and gibbering. Wounded men laughing in agony on the barbed wire, until a friendly spout of liquid fire shrivels them up like a fly in a candle. But these are only words, and probably only convey a fraction of their meaning to their hearers. They shudder and it is forgotten. I need hardly say that on a great number of men war does not produce this effect; of these the old regular officer is a type blunt, kindly, jolly good fellows who have never stopped to think in their lives. |
George Simmers
American Modernism Conference
Oxford Brookes University, Sep 22nd, 2006