Letters of a Soldier | Page 8

the past.
But I need my whole strength at times for keeping down the pangs of
memory and accepting what is.'
Indeed, strength was called for day by day. This 'adaptation' was no
transformation. But by a continuous act of vital energy he assimilated
all that he drew from his surroundings. Thus he fed his heart, and kept
his own ideals. This was a way to renounce all things, and by
renunciation to keep the one thing needful, to remain himself, to live,
and not only to live but to flourish; to have a part in that universal life
which produces flowers in nature, art and poetry in man. To gain so
much, all that was needed was to treasure, unaltered by the terrors of
war, a heart eager for all shapes of beauty. For this most religious poet,
beauty was that divine spirit which shines more or less clearly in all
things, and which raises him who perceives it higher than the accidents
of individual existence. And he receives its full influence, and is rid of
all anxiety, who is able to bid adieu to the present and the past, to regret
nothing, to desire nothing, to receive from the passing moment that
influence in its plenitude. 'I accept all from the hands of fate, and I have
captured every delight that lurks under cover of every moment.' In this
state of simplicity, which is almost a state of grace, he enters into
communion with the living reality of the world. 'Let us eat and drink to
all that is eternal, for to-morrow we die to all that is of earth.'
That emancipation of the soul is not achieved in a day. The earlier
letters are beautiful, but what they teach is learnt by nearly all our
soldiers. In these he tells of the spirit of the men, their fire of

enthusiasm, their imperious sense of duty, their resolve to carry 'an
undefiled conscience as far as their feet may lead.' Yet already he is
seeking to maintain control of his own private self amid all the
excitement of numbers. And he succeeds. He guards himself, he
separates himself, 'as much as possible,' in the midst of his comrades,
he keeps his intellectual life intact. Meanwhile he is within barrack
walls, or else he is jotting down his letters at a railway station, or else
he is in the stages of an interminable journey, 'forty men to a truck.' But
to know him completely, wait until you see him within the zone of war,
in billets, in the front line, on guard, when he has returned to contact
with the very earth. As soon as he breathes open air, his instincts are
awake again, the instinct 'to draw all the beauty out,' and--in the
shadow where the future hides--'to draw out the utmost beauty as
quickly as may be.' 'I picked flowers in the mud; keep them in
remembrance of me,' he will write in a day of foreboding. A most
significant trait is this--in the tedium of trench days, or when imminent
peril silences the idle tongues, he gathers the greatest number of these
magical flowers. In those moments when speech fails, his soul is serene,
it has free play, and we hear its own fine sounds. Hitherto we had heard
the repetition of the word of courage and of brotherhood uttered by all
our gathering armies. But here, in battle, face to face with the eternities,
that spirit of his sounds like the chord of an instrument heard for the
first time in its originality and its infinite sensibility. Nor are these
random notes; they soon make one harmonious sound and acquire a
most touching significance, until by daily practice he learns how to
abstract himself altogether from the most wretched surroundings. A
quite impersonal ego seems then to detach itself from the particular ego
that suffers and is in peril; it looks impartially upon all things, and sees
its other self as a passing wave in the tide that a mysterious Intelligence
controls. Strange faculty of double existence and of vision! He
possesses it in the midst of the very battle in which his active valour
gained him the congratulations of his commanding officer. In the
furnace in which his flesh may be consumed he looks about him, and
next morning he writes, 'Well, it was interesting.' And he adds, 'what I
had kept about me of my own individuality was a certain visual
perceptiveness that caused me to register the setting of things--a setting
that dramatised itself as artistically as in any stage-management.

During all these minutes I never relaxed in my resolve to see how it
was.' He then, too, became aware of the meaning of violence. His
tender and meditative nature had always held it