The Glory of the Trenches | Page 3

escape me. There's only one way of recording an impression--catch it while it's fresh, vivid, vital; shoot it on the wing. If you wait too long it will vanish." It was because he felt in this way that he wrote in red-hot haste, sacrificing his brief leave to the task, and concentrating all his mind upon it.
There was one impression that he was particularly anxious to record,--his sense of the spiritual processes which worked behind the grim offence of war, the new birth of religious ideas, which was one of its most wonderful results. He had both witnessed and shared this renascence. It was too indefinite, too immature to be chronicled with scientific accuracy, but it was authentic and indubitable. It was atmospheric, a new air which men breathed, producing new energies and forms of thought. Men were rediscovering themselves, their own forgotten nobilities, the latent nobilities in all men. Bound together in the daily obedience of self-surrender, urged by the conditions of their task to regard duty as inexorable, confronted by the pitiless destruction of the body, they were forced into a new recognition of the spiritual values of life. In the common conventional use of the term these men were not religious. There was much in their speech and in their conduct which would outrage the standards of a narrow pietism. Traditional creeds and forms of faith had scant authority for them. But they had made their own a surer faith than lives in creeds. It was expressed not in words but acts. They had freed their souls from the tyrannies of time and the fear of death. They had accomplished indeed that very emancipation of the soul which is the essential evangel of all religions, which all religions urge on men, but which few men really achieve, however earnestly they profess the forms of pious faith.
This was the true Glory of the Trenches. They were the Calvaries of a new redemption being wrought out for men by soiled unconscious Christs. And, as from that ancient Calvary, with all its agony of shame, torture and dereliction, there flowed a flood of light which made a new dawn for the world, so from these obscure crucifixions there would come to men a new revelation of the splendour of the human soul, the true divinity that dwells in man, the God made manifest in the flesh by acts of valour, heroism, and self-sacrifice which transcend the instincts and promptings of the flesh, and bear witness to the indestructible life of the spirit.
It is to express these thoughts and convictions that this book was written. It is a record of things deeply felt, seen and?experienced--this, first of all and chiefly. The lesson of what is recorded is incidental and implicit. It is left to the discovery of the reader, and yet is so plainly indicated that he cannot fail to discover it. We shall all see this war quite wrongly, and shall interpret it by imperfect and base equivalents, if we see it only as a human struggle for human ends. We shall err yet more miserably if all our thoughts and sensations about it are drawn from its physical horror, "the deformations of our common manhood" on the battlefield, the hopeless waste and havoc of it all. We shall only view it in its real perspective when we recognise the spiritual impulses which direct it, and the strange spiritual efficacy that is in it to burn out the deep-fibred cancer of doubt and decadence which has long threatened civilisation with a slow corrupt death. Seventy-five years ago Mrs. Browning, writing on The Greek Christian Poets, used a striking sentence to which the condition of human thought to-day lends a new emphasis. "We want," she said, "the touch of Christ's hand upon our literature, as it touched other dead things--we want the sense of the saturation of Christ's blood upon the souls of our poets that it may cry through them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the Sphinx of our humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Something of this has been perceived in art when its glory was at the fullest." It is this glory of divine sacrifice which is the Glory of the Trenches. It is because the writer recognises this that he is able to walk undismayed among things terrible and dismaying, and to expound agony into renovation.
W. J. DAWSON.?February, 1918.
IN HOSPITAL
Hushed and happy whiteness,?Miles on miles of cots,?The glad contented brightness?Where sunlight falls in spots.
Sisters swift and saintly?Seem to tread on grass;?Like flowers stirring faintly,?Heads turn to watch them pass.
Beauty, blood, and sorrow,?Blending in a trance--?Eternity's to-morrow?In this half-way house of France.
Sounds of whispered talking,?Laboured indrawn breath;?Then like a young girl walking?The dear familiar Death.
I
THE ROAD TO BLIGHTY
I am in hospital in London, lying between clean white