War and the Future | Page 2

things
from Mr. Stephen Graham in the Dark Forest of Russia. All this is quite
over and above such writing of facts at first hand as Mr. Patrick McGill
and a dozen other real experiencing soldiers--not to mention the
soldiers' letters Mr. James Milne has collected, or the unforgettable and
immortal /Prisoner of War/ of Mr. Arthur Green--or such admirable
war correspondents' work as Mr. Philip Gibbs or Mr. Washburne has
done. Some of us writers--I can answer for one--have made our Tour of
the Fronts with a very understandable diffidence. For my own part I did
not want to go. I evaded a suggestion that I should go in 1915. I travel
badly, I speak French and Italian with incredible atrocity, and am an
extreme Pacifist. I hate soldiering. And also I did not want to write
anything "under instruction". It is largely owing to a certain stiffness in
the composition of General Delme-Radcliffe is resolved that Italy shall
not feel neglected by the refusal of the invitation from the Comando
Supremo by anyone who from the perspective of Italy may seem to be a
representative of British opinion. If Herbert Spencer had been alive
General Radcliffe would have certainly made him come,
travelling-hammock, ear clips and all-- and I am not above confessing
that I wish that Herbert Spencer was alive--for this purpose. I found
Udine warm and gay with memories of Mr. Belloc, Lord Northcliffe,
Mr. Sidney Low, Colonel Repington and Dr. Conan Doyle, and
anticipating the arrival of Mr. Harold Cox. So we pass, mostly in
automobiles that bump tremendously over war roads, a cloud of
witnesses each testifying after his manner. Whatever else has happened,
we have all been photographed with invincible patience and resolution
under the direction of Colonel Barberich in a sunny little court in
Udine.
My own manner of testifying must be to tell what I have seen and what
I have thought during this extraordinary experience. It has been my
natural disposition to see this war as something purposeful and epic, as
it is great, as an epoch, as "the War that will end War"--but of that last,
more anon. I do not think I am alone in this inclination to a dramatic
and logical interpretation. The caricatures in the French shops show
civilisation (and particularly Marianne) in conflict with a huge and

hugely wicked Hindenburg Ogre. Well, I come back from this tour with
something not so simple as that. If I were to be tied down to one word
for my impression of this war, I should say that this war is /Queer./ It is
not like anything in a really waking world, but like something in a
dream. It hasn't exactly that clearness of light against darkness or of
good against ill. But it has the quality of wholesome instinct struggling
under a nightmare. The world is not really awake. This vague appeal
for explanations to all sorts of people, this desire to exhibit the business,
to get something in the way of elucidation at present missing, is
extraordinarily suggestive of the efforts of the mind to wake up that
will sometimes occur at a deep crisis. My memory of this tour I have
just made is full of puzzled-looking men. I have seen thousands of
/poilus/ sitting about in cafes, by the roadside, in tents, in trenches,
thoughtful. I have seen Alpini sitting restfully and staring with
speculative eyes across the mountain gulfs towards unseen and
unaccountable enemies. I have seen trainloads of wounded staring out
of the ambulance train windows as we passed. I have seen these dim
intimations of questioning reflection in the strangest juxtapositions; in
Malagasy soldiers resting for a spell among the big shells they were
hoisting into trucks for the front, in a couple of khaki-clad Maoris
sitting upon the step of a horse-van in Amiens station. It is always the
same expression one catches, rather weary, rather sullen, inturned. The
shoulders droop. The very outline is a note of interrogation. They look
up as the privileged tourist of the front, in the big automobile or the
reserved compartment, with his officer or so in charge, passes--
importantly. One meets a pair of eyes that seems to say: "Perhaps /you/
understand....
"In which case---...?"
It is a part, I think, of this disposition to investigate what makes
everyone collect "specimens" of the war. Everywhere the souvenir
forces itself upon the attention. The homecoming permissionaire brings
with him invariably a considerable weight of broken objects, bits of
shell, cartridge clips, helmets; it is a peripatetic museum. It is as if he
hoped for a clue. It is almost impossible, I have found, to escape these
pieces in evidence. I am the least collecting of men, but I have brought

home Italian cartridges, Austrian cartridges, the