Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump;

“Oh, if you choose to dwell on the horrors – !”

“The one decent thing that we men who sit at home in the warm can do is to dwell on the horrors and do our little best to make sure that never, never shall this thing happen again. And that won’t be done, Wilkins, by leaving War alone. War, war with modern machines, is a damned great horrible trampling monster, a filthy thing, an indecency; we aren’t doing anything heroic, we are trying to lift a foul stupidity off the earth, we are engaged in a colossal sanitary job. These men who go for us into the trenches, they come back with no illusions. They know how dirty and monstrous it is. They are like men who have gone down for the sake of the people they love to clear out a choked drain. They have no illusions about being glorified. They only hope they aren’t blood-poisoned and their bodies altogether ruined. And as for the bracing stir of it, they tell me, Wilkins, that their favourite song now in the trenches is —

“‘Nobody knows how bored we are,
Bored we are,
Bored we are,
Nobody knows how bored we are,
And nobody seems to care.’

Meanwhile you sit at home and feel vicariously ennobled.”

He laid his hand on a daily newspaper beside him.

“Oh, you’re not the only one. I will make you ashamed of yourself, Wilkins. Here’s the superlative to your positive. Here’s the sort of man I should like to hold for five minutes head downwards in the bilge of a trench, writing on the Heroic Spirit in the Morning Post. He’s one of your gentlemen who sit in a room full of books and promise themselves much moral benefit from the bloodshed in France. Coleridge, he says, Coleridge – the heroic, self-controlled Spartan Coleridge was of his opinion and very hard on Pacificism – Coleridge complained of peace-time in such words as these: ‘All individual dignity and power, engulfed in courts, committees, institutions… One benefit-club for mutual flattery.’… And then, I suppose, the old loafer went off to sponge on somebody… And here’s the stuff the heroic, spirited Osborn, the Morning Post gentleman – unhappily not a German, and unhappily too old for trench work – quotes with delight now —now!– after Belgium! —

“‘My spear, my sword, my shaggy shield!
With these I till, with these I sow,
With these I reap my harvest field —
No other wealth the gods bestow:
With these I plant the fertile vine,
With these I press the luscious wine.

My spear, my sword, my shaggy shield!
They make me lord of all below —
For those who dread my spear to wield,
Before my shaggy shield must bow.
Their fields, their vineyards, they resign,
And all that cowards have is mine.’

“He goes on to this —

“‘It is in vain that the Pacificist rages at such staunch braggadocio. It blares out a political truth of timeless validity in words that are by no means politic. Sparta was the working model in ancient times of the State that lives by and for warfare, though never despising the rewards of an astute diplomacy; she was the Prussia of antiquity…

“‘Spartan ideal of duty and discipline.’…

“You see the spirit of him! You see what has got loose! It is a real and potent spirit; you have to reckon with it through all this business. To this sort of mind the ‘Pacificist’ is a hateful fool. The Pacificist prefers making vineyards, painting pictures, building Gothic cathedrals, thinking clear thoughts to bawling “Bruteland, Bruteland, over all!” and killing people and smashing things up. He is a maker. That is what is intended here by a ‘coward.’ All real creative activity is hateful to a certain ugly, influential, aggressive type of mind, to this type of mind that expresses itself here in England through the Morning Post and Spectator. Both these papers are soaked through and through with a genuine detestation of all fine creation, all beauty, all novelty, all frank, generous, and pleasant things. In peace-time they maintain an attitude of dyspeptic hostility to free art, to free literature, to fresh thought. They stand uncompromisingly for ugliness, dullness, and restriction – as ends in themselves. When you talk, Wilkins, of the intellectual good of the war, I ask you to note the new exultation that has come into these evil papers. When they speak of the ‘moral benefits’ of war they mean the smashing up of everything that they hate and we care for. They mean reaction. This good man Osborn, whom I have never seen or heard of before, seems to be quintessential of all that side. I can imagine him. I believe I could reconstruct him from this article I have here, just as anatomists have reconstructed extinct monsters from a single bone. He is, I am certain, a don. The emotional note suggests Oxford. He is a classical scholar. And that is the extent of his knowledge. Something in this way.”

He began to sketch rapidly.

“You have to realize that while the Pacificists talk of the horrible ugliness of war and the necessity of establishing an everlasting world-peace, whiskered old ladies in hydropaths, dons on the Morning Post, chattering district visitors and blustering, bellowing parsons, people who are ever so much more representative of general humanity than we literary oddities – all that sort of people tucked away somewhere safe, are in a state of belligerent lustfulness and prepared – oh, prepared to give the very eyes of everybody else in this country, prepared to sacrifice the lives of all their servants and see the poor taxed to the devil, first for a victory over Germany and then for the closest, silliest, loudest imitation of Prussian swagger on our part (with them, of course, on the very top of it all) that we can contrive. That spirit is loose, Wilkins. All the dowagers are mewing for blood, all the male old women who teach classics and dream of re-action at Oxford and Cambridge, are having the time of their lives. They trust to panic, to loud accusations, to that fear of complexity that comes with fatigue. They trust to the exhaustion of delicate purposes and sensitive nerves. And this force-loving, bullying silliness is far more likely to come out on top, after the distresses of this war, after the decent men are dead in the trenches and the wise ones shouted to silence, than any finely intellectual, necessarily difficult plan to put an end for ever to all such senseless brutalities.”

“I think you underrate the power of – well, modern sanity,” said Wilkins.

“Time will show,” said Boon. “I hope I do.”

“This man Osborn, whoever he may be, must be just a fantastic extremist… I do not see that he is an answer to my suggestion that for the whole mass of people this war means graver thought, steadier thought, a firmer collective purpose. It isn’t only by books and formal literature that people think. There is the tremendous effect of realized and accumulated facts – ”

“Wilkins,” said Boon, “do not cuddle such illusions. It is only in books and writings that facts get assembled. People are not grasping any comprehensive effects at all at the present time. One day one monstrous thing batters on our minds – a battleship is blown up or a hundred villagers murdered – and next day it is another. We do not so much think about it as get mentally scarred… You can see in this spy hunt that is going on and in the increasing denunciations and wrangling of the papers how the strain is telling… Attention is overstrained and warms into violence. People are reading no books. They are following out no conclusions. No intellectual force whatever is evident dominating the situation. No organization is at work for a sane peace. Where is any power for Pacificism? Where is any strength on its side? America is far too superior to do anything but trade, the liberals here sniff at each other and quarrel gently but firmly on minor points, Mr. Norman Angell advertises himself in a small magazine and resents any other work for peace as though it were an infringement of his copyright. Read the daily papers; go and listen to the talk of people! Don’t theorize, but watch. The mind you will meet is not in the least like a mind doing something slowly but steadfastly; far more is it like a mind being cruelly smashed about and worried and sticking to its immediate purpose with a narrower and narrower intensity. Until at last it is a pointed intensity. It is like a dying man strangling a robber in his death-grip… We shall beat them, but we shall be dead beat doing it… You see, Wilkins, I have tried to think as you do. In a sort of way this war has inverted our relations. I say these things now because they force themselves upon me…”

Wilkins considered for some moments.

“Even if nothing new appears,” he said at last, “the mere beating down and discrediting of the militarist system leaves a world released…”

“But will it be broken down?” said Boon. “Think of the Osborns.”

And then he cried in a voice of infinite despair: “No! War is just the killing of things and the smashing of things. And when it is all over, then literature and civilization will have to begin all over again. They will have to begin lower down and against a heavier load, and the days of our jesting are done. The Wild Asses of the Devil are loose and there is no restraining them. What is the good, Wilkins, of pretending that the Wild Asses are the instruments of Providence kicking better than we know? It is all evil. Evil. An evil year. And I lie here helpless, spitting and spluttering, with this chill upon my chest… I cannot say or write what I would… And in the days of my sunshine there were things I should have written, things I should have understood…”

§ 6

Afterwards Boon consoled himself very much for a time by making further speculative sketches of Mr. Osborn, as the embodiment of the Heroic Spirit. I append one or two of the least offensive of these drawings.

§ 7

Boon’s pessimistic outlook on the war had a profoundly depressing effect upon me. I do all in my power to believe that Wilkins is right, and that the hopelessness that darkened Boon’s last days was due to the overshadowing of his mind by his illness. It was not simply that he despaired of the world at large; so far as I am concerned, he pointed and barbed his opinion by showing how inevitable it was that the existing publishing and book trade would be shattered to fragments. Adapted as I am now to the necessities of that trade, incapable as I am of the fresh exertions needed to bring me into a successful relationship to the unknown exigencies of the future, the sense of complete personal ruin mingled with and intensified the vision he imposed upon me of a world laid waste. I lay awake through long stretches of the night contemplating now my own life, no longer in its first vigour, pinched by harsh necessities and the fiercer competition of a young and needy generation, and now all life with its habits and traditions strained and broken. My daily fatigues at drill and the universal heavy cold in the head that has oppressed all Britain this winter almost more than the war, have added their quota to my nightly discomfort. And when at last I have slept I have been oppressed with peculiar and melancholy dreams.

One is so vividly in my mind that I am obliged to tell it here, although I am doubtful whether, except by a very extreme stretching of the meaning of words, we can really consider it among the Remains of George Boon.

It was one of those dreams of which the scenery is not so much a desolate place as desolation itself, and I was there toiling up great steepnesses with a little box of something in my hand. And I knew, in that queer confused way that is peculiar to dreams, that I was not myself but that I was the Author who is the hero of the Wild Asses of the Devil, and also that I was neither he nor I, but all sorts of authors, the spirit of authorship, no Author in particular but the Author at large, and that, since the melancholy devil had deserted me – he had sneaked off Heaven knows whither – it rested with me and with me alone to discover and catch and send out of this tormented world those same Wild Asses of the Devil of which you have read. And so I had salt in my box, Attic Salt, a precious trust, the one thing in all the universe with which I could subdue them.

And then suddenly there I was amidst all those very asses of which I have told you. There they were all about me, and they were more wild and horrible than I can describe to you. It was not that they were horrible in any particular way, they were just horrible, and they kicked up far over head, and leapt and did not even seem to trouble to elude my poor ineffectual efforts to get within salting distance of them. I toiled and I pursued amidst mad mountains that were suddenly marble flights of stairs that sloped and slid me down to precipices over which I floated; and then we were in soft places knee-deep in blood-red mud; and then they were close to my face, eye to eye, enormous revolving eyes, like the lanterns of lighthouses; and then they swept away, and always I grew smaller and feebler and more breathless, and always they grew larger, until only their vast legs danced about me on the sward, and all the rest was hidden. And all the while I was tugging at my box of Attic Salt, to get it open, to get a pinch. Suddenly I saw they were all coming down upon me, and all the magic salt I had was in the box that would not open…

I saw the sward they trampled, and it was not sward, it was living beings, men hurt by dreadful wounds, and poor people who ran in streaming multitudes under the beating hoofs, and a lichenous growth of tender things and beautiful and sweet and right things on which they beat, splashing it all to blood and dirt. I could not open my box. I could not open my box. And a voice said: “Your box! Your box! Laugh at them for the fools they are, and at the salt sting of laughter back they will fly to hell!”

But I could not open my box, for I thought of my friend’s sons and dear friends of my own, and there was no more spirit in me. “We cannot laugh!” I cried. “We cannot laugh! Another generation! Another generation may have the heart to do what we cannot do.”

And the voice said: “Courage! Only your poor courage can save us!”

But in my dream I could do no more than weep pitifully and weep, and when I woke up my eyes were wet with tears.

CHAPTER THE TENTH

The Story of the Last Trump

§ 1

“After this war,” said Wilkins, “after its revelation of horrors and waste and destruction, it is impossible that people will tolerate any longer that system of diplomacy and armaments and national aggression that has brought this catastrophe upon mankind. This is the war that will end war.”

“Osborn,” said Boon, “Osborn.”

“But after all the world has seen – !”

“The world doesn’t see,” said Boon…

Boon’s story of the Last Trump may well come after this to terminate my book. It has been by no means an easy task to assemble the various portions of this manuscript. It is written almost entirely in pencil, and sometimes the writing is so bad as to be almost illegible. But here at last it is, as complete, I think, as Boon meant it to be. It is his epitaph upon his dream of the Mind of the Race.

§ 2

The Story of the Last Trump