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

“He will certainly rush home,” said the Author, as the clock crept round to half-past eleven. “But anyhow let us get into the Strangers’ Gallery and keep our eyes on him to the last.”

They managed it with difficulty.

I remember how vividly Boon drew the picture for us: the rather bored House, a coming and going of a few inattentive Members, the nodding Speaker and the clerks, the silent watchers in the gallery, a little flicker of white behind the grille. And then at five minutes to twelve the honourable Member arose…

“We were wrong,” said the Author.

“The draught here is fearful,” said the devil. “Hadn’t we better go?”

The honourable Member went on speaking showy, memorable, mischievous things. The seconds ticked away. And then – then it happened.

The Author made a faint rattling sound in his throat and clung to the rail before him. The devil broke into a cold sweat. There, visible to all men, was a large black Wild Ass, kicking up its heels upon the floor of the House. And braying.

And nobody was minding!

The Speaker listened patiently, one long finger against his cheek. The clerks bowed over the papers. The honourable Member’s two colleagues listened like men under an anæsthetic, each sideways, each with his arm over the back of the seat. Across the House one Member was furtively writing a letter and three others were whispering together.

The Author felt for the salt, then he gripped the devil’s wrist.

“Say those words!” he shouted quite loudly – “say those words! Say them now. Then – we shall have him.”

But you know those House of Commons ushers. And at that time their usual alertness had been much quickened by several Suffragette outrages. Before the devil had got through his second sentence or the Author could get his salt out of his pocket both devil and Author were travelling violently, scruff and pant-seat irresistibly gripped, down Saint Stephen’s Hall…

§ 2

“And you really begin to think,” said Wilkins, “that there has been an increase in violence and unreasonableness in the world?”

“My case is that it is an irruption,” said Boon. “But I do begin to see a sort of violence of mind and act growing in the world.”

“There has always been something convulsive and extravagant in human affairs,” said Wilkins. “No public thing, no collective thing, has ever had the sanity of men thinking quietly in a study.”

And so we fell to discussing the Mind of the Race again, and whether there was indeed any sanity growing systematically out of human affairs, or whether this Mind of the Race was just a poor tormented rag of partial understanding that would never control the blind forces that had made and would destroy it. And it was inevitable that such a talk should presently drift to the crowning human folly, to that crowned Wild Ass of the Devil, aggressive militarism. That talk was going on, I remember, one very bright, warm, sunny day in May, or it may be in June, of 1914. And we talked of militarism as a flourish, as a kicking up of the national heels, as extravagance and waste; but, what seems to me so singular now, we none of us spoke of it or thought of it as a thing that could lead to the full horror of a universal war. Human memory is so strange and treacherous a thing that I doubt now if many English people will recall our habitual disregard in those days of war as a probability. We thought of it as a costly, foolish threatening, but that it could actually happen – !

§ 3

Some things are so shocking that they seem to have given no shock at all, just as there are noises that are silences because they burst the ears. And for some days after the declaration of war against Germany the whole business seemed a vast burlesque. It was incredible that this great people, for whom all Western Europe has mingled, and will to the end of time mingle, admiration with a certain humorous contempt, was really advancing upon civilization, enormously armed, scrupulously prepared, bellowing, “Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles!” smashing, destroying, killing. We felt for a time, in spite of reason, that it was a joke, that presently Michael would laugh…

But by Jove! the idiot wasn’t laughing…

For some weeks nobody in the circle about Boon talked of anything but the war. The Wild Asses of the Devil became an allusion, to indicate all this that was kicking Europe to splinters. We got maps, and still more maps; we sent into the town for newspapers and got special intelligence by telephone; we repeated and discussed rumours. The Belgians were showing pluck and resource, but the French were obviously shockingly unprepared. There were weeks – one may confess it now that they have so abundantly proved the contrary – when the French seemed crumpling up like pasteboard. They were failing to save the line of the Meuse, Maubeuge, Lille, Laon; there were surrenders, there was talk of treachery, and General French, left with his flank exposed, made a costly retreat. It was one Sunday in early September that Wilkins came to us with a Sunday Observer. “Look,” he said, “they are down on the Seine! They are sweeping right round behind the Eastern line. They have broken the French in two. Here at Senlis they are almost within sight of Paris…”

Then some London eavesdropper talked of the British retreat. “Kitchener says our Army has lost half its fighting value. Our base is to be moved again from Havre to La Rochelle…”

Boon sat on the edge of his hammock.

“The Germans must be beaten,” he said. “The new world is killed; we go back ten thousand years; there is no light, no hope, no thought nor freedom any more unless the Germans are beaten… Until the Germans are beaten there is nothing more to be done in art, in literature, in life. They are a dull, envious, greedy, cunning, vulgar, interfering, and intolerably conceited people. A world under their dominance will be intolerable. I will not live in it…”

“I had never believed they would do it,” said Wilkins…

“Both my boys,” said Dodd, “have gone into the Officers’ Training Corps. They were in their cadet corps at school.”

“Wasn’t one an engineer?” asked Boon.

“The other was beginning to paint rather well,” said Dodd. “But it all has to stop.”

“I suppose I shall have to do something,” said the London eavesdropper. “I’m thirty-eight… I can ride and I’m pretty fit… It’s a nuisance.”

“What is a man of my kind to do?” asked Wilkins. “I’m forty-eight.”

“I can’t believe the French are as bad as they seem,” said Boon. “But, anyhow, we’ve no business to lean on the French… But I wonder now – Pass me that map.”

§ 4

Next week things had mended, and the French and British were pushing the Germans back from the Marne to the Aisne. Whatever doubts we had felt about the French were dispelled in that swift week of recovery. They were all right. It was a stupendous relief, for if France had gone down, if her spirit had failed us, then we felt all liberalism, all republicanism, all freedom and light would have gone out in this world for centuries.

But then again at the Aisne the Germans stood, and our brisk rush of hope sobered down towards anxiety as the long flanking movement stretched towards the sea and the Antwerp situation developed…

By imperceptible degrees our minds began to free themselves from the immediate struggle of the war, from strategy and movements, from the daily attempt to unriddle from reluctant and ambiguous dispatches, Dutch rumours, censored gaps, and uninforming maps what was happening. It became clear to us that there were to be no particular dramatic strokes, no sudden, decisive battles, no swift and clear conclusions. The struggle began to assume in our minds its true proportions, its true extent, in time, in space, in historical consequence. We had thought of a dramatic three months’ conflict and a redrawn map of Europe; we perceived we were in the beginnings of a far vaster conflict; the end of an age; the slow, murderous testing and condemnation of whole systems of ideas that had bound men uneasily in communities for all our lives. We discussed – as all the world was discussing – the huge organization of sentiment and teaching that had produced this aggressive German patriotism, this tremendous national unanimity. Ford Madox Hueffer came in to tell us stories of a disciplined professoriate, of all education turned into a war propaganda, of the deliberate official mental moulding of a whole people that was at once fascinating and incredible. We went over Bernhardi and Treitschke; we weighed Nietzsche’s share in that mental growth. Our talk drifted with the changing season and Boon’s sudden illness after his chill, from his garden to his sitting-room, where he lay wrapped up upon a sofa, irritable and impatient with this unaccustomed experience of ill-health.

“You see how much easier it is to grow an evil weed than a wholesome plant,” he said. “While this great strong wickedness has developed in Germany, what thought have we had in our English-speaking community? What does our world of letters amount to? Clowns and dons and prigs, cults of the precious and cults of style, a few squeaking author-journalists and such time-serving scoundrels as I, with my patent Bathwick filter, my twenty editions, and my thousands a year. None of us with any sense of a whole community or a common purpose! Where is our strength to go against that strength of the heavy German mind? Where is the Mind of our Race?”

He looked at me with tired eyes.

“It has been a joke with us,” he said.

“Is there no power of thought among free men strong enough to swing them into armies that can take this monster by the neck? Must men be bullied for ever? Are there no men to think at least as earnestly as one climbs a mountain, and to write with their uttermost pride? Are there no men to face truth as those boys at Mons faced shrapnel, and to stick for the honour of the mind and for truth and beauty as those lads stuck to their trenches? Bliss and I have tried to write of all the world of letters, and we have found nothing to write about but posturing and competition and sham reputations, and of dullness and impudence hiding and sheltering in the very sheath of the sword of thought… For a little while after the war began our people seemed noble and dignified; but see now how all Britain breaks after its first quiet into chatter about spies, sentimentality about the architecture of Louvain, invasion scares, the bitter persecution of stray Germans, and petty disputes and recriminations like a pool under a breeze. And below that nothing. While still the big thing goes on, ungrasped, day after day, a monstrous struggle of our world against the thing it will not have… No one is clear about what sort of thing we will have. It is a nightmare in which we try continually to escape and have no-whither to escape… What is to come out of this struggle? Just anything that may come out of it, or something we mean shall come out of it?”

He sat up in his bed; his eyes were bright and he had little red spots in his cheeks.

“At least the Germans stand for something. It may be brutal, stupid, intolerable, but there it is – a definite intention, a scheme of living, an order, Germanic Kultur. But what the devil do we stand for? Was there anything that amounted to an intellectual life at all in all our beastly welter of writing, of nice-young-man poetry, of stylish fiction and fiction without style, of lazy history, popular philosophy, slobbering criticism, Academic civilities? Is there anything here to hold a people together? Is there anything to make a new world? A literature ought to dominate the mind of its people. Yet here comes the gale, and all we have to show for our racial thought, all the fastness we have made for our souls, is a flying scud of paper scraps, poems, such poems! casual articles, whirling headlong in the air, a few novels drowning in the floods…”

§ 5

There were times during his illness and depression when we sat about Boon very much after the fashion of Job’s Comforters. And I remember an occasion when Wilkins took upon himself the responsibility for a hopeful view. There was about Wilkins’s realistic sentimentality something at once akin and repugnant to Boon’s intellectual mysticism, so that for a time Boon listened resentfully, and then was moved to spirited contradiction. Wilkins declared that the war was like one of those great illnesses that purge the system of a multitude of minor ills. It was changing the spirit of life about us; it would end a vast amount of mere pleasure-seeking and aimless extravagance; it was giving people a sterner sense of duty and a more vivid apprehension of human brotherhood. This ineffective triviality in so much of our literary life of which Boon complained would give place to a sense of urgent purpose…

“War,” said Boon, turning his face towards Wilkins, “does nothing but destroy.”

“All making is destructive,” said Wilkins, while Boon moved impatiently; “the sculptor destroys a block of marble, the painter scatters a tube of paint…”

Boon’s eye had something of the expression of a man who watches another ride his favourite horse.

“See already the new gravity in people’s faces, the generosities, the pacification of a thousand stupid squabbles – ”

“If you mean Carsonism,” said Boon, “it’s only sulking until it can cut in again.”

“I deny it,” said Wilkins, warming to his faith. “This is the firing of the clay of Western European life. It stops our little arts perhaps – but see the new beauty that comes… We can well spare our professional books and professional writing for a time to get such humour and wonder as one can find in the soldiers’ letters from the front. Think of all the people whose lives would have been slack and ignoble from the cradle to the grave, who are being twisted up now to the stern question of enlistment; think of the tragedies of separation and danger and suffering that are throwing a stern bright light upon ten thousand obscure existences…”

“And the noble procession of poor devils tramping through the slush from their burning homes, God knows whither! And the light of fire appearing through the cracks of falling walls, and charred bits of old people in the slush of the roadside, and the screams of men disembowelled, and the crying of a dying baby, in a wet shed full of starving refugees who do not know whither to go. Go on, Wilkins.”