Читать книгу Disenchantment - C. E. Montague - Страница 5

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The higher the wall or the horse from which you have tumbled, the larger, under Nature's iron law, are your bruises and consequent crossness likely to be. Before we try shaking or cuffing the disenraptured young Solomons in our magazines and our pits it would be humane to reflect that some five millions of these, in their turns, have fallen off an extremely high horse. Of course, we have all fallen off something since 1914. Even owners of ships and vendors of heavy woollens might, if all hearts were laid bare, be found to have fallen, not perhaps off a high horse, but at least off some minute metaphysical pony. Still, the record in length of vertical fall, and of proportionate severity of incidence upon an inelastic earth, is probably held by ex-soldiers and, among these, by the volunteers of the first year of the war. We were all, of course, volunteers then, undiluted by indispensable Harry's later success in getting dispensable Johnnie forced to join us in the Low Countries.

Most of those volunteers of the prime were men of handsome and boundless illusions. Each of them quite seriously thought of himself as a molecule in the body of a nation that was really, and not just figuratively, "straining every nerve" to discharge an obligation of honour. Honestly, there was about them as little as there could humanly be of the coxcombry of self-devotion. They only felt that they had got themselves happily placed on a rope at which everyone else, in some way or other, was tugging his best as well as they. All the air was ringing with rousing assurances. France to be saved, Belgium righted, freedom and civilization re-won, a sour, soiled, crooked old world to be rid of bullies and crooks and reclaimed for straightness, decency, good-nature, the ways of common men dealing with common men. What a chance! The plain recruit who had not the gift of a style said to himself that for once he had got right in on the ground-floor of a topping good thing, and he blessed the luck that had made him neither too old nor too young. Rupert Brooke, meaning exactly the same thing, was writing:

Now, God be thank'd who has match'd us with His hour,

And caught our youth and waken'd us from sleeping,

With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpen'd power,

To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary....

Of course, it is easy to say to any such simpleton now: "Well, if you were like that, what could you expect? Vous l'avez voulu, George Dandin. You were rushing upon disillusionment." Of course he was. If each recruit in 1914 had been an à Kempis, or even a Rochefoucauld, he would have known that if you are to love mankind you must not expect too much from it. But he was not, as a rule, a philosopher. He was a common man, not much inclined to think evil of people. It no more occurred to him at that time that he was the natural prey of seventy-seven separate breeds of profiteers than it did that presently he would be overrun by less figurative lice. When Garibaldi led an infantry attack against the Austrians it was said that he never looked round to see if his men were following; he knew to a dead certainty that at the moment when he reached the enemy he would feel his men's breath hot on the back of his neck. The early volunteer in his blindness imagined that there was between all Englishmen then that oneness of faith, love, and courage.