Читать книгу All Else Is Folly - Peregrine Acland - Страница 10

I do hope that, quite apart from the esthetico-literary considerations that are my usual tic and that as a rule prevent the British reader from paying any attention to books that I urge on his attention so that I practically never, whatever may be the case with the United States, write any prefaces for the English editions of books.… I do hope then that a very large public may be found for Major Acland’s book on both sides of the Atlantic.

For it is the convincing, mournful and unrelieved account of a simple soul’s sufferings in the late war.

And I believe that those sufferings have never been sufficiently brought home to the public as a whole and that is why the late war has not aroused half the horror of war as a whole that it should have aroused.… For the defect of all novel-writing is that, as a rule, the novelist — heaven help him! — must needs select unusual, hypersensitized souls to endure any vicissitudes that he is pleased to make them endure and that makes him lose half the game with the normal reader. I remember very well — for I am not pleading not guilty! — thinking to myself when about half-way through a novel about the late war: “Well, my central character is altogether such a queer, unusual fellow that I do not see how anyone is going much to sympathize with him in his misfortunes.…” Thoughts to that effect…. And pretty nearly as much can be said of the books of most of my Anglo-Saxon or Latin colleagues, whilst, on the whole, writers from the Central or Slavic Empires emphasize the note by dwelling on the sufferings of mournful but unusual peasants. The result is that the normal man says: “These are not normal people!” and continues to comfort himself either by imagining that the late struggle was for those engaged in it a perpetual picnic varied with sexual jamborees or by ignoring the matter altogether.

That is a misfortune. But it is a misfortune that Major Acland’s book may do a great deal to mitigate. For his central character is about as normal in temperament and circumstances as it is possible to be. He is neither high nor low in station; neither hypersensitized nor callous; neither Adonis nor Caliban; neither illiterate nor of the intelligentsia; neither a brute nor a poet, though like so many of us he writes an occasional very mediocre sonnet which fails to cause the lady of his devotion to fall for him. And he is no coward and no hero — though he endures without much squealing sufferings out of which he, like the rest of us, would very gladly have got — wangled, used to be the technical word!… “If one could only,” one used to say innumerable times, “wrangle a staff job.” Or a Home Job. Or a week-end’s leave in Paris.… Or even a Blighty!

So Major Acland’s Falcon would eventually very gladly — but like all of us, how vainly! — have applied for a Staff Job; have been sent home to Canada to train details — with young woman for the use of officer, one, complete.… Then when he is worn and wearied out he is put into the most hellish scrap of all. And gets his Blighty.…

But with his bashed in face and mangled limbs his young woman who also is wearied out turns him down and back he goes to Canada — and presumably carries on.

Nevertheless, at the skirl of the pipes: “War-lust again surged through him.” As it does for us all. And that really is the lesson of the book — the lesson that our publics and lawmakers would do well to ponder. “Yet now,” Major Acland concludes, “with the skirling of the pipes in his ears, he would have signed away his liberty, his life, for another war. It wouldn’t have mattered much what the war was about.… Not when this vast hall rocked with the tread of two thousand feet and his hot blood leaped to the pipes.…”

I have, myself, by coincidence, felt much the same in Montreal when Major Acland’s kilted regiment went by on the street. For the matter of that I felt much the same on the yesterday of this writing when the 165th regiment of United States Infantry went past the Public Library on Fifth Avenue with the equivalent for the King’s Colours and the other colours flying and the band playing for St. Patrick’s day in the morning.… Of course not quite the same feeling.…

Towards the end Major Acland’s book works up to a very great — a very fine — poignancy of feeling. I imagine that, as a relatively senior officer but a quite junior writer, much as we did during the war, he picked up knowledge of how to handle things as he went along. But I don’t of course know. It is, I mean, difficult to say whether the relatively jejune effect of the rendering of English Country house life and women is caused just by timidity of handling or whether it is a masterly compte rendu of how a young Colonial (Pardon the word, Major, but there is no other adjective.… You can’t write Dominional) footslogging, second loot with bare and hairy knees would feel on introduction to a rather vanished Smart Set.… In any case the effect is the same and the information is very valuable.

Major Acland’s is, I imagine, the first really authentic work of imaginative writing dealing with the war to come out of one of the great British Dominions and if I were any sort of publicist I should make a great deal out of that. But I am not, so I don’t. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the war of the future, if there is to be one, will pivot round the great British Dominions and, whether to our own country or to individuals desirous to be responsible for turning lately allied nations into those enemy to our own, ALL ELSE IS FOLLY should present a great deal of food for thought — and for misgiving. For it is a work that is a singularly reliable subjectivization of that matter.

In it you see, really wonderfully rendered, the admirable Canadians going through their jobs, with stoicism, without apparent enthusiasm, with orderliness, discipline — and with what endurance! I saw a good deal of the Canadians in France and liked them really more than any other troops, my own battalion naturally excepted. And I am really in a position to say that Major Acland’s rendering is by no means laudatorily coloured.…

And how admirably it is all done.… When I read of the marching and fighting towards the end of the book, I feel on my skin the keen air of the early mornings standing to, I have in my mouth the dusky tastes, in my eyes the dusky landscapes, in my ears the sounds that were silences interrupted by clickings of metal on metal that at any moment might rise to the infernal clamour of all Armageddon.… Yes, indeed, one lives it all again, with the fear, and the nausea … and the surprised relief to find oneself still alive. I wish I could have done it as well myself: envy, you see, will come creeping in. But since I couldn’t, the next best thing seems to me to be to say that it will be little less than a scandal if the book is not read enormously widely. And that is the truth.

Ford Madox Ford