Читать книгу Across the Frontiers - Philip Gibbs - Страница 4

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It is twenty years after a world war which now seems extremely remote to a younger generation grown up since those days. They hardly remember it, except as a vague memory, perhaps, of being carried down from their beds during an air-raid, or not having quite enough for their suppers now and then. Some of them, old enough to be called men and women, don’t remember it at all, and wonder what it was all about anyhow, and can’t get a satisfactory explanation from their elders.

Those elders are we who went through it. We are twenty years older now, and some of us look the worse for wear. One night, before sitting down to begin this book, I went to a village branch of the British Legion—the survivors of that war—and as I looked down the wooden benches where they sat at table I realised how much they had changed—and I with them—since they trudged behind the guns up the Albert-Bapaume road, or first came out to France singing that foolish old song “A Long, Long Way to Tipperary” or that other ballad, “Hullo! Hullo! It’s a Different Girl Again!” One forgets how the years go slipping by. These heroes of the Great War who had gone back to gardening and other jobs were no longer quite the boys they had been. Some of them had grown corpulent. Some of them had lost their hair and their teeth. Some of them—good Lord!—were grandfathers.

“Sorry, gentlemen, if I get a bit puffed,” said a stout fellow who went to the piano to lead a chorus or two. “Too much stuff below the belt nowadays!”

He patted that part of his anatomy before striking some chords as the prelude to an old familiar tune. “Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag and smile, smile, smile!”

The men were singing it again as once they had sung it in old shell-slashed barns behind the lines of a war which seemed as though it would last for ever, or as long as there were men left to be killed. Now some of the voices trailed away. They couldn’t get the high notes. They had forgotten the words. Twenty years after some of the spirit had gone out of the tune. After all it was a long time ago, all that. A different world now!

While my comrades of the British Legion were getting on with their annual dinner in a village hall I remembered the ending of that old war. It was not very dramatic where I happened to be on the road to Mons, where for some of our men it had begun. A bugle blew somewhere in a soggy field. Its note came through a mist which looked as thick as cotton wool. It blew the “Cease Fire!” to guns which had gone on firing for four and a half years.

It was the “Cease Fire” to a war which had killed ten million men or so—no one will ever know the exact figures—and wounded forty million.

One of my friends at the table where the members of this village branch of the British Legion sat asked me a question between one song and another.

“Things look pretty bad, don’t they?”

“What things?” I asked, my thoughts having strayed back to twenty years ago.

“That Japanese business in China. It’s a grim outlook for the Western world, especially if we have another European war—which looks very likely, according to the newspapers. We don’t seem to have learnt much from what happened in 1914! We seem to be making arrangements for the next massacre.”

He spoke with a touch of irony and a touch of bitterness.

“Before we leave, gentlemen,” said a distinguished member of the British Legion, “I want to call your attention to a series of lectures in the village hall on Anti-Gas precautions. These will be given on Monday nights. I hope you will all attend. It’s very important, you know, and the lectures are being given by Home Office orders. In the present state of the world!——”

Some of the men still bore on their bodies the scars of the last war’s wounds. It seemed a pity that they should be thinking so much about another war in which the last of our youth will be slaughtered, if it happens, or blinded and suffocated by poison gases.

I should have liked to have got up and to have told these men that it wasn’t going to happen—that at least there was still time to prevent it happening. I hated the idea of those gas-masks which would be served out with kind instructions from the Home Office. What a surrender of all civilised ideals, and all hopes of human intelligence, if we have to include anti-gas drill in our elementary education and cover our children’s faces in those beast-like masks—teaching them terror when they first look out upon this life! ...

The stout fellow at the piano, with too much stuff below his belt, played “Auld Lang Syne,” and we joined heartily in the chorus of the good old words.