The Passionate Friends
like something that broods and watches.
I remember I sat up in the darkness staring at it.
I found myself murmuring: "Get the proportions of things, get the
proportions of things!" I had an absurd impression of a duel between
myself and the cavernous antagonism of the huge black spaces below me. I
argued that all this pain and waste was no more than the selvedge of a
proportionately limitless fabric of sane, interested, impassioned and
joyous living. These stiff still memories seemed to refute me. But why
us? they seemed to insist. In some way it's essential,--this margin. I
stopped at that.
"If all this pain, waste, violence, anguish is essential to life, why
does my spirit rise against it? What is wrong with me?" I got from that
into a corner of self-examination. Did I respond overmuch to these
painful aspects in life? When I was a boy I had never had the spirit
even to kill rats. Siddons came into the meditation, Siddons, the
essential Englishman, a little scornful, throwing out contemptuous
phrases. Soft! Was I a soft? What was a soft? Something not rough, not
hearty and bloody! I felt I had to own to the word--after years of
resistance. A dreadful thing it is when a great empire has to rely upon
soft soldiers.
Was civilization breeding a type of human being too tender to go on
living? I stuck for a time as one does on these nocturnal occasions at
the word "hypersensitive," going round it and about it....
I do not know now how it was that I passed from a mood so darkened and
sunless to one of exceptional exaltation, but I recall very clearly that
I did. I believe that I made a crowning effort against this despair and
horror that had found me out in the darkness and overcome. I cried in
my heart for help, as a lost child cries, to God. I seem to remember a
rush of impassioned prayer, not only for myself, not chiefly for myself,
but for all those smashed and soiled and spoilt and battered residues of
men whose memories tormented me. I prayed to God that they had not lived
in vain, that particularly those poor Kaffir scouts might not have lived
in vain. "They are like children," I said. "It was a murder of
children.... _By children!_"
My horror passed insensibly. I have to feel the dreadfulness of these
things, I told myself, because it is good for such a creature as I to
feel them dreadful, but if one understood it would all be simple. Not
dreadful at all. I clung to that and repeated it,--"it would all be
perfectly simple." It would come out no more horrible than the things
that used to frighten me as a child,--the shadow on the stairs, the
white moonrise reflected on a barked and withered tree, a peculiar dream
of moving geometrical forms, an ugly illustration in the "Arabian
Nights." ...
I do not know how long I wrestled with God and prayed that night, but
abruptly the shadows broke; and very suddenly and swiftly my spirit
seemed to flame up into space like some white beacon that is set alight.
Everything became light and clear and confident. I was assured that all
was well with us, with us who lived and fought and with the dead who
rotted now in fifty thousand hasty graves....
For a long time it seemed I was repeating again and again with soundless
lips and finding the deepest comfort in my words:--"And out of our
agonies comes victory, out of our agonies comes victory! Have pity on
us, God our Father!"
I think that mood passed quite insensibly from waking to a kind of
clear dreaming. I have an impression that I fell asleep and was aroused
by a gun. Yet I was certainly still sitting up when I heard that gun.
I was astonished to find things darkly visible about me. I had not noted
that the stars were growing pale until the sound of this gun very far
away called my mind back to the grooves in which it was now accustomed
to move. I started into absolute wakefulness. A gun?...
I found myself trying to see my watch.
I heard a slipping and clatter of pebbles near me, and discovered Fred
Maxim at my side. "Look!" he said, hoarse with excitement. "Already!" He
pointed to a string of dim little figures galloping helter-skelter over
the neck and down the gap in the hills towards us.
They came up against the pale western sky, little nodding swaying black
dots, and flashed over and were lost in the misty purple groove towards
us. They must have been riding through the night--the British following.
To them we were invisible. Behind us was the shining east, we were in a
shadow still too dark to betray us.
In a moment I was afoot and called out to the men, my philosophy, my
deep questionings, all torn out of my mind like a page of scribbled
poetry plucked out of a business note-book. Khaki figures were up all
about me passing the word and hurrying to their places. All the
dispositions I had made overnight came back clear and sharp into my
mind. We hadn't long for preparations....
It seems now there were only a few busy moments before the fighting
began. It must have been much longer in reality. By that time we had
seen their gun come over and a train of carts. They were blundering
right into us. Every moment it was getting lighter, and the moment of
contact nearer. Then "Crack!" from down below among the rocks, and there
was a sudden stoppage of the trail of dark shapes upon the hillside.
"Crack!" came a shot from our extreme left. I damned the impatient men
who had shot away the secret of our presence. But we had to keep them at
a shooting distance. Would the Boers have the wit to charge through us
before the daylight came, or should we hold them? I had a swift,
disturbing idea. Would they try a bolt across our front to the left? Had
we extended far enough across the deep valley to our left? But they'd
hesitate on account of their gun. The gun couldn't go that way because
of the gullies and thickets.... But suppose they tried it! I hung
between momentous decisions....
Then all up the dim hillside I could make out the Boers halting and
riding back. One rifle across there flashed.
We held them!...
We had begun the fight of Pieters Nek which ended before midday with the
surrender of Simon Botha and over seven hundred men. It was the crown of
all my soldiering.
§ 4
I came back to England at last when I was twenty-six. After the peace of
Vereeniging I worked under the Repatriation Commission which controlled
the distribution of returning prisoners and concentrated population to
their homes; for the most part I was distributing stock and grain, and
presently manoeuvring a sort of ploughing flying column that the dearth
of horses and oxen made necessary, work that was certainly as hard as if
far less exciting than war. That particular work of replanting the
desolated country with human beings took hold of my imagination, and for
a time at least seemed quite straightforward and understandable. The
comfort of ceasing to destroy!
No one has written anything that really conveys the quality of that
repatriation process; the queer business of bringing these suspicious,
illiterate, despondent people back to their desolated homes, reuniting
swarthy fathers and stockish mothers, witnessing their touchingly
inexpressive encounters, doing what one could to put heart into their
resumption. Memories come back to me of great littered heaps of luggage,
bundles, blankets, rough boxes, piled newly purchased stores, ready-made
doors, window sashes heaped ready for the waggons, slow-moving,
apathetic figures sitting and eating, an infernal squawking of parrots,
sometimes a wailing of babies. Repatriation went on to a parrot
obligato, and I never hear a parrot squawk without a flash of South
Africa across my mind. All the prisoners, I believe, brought back
parrots--some two or three. I had to spread these people out, over a
country still grassless, with teams of war-worn oxen, mules and horses
that died by the dozen on my hands. The end of each individual instance
was a handshake, and one went lumbering on, leaving the children one had
deposited behind one already playing with old ration-tins or hunting
about for cartridge-cases, while adults stared at the work they had to
do.
There was something elementary in all that redistribution. I felt at
times like a child playing in a nursery and putting out its bricks and
soldiers on the floor. There was a kind of greatness too about the
process, a quality of atonement. And the people I was taking back, the
men anyhow, were for the most part charming and wonderful people, very
simple and emotional, so that once a big bearded man, when I wanted him
in the face of an overflowing waggon to abandon about half-a-dozen great
angular colored West Indian shells he had lugged with him from Bermuda,
burst into tears of disappointment. I let him take them, and at the end
I saw them placed with joy and reverence in a little parlor, to become
the war heirlooms no doubt of a long and bearded family. As we shook
hands after our parting coffee he glanced at them with something between
gratitude and triumph in his eyes.
Yes, that was a great work, more especially for a ripening youngster
such as I was at that time. The memory of long rides and tramps over
that limitless veld returns to me, lonely in spite of the creaking,
lumbering waggons and transport riders and Kaffirs that followed behind.
South Africa is a country not only of immense spaces but of an immense
spaciousness. Everything is far apart; even the grass blades are far
apart. Sometimes one crossed wide stony wastes, sometimes came great
stretches of tall, yellow-green grass, wheel-high, sometimes a little
green patch of returning cultivation drew nearer for an hour or so,
sometimes the blundering, toilsome passage of a torrent interrupted our
slow onward march. And constantly one saw long lines of torn and twisted
barbed wire stretching away and away, and here and there one found
archipelagoes as it were in this dry ocean of the skeletons of cattle,
and there were places where troops had halted and their scattered
ration-tins shone like diamonds in the sunshine. Occasionally I struck
talk, some returning prisoner, some group of discharged British soldiers
become carpenters or bricklayers again and making their pound a day by
the work of rebuilding; always everyone was ready to expatiate upon the
situation. Usually, however, I was alone, thinking over this immense now
vanished tornado of a war and this equally astonishing work of healing
that was following it.
I became keenly interested in all this great business, and thought at
first of remaining indefinitely in Africa. Repatriation was presently
done and finished. I had won Milner's good opinion, and he was anxious
for me to go on working in relation to the labor difficulty that rose
now more and more into prominence behind the agricultural re-settlement.
But when I faced that I found myself in the middle of a tangle
infinitely less simple than putting back an agricultural population upon
its land.
§ 5
For the first time in my life I was really looking at the social
fundamental of Labor.
There is something astonishingly naïve in the unconsciousness with which
people of our class float over the great economic realities. All my life
I had been hearing of the Working Classes, of Industrialism, of Labor
Problems and the Organization of Labor; but it was only now in South
Africa, in this chaotic, crude illuminating period of putting a smashed
and desolated social order together again, that I perceived these
familiar phrases represented something--something stupendously real.
There were, I began to recognize, two sides to civilization; one
traditional, immemorial, universal, the side of the homestead, the side
I had been seeing and restoring; and there was another, ancient, too,