hubertcollins

[hubertcollins]

The Eighty-Third by Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Having at last reached a provincial city of a neutral country (not my own, though mine, too, still calls itself neutral), and being provided, for the first time in many months, with the ordinary comforts of life, I feel it my duty to set down certain facts that have recently come to my notice. 

They cannot possibly be printed until the war is over, and I question very much whether they can he printed then. There will be, if I mistake not, a very strict censorship exercised by the conquerors. Indeed, the mere fact that a neutral press has not yet got hold of the details I have to relate—or dared to print them if it has a hint—shows what the fear of the invaders already is. 

Besides, this is not a gossipy time. We do not glory in our neutrality; we cling to it as a drowning man to a tiny splinter of his wrecked ship; we are terribly afraid of saying the least thing, publicly or privately, that may draw attention to us. Nothing but a happy series of accidents can keep us out of the conflict, and, indeed, when it is all settled, we shall have scarce more shrift than the conquered belligerents. 

I do not even dare name the army to which the 83rd regiment belongs. By the time this document comes to light—if it ever does—it will be easy enough to guess.

When what, in my youth, was known as the “Great War” or the “World War” was going on—the war that began in August 1914-—I had a mighty desire to see something of its terrors. I was completing my education, and I had no great taste for learning. I thought I should do much better flying above a battlefield than acquiring knowledge—since all knowledge, I thought, was destined to be presently superseded. 

My family would not hear of it, however—they had always frowned on my aviator’s ambitions. So I never got in on the “Great War” at all; and, like most other people, I thought it meant my last chance. Obviously, there was never going to be another big armed conflict. This was a madness; the world for ever after would be sane. 

We were very innocent in those days. Certainly, when I sulked at being kept at home, it was honest sulking with real provocation. I never dreamed that, when I had reached the prime of life, I should see a struggle that would throw the whole world into terror—not merely half of it. 

We were all proud of the Congress of 1917, you know—I speak as a man old before my time, to generations yet unborn. There won’t, I think, be even a fiction of a Congress after this war. It will be more like a gigantic peace palaver in a reeking jungle. But I am not concerned to prophesy, for, to deal with that future, we shall need vast and exotic vocabularies. Small use the Oxford Dictionary will be, alas! to our children— or Esperanto, either.

I have double-locked my doors; I have shuttered the lower half of my windows; and I have looked quizzically at my fountain pen, as if it were an object that might sometime be dug up to bear witness to a lost civilization. All the little things of every day have a trick now of seeming vitally important— they may pass so soon, with us to whom they belonged.

Outside, in the street, it is very quiet. Even in this remote little neutral town, there is no pretense of “business as usual.” Business will never be “as usual” again; it will be different. But this is as near as I can get, at present, to the atmosphere in which I was bred, and I will try to write as a plain man writes.

I have been for some months previous to this in a corner of the war zone. That is, as I intended it should be, a vague statement. Most of the planet is, if not part of the war zone, at least belligerent territory. 

I am a good linguist, owing to experiences of my childhood and early youth; I speak, fairly well, a lot of languages that in my day were not considered part of one’s education. My parents were wanderers, and I had the oddest collection of nurses and attendants that any child ever had. Luckily, their talk stuck by me—I never forgot any idiom I had learned. So I got on better than most would have done when I was caught by the war in a foreign country. I had luck, too, in my country; I could actually, thanks to a nurse I had once had for a year, talk with the peasants.

I cannot say that I had any plan when the war broke out. Everyone knew that, once started, it would work as it did—spreading like a forest fire with a gale to aid it. Nation by nation, tribe by tribe, race by race came into it; and all a neutral could do was to edge along, little stage by little stage, to some extraordinary spot that by accident was not technically involved. Practically and commercially, of course, everything and every one is involved.

I have had, naturally, a good many hairbreadth escapes. Neutrals are so few that no one considers them of the slightest importance; and I have found that if you have a passport, you are likely to be arrested as a spy. I destroyed my passport early in the game, for fear it should get me into trouble. I lived like an animal, where I could— suspecting everything and everyone, and never dreaming of depending on any habitation for more than a night. 

After three months of the war, as I was “inching” along to a neutral frontier, I began to hear on the timid lips of non-combatants constant reference to a terrible regiment belonging to one of the allied groups. I will not be more definite than that. I never asked questions, but I stored away what I heard. Eventually, I learned the facts.

You must understand that I traveled as light as a hobo. I had a certain amount of money secreted about my person, but wherever it was possible, I paid in physical labor for my plate of food or my bit of cottage floor. My familiarity with the language stood me in good stead. Without it, every man’s hand would have been against me, for I was obviously not a native, and might have been, to the peasants’ inexperienced imaginations, anything. 

I always put my cards on the table—not merely my own hand, you might say, but the whole pack. I made no indiscreet inquiries; I helped the people when and as I could; and I told them of myself frankly that I was trying to work my way to a neutral country. My poverty of aspect robbed me, to begin with, of any too unwelcome importance. I told them directly that I had no political sympathies, but that I loathed all slaughter and cruelty, and wanted, as my own country was not at war, to get out of the way of any army whatsoever—being (this I tried to show) meanwhile, en route, a decent person. 

Often, I took the man of the house—when there was one—aside, gave my pistol to him for the night, and half stripped myself to show him I was concealing no other weapons. The knowledge of my money belt I kept to myself; though, in the morning, I gave the people a coin or two if it seemed that currency would be of any use to them.

This, roughly, was the mode of my existence for three months following the outbreak of the conflagration. If my progress towards safety and comfort (both of which can be only comparative—and temporary, even more than comparative) seems incredibly slow, I can only point out the fact that every step I took was precarious and that a snail’s pace was inevitable. I had to dodge both the invading and defending armies; all means of transportation, down to the most aged donkey, were commandeered; the fighting radius of any given corps was immensely extended by scouts; the non-combatants were suspicious of every human creature not personally known to them. 

Remember that everyone except the young people had been eyewitnesses of an earlier war which was supposed to surpass in horror everything hitherto known to history. This is a grave generation, all over the world; and the particular nation in whose territory I found myself has been played with after a fashion that no one—least of all itself—can understand.

I had to make wide detours, and sometimes judged it best to skulk out of a village almost before I had taken stock of it. But a number of the peasants were unbelievably humane; and a hurried clasp of the hand in the dawn was sometimes an almost intolerable parting. At such a time, a human relation becomes historic in twenty-four hours.

It was in the village of V—— that I first heard anything definite about the mysterious regiment. The one-armed son of the blacksmith had returned from the nearest town, full of tales. I listened, not too credulous, for the tales were wild. The opposing armies, as everyone knows, are a medley of races; and one hint of the exotic will breed hideous anecdote. I was welcome that night at the little public house—I know not what else to call it. for it was scarcely an inn. The villagers gathered and drank, men and women together, a villainous local wine—moderately, in no spirit of orgy, though here and there the fantastic costume of some refugee goatherd from the hills seemed to make the scene dance before my eyes.

The gist of the report brought by the blacksmith’s son was that the 83rd regiment was in the field, and that they might look for heavier trouble than was yet upon them. Every week men were hurried off to camp from this or that village. Officials would descend to prod and poke peasants supposed exempt. Unless you had lost an arm or a leg, no chronic ailment, no guarantee of over- or under-age availed you. 

Presently, there would be only women, cripples, and imbeciles left. I could vouch, myself, for the truth of that; with my own eyes I had seen the little population of non-combatants dwindle terrifically in the province. Then would come the turn of the 83rd regiment. It skulked behind the others and did its trick, apparently, after the fighting was done and towns lay waste and helpless. They were on no army list, mind you. Officially, there was no 83rd regiment; but its name was in everyone’s mouth—at least, in such mouths as dared to speak in a whisper among tried companions.

“But what do they do?” I asked— my  first  leading question  in many weeks. “Do they massacre and plunder— jackals following their fighting brothers?”

“Some folk say they are not human at all.” This was the sulky reply of the blacksmith’s son.

The women crossed themselves, and I began to disbelieve the tale, root and branch—though I had heard of the 83rd before. Still: demons—we had not come to that.

“They pass in the night—in the night; and they speak no tongue that mortal has ever heard.” An old woman crooned this in her corner, then covered her face with her dirty, gaudy shawl.

“Demons!” The word ran like a flame round the room, and presently they were all crossing themselves and swaying back and forth in a gloomy ecstasy of terror.

“Who has seen them?” The question was asked directly of the crippled messenger by a woman with a harsh voice. I judged from the attitude of the rest that only the common danger permitted her to be of their company. But the mutter of “ Demons! demons!” drowned the sneer with which she followed up her question. Children, waking, stuck their heads out of their mothers’ shawls, and their whimpering had to be quieted before the blacksmith’s son could reply.

“The bellows-mender’s wife in W—— . She saw them and ran all night through swamps and woods to reach her own place. She had taken the journey in hope of news of her husband and son. Aie! but she came running back when she had a glimpse by moonlight of the 83rd. She is half crazed, and the other womenfolk told me. She wrings her hands and tears her coif. W—— buzzes with the tale.”

“Half crazed, indeed! Who needs demons when men can be so like them?” This from the harsh-voiced woman outcast.

The rising murmur of anger was checked by the village priest, and the woman on her three-legged stool finally fell silent.

“I don’t say they are demons,” returned the blacksmith’s son. “All that is foolishness.” He assumed a jauntier air. “But they are not like other men. They do not march like other men. Some are carried in litters.”

“Oh—oh!” There was a common protest. “Regiments do not carry their wounded on the march. And if they are demons, they cannot be wounded. You have drunk the moonlight, brother.”

“I do not know the truth. Some say they are demons, I tell you. That is foolishness. Some say they are cannibals that feast as they go. And some say they are great gray apes from Africa. But all say that it is better to be shot than to meet the 83rd after a battle. They are not as other men. Now I have no more to say.”

I have recorded this as accurately as I can, because it was the longest conversation I ever heard on the subject. After that night, I met the tale everywhere, but never with such wealth of hypothesis. The rumor of the regiment ran like wildfire about the country. It was a terror too great for telling: “the 83rd”—and then talk stopped, save perhaps for a phrase of vague and desperate fear. Speech dried on their starved lips. At first, I wondered at it; but came to the conclusion after many a chilled night in a rickety grange that they positively feared lest explicit discussion should, like an incantation, raise the object of their terrors bodily before them. There was trouble enough and to spare, without the 83rd.

Death by wounds and exposure can scarcely be so bad as this more lingering dissolution to which non-combatants are presently destined. For there is no hope in this war—none. The melting-pot we used to talk of so glibly in times of peace is seething over a planet-wide fire; all races are thrust in, and are steeping in the poisons of Africa and Asia. No man knows what will come of it—but the 83rd is trying to tell.

There is good reason why a document that must be for a long time in an inside pocket should not be too bulky, so I will not describe further the months of my flight. I was trying all the time for a certain point on the frontier of the little nation which at present is offering me such scant protection as “neutrality” affords; but I had to take a zigzag course, often actually doubling back on my tracks.

Almost everyone knows something about this war at first hand, so I will not describe the prolonged despair of existence in a stricken country. I never really got hardened to it, because there has never been a single relieved moment when one could look forward with hope. You face every horror; and there are vaster horrors behind, like a rear-guard stretching from pole to pole. 

The devil has been in their counsels; and he has proved himself, once again, a medievalist. Bloodshed is healthy compared with his subtleties. Ah, why talk of the devil, when we may all, before we die, have fetish officially thrust upon us? To what future am I addressing myself? And what difference can a detail like this I have knowledge of make to a posterity that comes out of such a melting-pot? Still, I was born in the nineteenth century, and some archaic notions stick—the respect for curious documents, for example—the respect for data and for historians!

I had come to the village of Z—— on the last lap of my flight. My money was running low—going faster, in point of fact, near the frontier, since there was some hope of getting across and making purchases. I always gave money, as I said, when I thought it could help. I was determined to save some, and not be absolutely penniless when I, myself, reached a neutral state. So, for some weeks previous to actual escape, I went at a cripple’s pace. I took no doubtful short cuts and put up at no inns; I no longer sought out the biggest farm in the village, or asked for meat or beer. I crawled very close to the earth; I lived like a slug.

When I reached Z—— , I walked round the little settlement—skirted it in search of the feeblest building that could call itself a shelter. I begged some porridge, towards twilight, from a farm wench, and some rods beyond I found a building just to my purpose—a tumble-down grange, all chinks and falling rubble, which was evidently wholly disused. It was essential that I should be alone, that my presence should be unsuspected. 

The tide of actual conflict was rolling towards the confines of the little state, and suspicion rode on the spray of the bloody waves. Only in the dusk should I have dared to beg my porridge, trusting to the mere whisper of familiar words; for though I was browned and dirty and limping, my features were not of the country and would have belied my accent. All day I had heard cannonading, as I crept from covert to covert and rock to rock. Perhaps, I thought, as I huddled under the densest bit of thatch I could find, I should not reach neutrality, after all—should roll over in an ignominious heap on the bristling verge of safety.

I cannot say how long I slept—for sleep I did: a dogged sleep of the body which the mind was powerless to prevent. When I woke, the moon-rays were falling crazily through the jagged holes in the roof, making little idiotic pools of light on the floor. The atmosphere was thick with sound. 

At first, I could distinguish nothing, though I knew physically, from head to foot, that the noise was sinister. Then something woke me out of my doze—a shadowy stirring in the opposite corner of my den. That was near, was concrete, was imminent; and I got my pistol into position. It was not a soldier, I felt sure; one soldier would scarcely be hiding in such a place. I whispered a sharp query in the native tongue; and, very slowly, the dark huddle shaped itself into a woman’s form. Well—I was not yet afraid of a woman; and I put the pistol into my pocket, though I kept my hand on it.

As she came out into one of the rays of light, I saw that she was a mere peasant girl, barefoot, in ragged clothes, her terrified mind as ragged as her garb. We looked each other over in silence; and presently, to judge from the evidence of her features, her wits began to reassemble themselves. I ventured to question her. How could we two miserable creatures be foes?

“What is it?” There was no need of being more definite than that. The thick, disturbed volume of sound outside called for explanation; if you could have heard it from Mars, you would have known it stood for danger. Yet it was a mere faint thrumming on the strings of peril—no explosions, no sharp reports, no shouting. The elements of noise were soft and stealthy—gentle thuddings on the worn earth, faint creakings, hoarse whispers, as it were, a death-rattle filling the whole atmosphere. 

I cannot describe it, but it made shrapnel seem healthy—something to which a man would bare his breast gladly. This sounded rather like the nether slime of danger. The very fear it caused was unhealthy—a crooked trail of paralysis through the nerve paths. My hand was steady, but my legs shook beneath me; my blood was warm, but things mopped and mowed in my brain. As yet, I had not stirred to look; but, as if my ears had not told me enough, my nostrils began to detect a faint, sickening smell. It was as if the dead had risen out of their trenches, with a little clatter of corrupted bones and weak motions of decomposing flesh. A terror that you could hear and smell, but as yet nameless and invisible.

“What is it?” I repeated my raucous whisper.

“The Eighty-Third!” The girl gasped it out, then keeled over on the floor.

A sane little current of curiosity began to wind through my veins. If this was the 83rd, I would behold it. I stepped over the girl’s body, touching her slightly in the movement. She had fainted, apparently, and it was safer so. 

I went to the slit of a window. Luckily, the overhanging thatch kept my face in the shadow; I was safe from the 83rd until they began to search. I looked in silence, guarding my very breath. It was not a time to bear witness to one’s own existence.

I do not know how long I crouched there, watching. For crouch I did; mere leaning against the wall would not have sufficed. I needed support from every direction; my hands as well as my feet demanded the close proximity of something solid. I could not count on any inward strength to hold myself upright, could not count on muscles to do their duty at any distance from a firm basis.

Can I ever describe, for cold information to those who may read this document, what I became aware of during the next quarter of an hour? I say “ became aware of” advisedly; for though now, in the half-obscurity, I saw, the facts seemed at first to beat even more heavily on other senses than that of vision. 

Sight, at all events, did not utterly replace sound and smell, even though I was all a-stare in my shadowed recess. And it cannot have been for more than a quarter of an hour that I looked. As soon as I understood, I dropped back into my ruinous shelter and let the 83rd go on without my witness. Yes, it must have taken me just about that time to get through my head the quis and qualis of the 83rd.

And, after all, all I have to do is to set down those unassailable facts. I have only to announce, in one careful sentence, the particular business of the 83rd. Yet the necessary few firm words seem to rot and drop away under my pen, Moreover, since mine is evidence that must tip the scales against a monumental incredibility, perhaps I had best be chronological—so far as I can. I will be brief—I must be.

Shreds of the talk already recorded came back to me in the first moments. “They pass in the night—in the night; they speak no tongue that mortal has ever heard; they do not march like other men; some are carried in litters; some say they are great gray apes from Africa. . . .” I remembered, and I bore witness. They did not march like other men; the litters were there. . . .

The few males of the depopulated village must have been shot or otherwise disposed of when the regiment first entered. From beginning to end, I saw, of the village inhabitants, only women; yet, from beginning to end, I did not hear one scream. The horror that denied to me the comforting heat of anger and left me shivering must have stifled their voices in their throats. 

Sheer loss of sense and wits, I hope, came to the victims; but if madness blessed them, it was a dumb madness. At least, near though I was in my low-pitched upper chamber, I heard no voice rise above the hoarse mutter of the soldiers. Soldiers! Well, any human creature that goes out to destroy an enemy may be called a soldier. And, worst of all, there were men there who looked like other men—a few Europeans in uniform to command that monstrous company.

Though the purpose of the invaders soon became tragically clear to me— women only were the picked and chosen prey, and, even with shut eyes, I should have known—I still marveled a little.

This was no orgy of inflamed soldiery. The 83rd shuffled and shambled about its business, under orders from its few commanders. They burned no cottages; I saw no attempt to loot even food or drink. 

The very stillness of the scene made it more devilish; here was no spontaneous glutting of appetite—bestial, but natural, like all bestial things. In some human brain all this had been coldly conceived, and by human beings it was being coldly carried out. I saw a misshapen man drag a girl across the road; they disappeared among the tall rows of the standing wheat. Even then, I had not the key of the enigma. 

Only when I saw a man in uniform light a match and look at his watch, then make a signal, did understanding begin to come. At his gesture, the litters were flung down, and things rose out of them. I thought I was going mad; that I was not really seeing what I thought I saw—the ghosts of misbegotten creatures in a macabre group, proceeding with motions unspeakably grotesque and vile to a sinister Sabbath. I could not believe it; the one illuminating word did not come to focus my bewilderment. I saw women disappearing by handfuls in the midst of loathsome groups—parodies of the human body that had been garbed in a nightmare. And, still, the word did not come.

Then, from a little close beneath my shadowed window, a figure—legless, armless—became evident to me. The moon, by a special act of grace, showed me the face clear—white as ice, with a fixed, mutilated grin; apishly conceived and wrought in some stuff not like flesh. Yet, in that all but decomposing medium, something stood for envy. . . . The word had come. I knew; and I fell back, crouched on guard over the fainting woman beside me. That I could, at need, kill her where she lay, was the one hint of God in the universe.

Half stupefied, I stayed there beside her for I do not know how long. I nursed my pistol with loving slyness, and watched her face, on which one ray of moonlight fell through the gaping thatch. This heavy-featured farm wench seemed to me the purest thing in the world. Why? Because, I suppose, I had a cartridge there for her; because it was absolutely in my power to preserve her as she was. 

She might have been maid, wife or widow; she was absolutely saved from the 83rd. They might suspect the ruin in which we were lying hid, might search it, but I could reach her first. I was so close to her that I touched her; my hand would have to move only a few inches to reach a vital spot. Whatever happened, it would have time to make that journey. She seemed to me sacred, as I bent over her; she was like a miraculous image of Diana saved from the sack of a town. If she had been steeped in all unclean-ness before she took shelter in that disrupted pile of thatch and rubble, she would still, now, by contrast to what she might have been, appear the purest of the pure. For one forgot latitude and longitude; this village seemed the world—no less; and she, of all living women, was spared the horror of that night. Would not her coarse comeliness become a legend, and she the saint of a hew cult?

I set down these wanderings of my thought to show that it was in the power of the 83rd to divorce a man from reason. I knew, of course, that at any moment they might think it worthwhile to enter, to climb up the worm-eaten ladder and make a few bayonet passes in the dark. But I had no sense of danger; death was no peril to face, and from the things that really looked like peril, I had the means to deliver us both. 

They could not take from me the freedom of my right hand—they would not have time. I was glad of that swoon, prolonging itself beside me. If she had come out of it to babble, I should have had to shoot at once. I felt a childish eagerness in having her preserved. I was all given over to my myth. If I had been a woman, I should have gone mad there in the checkered obscurity; mere consciousness of my sex saved me to this temporary light-headedness. And the possession of a pistol in working order seemed a miracle; I recognized in it the interposing finger of Jehovah. I remember once wondering dizzily why I was chosen, as minor prophets must have wondered why they were rapt from their herds and tribes-fellows.

Gradually, as the moon set and the night wore on, the 83rd girded up its smitten loins for departure. It was true, they passed “in the night—in the night”; and no man knew what or whence they were. No man save me; and still, after these harrowed weeks, I bear about me the sense of a peculiar destiny, in that I have it in my power to give this testimony. 

My giddiness began and passed with that hour, and though I left my shelter before dawn and made my way westward, what I saw and heard, even as I fled from it—writhing shapes of women and guttural moans and stricken whispers from cottage windows—confirmed what my steady gaze from under the deep eaves had earlier told me. Hatred, with other normal powers, came back to me then; I developed at least a feeble, white man’s hatred of my own with which to meet inadequately the hatred that had taken shape and action before my eyes that night.

For, in the idea that created the 83rd, there was nothing so decent, because nothing so spontaneous, as lust of blood or lust of the flesh. Probably, the plan was never committed to writing or to formal speech; but the black hint must have sped southward, eastward, through a hundred minds, before the 83rd could be recruited—creatures that were polluted to the marrow in rare and horrible ways; gathered from sun-infested lands and brought overseas to furnish the last argument of hate. 

This was the plan: that those who did not go the clean, cruel way of death should be defiled past hope. The fountain of life should be fouled. No surviving enemy should rear fighting men and clean women. The 83rd would take away all hope—even the winded, rickety hopes that look timidly forward to a future some ages off. The conquerors would not even mate with their victims. The rebellious seed should die utterly, and it should not have even a mongrel’s claim to a pedigree. Atavism should not have a chance with sports and mutations. . . . 

The victors would then people the world from the yellow, the black, and the brown; from tradition-less creatures of whom they could be sure because they were stuff of their own souls. Did those who slew so gallantly in our youth, with shibboleths upon their lips, think of this—a war without shibboleths, where no man calls even blasphemously upon the name of God, though, here and there, a turban may be knotted in orthodox folds, or a juju be tucked away in a loin-cloth? 

No man fights now for “democracy” or any other windy word; white or black, he fights only for his personal right to live. Peace and poverty, twin-born of our last war, have brought us to this one almost unarmed; and what can the little ammunition we have garnered do against the spawn of a whole hemisphere? 

Moreover, the flower of the Western world went then, and there has scarce been time for a second blooming. It seems hard to believe that there were ever mild creatures like Crusaders or Jacobites on our planet. For the end is not yet; and though a few countries are allowed still to play at neutrality like children, their toy will be taken from them whenever the strong men think it time. 

The East has grimaced in front of the Western mirror until it has learned the little it wants of us. But now it is all too clear that, with whichever of the polyglot alliances the white man fights, his preservation is not really desired. Small chance of this ever getting to the light! So why waste words?

I left the girl on the floor of the grange that had sheltered us both. She had recovered from unconsciousness only to pant thickly and, when I bade her be quiet, to fall asleep. Comparative stillness shrouded the village during those few moments when she breathed so hard and muttered her questions. She could well believe that I told her—as I did—the truth in saying that the 83rd had gone. Some deep, bewildered exhaustion claimed her, for she asked no questions about what had happened while she lay there. 

I left her, as I say. It was the only thing I could do. She was safe from the pestilence that had walked in the darkness. Her life had at least been touched by a miracle; she would have to face the horror of waking as best she could. My exalted mood had passed with the passing of the stench and sound—all that faint and filthy clamor—and I no longer idealized her. I was simply very pityingly glad that to one human being something had been spared. 

I preserved, in my flight, no illusions about her. I was bent doggedly on my own salvation, for the situation was such that I could not hope to save others. Perhaps I was deceived as to the value of my own life; but I struggled for it because it seemed to me that my knowledge gave me some worth. Otherwise, I grant you, it would have been more decent not to save a single cartridge.

The story of my progress to the place where I now am does not much matter. The 83rd—or that detachment of it which I had seen—was very near the border; and I had not far to go. Yet, it was a hard and haunted path that I took, for I knew this enemy would take cover in the daytime, and the deep reaches of woods which I had hitherto counted most friendly were likely to hold a poisonous encampment. 

I steered in the open by the distant sound of cannonading, veering hither and yon like an irresponsible breeze. In two days, I was clear of any possible route of theirs. They are not fighters, the 83rd; they are not (what is the old phrase we used to utter with perfect seriousness?) medically fit. That is it—they are not medically fit. Led by a few competents, they skulk in the safe desolation created for them by the fighting men. Even if one were given to irony, one could scarcely recommend the Red Cross to follow in the wake of the 83rd. Besides, the Red Cross is said to have died an early death in this war. The bulk of the combatants do not understand conventions, and the notion of immunity has never got inside their skulls.

Here, this afternoon, as I write, I am glad of only one thing—that I can still feel a good, old-fashioned anger with a spice of chivalry in it. We have all been unutterably foolish, I think—though I speak only as a survivor—in the generations immediately past. We praised peace; then we leaped to the sword. War depleted and enfeebled us, then turned us callous to its own horrors. We had not the strength either to be ruthless or effectually to loathe ruthlessness. With our love of little states and our distrust of big ones, we drew, ourselves, the few remaining teeth we had.

The half of the world that had not mulcted itself of its youth saw its chance. They have no need of justifying formulas; the loose and convenient solidarity of hate serves their turn. For the white men who are fighting, on this side and on that, mark my words, are negligible. They are to be used and flung aside. The strong and secret bond is among all those who are not white. 

I think perhaps, in the beginning, the missionaries were to blame—or, rather, the nations back of them, who would not live up to the professions of their emissaries. In giving the lower races license, by our example, to fight, we did not inevitably impose upon them our rules of warfare. As might be expected, they took the fact and let the method go. And the cure for war is not more war. Animals all! And tooth and claw will have their way at the last. 

Britons—and others—never would be slaves, I remember. Well, you cannot tame a zebra, I believe. His individuality resists all hints. But you can kill him. Kill! Kill! . . .  We let ourselves in for it, and, so far as I can see, we are to be thrust back to the spawning chaos of pre-Promethian myth. How far away they sound—those tinkling, sweet philosophies!

I have finished. I should never have permitted myself these musings, for I have never been what in my time was called a thinking man. I lack the learning a publicist needs. But so definitely do I feel myself on the dizzy verge—and alone on that verge—of all that we used glibly to call “life,” that there is a kind of solemnity even in seeing my pen trace the familiar characters on the page. 

Any cry out of the old time is justified, though the ghosts of our ancestors writhe in disapprobation. Had I had more hope of this document’s surviving, it should have held it (if possible) to a colder tone; to the unmalleable idiom of the perfect testimony. As it is, it is—almost—only for Heaven that I write.

But I swear before that invisible witness that, so far as lay in my verbal power, I have spoken sheer truth. And it is not fitting that a man who has seen the 83rd should perish in silence. My pessimism may be unjustified, and then my facts will serve a purpose; whereas, if I am right in my saddest conjectures, it will not matter—nothing on this planet will matter again, for an age or two.

(from Harper’s Monthly Magazine, February 1916)