Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump Part 14

At this point the surviving ma.n.u.script comes to an abrupt end.

But Boon read or extemporized far beyond this point.

He made a figure that was at once absurd and pitiful of his little Author making this raid upon the world, resolved to detect and exorcise these suspected Wild a.s.ses, and he told us at great length of how steadily and inevitably the poor enthusiast entangled himself in feuds and false accusations, libels and denunciations, free fights, burglaries, and so to universal execration in a perpetually tightening coil. "I'll stick to it," he squeaks, with every fresh blow of Fate.

Behind him, with a developing incurable bronchitis that could never be fatal, toiled the devil, more and more despondent, more and more draggle-tailed, voiceless and unhelpful.

After a time he was perpetually trying to give his Author the slip.

But continually it is clearer that there _were_ diabolical Wild a.s.ses loose and active in the affairs of the world....

One day the Author had an inspiration. "Was your lot the only lot that ever escaped?"

"Oh no!" said the devil. "Ages before--there were some. It led to an awful row. Just before the Flood. They had to be drowned out. That's why they've been so stiff with me.... I'm not quite sure whether they didn't interbreed. They say in h.e.l.l that the world has never been quite the same place since."...

You see the scope this story gave Boon's disposition to derision.

There were endless things that Boon hated, movements that seemed to him wanton and mischievous, outbreaks of disastrous violence, evil ideas. I should get myself into as much hot water as his Author did if I were to tell all this poor man's adventures. He went to Ulster, he pursued prominent Tariff Reformers, he started off to Mexico and came back to investigate Pan-Germanism. I seem to remember his hanging for days about the entrance to Printing House Square.... And there was a scene in the House of Commons. The Author and the devil had been tracking a prominent politician--never mind whom--with the growing belief that here at last they had one of them. And Walpurgis Night grew near. Walpurgis Night came.

"We must not lose sight of him," said the Author, very alert and ruthless. "If necessary we must smash the windows, blow open doors."

But the great man went down to the House as though nothing could possibly happen. They followed him.

"He will certainly rush home," said the Author, as the clock crept round to half-past eleven. "But anyhow let us get into the Strangers'

Gallery and keep our eyes on him to the last."

They managed it with difficulty.

I remember how vividly Boon drew the picture for us: the rather bored House, a coming and going of a few inattentive Members, the nodding Speaker and the clerks, the silent watchers in the gallery, a little flicker of white behind the grille. And then at five minutes to twelve the honourable Member arose....

"We were wrong," said the Author.

"The draught here is fearful," said the devil. "Hadn't we better go?"

The honourable Member went on speaking showy, memorable, mischievous things. The seconds ticked away. And then--then it happened.

The Author made a faint rattling sound in his throat and clung to the rail before him. The devil broke into a cold sweat. There, visible to all men, was a large black Wild a.s.s, kicking up its heels upon the floor of the House. And braying.

And n.o.body was minding!

The Speaker listened patiently, one long finger against his cheek. The clerks bowed over the papers. The honourable Member's two colleagues listened like men under an anaesthetic, each sideways, each with his arm over the back of the seat. Across the House one Member was furtively writing a letter and three others were whispering together.

The Author felt for the salt, then he gripped the devil's wrist.

"Say those words!" he shouted quite loudly--"say those words! Say them now. Then--we shall have him."

But you know those House of Commons ushers. And at that time their usual alertness had been much quickened by several Suffragette outrages. Before the devil had got through his second sentence or the Author could get his salt out of his pocket both devil and Author were travelling violently, scruff and pant-seat irresistibly gripped, down Saint Stephen's Hall....

-- 2

"And you really begin to think," said Wilkins, "that there has been an increase in violence and unreasonableness in the world?"

"My case is that it is an irruption," said Boon. "But I do begin to see a sort of violence of mind and act growing in the world."

"There has always been something convulsive and extravagant in human affairs," said Wilkins. "No public thing, no collective thing, has ever had the sanity of men thinking quietly in a study."

And so we fell to discussing the Mind of the Race again, and whether there was indeed any sanity growing systematically out of human affairs, or whether this Mind of the Race was just a poor tormented rag of partial understanding that would never control the blind forces that had made and would destroy it. And it was inevitable that such a talk should presently drift to the crowning human folly, to that crowned Wild a.s.s of the Devil, aggressive militarism. That talk was going on, I remember, one very bright, warm, sunny day in May, or it may be in June, of 1914. And we talked of militarism as a flourish, as a kicking up of the national heels, as extravagance and waste; but, what seems to me so singular now, we none of us spoke of it or thought of it as a thing that could lead to the full horror of a universal war. Human memory is so strange and treacherous a thing that I doubt now if many English people will recall our habitual disregard in those days of war as a probability. We thought of it as a costly, foolish threatening, but that it could actually happen----!

-- 3

Some things are so shocking that they seem to have given no shock at all, just as there are noises that are silences because they burst the ears. And for some days after the declaration of war against Germany the whole business seemed a vast burlesque. It was incredible that this great people, for whom all Western Europe has mingled, and will to the end of time mingle, admiration with a certain humorous contempt, was really advancing upon civilization, enormously armed, scrupulously prepared, bellowing, "Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles!" smas.h.i.+ng, destroying, killing. We felt for a time, in spite of reason, that it was a joke, that presently Michael would laugh....

But by Jove! the idiot wasn't laughing....

For some weeks n.o.body in the circle about Boon talked of anything but the war. The Wild a.s.ses of the Devil became an allusion, to indicate all this that was kicking Europe to splinters. We got maps, and still more maps; we sent into the town for newspapers and got special intelligence by telephone; we repeated and discussed rumours. The Belgians were showing pluck and resource, but the French were obviously shockingly unprepared. There were weeks--one may confess it now that they have so abundantly proved the contrary--when the French seemed crumpling up like pasteboard. They were failing to save the line of the Meuse, Maubeuge, Lille, Laon; there were surrenders, there was talk of treachery, and General French, left with his flank exposed, made a costly retreat. It was one Sunday in early September that Wilkins came to us with a _Sunday Observer_. "Look," he said, "they are down on the Seine! They are sweeping right round behind the Eastern line. They have broken the French in two. Here at Senlis they are almost within sight of Paris...."

Then some London eavesdropper talked of the British retreat.

"Kitchener says our Army has lost half its fighting value. Our base is to be moved again from Havre to La Roch.e.l.le...."

Boon sat on the edge of his hammock.

"The Germans must be beaten," he said. "The new world is killed; we go back ten thousand years; there is no light, no hope, no thought nor freedom any more unless the Germans are beaten.... Until the Germans are beaten there is nothing more to be done in art, in literature, in life. They are a dull, envious, greedy, cunning, vulgar, interfering, and intolerably conceited people. A world under their dominance will be intolerable. I will not live in it...."

"I had never believed they would do it," said Wilkins....

"Both my boys," said Dodd, "have gone into the Officers' Training Corps. They were in their cadet corps at school."

"Wasn't one an engineer?" asked Boon.

"The other was beginning to paint rather well," said Dodd. "But it all has to stop."

"I suppose I shall have to do something," said the London eavesdropper. "I'm thirty-eight.... I can ride and I'm pretty fit....

It's a nuisance."

"What is a man of my kind to do?" asked Wilkins. "I'm forty-eight."

"I can't believe the French are as bad as they seem," said Boon. "But, anyhow, we've no business to lean on the French.... But I wonder now---- Pa.s.s me that map."

-- 4

Next week things had mended, and the French and British were pus.h.i.+ng the Germans back from the Marne to the Aisne. Whatever doubts we had felt about the French were dispelled in that swift week of recovery.

They were all right. It was a stupendous relief, for if France had gone down, if her spirit had failed us, then we felt all liberalism, all republicanism, all freedom and light would have gone out in this world for centuries.

But then again at the Aisne the Germans stood, and our brisk rush of hope sobered down towards anxiety as the long flanking movement stretched towards the sea and the Antwerp situation developed....

By imperceptible degrees our minds began to free themselves from the immediate struggle of the war, from strategy and movements, from the daily attempt to unriddle from reluctant and ambiguous dispatches, Dutch rumours, censored gaps, and uninforming maps what was happening.

It became clear to us that there were to be no particular dramatic strokes, no sudden, decisive battles, no swift and clear conclusions.

The struggle began to a.s.sume in our minds its true proportions, its true extent, in time, in s.p.a.ce, in historical consequence. We had thought of a dramatic three months' conflict and a redrawn map of Europe; we perceived we were in the beginnings of a far vaster conflict; the end of an age; the slow, murderous testing and condemnation of whole systems of ideas that had bound men uneasily in communities for all our lives. We discussed--as all the world was discussing--the huge organization of sentiment and teaching that had produced this aggressive German patriotism, this tremendous national unanimity. Ford Madox Hueffer came in to tell us stories of a disciplined professoriate, of all education turned into a war propaganda, of the deliberate official mental moulding of a whole people that was at once fascinating and incredible. We went over Bernhardi and Treitschke; we weighed Nietzsche's share in that mental growth. Our talk drifted with the changing season and Boon's sudden illness after his chill, from his garden to his sitting-room, where he lay wrapped up upon a sofa, irritable and impatient with this unaccustomed experience of ill-health.