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and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team








THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES

AN INTERPRETATION

By Coningsby Dawson

Author of "Carry On: Letters In Wartime," Etc.


With An Introduction By His Father, W. J. Dawson


"The glory is all in the souls of the men--it's nothing external."
 --From "Carry On"


1917


[Illustration: LIEUTENANT CONINGSBY DAWSON]




TO YOU AT HOME


   Each night we panted till the runners came,
     Bearing your letters through the battle-smoke.
   Their path lay up Death Valley spouting flame,
     Across the ridge where the Hun's anger spoke
   In bursting shells and cataracts of pain;
     Then down the road where no one goes by day,
   And so into the tortured, pockmarked plain
     Where dead men clasp their wounds and point the way.
   Here gas lurks treacherously and the wire
     Of old defences tangles up the feet;
   Faces and hands strain upward through the mire,
     Speaking the anguish of the Hun's retreat.
   Sometimes no letters came; the evening hate
     Dragged on till dawn. The ridge in flying spray
   Of hissing shrapnel told the runners' fate;
     We knew we should not hear from you that day--
   From you, who from the trenches of the mind
     Hurl back despair, smiling with sobbing breath,
   Writing your souls on paper to be kind,
     That you for us may take the sting from Death.




CONTENTS


TO YOU AT HOME. (Poem)

HOW THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN

IN HOSPITAL. (Poem)

THE ROAD TO BLIGHTY

THE LADS AWAY. (Poem)

THE GROWING OF THE VISION

THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES. (Poem)

GOD AS WE SEE HIM




HOW THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN


In my book, _The Father of a Soldier_, I have already stated the
conditions under which this book of my son's was produced.

He was wounded in the end of June, 1917, in the fierce struggle before
Lens. He was at once removed to a base-hospital, and later on to a
military hospital in London. There was grave danger of amputation of
the right arm, but this was happily avoided. As soon as he could use
his hand he was commandeered by the Lord High Commissioner of Canada
to write an important paper, detailing the history of the Canadian
forces in France and Flanders. This task kept him busy until the end
of August, when he obtained a leave of two months to come home. He
arrived in New York in September, and returned again to London in the
end of October.

The plan of the book grew out of his conversations with us and the
three public addresses which he made. The idea had already been
suggested to him by his London publisher, Mr. John Lane. He had
written a few hundred words, but had no very keen sense of the value
of the experiences he had been invited to relate. He had not even read
his own published letters in _Carry On_. He said he had begun to read
them when the book reached him in the trenches, but they made him
homesick, and he was also afraid that his own estimate of their value
might not coincide with ours, or with the verdict which the public has
since passed upon them. He regarded his own experiences, which we
found so thrilling, in the same spirit of modest depreciation. They
were the commonplaces of the life which he had led, and he was
sensitive lest they should be regarded as improperly heroic. No one
was more astonished than he when he found great throngs eager to hear
him speak. The people assembled an hour before the advertised time,
they stormed the building as soon as the doors were open, and when
every inch of room was packed they found a way in by the windows and a
fire-escape. This public appreciation of his message indicated a value
in it which he had not suspected, and led him to recognise that what
he had to say was worthy of more than a fugitive utterance on a public
platform. He at once took up the task of writing this book, with a
genuine and delighted surprise that he had not lost his love of
authorship. He had but a month to devote to it, but by dint of daily
diligence, amid many interruptions of a social nature, he finished his
task before he left. The concluding lines were actually written on the
last night before he sailed for England.

We discussed several titles for the book. _The Religion of Heroism_
was the title suggested by Mr. John Lane, but this appeared too
didactic and restrictive. I suggested _Souls in Khaki_, but this
admirable title had already been appropriated. Lastly, we decided on
_The Glory of the Trenches_, as the most expressive of his aim. He
felt that a great deal too much had been said about the squalor,
filth, discomfort and suffering of the trenches. He pointed out that a
very popular war-book which we were then reading had six paragraphs in
the first sixty pages which described in unpleasant detail the
verminous condition of the men, as if this were the chief thing to be
remarked concerning them. He held that it was a mistake for a writer
to lay too much stress on the horrors of war. The effect was bad
physiologically--it frightened the parents of soldiers; it was equally
bad for the enlisted man himself, for it created a false impression in
his mind. We all knew that war was horrible, but as a rule the soldier
thought little of this feature in his lot. It bulked large to the
civilian who resented inconvenience and discomfort, because he had
only known their opposites; but the soldier's real thoughts were
concerned with other things. He was engaged in spiritual acts. He was
accomplishing spiritual purposes as truly as the martyr of faith and
religion. He was moved by spiritual impulses, the evocation of duty,
the loyal dependence of comradeship, the spirit of sacrifice, the
complete surrender of the body to the will of the soul. This was the
side of war which men needed most to recognise. They needed it not
only because it was the true side, but because nothing else could
kindle and sustain the enduring flame of heroism in men's hearts.

While some erred in exhibiting nothing but the brutalities of war,
others erred by sentimentalising war. He admitted that it was
perfectly possible to paint a portrait of a soldier with the aureole
of a saint, but it would not be a representative portrait. It would be
eclectic, the result of selection elimination. It would be as unlike
the common average as Rupert Brooke, with his poet's face and poet's
heart, was unlike the ordinary naval officers with whom he sailed to
the AEgean.

The ordinary soldier is an intensely human creature, with an
"endearing blend of faults and virtues." The romantic method of
portraying him not only misrepresented him, but its result is far less
impressive than a portrait painted in the firm lines of reality. There
is an austere grandeur in the reality of what he is and does which
needs no fine gilding from the sentimentalist. To depict him as a Sir
Galahad in holy armour is as serious an offence as to exhibit him as a
Caliban of marred clay; each method fails of truth, and all that the
soldier needs to be known about him, that men should honour him, is
the truth.

What my son aimed at in writing this book was to tell the truth about
the men who were his comrades, in so far as it was given him to see
it. He was in haste to write while the impression was fresh in his
mind, for he knew how soon the fine edge of these impressions grew
dull as they receded from the immediate area of vision. "If I wait
till the war is over, I shan't be able to write of it at all," he
said. "You've noticed that old soldiers are very often silent men.
They've had their crowded hours of glorious life, but they rarely tell
you much about them. I remember you used to tell me that you once knew
a man who sailed with Napoleon to St Helena, but all he could tell you
was that Napoleon had a fine leg and wore white silk stockings. If
he'd written down his impressions of Napoleon day by day as he watched
him walking the deck of the _Bellerophon_, he'd have told you a great
deal more about him than that he wore white silk stockings. If I wait
till the war is over before I write about it, it's very likely I shall
recollect only trivial details, and the big heroic spirit of the thing
will escape me. There's only one way of recording an impression--catch
it while it's fresh, vivid, vital; shoot it on the wing. If you wait
too long it will vanish." It was because he felt in this way that he
wrote in red-hot haste, sacrificing his brief leave to the task, and
concentrating all his mind upon it.

There was one impression that he was particularly anxious to
record,--his sense of the spiritual processes which worked behind the
grim offence of war, the new birth of religious ideas, which was one
of its most wonderful results. He had both witnessed and shared this
renascence. It was too indefinite, too immature to be chronicled with
scientific accuracy, but it was authentic and indubitable. It was
atmospheric, a new air which men breathed, producing new energies and
forms of thought. Men were rediscovering themselves, their own
forgotten nobilities, the latent nobilities in all men. Bound together
in the daily obedience of self-surrender, urged by the conditions of
their task to regard duty as inexorable, confronted by the pitiless
destruction of the body, they were forced into a new recognition of
the spiritual values of life. In the common conventional use of the
term these men were not religious. There was much in their speech and
in their conduct which would outrage the standards of a narrow
pietism. Traditional creeds and forms of faith had scant authority for
them. But they had made their own a surer faith than lives in
creeds. It was expressed not in words but acts. They had freed their
souls from the tyrannies of time and the fear of death. They had
accomplished indeed that very emancipation of the soul which is the
essential evangel of all religions, which all religions urge on men,
but which few men really achieve, however earnestly they profess the
forms of pious faith.

This was the true Glory of the Trenches. They were the Calvaries of a
new redemption being wrought out for men by soiled unconscious
Christs. And, as from that ancient Calvary, with all its agony of
shame, torture and dereliction, there flowed a flood of light which
made a new dawn for the world, so from these obscure crucifixions
there would come to men a new revelation of the splendour of the human
soul, the true divinity that dwells in man, the God made manifest in
the flesh by acts of valour, heroism, and self-sacrifice which
transcend the instincts and promptings of the flesh, and bear witness
to the indestructible life of the spirit.

It is to express these thoughts and convictions that this book was
written. It is a record of things deeply felt, seen and
experienced--this, first of all and chiefly. The lesson of what is
recorded is incidental and implicit. It is left to the discovery of
the reader, and yet is so plainly indicated that he cannot fail to
discover it. We shall all see this war quite wrongly, and shall
interpret it by imperfect and base equivalents, if we see it only as a
human struggle for human ends. We shall err yet more miserably if all
our thoughts and sensations about it are drawn from its physical
horror, "the deformations of our common manhood" on the battlefield,
the hopeless waste and havoc of it all. We shall only view it in its
real perspective when we recognise the spiritual impulses which direct
it, and the strange spiritual efficacy that is in it to burn out the
deep-fibred cancer of doubt and decadence which has long threatened
civilisation with a slow corrupt death. Seventy-five years ago Mrs.
Browning, writing on _The Greek Christian Poets_, used a striking
sentence to which the condition of human thought to-day lends a new
emphasis. "We want," she said, "the touch of Christ's hand upon our
literature, as it touched other dead things--we want the sense of the
saturation of Christ's blood upon the souls of our poets that it may
cry through them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the Sphinx of our
humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Something of this has been
perceived in art when its glory was at the fullest." It is this glory
of divine sacrifice which is the Glory of the Trenches. It is because
the writer recognises this that he is able to walk undismayed among
things terrible and dismaying, and to expound agony into renovation.

W. J. DAWSON.

February, 1918.




IN HOSPITAL


   Hushed and happy whiteness,
     Miles on miles of cots,
   The glad contented brightness
     Where sunlight falls in spots.

   Sisters swift and saintly
     Seem to tread on grass;
   Like flowers stirring faintly,
     Heads turn to watch them pass.

   Beauty, blood, and sorrow,
     Blending in a trance--
   Eternity's to-morrow
     In this half-way house of France.

   Sounds of whispered talking,
     Laboured indrawn breath;
   Then like a young girl walking
     The dear familiar Death.




I

THE ROAD TO BLIGHTY


I am in hospital in London, lying between clean white sheets and
feeling, for the first time in months, clean all over. At the end of
the ward there is a swinging door; if I listen intently in the
intervals when the gramophone isn't playing, I can hear the sound of
bath-water running--running in a reckless kind of fashion as if it
didn't care how much was wasted. To me, so recently out of the
fighting and so short a time in Blighty, it seems the finest music in
the world. For the sheer luxury of the contrast I close my eyes
against the July sunlight and imagine myself back in one of those
narrow dug-outs where it isn't the thing to undress because the row
may start at any minute.

Out there in France we used to tell one another fairy-tales of how we
would spend the first year of life when war was ended. One man had a
baby whom he'd never seen; another a girl whom he was anxious to
marry. My dream was more prosaic, but no less ecstatic--it began and
ended with a large white bed and a large white bath. For the first
three hundred and sixty-five mornings after peace had been declared I
was to be wakened by the sound of my bath being filled; water was to
be so plentiful that I could tumble off to sleep again without