Blasting and Bomardiering

by Wyndham Lewis

  'I could hairrdly squeeze oot o' the cairage cause o' them!' he said, 'I went doon the platforrm to get a wee hauf. When I came back I didn't have to luk for me cairage. The whole of the blamed postal office was collected in front of it.'

  The Yorkshireman felt it advisable here to put in a plea for discrimination.

  'Yes, when the family comes to see you off, well—your family—'

  'That's different, but you should ha' seen those bloomin' post office offeeshuls,' persisted the Scot.

  They none of them doubted that the mobilization meant war. The 'Kayser' had made the war, of course. In these simple minds that German Mars, with his imperial helmet, stood delivering Ultimatums. He'd 'cop it this time right enough, the bastard' more than he bargained for.

  King's Cross was reached—more troops, of course, at this great terminus.

  LONDON

  A giant canvas by Frith. Or something like a century old print, the perpetual morning of the romantic Coaching highway, fresh and conventional, occurred to Cantleman as he stepped out upon the King's Cross platform. Life had already gone back a century. Everything was become historical—the past had returned. Romance had oozed up and steeped everything in its glamours. Also this was a People's World once more, racy, rich and turbulent.

  Cantleman was enthusiastic. Like the others he did not question the credentials of this miracle at first. Soldiers and sailors, an army of porters, rushed and jostled. A big German with scarred face came down from the big gates, looking for his luggage. Acid theatrical concentration behind his glasses. He was another description of reservist.

  Cantleman went to his rooms. After a wash he went out to look round and sample the intoxication of this colossal event. He went about in his usual solitary fashion, drifting with the crowd. He enjoyed its enormous depths. The Hippodrome was passed on the other side. He saboted the Bomb Shop, where his bombs sold well. Opposite Crosse and Blackwells he crossed the road, abreast of the Soho Distillery, he went in. The saloon-bar was not very full. Two horse-guards, standing at attention, cane protruding back and front, right elbow up, drained two half pint mugs of 'Four-alf', exchanged a wooden-soldier's painted glance, without moving their lips within their strapped-down jaws, reversed sur place, jingling their spurs, and marched out in step, watched by the customers. When they had passed out of sight the other customers looked at each other.

  'Fine young fellows!' said one man.

  'I suppose they'll be having to stand by pretty soon now,' said the second.

  'Ah! I shouldn't be surprised' said the first. 'Looks like it don't it?'

  Cantleman sat in silence, drank his Worthington and returned to the Crowd. At Oxford Circus the newspapers were bellowing. He bought a paper. The news-headings that animated the Crowd animated him. The news-sheets were full of gathering climaxes.

  War came heavily on with a resolution no one ever credited it with. The unbelievable was going to happen. The Crowd was still blind, with a first pup-like intensity.

  The 'great historical event' is always hatching; the Crowd in its habitual infantile sleep. Then the appointed hand releases the clutch, the 'great event' is set in motion: the crowd rises to meet the crash half awake and struggling, with voluptuous spasms. It is the Rape of the Crowd.

  Every acquaintance Cantleman met was a new person. The only possibility of renewal for the individual is into this temporary Death and Resurrection of the Crowd, it appears. The war was like a great new fashion. Cantleman conformed. He became a man of fashion. But he was cold in the midst of the Melee. In the first days he experienced nothing but a penetrating interest in all that was taking place. His detachment was complete and his attention was directed everywhere. His movements resembled those of a freelance cinema-operator.

  CHAPTER IV

  The War-Crowds, 1914

  THE CROWD

  LONDON, JULY, 1914

  Men drift in thrilling masses past the Admiralty, cold night tide. Their throng creeps round corners, breaks faintly here and there up against a railing barring from possible sights. Local embullience and thickening: some madman disturbing their depths with baffling and recondite noise.

  The police with distant icy contempt herd London. They shift it in lumps, passim, touching and shaping it with heavy delicate professional fingers. Their attitude suggests that these universal crowds are out for some new vague Suffrage—which they may, but only after interminable battles, be accorded.

  Is this opposition correct? In ponderous masses they prowl, with excited hearts. Are the Crowds then female? The police at all events handle them with a professional contempt of their excited violence, cold in their helmets.—Some tiny grain of suffrage will perhaps be thrown to the millions in the street. Or taken away.

  The police are contemptuous, cold and disagreeable, however. 1

  Already the newspapers smell carrion. They allow themselves the giant type reserved for great catastrophes. They know when they are on a good thing, and it is a good thing they are on.

  Prussia should be the darling of the Press. The theatrical instinct of the New Germany has saved the Crowd from breaking up for a third of a century. It has kept men in crowds,

  enslaving them to the feminine entity of their meaningless numbers. Bang! Bang! Ultimatum to you! Ultimatum to you! Ultimatum to you! ULTIMATUM! From an evening paper: July —.

  'The outlook has become far more grave during the afternoon. Germany's attitude causes considerable uneasiness. She seems to be throwing obstacles in the way.—The German ambassador in Vienna has telegraphed to his government, etc.'

  Germany, the sinister brigand of latter-day Europe, 'mauvais voisin' for the little French bourgeois-reservist, remains silent and ominously unhelpful in her armoured cave across the Rhine.

  Do all these idiots really mean—?! An is it possible! from Cantleman. To which there is only one answer. YES!

  The Crowd, that first mobilization of a country, now is formed in London. It is established with all its vague but profound organs au grand complet. Every night it serpentines in thick well-nourished coils, all over the city, in tropic degusta-tion of news.

  The individual and the Crowd. Peace and War.—Man's solitude and Man's Peace. Man's community, and Row—or war.

  Cantleman sees another analogy, to express the meaning of this Crowd. The Bachelor and the Husband Crowd. How about that? The married man as the symbol of the Crowd!—Is it not his function to bring one into being? To create one in the bowels of his wife? At the altar he embraces Death, just as the crowd does, who assembles to shout WAR!

  So periodically we shed our individual skin, or are apt to, and are purged in big being.—An empty throb.

  Men resist death with horror, it is true, when their time comes. But death is only a form of Crowd. It is a similar surrender. Does not the Crowd in life spell death, when most intensely marshalled? The Crowd is an immense anaesthetic towards death, such is its immemorial function.

  A fine dust of extinction, a grain or two for each man, is scattered in any crowd like these black London war-crowds. Their pace is so mournful. Wars begin with this huge indefinite interment in the cities.

  For days now wherever you are you hear a sound like a very harsh perpetual voice of a shell. If you put W before it, it always makes War. It is the crowd cheering everywhere. Even weeks afterwards, when the Crowd has served its turn and been dissolved, those living in the town's heart will seem to hear this noise.

  Cantleman's crowd-experiments began at once. He moved immediately to the centre of London—he dropped out of his taxicab, at hazard—rapping on the window for it to stop where the crowd seemed densest and stupidest.

  For some hours he moved forward at a snail's pace. The night came on. He allowed himself to be carried by the crowd. He offered himself to its emotion, which saturated him at length. When it had sunk in, he examined it. Apparently it was sluggish electricity. That was all. As such it had no meaning, beyond what the power of a great body of water has, for instance. It conduct
ed nowhere: it was aimlessly flowing through these torpid coils. The human cables had been disposed no doubt by skilful brains : they might be admirable. But not the electricity.

  However, human messages passed up and down. He interpreted the messages. Like the spirit-writing of the planchette pencil, they were exceedingly stupid.

  He went aside into a Neapolitan cafe, which was empty. The crowd passed slowly in front of the door. Taking his note-book from his pocket, he wrote in large letters in the left hand top corner of the empty page.

  An Experiment with a Crowd

  What was the experiment to be? Well, he would not only mix with the crowd, he would train himself to act its mood, so that he could persuade its emotion to enter him properly. There he could store it, to some extent. Then he would, from time to time, hasten outside it. In isolation, he would examine himself in the Crowd-mood.

  This experiment would require a great deal of suppleness, needless to say. He went outside into the crowd again. He sank like a diver. He disposed his body in a certain way, douched heavily along, fixed his eyes ahead of him. Soon he had become an entranced medium, or the next thing to it.

  Then he began to think of things very remote from the herd. There was a bogus countess who was eager to finance a review. He was to be editor. Bogus countesses were a sore trial.

  He proceeded to the office of this paper-to-be : he prepared his first number: he composed his prospectus: he defined his policy.

  Suddenly he experienced a distinct and he believed authentic shock. It could only come from the crowd! Evidently he had penetrated its mind—the cerebration of this jelly-fish! Hence the sting! He had received his first novel sensation. What was it exactly—could he define it? Well, it seemed to be that he was a married man.

  Unquestionably he possessed, and with extreme suddeness at that, that married feeling. He had never had it before—so he knew it must be genuine. Immediately he withdrew from the crowd. There was a public house, he entered the saloon bar, ordered a bitter beer, and, sitting at a table, produced his note-book once more.

  Experiment with a Crowd

  (1) Single man experiences sensation of married state. The Family. The Crowd.

  [question : Do married men (in crowds) feel single ? Feel like irresponsible married man. No sensation of children. Perhaps Crowd-matrix full of children?]

  He read this through. He was disappointed. He returned to the Crowd.

  For some time, as mechanically as possible, he tramped forward. He reached Charing Cross, then the end of the Strand. Trafalgar Square was an extensive human lake. He moved towards the Nelson Column. He might obtain a valuable note if he climbed up, upon the plinth. Hoarse voices were muttering all round him. He felt the pressure of the visible ghosts whom he was inviting to inscribe their ideas on the tabula rasa he offered them.

  Their messages continued to be extremely confused. He noticed he had lost ground, even. He felt more and more solitary. Then free—single; and so divorced.

  Upon the plinth of the Nelson Column he strained for a distinct sensation. It must this time be distinct. Nothing came at all. He strained again. He felt as detached as the stone Nelson. What a change from Trafalgar! he thought. What a change! Lady Hamilton floated into his mind. She had scent upon her limbs, which were sheathed in tight-fitting bathing drawers. She was going for a dip. She was Britannia. A wave slapped her, roguishly. Elle faisait le culbute. Immediately a sensation occurred. Cantleman produced his notebook.

  Experiment with a Crowd

  (2) A sensation of immediate bawdiness occurs, in contact with Nelson. 'England expects every man to'—yes, what? To sleep with Lady Hamilton, apparently. Violets and brine. There's nothing else for it.

  (note.—Plutot par snobisme que par vice.)

  And the imperial votaress passed on,

  In maiden meditation, fancy free.

  I see her drying thighs, in a virginal pavilion.

  Nelson adjusts his blind eye to the keyhole.

  Cantleman descended from the plinth, and stood uncertainly gazing to North and South. He turned northwards and made his way round the drab circular fountain, on the sides of which couples squatted, up the shallow steps, over to where the bronze signs set in the granite plinth of the National Gallery by the government, provide a public test gauge. So to the right, to the northern bus-route. He was in St. Martin's Lane. He thought he felt something. Swiftly he withdrew into an Italian caf6, and yanked out his note-book.

  Experiment with a Crowd

  (3) The English Crowd is a. stupid dragon. It ought not to be allowed out alone! I have lain in it for hours together and have received no sensation worth noting. As Crowd it is a washout.

  (Postscript. Up, the King's Navy. Lord Nelson although on a column now like a gymnosophist, gave me my one sensation.—He had forgotten Trafalgar. He is now quite blind. He had retired into his needle. The wild ass stamps o'er his head but cannot break his sleep.)

  CHAPTER V

  The 'Author of Tarr'

  So much for Mr. Cantleman. Need I repeat that this hero of mine is not to be identified with me? But to some extent, in the fragments I have just quoted, you get the lowdown on the editor of Blast. That is why I used them.

  Remember that I wrote that in 1914. It was written on the spot. It was almost as contemporary as the notes jotted down by Cantleman in his cafes, into which he went aside, out of the Crowd, to report his sensations, as soon as he got one.

  You have read what Cantleman felt. Well, that is pretty near ' to what I felt.—Great interest. Great curiosity. But no identification of my personality with that collective Sensation. The war-crowds who roared approval of the declaration of war in 1914, were a jellyfish, in my judgement. For some they were a Great People in their wrath, roaring before the throne of the God of Justice, for the blood of the unrighteous. That was not my view of the matter.

  This 'Cantleman' fragment (which as I started by saying appeared in Blast) was entitled 'The Crowd-Master'. Deliberately autobiographical up to a point, it is the best possible material for an Autobiography: and what was meant by 'Crowdmaster' was that I was master of myself. Not of anybody else—that I have never wanted to be. I was master in the crowd, not master of the crowd. I moved freely and with satisfaction up and down its bloodstream, in strict, even arrogant, insulation from its demonic impulses.

  This I regarded as, in some sort, a triumph of mind over matter. It was a triumph (as I saw it then) of the individualist principle. I believed a great deal in the individual. And I still prefer him to his collective counterpart, though recognizing his shortcomings.

  Now you will probably see without my telling you what follows from all this. My attitude to War is complex. Per se, I neither hate it nor love it. War I only came to know gradually, it is true. War takes some getting to know. I know it intimately. And what's more, I know all about war's gestation and antecedents, and I have savoured its aftermaths. What I don't know about War is not worth knowing.

  When first I met War face to face I brought no moral judgements with me at all. I have never been able to regard war— modern war—as good or bad. Only supremely stupid.

  Certainly I understand that almost all wars are promoted and directed by knaves, for their own unpleasant ends, at the expense of fools, their cannonfodder. And certainly knaves are bad men, very bad men. But the greatest wickedness of all— if we much deal in moral values—is the perpetuation of foolishness which these carnivals of mass-murder involve.

  But now I will take up the narrative in my own person again. The War has started. That is the main point. I have shown you how it started, for me. The next step is to tell you what I did next. All Europe was at war and a bigger Blast than mine had rather taken the wind out of my sails.

  My health was impaired. It gave me a great deal of trouble. For a long time I lived at No. 4 Percy Street treating myself, sometimes in bed for ten days at a time. Percy Street is a short street off the Tottenham Court Road—it would be called Soho by a careless gui
de. It is principally noted for Stulik. There are other people in it, but he's the one who counts.

  Alcohol was an inadmissible indulgence in my poisoned state. But I had most of my meals next door, at the Eiffel Tower Restaurant. There the wines were good. Supposing myself on the way to recovering, I would have a bottle, perhaps, of one of Stulik's less celebrated marks. My symptoms would reappear. Then I would retire to the hospitable comfort of Mrs. Pierce's apartment, at No. 4. Captain Guy Baker, whose acquaintance I had just made in the restaurant next door, would bring me up newspapers and cigarettes, and we would curse together the micro-organism and all its works, discussing Mr. Churchill's escapades at Antwerp, and waggling our old school ties at each

  other, for we had been at the same school.

  During this peaceful period—war was all round us, but I was at peace, with my pestilential complaint—I wrote, practically, the whole of my first novel Tarr, which I was under contract to finish.

  The question as to whether immediately to attest or not, did not arise, therefore, as I could not have done so had I wished. Any violent movement or exertion redoubled the septacaemia. I had to get well first, before my King and Country could benefit by my martial intervention. Probably the micro-organisms saved my life.

  That I would 'join up' as soon as I was well I accepted as a matter of course, though I hoped that I might, without too much difficulty, obtain a commission. Later on, by the time I was fit, that was not so easy.

  Meanwhile, I had never done anything considerable in the art of writing—or of course in painting for that matter. I said to myself that if I was going to be killed in battle I should like first to finish this first book, so that the world might have a chance of judging what an artist it had lost. Under the circumstances a not inexcusable vanity.