Blasting and Bomardiering

by Wyndham Lewis

  'Good morning, good morning' the General said, As we passed him one day as we went up the line. But the lads that he spoke to are most of them dead And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine. 'He's a cheery old sport!' muttered Harry to Jack.

  But he's done for them both with his plan of attack.

  That was too easy and obvious. It amazes me that so many people should accept that as satisfactory. The incompetent general was clearly such a very secondary thing compared with the incompetent, or unscrupulous, politician, that this conventional 'grouse' against the imperfect strategy of the military gentleman directing operations in the field seemed not only unintelligent but dangerously misleading. 'Harry and Jack' were killed, not by the General, but by the people, whoever they were, responsible for the war.

  Nor could I obtain much from cursing my mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, as Mr. Aldington or the Sitwells did. For it was not quite certain that we were not just as big fools as our not very farsighted forebears. There was not much sense in blaming the ancestors of the community to which I belonged for the murderous nonsense in which I found myself, up to the neck, it seemed to me.

  On the other hand, as it was not war per se that I objected to, I was not forgetful of the fact that most wars had been stupid, and had only benefited a handful of people. No one objects to being killed, if the society to which he belongs, and its institutions, are threatened, we can assume. But any intelligent man objects to being killed (or bankrupted) for nothing. That is insulting.

  Where was I then? If you have a little politics you will say, perhaps, is any society worth being killed, or ruined, for? Is the Sovereign State to be taken seriously? Are any merely national institutions so valuable, so morally or intellectually valid, that we should lay down our lives for them, as a matter of course?

  I could not answer that question by a mere yes or no. Naturally I can image a State that it would be your duty to die for. There are many principles also, which might find themselves incarnated in a State, which I personally consider matters of life and death. But whether the machine-age has left any State intact in such a way as to put men under a moral or emotional compulsion to die for it, is a matter I am unable to discuss. That would 'take us too far', as the valuable cliche has it.

  And too far I am not going upon those tortuous roads. This is a plain tale of mere surface events. I am not out to do more than limn the action. I am keeping out the pale cast of thought as far as possible.

  CHAPTER XIII

  Kamper makes Whoopee

  The officer who had replaced on No. 3 my wounded gun-partner looked round as I took him up to the guns and pronounced himself as agreeably surprised. He dropped into an easy patch. Three days, later, however, we had the worst shelling we had experienced. Our Mess was subterranean. Several of us were there doing some work on trench-maps. After the disturbance one by one we went out to the urinal. I was always the last in these processions—a question not of valour but superior sphincters or perhaps a cast-iron kidney.

  The atmosphere still somewhat electric, a telegram was brought down. It was to the effect that my mother was dangerously ill. It was her second attack of pneumonia since the outbreak of war and therefore more liable to have fatal consequences. I hurried back to England, on special leave, the War entirely banished from my consciousness by this threatened personal loss.

  She did not die then. She died from yet a third attack, in the great pneumonia epidemic which immediately followed the War, and which was undoubtedly the result of it. Consequently she was as well and truly killed by the military upheaval as if it had been shellfire and not pneumococci that did the trick. She was fifty years old and an extremely vigorous woman. And as far as my private feelings about war and all its works were concerned, this death affected me more than anything else. Parents who have lost the apples of their eyes in wars and who mourn them extremely, are apt to experience a hostile feeling thenceforth for the members of the nation which they hold responsible for their death : 'The Germans killed my son', they are liable, for instance, to observe: or 'the English'. I, sustaining a loss the other way round, had not the consolation of feeling a slight coldness for the Kaiser. Mine was, momentarily, a more abstract vendetta.

  The oxygen cylinders were still there when I reached England. But the danger-period was over. My leave was for this special pupose and the moment arrived to return to my battery. 'Why return to your battery?' It was Guy Baker who put this leading question. 'Listen. It's quite unnecessary.' I pricked up my ears. 'Why not paint a picture instead?' The old devil grinned invitingly at me. A poor joke, it seemed to me—but Baker had a big idea. 'All young artists have got cushy jobs,' he said 'except you, painting pictures of the war.' I had not heard of this. And he then unfolded to me the all-important facts, which led eventually to my entering the charmed circle of the Staff; not as a brasshat, but with a palette on my thumb.

  England's artists were being 'saved', by Canada of all countries, and by Lord Beaverbrook of all people. I mean of course that we do not associate the land of the 'Mounties' and of Montcalm with the fine arts, and Lord Beaverbrook I imagined fully occupied making and unmaking Governments and and Cabinets.

  I said that I 'saved' myself, a few pages back, but it was Guy Baker who called the taxi, forced me into it, drove me to the entrance of the Albany, Piccadilly, and insisted on my visiting P. K. Konody, the art-critic. Konody it was who was charged with the selection of the artists, or advised Lord Beaverbrook in the matter. I was reluctant to take this step at first. Konody had wanted to call a paper 'the Vortex', and I had forbidden this and told him it was only over my dead body he would employ the word 'Vortex', of which I considered I had a monopoly.

  Konody received me, almost literally, with open arms. When I asked him if he had among his artists an artillery-artist, to paint howitzers, he shouted no ! When I said I knew all about howitzers—how would it be for me to paint one—he screamed of course ! ! ! With his dramatic miteuropean accent he gave this suggestion such a rich Austrian welcome as no suggestion ever had before or since. Two days later I found myself in the presence of Lord Beaverbrook, in an office off Regent Street.

  And in his very much quieter way this genial Press Baron welcomed the idea too. And so it came about that I returned to the Front, this time to Vimy Ridge, as a painter-soldier, attached to the Corps-headquarter Staff of the Canadian Army.

  I have always considered Lord Beaverbrook the brightest of the Press Barons and he must have a very remarkable instinct for affairs, to have got rich so young, to have pushed politicians about just as he wanted to, and to have created far and away the best cruiserweight newspaper in England, the Evening Standard.

  Three feats; not the least of which is to run an original paper in England and to make it pay. He always showed towards me an extreme courtesy. On one occasion, during this period, he placed me upon his righthandside at luncheon at the Hyde Park Hotel, where he was being officially feted, so that I was sort of feted too. I suppose as I was the only person in Khaki that I was being the Unknown Soldier for the moment, but it was very jolly. He asked me I remember whether I would rather go round the world with Augustus John or with Orpen. We both agreed that the former experience would be more full of incident. He was very natural and amusing. We both seemed to have the same quiet tastes.

  So I got my Staff job, was seconded from the English Army and attached to Canadian War Records—an office created by Lord Beaverbrook for supplying the Dominion of Canada with a complete picture gallery of the War. But now came the longueurs of the War Office. Everything was settled except the seconding.

  In the War Office, where next I had to present myself, I saw a fierce little dugout Major who bounced and bristled when I mentioned pictures.—'To paint a picture!' he exclaimed. 'I've never heard of such a thing! Is that the way to win the war?' His bluster meant nothing. I refrained from pointing out that his own occupation was hardly calculated to put the Germans to flight.

  Through the
good offices of Lady Cunard, who was a great friend of the Quartermaster General—one of the three highest

  officers in the British Army—I obtained four successive exten- ' sions of leave while awaiting transfer. Why it could not be done quicker I have not the faintest idea. I suppose if there were lest red tape there'd be fewer jobs in the War Office. ..;

  For six weeks, or maybe more, I was in the society of Lady Cunard continuously and it was here that I had an opportunity of observing at first hand the less seamy side of the war— though of course by that time all England was one vast Heart- ^ break House. The saturnalia that accompanies such fevered
  There must have been people in England who understood ';v what was happening. Lord Lansdowne was one of them no -'j doubt. But I met none, and day after day I was amongst | politicians and members of the official class who were 'winning the war', on the 'Home Front'. Examining in retrospect the attitude of mind that was common to all those people, I can detect no consciousness of the national calamity that the War had, by that time, come to be. They were 'seeing it through', in what they regarded as the traditional English fashion. i

  Anybody, however, who has taken the trouble to observe fairly closely the attitude of these same classes of people—the clubman, the man of the so-called 'ruling class'—during the last few years (say 1933-37), will be in no way surprised at this strange obtuseness. For today they are busy committing themselves, and their country, all over again to the same unprofitable adventure. So much short-sightedness, so little ability to learn from even the most bitter experience, has to be seen to be believed.

  The major war that is at present in preparation (Great War No. 2) will finish what the last one began. The class that will be directly responsible for it cannot survive it: nor can the State—as a 'sovereign state', that is. With their eyes open, but rather dreamily and as if bewitched, they sign their own death-warrant. But they were the same then as they are now.

  Do you want me to say whether I think it will be a good thing or a bad thing, if all this society is swept away, in a second and even vaster conflagration? But really that is a thing that each man must decide for himself. What do you think? A stupid society, like a stupid man, is not of much good to itself or anybody else. There is always that. But here it is as an observer only that I am writing. All I can say is that the last time they didn't know what was happening to them, or to England. They were keeping a stiff upper lip, on the Home Front, and living very much for the moment and whatever consolations it might bring.

  As to the saturnalia, Kamper, the officer in command of our Jamaican Blacks, supplied me with a good deal of that. For he turned up in London too, on leave from the battery. And though the sphere of his activities was far removed from the worldly splendours of Mayfair, they resounded with the vital principle to such an extent, as sometimes to blot out, in memory, some polished happenings entirely. The piratic silhouette of Kamper jostles with those of Vice-regents and Ministers of State. I see him with great distinctness, a svelte Laocoon, in the toils of a conquest he had made, at the top of the basement stairs of an eating-house. It was his last night in London—the leave-train in the morning was to bear him away.

  'Don't make things too difficult, darling!' I heard Kamper breathe out in a maudlin undertone. Next moment there was a violet spasm—he had untied the lover's knot: the white snakes, by which his neck had been constricted, writhed in the air, and the woman abruptly disappeared into the basement.

  I have another vignette of this enjoyable colonial on the roof of the hotel in the small hours of the morning. Midway through his leave we had a Zeppelin raid. The sirens woke us.

  Standing at the foot of the stairs, I looked up at the sky and there were the searchlights converging upon a bright silver fish, which dropped egg after egg upon London, as one could hear from the big roaring bangs. But then came a deafening explosion. It was Kamper coming into action. Still bearing up beneath the White Man's burden—for one of the hotel domestics clung to him in delighted terror—his Norseman's

  o*

  head thrown up, his arm outstretched, he was taking aim at the Zeppelin. Up among the roofs the crashing reports reverberated quite dwarfing the anti-aircraft guns, the bombs and all the rest of the surrounding uproar. It was an unspeakably noisy weapon, which I am persuaded Kamper must have chosen for its bark rather than for its bite.

  Finally my seconding was an accomplished fact—all but one ceremony. I had to return to my battery, to report to my O.G. and be personally seconded by him. A postcard would have done just as well. But no; at the time of Malplaquet that was how it was done, and so this pointless displacement had to be gone through with. Once more I found myself in the officers' club at Poperinghe, and in due course back in my dank dugout.

  This episode was not without its grimness. The sensation of a desertion came back to me with redoubled force, more as regards the men than the officers. Each of my fellow officers naturally asked himself why in God's name he hadn't been taught to paint pictures. 'Some people have all the luck!' was the general attitude.

  Then too, the shelling did not stop. Obviously it should have stopped, to enable me to get peaceably through my ceremony of secondization. Destiny, I felt, might regard it as a joke in excellent taste to blow my head off, just as I was receiving my formal Godspeed from my O.G.

  I am never sure that there is not an Observer up above us, like the Observer in the sausage-balloon, but yet more advantageously placed : one who is quite capable of setting a battery on to one, and in a word, causing the fire to be more personal than otherwise it would be.

  If that is the case, and if he was watching me, he did not on that occasion molest me. The O.C. seconded me. How he knew how to do it I cannot imagine, as in civilian life he was probably a bank manager. But he said the magic words, and I saluted him for the last time. I turned my back with a sigh, half relief, half regret, upon the English Army. The squalid, insanitary, little rat-hole where I slept, beside the battered

 

  rivulet—with just a quiet bomb or two, no more, in the misty night, dropping sullenly in the ruins of Ypres—what is the claim that such places, such conditions, have upon one's desires, that no Ritz suite or castle-palace can compete with?

  Perhaps I am half a romantic. Half my mind was elated at the congenial prospect of twirling my brush once more and bringing to life upon the canvas a painted battery. But half my mind was forlorn as I said good-bye to my untidy little batman. I was like the heartless young squire bidding a last farewell to the simple village maid he has betrayed, beside the cottage gate. But my batman I am afraid would let the image down badly, if we pressed it too far, even if I could to some extent have sustained it.

  Once more upon the shores of England a little more seconding went on, and then I was finally dispatched to Canadian Corps Headquarters, upon the Vimy Ridge.—It was a very different ridge to the ridges I had been used to in the Salient.

  CHAPTER XIV

  The Booze Artist

  The Canadian Corps Headquarter Mess, and the Chateau where the war-artists were lodged, would be a book in itself and an extremely entertaining book too. All I can relate is the mere outline of the sort of thing it was.

  When I reported for duty, or put in an appearance—for formality was conspicuous by its absence—the Staff were not themselves. There was great tension. Everybody had a stern look, for something of extreme gravity had happend. There had been a leakage of whisky. What was far more serious, one of the most influential Mess servants was implicated.

  After lunch a council of war was held. I was present, as an onlooker. No one wanted to act, and yet Action was called for and that of a rather radical order. For the leakage had amounted
to bucketsful. Nearly half the headquarter's stock had vanished. Much as these men-of-action disliked Action, it was incumbent on them to be up and doing. So it was brusquely decided to call in the man to whom everything pointed as the culprit.

  'Send in Sergeant Shotspur!' ordered the senior officer.

  But Sergeant Shotspur was not far off and he forestalled this command by opening the door and stepping into the room. He had had his ear to the keyhole all along, that was quite clear. And from the expression on his face it was evident that Sergeant Shotspur was in no mood to be trifled with.

  Sergeant Shotspur took two paces forward, clicked his heels, saluted and glared at the assembled company. He glared not as a soldier glares, but as a lawyer glares: and one who is pretty sure of his case—whose brief-case is stuffed with cast-iron alibis.

  'You asked for me?' said Sergeant Shotspur. To say that the Headquarter Mess looked confused would be a fulsome understatement. They looked so uncomfortable that I felt sorry for them.

  These men were the best of fellows, a most likeable lot. But they were very awkwardly placed. And they had not the dour-ness of the Australians. The fact was that they were officers, but they were not 'gentlemen'—at least no more so than the sergeants and the Mess servants, and they had no ambition to be imitation toffs, as the English had. They held commissioned rank; but it was on such a rigid understanding that they should not throw their weight about, they enjoyed it under such awful democratic safeguards, that the only advantage it took with it was that they had the equivalent of much more money than their subordinates, not much more rank. Also they had a Sam Browne belt and the others hadn't.

  Often I have felt sorry for an English King, groaning under the weight of all the 'constitutional' safeguards that accompany his paradoxical rank—caged in by all the spectacular lack of power that doth hedge a King in England. For what's the use of being a King if you can't say bo to a goose without being put on the carpet by any jumped-up minister? But an officer in an Anglo-Saxon colonial army is in a not much better case.