The Glory of the Trenches | Page 3

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