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Selections from Charles Hamilton Sorley's Letters, 1914-1915 | |
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To A E Hutchinson, 10th August 1914, Cambridge
...But isn't all this bloody? I am full of mute and burning rage and annoyance and sulkiness about it.... ....I could wager that out of twelve million eventual combatants there aren't twelve who really want it. And, 'serving one's country' is so unpicturesque and unheroic when it comes to the point. Spending a year in a beastly Territorial camp guarding telegraph wires has nothing poetical about it: nor very useful as far as I can see. Besides the Germans are so nice; but I suppose the best thing that could happen to them would be their defeat.... To A J Hopkinson, October 1914, Shorncliffe ..it seems to me that Germany's only fault ..is a lack of real insight and sympathy with those who differ from her. We are not fighting a bully, but a bigot. They are a young nation and don't yet see that what they consider is being done for the good of the world may really being done for self-gratification - like X who, under pretence of informing the form, dropped into the habit of parading his own knowledge. X incidentally did the form a service by creating great amusement for it, and so is Germany incidentally doing the world a service (though not in the way it meant) by giving them something to live and die for, which no country but Germany had before. If the bigot conquers he will learn in time his mistaken methods (for it is only of the methods and not the goal of Germany that one can disapprove) - just as the early Christian bigots conquered by bigotry and grew larger in sympathy and tolerance after conquest. I regard the war as one between sisters, between Martha and Mary, the efficient and intolerant against the casual and sympathetic. Each side has a virtue for which it is fighting, and each that virtue's supplementary vice. And I hope that whatever the material result of the conflict, it will purge these two virtues of their vices, and efficiency and tolerance will no longer be incompatible. But I think that tolerance is the larger virtue of the two, and efficiency must be her servant. So I am quite glad to fight this rebellious servant. I n fact I look at it this way. Suppose my platoon were the world. Then my platoon-sergeant would represent efficiency and I would represent tolerance. And I always take the sternest measures to keep my platoon-sergeant in check! I fully appreciate the wisdom of the War Office when they put inefficient officers to rule sergeants.... To A E Hutchinson, 14 November 1914 ...England - I am sick of the sound of the word. In training to fight for England, I am training to fight for that deliberate hypocrisy, that terrible middle-class sloth of outlook and appalling 'imaginative indolence' that has marked us out from generation to generation. Goliath and Caiaphas - the Philistine and the Pharisee - pound these together and there you have Suburbia and Westminster and Fleet Street. And yet we have the impudence to write down Germany (who with all their bigotry are at least seekers) as 'Huns', because they are doing what every brave man ought to do and making experiments in morality. Not that I approve of the experiment in this particular case. Indeed I think that after the war all brave men will renounce their country and confess that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth. 'For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country.' But all these convictions are useless for me to state since I have not had the courage of them. What a worm one is under the cart-wheels - big clumsy careless lumbering cart-wheels - of public opinion. I might have been giving my mind to fight against Sloth and Stupidity: instead, I am giving my body (by a refinement of cowardice) to fight against the most enterprising nation in the world....... To A E Hutchinson, 25 January 1915, Shorncliffe War in England only means putting all the men of 'military age' in England into a state of routinal coma, preparatory to getting them killed. You are being given six months to become conventional: your peace thus made with God, you will be sent out and killed. At least, if you aren't killed, you'll come back so unfitted for any other job that you'll have to stay in the Army. I should like so much to kill whoever was primarily responsible for the war. The alarming sameness with which day passes day until this unnatural state of affairs is over is worse than any so-called atrocities; for people enjoy grief, the only unbearable thing is dullness...... ....We talk
of going out in March. I am positively looking forward to that event,
not in the brave British drummer-boy spirit, of course, but as a relief
from this boredom....
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Charles Hamilton Sorley |
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