1914: Seeing the soldiers off
(D.H. Lawrence)
The reservists were leaving for London by the nine o'clock train. They were young men, some of them drunk. There was one bawling and brawling before the ticket window; there were two swaying on the steps of the subway shouting, and ending, "Let's go an' have another afore we go." There were a few women seeing off their sweethearts and brothers, but, on the whole, the reservist had been a lodger in the town and had only his own pals. One woman stood before the carriage window. She and her sweetheart were being very matter-of-fact, cheerful and bumptious over the parting.
"Well, so long!" she cried as the train began to move. "When you see 'em let 'em have it."
"Ay, no fear," shouted the man, and the train was gone, the man grinning.
I thought what it would really be like, "when he saw 'em".
Last autumn I followed the Bavarian army down the Isar valley and near the foot of the Alps. Then I could see what war would be like - an affair entirely of machines, with men attached to the machines as the subordinate part thereof, as the butt is the part of a rifle.
I remember standing on a little round hill one August afternoon. There was a beautiful blue sky, and white clouds from the mountains. On the crown of the little hill were three quick-firing guns, with the gunners behind. At the side, perched up on a tiny platform at the top of a high pair of steps, was an officer looking through a fixed spy-glass. A little further behind, lower down the hill, was a group of horses and soldiers.
Every moment came the hard, tearing, hideous noise of the German command from the officer perched aloft, giving the range to the guns; and then the sharp cry, "Fire!" There was a burst, something in the guns started back, the faintest breath of vapour disappeared. The shots had gone.
I watched, but I could not see where they had gone, nor what had been aimed at. Evidently they were directed against an enemy a mile and a half away, men unseen by any of the soldiers at the guns. Whether the shot they fired hit or missed, killed or did not touch, I and the gun-party did not know. Only the officer was shouting the range again, the guns were again starting back, we were again staring over the face of the green and dappled, inscrutable country into which the missiles sped unseen.
What work was there to do? Only mechanically to adjust the guns and fire the shot. What was there to feel? Only the unnatural suspense and suppression of serving a machine which, for ought we knew, was killing our fellow men, whilst we stood there, blind, without knowledge or participation, subordinate to the cold machine. This was the glamour and the glory of the war: blue sky overhead and living green country all around, but we, amid it all, a part in some iron insensate will, our flesh and blood, our soul and intelligence shed away, and all that remained of us a cold, metallic adherence to an iron machine. There was neither ferocity nor joy nor exhilaration nor even quick fear: only a mechanical, expressionless movement.
And this is how the gunner would "let 'em have it". He would mechanically move a certain apparatus when he heard a certain shout. Of the result he would see and know nothing. He had nothing to do with it.
And I remember a captain of the bersaglieri who talked to me in the train in Italy when he had come back from Tripoli. The Italian soldier, he said, was the finest soldier in the world at a rush. But - and he spoke with a certain horror that cramped his voice - when it came to lying there under the Snyder fire you had to stand behind them with a revolver. And I saw he could not get beyond the agony of this.
"Well," I said, "that is because they cannot feel themselves parts of a machine. They have all the old natural courage, when one rushes at one's enemy. But it is unnatural to them to lie still under machine-fire. It is unnatural to anybody. War with machines, and the machine predominant, is too unnatural for an Italian. It is a wicked thing a machine, and your Italians are too naturally good. They will do anything to get away from it. Let us see our enemy and go for him. But we cannot endure this taking death out of machines, and giving death out of machines, our blood cold, without any enemy to rise against."
It is a war of artillery, a war of machines, and men no more than the subjective material of the machine.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnIRnNtZ1A5akloTW8
