As I see it, a carefully cultivated introduction of practices which hint at the extermination of the race is to be the means by which the German is to prevent us avenging those mounds of lime and mud which once were Britons.
The Fall of Rome
When in time I grasped the perfection of this demoniacal plan, it seemed to me that all the horrors of shells and gas and pestilence introduced by the Germans in their open warfare would have but a fraction of the effect in exterminating the manhood of Britain as the plan by which they have already destroyed the first 47,000.
As I have already said in these columns, it is a terrible thought to contemplate that the British Empire should fall as fell the great Empire of Rome, and the victor now, as then, should be the Hun.
The story of the contents of this book has opened my eyes, and the matter must not rest.
Rivers threw the page down. ‘If only German minds can conceive of this lasciviousness and only German bodies execute it, how on earth do the 47,000 manage to do it?’ He took off his glasses and swept his hand down across his eyes. ‘Sorry, I’m being donnish.’ He looked at Manning, noting the lines of strain around his eyes, the coarse tremor as he raised the cigarette to his mouth. For somebody like Manning, profoundly committed to living a double life, the revelation that both sides of his life were visible to unknown eyes must be like having the door to the innermost part of one’s identity smashed open. ‘Has anybody else been sent this?’
‘Ross. One or two others.’
‘Friends of Ross?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ross is a… quite a dangerous man to know.’
‘What can I do, Rivers? It’s not a recent friendship.’
Rivers sighed. ‘I don’t think you can do anything.’
Manning sat brooding. ‘I think it would help if I felt I could understand it. I mean, I can see the war’s going pretty badly and there are always going to be people who want scapegoats instead of reasons, but… Why this? I can see why people with German names get beaten up… or or interned. And conchies. I don’t approve, but I can understand it. I don’t understand this.’
‘I’m not sure I do. I think it’s the result of certain impulses rising to the surface in wartime, and having to be very formally disowned. Homosexuality, for instance. In war there’s this enormous glorification of love between men, and yet at the same time it arouses anxiety. Is it the right kind of love? Well, one way to make sure it’s the right kind is to make public disapproval of the other thing crystal clear. And then there’s pleasure in killing—’
Manning looked shocked. ‘I don’t know that —’
‘No, I meant civilians. Vicarious, but real nevertheless. And in the process sadistic impulses are aroused that would normally be repressed, and that also causes anxiety. So to put on a play by a known homosexual in which a woman kisses a man’s severed head…’
‘I talked about the trial to Jane. I said I thought the real target was Ross, and one or two others, and she said of course I did. Seeing — what was it? “Seeing his own sex as peripheral to the point at issue was a feat of mental agility of which no man is capable.”’
‘I look forward to meeting Mrs Manning one day.’
‘She says the the… sentimentality about the role women are playing — doing their bit and all that — really masks a kind of deep-rooted fear that they’re getting out of line. She thinks pillorying Maud Allan is actually a way of teaching them a lesson. Not just lesbians. All women. Just as Salome is presented as a strong woman by Wilde, and yet at the same time she has to be killed. I mean it is quite striking at the end when all the men fall on her and kill her.’
‘What do you think about that?’
‘I think it’s a bit naïve. I think it ignores Wilde’s identification with Salome. He isn’t saying women like this have to be destroyed. He’s saying people like me have to be destroyed. And how right he was. Is.’
This was all very well, Rivers thought, but Manning was ill, and it was not literary discussion that was going to cure him.
‘Do you think Spencer’s mad?’ Manning asked abruptly.
‘On the basis of his evidence, yes. Though whether he’ll be recognized as mad…’
‘It’s an odd contrast with Sassoon, isn’t it?’
Rivers looked surprised.
‘Spencer being feted like this. Sassoon says something perfectly sensible about the war, and he’s packed off to a mental hospital.’
Of course, Rivers thought, all the members of Robert Ross’s circle would know the story of Sassoon’s protest against the war, and the part he’d played in persuading Sassoon to go back.
Manning said, ‘I suppose I shouldn’t mention him?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’s a patient.’
‘He’s somebody we both know.’
‘Only he’s been on my mind lately. I was wondering if they’d have the nerve to send this to him. Or to anybody out there.’
‘I think the sort of mind that produces this can’t conceive of the possibility that any of “the 47,000” might be in France.’
So far Manning had found it impossible to talk about the war. Manning himself would have denied this. He would have said they talked about it all the time: strategy, tactics, war aims, the curiously inadequate response of civilian writers, the poems of Sassoon and Graves. Suddenly, Rivers thought he saw a way of beginning, very gently, to force the issue. ‘Are you familiar with the strict Freudian view of war neurosis?’ he asked. Manning, he knew, had read a certain amount of Freud.
‘I didn’t know there was one.’
‘Oh, yes. Basically, they believe the experience of an all-male environment, with a high level of emotional intensity, together with the experience of battle, arouses homosexual and sadistic impulses that are normally repressed. In vulnerable men — obviously those in whom the repressed desires are particularly strong — this leads to breakdown.’
‘Is that what you believe?’
Rivers shook his head. ‘I want to know what you think.’
‘I don’t know what makes other people break down. I don’t think sex had much to do with my breakdown.’ A slight smile. ‘But then I’m not a repressed homosexual.’
Rivers smiled back. ‘But you must have a… an instinctive reaction, that it’s possible, or it’s obvious nonsense, or —’
‘I’m just trying to think. Do you know Sassoon’s poem “The Kiss”?’
‘The one about the bayonet. Yes.’
‘I think that’s the strongest poem he’s ever written. You know, I’ve never served with him so I don’t know this from personal experience, but I’ve talked a lot to Robert Graves and he says the extent to which Sassoon contrives to be two totally different people at the Front is absolutely amazing. You know he’s a tremendously successful and bloodthirsty platoon commander, and yet at the same time, back in billets, out comes the notebook. Another anti-war poem. And the poem uses the experience of the platoon commander, but it never uses any of his attitudes. And yet for once, in that one poem, he gets both versions of himself in.’
Yes, Rivers thought. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see that.’
‘And of course it’s crawling with sexual ambiguities. But then I think it’s too easy to see that as a matter of personal… I don’t know what. The fact is the army’s attitude to the bayonet is pretty bloody ambiguous. You read the training manuals and they’re all going on about importance of close combat. Fair enough, but you get the impression there’s a value in it which is independent of whether it gains the objective or not. It’s proper war. Manly war. Not all this nonsense about machine-guns and shrapnel. And it’s reflected in the training. I mean, it’s one long stream of sexual innuendo. Stick him in the gooleys. No more little fritzes. If Sassoon had used language like that, he’d never have been published.’ Manning stopped abruptly. ‘You know I think I’ve lost the thread. No, that’s it, I was trying… I was trying to be honest and think whether I hated bayonet practice more because… because the body that the sack represents is one that I… come on, Rivers. Nice psychological term?’