‘You took me into your home after I got back from the war. Enid and yourself were the angels who saved my life. You provided me with a room in your peaceful Lincolnshire house where I could store my books and assemble my equipment — by which I still contrived to be in two places at once, often to the distress of occasional strangers who stumbled on me while I was at work.
‘The state of being in two places at once meant that while my body was fixed to the radio as if I were on a foundering ship and trying to make my SOS heard before the water drowned me, my spirit was out in space among the stars searching for the word of God. Would the new Book of Genesis tap its way like bird noises into my brain from outer space? I waited avidly for it, but it never came — not at least in the way I expected. I learned Hebrew in case it appeared, for it was hard to believe that God would need to change. His language.
‘It is now midnight, and a ship’s hooter is calling from the harbour. In the morning Dawley gets on the plane for London, and he’ll take this letter. Before he does I will talk to you about Revolution and War, matters in which I have always had a profound interest. So I must try to make myself clear, to be in one mind, at one place, at the same time.
‘Revolution and War have absorbed and obsessed you. The decaying components of the brain and body won’t wait, so I write quickly. Revolution means War, and we are living people, all of us at this table, so how can we speak the words War and Life in the same breath? Listen to me. Don’t despair. Don’t condemn me. I am innocent, therefore I will kill myself. Think deeply. Someone is shouting from the street in Spanish.
‘If War were a means of preserving life there would be no justification for this letter. But War is a method of acquiring more property, and killing in order to get that property. It is only another way of greed and death. It is not War however if a man has to struggle to save his family or his home — or even himself from imminent destruction. That is self-preservation. In the same holy language, a man who has nothing has a right and a duty to persuade he who has much to share his excess. Can the Prodigal Son become the Good Samaritan?
‘It is easy to keep a sense of reality, being so close to my earthly death. Self-preservation means individuals, small groups, tribes at most, a small country perhaps. War, which is organised aggression, needs the resources of a nation and religion to sustain it. Nearly everyone admits this, but are glad nothing can be done about it. We are lazy, and too close to the earth. The men who weild the sword or fire the gun don’t get rich. They are hired labourers, because armies maintain their hierarchies and caste structures in order to preserve themselves for future robberies. Those at the top get everything, while those at the bottom receive nothing.
‘We know about the vicious war of aggression which calls itself defence, but educated people who should know better connive in this assassination of language so that robbery and murder can begin. The “involvements” in Africa and Asia are terrible for those deliberate victims stricken by these “defenders” from technologically superior nations.
‘Noted military writers have commented that War is a continuation of life by other means. It is a conceit as old as Empedocles, but death and maiming of the young, energetic and talented is an insult to life.
‘If the dead could speak we would know more about life. Would we know more about the nature of War from those who died by it? Those who do not want to die can say that War is evil. Coward is the most abominable word ever invented. Those who have died are the only ones who have a right to express an opinion. Perhaps they would say that death is good because they have already achieved it, and thus got over the dread of it. But the word “evil” may well sound hollow in such ears, and something far stronger would be spoken by them, because they have nostalgic memories of life when it was good, full of the love and peace which God intended they should have.
‘But only the living can speak for the dead, and who of the living can rend the imagination to the extent of telling us what death is like? The act of dying has been many times described, but can anyone make real and pertinent the non-sensation of being actually dead? I am dead, but I cannot do it.
‘Until the dead have spoken, those who are living may still find some among them who will say there is virtue in War, who will give out that there is pleasure and excitement in it, talk about the law of the jungle, and the survival of the fittest. There are poverty-stricken spirits who believe that to be a member of a diabolical army dedicated to the destruction of life and property will enrich themselves and their lives. They are always less poverty-stricken than the people they are about to destroy. The people they wish to destroy are nearly always spiritually richer. After they have destroyed them the aggressors can only be spiritually poorer themselves, too spiritually denuded in fact to realise it.
‘Show me a patriot, and I will show you a monster of the human race. Patriotism is akin to sex in the head, a sort of spiritual pornography. A patriot ends by killing children, and lives to an honourable old age. He mixes back into society like a fish in water, and society accepts him willingly. I read English newspapers here, and notice how it is rightly deplored when an unfortunate man is knocked on the head in the street for his money and dies from it. The newspapers make an outcry and call for the criminal to be hanged. Yet when the crew of a bomber kills men, women and children, they keep silent or try to justify it. Governments who do not condemn these atrocities are composed of bandits and butchers. The air-crews are pushbutton slaughterers from the stratosphere, who murder in my name. I have never wanted to hurt anyone. Each bomb has my name on it, but if I am dead it won’t have, because my name will no longer exist. My guilt is expunged, by suicide. Society has given me no other way.
‘I think of Richard and Adam working over their theories of insurrection, sketching out timetables for a coup d’état, pinpointing the logic and hopes of Revolution. These are not fantasies. You would have them real. But Civil War is the same as any other war, its motives similar because the end result is death and an exchange of property. A country may fight for self-preservation, to keep out the robbers and butchers, but for no other reason.
‘But I took part for many years in your discussions, and my motive was that of revenge against British officers who betrayed me to the Japanese for starting a left-wing news sheet when I was a prisoner in Singapore. For their action they were rewarded by no longer having to do labouring work with their men.
‘So my revolutionary fervour arose from a desire for vengeance — to overthrow that system which willingly betrayed me for so little. But revenge belongs to God alone.’
‘I’m thinking slowly, so have the patience to hear my sermon. Revolution is a holy cause, and the pursuit of it must go on. But without a sense of God and goodness and justice Revolution is bound to fail. Revolution always has, and always will, only come as an act of God, or after a series of circumstances which must be considered acts of God because no single group of men could have brought them about.
‘But still one must train for it like a high priest in his or her apprenticeship. God desires this. Train and purify yourselves for it. Imbue yourselves with skill, patience, and faith, and goodness of heart. By regarding Revolution as religious more than political you can never be robbed of your faith by the shallow and insipid world. There is no such thing as a God that failed. Only you fail. The transient world lives in a dream. It lies on the edge of nightmare yet rarely tips into it — though this century of tears isn’t over yet. Only good can negate evil.