OPTIMIST You are quite right. After all, such men provide the most welcome proof of their indispensability by what they create. But apart from them, we do need war columnists and war correspondents; they are exempt from service at the front in order to—
GRUMBLER —whet other people’s appetite for it.
OPTIMIST In their own way they prove their worth as well as the military doctors who—
GRUMBLER —prove all the more unfit, the more people they declare fit for service, hence the more sure they are to save their own lives—
OPTIMIST —the more wounded they restore to life—
GRUMBLER —so that they can lose it again. While military assessors can count on saving their own lives by depriving healthy people of theirs.
OPTIMIST One shouldn’t generalize.
GRUMBLER You are allowed to do anything except generalize.
OPTIMIST The country needs soldiers, but it needs war correspondents too. After all, we’re at war, so they have to tell us about it.
GRUMBLER
So there’s a war on? That’s what we are told
by those revolting hacks who write reports
on what they’re feeling when they view the conflict.
Those nosey scribblers wouldn’t half deserve
a kicking from a warhorse thrashing out
with its hind legs. But those riding on top
invite the scum to join them at their table
and talk their tactics through. Was war too weak
to overcome the enemy within?
Scoops for his paper, cooked up at the front,
conceal war’s miseries behind his bland façade.
He’s indestructible — lives on — he’ll never serve.
Is there no arms drill for the rank and vile?
When there’s a war on, they can live in peace?
Good people go to war, the scum sit tight.
No need to lose their lives, for they can write.
(A file of grey-bearded recruits goes past.)
OPTIMIST Look, they’re enlisting.
GRUMBLER Not quite.
OPTIMIST What do you mean?
GRUMBLER Properly speaking, they’ve been compulsorily enlisted. The present participle “enlisting” would indicate that they’re doing it of their own free will, that’s why it has to be a past participle. So they are compulsorily enlisted. Soon they’ll be in the front line.
OPTIMIST Very well. So they are forced to go and fight.
GRUMBLER Quite right, they are forced. Universal conscription has turned mankind into a passive noun. Once men joined the forces, now they’re forced to join. Only in Germany have they gone a stage further.
OPTIMIST In what way?
GRUMBLER I saw a big poster in Karlsruhe which said: Let Soldiers Go! What’s more, it was over the entrance to the High Command.
OPTIMIST How is that possible, that’s revolution! How can the High Command in Karlsruhe—
GRUMBLER Well, they need clerks for their office and want civilians to apply, so that soldiers who still work in the office are freed up to go to the front. Hence “Let Soldiers Go!” Here we would say “Let Soldiers Join the Forces”, which conveys just enough free will. But I think the German poster achieves its goal in any case. For even if it doesn’t achieve its goal, the German military authorities know how to ensure the vacant clerical posts will be filled. There could only be a lack of applicants if all the possible candidates had already become soldiers of their own free will.
OPTIMIST Even an official announcement from the High Command in Karlsruhe doesn’t stop your eternal grumbling.
GRUMBLER As it happens, I saw another poster when I was over there, in a police station. Its text is still ringing in my ears:
Thrash the villains, drive them south,
Chase them into Etna’s mouth,
Let Vesuvius make them yell,
Sizzling in the jaws of hell!
Thrash them till they know they’re sunk,
Squeeze their guts out in a funk!
Have no mercy in your heart,
Traitors must be torn apart!
Dynamite each valley there,
Purge the perfidious perjurer.
Smash their skulls in, to a man,
Proud of the name “barbarian”!
OPTIMIST Other nations might do that sort of thing too.
GRUMBLER One shouldn’t generalize. But perhaps you’re right. Even the English might do it after they’ve had a few more years of conscription. Soon all nations will realize every valley is there to be dynamited. Except for one line: “Squeeze their guts out in a funk”—that has a certain local colour, don’t you think?
OPTIMIST A bit crude, that’s all. One shouldn’t generalize.
GRUMBLER One certainly shouldn’t. It wouldn’t occur to an Englishman, whether white or coloured.
OPTIMIST It’s only an isolated instance in Germany, too.
GRUMBLER But one only possible in Germany. And the fellow who coined it is sitting in some office and would jump if you burst a paper bag.
OPTIMIST Well, there you are—
GRUMBLER But the same fellow, when he gets to the front, is a passionate killer, twists his bayonet in a dying man, proudly tells the tale back home, and still jumps if you burst a paper bag.
OPTIMIST I don’t understand you. In war there are both good people and evil. You say yourself that the war has merely heightened the contrasts.
GRUMBLER Exactly, including that between you and me. In peacetime you were already an optimist, and now—
OPTIMIST In peacetime you were already a grumbler, and now—
GRUMBLER Now I even accuse clichés of murder.
OPTIMIST Well, why should the war have cured you of your idée fixe?
GRUMBLER Just so. It has even reinforced it. The great cause has made me more narrow-minded. I see those who are “compulsorily enlisted”, and feel that is an offence against language. There are bloodstained scraps of nature hanging from the barbed-wire entanglements.
OPTIMIST So you really want to enlist grammar in this war?
GRUMBLER No, that’s not it. I’m not interested in rules for their own sake, only in the meaning of the living whole. War makes language a matter of life and death. Look at what has happened. A commercial logo and a coat of arms are now indistinguishable. The pursuit of profit under a shop sign ends up as the pursuit of merit under insignia. It’s a mingling of the spheres, and the new world is a crueller one than the old, since its horrific new meaning is rendered even more horrific by the old forms it hasn’t been able to outgrow mentally. From nursery rhymes to flamethrowers! Paper to banner! Having once unsheathed the sword, we must now unleash mustard gas. And this is a cutthroat war, a war to the death.
OPTIMIST That’s beyond me. Let’s keep our feet on the ground. We mean business in this—
GRUMBLER Exactly, we mean — business!
OPTIMIST If the combatants were not pursuing an ideal, they would not go to war. It’s not a question of words. It’s because the peoples are pursuing ideals that they put themselves—
GRUMBLER Under the hammer!
OPTIMIST But you must surely acknowledge that the language of our military leaders is quite at variance with the trivial prose you despise in the world of business.
GRUMBLER Certainly, for the only connection their language reveals is with the world of show business. For instance, I read one divisional commander’s review of “… those who exhibited in the highest degree the heroism, death-defying bravery and self-sacrifice of which first-class troops are capable…” I’m sure the divisional commander had in mind the music-hall revues with those first-class troupes in which he frequently took such pleasure in peacetime. Business pure and simple comes into play more in the continuing confusion of signs and insignia.