War and Love/Foreword
FOREWORD
To F. S. Flint:
I would like to dedicate this little book to you since, among my friends, you will I think be most likely to understand, through similar experiences, the moods it attempts to express.
Like "Images" this little book comes out of a conflict, but whereas in the former the conflict was of the spirit here it is of the flesh. "Images" consisted of short-hand notes, as it were, to illustrate the moods of a spirit torn between the beauty one imagines and the ugliness that is thrust upon one. The conclusion—if any—that I wanted drawn was a kind of tolerance, an affection for "carnal wisdom" as well as for "divine wisdom." I don't think I succeeded; the matter was not interesting to most readers and the manner—more or less novel at the time—repelled many who might otherwise have been interested.
Here I have written less for myself and you and others who are interested in subtleties and more for the kind of men I lived with in camp and in the line. (That they did not understand very much is a matter for cheerful acceptance.) Perhaps I have lost something by this; but you must know that, in intention at least, this is a book by a common soldier for common soldiers.
Just now I spoke of conflict; I did not mean war in its universal or journalistic sense but in its innpingement upon the individual. These notations of moods attempt to express that conflict between the delight of the flesh, which we call love or passion, and that agony of the flesh which is known only to the infantrymen of the line.
Even you may feel that these notes on war are overstrained, morbidly self-conscious, petulant perhaps. That may be, but (taking into account all enthusiasms and devotions) I affirm that they represent to some degree the often inarticulate feelings of the ordinary civilized man thrust suddenly into these extraordinary and hellish circumstances—feelings of bewilderment, bitterness, dumb revolt and rather piteous weakness. Poor human flesh is so easily rent by the shattering of explosive and the jagged shear of metal. Those of us who have seen it will never be quite happy again.
You may feel also an almost exaggerated passion or sensualism in the second part of the book. That may be, but it expresses the soldier's mood; a reckless and disregard of rules for conduct, a yearning of the flesh, a wild grasping at life.
I think I have told you that when I came back from France last year I was quite overwhelmed by the beauty there seemed to be in women's faces. Well, can you understand that after those endless days of mud and destruction and racked nerves the body is wrought up to such an intensity that the passion of love becomes almost unendurable in its piercing beauty?
After the war if we are both still alive—which seems highly improbable—we shall have much to talk of and this little book will be a sort of memoir of the last two years, rather poignant to me and a little pathetic in that it falls so short of what it attempts. The army is not an ideal environment for literature.
Yours ever,
Richard Aldington
February, 1918