And We Go On Read Online Free PDF Page A

is closer to Siegfried Sassoon than to any other writer in the English tradition. In a Hobbesean world of war where life reverts to its primordial state – “nasty, brutish and short” – Bird, like Sassoon, is obliged to lead two lives simultaneously. Sassoon, at the end of Sherston’s Progress (1936), comes to realize that the soldier-writer “really needs two lives; one for experiencing and another for thinking it over. Knowing that I need two lives and am only allowed one, I do my best to lead two lives” (104). In fact, “Siegfried had always coped,” as Pat Barker remarks in her Great War novel The Eye in the Door (1993), “by being two people: the anti-war poet and pacifist; the bloodthirsty, efficient company commander” (233). Bird’s work, like Sassoon’s, is made from the same dichotomies: a keen eye for beauty, whether in a sunset or a reflecting pool reeking of death, and a sharp eye, focused on the instinct for survival, on night patrol through enemy territory. These give Bird’s writing a psychological and ideological complexity mostly lacking in All Quiet and in Generals, which are both founded on pretence – Remarque’s private pretence of having been a true veteran of combat, and Harrison’s outright lie that Canadians had committed a war crime at Amiens to revenge a hospital ship that had been sunk by Germans for carrying munitions. The “judgment” meted out by Canadian troops was not without cause – the hospitalship had not carried munitions and the “surrendering” foe at Amiens had in fact led the 14th Battalion, in which Harrison served, into a deadly ambush in which they responded by annihilating the “surrendering” Germans to a man.
    Contrary to Bird and Sassoon, Remarque and Harrison made the dehumanization and the bestializing of men at war central to their work. In Generals, to take a single example: “We fight among ourselves” when the rations arrive: “Cleary is sharing it out. Broadbent suspects that his piece is smaller than the rest. An oath is spat out … In a moment they are at each other’s throats like hungry, snarling animals … Cleary wipes the blood from his face. He scowls and holds this hunk of bread in his hands like an animal” (49–50). By contrast, Bird sees an inherent dignity in men who, as if by some sixth sense, glimpse their deaths, and yet respond not as victims but as seers and visionaries, even when, “White-faced, unsmiling, filled with a strange courage, they greeted that which waited them” (4). A man named Freddy is the first of Bird’s comrades to dream of “a woman in white” passing through the wall of their tent and pointing, he said, “‘at you, and you, and you.’ He jerked a thumb toward six of the men who were in their blankets. ‘And I know,’ he went on, ‘that I’m going to get mine – I’ll never see Canada again’” (6). The truth of Freddy’s premonition is soon confirmed at the Battle of Vimy Ridge. In the moment, Bird is enough of a rationalist to say, “Long after all the others were snoring I lay there in the dark and thought about Freddy’s dream. Was there anything in dreams? Why had he seemed so certain?” (4). Later on, a man named Gordon, who “was quiet, thoughtful, kind in manner” insisted that he was “going to his death … and would meet it like a soldier, and there was that in his voice that told me any argument of mine would be futile. My skin was pricked with goose flesh as he talked” (74).
    At least eight times in And We Go On , privates and officers approach Bird to take their leave of him before they die. Perhaps the most interesting of these is the atheist Christensen who has always refused to go on church parade and is “crimed” for it. All the same, he tells Will of his premonitions of death just