And We Go On Read Online Free PDF

before the Battle of Amiens:
    â€œGood-bye, Bird,” he said. “I’m going to find out to-day which of us is right.”
    He and I had argued about the hereafter, and I had tried hard to convince him everything, even to a blade of grass, cried out that there was a God who governed creation. … “What’s got into you,” I said. “You’ll not get hit.”
    â€œI’ll be killed,” he said, smiling in a way that startled me. He didn’t seem the least frightened, but was matter-of-fact as if his leave had come through. “An hour ago,” he said, “something came to me. It was as if every sound in the world was stilled at once, as if there was nothing more for me to hear, and I knew what it meant. I’m not the least bit afraid, and I’ll be satisfied if it comes quick.” It was useless to try to console him, he didn’t want sympathy. Not one man who had mentioned the same thing to me had acted the same as he did. He almost seemed glad, and when I pointed out that, if he were right, there was some power beyond the visible that imparted information, he partially admitted it. (143)
    Even in the face of death, the atheist remains open to other possibilities. But the outcome is both unsettling and ennobling. When Bird sees Christensen “hit in the arm by a piece of shrapnel,” he tells him “you were wrong … You’re away for Blighty” (a word derived from Urdu, and long used by British soldiers in India to refer to home). To which Christensen replies, “By night I’ll be a corpse. Remember what I tell you” (148). The next day, their Sergeant-major comes to inquire of Bird, “Wasn’t it funny about Christensen?” Well back of the line, “a shell came, and he was killed by shrapnel. He was away back there and one would have thought him safe for Blighty” (150).
    While this is the most uncanny of the eight stories of premonitory deaths, each works to undermine the position of the “passivists,” or so-called “realists,” who claim, as even Owen had done in “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” that “these die as cattle.” For Bird, the truth is quite different: the war “drew from even dulled and uncouth natures a perception that was attributed to the mystic and supernal.” And it prompts him to one of his most fierce expressions of egalitarianism among the men: “the private in the trenches had other thoughts than of the flesh, had often finer vision and strength of soul than those who would fit him to their sordid, sensation-seeking fiction” (5).
    Bird sees himself and his fellows as actors in a great tragedy, one similar to that of the ancient Greeks: “Men glimpsed, or thought they glimpsed, that grim cross roads we all must pass. It was as if for them a voice had spoken, a hand beckoned them on. And at once there fell from them all frenzy and confusion” (4). Whether he realized it or not, such recognition is Aristotelian, describing a moment of anagnorisis , realization and acceptance of one’s fate, that ennobles dying heroes, whether in myth, on the stage, or at the Front. Bird’s vision is essentially tragic: both the worst and the best of which human life is capable is written on his pages in blood. Hence Bird’s anger, often palpable, at the “irrevocable insult” given by “passivists” to “those gallant men who lie in French or Belgian graves” (5). This sentiment is expressed far less aggressively at the end of another scene: “Privates in a dirty, wind-blown, rain-soaked tent, unshaven, strangers to each other … discussing topics that cause any man to sober. I think of Spike and that 7th man every time I read of the ‘sodden cattle’ of the dugouts” (44). Bird has an unwavering respect for the courage and dignity of men facing what they see as certain death.
    This respect explains