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Nothing of Importance / A record of eight months at the front with a Welsh battalion, October, 1915, to June, 1916 cover

Nothing of Importance / A record of eight months at the front with a Welsh battalion, October, 1915, to June, 1916

Chapter 32: Transcriber’s Note:
By Bernard Adams
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About This Book

A first-person record of eight months at the front with a battalion during the First World War, blending vivid trench scenes—patrols, sniping, mines, working-parties, marches, billets—and the daily routines of officers and men with reflective passages on courage, comradeship, and the erosion of martial romance. The account alternates practical detail and quiet moral observation, tracing shifts from first impressions through combat, rest, and recovery, and concluding with the author's wounding. Maps and a portrait supplement the text as it aims to convey the lived experience and human costs of modern industrialized conflict.

There is only one sure way, I said at last. And again a clear conviction filled me. There is only one way to put an end to the arena. Pledges and treaties have failed; and force will fail. These things may bring peace for a time, but they cannot crush those glittering eyes. There is only one Man whose eyes have never glittered. Look at the palms of your hands, you, who have had a bullet through the middle of it! Did they not give you morphia to ease the pain? And did you not often cry out alone in the darkness in the terrible agony, that you did not care who won the war if only the pain would cease? Yet one Man there was who held out His hand upon the wood, while they knocked, knocked, knocked in the nail, every knock bringing a jarring, excruciating pain, every bit as bad as yours. And any moment His will-power could have weakened, and He could have saved Himself that awful pain. And then they nailed through the other hand: and then the feet. And as they lifted the Cross, all the weight came upon the pierced hands. And when He had tasted the vinegar He would not drink. And any moment He could have come down from the Cross: yet He so cared that love should win the war against evil, that He never wavered, His eyes never glittered. Do you want to put an end to the arena? Here is a Man to follow. In hoc signo vinces.

I stood up again, and stretched out my hands. And as I did so a memory came back vivid and strong. I remembered the night when I stood out on the hillside by Trafalgar Square, under the moon. And I remembered how I had felt a strength out of the pain, and even as the strength came a more unutterable weakness, the weakness of a man battering against a wall of steel. The sound of the relentless guns had mocked at me. Now as I stood on the lawn, I heard the long continuous vibration of the guns upon the Somme.

“You are War,” I said aloud. “This is your hour, the power of darkness. But the time will come when we shall follow the Man who has conquered your last weapon, death: and then your walls of steel will waver, cringe, and fall, melted away before the fire of LOVE.”

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND

Transcriber’s Note:

Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.