Blasting and Bomardiering Read online

  So when the little knife of the doctor with his smallpox serum started to scrape their cuticles, they did an ignominous quit— they just closed their eyes and withdrew in a swoon from all this spectacle of suffering.

  But here was a new world beginning for this sheltered people and its 'free' institutions. They would have to get used to many things that the Nineteenth century Englishman would not have believed possible. I was present—I dimly recognized—at the passage of an entire people out of one system into another. I could not but, in consequence, discharge my question-marks in their bloodless faces, as these men lay there, put out of action so early in the day. And I of course was one of them, in this most awkward of fixes, shoulder to shoulder; I too was being translated from a relaxed system to a far more stringent one : I was experiencing my full share of perplexity at finding myself assisting at the assassination of Democracy: I put just as much value on my skin as they did on theirs, I was as exigent on the score of my privileges as an individual; I too was born to Habeas Corpus. I differed from my brothers-in-arms only in a scepticism regarding the reality of this Democracy which had bestowed upon me such a high opinion of my skin, and experienced an inability to accept the theory that I was making the world any more 'safe' by my present activities. Everything that I was doing seemed to me to be making it very much the reverse.

  There was another way in which we differed, I and my brothers-in-arms: namely, in what fundamentally was my attitude to 'militarism'. For I was less averse to Mars and all his works than they were. My aristocratic training accounted for this a little I suppose—the Army Class it had been my intention to enter as a schoolboy, my period as a student in Germany, the influence of a peculiarly martial father. The career of arms, at all events, as such, did not scandalize me. Perhaps I had a touch of the Junker, I do not know.

  I took no great interest in war: but that was nothing. Who was the king, surely a Teuton, who disliked war, because, he said, it was so bad for the army—undoing in a few weeks what had taken years of intensive parades to accomplish? How right that king was! If I had had my way we should have militarized ourselves out of all recognition—but never gone to war. Everyone would have been afraid anyway of going to war with such martial looking chaps.

  Somewhere Frederick Nietzsche—you may recall the name, he was a Hun philosopher who was a power-maniac, with bristling Polish moustaches—somewhere this Nietzsche describes his emotions of unquestioning response to the spectacle of martial power. A regiment of Prussian horse guards crashed past him, with all their cuirasses, drums and eagles—at the time he was a young doctor, 'doing his bit' in the Franco-Prussian War. Though not going so far as that perhaps, for after all I am not a Prussian, nevertheless things military do not outrage me.

  They do not throw me into pacifist tantrums, or bring to my lips a Huxleyish sneer. If I do not burst into a great mystical Yea! on the pattern of that fire-eating Prussian professor, I yet do not fall into the furibund Nay! of the Anglosaxon man of Peace (of Collective Peace). Had I been at Rolica in 1808, where the English wore for the last time their pigtails and powder, the smell of guncotton and the stains of rice-powder upon the scarlet tunics would have appeared as natural to me as the nails on our fingers and the battle of our phagocytes in the blood : I should not have examined too closely the 'intelligence' of our behaviour. Indeed it would never have occurred to me to suppose that it was intelligent: for if I had examined it, I should probably have concluded that since this was an impossibly clumsy and wrong-headed universe, public brawls, in powder and pigtails, were no worse than private brawls, in which words and 'mental cruelty' take the place of round-shot and physical violence.

  At this training camp in Dorsetshire I behaved in all respects like other Bombardiers. The evenings were passed bombardiering in the public bars, or secret upstairs parlours, of the neighbouring port. One of my bottle-companions was the sergeant-major to whom I have already had occasion to refer. In the company of this dignitary and that of the 'quarter-bloke', I would march down into our seaport most nights after supper to the 'house' favoured by the S.M. I remember that on one occasion, this having happened as usual, we were almost trapped in the police-raid.

  Sitting upstairs in the seclusion of a curtained parlour, a pianola pedalling away for us, we sang drunkenly in mawkish ragtime. The 'quarter-bloke', his tunic open at the neck, his hair ruffled by the fingers of a pub houri, periodically turned to me, as we sat side by side on the sofa and exclaimed 'I say, do you think we shall win!' or 'I say, what a gime! Eh? What a gime!' And I would turn to the sergeant-major and hiss: T say Sergeant-Major. Do you think we shall win?' At which the sergeant-major would reply, 'I think so, don't youV And I would answer, 'I feel we shall. I feel we shall!'

  But the S.M. had his rank to think about. He was not a bird to be caught in an ordinary police trap. Springing up, after cocking his ear for a moment, he was out of the door like a startled stoat. 'Jump to it! It's the M.P.s! Police!' he called back to us as he disappeared. Not many paces behind him I stumbled out into the pitch-black yard at the rear of the public house, and at once fell headlong over the prostrate bodies of a sailor and one of the daughters of the house. They lay parallel with the door. All the nice girls love a tar!—but I cursed and was scrambling to my feet when the quarter-bloke came cannonading over the handyman and his momentary consort, horridly indifferent to the military 'busies' blasting their way into the inner premises. Down I went a seond time. When the quarter-bloke and myself emerged in the dark and empty street, the S.M. was half-down it, his cane glued into his armpit, his rather stiff straddle taking him off into safety with commendable celerity. When we caught him up, he looked grave. The threat to his rank had scared and sobered him. Then, hardly recovered from this, when we reached the bridge across the estuary, a searchlight burst out of the street we had just left. The S.M. ordered us to take cover, and we all went over the side of the bridge as one man, and crouched out of sight till the car had passed. It was driven by a soldier and contained officers: good little S.M.'s, as all other ranks short of the starry commissioned ones, should have been in bed and asleep. Another narrow squeak for the S.M. crown on his sleeve. We entered the camp as usual, not by the gate where a sentry stood, but by a gap in the hedge. This was the recognized backdoor and invariably used by those out after hours.

  After the departure for France of these earliest boon companions I continued to bellow in the field where the recruits were instructed in the elements of infantry drill. Then at last I was told that I had been recommended for a commission and left for the Field Artillery Cadet School at Exeter.

  We did not correspond, the S.M. and myself: we were ships that passed in the night. But later on in France I met a member of my original unit. My attachment to this human group was manifested by my meticulous enquiries regarding the fate of its individual members. It was then that I heard that the Sergeant

  Major had been killed within a fortnight of his arrival at the Front.

  It appeared that the S.M. had died giving utterance to a torrent of expletives. The O.C. Battery was the principal target for his dying tirade; for they had been in disagreement regarding the site selected for the battery-position, which the S.M. regarded as too exposed. It was the usual battle between the old army, represented by the S.M., and the transmogrified bank manager, the temporary officer and gentleman, who was in command of the unit. The pig-headed incompetence of this litde jumped-up amateur had cost the life of a better man than himself, such was the burden of my old friend's swan-song. The ill-conceived position chosen, especially for the dugouts, had accounted for a direct hit being registered with such promptitude upon the sumptuous rat-hole of the S.M., which, in spite of all the logs and sand-bags heaped on it under the direction of its occupant, could not withstand an ordinary 5.9, much less an H.E. or high-explosive shell.

  This man was in reality a quartermaster in the old army, in appearance more like a prosperous tradesman than a warrior. He was a tall, corpulent man, with a slig
ht stoop. On more than one occasion he remarked to me: T can tell you one thing, this child doesn't intend to get killed and that's that!' An ill-omened boastfulness on the part of this ill-starred S.M.

  CHAPTER II

  Mr. W. L. as Leader of the "Great London Vortex"

  At some time during the six months that preceded the declaration of war, very suddenly, from a position of relative obscurity, I became extremely well-known. Roughly this coincided with the publication of Blast. I can remember no specific morning upon which I woke and found that this had happened. But by August 1914 no newspaper was complete without news about 'vorticism' and its arch-exponent Mr. Lewis.

  As chef de bande of the Vorticists I cut a figure in London not unlike that of Degrelle to-day in Brussels. There were no politics then. There was no Rexist Party or suchlike. Instead there was the 'Vorticist Group'. I might have been at the head of a social revolution, instead of merely being the prophet of a new fashion in art.

  Really all this organized disturbance was Art behaving as if it were Politics. But I swear I did not know it. It may in fact have been politics. I see that now. Indeed it must have been. But I was unaware of the fact: I believed that this was the way artists were always received; a somewhat tumultuous reception, perhaps, but after all why not? I mistook the agitation in the audience for the sign of an awakening of the emotions of artistic sensibility. And then I assumed too that artists always formed militant groups. I supposed they had to do this, seeing how 'bourgeois' all Publics were—or all Publics of which I had any experience. And I concluded that as a matter of course some romantic figure must always emerge, to captain the 'group'. Like myself! How otherwise could a 'group' get about, and above all talk. For it had to have a mouthpiece didn't it? I was so little of a communist that it never occurred to me that left to itself a group might express itself in chorus. The 'leadership' principle, you will observe, was in my bones.

  Meanwhile the excitement was intense. Putsches took place every month or so. Marinetti for instance. You may have heard of him! It was he who put Mussolini up to Fascism. Mussolini admits it. They ran neck and neck for a bit, but Mussolini was the better politician. Well, Marinetti brought off a Futurist Putsch about this time.

  It started in Bond Street. I counter-putsched. I assembled in Greek Street a determined band of miscellaneous anti-futurists. Mr. Epstein was there; Gaudier Brzeska, T. E. Hulme, Edward Wadsworth and a cousin of his called Wallace, who was very muscular and forcible, according to my eminent colleague, and he rolled up very silent and grim. There were about ten of us. After a hearty meal we shuffled bellicosely round to the Dore Gallery.

  Marinetti had entrenched himself upon a high lecture platform, and he put down a tremendous barrage in French as we entered. Gaudier went into action at once. He was very good at the parlez-vous, in fact he was a Frenchman. He was sniping him without intermission, standing up in his place in the audience all the while. The remainder of our party maintained a confused uproar.

  The Italian intruder was worsted. There was another occasion (before he declared war on us, and especially on me) when Mr. G. R. W. Nevinson—always a dark horse—assisted him. The founder of Fascism had been at Adrianople, when there was a siege. He wanted to imitate the noise of bombardment. It was a poetic declamation, which must be packed to the muzzle with what he called 'la rage balkanique'. So Mr. Nevinson concealed himself somewhere in the hall, and at a signal from Marinetti belaboured a gigantic drum.

  But it was a matter for astonishment what Marinetti could do with his unaided voice. He certainly made an extraordinary amount of noise. A day of attack upon the Western Front, with all the 'heavies' hammering together, right back to the horizon, was nothing to it. My equanimity when first subjected to the sounds of mass-bombardment in Flanders was possibly due to my marinettian preparation—it seemed 'all quiet' to me in fact, by comparison.

  When I first was present at a lecture of his I accompanied him afterwards in a taxicab to the Cafe Royal. 'II faut une force de poumon epouvantable pour faire ca!' He explained to me, wiping the perspiration off his neck, and striking himself upon the chest-wall.

  Marinetti was a rich man. It was said that his father owned a lot of Alexandria and other ports in the Eastern Mediterranean. I do not know whether this was true. But he certainly had at his disposal very considerable funds.

  'You are a futurist, Lewis!' he shouted at me one day, as we were passing into a lavabo together, where he wanted to wash after a lecture where he had drenched himself in sweat.

  'No,' I said.

  'Why don't you announce that you are a futurist!' he asked me squarely.

  'Because I am not one,' I answered, just as pointblank and to the point.

  'Yes. But what's it matter!' said he with great impatience.

  'It's most important,' I replied rather coldly.

  'Not at all!' said he. 'Futurism is good. It is all right.'

  'Not too bad,' said I. 'It has its points. But you Wops insist too much on the Machine. You're always on about these driving-belts, you are always exploding about internal combustion. We've had machines here in England for a donkey's years. They're no novelty to us'

  'You have never understood your machines! You have never known the ivresse of travelling at a kilometre a minute. Have you ever travelled at a kilometre a minute?'

  'Never.' I shook my head energetically. 'Never. I loathe anything that goes too quickly. If it goes too quickly, it is not there.'

  'It is not there!' he thundered for this had touched him on the raw. 'It is only when it goes quickly that it is there!'

  'That is nonsense,' I said. 'I cannot see a thing that is going too quickly.'

  'See it—see it! Why should you want to see?' he exclaimed. 'But you do see it. You see it multiplied a thousand times. You see a thousand things instead of one thing.'

  I shrugged my shoulders—this was not the first time I had had this argument.

  'That's just what I don't want to see. I am not a futurist,' I said. 'I prefer one thing.'

  'There is no such thing as one thing.'

  'There is if I wish to have it so. And I wish to have it so.'

  'You are a monist!' he said at this, with a contemptuous glance, curling his lip.

  'All right. I am not a futurist anyway. Je hais le mouvement qui deplace les lignes.'

  At this quotation he broke into a hundred angry pieces.

  'And you "never weep"—I know, I know. Ah zut alors! What a thing to be an Englishman!'

  This was the sort of thing that was going on the whole time. And at last this man attempted a Putsch against the 'great London Vortex'. He denounced me in letters to the Press, as the major obstacle to the advance of Futurism in England. And this was perfectly true. I 'stood in its path', as Sir Austen Chamberlain would have said.

  Then Mr. C. R. W. Nevinson attempted a Putsch. He selected a sheet of 'Rebel Art Centre' notepaper. The 'Rebel Art Centre' in Great Ormond Street, founded by Miss Lech-mere and myself, was the seat of the 'Great London Vortex'. Upon this notepaper Mr. C. R. W. Nevinson expressed Futurist opinions; he too, I think, went over into the Press, and I had to repudiate him as an interloper and a heretic.

  I have said enough to show that the months immediately preceding the declaration of war were full of sound and fury, and that all the artists and men of letters had gone into action before the bank-clerks were clapped into khaki and despatched to the land of Flanders Poppies to do their bit. Life was one big bloodless brawl, prior to the Great Bloodletting.

  There was the next thing to barricades; there was everything short of Committees of Public Safety. Gaudier was spoiling for a fight. He threatened at Ford's to sock Bomberg on the jaw, and when I asked him why, he explained that he had an imperfect control over his temper, and he must not be found with Bomberg, for the manner adopted by that gentleman was of a sort that put him beside himself. I had therefore to keep them apart. On the other hand I seized Hulme by the throat; but he transfixed me upon the railings of S
oho Square. I never see the summer house in its centre without remembering how I saw it upside down. Mr Epstein and David Bomberg kissed, to seal a truce, beneath the former's 'RockdrilP or similar fine piece of dynamic statuary. This was in the salons of the Goupil. And Mr. T. S. Eliot (that was just after the War, but no matter) challenged Mr. St. John Hutchinson to a duel, upon the sands at Calais. But the latter gentleman, now so eminent a K.C., replied that he was 'too afraid'. So he got the best of that encounter, as one would expect when a K.C. clashes with a poet.

  The Press in 1914 had no Cinema, no Radio, and no Politics: so the painter could really become a 'star'. There was nothing against it. Anybody could become one, who did anything funny. And Vorticism was replete with humour, of course; it was acclaimed the best joke ever. Pictures, I mean oil-paintings, were 'news'. Exhibitions were reviewed in column after column. And no illustrated paper worth its salt but carried a photog-graph of some picture of mine or of my 'school', as I have said, or one of myself, smiling insinuatingly from its pages. To the photograph would be attached some scrap of usually quite misleading gossip; or there would be an article from my pen, explaining why life had to be changed, and how. 'Kill John Bull with Art!' I shouted. And John and Mrs. Bull leapt for joy, in a cynical convulsion. For they felt as safe as houses. So did I.

  CHAPTER III

  Some Specimen Pages of 'Blast' No. i (June 20, 1914)

  It has occurred to me that since Blast was the centre of this disturbance, it might not be amiss to reproduce a few specimen pages. With a page-area of 12 inches by this publication was of a bright puce colour. In general appearance it was not unlike a telephone book. It contained manifestoes, poems, plays, stories, and outbursts of one sort and another. I will not reproduce the major Manifesto (of the 'Great London Vortex') signed by R. Aldington, Aubuthnot, L. Atkinson, Gaudier Brzeska, J. Dismor, C. Hamilton, E. Pound, W. Roberts, H. Sanders, E. Wadsworth, Wyndham Lewis. That would be too long. Instead I will select a few random pages from the 'Blasts and Blesses'.