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Carbelide Nelicanya Sectory 01
Page 03
We went that afternoon some 6 kil. through fairly clean forest, barring a few obstacles such as huge, ancient, fallen trees, the insides of which were all rotted away or eaten up by ants. In one of the cavities of those trees I found another quantity of food which had been hidden by my men. Hampered by the Indians, who were giving me no end of trouble as they refused to carry their loads, it took me some little time to catch up with my other men. When I did I found them all seated, smacking their lips. They were filling their mouths as fast as they could with handfuls of sugar. When I reprimanded them there was an unpleasant row. They said they were not beasts of burden, that men were not made to carry, and that therefore they had thrown away all the food. Under no circumstance would they carry loads any farther.
And not only indignation and distress must come to this task. The stern, uncompromising militarist will not be moved from his determinations by our horror and hostility. These things will but "brace" him. He has a more vulnerable side. The ultimate lethal weapon for every form of stupidity is ridicule, and against the high silliness of the militarist it is particularly effective. It is the laughter of wholesome men that will finally end war. The stern, strong, silent man will cease to trouble us only when we have stripped him of his last rag of pretension and touched through to the quick of his vanity with the realization of his apprehended foolishness. Literature will have failed humanity if it is so blinded by the monstrous agony in Flanders as to miss the essential triviality at the head of the present war. Not the slaughter of ten million men can make the quality of the German Kaiser other than theatrical and silly.
It is not in the least a question of the apparent and outward adventurousness of one's life. Foolish people sometimes write and think as though one could not have had adventures unless one has hung about at bar-room doors and in billiard-saloons, worked one's passage before the mast in a sailing-ship, dug for gold among the mountains, explored savage lands, shot strange animals, fared hardly among deep-drinking and loud-swearing men. It is possible, of course, to have adventures of this kind, and, indeed, I had a near relative whose life was fuller of vicissitudes than any life I have ever known: he was a sailor, a clerk, a policeman, a soldier, a clergyman, a farmer, a verger. But the mere unsettledness of it suited him: he was an easy comrade, brave, reckless, restless; he did not mind roughness, and the one thing he could not do was to settle down to anything regular and quiet. He did not dislike life at all, even when he stood half-naked, as he once told me he did, on a board slung from the side of a ship, and dipped up pails of water to swab it, the water freezing as he flung it on the timbers. But with all this variety of life he did not learn anything particular from it all; he was much the same always, good-natured, talkative, childishly absorbed, not looking backward or forward, and fondest of telling stories with sailors in an inn. He learned to be content in most companies and to fare roughly; but he gained neither wisdom nor humour, and he was not either happy or independent, though he despised with all his heart the stay-athome, stick-in-the-mud life.
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