Carry On written by Coningsby Dawson

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Carry On

By Lieutenant
Coningsby
Dawson

CARRY ON

[Illustration: Lieutenant Coningsby Dawson
Canadian Field Artillery]

CARRY ON

LETTERS IN WAR TIME

BY

CONINGSBY DAWSON

NOVELIST AND SOLDIER

WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES

BY HIS FATHER, W.J. DAWSON

FRONTISPIECE

1917

WHEN THE WAR'S AT AN END

At length when the war's at an end
And we're just ourselves,--you and I,
And we gather our lives up to mend,
We, who've learned how to live and to die:

Shall we think of the old ambition
For riches, or how to grow wise,
When, like Lazarus freshly arisen,
We've the presence of Death in our eyes?

Shall we dream of our old life's passion,--
To toil for our heart's desire,
Whose souls War has taken to fashion
With molten death and with fire?

I think we shall crave the laughter
Of the wind through trees gold with the sun,
When our strife is all finished,--after
The carnage of War is done.

Just these things will then seem worth while:--
How to make Life more wondrously sweet;
How to live with a song and a smile,
How to lay our lives at Love's feet.

ERIC P. DAWSON,
_Sub. Lieut_. R.N.V.R.

INTRODUCTION

The letters in this volume were not written for publication. They are
intimate and personal in a high degree. They would not now be published
by those to whom they are addressed, had they not come to feel that the
spirit and temper of the writer might do something to strengthen and
invigorate those who, like himself, are called on to make great
sacrifices for high causes and solemn duties.

They do not profess to give any new information about the military
operations of the Allies; this is the task of the publicist, and at all
times is forbidden to the soldier in the field. Here and there some
striking or significant fact has been allowed to pass the censor; but
the value of the letters does not lie in these things. It is found
rather in the record of how the dreadful yet heroic realities of war
affect an unusually sensitive mind, long trained in moral and romantic
idealism; the process by which this mind adapts itself to unanticipated
and incredible conditions, to acts and duties which lie close to horror,
and are only saved from being horrible by the efficacy of the spiritual
effort which they evoke. Hating the brutalities of War, clearly
perceiving the wide range of its cruelties, yet the heart of the writer
is never hardened by its daily commerce with death; it is purified by
pity and terror, by heroism and sacrifice, until the whole nature seems
fresh annealed into a finer strength.

The intimate nature of these letters makes it necessary to say something
about the writer.

Coningsby Dawson graduated with honours in history from Oxford in 1905,
and in the same year came to the United States with the intention of
taking a theological course at Union Seminary. After a year at the
Seminary he reached the conclusion that his true lifework lay in
literature, and he at once began to fit himself for his vocation. In the
meantime his family left England, and we had made our home in Taunton,
Massachusetts. Here, in a quiet house, amid lawns and leafy elms, he
gave himself with indefatigable ardour to the art of writing. He wrote
from seven to ten hours a day, producing many poems, short stories, and
three novels. Few writers have ever worked harder to attain literary
excellence, or have practised a more austere devotion to their art. I
often marvelled how a young man, fresh from a brilliant career at the
greatest of English Universities, could be content with a life that was
so widely separated from association with men and affairs. I wondered
still more at the patience with which he endured the rebuffs that always
await the beginner in literature, and the humility with which he was
willing to learn the hard lessons of his apprenticeship in literary
form. The secret lay, no doubt, in his secure sense of a vocation, and
his belief that good work could not fail in the end to justify itself.
But, not the less, these four years of obscure drudgery wore upon his
spirit, and hence some of the references in these letters to his days of
self-despising. The period of waiting came to an end at last with the
publication in 1913 of his _Garden Without Walls_, which attained
immediate success. When he speaks in these letters of his brief burst of
fame, he refers to those crowded months in the Fall of 1913, when his
novel was being discussed on every hand, and, for the first time, he met
many writers of established reputation as an equal.

Another novel, _The Raft_, followed _The Garden Without Walls_. The
nature of his life now seemed fixed. To the task of novel-writing he had
brought a temperament highly idealistic and romantic, a fresh and vivid
imagination, and a thorough literary equipment. His life, as he planned
it, held but one purpose for him, outside the warmth and tenacity of
its affections--the triumph of the efficient purpose in the adequate
expression of his mind in literature. The austerity of his long years of
preparation had left him relatively indifferent to the common prizes of
life, though they had done nothing to lessen his intense joy in life.
His whole mind was concentrated on his art. His adventures would be the
adventures of the mind in search of ampler modes of expression. His
crusades would be the crusades of the spirit in search of the realities
of truth. He had received the public recognition which gave him faith in
himself and faith in his ability to achieve the reputation of the true
artist, whose work is not cheapened but dignified and broadened by
success. So he read the future, and so his critics read it for him. And
then, sudden and unheralded, there broke on this quiet life of
intellectual devotion the great storm of 1914. The guns that roared
along the Marne shattered all his purposes, and left him face to face
with a solemn spiritual exigency which admitted no equivocation.

At first, in common with multitudes more experienced than himself, he
did not fully comprehend the true measure of the cataclysm which had
overwhelmed the world. There had been wars before, and they had been
fought out by standing armies. It was incredible that any war should
last more than a few months. Again and again the world had been assured
that war would break down with its own weight, that no war could be
financed beyond a certain brief period, that the very nature of modern
warfare, with its terrible engines of destruction, made swift decisions
a necessity. The conception of a British War which involved the entire
manhood of the nation was new, and unparalleled in past history. And the
further conception of a war so vast in its issues that it really
threatened the very existence of the nation was new too. Alarmists had
sometimes predicted these things, but they had been disbelieved.
Historians had used such phrases of long past struggles, but often as a
mode of rhetoric rather than as the expression of exact truth. Yet, in a
very few weeks, it became evident that not alone England, but the entire
fabric of liberal civilisation was threatened by a power that knew no
honour, no restraints of either caution or magnanimity, no ethic but the
armed might that trampled under blood-stained feet all the things which
the common sanction of centuries held dearest and fairest.

Perhaps, if Coningsby had been resident in England, these realities of
the situation would have been immediately apparent. Residing in
America, the real outlines of the struggle were a little dimmed by
distance. Nevertheless, from the very first he saw clearly where his
duty lay. He could not enlist immediately. He was bound in honour to
fulfil various literary obligations. His latest book, _Slaves of
Freedom_, was in process of being adapted for serial use, and its
publication would follow. He set the completion of this work as the
period when he must enlist; working on with difficult self-restraint
toward the appointed hour. If he had regrets for a career broken at the
very point where it had reached success and was assured of more than
competence, he never expressed them. His one regret was the effect of
his enlistment on those most closely bound to him by affections which
had been deepened and made more tender by the sense of common exile. At
last the hour came when he was free to follow the imperative call of
patriotic duty. He went to Ottawa, saw Sir Sam Hughes, and was offered a
commission in the Canadian Field Artillery on the completion of his
training at the Royal Military College, at Kingston, Ontario. The last
weeks of his training were passed at the military camp of Petewawa on
the Ottawa River. There his family was able to meet him in the July of
1916. While we were with him he was selected, with twenty-four other
officers, for immediate service in France; and at the same time his two
younger brothers enlisted in the Naval Patrol, then being recruited in
Canada by Commander Armstrong.

The letters in this volume commence with his departure from Ottawa. Week
by week they have come, with occasional interruptions; mud stained
epistles, written in pencil, in dug-outs by the light of a single
candle, in the brief moments snatched from hard and perilous duties.
They give no hint of where he was on the far-flung battle-line. We know
now that he was at Albert, at Thiepval, at Courcelette, and at the
taking of the Regina trench, where, unknown to him, one of his cousins
fell in the heroic charge of the Canadian infantry. His constant
thoughtfulness for those who were left at home is manifest in all he
writes. It has been expressed also in other ways, dear and precious to
remember: in flowers delivered by his order from the battlefield each
Sabbath morning at our house in Newark, in cables of birthday
congratulations, which arrived on the exact date. Nothing has been
forgotten that could alleviate the loneliness of our separation, or
stimulate our courage, or make us conscious of the unbroken bond of
love.

The general point of view in these letters is, I think, adequately
expressed in the phrase "_Carry On_," which I have used as the title of
this book. It was our happy lot to meet Coningsby in London in the
January of the present year, when he was granted ten days' leave. In the
course of conversation one night he laid emphasis on the fact that he,
and those who served with him, were, after all, not professional
soldiers, but civilians at war. They did not love war, and when the war
was ended not five per cent of them would remain in the army. They were
men who had left professions and vocations which still engaged the best
parts of their minds, and would return to them when the hour came. War
was for them an occupation, not a vocation. Yet they had proved
themselves, one and all, splendid soldiers, bearing the greatest
hardships without complaint, and facing wounds and death with a gay
courage which had made the Canadian forces famous even among a host of
men, equally brave and heroic. The secret of their fortitude lay in the
one brief phrase, "Carry On." Their fortitude was of the spirit rather
than the nerves. They were aware of the solemn ideals of justice,
liberty, and righteousness for which they fought, and would never give
up till they were won. In the completeness of their surrender to a great
cause they had been lifted out of themselves to a new plane of living
by the transformation of their spirit. It was the dogged indomitable
drive of spiritual forces controlling bodily forces. Living or dying
those forces would prevail. They would carry on to the end, however long
the war, and would count no sacrifice too great to assure its triumph.

This is the spirit which breathes through these letters. The splendour
of war, as my son puts it, is in nothing external; it is all in the
souls of the men. "There's a marvellous grandeur about all this carnage
and desolation--men's souls rise above the distress--they have to, in
order to survive." "Every man I have met out here has the amazing guts
to wear his crown of thorns as though it were a cap-and-bells." They
have shredded off their weaknesses, and attained that "corporate
stout-heartedness" which is "the acme of what Aristotle meant by
virtue." For himself, he discovers that the plague of his former modes
of life lay in self-distrust. It was the disease of the age. The doubt
of many things which it were wisdom to believe had ended in the doubt of
one's own capacity for heroism. All those doubts and self-despisings had
vanished in the supreme surrender to sacrificial duty. The doors of the
Kingdom of Heroism were flung so wide that the meanest might enter in,
and in that act the humblest became comrades of Drake's men, who could
jest as they died. No one knows his real strength till it is put to the
test; the highest joy of life is to discover that the soul can meet the
test, and survive it.

The Somme battlefield, from which all these letters were despatched, is
an Inferno much more terrible than any Dante pictured. It is a vast sea
of mud, full of the unburied dead, pitted and pock-marked by
shell-holes, treeless and horseless, "the abomination of desolation."
And the men who toil across it look more like outcasts of the London
Embankment than soldiers. "They're loaded down like pack-animals, their
shoulders are rounded, they're wearied to death, but they go on and go
on.... There's no flash of sword or splendour of uniforms. They're only
very tired men determined to carry on. The war will be won by tired men
who can never again pass an insurance test." Yet they carry on--the
"broken counter-jumper, the ragged ex-plumber," the clerk from the
office, the man from the farm; Londoner, Canadian, Australian, New
Zealander, men drawn from every quarter of the Empire, who daily justify
their manhood by devotion to an ideal and by contempt of death. And in
the heart of each there is a settled conviction that the cause for which
they have sacrificed so much must triumph. They have no illusions about
an early peace. They see their comrades fall, and say quietly, "He's
gone West." They do heroic things daily, which in a lesser war would
have won the Victoria Cross, but in this war are commonplaces. They know
themselves re-born in soul, and are dimly aware that the world is
travailing toward new birth with them. They are still very human, men
who end their letters with a row of crosses which stand for kisses. They
are not dehumanised by war; the kindliness and tenderness of their
natures are unspoiled by all their daily traffic in horror. But they
have won their souls; and when the days of peace return these men will
take with them to the civilian life a tonic strength and nobleness which
will arrest and extirpate the decadence of society with the saving salt
of valour and of faith.

It may be said also that they do not hate their foe, although they hate
the things for which he fights. They are fighting a clean fight, with
men whose courage they respect. A German prisoner who comes into the
British camp is sure of good treatment. He is neither starved nor
insulted. His captors share with him cheerfully their rations and their
little luxuries. Sometimes a sullen brute will spit in the face of his
captor when he offers him a cigarette; he is always an officer, never a
private. And occasionally between these fighting hosts there are acts of
magnanimity which stand out illumined against the dark background of
death and suffering. One of the stories told me by my son illustrates
this. During one fierce engagement a British officer saw a German
officer impaled on the barbed wire, writhing in anguish. The fire was
dreadful, yet he still hung there unscathed. At length the British
officer could stand it no longer. He said quietly, "I can't bear to look
at that poor chap any longer." So he went out under the hail of shell,
released him, took him on his shoulders and carried him to the German
trench. The firing ceased. Both sides watched the act with wonder. Then
the Commander in the German trench came forward, took from his own bosom
the Iron Cross, and pinned it on the breast of the British officer. Such
an episode is true to the holiest ideals of chivalry; and it is all the
more welcome because the German record is stained by so many acts of
barbarism, which the world cannot forgive.

This magnanimous attitude toward the enemy is very apparent in these
letters. The man whose mind is filled with great ideals of sacrifice and
duty has no room for the narrowness of hate. He can pity a foe whose
sufferings exceed his own, and the more so because he knows that his
foe is doomed. The British troops do know this to-day by many infallible
signs. In the early days of the war untrained men, poorly equipped with
guns, were pitted against the best trained troops in Europe. The first
Canadian armies were sacrificed, as was that immortal army of Imperial
troops who saved the day at Mons. The Canadians often perished in that
early fighting by the excess of their own reckless bravery. They are
still the most daring fighters in the British army, but they have
profited by the hard discipline of the past. They know now that they
have not only the will to conquer, but the means of conquest. Their,
artillery has become conspicuous for its efficiency. It is the ceaseless
artillery fire which has turned the issue of the war for the British
forces. The work of the infantry is beyond praise. They "go over the
top" with superb courage, and all who have seen them are ready to say
with my son, "I'm hats off to the infantry." And in this final
efficiency, surpassing all that could have been thought possible in the
earlier stages of the war, the British forces read the clear augury of
victory. The war will be won by the Allied armies; not only because they
fight for the better cause, which counts for much, in spite of
Napoleon's cynical saying that "God is on the side of the strongest
battalions"; but because at last they have superiority in equipment,
discipline and efficiency. Upon that shell-torn Western front, amid the
mud and carnage of the Somme, there has been slowly forged the weapon
which will drive the Teuton enemy across the Rhine, and give back to
Europe and the world unhindered liberty and enduring peace.

W.J. DAWSON.

March, 1917.

THE LETTERS

In order to make some of the allusions in these letters clear I will set
down briefly the circumstances which explain them, and supply a
narrative link where it may be required.

I have already mentioned the Military Camp at Petewawa, on the Ottawa
river. The Camp is situated about seven miles from Pembroke. The Ottawa
river is at this point a beautiful lake. Immediately opposite the Camp
is a little summer hotel of the simplest description. It was at this
hotel that my wife, my daughter, and myself stayed in the early days of
July, 1916.

The hotel was full of the wives of the officers stationed in the Camp.
During the daytime I was the only man among the guests. About five
o'clock in the afternoon the officers from the Camp began to arrive on a
primitive motor ferryboat. My son came over each day, and we often
visited him at the Camp. His long training at Kingston had been very
severe. It included besides the various classes which he attended a
great deal of hard exercise, long rides or foot marches over frozen
roads before breakfast, and so forth. After this strenuous winter the
Camp at Petewawa was a delightful change. His tent stood on a bluff,
commanding an exquisite view of the broad stretch of water, diversified
by many small islands. We had a great deal of swimming in the lake, and
several motor-boat excursions to its beautiful upper reaches. One
afternoon when we went over in our launch to meet him at the Camp wharf,
he told us that that day a General had come from Ottawa to ask for
twenty-five picked officers to supply the casualties among the Canadian
Field Artillery at the front. He had immediately volunteered and been
accepted.

At this time my two younger sons, who had joined us at Petewawa in order
to see their brother, enrolled themselves in the Royal Naval Motor
Patrol Service, and had to return to Nelson, British Columbia, to settle
their affairs. Near Nelson, on the Kootenay Lake, we have a large fruit
ranch, managed by my second son, Reginald. My youngest son, Eric, was
with a law-firm in Nelson, and had just passed his final examinations as
solicitor and barrister.

This ranch had played a great part in our lives. The scenery is among
the finest in British Columbia. We usually spent our summers there,
finding not only continual interest in the development of our orchards,
but a great deal of pleasure in riding, swimming, and boating. We had
often talked of building a modern house there, but had never done so.
The original "little shack" was the work of Reginald's own hands, in the
days when most of the ranch was primeval forest. It had been added to,
but was still of the simplest description. One reason why we had not
built a modern house was that this "little shack" had become much
endeared to us by association and memory. We were all together there
more than once, and Coningsby had written a great deal there. We built
later on a sort of summer library--a big room on the edge of a beautiful
ravine--to which reference is made in later letters. Some of the
happiest days of our lives were spent in these lovely surroundings, and
the memory of those blue summer days, amid the fragrance of miles of
pine-forest, often recurs to Coningsby as he writes from the mud-wastes
of the Somme.

We left Petewawa to go to the ranch before Coningsby sailed for England,
that we might get our other two sons ready for their journey to England.
They left us on August 21st, and the ranch was sub-let to Chinamen in
the end of September, when we returned to Newark, New Jersey.

CARRY ON

I

OTTAWA, July 16th, 1916.

DEAREST ALL:

So much has happened since last I saw you that it's difficult to know
where to start. On Thursday, after lunch, I got the news that we were to
entrain from Petewawa next Friday morning. I at once put in for leave to
go to Ottawa the next day until the following Thursday at reveille. We
came here with a lot of the other officers who are going over and have
been having a very full time.

I am sailing from a port unknown on board the _Olympic_ with 6,000
troops--there is to be a big convoy. I feel more than ever I did--and
I'm sure it's a feeling that you share since visiting the camp--that I
am setting out on a Crusade from which it would have been impossible to
withhold myself with honour. I go quite gladly and contentedly, and pray
that in God's good time we may all sit again in the little shack at
Kootenay and listen to the rustling of the orchard outside. It will be
of those summer days that I shall be thinking all the time.

Yours, with very much love,

CON.

II

HALIFAX, July 23rd.

MY DEAR ONES:

We've spent all morning on the dock, seeing to our baggage, and have
just got leave ashore for two hours. We have had letters handed to us
saying that on no account are we to mention anything concerning our
passage overseas, neither are we allowed to cable our arrival from the
other side until four clear days have elapsed.

You are thinking of me this quiet Sunday morning at the ranch, and I of
you. And I am wishing--As I wish, I stop and ask myself, "Would I be
there if I could have my choice?" And I remember those lines of
Emerson's which you quoted:

"Though love repine and reason chafe,
There comes a voice without reply,
'Twere man's perdition to be safe,
When for the Truth he ought to die."

I wouldn't turn back if I could, but my heart cries out against "the
voice which speaks without reply."

Things are growing deeper with me in all sorts of ways. Family
affections stand out so desirably and vivid, like meadows green after
rain. And religion means more. The love of a few dear human people and
the love of the divine people out of sight, are all that one has to lean
on in the graver hours of life. I hope I come back again--I very much
hope I come back again; there are so many finer things that I could do
with the rest of my days--bigger things. But if by any chance I should
cross the seas to stay, you'll know that that also will be right and as
big as anything that I could do with life, and something that you'll be
able to be just as proud about as if I had lived to fulfil all your
other dear hopes for me. I don't suppose I shall talk of this again. But
I wanted you to know that underneath all the lightness and ambition
there's something that I learnt years ago in Highbury[1]. I've become a
little child again in God's hands, with full confidence in His love and
wisdom, and a growing trust that whatever He decides for me will be best
and kindest.

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