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Poems-Part3_Alan Seeger(1888-1916)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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We saw not clearly nor understood,

But, yielding ourselves to the master hand,



Each in his part, as best he could,

We played it through as the author planned.



It was not, in his own conception, a "war against war" that he was waging;

it was simply a fight for freedom and for France. Some of us may hope



and believe that, in after years, when he was at leisure

to view history in perspective and carry his psychology a little deeper,



he would have allowed, if not more potency, at any rate more adaptability,

to the human will. In order to do so, it would not have been necessary



to abandon his fatalistic creed. He would have seen, perhaps,

that even if we only will what we have to will, the factors which shape



the will -- of the individual, the nation, or the race -- are always changing,

and that it is not only possible but probable that the factors



which make for peace may one day gain the upper hand of those which

(for perfectlydefinite and tangible reasons) have hitherto made for war.



The fact remains, however, that he shouldered his knapsack

without any theoretic distaste for the soldier's calling.



In so far he was more happily situated than thousands who have made

all the better soldiers for their intense detestation of the stupidity of war.



But this in no way detracts from his loyalty to his personal ideal,

or from the high chivalry of his devotion to France.



The story of his life as a soldier shall be told, so far as possible,

in his own words.



After some brief preliminary training at Rouen he was sent to Toulouse.

Thence, on September 28, 1914, he wrote as follows:



==

2me Regiment Etranger,



Bataillon C., 1re. Cie, 3me Section.

Toulouse, Sept. 28, 1914.



Dear Mother,

. . . We have been putting in our time here at very hard drilling,



and are supposed to have learned in six weeks what the ordinary recruit,

in times of peace, takes all his two years at. We rise at 5,



and work stops in the afternoon at 5. A twelve hours day at one sou a day.

I hope to earn higher wages than this in time to come, but I never expect



to work harder. The early rising hour is splendid for it gives one the chance

to see the most beautiful part of these beautiful autumn days in the South.



We march up to a lovely open field on the end of the ridge

behind the barracks, walking right into the rising sun.



From this panorama, spread about on three sides is incomparably fine

-- yellow cornfields, vineyards, harvest-fields where



the workers and their teams can be seen moving about in tiny figures --

poplars, little hamlets and church-towers, and far away to the south



the blue line of the Pyrenees, the high peaks capped with snow.

It makes one in love with life, it is all so peaceful and beautiful.



But Nature to me is not only hills and blue skies and flowers,

but the Universe, the totality of things, reality as it most obviously



presents itself to us; and in this universestrife and sternness

play as big a part as love and tenderness, and cannot be shirked



by one whose will it is to rule his life in accordance with the cosmic forces

he sees in play about him. I hope you see the thing as I do, and think



that I have done well, being without responsibilities and with no one

to suffer materially by my decision, in taking upon my shoulders, too,



the burden that so much of humanity is suffering under,

and, rather than stand ingloriously aside when the opportunity was given me,



doing my share for the side that I think right. . . .

==



The battalion must have left Toulouse almost immediately

after this was written, for in a post-card of October 10,



from the Camp de Mailly, Aube, he says that they have been there ten days.

A week later he wrote:



==

. . . After two weeks here and less than two months from enlistment,



we are actually going at last to the firing line. By the time

you receive this we shall already perhaps have had our `bapteme de feu'.



We have been engaged in the hardest kind of hard work

-- two weeks of beautiful autumn weather on the whole,






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