Entries from the Diary of Walter Cuthbert Blythe
Disclaimer: I am not L.M. Montgomery. :D
4 August 1914
We live in the blood-stained shards of a broken world – we live for the smallest sliver of hope in naked bleeding fear. It has been like that since the night at the lighthouse – mornings when food is no longer the main object; when all other affairs are trifling business in the shadow of the paper that Dad holds, with white-knuckled fingers. The afternoons are colourless, sordid; things that once gave me pleasure, that sated the soul-hunger, are bitter to me, bitter in my eyes. They stay in the wreck of existence to mock us. Mock us, we who are broken enough! If the world greyed and crumbled, as we do, it would be easier to bear. But the beauty is still there – beauty that is lifted like bitter medicine to my lips, beauty that flaunts itself in my face. Susan's peonies are blood-stained – the sky is blood-red in the night – the roses are petalled cups of blood – they are all omens of things to come – of bloodshed, and unbroken horror. This war – this blackness – cannot be short-lived.
And I am afraid – afraid as I have never been before. Fear came at the dance – on the violet wings of sunset, across the gulf, and struck and held us when Jack Elliot told us the news. I remember standing on the rocks and saying something to Mary afterwards – something strange and warped and terrible – Faith's black eyes, stricken, dilated with that fear. And then Jem strong and purposeful, in the red-washed evening, climbing upward, over the golden rocks, until he stood alone, with his brown fine arms raised into violet fire, and his face glad and open-browed. It was then that Fear washed over me, in black suffocating waves. Jem would go – I saw it in his face, in his eyes, expectant, glad like one who goes unto an adventure. He told me himself that the Piper had come.
The Piper piped his first tune on that night. His first summons, rather, to the boys of the maple. A haunting lilt of fragrance, streaming across the gulf on violet wings – faint at first, but rising into deep persuasive resonance. Song drifting through steepled gold, shining like a gilt-edged shadow in the dawning. I wonder if I will go, too. I wonder if that is why I am afraid. Afraid of being drawn, like the rest, in his tread, haunted by the promise of glory - glory that can only be won through bitterness and bloodshed.
Jem and Jerry are going to Charlottetown to enlist tonight. All morning Ingleside has rested under a thick unbroken silence. The silence is, in a sense, a relief after the strange garbled talk of war and declarations and invasions that has gone on since yesterday at the lighthouse. Jem has gone to the manse to see Jerry, and Dog Monday is with him. I think Dog Monday suspects, with the uncanny knowledge of the devoted, that Jem is going, and it will be a different master, a different Jem, who will be coming back to him. Not a boy, but a man in khaki.
Fear has come again, coupled with a black terrible shame - shame that I, who am able, have shirked my duty; shame that I have stooped to this selfishness of soul. Why cannot I, with all my ideals, my beliefs, my visions, go with them – they who have the task of preserving beauty, and peace; they who are able to fight the hideousness of existence? I should go – I, with all these motives – but I am frightened of hideousness itself; I am frightened of the ugliness of pain, the pain of death, not of dying.
10 September 1914
At university they are going, in eager quick-footed swarms – and the going strikes more fear, and more shame, in me, than it did at home. Here there is a marked division between the enlisted, and the others. The others – the shirkers, like me, pitiable and cowardly and trembling. At least THEY have excuses for their cowardice. I have none, except that of my recent illness, which is little excuse at all. All of them know I am perfectly well. They are already steeping their shafts in poison – aiming them at the chosen few. The enlisted are spoken of in the highest terms – exalted like the very gods of war. For the chosen few, there are sharp-toothed hints, graciously fashioned statements, well-modelled remarks. Soon the graciousness will fade out of it all, and men will lose the gift of courtesy in their war-time zest.
The Piper is crafting his tunes a-fresh – altering their intensity; making them haunt and stir with greater power.
I am a coward. I hear it in my ears; I see it every moment of my existence, searing my life, branding my soul with its red-hot glow. No matter how hard I seek to forget, to deny, it haunts me; haunts me in every note that the Piper pipes; mocks me in every word that the Professor says – words that are measured, weighed, and then spoken, with cutting, contemptuous ease.
Rilla tries so hard to help me. I have confided in her – in little Rilla-my-Rilla. I thought she would understand, as Di might not. I thought she would not judge me, and I was right. She cannot judge me – I don't think Rilla is capable of judging me at any stage of her existence. And I am glad of it. I can talk to her of my fear – the fear that grips, and sears, as badly as the knowledge of my cowardice does. The fear of the ugliness that I will see if I go – the fear that my ideals and my illusions will fade out of existence, obliterated by the ugliness. Rilla understands, I think, in her own way. She quoted Shakespeare to me once, and I shall always remember, and treasure, the earnest manner in which she said it: "The brave man is not he who feels no fear, but he whose noble soul that fear subdues." It is a beautiful sentence, fashioned as only Shakespeare could fashion sentences, but somehow it did not ring as it might have rung.
24 May 1915
I have enlisted.
I went to town in the dawn – a dawn that might have been grim and stark and angular – a dawn which was, instead, transformed into a maiden, rose-cheeked and bewitching, with silk-clothed slimness, and hair spun from cream and violets and sunbeams.
I can write again – write with pure euphoria; write without the guilt which has seared my soul with its brand of misery and bitterness. Mine is but a small triumph in the glory of Italy's declaration of war, but it has meant release, and victory, for me. It is as if my soul has come out of blackness; lifted out of it, rather, by the sinking of the Lusitania. My mind is clear – clear as it has not been since the days before the war. I can no longer wallow in self-pity; linger here, in misery and horror and fear, in the hope that the hideousness will cease to be – in the vain, small-souled hope that it will not conquer, and live, and thrive, in this world that was meant to be beautiful. I realize, now, my purpose – our purpose in this black chaos of atrocity and futility. I see it in every one of the men and women and children of this place – of this world – girls like Rilla with the souls of women - people with vision, and strength, like Mother and Susan and Dad - common people, with uncommon souls. I see my purpose in the children who are to come, to whom we will pass on the legacy of peace – a legacy made all the more precious because of our sacrifice.
I shall carry a part of home with me when I go to the trenches - a part of a rosy virgin world, of young lithe nymphs in moonlight, of gulf water and wind laughing up at a rose-steeped sky, of Dog Monday's eyes, and the eyes of a million others like him, anguished with waiting. There will be one part of home always – always to remind me of what I am fighting for.