CHAPTER I
Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances.
For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under
the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were
dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and
shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were
a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom,
the second of man's creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all
our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded
in its glare.
As time went by our need to fight for the ideal increased to an
unquestioning possession, riding with spur and rein over our doubts.
Willy-nilly it became a faith. We had sold ourselves into its slavery,
manacled ourselves together in its chain-gang, bowed ourselves to serve
its holiness with all our good and ill content. The mentality of
ordinary human slaves is terrible--they have lost the world--and we had
surrendered, not body alone, but soul to the overmastering greed of
victory. By our own act we were drained of morality, of volition, of
responsibility, like dead leaves in the wind.
The everlasting battle stripped from us care of our own lives or of
others'. We had ropes about our necks, and on our heads prices which
showed that the enemy intended hideous tortures for us if we were
caught. Each day some of us pa**ed; and the living knew themselves just
sentient puppets on God's stage: indeed, our taskmaster was merciless,
merciless, so long as our bruised feet could stagger forward on the
road. The weak envied those tired enough to die; for success looked so
remote, and failure a near and certain, if sharp, release from toil. We
lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in
the trough of waves of feeling. This impotency was bitter to us, and
made us live only for the seen horizon, reckless what spite we
inflicted or endured, since physical sensation showed itself meanly
transient. Gusts of cruelty, perversions, lusts ran lightly over the
surface without troubling us; for the moral laws which had seemed to
hedge about these silly accidents must be yet fainter words. We had
learned that there were pangs too sharp, griefs too deep, ecstasies too
high for our finite selves to register. When emotion reached this pitch
the mind choked; and memory went white till the circumstances were
humdrum once more.
Such exaltation of thought, while it let adrift the spirit, and gave it
licence in strange airs, lost it the old patient rule over the body.
The body was too coarse to feel the utmost of our sorrows and of our
joys. Therefore, we abandoned it as rubbish: we left it below us to
march forward, a breathing simulacrum, on its own unaided level,
subject to influences from which in normal times our instincts would
have shrunk. The men were young and sturdy; and hot flesh and blood
unconsciously claimed a right in them and tormented their bellies with
strange longings. Our privations and dangers fanned this virile heat,
in a climate as racking as can be conceived. We had no shut places to
be alone in, no thick clothes to hide our nature. Man in all things
lived candidly with man.
The Arab was by nature continent; and the use of universal marriage had
nearly abolished irregular courses in his tribes. The public women of
the rare settlements we encountered in our months of wandering would
have been nothing to our numbers, even had their raddled meat been
palatable to a man of healthy parts. In horror of such sordid commerce
our youths began indifferently to slake one another's few needs in
their own clean bodies--a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed
s**less and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile
process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand
with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the
darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental pa**ion which was welding
our souls and spirits in one flaming effort. Several, thirsting to
punish appetites they could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride in
degrading the body, and offered themselves fiercely in any habit which
promised physical pain or filth.
I was sent to these Arabs as a stranger, unable to think their thoughts
or subscribe their beliefs, but charged by duty to lead them forward
and to develop to the highest any movement of theirs profitable to
England in her war. If I could not a**ume their character, I could at
least conceal my own, and pa** among them without evident friction,
neither a discord nor a critic but an unnoticed influence. Since I was
their fellow, I will not be their apologist or advocate. To-day in my
old garments, I could play the bystander, obedient to the sensibilities
of our theatre . . . but it is more honest to record that these ideas
and actions then pa**ed naturally. What now looks wanton or sadic
seemed in the field inevitable, or just unimportant routine.
Blood was always on our hands: we were licensed to it. Wounding and
k**ing seemed ephemeral pains, so very brief and sore was life with
us. With the sorrow of living so great, the sorrow of punishment had to
be pitiless. We lived for the day and died for it. When there was
reason and desire to punish we wrote our lesson with gun or whip
immediately in the sullen flesh of the sufferer, and the case was
beyond appeal. The desert did not afford the refined slow penalties of
courts and gaols.
Of course our rewards and pleasures were as suddenly sweeping as our
troubles; but, to me in particular, they bulked less large. Bedouin
ways were hard even for those brought up to them, and for strangers
terrible: a d**h in life. When the march or labour ended I had no
energy to record sensation, nor while it lasted any leisure to see the
spiritual loveliness which sometimes came upon us by the way. In my
notes, the cruel rather than the beautiful found place. We no doubt
enjoyed more the rare moments of peace and forgetfulness; but I
remember more the agony, the terrors, and the mistakes. Our life is
not summed up in what I have written (there are things not to be
repeated in cold blood for very shame); but what I have written was in
and of our life. Pray God that men reading the story will not, for love
of the glamour of strangeness, go out to prostitute themselves and
their talents in serving another race.
A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo
life, having bartered his soul to a brute-master. He is not of them. He
may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist
them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have
been. Then he is exploiting his old environment to press them out of
theirs. Or, after my model, he may imitate them so well that they
spuriously imitate him back again. Then he is giving away his own
environment: pretending to theirs; and pretences are hollow, worthless
things. In neither case does he do a thing of himself, nor a thing so
clean as to be his own (without thought of conversion), letting them
take what action or reaction they please from the silent example.
In my case, the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs,
and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self,
and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they
destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on
the Arab skin: it was an affectation only. Easily was a man made an
infidel, but hardly might he be converted to another faith. I had
dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like
Mohammed's coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense
loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they
do. Such detachment came at times to a man exhausted by prolonged
physical effort and isolation. His body plodded on mechanically, while
his reasonable mind left him, and from without looked down critically
on him, wondering what that futile lumber did and why. Sometimes these
selves would converse in the void; and then madness was very near, as I
believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils
at once of two customs, two educations, two environments.