AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

nightmare to me; and I remember nothing except that I spoke on the right side.
Then I went home and went to bed, tried to write a reply to Bernard Shaw, of
which about one paragraph may still exist, and was soon incapable of writing
anything. The illness left certain results that prevented me, even when I had
recovered, from doing anything more useful than writing. But I set to work to
contribute as much as I could both to the general press and the Government
Propaganda; of which there were several departments. And I may remark here
that the conduct of the war, whether at home or abroad, was an excellent
education for any writer, tending too much to theories, in that complex but
concrete matter of the material of mankind; the mystery and inconsistency of
man. Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not small virtues; capable
of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper. And I must admit that I
was astounded, when writing propagandist literature at the request of various
Government Departments, at the small and spinsterish vanities and jealousies
that seemed to divide those Departments; and the way in which they kept up
their fussy formalities in the full glare of the Day of Judgment. The facts were
really very much as they were so cleverly described by Mr. Arnold Bennett in
his story of Lord Raingo. I could understand a man being a coward and
running away from a German; I can understand, and I hope humbly might
emulate, a man fighting and standing firm. But that any Englishman should
behave as if it were not a fight between an Englishman and a German, but a
fight between a Foreign Office clerk and a War Office clerk, is something that
altogether escapes my imagination. I daresay every one of those Government
officials would have died for England without any fuss at all. But he could not
have it suggested that some two-penny leaflet should pass through another
little cell in the huge hive of Whitehall, without making a most frightful fuss. I
had imagined that I was, for the moment, of one body with Englishmen from
whom I differed on the deepest vitals of the soul; one in that hour of death
with atheists and pessimists and Manichean Puritans and even with
Orangemen from Belfast. But the forms of the Circumlocution Office could
still divide men whom neither God nor devil could put asunder. It was a small
thing; but it was a part of that realisation of the real riddle of man, which is
hidden from boys and comes only to men in their maturity; and which took on
more and more the nature of a religious enlightenment; upon the true doctrine
of Original Sin and of Human Dignity. It was part of that belated process of
growing up, which must unfortunately precede the splendid attainment of
second childhood.
When I first recovered full consciousness, in the final turn of my long
sickness, I am told that I asked for Land and Water, in which Mr. Belloc had
already begun his well-known series of War articles, the last of which I had
read, or been able to understand, being the news of the new hope from the
Marne. When I woke again to real things, the long battles before Ypres were