MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IWAS talking the other day to a young officer who, after two years with the Eighth Army, had returned home to nurse his wounds. He had for long been interested in the state of mind of those of his generation who were serving in the Forces, and he hoped, during his sick leave, to do something to diminish their sense of isolation. His idea was that it might be useful to start some inexpensive newspaper, edited and controlled by men under thirty, and seeking to examine in terms of " the submerged generation " the doubts and problems by which they were assailed. He was appalled by the gap in confidence which existed between " we " (by which he meant the young) and " they " (by which he meant the con- trolling authorities). This gap, he contended, could not possibly be bridged by any devices, however tactful or ingenious, which " they " might adopt : he did not doubt the benevolence or even the sympathy of the older men ; he admitted that, in the Army at least, the con- trolling authorities were anxious to be modern ; but he was convinced that the gap or barrier between the older and the younger generation was so wide and high that, however modestly the old might seek to explain things to the young, the latter would always imagine that they were being subjected to " propaganda " or at least " being talked down to." The only hope, therefore, was to arrange some method by which the young might explain things to each other. I was much interested in this suggestion, and asked him to define more specifically the nature of the dissatisfaction which the submerged generation felt. He read me a letter which he had received from a midshipman and which defined his disquiet by the unexpected word " loneliness." It seemed unthinkable to me that in conditions which exalted comradeship and excluded privacy any sense of loneliness could subsist. Obviously, what was meant was spiritual and not physical loneliness. " I think," my friend said, " that the word he wished to use was ' forsakenness.' " That word has haunted me ever since. What does it imply?
* * * * The majority of young men and women in the Forces today surrender themselves without conflict, and sometimes even with relief, to the loss of individuality which war discipline implies ; there are some even who welcome a system which relieves them of all personal responsibility. But if these be the majority, they are not a very interesting majority : the interesting problem exists for those educated or intelligent young men and women who constitute a very important minority in our citizen Forces. Why should these sensitive and valuable people regard themselves as " forsaken "? This sub- merged generation hovers, as we know, between two worlds—" one dead, the other powerless to be born." It is a truism to say that they " lack faith," which can mean little more than that they have as yet been unable to find or to define their absolute values. They have been brought up in an age of denial rather than in an age of affirmation, and they are not exposed, as my generation were exposed, to the pressure of conventional habit. It is not only that they lack leaders ; they have no heroes ; although they behave heroically, they scarcely believe in heroism. They have an instinctive suspicion. of all the older patterns of achievement, and the men whom they most admire are those, such as T. E. Lawrence, who deliberately abandoned their own success. It is customary and right that the younger generation should repudiate the standards and conventions of their predecessors ; but the tragedy of our submerged generation is that, as yet, they have evolved no standards of their own. They possess qualities of energy and intelligence greater than any we possessed, yet they float sullen and dispersed upon an ocean of disillusion.
* * * * The major element in this disillusion is distrust. There is distrust, in the first place, of the older generation and all the several systems, theories, aphorisms, fictions and dogmas which' the last century evolved. But the distrust between " we " and " they " (the age gulf, the class gulf, or the even more significant gap which widens between the products of the primary and secondary schools) is not the most
important form of modern distrust : far more operative in the disquiet of the young is their distrust of themselves. It is natural, I suppose, that young people should suffer from some lack of self-confidence ; but the diffidence of the submerged generation, and the irritated help- lessness which it produces, are beyond the normal. In my day we were able to conceal and assuage our diffidence by impudently attacking the conventions of our elders ; yet heresy becomes a vapid. thing if unaccompanied by faith ; nor is much fun to be derived) from attacking systems which one believes to be already dead. In my day we felt that we were being comfortably carried down the river of existence, and it was most amusing to fling insults at the people on the banks ; today the river is reaching the open sea, the banks have receded, and ocean fogs come up to obscure the buoys and beacons. The young today find themselves carried out in little boats towards an uncharted sea. It is not surprising that they should feel forsaken and alarmed. It is not surprising that the more sensitive an intelligent, such as Richard Hillary, should come to feel that in all this uncertainty the only positive certainty is death.
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In peace the young were enabled to adjust themselves to the adult world, and even to rapidly changing circumstances, by a series of almost imperceptible gradations. A sense of continuity was given them by their family, their trade or their profession ; a sense of diversity was provided by their occupations, amusements, friendships and love affairs. Their relation to the community, being in this manner both canalised and dispersed, did not in most cases assume the frightening appearance of a contrast or a conflict. Under war conditions no such gradual acclimatisation is possible. Their lives no longer seem to them some continuous process moving gently to a distant and unforeseeable end ; they know that at any instant their lives may be severed in a sudden snap. The stark intimacy of their relations with their fellows, the automatism of their occupations, force them to create for themselves an inner privacy, in the recesses of which they commune dolefully with their own souls. The fact that the community demands from them so immense an abandon- ment of personality, such grave sacrifices of hope and pleasure, leads them inevitably to ponder whether the community will, if they survive, provide them with any assurance of future usefulness. The demands which are made of them suggest that for the moment they must be immensely valuable ; but they have a suspicion that, having responded to this demand, they will be dismissed as valueless. The more intelligent among them feel, not merely that they are being sacrificed to functions which are naturally abhorrent to them, but that they are being robbed of the opportunity of exercising other functions for which they know themselves to be specially adapted. Upon nerves tautened as are theirs the elderly eulogies of the Press, the smooth optimism of the wireless, grate intolerably ; they know that they are faced with an insoluble riddle ; they become enraged when that riddle is either ignored or answered by mumbled matronly platitudes.
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It may well be that some help can be afforded, some relief to loneliness achieved, if these young people could' have some channel of their own through which they could discuss their own contribution to a future world. If a newspaper is contemplated, then it would have to be a periodical priced at zd. ; grave problems of finance and newsprint would arise. Today the submerged generation are either inarticulate, or articulate only in an tincommunicated way. Letters as excellent as those published in the June number of Horizon from Lieutenant Michael Howard and Lieutenant Eversley Belfield deserve an even wider public. It is little good for the elderly to display sympathy or to make mild gestures of under- standing ; these difficult wounds can be dressed only by those who have been similarly wounded. This sense of uselessness may become as sad as that which ,afflicted the young German generation of 1929; if it be suppressed, this mood may become septic ; the only cure is to expose it to the light.
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