basilrathbone.net update

The Liverpool Scottish in the line, 1915

Marcia Jessen has just created a fantastic page about Rathbone and the Great War. All admirer of the Baz need to visit. Included is this quote from Rathbone, when asked, in a 1940 interview, what constituted real horror to him:

“War! . . . Going into an attack, paralyzed with fear, knowing that if we had our own free will, not a living man of us would go! Every living man of us would funk it. We go because we cease to be individuals. We become a mass machine. We are dominated by mass psychology. We become a composite Thing of arms, legs, heads and wills. We move into the attack only because it is the only way out. If we do not go into the attack, if we turn back one quivering inch, we are sot down like dogs – deserters. So we are forced to go forward, not because we are brave and gallant gentlemen, but because we are in a trap. War is a trap, a monstrous, gigantic, inconceivably barbarous trap. And there you have it. A trap is the most horrible thing in the world. Any kind of a trap. Because in a trap you are alone, crouched there with fear. There is Death screaming at you in front. There is Death sticking his tongue out at you from behind. . . . In the trap a man, no longer a man, lives with Death. There is no horror like it!”