The Project Gutenberg eBook, Disenchantment, by C. E. (Charles Edward)
Montague
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Title: Disenchantment
Author: C. E. (Charles Edward) Montague
Release Date: September 20, 2019 [eBook #60332]
Language: English
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DISENCHANTMENT
by
CHARLES EDWARD MONTAGUE
New York
Brentano's
Publishers
1922
_To_
AUBREY MONTAGUE
OF LAUTOKA, FIJI
"We twa hae paidlet i' the burn"
CONTENTS
I. The Vision 1
II. Misgiving 16
III. At Agincourt and Ypres 35
IV. Tedium 62
V. The Sheep that were not Fed 84
VI. 'Ware Politicians 103
VII. "Can't Believe a Word" 114
VIII. The Duty of Lying 127
IX. Autumn Comes 157
X. Autumn Tints in Chivalry 173
XI. Stars in their Courses 189
XII. Belated Boons 205
XIII. The Old Age of the War 219
XIV. Our Moderate Satanists 232
XV. Any Cure? 252
XVI. Fair warning 266
CHAPTER I
THE VISION
I
Now that most of our men in the prime of life have been in the army we
seem to be in for a goodly literature of disappointment. All the
ungifted young people came back from the war to tell us that they were
"fed up." That was their ailment, in outline. The gifted ones are now
coming down to detail. They say that a web has been woven over the sky,
or that something or other has made a goblin of the sun--about as full
details of a pain as you can fairly expect a gifted person to give,
although he really may feel it.
No doubt disenchantment has flourished before. About the year 1880
nearly all the best art was wan and querulous; that of Burne-Jones was
always in trouble; Matthew Arnold's verse was a well-bred, melodious
whine; Rossetti was all disenamourment and displacement. Yet you could
feel that their broken-toy view of the world was only their nice little
way with the public. Burne-Jones in his home was a red, jovial man;
Arnold a diner-out of the first lustre; Rossetti a sworn friend to bacon
and eggs and other plain pleasures. The young melancholiasts of to-day
are less good at their craft, and yet they do give you a notion that
some sort of silver cord really seems to them to have come loose in
their insides, or some golden bowl, which mattered to them, to have been
more or less broken, and that they are feeling honestly sour about it.
If they do not know how to take it out of mankind by writing desolatory
verses about ashes and dust in the _English Review_, at least they can,
if they be workmen, vote for a strike: they thus achieve the same good
end and put it beyond any doubt that they don't think all is well with
the world.
II
The higher the wall or the horse from which you have tumbled, the
larger, under Nature's iron law, are your bruises and consequent
crossness likely to be. Before we try shaking or cuffing the
disenraptured young Solomons in our magazines and our pits it would be
humane to reflect that some five millions of these, in their turns, have
fallen off an extremely high horse. Of course, we have all fallen off
something since 1914. Even owners of ships and vendors of heavy woollens
might, if all hearts were laid bare, be found to have fallen, not
perhaps off a high horse, but at least off some minute metaphysical
pony. Still, the record in length of vertical fall, and of proportionate
severity of incidence upon an inelastic earth, is probably held by
ex-soldiers and, among these, by the volunteers of the first year of the
war. We were all, of course, volunteers then, undiluted by indispensable
Harry's later success in getting dispensable Johnnie forced to join us
in the Low Countries.
Most of those volunteers of the prime were men of handsome and boundless
illusions. Each of them quite seriously thought of himself as a molecule
in the body of a nation that was really, and not just figuratively,
"straining every nerve" to discharge an obligation of honour. Honestly,
there was about them as little as there could humanly be of the
coxcombry of self-devotion. They only felt that they had got themselves
happily placed on a rope at which everyone else, in some way or other,
was tugging his best as well as they. All the air was ringing with
rousing assurances. France to be saved, Belgium righted, freedom and
civilization re-won, a sour, soiled, crooked old world to be rid of
bullies and crooks and reclaimed for straightness, decency, good-nature,
the ways of common men dealing with common men. What a chance! The plain
recruit who had not the gift of a style said to himself that for once he
had got right in on the ground-floor of a topping good thing, and he
blessed the luck that had made him neither too old nor too young. Rupert
Brooke, meaning exactly the same thing, was writing:
Now, God be thank'd who has match'd us with His hour,
And caught our youth and waken'd us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpen'd power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary....
Of course, it is easy to say to any such simpleton now: "Well, if you
were like that, what could you expect? _Vous l'avez voulu, George
Dandin._ You were rushing upon disillusionment." Of course he was. If
each recruit in 1914 had been an à Kempis, or even a Rochefoucauld, he
would have known that if you are to love mankind you must not expect too
much from it. But he was not, as a rule, a philosopher. He was a common
man, not much inclined to think evil of people. It no more occurred to
him at that time that he was the natural prey of seventy-seven separate
breeds of profiteers than it did that presently he would be overrun by
less figurative lice. When Garibaldi led an infantry attack against the
Austrians it was said that he never looked round to see if his men were
following; he knew to a dead certainty that at the moment when he
reached the enemy he would feel his men's breath hot on the back of his
neck. The early volunteer in his blindness imagined that there was
between all Englishmen then that oneness of faith, love, and courage.
III
Everything helped, for a time, to keep him the child that he was. Except
in the matter of separation from civilian friends his daily life was
pretty well that of the happiest children. The men knew nothing and
hoped for wonderful things. Drill, to the average recruit, was like some
curious game or new dance, various and rhythmic, and not very hard: it
was rather fun for adults to be able to play at such things without
being laughed at. Their lives had undergone an immense simplification.
Of course, an immense simplification of life is not certain to be a
wholly good thing. A Zulu's life may be simpler than Einstein's and yet
the estate of Einstein may be the more gracious. If a boatload of men
holding the Order of Merit were cast away on a desert island they might,
on the whole, think the life as beastly as Touchstone found the life in
the Forest of Arden. Yet some of those eminent men might find a soul of
good in that evil. They might grill all the day and shiver all night,
and be half-starved the whole of the time. But their minds would get a
rest cure. While they were there they would have to settle no
heartrending questions of patronage, nor to decree the superannuation of
elderly worthies. The brutal instancy of physical wants might be trying;
but they would at least be spared, until they were rescued, the solving
of any stiff conundrums of professional ethics.
Moulding the pet recreations of civilized men you find their craving to
have something simple to do for a change, to be given an easy one after
so many twisters. People whose work is the making of calculations or the
manipulation of thoughts have been known to find a curiously restful
pleasure in chopping firewood or painting tool-sheds till their backs
ache. It soothes them with a flattering sense of getting something
useful done straight off. So much of their "real" work is a taking of
some minute or indirect means to some end remote, dimly and doubtfully
visible, possibly--for the dread thought will intrude--not worth
attaining. The pile of chopped wood is at least a spice of the ultimate
good: visible, palpable, it is success; and the advanced and complex
man, the statesman or sociologist who has chopped it, escapes for the
moment from all his own advancement and complication, and savours in
quiet ecstasy one of the sane primeval satisfactions.
A country fellow at the pleugh,
His acre's tilled, he's right eneugh;
A country girl at her wheel,
Her dizzen's done, she's unco weel.
The climber of mountains seeks a similar rapture by going to places
where he is, in full exertion, the sum of his physical faculties, little
more. Here all his hopes are for things close at hand: ambition lives
along one arm stretched out to grasp a rock eighteen inches away; his
sole aim in life may be simply the top of a thirty-foot cleft in a steep
face of stone. At home, in the thick of his work, he had seemed to be
everlastingly threading mazes that no one could thread right to the end;
here, on the crags, it is all divinely simplified; who would trouble his
head with subtle questionings about what human life will, might, or
ought to be when every muscle and nerve are tautly engaged in the primal
job of sticking to life as it is?
To have for his work these raptures of play was the joy of the new
recruit who had common health and good-humour. All his maturity's
worries and burdens seemed, by some magical change, to have dropped from
him; no difficult choices had to be made any longer; hardly a moral
chart to be conned; no one had any finances to mind; nobody else's fate
was put in his hands, and not even his own. All was fixed from above,
down to the time of his going to bed and the way he must lace up his
boots. His vow of willing self-enslavement for a season had brought him
the peace of the soldier, which passeth understanding as wholly as that
of the saint, the blitheness of heart that comes to both with their
clarifying, tranquillizing acquiescence in some mystic will outside
their own. Immersed in that Dantean repose of utter obedience the men
slept like babies, ate like hunters, and rediscovered the joy of infancy
in getting some rather elementary bodily movement to come right. They
saw everything that God had made, and behold! it was very good. That was
the vision.
IV
The mental peace, the physical joy, the divinely simplified sense of
having one clear aim, the remoteness from all the rest of the world, all
favoured a tropical growth of illusion. A man, says Tennyson, "imputes
himself." If he be decent he readily thinks other people are decent.
Here were hundreds of thousands of quite commonplace persons rendered,
by comradeship in an enthusiasm, self-denying, cheerful, unexacting,
sanely exalted, substantially good. To get the more fit to be quickly
used men would give up even the little darling vices which are nearest
to many simple hearts. Men who had entertained an almost reasoned
passion for whisky, men who in civil life had messed up careers for it
and left all and followed it, would cut off their whisky lest it should
spoil their marching. Little white, prim clerks from Putney--men whose
souls were saturated with the consciousness of class--would abdicate
freely and wholeheartedly their sense of the wide, unplumbed, estranging
seas that ought to roar between themselves and Covent Garden market
porters. Many men who had never been dangerous rivals to St. Anthony
kept an unwonted hold on themselves during the months when hundreds of
reputable women and girls round every camp seemed to have been suddenly
smitten with a Bacchantic frenzy. Real, constitutional lazy fellows
would buy little cram-books of drill out of their pay and sweat them up
at night so as to get on the faster. Men warned for a guard next day
would agree among themselves to get up an hour before the pre-dawn
winter Réveillé to practise among themselves the beautiful symbolic
ritual of mounting guard in the hope of approaching the far-off,
longed-for ideal of smartness, the passport to France. Men were known to
subscribe in order to get some dummy bombs made with which to practise
bomb-throwing by themselves on summer nights after drilling and marching
from six in the morning till five in the evening. How could they not
have the illusion that the whole nation's sense of comradeship went as
far as their own?
Who of all those who were in camp at that time, and still are alive,
will not remember until he dies the second boyhood that he had in the
late frosts and then in the swiftly filling and bursting spring and
early summer of 1915? The awakening bird-notes of Réveillé at dawn, the
two-mile run through auroral mists breaking over a still inviolate
England, the men's smoking breath and the swish of their feet brushing
the dew from the tips of the June grass and printing their track of
darker green on the pearly-grey turf; the long, intent morning parades
under the gummy shine of chestnut buds in the deepening meadows; the
peace of the tranquil hours on guard at some sequestered post, alone
with the sylvester midnight, the wheeling stars and the quiet breathing
of the earth in its sleep, when time, to the sentry's sense, fleets on
unexpectedly fast and life seems much too short because day has slipped
into day without the night-long sleeper's false sense of a pause; and
then jocund days of marching and digging trenches in the sun; the silly
little songs on the road that seemed, then, to have tunes most human,
pretty, and jolly; the dinners of haversack rations you ate as you sat
on the roadmakers' heaps of chopped stones or lay back among buttercups.
When you think of the youth that you have lost, the times when it seems
to you now that life was most poignantly good may not be the ones when
everything seemed at the time to go well with your plans, and the world,
as they say, to be at your feet; rather some few unaccountable moments
when nothing took place that was out of the way and yet some word of a
friend's, or a look on the face of the sky, the taste of a glass of
spring water, the plash of laughter and oars heard across midsummer
meadows at night raised the soul of enjoyment within you to strangely
higher powers of itself. That spirit bloweth and is still: it will not
rise for our whistling nor keep a time-table; no wine that we know can
give us anything more than a fugitive caricature of its ecstasies. When
it has blown free we remember it always, and know, without proof, that
while the rapture was there we were not drunk, but wise; that for a
moment some intervening darkness had thinned and we were seeing further
than we can see now into the heart of life.
To one recollection at least it has seemed that the New Army's
spring-tide of faith and joyous illusion came to its height on a night
late in the most beautiful May of 1915, in a hut where thirty men slept
near a forest in Essex. Nothing particular happened; the night was like
others. Yet in the times that came after, when half of the thirty were
dead and most of the others jaded and soured, the feel of that night
would come back with the strange distinctness of those picked,
remembered mornings and evenings of boyhood when everything that there
was became everlastingly memorable as though it had been the morning or
evening of the first day. Ten o'clock came and Lights Out, but a kind of
luminous bloom still on the air and a bugle blowing Last Post in some
far-away camp that kept worse hours than we. I believe the whole hut
held its breath to hear the notes better. Who wouldn't, to listen to
that most lovely and melancholy of calls, the noble death of each day's
life, a sound moving about hither and thither, like a veiled figure
making gestures both stately and tender, among the dim thoughts that we
have about death the approaching extinguisher--resignation and sadness
and unfulfilment and triumph all coming back to the overbearing sense of
extinction in those two recurrent notes of "Lights Out"? One listens as
if with bowed mind, as though saying "Yes; out, out, brief candle." A
moment's silence to let it sink in and the chaffing and laughter broke
out like a splash of cool water in summer again. That hut always went to
bed laughing and chaffing all round, and, though there was no wit among
us, the stories tasted of life, the inexhaustible game and adventure.
Looker, ex-marine turned soldier, told us how he had once gone down in a
diving-suit to find a lost anchor and struck on the old tin lining out
of a crate, from which some octopian beast with long feelers had reached
out at him, and the feelers had come nearer and nearer through the dim
water. "What did you do, Filthy?" somebody asked (we called Looker
"Filthy" with friendly jocoseness). "I 'opped it," the good fellow said,
and the sane anti-climax of real life seemed twice as good as the climax
that any Hugo or Verne could have put to the yarn. Another described the
great life he had lived as an old racing "hen," or minor sutler of the
sport of kings. Hard work, of course. "All day down at Epsom openin'
doors an' brushin' coats and shiftin' truck for bookies till you'd make,
perhaps, two dollars an' speculate it on the las' race and off back 'ome
to London 'ungry, on your 'oofs." Once a friend of his, who had had a
bad day, had not walked--had slipped into the London train, and at
Vauxhall, where tickets were taken, had gone to earth under the seat
with a brief appeal to his fellow travellers: "Gents, I rely on your
honour." The stout narrator could see no joke at all in the phrase. He
was rather scandalized by our great roar of laughter. "'Is honour! And
'im robbin' the comp'ny! 'nough to take away a man's kerrikter!" said
the patient walker-home in emergency. It made life seem too wonderful to
end; such were the untold reserves that we had in this nation of men
with a hold on themselves, of hardly uprightness; even this unhelped son
of the gutter, living from hand to mouth in the common lodging-houses of
slums, a parasite upon parasites, poor little animalcule doing odd jobs
for the caterpillars of the commonwealth--even he could persist in
carrying steadily, clear of the dirt, the full vase of his private
honour. What, then, must be the unused stores of greedless and fearless
straightness in others above us, generals and statesmen, men in whom, as
in bank-porters, character is three parts of the trade! The world seemed
clean that night; such a lovely unreason of optimist faith was astir in
us all,
We felt for that time ravish'd above earth
And possess'd joys not promised at our birth.
It seemed hardly credible now, in this soured and quarrelsome country
and time, that so many men of different classes and kinds, thrown
together at random, should ever have been so simply and happily
friendly, trustful, and keen. But they were, and they imagined that all
their betters were too. That was the paradise that the bottom fell out
of.
CHAPTER II
MISGIVING
I
What could the New Army not have done if all the time of its training
had been fully used! A few, at least, of its units had a physique above
that of the Guards; many did more actual hours of work, before going
abroad, than Guardsmen in peace-time do in two years; all were at first
as keen as boys, collectors, or spaniels--whichever are keenest; when
the official rations of warlike instruction fell short they would go
about hungrily trying to scratch crumbs of that provender out of the
earth like fowls in a run.
But there was an imp of frustration about. He pervaded, like Ariel, all
the labouring ship of our State. I had seen him in Lancashire once, on
one of the early days of the war, when fifty young miners marched in
from one pit, with their colliery band, to enlist at an advertised place
and time of enlistment. The futilitarian elf took care that the shutters
were up and nobody there, so that the men should kick their heels all
the day in the street and walk back at night with their tails between
their legs, and the band not playing, to tell their mates that the whole
thing was a mug's game, a ramp, got up by the hot-air merchants and
crooks in control. The imp must have grinned, not quite as all of us
have grinned since, on the wrong side of our mouths, at the want of
faith that miners have in the great and wise who rule over them. Another
practical joke of his was to slip into the War Office or Admiralty and
tear up any letters he found from people offering gifts of motor-cars,
motor-boats, steam-yachts, training grounds, etc., lest they be answered
and the writers and other friends of their country encouraged. Perhaps
his brightest triumph of all was to dress himself up as England and send
away with a flea in her ear the Ireland whom the wonder-working Redmond
had induced to offer to fight at our side. Those were a few of his
master-pieces. Between times he would keep his hand in by putting it
into the Old Army's head to take the keenness out of the New.
Dearest of all the New Army's infant illusions was the Old Army--still
at that time the demigod host of an unshattered legend of Mons. To the
new recruits any old Regular sergeant was more--if the world can hold
more--than a county cricketer is to a small boy at school. He had the
talisman; he was a vessel full of the grace by which everything was to
be saved; like a king, he could "touch for" the malady of
unsoldierliness. How could he err, how could he shirk, now that the fate
of a world hung upon him?
There was something in that. No doubt there always is in illusions. They
are not delusions. The pick of the old N.C.O.'s of the Regular Army were
packed as tight as bits of radium with virtues and powers. A man of
fifty-five who came back to the army from spending ten years in a
farcical uniform whistling for taxis outside a flash music-hall would
teach every rank in a battalion its duties for 4_s._ 8_d._ a
day--coaching the dug-out colonel in the new infantry drill, the field
officers in court-martial procedure, the chaplain in details of
drum-head worship, the medical officer in the order of sick parades, the
subalterns and N.C.O.'s in camp economy, field hygiene, and what not,
and always holding the attention of a man or a mess or a battalion fixed
fast by the magic of his own oaken character, his simple, vivid mind,
his passion for getting things right, and his humorous, patient
knowledge of mankind. Even such minor masterpieces as average Guards
ex-sergeant-majors were rather godlike on parade. In drill, at any rate,
they had the circumstantial vision and communicable fire of the
prophets. Early in 1915 a little famished London cab-tout, a recruit,
still rectilinear as a starved cat even after a month of army rations,
was to be heard praying softly at night in his cot that he might be made
like unto one of these, whom he named.
II
Where, then, did the first shiver of disillusion begin? Perhaps with
some trivial incident. Say a new-born company, quartered in a great
town, was sent out for a long afternoon's marching. Only through long,
steady grinds can the perfect rhythm of marching, like that of rowing,
be generated at last. The men, youthfully eager to kiss all possible
rods and endure any obtainable hardness, march forth in a high state of
delight--they are going to learn how to march to Berlin! No officer
being present--and scarcely any existing as yet--a sergeant-major is in
command. He is a very old hand. For twenty minutes he leads his 250
adorers into the thick of a populous quarter. Then he orders them to
fall out. A public-house resembling Buckingham Palace, but smaller, is
near. Most of the men, in their ardour, stand about on the kerb, ready
to leap back to their places as soon as the whistle shall sound. A few
thirsty souls jostle hurriedly into the bars, where they find that
arrangements for serving a multitude are surprisingly complete. Soon
they are further reassured by descrying the sergeant-major's handsome
form, like Tam o' Shanter's, "planted unco' right" in a chair in an
inner holy of holies along with the landlord. This esoteric session has
an air of permanence; the sergeant-major is evidently _au mieux_ with
the management. The thirsty souls settle down to their beer.
Five minutes, twenty, half an hour pass fairly fast for them, less fast
for the keener warriors pawing the kerbstone without. At the end of an
hour fifty per cent. of the kerbstone zealots have been successfully
frozen into the bars. The rest stare at each other with a wild surmise.
Rumour shakes her wings and begins to fly round. The sergeant-major, she
says, is holding a species of court in the depths of the pub; some
privates with money upon them, children of this world, are pressing in,
she says, even now, into that heart of the rose, and with a few manly
words are standing the great man the extremely expensive combination of
nectars that he prefers. "Were it not better done as others use?"--the
Spartan residuum on the kerb is diminishing. Another hour goes; only an
inconsiderable remnant of Spartans is left; these are exchanging profane
remarks about patriotism and other virtues. One of them quotes a famous
Conservative statesman whose footman he was before he enlisted: "I
believe we shall win, in spite of the Regular Army." When just enough
time is left to march back to quarters the whistle is blown, the men
slouch into their places and stump unrhythmically home, revolving many
things according to their several natures. A child who has rashly taken
its parent on trust, and yet more rashly taken the parent's all-round
perfection as some sort of sample and proof of a creditable government
of the world, must have a good deal of mental rearrangement to do the
first time the parent comes home full of liquor and sells the furniture
to get some more.
III
Perhaps, in another company or another battalion, some private of
relative wealth has felt, in the strength of his youth and the heat of
his zeal, that he wants more to do. He longs to get on with the job. So
he guilelessly goes to his own sergeant-major and asks him if there is a
chance of getting some lessons in bayonet-fighting anywhere in the town.
The sergeant-major sizes him up with a stare. "You're a fine likely
man," he says, "for a stripe." He stares harder. "Or three," he
subjoins.
The gilded youth is confounded. He an N.C.O.! He would as soon have
thought of being a primate. "I'll give you," the Old Army continues,
"the lessons myself. It'll be twelve quid--_for the lot_." To reproduce
the emphasis upon the last three words is beyond the resources of
typography.
The gilded youth may feel a slight pricking in his thumbs. Still, there
is no overt crook in the deal. The teaching is sure to be good. And he
has the cash and an inexact sense of values. So he agrees. The senior
man-at-arms expresses a preference for ready money. Agreed, too. After
one lesson the tutor is frankly bored by his tutorial function. "Hang
it," he says, "what's the sense of you and me sweating our 'oly guts
out? You've paid, and you'll find I won't bilk you." Youth is mystified;
feels it is getting somewhat short weight. But what are acolytes against
high priests? Youth leaves it at that.
In two or three weeks the frustrated pupil is sent for by his
frustrator. A man is wanted for Post Corporal, or even for Battalion
Provost Sergeant. What would the gilded youth say to the job? On his
saying nothing at first the sergeant-major, with swiftly rising contempt
for such friarly hesitancy, recites the beauties of this piece of
preferment. "Cushiest job in the 'ole outfit! Long as you're sober
enough to stand up at the staff parade of a night, that's all there is
to it. Where'd the crime be among you 'oly Christians?" (The almost
fanatical abstention of the New Army from ordinary military crimes often
gave some scandal to experts drawn from the Old. They regarded it with
perplexity and suspicion. The phenomenon was really simple, the men
being in panic-fear of getting left behind in England if their unit
should suddenly be sent abroad.) While the gilded youth tries to
explain, without a lapse from tact, that the ranks are good enough for
himself he feels a regal scorn beat down on him like a vertical sun. A
fulmination follows. "Then what the 'ell did you ever come to me for?
'Op off! Out of it!"
The youth retires feeling that he has somehow strayed into a black list.
He talks it over with a friend. The friend, he finds, has heard
something like it from somebody else. Ribald jibes are soon flying
about--"Four pound a stripe!" "Stripes are ris' to-day!" "Corporals,
three for a tenner!" The story goes that a little "Scotch draper," the
worst drill in a section, has felt that in this newly revealed world his
professional credit for tactful effrontery is at stake; he has bet a
fiver that he will offer the bare market price of a recommendation for
"lance-Jack" and bring the thing off; the enterprise has prospered and
the architect of his own fortunes is wearing the stripe, spending his
pound balance on the transaction, commanding his brethren, and enjoying
his new dispensation from fatigues. The band of brothers begin to look
at each other with some circumspection. They wonder. How far does the
dirty work go? Who may not try it on next? And did not somebody say he
had seen the stud pass between the contractor who emptied the swill-tubs
and the sergeant-cook who filled them with half-legs of mutton? What was
that shorter creed to which the sergeants' mess waiters said that the
Regular sergeants always recurred in their cups--"Stick together, boys,"
and "Anything can be wangled in the army"?
IV
What about officers, too? The men wonder again. That new company
commander who started in as a captain, but never could give the simplest
command on parade without his sergeant-major to give him the words like
a parson doing a marriage? What about little Y., who suddenly got a
commission when he was doing a fortnight's C.B. for coming on parade
with a dirty neck? And the major's lecture on musketry? And the
colonel's on field operations?
Part of the scheme of training is that all the senior officers should
lecture to the men on something or other--marching, map-reading, field
hygiene, and what not. An excellent plan, but terribly hard on an old
Regular Army not exactly officered by the brightest wits of public
schools. The major's musketry lecture has made the men think. He has
told them first that, just to let them know that he was not talking
through his hat, he might say he had been, in his time, the champion
shot of the Army in India. The men had known that already--had doted, in
fact, on anything known to the glory of any of their commanders. Fair
enough, too, they had felt, that a man should buck a bit about what he
had done. Anyone would. And so they had not even smiled. But then the
major had amplified. He had recited his moderate, but not bad, earlier
scores in competitions: he had given statistics of his rapid rise; he
had painted the astonishment of all who saw him shoot in those
days--above all, the delight of the men of his old regiment; for, the
major had said, "I may have faults, but this at least I can say, that
wherever I went the men simply worshipped the ground that I trod on."
All this had filled the first half of the lecturer's hour. The men had
begun to look at each other cautiously, marvelling. When would the major
begin? Could this be a Regular Army custom? But then the major had
warmed to his subject. With rising zest he had described the dramatic
tension pervading the butts as the crisis of each of his greater
triumphs approached. And then the climax had come--"the one time that I
failed." In sombre tones the major had told how five shots had to be
fired at one out of several targets arranged in a row. "I fired my first
four shots. A bull each time. I fired again, and the marker signalled a
miss! Everyone present was thunderstruck. I knew what had happened. I
said to the butt officer, 'Do you mind, sir, enquiring if there is any
shot on the target to the right of mine?' He did so. 'Yes,' was
signalled back. 'What is it?' I asked, though I knew. 'A bull.' 'That
was my last shot,' said I. I had made the mistake of my life. I had
fired at the wrong target. Fall out."
On this tragic climax the lecture had ended, the men had streamed out,
some silent, bewildered, some dropping words of amazement. "Lecture!
W'y, it's the man's pers'nal 'istory!"
And then the C.O. has lectured on training in field operations--the old,
cold colonel, upright, dutiful, unintelligent, waxen, drawn away by a
genuine patriotism from his roses and croquet to help joylessly in the
queer labour of trying to teach this uncouth New Army a few of the
higher qualities of the old. Too honest a man to pretend that he was not
taking all that he said in his lecture out of the Army's official
manual, _Infantry Training_, 1914, he has held the little red book in
his hand, read out frankly a sentence at a time from that terse and
luminous masterpiece of instruction, and then has tried to "explain" it
while the men gaped at the strange contrast between the thing clearly
said in the book and the same thing plunged into obscurity by the poor
colonel's woolly and faltering verbiage. Half the men had bought the
little book themselves and devoured it as hungrily as boys consume a
manual of rude boat-building or of camping-out. And here was the colonel
bringing his laboured jets of darkness to show the way through sunlight;
elucidating plainness itself with the tangled clues of his own mind's
confusion, like Bardolph: "'Accommodated'; that is, when a man is, as
they say, accommodated; or when a man is, being, whereby a' may be
thought to be accommodated."
V
A favourite trick with the disillusioning imp was to get hold of
authority's wisely drafted time-table of work for a new division in
training and mix up all the subjects and times. The effect must have
often diverted the author of this piece of humour. Some day a company,
say, would begin to learn bayonet-fighting. This would at once revive in
the men the fading ecstasies of their first simple faith. Whenever
instructors said--"Now then, men, I want to see a bit more murder in
them eyes" pleasant little thrills of chartered pugnacity would inspirit
them. This, they would feel, was the real thing; this was what they were
there for. Then just as, perhaps, they approached the engaging and
manifestly serviceable "short jab" Puck's little witticism would
suddenly tell; bayonet-fighting would abruptly stop; an urgent order
would come from on high to "get on with night operations" or "get on
with outpost work," and one of these bodies of knowledge would, in its
turn, be partly imbibed by the infant mind and then as suddenly
withdrawn from its thirsty lips for something else to be started
instead--perhaps a thing that had already been once started and dropped.
In the working out of this fantastic pattern of smatterings a company
might begin to learn bayonet-fighting three or four times and each time
be switched off it before getting half way, and go to France in the end
with the A.B.C. of each of several alphabets learnt to boredom and the
X.Y.Z. of none of them touched, the men being left to improvise the
short jab and other far-on letters by the light of nature, in intimate
contact, perhaps, with less humorously instructed Germans.
All this was not universal. Still, it could and did happen. And then the
men stared and marvelled. Authority, it is true, had, at the worst, some
gusts of passion for perfection. But even these might fortify, in their
way, the new occupant of the seat of the scorners. A sudden order might
come for a brigade or other inspection, and then authority might in a
brief hour become like mediæval man when he fell suddenly ill and the
pains of hell gat hold of his mind and he felt that God must be squared
without conduct because it might take more time to conduct himself than
he had got. In this pious frenzy all attention to measures for
incommoding the Germans would yield to the primary duty of whiting the
sepulchre; energies that would carry a Hohenzollern Redoubt would be put
into the evolution of sections which, through somebody's slackness, did
not exist, or the hiding of men who, through some one's mismanagement,
were not fit to be seen on parade; old N.C.O.'s would present the men
with the tip for making a seemingly full valise look nicely rectangular
by the judicious insertion of timber, and other homely recipes for
cleaning the outsides of cups and platters. "Eye-wash?" these children
of light would say, as they taught. "Of course, it's all eye-wash. What
ain't eye-wash in this old world?"
It was a question much asked at the time by those whose post-war
inclinations to answer "Nothing, among the lot who run England now" are
whitening the hair of statesmen. They were then only asking "How far
does it go? How much of the timber is rotten"? Enough to bring down the
whole house? Here, there, everywhere the men's new suspicion peered
about in the dark and the half-light. Most of the men were the almost
boundless reservoirs of patience, humility, and good humour that common
Englishmen are. They would take long to run dry. But the waters were
steadily falling. Most of them had come from civil employments in which
the curse of Adam still holds and a man must either work or get out,
mind his P's and Q's, or go short of his victuals. They knew that in
civil life a foreman who thieved like some of the Regular N.C.O.'s would
soon be in the street or in gaol. They knew that in civil life a manager
who could not get down to the point any better than the colonel or the
major would soon have the business piled up on the rocks. Here was an
eye-opening find--a world in which any old rule of that kind could be
dodged if you got the right tip. It became the dominant topic for talk,
more dominant even than food, the staple theme of the conversation of
soldiers. How far did the rottenness go? Would they ever get to the
other side of this bog through which poor old England was wading? If you
bored deeper and deeper still into this amazing old Regular Army would
there ever come a point at which you would strike the good firm stone of
English decency and sense again? And was it open to hope that in
Germany, too, such failures abounded--that these diseases of ours were
rife in all armies and not in the British alone, so that there might be
a chance for us still, as there is for one toothless dog fighting
another?
Whatever else might lack in our training-camps throughout England during
the spring and summer of 1915, good fresh food for suspicion always
abounded. Runlets of news and rumour came trickling from France; wounded
soldiers talked and could not be censored; they talked of the failure of
French; of the sneer on the face of France; of Staff work that hung up
whole platoons of our men, like old washing or scarecrows, to rot on
uncut German wire; of little, splendid bands of company officers and men
who did take bits of enemy trench, in spite of it all, and then were
bombed to death by the Germans at leisure, no support coming, no bombs
to throw back--and here, at home, old Regular colonels were saying to
hollow squares of their men: "I hear that in France there's a certain
amount of throwing of some sort of ginger-beer bottles about, but the
old Lee-Metford's good enough for me."
No need, indeed, to look as far away as France. London, to any open eye,
was grotesque with a kind of fancy-dress ball of non-combatant khaki: it
seemed as if no well-to-do person could be an abstainer from warfare too
total to go about disguised as a soldier. He might be anything--a lord
lieutenant, an honorary colonel, a dealer in horses, a valuer of cloth,
an accountant, an actor in full work, a recruiter of other men for the
battles that he avoided himself, a "soldier politician" of swiftly and
strangely acquired field rank and the "swashing and martial outside" of
a Rosalind, and a Rosalind's record of active service. No doubt this
latter carnival was not to be at its height till most of the New Army of
1914 was well out of the way. Conscription had not yet been vouchsafed
to the prayers of healthy young publicists who then begged themselves
off before tribunals. The ultimate farce of the mobbing of the
relatively straight "conscientious objector" by these, his less
conscientious brother-objectors, had still to be staged. But already the
comedy, like Mercutio's wound, was enough; it served. Colonel
Repington's confessional diary had not been published, but the
underworld which it reveals was pretty correctly guessed by the New
Army's rising suspicion. And rumour said that all the chief tribes of
posturers, shirkers, "have-a-good-timers," and jobbers were banding
themselves together against the one man in high place whom the New Army
believed, with the assurance of absolute faith, to be straight and "a
tryer." It was said that Kitchener was to be set upon soon by a league
of all the sloths whom he had put to work, the "stunt" journalists whom
he had kept at a distance, the social principalities and powers whose
jobs he would not do. All the slugs of the commonwealth were to combine
against the commonwealth unpleasantly dutiful gardener--down with his
lantern and can of caustic solution!
VI
It was, of course, an incomplete view of the case. Shall we have
Henries, Fluellens, and Erpinghams at the hand of God, and no Bardolphs,
Pistols, and Nyms? Our stage was not really rotten by any means; only
half-rotten, like others of man's institutions. Half the Old Army, at
least, was exemplary. Even among politicians unselfishness may, with
some trouble, be found. Still, this is no exposition of what the New
Army ought to have said to itself as it lay on the ground after Lights
Out compounding the new temper which comes out to-day, but only of what
it did say. It was reacting. In the first weeks of the war most of the
flock had too simply taken on trust all that its pastors and masters had
said. Now, after believing rather too much, they were out to believe
little or nothing--except that in the lump pastors and masters were
frauds. From any English training-camp, about that time, you almost
seemed to see a light steam rising, as it does from a damp horse. This
was illusion beginning to evaporate.
CHAPTER III
AT AGINCOURT AND YPRES
I
Shakespeare seems to have known what
there is to be known about our Great War of 1914-18. And he was not
censored. So he put into his _Henry IV_ and _Henry V_ a lot of little
things that our press had to leave out at the time for the good of the
country. If you look closely you can see them lying about all over the
plays. There is the ugly affair of the pyx, at Corbie, on the Somme;
there are the little irregularities in recruiting; there are the small
patches of baddish _moral_ on the coast and even in Picardy; there is
the painful case of the oldish lieutenant who drank and had cold feet,
after talking bigger than anyone else. One almost expects to find
something in _Henry V_ about the mutiny at Etaples, or the predilection
of the Australians for chickens. Anyhow, there is a more understanding
account than any war correspondent has given of English troops about to
go into battle.
Timing it for the morning of Agincourt, Shakespeare shows us three
standard types of the privates who were to win the Great War. One of
them, Court, says little; he just looks out for the dawn. We all know
Court; he has won many battles. Bates, the second man, gives tongue
pretty freely. Bates is not ruled by funk, but he professes it.
"He (the King) may show what outward courage he will, but I believe,
as cold a night as 'tis, he could wish himself in the Thames up to
the neck, and so I would he were, and I by him, at all adventures,
so we were quit here."
Bates, being dead, yet liveth, like Court. In 1915, as in 1415, he was
prosecuting his conquests in France, and his unaltered soul was
fortifying itself with chants like
Far, far away would I be,
Where the Alleyman cannot catch me,
and
Oh my! I don't want to die,
_I_ want to go home,
sung to dourly wailful tunes, at the seasons of stress when Scotsmen and
Irishmen screwed themselves up to the sticking-point with their Tyrtæan
anti-English ballads, when Frenchmen would soulfully hymn Glory and
Love, and when Germans, if the ear did not deceive, were calling out the
whole Landwehr and Landsturm of the straight patriotic lyre. Williams,
the third of the Agincourt privates, lives too. He lives with a
vengeance. You will remember that he was an anti-ranter, anti-canter and
anti-gusher, like Bates. But he ran a special line of his own. He was
not simply "fed up"--as he would say now--with tall talk about the just
cause and brothers-in-arms and the moral beauty of dying in battle. He
was suspicious, besides. He darkly fancied that those who emitted the
stuff must have some crooked game on. "That's more than we know" was his
stopper for all stock heroics. He would take none of his betters on
trust, neither High Command nor Government nor Church--only one company
officer whom he knew for himself--"a good old commander and a most kind
gentleman." This one small plot of dry ground was reclaimed from the
broad sea of Williams' scepticism.
II
If this Doubting Thomas abounded at Agincourt how could he not abound
at, say, the third Battle of Ypres? At Agincourt our whole army was just
small enough to have comradeship all the way through it--not the
figure-of-speech used by the orators, but the thing that soldiers know.
Comradeship in a battalion will come of itself; it may be grown, with
some effort, in a brigade; in good divisions it has flickered into life
for a while during a war; army corps know it not, though their
headquarters staffs may dine together at times. At Agincourt the whole
of our force was an infantry brigade and a half. It all lay handy in one
bivouac. Generals led advancing troops as second-lieutenants do now. The
commander-in-chief could go round the lines of a night and talk to the
men; if he should speak to them about "we few, we happy few, we band of
brothers," he would not be projecting gas.
But now----? It is nobody's fault, but all of that has been lost, as
utterly lost as the old comradeship of master and journeyman worker is
lost in a mill where half the thousand hands may never have seen the
employer who sits in a far-away office, perhaps in a far-away town. Two
million men can never be a happy few; nor yet a band of brothers--you
have to know a brother first. A man could serve six months in France and
never see the general commanding his division. He could be there for
four years and not know what a corps or an army commander looked like.
How can you help it? Many generals did what they could--more, you might
say, than they should. They left their desks and maps to visit their men
in the line; they made excuses to get under fire; two or three were
killed doing so; one corps commander smuggled himself into the front
line of an attack by his corps. But these were escapades, strictly. The
higher commands have no right to get hit. Modern war has pushed the
right place for them farther and farther away from the fighting, away
from the men, whom some of the higher commanders, as well as the lower,
do really love with a love passing the love of women--"the dear men" of
whom I have heard an officer, tied to the staff and the base by the
results of head wounds, speak with an almost wailing ache of desire, as
horses whinny for a friend--"Would I were with him, wheresoe'er he is,
either in heaven or in hell." But how were the men to know that?
Everything helped to indispose them to know it; everything went to point
the contrast between their own fate and that of its distant and unknown
controllers. The evolution of the war was now calling on all ranks of
troops in the actual line to put up with a much diminished chance of
survival, only the barest off-chance if they stayed there year after
year. While they lived it was inflicting upon them in trenches a life
squalid beyond precedent. And that same evolution had pressed back the
chief seats of command into places where life was said to contrast
itself in wonderful ways with that life of mud and stench and
underground gloom.
It was quite truly said. Of the separation and contrast you got a full
sense if fate took you straight from trench life in the stiff Flanders
slime or the dreary wet chalk of the disembowelled Loos plain to one of
the seats of authority far in the rear. G.H.Q., the most regal seat of
them all, was divinely niched, during most of the war, at Montreuil, and
Montreuil was a place to bring tears to the eyes of an artist, like
Castelfranco, St. Andrews, or Windsor; the tiny walled town on a hill
had that poignant fulness of loveliness, making the sense ache at it,
like still summer evenings in England. It was a storied antique,
unscathed and still living and warm, weathered mellow with centuries of
sunshine and tranquillity, all its own old wars long laid aside and the
racket of this new one very far from it. Walking among its walled
gardens, where roses hung over the walls, or sitting upon the edge of
the rampart, your feet dangling over among the top boughs of embosoming
trees, you were not merely out of the war; you were out of all war! you
entered into that beatitude of super-peace which fills your mind as you
look at a Roman camp on a sunned Sussex down, where the gentle
convexities of the turf seem to turn war into an old tale for children.
Such gardens of enchantment were not known by sight to most of our
fighting troops, but they were rumoured. The mind of Williams, in the
front line, worked with a surly zest on the contrast between the two
hemispheres of an army--the hemisphere of combatancy, of present
torment, of scant reward, of probable extinction, and the hemisphere of
non-combatancy, of comfort, of safety, of more profuse decoration, the
second hemisphere ruling over the former and decimating it sometimes by
feats like the Staff work of 1915. Among the straw in billets and the
chalk clods in dug-outs, in the reeking hot twilight of parlours in
French village inns, in the confidential darkness after Lights Out in
hospital wards from Bethune to Versailles and Rouen, the vinegar tongue
of Williams let itself go.
Of course, he went wrong. And yet his error, like the facts which begat
it, could not be helped. If all that you know of an alleged brother of
yours is that he is having the best of the deal while you are getting
the worst you have to be a saint of the prime to take it on trust that
it really did please God, or any godlike human authority, to call him to
a station in a dry hut with a stove, among the flesh-pots of an
agreeable coast, and you to a station in a wet burrow full of rats and
lice and yellow or white mud and ugly liabilities. And Williams was not
a saint, although when he enlisted he was profusely told that he was by
people who were to call him a sinner later, when as a Dundee rioter or
"Bolshevik" miner, or as a Sinn Feiner or a Black-and-Tan, he
transgressed some eternal law. Williams was and is only a quiet simple
substance exhibiting certain normal reactions under certain chemical
tests.
III
There may be laid up in Heaven a pattern of some front line by which the
Staff in its rear would be really loved. But such love is not in the
nature of man. If the skin on Mr. Dempsey's knuckles could speak, and
were perfectly frank, it would not say that it loved the unexposed and
unabraded tissues of Mr. Dempsey's directive brain. Hotspur, in
deathless words, has aired the eternal grudge of the combatant soldier
against the Brass Hat--
I remember, when the fight was done,
When I was dry with rage and extreme toil,
Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,
Came there a certain lord, neat and trimly dressed,
Fresh as a bridegroom.
So the jaundiced narrative flows on and on, doing the fullest justice on
record to some of the main heads of the front line's immemorial distaste
for the Staff--for its too Olympian line of comment upon the vulgar
minutiæ of combat, its offensively manifest facilities for getting a
good shave, its fertility in gratuitous advice of an imperfectly
practical kind, and its occasional lapses from grace in speaking of the
men, the beloved men, the objects of every good combatant officer's
jealous and wrathful affection.
Or, again, you might say that a Staff is a trouser-button, which there
are few to praise while it goes on with its work, and very few to
abstain from cursing when it comes off. When a Staff's work is done well
the front line only feels as if Nature were marching, without actual
molestation, along some beneficent course of her own. But when some one
slips up, and half a brigade is left to itself in a cold, cold world
encircled by Germans, the piercing eye of the front line perceives in a
moment how pitifully ill the Brass Hats deserve of their country. If you
are an infantry-man the Brass Hats above you are, in your sight, a kind
of _ex officio_ children of perdition, like your own gunners. As long as
your own gunners go on achieving the masterpiece of mathematics that is
required to confine the incidence of their shells to the enemy you feel
that, just for the moment, a gunner's rich natural endowment of original
sin is not telling for all it is worth. But some day the frailty of man
or of metal causes a short one to drop once again among you and your
friends; and then you are mightily refreshed and confirmed in the stern
Calvinistic faith of the infantry that there are chosen vessels of grace
and also chosen vessels of homicidal mania.
If man, in all his wars, is predestined never to love and trust his
Brass Hats, least of all can he struggle against this disability when he
is warring in trenches. Why? Because trench life is very domestic,
highly atomic. Its atom, or unit, like that of slum life, is the
jealously close, exclusive, contriving life of a family housed in an
urban cellar. During the years of trench war a man seldom saw the whole
of his company at a time. Our total host might be two millions strong,
or ten millions; whatever its size a man's world was that of his
section--at most, his platoon; all that mattered much to him was the one
little boatload of castaways with whom he was marooned on a desert
island and making shift to keep off the weather and any sudden attack of
wild beasts. Absorbed in the primitive job of keeping alive on an earth
naked except in the matter of food, they became, like other primitive
men, family separatists. Any odd chattel that each trench household
acquired served as an extra dab of cement for the household's internal
affections, as well as a possible _casus belli_ against the unblessed
outsiders who dared to cast upon it the eye of desire. A brazier with
three equal legs would be coveted by a whole company. Once a platoon
acquired a broken, but just practicable, arm-chair; not exactly a
stronghold of luxury; rather a freakish wave of her banner; and this
symbol of lost joys was borne, at great inconvenience, from sector to
sector of the front, amidst the affected derision of other
platoons--veiling what was well understood to be envy. It was like the
grim, ineffusive spiritual cohesion of a Scottish family soldered
together to keep out the world.
Constantly jammed up against one another, every man in each of these
isolated knots of adventurers came to be seen by the rest for what he
was worth, with the drastic clearness of open-eyed husbands and wives of
long standing. They had domesticated the Day of Judgment. Many old
valuations had to go by the board; some great home reputations wilted
surprisingly; stones that the builders of public opinion on Salisbury
Plain had confidently rejected found their way up to the heads of
corners. Officers, watched almost as closely, were sorted out by the
minds of the men into themes for contemptuous silence, objects of the
love that doeth and beareth all things, and cases of Not Proven Yet. The
cutting equity of this family council was bracing. It got the best out
of everybody in whom there was anything. Imagine a similar overhauling
of public life here! And the size of the scrap-heap! But to the outer
world, which it did not half know, the tribunal was harsh, and harshest
of all to the outer and upper world of army principalities and powers.
These were, to it, the untested, unsifted, "the crowd that was never put
through it." There were presumptions against them, besides. They were
akin, in the combatant's sight, to the elfish gods that had ruled and
bedevilled his training at home. They were of the breed of the wasters,
the misorganizers, the beauties who sent his battalion out from the
Wiltshire downs to Bruay along a course of gigantic zigzags, like a
yacht beating up in the teeth of a wind, first running far south to
Havre, then north to near the German Ocean, and then going about and
opening out again upon the southward tack until Bruay was struck; for it
was, indeed, along a trajectory somewhat like that of an actual flash of
lightning in some quaint engraving that Britain hurled at the enemy many
of her new thunderbolts of war. Also, they stood in the shoes of the men
who in French's day had sent platoon commanders to take woods and
quarries not marked on their maps. And they were the men who, when
troops had been marching twelve miles in full kit on the high-cambered,
heavily greased Flanders setts in the rain, would appear on the roadside
turf round a blind corner, sitting chubby and sleek on fresh horses, and
say that the marching was damned bad and troops must go back to-morrow
and do it again. But the chief count was the first--that they had not
all gone through the mill; that they lived in a world in which all the
respectable old bubbles, pricked elsewhere, were still fat and shining,
where all the old bluffs were uncalled and still going strong, and the
wangler could still inherit the earth and eye-wash reign happy and
glorious.
Not a judgment wholly just. But not one contemptible either; for,
wherever it ended, it set out from the right idea of judging a man only
by what he was worth and what he could do. And, just or not, it was
real; it influenced men's acts, not to the extent of losing us the war,
but to that of helping to send the winners home possessed with that
contemptuous impatience of authority which has already thrown out of
gear so much of the pre-war machinery for regulating the joint action of
mankind.
IV
There was yet another special check during the war upon love and respect
for the higher commands. There were so many things of moment which they
were the last to find out. Time after time the great ones of this world
were seen to be walking in darkness long after the lowly had seen a
great light. While the appointed brains of our army were still swearing
hard by the rifle, and nothing but it, as the infantry's friend, a more
saving truth had entered in at the lowly door of the infantry's mind.
Ignoring all that at Aldershot they had learnt to be sacred, they
contumaciously saw that so long as you stand in a hole deeper than you
are tall you never will hit with a rifle-bullet another man standing in
just such another hole twenty yards off. But also--divine idea!--that
you can throw a tin can from your hole into his.
In England the mighty had taken a great deal of pains to teach the New
Army always to parry the thrust of its enemy's bayonet first, and only
then to get in its own. A fine, stately procedure it was when taught by
an exemplary Regular Army instructor fully resolved that, whatever
Shelley may say, no part of any movement must mingle in any other part's
being. In France, and no doubt on other fronts too, it abruptly dawned
on those whose style this formalist had moulded, more or less, that a
second German or Turk was apt to cut in before the appointed ritual of
debate with the first could be carried to a happy end. Illicit
abridgements followed, attended by contumacious reflections.
Whatever, again, was august in Canadian life and affairs was bent in
1914 upon arming Canadian troops with what was indeed, by a long chalk,
the pick of all match-shooting rifles. It was the last word of man in
his struggle against the caprices of barometric and thermometric
pressures on ranges. And it was to show a purblind Europe, among other
things, that Sam Hughes was the man and that wisdom would die with him.
Yet hardly had its use, in wrath, begun when there broke upon the
untutored Canadian foot-soldier a revelation withheld from the Hugheses
of this world. He perceived that the enemy, in his perversity, did not
intend to stand up on a skyline a thousand yards off to be shot with all
the refinements of science; point-blank was going to be the only range,
except for a few specialists; rapidity of fire would matter more than
precision; and all the super-subtle appliances tending to triumphs at
Bisley would here be no better than aids to the picking of mud from
trench walls as the slung rifle joggled against them.
The great did not turn these truths of mean origin right away from the
door. They would quite often take a discovery in. Only there was no
running to greet it.
There was no hurry in their hands,
No hurry in their feet.
Like smells that originate in the kitchen and work their way up by
degrees to the best bedroom the new revelations of war ascended slowly
from floor to floor of the hierarchy. They did arrive in the end. The
Canadians got, in the end, a rifle not too great and good for business.
By the third year of the war the infantry schools at the base were
teaching drafts from home to use the bayonet as troops in the line had
taught themselves to use it in the second. The frowning down of the
tanks can hardly have lasted a year. The Stokes gun was not blackballed
for good. It was not for all time, but only for what seemed to them like
an age, that our troops had to keep off the well-found enemy bomber with
bombs that they made of old jam tins, wire, a little gun-cotton, a
little time fuse, and some bits of sharp stone, old iron, or anything
hard that was lying about, with earth to fill in; the higher powers did
the thing well in the end; they came down handsomely at last; in the
next life the Mills bomb alone should be good for at least a night out
once a year on an iceberg to some War Office brave who would not see it
killed in the cradle.
And yet authority wore, in the eyes of its troops in the field, an
inexpert air--sublime, benevolent, but somehow inexpert. They had begun
to notice it even before leaving England. Imagine the headquarters Staff
of a district command watching a test for battalion bombing officers and
sergeants at the close of a divisional bombing course in 1915: the
instructor in charge a quick-witted Regular N.C.O. who has shone at Loos
and is now decorated, commissioned, slightly shell-shocked, and sent
home to teach, full of the new craft and subtlety of trench war; the
pupils all picked for the job and devouringly keen, half of them old
cricketers, all able-bodied, and all now able, after hard practice
during the course, to drop a bomb on to any desired square yard within
thirty-five yards of their stance; and then the Staff, tropically
dazzling in their red and gold, august beyond words, but genial, benign,
encouraging, only too ready to praise things that they would see to be
easy if only they knew more about them and were not like middle-aged
mothers watching their offspring at football--so a profane bombing
sergeant describes them that night to his mess.
V
"Your Old Army's all bloody born amatoors," an Australian of ripe war
experience remarked with some frankness in France. His immediate
occasion for generalizing so rashly was somebody's slip in passing
certain grenades as good for field use. Most of our hand and rifle
grenades undoubtedly were. If anything they were too fine for it, too
fit to beautify drawing-rooms as well. One _objet d'art_, a delight to
the eye, was said to cost its country one pound five as against the two
francs for which France was composing an angel of death less pretty but
equally virtuous. Still, ours would kill, if you had the heart to break
up an object so fair. But the batch that made the Australian blaspheme,
though good in design, were mismade. They were made as if the people who
made them had not guessed what they were for.
As you know, the outside of most kinds of grenade is a thick metal case
serrated with deeply-cut lines that cross each other like those more
shallow sunk lines on crocodile-leather, only at right angles. These
lines of weakness, cut into the metal, mark out almost the whole of the
case into little squares standing up in relief, sixteen or thirty-two or
forty-eight or seventy-two according to type. The burst, if all goes
well, attacks the lines of weakness, cuts them right through, and so
disperses all the little squares of brass, cast-iron, or steel radially
as flying bits of shrapnel. What led the Australian to sin was that this
batch had come out to France with their lines of weakness cut not half
as deep as they should be. The burst only ripped the case open without
breaking it up. It had been lovely in life, and in death it was not
divided. It just gave a jump, the length of a frog's, and presented the
foe with a cheap good souvenir, reassuring besides.
There must have been a good many thousands of these. They may have done
good--perhaps won a good-conduct mark to some War Office hero for
rushing them out in good time to the front; perhaps assisted some
politician to feel that he was riding a whirlwind and directing a storm,
solving munition crises and winning the war. All human happiness counts.
In France, if the physical effects of their detonation were poor, the
moral reverberations which followed were lively. A bombing sergeant,
sent down the line for a rest and instructing new drafts in a hollow
among the sand dunes at Etaples well out of authority's hearing, would
start his lecture by holding one of them up and saying: "This 'ere, men,
is a damn bad grenade. But it's all that the bloody tailors give you to
work with. So just pay attention to me." And then he would go on to pour
out his cornucopia of tips, fruits of empiric research, for doing what
somebody's slackness or folly had made it so much less easy to do.
VI
Whenever you passed from east to west across the British zone during the
war you would find somebody saying with fervour that somebody else, a
little more to the west and a little higher in rank, had not even learnt
his job well enough to keep out of the way. Subalterns, who by some odd
arrangement of flukes had come through our attacks on the Somme in 1916
and in Artois and Flanders next year, would hoot at the notion--it had a
vogue with part of the Staff in a tranquil far west--that the way to get
on with the war was to raise a more specific thirst for blood in the
private. Battalion commanders did not soon tire of telling how in the
busiest days of big battles the unseen powers would pester them for
instant returns of the number of shovels they had, or of the number of
men who in civil life had been fitters, or had been moulders. Brigadiers
would savagely wonder aloud whether it ever occurred to a higher command
that to make little attack after little attack, each on a narrow,
one-brigade front, was merely to ask to have each attack squashed flat
in its turn by a fan-like convergence of fire from the enemy's guns on
both flanks, not to speak of supports. The day the bad turn came for us,
in the two-chaptered battle of Cambrai, an officer on the Staff of one
of the worst-hit divisions observed: "Our attitude is just 'we told you
so'." When the good turn in the war had come the next summer there was a
day, not so good as the rest, when two squadrons of horse were sent to
charge, in column, up a straight, treeless rising road for half a mile
and take a little wood at the top. There were many machine-guns in the
wood--how could there not have been?--and the whole air sang with
warnings of that. No horse or man either got to the wood or came back.
They were all in a few seconds lying in the white dust, almost in the
order they rode in, the officer in command a little ahead of the rest.
It looked, in its formal completeness, like a thing acted, a cinema play
showing a part of Sennacherib's army on which the angel had breathed. On
the road back from the place I met a corps commander--a great man at his
work. When he heard his face crumpled up for a moment--he was a
soft-hearted man. "Another of those damned cavalry follies!" he growled.
His voice had the scorn that the man who is versed in to-day's practice
feels for the men who still move among yesterday's theories. So it was,
from east to west, all the way.
All the wise men were not in the east. It was the fault of the war, the
outlandish, innovatory war that did not conform to the proper text-books
as it ought to have done; an unimagined war of flankless armies
scratching each other's faces across an endless thorn hedge, not dreamt
of in Staff College philosophy; a war that was always putting out of
date the best that had been known and thought and invented, always
sending everyone to school again; unkind, above all, to us who, if
well-to-do, bring up our young to have a proper respect for the past and
to feel that if yesterday's parasol will not keep out the rain of
to-day, then it ought to, and no one can blame them for using it.
VII
Yet the men in the line talked, and so did the subalterns, most of whom
had been in the ranks, now that the war ran into years. Soldiers have
endless occasions for talk. Being seldom alone, and having to hold their
tongues sometimes, they talk all the time that they can. And most of
their talk was sour and scornful. Ever since their enlistment there had
been running down in them one of the springs of health in the life of a
country. An unprecedented number of the most healthy, high-spirited, and
nationally valuable Englishmen in the prime of life were telling one
another that, among those whom they had hitherto taken more or less
completely on trust as their "betters," things were going on which must
make the war harder for us to win; while they, the common people, cared
with all their hearts about saving Belgium and France, those betters, so
placed that they could do more to that end if they would, seemed to be
caring, on the whole, less--shouting and gesticulating enough, but ready
to give up less of what was pleasant and to do less of what was hard,
and perhaps not able to do much at their best. Colonel Repington's
friends, with their scented baths, their prime vintages, and their
mutinous chatter, were not actually seen; but there was a bad smell
about; the air stank of bad work in high places.
Most of our N.C.O.'s and men in the field had come to feel that it was
left to them and to the soundest regimental officers to pull the
foundered rulers of England and heads of the army through the scrape.
They assumed now that while they were doing this job they must expect to
be crawled upon by all the vermin bred in the dark places of a rich
country vulgarly governed. They were well on their guard by this time
against expressing any thoroughgoing faith in anything or anybody, or
incurring any suspicion of dreaming that such a faith was likely to
animate others; a man was a fool if he imagined that anyone set over him
was not looking after number one; the patriotism of the press was
bunkum, screening all sorts of queer games; the eloquence of patriotic
orators was just a smoke barrage to cover their little manoeuvres
against one another; the red tabs of the Staff were the "Red Badge of
Funk"; a hospital ward full of sick men would exchange, when left to
themselves, vitriolic surmises about the extravagant pay that the nurses
were probably getting, and go on to suggest what vast profits the
Y.M.C.A. must be making out of its huts. Wherever the contrary had not
been proved to their own senses, the slacking, self-seeking and shirking
that had muddled and spoilt their own training for war until they were
put, half-trained, in the hottest of the fire must be assumed to be in
authority everywhere.
Long ago, perhaps, the commons of England may, on the whole, have
accepted the view that while they were the fists of her army there was a
strong brain somewhere behind, as good at its job as the fists were at
theirs; that above them, using them for the best, mind was enthroned,
mind the deviser, adapter, foreseer, the finder of ever new means to new
ends, mind which knew better than fists, and from which, in any time of
trial, all good counsels and provident works were sure to proceed. If
so, the faith of the general mass of the English common people in any
such division of functions was now pretty near its last kick. The lions
felt they had found out the asses. They would not try to throw off the
lead of the asses just then: you cannot reorganize a fire-brigade in the
midst of a fire. That had to wait. They worked grimly on at the job of
the moment, resigned for the present to seeing all the things go ill
which the great ones of their world ought to have caused to go well. For
themselves, in each of their units, they saw what was coming. Some day
soon they would be put into an attack and would come out with half their
numbers or, perhaps, two-thirds, and nothing gained for England, perhaps
because some old Regular in his youth had preferred playing polo to
learning his job. The rest would be brought up to strength with
half-trained drafts and then put in again, and the process would go on
over and over again until our commanders learnt war, and then perhaps we
might win, if any of us were left.
While so many things were shaken one thing that held fast was the men's
will to win. It may have changed from the first lyric-hearted
enthusiasm. But it was a dour and inveterate will. At the worst most of
the men fully meant to go down killing for all they were worth. And
there was just a hope that in Germany, too, such default as they saw on
our side was the rule; it was, perhaps, a disease of all armies and
countries, not of ours alone; there might thus be a chance for us still.
On that chance they still worked away with a sullen ardour that no
muddling or sloth in high places could wholly damp down. Many of them
were like children clinging with a cross crankiness to a hobby of
learning to read in a school where some of the teachers were good, but
some could not read themselves, and others could read but preferred
other occupations to teaching.
All were so deeply absorbed in winning that no practical upshot of all
their new thoughts about England's diseases was yet, as far as I could
perceive, taking shape in their minds. On that side their mood was
merely one of postponement, somewhat menacing in its form, but still
postponement. "We've _got_ to win first. Then----? But we've got to win
first." They were almost exactly the words in which most German
prisoners, till 1918, expressed their own feeling about the old rulers
of Germany.
CHAPTER IV
TEDIUM
I
A book may be bad and yet tell you much.
Lately I came across such a book. It is surely one of the crossest books
ever written. Its author fought in France, in the ranks, for a good many
months of the war. He must have been one of the men who make sergeants
grey--a "proper lawyer," as Regulars call the type which a cotton
district labels as "self-acting mules."
I seem to know that man. He was a volunteer, but he would not enlist
until conscription came in, because of some precious doctrine he had
about younger men without families. When he did join his first act was
to ask to speak to the colonel. He was aggrieved because army doctors
would not act, when he desired it, except as such. When anyone checked
him he felt an ardent thirst to "explain," and the explanation was
always that he who had checked was wrong. In the field he kept a diary
and sternly would he note on its recording page that tea one day--nay,
on more than one--was served "very late indeed." Heinous!
The continued existence of war is precarious. More than the League of
Nations menaces its future. For it depends, at the last, on the
infrequency of "proper lawyers." Armies can now be made, and moved about
when made, only because the plain man who keeps the world going round
does not stick up for the last ounce of his rights, or stick out for the
joys of having the last word, so dourly as these. Even to keep up a game
with so modest an element of voluntaryism about it as penal justice you
have to have some little effort of co-operation all round. If your
convicts will not even eat the whole thing begins crumbling. The
"suffragettes" showed us that. A pioneer still earlier, an Indian
coolie, proved it in a Fijian gaol. Were every soldier like this diarist
war would have to be dropped, not because men were too good, but because
they were too prickly.
II
And yet the book told something which no other book has yet succeeded in
telling you. Wordy, cantankerous, dull, repeating itself like a decimal,
padded with cheap political "thoughts" gathered from old "stunts" in bad
papers--still, it came nearer than any other to showing you the way
trench warfare struck a mind and soul quite commonplace in everything
except a double dose of native sourness. Here was nothing of M.
Barbusse's doctrinaire fire to make the author pervert or exaggerate. No
thrill of drastic passion, not even the passionate self-pity of Dickens
describing his childhood as Copperfield's, stirred the plodding and
crabbed narrative. The writer seemed too peevish to be at the pains to
beautify or exalt. And so his account of the bungled attack in which he
took part is extraordinarily true to all that the commonplace man found
to be left in almost any attack when once all the picturesque fluff
filling the current literary pictures of it were found not to be
there--the touch of bathos; the supposed heroic moment only seeming a
bit of a "dud," a miscarriage; the hugger-mugger element of confusion;
the baffling way that the real thing did not so often give men obvious
gallant things to do as irritating puzzles to solve, muddles to
liquidate at short notice; the queer flashes of revelation, in contact
with individual enemies, of the bottomless falsity of the cheaper kind
of current war psychology.
Advances, however, were far from being the staple of warfare. They
caused the most losses, but still they did less than the years of less
sensational routine to make what changes were made by the war in the
minds of the men in the ranks. And here our pettish author found the
congenial theme for his own acrid, accurate method. His trivial
reiterations succeed, in the end, in piling up in the reader's mind an
image of that old trench life as the sum of innumerable dreary units of
irksome fatigue. This was the normal life of the infantry private in
France. For N.C.O.'s it was lightened by the immunity of their rank from
fatigue work in the technical sense. For the officer it was much further
lightened by better quarters and the servant system. For most of his
time the average private was tired. Fairly often he was so tired as no
man at home ever is in the common run of his work.
If a company's trench strength was low and sentry-posts abounded more
than usual in its sector a man might, for eight days running, get no
more than one hour off duty at any one time, day or night. If enemy guns
were active many of these hours off guard duty might have to be spent on
trench repair. After one of these bad times in trenches a company or
platoon would sometimes come out on to the road behind the communication
trench like a flock of over-driven sheep. The weakest ones would fall
out and drop here and there along the road, not as a rule fainting, but
in the state of a horse dead-beat, to whom any amount of thrashing seems
preferable to going on. Men would come out light-headed with fatigue,
and ramble away to the men next them about some great time which they
had had, or meant to have, at home. Or a man would march all right till
the road fetched a bend, and then he would march straight on into the
ditch in his sleep. Upon a greasy road with a heavy camber I have seen a
used-up man get the illusion, on a night-march back to billets, that he
was walking on a round, smooth, horizontal pole or convex plank above
some fearsome sort of gulf. He would struggle hard to recover imaginary
losses of footing, pant and sweat and scrape desperately sideways with
his feet like a frightened young horse new to harness when it leans in
against the pole, with its feet skidding outwards on the setts. Down he
would go, time after time, in the mud, each time as unable to rise of
himself, under the weight of his pack and equipment, as any mediæval
knight unhorsed and held down by the weight of his armour. Hauled up
again to his feet, to be driven along like one of the spent cab-horses
in Naples just strong enough to move when up, but not to rise, he would
in another five minutes be agonizing again on the greasy pole of his
delirium.
The querulist of the book took it hard, I remember, that more kind words
did not come to the men. He saw his own lot very clearly, but not so
clearly the lot of those other unfortunates who had to put the job
through. A man who finds himself in charge of a spent horse at night, in
a place where there may be no safe waiting till dawn, must do something.
Ten to one he will flog or kick the horse into moving. He may feel that
he, not the horse, is the beast; but still he will do it. So, too, will
he bully and curse exhausted men into safety. That was what happened.
Every decent N.C.O. and company officer--and far the larger part were
decent--did what they could to humour and "buck" the bad cases through
the pangs of endurance. Some would reach the journey's end carrying
whole faggots of rifles. Some would put by their own daily rations of
rum to ginger beaten men through the last mile. But there would come
times when only hard driving seemed to be left. _Bella, horrida bella!_
III
Suppose those first eight days in the front and support trenches to be
the beginning of a divisional tour of sixteen days' duty in the line.
For four days now the weary men would be in reserve, under enemy fire,
but not in trenches; probably in the cellars of ruined houses. But these
were not times of rest. Each day or night every man would make one or
more journeys back to the trenches that they had left carrying some load
of food, water, or munitions up to the three companies in trenches, or
perhaps leading a pack-mule over land to some point near the front line,
under cover of night. Even to lead a laden mule in the dark over waste
ground confusingly wired and trenched is work; to get him back on to his
feet when fallen and wriggling, in wild consternation, among a tangle of
old barbed wire may be quite hard work.
In intervals between these journeys most men would lie in the straw in
the cellars or hobble weakly about the outside of the premises, looking
as boys sometimes do when stiff with many hearty hacks sustained in a
hard game of football, with a chill after it. They crawled in and out of
their billets like late autumn bees, feebly scraping the eight days'
plating of mud off their clothes and cleaning their jack-knives after
meals with the languor of the elders in the Bible to whom the
grasshopper was a burden. A few robust spirits, armed with craft and
subtlety more fully than the rest, would strike out, whenever released,
for some "just-a-minute," or _estaminet_, not too far off, nor yet too
near, and there lie _perdus_, lest the Company Orderly Sergeant warn
them for some new liturgy. This defensive policy did not lighten the
work of their brethren.
After four days of their labours as sumpter mules, or muleteers, the
company would plod back for another four days of duty in trenches, come
out yet more universally tired at their end, and drift back to
rest-billets, out of ordinary shell-fire, for their sixteen days or so
of "divisional rest." Here their work was really lighter, but still it
was work and not rest. It did not wholly wind up in most of the men the
spring that had run down while they were in the line. And then the
division would go again into the line, and the old cycle be worked
through once more. So most of the privates were tired the whole of the
time; sometimes to the point of torment, sometimes much less, but always
more or less tired.
IV
Many, of course, lost health and drifted "down the line," as it was
called, to the base, where work might be light, but much of the company
rather more blighting than any work to the spirit. Hither, to all the
divisional base depots and into the ultimate dust-hole or sink that was
called "Base Details," there gravitated most of the walking wreckage and
wastage, physical and moral, of active warfare: convalescent, sick and
wounded from hospital, men found too old or too young for trench work,
broken-nerved men smuggled out of the way before disaster should come,
and malingerers triumphant and chuckling, or only semi-successful,
suspect, and tediously over-acting.
There was the good man fretting and raging to get back to his friends
and the fight, away from this tainted backwater in which the swelling
flotillas of the unfit and the unwilling were left to rot at their
moorings. There was the pallid and bent London clerk, faintly disguised
in khaki but too blind to fight, now working furiously fifteen hours
each day of his seven-day week in the orderly room--no Sunday here, no
Saturday afternoon--for pure love of international right. There was the
dug-out, the Grenadier Guards sergeant-major of sixty, the handsome and
melancholy old boy, a Victorian survivor into our little vulgar age,
with a careful and dignified manner and mighty memories of a radiant
past in London, when all parades, for a good-conduct-man well up in his
drill, were over by half-past ten in the morning and he had a permanent
midnight pass into barracks and so could act as a super at one of the
theatres every night except when doing a guard, and see life and move
among genius and beauty, making good money. Oh, yes, he had acted with
Irving and Booth, and lived the life, and heard the chimes at midnight.
But also the veteran crooks, old dregs of the Regular Army, Queen
Victoria's worst bargains, N.C.O.'s who would boast that they had not
been once on parade in the last twenty years, waiters and caterers for
the whole of their martial careers till the liquor fairly lipped over
the edge of their eyelids and bleached the blue of their eyes. You would
hear one of them boast that no doctor on earth could find him out to be
fit when he, the tactician, wished otherwise. Another had made
pathological studies, learning up the few conjectural symptoms of
maladies that show no outward trace; as science advanced to the point of
recording detectively the true state of the heart he had deftly changed
ground, relinquished rheumatism of that organ and done some work of
research into pains in the head; much faith did he put, too, in the
sciatic nerve. When a couple of these savants slept in one tent they
would argue after Lights Out--was sciatica safest, or shell-shock, or
general debility? "Them grey hairs should be a lot of use to you,
corp.," one of them would quite feelingly say to a new man in the tent,
"when you want to get swinging the lead."
While these ignoble presences befouled the air of a base, good things,
also, were there; but you seldom quite knew which was which. All very
well for the King to come out with his "Go, hang yourself, brave
Crillon! We fought at Arques and you were not there." But if you, too,
were not at the battle--if some unlucky effect of combustion compelled
you to live as a messmate of Crillon, far, far from Arques when the
battle was on, you would have to use tact. Somehow the man who was
undisguisedly keen to get back to the centre of things felt a slight
coldness pervading the air about him. It was as if a workman, who might
have so easily let well alone, had sinned against the trade-union
spirit, helped to raise the standard of employers' expectation, forced
the pace of dutifulness in a world where authority could be trusted to
speed things up quite enough. Even officers tended to deprecate the
higher temperatures of ardour in other ranks of base establishments.
"You're out for distinction,"--one honest rationalist would
advise--"that's what it is. Well, trust to me--up the line's not the
place where you get it. Every time a war ends you'll find most of the
decorations go to the people at G.H.Q., L. of C., and the bases. So, if
you want a nice row of ribbons to show to your kiddies, stop here." And
another would put it more subtly: "Isn't one's duty, as a rule, just
here and now?" Some were good-natured; they were not for keeping the
primrose path all to themselves. Others were anxious lest the taking of
steep and thorny paths, as they thought them, should come to be "the
done thing."
V
The men who could not shirk the choice of Hercules, for other people,
were the doctors. The stay of every N.C.O. or man at a base depot was on
probation. Each had to go before a Medical Board soon after he came. It
adjudged him either T.B. (Temporary Base) or P.B. (Permanent Base). If
marked T.B. he went before the Board again once a week, and each time he
might be marked T.B. again, or, if his disablement was thought graver or
more likely to last, P.B.; or he might be marked A. (Active Service),
and then he would join the next draft from home going up to his own
battalion or another battalion of his regiment. When once a man was
marked P.B. he only went before the Board once a month, and each time
he, too, might be marked either P.B., T.B., or A.
Chance relegated me once for some weeks to a base and gave me the job of
marching parties of crocks, total and partial, real, half-real, and
sham, across the sand dunes to the place where the faculty did its
endeavour to sort them. A picture remains of a hut with a long table in
it: two middle-aged army doctors sitting beyond it, like dons at a Viva,
and each of my party in turn taking his stand at attention, my side of
the table, facing the Board, like so many Oliver Twists. The presiding
officer takes a manifest pride in knowing all the guile and subtlety of
soldier-men. No taking _him_ in--that is proclaimed in every look and
tone. He has had several other parties before him to-day, and the lamp
of his faith, never dazzling while these rites are on, has burnt low.
"Well, my man--cold feet, I suppose?" he begins, to the first of my
lamentable party. As some practitioners are said to begin all treatments
with a prefatory purge, so would this psychologist start with a good
full dose of insult and watch the patient's reaction under the stimulus.
"No, sir, me 'eart's thrutched up," says the examinee. Then, while the
Board perforates him from head to foot for some seconds with a basilisk
stare of unbelief, he dribbles out at intervals, in a voice that
bespeaks falling hope, such ineffective addenda as "Can't get me sleep"
and "Not a smile in me."
"Very picturesque, indeed," says the senior expert in doubting. "We'll
see to that 'thrutched' heart of yours. Kardiagraph case. Next man."
The suspect, duly spat upon, slinks out. The next man takes his place at
the table. The president gives him the Dogberry eye that means:
"Masters, it is proved already that you are little better than false
knaves; and it will go near to be thought so shortly." What he says is:
"Another old hospital bird? Eh? Now, hadn't you better get back to work
before you're in trouble?"
The target of this consputation is almost convinced by its force that he
must be guilty of something, if only he knew what it was. Still, he
repeats authority's last diagnosis as well as he can: "Mine's Arthuritic
rheumatism, sir. _An'_ piles."
"Fall out and strip. Next man." While the next is taking his stand the
presiding M.O. has been making a note, and does not look up before
saying "Well, what's the matter with _you_--besides rheumatism?"
"No rheumatism, sir. And nothing else." The voice is as stiff as it
dares.
The presiding M.O. seems taken aback. Why, here is a fellow not playing
up to him! Making a nasty break in the long line of cases that fed his
darling cynicism so well! Flat burglary as ever was committed. The
second member of the Board comes to life and begins in a tone that
savours of dissatisfaction: "Well, you're the first man----"
"I'm an N.C.O., sir." The young lance-sergeant's voice is again about as
stiff as is safe. Quite safe, though, this time. For the presiding M.O.
is a Regular. Verbal points of military correctitude are the law and the
prophets to him. He cannot be wholly sorry when junior colleagues,
temporary commissioners, slip up on even the least of these shreds of
orange-peel. Like Susan Nipper, he knows his place--"me being a
permanency"--and thinks that "temporaries" ought to know theirs. So he
amends the outsider's false start to: "You're the first N.C.O. or man
who has come before us this morning and not said he had rheumatism."
The sergeant, whom I have known for some days as a choleric body, holds
his tongue, having special reasons just now not to risk a court-martial.
"Well," the president snaps as if in resentment of this self-control,
"what _is_ the matter with you?"
"Fit as can be, sir."
"What are you doing down here, then, away from your unit?"
"Obeying orders of Medical Board, sir. No. 8 General Hospital, December
8."
"Not sorry, either, I daresay," the president mutters, wobbling back
towards his first line of approach to the business. "Not very keen to go
back up the line, sergeant, eh?"
"It's all I want, sir, thank you." The sergeant puts powerful brakes on
his tongue and says only that. But he has sadly disconcerted the
faculty. A major with twenty years' service has cast himself for the
fine sombre part of recording angel to note all the cowardice and
mendacity that he can. And here is a minor actor forgetting his part and
putting everything out. From where I am keeping a wooden face near the
door I see opposition arising in the heart of the outraged psychologist
beyond the table.
A sound professional instinct reinforces the personal one. Whenever a
soldier goes before a Medical Board it is soon clear that he wants to be
thought either less fit than he is or more fit. The doctor's first
impulse, as soon as he sees which way the man's wishes tend, is to lean
towards the other. And this, in due measure, is just. We all understate
or overstate symptoms to our own family doctors according to what we
fear or desire. The doctor rightly tries to detect the disturbing force
in the patient's mind, and to discount for it duly--just like
"laying-off" for a side-wind in shooting. So now the president sees
light again. The Board is now out to find the lance-sergeant a crock.
"Hold out your wrist," says the senior member. The pulse is jealously
felt.
"Rotten!" the senior member says to the junior. Then, penetratingly, to
the sergeant: "What's that cicatrix you've got on the back of your hand?
Both hands! Show me here."
Two spongy, purplish-red pads of new flesh are inspected. "Burns,
scarcely healed!" says the president wrathfully. "Skin just the strength
of wet tissue-paper! Man alive, you've a bracelet of ulcers all round
your wrists. Never wash, eh?" When liquid fire flayed a man's hands to
the sleeve, but not further, the skin was apt to break out, as he
recovered, in small, deep boils about the frontier of the new skin and
the old. The sergeant does not answer. He wants no capital punishment
under the Army act.
"Man's an absolute wreck," says the major. "Debility, wounds imperfectly
healed, blood-poisoning likely. Not fit for the line for two months to
come. P.B.--eh?" he turns to his junior.
"That's what _I_ should say, sir," the junior concurs, in a tone of
desperate independence.
"Next man," says the major. Before the lance-sergeant has quite stalked
to the door the major calls after him "Sergeant!"
"Sir?" says the sergeant, furious and red but contained.
"You're a damned good man, but it won't do," says the major. "Good luck
to you!" Great are the forces of decent human relentment after a hearty
let-out with the temper.
The inquisition proceeds, still on that Baconian principle of finding
out which is a man's special bent and then bending the twig pretty hard
in the other direction; still, too, with the dry light of reason a
little suffused, as Bacon would say, with the humours of the affections,
of vanity, ill-temper and impatience. Nearly everybody is morally weary.
Most of the men inspected have outlived the first profuse impulse to
court more of bodily risk than authority expressly orders. Most of the
doctors, living here in the distant rear of the war, have outlived their
first generous belief in an almost universally high _moral_ among the
men. In the training-camps in 1914 the safe working presumption about
any unknown man was that he only wanted to get at the enemy as soon as
he could. Now the working presumption, the starting hypothesis, is that
a man wants to stay in, out of the rain, as long as you let him. Faith
has fallen lame; generosity flags; there has entered into the soul as
well as the body the malady known to athletes as staleness.
VI
The war had more obvious disagreeables, too; you have heard all about
them: the quelling coldness of frosty nights spent in soaked
clothes--for no blankets were brought up to the trenches; the ubiquitous
dust and stench of corpses and buzzing of millions of corpse-fed flies
on summer battle-fields; and so on, and so on--no need to go over the
list. But these annoyances seemed to me to do less in the way of
moulding the men's cast of mind than that general, chronic weariness,
different from all the common fatigues of peace, inasmuch as each
instalment of this course of exhaustion was not sandwiched in between
heavenly contrasts of utter rest before and after--divine sleeps in a
bed and dry clothes, and meals on a table, with a white tablecloth on it
and shiny glasses. It raised some serious thoughts in professional
football-players and boxers who had believed they were strong, and in
navvies and tough mountaineers. You need to know this in order to
understand the redoubled ardour with which that capital soldier, the
Lancashire miner, has sought the off-day and ensued it since he came
back from campaigning abroad.
You need, too, to know it in order to chart out the general post-war
condition of mind with its symptoms of apathy, callousness, and
lassitude. Something has gone to come of it if you have lain for a time
in the garden of Proserpine, where the great values decline and faith
and high impulse fall in like _soufflés_ grown tepid, and fatalistic
indifference comes out of long flat expanses of tiring sameness.
I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving,
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Heaven forbid that I should impute any melodious Swinburnian melancholy,
or any other form of luxious self-pity, to millions of good fellows
still fighting the good fight against circumstance. They would hoot at
the notion. But in nearly all of them hope has, at some time or other,
lost her first innocence. Time and place came when the spirit, although
unbroken, went numb: the dull mind came to feel as if its business with
ardour and choric spheres and quests of Holy Grails, and everything but
rest, had been done quite a long while ago. Well chained to an oar in
the galley, closely kept to a job in the mine, men caught a touch of the
recklessness of the slave--if the world were so foul, let it go where it
chose; they would snatch what they could, when they could; drink, and
let the world go round.
It is not sense to hope to reattain at will that deflowered virginity of
faith. Others who have it may come in good time to be a majority of us
all. Already three yearly "classes" of men who did not suffer that
immense loss of experience which came with war service have come of age
since the war; the new skin grows over the wounds. But we cannot write
off as mere dream, with no after effects, the time when it was a kind of
trench fashion to meet the demoded oaths of a friend with the dogma that
"There _is_ no ---- God."
CHAPTER V
THE SHEEP THAT WERE NOT FED
I
"Of late years," the novel of _Shirley_ begins, "an abundant shower of
curates has fallen upon the North of England; they lie very thick on the
hills; every parish has one or more of them; they are young enough to be
very active, and ought to be doing a great deal of good." This blessing,
conferred on the West Riding a little before Waterloo, descended on our
Western Front a little after the first battle of the Marne.
It was received by our troops with the greater thanksgiving because it
brought with it no perceptible revival of church parades, a ministration
of which the average private, _l'homme moyen sensuel_ of Matthew Arnold,
had taken a long and glad farewell on leaving Salisbury Plain. Like the
infinite cleaning of brass-work, the hearing of many well-meaning
divines in the Tidworth garrison church had been one of the tribulations
through which the defender of Britain must work out his passage to
France. With the final order to tarnish his buttons with fire and oil
there came also a longed-for release from regular Sunday adjurations to
keep sober and think of his end. "The Lorrd," said a grim Scots
corporal, a hanging judge of a sermon, after hearing the last essay of
our English Bossuets before he went to the wars, "hath turrned the
capteevity of Zion." No more attendance for him at such "shauchlin'"
athletic displays as the wrestlings of the southron divinity passman
with the lithe and sinuous mind of St. Paul. "Sunday," the blithe
Highlander in _Waverley_ said, "seldom cam aboon the pass of Bally
Brough." For better or worse, as a reliever from work or a restrainer of
play, Sunday seldom came across the Channel during the war. A man in the
ranks might be six months in France and not find a religious service of
any kind coming his way, whether he dreaded or sought it.
Yet chaplains abounded. Not measures, but men, to invert the old phrase.
And men of all kinds, as might safely be guessed. There was the hero and
saint, T. B. Hardy, to whom a consuming passion of human brotherhood
brought, as well as rarer things, the M.C., the D.S.O., the V.C., the
unaccepted invitation of the King, when he saw Hardy in France, to come
home as one of his own chaplains and live, and then the death which
everyone had seen to be certain. There was a chaplain drunk at dinner in
Gobert's restaurant at Amiens on the evening of one of the bloodiest
days of the first battle of the Somme. There was the circumspect,
ecclesiastical statesman, out to see that in this grand shaking-up and
re-arranging of pre-war positions and values the right cause--whichever
of the right causes was his--was not jilted or any way wronged. There
was the man who, urged by national comradeship, would have been a
soldier but that his bishop barred it; to be an army chaplain was the
next best thing. There was the man who, urged by a different instinct,
felt irresistibly, as many laymen did, that at the moment the war was
the central thing in the whole world, and that it was unbearable not to
be at the centre of things. And there was, in great force, the large,
healthy, pleasant young curate not severely importuned by a vocation,
the ex-athlete, the prop and stay of village cricket-clubs, the good
fellow whom the desires of parents, the gaiety of his youth at the
university, and the whole drift of things about him had shepherded
unresistingly into the open door of the Church. Sudden, unhoped-for, the
war had brought him the chance of escape back to an almost solely
physical life, like his own happy youth of rude health, only better: a
life all salt and tingling with vicissitudes of simple bodily discomfort
and pleasure, fatigue and rest, risk and the ceasing of risk; a heaven
after the flatness, the tedium, the cloying security and the confounded
moral problems attending the uninspired practice of professional
brightness and breeziness in an uncritical parish. He abounded so much
that whenever now one hears the words "army chaplain" his large, genial
image springs up of itself in the mind.
II
In the eyes of the men he had notable merits. He was a running fountain,
more often than not, of good cigarettes. Of the exceeding smallness of
Low Country beer he could talk, man to man, with knowledge and right
feeling. He gladly frequented the least healthy parts of the line, and
would frankly mourn the pedantry which denied him a service revolver and
did not even allow him the grievous ball-headed club with which a
mediæval bishop felt himself free to take his own part in a war, because
with this lethal tool he did not exactly shed blood, though he dealt
liberally enough in contused wounds that would serve equally well.
Having a caste of his own, not precisely the combatant officer's, he had
a tongue less rigidly tied in the men's hearing, so he could soothe the
couch of a wounded sergeant by telling him, with a diverting gusto, how
downily the old colonel, the one last ungummed, had timed his enteric
inoculation at home so as to rescue himself from the fiery ordeal of a
divisional field-day. These were solid merits. And yet there was
something about this type of chaplain--he had his counterpart in all the
churches--with which the common men-at-arms would privily and
temperately find a little fault. He seemed to be only too much afraid of
having it thought that he was anything more than one of themselves. He
had, with a vengeance, "no clerical nonsense about him." The vigour with
which he threw off the parson and put on the man and the brother did not
always strike the original men and brothers as it was intended. Your
virilist chaplain was apt to overdo, to their mind, his jolly implied
disclaimers of any compromising connection with kingdoms not of this
world. For one thing, he was, for the taste of people versed in carnage,
a shade too fussily bloodthirsty. Nobody made such a point of aping your
little trench affectations of callousness; nobody else was so anxious to
keep you assured that the blood of the enemy smelt as good to his nose
as it could to any of yours. In the whole blood-and-iron province of
talk he would not only outshine any actual combatant--that is quite easy
to do--but he would outshine any colonel who lived at a base. I never
met a regimental officer or "other rank" who wanted a day more of the
war for himself, his friends or his country after the Armistice. But I
have heard more than one chaplain repining because the killing was not
to go on until a few German towns had been smashed and our last thing in
gas had had a fair innings.
No doubt the notion was good, in a way. If the parson in war was to make
the men mind what he said he must not stand too coldly aloof from "the
men's point of view": he must lay his mind close up alongside theirs, so
as to get a hold of their souls. It sounds all right; the wisdom of the
serpent has been bidden to back up the labours of the dove. And yet the
men, however nice they might be to the chaplain himself, would presently
say to each other in private that "Charlie came it too thick," while
still allowing that he was a "proper good sort." They felt there was
something or other--they could not tell what--which he might have been
and which he was not. They could talk lyddite and ammonal well enough
for themselves, but, surprising to say, they secretly wanted a change
from themselves; had the parsons really nothing to say of their own
about this noisome mess in which the good old world seemed to be
foundering? The relatively heathen English were only groping about to
find out what it was that they missed; the Scots, who have always had
theology for a national hobby, made nearer approaches to being
articulate. Part of a famous division of Highland infantry were given
one day, as a special treat, a harangue by one of the most highly
reputed of chaplains. This spell-binder preached like a tempest--the old
war-sermon, all God of Hosts and chariots of wrath and laying His rod on
the back of His foes, and other thunderous sounds such as were then
reverberating, no doubt, throughout the best churches in Berlin. In the
south-western postal district of London, too, his cyclone might have had
a distinguished success at the time. As soon as the rumbling died away
one of the hard-bitten kilted sergeants leant across to another and
quoted dourly: "A great and strong wind, but the Lorrd was not in the
wind."
III
"I've been a Christian all my life, but this war is a bit too serious."
So saying, a certain New Army recruit had folded up his religion in
1914, and put it away, as it were, in a drawer with his other civil
attire to wait until public affairs should again permit of their use. He
had said it quite simply. A typical working-class Englishman, literal,
serious, and straight, he had not got one loop of subtlety or one
vibration of irony in his whole mind. Like most of his kind he had, as a
rule, left church-going to others. Like most of them, too, he had read
the Gospels and found that whatever Christ had said mattered enormously:
it built itself into the mind; when any big choice had to be made it was
at least a part of that which decided. Not having ever been taught how
to dodge an awkward home-thrust at his conscience, he felt, all
unblunted, the point of what Christ had said about such things as wealth
and war and loving one's enemies. Getting rich made you bad; fighting
was evil--better submit than resist. There was no getting over such
doctrine, nor round it: why try?
Ever since those disconcerting bombs were originally thrown courageous
divines and laymen have been rushing in to pick them up and throw them
away, combining as well as they could an air of respect for the thrower
with tender care for the mental ease of congregations occupied generally
in making money and occasionally in making war. Yet there they lie,
miraculously permanent and disturbing, as if just thrown. Now and then
one will go off, with seismic results, in the mind of some St. Francis
or Tolstoy. And yet it remains where it was, like the plucked Golden
Bough: _uno avulso, non deficit alter_, ready as ever to work on a
guileless mind like our friend's.
But this war had to be won; that was flat. It was like putting out
houses on fire, or not letting children be killed; it did not even need
to be proved; that we had got to win was now the one quite certain thing
left in a world of shaken certainties. Any religion or anything else
that seemed to chill, or deter, or suggest an alternative need not be
wholly renounced. But it had to be put away in a drawer. After the war,
when that dangerous precept about the left cheek could no longer do
serious harm, it might come out again; our friend would see what could
be done. For he was a man more strongly disposed than most of his
fellows to hold, if he honestly could, the tenets of some formal
religion. "They got hold o' something," he used to say, with curiosity
and some respect, of more regular practitioners than himself. "Look at
the Salvation Army legging along in the mud and their eyes fair shining
with happiness! Aye, they got on to _something_." He would investigate,
when the time came.
IV
The testimonies that might have ensued were foreclosed by a shell that
buried him alive in Oppy Wood, under the Vimy Ridge, where he was
engaged in diverting the energies of the Central Powers from the
prostrate army of Nivelle. He had by then been two years in France, and
had told a few friends about various "queer feels" and "rum goes" which
he would not have known by name if you had called them spiritual
experiences. One of his points--though he did not put it in that
way--was that in war a lot of raw material for making some sort of
religion was lying about, but that war also made some of the finished
doctrinal products now extant look pretty poor, especially, as he said,
"all the damning department." Rightly or wrongly, no men who have been
close friends for a year, and who know that in the next few hours they
are nearly as likely as not to be killed together in doing what they all
hold to be right, will entertain on any terms the idea of any closing of
gates of divine mercy, open to themselves, in the face of any comrade in
the business.
The sunshine of one of the first clement days of 1916 drew him about as
far as I heard him go on the positive side. "You know what it is," he
said in the course of one of the endless trench talks, "when you got to
make up your mind to do as you oughter. Worry and fuss and oh, ain't it
too hard, and why the 'ell can't I let myself off!--that's how it is.
Folla me?"
The audience grunted assent. "Some other time," he pursued, "perhaps
once in ten years, it's all t'other way. You're set free like. Kind of a
miracle. Don't even have to think what you're going to get by it. All
you know is that there's just the one thing, in all the whole world,
good enough. Doing it ain't even hard. All the sport there ever was has
been took out of everything else and put into that. Kind of a miracle.
Folla me?"
"That's right," another man confirmed. "You'll see it at fires when
people are like to be burnt. Men'll go fair mad to help them. Don't
think. Don't feel it if they're hurt. Fair off it to get at them--same
as a dog when you throw a stick in a pond."
"Ah, then," contributed somebody else, "you've only to hear a man with a
grand tenor voice in a song till you'll feel a coolness blowing softly
and swif'ly over your face and then gone, the way you'd have died on a
cross with all the pleasure in life while it lasted."
"Aye, and you'll get it from whisky," another put in. "Isn't it just
what more men'll get drunk for than anything else? And why the rum's
double before you go over?"
No doubt you know all about it from books, and you may prefer the
wording of that tentative approach made by the most spiritually-minded
of modern philosophers to a definition of God--"Something that is in and
about me, in the consciousness of which I am free from fear and
desire--something which would make it easy to do the most (otherwise)
difficult thing without any other motive except that it was the one
thing worth doing." And William James has, of course, shown more skill
in explaining what mystic ecstasy is and what is its place in religion,
and what its relations to such mirages of itself as the mock
inspirations of Antony's lust and Burns' drunkenness.
And yet the clumsy fumblings of uninstructed people among things of the
spirit might, one imagines, be just such stuff as a skilled teacher and
leader in this field might have delighted to come upon and to inspirit
and marshal. With tongues unwontedly loosened men would set to and dig
out of themselves, not knowing what it was, the clay of which the bricks
are made with which religions are built. One man, with infinite
exertions of disentanglement, would struggle up to some expression of
the fugitive trance of realization into which he had found he could
throw himself by letting his mind go, for all it was worth, on the
thought of his own self, his "I-ness" until for some few seconds of
poised exaltation he had thought self clean away and was free. "It first
came by a fluke when I was a kiddy. If I'd lie in my cot, very still,
and look hard a long time at the candle, and think very hard--'I,' 'I,'
'I,' what's 'I?' I could work myself up to that state I'd be right
outside o' myself, and seeing the queer little body I'd been, with my
thought about 'I' doing this and 'I' getting that, and the way that I'd
thought it was natural I should, and no such a thing as any 'I' there
all the time, or only one to the whole set of us. Hard I'd try, every
time, to hold the thing on. Seemed as if there was no end to what I
might get to know if I could make it last out, that sort of rum start.
But the thing went to bits every time, next moment after I'd got it
worked up, and there I'd be left on the mat like, and thinking 'Gosh!
what a pitch I got up to that time!' and how I'd screw it up higher,
next go."
Then somebody else would bring up the way he had been taken by that
queer little rent in the veil of common experience--the sudden rush of
certainty that something which is happening now has all happened before,
or that some place, when first we see it, has really been known to us of
old and is only being revisited now, not discovered. You know how you
seem, when that sudden light comes, to escape for a while from your
common thoughts about time, as if out of a prison in which you have been
shut up so long that you had almost forgotten what it is to be free: it
flashes into your mind that immortality, for all you know, may exist
within one moment; that life, for all you know, may draw out into state
after state, and that all that you are conscious of at common times
might be merely a drop or two lipping over the edge of the full vessel
of some vast consciousness animating the whole world.
Another man would bring into the common stock a recollection of the kind
of poignant portrait dream that sometimes comes: not a dream of any
incident, but only the face of a friend, more living than life, with all
the secret kindness and loneliness of his mind suddenly visible in the
face, so that you think of him as you think of your mother when she is
dead and the stabbing insight of remorse begins.
Thus would these inexpert people hang unconsciously about the uncrossed
threshold of religion. With minds which had recovered in some degree the
penetrative simplicity of a child's, they disinterred this or that
unidentified bone of the buried God from under the monumental piles of
débris which the learned, the cunning, and the proud, priests and kings,
churches and chapels, had heaped up over the ideas of perfect love, of
faith that would leave all to follow that love, and of the faithful
spirit's release from mean fears of extinction. In talk they could bring
each other up to the point of feeling that little rifts had opened here
and there in the screens which are hung round the life of man on the
earth, and that they had peeped through into some large outer world that
was strange only because they were used to a small and dim one. They
were prepared and expectant. If any official religion could ever refine
the gold out of all that rich alluvial drift of "obstinate questionings
of sense and outward things," now was its time. No figure of speech,
among all these that I have mixed, can give the measure of the greatness
of that opportunity.
V
Nobody used it: the tide in the affairs of churches flowed its best, but
no church came to take it. Instead, as if chance had planned a kind of
satiric practical epigram, came the brigade chaplain. As soon as his
genial bulk hove in sight, and his cheery robustious chaff began blowing
about, the shy and uncouth muse of our savage theology unfolded her
wings and flew away. Once more the talk was all footer and rations and
scragging the Kaiser, and how "the Hun" would walk a bit lame after the
last knock he had got. Very nice, too, in its way. And yet there had
been a kind of a savour about the themes that had now shambled back in
confusion, before the clerical onset, into their twilight lairs in the
souls of individual laymen.
When you want to catch the Thames gudgeon you first comb the river's bed
hard with a long rake. In the turbid water thus caused the creatures
will be on the feed, and if you know how to fish you may get a great
take. For our professional fishers of men in the army the war did the
raking _gratis_. The men came under their hands at the time of most
drastic experience in most of the men's lives, immersed in a new and
strange life of sensations at once simple and intense, shaken roughly
out of the world of mechanical habit which at most times puts a kind of
bar between one's mind and truth, living always among swiftly dying
friends and knowing their own death at any time to be as probable as
anyone's. To get rid of your phlegm, it was said, is to be a
philosopher. It is also to be a saint, at least in the rough; you have
broken the frozen ground; you can grow anything now; you can see the
greatest things in the very smallest, so that sunrise on Inverness Copse
is the morning of the first day and a spoonful of rum and a biscuit a
sacrament. Imagine the religious revival that there might have been if
some man of apostolic genius had had the fishing in the troubled waters,
the ploughing and sowing of the broken soil.
The frozen fountain would have leapt,
The buds gone on to blow,
The warm south wind would have awaked
To melt the snow.
Nothing now perceptible came of it all. What, indeed, could the average
army chaplain have done, with his little budget of nice traits and
limitations? How had we ever armed and equipped him? When you are given
an infant earth to fashion out of a whirling ball of flaming metals and
gases, then good humour, some taste for adventure, distinction at
cricket, a jolly way with the men, and an imperfect digestion of
thirty-nine partly masticated articles may not carry you far. You may
come off, by no fault of your own, like the curate in Shakespeare who
was put up to play Alexander the Great: "A marvellous good neighbour, i'
faith, and a very good bowler: but, for Alisander--alas, you see how
'tis--a little o'erparted."
The men, once again, did not put it in that way. They did not miss
anything that most of them could have described. They only felt a
vacancy, an unspecified void, like the want of some unknown great thing
in their generals' minds and in the characters of their rulers at home.
The chaplain's tobacco was all to the good; so was the civil tongue that
he kept in his head; so were all the good turns that he did. But, when
it came to religion, were these things "all there was to it"? Had the
churches really not "got hold of something," with all their enormous
deposits of stone and mortar and clerical consequence? So, in his own
way, the army chaplain, too, became a tributary brook feeding the
general reservoir of disappointment and mistrust that was steadily
filled by the surface drainage of all the higher ground of our British
social landscape under the dirty weather of the war.
CHAPTER VI
'WARE POLITICIANS
I
When a man enlisted during the war he found himself living the life of
the common man in a Communist State. Once inside he had no more choices
to make than a Russian under the Soviet. His work, his pay, his food,
his place and mode of living were fixed from on high. He might not even
decide whether he should remain a soldier or be turned, say, into a
miner. If the wisdom that sat up aloft put him down for a draft to a
tunnelling company, to earth he went. He had ceased to be Economic Man,
the being whom we were brought up to regard as causing the world to go
round by making a bee-line to the best pay available. Now he was
ex-Economic Man, or Economic Man popped off all the hooks that had
fastened him into a place in the system called capitalistic by those who
least admire it. No one was left to say of a job any longer that you
might "take it or leave it," for leaving was barred. You could not be
called a wage-slave, for you got no wages to speak of. You had become a
true "proletarian" under a pretty big-fisted dictatorship. It might not
be a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a dictatorship smells about as
sweet by one name as another when it levers you out of bed before dawn
or ties you up to the wheel of a gun for cutting a job that irks you.
Dr. Johnson declined to attempt to settle degrees of precedence between
a flea and a louse. It is as hard to decide between the charms of a
"sanitary fatigue" when done for our War Office and when done for Mr.
Lenin.
In a sense, no doubt, the average man liked it all--the sense in which
men like to break the ice in the Serpentine for a swim. He had willed
it. He felt that when it was over it would be a good thing to have done.
But he also saw, perhaps with surprise, that there were many men who
liked it wholly, without any juggling with future and pluperfect tenses.
They liked to have their hours of rising and going to bed settled by
colonel or Soviet rather than face for themselves this distracting
problem in self-government. They liked meals which they did not choose,
and which might not be good, but which came up of themselves, in their
season, like grass. They liked quarters which they might perhaps have to
share with brethren too weak to carry their liquor and not too wise to
essay great feats of the kind, but which, anyhow, did not have to be
sought for, rented, furnished, and, on every Monday, paid for with a
separate pang. They liked, at any rate as the lesser evil, work which
was no subject of either collective or individual bargain, but came out
of the sky, like the weather, usually open to objection, but sometimes
not.
Perhaps you concluded, after a time, that there must be some
temperaments communistic or socialistic by nature, like the "souls
Christian by nature" of the theologians. You might even have suspected
that in all this wide field of dispute the most fundamental difference
is not between the intrinsic and absolute merits of the individualistic
and of the communistic State, but between two contrasted human
types--the type which is actually happiest in communal messes and
dormitories and playgrounds and forced labour and State-fixed pay in a
State-chosen career, and the type which exults in even the smallest
separate cottage and garden, as a lion rejoices in his own den; the type
which cooks its mutton with a special rapture in an exclusive oven,
however imperfect, and sallies forth rejoicing, as the bridegroom goeth
out from his chamber, to angle for the dearest market for the labour of
its hands and the cheapest for its victuals. So that the only ideal
solution might be to cut up the world, or each of its States, into two
hemispheres, as trains are divided into "non-smoking" and "smoking." A
little difficult, perhaps; but then it is difficult to make either breed
be happy in the other's paradise.
II
Other speculations were apt to visit your mind if, later on in the war,
as a New Army officer, you watched, open-mouthed, the way that much of
the Regular Army's business was done. In civil life you might have had
wild dreams of what business life would be like if its one great, black,
ruling, quelling possibility were for ever removed, if the last Official
Receiver had gone the way of the great auk, and the two-handed engine of
bankruptcy stood no longer at the door, its place being taken by a genie
carrying countless Treasury notes and ready to come in and "make it all
right" as soon as you gave the slightest rub to the electric lamp on
your desk. How nobly free you would be from the base care of overhead
charges! How pungently you would keep in his proper place any large
customer whose tone displeased you! How handsomely, when in a generous
mood, you would cast away the sordid preoccupation of getting value for
money and indulge yourself with a sight of the smile-wreathed face of a
friend to whom you had given the bargain of a lifetime! How dignified a
leisure you would enjoy after all those years of answering letters on
the day you got them! Or, if that were your line, how high you would
wave the banner of an ideal precision, stooping to none of the slavish,
supple complaisances of competitive commerce, but making everyone who
wrote a letter to you mind his P's and Q's, and do the thing in form,
and go on doing it until he got it right, as long as the forests of
Scandinavia held out to supply you both with stationery!
In the throes of a great war, and within sound of its guns, the genius
of our race achieved, at any rate in some minor departmental Edens, this
approach to a business man's heaven. To the rightful inhabitants of
these paradises the intrusion of an ordinary fallen business man, with
his vulgar notions of efficiency, gave something of a shock. He seemed
cold and clammy--a serpent in the garden. "At the War Office," an old
Staff officer plaintively said to one of these kill-joys, "we never used
to open the afternoon letters till the next day." He felt that life
would lose its old-world bloom if he had to do things on the nail.
"After all, it won't kill the British taxpayer"--that was another golden
formula.
III
Returned from these illuminating experiences the victorious soldier
finds the British taxpayer--not, indeed, killed, but rubbing his wounds
and groaning and being advised by several different kinds of friends to
try if a hair, or perhaps the whole skin, of the dog that bit him will
make him feel better. "Put your trust," say the august political
authoritarians, "in your natural rulers, from Lord Chaplin and the Duke
of Northumberland down to about as low as Sir Eric Geddes; scrap all the
outworn and discredited humbug of democracy and parliamentarism;
recognize that only a governing class with ample traditions of skill and
devotion can govern to any effect."
"Rats!" observe the Extreme Left; "all that ramp was exposed long
ago--ruling class and Parliament, and all of it. Turn down aristocracy
and democracy, too, and put your money on the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat and----" At which the poor tax-paying proletarian looks up
with a gleam of hope and asks if he may begin dictating now. With a
pitying smile the Extreme Left explains that it is to be named his
dictatorship, but that it will be exercised not by him but by the Proper
Persons. Will he elect them? he asks. Oh, no; that would be mere
_bourgeois_ Liberalism, quite out of date. Well, he asks, how is he to
feel sure that they will do what he wants? Can he doubt it?--he is
reproachfully asked. Does he not see that men ruling only as dictators
for the whole nation, men serving only their country and no grubby
individual employer or caucus, will and must be fired, at once and for
ever, with a new spirit of devotion, wisdom, purity, humanity, and love
such as was never yet seen on earth--indeed, could not be seen on it
while its surface was defaced with Houses of Parliament and joint-stock
mills?
At this point the demobilized business man is likely to go out
sorrowfully, reflecting that thanks to the war he has known, in turn,
what it is to be one of the rulers, and what it is to be one of the
ruled, in a community where the people below have no hold on the people
above, and where the people above are pricked by no coarser spur than
their own pure zeal for the best of causes in the sorest of its straits.
Communism delights him not, nor Toryism either.
Nor, indeed, any other political creed of all those that he knows.
Liberals he has, perhaps, come to figure as sombre and dry, all-round
prohibitors, humanitarians but not humanists, people with democratic
principles but not democratic sympathies, uncomradelike lovers of man,
preaching the brotherhood of nations but not knowing how to speak
without offence to a workman from their own village. The Labour Party,
indeed, he may feel to be, as yet, not wholly damned, but chiefly
because it has never been tried at the big job. Its leaders have not,
like the Liberal and Conservative chiefs, to answer for any grand public
triumphs of incapacity like the diplomacy that gave Bulgaria and Turkey
to Germany. Labour has not the name of Gallipoli to wear on its party
colours; the _Goeben_ and the _Breslau_ did not escape with it at the
Admiralty; none of its leaders intrigued with any general against his
superiors; it did not turn Ireland's offered help into enmity in the
hour of need. What of that, though? Liberals and Conservatives, too,
might not have failed yet if they had not been tested. As likely as not
that the Labour chiefs, too, would show, at a pinch, the old vice of the
others--live and act in a visionary world of their own, the world as
they would have liked to have it, not the world in which rough work and
fighting and starving go on and the people who make it go round are not
politicians.
IV
A century of almost unbroken European peace--unbroken, that is, by wars
hugely destructive--had built up insensibly in men's minds a
consciousness of an unbounded general stability in the political as well
as in the physical world. The crust of the political globe seemed to
have caked, on the whole, almost as hard and cool as that of the elderly
earth. It felt as if it were so firm that we could safely play the fool
on it, as boys jump on the ice of a pond and defy it to break under
them. So an immense tolerance of political rubbish had grown up. On
decade after decade of indulgence the man of booming phrases and
grandiosely noble professions had swelled into a marvel of inflation
surpassing any barking frog at the Zoo. That doing of hard and plain
work well, which is the basis of all right living and success in men or
nations, had grown almost dull in the sight of a people who took too
seriously the trumpetings and naggings of the various fashionable
schools of virtuosi in political blatancy. It would not be common sense
to suppose that no psychological change of any moment would, in any
case, have been wrought by a passage from that substantially stable
world into a world in which the three great empires of Continental
Europe have been ground to dust like Ypres. Anyhow, the adventure of
finding our cooled and solid earth turning once more into a ball of fire
under the foot would not have left the state of our minds quite as it
had been. They are all the more changed now that most of us feel we have
pulled through the scrape, scorched and battered, by our own sweat, and
not by the leadership of those to whom we had too lazily given the
places of mark in that rather childish old world before the smash came.
Some of the chief ingredients in the new temper are a more vigilant
scepticism; a new impatience of strident enunciations of vague,
venerable, political principles; a rough instinctive application of
something like the new philosophy of pragmatism to all questions; and an
elated sense of the speed and completeness with which institutions and
powers apparently founded on rock can be scoured away. Great masses of
men have become more freely critical of the claims of institutions and
political creeds and parties which they used to accept without much
scrutiny. It is not a temper that need be regarded with terror or
reprobation. In itself it is neither good nor bad. It is the raw
material of either good or evil, accordingly as it is guided--of barren
destruction or of bold repair and improvement. But it is formidable. For
men who have seen cities pounded to rubble, men who with little aid or
guidance from their own rulers have chased emperors from their thrones,
are pretty fully disengaged, at last, from the Englishman's old sense of
immutable fixity in institutions which he may find irksome or worthless.
"There's comfort yet. They are assailable." If the Holy Roman Empire has
been knocked into smithereens, what public nuisance need remain?
CHAPTER VII
"CAN'T BELIEVE A WORD"
I
If you cannot hit or kick during a fight, at any rate you can spit. But,
to be happy in this arm of the service, you have to feel sure that the
adversary is signally fit to be spat upon. Hence, on each side in every
war, the civilian will-to-believe that the other side are a set of
ogres, every man of them. What a capital fiend the Boer, the man like
Botha or Smuts, was made out to be during the last Boer War! He abused
the white flag, he sawed a woman in two, he advanced behind screens of
niggers; O, he was a great fellow! In 1870 French civilians laid freely
to their souls the flattering unction that the Prussians murdered their
prisoners. Strong in what was at bottom the same joyous faith, German
civilians told you that French officers usually broke their parole. A
few choice spirits will even carry this fond observance into the milder
climate of sport. A boy of this kidney, while looking on at a vital
house match, will give his mind ease by telling a friend what "a lot of
stinkers" the other house are. A follower of Cambridge cricket, a man of
fifty, in whom you might expect the choler of youth to have cooled, has
been found musing darkly over a large photograph of an Oxford eleven.
They seemed to me, as is the way of these heroes, to lack nothing of
outward charm except the light of intellect in the eye. But "Look at
them!" he observed with conviction. "The hangdog expressions! The
narrow, ill-set Mongol eyes! The thin, cruel lips! Prejudice apart,
would you like to meet that gang in a quiet place on a dark night?" From
these sombre reflections he seemed to derive a sort of pasture.
Little doubt, then, as to what had to come when five of the greatest
nations on earth were suddenly rolling over and under each other in the
dust. While their armies saw to the biting, the snarling was done with a
will by the press of Berlin and Vienna, Petrograd, Paris, and London.
That we were all fighting foul, every man, was the burden of the strain.
Phone and anti-phone, the choric hymn of detraction swelled; if this had
been an age of simpler faith there might have been serious fear lest the
music should reach the ear of some Jove sitting at his nectar; what if
he should say in a rage that those nasty little beasts were at it again,
and throw such a comet down on the earth as would settle the hash of us
all? But no such fears troubled Europe. And then policy, viewing these
operations of instinct, was moved to cut in. Official propaganda began,
and one of its stock lines was to help in stoking these fires in the
non-combatant heart.
II
Some of the fuel to hand was fine. The German command fed the best of it
all into our bunkers, gratis. It owned that its "frightfulness" plan was
no slip, no "indiscretion of a subordinate," but a policy weighed and
picked out--worse than that, an embodied ethical doctrine. A Frenchman,
when he is cross with our English virtue, will say that none of us can
steal a goose without saying he does it for the public good. But the fey
rulers of Germany could not even be content to say it was an act of
moral beauty to sink the _Lusitania_ or to burn Louvain. They must go on
to boast that these scrubby actions were pieces of sound, hard thinking,
the only tenable conclusions to impregnable syllogisms. Besides man's
natural aversion to cruel acts, they thus incurred his still more
universal distaste for pedants. They delivered themselves into our hand.
They were beautiful butts, ready made, like the learned elderly lady in
_Roderick Random_, whose bookish philosophy made her desire to "drag the
parent by the hoary hair," and to "toss the sprawling infant on her
spear."
But man, rash man, must always be trying to go one better than the best.
With this thing of beauty there for our use, crying out to be used, some
of our propagandists must needs go beyond it and try to make out that
the average German soldier, the docile blond with yellow hair, long
skull, and blue, woolgathersome eyes, who swarmed in our corps cages
during the last two years of the war, craving for some one, anyone, to
give him an order, was one of the monsters who hang about the gates of
Vergil's Hell. If you had to make out a good hanging case against
Germany could you, as Hamlet asks his injudicious mother, on that fair
mountain cease to feed and batten on this moor? And yet some of us did.
The authentic scarecrow, the school of thought that ruled the old German
State, was not used for half of what it was worth. But the word went
forth that any redeeming traits in the individual German conscript were
better hushed up. When he showed extreme courage in an attack, not much
must be made of it. When he behaved well to a wounded Englishman, it
must be hidden. A war correspondent who mentioned some chivalrous act
that a German had done to an Englishman during an action received a
rebuking wire from his employer, "Don't want to hear about any nice,
good Germans."
Even in the very temple of humourless shabbiness comedy may contrive to
keep up a little shrine of her own, and on this forlorn altar the dread
of "crying up anything German" laid, now and then, an undesigned
offering. One worthy field censor was suddenly taken aback by a
dangerous flaw in a war correspondent's exultant account of a swiftly
successful British attack. "Within ten minutes from zero," I think the
correspondent had written, "our men were sitting at ease on what had
been the enemy's parapet, smoking good German cigars." "Hullo!" said the
censor, "this won't do. 'Good' German cigars. _Good_ German cigars! No!
'Good' must come out." And come out it did. Like the _moral_ of his
troops, like the generalship of his chiefs, the foeman's tobacco had to
be bad. It was the time when some of our patriotic pundits found out
that Mommsen's Roman history was all wrong, and that Poppo did not half
know his Thucydides.
III
Of all this kind of swordsmanship the most dashing feat was the
circulation of the "corpse factory" story. German troops, it was written
in part of our Press, had got, in certain places near their front, a
proper plant for boiling down the fat of their own dead. It was not said
whether the product was to be used as a food, or as a lubricant or
illuminant only. Chance brought me into one of the reputed seats of this
refinement of frugality. It was on ground that our troops had just
taken, in 1918. At Bellicourt the St. Quentin Canal goes into a long
tunnel. Some little way in from its mouth you could find, with a
flash-lamp, a small doorway cut in the tunnel's brick wall, on the
tow-path side of the canal. The doorway led to the foot of a narrow
staircase that wound up through the earth till it came to an end in a
room about twenty feet long. It, too, was subterranean, but now its
darkness was pierced by one sharp-edged shaft of sunlight let in through
a neat round hole cut in the five or six feet of earth above. Loaves,
bits of meat, and articles of German equipment lay scattered about, and
two big dixies or cauldrons, like those in which we stewed our tea, hung
over two heaps of cold charcoal. Eight or ten bodies, lying pell-mell,
nearly covered half of the floor. They showed the usual effects of
shell-fire. Another body, disembowelled and blown almost to rags, lay
across one of the dixies and mixed with the puddle of coffee that it
contained. A quite simple case. Shells had gone into cook-houses of
ours, long before then, and had messed up the cooks with the stew.
An Australian sergeant, off duty and poking about, like a good
Australian, for something to see, had come up the stairs, too. He had
heard the great fat-boiling yarn, and how this was the latest seat of
the industry. Sadly he surveyed the disappointing scene. Ruefully he
noted the hopelessly normal nature of all the proceedings that had
produced it. Then he broke the silence in which we had made our several
inspections. "Can't believe a word you read, sir, can you?" he said with
some bitterness. Life had failed to yield one of its advertised marvels.
The Press had lied again. The propagandist myth about Germans had
cracked up once more. "Can't believe a word you read" had long been
becoming a kind of catch-phrase in the army. And now another good man
had been duly confirmed in the faith, ordained as a minister of the
faith, that whatever your pastors and masters tell you had best be
assumed to be just a bellyful of east wind.
IV
Partly it came of the nature--which could not be helped by that time--of
war correspondence. In the first months of the war our General Staff,
being what we had made it, treated British war correspondents as pariah
dogs. They might escape arrest so long as they kept out of sight; that
was about the sum of their privileges. Long before the end of the war
the Chiefs of Staff of our several armies received them regularly on the
eve of every battle, explained to them the whole of our plans and hopes,
gave them copies of our most secret objective and barrage maps; every
perilous secret we had was put into their keeping. A little later still
an Army Commander would murmur, with very little indistinctness, if he
thought the war correspondents had not been writing enough about his
army of late. After the Armistice Sir Douglas Haig made them a speech of
thanks and praise on the great bridge over the Rhine at Cologne, and at
the Peace all the regular pariah dogs were offered knighthoods.
The Regular Army had set out by taking a war correspondent to be, _ex
officio_, a low fellow paid to extract kitchen literature from such
private concerns of the military profession as wars. It harboured the
curious notion that it would be possible in this century to feed the
nation at home on _communiqués_ from G.H.Q. alone or eked out with
"Eye-Witness" stuff--official "word-painting" by some Regular Officer
with a tincture of letters. With that power of learning things, only
just not too late, which distinguishes our Regular Army from the
Bourbons, it presently saw that this plan had broken down. About the
same time the Regular Army began to recognise in the abhorred war
correspondent a man whom it had known at school, and who had gone to the
university about the time when it, the Army, was going into the Army
Class. That was enough. Foul as was his profession, still he might be a
decent fellow; he might not want to injure his country.
When these reflections were dawning slowly over the Regular Army mind it
happened--Sir Douglas Haig having a mind himself--that his Chief of
Intelligence was a fully educated man with a good fifty per cent. more
of brains, imagination, decision, and initiative than the average of his
fellow-Regulars on the Staff. He knew something of the Press at first
hand. Being a Scotsman, he regarded writers and well-read people with
interest and not with alarm. Under his command the policy of helping the
Press rose to its maximum. War correspondents were given the "status,"
almost the rank, of officers. Actual officers were detailed to see to
their comfort, to pilot them about the front, to secure their friendly
treatment by all ranks and at all headquarters. Never were war
correspondents so helped, shielded and petted before. And, almost
without an exception, they were good men. Only one or two black sheep of
the trade would try to make a reader believe that they had seen things
which they had not. The general level of personal and professional
honour, of courage, public spirit, and serious enterprise, was high. No
average Staff Officer could talk with the average British correspondent
without feeling that this was a sound human being and had a better mind
than his own--that he knew more, had seen more, and had been less
deadened by the coolie work of a professional routine. When once known,
the war correspondents were trusted and liked--by the Staff.
V
There lay the trouble. They lived in the Staff world, its joys and its
sorrows, not in the combatant world. The Staff was both their friend and
their censor. How could they show it up when it failed? One of the first
rules of field censorship was that from war correspondents "there must
be no criticism of authority or command"; how could they disobey that?
They would visit the front now and then, as many Staff Officers did, but
it could be only as afternoon callers from one of the many mansions of
G.H.Q., that heaven of security and comfort. When autumn twilight came
down on the haggard trench world of which they had caught a quiet
noon-day glimpse they would be speeding west in Vauxhall cars to lighted
châteaux gleaming white among scatheless woods. Their staple emotions
before a battle were of necessity akin to those of the Staff, the
racehorse-owner or trainer exalted with brilliant hopes, thrilled by the
glorious uncertainty of the game, the fascinating nicety of every
preparation, and feeling the presence of horrible fatigues and the
nearness of multitudinous deaths chiefly as a dim, sombre background
that added importance to the rousing scene, and not as things that need
seriously cloud the spirit or qualify delight in a plan.
"Our casualties will be enormous," a General at G.H.Q. said with the
utmost serenity on the eve of one of our great attacks in 1917. The
average war correspondent--there were golden exceptions--insensibly
acquired the same cheerfulness in face of vicarious torment and danger.
In his work it came out at times in a certain jauntiness of tone that
roused the fighting troops to fury against the writer. Through his
despatches there ran a brisk implication that regimental officers and
men enjoyed nothing better than "going over the top"; that a battle was
just a rough, jovial picnic; that a fight never went on long enough for
the men; that their only fear was lest the war should end on this side
of the Rhine. This, the men reflected in helpless anger, was what people
at home were offered as faithful accounts of what their friends in the
field were thinking and suffering.
Most of the men had, all their lives, been accepting "what it says 'ere
in the paper" as being presumptively true. They had taken the Press at
its word without checking. Bets had been settled by reference to a
paper. Now, in the biggest event of their lives, hundreds of thousands
of men were able to check for themselves the truth of that workaday
Bible. They fought in a battle or raid, and two days after they read,
with jeers on their lips, the account of "the show" in the papers. They
felt they had found the Press out. The most bloody defeat in the history
of Britain, a very world's wonder of valour frustrated by feckless
misuse, of regimental glory and Staff shame, might occur on the Ancre on
July 1, 1916, and our Press come out bland and copious and graphic, with
nothing to show that we had not had quite a good day--a victory really.
Men who had lived through the massacre read the stuff open-mouthed.
Anything, then, could figure as anything else in the Press--as its own
opposite even. Black was only an aspect of white. With a grin at the way
he must have been taken in up to now, the fighting soldier gave the
Press up. So it comes that each of several million ex-soldiers now reads
every solemn appeal of a Government, each beautiful speech of a Premier
or earnest assurance of a body of employers with that maxim on guard in
his mind--"You can't believe a word you read."
CHAPTER VIII
THE DUTY OF LYING
I
To fool the other side has always been
fair in a game. Every fencer or boxer may feint. A Rugby football player
"gives the dummy" without any shame. In cricket a bowler is justly
valued the more for masking his action.
In war your licence to lead the other fellow astray is yet more ample.
For war, though it may be good sport to some men, is not a mere sport.
In sport you are not "out to win" except on certain terms of courtesy
and handsomeness. Who would take pride in a race won by a fluke? At
Henley, a long time ago, there were five or six scullers in for the
Diamonds. One of them, L----, was known to be far the best man in the
race. In the first heat he was drawn against A----, of Oxford, about the
best of the others. L---- had one fault--a blind eye; and it often made
him steer a bad course. Before the two had raced for fifty yards L----
blundered out of his course, crashed into A----, and capsized him. The
rules of boat-racing are clear: L---- had done for himself. A----, who
was now swimming, had only to look up to the umpire's launch and hold up
a hand. A nod would have been the reply, and the heat would have been
A----'s, and the final heat, in all likelihood, too. A---- looked well
away from the umpire and kept his hands down, got back into his boat and
said to his contrite opponent, "Start again here, sir?" A---- was
decisively beaten, and never came so near to winning the Diamonds again.
Of course he was right, the race being sport. He had "loved the game
beyond the prize"; he had, like Cyrano, _emporté son panache_; he had
seen that in sport the thing to strive for is prowess itself, and not
its metallic symbol. But the prize of victory in war is no symbol; it is
the thing itself, the real end and aim of all that you do and endure. If
A---- had been sculling not for a piece of silversmith's work but for
the righting of a wronged nation or for the reassertion of public right
throughout Europe, not only would he have been morally free to take a
lucky fluke when he got it: he would not have been morally free to
reject it. In war you have to "play to win"--words of sinister import in
sport. Pot-hunting, unhonoured in sport, is a duty in war, where the pot
is, perhaps, the chance of a free life for your children.
Hence your immemorial right to fall on your enemy where he is weak, to
start before he is ready, to push him out of the course, to jockey him
on to the rails, to use against him all three of Bacon's recipes for
deceiving. A good spy will lie to the last, and in war a prisoner may
lie like a saint and hero. With unmistakable glee the Old Testament
tells us of Gideon's excellent practical fib with the crockery and
trumpets. Even the Wooden Horse of the Greeks has long ceased to raise
moral questions. The pious Aeneas, certainly, called it a foul. But what
did he do himself, when he got a good opening? Went, as the Irish say,
beyond the beyonds and fought in an enemy uniform. Ruses of war and war
lies are as ancient as war itself, and as respectable. The most innocent
animals use them; they shammed dead in battle long before Falstaff.
The only new thing about deception in war is modern man's more perfect
means for its practice. The thing has become, in his hand, a trumpet
more efficacious than Gideon's own. When Sinon set out to palm off on
the Trojans the false news of a Greek total withdrawal, that first of
Intelligence officers made a venture like that of early man, with his
flint-headed arrow, accosting a lion. Sinon's pathetic little armament
of yarns, to be slung at his proper peril, was frailer than David's five
stones from the brook. Modern man is far better off. To match the Lewis
gun with which he now fires his solids, he has to his hand the newspaper
Press, a weapon which fires as fast as the Lewis itself, and is almost
as easy to load whenever he needs, in his wars, to let fly at the
enemy's head the thing which is not.
He has this happiness, too: however often he fires, he can, in a sense,
never miss. He knows that while he is trying to feed the enemy with
whatever it may be bad for him to read the enemy will be trying just as
hard to leave no word of it unread. As busily as your enemy's telescopes
will be conning your lines in the field, his Intelligence will be
scrutinising whatever is said in your Press, worrying out what it means
and which of the things that it seems to let out are the traps and which
are the real, the luminous, priceless slips made in unwariness. What the
Sphinx was to her _clientèle_, what the sky is to mountain-climbers and
sailors, your Press is to him: an endless riddle, to be interrogated and
interpreted for dear life. His wits have to be at work on it always.
Like a starved rat in a house where rat-poison is laid, he can afford
neither to nibble a crumb that has got the virus on it, nor yet to leave
uneaten any clean crumb that has fallen accidentally from a table. Do
not thrilling possibilities open before you?
What cannot you and I perform upon
The unguarded Duncan? What not put upon
His spongy officers?
--that is, if Duncan be really unguarded enough to "ravin down his
proper bane," like a dutiful rat, and his officers spongy enough to sop
up, according to plan, the medicated stuff that you give them.
III
It is the common habit of nations at war to ascribe to the other side
all the cunning, as if the possession of a Ulysses were some sort of
discredit. Happily for us our chosen Ulysses in France, at the most
critical time, was of the first order. But no soldier can go far ahead
of his time; he has to work in it and with it. And so the rich new mine
of Intelligence work through the Press was not worked by either side, in
the Great War, for all it was worth. Only a few trial borings were made;
experimental shafts were sunk into the seam, and good, promising stuff
was brought to the top.
Here are a couple of samples. Some readers of popular science, as it is
called, may have been shocked to see in a technical journal, rather late
in the war, a recklessly full description of our "listening sets"--the
apparatus by which an enemy telephone message is overheard in the field.
"Why," they must have thought, "this is giving away one of our subtlest
devices for finding out what the enemy is about. The journal ought to be
prosecuted." The article had really come from G.H.Q. It was the last
thrust in a long duel.
When the war opened the Germans had good apparatus for telephonic
eavesdropping. We had, as usual, nothing to speak of. The most
distinctly traceable result was the annihilation of our first attack at
Ovillers, near Albert, early in July 1916. At the instant fixed for the
attack our front at the spot was smothered under a bombardment which
left us with no men to make it. A few days after when we took Ovillers,
we found the piece of paper on which the man with the German "listening
set" had put down, word for word, our orders for the first assault. Then
we got to work. We drew our own telephones back, and we perfected our
own "listening sets" till the enemy drew back his, further and further,
giving up more and more of ease and rapidity of communication in order
to be safe. At last a point was reached at which he had backed right out
of hearing. All hope of pushing him back further still, by proving in
practice that we could still overhear, was now gone. All that was left
to do was to add the effects of a final bluff to the previous effects of
the real strength of our hand. And so there slipped into a rather
out-of-the-way English journal the indiscretion by which the reach of
our electric ears was, to say the least of it, not under-stated. Few
people in England might notice the article. The enemy could be trusted
to do so.
When the Flanders battle of July 31, 1917, was about to be fought, we
employed the old ruse of the Chinese attack. We modernised the trick of
medieval garrisons which would make a show of getting ready to break out
at one gate when a real sally was to be made from another. The enemy was
invited to think that a big attack was at hand. But against Lens, and
not east of Ypres. Due circumstantial evidence was provided. There were
audible signs that a great concentration of British guns were cautiously
registering, west of Lens. A little scuffle on that part of the front
elicited from our side an amazing bombardment--apparently loosed in a
moment of panic. I fancy a British Staff Officer's body--to judge by his
brassard and tabs--may have floated down the Scarpe into the German
lines. Interpreted with German thoroughness, the maps and papers upon it
might easily betray the fact that Lens was the objective. And then a
really inexcusable indiscretion appeared--just for a moment, and then
was hushed up--in the London Press. To an acute German eye it must have
been obvious that this composition was just the inconsequent gassing of
some typically stupid English General at home on leave; he was clearly
throwing his weight about, as they say, without any real understanding
of anything. The stuff was of no serious value, except for one
parenthetic, accidental allusion to Lens as the mark. As far as I know,
this ebullition of babble was printed in only one small edition of one
London paper. Authority was then seen to be nervously trying, as Uncle
Toby advised, "to wipe it up and say no more about it." Lest it should
not be observed to have taken this wise precaution some fussy member of
Parliament may have asked in the House of Commons how so outrageous a
breach of soldierly reticence had occurred. And was there no control
over the Press? It all answered. The Germans kept their guns in force at
Lens, and their counter barrage east of Ypres was so much the lighter,
and our losses so much the less.
IV
If we did these things in the green leaf, what might we not do in the
dry? Mobilize our whole Press, conscribe it for active service under a
single control, a--let us be frank--a Father-General of Lies, the
unshaming strategic and tactical lies of "the great wars" which "make
ambition virtue," and sometimes make mendacity a virtue too? Coach the
whole multitudinous orchestra of the Press to carry out the vast
conceptions of some consummate conductor, _splendide mendax_? From each
instrument under his baton this artist would draw its utmost
contributive aid to immense schemes of concerted delusiveness, the
harping of the sirens elaborated into Wagnerian prodigies of volume and
complexity.
As you gaze from the top of a tree or a tower behind your own front, in
a modern war, all the landscape beyond it looks as if man had perished
from the earth, leaving his works behind him. It all looks strangely
vacant and dead, the roofs of farms and the spires of churches serving
only to deepen your sense of this blank deletion of man, as the Roman
arches enhance the vacuous stillness of the Campagna. Your Intelligence
Corps has to convert this first impression, this empty page, into a
picture, built up line by line, dot by dot, of the universe of
activities that are going on out there. Its first and easiest task is to
mark out correctly the place where every enemy unit is, each division,
each battery, each railhead, aerodrome, field hospital and dump. Next it
has to mark each movement of each of these, the shiftings of the various
centres of gravity, the changes in the relative density and relative
quality of troops and guns at various sectors, the increase, at any
sector, of field hospitals, the surest harbingers of heavy attacks. The
trains on all lines must be counted, their loads calculated. Next must
be known in what sort of spirits the enemy is, in the field and also at
home. Do the men believe in their officers? Do the men get confident
letters from their civilian friends? Do they send cheerful ones back? Is
desertion rare and much abhorred? Or so common that men are no longer
shot for it now? So you may go on enumerating until it strikes you that
you are simply drifting into an inventory of all the details of the
enemy's wartime life, in the field and at home. And then you understand.
For what you want to know, in order to beat him, is no less than
this--to see him steadily and see him whole. In the past we have talked
of information "of military value" as distinct from other information.
But all information about either side is of military value to the other.
News of the outbreak or settlement of a strike in a Welsh coalfield was
of military value to Ludendorff. News of the day's weather in Central
Europe was of military value to Sir Douglas Haig. News of anything that
expressed in any degree the temper of London or Berlin, of Munich or
Manchester, helped to eke out that accurate vision of an enemy's body
and mind which is the basis of success in combat. A black dot, of the
size of a pin-head, may seem, when looked at alone, to give no secret
away. But when the same dot is seen, no longer in isolation, but as part
of a pen-and-ink drawing, perhaps it may leap into vital prominence,
showing now as the pupil of the eye that completes a whole portrait,
gives its expression to a face and identifies a sitter.
Throughout the Great War our own Press and that of the Germans were each
pouring out, for the undesigned benefit of their enemy, substantially
correct descriptions of everything in the war life of their respective
nations, except a few formal military and naval secrets specially
reserved by the censors. Each nation fought, on the whole, with the
other standing well out in the light, with no inscrutability about its
countenance. If we were ever again in such risk of our national life,
would we not seriously try to make ourselves an enigma? Or would we
leave this, as we have left some other refinements of war, to the other
side to introduce first?
V
Suppose us again at war with a Power less strong at sea than ourselves.
If we should want its fleet to come out and fight in the open, why not
evoke, some fine morning, from every voice in our daily press, a sudden
and seemingly irrepressible cry of grief and rage over the unconcealable
news--the Censor might be defied by the way--that our Grand Fleet, while
ranging the seas, had struck a whole school of drift mines and lost half
its numbers? Strategic camouflage, however, would go far beyond such
special means to special ends as that. It would, as a regular thing,
derange the whole landscape presented to enemy eyes by our Press. There
was in the war a French aerodrome across which the French camouflage
painters had simply painted a great white high-road: it ran across
hangars, huts, turf, everything; and everything was amazingly
obliterated by it. Across our real life, as seen under the noonday rays
of publicity in ordinary times, the supreme controller might draw some
such enormous lines of falsification.
Most of the fibs that we used in the war were mere nothings, and clumsy
at that. When the enemy raided our trenches in the dead winter season,
took fifty prisoners, and did as he liked for a while--so much as he
liked that a court of inquiry was afterwards held and a colonel deprived
of his command--we said in our official _communiqué_ that a hostile
raiding party had "entered our trenches" but was "speedily driven out,
leaving a number of dead." When civilian _moral_ at home was going
through one of its occasional depressions, we gave out that it was
higher than ever. We did not officially summon from the vasty deep the
myth about Russian soldiers in England. But when it arose out of nothing
we did make some use of it. These were, however, little more than bare
admissions of the principle that truthfulness in war is not imperative.
Falsification was tried, but it was not "tried out." Like really
long-range guns, the kindred of "Bertha," it came into use only enough
to suggest what another world-war might be. _Vidimus tantum._ And then
the war ended.
Under a perfected propaganda system the whole surface presented by a
country's Press to the enemy's Intelligence would be a kind of painted
canvas. The artist would not merely be reticent about the positions,
say, of our great training camps. He would create, by indirect evidence,
great dummy training camps. In the field we had plenty of dummy
aerodromes, with hangars complete and a few dummy machines sprawling
outside, to draw enemy bomb-fire. At home we would have dummy Salisbury
Plains to which a guarded allusion would peep out here and there while
the new unity of command over the Press would delete the minutest clue
to the realities. Episodes like that of the famous Lansdowne letter
would not be left for nature to bungle. If at any time such an episode
seemed likely to touch any diplomatic spring with good strategic effect,
it would happen at that moment and no other. Otherwise it would not
happen, so far as any trace of it in the Press could betray.
By-elections, again, their course and result, may tell an enemy much of
what your people are thinking. But, for military purposes, there is
always some particular thing which you want him to believe them to be
thinking. So you would not leave it to the capricious chances of an
actual election to settle whether he should be led to believe this or
not. You would see to it. Just as you camouflage your real guns and
expose dummy guns, so you would obliterate from the Press all trace of
your real elections and offer to view, at the times that best suited,
dummy elections, _ad hoc_ elections, complete in all their parts.
We have imagined a case in which it would be our interest to raise false
confidence in the enemy, perhaps to draw a hurried attack on our shores
at a time of our own choosing. Then, if the whole of our Press is held
in our hand like a fiddle, ready to take and give out any tune, what
should prevent us from letting fall, in sudden distress, a hundred
doleful, forced admissions that the strain has proved too great, the
smash has come, the head of the State is in hiding from his troops, the
Premier in flight, naval officers hanging from modern equivalents to the
yard-arm, Ministers and Commanders-in-Chief shaking their fists in one
another's faces? Or take the opposite case, that you mean to attack in
force, in the field. Here you would add to the preliminary bombardment
of your guns such a bombardment of assertion and insinuation, not
disprovable before "zero" hour, as has never yet been essayed; plausible
proofs from neutral quarters that the enemy's troops are being betrayed
by their politicians behind, that typhus has broken out among the men's
homes, that their children are dying like flies, and some of the
mothers, insane with famine and grief, are eating the dead in hope of
nursing the living. Oh, you could say a great deal.
And you could deliver your messages, too. The enemy's command might try
to keep the contents of your Press from reaching his troops. But, thanks
to the aeroplane, you can circularize the enemy's troops almost as
easily as traders can canvass custom at home. You can flood his front
line with leaflets, speeches, promises, rumours, and caricatures. You
can megaphone to it. Only in recent years has human ingenuity thought of
converting the older and tamer form of political strife into the
pandemonic "stunt" of a "whirlwind election." Shall war not have her
whirlwind canvasses no less renowned than those of peace? Some rather
shame-faced passages of love there have been between us and the Rumour
of Shakespeare, the person "painted full of tongues," who "stuffs the
ears of men with false reports," to the advantage of her wooers. Why not
espouse the good lady right out? Make an honest woman of her?
VI
Perhaps you would shrink back. Perhaps at any rate you do so now, when
for the moment this great implement is not being offered to you, to take
or leave, at an instant crisis of your country's fate. You feel that
even in such a case you would stand loftily aloof in your cold purity?
You would disclaim as a low, unknightly business the uttering of such
base coinage as cooked news, whatever your proud chastity may cost
anyone else? Or arrive, perhaps, at the same result by a different
route, and make out to yourself that really it pays, in the end, to be
decent; that clean chivalry is a good investment at bottom, and that a
nation of Galahads and Bayards is sure to come out on top, on the canny
reckoning that the body housing a pure heart has got the strength of
ten? That is one possible course. And the other is to accept, with all
that it implies, the doctrine that there is one morality for peace and
another morality for war; that just as in war you may with the clearest
conscience stab a man in the back, or kick him in the bowels, in spite
of all the sportsmanship you learnt at school, so you may stainlessly
carry deception to lengths which in peace would get you blackballed at a
club and cut by your friends.
It may be too much to hope that, whichever of these two paths we may
choose, we shall tread it with a will. We have failed so much in the way
of what Germany used to call "halfness," the fault of Macbeth, the wish
to hunt with the hounds while we run with the hare, that it would be
strange if we did not still try to play Bayard and Ulysses as one man
and succeed in combining the shortcomings of an inefficient serpent with
those of a sophisticated dove. If we really went the whole serpent the
first day of any new war would see a wide, opaque veil of false news
drawn over the whole face of our country. Authority playing on all the
keys, white and black, of the Press as upon one piano, would give the
listening enemy the queerest of Ariel's tunes to follow. All that we
did, all that we thought, would be bafflingly falsified. The whole
landscape of life in this island, as it reflects itself in the waters of
the Press, would come out suddenly altered as far past recognition as
that physical landscape amid which it is passed has been changed by a
million years of sunshine, rain, and frost. The whole sky would be
darkened with flights of strategic and tactical lies so dense that the
enemy would fight in a veritable "fog of war" darker than London's own
November brews, and the world would feel that not only the Angel of
Death was abroad, but the Angel of Delusion too, and would almost hear
the beating of two pairs of wings.
VII
Well--and then? Any weapon you use in a war leaves some bill to be
settled in peace, and the Propaganda arm has its cost like another. To
say so is not to say, without more ado, that it should not be used. Its
cost should be duly cast up, like our other accounts; that is all. We
all agree--with a certain demur from the Quakers--that one morality has
to be practised in peace and another in war; that the same bodily act
may be wrong in the one and right in the other. So, to be perfect, you
need to have two gears to your morals, and drive on the one gear in war
and on the other in peace. While you are on the peace gear you must not
even shoot a bird sitting. At the last stroke of some August midnight
you clap on the war gear and thenceforth you may shoot a man sitting or
sleeping or any way you can get him, provided you and he be soldiers on
opposite sides.
Now, in a well-made car, in the prime of its life, there is nothing to
keep you from passing straight and conclusively from one gear to
another. The change once made, the new gear continues in force and does
not wobble back fitfully and incalculably into the old. But in matters
of conduct you cannot, somehow, drive long on one gear without letting
the other become noticeably rusty, stiff, and disinclined to act. It was
found in the Great War that after a long period of peace and general
saturation with peace morals it took some time to release the average
English youth from his indurated distaste for stabbing men in the
bowels. Conversely it has been found of late, in Ireland and elsewhere,
that, after some years of effort to get our youths off the no-homicide
gear, they cannot all be got quickly back to it either, some of them
still being prone to kill, as the French say, _paisiblement_, with a
lightness of heart that embarrasses statesmen.
We must, to be on the conservative side, assume that the same phenomenon
would attend a post-war effort to bring back to the truth gear of peace
a Press that we had driven for some years on the war gear of
untruthfulness. Indeed, we are not wholly left to assumption and
speculation. During the war the art of Propaganda was little more than
born. The various inspired articles-with-a-purpose, military or
political, hardly went beyond the _vagitus_, the earliest cry of the
new-born method, as yet
An infant crying in the night,
And with no language but a cry.
Yet for more than three years since the Armistice our rulers have
continued to issue to the Press, at our cost as Blue Books and White
Papers, long passages of argument and suggestion almost fantastically
different from the dry and dignified official publications of the
pre-war days. English people used to feel a sovereign contempt for the
"semi-official" journalism of Germany and Russia. But the war has left
us with a Press at any rate intermittently inspired. What would be left
by a war in which Propaganda had come of age and the State had used the
Press, as camouflaging material, for all it was worth?
It used at one time to be a great joke--and a source of gain
sometimes--among little boys to take it as a benign moral law that so
long as you said a thing "over the left," it did not matter whether it
was true or not. If, to gain your private ends, or to make a fool of
somebody else, you wanted to utter a fib, all that you had to do was to
append to it these three incantatory words, under your breath, or indeed
without any sound or move of your lips at all, but just to yourself in
the session of sweet silent thought. Then you were blameless. You had
cut yourself free, under the rules, from the vulgar morality. War
confers on those who wage it much the same self-dispensing power. They
can absolve themselves of a good many sins. Persuade yourself that you
are at war with somebody else and you find your moral liberty expanding
almost faster than you can use it. An Irishman in a fury with England
says to himself "State of war--that's what it is," and then finds he can
go out and shoot a passing policeman from behind a hedge without the
discomfort of feeling base. The policeman's comrades say to themselves
"State of war--that's what it has come to," and go out and burn some
other Irishman's shop without a sense of doing anything wrong, either.
They all do it "over the left." They have stolen the key of the magical
garden wherein you may do things that are elsewhere most wicked and yet
enjoy the mental peace of the soldier which passeth all understanding.
To kill and to burn may be sore temptations at times, but not so
besetting to most men as the temptation to lie is to public speakers and
writers. Another frequent temptation of theirs is to live in a world of
stale figures of speech, of flags nailed to the mast, of standing to
one's guns, of deaths in last ditches, of quarter neither asked nor
given. It is their hobby to figure their own secure, squabblesome lives
in images taken from war. And their little excesses, their breaches of
manners, and even, sometimes, of actual law, are excused, as a rule, in
terms of virile disdain for anything less drastic and stern than the
morals of the real warfare which they know so little. We have to think
in what state we might leave these weak brethren after a long war in
which we had practised them hard in lying for the public good and also
in telling themselves it was all right because of the existence of a
state of war. State of war! Why, that is what every excitable politician
or journalist declares to exist all the time. To the wild party man the
party which he hates is always "more deadly than any foreign enemy." All
of us could mention a few politicians, at least, to whom the Great War
was merely a passing incident or momentary interruption of the more
burningly authentic wars of Irish Orange and Green, or of English Labour
and Capital.
VIII
Under the new dispensation we should have to appoint on the declaration
of war, if we had not done it already, a large Staff Department of Press
Camouflage. Everything is done best by those who have practised it
longest. The best inventors and disseminators of what was untrue in our
hour of need would be those who had made its manufacture and sale their
trade in our hours of ease. The most disreputable of successful
journalists and "publicity experts" would naturally man the upper grades
of the war staff. The reputable journalists would labour under them,
trying their best to conform, as you say in drill, to the movements of
the front rank. For in this new warfare the journalist untruthful from
previous habit and training would have just that advantage over the
journalist of character which the Regular soldier had over the New Army
officer or man in the old. He would be, as Mr. Kipling sings,
A man that's too good to be lost you,
A man that is 'andled and made,
A man that will pay what 'e cost you
In learnin' the others their trade.
After the war was over he would return to his trade with an immense
accession of credit. He would have been decorated and publicly praised
and thanked. Having a readier pen than the mere combatant soldiers, he
would probably write a book to explain that the country had really been
saved by himself, though the fighting men were, no doubt, gallant
fellows. He would, in all likelihood, have completed the disengagement
of his mind from the idea that public opinion is a thing to be dealt
with by argument and persuasion, appeals to reason and conscience. He
would feel surer than ever that men's and women's minds are most
strongly moved not by the leading articles of a paper but by its news,
by what they may be led to accept as "the facts." So the practice of
colouring news, of ordering reporters to take care that they see only
such facts as tell in one way, would leap forward. For it would have the
potent support of a new moral complacency. When a man feels that his
tampering with truth has saved civilization, why should he deny himself,
in his private business, the benefit of such moral reflections as this
feeling may suggest?
Scott gives, in _Woodstock_, an engaging picture of the man who has
"attained the pitch of believing himself above ordinances." The
independent trooper, Tomkins, finds his own favourite vices fitting
delightfully into an exalted theory of moral freedom. In former days, he
avows, he had been only "the most wild, malignant rakehell in
Oxfordshire." Now he is a saint, and can say to the girl whom he wants
to debauch:
Stand up, foolish maiden, and listen; and know, in one word, that
sin, for which the spirit of man is punished with the vengeance of
heaven, lieth not in the corporal act, but in the thought of the
sinner. Believe, lovely Phoebe, that to the pure all acts are pure,
and that sin is in our thought, not in our actions, even as the
radiance of the day is dark to a blind man but seen and enjoyed by
him whose eyes receive it. To him who is but a novice in the things
of the spirit much is enjoined, much is prohibited; and he is fed
with milk fit for babes--for him are ordinances, prohibitions, and
commands. But the saint is above all these ordinances and
restraints. To him, as to the chosen child of the house, is given
the pass-key to open all locks which withhold him from the enjoyment
of his heart's desire. Into such pleasant paths will I guide thee,
lovely Phoebe, as shall unite in joy, in innocent freedom, pleasures
which, to the unprivileged, are sinful and prohibited.
So when a journalist with no strong original predisposition to swear to
his own hurt shall have gained high public distinction by his fertility
in falsehoods for consumption by an enemy in the field, the fishes that
tipple in the deep may well "know no such liberty" as this expert in
fiction will allow himself when restored to his own more intoxicating
element.
The general addition of prestige to the controversial device of giving
false impressions and raising false issues would naturally be immense.
To argue any case merely on its merits and on the facts would seem to
the admirers of the new way a kind of virtuous imbecility. In what great
industrial dispute or political campaign, in what struggle between great
financial interests, would both sides, or either, forego the use of
munitions so formidable? Such conflicts might almost wholly cease to be
competitions in serious argument at all; they might become merely trials
of skill in fantastic false pretences, and of expertness in the morbid
psychology of credulity.
So men argued, surmised and predicted, talking and talking away in the
endless hours that war gives for talking things out. When first they
began to ask each other why so many lies were about, the common
hypothesis, based on prior experience, was that they must be meant to
save some "dud," up above, from losing his job. Then they came to admit
there was something more in it than that. Lies had a good enough use for
fooling the Germans. A beastly expedient, no doubt; acquiescence in
lying does not come quite so easily to a workman of good character as it
does to men of a class in which more numerous formal fibs are kept in
use as social conveniences. Still, the men were not cranks enough to
object. "They love not poison that do poison need." The men had hated,
and still continued to hate, the use of poison gas, too. It was a
scrub's trick, like vitriol-throwing. But who could have done without
it, when once the Germans began? And now who could object to the use of
this printed gas either? Could they, in this new warfare of propaganda,
expect their country to go into action armed in a white robe of candour,
and nothing besides, like a maskless man going forth to war against a
host assisted by phosgene and all her foul sisters?
It was a clear enough case: decency had to go under. But it was hard
luck not to be able to know where you were. Where were they? If all the
news they could check was mixed with lies, what about all the rest,
which they were unable to check? Was it likely to be any truer? Why, we
might be losing the war all the time, everywhere! Who could believe now
what was said about our catching the submarines? Or about India's being
all right? And how far would you have to go to get outside the lie belt?
Could our case for going to war with the Germans be partly lies too?
Beastly idea!
How would it be, again, when we came to play these major tricks which
the men were already discussing as likely to come into use? Suppose it
became part of our game to publish, for some good strategical reason,
news of a naval or military disaster to ourselves, the same not having
happened? To take in the enemy this lie would have to take in our own
people too; the ruse would be given away if the Government tried to tip
so much as a wink to the British reader of the British Press. So men's
friends at home would have the agonies of false alarms added to their
normal war-time miseries, and wives might be widowed twice and mothers
of one son made childless more than once before the truth finally
overshadowed their lives.
And then, your war won, there would be that new lie-infested and
infected world of peace. In one of his great passages Thucydides tells
us what happened to Greece after some years of war and of the necessary
war morality. He says that, as far as veracity, public and private,
goes, the peace gear was found to have got wholly out of working order
and could not be brought back into use. "The meaning of words had no
longer the same relation to things, but was changed by men as they
thought proper." The pre-war hobby of being straight and not telling
people lies went clean out of fashion. Anyone who could bring off a good
stroke of deceit, to the injury of some one whom he disliked,
"congratulated himself on having taken the safer course, over-reached
his enemy, and gained the prize of superior talent." A man who did not
care to use so sound a means to his ends was thought to be a goody-goody
ass. War worked in that way on the soul of Greece, in days when war was
still confined, in the main, to the relatively cleanly practice of
hitting your enemy over the head, wherever you could find him. The
philosophers in our dugouts preserved moderation when they expected as
ugly a sequel for war in our age, when the chivalrous school seems to
have pretty well worked itself out and the most promising lines of
advance are poison gas and canards. But the survivors among them are not
detached philosophers only. They act in the new world that they foresaw,
and the man whose word you could trust like your own eyes and ears,
eight years ago, has come back with the thought in his mind that so many
comrades of his have expressed: "They tell me we've pulled through at
last all right because our propergander dished out better lies than what
the Germans did. So I say to myself 'If tellin' lies is all that bloody
good in war, what bloody good is tellin' truth in peace?'"
CHAPTER IX
AUTUMN COMES
I
In the autumn of 1917 the war entered into an
autumn, or late middle-age, of its own. "Your young men," we are told,
"shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams." The same with
whole armies. But middle-aged armies or men may not have the mists of
either morning or evening to charm them. So they may feel like Corot,
when he had painted away, in a trance of delight, till the last vapour
of dawn was dried up by the sun; then he said, "You can see everything
now. Nothing is left," and knocked off work for the day. There was no
knocking off for the army. But that feeling had come. A high time was
over, a great light was out; our eyes had lost the use of something,
either an odd penetration that they had had for a while, or else an odd
web that had been woven across them, shutting only ugliness out.
The feeling was apt to come on pretty strong if you lived at the time on
the top of the little hill of Cassel, west of Ypres. The Second Army's
Headquarters were there. You might, as some Staff duty blew you about
the war zone, be watching at daybreak one of that autumn's many dour
bouts of attrition under the Passchendale Ridge, in the mud, and come
back, the same afternoon, to sit in an ancient garden hung on the slope
of the hill, where a great many pears were yellowing on the wall and
sunflowers gazing fixedly into the sun that was now failing them. All
the corn of French Flanders lay cut on the brown plain under your eyes,
from Dunkirk, with its shimmering dunes and the glare on the sea, to the
forested hills north of Arras. Everywhere lustre, reverie, stillness;
the sinking hum of old bees, successful in life and now rather tired;
the many windmills fallen motionless, the aureate light musing over the
aureate harvest; out in the east the broken white stalks of Poperinghe's
towers pensive in haze; and, behind and about you, the tiny hill city,
itself in its distant youth the name-giver and prize of three mighty
battles that do not matter much now. All these images or seats of
outlived ardour, mellowed now with the acquiescence of time in the
slowing down of some passionate stir in the sap of a plant or the spirit
of insects or men, joined to work on you quietly. There, where the earth
and the year were taking so calmly the end of all the grand racket that
they had made in their prime, why not come off the high horse that we,
too, in that ingenuous season, had ridden so hard? It was not now as it
had been of yore. And why pretend that it was?
II
One leaf that had gone pretty yellow by now was the hope of perfect
victory--swift, unsoured, unruinous, knightly: St. George's over the
dragon, David's over Goliath. Some people at home seem to be still
clinging hard to that first pretty vision of us as a gifted, lithe, wise
little Jack fighting down an unwieldy, dastardly giant. But troops in
the field become realists. Ours had seen their side visibly swelling for
more than two years, till Jack had become a heavier weight than the
giant and yet could not finish him off. We knew that our allies and we
outnumbered the Germans and theirs. We knew we were just as well armed.
We had seen Germans advancing under our fire and made no mistake about
what they were worth. Our first vision of victory had gone the way of
its frail sister dream of a perfect Allied comradeship. French soldiers
sneered at British now, and British at French. Both had the same
derisive note in the voice when they named the "Brav' Belges." Canadians
and Australians had almost ceased to take the pains to break it to us
gently that they were the "storm troops," the men who had to be sent for
to do the tough jobs; that, out of all us sorry home troops, only the
Guards Division, two kilted divisions and three English ones could be
said to know how to fight. "The English let us down again"; "The Tommies
gave us a bad flank, as usual"--these were the stirring things you would
hear if you called upon an Australian division a few hours after a
battle in which the lion had fought by the side of his whelps. Chilly,
autumnal things; while you listened, the war was apparelled no longer in
the celestial light of its spring.
An old Regular colonel, a man who had done all his work upon the Staff,
said, at the time, that "the war was settling down to peace conditions."
He meant no bitter epigram. He was indeed unfeignedly glad. The war was
ceasing to be, like a fire or shipwreck, a leveller of ranks which, he
felt, ought not to be levelled. Those whom God had put asunder it was
less recklessly joining together. The first wild generosities were
cooling off. Not many peers and heirs-apparent to great wealth were
becoming hospital orderlies now. Since the first earthquake and tidal
wave the disturbed social waters had pretty well found their old seemly
levels again; under conscription the sons of the poor were now making
privates; the sons of the well-to-do were making officers; sanity was
returning. The Regular had faced and disarmed the invading hordes of
1914. No small feat of audacity, either. Think what the shock must have
been--what it would be for any profession, just at the golden prime of
rich opportunity and searching test, to be overrun of a sudden by hosts
of keen amateurs, many of them quick-witted, possibly critical, some of
them the best brains of the country, most of them vulgarly void of the
old professional habits of mind, almost indecently ready to use new and
outlandish means to the new ends of to-day.
But now the stir and the peril were over. The Old Army had won. It had
scarcely surrendered a single strong point or good billet; Territorials
and New Army toiled at the coolie jobs of its household. It had not even
been forced, like kings in times of revolution, to make apparent
concessions, to water down the pure milk of the word. It had become only
the more intensely itself; never in any war had commands been retained
so triumphantly in the hands of the cavalry and the Guards, the leaders
and symbols of the Old Army resistance to every inroad of mere
professional ardour and knowledge and strong, eager brains. When Sir
Francis Lloyd relinquished the London District Command a highly
composite mess in France discussed possible successors. "Of course,"
said a Guards colonel gravely--and he was a guest in the Mess--"the
first point is--he _must_ be a Guardsman." Peace conditions returning,
you see; the peace frame of mind; the higher commands restored to their
ancient status as property, "livings," perquisites, the bread of the
children, not to be given to dogs. At home, too, peace conditions were
taking heart to return. The scattered coveys of profiteers and
job-hunters, almost alarmed by the first shots of the war, had long
since met in security; "depredations as usual" was the word; and the
mutual scalping and knifing of politicians had ceased to be shamefaced;
who could fairly expect an old Regular Army to practise a more austere
virtue than merchant princes and statesmen?
III
Even in trenches and near them, where most of the health was, time had
begun to embrown the verdant soul of the army. "Kitchener's Army" was
changing. Like every volunteer army, his had sifted itself, at its
birth, with the only sieve that will riddle out, even roughly, the best
men to be near in a fight. Till the first of the pressed men arrived at
our front, a sergeant there, when he posted a sentry and left him alone
in the dark, could feel about as complete a moral certitude as there is
on the earth that the post would not be let down. For, whatever might
happen, nothing inside the man could start whispering to him "You never
asked to be here! if you do fail, it isn't your doing."
Nine out of ten of the conscripts were equally sound. For they would
have been volunteers if they could. The tenth was the problem; the more
so because there was nothing to tell you which was the tenth and which
were the nine. For all that you knew, any man who came out on a draft,
from then on, might be the exception, the literal-minded Christian who
thought it wicked to kill in a war; or an anti-nationalist zealot who
thought us all equally fools, the Germans and us, to be out there
pasturing lice, instead of busy at home taking the hide off the
_bourgeois_; or one of those drift wisps of loveless critical mind,
attached to no place or people more than another, and just as likely as
not to think that the war was our fault and that we ought to be beaten.
_Riant avenir!_ as a French sergeant said when, in an hour of ease, we
were talking over the nature of man, and he told me, in illustration of
its diversity, how a section of his had just been enriched with a draft
of neurasthenic burglars.
These vulgar considerations of military expediency never seemed to cross
the outer rim of the consciousness of many worthies who were engaged at
home in shooing the reluctant into the army. If a recalcitrant seemed to
be lazy, spiritless, nerveless, if there was every sign of his making a
specially worthless and troublesome consumer of rations in a trench,
then a burning zeal to inflict this nuisance and danger on some
unoffending platoon in France seemed to invade the ordinary military
tribunal. Report said that the satisfaction of this impulse was called,
by the possessed persons, "giving Haig the men," and sometimes, with a
more pungent irony, "supporting our fellows in the trenches." _Non tali
auxilio nec defensoribus istis._ Australia's fellows in the trenches
were suffered to vote themselves out of the risk of getting any support
of the kind. Australia is a democracy. Ours were not asked whether they
wanted to see their trenches employed as a penal settlement to which
middle-aged moralists in England might deport, among other persons,
those whom they felt to be morally the least beautiful of their juniors.
So nothing impeded the pious practice of "larning toads to be toads."
For the shirker, the "kicker," the "lawyer," for all the types of
undesirables that contribute most liberally to the wrinkled appearance
of sergeants, those pious men had the nose of collectors. Wherever there
was a spare fifty yards of British front to be held, they, if anyone,
could find a man likely to go to sleep there on guard, or, in some
cyclonic disturbance of spirit, to throw down his rifle and light out
for the coast, across country.
Such episodes were reasonably few. The inveterate mercy that guards
drunken sailors preserved from the worst disaster the cranks who had
made a virtue of giving their country every bad soldier they could. And
the abounding mercy of most courts-martial rendered few of the episodes
fatal to individual conscripts. Nor, indeed, was the growth in their
frequency after conscription wholly due to the more fantastic tricks
played before high Heaven by some of the Falstaffs who dealt with the
Mouldies, Shadows and Bull-calves. Conscription, in any case, must be
dilution. You may get your water more quickly by throwing the filter
away, but don't hope to keep the quality what it was. And the finer a
New Army unit had been, to begin with, the swifter the autumnal change.
Every first-rate battalion fighting in France or Belgium lost its whole
original numbers over and over again. First, because in action it spared
itself less than the poor ones; secondly, because the best divisions
rightly got the hard jobs. Going out in the late autumn of 1915, a good
battalion with normal luck might have nearly half its original volunteer
strength left after the Battle of the Somme. Drafts of conscripts would
fill up the gap, each draft with a listless or enigmatic one-tenth that
volunteering had formerly kept at a distance. The Battle of Arras next
spring might leave only twenty per cent of the first volunteers, and the
autumn battles in Flanders would pretty well finish their business.
Seasons returned, but not to that battalion returned the spirit of
delight in which it had first learnt to soldier together and set foot
together in France and first marched through darkness and ruined
villages towards the flaring fair-ground of the front. While a New Army
battalion was still very young, and fully convinced that no crowd of men
so good to be with had ever been brought together before, it used to be
always saying how it would keep things up after the war. No such genial
reunions had ever been held as these were to be. But now the few odd men
that are left only write to each other at long intervals, feeling almost
as if they were raising their voices in an empty church. One of them
asks another has he any idea what the battalion was like after Oppy, or
Bourlon Wood, or wherever their own knock-out came. Like any other
battalion, no doubt--a mere G.C.M. of all conscript battalions;
conscription filed down all special features and characters.
Quick waste and renewal are said to be good for the body; the faster you
burn up old tissues, by good sweaty work, the better your health; fresh
and superior tissue is added unto you all the more merrily. Capital,
too, the economists say, must be swiftly used up and reborn, over and
over again, to do the most good that it can. And then there is the case
of the phoenix--in fact, of all the birds and all the beasts too, for
all evolution would seem to be just the dying of something worse, as
fast as it can, in order that something better may live in its place. No
need for delay in turning your anthropoid apes into Shakespeares and
Newtons.
But what if you found, after all your hard work, that not all the
deceased cells of your flesh were replaced by new cells of the sort you
would like? If some of your good golden pounds should have perished only
that inconvertible paper might live? If out of your phoenix's ashes only
a common-place rooster should spring? If evolution were guyed and
bedevilled into retrovolution, a process by which the fittest must more
and more dwindle away and the less fit survive them, and species be not
multiplied but made fewer? Something, perhaps, of the sort may go on in
the body in its old age, or in roses in autumn. It must go on in a
volunteer army when it is becoming an army of conscripts during a war
that is highly lethal.
IV
The fall of the leaf had brought, too, a sad shortage of heroes--of
highly-placed ones, for, of course, every company had its own,
authenticated beyond any proof that crosses or medals could give. A few
very old Regular privates would say, "Ah! if we had Buller here!" Sir
Redvers Buller has always remained, in lofty disregard of conclusive
disproof, the Cæsar or Hannibal of the old Regular private, who sets
little store by such heroes of Whitehall and Fleet Street as Roberts and
Kitchener. But the chiefs of to-day left men cold, at the best. The name
of at least one was a by-word. Haig was a name and no more, though a
name immune in a mysterious degree from the general scoffing surmise
about the demerits of higher commands. Few subalterns or men had seen
him. No one knew what he was doing or leaving undone. But some power,
not ourselves, making for charity, seemed to recommend him to mercy in
everyone's judgement; as if, from wherever he was, nameless waves of
some sort rippled out through an uncharted ether, conveying some virtue
exhaled by that winning incarnation of honour, courage, and kindness
who, seen and heard in the flesh, made you wish to find in him all other
excellent qualities too. The front line gave him all the benefit of
every doubt. God only knew, it said, whether he or somebody else would
have to answer for Bullecourt and Serre. It might not be he who had left
the door lying open, unentered, for two nights and days, when the lions
had won the battle of Arras that spring, and the asses had let the
victory slip till the Germans crept back in the dark to the fields east
of Vimy from which they had fled in despair. But slowness to judge can
hardly be called hero-worship: at most, a somewhat sere October phase of
that vernal religion.
One of the heavenly things on which the New Army had almost counted, in
its green faith, was that our higher commands would have genius. Of
course, we had no right to do it. No X has any right to ask of Y that Y
shall be Alexander the Great or Bach or Rembrandt or Garrick, or any
kind of demonic first-rater. As reasonably send precepts to the
Leviathan to come ashore. Yet we had indulged that insane expectation,
just as we had taken it for granted that this time the nation would be
as one man, and nobody "out to do a bit for himself on the quiet." And
now behold the falling leaf and no Leviathan coming ashore in response
to our May-Day desires.
Certainly other things, highly respectable, came. The Second Army
Staff's direction of that autumn's almost continuous battles was of a
competence passing all British precedents. Leap-frogging waves of
assault, box barrages, creeping barrages, actions, interactions, and
counter-actions were timed and concerted as no Staff of ours had done it
before. The intricate dance which has to go on behind a crowded battle
front, so that columns moving east and west and columns moving north and
south shall not coincide at cross roads, was danced with the
circumstantial precision of the best ballets. An officer cast away
somewhere in charge of a wayside smithy for patching up chipped guns
felt that there was a power perched on the top of the hill at Cassel
which smelt out a bit of good work, or of bad, wherever anyone did it.
Sense, keenness, sympathy, resolution, exactness--all the good things
abode in that eyrie which have to be in attendance before genius can
bring off its marvels; every chamber swept and garnished, and yet--.
Foch tells us what he thinks Napoleon might have said to the Allied
commands if he could have risen in our black times from the dead. "What
cards you people have!" he would have said, "and how little you do with
them! Look!" And then, Foch thinks, within a month or two he "would have
rearranged everything, gone about it all in some new way, thrown out the
enemy's plans and quite crushed him." That "some new way" was not fated
to come. The spark refused to fall, the divine accident would not
happen. How could it? you ask with some reason. Had not trench warfare
reached an impasse? Yes; there is always an impasse before genius shows
a way through. Music on keyboards had reached an impasse before a person
of genius thought of using his thumb as well as his fingers. Well, that
was an obvious dodge, you may say, but in Flanders what way through
could there have been? The dodge found by genius is always an obvious
dodge, afterwards. Till it is found it can as little be stated by us
common people as can the words of the poems that Keats might have
written if he had lived longer. You would have to become a Keats to do
that, and a Napoleon to say how Napoleon would have got through to
Bruges in the autumn that seemed so autumnal to us. All that the army
knew, as it decreased in the mud, was that no such uncovenanted mercy
came to transmute its casualties into the swiftly and richly fruitful
ones of a Napoleon, the incidental expenses of some miraculous draught
of victory.
Nothing to grouse at in that. The winds of inspiration have to blow the
best way they can. Prospero himself could not raise them; how could the
likes of us hope to? And yet there had been that illogical hope, almost
reliance--part of the high unreason of faith that could move mountains
in 1914 and seems to be scarcely able to shift an ant-hill to-day.
CHAPTER X
AUTUMN TINTS IN CHIVALRY
I
In either of two opposite tempers you may carry on war. In one of the
two you will want to rate your enemy, all round, as high as you can. You
may pursue him down a trench, or he you; but in neither case do you care
to have him described by somebody far, far away as a fat little
short-sighted scrub. Better let him pass for a paladin. This may at
bottom be vanity, sentimentality, all sorts of contemptible things. Let
him who knows the heart of man be dogmatic about it. Anyhow, this temper
comes, as they would say in Ireland, of decent people. It spoke in
Porsena of Clusium's whimsical prayer that Horatius might swim the Tiber
safely; it animates Velasquez' knightly _Surrender of Breda_; it
prompted Lord Roberts's first words to Cronje when Paardeberg
fell--"Sir, you have made a very gallant defence"; it is avowed in a
popular descant of Newboldt's--
To honour, while you strike him down,
The foe who comes with eager eyes.
The other temper has its niche in letters, too. There was the man that
"wore his dagger in his mouth." And there was Little Flanigan, the
bailiff's man in Goldsmith's play. During one of our old wars with
France he was always "damning the French, the parle-vous, and all that
belonged to them." "What," he would ask the company, "makes the bread
rising? The parle-vous that devour us. What makes the mutton fivepence a
pound? The parle-vous that eat it up. What makes the beer
threepence-halfpenny a pot?"
Well, your first aim in war is to hit your enemy hard, and the question
may well be quite open--in which of these tempers can he be hit hardest?
If, as we hear, a man's strength be "as the strength of ten because his
heart is pure," possibly it may add a few footpounds to his momentum in
an attack if he has kept a clean tongue in his head. And yet the
production of heavy woollens in the West Riding, for War Office use,
may, for all that we know, have been accelerated by yarns about
crucified Canadians and naked bodies of women found in German trenches.
There is always so much, so bewilderingly much, to be said on both
sides. All I can tell is that during the war the Newbolt spirit seemed,
on the whole, to have its chief seat in and near our front line, and
thence to die down westward all the way to London. There Little Flanigan
was enthroned, and, like Montrose, would bear no rival near his throne,
so that a man on leave from our trench system stood in some danger of
being regarded as little better than one of the wicked. Anyhow, he was a
kind of provincial. Not his will, but that of Flanigan, had to be done.
For Flanigan was at the centre of things; he had leisure, or else
volubility was his trade; and he had got hold of the megaphones.
II
In the first months of the war there was any amount of good
sportsmanship going; most, of course, among men who had seen already the
whites of enemy eyes. I remember the potent emetic effect of Flaniganism
upon a little blond Regular subaltern maimed at the first battle of
Ypres. "Pretty measly sample of the sin against the Holy Ghost!" the
one-legged child grunted savagely, showing a London paper's comic sketch
of a corpulent German running away. The first words I ever heard uttered
in palliation of German misdoings in Belgium came from a Regular N.C.O.,
a Dragoon Guards sergeant, holding forth to a sergeants' mess behind our
line. "We'd have done every damn thing they did," he averred, "if it had
been we." I thought him rather extravagant, then. Later on, when the
long row of hut hospitals, jammed between the Calais-Paris Railway at
Etaples and the great reinforcement camp on the sand-hills above it, was
badly bombed from the air, even the wrath of the R.A.M.C. against those
who had wedged in its wounded and nurses between two staple targets
scarcely exceeded that of our Royal Air Force against war correspondents
who said the enemy must have done it on purpose.
Airmen, no doubt, or some of them, went to much greater lengths in the
chivalrous line than the rest of us. Many things helped them to do it.
Combatant flying was still new enough to be almost wholly an officer's
job; the knight took the knocks, and the squire stayed behind and looked
after his gear. Air-fighting came to be pretty well the old duel, or
else the mediæval mêlée between little picked teams. The clean element,
too, may have counted--it always looked a clean job from below, where
your airy notions got mixed with trench mud, while the airman seemed
like Sylvia in the song, who so excelled "each mortal thing upon the
dull earth dwelling." Whatever the cause, he excelled in his bearing
towards enemies, dead or alive. The funeral that he gave to Richthofen
in France was one of the few handsome gestures exchanged in the war. And
whenever Little Flanigan at home began squealing aloud that we ought to
take some of our airmen off fighting and make them bomb German women and
children instead, our airmen's scorn for these ethics of the dirt helped
to keep up the flickering hope that the post-war world might not be
ignoble.
Even on the dull earth it takes time and pains to get a clean-run boy or
young man into a mean frame of mind. A fine N.C.O. of the Grenadier
Guards was killed near Laventie--no one knows how--while going over to
shake hands with the Germans on Christmas morning. "What! not shake on
Christmas Day?" He would have thought it poor, sulky fighting. Near
Armentières at the Christmas of 1914 an incident happened which seemed
quite the natural thing to most soldiers then. On Christmas Eve the
Germans lit up their front line with Chinese lanterns. Two British
officers thereupon walked some way across No Man's Land, hailed the
enemy's sentries, and asked for an officer. The German sentries said,
"Go back, or we shall have to shoot." The Englishmen said "Not likely!"
advanced to the German wire, and asked again for an officer. The
sentries held their fire and sent for an officer. With him the
Englishmen made a one-day truce, and on Christmas Day the two sides
exchanged cigarettes and played football together. The English intended
the truce to end with the day, as agreed, but decided not to shoot next
day till the enemy did. Next morning the Germans were still to be seen
washing and breakfasting outside their wire; so our men, too, got out of
the trench and sat about in the open. One of them, cleaning his rifle,
loosed a shot by accident, and an English subaltern went to tell the
Germans it had not been fired to kill. The ones he spoke to understood,
but as he was walking back a German somewhere wide on a flank fired and
hit him in the knee, and he has walked lame ever since. Our men took it
that some German sentry had misunderstood our fluke shot. They did not
impute dishonour. The air in such places was strangely clean in those
distant days. During one of the very few months of open warfare a
cavalry private of ours brought in a captive, a gorgeous specimen of the
terrific Prussian Uhlan of tradition. "But why didn't you put your sword
through him?" an officer asked, who belonged to the school of Froissart
less obviously than the private. "Well, sir," the captor replied, "the
gentleman wasn't looking."
III
At no seat of war will you find it quite easy to live up to Flanigan's
standards of hatred towards an enemy. Reaching a front, you find that
all you want is just to win the war. Soon you are so taken up with the
pursuit of this aim that you are always forgetting to burn with the
gem-like flame of pure fury that fires the lion-hearted publicist at
home.
A soldier might have had the Athanasian ecstasy all right till he
reached the firing line. Every individual German had sunk the
_Lusitania_; there was none righteous, none. And yet at a front the holy
passion began to ooze out at the ends of his fingers. The bottom trouble
is that you cannot fight a man in the physical way without somehow
touching him. The relation of actual combatants is a personal one--no
doubt, a rude, primitive one, but still quite advanced as compared with
that between a learned man at Berlin who keeps on saying _Delenda est
Britannia!_ at the top of his voice and a learned man in London who
keeps on saying that every German must have a black heart because Cæsar
did not conquer Germany as he did Gaul and Britain. Just let the round
head of a German appear for a passing second, at long intervals, above a
hummock of clay in the middle distance. Before you had made half a dozen
sincere efforts to shoot him the fatal germ of human relationship had
begun to find a nidus again: he had acquired in your mind the rudiments
of a personal individuality. You would go on trying to shoot him with
zest--indeed, with a diminished likelihood of missing, for mere hatred
is a flustering emotion. And yet the hatred business had started
crumbling. There had begun the insidious change that was to send you
home, on your first leave, talking unguardedly of "old Fritz" or of "the
good old Boche" to the pain of your friends, as if he were a stout dog
fox or a real stag of a hare.
The deadliest solvent of your exalted hatreds is laughter. And you can
never wholly suppress laughter between two crowds of millions of men
standing within earshot of each other along a line of hundreds of miles.
There was, in the Loos salient in 1916, a German who, after his meals,
would halloo across to an English unit taunts about certain accidents of
its birth. None of his British hearers could help laughing at his
mistakes, his knowledge, and his English. Nor could the least humorous
priest of ill-will have kept his countenance at a relief when the enemy
shouted: "We know you are relieving," "No good hiding it," "Good-bye, Ox
and Bucks," "Who's coming in?" and some humorist in the obscure English
battalion relieving shouted back, with a terrific assumption of accent,
"Furrst Black Watch!" or "Th' Oirish Gyards!" and a hush fell at the
sound of these great names. Comedy, expelled with a fork by the
dignified figure of Quenchless Hate, had begun to steal back of herself.
At home that tragedy queen might do very well; she did not have these
tenpenny nails scattered about on her road to puncture the nobly
inflated tyres of her chariot. The heroes who spoke up for shooing all
the old German governesses into the barbed wire compounds were not
exposed to the moral danger of actually hustling, _propria persona_,
these formidable ancients. But while Hamilcar at home was swearing
Hannibal and all the other little Hamilcars to undying hatred of the
foe, an enemy dog might be trotting across to the British front line to
sample its rats, and its owner be losing in some British company's eyes
his proper quality as an incarnation of all the Satanism of Potsdam and
becoming simply "him that lost the dog."
If you took his trench it might be no better; perhaps Incarnate Evil had
left its bit of food half-cooked, and the muddy straw, where it lay
last, was pressed into a hollow by Incarnate Evil's back as by a cat's.
Incarnate Evil should not do these things that other people in trenches
do. It ought to be more strange and beastly and keep on making _beaux
gestes_ with its talons and tail, like the proper dragon slain by St.
George. Perhaps Incarnate Evil was extinct and you went over its
pockets. They never contained the right things--no poison to put in our
wells, no practical hints for crucifying Canadians; only the usual
stuffing of all soldiers' pockets--photographs and tobacco and bits of
string and the wife's letters, all about how tramps were always stealing
potatoes out of the garden, and how the baby was worse, and was his
leave never coming! No good to look at such things.
IV
With this guilty weakness gaining upon them our troops drove the Germans
from Albert to Mons. There were scandalous scenes on the way. Imagine
two hundred German prisoners grinning inside a wire cage while a little
Cockney corporal chaffs them in half the dialects of Germany! His
father, he says, was a slop tailor in Whitechapel; most of his
journeymen came from somewhere or other in Germany--"Ah! and my dad
sweated 'em proper," he says proudly; so the boy learnt all their kinds
of talk. He convulses Bavarians now with his flow of Silesian. He
fraternizes grossly and jubilantly. Other British soldiers laugh when
one of the Germans sings, in return for favours received, the British
ballad "Knocked 'em in the Ol' Kent Road." By the time our men had
marched to the Rhine there was little hatred left in them. How can you
hate the small boy who stands at the farm door visibly torn between
dread of the invader and deep delight in all soldiers, as soldiers? How
shall a man not offer a drink to the first disbanded German soldier who
sits next to him in a public house at Cologne, and try to find out if he
was ever in the line at the Brick-stacks or near the Big Crater? Why,
that might have been his dog!
The billeted soldier's immemorial claim on "a place by the fire" carried
on the fell work. It is hopelessly bad for your grand Byronic hates if
you sit through whole winter evenings in the abhorred foe's kitchen and
the abhorred foe grants you the uncovenanted mercy of hot coffee and
discusses without rancour the relative daily yields of the British and
the German milch cow. And then comes into play the British soldier's
incorrigible propensity, wherever he be, to form virtuous attachments.
"Love, unfoiled in the war," as Sophocles says. The broad road has a
terribly easy gradient. When all the great and wise at Paris were making
peace, as somebody said, with a vengeance, our command on the Rhine had
to send a wire to say that unless something was done to feed the Germans
starving in the slums it could not answer for discipline in its army;
the men were giving their rations away, and no orders would stop them.
Rank "Pro-Germanism," you see--the heresy of Edith Cavell; "Patriotism
is not enough; I must have no hatred or bitterness in my heart." While
these men fought on, year after year, they had mostly been growing more
void of mere spite all the time, feeling always more and more sure that
the average German was just a decent poor devil like everyone else. One
trembles to think what the really first-class haters at home would have
said of our army if they had known at the time.
V
Even at places less distant than home the survival of old English
standards of fighting had given some scandal. In that autumn of the war
when our generalship seemed to have explored all its own talents and
found only the means to stage in an orderly way the greatest possible
number of combats of pure attrition, the crying up of unknightliness
became a kind of fashion among a good many Staff Officers of the higher
grades. "I fancy our fellows were not taking many prisoners this
morning," a Corps Commander would say with a complacent grin, on the
evening after a battle. Jocose stories of comic things said by privates
when getting rid of undesired captives became current in messes far in
the rear. The other day I saw in a history of one of the most gallant of
all British divisions an illustration given by the officer who wrote it
of what he believed to be the true martial spirit. It was the case of a
wounded Highlander who had received with a bomb a German Red Cross
orderly who was coming to help him. A General of some consequence during
part of the war gave a lecture, towards its end, to a body of officers
and others on what he called "the fighting spirit." He told with
enthusiasm an anecdote of a captured trench in which some of our men had
been killing off German appellants for quarter. Another German appearing
and putting his hands up, one of our men--so the story went--called out,
"'Ere! Where's 'Arry? 'E ain't 'ad one yet." Probably some one had
pulled the good general's leg, and the thing never happened. But he
believed it, and deeply approved the "blooding" of 'Arry. That, he
explained, was the "fighting spirit." Men more versed than he in the
actual hand-to-hand business of fighting this war knew that he was
mistaken, and that the spirit of trial by combat and that of
pork-butchery are distinct. But that is of course. The notable thing was
that such things should be said by anyone wearing our uniform. Twenty
years before, if it had been rumoured, you would, without waiting, have
called the rumour a lie invented by some detractor of England or of her
army. Now it passed quite unhissed. It was the latter-day wisdom.
Scrofulous minds at home had long been itching, publicly and in print,
to bomb German women and children from aeroplanes, and to "take it out
of" German prisoners of war. Now the disease had even affected some
parts of the non-combatant Staff of our army.
VI
You know the most often quoted of all passages of Burke. Indeed, it is
only through quotations of it that most of us know Burke at all--
But the age of chivalry is gone ... the unbought grace of life, the
cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic
enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that
chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired
courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it
touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing
all its grossness.
Burke would never say a thing by halves. And as truth goes by halves,
and declines to be sweeping like rhetoric, Burke made sure of being
wrong to the tune of some fifty per cent. The French Revolution did not,
as his beautiful language implies, confine mankind for the rest of its
days to the procreation of curs. And yet his words do give you, in their
own lush, Corinthian way, a notion of something that probably did
happen, a certain limited shifting of the centre of gravity of West
European morals or manners.
One would be talking like Burke--talking, perhaps you might say, through
Burke's hat--if one were to say that the war found chivalry alive and
left it dead. Chivalry is about as likely to perish as brown eyes or the
moon. Yet something did happen, during the war, to which these wild
words would have some sort of relation. We were not all Bayards in 1914;
even then a great part of our Press could not tell indignation from
spite, nor uphold the best cause in the world without turpitude. Nor
were we all, after the Armistice, rods of the houses of Thersites and
Cleon; Haig was still alive, and so were Gough and Hamilton and
thousands of Arthurian subalterns and privates and of like-minded
civilians, though it is harder for a civilian not to lose generosity
during a war. But something had happened; the chivalrous temper had had
a set-back; it was no longer the mode; the latest wear was a fine robust
shabbiness. All through the war there had been a bear movement in
Newbolts and Burkes, and, corresponding to this, a bull movement in
stocks of the Little Flanigan group.
CHAPTER XI
STARS IN THEIR COURSES
I
"Doth any man doubt," the wise Bacon asks, "that if there were taken out
of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations,
imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of
a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and
indisposition and unpleasing to themselves?" One of the most sweetly
flattering hopes that we had in the August of 1914 was that in view of
the greatness of the occasion causes were not going to have their
effects.
Nothing new, you may truthfully answer, in that. The improvement is one
which man, in his cups and his dreams and other seasons of maudlin
vision, has always perceived to have just come at last. Now, he
exaltedly says to himself, for a clean break with my inadequately wise
and brilliant past. Away with that plaguey old list of my things done
which should not have been done, and of things left undone which I ought
to have done. At the end of popular plays the sympathetic youth who had
idled, philandered, or stolen till then would book to the Rand or the
Yukon, fully assured that "in that free, outdoor life" one's character
is not one's fate any longer; blessed, "out there," are Europe's
slackers and wasters, for they shall inherit the earth, or its
auriferous parts. Grasshoppers, too, if they drank or resorted to
sentimental novels and plays, might have gallant little revolts in their
hearts, and chirrup "Down with causation!" and feel cock-sure that some
good-natured god would give them a chance of "redeeming their pasts"
quite late in autumn, and put in their way a winter provision far ampler
than that which crowns the coolie labours of those sorry daughters of
Martha, the bees. But, for working this benign miracle in the soul, no
other strong waters can equal the early days of a war. If, with
unbecoming sobriety, anyone hints, in such days, that causes may still
retain some sort of control, he is easily seen to have no drop of true
blood in him; base is the slave who fears we must reap as we sowed;
shame upon spiritless whispers about any connection between the making
of beds and the lying thereon; now they shall see what excellent
hothouse grapes will be borne by the fine healthy thistles that we have
been planting and watering.
Something in it too, perhaps--at least some centuries ago. When a great
nation's army was only a few thousands strong the freak and the fluke
had their chance. An Achilles or two, at the top of their form on the
day, might upset the odds. But when armies are millions of men, and
machinery counts for more than the men, the few divine accidents of
exceptional valour cannot go far. With eleven a-side a Grace or an
Armstrong may win a game off his own bat. He will hardly do that in a
game where the sides are eleven thousand apiece. More and more, as the
armies increase, must the law of averages have it its own dreary way;
glorious uncertainties wither; statistical "curves" of relative national
fitness to win, and to stand the strain of winning or losing, overbear
everything else. What are the two armies' and the two nations' relative
numbers? What is the mean physique on each side? And the mean
intelligence? How far has each nation's history--social, political,
religious, industrial--tended to make its men rich in just pride,
self-reliance, high spirit, devotion, and hardihood? How many per cent
on each side have been sapped by venereal disease? How much of their
work have its officers troubled to learn? These are the questions. The
more men you have in a war, and the longer it lasts, the more completely
has it to lose the romance of a glorious gamble and sink--or, as some
would say, rise--to the plane of a circumstantial, matter-of-fact
liquidation of whatever relative messes the nations engaged have made of
the whole of their previous lives.
II
Any soldier will tell you the bayonet does not win battles. It only
claims, in a way that a beaten side cannot ignore, a victory won already
by gunfire, rifles, gas, bombs, or some combination of these. The
bayonet's thrust is more of a gesture: a cogent appeal, like the urgent
"How's that?" from the whole of the field when a batsman is almost
certainly out. But you may go much further back. That predominant fire
itself is just such another appeal. Its greater volume and better
direction are only the terms of an army's or a nation's claim to be
registered as the winner of what it had really won long ago when,
compared with the other nation, it minded its job and lived cleanly and
sanely. All war on the new huge scale may be seen as a process, very
expensive, of registration or verification. Whenever a war is declared
you may say that now, in a sense, it is over at last; all the votes have
been cast; the examination papers are written; the time has come for the
counting of votes and adjudging of marks. Of course, we may still "do
our bit," but the possible size of our bit had its limit fixed long ago
by the acts of ourselves and our fathers and rulers which made us the
men that we are and no more. No use now to try to cadge favour with any
_ad hoc_ God of Battles. For this, of all gods, is the most dourly
Protestant. No squaring of him on the deathbeds of people who would not
work while it was yet light.
From many points in the field--some of the best were in the tops of high
trees on high ground--you could watch through your glass the casting up
of accounts. You might survey from beginning to end a British attack up
a bare opposite slope, perhaps with home troops on the left and Canadian
or Australasian troops on the right. You had already seen them meet on
roads in the rear: battalions of colourless, stunted, half-toothless
lads from hot, humid Lancashire mills; battalions of slow, staring
faces, gargoyles out of the tragical-comical-historical-pastoral edifice
of modern English rural life; Dominion battalions of men startlingly
taller, stronger, handsomer, prouder, firmer in nerve, better schooled,
more boldly interested in life, quicker to take means to an end and to
parry and counter any new blow of circumstance, men who had learned
already to look at our men with the half-curious, half-pitying look of a
higher, happier caste at a lower. And now you saw them, all these kinds,
arise in one continuous line out of the earth and walk forward to bear
in the riddled flesh and wrung spirit the sins of their several fathers,
pastors, and masters.
Time after time there would come to the watching eye, to the mind still
desperately hugging the hope that known causes might not bring their
normal effects, the same crushing demonstration that things are as we
have made them. Sometimes the line of home troops would break into gaps
and bunches, lose touch and direction and common purpose, some of the
knots plunging on into the back of our barrage or feasting some enemy
machine-gunner on their density, others straggling back to the place
whence they had started, while the Dominion troops still ambled steadily
on, their line delicately waving but always continuous, closing again,
as living flesh closes over a pinprick, wherever an enemy shell tore a
hole.
Perhaps the undersized boys from our slums and the under-witted boys
from the "agricultural, residential, and sporting estates" of our
auctioneers' advertisements would get to their goal, the spirit
wrestling prodigies of valour out of the wronged flesh, hold on there
for an hour or two with the shells splashing the earth up about them
like puddle water when great rain-drops make its surface jump, and then
fall back under orders, without any need, the brain of our army failing
to know how to use what its muscle had won. Then, while you saw the
triumphant Australians throw back a protective flank from the left of
their newly-won front to the English right, far in their rear, you knew
bitterly what the Australians were saying once more: "They've let us
down again!" "Another Tommy officer who didn't know he'd won!" As if it
were the fault, that day, of anyone there! Our men could only draw on
such funds of nerve and physique, knowledge and skill, as we had put
into the bank for them. Not they, but their rulers and "betters," had
lost their heads in the joy of making money fast out of steam, and so
made half of our nation slum-dwellers. It was not they who had moulded
English rustic life to keep up the complacency of sentimental modern
imitators of feudal barons. It was not they who had made our Regular
Army neither aristocratic, with the virtues of aristocracy, nor
democratic, with the different virtues of democracy, nor keenly
professional with the professional virtues of gusto and curiosity about
the possibilities of its work. _Delicta majorum immeritus lues._ Like
the syphilitic children of some jolly Victorian rake, they could only
bring to this harsh examination such health and sanity as all the
pleasant vices of Victorian and Edwardian England had left them.
III
The winter after the battle of Loos a sentry on guard at one part of our
line could always see the frustrate skeletons of many English dead. They
lay outside our wire, picked clean by the rats, so that the khaki fell
in on them loosely--little heaps of bone and cloth half hidden now by
nettles and grass. If the sentry had been a year in the army he knew
well enough that they had gone foredoomed into a battle lost before a
shot was fired. After the Boer War, you remember, England, under the
first shock of its blunders, had tried to find out why the Staff work
was so bad. What it found, in the words of a famous Report, was that the
fashion in sentiment in our Regular Army was to think hard work "bad
form"; a subaltern was felt to be a bit of a scrub if he worried too
much about discovering how to support an attack when he might be more
spiritedly employed in playing polo; "The nobleness of life," as Antony
said, when he kissed Cleopatra, was to go racing or hunting, not to sit
learning how to forecast the course of great battles and how to provide
for answering their calls. And so the swathes of little brown bundles,
with bones showing through, lay in the nettles and grass.
Consider the course of the life of the British Regular officer as you
had known him in youth--not the pick, the saving few, the unconquerably
sound and keen, but the average, staple article made by a sleek,
complacent, snobbish, safe, wealth-governed England after her own image.
Think of his school; of the mystic aureole of quasi-moral beauty
attached by authority there to absorption in the easy thing--in play;
the almost passionate adoration of all those energies and dexterities
which, in this world of evolution towards the primacy of the acute, full
brain, are of the least possible use as aids to survival in men and to
victory in armies. Before he first left home for school he may have been
a normal child who only craved to be given some bit, any odd bit, of
"real work," as an experience more thrilling than games. Like most
children, he may have had a zestful command of fresh, vivid, personal
speech, his choice of words expressing simply and gaily the individual
working of his mind and his joy in its work. Through easy contact with
gardeners, gamekeepers, and village boys he often had established a
quite natural, unconscious friendliness with people of different social
grades. He was probably born of the kind that pries young, that ask,
when they play on sea sands, why there are tides, and what goes on in
the sky that there should be rain. And then down came the shades of the
prison-house. To make this large, gay book of fairy tales, the earth,
dull and stale to a child importunately fingering at its covers might
seem a task to daunt the strongest. But many of the teachers of our
youth are indomitable men. They can make earth's most ardent small lover
learn from a book what a bore his dear earth can be, with her strings of
names of towns, rivers, and lakes, her mileages _à faire mourir_, and
her insufferable tale of flax and jute. With an equal firmness your
early power of supple and bright-coloured speech may be taken away and a
rag-bag of feeble stock phrases, misfits for all your thoughts, and worn
dull and dirty by everyone else, be forced upon you instead of the
treasure you had. You may leave school unable to tell what stars are
about you at night or to ask your way to a journey's end in any country
but your own. Between your helpless mind and most of your
fellow-countrymen thick screens of division are drawn, so that when you
are fifteen you do not know how to speak to them with a natural
courtesy; you have a vague idea that they will steal your watch if you
leave it about. Above all, you have learnt that it is still "bad form"
to work; that the youth with brains and no money may well be despised by
the youth with money and no brains; that the absorbed student or artist
is ignoble or grotesque; that to be able to afford yourself "a good
time" is a natural title to respect and regard; and that to give
yourself any "good time" that you can is an action of spirit. So it went
on at prep. school, public school, Sandhurst, Camberley. That was how
Staff College French came to be what it was. And as it was what it was,
you can guess what Staff College tactics and strategy were, and why all
the little brown bundles lay where they did in the nettles and grass.
IV
You are more aware of the stars in war than in peace. A full moon may
quite halve the cares of a sentry; the Pole Star will sometimes be all
that a company has, when relieved, to guide it back across country to
Paradisiac rest; sleeping often under the sky, you come to find out for
yourself what nobody taught you at school--how Orion is sure to be not
there in summer, and Aquila always missing in March, and how the Great
Bear, that was straight overhead in the April nights, is wont to hang
low in the north in the autumn. Childish as it may seem to the wise, a
few years' nightly view of these and other invariable arrangements may
give a simple soul a surprisingly lively twinge of what the ages of
faith seem to have meant by the fear of God--the awesome suspicion that
there is some sort of fundamental world order or control which cannot by
any means be put off or dodged or bribed to help you to break its own
laws. "Anything," the old Regular warrant-officers say, "can be wangled
in the army," but who shall push the Dragon or the Great Dog off his
beat? And--who knows?--that may be only a part of a larger system of
cause and effect, all of it as hopelessly undodgable.
These apprehensions were particularly apt to arise if you had spent an
hour that day in seeing herds of the English "common people" ushered
down narrowing corridors of barbed wire into some gap that had all the
German machine guns raking its exit, the nature of Regular officers'
pre-war education in England precluding the prompt evolution of any
effectual means on our side to derange the working of this ingenious
abattoir. We had asked for it all. We had made the directing brains of
our armies the poor things that they were. Small blame to them if in
this season of liquidation they failed to produce assets which we had
never equipped them to earn--mental nimbleness, powers of individual
observation, quickness to cap with counter-strokes of invention each new
device of the fertile specialists opposite. Being as we had moulded
them, they had probably done pretty well in doing no worse.
What's _done_ we partly may compute,
But know not what's _resisted_.
Who shall say what efforts it may have cost some of those poor
custom-ridden souls not to veto, for good and all, an engine of war so
far from "smart" as the tank, or to accept any help at all from such
folk as the new-fangled, untraditional airmen, some of whom took no
shame to go forth to the fray in pyjamas. Not they alone, but all of
ourselves, with our boastful chatter about the "public school spirit,"
our gallant, robust contempt for "swats" and "smugs" and all who
invented new means to new ends and who trained and used their brains
with a will--we had arranged for these easy battues of thousands of
Englishmen, who, for their part, did not fail. To-morrow you would see
it all again--a few hundred square yards of ground gained by the deaths,
perhaps, of twenty thousand men who would
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain.
So it would go on, week after week, sitting after sitting of the dismal
court that liquidated in the Flanders mud our ruling classes' wasted
decades, until we either lost the war outright or were saved from utter
disaster by clutching at aid from French brains and American numbers.
Like Lucifer when he was confronted with the sky at night, you "looked
and sank."
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.
What had we done, when we could, that the stars in their courses should
fight for us now? Or left undone, of all that could provoke this
methodical universe of swinging and returning forces to shake off such
dust from its constant wheels?
V
"I planted a set of blind hopes in their minds," said Prometheus, making
it out to be quite a good turn that he had done to mankind. And the Dr.
Relling of Ibsen, a kind of Prometheus in general practice, kept at hand
a whole medicine-chest of assorted illusions to dope his patients with.
"Illusion, you know," said this sage, "is the tonic to give 'em." It may
be. But even illusions cost something. The bill, as Hotspur said of the
river Trent, "comes me cranking in" presently, nature's iron law laying
it down that the more superb your state of inflation the deeper shall
the dumps occasioned by a puncture be. The Promethean gift of Mr. Dunlop
to our race undoubtedly lifted the pastime of cycling out of a somewhat
bumpy order of prose into a lyric heaven. And yet the stoutest of all
nails could plunge itself into the solid tyre of old without compelling
you to walk a foundered Pegasus from the top of the Honister Pass the
whole way to Keswick, enjoying _en route_ neither the blessing of a
bicycle nor that of the unhampered use of Shanks' Mare.
So War, who keeps such a pump to blow you up with, and also such thorns
for your puncturing, had to leave us the "poor shrunken things" that we
are, anyhow. It is as if the average man had been passing himself off on
himself, in a dream, as the youthful hero of some popular drama, and, in
a rousing last act, had departed, in 1914, on excellent terms with
himself and the audience, bands playing and flags flying, to start a
noble and happy new life on the virgin soil of the "golden West." And
now he awakes in the "golden West" on a slobbery and a dirty farm, with
all the purchase money still to pay, and tools and manures remarkably
dear, and no flag visible, nor instrument of music audible, and dismal
reports coming in from neighbouring farmers, and cause and effect as
abominably linked one to another as ever, and all the time his mind full
of a sour surmise that many sorts of less credulous men have "made a
bit" of inordinate size out of the bit that he did rather than made,
during the raging and tearing run of the drama now taken off and, as far
as may be, forgotten.
CHAPTER XII
BELATED BOONS
I
There is no one day of which you can say: "My youth ended then. On the
Monday the ball of my vision had eagles that flew unabashed to the sun.
On the Tuesday it hadn't." The season of rapture goes out like a tide
that has turned; a time has come when the mud flats are bare; but, long
after the ebb has set in, any wave that has taken a special strength of
its own from some combination of flukes out at sea may cover them up for
a moment--may even throw itself far up the beach, making as if to
recapture the lost high-water mark. So the youth of our war had its
feints at renewal, hours of Indian summer when there was wine again in
the air; in the "bare, ruined choirs" a lated golden auriole would
strike up once more for a while, before leaving.
Because hope does spring eternal the evening before a great battle must
always make fires leap up in the mind. The calm before Thermopylæ, the
rival camps on the night before Agincourt, the ball before Waterloo--not
without reason have writers of genius, searching for glimpses of life in
its most fugitive acme of bloom, the poised and just breaking crest of
the wave, gone to places and times of the kind. For there the wits and
the heart may be really astir and at gaze, and the common man may have,
for the hour, the artist's vision of life as an adventure and challenge,
lovely, harsh, fleeting, and strange. The great throw, the new age's
impending nativity, Fate with her fingers approaching the veil, about to
lift--a sense of these things is a drug as strong as strychnine to
quicken the failing pulse of the most heart-weary of moribund raptures.
We all had the dope in our wine on the night of August 7, 1918. At
daybreak our troops to the east of Amiens would second the first blow of
Foch at the German salient towards Paris, the giant arm that was now
left sticking out into the air to be hit; its own smashing blow had been
struck without killing; its first strength was spent; the spirit behind
it was cracking; now, in its moment of check, of lost momentum, of risky
extension, now to have at it and smash it. The bull had rushed right on
to gore us and missed; we had his flank to stab now.
Someone who dined at the mess had just motored from Paris, through white
dust and sunshine and, everywhere, quickly turned heads and eager faces.
He had been in the streets all the night of the enemy's last mighty
lunge at the city. He spoke of the silent crowds blackening the
boulevards through the few hours of midsummer darkness; other crowds on
the sky-line of roofs, all black and immobile, the whole city hushed to
hear the bombardment, and staring, staring fixedly east at the flame
that incessantly winked in the sky above Château-Thierry--history come
to life, still enigmatic, but audible, visible, galloping through the
night. Poor old France, tormented and stoical, what could not the world
forgive her? Then he had seen the news come the next day to these that
had thus watched as the non-combatants watched from the high walls of
Troy; and how an American had broken down uncontrollably on hearing how
his country's Third Division had bundled the Germans back into the
Marne: "We _are_ all right! By God, we _are_ all right!" he had cried, a
whole new nation's secret self-distrust before a supercilious ancient
world changing into a younger boy's ecstasy of relief in the thought
that now he has jolly well given his proofs and the older boys will not
sneer at him now, and he never need bluff any more. Good fellows really,
the Yanks; most simple and human as soon as you knew them. One seemed to
know everyone then, for that evening.
II
Night came on cloudless and windless and braced with autumn's first
astringent tang of coolness. Above, as I lay on my back in the meadow,
the whole dome had a stir of life in its shimmering fresco, stars
flashing and winking with that eager air of having great things to
impart--they have it on frosty nights in the Alps, over a high bivouac.
We were all worked up, you see. Could it be coming at last, I thought as
I went to sleep--the battle unlike other battles? How many I had seen
outlive their little youth of groundless hope, from the approach along
darkened roads through summer nights, the eastern sky pulsating with its
crimson flush, the wild glow always leaping up and always drawing in,
and the waiting cavalry's lances upright, black and multitudinous in
road-side fields, impaling the blenching sky just above the horizon; and
then, in the bald dawn, the backward trickles of wastage swelling into
great streams or rather endless friezes seen in silhouette across the
fields, the trailing processions of wounded, English and German, on foot
and on stretchers, dripping so much blood that some of the tracks were
flamboyantly marked for miles across country; and then the evening's
reports, with their anxious efforts to show that we had gained something
worth having. Was it to be only Loos and the Somme and Arras and
Flanders and Cambrai, all over again?
Thought must have passed into dream when I was awakened by some bird
that may have had a dream too and had fallen right off its perch in a
bush near my head, with a disconcerted squeak and a scuffling sound
among dry leaves. Opening my eyes, I found that a thickish veil was
drawn over the stars. When I sat up the veil was gone; my eyes were
above it; a quilt of white mist, about a foot thick, had spread itself
over the meadow. Good! Let it thicken away and be shoes of silence and
armour of darkness at dawn for our men. Soon night's habitual sounds
brought on sleep again. An owl in the wood by the little chalk stream
would hoot, patiently wait for the answering call that should come, and
then hoot again, and listen again. The low, dry, continuous buzz of an
aeroplane engine, more evenly humming than any of ours, droned itself
into hearing and softly ascended the scale of audibility; overhead, as
the enemy passed, was slowly drawn across the sky from east to west a
line of momentarily obscured stars, each coming back into sight as the
next one was deleted. In the east the low, slow grumbling sound of a few
guns from fifty miles of front seemed, in its approach to quietude, like
the audible breath of a sleeper. The war was taking its rest.
Some sort of musing half-dream about summer heaths, buzzing with bees,
was jarred by the big blunted sound, distant and dull, of wooden boxes
tumbling down wooden stairs, "off," as they do in a farce. Of
course--that night-bomber unloading on St. Omer, Abbeville, Etaples,
some one of the usual marks. But now there was something to wake for.
Not a star to be seen. I jumped up and found the mist thick to my
armpits, and rising. Oh, good, good! Our men would walk safe as the
attacking Germans had walked in the mist of that lovely and fatal
morning in March. I slept hard till two o'clock came--time to get up for
work. The mist was doing its best; it seemed to fill the whole wide
vessel of the universe.
III
Ten miles to the east of Amiens a steep-sided ridge divides the
converging rivers of Ancre and Somme. They meet where it sinks, at its
western end, into the plain. From the ridge there was, in pre-war days,
a beautiful view. On the south the ground fell from your feet abruptly,
a kind of earth cliff, to the north bank of the Somme, about a hundred
feet below. Southwards, beyond the river, stretched, as far as eye could
see, the expanse of the level Santerre, one of France's best cornlands.
South-eastward you looked up the Somme valley, mile after mile, towards
Bray and Péronne--a shining valley of poplars and stream and linked
ponds and red-roofed villages among the poplars. But now the Santerre
lay untilled, gone back to heath of a faded fawn-grey. The red roofs had
been shelled; the Germans possessed them; the Germans held the blasted
heath, across the river; other Germans held most of the ridge on this
side to a mile or so east of the point to which I was posted that
morning. English troops were to carry the eastern end of the ridge and
the tricky low ground between it and the Somme. Australian and Canadian
troops were to attack on a broad front, out on the level Santerre,
across the river and under our eyes.
But there was no seeing. The mist, in billowy, bolster-like masses,
wallowed and rolled about at the touch of light airs; at one moment a
figure some thirty yards off could be seen and then a thickened
whiteness would rub it out; down the earth cliff we looked into a
cauldron of that seething milky opaqueness. Of what might go on in that
pit of enigma the eye could tell nothing; the mind hung on what news
might come through the ear. We knew that there was to be no prior
bombardment; the men would start with the barrage and go for five miles
across the Santerre if they could, pushing the enemy off it. The stage
was set, the play of plays was about to begin on the broad stage below;
only, between our eyes and the boards there was hung a white curtain.
Up the cliff, fumbling and muted, came the first burst of the barrage,
suggesting, as barrages usually do, a race between sounds, a piece
bangingly played against time on a keyboard. Now the men would be rising
full length above earth and walking out with smoking breath and
bejewelled eyebrows into the infested mist. Then our guns, for an
interval, fell almost silent--first lift of the barrage--a chance for
hungry ears to assess the weight of the enemy's answering gunfire.
Surely, surely it had not all the volume it had had at Arras and Ypres
last year. And then down came our barrage again, like one rifle-bolt
banging home, and all thought was again with the friends before whose
faces the wall of splashing metal, earth, and flame had just risen and
moved on ahead like the pillars of fire and cloud.
Hours passed, bringing the usual changes of sounds in battles. The piece
that had started so rapidly on the piano slowed down; the notes spaced
themselves out; the first continuous barking of many guns slackened off
irregularly into isolated barks and groups of barks--just what you hear
from a dog whose temper is subsiding, with occasional returns. That, in
itself, told nothing. Troops might only have gained a few hundred yards
in the old Flanders way, and then flopped down to dig and be murdered.
Or--but one kept a tight hand on hope. One had hoped too often since
Loos. And then the mist lifted. It rolled right up into the sky in one
piece, like a theatre curtain, almost suddenly taking its white quilted
thickness away from between our eyes and the vision so much longed for
during four years. Beyond the river a miracle--_the_ miracle--had begun.
It was going on fast. Remember that all previous advances had gained us
little more than freedom to skulk up communication trenches a mile or
two further eastward, if that. But now! Across the level Santerre, which
the sun was beginning to fill with a mist-filtered lustre, two endless
columns of British guns, wagons, and troops were marching steadily east,
unshelled, over the ground that the Germans had held until dawn.
Nothing like it had ever been seen in the war. Above, on our cliff, we
turned and stared at each other. We must have looked rather like Cortes'
men agape on their peak. The marvel seemed real; the road lay open and
dry across the Red Sea. Far off, six thousand yards off in the shining
south-east, tanks and cavalry were at work, shifting and gleaming and
looking huge on the sky-line of some little rumpled fold of the Santerre
plateau. Nearer, the glass could make out an enemy battery, captured
complete, caught with the leather caps still on the muzzles of guns. The
British dead on the plain, horses and men, lay scattered thinly over
wide spaces; scarcely a foundered tank could be seen; the ground had
turf on it still; it was only speckled with shell-holes, not
disembowelled or flayed. The war had put on a sort of benignity, coming
out gallantly on the top of the earth and moving about in the air and
the sun; the warm heath, with so few dead upon it, looked almost clement
and kind, almost gay after the scabrous mud wastes and the stink of the
captured dug-outs of the Salient, piled up to ground-level with corpses,
some feet uppermost, some heads, like fish in a basket, making you think
what wonderful numbers there are of mankind. For a moment, the object of
all dream and desire seemed to have come; the flaming sword was gone,
and the gate of the garden open.
Too late, as you know. We awoke from delight, and remembered. Four years
ago, three years ago, even two years ago, a lasting repose of beatitude
might have come with that regaining of paradise! Now! The control of our
armies, jealously hugged for so long and used, on the whole, to so
little purpose, had passed from us, thrown up in a moment of failure,
dissension and dread. While still outnumbered by the enemy we had not
won; while on even terms with him we had not won; only under a foreign
Commander-in-Chief, and with America's inexhaustible numbers crowding
behind to hold up our old arms, had our just cause begun to prevail. And
now the marred triumph would leave us jaded and disillusioned, divided,
half bankrupt; sneerers at lofty endeavour, and yet not the men for the
plodding of busy and orderly peace; bilious with faiths and enthusiasms
gone sour in the stomach. That very night I was to hear the old
Australian sneer again. The British corps on their left, at work in the
twisty valley and knucklesome banks of the Somme, had failed to get on
quite as fast as they and the Canadian troops on their right. "The
Canadians were all right of course, but the Tommies! Well, we might have
known!" They had got rid, they chuckingly said, of their own last "Tommy
officers" now; they wanted to have it quite clear that in England's war
record they were not involved except as our saviours from our sorry
selves.
IV
There were other days, during the following months of worm-eaten
success, when some mirage of the greater joys which we had forfeited
hung for a few moments over the sand. It must be always a strange
delight to an infantryman to explore at his ease, in security, ground
that to him has been almost as unimaginable as events after death. There
is no describing the vesture of enigmatic remoteness enfolding a
long-watched enemy line. Tolstoy has tried, but even he does not come up
to it. Virgil alone has expressed one sensation of the British overflow
over Lille and Cambria, Menin (even the Menin Road had an end) and
Bruges and Ostend, Le Câteau and Landrecies, Liège and Namur--
Juvat ire et Dorica castra
Desertosque videre locos, litusque relictum.
Classibus hic locus, hic acie certare solebant,
Hic Dolopum manus, hic sævus tendebat Achilles.
And then, wherever you went, till the frontier was reached, everyone was
your host and your friend; all the relations of strangers to one another
had been transfigured into the sum of all kindness and courtesy. In one
mining village in Flanders, quitted that day by the Germans, a woman
rushed out of a house to give me a lump of bread, thinking that we must
all be as hungry as she and her neighbours. Late one night in Brussels,
just after the Germans had gone, I was walking with another officer down
the chief street of the city, then densely crowded with radiant
citizens. My friend had a wooden stump leg and could not walk very well;
and this figure of a khaki-clad man, maimed in the discharge of an
Allied obligation to Belgium, seemed suddenly and almost simultaneously
to be seen by the whole of that great crowd in all its symbolic value,
so that the crowd fell silent and opened out spontaneously along the
whole length of the street and my friend had to hobble down the middle
of a long avenue of bare-headed men and bowing women.
Finally--last happy thrill of the war--the first stroke of eleven
o'clock, on the morning of Armistice Day, on the town clock of Mons,
only captured that morning; Belgian civilians and British soldiers
crowding together into the square, shaking each other's hands and
singing each other's national anthems; a little toy-like peal of bells
in the church contriving to tinkle out "Tipperary" for our welcome,
while our airmen, released from their labours, tumbled and romped
overhead like boys turning cartwheels with ecstasy.
What a victory it might have been--the real, the Winged Victory,
chivalric, whole and unstained! The bride that our feckless wooing had
sought and not won in the generous youth of the war had come to us now:
an old woman, or dead, she no longer refused us. We had arrived, like
the prince in the poem--
Too late for love, too late for joy,
Too late, too late!
You loitered on the road too long,
You trifled at the gate:
The enchanted dove upon her branch
Died without a mate;
The enchanted princess in her tower
Slept, died behind the grate:
Her heart was starving all this while
You made it wait.
CHAPTER XIII
THE OLD AGE OF THE WAR
I
Men wearying in trenches used to tell one another sometimes what they
fancied the end of the war would be like. Each had his particular
favourite vision. Some morning the Captain would come down the trench at
"stand-to" and try to speak as if it were nothing. "All right, men," he
would say, "you can go across and shake hands." Or the first thing we
should hear would be some jubilant peal suddenly shaken out on the air
from the nearest standing church in the rear. But the commonest vision
was that of marching down a road to a wide, shining river. Once more the
longing of a multitude struggling slowly across a venomous wilderness
fixed itself on the first glimpse of a Jordan beyond; for most men the
Rhine was the physical goal of effort, the term of endurance, the symbol
of all attainment and rest.
To win what your youth had desired, and find the taste of it gone, is
said to be one of the standard pains of old age. With a kind of blank
space in their minds where the joy of fulfilment ought to have been, two
British privates of 1914, now Captains attached to the Staff, emerged
from the narrow and crowded High Street of Cologne on December 7, 1918,
crossed the Cathedral square, and gained their first sight of the Rhine.
As they stood on the Hohenzollern bridge and looked at the mighty
breadth of rushing stream, each of them certainly gave his heart leave
to leap up if it would and if it could. Had they not, by toil and
entreaty, gained permission to enter the city with our first cavalry?
Were they not putting their lips to the first glass of the sparkling
vintage of victory? Neither of them said anything then. The heart that
knoweth its own bitterness need not always avow it straight off. But
they were friends; they told afterwards.
The first hours of that ultimate winding-up of the old, long-decayed
estate of hopes and illusions were not the worst, either. The cavalry
brigadier in command at Cologne, those first few days, was a man with a
good fighting record; and now his gesture towards the conquered was that
of the happy warrior, that of Virgilian Rome, that of the older England
in hours of victory. German civilians clearly expected some kind of
mal-treatment, such perhaps as their own scum had given to Belgians.
They strove with desperate care to be correct in their bearing, neither
to jostle us accidentally in the streets nor to shrink away from us
pointedly. Soon, to their surprise and shame, they found that among the
combatant English there lingered the hobby of acting like those whom the
Germans had known through their Shakespeare: "We give express charge
that in our marches through the country there be nothing compelled from
the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French upbraided
or abused in disdainful language."
The "cease fire" order on Armistice Day had forbidden all
"fraternizing." But any man who has fought with a sword, or its
equivalent, knows more about that than the man who has only blown with a
trumpet. To men who for years have lived like foxes or badgers, dodging
their way from each day of being alive to the next, there comes back
more easily, after a war, a sense of the tacit league that must, in mere
decency, bind together all who cling precariously to life on a
half-barren ball that goes spinning through space. All castaways
together, all really marooned on the one desert island, they know that,
however hard we may have to fight to sober a bully or guard to each man
his share of the shell-fish and clams, we all have to come back at last
to the joint work of making the island more fit to live on. The gesture
of the decimated troops who held Cologne at the end of that year was, in
essence, that of the cavalry brigadiers. Sober or drunk, the men were
contumaciously sportsmen, incorrigibly English. One night before
Christmas I thought I heard voices outside my quarters long after
curfew, and went to look out from my balcony high up in the Domhof into
the moon-flooded expanse of the Cathedral square below. By rights there
should have been no figures there at that hour, German or British. But
there were three; two tipsy Highlanders--"Women from Hell," as German
soldiers used to call the demonic stabbers in kilts--gravely dispensing
the consolations of chivalry to a stout burgher of Cologne. "Och, dinna
tak' it to hairrt, mon. I tell ye that your lads were grond." It was
like a last leap of the flame that had burnt clear and high four years
before.
II
For the day of the fighting man, him and his chivalric hobbies, was
over. The guns had hardly ceased to fire before from the rear, from the
bases, from London, there came flooding up the braves who for all those
four years had been squealing threats and abuse, some of them begging
off service in arms on the plea that squealing was indispensable
national work. We had not been long in Cologne when there arrived in hot
haste a young pressman from London, one of the first of a swarm. He
looked a fine strong man. He seemed to be one of the male Vestals who
have it for their trade to feed the eternal flame of hatred between
nations, instead of cleaning out stables or doing some other work fit
for a male. His train had fortunately brought him just in time for
luncheon. This he ate and drank with goodwill, complaining only that the
wine, which seemed to me good, was not better. He then slept on his bed
until tea-time. Reanimated with tea, he said genially, "Well, I must be
getting on with my mission of hate," and retired to his room to write a
vivacious account of the wealth and luxury of Cologne, the guzzling in
all cafés and restaurants, the fair round bellies of all the working
class, the sleek and rosy children of the poor. I read it, two days
after, in his paper. Our men who had helped to fight Germany down were
going short of food at the time, through feeding the children in houses
where they were billeted. "Proper Zoo there is in this place," one of
them told me. "Proper lions and tigers. Me and my friend are taking the
kids from our billet soon's we've got them fatted up a bit. If you'll
believe me, sir, them kiddies ain't safe in a Zoo. They could walk in
through the bars and get patting the lions." I had just seen some of the
major carnivora in their cages close to the Rhine, each a rectangular
lamina of fur and bone like the tottering cats I had seen pass through
incredible slits of space in Amiens a month after the people had fled
from the city that spring. But little it mattered in London what he or I
saw. The nimble scamps had the ear of the world; what the soldier said
was not evidence.
Some Allied non-combatants did almost unthinkable things in the first
ecstasy of the triumph that others had won. One worthy drove into
Cologne in a car plastered over with Union Jacks, like a minor bookie
going to Epsom. It passed the wit of man to make him understand that one
does not do these things to defeated peoples. But he could understand,
with some help, that our Commander-in-Chief alone was entitled to carry
a Union Jack on his car. "We must show these fellows our power"; that
was the form of the licence taken out by every churl in spirit who
wanted to let his coltish nature loose on a waiter or barber in some
German hotel. I saw one such gallant assert the majesty of the Allies by
refusing to pay more than half the prices put down on the wine-list.
Another would send a waiter across an hotel dining-room to order a quiet
party of German men and women not to speak so loud. Another was all for
inflicting little bullying indignities on the editor of the _Kölnische
Zeitung_--making him print as matters of fact our versions of old cases
of German misconduct, etc. Probably he did not even know that the
intended exhibition-ground for these deplorable tricks was one of the
great journals of Europe.
Not everybody, not even every non-combatant in the dress of a soldier,
had caught that shabby epidemic of spite. But it was rife. It had become
a fashion to have it, as in some raffish circles it is a fashion at
times to have some rakish disease. In the German military cemetery at
Lille I have heard a man reared at one of our most famous public schools
and our most noble university, and then wearing our uniform, say that he
thought the French might do well to desecrate all the German soldiers'
graves on French soil. Another, at Brussels, commended a Belgian who was
said to have stripped his wife naked in one of the streets of that city
and cut off her hair on some airy suspicion of an affair with a German
officer during the enemy's occupation. A fine sturdy sneer at the notion
of doing anything chivalrous was by this time the mode. "I hope to God,"
an oldish and highly non-combatant general said, in discussing the
probable terms of peace with a younger general who had begun the war as
a full lieutenant and fought hard all the way up, "that there's going to
be no rot about not kicking a man when he's down." The junior general
grunted. He did not agree. But he clearly felt shy of protesting.
Worshippers of setting suns feel ill at ease in discussion with these
bright, confident fellows who swear by the rising one.
III
The senior general need not have feared. The generous youth of the war,
when England could carry, with no air of burlesque, the flag of St.
George, was pretty well gone. The authentic flame might still flicker on
in the minds of a few tired soldiers and disregarded civilians.
Otherwise it was as dead as the half-million of good fellows whom it had
fired four years ago, whose credulous hearts the maggots were now eating
under so many shining and streaming square miles of wet Flanders and
Picardy. They gone, their war had lived into a kind of dotage ruled by
mean fears and desires. At home our places of honour were brown with
shirkers masquerading in the dead men's clothes and licensed by careless
authorities to shelter themselves from all danger under the titles of
Colonel, Major, and Captain. Nimble politicians were rushing already to
coin into votes for themselves--"the men who won the war"--the golden
memory of the dead before the living could come home and make themselves
heard. Sounds of a general election, the yells of political cheap-jacks,
the bawling of some shabby promise, capped by some shabbier bawl, made
their way out to Cologne.
"This way, gents, for the right sort of whip to give Germans!" "Rats,
gentlemen, rats! Don't listen to _him_. Leave it to me and I'll chastise
'em with scorpions." "I'll devise the brave punishments for them." "Ah,
but I'll sweat you more money out of the swine." That was the gist of
the din that most of the gramophones of the home press gave out on the
Rhine. Each little demagogue had got his little pots of pitch and
sulphur on sale for the proper giving of hell to the enemy whom he had
not faced. Germany lay at our feet, a world's wonder of downfall, a very
Lucifer, fallen, broken, bereaved beyond all the retributive griefs
which Greek tragedy shows you afflicting the great who were insolent,
wilful, and proud. But it was not enough for our small epicures of
revenge. They wanted to twist the enemy's wrists, where he lay bound,
and to run pins into his eyes. And they had the upper hand of us now.
The soldiers could only look on while the scurvy performance dragged
itself out till the meanest of treaties was signed at Versailles. "Fatal
Versailles!" as General Sir Ian Hamilton said for us all; "Not a
line--not one line in your treaty to show that those boys (our friends
who were dead) had been any better than the emperors; not one line to
stand for the kindliness of England; not one word to bring back some
memory of the generosity of her sons!"
"The freedom of Europe," "The war to end war," "The overthrow of
militarism," "The cause of civilization"--most people believe so little
now in anything or anyone that they would find it hard to understand the
simplicity and intensity of faith with which these phrases were once
taken among our troops, or the certitude felt by hundreds of thousands
of men who are now dead that if they were killed their monument would be
a new Europe not soured or soiled with the hates and greeds of the old.
That the old spirit of Prussia might not infest our world any more; that
they or, if not they, their sons might breathe a new, cleaner air they
had willingly hung themselves up to rot on the uncut wire at Loos or
wriggled to death, slow hour by hour, in the cold filth at Broodseinde.
Now all was done that man could do, and all was done in vain. The old
spirit of Prussia was blowing anew, from strange mouths. From several
species of men who passed for English--as mongrels, curs, shoughs,
water-rugs, and demi-wolves are all clept by the name of dogs--there was
rising a chorus of shrill yelps for the outdoing of all the base folly
committed by Prussia when drunk with her old conquest of France.
Prussia, beaten out of the field, had won in the souls of her
conquerors' rulers; they had become her pupils; they took her word for
it that she, and not the older England, knew how to use Victory.
IV
Sir Douglas Haig came to Cologne when we had been there a few days. On
the grandiose bridge over the Rhine he made a short speech to a few of
us. Most of it sounded as if the thing were a job he had got to get
through with, and did not much care for. Perhaps the speech, like those
of other great men who wisely hate making speeches, had been written for
him by somebody else. But once he looked up from the paper and put in
some words which I felt sure were his own; "I only hope that, now we
have won, we shall not lose our heads as the Germans did after 1870. It
has brought them to this." He looked at the gigantic mounted statue of
the Kaiser overhead, a thing crying out in its pride for fire from
heaven to fall and consume it, and at the homely, squat British sentry
moving below on his post. I think the speech was reported. But none of
our foremen at home took any notice of it at all. They knew a trick
worth two of Haig's. They were as moonstruck as any victorious Prussian.
So we had failed--had won the fight and lost the prize; the garland of
the war was withered before it was gained. The lost years, the broken
youth, the dead friends, the women's overshadowed lives at home, the
agony, and bloody sweat--all had gone to darken the stains which most of
us had thought to scour out of the world that our children would live
in. Many men felt, and said to each other, that they had been fooled.
They had believed that their country was backing them. They had thought,
as they marched into Germany, "Now we shall show old Fritz how you treat
a man when you've thrashed him." They would let him into the English
secret, the tip that the power and glory are not to the bully. As some
of them looked at the melancholy performance which followed, our Press
and our politicians parading at Paris in moral _pickelhauben_ and doing
the Prussianist goose-step by way of _pas de triomphe_, they could not
but say in dismay to themselves: "This is our doing. We cannot wish the
war unwon; and yet--if we had shirked, poor old England, for all we
know, might not have come to this pass. So we come home draggle-tailed,
sick of the mess that we were unwittingly helping to make when we tried
to do well."
CHAPTER XIV
OUR MODERATE SATANISTS
I
Satanism is one of the words that most of us simple people have heard
others use; we guiltily feel that we ought to know what it means, but do
not quite like to ask, lest we expose the nakedness of the land. Then
comes Professor Gilbert Murray, one of the few learned men who are able
to make a thing clear to people not quite like themselves, and tells us
all about it in a cheap, small book, easy to read. It seems that the
Satanists, or the pick of the sect, were Bohemian Protestants at the
start, and quite plain, poor men from the country.
"Every person in authority met them with rack and sword, cursed
their religious leaders as emissaries of the Devil, and punished
them for all the things which they considered holy. The earth was
the Lord's, and the Pope and Emperor were the vicegerents of God
upon the earth. So they were told; and in time they accepted the
statement. That was the division of the world. On the one side God,
Pope and Emperor, and the army of persecutors; on the other
themselves, downtrodden and poor...."
How easy to understand! In crude works of non-imagination the wicked,
_repente turpissimus_, suddenly says, some fine morning, "Evil, be thou
my good." In life the conversion is slower. It is a gradual process of
coming to feel that what has passed officially as true, right, and
worshipful is so implicated in work manifestly dirty, and so easily made
to serve the ends of the greedy, lazy, and cruel, that faith in its
authenticity has to be given up as not to be squared with the facts of
the world. From feeling this it is not a long step to the further
surmise that the grand traditional foe of that old moral order of the
world, now so severely discredited, may be less black than so lying an
artist has painted him. Does he not, anyhow, stand at the opposite pole
to that which has just proved itself base? He, too, perhaps, is some
helpless butt of the slings and arrows of an enthroned barbarity
tormenting the world. The legend about his condign fall from heaven may
only be some propagandist lie--all we are suffered to hear about some
early crime in the long, beastly annals of governmental misdoing. So
thought trips, fairly lightly, along till your worthy Bohemian peasant,
literal, serious, and straight, like the plain working-man of all
countrysides, turns, with a desperate logical integrity and courage,
right away from a world order which has called itself divine and shown
itself diabolic. He will embrace, in its stead, the only other world
order supposed to be extant: the one which the former order called
diabolic; at any rate, he has not wittingly suffered any such wrong at
its hand as the scourges of Popes and of Emperors. So the plain man
emerges a Satanist.
II
To-day the convert does not insist upon bearing the new name. He does
not, except in the case of a few doctrinaire bigots, repeat any Satanist
creed. But in several portions of Europe the war made conversions
abound. Imagine the state of mind that it must have induced in many a
plain Russian peasant, literal, serious, and straight, like the
Bohemian. First the Tsar, in the name of God and of Holy Russia, sent
him, perhaps without so much as a rifle, to starve and be shelled in a
trench. If he escaped, the Soviet chiefs, in the name of Justice, sent
him to fight against those for whom the Tsar had made him fight before,
while his wife and babies were starved by those whom he fought both for
and against. When his fighting was done he was made, in the name of
social right, an industrial conscript or wage-slave. If alive, to-day,
he is probably overworked and starved, perhaps far from home, his family
life broken up, his instinct or right of self-direction ignored or
punished as treason by rulers whom he did not choose, his whole country
in danger of lapsing into the abject miseries of an uncared-for
fowl-run--all brought about in the name of human freedom.
Consider, again, the case of some German or Austrian widow with many
young children. The Kaiser's Government, breathing the most Christian
sentiments, gave the Fatherland war in her time; her husband was killed,
her country is ruined, her children are growing up stunted and marred by
all the years of semi-starvation; the Paris Press is crying out, in the
name of moral order throughout the world, that they ought to be starved
more drastically; part of the English Press complains, in the tone of an
outraged spiritual director, that she has shown no adequate signs of
repentance of the Kaiser's sins, and that she and hers are living like
fighting cocks; the German Agrarian Party, in the name of Patriotism,
manoeuvres to keep her from getting her weekly ounce or two of butcher's
meat from abroad more cheaply than they would like to sell it to her at
home.
What could you say to such people if they should break out at last in
despair and defiance: "Anyhow, all these people, here and abroad, who
take upon themselves to speak for God and duty and patriotism and
liberty and loyalty are evil people, and do evil things. Shall not all
these trees that they swear by be judged by their fruits? Away with them
into the fire, God and country and social duty and justice and every old
phrase that used to seem more than a phrase till the war came to show it
up for what it was worth as a means to right conduct in men?" Of course
you could say a great deal. But at every third word they could incommode
you with some stumping case of the foulest thing done in the holiest
name till you would be shamed into silence at the sight of all the
crowns of thorns brought to market by keepers of what you still believe
to be vineyards. So, throughout much of Europe, Satan's most promising
innings for many long years has begun.
III
In their vices as well as their virtues the English preserve a
distinguished moderation. They do not utterly shrink from jobbery, for
example; they do from a job that is flagrant or gross. They give
judgeships as prizes for party support, but not to the utterly
briefless, the dullard who knows no more law than necessity. Building
contractors, when in the course of their rise they become town
councillors, do not give bribes right and left: their businesses thrive
without that. An Irishman running a Tammany in the States cannot thus
hold himself in: the humorous side of corruption charms him too much: he
wants to let the grand farce of roguery rip for all it is worth. But the
English private's pet dictum, "There's reason in everything," rules the
jobber, the profiteer, the shirker and placeman of Albion as firmly as
it controls the imagination of her Wordsworths and the political
idealism of her Cromwells and Pitts. Like her native cockroaches and
bugs, whose moderate stature excites the admiration and envy of human
dwellers among the corresponding fauna of the tropics, the caterpillars
of her commonwealth preserve the golden mean; few, indeed, are
flamboyants or megalomaniacs.
So, when the war with its great opportunities came we were but
temperately robbed by our own birds of prey. Makers of munitions made
mighty fortunes out of our peril. Still, every British soldier did have
a rifle, at any rate when he went to the front. I have watched a
twelve-inch gun fire, in action, fifteen of its great bales or barrels
of high explosives, fifteen running, and only three of the fifteen
costly packages failed to explode duly on its arrival beyond. Vendors of
soldiers' clothes and boots acquired from us the wealth which dazzles us
all in these days of our own poverty. They knew how to charge: they made
hay with a will while the blessed suns of 1914-18 were high in the
heavens. Still, nearly all the tunics made in that day of temptation did
hold together; none of the boots, so far as I knew or heard tell, was
made of brown paper. "He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be
innocent." Still, there is reason in everything. "Meden agan," as the
Greeks said--temperance in all things, even in robbery, even in
patriotism and personal honour. Our profiteers did not bid Satan get him
behind them; but they did ask him to stand a little to one side.
So, too, in the army. Some old Regular sergeant-majors would sell every
stripe that they could, but they would not sell a map to the enemy. Some
of our higher commanders would use their A.D.C. rooms as funk-holes to
shelter the healthy young nephew or son of their good friend the earl,
or their distant cousin the marquis. But there were others. Sometimes a
part of our Staff would almost seem to forget the war, and give its
undivided mind to major struggles--its own intestine "strafes" and the
more bitter war against uncomplaisant politicians at home. But presently
it would remember, and work with a will. There was, again, an undeniable
impulse abroad, among the "best people" of the old Army, to fall back
towards G.H.Q. and its safety as soon as the first few months made it
clear that this was to be none of our old gymkhana wars, but almost
certainly lethal to regimental officers who stayed it out with their
units. But this centripetal instinct, this "safety first" movement,
though real, was moderate. Lists of headquarter formations might show an
appreciable excess of names of some social distinction. But not an
outrageous excess. Some peers and old baronets and their sons were still
getting killed, by their own choice, along with the plebs to the very
end of the war. Again, all through the war one could not deny that those
who had chosen the safer part, or had it imposed upon them, absorbed a
stout and peckish lion's share of the rewards for martial valour. And
yet they did not absolutely withhold these meeds from officers and men
who fought. The king of beasts being duly served, these hard-bitten
jackals got some share, though not perhaps, for their numbers, a copious
one. Some well-placed shirkers were filled with good things, but the
brave were not sent utterly empty away. Guardsmen and cavalrymen, the
least richly brained soldiers we had, kept to themselves the bulk of the
distinguished jobs for which brain-work was needed; and yet the poor
foot-soldier was not expressly taboo; quite a good billet would fall to
him sometimes--Plumer commanded an army.
As with the moral virtues, so with the mental. Brilliancy, genius,
scientific imagination in any higher command would have caused almost a
shock; a general with the demonic insight to see that he had got the
enemy stiff at Arras in 1917 and at Cambrai the same autumn, might have
seemed an _outré_ highbrow, almost unsafe. And yet the utter slacker was
not countenanced, and the dunce had been known to be so dull that he was
sent home as an empty by those unexacting chiefs. There was reason in
everything, even in reason.
IV
All this relative mildness in the irritants administered to the common
Englishman as soldier had its counterpart in the men's ingrained
moderateness of reaction. At Bray-sur-Somme during the battle of 1916 I
saw a French soldier go so mad with rage at what he considered to be the
deficiencies of his leaders that he brought out each article of his kit
and equipment in succession to the door of his billet and threw it into
the deep central mud of the road with a separate curse, at each cast, on
war, patriotism, civilization, and the Commander-in-Chief. This
Athanasian service of commination endured for a full quarter of an hour.
But from an English private who witnessed the rite it only drew the
phlegmatic diagnosis: "He'll 'ave 'ad a drop o' sugar-water an' got
excited." Firewater itself could not excite the English soldier to so
rounded an eloquence or to so sweeping a series of judgements. He never
thought of throwing his messing-tin and his paybook into the mud; still
less of forming a Council of Soldiers and Workmen. Either step would
have been of the abhorred nature of a "scene."
Unaggressive, unoriginal, anti-extreme, contemptuous of all "hot air"
and windy ideas, he too was braked by the same internal negations that
helped to keep his irredeemably middling commanders equidistant from
genius and from arrant failure. Confronted now with the frustration of
so many too-high hopes, the discrediting of so many persons or
institutions hitherto taken on trust, he did not say, as the humbler
sort of Bolshevist seems to have said in his heart: "What order, or
disorder, could ever be worse than this which has failed? Why not
anything, any wild-seeming nihilism or fantasy of savage rudeness,
rather than sit quiet under this old contemptible rule?" Instead of
contracting a violent new sort of heat he simply went cold, and has
remained so. Where a Slav or a Latin might have become a hundred per
cent. Satanist he became about a thirty per center. The disbelief, the
suspicion, the vacuous space in the disendowed heart, the spiritual
rubbish-heap of draggled banners and burst drums--all that blank,
unlighting and unwarming part of Satanism was his, without any other: a
Lucifer cold as a moon prompted him listlessly, not to passionate
efforts of crime, but to self-regarding and indolent apathy.
From the day he went into the army till now he has been learning to take
many things less seriously than he did. First what Burke calls the pomps
and plausibilities of the world. He has tumbled many kings into the dust
and proved the strongest emperor assailable. I remember a little
private, who seemed to know Dickens by heart, applying to William the
Second in 1915 the words used by the Game Chicken about Mr. Dombey--"as
stiff a cove as ever he see, but within the resources of science to
double him up with one blow in the waistcoat." This he proved, too, he
and his like, casting down the proud from their seats with little help
from all that was highly placed and reverently regarded in his own
country. Our ruling class had, on the whole, failed, and had to be
pulled through by him and the French and Americans; that feeling, in one
form or another, is clear in the common man's mind. He may not know in
detail the record of French as commander-in-chief, nor the exact state
of the Admiralty which let the _Goeben_ and the _Breslau_ go free, nor
the inner side of the diplomacy which added Turkey, and even Bulgaria,
to our enemies, nor yet the well-born underworld of war-time luxury,
disloyalty, and intrigue which notorious memoirs have since revealed.
But some horse instinct or some pricking in his thumbs told him
correctly that in every public service manned mainly by our upper
classes the war-time achievement was relatively low. There is very
little natural inclination to class jealousy among plain Englishmen.
Equalitarian theory does not interest them much. Their general relish
for a gamble makes them rather like a lucky-bag or bran-tub society in
which anyone may pick up, with luck, a huge unearned prize. By
cheerfully helping to keep up the big gaming-hell, by giving Barnatos
and Joels pretty full value for their win, the pre-war governing class
gained a kind of strength which a prouder and more fastidious
aristocracy would have forgone. It stands in little physical danger now.
But it lives, since the war, in a kind of contempt. The one good word
that the average private had for bestowal among his unseen "betters"
during the latter years of the war was for the King. "_He_ did give up
his beer" was said a thousand times by men whom that symbolic act of
willing comradeship with the dry throat on the march and the war-pinched
household at home had touched and astonished.
Other institutions, too, had been weighed in the balance. The War Office
was only the commonest of many by-words. The Houses of Parliament, in
which too many men of military age had demanded the forced enlistment of
others, wore an air of insincerity, apart from the loss of prestige
inevitable in a war; for armies always take the colour out of
deliberative assemblies. To moderate this effect a large number of
members who did not go to the war found means to wear khaki in London
instead of black, but this well-conceived precaution only succeeded in
further curling the lip of derision among actual soldiers. The churches,
as we have seen, got their chance, made little or nothing of it, and
came out of the war quite good secular friends with the men, but almost
null and void in their eyes as ghostly counsellors, and stripped of the
vague consequence with which many men had hitherto credited them on
account of any divine mission they might be found to have upon closer
acquaintance. Respect for the truthfulness of the Press was clean gone.
The contrast between the daily events that men saw and the daily
accounts that were printed was final. What the Press said thenceforth
was not evidence. But still it had sent out plum puddings at Christmas.
Neither was anything evidence now that was said by a politician. A great
many plain men had really drawn a distinction, all their lives, between
the solemn public assurances of statesmen and the solemn public
assurances of men who draw teeth outside dock-gates and take off their
caps and call upon God to blast the health of their own darling children
if a certain pill they have for sale does not cure colds, measles,
ring-worm, and the gripes within twenty-four hours of taking. A Swift
might say there never was any difference, but the plain man had always
firmly believed that there was. Now, after the war, he is shaken. Every
disease which victory was to cure he sees raging worse than before: more
poverty, less liberty, more likelihood of other wars, more spite between
master and man, less national comradeship. And then the crucial test
case, the solemn vow of the statesmen, all with their hands on their
sleek bosoms, that if only the common man would save them just that once
they would turn to and think of nothing else, do nothing else, but build
him a house, assure him of work, settle him on land, make all England a
paradise for him--a "land fit for heroes to live in." And then the
sequel: the cold fit; the feint at house-building and its abandonment;
all the bankruptcy of promise; the ultimate bilking, done by way of
reluctant surrender to "anti-waste" stunts got up by the same
cheap-jacks of the Press who in the first year of the war would have had
the statesmen promise yet more wildly than they did. Colds, measles,
ring-worm, and gripes all flourishing, much more than twenty-four hours
after, and new ailments added unto them.
No relief, either, by running from one medicine-man to the next. Few of
our disenchanted men doubt that the lightning cure of the Communist is
only just another version of the lightning cure of the Tory, the
authoritarian, the peremptory regimentalist. "Give _me_ a free hand and
all will be well with you." Both say exactly the same thing in the end.
One of them may call it the rule of the fittest, the other the rule of
the proletariat; each means exactly the same thing--the rule of himself,
the enforcement on everyone else of his own darling theory of what is
best for them, whether they know it or not. Small choice in rotten
apples; one bellyful of east wind is a diet as poor as another. Not in
the yells and counter-yells of this and that vendor of patent hot-air is
the heart of the average ex-soldier engaged. Rather "Away with all
gas-projectors alike" is his present feeling towards eloquent men, Left
or Right. For the moment he knows them too well, and is tired of hearing
of plans which might work if he were either a babe in arms or a Michael
of super-angelic wisdom and power.
V
You may be disillusioned about the value of things, or about their
security, either coming to feel that your house is a poor place to live
in or that, pleasant or not, it is likely enough to come down on your
head. Of these two forms of discomfort our friend experiences both. Much
that he took to be fairly noble now looks pretty mean; and much that
seemed reassuringly stable is seen to be shaky. Civilization itself, the
at any rate habitable dwelling which was to be shored up by the war,
wears a strange new air of precariousness.
Even before the war a series of melancholy public mis-adventures had
gone some way to awake the disquieting notion that civilization, the
whole ordered, fruitful joint action of a nation, a continent, or the
whole world, was only a bluff. When the world is at peace and fares
well, the party of order and decency, justice and mercy and
self-control, is really bluffing a much larger party of egoism and greed
that would bully and grab if it dared. The deep anti-social offence of
the "suffragettes," with their hatchets and hunger-strikes, was that
they gave away, in some measure, the bluff by which non-criminal people
had hitherto kept some control over reluctant assentors to the rule of
mutual protection and forbearance. They helped the baser sort to see
that the bluff of civilization is at the mercy of anyone ready to run a
little bodily risk in calling it. Sir Edward Carson took up the work. He
"called" the bluff of the Pax Britannica, the presumption that armed
treason to the law and order of the British Empire must lead to the
discomfiture of the traitor, whoever he was; he presented Sinn Fein and
every other would-be insurgent with proof that treason may securely do
much more than peep at what it would; British subjects, he showed, might
quite well conspire for armed revolt against the King's peace and not be
any losers, in their own persons, by doing it.
The greatest of all bluffs, the general peace of the world and the joint
civilization of Europe, remained uncalled for a year or two more. It was
a high moral bluff. People were everywhere saying that world-war was too
appalling, too frantically wicked a thing for any government to invite
or procure. Peace, they argued, held a hand irresistibly strong. Had she
not, among her cards, every acknowledged precept of Christianity and of
morality, even of wisdom for a man's self or a nation's? Potsdam called
the world's bluff, and the world's hand was found to be empty. Potsdam
lost the game in the end, but it had not called wholly in vain. To a
Europe exhausted, divided, and degraded by five years of return to the
morals of the Stone Age it had suggested how many things are as they
are, how many things are owned as they are, how many lives are safely
continued, merely because our birds of prey have not yet had the wit to
see what would come of a sudden snatch made with a will and with
assurance. The total number of policemen on a race-course is always a
minute percentage of the total number of its thieves and roughs. The bad
men are not held down by force; they are only bluffed by the pretence of
it. They have got the tip now, and the plain man is dimly aware how
surprisingly little there is to keep us all from slipping back into the
state we were in when a man would kill another to steal a piece of food
that he had got, and when a young woman was not safe on a road out of
sight of her friends.
The plain man, so far as I know him, is neither aghast nor gleeful at
this revelation. For the most part he looks somewhat listlessly on, as
at a probable dog-fight in which there is no dog of his. A sense of
moral horror does not come easily when you have supped full of horrors
on most of the days of three or four years; sacrilege has to go far,
indeed, to shock men who have seen their old gods looking extremely
human and blowing out, one by one, the candles before their own shrines.
Some new god, or devil, of course, may enter at any time into this
disfurnished soul. Genius in some leader might either possess
it with an anarchic passion to smash and delete all the
old institutions that disappointed in the day of trial or fire it with a
new craving to lift itself clear of the wrack and possess itself on the
heights. For either a Lenin or a St. Francis there is a wide field to
till, cleared, but of pretty stiff clay. Persistently sane in his
disenchantment as he had been in his rapture, the common man, whose
affection and trust the old order wore out in the war, is still slow to
enlist out-and-out in any Satanist unit. There's reason, he still feels,
in everything. So he remains, for the time, like one of the angels whom
the Renaissance poet represented as reincarnate in man; the ones who in
the insurrection of Lucifer were not for Jehovah nor yet for his enemy.
CHAPTER XV
ANY CURE?
I
How shall it all be set right? For it must be, of course. A people that
did not wait to be pushed off its seat by the Kaiser is not likely now
to turn its face to the wall and die inertly of shortage of faith and
general moral debility. Some day soon we shall have to cease squatting
among the potsherds and crabbing each other, and give all the strength
we have left to the job of regaining the old control of ourselves and
our fate which, in the days of our health, could only be kept by putting
forth constantly the whole force of the will. "Not to be done," you may
say. And, of course, it will be a miracle. But only the everyday miracle
done in somebody's body, or else in his soul. When the skin shines white
and tight over the joints, and the face is only a skull with some
varieties of expression, and the very flame flickers and jumps in the
lamp, the body will bend itself up to expel a disease that it could not,
in all its first splendour of health, keep from the door. In all the
breeds of cowardly livers--drunkards, thieves, liars, sorners,
drug-takers, all the kinds that have run from the enemy, throwing away
as they ran every weapon that better men use to repel him--you will find
some that turn in the end and rend with their bare hands the fiend that
they could not face with their bow and their spear.
But these recoveries only come upon terms: no going back to heaven
except through a certain purgatorial passage. There, while it lasts, the
invalid must not expect to enjoy either the heady visions of the fever
that is now taking its leave or the more temperate beatitude of the
health that may presently come. He lies reduced to animal, almost
vegetable, matter, quite joyless and unthrilled, and has to abide in
numb passivity, like an unborn child's, whatever may come of the million
minute molecular changes going on unseen in the enigmatic darkness of
his tissues, where tiny cell is adding itself to tiny cell to build he
knows not what. And then some day the real thing, the second birth as
wonderful as the first, comes of itself and the stars are singing
together all right and the sons of God shouting for joy. The same way
with the spirit, except that the body faints, and so is eased, at some
point in any rising scale of torment: the spirit has to go on through
the mill without such anæsthetics as fainting. So the man who has gone
far off the rails in matters of conduct, and tries to get back to them,
has such hells of patience to live through, and out of, as no liquid
fire known to the war chemists could make for the flesh. To possess your
soul in patience, with all the skin and some of the flesh burnt off your
face and hands, is a job for a boy compared with the pains of a man who
has lived pretty long in the exhilarating world that drugs or strong
waters seem to create and is trying to live now in the first bald
desolation created by knocking them off, the time in which
The dulled heart feels
That somewhere, sealed with hopeless seals,
The unmeaning heaven about him reels,
And he lies hurled
Beyond the roar of all the wheels
Of all the world.
And yet no other way out. Disease and imbecility and an early and
ignoble death, or else that stoic facing, through interminable days, of
an easily escapable dulness that may be anything from an ache up to an
agony.
II
That is about where we stand as a nation. Of course, a few fortunates
mailed in a happy, indefeasible genius of wonder and delight at
everything round them are all right. And so are a few clods of whole-hog
insensibility. Most of us, on the whole, find that effort is less fun
than it was, and many things somewhat dull that used to sparkle with
interest; the salt has lost, not all, but some of its savour; the
grasshopper is a bit of a burden; old hobbies of politics, social
causes, liberal comradeships, the loves and wars of letters and art,
which used to excite, look at times as if they might only have been, at
the best, rather a much ado about nothing; buzzing about our heads there
come importunate suspicions that much of what we used to do so keenly
was hardly worth doing, and that the dim, far goals we used to struggle
towards were only possibly worth trying for and are, anyhow, out of
reach now. That is the somewhat sick spirit's condition. The limp apathy
that we see at elections, the curious indifference in presence of public
wrongs and horrors, the epidemic of sneaking pilferage, the slackening
of sexual self-control--all these are symptomatic like the furred
tongue, subnormal heat, and muddy eye.
Like the hard drinker next morning, we suffer a touch of Hamlet's
complaint, the malady of the dyspeptic soul, of indolent kings and of
pampered youth before it has found any man's work to try itself on--
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
To me are all the uses of the world!
Not the despair of the battered, vanquished, or oppressed, but the
moping of the relaxed, the surfeited, or the morbid. Glad as we all were
to be done with the war, its ends left even the strongest of us a little
let down, as the ends of other long and intense excitements, good or
bad, do. As Ibsen's young woman out in search of thrills would have
said, there were harps in the air during the war. Many of them were
disagreeable in their timbre, but still they were harps. Since the war a
good many of the weaker vessels have somehow failed to find harps in the
air, though there are really plenty of them in full vibration. So they
have run about looking for little pick-me-ups and nips of something
mildly exciting to keep up to par their sagging sense of the
adventuresomeness of life. Derby sweeps never had such a vogue; every
kind of gamble has boomed; dealers in public entertainment have found
that the rawest sensationalism pays better than ever--anything that will
give a fillip, any poor new-whisky fillip, to jaded nerves.
III
Of course, life itself is all right. It never grows dull. All dullness
is in the mind; it comes out thence and diffuses itself over everything
round the dull person, and then he terms everything dull, and thinks
himself the victim of the impact of dull things. In stupid rich people,
in boys and girls deadeningly taught at dead-alive schools, in all
disappointed weaklings and in declining nations, this loss of power to
shed anything but dullness upon what one sees and hears is common
enough. Second-rate academic people, Victorian official art, the French
Second Empire drama, late Latin literature exhibit its ravages well. In
healthy children, in men and women of high mental vitality, in places
where any of the radio-activity of gifted teaching breaks out for a
while, and in swiftly and worthily rising nations the mind is easily
delighted and absorbed by almost any atom of ordinary experience and its
relation to the rest. The wonder and beauty and humour of life go on
just the same as ever whether Spain or Holland or Italy feel them or
miss them; youth would somewhere hear the chimes at midnight with the
stir they made in Shakespeare's wits although all England were peopled
for ages with dullards whose pastors and masters had trained them to
find the divine Falstaffiad as dull as a thaw.
It need not come to that. Sick as we are, we have still in reserve the
last resource of the sick, that saving miracle of recuperative force
with which I have bored you. To let the sick part of our soul just be
still and recover; to make our alcoholized tissues just do their work
long enough on plain water--that, if we can but do it, is all the
sweeping and garnishing needed to make us possible dwelling-places again
for the vitalizing spirit of sane delight in whatever adventure befalls
us. How, then, to do it? Not, I fancy, by any kind of pow-wow or palaver
of congress, conference, general committee, sub-committee, or other
expedient for talking in company instead of working alone. This is an
individual's job, and a somewhat lonely one, though a nation has to be
saved by it. To get down to work, whoever else idles; to tell no lies,
whoever else may thrive on their uses; to keep fit, and the beast in you
down; to help any who need it; to take less from your world than you
give it; to go without the old drams to the nerves--the hero stunt, the
sob story, all the darling liqueurs of war emotionalism, war vanity, war
spite, war rant and cant of every kind; and to do it all, not in a
sentimental mood of self-pity like some actor mounting in an empty
theatre and thinking what treasures the absent audience has lost, but
like a man on a sheep-farm in the mountains, as much alone and at peace
with his work of maintaining the world as God was when he made it.
You remember the little French towns which the pestle and mortar of war
had so ground into dust, red and white, that each separate brick went
back at last, dust to dust, to mix with the earth from which it had
come. The very clay of them has to be put into moulds and fired again.
To some such remaking of bricks, some shaping and hardening anew of the
most elementary, plainest units of rightness in action, we have to get
back. Humdrum decencies, patiently practised through millions of
undistinguished lives, were the myriad bricks out of which all the
advanced architecture of conduct was built--the solemn temples of
creeds, gorgeous palaces of romantic heroism, cloud-capped towers of
patriotic exaltation. And now, just when there seems to be such a babble
as never before about these grandiose structures, bricks have run short.
Something simple, minute, and obscure, wholly good and not pulled up at
all, something almost atomic--a grain of wheat, a thread of wool, a
crystal of clean salt, figures best the kind of human excellence of
which our world has now most need. We would seem to have plunged on too
fast and too far, like boys who have taken to spouting six-syllabled
words until they forget what they had learnt of the alphabet. The moral
beauty of perfect contrition is preached to a beaten enemy by our Press
while the vitals of England are rotting with unprecedented growths of
venereal disease: an England of boundlessly advertised heroes and saints
has ousted the England in which you would never, wherever you travelled,
be given wrong change on a bus.
The wise man saved his little city, "yet no man remembered that same
poor man," and no one had better take to this way of saving England if
what he wants is public distinction. It will be a career as
undistinguished as that of one of the extra corpuscles formed in the
blood to enable a lowland man to live on Himalayan heights. Our best
friends for a long time to come will not be any of the standing
cynosures of reporters' eyes; they will find a part of their
satisfaction in being nobodies; assured of the truth of the saying that
there is no limit to what a man can do so long as he does not care a
straw who gets the credit for it. Working apart from the whole overblown
world of war valuations, the scramble for honours earned and unearned,
the plotting and jostling for front places on the stage and larger
letters on the bill, the whole life that is commonly held up to
admiration as great and enviable, they will live in a kind of retreat
almost cloistral; plenty of work for the faculties, plenty of rest for
the nerves, control for desire and atrophy for conceit. Hard?--yes, but
England is worth it.
IV
Among the mind's powers is one that comes of itself to many children and
artists. It need not be lost, to the end of his days, by anyone who has
ever had it. This is the power of taking delight in a thing, or rather
in anything, everything, not as a means to some other end, but just
because it is what it is, as the lover dotes on whatever may be the
traits of the beloved object. A child in the full health of his mind
will put his hand flat on the summer turf, feel it, and give a little
shiver of private glee at the elastic firmness of the globe. He is not
thinking how well it will do for some game or to feed sheep upon. That
would be the way of the wooer whose mind runs on his mistress's money.
The child's is sheer affection, the true ecstatic sense of the thing's
inherent characteristics. No matter what the things may be, no matter
what they are good or no good for, there they are, each with a thrilling
unique look and feel of its own, like a face; the iron astringently cool
under its paint, the painted wood familiarly warmer, the clod crumbling
enchantingly down in the hands, with its little dry smell of the sun and
of hot nettles; each common thing a personality marked by delicious
differences.
This joy of an Adam new to the garden and just looking round is brought
by the normal child to the things that he does as well as those that he
sees. To be suffered to do some plain work with the real spade used by
mankind can give him a mystical exaltation: to come home with his legs,
as the French say, re-entering his body from the fatigue of helping the
gardener to weed beds sends him to sleep in the glow of a beatitude that
is an end in itself. Then the paradoxes of conduct begin to twinkle into
sight; sugar is good, but there is a time to refrain from taking it
though you can; a lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet,
strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the
scrape and left out the lie. Divine unreason, as little scrutable and
yet as surely a friend as the star that hangs a lamp out from the Pole
to show you the way across gorse-covered commons in Surrey. So he will
toe the line of a duty, not with a mere release from dismay, but
exultantly, with the fire and lifting of heart of the strong man and the
bridegroom, feeling always the same secret and almost sensuous
transport, while he suppresses a base impulse, that he felt when he
pressed the warm turf with his hand or the crumbling clay trickled warm
between his fingers.
The right education, if we could find it, would work up this creative
faculty of delight into all its branching possibilities of knowledge,
wisdom, and nobility. Of all three it is the beginning, condition, or
raw material. At present it almost seems to be the aim of the
commonplace teacher to take it firmly away from any pupil so blessed as
to possess it. How we all know the kind of public school master whose
manner expresses breezy comradeship with the boys in facing jointly the
boredom of admittedly beastly but still unavoidable lessons! And the
assumption that life out of school is too dull to be faced without the
aid of infinitely elaborated games! And the girl schools where it seems
to be feared that evil must come in any space of free time in which
neither a game nor a dance nor a concert nor a lecture with a lantern
intervenes to rescue the girls from the presumed tedium of mere youth
and health! Everywhere the assumption that simple things have failed;
that anything like hardy mental living and looking about for oneself, to
find interests, is destined to end ill; that the only hope is to keep up
the full dose of drugs, to be always pulling and pushing, prompting and
coaxing and tickling the youthful mind into condescending to be
interested. You know the effects: the adolescent whose mind seems to
drop when taken out of the school shafts, or at least to look round,
utterly at a loss, with a plaintive appeal for a suggestion of something
to do, some excitement to come, something to make it worth while to be
alive on this dull earth. We saw the effects in our hapless brain work
in the war.
But if we were to wait to save England till thousands of men and women
brought up in this way see what they have lost and insist on a better
fate for their children we might as well write England off as one with
Tyre and Sidon already. Her case is too pressing. She cannot wait for
big, slowly telling improvements in big institutions, although
improvements must come. She has to be saved by a change in the
individual temper. We each have to fall back, with a will, on the only
way of life in which the sane simplicity of joy in plain things and in
common rightness of action can be generated. Health of mind or body
comes of doing wholesome things--perhaps for a long time without joy in
doing them, as the sick man lies chafing, eating the slops that are all
he is fit for, or as the dipsomaniac drinks in weariness and depression
the insipid water that is to save him. Then, on some great day,
self-control may cease to be merely the sum of many dreary acts of
abstention; it may take life again as an inspiriting force, both a
warmth and a light, such as makes nations great.
CHAPTER XVI
FAIR WARNING
I
To give the cure a chance we must have a long quiet time. And we must
secure it now.
For the moment, no doubt, war has gone out of fashion; it pines in the
shade, like the old horsehair covers for sofas, or antimacassars of
lace. Hardly a day can pass, even now, but someone finds out, with a
start and a look of displeasure, that war has been given its chance and
has not done quite so well as it ought to have done. One man will write
to the Press, in dismay, that the meals in the Simplon express are not
what they were in 1910. Another, outward bound by Calais to Cannes, has
found that the hot-water plant in his sleeping-compartment struck
work--and that in a specially cold sector down by the Alps. Thus does
war in the end, knock at the doors of us all: like the roll of the earth
upon its axis, it brings us, if not death or destitution or some ashy
taste in the mouth, at any rate a sense of a fallen temperature in our
bunks. However non-porous our minds, there does slowly filter into us
the thought that when a million of a country's men of working age have
just been killed there may be a plaguey dearth of the man-power needed
to keep in pleasant order the lavatories of its _trains de luxe_. Sad to
think how many tender minds, formed in those Elysian years--Elysian for
anyone who was not poor--before the war, will have to suffer, probably
for many years, these little shocks of realization.
Surely there never was any time in the life of the world when it was so
good, in the way of obvious material comfort, to be alive and fairly
well-to-do as it was before the war. Think of the speed and comfort and
relative cheapness of the Orient Express; of the way you could wander,
unruined, through long æsthetic holidays in Italy and semi-æsthetic,
semi-athletic holidays in the Alps; of the week-end accessibility of
London from Northern England; of the accessibility of public schools for
the sons of the average parson or doctor; of the penny post, crown of
our civilization--torn from us while the abhorred half-penny post for
circulars was yet left; of the Income Tax just large enough to give us a
pleasant sense of grievance patriotically borne, but not to prostrate
us, winter and summer, with two "elbow jolts" or "Mary Ann punches" like
those of the perfected modern prize-fighter.
Many sanguine well-to-do people dreamt, in the August of 1914, that the
war, besides attaining its primary purpose of beating the enemy, would
disarrange none of these blessings; that it would even have as a
by-product a kind of "old-time Merrie England," with the working classes
cured of the thirst for wages and deeply convinced that everyone who was
not one of themselves was a natural ruler over them. For any little
expense to which the war might put us the Germans would pay, and our
troops would return home to dismiss all trade-union officials and to
regard the upper and middle classes thenceforth as a race of heaven-sent
colonels--men to be followed, feared, and loved. Ah, happy vision,
beautiful dream!--like Thackeray's reverie about having a very old and
rich aunt. The dreamer awakes among the snows of the Mont Cenis with a
horrid smell in the corridor and the hot-water pipes out of order. And
so war has gone out of fashion, even among cheery well-to-do-people.
II
But may it not come into fashion again? Do not all the great fashions
move in cycles, like stars? When our wars with Napoleon were just over,
and all the bills still to be paid, and the number of visibly one-legged
men at its provisional maximum, must not many simple minds have thought
that surely man would never idealize any business so beastly and costly
again? And then see what happened. We were all tranquilly feeding, good
as gold, in the deep and pleasant meadows of the long Victorian peace
when from some of the frailest animals in the pasture there rose a
plaintive bleat for war. It was the very lambs that began it. "Shall we
never have carnage?" Stevenson, the consumptive, sighed to a friend.
Henley, the cripple, wrote a longing "Song of the Sword." Out of the
weak came forth violence. Bookish men began to hug the belief that they
had lost their way in life; they felt that they were Neys or Nelsons
_manqués_, or cavalry leaders lost to the world. "If I had been born a
corsair or a pirate," thought Mr. Tappertit, musing among the ninepins,
"I should have been all right." Fragile dons became connoisseurs. _faute
de mieux_, of prize-fighting; they talked, nineteen to the dozen, about
the still, strong man and "straight-flung words and few," adored "naked
force," averred they were not cotton-spinners all, and deplored the
cankers of a quiet world and a long peace. Some of them entered quite
hotly, if not always expertly, into the joys and sorrows of what they
called "Tommies," and chafed at the many rumoured refusals Of British
innkeepers to serve them, little knowing that only by these great acts
of renunciation on the part of licensees has many a gallant private been
saved from falling into that morgue an "officer house," and having his
beer congealed in the glass by the refrigerative company of colonels.
The father and mother of this virilistic movement among the well-read
were Mr. Andrew Lang, the most donnish of wits, and one of the wittiest.
Lang would review a new book in a great many places at once. So, when he
blessed, his blessing would carry as far as the more wholly literal
myrrh and frankincense wafted abroad by the hundred hands of Messrs.
Boot. The fame of Mr. Rider Haggard was one of Lang's major products.
Mr. Haggard was really a man of some mettle. By persons fitted to judge
he was believed to have at his fingers' ends all the best of what is
known and thought by mankind about turnips and other crops with which
they may honourably and usefully rotate. But it was for turning his back
upon these humdrum sustainers of life and writing, in a rich Corinthian
style, accounts of fancy "slaughters grim and great," that his flame
lived and spread aloft, as Milton says, in the pure eyes and perfect
witness of Lang. Another nursling of Lang's was the wittier Kipling,
then a studious youth exuding Border ballads and Bret Harte from every
pore, but certified to carry about him, on paper, the proper smell of
blood and tobacco.
Deep answered unto deep. In Germany, too, the pibrochs of the professors
were rending the skies, and poets of C4 medical grade were tearing the
mask from the hideous face of peace. The din throughout the bookish
parts of Central and Western Europe suggested to an irreverent mind a
stage with a quaint figure of some short-sighted pedagogue of tradition
coming upon it, round-shouldered, curly-toed, print-fed, physically
inept, to play the part of the war-horse in Job, swallowing the ground
with fierceness and rage, and "saying among the trumpets 'Ha, ha!'" You
may see it all as a joke. Or as something rather more than a joke, in
its effects. Mr. Yeats suggested that an all-seeing eye might perceive
the Trojan War to have come because of a tune that a boy had once piped
in Thessaly. What if all our millions of men had to be killed because
some academic Struwwelpeter, fifty years since, took on himself to pipe
up "Take the nasty peace away!" and kick the shins of Concord, his most
kindly nurse?
III
If he did, it was natural. All Struwwelpeters are natural. All
heirs-apparent are said to take the opposite side to their fathers still
on the throne. And those learned men were heirs to the age of the
Crystal Palace, the age of the first "Locksley Hall," with its
"parliament of man" and "federation of the world," the age that laid a
railway line along the city moat of Amiens and opened capacious Hôtels
de la Paix throughout Latin Europe, the age when passports withered and
Baedeker was more and more, the age that in one of its supreme moments
of ecstasy founded the London International College, an English public
school (now naturally dead) in which the boys were to pass some of their
terms among the heathen in Germany or France.
The cause of peace, like all triumphant causes, good as they may be, had
made many second-rate friends. It had become safe, and even sound, for
the worldly to follow. The dullards, the people who live by phrases
alone, the scribes who write by rote and not with authority--most of
these had drifted into its service. It had become a provocation, a
challenge, vexing those "discoursing wits" who "count it," Bacon says,
"a bondage to fix a belief." A rebound had to come. And those
arch-rebounders were men of the teaching and writing trades, wherein the
newest fashions in thought are most eagerly canvassed, and any
inveterate acquiescence in mere common sense afflicts many bosoms with
the fear of lagging yards and yards behind the foremost files of time;
perhaps--that keenest agony--of having nothing piquant or startling to
say, no little bombs handy for conversational purposes. "I sat down,"
the deserving young author says in _The Vicar of Wakefield_, "and,
finding that the best things remained to be said on the wrong side, I
resolved to write a book that should be wholly new. I therefore dressed
up three paradoxes with some ingenuity. They were false, indeed, but
they were new. The jewels of truth have been so often imported by others
that nothing was left for me to import but some splendid things that, at
a distance, looked every bit as well." "Peace on earth, good-will
towards men," "Blessed are the peacemakers"--these and the like might be
jewels; but they were demoded; they were old tags; they were clichés of
bourgeois morality; they were _vieux jeu_, like the garnets with which,
in _She Stoops to Conquer_, the young woman of fashion declined to be
pacified when her heart cried out for the diamonds.
IV
Then the Church itself must needs take a hand--or that part of the
Church which ever cocks an eye at the latest fashions in public opinion,
the "blessed fellows," like Poins, that "think as every man thinks" and
help to swell every passing shout into a roar. I find among old papers a
letter written in Queen Victoria's reign by an unfashionable curmudgeon
whose thought would not keep to the roadway like theirs. "I see," this
rude ironist writes, "that 'the Church's duty in regard to war' is to be
discussed at the Church Congress. That is right. For a year the heads of
our Church have been telling us what war is and does--that it is a
school of character, that it sobers men, cleans them, strengthens them,
knits their hearts, makes them brave, patient, humble, tender, prone to
self-sacrifice. Watered by 'war's red rain,' one bishop tells us, virtue
grows; a cannonade, he points out, is an 'oratorio'--almost a form of
worship. True; and to the Church men look for help to save their souls
from starving for lack of this good school, this kindly rain, this
sacred music. Congresses are apt to lose themselves in wastes of words.
This one must not--surely cannot--so straight is the way to the goal. It
has simply to draft and submit a new Collect for 'war in our time,' and
to call for the reverent but firm emendation, in the spirit of the best
modern thought, of those passages in Bible and Prayer-book by which even
the truest of Christians and the best of men have at times been blinded
to the duty of seeking war and ensuing it.
"Still, man's moral nature cannot, I admit, live by war alone. Nor do I
say, with some, that peace is wholly bad. Even amid the horrors of peace
you will find little shoots of character fed by the gentle and timely
rains of plague and famine, tempest and fire; simple lessons of patience
and courage conned in the schools of typhus, gout, and stone; not
oratorios, perhaps, but homely anthems and rude hymns played on knife
and gun, in the long winter nights. Far from me to 'sin our mercies' or
to call mere twilight dark. Yet dark it may become. For remember that
even these poor makeshift schools of character, these second-bests,
these halting substitutes for war--remember that the efficiency of every
one of them, be it hunger, accident, ignorance, sickness or pain, is
menaced by the intolerable strain of its struggle with secular doctors,
plumbers, inventors, school-masters, and policemen. Every year thousands
who would in nobler days have been braced and steeled by manly tussles
with smallpox or diphtheria are robbed of that blessing by the great
changes made in our drains. Every year thousands of women and children
must go their way bereft of the rich spiritual experience of the widow
and the orphan. I try not to despond, but when I think of all that
Latimer owed to the fire, Regulus to a spiked barrel, Socrates to
prison, and Job to destitution and disease--when I think of these things
and then think of how many of my poor fellow creatures in our modern
world are robbed daily of the priceless discipline of danger, want, and
torture, then I ask myself--I cannot help asking myself--whether we are
not walking into a very slough of moral and spiritual squalor.
"Once more, I am no alarmist. As long as we have wars to stay our souls
upon, the moral evil will not be grave; and, to do the Ministry justice,
I see no risk of their drifting into any long or serious peace. But weak
or vicious men may come after them, and it is now, in the time of our
strength, of quickened insight and deepened devotion, that we must take
thought for the leaner years when there may be no killing of multitudes
of Englishmen, no breaking up of English homes, no chastening blows to
English trade, no making, by thousands, of English widows, orphans, and
cripples--when the school may be shut and the rain a drought and the
oratorio dumb."
But what did a few unfashionable curmudgeons count for, against so many
gifted divines?
V
And yet all mortal things are subject to decay, even reactions, even
decay itself, and there comes a time when the dead Ophelia may justly be
said to be not decomposing, but recomposing successfully as violets and
so forth. Heirs-apparent grow up into kings and have little heirs of
their own who, hearkening to nature's benevolent law, become stout
counter-reactionists in their turn. So now the pre-war virilists, the
literary braves who felt that they had supped too full of peace, have
died in their beds, or lost voice, like the cuckoos in June, and a
different breed find voice and pipe up. These are the kind, the numerous
kind, whose youth has supped quite full enough of war. For them Bellona
has not the mystical charm, as of grapes out of reach, that she had for
the Henleys and Stevensons. All the veiled-mistress business is off.
Battles have no aureoles now in the sight of young men as they had for
the British prelate who wrote that old poem about the "red rain." The
men of the counter-reaction have gone to the school and sat the oratorio
out and taken a course of the waters, after the worthy prelate's
prescription. They have seen trenches full of gassed men, and the queue
of their friends at the brothel-door in Bethune. At the heart of the
magical rose was seated an earwig.
Presently all the complaisant part of our Press may jump to the fact
that the game of idealizing war is now, in its turn, a back number. Then
we may hear such a thudding or patter of feet as Carlyle describes when
Louis XV was seen to be dead and the Court bolted off, _ventre à terre_,
along the corridors of Versailles, to kiss the hand of Louis XVI. And
then will come the season of danger. Woe unto Peace, or anyone else,
when all men speak well of her, even the base. When Lord Robert Cecil
and Mr. Clynes and Sir Hubert Gough stand up for the peace which
ex-soldiers desire, it is all right. But what if Tadpoe and Taper stood
up for it? What if all the vendors of supposedly popular stuff, all the
timid gregarious repeaters of current banalities, all the largest
circulations in the solar system were on the side of peace, as well as
her old bodyguard of game disregarders of fashion and whimsical
stickers-up for Christianity, chivalry, or sportsmanship?
We must remember that, in the course of nature, the proportion of former
combatants among us must steadily decline. And war hath no fury like a
non-combatant. Can you not already forehear, in the far distance, beyond
the peace period now likely to come, the still, small voice of some
Henley or Lang of later days beginning to pipe up again with Ancient
Pistol's ancient suggestion: "What? Shall we have incision? Shall we
imbrue?" And then a sudden _furore_, a war-dance, a beating of tom-toms.
And so the whole cycle revolving again. "Seest thou not, I say, what a
deformed thief this fashion is? How giddily a' turns about all the hot
bloods between fourteen and five-and-thirty? Sometimes fashioning them
like Pharaoh's soldiers in the reechy painting, sometimes like god Bel's
priests in the old church window; sometimes like the shaven Hercules in
the smirched worm-eaten tapestry?" Anything to be in the fashion.
There is only one thing for it. There must still be five or six million
ex-soldiers. They are the most determined peace party that ever existed
in Britain. Let them clap the only darbies they have--the Covenant of
the League of Nations--on to the wrists of all future poets, romancers,
and sages. The future is said to be only the past entered by another
door. We must beware in good time of those boys, and fiery elderly men,
piping in Thessaly.
* * * * * *
Transcriber's note:
Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
Typographical errors were silently corrected.
Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a
predominant form was found in this book.
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