IV
With spring comes also the thought of the Next Push.
But we do not talk quite so glibly of pushes as we did. Neither, for that matter, does Brother Boche. He has just completed six weeks' pushing at Verdun, and is beginning to be a little uncertain as to which direction the pushing is coming from.
No; once more the military textbooks are being rewritten. We started this war under one or two rather fallacious premises. One was that Artillery was more noisy than dangerous. When Antwerp fell, we rescinded that theory. Then the Boche set out to demonstrate that an Attack, provided your Artillery preparation is sufficiently thorough, and you are prepared to set no limit to your expenditure of Infantry, must ultimately succeed. To do him justice, the Boche supported his assertions very plausibly. His phalanx bundled the Russians all the way from Tannenburg to Riga. The Austrians adopted similar tactics, with similar results.
We were duly impressed. The world last summer did not quite realize how far the results of the campaign were due to German efficiency and how far to Russian unpreparedness. (Russia, we realise now, found herself in the position of the historic Mrs. Partington, who endeavoured to repel the Atlantic with a mop. This year, we understand, she is in a position to discard the mop in favour of something far, far better.)
Then came—Verdun. Military science turned over yet another page, and noted that against consummate generalship, unlimited munitions, and selfless devotion on the part of the defence, the most spectacular and highly-doped phalanx can spend itself in vain. Military science also noted that, under modern conditions, the capture of this position or that signifies nothing: the only method of computing victory is to count the dead on either side. On that reckoning, the French at Verdun have already gained one of the great victories of all time.
"In fact," said Colonel Kemp, "this war will end when the Boche has lost so many men as to be unable to man his present trench-line, and not before."
"You don't think, sir, that we shall make another Push?" suggested Angus M'Lachlan eagerly. The others were silent: they had experienced a Push already.
"Not so long as the Boche continues to play our game for us, by attacking. If he tumbles to the error he is making, and digs himself in again—well, it may become necessary to draw him. In that case, M'Lachlan, you shall have first chop at the Victoria Crosses. Afraid I can't recommend you for your last exploit, though I admit it must have required some nerve!"
There was unseemly laughter at this allusion. Four nights previously Angus had been sent out in charge of a wiring-party. He had duly crawled forth with his satellites, under cover of darkness, on to No Man's Land; and, there selecting a row of "knife-rests" which struck him as being badly in need of repair, had well and truly reinforced the same with many strands of the most barbarous brand of barbed wire. This, despite more than usually fractious behaviour upon the part of the Boche.
Next morning, through a sniper's loophole, he exhibited the result of his labours to Major Wagstaffe. The Major gazed long and silently upon his subordinate's handiwork. There was no mistaking it. It stood out bright and gleaming in the rays of the rising sun, amid its dingy surroundings of rusty ironmongery. Angus M'Lachlan waited anxiously for a little praise.
"Jolly good piece of work," said Major Wagstaffe at last. "But tell me, why have you repaired the Boche wire instead of your own?"
"The only enemy we have to fear," continued Colonel Kemp, rubbing his spectacles savagely, "is the free and independent British voter—I mean, the variety of the species that we have left at home. Like the gentleman in Jack Point's song, 'He likes to get value for money'; and he is quite capable of asking us, about June or July, 'if we know that we are paid to be funny?'—before we are ready. What's your view of the situation at home, Wagstaffe? You're the last off leave."
Wagstaffe shook his head.
"The British Nation," he said, "is quite mad. That fact, of course, has been common property on the Continent of Europe ever since Cook's Tours were invented. But what irritates the orderly Boche is that there is no method in its madness. Nothing you can go upon, or take hold of, or wring any advantage from."
"As how?"
"Well, take compulsory service. For generations the electorate of our country has been trained by a certain breed of politician—the Bandar-log of the British Constitution—to howl down such a low and degrading business as National Defence. A nasty Continental custom, they called it. Then came the War, and the glorious Voluntary System got to work."
"Aided," the Colonel interpolated, "by a campaign of mural advertisement which a cinema star's press agent would have boggled at!"
"Quite so," agreed Wagstaffe. "Next, when the Voluntary System had done its damnedest—in other words, when the willing horse had been worked to his last ounce—we tried the Derby Scheme. The manhood of the nation was divided into groups, and a fresh method of touting for troops was adopted. Married shysters, knowing that at least twenty groups stood between them and a job of work, attested in comparatively large numbers. The single shysters were less reckless—so much less reckless, in fact, that compulsion began to materialise at last."
"But only for single shysters," said Bobby Little regretfully.
"Yes; and the married shyster rejoiced accordingly. But the single shyster is a most subtle reptile. On examination, it was found that the single members of this noble army of martyrs were all 'starred,' or 'reserved', or 'ear-marked'—or whatever it is that they do to these careful fellows. So the poor old married shyster, who had only attested to show his blooming patriotism and encourage the others, suddenly found himself confronted with the awful prospect of having to defend his country personally, instead of by letter to the halfpenny press. Then the fat was fairly in the fire! The married martyr—"
"Come, come, old man! Not all of them!" said Colonel Kemp. "I have a married brother of my own, a solicitor of thirty-eight, who is simply clamouring for active service!"
"I know that, sir," admitted Wagstaffe quickly. "Thank God, these fellows are only a minority, and a freak minority at that; but freak minorities seem to get the monopoly of the limelight in our unhappy country."
"The whole affair," mused the Colonel, "can hardly be described as a frenzied rally round the Old Flag. By God," he broke out suddenly, "it fairly makes one's blood boil! When I think of the countless good fellows, married and single, but mainly married, who left all and followed the call of common decency and duty the moment the War broke out—most of them now dead or crippled; and when I see this miserable handful of shirkers, holding up vital public business while the pros and cons of their wretched claims to exemption are considered—well, I almost wish I had been born a Boche!"
"I don't think you need apply for naturalisation papers yet, Colonel," said Wagstaffe. "The country is perfectly sound at heart over this question, and always was. The present agitation, as I say, is being engineered by the more verminous section of our incomparable daily Press, for its own ends. It makes our Allies lift their eyebrows a bit; but they are sensible people, and they realise that although we are a nation of lunatics, we usually deliver the goods in the end. As for the Boche, poor fellow, the whole business makes him perfectly rabid. Here he is, with all his splendid organisation and brutal efficiency, and he can't even knock a dent into our undisciplined, back-chatting, fool-ridden, self-depreciating old country! I, for one, sympathise with the Boche profoundly. On paper, we don't deserve to win!"
"But we shall!" remarked that single-minded paladin, Bobby Little.
"Of course we shall! And what's more, we are going to derive a national benefit out of this war which will in itself be worth the price of admission!"
"How?" asked several voices.
Wagstaffe looked round the table. The Battalion were for the moment in Divisional Reserve, and consequently out of the trenches. Some one had received a box of Coronas from home, and the mess president had achieved a bottle of port. Hence the present symposium at Headquarters Mess. Wagstaffe's eyes twinkled.
"Will each officer present," he said, "kindly name his pet aversion among his fellow-creatures?"
"A person or a type?" asked Mr. Waddell cautiously.
"A type."
Colonel Kemp led off.
"Male ballet-dancers," he said.
"Fat, shiny men," said Bobby Little, "with walrus mustaches!"
"All conscientious objectors, passive resisters, pacifists, and other cranks!" continued the orthodox Waddell.
"All people who go on strike during war-time," said the Adjutant.
There was an approving murmur—then silence.
"Your contribution, M'Lachlan?" said Wagstaffe.
Angus, who had kept silence from shyness, suddenly blazed out:—
"I think," he said, "that the most contemptible people in the world to-day are those politicians and others who, in years gone by, systematically cried down anything in the shape of national defence or national inclination to personal service, because they saw there were no votes in such a programme; and who now"—Angus's passion rose to fever-heat,—"stand up and endeavour to cultivate popular favour by reviling the Ministry and the Army for want of preparedness and initiative. Such men do not deserve to live! Oh, sirs—"
But Angus's peroration was lost in a storm of applause.
"You are adjudged to have hit the bull's-eye, M'Lachlan," said Colonel Kemp. "But tell us, Wagstaffe, your exact object in compiling this horrible catalogue."
"Certainly. It is this. Universal Service is a fait accompli at last, or is shortly going to be—and without anything very much in the way of exemption either. When it comes, just think of it! All these delightful people whom we have been enumerating will have to toe the line at last. For the first time in their little lives they will learn the meaning of discipline, and fresh air, and ésprit de corps. Isn't that worth a war? If the present scrap can only be prolonged for another year, our country will receive a tonic which will carry it on for another century. Think of it! Great Britain, populated by men who have actually been outside their own parish; men who know that the whole is greater than the part; men who are too wide awake to go on doing just what the Bandar-log tell them, and allow themselves to be used as stalking-horses for low-down political ramps! When we, going round in bath-chairs and on crutches, see that sight—well, I don't think we shall regret our missing arms and legs quite so much, Colonel. War is Hell, and all that; but there is one worse thing than a long war, and that is a long peace!"
"I wonder!" said Colonel Kemp reflectively. He was thinking of his wife and four children in distant Argyllshire.
But the rapt attitude and quickened breath of Temporary Captain Bobby Little endorsed every word that Major Wagstaffe had spoken. As he rolled into his "flea-bag" that night, Bobby requoted to himself, for the hundredth time, a passage from Shakespeare which had recently come to his notice. He was not a Shakespearian scholar, nor indeed a student of literature at all; but these lines had been sent to him, cut out of a daily almanac, by an equally unlettered and very adorable confidante at home:—
"And gentlemen in England now a-bed,
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day!"
Bobby was the sort of person who would thoroughly have enjoyed the
Battle of Agincourt.