Ten years after

by Philip Gibbs

The Agony of England

Beneath the mask of cheeriness England agonised. Fathers grew old and white and withered because of their sons’ sacrifice, but kept a stiff upper lip when the telegraph boy was the messenger of death. The mothers of boys out there suffered martyrdom in wakeful nights, in dreadful dreams, though they kept smiling when the boys came home between the battles and—worst of all—went back again. They hid their tears, steeled their hearts to courage. Even the pretty ladies—the most frivolous, the most light-hearted—gave their love so easily because it was all they had to give, and they would grudge nothing to the boys. Apart from a vicious little set, the women were beyond words wonderful in service and self-sacrifice. In spite of all the weakness of human nature and the low passions stirred up by the war, the British people as a whole during these years of great ordeal were sublime in resignation and spiritual courage. In millions of little houses in mean streets, and in all the houses of the rich, to which a double knock came with news of a dead or wounded boy, the awful meaning of the war burnt its way into the soul of the people. But they would not yield to weakness and had a stubborn obstinacy of faith in final victory—somehow, in a way they could not see. Anyhow, they wouldn’t “let down” their men or show the white feather. They did not know that many of the men were sullen because of this unreasonable optimism, this “bloody cheerfulness.” They did not know that in the trenches, under an awful gunfire, many men looked back to England as to another world, which they no longer knew, from which they were cut off by spiritual distances no longer to be bridged, and for whose safety, frivolity, profiteers and prostitutes they were asked to die, to be shell-shocked, gassed or mutilated, under incompetent generalship and for inadequate reasons.

The meaning of the war in those men’s minds had become less simple and clear-cut since the days when it seemed a straight fight between idealism and brutality—the Allies with all the right on their side against the Germans with all the wrong. To the end some men thought like that, and they were lucky. They were the generals, the statesmen, and, now and then, the fighting men with unbending will and purpose. But to many of our officers and men sitting in their ditches, as I know, the war was no longer as simple as that. It was no longer, they thought, a conflict between idealism and brutality. It had developed into a monstrous horror, a crime against humanity itself, in which all the fighting nations were involved equally in a struggle for existence against powers beyond their own control. The machinery of destruction was greater than the men who were its victims. Human flesh and spirit were of no avail against long-range guns and high explosives. The common German soldiers, blown to bits by our guns, torn to fragments by our mines, poisoned by our gas, as our men were so destroyed, had no more responsibility for these devilish things than we had. It may have been so in the beginning—though that was doubtful. What did they know in their peasant skulls? But now they were just the victims of the ghastly madness that had stricken us all, of the crime against civilisation into which we had all staggered. There was no getting out of it, of course. The Germans had to be killed or they would kill us, but the whole damned thing had happened against the will of those who on both sides of the lines cowered under screeching shells and hated it. Surely to God, they argued, it ought not to have happened! It was civilisation that had been at fault, not those poor devils in the mud and mire.

It was the statesmen and politicians who were guilty of this thing, or the Kings and the Emperors, or the schoolmasters and the journalists, or the whole structure of society based on competition and commercial greed, supported by armies and fleets, or the incurable stupidity of the human race, or a denial of God in the hearts of men; but not the fault, certainly, of those fellows from Bavaria and Saxony who were waiting for our next attack and writing picture-postcards in their dug-outs to women who would soon be widows. So many of our men began to talk and think, as every padre knows and as I know. So, even in France, the soldiers argued, if we may believe Barbusse and others, whom I believe as evidence of that. So certainly the German troops were thinking, as I heard from prisoners and afterwards from those who had fought to the last. The original meaning of the war altered, or was overwhelmed, as man sank more deeply into the mud and misery of it on both sides. It was only a few who held fast to its first principles of right and wrong, simple, clear, and utterly divided by a line of trenches and barbed wire.