In saying the war was over I was wrong. I should have said the fighting. There were other and equally terrible sides of this world-tragedy which I was destined to see and feel.
Let me sketch briefly the facts which led to my return to duty.
The Medical Authorities sent me to a place called The Funkhole of England, a seaside town where never a bomb from airships or raiding Gothas disturbed the sunny calm, a community of convalescent hospitals with a list of rules as long as your arm, hotels full of moneyed Hebrews, who only journeyed to London by day to make more money, and retired by night to the security of their wives in the Funkhole, shop-keepers who rejoiced in the war because it enabled them to put up their prices two hundred per cent., and indecent flappers always ready to be picked up by any subaltern.
The War Office authorities hastened to notify me that I was now reduced to subaltern, but somehow I was “off” flappers. Another department begged me to get well quickly, because, being no longer fit to command a battery, I was wanted for that long-forgotten liaison job.
The explanation of degrading from Major to subaltern is not forthcoming. Perhaps the Government were thinking of the rate payers. The difference in pay is about two shillings and sixpence a day, and there were many thousands of us thus reduced.—But it does not make for an exuberant patriotism. My reply was that if I didn’t go out as a Major, I should not hurry to get well. This drew a telegram which stated that I was re-appointed acting-Major while employed as liaison officer, but what they gave with one hand they took back with the other, for the telegram ordered me to France again three weeks before the end of my sick leave.
It was a curious return. But for the fact that I was still in uniform I might have been a mere tourist, a spectator. The job was more “cushy” even than that of R.T.O. or M.L.O. Was I glad? Enormously. Was I sorry? Yes, for out there in the thick of it were those men of mine, in a sense my children, who had looked to me for the food they ate, the clothes they wore, the pay they drew, the punishments they received, whose lives had been in my keeping so long, who, for two years, had constituted all my life, with whom I had shared good days and bad, short rations and full, hardships innumerable, suffering indescribable. It was impossible to live softly and be driven in a big Vauxhall car, while they were still out there, without a twinge of conscience, even though one was not fit to go back to them. I slept in a bed with sheets, and now and again a hot bath, receiving letters from home in four days instead of eight, and generally enjoying all the creature comforts which console the back-area officer for the lack of excitement only found in the firing line. It was a period of doing little, observing much and thinking a great deal among those lucky ones of the earth, whose lines had been cast in peaceful waters far behind even the backwash of that cataclysmic tidal wave in which so many less fortunate millions had been sucked under.
My first job was to accompany a party of French war correspondents to the occupied territory which the enemy had recently been forced to evacuate,—Dunkerque, Ostend, Bruges, Courtrai, Denain, Lille. There one marvelled at the courage of those citizens who for four years had had to bow the neck to the invader. From their own mouths we heard stories of the systematic, thought-out cruelty of the Germans who hurt not only the bodies of their victims, but their self-respect, their decency, their honour, their souls. How they survived that interminable hopeless four years of exaggerated brutality and pillage, cut off from all communication with the outside world; fed with stories of ghastly defeats inflicted upon their countrymen and allies, of distrust and revolt between England and France; fined and imprisoned for uncommitted offences against military law, not infrequently shot in cold blood without trial; their women submitted to the last indignities of the “Inspection sanitaire,” irrespective of age or class, wrenched from their homes and deported into the unknown interior, sent to work for the hated enemy behind the firing line, unprotected from the assault of any German soldier or officer,—for those women there were worse things than the firing trenches.
We saw the results of the German Official Department of Demobilization, which had its headquarters in Alsace-Lorraine at Metz, under a General, by whose direct orders all the factories in the occupied regions were dismantled and sent back piecemeal to Germany, the shells of the plant then being dynamited under pretence of military necessity. We saw a country stripped of its resources, gutted, sacked, rendered sterile.
What is the Kultur, the philosophy which not only renders such conduct thinkable, but puts it into the most thorough execution? Are we mad to think that such people can be admitted into a League of Nations until after hundreds of years of repentance and expiation in sackcloth and ashes? They should be made the slaves of Europe, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the road-sweepers and offal-burners, deprived of a voice in their own government, without standing in the eyes of all peoples.