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.