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.