And yet authority wore, in the eyes of its troops in the field, an inexpert air—sublime, benevolent, but somehow inexpert. They had begun to notice it even before leaving England. Imagine the headquarters Staff of a district command watching a test for battalion bombing officers and sergeants at the close of a divisional bombing course in 1915: the instructor in charge a quick-witted Regular N.C.O. who has shone at Loos and is now decorated, commissioned, slightly shell-shocked, and sent home to teach, full of the new craft and subtlety of trench war; the pupils all picked for the job and devouringly keen, half of them old cricketers, all able-bodied, and all now able, after hard practice during the course, to drop a bomb on to any desired square yard within thirty-five yards of their stance; and then the Staff, tropically dazzling in their red and gold, august beyond words, but genial, benign, encouraging, only too ready to praise things that they would see to be easy if only they knew more about them and were not like middle-aged mothers watching their offspring at football—so a profane bombing sergeant describes them that night to his mess.
V
"Your Old Army's all bloody born amatoors," an Australian of ripe war experience remarked with some frankness in France. His immediate occasion for generalizing so rashly was somebody's slip in passing certain grenades as good for field use. Most of our hand and rifle grenades undoubtedly were. If anything they were too fine for it, too fit to beautify drawing-rooms as well. One objet d'art, a delight to the eye, was said to cost its country one pound five as against the two francs for which France was composing an angel of death less pretty but equally virtuous. Still, ours would kill, if you had the heart to break up an object so fair. But the batch that made the Australian blaspheme, though good in design, were mismade. They were made as if the people who made them had not guessed what they were for.
As you know, the outside of most kinds of grenade is a thick metal case serrated with deeply-cut lines that cross each other like those more shallow sunk lines on crocodile-leather, only at right angles. These lines of weakness, cut into the metal, mark out almost the whole of the case into little squares standing up in relief, sixteen or thirty-two or forty-eight or seventy-two according to type. The burst, if all goes well, attacks the lines of weakness, cuts them right through, and so disperses all the little squares of brass, cast-iron, or steel radially as flying bits of shrapnel. What led the Australian to sin was that this batch had come out to France with their lines of weakness cut not half as deep as they should be. The burst only ripped the case open without breaking it up. It had been lovely in life, and in death it was not divided. It just gave a jump, the length of a frog's, and presented the foe with a cheap good souvenir, reassuring besides.
There must have been a good many thousands of these. They may have done good—perhaps won a good-conduct mark to some War Office hero for rushing them out in good time to the front; perhaps assisted some politician to feel that he was riding a whirlwind and directing a storm, solving munition crises and winning the war. All human happiness counts. In France, if the physical effects of their detonation were poor, the moral reverberations which followed were lively. A bombing sergeant, sent down the line for a rest and instructing new drafts in a hollow among the sand dunes at Etaples well out of authority's hearing, would start his lecture by holding one of them up and saying: "This 'ere, men, is a damn bad grenade. But it's all that the bloody tailors give you to work with. So just pay attention to me." And then he would go on to pour out his cornucopia of tips, fruits of empiric research, for doing what somebody's slackness or folly had made it so much less easy to do.
VI
Whenever you passed from east to west across the British zone during the war you would find somebody saying with fervour that somebody else, a little more to the west and a little higher in rank, had not even learnt his job well enough to keep out of the way. Subalterns, who by some odd arrangement of flukes had come through our attacks on the Somme in 1916 and in Artois and Flanders next year, would hoot at the notion—it had a vogue with part of the Staff in a tranquil far west—that the way to get on with the war was to raise a more specific thirst for blood in the private. Battalion commanders did not soon tire of telling how in the busiest days of big battles the unseen powers would pester them for instant returns of the number of shovels they had, or of the number of men who in civil life had been fitters, or had been moulders. Brigadiers would savagely wonder aloud whether it ever occurred to a higher command that to make little attack after little attack, each on a narrow, one-brigade front, was merely to ask to have each attack squashed flat in its turn by a fan-like convergence of fire from the enemy's guns on both flanks, not to speak of supports. The day the bad turn came for us, in the two-chaptered battle of Cambrai, an officer on the Staff of one of the worst-hit divisions observed: "Our attitude is just 'we told you so'." When the good turn in the war had come the next summer there was a day, not so good as the rest, when two squadrons of horse were sent to charge, in column, up a straight, treeless rising road for half a mile and take a little wood at the top. There were many machine-guns in the wood—how could there not have been?—and the whole air sang with warnings of that. No horse or man either got to the wood or came back. They were all in a few seconds lying in the white dust, almost in the order they rode in, the officer in command a little ahead of the rest. It looked, in its formal completeness, like a thing acted, a cinema play showing a part of Sennacherib's army on which the angel had breathed. On the road back from the place I met a corps commander—a great man at his work. When he heard his face crumpled up for a moment—he was a soft-hearted man. "Another of those damned cavalry follies!" he growled. His voice had the scorn that the man who is versed in to-day's practice feels for the men who still move among yesterday's theories. So it was, from east to west, all the way.
All the wise men were not in the east. It was the fault of the war, the outlandish, innovatory war that did not conform to the proper text-books as it ought to have done; an unimagined war of flankless armies scratching each other's faces across an endless thorn hedge, not dreamt of in Staff College philosophy; a war that was always putting out of date the best that had been known and thought and invented, always sending everyone to school again; unkind, above all, to us who, if well-to-do, bring up our young to have a proper respect for the past and to feel that if yesterday's parasol will not keep out the rain of to-day, then it ought to, and no one can blame them for using it.