After four days of their labours as sumpter mules, or muleteers, the company would plod back for another four days of duty in trenches, come out yet more universally tired at their end, and drift back to rest-billets, out of ordinary shell-fire, for their sixteen days or so of "divisional rest." Here their work was really lighter, but still it was work and not rest. It did not wholly wind up in most of the men the spring that had run down while they were in the line. And then the division would go again into the line, and the old cycle be worked through once more. So most of the privates were tired the whole of the time; sometimes to the point of torment, sometimes much less, but always more or less tired.
IV
Many, of course, lost health and drifted "down the line," as it was called, to the base, where work might be light, but much of the company rather more blighting than any work to the spirit. Hither, to all the divisional base depots and into the ultimate dust-hole or sink that was called "Base Details," there gravitated most of the walking wreckage and wastage, physical and moral, of active warfare: convalescent, sick and wounded from hospital, men found too old or too young for trench work, broken-nerved men smuggled out of the way before disaster should come, and malingerers triumphant and chuckling, or only semi-successful, suspect, and tediously over-acting.
There was the good man fretting and raging to get back to his friends and the fight, away from this tainted backwater in which the swelling flotillas of the unfit and the unwilling were left to rot at their moorings. There was the pallid and bent London clerk, faintly disguised in khaki but too blind to fight, now working furiously fifteen hours each day of his seven-day week in the orderly room—no Sunday here, no Saturday afternoon—for pure love of international right. There was the dug-out, the Grenadier Guards sergeant-major of sixty, the handsome and melancholy old boy, a Victorian survivor into our little vulgar age, with a careful and dignified manner and mighty memories of a radiant past in London, when all parades, for a good-conduct-man well up in his drill, were over by half-past ten in the morning and he had a permanent midnight pass into barracks and so could act as a super at one of the theatres every night except when doing a guard, and see life and move among genius and beauty, making good money. Oh, yes, he had acted with Irving and Booth, and lived the life, and heard the chimes at midnight.
But also the veteran crooks, old dregs of the Regular Army, Queen Victoria's worst bargains, N.C.O.'s who would boast that they had not been once on parade in the last twenty years, waiters and caterers for the whole of their martial careers till the liquor fairly lipped over the edge of their eyelids and bleached the blue of their eyes. You would hear one of them boast that no doctor on earth could find him out to be fit when he, the tactician, wished otherwise. Another had made pathological studies, learning up the few conjectural symptoms of maladies that show no outward trace; as science advanced to the point of recording detectively the true state of the heart he had deftly changed ground, relinquished rheumatism of that organ and done some work of research into pains in the head; much faith did he put, too, in the sciatic nerve. When a couple of these savants slept in one tent they would argue after Lights Out—was sciatica safest, or shell-shock, or general debility? "Them grey hairs should be a lot of use to you, corp.," one of them would quite feelingly say to a new man in the tent, "when you want to get swinging the lead."
While these ignoble presences befouled the air of a base, good things, also, were there; but you seldom quite knew which was which. All very well for the King to come out with his "Go, hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques and you were not there." But if you, too, were not at the battle—if some unlucky effect of combustion compelled you to live as a messmate of Crillon, far, far from Arques when the battle was on, you would have to use tact. Somehow the man who was undisguisedly keen to get back to the centre of things felt a slight coldness pervading the air about him. It was as if a workman, who might have so easily let well alone, had sinned against the trade-union spirit, helped to raise the standard of employers' expectation, forced the pace of dutifulness in a world where authority could be trusted to speed things up quite enough. Even officers tended to deprecate the higher temperatures of ardour in other ranks of base establishments. "You're out for distinction,"—one honest rationalist would advise—"that's what it is. Well, trust to me—up the line's not the place where you get it. Every time a war ends you'll find most of the decorations go to the people at G.H.Q., L. of C., and the bases. So, if you want a nice row of ribbons to show to your kiddies, stop here." And another would put it more subtly: "Isn't one's duty, as a rule, just here and now?" Some were good-natured; they were not for keeping the primrose path all to themselves. Others were anxious lest the taking of steep and thorny paths, as they thought them, should come to be "the done thing."
V
The men who could not shirk the choice of Hercules, for other people, were the doctors. The stay of every N.C.O. or man at a base depot was on probation. Each had to go before a Medical Board soon after he came. It adjudged him either T.B. (Temporary Base) or P.B. (Permanent Base). If marked T.B. he went before the Board again once a week, and each time he might be marked T.B. again, or, if his disablement was thought graver or more likely to last, P.B.; or he might be marked A. (Active Service), and then he would join the next draft from home going up to his own battalion or another battalion of his regiment. When once a man was marked P.B. he only went before the Board once a month, and each time he, too, might be marked either P.B., T.B., or A.
Chance relegated me once for some weeks to a base and gave me the job of marching parties of crocks, total and partial, real, half-real, and sham, across the sand dunes to the place where the faculty did its endeavour to sort them. A picture remains of a hut with a long table in it: two middle-aged army doctors sitting beyond it, like dons at a Viva, and each of my party in turn taking his stand at attention, my side of the table, facing the Board, like so many Oliver Twists. The presiding officer takes a manifest pride in knowing all the guile and subtlety of soldier-men. No taking him in—that is proclaimed in every look and tone. He has had several other parties before him to-day, and the lamp of his faith, never dazzling while these rites are on, has burnt low.
"Well, my man—cold feet, I suppose?" he begins, to the first of my lamentable party. As some practitioners are said to begin all treatments with a prefatory purge, so would this psychologist start with a good full dose of insult and watch the patient's reaction under the stimulus.