I
In the autumn of 1917 the war entered into an
autumn, or late middle-age, of its own. "Your young men," we are told, "shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams." The same with whole armies. But middle-aged armies or men may not have the mists of either morning or evening to charm them. So they may feel like Corot, when he had painted away, in a trance of delight, till the last vapour of dawn was dried up by the sun; then he said, "You can see everything now. Nothing is left," and knocked off work for the day. There was no knocking off for the army. But that feeling had come. A high time was over, a great light was out; our eyes had lost the use of something, either an odd penetration that they had had for a while, or else an odd web that had been woven across them, shutting only ugliness out.
The feeling was apt to come on pretty strong if you lived at the time on the top of the little hill of Cassel, west of Ypres. The Second Army's Headquarters were there. You might, as some Staff duty blew you about the war zone, be watching at daybreak one of that autumn's many dour bouts of attrition under the Passchendale Ridge, in the mud, and come back, the same afternoon, to sit in an ancient garden hung on the slope of the hill, where a great many pears were yellowing on the wall and sunflowers gazing fixedly into the sun that was now failing them. All the corn of French Flanders lay cut on the brown plain under your eyes, from Dunkirk, with its shimmering dunes and the glare on the sea, to the forested hills north of Arras. Everywhere lustre, reverie, stillness; the sinking hum of old bees, successful in life and now rather tired; the many windmills fallen motionless, the aureate light musing over the aureate harvest; out in the east the broken white stalks of Poperinghe's towers pensive in haze; and, behind and about you, the tiny hill city, itself in its distant youth the name-giver and prize of three mighty battles that do not matter much now. All these images or seats of outlived ardour, mellowed now with the acquiescence of time in the slowing down of some passionate stir in the sap of a plant or the spirit of insects or men, joined to work on you quietly. There, where the earth and the year were taking so calmly the end of all the grand racket that they had made in their prime, why not come off the high horse that we, too, in that ingenuous season, had ridden so hard? It was not now as it had been of yore. And why pretend that it was?
II
One leaf that had gone pretty yellow by now was the hope of perfect victory—swift, unsoured, unruinous, knightly: St. George's over the dragon, David's over Goliath. Some people at home seem to be still clinging hard to that first pretty vision of us as a gifted, lithe, wise little Jack fighting down an unwieldy, dastardly giant. But troops in the field become realists. Ours had seen their side visibly swelling for more than two years, till Jack had become a heavier weight than the giant and yet could not finish him off. We knew that our allies and we outnumbered the Germans and theirs. We knew we were just as well armed. We had seen Germans advancing under our fire and made no mistake about what they were worth. Our first vision of victory had gone the way of its frail sister dream of a perfect Allied comradeship. French soldiers sneered at British now, and British at French. Both had the same derisive note in the voice when they named the "Brav' Belges." Canadians and Australians had almost ceased to take the pains to break it to us gently that they were the "storm troops," the men who had to be sent for to do the tough jobs; that, out of all us sorry home troops, only the Guards Division, two kilted divisions and three English ones could be said to know how to fight. "The English let us down again"; "The Tommies gave us a bad flank, as usual"—these were the stirring things you would hear if you called upon an Australian division a few hours after a battle in which the lion had fought by the side of his whelps. Chilly, autumnal things; while you listened, the war was apparelled no longer in the celestial light of its spring.
An old Regular colonel, a man who had done all his work upon the Staff, said, at the time, that "the war was settling down to peace conditions." He meant no bitter epigram. He was indeed unfeignedly glad. The war was ceasing to be, like a fire or shipwreck, a leveller of ranks which, he felt, ought not to be levelled. Those whom God had put asunder it was less recklessly joining together. The first wild generosities were cooling off. Not many peers and heirs-apparent to great wealth were becoming hospital orderlies now. Since the first earthquake and tidal wave the disturbed social waters had pretty well found their old seemly levels again; under conscription the sons of the poor were now making privates; the sons of the well-to-do were making officers; sanity was returning. The Regular had faced and disarmed the invading hordes of 1914. No small feat of audacity, either. Think what the shock must have been—what it would be for any profession, just at the golden prime of rich opportunity and searching test, to be overrun of a sudden by hosts of keen amateurs, many of them quick-witted, possibly critical, some of them the best brains of the country, most of them vulgarly void of the old professional habits of mind, almost indecently ready to use new and outlandish means to the new ends of to-day.
But now the stir and the peril were over. The Old Army had won. It had scarcely surrendered a single strong point or good billet; Territorials and New Army toiled at the coolie jobs of its household. It had not even been forced, like kings in times of revolution, to make apparent concessions, to water down the pure milk of the word. It had become only the more intensely itself; never in any war had commands been retained so triumphantly in the hands of the cavalry and the Guards, the leaders and symbols of the Old Army resistance to every inroad of mere professional ardour and knowledge and strong, eager brains. When Sir Francis Lloyd relinquished the London District Command a highly composite mess in France discussed possible successors. "Of course," said a Guards colonel gravely—and he was a guest in the Mess—"the first point is—he must be a Guardsman." Peace conditions returning, you see; the peace frame of mind; the higher commands restored to their ancient status as property, "livings," perquisites, the bread of the children, not to be given to dogs. At home, too, peace conditions were taking heart to return. The scattered coveys of profiteers and job-hunters, almost alarmed by the first shots of the war, had long since met in security; "depredations as usual" was the word; and the mutual scalping and knifing of politicians had ceased to be shamefaced; who could fairly expect an old Regular Army to practise a more austere virtue than merchant princes and statesmen?
III
Even in trenches and near them, where most of the health was, time had begun to embrown the verdant soul of the army. "Kitchener's Army" was changing. Like every volunteer army, his had sifted itself, at its birth, with the only sieve that will riddle out, even roughly, the best men to be near in a fight. Till the first of the pressed men arrived at our front, a sergeant there, when he posted a sentry and left him alone in the dark, could feel about as complete a moral certitude as there is on the earth that the post would not be let down. For, whatever might happen, nothing inside the man could start whispering to him "You never asked to be here! if you do fail, it isn't your doing."