IV
With this guilty weakness gaining upon them our troops drove the Germans from Albert to Mons. There were scandalous scenes on the way. Imagine two hundred German prisoners grinning inside a wire cage while a little Cockney corporal chaffs them in half the dialects of Germany! His father, he says, was a slop tailor in Whitechapel; most of his journeymen came from somewhere or other in Germany—"Ah! and my dad sweated 'em proper," he says proudly; so the boy learnt all their kinds of talk. He convulses Bavarians now with his flow of Silesian. He fraternizes grossly and jubilantly. Other British soldiers laugh when one of the Germans sings, in return for favours received, the British ballad "Knocked 'em in the Ol' Kent Road." By the time our men had marched to the Rhine there was little hatred left in them. How can you hate the small boy who stands at the farm door visibly torn between dread of the invader and deep delight in all soldiers, as soldiers? How shall a man not offer a drink to the first disbanded German soldier who sits next to him in a public house at Cologne, and try to find out if he was ever in the line at the Brick-stacks or near the Big Crater? Why, that might have been his dog!
The billeted soldier's immemorial claim on "a place by the fire" carried on the fell work. It is hopelessly bad for your grand Byronic hates if you sit through whole winter evenings in the abhorred foe's kitchen and the abhorred foe grants you the uncovenanted mercy of hot coffee and discusses without rancour the relative daily yields of the British and the German milch cow. And then comes into play the British soldier's incorrigible propensity, wherever he be, to form virtuous attachments. "Love, unfoiled in the war," as Sophocles says. The broad road has a terribly easy gradient. When all the great and wise at Paris were making peace, as somebody said, with a vengeance, our command on the Rhine had to send a wire to say that unless something was done to feed the Germans starving in the slums it could not answer for discipline in its army; the men were giving their rations away, and no orders would stop them. Rank "Pro-Germanism," you see—the heresy of Edith Cavell; "Patriotism is not enough; I must have no hatred or bitterness in my heart." While these men fought on, year after year, they had mostly been growing more void of mere spite all the time, feeling always more and more sure that the average German was just a decent poor devil like everyone else. One trembles to think what the really first-class haters at home would have said of our army if they had known at the time.
V
Even at places less distant than home the survival of old English standards of fighting had given some scandal. In that autumn of the war when our generalship seemed to have explored all its own talents and found only the means to stage in an orderly way the greatest possible number of combats of pure attrition, the crying up of unknightliness became a kind of fashion among a good many Staff Officers of the higher grades. "I fancy our fellows were not taking many prisoners this morning," a Corps Commander would say with a complacent grin, on the evening after a battle. Jocose stories of comic things said by privates when getting rid of undesired captives became current in messes far in the rear. The other day I saw in a history of one of the most gallant of all British divisions an illustration given by the officer who wrote it of what he believed to be the true martial spirit. It was the case of a wounded Highlander who had received with a bomb a German Red Cross orderly who was coming to help him. A General of some consequence during part of the war gave a lecture, towards its end, to a body of officers and others on what he called "the fighting spirit." He told with enthusiasm an anecdote of a captured trench in which some of our men had been killing off German appellants for quarter. Another German appearing and putting his hands up, one of our men—so the story went—called out, "'Ere! Where's 'Arry? 'E ain't 'ad one yet." Probably some one had pulled the good general's leg, and the thing never happened. But he believed it, and deeply approved the "blooding" of 'Arry. That, he explained, was the "fighting spirit." Men more versed than he in the actual hand-to-hand business of fighting this war knew that he was mistaken, and that the spirit of trial by combat and that of pork-butchery are distinct. But that is of course. The notable thing was that such things should be said by anyone wearing our uniform. Twenty years before, if it had been rumoured, you would, without waiting, have called the rumour a lie invented by some detractor of England or of her army. Now it passed quite unhissed. It was the latter-day wisdom. Scrofulous minds at home had long been itching, publicly and in print, to bomb German women and children from aeroplanes, and to "take it out of" German prisoners of war. Now the disease had even affected some parts of the non-combatant Staff of our army.
VI
You know the most often quoted of all passages of Burke. Indeed, it is only through quotations of it that most of us know Burke at all—
But the age of chivalry is gone ... the unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.
Burke would never say a thing by halves. And as truth goes by halves, and declines to be sweeping like rhetoric, Burke made sure of being wrong to the tune of some fifty per cent. The French Revolution did not, as his beautiful language implies, confine mankind for the rest of its days to the procreation of curs. And yet his words do give you, in their own lush, Corinthian way, a notion of something that probably did happen, a certain limited shifting of the centre of gravity of West European morals or manners.
One would be talking like Burke—talking, perhaps you might say, through Burke's hat—if one were to say that the war found chivalry alive and left it dead. Chivalry is about as likely to perish as brown eyes or the moon. Yet something did happen, during the war, to which these wild words would have some sort of relation. We were not all Bayards in 1914; even then a great part of our Press could not tell indignation from spite, nor uphold the best cause in the world without turpitude. Nor were we all, after the Armistice, rods of the houses of Thersites and Cleon; Haig was still alive, and so were Gough and Hamilton and thousands of Arthurian subalterns and privates and of like-minded civilians, though it is harder for a civilian not to lose generosity during a war. But something had happened; the chivalrous temper had had a set-back; it was no longer the mode; the latest wear was a fine robust shabbiness. All through the war there had been a bear movement in Newbolts and Burkes, and, corresponding to this, a bull movement in stocks of the Little Flanigan group.