CHAPTER XI
STARS IN THEIR COURSES
I
"Doth any man doubt," the wise Bacon asks, "that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition and unpleasing to themselves?" One of the most sweetly flattering hopes that we had in the August of 1914 was that in view of the greatness of the occasion causes were not going to have their effects.
Nothing new, you may truthfully answer, in that. The improvement is one which man, in his cups and his dreams and other seasons of maudlin vision, has always perceived to have just come at last. Now, he exaltedly says to himself, for a clean break with my inadequately wise and brilliant past. Away with that plaguey old list of my things done which should not have been done, and of things left undone which I ought to have done. At the end of popular plays the sympathetic youth who had idled, philandered, or stolen till then would book to the Rand or the Yukon, fully assured that "in that free, outdoor life" one's character is not one's fate any longer; blessed, "out there," are Europe's slackers and wasters, for they shall inherit the earth, or its auriferous parts. Grasshoppers, too, if they drank or resorted to sentimental novels and plays, might have gallant little revolts in their hearts, and chirrup "Down with causation!" and feel cock-sure that some good-natured god would give them a chance of "redeeming their pasts" quite late in autumn, and put in their way a winter provision far ampler than that which crowns the coolie labours of those sorry daughters of Martha, the bees. But, for working this benign miracle in the soul, no other strong waters can equal the early days of a war. If, with unbecoming sobriety, anyone hints, in such days, that causes may still retain some sort of control, he is easily seen to have no drop of true blood in him; base is the slave who fears we must reap as we sowed; shame upon spiritless whispers about any connection between the making of beds and the lying thereon; now they shall see what excellent hothouse grapes will be borne by the fine healthy thistles that we have been planting and watering.
Something in it too, perhaps—at least some centuries ago. When a great nation's army was only a few thousands strong the freak and the fluke had their chance. An Achilles or two, at the top of their form on the day, might upset the odds. But when armies are millions of men, and machinery counts for more than the men, the few divine accidents of exceptional valour cannot go far. With eleven a-side a Grace or an Armstrong may win a game off his own bat. He will hardly do that in a game where the sides are eleven thousand apiece. More and more, as the armies increase, must the law of averages have it its own dreary way; glorious uncertainties wither; statistical "curves" of relative national fitness to win, and to stand the strain of winning or losing, overbear everything else. What are the two armies' and the two nations' relative numbers? What is the mean physique on each side? And the mean intelligence? How far has each nation's history—social, political, religious, industrial—tended to make its men rich in just pride, self-reliance, high spirit, devotion, and hardihood? How many per cent on each side have been sapped by venereal disease? How much of their work have its officers troubled to learn? These are the questions. The more men you have in a war, and the longer it lasts, the more completely has it to lose the romance of a glorious gamble and sink—or, as some would say, rise—to the plane of a circumstantial, matter-of-fact liquidation of whatever relative messes the nations engaged have made of the whole of their previous lives.
II
Any soldier will tell you the bayonet does not win battles. It only claims, in a way that a beaten side cannot ignore, a victory won already by gunfire, rifles, gas, bombs, or some combination of these. The bayonet's thrust is more of a gesture: a cogent appeal, like the urgent "How's that?" from the whole of the field when a batsman is almost certainly out. But you may go much further back. That predominant fire itself is just such another appeal. Its greater volume and better direction are only the terms of an army's or a nation's claim to be registered as the winner of what it had really won long ago when, compared with the other nation, it minded its job and lived cleanly and sanely. All war on the new huge scale may be seen as a process, very expensive, of registration or verification. Whenever a war is declared you may say that now, in a sense, it is over at last; all the votes have been cast; the examination papers are written; the time has come for the counting of votes and adjudging of marks. Of course, we may still "do our bit," but the possible size of our bit had its limit fixed long ago by the acts of ourselves and our fathers and rulers which made us the men that we are and no more. No use now to try to cadge favour with any ad hoc God of Battles. For this, of all gods, is the most dourly Protestant. No squaring of him on the deathbeds of people who would not work while it was yet light.
From many points in the field—some of the best were in the tops of high trees on high ground—you could watch through your glass the casting up of accounts. You might survey from beginning to end a British attack up a bare opposite slope, perhaps with home troops on the left and Canadian or Australasian troops on the right. You had already seen them meet on roads in the rear: battalions of colourless, stunted, half-toothless lads from hot, humid Lancashire mills; battalions of slow, staring faces, gargoyles out of the tragical-comical-historical-pastoral edifice of modern English rural life; Dominion battalions of men startlingly taller, stronger, handsomer, prouder, firmer in nerve, better schooled, more boldly interested in life, quicker to take means to an end and to parry and counter any new blow of circumstance, men who had learned already to look at our men with the half-curious, half-pitying look of a higher, happier caste at a lower. And now you saw them, all these kinds, arise in one continuous line out of the earth and walk forward to bear in the riddled flesh and wrung spirit the sins of their several fathers, pastors, and masters.
Time after time there would come to the watching eye, to the mind still desperately hugging the hope that known causes might not bring their normal effects, the same crushing demonstration that things are as we have made them. Sometimes the line of home troops would break into gaps and bunches, lose touch and direction and common purpose, some of the knots plunging on into the back of our barrage or feasting some enemy machine-gunner on their density, others straggling back to the place whence they had started, while the Dominion troops still ambled steadily on, their line delicately waving but always continuous, closing again, as living flesh closes over a pinprick, wherever an enemy shell tore a hole.