Perhaps the undersized boys from our slums and the under-witted boys from the "agricultural, residential, and sporting estates" of our auctioneers' advertisements would get to their goal, the spirit wrestling prodigies of valour out of the wronged flesh, hold on there for an hour or two with the shells splashing the earth up about them like puddle water when great rain-drops make its surface jump, and then fall back under orders, without any need, the brain of our army failing to know how to use what its muscle had won. Then, while you saw the triumphant Australians throw back a protective flank from the left of their newly-won front to the English right, far in their rear, you knew bitterly what the Australians were saying once more: "They've let us down again!" "Another Tommy officer who didn't know he'd won!" As if it were the fault, that day, of anyone there! Our men could only draw on such funds of nerve and physique, knowledge and skill, as we had put into the bank for them. Not they, but their rulers and "betters," had lost their heads in the joy of making money fast out of steam, and so made half of our nation slum-dwellers. It was not they who had moulded English rustic life to keep up the complacency of sentimental modern imitators of feudal barons. It was not they who had made our Regular Army neither aristocratic, with the virtues of aristocracy, nor democratic, with the different virtues of democracy, nor keenly professional with the professional virtues of gusto and curiosity about the possibilities of its work. Delicta majorum immeritus lues. Like the syphilitic children of some jolly Victorian rake, they could only bring to this harsh examination such health and sanity as all the pleasant vices of Victorian and Edwardian England had left them.
III
The winter after the battle of Loos a sentry on guard at one part of our line could always see the frustrate skeletons of many English dead. They lay outside our wire, picked clean by the rats, so that the khaki fell in on them loosely—little heaps of bone and cloth half hidden now by nettles and grass. If the sentry had been a year in the army he knew well enough that they had gone foredoomed into a battle lost before a shot was fired. After the Boer War, you remember, England, under the first shock of its blunders, had tried to find out why the Staff work was so bad. What it found, in the words of a famous Report, was that the fashion in sentiment in our Regular Army was to think hard work "bad form"; a subaltern was felt to be a bit of a scrub if he worried too much about discovering how to support an attack when he might be more spiritedly employed in playing polo; "The nobleness of life," as Antony said, when he kissed Cleopatra, was to go racing or hunting, not to sit learning how to forecast the course of great battles and how to provide for answering their calls. And so the swathes of little brown bundles, with bones showing through, lay in the nettles and grass.
Consider the course of the life of the British Regular officer as you had known him in youth—not the pick, the saving few, the unconquerably sound and keen, but the average, staple article made by a sleek, complacent, snobbish, safe, wealth-governed England after her own image. Think of his school; of the mystic aureole of quasi-moral beauty attached by authority there to absorption in the easy thing—in play; the almost passionate adoration of all those energies and dexterities which, in this world of evolution towards the primacy of the acute, full brain, are of the least possible use as aids to survival in men and to victory in armies. Before he first left home for school he may have been a normal child who only craved to be given some bit, any odd bit, of "real work," as an experience more thrilling than games. Like most children, he may have had a zestful command of fresh, vivid, personal speech, his choice of words expressing simply and gaily the individual working of his mind and his joy in its work. Through easy contact with gardeners, gamekeepers, and village boys he often had established a quite natural, unconscious friendliness with people of different social grades. He was probably born of the kind that pries young, that ask, when they play on sea sands, why there are tides, and what goes on in the sky that there should be rain. And then down came the shades of the prison-house. To make this large, gay book of fairy tales, the earth, dull and stale to a child importunately fingering at its covers might seem a task to daunt the strongest. But many of the teachers of our youth are indomitable men. They can make earth's most ardent small lover learn from a book what a bore his dear earth can be, with her strings of names of towns, rivers, and lakes, her mileages à faire mourir, and her insufferable tale of flax and jute. With an equal firmness your early power of supple and bright-coloured speech may be taken away and a rag-bag of feeble stock phrases, misfits for all your thoughts, and worn dull and dirty by everyone else, be forced upon you instead of the treasure you had. You may leave school unable to tell what stars are about you at night or to ask your way to a journey's end in any country but your own. Between your helpless mind and most of your fellow-countrymen thick screens of division are drawn, so that when you are fifteen you do not know how to speak to them with a natural courtesy; you have a vague idea that they will steal your watch if you leave it about. Above all, you have learnt that it is still "bad form" to work; that the youth with brains and no money may well be despised by the youth with money and no brains; that the absorbed student or artist is ignoble or grotesque; that to be able to afford yourself "a good time" is a natural title to respect and regard; and that to give yourself any "good time" that you can is an action of spirit. So it went on at prep. school, public school, Sandhurst, Camberley. That was how Staff College French came to be what it was. And as it was what it was, you can guess what Staff College tactics and strategy were, and why all the little brown bundles lay where they did in the nettles and grass.
IV
You are more aware of the stars in war than in peace. A full moon may quite halve the cares of a sentry; the Pole Star will sometimes be all that a company has, when relieved, to guide it back across country to Paradisiac rest; sleeping often under the sky, you come to find out for yourself what nobody taught you at school—how Orion is sure to be not there in summer, and Aquila always missing in March, and how the Great Bear, that was straight overhead in the April nights, is wont to hang low in the north in the autumn. Childish as it may seem to the wise, a few years' nightly view of these and other invariable arrangements may give a simple soul a surprisingly lively twinge of what the ages of faith seem to have meant by the fear of God—the awesome suspicion that there is some sort of fundamental world order or control which cannot by any means be put off or dodged or bribed to help you to break its own laws. "Anything," the old Regular warrant-officers say, "can be wangled in the army," but who shall push the Dragon or the Great Dog off his beat? And—who knows?—that may be only a part of a larger system of cause and effect, all of it as hopelessly undodgable.
These apprehensions were particularly apt to arise if you had spent an hour that day in seeing herds of the English "common people" ushered down narrowing corridors of barbed wire into some gap that had all the German machine guns raking its exit, the nature of Regular officers' pre-war education in England precluding the prompt evolution of any effectual means on our side to derange the working of this ingenious abattoir. We had asked for it all. We had made the directing brains of our armies the poor things that they were. Small blame to them if in this season of liquidation they failed to produce assets which we had never equipped them to earn—mental nimbleness, powers of individual observation, quickness to cap with counter-strokes of invention each new device of the fertile specialists opposite. Being as we had moulded them, they had probably done pretty well in doing no worse.
What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted.
Who shall say what efforts it may have cost some of those poor custom-ridden souls not to veto, for good and all, an engine of war so far from "smart" as the tank, or to accept any help at all from such folk as the new-fangled, untraditional airmen, some of whom took no shame to go forth to the fray in pyjamas. Not they alone, but all of ourselves, with our boastful chatter about the "public school spirit," our gallant, robust contempt for "swats" and "smugs" and all who invented new means to new ends and who trained and used their brains with a will—we had arranged for these easy battues of thousands of Englishmen, who, for their part, did not fail. To-morrow you would see it all again—a few hundred square yards of ground gained by the deaths, perhaps, of twenty thousand men who would