Tonight we pull our guns out. Where we’re going nobody knows. Our infantry are already marching out in sections and the Imperials are taking over from us. Staff officers with their red tabs go up and down the trenches. Brass-hats pass down the sunken road and pop their heads in at my observation post to enquire their direction. There’s mystery and excitement in the air. They can’t be withdrawing us for a third time merely to go into training. It must be for the counter-stroke which we have so long expected. But when are we going to strike and where?
I’d like to see our Captain at this moment. The whole impatience of our corps through this summer seems to be summed up in his person. Like all of us, only more so, he has listened since the spring with a kind of agony for the galloping of the black horseman who rides alone. He himself is a man who rides solitarily. His eyes have a steady forward gaze, quiet and firm and unflinching. I shouldn’t say he was a good soldier—not in details or in the ordinary sense; he came into the war, as most of us did, too late in life for that. In peace times he was a painter and a dilletante, noted for many oddities which do not matter now. He was successful and courted and on the crest of the wave. When war broke out, he downed tools at once and offered himself for cannon-fodder. In August 1914 a new way of valuing men came into fashion. Death is the sincerest of all democrats. It did not matter who we were, what our attainments, wealth, position: the chimney-sweep and the genius were of equal worth. Kreisler’s bow-arm was only of service to his country for firing a rifle. A man might have the greatest singing voice in Europe; his voice would not help. We required of him his body; it would stop a bullet. When we reached the trenches, we learnt even more dramatically that nothing that we had been counted. Only the heart that was in us could raise us above our fellows—or to use the more colloquial army term, “the guts". Guts would enable a man to fight on when hope had retreated, until hope in very shame returned. A man who hadn’t guts was shot at the back of the line by his comrades as a deserter. A man who had was shot up front as a white man with his face towards the enemy. There was no appeal from these alternatives; birth, talents, money could not disturb the sentence. There was only one standard by which our worth was estimated—-the measure of our sacrificial courage.
Of course we were all inefficient. We had never dreamt of being soldiers till the deluge of brutality poured out of Germany and threatened to destroy the world. We were specialists in various small departments of human knowledge; our special knowledge, unless it was military, was no longer of service. That was the hard part of it—that many of us who had known the pride of being specialists, were now called upon to approve ourselves in an effort for which we were totally unfitted. Of all the qualities which we had cultivated so carefully the world asked for the one to which we had paid least attention—our courage. So the Captain laid down his brush, turned his canvases to the wall, joined as an artillery driver and went to grooming horses. When his training was ended and he was shot out to the Front, he learnt almost over-night the tremendous lesson that it’s the spirit that counts—the thing that a man is essentially inside himself and not the thing which his social advantages make him appear to other people. A man cannot camouflage under shell-fire; in the face of death his true worth becomes known to everybody. When war started, Judgment Day commenced in the world for every man who put on khaki. God estimated us in the front-line, and God’s eyes were the eyes of our fellows.
I believe the Captain had expected that he would prove himself a coward—most of us expected that for ourselves. When he found that he could be fearless, the relief was so triumphant that he became possessed by an immense elation. He took the wildest chances and was always trying to outdo in heroism his own last bravest act. Promotion came rapidly; at the end of eight months he was a sergeant and before the year was out had gained his commission. He joined our brigade as an officer in September of 1916, when we were waiting on the high ground behind Albert, preparatory to being flung into the cauldron of the Somme offensive. He was treated with suspicion at first; no one expected much from a chap who had been a painter. The Colonel sniffed contemptuously when he reported at the tent which was brigade headquarters.
“What were you before you became a soldier?”
“A painter, sir.”
“Of houses?”
“No. Of landscapes and portraits.”
To a hustler who has flung railroads across continents, outwitting nature and abbreviating time, to have been a painter seemed a sorry occupation—an occupation which indicated long hair, innumerable cigarettes, artists’ models and silken ways of life. The Colonel himself had been in the North-West Mounted Police and had lived furiously, tracking outlaws and rounding up Indians.
“So you’ve been a painter, Heming,” he sniffed. “Out here we don’t do much that’s in your line. We deal in only two colours: the mud-brown of weariness and the scarlet of sacrifice. We don’t copy landscapes—we make them.”