A Student in Arms: Second Series

by Donald Hankey

I had a letter the other day from an Oxford friend. In it was this phrase: "I loathe militarism in all its forms." Somehow it took me back quite suddenly to the days before the war, to ideas that I had almost completely forgotten. I suppose that in those days the great feature of those of us who tried to be "in the forefront of modern thought" was their riotous egotism, their anarchical insistence on the claims of the individual at the expense even of law, order, society, and convention. "Self-realization" we considered to be the primary duty of every man and woman.

The wife who left her husband, children, and home because of her passion for another man was a heroine, braving the hypocritical judgments of society to assert the claims of the individual soul. The woman who refused to abandon all for love's sake, was not only a coward but a criminal, guilty of the deadly sin of sacrificing her soul, committing it to a prison where it would languish and never blossom to its full perfection. The man who was bound to uncongenial drudgery by the chains of an early marriage or aged parents dependent on him, was the victim of a tragedy which drew tears from our eyes. The woman who neglected her home because she needed a "wider sphere" in which to develop her personality was a champion of women's rights, a pioneer of enlightenment. And, on the other hand, the people who went on making the best of uncongenial drudgery, or in any way subjected their individualities to what old-fashioned people called duty, were in our eyes contemptible poltroons.

It was the same in politics and religion. To be loyal to a party or obedient to a Church was to stand self-confessed a fool or a hypocrite. Self-realization, that was in our eyes the whole duty of man.

And then I thought of what I had seen only a few days before. First, of battalions of men marching in the darkness, steadily and in step, towards the roar of the guns; destined in the next twelve hours to charge as one man, without hesitation or doubt, through barrages of cruel shell and storms of murderous bullets. Then, the following afternoon, of a handful of men, all that was left of about three battalions after ten hours of fighting, a handful of men exhausted, parched, strained, holding on with grim determination to the last bit of German trench, until they should receive the order to retire. And lastly, on the days and nights following, of the constant streams of wounded and dead being carried down the trench; of the unceasing search that for three or four days was never fruitless.

Self-realization! How far we have travelled from the ideals of those pre-war days. And as I thought things over I wondered at how faint a response that phrase, "I loathe militarism in all its forms," found in my own mind.

Before the war I too hated "militarism." I despised soldiers as men who had sold their birthright for a mess of pottage. The sight of the Guards drilling in Wellington Barracks, moving as one man to the command of their drill instructor, stirred me to bitter mirth. They were not men but manikins. When I first enlisted, and for many months afterwards, the "mummeries of military discipline," the saluting, the meticulous uniformity, the rigid suppression of individual exuberance, chafed and infuriated me. I compared it to a ritualistic religion, a religion of authority only, which depended not on individual assent but on tradition for its sanctions. I loathed militarism in all its forms. Now ... well, I am inclined to reconsider my judgment. Seeing the end of military discipline, has shown me something of its ethical meaning—more than that, of its spiritual meaning.

For though the part of the "great push" that it fell to my lot to see was not a successful part, it was none the less a triumph—a spiritual triumph. From the accounts of the ordinary war correspondent I think one hardly realizes how great a spiritual triumph it was. For the war correspondent only sees the outside, and can only describe the outside of things. We who are in the Army, who know the men as individuals, who have talked with them, joked with them, censored their letters, worked with them, lived with them we see below the surface.

The war correspondent sees the faces of the men as they march towards the Valley of the Shadow, sees the steadiness of eye and mouth, hears the cheery jest. He sees them advance into the Valley without flinching. He sees some of them return, tired, dirty, strained, but still with a quip for the passer-by. He gives us a picture of men without nerves, without sensitiveness, without imagination, schooled to face death as they would face rain or any trivial incident of everyday life. The "Tommy" of the war correspondent is not a human being, but a lay figure with a gift for repartee, little more than the manikin that we thought him in those far-off days before the war, when we watched him drilling on the barrack square. We soldiers know better. We know that each one of those men is an individual, full of human affections, many of them writing tender letters home every week, each one longing with all his soul for the end of this hateful business of war which divides him from all that he loves best in life. We know that every one of these men has a healthy individual's repugnance to being maimed, and a human shrinking from hurt and from the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

The knowledge of all this does not do away with the even tread of the troops as they pass, the steady eye and mouth, the cheery jest; but it makes these a hundred times more significant. For we know that what these things signify is not lack of human affection, or weakness, or want of imagination, but something superimposed on these, to which they are wholly subordinated. Over and above the individuality of each man, his personal desires and fears and hopes, there is the corporate personality of the soldier which knows no fear and only one ambition—to defeat the enemy, and so to further the righteous cause for which he is fighting. In each of those men there is this dual personality: the ordinary human ego that hates danger and shrinks from hurt and death, that longs for home, and would welcome the end of the war on any terms; and also the stronger personality of the soldier who can tolerate but one end to this war, cost what that may—the victory of liberty and justice, and the utter abasement of brute force.

And when one looks back over the months of training that the soldier has had, one recognizes how every feature of it, though at the time it often seemed trivial and senseless and irritating, was in reality directed to this end. For from the moment that a man becomes a soldier his dual personality begins. Henceforth he is both a man and a soldier. Before his training is complete the order must be reversed, and he must be a soldier and a man. As a soldier he must obey and salute those whom, as a man, he very likely dislikes and despises. In his conduct he no longer only has to consider his reputation as a man, but still more his honour as a soldier. In all the conditions of his life, his dress, appearance, food, drink, accommodation, and work, his individual preferences count for nothing, his efficiency as a soldier counts for everything. At first he "hates" this, and "can't see the point of" that. But by the time his training is complete he has realized that whether he hates a thing or not, sees the point of a thing or not, is a matter of the uttermost unimportance. If he is wise, he keeps his likes and dislikes to himself.