Gallant souls, those boys, and all the more gallant because they hate war so much. Their nerves quiver when a shell or a "Minnie" falls into the trench near them, and then they smile to hide their weakness. They hate going over the parapet when the machine guns are playing; so they don't hesitate, but plunge over with a smile to hide their fears. Their cure for every mental worry is a smile, their answer to every prompting of fear is a plunge. They have no philosophy or fanaticism to help them—only the sporting instinct which is in every healthy British boy.
Then there are "the old men," less attractive, less stirring to the imagination, less sensitive, but who grow upon you more and more as you get to know them. Any one over twenty-three or so is an "old man." They have lost the grace, the irresponsibility, the sensibility of youth. Their eyes and mouths are steadier, their movements more deliberate. But they are the fellows whom you would choose for a patrol, or a raid, where a cool head and a stout heart are what is wanted. It takes you longer to know these. They are less responsive to your advances. But when you have tested them and they have tested you, you know that you have that which is stronger than any terror of night or day, a loyalty which nothing can shake.
And then when he thinks how little he deserves all this love and loyalty, the subaltern's heart aches with a feeling that can find no expression either in word or deed.
This is a tale that has often been told, and that people in England know by heart. It cannot be told too often. It cannot be learnt too well. For the time will come when we shall need to remember it, and when it will be easy to forget. Will you remember it, O ye people, when the boy has become a man, and the soldier has become a workman? But there are other tales to tell. There are the tales of the sergeant-major and the sergeants, the corporals and the "lance-jacks." Sergeant-majors, sergeants, and corporals are not romantic figures. If you think of them at all, you probably think of rumjars and profanity. Yet they are the very backbone of the Army. I have been a sergeant and I have been a private soldier, and I know that the latter has much the better time of the two. He at least has the kind of liberty which belongs to utter irresponsibility. If he breaks bounds in the exuberance of his spirits, no one thinks much worse of him as long as he does not make a song about paying the penalty!
Of course he has to be punished. So many days of sleeping in the guard tent, extra fatigues, pack-drill, and perhaps a couple of hours tied up, as an example to evil-doers. But if he has counted the cost, and pays the price with a grin, we just say "Young scamp!" and dismiss the matter. But if a sergeant or a corporal does the same, that's a very different matter. He has shown himself unfit for his job. He has betrayed a trust. We cannot forgive him. Responsibility has its disadvantages. The senior N.C.O. gets no relaxation from discipline. In the line and out of it he must always be watchful, self-controlled, orderly. He must never wink. These men have not the glamour of the boy private; but their high sense of duty and discipline, their keenness and efficiency, merit all the honour that we can give them.
Finally—for it would not do for a subaltern to discuss his superiors—we come to the junior officer. Somehow I fancy that in the public eye he too is a less romantic figure than the private. One does not associate him with privations and hardships, but with parcels from home. Well, it is quite right. He has such a much less uncomfortable time than his men that he does not deserve or want sympathy on that score. He is better off in every way. He has better quarters, better food, more kit, a servant, and in billets far greater liberty. And yet there is many a man who is now an officer who looks back on his days as a private with regret. Could he have his time over again ... yes, he would take a commission; but he would do so, not with any thought for the less hardship of it, but from a stern sense of duty—the sense of duty which does not allow a man with any self-respect to refuse to shoulder a heavier burden when called upon to do so.
Those apparently irresponsible subalterns whom you see entertaining their lady friends at the Canton or Ciro's do, when they are at the front, have very heavy responsibilities. Even in the ordinary routine of trench life, so many decisions have to be made, with the chance of a "telling off" whichever way you choose, and the lives of other men hanging in the balance. Suppose you are detailed for a wiring party, and you arrive to find a full moon beaming sardonically down at you. What are you to do? If you go out you may be seen. Half a dozen of your men may be mown down by a machine gun. You will be blamed and will blame yourself for not having decided to remain behind the parapet. If you do not go out you may set a precedent, and night after night the work will be postponed, till at last it is too late, and the Hun has got through, and raided the trench. If you hesitate or ask advice you are lost. You have to make up your mind in an instant, and to stand by it. If you waver your men will never have confidence in you again.
Still more in a push; a junior subaltern is quite likely to find himself at any time in command of a company, while he may for a day even have to command the relics of a battalion. I have seen boys almost fresh from a Public School in whose faces there were two personalities expressed: the one full of the lighthearted, reckless, irresponsible vitality of boyhood, and the other scarred with the anxious lines of one to whom a couple of hundred exhausted and nerve-shattered men have looked, and not looked in vain, for leadership and strength in their grim extremity. From a boy in such a position is required something far more difficult than personal courage. If we praise the boy soldier for his smile in the face of shells and machine guns, don't let us forget to praise still more the boy officer who, in addition to facing death on his own account, has to bear the responsibility of the lives of a hundred other men. There is many a man of undoubted courage whose nerve would fail to bear that strain.
A day or two ago I was reading Romance, by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer. It is a glorious tale of piracy and adventure in the West Indies; but for the moment I wondered how it came about that Conrad, the master of psychology, should have helped to write such a book. And then I understood. For these boys who hate the war, and suffer and endure with the smile that is sometimes so difficult, and long with a great longing for home and peace—some day some of them will look back on these days and will tell themselves that after all it was Romance, the adventure, which made their lives worth while. And they will long to feel once again the stirring of the old comradeship and love and loyalty, to dip their clasp-knives into the same pot of jam, and lie in the same dug-out, and work on the same bit of wire with the same machine gun striking secret terror into their hearts, and look into each other's eyes for the same courageous smile. For Romance, after all, is woven of the emotions, especially the elemental ones of love and loyalty and fear and pain.