No man comes out from the Army as he went in; there are many types, and with the enormous increase in numbers at the present time, the number of types will increase as well as the number of representatives of each type. Country youths, town dwellers, agricultural labourers—who often make the best and keenest soldiers—men who know nothing of what labour is like, skilled artisans, and men from the office—all come to the ranks of the Army, which, shaping them to compliance with discipline, still leaves the stamp of individuality. The soldiers of the new army will come back to their ordinary avocations bearing the stamp of military training, stronger physically, and different in many ways—mainly improved ways. But the metal on which the stamp of the Army is impressed will remain the same, for one is first a man and then a soldier. The instances of Prussian brutality evident to-day, and an eternal disgrace to the German nation, do not prove anything against the Prussian military system, but afford evidence that brutality is ingrained in the Prussian before he goes up as a conscript to begin his training. So, whatever the characteristics of a man may be, the Army cannot make a brave soldier out of a cowardly civilian, and it cannot make a good man into a bad one; it accentuates certain traits of character and drives others into the background, but it neither destroys nor creates. It is a training school which, taken in the right way, brings out all that is best in a man, stiffens him to face the battle of life as well as the battles of military service, and strengthens self-confidence and self-respect. The men who are seen to have suffered in character during their military training are by no means examples from which one can cite the result of discipline and army work, for it is not the training that is at fault, but the inherent weakness of the men themselves. The social standing of the majority of recruits joining the new army renders it ten times more true of the Army of to-day than of the Army of yesterday, that military training gives more than it demands, inculcates habits which, followed in after life, are invaluable, and makes a man—in the best sense of the word—of each one who joins its ranks.
One thing that officers and men alike in the new army should be made to realise is that the possession of a good kit carries one half of the way on active service—the things that carry the other half of the way are not to be purchased. But the man who has undergone the rigours of active service understands the value of good boots, good field-glasses, well-fitting and suitable clothing, and really portable accessories to personal comfort. These things, and an intelligent choice of them, go far to make up the difference between the man successful at his work and the failure, for although a bad workman is said to quarrel with his tools a good workman cannot do good work with bad tools. In the peculiarly exacting conditions entailed on men by active service, kit and equipment should be of the best quality obtainable, and the choice of what to take and what to leave behind is evidence, to some extent, of the fitness of the man for his work. The most important item of all is boots, and in fitting boots for active service one should be careful to select a size that will admit of the wearer enjoying a night’s sleep without removing his footwear. Care of the feet, and retention of the ability to march, are quite as important as shooting abilities, for the man who cannot march with the rest will not be in it when the shooting begins. For the rest, it is wise to try, if not to follow, as often as possible the tips given, by men who have been on active service, with regard to the choice of kit and the little things that make for comfort—that is, as far as compliance with these “tips” is compatible with keeping the size of one’s outfit down. The seasoned man, when talking of such subjects as kit and comfort, usually speaks out of his own experience, and his advice is worth following. The golden rule in the choice of an outfit for service is simply “as little as possible, and that little good.”
This rule, by the way, used to be applied to the British Army in another way: the new army, however, makes a difference in the matter of size.
CHAPTER XI
ACTIVE SERVICE
The popular conception of active service is of a succession of encounters with the enemy. Desperate deeds of valour, brilliant charges by bodies of troops, men saving other men under fire, the storming of positions, and the flush of victory after strenuous action enter largely into the civilian conception of war.
The reality is a sombre business of marching and watching, nights without sleep and days without food; retracing one’s steps in order to execute the plan of the brain to which a man is but one effective rifle out of many thousands, marching for days and days, seeing nothing more exciting than a burnt-out house and the marching men on either side and to front and rear—and then the contact with the enemy. A vicious crack from somewhere, or the solid boom of a piece of artillery; somewhere away to the front or flank is the enemy, and his pieces do damage in the ranks; there is a searching for cover, some orders are given, perhaps a comrade lies utterly still, and one knows that that man will not move any more; there is a desperate sense of ineffectiveness, of anger at this cowardly (as it seems) trick of hitting when one cannot hit back. There is the satisfaction of getting the range and firing, with results that may be guessed but cannot be known accurately by the man who fires; there is the curious thrill that comes when an angrily singing bullet passes near, and one realises that one is under fire from the enemy. In a normal action, there is the sense of disaster, even of defeat when one’s side may in reality be winning, for one sees men dying, wounded, lying dead—one knows the damage the enemy has inflicted, but has no idea of the damage ones own force has inflicted in return. Often, when it begins to be apparent that the enemy is nearly beaten, there comes the order to retire; one does not understand the order, but, with a sullen sense of resentment at it, retires, ducking at the whizzing of a shell, though not all the ducking in the world would avail if the shell were truly aimed at the one who ducks, or starting back to avoid a bullet that whizzed by—as if by starting back one could get out of the way of a bullet!
After a day of action, or after the chance has come to rest for a while after days of action, one gets a sense of the horror of the whole business—the tragedy of lives laid down, in a good cause certainly, but the men are dead, and one questions almost with despair if it is worth while. So many good men with whom one has joked and worked and played in time of peace have gone under—and there are probably more battles yet to fight. It is not until a war has concluded, and men who have served are able to get some idea of the operations as a whole, that they are able to understand what has been done and why it has been done. Men who came back wounded from Mons and Charleroi, away from the magnificent three weeks’ retreat that was then in progress for the British and French armies, were, in many cases, fully convinced that they had been defeated—that their armies were beaten, and had to retreat to save themselves from destruction. The man in the ranks cannot understand the plan of the staff who control him, for he sees so very little of the whole; at the most, he knows what is happening to a division of men, while engaged in the retreat to the position of the Marne were, at the least, twenty divisions on the side of the Allies. Had one of these been utterly shattered in a set battle, the other nineteen might still have won a decisive victory, and, if news of that victory had not come through for a day or two, the survivors from the shattered division would have spread tidings of a defeat—which it would have been, to them. The man in the ranks sees so little of the whole.
Here the war correspondent makes the most egregious mistakes, for, untrained in military service himself, he takes the word of the man in the ranks—the man on the staff of army headquarters is far too busy and far too discreet to talk to war correspondents—and out of what the man in the ranks has to say the war correspondent makes up his story. Though the man in the ranks may believe his own story to be true, though he may tell of the operations as he conceives them, he may be giving an utterly false impression of what is actually happening. The man in the ranks is one cog in a machine, and he cannot tell what all the machine is doing at any time, least of all when a battle is in progress.