That veteran regular—let us separate him from the crowd,—is a type I have often seen, a type that has become as familiar as one’s neighbours in one’s own town. We will call him the tenth man. That is, of every ten men who went to the front a year ago in his battalion, nine are gone. All of the hardships and all of the terrors of war he has witnessed: men dropped neatly by a bullet; men mangled by shells.
His khaki is spotless, thanks to his wife, who has dressed in her best for the occasion. Terrible as war itself, but new, that hat of hers, which probably represented a good deal of looking into windows and pricing; and her gown of the cheapest material, drooping from her round shoulders, is the product of the poor dressmaking skill of hands which show only too well who does all the housework at home. The children, a boy of four and a girl of seven, are in their best, too, with faces scrubbed till they shine.
You will see like scenes in stations at home when the father has found work in a distant city and is going on ahead to get established before the family follow him. Such incidents are common in civil life; they became common at Victoria Station. What is common has no significance, editors say.
When the time came to go through the gate, the veteran picked the boy up in his arms and pressed him very close and the little girl looked on wonderingly, while the mother was not going to make it any harder for the father by tears. “Good-bye, Tom!” she said. So his name was Tom, this tenth man.
I spoke with him. His battalion was full with recruits. It had been kept full. But, considering the law of chance, what about the surviving one out of an original ten?
“Yes, I’ve had my luck with me,” he said. “Probably my turn will come. Maybe I’ll never see the wife and kids again.”
The morning roar of London had begun. That station was a small spot in the city. There were not enough officers and men taking the train to make up a day’s casualty list; for ours was only a small party returning from leave. The transports, unseen, carried the multitudes. Wherever one had gone in England he had seen soldiers and wherever he went in France he was to see still more soldiers. England had become an armed camp; and England plodded on, “muddled” on, preparing, ever preparing, to forge in time of war the thunderbolt for war which was undreamed of in time of peace when other nations were forging their thunderbolts.
Still the recruiting posters called for more soldiers and the casualty lists appeared day after day with the regularity of want advertisements. Imagine eight million men under arms in the United States and you have the equivalent to what England did by the volunteer system. The more there were the more pessimistic became the British press. Pessimism brought in recruits. Bad news made England take another deep breath of energising determination. It was the last battle which was decisive. She had always won that. She would win it again.
They talk of war aboard the Pullman, after officers have waved their hands out of the windows to their wives, quite as if they were going to Scotland for a week-end instead of back to the firing-line. British phlegm that is called. No, British habit, I should say, the race-bred, individualistic quality of never parading emotions in public, the instinct of keeping things which are one’s own to one’s self. Personally, I like this way. In one form or another, as the hedges fly by the train windows, the subject is always war. War creeps into golf, or shooting, or investments, or politics. Only one suggestion quite frees the mind from the omnipresent theme: Will the Channel be smooth? The Germans have nothing to do with that. It is purely a matter of weather. Bad sailors are more worried about the crossing than about the shell-fire they are going to face.
With bad sailors or good sailors, the significant thing which had become a commonplace was that the Channel was a safely-guarded British sea lane. In all my crossings I was never delayed. For England had one thunderbolt ready forged when the war began. The only submarines, or destroyers, or dirigibles that one saw were hers. Antennæ these of the great fleet waiting with the threat of stored lightning ready to be flashed from gun-mouths; a threat as efficacious as action, in nowise mysterious or subtle, but definite as steel and powder, speaking the will of a people in their chosen field of power, felt over all the seas of the world, coast of Maine and the Carolinas no less than Labrador. Thousands of transports had come and gone, carrying hundreds of thousands of soldiers and food for men and guns to India; and on the highroad to India, to Australia, to San Francisco, shipping went its way undisturbed by anything that dives or flies.