CHAPTER XIX
CITIZEN SOLDIERS
I stood, with my friend M. beside me, on the top of a hill and looked down at a large camp spread out along the valley beneath us. It was growing dark. The lines of lights along the roads shone bright and clear. Lights twinkled from the windows of busy orderly-rooms and offices. Lights shone, browny red, through the canvas of the tents. The noise of thousands of men, talking, laughing, singing, rose to us, a confused murmur of sound. As we stood there, looking, listening, a bugle sounded from one corner of the great camp, blowing the “Last Post.” One after another, from all directions, many bugles took up the sound. Lights were extinguished. Silence followed by degrees. We scrambled down a steep path to our quarters.
“This,” I said, “is not an army. It is an empire in arms.”
M. would never have made a remark of that kind. He has too much common sense to allow himself to talk big. He is, of all men known to me, least inclined to sentimentality. He did not even answer me. If he had he would probably have pointed out to me that I was wrong. What lay below us, a small part of the B.E.F., was an army, if discipline, skill, valour, and unity are what distinguish an army from a mob.
Yet what I said meant something. I had seen enough of the professional soldiers of the old army, officers and N.C.O.’s, to know that the men who are now fighting are soldiers with a difference. They do not conform to the type which we knew as the soldier type before the war. Neither officers nor men are the same. Only in the cavalry, and perhaps in the Guards, do we now find the spirit, or, if spirit is the wrong word, the flavour of the old army. The professional soldier, save among field officers and the older N.C.O.’s, is becoming rare. The citizen soldier has taken his place.
To say this is to repeat a commonplace. My remark was a commonplace, stale with reiteration. But it is the nature of commonplaces and truisms that they only become real to us when we discover them for ourselves. I was familiar with the idea of the citizen soldier, with the very phrase “an empire in arms,” long before I went to France. Yet my earliest experiences were a surprise to me. I had believed, but I had not realised, that our ranks indeed contain “all sorts and conditions of men.”
I remember very well the first time that the truism began to assert itself as a truth to me. I was in a soldiers’ club, one of those excellent places of refreshment and recreation run by societies and individuals for the benefit of our men. It was an abominable evening. Snow, that was half sleet, was driven across the camp by a strong wind. Melting snow lay an inch deep on the ground. The club, naturally under the circumstances, was crammed. Men sat at every table, reading papers, writing letters, playing draughts and dominoes. They stood about with cups of tea and cocoa in their hands. They crowded round the fires. The steam of wet clothes and thick clouds of tobacco smoke filled the air and dimmed the light from lamps, feeble at best, which hung from ceiling and wall.
In one corner a man sat on a rickety chair. His back was turned to the room. He faced the two walls of his corner. The position struck me as odd until I noticed that he sat that way in order to get a little light on the pages of the book he read. It was Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis. It was, I suppose, part of my business to make friends of the men round me. I managed with some difficulty to get into conversation with that man. He turned his chair half round and, starting from Oscar Wilde, gave me his views on prison life. The private soldier, coming under military discipline, is a prisoner, so this man thought. He did not deny that it may be worth while to go to prison for a good cause. But prison life is as galling and abominable for a martyr as for a criminal.
There is a stir among the men. A lady, heavily cloaked and waterproofed, made a slow progress through the room, staring round her with curious eyes. She was a stranger, evidently a distinguished stranger, for she was escorted by a colonel and two other officers. My friend nodded towards her.