At that, understanding came to the correspondent—he knew now why the thoughtful liaison officer had cautioned him to step lightly. To these men lying here about him the infernal clamour of the shells had become a customary part of their lives, whether waking or sleeping. To their natures, accustomed as they were to it, this hideous din was a lullaby song. But any small unusual sound, such as the noise of a booted foot falling upon a squeaky board, might rouse them, and two men clumping carelessly past them would have brought every one of them out of his slumbers, sitting up.
Paradoxes such as this are forever cropping up in one's wartime experiences. Indeed, war may be said to be made up of countless paradoxes, overlapping and piled one upon another. To me the most striking of the outstanding manifestations of war on its paradoxical side is the fact that in this war nothing, or almost nothing, actually turns out in accordance with what one's idea of it had been beforehand. Looking backward on what I myself have viewed of its physical and metaphysical aspects I can think of scarcely an element or a phase which accorded with my preconceived brain image of the thing. I do not mean by this that as a spectacle it has been disappointing, but that almost invariably it has been different from what I was expecting it would be. I found this to be true in 1914, back at the very beginning.
Take for example the fashion after which men bear themselves as they go into battle; and, for a more striking illustration than that, their customary deportment after they actually are in the battle. I figure that beforehand my own notion of what these two demonstrations would be like was based probably in part upon conceptions derived from old-time pictures of Civil War engagements, highly coloured, highly imaginative representations such as used to hang upon the parlour walls of every orthodox rural home in our country; and in part upon fiction stories with war for a background which I had read; and finally perhaps in some lesser part upon the moving-picture man's ideas as worked out with more or less artistic license in the pre-war films. I rather think the average stay-at-home's notions in these regards must be pretty much what mine were, because he probably derived them from the same sources. The utter dissimilarity of the actual thing as I have repeatedly viewed it in three countries of Europe astonished me at first, and in lessening degree continued to astonish me until the real picture of it had supplanted the conjured one in my mind.
If the reader's ideas are still fundamentally organised as mine formerly were he thinks men on the edge of the fight, with the prospect before them of very shortly being at grips with the enemy, maintain a sober and a serious front, wearing upon them the look of men who are upborne and inspired by a purpose to acquit themselves steadfastly and well. By the same process of reasoning I take it that the reader, conceding he or she has never been brought face to face with war, pictures men on the march in periods of comparative immunity from immediate peril as singing their way along, with jokes and catchwords flitting back and forth and a general holidaying air pervading the scene presented by the swinging column. Now my observation has been that the exact opposite is commonly the case.
Men on the casual march, say, from one billeting place to another, are apt to push ahead stolidly and for the most part in silence. It is hard work, marching under heavy equipment is, and after a few hours of it the strongest individual in the ranks feels the pangs of weariness in his scissoring legs and along his burdened back. So he bends forward from the hips and he hunches his shoulders and wastes mighty little of his breath in idle persiflage. Only toward the end of the journey, when rest and food are in impending prospect, do his spirits revive to a point where he feels like singing and guying his mates. The thud-thud-thud of the feet upon the highroad, the grunted commands of the officers, and the occasional clatter of metal striking against metal as a man shifts his piece are likely to be the only accompaniments of the hike for miles on end; and there isn't much music really in such sounds as these.
But suppose the same men are moving into action and know whither they are bound. The preliminary nervousness that possesses every normally constituted man at the prospect of facing the deadliest forms of danger now moves these men to hide their true emotions under a masking of gaiety. This gaiety, which largely is assumed at the outset, presently becomes their real mood. Nine men out of ten who pass are indulging in quips and catches. Nine in ten are ready to laugh at trivialities that ordinarily would go unnoticed. One standing by to watch them must diagnose the average expression on the average face as betokening exultation rather than exaltation. The tenth man is quiet and of a thoughtful port. He is forcing himself to appraise the situation before him in its right proportions, and so the infection that fills his comrades passes him by. Yet it is safe to bet on it that the sober one-tenth, in the high hour of the grapple, will contend with just as much gallantry as the nine-tenths can hope to show.
Particularly is the mental slant that I have here sought to describe true in its application to raw troops who have yet to taste of close-up fighting. Seasoned veterans who have weathered the experience before now and who know what it means, and know, too, that they may count upon themselves and their fellows to acquit themselves valorously, are upborne by a certain all-pervading cheerfulness—perhaps as a rule confidence would be a better word than cheerfulness—but they are not quite so noisy, not quite so enthusiastic as the greener hands. At this moment they are not doing very much in the cheering line, though they will yell just as loudly as any when the order is to fix bayonets and charge.
Paradoxically the reaction upon men who have come whole out of the inferno of battling at close quarters affects these two compared classes of soldier-men differently—at least that has been my observation. The unseasoned men, to whom the hell from which they have just emerged has been for them a new kind of hell, are as likely as not almost downcast in their outward demeanour, irritable and peevish in their language. For one thing, they are dog-tired; for another, I would say, a true appreciation of the ordeal through which they have passed is now coming home to them; for still another, the shock of having seen their mates wiped out all about them surely affects the general consciousness of the survivors; and finally, as I appraise their sensations, the calm following the tumult and the struggle leaves them well-nigh numbed. Certainly it frequently leaves them inarticulate almost to dumbness. Give them twenty-four hours for rest and mental adjustment, and the coltishness of youth returns to them in ample measure, especially if there is a victory to their credit.
On the contrasting hand, if you want to witness an exhibition of good cheer at the end of a day of fighting seek for it among the veterans. On a certain day in May when the second of the great German drives was in progress I chanced to be at a spot where a brigade of French infantry—a brigade with a magnificent record made earlier in the war—was thrown into action to reenforce a hard-pressed and decimated British command. Almost without exception the little dusty, rusty poilus went to the fighting in a sort of matter-of-fact methodical silence more impressive to me than loud outbursts could possibly have been. Quietly, swiftly, without lost motion or vain exclamations, but moving all like men intent upon the performance of a difficult and an unpleasant but a highly necessary task, they took up their guns, adjusted their packs of ammunition, set their helmets over their foreheads, and walked with no undue haste but only with an assured and briskened serenity into the awfulness that was beyond the clouds of smoke and dust, just yonder.
That same evening, by a streak of luck, I returned to approximately the same spot at the moment when those who were left of the Frenchmen prepared to bivouac on the edges of the same terrain where all the afternoon they had fought. With the help of some skeleton formations of British companies they had withstood the German onslaught; more than that, they had broken two advancing waves of the gray coats and finally had swept the ripped and riddled legions of the enemy back for a good mile, so that now they held the field as victors. Elsewhere along that fifty-mile front there might be a different story to tell, but here in this small corner of the great canvas of the mighty battle a localised success that was worth while had been achieved by these heroes. Under them now their legs quivered from stark weariness. Some were black like negroes; the stale sweat and the dried dirt and the powder grit had caked them over. Some were red like Indians, where the crusted blood from small unconsidered wounds dyed the skin on their faces and their hands.