November 10, 1914
Just when I ought to keep up my diary more accurately than ever I leave it for weeks. It's no good putting in all the news about the war: that is all seared into my soul. These three months have seen the deaths of all the men who seemed to me to matter when I was at Oxford. All the men of my age were killed off at once: they got out at the beginning. From the other side they tell me it's just an endless line of blood and mud, periods of intense boredom relieved by moments of fearful fright. Every one thought in August that it would be all over by Christmas. Kitchener gives it three years. My God! there'd be no England left after three years. I went up to London to lecture on the teaching of English and found the streets all darkened, which makes the town incredibly beautiful and eerie. I suppose the idea is to bring the war home to us more closely.
This term has been altogether strange. We are chastened and quite different. Young boys are now prefects, heads of Houses, captains of games: the Corps has ousted athletics. It seems wrong to be chasing up and down a "Rugger" field while our brothers and dearest friends are being killed within a few hundred miles. We have done an amazing amount of Corps work this term: everybody is as keen as mustard to make himself really fit. Boys are reading their Stonewall Jackson, and Haking, and John Buchan, and everything that they can lay their hands on to inform themselves of what is going on across the Channel and how they shall best occupy their time here in preparation. By a very quaint irony, for the first time in my life I have noticed that boys are becoming really anxious to learn. Somehow intellectual pursuits seem to be worth striving after: there is a perceptible wish in every boy's mind to explore the garner-house of wisdom.
Never have I felt that the schoolmaster's job was so important as I do now. Many of these boys will, please God, not have to fight, but they will all have to take an active part in the reconstruction of England. Every hour of every day we shall have to keep before them the ideals which we mean to see put into practice by the next generation. Last year we were in danger of getting sloppy: we were too rich, we were chasing after every kind of new pleasure, not a thought was given to the myriad problems of capital and labour, of poverty, of housing, of health, of education. We are all trying our best at last to see which of us can do the most for the sake of England: the name didn't mean much to us so long as she was safe; now that she is in deadly peril we are beginning to realize all that she is to us. Our new activity in the Corps is a beginning: we are drilling, digging, scouting, signalling, lecturing, bombing, bridge-building, range-finding, entrenching—learning up tactics and strategy. So far as actual military skill is concerned we are doing our best, but there is an enormous amount of leeway to be made up in other departments of life. For one thing, I believe the school is far more devout than it was. Suffering has sent us back to the Cross. We have weekly Intercession Services for our old boys. These are voluntary, but very few boys absent themselves. Our preachers seem almost inspired. It must be much easier to preach now than it used to be: we are all only too anxious to know what to do: "Here am I, send me" is the cry of every one in chapel. Our religion is a much more vital thing than it ever used to be. We are all working at top speed all the time. I only hope we don't break down as the newspapers have. Every one of the papers except the Daily Telegraph has lost its head not once nor twice since war broke out. It is almost painful to read the leading articles at present. They blame everybody in authority for failure to cope with the present situation. How the German Press must gloat.
In the place of the young men who have left us we have had to employ very old men, who are for the most part extraordinarily genial and take to the work as a trout to water. Not all of them, alas, have been successful. Boys still "rag" a man who is incompetent, and they have little respect for age, but on the whole these old men have fallen into line far better than any one would have dreamt possible.
December 13, 1914
Our first term of war is nearly over. It has been a strange, unreal sort of life. Every day some fresh disaster befalls us in the shape of casualties. Every week some boys come back, healthy, handsome and extraordinarily grown-up in their officers' uniforms: we at school seem to be settling down to play our part. The officers of the O.T.C. have been told to carry on where they are, that the work they are doing is invaluable: so we content ourselves with that, though it seems very little. We have had a naval victory at the Heligoland Bight, and a defeat and a victory off the coast of South America. The Germans advance no more in France, the whole world seems to be preparing to rise in arms on the slightest provocation. Every week Horatio Bottomley and Belloc explain to us that the end is in sight and the Northcliffe Press tells us that we can never win but shall wage an age-long war. We hope the one and fear the other—and carry on.
It is a strange thing, but the beginning of war which I expected would quash all chance of writing has seen the beginning of my success. Blackwood's, the Contemporary and the National Review have all printed articles of mine, and I am writing as much as I can, spurred on by this undreamt-of piece of luck.
Although it is a time of war and full of horrors the term passed very quickly indeed. Elspeth and I are now absolutely united. Her father has gone out to Egypt with a staff appointment, her mother is still in Bath, both her brothers are out in France. All entertainments at Marlton have suddenly ceased. There are no more dinner-parties, no more House suppers, school matches were all "scratched" this term, and the people in the town no longer play "bridge." We are rapidly becoming a soberer people and our efforts are directed to one object only, the winning of the war. Yet the strange thing is that so many things go on just as usual. People seem to have any amount of money, the shops advertise the same old extravagant useless things; dances, theatres, horse-racing, football matches still continue—there is no lack of these things any more than there was during the Boer War.
Perhaps we are learning to "do without" gradually. It must be different in France and Belgium. I shall never forget my first sight of Belgian refugees and wounded soldiers arriving at Marlton station. Somehow we don't, we can't realize the horror of it in this peaceful valley, but the tragic faces of these tortured, homeless women penetrates at one flash into the very heart. All the gay, irresponsible women who last July spent their days on the polo ground now vie with one another in providing homes for the Belgians and hospitals for the wounded. Girls who were accustomed to do nothing more arduous than hunt or take the spaniels for a walk now nurse through the night, scrub floors, act as kitchenmaids, drive motor-vans and generally carry on the work that is left for them to do. So many of them have husbands or brothers fighting that they would go mad with brooding too much if they were not working every hour of every day. There may be a few who are still untouched by the war, but there are certainly none in Marlton. Boys who left at the end of last term have already come back decorated with the Military Cross. Letters reach me from all parts of the globe from old boys of Radchester who are sailing to fight in some region I never heard of before the war. And all the time we try to preserve the spirit that has made England great here at home in Marlton. It used to seem something of a backwater before the war—how much more is it one now: the milkmen and the farm labourers, the shop assistants, and the railway porters who had never been farther afield than Exeter are now in Egypt, Malta, India, France, all over the globe. What a widening of experience, what books will be written when it is all over. For the last year we have thought of nothing but the wonderful adventures of Captain Scott and his fellow-adventurers in their quest for the South Pole. Commander Evans came to Marlton and lectured to us about the heroic death of Captain Oates: we were all swept off our feet with enthusiasm but no one in the hall ever dreamt that he would be called upon to emulate such a deed, and yet now daily, hourly, that feat is being rivalled. So long as there are any men left in this country there is no need to fear that we shall lack for heroes. Boys, who when they were at school were looked upon as feckless funks, have performed valorous exploits, which any one remembering their school days would have regarded as absolutely beyond the bounds of belief.