Again, the cheerful way in which one or two of the correspondents wrote, as though a battle was a kind of glorified football match, exasperated the troops who knew their own losses, and the public who agonized over that great sum of death and mutilation.
Personally, I cannot convict myself of overcheerfulness or the minimizing of the tragic side of war, for, by temperament as well as by intellectual conviction, I wrote always with heavy stress on the suffering and tragedy of warfare, though I coerced my soul to maintain the spiritual courage of the nation and the fighting men—sometimes when my own spirit was dark with despair.
To our mess, between the two worlds, came visitors from both. It was our special pleasure to give a lift in one of our Vauxhalls to some young officer of the fighting line and bring him to our little old château or one of our billets behind the lines and help him to forget the filth and discomfort of trenches and dugouts by a good dinner in a good room. They were grateful for that, and we had many friends in the infantry, cavalry, Tank corps, machine guns, field artillery and “heavies” to whom we gave this hospitality.
When Neville Lytton became our chief, we even rose to the height of having a military band to play to our guests after dinner on certain memorable nights, and I remember a little French interpreter, himself a fine musician, who, on one of those evenings when our salon was crowded with officers tapping heel and toe to the music, raised his hands in ecstasy and said, “This is like one of the wars of the eighteenth century when slaughter did not prevent elegance and the courtesies of life.”
But in the morning there was the same old routine of setting out for the stricken fields, the same old vision of mangled men streaming back from battle, prisoners huddled like tired beasts, and shell fire ravaging the enemy’s line, and ours.
Army, Corps, and Divisional Generals, occasionally some tremendous man from G.H.Q., like our supreme chief, General Charteris, favored us with their company, and discussed every aspect of the war with us without reserve. Their old hostility had utterly disappeared, their old suspicion was gone, and for three years we possessed their confidence and their friendship.
In a book of mine—“Realities of War,” published in the United States under the title of “Now It Can Be Told”—I have been a critic of the Staff, and have said some hard and cruel things about the blundering and inefficiency of its system. But for many of the Generals and Staff officers in their personal character I had nothing but admiration and esteem. Their courage and devotion to duty, their patriotism and honor, were beyond criticism, and they were gentlemen of the good old school, with, for the most part, a simplicity of mind and manner which doesn’t, perhaps, belong to our present time. Yet I could not help thinking, as I still think, that those elderly gentlemen who had been trained in the South-African school of warfare, had been confronted with problems in another kind of war which were beyond their imagination and range of thought or experience. Even that verdict, however, which is true, I believe, of the High Command, must be modified in favor of men who created a New Army, marvelously perfect as a machine. Our artillery, our transport, our medical service, our training, were highly efficient, as the Germans themselves admitted. The machine was as good as an English-built engine, and marvelous when one takes into account its rapid and enormous growth in an untrained nation. It was in the handling of the machine that criticism finds an open field—and it’s an easy game, anyhow!
Apart from Generals, staff officers, and battalion officers who came to our mess, there were other visitors, now and then, from that remote world which had been ours before the war—the civilian world of England.