Ten years after

by Philip Gibbs

The Spirit of the Victims

By the end of the Battle of the Somme the first impulses of the war had died down, the first emotions had been forgotten. Disillusion, dreadful experience, bitterness, had turned the edge of idealism. One cannot understand the mind of men ten years after without going back to that period of disenchantment. The young men who had hurried to the recruiting stations were on fire with enthusiasm for France and Belgium, for the rescue of liberty and civilisation, and for love of England. They became rather damped in the training camps because of so much red-tape, eyewash, spit and polish, and humiliation. They were handled, not like men filled with heroic spirit, but often like swine. Sergeant-majors swore at them in filthy language; old officers, too feeble for the front or sent back in disgrace for their incompetence, set them to ridiculous, time-wasting work. Reviews, inspections, parades, took the heart out of them. They had not joined for this ... they were trained and staled by the time they went to France, though their spirits rose at the thought of getting into “the real thing” at last. They didn’t like it. They hated it when its routine became familiar and horrible and deadly. They were ready to stick it out to the death—they did so—but certain values altered as their illusions were shattered. It was all very well—though not at all pleasant—to die for civilisation or liberty, but it was another thing to die for some old General they had never seen because he ordered them to attack positions which were wrongly marked on his maps, or because he was competing in “raids” with the General commanding the line on his left, or because he believed in keeping up the “fighting spirit” of his troops by ordering the capture of German trenches which made another salient in his line and were bound to be blotted out in mud and blood as soon as the German guns received their signals. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Sweet to die for one’s country—in the first flash of enthusiasm—and afterwards necessary anyhow, though distinctly unpleasant to have both legs blown off, or both eyes blinded, or one’s entrails torn out. But not in any way comforting to be sent over the top with a battalion unsupported on the right or left, or with wrong orders, or without a barrage to smash the enemy’s wire, or by some incredible blunder which meant the massacre of a man’s best pals and a hole in his stomach. Inevitable, perhaps. Yes, but unforgivable by its victims when it became a habit.... Over and over again battalions were wiped out because some one had blundered. It was the same on the German front, the French front, every front. And its effect in the minds of the fighting men was the same in all nations and on both sides of the line. It made them rage against the Staff. It made them feel that the front line men were being sacrificed, wasted and murdered by pompous old gentlemen and elegant young men living very comfortably behind the lines in pleasant châteaux of France, far from shell fire, growing “flower borders” on their breasts. Men talked like that, with increasing irony. They were unfair, often. It’s not easy to be fair when one’s certain death is being ordered by influential folk who do not share the risks.

The People at Home

For England’s sake! Yes, those young officers and men who went through the battles of the Somme and many others, seeing no end to the war, and the only chance of life in a lucky wound, endured everything of fear and filth, because at the back of their minds and hidden in their hearts was the remembrance of some home or plot of earth, some old village with an old church, which meant to them—England, or Scotland, or Wales. They “stuck it” all because in their spirit, consciously or unconsciously, was the love of their country, and in their blood the old urge of its pride. But as the war went on even this, though it was never lost and flamed up again in the darkest hours, was overcast by doubts and angers and ironies. They were all so damned cheerful in little old England! They took the losses of men as a matter of course. Business as usual and keep the home fires burning! That was all very well, but those “charity bazaars for the poor dear wounded,” all that jazz and dancing and love-making, giving the boys a good time in their seven days’ leave, earning wonderful wages in the munition works, making enormous profits out of shipping and contracts, spending their money like water, filling the theatres, keeping up the spirit of the nation, wasn’t it too much of a good thing when viewed from the angle of a trench with one’s pals’ dead bodies in No Man’s Land, and a blasted world around one, and death screaming overhead?

The profiteers were determined to “see this thing through,” to the bitter end. The Statesmen would fight to the last man. The old gentlemen on military service boards were outraged by poor devils with wives and babes who tried to evade conscription. At dinner parties and banquets these same old gentlemen, in clean linen, grew purple in the face with eloquence about the unthinkable shame of peace without victory. They would sacrifice their last son, or at least all their numerous nephews, on the altar of patriotism. They would go without sugar to the end of time rather than yield to a brutal enemy. Noble sentiments! But some of the sons and the numerous nephews who were going to be sacrificed on the altar of patriotism were secretly hoping that diplomacy, or strategy, or some miracle of God might find some decent way of peace before that sacrifice was accomplished. They were in love with life, those boys of ours. They didn’t want to die, strange as it may have seemed to those who thought it was their duty to die and look pleasant about it.

They were unfair, those fellows who sat in wet trenches cursing the levity of England, writing sonnets, some of them about the murderous old men and the laughing ladies. It was true that some old men were making money—piles of it—out of all this business of war. It was true that some of the pretty ladies seemed callous of the death of the boys they “vamped.” It was true that large numbers of men in factories and workshops were making fantastic wages in safe jobs while poor old Tommy was dodging death in the mud for fourteen pence a day. It was true that war and casualties had become so familiar to the mind that many folk at home were beginning to accept it all as a normal thing. It was true that cheerfulness, gaiety, high spirits, were adopted as the only code of life, and that melancholy, fear, pessimism, prophets of woe, were barred as people of bad form. It was true that the imagination of the average man and woman at home was incapable of visualising a front line trench or a battlefield under a German barrage fire. It was true that the newspapers were full of false optimism and false victories. It was true that in a war against militarism England had been militarised, and that officers on seven days’ leave from Hell-on-Earth were insulted by little squirts called A.P.M.’s because they didn’t carry gloves or because their collars were too light in colour, with a thousand other tyrannies. It was true that the hatred of women against “the Huns” was not shared by men who had come to have a fellow-feeling in their hearts for German peasants caught in the trap of war against their will, with no less courage than the men who killed them or whom they killed. It was true that parsons professing Christianity were more bloodthirsty than soldiers who cried out to God in hours of agony and blasphemed in hours of rage. It was true that in England in war time there was a noisy cheerfulness that seemed like callousness to those condemned to death. But it was not true that England was indifferent to the sufferings of the men, or that all that optimism was due to carelessness, or that all the laughing ladies were having the time of their lives because of war’s delightful thrill and the chance of three husbands, or more lovers, in rapid sequence as battle followed battle and wiped out young life.

The Agony of England

Beneath the mask of cheeriness England agonised. Fathers grew old and white and withered because of their sons’ sacrifice, but kept a stiff upper lip when the telegraph boy was the messenger of death. The mothers of boys out there suffered martyrdom in wakeful nights, in dreadful dreams, though they kept smiling when the boys came home between the battles and—worst of all—went back again. They hid their tears, steeled their hearts to courage. Even the pretty ladies—the most frivolous, the most light-hearted—gave their love so easily because it was all they had to give, and they would grudge nothing to the boys. Apart from a vicious little set, the women were beyond words wonderful in service and self-sacrifice. In spite of all the weakness of human nature and the low passions stirred up by the war, the British people as a whole during these years of great ordeal were sublime in resignation and spiritual courage. In millions of little houses in mean streets, and in all the houses of the rich, to which a double knock came with news of a dead or wounded boy, the awful meaning of the war burnt its way into the soul of the people. But they would not yield to weakness and had a stubborn obstinacy of faith in final victory—somehow, in a way they could not see. Anyhow, they wouldn’t “let down” their men or show the white feather. They did not know that many of the men were sullen because of this unreasonable optimism, this “bloody cheerfulness.” They did not know that in the trenches, under an awful gunfire, many men looked back to England as to another world, which they no longer knew, from which they were cut off by spiritual distances no longer to be bridged, and for whose safety, frivolity, profiteers and prostitutes they were asked to die, to be shell-shocked, gassed or mutilated, under incompetent generalship and for inadequate reasons.

The meaning of the war in those men’s minds had become less simple and clear-cut since the days when it seemed a straight fight between idealism and brutality—the Allies with all the right on their side against the Germans with all the wrong. To the end some men thought like that, and they were lucky. They were the generals, the statesmen, and, now and then, the fighting men with unbending will and purpose. But to many of our officers and men sitting in their ditches, as I know, the war was no longer as simple as that. It was no longer, they thought, a conflict between idealism and brutality. It had developed into a monstrous horror, a crime against humanity itself, in which all the fighting nations were involved equally in a struggle for existence against powers beyond their own control. The machinery of destruction was greater than the men who were its victims. Human flesh and spirit were of no avail against long-range guns and high explosives. The common German soldiers, blown to bits by our guns, torn to fragments by our mines, poisoned by our gas, as our men were so destroyed, had no more responsibility for these devilish things than we had. It may have been so in the beginning—though that was doubtful. What did they know in their peasant skulls? But now they were just the victims of the ghastly madness that had stricken us all, of the crime against civilisation into which we had all staggered. There was no getting out of it, of course. The Germans had to be killed or they would kill us, but the whole damned thing had happened against the will of those who on both sides of the lines cowered under screeching shells and hated it. Surely to God, they argued, it ought not to have happened! It was civilisation that had been at fault, not those poor devils in the mud and mire.

It was the statesmen and politicians who were guilty of this thing, or the Kings and the Emperors, or the schoolmasters and the journalists, or the whole structure of society based on competition and commercial greed, supported by armies and fleets, or the incurable stupidity of the human race, or a denial of God in the hearts of men; but not the fault, certainly, of those fellows from Bavaria and Saxony who were waiting for our next attack and writing picture-postcards in their dug-outs to women who would soon be widows. So many of our men began to talk and think, as every padre knows and as I know. So, even in France, the soldiers argued, if we may believe Barbusse and others, whom I believe as evidence of that. So certainly the German troops were thinking, as I heard from prisoners and afterwards from those who had fought to the last. The original meaning of the war altered, or was overwhelmed, as man sank more deeply into the mud and misery of it on both sides. It was only a few who held fast to its first principles of right and wrong, simple, clear, and utterly divided by a line of trenches and barbed wire.