Meditation passed away with the first bewilderment and was discouraged with every forward step of a nation arming itself for defence. From time to time spirits dwelling in isolation struggled to preserve detachment, the young poets who lay out under the stars in momentary expectation of death raised their voices in challenge to incomprehensibility; but the first were arrested as sedition-mongers and the second were dismissed as poets. Meditation was not allowed to become articulate until the armistice. It were fruitless and ungracious to dwell on the epidemic delusions and organised fury of those first days: they are common to every country in every war;[24] though they broke out periodically, their grotesque violence abated as new work called for undivided attention.
Not for long did it seem that the casualties would be confined to the regular army and the expeditionary force. Officers of the special reserve received their mobilisation-orders and reported for duty on the south coast; after long and anxious silence, during which it could only be assumed that they had crossed the channel and were being hurried into Belgium, some of the survivors at length wrote that they had been in the great advance and the great retreat, that they had lost almost every part of their kit, but were enjoying a moment's breathing-time. After the Marne, they moved up again, "dodging death and danger, without rest or food or drink ... till death seemed relaxation and a wound a luxury." Although for more than four years hardly a day passed without bringing news of the death, disablement or loss of some relation or friend, for the men under thirty the casualties crowded thickest in the early weeks; their generation was the most plenteously represented in the first months; and, after four years, of their generation fewest remained.
CHAPTER VII
THE FRINGE OF WAR
" ... In a few hours at most, as they well knew, perhaps a tenth of them would have looked their last on the sun, and be a part of foreign earth or dumb things that the tides push. Many of them would have disappeared for ever from the knowledge of man, blotted from the book of life none would know how—by a fall or chance shot in the darkness, in the blast of a shell, or alone, like a hurt beast, in some scrub or gully, far from comrades and the English speech and the English singing. And perhaps a third of them would be mangled, blinded or broken, lamed, made imbecile or disfigured, with the colour and the taste of life taken from them, so that they would never more move with comrades nor exult in the sun. And those not taken thus would be under the ground, sweating in the trench, carrying sandbags up the sap, dodging death and danger, without rest or food or drink ... till death seemed relaxation and a wound a luxury. But as they moved out these things were but the end they asked, the reward they had come for, the unseen cross upon the breast. All that they felt was a gladness of exultation that their young courage was to be used. They went like kings in a pageant to the imminent death. As they passed from moorings to the man-of-war anchorage on their way to the sea, their feeling that they had done with life and were going out to something new welled up in those battalions; they cheered and cheered till the harbour rang with cheering. As each ship crammed with soldiers drew near the battleships, the men swung their caps and cheered again, and the sailors answered, and the noise of cheering swelled, and the men in the ships not yet moving joined in, and the men ashore, till all the life in the harbour was giving thanks that it could go to death rejoicing. All was beautiful in the gladness of men about to die, but the most moving thing was the greatness of their generous hearts...."
John Masefield: Gallipoli.
I
"For various reasons," wrote William Glynne Charles Gladstone to General Sir Henry MacKinnon,[25] "I feel the time has come when I ought to enlist in His Majesty's Army. Heaven knows, so far from having the least inclination for military service, I dread it and dislike it intensely; consistently with that I have no natural aptitude for it, and what is more, no training of any sort. I have never done a single minute's military training in my whole life, I am a rank although not a very robust civilian; even my love of shooting has somehow never led to my learning to shoot with a rifle. I recall all that to your mind because I want to put it to you that under these circumstances there is only one thing for me to do, and that is to begin at the beginning and enlist as a private. I am not prepared to face the possibility, however remote, of being put in some post of responsibility without knowing the ropes very well and from the beginning.... I have decided not to enlist in any force which is confined to home defence, but one which in its turn will be called upon to go to the front."