Indubitably it is the perfection of transportation. Napoleon said, or is supposed to have said, that an army, like a snake, moves on its belly. The truth is, of course, that the art of war is, as to six-sevenths of it, the art of carrying heavy things from one place to another. You have got to move obvious necessaries, such as food and fuel and housing-timber and spare clothes; and human frames—that to marching men are heavier at the end of a long day than anything in the world; and rifles, bayonets and bombs, the ultimate ratio decidendi of all operations; and shells that look like death, and weigh as much as a model bungalow; and frowning Frankensteins of guns that look like the Day of Judgment, and weigh as much as a small foundry; and the wounded who come back with the Cross, steeped in blood, to stand as a fit symbol of their sacrifice. But you must move a great deal that is less obvious and more necessary. When you export an army such as ours, which is in reality a nation and not a small one, you must send with it a government. Now knowledge, and the administrative body in which it expresses itself, is of all things the most difficult to export. This scheme of transportation is the first miracle of sheer brain-power that strikes you, but it is not the greatest. I do not scruple to say that as a study in government, that is to say, in the efficient conduct of human things in the mass, the present army, as organised through G.H.Q., is far more impressive than most civil constitutions.
I do not speak merely of the actual Higher Command. Your heads of that must carry all the apparatus of all its range from minor tactics to military statesmanship. Note, rather, then, when you send an army you must send a Treasury, a General Post Office, a Judiciary and Record Office, and one hardly knows what beside. Your quartermaster-general has got to be the Selfridge of six million gaily grumbling customers, who are perpetually on the move. A mere battalion quartermaster must possess qualities that would win a fortune in a large suburban shop.
And it is possible to overlook the service of information—the signallers. Everywhere the army goes it lays behind it a tentacular network of news-carrying wire. The arm of its reporting power is indefinitely longer than that of any Associated Press. From the company dug-out in the front trench to Sir Douglas Haig, and from him to Whitehall, there is no gap. On the earth, beneath it and above, this nerve-system extends: aeroplane, observation balloon, patrol, vedette, sniping-post, all collect their varying toll of fact and surmise; electricity, drilled to the use of the men who wear the blue-and-white bands, vibrates it on to its destination. And so is this particular area of the army cerebrum kept alive and alert. I have hardly spoken of the A.S.C., of the endless chain of supply that for ever runs and returns on its infallible cogs about the roads and railways.
There are other, many other, things to admire as patterns of organisation. It is what our subalterns, with their strict and shy economy of speech, describe as a “great show.” All the world has heard of carrying on. But it was first of all necessary to carry. And we have carried to war across the seas not a mere army, but a people in arms.
II.—The Long Endurance
In the history of war, especially as it was practised by the Irish regiments, we have been accustomed to the brief ecstasy of assault, the flash of bayonets, the headlong avalanche of death and victory.... Often there had been, before this sharp decision, the heroism of a long march. But in general, instantaneity had been the characteristic of Irish soldiers as it is of Irish football forwards. There are instances enough of the old quality in this war from Festubert to Suvla Bay, from Loos to that shell-powdered sinister terrain over which the Ulster Division swept in its great charges. But there is another heroism. The three chapters of this war may well bear for rubrics: the Grim Retreat, the Long Endurance, the Epic Push. It is of the second that I write here.
Note that this, the greatest, is also the dullest of all recorded campaigns. It is wrong, indeed, to call it a campaign or even a series of campaigns: one had better style it the Wall-paper War. Everywhere the same type and development of fighting, the same pattern repeated and indefinitely repeated. It is true that the walls are the walls of the world, and the colours are those of life and death. None the less the effect on the mind is that of near bigness, which is always of its nature wearisome. It is not of that weariness of the detached mind that I now write, but of the more intimate and crushing fatigue of the actual man on the spot. There may very well be units of this immense army that on their return home will have apparently little to show for their lost blood.
People will say to them—
“I suppose you were in the dash at X? No? Oh, it was the capture of Y? I mean, of course, the round-up at Z?”
And they will answer rather dully—