It has been my privilege to have seen a good deal of the Guards in this war. You would scarcely recognize in these battle-stained warriors the spruce Guardsmen of St. James’s and the Park. The first Guardsmen I met in this war were a battalion of Irish Guards and a battalion of the Coldstreams on an evening in May, as they were marching down a road near Chocques towards the firing-line. Their creased caps and stained khaki, their dull green web equipment and short brown rifles, made them look at the first superficial glance like any other Regular troops. But something about their stride, the way they bore themselves, their alignment (though they were marching easy), made me look again. That magnificent physique, that brave poise of the head, that clear, cool look of the eye—that could only be of the Guards!
They had come a long way. It was a close, warm evening, and the roads were a smother of choking dust. The Guards wore their caps pushed back off their foreheads, and their tunics unbuttoned at the neck, showing a patch of white skin where the deep tan of their faces and necks ended. The perspiration poured off them in streams. It traced little channels in the dust that lay thick on their sunburnt cheeks. Every now and then a man, with a grunt, would wipe the sweat from his eyes, and in the same motion administer that little hoist to his pack that is peculiar to the British soldier marching with a full load.
Many a time, on German manœuvres, I have passed a regiment on the march, like these Guardsmen, in the stifling dust of a summer day. I have been all but choked by the sour odour which the breeze has wafted over from the marching men, and have been only too glad to follow the advice of the old hands to put the wind between them and me. But these British Guardsmen, grimy and travel-stained though they were on the outside, were clean of body, and the air about them was pure. Looking at them closer, I saw that under the dust their haversacks were neatly packed and fastened, their uniform well-fitting and whole, their puttees beautifully tied. These things may seem trifles to you who will read this in the sheltered atmosphere of England, where one man in khaki with a gun seems as another. But they are the mark of a good battalion, and, noting them on that dusty French road, with the guns drumming faintly in the distance and an aeroplane droning aloft, I knew that the trenches for which those troops were bound would be well held.
One of the most stirring military spectacles it has ever been my good-fortune to witness was a parade of some battalions of the Guards before the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Kitchener, and M. Millerand, the French Minister of War. I have seen many reviews of the Prussian Guard before the German Emperor, both in Berlin and in Potsdam. My eye has been fascinated by the perfect precision of the movements of the Prussian drill, the long lines of heads thrown stiffly over at the left shoulder at the same angle, of feet flung forward in the Paradeschritt with such mathematical exactitude that they seemed as one movement, of white-gloved hands swinging to and fro in absolute accord.
I have watched the rippling line of the French infantry swing past the saluting-point at Longchamps reviews with a wiry elasticity that gave better promise of efficiency in the field than the stiff precision of the Prussian, and have delighted in the brilliant array of colours, the red and blue and gold and silver against the deep green background of the historic racecourse.
But I have never seen, and never wish to see, a more inspiring picture than those four battalions of Guards drawn up in their drab khaki on a heath in Flanders over against the Tricolour and the Union Jack flying side by side. An ancient military tradition, a high purpose and perfect physical condition, never combined to produce a more sublime spectacle of troops than this. There was no display, no searching after cheap effects. The Guards were there in their khaki, as they had come from the trenches; the officers carried no swords; the colours were guarded in churches at home. The Grenadiers and Coldstreams had their drums and fifes; the Scots Guards their pipers, wearing the proud red tartan of the ancient House of Stuart. The four battalions stood there in four solid phalanxes, unbeautiful and undecorative, save when, to the crash of the opening bars of the “Marseillaise,” three distinct ripples ran through those serried ranks, and with a dazzling flash of steel the Guards presented arms.
Memories of Mons and Landrecies, of Klein Zillebeke and Cuinchy and Festubert, went shuddering by, pale shadows escaping from the prison of the imagination, as the stalwart giants of the King’s Company of the Grenadiers led off the march past. The drums and fifes crashed through “The British Grenadiers” again and again and again before the serried files of men, marching with an iron tread that fairly shook the earth, had all gone by, and the skirling of the pipes proclaimed the approach of the Scots Guards.
There were faces in that procession like faces on a Greek frieze, fighters all, radiant with youth and strength and determination to conquer or readiness to die, men who had looked Death in the eyes, and, in that they had withstood the ordeal, had risen above man’s puny fears of the Unknown. It was a spectacle to thrill a soldier, to inspire a poet, to make an Englishman vibrate with pride at the thought that these are his brothers.
The army in the field loves the Guards. It is not jealous of their exclusiveness, for the Guards have shown in this war that they are not content to rest upon their laurels. The army trusts the Guards, for it knows that, when in a critical hour Wellington’s voice shall be heard once more above the storm crying, “Stand up, Guards!” the Guards will rise again in a solid wall of steel, as invulnerable as their phalanx at Waterloo.