What is the spirit of the British Army in the field? I have been asked. How was it inculcated, and how is it maintained? And I would reply that the spirit of our army is the spirit of our public schools, for it was inculcated and is maintained by the Regimental Officer, himself the product of our public schools. In saying this I do not mean that the British Army is dominated by an aristocratic caste. I mean that its spirit of courage, self-sacrifice, loyalty, and public-spirited obedience is the spirit upon which the whole of our public school system is based, a great commonwealth in which no man is for the party, but all are for the State.
The Regimental Officer, who has blazed for himself an imperishable trail of glory in this war, has cherished and fostered this feeling. His spirit of quiet, unostentatious courage, of uncomplaining devotion to duty, of never-failing thoughtfulness for the other man, the new-comer, “the fellow who’s a bit rattled, don’t you know?” carries on the tradition of our forefathers who fought with Marlborough and Wellington and Raglan. It is an eminently English spirit. That is why, no doubt, despite the expansion of our little Expeditionary Force into a great democratic host, our new armies have slipped it on with their tunics and their belts, so that the spirit of the new is the spirit of the old.
When this war is over I shall hope to see a monument erected in London, in the most prominent site that can be found, that the honour may be greater, with the plain inscription, “To the Regimental Officer, 1914.” Let it be white like his escutcheon, of marble like his fortitude, and in size vast and overwhelming and imposing like the pile of heroic deeds he has amassed to his credit in all our wars. German organization may have given the German armies high-explosive shells innumerable and machine-guns galore to break our bodies, and asphyxiating gases to stop our breath; they have no weapon to break the spirit of the Regimental Officer, which is the spirit of his men, the spirit of the army. The German Army is inspired by a magnificent military tradition, but it seems to linger principally in the regulars, and to be present only in a diminished form in the officers and men of the Reserve, the Landwehr, and the Landsturm. For the spirit of the German Army is artificial, the atmosphere of a military caste. The spirit of our army is the spirit of England that sent Drake sailing over the seven seas, that gave our greatest sailor that far-famed “Nelson touch”; it is the vivifying breath of the greatest Empire that the world has ever seen.
“Gentlemen, hats off!” as Napoleon said at the grave of Frederick the Great—hats off to the Regimental Officer. The military correspondent of The Times sounded a sane note, in the midst of the great clamour about the shortage of shells, when he bade us remember the value of good infantry, dashing in the attack, steady on the defensive. The Regimental Officer is the soul of our infantry. No matter that he is a boy, or that he is out from home but a few weeks, his sergeants will do the technical part of the job if needs be. But the Regimental Officer will show them all how to die.
Lord Wolseley used to tell how, standing on the parapet of the earthworks before Tel-el-Kebir, he saw a shell, a huge, clumsy projectile, hurling through the air before him. In an instant the question flashed across his mind whether it was the duty of the Regimental Officer to preserve his life usefully for the battalion, or to take a risk and give the men an example in indifference to danger. The shell answered the question for him by passing him by and bursting innocuously behind him. But I know what Wolseley’s, what any Regimental Officer’s answer would have been: “Stay where you are and take your chance!”
Revolutionary changes have been wrought in the army in everything, save in its spirit, since the outbreak of the war. We have come to rely on heavy artillery and high-explosive shells and machine-guns; we count our men by the hundred thousand where we counted them by the thousand before. The Territorial, the raw recruit, have proved their metal in the fiercest fire; the Canadian has not belied the reputation of our fighting race. Caste restrictions in the army have been swept away; exclusive regiments are now exclusive only to the incompetent. That jealously guarded, poorly paid, and, if the truth were told, rather ill-considered little army that the British people kept to fight its battles before August, 1914, has been swallowed up in the millions of Britons who have heard the country’s call. But the soul of the army marches on unchanged, with the same self-sacrifice, the same willing obedience, the same admirable discipline. The soul of the army is enshrined in the Regimental Officer. In the remoteness and the obscurity of the trenches and the billets he goes about his work quietly and without fuss, in the same way as he performs the deeds that win him distinction, in the same way that he goes to his death. His men worship him. His Brigadier trusts him. “The Regimental Officer,” said a General to me, “by God, he’s the salt of the earth!”
CHAPTER II
THE WAR OF POSITIONS
The Germans have a mania for phraseology. Their language lends itself to it, capable, as it is, of accumulative word-building and every kind of permutation. “German is a code, not a language,” has been very justly said. Theirs is the pigeon-hole brain in which everything is ticketed with its precise label, and classified under its own particular head. I have been often amused to find them carrying this habit of theirs into military matters. Thus, a German in a letter home, describing an attack on his trench, says that the warning passed along was: “Höchste Alarmbereitschaft” (highest alarm-readiness).
In the same way they describe trench warfare as the “Stellungskrieg,” the war of positions. It was from a German prisoner that I first heard this expression, a big, fair Westphalian captured at Neuve Chapelle, with whom I had some conversation in the train that was taking him and some 500 of his comrades down to Havre to embark for England. I did not at first grasp what he meant by his continual references to the “Stellungskrieg,” and asked him what the phrase signified. “‘Stellungskrieg,’” he said, “you know, what followed the ‘Bewegungskrieg’” (the war of movements).
The German mind again! “The war of movements!” What a priceless phrase to flash in the eyes of a blindly credulous people! The phrase has the inestimable advantage of being entirely vague. It does not say which way the movements went. I tested my prisoner on this point. He was quite positive that the Bewegungskrieg stopped and the Stellungskrieg set in by virtue of the carefully laid plans and ripe decision of the Great General Staff, and not of military necessity imposed on the Fatherland by the Allies. “Everybody knows,” a German-Swiss paper “kept” by the German Government cried the other day, “everybody knows that there never was a battle of the Marne!” That is the conviction of all German soldiers who did not take part in that disastrous and unforgettable retreat.