The Project Gutenberg eBook, Disenchantment, by C. E. (Charles Edward) Montague

DISENCHANTMENT

Disenchantment

By Charles Edward Montague

New York

Brentano's

Publishers

1922

To

AUBREY MONTAGUE

OF LAUTOKA, FIJI

"We twa hae paidlet i' the burn"

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
THE VISION

I

Now that most of our men in the prime of life have been in the army we seem to be in for a goodly literature of disappointment. All the ungifted young people came back from the war to tell us that they were "fed up." That was their ailment, in outline. The gifted ones are now coming down to detail. They say that a web has been woven over the sky, or that something or other has made a goblin of the sun—about as full details of a pain as you can fairly expect a gifted person to give, although he really may feel it.

No doubt disenchantment has flourished before. About the year 1880 nearly all the best art was wan and querulous; that of Burne-Jones was always in trouble; Matthew Arnold's verse was a well-bred, melodious whine; Rossetti was all disenamourment and displacement. Yet you could feel that their broken-toy view of the world was only their nice little way with the public. Burne-Jones in his home was a red, jovial man; Arnold a diner-out of the first lustre; Rossetti a sworn friend to bacon and eggs and other plain pleasures. The young melancholiasts of to-day are less good at their craft, and yet they do give you a notion that some sort of silver cord really seems to them to have come loose in their insides, or some golden bowl, which mattered to them, to have been more or less broken, and that they are feeling honestly sour about it. If they do not know how to take it out of mankind by writing desolatory verses about ashes and dust in the English Review, at least they can, if they be workmen, vote for a strike: they thus achieve the same good end and put it beyond any doubt that they don't think all is well with the world.

II

The higher the wall or the horse from which you have tumbled, the larger, under Nature's iron law, are your bruises and consequent crossness likely to be. Before we try shaking or cuffing the disenraptured young Solomons in our magazines and our pits it would be humane to reflect that some five millions of these, in their turns, have fallen off an extremely high horse. Of course, we have all fallen off something since 1914. Even owners of ships and vendors of heavy woollens might, if all hearts were laid bare, be found to have fallen, not perhaps off a high horse, but at least off some minute metaphysical pony. Still, the record in length of vertical fall, and of proportionate severity of incidence upon an inelastic earth, is probably held by ex-soldiers and, among these, by the volunteers of the first year of the war. We were all, of course, volunteers then, undiluted by indispensable Harry's later success in getting dispensable Johnnie forced to join us in the Low Countries.

Most of those volunteers of the prime were men of handsome and boundless illusions. Each of them quite seriously thought of himself as a molecule in the body of a nation that was really, and not just figuratively, "straining every nerve" to discharge an obligation of honour. Honestly, there was about them as little as there could humanly be of the coxcombry of self-devotion. They only felt that they had got themselves happily placed on a rope at which everyone else, in some way or other, was tugging his best as well as they. All the air was ringing with rousing assurances. France to be saved, Belgium righted, freedom and civilization re-won, a sour, soiled, crooked old world to be rid of bullies and crooks and reclaimed for straightness, decency, good-nature, the ways of common men dealing with common men. What a chance! The plain recruit who had not the gift of a style said to himself that for once he had got right in on the ground-floor of a topping good thing, and he blessed the luck that had made him neither too old nor too young. Rupert Brooke, meaning exactly the same thing, was writing:

Now, God be thank'd who has match'd us with His hour,

And caught our youth and waken'd us from sleeping,

With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpen'd power,

To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary....

Of course, it is easy to say to any such simpleton now: "Well, if you were like that, what could you expect? Vous l'avez voulu, George Dandin. You were rushing upon disillusionment." Of course he was. If each recruit in 1914 had been an à Kempis, or even a Rochefoucauld, he would have known that if you are to love mankind you must not expect too much from it. But he was not, as a rule, a philosopher. He was a common man, not much inclined to think evil of people. It no more occurred to him at that time that he was the natural prey of seventy-seven separate breeds of profiteers than it did that presently he would be overrun by less figurative lice. When Garibaldi led an infantry attack against the Austrians it was said that he never looked round to see if his men were following; he knew to a dead certainty that at the moment when he reached the enemy he would feel his men's breath hot on the back of his neck. The early volunteer in his blindness imagined that there was between all Englishmen then that oneness of faith, love, and courage.

III

Everything helped, for a time, to keep him the child that he was. Except in the matter of separation from civilian friends his daily life was pretty well that of the happiest children. The men knew nothing and hoped for wonderful things. Drill, to the average recruit, was like some curious game or new dance, various and rhythmic, and not very hard: it was rather fun for adults to be able to play at such things without being laughed at. Their lives had undergone an immense simplification. Of course, an immense simplification of life is not certain to be a wholly good thing. A Zulu's life may be simpler than Einstein's and yet the estate of Einstein may be the more gracious. If a boatload of men holding the Order of Merit were cast away on a desert island they might, on the whole, think the life as beastly as Touchstone found the life in the Forest of Arden. Yet some of those eminent men might find a soul of good in that evil. They might grill all the day and shiver all night, and be half-starved the whole of the time. But their minds would get a rest cure. While they were there they would have to settle no heartrending questions of patronage, nor to decree the superannuation of elderly worthies. The brutal instancy of physical wants might be trying; but they would at least be spared, until they were rescued, the solving of any stiff conundrums of professional ethics.

Moulding the pet recreations of civilized men you find their craving to have something simple to do for a change, to be given an easy one after so many twisters. People whose work is the making of calculations or the manipulation of thoughts have been known to find a curiously restful pleasure in chopping firewood or painting tool-sheds till their backs ache. It soothes them with a flattering sense of getting something useful done straight off. So much of their "real" work is a taking of some minute or indirect means to some end remote, dimly and doubtfully visible, possibly—for the dread thought will intrude—not worth attaining. The pile of chopped wood is at least a spice of the ultimate good: visible, palpable, it is success; and the advanced and complex man, the statesman or sociologist who has chopped it, escapes for the moment from all his own advancement and complication, and savours in quiet ecstasy one of the sane primeval satisfactions.

A country fellow at the pleugh,

His acre's tilled, he's right eneugh;

A country girl at her wheel,

Her dizzen's done, she's unco weel.

The climber of mountains seeks a similar rapture by going to places where he is, in full exertion, the sum of his physical faculties, little more. Here all his hopes are for things close at hand: ambition lives along one arm stretched out to grasp a rock eighteen inches away; his sole aim in life may be simply the top of a thirty-foot cleft in a steep face of stone. At home, in the thick of his work, he had seemed to be everlastingly threading mazes that no one could thread right to the end; here, on the crags, it is all divinely simplified; who would trouble his head with subtle questionings about what human life will, might, or ought to be when every muscle and nerve are tautly engaged in the primal job of sticking to life as it is?

To have for his work these raptures of play was the joy of the new recruit who had common health and good-humour. All his maturity's worries and burdens seemed, by some magical change, to have dropped from him; no difficult choices had to be made any longer; hardly a moral chart to be conned; no one had any finances to mind; nobody else's fate was put in his hands, and not even his own. All was fixed from above, down to the time of his going to bed and the way he must lace up his boots. His vow of willing self-enslavement for a season had brought him the peace of the soldier, which passeth understanding as wholly as that of the saint, the blitheness of heart that comes to both with their clarifying, tranquillizing acquiescence in some mystic will outside their own. Immersed in that Dantean repose of utter obedience the men slept like babies, ate like hunters, and rediscovered the joy of infancy in getting some rather elementary bodily movement to come right. They saw everything that God had made, and behold! it was very good. That was the vision.

IV

The mental peace, the physical joy, the divinely simplified sense of having one clear aim, the remoteness from all the rest of the world, all favoured a tropical growth of illusion. A man, says Tennyson, "imputes himself." If he be decent he readily thinks other people are decent. Here were hundreds of thousands of quite commonplace persons rendered, by comradeship in an enthusiasm, self-denying, cheerful, unexacting, sanely exalted, substantially good. To get the more fit to be quickly used men would give up even the little darling vices which are nearest to many simple hearts. Men who had entertained an almost reasoned passion for whisky, men who in civil life had messed up careers for it and left all and followed it, would cut off their whisky lest it should spoil their marching. Little white, prim clerks from Putney—men whose souls were saturated with the consciousness of class—would abdicate freely and wholeheartedly their sense of the wide, unplumbed, estranging seas that ought to roar between themselves and Covent Garden market porters. Many men who had never been dangerous rivals to St. Anthony kept an unwonted hold on themselves during the months when hundreds of reputable women and girls round every camp seemed to have been suddenly smitten with a Bacchantic frenzy. Real, constitutional lazy fellows would buy little cram-books of drill out of their pay and sweat them up at night so as to get on the faster. Men warned for a guard next day would agree among themselves to get up an hour before the pre-dawn winter Réveillé to practise among themselves the beautiful symbolic ritual of mounting guard in the hope of approaching the far-off, longed-for ideal of smartness, the passport to France. Men were known to subscribe in order to get some dummy bombs made with which to practise bomb-throwing by themselves on summer nights after drilling and marching from six in the morning till five in the evening. How could they not have the illusion that the whole nation's sense of comradeship went as far as their own?

Who of all those who were in camp at that time, and still are alive, will not remember until he dies the second boyhood that he had in the late frosts and then in the swiftly filling and bursting spring and early summer of 1915? The awakening bird-notes of Réveillé at dawn, the two-mile run through auroral mists breaking over a still inviolate England, the men's smoking breath and the swish of their feet brushing the dew from the tips of the June grass and printing their track of darker green on the pearly-grey turf; the long, intent morning parades under the gummy shine of chestnut buds in the deepening meadows; the peace of the tranquil hours on guard at some sequestered post, alone with the sylvester midnight, the wheeling stars and the quiet breathing of the earth in its sleep, when time, to the sentry's sense, fleets on unexpectedly fast and life seems much too short because day has slipped into day without the night-long sleeper's false sense of a pause; and then jocund days of marching and digging trenches in the sun; the silly little songs on the road that seemed, then, to have tunes most human, pretty, and jolly; the dinners of haversack rations you ate as you sat on the roadmakers' heaps of chopped stones or lay back among buttercups.

When you think of the youth that you have lost, the times when it seems to you now that life was most poignantly good may not be the ones when everything seemed at the time to go well with your plans, and the world, as they say, to be at your feet; rather some few unaccountable moments when nothing took place that was out of the way and yet some word of a friend's, or a look on the face of the sky, the taste of a glass of spring water, the plash of laughter and oars heard across midsummer meadows at night raised the soul of enjoyment within you to strangely higher powers of itself. That spirit bloweth and is still: it will not rise for our whistling nor keep a time-table; no wine that we know can give us anything more than a fugitive caricature of its ecstasies. When it has blown free we remember it always, and know, without proof, that while the rapture was there we were not drunk, but wise; that for a moment some intervening darkness had thinned and we were seeing further than we can see now into the heart of life.

To one recollection at least it has seemed that the New Army's spring-tide of faith and joyous illusion came to its height on a night late in the most beautiful May of 1915, in a hut where thirty men slept near a forest in Essex. Nothing particular happened; the night was like others. Yet in the times that came after, when half of the thirty were dead and most of the others jaded and soured, the feel of that night would come back with the strange distinctness of those picked, remembered mornings and evenings of boyhood when everything that there was became everlastingly memorable as though it had been the morning or evening of the first day. Ten o'clock came and Lights Out, but a kind of luminous bloom still on the air and a bugle blowing Last Post in some far-away camp that kept worse hours than we. I believe the whole hut held its breath to hear the notes better. Who wouldn't, to listen to that most lovely and melancholy of calls, the noble death of each day's life, a sound moving about hither and thither, like a veiled figure making gestures both stately and tender, among the dim thoughts that we have about death the approaching extinguisher—resignation and sadness and unfulfilment and triumph all coming back to the overbearing sense of extinction in those two recurrent notes of "Lights Out"? One listens as if with bowed mind, as though saying "Yes; out, out, brief candle." A moment's silence to let it sink in and the chaffing and laughter broke out like a splash of cool water in summer again. That hut always went to bed laughing and chaffing all round, and, though there was no wit among us, the stories tasted of life, the inexhaustible game and adventure. Looker, ex-marine turned soldier, told us how he had once gone down in a diving-suit to find a lost anchor and struck on the old tin lining out of a crate, from which some octopian beast with long feelers had reached out at him, and the feelers had come nearer and nearer through the dim water. "What did you do, Filthy?" somebody asked (we called Looker "Filthy" with friendly jocoseness). "I 'opped it," the good fellow said, and the sane anti-climax of real life seemed twice as good as the climax that any Hugo or Verne could have put to the yarn. Another described the great life he had lived as an old racing "hen," or minor sutler of the sport of kings. Hard work, of course. "All day down at Epsom openin' doors an' brushin' coats and shiftin' truck for bookies till you'd make, perhaps, two dollars an' speculate it on the las' race and off back 'ome to London 'ungry, on your 'oofs." Once a friend of his, who had had a bad day, had not walked—had slipped into the London train, and at Vauxhall, where tickets were taken, had gone to earth under the seat with a brief appeal to his fellow travellers: "Gents, I rely on your honour." The stout narrator could see no joke at all in the phrase. He was rather scandalized by our great roar of laughter. "'Is honour! And 'im robbin' the comp'ny! 'nough to take away a man's kerrikter!" said the patient walker-home in emergency. It made life seem too wonderful to end; such were the untold reserves that we had in this nation of men with a hold on themselves, of hardly uprightness; even this unhelped son of the gutter, living from hand to mouth in the common lodging-houses of slums, a parasite upon parasites, poor little animalcule doing odd jobs for the caterpillars of the commonwealth—even he could persist in carrying steadily, clear of the dirt, the full vase of his private honour. What, then, must be the unused stores of greedless and fearless straightness in others above us, generals and statesmen, men in whom, as in bank-porters, character is three parts of the trade! The world seemed clean that night; such a lovely unreason of optimist faith was astir in us all,

We felt for that time ravish'd above earth

And possess'd joys not promised at our birth.

It seemed hardly credible now, in this soured and quarrelsome country and time, that so many men of different classes and kinds, thrown together at random, should ever have been so simply and happily friendly, trustful, and keen. But they were, and they imagined that all their betters were too. That was the paradise that the bottom fell out of.

CHAPTER II
MISGIVING

I

What could the New Army not have done if all the time of its training had been fully used! A few, at least, of its units had a physique above that of the Guards; many did more actual hours of work, before going abroad, than Guardsmen in peace-time do in two years; all were at first as keen as boys, collectors, or spaniels—whichever are keenest; when the official rations of warlike instruction fell short they would go about hungrily trying to scratch crumbs of that provender out of the earth like fowls in a run.

But there was an imp of frustration about. He pervaded, like Ariel, all the labouring ship of our State. I had seen him in Lancashire once, on one of the early days of the war, when fifty young miners marched in from one pit, with their colliery band, to enlist at an advertised place and time of enlistment. The futilitarian elf took care that the shutters were up and nobody there, so that the men should kick their heels all the day in the street and walk back at night with their tails between their legs, and the band not playing, to tell their mates that the whole thing was a mug's game, a ramp, got up by the hot-air merchants and crooks in control. The imp must have grinned, not quite as all of us have grinned since, on the wrong side of our mouths, at the want of faith that miners have in the great and wise who rule over them. Another practical joke of his was to slip into the War Office or Admiralty and tear up any letters he found from people offering gifts of motor-cars, motor-boats, steam-yachts, training grounds, etc., lest they be answered and the writers and other friends of their country encouraged. Perhaps his brightest triumph of all was to dress himself up as England and send away with a flea in her ear the Ireland whom the wonder-working Redmond had induced to offer to fight at our side. Those were a few of his master-pieces. Between times he would keep his hand in by putting it into the Old Army's head to take the keenness out of the New.

Dearest of all the New Army's infant illusions was the Old Army—still at that time the demigod host of an unshattered legend of Mons. To the new recruits any old Regular sergeant was more—if the world can hold more—than a county cricketer is to a small boy at school. He had the talisman; he was a vessel full of the grace by which everything was to be saved; like a king, he could "touch for" the malady of unsoldierliness. How could he err, how could he shirk, now that the fate of a world hung upon him?

There was something in that. No doubt there always is in illusions. They are not delusions. The pick of the old N.C.O.'s of the Regular Army were packed as tight as bits of radium with virtues and powers. A man of fifty-five who came back to the army from spending ten years in a farcical uniform whistling for taxis outside a flash music-hall would teach every rank in a battalion its duties for 4s. 8d. a day—coaching the dug-out colonel in the new infantry drill, the field officers in court-martial procedure, the chaplain in details of drum-head worship, the medical officer in the order of sick parades, the subalterns and N.C.O.'s in camp economy, field hygiene, and what not, and always holding the attention of a man or a mess or a battalion fixed fast by the magic of his own oaken character, his simple, vivid mind, his passion for getting things right, and his humorous, patient knowledge of mankind. Even such minor masterpieces as average Guards ex-sergeant-majors were rather godlike on parade. In drill, at any rate, they had the circumstantial vision and communicable fire of the prophets. Early in 1915 a little famished London cab-tout, a recruit, still rectilinear as a starved cat even after a month of army rations, was to be heard praying softly at night in his cot that he might be made like unto one of these, whom he named.

II

Where, then, did the first shiver of disillusion begin? Perhaps with some trivial incident. Say a new-born company, quartered in a great town, was sent out for a long afternoon's marching. Only through long, steady grinds can the perfect rhythm of marching, like that of rowing, be generated at last. The men, youthfully eager to kiss all possible rods and endure any obtainable hardness, march forth in a high state of delight—they are going to learn how to march to Berlin! No officer being present—and scarcely any existing as yet—a sergeant-major is in command. He is a very old hand. For twenty minutes he leads his 250 adorers into the thick of a populous quarter. Then he orders them to fall out. A public-house resembling Buckingham Palace, but smaller, is near. Most of the men, in their ardour, stand about on the kerb, ready to leap back to their places as soon as the whistle shall sound. A few thirsty souls jostle hurriedly into the bars, where they find that arrangements for serving a multitude are surprisingly complete. Soon they are further reassured by descrying the sergeant-major's handsome form, like Tam o' Shanter's, "planted unco' right" in a chair in an inner holy of holies along with the landlord. This esoteric session has an air of permanence; the sergeant-major is evidently au mieux with the management. The thirsty souls settle down to their beer.

Five minutes, twenty, half an hour pass fairly fast for them, less fast for the keener warriors pawing the kerbstone without. At the end of an hour fifty per cent. of the kerbstone zealots have been successfully frozen into the bars. The rest stare at each other with a wild surmise. Rumour shakes her wings and begins to fly round. The sergeant-major, she says, is holding a species of court in the depths of the pub; some privates with money upon them, children of this world, are pressing in, she says, even now, into that heart of the rose, and with a few manly words are standing the great man the extremely expensive combination of nectars that he prefers. "Were it not better done as others use?"—the Spartan residuum on the kerb is diminishing. Another hour goes; only an inconsiderable remnant of Spartans is left; these are exchanging profane remarks about patriotism and other virtues. One of them quotes a famous Conservative statesman whose footman he was before he enlisted: "I believe we shall win, in spite of the Regular Army." When just enough time is left to march back to quarters the whistle is blown, the men slouch into their places and stump unrhythmically home, revolving many things according to their several natures. A child who has rashly taken its parent on trust, and yet more rashly taken the parent's all-round perfection as some sort of sample and proof of a creditable government of the world, must have a good deal of mental rearrangement to do the first time the parent comes home full of liquor and sells the furniture to get some more.

III

Perhaps, in another company or another battalion, some private of relative wealth has felt, in the strength of his youth and the heat of his zeal, that he wants more to do. He longs to get on with the job. So he guilelessly goes to his own sergeant-major and asks him if there is a chance of getting some lessons in bayonet-fighting anywhere in the town. The sergeant-major sizes him up with a stare. "You're a fine likely man," he says, "for a stripe." He stares harder. "Or three," he subjoins.

The gilded youth is confounded. He an N.C.O.! He would as soon have thought of being a primate. "I'll give you," the Old Army continues, "the lessons myself. It'll be twelve quid—for the lot." To reproduce the emphasis upon the last three words is beyond the resources of typography.

The gilded youth may feel a slight pricking in his thumbs. Still, there is no overt crook in the deal. The teaching is sure to be good. And he has the cash and an inexact sense of values. So he agrees. The senior man-at-arms expresses a preference for ready money. Agreed, too. After one lesson the tutor is frankly bored by his tutorial function. "Hang it," he says, "what's the sense of you and me sweating our 'oly guts out? You've paid, and you'll find I won't bilk you." Youth is mystified; feels it is getting somewhat short weight. But what are acolytes against high priests? Youth leaves it at that.

In two or three weeks the frustrated pupil is sent for by his frustrator. A man is wanted for Post Corporal, or even for Battalion Provost Sergeant. What would the gilded youth say to the job? On his saying nothing at first the sergeant-major, with swiftly rising contempt for such friarly hesitancy, recites the beauties of this piece of preferment. "Cushiest job in the 'ole outfit! Long as you're sober enough to stand up at the staff parade of a night, that's all there is to it. Where'd the crime be among you 'oly Christians?" (The almost fanatical abstention of the New Army from ordinary military crimes often gave some scandal to experts drawn from the Old. They regarded it with perplexity and suspicion. The phenomenon was really simple, the men being in panic-fear of getting left behind in England if their unit should suddenly be sent abroad.) While the gilded youth tries to explain, without a lapse from tact, that the ranks are good enough for himself he feels a regal scorn beat down on him like a vertical sun. A fulmination follows. "Then what the 'ell did you ever come to me for? 'Op off! Out of it!"

The youth retires feeling that he has somehow strayed into a black list. He talks it over with a friend. The friend, he finds, has heard something like it from somebody else. Ribald jibes are soon flying about—"Four pound a stripe!" "Stripes are ris' to-day!" "Corporals, three for a tenner!" The story goes that a little "Scotch draper," the worst drill in a section, has felt that in this newly revealed world his professional credit for tactful effrontery is at stake; he has bet a fiver that he will offer the bare market price of a recommendation for "lance-Jack" and bring the thing off; the enterprise has prospered and the architect of his own fortunes is wearing the stripe, spending his pound balance on the transaction, commanding his brethren, and enjoying his new dispensation from fatigues. The band of brothers begin to look at each other with some circumspection. They wonder. How far does the dirty work go? Who may not try it on next? And did not somebody say he had seen the stud pass between the contractor who emptied the swill-tubs and the sergeant-cook who filled them with half-legs of mutton? What was that shorter creed to which the sergeants' mess waiters said that the Regular sergeants always recurred in their cups—"Stick together, boys," and "Anything can be wangled in the army"?

IV

What about officers, too? The men wonder again. That new company commander who started in as a captain, but never could give the simplest command on parade without his sergeant-major to give him the words like a parson doing a marriage? What about little Y., who suddenly got a commission when he was doing a fortnight's C.B. for coming on parade with a dirty neck? And the major's lecture on musketry? And the colonel's on field operations?

Part of the scheme of training is that all the senior officers should lecture to the men on something or other—marching, map-reading, field hygiene, and what not. An excellent plan, but terribly hard on an old Regular Army not exactly officered by the brightest wits of public schools. The major's musketry lecture has made the men think. He has told them first that, just to let them know that he was not talking through his hat, he might say he had been, in his time, the champion shot of the Army in India. The men had known that already—had doted, in fact, on anything known to the glory of any of their commanders. Fair enough, too, they had felt, that a man should buck a bit about what he had done. Anyone would. And so they had not even smiled. But then the major had amplified. He had recited his moderate, but not bad, earlier scores in competitions: he had given statistics of his rapid rise; he had painted the astonishment of all who saw him shoot in those days—above all, the delight of the men of his old regiment; for, the major had said, "I may have faults, but this at least I can say, that wherever I went the men simply worshipped the ground that I trod on."

All this had filled the first half of the lecturer's hour. The men had begun to look at each other cautiously, marvelling. When would the major begin? Could this be a Regular Army custom? But then the major had warmed to his subject. With rising zest he had described the dramatic tension pervading the butts as the crisis of each of his greater triumphs approached. And then the climax had come—"the one time that I failed." In sombre tones the major had told how five shots had to be fired at one out of several targets arranged in a row. "I fired my first four shots. A bull each time. I fired again, and the marker signalled a miss! Everyone present was thunderstruck. I knew what had happened. I said to the butt officer, 'Do you mind, sir, enquiring if there is any shot on the target to the right of mine?' He did so. 'Yes,' was signalled back. 'What is it?' I asked, though I knew. 'A bull.' 'That was my last shot,' said I. I had made the mistake of my life. I had fired at the wrong target. Fall out."

On this tragic climax the lecture had ended, the men had streamed out, some silent, bewildered, some dropping words of amazement. "Lecture! W'y, it's the man's pers'nal 'istory!"

And then the C.O. has lectured on training in field operations—the old, cold colonel, upright, dutiful, unintelligent, waxen, drawn away by a genuine patriotism from his roses and croquet to help joylessly in the queer labour of trying to teach this uncouth New Army a few of the higher qualities of the old. Too honest a man to pretend that he was not taking all that he said in his lecture out of the Army's official manual, Infantry Training, 1914, he has held the little red book in his hand, read out frankly a sentence at a time from that terse and luminous masterpiece of instruction, and then has tried to "explain" it while the men gaped at the strange contrast between the thing clearly said in the book and the same thing plunged into obscurity by the poor colonel's woolly and faltering verbiage. Half the men had bought the little book themselves and devoured it as hungrily as boys consume a manual of rude boat-building or of camping-out. And here was the colonel bringing his laboured jets of darkness to show the way through sunlight; elucidating plainness itself with the tangled clues of his own mind's confusion, like Bardolph: "'Accommodated'; that is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated; or when a man is, being, whereby a' may be thought to be accommodated."

V

A favourite trick with the disillusioning imp was to get hold of authority's wisely drafted time-table of work for a new division in training and mix up all the subjects and times. The effect must have often diverted the author of this piece of humour. Some day a company, say, would begin to learn bayonet-fighting. This would at once revive in the men the fading ecstasies of their first simple faith. Whenever instructors said—"Now then, men, I want to see a bit more murder in them eyes" pleasant little thrills of chartered pugnacity would inspirit them. This, they would feel, was the real thing; this was what they were there for. Then just as, perhaps, they approached the engaging and manifestly serviceable "short jab" Puck's little witticism would suddenly tell; bayonet-fighting would abruptly stop; an urgent order would come from on high to "get on with night operations" or "get on with outpost work," and one of these bodies of knowledge would, in its turn, be partly imbibed by the infant mind and then as suddenly withdrawn from its thirsty lips for something else to be started instead—perhaps a thing that had already been once started and dropped. In the working out of this fantastic pattern of smatterings a company might begin to learn bayonet-fighting three or four times and each time be switched off it before getting half way, and go to France in the end with the A.B.C. of each of several alphabets learnt to boredom and the X.Y.Z. of none of them touched, the men being left to improvise the short jab and other far-on letters by the light of nature, in intimate contact, perhaps, with less humorously instructed Germans.

All this was not universal. Still, it could and did happen. And then the men stared and marvelled. Authority, it is true, had, at the worst, some gusts of passion for perfection. But even these might fortify, in their way, the new occupant of the seat of the scorners. A sudden order might come for a brigade or other inspection, and then authority might in a brief hour become like mediæval man when he fell suddenly ill and the pains of hell gat hold of his mind and he felt that God must be squared without conduct because it might take more time to conduct himself than he had got. In this pious frenzy all attention to measures for incommoding the Germans would yield to the primary duty of whiting the sepulchre; energies that would carry a Hohenzollern Redoubt would be put into the evolution of sections which, through somebody's slackness, did not exist, or the hiding of men who, through some one's mismanagement, were not fit to be seen on parade; old N.C.O.'s would present the men with the tip for making a seemingly full valise look nicely rectangular by the judicious insertion of timber, and other homely recipes for cleaning the outsides of cups and platters. "Eye-wash?" these children of light would say, as they taught. "Of course, it's all eye-wash. What ain't eye-wash in this old world?"

It was a question much asked at the time by those whose post-war inclinations to answer "Nothing, among the lot who run England now" are whitening the hair of statesmen. They were then only asking "How far does it go? How much of the timber is rotten"? Enough to bring down the whole house? Here, there, everywhere the men's new suspicion peered about in the dark and the half-light. Most of the men were the almost boundless reservoirs of patience, humility, and good humour that common Englishmen are. They would take long to run dry. But the waters were steadily falling. Most of them had come from civil employments in which the curse of Adam still holds and a man must either work or get out, mind his P's and Q's, or go short of his victuals. They knew that in civil life a foreman who thieved like some of the Regular N.C.O.'s would soon be in the street or in gaol. They knew that in civil life a manager who could not get down to the point any better than the colonel or the major would soon have the business piled up on the rocks. Here was an eye-opening find—a world in which any old rule of that kind could be dodged if you got the right tip. It became the dominant topic for talk, more dominant even than food, the staple theme of the conversation of soldiers. How far did the rottenness go? Would they ever get to the other side of this bog through which poor old England was wading? If you bored deeper and deeper still into this amazing old Regular Army would there ever come a point at which you would strike the good firm stone of English decency and sense again? And was it open to hope that in Germany, too, such failures abounded—that these diseases of ours were rife in all armies and not in the British alone, so that there might be a chance for us still, as there is for one toothless dog fighting another?

Whatever else might lack in our training-camps throughout England during the spring and summer of 1915, good fresh food for suspicion always abounded. Runlets of news and rumour came trickling from France; wounded soldiers talked and could not be censored; they talked of the failure of French; of the sneer on the face of France; of Staff work that hung up whole platoons of our men, like old washing or scarecrows, to rot on uncut German wire; of little, splendid bands of company officers and men who did take bits of enemy trench, in spite of it all, and then were bombed to death by the Germans at leisure, no support coming, no bombs to throw back—and here, at home, old Regular colonels were saying to hollow squares of their men: "I hear that in France there's a certain amount of throwing of some sort of ginger-beer bottles about, but the old Lee-Metford's good enough for me."

No need, indeed, to look as far away as France. London, to any open eye, was grotesque with a kind of fancy-dress ball of non-combatant khaki: it seemed as if no well-to-do person could be an abstainer from warfare too total to go about disguised as a soldier. He might be anything—a lord lieutenant, an honorary colonel, a dealer in horses, a valuer of cloth, an accountant, an actor in full work, a recruiter of other men for the battles that he avoided himself, a "soldier politician" of swiftly and strangely acquired field rank and the "swashing and martial outside" of a Rosalind, and a Rosalind's record of active service. No doubt this latter carnival was not to be at its height till most of the New Army of 1914 was well out of the way. Conscription had not yet been vouchsafed to the prayers of healthy young publicists who then begged themselves off before tribunals. The ultimate farce of the mobbing of the relatively straight "conscientious objector" by these, his less conscientious brother-objectors, had still to be staged. But already the comedy, like Mercutio's wound, was enough; it served. Colonel Repington's confessional diary had not been published, but the underworld which it reveals was pretty correctly guessed by the New Army's rising suspicion. And rumour said that all the chief tribes of posturers, shirkers, "have-a-good-timers," and jobbers were banding themselves together against the one man in high place whom the New Army believed, with the assurance of absolute faith, to be straight and "a tryer." It was said that Kitchener was to be set upon soon by a league of all the sloths whom he had put to work, the "stunt" journalists whom he had kept at a distance, the social principalities and powers whose jobs he would not do. All the slugs of the commonwealth were to combine against the commonwealth unpleasantly dutiful gardener—down with his lantern and can of caustic solution!

VI

It was, of course, an incomplete view of the case. Shall we have Henries, Fluellens, and Erpinghams at the hand of God, and no Bardolphs, Pistols, and Nyms? Our stage was not really rotten by any means; only half-rotten, like others of man's institutions. Half the Old Army, at least, was exemplary. Even among politicians unselfishness may, with some trouble, be found. Still, this is no exposition of what the New Army ought to have said to itself as it lay on the ground after Lights Out compounding the new temper which comes out to-day, but only of what it did say. It was reacting. In the first weeks of the war most of the flock had too simply taken on trust all that its pastors and masters had said. Now, after believing rather too much, they were out to believe little or nothing—except that in the lump pastors and masters were frauds. From any English training-camp, about that time, you almost seemed to see a light steam rising, as it does from a damp horse. This was illusion beginning to evaporate.

CHAPTER III
AT AGINCOURT AND YPRES

I

Shakespeare seems to have known what

there is to be known about our Great War of 1914-18. And he was not censored. So he put into his Henry IV and Henry V a lot of little things that our press had to leave out at the time for the good of the country. If you look closely you can see them lying about all over the plays. There is the ugly affair of the pyx, at Corbie, on the Somme; there are the little irregularities in recruiting; there are the small patches of baddish moral on the coast and even in Picardy; there is the painful case of the oldish lieutenant who drank and had cold feet, after talking bigger than anyone else. One almost expects to find something in Henry V about the mutiny at Etaples, or the predilection of the Australians for chickens. Anyhow, there is a more understanding account than any war correspondent has given of English troops about to go into battle.

Timing it for the morning of Agincourt, Shakespeare shows us three standard types of the privates who were to win the Great War. One of them, Court, says little; he just looks out for the dawn. We all know Court; he has won many battles. Bates, the second man, gives tongue pretty freely. Bates is not ruled by funk, but he professes it.

"He (the King) may show what outward courage he will, but I believe, as cold a night as 'tis, he could wish himself in the Thames up to the neck, and so I would he were, and I by him, at all adventures, so we were quit here."

Bates, being dead, yet liveth, like Court. In 1915, as in 1415, he was prosecuting his conquests in France, and his unaltered soul was fortifying itself with chants like

Far, far away would I be,

Where the Alleyman cannot catch me,

and

Oh my! I don't want to die,

I want to go home,

sung to dourly wailful tunes, at the seasons of stress when Scotsmen and Irishmen screwed themselves up to the sticking-point with their Tyrtæan anti-English ballads, when Frenchmen would soulfully hymn Glory and Love, and when Germans, if the ear did not deceive, were calling out the whole Landwehr and Landsturm of the straight patriotic lyre. Williams, the third of the Agincourt privates, lives too. He lives with a vengeance. You will remember that he was an anti-ranter, anti-canter and anti-gusher, like Bates. But he ran a special line of his own. He was not simply "fed up"—as he would say now—with tall talk about the just cause and brothers-in-arms and the moral beauty of dying in battle. He was suspicious, besides. He darkly fancied that those who emitted the stuff must have some crooked game on. "That's more than we know" was his stopper for all stock heroics. He would take none of his betters on trust, neither High Command nor Government nor Church—only one company officer whom he knew for himself—"a good old commander and a most kind gentleman." This one small plot of dry ground was reclaimed from the broad sea of Williams' scepticism.

II

If this Doubting Thomas abounded at Agincourt how could he not abound at, say, the third Battle of Ypres? At Agincourt our whole army was just small enough to have comradeship all the way through it—not the figure-of-speech used by the orators, but the thing that soldiers know. Comradeship in a battalion will come of itself; it may be grown, with some effort, in a brigade; in good divisions it has flickered into life for a while during a war; army corps know it not, though their headquarters staffs may dine together at times. At Agincourt the whole of our force was an infantry brigade and a half. It all lay handy in one bivouac. Generals led advancing troops as second-lieutenants do now. The commander-in-chief could go round the lines of a night and talk to the men; if he should speak to them about "we few, we happy few, we band of brothers," he would not be projecting gas.

But now——? It is nobody's fault, but all of that has been lost, as utterly lost as the old comradeship of master and journeyman worker is lost in a mill where half the thousand hands may never have seen the employer who sits in a far-away office, perhaps in a far-away town. Two million men can never be a happy few; nor yet a band of brothers—you have to know a brother first. A man could serve six months in France and never see the general commanding his division. He could be there for four years and not know what a corps or an army commander looked like. How can you help it? Many generals did what they could—more, you might say, than they should. They left their desks and maps to visit their men in the line; they made excuses to get under fire; two or three were killed doing so; one corps commander smuggled himself into the front line of an attack by his corps. But these were escapades, strictly. The higher commands have no right to get hit. Modern war has pushed the right place for them farther and farther away from the fighting, away from the men, whom some of the higher commanders, as well as the lower, do really love with a love passing the love of women—"the dear men" of whom I have heard an officer, tied to the staff and the base by the results of head wounds, speak with an almost wailing ache of desire, as horses whinny for a friend—"Would I were with him, wheresoe'er he is, either in heaven or in hell." But how were the men to know that?

Everything helped to indispose them to know it; everything went to point the contrast between their own fate and that of its distant and unknown controllers. The evolution of the war was now calling on all ranks of troops in the actual line to put up with a much diminished chance of survival, only the barest off-chance if they stayed there year after year. While they lived it was inflicting upon them in trenches a life squalid beyond precedent. And that same evolution had pressed back the chief seats of command into places where life was said to contrast itself in wonderful ways with that life of mud and stench and underground gloom.

It was quite truly said. Of the separation and contrast you got a full sense if fate took you straight from trench life in the stiff Flanders slime or the dreary wet chalk of the disembowelled Loos plain to one of the seats of authority far in the rear. G.H.Q., the most regal seat of them all, was divinely niched, during most of the war, at Montreuil, and Montreuil was a place to bring tears to the eyes of an artist, like Castelfranco, St. Andrews, or Windsor; the tiny walled town on a hill had that poignant fulness of loveliness, making the sense ache at it, like still summer evenings in England. It was a storied antique, unscathed and still living and warm, weathered mellow with centuries of sunshine and tranquillity, all its own old wars long laid aside and the racket of this new one very far from it. Walking among its walled gardens, where roses hung over the walls, or sitting upon the edge of the rampart, your feet dangling over among the top boughs of embosoming trees, you were not merely out of the war; you were out of all war! you entered into that beatitude of super-peace which fills your mind as you look at a Roman camp on a sunned Sussex down, where the gentle convexities of the turf seem to turn war into an old tale for children.

Such gardens of enchantment were not known by sight to most of our fighting troops, but they were rumoured. The mind of Williams, in the front line, worked with a surly zest on the contrast between the two hemispheres of an army—the hemisphere of combatancy, of present torment, of scant reward, of probable extinction, and the hemisphere of non-combatancy, of comfort, of safety, of more profuse decoration, the second hemisphere ruling over the former and decimating it sometimes by feats like the Staff work of 1915. Among the straw in billets and the chalk clods in dug-outs, in the reeking hot twilight of parlours in French village inns, in the confidential darkness after Lights Out in hospital wards from Bethune to Versailles and Rouen, the vinegar tongue of Williams let itself go.

Of course, he went wrong. And yet his error, like the facts which begat it, could not be helped. If all that you know of an alleged brother of yours is that he is having the best of the deal while you are getting the worst you have to be a saint of the prime to take it on trust that it really did please God, or any godlike human authority, to call him to a station in a dry hut with a stove, among the flesh-pots of an agreeable coast, and you to a station in a wet burrow full of rats and lice and yellow or white mud and ugly liabilities. And Williams was not a saint, although when he enlisted he was profusely told that he was by people who were to call him a sinner later, when as a Dundee rioter or "Bolshevik" miner, or as a Sinn Feiner or a Black-and-Tan, he transgressed some eternal law. Williams was and is only a quiet simple substance exhibiting certain normal reactions under certain chemical tests.

III

There may be laid up in Heaven a pattern of some front line by which the Staff in its rear would be really loved. But such love is not in the nature of man. If the skin on Mr. Dempsey's knuckles could speak, and were perfectly frank, it would not say that it loved the unexposed and unabraded tissues of Mr. Dempsey's directive brain. Hotspur, in deathless words, has aired the eternal grudge of the combatant soldier against the Brass Hat—

I remember, when the fight was done,

When I was dry with rage and extreme toil,

Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,

Came there a certain lord, neat and trimly dressed,

Fresh as a bridegroom.

So the jaundiced narrative flows on and on, doing the fullest justice on record to some of the main heads of the front line's immemorial distaste for the Staff—for its too Olympian line of comment upon the vulgar minutiæ of combat, its offensively manifest facilities for getting a good shave, its fertility in gratuitous advice of an imperfectly practical kind, and its occasional lapses from grace in speaking of the men, the beloved men, the objects of every good combatant officer's jealous and wrathful affection.

Or, again, you might say that a Staff is a trouser-button, which there are few to praise while it goes on with its work, and very few to abstain from cursing when it comes off. When a Staff's work is done well the front line only feels as if Nature were marching, without actual molestation, along some beneficent course of her own. But when some one slips up, and half a brigade is left to itself in a cold, cold world encircled by Germans, the piercing eye of the front line perceives in a moment how pitifully ill the Brass Hats deserve of their country. If you are an infantry-man the Brass Hats above you are, in your sight, a kind of ex officio children of perdition, like your own gunners. As long as your own gunners go on achieving the masterpiece of mathematics that is required to confine the incidence of their shells to the enemy you feel that, just for the moment, a gunner's rich natural endowment of original sin is not telling for all it is worth. But some day the frailty of man or of metal causes a short one to drop once again among you and your friends; and then you are mightily refreshed and confirmed in the stern Calvinistic faith of the infantry that there are chosen vessels of grace and also chosen vessels of homicidal mania.

If man, in all his wars, is predestined never to love and trust his Brass Hats, least of all can he struggle against this disability when he is warring in trenches. Why? Because trench life is very domestic, highly atomic. Its atom, or unit, like that of slum life, is the jealously close, exclusive, contriving life of a family housed in an urban cellar. During the years of trench war a man seldom saw the whole of his company at a time. Our total host might be two millions strong, or ten millions; whatever its size a man's world was that of his section—at most, his platoon; all that mattered much to him was the one little boatload of castaways with whom he was marooned on a desert island and making shift to keep off the weather and any sudden attack of wild beasts. Absorbed in the primitive job of keeping alive on an earth naked except in the matter of food, they became, like other primitive men, family separatists. Any odd chattel that each trench household acquired served as an extra dab of cement for the household's internal affections, as well as a possible casus belli against the unblessed outsiders who dared to cast upon it the eye of desire. A brazier with three equal legs would be coveted by a whole company. Once a platoon acquired a broken, but just practicable, arm-chair; not exactly a stronghold of luxury; rather a freakish wave of her banner; and this symbol of lost joys was borne, at great inconvenience, from sector to sector of the front, amidst the affected derision of other platoons—veiling what was well understood to be envy. It was like the grim, ineffusive spiritual cohesion of a Scottish family soldered together to keep out the world.

Constantly jammed up against one another, every man in each of these isolated knots of adventurers came to be seen by the rest for what he was worth, with the drastic clearness of open-eyed husbands and wives of long standing. They had domesticated the Day of Judgment. Many old valuations had to go by the board; some great home reputations wilted surprisingly; stones that the builders of public opinion on Salisbury Plain had confidently rejected found their way up to the heads of corners. Officers, watched almost as closely, were sorted out by the minds of the men into themes for contemptuous silence, objects of the love that doeth and beareth all things, and cases of Not Proven Yet. The cutting equity of this family council was bracing. It got the best out of everybody in whom there was anything. Imagine a similar overhauling of public life here! And the size of the scrap-heap! But to the outer world, which it did not half know, the tribunal was harsh, and harshest of all to the outer and upper world of army principalities and powers.

These were, to it, the untested, unsifted, "the crowd that was never put through it." There were presumptions against them, besides. They were akin, in the combatant's sight, to the elfish gods that had ruled and bedevilled his training at home. They were of the breed of the wasters, the misorganizers, the beauties who sent his battalion out from the Wiltshire downs to Bruay along a course of gigantic zigzags, like a yacht beating up in the teeth of a wind, first running far south to Havre, then north to near the German Ocean, and then going about and opening out again upon the southward tack until Bruay was struck; for it was, indeed, along a trajectory somewhat like that of an actual flash of lightning in some quaint engraving that Britain hurled at the enemy many of her new thunderbolts of war. Also, they stood in the shoes of the men who in French's day had sent platoon commanders to take woods and quarries not marked on their maps. And they were the men who, when troops had been marching twelve miles in full kit on the high-cambered, heavily greased Flanders setts in the rain, would appear on the roadside turf round a blind corner, sitting chubby and sleek on fresh horses, and say that the marching was damned bad and troops must go back to-morrow and do it again. But the chief count was the first—that they had not all gone through the mill; that they lived in a world in which all the respectable old bubbles, pricked elsewhere, were still fat and shining, where all the old bluffs were uncalled and still going strong, and the wangler could still inherit the earth and eye-wash reign happy and glorious.

Not a judgment wholly just. But not one contemptible either; for, wherever it ended, it set out from the right idea of judging a man only by what he was worth and what he could do. And, just or not, it was real; it influenced men's acts, not to the extent of losing us the war, but to that of helping to send the winners home possessed with that contemptuous impatience of authority which has already thrown out of gear so much of the pre-war machinery for regulating the joint action of mankind.

IV

There was yet another special check during the war upon love and respect for the higher commands. There were so many things of moment which they were the last to find out. Time after time the great ones of this world were seen to be walking in darkness long after the lowly had seen a great light. While the appointed brains of our army were still swearing hard by the rifle, and nothing but it, as the infantry's friend, a more saving truth had entered in at the lowly door of the infantry's mind. Ignoring all that at Aldershot they had learnt to be sacred, they contumaciously saw that so long as you stand in a hole deeper than you are tall you never will hit with a rifle-bullet another man standing in just such another hole twenty yards off. But also—divine idea!—that you can throw a tin can from your hole into his.

In England the mighty had taken a great deal of pains to teach the New Army always to parry the thrust of its enemy's bayonet first, and only then to get in its own. A fine, stately procedure it was when taught by an exemplary Regular Army instructor fully resolved that, whatever Shelley may say, no part of any movement must mingle in any other part's being. In France, and no doubt on other fronts too, it abruptly dawned on those whose style this formalist had moulded, more or less, that a second German or Turk was apt to cut in before the appointed ritual of debate with the first could be carried to a happy end. Illicit abridgements followed, attended by contumacious reflections.

Whatever, again, was august in Canadian life and affairs was bent in 1914 upon arming Canadian troops with what was indeed, by a long chalk, the pick of all match-shooting rifles. It was the last word of man in his struggle against the caprices of barometric and thermometric pressures on ranges. And it was to show a purblind Europe, among other things, that Sam Hughes was the man and that wisdom would die with him. Yet hardly had its use, in wrath, begun when there broke upon the untutored Canadian foot-soldier a revelation withheld from the Hugheses of this world. He perceived that the enemy, in his perversity, did not intend to stand up on a skyline a thousand yards off to be shot with all the refinements of science; point-blank was going to be the only range, except for a few specialists; rapidity of fire would matter more than precision; and all the super-subtle appliances tending to triumphs at Bisley would here be no better than aids to the picking of mud from trench walls as the slung rifle joggled against them.

The great did not turn these truths of mean origin right away from the door. They would quite often take a discovery in. Only there was no running to greet it.

There was no hurry in their hands,

No hurry in their feet.

Like smells that originate in the kitchen and work their way up by degrees to the best bedroom the new revelations of war ascended slowly from floor to floor of the hierarchy. They did arrive in the end. The Canadians got, in the end, a rifle not too great and good for business. By the third year of the war the infantry schools at the base were teaching drafts from home to use the bayonet as troops in the line had taught themselves to use it in the second. The frowning down of the tanks can hardly have lasted a year. The Stokes gun was not blackballed for good. It was not for all time, but only for what seemed to them like an age, that our troops had to keep off the well-found enemy bomber with bombs that they made of old jam tins, wire, a little gun-cotton, a little time fuse, and some bits of sharp stone, old iron, or anything hard that was lying about, with earth to fill in; the higher powers did the thing well in the end; they came down handsomely at last; in the next life the Mills bomb alone should be good for at least a night out once a year on an iceberg to some War Office brave who would not see it killed in the cradle.

And yet authority wore, in the eyes of its troops in the field, an inexpert air—sublime, benevolent, but somehow inexpert. They had begun to notice it even before leaving England. Imagine the headquarters Staff of a district command watching a test for battalion bombing officers and sergeants at the close of a divisional bombing course in 1915: the instructor in charge a quick-witted Regular N.C.O. who has shone at Loos and is now decorated, commissioned, slightly shell-shocked, and sent home to teach, full of the new craft and subtlety of trench war; the pupils all picked for the job and devouringly keen, half of them old cricketers, all able-bodied, and all now able, after hard practice during the course, to drop a bomb on to any desired square yard within thirty-five yards of their stance; and then the Staff, tropically dazzling in their red and gold, august beyond words, but genial, benign, encouraging, only too ready to praise things that they would see to be easy if only they knew more about them and were not like middle-aged mothers watching their offspring at football—so a profane bombing sergeant describes them that night to his mess.

V

"Your Old Army's all bloody born amatoors," an Australian of ripe war experience remarked with some frankness in France. His immediate occasion for generalizing so rashly was somebody's slip in passing certain grenades as good for field use. Most of our hand and rifle grenades undoubtedly were. If anything they were too fine for it, too fit to beautify drawing-rooms as well. One objet d'art, a delight to the eye, was said to cost its country one pound five as against the two francs for which France was composing an angel of death less pretty but equally virtuous. Still, ours would kill, if you had the heart to break up an object so fair. But the batch that made the Australian blaspheme, though good in design, were mismade. They were made as if the people who made them had not guessed what they were for.

As you know, the outside of most kinds of grenade is a thick metal case serrated with deeply-cut lines that cross each other like those more shallow sunk lines on crocodile-leather, only at right angles. These lines of weakness, cut into the metal, mark out almost the whole of the case into little squares standing up in relief, sixteen or thirty-two or forty-eight or seventy-two according to type. The burst, if all goes well, attacks the lines of weakness, cuts them right through, and so disperses all the little squares of brass, cast-iron, or steel radially as flying bits of shrapnel. What led the Australian to sin was that this batch had come out to France with their lines of weakness cut not half as deep as they should be. The burst only ripped the case open without breaking it up. It had been lovely in life, and in death it was not divided. It just gave a jump, the length of a frog's, and presented the foe with a cheap good souvenir, reassuring besides.

There must have been a good many thousands of these. They may have done good—perhaps won a good-conduct mark to some War Office hero for rushing them out in good time to the front; perhaps assisted some politician to feel that he was riding a whirlwind and directing a storm, solving munition crises and winning the war. All human happiness counts. In France, if the physical effects of their detonation were poor, the moral reverberations which followed were lively. A bombing sergeant, sent down the line for a rest and instructing new drafts in a hollow among the sand dunes at Etaples well out of authority's hearing, would start his lecture by holding one of them up and saying: "This 'ere, men, is a damn bad grenade. But it's all that the bloody tailors give you to work with. So just pay attention to me." And then he would go on to pour out his cornucopia of tips, fruits of empiric research, for doing what somebody's slackness or folly had made it so much less easy to do.

VI

Whenever you passed from east to west across the British zone during the war you would find somebody saying with fervour that somebody else, a little more to the west and a little higher in rank, had not even learnt his job well enough to keep out of the way. Subalterns, who by some odd arrangement of flukes had come through our attacks on the Somme in 1916 and in Artois and Flanders next year, would hoot at the notion—it had a vogue with part of the Staff in a tranquil far west—that the way to get on with the war was to raise a more specific thirst for blood in the private. Battalion commanders did not soon tire of telling how in the busiest days of big battles the unseen powers would pester them for instant returns of the number of shovels they had, or of the number of men who in civil life had been fitters, or had been moulders. Brigadiers would savagely wonder aloud whether it ever occurred to a higher command that to make little attack after little attack, each on a narrow, one-brigade front, was merely to ask to have each attack squashed flat in its turn by a fan-like convergence of fire from the enemy's guns on both flanks, not to speak of supports. The day the bad turn came for us, in the two-chaptered battle of Cambrai, an officer on the Staff of one of the worst-hit divisions observed: "Our attitude is just 'we told you so'." When the good turn in the war had come the next summer there was a day, not so good as the rest, when two squadrons of horse were sent to charge, in column, up a straight, treeless rising road for half a mile and take a little wood at the top. There were many machine-guns in the wood—how could there not have been?—and the whole air sang with warnings of that. No horse or man either got to the wood or came back. They were all in a few seconds lying in the white dust, almost in the order they rode in, the officer in command a little ahead of the rest. It looked, in its formal completeness, like a thing acted, a cinema play showing a part of Sennacherib's army on which the angel had breathed. On the road back from the place I met a corps commander—a great man at his work. When he heard his face crumpled up for a moment—he was a soft-hearted man. "Another of those damned cavalry follies!" he growled. His voice had the scorn that the man who is versed in to-day's practice feels for the men who still move among yesterday's theories. So it was, from east to west, all the way.

All the wise men were not in the east. It was the fault of the war, the outlandish, innovatory war that did not conform to the proper text-books as it ought to have done; an unimagined war of flankless armies scratching each other's faces across an endless thorn hedge, not dreamt of in Staff College philosophy; a war that was always putting out of date the best that had been known and thought and invented, always sending everyone to school again; unkind, above all, to us who, if well-to-do, bring up our young to have a proper respect for the past and to feel that if yesterday's parasol will not keep out the rain of to-day, then it ought to, and no one can blame them for using it.

VII

Yet the men in the line talked, and so did the subalterns, most of whom had been in the ranks, now that the war ran into years. Soldiers have endless occasions for talk. Being seldom alone, and having to hold their tongues sometimes, they talk all the time that they can. And most of their talk was sour and scornful. Ever since their enlistment there had been running down in them one of the springs of health in the life of a country. An unprecedented number of the most healthy, high-spirited, and nationally valuable Englishmen in the prime of life were telling one another that, among those whom they had hitherto taken more or less completely on trust as their "betters," things were going on which must make the war harder for us to win; while they, the common people, cared with all their hearts about saving Belgium and France, those betters, so placed that they could do more to that end if they would, seemed to be caring, on the whole, less—shouting and gesticulating enough, but ready to give up less of what was pleasant and to do less of what was hard, and perhaps not able to do much at their best. Colonel Repington's friends, with their scented baths, their prime vintages, and their mutinous chatter, were not actually seen; but there was a bad smell about; the air stank of bad work in high places.

Most of our N.C.O.'s and men in the field had come to feel that it was left to them and to the soundest regimental officers to pull the foundered rulers of England and heads of the army through the scrape. They assumed now that while they were doing this job they must expect to be crawled upon by all the vermin bred in the dark places of a rich country vulgarly governed. They were well on their guard by this time against expressing any thoroughgoing faith in anything or anybody, or incurring any suspicion of dreaming that such a faith was likely to animate others; a man was a fool if he imagined that anyone set over him was not looking after number one; the patriotism of the press was bunkum, screening all sorts of queer games; the eloquence of patriotic orators was just a smoke barrage to cover their little manoeuvres against one another; the red tabs of the Staff were the "Red Badge of Funk"; a hospital ward full of sick men would exchange, when left to themselves, vitriolic surmises about the extravagant pay that the nurses were probably getting, and go on to suggest what vast profits the Y.M.C.A. must be making out of its huts. Wherever the contrary had not been proved to their own senses, the slacking, self-seeking and shirking that had muddled and spoilt their own training for war until they were put, half-trained, in the hottest of the fire must be assumed to be in authority everywhere.

Long ago, perhaps, the commons of England may, on the whole, have accepted the view that while they were the fists of her army there was a strong brain somewhere behind, as good at its job as the fists were at theirs; that above them, using them for the best, mind was enthroned, mind the deviser, adapter, foreseer, the finder of ever new means to new ends, mind which knew better than fists, and from which, in any time of trial, all good counsels and provident works were sure to proceed. If so, the faith of the general mass of the English common people in any such division of functions was now pretty near its last kick. The lions felt they had found out the asses. They would not try to throw off the lead of the asses just then: you cannot reorganize a fire-brigade in the midst of a fire. That had to wait. They worked grimly on at the job of the moment, resigned for the present to seeing all the things go ill which the great ones of their world ought to have caused to go well. For themselves, in each of their units, they saw what was coming. Some day soon they would be put into an attack and would come out with half their numbers or, perhaps, two-thirds, and nothing gained for England, perhaps because some old Regular in his youth had preferred playing polo to learning his job. The rest would be brought up to strength with half-trained drafts and then put in again, and the process would go on over and over again until our commanders learnt war, and then perhaps we might win, if any of us were left.

While so many things were shaken one thing that held fast was the men's will to win. It may have changed from the first lyric-hearted enthusiasm. But it was a dour and inveterate will. At the worst most of the men fully meant to go down killing for all they were worth. And there was just a hope that in Germany, too, such default as they saw on our side was the rule; it was, perhaps, a disease of all armies and countries, not of ours alone; there might thus be a chance for us still. On that chance they still worked away with a sullen ardour that no muddling or sloth in high places could wholly damp down. Many of them were like children clinging with a cross crankiness to a hobby of learning to read in a school where some of the teachers were good, but some could not read themselves, and others could read but preferred other occupations to teaching.

All were so deeply absorbed in winning that no practical upshot of all their new thoughts about England's diseases was yet, as far as I could perceive, taking shape in their minds. On that side their mood was merely one of postponement, somewhat menacing in its form, but still postponement. "We've got to win first. Then——? But we've got to win first." They were almost exactly the words in which most German prisoners, till 1918, expressed their own feeling about the old rulers of Germany.

CHAPTER IV
TEDIUM

I

A book may be bad and yet tell you much.

Lately I came across such a book. It is surely one of the crossest books ever written. Its author fought in France, in the ranks, for a good many months of the war. He must have been one of the men who make sergeants grey—a "proper lawyer," as Regulars call the type which a cotton district labels as "self-acting mules."

I seem to know that man. He was a volunteer, but he would not enlist until conscription came in, because of some precious doctrine he had about younger men without families. When he did join his first act was to ask to speak to the colonel. He was aggrieved because army doctors would not act, when he desired it, except as such. When anyone checked him he felt an ardent thirst to "explain," and the explanation was always that he who had checked was wrong. In the field he kept a diary and sternly would he note on its recording page that tea one day—nay, on more than one—was served "very late indeed." Heinous!

The continued existence of war is precarious. More than the League of Nations menaces its future. For it depends, at the last, on the infrequency of "proper lawyers." Armies can now be made, and moved about when made, only because the plain man who keeps the world going round does not stick up for the last ounce of his rights, or stick out for the joys of having the last word, so dourly as these. Even to keep up a game with so modest an element of voluntaryism about it as penal justice you have to have some little effort of co-operation all round. If your convicts will not even eat the whole thing begins crumbling. The "suffragettes" showed us that. A pioneer still earlier, an Indian coolie, proved it in a Fijian gaol. Were every soldier like this diarist war would have to be dropped, not because men were too good, but because they were too prickly.

II

And yet the book told something which no other book has yet succeeded in telling you. Wordy, cantankerous, dull, repeating itself like a decimal, padded with cheap political "thoughts" gathered from old "stunts" in bad papers—still, it came nearer than any other to showing you the way trench warfare struck a mind and soul quite commonplace in everything except a double dose of native sourness. Here was nothing of M. Barbusse's doctrinaire fire to make the author pervert or exaggerate. No thrill of drastic passion, not even the passionate self-pity of Dickens describing his childhood as Copperfield's, stirred the plodding and crabbed narrative. The writer seemed too peevish to be at the pains to beautify or exalt. And so his account of the bungled attack in which he took part is extraordinarily true to all that the commonplace man found to be left in almost any attack when once all the picturesque fluff filling the current literary pictures of it were found not to be there—the touch of bathos; the supposed heroic moment only seeming a bit of a "dud," a miscarriage; the hugger-mugger element of confusion; the baffling way that the real thing did not so often give men obvious gallant things to do as irritating puzzles to solve, muddles to liquidate at short notice; the queer flashes of revelation, in contact with individual enemies, of the bottomless falsity of the cheaper kind of current war psychology.

Advances, however, were far from being the staple of warfare. They caused the most losses, but still they did less than the years of less sensational routine to make what changes were made by the war in the minds of the men in the ranks. And here our pettish author found the congenial theme for his own acrid, accurate method. His trivial reiterations succeed, in the end, in piling up in the reader's mind an image of that old trench life as the sum of innumerable dreary units of irksome fatigue. This was the normal life of the infantry private in France. For N.C.O.'s it was lightened by the immunity of their rank from fatigue work in the technical sense. For the officer it was much further lightened by better quarters and the servant system. For most of his time the average private was tired. Fairly often he was so tired as no man at home ever is in the common run of his work.

If a company's trench strength was low and sentry-posts abounded more than usual in its sector a man might, for eight days running, get no more than one hour off duty at any one time, day or night. If enemy guns were active many of these hours off guard duty might have to be spent on trench repair. After one of these bad times in trenches a company or platoon would sometimes come out on to the road behind the communication trench like a flock of over-driven sheep. The weakest ones would fall out and drop here and there along the road, not as a rule fainting, but in the state of a horse dead-beat, to whom any amount of thrashing seems preferable to going on. Men would come out light-headed with fatigue, and ramble away to the men next them about some great time which they had had, or meant to have, at home. Or a man would march all right till the road fetched a bend, and then he would march straight on into the ditch in his sleep. Upon a greasy road with a heavy camber I have seen a used-up man get the illusion, on a night-march back to billets, that he was walking on a round, smooth, horizontal pole or convex plank above some fearsome sort of gulf. He would struggle hard to recover imaginary losses of footing, pant and sweat and scrape desperately sideways with his feet like a frightened young horse new to harness when it leans in against the pole, with its feet skidding outwards on the setts. Down he would go, time after time, in the mud, each time as unable to rise of himself, under the weight of his pack and equipment, as any mediæval knight unhorsed and held down by the weight of his armour. Hauled up again to his feet, to be driven along like one of the spent cab-horses in Naples just strong enough to move when up, but not to rise, he would in another five minutes be agonizing again on the greasy pole of his delirium.

The querulist of the book took it hard, I remember, that more kind words did not come to the men. He saw his own lot very clearly, but not so clearly the lot of those other unfortunates who had to put the job through. A man who finds himself in charge of a spent horse at night, in a place where there may be no safe waiting till dawn, must do something. Ten to one he will flog or kick the horse into moving. He may feel that he, not the horse, is the beast; but still he will do it. So, too, will he bully and curse exhausted men into safety. That was what happened. Every decent N.C.O. and company officer—and far the larger part were decent—did what they could to humour and "buck" the bad cases through the pangs of endurance. Some would reach the journey's end carrying whole faggots of rifles. Some would put by their own daily rations of rum to ginger beaten men through the last mile. But there would come times when only hard driving seemed to be left. Bella, horrida bella!

III

Suppose those first eight days in the front and support trenches to be the beginning of a divisional tour of sixteen days' duty in the line. For four days now the weary men would be in reserve, under enemy fire, but not in trenches; probably in the cellars of ruined houses. But these were not times of rest. Each day or night every man would make one or more journeys back to the trenches that they had left carrying some load of food, water, or munitions up to the three companies in trenches, or perhaps leading a pack-mule over land to some point near the front line, under cover of night. Even to lead a laden mule in the dark over waste ground confusingly wired and trenched is work; to get him back on to his feet when fallen and wriggling, in wild consternation, among a tangle of old barbed wire may be quite hard work.

In intervals between these journeys most men would lie in the straw in the cellars or hobble weakly about the outside of the premises, looking as boys sometimes do when stiff with many hearty hacks sustained in a hard game of football, with a chill after it. They crawled in and out of their billets like late autumn bees, feebly scraping the eight days' plating of mud off their clothes and cleaning their jack-knives after meals with the languor of the elders in the Bible to whom the grasshopper was a burden. A few robust spirits, armed with craft and subtlety more fully than the rest, would strike out, whenever released, for some "just-a-minute," or estaminet, not too far off, nor yet too near, and there lie perdus, lest the Company Orderly Sergeant warn them for some new liturgy. This defensive policy did not lighten the work of their brethren.

After four days of their labours as sumpter mules, or muleteers, the company would plod back for another four days of duty in trenches, come out yet more universally tired at their end, and drift back to rest-billets, out of ordinary shell-fire, for their sixteen days or so of "divisional rest." Here their work was really lighter, but still it was work and not rest. It did not wholly wind up in most of the men the spring that had run down while they were in the line. And then the division would go again into the line, and the old cycle be worked through once more. So most of the privates were tired the whole of the time; sometimes to the point of torment, sometimes much less, but always more or less tired.

IV

Many, of course, lost health and drifted "down the line," as it was called, to the base, where work might be light, but much of the company rather more blighting than any work to the spirit. Hither, to all the divisional base depots and into the ultimate dust-hole or sink that was called "Base Details," there gravitated most of the walking wreckage and wastage, physical and moral, of active warfare: convalescent, sick and wounded from hospital, men found too old or too young for trench work, broken-nerved men smuggled out of the way before disaster should come, and malingerers triumphant and chuckling, or only semi-successful, suspect, and tediously over-acting.

There was the good man fretting and raging to get back to his friends and the fight, away from this tainted backwater in which the swelling flotillas of the unfit and the unwilling were left to rot at their moorings. There was the pallid and bent London clerk, faintly disguised in khaki but too blind to fight, now working furiously fifteen hours each day of his seven-day week in the orderly room—no Sunday here, no Saturday afternoon—for pure love of international right. There was the dug-out, the Grenadier Guards sergeant-major of sixty, the handsome and melancholy old boy, a Victorian survivor into our little vulgar age, with a careful and dignified manner and mighty memories of a radiant past in London, when all parades, for a good-conduct-man well up in his drill, were over by half-past ten in the morning and he had a permanent midnight pass into barracks and so could act as a super at one of the theatres every night except when doing a guard, and see life and move among genius and beauty, making good money. Oh, yes, he had acted with Irving and Booth, and lived the life, and heard the chimes at midnight.

But also the veteran crooks, old dregs of the Regular Army, Queen Victoria's worst bargains, N.C.O.'s who would boast that they had not been once on parade in the last twenty years, waiters and caterers for the whole of their martial careers till the liquor fairly lipped over the edge of their eyelids and bleached the blue of their eyes. You would hear one of them boast that no doctor on earth could find him out to be fit when he, the tactician, wished otherwise. Another had made pathological studies, learning up the few conjectural symptoms of maladies that show no outward trace; as science advanced to the point of recording detectively the true state of the heart he had deftly changed ground, relinquished rheumatism of that organ and done some work of research into pains in the head; much faith did he put, too, in the sciatic nerve. When a couple of these savants slept in one tent they would argue after Lights Out—was sciatica safest, or shell-shock, or general debility? "Them grey hairs should be a lot of use to you, corp.," one of them would quite feelingly say to a new man in the tent, "when you want to get swinging the lead."

While these ignoble presences befouled the air of a base, good things, also, were there; but you seldom quite knew which was which. All very well for the King to come out with his "Go, hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques and you were not there." But if you, too, were not at the battle—if some unlucky effect of combustion compelled you to live as a messmate of Crillon, far, far from Arques when the battle was on, you would have to use tact. Somehow the man who was undisguisedly keen to get back to the centre of things felt a slight coldness pervading the air about him. It was as if a workman, who might have so easily let well alone, had sinned against the trade-union spirit, helped to raise the standard of employers' expectation, forced the pace of dutifulness in a world where authority could be trusted to speed things up quite enough. Even officers tended to deprecate the higher temperatures of ardour in other ranks of base establishments. "You're out for distinction,"—one honest rationalist would advise—"that's what it is. Well, trust to me—up the line's not the place where you get it. Every time a war ends you'll find most of the decorations go to the people at G.H.Q., L. of C., and the bases. So, if you want a nice row of ribbons to show to your kiddies, stop here." And another would put it more subtly: "Isn't one's duty, as a rule, just here and now?" Some were good-natured; they were not for keeping the primrose path all to themselves. Others were anxious lest the taking of steep and thorny paths, as they thought them, should come to be "the done thing."

V

The men who could not shirk the choice of Hercules, for other people, were the doctors. The stay of every N.C.O. or man at a base depot was on probation. Each had to go before a Medical Board soon after he came. It adjudged him either T.B. (Temporary Base) or P.B. (Permanent Base). If marked T.B. he went before the Board again once a week, and each time he might be marked T.B. again, or, if his disablement was thought graver or more likely to last, P.B.; or he might be marked A. (Active Service), and then he would join the next draft from home going up to his own battalion or another battalion of his regiment. When once a man was marked P.B. he only went before the Board once a month, and each time he, too, might be marked either P.B., T.B., or A.

Chance relegated me once for some weeks to a base and gave me the job of marching parties of crocks, total and partial, real, half-real, and sham, across the sand dunes to the place where the faculty did its endeavour to sort them. A picture remains of a hut with a long table in it: two middle-aged army doctors sitting beyond it, like dons at a Viva, and each of my party in turn taking his stand at attention, my side of the table, facing the Board, like so many Oliver Twists. The presiding officer takes a manifest pride in knowing all the guile and subtlety of soldier-men. No taking him in—that is proclaimed in every look and tone. He has had several other parties before him to-day, and the lamp of his faith, never dazzling while these rites are on, has burnt low.

"Well, my man—cold feet, I suppose?" he begins, to the first of my lamentable party. As some practitioners are said to begin all treatments with a prefatory purge, so would this psychologist start with a good full dose of insult and watch the patient's reaction under the stimulus.

"No, sir, me 'eart's thrutched up," says the examinee. Then, while the Board perforates him from head to foot for some seconds with a basilisk stare of unbelief, he dribbles out at intervals, in a voice that bespeaks falling hope, such ineffective addenda as "Can't get me sleep" and "Not a smile in me."

"Very picturesque, indeed," says the senior expert in doubting. "We'll see to that 'thrutched' heart of yours. Kardiagraph case. Next man."

The suspect, duly spat upon, slinks out. The next man takes his place at the table. The president gives him the Dogberry eye that means: "Masters, it is proved already that you are little better than false knaves; and it will go near to be thought so shortly." What he says is: "Another old hospital bird? Eh? Now, hadn't you better get back to work before you're in trouble?"

The target of this consputation is almost convinced by its force that he must be guilty of something, if only he knew what it was. Still, he repeats authority's last diagnosis as well as he can: "Mine's Arthuritic rheumatism, sir. An' piles."

"Fall out and strip. Next man." While the next is taking his stand the presiding M.O. has been making a note, and does not look up before saying "Well, what's the matter with you—besides rheumatism?"

"No rheumatism, sir. And nothing else." The voice is as stiff as it dares.

The presiding M.O. seems taken aback. Why, here is a fellow not playing up to him! Making a nasty break in the long line of cases that fed his darling cynicism so well! Flat burglary as ever was committed. The second member of the Board comes to life and begins in a tone that savours of dissatisfaction: "Well, you're the first man——"

"I'm an N.C.O., sir." The young lance-sergeant's voice is again about as stiff as is safe. Quite safe, though, this time. For the presiding M.O. is a Regular. Verbal points of military correctitude are the law and the prophets to him. He cannot be wholly sorry when junior colleagues, temporary commissioners, slip up on even the least of these shreds of orange-peel. Like Susan Nipper, he knows his place—"me being a permanency"—and thinks that "temporaries" ought to know theirs. So he amends the outsider's false start to: "You're the first N.C.O. or man who has come before us this morning and not said he had rheumatism."

The sergeant, whom I have known for some days as a choleric body, holds his tongue, having special reasons just now not to risk a court-martial. "Well," the president snaps as if in resentment of this self-control, "what is the matter with you?"

"Fit as can be, sir."

"What are you doing down here, then, away from your unit?"

"Obeying orders of Medical Board, sir. No. 8 General Hospital, December 8."

"Not sorry, either, I daresay," the president mutters, wobbling back towards his first line of approach to the business. "Not very keen to go back up the line, sergeant, eh?"

"It's all I want, sir, thank you." The sergeant puts powerful brakes on his tongue and says only that. But he has sadly disconcerted the faculty. A major with twenty years' service has cast himself for the fine sombre part of recording angel to note all the cowardice and mendacity that he can. And here is a minor actor forgetting his part and putting everything out. From where I am keeping a wooden face near the door I see opposition arising in the heart of the outraged psychologist beyond the table.

A sound professional instinct reinforces the personal one. Whenever a soldier goes before a Medical Board it is soon clear that he wants to be thought either less fit than he is or more fit. The doctor's first impulse, as soon as he sees which way the man's wishes tend, is to lean towards the other. And this, in due measure, is just. We all understate or overstate symptoms to our own family doctors according to what we fear or desire. The doctor rightly tries to detect the disturbing force in the patient's mind, and to discount for it duly—just like "laying-off" for a side-wind in shooting. So now the president sees light again. The Board is now out to find the lance-sergeant a crock. "Hold out your wrist," says the senior member. The pulse is jealously felt.

"Rotten!" the senior member says to the junior. Then, penetratingly, to the sergeant: "What's that cicatrix you've got on the back of your hand? Both hands! Show me here."

Two spongy, purplish-red pads of new flesh are inspected. "Burns, scarcely healed!" says the president wrathfully. "Skin just the strength of wet tissue-paper! Man alive, you've a bracelet of ulcers all round your wrists. Never wash, eh?" When liquid fire flayed a man's hands to the sleeve, but not further, the skin was apt to break out, as he recovered, in small, deep boils about the frontier of the new skin and the old. The sergeant does not answer. He wants no capital punishment under the Army act.

"Man's an absolute wreck," says the major. "Debility, wounds imperfectly healed, blood-poisoning likely. Not fit for the line for two months to come. P.B.—eh?" he turns to his junior.

"That's what I should say, sir," the junior concurs, in a tone of desperate independence.

"Next man," says the major. Before the lance-sergeant has quite stalked to the door the major calls after him "Sergeant!"

"Sir?" says the sergeant, furious and red but contained.

"You're a damned good man, but it won't do," says the major. "Good luck to you!" Great are the forces of decent human relentment after a hearty let-out with the temper.

The inquisition proceeds, still on that Baconian principle of finding out which is a man's special bent and then bending the twig pretty hard in the other direction; still, too, with the dry light of reason a little suffused, as Bacon would say, with the humours of the affections, of vanity, ill-temper and impatience. Nearly everybody is morally weary. Most of the men inspected have outlived the first profuse impulse to court more of bodily risk than authority expressly orders. Most of the doctors, living here in the distant rear of the war, have outlived their first generous belief in an almost universally high moral among the men. In the training-camps in 1914 the safe working presumption about any unknown man was that he only wanted to get at the enemy as soon as he could. Now the working presumption, the starting hypothesis, is that a man wants to stay in, out of the rain, as long as you let him. Faith has fallen lame; generosity flags; there has entered into the soul as well as the body the malady known to athletes as staleness.

VI

The war had more obvious disagreeables, too; you have heard all about them: the quelling coldness of frosty nights spent in soaked clothes—for no blankets were brought up to the trenches; the ubiquitous dust and stench of corpses and buzzing of millions of corpse-fed flies on summer battle-fields; and so on, and so on—no need to go over the list. But these annoyances seemed to me to do less in the way of moulding the men's cast of mind than that general, chronic weariness, different from all the common fatigues of peace, inasmuch as each instalment of this course of exhaustion was not sandwiched in between heavenly contrasts of utter rest before and after—divine sleeps in a bed and dry clothes, and meals on a table, with a white tablecloth on it and shiny glasses. It raised some serious thoughts in professional football-players and boxers who had believed they were strong, and in navvies and tough mountaineers. You need to know this in order to understand the redoubled ardour with which that capital soldier, the Lancashire miner, has sought the off-day and ensued it since he came back from campaigning abroad.

You need, too, to know it in order to chart out the general post-war condition of mind with its symptoms of apathy, callousness, and lassitude. Something has gone to come of it if you have lain for a time in the garden of Proserpine, where the great values decline and faith and high impulse fall in like soufflés grown tepid, and fatalistic indifference comes out of long flat expanses of tiring sameness.

I am tired of tears and laughter,

And men that laugh and weep;

Of what may come hereafter

For men that sow to reap:

I am weary of days and hours,

Blown buds of barren flowers,

Desires and dreams and powers

And everything but sleep.

From too much love of living,

From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving,

Whatever gods may be,

That no life lives for ever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Heaven forbid that I should impute any melodious Swinburnian melancholy, or any other form of luxious self-pity, to millions of good fellows still fighting the good fight against circumstance. They would hoot at the notion. But in nearly all of them hope has, at some time or other, lost her first innocence. Time and place came when the spirit, although unbroken, went numb: the dull mind came to feel as if its business with ardour and choric spheres and quests of Holy Grails, and everything but rest, had been done quite a long while ago. Well chained to an oar in the galley, closely kept to a job in the mine, men caught a touch of the recklessness of the slave—if the world were so foul, let it go where it chose; they would snatch what they could, when they could; drink, and let the world go round.

It is not sense to hope to reattain at will that deflowered virginity of faith. Others who have it may come in good time to be a majority of us all. Already three yearly "classes" of men who did not suffer that immense loss of experience which came with war service have come of age since the war; the new skin grows over the wounds. But we cannot write off as mere dream, with no after effects, the time when it was a kind of trench fashion to meet the demoded oaths of a friend with the dogma that "There is no —— God."

CHAPTER V
THE SHEEP THAT WERE NOT FED

I

"Of late years," the novel of Shirley begins, "an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the North of England; they lie very thick on the hills; every parish has one or more of them; they are young enough to be very active, and ought to be doing a great deal of good." This blessing, conferred on the West Riding a little before Waterloo, descended on our Western Front a little after the first battle of the Marne.

It was received by our troops with the greater thanksgiving because it brought with it no perceptible revival of church parades, a ministration of which the average private, l'homme moyen sensuel of Matthew Arnold, had taken a long and glad farewell on leaving Salisbury Plain. Like the infinite cleaning of brass-work, the hearing of many well-meaning divines in the Tidworth garrison church had been one of the tribulations through which the defender of Britain must work out his passage to France. With the final order to tarnish his buttons with fire and oil there came also a longed-for release from regular Sunday adjurations to keep sober and think of his end. "The Lorrd," said a grim Scots corporal, a hanging judge of a sermon, after hearing the last essay of our English Bossuets before he went to the wars, "hath turrned the capteevity of Zion." No more attendance for him at such "shauchlin'" athletic displays as the wrestlings of the southron divinity passman with the lithe and sinuous mind of St. Paul. "Sunday," the blithe Highlander in Waverley said, "seldom cam aboon the pass of Bally Brough." For better or worse, as a reliever from work or a restrainer of play, Sunday seldom came across the Channel during the war. A man in the ranks might be six months in France and not find a religious service of any kind coming his way, whether he dreaded or sought it.

Yet chaplains abounded. Not measures, but men, to invert the old phrase. And men of all kinds, as might safely be guessed. There was the hero and saint, T. B. Hardy, to whom a consuming passion of human brotherhood brought, as well as rarer things, the M.C., the D.S.O., the V.C., the unaccepted invitation of the King, when he saw Hardy in France, to come home as one of his own chaplains and live, and then the death which everyone had seen to be certain. There was a chaplain drunk at dinner in Gobert's restaurant at Amiens on the evening of one of the bloodiest days of the first battle of the Somme. There was the circumspect, ecclesiastical statesman, out to see that in this grand shaking-up and re-arranging of pre-war positions and values the right cause—whichever of the right causes was his—was not jilted or any way wronged. There was the man who, urged by national comradeship, would have been a soldier but that his bishop barred it; to be an army chaplain was the next best thing. There was the man who, urged by a different instinct, felt irresistibly, as many laymen did, that at the moment the war was the central thing in the whole world, and that it was unbearable not to be at the centre of things. And there was, in great force, the large, healthy, pleasant young curate not severely importuned by a vocation, the ex-athlete, the prop and stay of village cricket-clubs, the good fellow whom the desires of parents, the gaiety of his youth at the university, and the whole drift of things about him had shepherded unresistingly into the open door of the Church. Sudden, unhoped-for, the war had brought him the chance of escape back to an almost solely physical life, like his own happy youth of rude health, only better: a life all salt and tingling with vicissitudes of simple bodily discomfort and pleasure, fatigue and rest, risk and the ceasing of risk; a heaven after the flatness, the tedium, the cloying security and the confounded moral problems attending the uninspired practice of professional brightness and breeziness in an uncritical parish. He abounded so much that whenever now one hears the words "army chaplain" his large, genial image springs up of itself in the mind.

II

In the eyes of the men he had notable merits. He was a running fountain, more often than not, of good cigarettes. Of the exceeding smallness of Low Country beer he could talk, man to man, with knowledge and right feeling. He gladly frequented the least healthy parts of the line, and would frankly mourn the pedantry which denied him a service revolver and did not even allow him the grievous ball-headed club with which a mediæval bishop felt himself free to take his own part in a war, because with this lethal tool he did not exactly shed blood, though he dealt liberally enough in contused wounds that would serve equally well. Having a caste of his own, not precisely the combatant officer's, he had a tongue less rigidly tied in the men's hearing, so he could soothe the couch of a wounded sergeant by telling him, with a diverting gusto, how downily the old colonel, the one last ungummed, had timed his enteric inoculation at home so as to rescue himself from the fiery ordeal of a divisional field-day. These were solid merits. And yet there was something about this type of chaplain—he had his counterpart in all the churches—with which the common men-at-arms would privily and temperately find a little fault. He seemed to be only too much afraid of having it thought that he was anything more than one of themselves. He had, with a vengeance, "no clerical nonsense about him." The vigour with which he threw off the parson and put on the man and the brother did not always strike the original men and brothers as it was intended. Your virilist chaplain was apt to overdo, to their mind, his jolly implied disclaimers of any compromising connection with kingdoms not of this world. For one thing, he was, for the taste of people versed in carnage, a shade too fussily bloodthirsty. Nobody made such a point of aping your little trench affectations of callousness; nobody else was so anxious to keep you assured that the blood of the enemy smelt as good to his nose as it could to any of yours. In the whole blood-and-iron province of talk he would not only outshine any actual combatant—that is quite easy to do—but he would outshine any colonel who lived at a base. I never met a regimental officer or "other rank" who wanted a day more of the war for himself, his friends or his country after the Armistice. But I have heard more than one chaplain repining because the killing was not to go on until a few German towns had been smashed and our last thing in gas had had a fair innings.

No doubt the notion was good, in a way. If the parson in war was to make the men mind what he said he must not stand too coldly aloof from "the men's point of view": he must lay his mind close up alongside theirs, so as to get a hold of their souls. It sounds all right; the wisdom of the serpent has been bidden to back up the labours of the dove. And yet the men, however nice they might be to the chaplain himself, would presently say to each other in private that "Charlie came it too thick," while still allowing that he was a "proper good sort." They felt there was something or other—they could not tell what—which he might have been and which he was not. They could talk lyddite and ammonal well enough for themselves, but, surprising to say, they secretly wanted a change from themselves; had the parsons really nothing to say of their own about this noisome mess in which the good old world seemed to be foundering? The relatively heathen English were only groping about to find out what it was that they missed; the Scots, who have always had theology for a national hobby, made nearer approaches to being articulate. Part of a famous division of Highland infantry were given one day, as a special treat, a harangue by one of the most highly reputed of chaplains. This spell-binder preached like a tempest—the old war-sermon, all God of Hosts and chariots of wrath and laying His rod on the back of His foes, and other thunderous sounds such as were then reverberating, no doubt, throughout the best churches in Berlin. In the south-western postal district of London, too, his cyclone might have had a distinguished success at the time. As soon as the rumbling died away one of the hard-bitten kilted sergeants leant across to another and quoted dourly: "A great and strong wind, but the Lorrd was not in the wind."

III

"I've been a Christian all my life, but this war is a bit too serious." So saying, a certain New Army recruit had folded up his religion in 1914, and put it away, as it were, in a drawer with his other civil attire to wait until public affairs should again permit of their use. He had said it quite simply. A typical working-class Englishman, literal, serious, and straight, he had not got one loop of subtlety or one vibration of irony in his whole mind. Like most of his kind he had, as a rule, left church-going to others. Like most of them, too, he had read the Gospels and found that whatever Christ had said mattered enormously: it built itself into the mind; when any big choice had to be made it was at least a part of that which decided. Not having ever been taught how to dodge an awkward home-thrust at his conscience, he felt, all unblunted, the point of what Christ had said about such things as wealth and war and loving one's enemies. Getting rich made you bad; fighting was evil—better submit than resist. There was no getting over such doctrine, nor round it: why try?

Ever since those disconcerting bombs were originally thrown courageous divines and laymen have been rushing in to pick them up and throw them away, combining as well as they could an air of respect for the thrower with tender care for the mental ease of congregations occupied generally in making money and occasionally in making war. Yet there they lie, miraculously permanent and disturbing, as if just thrown. Now and then one will go off, with seismic results, in the mind of some St. Francis or Tolstoy. And yet it remains where it was, like the plucked Golden Bough: uno avulso, non deficit alter, ready as ever to work on a guileless mind like our friend's.

But this war had to be won; that was flat. It was like putting out houses on fire, or not letting children be killed; it did not even need to be proved; that we had got to win was now the one quite certain thing left in a world of shaken certainties. Any religion or anything else that seemed to chill, or deter, or suggest an alternative need not be wholly renounced. But it had to be put away in a drawer. After the war, when that dangerous precept about the left cheek could no longer do serious harm, it might come out again; our friend would see what could be done. For he was a man more strongly disposed than most of his fellows to hold, if he honestly could, the tenets of some formal religion. "They got hold o' something," he used to say, with curiosity and some respect, of more regular practitioners than himself. "Look at the Salvation Army legging along in the mud and their eyes fair shining with happiness! Aye, they got on to something." He would investigate, when the time came.

IV

The testimonies that might have ensued were foreclosed by a shell that buried him alive in Oppy Wood, under the Vimy Ridge, where he was engaged in diverting the energies of the Central Powers from the prostrate army of Nivelle. He had by then been two years in France, and had told a few friends about various "queer feels" and "rum goes" which he would not have known by name if you had called them spiritual experiences. One of his points—though he did not put it in that way—was that in war a lot of raw material for making some sort of religion was lying about, but that war also made some of the finished doctrinal products now extant look pretty poor, especially, as he said, "all the damning department." Rightly or wrongly, no men who have been close friends for a year, and who know that in the next few hours they are nearly as likely as not to be killed together in doing what they all hold to be right, will entertain on any terms the idea of any closing of gates of divine mercy, open to themselves, in the face of any comrade in the business.

The sunshine of one of the first clement days of 1916 drew him about as far as I heard him go on the positive side. "You know what it is," he said in the course of one of the endless trench talks, "when you got to make up your mind to do as you oughter. Worry and fuss and oh, ain't it too hard, and why the 'ell can't I let myself off!—that's how it is. Folla me?"

The audience grunted assent. "Some other time," he pursued, "perhaps once in ten years, it's all t'other way. You're set free like. Kind of a miracle. Don't even have to think what you're going to get by it. All you know is that there's just the one thing, in all the whole world, good enough. Doing it ain't even hard. All the sport there ever was has been took out of everything else and put into that. Kind of a miracle. Folla me?"

"That's right," another man confirmed. "You'll see it at fires when people are like to be burnt. Men'll go fair mad to help them. Don't think. Don't feel it if they're hurt. Fair off it to get at them—same as a dog when you throw a stick in a pond."

"Ah, then," contributed somebody else, "you've only to hear a man with a grand tenor voice in a song till you'll feel a coolness blowing softly and swif'ly over your face and then gone, the way you'd have died on a cross with all the pleasure in life while it lasted."

"Aye, and you'll get it from whisky," another put in. "Isn't it just what more men'll get drunk for than anything else? And why the rum's double before you go over?"

No doubt you know all about it from books, and you may prefer the wording of that tentative approach made by the most spiritually-minded of modern philosophers to a definition of God—"Something that is in and about me, in the consciousness of which I am free from fear and desire—something which would make it easy to do the most (otherwise) difficult thing without any other motive except that it was the one thing worth doing." And William James has, of course, shown more skill in explaining what mystic ecstasy is and what is its place in religion, and what its relations to such mirages of itself as the mock inspirations of Antony's lust and Burns' drunkenness.

And yet the clumsy fumblings of uninstructed people among things of the spirit might, one imagines, be just such stuff as a skilled teacher and leader in this field might have delighted to come upon and to inspirit and marshal. With tongues unwontedly loosened men would set to and dig out of themselves, not knowing what it was, the clay of which the bricks are made with which religions are built. One man, with infinite exertions of disentanglement, would struggle up to some expression of the fugitive trance of realization into which he had found he could throw himself by letting his mind go, for all it was worth, on the thought of his own self, his "I-ness" until for some few seconds of poised exaltation he had thought self clean away and was free. "It first came by a fluke when I was a kiddy. If I'd lie in my cot, very still, and look hard a long time at the candle, and think very hard—'I,' 'I,' 'I,' what's 'I?' I could work myself up to that state I'd be right outside o' myself, and seeing the queer little body I'd been, with my thought about 'I' doing this and 'I' getting that, and the way that I'd thought it was natural I should, and no such a thing as any 'I' there all the time, or only one to the whole set of us. Hard I'd try, every time, to hold the thing on. Seemed as if there was no end to what I might get to know if I could make it last out, that sort of rum start. But the thing went to bits every time, next moment after I'd got it worked up, and there I'd be left on the mat like, and thinking 'Gosh! what a pitch I got up to that time!' and how I'd screw it up higher, next go."

Then somebody else would bring up the way he had been taken by that queer little rent in the veil of common experience—the sudden rush of certainty that something which is happening now has all happened before, or that some place, when first we see it, has really been known to us of old and is only being revisited now, not discovered. You know how you seem, when that sudden light comes, to escape for a while from your common thoughts about time, as if out of a prison in which you have been shut up so long that you had almost forgotten what it is to be free: it flashes into your mind that immortality, for all you know, may exist within one moment; that life, for all you know, may draw out into state after state, and that all that you are conscious of at common times might be merely a drop or two lipping over the edge of the full vessel of some vast consciousness animating the whole world.

Another man would bring into the common stock a recollection of the kind of poignant portrait dream that sometimes comes: not a dream of any incident, but only the face of a friend, more living than life, with all the secret kindness and loneliness of his mind suddenly visible in the face, so that you think of him as you think of your mother when she is dead and the stabbing insight of remorse begins.

Thus would these inexpert people hang unconsciously about the uncrossed threshold of religion. With minds which had recovered in some degree the penetrative simplicity of a child's, they disinterred this or that unidentified bone of the buried God from under the monumental piles of débris which the learned, the cunning, and the proud, priests and kings, churches and chapels, had heaped up over the ideas of perfect love, of faith that would leave all to follow that love, and of the faithful spirit's release from mean fears of extinction. In talk they could bring each other up to the point of feeling that little rifts had opened here and there in the screens which are hung round the life of man on the earth, and that they had peeped through into some large outer world that was strange only because they were used to a small and dim one. They were prepared and expectant. If any official religion could ever refine the gold out of all that rich alluvial drift of "obstinate questionings of sense and outward things," now was its time. No figure of speech, among all these that I have mixed, can give the measure of the greatness of that opportunity.

V

Nobody used it: the tide in the affairs of churches flowed its best, but no church came to take it. Instead, as if chance had planned a kind of satiric practical epigram, came the brigade chaplain. As soon as his genial bulk hove in sight, and his cheery robustious chaff began blowing about, the shy and uncouth muse of our savage theology unfolded her wings and flew away. Once more the talk was all footer and rations and scragging the Kaiser, and how "the Hun" would walk a bit lame after the last knock he had got. Very nice, too, in its way. And yet there had been a kind of a savour about the themes that had now shambled back in confusion, before the clerical onset, into their twilight lairs in the souls of individual laymen.

When you want to catch the Thames gudgeon you first comb the river's bed hard with a long rake. In the turbid water thus caused the creatures will be on the feed, and if you know how to fish you may get a great take. For our professional fishers of men in the army the war did the raking gratis. The men came under their hands at the time of most drastic experience in most of the men's lives, immersed in a new and strange life of sensations at once simple and intense, shaken roughly out of the world of mechanical habit which at most times puts a kind of bar between one's mind and truth, living always among swiftly dying friends and knowing their own death at any time to be as probable as anyone's. To get rid of your phlegm, it was said, is to be a philosopher. It is also to be a saint, at least in the rough; you have broken the frozen ground; you can grow anything now; you can see the greatest things in the very smallest, so that sunrise on Inverness Copse is the morning of the first day and a spoonful of rum and a biscuit a sacrament. Imagine the religious revival that there might have been if some man of apostolic genius had had the fishing in the troubled waters, the ploughing and sowing of the broken soil.

The frozen fountain would have leapt,

The buds gone on to blow,

The warm south wind would have awaked

To melt the snow.

Nothing now perceptible came of it all. What, indeed, could the average army chaplain have done, with his little budget of nice traits and limitations? How had we ever armed and equipped him? When you are given an infant earth to fashion out of a whirling ball of flaming metals and gases, then good humour, some taste for adventure, distinction at cricket, a jolly way with the men, and an imperfect digestion of thirty-nine partly masticated articles may not carry you far. You may come off, by no fault of your own, like the curate in Shakespeare who was put up to play Alexander the Great: "A marvellous good neighbour, i' faith, and a very good bowler: but, for Alisander—alas, you see how 'tis—a little o'erparted."

The men, once again, did not put it in that way. They did not miss anything that most of them could have described. They only felt a vacancy, an unspecified void, like the want of some unknown great thing in their generals' minds and in the characters of their rulers at home. The chaplain's tobacco was all to the good; so was the civil tongue that he kept in his head; so were all the good turns that he did. But, when it came to religion, were these things "all there was to it"? Had the churches really not "got hold of something," with all their enormous deposits of stone and mortar and clerical consequence? So, in his own way, the army chaplain, too, became a tributary brook feeding the general reservoir of disappointment and mistrust that was steadily filled by the surface drainage of all the higher ground of our British social landscape under the dirty weather of the war.

CHAPTER VI
'WARE POLITICIANS

I

When a man enlisted during the war he found himself living the life of the common man in a Communist State. Once inside he had no more choices to make than a Russian under the Soviet. His work, his pay, his food, his place and mode of living were fixed from on high. He might not even decide whether he should remain a soldier or be turned, say, into a miner. If the wisdom that sat up aloft put him down for a draft to a tunnelling company, to earth he went. He had ceased to be Economic Man, the being whom we were brought up to regard as causing the world to go round by making a bee-line to the best pay available. Now he was ex-Economic Man, or Economic Man popped off all the hooks that had fastened him into a place in the system called capitalistic by those who least admire it. No one was left to say of a job any longer that you might "take it or leave it," for leaving was barred. You could not be called a wage-slave, for you got no wages to speak of. You had become a true "proletarian" under a pretty big-fisted dictatorship. It might not be a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a dictatorship smells about as sweet by one name as another when it levers you out of bed before dawn or ties you up to the wheel of a gun for cutting a job that irks you. Dr. Johnson declined to attempt to settle degrees of precedence between a flea and a louse. It is as hard to decide between the charms of a "sanitary fatigue" when done for our War Office and when done for Mr. Lenin.

In a sense, no doubt, the average man liked it all—the sense in which men like to break the ice in the Serpentine for a swim. He had willed it. He felt that when it was over it would be a good thing to have done. But he also saw, perhaps with surprise, that there were many men who liked it wholly, without any juggling with future and pluperfect tenses. They liked to have their hours of rising and going to bed settled by colonel or Soviet rather than face for themselves this distracting problem in self-government. They liked meals which they did not choose, and which might not be good, but which came up of themselves, in their season, like grass. They liked quarters which they might perhaps have to share with brethren too weak to carry their liquor and not too wise to essay great feats of the kind, but which, anyhow, did not have to be sought for, rented, furnished, and, on every Monday, paid for with a separate pang. They liked, at any rate as the lesser evil, work which was no subject of either collective or individual bargain, but came out of the sky, like the weather, usually open to objection, but sometimes not.

Perhaps you concluded, after a time, that there must be some temperaments communistic or socialistic by nature, like the "souls Christian by nature" of the theologians. You might even have suspected that in all this wide field of dispute the most fundamental difference is not between the intrinsic and absolute merits of the individualistic and of the communistic State, but between two contrasted human types—the type which is actually happiest in communal messes and dormitories and playgrounds and forced labour and State-fixed pay in a State-chosen career, and the type which exults in even the smallest separate cottage and garden, as a lion rejoices in his own den; the type which cooks its mutton with a special rapture in an exclusive oven, however imperfect, and sallies forth rejoicing, as the bridegroom goeth out from his chamber, to angle for the dearest market for the labour of its hands and the cheapest for its victuals. So that the only ideal solution might be to cut up the world, or each of its States, into two hemispheres, as trains are divided into "non-smoking" and "smoking." A little difficult, perhaps; but then it is difficult to make either breed be happy in the other's paradise.

II

Other speculations were apt to visit your mind if, later on in the war, as a New Army officer, you watched, open-mouthed, the way that much of the Regular Army's business was done. In civil life you might have had wild dreams of what business life would be like if its one great, black, ruling, quelling possibility were for ever removed, if the last Official Receiver had gone the way of the great auk, and the two-handed engine of bankruptcy stood no longer at the door, its place being taken by a genie carrying countless Treasury notes and ready to come in and "make it all right" as soon as you gave the slightest rub to the electric lamp on your desk. How nobly free you would be from the base care of overhead charges! How pungently you would keep in his proper place any large customer whose tone displeased you! How handsomely, when in a generous mood, you would cast away the sordid preoccupation of getting value for money and indulge yourself with a sight of the smile-wreathed face of a friend to whom you had given the bargain of a lifetime! How dignified a leisure you would enjoy after all those years of answering letters on the day you got them! Or, if that were your line, how high you would wave the banner of an ideal precision, stooping to none of the slavish, supple complaisances of competitive commerce, but making everyone who wrote a letter to you mind his P's and Q's, and do the thing in form, and go on doing it until he got it right, as long as the forests of Scandinavia held out to supply you both with stationery!

In the throes of a great war, and within sound of its guns, the genius of our race achieved, at any rate in some minor departmental Edens, this approach to a business man's heaven. To the rightful inhabitants of these paradises the intrusion of an ordinary fallen business man, with his vulgar notions of efficiency, gave something of a shock. He seemed cold and clammy—a serpent in the garden. "At the War Office," an old Staff officer plaintively said to one of these kill-joys, "we never used to open the afternoon letters till the next day." He felt that life would lose its old-world bloom if he had to do things on the nail. "After all, it won't kill the British taxpayer"—that was another golden formula.

III

Returned from these illuminating experiences the victorious soldier finds the British taxpayer—not, indeed, killed, but rubbing his wounds and groaning and being advised by several different kinds of friends to try if a hair, or perhaps the whole skin, of the dog that bit him will make him feel better. "Put your trust," say the august political authoritarians, "in your natural rulers, from Lord Chaplin and the Duke of Northumberland down to about as low as Sir Eric Geddes; scrap all the outworn and discredited humbug of democracy and parliamentarism; recognize that only a governing class with ample traditions of skill and devotion can govern to any effect."

"Rats!" observe the Extreme Left; "all that ramp was exposed long ago—ruling class and Parliament, and all of it. Turn down aristocracy and democracy, too, and put your money on the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and——" At which the poor tax-paying proletarian looks up with a gleam of hope and asks if he may begin dictating now. With a pitying smile the Extreme Left explains that it is to be named his dictatorship, but that it will be exercised not by him but by the Proper Persons. Will he elect them? he asks. Oh, no; that would be mere bourgeois Liberalism, quite out of date. Well, he asks, how is he to feel sure that they will do what he wants? Can he doubt it?—he is reproachfully asked. Does he not see that men ruling only as dictators for the whole nation, men serving only their country and no grubby individual employer or caucus, will and must be fired, at once and for ever, with a new spirit of devotion, wisdom, purity, humanity, and love such as was never yet seen on earth—indeed, could not be seen on it while its surface was defaced with Houses of Parliament and joint-stock mills?

At this point the demobilized business man is likely to go out sorrowfully, reflecting that thanks to the war he has known, in turn, what it is to be one of the rulers, and what it is to be one of the ruled, in a community where the people below have no hold on the people above, and where the people above are pricked by no coarser spur than their own pure zeal for the best of causes in the sorest of its straits. Communism delights him not, nor Toryism either.

Nor, indeed, any other political creed of all those that he knows. Liberals he has, perhaps, come to figure as sombre and dry, all-round prohibitors, humanitarians but not humanists, people with democratic principles but not democratic sympathies, uncomradelike lovers of man, preaching the brotherhood of nations but not knowing how to speak without offence to a workman from their own village. The Labour Party, indeed, he may feel to be, as yet, not wholly damned, but chiefly because it has never been tried at the big job. Its leaders have not, like the Liberal and Conservative chiefs, to answer for any grand public triumphs of incapacity like the diplomacy that gave Bulgaria and Turkey to Germany. Labour has not the name of Gallipoli to wear on its party colours; the Goeben and the Breslau did not escape with it at the Admiralty; none of its leaders intrigued with any general against his superiors; it did not turn Ireland's offered help into enmity in the hour of need. What of that, though? Liberals and Conservatives, too, might not have failed yet if they had not been tested. As likely as not that the Labour chiefs, too, would show, at a pinch, the old vice of the others—live and act in a visionary world of their own, the world as they would have liked to have it, not the world in which rough work and fighting and starving go on and the people who make it go round are not politicians.

IV

A century of almost unbroken European peace—unbroken, that is, by wars hugely destructive—had built up insensibly in men's minds a consciousness of an unbounded general stability in the political as well as in the physical world. The crust of the political globe seemed to have caked, on the whole, almost as hard and cool as that of the elderly earth. It felt as if it were so firm that we could safely play the fool on it, as boys jump on the ice of a pond and defy it to break under them. So an immense tolerance of political rubbish had grown up. On decade after decade of indulgence the man of booming phrases and grandiosely noble professions had swelled into a marvel of inflation surpassing any barking frog at the Zoo. That doing of hard and plain work well, which is the basis of all right living and success in men or nations, had grown almost dull in the sight of a people who took too seriously the trumpetings and naggings of the various fashionable schools of virtuosi in political blatancy. It would not be common sense to suppose that no psychological change of any moment would, in any case, have been wrought by a passage from that substantially stable world into a world in which the three great empires of Continental Europe have been ground to dust like Ypres. Anyhow, the adventure of finding our cooled and solid earth turning once more into a ball of fire under the foot would not have left the state of our minds quite as it had been. They are all the more changed now that most of us feel we have pulled through the scrape, scorched and battered, by our own sweat, and not by the leadership of those to whom we had too lazily given the places of mark in that rather childish old world before the smash came.

Some of the chief ingredients in the new temper are a more vigilant scepticism; a new impatience of strident enunciations of vague, venerable, political principles; a rough instinctive application of something like the new philosophy of pragmatism to all questions; and an elated sense of the speed and completeness with which institutions and powers apparently founded on rock can be scoured away. Great masses of men have become more freely critical of the claims of institutions and political creeds and parties which they used to accept without much scrutiny. It is not a temper that need be regarded with terror or reprobation. In itself it is neither good nor bad. It is the raw material of either good or evil, accordingly as it is guided—of barren destruction or of bold repair and improvement. But it is formidable. For men who have seen cities pounded to rubble, men who with little aid or guidance from their own rulers have chased emperors from their thrones, are pretty fully disengaged, at last, from the Englishman's old sense of immutable fixity in institutions which he may find irksome or worthless. "There's comfort yet. They are assailable." If the Holy Roman Empire has been knocked into smithereens, what public nuisance need remain?

CHAPTER VII
"CAN'T BELIEVE A WORD"

I

If you cannot hit or kick during a fight, at any rate you can spit. But, to be happy in this arm of the service, you have to feel sure that the adversary is signally fit to be spat upon. Hence, on each side in every war, the civilian will-to-believe that the other side are a set of ogres, every man of them. What a capital fiend the Boer, the man like Botha or Smuts, was made out to be during the last Boer War! He abused the white flag, he sawed a woman in two, he advanced behind screens of niggers; O, he was a great fellow! In 1870 French civilians laid freely to their souls the flattering unction that the Prussians murdered their prisoners. Strong in what was at bottom the same joyous faith, German civilians told you that French officers usually broke their parole. A few choice spirits will even carry this fond observance into the milder climate of sport. A boy of this kidney, while looking on at a vital house match, will give his mind ease by telling a friend what "a lot of stinkers" the other house are. A follower of Cambridge cricket, a man of fifty, in whom you might expect the choler of youth to have cooled, has been found musing darkly over a large photograph of an Oxford eleven. They seemed to me, as is the way of these heroes, to lack nothing of outward charm except the light of intellect in the eye. But "Look at them!" he observed with conviction. "The hangdog expressions! The narrow, ill-set Mongol eyes! The thin, cruel lips! Prejudice apart, would you like to meet that gang in a quiet place on a dark night?" From these sombre reflections he seemed to derive a sort of pasture.

Little doubt, then, as to what had to come when five of the greatest nations on earth were suddenly rolling over and under each other in the dust. While their armies saw to the biting, the snarling was done with a will by the press of Berlin and Vienna, Petrograd, Paris, and London. That we were all fighting foul, every man, was the burden of the strain. Phone and anti-phone, the choric hymn of detraction swelled; if this had been an age of simpler faith there might have been serious fear lest the music should reach the ear of some Jove sitting at his nectar; what if he should say in a rage that those nasty little beasts were at it again, and throw such a comet down on the earth as would settle the hash of us all? But no such fears troubled Europe. And then policy, viewing these operations of instinct, was moved to cut in. Official propaganda began, and one of its stock lines was to help in stoking these fires in the non-combatant heart.

II

Some of the fuel to hand was fine. The German command fed the best of it all into our bunkers, gratis. It owned that its "frightfulness" plan was no slip, no "indiscretion of a subordinate," but a policy weighed and picked out—worse than that, an embodied ethical doctrine. A Frenchman, when he is cross with our English virtue, will say that none of us can steal a goose without saying he does it for the public good. But the fey rulers of Germany could not even be content to say it was an act of moral beauty to sink the Lusitania or to burn Louvain. They must go on to boast that these scrubby actions were pieces of sound, hard thinking, the only tenable conclusions to impregnable syllogisms. Besides man's natural aversion to cruel acts, they thus incurred his still more universal distaste for pedants. They delivered themselves into our hand. They were beautiful butts, ready made, like the learned elderly lady in Roderick Random, whose bookish philosophy made her desire to "drag the parent by the hoary hair," and to "toss the sprawling infant on her spear."

But man, rash man, must always be trying to go one better than the best. With this thing of beauty there for our use, crying out to be used, some of our propagandists must needs go beyond it and try to make out that the average German soldier, the docile blond with yellow hair, long skull, and blue, woolgathersome eyes, who swarmed in our corps cages during the last two years of the war, craving for some one, anyone, to give him an order, was one of the monsters who hang about the gates of Vergil's Hell. If you had to make out a good hanging case against Germany could you, as Hamlet asks his injudicious mother, on that fair mountain cease to feed and batten on this moor? And yet some of us did. The authentic scarecrow, the school of thought that ruled the old German State, was not used for half of what it was worth. But the word went forth that any redeeming traits in the individual German conscript were better hushed up. When he showed extreme courage in an attack, not much must be made of it. When he behaved well to a wounded Englishman, it must be hidden. A war correspondent who mentioned some chivalrous act that a German had done to an Englishman during an action received a rebuking wire from his employer, "Don't want to hear about any nice, good Germans."

Even in the very temple of humourless shabbiness comedy may contrive to keep up a little shrine of her own, and on this forlorn altar the dread of "crying up anything German" laid, now and then, an undesigned offering. One worthy field censor was suddenly taken aback by a dangerous flaw in a war correspondent's exultant account of a swiftly successful British attack. "Within ten minutes from zero," I think the correspondent had written, "our men were sitting at ease on what had been the enemy's parapet, smoking good German cigars." "Hullo!" said the censor, "this won't do. 'Good' German cigars. Good German cigars! No! 'Good' must come out." And come out it did. Like the moral of his troops, like the generalship of his chiefs, the foeman's tobacco had to be bad. It was the time when some of our patriotic pundits found out that Mommsen's Roman history was all wrong, and that Poppo did not half know his Thucydides.

III

Of all this kind of swordsmanship the most dashing feat was the circulation of the "corpse factory" story. German troops, it was written in part of our Press, had got, in certain places near their front, a proper plant for boiling down the fat of their own dead. It was not said whether the product was to be used as a food, or as a lubricant or illuminant only. Chance brought me into one of the reputed seats of this refinement of frugality. It was on ground that our troops had just taken, in 1918. At Bellicourt the St. Quentin Canal goes into a long tunnel. Some little way in from its mouth you could find, with a flash-lamp, a small doorway cut in the tunnel's brick wall, on the tow-path side of the canal. The doorway led to the foot of a narrow staircase that wound up through the earth till it came to an end in a room about twenty feet long. It, too, was subterranean, but now its darkness was pierced by one sharp-edged shaft of sunlight let in through a neat round hole cut in the five or six feet of earth above. Loaves, bits of meat, and articles of German equipment lay scattered about, and two big dixies or cauldrons, like those in which we stewed our tea, hung over two heaps of cold charcoal. Eight or ten bodies, lying pell-mell, nearly covered half of the floor. They showed the usual effects of shell-fire. Another body, disembowelled and blown almost to rags, lay across one of the dixies and mixed with the puddle of coffee that it contained. A quite simple case. Shells had gone into cook-houses of ours, long before then, and had messed up the cooks with the stew.

An Australian sergeant, off duty and poking about, like a good Australian, for something to see, had come up the stairs, too. He had heard the great fat-boiling yarn, and how this was the latest seat of the industry. Sadly he surveyed the disappointing scene. Ruefully he noted the hopelessly normal nature of all the proceedings that had produced it. Then he broke the silence in which we had made our several inspections. "Can't believe a word you read, sir, can you?" he said with some bitterness. Life had failed to yield one of its advertised marvels. The Press had lied again. The propagandist myth about Germans had cracked up once more. "Can't believe a word you read" had long been becoming a kind of catch-phrase in the army. And now another good man had been duly confirmed in the faith, ordained as a minister of the faith, that whatever your pastors and masters tell you had best be assumed to be just a bellyful of east wind.

IV

Partly it came of the nature—which could not be helped by that time—of war correspondence. In the first months of the war our General Staff, being what we had made it, treated British war correspondents as pariah dogs. They might escape arrest so long as they kept out of sight; that was about the sum of their privileges. Long before the end of the war the Chiefs of Staff of our several armies received them regularly on the eve of every battle, explained to them the whole of our plans and hopes, gave them copies of our most secret objective and barrage maps; every perilous secret we had was put into their keeping. A little later still an Army Commander would murmur, with very little indistinctness, if he thought the war correspondents had not been writing enough about his army of late. After the Armistice Sir Douglas Haig made them a speech of thanks and praise on the great bridge over the Rhine at Cologne, and at the Peace all the regular pariah dogs were offered knighthoods.

The Regular Army had set out by taking a war correspondent to be, ex officio, a low fellow paid to extract kitchen literature from such private concerns of the military profession as wars. It harboured the curious notion that it would be possible in this century to feed the nation at home on communiqués from G.H.Q. alone or eked out with "Eye-Witness" stuff—official "word-painting" by some Regular Officer with a tincture of letters. With that power of learning things, only just not too late, which distinguishes our Regular Army from the Bourbons, it presently saw that this plan had broken down. About the same time the Regular Army began to recognise in the abhorred war correspondent a man whom it had known at school, and who had gone to the university about the time when it, the Army, was going into the Army Class. That was enough. Foul as was his profession, still he might be a decent fellow; he might not want to injure his country.

When these reflections were dawning slowly over the Regular Army mind it happened—Sir Douglas Haig having a mind himself—that his Chief of Intelligence was a fully educated man with a good fifty per cent. more of brains, imagination, decision, and initiative than the average of his fellow-Regulars on the Staff. He knew something of the Press at first hand. Being a Scotsman, he regarded writers and well-read people with interest and not with alarm. Under his command the policy of helping the Press rose to its maximum. War correspondents were given the "status," almost the rank, of officers. Actual officers were detailed to see to their comfort, to pilot them about the front, to secure their friendly treatment by all ranks and at all headquarters. Never were war correspondents so helped, shielded and petted before. And, almost without an exception, they were good men. Only one or two black sheep of the trade would try to make a reader believe that they had seen things which they had not. The general level of personal and professional honour, of courage, public spirit, and serious enterprise, was high. No average Staff Officer could talk with the average British correspondent without feeling that this was a sound human being and had a better mind than his own—that he knew more, had seen more, and had been less deadened by the coolie work of a professional routine. When once known, the war correspondents were trusted and liked—by the Staff.

V

There lay the trouble. They lived in the Staff world, its joys and its sorrows, not in the combatant world. The Staff was both their friend and their censor. How could they show it up when it failed? One of the first rules of field censorship was that from war correspondents "there must be no criticism of authority or command"; how could they disobey that? They would visit the front now and then, as many Staff Officers did, but it could be only as afternoon callers from one of the many mansions of G.H.Q., that heaven of security and comfort. When autumn twilight came down on the haggard trench world of which they had caught a quiet noon-day glimpse they would be speeding west in Vauxhall cars to lighted châteaux gleaming white among scatheless woods. Their staple emotions before a battle were of necessity akin to those of the Staff, the racehorse-owner or trainer exalted with brilliant hopes, thrilled by the glorious uncertainty of the game, the fascinating nicety of every preparation, and feeling the presence of horrible fatigues and the nearness of multitudinous deaths chiefly as a dim, sombre background that added importance to the rousing scene, and not as things that need seriously cloud the spirit or qualify delight in a plan.

"Our casualties will be enormous," a General at G.H.Q. said with the utmost serenity on the eve of one of our great attacks in 1917. The average war correspondent—there were golden exceptions—insensibly acquired the same cheerfulness in face of vicarious torment and danger. In his work it came out at times in a certain jauntiness of tone that roused the fighting troops to fury against the writer. Through his despatches there ran a brisk implication that regimental officers and men enjoyed nothing better than "going over the top"; that a battle was just a rough, jovial picnic; that a fight never went on long enough for the men; that their only fear was lest the war should end on this side of the Rhine. This, the men reflected in helpless anger, was what people at home were offered as faithful accounts of what their friends in the field were thinking and suffering.

Most of the men had, all their lives, been accepting "what it says 'ere in the paper" as being presumptively true. They had taken the Press at its word without checking. Bets had been settled by reference to a paper. Now, in the biggest event of their lives, hundreds of thousands of men were able to check for themselves the truth of that workaday Bible. They fought in a battle or raid, and two days after they read, with jeers on their lips, the account of "the show" in the papers. They felt they had found the Press out. The most bloody defeat in the history of Britain, a very world's wonder of valour frustrated by feckless misuse, of regimental glory and Staff shame, might occur on the Ancre on July 1, 1916, and our Press come out bland and copious and graphic, with nothing to show that we had not had quite a good day—a victory really. Men who had lived through the massacre read the stuff open-mouthed. Anything, then, could figure as anything else in the Press—as its own opposite even. Black was only an aspect of white. With a grin at the way he must have been taken in up to now, the fighting soldier gave the Press up. So it comes that each of several million ex-soldiers now reads every solemn appeal of a Government, each beautiful speech of a Premier or earnest assurance of a body of employers with that maxim on guard in his mind—"You can't believe a word you read."

CHAPTER VIII
THE DUTY OF LYING

I

To fool the other side has always been

fair in a game. Every fencer or boxer may feint. A Rugby football player "gives the dummy" without any shame. In cricket a bowler is justly valued the more for masking his action.

In war your licence to lead the other fellow astray is yet more ample. For war, though it may be good sport to some men, is not a mere sport. In sport you are not "out to win" except on certain terms of courtesy and handsomeness. Who would take pride in a race won by a fluke? At Henley, a long time ago, there were five or six scullers in for the Diamonds. One of them, L——, was known to be far the best man in the race. In the first heat he was drawn against A——, of Oxford, about the best of the others. L—— had one fault—a blind eye; and it often made him steer a bad course. Before the two had raced for fifty yards L—— blundered out of his course, crashed into A——, and capsized him. The rules of boat-racing are clear: L—— had done for himself. A——, who was now swimming, had only to look up to the umpire's launch and hold up a hand. A nod would have been the reply, and the heat would have been A——'s, and the final heat, in all likelihood, too. A—— looked well away from the umpire and kept his hands down, got back into his boat and said to his contrite opponent, "Start again here, sir?" A—— was decisively beaten, and never came so near to winning the Diamonds again.

Of course he was right, the race being sport. He had "loved the game beyond the prize"; he had, like Cyrano, emporté son panache; he had seen that in sport the thing to strive for is prowess itself, and not its metallic symbol. But the prize of victory in war is no symbol; it is the thing itself, the real end and aim of all that you do and endure. If A—— had been sculling not for a piece of silversmith's work but for the righting of a wronged nation or for the reassertion of public right throughout Europe, not only would he have been morally free to take a lucky fluke when he got it: he would not have been morally free to reject it. In war you have to "play to win"—words of sinister import in sport. Pot-hunting, unhonoured in sport, is a duty in war, where the pot is, perhaps, the chance of a free life for your children.

Hence your immemorial right to fall on your enemy where he is weak, to start before he is ready, to push him out of the course, to jockey him on to the rails, to use against him all three of Bacon's recipes for deceiving. A good spy will lie to the last, and in war a prisoner may lie like a saint and hero. With unmistakable glee the Old Testament tells us of Gideon's excellent practical fib with the crockery and trumpets. Even the Wooden Horse of the Greeks has long ceased to raise moral questions. The pious Aeneas, certainly, called it a foul. But what did he do himself, when he got a good opening? Went, as the Irish say, beyond the beyonds and fought in an enemy uniform. Ruses of war and war lies are as ancient as war itself, and as respectable. The most innocent animals use them; they shammed dead in battle long before Falstaff.

The only new thing about deception in war is modern man's more perfect means for its practice. The thing has become, in his hand, a trumpet more efficacious than Gideon's own. When Sinon set out to palm off on the Trojans the false news of a Greek total withdrawal, that first of Intelligence officers made a venture like that of early man, with his flint-headed arrow, accosting a lion. Sinon's pathetic little armament of yarns, to be slung at his proper peril, was frailer than David's five stones from the brook. Modern man is far better off. To match the Lewis gun with which he now fires his solids, he has to his hand the newspaper Press, a weapon which fires as fast as the Lewis itself, and is almost as easy to load whenever he needs, in his wars, to let fly at the enemy's head the thing which is not.

He has this happiness, too: however often he fires, he can, in a sense, never miss. He knows that while he is trying to feed the enemy with whatever it may be bad for him to read the enemy will be trying just as hard to leave no word of it unread. As busily as your enemy's telescopes will be conning your lines in the field, his Intelligence will be scrutinising whatever is said in your Press, worrying out what it means and which of the things that it seems to let out are the traps and which are the real, the luminous, priceless slips made in unwariness. What the Sphinx was to her clientèle, what the sky is to mountain-climbers and sailors, your Press is to him: an endless riddle, to be interrogated and interpreted for dear life. His wits have to be at work on it always. Like a starved rat in a house where rat-poison is laid, he can afford neither to nibble a crumb that has got the virus on it, nor yet to leave uneaten any clean crumb that has fallen accidentally from a table. Do not thrilling possibilities open before you?

What cannot you and I perform upon

The unguarded Duncan? What not put upon

His spongy officers?

—that is, if Duncan be really unguarded enough to "ravin down his proper bane," like a dutiful rat, and his officers spongy enough to sop up, according to plan, the medicated stuff that you give them.

III

It is the common habit of nations at war to ascribe to the other side all the cunning, as if the possession of a Ulysses were some sort of discredit. Happily for us our chosen Ulysses in France, at the most critical time, was of the first order. But no soldier can go far ahead of his time; he has to work in it and with it. And so the rich new mine of Intelligence work through the Press was not worked by either side, in the Great War, for all it was worth. Only a few trial borings were made; experimental shafts were sunk into the seam, and good, promising stuff was brought to the top.

Here are a couple of samples. Some readers of popular science, as it is called, may have been shocked to see in a technical journal, rather late in the war, a recklessly full description of our "listening sets"—the apparatus by which an enemy telephone message is overheard in the field. "Why," they must have thought, "this is giving away one of our subtlest devices for finding out what the enemy is about. The journal ought to be prosecuted." The article had really come from G.H.Q. It was the last thrust in a long duel.

When the war opened the Germans had good apparatus for telephonic eavesdropping. We had, as usual, nothing to speak of. The most distinctly traceable result was the annihilation of our first attack at Ovillers, near Albert, early in July 1916. At the instant fixed for the attack our front at the spot was smothered under a bombardment which left us with no men to make it. A few days after when we took Ovillers, we found the piece of paper on which the man with the German "listening set" had put down, word for word, our orders for the first assault. Then we got to work. We drew our own telephones back, and we perfected our own "listening sets" till the enemy drew back his, further and further, giving up more and more of ease and rapidity of communication in order to be safe. At last a point was reached at which he had backed right out of hearing. All hope of pushing him back further still, by proving in practice that we could still overhear, was now gone. All that was left to do was to add the effects of a final bluff to the previous effects of the real strength of our hand. And so there slipped into a rather out-of-the-way English journal the indiscretion by which the reach of our electric ears was, to say the least of it, not under-stated. Few people in England might notice the article. The enemy could be trusted to do so.

When the Flanders battle of July 31, 1917, was about to be fought, we employed the old ruse of the Chinese attack. We modernised the trick of medieval garrisons which would make a show of getting ready to break out at one gate when a real sally was to be made from another. The enemy was invited to think that a big attack was at hand. But against Lens, and not east of Ypres. Due circumstantial evidence was provided. There were audible signs that a great concentration of British guns were cautiously registering, west of Lens. A little scuffle on that part of the front elicited from our side an amazing bombardment—apparently loosed in a moment of panic. I fancy a British Staff Officer's body—to judge by his brassard and tabs—may have floated down the Scarpe into the German lines. Interpreted with German thoroughness, the maps and papers upon it might easily betray the fact that Lens was the objective. And then a really inexcusable indiscretion appeared—just for a moment, and then was hushed up—in the London Press. To an acute German eye it must have been obvious that this composition was just the inconsequent gassing of some typically stupid English General at home on leave; he was clearly throwing his weight about, as they say, without any real understanding of anything. The stuff was of no serious value, except for one parenthetic, accidental allusion to Lens as the mark. As far as I know, this ebullition of babble was printed in only one small edition of one London paper. Authority was then seen to be nervously trying, as Uncle Toby advised, "to wipe it up and say no more about it." Lest it should not be observed to have taken this wise precaution some fussy member of Parliament may have asked in the House of Commons how so outrageous a breach of soldierly reticence had occurred. And was there no control over the Press? It all answered. The Germans kept their guns in force at Lens, and their counter barrage east of Ypres was so much the lighter, and our losses so much the less.