NormalizeHEADmain

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 6232 deletions

diff --git a/old/60332-8.txt b/old/60332-8.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index ab6f86b..0000000
--- a/old/60332-8.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,6232 +0,0 @@
-The Project Gutenberg eBook, Disenchantment, by C. E. (Charles Edward)
-Montague
-
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-
-Title: Disenchantment
-
-
-Author: C. E. (Charles Edward) Montague
-
-
-
-Release Date: September 20, 2019  [eBook #60332]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
-
-
-***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DISENCHANTMENT***
-
-
-E-text prepared by David King and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
-(http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by
-Internet Archive (https://archive.org)
-
-
-
-Note: Images of the original pages are available through
-      Internet Archive. See
-      https://archive.org/details/disenchantment00mont
-
-
-Transcriber's note:
-
-      Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
-
-
-
-
-
-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
-
-
-                      I. The Vision                    1
-
-                     II. Misgiving                    16
-
-                    III. At Agincourt and Ypres       35
-
-                     IV. Tedium                       62
-
-                      V. The Sheep that were not Fed  84
-
-                     VI. 'Ware Politicians           103
-
-                    VII. "Can't Believe a Word"      114
-
-                   VIII. The Duty of Lying           127
-
-                     IX. Autumn Comes                157
-
-                      X. Autumn Tints in Chivalry    173
-
-                     XI. Stars in their Courses      189
-
-                    XII. Belated Boons               205
-
-                   XIII. The Old Age of the War      219
-
-                    XIV. Our Moderate Satanists      232
-
-                     XV. Any Cure?                   252
-
-                    XVI. Fair warning                266
-
-
-
-
-                               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 4_s._ 8_d._ 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.
-
-
-                                   IV
-
-
-If we did these things in the green leaf, what might we not do in the
-dry? Mobilize our whole Press, conscribe it for active service under a
-single control, a--let us be frank--a Father-General of Lies, the
-unshaming strategic and tactical lies of "the great wars" which "make
-ambition virtue," and sometimes make mendacity a virtue too? Coach the
-whole multitudinous orchestra of the Press to carry out the vast
-conceptions of some consummate conductor, _splendide mendax_? From each
-instrument under his baton this artist would draw its utmost
-contributive aid to immense schemes of concerted delusiveness, the
-harping of the sirens elaborated into Wagnerian prodigies of volume and
-complexity.
-
-As you gaze from the top of a tree or a tower behind your own front, in
-a modern war, all the landscape beyond it looks as if man had perished
-from the earth, leaving his works behind him. It all looks strangely
-vacant and dead, the roofs of farms and the spires of churches serving
-only to deepen your sense of this blank deletion of man, as the Roman
-arches enhance the vacuous stillness of the Campagna. Your Intelligence
-Corps has to convert this first impression, this empty page, into a
-picture, built up line by line, dot by dot, of the universe of
-activities that are going on out there. Its first and easiest task is to
-mark out correctly the place where every enemy unit is, each division,
-each battery, each railhead, aerodrome, field hospital and dump. Next it
-has to mark each movement of each of these, the shiftings of the various
-centres of gravity, the changes in the relative density and relative
-quality of troops and guns at various sectors, the increase, at any
-sector, of field hospitals, the surest harbingers of heavy attacks. The
-trains on all lines must be counted, their loads calculated. Next must
-be known in what sort of spirits the enemy is, in the field and also at
-home. Do the men believe in their officers? Do the men get confident
-letters from their civilian friends? Do they send cheerful ones back? Is
-desertion rare and much abhorred? Or so common that men are no longer
-shot for it now? So you may go on enumerating until it strikes you that
-you are simply drifting into an inventory of all the details of the
-enemy's wartime life, in the field and at home. And then you understand.
-
-For what you want to know, in order to beat him, is no less than
-this--to see him steadily and see him whole. In the past we have talked
-of information "of military value" as distinct from other information.
-But all information about either side is of military value to the other.
-News of the outbreak or settlement of a strike in a Welsh coalfield was
-of military value to Ludendorff. News of the day's weather in Central
-Europe was of military value to Sir Douglas Haig. News of anything that
-expressed in any degree the temper of London or Berlin, of Munich or
-Manchester, helped to eke out that accurate vision of an enemy's body
-and mind which is the basis of success in combat. A black dot, of the
-size of a pin-head, may seem, when looked at alone, to give no secret
-away. But when the same dot is seen, no longer in isolation, but as part
-of a pen-and-ink drawing, perhaps it may leap into vital prominence,
-showing now as the pupil of the eye that completes a whole portrait,
-gives its expression to a face and identifies a sitter.
-
-Throughout the Great War our own Press and that of the Germans were each
-pouring out, for the undesigned benefit of their enemy, substantially
-correct descriptions of everything in the war life of their respective
-nations, except a few formal military and naval secrets specially
-reserved by the censors. Each nation fought, on the whole, with the
-other standing well out in the light, with no inscrutability about its
-countenance. If we were ever again in such risk of our national life,
-would we not seriously try to make ourselves an enigma? Or would we
-leave this, as we have left some other refinements of war, to the other
-side to introduce first?
-
-
-                                   V
-
-
-Suppose us again at war with a Power less strong at sea than ourselves.
-If we should want its fleet to come out and fight in the open, why not
-evoke, some fine morning, from every voice in our daily press, a sudden
-and seemingly irrepressible cry of grief and rage over the unconcealable
-news--the Censor might be defied by the way--that our Grand Fleet, while
-ranging the seas, had struck a whole school of drift mines and lost half
-its numbers? Strategic camouflage, however, would go far beyond such
-special means to special ends as that. It would, as a regular thing,
-derange the whole landscape presented to enemy eyes by our Press. There
-was in the war a French aerodrome across which the French camouflage
-painters had simply painted a great white high-road: it ran across
-hangars, huts, turf, everything; and everything was amazingly
-obliterated by it. Across our real life, as seen under the noonday rays
-of publicity in ordinary times, the supreme controller might draw some
-such enormous lines of falsification.
-
-Most of the fibs that we used in the war were mere nothings, and clumsy
-at that. When the enemy raided our trenches in the dead winter season,
-took fifty prisoners, and did as he liked for a while--so much as he
-liked that a court of inquiry was afterwards held and a colonel deprived
-of his command--we said in our official _communiqué_ that a hostile
-raiding party had "entered our trenches" but was "speedily driven out,
-leaving a number of dead." When civilian _moral_ at home was going
-through one of its occasional depressions, we gave out that it was
-higher than ever. We did not officially summon from the vasty deep the
-myth about Russian soldiers in England. But when it arose out of nothing
-we did make some use of it. These were, however, little more than bare
-admissions of the principle that truthfulness in war is not imperative.
-Falsification was tried, but it was not "tried out." Like really
-long-range guns, the kindred of "Bertha," it came into use only enough
-to suggest what another world-war might be. _Vidimus tantum._ And then
-the war ended.
-
-Under a perfected propaganda system the whole surface presented by a
-country's Press to the enemy's Intelligence would be a kind of painted
-canvas. The artist would not merely be reticent about the positions,
-say, of our great training camps. He would create, by indirect evidence,
-great dummy training camps. In the field we had plenty of dummy
-aerodromes, with hangars complete and a few dummy machines sprawling
-outside, to draw enemy bomb-fire. At home we would have dummy Salisbury
-Plains to which a guarded allusion would peep out here and there while
-the new unity of command over the Press would delete the minutest clue
-to the realities. Episodes like that of the famous Lansdowne letter
-would not be left for nature to bungle. If at any time such an episode
-seemed likely to touch any diplomatic spring with good strategic effect,
-it would happen at that moment and no other. Otherwise it would not
-happen, so far as any trace of it in the Press could betray.
-By-elections, again, their course and result, may tell an enemy much of
-what your people are thinking. But, for military purposes, there is
-always some particular thing which you want him to believe them to be
-thinking. So you would not leave it to the capricious chances of an
-actual election to settle whether he should be led to believe this or
-not. You would see to it. Just as you camouflage your real guns and
-expose dummy guns, so you would obliterate from the Press all trace of
-your real elections and offer to view, at the times that best suited,
-dummy elections, _ad hoc_ elections, complete in all their parts.
-
-We have imagined a case in which it would be our interest to raise false
-confidence in the enemy, perhaps to draw a hurried attack on our shores
-at a time of our own choosing. Then, if the whole of our Press is held
-in our hand like a fiddle, ready to take and give out any tune, what
-should prevent us from letting fall, in sudden distress, a hundred
-doleful, forced admissions that the strain has proved too great, the
-smash has come, the head of the State is in hiding from his troops, the
-Premier in flight, naval officers hanging from modern equivalents to the
-yard-arm, Ministers and Commanders-in-Chief shaking their fists in one
-another's faces? Or take the opposite case, that you mean to attack in
-force, in the field. Here you would add to the preliminary bombardment
-of your guns such a bombardment of assertion and insinuation, not
-disprovable before "zero" hour, as has never yet been essayed; plausible
-proofs from neutral quarters that the enemy's troops are being betrayed
-by their politicians behind, that typhus has broken out among the men's
-homes, that their children are dying like flies, and some of the
-mothers, insane with famine and grief, are eating the dead in hope of
-nursing the living. Oh, you could say a great deal.
-
-And you could deliver your messages, too. The enemy's command might try
-to keep the contents of your Press from reaching his troops. But, thanks
-to the aeroplane, you can circularize the enemy's troops almost as
-easily as traders can canvass custom at home. You can flood his front
-line with leaflets, speeches, promises, rumours, and caricatures. You
-can megaphone to it. Only in recent years has human ingenuity thought of
-converting the older and tamer form of political strife into the
-pandemonic "stunt" of a "whirlwind election." Shall war not have her
-whirlwind canvasses no less renowned than those of peace? Some rather
-shame-faced passages of love there have been between us and the Rumour
-of Shakespeare, the person "painted full of tongues," who "stuffs the
-ears of men with false reports," to the advantage of her wooers. Why not
-espouse the good lady right out? Make an honest woman of her?
-
-
-                                   VI
-
-
-Perhaps you would shrink back. Perhaps at any rate you do so now, when
-for the moment this great implement is not being offered to you, to take
-or leave, at an instant crisis of your country's fate. You feel that
-even in such a case you would stand loftily aloof in your cold purity?
-You would disclaim as a low, unknightly business the uttering of such
-base coinage as cooked news, whatever your proud chastity may cost
-anyone else? Or arrive, perhaps, at the same result by a different
-route, and make out to yourself that really it pays, in the end, to be
-decent; that clean chivalry is a good investment at bottom, and that a
-nation of Galahads and Bayards is sure to come out on top, on the canny
-reckoning that the body housing a pure heart has got the strength of
-ten? That is one possible course. And the other is to accept, with all
-that it implies, the doctrine that there is one morality for peace and
-another morality for war; that just as in war you may with the clearest
-conscience stab a man in the back, or kick him in the bowels, in spite
-of all the sportsmanship you learnt at school, so you may stainlessly
-carry deception to lengths which in peace would get you blackballed at a
-club and cut by your friends.
-
-It may be too much to hope that, whichever of these two paths we may
-choose, we shall tread it with a will. We have failed so much in the way
-of what Germany used to call "halfness," the fault of Macbeth, the wish
-to hunt with the hounds while we run with the hare, that it would be
-strange if we did not still try to play Bayard and Ulysses as one man
-and succeed in combining the shortcomings of an inefficient serpent with
-those of a sophisticated dove. If we really went the whole serpent the
-first day of any new war would see a wide, opaque veil of false news
-drawn over the whole face of our country. Authority playing on all the
-keys, white and black, of the Press as upon one piano, would give the
-listening enemy the queerest of Ariel's tunes to follow. All that we
-did, all that we thought, would be bafflingly falsified. The whole
-landscape of life in this island, as it reflects itself in the waters of
-the Press, would come out suddenly altered as far past recognition as
-that physical landscape amid which it is passed has been changed by a
-million years of sunshine, rain, and frost. The whole sky would be
-darkened with flights of strategic and tactical lies so dense that the
-enemy would fight in a veritable "fog of war" darker than London's own
-November brews, and the world would feel that not only the Angel of
-Death was abroad, but the Angel of Delusion too, and would almost hear
-the beating of two pairs of wings.
-
-
-                                  VII
-
-
-Well--and then? Any weapon you use in a war leaves some bill to be
-settled in peace, and the Propaganda arm has its cost like another. To
-say so is not to say, without more ado, that it should not be used. Its
-cost should be duly cast up, like our other accounts; that is all. We
-all agree--with a certain demur from the Quakers--that one morality has
-to be practised in peace and another in war; that the same bodily act
-may be wrong in the one and right in the other. So, to be perfect, you
-need to have two gears to your morals, and drive on the one gear in war
-and on the other in peace. While you are on the peace gear you must not
-even shoot a bird sitting. At the last stroke of some August midnight
-you clap on the war gear and thenceforth you may shoot a man sitting or
-sleeping or any way you can get him, provided you and he be soldiers on
-opposite sides.
-
-Now, in a well-made car, in the prime of its life, there is nothing to
-keep you from passing straight and conclusively from one gear to
-another. The change once made, the new gear continues in force and does
-not wobble back fitfully and incalculably into the old. But in matters
-of conduct you cannot, somehow, drive long on one gear without letting
-the other become noticeably rusty, stiff, and disinclined to act. It was
-found in the Great War that after a long period of peace and general
-saturation with peace morals it took some time to release the average
-English youth from his indurated distaste for stabbing men in the
-bowels. Conversely it has been found of late, in Ireland and elsewhere,
-that, after some years of effort to get our youths off the no-homicide
-gear, they cannot all be got quickly back to it either, some of them
-still being prone to kill, as the French say, _paisiblement_, with a
-lightness of heart that embarrasses statesmen.
-
-We must, to be on the conservative side, assume that the same phenomenon
-would attend a post-war effort to bring back to the truth gear of peace
-a Press that we had driven for some years on the war gear of
-untruthfulness. Indeed, we are not wholly left to assumption and
-speculation. During the war the art of Propaganda was little more than
-born. The various inspired articles-with-a-purpose, military or
-political, hardly went beyond the _vagitus_, the earliest cry of the
-new-born method, as yet
-
-    An infant crying in the night,
-      And with no language but a cry.
-
-Yet for more than three years since the Armistice our rulers have
-continued to issue to the Press, at our cost as Blue Books and White
-Papers, long passages of argument and suggestion almost fantastically
-different from the dry and dignified official publications of the
-pre-war days. English people used to feel a sovereign contempt for the
-"semi-official" journalism of Germany and Russia. But the war has left
-us with a Press at any rate intermittently inspired. What would be left
-by a war in which Propaganda had come of age and the State had used the
-Press, as camouflaging material, for all it was worth?
-
-It used at one time to be a great joke--and a source of gain
-sometimes--among little boys to take it as a benign moral law that so
-long as you said a thing "over the left," it did not matter whether it
-was true or not. If, to gain your private ends, or to make a fool of
-somebody else, you wanted to utter a fib, all that you had to do was to
-append to it these three incantatory words, under your breath, or indeed
-without any sound or move of your lips at all, but just to yourself in
-the session of sweet silent thought. Then you were blameless. You had
-cut yourself free, under the rules, from the vulgar morality. War
-confers on those who wage it much the same self-dispensing power. They
-can absolve themselves of a good many sins. Persuade yourself that you
-are at war with somebody else and you find your moral liberty expanding
-almost faster than you can use it. An Irishman in a fury with England
-says to himself "State of war--that's what it is," and then finds he can
-go out and shoot a passing policeman from behind a hedge without the
-discomfort of feeling base. The policeman's comrades say to themselves
-"State of war--that's what it has come to," and go out and burn some
-other Irishman's shop without a sense of doing anything wrong, either.
-They all do it "over the left." They have stolen the key of the magical
-garden wherein you may do things that are elsewhere most wicked and yet
-enjoy the mental peace of the soldier which passeth all understanding.
-
-To kill and to burn may be sore temptations at times, but not so
-besetting to most men as the temptation to lie is to public speakers and
-writers. Another frequent temptation of theirs is to live in a world of
-stale figures of speech, of flags nailed to the mast, of standing to
-one's guns, of deaths in last ditches, of quarter neither asked nor
-given. It is their hobby to figure their own secure, squabblesome lives
-in images taken from war. And their little excesses, their breaches of
-manners, and even, sometimes, of actual law, are excused, as a rule, in
-terms of virile disdain for anything less drastic and stern than the
-morals of the real warfare which they know so little. We have to think
-in what state we might leave these weak brethren after a long war in
-which we had practised them hard in lying for the public good and also
-in telling themselves it was all right because of the existence of a
-state of war. State of war! Why, that is what every excitable politician
-or journalist declares to exist all the time. To the wild party man the
-party which he hates is always "more deadly than any foreign enemy." All
-of us could mention a few politicians, at least, to whom the Great War
-was merely a passing incident or momentary interruption of the more
-burningly authentic wars of Irish Orange and Green, or of English Labour
-and Capital.
-
-
-                                  VIII
-
-
-Under the new dispensation we should have to appoint on the declaration
-of war, if we had not done it already, a large Staff Department of Press
-Camouflage. Everything is done best by those who have practised it
-longest. The best inventors and disseminators of what was untrue in our
-hour of need would be those who had made its manufacture and sale their
-trade in our hours of ease. The most disreputable of successful
-journalists and "publicity experts" would naturally man the upper grades
-of the war staff. The reputable journalists would labour under them,
-trying their best to conform, as you say in drill, to the movements of
-the front rank. For in this new warfare the journalist untruthful from
-previous habit and training would have just that advantage over the
-journalist of character which the Regular soldier had over the New Army
-officer or man in the old. He would be, as Mr. Kipling sings,
-
-    A man that's too good to be lost you,
-      A man that is 'andled and made,
-    A man that will pay what 'e cost you
-      In learnin' the others their trade.
-
-After the war was over he would return to his trade with an immense
-accession of credit. He would have been decorated and publicly praised
-and thanked. Having a readier pen than the mere combatant soldiers, he
-would probably write a book to explain that the country had really been
-saved by himself, though the fighting men were, no doubt, gallant
-fellows. He would, in all likelihood, have completed the disengagement
-of his mind from the idea that public opinion is a thing to be dealt
-with by argument and persuasion, appeals to reason and conscience. He
-would feel surer than ever that men's and women's minds are most
-strongly moved not by the leading articles of a paper but by its news,
-by what they may be led to accept as "the facts." So the practice of
-colouring news, of ordering reporters to take care that they see only
-such facts as tell in one way, would leap forward. For it would have the
-potent support of a new moral complacency. When a man feels that his
-tampering with truth has saved civilization, why should he deny himself,
-in his private business, the benefit of such moral reflections as this
-feeling may suggest?
-
-Scott gives, in _Woodstock_, an engaging picture of the man who has
-"attained the pitch of believing himself above ordinances." The
-independent trooper, Tomkins, finds his own favourite vices fitting
-delightfully into an exalted theory of moral freedom. In former days, he
-avows, he had been only "the most wild, malignant rakehell in
-Oxfordshire." Now he is a saint, and can say to the girl whom he wants
-to debauch:
-
-    Stand up, foolish maiden, and listen; and know, in one word, that
-    sin, for which the spirit of man is punished with the vengeance of
-    heaven, lieth not in the corporal act, but in the thought of the
-    sinner. Believe, lovely Phoebe, that to the pure all acts are pure,
-    and that sin is in our thought, not in our actions, even as the
-    radiance of the day is dark to a blind man but seen and enjoyed by
-    him whose eyes receive it. To him who is but a novice in the things
-    of the spirit much is enjoined, much is prohibited; and he is fed
-    with milk fit for babes--for him are ordinances, prohibitions, and
-    commands. But the saint is above all these ordinances and
-    restraints. To him, as to the chosen child of the house, is given
-    the pass-key to open all locks which withhold him from the enjoyment
-    of his heart's desire. Into such pleasant paths will I guide thee,
-    lovely Phoebe, as shall unite in joy, in innocent freedom, pleasures
-    which, to the unprivileged, are sinful and prohibited.
-
-So when a journalist with no strong original predisposition to swear to
-his own hurt shall have gained high public distinction by his fertility
-in falsehoods for consumption by an enemy in the field, the fishes that
-tipple in the deep may well "know no such liberty" as this expert in
-fiction will allow himself when restored to his own more intoxicating
-element.
-
-The general addition of prestige to the controversial device of giving
-false impressions and raising false issues would naturally be immense.
-To argue any case merely on its merits and on the facts would seem to
-the admirers of the new way a kind of virtuous imbecility. In what great
-industrial dispute or political campaign, in what struggle between great
-financial interests, would both sides, or either, forego the use of
-munitions so formidable? Such conflicts might almost wholly cease to be
-competitions in serious argument at all; they might become merely trials
-of skill in fantastic false pretences, and of expertness in the morbid
-psychology of credulity.
-
-So men argued, surmised and predicted, talking and talking away in the
-endless hours that war gives for talking things out. When first they
-began to ask each other why so many lies were about, the common
-hypothesis, based on prior experience, was that they must be meant to
-save some "dud," up above, from losing his job. Then they came to admit
-there was something more in it than that. Lies had a good enough use for
-fooling the Germans. A beastly expedient, no doubt; acquiescence in
-lying does not come quite so easily to a workman of good character as it
-does to men of a class in which more numerous formal fibs are kept in
-use as social conveniences. Still, the men were not cranks enough to
-object. "They love not poison that do poison need." The men had hated,
-and still continued to hate, the use of poison gas, too. It was a
-scrub's trick, like vitriol-throwing. But who could have done without
-it, when once the Germans began? And now who could object to the use of
-this printed gas either? Could they, in this new warfare of propaganda,
-expect their country to go into action armed in a white robe of candour,
-and nothing besides, like a maskless man going forth to war against a
-host assisted by phosgene and all her foul sisters?
-
-It was a clear enough case: decency had to go under. But it was hard
-luck not to be able to know where you were. Where were they? If all the
-news they could check was mixed with lies, what about all the rest,
-which they were unable to check? Was it likely to be any truer? Why, we
-might be losing the war all the time, everywhere! Who could believe now
-what was said about our catching the submarines? Or about India's being
-all right? And how far would you have to go to get outside the lie belt?
-Could our case for going to war with the Germans be partly lies too?
-Beastly idea!
-
-How would it be, again, when we came to play these major tricks which
-the men were already discussing as likely to come into use? Suppose it
-became part of our game to publish, for some good strategical reason,
-news of a naval or military disaster to ourselves, the same not having
-happened? To take in the enemy this lie would have to take in our own
-people too; the ruse would be given away if the Government tried to tip
-so much as a wink to the British reader of the British Press. So men's
-friends at home would have the agonies of false alarms added to their
-normal war-time miseries, and wives might be widowed twice and mothers
-of one son made childless more than once before the truth finally
-overshadowed their lives.
-
-And then, your war won, there would be that new lie-infested and
-infected world of peace. In one of his great passages Thucydides tells
-us what happened to Greece after some years of war and of the necessary
-war morality. He says that, as far as veracity, public and private,
-goes, the peace gear was found to have got wholly out of working order
-and could not be brought back into use. "The meaning of words had no
-longer the same relation to things, but was changed by men as they
-thought proper." The pre-war hobby of being straight and not telling
-people lies went clean out of fashion. Anyone who could bring off a good
-stroke of deceit, to the injury of some one whom he disliked,
-"congratulated himself on having taken the safer course, over-reached
-his enemy, and gained the prize of superior talent." A man who did not
-care to use so sound a means to his ends was thought to be a goody-goody
-ass. War worked in that way on the soul of Greece, in days when war was
-still confined, in the main, to the relatively cleanly practice of
-hitting your enemy over the head, wherever you could find him. The
-philosophers in our dugouts preserved moderation when they expected as
-ugly a sequel for war in our age, when the chivalrous school seems to
-have pretty well worked itself out and the most promising lines of
-advance are poison gas and canards. But the survivors among them are not
-detached philosophers only. They act in the new world that they foresaw,
-and the man whose word you could trust like your own eyes and ears,
-eight years ago, has come back with the thought in his mind that so many
-comrades of his have expressed: "They tell me we've pulled through at
-last all right because our propergander dished out better lies than what
-the Germans did. So I say to myself 'If tellin' lies is all that bloody
-good in war, what bloody good is tellin' truth in peace?'"
-
-
-
-
-                               CHAPTER IX
-                              AUTUMN COMES
-
-
-                                   I
-
-             In the autumn of 1917 the war entered into an
-
-autumn, or late middle-age, of its own. "Your young men," we are told,
-"shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams." The same with
-whole armies. But middle-aged armies or men may not have the mists of
-either morning or evening to charm them. So they may feel like Corot,
-when he had painted away, in a trance of delight, till the last vapour
-of dawn was dried up by the sun; then he said, "You can see everything
-now. Nothing is left," and knocked off work for the day. There was no
-knocking off for the army. But that feeling had come. A high time was
-over, a great light was out; our eyes had lost the use of something,
-either an odd penetration that they had had for a while, or else an odd
-web that had been woven across them, shutting only ugliness out.
-
-The feeling was apt to come on pretty strong if you lived at the time on
-the top of the little hill of Cassel, west of Ypres. The Second Army's
-Headquarters were there. You might, as some Staff duty blew you about
-the war zone, be watching at daybreak one of that autumn's many dour
-bouts of attrition under the Passchendale Ridge, in the mud, and come
-back, the same afternoon, to sit in an ancient garden hung on the slope
-of the hill, where a great many pears were yellowing on the wall and
-sunflowers gazing fixedly into the sun that was now failing them. All
-the corn of French Flanders lay cut on the brown plain under your eyes,
-from Dunkirk, with its shimmering dunes and the glare on the sea, to the
-forested hills north of Arras. Everywhere lustre, reverie, stillness;
-the sinking hum of old bees, successful in life and now rather tired;
-the many windmills fallen motionless, the aureate light musing over the
-aureate harvest; out in the east the broken white stalks of Poperinghe's
-towers pensive in haze; and, behind and about you, the tiny hill city,
-itself in its distant youth the name-giver and prize of three mighty
-battles that do not matter much now. All these images or seats of
-outlived ardour, mellowed now with the acquiescence of time in the
-slowing down of some passionate stir in the sap of a plant or the spirit
-of insects or men, joined to work on you quietly. There, where the earth
-and the year were taking so calmly the end of all the grand racket that
-they had made in their prime, why not come off the high horse that we,
-too, in that ingenuous season, had ridden so hard? It was not now as it
-had been of yore. And why pretend that it was?
-
-
-                                   II
-
-
-One leaf that had gone pretty yellow by now was the hope of perfect
-victory--swift, unsoured, unruinous, knightly: St. George's over the
-dragon, David's over Goliath. Some people at home seem to be still
-clinging hard to that first pretty vision of us as a gifted, lithe, wise
-little Jack fighting down an unwieldy, dastardly giant. But troops in
-the field become realists. Ours had seen their side visibly swelling for
-more than two years, till Jack had become a heavier weight than the
-giant and yet could not finish him off. We knew that our allies and we
-outnumbered the Germans and theirs. We knew we were just as well armed.
-We had seen Germans advancing under our fire and made no mistake about
-what they were worth. Our first vision of victory had gone the way of
-its frail sister dream of a perfect Allied comradeship. French soldiers
-sneered at British now, and British at French. Both had the same
-derisive note in the voice when they named the "Brav' Belges." Canadians
-and Australians had almost ceased to take the pains to break it to us
-gently that they were the "storm troops," the men who had to be sent for
-to do the tough jobs; that, out of all us sorry home troops, only the
-Guards Division, two kilted divisions and three English ones could be
-said to know how to fight. "The English let us down again"; "The Tommies
-gave us a bad flank, as usual"--these were the stirring things you would
-hear if you called upon an Australian division a few hours after a
-battle in which the lion had fought by the side of his whelps. Chilly,
-autumnal things; while you listened, the war was apparelled no longer in
-the celestial light of its spring.
-
-An old Regular colonel, a man who had done all his work upon the Staff,
-said, at the time, that "the war was settling down to peace conditions."
-He meant no bitter epigram. He was indeed unfeignedly glad. The war was
-ceasing to be, like a fire or shipwreck, a leveller of ranks which, he
-felt, ought not to be levelled. Those whom God had put asunder it was
-less recklessly joining together. The first wild generosities were
-cooling off. Not many peers and heirs-apparent to great wealth were
-becoming hospital orderlies now. Since the first earthquake and tidal
-wave the disturbed social waters had pretty well found their old seemly
-levels again; under conscription the sons of the poor were now making
-privates; the sons of the well-to-do were making officers; sanity was
-returning. The Regular had faced and disarmed the invading hordes of
-1914. No small feat of audacity, either. Think what the shock must have
-been--what it would be for any profession, just at the golden prime of
-rich opportunity and searching test, to be overrun of a sudden by hosts
-of keen amateurs, many of them quick-witted, possibly critical, some of
-them the best brains of the country, most of them vulgarly void of the
-old professional habits of mind, almost indecently ready to use new and
-outlandish means to the new ends of to-day.
-
-But now the stir and the peril were over. The Old Army had won. It had
-scarcely surrendered a single strong point or good billet; Territorials
-and New Army toiled at the coolie jobs of its household. It had not even
-been forced, like kings in times of revolution, to make apparent
-concessions, to water down the pure milk of the word. It had become only
-the more intensely itself; never in any war had commands been retained
-so triumphantly in the hands of the cavalry and the Guards, the leaders
-and symbols of the Old Army resistance to every inroad of mere
-professional ardour and knowledge and strong, eager brains. When Sir
-Francis Lloyd relinquished the London District Command a highly
-composite mess in France discussed possible successors. "Of course,"
-said a Guards colonel gravely--and he was a guest in the Mess--"the
-first point is--he _must_ be a Guardsman." Peace conditions returning,
-you see; the peace frame of mind; the higher commands restored to their
-ancient status as property, "livings," perquisites, the bread of the
-children, not to be given to dogs. At home, too, peace conditions were
-taking heart to return. The scattered coveys of profiteers and
-job-hunters, almost alarmed by the first shots of the war, had long
-since met in security; "depredations as usual" was the word; and the
-mutual scalping and knifing of politicians had ceased to be shamefaced;
-who could fairly expect an old Regular Army to practise a more austere
-virtue than merchant princes and statesmen?
-
-
-                                  III
-
-
-Even in trenches and near them, where most of the health was, time had
-begun to embrown the verdant soul of the army. "Kitchener's Army" was
-changing. Like every volunteer army, his had sifted itself, at its
-birth, with the only sieve that will riddle out, even roughly, the best
-men to be near in a fight. Till the first of the pressed men arrived at
-our front, a sergeant there, when he posted a sentry and left him alone
-in the dark, could feel about as complete a moral certitude as there is
-on the earth that the post would not be let down. For, whatever might
-happen, nothing inside the man could start whispering to him "You never
-asked to be here! if you do fail, it isn't your doing."
-
-Nine out of ten of the conscripts were equally sound. For they would
-have been volunteers if they could. The tenth was the problem; the more
-so because there was nothing to tell you which was the tenth and which
-were the nine. For all that you knew, any man who came out on a draft,
-from then on, might be the exception, the literal-minded Christian who
-thought it wicked to kill in a war; or an anti-nationalist zealot who
-thought us all equally fools, the Germans and us, to be out there
-pasturing lice, instead of busy at home taking the hide off the
-_bourgeois_; or one of those drift wisps of loveless critical mind,
-attached to no place or people more than another, and just as likely as
-not to think that the war was our fault and that we ought to be beaten.
-_Riant avenir!_ as a French sergeant said when, in an hour of ease, we
-were talking over the nature of man, and he told me, in illustration of
-its diversity, how a section of his had just been enriched with a draft
-of neurasthenic burglars.
-
-These vulgar considerations of military expediency never seemed to cross
-the outer rim of the consciousness of many worthies who were engaged at
-home in shooing the reluctant into the army. If a recalcitrant seemed to
-be lazy, spiritless, nerveless, if there was every sign of his making a
-specially worthless and troublesome consumer of rations in a trench,
-then a burning zeal to inflict this nuisance and danger on some
-unoffending platoon in France seemed to invade the ordinary military
-tribunal. Report said that the satisfaction of this impulse was called,
-by the possessed persons, "giving Haig the men," and sometimes, with a
-more pungent irony, "supporting our fellows in the trenches." _Non tali
-auxilio nec defensoribus istis._ Australia's fellows in the trenches
-were suffered to vote themselves out of the risk of getting any support
-of the kind. Australia is a democracy. Ours were not asked whether they
-wanted to see their trenches employed as a penal settlement to which
-middle-aged moralists in England might deport, among other persons,
-those whom they felt to be morally the least beautiful of their juniors.
-So nothing impeded the pious practice of "larning toads to be toads."
-For the shirker, the "kicker," the "lawyer," for all the types of
-undesirables that contribute most liberally to the wrinkled appearance
-of sergeants, those pious men had the nose of collectors. Wherever there
-was a spare fifty yards of British front to be held, they, if anyone,
-could find a man likely to go to sleep there on guard, or, in some
-cyclonic disturbance of spirit, to throw down his rifle and light out
-for the coast, across country.
-
-Such episodes were reasonably few. The inveterate mercy that guards
-drunken sailors preserved from the worst disaster the cranks who had
-made a virtue of giving their country every bad soldier they could. And
-the abounding mercy of most courts-martial rendered few of the episodes
-fatal to individual conscripts. Nor, indeed, was the growth in their
-frequency after conscription wholly due to the more fantastic tricks
-played before high Heaven by some of the Falstaffs who dealt with the
-Mouldies, Shadows and Bull-calves. Conscription, in any case, must be
-dilution. You may get your water more quickly by throwing the filter
-away, but don't hope to keep the quality what it was. And the finer a
-New Army unit had been, to begin with, the swifter the autumnal change.
-Every first-rate battalion fighting in France or Belgium lost its whole
-original numbers over and over again. First, because in action it spared
-itself less than the poor ones; secondly, because the best divisions
-rightly got the hard jobs. Going out in the late autumn of 1915, a good
-battalion with normal luck might have nearly half its original volunteer
-strength left after the Battle of the Somme. Drafts of conscripts would
-fill up the gap, each draft with a listless or enigmatic one-tenth that
-volunteering had formerly kept at a distance. The Battle of Arras next
-spring might leave only twenty per cent of the first volunteers, and the
-autumn battles in Flanders would pretty well finish their business.
-Seasons returned, but not to that battalion returned the spirit of
-delight in which it had first learnt to soldier together and set foot
-together in France and first marched through darkness and ruined
-villages towards the flaring fair-ground of the front. While a New Army
-battalion was still very young, and fully convinced that no crowd of men
-so good to be with had ever been brought together before, it used to be
-always saying how it would keep things up after the war. No such genial
-reunions had ever been held as these were to be. But now the few odd men
-that are left only write to each other at long intervals, feeling almost
-as if they were raising their voices in an empty church. One of them
-asks another has he any idea what the battalion was like after Oppy, or
-Bourlon Wood, or wherever their own knock-out came. Like any other
-battalion, no doubt--a mere G.C.M. of all conscript battalions;
-conscription filed down all special features and characters.
-
-Quick waste and renewal are said to be good for the body; the faster you
-burn up old tissues, by good sweaty work, the better your health; fresh
-and superior tissue is added unto you all the more merrily. Capital,
-too, the economists say, must be swiftly used up and reborn, over and
-over again, to do the most good that it can. And then there is the case
-of the phoenix--in fact, of all the birds and all the beasts too, for
-all evolution would seem to be just the dying of something worse, as
-fast as it can, in order that something better may live in its place. No
-need for delay in turning your anthropoid apes into Shakespeares and
-Newtons.
-
-But what if you found, after all your hard work, that not all the
-deceased cells of your flesh were replaced by new cells of the sort you
-would like? If some of your good golden pounds should have perished only
-that inconvertible paper might live? If out of your phoenix's ashes only
-a common-place rooster should spring? If evolution were guyed and
-bedevilled into retrovolution, a process by which the fittest must more
-and more dwindle away and the less fit survive them, and species be not
-multiplied but made fewer? Something, perhaps, of the sort may go on in
-the body in its old age, or in roses in autumn. It must go on in a
-volunteer army when it is becoming an army of conscripts during a war
-that is highly lethal.
-
-
-                                   IV
-
-
-The fall of the leaf had brought, too, a sad shortage of heroes--of
-highly-placed ones, for, of course, every company had its own,
-authenticated beyond any proof that crosses or medals could give. A few
-very old Regular privates would say, "Ah! if we had Buller here!" Sir
-Redvers Buller has always remained, in lofty disregard of conclusive
-disproof, the Cæsar or Hannibal of the old Regular private, who sets
-little store by such heroes of Whitehall and Fleet Street as Roberts and
-Kitchener. But the chiefs of to-day left men cold, at the best. The name
-of at least one was a by-word. Haig was a name and no more, though a
-name immune in a mysterious degree from the general scoffing surmise
-about the demerits of higher commands. Few subalterns or men had seen
-him. No one knew what he was doing or leaving undone. But some power,
-not ourselves, making for charity, seemed to recommend him to mercy in
-everyone's judgement; as if, from wherever he was, nameless waves of
-some sort rippled out through an uncharted ether, conveying some virtue
-exhaled by that winning incarnation of honour, courage, and kindness
-who, seen and heard in the flesh, made you wish to find in him all other
-excellent qualities too. The front line gave him all the benefit of
-every doubt. God only knew, it said, whether he or somebody else would
-have to answer for Bullecourt and Serre. It might not be he who had left
-the door lying open, unentered, for two nights and days, when the lions
-had won the battle of Arras that spring, and the asses had let the
-victory slip till the Germans crept back in the dark to the fields east
-of Vimy from which they had fled in despair. But slowness to judge can
-hardly be called hero-worship: at most, a somewhat sere October phase of
-that vernal religion.
-
-One of the heavenly things on which the New Army had almost counted, in
-its green faith, was that our higher commands would have genius. Of
-course, we had no right to do it. No X has any right to ask of Y that Y
-shall be Alexander the Great or Bach or Rembrandt or Garrick, or any
-kind of demonic first-rater. As reasonably send precepts to the
-Leviathan to come ashore. Yet we had indulged that insane expectation,
-just as we had taken it for granted that this time the nation would be
-as one man, and nobody "out to do a bit for himself on the quiet." And
-now behold the falling leaf and no Leviathan coming ashore in response
-to our May-Day desires.
-
-Certainly other things, highly respectable, came. The Second Army
-Staff's direction of that autumn's almost continuous battles was of a
-competence passing all British precedents. Leap-frogging waves of
-assault, box barrages, creeping barrages, actions, interactions, and
-counter-actions were timed and concerted as no Staff of ours had done it
-before. The intricate dance which has to go on behind a crowded battle
-front, so that columns moving east and west and columns moving north and
-south shall not coincide at cross roads, was danced with the
-circumstantial precision of the best ballets. An officer cast away
-somewhere in charge of a wayside smithy for patching up chipped guns
-felt that there was a power perched on the top of the hill at Cassel
-which smelt out a bit of good work, or of bad, wherever anyone did it.
-Sense, keenness, sympathy, resolution, exactness--all the good things
-abode in that eyrie which have to be in attendance before genius can
-bring off its marvels; every chamber swept and garnished, and yet--.
-
-Foch tells us what he thinks Napoleon might have said to the Allied
-commands if he could have risen in our black times from the dead. "What
-cards you people have!" he would have said, "and how little you do with
-them! Look!" And then, Foch thinks, within a month or two he "would have
-rearranged everything, gone about it all in some new way, thrown out the
-enemy's plans and quite crushed him." That "some new way" was not fated
-to come. The spark refused to fall, the divine accident would not
-happen. How could it? you ask with some reason. Had not trench warfare
-reached an impasse? Yes; there is always an impasse before genius shows
-a way through. Music on keyboards had reached an impasse before a person
-of genius thought of using his thumb as well as his fingers. Well, that
-was an obvious dodge, you may say, but in Flanders what way through
-could there have been? The dodge found by genius is always an obvious
-dodge, afterwards. Till it is found it can as little be stated by us
-common people as can the words of the poems that Keats might have
-written if he had lived longer. You would have to become a Keats to do
-that, and a Napoleon to say how Napoleon would have got through to
-Bruges in the autumn that seemed so autumnal to us. All that the army
-knew, as it decreased in the mud, was that no such uncovenanted mercy
-came to transmute its casualties into the swiftly and richly fruitful
-ones of a Napoleon, the incidental expenses of some miraculous draught
-of victory.
-
-Nothing to grouse at in that. The winds of inspiration have to blow the
-best way they can. Prospero himself could not raise them; how could the
-likes of us hope to? And yet there had been that illogical hope, almost
-reliance--part of the high unreason of faith that could move mountains
-in 1914 and seems to be scarcely able to shift an ant-hill to-day.
-
-
-
-
-                               CHAPTER X
-                        AUTUMN TINTS IN CHIVALRY
-
-
-                                   I
-
-
-In either of two opposite tempers you may carry on war. In one of the
-two you will want to rate your enemy, all round, as high as you can. You
-may pursue him down a trench, or he you; but in neither case do you care
-to have him described by somebody far, far away as a fat little
-short-sighted scrub. Better let him pass for a paladin. This may at
-bottom be vanity, sentimentality, all sorts of contemptible things. Let
-him who knows the heart of man be dogmatic about it. Anyhow, this temper
-comes, as they would say in Ireland, of decent people. It spoke in
-Porsena of Clusium's whimsical prayer that Horatius might swim the Tiber
-safely; it animates Velasquez' knightly _Surrender of Breda_; it
-prompted Lord Roberts's first words to Cronje when Paardeberg
-fell--"Sir, you have made a very gallant defence"; it is avowed in a
-popular descant of Newboldt's--
-
-    To honour, while you strike him down,
-    The foe who comes with eager eyes.
-
-The other temper has its niche in letters, too. There was the man that
-"wore his dagger in his mouth." And there was Little Flanigan, the
-bailiff's man in Goldsmith's play. During one of our old wars with
-France he was always "damning the French, the parle-vous, and all that
-belonged to them." "What," he would ask the company, "makes the bread
-rising? The parle-vous that devour us. What makes the mutton fivepence a
-pound? The parle-vous that eat it up. What makes the beer
-threepence-halfpenny a pot?"
-
-Well, your first aim in war is to hit your enemy hard, and the question
-may well be quite open--in which of these tempers can he be hit hardest?
-If, as we hear, a man's strength be "as the strength of ten because his
-heart is pure," possibly it may add a few footpounds to his momentum in
-an attack if he has kept a clean tongue in his head. And yet the
-production of heavy woollens in the West Riding, for War Office use,
-may, for all that we know, have been accelerated by yarns about
-crucified Canadians and naked bodies of women found in German trenches.
-There is always so much, so bewilderingly much, to be said on both
-sides. All I can tell is that during the war the Newbolt spirit seemed,
-on the whole, to have its chief seat in and near our front line, and
-thence to die down westward all the way to London. There Little Flanigan
-was enthroned, and, like Montrose, would bear no rival near his throne,
-so that a man on leave from our trench system stood in some danger of
-being regarded as little better than one of the wicked. Anyhow, he was a
-kind of provincial. Not his will, but that of Flanigan, had to be done.
-For Flanigan was at the centre of things; he had leisure, or else
-volubility was his trade; and he had got hold of the megaphones.
-
-
-                                   II
-
-
-In the first months of the war there was any amount of good
-sportsmanship going; most, of course, among men who had seen already the
-whites of enemy eyes. I remember the potent emetic effect of Flaniganism
-upon a little blond Regular subaltern maimed at the first battle of
-Ypres. "Pretty measly sample of the sin against the Holy Ghost!" the
-one-legged child grunted savagely, showing a London paper's comic sketch
-of a corpulent German running away. The first words I ever heard uttered
-in palliation of German misdoings in Belgium came from a Regular N.C.O.,
-a Dragoon Guards sergeant, holding forth to a sergeants' mess behind our
-line. "We'd have done every damn thing they did," he averred, "if it had
-been we." I thought him rather extravagant, then. Later on, when the
-long row of hut hospitals, jammed between the Calais-Paris Railway at
-Etaples and the great reinforcement camp on the sand-hills above it, was
-badly bombed from the air, even the wrath of the R.A.M.C. against those
-who had wedged in its wounded and nurses between two staple targets
-scarcely exceeded that of our Royal Air Force against war correspondents
-who said the enemy must have done it on purpose.
-
-Airmen, no doubt, or some of them, went to much greater lengths in the
-chivalrous line than the rest of us. Many things helped them to do it.
-Combatant flying was still new enough to be almost wholly an officer's
-job; the knight took the knocks, and the squire stayed behind and looked
-after his gear. Air-fighting came to be pretty well the old duel, or
-else the mediæval mêlée between little picked teams. The clean element,
-too, may have counted--it always looked a clean job from below, where
-your airy notions got mixed with trench mud, while the airman seemed
-like Sylvia in the song, who so excelled "each mortal thing upon the
-dull earth dwelling." Whatever the cause, he excelled in his bearing
-towards enemies, dead or alive. The funeral that he gave to Richthofen
-in France was one of the few handsome gestures exchanged in the war. And
-whenever Little Flanigan at home began squealing aloud that we ought to
-take some of our airmen off fighting and make them bomb German women and
-children instead, our airmen's scorn for these ethics of the dirt helped
-to keep up the flickering hope that the post-war world might not be
-ignoble.
-
-Even on the dull earth it takes time and pains to get a clean-run boy or
-young man into a mean frame of mind. A fine N.C.O. of the Grenadier
-Guards was killed near Laventie--no one knows how--while going over to
-shake hands with the Germans on Christmas morning. "What! not shake on
-Christmas Day?" He would have thought it poor, sulky fighting. Near
-Armentières at the Christmas of 1914 an incident happened which seemed
-quite the natural thing to most soldiers then. On Christmas Eve the
-Germans lit up their front line with Chinese lanterns. Two British
-officers thereupon walked some way across No Man's Land, hailed the
-enemy's sentries, and asked for an officer. The German sentries said,
-"Go back, or we shall have to shoot." The Englishmen said "Not likely!"
-advanced to the German wire, and asked again for an officer. The
-sentries held their fire and sent for an officer. With him the
-Englishmen made a one-day truce, and on Christmas Day the two sides
-exchanged cigarettes and played football together. The English intended
-the truce to end with the day, as agreed, but decided not to shoot next
-day till the enemy did. Next morning the Germans were still to be seen
-washing and breakfasting outside their wire; so our men, too, got out of
-the trench and sat about in the open. One of them, cleaning his rifle,
-loosed a shot by accident, and an English subaltern went to tell the
-Germans it had not been fired to kill. The ones he spoke to understood,
-but as he was walking back a German somewhere wide on a flank fired and
-hit him in the knee, and he has walked lame ever since. Our men took it
-that some German sentry had misunderstood our fluke shot. They did not
-impute dishonour. The air in such places was strangely clean in those
-distant days. During one of the very few months of open warfare a
-cavalry private of ours brought in a captive, a gorgeous specimen of the
-terrific Prussian Uhlan of tradition. "But why didn't you put your sword
-through him?" an officer asked, who belonged to the school of Froissart
-less obviously than the private. "Well, sir," the captor replied, "the
-gentleman wasn't looking."
-
-
-                                  III
-
-
-At no seat of war will you find it quite easy to live up to Flanigan's
-standards of hatred towards an enemy. Reaching a front, you find that
-all you want is just to win the war. Soon you are so taken up with the
-pursuit of this aim that you are always forgetting to burn with the
-gem-like flame of pure fury that fires the lion-hearted publicist at
-home.
-
-A soldier might have had the Athanasian ecstasy all right till he
-reached the firing line. Every individual German had sunk the
-_Lusitania_; there was none righteous, none. And yet at a front the holy
-passion began to ooze out at the ends of his fingers. The bottom trouble
-is that you cannot fight a man in the physical way without somehow
-touching him. The relation of actual combatants is a personal one--no
-doubt, a rude, primitive one, but still quite advanced as compared with
-that between a learned man at Berlin who keeps on saying _Delenda est
-Britannia!_ at the top of his voice and a learned man in London who
-keeps on saying that every German must have a black heart because Cæsar
-did not conquer Germany as he did Gaul and Britain. Just let the round
-head of a German appear for a passing second, at long intervals, above a
-hummock of clay in the middle distance. Before you had made half a dozen
-sincere efforts to shoot him the fatal germ of human relationship had
-begun to find a nidus again: he had acquired in your mind the rudiments
-of a personal individuality. You would go on trying to shoot him with
-zest--indeed, with a diminished likelihood of missing, for mere hatred
-is a flustering emotion. And yet the hatred business had started
-crumbling. There had begun the insidious change that was to send you
-home, on your first leave, talking unguardedly of "old Fritz" or of "the
-good old Boche" to the pain of your friends, as if he were a stout dog
-fox or a real stag of a hare.
-
-The deadliest solvent of your exalted hatreds is laughter. And you can
-never wholly suppress laughter between two crowds of millions of men
-standing within earshot of each other along a line of hundreds of miles.
-There was, in the Loos salient in 1916, a German who, after his meals,
-would halloo across to an English unit taunts about certain accidents of
-its birth. None of his British hearers could help laughing at his
-mistakes, his knowledge, and his English. Nor could the least humorous
-priest of ill-will have kept his countenance at a relief when the enemy
-shouted: "We know you are relieving," "No good hiding it," "Good-bye, Ox
-and Bucks," "Who's coming in?" and some humorist in the obscure English
-battalion relieving shouted back, with a terrific assumption of accent,
-"Furrst Black Watch!" or "Th' Oirish Gyards!" and a hush fell at the
-sound of these great names. Comedy, expelled with a fork by the
-dignified figure of Quenchless Hate, had begun to steal back of herself.
-
-At home that tragedy queen might do very well; she did not have these
-tenpenny nails scattered about on her road to puncture the nobly
-inflated tyres of her chariot. The heroes who spoke up for shooing all
-the old German governesses into the barbed wire compounds were not
-exposed to the moral danger of actually hustling, _propria persona_,
-these formidable ancients. But while Hamilcar at home was swearing
-Hannibal and all the other little Hamilcars to undying hatred of the
-foe, an enemy dog might be trotting across to the British front line to
-sample its rats, and its owner be losing in some British company's eyes
-his proper quality as an incarnation of all the Satanism of Potsdam and
-becoming simply "him that lost the dog."
-
-If you took his trench it might be no better; perhaps Incarnate Evil had
-left its bit of food half-cooked, and the muddy straw, where it lay
-last, was pressed into a hollow by Incarnate Evil's back as by a cat's.
-Incarnate Evil should not do these things that other people in trenches
-do. It ought to be more strange and beastly and keep on making _beaux
-gestes_ with its talons and tail, like the proper dragon slain by St.
-George. Perhaps Incarnate Evil was extinct and you went over its
-pockets. They never contained the right things--no poison to put in our
-wells, no practical hints for crucifying Canadians; only the usual
-stuffing of all soldiers' pockets--photographs and tobacco and bits of
-string and the wife's letters, all about how tramps were always stealing
-potatoes out of the garden, and how the baby was worse, and was his
-leave never coming! No good to look at such things.
-
-
-                                   IV
-
-
-With this guilty weakness gaining upon them our troops drove the Germans
-from Albert to Mons. There were scandalous scenes on the way. Imagine
-two hundred German prisoners grinning inside a wire cage while a little
-Cockney corporal chaffs them in half the dialects of Germany! His
-father, he says, was a slop tailor in Whitechapel; most of his
-journeymen came from somewhere or other in Germany--"Ah! and my dad
-sweated 'em proper," he says proudly; so the boy learnt all their kinds
-of talk. He convulses Bavarians now with his flow of Silesian. He
-fraternizes grossly and jubilantly. Other British soldiers laugh when
-one of the Germans sings, in return for favours received, the British
-ballad "Knocked 'em in the Ol' Kent Road." By the time our men had
-marched to the Rhine there was little hatred left in them. How can you
-hate the small boy who stands at the farm door visibly torn between
-dread of the invader and deep delight in all soldiers, as soldiers? How
-shall a man not offer a drink to the first disbanded German soldier who
-sits next to him in a public house at Cologne, and try to find out if he
-was ever in the line at the Brick-stacks or near the Big Crater? Why,
-that might have been his dog!
-
-The billeted soldier's immemorial claim on "a place by the fire" carried
-on the fell work. It is hopelessly bad for your grand Byronic hates if
-you sit through whole winter evenings in the abhorred foe's kitchen and
-the abhorred foe grants you the uncovenanted mercy of hot coffee and
-discusses without rancour the relative daily yields of the British and
-the German milch cow. And then comes into play the British soldier's
-incorrigible propensity, wherever he be, to form virtuous attachments.
-"Love, unfoiled in the war," as Sophocles says. The broad road has a
-terribly easy gradient. When all the great and wise at Paris were making
-peace, as somebody said, with a vengeance, our command on the Rhine had
-to send a wire to say that unless something was done to feed the Germans
-starving in the slums it could not answer for discipline in its army;
-the men were giving their rations away, and no orders would stop them.
-Rank "Pro-Germanism," you see--the heresy of Edith Cavell; "Patriotism
-is not enough; I must have no hatred or bitterness in my heart." While
-these men fought on, year after year, they had mostly been growing more
-void of mere spite all the time, feeling always more and more sure that
-the average German was just a decent poor devil like everyone else. One
-trembles to think what the really first-class haters at home would have
-said of our army if they had known at the time.
-
-
-                                   V
-
-
-Even at places less distant than home the survival of old English
-standards of fighting had given some scandal. In that autumn of the war
-when our generalship seemed to have explored all its own talents and
-found only the means to stage in an orderly way the greatest possible
-number of combats of pure attrition, the crying up of unknightliness
-became a kind of fashion among a good many Staff Officers of the higher
-grades. "I fancy our fellows were not taking many prisoners this
-morning," a Corps Commander would say with a complacent grin, on the
-evening after a battle. Jocose stories of comic things said by privates
-when getting rid of undesired captives became current in messes far in
-the rear. The other day I saw in a history of one of the most gallant of
-all British divisions an illustration given by the officer who wrote it
-of what he believed to be the true martial spirit. It was the case of a
-wounded Highlander who had received with a bomb a German Red Cross
-orderly who was coming to help him. A General of some consequence during
-part of the war gave a lecture, towards its end, to a body of officers
-and others on what he called "the fighting spirit." He told with
-enthusiasm an anecdote of a captured trench in which some of our men had
-been killing off German appellants for quarter. Another German appearing
-and putting his hands up, one of our men--so the story went--called out,
-"'Ere! Where's 'Arry? 'E ain't 'ad one yet." Probably some one had
-pulled the good general's leg, and the thing never happened. But he
-believed it, and deeply approved the "blooding" of 'Arry. That, he
-explained, was the "fighting spirit." Men more versed than he in the
-actual hand-to-hand business of fighting this war knew that he was
-mistaken, and that the spirit of trial by combat and that of
-pork-butchery are distinct. But that is of course. The notable thing was
-that such things should be said by anyone wearing our uniform. Twenty
-years before, if it had been rumoured, you would, without waiting, have
-called the rumour a lie invented by some detractor of England or of her
-army. Now it passed quite unhissed. It was the latter-day wisdom.
-Scrofulous minds at home had long been itching, publicly and in print,
-to bomb German women and children from aeroplanes, and to "take it out
-of" German prisoners of war. Now the disease had even affected some
-parts of the non-combatant Staff of our army.
-
-
-                                   VI
-
-
-You know the most often quoted of all passages of Burke. Indeed, it is
-only through quotations of it that most of us know Burke at all--
-
-    But the age of chivalry is gone ... the unbought grace of life, the
-    cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic
-    enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that
-    chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired
-    courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it
-    touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing
-    all its grossness.
-
-Burke would never say a thing by halves. And as truth goes by halves,
-and declines to be sweeping like rhetoric, Burke made sure of being
-wrong to the tune of some fifty per cent. The French Revolution did not,
-as his beautiful language implies, confine mankind for the rest of its
-days to the procreation of curs. And yet his words do give you, in their
-own lush, Corinthian way, a notion of something that probably did
-happen, a certain limited shifting of the centre of gravity of West
-European morals or manners.
-
-One would be talking like Burke--talking, perhaps you might say, through
-Burke's hat--if one were to say that the war found chivalry alive and
-left it dead. Chivalry is about as likely to perish as brown eyes or the
-moon. Yet something did happen, during the war, to which these wild
-words would have some sort of relation. We were not all Bayards in 1914;
-even then a great part of our Press could not tell indignation from
-spite, nor uphold the best cause in the world without turpitude. Nor
-were we all, after the Armistice, rods of the houses of Thersites and
-Cleon; Haig was still alive, and so were Gough and Hamilton and
-thousands of Arthurian subalterns and privates and of like-minded
-civilians, though it is harder for a civilian not to lose generosity
-during a war. But something had happened; the chivalrous temper had had
-a set-back; it was no longer the mode; the latest wear was a fine robust
-shabbiness. All through the war there had been a bear movement in
-Newbolts and Burkes, and, corresponding to this, a bull movement in
-stocks of the Little Flanigan group.
-
-
-
-
-                               CHAPTER XI
-                         STARS IN THEIR COURSES
-
-
-                                   I
-
-
-"Doth any man doubt," the wise Bacon asks, "that if there were taken out
-of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations,
-imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of
-a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and
-indisposition and unpleasing to themselves?" One of the most sweetly
-flattering hopes that we had in the August of 1914 was that in view of
-the greatness of the occasion causes were not going to have their
-effects.
-
-Nothing new, you may truthfully answer, in that. The improvement is one
-which man, in his cups and his dreams and other seasons of maudlin
-vision, has always perceived to have just come at last. Now, he
-exaltedly says to himself, for a clean break with my inadequately wise
-and brilliant past. Away with that plaguey old list of my things done
-which should not have been done, and of things left undone which I ought
-to have done. At the end of popular plays the sympathetic youth who had
-idled, philandered, or stolen till then would book to the Rand or the
-Yukon, fully assured that "in that free, outdoor life" one's character
-is not one's fate any longer; blessed, "out there," are Europe's
-slackers and wasters, for they shall inherit the earth, or its
-auriferous parts. Grasshoppers, too, if they drank or resorted to
-sentimental novels and plays, might have gallant little revolts in their
-hearts, and chirrup "Down with causation!" and feel cock-sure that some
-good-natured god would give them a chance of "redeeming their pasts"
-quite late in autumn, and put in their way a winter provision far ampler
-than that which crowns the coolie labours of those sorry daughters of
-Martha, the bees. But, for working this benign miracle in the soul, no
-other strong waters can equal the early days of a war. If, with
-unbecoming sobriety, anyone hints, in such days, that causes may still
-retain some sort of control, he is easily seen to have no drop of true
-blood in him; base is the slave who fears we must reap as we sowed;
-shame upon spiritless whispers about any connection between the making
-of beds and the lying thereon; now they shall see what excellent
-hothouse grapes will be borne by the fine healthy thistles that we have
-been planting and watering.
-
-Something in it too, perhaps--at least some centuries ago. When a great
-nation's army was only a few thousands strong the freak and the fluke
-had their chance. An Achilles or two, at the top of their form on the
-day, might upset the odds. But when armies are millions of men, and
-machinery counts for more than the men, the few divine accidents of
-exceptional valour cannot go far. With eleven a-side a Grace or an
-Armstrong may win a game off his own bat. He will hardly do that in a
-game where the sides are eleven thousand apiece. More and more, as the
-armies increase, must the law of averages have it its own dreary way;
-glorious uncertainties wither; statistical "curves" of relative national
-fitness to win, and to stand the strain of winning or losing, overbear
-everything else. What are the two armies' and the two nations' relative
-numbers? What is the mean physique on each side? And the mean
-intelligence? How far has each nation's history--social, political,
-religious, industrial--tended to make its men rich in just pride,
-self-reliance, high spirit, devotion, and hardihood? How many per cent
-on each side have been sapped by venereal disease? How much of their
-work have its officers troubled to learn? These are the questions. The
-more men you have in a war, and the longer it lasts, the more completely
-has it to lose the romance of a glorious gamble and sink--or, as some
-would say, rise--to the plane of a circumstantial, matter-of-fact
-liquidation of whatever relative messes the nations engaged have made of
-the whole of their previous lives.
-
-
-                                   II
-
-
-Any soldier will tell you the bayonet does not win battles. It only
-claims, in a way that a beaten side cannot ignore, a victory won already
-by gunfire, rifles, gas, bombs, or some combination of these. The
-bayonet's thrust is more of a gesture: a cogent appeal, like the urgent
-"How's that?" from the whole of the field when a batsman is almost
-certainly out. But you may go much further back. That predominant fire
-itself is just such another appeal. Its greater volume and better
-direction are only the terms of an army's or a nation's claim to be
-registered as the winner of what it had really won long ago when,
-compared with the other nation, it minded its job and lived cleanly and
-sanely. All war on the new huge scale may be seen as a process, very
-expensive, of registration or verification. Whenever a war is declared
-you may say that now, in a sense, it is over at last; all the votes have
-been cast; the examination papers are written; the time has come for the
-counting of votes and adjudging of marks. Of course, we may still "do
-our bit," but the possible size of our bit had its limit fixed long ago
-by the acts of ourselves and our fathers and rulers which made us the
-men that we are and no more. No use now to try to cadge favour with any
-_ad hoc_ God of Battles. For this, of all gods, is the most dourly
-Protestant. No squaring of him on the deathbeds of people who would not
-work while it was yet light.
-
-From many points in the field--some of the best were in the tops of high
-trees on high ground--you could watch through your glass the casting up
-of accounts. You might survey from beginning to end a British attack up
-a bare opposite slope, perhaps with home troops on the left and Canadian
-or Australasian troops on the right. You had already seen them meet on
-roads in the rear: battalions of colourless, stunted, half-toothless
-lads from hot, humid Lancashire mills; battalions of slow, staring
-faces, gargoyles out of the tragical-comical-historical-pastoral edifice
-of modern English rural life; Dominion battalions of men startlingly
-taller, stronger, handsomer, prouder, firmer in nerve, better schooled,
-more boldly interested in life, quicker to take means to an end and to
-parry and counter any new blow of circumstance, men who had learned
-already to look at our men with the half-curious, half-pitying look of a
-higher, happier caste at a lower. And now you saw them, all these kinds,
-arise in one continuous line out of the earth and walk forward to bear
-in the riddled flesh and wrung spirit the sins of their several fathers,
-pastors, and masters.
-
-Time after time there would come to the watching eye, to the mind still
-desperately hugging the hope that known causes might not bring their
-normal effects, the same crushing demonstration that things are as we
-have made them. Sometimes the line of home troops would break into gaps
-and bunches, lose touch and direction and common purpose, some of the
-knots plunging on into the back of our barrage or feasting some enemy
-machine-gunner on their density, others straggling back to the place
-whence they had started, while the Dominion troops still ambled steadily
-on, their line delicately waving but always continuous, closing again,
-as living flesh closes over a pinprick, wherever an enemy shell tore a
-hole.
-
-Perhaps the undersized boys from our slums and the under-witted boys
-from the "agricultural, residential, and sporting estates" of our
-auctioneers' advertisements would get to their goal, the spirit
-wrestling prodigies of valour out of the wronged flesh, hold on there
-for an hour or two with the shells splashing the earth up about them
-like puddle water when great rain-drops make its surface jump, and then
-fall back under orders, without any need, the brain of our army failing
-to know how to use what its muscle had won. Then, while you saw the
-triumphant Australians throw back a protective flank from the left of
-their newly-won front to the English right, far in their rear, you knew
-bitterly what the Australians were saying once more: "They've let us
-down again!" "Another Tommy officer who didn't know he'd won!" As if it
-were the fault, that day, of anyone there! Our men could only draw on
-such funds of nerve and physique, knowledge and skill, as we had put
-into the bank for them. Not they, but their rulers and "betters," had
-lost their heads in the joy of making money fast out of steam, and so
-made half of our nation slum-dwellers. It was not they who had moulded
-English rustic life to keep up the complacency of sentimental modern
-imitators of feudal barons. It was not they who had made our Regular
-Army neither aristocratic, with the virtues of aristocracy, nor
-democratic, with the different virtues of democracy, nor keenly
-professional with the professional virtues of gusto and curiosity about
-the possibilities of its work. _Delicta majorum immeritus lues._ Like
-the syphilitic children of some jolly Victorian rake, they could only
-bring to this harsh examination such health and sanity as all the
-pleasant vices of Victorian and Edwardian England had left them.
-
-
-                                  III
-
-
-The winter after the battle of Loos a sentry on guard at one part of our
-line could always see the frustrate skeletons of many English dead. They
-lay outside our wire, picked clean by the rats, so that the khaki fell
-in on them loosely--little heaps of bone and cloth half hidden now by
-nettles and grass. If the sentry had been a year in the army he knew
-well enough that they had gone foredoomed into a battle lost before a
-shot was fired. After the Boer War, you remember, England, under the
-first shock of its blunders, had tried to find out why the Staff work
-was so bad. What it found, in the words of a famous Report, was that the
-fashion in sentiment in our Regular Army was to think hard work "bad
-form"; a subaltern was felt to be a bit of a scrub if he worried too
-much about discovering how to support an attack when he might be more
-spiritedly employed in playing polo; "The nobleness of life," as Antony
-said, when he kissed Cleopatra, was to go racing or hunting, not to sit
-learning how to forecast the course of great battles and how to provide
-for answering their calls. And so the swathes of little brown bundles,
-with bones showing through, lay in the nettles and grass.
-
-Consider the course of the life of the British Regular officer as you
-had known him in youth--not the pick, the saving few, the unconquerably
-sound and keen, but the average, staple article made by a sleek,
-complacent, snobbish, safe, wealth-governed England after her own image.
-Think of his school; of the mystic aureole of quasi-moral beauty
-attached by authority there to absorption in the easy thing--in play;
-the almost passionate adoration of all those energies and dexterities
-which, in this world of evolution towards the primacy of the acute, full
-brain, are of the least possible use as aids to survival in men and to
-victory in armies. Before he first left home for school he may have been
-a normal child who only craved to be given some bit, any odd bit, of
-"real work," as an experience more thrilling than games. Like most
-children, he may have had a zestful command of fresh, vivid, personal
-speech, his choice of words expressing simply and gaily the individual
-working of his mind and his joy in its work. Through easy contact with
-gardeners, gamekeepers, and village boys he often had established a
-quite natural, unconscious friendliness with people of different social
-grades. He was probably born of the kind that pries young, that ask,
-when they play on sea sands, why there are tides, and what goes on in
-the sky that there should be rain. And then down came the shades of the
-prison-house. To make this large, gay book of fairy tales, the earth,
-dull and stale to a child importunately fingering at its covers might
-seem a task to daunt the strongest. But many of the teachers of our
-youth are indomitable men. They can make earth's most ardent small lover
-learn from a book what a bore his dear earth can be, with her strings of
-names of towns, rivers, and lakes, her mileages _à faire mourir_, and
-her insufferable tale of flax and jute. With an equal firmness your
-early power of supple and bright-coloured speech may be taken away and a
-rag-bag of feeble stock phrases, misfits for all your thoughts, and worn
-dull and dirty by everyone else, be forced upon you instead of the
-treasure you had. You may leave school unable to tell what stars are
-about you at night or to ask your way to a journey's end in any country
-but your own. Between your helpless mind and most of your
-fellow-countrymen thick screens of division are drawn, so that when you
-are fifteen you do not know how to speak to them with a natural
-courtesy; you have a vague idea that they will steal your watch if you
-leave it about. Above all, you have learnt that it is still "bad form"
-to work; that the youth with brains and no money may well be despised by
-the youth with money and no brains; that the absorbed student or artist
-is ignoble or grotesque; that to be able to afford yourself "a good
-time" is a natural title to respect and regard; and that to give
-yourself any "good time" that you can is an action of spirit. So it went
-on at prep. school, public school, Sandhurst, Camberley. That was how
-Staff College French came to be what it was. And as it was what it was,
-you can guess what Staff College tactics and strategy were, and why all
-the little brown bundles lay where they did in the nettles and grass.
-
-
-                                   IV
-
-
-You are more aware of the stars in war than in peace. A full moon may
-quite halve the cares of a sentry; the Pole Star will sometimes be all
-that a company has, when relieved, to guide it back across country to
-Paradisiac rest; sleeping often under the sky, you come to find out for
-yourself what nobody taught you at school--how Orion is sure to be not
-there in summer, and Aquila always missing in March, and how the Great
-Bear, that was straight overhead in the April nights, is wont to hang
-low in the north in the autumn. Childish as it may seem to the wise, a
-few years' nightly view of these and other invariable arrangements may
-give a simple soul a surprisingly lively twinge of what the ages of
-faith seem to have meant by the fear of God--the awesome suspicion that
-there is some sort of fundamental world order or control which cannot by
-any means be put off or dodged or bribed to help you to break its own
-laws. "Anything," the old Regular warrant-officers say, "can be wangled
-in the army," but who shall push the Dragon or the Great Dog off his
-beat? And--who knows?--that may be only a part of a larger system of
-cause and effect, all of it as hopelessly undodgable.
-
-These apprehensions were particularly apt to arise if you had spent an
-hour that day in seeing herds of the English "common people" ushered
-down narrowing corridors of barbed wire into some gap that had all the
-German machine guns raking its exit, the nature of Regular officers'
-pre-war education in England precluding the prompt evolution of any
-effectual means on our side to derange the working of this ingenious
-abattoir. We had asked for it all. We had made the directing brains of
-our armies the poor things that they were. Small blame to them if in
-this season of liquidation they failed to produce assets which we had
-never equipped them to earn--mental nimbleness, powers of individual
-observation, quickness to cap with counter-strokes of invention each new
-device of the fertile specialists opposite. Being as we had moulded
-them, they had probably done pretty well in doing no worse.
-
-    What's _done_ we partly may compute,
-      But know not what's _resisted_.
-
-Who shall say what efforts it may have cost some of those poor
-custom-ridden souls not to veto, for good and all, an engine of war so
-far from "smart" as the tank, or to accept any help at all from such
-folk as the new-fangled, untraditional airmen, some of whom took no
-shame to go forth to the fray in pyjamas. Not they alone, but all of
-ourselves, with our boastful chatter about the "public school spirit,"
-our gallant, robust contempt for "swats" and "smugs" and all who
-invented new means to new ends and who trained and used their brains
-with a will--we had arranged for these easy battues of thousands of
-Englishmen, who, for their part, did not fail. To-morrow you would see
-it all again--a few hundred square yards of ground gained by the deaths,
-perhaps, of twenty thousand men who would
-
-    Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
-    Which is not tomb enough and continent
-    To hide the slain.
-
-So it would go on, week after week, sitting after sitting of the dismal
-court that liquidated in the Flanders mud our ruling classes' wasted
-decades, until we either lost the war outright or were saved from utter
-disaster by clutching at aid from French brains and American numbers.
-Like Lucifer when he was confronted with the sky at night, you "looked
-and sank."
-
-    Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
-        The army of unalterable law.
-
-What had we done, when we could, that the stars in their courses should
-fight for us now? Or left undone, of all that could provoke this
-methodical universe of swinging and returning forces to shake off such
-dust from its constant wheels?
-
-
-                                   V
-
-
-"I planted a set of blind hopes in their minds," said Prometheus, making
-it out to be quite a good turn that he had done to mankind. And the Dr.
-Relling of Ibsen, a kind of Prometheus in general practice, kept at hand
-a whole medicine-chest of assorted illusions to dope his patients with.
-"Illusion, you know," said this sage, "is the tonic to give 'em." It may
-be. But even illusions cost something. The bill, as Hotspur said of the
-river Trent, "comes me cranking in" presently, nature's iron law laying
-it down that the more superb your state of inflation the deeper shall
-the dumps occasioned by a puncture be. The Promethean gift of Mr. Dunlop
-to our race undoubtedly lifted the pastime of cycling out of a somewhat
-bumpy order of prose into a lyric heaven. And yet the stoutest of all
-nails could plunge itself into the solid tyre of old without compelling
-you to walk a foundered Pegasus from the top of the Honister Pass the
-whole way to Keswick, enjoying _en route_ neither the blessing of a
-bicycle nor that of the unhampered use of Shanks' Mare.
-
-So War, who keeps such a pump to blow you up with, and also such thorns
-for your puncturing, had to leave us the "poor shrunken things" that we
-are, anyhow. It is as if the average man had been passing himself off on
-himself, in a dream, as the youthful hero of some popular drama, and, in
-a rousing last act, had departed, in 1914, on excellent terms with
-himself and the audience, bands playing and flags flying, to start a
-noble and happy new life on the virgin soil of the "golden West." And
-now he awakes in the "golden West" on a slobbery and a dirty farm, with
-all the purchase money still to pay, and tools and manures remarkably
-dear, and no flag visible, nor instrument of music audible, and dismal
-reports coming in from neighbouring farmers, and cause and effect as
-abominably linked one to another as ever, and all the time his mind full
-of a sour surmise that many sorts of less credulous men have "made a
-bit" of inordinate size out of the bit that he did rather than made,
-during the raging and tearing run of the drama now taken off and, as far
-as may be, forgotten.
-
-
-
-
-                              CHAPTER XII
-                             BELATED BOONS
-
-
-                                   I
-
-
-There is no one day of which you can say: "My youth ended then. On the
-Monday the ball of my vision had eagles that flew unabashed to the sun.
-On the Tuesday it hadn't." The season of rapture goes out like a tide
-that has turned; a time has come when the mud flats are bare; but, long
-after the ebb has set in, any wave that has taken a special strength of
-its own from some combination of flukes out at sea may cover them up for
-a moment--may even throw itself far up the beach, making as if to
-recapture the lost high-water mark. So the youth of our war had its
-feints at renewal, hours of Indian summer when there was wine again in
-the air; in the "bare, ruined choirs" a lated golden auriole would
-strike up once more for a while, before leaving.
-
-Because hope does spring eternal the evening before a great battle must
-always make fires leap up in the mind. The calm before Thermopylæ, the
-rival camps on the night before Agincourt, the ball before Waterloo--not
-without reason have writers of genius, searching for glimpses of life in
-its most fugitive acme of bloom, the poised and just breaking crest of
-the wave, gone to places and times of the kind. For there the wits and
-the heart may be really astir and at gaze, and the common man may have,
-for the hour, the artist's vision of life as an adventure and challenge,
-lovely, harsh, fleeting, and strange. The great throw, the new age's
-impending nativity, Fate with her fingers approaching the veil, about to
-lift--a sense of these things is a drug as strong as strychnine to
-quicken the failing pulse of the most heart-weary of moribund raptures.
-
-We all had the dope in our wine on the night of August 7, 1918. At
-daybreak our troops to the east of Amiens would second the first blow of
-Foch at the German salient towards Paris, the giant arm that was now
-left sticking out into the air to be hit; its own smashing blow had been
-struck without killing; its first strength was spent; the spirit behind
-it was cracking; now, in its moment of check, of lost momentum, of risky
-extension, now to have at it and smash it. The bull had rushed right on
-to gore us and missed; we had his flank to stab now.
-
-Someone who dined at the mess had just motored from Paris, through white
-dust and sunshine and, everywhere, quickly turned heads and eager faces.
-He had been in the streets all the night of the enemy's last mighty
-lunge at the city. He spoke of the silent crowds blackening the
-boulevards through the few hours of midsummer darkness; other crowds on
-the sky-line of roofs, all black and immobile, the whole city hushed to
-hear the bombardment, and staring, staring fixedly east at the flame
-that incessantly winked in the sky above Château-Thierry--history come
-to life, still enigmatic, but audible, visible, galloping through the
-night. Poor old France, tormented and stoical, what could not the world
-forgive her? Then he had seen the news come the next day to these that
-had thus watched as the non-combatants watched from the high walls of
-Troy; and how an American had broken down uncontrollably on hearing how
-his country's Third Division had bundled the Germans back into the
-Marne: "We _are_ all right! By God, we _are_ all right!" he had cried, a
-whole new nation's secret self-distrust before a supercilious ancient
-world changing into a younger boy's ecstasy of relief in the thought
-that now he has jolly well given his proofs and the older boys will not
-sneer at him now, and he never need bluff any more. Good fellows really,
-the Yanks; most simple and human as soon as you knew them. One seemed to
-know everyone then, for that evening.
-
-
-                                   II
-
-
-Night came on cloudless and windless and braced with autumn's first
-astringent tang of coolness. Above, as I lay on my back in the meadow,
-the whole dome had a stir of life in its shimmering fresco, stars
-flashing and winking with that eager air of having great things to
-impart--they have it on frosty nights in the Alps, over a high bivouac.
-We were all worked up, you see. Could it be coming at last, I thought as
-I went to sleep--the battle unlike other battles? How many I had seen
-outlive their little youth of groundless hope, from the approach along
-darkened roads through summer nights, the eastern sky pulsating with its
-crimson flush, the wild glow always leaping up and always drawing in,
-and the waiting cavalry's lances upright, black and multitudinous in
-road-side fields, impaling the blenching sky just above the horizon; and
-then, in the bald dawn, the backward trickles of wastage swelling into
-great streams or rather endless friezes seen in silhouette across the
-fields, the trailing processions of wounded, English and German, on foot
-and on stretchers, dripping so much blood that some of the tracks were
-flamboyantly marked for miles across country; and then the evening's
-reports, with their anxious efforts to show that we had gained something
-worth having. Was it to be only Loos and the Somme and Arras and
-Flanders and Cambrai, all over again?
-
-Thought must have passed into dream when I was awakened by some bird
-that may have had a dream too and had fallen right off its perch in a
-bush near my head, with a disconcerted squeak and a scuffling sound
-among dry leaves. Opening my eyes, I found that a thickish veil was
-drawn over the stars. When I sat up the veil was gone; my eyes were
-above it; a quilt of white mist, about a foot thick, had spread itself
-over the meadow. Good! Let it thicken away and be shoes of silence and
-armour of darkness at dawn for our men. Soon night's habitual sounds
-brought on sleep again. An owl in the wood by the little chalk stream
-would hoot, patiently wait for the answering call that should come, and
-then hoot again, and listen again. The low, dry, continuous buzz of an
-aeroplane engine, more evenly humming than any of ours, droned itself
-into hearing and softly ascended the scale of audibility; overhead, as
-the enemy passed, was slowly drawn across the sky from east to west a
-line of momentarily obscured stars, each coming back into sight as the
-next one was deleted. In the east the low, slow grumbling sound of a few
-guns from fifty miles of front seemed, in its approach to quietude, like
-the audible breath of a sleeper. The war was taking its rest.
-
-Some sort of musing half-dream about summer heaths, buzzing with bees,
-was jarred by the big blunted sound, distant and dull, of wooden boxes
-tumbling down wooden stairs, "off," as they do in a farce. Of
-course--that night-bomber unloading on St. Omer, Abbeville, Etaples,
-some one of the usual marks. But now there was something to wake for.
-Not a star to be seen. I jumped up and found the mist thick to my
-armpits, and rising. Oh, good, good! Our men would walk safe as the
-attacking Germans had walked in the mist of that lovely and fatal
-morning in March. I slept hard till two o'clock came--time to get up for
-work. The mist was doing its best; it seemed to fill the whole wide
-vessel of the universe.
-
-
-                                  III
-
-
-Ten miles to the east of Amiens a steep-sided ridge divides the
-converging rivers of Ancre and Somme. They meet where it sinks, at its
-western end, into the plain. From the ridge there was, in pre-war days,
-a beautiful view. On the south the ground fell from your feet abruptly,
-a kind of earth cliff, to the north bank of the Somme, about a hundred
-feet below. Southwards, beyond the river, stretched, as far as eye could
-see, the expanse of the level Santerre, one of France's best cornlands.
-South-eastward you looked up the Somme valley, mile after mile, towards
-Bray and Péronne--a shining valley of poplars and stream and linked
-ponds and red-roofed villages among the poplars. But now the Santerre
-lay untilled, gone back to heath of a faded fawn-grey. The red roofs had
-been shelled; the Germans possessed them; the Germans held the blasted
-heath, across the river; other Germans held most of the ridge on this
-side to a mile or so east of the point to which I was posted that
-morning. English troops were to carry the eastern end of the ridge and
-the tricky low ground between it and the Somme. Australian and Canadian
-troops were to attack on a broad front, out on the level Santerre,
-across the river and under our eyes.
-
-But there was no seeing. The mist, in billowy, bolster-like masses,
-wallowed and rolled about at the touch of light airs; at one moment a
-figure some thirty yards off could be seen and then a thickened
-whiteness would rub it out; down the earth cliff we looked into a
-cauldron of that seething milky opaqueness. Of what might go on in that
-pit of enigma the eye could tell nothing; the mind hung on what news
-might come through the ear. We knew that there was to be no prior
-bombardment; the men would start with the barrage and go for five miles
-across the Santerre if they could, pushing the enemy off it. The stage
-was set, the play of plays was about to begin on the broad stage below;
-only, between our eyes and the boards there was hung a white curtain.
-
-Up the cliff, fumbling and muted, came the first burst of the barrage,
-suggesting, as barrages usually do, a race between sounds, a piece
-bangingly played against time on a keyboard. Now the men would be rising
-full length above earth and walking out with smoking breath and
-bejewelled eyebrows into the infested mist. Then our guns, for an
-interval, fell almost silent--first lift of the barrage--a chance for
-hungry ears to assess the weight of the enemy's answering gunfire.
-Surely, surely it had not all the volume it had had at Arras and Ypres
-last year. And then down came our barrage again, like one rifle-bolt
-banging home, and all thought was again with the friends before whose
-faces the wall of splashing metal, earth, and flame had just risen and
-moved on ahead like the pillars of fire and cloud.
-
-Hours passed, bringing the usual changes of sounds in battles. The piece
-that had started so rapidly on the piano slowed down; the notes spaced
-themselves out; the first continuous barking of many guns slackened off
-irregularly into isolated barks and groups of barks--just what you hear
-from a dog whose temper is subsiding, with occasional returns. That, in
-itself, told nothing. Troops might only have gained a few hundred yards
-in the old Flanders way, and then flopped down to dig and be murdered.
-Or--but one kept a tight hand on hope. One had hoped too often since
-Loos. And then the mist lifted. It rolled right up into the sky in one
-piece, like a theatre curtain, almost suddenly taking its white quilted
-thickness away from between our eyes and the vision so much longed for
-during four years. Beyond the river a miracle--_the_ miracle--had begun.
-It was going on fast. Remember that all previous advances had gained us
-little more than freedom to skulk up communication trenches a mile or
-two further eastward, if that. But now! Across the level Santerre, which
-the sun was beginning to fill with a mist-filtered lustre, two endless
-columns of British guns, wagons, and troops were marching steadily east,
-unshelled, over the ground that the Germans had held until dawn.
-
-Nothing like it had ever been seen in the war. Above, on our cliff, we
-turned and stared at each other. We must have looked rather like Cortes'
-men agape on their peak. The marvel seemed real; the road lay open and
-dry across the Red Sea. Far off, six thousand yards off in the shining
-south-east, tanks and cavalry were at work, shifting and gleaming and
-looking huge on the sky-line of some little rumpled fold of the Santerre
-plateau. Nearer, the glass could make out an enemy battery, captured
-complete, caught with the leather caps still on the muzzles of guns. The
-British dead on the plain, horses and men, lay scattered thinly over
-wide spaces; scarcely a foundered tank could be seen; the ground had
-turf on it still; it was only speckled with shell-holes, not
-disembowelled or flayed. The war had put on a sort of benignity, coming
-out gallantly on the top of the earth and moving about in the air and
-the sun; the warm heath, with so few dead upon it, looked almost clement
-and kind, almost gay after the scabrous mud wastes and the stink of the
-captured dug-outs of the Salient, piled up to ground-level with corpses,
-some feet uppermost, some heads, like fish in a basket, making you think
-what wonderful numbers there are of mankind. For a moment, the object of
-all dream and desire seemed to have come; the flaming sword was gone,
-and the gate of the garden open.
-
-Too late, as you know. We awoke from delight, and remembered. Four years
-ago, three years ago, even two years ago, a lasting repose of beatitude
-might have come with that regaining of paradise! Now! The control of our
-armies, jealously hugged for so long and used, on the whole, to so
-little purpose, had passed from us, thrown up in a moment of failure,
-dissension and dread. While still outnumbered by the enemy we had not
-won; while on even terms with him we had not won; only under a foreign
-Commander-in-Chief, and with America's inexhaustible numbers crowding
-behind to hold up our old arms, had our just cause begun to prevail. And
-now the marred triumph would leave us jaded and disillusioned, divided,
-half bankrupt; sneerers at lofty endeavour, and yet not the men for the
-plodding of busy and orderly peace; bilious with faiths and enthusiasms
-gone sour in the stomach. That very night I was to hear the old
-Australian sneer again. The British corps on their left, at work in the
-twisty valley and knucklesome banks of the Somme, had failed to get on
-quite as fast as they and the Canadian troops on their right. "The
-Canadians were all right of course, but the Tommies! Well, we might have
-known!" They had got rid, they chuckingly said, of their own last "Tommy
-officers" now; they wanted to have it quite clear that in England's war
-record they were not involved except as our saviours from our sorry
-selves.
-
-
-                                   IV
-
-
-There were other days, during the following months of worm-eaten
-success, when some mirage of the greater joys which we had forfeited
-hung for a few moments over the sand. It must be always a strange
-delight to an infantryman to explore at his ease, in security, ground
-that to him has been almost as unimaginable as events after death. There
-is no describing the vesture of enigmatic remoteness enfolding a
-long-watched enemy line. Tolstoy has tried, but even he does not come up
-to it. Virgil alone has expressed one sensation of the British overflow
-over Lille and Cambria, Menin (even the Menin Road had an end) and
-Bruges and Ostend, Le Câteau and Landrecies, Liège and Namur--
-
-        Juvat ire et Dorica castra
-    Desertosque videre locos, litusque relictum.
-    Classibus hic locus, hic acie certare solebant,
-    Hic Dolopum manus, hic sævus tendebat Achilles.
-
-And then, wherever you went, till the frontier was reached, everyone was
-your host and your friend; all the relations of strangers to one another
-had been transfigured into the sum of all kindness and courtesy. In one
-mining village in Flanders, quitted that day by the Germans, a woman
-rushed out of a house to give me a lump of bread, thinking that we must
-all be as hungry as she and her neighbours. Late one night in Brussels,
-just after the Germans had gone, I was walking with another officer down
-the chief street of the city, then densely crowded with radiant
-citizens. My friend had a wooden stump leg and could not walk very well;
-and this figure of a khaki-clad man, maimed in the discharge of an
-Allied obligation to Belgium, seemed suddenly and almost simultaneously
-to be seen by the whole of that great crowd in all its symbolic value,
-so that the crowd fell silent and opened out spontaneously along the
-whole length of the street and my friend had to hobble down the middle
-of a long avenue of bare-headed men and bowing women.
-
-Finally--last happy thrill of the war--the first stroke of eleven
-o'clock, on the morning of Armistice Day, on the town clock of Mons,
-only captured that morning; Belgian civilians and British soldiers
-crowding together into the square, shaking each other's hands and
-singing each other's national anthems; a little toy-like peal of bells
-in the church contriving to tinkle out "Tipperary" for our welcome,
-while our airmen, released from their labours, tumbled and romped
-overhead like boys turning cartwheels with ecstasy.
-
-What a victory it might have been--the real, the Winged Victory,
-chivalric, whole and unstained! The bride that our feckless wooing had
-sought and not won in the generous youth of the war had come to us now:
-an old woman, or dead, she no longer refused us. We had arrived, like
-the prince in the poem--
-
-    Too late for love, too late for joy,
-      Too late, too late!
-    You loitered on the road too long,
-      You trifled at the gate:
-    The enchanted dove upon her branch
-      Died without a mate;
-    The enchanted princess in her tower
-      Slept, died behind the grate:
-    Her heart was starving all this while
-      You made it wait.
-
-
-
-
-                              CHAPTER XIII
-                         THE OLD AGE OF THE WAR
-
-
-                                   I
-
-
-Men wearying in trenches used to tell one another sometimes what they
-fancied the end of the war would be like. Each had his particular
-favourite vision. Some morning the Captain would come down the trench at
-"stand-to" and try to speak as if it were nothing. "All right, men," he
-would say, "you can go across and shake hands." Or the first thing we
-should hear would be some jubilant peal suddenly shaken out on the air
-from the nearest standing church in the rear. But the commonest vision
-was that of marching down a road to a wide, shining river. Once more the
-longing of a multitude struggling slowly across a venomous wilderness
-fixed itself on the first glimpse of a Jordan beyond; for most men the
-Rhine was the physical goal of effort, the term of endurance, the symbol
-of all attainment and rest.
-
-To win what your youth had desired, and find the taste of it gone, is
-said to be one of the standard pains of old age. With a kind of blank
-space in their minds where the joy of fulfilment ought to have been, two
-British privates of 1914, now Captains attached to the Staff, emerged
-from the narrow and crowded High Street of Cologne on December 7, 1918,
-crossed the Cathedral square, and gained their first sight of the Rhine.
-As they stood on the Hohenzollern bridge and looked at the mighty
-breadth of rushing stream, each of them certainly gave his heart leave
-to leap up if it would and if it could. Had they not, by toil and
-entreaty, gained permission to enter the city with our first cavalry?
-Were they not putting their lips to the first glass of the sparkling
-vintage of victory? Neither of them said anything then. The heart that
-knoweth its own bitterness need not always avow it straight off. But
-they were friends; they told afterwards.
-
-The first hours of that ultimate winding-up of the old, long-decayed
-estate of hopes and illusions were not the worst, either. The cavalry
-brigadier in command at Cologne, those first few days, was a man with a
-good fighting record; and now his gesture towards the conquered was that
-of the happy warrior, that of Virgilian Rome, that of the older England
-in hours of victory. German civilians clearly expected some kind of
-mal-treatment, such perhaps as their own scum had given to Belgians.
-They strove with desperate care to be correct in their bearing, neither
-to jostle us accidentally in the streets nor to shrink away from us
-pointedly. Soon, to their surprise and shame, they found that among the
-combatant English there lingered the hobby of acting like those whom the
-Germans had known through their Shakespeare: "We give express charge
-that in our marches through the country there be nothing compelled from
-the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French upbraided
-or abused in disdainful language."
-
-The "cease fire" order on Armistice Day had forbidden all
-"fraternizing." But any man who has fought with a sword, or its
-equivalent, knows more about that than the man who has only blown with a
-trumpet. To men who for years have lived like foxes or badgers, dodging
-their way from each day of being alive to the next, there comes back
-more easily, after a war, a sense of the tacit league that must, in mere
-decency, bind together all who cling precariously to life on a
-half-barren ball that goes spinning through space. All castaways
-together, all really marooned on the one desert island, they know that,
-however hard we may have to fight to sober a bully or guard to each man
-his share of the shell-fish and clams, we all have to come back at last
-to the joint work of making the island more fit to live on. The gesture
-of the decimated troops who held Cologne at the end of that year was, in
-essence, that of the cavalry brigadiers. Sober or drunk, the men were
-contumaciously sportsmen, incorrigibly English. One night before
-Christmas I thought I heard voices outside my quarters long after
-curfew, and went to look out from my balcony high up in the Domhof into
-the moon-flooded expanse of the Cathedral square below. By rights there
-should have been no figures there at that hour, German or British. But
-there were three; two tipsy Highlanders--"Women from Hell," as German
-soldiers used to call the demonic stabbers in kilts--gravely dispensing
-the consolations of chivalry to a stout burgher of Cologne. "Och, dinna
-tak' it to hairrt, mon. I tell ye that your lads were grond." It was
-like a last leap of the flame that had burnt clear and high four years
-before.
-
-
-                                   II
-
-
-For the day of the fighting man, him and his chivalric hobbies, was
-over. The guns had hardly ceased to fire before from the rear, from the
-bases, from London, there came flooding up the braves who for all those
-four years had been squealing threats and abuse, some of them begging
-off service in arms on the plea that squealing was indispensable
-national work. We had not been long in Cologne when there arrived in hot
-haste a young pressman from London, one of the first of a swarm. He
-looked a fine strong man. He seemed to be one of the male Vestals who
-have it for their trade to feed the eternal flame of hatred between
-nations, instead of cleaning out stables or doing some other work fit
-for a male. His train had fortunately brought him just in time for
-luncheon. This he ate and drank with goodwill, complaining only that the
-wine, which seemed to me good, was not better. He then slept on his bed
-until tea-time. Reanimated with tea, he said genially, "Well, I must be
-getting on with my mission of hate," and retired to his room to write a
-vivacious account of the wealth and luxury of Cologne, the guzzling in
-all cafés and restaurants, the fair round bellies of all the working
-class, the sleek and rosy children of the poor. I read it, two days
-after, in his paper. Our men who had helped to fight Germany down were
-going short of food at the time, through feeding the children in houses
-where they were billeted. "Proper Zoo there is in this place," one of
-them told me. "Proper lions and tigers. Me and my friend are taking the
-kids from our billet soon's we've got them fatted up a bit. If you'll
-believe me, sir, them kiddies ain't safe in a Zoo. They could walk in
-through the bars and get patting the lions." I had just seen some of the
-major carnivora in their cages close to the Rhine, each a rectangular
-lamina of fur and bone like the tottering cats I had seen pass through
-incredible slits of space in Amiens a month after the people had fled
-from the city that spring. But little it mattered in London what he or I
-saw. The nimble scamps had the ear of the world; what the soldier said
-was not evidence.
-
-Some Allied non-combatants did almost unthinkable things in the first
-ecstasy of the triumph that others had won. One worthy drove into
-Cologne in a car plastered over with Union Jacks, like a minor bookie
-going to Epsom. It passed the wit of man to make him understand that one
-does not do these things to defeated peoples. But he could understand,
-with some help, that our Commander-in-Chief alone was entitled to carry
-a Union Jack on his car. "We must show these fellows our power"; that
-was the form of the licence taken out by every churl in spirit who
-wanted to let his coltish nature loose on a waiter or barber in some
-German hotel. I saw one such gallant assert the majesty of the Allies by
-refusing to pay more than half the prices put down on the wine-list.
-Another would send a waiter across an hotel dining-room to order a quiet
-party of German men and women not to speak so loud. Another was all for
-inflicting little bullying indignities on the editor of the _Kölnische
-Zeitung_--making him print as matters of fact our versions of old cases
-of German misconduct, etc. Probably he did not even know that the
-intended exhibition-ground for these deplorable tricks was one of the
-great journals of Europe.
-
-Not everybody, not even every non-combatant in the dress of a soldier,
-had caught that shabby epidemic of spite. But it was rife. It had become
-a fashion to have it, as in some raffish circles it is a fashion at
-times to have some rakish disease. In the German military cemetery at
-Lille I have heard a man reared at one of our most famous public schools
-and our most noble university, and then wearing our uniform, say that he
-thought the French might do well to desecrate all the German soldiers'
-graves on French soil. Another, at Brussels, commended a Belgian who was
-said to have stripped his wife naked in one of the streets of that city
-and cut off her hair on some airy suspicion of an affair with a German
-officer during the enemy's occupation. A fine sturdy sneer at the notion
-of doing anything chivalrous was by this time the mode. "I hope to God,"
-an oldish and highly non-combatant general said, in discussing the
-probable terms of peace with a younger general who had begun the war as
-a full lieutenant and fought hard all the way up, "that there's going to
-be no rot about not kicking a man when he's down." The junior general
-grunted. He did not agree. But he clearly felt shy of protesting.
-Worshippers of setting suns feel ill at ease in discussion with these
-bright, confident fellows who swear by the rising one.
-
-
-                                  III
-
-
-The senior general need not have feared. The generous youth of the war,
-when England could carry, with no air of burlesque, the flag of St.
-George, was pretty well gone. The authentic flame might still flicker on
-in the minds of a few tired soldiers and disregarded civilians.
-Otherwise it was as dead as the half-million of good fellows whom it had
-fired four years ago, whose credulous hearts the maggots were now eating
-under so many shining and streaming square miles of wet Flanders and
-Picardy. They gone, their war had lived into a kind of dotage ruled by
-mean fears and desires. At home our places of honour were brown with
-shirkers masquerading in the dead men's clothes and licensed by careless
-authorities to shelter themselves from all danger under the titles of
-Colonel, Major, and Captain. Nimble politicians were rushing already to
-coin into votes for themselves--"the men who won the war"--the golden
-memory of the dead before the living could come home and make themselves
-heard. Sounds of a general election, the yells of political cheap-jacks,
-the bawling of some shabby promise, capped by some shabbier bawl, made
-their way out to Cologne.
-
-"This way, gents, for the right sort of whip to give Germans!" "Rats,
-gentlemen, rats! Don't listen to _him_. Leave it to me and I'll chastise
-'em with scorpions." "I'll devise the brave punishments for them." "Ah,
-but I'll sweat you more money out of the swine." That was the gist of
-the din that most of the gramophones of the home press gave out on the
-Rhine. Each little demagogue had got his little pots of pitch and
-sulphur on sale for the proper giving of hell to the enemy whom he had
-not faced. Germany lay at our feet, a world's wonder of downfall, a very
-Lucifer, fallen, broken, bereaved beyond all the retributive griefs
-which Greek tragedy shows you afflicting the great who were insolent,
-wilful, and proud. But it was not enough for our small epicures of
-revenge. They wanted to twist the enemy's wrists, where he lay bound,
-and to run pins into his eyes. And they had the upper hand of us now.
-The soldiers could only look on while the scurvy performance dragged
-itself out till the meanest of treaties was signed at Versailles. "Fatal
-Versailles!" as General Sir Ian Hamilton said for us all; "Not a
-line--not one line in your treaty to show that those boys (our friends
-who were dead) had been any better than the emperors; not one line to
-stand for the kindliness of England; not one word to bring back some
-memory of the generosity of her sons!"
-
-"The freedom of Europe," "The war to end war," "The overthrow of
-militarism," "The cause of civilization"--most people believe so little
-now in anything or anyone that they would find it hard to understand the
-simplicity and intensity of faith with which these phrases were once
-taken among our troops, or the certitude felt by hundreds of thousands
-of men who are now dead that if they were killed their monument would be
-a new Europe not soured or soiled with the hates and greeds of the old.
-That the old spirit of Prussia might not infest our world any more; that
-they or, if not they, their sons might breathe a new, cleaner air they
-had willingly hung themselves up to rot on the uncut wire at Loos or
-wriggled to death, slow hour by hour, in the cold filth at Broodseinde.
-Now all was done that man could do, and all was done in vain. The old
-spirit of Prussia was blowing anew, from strange mouths. From several
-species of men who passed for English--as mongrels, curs, shoughs,
-water-rugs, and demi-wolves are all clept by the name of dogs--there was
-rising a chorus of shrill yelps for the outdoing of all the base folly
-committed by Prussia when drunk with her old conquest of France.
-Prussia, beaten out of the field, had won in the souls of her
-conquerors' rulers; they had become her pupils; they took her word for
-it that she, and not the older England, knew how to use Victory.
-
-
-                                   IV
-
-
-Sir Douglas Haig came to Cologne when we had been there a few days. On
-the grandiose bridge over the Rhine he made a short speech to a few of
-us. Most of it sounded as if the thing were a job he had got to get
-through with, and did not much care for. Perhaps the speech, like those
-of other great men who wisely hate making speeches, had been written for
-him by somebody else. But once he looked up from the paper and put in
-some words which I felt sure were his own; "I only hope that, now we
-have won, we shall not lose our heads as the Germans did after 1870. It
-has brought them to this." He looked at the gigantic mounted statue of
-the Kaiser overhead, a thing crying out in its pride for fire from
-heaven to fall and consume it, and at the homely, squat British sentry
-moving below on his post. I think the speech was reported. But none of
-our foremen at home took any notice of it at all. They knew a trick
-worth two of Haig's. They were as moonstruck as any victorious Prussian.
-
-So we had failed--had won the fight and lost the prize; the garland of
-the war was withered before it was gained. The lost years, the broken
-youth, the dead friends, the women's overshadowed lives at home, the
-agony, and bloody sweat--all had gone to darken the stains which most of
-us had thought to scour out of the world that our children would live
-in. Many men felt, and said to each other, that they had been fooled.
-They had believed that their country was backing them. They had thought,
-as they marched into Germany, "Now we shall show old Fritz how you treat
-a man when you've thrashed him." They would let him into the English
-secret, the tip that the power and glory are not to the bully. As some
-of them looked at the melancholy performance which followed, our Press
-and our politicians parading at Paris in moral _pickelhauben_ and doing
-the Prussianist goose-step by way of _pas de triomphe_, they could not
-but say in dismay to themselves: "This is our doing. We cannot wish the
-war unwon; and yet--if we had shirked, poor old England, for all we
-know, might not have come to this pass. So we come home draggle-tailed,
-sick of the mess that we were unwittingly helping to make when we tried
-to do well."
-
-
-
-
-                              CHAPTER XIV
-                         OUR MODERATE SATANISTS
-
-
-                                   I
-
-
-Satanism is one of the words that most of us simple people have heard
-others use; we guiltily feel that we ought to know what it means, but do
-not quite like to ask, lest we expose the nakedness of the land. Then
-comes Professor Gilbert Murray, one of the few learned men who are able
-to make a thing clear to people not quite like themselves, and tells us
-all about it in a cheap, small book, easy to read. It seems that the
-Satanists, or the pick of the sect, were Bohemian Protestants at the
-start, and quite plain, poor men from the country.
-
-    "Every person in authority met them with rack and sword, cursed
-    their religious leaders as emissaries of the Devil, and punished
-    them for all the things which they considered holy. The earth was
-    the Lord's, and the Pope and Emperor were the vicegerents of God
-    upon the earth. So they were told; and in time they accepted the
-    statement. That was the division of the world. On the one side God,
-    Pope and Emperor, and the army of persecutors; on the other
-    themselves, downtrodden and poor...."
-
-How easy to understand! In crude works of non-imagination the wicked,
-_repente turpissimus_, suddenly says, some fine morning, "Evil, be thou
-my good." In life the conversion is slower. It is a gradual process of
-coming to feel that what has passed officially as true, right, and
-worshipful is so implicated in work manifestly dirty, and so easily made
-to serve the ends of the greedy, lazy, and cruel, that faith in its
-authenticity has to be given up as not to be squared with the facts of
-the world. From feeling this it is not a long step to the further
-surmise that the grand traditional foe of that old moral order of the
-world, now so severely discredited, may be less black than so lying an
-artist has painted him. Does he not, anyhow, stand at the opposite pole
-to that which has just proved itself base? He, too, perhaps, is some
-helpless butt of the slings and arrows of an enthroned barbarity
-tormenting the world. The legend about his condign fall from heaven may
-only be some propagandist lie--all we are suffered to hear about some
-early crime in the long, beastly annals of governmental misdoing. So
-thought trips, fairly lightly, along till your worthy Bohemian peasant,
-literal, serious, and straight, like the plain working-man of all
-countrysides, turns, with a desperate logical integrity and courage,
-right away from a world order which has called itself divine and shown
-itself diabolic. He will embrace, in its stead, the only other world
-order supposed to be extant: the one which the former order called
-diabolic; at any rate, he has not wittingly suffered any such wrong at
-its hand as the scourges of Popes and of Emperors. So the plain man
-emerges a Satanist.
-
-
-                                   II
-
-
-To-day the convert does not insist upon bearing the new name. He does
-not, except in the case of a few doctrinaire bigots, repeat any Satanist
-creed. But in several portions of Europe the war made conversions
-abound. Imagine the state of mind that it must have induced in many a
-plain Russian peasant, literal, serious, and straight, like the
-Bohemian. First the Tsar, in the name of God and of Holy Russia, sent
-him, perhaps without so much as a rifle, to starve and be shelled in a
-trench. If he escaped, the Soviet chiefs, in the name of Justice, sent
-him to fight against those for whom the Tsar had made him fight before,
-while his wife and babies were starved by those whom he fought both for
-and against. When his fighting was done he was made, in the name of
-social right, an industrial conscript or wage-slave. If alive, to-day,
-he is probably overworked and starved, perhaps far from home, his family
-life broken up, his instinct or right of self-direction ignored or
-punished as treason by rulers whom he did not choose, his whole country
-in danger of lapsing into the abject miseries of an uncared-for
-fowl-run--all brought about in the name of human freedom.
-
-Consider, again, the case of some German or Austrian widow with many
-young children. The Kaiser's Government, breathing the most Christian
-sentiments, gave the Fatherland war in her time; her husband was killed,
-her country is ruined, her children are growing up stunted and marred by
-all the years of semi-starvation; the Paris Press is crying out, in the
-name of moral order throughout the world, that they ought to be starved
-more drastically; part of the English Press complains, in the tone of an
-outraged spiritual director, that she has shown no adequate signs of
-repentance of the Kaiser's sins, and that she and hers are living like
-fighting cocks; the German Agrarian Party, in the name of Patriotism,
-manoeuvres to keep her from getting her weekly ounce or two of butcher's
-meat from abroad more cheaply than they would like to sell it to her at
-home.
-
-What could you say to such people if they should break out at last in
-despair and defiance: "Anyhow, all these people, here and abroad, who
-take upon themselves to speak for God and duty and patriotism and
-liberty and loyalty are evil people, and do evil things. Shall not all
-these trees that they swear by be judged by their fruits? Away with them
-into the fire, God and country and social duty and justice and every old
-phrase that used to seem more than a phrase till the war came to show it
-up for what it was worth as a means to right conduct in men?" Of course
-you could say a great deal. But at every third word they could incommode
-you with some stumping case of the foulest thing done in the holiest
-name till you would be shamed into silence at the sight of all the
-crowns of thorns brought to market by keepers of what you still believe
-to be vineyards. So, throughout much of Europe, Satan's most promising
-innings for many long years has begun.
-
-
-                                  III
-
-
-In their vices as well as their virtues the English preserve a
-distinguished moderation. They do not utterly shrink from jobbery, for
-example; they do from a job that is flagrant or gross. They give
-judgeships as prizes for party support, but not to the utterly
-briefless, the dullard who knows no more law than necessity. Building
-contractors, when in the course of their rise they become town
-councillors, do not give bribes right and left: their businesses thrive
-without that. An Irishman running a Tammany in the States cannot thus
-hold himself in: the humorous side of corruption charms him too much: he
-wants to let the grand farce of roguery rip for all it is worth. But the
-English private's pet dictum, "There's reason in everything," rules the
-jobber, the profiteer, the shirker and placeman of Albion as firmly as
-it controls the imagination of her Wordsworths and the political
-idealism of her Cromwells and Pitts. Like her native cockroaches and
-bugs, whose moderate stature excites the admiration and envy of human
-dwellers among the corresponding fauna of the tropics, the caterpillars
-of her commonwealth preserve the golden mean; few, indeed, are
-flamboyants or megalomaniacs.
-
-So, when the war with its great opportunities came we were but
-temperately robbed by our own birds of prey. Makers of munitions made
-mighty fortunes out of our peril. Still, every British soldier did have
-a rifle, at any rate when he went to the front. I have watched a
-twelve-inch gun fire, in action, fifteen of its great bales or barrels
-of high explosives, fifteen running, and only three of the fifteen
-costly packages failed to explode duly on its arrival beyond. Vendors of
-soldiers' clothes and boots acquired from us the wealth which dazzles us
-all in these days of our own poverty. They knew how to charge: they made
-hay with a will while the blessed suns of 1914-18 were high in the
-heavens. Still, nearly all the tunics made in that day of temptation did
-hold together; none of the boots, so far as I knew or heard tell, was
-made of brown paper. "He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be
-innocent." Still, there is reason in everything. "Meden agan," as the
-Greeks said--temperance in all things, even in robbery, even in
-patriotism and personal honour. Our profiteers did not bid Satan get him
-behind them; but they did ask him to stand a little to one side.
-
-So, too, in the army. Some old Regular sergeant-majors would sell every
-stripe that they could, but they would not sell a map to the enemy. Some
-of our higher commanders would use their A.D.C. rooms as funk-holes to
-shelter the healthy young nephew or son of their good friend the earl,
-or their distant cousin the marquis. But there were others. Sometimes a
-part of our Staff would almost seem to forget the war, and give its
-undivided mind to major struggles--its own intestine "strafes" and the
-more bitter war against uncomplaisant politicians at home. But presently
-it would remember, and work with a will. There was, again, an undeniable
-impulse abroad, among the "best people" of the old Army, to fall back
-towards G.H.Q. and its safety as soon as the first few months made it
-clear that this was to be none of our old gymkhana wars, but almost
-certainly lethal to regimental officers who stayed it out with their
-units. But this centripetal instinct, this "safety first" movement,
-though real, was moderate. Lists of headquarter formations might show an
-appreciable excess of names of some social distinction. But not an
-outrageous excess. Some peers and old baronets and their sons were still
-getting killed, by their own choice, along with the plebs to the very
-end of the war. Again, all through the war one could not deny that those
-who had chosen the safer part, or had it imposed upon them, absorbed a
-stout and peckish lion's share of the rewards for martial valour. And
-yet they did not absolutely withhold these meeds from officers and men
-who fought. The king of beasts being duly served, these hard-bitten
-jackals got some share, though not perhaps, for their numbers, a copious
-one. Some well-placed shirkers were filled with good things, but the
-brave were not sent utterly empty away. Guardsmen and cavalrymen, the
-least richly brained soldiers we had, kept to themselves the bulk of the
-distinguished jobs for which brain-work was needed; and yet the poor
-foot-soldier was not expressly taboo; quite a good billet would fall to
-him sometimes--Plumer commanded an army.
-
-As with the moral virtues, so with the mental. Brilliancy, genius,
-scientific imagination in any higher command would have caused almost a
-shock; a general with the demonic insight to see that he had got the
-enemy stiff at Arras in 1917 and at Cambrai the same autumn, might have
-seemed an _outré_ highbrow, almost unsafe. And yet the utter slacker was
-not countenanced, and the dunce had been known to be so dull that he was
-sent home as an empty by those unexacting chiefs. There was reason in
-everything, even in reason.
-
-
-                                   IV
-
-
-All this relative mildness in the irritants administered to the common
-Englishman as soldier had its counterpart in the men's ingrained
-moderateness of reaction. At Bray-sur-Somme during the battle of 1916 I
-saw a French soldier go so mad with rage at what he considered to be the
-deficiencies of his leaders that he brought out each article of his kit
-and equipment in succession to the door of his billet and threw it into
-the deep central mud of the road with a separate curse, at each cast, on
-war, patriotism, civilization, and the Commander-in-Chief. This
-Athanasian service of commination endured for a full quarter of an hour.
-But from an English private who witnessed the rite it only drew the
-phlegmatic diagnosis: "He'll 'ave 'ad a drop o' sugar-water an' got
-excited." Firewater itself could not excite the English soldier to so
-rounded an eloquence or to so sweeping a series of judgements. He never
-thought of throwing his messing-tin and his paybook into the mud; still
-less of forming a Council of Soldiers and Workmen. Either step would
-have been of the abhorred nature of a "scene."
-
-Unaggressive, unoriginal, anti-extreme, contemptuous of all "hot air"
-and windy ideas, he too was braked by the same internal negations that
-helped to keep his irredeemably middling commanders equidistant from
-genius and from arrant failure. Confronted now with the frustration of
-so many too-high hopes, the discrediting of so many persons or
-institutions hitherto taken on trust, he did not say, as the humbler
-sort of Bolshevist seems to have said in his heart: "What order, or
-disorder, could ever be worse than this which has failed? Why not
-anything, any wild-seeming nihilism or fantasy of savage rudeness,
-rather than sit quiet under this old contemptible rule?" Instead of
-contracting a violent new sort of heat he simply went cold, and has
-remained so. Where a Slav or a Latin might have become a hundred per
-cent. Satanist he became about a thirty per center. The disbelief, the
-suspicion, the vacuous space in the disendowed heart, the spiritual
-rubbish-heap of draggled banners and burst drums--all that blank,
-unlighting and unwarming part of Satanism was his, without any other: a
-Lucifer cold as a moon prompted him listlessly, not to passionate
-efforts of crime, but to self-regarding and indolent apathy.
-
-From the day he went into the army till now he has been learning to take
-many things less seriously than he did. First what Burke calls the pomps
-and plausibilities of the world. He has tumbled many kings into the dust
-and proved the strongest emperor assailable. I remember a little
-private, who seemed to know Dickens by heart, applying to William the
-Second in 1915 the words used by the Game Chicken about Mr. Dombey--"as
-stiff a cove as ever he see, but within the resources of science to
-double him up with one blow in the waistcoat." This he proved, too, he
-and his like, casting down the proud from their seats with little help
-from all that was highly placed and reverently regarded in his own
-country. Our ruling class had, on the whole, failed, and had to be
-pulled through by him and the French and Americans; that feeling, in one
-form or another, is clear in the common man's mind. He may not know in
-detail the record of French as commander-in-chief, nor the exact state
-of the Admiralty which let the _Goeben_ and the _Breslau_ go free, nor
-the inner side of the diplomacy which added Turkey, and even Bulgaria,
-to our enemies, nor yet the well-born underworld of war-time luxury,
-disloyalty, and intrigue which notorious memoirs have since revealed.
-But some horse instinct or some pricking in his thumbs told him
-correctly that in every public service manned mainly by our upper
-classes the war-time achievement was relatively low. There is very
-little natural inclination to class jealousy among plain Englishmen.
-Equalitarian theory does not interest them much. Their general relish
-for a gamble makes them rather like a lucky-bag or bran-tub society in
-which anyone may pick up, with luck, a huge unearned prize. By
-cheerfully helping to keep up the big gaming-hell, by giving Barnatos
-and Joels pretty full value for their win, the pre-war governing class
-gained a kind of strength which a prouder and more fastidious
-aristocracy would have forgone. It stands in little physical danger now.
-But it lives, since the war, in a kind of contempt. The one good word
-that the average private had for bestowal among his unseen "betters"
-during the latter years of the war was for the King. "_He_ did give up
-his beer" was said a thousand times by men whom that symbolic act of
-willing comradeship with the dry throat on the march and the war-pinched
-household at home had touched and astonished.
-
-Other institutions, too, had been weighed in the balance. The War Office
-was only the commonest of many by-words. The Houses of Parliament, in
-which too many men of military age had demanded the forced enlistment of
-others, wore an air of insincerity, apart from the loss of prestige
-inevitable in a war; for armies always take the colour out of
-deliberative assemblies. To moderate this effect a large number of
-members who did not go to the war found means to wear khaki in London
-instead of black, but this well-conceived precaution only succeeded in
-further curling the lip of derision among actual soldiers. The churches,
-as we have seen, got their chance, made little or nothing of it, and
-came out of the war quite good secular friends with the men, but almost
-null and void in their eyes as ghostly counsellors, and stripped of the
-vague consequence with which many men had hitherto credited them on
-account of any divine mission they might be found to have upon closer
-acquaintance. Respect for the truthfulness of the Press was clean gone.
-The contrast between the daily events that men saw and the daily
-accounts that were printed was final. What the Press said thenceforth
-was not evidence. But still it had sent out plum puddings at Christmas.
-
-Neither was anything evidence now that was said by a politician. A great
-many plain men had really drawn a distinction, all their lives, between
-the solemn public assurances of statesmen and the solemn public
-assurances of men who draw teeth outside dock-gates and take off their
-caps and call upon God to blast the health of their own darling children
-if a certain pill they have for sale does not cure colds, measles,
-ring-worm, and the gripes within twenty-four hours of taking. A Swift
-might say there never was any difference, but the plain man had always
-firmly believed that there was. Now, after the war, he is shaken. Every
-disease which victory was to cure he sees raging worse than before: more
-poverty, less liberty, more likelihood of other wars, more spite between
-master and man, less national comradeship. And then the crucial test
-case, the solemn vow of the statesmen, all with their hands on their
-sleek bosoms, that if only the common man would save them just that once
-they would turn to and think of nothing else, do nothing else, but build
-him a house, assure him of work, settle him on land, make all England a
-paradise for him--a "land fit for heroes to live in." And then the
-sequel: the cold fit; the feint at house-building and its abandonment;
-all the bankruptcy of promise; the ultimate bilking, done by way of
-reluctant surrender to "anti-waste" stunts got up by the same
-cheap-jacks of the Press who in the first year of the war would have had
-the statesmen promise yet more wildly than they did. Colds, measles,
-ring-worm, and gripes all flourishing, much more than twenty-four hours
-after, and new ailments added unto them.
-
-No relief, either, by running from one medicine-man to the next. Few of
-our disenchanted men doubt that the lightning cure of the Communist is
-only just another version of the lightning cure of the Tory, the
-authoritarian, the peremptory regimentalist. "Give _me_ a free hand and
-all will be well with you." Both say exactly the same thing in the end.
-One of them may call it the rule of the fittest, the other the rule of
-the proletariat; each means exactly the same thing--the rule of himself,
-the enforcement on everyone else of his own darling theory of what is
-best for them, whether they know it or not. Small choice in rotten
-apples; one bellyful of east wind is a diet as poor as another. Not in
-the yells and counter-yells of this and that vendor of patent hot-air is
-the heart of the average ex-soldier engaged. Rather "Away with all
-gas-projectors alike" is his present feeling towards eloquent men, Left
-or Right. For the moment he knows them too well, and is tired of hearing
-of plans which might work if he were either a babe in arms or a Michael
-of super-angelic wisdom and power.
-
-
-                                   V
-
-
-You may be disillusioned about the value of things, or about their
-security, either coming to feel that your house is a poor place to live
-in or that, pleasant or not, it is likely enough to come down on your
-head. Of these two forms of discomfort our friend experiences both. Much
-that he took to be fairly noble now looks pretty mean; and much that
-seemed reassuringly stable is seen to be shaky. Civilization itself, the
-at any rate habitable dwelling which was to be shored up by the war,
-wears a strange new air of precariousness.
-
-Even before the war a series of melancholy public mis-adventures had
-gone some way to awake the disquieting notion that civilization, the
-whole ordered, fruitful joint action of a nation, a continent, or the
-whole world, was only a bluff. When the world is at peace and fares
-well, the party of order and decency, justice and mercy and
-self-control, is really bluffing a much larger party of egoism and greed
-that would bully and grab if it dared. The deep anti-social offence of
-the "suffragettes," with their hatchets and hunger-strikes, was that
-they gave away, in some measure, the bluff by which non-criminal people
-had hitherto kept some control over reluctant assentors to the rule of
-mutual protection and forbearance. They helped the baser sort to see
-that the bluff of civilization is at the mercy of anyone ready to run a
-little bodily risk in calling it. Sir Edward Carson took up the work. He
-"called" the bluff of the Pax Britannica, the presumption that armed
-treason to the law and order of the British Empire must lead to the
-discomfiture of the traitor, whoever he was; he presented Sinn Fein and
-every other would-be insurgent with proof that treason may securely do
-much more than peep at what it would; British subjects, he showed, might
-quite well conspire for armed revolt against the King's peace and not be
-any losers, in their own persons, by doing it.
-
-The greatest of all bluffs, the general peace of the world and the joint
-civilization of Europe, remained uncalled for a year or two more. It was
-a high moral bluff. People were everywhere saying that world-war was too
-appalling, too frantically wicked a thing for any government to invite
-or procure. Peace, they argued, held a hand irresistibly strong. Had she
-not, among her cards, every acknowledged precept of Christianity and of
-morality, even of wisdom for a man's self or a nation's? Potsdam called
-the world's bluff, and the world's hand was found to be empty. Potsdam
-lost the game in the end, but it had not called wholly in vain. To a
-Europe exhausted, divided, and degraded by five years of return to the
-morals of the Stone Age it had suggested how many things are as they
-are, how many things are owned as they are, how many lives are safely
-continued, merely because our birds of prey have not yet had the wit to
-see what would come of a sudden snatch made with a will and with
-assurance. The total number of policemen on a race-course is always a
-minute percentage of the total number of its thieves and roughs. The bad
-men are not held down by force; they are only bluffed by the pretence of
-it. They have got the tip now, and the plain man is dimly aware how
-surprisingly little there is to keep us all from slipping back into the
-state we were in when a man would kill another to steal a piece of food
-that he had got, and when a young woman was not safe on a road out of
-sight of her friends.
-
-The plain man, so far as I know him, is neither aghast nor gleeful at
-this revelation. For the most part he looks somewhat listlessly on, as
-at a probable dog-fight in which there is no dog of his. A sense of
-moral horror does not come easily when you have supped full of horrors
-on most of the days of three or four years; sacrilege has to go far,
-indeed, to shock men who have seen their old gods looking extremely
-human and blowing out, one by one, the candles before their own shrines.
-Some new god, or devil, of course, may enter at any time into this
-disfurnished soul. Genius in some leader might either possess
-it with an anarchic passion to smash and delete all the
-old institutions that disappointed in the day of trial or fire it with a
-new craving to lift itself clear of the wrack and possess itself on the
-heights. For either a Lenin or a St. Francis there is a wide field to
-till, cleared, but of pretty stiff clay. Persistently sane in his
-disenchantment as he had been in his rapture, the common man, whose
-affection and trust the old order wore out in the war, is still slow to
-enlist out-and-out in any Satanist unit. There's reason, he still feels,
-in everything. So he remains, for the time, like one of the angels whom
-the Renaissance poet represented as reincarnate in man; the ones who in
-the insurrection of Lucifer were not for Jehovah nor yet for his enemy.
-
-
-
-
-                               CHAPTER XV
-                               ANY CURE?
-
-
-                                   I
-
-
-How shall it all be set right? For it must be, of course. A people that
-did not wait to be pushed off its seat by the Kaiser is not likely now
-to turn its face to the wall and die inertly of shortage of faith and
-general moral debility. Some day soon we shall have to cease squatting
-among the potsherds and crabbing each other, and give all the strength
-we have left to the job of regaining the old control of ourselves and
-our fate which, in the days of our health, could only be kept by putting
-forth constantly the whole force of the will. "Not to be done," you may
-say. And, of course, it will be a miracle. But only the everyday miracle
-done in somebody's body, or else in his soul. When the skin shines white
-and tight over the joints, and the face is only a skull with some
-varieties of expression, and the very flame flickers and jumps in the
-lamp, the body will bend itself up to expel a disease that it could not,
-in all its first splendour of health, keep from the door. In all the
-breeds of cowardly livers--drunkards, thieves, liars, sorners,
-drug-takers, all the kinds that have run from the enemy, throwing away
-as they ran every weapon that better men use to repel him--you will find
-some that turn in the end and rend with their bare hands the fiend that
-they could not face with their bow and their spear.
-
-But these recoveries only come upon terms: no going back to heaven
-except through a certain purgatorial passage. There, while it lasts, the
-invalid must not expect to enjoy either the heady visions of the fever
-that is now taking its leave or the more temperate beatitude of the
-health that may presently come. He lies reduced to animal, almost
-vegetable, matter, quite joyless and unthrilled, and has to abide in
-numb passivity, like an unborn child's, whatever may come of the million
-minute molecular changes going on unseen in the enigmatic darkness of
-his tissues, where tiny cell is adding itself to tiny cell to build he
-knows not what. And then some day the real thing, the second birth as
-wonderful as the first, comes of itself and the stars are singing
-together all right and the sons of God shouting for joy. The same way
-with the spirit, except that the body faints, and so is eased, at some
-point in any rising scale of torment: the spirit has to go on through
-the mill without such anæsthetics as fainting. So the man who has gone
-far off the rails in matters of conduct, and tries to get back to them,
-has such hells of patience to live through, and out of, as no liquid
-fire known to the war chemists could make for the flesh. To possess your
-soul in patience, with all the skin and some of the flesh burnt off your
-face and hands, is a job for a boy compared with the pains of a man who
-has lived pretty long in the exhilarating world that drugs or strong
-waters seem to create and is trying to live now in the first bald
-desolation created by knocking them off, the time in which
-
-          The dulled heart feels
-    That somewhere, sealed with hopeless seals,
-    The unmeaning heaven about him reels,
-          And he lies hurled
-    Beyond the roar of all the wheels
-          Of all the world.
-
-And yet no other way out. Disease and imbecility and an early and
-ignoble death, or else that stoic facing, through interminable days, of
-an easily escapable dulness that may be anything from an ache up to an
-agony.
-
-
-                                   II
-
-
-That is about where we stand as a nation. Of course, a few fortunates
-mailed in a happy, indefeasible genius of wonder and delight at
-everything round them are all right. And so are a few clods of whole-hog
-insensibility. Most of us, on the whole, find that effort is less fun
-than it was, and many things somewhat dull that used to sparkle with
-interest; the salt has lost, not all, but some of its savour; the
-grasshopper is a bit of a burden; old hobbies of politics, social
-causes, liberal comradeships, the loves and wars of letters and art,
-which used to excite, look at times as if they might only have been, at
-the best, rather a much ado about nothing; buzzing about our heads there
-come importunate suspicions that much of what we used to do so keenly
-was hardly worth doing, and that the dim, far goals we used to struggle
-towards were only possibly worth trying for and are, anyhow, out of
-reach now. That is the somewhat sick spirit's condition. The limp apathy
-that we see at elections, the curious indifference in presence of public
-wrongs and horrors, the epidemic of sneaking pilferage, the slackening
-of sexual self-control--all these are symptomatic like the furred
-tongue, subnormal heat, and muddy eye.
-
-Like the hard drinker next morning, we suffer a touch of Hamlet's
-complaint, the malady of the dyspeptic soul, of indolent kings and of
-pampered youth before it has found any man's work to try itself on--
-
-    How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
-    To me are all the uses of the world!
-
-Not the despair of the battered, vanquished, or oppressed, but the
-moping of the relaxed, the surfeited, or the morbid. Glad as we all were
-to be done with the war, its ends left even the strongest of us a little
-let down, as the ends of other long and intense excitements, good or
-bad, do. As Ibsen's young woman out in search of thrills would have
-said, there were harps in the air during the war. Many of them were
-disagreeable in their timbre, but still they were harps. Since the war a
-good many of the weaker vessels have somehow failed to find harps in the
-air, though there are really plenty of them in full vibration. So they
-have run about looking for little pick-me-ups and nips of something
-mildly exciting to keep up to par their sagging sense of the
-adventuresomeness of life. Derby sweeps never had such a vogue; every
-kind of gamble has boomed; dealers in public entertainment have found
-that the rawest sensationalism pays better than ever--anything that will
-give a fillip, any poor new-whisky fillip, to jaded nerves.
-
-
-                                  III
-
-
-Of course, life itself is all right. It never grows dull. All dullness
-is in the mind; it comes out thence and diffuses itself over everything
-round the dull person, and then he terms everything dull, and thinks
-himself the victim of the impact of dull things. In stupid rich people,
-in boys and girls deadeningly taught at dead-alive schools, in all
-disappointed weaklings and in declining nations, this loss of power to
-shed anything but dullness upon what one sees and hears is common
-enough. Second-rate academic people, Victorian official art, the French
-Second Empire drama, late Latin literature exhibit its ravages well. In
-healthy children, in men and women of high mental vitality, in places
-where any of the radio-activity of gifted teaching breaks out for a
-while, and in swiftly and worthily rising nations the mind is easily
-delighted and absorbed by almost any atom of ordinary experience and its
-relation to the rest. The wonder and beauty and humour of life go on
-just the same as ever whether Spain or Holland or Italy feel them or
-miss them; youth would somewhere hear the chimes at midnight with the
-stir they made in Shakespeare's wits although all England were peopled
-for ages with dullards whose pastors and masters had trained them to
-find the divine Falstaffiad as dull as a thaw.
-
-It need not come to that. Sick as we are, we have still in reserve the
-last resource of the sick, that saving miracle of recuperative force
-with which I have bored you. To let the sick part of our soul just be
-still and recover; to make our alcoholized tissues just do their work
-long enough on plain water--that, if we can but do it, is all the
-sweeping and garnishing needed to make us possible dwelling-places again
-for the vitalizing spirit of sane delight in whatever adventure befalls
-us. How, then, to do it? Not, I fancy, by any kind of pow-wow or palaver
-of congress, conference, general committee, sub-committee, or other
-expedient for talking in company instead of working alone. This is an
-individual's job, and a somewhat lonely one, though a nation has to be
-saved by it. To get down to work, whoever else idles; to tell no lies,
-whoever else may thrive on their uses; to keep fit, and the beast in you
-down; to help any who need it; to take less from your world than you
-give it; to go without the old drams to the nerves--the hero stunt, the
-sob story, all the darling liqueurs of war emotionalism, war vanity, war
-spite, war rant and cant of every kind; and to do it all, not in a
-sentimental mood of self-pity like some actor mounting in an empty
-theatre and thinking what treasures the absent audience has lost, but
-like a man on a sheep-farm in the mountains, as much alone and at peace
-with his work of maintaining the world as God was when he made it.
-
-You remember the little French towns which the pestle and mortar of war
-had so ground into dust, red and white, that each separate brick went
-back at last, dust to dust, to mix with the earth from which it had
-come. The very clay of them has to be put into moulds and fired again.
-To some such remaking of bricks, some shaping and hardening anew of the
-most elementary, plainest units of rightness in action, we have to get
-back. Humdrum decencies, patiently practised through millions of
-undistinguished lives, were the myriad bricks out of which all the
-advanced architecture of conduct was built--the solemn temples of
-creeds, gorgeous palaces of romantic heroism, cloud-capped towers of
-patriotic exaltation. And now, just when there seems to be such a babble
-as never before about these grandiose structures, bricks have run short.
-
-Something simple, minute, and obscure, wholly good and not pulled up at
-all, something almost atomic--a grain of wheat, a thread of wool, a
-crystal of clean salt, figures best the kind of human excellence of
-which our world has now most need. We would seem to have plunged on too
-fast and too far, like boys who have taken to spouting six-syllabled
-words until they forget what they had learnt of the alphabet. The moral
-beauty of perfect contrition is preached to a beaten enemy by our Press
-while the vitals of England are rotting with unprecedented growths of
-venereal disease: an England of boundlessly advertised heroes and saints
-has ousted the England in which you would never, wherever you travelled,
-be given wrong change on a bus.
-
-The wise man saved his little city, "yet no man remembered that same
-poor man," and no one had better take to this way of saving England if
-what he wants is public distinction. It will be a career as
-undistinguished as that of one of the extra corpuscles formed in the
-blood to enable a lowland man to live on Himalayan heights. Our best
-friends for a long time to come will not be any of the standing
-cynosures of reporters' eyes; they will find a part of their
-satisfaction in being nobodies; assured of the truth of the saying that
-there is no limit to what a man can do so long as he does not care a
-straw who gets the credit for it. Working apart from the whole overblown
-world of war valuations, the scramble for honours earned and unearned,
-the plotting and jostling for front places on the stage and larger
-letters on the bill, the whole life that is commonly held up to
-admiration as great and enviable, they will live in a kind of retreat
-almost cloistral; plenty of work for the faculties, plenty of rest for
-the nerves, control for desire and atrophy for conceit. Hard?--yes, but
-England is worth it.
-
-
-                                   IV
-
-
-Among the mind's powers is one that comes of itself to many children and
-artists. It need not be lost, to the end of his days, by anyone who has
-ever had it. This is the power of taking delight in a thing, or rather
-in anything, everything, not as a means to some other end, but just
-because it is what it is, as the lover dotes on whatever may be the
-traits of the beloved object. A child in the full health of his mind
-will put his hand flat on the summer turf, feel it, and give a little
-shiver of private glee at the elastic firmness of the globe. He is not
-thinking how well it will do for some game or to feed sheep upon. That
-would be the way of the wooer whose mind runs on his mistress's money.
-The child's is sheer affection, the true ecstatic sense of the thing's
-inherent characteristics. No matter what the things may be, no matter
-what they are good or no good for, there they are, each with a thrilling
-unique look and feel of its own, like a face; the iron astringently cool
-under its paint, the painted wood familiarly warmer, the clod crumbling
-enchantingly down in the hands, with its little dry smell of the sun and
-of hot nettles; each common thing a personality marked by delicious
-differences.
-
-This joy of an Adam new to the garden and just looking round is brought
-by the normal child to the things that he does as well as those that he
-sees. To be suffered to do some plain work with the real spade used by
-mankind can give him a mystical exaltation: to come home with his legs,
-as the French say, re-entering his body from the fatigue of helping the
-gardener to weed beds sends him to sleep in the glow of a beatitude that
-is an end in itself. Then the paradoxes of conduct begin to twinkle into
-sight; sugar is good, but there is a time to refrain from taking it
-though you can; a lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet,
-strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the
-scrape and left out the lie. Divine unreason, as little scrutable and
-yet as surely a friend as the star that hangs a lamp out from the Pole
-to show you the way across gorse-covered commons in Surrey. So he will
-toe the line of a duty, not with a mere release from dismay, but
-exultantly, with the fire and lifting of heart of the strong man and the
-bridegroom, feeling always the same secret and almost sensuous
-transport, while he suppresses a base impulse, that he felt when he
-pressed the warm turf with his hand or the crumbling clay trickled warm
-between his fingers.
-
-The right education, if we could find it, would work up this creative
-faculty of delight into all its branching possibilities of knowledge,
-wisdom, and nobility. Of all three it is the beginning, condition, or
-raw material. At present it almost seems to be the aim of the
-commonplace teacher to take it firmly away from any pupil so blessed as
-to possess it. How we all know the kind of public school master whose
-manner expresses breezy comradeship with the boys in facing jointly the
-boredom of admittedly beastly but still unavoidable lessons! And the
-assumption that life out of school is too dull to be faced without the
-aid of infinitely elaborated games! And the girl schools where it seems
-to be feared that evil must come in any space of free time in which
-neither a game nor a dance nor a concert nor a lecture with a lantern
-intervenes to rescue the girls from the presumed tedium of mere youth
-and health! Everywhere the assumption that simple things have failed;
-that anything like hardy mental living and looking about for oneself, to
-find interests, is destined to end ill; that the only hope is to keep up
-the full dose of drugs, to be always pulling and pushing, prompting and
-coaxing and tickling the youthful mind into condescending to be
-interested. You know the effects: the adolescent whose mind seems to
-drop when taken out of the school shafts, or at least to look round,
-utterly at a loss, with a plaintive appeal for a suggestion of something
-to do, some excitement to come, something to make it worth while to be
-alive on this dull earth. We saw the effects in our hapless brain work
-in the war.
-
-But if we were to wait to save England till thousands of men and women
-brought up in this way see what they have lost and insist on a better
-fate for their children we might as well write England off as one with
-Tyre and Sidon already. Her case is too pressing. She cannot wait for
-big, slowly telling improvements in big institutions, although
-improvements must come. She has to be saved by a change in the
-individual temper. We each have to fall back, with a will, on the only
-way of life in which the sane simplicity of joy in plain things and in
-common rightness of action can be generated. Health of mind or body
-comes of doing wholesome things--perhaps for a long time without joy in
-doing them, as the sick man lies chafing, eating the slops that are all
-he is fit for, or as the dipsomaniac drinks in weariness and depression
-the insipid water that is to save him. Then, on some great day,
-self-control may cease to be merely the sum of many dreary acts of
-abstention; it may take life again as an inspiriting force, both a
-warmth and a light, such as makes nations great.
-
-
-
-
-                              CHAPTER XVI
-                              FAIR WARNING
-
-
-                                   I
-
-
-To give the cure a chance we must have a long quiet time. And we must
-secure it now.
-
-For the moment, no doubt, war has gone out of fashion; it pines in the
-shade, like the old horsehair covers for sofas, or antimacassars of
-lace. Hardly a day can pass, even now, but someone finds out, with a
-start and a look of displeasure, that war has been given its chance and
-has not done quite so well as it ought to have done. One man will write
-to the Press, in dismay, that the meals in the Simplon express are not
-what they were in 1910. Another, outward bound by Calais to Cannes, has
-found that the hot-water plant in his sleeping-compartment struck
-work--and that in a specially cold sector down by the Alps. Thus does
-war in the end, knock at the doors of us all: like the roll of the earth
-upon its axis, it brings us, if not death or destitution or some ashy
-taste in the mouth, at any rate a sense of a fallen temperature in our
-bunks. However non-porous our minds, there does slowly filter into us
-the thought that when a million of a country's men of working age have
-just been killed there may be a plaguey dearth of the man-power needed
-to keep in pleasant order the lavatories of its _trains de luxe_. Sad to
-think how many tender minds, formed in those Elysian years--Elysian for
-anyone who was not poor--before the war, will have to suffer, probably
-for many years, these little shocks of realization.
-
-Surely there never was any time in the life of the world when it was so
-good, in the way of obvious material comfort, to be alive and fairly
-well-to-do as it was before the war. Think of the speed and comfort and
-relative cheapness of the Orient Express; of the way you could wander,
-unruined, through long æsthetic holidays in Italy and semi-æsthetic,
-semi-athletic holidays in the Alps; of the week-end accessibility of
-London from Northern England; of the accessibility of public schools for
-the sons of the average parson or doctor; of the penny post, crown of
-our civilization--torn from us while the abhorred half-penny post for
-circulars was yet left; of the Income Tax just large enough to give us a
-pleasant sense of grievance patriotically borne, but not to prostrate
-us, winter and summer, with two "elbow jolts" or "Mary Ann punches" like
-those of the perfected modern prize-fighter.
-
-Many sanguine well-to-do people dreamt, in the August of 1914, that the
-war, besides attaining its primary purpose of beating the enemy, would
-disarrange none of these blessings; that it would even have as a
-by-product a kind of "old-time Merrie England," with the working classes
-cured of the thirst for wages and deeply convinced that everyone who was
-not one of themselves was a natural ruler over them. For any little
-expense to which the war might put us the Germans would pay, and our
-troops would return home to dismiss all trade-union officials and to
-regard the upper and middle classes thenceforth as a race of heaven-sent
-colonels--men to be followed, feared, and loved. Ah, happy vision,
-beautiful dream!--like Thackeray's reverie about having a very old and
-rich aunt. The dreamer awakes among the snows of the Mont Cenis with a
-horrid smell in the corridor and the hot-water pipes out of order. And
-so war has gone out of fashion, even among cheery well-to-do-people.
-
-
-                                   II
-
-
-But may it not come into fashion again? Do not all the great fashions
-move in cycles, like stars? When our wars with Napoleon were just over,
-and all the bills still to be paid, and the number of visibly one-legged
-men at its provisional maximum, must not many simple minds have thought
-that surely man would never idealize any business so beastly and costly
-again? And then see what happened. We were all tranquilly feeding, good
-as gold, in the deep and pleasant meadows of the long Victorian peace
-when from some of the frailest animals in the pasture there rose a
-plaintive bleat for war. It was the very lambs that began it. "Shall we
-never have carnage?" Stevenson, the consumptive, sighed to a friend.
-Henley, the cripple, wrote a longing "Song of the Sword." Out of the
-weak came forth violence. Bookish men began to hug the belief that they
-had lost their way in life; they felt that they were Neys or Nelsons
-_manqués_, or cavalry leaders lost to the world. "If I had been born a
-corsair or a pirate," thought Mr. Tappertit, musing among the ninepins,
-"I should have been all right." Fragile dons became connoisseurs. _faute
-de mieux_, of prize-fighting; they talked, nineteen to the dozen, about
-the still, strong man and "straight-flung words and few," adored "naked
-force," averred they were not cotton-spinners all, and deplored the
-cankers of a quiet world and a long peace. Some of them entered quite
-hotly, if not always expertly, into the joys and sorrows of what they
-called "Tommies," and chafed at the many rumoured refusals Of British
-innkeepers to serve them, little knowing that only by these great acts
-of renunciation on the part of licensees has many a gallant private been
-saved from falling into that morgue an "officer house," and having his
-beer congealed in the glass by the refrigerative company of colonels.
-
-The father and mother of this virilistic movement among the well-read
-were Mr. Andrew Lang, the most donnish of wits, and one of the wittiest.
-Lang would review a new book in a great many places at once. So, when he
-blessed, his blessing would carry as far as the more wholly literal
-myrrh and frankincense wafted abroad by the hundred hands of Messrs.
-Boot. The fame of Mr. Rider Haggard was one of Lang's major products.
-Mr. Haggard was really a man of some mettle. By persons fitted to judge
-he was believed to have at his fingers' ends all the best of what is
-known and thought by mankind about turnips and other crops with which
-they may honourably and usefully rotate. But it was for turning his back
-upon these humdrum sustainers of life and writing, in a rich Corinthian
-style, accounts of fancy "slaughters grim and great," that his flame
-lived and spread aloft, as Milton says, in the pure eyes and perfect
-witness of Lang. Another nursling of Lang's was the wittier Kipling,
-then a studious youth exuding Border ballads and Bret Harte from every
-pore, but certified to carry about him, on paper, the proper smell of
-blood and tobacco.
-
-Deep answered unto deep. In Germany, too, the pibrochs of the professors
-were rending the skies, and poets of C4 medical grade were tearing the
-mask from the hideous face of peace. The din throughout the bookish
-parts of Central and Western Europe suggested to an irreverent mind a
-stage with a quaint figure of some short-sighted pedagogue of tradition
-coming upon it, round-shouldered, curly-toed, print-fed, physically
-inept, to play the part of the war-horse in Job, swallowing the ground
-with fierceness and rage, and "saying among the trumpets 'Ha, ha!'" You
-may see it all as a joke. Or as something rather more than a joke, in
-its effects. Mr. Yeats suggested that an all-seeing eye might perceive
-the Trojan War to have come because of a tune that a boy had once piped
-in Thessaly. What if all our millions of men had to be killed because
-some academic Struwwelpeter, fifty years since, took on himself to pipe
-up "Take the nasty peace away!" and kick the shins of Concord, his most
-kindly nurse?
-
-
-                                  III
-
-
-If he did, it was natural. All Struwwelpeters are natural. All
-heirs-apparent are said to take the opposite side to their fathers still
-on the throne. And those learned men were heirs to the age of the
-Crystal Palace, the age of the first "Locksley Hall," with its
-"parliament of man" and "federation of the world," the age that laid a
-railway line along the city moat of Amiens and opened capacious Hôtels
-de la Paix throughout Latin Europe, the age when passports withered and
-Baedeker was more and more, the age that in one of its supreme moments
-of ecstasy founded the London International College, an English public
-school (now naturally dead) in which the boys were to pass some of their
-terms among the heathen in Germany or France.
-
-The cause of peace, like all triumphant causes, good as they may be, had
-made many second-rate friends. It had become safe, and even sound, for
-the worldly to follow. The dullards, the people who live by phrases
-alone, the scribes who write by rote and not with authority--most of
-these had drifted into its service. It had become a provocation, a
-challenge, vexing those "discoursing wits" who "count it," Bacon says,
-"a bondage to fix a belief." A rebound had to come. And those
-arch-rebounders were men of the teaching and writing trades, wherein the
-newest fashions in thought are most eagerly canvassed, and any
-inveterate acquiescence in mere common sense afflicts many bosoms with
-the fear of lagging yards and yards behind the foremost files of time;
-perhaps--that keenest agony--of having nothing piquant or startling to
-say, no little bombs handy for conversational purposes. "I sat down,"
-the deserving young author says in _The Vicar of Wakefield_, "and,
-finding that the best things remained to be said on the wrong side, I
-resolved to write a book that should be wholly new. I therefore dressed
-up three paradoxes with some ingenuity. They were false, indeed, but
-they were new. The jewels of truth have been so often imported by others
-that nothing was left for me to import but some splendid things that, at
-a distance, looked every bit as well." "Peace on earth, good-will
-towards men," "Blessed are the peacemakers"--these and the like might be
-jewels; but they were demoded; they were old tags; they were clichés of
-bourgeois morality; they were _vieux jeu_, like the garnets with which,
-in _She Stoops to Conquer_, the young woman of fashion declined to be
-pacified when her heart cried out for the diamonds.
-
-
-                                   IV
-
-
-Then the Church itself must needs take a hand--or that part of the
-Church which ever cocks an eye at the latest fashions in public opinion,
-the "blessed fellows," like Poins, that "think as every man thinks" and
-help to swell every passing shout into a roar. I find among old papers a
-letter written in Queen Victoria's reign by an unfashionable curmudgeon
-whose thought would not keep to the roadway like theirs. "I see," this
-rude ironist writes, "that 'the Church's duty in regard to war' is to be
-discussed at the Church Congress. That is right. For a year the heads of
-our Church have been telling us what war is and does--that it is a
-school of character, that it sobers men, cleans them, strengthens them,
-knits their hearts, makes them brave, patient, humble, tender, prone to
-self-sacrifice. Watered by 'war's red rain,' one bishop tells us, virtue
-grows; a cannonade, he points out, is an 'oratorio'--almost a form of
-worship. True; and to the Church men look for help to save their souls
-from starving for lack of this good school, this kindly rain, this
-sacred music. Congresses are apt to lose themselves in wastes of words.
-This one must not--surely cannot--so straight is the way to the goal. It
-has simply to draft and submit a new Collect for 'war in our time,' and
-to call for the reverent but firm emendation, in the spirit of the best
-modern thought, of those passages in Bible and Prayer-book by which even
-the truest of Christians and the best of men have at times been blinded
-to the duty of seeking war and ensuing it.
-
-"Still, man's moral nature cannot, I admit, live by war alone. Nor do I
-say, with some, that peace is wholly bad. Even amid the horrors of peace
-you will find little shoots of character fed by the gentle and timely
-rains of plague and famine, tempest and fire; simple lessons of patience
-and courage conned in the schools of typhus, gout, and stone; not
-oratorios, perhaps, but homely anthems and rude hymns played on knife
-and gun, in the long winter nights. Far from me to 'sin our mercies' or
-to call mere twilight dark. Yet dark it may become. For remember that
-even these poor makeshift schools of character, these second-bests,
-these halting substitutes for war--remember that the efficiency of every
-one of them, be it hunger, accident, ignorance, sickness or pain, is
-menaced by the intolerable strain of its struggle with secular doctors,
-plumbers, inventors, school-masters, and policemen. Every year thousands
-who would in nobler days have been braced and steeled by manly tussles
-with smallpox or diphtheria are robbed of that blessing by the great
-changes made in our drains. Every year thousands of women and children
-must go their way bereft of the rich spiritual experience of the widow
-and the orphan. I try not to despond, but when I think of all that
-Latimer owed to the fire, Regulus to a spiked barrel, Socrates to
-prison, and Job to destitution and disease--when I think of these things
-and then think of how many of my poor fellow creatures in our modern
-world are robbed daily of the priceless discipline of danger, want, and
-torture, then I ask myself--I cannot help asking myself--whether we are
-not walking into a very slough of moral and spiritual squalor.
-
-"Once more, I am no alarmist. As long as we have wars to stay our souls
-upon, the moral evil will not be grave; and, to do the Ministry justice,
-I see no risk of their drifting into any long or serious peace. But weak
-or vicious men may come after them, and it is now, in the time of our
-strength, of quickened insight and deepened devotion, that we must take
-thought for the leaner years when there may be no killing of multitudes
-of Englishmen, no breaking up of English homes, no chastening blows to
-English trade, no making, by thousands, of English widows, orphans, and
-cripples--when the school may be shut and the rain a drought and the
-oratorio dumb."
-
-But what did a few unfashionable curmudgeons count for, against so many
-gifted divines?
-
-
-                                   V
-
-
-And yet all mortal things are subject to decay, even reactions, even
-decay itself, and there comes a time when the dead Ophelia may justly be
-said to be not decomposing, but recomposing successfully as violets and
-so forth. Heirs-apparent grow up into kings and have little heirs of
-their own who, hearkening to nature's benevolent law, become stout
-counter-reactionists in their turn. So now the pre-war virilists, the
-literary braves who felt that they had supped too full of peace, have
-died in their beds, or lost voice, like the cuckoos in June, and a
-different breed find voice and pipe up. These are the kind, the numerous
-kind, whose youth has supped quite full enough of war. For them Bellona
-has not the mystical charm, as of grapes out of reach, that she had for
-the Henleys and Stevensons. All the veiled-mistress business is off.
-Battles have no aureoles now in the sight of young men as they had for
-the British prelate who wrote that old poem about the "red rain." The
-men of the counter-reaction have gone to the school and sat the oratorio
-out and taken a course of the waters, after the worthy prelate's
-prescription. They have seen trenches full of gassed men, and the queue
-of their friends at the brothel-door in Bethune. At the heart of the
-magical rose was seated an earwig.
-
-Presently all the complaisant part of our Press may jump to the fact
-that the game of idealizing war is now, in its turn, a back number. Then
-we may hear such a thudding or patter of feet as Carlyle describes when
-Louis XV was seen to be dead and the Court bolted off, _ventre à terre_,
-along the corridors of Versailles, to kiss the hand of Louis XVI. And
-then will come the season of danger. Woe unto Peace, or anyone else,
-when all men speak well of her, even the base. When Lord Robert Cecil
-and Mr. Clynes and Sir Hubert Gough stand up for the peace which
-ex-soldiers desire, it is all right. But what if Tadpoe and Taper stood
-up for it? What if all the vendors of supposedly popular stuff, all the
-timid gregarious repeaters of current banalities, all the largest
-circulations in the solar system were on the side of peace, as well as
-her old bodyguard of game disregarders of fashion and whimsical
-stickers-up for Christianity, chivalry, or sportsmanship?
-
-We must remember that, in the course of nature, the proportion of former
-combatants among us must steadily decline. And war hath no fury like a
-non-combatant. Can you not already forehear, in the far distance, beyond
-the peace period now likely to come, the still, small voice of some
-Henley or Lang of later days beginning to pipe up again with Ancient
-Pistol's ancient suggestion: "What? Shall we have incision? Shall we
-imbrue?" And then a sudden _furore_, a war-dance, a beating of tom-toms.
-And so the whole cycle revolving again. "Seest thou not, I say, what a
-deformed thief this fashion is? How giddily a' turns about all the hot
-bloods between fourteen and five-and-thirty? Sometimes fashioning them
-like Pharaoh's soldiers in the reechy painting, sometimes like god Bel's
-priests in the old church window; sometimes like the shaven Hercules in
-the smirched worm-eaten tapestry?" Anything to be in the fashion.
-
-There is only one thing for it. There must still be five or six million
-ex-soldiers. They are the most determined peace party that ever existed
-in Britain. Let them clap the only darbies they have--the Covenant of
-the League of Nations--on to the wrists of all future poets, romancers,
-and sages. The future is said to be only the past entered by another
-door. We must beware in good time of those boys, and fiery elderly men,
-piping in Thessaly.
-
-
-
-
-      *      *      *      *      *      *
-
-
-
-
-Transcriber's note:
-
-Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
-
-Typographical errors were silently corrected.
-
-Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a
-predominant form was found in this book.
-
-
-
-***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DISENCHANTMENT***
-
-
-******* This file should be named 60332-8.txt or 60332-8.zip *******
-
-
-This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
-http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/6/0/3/3/60332
-
-
-Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
-be renamed.
-
-Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
-law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
-so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
-States without permission and without paying copyright
-royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
-of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
-concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
-and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive
-specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
-eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook
-for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,
-performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given
-away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks
-not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the
-trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
-
-START: FULL LICENSE
-
-THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
-PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
-
-To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
-distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
-(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
-Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
-Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
-www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-
-1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
-and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
-(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
-the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
-destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
-possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
-Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
-by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
-person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
-1.E.8.
-
-1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
-used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
-agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
-things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
-paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
-agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
-
-1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
-Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
-of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
-works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
-States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
-United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
-claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
-displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
-all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
-that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
-free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
-works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
-Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
-comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
-same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
-you share it without charge with others.
-
-1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
-what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
-in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
-check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
-agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
-distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
-other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
-representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
-country outside the United States.
-
-1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
-
-1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
-immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
-prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
-on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
-phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
-performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
-
-  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
-  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
-  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
-  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
-  United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you
-  are located before using this ebook.
-
-1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
-derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
-contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
-copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
-the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
-redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
-Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
-either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
-obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
-trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
-
-1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
-with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
-must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
-additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
-will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
-posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
-beginning of this work.
-
-1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
-work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
-
-1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
-electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
-prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
-active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm License.
-
-1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
-compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
-any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
-to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
-other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
-version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site
-(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
-to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
-of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
-Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
-full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
-
-1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
-performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
-unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
-
-1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
-access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-provided that
-
-* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
-  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
-  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
-  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
-  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
-  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
-  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
-  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
-  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
-  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
-  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
-  Literary Archive Foundation."
-
-* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
-  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
-  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
-  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
-  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
-  works.
-
-* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
-  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
-  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
-  receipt of the work.
-
-* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
-  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
-are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
-from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The
-Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm
-trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
-
-1.F.
-
-1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
-effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
-works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
-Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
-contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
-or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
-intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
-other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
-cannot be read by your equipment.
-
-1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
-of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
-liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
-fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
-LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
-PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
-TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
-LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
-INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
-DAMAGE.
-
-1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
-defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
-receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
-written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
-received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
-with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
-with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
-lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
-or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
-opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
-the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
-without further opportunities to fix the problem.
-
-1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
-in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
-OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
-LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
-
-1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
-warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
-damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
-violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
-agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
-limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
-unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
-remaining provisions.
-
-1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
-trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
-providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
-accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
-production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
-including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
-the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
-or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
-additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
-Defect you cause.
-
-Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
-electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
-computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
-exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
-from people in all walks of life.
-
-Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
-assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
-goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
-remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
-and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
-generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
-Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
-www.gutenberg.org
-
-Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation
-
-The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
-501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
-state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
-Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
-number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
-U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
-
-The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the
-mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its
-volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous
-locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt
-Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to
-date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and
-official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
-
-For additional contact information:
-
-    Dr. Gregory B. Newby
-    Chief Executive and Director
-    gbnewby@pglaf.org
-
-Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
-spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
-increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
-freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
-array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
-($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
-status with the IRS.
-
-The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
-charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
-States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
-considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
-with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
-where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
-DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
-state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
-have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
-against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
-approach us with offers to donate.
-
-International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
-any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
-outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
-
-Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
-methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
-ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
-donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.
-
-Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
-freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
-distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
-volunteer support.
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
-editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
-the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
-necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
-edition.
-
-Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search
-facility: www.gutenberg.org
-
-This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
-including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
-subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
-