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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. 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