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DISENCHANTMENT
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO
3 1822 00786 6676
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DISENCHANTMENT
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
A HIND LET LOOSE
THE MORNING'S WAR
DRAMATIC VALUES
DISENCHANTMENT
By C. E. MONTAGUE
NEW YORK
BRENTANO'S
PUBLISHERS
Published, 1922, by
BRENTANO'S
Printed in the United States of America
To
AUBREY MONTAGUE
OF LAUTOKA, FIJI
"We twa hae paidlet i' the burn"
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Vision i
II. Misgiving i6
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 I57
X. Autumn Tints in Chivalry I73
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
DISENCHANTMENT
CHAPTER I
THE VISION
I
Now that most of our men in the prime
of Hfe have been in the army we seem
to be in for a goodly Hterature of disap-
pointment. 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 al-
ways in trouble; Matthew Arnold's verse was a
well-bred, melodious whine; Rossetti was all dis-
enamourment and displacement. Yet you could
I
DISENCHANTMENT
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
2
THE VISION
fallen off an extremely high horse. Of course, we
have all fallen off something since 19 14. 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 pro-
portionate 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, un-
diluted 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 mole-
cule 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 hu-
manly 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
3
DISENCHANTMENT
civilization re-won, a sour, soiled, crooked old
world to be rid of bullies and crooks and reclaimed
for straiglitness, 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 simple-
ton now: " Well, if you were like that, what could
you expect? Voits I'avez voulii, George Dandin.
You were rushing upon disillusionment." Of
course he was. If each recruit in 19 14 had been
an a 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
4
THE VISION
the natural prey of seventy-seven separate breeds
of profiteers than it did that presently he would
be overrun by less figurative lice. When Gari-
baldi 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 cer-
tainty 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 blind-
ness imagined that there was between all English-
men then that oneness of faith, love, and courage.
Ill
Everything helped, for a time, to keep him the
child that he was. Except in the matter of sep-
aration 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 im-
mense simplification. Of course, an immense sim-
plification 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
5
DISENCHANTMENT
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 pleas-
ure in chopping firewood or painting tool-sheds
till their backs ache. It soothes them with a flat-
tering 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
6
THE VISION
— 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, es-
capes for the moment from all his own advance-
ment and complication, and savours in quiet ec-
stasy 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: ambi-
tion 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 thread-
ing 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 question-
ings about what human life will, might, or ought
to be when every muscle and nerve are tautly en-
gaged in the primal job of sticking to life as it is?
7
DISENCHANTMENT
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 sol-
dier, which passeth understanding as wholly as
that of the saint, the blitheness of heart that comes
to both with their clarifying, tranquillizing acqui-
escence in some mystic will outside their own. Im-
mersed in that Dantean repose of utter obedience
the men slept like babies, ate like hunters, and re-
discovered the joy of infancy in getting some
rather elementary bodily movement to come right.
They saw everything that God had made, and
behold I 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 re-
moteness from all the rest of the world, all fa-
8
THE VISION
voured 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 per-
sons 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 rea-
soned 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, un-
plumbed, estranging seas that ought to roar be-
tween themselves and Covent Garden market por-
ters. 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 Bac-
chantic 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
9
DISENCHANTMENT
faster. Men warned for a guard next day would
agree among themselves to get up an hour before
the pre-dawn winter Reveille to practise among
themselves the beautiful symbolic ritual of mount-
ing 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 Reveille at dawn, the two-mile run
through auroral mists breaking over a still invio-
late 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 seques-
10
THE VISION
tered 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 hfe 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
II
DISENCHANTMENT
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 mo-
ment 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 il-
lusion came to its height on a night late in the most
beautiful May of 19 15, 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, re-
membered mornings and evenings of boyhood
when everything that there was became everlast-
ingly memorable as though it had been the morn-
ing 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
12
THE VISION
each day's life, a sound moving about hither and
thither, Hke 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 can-
dle." 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 adven-
ture. 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 feel-
ers 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
13
DISENCHANTMENT
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 Vaux-
hall, 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 I 'nough to take away a man's kerrik-
ter! " 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 up-
rightness; 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 un-
THE VISION
used 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 to-
gether at random, should ever have been so sim-
ply 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.
tS
CHAPTER II
MISGIVING
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 go-
ing abroad, than Guardsmen in peace-time do in
two years; all were at first as keen as boys, col-
lectors, 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 min-
ers 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 be-
tween their legs, and the band not playing, to tell
their mates that the whole thing was a mug's
i6
MISGIVING
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 en-
couraged. 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 won-
der-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 demi-
god 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
17
DISENCHANTMENT
could " touch for " the malady of unsoldlerliness.
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.
7 he pick of the old N.C.O.'s of the Regular Army
were packed as tight as bits of radium with vir-
tues 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 ^s. Sd. 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 pas-
sion for getting things right, and his humorous,
patient knowledge of mankind. Even such minor
masterpieces as average Guards ex-sergeant-ma-
jors were rather godlike on parade. In drill, at
any rate, they had the circumstantial vision and
communicable fire of the prophets. Early in 19 15
a little famished London cab-tout, a recruit, still
18
MISGIVING
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 gen-
erated at last. The men, youthfully eager to kiss
all possible rods and endure any obtainable hard-
ness, 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 multi-
19
DISENCHANTMENT
tude are surprisingly complete. Soon they are
further reassured by descrying the sergeant-ma-
jor'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 stand-
ing the great man the extremely expensive combi-
nation of nectars that he prefers. " Were it not
better done as others use?" — the Spartan re-
siduum 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
20
MISGIVING
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 sorL 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.
Ill
Perhaps, in another company or another bat-
talion, 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 any-
where 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.
21
DISENCHANTMENT
The gilded youth is confounded. He an
N.C.O. ! He would as soon have thought of be-
ing 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
Ais 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 tu-
torial 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 Ser-
geant. 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
22
MISGIVING
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 Chris-
tians? " (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 him-
self 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 Hst. 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 ten-
ner! " The story goes that a little " Scotch dra-
per," 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
23
DISENCHANTMENT
that he will offer the bare market price of a recom-
mendation for " lance-Jack " and bring the thing
off; the enterprise has prospered and the architect
of his own fortunes is wearing the stripe, spend-
ing his pound balance on the transaction, com-
manding his brethren, and enjoying his new dis-
pensation from fatigues. The band of brothers
begin to look at each other with some circumspec-
tion. 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 stuff pass be-
tween 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
24
MISGIVING
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 some-
thing or other — marching, map-reading, field hy-
giene, and what not. An excellent plan, but ter-
ribly 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 com-
petitions: 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
25
DISENCHANTMENT
say, that wherever I went the men simply wor-
shipped the ground that I trod on."
All this had filled the first half of the lec-
turer's hour. The men had begun to look at each
other cautiously, marvelling. When would the ma-
jor begin? Could this be a Regular Army cus-
tom? 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 1
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 tar-
get. Fall out."
On this tragic climax the lecture had ended, the
men had streamed out, some silent, bewildered,
26
MISGIVING
some dropping words of amazement. " Lecture!
W'y> it's the man's pers'nal 'istory! "
And then the CO. 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 quali-
ties 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 Train'
ing, 1 9 14, 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 hun-
grily 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 plain-
ness itself with the tangled clues of his own mind's
confusion, like Bardolph: "'Accommodated';
that is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated;
27
DISENCHANTMENT
or when a man is, being, whereby a' may be
thought to be accommodated."
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 engag-
ing and manifestly serviceable " short jab " Puck's
little witticism would suddenly tell; bayonet-fight-
ing would abruptly stop; an urgent order would
come from on high to " get on with night opera-
tions " 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 some-
thing else to be started instead — perhaps a thing
28
MISGIVING
that had already been once started and dropped.
In the working out of this fantastic pattern of
smatterings a company might begin to learn bay-
onet-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 sev-
eral 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 mar-
velled. Authority, it is true, had, at the worst,
some gusts of passion for perfection. But even
these might fortify, in their way, the new occu-
pant of the seat of the scorners. A sudden or-
der might come for a brigade or other inspection,
and then authority might in a brief hour become
like mediaeval 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 HohenzoUern Re-
29
DISENCHANTMENT
doubt would be put into the evolution of sections
which, through somebody's slackness, did not ex-
ist, 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 rec-
tangular 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 al-
most 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
30
MISGIVING
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 sol-
diers. 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 sum-
mer of 19 1 5, good fresh food for suspicion always
31
DISENCHANTMENT
abounded. Runlets of news and rumour came trick-
ling 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 un-
cut German wire; of little, splendid bands of com-
pany 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 com-
ing, 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 dis-
guised 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
32
MISGIVING
" 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 19 14 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 re-
veals 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 them-
selves 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 com-
33
DISENCHANTMENT
monwealth's 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 Er-
pinghams at the hand of God, and no Bardolphs,
Pistols, and Nyms? Our stage was not really rot-
ten by any means; only half-rotten, like others of
man's institutions. Half the Old Army, at least,
was exemplary. Even among politicians unsel-
fishness 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 be-
lieving 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.
34
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 lit-
tle 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 Cor-
bie, on the Somme; there are the little irregulari-
ties 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 Eta-
ples, 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, Shake-
speare shows us three standard types of the pri-
vates 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 bat-
DISENCHANTMENT
ties. Bates, the second man, gives tongue pretty
freely. Bates is not ruled by funk, but he pro-
fesses 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 it-
self with chants like
Far, far away would I be.
Where the Alleyman cannot catch me.
and
Oh my! I don't want to die,
/ want to go home,
sung to dourly wailful tunes, at the seasons of
stress when Scotsmen and Irishmen screwed them-
selves up to the sticking-point with their Tyrtaean
anti-English ballads, when Frenchmen would soul-
fully 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 Agin-
court privates, lives too. He lives with a ven-
geance. You will remember that he was an anti-
2^
AT AGINCOURT AND YPRES
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 offi-
cer whom he knew for himself — " a good old com-
mander 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 Agin-
court 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,
37
DISENCHANTMENT
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 com-
mander-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 broth-
ers," 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 com-
radeship 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 of-
fice, 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 com-
mander smuggled himself into the front line of an
38
AT AGINCOURT AND YPRES
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 fight-
ing, 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 sur-
vival, 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 be-
yond 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.
39
DISENCHANTMENT
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, mak-
ing 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 sit-
ting upon the edge of the rampart, your feet dan-
gling over among the top boughs of embosoming
trees, you were not merely out of the war; you
were out of all war I you entered into that beati-
tude 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
40
AT AGINCOURT AND YPRES
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 con-
trast between the two hemispheres of an army —
the hemisphere of combatancy, of present tor-
ment, 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 19 15.
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.
41
DISENCHANTMENT
And Williams was not a saint, although when he
enlisted he was profusely told that he was by peo-
ple 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.
Ill
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 na-
ture 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
42
AT AGINCOURT AND YPRES
heads of the front line's immemorial distaste for
the Staff — for its too Olympian line of comment
upon the vulgar minutiae 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 spealcing of the men, the beloved men, the ob-
jects of every good combatant officer's jealous and
wrathful affection.
Or, again, you might say that a Staff is a trou-
ser-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 molesta-
tion, 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 Ger-
mans, the piercing eye of the front line perceives
in a moment how pitifully ill the Brass Hats de-
serve 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
43
DISENCHANTMENT
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
intrenches. Why? Because trench life is very do-
mestic, highly atomic. Its atom, or unit, like that
of slum life, is the jealously close, exclusive, con-
triving 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 cast-
aways 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
44
AT AGINCOURT AND YPRES
odd chattel that each trench household acquired
served as an extra dab of cement for the house-
hold'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 brolcen, but
just practicable, arm-chair; not exactly a strong-
hold of luxury; rather a freakish wave of her ban-
ner; and this symbol of lost joys was borne, at
great inconvenience, from sector to sector of the
front, amidst the affected derision of other pla-
toons — veiling what was well understood to be
envy. It was like the grim, ineffusive spiritual co-
hesion 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 ad-
venturers 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
45
DISENCHANTMENT
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 battahon
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 engrav-
ing that Britain hurled at the enemy many of her
46
AT AGINCOURT AND YPRES
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 else-
where, 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 con-
temptible 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
47
DISENCHANTMENT
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 com-
mands. 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 sav-
ing 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 y6u 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
48
AT AGINCOURT AND YPRES
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 19 14 upon arming Cana-
dian 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 ca-
prices 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 per-
versity, did not intend to stand up on a skyline a
thousand yards off to be shot with all the refine-
ments 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
49
DISENCHANTMENT
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 ori-
gin right away from the door. They would quite
often take a discovery in. Only there was no run-
ning to greet it.
There was no hurrj^ in their hands,
No hurrj^ 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 bayo-
net 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
SO
AT AGINCOURT AND YPRES
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
19 1 5 : 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 crick-
eters, 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 daz-
zling in their red and gold, august beyond words,
but genial, benign, encouraging, only too ready to
SI
DISENCHANTMENT
praise things that they would see to be easy if only
they knew more about them and were not like mid-
dle-aged mothers watching their offspring at foot-
ball — 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 some-
body'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 gre-
nade is a thick metal case serrated with deeply-cut
lines that cross each other like those more shallow
52
AT AGINCOURT AND YPRES
sunk lines on crocodile-leather, only at right an-
gles. 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 dis-
perses 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 di-
vided. 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 phys-
ical effects of their detonation were poor, the
53
DISENCHANTMENT
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 hear-
ing, 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 cornu-
copia of tips, fruits of empiric research, for do-
ing 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 191 6 and in Artois
and Flanders next year, would hoot at the notion
— it had a vogue with part of the Staff in a tran-
quil far west — that the way to get on with the war
was to raise a more specific thirst for blood in the
54
AT AGINCOURT AND YPRES
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 re-
turns 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 at-
tack, 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 oflScer
on the Staff of one of the worst-hit divisions ob-
served : " 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
55
DISENCHANTMENT
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. " An-
other of those damned cavalry f oUies 1 " 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 every-
one 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.
56
AT AGINCOURT AND YPRES
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 en-
listment 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 mu-
57
DISENCHANTMENT
tinous 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 them-
selves, 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 con-
58
AT AGINCOURT AND YPRES
trary had not been proved to their own senses, the
slacking, self-seeking and shirking that had mud-
dled 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 every-
where.
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-bri-
gade 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
59
DISENCHANTMENT
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, per-
haps, 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 enthu-
siasm. 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 sul-
len 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
60
AT AGINCOURT AND YPRES
read themselves, and others could read but pre-
ferred 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 per-
ceive, taking shape in their minds. On that side
their mood was merely one of postponement,
somewhat menacing in its form, but still postpone-
ment. " We've ^0/ to win first. Then ? But
we've got to win first." They were almost ex-
actly the words in which most German prisoners,
till 19 1 8, expressed their own feeling about the
old rulers of Germany.
61
CHAPTER IV
TEDIUM
I
A BOOK may be bad and yet tell you much.
Lately I came across such a book. It i>
surely one of the crossest books ever writ-
ten. 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 re-
cording 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 fu-
62
TEDIUM
ture. For it depends, at the last, on the infre-
quency of " proper lawyers." Armies can now
be made, and moved about when made, only be-
cause 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 ef-
fort 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 Fi-
jian 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 com-
monplace in everything except a double dose of
native sourness. Here was nothing of M. Bar-
63
DISENCHANTMENT
busse'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 plod-
ding 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 he-
roic moment only seeming a bit of a " dud," a mis-
carriage; the hugger-mugger element of confu-
sion; the baffling way that the real thing did not so
often give men obvious gallant things to do as irri-
tating puzzles to solve, muddles to liquidate at
short notice; the queer flashes of revelation, in
contact with individual enemies, of the bottom-
less falsity of the cheaper kind of current war psy-
chology.
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 sensa-
tional 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
64
TEDIUM
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 irk-
some 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 fa-
tigue 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 sen-
try-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 communica-
tion 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
6S
DISENCHANTMENT
on. Men would come out light-headed with fa-
tigue, 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 mediae-
val 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 re-
member, that more kind words did not come to the
66
TEDIUM
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 him-
self 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 bell a f
III
Suppose those first eight days In the front and
support trenches to be the beginning of a divi-
sional tour of sixteen days' duty in the line. For
four days now the weary men would be in re-
serve, under enemy fire, but not in trenches; prob-
ably in the cellars of ruined houses. But these
67
DISENCHANTMENT
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 compa-
nies 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
68
TEDIUM
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 divi-
sion 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; some-
times 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 com-
pany 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
69
DISENCHANTMENT
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 smug-
gled 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 flotil-
las 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 per-
manent 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
70
TEDIUM
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 ca-
reers 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 conjec-
tural symptoms of maladies that show no outward
trace; as science advanced to the point of record-
ing 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 sa-
vants 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."
71
DISENCHANTMENT
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 com-
bustion 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 tem-
peratures of ardour in other ranks of base estab-
lishments. " 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 kid-
72
TEDIUM
dies, 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."
The men who could not shirk the choice of Her-
cules, 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.
73
DISENCHANTMENT
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 mid-
dle-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 pre-
siding officer takes a manifest pride in knowing all
the guile and subtlety of soldier-men. No taking
/n'w 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 be-
gins, 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 pa-
tient's reaction under the stimulus.
" No, sir, me 'eart's thrutched up," says the ex-
aminee. Then, while the Board perforates him
from head to foot for some seconds with a basi-
lisk stare of unbelief, he dribbles out at intervals,
74
TEDIUM
in a voice that bespeaks falling hope, such inef-
fective addenda as " Can't get me sleep " and
" Not a smile in me."
" Very picturesque, indeed," says the senior ex-
pert 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 p.lace at the table. The presi-
dent 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 con-
vinced by its force that he must be guilty of some-
thing, if only he knew what it was. Still, he re-
peats 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 — be-
sides rheumatism? "
" No rheumatism, sir. And nothing else." The
voice is as stiff as it dares.
75
DISENCHANTMENT
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 sa-
vours of dissatisfaction: "Well, you're the first
man "
" I'm an N.C.O., sir." The young lance-ser-
geant'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 cor-
rectitude 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 Nip-
per, he knows his place — " me being a perma-
nency " — 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-mar-
tial. " Well," the president snaps as if in resent-
76
TEDIUM
ment 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 ser-
geant puts powerful brakes on his tongue and says
only that. But he has sadly disconcerted the fac-
ulty. 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 oppo-
sition arising in the heart of the outraged psy-
chologist beyond the table.
A sound professional instinct reinforces the per-
sonal 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.
77
DISENCHANTMENT
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 de-
sire. The doctor rightly tries to detect the dis-
turbing 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 cicatrice 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 wrathfuUy. " 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 ser-
geant does not answer. He wants no capital pun-
ishment under the Army act.
78
TEDIUM
" Man's an absolute wreck," says the major.
" Debility, wounds imperfectly healed, blood-poi-
soning likely. Not fit for the line for two months
to come. P.B. — eh?" he turns to his junior.
" That's what / should say, sir," the junior con-
curs, 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 hght 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,
79
DISENCHANTMENT
have outlived their first generous belief in an al-
most universally high moral among the men. In
the training-camps in 19 14 the safe working pre-
sumption about any unknown man was that he
only wanted to get at the enemy as soon as he
could. Now the working presumption, the start-
ing 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 cold-
ness 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
80
TEDIUM
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 pro-
fessional football-players and boxers who had be-
lieved 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 souffles grown tepid, and fatalistic in-
difference 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.
8l
DISENCHANTMENT
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 melo-
dious 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
82
TEDIUM
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."
83
CHAPTER V
THE SHEEP THAT WERE NOT FED
" ^^^ F late years," the novel of Shirley begins,
I 1 " 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 Rid-
ing 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 percep-
tible revival of church parades, a ministration of
which the average private, I'homme moyen sensuel
of Matthew Arnold, had taken a long and glad
farewell on leaving Salisbury Plain. Like the in-
finite 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 tar-
nish his buttons with fire and oil there came also a
longed-for release from regular Sunday adjura-
tions to keep sober and think of his end. " The
84
THE SHEEP THAT WERE NOT FED
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 Wa-
verley 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 every-
one 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
85
DISENCHANTMENT
first battle of the Somme. There was the circum-
spect, 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 chap-
lain 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 dis-
comfort and pleasure, fatigue and rest, risk and
the ceasing of risk; a heaven after the flatness,
86
THE SHEEP THAT WERE NOT FED
the tedium, the cloying security and the con-
founded 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 fre-
quented 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 mediae-
val 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 pre-
cisely 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
87
DISENCHANTMENT
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 some-
thing about this type of chaplain — he had his coun-
terpart in all the churches — with which the com-
mon 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 in-
tended. Your virllist 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 ap-
ing 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
THE SHEEP THAT WERE NOT FED
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 Icilling 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 some-
thing 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 noi-
some mess in which the good old world seemed to
89
DISENCHANTMENT
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 ap-
proaches to being articulate. Part of a famous di-
vision 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 thun-
derous 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."
Ill
" 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 19 14,
and put it away, as it were, in a drawer with his
other civil attire to wait until public affairs should
90
THE SHEEP THAT WERE NOT FED
again permit of their use. He had said it quite
simply. A typical working-class Englishman, lit-
eral, 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 what-
ever 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 de-
cided. 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; fight-
ing was evil — better submit than resist. There
was no getting over such doctrine, nor round it:
why try?
Ever since those disconcerting bombs were orig-
inally 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 re-
spect 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 dis-
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turbing, 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:
lino aviilso, 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 cer-
tainties. 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.
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THE SHEEP THAT WERE NOT FED
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 en-
gaged 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 experi-
ences. One of his points — though he did not put
it in that way — was that in war a lot of raw ma-
terial for making some sort of religion was lying
about, but that war also made some of the fin-
ished 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
19 1 6 drew him about as far as I heard him go
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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. Folia 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. Folia
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
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THE SHEEP THAT WERE NOT FED
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'U get drunk
for than anything else ? And why the rum's dou-
ble 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 con-
sciousness of which I am free from fear and de-
sire — 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' drunken-
ness.
And yet the clumsy fumblings of uninstructed
people among things of the spirit might, one im-
agines, 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
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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 dis-
entanglement, would struggle up to some expres-
sion of the fugitive trance of realization into
which he had found he could throw himself by let-
ting 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 out-
side 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 think-
ing ' Gosh! what a pitch I got up to that time! '
and how I'd screw it up higher, next go."
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THE SHEEP THAT WERE NOT FED
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 cer-
tainty 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 animat-
ing the whole world.
Another man would bring into the common
stock a recollection of the kind of poignant por-
trait 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
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mother when she is dead and the stabbing insight
of remorse begins.
Thus would these inexpert people hang uncon-
sciously about the uncrossed threshold of religion.
With minds which had recovered in some degree
the penetrative simplicity of a child's, they dis-
interred this or that unidentified bone of the buried
God from under the monumental piles of debris
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 ex-
tinction. 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.
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THE SHEEP THAT WERE NOT FED
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 scrag-
ging 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 on-
set, into their twilight lairs in the souls of individ-
ual 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 crea-
tures will be on the feed, and if you know how to
fish you may get a great take. For our profes-
sional 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
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DISENCHANTMENT
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 be-
tween 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 philoso-
pher. 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 Iverness
Copse is the morning of the first day and a spoon-
ful 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 fish-
ing in the troubled waters, the ploughing and sow-
ing 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 limi-
tations? How had we ever armed and equipped
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THE SHEEP THAT WERE NOT FED
him? When you are given an infant earth to fash-
ion out of a whirling ball of flaming metals and
gases, then good humour, some taste for adven-
ture, 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 neigh-
bour, i' faith, and a very good bowler: but, for
Alisander — alas, you see how 'tis — a little o'er-
parted."
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 va-
cancy, 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
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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.
102
CHAPTER VI
'WARE POLITICIANS
I
WHEN a man enlisted during the war he
found himself living the life of the com-
mon man in a Communist State. Once
inside he had no more choices to make than a Rus-
sian 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 be-
come a true " proletarian " under a pretty big-
fisted dictatorship. It might not be a dictatorship
of the proletariat, but a dictatorship smells about
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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 dis-
tracting 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
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'WARE POLITICIANS
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 social-
istic by nature, like the " souls Christian by na-
ture " of the theologians. You might even have
suspected that in all this wide field of dispute the
most fundamental difference is not between the in-
trinsic and absolute merits of the individuahstic
and of the communistic State, but between two
contrasted human types — the type which is actual-
ly happiest in communal messes and dormito-
ries 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 rap-
ture 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 cheap-
est for its victuals. So that the only ideal solu-
tion might be to cut up the world, or each of its
States, into two hemispheres, as trains are divided
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DISENCHANTMENT
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 bank-
ruptcy 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 I 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
io6
'WARE POLITICIANS
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 com-
petitive 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 intru-
sion 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.
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DISENCHANTMENT
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 po-
litical authoritarians, " in your natural rulers,
from Lord Chaplin and the Duke of Northumber-
land 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 Par-
liament, and all of it. Turn down aristocracy and
democracy, too, and put your money on the Dic-
tatorship 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 ex-
plains 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.
io8
'WARE POLITICIANS
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 de-
faced 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 pro-
hibitors, humanitarians but not humanists, people
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with democratic principles but not democratic sym-
pathies, 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 Con-
servative 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 es-
cape 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 righting and starving go
on and the people who make it go round are not
politicians.
IIO
'WARE 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 conscious-
ness of an unbounded general stability in the polit-
ical 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 rub-
bish had grown up. On decade after decade of
indulgence the man of booming phrases and gran-
diosely noble professions had swelled into a mar-
vel 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 trum-
petings and naggings of the various fashionable
schools of virtuosi in political blatancy. It would
not be common sense to suppose that no psycho-
logical change of any moment would, in any case,
have been wrought by a passage from that sub-
stantially stable world into a world in which the
III
DISENCHANTMENT
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, polit-
ical 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
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'WARE POLITICIANS
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 English-
man'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?
113
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 wlll-
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 fel-
low! In 1870 French civilians laid freely to their
souls the flattering unction that the Prussians mur-
dered 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
114
"CAN'T BELIEVE A WORD"
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 I The narrow, ill-set Mon-
gol 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, Petrogad, 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 seri-
ous 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,
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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 " frightful-
ness " plan was no slip, no " indiscretion of a sub-
ordinate," 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 ten-
able conclusions to impregnable syllogisms. Be-
sides 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,
ii6
♦'CAN'T BELIEVE A WORD"
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 injudi-
cious 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 indi-
vidual 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.
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DISENCHANTMENT
A war correspondent who mentioned some chival-
rous act that a German had done to an English-
man 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 shabbi-
ness 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 exult-
ant account of a swiftly successful British attack.
" Within ten minutes from zero," I think the cor-
respondent 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.
ii8
"CAN'T BELIEVE A WORD"
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
119
DISENCHANTMENT
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
120
"CAN'T BELIEVE A WORD"
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 es-
cape 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 th^
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 keep-
ing. 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
121
DISENCHANTMENT
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 communiques 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, imagi-
nation, decision, and initiative than the average
122
"CAN'T BELIEVE A WORD"
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.
123
DISENCHANTMENT
V
There lay the trouble. They lived in the Staff
world, its joys and its sorrows, not in the combat-
ant 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 censor-
ship 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 chateaux 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
124
♦'CAN'T BELIEVE A WORD"
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 19 17. The
average war correspondent — there were golden
exceptions — insensibly acquired the same cheerful-
ness in face of vicarious torment and danger. In
his work it came out at times in a certain jaunti-
ness of tone that roused the fighting troops to
fury against the writer. Through his despatches
there ran a brisk implication that iregimental
officers and men enjoyed nothing better than "go-
ing 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
125
DISENCHANTMENT
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 i, 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."
126
CHAPTER VIII
THE DUTY OF LYING
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 swim-
ming, had only to look up to the umpire's launch
127
DISENCHANTMENT
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, emporte 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
128
THE DUTY OF LYING
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 prac-
tical fib with the crockery and trumpets. Even
the Wooden Horse of the Greeks has long ceased
to raise moral questions. The pious Aeneas, cer-
tainly, called it a foul. But what did he do him-
self, 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 Intelli-
gence 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
129
DISENCHANTMENT
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 news-
paper Press, a weapon which fires as fast as the
Lewis itself, and is almost as easy to load when-
ever 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 Intelli-
gence 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 clientele, what the sky Is to mountain-
climbers and sailors, your Press is to him: an end-
less 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
130
THE DUTY OF LYING
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.
Ill
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 dis-
credit. 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
131
DISENCHANTMENT
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 19 16.
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 com-
munication In order to be safe. At last a point
132
THE DUTY OF LYING
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 previ-
ous effects of the real strength of our hand. And
so there slipped into a rather out-of-the-way Eng-
lish 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 no-
tice the article. The enemy could be trusted to
do so.
When the Flanders battle of July 31, 19 17,
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
^33
DISENCHANTMENT
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 indiscre-
tion 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 ebulli-
tion of babble was printed in only one small edi-
tion of one London paper. Authority was then
seen to be nervously trying, as Uncle Toby ad-
vised, " 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
134
THE DUTY OF LYING
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 vir-
tue too? Coach the whole multitudinous or-
chestra of the Press to carry out the vast concep-
tions 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 Wagner-
ian 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
135
DISENCHANTMENT
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 hos-
pital and dump. Next it has to mark each move-
ment 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 at-
tacks. 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 of-
ficers? 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 war-
time life, in the field and at home. And then you
understand.
For what you want to know, in order to beat
136
THE DUTY OF LYING
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 Luden-
dorff. 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 Mun-
ich or Manchester, helped to eke out that ac-
curate 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, substan-
tially correct descriptions of everything in the
war life of their respective nations, except a few
formal military and naval secrets specially re-
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DISENCHANTMENT
served 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?
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, de-
range 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, every-
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THE DUTY OF LYING
thing; 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 enor-
mous 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 sea-
son, took fifty prisoners, and did as he liked for
a while — so much as he liked that a court of in-
quiry was afterwards held and a colonel deprived
of his command — we said in our official com-
munique that a hostile raiding party had " entered
our trenches " but was " speedily driven out, leav-
ing 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. Falsi-
fication was tried, but it was not " tried out."
Like really long-range guns, the kindred of
" Bertha," it came into use only enough to sug-
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gest what another world-war might be. Vidimus
tantiim. 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 Lans-
downe 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
140
THE DUTY OF LYING
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 be-
lieve 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,
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as has never yet been essayed; plausible proofs
from neutral quarters that the enemy's troops are
being betrayed by their politicians behind, that ty-
phus 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 eat-
ing 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 can-
vass 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 con-
verting the older and tamer form of political strife
into the pandemonic '* stunt " of a " whirlwind
election." Shall war not have her whirlwind can-
vasses no less renowned than those of peace?
Some rather shame-faced passages of love there
have been between us and the Rumour of Shake-
speare, the person " painted full of tongues," who
" stuffs the ears of men with false reports," to
the advantage of her wooers. Why not espouse
142
THE DUTY OF LYING
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 utter-
ing of such base coinage as cooked news, whatever
your proud chastity may cost anyone else ? Or ar-
rive, 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 clear-
est 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 de-
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ception 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 falsi-
fied. 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 dark-
ened with flights of strategic and tactical lies so
dense that the enemy would fight in a veritable
144
THE DUTY OF LYING
" fog of war " darker than London's own No-
vember 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 per-
fect, 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
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DISENCHANTMENT
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 can-
not, somehow, drive long on one gear without let-
ting 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 sat-
uration with peace morals it took some time to re-
lease the average English youth from his indur-
ated distaste for stabbing men in the bowels. Con-
versely 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, paisible-
ment, 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. Dur-
ing the war the art of Propaganda was little more
than born. The various inspired articles-with-a-
purpose, military or political, hardly went beyond
146
THE DUTY OF LYING
the vagitus, the earhest cry of the new-born meth-
od, as yet
An infant cr>'ing 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 fan-
tastically different from the dry and dignified offi-
cial publications of the pre-war days. English
people used to feel a sovereign contempt for the
" semi-official " journalism of Germany and Rus-
sia. 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 pri-
vate 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
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DISENCHANTMENT
of your lips at all, but just to yourself in the ses-
sion 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 them-
selves " 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 en-
joy 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 He 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
148
THE DUTY OF LYING
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, squab-
blesome lives in images taken from war. And
their httle 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 war-
fare 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 de-
clares 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 men-
tion 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
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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 manu-
facture 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 jour-
nalists 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
150
THE DUTY OF LYING
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 like-
lihood, have completed the disengagement of his
mind from the idea that public opinion is a thing
to be dealt with by argument and persuasion, ap-
peals 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 col-
ouring 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 po-
tent 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 re-
flections as this feeling may suggest?
Scott gives, in Woodstock^ an engaging picture
of the man who has " attained the pitch of believ-
ing 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 Ox-
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fordshlre." 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 pro-
hibited ; 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 pro-
hibited.
So when a journalist with no strong original pre-
disposition 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 contro-
versial device of giving false impressions and rais-
152
THE DUTY OF LYING
ing 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 in-
dustrial 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 argu-
ment 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 be-
gan 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 Ger-
mans. A beastly expedient, no doubt; acquies-
cence 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
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DISENCHANTMENT
not poison that do poison need." The men had
hated, and still continued to hate, the use of poi-
son 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 I
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
154
THE DUTY OF LYING
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 hap-
pened? 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 work-
ing 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
DISENCHANTMENT
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 ex-
pressed: "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? ' "
156
CHAPTER IX
AUTUMN COMES
IN the autumn of 19 17 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 watch-
ing at daybreak one of that autumn's many dour
157
DISENCHANTMENT
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 ar-
dour, 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?
158
AUTUMN COMES
It was nrot 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 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 Brit-
ish at French. Both had the same derisive note
in the voice when they named the " Brav' Beiges."
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
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DISENCHANTMENT
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 un-
feignedly 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 so-
cial 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 re-
i6o
AUTUMN COMES
turning. The Regular had faced and disarmed
the invading hordes of 19 14. 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 search-
ing 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 coun-
try, most of them vulgarly void of the old pro-
fessional 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 house-
hold. 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 dis-
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DISENCHANTMENT
cussed 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 com-
mands restored to their ancient status as property,
" livings," perquisites, the bread of the children,
not to be given to dogs. At home, too, peace con-
ditions 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 prac-
tise a more austere virtue than merchant princes
and statesmen?
Ill
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
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AUTUMN COMES
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
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DISENCHANTMENT
had just been enriched with a draft of neuras-
thenic burglars.
These vulgar considerations of military expedi-
ency 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, nerve-
less, if there was every sign of his making a spe-
cially worthless and troubelsome consumer of ra-
tions 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 nee defensoribus
istis. Australia's fellows in the trenches were
suffered to vote themselves out of the risk of get-
ting any support of the kind. Australia is a de-
mocracy. Ours were not asked whether they
wanted to see their trenches employed as a penal
settlement to which middle-aged moralists in Eng-
land 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 " laming toads to be toads." For the
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AUTUMN COMES
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 dis-
turbance of spirit, to throw down his rifle and light
out for the coast, across country.
Such episodes were reasonably few. The invet-
erate 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 be-
fore 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
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DISENCHANTMENT
over and over again. First, because in action it
spared itself less than the poor ones; secondly, be-
cause the best divisions rightly got the hard jobs.
Going out in the late autumn of 19 15, a good bat-
talion 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 rais-
ing their voices in an empty church. One of them
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AUTUMN COMES
asks another has he any idea what the battahon
was like after Oppy, or Bourlon Wood, or wher-
ever their own knock-out came. Like any other
battalion, no doubt — a mere G.C.M. of all con-
script battalions; conscription filed down all spe-
cial 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 evolu-
tion 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
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DISENCHANTMENT
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, per-
haps, 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 Caesar 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. Halg was a name and no more, though
a name immune In a mysterious degree from the
general scofl'ing surmise about the demerits of
higher commands. Few subalterns or men had
seen him. No one knew what he was doing or
i68
AUTUMN COMES
leaving undone. But some power, not ourselves,
making for charity, seemed to recommend him to
mercy in everyone's judgement; as if, from wher-
ever 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, un-
entered, 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 slow-
ness to judge can hardly be called hero-worship : at
most, a somewhat sere October phase of that ver-
nal 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
169
DISENCHANTMENT
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 na-
tion 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 au-
tumn's almost continuous battles was of a compe-
tence passing all British precedents. Leap-frog-
ging waves of assault, box barrages, creeping bar-
rages, 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, ex-
actness — all the good things abode in that eyrie
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AUTUMN COMES
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
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DISENCHANTMENT
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 casual-
ties into the swiftly and richly fruitful ones of a
Napoleon, the incidental expenses of some miracu-
lous draught of victory.
Nothing to grouse at in that. The winds of in-
spiration 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 1 9 14 and seems to be scarcely able to shift an
ant-hill to-day.
172
CHAPTER X
AUTUMN TINTS IN
CHIVALRY
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 Ho-
ratius 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.
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DISENCHANTMENT
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 " damn-
ing the French, the parle-vous, and all that be-
longed 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 pro-
duction of heavy woollens in the West Riding, for
War Office use, may, for all that we know, have
been accelerated by yarns about crucified Cana-
dians and naked bodies of women found in Ger-
man trenches. There is always so much, so bewil-
deringly 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
174
AUTUMN TINTS IN CHIVALRY
near our front line, and thence to die down west-
ward all the way to London. There Little Flani-
gan 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 dan-
ger 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 Ger-
man 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
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DISENCHANTMENT
have done every damn thing they did," he averred,
"if it had been we." I thought him rather extrava-
gant, then. Later on, when the long row of hut
hospitals, jammed between the Calais-Paris Rail-
way 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 correspond-
ents 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 al-
most 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 mediaeval melee 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,
176
AUTUMN TINTS IN CHIVALRY
dead or alive. The funeral that he gave to Rich-
thofen 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 fight-
ing and make them bomb German women and chil-
dren 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 Armen-
tieres at the Christmas of 19 14 an incident hap-
pened which seemed quite the natural thing to
most soldiers then. On Christmas Eve the Ger-
mans lit up their front line with Chinese lant^ns.
Two British oflEicers thereupon walked some way
across No Man's Land, hailed the enemy's sen-
tries, and asked for an officer. The German sen-
tries 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.
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DISENCHANTMENT
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 dis-
tant 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 oflicer
asked, who belonged to the school of Froissart less
obviously than the private. " Well, sir," the cap-
tor replied, " the gentleman wasn't looking."
178
AUTUMN TINTS IN CHIVALRY
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 ec-
stasy 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 Cassar 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 inter-
vals, above a hummock of clay in the middle dis-
179
DISENCHANTMENT
tance. Before you had made half a dozen sincere
efforts to shoot him the fatal germ of human rela-
tionship 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 likeli-
hood 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 mis-
takes, 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
180
AUTUMN TINTS IN CHIVALRY
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 prop-
er 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 ; per-
haps 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
i8i
DISENCHANTMENT
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 mak-
ing beaux gestes with its talons and tail, like the
proper dragon slain by St. George. Perhaps In-
carnate 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
182
AUTUMN TINTS IN CHIVALRY
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 01' 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 at-
tachments. " Love, unfoiled in the war," as
183
DISENCHANTMENT
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 de-
cent 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.
Even at places less distant than home the sur-
vival 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
184
AUTUMN TINTS IN CHIVALRY
of combats of pure attrition, the crying up of un-
knightliness 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 bat-
tle. Jocose stories of comic things said by privates
when getting rid of undesired captives became cur-
rent 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 Ger-
man 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 anec-
dote 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
i8s
DISENCHANTMENT
" 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 unhlssed. It was the latter-day wis-
dom. 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,
i86
AUTUMN TINTS IN CHIVALRY
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 sweep-
ing 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 im-
plies, 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 no-
tion 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, per-
haps 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 19 14; even then a great part of our
Press could not tell indignation from spite, nor up-
hold the best cause in the world without turpi-
tude. Nor were we all, after the Armistice, rods
187
DISENCHANTMENT
of the houses of Thersites and Cleon; Halg was
still alive, and so were Gough and Hamilton and
thousands of Arthurian subalterns and privates
and of hke-minded civilians, though it is harder
for a civilian not to lose generosity during a war.
But something had happened; the chivalrous tem-
per 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 Flani-
gan group.
i88
CHAPTERXI
STARS IN THEIR COURSES
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 mel-
ancholy and indisposition and unpleasing to them-
selves? " One of the most sweetly flattering hopes
that we had in the August of 19 14 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 bril-
liant 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 sympa-
thetic 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 "
189
DISENCHANTMENT
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 au-
riferous 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 la-
bours 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, any-
one 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 spir-
itless 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 cen-
turies ago. When a great nation's army was only
a few thousands strong the freak and the fluke had
190
STARS IN THEIR COURSES
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 acci-
dents 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 intelli-
gence? How far has each nation's history — so-
cial, 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 dis-
ease? 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 ro-
mance of a glorious gamble and sink — or, as some
would say, rise — to the plane of a circumstantial,
191
DISENCHANTMENT
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 gun-
fire, 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 al-
most certainly out. But you may go much further
back. That predominant fire itself is just such an-
other appeal. Its greater volume and better di-
rection are only the terms of an army's or a na-
tion'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 registra-
tion 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 pa-
pers are written; the time has come for the count-
ing of votes and adjudging of marks. Of course,
we may still " do our bit," but the possible size of
192
STARS IN THEIR COURSES
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 begin-
ning 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-tooth-
less lads from hot, humid Lancashire mills; bat-
talions of slow, staring faces, gargoyles out of the
tragical-comical-historical-pastoral edifice of mod-
ern English rural life; Dominion battalions of men
startllngly taller, stronger, handsomer, prouder,
firmer in nerve, better schooled, more boldly in-
terested in life, quicker to take means to an end
and to parry and counter any new blow of circum-
stance, men who had learned already to look at
our men with the half-curious, half-pitying look of
193
DISENCHANTMENT
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 watch-
ing eye, to the mind still desperately hugging the
hope that known causes might not bring their nor-
mal 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 pur-
pose, 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 Do-
minion troops still ambled steadily on, their line
delicately waving but always continuous, closing
again, as living flesh closes over a pinprick, wher-
ever 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 auction-
eers' 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
194
STARS IN THEIR COURSES
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 new-
ly-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 ofl^cer who didn't know he'd
won! " As if it were the fault, that day, of any-
one 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 syph-
ilitic children of some jolly Victorian rake, they
195
DISENCHANTMENT
could only bring to this harsh examination such
health and sanity as all the pleasant vices of Vic-
torian and Edwardian England had left them.
Ill
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 net-
tles 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, Eng-
land, 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 wor-
ried too much about discovering how to support an
attack when he might be more spiritedly employed
in playing polo; "The nobleness of life," as An-
tony said, when he kissed Cleopatra, was to go
racing or hunting, not to sit learning how to fore-
cast the course of great battles and how to pro-
196
STARS IN THEIR COURSES
vide 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 qua-
si-moral beauty attached by authority there to ab-
sorption in the easy thing — in play; the almost
passionate adoration of all those energies and
dexterities which, in this world of evolution to-
wards 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 estab-
lished a quite natural, unconscious friendliness
197
DISENCHANTMENT
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 a faire mourir, and her insuf-
ferable tale of flax and jute. With an equal firm-
ness your early power of supple and bright-col-
oured 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 jour-
ney's end in any country but your own. Between
your helpless mind and most of your fellow-coun-
trymen 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
198
STARS IN THEIR COURSES
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 ab-
sorbed 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
199
DISENCHANTMENT
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-offi-
cers 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 direct-
ing brains of our armies the poor things that they
200
STARS IN THEIR COURSES
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 nimble-
ness, 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 pardy 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 con-
tempt 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 ar-
ranged for these easy battues of thousands of Eng-
lishmen, who, for their part, did not fail. To-
morrow you would see it all again — a few hundred
201
DISENCHANTMENT
square yards of ground gained by the deaths, per-
haps, 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.
202
STARS IN THEIR COURSES
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. " Il-
lusion, 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, na-
ture'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 19 14, on ex-
cellent terms with himself and the audience, bands
203
DISENCHANTMENT
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 remark-
ably 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.
204
C HA PT ER 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 re-
capture the lost high-water mark. So the youth
of our war had its feints at renewal, hours of In-
dian summer when there was wine again in the air;
in the " bare, ruined choirs " a lated golden auri-
cle 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 Thermopylae,
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
205
DISENCHANTMENT
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 com-
mon man may have, for the hour, the artist's vi-
sion 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, 19 1 8. At daybreak our troops to the
east of Amiens would second the first blow of
Poch 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 mo-
ment of check, of lost momentum, of risky exten-
sion, 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 mo-
tored from Paris, through white dust and sun-
shine and, everywhere, quickly turned heads and
eager faces. He had been in the streets all the
206
BELATED BOONS
night of the enemy's last mighty lunge at the city.
He spoke of the silent crowds blackening the bou-
levards 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 fix-
edly east at the flame that incessantly winked in the
sky above Chateau-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 be-
fore 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,
207
DISENCHANTMENT
II
Night came on cloudless and windless and
braced with autumn's first astringent tang of cool-
ness. Above, as I lay on my back in the meadow,
the whole dome had a stir of life in its shimmer-
ing 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 wound-
ed, English and German, on foot and on stretch-
ers, dripping so much blood that some of the
tracks were flamboyantly marked for miles across
country; and then the evening's reports, with their
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BELATED BOONS
anxious efforts to show that we had gained some-
thing 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 answer-
ing 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 ob-
scured stars, each coming back into sight as the
next one was deleted. In the east the low, slow
209
DISENCHANTMENT
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 unload-
ing 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 uni-
verse.
Ill
Ten miles to the east of Amiens a steep-sided
ridge divides the converging rivers of Ancre and
Som.me. 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
210
BELATED BOONS
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
Peronne — 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 pos-
sessed 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. Eng-
lish 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
211
DISENCHANTMENT
seething milky opaqueness. Of what might go
on in that pit of enigma the eye could tell noth-
ing; 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 bang-
ingly played against time on a keyboard. Now
the men would be rising full length above earth
and walking out with smoking breath and be-
jewelled 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 gun-
fire. 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 splash-
212
BELATED BOONS
ing 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 bark-
ing 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
213
DISENCHANTMENT
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
214
BELATED BOONS
uppermost, some heads, like fish in a basket, mak-
ing 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 de-
light, and remembered. Four years ago, three
years ago, even two years ago, a lasting repose
of beatitude might have come with that regain-
ing 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 Com-
mander-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,
215
DISENCHANTMENT
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 Cateau and
Landrecies, Liege and Namur —
216
BELATED BOONS
Juvat ire et Dorica castra
Desertosque videre locos, Htusque relictum.
Classibus hie locus, hie acie certare solebant,
Hie Dolopum manus, hie saevus 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 an-
other 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 radi-
ant 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 sud-
denly 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.
217
DISENCHANTMENT
Finally — last happy thrill of the war — the first
stroke of eleven o'clock, on the morning of Arm-
istice Day, on the town clock of Mons, only cap-
tured that morning; Belgian civilians and British
soldiers crowding together into the square, shak-
ing 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 " Tipper-
ary " for our welcome, while our airmen, released
from their labours, tumbled and romped over-
head like boys turning cartwheels with ecstasy.
What a victory it might have been — the real,
the Winged Victory, chivalric, whole and un-
stained ! 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.
2l8
CHAPTER XIII
THE OLD AGE OF THE WAR
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 morn-
ing 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, shin-
ing river. Once more the longing of a multitude
struggling slowly across a venomous wilderness
fixed itself on the first glimpse of a Jordan be-
yond; 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 stand-
ard 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 19 14, now
Captains attached to the Staff, emerged from the
219
DISENCHANTMENT
narrow and crowded High Street of Cologne on
December 7, 19 18, 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 put-
ting their lips to the first glass of the sparkling
vintage of victory? Neither of them said any-
thing then. The heart that knoweth its own bit-
terness 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 briga-
dier 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-treat-
ment, 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
220
THE OLD AGE OF THE WAR
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 Co-
221
DISENCHANTMENT
logne 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 might 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 stab-
bers 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 beg-
ging off service in arms on the plea that squeal-
222
THE OLD AGE OF THE WAR
ing 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 cafes
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
223
DISENCHANTMENT
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 un-
thinkable 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
224
THE OLD AGE OF THE WAR
to pay more than half the prices put down on
the wine-Hst. 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 in-
dignities on the editor of the Kolnische Zeitung —
making him print as matters of fact our versions
of old cases of German misconduct, etc. Prob-
ably 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 be-
come a fashion to have it, as in some raffish circles
it is a fashion at times to have some rakish dis-
ease. In the German mihtary cemetery at Lille
I have heard a man reared at one of our most
famous public schools and our most noble uni-
versity, 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
225
DISENCHANTMENT
sturdy sneer at the notion of doing anything chiv-
alrous was by this time the mode. " I hope to
God," an oldish and highly non-combatant gen-
eral 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.
Ill
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. Other-
wise 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
226
THE OLD AGE OF THE WAR
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 be-
fore the living could come home and make them-
selves 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." " FU devise the
brave punishments for them." " Ah, but Fll
sweat you more money out of the swine." That
was the gist of the din that most of the gramo-
phones 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
227
DISENCHANTMENT
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 in-
tensity 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
228
THE OLD AGE OF THE WAR
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 spe-
cies 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 con-
querors' 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
229
DISENCHANTMENT
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 victori-
ous 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 overshad-
owed 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
230
THE OLD AGE OF THE WAR
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 perform-
ance which followed, our Press and our politi-
cians 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.
231
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 ex-
pose the nakedness of the land. Then comes Pro-
fessor 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
232
OUR MODERATE SATANISTS
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 tradi-
tional 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, per-
haps, is some helpless butt of the slings and ar-
rows 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 mis-
doing. 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 in-
tegrity and courage, right away from a world
order which has called itself divine and shown
itself diabolic. He will embrace, in its stead, the
233
DISENCHANTMENT
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 bear-
ing the new name. He does not, except in the
case of a few doctrinaire bigots, repeat any Satan-
ist 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
234
OUR MODERATE SATANISTS
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 Christ-
ian 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 Patriot-
ism, 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,
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DISENCHANTMENT
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.
Ill
In their vices as well as their virtues the Eng-
lish 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,
236
OUR MODERATE SATANISTS
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 rea-
son 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 com-
monwealth preserve the golden mean; few, in-
deed, 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
237
DISENCHANTMENT
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 19 14-18
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 ser-
geant-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
238
OUR MODERATE SATANISTS
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 cen-
tripetal 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
239
DISENCHANTMENT
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 19 17
and at Cambrai the same autumn, might have
seemed an outre 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 ad-
ministered to the common Englishman as soldier
had its counterpart in the men's ingrained moder-
ateness of reaction. At Bray-sur-Somme during
the battle of 191 6 I saw a I'Vench soldier go so
mad with rage at what he considered to be the
240
OUR MODERATE SATANISTS
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, civiliza-
tion, and the Commander-in-Chief. This Atha-
nasian 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 ex-
cite 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, con-
temptuous 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 ar-
rant failure. Confronted now with the frustra-
tion 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
* 241
DISENCHANTMENT
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 un-
warming 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 seri-
ously 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 19 15 the words
used by the Game Chicken about Mr. Dombey —
" as stiff a cove as ever he see, but within the
242
OUR MODERATE SATANISTS
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 coun-
try. 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 diplo-
macy 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 EngHshmen. 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 help-
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DISENCHANTMENT
ing 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 com-
monest of many by-words. The Houses of Parlia-
ment, 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 mem-
bers 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 fur-
ther curling the lip of derision among actual
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OUR MODERATE SATANISTS
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 con-
sequence with which many men had hitherto cred-
ited them on account of any divine mission they
might be found to have upon closer acquaint-
ance. 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.
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DISENCHANTMENT
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 comrade-
ship. 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 sur-
render 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 medi-
cine-man to the next. Few of our disenchanted
men doubt that the lightning cure of the Commu-
nist is only just another version of the lightning
cure of the Tory, the authoritarian, the per-
246
OUR MODERATE SATANISTS
emptory 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 an-
other. 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 pres-
ent 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.
y
You maybe 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 dis-
comfort our friend experiences both. Much that
247
DISENCHANTMENT
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 precarious-
ness.
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 hither-
to 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
248
OUR MODERATE SATANISTS
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 say-
ing that world-war was too appalling, too frantic-
ally wicked a thing for any government to invite
or procure. Peace, they argued, held a hand irre-
sistibly 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
249
DISENCHANTMENT
not yet had the wit to see what would come of
a sudden snatch made with a will and with as-
surance. 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 blow-
ing 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
250
OUR MODERATE SATANISTS
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.
251
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 gen-
eral moral debility. Some day soon we shall have
to cease squatting among the potsherds and crab-
bing each other, and give all the strength we have
left to the job of regaining the old control of our-
selves and our fate which, in the days of our
health, could only be kept by putting forth con-
stantly 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
252
ANY CURE?
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 cer-
tain 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 re-
duced 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 go-
ing 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 sing-
ing together all right and the sons of God shout-
ing for joy. The same way with the spirit, ex-
cept 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 anaesthe-
tics as fainting. So the man who has gone far
off the rails in matters of conduct, and tries to
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DISENCHANTMENT
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 exhilar-
ating world that drugs or strong waters seem to
create and is trying to Hve 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, inde-
feasible genius of wonder and delight at every-
254
ANY CURE?
thing 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 suspi-
cions 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 pos-
sibly 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 elec-
tions, the curious indifference in presence of pub-
lic wrongs and horrors, the epidemic of sneak-
ing 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 pam-
255
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pered 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 sur-
feited, or the morbid. Glad as we all were to be
done with the war, its ends left even the strong-
est 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 pub-
lic entertainment have found that the rawest sen-
sationalism pays better than ever — anything that
will give a fillip, any poor new-whisky fillip, to
jaded nerves.
256
ANY CURE?
Ill
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 lit-
erature exhibit its ravages well. In healthy chil-
dren, 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 ex-
perience 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
257
DISENCHANTMENT
masters had trained them to find the divine Fal-
staffiad 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 al-
coholized 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 pos-
sible 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 ex-
pedient for talking in company instead of working
alone. This is an individual's job, and a some-
what 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
258
ANY CURE?
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 moun-
tains, 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 puffed up at all, something almost
atomic — a grain of wheat, a thread of wool, a
259
DISENCHANTMENT
crystal of clean salt, figures best the kind of hu-
man 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 Eng-
land are rotting with unprecedented growths of
venereal disease: an England of boundlessly ad-
vertised 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 ex-
tra corpuscles formed in the blood to enable a low-
land 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 no-
bodies; 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
260
ANY CURE?
world of war valuations, the scramble for hon-
ours earned and unearned, the plotting and jost-
ling 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 con-
ceit. 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 mis-
tress's money. The child's is sheer affection, the
true ecstatic sense of the thing's inherent charac-
261
DISENCHANTMENT
teristics. 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 be-
gin 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
262
ANY CURE?
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, feel-
ing 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, condi-
tion, or raw materal. 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 pos-
sess it. How we all know the kind of public school
master whose manner expresses breezy comrade-
ship 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 elab-
orated 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
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DISENCHANTMENT
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 push-
ing, prompting and coaxing and tickling the youth-
ful 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 plain-
tive 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 Eng-
land off as one with Tyre and Sidon already. Her
case is too pressing. She cannot wait for big,
slowly telling improvements in big institutions, al-
though 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
264
ANY CURE?
plain things and in common Tightness 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 de-
pression 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 absten-
tion; it may take life again as an inspiriting force,
both a warmth and a light, such as makes nations
great.
265
CHAPTER XVI
FAIR WARNING
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, hke the old
horsehair covers for sofas, or antimacassars of
lace. Hardly a day can pass, even now, but some-
one finds out, with a start and a look of displeas-
ure, 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 19 lo. 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 tem-
perature 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 work-
ing age have just been killed there may be a pla-
266
FAIR WARNING
guey 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 ob-
vious 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 aesthetic holidays in Italy
and semi-aesthetic, 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 civi-
lization — torn from us while the abhorred half-
penny post for circulars was yet left; of the In-
come Tax just large enough to give us a pleasant
sense of grievance patriotically borne, but not to
prostrate us, winter and summer, with two " el-
bow jolts " or " Mary Ann punches " like those of
the perfected modern prize-fighter.
Many sanguine well-to-do people dreamt, in the
267
DISENCHANTMENT
August of 19 14, 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
Merrle 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 cor-
ridor 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
268
FAIR WARNING
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 feed-
ing, good as gold, in the deep and pleasant mead-
ows 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 manques, 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
269
DISENCHANTMENT
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 refrigera-
tive company of colonels.
The father and mother of this virilistic move-
ment 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 be-
lieved to have at his fingers' ends all the best of
what is known and thought by mankind about tur-
nips and other crops with which they may honour-
ably 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
270
FAIR WARNING
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, swallow-
ing the ground with fierceness and rage, and " say-
ing 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 mil-
lions of men had to be killed because some aca-
demic 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?
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DISENCHANTMENT
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 Hotels 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 provoca-
tion, a challenge, vexing those " discoursing wits "
who " count it," Bacon says, " a bondage to fix a
272
FAIR WARNING
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 in-
veterate acquiescence in mere common sense af-
flicts many bosoms with the fear of lagging yards
and yards behind the foremost files of time; per-
haps — that keenest agony — of having nothing pi-
quant or startling to say, no little bombs handy for
conversational purposes. " I sat down," the de-
serving young author says in The Vicar of Wake-
field, " 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 cliches
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 paci-
fied when her heart cried out for the diamonds.
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DISENCHANTMENT
IV
Then the Church itself must needs take a hand
— or that part of the Church which ever coclcs 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 pass-
ing 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 ' — al-
most 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
274
FAIR WARNING
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 en-
suing 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, tem-
pest and fire; simple lessons of patience and cour-
age conned in the schools of typhus, gout, and
stone; not oratorios, perhaps, but homely an-
thems 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 — remem-
ber 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-
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DISENCHANTMENT
masters, and policemen. Every year thousands
who would in nobler days have been braced and
steeled by manly tussles with smallpox or diph-
theria are robbed of that blessing by the great
changes made in our drains. Every year thou-
sands 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, Regu-
lus 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 ask-
ing 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 jus-
tice, 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 multiudes
276
FAIR WARNING
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 success-
fully 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
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DISENCHANTMENT
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 prescrip-
tion. 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 Car-
lyle describes when Louis XV was seen to be dead
and the Court bolted off, ventre a terre, along the
corridors of Versailles, to kiss the hand of Louis
XVL 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 gregari-
ous repeaters of current banalities, all the largest
circulations in the solar system were on the side
278
FAIR WARNING
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 na-
ture, the proportion of former combatants among
us must steadily decline. And war hath no fury
like a non-combatant. Can you not already fore-
hear, 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 im-
brue? " 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
279
DISENCHANTMENT
— 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 en-
tered by another door. We must beware in good
time of those boys, and fiery elderly men, piping
in Thessaly.
THE END
280
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