Part 55 (1/2)

What of England?... Looking back at the immense effort of the British people in the war, our high sum of sacrifice in blood and treasure, and the patient courage of our fighting-men, the world must, and does, indeed, acknowledge that the old stoic virtue of our race was called out by this supreme challenge, and stood the strain. The traditions of a thousand years of history filled with war and travail and adventure, by which old fighting races had blended with different strains of blood and temper-Roman, Celtic, Saxon, Danish, Norman-survived in the fiber of our modern youth, country-bred or city-bred, in spite of the weakening influences of slumdom, vicious environment, ill-nourishment, clerks.h.i.+p, and sedentary life. The Londoner was a good soldier. The Liverpools and Manchesters were hard and tough in attack and defense. The South Country battalions of Devons and Dorsets, Suss.e.x and Somersets, were not behindhand in ways of death. The Scots had not lost their fire and pa.s.sion, but were terrible in their onslaught. The Irish battalions, with recruiting cut off at the base, fought with their old gallantry, until there were few to answer the last roll-call. The Welsh dragon encircled Mametz Wood, devoured the ”c.o.c.kchafers” on Pilkem Ridge, and was hard on the trail of the Black Eagle in the last offensive. The Australians and Canadians had all the British quality of courage and the benefit of a harder physique, gained by outdoor life and unweakened ancestry. In the ma.s.s, apart from neurotic types here and there among officers and men, the stock was true and strong. The spirit of a seafaring race which has the salt in its blood from Land's End to John o' Groat's and back again to Wapping had not been destroyed, but answered the ruffle of Drake's drum and, with simplicity and gravity in royal navy and in merchant marine, swept the highways of the seas, hunted worse monsters than any fabulous creatures of the deep, and s.h.i.+rked no dread adventure in the storms and darkness of a s.p.a.cious h.e.l.l. The men who went to Zeebrugge were the true sons of those who fought the Spanish Armada and singed the King o' Spain's beard in Cadiz harbor. The victors of the Jutland battle were better men than Nelson's (the scourings of the prisons and the sweepings of the press-gang) and not less brave in frightful hours. Without the service of the British seamen the war would have been lost for France and Italy and Belgium, and all of us.

The flower of our youth went out to France and Flanders, to Egypt, Palestine, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and Saloniki, and it was a fine flower of gallant boyhood, clean, for the most part eager, not brutal except by intensive training, simple in minds and hearts, chivalrous in instinct, without hatred, adventurous, laughter-loving, and dutiful. That is G.o.d's truth, in spite of vice-rotted, criminal, degenerate, and brutal fellows in many battalions, as in all crowds of men.

In millions of words during the years of war I recorded the bravery of our troops on the western front, their patience, their cheerfulness, suffering, and agony; yet with all those words describing day by day the incidents of their life in war I did not exaggerate the splendor of their stoic spirit or the measure of their sacrifice. The heroes of mythology were but paltry figures compared with those who, in the great war, went forward to the roaring devils of modern gun-fire, dwelt amid high explosives more dreadful than dragons, breathed in the fumes of poison-gas more foul than the breath of Medusa, watched and slept above mine-craters which upheaved the h.e.l.l-fire of Pluto, and defied thunderbolts more certain in death-dealing blows than those of Jove.

Something there was in the spirit of our men which led them to endure these things without revolt-ideals higher than the selfish motives of life. They did not fight for greed or glory, not for conquest, nor for vengeance. Hatred was not the inspiration of the ma.s.s of them, for I am certain that except in hours when men ”see red” there was no direct hatred of the men in the opposite trenches, but, on the other hand, a queer sense of fellow-feeling, a humorous sympathy for ”old Fritz,” who was in the same b.l.o.o.d.y mess as themselves. Our generals, it is true, hated the Germans. ”I should like one week in Cologne,” one of them told me, before there seemed ever a chance of getting there, ”and I would let my men loose in the streets and turn a blind eye to anything they liked to do.”

Some of our officers were inspired by a bitter, unrelenting hate.

”If I had a thousand Germans in a row,” one of them said to me, ”I would cut all their throats, and enjoy the job.”

But that was not the mentality of the men in the ranks, except those who were murderers by nature and pleasure. They gave their cigarettes to prisoners and filled their water-bottles and chatted in a friendly way with any German who spoke a little English, as I have seen them time and time again on days of battle, in the fields of battle. There were exceptions to this treatment, but even the Australians and the Scots, who were most fierce in battle, giving no quarter sometimes, treated their prisoners with humanity when they were bundled back. Hatred was not the motive which made our men endure all things. It was rather, as I have said, a refusal in their souls to be beaten in manhood by all the devils of war, by all its terrors, or by its beastliness, and at the back of all the thought that the old country was ”up against it” and that they were there to avert the evil.

Young soldiers of ours, not only of officer rank, but of ”other ranks,” as they were called, were inspired at the beginning, and some of them to the end, with a simple, boyish idealism. They saw no other causes of war than German brutality. The enemy to them was the monster who had to be destroyed lest the world and its beauty should perish-and that was true so long as the individual German, who loathed the war, obeyed the discipline of the herd-leaders and did not revolt against the natural laws which, when the war had once started, bade him die in defense of his own Fatherland. Many of those boys of ours made a dedication of their lives upon the altar of sacrifice, believing that by this service and this sacrifice they would help the victory of civilization over barbarism, and of Christian morality over the devil's law. They believed that they were fighting to dethrone militarism, to insure the happiness and liberties of civilized peoples, and were sure of the grat.i.tude of their nation should they not have the fate to fall upon the field of honor, but go home blind or helpless.

I have read many letters from boys now dead in which they express that faith.

”Do not grieve for me,” wrote one of them, ”for I shall be proud to die for my country's sake.”

”I am happy,” wrote another (I quote the tenor of his letters), ”because, though I hate war, I feel that this is the war to end war. We are the last victims of this way of argument. By smas.h.i.+ng the German war-machine we shall prove for all time the criminal folly of militarism and Junkerdom.”

There were young idealists like that, and they were to be envied for their faith, which they brought with them from public schools and from humble homes where they had read old books and heard old watchwords. I think, at the beginning of the war there were many like that. But as it continued year after year doubts crept in, dreadful suspicions of truth more complex than the old simplicity, a sense of revolt against sacrifice unequally shared and devoted to a purpose which was not that for which they had been called to fight.

They had been told that they were fighting for liberty. But their first lesson was the utter loss of individual liberty under a discipline which made the private soldier no more than a number. They were ordered about like galley-slaves, herded about like cattle, treated individually and in the ma.s.s with utter disregard of their comfort and well-being. Often, as I know, they were detrained at rail-heads in the wind and rain and by ghastly errors of staff-work kept waiting for their food until they were weak and famished. In the base camps men of one battalion were drafted into other battalions, where they lost their old comrades and were unfamiliar with the speech and habits of a crowd belonging to different counties, the Suss.e.x men going to a Manchester regiment, the Yorks.h.i.+re men being drafted to a Surrey unit. By R.T.O.'s and A.M.L.O.'s and camp commandments and town majors and staff pups men were bullied and bundled about, not like human beings, but like dumb beasts, and in a thousand ways injustice, petty tyranny, hard work, degrading punishments for trivial offenses, struck at their souls and made the name of personal liberty a mockery. From their own individuality they argued to broader issues. Was this war for liberty? Were the ma.s.ses of men on either side fighting with free will as free men? Those Germans-were they not under discipline, each man of them, forced to fight whether they liked it or not? Compelled to go forward to sacrifice, with machine-guns behind them to shoot them down if they revolted against their slave-drivers? What liberty had they to follow their conscience or their judgment-”Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die”-like all soldiers in all armies. Was it not rather that the ma.s.ses of men engaged in slaughter were serving the purpose of powers above them, rival powers, greedy for one another's markets, covetous of one another's wealth, and callous of the lives of humble men? Surely if the leaders of the warring nations were put together for even a week in some such place as Hooge, or the Hohenzollern redoubt, afflicted by the usual hara.s.sing fire, poison-gas, mine explosions, lice, rats, and the stench of rotting corpses, with the certainty of death or dismemberment at the week-end, they would settle the business and come to terms before the week was out. I heard that proposition put forward many times by young officers of ours, and as an argument against their own sacrifice they found it unanswerable.

V

The condition and psychology of their own country as they read about it in the Paris Daily Mail, which was first to come into their billets, filled some of these young men with distress and disgust, strengthened into rage when they went home on leave. The deliberate falsification of news (the truth of which they heard from private channels) made them discredit the whole presentation of our case and state. They said, ”Propaganda!” with a sharp note of scorn. The breezy optimism of public men, preachers, and journalists, never downcast by black news, never agonized by the slaughter in these fields, minimizing horrors and loss and misery, crowing over the enemy, prophesying early victory which did not come, accepting all the destruction of manhood (while they stayed safe) as a necessary and inevitable ”misfortune,” had a depressing effect on men who knew they were doomed to die, in the law of averages, if the war went on. ”d.a.m.n their optimism!” said some of our officers. ”It's too easy for those behind the lines. It is only we who have the right of optimism. It's we who have to do the dirty work! They seem to think we like the job! What are they doing to bring the end nearer?”

The frightful suspicion entered the heads of some of our men (some of those I knew) that at home people liked the war and were not anxious to end it, and did not care a jot for the sufferings of the soldiers. Many of them came back from seven days' leave fuming and sullen. Everybody was having a good time. Munition-workers were earning wonderful wages and spending them on gramophones, pianos, furs, and the ”pictures.” Everybody was gadding about in a state of joyous exultation. The painted flapper was making herself sick with the sweets of life after office hours in government employ, where she did little work for a lot of pocket-money. The society girl was dancing bare-legged for ”war charities,” pus.h.i.+ng into bazaars for the ”poor, dear wounded,” getting her pictures into the papers as a ”notable warworker,” married for the third time in three years; the middle-cla.s.s cousin was driving staff-officers to Whitehall, young gentlemen of the Air Service to Hendon, junior secretaries to their luncheon. Millions of girls were in some kind of fancy dress with b.u.t.tons and shoulder-straps, breeches and puttees, and they seemed to be making a game of the war and enjoying it thoroughly. Oxford dons were harvesting, and proud of their prowess with the pitchfork-behold their patriotism!-while the boys were being blown to bits on the Yser Ca.n.a.l. Miners were striking for more wages, factory hands were downing tools for fewer hours at higher pay, the government was paying any price for any labor-while Tommy Atkins drew his one-and-twopence and made a little go a long way in a wayside estaminet before jogging up the Menin road to have his head blown off. The government had created a world of parasites and placemen housed in enormous hotels, where they were engaged at large salaries upon mysterious unproductive labors which seemed to have no result in front-line trenches. Government contractors were growing fat on the life of war, ama.s.sing vast fortunes, juggling with excess profits, battening upon the flesh and blood of boyhood in the fighting-lines. These old men, these fat men, were breathing out fire and fury against the Hun, and vowing by all their G.o.ds that they would see their last son die in the last ditch rather than agree to any peace except that of destruction. There were ”fug committees” (it was Lord Kitchener's word) at the War Office, the Board of Trade, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the Ministry of Munitions, the Ministry of Information, where officials on enormous salaries smoked cigars of costly brands and decided how to spend vast sums of public money on ”organization” which made no difference to the man stifling his cough below the parapet in a wet fog of Flanders, staring across No Man's Land for the beginning of a German attack.

In all cla.s.ses of people there was an epidemic of dancing, jazzing, card-playing, theater-going. They were keeping their spirits up wonderfully. Too well for men slouching about the streets of London on leave, and wondering at all this gaiety, and thinking back to the things they had seen and forward to the things they would have to do. People at home, it seemed, were not much interested in the life of the trenches; anyhow, they could not understand. The soldier listened to excited tales of air raids. A bomb had fallen in the next street. The windows had been broken. Many people had been killed in a house somewhere in Hackney. It was frightful. The Germans were devils. They ought to be torn to pieces, every one of them. The soldier on leave saw crowds of people taking shelter in underground railways, working-men among them, st.u.r.dy lads, panic-stricken. But for his own wife and children he had an evil sense of satisfaction in these sights. It would do them good. They would know what war meant-just a little. They would not be so easy in their d.a.m.ned optimism. An air raid? Lord G.o.d, did they know what a German barrage was like? Did they guess how men walked day after day through hara.s.sing fire to the trenches? Did they have any faint idea of life in a sector where men stood, slept, ate, worked, under the fire of eight-inch sh.e.l.ls, five-point-nines, trench-mortars, rifle-grenades, machine-gun bullets, snipers, to say nothing of poison-gas, long-range fire on the billets in small farmsteads, and on every moonlight night air raids above wooden hutments so closely crowded into a small s.p.a.ce that hardly a bomb could fall without killing a group of men.

”Oh, but you have your dugouts!” said a careless little lady.

The soldier smiled.

It was no use talking. The people did not want to hear the tragic side of things. Bairnsfather's ”Ole Bill” seemed to them to typify the spirit of the fighting-man... ”'Alf a mo', Kaiser!”...

The British soldier was gay and careless of death-always. Sh.e.l.l-fire meant nothing to him. If he were killed-well, after all, what else could he expect? Wasn't that what he was out for? The twice-married girl knew a charming boy in the air force. He had made love to her even before Charlie was ”done in.” These dear boys were so greedy for love. She could not refuse them, poor darlings! Of course they had all got to die for liberty, and that sort of thing. It was very sad. A terrible thing-war!... Perhaps she had better give up dancing for a week, until Charlie had been put into the casualty lists.

”What are we fighting for?” asked officers back from leave, turning over the pages of the Sketch and Tatler, with pictures of race-meetings, strike-meetings, bare-backed beauties at war bazaars, and portraits of profiteers in the latest honors list. ”Are we going to die for these swine? These parasites and prost.i.tutes? Is this the war for n.o.ble ideals, liberty, Christianity, and civilization? To h.e.l.l with all this filth! The world has gone mad and we are the victims of insanity.”

Some of them said that below all that froth there were deep and quiet waters in England. They thought of the anguish of their own wives and mothers, their n.o.ble patience, their uncomplaining courage, their spiritual faith in the purpose of the war. Perhaps at the heart England was true and clean and pitiful. Perhaps, after, all, many people at home were suffering more than the fighting-men, in agony of spirit. It was unwise to let bitterness poison their brains. Anyhow, they had to go on. How long, how long, O Lord?

”How long is it going to last?” asked the London Rangers of their chaplain. He lied to them and said another three months. Always he had absolute knowledge that the war would end three months later. That was certain. ”Courage!” he said. ”Courage to the end of the last lap!”