MY desire was once to pass a peaceful and pleasant winter in Brussels,
attending to my work, improving my mind. Brussels is a bright and
cheerful town, and I think I could have succeeded had it not been for the
Belgian Army. The Belgian Army would follow me about and worry me.
Judging of it from my own experience, I should say it was a good army.
Napoleon laid it down as an axiom that your enemy never ought to be
permitted to get away from you—never ought to be allowed to feel, even
for a moment, that he had shaken you off. What tactics the Belgian Army
might adopt under other conditions I am unable to say, but against me
personally that was the plan of campaign it determined upon and carried
out with a success that was astonishing, even to myself.
I found it utterly impossible to escape from the Belgian Army. I made a
point of choosing the quietest and most unlikely streets, I chose all
hours—early in the morning, in the afternoon, late in the evening. There
were moments of wild exaltation when I imagined I had given it the slip.
I could not see it anywhere, I could not hear it.
“Now,” said I to myself, “now for five minutes’ peace and quiet.”
I had been doing it injustice: it had been working round me. Approaching
the next corner, I would hear the tattoo of its drum. Before I had gone
another quarter of a mile it would be in full pursuit of me. I would
jump upon a tram, and travel for miles. Then, thinking I had shaken it
off, I would alight and proceed upon my walk. Five minutes later another
detachment would be upon my heels. I would slink home, the Belgian Army
pursuing me with its exultant tattoo. Vanquished, shamed, my insular
pride for ever vanished, I would creep up into my room and close the
door. The victorious Belgian Army would then march back to barracks.
If only it had followed me with a band: I like a band. I can loaf
against a post, listening to a band with anyone. I should not have
minded so much had it come after me with a band. But the Belgian Army,
apparently, doesn’t run to a band. It has nothing but this drum. It has
not even a real drum—not what I call a drum. It is a little boy’s drum,
the sort of thing I used to play myself at one time, until people took it
away from me, and threatened that if they heard it once again that day
they would break it over my own head. It is cowardly going up and down,
playing a drum of this sort, when there is nobody to stop you. The man
would not dare to do it if his mother was about. He does not even play
it. He walks along tapping it with a little stick. There’s no tune,
there’s no sense in it. He does not even keep time. I used to think at
first, hearing it in the distance, that it was the work of some young
gamin who ought to be at school, or making himself useful taking the baby
out in the perambulator: and I would draw back into dark doorways,
determined, as he came by, to dart out and pull his ear for him. To my
astonishment—for the first week—I learnt it was the Belgian Army, getting
itself accustomed, one supposes, to the horrors of war. It had the
effect of making me a peace-at-any-price man.
They tell me these armies are necessary to preserve the tranquility of
Europe. For myself, I should be willing to run the risk of an occasional
row. Cannot someone tell them they are out of date, with their bits of
feathers and their odds and ends of ironmongery—grown men that cannot be
sent out for a walk unless accompanied by a couple of nursemen, blowing a
tin whistle and tapping a drum out of a toy shop to keep them in order
and prevent their running about: one might think they were chickens. A
herd of soldiers with their pots and pans and parcels, and all their
deadly things tied on to them, prancing about in time to a tune, makes me
think always of the White Knight that Alice met in Wonderland. I take it
that for practical purposes—to fight for your country, or to fight for
somebody else’s country, which is, generally speaking, more popular—the
thing essential is that a certain proportion of the populace should be
able to shoot straight with a gun. How standing in a line and turning
out your toes is going to assist you, under modern conditions of warfare,
is one of the many things my intellect is incapable of grasping.
In mediæval days, when men fought hand to hand, there must have been
advantage in combined and precise movement. When armies were mere iron
machines, the simple endeavour of each being to push the other off the
earth, then the striking simultaneously with a thousand arms was part of
the game. Now, when we shoot from behind cover with smokeless powder,
brain not brute force—individual sense not combined solidity is surely
the result to be aimed at. Cannot somebody, as I have suggested, explain
to the military man that the proper place for the drill sergeant nowadays
is under a glass case in some museum of antiquities?
I lived once near the Hyde Park barracks, and saw much of the drill
sergeant’s method. Generally speaking, he is a stout man with the walk
of an egotistical pigeon. His voice is one of the most extraordinary
things in nature: if you can distinguish it from the bark of a dog, you
are clever. They tell me that the privates, after a little practice,
can—which gives one a higher opinion of their intelligence than otherwise
one might form. But myself I doubt even this statement. I was the owner
of a fine retriever dog about the time of which I am speaking, and
sometimes he and I would amuse ourselves by watching Mr. Sergeant
exercising his squad. One morning he had been shouting out the usual
“Whough, whough, whough!” for about ten minutes, and all had hitherto
gone well. Suddenly, and evidently to his intense astonishment, the
squad turned their backs upon him and commenced to walk towards the
Serpentine.
“Halt!” yelled the sergeant, the instant his amazed indignation permitted
him to speak, which fortunately happened in time to save the detachment
from a watery grave.
The squad halted.
“Who the thunder, and the blazes, and other things told you to do that?”
The squad looked bewildered, but said nothing, and were brought back to
the place where they were before. A minute later precisely the same
thing occurred again. I really thought the sergeant would burst. I was
preparing to hasten to the barracks for medical aid. But the paroxysm
passed. Calling upon the combined forces of heaven and hell to sustain
him in his trouble, he requested his squad, as man to man, to inform him
of the reason why to all appearance they were dispensing with his
services and drilling themselves.
At this moment “Columbus” barked again, and the explanation came to him.
“Please go away, sir,” he requested me. “How can I exercise my men with
that dog of yours interfering every five minutes?”
It was not only on that occasion. It happened at other times. The dog
seemed to understand and take a pleasure in it. Sometimes meeting a
soldier, walking with his sweetheart, Columbus, from behind my legs,
would bark suddenly. Immediately the man would let go the girl and
proceed, involuntarily, to perform military tricks.
The War Office authorities accused me of having trained the dog. I had
not trained him: that was his natural voice. I suggested to the War
Office authorities that instead of quarrelling with my dog for talking
his own language, they should train their sergeants to use English.
They would not see it. Unpleasantness was in the air, and, living where
I did at the time, I thought it best to part with Columbus. I could see
what the War Office was driving at, and I did not desire that
responsibility for the inefficiency of the British Army should be laid at
my door.
Some twenty years ago we, in London, were passing through a riotous
period, and a call was made to law-abiding citizens to enrol themselves
as special constables. I was young, and the hope of trouble appealed to
me more than it does now. In company with some five or six hundred other
more or less respectable citizens, I found myself one Sunday morning in
the drill yard of the Albany Barracks. It was the opinion of the
authorities that we could guard our homes and protect our wives and
children better if first of all we learned to roll our “eyes right” or
left at the given word of command, and to walk with our thumbs stuck out.
Accordingly a drill sergeant was appointed to instruct us on these
points. He came out of the canteen, wiping his mouth and flicking his
leg, according to rule, with the regulation cane. But, as he approached
us, his expression changed. We were stout, pompous-looking gentlemen,
the majority of us, in frock coats and silk hats. The sergeant was a man
with a sense of the fitness of things. The idea of shouting and swearing
at us fell from him: and that gone there seemed to be no happy medium
left to him. The stiffness departed from his back. He met us with a
defferential attitude, and spoke to us in the language of social
intercourse.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” said the sergeant.
“Good morning,” we replied: and there was a pause.
The sergeant fidgetted upon his feet. We waited.
“Well, now, gentlemen,” said the sergeant, with a pleasant smile, “what
do you say to falling in?”
We agreed to fall in. He showed us how to do it. He cast a critical eye
along the back of our rear line.
“A little further forward, number three, if you don’t mind, sir,” he
suggested.
Number three, who was an important-looking gentleman, stepped forward.
The sergeant cast his critical eye along the front of the first line.
“A little further back, if you don’t mind, sir,” he suggested, addressing
the third gentleman from the end.
“Can’t,” explained the third gentleman, “much as I can do to keep where I
am.”
The sergeant cast his critical eye between the lines.
“Ah,” said the sergeant, “a little full-chested, some of us. We will
make the distance another foot, if you please, gentlemen.”
In pleasant manner, like to this, the drill proceeded.
“Now then, gentlemen, shall we try a little walk? Quick march! Thank
you, gentlemen. Sorry to trouble you, but it may be necessary to
run—forward I mean, of course.. So if you really do not mind, we will
now do the double quick. Halt! And if next time you can keep a little
more in line—it has a more imposing appearance, if you understand me.
The breathing comes with practice.”
If the thing must be done at all, why should it not be done in this way?
Why should not the sergeant address the new recruits politely:
“Now then, you young chaps, are you all ready? Don’t hurry yourselves:
no need to make hard work of what should be a pleasure to all of us.
That’s right, that’s very good indeed—considering you are only novices.
But there is still something to be desired in your attitude, Private
Bully-boy. You will excuse my being personal, but are you knock-kneed
naturally? Or could you, with an effort, do you think, contrive to give
yourself less the appearance of a marionette whose strings have become
loose? Thank you, that is better. These little things appear trivial, I
know, but, after all, we may as well try and look our best—
“Don’t you like your boots, Private Montmorency? Oh, I beg your pardon.
I thought from the way you were bending down and looking at them that
perhaps their appearance was dissatisfying to you. My mistake.
“Are you suffering from indigestion, my poor fellow? Shall I get you a
little brandy? It isn’t indigestion. Then what’s the matter with it?
Why are you trying to hide it? It’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’ve all
got one. Let it come forward man. Let’s see it.”
Having succeeded, with a few such kindly words, in getting his line into
order, he would proceed to recommend healthy exercise.
“Shoulder arms! Good, gentlemen, very good for a beginning. Yet still,
if I may be critical, not perfect. There is more in this thing than you
might imagine, gentlemen. May I point out to Private Henry Thompson that
a musket carried across the shoulder at right angles is apt to
inconvenience the gentleman behind. Even from the point of view of his
own comfort, I feel sure that Private Thompson would do better to follow
the usual custom in this matter.
“I would also suggest to Private St. Leonard that we are not here to
practice the art of balancing a heavy musket on the outstretched palm of
the hand. Private St. Leonard’s performance with the musket is decidedly
clever. But it is not war.
“Believe me, gentlemen, this thing has been carefully worked out, and no
improvement is likely to result from individual effort. Let our idea be
uniformity. It is monotonous, but it is safe. Now, then, gentlemen,
once again.”
The drill yard would be converted into a source of innocent delight to
thousands. “Officer and gentleman” would become a phrase of meaning. I
present the idea, for what it may be worth, with my compliments, to Pall
Mall.
The fault of the military man is that he studies too much, reads too much
history, is over reflective. If, instead, he would look about him more
he would notice that things are changing. Someone has told the British
military man that Waterloo was won upon the playing fields of Eton. So
he goes to Eton and plays. One of these days he will be called upon to
fight another Waterloo: and afterwards—when it is too late—they will
explain to him that it was won not upon the play field but in the class
room.
From the mound on the old Waterloo plain one can form a notion of what
battles, under former conditions, must have been. The other battlefields
of Europe are rapidly disappearing: useful Dutch cabbages, as Carlyle
would have pointed out with justifiable satisfaction, hiding the theatre
of man’s childish folly. You find, generally speaking, cobblers happily
employed in cobbling shoes, women gossipping cheerfully over the washtub
on the spot where a hundred years ago, according to the guide-book, a
thousand men dressed in blue and a thousand men dressed in red rushed
together like quarrelsome fox-terriers, and worried each other to death.
But the field of Waterloo is little changed. The guide, whose
grandfather was present at the battle—quite an extraordinary number of
grandfathers must have fought at Waterloo: there must have been whole
regiments composed of grandfathers—can point out to you the ground across
which every charge was delivered, can show you every ridge, still
existing, behind which the infantry crouched. The whole business was
began and finished within a space little larger than a square mile. One
can understand the advantage then to be derived from the perfect moving
of the military machine; the uses of the echelon, the purposes of the
linked battalion, the manipulation of centre, left wing and right wing.
Then it may have been worth while—if war be ever worth the while—which
grown men of sense are beginning to doubt—to waste two years of a
soldier’s training, teaching him the goose-step. In the twentieth
century, teaching soldiers the evolutions of the Thirty Years’ War is
about as sensible as it would be loading our iron-clads with canvas.
I followed once a company of Volunteers across Blackfriars Bridge on
their way from Southwark to the Temple. At the bottom of Ludgate Hill
the commanding officer, a young but conscientious gentleman, ordered
“Left wheel!” At once the vanguard turned down a narrow alley—I forget
its name—which would have led the troop into the purlieus of Whitefriars,
where, in all probability, they would have been lost for ever. The whole
company had to be halted, right-about-faced, and retired a hundred yards.
Then the order “Quick march!” was given. The vanguard shot across
Ludgate Circus, and were making for the Meat Market.
At this point that young commanding officer gave up being a military man
and talked sense.
“Not that way,” he shouted: “up Fleet Street and through Middle Temple
Lane.”
Then without further trouble the army of the future went upon its way.