Not a day but some winning thing was said or done by one or other of
them. A man whom I hardly knew had been changing his book when he heard
me talking about green envelopes.
'Do you want a green envelope?' he asked point-blank.
'As a matter of fact, I do.'
'Then I'll see if I can't get you one.'
Now, the point about the 'green envelope' is the printed declaration on
the outside, that the contents 'refer to nothing but private and family
matters'; this being signed by the sender, your letter is censorable
only at the base, and will not be read by anybody with whom you are in
daily contact. There is, I believe, a weekly issue of one of these
envelopes per man. This I only remembered as the generous soul was
turning away.
'Don't you go giving me anything you want yourself!' I called after him.
He just looked over his shoulder. 'Then it wouldn't be much of a gift,
would it?' was all he said; but I shall never give a copper to a
crossing-sweeper without trying to forget his words.
That man was a driver in the R.H.A., and beyond the fact that he had
just been reading _The White Company_ I know nothing about him. They
cropped up under every cap-badge, these crisp, articulate, enlightening
men; they had shaken off their marching feet the dust of every walk in
civil life, and it was only here and there a tenacious speck caught the
eye. I _have_ heard a Southern in Jock's clothing work in a word about
the season-ticket and the 'silk hat' of his City days; but as a rule a
soldier no more thinks of trading upon his civilian past than a small
boy at a Public School dreams of bragging about his people. More than in
any community on earth, the man at the front has to depend upon his own
personality, absolutely without any extraneous aid whatsoever; and the
knowledge that he has to do so is a tremendous sharpener of
individuality.
Yet your arrant individualist is the last to see it. I remember
recommending _The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_ to a young man full
of brains and sensibility--one of that Field Ambulance to which, as we
saw it, the description applies in bulk. He came back enthusiastic, as I
knew he would, and we discussed the book. I quarrelled with the passage
in which Gissing rails at the weekly drill in his school playground:
'even after forty years' the memory brought on a 'tremor of passionate
misery.... The loss of individuality seemed to me sheer disgrace.' My
Red Cross friend applauded the sentiments that I deplored; himself as
individual as a man need be, he assured me that the Army _did_ crush the
individuality out of a man; and when, refraining from the _argumentum ad
hominem_, I called his attention to many others present who showed no
sign of such subdual, he said at any rate it happened to the weaker men.
It may: and if a man has no personality of his own, will he be so much
the worse for the composite substitute to be acquired in the Army?
Better an efficient machine than a mere nonentity; but an efficient
machine may be many things besides, and, under the British system,
nearly always is. The truth is that discipline and restriction do not
'crush' the normal personality in the least. They compress it; and
compression is strength. They prevent a man from 'slopping over'; they
conserve his essence. They may not 'make a man' of one who is a man
already, but they do exalt and intensify the quality of manhood; they do
make a good man in that sense better, and a goodish man out of many a
one who has been accounted 'no good' all his life.
Often when the hut was full of magnificent young life; bodies at their
very best, perfect instruments in perfect tune; minds inquisitive,
receptive, experienced beyond the dreams of pre-war philosophy, and
honest as minds must be on the brink of Beyond; often and often have I
looked down the hut and compared the splendid fellows I saw before me
with the peace-time types perceptibly represented by so many. Small
tradesmen, clerks, shop assistants, grooms and gardeners, labourers in
every overcrowded field, what they were losing in the softer influences
of life, that one might guess, but what they were gaining all the time,
in mind, body, and character, that one could see. It did not lessen the
heart-break of the thought that perhaps half would never see their homes
again; but it did console with the conviction that the half who survived
would be twice the men they ever would or could have been without the
war. Nay, they were twice their old selves already, if I am any judge of
a man who talks to me. I only know I never foregathered with a couple of
them without feeling that we were all three the harder and yet the
tenderer men for our humble sacrifices, our aching hearts and our
precarious lives. I never looked thoughtfully upon a body of these
younger brothers without thinking of the race to spring from loins so
tried in such a fire. Never--if only because it was the first comfort
that came to mind.
But it was not the only one. Here before my eyes, day after day, were
scores of young men not only 'in the pink,' but in better 'form' than
perhaps they themselves suspected; not only intensely alive but
manifestly enjoying life, the corporate life of constant comradeship and
a common if sub-conscious excitement, to an extent impossible for them
to appreciate at the time. They put me in mind of a man I know who
volunteered for South Africa in his athletic youth, and has ever since
been celebrated among his friends for the remark of a lifetime. Somebody
had asked him how he liked the Army. 'The Army?' cried this young
patriot. '_Once a soldier, always a civilian!_' None the less, he was
one of those I met in France, a Major in the A.S.C., which he had joined
(under a false age) at the beginning of the war. And how many, now the
first to adopt his watchword, would not jump at the chance to emulate
his deed in another fifteen unadventurous years!
Many, we are told, will anticipate the inconceivable by making their own
adventures, if not their own war on society, such are the brutalising
effects of war! In this proposition there is probably as much as a grain
of truth to a sandhill of imbecility; but we shall hear of that grain on
all sides; the soldier-criminal will be only too certain of a copious
press, the bombing burglar of his headline. The people we are not going
to hear about, and have no desire to recognise as such, are the rascals
reformed, the weak men strengthened, the prodigals born again in this
war, and at least less likely to die a second death-in-life. With all my
heart I believe that, with few exceptions, the only characters which
will have suffered by the war are those of such youngish men as have
managed to stand out of it to the end, and men of all ages and all
conditions who have failed throughout to put their personal
considerations in their pockets, and left it to other men and other
men's sons to die or bleed for them. I hope they are not more numerous
than the men who have been 'brutalised' by war. At all events there were
no successful shirkers about our huts in France; and that may have made
the atmosphere what it was. All might not have the heart for war; here
and there some sapient head might wag aloof; but at least all had their
lives and bodies in the cause, there were no safe skins, no cold
detachment, no complacent lookers-on. It was an atmosphere of manhood
the more potent for the plain fact that no man regarded himself as such
in any marked degree, or for one moment in the light of a hero.
That is all I have to say about their heroism. It is an absolute, like
the beauty of Venus or the goodness of God. Daily and hourly they are
rising to heights that keep all the world always wondering--when,
indeed, it does not kill the power of wonderment. But their dead level,
the level on which I saw them every day, lies high enough for me. It is
not only what discipline has done for them, not only what the habit of
sacrifice has made of them, that appeals and must appeal to the older
man privileged to mix with soldiers at the front. It is also the
wonderful quality of his fellow-countrymen as revealed in these
tremendous years. That was there all the time, but it took the war to
show it up, it took the war to make us see it. I might have known that
rough poor lads were reading Ruskin and Carlyle, that a Northamptonshire
shoemaker was as likely as anybody else to be steeped in Charles Lamb,
or a telegraph-clerk and his wife to tramp the Yorkshire dales with
Wordsworth and Keats about their persons. Yet I, for one, more shame for
me! would never have imagined such men if the God of battles had not put
me to school in my Rest Hut for one short half-term.
Neither could I have invented, at my best or worst, a young City clerk
who played the piano divinely by the hour together, or a very shy young
man, a chemist's assistant from the most unhallowed suburb, for whom I
had to order Beethoven and Chopin, Liszt and Brahms and Schumann,
because _he_ could play even better, but not from memory. Those two lads
were the joy of the hut, of hundreds who frequented it. And how much joy
had they given in their lodgings or behind the shop? Who had ever been
prouder of them than their comrades, or done so much to 'bring them
out'? Yet, need I say it? they both belonged to that clever,
intellectual, fascinating Field Ambulance to which the Rest Hut owed so
much; and I shouldn't wonder if they both agreed with that other nice
fellow, their thoroughly individual comrade who declared that 'the Army
crushes the individuality out of a man!'
'WE FALL TO RISE'
(_March-April, 1918_)