spectacular acceptance of every obvious appearance, the younger minds
passed very rapidly to a critical and intricate examination. In the
first blaze of indignation against Germany, in the first enthusiasm,
there was a disposition to trust and confide in every one in a position
of authority and responsibility. The War Office was supposed—against
every possibility—to be planning wisely and acting rapidly; the wisdom
of the Admiralty was taken for granted, the politicians now could have
no end in view but victory. It was assumed that Sir Edward Carson could
become patriotic, Lord Curzon self-forgetful, Mr. Asquith energetic, and
Mr. Lloyd George straightforward. It was indeed a phase of extravagant
idealism. Throughout the opening weeks of the war there was an
appearance, there was more than an appearance, of a common purpose and a
mutual confidence. The swift response of the Irish to the call of the
time, the generous loyalty of India, were like intimations of a new age.
The whole Empire was uplifted; a flush of unwonted splendour suffused
British affairs.
Then the light faded again. There was no depth of understanding to
sustain it; habit is in the long run a more powerful thing than even the
supremest need. In a little time all the inglorious characteristics of
Britain at peace, the double-mindedness, the slackness, were reappearing
through the glow of warlike emotion. Fifty years of undereducation are
not to be atoned for in a week of crisis. The men in power were just the
same men. The inefficient were still inefficient; the individualists
still self-seeking. The party politicians forgot their good resolutions,
and reverted to their familiar intrigues and manœuvres. Redmond and
Ireland learnt a bitter lesson of the value of generosity in the face of
such ignorant and implacable antagonists as the Carsonites. Britain, it
became manifest, had neither the greatness of education nor yet the
simplicity of will to make war brilliantly or to sustain herself
splendidly. At every point devoted and able people found themselves
baffled by the dull inertias of the old system. And the clear flame of
enthusiasm that blazed out from the youth of the country at the first
call of the war was coloured more and more by disillusionment as that
general bickering which was British public life revived again, and a
gathering tale of waste, failure, and needless suffering mocked the
reasonable expectation of a swift and glorious victory.
The change in the thought and attitude of the youth of Britain is to be
found expressed very vividly in the war poetry of the successive years.
Such glowing young heroes as Julian Grenfell and Rupert Brooke shine
with a faith undimmed; they fight consciously, confident of the nearness
of victory; they sing and die in what they believe to be a splendid
cause and for a splendid end. An early death in the great war was not an
unmitigated misfortune. Three years later the young soldier’s mind found
a voice in such poetry as that of young Siegfried Sassoon, who came home
from the war with medals and honours only to denounce the war in verse
of the extremest bitterness. His song is no longer of picturesque
nobilities and death in a glorious cause; it is a cry of anger at the
old men who have led the world to destruction; of anger against the
dull, ignorant men who can neither make war nor end war; the men who
have lost the freshness and simplicity but none of the greed and egotism
of youth. Germany is no longer the villain of the piece. Youth turns
upon age, upon laws and institutions, upon the whole elaborate
rottenness of the European system, saying: “_What is this to which you
have brought us? What have you done with our lives?_”
No story of these years can ever be true that does not pass under a
shadow. Of the little group of youths and men who have figured in this
story thus far, there was scarcely one who was not either killed
outright or crippled or in some way injured in the Great War—excepting
only Huntley. Huntley developed a deepening conscience against warfare
as the war went on, and suffered nothing worse than some unpleasant
half-hours with Tribunals and the fatigues of agricultural labour.
Death, which had first come to Joan as a tragic end to certain
“kittays,” was now the familiar associate of her every friend. Her
confidence in the safety of the world, in the wisdom of human laws and
institutions, in the worth and dignity of empires and monarchs, and the
collective sanity of mankind was withdrawn as a veil is withdrawn, from
the harsh realities of life.
Wilmington, with his humourless intensity, was one of the first to bring
home to her this disillusionment and tragedy of the youth of the world.
He liked pure mathematics; it was a subject in which he felt
comfortable. He had worked well in the first part of the mathematical
tripos, and he was working hard in the second part when the war broke
out. He fluctuated for some days between an utter repudiation of all war
and an immediate enlistment, and it was probably the light and colour of
Joan in his mind that made Wilmington a warrior. War was a business of
killing, he decided, and what he had to do was to apply himself and his
mathematics to gunnery as efficiently as possible, learning as rapidly
as might be all that was useful about shells, guns and explosives, and
so get to the killing of Germans thoroughly, expeditiously, and
abundantly. He was a particularly joyless young officer, white-faced and
intent, with an appearance of scorn that presently developed from
appearance into reality, for most of his colleagues. He was working as
hard and as well as he could. At first with incredulity and then with
disgust he realized that the ordinary British officer was not doing so.
They sang songs, they ragged, they left things to chance, they thought
blunders funny, they condoned silliness and injustice in the powers
above. He would not sing nor rag nor drink. He worked to the verge of
exhaustion. But this exemplary conduct, oddly enough, did not make him
unpopular either with the junior officers or with his seniors. The
former tolerated him and rather admired him; the latter put work upon
him and sought to promote him.
In quite a little while as it seemed—for in those days, while each day
seemed long and laborious and heavy, yet the weeks and months passed
swiftly—he was a captain in France, and before the end of 1915 he wrote
to say that his major had left him practically in command of his battery
for three weeks. He had been twice slightly wounded by that time, but he
got little leisure because he was willing and indispensable.
He wrote to Joan very regularly. He was a motherless youth, and Joan was
not only his great passion but his friend and confidante. His interest
in his work overflowed into his letters; they were more and more about
gunnery and the art of war, which became at last, it would seem, a
serious rival to Joan in his affections. He described ill, but he would
send her reasoned statements of unanswerable views. He could not
understand why considerations that were so plain as to be almost
obvious, were being universally disregarded by the Heads and the War
Office. He appealed to Joan to read what he had to say, and tell him
whether he or the world was mad. When he came back on leave in the
spring of 1916, she was astonished to find that he was still visibly as
deeply in love with her as ever. The fact of it was he had words for his
gunnery and military science, but he had no words, and that was the
essence of his misfortune, for his love for Joan.
But the burthen of his story was bitter disillusionment at the levity
with which his country could carry on a war that must needs determine
the whole future of mankind. He would write out propositions of this
sort: “It is manifest that success in warfare depends upon certain
primary factors, of which generalship is one. No country resolute to win
a war will spare any effort to find the _best men_, and make them its
generals and leaders irrespective of every other consideration. No
honourable patriots will permit generals to be appointed by any means
except the _best selective methods_, and no one who cares for his
country will obstruct (1) the _promotion_, (2) _trying over_, and (3)
_prompt removal_, if they fail to satisfy the most exacting tests, of
all possible men. And next consider what sort of men will be the best
commanders. They must be _fresh-minded young men_. All the great
generals of the world, the supreme cases, the Alexanders, Napoleons, and
so on, have shown their quality before thirty even in the days when
strategy and tactics did not change very greatly from year to year, and
now when the material and expedients of war make warfare practically a
_new thing_ every few years, the need for fresh young commanders is far
more urgent than ever it has been. But the British army is at present
commanded by oldish men who are manifestly of not more than mediocre
intelligence, and who have no knowledge of this new sort of war that has
arisen. It is a war of guns and infantry—with aeroplanes coming in more
and more—and most of the higher positions are held by cavalry officers;
the artillery is invariably commanded by men unused to the handling of
such heavy guns as we are using, who stick far behind our forward
positions and decline any practical experience of our difficulties. They
put us in the wrong positions, they move us about absurdly; young
officers have had to work out most of the problems of gun-pits and so
forth for themselves—against resistance and mere stupid interference
from above. The Heads have no idea of the kind of work we do or of the
kind of work we could do. They are worse than amateurs; they are
unteachable fossils. But why is this so? If the country is serious about
the war, why does it permit it? If the Government is serious about the
war, why does it permit it? If the War Office is serious about the war,
why does it permit it? If G.H.Q. is serious about the war, why does it
permit it? What is wrong? There is a hitch here I don’t understand. Am I
over-serious, and is all this war really some sort of gross, grim joke,
Joan? Do I take life too seriously?
“Joan, in this last push this battery did its little job _right_; we cut
all the wire opposite us and blew out every blessed stake. We made a
nice tidy clean up. It was quite easy to do, given hard work. If I
hadn’t done it I ought either to have been shot for neglect or dismissed
for incapacity. But on our left it wasn’t done. Well, there were at
least a hundred poor devils of our infantrymen on that wire, a hundred
mothers’ sons, hanging like rags on it or crumpled up below. I saw them.
It made me sick. And I saw the chap who was chiefly responsible for
that, Major Clutterwell, a little bit screwed, being the life and soul
of a little party in Hazebrouck three days after! He ought to have been
the life and soul of a hari kari party, but either he is too big a cad
or too big a fool—or both. The way they shy away our infantrymen over
here is damnable. They are the finest men in the world, I’m convinced;
they will go at anything, and the red tabs send them into impossible
jobs, fail to back them up—always they fail to back them up; they
neglect them, Joan; they neglect them even when they are fighting and
dying! There are men here, colonels, staff officers, I would like to
beat about the head with an iron bar....”
This was an unusually eloquent passage. Frequently his letters were
mainly diagram to show for example how we crowded batteries to brass
away at right angles to the trenches when we ought to enfilade them, or
some such point. Sometimes he was trying to establish profound truths
about the proper functions of field guns and howitzers. For a time he
was gnawing a bitter grievance. “I was told to shell a line I couldn’t
reach. The contours wouldn’t allow of it. You can do a lot with a shell,
but you cannot make it hop slightly and go round a corner. There is a
definite limit to the height to which a gun will lob a shell. I tried to
explain these elementary limitations of gunfire through the telephone,
and I was told I should be put under arrest if I did not obey orders. I
wasn’t up against a commander, I wasn’t up against an intelligence; I
was up against a silly old man in a temper. So I put over a barrage
about fifty yards beyond the path—the nearest possible. Every one was
perfectly satisfied—the Boche included. Thus it is that the young
officer is subdued to the medium he works in.”
At times Wilmington would embark on a series of propositions to
demonstrate with mathematical certitude that if the men and material
wasted at Loos had been used in the Dardanelles, the war would have been
decided by the end of 1915. But the topic to which his mind recurred
time after time was the topic of efficient leadership. “Modern war
demands continuity of idea, continuity of will, and continuous
progressive adaptation of means and methods,” he wrote—in two separate
letters. In the second of these he had got on to a fresh notion.
“Education in England is a loafer education; it does not point to an
end; it does not drive through; it does not produce _minds that can hold
out_ through a long effort. The young officers come out here with the
best intentions in the world, but one’s everyday life is shaped not by
our intentions but our habits. Their habits of mind are loafing habits.
They learnt to loaf at school. Caxton, I am now convinced, is one of the
best schools in England; but even at Caxton we did not fully acquire the
_habit of steadfast haste_ which modern life demands. Everything that
gets done out here is done by a spurt. With the idea behind it of
presently doing nothing. The ordinary state of everybody above the
non-commissioned ranks is loafing. At the present moment my major is
shooting pheasants; the batteries to the left of us are cursing because
they have to shift—it holds up their scheme for a hunt. Just as though
artillery work wasn’t the most intense sport in the world—especially now
that we are going to have kite balloons and do really scientific
observing. Even the conscientious men of the Kitchener-Byng school don’t
really seem to me to _get on_; they work like Trojans at established and
routine stuff but they don’t keep up inquiry. They are human, all too
human. Man is a sedentary animal, and the schoolmaster exists to prevent
his sitting down comfortably.” This from Wilmington without a suspicion
of jesting. “This human weakness for just living can only be corrected
in schools. The more I scheme about increasing efficiency out here, the
more I realize that it can’t be done here, that one has to go right back
to the schools and begin with _a more continuous urge_. When this war is
over I shall try to be a schoolmaster. I shall hate it most of the time,
but then I hate most things....”
But Wilmington never became a schoolmaster. He got a battery of six-inch
guns just before the Somme push in 1916, and he went forward with them
into positions he chose and built up very carefully, only to be shifted
against his wishes almost at once to a new and, he believed, an
altogether inferior position. He was blown to nothingness by a German
shell while he was constructing a gun pit.
§ 6
Wilmington was not the first of Joan’s little company to be killed. Joan
had the gift of friendship. She was rare among girls in that respect.
She was less of an artist in egotism than most of her contemporaries;
there were even times when she could be self-forgetful to the pitch of
untidiness. Two other among that handful of young soldiers who were
killed outright and who had been her friends, wrote to her with some
regularity right up to the times of their deaths, and found a comfort in
doing so. They wrote to her at first upon neat notepaper adorned with
regimental crests, but their later letters as they worked their slow
passages towards the place of death were pencilled on thin paper. She
kept them all. She felt she could have been a good sister to many
brothers.
One of these two who died early was Winterbaum. She did not hear from
this young man of the world for some weeks after the declaration of war.
Then came a large photograph of himself in cavalry uniform, and a manly,
worldly letter strongly reminiscent of Kipling and anticipatory of
Gilbert Frankau. “There is something splendid about this life after
all,” he wrote. “It’s good to be without one’s little luxuries for a
space, democratically undistinguished among one’s fellows. It’s good to
harden up until nothing seems able to bruise one any more. I bathed
yesterday, without water, Joan—just a dry towel, and that not over
clean—was all that was available. After this is all over I shall have
such an appetite for luxury—I shall be fierce, Joan.”
Those early days were still days of unrestricted plenty, and the
disposition of the British world was to pet and indulge everything in
khaki. Young Winterbaum wore his spurs and the most beautiful
riding-breeches to night clubs and great feasts in the more
distinguished restaurants. He took his car about with him, his neat
little black-and-white car, fitted with ivory fopperies. He tried hard
to take it with him to France. From France his scribbled letters became
more and more heroic in tone. “Poor David has been done in,” he said. “I
am now only three from the Contango peerage. Heaven send I get no
nearer! No Feudal dignities for me. I would give three gilded chambers
at any time for one reasonably large and well-lit studio. And—I have a
kind of affection for my cousins.”
His prayer was answered. He got no nearer to the Contango peerage. The
powers above him decided that a little place called Loos was of such
strategic value to the British army as to be worth the lives of a great
number of young men, and paid in our generous British fashion even more
than the estimate. Winterbaum was part of the price. No particulars of
his death ever came to Joan and Peter. The attack began brightly, and
then died away. There was a failure to bring up reserves and grasp
opportunity. Winterbaum vanished out of life in the muddle—one of
thousands. He was the first of the little company of Joan’s friends to
be killed.
Bunny Cuspard spread a less self-conscious, more western, and altogether
more complicated psychology before Joan’s eyes. Like Wilmington he had
faltered at the outset of the war between enlistment and extreme
pacifism, but unlike Wilmington he had never reconciled himself to his
decision. Bunny was out of sympathy with the fierceness of mankind; he
wanted a kindly, prosperous, rather funny world where there is nothing
more cruel than gossip; that was the world he was fitted for. He
repeated in his own person and quality the tragedy of Anatole France. He
wanted to assure the world and himself that at heart everything was
quite right and magnificent fun, to laugh gaily at everything, seeing
through its bristling hostilities into the depth of genial absurdity
beneath.
And so often he could find no genial absurdity.
He had always pretended that discovering novel sorts of cakes for his
teas or new steps for dances was the really serious business of life.
One of his holiday amusements had been “Little Wars,” which he played
with toy soldiers and little model houses and miniature woods of twigs
and hills of boarding in a big room at his Limpsfield home. He would
have vacation parties for days to carry out these wars, and he and his
guests conducted them with a tremendous seriousness. He had elaborated
his miniature battle scenery more and more, making graveyards, churches,
inns, walls, fences—even sticking absurd notices and advertisements upon
the walls, and writing epitaphs upon his friends in the graveyard. He
had loved the burlesque of it. He had felt that it brought history into
a proper proportion to humour. But one of the drawbacks had always been
that as the players lay upon the floor to move their soldiers and guns
about they crushed down his dear little toy houses and woods....
His mind still fought desperately to see the war as a miniature.
He got to a laugh ever and again by a great effort, but some of the
things that haunted his imagination would not under any circumstances
dissolve in laughter. Things that other people seemed to hear only to
dismiss remained to suppurate in his mind. One or two of the things that
were most oppressive to him he never told Joan. But she had a glimpse
now and then of what was there, through the cracks in his laughter.
He had heard a man telling a horrible story of the opening bombardment
of Ypres by the Germans. The core of the story was a bricked tunnel near
the old fortifications of the town, whither a crowd of refugees had fled
from the bombardment, and into which a number of injured people had been
carried. A shell exploded near the exit and imprisoned all those people
in a half-light without any provisions or help. There was not even
drinking-water for the wounded. A ruptured drain poured a foul trickle
across the slimy floor on which the wounded and exhausted lay. Now quite
near and now at a distance the shells were still bursting, and through
that thudding and uproar, above all the crouching and murmuring
distresses of that pit of misery sounded the low, clear, querulous voice
of a little girl who was talking as she died, talking endlessly of how
she suffered, of how her sister could not come to help her, of her
desire to be taken away; a little, scolding, indignant spirit she was,
with a very clear explicit sense of the vast impropriety of everything
about her.
“Why does not some one come?”
“Be tranquil,” an old woman’s voice remonstrated time after time. “Help
will come.”
But for most of the people in the tunnel help never came. Through a
slow, unhurrying night of indescribable pain and discomfort, in hunger,
darkness, and an evil stench, their lives ebbed away one by one....
That dark, dreadful, stinking place, quivering to the incessant thunder
of guns, sinking through twilight into night, lit by flashes and distant
flames, and passing through an eternity of misery to a cold, starving
dawn, threaded by the child’s shrill voice, took a pitiless grip upon
Bunny’s imagination. He could neither mitigate it nor forget it.
How could one laugh at the Kaiser with this rankling in his mind? He
could not fit it into any merry scheme of things, and he could not bear
any scheme that was not merry; and not to be able to fit dreadful things
into a scheme that does at last prevail over them was, for such a mind
as Bunny’s, to begin to drift from sanity.
The second story that mutely reinforced the shrill indictment of that
little Belgian girl was a description he had heard of some poor devil
being shot for cowardice at dawn. A perplexed, stupid youth of two- or
three-and-twenty, with little golden hairs that gleamed on a pallid
cheek, was led out to a heap of empty ammunition boxes in a desolate and
mutilated landscape of mud and splintered trees under a leaden sky, and
set down on a box to die. It was as if Bunny had seen that living body
with his own eyes, the body that jumped presently to the impact of the
bullets and lurched forward, and how the officer in command—who had been
himself but a little child in a garden a dozen years or more ago—came up
to the pitiful prostrate form and put his revolver to the head behind
the ear that would never hear again and behind the eye that stared and
glazed, and pulled the trigger “to make sure.”
Bunny could feel that revolver behind his own ear. It felt as a dental
instrument feels in the mouth.
“Oh, my God!” cried Bunny; “oh, my God!” starting up from his sack of
straw on the floor in his billet in the middle of the night.
“Oh! _shut_ it!” said the man who was trying to sleep beside him.
“Sorry!” said Bunny.
“You keep it for the Germans, mate.”
“Oh! Oh! If I could kill this damned Kaiser with ten thousand torments!”
whispered Bunny, quieting down....