Then came a letter which plunged abruptly into criticism.
"My dear Parent, this is a swearing letter. I must let go to somebody.
And somehow none of the other chaps are convenient. I don't know if I
ought to be put against a wall and shot for it, but I hereby declare
that all the officers of this battalion over and above the rank of
captain are a constellation of incapables--and several of the captains
are herewith included. Some of them are men of a pleasant disposition
and carefully aborted mental powers, and some are men of an unpleasant
disposition and no mental powers at all. And I believe--a little
enlightened by your recent letter to _The Times_--that they are a fair
sample of the entire 'army' class which has got to win this war. Usually
they are indolent, but when they are thoroughly roused they are fussy.
The time they should spend in enlarging their minds and increasing their
military efficiency they devote to keeping fit. They are, roughly
speaking, fit--for nothing. They cannot move us thirty miles without
getting half of us left about, without losing touch with food and
shelter, and starving us for thirty-six hours or so in the process, and
they cannot count beyond the fingers of one hand, not having learnt to
use the nose for arithmetical operations.... I conclude this war is
going to be a sort of Battle of Inkerman on a large scale. We chaps in
the ranks will have to do the job. Leading is 'off.'...
"All of this, my dear Parent, is just a blow off. I have been needlessly
starved, and fagged to death and exasperated. We have moved
five-and-twenty miles across country--in fifty-seven hours. And without
food for about eighteen hours. I have been with my Captain, who has been
billeting us here in Cheasingholt. Oh, he is a MUFF! Oh God! oh God of
Heaven! what a MUFF! He is afraid of printed matter, but he controls
himself heroically. He prides himself upon having no 'sense of locality,
confound it!' Prides himself! He went about this village, which is a
little dispersed, at a slight trot, and wouldn't avail himself of the
one-inch map I happened to have. He judged the capacity of each room
with his eye and wouldn't let me measure, even with God's own paces. Not
with the legs I inherit. 'We'll put five fellahs hea!' he said. 'What
d'you want to measure the room for? We haven't come to lay down
carpets.' Then, having assigned men by _coup d'oeil_, so as to congest
half the village miserably, he found the other half unoccupied and had
to begin all over again. 'If you measured the floor space first, sir,' I
said, 'and made a list of the houses--' 'That isn't the way I'm going to
do it,' he said, fixing me with a pitiless eye....
"That isn't the way they are going to do it, Daddy! The sort of thing
that is done over here in the green army will be done over there in the
dry. They won't be in time; they'll lose their guns where now they lose
our kitchens. I'm a mute soldier; I've got to do what I'm told; still,
I begin to understand the Battle of Neuve Chapelle.
"They say the relations of men and officers in the new army are
beautiful. Some day I may learn to love my officer--but not just yet.
Not till I've forgotten the operations leading up to the occupation of
Cheasingholt.... He muffs his real job without a blush, and yet he would
rather be shot than do his bootlaces up criss-cross. What I say about
officers applies only and solely to him really.... How well I understand
now the shooting of officers by their men.... But indeed, fatigue and
exasperation apart, this shift has been done atrociously...."
The young man returned to these criticisms in a later letter.
"You will think I am always carping, but it does seem to me that nearly
everything is being done here in the most wasteful way possible. We
waste time, we waste labour, we waste material, oh Lord! how we waste
our country's money. These aren't, I can assure you, the opinions of a
conceited young man. It's nothing to be conceited about.... We're bored
to death by standing about this infernal little village. There is
nothing to do--except trail after a small number of slatternly young
women we despise and hate. I _don't_, Daddy. And I don't drink. Why have
I inherited no vices? We had a fight here yesterday--sheer boredom.
Ortheris has a swollen lip, and another private has a bad black eye.
There is to be a return match. I perceive the chief horror of warfare is
boredom....
"Our feeding here is typical of the whole system. It is a system
invented not with any idea of getting the best results--that does not
enter into the War Office philosophy--but to have a rule for everything,
and avoid arguments. There is rather too generous an allowance of bread
and stuff per man, and there is a very fierce but not very efficient
system of weighing and checking. A rather too generous allowance is, of
course, a direct incentive to waste or stealing--as any one but our
silly old duffer of a War Office would know. The checking is for
quantity, which any fool can understand, rather than for quality. The
test for the quality of army meat is the smell. If it doesn't smell bad,
it is good....
"Then the raw material is handed over to a cook. He is a common soldier
who has been made into a cook by a simple ceremony. He is told, 'You are
a cook.' He does his best to be. Usually he roasts or bakes to begin
with, guessing when the joint is done, afterwards he hacks up what is
left of his joints and makes a stew for next day. A stew is hacked meat
boiled up in a big pot. It has much fat floating on the top. After you
have eaten your fill you want to sit about quiet. The men are fed
usually in a large tent or barn. We have a barn. It is not a clean barn,
and just to make it more like a picnic there are insufficient plates,
knives and forks. (I tell you, no army people can count beyond eight or
ten.) The corporals after their morning's work have to carve. When they
have done carving they tell me they feel they have had enough dinner.
They sit about looking pale, and wander off afterwards to the village
pub. (I shall probably become a corporal soon.) In these islands before
the war began there was a surplus of women over men of about a million.
(See the publications of the Fabian Society, now so popular among the
young.) None of these women have been trusted by the government with the
difficult task of cooking and giving out food to our soldiers. No man of
the ordinary soldier class ever cooks anything until he is a soldier....
All food left over after the stew or otherwise rendered uneatable by the
cook is thrown away. We throw away pail-loads. _We bury meat_....
"Also we get three pairs of socks. We work pretty hard. We don't know
how to darn socks. When the heels wear through, come blisters. Bad
blisters disable a man. Of the million of surplus women (see above) the
government has not had the intelligence to get any to darn our socks.
So a certain percentage of us go lame. And so on. And so on.
"You will think all this is awful grousing, but the point I want to
make--I hereby to ease my feelings make it now in a fair round hand--is
that all this business could be done far better and far cheaper if it
wasn't left to these absolutely inexperienced and extremely exclusive
military gentlemen. They think they are leading England and showing us
all how; instead of which they are just keeping us back. Why in thunder
are they doing everything? Not one of them, when he is at home, is
allowed to order the dinner or poke his nose into his own kitchen or
check the household books.... The ordinary British colonel is a helpless
old gentleman; he ought to have a nurse.... This is not merely the
trivial grievance of my insulted stomach, it is a serious matter for the
country. Sooner or later the country may want the food that is being
wasted in all these capers. In the aggregate it must amount to a daily
destruction of tons of stuff of all sorts. Tons.... Suppose the war
lasts longer than we reckon!"
From this point Hugh's letter jumped to a general discussion of the
military mind.
"Our officers are beastly good chaps, nearly all of them. That's where
the perplexity of the whole thing comes in. If only they weren't such
good chaps! If only they were like the Prussian officers to their men,
then we'd just take on a revolution as well as the war, and make
everything tidy at once. But they are decent, they are charming.... Only
they do not think hard, and they do not understand that doing a job
properly means doing it as directly and thought-outly as you possibly
can. They won't worry about things. If their tempers were worse perhaps
their work might be better. They won't use maps or timetables or books
of reference. When we move to a new place they pick up what they can
about it by hearsay; not one of our lot has the gumption to possess a
contoured map or a Michelin guide. They have hearsay minds. They are
fussy and petty and wasteful--and, in the way of getting things done,
pretentious. By their code they're paragons of honour. Courage--they're
all right about that; no end of it; honesty, truthfulness, and so
on--high. They have a kind of horsey standard of smartness and pluck,
too, that isn't bad, and they have a fine horror of whiskers and being
unbuttoned. But the mistake they make is to class thinking with
whiskers, as a sort of fussy sidegrowth. Instead of classing it with
unbuttonedupness. They hate economy. And preparation....
"They won't see that inefficiency is a sort of dishonesty. If a man
doesn't steal sixpence, they think it a light matter if he wastes half a
crown. Here follows wisdom! _From the point of view of a nation at war,
sixpence is just a fifth part of half a crown_....
"When I began this letter I was boiling with indignation, complicated, I
suspect, by this morning's 'stew'; now I have written thus far I feel
I'm an ungenerous grumbler.... It is remarkable, my dear Parent, that I
let off these things to you. I like writing to you. I couldn't possibly
say the things I can write. Heinrich had a confidential friend at
Breslau to whom he used to write about his Soul. I never had one of
those Teutonic friendships. And I haven't got a Soul. But I have to
write. One must write to some one--and in this place there is nothing
else to do. And now the old lady downstairs is turning down the gas; she
always does at half-past ten. She didn't ought. She gets--ninepence
each. Excuse the pencil...."
That letter ended abruptly. The next two were brief and cheerful. Then
suddenly came a new note.
"We've got rifles! We're real armed soldiers at last. Every blessed man
has got a rifle. And they come from Japan! They are of a sort of light
wood that is like new oak and art furniture, and makes one feel that
one belongs to the First Garden Suburb Regiment; but I believe much can
be done with linseed oil. And they are real rifles, they go bang. We are
a little light-headed about them. Only our training and discipline
prevent our letting fly at incautious spectators on the skyline. I saw a
man yesterday about half a mile off. I was possessed by the idea that I
could get him--right in the middle.... Ortheris, the little beast, has
got a motor-bicycle, which he calls his 'b----y oto'--no one knows
why--and only death or dishonourable conduct will save me, I gather,
from becoming a corporal in the course of the next month...."