By the end of the Battle of the Somme the first impulses of the war
had died down, the first emotions had been forgotten. Disillusion,
dreadful experience, bitterness, had turned the edge of idealism. One
cannot understand the mind of men ten years after without going back
to that period of disenchantment. The young men who had hurried to
the recruiting stations were on fire with enthusiasm for France and
Belgium, for the rescue of liberty and civilisation, and for love of
England. They became rather damped in the training camps because of so
much red-tape, eyewash, spit and polish, and humiliation. They were
handled, not like men filled with heroic spirit, but often like swine.
Sergeant-majors swore at them in filthy language; old officers, too
feeble for the front or sent back in disgrace for their incompetence,
set them to ridiculous, time-wasting work. Reviews, inspections,
parades, took the heart out of them. They had not joined for this ...
they were trained and staled by the time they went to France, though
their spirits rose at the thought of getting into “the real thing”
at last. They didn’t like it. They hated it when its routine became
familiar and horrible and deadly. They were ready to stick it out to
the death—they did so—but certain values altered as their illusions
were shattered. It was all very well—though not at all pleasant—to
die for civilisation or liberty, but it was another thing to die for
some old General they had never seen because he ordered them to attack
positions which were wrongly marked on his maps, or because he was
competing in “raids” with the General commanding the line on his left,
or because he believed in keeping up the “fighting spirit” of his
troops by ordering the capture of German trenches which made another
salient in his line and were bound to be blotted out in mud and blood
as soon as the German guns received their signals. _Dulce et decorum
est pro patria mori._ Sweet to die for one’s country—in the first
flash of enthusiasm—and afterwards necessary anyhow, though distinctly
unpleasant to have both legs blown off, or both eyes blinded, or one’s
entrails torn out. But not in any way comforting to be sent over the
top with a battalion unsupported on the right or left, or with wrong
orders, or without a barrage to smash the enemy’s wire, or by some
incredible blunder which meant the massacre of a man’s best pals and
a hole in his stomach. Inevitable, perhaps. Yes, but unforgivable by
its victims when it became a habit.... Over and over again battalions
were wiped out because some one had blundered. It was the same on the
German front, the French front, every front. And its effect in the
minds of the fighting men was the same in all nations and on both sides
of the line. It made them rage against the Staff. It made them feel
that the front line men were being sacrificed, wasted and murdered by
pompous old gentlemen and elegant young men living very comfortably
behind the lines in pleasant châteaux of France, far from shell fire,
growing “flower borders” on their breasts. Men talked like that, with
increasing irony. They were unfair, often. It’s not easy to be fair
when one’s certain death is being ordered by influential folk who do
not share the risks.