For England’s sake! Yes, those young officers and men who went through
the battles of the Somme and many others, seeing no end to the war,
and the only chance of life in a lucky wound, endured everything of
fear and filth, because at the back of their minds and hidden in their
hearts was the remembrance of some home or plot of earth, some old
village with an old church, which meant to them—England, or Scotland,
or Wales. They “stuck it” all because in their spirit, consciously or
unconsciously, was the love of their country, and in their blood the
old urge of its pride. But as the war went on even this, though it
was never lost and flamed up again in the darkest hours, was overcast
by doubts and angers and ironies. They were all so damned cheerful
in little old England! They took the losses of men as a matter of
course. Business as usual and keep the home fires burning! That was
all very well, but those “charity bazaars for the poor dear wounded,”
all that jazz and dancing and love-making, giving the boys a good time
in their seven days’ leave, earning wonderful wages in the munition
works, making enormous profits out of shipping and contracts, spending
their money like water, filling the theatres, keeping up the spirit of
the nation, wasn’t it too much of a good thing when viewed from the
angle of a trench with one’s pals’ dead bodies in No Man’s Land, and a
blasted world around one, and death screaming overhead?
The profiteers were determined to “see this thing through,” to the
bitter end. The Statesmen would fight to the last man. The old
gentlemen on military service boards were outraged by poor devils with
wives and babes who tried to evade conscription. At dinner parties
and banquets these same old gentlemen, in clean linen, grew purple in
the face with eloquence about the unthinkable shame of peace without
victory. They would sacrifice their last son, or at least all their
numerous nephews, on the altar of patriotism. They would go without
sugar to the end of time rather than yield to a brutal enemy. Noble
sentiments! But some of the sons and the numerous nephews who were
going to be sacrificed on the altar of patriotism were secretly hoping
that diplomacy, or strategy, or some miracle of God might find some
decent way of peace before that sacrifice was accomplished. They were
in love with life, those boys of ours. They didn’t want to die, strange
as it may have seemed to those who thought it was their duty to die and
look pleasant about it.
They were unfair, those fellows who sat in wet trenches cursing the
levity of England, writing sonnets, some of them about the murderous
old men and the laughing ladies. It was true that some old men were
making money—piles of it—out of all this business of war. It was true
that some of the pretty ladies seemed callous of the death of the boys
they “vamped.” It was true that large numbers of men in factories and
workshops were making fantastic wages in safe jobs while poor old
Tommy was dodging death in the mud for fourteen pence a day. It was
true that war and casualties had become so familiar to the mind that
many folk at home were beginning to accept it all as a normal thing.
It was true that cheerfulness, gaiety, high spirits, were adopted as
the only code of life, and that melancholy, fear, pessimism, prophets
of woe, were barred as people of bad form. It was true that the
imagination of the average man and woman at home was incapable of
visualising a front line trench or a battlefield under a German barrage
fire. It was true that the newspapers were full of false optimism and
false victories. It was true that in a war against militarism England
had been militarised, and that officers on seven days’ leave from
Hell-on-Earth were insulted by little squirts called A.P.M.’s because
they didn’t carry gloves or because their collars were too light in
colour, with a thousand other tyrannies. It was true that the hatred
of women against “the Huns” was not shared by men who had come to have
a fellow-feeling in their hearts for German peasants caught in the
trap of war against their will, with no less courage than the men who
killed them or whom they killed. It was true that parsons professing
Christianity were more bloodthirsty than soldiers who cried out to God
in hours of agony and blasphemed in hours of rage. It was true that in
England in war time there was a noisy cheerfulness that seemed like
callousness to those condemned to death. But it was _not_ true that
England was indifferent to the sufferings of the men, or that all that
optimism was due to carelessness, or that all the laughing ladies were
having the time of their lives because of war’s delightful thrill and
the chance of three husbands, or more lovers, in rapid sequence as
battle followed battle and wiped out young life.