Beneath the mask of cheeriness England agonised. Fathers grew old
and white and withered because of their sons’ sacrifice, but kept a
stiff upper lip when the telegraph boy was the messenger of death.
The mothers of boys out there suffered martyrdom in wakeful nights,
in dreadful dreams, though they kept smiling when the boys came home
between the battles and—worst of all—went back again. They hid their
tears, steeled their hearts to courage. Even the pretty ladies—the
most frivolous, the most light-hearted—gave their love so easily
because it was all they had to give, and they would grudge nothing
to the boys. Apart from a vicious little set, the women were beyond
words wonderful in service and self-sacrifice. In spite of all the
weakness of human nature and the low passions stirred up by the war,
the British people as a whole during these years of great ordeal were
sublime in resignation and spiritual courage. In millions of little
houses in mean streets, and in all the houses of the rich, to which a
double knock came with news of a dead or wounded boy, the awful meaning
of the war burnt its way into the soul of the people. But they would
not yield to weakness and had a stubborn obstinacy of faith in final
victory—somehow, in a way they could not see. Anyhow, they wouldn’t
“let down” their men or show the white feather. They did not know that
many of the men were sullen because of this unreasonable optimism, this
“bloody cheerfulness.” They did not know that in the trenches, under
an awful gunfire, many men looked back to England as to another world,
which they no longer knew, from which they were cut off by spiritual
distances no longer to be bridged, and for whose safety, frivolity,
profiteers and prostitutes they were asked to die, to be shell-shocked,
gassed or mutilated, under incompetent generalship and for inadequate
reasons.
The meaning of the war in those men’s minds had become less simple
and clear-cut since the days when it seemed a straight fight between
idealism and brutality—the Allies with all the right on their side
against the Germans with all the wrong. To the end some men thought
like that, and they were lucky. They were the generals, the statesmen,
and, now and then, the fighting men with unbending will and purpose.
But to many of our officers and men sitting in their ditches, as I
know, the war was no longer as simple as that. It was no longer, they
thought, a conflict between idealism and brutality. It had developed
into a monstrous horror, a crime against humanity itself, in which all
the fighting nations were involved equally in a struggle for existence
against powers beyond their own control. The machinery of destruction
was greater than the men who were its victims. Human flesh and spirit
were of no avail against long-range guns and high explosives. The
common German soldiers, blown to bits by our guns, torn to fragments
by our mines, poisoned by our gas, as our men were so destroyed, had
no more responsibility for these devilish things than we had. It may
have been so in the beginning—though that was doubtful. What did they
know in their peasant skulls? But now they were just the victims of
the ghastly madness that had stricken us all, of the crime against
civilisation into which we had all staggered. There was no getting out
of it, of course. The Germans had to be killed or they would kill us,
but the whole damned thing had happened against the will of those who
on both sides of the lines cowered under screeching shells and hated
it. Surely to God, they argued, it ought _not_ to have happened! It was
civilisation that had been at fault, not those poor devils in the mud
and mire.
It was the statesmen and politicians who were guilty of this thing, or
the Kings and the Emperors, or the schoolmasters and the journalists,
or the whole structure of society based on competition and commercial
greed, supported by armies and fleets, or the incurable stupidity of
the human race, or a denial of God in the hearts of men; but not the
fault, certainly, of those fellows from Bavaria and Saxony who were
waiting for our next attack and writing picture-postcards in their
dug-outs to women who would soon be widows. So many of our men began
to talk and think, as every padre knows and as I know. So, even in
France, the soldiers argued, if we may believe Barbusse and others,
whom I believe as evidence of that. So certainly the German troops were
thinking, as I heard from prisoners and afterwards from those who had
fought to the last. The original meaning of the war altered, or was
overwhelmed, as man sank more deeply into the mud and misery of it on
both sides. It was only a few who held fast to its first principles
of right and wrong, simple, clear, and utterly divided by a line of
trenches and barbed wire.