Even the men who fought through those years seldom speak of their
experience. It is fading out of their own minds, though it seemed
unforgettable. They are forgetting the names of the villages in France
and Flanders where they were billeted, or where they fought, or where
they passed a hundred times with their guns and transport under shell
fire. Good heavens!—don’t you remember?—that place where the waggons
were “pasted,” where the Sergeant-Major was blown to bits, where old
Dick got his “Blighty” wound? No. Something has passed a sponge across
those tablets of memory—things that happened afterwards. Now and again
at Divisional banquets officers try to revive the spirit of those
days and exchange yarns about trench warfare and days of battle. It
is queer how they remember only the jokes, the laughable things, the
comradeship, the thrill. The horror has passed.
Something else has passed; the comradeship itself, between officers and
men, between all classes united for a time in common sacrifice and
service, annihilating all differences of rank and social prejudice and
wealth at the beginning of the war. It seemed then as though nothing
could ever again build up those barriers of caste. The muddiest,
dirtiest, commonest soldier from the slums or the factories or the
fields was a hero before whom great ladies were eager to kneel in
devotion and love, to cut away his blood-stained clothes, to dress his
wounds. In the canteens the pretty ladies slaved like drudges to give
cocoa or any comfort to “the boys” from the front. In the trenches
or in ruins under shell fire young officers wrote home about their
men: “They’re too splendid for words!... I am proud to command such a
topping crowd.... They make me feel ashamed of things I used to think
about the working man. There is nothing too good for them.” The British
Government thought so too, and promised them great rewards—“homes for
heroes,” good wages for good work, “a world safe for democracy.”