"When are you going? To-day?" shouted the Old Bird.
"Yes; there's a car to take us to the station in a quarter of an
hour."
They both left their unfinished breakfasts and tore off to their
billets. There it was but a matter of moments to throw a few things
into their packs. No one ever takes any luggage when going on leave.
They tore back to the mess to leave instructions for their servants,
and we strolled out _en masse_ to see the lucky fellows off.
The box-body drew away from where we were standing. We watched it grow
smaller and smaller down the long white road, and turned back with
regrets and pleasure in our hearts. With regrets, that we ourselves
were not the lucky ones, and knowing that for some of us leave would
never come; with pleasure, because one is always glad that a few of
the deserving reap a small share of their reward.
Then, strolling over to the Parade Ground, we heard the "Five Minutes"
sounding. Some dashed off to get their Sam Brownes, others called for
their servants to wipe a few flecks of dust from their boots and
puttees.
When the "Fall In" began, the entire Company was standing "At Ease" on
the Parade Ground. As the last note of the call sounded, the whole
parade sprang to "Attention," and the Major, who had been standing on
the edge of the field, walked forward to inspect.
Every morning was spent in this manner, except for those who had
special courses to follow. We devoted all our time and attention to
"Forming Fours" in as perfect a manner as possible; to saluting with
the greatest accuracy and fierceness; and to unwearying repetition of
every movement and detail, until machinelike precision was attained.
All that we were doing then is the very foundation and essence of good
discipline. Discipline is the state to which a man is trained, in
order that under all circumstances he shall carry out without
secondary reasoning any order that may be given him by a superior.
There is nothing of a servile nature in this form of obedience. Each
man realizes that it is for the good of the whole. By placing his
implicit confidence in the commands of one of a higher rank than his
own, he gives an earnest of his ability to himself command at some
future time. It is but another proof of the old adage, that the man
who obeys least is the least fitted to command.
[Illustration: _Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N.Y._
A BRITISH TANK IN THE LIBERTY LOAN PARADE IN NEW YORK]
When this war started, certain large formations, with the sheer lust
for fighting in their blood, did not, while being formed, realize the
absolute necessity of unending drill and inspection. Their first cry
was, "Give us a rifle, a bayonet, and a bomb, show us how to use them,
and we will do the rest." Acting upon this idea, they flung themselves
into battle, disregarding the iron rules of a preliminary training. At
first their very impetus and courage carried them over incredible
obstacles. But after a time, and as their best were killed off, the
original blaze died down, and the steady flame of ingrained discipline
was not there to take the place of burning enthusiasm. The terrible
waste and useless sacrifice that ensued showed only too plainly that
even the greatest individual bravery is not enough.
In this modern warfare there are many trials and experiences
unimagined before, which wear down the actual will-power of the men
who undergo them. When troops are forced to sit in a trench under the
most terrific shell-fire, the nerve-racking noise, the sight of their
comrades and their defences being blown to atoms, and the constant
fear that they themselves will be the next to go, all deprive the
ordinary mind of vital initiative. Having lost the active mental
powers that a human being possesses, they are reduced to the level of
machines. The officers and non-commissioned officers, on whom the
responsibility of leadership rests, have that spur to maintain their
equilibrium, but the private soldiers, who have themselves only to
think of, are the most open to this devastating influence. If these
machines are to be controlled, as they must be, by an exterior
intelligence, they must obey automatically, and if in the past
automatic obedience has not been implanted, there is nothing to take
its place.
The only means by which to obtain inherent response to a given order
is so to train a man in minute details, by constant, inflexible
insistence on perfection, that it becomes part of his being to obey
without thinking.
It must not be presumed that, in obtaining this almost inhuman
reaction, all independent qualities are obliterated. For, though a
man's mind is adjusted to carrying out, without questioning, any task
that is demanded of him, yet in the execution of this duty he is
allowed the full scope of his invention and initiative.
Thus, by this dull and unending routine, we laid the foundation of
that inevitable success toward which we were slowly working.
When the Company dismissed, the Major, Talbot, and the Old Bird walked
over to lunch together.
"Well, it's a great war, isn't it?" said the Major, turning to the
other two.
"It's very nice to have got through a couple of shows, sir," replied
Talbot. "What do you think about it, Old Bird?"
"Well, of course, war is all very well for those who like it. But give
me the Base every time," answered the Old Bird, true to his
reputation. Then, turning to the Major with his most ingratiating
smile, he said, "By the way, sir, what about a few days in Boulogne?"
FOOTNOTES:
[1] A late, third-rate English pantomime producer.
[2] Stands for Army Service Corps, and its equivalent in the American
Army is the Quartermaster's Corps.
IX
A PHILOSOPHY OF WAR
It has often been observed that if this war is to end war for all
time, and if all the sacrifices and misery and suffering will help to
prevent any recurrence of them, then it is well worth while.
In these days of immediate demands and quick results, this question is
too vague and too far-reaching to bring instant consolation. Apart
from that, too, it cannot decide whether any war, however great, can
ever abolish the natural and primitive fighting instinct in man.
The source from which we must draw the justification for our optimism
lies much nearer to hand. We must regard the effect that warring life
has already produced upon each individual member of the nations who
are and who are not engaged in it.
At the very heart of it is the effect on the man who is actually
fighting. Take the case of him who before the war was either working
in a factory, who was a clerk in a business house, or who was nothing
at all beyond the veriest loafer and bar-lounger. To begin with, he
was perhaps purely selfish. The foundation of his normal life was
self-protection. Whether worthless or worthy, whether hating or
respecting his superiors, the private gain and comfort for himself and
his was the object of his existence. He becomes a soldier, and that
act alone is a conversion. His wife and children are cared for, it is
true; but he himself, for a shilling a day, sells to his country his
life, his health, his pleasures, and his hopes for the future. To make
good measure he throws in cheerfulness, devotion, philosophy, humour,
and an unfailing kindness. One man, for instance, sells up three
grocery businesses in the heart of Lancashire, an ambition which it
has taken him ten years to accomplish. Without a trace of bitterness
he divorces himself from the routine of a lifetime, and goes out to
France to begin life again at the very bottom of a new ladder. He who
for years had many men under him is now under all, and receives,
unquestioningly, orders which in a different sphere he had been
accustomed to give. Apart from the mere letter of obedience and
discipline he gains a spirit of devotion and self-sacrifice, which
turns the bare military instrument into a divine virtue. He may, for
instance, take up the duties of an officer's servant. Immediately he
throws himself whole-heartedly into a new form of selfless generosity,
which leads him to a thousand ways of care and forethought, that even
the tenderest woman could hardly conceive. The man who receives this
unwavering devotion can only accept it with the knowledge that no one
can deserve it, and that it is greater gain to him who gives than to
him who takes.
What life of peace is there that produces this god-like fibre in the
plainest of men? Why, indeed, is it produced in the life of war? It is
because in war sordidness and petty worries are eliminated; because
the one great and ever-present fear, the fear of death, reduces all
other considerations to their proper values. The actual fear of death
is always present, but this fear itself cannot be sordid when men can
meet it of their own free will and with the most total absence of
cringing or of cowardice.
In commercial rivalry a man will sacrifice the friend of years to gain
a given sum, which will insure him increased material comforts. In war
a man will deliberately sacrifice the life for which he wanted those
comforts, to save perhaps a couple of men who have no claim on him
whatsoever. He who before feared any household calamity now throws
himself upon a live bomb, which, even though he might escape himself,
will without his action kill other men who are near it. This deed
loses none of its value because of the general belief among soldiers
that life is cheap. Other men's lives are cheap. One's own life is
always very dear.
One of the most precious results has been the resurrection of the
quality of admiration. The man who before the war said, "Why is he my
master?" is now only too glad to accept a leader who is a leader
indeed. He has learned that as his leader cannot do without him, so he
cannot do without his leader, and although each is of equal
importance in the scheme of affairs, their positions in the scheme are
different. He has learned that there is a higher equality than the
equality of class: it is the equality of spirit.
This same feeling is reflected, more especially among the leaders of
the men, in the complete disappearance of snobbishness. No such
artificial imposition can survive in a life where inherent value
automatically finds its level; where a disguise which in peace-time
passed as superiority, now disintegrates when in contact with this
life of essentials. For war is, above all, a reduction to essentials.
It is the touchstone which proves the qualities of our youth's
training. All those pleasures that formed the gamut of a young man's
life either fall away completely or find their proper place. Sport,
games, the open-air life, have taught him that high cheerfulness,
through failure or success, which makes endurance possible. But the
complicated, artificial pleasures of ordinary times have receded into
a dim, unspoken background. The wholesomeness of the existence that
he now leads has taught him to delight in the most simple and natural
of things. This throwing aside of the perversions and fripperies of an
over-civilization has forced him to regard them with a disgust that
can never allow him to be tempted again by their inducements of
delight and dissipation. The natural, healthy desires which a man is
sometimes inclined to indulge in are no longer veiled under a mask of
hypocrisy. They are treated in a perfectly outspoken fashion as the
necessary accompaniments to a hard, open-air life, where a man's
vitality is at its best. In consequence of this, and as the result of
the deepening of man's character which war inevitably produces, the
sense of adventure and mystery which accompanied the fulfilment of
these desires has disappeared, and with it to a great extent the
desires themselves have assumed a far less importance.
In peace, and especially in war, the young man's creed is casualness.
Not the casualness of carelessness, but that which comes from the
knowledge that up to each given point he has done his best. It is
this fundamental peace of mind which comes to a soldier that forms the
beauty of his life. The order received must be obeyed in its exact
degree, neither more nor less; and the responsibility, though great,
is clearly defined. Each man must use his individual intelligence
within the scope of the part assigned to him. The responsibility
differs in kind, but not in degree, and the last link of the chain is
as important as the first. There can be no shirking or shifting, and,
knowing this, each task is finished, rounded out, and put away. One
might think that this made thought mechanical: but it is mechanical
only in so far as each man's intelligence is concentrated on his own
particular duty, and each part working in perfect order contributes to
the unison through which the whole machine develops its power. Thus
the military life induces in men a clearer and more accurate habit of
thought, and teaches each one to do his work well and above all to do
his own work only.
From this very simplicity of life, which brings out a calmness of mind
and that equable temperament that minor worries can no longer shake,
springs the mental leisure which gives time for other and unaccustomed
ideas. Men who wittingly, time and again, have faced but escaped
death, will inevitably begin to think what death may mean. As the
first lessons of obedience teach each man that he needs a leader to
pass through a certain crisis, so the crisis of death, where man must
pass alone, demands a still higher Leader. With the admission that no
man is self-sufficient, that sin of pride, which is the strongest
barrier between a man and his God, falls away. He is forced, if only
in self-defence, to recognize that faith in some all-sufficient Power
is the only thing that will carry him through. If he could cut away
the thousand sins of thought, man would automatically find himself at
faith. It is the central but often hidden point of our intelligence;
and although there are a hundred roads that lead to it, they may be
completely blocked. The clean flame of the disciplined life burns away
the rubbish that chokes these roads, and faith becomes a nearer and
more constant thing.
The sadness of war lies in the loss of actual personalities, but it is
only by means of these losses that this surrender can be attained.
It must not be thought that faith comes overnight as a free gift. It
is a long and slow process of many difficult steps. There may be first
the actual literal crumbling, unknown in peace-time, of one's solid
surroundings, to be repeated perhaps again and again until the old
habit of reliance upon them is uprooted. Then comes the realization
that this life at the front has but two possible endings. The first is
to be so disabled that a man's fighting days are over. The other is
death. Instant death rather than a slow death from wounds. Every man
hopes for a wound which will send him home to England. That, however,
is only a respite, as his return to France follows upon his
convalescence. The other most important step is the loss of one's
friends. It is not the fact of actually seeing them killed, for in the
chaos and tumult of a battle the mind hardly registers such
impressions. One's only feeling is the purely primitive one of relief,
that it is another and not one's self. It is only afterwards, when
the excitement is over, and a man realizes that again there is a space
of life, for him, but not for his friend, that the loneliness and the
loss are felt. He then says to himself, "Why am I spared when many
better men have gone?" At first resentment swallows up all other
emotions. In time, when this bitterness begins to pass, the belief
that somehow this loss is of some avail, carries him a little farther
on the road to faith. This all comes to the man who before the war
believed that the world was made for his pleasure, and who treated
life from that standpoint. All that he wanted he took without asking.
Now, all that he has he gives without being asked.
Woman, too, gives more than herself. She gives her men, her peace of
mind and all that makes her life worth living. The man after all may
have little hope, but while he is alive he has the daily pleasures of
health, vitality, excitement, and a thousand interests. A woman has
but a choice of sorrows: the sorrow of unbearable suspense or the
acceptance of the end.
Yet it needed this war to show again to women what they could best do
in life: to love their men, bear their children, care for the sick and
suffering, and learn to endure. It has taught them also to accept from
man what he is able or willing to give, and to admit a higher claim
than their own. They have been forced to put aside the demands and
exactions which they felt before were their right, and to accept
loneliness and loss without murmur or question.
A woman who loses her son loses the supreme reason of her existence;
and yet the day after the news has come, she goes back to her work for
the sons of other women. If she has more sons to give she gives them,
and faces again the eternal suspense that she has lived through
before. The younger women, who in times of peace would have looked
forward to an advantageous and comfortable marriage, will now marry
men whom they may never see again after the ten days' honeymoon is
over, and will unselfishly face the very real possibility of widowhood
and lonely motherhood. They have had to learn the old lesson that work
for others is the only cure for sorrow, and they have learned too
that it is the only cure for all those petty worries and boredoms
which assailed them in times of peace. If they have learned this, then
again one may say that war is worth while.
What effect has the war had upon those countries who in the beginning
were not engaged in it? The United States, for instance, has for three
years been an onlooker. The people of that country have had every
opportunity to view, in their proper perspectives, the feelings and
changes brought about among the men and women of the combatant
countries. At first, the enormous casualties, the sufferings and the
sorrow, led them to believe that nothing was worth the price they
would have to pay, were they to enter into the lists. For in the
beginning, before that wonderful philosophy of spirit and cheerfulness
of outlook arose, and before the far-reaching effects of the sacrifice
of loved ones could be perceived, there seemed to be little reason or
right for such a train of desolation. They were perfectly justified,
too, in thinking this, when insufficient time had elapsed to enable
them to judge of the immense, sweeping, beneficial effects that this
struggle has produced in the moral fibre and stamina of the nations
engaged.
It must be remembered that the horrors of the imagination are far
worse than the realities. The men who fight and the women who tend
their wounds suffer mentally far less than those who paint the
pictures in their minds, from data which so very often are grossly
exaggerated. One must realize that the hardships of war are merely
transient. Men suffer untold discomforts, and yet, when these
sufferings are over and mind and body are at ease for a while, they
are completely forgotten. The only mark they leave is the
disinclination to undergo them again. But on those who do not realize
them in their actuality, they cause a far more terrifying effect.
Now, others, as well, have discovered that war's advantages outweigh
so much its losses. They who with their own eyes had seen the
wonderful fortitude with which men stand pain, and the amazing
submission with which women bear sorrow, returned full of zeal and
enthusiasm, to carry the torch of this uplifting flame to their own
countrymen.
Others will realize, too, that although one may lose one's best, yet
one's worst is made better. The women will find that the characters of
their men will become softened. The clear-cut essentials of a life of
war must make the mind of man direct. It may be brutal in its
simplicity, but it is clear and frank. Yet to counteract this, the
continual sight of suffering bravely borne, the deep love and humility
that the devotion of others unconsciously produces, bring about this
charity of feeling, this desire to forgive and this moderation in
criticism, which is so marked in those who have passed through the
strenuous, searing realities of war. Since the thirty pieces of
silver, no minted coin in the world has bought so much as has the
King's shilling of to-day.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
U·S·A