At first, in the beginning of the war, our officers and men believed
that it would have a quick ending. Our first Expeditionary Force came
out to France with the cheerful shout of “Now we sha'n't be long!”
before they fell back from an advancing tide of Germans from Mons to the
Marne, and fell in their youth like autumn leaves. The New Army boys who
followed them were desperate to get out to “the great adventure.” They
cursed the length of their training in English camps. “We sha'n't get
out till it's too late!” they said. Too late, O God! Even when they
had had their first spell in the trenches and came up against German
strength they kept a queer faith, for a time, that “something” would
happen to bring peace as quickly as war had come. Peace was always
coming three months ahead. Generals and staff-officers, as well as
sergeants and privates, had that strong optimism, not based on any kind
of reason; but gradually it died out, and in its place came the awful
conviction which settled upon the hearts of the fighting-men, that
this war would go on forever, that it was their doom always to live
in ditches and dugouts, and that their only way of escape was by a
“Blighty” wound or by death.
A chaplain I knew used to try to cheer up despondent boys by pretending
to have special knowledge of inside politics.
“I have it on good authority,” he said, “that peace is near at hand.
There have been negotiations in Paris--”
Or:
“I don't mind telling you lads that if you get through the next scrap
you will have peace before you know where you are.”
They were not believing, now. He had played that game too often.
“Old stuff, padre!” they said.
That particular crowd did not get through the next scrap. But the
padre's authority was good. They had peace long before the armistice.
It was worst of all for boys of sensitive minds who were lucky enough
to get a “cushie” wound, and so went on and on, or who were patched up
again quickly after one, two, or three wounds, and came back again.
It was a boy like that who revealed his bitterness to me one day as we
stood together in the salient.
“It's the length of the war,” he said, “which does one down. At first it
seemed like a big adventure, and the excitement of it, horrible though
it was, kept one going. Even the first time I went over the top wasn't
so bad as I thought it would be. I was dazed and drunk with all sorts of
emotions, including fear, that were worse before going over. I had what
we call `the needle.' They all have it. Afterward one didn't know what
one was doing--even the killing part of the business--until one reached
the objective and lay down and had time to think and to count the dead
about... Now the excitement has gone out of it, and the war looks as
though it would go on forever. At first we all searched the papers for
some hope that the end was near. We don't do that now. We know that
whenever the war ends, this year or next, this little crowd will be
mostly wiped out. Bound to be. And why are we going to die? That's what
all of us want to know. What's it all about? Oh yes, I know the usual
answers: 'In defense of liberty,' 'To save the Empire.' But we've
all lost our liberty. We're slaves under shell-fire. And as for the
Empire--I don't give a curse for it. I'm thinking only of my little
home at Streatham Hill. The horrible Hun? I've no quarrel with the poor
blighters over there by Hooge. They are in the same bloody mess as we
are. They hate it just as much. We're all under a spell together, which
some devils have put on us. I wonder if there's a God anywhere.”
This sense of being under a black spell I found expressed by other men,
and by German prisoners who used the same phrase. I remember one of them
in the battles of the Somme, who said, in good English: “This war was
not made in any sense by mankind. We are under a spell.” This belief was
due, I think, to the impersonal character of modern warfare, in which
gun-fire is at so long a range that shell-fire has the quality of
natural and elemental powers of death--like thunderbolts--and men killed
twenty miles behind the lines while walking over sunny fields or in
busy villages had no thought of a human enemy desiring their individual
death.
God and Christianity raised perplexities in the minds of simple lads
desiring life and not death. They could not reconcile the Christian
precepts of the chaplain with the bayoneting of Germans and the shambles
of the battlefields. All this blood and mangled flesh in the fields of
France and Flanders seemed to them--to many of them, I know--a certain
proof that God did not exist, or if He did exist was not, as they were
told, a God of Love, but a monster glad of the agonies of men. That at
least was the thought expressed to me by some London lads who argued
the matter with me one day, and that was the thought which our army
chaplains had to meet from men who would not be put off by conventional
words. It was not good enough to tell them that the Germans were guilty
of all this crime and that unless the Germans were beaten the world
would lose its liberty and life. “Yes, we know all that,” they said,
“but why did God allow the Germans, or the statesmen who arranged the
world by force, or the clergy who christened British warships? And how
is it that both sides pray to the same God for victory? There must be
something wrong somewhere.”
It was not often men talked like that, except to some chaplain who was
a human, comradely soul, some Catholic “padre” who devoted himself
fearlessly to their bodily and spiritual needs, risking his life with
them, or to some Presbyterian minister who brought them hot cocoa under
shell-fire, with a cheery word or two, as I once heard, of “Keep your
hearts up, my lads, and your heads down.”
Most of the men became fatalists, with odd superstitions in the place of
faith. “It's no good worrying,” they said.
“If your name is written on a German shell you can't escape it, and if
it isn't written, nothing can touch you.”
Officers as well as men had this fatalistic belief and superstitions
which amused them and helped them. “Have the Huns found you out yet?” I
asked some gunner officers in a ruined farmhouse near Kemmel Hill. “Not
yet,” said one of them, and then they all left the table at which we
were at lunch and, making a rush for some oak beams, embraced them
ardently. They were touching wood.
“Take this with you,” said an Irish officer on a night I went to Ypres.
“It will help you as it has helped me. It's my lucky charm.” He gave
me a little bit of coal which he carried in his tunic, and he was so
earnest about it that I took it without a smile and felt the safer for
it.
Once in a while the men went home on seven days' leave, or four, and
then came back again, gloomily, with a curious kind of hatred of England
because the people there seemed so callous to their suffering, so
utterly without understanding, so “damned cheerful.” They hated the
smiling women in the streets. They loathed the old men who said, “If
I had six sons I would sacrifice them all in the Sacred Cause.” They
desired that profiteers should die by poison-gas. They prayed God to get
the Germans to send Zeppelins to England--to make the people know what
war meant. Their leave had done them no good at all.
From a week-end at home I stood among a number of soldiers who were
going back to the front, after one of those leaves. The boat warped away
from the pier, the M. T. O. and a small group of officers, detectives,
and Red Cross men disappeared behind an empty train, and the “revenants”
on deck stared back at the cliffs of England across a widening strip of
sea.
“Back to the bloody old trenches,” said a voice, and the words ended
with a hard laugh. They were spoken by a young officer of the Guards,
whom I had seen on the platform of Victoria saying good-by to a pretty
woman, who had put her hand on his shoulder for a moment, and said, “Do
be careful, Desmond, for my sake!” Afterward he had sat in the corner of
his carriage, staring with a fixed gaze at the rushing countryside, but
seeing nothing of it, perhaps, as his thoughts traveled backward. (A few
days later he was blown to bits by a bomb--an accident of war.)
A little man on deck came up to me and said, in a melancholy way, “You
know who I am, don't you, sir?”
I hadn't the least idea who he was--this little ginger--haired
soldier with a wizened and wistful face. But I saw that he wore the
claret-colored ribbon of the V. C. on his khaki tunic. He gave me his
name, and said the papers had “done him proud,” and that they had made
a lot of him at home--presentations, receptions, speeches, Lord Mayor's
addresses, cheering crowds, and all that. He was one of our Heroes,
though one couldn't tell it by the look of him.
“Now I'm going back to the trenches,” he said, gloomily. “Same old
business and one of the crowd again.” He was suffering from the reaction
of popular idolatry. He felt hipped because no one made a fuss of him
now or bothered about his claret-colored ribbon. The staff-officers,
chaplains, brigade majors, regimental officers, and army nurses were
more interested in an airship, a silver fish with shining gills and a
humming song in its stomach.
France... and the beginning of what the little V. C. had called “the
same old business.” There was the long fleet of motor-ambulances as a
reminder of the ultimate business of all those young men in khaki whom
I had seen drilling in the Embankment gardens and shouldering their way
down the Strand.
Some stretchers were being carried to the lift which goes down to the
deck of the hospital-ship, on which an officer was ticking off each
wounded body after a glance at the label tied to the man's tunic.
Several young officers lay under the blankets on those stretchers and
one of them caught my eye and smiled as I looked down upon him. The same
old business and the same old pluck.
I motored down the long, straight roads of France eastward, toward that
network of lines which are the end of all journeys after a few days'
leave, home and back again. The same old sights and sounds and smells
which, as long as memory lasts, to men who had the luck to live through
the war, will haunt them for the rest of life, and speak of Flanders.
The harvest was nearly gathered in, and where, a week or two before,
there had been fields of high, bronzed corn there were now long
stretches of stubbled ground waiting for the plow. The wheat-sheaves had
been piled into stacks or, from many great fields, carted away to
the red-roofed barns below the black old windmills whose sails were
motionless because no breath of air stirred on this September afternoon.
The smell of Flemish villages--a mingled odor of sun-baked thatch and
bakeries and manure heaps and cows and ancient vapors stored up through
the centuries--was overborne by a new and more pungent aroma which crept
over the fields with the evening haze.
It was a sad, melancholy smell, telling of corruption and death. It
was the first breath of autumn, and I shivered a little. Must there
be another winter of war? The old misery of darkness and dampness was
creeping up through the splendor of September sunshine.
Those soldiers did not seem to smell it, or, if their nostrils were
keen, to mind its menace--those soldiers who came marching down the
road, with tanned faces. How fine they looked, and how hard, and how
cheerful, with their lot! Speak to them separately and every man would
“grouse” at the duration of the war and swear that he was “fed up” with
it. Homesickness assailed them at times with a deadly nostalgia. The
hammering of shell-fire, which takes its daily toll, spoiled their
temper and shook their nerves, as far as a British soldier had
any nerves, which I used to sometimes doubt, until I saw again the
shell-shock cases.
But again I heard their laughter and an old song whistled vilely out of
tune, but cheerful to the tramp of their feet. They were going back to
the trenches after a spell in a rest-camp, to the same old business of
whizz-bangs and pip-squeaks, and dugouts, and the smell of wet clay
and chloride of lime, and the life of earth-men who once belonged to
a civilization which had passed. And they went whistling on their way,
because it was the very best thing to do.
One picked up the old landmarks again, and got back into the “feel”
of the war zone. There were the five old windmills of Cassel that wave
their arms up the hill road, and the estaminets by which one found one's
way down country lanes--“The Veritable Cuckoo” and “The Lost Corner” and
“The Flower of the Fields”--and the first smashed roofs and broken barns
which led to the area of constant shell-fire. Ugh!
So it was still going on, this bloody murder! There were some more
cottages down in the village, where we had tea a month before. And in
the market-place of a sleepy old town the windows were mostly broken
and some shops had gone into dust and ashes. That was new since we last
passed this way.
London was only seven hours away, but the hours on leave there seemed
a year ago already. The men who had come back, after sleeping in
civilization with a blessed sense of safety, had a few minutes of queer
surprise that, after all, this business of war was something more real
than a fantastic nightmare, and then put on their moral cloaks against
the chill and grim reality, for another long spell of it. Very quickly
the familiarity of it all came back to them and became the normal
instead of the abnormal. They were back again to the settled state of
war, as boys go back to public schools after the wrench from home, and
find that the holiday is only the incident and school the more enduring
experience.
There were no new impressions, only the repetition of old impressions.
So I found when I heard the guns again and watched the shells bursting
about Ypres and over Kemmel Ridge and Messines church tower.
Two German airplanes passed overhead, and the hum of their engines was
loud in my ears as I lay in the grass. Our shrapnel burst about them,
but did not touch their wings. All around there was the slamming
of great guns, and I sat chewing a bit of straw by the side of a
shell-hole, thinking in the same old way of the utter senselessness of
all this noise and hate and sudden death which encircled me for miles.
No amount of meditation would screw a new meaning out of it all. It was
just the commonplace of life out here.
The routine of it went on. The officer who came back from home stepped
into his old place, and after the first greeting of, “Hullo, old man!
Had a good time?” found his old job waiting for him. So there was a new
brigadier-general? Quick promotion, by Jove!
Four men had got knocked out that morning at D4, and it was rotten bad
luck that the sergeant-major should have been among them. A real good
fellow. However, there's that court martial for this afternoon, and,
by the by, when is that timber coming up? Can't build the new dugout if
there's no decent wood to be got by stealing or otherwise. You heard how
the men got strafed in their billets the other day? Dirty work!
The man who had come back went into the trenches and had a word or two
with the N.C.O.'s. Then he went into his own dugout. The mice had been
getting at his papers. Oh yes, that's where he left his pipe! It was
lying under the trestle-table, just where he dropped it before going on
leave. The clay walls were a bit wet after the rains. He stood with a
chilled feeling in this little hole of his, staring at every familiar
thing in it.
Tacked to the wall was the portrait of a woman. He said good-by to her
at Victoria Station. How long ago? Surely more than seven hours, or
seven years... Outside there were the old noises. The guns were at it
again. That was a trench-mortar. The enemy's eight-inch howitzers were
plugging away. What a beastly row that machine-gun was making! Playing
on the same old spot. Why couldn't they leave it alone, the asses?...
Anyhow, there was no doubt about it--he had come back again. Back to the
trenches and the same old business.
There was a mine to be blown up that night and it would make a pretty
mess in the enemy's lines. The colonel was very cheerful about it, and
explained that a good deal of sapping had been done. “We've got the
bulge on 'em,” he said, referring to the enemy's failures in this class
of work. In the mess all the officers were carrying on as usual, making
the same old jokes.
The man who had come back got back also the spirit of the thing with
astonishing rapidity. That other life of his, away there in old London,
was shut up in the cupboard of his heart.
So it went on and on until the torture of its boredom was broken by
the crash of big battles, and the New Armies, which had been learning
lessons in the School of Courage, went forward to the great test, and
passed, with honor.