For some days in that February of 1916 the war correspondents in the
Chateau of Tilques, from which they made their expeditions to the line,
were snowed up like the army round them. Not even the motor-cars could
move through that snow which drifted across the roads. We sat indoors
talking--high treason sometimes--pondering over the problem of a
war from which there seemed no way out, becoming irritable with one
another's company, becoming passionate in argument about the ethics of
war, the purpose of man, the gospel of Christ, the guilt of Germany, and
the dishonesty of British politicians. Futile, foolish arguments,
while men were being killed in great numbers, as daily routine, without
result!
Officers of a division billeted nearby came in to dine with us, some of
them generals with elaborate theories on war and a passionate hatred of
Germany, seeing no other evil in the world; some of them brigadiers with
tales of appalling brutality (which caused great laughter), some of them
battalion officers with the point of view of those who said, “Morituri
te saluant!”
There was one whose conversation I remember (having taken notes of
it before I turned in that night). It was a remarkable conversation,
summing up many things of the same kind which I had heard in stray
sentences by other officers, and month by month, years afterward, heard
again, spoken with passion. This officer who had come out to France in
1914 and had been fighting ever since by a luck which had spared his
life when so many of his comrades had fallen round him, did not speak
with passion. He spoke with a bitter, mocking irony. He said that G.H.Q.
was a close corporation in the hands of the military clique who had
muddled through the South African War, and were now going to muddle
through a worse one. They were, he said, intrenched behind impregnable
barricades of old, moss-eaten traditions, red tape, and caste privilege.
They were, of course, patriots who believed that the Empire depended
upon their system. They had no doubt of their inherent right to conduct
the war, which was “their war,” without interference or criticism or
publicity. They spent many hours of the days and nights in writing
letters to one another, and those who wrote most letters received most
decorations, and felt, with a patriotic fire within their breasts, that
they were getting on with the war.
Within their close corporation there were rivalries, intrigues,
perjuries, and treacheries like those of a medieval court. Each general
and staff-officer had his followers and his sycophants, who jostled for
one another's jobs, fawned on the great man, flattered his vanity, and
made him believe in his omniscience. Among the General Staff there were
various grades--G.S.O. I, G.S.O. II, G.S.O. III, and those in the lower
grades fought for a higher grade with every kind of artfulness, and
diplomacy and back-stair influence. They worked late into the night.
That is to say, they went back to their offices after dining at
mess--“so frightfully busy, you know, old man!”--and kept their lights
burning, and smoked more cigarettes, and rang one another up on the
telephone with futile questions, and invented new ways of preventing
something from being down somewhere. The war to them was a far-off
thing essential to their way of life, as miners in the coal-fields are
essential to statesmen in Downing Street, especially in cold weather.
But it did not touch their souls or their bodies. They did not see its
agony, or imagine it, or worry about it. They were always cheerful,
breezy, bright with optimism. They made a little work go a long way.
They were haughty and arrogant with subordinate officers, or at the best
affable and condescending, and to superior officers they said, “Yes,
sir,” “No, sir,” “Quite so, sir,” to any statement, however absurd in
its ignorance and dogmatism. If a major-general said, “Wagner was a
mountebank in music,” G.S.O. III, who had once studied at Munich, said,
“Yes, sir,” or, “You think so, sir? Of course you're right.”
If a lieutenant-colonel said, “Browning was not a poet,” a staff
captain, who had read Browning at Cambridge with passionate admiration,
said: “I quite agree with you, sir. And who do you think was a poet,
sir?”
It was the army system. The opinion of a superior officer was correct,
always. It did not admit of contradiction. It was not to be criticized.
Its ignorance was wisdom.
G. H. Q. lived, said our guest, in a world of its own, rose-colored,
remote from the ugly things of war. They had heard of the trenches, yes,
but as the West End hears of the East End--a nasty place where common
people lived. Occasionally they visited the trenches as society folk
go slumming, and came back proud of having seen a shell burst, having
braved the lice and the dirt.
“The trenches are the slums,” said our guest. “We are the Great
Unwashed. We are the Mud-larks.”
There was a trench in the salient called J. 3. It was away out in
advance of our lines. It was not connected with our own trench system.
It had been left derelict by both sides and was a ditch in No Man's
Land. But our men were ordered to hold it--“to save sniping.” A
battalion commander protested to the Headquarters Staff. There was no
object in holding J. 3. It was a target for German guns and a temptation
to German miners.
“J. 3,” came the staff command, “must be held until further orders.”
We lost five hundred men in holding it. The trench and all in it were
thrown up by mines. Among those killed was the Hon. Lyndhurst Bruce, the
husband of Camille Clifford, with other husbands of women unknown.
Our guest told the story of the massacre in Neuve Chapelle. “This is a
death sentence,” said the officers who were ordered to attack. But they
attacked, and died, with great gallantry, as usual.
“In the slums,” said our guest, “we are expected to die if G. H. Q.
tells us so, or if the corps arranges our funeral. And generally we do.”
That night, when the snow lay on the ground, I listened to the rumbling
of the gunning away in the salient, and seemed to hear the groans of men
at Hooge, at St.-Eloi, in other awful places. The irony of that guest of
ours was frightful. It was bitter beyond justice, though with truth
in the mockery, the truth of a soul shocked by the waste of life and
heroism;... when I met him later in the war he was on the staff.