What of England?... Looking back at the immense effort of the British
people in the war, our high sum of sacrifice in blood and treasure,
and the patient courage of our fighting-men, the world must, and does,
indeed, acknowledge that the old stoic virtue of our race was called
out by this supreme challenge, and stood the strain. The traditions of a
thousand years of history filled with war and travail and adventure, by
which old fighting races had blended with different strains of blood and
temper--Roman, Celtic, Saxon, Danish, Norman-survived in the fiber of
our modern youth, country-bred or city-bred, in spite of the weakening
influences of slumdom, vicious environment, ill-nourishment, clerkship,
and sedentary life. The Londoner was a good soldier. The Liverpools and
Manchesters were hard and tough in attack and defense. The South
Country battalions of Devons and Dorsets, Sussex and Somersets, were
not behindhand in ways of death. The Scots had not lost their fire and
passion, but were terrible in their onslaught. The Irish battalions,
with recruiting cut off at the base, fought with their old gallantry,
until there were few to answer the last roll-call. The Welsh dragon
encircled Mametz Wood, devoured the “Cockchafers” on Pilkem Ridge, and
was hard on the trail of the Black Eagle in the last offensive. The
Australians and Canadians had all the British quality of courage and
the benefit of a harder physique, gained by outdoor life and unweakened
ancestry. In the mass, apart from neurotic types here and there among
officers and men, the stock was true and strong. The spirit of a
seafaring race which has the salt in its blood from Land's End to
John o' Groat's and back again to Wapping had not been destroyed, but
answered the ruffle of Drake's drum and, with simplicity and gravity
in royal navy and in merchant marine, swept the highways of the seas,
hunted worse monsters than any fabulous creatures of the deep, and
shirked no dread adventure in the storms and darkness of a spacious
hell. The men who went to Zeebrugge were the true sons of those who
fought the Spanish Armada and singed the King o' Spain's beard in Cadiz
harbor. The victors of the Jutland battle were better men than Nelson's
(the scourings of the prisons and the sweepings of the press-gang) and
not less brave in frightful hours. Without the service of the British
seamen the war would have been lost for France and Italy and Belgium,
and all of us.
The flower of our youth went out to France and Flanders, to Egypt,
Palestine, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and Saloniki, and it was a fine
flower of gallant boyhood, clean, for the most part eager, not brutal
except by intensive training, simple in minds and hearts, chivalrous
in instinct, without hatred, adventurous, laughter-loving, and dutiful.
That is God's truth, in spite of vice-rotted, criminal, degenerate, and
brutal fellows in many battalions, as in all crowds of men.
In millions of words during the years of war I recorded the bravery of
our troops on the western front, their patience, their cheerfulness,
suffering, and agony; yet with all those words describing day by day
the incidents of their life in war I did not exaggerate the splendor
of their stoic spirit or the measure of their sacrifice. The heroes of
mythology were but paltry figures compared with those who, in the great
war, went forward to the roaring devils of modern gun-fire, dwelt amid
high explosives more dreadful than dragons, breathed in the fumes of
poison-gas more foul than the breath of Medusa, watched and slept
above mine-craters which upheaved the hell-fire of Pluto, and defied
thunderbolts more certain in death-dealing blows than those of Jove.
Something there was in the spirit of our men which led them to endure
these things without revolt--ideals higher than the selfish motives of
life. They did not fight for greed or glory, not for conquest, nor for
vengeance. Hatred was not the inspiration of the mass of them, for I
am certain that except in hours when men “see red” there was no direct
hatred of the men in the opposite trenches, but, on the other hand, a
queer sense of fellow--feeling, a humorous sympathy for “old Fritz,”
who was in the same bloody mess as themselves. Our generals, it is true,
hated the Germans. “I should like one week in Cologne,” one of them told
me, before there seemed ever a chance of getting there, “and I would let
my men loose in the streets and turn a blind eye to anything they liked
to do.”
Some of our officers were inspired by a bitter, unrelenting hate.
“If I had a thousand Germans in a row,” one of them said to me, “I would
cut all their throats, and enjoy the job.”
But that was not the mentality of the men in the ranks, except those
who were murderers by nature and pleasure. They gave their cigarettes to
prisoners and filled their water-bottles and chatted in a friendly way
with any German who spoke a little English, as I have seen them time
and time again on days of battle, in the fields of battle. There were
exceptions to this treatment, but even the Australians and the Scots,
who were most fierce in battle, giving no quarter sometimes, treated
their prisoners with humanity when they were bundled back. Hatred was
not the motive which made our men endure all things. It was rather, as
I have said, a refusal in their souls to be beaten in manhood by all
the devils of war, by all its terrors, or by its beastliness, and at
the back of all the thought that the old country was “up against it” and
that they were there to avert the evil.
Young soldiers of ours, not only of officer rank, but of “other ranks,”
as they were called, were inspired at the beginning, and some of them to
the end, with a simple, boyish idealism. They saw no other causes of war
than German brutality. The enemy to them was the monster who had to be
destroyed lest the world and its beauty should perish--and that was
true so long as the individual German, who loathed the war, obeyed the
discipline of the herd-leaders and did not revolt against the natural
laws which, when the war had once started, bade him die in defense of
his own Fatherland. Many of those boys of ours made a dedication of
their lives upon the altar of sacrifice, believing that by this service
and this sacrifice they would help the victory of civilization over
barbarism, and of Christian morality over the devil's law. They believed
that they were fighting to dethrone militarism, to insure the happiness
and liberties of civilized peoples, and were sure of the gratitude of
their nation should they not have the fate to fall upon the field of
honor, but go home blind or helpless.
I have read many letters from boys now dead in which they express that
faith.
“Do not grieve for me,” wrote one of them, “for I shall be proud to die
for my country's sake.”
“I am happy,” wrote another (I quote the tenor of his letters),
“because, though I hate war, I feel that this is the war to end war.
We are the last victims of this way of argument. By smashing the German
war-machine we shall prove for all time the criminal folly of militarism
and Junkerdom.”
There were young idealists like that, and they were to be envied for
their faith, which they brought with them from public schools and from
humble homes where they had read old books and heard old watchwords. I
think, at the beginning of the war there were many like that. But as it
continued year after year doubts crept in, dreadful suspicions of
truth more complex than the old simplicity, a sense of revolt against
sacrifice unequally shared and devoted to a purpose which was not that
for which they had been called to fight.
They had been told that they were fighting for liberty. But their first
lesson was the utter loss of individual liberty under a discipline which
made the private soldier no more than a number. They were ordered about
like galley--slaves, herded about like cattle, treated individually and
in the mass with utter disregard of their comfort and well-being. Often,
as I know, they were detrained at rail-heads in the wind and rain and by
ghastly errors of staff-work kept waiting for their food until they were
weak and famished. In the base camps men of one battalion were drafted
into other battalions, where they lost their old comrades and were
unfamiliar with the speech and habits of a crowd belonging to different
counties, the Sussex men going to a Manchester regiment, the Yorkshire
men being drafted to a Surrey unit. By R.T.O.'s and A.M.L.O.'s and camp
commandments and town majors and staff pups men were bullied and bundled
about, not like human beings, but like dumb beasts, and in a thousand
ways injustice, petty tyranny, hard work, degrading punishments for
trivial offenses, struck at their souls and made the name of personal
liberty a mockery. From their own individuality they argued to broader
issues. Was this war for liberty? Were the masses of men on either side
fighting with free will as free men? Those Germans--were they not under
discipline, each man of them, forced to fight whether they liked it or
not? Compelled to go forward to sacrifice, with machine-guns behind them
to shoot them down if they revolted against their slave-drivers? What
liberty had they to follow their conscience or their judgment--“Theirs
not to reason why, theirs but to do and die”--like all soldiers in all
armies. Was it not rather that the masses of men engaged in slaughter
were serving the purpose of powers above them, rival powers, greedy for
one another's markets, covetous of one another's wealth, and callous of
the lives of humble men? Surely if the leaders of the warring nations
were put together for even a week in some such place as Hooge, or the
Hohenzollern redoubt, afflicted by the usual harassing fire, poison-gas,
mine explosions, lice, rats, and the stench of rotting corpses, with the
certainty of death or dismemberment at the week-end, they would settle
the business and come to terms before the week was out. I heard that
proposition put forward many times by young officers of ours, and as an
argument against their own sacrifice they found it unanswerable.
V
The condition and psychology of their own country as they read about
it in the Paris Daily Mail, which was first to come into their billets,
filled some of these young men with distress and disgust, strengthened
into rage when they went home on leave. The deliberate falsification
of news (the truth of which they heard from private channels) made
them discredit the whole presentation of our case and state. They said,
“Propaganda!” with a sharp note of scorn. The breezy optimism of public
men, preachers, and journalists, never downcast by black news, never
agonized by the slaughter in these fields, minimizing horrors and loss
and misery, crowing over the enemy, prophesying early victory which did
not come, accepting all the destruction of manhood (while they stayed
safe) as a necessary and inevitable “misfortune,” had a depressing
effect on men who knew they were doomed to die, in the law of averages,
if the war went on. “Damn their optimism!” said some of our officers.
“It's too easy for those behind the lines. It is only we who have the
right of optimism. It's we who have to do the dirty work! They seem to
think we like the job! What are they doing to bring the end nearer?”
The frightful suspicion entered the heads of some of our men (some of
those I knew) that at home people liked the war and were not anxious to
end it, and did not care a jot for the sufferings of the soldiers. Many
of them came back from seven days' leave fuming and sullen. Everybody
was having a good time. Munition-workers were earning wonderful wages
and spending them on gramophones, pianos, furs, and the “pictures.”
Everybody was gadding about in a state of joyous exultation. The painted
flapper was making herself sick with the sweets of life after office
hours in government employ, where she did little work for a lot
of pocket-money. The society girl was dancing bare-legged for “war
charities,” pushing into bazaars for the “poor, dear wounded,” getting
her pictures into the papers as a “notable warworker,” married for
the third time in three years; the middle-class cousin was driving
staff-officers to Whitehall, young gentlemen of the Air Service to
Hendon, junior secretaries to their luncheon. Millions of girls were in
some kind of fancy dress with buttons and shoulder--straps, breeches and
puttees, and they seemed to be making a game of the war and enjoying it
thoroughly. Oxford dons were harvesting, and proud of their prowess with
the pitchfork--behold their patriotism!--while the boys were being blown
to bits on the Yser Canal. Miners were striking for more wages, factory
hands were downing tools for fewer hours at higher pay, the government
was paying any price for any labor--while Tommy Atkins drew his
one-and-twopence and made a little go a long way in a wayside estaminet
before jogging up the Menin road to have his head blown off. The
government had created a world of parasites and placemen housed
in enormous hotels, where they were engaged at large salaries upon
mysterious unproductive labors which seemed to have no result in
front-line trenches. Government contractors were growing fat on the life
of war, amassing vast fortunes, juggling with excess profits, battening
upon the flesh and blood of boyhood in the fighting-lines. These old
men, these fat men, were breathing out fire and fury against the Hun,
and vowing by all their gods that they would see their last son die
in the last ditch rather than agree to any peace except that of
destruction. There were “fug committees” (it was Lord Kitchener's word)
at the War Office, the Board of Trade, the Foreign Office, the Home
Office, the Ministry of Munitions, the Ministry of Information, where
officials on enormous salaries smoked cigars of costly brands and
decided how to spend vast sums of public money on “organization” which
made no difference to the man stifling his cough below the parapet in a
wet fog of Flanders, staring across No Man's Land for the beginning of a
German attack.
In all classes of people there was an epidemic of dancing, jazzing,
card-playing, theater-going. They were keeping their spirits up
wonderfully. Too well for men slouching about the streets of London on
leave, and wondering at all this gaiety, and thinking back to the things
they had seen and forward to the things they would have to do. People at
home, it seemed, were not much interested in the life of the trenches;
anyhow, they could not understand. The soldier listened to excited tales
of air raids. A bomb had fallen in the next street. The windows had been
broken. Many people had been killed in a house somewhere in Hackney. It
was frightful. The Germans were devils. They ought to be torn to pieces,
every one of them. The soldier on leave saw crowds of people taking
shelter in underground railways, working--men among them, sturdy lads,
panic-stricken. But for his own wife and children he had an evil sense
of satisfaction in these sights. It would do them good. They would know
what war meant--just a little. They would not be so easy in their damned
optimism. An air raid? Lord God, did they know what a German barrage was
like? Did they guess how men walked day after day through harassing fire
to the trenches? Did they have any faint idea of life in a sector where
men stood, slept, ate, worked, under the fire of eight-inch shells,
five-point--nines, trench-mortars, rifle-grenades, machine-gun bullets,
snipers, to say nothing of poison-gas, long-range fire on the billets
in small farmsteads, and on every moonlight night air raids above wooden
hutments so closely crowded into a small space that hardly a bomb could
fall without killing a group of men.
“Oh, but you have your dugouts!” said a careless little lady.
The soldier smiled.
It was no use talking. The people did not want to hear the tragic side
of things. Bairnsfather's “Ole Bill” seemed to them to typify the spirit
of the fighting-man... “'Alf a mo', Kaiser!”...
The British soldier was gay and careless of death--always. Shell-fire
meant nothing to him. If he were killed--well, after all, what else
could he expect? Wasn't that what he was out for? The twice-married
girl knew a charming boy in the air force. He had made love to her even
before Charlie was “done in.” These dear boys were so greedy for love.
She could not refuse them, poor darlings! Of course they had all got
to die for liberty, and that sort of thing. It was very sad. A terrible
thing--war!... Perhaps she had better give up dancing for a week, until
Charlie had been put into the casualty lists.
“What are we fighting for?” asked officers back from leave, turning
over the pages of the Sketch and Tatler, with pictures of race-meetings,
strike-meetings, bare--backed beauties at war bazaars, and portraits
of profiteers in the latest honors list. “Are we going to die for
these swine? These parasites and prostitutes? Is this the war for noble
ideals, liberty, Christianity, and civilization? To hell with all this
filth! The world has gone mad and we are the victims of insanity.”
Some of them said that below all that froth there were deep and quiet
waters in England. They thought of the anguish of their own wives
and mothers, their noble patience, their uncomplaining courage, their
spiritual faith in the purpose of the war. Perhaps at the heart England
was true and clean and pitiful. Perhaps, after, all, many people at home
were suffering more than the fighting-men, in agony of spirit. It was
unwise to let bitterness poison their brains. Anyhow, they had to go on.
How long, how long, O Lord?
“How long is it going to last?” asked the London Rangers of their
chaplain. He lied to them and said another three months. Always he had
absolute knowledge that the war would end three months later. That was
certain. “Courage!” he said. “Courage to the end of the last lap!”
Most of the long-service men were dead and gone long before the last
lap came. It was only the new boys who went as far as victory. He asked
permission of the general to withdraw nineteen of them from the line to
instruct them for Communion. They were among the best soldiers, and not
afraid of the ridicule of their fellows because of their religious zeal.
The chaplain's main purpose was to save their lives, for a while, and
give them a good time and spiritual comfort. They had their good time.
Three weeks later came the German attack on Arras and they were all
killed. Every man of them.
The chaplain, an Anglican, found it hard to reconcile Christianity
with such a war as this, but he did not camouflage the teachings of the
Master he tried to serve. He preached to his men the gospel of love and
forgiveness of enemies. It was reported to the general, who sent for
him.
“Look here, I can't let you go preaching 'soft stuff' to my men. I can't
allow all that nonsense about love. My job is to teach them to hate. You
must either cooperate with me or go.”
The chaplain refused to change his faith or his teaching, and the
general thought better of his intervention.
For all chaplains it was difficult. Simple souls were bewildered by the
conflict between the spirit of Christianity and the spirit of war. Many
of them--officers as well as men--were blasphemous in their scorn of
“parson stuff,” some of them frightfully ironical.
A friend of mine watched two chaplains passing by. One of them was a
tall man with a crown and star on his shoulder-strap.
“I wonder,” said my friend, with false simplicity, “whether Jesus Christ
would have been a lieutenant--colonel?”
On the other hand, many men found help in religion, and sought its
comfort with a spiritual craving. They did not argue about Christian
ethics and modern warfare. Close to death in the midst of tragedy,
conscious in a strange way of their own spiritual being and of a
spirituality present among masses of men above the muck of war, the
stench of corruption, and fear of bodily extinction, they groped out
toward God. They searched for some divine wisdom greater than the folly
of the world, for a divine aid which would help them to greater courage.
The spirit of God seemed to come to them across No Man's Land with pity
and comradeship. Catholic soldiers had a simpler, stronger faith than
men of Protestant denominations, whose faith depended more on ethical
arguments and intellectual reasonings. Catholic chaplains had an easier
task. Leaving aside all argument, they heard the confessions of the
soldiers, gave them absolution for their sins, said mass for them in
wayside barns, administered the sacraments, held the cross to their lips
when they fell mortally wounded, anointed them when the surgeon's knife
was at work, called the names of Jesus and Mary into dying ears. There
was no need of argument here. The old faith which has survived many
wars, many plagues, and the old wickedness of men was still full of
consolation to those who accepted it as little children, and by their
own agony hoped for favor from the Man of Sorrows who was hanged upon a
cross, and found a mother-love in the vision of Mary, which came to them
when they were in fear and pain and the struggle of death. The padre
had a definite job to do in the trenches and for that reason was allowed
more liberty in the line than other chaplains. Battalion officers,
surgeons, and nurses were patient with mysterious rites which they did
not understand, but which gave comfort, as they saw, to wounded men; and
the heroism with which many of those priests worked under fire, careless
of their own lives, exalted by spiritual fervor, yet for the most part
human and humble and large-hearted and tolerant, aroused a general
admiration throughout the army. Many of the Protestant clergy were
equally devoted, but they were handicapped by having to rely more upon
providing physical comforts for the men than upon spiritual acts, such
as anointing and absolution, which were accepted without question by
Catholic soldiers.
Yet the Catholic Church, certain of its faith, and all other churches
claiming that they teach the gospel of Christ, have been challenged to
explain their attitude during the war and the relation of their teaching
to the world-tragedy, the Great Crime, which has happened. It will not
be easy for them to do so. They will have to explain how it is that
German bishops, priests, pastors, and flocks, undoubtedly sincere
in their professions of faith, deeply pious, as our soldiers saw in
Cologne, and fervent in their devotion to the sacraments on their side
of the fighting-line, as the Irish Catholics on our side, were able
to reconcile this piety with their war of aggression. The faith of the
Austrian Catholics must be explained in relation to their crimes, if
they were criminal, as we say they were, in leading the way to this
war by their ultimatum to Serbia. If Christianity has no restraining
influence upon the brutal instincts of those who profess and follow its
faith, then surely it is time the world abandoned so ineffective a
creed and turned to other laws likely to have more influence on human
relationships. That, brutally, is the argument of the thinking world
against the clergy of all nations who all claimed to be acting according
to the justice of God and the spirit of Christ. It is a powerful
argument, for the simple mind, rejecting casuistry, cuts straight to the
appalling contrast between Christian profession and Christian practice,
and says: “Here, in this war, there was no conflict between one faith
and another, but a murderous death-struggle between many nations holding
the same faith, preaching the same gospel, and claiming the same God as
their protector. Let us seek some better truth than that hypocrisy! Let
us, if need be, in honesty, get back to the savage worship of national
gods, the Ju-ju of the tribe.”
My own belief is that the war was no proof against the Christian faith,
but rather is a revelation that we are as desperately in need of the
spirit of Christ as at any time in the history of mankind. But I
think the clergy of all nations, apart from a heroic and saintly few,
subordinated their faith, which is a gospel of charity, to national
limitations. They were patriots before they were priests, and their
patriotism was sometimes as limited, as narrow, as fierce, and as
bloodthirsty as that of the people who looked to them for truth and
light. They were often fiercer, narrower, and more desirous of vengeance
than the soldiers who fought, because it is now a known truth that the
soldiers, German and Austrian, French and Italian and British, were sick
of the unending slaughter long before the ending of the war, and would
have made a peace more fair than that which now prevails if it had
been put to the common vote in the trenches; whereas the Archbishop of
Canterbury, the Archbishop of Cologne, and the clergy who spoke from
many pulpits in many nations, under the Cross of Christ, still stoked up
the fires of hate and urged the armies to go on fighting “in the
cause of justice,” “for the defense of the Fatherland,” “for Christian
righteousness,” to the bitter end. Those words are painful to write,
but as I am writing this book for truth's sake, at all cost, I let them
stand....