After all, quite the most important things out here are a fine meal
and a good bath. If you consider the vast area of the war the facts
that we have lost two guns or advanced five miles are of very little
importance. War, making one realize the hopeless insignificance of
the individual, creates in one such an immense regard for self, that
so long as one does well it matters little if four officers have been
killed reconnoitering or some wounded have had to be left under an
abandoned gun all night. I started with an immense interest in tactics.
This has nearly all left me and I remain a more or less efficient
despatch-carrying animal--a part of a machine realizing the hopeless,
enormous size of the machine.
The infantry officer after two months of modern war is a curious
phenomenon.[9] He is probably one of three survivors of an original
twenty-eight. He is not frightened of being killed; he has forgotten
to think about it. But there is a sort of reflex fright. He becomes
either cautious and liable to sudden panics, or very rash indeed,
or absolutely mechanical in his actions. The first state means the
approach of a nervous breakdown, the second a near death. There are
very few, indeed, who retain a nervous balance and a calm judgment. And
all have a harsh, frightened voice. If you came suddenly out here, you
would think they were all mortally afraid. But it is only giving orders
for hours together under a heavy fire.
Battle noises are terrific. At the present moment a howitzer is going
strong behind this, and the concussion is tremendous. The noise is
like dropping a traction-engine on a huge tin tray. A shell passing
away from you over your head is like the loud crackling of a newspaper
close to your ear. It makes a sort of deep reverberating crackle in
the air, gradually lessening, until there is a dull boom, and a mile
or so away you see a thick little cloud of white smoke in the air or a
pear-shaped cloud of grey-black smoke on the ground. Coming towards you
a shell makes a cutting, swishing note, gradually getting higher and
higher, louder and louder. There is a longer note one instant and then
it ceases. Shrapnel bursting close to you has the worst sound.
It is almost funny in a village that is being shelled. Things simply
disappear. You are standing in an archway a little back from the
road--a shriek of shrapnel. The windows are broken and the tiles rush
clattering into the street, while little bullets and bits of shell jump
like red-hot devils from side to side of the street, ricochetting until
their force is spent. Or a deeper bang, a crash, and a whole house
tumbles down.
_¾-hour later._--Curious life this. Just after I had finished the
last sentence, I was called out to take a message to a battery telling
them to shell a certain village. Here am I wandering out, taking orders
for the complete destruction of a village and probably for the death of
a couple of hundred men[10] without a thought, except that the roads
are very greasy and that lunch time is near.
Again, yesterday, I put our Heavies in action, and in a quarter of
an hour a fine old church, with what appeared from the distance a
magnificent tower, was nothing but a grotesque heap of ruins. The
Germans were loopholing it for defence.
Oh, the waste, the utter damnable waste of everything out here--men,
horses, buildings, cars, everything. Those who talk about war being
a salutary discipline are those who remain at home. In a modern war
there is little room for picturesque gallantry or picture-book heroism.
We are all either animals or machines, with little gained except our
emotions dulled and brutalized and nightmare flashes of scenes that
cannot be written about because they are unbelievable. I wonder what
difference you will find in us when we come home----