Pride of city, calling, class, and creed imposes standards and
obligations which hold men above themselves at a pinch, and steady them
through long strain. One meets it in the New Army at every turn, from
the picked Territorials who slipped across Channel last night to the
six-week-old Service battalion maturing itself in mud. It is balanced by
the ineradicable English instinct to understate, detract, and decry—to
mask the thing done by loudly drawing attention to the things undone.
The more one sees of the camps the more one is filled with facts and
figures of joyous significance, which will become clearer as the days
lengthen; and the less one hears of the endurance, decency,
self-sacrifice, and utter devotion which have made, and are hourly
making, this wonderful new world. The camps take this for granted—else
why should any man be there at all? He might have gone on with his
business, or—watched ‘soccer.’ But having chosen to do his bit, he does
it, and talks as much about his motives as he would of his religion or
his love-affairs. He is eloquent over the shortcomings of the
authorities, more pessimistic as to the future of his next neighbour
battalion than would be safe to print, and lyric on his personal
needs—baths and drying-rooms for choice. But when the grousing gets
beyond a certain point—say at three a.m., in steady wet, with the
tent-pegs drawing like false teeth—the nephew of the insurance-agent
asks the cousin of the baronet to inquire of the son of the fried-fish
vendor what the stevedore’s brother and the tutor of the public school
joined the Army _for_. Then they sing ‘Somewhere the Sun is Shining’
till the Sergeant Ironmonger’s assistant cautions them to drown in
silence or the Lieutenant Telephone-appliances-manufacturer will speak
to them in the morning.
The New armies have not yet evolved their typical private, n.c.o., and
officer, though one can see them shaping. They are humorous because, for
all our long faces, we are the only genuinely humorous race on earth;
but they all know for true that there are no excuses in the Service. ‘If
there _were_,’ said a three-month-old under-gardener-private to me,
‘what ‘ud become of Discipline?’
They are already setting standards for the coming millions, and have
sown little sprouts of regimental tradition which may grow into age-old
trees. In one corps, for example, though no dubbin is issued a man loses
his name for parading with dirty boots. He looks down scornfully on the
next battalion where they are not expected to achieve the impossible. In
another—an ex-Guards sergeant brought ‘em up by hand—the drill is rather
high-class. In a third they fuss about records for route-marching, and
men who fall out have to explain themselves to their sweating
companions. This is entirely right. They are all now in the Year One,
and the meanest of them may be an ancestor of whom regimental posterity
will say: ‘There were giants in those days!’