MISGIVING
I
What could the New Army not have done if all the time of its training
had been fully used! A few, at least, of its units had a physique above
that of the Guards; many did more actual hours of work, before going
abroad, than Guardsmen in peace-time do in two years; all were at first
as keen as boys, collectors, or spaniels--whichever are keenest; when
the official rations of warlike instruction fell short they would go
about hungrily trying to scratch crumbs of that provender out of the
earth like fowls in a run.
But there was an imp of frustration about. He pervaded, like Ariel, all
the labouring ship of our State. I had seen him in Lancashire once, on
one of the early days of the war, when fifty young miners marched in
from one pit, with their colliery band, to enlist at an advertised place
and time of enlistment. The futilitarian elf took care that the shutters
were up and nobody there, so that the men should kick their heels all
the day in the street and walk back at night with their tails between
their legs, and the band not playing, to tell their mates that the whole
thing was a mug's game, a ramp, got up by the hot-air merchants and
crooks in control. The imp must have grinned, not quite as all of us
have grinned since, on the wrong side of our mouths, at the want of
faith that miners have in the great and wise who rule over them. Another
practical joke of his was to slip into the War Office or Admiralty and
tear up any letters he found from people offering gifts of motor-cars,
motor-boats, steam-yachts, training grounds, etc., lest they be answered
and the writers and other friends of their country encouraged. Perhaps
his brightest triumph of all was to dress himself up as England and send
away with a flea in her ear the Ireland whom the wonder-working Redmond
had induced to offer to fight at our side. Those were a few of his
master-pieces. Between times he would keep his hand in by putting it
into the Old Army's head to take the keenness out of the New.
Dearest of all the New Army's infant illusions was the Old Army--still
at that time the demigod host of an unshattered legend of Mons. To the
new recruits any old Regular sergeant was more--if the world can hold
more--than a county cricketer is to a small boy at school. He had the
talisman; he was a vessel full of the grace by which everything was to
be saved; like a king, he could "touch for" the malady of
unsoldierliness. How could he err, how could he shirk, now that the fate
of a world hung upon him?
There was something in that. No doubt there always is in illusions. They
are not delusions. The pick of the old N.C.O.'s of the Regular Army were
packed as tight as bits of radium with virtues and powers. A man of
fifty-five who came back to the army from spending ten years in a
farcical uniform whistling for taxis outside a flash music-hall would
teach every rank in a battalion its duties for 4_s._ 8_d._ a
day--coaching the dug-out colonel in the new infantry drill, the field
officers in court-martial procedure, the chaplain in details of
drum-head worship, the medical officer in the order of sick parades, the
subalterns and N.C.O.'s in camp economy, field hygiene, and what not,
and always holding the attention of a man or a mess or a battalion fixed
fast by the magic of his own oaken character, his simple, vivid mind,
his passion for getting things right, and his humorous, patient
knowledge of mankind. Even such minor masterpieces as average Guards
ex-sergeant-majors were rather godlike on parade. In drill, at any rate,
they had the circumstantial vision and communicable fire of the
prophets. Early in 1915 a little famished London cab-tout, a recruit,
still rectilinear as a starved cat even after a month of army rations,
was to be heard praying softly at night in his cot that he might be made
like unto one of these, whom he named.
II
Where, then, did the first shiver of disillusion begin? Perhaps with
some trivial incident. Say a new-born company, quartered in a great
town, was sent out for a long afternoon's marching. Only through long,
steady grinds can the perfect rhythm of marching, like that of rowing,
be generated at last. The men, youthfully eager to kiss all possible
rods and endure any obtainable hardness, march forth in a high state of
delight--they are going to learn how to march to Berlin! No officer
being present--and scarcely any existing as yet--a sergeant-major is in
command. He is a very old hand. For twenty minutes he leads his 250
adorers into the thick of a populous quarter. Then he orders them to
fall out. A public-house resembling Buckingham Palace, but smaller, is
near. Most of the men, in their ardour, stand about on the kerb, ready
to leap back to their places as soon as the whistle shall sound. A few
thirsty souls jostle hurriedly into the bars, where they find that
arrangements for serving a multitude are surprisingly complete. Soon
they are further reassured by descrying the sergeant-major's handsome
form, like Tam o' Shanter's, "planted unco' right" in a chair in an
inner holy of holies along with the landlord. This esoteric session has
an air of permanence; the sergeant-major is evidently _au mieux_ with
the management. The thirsty souls settle down to their beer.
Five minutes, twenty, half an hour pass fairly fast for them, less fast
for the keener warriors pawing the kerbstone without. At the end of an
hour fifty per cent. of the kerbstone zealots have been successfully
frozen into the bars. The rest stare at each other with a wild surmise.
Rumour shakes her wings and begins to fly round. The sergeant-major, she
says, is holding a species of court in the depths of the pub; some
privates with money upon them, children of this world, are pressing in,
she says, even now, into that heart of the rose, and with a few manly
words are standing the great man the extremely expensive combination of
nectars that he prefers. "Were it not better done as others use?"--the
Spartan residuum on the kerb is diminishing. Another hour goes; only an
inconsiderable remnant of Spartans is left; these are exchanging profane
remarks about patriotism and other virtues. One of them quotes a famous
Conservative statesman whose footman he was before he enlisted: "I
believe we shall win, in spite of the Regular Army." When just enough
time is left to march back to quarters the whistle is blown, the men
slouch into their places and stump unrhythmically home, revolving many
things according to their several natures. A child who has rashly taken
its parent on trust, and yet more rashly taken the parent's all-round
perfection as some sort of sample and proof of a creditable government
of the world, must have a good deal of mental rearrangement to do the
first time the parent comes home full of liquor and sells the furniture
to get some more.
III
Perhaps, in another company or another battalion, some private of
relative wealth has felt, in the strength of his youth and the heat of
his zeal, that he wants more to do. He longs to get on with the job. So
he guilelessly goes to his own sergeant-major and asks him if there is a
chance of getting some lessons in bayonet-fighting anywhere in the town.
The sergeant-major sizes him up with a stare. "You're a fine likely
man," he says, "for a stripe." He stares harder. "Or three," he
subjoins.
The gilded youth is confounded. He an N.C.O.! He would as soon have
thought of being a primate. "I'll give you," the Old Army continues,
"the lessons myself. It'll be twelve quid--_for the lot_." To reproduce
the emphasis upon the last three words is beyond the resources of
typography.
The gilded youth may feel a slight pricking in his thumbs. Still, there
is no overt crook in the deal. The teaching is sure to be good. And he
has the cash and an inexact sense of values. So he agrees. The senior
man-at-arms expresses a preference for ready money. Agreed, too. After
one lesson the tutor is frankly bored by his tutorial function. "Hang
it," he says, "what's the sense of you and me sweating our 'oly guts
out? You've paid, and you'll find I won't bilk you." Youth is mystified;
feels it is getting somewhat short weight. But what are acolytes against
high priests? Youth leaves it at that.
In two or three weeks the frustrated pupil is sent for by his
frustrator. A man is wanted for Post Corporal, or even for Battalion
Provost Sergeant. What would the gilded youth say to the job? On his
saying nothing at first the sergeant-major, with swiftly rising contempt
for such friarly hesitancy, recites the beauties of this piece of
preferment. "Cushiest job in the 'ole outfit! Long as you're sober
enough to stand up at the staff parade of a night, that's all there is
to it. Where'd the crime be among you 'oly Christians?" (The almost
fanatical abstention of the New Army from ordinary military crimes often
gave some scandal to experts drawn from the Old. They regarded it with
perplexity and suspicion. The phenomenon was really simple, the men
being in panic-fear of getting left behind in England if their unit
should suddenly be sent abroad.) While the gilded youth tries to
explain, without a lapse from tact, that the ranks are good enough for
himself he feels a regal scorn beat down on him like a vertical sun. A
fulmination follows. "Then what the 'ell did you ever come to me for?
'Op off! Out of it!"
The youth retires feeling that he has somehow strayed into a black list.
He talks it over with a friend. The friend, he finds, has heard
something like it from somebody else. Ribald jibes are soon flying
about--"Four pound a stripe!" "Stripes are ris' to-day!" "Corporals,
three for a tenner!" The story goes that a little "Scotch draper," the
worst drill in a section, has felt that in this newly revealed world his
professional credit for tactful effrontery is at stake; he has bet a
fiver that he will offer the bare market price of a recommendation for
"lance-Jack" and bring the thing off; the enterprise has prospered and
the architect of his own fortunes is wearing the stripe, spending his
pound balance on the transaction, commanding his brethren, and enjoying
his new dispensation from fatigues. The band of brothers begin to look
at each other with some circumspection. They wonder. How far does the
dirty work go? Who may not try it on next? And did not somebody say he
had seen the stud pass between the contractor who emptied the swill-tubs
and the sergeant-cook who filled them with half-legs of mutton? What was
that shorter creed to which the sergeants' mess waiters said that the
Regular sergeants always recurred in their cups--"Stick together, boys,"
and "Anything can be wangled in the army"?
IV
What about officers, too? The men wonder again. That new company
commander who started in as a captain, but never could give the simplest
command on parade without his sergeant-major to give him the words like
a parson doing a marriage? What about little Y., who suddenly got a
commission when he was doing a fortnight's C.B. for coming on parade
with a dirty neck? And the major's lecture on musketry? And the
colonel's on field operations?
Part of the scheme of training is that all the senior officers should
lecture to the men on something or other--marching, map-reading, field
hygiene, and what not. An excellent plan, but terribly hard on an old
Regular Army not exactly officered by the brightest wits of public
schools. The major's musketry lecture has made the men think. He has
told them first that, just to let them know that he was not talking
through his hat, he might say he had been, in his time, the champion
shot of the Army in India. The men had known that already--had doted, in
fact, on anything known to the glory of any of their commanders. Fair
enough, too, they had felt, that a man should buck a bit about what he
had done. Anyone would. And so they had not even smiled. But then the
major had amplified. He had recited his moderate, but not bad, earlier
scores in competitions: he had given statistics of his rapid rise; he
had painted the astonishment of all who saw him shoot in those
days--above all, the delight of the men of his old regiment; for, the
major had said, "I may have faults, but this at least I can say, that
wherever I went the men simply worshipped the ground that I trod on."
All this had filled the first half of the lecturer's hour. The men had
begun to look at each other cautiously, marvelling. When would the major
begin? Could this be a Regular Army custom? But then the major had
warmed to his subject. With rising zest he had described the dramatic
tension pervading the butts as the crisis of each of his greater
triumphs approached. And then the climax had come--"the one time that I
failed." In sombre tones the major had told how five shots had to be
fired at one out of several targets arranged in a row. "I fired my first
four shots. A bull each time. I fired again, and the marker signalled a
miss! Everyone present was thunderstruck. I knew what had happened. I
said to the butt officer, 'Do you mind, sir, enquiring if there is any
shot on the target to the right of mine?' He did so. 'Yes,' was
signalled back. 'What is it?' I asked, though I knew. 'A bull.' 'That
was my last shot,' said I. I had made the mistake of my life. I had
fired at the wrong target. Fall out."
On this tragic climax the lecture had ended, the men had streamed out,
some silent, bewildered, some dropping words of amazement. "Lecture!
W'y, it's the man's pers'nal 'istory!"
And then the C.O. has lectured on training in field operations--the old,
cold colonel, upright, dutiful, unintelligent, waxen, drawn away by a
genuine patriotism from his roses and croquet to help joylessly in the
queer labour of trying to teach this uncouth New Army a few of the
higher qualities of the old. Too honest a man to pretend that he was not
taking all that he said in his lecture out of the Army's official
manual, _Infantry Training_, 1914, he has held the little red book in
his hand, read out frankly a sentence at a time from that terse and
luminous masterpiece of instruction, and then has tried to "explain" it
while the men gaped at the strange contrast between the thing clearly
said in the book and the same thing plunged into obscurity by the poor
colonel's woolly and faltering verbiage. Half the men had bought the
little book themselves and devoured it as hungrily as boys consume a
manual of rude boat-building or of camping-out. And here was the colonel
bringing his laboured jets of darkness to show the way through sunlight;
elucidating plainness itself with the tangled clues of his own mind's
confusion, like Bardolph: "'Accommodated'; that is, when a man is, as
they say, accommodated; or when a man is, being, whereby a' may be
thought to be accommodated."
V
A favourite trick with the disillusioning imp was to get hold of
authority's wisely drafted time-table of work for a new division in
training and mix up all the subjects and times. The effect must have
often diverted the author of this piece of humour. Some day a company,
say, would begin to learn bayonet-fighting. This would at once revive in
the men the fading ecstasies of their first simple faith. Whenever
instructors said--"Now then, men, I want to see a bit more murder in
them eyes" pleasant little thrills of chartered pugnacity would inspirit
them. This, they would feel, was the real thing; this was what they were
there for. Then just as, perhaps, they approached the engaging and
manifestly serviceable "short jab" Puck's little witticism would
suddenly tell; bayonet-fighting would abruptly stop; an urgent order
would come from on high to "get on with night operations" or "get on
with outpost work," and one of these bodies of knowledge would, in its
turn, be partly imbibed by the infant mind and then as suddenly
withdrawn from its thirsty lips for something else to be started
instead--perhaps a thing that had already been once started and dropped.
In the working out of this fantastic pattern of smatterings a company
might begin to learn bayonet-fighting three or four times and each time
be switched off it before getting half way, and go to France in the end
with the A.B.C. of each of several alphabets learnt to boredom and the
X.Y.Z. of none of them touched, the men being left to improvise the
short jab and other far-on letters by the light of nature, in intimate
contact, perhaps, with less humorously instructed Germans.
All this was not universal. Still, it could and did happen. And then the
men stared and marvelled. Authority, it is true, had, at the worst, some
gusts of passion for perfection. But even these might fortify, in their
way, the new occupant of the seat of the scorners. A sudden order might
come for a brigade or other inspection, and then authority might in a
brief hour become like mediæval man when he fell suddenly ill and the
pains of hell gat hold of his mind and he felt that God must be squared
without conduct because it might take more time to conduct himself than
he had got. In this pious frenzy all attention to measures for
incommoding the Germans would yield to the primary duty of whiting the
sepulchre; energies that would carry a Hohenzollern Redoubt would be put
into the evolution of sections which, through somebody's slackness, did
not exist, or the hiding of men who, through some one's mismanagement,
were not fit to be seen on parade; old N.C.O.'s would present the men
with the tip for making a seemingly full valise look nicely rectangular
by the judicious insertion of timber, and other homely recipes for
cleaning the outsides of cups and platters. "Eye-wash?" these children
of light would say, as they taught. "Of course, it's all eye-wash. What
ain't eye-wash in this old world?"
It was a question much asked at the time by those whose post-war
inclinations to answer "Nothing, among the lot who run England now" are
whitening the hair of statesmen. They were then only asking "How far
does it go? How much of the timber is rotten"? Enough to bring down the
whole house? Here, there, everywhere the men's new suspicion peered
about in the dark and the half-light. Most of the men were the almost
boundless reservoirs of patience, humility, and good humour that common
Englishmen are. They would take long to run dry. But the waters were
steadily falling. Most of them had come from civil employments in which
the curse of Adam still holds and a man must either work or get out,
mind his P's and Q's, or go short of his victuals. They knew that in
civil life a foreman who thieved like some of the Regular N.C.O.'s would
soon be in the street or in gaol. They knew that in civil life a manager
who could not get down to the point any better than the colonel or the
major would soon have the business piled up on the rocks. Here was an
eye-opening find--a world in which any old rule of that kind could be
dodged if you got the right tip. It became the dominant topic for talk,
more dominant even than food, the staple theme of the conversation of
soldiers. How far did the rottenness go? Would they ever get to the
other side of this bog through which poor old England was wading? If you
bored deeper and deeper still into this amazing old Regular Army would
there ever come a point at which you would strike the good firm stone of
English decency and sense again? And was it open to hope that in
Germany, too, such failures abounded--that these diseases of ours were
rife in all armies and not in the British alone, so that there might be
a chance for us still, as there is for one toothless dog fighting
another?
Whatever else might lack in our training-camps throughout England during
the spring and summer of 1915, good fresh food for suspicion always
abounded. Runlets of news and rumour came trickling from France; wounded
soldiers talked and could not be censored; they talked of the failure of
French; of the sneer on the face of France; of Staff work that hung up
whole platoons of our men, like old washing or scarecrows, to rot on
uncut German wire; of little, splendid bands of company officers and men
who did take bits of enemy trench, in spite of it all, and then were
bombed to death by the Germans at leisure, no support coming, no bombs
to throw back--and here, at home, old Regular colonels were saying to
hollow squares of their men: "I hear that in France there's a certain
amount of throwing of some sort of ginger-beer bottles about, but the
old Lee-Metford's good enough for me."
No need, indeed, to look as far away as France. London, to any open eye,
was grotesque with a kind of fancy-dress ball of non-combatant khaki: it
seemed as if no well-to-do person could be an abstainer from warfare too
total to go about disguised as a soldier. He might be anything--a lord
lieutenant, an honorary colonel, a dealer in horses, a valuer of cloth,
an accountant, an actor in full work, a recruiter of other men for the
battles that he avoided himself, a "soldier politician" of swiftly and
strangely acquired field rank and the "swashing and martial outside" of
a Rosalind, and a Rosalind's record of active service. No doubt this
latter carnival was not to be at its height till most of the New Army of
1914 was well out of the way. Conscription had not yet been vouchsafed
to the prayers of healthy young publicists who then begged themselves
off before tribunals. The ultimate farce of the mobbing of the
relatively straight "conscientious objector" by these, his less
conscientious brother-objectors, had still to be staged. But already the
comedy, like Mercutio's wound, was enough; it served. Colonel
Repington's confessional diary had not been published, but the
underworld which it reveals was pretty correctly guessed by the New
Army's rising suspicion. And rumour said that all the chief tribes of
posturers, shirkers, "have-a-good-timers," and jobbers were banding
themselves together against the one man in high place whom the New Army
believed, with the assurance of absolute faith, to be straight and "a
tryer." It was said that Kitchener was to be set upon soon by a league
of all the sloths whom he had put to work, the "stunt" journalists whom
he had kept at a distance, the social principalities and powers whose
jobs he would not do. All the slugs of the commonwealth were to combine
against the commonwealth unpleasantly dutiful gardener--down with his
lantern and can of caustic solution!
VI
It was, of course, an incomplete view of the case. Shall we have
Henries, Fluellens, and Erpinghams at the hand of God, and no Bardolphs,
Pistols, and Nyms? Our stage was not really rotten by any means; only
half-rotten, like others of man's institutions. Half the Old Army, at
least, was exemplary. Even among politicians unselfishness may, with
some trouble, be found. Still, this is no exposition of what the New
Army ought to have said to itself as it lay on the ground after Lights
Out compounding the new temper which comes out to-day, but only of what
it did say. It was reacting. In the first weeks of the war most of the
flock had too simply taken on trust all that its pastors and masters had
said. Now, after believing rather too much, they were out to believe
little or nothing--except that in the lump pastors and masters were
frauds. From any English training-camp, about that time, you almost
seemed to see a light steam rising, as it does from a damp horse. This
was illusion beginning to evaporate.