AT AGINCOURT AND YPRES
I
Shakespeare seems to have known what
there is to be known about our Great War of 1914-18. And he was not
censored. So he put into his _Henry IV_ and _Henry V_ a lot of little
things that our press had to leave out at the time for the good of the
country. If you look closely you can see them lying about all over the
plays. There is the ugly affair of the pyx, at Corbie, on the Somme;
there are the little irregularities in recruiting; there are the small
patches of baddish _moral_ on the coast and even in Picardy; there is
the painful case of the oldish lieutenant who drank and had cold feet,
after talking bigger than anyone else. One almost expects to find
something in _Henry V_ about the mutiny at Etaples, or the predilection
of the Australians for chickens. Anyhow, there is a more understanding
account than any war correspondent has given of English troops about to
go into battle.
Timing it for the morning of Agincourt, Shakespeare shows us three
standard types of the privates who were to win the Great War. One of
them, Court, says little; he just looks out for the dawn. We all know
Court; he has won many battles. Bates, the second man, gives tongue
pretty freely. Bates is not ruled by funk, but he professes it.
"He (the King) may show what outward courage he will, but I believe,
as cold a night as 'tis, he could wish himself in the Thames up to
the neck, and so I would he were, and I by him, at all adventures,
so we were quit here."
Bates, being dead, yet liveth, like Court. In 1915, as in 1415, he was
prosecuting his conquests in France, and his unaltered soul was
fortifying itself with chants like
Far, far away would I be,
Where the Alleyman cannot catch me,
and
Oh my! I don't want to die,
_I_ want to go home,
sung to dourly wailful tunes, at the seasons of stress when Scotsmen and
Irishmen screwed themselves up to the sticking-point with their Tyrtæan
anti-English ballads, when Frenchmen would soulfully hymn Glory and
Love, and when Germans, if the ear did not deceive, were calling out the
whole Landwehr and Landsturm of the straight patriotic lyre. Williams,
the third of the Agincourt privates, lives too. He lives with a
vengeance. You will remember that he was an anti-ranter, anti-canter and
anti-gusher, like Bates. But he ran a special line of his own. He was
not simply "fed up"--as he would say now--with tall talk about the just
cause and brothers-in-arms and the moral beauty of dying in battle. He
was suspicious, besides. He darkly fancied that those who emitted the
stuff must have some crooked game on. "That's more than we know" was his
stopper for all stock heroics. He would take none of his betters on
trust, neither High Command nor Government nor Church--only one company
officer whom he knew for himself--"a good old commander and a most kind
gentleman." This one small plot of dry ground was reclaimed from the
broad sea of Williams' scepticism.
II
If this Doubting Thomas abounded at Agincourt how could he not abound
at, say, the third Battle of Ypres? At Agincourt our whole army was just
small enough to have comradeship all the way through it--not the
figure-of-speech used by the orators, but the thing that soldiers know.
Comradeship in a battalion will come of itself; it may be grown, with
some effort, in a brigade; in good divisions it has flickered into life
for a while during a war; army corps know it not, though their
headquarters staffs may dine together at times. At Agincourt the whole
of our force was an infantry brigade and a half. It all lay handy in one
bivouac. Generals led advancing troops as second-lieutenants do now. The
commander-in-chief could go round the lines of a night and talk to the
men; if he should speak to them about "we few, we happy few, we band of
brothers," he would not be projecting gas.
But now----? It is nobody's fault, but all of that has been lost, as
utterly lost as the old comradeship of master and journeyman worker is
lost in a mill where half the thousand hands may never have seen the
employer who sits in a far-away office, perhaps in a far-away town. Two
million men can never be a happy few; nor yet a band of brothers--you
have to know a brother first. A man could serve six months in France and
never see the general commanding his division. He could be there for
four years and not know what a corps or an army commander looked like.
How can you help it? Many generals did what they could--more, you might
say, than they should. They left their desks and maps to visit their men
in the line; they made excuses to get under fire; two or three were
killed doing so; one corps commander smuggled himself into the front
line of an attack by his corps. But these were escapades, strictly. The
higher commands have no right to get hit. Modern war has pushed the
right place for them farther and farther away from the fighting, away
from the men, whom some of the higher commanders, as well as the lower,
do really love with a love passing the love of women--"the dear men" of
whom I have heard an officer, tied to the staff and the base by the
results of head wounds, speak with an almost wailing ache of desire, as
horses whinny for a friend--"Would I were with him, wheresoe'er he is,
either in heaven or in hell." But how were the men to know that?
Everything helped to indispose them to know it; everything went to point
the contrast between their own fate and that of its distant and unknown
controllers. The evolution of the war was now calling on all ranks of
troops in the actual line to put up with a much diminished chance of
survival, only the barest off-chance if they stayed there year after
year. While they lived it was inflicting upon them in trenches a life
squalid beyond precedent. And that same evolution had pressed back the
chief seats of command into places where life was said to contrast
itself in wonderful ways with that life of mud and stench and
underground gloom.
It was quite truly said. Of the separation and contrast you got a full
sense if fate took you straight from trench life in the stiff Flanders
slime or the dreary wet chalk of the disembowelled Loos plain to one of
the seats of authority far in the rear. G.H.Q., the most regal seat of
them all, was divinely niched, during most of the war, at Montreuil, and
Montreuil was a place to bring tears to the eyes of an artist, like
Castelfranco, St. Andrews, or Windsor; the tiny walled town on a hill
had that poignant fulness of loveliness, making the sense ache at it,
like still summer evenings in England. It was a storied antique,
unscathed and still living and warm, weathered mellow with centuries of
sunshine and tranquillity, all its own old wars long laid aside and the
racket of this new one very far from it. Walking among its walled
gardens, where roses hung over the walls, or sitting upon the edge of
the rampart, your feet dangling over among the top boughs of embosoming
trees, you were not merely out of the war; you were out of all war! you
entered into that beatitude of super-peace which fills your mind as you
look at a Roman camp on a sunned Sussex down, where the gentle
convexities of the turf seem to turn war into an old tale for children.
Such gardens of enchantment were not known by sight to most of our
fighting troops, but they were rumoured. The mind of Williams, in the
front line, worked with a surly zest on the contrast between the two
hemispheres of an army--the hemisphere of combatancy, of present
torment, of scant reward, of probable extinction, and the hemisphere of
non-combatancy, of comfort, of safety, of more profuse decoration, the
second hemisphere ruling over the former and decimating it sometimes by
feats like the Staff work of 1915. Among the straw in billets and the
chalk clods in dug-outs, in the reeking hot twilight of parlours in
French village inns, in the confidential darkness after Lights Out in
hospital wards from Bethune to Versailles and Rouen, the vinegar tongue
of Williams let itself go.
Of course, he went wrong. And yet his error, like the facts which begat
it, could not be helped. If all that you know of an alleged brother of
yours is that he is having the best of the deal while you are getting
the worst you have to be a saint of the prime to take it on trust that
it really did please God, or any godlike human authority, to call him to
a station in a dry hut with a stove, among the flesh-pots of an
agreeable coast, and you to a station in a wet burrow full of rats and
lice and yellow or white mud and ugly liabilities. And Williams was not
a saint, although when he enlisted he was profusely told that he was by
people who were to call him a sinner later, when as a Dundee rioter or
"Bolshevik" miner, or as a Sinn Feiner or a Black-and-Tan, he
transgressed some eternal law. Williams was and is only a quiet simple
substance exhibiting certain normal reactions under certain chemical
tests.
III
There may be laid up in Heaven a pattern of some front line by which the
Staff in its rear would be really loved. But such love is not in the
nature of man. If the skin on Mr. Dempsey's knuckles could speak, and
were perfectly frank, it would not say that it loved the unexposed and
unabraded tissues of Mr. Dempsey's directive brain. Hotspur, in
deathless words, has aired the eternal grudge of the combatant soldier
against the Brass Hat--
I remember, when the fight was done,
When I was dry with rage and extreme toil,
Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,
Came there a certain lord, neat and trimly dressed,
Fresh as a bridegroom.
So the jaundiced narrative flows on and on, doing the fullest justice on
record to some of the main heads of the front line's immemorial distaste
for the Staff--for its too Olympian line of comment upon the vulgar
minutiæ of combat, its offensively manifest facilities for getting a
good shave, its fertility in gratuitous advice of an imperfectly
practical kind, and its occasional lapses from grace in speaking of the
men, the beloved men, the objects of every good combatant officer's
jealous and wrathful affection.
Or, again, you might say that a Staff is a trouser-button, which there
are few to praise while it goes on with its work, and very few to
abstain from cursing when it comes off. When a Staff's work is done well
the front line only feels as if Nature were marching, without actual
molestation, along some beneficent course of her own. But when some one
slips up, and half a brigade is left to itself in a cold, cold world
encircled by Germans, the piercing eye of the front line perceives in a
moment how pitifully ill the Brass Hats deserve of their country. If you
are an infantry-man the Brass Hats above you are, in your sight, a kind
of _ex officio_ children of perdition, like your own gunners. As long as
your own gunners go on achieving the masterpiece of mathematics that is
required to confine the incidence of their shells to the enemy you feel
that, just for the moment, a gunner's rich natural endowment of original
sin is not telling for all it is worth. But some day the frailty of man
or of metal causes a short one to drop once again among you and your
friends; and then you are mightily refreshed and confirmed in the stern
Calvinistic faith of the infantry that there are chosen vessels of grace
and also chosen vessels of homicidal mania.
If man, in all his wars, is predestined never to love and trust his
Brass Hats, least of all can he struggle against this disability when he
is warring in trenches. Why? Because trench life is very domestic,
highly atomic. Its atom, or unit, like that of slum life, is the
jealously close, exclusive, contriving life of a family housed in an
urban cellar. During the years of trench war a man seldom saw the whole
of his company at a time. Our total host might be two millions strong,
or ten millions; whatever its size a man's world was that of his
section--at most, his platoon; all that mattered much to him was the one
little boatload of castaways with whom he was marooned on a desert
island and making shift to keep off the weather and any sudden attack of
wild beasts. Absorbed in the primitive job of keeping alive on an earth
naked except in the matter of food, they became, like other primitive
men, family separatists. Any odd chattel that each trench household
acquired served as an extra dab of cement for the household's internal
affections, as well as a possible _casus belli_ against the unblessed
outsiders who dared to cast upon it the eye of desire. A brazier with
three equal legs would be coveted by a whole company. Once a platoon
acquired a broken, but just practicable, arm-chair; not exactly a
stronghold of luxury; rather a freakish wave of her banner; and this
symbol of lost joys was borne, at great inconvenience, from sector to
sector of the front, amidst the affected derision of other
platoons--veiling what was well understood to be envy. It was like the
grim, ineffusive spiritual cohesion of a Scottish family soldered
together to keep out the world.
Constantly jammed up against one another, every man in each of these
isolated knots of adventurers came to be seen by the rest for what he
was worth, with the drastic clearness of open-eyed husbands and wives of
long standing. They had domesticated the Day of Judgment. Many old
valuations had to go by the board; some great home reputations wilted
surprisingly; stones that the builders of public opinion on Salisbury
Plain had confidently rejected found their way up to the heads of
corners. Officers, watched almost as closely, were sorted out by the
minds of the men into themes for contemptuous silence, objects of the
love that doeth and beareth all things, and cases of Not Proven Yet. The
cutting equity of this family council was bracing. It got the best out
of everybody in whom there was anything. Imagine a similar overhauling
of public life here! And the size of the scrap-heap! But to the outer
world, which it did not half know, the tribunal was harsh, and harshest
of all to the outer and upper world of army principalities and powers.
These were, to it, the untested, unsifted, "the crowd that was never put
through it." There were presumptions against them, besides. They were
akin, in the combatant's sight, to the elfish gods that had ruled and
bedevilled his training at home. They were of the breed of the wasters,
the misorganizers, the beauties who sent his battalion out from the
Wiltshire downs to Bruay along a course of gigantic zigzags, like a
yacht beating up in the teeth of a wind, first running far south to
Havre, then north to near the German Ocean, and then going about and
opening out again upon the southward tack until Bruay was struck; for it
was, indeed, along a trajectory somewhat like that of an actual flash of
lightning in some quaint engraving that Britain hurled at the enemy many
of her new thunderbolts of war. Also, they stood in the shoes of the men
who in French's day had sent platoon commanders to take woods and
quarries not marked on their maps. And they were the men who, when
troops had been marching twelve miles in full kit on the high-cambered,
heavily greased Flanders setts in the rain, would appear on the roadside
turf round a blind corner, sitting chubby and sleek on fresh horses, and
say that the marching was damned bad and troops must go back to-morrow
and do it again. But the chief count was the first--that they had not
all gone through the mill; that they lived in a world in which all the
respectable old bubbles, pricked elsewhere, were still fat and shining,
where all the old bluffs were uncalled and still going strong, and the
wangler could still inherit the earth and eye-wash reign happy and
glorious.
Not a judgment wholly just. But not one contemptible either; for,
wherever it ended, it set out from the right idea of judging a man only
by what he was worth and what he could do. And, just or not, it was
real; it influenced men's acts, not to the extent of losing us the war,
but to that of helping to send the winners home possessed with that
contemptuous impatience of authority which has already thrown out of
gear so much of the pre-war machinery for regulating the joint action of
mankind.
IV
There was yet another special check during the war upon love and respect
for the higher commands. There were so many things of moment which they
were the last to find out. Time after time the great ones of this world
were seen to be walking in darkness long after the lowly had seen a
great light. While the appointed brains of our army were still swearing
hard by the rifle, and nothing but it, as the infantry's friend, a more
saving truth had entered in at the lowly door of the infantry's mind.
Ignoring all that at Aldershot they had learnt to be sacred, they
contumaciously saw that so long as you stand in a hole deeper than you
are tall you never will hit with a rifle-bullet another man standing in
just such another hole twenty yards off. But also--divine idea!--that
you can throw a tin can from your hole into his.
In England the mighty had taken a great deal of pains to teach the New
Army always to parry the thrust of its enemy's bayonet first, and only
then to get in its own. A fine, stately procedure it was when taught by
an exemplary Regular Army instructor fully resolved that, whatever
Shelley may say, no part of any movement must mingle in any other part's
being. In France, and no doubt on other fronts too, it abruptly dawned
on those whose style this formalist had moulded, more or less, that a
second German or Turk was apt to cut in before the appointed ritual of
debate with the first could be carried to a happy end. Illicit
abridgements followed, attended by contumacious reflections.
Whatever, again, was august in Canadian life and affairs was bent in
1914 upon arming Canadian troops with what was indeed, by a long chalk,
the pick of all match-shooting rifles. It was the last word of man in
his struggle against the caprices of barometric and thermometric
pressures on ranges. And it was to show a purblind Europe, among other
things, that Sam Hughes was the man and that wisdom would die with him.
Yet hardly had its use, in wrath, begun when there broke upon the
untutored Canadian foot-soldier a revelation withheld from the Hugheses
of this world. He perceived that the enemy, in his perversity, did not
intend to stand up on a skyline a thousand yards off to be shot with all
the refinements of science; point-blank was going to be the only range,
except for a few specialists; rapidity of fire would matter more than
precision; and all the super-subtle appliances tending to triumphs at
Bisley would here be no better than aids to the picking of mud from
trench walls as the slung rifle joggled against them.
The great did not turn these truths of mean origin right away from the
door. They would quite often take a discovery in. Only there was no
running to greet it.
There was no hurry in their hands,
No hurry in their feet.
Like smells that originate in the kitchen and work their way up by
degrees to the best bedroom the new revelations of war ascended slowly
from floor to floor of the hierarchy. They did arrive in the end. The
Canadians got, in the end, a rifle not too great and good for business.
By the third year of the war the infantry schools at the base were
teaching drafts from home to use the bayonet as troops in the line had
taught themselves to use it in the second. The frowning down of the
tanks can hardly have lasted a year. The Stokes gun was not blackballed
for good. It was not for all time, but only for what seemed to them like
an age, that our troops had to keep off the well-found enemy bomber with
bombs that they made of old jam tins, wire, a little gun-cotton, a
little time fuse, and some bits of sharp stone, old iron, or anything
hard that was lying about, with earth to fill in; the higher powers did
the thing well in the end; they came down handsomely at last; in the
next life the Mills bomb alone should be good for at least a night out
once a year on an iceberg to some War Office brave who would not see it
killed in the cradle.
And yet authority wore, in the eyes of its troops in the field, an
inexpert air--sublime, benevolent, but somehow inexpert. They had begun
to notice it even before leaving England. Imagine the headquarters Staff
of a district command watching a test for battalion bombing officers and
sergeants at the close of a divisional bombing course in 1915: the
instructor in charge a quick-witted Regular N.C.O. who has shone at Loos
and is now decorated, commissioned, slightly shell-shocked, and sent
home to teach, full of the new craft and subtlety of trench war; the
pupils all picked for the job and devouringly keen, half of them old
cricketers, all able-bodied, and all now able, after hard practice
during the course, to drop a bomb on to any desired square yard within
thirty-five yards of their stance; and then the Staff, tropically
dazzling in their red and gold, august beyond words, but genial, benign,
encouraging, only too ready to praise things that they would see to be
easy if only they knew more about them and were not like middle-aged
mothers watching their offspring at football--so a profane bombing
sergeant describes them that night to his mess.
V
"Your Old Army's all bloody born amatoors," an Australian of ripe war
experience remarked with some frankness in France. His immediate
occasion for generalizing so rashly was somebody's slip in passing
certain grenades as good for field use. Most of our hand and rifle
grenades undoubtedly were. If anything they were too fine for it, too
fit to beautify drawing-rooms as well. One _objet d'art_, a delight to
the eye, was said to cost its country one pound five as against the two
francs for which France was composing an angel of death less pretty but
equally virtuous. Still, ours would kill, if you had the heart to break
up an object so fair. But the batch that made the Australian blaspheme,
though good in design, were mismade. They were made as if the people who
made them had not guessed what they were for.
As you know, the outside of most kinds of grenade is a thick metal case
serrated with deeply-cut lines that cross each other like those more
shallow sunk lines on crocodile-leather, only at right angles. These
lines of weakness, cut into the metal, mark out almost the whole of the
case into little squares standing up in relief, sixteen or thirty-two or
forty-eight or seventy-two according to type. The burst, if all goes
well, attacks the lines of weakness, cuts them right through, and so
disperses all the little squares of brass, cast-iron, or steel radially
as flying bits of shrapnel. What led the Australian to sin was that this
batch had come out to France with their lines of weakness cut not half
as deep as they should be. The burst only ripped the case open without
breaking it up. It had been lovely in life, and in death it was not
divided. It just gave a jump, the length of a frog's, and presented the
foe with a cheap good souvenir, reassuring besides.
There must have been a good many thousands of these. They may have done
good--perhaps won a good-conduct mark to some War Office hero for
rushing them out in good time to the front; perhaps assisted some
politician to feel that he was riding a whirlwind and directing a storm,
solving munition crises and winning the war. All human happiness counts.
In France, if the physical effects of their detonation were poor, the
moral reverberations which followed were lively. A bombing sergeant,
sent down the line for a rest and instructing new drafts in a hollow
among the sand dunes at Etaples well out of authority's hearing, would
start his lecture by holding one of them up and saying: "This 'ere, men,
is a damn bad grenade. But it's all that the bloody tailors give you to
work with. So just pay attention to me." And then he would go on to pour
out his cornucopia of tips, fruits of empiric research, for doing what
somebody's slackness or folly had made it so much less easy to do.
VI
Whenever you passed from east to west across the British zone during the
war you would find somebody saying with fervour that somebody else, a
little more to the west and a little higher in rank, had not even learnt
his job well enough to keep out of the way. Subalterns, who by some odd
arrangement of flukes had come through our attacks on the Somme in 1916
and in Artois and Flanders next year, would hoot at the notion--it had a
vogue with part of the Staff in a tranquil far west--that the way to get
on with the war was to raise a more specific thirst for blood in the
private. Battalion commanders did not soon tire of telling how in the
busiest days of big battles the unseen powers would pester them for
instant returns of the number of shovels they had, or of the number of
men who in civil life had been fitters, or had been moulders. Brigadiers
would savagely wonder aloud whether it ever occurred to a higher command
that to make little attack after little attack, each on a narrow,
one-brigade front, was merely to ask to have each attack squashed flat
in its turn by a fan-like convergence of fire from the enemy's guns on
both flanks, not to speak of supports. The day the bad turn came for us,
in the two-chaptered battle of Cambrai, an officer on the Staff of one
of the worst-hit divisions observed: "Our attitude is just 'we told you
so'." When the good turn in the war had come the next summer there was a
day, not so good as the rest, when two squadrons of horse were sent to
charge, in column, up a straight, treeless rising road for half a mile
and take a little wood at the top. There were many machine-guns in the
wood--how could there not have been?--and the whole air sang with
warnings of that. No horse or man either got to the wood or came back.
They were all in a few seconds lying in the white dust, almost in the
order they rode in, the officer in command a little ahead of the rest.
It looked, in its formal completeness, like a thing acted, a cinema play
showing a part of Sennacherib's army on which the angel had breathed. On
the road back from the place I met a corps commander--a great man at his
work. When he heard his face crumpled up for a moment--he was a
soft-hearted man. "Another of those damned cavalry follies!" he growled.
His voice had the scorn that the man who is versed in to-day's practice
feels for the men who still move among yesterday's theories. So it was,
from east to west, all the way.
All the wise men were not in the east. It was the fault of the war, the
outlandish, innovatory war that did not conform to the proper text-books
as it ought to have done; an unimagined war of flankless armies
scratching each other's faces across an endless thorn hedge, not dreamt
of in Staff College philosophy; a war that was always putting out of
date the best that had been known and thought and invented, always
sending everyone to school again; unkind, above all, to us who, if
well-to-do, bring up our young to have a proper respect for the past and
to feel that if yesterday's parasol will not keep out the rain of
to-day, then it ought to, and no one can blame them for using it.
VII
Yet the men in the line talked, and so did the subalterns, most of whom
had been in the ranks, now that the war ran into years. Soldiers have
endless occasions for talk. Being seldom alone, and having to hold their
tongues sometimes, they talk all the time that they can. And most of
their talk was sour and scornful. Ever since their enlistment there had
been running down in them one of the springs of health in the life of a
country. An unprecedented number of the most healthy, high-spirited, and
nationally valuable Englishmen in the prime of life were telling one
another that, among those whom they had hitherto taken more or less
completely on trust as their "betters," things were going on which must
make the war harder for us to win; while they, the common people, cared
with all their hearts about saving Belgium and France, those betters, so
placed that they could do more to that end if they would, seemed to be
caring, on the whole, less--shouting and gesticulating enough, but ready
to give up less of what was pleasant and to do less of what was hard,
and perhaps not able to do much at their best. Colonel Repington's
friends, with their scented baths, their prime vintages, and their
mutinous chatter, were not actually seen; but there was a bad smell
about; the air stank of bad work in high places.
Most of our N.C.O.'s and men in the field had come to feel that it was
left to them and to the soundest regimental officers to pull the
foundered rulers of England and heads of the army through the scrape.
They assumed now that while they were doing this job they must expect to
be crawled upon by all the vermin bred in the dark places of a rich
country vulgarly governed. They were well on their guard by this time
against expressing any thoroughgoing faith in anything or anybody, or
incurring any suspicion of dreaming that such a faith was likely to
animate others; a man was a fool if he imagined that anyone set over him
was not looking after number one; the patriotism of the press was
bunkum, screening all sorts of queer games; the eloquence of patriotic
orators was just a smoke barrage to cover their little manoeuvres
against one another; the red tabs of the Staff were the "Red Badge of
Funk"; a hospital ward full of sick men would exchange, when left to
themselves, vitriolic surmises about the extravagant pay that the nurses
were probably getting, and go on to suggest what vast profits the
Y.M.C.A. must be making out of its huts. Wherever the contrary had not
been proved to their own senses, the slacking, self-seeking and shirking
that had muddled and spoilt their own training for war until they were
put, half-trained, in the hottest of the fire must be assumed to be in
authority everywhere.
Long ago, perhaps, the commons of England may, on the whole, have
accepted the view that while they were the fists of her army there was a
strong brain somewhere behind, as good at its job as the fists were at
theirs; that above them, using them for the best, mind was enthroned,
mind the deviser, adapter, foreseer, the finder of ever new means to new
ends, mind which knew better than fists, and from which, in any time of
trial, all good counsels and provident works were sure to proceed. If
so, the faith of the general mass of the English common people in any
such division of functions was now pretty near its last kick. The lions
felt they had found out the asses. They would not try to throw off the
lead of the asses just then: you cannot reorganize a fire-brigade in the
midst of a fire. That had to wait. They worked grimly on at the job of
the moment, resigned for the present to seeing all the things go ill
which the great ones of their world ought to have caused to go well. For
themselves, in each of their units, they saw what was coming. Some day
soon they would be put into an attack and would come out with half their
numbers or, perhaps, two-thirds, and nothing gained for England, perhaps
because some old Regular in his youth had preferred playing polo to
learning his job. The rest would be brought up to strength with
half-trained drafts and then put in again, and the process would go on
over and over again until our commanders learnt war, and then perhaps we
might win, if any of us were left.
While so many things were shaken one thing that held fast was the men's
will to win. It may have changed from the first lyric-hearted
enthusiasm. But it was a dour and inveterate will. At the worst most of
the men fully meant to go down killing for all they were worth. And
there was just a hope that in Germany, too, such default as they saw on
our side was the rule; it was, perhaps, a disease of all armies and
countries, not of ours alone; there might thus be a chance for us still.
On that chance they still worked away with a sullen ardour that no
muddling or sloth in high places could wholly damp down. Many of them
were like children clinging with a cross crankiness to a hobby of
learning to read in a school where some of the teachers were good, but
some could not read themselves, and others could read but preferred
other occupations to teaching.
All were so deeply absorbed in winning that no practical upshot of all
their new thoughts about England's diseases was yet, as far as I could
perceive, taking shape in their minds. On that side their mood was
merely one of postponement, somewhat menacing in its form, but still
postponement. "We've _got_ to win first. Then----? But we've got to win
first." They were almost exactly the words in which most German
prisoners, till 1918, expressed their own feeling about the old rulers
of Germany.