TEDIUM
I
A book may be bad and yet tell you much.
Lately I came across such a book. It is surely one of the crossest books
ever written. Its author fought in France, in the ranks, for a good many
months of the war. He must have been one of the men who make sergeants
grey--a "proper lawyer," as Regulars call the type which a cotton
district labels as "self-acting mules."
I seem to know that man. He was a volunteer, but he would not enlist
until conscription came in, because of some precious doctrine he had
about younger men without families. When he did join his first act was
to ask to speak to the colonel. He was aggrieved because army doctors
would not act, when he desired it, except as such. When anyone checked
him he felt an ardent thirst to "explain," and the explanation was
always that he who had checked was wrong. In the field he kept a diary
and sternly would he note on its recording page that tea one day--nay,
on more than one--was served "very late indeed." Heinous!
The continued existence of war is precarious. More than the League of
Nations menaces its future. For it depends, at the last, on the
infrequency of "proper lawyers." Armies can now be made, and moved about
when made, only because the plain man who keeps the world going round
does not stick up for the last ounce of his rights, or stick out for the
joys of having the last word, so dourly as these. Even to keep up a game
with so modest an element of voluntaryism about it as penal justice you
have to have some little effort of co-operation all round. If your
convicts will not even eat the whole thing begins crumbling. The
"suffragettes" showed us that. A pioneer still earlier, an Indian
coolie, proved it in a Fijian gaol. Were every soldier like this diarist
war would have to be dropped, not because men were too good, but because
they were too prickly.
II
And yet the book told something which no other book has yet succeeded in
telling you. Wordy, cantankerous, dull, repeating itself like a decimal,
padded with cheap political "thoughts" gathered from old "stunts" in bad
papers--still, it came nearer than any other to showing you the way
trench warfare struck a mind and soul quite commonplace in everything
except a double dose of native sourness. Here was nothing of M.
Barbusse's doctrinaire fire to make the author pervert or exaggerate. No
thrill of drastic passion, not even the passionate self-pity of Dickens
describing his childhood as Copperfield's, stirred the plodding and
crabbed narrative. The writer seemed too peevish to be at the pains to
beautify or exalt. And so his account of the bungled attack in which he
took part is extraordinarily true to all that the commonplace man found
to be left in almost any attack when once all the picturesque fluff
filling the current literary pictures of it were found not to be
there--the touch of bathos; the supposed heroic moment only seeming a
bit of a "dud," a miscarriage; the hugger-mugger element of confusion;
the baffling way that the real thing did not so often give men obvious
gallant things to do as irritating puzzles to solve, muddles to
liquidate at short notice; the queer flashes of revelation, in contact
with individual enemies, of the bottomless falsity of the cheaper kind
of current war psychology.
Advances, however, were far from being the staple of warfare. They
caused the most losses, but still they did less than the years of less
sensational routine to make what changes were made by the war in the
minds of the men in the ranks. And here our pettish author found the
congenial theme for his own acrid, accurate method. His trivial
reiterations succeed, in the end, in piling up in the reader's mind an
image of that old trench life as the sum of innumerable dreary units of
irksome fatigue. This was the normal life of the infantry private in
France. For N.C.O.'s it was lightened by the immunity of their rank from
fatigue work in the technical sense. For the officer it was much further
lightened by better quarters and the servant system. For most of his
time the average private was tired. Fairly often he was so tired as no
man at home ever is in the common run of his work.
If a company's trench strength was low and sentry-posts abounded more
than usual in its sector a man might, for eight days running, get no
more than one hour off duty at any one time, day or night. If enemy guns
were active many of these hours off guard duty might have to be spent on
trench repair. After one of these bad times in trenches a company or
platoon would sometimes come out on to the road behind the communication
trench like a flock of over-driven sheep. The weakest ones would fall
out and drop here and there along the road, not as a rule fainting, but
in the state of a horse dead-beat, to whom any amount of thrashing seems
preferable to going on. Men would come out light-headed with fatigue,
and ramble away to the men next them about some great time which they
had had, or meant to have, at home. Or a man would march all right till
the road fetched a bend, and then he would march straight on into the
ditch in his sleep. Upon a greasy road with a heavy camber I have seen a
used-up man get the illusion, on a night-march back to billets, that he
was walking on a round, smooth, horizontal pole or convex plank above
some fearsome sort of gulf. He would struggle hard to recover imaginary
losses of footing, pant and sweat and scrape desperately sideways with
his feet like a frightened young horse new to harness when it leans in
against the pole, with its feet skidding outwards on the setts. Down he
would go, time after time, in the mud, each time as unable to rise of
himself, under the weight of his pack and equipment, as any mediæval
knight unhorsed and held down by the weight of his armour. Hauled up
again to his feet, to be driven along like one of the spent cab-horses
in Naples just strong enough to move when up, but not to rise, he would
in another five minutes be agonizing again on the greasy pole of his
delirium.
The querulist of the book took it hard, I remember, that more kind words
did not come to the men. He saw his own lot very clearly, but not so
clearly the lot of those other unfortunates who had to put the job
through. A man who finds himself in charge of a spent horse at night, in
a place where there may be no safe waiting till dawn, must do something.
Ten to one he will flog or kick the horse into moving. He may feel that
he, not the horse, is the beast; but still he will do it. So, too, will
he bully and curse exhausted men into safety. That was what happened.
Every decent N.C.O. and company officer--and far the larger part were
decent--did what they could to humour and "buck" the bad cases through
the pangs of endurance. Some would reach the journey's end carrying
whole faggots of rifles. Some would put by their own daily rations of
rum to ginger beaten men through the last mile. But there would come
times when only hard driving seemed to be left. _Bella, horrida bella!_
III
Suppose those first eight days in the front and support trenches to be
the beginning of a divisional tour of sixteen days' duty in the line.
For four days now the weary men would be in reserve, under enemy fire,
but not in trenches; probably in the cellars of ruined houses. But these
were not times of rest. Each day or night every man would make one or
more journeys back to the trenches that they had left carrying some load
of food, water, or munitions up to the three companies in trenches, or
perhaps leading a pack-mule over land to some point near the front line,
under cover of night. Even to lead a laden mule in the dark over waste
ground confusingly wired and trenched is work; to get him back on to his
feet when fallen and wriggling, in wild consternation, among a tangle of
old barbed wire may be quite hard work.
In intervals between these journeys most men would lie in the straw in
the cellars or hobble weakly about the outside of the premises, looking
as boys sometimes do when stiff with many hearty hacks sustained in a
hard game of football, with a chill after it. They crawled in and out of
their billets like late autumn bees, feebly scraping the eight days'
plating of mud off their clothes and cleaning their jack-knives after
meals with the languor of the elders in the Bible to whom the
grasshopper was a burden. A few robust spirits, armed with craft and
subtlety more fully than the rest, would strike out, whenever released,
for some "just-a-minute," or _estaminet_, not too far off, nor yet too
near, and there lie _perdus_, lest the Company Orderly Sergeant warn
them for some new liturgy. This defensive policy did not lighten the
work of their brethren.
After four days of their labours as sumpter mules, or muleteers, the
company would plod back for another four days of duty in trenches, come
out yet more universally tired at their end, and drift back to
rest-billets, out of ordinary shell-fire, for their sixteen days or so
of "divisional rest." Here their work was really lighter, but still it
was work and not rest. It did not wholly wind up in most of the men the
spring that had run down while they were in the line. And then the
division would go again into the line, and the old cycle be worked
through once more. So most of the privates were tired the whole of the
time; sometimes to the point of torment, sometimes much less, but always
more or less tired.
IV
Many, of course, lost health and drifted "down the line," as it was
called, to the base, where work might be light, but much of the company
rather more blighting than any work to the spirit. Hither, to all the
divisional base depots and into the ultimate dust-hole or sink that was
called "Base Details," there gravitated most of the walking wreckage and
wastage, physical and moral, of active warfare: convalescent, sick and
wounded from hospital, men found too old or too young for trench work,
broken-nerved men smuggled out of the way before disaster should come,
and malingerers triumphant and chuckling, or only semi-successful,
suspect, and tediously over-acting.
There was the good man fretting and raging to get back to his friends
and the fight, away from this tainted backwater in which the swelling
flotillas of the unfit and the unwilling were left to rot at their
moorings. There was the pallid and bent London clerk, faintly disguised
in khaki but too blind to fight, now working furiously fifteen hours
each day of his seven-day week in the orderly room--no Sunday here, no
Saturday afternoon--for pure love of international right. There was the
dug-out, the Grenadier Guards sergeant-major of sixty, the handsome and
melancholy old boy, a Victorian survivor into our little vulgar age,
with a careful and dignified manner and mighty memories of a radiant
past in London, when all parades, for a good-conduct-man well up in his
drill, were over by half-past ten in the morning and he had a permanent
midnight pass into barracks and so could act as a super at one of the
theatres every night except when doing a guard, and see life and move
among genius and beauty, making good money. Oh, yes, he had acted with
Irving and Booth, and lived the life, and heard the chimes at midnight.
But also the veteran crooks, old dregs of the Regular Army, Queen
Victoria's worst bargains, N.C.O.'s who would boast that they had not
been once on parade in the last twenty years, waiters and caterers for
the whole of their martial careers till the liquor fairly lipped over
the edge of their eyelids and bleached the blue of their eyes. You would
hear one of them boast that no doctor on earth could find him out to be
fit when he, the tactician, wished otherwise. Another had made
pathological studies, learning up the few conjectural symptoms of
maladies that show no outward trace; as science advanced to the point of
recording detectively the true state of the heart he had deftly changed
ground, relinquished rheumatism of that organ and done some work of
research into pains in the head; much faith did he put, too, in the
sciatic nerve. When a couple of these savants slept in one tent they
would argue after Lights Out--was sciatica safest, or shell-shock, or
general debility? "Them grey hairs should be a lot of use to you,
corp.," one of them would quite feelingly say to a new man in the tent,
"when you want to get swinging the lead."
While these ignoble presences befouled the air of a base, good things,
also, were there; but you seldom quite knew which was which. All very
well for the King to come out with his "Go, hang yourself, brave
Crillon! We fought at Arques and you were not there." But if you, too,
were not at the battle--if some unlucky effect of combustion compelled
you to live as a messmate of Crillon, far, far from Arques when the
battle was on, you would have to use tact. Somehow the man who was
undisguisedly keen to get back to the centre of things felt a slight
coldness pervading the air about him. It was as if a workman, who might
have so easily let well alone, had sinned against the trade-union
spirit, helped to raise the standard of employers' expectation, forced
the pace of dutifulness in a world where authority could be trusted to
speed things up quite enough. Even officers tended to deprecate the
higher temperatures of ardour in other ranks of base establishments.
"You're out for distinction,"--one honest rationalist would
advise--"that's what it is. Well, trust to me--up the line's not the
place where you get it. Every time a war ends you'll find most of the
decorations go to the people at G.H.Q., L. of C., and the bases. So, if
you want a nice row of ribbons to show to your kiddies, stop here." And
another would put it more subtly: "Isn't one's duty, as a rule, just
here and now?" Some were good-natured; they were not for keeping the
primrose path all to themselves. Others were anxious lest the taking of
steep and thorny paths, as they thought them, should come to be "the
done thing."
V
The men who could not shirk the choice of Hercules, for other people,
were the doctors. The stay of every N.C.O. or man at a base depot was on
probation. Each had to go before a Medical Board soon after he came. It
adjudged him either T.B. (Temporary Base) or P.B. (Permanent Base). If
marked T.B. he went before the Board again once a week, and each time he
might be marked T.B. again, or, if his disablement was thought graver or
more likely to last, P.B.; or he might be marked A. (Active Service),
and then he would join the next draft from home going up to his own
battalion or another battalion of his regiment. When once a man was
marked P.B. he only went before the Board once a month, and each time
he, too, might be marked either P.B., T.B., or A.
Chance relegated me once for some weeks to a base and gave me the job of
marching parties of crocks, total and partial, real, half-real, and
sham, across the sand dunes to the place where the faculty did its
endeavour to sort them. A picture remains of a hut with a long table in
it: two middle-aged army doctors sitting beyond it, like dons at a Viva,
and each of my party in turn taking his stand at attention, my side of
the table, facing the Board, like so many Oliver Twists. The presiding
officer takes a manifest pride in knowing all the guile and subtlety of
soldier-men. No taking _him_ in--that is proclaimed in every look and
tone. He has had several other parties before him to-day, and the lamp
of his faith, never dazzling while these rites are on, has burnt low.
"Well, my man--cold feet, I suppose?" he begins, to the first of my
lamentable party. As some practitioners are said to begin all treatments
with a prefatory purge, so would this psychologist start with a good
full dose of insult and watch the patient's reaction under the stimulus.
"No, sir, me 'eart's thrutched up," says the examinee. Then, while the
Board perforates him from head to foot for some seconds with a basilisk
stare of unbelief, he dribbles out at intervals, in a voice that
bespeaks falling hope, such ineffective addenda as "Can't get me sleep"
and "Not a smile in me."
"Very picturesque, indeed," says the senior expert in doubting. "We'll
see to that 'thrutched' heart of yours. Kardiagraph case. Next man."
The suspect, duly spat upon, slinks out. The next man takes his place at
the table. The president gives him the Dogberry eye that means:
"Masters, it is proved already that you are little better than false
knaves; and it will go near to be thought so shortly." What he says is:
"Another old hospital bird? Eh? Now, hadn't you better get back to work
before you're in trouble?"
The target of this consputation is almost convinced by its force that he
must be guilty of something, if only he knew what it was. Still, he
repeats authority's last diagnosis as well as he can: "Mine's Arthuritic
rheumatism, sir. _An'_ piles."
"Fall out and strip. Next man." While the next is taking his stand the
presiding M.O. has been making a note, and does not look up before
saying "Well, what's the matter with _you_--besides rheumatism?"
"No rheumatism, sir. And nothing else." The voice is as stiff as it
dares.
The presiding M.O. seems taken aback. Why, here is a fellow not playing
up to him! Making a nasty break in the long line of cases that fed his
darling cynicism so well! Flat burglary as ever was committed. The
second member of the Board comes to life and begins in a tone that
savours of dissatisfaction: "Well, you're the first man----"
"I'm an N.C.O., sir." The young lance-sergeant's voice is again about as
stiff as is safe. Quite safe, though, this time. For the presiding M.O.
is a Regular. Verbal points of military correctitude are the law and the
prophets to him. He cannot be wholly sorry when junior colleagues,
temporary commissioners, slip up on even the least of these shreds of
orange-peel. Like Susan Nipper, he knows his place--"me being a
permanency"--and thinks that "temporaries" ought to know theirs. So he
amends the outsider's false start to: "You're the first N.C.O. or man
who has come before us this morning and not said he had rheumatism."
The sergeant, whom I have known for some days as a choleric body, holds
his tongue, having special reasons just now not to risk a court-martial.
"Well," the president snaps as if in resentment of this self-control,
"what _is_ the matter with you?"
"Fit as can be, sir."
"What are you doing down here, then, away from your unit?"
"Obeying orders of Medical Board, sir. No. 8 General Hospital, December
8."
"Not sorry, either, I daresay," the president mutters, wobbling back
towards his first line of approach to the business. "Not very keen to go
back up the line, sergeant, eh?"
"It's all I want, sir, thank you." The sergeant puts powerful brakes on
his tongue and says only that. But he has sadly disconcerted the
faculty. A major with twenty years' service has cast himself for the
fine sombre part of recording angel to note all the cowardice and
mendacity that he can. And here is a minor actor forgetting his part and
putting everything out. From where I am keeping a wooden face near the
door I see opposition arising in the heart of the outraged psychologist
beyond the table.
A sound professional instinct reinforces the personal one. Whenever a
soldier goes before a Medical Board it is soon clear that he wants to be
thought either less fit than he is or more fit. The doctor's first
impulse, as soon as he sees which way the man's wishes tend, is to lean
towards the other. And this, in due measure, is just. We all understate
or overstate symptoms to our own family doctors according to what we
fear or desire. The doctor rightly tries to detect the disturbing force
in the patient's mind, and to discount for it duly--just like
"laying-off" for a side-wind in shooting. So now the president sees
light again. The Board is now out to find the lance-sergeant a crock.
"Hold out your wrist," says the senior member. The pulse is jealously
felt.
"Rotten!" the senior member says to the junior. Then, penetratingly, to
the sergeant: "What's that cicatrix you've got on the back of your hand?
Both hands! Show me here."
Two spongy, purplish-red pads of new flesh are inspected. "Burns,
scarcely healed!" says the president wrathfully. "Skin just the strength
of wet tissue-paper! Man alive, you've a bracelet of ulcers all round
your wrists. Never wash, eh?" When liquid fire flayed a man's hands to
the sleeve, but not further, the skin was apt to break out, as he
recovered, in small, deep boils about the frontier of the new skin and
the old. The sergeant does not answer. He wants no capital punishment
under the Army act.
"Man's an absolute wreck," says the major. "Debility, wounds imperfectly
healed, blood-poisoning likely. Not fit for the line for two months to
come. P.B.--eh?" he turns to his junior.
"That's what _I_ should say, sir," the junior concurs, in a tone of
desperate independence.
"Next man," says the major. Before the lance-sergeant has quite stalked
to the door the major calls after him "Sergeant!"
"Sir?" says the sergeant, furious and red but contained.
"You're a damned good man, but it won't do," says the major. "Good luck
to you!" Great are the forces of decent human relentment after a hearty
let-out with the temper.
The inquisition proceeds, still on that Baconian principle of finding
out which is a man's special bent and then bending the twig pretty hard
in the other direction; still, too, with the dry light of reason a
little suffused, as Bacon would say, with the humours of the affections,
of vanity, ill-temper and impatience. Nearly everybody is morally weary.
Most of the men inspected have outlived the first profuse impulse to
court more of bodily risk than authority expressly orders. Most of the
doctors, living here in the distant rear of the war, have outlived their
first generous belief in an almost universally high _moral_ among the
men. In the training-camps in 1914 the safe working presumption about
any unknown man was that he only wanted to get at the enemy as soon as
he could. Now the working presumption, the starting hypothesis, is that
a man wants to stay in, out of the rain, as long as you let him. Faith
has fallen lame; generosity flags; there has entered into the soul as
well as the body the malady known to athletes as staleness.
VI
The war had more obvious disagreeables, too; you have heard all about
them: the quelling coldness of frosty nights spent in soaked
clothes--for no blankets were brought up to the trenches; the ubiquitous
dust and stench of corpses and buzzing of millions of corpse-fed flies
on summer battle-fields; and so on, and so on--no need to go over the
list. But these annoyances seemed to me to do less in the way of
moulding the men's cast of mind than that general, chronic weariness,
different from all the common fatigues of peace, inasmuch as each
instalment of this course of exhaustion was not sandwiched in between
heavenly contrasts of utter rest before and after--divine sleeps in a
bed and dry clothes, and meals on a table, with a white tablecloth on it
and shiny glasses. It raised some serious thoughts in professional
football-players and boxers who had believed they were strong, and in
navvies and tough mountaineers. You need to know this in order to
understand the redoubled ardour with which that capital soldier, the
Lancashire miner, has sought the off-day and ensued it since he came
back from campaigning abroad.
You need, too, to know it in order to chart out the general post-war
condition of mind with its symptoms of apathy, callousness, and
lassitude. Something has gone to come of it if you have lain for a time
in the garden of Proserpine, where the great values decline and faith
and high impulse fall in like _soufflés_ grown tepid, and fatalistic
indifference comes out of long flat expanses of tiring sameness.
I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving,
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Heaven forbid that I should impute any melodious Swinburnian melancholy,
or any other form of luxious self-pity, to millions of good fellows
still fighting the good fight against circumstance. They would hoot at
the notion. But in nearly all of them hope has, at some time or other,
lost her first innocence. Time and place came when the spirit, although
unbroken, went numb: the dull mind came to feel as if its business with
ardour and choric spheres and quests of Holy Grails, and everything but
rest, had been done quite a long while ago. Well chained to an oar in
the galley, closely kept to a job in the mine, men caught a touch of the
recklessness of the slave--if the world were so foul, let it go where it
chose; they would snatch what they could, when they could; drink, and
let the world go round.
It is not sense to hope to reattain at will that deflowered virginity of
faith. Others who have it may come in good time to be a majority of us
all. Already three yearly "classes" of men who did not suffer that
immense loss of experience which came with war service have come of age
since the war; the new skin grows over the wounds. But we cannot write
off as mere dream, with no after effects, the time when it was a kind of
trench fashion to meet the demoded oaths of a friend with the dogma that
"There _is_ no ---- God."