AUTUMN COMES
I
In the autumn of 1917 the war entered into an
autumn, or late middle-age, of its own. "Your young men," we are told,
"shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams." The same with
whole armies. But middle-aged armies or men may not have the mists of
either morning or evening to charm them. So they may feel like Corot,
when he had painted away, in a trance of delight, till the last vapour
of dawn was dried up by the sun; then he said, "You can see everything
now. Nothing is left," and knocked off work for the day. There was no
knocking off for the army. But that feeling had come. A high time was
over, a great light was out; our eyes had lost the use of something,
either an odd penetration that they had had for a while, or else an odd
web that had been woven across them, shutting only ugliness out.
The feeling was apt to come on pretty strong if you lived at the time on
the top of the little hill of Cassel, west of Ypres. The Second Army's
Headquarters were there. You might, as some Staff duty blew you about
the war zone, be watching at daybreak one of that autumn's many dour
bouts of attrition under the Passchendale Ridge, in the mud, and come
back, the same afternoon, to sit in an ancient garden hung on the slope
of the hill, where a great many pears were yellowing on the wall and
sunflowers gazing fixedly into the sun that was now failing them. All
the corn of French Flanders lay cut on the brown plain under your eyes,
from Dunkirk, with its shimmering dunes and the glare on the sea, to the
forested hills north of Arras. Everywhere lustre, reverie, stillness;
the sinking hum of old bees, successful in life and now rather tired;
the many windmills fallen motionless, the aureate light musing over the
aureate harvest; out in the east the broken white stalks of Poperinghe's
towers pensive in haze; and, behind and about you, the tiny hill city,
itself in its distant youth the name-giver and prize of three mighty
battles that do not matter much now. All these images or seats of
outlived ardour, mellowed now with the acquiescence of time in the
slowing down of some passionate stir in the sap of a plant or the spirit
of insects or men, joined to work on you quietly. There, where the earth
and the year were taking so calmly the end of all the grand racket that
they had made in their prime, why not come off the high horse that we,
too, in that ingenuous season, had ridden so hard? It was not now as it
had been of yore. And why pretend that it was?
II
One leaf that had gone pretty yellow by now was the hope of perfect
victory--swift, unsoured, unruinous, knightly: St. George's over the
dragon, David's over Goliath. Some people at home seem to be still
clinging hard to that first pretty vision of us as a gifted, lithe, wise
little Jack fighting down an unwieldy, dastardly giant. But troops in
the field become realists. Ours had seen their side visibly swelling for
more than two years, till Jack had become a heavier weight than the
giant and yet could not finish him off. We knew that our allies and we
outnumbered the Germans and theirs. We knew we were just as well armed.
We had seen Germans advancing under our fire and made no mistake about
what they were worth. Our first vision of victory had gone the way of
its frail sister dream of a perfect Allied comradeship. French soldiers
sneered at British now, and British at French. Both had the same
derisive note in the voice when they named the "Brav' Belges." Canadians
and Australians had almost ceased to take the pains to break it to us
gently that they were the "storm troops," the men who had to be sent for
to do the tough jobs; that, out of all us sorry home troops, only the
Guards Division, two kilted divisions and three English ones could be
said to know how to fight. "The English let us down again"; "The Tommies
gave us a bad flank, as usual"--these were the stirring things you would
hear if you called upon an Australian division a few hours after a
battle in which the lion had fought by the side of his whelps. Chilly,
autumnal things; while you listened, the war was apparelled no longer in
the celestial light of its spring.
An old Regular colonel, a man who had done all his work upon the Staff,
said, at the time, that "the war was settling down to peace conditions."
He meant no bitter epigram. He was indeed unfeignedly glad. The war was
ceasing to be, like a fire or shipwreck, a leveller of ranks which, he
felt, ought not to be levelled. Those whom God had put asunder it was
less recklessly joining together. The first wild generosities were
cooling off. Not many peers and heirs-apparent to great wealth were
becoming hospital orderlies now. Since the first earthquake and tidal
wave the disturbed social waters had pretty well found their old seemly
levels again; under conscription the sons of the poor were now making
privates; the sons of the well-to-do were making officers; sanity was
returning. The Regular had faced and disarmed the invading hordes of
1914. No small feat of audacity, either. Think what the shock must have
been--what it would be for any profession, just at the golden prime of
rich opportunity and searching test, to be overrun of a sudden by hosts
of keen amateurs, many of them quick-witted, possibly critical, some of
them the best brains of the country, most of them vulgarly void of the
old professional habits of mind, almost indecently ready to use new and
outlandish means to the new ends of to-day.
But now the stir and the peril were over. The Old Army had won. It had
scarcely surrendered a single strong point or good billet; Territorials
and New Army toiled at the coolie jobs of its household. It had not even
been forced, like kings in times of revolution, to make apparent
concessions, to water down the pure milk of the word. It had become only
the more intensely itself; never in any war had commands been retained
so triumphantly in the hands of the cavalry and the Guards, the leaders
and symbols of the Old Army resistance to every inroad of mere
professional ardour and knowledge and strong, eager brains. When Sir
Francis Lloyd relinquished the London District Command a highly
composite mess in France discussed possible successors. "Of course,"
said a Guards colonel gravely--and he was a guest in the Mess--"the
first point is--he _must_ be a Guardsman." Peace conditions returning,
you see; the peace frame of mind; the higher commands restored to their
ancient status as property, "livings," perquisites, the bread of the
children, not to be given to dogs. At home, too, peace conditions were
taking heart to return. The scattered coveys of profiteers and
job-hunters, almost alarmed by the first shots of the war, had long
since met in security; "depredations as usual" was the word; and the
mutual scalping and knifing of politicians had ceased to be shamefaced;
who could fairly expect an old Regular Army to practise a more austere
virtue than merchant princes and statesmen?
III
Even in trenches and near them, where most of the health was, time had
begun to embrown the verdant soul of the army. "Kitchener's Army" was
changing. Like every volunteer army, his had sifted itself, at its
birth, with the only sieve that will riddle out, even roughly, the best
men to be near in a fight. Till the first of the pressed men arrived at
our front, a sergeant there, when he posted a sentry and left him alone
in the dark, could feel about as complete a moral certitude as there is
on the earth that the post would not be let down. For, whatever might
happen, nothing inside the man could start whispering to him "You never
asked to be here! if you do fail, it isn't your doing."
Nine out of ten of the conscripts were equally sound. For they would
have been volunteers if they could. The tenth was the problem; the more
so because there was nothing to tell you which was the tenth and which
were the nine. For all that you knew, any man who came out on a draft,
from then on, might be the exception, the literal-minded Christian who
thought it wicked to kill in a war; or an anti-nationalist zealot who
thought us all equally fools, the Germans and us, to be out there
pasturing lice, instead of busy at home taking the hide off the
_bourgeois_; or one of those drift wisps of loveless critical mind,
attached to no place or people more than another, and just as likely as
not to think that the war was our fault and that we ought to be beaten.
_Riant avenir!_ as a French sergeant said when, in an hour of ease, we
were talking over the nature of man, and he told me, in illustration of
its diversity, how a section of his had just been enriched with a draft
of neurasthenic burglars.
These vulgar considerations of military expediency never seemed to cross
the outer rim of the consciousness of many worthies who were engaged at
home in shooing the reluctant into the army. If a recalcitrant seemed to
be lazy, spiritless, nerveless, if there was every sign of his making a
specially worthless and troublesome consumer of rations in a trench,
then a burning zeal to inflict this nuisance and danger on some
unoffending platoon in France seemed to invade the ordinary military
tribunal. Report said that the satisfaction of this impulse was called,
by the possessed persons, "giving Haig the men," and sometimes, with a
more pungent irony, "supporting our fellows in the trenches." _Non tali
auxilio nec defensoribus istis._ Australia's fellows in the trenches
were suffered to vote themselves out of the risk of getting any support
of the kind. Australia is a democracy. Ours were not asked whether they
wanted to see their trenches employed as a penal settlement to which
middle-aged moralists in England might deport, among other persons,
those whom they felt to be morally the least beautiful of their juniors.
So nothing impeded the pious practice of "larning toads to be toads."
For the shirker, the "kicker," the "lawyer," for all the types of
undesirables that contribute most liberally to the wrinkled appearance
of sergeants, those pious men had the nose of collectors. Wherever there
was a spare fifty yards of British front to be held, they, if anyone,
could find a man likely to go to sleep there on guard, or, in some
cyclonic disturbance of spirit, to throw down his rifle and light out
for the coast, across country.
Such episodes were reasonably few. The inveterate mercy that guards
drunken sailors preserved from the worst disaster the cranks who had
made a virtue of giving their country every bad soldier they could. And
the abounding mercy of most courts-martial rendered few of the episodes
fatal to individual conscripts. Nor, indeed, was the growth in their
frequency after conscription wholly due to the more fantastic tricks
played before high Heaven by some of the Falstaffs who dealt with the
Mouldies, Shadows and Bull-calves. Conscription, in any case, must be
dilution. You may get your water more quickly by throwing the filter
away, but don't hope to keep the quality what it was. And the finer a
New Army unit had been, to begin with, the swifter the autumnal change.
Every first-rate battalion fighting in France or Belgium lost its whole
original numbers over and over again. First, because in action it spared
itself less than the poor ones; secondly, because the best divisions
rightly got the hard jobs. Going out in the late autumn of 1915, a good
battalion with normal luck might have nearly half its original volunteer
strength left after the Battle of the Somme. Drafts of conscripts would
fill up the gap, each draft with a listless or enigmatic one-tenth that
volunteering had formerly kept at a distance. The Battle of Arras next
spring might leave only twenty per cent of the first volunteers, and the
autumn battles in Flanders would pretty well finish their business.
Seasons returned, but not to that battalion returned the spirit of
delight in which it had first learnt to soldier together and set foot
together in France and first marched through darkness and ruined
villages towards the flaring fair-ground of the front. While a New Army
battalion was still very young, and fully convinced that no crowd of men
so good to be with had ever been brought together before, it used to be
always saying how it would keep things up after the war. No such genial
reunions had ever been held as these were to be. But now the few odd men
that are left only write to each other at long intervals, feeling almost
as if they were raising their voices in an empty church. One of them
asks another has he any idea what the battalion was like after Oppy, or
Bourlon Wood, or wherever their own knock-out came. Like any other
battalion, no doubt--a mere G.C.M. of all conscript battalions;
conscription filed down all special features and characters.
Quick waste and renewal are said to be good for the body; the faster you
burn up old tissues, by good sweaty work, the better your health; fresh
and superior tissue is added unto you all the more merrily. Capital,
too, the economists say, must be swiftly used up and reborn, over and
over again, to do the most good that it can. And then there is the case
of the phoenix--in fact, of all the birds and all the beasts too, for
all evolution would seem to be just the dying of something worse, as
fast as it can, in order that something better may live in its place. No
need for delay in turning your anthropoid apes into Shakespeares and
Newtons.
But what if you found, after all your hard work, that not all the
deceased cells of your flesh were replaced by new cells of the sort you
would like? If some of your good golden pounds should have perished only
that inconvertible paper might live? If out of your phoenix's ashes only
a common-place rooster should spring? If evolution were guyed and
bedevilled into retrovolution, a process by which the fittest must more
and more dwindle away and the less fit survive them, and species be not
multiplied but made fewer? Something, perhaps, of the sort may go on in
the body in its old age, or in roses in autumn. It must go on in a
volunteer army when it is becoming an army of conscripts during a war
that is highly lethal.
IV
The fall of the leaf had brought, too, a sad shortage of heroes--of
highly-placed ones, for, of course, every company had its own,
authenticated beyond any proof that crosses or medals could give. A few
very old Regular privates would say, "Ah! if we had Buller here!" Sir
Redvers Buller has always remained, in lofty disregard of conclusive
disproof, the Cæsar or Hannibal of the old Regular private, who sets
little store by such heroes of Whitehall and Fleet Street as Roberts and
Kitchener. But the chiefs of to-day left men cold, at the best. The name
of at least one was a by-word. Haig was a name and no more, though a
name immune in a mysterious degree from the general scoffing surmise
about the demerits of higher commands. Few subalterns or men had seen
him. No one knew what he was doing or leaving undone. But some power,
not ourselves, making for charity, seemed to recommend him to mercy in
everyone's judgement; as if, from wherever he was, nameless waves of
some sort rippled out through an uncharted ether, conveying some virtue
exhaled by that winning incarnation of honour, courage, and kindness
who, seen and heard in the flesh, made you wish to find in him all other
excellent qualities too. The front line gave him all the benefit of
every doubt. God only knew, it said, whether he or somebody else would
have to answer for Bullecourt and Serre. It might not be he who had left
the door lying open, unentered, for two nights and days, when the lions
had won the battle of Arras that spring, and the asses had let the
victory slip till the Germans crept back in the dark to the fields east
of Vimy from which they had fled in despair. But slowness to judge can
hardly be called hero-worship: at most, a somewhat sere October phase of
that vernal religion.
One of the heavenly things on which the New Army had almost counted, in
its green faith, was that our higher commands would have genius. Of
course, we had no right to do it. No X has any right to ask of Y that Y
shall be Alexander the Great or Bach or Rembrandt or Garrick, or any
kind of demonic first-rater. As reasonably send precepts to the
Leviathan to come ashore. Yet we had indulged that insane expectation,
just as we had taken it for granted that this time the nation would be
as one man, and nobody "out to do a bit for himself on the quiet." And
now behold the falling leaf and no Leviathan coming ashore in response
to our May-Day desires.
Certainly other things, highly respectable, came. The Second Army
Staff's direction of that autumn's almost continuous battles was of a
competence passing all British precedents. Leap-frogging waves of
assault, box barrages, creeping barrages, actions, interactions, and
counter-actions were timed and concerted as no Staff of ours had done it
before. The intricate dance which has to go on behind a crowded battle
front, so that columns moving east and west and columns moving north and
south shall not coincide at cross roads, was danced with the
circumstantial precision of the best ballets. An officer cast away
somewhere in charge of a wayside smithy for patching up chipped guns
felt that there was a power perched on the top of the hill at Cassel
which smelt out a bit of good work, or of bad, wherever anyone did it.
Sense, keenness, sympathy, resolution, exactness--all the good things
abode in that eyrie which have to be in attendance before genius can
bring off its marvels; every chamber swept and garnished, and yet--.
Foch tells us what he thinks Napoleon might have said to the Allied
commands if he could have risen in our black times from the dead. "What
cards you people have!" he would have said, "and how little you do with
them! Look!" And then, Foch thinks, within a month or two he "would have
rearranged everything, gone about it all in some new way, thrown out the
enemy's plans and quite crushed him." That "some new way" was not fated
to come. The spark refused to fall, the divine accident would not
happen. How could it? you ask with some reason. Had not trench warfare
reached an impasse? Yes; there is always an impasse before genius shows
a way through. Music on keyboards had reached an impasse before a person
of genius thought of using his thumb as well as his fingers. Well, that
was an obvious dodge, you may say, but in Flanders what way through
could there have been? The dodge found by genius is always an obvious
dodge, afterwards. Till it is found it can as little be stated by us
common people as can the words of the poems that Keats might have
written if he had lived longer. You would have to become a Keats to do
that, and a Napoleon to say how Napoleon would have got through to
Bruges in the autumn that seemed so autumnal to us. All that the army
knew, as it decreased in the mud, was that no such uncovenanted mercy
came to transmute its casualties into the swiftly and richly fruitful
ones of a Napoleon, the incidental expenses of some miraculous draught
of victory.
Nothing to grouse at in that. The winds of inspiration have to blow the
best way they can. Prospero himself could not raise them; how could the
likes of us hope to? And yet there had been that illogical hope, almost
reliance--part of the high unreason of faith that could move mountains
in 1914 and seems to be scarcely able to shift an ant-hill to-day.