AUTUMN TINTS IN CHIVALRY
I
In either of two opposite tempers you may carry on war. In one of the
two you will want to rate your enemy, all round, as high as you can. You
may pursue him down a trench, or he you; but in neither case do you care
to have him described by somebody far, far away as a fat little
short-sighted scrub. Better let him pass for a paladin. This may at
bottom be vanity, sentimentality, all sorts of contemptible things. Let
him who knows the heart of man be dogmatic about it. Anyhow, this temper
comes, as they would say in Ireland, of decent people. It spoke in
Porsena of Clusium's whimsical prayer that Horatius might swim the Tiber
safely; it animates Velasquez' knightly _Surrender of Breda_; it
prompted Lord Roberts's first words to Cronje when Paardeberg
fell--"Sir, you have made a very gallant defence"; it is avowed in a
popular descant of Newboldt's--
To honour, while you strike him down,
The foe who comes with eager eyes.
The other temper has its niche in letters, too. There was the man that
"wore his dagger in his mouth." And there was Little Flanigan, the
bailiff's man in Goldsmith's play. During one of our old wars with
France he was always "damning the French, the parle-vous, and all that
belonged to them." "What," he would ask the company, "makes the bread
rising? The parle-vous that devour us. What makes the mutton fivepence a
pound? The parle-vous that eat it up. What makes the beer
threepence-halfpenny a pot?"
Well, your first aim in war is to hit your enemy hard, and the question
may well be quite open--in which of these tempers can he be hit hardest?
If, as we hear, a man's strength be "as the strength of ten because his
heart is pure," possibly it may add a few footpounds to his momentum in
an attack if he has kept a clean tongue in his head. And yet the
production of heavy woollens in the West Riding, for War Office use,
may, for all that we know, have been accelerated by yarns about
crucified Canadians and naked bodies of women found in German trenches.
There is always so much, so bewilderingly much, to be said on both
sides. All I can tell is that during the war the Newbolt spirit seemed,
on the whole, to have its chief seat in and near our front line, and
thence to die down westward all the way to London. There Little Flanigan
was enthroned, and, like Montrose, would bear no rival near his throne,
so that a man on leave from our trench system stood in some danger of
being regarded as little better than one of the wicked. Anyhow, he was a
kind of provincial. Not his will, but that of Flanigan, had to be done.
For Flanigan was at the centre of things; he had leisure, or else
volubility was his trade; and he had got hold of the megaphones.
II
In the first months of the war there was any amount of good
sportsmanship going; most, of course, among men who had seen already the
whites of enemy eyes. I remember the potent emetic effect of Flaniganism
upon a little blond Regular subaltern maimed at the first battle of
Ypres. "Pretty measly sample of the sin against the Holy Ghost!" the
one-legged child grunted savagely, showing a London paper's comic sketch
of a corpulent German running away. The first words I ever heard uttered
in palliation of German misdoings in Belgium came from a Regular N.C.O.,
a Dragoon Guards sergeant, holding forth to a sergeants' mess behind our
line. "We'd have done every damn thing they did," he averred, "if it had
been we." I thought him rather extravagant, then. Later on, when the
long row of hut hospitals, jammed between the Calais-Paris Railway at
Etaples and the great reinforcement camp on the sand-hills above it, was
badly bombed from the air, even the wrath of the R.A.M.C. against those
who had wedged in its wounded and nurses between two staple targets
scarcely exceeded that of our Royal Air Force against war correspondents
who said the enemy must have done it on purpose.
Airmen, no doubt, or some of them, went to much greater lengths in the
chivalrous line than the rest of us. Many things helped them to do it.
Combatant flying was still new enough to be almost wholly an officer's
job; the knight took the knocks, and the squire stayed behind and looked
after his gear. Air-fighting came to be pretty well the old duel, or
else the mediæval mêlée between little picked teams. The clean element,
too, may have counted--it always looked a clean job from below, where
your airy notions got mixed with trench mud, while the airman seemed
like Sylvia in the song, who so excelled "each mortal thing upon the
dull earth dwelling." Whatever the cause, he excelled in his bearing
towards enemies, dead or alive. The funeral that he gave to Richthofen
in France was one of the few handsome gestures exchanged in the war. And
whenever Little Flanigan at home began squealing aloud that we ought to
take some of our airmen off fighting and make them bomb German women and
children instead, our airmen's scorn for these ethics of the dirt helped
to keep up the flickering hope that the post-war world might not be
ignoble.
Even on the dull earth it takes time and pains to get a clean-run boy or
young man into a mean frame of mind. A fine N.C.O. of the Grenadier
Guards was killed near Laventie--no one knows how--while going over to
shake hands with the Germans on Christmas morning. "What! not shake on
Christmas Day?" He would have thought it poor, sulky fighting. Near
Armentières at the Christmas of 1914 an incident happened which seemed
quite the natural thing to most soldiers then. On Christmas Eve the
Germans lit up their front line with Chinese lanterns. Two British
officers thereupon walked some way across No Man's Land, hailed the
enemy's sentries, and asked for an officer. The German sentries said,
"Go back, or we shall have to shoot." The Englishmen said "Not likely!"
advanced to the German wire, and asked again for an officer. The
sentries held their fire and sent for an officer. With him the
Englishmen made a one-day truce, and on Christmas Day the two sides
exchanged cigarettes and played football together. The English intended
the truce to end with the day, as agreed, but decided not to shoot next
day till the enemy did. Next morning the Germans were still to be seen
washing and breakfasting outside their wire; so our men, too, got out of
the trench and sat about in the open. One of them, cleaning his rifle,
loosed a shot by accident, and an English subaltern went to tell the
Germans it had not been fired to kill. The ones he spoke to understood,
but as he was walking back a German somewhere wide on a flank fired and
hit him in the knee, and he has walked lame ever since. Our men took it
that some German sentry had misunderstood our fluke shot. They did not
impute dishonour. The air in such places was strangely clean in those
distant days. During one of the very few months of open warfare a
cavalry private of ours brought in a captive, a gorgeous specimen of the
terrific Prussian Uhlan of tradition. "But why didn't you put your sword
through him?" an officer asked, who belonged to the school of Froissart
less obviously than the private. "Well, sir," the captor replied, "the
gentleman wasn't looking."
III
At no seat of war will you find it quite easy to live up to Flanigan's
standards of hatred towards an enemy. Reaching a front, you find that
all you want is just to win the war. Soon you are so taken up with the
pursuit of this aim that you are always forgetting to burn with the
gem-like flame of pure fury that fires the lion-hearted publicist at
home.
A soldier might have had the Athanasian ecstasy all right till he
reached the firing line. Every individual German had sunk the
_Lusitania_; there was none righteous, none. And yet at a front the holy
passion began to ooze out at the ends of his fingers. The bottom trouble
is that you cannot fight a man in the physical way without somehow
touching him. The relation of actual combatants is a personal one--no
doubt, a rude, primitive one, but still quite advanced as compared with
that between a learned man at Berlin who keeps on saying _Delenda est
Britannia!_ at the top of his voice and a learned man in London who
keeps on saying that every German must have a black heart because Cæsar
did not conquer Germany as he did Gaul and Britain. Just let the round
head of a German appear for a passing second, at long intervals, above a
hummock of clay in the middle distance. Before you had made half a dozen
sincere efforts to shoot him the fatal germ of human relationship had
begun to find a nidus again: he had acquired in your mind the rudiments
of a personal individuality. You would go on trying to shoot him with
zest--indeed, with a diminished likelihood of missing, for mere hatred
is a flustering emotion. And yet the hatred business had started
crumbling. There had begun the insidious change that was to send you
home, on your first leave, talking unguardedly of "old Fritz" or of "the
good old Boche" to the pain of your friends, as if he were a stout dog
fox or a real stag of a hare.
The deadliest solvent of your exalted hatreds is laughter. And you can
never wholly suppress laughter between two crowds of millions of men
standing within earshot of each other along a line of hundreds of miles.
There was, in the Loos salient in 1916, a German who, after his meals,
would halloo across to an English unit taunts about certain accidents of
its birth. None of his British hearers could help laughing at his
mistakes, his knowledge, and his English. Nor could the least humorous
priest of ill-will have kept his countenance at a relief when the enemy
shouted: "We know you are relieving," "No good hiding it," "Good-bye, Ox
and Bucks," "Who's coming in?" and some humorist in the obscure English
battalion relieving shouted back, with a terrific assumption of accent,
"Furrst Black Watch!" or "Th' Oirish Gyards!" and a hush fell at the
sound of these great names. Comedy, expelled with a fork by the
dignified figure of Quenchless Hate, had begun to steal back of herself.
At home that tragedy queen might do very well; she did not have these
tenpenny nails scattered about on her road to puncture the nobly
inflated tyres of her chariot. The heroes who spoke up for shooing all
the old German governesses into the barbed wire compounds were not
exposed to the moral danger of actually hustling, _propria persona_,
these formidable ancients. But while Hamilcar at home was swearing
Hannibal and all the other little Hamilcars to undying hatred of the
foe, an enemy dog might be trotting across to the British front line to
sample its rats, and its owner be losing in some British company's eyes
his proper quality as an incarnation of all the Satanism of Potsdam and
becoming simply "him that lost the dog."
If you took his trench it might be no better; perhaps Incarnate Evil had
left its bit of food half-cooked, and the muddy straw, where it lay
last, was pressed into a hollow by Incarnate Evil's back as by a cat's.
Incarnate Evil should not do these things that other people in trenches
do. It ought to be more strange and beastly and keep on making _beaux
gestes_ with its talons and tail, like the proper dragon slain by St.
George. Perhaps Incarnate Evil was extinct and you went over its
pockets. They never contained the right things--no poison to put in our
wells, no practical hints for crucifying Canadians; only the usual
stuffing of all soldiers' pockets--photographs and tobacco and bits of
string and the wife's letters, all about how tramps were always stealing
potatoes out of the garden, and how the baby was worse, and was his
leave never coming! No good to look at such things.
IV
With this guilty weakness gaining upon them our troops drove the Germans
from Albert to Mons. There were scandalous scenes on the way. Imagine
two hundred German prisoners grinning inside a wire cage while a little
Cockney corporal chaffs them in half the dialects of Germany! His
father, he says, was a slop tailor in Whitechapel; most of his
journeymen came from somewhere or other in Germany--"Ah! and my dad
sweated 'em proper," he says proudly; so the boy learnt all their kinds
of talk. He convulses Bavarians now with his flow of Silesian. He
fraternizes grossly and jubilantly. Other British soldiers laugh when
one of the Germans sings, in return for favours received, the British
ballad "Knocked 'em in the Ol' Kent Road." By the time our men had
marched to the Rhine there was little hatred left in them. How can you
hate the small boy who stands at the farm door visibly torn between
dread of the invader and deep delight in all soldiers, as soldiers? How
shall a man not offer a drink to the first disbanded German soldier who
sits next to him in a public house at Cologne, and try to find out if he
was ever in the line at the Brick-stacks or near the Big Crater? Why,
that might have been his dog!
The billeted soldier's immemorial claim on "a place by the fire" carried
on the fell work. It is hopelessly bad for your grand Byronic hates if
you sit through whole winter evenings in the abhorred foe's kitchen and
the abhorred foe grants you the uncovenanted mercy of hot coffee and
discusses without rancour the relative daily yields of the British and
the German milch cow. And then comes into play the British soldier's
incorrigible propensity, wherever he be, to form virtuous attachments.
"Love, unfoiled in the war," as Sophocles says. The broad road has a
terribly easy gradient. When all the great and wise at Paris were making
peace, as somebody said, with a vengeance, our command on the Rhine had
to send a wire to say that unless something was done to feed the Germans
starving in the slums it could not answer for discipline in its army;
the men were giving their rations away, and no orders would stop them.
Rank "Pro-Germanism," you see--the heresy of Edith Cavell; "Patriotism
is not enough; I must have no hatred or bitterness in my heart." While
these men fought on, year after year, they had mostly been growing more
void of mere spite all the time, feeling always more and more sure that
the average German was just a decent poor devil like everyone else. One
trembles to think what the really first-class haters at home would have
said of our army if they had known at the time.
V
Even at places less distant than home the survival of old English
standards of fighting had given some scandal. In that autumn of the war
when our generalship seemed to have explored all its own talents and
found only the means to stage in an orderly way the greatest possible
number of combats of pure attrition, the crying up of unknightliness
became a kind of fashion among a good many Staff Officers of the higher
grades. "I fancy our fellows were not taking many prisoners this
morning," a Corps Commander would say with a complacent grin, on the
evening after a battle. Jocose stories of comic things said by privates
when getting rid of undesired captives became current in messes far in
the rear. The other day I saw in a history of one of the most gallant of
all British divisions an illustration given by the officer who wrote it
of what he believed to be the true martial spirit. It was the case of a
wounded Highlander who had received with a bomb a German Red Cross
orderly who was coming to help him. A General of some consequence during
part of the war gave a lecture, towards its end, to a body of officers
and others on what he called "the fighting spirit." He told with
enthusiasm an anecdote of a captured trench in which some of our men had
been killing off German appellants for quarter. Another German appearing
and putting his hands up, one of our men--so the story went--called out,
"'Ere! Where's 'Arry? 'E ain't 'ad one yet." Probably some one had
pulled the good general's leg, and the thing never happened. But he
believed it, and deeply approved the "blooding" of 'Arry. That, he
explained, was the "fighting spirit." Men more versed than he in the
actual hand-to-hand business of fighting this war knew that he was
mistaken, and that the spirit of trial by combat and that of
pork-butchery are distinct. But that is of course. The notable thing was
that such things should be said by anyone wearing our uniform. Twenty
years before, if it had been rumoured, you would, without waiting, have
called the rumour a lie invented by some detractor of England or of her
army. Now it passed quite unhissed. It was the latter-day wisdom.
Scrofulous minds at home had long been itching, publicly and in print,
to bomb German women and children from aeroplanes, and to "take it out
of" German prisoners of war. Now the disease had even affected some
parts of the non-combatant Staff of our army.
VI
You know the most often quoted of all passages of Burke. Indeed, it is
only through quotations of it that most of us know Burke at all--
But the age of chivalry is gone ... the unbought grace of life, the
cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic
enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that
chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired
courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it
touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing
all its grossness.
Burke would never say a thing by halves. And as truth goes by halves,
and declines to be sweeping like rhetoric, Burke made sure of being
wrong to the tune of some fifty per cent. The French Revolution did not,
as his beautiful language implies, confine mankind for the rest of its
days to the procreation of curs. And yet his words do give you, in their
own lush, Corinthian way, a notion of something that probably did
happen, a certain limited shifting of the centre of gravity of West
European morals or manners.
One would be talking like Burke--talking, perhaps you might say, through
Burke's hat--if one were to say that the war found chivalry alive and
left it dead. Chivalry is about as likely to perish as brown eyes or the
moon. Yet something did happen, during the war, to which these wild
words would have some sort of relation. We were not all Bayards in 1914;
even then a great part of our Press could not tell indignation from
spite, nor uphold the best cause in the world without turpitude. Nor
were we all, after the Armistice, rods of the houses of Thersites and
Cleon; Haig was still alive, and so were Gough and Hamilton and
thousands of Arthurian subalterns and privates and of like-minded
civilians, though it is harder for a civilian not to lose generosity
during a war. But something had happened; the chivalrous temper had had
a set-back; it was no longer the mode; the latest wear was a fine robust
shabbiness. All through the war there had been a bear movement in
Newbolts and Burkes, and, corresponding to this, a bull movement in
stocks of the Little Flanigan group.