STARS IN THEIR COURSES
I
"Doth any man doubt," the wise Bacon asks, "that if there were taken out
of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations,
imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of
a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and
indisposition and unpleasing to themselves?" One of the most sweetly
flattering hopes that we had in the August of 1914 was that in view of
the greatness of the occasion causes were not going to have their
effects.
Nothing new, you may truthfully answer, in that. The improvement is one
which man, in his cups and his dreams and other seasons of maudlin
vision, has always perceived to have just come at last. Now, he
exaltedly says to himself, for a clean break with my inadequately wise
and brilliant past. Away with that plaguey old list of my things done
which should not have been done, and of things left undone which I ought
to have done. At the end of popular plays the sympathetic youth who had
idled, philandered, or stolen till then would book to the Rand or the
Yukon, fully assured that "in that free, outdoor life" one's character
is not one's fate any longer; blessed, "out there," are Europe's
slackers and wasters, for they shall inherit the earth, or its
auriferous parts. Grasshoppers, too, if they drank or resorted to
sentimental novels and plays, might have gallant little revolts in their
hearts, and chirrup "Down with causation!" and feel cock-sure that some
good-natured god would give them a chance of "redeeming their pasts"
quite late in autumn, and put in their way a winter provision far ampler
than that which crowns the coolie labours of those sorry daughters of
Martha, the bees. But, for working this benign miracle in the soul, no
other strong waters can equal the early days of a war. If, with
unbecoming sobriety, anyone hints, in such days, that causes may still
retain some sort of control, he is easily seen to have no drop of true
blood in him; base is the slave who fears we must reap as we sowed;
shame upon spiritless whispers about any connection between the making
of beds and the lying thereon; now they shall see what excellent
hothouse grapes will be borne by the fine healthy thistles that we have
been planting and watering.
Something in it too, perhaps--at least some centuries ago. When a great
nation's army was only a few thousands strong the freak and the fluke
had their chance. An Achilles or two, at the top of their form on the
day, might upset the odds. But when armies are millions of men, and
machinery counts for more than the men, the few divine accidents of
exceptional valour cannot go far. With eleven a-side a Grace or an
Armstrong may win a game off his own bat. He will hardly do that in a
game where the sides are eleven thousand apiece. More and more, as the
armies increase, must the law of averages have it its own dreary way;
glorious uncertainties wither; statistical "curves" of relative national
fitness to win, and to stand the strain of winning or losing, overbear
everything else. What are the two armies' and the two nations' relative
numbers? What is the mean physique on each side? And the mean
intelligence? How far has each nation's history--social, political,
religious, industrial--tended to make its men rich in just pride,
self-reliance, high spirit, devotion, and hardihood? How many per cent
on each side have been sapped by venereal disease? How much of their
work have its officers troubled to learn? These are the questions. The
more men you have in a war, and the longer it lasts, the more completely
has it to lose the romance of a glorious gamble and sink--or, as some
would say, rise--to the plane of a circumstantial, matter-of-fact
liquidation of whatever relative messes the nations engaged have made of
the whole of their previous lives.
II
Any soldier will tell you the bayonet does not win battles. It only
claims, in a way that a beaten side cannot ignore, a victory won already
by gunfire, rifles, gas, bombs, or some combination of these. The
bayonet's thrust is more of a gesture: a cogent appeal, like the urgent
"How's that?" from the whole of the field when a batsman is almost
certainly out. But you may go much further back. That predominant fire
itself is just such another appeal. Its greater volume and better
direction are only the terms of an army's or a nation's claim to be
registered as the winner of what it had really won long ago when,
compared with the other nation, it minded its job and lived cleanly and
sanely. All war on the new huge scale may be seen as a process, very
expensive, of registration or verification. Whenever a war is declared
you may say that now, in a sense, it is over at last; all the votes have
been cast; the examination papers are written; the time has come for the
counting of votes and adjudging of marks. Of course, we may still "do
our bit," but the possible size of our bit had its limit fixed long ago
by the acts of ourselves and our fathers and rulers which made us the
men that we are and no more. No use now to try to cadge favour with any
_ad hoc_ God of Battles. For this, of all gods, is the most dourly
Protestant. No squaring of him on the deathbeds of people who would not
work while it was yet light.
From many points in the field--some of the best were in the tops of high
trees on high ground--you could watch through your glass the casting up
of accounts. You might survey from beginning to end a British attack up
a bare opposite slope, perhaps with home troops on the left and Canadian
or Australasian troops on the right. You had already seen them meet on
roads in the rear: battalions of colourless, stunted, half-toothless
lads from hot, humid Lancashire mills; battalions of slow, staring
faces, gargoyles out of the tragical-comical-historical-pastoral edifice
of modern English rural life; Dominion battalions of men startlingly
taller, stronger, handsomer, prouder, firmer in nerve, better schooled,
more boldly interested in life, quicker to take means to an end and to
parry and counter any new blow of circumstance, men who had learned
already to look at our men with the half-curious, half-pitying look of a
higher, happier caste at a lower. And now you saw them, all these kinds,
arise in one continuous line out of the earth and walk forward to bear
in the riddled flesh and wrung spirit the sins of their several fathers,
pastors, and masters.
Time after time there would come to the watching eye, to the mind still
desperately hugging the hope that known causes might not bring their
normal effects, the same crushing demonstration that things are as we
have made them. Sometimes the line of home troops would break into gaps
and bunches, lose touch and direction and common purpose, some of the
knots plunging on into the back of our barrage or feasting some enemy
machine-gunner on their density, others straggling back to the place
whence they had started, while the Dominion troops still ambled steadily
on, their line delicately waving but always continuous, closing again,
as living flesh closes over a pinprick, wherever an enemy shell tore a
hole.
Perhaps the undersized boys from our slums and the under-witted boys
from the "agricultural, residential, and sporting estates" of our
auctioneers' advertisements would get to their goal, the spirit
wrestling prodigies of valour out of the wronged flesh, hold on there
for an hour or two with the shells splashing the earth up about them
like puddle water when great rain-drops make its surface jump, and then
fall back under orders, without any need, the brain of our army failing
to know how to use what its muscle had won. Then, while you saw the
triumphant Australians throw back a protective flank from the left of
their newly-won front to the English right, far in their rear, you knew
bitterly what the Australians were saying once more: "They've let us
down again!" "Another Tommy officer who didn't know he'd won!" As if it
were the fault, that day, of anyone there! Our men could only draw on
such funds of nerve and physique, knowledge and skill, as we had put
into the bank for them. Not they, but their rulers and "betters," had
lost their heads in the joy of making money fast out of steam, and so
made half of our nation slum-dwellers. It was not they who had moulded
English rustic life to keep up the complacency of sentimental modern
imitators of feudal barons. It was not they who had made our Regular
Army neither aristocratic, with the virtues of aristocracy, nor
democratic, with the different virtues of democracy, nor keenly
professional with the professional virtues of gusto and curiosity about
the possibilities of its work. _Delicta majorum immeritus lues._ Like
the syphilitic children of some jolly Victorian rake, they could only
bring to this harsh examination such health and sanity as all the
pleasant vices of Victorian and Edwardian England had left them.
III
The winter after the battle of Loos a sentry on guard at one part of our
line could always see the frustrate skeletons of many English dead. They
lay outside our wire, picked clean by the rats, so that the khaki fell
in on them loosely--little heaps of bone and cloth half hidden now by
nettles and grass. If the sentry had been a year in the army he knew
well enough that they had gone foredoomed into a battle lost before a
shot was fired. After the Boer War, you remember, England, under the
first shock of its blunders, had tried to find out why the Staff work
was so bad. What it found, in the words of a famous Report, was that the
fashion in sentiment in our Regular Army was to think hard work "bad
form"; a subaltern was felt to be a bit of a scrub if he worried too
much about discovering how to support an attack when he might be more
spiritedly employed in playing polo; "The nobleness of life," as Antony
said, when he kissed Cleopatra, was to go racing or hunting, not to sit
learning how to forecast the course of great battles and how to provide
for answering their calls. And so the swathes of little brown bundles,
with bones showing through, lay in the nettles and grass.
Consider the course of the life of the British Regular officer as you
had known him in youth--not the pick, the saving few, the unconquerably
sound and keen, but the average, staple article made by a sleek,
complacent, snobbish, safe, wealth-governed England after her own image.
Think of his school; of the mystic aureole of quasi-moral beauty
attached by authority there to absorption in the easy thing--in play;
the almost passionate adoration of all those energies and dexterities
which, in this world of evolution towards the primacy of the acute, full
brain, are of the least possible use as aids to survival in men and to
victory in armies. Before he first left home for school he may have been
a normal child who only craved to be given some bit, any odd bit, of
"real work," as an experience more thrilling than games. Like most
children, he may have had a zestful command of fresh, vivid, personal
speech, his choice of words expressing simply and gaily the individual
working of his mind and his joy in its work. Through easy contact with
gardeners, gamekeepers, and village boys he often had established a
quite natural, unconscious friendliness with people of different social
grades. He was probably born of the kind that pries young, that ask,
when they play on sea sands, why there are tides, and what goes on in
the sky that there should be rain. And then down came the shades of the
prison-house. To make this large, gay book of fairy tales, the earth,
dull and stale to a child importunately fingering at its covers might
seem a task to daunt the strongest. But many of the teachers of our
youth are indomitable men. They can make earth's most ardent small lover
learn from a book what a bore his dear earth can be, with her strings of
names of towns, rivers, and lakes, her mileages _à faire mourir_, and
her insufferable tale of flax and jute. With an equal firmness your
early power of supple and bright-coloured speech may be taken away and a
rag-bag of feeble stock phrases, misfits for all your thoughts, and worn
dull and dirty by everyone else, be forced upon you instead of the
treasure you had. You may leave school unable to tell what stars are
about you at night or to ask your way to a journey's end in any country
but your own. Between your helpless mind and most of your
fellow-countrymen thick screens of division are drawn, so that when you
are fifteen you do not know how to speak to them with a natural
courtesy; you have a vague idea that they will steal your watch if you
leave it about. Above all, you have learnt that it is still "bad form"
to work; that the youth with brains and no money may well be despised by
the youth with money and no brains; that the absorbed student or artist
is ignoble or grotesque; that to be able to afford yourself "a good
time" is a natural title to respect and regard; and that to give
yourself any "good time" that you can is an action of spirit. So it went
on at prep. school, public school, Sandhurst, Camberley. That was how
Staff College French came to be what it was. And as it was what it was,
you can guess what Staff College tactics and strategy were, and why all
the little brown bundles lay where they did in the nettles and grass.
IV
You are more aware of the stars in war than in peace. A full moon may
quite halve the cares of a sentry; the Pole Star will sometimes be all
that a company has, when relieved, to guide it back across country to
Paradisiac rest; sleeping often under the sky, you come to find out for
yourself what nobody taught you at school--how Orion is sure to be not
there in summer, and Aquila always missing in March, and how the Great
Bear, that was straight overhead in the April nights, is wont to hang
low in the north in the autumn. Childish as it may seem to the wise, a
few years' nightly view of these and other invariable arrangements may
give a simple soul a surprisingly lively twinge of what the ages of
faith seem to have meant by the fear of God--the awesome suspicion that
there is some sort of fundamental world order or control which cannot by
any means be put off or dodged or bribed to help you to break its own
laws. "Anything," the old Regular warrant-officers say, "can be wangled
in the army," but who shall push the Dragon or the Great Dog off his
beat? And--who knows?--that may be only a part of a larger system of
cause and effect, all of it as hopelessly undodgable.
These apprehensions were particularly apt to arise if you had spent an
hour that day in seeing herds of the English "common people" ushered
down narrowing corridors of barbed wire into some gap that had all the
German machine guns raking its exit, the nature of Regular officers'
pre-war education in England precluding the prompt evolution of any
effectual means on our side to derange the working of this ingenious
abattoir. We had asked for it all. We had made the directing brains of
our armies the poor things that they were. Small blame to them if in
this season of liquidation they failed to produce assets which we had
never equipped them to earn--mental nimbleness, powers of individual
observation, quickness to cap with counter-strokes of invention each new
device of the fertile specialists opposite. Being as we had moulded
them, they had probably done pretty well in doing no worse.
What's _done_ we partly may compute,
But know not what's _resisted_.
Who shall say what efforts it may have cost some of those poor
custom-ridden souls not to veto, for good and all, an engine of war so
far from "smart" as the tank, or to accept any help at all from such
folk as the new-fangled, untraditional airmen, some of whom took no
shame to go forth to the fray in pyjamas. Not they alone, but all of
ourselves, with our boastful chatter about the "public school spirit,"
our gallant, robust contempt for "swats" and "smugs" and all who
invented new means to new ends and who trained and used their brains
with a will--we had arranged for these easy battues of thousands of
Englishmen, who, for their part, did not fail. To-morrow you would see
it all again--a few hundred square yards of ground gained by the deaths,
perhaps, of twenty thousand men who would
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain.
So it would go on, week after week, sitting after sitting of the dismal
court that liquidated in the Flanders mud our ruling classes' wasted
decades, until we either lost the war outright or were saved from utter
disaster by clutching at aid from French brains and American numbers.
Like Lucifer when he was confronted with the sky at night, you "looked
and sank."
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.
What had we done, when we could, that the stars in their courses should
fight for us now? Or left undone, of all that could provoke this
methodical universe of swinging and returning forces to shake off such
dust from its constant wheels?
V
"I planted a set of blind hopes in their minds," said Prometheus, making
it out to be quite a good turn that he had done to mankind. And the Dr.
Relling of Ibsen, a kind of Prometheus in general practice, kept at hand
a whole medicine-chest of assorted illusions to dope his patients with.
"Illusion, you know," said this sage, "is the tonic to give 'em." It may
be. But even illusions cost something. The bill, as Hotspur said of the
river Trent, "comes me cranking in" presently, nature's iron law laying
it down that the more superb your state of inflation the deeper shall
the dumps occasioned by a puncture be. The Promethean gift of Mr. Dunlop
to our race undoubtedly lifted the pastime of cycling out of a somewhat
bumpy order of prose into a lyric heaven. And yet the stoutest of all
nails could plunge itself into the solid tyre of old without compelling
you to walk a foundered Pegasus from the top of the Honister Pass the
whole way to Keswick, enjoying _en route_ neither the blessing of a
bicycle nor that of the unhampered use of Shanks' Mare.
So War, who keeps such a pump to blow you up with, and also such thorns
for your puncturing, had to leave us the "poor shrunken things" that we
are, anyhow. It is as if the average man had been passing himself off on
himself, in a dream, as the youthful hero of some popular drama, and, in
a rousing last act, had departed, in 1914, on excellent terms with
himself and the audience, bands playing and flags flying, to start a
noble and happy new life on the virgin soil of the "golden West." And
now he awakes in the "golden West" on a slobbery and a dirty farm, with
all the purchase money still to pay, and tools and manures remarkably
dear, and no flag visible, nor instrument of music audible, and dismal
reports coming in from neighbouring farmers, and cause and effect as
abominably linked one to another as ever, and all the time his mind full
of a sour surmise that many sorts of less credulous men have "made a
bit" of inordinate size out of the bit that he did rather than made,
during the raging and tearing run of the drama now taken off and, as far
as may be, forgotten.