THE OLD AGE OF THE WAR
I
Men wearying in trenches used to tell one another sometimes what they
fancied the end of the war would be like. Each had his particular
favourite vision. Some morning the Captain would come down the trench at
"stand-to" and try to speak as if it were nothing. "All right, men," he
would say, "you can go across and shake hands." Or the first thing we
should hear would be some jubilant peal suddenly shaken out on the air
from the nearest standing church in the rear. But the commonest vision
was that of marching down a road to a wide, shining river. Once more the
longing of a multitude struggling slowly across a venomous wilderness
fixed itself on the first glimpse of a Jordan beyond; for most men the
Rhine was the physical goal of effort, the term of endurance, the symbol
of all attainment and rest.
To win what your youth had desired, and find the taste of it gone, is
said to be one of the standard pains of old age. With a kind of blank
space in their minds where the joy of fulfilment ought to have been, two
British privates of 1914, now Captains attached to the Staff, emerged
from the narrow and crowded High Street of Cologne on December 7, 1918,
crossed the Cathedral square, and gained their first sight of the Rhine.
As they stood on the Hohenzollern bridge and looked at the mighty
breadth of rushing stream, each of them certainly gave his heart leave
to leap up if it would and if it could. Had they not, by toil and
entreaty, gained permission to enter the city with our first cavalry?
Were they not putting their lips to the first glass of the sparkling
vintage of victory? Neither of them said anything then. The heart that
knoweth its own bitterness need not always avow it straight off. But
they were friends; they told afterwards.
The first hours of that ultimate winding-up of the old, long-decayed
estate of hopes and illusions were not the worst, either. The cavalry
brigadier in command at Cologne, those first few days, was a man with a
good fighting record; and now his gesture towards the conquered was that
of the happy warrior, that of Virgilian Rome, that of the older England
in hours of victory. German civilians clearly expected some kind of
mal-treatment, such perhaps as their own scum had given to Belgians.
They strove with desperate care to be correct in their bearing, neither
to jostle us accidentally in the streets nor to shrink away from us
pointedly. Soon, to their surprise and shame, they found that among the
combatant English there lingered the hobby of acting like those whom the
Germans had known through their Shakespeare: "We give express charge
that in our marches through the country there be nothing compelled from
the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French upbraided
or abused in disdainful language."
The "cease fire" order on Armistice Day had forbidden all
"fraternizing." But any man who has fought with a sword, or its
equivalent, knows more about that than the man who has only blown with a
trumpet. To men who for years have lived like foxes or badgers, dodging
their way from each day of being alive to the next, there comes back
more easily, after a war, a sense of the tacit league that must, in mere
decency, bind together all who cling precariously to life on a
half-barren ball that goes spinning through space. All castaways
together, all really marooned on the one desert island, they know that,
however hard we may have to fight to sober a bully or guard to each man
his share of the shell-fish and clams, we all have to come back at last
to the joint work of making the island more fit to live on. The gesture
of the decimated troops who held Cologne at the end of that year was, in
essence, that of the cavalry brigadiers. Sober or drunk, the men were
contumaciously sportsmen, incorrigibly English. One night before
Christmas I thought I heard voices outside my quarters long after
curfew, and went to look out from my balcony high up in the Domhof into
the moon-flooded expanse of the Cathedral square below. By rights there
should have been no figures there at that hour, German or British. But
there were three; two tipsy Highlanders--"Women from Hell," as German
soldiers used to call the demonic stabbers in kilts--gravely dispensing
the consolations of chivalry to a stout burgher of Cologne. "Och, dinna
tak' it to hairrt, mon. I tell ye that your lads were grond." It was
like a last leap of the flame that had burnt clear and high four years
before.
II
For the day of the fighting man, him and his chivalric hobbies, was
over. The guns had hardly ceased to fire before from the rear, from the
bases, from London, there came flooding up the braves who for all those
four years had been squealing threats and abuse, some of them begging
off service in arms on the plea that squealing was indispensable
national work. We had not been long in Cologne when there arrived in hot
haste a young pressman from London, one of the first of a swarm. He
looked a fine strong man. He seemed to be one of the male Vestals who
have it for their trade to feed the eternal flame of hatred between
nations, instead of cleaning out stables or doing some other work fit
for a male. His train had fortunately brought him just in time for
luncheon. This he ate and drank with goodwill, complaining only that the
wine, which seemed to me good, was not better. He then slept on his bed
until tea-time. Reanimated with tea, he said genially, "Well, I must be
getting on with my mission of hate," and retired to his room to write a
vivacious account of the wealth and luxury of Cologne, the guzzling in
all cafés and restaurants, the fair round bellies of all the working
class, the sleek and rosy children of the poor. I read it, two days
after, in his paper. Our men who had helped to fight Germany down were
going short of food at the time, through feeding the children in houses
where they were billeted. "Proper Zoo there is in this place," one of
them told me. "Proper lions and tigers. Me and my friend are taking the
kids from our billet soon's we've got them fatted up a bit. If you'll
believe me, sir, them kiddies ain't safe in a Zoo. They could walk in
through the bars and get patting the lions." I had just seen some of the
major carnivora in their cages close to the Rhine, each a rectangular
lamina of fur and bone like the tottering cats I had seen pass through
incredible slits of space in Amiens a month after the people had fled
from the city that spring. But little it mattered in London what he or I
saw. The nimble scamps had the ear of the world; what the soldier said
was not evidence.
Some Allied non-combatants did almost unthinkable things in the first
ecstasy of the triumph that others had won. One worthy drove into
Cologne in a car plastered over with Union Jacks, like a minor bookie
going to Epsom. It passed the wit of man to make him understand that one
does not do these things to defeated peoples. But he could understand,
with some help, that our Commander-in-Chief alone was entitled to carry
a Union Jack on his car. "We must show these fellows our power"; that
was the form of the licence taken out by every churl in spirit who
wanted to let his coltish nature loose on a waiter or barber in some
German hotel. I saw one such gallant assert the majesty of the Allies by
refusing to pay more than half the prices put down on the wine-list.
Another would send a waiter across an hotel dining-room to order a quiet
party of German men and women not to speak so loud. Another was all for
inflicting little bullying indignities on the editor of the _Kölnische
Zeitung_--making him print as matters of fact our versions of old cases
of German misconduct, etc. Probably he did not even know that the
intended exhibition-ground for these deplorable tricks was one of the
great journals of Europe.
Not everybody, not even every non-combatant in the dress of a soldier,
had caught that shabby epidemic of spite. But it was rife. It had become
a fashion to have it, as in some raffish circles it is a fashion at
times to have some rakish disease. In the German military cemetery at
Lille I have heard a man reared at one of our most famous public schools
and our most noble university, and then wearing our uniform, say that he
thought the French might do well to desecrate all the German soldiers'
graves on French soil. Another, at Brussels, commended a Belgian who was
said to have stripped his wife naked in one of the streets of that city
and cut off her hair on some airy suspicion of an affair with a German
officer during the enemy's occupation. A fine sturdy sneer at the notion
of doing anything chivalrous was by this time the mode. "I hope to God,"
an oldish and highly non-combatant general said, in discussing the
probable terms of peace with a younger general who had begun the war as
a full lieutenant and fought hard all the way up, "that there's going to
be no rot about not kicking a man when he's down." The junior general
grunted. He did not agree. But he clearly felt shy of protesting.
Worshippers of setting suns feel ill at ease in discussion with these
bright, confident fellows who swear by the rising one.
III
The senior general need not have feared. The generous youth of the war,
when England could carry, with no air of burlesque, the flag of St.
George, was pretty well gone. The authentic flame might still flicker on
in the minds of a few tired soldiers and disregarded civilians.
Otherwise it was as dead as the half-million of good fellows whom it had
fired four years ago, whose credulous hearts the maggots were now eating
under so many shining and streaming square miles of wet Flanders and
Picardy. They gone, their war had lived into a kind of dotage ruled by
mean fears and desires. At home our places of honour were brown with
shirkers masquerading in the dead men's clothes and licensed by careless
authorities to shelter themselves from all danger under the titles of
Colonel, Major, and Captain. Nimble politicians were rushing already to
coin into votes for themselves--"the men who won the war"--the golden
memory of the dead before the living could come home and make themselves
heard. Sounds of a general election, the yells of political cheap-jacks,
the bawling of some shabby promise, capped by some shabbier bawl, made
their way out to Cologne.
"This way, gents, for the right sort of whip to give Germans!" "Rats,
gentlemen, rats! Don't listen to _him_. Leave it to me and I'll chastise
'em with scorpions." "I'll devise the brave punishments for them." "Ah,
but I'll sweat you more money out of the swine." That was the gist of
the din that most of the gramophones of the home press gave out on the
Rhine. Each little demagogue had got his little pots of pitch and
sulphur on sale for the proper giving of hell to the enemy whom he had
not faced. Germany lay at our feet, a world's wonder of downfall, a very
Lucifer, fallen, broken, bereaved beyond all the retributive griefs
which Greek tragedy shows you afflicting the great who were insolent,
wilful, and proud. But it was not enough for our small epicures of
revenge. They wanted to twist the enemy's wrists, where he lay bound,
and to run pins into his eyes. And they had the upper hand of us now.
The soldiers could only look on while the scurvy performance dragged
itself out till the meanest of treaties was signed at Versailles. "Fatal
Versailles!" as General Sir Ian Hamilton said for us all; "Not a
line--not one line in your treaty to show that those boys (our friends
who were dead) had been any better than the emperors; not one line to
stand for the kindliness of England; not one word to bring back some
memory of the generosity of her sons!"
"The freedom of Europe," "The war to end war," "The overthrow of
militarism," "The cause of civilization"--most people believe so little
now in anything or anyone that they would find it hard to understand the
simplicity and intensity of faith with which these phrases were once
taken among our troops, or the certitude felt by hundreds of thousands
of men who are now dead that if they were killed their monument would be
a new Europe not soured or soiled with the hates and greeds of the old.
That the old spirit of Prussia might not infest our world any more; that
they or, if not they, their sons might breathe a new, cleaner air they
had willingly hung themselves up to rot on the uncut wire at Loos or
wriggled to death, slow hour by hour, in the cold filth at Broodseinde.
Now all was done that man could do, and all was done in vain. The old
spirit of Prussia was blowing anew, from strange mouths. From several
species of men who passed for English--as mongrels, curs, shoughs,
water-rugs, and demi-wolves are all clept by the name of dogs--there was
rising a chorus of shrill yelps for the outdoing of all the base folly
committed by Prussia when drunk with her old conquest of France.
Prussia, beaten out of the field, had won in the souls of her
conquerors' rulers; they had become her pupils; they took her word for
it that she, and not the older England, knew how to use Victory.
IV
Sir Douglas Haig came to Cologne when we had been there a few days. On
the grandiose bridge over the Rhine he made a short speech to a few of
us. Most of it sounded as if the thing were a job he had got to get
through with, and did not much care for. Perhaps the speech, like those
of other great men who wisely hate making speeches, had been written for
him by somebody else. But once he looked up from the paper and put in
some words which I felt sure were his own; "I only hope that, now we
have won, we shall not lose our heads as the Germans did after 1870. It
has brought them to this." He looked at the gigantic mounted statue of
the Kaiser overhead, a thing crying out in its pride for fire from
heaven to fall and consume it, and at the homely, squat British sentry
moving below on his post. I think the speech was reported. But none of
our foremen at home took any notice of it at all. They knew a trick
worth two of Haig's. They were as moonstruck as any victorious Prussian.
So we had failed--had won the fight and lost the prize; the garland of
the war was withered before it was gained. The lost years, the broken
youth, the dead friends, the women's overshadowed lives at home, the
agony, and bloody sweat--all had gone to darken the stains which most of
us had thought to scour out of the world that our children would live
in. Many men felt, and said to each other, that they had been fooled.
They had believed that their country was backing them. They had thought,
as they marched into Germany, "Now we shall show old Fritz how you treat
a man when you've thrashed him." They would let him into the English
secret, the tip that the power and glory are not to the bully. As some
of them looked at the melancholy performance which followed, our Press
and our politicians parading at Paris in moral _pickelhauben_ and doing
the Prussianist goose-step by way of _pas de triomphe_, they could not
but say in dismay to themselves: "This is our doing. We cannot wish the
war unwon; and yet--if we had shirked, poor old England, for all we
know, might not have come to this pass. So we come home draggle-tailed,
sick of the mess that we were unwittingly helping to make when we tried
to do well."