Disenchantment

I

Now that most of our men in the prime of life have been in the army we seem to be in for a goodly literature of disappointment. All the ungifted young people came back from the war to tell us that they were “fed up.” That was their ailment, in outline. The gifted ones are now coming down to detail. They say that a web has been woven over the sky, or that something or other has made a goblin of the sun—about as full details of a pain as you can fairly expect a gifted person to give, although he really may feel it.

No doubt disenchantment has flourished before. About the year 1880 nearly all the best art was wan and querulous; that of Burne-Jones was always in trouble; Matthew Arnold’s verse was a well-bred, melodious whine; Rossetti was all disenamourment and displacement. Yet you could feel that their broken-toy view of the world was only their nice little way with the public. Burne-Jones in his home was a red, jovial man; Arnold a diner-out of the first lustre; Rossetti a sworn friend to bacon and eggs and other plain pleasures. The young melancholiasts of today are less good at their craft, and yet they do give you a notion that some sort of silver cord really seems to them to have come loose in their insides, or some golden bowl, which mattered to them, to have been more or less broken, and that they are feeling honestly sour about it. If they do not know how to take it out of mankind by writing desolatory verses about ashes and dust in the English Review, at least they can, if they be workmen, vote for a strike: they thus achieve the same good end and put it beyond any doubt that they don’t think all is well with the world.

II

The higher the wall or the horse from which you have tumbled, the larger, under Nature’s iron law, are your bruises and consequent crossness likely to be. Before we try shaking or cuffing the disenraptured young Solomons in our magazines and our pits it would be humane to reflect that some five millions of these, in their turns, have fallen off an extremely high horse. Of course, we have all fallen off something since 1914. Even owners of ships and vendors of heavy woollens might, if all hearts were laid bare, be found to have fallen, not perhaps off a high horse, but at least off some minute metaphysical pony. Still, the record in length of vertical fall, and of proportionate severity of incidence upon an inelastic earth, is probably held by ex-soldiers and, among these, by the volunteers of the first year of the war. We were all, of course, volunteers then, undiluted by indispensable Harry’s later success in getting dispensable Johnnie forced to join us in the Low Countries.

Most of those volunteers of the prime were men of handsome and boundless illusions. Each of them quite seriously thought of himself as a molecule in the body of a nation that was really, and not just figuratively, “straining every nerve” to discharge an obligation of honour. Honestly, there was about them as little as there could humanly be of the coxcombry of self-devotion. They only felt that they had got themselves happily placed on a rope at which everyone else, in some way or other, was tugging his best as well as they. All the air was ringing with rousing assurances. France to be saved, Belgium righted, freedom and civilization re-won, a sour, soiled, crooked old world to be rid of bullies and crooks and reclaimed for straightness, decency, good-nature, the ways of common men dealing with common men. What a chance! The plain recruit who had not the gift of a style said to himself that for once he had got right in on the ground-floor of a topping good thing, and he blessed the luck that had made him neither too old nor too young. Rupert Brooke, meaning exactly the same thing, was writing:

Now, God be thank’d who has match’d us with His hour,
And caught our youth and waken’d us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpen’d power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary. …

Of course, it is easy to say to any such simpleton now: “Well, if you were like that, what could you expect? Vous l’avez voulu, George Dandin. You were rushing upon disillusionment.” Of course he was. If each recruit in 1914 had been an à Kempis, or even a Rochefoucauld, he would have known that if you are to love mankind you must not expect too much from it. But he was not, as a rule, a philosopher. He was a common man, not much inclined to think evil of people. It no more occurred to him at that time that he was the natural prey of seventy-seven separate breeds of profiteers than it did that presently he would be overrun by less figurative lice. When Garibaldi led an infantry attack against the Austrians it was said that he never looked round to see if his men were following; he knew to a dead certainty that at the moment when he reached the enemy he would feel his men’s breath hot on the back of his neck. The early volunteer in his blindness imagined that there was between all Englishmen then that oneness of faith, love, and courage.

III

Everything helped, for a time, to keep him the child that he was. Except in the matter of separation from civilian friends his daily life was pretty well that of the happiest children. The men knew nothing and hoped for wonderful things. Drill, to the average recruit, was like some curious game or new dance, various and rhythmic, and not very hard: it was rather fun for adults to be able to play at such things without being laughed at. Their lives had undergone an immense simplification. Of course, an immense simplification of life is not certain to be a wholly good thing. A Zulu’s life may be simpler than Einstein’s and yet the estate of Einstein may be the more gracious. If a boatload of men holding the Order of Merit were cast away on a desert island they might, on the whole, think the life as beastly as Touchstone found the life in the Forest of Arden. Yet some of those eminent men might find a soul of good in that evil. They might grill all the day and shiver all night, and be half-starved the whole of the time. But their minds would get a rest cure. While they were there they would have to settle no heartrending questions of patronage, nor to decree the superannuation of elderly worthies. The brutal instancy of physical wants might be trying; but they would at least be spared, until they were rescued, the solving of any stiff conundrums of professional ethics.

Moulding the pet recreations of civilized men you find their craving to have something simple to do for a change, to be given an easy one after so many twisters. People whose work is the making of calculations or the manipulation of thoughts have been known to find a curiously restful pleasure in chopping firewood or painting tool-sheds till their backs ache. It soothes them with a flattering sense of getting something useful done straight off. So much of their “real” work is a taking of some minute or indirect means to some end remote, dimly and doubtfully visible, possibly—for the dread thought will intrude—not worth attaining. The pile of chopped wood is at least a spice of the ultimate good: visible, palpable, it is success; and the advanced and complex man, the statesman or sociologist who has chopped it, escapes for the moment from all his own advancement and complication, and savours in quiet ecstasy one of the sane primeval satisfactions.

A country fellow at the pleugh,
His acre’s tilled, he’s right eneugh;
A country girl at her wheel,
Her dizzen’s done, she’s unco weel.

The climber of mountains seeks a similar rapture by going to places where he is, in full exertion, the sum of his physical faculties, little more. Here all his hopes are for things close at hand: ambition lives along one arm stretched out to grasp a rock eighteen inches away; his sole aim in life may be simply the top of a thirty-foot cleft in a steep face of stone. At home, in the thick of his work, he had seemed to be everlastingly threading mazes that no one could thread right to the end; here, on the crags, it is all divinely simplified; who would trouble his head with subtle questionings about what human life will, might, or ought to be when every muscle and nerve are tautly engaged in the primal job of sticking to life as it is?

To have for his work these raptures of play was the joy of the new recruit who had common health and good-humour. All his maturity’s worries and burdens seemed, by some magical change, to have dropped from him; no difficult choices had to be made any longer; hardly a moral chart to be conned; no one had any finances to mind; nobody else’s fate was put in his hands, and not even his own. All was fixed from above, down to the time of his going to bed and the way he must lace up his boots. His vow of willing self-enslavement for a season had brought him the peace of the soldier, which passeth understanding as wholly as that of the saint, the blitheness of heart that comes to both with their clarifying, tranquillizing acquiescence in some mystic will outside their own. Immersed in that Dantean repose of utter obedience the men slept like babies, ate like hunters, and rediscovered the joy of infancy in getting some rather elementary bodily movement to come right. They saw everything that God had made, and behold! it was very good. That was the vision.

IV

The mental peace, the physical joy, the divinely simplified sense of having one clear aim, the remoteness from all the rest of the world, all favoured a tropical growth of illusion. A man, says Tennyson, “imputes himself.” If he be decent he readily thinks other people are decent. Here were hundreds of thousands of quite commonplace persons rendered, by comradeship in an enthusiasm, self-denying, cheerful, unexacting, sanely exalted, substantially good. To get the more fit to be quickly used men would give up even the little darling vices which are nearest to many simple hearts. Men who had entertained an almost reasoned passion for whisky, men who in civil life had messed up careers for it and left all and followed it, would cut off their whisky lest it should spoil their marching. Little white, prim clerks from Putney—men whose souls were saturated with the consciousness of class—would abdicate freely and wholeheartedly their sense of the wide, unplumbed, estranging seas that ought to roar between themselves and Covent Garden market porters. Many men who had never been dangerous rivals to St. Anthony kept an unwonted hold on themselves during the months when hundreds of reputable women and girls round every camp seemed to have been suddenly smitten with a Bacchantic frenzy. Real, constitutional lazy fellows would buy little cram-books of drill out of their pay and sweat them up at night so as to get on the faster. Men warned for a guard next day would agree among themselves to get up an hour before the pre-dawn winter Réveillé to practise among themselves the beautiful symbolic ritual of mounting guard in the hope of approaching the far-off, longed-for ideal of smartness, the passport to France. Men were known to subscribe in order to get some dummy bombs made with which to practise bomb-throwing by themselves on summer nights after drilling and marching from six in the morning till five in the evening. How could they not have the illusion that the whole nation’s sense of comradeship went as far as their own?

Who of all those who were in camp at that time, and still are alive, will not remember until he dies the second boyhood that he had in the late frosts and then in the swiftly filling and bursting spring and early summer of 1915? The awakening bird-notes of Réveillé at dawn, the two-mile run through auroral mists breaking over a still inviolate England, the men’s smoking breath and the swish of their feet brushing the dew from the tips of the June grass and printing their track of darker green on the pearly-grey turf; the long, intent morning parades under the gummy shine of chestnut buds in the deepening meadows; the peace of the tranquil hours on guard at some sequestered post, alone with the sylvester midnight, the wheeling stars and the quiet breathing of the earth in its sleep, when time, to the sentry’s sense, fleets on unexpectedly fast and life seems much too short because day has slipped into day without the nightlong sleeper’s false sense of a pause; and then jocund days of marching and digging trenches in the sun; the silly little songs on the road that seemed, then, to have tunes most human, pretty, and jolly; the dinners of haversack rations you ate as you sat on the roadmakers’ heaps of chopped stones or lay back among buttercups.

When you think of the youth that you have lost, the times when it seems to you now that life was most poignantly good may not be the ones when everything seemed at the time to go well with your plans, and the world, as they say, to be at your feet; rather some few unaccountable moments when nothing took place that was out of the way and yet some word of a friend’s, or a look on the face of the sky, the taste of a glass of spring water, the plash of laughter and oars heard across midsummer meadows at night raised the soul of enjoyment within you to strangely higher powers of itself. That spirit bloweth and is still: it will not rise for our whistling nor keep a timetable; no wine that we know can give us anything more than a fugitive caricature of its ecstasies. When it has blown free we remember it always, and know, without proof, that while the rapture was there we were not drunk, but wise; that for a moment some intervening darkness had thinned and we were seeing further than we can see now into the heart of life.

To one recollection at least it has seemed that the New Army’s spring-tide of faith and joyous illusion came to its height on a night late in the most beautiful May of 1915, in a hut where thirty men slept near a forest in Essex. Nothing particular happened; the night was like others. Yet in the times that came after, when half of the thirty were dead and most of the others jaded and soured, the feel of that night would come back with the strange distinctness of those picked, remembered mornings and evenings of boyhood when everything that there was became everlastingly memorable as though it had been the morning or evening of the first day. Ten o’clock came and Lights Out, but a kind of luminous bloom still on the air and a bugle blowing Last Post in some faraway camp that kept worse hours than we. I believe the whole hut held its breath to hear the notes better. Who wouldn’t, to listen to that most lovely and melancholy of calls, the noble death of each day’s life, a sound moving about hither and thither, like a veiled figure making gestures both stately and tender, among the dim thoughts that we have about death the approaching extinguisher—resignation and sadness and unfulfilment and triumph all coming back to the overbearing sense of extinction in those two recurrent notes of “Lights Out”? One listens as if with bowed mind, as though saying “Yes; out, out, brief candle.” A moment’s silence to let it sink in and the chaffing and laughter broke out like a splash of cool water in summer again. That hut always went to bed laughing and chaffing all round, and, though there was no wit among us, the stories tasted of life, the inexhaustible game and adventure. Looker, ex-marine turned soldier, told us how he had once gone down in a diving-suit to find a lost anchor and struck on the old tin lining out of a crate, from which some octopian beast with long feelers had reached out at him, and the feelers had come nearer and nearer through the dim water. “What did you do, Filthy?” somebody asked (we called Looker “Filthy” with friendly jocoseness). “I ’opped it,” the good fellow said, and the sane anticlimax of real life seemed twice as good as the climax that any Hugo or Verne could have put to the yarn. Another described the great life he had lived as an old racing “hen,” or minor sutler of the sport of kings. Hard work, of course. “All day down at Epsom openin’ doors an’ brushin’ coats and shiftin’ truck for bookies till you’d make, perhaps, two dollars an’ speculate it on the las’ race and off back ’ome to London ’ungry, on your ’oofs.” Once a friend of his, who had had a bad day, had not walked—had slipped into the London train, and at Vauxhall, where tickets were taken, had gone to earth under the seat with a brief appeal to his fellow travellers: “Gents, I rely on your honour.” The stout narrator could see no joke at all in the phrase. He was rather scandalized by our great roar of laughter. “ ’Is honour! And ’im robbin’ the comp’ny! ’nough to take away a man’s kerrikter!” said the patient walker-home in emergency. It made life seem too wonderful to end; such were the untold reserves that we had in this nation of men with a hold on themselves, of hardly uprightness; even this unhelped son of the gutter, living from hand to mouth in the common lodging-houses of slums, a parasite upon parasites, poor little animalcule doing odd jobs for the caterpillars of the commonwealth—even he could persist in carrying steadily, clear of the dirt, the full vase of his private honour. What, then, must be the unused stores of greedless and fearless straightness in others above us, generals and statesmen, men in whom, as in bank-porters, character is three parts of the trade! The world seemed clean that night; such a lovely unreason of optimist faith was astir in us all,

We felt for that time ravish’d above earth
And possess’d joys not promised at our birth.

It seemed hardly credible now, in this soured and quarrelsome country and time, that so many men of different classes and kinds, thrown together at random, should ever have been so simply and happily friendly, trustful, and keen. But they were, and they imagined that all their betters were too. That was the paradise that the bottom fell out of.

I

What could the New Army not have done if all the time of its training had been fully used! A few, at least, of its units had a physique above that of the Guards; many did more actual hours of work, before going abroad, than Guardsmen in peacetime do in two years; all were at first as keen as boys, collectors, or spaniels—whichever are keenest; when the official rations of warlike instruction fell short they would go about hungrily trying to scratch crumbs of that provender out of the earth like fowls in a run.

But there was an imp of frustration about. He pervaded, like Ariel, all the labouring ship of our State. I had seen him in Lancashire once, on one of the early days of the war, when fifty young miners marched in from one pit, with their colliery band, to enlist at an advertised place and time of enlistment. The futilitarian elf took care that the shutters were up and nobody there, so that the men should kick their heels all the day in the street and walk back at night with their tails between their legs, and the band not playing, to tell their mates that the whole thing was a mug’s game, a ramp, got up by the hot-air merchants and crooks in control. The imp must have grinned, not quite as all of us have grinned since, on the wrong side of our mouths, at the want of faith that miners have in the great and wise who rule over them. Another practical joke of his was to slip into the War Office or Admiralty and tear up any letters he found from people offering gifts of motorcars, motorboats, steam-yachts, training grounds, etc., lest they be answered and the writers and other friends of their country encouraged. Perhaps his brightest triumph of all was to dress himself up as England and send away with a flea in her ear the Ireland whom the wonder-working Redmond had induced to offer to fight at our side. Those were a few of his masterpieces. Between times he would keep his hand in by putting it into the Old Army’s head to take the keenness out of the New.

Dearest of all the New Army’s infant illusions was the Old Army—still at that time the demigod host of an unshattered legend of Mons. To the new recruits any old Regular sergeant was more—if the world can hold more—than a county cricketer is to a small boy at school. He had the talisman; he was a vessel full of the grace by which everything was to be saved; like a king, he could “touch for” the malady of unsoldierliness. How could he err, how could he shirk, now that the fate of a world hung upon him?

There was something in that. No doubt there always is in illusions. They are not delusions. The pick of the old N.C.O.’s of the Regular Army were packed as tight as bits of radium with virtues and powers. A man of fifty-five who came back to the army from spending ten years in a farcical uniform whistling for taxis outside a flash music-hall would teach every rank in a battalion its duties for 4s. 8d. a day—coaching the dugout colonel in the new infantry drill, the field officers in court-martial procedure, the chaplain in details of drumhead worship, the medical officer in the order of sick parades, the subalterns and N.C.O.’s in camp economy, field hygiene, and whatnot, and always holding the attention of a man or a mess or a battalion fixed fast by the magic of his own oaken character, his simple, vivid mind, his passion for getting things right, and his humorous, patient knowledge of mankind. Even such minor masterpieces as average Guards ex-sergeant-majors were rather godlike on parade. In drill, at any rate, they had the circumstantial vision and communicable fire of the prophets. Early in 1915 a little famished London cab-tout, a recruit, still rectilinear as a starved cat even after a month of army rations, was to be heard praying softly at night in his cot that he might be made like unto one of these, whom he named.

II

Where, then, did the first shiver of disillusion begin? Perhaps with some trivial incident. Say a newborn company, quartered in a great town, was sent out for a long afternoon’s marching. Only through long, steady grinds can the perfect rhythm of marching, like that of rowing, be generated at last. The men, youthfully eager to kiss all possible rods and endure any obtainable hardness, march forth in a high state of delight—they are going to learn how to march to Berlin! No officer being present—and scarcely any existing as yet—a sergeant-major is in command. He is a very old hand. For twenty minutes he leads his 250 adorers into the thick of a populous quarter. Then he orders them to fall out. A public-house resembling Buckingham Palace, but smaller, is near. Most of the men, in their ardour, stand about on the kerb, ready to leap back to their places as soon as the whistle shall sound. A few thirsty souls jostle hurriedly into the bars, where they find that arrangements for serving a multitude are surprisingly complete. Soon they are further reassured by descrying the sergeant-major’s handsome form, like Tam o’ Shanter’s, “planted unco’ right” in a chair in an inner holy of holies along with the landlord. This esoteric session has an air of permanence; the sergeant-major is evidently au mieux with the management. The thirsty souls settle down to their beer.

Five minutes, twenty, half an hour pass fairly fast for them, less fast for the keener warriors pawing the kerbstone without. At the end of an hour fifty percent of the kerbstone zealots have been successfully frozen into the bars. The rest stare at each other with a wild surmise. Rumour shakes her wings and begins to fly round. The sergeant-major, she says, is holding a species of court in the depths of the pub; some privates with money upon them, children of this world, are pressing in, she says, even now, into that heart of the rose, and with a few manly words are standing the great man the extremely expensive combination of nectars that he prefers. “Were it not better done as others use?”—the Spartan residuum on the kerb is diminishing. Another hour goes; only an inconsiderable remnant of Spartans is left; these are exchanging profane remarks about patriotism and other virtues. One of them quotes a famous Conservative statesman whose footman he was before he enlisted: “I believe we shall win, in spite of the Regular Army.” When just enough time is left to march back to quarters the whistle is blown, the men slouch into their places and stump unrhythmically home, revolving many things according to their several natures. A child who has rashly taken its parent on trust, and yet more rashly taken the parent’s all-round perfection as some sort of sample and proof of a creditable government of the world, must have a good deal of mental rearrangement to do the first time the parent comes home full of liquor and sells the furniture to get some more.

III

Perhaps, in another company or another battalion, some private of relative wealth has felt, in the strength of his youth and the heat of his zeal, that he wants more to do. He longs to get on with the job. So he guilelessly goes to his own sergeant-major and asks him if there is a chance of getting some lessons in bayonet-fighting anywhere in the town. The sergeant-major sizes him up with a stare. “You’re a fine likely man,” he says, “for a stripe.” He stares harder. “Or three,” he subjoins.

The gilded youth is confounded. He an N.C.O.! He would as soon have thought of being a primate. “I’ll give you,” the Old Army continues, “the lessons myself. It’ll be twelve quid—for the lot.” To reproduce the emphasis upon the last three words is beyond the resources of typography.

The gilded youth may feel a slight pricking in his thumbs. Still, there is no overt crook in the deal. The teaching is sure to be good. And he has the cash and an inexact sense of values. So he agrees. The senior man-at-arms expresses a preference for ready money. Agreed, too. After one lesson the tutor is frankly bored by his tutorial function. “Hang it,” he says, “what’s the sense of you and me sweating our ’oly guts out? You’ve paid, and you’ll find I won’t bilk you.” Youth is mystified; feels it is getting somewhat short weight. But what are acolytes against high priests? Youth leaves it at that.

In two or three weeks the frustrated pupil is sent for by his frustrater. A man is wanted for Post Corporal, or even for Battalion Provost Sergeant. What would the gilded youth say to the job? On his saying nothing at first the sergeant-major, with swiftly rising contempt for such friarly hesitancy, recites the beauties of this piece of preferment. “Cushiest job in the ’ole outfit! Long as you’re sober enough to stand up at the staff parade of a night, that’s all there is to it. Where’d the crime be among you ’oly Christians?” (The almost fanatical abstention of the New Army from ordinary military crimes often gave some scandal to experts drawn from the Old. They regarded it with perplexity and suspicion. The phenomenon was really simple, the men being in panic-fear of getting left behind in England if their unit should suddenly be sent abroad.) While the gilded youth tries to explain, without a lapse from tact, that the ranks are good enough for himself he feels a regal scorn beat down on him like a vertical sun. A fulmination follows. “Then what the ’ell did you ever come to me for? ’Op off! Out of it!”

The youth retires feeling that he has somehow strayed into a black list. He talks it over with a friend. The friend, he finds, has heard something like it from somebody else. Ribald jibes are soon flying about—“Four pound a stripe!” “Stripes are ris’ today!” “Corporals, three for a tenner!” The story goes that a little “Scotch draper,” the worst drill in a section, has felt that in this newly revealed world his professional credit for tactful effrontery is at stake; he has bet a fiver that he will offer the bare market price of a recommendation for “lance-Jack” and bring the thing off; the enterprise has prospered and the architect of his own fortunes is wearing the stripe, spending his pound balance on the transaction, commanding his brethren, and enjoying his new dispensation from fatigues. The band of brothers begin to look at each other with some circumspection. They wonder. How far does the dirty work go? Who may not try it on next? And did not somebody say he had seen the stud pass between the contractor who emptied the swill-tubs and the sergeant-cook who filled them with half-legs of mutton? What was that shorter creed to which the sergeants’ mess waiters said that the Regular sergeants always recurred in their cups—“Stick together, boys,” and “Anything can be wangled in the army”?

IV

What about officers, too? The men wonder again. That new company commander who started in as a captain, but never could give the simplest command on parade without his sergeant-major to give him the words like a parson doing a marriage? What about little Y., who suddenly got a commission when he was doing a fortnight’s C.B. for coming on parade with a dirty neck? And the major’s lecture on musketry? And the colonel’s on field operations?

Part of the scheme of training is that all the senior officers should lecture to the men on something or other—marching, map-reading, field hygiene, and whatnot. An excellent plan, but terribly hard on an old Regular Army not exactly officered by the brightest wits of public schools. The major’s musketry lecture has made the men think. He has told them first that, just to let them know that he was not talking through his hat, he might say he had been, in his time, the champion shot of the Army in India. The men had known that already—had doted, in fact, on anything known to the glory of any of their commanders. Fair enough, too, they had felt, that a man should buck a bit about what he had done. Anyone would. And so they had not even smiled. But then the major had amplified. He had recited his moderate, but not bad, earlier scores in competitions: he had given statistics of his rapid rise; he had painted the astonishment of all who saw him shoot in those days—above all, the delight of the men of his old regiment; for, the major had said, “I may have faults, but this at least I can say, that wherever I went the men simply worshipped the ground that I trod on.”

All this had filled the first half of the lecturer’s hour. The men had begun to look at each other cautiously, marvelling. When would the major begin? Could this be a Regular Army custom? But then the major had warmed to his subject. With rising zest he had described the dramatic tension pervading the butts as the crisis of each of his greater triumphs approached. And then the climax had come—“the one time that I failed.” In sombre tones the major had told how five shots had to be fired at one out of several targets arranged in a row. “I fired my first four shots. A bull each time. I fired again, and the marker signalled a miss! Everyone present was thunderstruck. I knew what had happened. I said to the butt officer, ‘Do you mind, sir, enquiring if there is any shot on the target to the right of mine?’ He did so. ‘Yes,’ was signalled back. ‘What is it?’ I asked, though I knew. ‘A bull.’ ‘That was my last shot,’ said I. I had made the mistake of my life. I had fired at the wrong target. Fall out.”

On this tragic climax the lecture had ended, the men had streamed out, some silent, bewildered, some dropping words of amazement. “Lecture! W’y, it’s the man’s pers’nal ’istory!”

And then the C.O. has lectured on training in field operations—the old, cold colonel, upright, dutiful, unintelligent, waxen, drawn away by a genuine patriotism from his roses and croquet to help joylessly in the queer labour of trying to teach this uncouth New Army a few of the higher qualities of the old. Too honest a man to pretend that he was not taking all that he said in his lecture out of the Army’s official manual, Infantry Training, 1914, he has held the little red book in his hand, read out frankly a sentence at a time from that terse and luminous masterpiece of instruction, and then has tried to “explain” it while the men gaped at the strange contrast between the thing clearly said in the book and the same thing plunged into obscurity by the poor colonel’s woolly and faltering verbiage. Half the men had bought the little book themselves and devoured it as hungrily as boys consume a manual of rude boat-building or of camping-out. And here was the colonel bringing his laboured jets of darkness to show the way through sunlight; elucidating plainness itself with the tangled clues of his own mind’s confusion, like Bardolph: “ ‘Accommodated’; that is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated; or when a man is, being, whereby a’ may be thought to be accommodated.”

V

A favourite trick with the disillusioning imp was to get hold of authority’s wisely drafted timetable of work for a new division in training and mix up all the subjects and times. The effect must have often diverted the author of this piece of humour. Some day a company, say, would begin to learn bayonet-fighting. This would at once revive in the men the fading ecstasies of their first simple faith. Whenever instructors said—“Now then, men, I want to see a bit more murder in them eyes” pleasant little thrills of chartered pugnacity would inspirit them. This, they would feel, was the real thing; this was what they were there for. Then just as, perhaps, they approached the engaging and manifestly serviceable “short jab” Puck’s little witticism would suddenly tell; bayonet-fighting would abruptly stop; an urgent order would come from on high to “get on with night operations” or “get on with outpost work,” and one of these bodies of knowledge would, in its turn, be partly imbibed by the infant mind and then as suddenly withdrawn from its thirsty lips for something else to be started instead—perhaps a thing that had already been once started and dropped. In the working out of this fantastic pattern of smatterings a company might begin to learn bayonet-fighting three or four times and each time be switched off it before getting halfway, and go to France in the end with the A.B.C. of each of several alphabets learnt to boredom and the X.Y.Z. of none of them touched, the men being left to improvise the short jab and other far-on letters by the light of nature, in intimate contact, perhaps, with less humorously instructed Germans.

All this was not universal. Still, it could and did happen. And then the men stared and marvelled. Authority, it is true, had, at the worst, some gusts of passion for perfection. But even these might fortify, in their way, the new occupant of the seat of the scorners. A sudden order might come for a brigade or other inspection, and then authority might in a brief hour become like medieval man when he fell suddenly ill and the pains of hell gat hold of his mind and he felt that God must be squared without conduct because it might take more time to conduct himself than he had got. In this pious frenzy all attention to measures for incommoding the Germans would yield to the primary duty of whiting the sepulchre; energies that would carry a Hohenzollern Redoubt would be put into the evolution of sections which, through somebody’s slackness, did not exist, or the hiding of men who, through someone’s mismanagement, were not fit to be seen on parade; old N.C.O.’s would present the men with the tip for making a seemingly full valise look nicely rectangular by the judicious insertion of timber, and other homely recipes for cleaning the outsides of cups and platters. “Eyewash?” these children of light would say, as they taught. “Of course, it’s all eyewash. What ain’t eyewash in this old world?”

It was a question much asked at the time by those whose postwar inclinations to answer “Nothing, among the lot who run England now” are whitening the hair of statesmen. They were then only asking “How far does it go? How much of the timber is rotten”? Enough to bring down the whole house? Here, there, everywhere the men’s new suspicion peered about in the dark and the half-light. Most of the men were the almost boundless reservoirs of patience, humility, and good humour that common Englishmen are. They would take long to run dry. But the waters were steadily falling. Most of them had come from civil employments in which the curse of Adam still holds and a man must either work or get out, mind his p’s and q’s, or go short of his victuals. They knew that in civil life a foreman who thieved like some of the Regular N.C.O.’s would soon be in the street or in gaol. They knew that in civil life a manager who could not get down to the point any better than the colonel or the major would soon have the business piled up on the rocks. Here was an eye-opening find—a world in which any old rule of that kind could be dodged if you got the right tip. It became the dominant topic for talk, more dominant even than food, the staple theme of the conversation of soldiers. How far did the rottenness go? Would they ever get to the other side of this bog through which poor old England was wading? If you bored deeper and deeper still into this amazing old Regular Army would there ever come a point at which you would strike the good firm stone of English decency and sense again? And was it open to hope that in Germany, too, such failures abounded—that these diseases of ours were rife in all armies and not in the British alone, so that there might be a chance for us still, as there is for one toothless dog fighting another?

Whatever else might lack in our training-camps throughout England during the spring and summer of 1915, good fresh food for suspicion always abounded. Runlets of news and rumour came trickling from France; wounded soldiers talked and could not be censored; they talked of the failure of French; of the sneer on the face of France; of Staff work that hung up whole platoons of our men, like old washing or scarecrows, to rot on uncut German wire; of little, splendid bands of company officers and men who did take bits of enemy trench, in spite of it all, and then were bombed to death by the Germans at leisure, no support coming, no bombs to throw back—and here, at home, old Regular colonels were saying to hollow squares of their men: “I hear that in France there’s a certain amount of throwing of some sort of ginger-beer bottles about, but the old Lee-Metford’s good enough for me.”

No need, indeed, to look as far away as France. London, to any open eye, was grotesque with a kind of fancy-dress ball of noncombatant khaki: it seemed as if no well-to-do person could be an abstainer from warfare too total to go about disguised as a soldier. He might be anything—a lord lieutenant, an honorary colonel, a dealer in horses, a valuer of cloth, an accountant, an actor in full work, a recruiter of other men for the battles that he avoided himself, a “soldier politician” of swiftly and strangely acquired field rank and the “swashing and martial outside” of a Rosalind, and a Rosalind’s record of active service. No doubt this latter carnival was not to be at its height till most of the New Army of 1914 was well out of the way. Conscription had not yet been vouchsafed to the prayers of healthy young publicists who then begged themselves off before tribunals. The ultimate farce of the mobbing of the relatively straight “conscientious objector” by these, his less conscientious brother-objectors, had still to be staged. But already the comedy, like Mercutio’s wound, was enough; it served. Colonel Repington’s confessional diary had not been published, but the underworld which it reveals was pretty correctly guessed by the New Army’s rising suspicion. And rumour said that all the chief tribes of posturers, shirkers, “have-a-good-timers,” and jobbers were banding themselves together against the one man in high place whom the New Army believed, with the assurance of absolute faith, to be straight and “a tryer.” It was said that Kitchener was to be set upon soon by a league of all the sloths whom he had put to work, the “stunt” journalists whom he had kept at a distance, the social principalities and powers whose jobs he would not do. All the slugs of the commonwealth were to combine against the commonwealth unpleasantly dutiful gardener—down with his lantern and can of caustic solution!

VI

It was, of course, an incomplete view of the case. Shall we have Henries, Fluellens, and Erpinghams at the hand of God, and no Bardolphs, Pistols, and Nyms? Our stage was not really rotten by any means; only half-rotten, like others of man’s institutions. Half the Old Army, at least, was exemplary. Even among politicians unselfishness may, with some trouble, be found. Still, this is no exposition of what the New Army ought to have said to itself as it lay on the ground after Lights Out compounding the new temper which comes out today, but only of what it did say. It was reacting. In the first weeks of the war most of the flock had too simply taken on trust all that its pastors and masters had said. Now, after believing rather too much, they were out to believe little or nothing—except that in the lump pastors and masters were frauds. From any English training-camp, about that time, you almost seemed to see a light steam rising, as it does from a damp horse. This was illusion beginning to evaporate.