Disenchantment - free ebook by C. E. (Charles Edward) Montague

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Disenchantment

C. E. (Charles Edward) Montague

81 chapters

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81 chapters

I

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 r

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II

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

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III

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 cour

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IV

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

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I

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 peace-time 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

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II

II

Where, then, did the first shiver of disillusion begin? Perhaps with some trivial incident. Say a new-born 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

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III

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

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IV

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 off

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V

V

A favourite trick with the disillusioning imp was to get hold of authority's wisely drafted time-table 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

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VI

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 compoundi

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I Shakespeare seems to have known what

I Shakespeare seems to have known what

there is to be known about our Great War of 1914-18. And he was not censored. So he put into his Henry IV and Henry V a lot of little things that our press had to leave out at the time for the good of the country. If you look closely you can see them lying about all over the plays. There is the ugly affair of the pyx, at Corbie, on the Somme; there are the little irregularities in recruiting; there are the small patches of baddish moral on the coast and even in Picardy; there is the painful case

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II

II

If this Doubting Thomas abounded at Agincourt how could he not abound at, say, the third Battle of Ypres? At Agincourt our whole army was just small enough to have comradeship all the way through it—not the figure-of-speech used by the orators, but the thing that soldiers know. Comradeship in a battalion will come of itself; it may be grown, with some effort, in a brigade; in good divisions it has flickered into life for a while during a war; army corps know it not, though their headquarters sta

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III

III

There may be laid up in Heaven a pattern of some front line by which the Staff in its rear would be really loved. But such love is not in the nature of man. If the skin on Mr. Dempsey's knuckles could speak, and were perfectly frank, it would not say that it loved the unexposed and unabraded tissues of Mr. Dempsey's directive brain. Hotspur, in deathless words, has aired the eternal grudge of the combatant soldier against the Brass Hat— So the jaundiced narrative flows on and on, doing the fulle

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IV

IV

There was yet another special check during the war upon love and respect for the higher commands. There were so many things of moment which they were the last to find out. Time after time the great ones of this world were seen to be walking in darkness long after the lowly had seen a great light. While the appointed brains of our army were still swearing hard by the rifle, and nothing but it, as the infantry's friend, a more saving truth had entered in at the lowly door of the infantry's mind. I

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V

V

"Your Old Army's all bloody born amatoors," an Australian of ripe war experience remarked with some frankness in France. His immediate occasion for generalizing so rashly was somebody's slip in passing certain grenades as good for field use. Most of our hand and rifle grenades undoubtedly were. If anything they were too fine for it, too fit to beautify drawing-rooms as well. One objet d'art , a delight to the eye, was said to cost its country one pound five as against the two francs for which Fr

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VI

VI

Whenever you passed from east to west across the British zone during the war you would find somebody saying with fervour that somebody else, a little more to the west and a little higher in rank, had not even learnt his job well enough to keep out of the way. Subalterns, who by some odd arrangement of flukes had come through our attacks on the Somme in 1916 and in Artois and Flanders next year, would hoot at the notion—it had a vogue with part of the Staff in a tranquil far west—that the way to

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VII

VII

Yet the men in the line talked, and so did the subalterns, most of whom had been in the ranks, now that the war ran into years. Soldiers have endless occasions for talk. Being seldom alone, and having to hold their tongues sometimes, they talk all the time that they can. And most of their talk was sour and scornful. Ever since their enlistment there had been running down in them one of the springs of health in the life of a country. An unprecedented number of the most healthy, high-spirited, and

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I A book may be bad and yet tell you much.

I A book may be bad and yet tell you much.

Lately I came across such a book. It is surely one of the crossest books ever written. Its author fought in France, in the ranks, for a good many months of the war. He must have been one of the men who make sergeants grey—a "proper lawyer," as Regulars call the type which a cotton district labels as "self-acting mules." I seem to know that man. He was a volunteer, but he would not enlist until conscription came in, because of some precious doctrine he had about younger men without families. When

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II

II

And yet the book told something which no other book has yet succeeded in telling you. Wordy, cantankerous, dull, repeating itself like a decimal, padded with cheap political "thoughts" gathered from old "stunts" in bad papers—still, it came nearer than any other to showing you the way trench warfare struck a mind and soul quite commonplace in everything except a double dose of native sourness. Here was nothing of M. Barbusse's doctrinaire fire to make the author pervert or exaggerate. No thrill

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III

III

Suppose those first eight days in the front and support trenches to be the beginning of a divisional tour of sixteen days' duty in the line. For four days now the weary men would be in reserve, under enemy fire, but not in trenches; probably in the cellars of ruined houses. But these were not times of rest. Each day or night every man would make one or more journeys back to the trenches that they had left carrying some load of food, water, or munitions up to the three companies in trenches, or p

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IV

IV

Many, of course, lost health and drifted "down the line," as it was called, to the base, where work might be light, but much of the company rather more blighting than any work to the spirit. Hither, to all the divisional base depots and into the ultimate dust-hole or sink that was called "Base Details," there gravitated most of the walking wreckage and wastage, physical and moral, of active warfare: convalescent, sick and wounded from hospital, men found too old or too young for trench work, bro

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V

V

The men who could not shirk the choice of Hercules, for other people, were the doctors. The stay of every N.C.O. or man at a base depot was on probation. Each had to go before a Medical Board soon after he came. It adjudged him either T.B. (Temporary Base) or P.B. (Permanent Base). If marked T.B. he went before the Board again once a week, and each time he might be marked T.B. again, or, if his disablement was thought graver or more likely to last, P.B. ; or he might be marked A . (Active Servic

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VI

VI

The war had more obvious disagreeables, too; you have heard all about them: the quelling coldness of frosty nights spent in soaked clothes—for no blankets were brought up to the trenches; the ubiquitous dust and stench of corpses and buzzing of millions of corpse-fed flies on summer battle-fields; and so on, and so on—no need to go over the list. But these annoyances seemed to me to do less in the way of moulding the men's cast of mind than that general, chronic weariness, different from all the

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I

I

"Of late years," the novel of Shirley begins, "an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the North of England; they lie very thick on the hills; every parish has one or more of them; they are young enough to be very active, and ought to be doing a great deal of good." This blessing, conferred on the West Riding a little before Waterloo, descended on our Western Front a little after the first battle of the Marne. It was received by our troops with the greater thanksgiving because it brought w

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II

II

In the eyes of the men he had notable merits. He was a running fountain, more often than not, of good cigarettes. Of the exceeding smallness of Low Country beer he could talk, man to man, with knowledge and right feeling. He gladly frequented the least healthy parts of the line, and would frankly mourn the pedantry which denied him a service revolver and did not even allow him the grievous ball-headed club with which a mediæval bishop felt himself free to take his own part in a war, because with

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III

III

"I've been a Christian all my life, but this war is a bit too serious." So saying, a certain New Army recruit had folded up his religion in 1914, and put it away, as it were, in a drawer with his other civil attire to wait until public affairs should again permit of their use. He had said it quite simply. A typical working-class Englishman, literal, serious, and straight, he had not got one loop of subtlety or one vibration of irony in his whole mind. Like most of his kind he had, as a rule, lef

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IV

IV

The testimonies that might have ensued were foreclosed by a shell that buried him alive in Oppy Wood, under the Vimy Ridge, where he was engaged in diverting the energies of the Central Powers from the prostrate army of Nivelle. He had by then been two years in France, and had told a few friends about various "queer feels" and "rum goes" which he would not have known by name if you had called them spiritual experiences. One of his points—though he did not put it in that way—was that in war a lot

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V

V

Nobody used it: the tide in the affairs of churches flowed its best, but no church came to take it. Instead, as if chance had planned a kind of satiric practical epigram, came the brigade chaplain. As soon as his genial bulk hove in sight, and his cheery robustious chaff began blowing about, the shy and uncouth muse of our savage theology unfolded her wings and flew away. Once more the talk was all footer and rations and scragging the Kaiser, and how "the Hun" would walk a bit lame after the las

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I

I

When a man enlisted during the war he found himself living the life of the common man in a Communist State. Once inside he had no more choices to make than a Russian under the Soviet. His work, his pay, his food, his place and mode of living were fixed from on high. He might not even decide whether he should remain a soldier or be turned, say, into a miner. If the wisdom that sat up aloft put him down for a draft to a tunnelling company, to earth he went. He had ceased to be Economic Man, the be

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II

II

Other speculations were apt to visit your mind if, later on in the war, as a New Army officer, you watched, open-mouthed, the way that much of the Regular Army's business was done. In civil life you might have had wild dreams of what business life would be like if its one great, black, ruling, quelling possibility were for ever removed, if the last Official Receiver had gone the way of the great auk, and the two-handed engine of bankruptcy stood no longer at the door, its place being taken by a

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III

III

Returned from these illuminating experiences the victorious soldier finds the British taxpayer—not, indeed, killed, but rubbing his wounds and groaning and being advised by several different kinds of friends to try if a hair, or perhaps the whole skin, of the dog that bit him will make him feel better. "Put your trust," say the august political authoritarians, "in your natural rulers, from Lord Chaplin and the Duke of Northumberland down to about as low as Sir Eric Geddes; scrap all the outworn

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IV

IV

A century of almost unbroken European peace—unbroken, that is, by wars hugely destructive—had built up insensibly in men's minds a consciousness of an unbounded general stability in the political as well as in the physical world. The crust of the political globe seemed to have caked, on the whole, almost as hard and cool as that of the elderly earth. It felt as if it were so firm that we could safely play the fool on it, as boys jump on the ice of a pond and defy it to break under them. So an im

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I

I

If you cannot hit or kick during a fight, at any rate you can spit. But, to be happy in this arm of the service, you have to feel sure that the adversary is signally fit to be spat upon. Hence, on each side in every war, the civilian will-to-believe that the other side are a set of ogres, every man of them. What a capital fiend the Boer, the man like Botha or Smuts, was made out to be during the last Boer War! He abused the white flag, he sawed a woman in two, he advanced behind screens of nigge

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II

II

Some of the fuel to hand was fine. The German command fed the best of it all into our bunkers, gratis. It owned that its "frightfulness" plan was no slip, no "indiscretion of a subordinate," but a policy weighed and picked out—worse than that, an embodied ethical doctrine. A Frenchman, when he is cross with our English virtue, will say that none of us can steal a goose without saying he does it for the public good. But the fey rulers of Germany could not even be content to say it was an act of m

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III

III

Of all this kind of swordsmanship the most dashing feat was the circulation of the "corpse factory" story. German troops, it was written in part of our Press, had got, in certain places near their front, a proper plant for boiling down the fat of their own dead. It was not said whether the product was to be used as a food, or as a lubricant or illuminant only. Chance brought me into one of the reputed seats of this refinement of frugality. It was on ground that our troops had just taken, in 1918

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IV

IV

Partly it came of the nature—which could not be helped by that time—of war correspondence. In the first months of the war our General Staff, being what we had made it, treated British war correspondents as pariah dogs. They might escape arrest so long as they kept out of sight; that was about the sum of their privileges. Long before the end of the war the Chiefs of Staff of our several armies received them regularly on the eve of every battle, explained to them the whole of our plans and hopes,

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V

V

There lay the trouble. They lived in the Staff world, its joys and its sorrows, not in the combatant world. The Staff was both their friend and their censor. How could they show it up when it failed? One of the first rules of field censorship was that from war correspondents "there must be no criticism of authority or command"; how could they disobey that? They would visit the front now and then, as many Staff Officers did, but it could be only as afternoon callers from one of the many mansions

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I To fool the other side has always been

I To fool the other side has always been

fair in a game. Every fencer or boxer may feint. A Rugby football player "gives the dummy" without any shame. In cricket a bowler is justly valued the more for masking his action. In war your licence to lead the other fellow astray is yet more ample. For war, though it may be good sport to some men, is not a mere sport. In sport you are not "out to win" except on certain terms of courtesy and handsomeness. Who would take pride in a race won by a fluke? At Henley, a long time ago, there were five

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III

III

It is the common habit of nations at war to ascribe to the other side all the cunning, as if the possession of a Ulysses were some sort of discredit. Happily for us our chosen Ulysses in France, at the most critical time, was of the first order. But no soldier can go far ahead of his time; he has to work in it and with it. And so the rich new mine of Intelligence work through the Press was not worked by either side, in the Great War, for all it was worth. Only a few trial borings were made; expe

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IV

IV

If we did these things in the green leaf, what might we not do in the dry? Mobilize our whole Press, conscribe it for active service under a single control, a—let us be frank—a Father-General of Lies, the unshaming strategic and tactical lies of "the great wars" which "make ambition virtue," and sometimes make mendacity a virtue too? Coach the whole multitudinous orchestra of the Press to carry out the vast conceptions of some consummate conductor, splendide mendax ? From each instrument under h

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V

V

Suppose us again at war with a Power less strong at sea than ourselves. If we should want its fleet to come out and fight in the open, why not evoke, some fine morning, from every voice in our daily press, a sudden and seemingly irrepressible cry of grief and rage over the unconcealable news—the Censor might be defied by the way—that our Grand Fleet, while ranging the seas, had struck a whole school of drift mines and lost half its numbers? Strategic camouflage, however, would go far beyond such

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VI

VI

Perhaps you would shrink back. Perhaps at any rate you do so now, when for the moment this great implement is not being offered to you, to take or leave, at an instant crisis of your country's fate. You feel that even in such a case you would stand loftily aloof in your cold purity? You would disclaim as a low, unknightly business the uttering of such base coinage as cooked news, whatever your proud chastity may cost anyone else? Or arrive, perhaps, at the same result by a different route, and m

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VII

VII

Well—and then? Any weapon you use in a war leaves some bill to be settled in peace, and the Propaganda arm has its cost like another. To say so is not to say, without more ado, that it should not be used. Its cost should be duly cast up, like our other accounts; that is all. We all agree—with a certain demur from the Quakers—that one morality has to be practised in peace and another in war; that the same bodily act may be wrong in the one and right in the other. So, to be perfect, you need to ha

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VIII

VIII

Under the new dispensation we should have to appoint on the declaration of war, if we had not done it already, a large Staff Department of Press Camouflage. Everything is done best by those who have practised it longest. The best inventors and disseminators of what was untrue in our hour of need would be those who had made its manufacture and sale their trade in our hours of ease. The most disreputable of successful journalists and "publicity experts" would naturally man the upper grades of the

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I In the autumn of 1917 the war entered into an

I In the autumn of 1917 the war entered into an

autumn, or late middle-age, of its own. "Your young men," we are told, "shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams." The same with whole armies. But middle-aged armies or men may not have the mists of either morning or evening to charm them. So they may feel like Corot, when he had painted away, in a trance of delight, till the last vapour of dawn was dried up by the sun; then he said, "You can see everything now. Nothing is left," and knocked off work for the day. There was no knock

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II

II

One leaf that had gone pretty yellow by now was the hope of perfect victory—swift, unsoured, unruinous, knightly: St. George's over the dragon, David's over Goliath. Some people at home seem to be still clinging hard to that first pretty vision of us as a gifted, lithe, wise little Jack fighting down an unwieldy, dastardly giant. But troops in the field become realists. Ours had seen their side visibly swelling for more than two years, till Jack had become a heavier weight than the giant and yet

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III

III

Even in trenches and near them, where most of the health was, time had begun to embrown the verdant soul of the army. "Kitchener's Army" was changing. Like every volunteer army, his had sifted itself, at its birth, with the only sieve that will riddle out, even roughly, the best men to be near in a fight. Till the first of the pressed men arrived at our front, a sergeant there, when he posted a sentry and left him alone in the dark, could feel about as complete a moral certitude as there is on t

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IV

IV

The fall of the leaf had brought, too, a sad shortage of heroes—of highly-placed ones, for, of course, every company had its own, authenticated beyond any proof that crosses or medals could give. A few very old Regular privates would say, "Ah! if we had Buller here!" Sir Redvers Buller has always remained, in lofty disregard of conclusive disproof, the Cæsar or Hannibal of the old Regular private, who sets little store by such heroes of Whitehall and Fleet Street as Roberts and Kitchener. But th

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I

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,

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II

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 palliati

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III

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

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IV

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 convu

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V

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

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VI

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

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I

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,

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II

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 onl

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III

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

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IV

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

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V

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

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I

I

There is no one day of which you can say: "My youth ended then. On the Monday the ball of my vision had eagles that flew unabashed to the sun. On the Tuesday it hadn't." The season of rapture goes out like a tide that has turned; a time has come when the mud flats are bare; but, long after the ebb has set in, any wave that has taken a special strength of its own from some combination of flukes out at sea may cover them up for a moment—may even throw itself far up the beach, making as if to recap

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II

II

Night came on cloudless and windless and braced with autumn's first astringent tang of coolness. Above, as I lay on my back in the meadow, the whole dome had a stir of life in its shimmering fresco, stars flashing and winking with that eager air of having great things to impart—they have it on frosty nights in the Alps, over a high bivouac. We were all worked up, you see. Could it be coming at last, I thought as I went to sleep—the battle unlike other battles? How many I had seen outlive their l

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III

III

Ten miles to the east of Amiens a steep-sided ridge divides the converging rivers of Ancre and Somme. They meet where it sinks, at its western end, into the plain. From the ridge there was, in pre-war days, a beautiful view. On the south the ground fell from your feet abruptly, a kind of earth cliff, to the north bank of the Somme, about a hundred feet below. Southwards, beyond the river, stretched, as far as eye could see, the expanse of the level Santerre, one of France's best cornlands. South

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IV

IV

There were other days, during the following months of worm-eaten success, when some mirage of the greater joys which we had forfeited hung for a few moments over the sand. It must be always a strange delight to an infantryman to explore at his ease, in security, ground that to him has been almost as unimaginable as events after death. There is no describing the vesture of enigmatic remoteness enfolding a long-watched enemy line. Tolstoy has tried, but even he does not come up to it. Virgil alone

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I

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 tha

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II

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 fin

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III

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.

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IV

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 w

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I

I

Satanism is one of the words that most of us simple people have heard others use; we guiltily feel that we ought to know what it means, but do not quite like to ask, lest we expose the nakedness of the land. Then comes Professor Gilbert Murray, one of the few learned men who are able to make a thing clear to people not quite like themselves, and tells us all about it in a cheap, small book, easy to read. It seems that the Satanists, or the pick of the sect, were Bohemian Protestants at the start

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II

II

To-day the convert does not insist upon bearing the new name. He does not, except in the case of a few doctrinaire bigots, repeat any Satanist creed. But in several portions of Europe the war made conversions abound. Imagine the state of mind that it must have induced in many a plain Russian peasant, literal, serious, and straight, like the Bohemian. First the Tsar, in the name of God and of Holy Russia, sent him, perhaps without so much as a rifle, to starve and be shelled in a trench. If he es

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III

III

In their vices as well as their virtues the English preserve a distinguished moderation. They do not utterly shrink from jobbery, for example; they do from a job that is flagrant or gross. They give judgeships as prizes for party support, but not to the utterly briefless, the dullard who knows no more law than necessity. Building contractors, when in the course of their rise they become town councillors, do not give bribes right and left: their businesses thrive without that. An Irishman running

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IV

IV

All this relative mildness in the irritants administered to the common Englishman as soldier had its counterpart in the men's ingrained moderateness of reaction. At Bray-sur-Somme during the battle of 1916 I saw a French soldier go so mad with rage at what he considered to be the deficiencies of his leaders that he brought out each article of his kit and equipment in succession to the door of his billet and threw it into the deep central mud of the road with a separate curse, at each cast, on wa

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V

V

You may be disillusioned about the value of things, or about their security, either coming to feel that your house is a poor place to live in or that, pleasant or not, it is likely enough to come down on your head. Of these two forms of discomfort our friend experiences both. Much that he took to be fairly noble now looks pretty mean; and much that seemed reassuringly stable is seen to be shaky. Civilization itself, the at any rate habitable dwelling which was to be shored up by the war, wears a

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I

I

How shall it all be set right? For it must be, of course. A people that did not wait to be pushed off its seat by the Kaiser is not likely now to turn its face to the wall and die inertly of shortage of faith and general moral debility. Some day soon we shall have to cease squatting among the potsherds and crabbing each other, and give all the strength we have left to the job of regaining the old control of ourselves and our fate which, in the days of our health, could only be kept by putting fo

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II

II

That is about where we stand as a nation. Of course, a few fortunates mailed in a happy, indefeasible genius of wonder and delight at everything round them are all right. And so are a few clods of whole-hog insensibility. Most of us, on the whole, find that effort is less fun than it was, and many things somewhat dull that used to sparkle with interest; the salt has lost, not all, but some of its savour; the grasshopper is a bit of a burden; old hobbies of politics, social causes, liberal comrad

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III

III

Of course, life itself is all right. It never grows dull. All dullness is in the mind; it comes out thence and diffuses itself over everything round the dull person, and then he terms everything dull, and thinks himself the victim of the impact of dull things. In stupid rich people, in boys and girls deadeningly taught at dead-alive schools, in all disappointed weaklings and in declining nations, this loss of power to shed anything but dullness upon what one sees and hears is common enough. Seco

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IV

IV

Among the mind's powers is one that comes of itself to many children and artists. It need not be lost, to the end of his days, by anyone who has ever had it. This is the power of taking delight in a thing, or rather in anything, everything, not as a means to some other end, but just because it is what it is, as the lover dotes on whatever may be the traits of the beloved object. A child in the full health of his mind will put his hand flat on the summer turf, feel it, and give a little shiver of

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I

I

To give the cure a chance we must have a long quiet time. And we must secure it now. For the moment, no doubt, war has gone out of fashion; it pines in the shade, like the old horsehair covers for sofas, or antimacassars of lace. Hardly a day can pass, even now, but someone finds out, with a start and a look of displeasure, that war has been given its chance and has not done quite so well as it ought to have done. One man will write to the Press, in dismay, that the meals in the Simplon express

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II

II

But may it not come into fashion again? Do not all the great fashions move in cycles, like stars? When our wars with Napoleon were just over, and all the bills still to be paid, and the number of visibly one-legged men at its provisional maximum, must not many simple minds have thought that surely man would never idealize any business so beastly and costly again? And then see what happened. We were all tranquilly feeding, good as gold, in the deep and pleasant meadows of the long Victorian peace

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III

III

If he did, it was natural. All Struwwelpeters are natural. All heirs-apparent are said to take the opposite side to their fathers still on the throne. And those learned men were heirs to the age of the Crystal Palace, the age of the first "Locksley Hall," with its "parliament of man" and "federation of the world," the age that laid a railway line along the city moat of Amiens and opened capacious Hôtels de la Paix throughout Latin Europe, the age when passports withered and Baedeker was more and

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IV

IV

Then the Church itself must needs take a hand—or that part of the Church which ever cocks an eye at the latest fashions in public opinion, the "blessed fellows," like Poins, that "think as every man thinks" and help to swell every passing shout into a roar. I find among old papers a letter written in Queen Victoria's reign by an unfashionable curmudgeon whose thought would not keep to the roadway like theirs. "I see," this rude ironist writes, "that 'the Church's duty in regard to war' is to be

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V

V

And yet all mortal things are subject to decay, even reactions, even decay itself, and there comes a time when the dead Ophelia may justly be said to be not decomposing, but recomposing successfully as violets and so forth. Heirs-apparent grow up into kings and have little heirs of their own who, hearkening to nature's benevolent law, become stout counter-reactionists in their turn. So now the pre-war virilists, the literary braves who felt that they had supped too full of peace, have died in th

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