higher rank to enable him to rescue the essential business of war from the busy hands of officialdom.
It is useless for me to attempt to analyze his efforts or to waste words on the various things that hampered him. The net result toward which he strived was that which would immediately occur to the man of common sense familiar with the conditions of modern warfare, and the odds against him were the usual accumulation of bunk and inefficiency in addition to the stupendous responsibility of an almost superhuman job. When nothing else could be done, he contented himself with the endeavor to acknowledge that the job was impossible without the hard work and cooperation of the men in the field.
And ‘when the tumult and the shouting died’ this genius still had his eye and hand on the essentials, already busying himself with the one great, dramatic element in the spectacle of demobilization — thousands of men suddenly, in a disorganized world, suspended, rendered, for the moment, useless, unattached. Sinews of war! A fine phrase by which patriotic orators refer to copper or steel or cotton. But these are the sinews of war — these men and their personal necessities; all else is superfluous, refinements — munitions to be expended, guns to be moved laid and fired. These will now rust, rot or corrode, unimportant, useless. And “organization” becomes a mere stack — miles of stacks — of useless papers, another incidental, a mere mechanical convenience. The whole may be tossed into the fire and the army remain as before — to be dissolved.
The bond is a very slight one. I had about come to the conclusion that officialdom had lost sight of it, and I was agreeably surprised to find that it was still known, and to have it simply acknowledged now that it was dissolved. My connection with the British Army had ended some years earlier. Most of these years I had spent on the training-ground, where, much to my annoyance, the very purpose of the training-ground seemed as often as not to have been lost sight of. Finally, disgusted, but probably much to the relief of my immediate associates, I was mustered out of the U.S. Army and had hied to the tall timber of Oregon, well back out of the way.
One day there was an unexpected visitor at my camp, miles and miles out in those Oregon backwoods. He announced himself as the British Consul, charged by his Majesty to advise me of the final disposition of affairs at the conclusion of our mutual exigent enterprise. A substantial gratuity was provided to enable men to establish contact again with normal pursuits.
The whole business was clean-cut and simple — and human. It might have been handled through the mail. A packet of forms, in quadruplicate, initialled here and there by uniformed clerks, locating, identifying and disposing of one McBride, an item of cast off war material, would have served the ends of some organizations. But the genius of common sense in the British War Office was humanly dissolving the bonds which make armies. You can’t put them on paper. It is a universal understanding between men and I accepted, the two medals as mere formal tokens of this, possessing a meaning exactly matching my understanding of it.
Chapter 15. The British Army
A RIFLEMAN at war is a soldier, and a soldier is one of an army. Something of his identity is imparted to the aggregate, something acquired from it. It is in the aggregate that he achieves victory or suffers defeat. His own state of mind and spirit is sensitive at all times to that of the whole. His record is determined not solely by his individual qualities, but, as well, by the qualities of those on either side of him, and by the organization which binds them together, directs their efforts and consolidates their gains, and by the spirit which this organization instils and fosters and the stimulus and incentive which he gains from it.
I should like, therefore, to say something about my comrades-in-arms during something like half of the not- so-recent war. Mine is not to be regarded as an illustrious record of service. I can see, now, many places where it might have been improved, but responsibility for its shortcomings is largely my own. The other fellow didn’t fail me, and I think the record gains rather than loses from being part of the record of the British Army. It gave me plenty of opportunity to show what I could do. If I felt, in the beginning, that there were some things that might have been managed better, I discovered many other things that aroused my admiration. Organization for war is a vast and complicated business. No ministry of war or general staff is omniscient. The first few weeks following the little incident in the Balkans witnessed not only the usual revolutionary change in the manner of life of the average man, but a change hardly less revolutionary in the methods of warfare itself. The civilian not only had to become a soldier, but the soldier had to become a different sort of soldier; and the ministry of war had not only to provide for his equipment and training, but to familiarize itself with the new conditions for which he was being equipped and trained.
I was better acquainted with the English and English customs than is the average American; yet, at first, I thought they were pretty slow at getting things done. I was a year late getting in the game; yet, one of the first things I ran across was a precious trio of snipers, blithely sniping away at ranges of a thousand yards and upwards. This rather dismayed me; particularly so since one of the trio was an officer. Here they were, diligently carrying on “according to orders,” unconcerned, apparently, by the obvious fact that they were accomplishing nothing, when they might so easily have got themselves into position to do some deadly work. The whole business seemed peculiarly inept — and peculiarly British. An American (only the so-called typical one) armed with the same authority would have been killing Germans in numbers, hardly knowing that he was disregarding orders in getting within range. But this is by no means to say that an American Army, under similar circumstances, would have had a well-organized and equipped sniping service. I have every reason to believe that it would not have had one, though a lot of individuals — if they could have got hold of the equipment — might have been having a great time with some real live targets. Besides, the Englishman has his own way of going about things, and eventually he did effective sniping, even if he had to get a General Order to bring him within range. And he probably had this by the time he had the equipment to justify an organization.
But it was not individual action that won the war; it was organized action. And even confining ourselves to the individual, this isolated instance tells us little about the Englishman, because it illustrates the characteristic in which he is notably weakest. It takes many other qualities to make a good soldier — and many soldiers to make an army. If you will look at the matter from all angles, I am willing to risk the charge of odium that is proverbially supposed to attach to comparisons. I hope there will be none, because I foresee that I am going to be constantly involved in comparisons. I spent a good many years with the American Army and did all my fighting with the British. And I am the more inclined to stick to my admiration for the British because it grew as my acquaintanceship lengthened. This does not, of course, mean that it grew at the expense of the United States. It is simply that I came a little nearer to understanding the Englishman. From the viewpoint of the average American he takes a good deal of understanding. And let me add here — for the other side of this matter of international amity — that he acquires a good deal of understanding before passing judgment. At his best — and you will find many of them — he is not even disposed to pass judgment. Rare virtue!
And the British Army requires a lot of understanding, even in its outward aspects, the mere catalogue of the various units. Any visitor to London has seen the Horse Guards down on Whitehall, and I am free to admit that, just common, every-day Hoosier that I am, I never see those magnificent living statues that I don’t get a thrill. Other Guards Regiments are the Coldstreams and Grenadiers and the Scots, Welsh and Irish Guards. In peace times a Guards Division is usually kept in London, forming the backbone of the garrison there and being available for the frequent ceremonies that mark the annual routine of the capital. They went to France with the first contingents, and I don’t know how many times their number flowed through their ranks — in as replacements, out as casualties — before the end.
Other regiments of the British Army bear the names of the cities or districts from which they are recruited. Many of them have histories running back for hundreds of years, and they carry on their colours the names of battles that mark turning points in the course of Empire, and of civilization, throughout many centuries. But the names of cities or districts is only the beginning. There are — to mix cavalry and infantry indiscriminately in the few names that I recall — Fusiliers, Dragoons, Foot, Horse, Rifles, Lancers, from various places and with various further designations, as King’s, Queen’s, Royal, etc.
The Territorials correspond roughly to our National Guard. They, too, are locally recruited and maintained — usually by counties, sometimes by cities. But they also run to diversity in the matter of designation, including such organizations as the London Scottish — which, by the way, sent the first Territorial Battalions to fight in France.
Scottish, also, was the first Regular Regiment offered the war-time British Army. This was the Royal Scots.
