Disenchantment

slum life, is the jealously close, exclusive, contriving life of a family housed in an urban cellar. During the years of trench war a man seldom saw the whole of his company at a time. Our total host might be two millions strong, or ten millions; whatever its size a man’s world was that of his section⁠—at most, his platoon; all that mattered much to him was the one little boatload of castaways with whom he was marooned on a desert island and making shift to keep off the weather and any sudden attack of wild beasts. Absorbed in the primitive job of keeping alive on an earth naked except in the matter of food, they became, like other primitive men, family separatists. Any odd chattel that each trench household acquired served as an extra dab of cement for the household’s internal affections, as well as a possible casus belli against the unblessed outsiders who dared to cast upon it the eye of desire. A brazier with three equal legs would be coveted by a whole company. Once a platoon acquired a broken, but just practicable, armchair; not exactly a stronghold of luxury; rather a freakish wave of her banner; and this symbol of lost joys was borne, at great inconvenience, from sector to sector of the front, amidst the affected derision of other platoons⁠—veiling what was well understood to be envy. It was like the grim, ineffusive spiritual cohesion of a Scottish family soldered together to keep out the world.

Constantly jammed up against one another, every man in each of these isolated knots of adventurers came to be seen by the rest for what he was worth, with the drastic clearness of open-eyed husbands and wives of long standing. They had domesticated the Day of Judgment. Many old valuations had to go by the board; some great home reputations wilted surprisingly; stones that the builders of public opinion on Salisbury Plain had confidently rejected found their way up to the heads of corners. Officers, watched almost as closely, were sorted out by the minds of the men into themes for contemptuous silence, objects of the love that doeth and beareth all things, and cases of Not Proven Yet. The cutting equity of this family council was bracing. It got the best out of everybody in whom there was anything. Imagine a similar overhauling of public life here! And the size of the scrapheap! But to the outer world, which it did not half know, the tribunal was harsh, and harshest of all to the outer and upper world of army principalities and powers.

These were, to it, the untested, unsifted, “the crowd that was never put through it.” There were presumptions against them, besides. They were akin, in the combatant’s sight, to the elfish gods that had ruled and bedevilled his training at home. They were of the breed of the wasters, the misorganizers, the beauties who sent his battalion out from the Wiltshire downs to Bruay along a course of gigantic zigzags, like a yacht beating up in the teeth of a wind, first running far south to Havre, then north to near the German Ocean, and then going about and opening out again upon the southward tack until Bruay was struck; for it was, indeed, along a trajectory somewhat like that of an actual flash of lightning in some quaint engraving that Britain hurled at the enemy many of her new thunderbolts of war. Also, they stood in the shoes of the men who in French’s day had sent platoon commanders to take woods and quarries not marked on their maps. And they were the men who, when troops had been marching twelve miles in full kit on the high-cambered, heavily greased Flanders setts in the rain, would appear on the roadside turf round a blind corner, sitting chubby and sleek on fresh horses, and say that the marching was damned bad and troops must go back tomorrow and do it again. But the chief count was the first⁠—that they had not all gone through the mill; that they lived in a world in which all the respectable old bubbles, pricked elsewhere, were still fat and shining, where all the old bluffs were uncalled and still going strong, and the wangler could still inherit the earth and eyewash reign happy and glorious.

Not a judgment wholly just. But not one contemptible either; for, wherever it ended, it set out from the right idea of judging a man only by what he was worth and what he could do. And, just or not, it was real; it influenced men’s acts, not to the extent of losing us the war, but to that of helping to send the winners home possessed with that contemptuous impatience of authority which has already thrown out of gear so much of the prewar machinery for regulating the joint action of mankind.

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. Ignoring all that at Aldershot they had learnt to be sacred, they contumaciously saw that so long as you stand in a hole deeper than you are tall you never will hit with a rifle-bullet another man standing in just such another hole twenty yards off. But also⁠—divine idea!⁠—that you can throw a tin can from your hole into his.

In England the mighty had taken a great deal of pains to teach the New Army always to parry the thrust of its enemy’s bayonet first, and only