There must have been a good many thousands of these. They may have done good—perhaps won a good-conduct mark to some War Office hero for rushing them out in good time to the front; perhaps assisted some politician to feel that he was riding a whirlwind and directing a storm, solving munition crises and winning the war. All human happiness counts. In France, if the physical effects of their detonation were poor, the moral reverberations which followed were lively. A bombing sergeant, sent down the line for a rest and instructing new drafts in a hollow among the sand dunes at Étaples well out of authority’s hearing, would start his lecture by holding one of them up and saying: “This ’ere, men, is a damn bad grenade. But it’s all that the bloody tailors give you to work with. So just pay attention to me.” And then he would go on to pour out his cornucopia of tips, fruits of empiric research, for doing what somebody’s slackness or folly had made it so much less easy to do.
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 get on with the war was to raise a more specific thirst for blood in the private. Battalion commanders did not soon tire of telling how in the busiest days of big battles the unseen powers would pester them for instant returns of the number of shovels they had, or of the number of men who in civil life had been fitters, or had been moulders. Brigadiers would savagely wonder aloud whether it ever occurred to a higher command that to make little attack after little attack, each on a narrow, one-brigade front, was merely to ask to have each attack squashed flat in its turn by a fan-like convergence of fire from the enemy’s guns on both flanks, not to speak of supports. The day the bad turn came for us, in the two-chaptered battle of Cambrai, an officer on the Staff of one of the worst-hit divisions observed: “Our attitude is just ‘we told you so.’ ” When the good turn in the war had come the next summer there was a day, not so good as the rest, when two squadrons of horse were sent to charge, in column, up a straight, treeless rising road for half a mile and take a little wood at the top. There were many machine-guns in the wood—how could there not have been?—and the whole air sang with warnings of that. No horse or man either got to the wood or came back. They were all in a few seconds lying in the white dust, almost in the order they rode in, the officer in command a little ahead of the rest. It looked, in its formal completeness, like a thing acted, a cinema play showing a part of Sennacherib’s army on which the angel had breathed. On the road back from the place I met a corps commander—a great man at his work. When he heard his face crumpled up for a moment—he was a softhearted man. “Another of those damned cavalry follies!” he growled. His voice had the scorn that the man who is versed in today’s practice feels for the men who still move among yesterday’s theories. So it was, from east to west, all the way.
All the wise men were not in the east. It was the fault of the war, the outlandish, innovatory war that did not conform to the proper textbooks as it ought to have done; an unimagined war of flankless armies scratching each other’s faces across an endless thorn hedge, not dreamt of in Staff College philosophy; a war that was always putting out of date the best that had been known and thought and invented, always sending everyone to school again; unkind, above all, to us who, if well-to-do, bring up our young to have a proper respect for the past and to feel that if yesterday’s parasol will not keep out the rain of today, then it ought to, and no one can blame them for using it.
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 nationally valuable Englishmen in the prime of life were telling one another that, among those whom they had hitherto taken more or less completely on trust as their “betters,” things were going on which must make the war harder for us to win; while they, the common people, cared with all their hearts about saving Belgium and France, those betters, so placed that they could do more to that end
