The continued existence of war is precarious. More than the League of Nations menaces its future. For it depends, at the last, on the infrequency of “proper lawyers.” Armies can now be made, and moved about when made, only because the plain man who keeps the world going round does not stick up for the last ounce of his rights, or stick out for the joys of having the last word, so dourly as these. Even to keep up a game with so modest an element of voluntaryism about it as penal justice you have to have some little effort of cooperation all round. If your convicts will not even eat the whole thing begins crumbling. The “suffragettes” showed us that. A pioneer still earlier, an Indian coolie, proved it in a Fijian gaol. Were every soldier like this diarist war would have to be dropped, not because men were too good, but because they were too prickly.
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 of drastic passion, not even the passionate self-pity of Dickens describing his childhood as Copperfield’s, stirred the plodding and crabbed narrative. The writer seemed too peevish to be at the pains to beautify or exalt. And so his account of the bungled attack in which he took part is extraordinarily true to all that the commonplace man found to be left in almost any attack when once all the picturesque fluff filling the current literary pictures of it were found not to be there—the touch of bathos; the supposed heroic moment only seeming a bit of a “dud,” a miscarriage; the hugger-mugger element of confusion; the baffling way that the real thing did not so often give men obvious gallant things to do as irritating puzzles to solve, muddles to liquidate at short notice; the queer flashes of revelation, in contact with individual enemies, of the bottomless falsity of the cheaper kind of current war psychology.
Advances, however, were far from being the staple of warfare. They caused the most losses, but still they did less than the years of less sensational routine to make what changes were made by the war in the minds of the men in the ranks. And here our pettish author found the congenial theme for his own acrid, accurate method. His trivial reiterations succeed, in the end, in piling up in the reader’s mind an image of that old trench life as the sum of innumerable dreary units of irksome fatigue. This was the normal life of the infantry private in France. For N.C.O.’s it was lightened by the immunity of their rank from fatigue work in the technical sense. For the officer it was much further lightened by better quarters and the servant system. For most of his time the average private was tired. Fairly often he was so tired as no man at home ever is in the common run of his work.
If a company’s trench strength was low and sentry-posts abounded more than usual in its sector a man might, for eight days running, get no more than one hour off duty at any one time, day or night. If enemy guns were active many of these hours off guard duty might have to be spent on trench repair. After one of these bad times in trenches a company or platoon would sometimes come out on to the road behind the communication trench like a flock of over-driven sheep. The weakest ones would fall out and drop here and there along the road, not as a rule fainting, but in the state of a horse deadbeat, to whom any amount of thrashing seems preferable to going on. Men would come out lightheaded with fatigue, and ramble away to the men next them about some great time which they had had, or meant to have, at home. Or a man would march all right till the road fetched a bend, and then he would march straight on into the ditch in his sleep. Upon a greasy road with a heavy camber I have seen a used-up man get the illusion, on a night-march back to billets, that he was walking on a round, smooth, horizontal pole or convex plank above some fearsome sort of gulf. He would struggle hard to recover imaginary losses of footing, pant and sweat and scrape desperately sideways with his feet like a frightened young horse new to harness when it leans in against the pole, with its feet skidding outwards on the setts. Down he would go, time after time, in the mud, each time as unable to rise of himself, under the weight of his pack and equipment, as any medieval knight unhorsed and held down by the weight of his armour. Hauled up again to his feet, to be driven along like one of the spent cab-horses in Naples just strong enough to move when up, but not to rise, he would in another five minutes be agonizing again on the greasy pole of his delirium.
The querulist of the book took it hard, I remember, that more kind words did not come to the men. He saw his own lot very clearly, but not so clearly
