The frozen fountain would have leapt,
The buds gone on to blow,
The warm south wind would have awaked
To melt the snow.
Nothing now perceptible came of it all. What, indeed, could the average army chaplain have done, with his little budget of nice traits and limitations? How had we ever armed and equipped him? When you are given an infant earth to fashion out of a whirling ball of flaming metals and gases, then good humour, some taste for adventure, distinction at cricket, a jolly way with the men, and an imperfect digestion of thirty-nine partly masticated articles may not carry you far. You may come off, by no fault of your own, like the curate in Shakespeare who was put up to play Alexander the Great: “A marvellous good neighbour, i’ faith, and a very good bowler: but, for Alisander—alas, you see how ’tis—a little o’erparted.”
The men, once again, did not put it in that way. They did not miss anything that most of them could have described. They only felt a vacancy, an unspecified void, like the want of some unknown great thing in their generals’ minds and in the characters of their rulers at home. The chaplain’s tobacco was all to the good; so was the civil tongue that he kept in his head; so were all the good turns that he did. But, when it came to religion, were these things “all there was to it”? Had the churches really not “got hold of something,” with all their enormous deposits of stone and mortar and clerical consequence? So, in his own way, the army chaplain, too, became a tributary brook feeding the general reservoir of disappointment and mistrust that was steadily filled by the surface drainage of all the higher ground of our British social landscape under the dirty weather of the war.
VI
’Ware Politicians
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 being whom we were brought up to regard as causing the world to go round by making a beeline to the best pay available. Now he was ex-Economic Man, or Economic Man popped off all the hooks that had fastened him into a place in the system called capitalistic by those who least admire it. No one was left to say of a job any longer that you might “take it or leave it,” for leaving was barred. You could not be called a wage-slave, for you got no wages to speak of. You had become a true “proletarian” under a pretty big-fisted dictatorship. It might not be a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a dictatorship smells about as sweet by one name as another when it levers you out of bed before dawn or ties you up to the wheel of a gun for cutting a job that irks you. Dr. Johnson declined to attempt to settle degrees of precedence between a flea and a louse. It is as hard to decide between the charms of a “sanitary fatigue” when done for our War Office and when done for Mr. Lenin.
In a sense, no doubt, the average man liked it all—the sense in which men like to break the ice in the Serpentine for a swim. He had willed it. He felt that when it was over it would be a good thing to have done. But he also saw, perhaps with surprise, that there were many men who liked it wholly, without any juggling with future and pluperfect tenses. They liked to have their hours of rising and going to bed settled by colonel or Soviet rather than face for themselves this distracting problem in self-government. They liked meals which they did not choose, and which might not be good, but which came up of themselves, in their season, like grass. They liked quarters which they might perhaps have to share with brethren too weak to carry their liquor and not too wise to essay great feats of the kind, but which, anyhow, did not have to be sought for, rented, furnished, and,
