Disenchantment

at home in shooing the reluctant into the army. If a recalcitrant seemed to be lazy, spiritless, nerveless, if there was every sign of his making a specially worthless and troublesome consumer of rations in a trench, then a burning zeal to inflict this nuisance and danger on some unoffending platoon in France seemed to invade the ordinary military tribunal. Report said that the satisfaction of this impulse was called, by the possessed persons, “giving Haig the men,” and sometimes, with a more pungent irony, “supporting our fellows in the trenches.” Non tali auxilio nec defensoribus istis. Australia’s fellows in the trenches were suffered to vote themselves out of the risk of getting any support of the kind. Australia is a democracy. Ours were not asked whether they wanted to see their trenches employed as a penal settlement to which middle-aged moralists in England might deport, among other persons, those whom they felt to be morally the least beautiful of their juniors. So nothing impeded the pious practice of “larning toads to be toads.” For the shirker, the “kicker,” the “lawyer,” for all the types of undesirables that contribute most liberally to the wrinkled appearance of sergeants, those pious men had the nose of collectors. Wherever there was a spare fifty yards of British front to be held, they, if anyone, could find a man likely to go to sleep there on guard, or, in some cyclonic disturbance of spirit, to throw down his rifle and light out for the coast, across country.

Such episodes were reasonably few. The inveterate mercy that guards drunken sailors preserved from the worst disaster the cranks who had made a virtue of giving their country every bad soldier they could. And the abounding mercy of most courts-martial rendered few of the episodes fatal to individual conscripts. Nor, indeed, was the growth in their frequency after conscription wholly due to the more fantastic tricks played before high Heaven by some of the Falstaffs who dealt with the Mouldies, Shadows and Bull-calves. Conscription, in any case, must be dilution. You may get your water more quickly by throwing the filter away, but don’t hope to keep the quality what it was. And the finer a New Army unit had been, to begin with, the swifter the autumnal change. Every first-rate battalion fighting in France or Belgium lost its whole original numbers over and over again. First, because in action it spared itself less than the poor ones; secondly, because the best divisions rightly got the hard jobs. Going out in the late autumn of 1915, a good battalion with normal luck might have nearly half its original volunteer strength left after the Battle of the Somme. Drafts of conscripts would fill up the gap, each draft with a listless or enigmatic one-tenth that volunteering had formerly kept at a distance. The Battle of Arras next spring might leave only twenty percent of the first volunteers, and the autumn battles in Flanders would pretty well finish their business. Seasons returned, but not to that battalion returned the spirit of delight in which it had first learnt to soldier together and set foot together in France and first marched through darkness and ruined villages towards the flaring fairground of the front. While a New Army battalion was still very young, and fully convinced that no crowd of men so good to be with had ever been brought together before, it used to be always saying how it would keep things up after the war. No such genial reunions had ever been held as these were to be. But now the few odd men that are left only write to each other at long intervals, feeling almost as if they were raising their voices in an empty church. One of them asks another has he any idea what the battalion was like after Oppy, or Bourlon Wood, or wherever their own knockout came. Like any other battalion, no doubt⁠—a mere G.C.M. of all conscript battalions; conscription filed down all special features and characters.

Quick waste and renewal are said to be good for the body; the faster you burn up old tissues, by good sweaty work, the better your health; fresh and superior tissue is added unto you all the more merrily. Capital, too, the economists say, must be swiftly used up and reborn, over and over again, to do the most good that it can. And then there is the case of the phoenix⁠—in fact, of all the birds and all the beasts too, for all evolution would seem to be just the dying of something worse, as fast as it can, in order that something better may live in its place. No need for delay in turning your anthropoid apes into Shakespeares and Newtons.

But what if you found, after all your hard work, that not all the deceased cells of your flesh were replaced by new cells of the sort you would like? If some of your good golden pounds should have perished only that inconvertible paper might live? If out of your phoenix’s ashes only a commonplace rooster should spring? If evolution were guyed and bedevilled into retrovolution, a process by which the fittest must more and more dwindle away and the less fit survive them, and species be not multiplied but made fewer? Something, perhaps, of the sort may go on in the body in its old age, or in roses in autumn. It must go on in a volunteer army when it is becoming an army of conscripts during a war that is highly lethal.

IV

The fall of the leaf had brought, too, a sad shortage of heroes⁠—of highly-placed ones, for, of course, every company had its own, authenticated beyond any proof that crosses or medals could give. A few very old Regular privates would say, “Ah! if we had Buller here!” Sir Redvers Buller has always remained, in lofty disregard of conclusive disproof, the Caesar or Hannibal of the