One of the heavenly things on which the New Army had almost counted, in its green faith, was that our higher commands would have genius. Of course, we had no right to do it. No X has any right to ask of Y that Y shall be Alexander the Great or Bach or Rembrandt or Garrick, or any kind of demonic first-rater. As reasonably send precepts to the Leviathan to come ashore. Yet we had indulged that insane expectation, just as we had taken it for granted that this time the nation would be as one man, and nobody “out to do a bit for himself on the quiet.” And now behold the falling leaf and no Leviathan coming ashore in response to our May Day desires.
Certainly other things, highly respectable, came. The Second Army Staff’s direction of that autumn’s almost continuous battles was of a competence passing all British precedents. Leapfrogging waves of assault, box barrages, creeping barrages, actions, interactions, and counteractions were timed and concerted as no Staff of ours had done it before. The intricate dance which has to go on behind a crowded battle front, so that columns moving east and west and columns moving north and south shall not coincide at cross roads, was danced with the circumstantial precision of the best ballets. An officer cast away somewhere in charge of a wayside smithy for patching up chipped guns felt that there was a power perched on the top of the hill at Cassel which smelt out a bit of good work, or of bad, wherever anyone did it. Sense, keenness, sympathy, resolution, exactness—all the good things abode in that eyrie which have to be in attendance before genius can bring off its marvels; every chamber swept and garnished, and yet—.
Foch tells us what he thinks Napoleon might have said to the Allied commands if he could have risen in our black times from the dead. “What cards you people have!” he would have said, “and how little you do with them! Look!” And then, Foch thinks, within a month or two he “would have rearranged everything, gone about it all in some new way, thrown out the enemy’s plans and quite crushed him.” That “some new way” was not fated to come. The spark refused to fall, the divine accident would not happen. How could it? you ask with some reason. Had not trench warfare reached an impasse? Yes; there is always an impasse before genius shows a way through. Music on keyboards had reached an impasse before a person of genius thought of using his thumb as well as his fingers. Well, that was an obvious dodge, you may say, but in Flanders what way through could there have been? The dodge found by genius is always an obvious dodge, afterwards. Till it is found it can as little be stated by us common people as can the words of the poems that Keats might have written if he had lived longer. You would have to become a Keats to do that, and a Napoleon to say how Napoleon would have got through to Bruges in the autumn that seemed so autumnal to us. All that the army knew, as it decreased in the mud, was that no such uncovenanted mercy came to transmute its casualties into the swiftly and richly fruitful ones of a Napoleon, the incidental expenses of some miraculous draught of victory.
Nothing to grouse at in that. The winds of inspiration have to blow the best way they can. Prospero himself could not raise them; how could the likes of us hope to? And yet there had been that illogical hope, almost reliance—part of the high unreason of faith that could move mountains in 1914 and seems to be scarcely able to shift an anthill today.
X
Autumn Tints in Chivalry
I
In either of two opposite tempers you may carry on war. In one of the two you will want to rate your enemy, all round, as high as you can. You may pursue him down a trench, or he you; but in neither case do you care to have him described by somebody far, far away as a fat little shortsighted scrub. Better let him pass for a paladin. This may at bottom be vanity, sentimentality, all sorts of contemptible things. Let him who knows the heart of man be dogmatic about it. Anyhow, this temper comes,
