To honour, while you strike him down,
The foe who comes with eager eyes.
The other temper has its niche in letters, too. There was the man that “wore his dagger in his mouth.” And there was Little Flanigan, the bailiff’s man in Goldsmith’s play. During one of our old wars with France he was always “damning the French, the parley-voos, and all that belonged to them.” “What,” he would ask the company, “makes the bread rising? The parley-voos that devour us. What makes the mutton fivepence a pound? The parley-voos that eat it up. What makes the beer threepence-halfpenny a pot?”
Well, your first aim in war is to hit your enemy hard, and the question may well be quite open—in which of these tempers can he be hit hardest? If, as we hear, a man’s strength be “as the strength of ten because his heart is pure,” possibly it may add a few footpounds to his momentum in an attack if he has kept a clean tongue in his head. And yet the production of heavy woollens in the West Riding, for War Office use, may, for all that we know, have been accelerated by yarns about crucified Canadians and naked bodies of women found in German trenches. There is always so much, so bewilderingly much, to be said on both sides. All I can tell is that during the war the Newbolt spirit seemed, on the whole, to have its chief seat in and near our front line, and thence to die down westward all the way to London. There Little Flanigan was enthroned, and, like Montrose, would bear no rival near his throne, so that a man on leave from our trench system stood in some danger of being regarded as little better than one of the wicked. Anyhow, he was a kind of provincial. Not his will, but that of Flanigan, had to be done. For Flanigan was at the centre of things; he had leisure, or else volubility was his trade; and he had got hold of the megaphones.
II
In the first months of the war there was any amount of good sportsmanship going; most, of course, among men who had seen already the whites of enemy eyes. I remember the potent emetic effect of Flaniganism upon a little blond Regular subaltern maimed at the first battle of Ypres. “Pretty measly sample of the sin against the Holy Ghost!” the one-legged child grunted savagely, showing a London paper’s comic sketch of a corpulent German running away. The first words I ever heard uttered in palliation of German misdoings in Belgium came from a Regular N.C.O., a Dragoon Guards sergeant, holding forth to a sergeants’ mess behind our line. “We’d have done every damn thing they did,” he averred, “if it had been we.” I thought him rather extravagant, then. Later on, when the long row of hut hospitals, jammed between the Calais-Paris Railway at Étaples and the great reinforcement camp on the sand-hills above it, was badly bombed from the air, even the wrath of the R.A.M.C. against those who had wedged in its wounded and nurses between two staple targets scarcely exceeded that of our Royal Air Force against war correspondents who said the enemy must have done it on purpose.
Airmen, no doubt, or some of them, went to much greater lengths in the chivalrous line than the rest of us. Many things helped them to do it. Combatant flying was still new enough to be almost wholly an officer’s job; the knight took the knocks, and the squire stayed behind and looked after his gear. Air-fighting came to be pretty well the old duel, or else the medieval melee between little picked teams. The clean element, too, may have counted—it always looked a clean job from below, where your airy notions got mixed with trench mud, while the airman seemed like Sylvia in the song, who so excelled “each mortal thing upon the dull earth dwelling.” Whatever the cause, he excelled in his bearing towards enemies, dead or alive. The funeral that he gave to Richthofen in France was one of the few handsome gestures exchanged in the war. And whenever Little Flanigan at home began squealing aloud that we ought to take some of our airmen off fighting and make them bomb German women and children instead, our airmen’s scorn for these ethics of the dirt helped to keep up the flickering hope that the postwar world might not be ignoble.
Even on the dull earth it takes time and pains to get a clean-run boy or young man into a mean frame of mind. A fine N.C.O. of the Grenadier Guards was killed near Laventie—no one knows how—while going over to shake hands with the Germans on Christmas morning. “What! not shake on Christmas Day?” He would have thought it poor, sulky fighting. Near Armentières at the Christmas of 1914 an incident happened which seemed quite the natural thing to most soldiers then. On Christmas Eve the Germans lit up their front line with Chinese lanterns. Two British officers thereupon walked some way across No Man’s Land, hailed the enemy’s sentries, and asked for an officer. The German sentries said, “Go back, or we shall have to shoot.” The Englishmen said “Not likely!” advanced to the German wire, and asked again for an officer. The sentries held their fire and sent for an officer. With him the Englishmen made a one-day truce, and on Christmas Day the two sides exchanged cigarettes and played football together. The English intended the truce to end with the day, as agreed, but decided
