happened; the night was like others. Yet in the times that came after, when half of the thirty were dead and most of the others jaded and soured, the feel of that night would come back with the strange distinctness of those picked, remembered mornings and evenings of boyhood when everything that there was became everlastingly memorable as though it had been the morning or evening of the first day. Ten o’clock came and Lights Out, but a kind of luminous bloom still on the air and a bugle blowing Last Post in some faraway camp that kept worse hours than we. I believe the whole hut held its breath to hear the notes better. Who wouldn’t, to listen to that most lovely and melancholy of calls, the noble death of each day’s life, a sound moving about hither and thither, like a veiled figure making gestures both stately and tender, among the dim thoughts that we have about death the approaching extinguisher—resignation and sadness and unfulfilment and triumph all coming back to the overbearing sense of extinction in those two recurrent notes of “Lights Out”? One listens as if with bowed mind, as though saying “Yes; out, out, brief candle.” A moment’s silence to let it sink in and the chaffing and laughter broke out like a splash of cool water in summer again. That hut always went to bed laughing and chaffing all round, and, though there was no wit among us, the stories tasted of life, the inexhaustible game and adventure. Looker, ex-marine turned soldier, told us how he had once gone down in a diving-suit to find a lost anchor and struck on the old tin lining out of a crate, from which some octopian beast with long feelers had reached out at him, and the feelers had come nearer and nearer through the dim water. “What did you do, Filthy?” somebody asked (we called Looker “Filthy” with friendly jocoseness). “I ’opped it,” the good fellow said, and the sane anticlimax of real life seemed twice as good as the climax that any Hugo or Verne could have put to the yarn. Another described the great life he had lived as an old racing “hen,” or minor sutler of the sport of kings. Hard work, of course. “All day down at Epsom openin’ doors an’ brushin’ coats and shiftin’ truck for bookies till you’d make, perhaps, two dollars an’ speculate it on the las’ race and off back ’ome to London ’ungry, on your ’oofs.” Once a friend of his, who had had a bad day, had not walked—had slipped into the London train, and at Vauxhall, where tickets were taken, had gone to earth under the seat with a brief appeal to his fellow travellers: “Gents, I rely on your honour.” The stout narrator could see no joke at all in the phrase. He was rather scandalized by our great roar of laughter. “ ’Is honour! And ’im robbin’ the comp’ny! ’nough to take away a man’s kerrikter!” said the patient walker-home in emergency. It made life seem too wonderful to end; such were the untold reserves that we had in this nation of men with a hold on themselves, of hardly uprightness; even this unhelped son of the gutter, living from hand to mouth in the common lodging-houses of slums, a parasite upon parasites, poor little animalcule doing odd jobs for the caterpillars of the commonwealth—even he could persist in carrying steadily, clear of the dirt, the full vase of his private honour. What, then, must be the unused stores of greedless and fearless straightness in others above us, generals and statesmen, men in whom, as in bank-porters, character is three parts of the trade! The world seemed clean that night; such a lovely unreason of optimist faith was astir in us all,
We felt for that time ravish’d above earth
And possess’d joys not promised at our birth.
It seemed hardly credible now, in this soured and quarrelsome country and time, that so many men of different classes and kinds, thrown together at random, should ever have been so simply and happily friendly, trustful, and keen. But they were, and they imagined that all their betters were too. That was the paradise that the bottom fell out of.
II
Misgiving
I
What could the New Army not have done if all the time of its training had been fully used! A few, at least, of its units had a physique above that of the Guards; many did more actual hours of work, before going abroad, than Guardsmen in peacetime do in two years; all were at first as keen as boys, collectors, or spaniels—whichever are keenest; when the official rations of warlike instruction fell short they would go about hungrily trying to scratch crumbs of that provender out of the earth like fowls in a run.
But there was an imp of frustration about. He pervaded, like Ariel, all the labouring ship of our State. I had seen him in Lancashire once, on one of the early days of the war, when fifty young miners marched in from one pit, with their colliery band, to enlist at an advertised place and time of enlistment. The futilitarian elf took care that the shutters were up and nobody there, so that the men should kick their heels all the day in the street and walk back at night with their tails between their legs, and the band not playing, to tell their mates that the whole thing was a mug’s game, a ramp, got up by the hot-air merchants and crooks in control. The imp must have grinned, not quite as all of us have grinned since, on the wrong side of our mouths, at the want of faith that miners have in the great and wise who rule over them. Another practical joke of his was to slip into the War Office or Admiralty and tear up any letters he found
