III
At no seat of war will you find it quite easy to live up to Flanigan’s standards of hatred towards an enemy. Reaching a front, you find that all you want is just to win the war. Soon you are so taken up with the pursuit of this aim that you are always forgetting to burn with the gem-like flame of pure fury that fires the lionhearted publicist at home.
A soldier might have had the Athanasian ecstasy all right till he reached the firing line. Every individual German had sunk the Lusitania; there was none righteous, none. And yet at a front the holy passion began to ooze out at the ends of his fingers. The bottom trouble is that you cannot fight a man in the physical way without somehow touching him. The relation of actual combatants is a personal one—no doubt, a rude, primitive one, but still quite advanced as compared with that between a learned man at Berlin who keeps on saying Delenda est Britannia! at the top of his voice and a learned man in London who keeps on saying that every German must have a black heart because Caesar did not conquer Germany as he did Gaul and Britain. Just let the round head of a German appear for a passing second, at long intervals, above a hummock of clay in the middle distance. Before you had made half a dozen sincere efforts to shoot him the fatal germ of human relationship had begun to find a nidus again: he had acquired in your mind the rudiments of a personal individuality. You would go on trying to shoot him with zest—indeed, with a diminished likelihood of missing, for mere hatred is a flustering emotion. And yet the hatred business had started crumbling. There had begun the insidious change that was to send you home, on your first leave, talking unguardedly of “old Fritz” or of “the good old Boche” to the pain of your friends, as if he were a stout dog fox or a real stag of a hare.
The deadliest solvent of your exalted hatreds is laughter. And you can never wholly suppress laughter between two crowds of millions of men standing within earshot of each other along a line of hundreds of miles. There was, in the Loos salient in 1916, a German who, after his meals, would halloo across to an English unit taunts about certain accidents of its birth. None of his British hearers could help laughing at his mistakes, his knowledge, and his English. Nor could the least humorous priest of ill-will have kept his countenance at a relief when the enemy shouted: “We know you are relieving,” “No good hiding it,” “Goodbye, Ox and Bucks,” “Who’s coming in?” and some humorist in the obscure English battalion relieving shouted back, with a terrific assumption of accent, “Furrst Black Watch!” or “Th’ Oirish Gyards!” and a hush fell at the sound of these great names. Comedy, expelled with a fork by the dignified figure of Quenchless Hate, had begun to steal back of herself.
At home that tragedy queen might do very well; she did not have these tenpenny nails scattered about on her road to puncture the nobly inflated tyres of her chariot. The heroes who spoke up for shooing all the old German governesses into the barbed wire compounds were not exposed to the moral danger of actually hustling, propria persona, these formidable ancients. But while Hamilcar at home was swearing Hannibal and all the other little Hamilcars to undying hatred of the foe, an enemy dog might be trotting across to the British front line to sample its rats, and its owner be losing in some British company’s eyes his proper quality as an incarnation of all the Satanism of Potsdam and becoming simply “him that lost the dog.”
If you took his trench it might be no better; perhaps Incarnate Evil had left its bit of food half-cooked, and the muddy straw, where it lay last, was pressed into a hollow by Incarnate Evil’s back as by a cat’s. Incarnate Evil should not do these things that other people in trenches do. It ought to be more strange and beastly and keep on making beaux gestes with its talons and tail, like the proper dragon slain by St. George. Perhaps Incarnate Evil was extinct and you went over its pockets. They never contained the right things—no poison to put in our wells, no practical hints for crucifying Canadians; only the usual stuffing of all soldiers’ pockets—photographs and tobacco and bits of string and the wife’s letters, all about how tramps were always stealing potatoes out of the garden, and how the baby was worse, and was his leave never coming! No good to look at such things.
IV
With
