Disenchantment

combination of these. The bayonet’s thrust is more of a gesture: a cogent appeal, like the urgent “How’s that?” from the whole of the field when a batsman is almost certainly out. But you may go much further back. That predominant fire itself is just such another appeal. Its greater volume and better direction are only the terms of an army’s or a nation’s claim to be registered as the winner of what it had really won long ago when, compared with the other nation, it minded its job and lived cleanly and sanely. All war on the new huge scale may be seen as a process, very expensive, of registration or verification. Whenever a war is declared you may say that now, in a sense, it is over at last; all the votes have been cast; the examination papers are written; the time has come for the counting of votes and adjudging of marks. Of course, we may still “do our bit,” but the possible size of our bit had its limit fixed long ago by the acts of ourselves and our fathers and rulers which made us the men that we are and no more. No use now to try to cadge favour with any ad hoc God of Battles. For this, of all gods, is the most dourly Protestant. No squaring of him on the deathbeds of people who would not work while it was yet light.

From many points in the field⁠—some of the best were in the tops of high trees on high ground⁠—you could watch through your glass the casting up of accounts. You might survey from beginning to end a British attack up a bare opposite slope, perhaps with home troops on the left and Canadian or Australasian troops on the right. You had already seen them meet on roads in the rear: battalions of colourless, stunted, half-toothless lads from hot, humid Lancashire mills; battalions of slow, staring faces, gargoyles out of the tragical-comical-historical-pastoral edifice of modern English rural life; Dominion battalions of men startlingly taller, stronger, handsomer, prouder, firmer in nerve, better schooled, more boldly interested in life, quicker to take means to an end and to parry and counter any new blow of circumstance, men who had learned already to look at our men with the half-curious, half-pitying look of a higher, happier caste at a lower. And now you saw them, all these kinds, arise in one continuous line out of the earth and walk forward to bear in the riddled flesh and wrung spirit the sins of their several fathers, pastors, and masters.

Time after time there would come to the watching eye, to the mind still desperately hugging the hope that known causes might not bring their normal effects, the same crushing demonstration that things are as we have made them. Sometimes the line of home troops would break into gaps and bunches, lose touch and direction and common purpose, some of the knots plunging on into the back of our barrage or feasting some enemy machine-gunner on their density, others straggling back to the place whence they had started, while the Dominion troops still ambled steadily on, their line delicately waving but always continuous, closing again, as living flesh closes over a pinprick, wherever an enemy shell tore a hole.

Perhaps the undersized boys from our slums and the under-witted boys from the “agricultural, residential, and sporting estates” of our auctioneers’ advertisements would get to their goal, the spirit wrestling prodigies of valour out of the wronged flesh, hold on there for an hour or two with the shells splashing the earth up about them like puddle water when great raindrops make its surface jump, and then fall back under orders, without any need, the brain of our army failing to know how to use what its muscle had won. Then, while you saw the triumphant Australians throw back a protective flank from the left of their newly-won front to the English right, far in their rear, you knew bitterly what the Australians were saying once more: “They’ve let us down again!” “Another Tommy officer who didn’t know he’d won!” As if it were the fault, that day, of anyone there! Our men could only draw on such funds of nerve and physique, knowledge and skill, as we had put into the bank for them. Not they, but their rulers and “betters,” had lost their heads in the joy of making money fast out of steam, and so made half of our nation slum-dwellers. It was not they who had moulded English rustic life to keep up the complacency of sentimental modern imitators of feudal barons. It was not they who had made our Regular Army neither aristocratic, with the virtues of aristocracy, nor democratic, with the different virtues of democracy, nor keenly professional with the professional virtues of gusto and curiosity about the possibilities of its work. Delicta majorum immeritus lues. Like the syphilitic children of some jolly Victorian rake, they could only bring to this harsh examination such health and sanity as all the pleasant vices of Victorian and Edwardian England had left them.

III

The winter after the battle of Loos a sentry on guard at one part of our line could always see the frustrate skeletons of many English dead. They lay outside our wire, picked clean by the rats, so that the khaki fell in on them loosely⁠—little heaps of bone and cloth half hidden now by nettles and grass. If the sentry had been a year in the army he knew well enough that they had gone foredoomed into a battle lost before a shot was fired. After the Boer War, you remember, England, under the first shock of its blunders, had tried to find out why the Staff work was so bad. What it found, in the words of a famous Report, was that the fashion in sentiment in our Regular Army was to think hard work “bad form”;