Too late, as you know. We awoke from delight, and remembered. Four years ago, three years ago, even two years ago, a lasting repose of beatitude might have come with that regaining of paradise! Now! The control of our armies, jealously hugged for so long and used, on the whole, to so little purpose, had passed from us, thrown up in a moment of failure, dissension and dread. While still outnumbered by the enemy we had not won; while on even terms with him we had not won; only under a foreign Commander-in-Chief, and with America’s inexhaustible numbers crowding behind to hold up our old arms, had our just cause begun to prevail. And now the marred triumph would leave us jaded and disillusioned, divided, half bankrupt; sneerers at lofty endeavour, and yet not the men for the plodding of busy and orderly peace; bilious with faiths and enthusiasms gone sour in the stomach. That very night I was to hear the old Australian sneer again. The British corps on their left, at work in the twisty valley and knucklesome banks of the Somme, had failed to get on quite as fast as they and the Canadian troops on their right. “The Canadians were all right of course, but the Tommies! Well, we might have known!” They had got rid, they chuckingly said, of their own last “Tommy officers” now; they wanted to have it quite clear that in England’s war record they were not involved except as our saviours from our sorry selves.
IV
There were other days, during the following months of worm-eaten success, when some mirage of the greater joys which we had forfeited hung for a few moments over the sand. It must be always a strange delight to an infantryman to explore at his ease, in security, ground that to him has been almost as unimaginable as events after death. There is no describing the vesture of enigmatic remoteness enfolding a long-watched enemy line. Tolstoy has tried, but even he does not come up to it. Virgil alone has expressed one sensation of the British overflow over Lille and Cambria, Menin (even the Menin Road had an end) and Bruges and Ostend, Le Câteau and Landrecies, Liège and Namur—
Desertosque videre locos, litusque relictum.
Classibus hic locus, hic acie certare solebant,
Hic Dolopum manus, hic saevus tendebat Achilles.
And then, wherever you went, till the frontier was reached, everyone was your host and your friend; all the relations of strangers to one another had been transfigured into the sum of all kindness and courtesy. In one mining village in Flanders, quitted that day by the Germans, a woman rushed out of a house to give me a lump of bread, thinking that we must all be as hungry as she and her neighbours. Late one night in Brussels, just after the Germans had gone, I was walking with another officer down the chief street of the city, then densely crowded with radiant citizens. My friend had a wooden stump leg and could not walk very well; and this figure of a khaki-clad man, maimed in the discharge of an Allied obligation to Belgium, seemed suddenly and almost simultaneously to be seen by the whole of that great crowd in all its symbolic value, so that the crowd fell silent and opened out spontaneously along the whole length of the street and my friend had to hobble down the middle of a long avenue of bareheaded men and bowing women.
Finally—last happy thrill of the war—the first stroke of eleven o’clock, on the morning of Armistice Day, on the town clock of Mons, only captured that morning; Belgian civilians and British soldiers crowding together into the square, shaking each other’s hands and singing each other’s national anthems; a little toy-like peal of bells in the church contriving to tinkle out “Tipperary” for our welcome, while our airmen, released from their labours, tumbled and romped overhead like boys turning cartwheels with ecstasy.
What a victory it might have been—the real, the Winged Victory, chivalric, whole and unstained! The bride that our feckless wooing had sought and not won in the generous youth of the war had come to us now: an old woman, or dead, she no longer refused us. We had arrived, like the prince in the poem—
Too late for love, too late for joy,
Too late, too late!
You loitered on the road too long,
You trifled at the gate:
The enchanted dove upon her branch
Died without a mate;
The enchanted princess in her tower
Slept, died behind the grate:
Her heart was starving all this while
You made it wait.
XIII
The Old Age of the War
I
Men wearying in trenches used to tell one another sometimes what they fancied the end of the war would be like. Each had his particular favourite vision. Some morning the Captain would come down the trench at “stand-to” and try to speak as if it were nothing. “All right, men,” he would say, “you can go across and shake hands.” Or the first thing we should hear would be some jubilant peal suddenly shaken out on the air from the nearest standing church in the rear. But the commonest vision was that of marching down a road to a wide, shining river. Once more the longing of a multitude struggling slowly across a venomous wilderness fixed itself on the first glimpse of a Jordan beyond; for most men the Rhine was the physical goal of effort, the term of endurance, the symbol of all attainment and rest.
To win what your youth had desired, and find the taste of it gone, is said to be one of the standard pains of old age. With a kind of blank space in their minds where the joy of fulfilment ought to have been, two British privates of 1914, now Captains attached to the Staff, emerged from the narrow and crowded High Street
