So, too, in the army. Some old Regular sergeant-majors would sell every stripe that they could, but they would not sell a map to the enemy. Some of our higher commanders would use their A.D.C. rooms as funk-holes to shelter the healthy young nephew or son of their good friend the earl, or their distant cousin the marquis. But there were others. Sometimes a part of our Staff would almost seem to forget the war, and give its undivided mind to major struggles—its own intestine “strafes” and the more bitter war against uncomplaisant politicians at home. But presently it would remember, and work with a will. There was, again, an undeniable impulse abroad, among the “best people” of the old Army, to fall back towards G.H.Q. and its safety as soon as the first few months made it clear that this was to be none of our old gymkhana wars, but almost certainly lethal to regimental officers who stayed it out with their units. But this centripetal instinct, this “safety first” movement, though real, was moderate. Lists of headquarter formations might show an appreciable excess of names of some social distinction. But not an outrageous excess. Some peers and old baronets and their sons were still getting killed, by their own choice, along with the plebs to the very end of the war. Again, all through the war one could not deny that those who had chosen the safer part, or had it imposed upon them, absorbed a stout and peckish lion’s share of the rewards for martial valour. And yet they did not absolutely withhold these meeds from officers and men who fought. The king of beasts being duly served, these hard-bitten jackals got some share, though not perhaps, for their numbers, a copious one. Some well-placed shirkers were filled with good things, but the brave were not sent utterly empty away. Guardsmen and cavalrymen, the least richly brained soldiers we had, kept to themselves the bulk of the distinguished jobs for which brain-work was needed; and yet the poor foot-soldier was not expressly taboo; quite a good billet would fall to him sometimes—Plumer commanded an army.
As with the moral virtues, so with the mental. Brilliancy, genius, scientific imagination in any higher command would have caused almost a shock; a general with the demonic insight to see that he had got the enemy stiff at Arras in 1917 and at Cambrai the same autumn, might have seemed an outré highbrow, almost unsafe. And yet the utter slacker was not countenanced, and the dunce had been known to be so dull that he was sent home as an empty by those unexacting chiefs. There was reason in everything, even in reason.
IV
All this relative mildness in the irritants administered to the common Englishman as soldier had its counterpart in the men’s ingrained moderateness of reaction. At Bray-sur-Somme during the battle of 1916 I saw a French soldier go so mad with rage at what he considered to be the deficiencies of his leaders that he brought out each article of his kit and equipment in succession to the door of his billet and threw it into the deep central mud of the road with a separate curse, at each cast, on war, patriotism, civilization, and the Commander-in-Chief. This Athanasian service of commination endured for a full quarter of an hour. But from an English private who witnessed the rite it only drew the phlegmatic diagnosis: “He’ll ’ave ’ad a drop o’ sugar-water an’ got excited.” Firewater itself could not excite the English soldier to so rounded an eloquence or to so sweeping a series of judgements. He never thought of throwing his messing-tin and his paybook into the mud; still less of forming a Council of Soldiers and Workmen. Either step would have been of the abhorred nature of a “scene.”
Unaggressive, unoriginal, anti-extreme, contemptuous of all “hot air” and windy ideas, he too was braked by the same internal negations that helped to keep his irredeemably middling commanders equidistant from genius and from arrant failure. Confronted now with the frustration of so many too-high hopes, the discrediting of so many persons or institutions hitherto taken on trust, he did not say, as the humbler sort of Bolshevist seems to have said in his heart: “What order, or disorder, could ever be worse than this which has failed? Why not anything, any wild-seeming nihilism or fantasy of savage rudeness, rather than sit quiet under this old contemptible rule?” Instead of contracting a violent new sort of heat he simply went cold, and has remained so. Where a Slav or a Latin might have become a hundred percent. Satanist he became about a thirty percenter. The disbelief, the suspicion, the vacuous space in the disendowed heart, the spiritual rubbish-heap of draggled banners and burst drums—all that blank, unlighting and unwarming part of Satanism was his, without any other: a Lucifer cold as a moon prompted him listlessly, not to passionate efforts of crime, but to self-regarding and indolent apathy.
From the day he went into the army till now he has been learning to take many things less seriously than he did. First what Burke calls the pomps and plausibilities of the world. He has tumbled many kings into the dust and proved the strongest emperor assailable. I remember a little private, who seemed to know Dickens by heart, applying to William the Second in 1915 the words used by the Game Chicken about Mr. Dombey—“as stiff a cove as ever he see, but within the resources of science to double him up with one blow in the waistcoat.” This he proved, too, he and his like, casting down the
