On this tragic climax the lecture had ended, the men had streamed out, some silent, bewildered, some dropping words of amazement. “Lecture! W’y, it’s the man’s pers’nal ’istory!”
And then the C.O. has lectured on training in field operations—the old, cold colonel, upright, dutiful, unintelligent, waxen, drawn away by a genuine patriotism from his roses and croquet to help joylessly in the queer labour of trying to teach this uncouth New Army a few of the higher qualities of the old. Too honest a man to pretend that he was not taking all that he said in his lecture out of the Army’s official manual, Infantry Training, 1914, he has held the little red book in his hand, read out frankly a sentence at a time from that terse and luminous masterpiece of instruction, and then has tried to “explain” it while the men gaped at the strange contrast between the thing clearly said in the book and the same thing plunged into obscurity by the poor colonel’s woolly and faltering verbiage. Half the men had bought the little book themselves and devoured it as hungrily as boys consume a manual of rude boat-building or of camping-out. And here was the colonel bringing his laboured jets of darkness to show the way through sunlight; elucidating plainness itself with the tangled clues of his own mind’s confusion, like Bardolph: “ ‘Accommodated’; that is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated; or when a man is, being, whereby a’ may be thought to be accommodated.”
V
A favourite trick with the disillusioning imp was to get hold of authority’s wisely drafted timetable of work for a new division in training and mix up all the subjects and times. The effect must have often diverted the author of this piece of humour. Some day a company, say, would begin to learn bayonet-fighting. This would at once revive in the men the fading ecstasies of their first simple faith. Whenever instructors said—“Now then, men, I want to see a bit more murder in them eyes” pleasant little thrills of chartered pugnacity would inspirit them. This, they would feel, was the real thing; this was what they were there for. Then just as, perhaps, they approached the engaging and manifestly serviceable “short jab” Puck’s little witticism would suddenly tell; bayonet-fighting would abruptly stop; an urgent order would come from on high to “get on with night operations” or “get on with outpost work,” and one of these bodies of knowledge would, in its turn, be partly imbibed by the infant mind and then as suddenly withdrawn from its thirsty lips for something else to be started instead—perhaps a thing that had already been once started and dropped. In the working out of this fantastic pattern of smatterings a company might begin to learn bayonet-fighting three or four times and each time be switched off it before getting halfway, and go to France in the end with the A.B.C. of each of several alphabets learnt to boredom and the X.Y.Z. of none of them touched, the men being left to improvise the short jab and other far-on letters by the light of nature, in intimate contact, perhaps, with less humorously instructed Germans.
All this was not universal. Still, it could and did happen. And then the men stared and marvelled. Authority, it is true, had, at the worst, some gusts of passion for perfection. But even these might fortify, in their way, the new occupant of the seat of the scorners. A sudden order might come for a brigade or other inspection, and then authority might in a brief hour become like medieval man when he fell suddenly ill and the pains of hell gat hold of his mind and he felt that God must be squared without conduct because it might take more time to conduct himself than he had got. In this pious frenzy all attention to measures for incommoding the Germans would yield to the primary duty of whiting the sepulchre; energies that would carry a Hohenzollern Redoubt would be put into the evolution of sections which, through somebody’s slackness, did not exist, or the hiding of men who, through someone’s mismanagement, were not fit to be seen on parade; old N.C.O.’s would present the men with the tip for making a seemingly full valise look nicely rectangular by the judicious insertion of timber, and other homely recipes for cleaning the outsides of cups and platters. “Eyewash?” these children of light would say, as they taught. “Of course, it’s all eyewash. What ain’t eyewash in this old world?”
It was a question much asked at the time by those whose postwar inclinations to answer “Nothing, among the lot who run England now” are whitening the hair of statesmen. They were then only asking “How far does it go? How much of the timber is rotten”? Enough to bring down the whole house? Here, there, everywhere the men’s new suspicion peered about in the dark and the half-light. Most of the men were the almost boundless reservoirs of patience, humility, and good humour that common Englishmen are. They would take long to run dry. But the waters were steadily falling. Most of them had come from civil employments in which the curse of Adam still holds and a man must either work or get out, mind his p’s and q’s,
