Timing it for the morning of Agincourt, Shakespeare shows us three standard types of the privates who were to win the Great War. One of them, Court, says little; he just looks out for the dawn. We all know Court; he has won many battles. Bates, the second man, gives tongue pretty freely. Bates is not ruled by funk, but he professes it.
“He” (the King) “may show what outward courage he will, but I believe, as cold a night as ’tis, he could wish himself in the Thames up to the neck, and so I would he were, and I by him, at all adventures, so we were quit here.”
Bates, being dead, yet liveth, like Court. In 1915, as in 1415, he was prosecuting his conquests in France, and his unaltered soul was fortifying itself with chants like
Far, far away would I be,
Where the Alleyman cannot catch me,
and
Oh my! I don’t want to die,
I want to go home,
sung to dourly wailful tunes, at the seasons of stress when Scotsmen and Irishmen screwed themselves up to the sticking-point with their Tyrtaean anti-English ballads, when Frenchmen would soulfully hymn Glory and Love, and when Germans, if the ear did not deceive, were calling out the whole Landwehr and Landsturm of the straight patriotic lyre. Williams, the third of the Agincourt privates, lives too. He lives with a vengeance. You will remember that he was an anti-ranter, anti-canter and anti-gusher, like Bates. But he ran a special line of his own. He was not simply “fed up”—as he would say now—with tall talk about the just cause and brothers-in-arms and the moral beauty of dying in battle. He was suspicious, besides. He darkly fancied that those who emitted the stuff must have some crooked game on. “That’s more than we know” was his stopper for all stock heroics. He would take none of his betters on trust, neither High Command nor Government nor Church—only one company officer whom he knew for himself—“a good old commander and a most kind gentleman.” This one small plot of dry ground was reclaimed from the broad sea of Williams’ scepticism.
II
If this Doubting Thomas abounded at Agincourt how could he not abound at, say, the third Battle of Ypres? At Agincourt our whole army was just small enough to have comradeship all the way through it—not the figure-of-speech used by the orators, but the thing that soldiers know. Comradeship in a battalion will come of itself; it may be grown, with some effort, in a brigade; in good divisions it has flickered into life for a while during a war; army corps know it not, though their headquarters staffs may dine together at times. At Agincourt the whole of our force was an infantry brigade and a half. It all lay handy in one bivouac. Generals led advancing troops as second-lieutenants do now. The commander-in-chief could go round the lines of a night and talk to the men; if he should speak to them about “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” he would not be projecting gas.
But now—? It is nobody’s fault, but all of that has been lost, as utterly lost as the old comradeship of master and journeyman worker is lost in a mill where half the thousand hands may never have seen the employer who sits in a faraway office, perhaps in a faraway town. Two million men can never be a happy few; nor yet a band of brothers—you have to know a brother first. A man could serve six months in France and never see the general commanding his division. He could be there for four years and not know what a corps or an army commander looked like. How can you help it? Many generals did what they could—more, you might say, than they should. They left their desks and maps to visit their men in the line; they made excuses to get under fire; two or three were killed doing so; one corps commander smuggled himself into the front line of an attack by his corps. But these were escapades, strictly. The higher commands have no right to get hit. Modern war has pushed the right place for them farther and farther away from the fighting, away from the men, whom some of the higher commanders, as well as the lower, do really love with a love passing the love of women—“the dear men” of whom I have heard an officer, tied to the staff and the base by the results of head wounds, speak with an almost wailing ache of desire, as horses whinny for a friend—“Would I were with him, wheresoe’er he is, either in heaven or in hell.” But how were the men to know that?
Everything helped to indispose them to know it; everything went to point the contrast between their own fate and that of its distant and unknown controllers. The evolution of the war was now calling on all ranks of troops in the actual line to put up with a much diminished chance of survival, only the barest off-chance if they stayed there year after year. While they lived it was inflicting upon them in trenches a life squalid beyond precedent. And that same evolution had pressed back the chief seats of command into places where life was said to contrast itself in wonderful ways with that life of mud and stench and underground gloom.
It was quite truly said. Of the separation and contrast you got a full sense if fate took you straight
