Some of our officers were inspired by a bitter, unrelenting hate.
“If I had a thousand Germans in a row,” one of them said to me, “I would cut all their throats, and enjoy the job.”
But that was not the mentality of the men in the ranks, except those who were murderers by nature and pleasure. They gave their cigarettes to prisoners and filled their water-bottles and chatted in a friendly way with any German who spoke a little English, as I have seen them time and time again on days of battle, in the fields of battle. There were exceptions to this treatment, but even the Australians and the Scots, who were most fierce in battle, giving no quarter sometimes, treated their prisoners with humanity when they were bundled back. Hatred was not the motive which made our men endure all things. It was rather, as I have said, a refusal in their souls to be beaten in manhood by all the devils of war, by all its terrors, or by its beastliness, and at the back of all the thought that the old country was “up against it” and that they were there to avert the evil.
Young soldiers of ours, not only of officer rank, but of “other ranks,” as they were called, were inspired at the beginning, and some of them to the end, with a simple, boyish idealism. They saw no other causes of war than German brutality. The enemy to them was the monster who had to be destroyed lest the world and its beauty should perish—and that was true so long as the individual German, who loathed the war, obeyed the discipline of the herd-leaders and did not revolt against the natural laws which, when the war had once started, bade him die in defense of his own Fatherland. Many of those boys of ours made a dedication of their lives upon the altar of sacrifice, believing that by this service and this sacrifice they would help the victory of civilization over barbarism, and of Christian morality over the devil’s law. They believed that they were fighting to dethrone militarism, to insure the happiness and liberties of civilized peoples, and were sure of the gratitude of their nation should they not have the fate to fall upon the field of honor, but go home blind or helpless.
I have read many letters from boys now dead in which they express that faith.
“Do not grieve for me,” wrote one of them, “for I shall be proud to die for my country’s sake.”
“I am happy,” wrote another (I quote the tenor of his letters), “because, though I hate war, I feel that this is the war to end war. We are the last victims of this way of argument. By smashing the German war-machine we shall prove for all time the criminal folly of militarism and Junkerdom.”
There were young idealists like that, and they were to be envied for their faith, which they brought with them from public schools and from humble homes where they had read old books and heard old watchwords. I think, at the beginning of the war there were many like that. But as it continued year after year doubts crept in, dreadful suspicions of truth more complex than the old simplicity, a sense of revolt against sacrifice unequally shared and devoted to a purpose which was not that for which they had been called to fight.
They had been told that they were fighting for liberty. But their first lesson was the utter loss of individual liberty under a discipline which made the private soldier no more than a number. They were ordered about like galley-slaves, herded about like cattle, treated individually and in the mass with utter disregard of their comfort and well-being. Often, as I know, they were detrained at railheads in the wind and rain and by ghastly errors of staff-work kept waiting for their food until they were weak and famished. In the base camps men of one battalion were drafted into other battalions, where they lost their old comrades and were unfamiliar with the speech and habits of a crowd belonging to different counties, the Sussex men going to a Manchester regiment, the Yorkshire men being drafted to a Surrey unit. By R.T.O.’s and A.M.L.O.’s and camp commandments and town majors and staff pups men were bullied and bundled about, not like human beings, but like dumb beasts, and in a thousand ways injustice, petty tyranny, hard work, degrading punishments for trivial offenses, struck at their souls and made the name of personal liberty a mockery. From their own individuality they argued to broader issues. Was this war for liberty? Were the masses of men on either side fighting with free will as free men? Those Germans—were they not under discipline, each man of them, forced to fight whether they liked it or not? Compelled to go forward to sacrifice, with machine-guns behind them to shoot them down if they revolted against their slave-drivers? What liberty had they to follow their conscience or their judgment—“Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die”—like all soldiers in all armies. Was it not rather that the masses of men engaged in slaughter were serving the purpose of powers above them, rival powers, greedy for one another’s markets, covetous of one another’s wealth, and callous of the lives of humble men? Surely if the leaders of the warring nations were put together for even a week in some such place as Hooge, or the Hohenzollern redoubt, afflicted by the usual harassing fire, poison-gas, mine explosions, lice, rats, and the stench of rotting corpses, with the certainty of death or dismemberment at the weekend, they would settle the business and come to terms before the week was out. I heard that proposition put forward many times by young officers of
