The Soul of the War Part 34

War is always a way of escape even though it be through the dark valley of death.

Nothing of this private melodrama was visible among those men who came to France. When they landed at Boulogne there was no visible expression on faces which have' been trained to be expressionless.

At Rouen, at Le Mans, at St. Omer, and many other towns in France I watched our British officers and tried to read their character after getting a different point of view among the French troops. Certainly in their way they were magnificent--the first gentlemen in the world, the most perfect type of aristocratic manhood. Their quietude and their coldness struck me as remarkable, because of the great contrast in the character of the people around them. For the first time I saw the qualities of my own race, with something like a foreigner's eyes, and realized the strength of our racial character. It was good to see the physique of these men, with their clear-cut English faces, and their fine easy swagger, utterly unconscious and unaffected, due to having played all manner of games since early boyhood, so that their athletic build was not spoilt by deliberate development.

And I gave homage to them because of the perfect cut and equipment of their uniforms, so neat and simple, and workmanlike for the job of war. Only Englishmen could look so well in these clothes.

And even in these French towns I saw the influence of English school life and of all our social traditions standing clear-cut against the temperament of another nation with different habits and ideals. They were confident without any demonstrative sign that they were superior beings destined by G.o.d, or the force of fate, to hold the fullest meaning of civilization. They were splendidly secure in this faith, not making a brag of it, not alluding to it, but taking it for granted, just as they had taken for granted their duty to come out to France and die if that were destined.

And studying them, at cafe tables, at the base, or in their depots, I acknowledged that, broadly, they were right. In spite of an extraordinary ignorance of art and letters (speaking of the great majority), in spite of ideas stereotyped by the machinery of their schools and universities, so that one might know precisely their att.i.tude to such questions as social reform, internationalism, Home Rule for Ireland, or the Suffragettes--any big problem demanding freedom of thought and un-conventionality of discussion--it was impossible to resist the conviction that these officers of the British army have qualities, supreme of their kind, which give a mastery to men. Their courage was not a pa.s.sion, demanding rage or religious fervour, or patriotic enthusiasm, for its inspiration. It was the very law of their life, the essential spirit in them. They were unconscious of it as a man is unconscious of breathing, unless diseased. Their honour was not a thing to talk about. To prate about the honour of the army or the honour of England was like talking about the honour of their mother. It is not done. And yet, as Mark Antony said, "They were all honourable men," and there seemed an austerity of virtue in them which no temptation would betray--the virtue of men who have a code admitting of certain easy vices, but not of treachery, or cowardice, or corruption.

They had such good form, these young men who had come out to a dirty devilish war. It was enormously good to hear them talking to each other in just the same civil, disinterested, casual way which belongs to the conversational range of St. James's Street clubs. Not once--like French soldiers--did they plunge into heated discussions on the ethics of war, or the philosophy of life, or the progress of civilization, or the rights of democracies. Never did they reveal to casual strangers like myself--and hundreds of French soldiers did-- the secret affections of their hearts, flowing back to the women they had left, or their fears of death and disablement, or their sense of the mystery of G.o.d. Not even war, with its unloosing of old restraints, its smas.h.i.+ng of conventionalities, could break down the code of these young English gentlemen whose first and last lessons had been those of self-concealment and self-control.

In England these characteristics are accepted, and one hardly thinks of them. It is the foreigner's point of view of us. But in France, in war time, in a country all vibrant with emotionalism, this restraint of manner and speech and utter disregard of all "problems" and mysteries of life, and quiet, cheerful acceptation of the job in hand, startled the imagination of Englishmen who had been long enough away from home to stand aloof and to study those officers with a fresh vision. There was something superb in those simple, self- confident, normal men, who made no fuss, but obeyed orders, or gave them, with a spirit of discipline which belonged to their own souls and was not imposed by a self-conscious philosophy. And yet I could understand why certain Frenchmen, in spite of their admiration, were sometimes irritated by these British officers. There were times when the similarity between them, the uniformity of that ridiculous little moustache on the upper lip, the intonation of voices with the peculiar timbre of the public school drawl, sound to them rather tiresome.

They had the manners of a caste, the touch of arrogance which belongs to a caste, in power. Every idea they had was a caste idea, contemptuous in a civil way of poor devils who had other ideas and who were therefore guilty--not by their own fault of course--of shocking bad form. To be a Socialist in such company would be worse than being drunk. To express a belief in democratic liberty would cause a silence to fall upon a group of them as though some obscenity beyond the limits allowed in an officers' mess-room had been uttered by a man without manners.

Their att.i.tude to French officers was, in the beginning of the war, calculated to put a little strain upon the Entente Cordiale. It was an att.i.tude of polite but haughty condescension. A number of young Frenchmen of the best families had been appointed as interpreters to the British Expedition. There were aristocrats among them whose names run like golden threads through the pages of French history. It was therefore disconcerting when the young Viscomte de Chose and a certain Marquis de Machin found that their knowledge of English was used for the purpose of buying a packet of cigarettes for a lieutenant who knew no French, and of running errands for British officers who accepted such services as a matter of course. The rank- and-file of the British army which first came into France was also a little careless of French susceptibilities. After the first rapture of that welcome which was extended to anyone in khaki, French citizens began to look a little askance at the regiments from the Highlands and Lowlands, some of whose men demanded free gifts in the shops, and, when a little drunk, were rather crude in their amorous advances to girls of decent up-bringing. These things were inevitable. In our regular army there were the sweepings of many slums, as well as the best blood of our peasantry and our good old families. Tough and hardened fellows called to the Colours again from Glasgow and Liverpool, Cardiff and Limehouse, had none of the refinements of the younger generation of soldiers who prefer lemonade to whisky, and sweetmeats to s.h.a.g. It was these who in the first Expeditionary Force gave most trouble to the military police and found themselves under the iron heel of a discipline which is very hard and very necessary in time of war.

4

These men were heroic soldiers, yet our hero-wors.h.i.+p need not blind us to the truth of things. There is nothing more utterly false than to imagine that war purges human nature of all its frailties and vices, and that under the shadow of death a great body of men gathered like this from many cla.s.ses and cities, become suddenly white knights, sans-peur et sans reproche, inspired by the highest ideals of faith and chivalry. If only some new Shakespeare would come out of the ranks after this war to give us immortal portraits of a twentieth- century Falstaff, with a modern Nym, Pistol, and Bardolph--what a human comedy would be there in the midst of all this tragedy in France and Flanders, setting off the fine exalted heroism of all those n.o.ble and excellent men who, like the knights and men-at-arms of Henry at Agincourt, thought that "the fewer men the greater share of honour," and fought for England with a devotion that was careless of death.

After the British retreat from Mons, when our regular troops realized very rapidly the real meaning of modern warfare, knowing now that it was to be no "picnic," but a deadly struggle against great odds, and a fight of men powerless against infernal engines, there came out to France by every s.h.i.+p the oddest types of men who had been called out to fill up the gaps and take a share in the deadly business. These "dug-outs" were strange fellows, some of them. Territorial officers who had held commissions in the Yeomanry, old soldiers who had served in India, Egypt, and South Africa, before playing interminable games of chess in St. James's Street, or taking tea in country rectories and croquet mallets on country lawns; provincial schoolmasters who had commanded an O.T.C. with high-toned voices which could recite a pa.s.sage from Ovid with cultured diction; purple-faced old fellows who for years had tempted Providence and apoplexy by violence to their valets; and young bloods who had once "gone through the Guards," before spending their week-ends at Brighton with little ladies from the Gaiety chorus, came to Boulogne or Havre by every boatload and astonished the natives of those ports by their martial manners.

The Red Cross was responsible for many astounding representatives of the British race in France, and there were other crosses--purple, green, blue, and black--who contributed to this melodrama of mixed cla.s.ses and types. Benevolent old gentlemen, garbed like second- hand Field Marshals, tottered down the quaysides and took the salutes of startled French soldiers with bland but dignified benevolence. The Jewish people were not only generous to the Red Cross work with unstinted wealth which they poured into its coffers, but with rich young men who offered their lives and their motor-cars in this good service--though the greater part of them never went nearer to the front (through no fault of their own) than Rouen or Paris, where they spent enormous sums of money at the best hotels, and took lady friends for joy rides in ambulances of magnificent design.

Boulogne became overcrowded with men and women wearing military uniforms of no known design with badges of mysterious import.

Even the Scotland Yard detectives were bewildered by some of these people whose pa.s.sports were thoroughly sound, but whose costumes aroused deep suspicion. What could they do, for instance, with a young Hindu, dressed as a boy-scout, wearing tortoise-sh.e.l.l spectacles, and a field kit of dangling bags, water-bottles, maps, cooking utensils, and other material suitable for life on a desert isle?

Or what could they say to a lady in breeches and top-boots, with a revolver stuck through her belt, and a sou'wester on her head, who was going to nurse the wounded in a voluntary hospital at Nice?

Contingents of remarkable women invaded the chief tea-shops in Boulogne and caused a panic among the waitresses. They wore Buffalo Bill hats and blue uniforms with heavy blue coats, which were literally spangled with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons. Upon their stalwart bosoms were four rows of b.u.t.tons, and there was a row of bra.s.s on each side of their top-coats, on their shoulders, and at the back of their waist-belts.

In the light of the tea-shop, where they consumed innumerable buns, one's eyes became dizzy with all these bits of s.h.i.+ning metal. To a wounded man the sight of one of these ladies must have been frightening, as though a sh.e.l.l had burst near his bedside, with the glint of broken steel. Young officers just drafted out with commissions on which the ink was hardly dry, plucked at their budding moustaches and said "War is h.e.l.l."

Some of the older officers, who had been called out after many years of civilian ease, found the spirit of youth again as soon as they set foot on the soil of France, and indulged in I the follies of youth as when they had been sub-lieutenants in the Indian hills. I remember one of these old gentlemen who refused to go to bed in the Hotel Tortoni at Havre, though the call was for six o'clock next morning with quite a chance of death before the week was out. Some younger officers with him coaxed him to his room just before midnight, but he came down again, condemning their impudence, and went out into the great silent square, shouting for a taxi. It seemed to me pitiful that a man with so many ribbons on his breast, showing distinguished service, should be wandering about a place where many queer characters roam in the darkness of night. I asked him if I could show him the way back to the Hotel Tortoni. "Sir," he said, "I desire to go to Piccadilly Circus, and if I have any of your impertinence I will break your head." Two apaches lurched up to him, a few minutes later, and he went off with them into a dark ally, speaking French with great deliberation and a Mayfair accent. He was a twentieth century Falstaff, and the playwright might find his low comedy in a character like this thrust into the grim horror of the war.

5

One's imagination must try to disintegrate that great collective thing called an army and see it as much as possible as a number of separate individualities, with their differences of temperament and ideals and habits of mind. There has been too much of the impersonal way of writing of our British Expeditionary Force as though it were a great human machine impelled with one idea and moving with one purpose. In its ranks was the coster with his c.o.c.kney speech and c.o.c.kney wit, his fear of great silences and his sense of loneliness and desolation away from the flare of gas-lights and the raucous shouts of the crowds in Petticoat Lane--so that when I met him in a field of Flanders with the mist and the long, flat marshlands about him he confessed to the almighty Hump. And there was the Irish peasant who heard the voice of the Banshee calling through that mist, and heard other queer voices of supernatural beings whispering to the melancholy which had been bred in his brain in the wilds of Connemara. Here was the English mechanic, matter-of-fact, keen on his job, with an alert brain and steady nerves; and with him was the Lowland Scot, hard as nails, with uncouth speech and a savage fighting instinct. Soldiers who had been through several battles and knew the tricks of old campaigners were the stiffening in regiments of younger men whose first experience of sh.e.l.l-fire was soul-shattering, so that some of them whimpered and were blanched with fear.

In the ranks were men who had been mob-orators, and who had once been those worst of pests, "barrack-room lawyers." They talked Socialism and revolution in the trenches to comrades who saw no use to alter the good old ways of England and "could find no manner of use" for political balderdash. Can you not see all these men, made up of every type in the life of the British Isles, suddenly transported to the Continent and thence into the zone of fire of ma.s.sed artillery which put each man to the supreme test of courage, demanding the last strength of his soul? Some of them had been slackers, rebels against discipline, "hard cases." Some of them were sensitive fellows with imaginations over-developed by cinematograph shows and the unhealthiness of life in cities. Some of them were no braver than you or I, my readers. And yet out of all this ma.s.s of manhood, with all their faults, vices, coward instincts, pride of courage, unexpressed ideals, unconscious patriotism, old traditions of pluck, untutored faith in things more precious than self-interest--the mixture that one finds in any great body of men--there was made an army, that "contemptible little army" of ours which has added a deathless story of human valour to the chronicles of our race.

These men who came out with the first Expeditionary Force had to endure a mode of warfare more terrible than anything the world has known before, and for week after week, month after month, they were called upon to stand firm under storms of sh.e.l.ls which seemed to come from no human agency, but to be devilish in intensity and frightfulness of destruction. Whole companies of them were annihilated, whole battalions decimated, yet the survivors were led to the shambles again. Great gaps were torn out of famous regiments and filled up with new men, so often that the old regiment was but a name and the last remaining officers and men were almost lost among the new-comers. Yet by a miracle in the blood of the British race, in humanity itself, if it is not decadent beyond the point of renaissance, these c.o.c.kneys and peasants, Scotsmen and Irishmen, and men from the Midlands, the North, and the Home Counties of this little England faced that ordeal, held on, and did not utter aloud (though sometimes secretly) one wailing cry to G.o.d for mercy in all this h.e.l.l.

With a pride of manhood beyond one's imagination, with a stern and bitter contempt for all this devilish torture, loathing it but "sticking"

it, very much afraid yet refusing to surrender to the coward in their souls (the coward in our souls which tempts all of us), sick of the blood and the beastliness, yet keeping sane (for the most part) with the health of normal minds and bodies in spite of all this wear and tear upon the nerves, the rank-and-file of that British Expedition in France and Flanders, under the leaders.h.i.+p of young men who gave their lives, with the largess of great prodigals, to the monstrous appet.i.te of Death, fought with something like superhuman qualities.

6

Although I spent most of my time on the Belgian and French side of the war, I had many glimpses of the British troops who were enduring these things, and many conversations with officers and men who had come, but a few hours ago, from the line of fire. I went through British hospitals and British ambulance trains where thousands of them lay with new wounds, and I dined with them when after a few weeks of convalescence they returned to the front to undergo the same ordeal.

Always I felt myself touched with a kind of wonderment at these men.

After many months of war the unwounded men were still unchanged, to all outward appearance, though something had altered in their souls. They were still quiet, self-controlled, unemotional. Only by a slight nervousness of their hands, a slightly fidgety way so that they could not sit still for very long, and by sudden lapses into silence, did some of them show the signs of the strain upon them. Even the lightly wounded men were astoundingly cheerful, resolute, and unbroken.

There were times when I used to think that my imagination exaggerated the things I had seen and heard, and that after all war was not so terrible, but a rather hard game with heavy risks. It was only when I walked among the wounded who had been more than "touched," and who were the shattered wrecks of men, that I realized again the immensity of the horror through which these other men had pa.s.sed and to which some of them were going back. When the shrieks of poor tortured boys rang in my ears, when one day I pa.s.sed an officer sitting up in his cot and laughing with insane mirth at his own image in a mirror, and when I saw men with both legs amputated up to the thighs, or with one leg torn to ribbons, and another already sawn away, lying among blinded and paralysed men, and men smashed out of human recognition but still alive, that I knew the courage of those others, who having seen and known, went back to risk the same frightfulness.

7

There was always a drama worth watching at the British base, for it was the gate of those who came in and of those who went out, "the halfway house" as a friend of mine called another place in France, between the front and home.

Everything came here first--the food for guns and men, new boots for soldiers who had marched the leather off their feet; the comforters and body-belts knitted by nimble-fingered girls, who in suburban houses and country factories had put a little bit of love into every st.i.tch; chloroform and morphia for army doctors who have moments of despair when their bottles get empty; ambulances, instruments, uniforms, motor lorries; all the letters which came to France full of prayers and hopes; and all the men who came to fill up the places of those for whom there are still prayers, but no more hope on this side of the river. It was the base of the British Expeditionary Force, and the Army in the field would be starved in less than a week if it were cut off from this port of supplies.

There was a hangar here, down by the docks, half a mile long. I suppose it was the largest shed in the world, and it was certainly the biggest store-cupboard ever kept under lock and key by a Mother Hubbard with a lot of hungry boys to feed. Their appet.i.tes were prodigious, so that every day thousands of cases were s.h.i.+fted out of this cupboard and sent by train and motor-car to the front. But always new cases were arriving in boats that are piloted into harbour across a sea where strange fish came up from the deeps at times. So the hangar was never empty, and on the signature of a British officer the British soldiers might be sure of their bully beef, and fairly sure of a clean s.h.i.+rt or two when the old ones had been burnt by the order of a medical officer with a delicate nose and high ideals in a trench.

New men as well as new stores came in the boats to this harbour, which was already crowded with craft not venturesome in a sea where one day huge submarine creatures lurked about. I watched some Tommies arrive. They had had a nasty "dusting" on the voyage, and as they marched through the streets of the port some of them looked rather washed out. They carried their rifles upside down as though that might ease the burden of them, and they had that bluish look of men who have suffered a bad bout of sea-sickness. But they pulled themselves up when they came into the chief square where the French girls at the flower stalls, and ladies at the hotel windows, and a group of French and Belgian soldiers under the shelter of an arcade, watched them pa.s.s through the rain.

"Give 'em their old tune, lads," said one of the men, and from this battalion of new-comers who had just set foot in France to fill up gaps in the ranks, out there, at the front, there came a shrill whistling chorus of La Ma.r.s.eillaise. Yorks.h.i.+re had learnt the hymn of France, her song of victory, and I heard it on the lips of Highlanders and Welshmen, who came tramping through the British base to the camps outside the town where they waited to be sent forward to the fighting line.

"Vive les Anglais!" cried a French girl, in answer to the whistling courtesy. Then she laughed, with her arm round the waist of a girl friend, and said, "They are all the same, these English soldiers. In their khaki one cannot tell one from the other, and now that I have seen so many thousands of them--Heaven! hundreds of thousands!

--I have exhausted my first enthusiasm. It is sad: the new arrivals do not get the same welcome from us."

That was true. So many of our soldiers had been through the British base that they were no longer a novelty. The French flower-girls did not empty their stalls into the arms of the regiments, as on the first days.

It was an English voice that gave the new-comers the highest praise, because professional.

"A hefty lot! ... Wish I were leading them." The praise and the wish came from a young English officer who was staying in the same hotel with me. For two days I had watched his desperate efforts to avoid death by boredom. He read every line of the Matin and Journal before luncheon, with tragic sighs, because every line repeated what had been said in the French newspapers since the early days of the war. After luncheon he made a sortie for the English newspapers, which arrived by boats. They kept him quiet until tea-time. After that he searched the cafes for any fellow officers who might be there.

"This is the most awful place in the world!" he repeated at intervals, even to the hall porter, who agreed with him. When I asked him how long he had been at the base he groaned miserably and confessed to three weeks of purgatory.

"I've been put into the wrong pigeon-hole at the War Office," he said.

"I'm lost."

There were many other men at the British base who seemed to have been put into the wrong pigeon-holes. Among them were about two hundred French interpreters who were awaiting orders to proceed with a certain division. But they were not so restless as my friend in the hotel. Was it not enough for them that they had been put into English khaki--supplied from the store-cupboard--and that every morning they had to practise the art of putting on a puttee? In order to be perfectly English they also practised the art of smoking a briar pipe--it was astoundingly difficult to keep it alight--and indulged in the habit of five o'clock tea (with boiled eggs, ye G.o.ds!), and braved all the horrors of indigestion, because they are not used to these things, with heroic fort.i.tude. At any cost they were determined to do honour to le khaki, in spite of the arrogance of certain British officers who treated them de haut en bas.

The Base Commandant's office was the sorting-house of the Expeditionary Force. The relays of officers who had just come off the boats came here to report themselves. They had sailed as it were under sealed orders and did not know their destination until they were enlightened by the Commandant, who received instructions from the headquarters in the field. They waited about in groups outside his door, slapping their riding-boots or twisting neat little moustaches, which were the envy of subalterns just out of Sandhurst.

Through another door was the registry office through which all the Army's letters pa.s.sed inwards and outwards. The military censors were there reading the letters of Private Atkins to his best girl, and to his second best. They shook their heads over military strategy written in the trenches, and laughed quietly at the humour of men who looked on the best side of things, even if they were German sh.e.l.ls or French fleas. It was astonis.h.i.+ng what a lot of humour pa.s.sed through this central registry from men who were having a tragic time for England's sake; but sometimes the military Censor had to blow his nose with violence because Private Atkins lapsed into pathos, and wrote of tragedy with a too poignant truth.

The Base Commandant was here at all hours. Even two hours after midnight he sat in the inner room with tired secretaries who marvelled at the physical and mental strength of a man who at that hour could still dictate letters full of important detail without missing a point or a comma; though he came down early in the morning. But he was responsible for the guarding of the Army's store-cupboard--that great hangar, half a mile long--and for the discipline of a town full of soldiers who, without discipline, would make a merry h.e.l.l of it, and for the orderly disposition of all the supplies at the base upon which the army in the field depends for its welfare. It was not what men call a soft job.

Through the hotel where I stayed there was a continual flow of officers who came for one night only. Their kit-bags and sleeping- bags were dumped into the hall, and these young gentlemen, some of whom had been gazetted only a few months ago, crowded into the little drawing-room to write their letters home before going to the front, and to inquire of each other what on earth there was to do in a town where lights are out at ten o'clock, where the theatres were all closed, and where rain was beating down on the pavements outside.

"How about a bath?" said one of them. "It is about the last chance, I reckon."

They took turns to the bathroom, thinking of the mud and vermin of the trenches which would soon be their home. Among those who stayed in the sitting-room until the patron turned out the lights were several officers who had been on forty-eight hours' leave from the front. They had made a dash to London and back, they had seen the lights of Piccadilly again, and the crowds in the streets of a city which seemed to know nothing of war, they had dined with women in evening-dress who had asked innocent questions about the way of a modern battlefield, and they had said good-bye again to those who clung to them a little too long outside a carriage window.

"Worth it, do you think?" asked one of them.