no story of these years can ever be true that does not pass under a shadow. of the little group of youths and men who have figured in this story thus far, there was scarcely one who was not either killed outright or crippled or in some way injured in the great war—excepting only huntley. huntley developed a deepening conscience against warfare as the war went on, and suffered nothing worse than some unpleasant half-hours with tribunals and the fatigues of agricultural labour. death, which had first come to joan as a tragic end to certain “kittays,” was now the familiar associate of her every friend. her confidence in the safety of the world, in the wisdom of human laws and institutions, in the worth and dignity of empires and monarchs, and the collective sanity of mankind was withdrawn as a veil is withdrawn, from the harsh realities of life.
wilmington, with his humourless intensity, was one of 463the first to bring home to her this disillusionment and tragedy of the youth of the world. he liked pure mathematics; it was a subject in which he felt comfortable. he had worked well in the first part of the mathematical tripos, and he was working hard in the second part when the war broke out. he fluctuated for some days between an utter repudiation of all war and an immediate enlistment, and it was probably the light and colour of joan in his mind that made wilmington a warrior. war was a business of killing, he decided, and what he had to do was to apply himself and his mathematics to gunnery as efficiently as possible, learning as rapidly as might be all that was useful about shells, guns and explosives, and so get to the killing of germans thoroughly, expeditiously, and abundantly. he was a particularly joyless young officer, white-faced and intent, with an appearance of scorn that presently developed from appearance into reality, for most of his colleagues. he was working as hard and as well as he could. at first with incredulity and then with disgust he realized that the ordinary british officer was not doing so. they sang songs, they ragged, they left things to chance, they thought blunders funny, they condoned silliness and injustice in the powers above. he would not sing nor rag nor drink. he worked to the verge of exhaustion. but this exemplary conduct, oddly enough, did not make him unpopular either with the junior officers or with his seniors. the former tolerated him and rather admired him; the latter put work upon him and sought to promote him.
in quite a little while as it seemed—for in those days, while each day seemed long and laborious and heavy, yet the weeks and months passed swiftly—he was a captain in france, and before the end of 1915 he wrote to say that his major had left him practically in command of his battery for three weeks. he had been twice slightly wounded by that time, but he got little leisure because he was willing and indispensable.
he wrote to joan very regularly. he was a motherless youth, and joan was not only his great passion but his friend and confidante. his interest in his work overflowed into his letters; they were more and more about gunnery 464and the art of war, which became at last, it would seem, a serious rival to joan in his affections. he described ill, but he would send her reasoned statements of unanswerable views. he could not understand why considerations that were so plain as to be almost obvious, were being universally disregarded by the heads and the war office. he appealed to joan to read what he had to say, and tell him whether he or the world was mad. when he came back on leave in the spring of 1916, she was astonished to find that he was still visibly as deeply in love with her as ever. the fact of it was he had words for his gunnery and military science, but he had no words, and that was the essence of his misfortune, for his love for joan.
but the burthen of his story was bitter disillusionment at the levity with which his country could carry on a war that must needs determine the whole future of mankind. he would write out propositions of this sort: “it is manifest that success in warfare depends upon certain primary factors, of which generalship is one. no country resolute to win a war will spare any effort to find the best men, and make them its generals and leaders irrespective of every other consideration. no honourable patriots will permit generals to be appointed by any means except the best selective methods, and no one who cares for his country will obstruct (1) the promotion, (2) trying over, and (3) prompt removal, if they fail to satisfy the most exacting tests, of all possible men. and next consider what sort of men will be the best commanders. they must be fresh-minded young men. all the great generals of the world, the supreme cases, the alexanders, napoleons, and so on, have shown their quality before thirty even in the days when strategy and tactics did not change very greatly from year to year, and now when the material and expedients of war make warfare practically a new thing every few years, the need for fresh young commanders is far more urgent than ever it has been. but the british army is at present commanded by oldish men who are manifestly of not more than mediocre intelligence, and who have no knowledge of this new sort of war that has arisen. it is a war of guns and infantry—with aeroplanes 465coming in more and more—and most of the higher positions are held by cavalry officers; the artillery is invariably commanded by men unused to the handling of such heavy guns as we are using, who stick far behind our forward positions and decline any practical experience of our difficulties. they put us in the wrong positions, they move us about absurdly; young officers have had to work out most of the problems of gun-pits and so forth for themselves—against resistance and mere stupid interference from above. the heads have no idea of the kind of work we do or of the kind of work we could do. they are worse than amateurs; they are unteachable fossils. but why is this so? if the country is serious about the war, why does it permit it? if the government is serious about the war, why does it permit it? if the war office is serious about the war, why does it permit it? if g.h.q. is serious about the war, why does it permit it? what is wrong? there is a hitch here i don’t understand. am i over-serious, and is all this war really some sort of gross, grim joke, joan? do i take life too seriously?
“joan, in this last push this battery did its little job right; we cut all the wire opposite us and blew out every blessed stake. we made a nice tidy clean up. it was quite easy to do, given hard work. if i hadn’t done it i ought either to have been shot for neglect or dismissed for incapacity. but on our left it wasn’t done. well, there were at least a hundred poor devils of our infantrymen on that wire, a hundred mothers’ sons, hanging like rags on it or crumpled up below. i saw them. it made me sick. and i saw the chap who was chiefly responsible for that, major clutterwell, a little bit screwed, being the life and soul of a little party in hazebrouck three days after! he ought to have been the life and soul of a hari kari party, but either he is too big a cad or too big a fool—or both. the way they shy away our infantrymen over here is damnable. they are the finest men in the world, i’m convinced; they will go at anything, and the red tabs send them into impossible jobs, fail to back them up—always they fail to back them up; they neglect them, joan; they neglect them even 466when they are fighting and dying! there are men here, colonels, staff officers, i would like to beat about the head with an iron bar....”
this was an unusually eloquent passage. frequently his letters were mainly diagram to show for example how we crowded batteries to brass away at right angles to the trenches when we ought to enfilade them, or some such point. sometimes he was trying to establish profound truths about the proper functions of field guns and howitzers. for a time he was gnawing a bitter grievance. “i was told to shell a line i couldn’t reach. the contours wouldn’t allow of it. you can do a lot with a shell, but you cannot make it hop slightly and go round a corner. there is a definite limit to the height to which a gun will lob a shell. i tried to explain these elementary limitations of gunfire through the telephone, and i was told i should be put under arrest if i did not obey orders. i wasn’t up against a commander, i wasn’t up against an intelligence; i was up against a silly old man in a temper. so i put over a barrage about fifty yards beyond the path—the nearest possible. every one was perfectly satisfied—the boche included. thus it is that the young officer is subdued to the medium he works in.”
at times wilmington would embark on a series of propositions to demonstrate with mathematical certitude that if the men and material wasted at loos had been used in the dardanelles, the war would have been decided by the end of 1915. but the topic to which his mind recurred time after time was the topic of efficient leadership. “modern war demands continuity of idea, continuity of will, and continuous progressive adaptation of means and methods,” he wrote—in two separate letters. in the second of these he had got on to a fresh notion. “education in england is a loafer education; it does not point to an end; it does not drive through; it does not produce minds that can hold out through a long effort. the young officers come out here with the best intentions in the world, but one’s everyday life is shaped not by our intentions but our habits. their habits of mind are loafing habits. they learnt to loaf at school. caxton, i am now convinced, is one of the best schools in england; but even at caxton we did not fully acquire the 467habit of steadfast haste which modern life demands. everything that gets done out here is done by a spurt. with the idea behind it of presently doing nothing. the ordinary state of everybody above the non-commissioned ranks is loafing. at the present moment my major is shooting pheasants; the batteries to the left of us are cursing because they have to shift—it holds up their scheme for a hunt. just as though artillery work wasn’t the most intense sport in the world—especially now that we are going to have kite balloons and do really scientific observing. even the conscientious men of the kitchener-byng school don’t really seem to me to get on; they work like trojans at established and routine stuff but they don’t keep up inquiry. they are human, all too human. man is a sedentary animal, and the schoolmaster exists to prevent his sitting down comfortably.” this from wilmington without a suspicion of jesting. “this human weakness for just living can only be corrected in schools. the more i scheme about increasing efficiency out here, the more i realize that it can’t be done here, that one has to go right back to the schools and begin with a more continuous urge. when this war is over i shall try to be a schoolmaster. i shall hate it most of the time, but then i hate most things....”
but wilmington never became a schoolmaster. he got a battery of six-inch guns just before the somme push in 1916, and he went forward with them into positions he chose and built up very carefully, only to be shifted against his wishes almost at once to a new and, he believed, an altogether inferior position. he was blown to nothingness by a german shell while he was constructing a gun pit.
