i

shakespeare seems to have known what

there is to be known about our great war of 1914-18. and he was not censored. so he put into his henry iv and henry v a lot of little things that our press had to leave out at the time for the good of the country. if you look closely you can see them lying about all over the plays. there is the ugly affair of the pyx, at corbie, on the somme; there are the little irregularities in recruiting; there are the small patches of baddish moral on the coast and even in picardy; there is the painful case of the oldish lieutenant who drank and had cold feet, after talking bigger than anyone else. one almost expects to find something in henry v about the mutiny at etaples, or the predilection of the australians for chickens. anyhow, there is a more understanding account than any war correspondent has given of english troops about to go into battle.

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 tyrt?an 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 far-away office, perhaps in a far-away 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 from trench life in the stiff flanders slime or the dreary wet chalk of the disembowelled loos plain to one of the seats of authority far in the rear. g.h.q., the most regal seat of them all, was divinely niched, during most of the war, at montreuil, and montreuil was a place to bring tears to the eyes of an artist, like castelfranco, st. andrews, or windsor; the tiny walled town on a hill had that poignant fulness of loveliness, making the sense ache at it, like still summer evenings in england. it was a storied antique, unscathed and still living and warm, weathered mellow with centuries of sunshine and tranquillity, all its own old wars long laid aside and the racket of this new one very far from it. walking among its walled gardens, where roses hung over the walls, or sitting upon the edge of the rampart, your feet dangling over among the top boughs of embosoming trees, you were not merely out of the war; you were out of all war! you entered into that beatitude of super-peace which fills your mind as you look at a roman camp on a sunned sussex down, where the gentle convexities of the turf seem to turn war into an old tale for children.

such gardens of enchantment were not known by sight to most of our fighting troops, but they were rumoured. the mind of williams, in the front line, worked with a surly zest on the contrast between the two hemispheres of an army—the hemisphere of combatancy, of present torment, of scant reward, of probable extinction, and the hemisphere of non-combatancy, of comfort, of safety, of more profuse decoration, the second hemisphere ruling over the former and decimating it sometimes by feats like the staff work of 1915. among the straw in billets and the chalk clods in dug-outs, in the reeking hot twilight of parlours in french village inns, in the confidential darkness after lights out in hospital wards from bethune to versailles and rouen, the vinegar tongue of williams let itself go.

of course, he went wrong. and yet his error, like the facts which begat it, could not be helped. if all that you know of an alleged brother of yours is that he is having the best of the deal while you are getting the worst you have to be a saint of the prime to take it on trust that it really did please god, or any godlike human authority, to call him to a station in a dry hut with a stove, among the flesh-pots of an agreeable coast, and you to a station in a wet burrow full of rats and lice and yellow or white mud and ugly liabilities. and williams was not a saint, although when he enlisted he was profusely told that he was by people who were to call him a sinner later, when as a dundee rioter or "bolshevik" miner, or as a sinn feiner or a black-and-tan, he transgressed some eternal law. williams was and is only a quiet simple substance exhibiting certain normal reactions under certain chemical tests.

iii

there may be laid up in heaven a pattern of some front line by which the staff in its rear would be really loved. but such love is not in the nature of man. if the skin on mr. dempsey's knuckles could speak, and were perfectly frank, it would not say that it loved the unexposed and unabraded tissues of mr. dempsey's directive brain. hotspur, in deathless words, has aired the eternal grudge of the combatant soldier against the brass hat—

i remember, when the fight was done,

when i was dry with rage and extreme toil,

breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,

came there a certain lord, neat and trimly dressed,

fresh as a bridegroom.

so the jaundiced narrative flows on and on, doing the fullest justice on record to some of the main heads of the front line's immemorial distaste for the staff—for its too olympian line of comment upon the vulgar minuti? of combat, its offensively manifest facilities for getting a good shave, its fertility in gratuitous advice of an imperfectly practical kind, and its occasional lapses from grace in speaking of the men, the beloved men, the objects of every good combatant officer's jealous and wrathful affection.

or, again, you might say that a staff is a trouser-button, which there are few to praise while it goes on with its work, and very few to abstain from cursing when it comes off. when a staff's work is done well the front line only feels as if nature were marching, without actual molestation, along some beneficent course of her own. but when some one slips up, and half a brigade is left to itself in a cold, cold world encircled by germans, the piercing eye of the front line perceives in a moment how pitifully ill the brass hats deserve of their country. if you are an infantry-man the brass hats above you are, in your sight, a kind of ex officio children of perdition, like your own gunners. as long as your own gunners go on achieving the masterpiece of mathematics that is required to confine the incidence of their shells to the enemy you feel that, just for the moment, a gunner's rich natural endowment of original sin is not telling for all it is worth. but some day the frailty of man or of metal causes a short one to drop once again among you and your friends; and then you are mightily refreshed and confirmed in the stern calvinistic faith of the infantry that there are chosen vessels of grace and also chosen vessels of homicidal mania.

if man, in all his wars, is predestined never to love and trust his brass hats, least of all can he struggle against this disability when he is warring in trenches. why? because trench life is very domestic, highly atomic. its atom, or unit, like that of slum life, is the jealously close, exclusive, contriving life of a family housed in an urban cellar. during the years of trench war a man seldom saw the whole of his company at a time. our total host might be two millions strong, or ten millions; whatever its size a man's world was that of his section—at most, his platoon; all that mattered much to him was the one little boatload of castaways with whom he was marooned on a desert island and making shift to keep off the weather and any sudden attack of wild beasts. absorbed in the primitive job of keeping alive on an earth naked except in the matter of food, they became, like other primitive men, family separatists. any odd chattel that each trench household acquired served as an extra dab of cement for the household's internal affections, as well as a possible casus belli against the unblessed outsiders who dared to cast upon it the eye of desire. a brazier with three equal legs would be coveted by a whole company. once a platoon acquired a broken, but just practicable, arm-chair; not exactly a stronghold of luxury; rather a freakish wave of her banner; and this symbol of lost joys was borne, at great inconvenience, from sector to sector of the front, amidst the affected derision of other platoons—veiling what was well understood to be envy. it was like the grim, ineffusive spiritual cohesion of a scottish family soldered together to keep out the world.

constantly jammed up against one another, every man in each of these isolated knots of adventurers came to be seen by the rest for what he was worth, with the drastic clearness of open-eyed husbands and wives of long standing. they had domesticated the day of judgment. many old valuations had to go by the board; some great home reputations wilted surprisingly; stones that the builders of public opinion on salisbury plain had confidently rejected found their way up to the heads of corners. officers, watched almost as closely, were sorted out by the minds of the men into themes for contemptuous silence, objects of the love that doeth and beareth all things, and cases of not proven yet. the cutting equity of this family council was bracing. it got the best out of everybody in whom there was anything. imagine a similar overhauling of public life here! and the size of the scrap-heap! but to the outer world, which it did not half know, the tribunal was harsh, and harshest of all to the outer and upper world of army principalities and powers.

these were, to it, the untested, unsifted, "the crowd that was never put through it." there were presumptions against them, besides. they were akin, in the combatant's sight, to the elfish gods that had ruled and bedevilled his training at home. they were of the breed of the wasters, the misorganizers, the beauties who sent his battalion out from the wiltshire downs to bruay along a course of gigantic zigzags, like a yacht beating up in the teeth of a wind, first running far south to havre, then north to near the german ocean, and then going about and opening out again upon the southward tack until bruay was struck; for it was, indeed, along a trajectory somewhat like that of an actual flash of lightning in some quaint engraving that britain hurled at the enemy many of her new thunderbolts of war. also, they stood in the shoes of the men who in french's day had sent platoon commanders to take woods and quarries not marked on their maps. and they were the men who, when troops had been marching twelve miles in full kit on the high-cambered, heavily greased flanders setts in the rain, would appear on the roadside turf round a blind corner, sitting chubby and sleek on fresh horses, and say that the marching was damned bad and troops must go back to-morrow and do it again. but the chief count was the first—that they had not all gone through the mill; that they lived in a world in which all the respectable old bubbles, pricked elsewhere, were still fat and shining, where all the old bluffs were uncalled and still going strong, and the wangler could still inherit the earth and eye-wash reign happy and glorious.

not a judgment wholly just. but not one contemptible either; for, wherever it ended, it set out from the right idea of judging a man only by what he was worth and what he could do. and, just or not, it was real; it influenced men's acts, not to the extent of losing us the war, but to that of helping to send the winners home possessed with that contemptuous impatience of authority which has already thrown out of gear so much of the pre-war machinery for regulating the joint action of mankind.

iv

there was yet another special check during the war upon love and respect for the higher commands. there were so many things of moment which they were the last to find out. time after time the great ones of this world were seen to be walking in darkness long after the lowly had seen a great light. while the appointed brains of our army were still swearing hard by the rifle, and nothing but it, as the infantry's friend, a more saving truth had entered in at the lowly door of the infantry's mind. ignoring all that at aldershot they had learnt to be sacred, they contumaciously saw that so long as you stand in a hole deeper than you are tall you never will hit with a rifle-bullet another man standing in just such another hole twenty yards off. but also—divine idea!—that you can throw a tin can from your hole into his.

in england the mighty had taken a great deal of pains to teach the new army always to parry the thrust of its enemy's bayonet first, and only then to get in its own. a fine, stately procedure it was when taught by an exemplary regular army instructor fully resolved that, whatever shelley may say, no part of any movement must mingle in any other part's being. in france, and no doubt on other fronts too, it abruptly dawned on those whose style this formalist had moulded, more or less, that a second german or turk was apt to cut in before the appointed ritual of debate with the first could be carried to a happy end. illicit abridgements followed, attended by contumacious reflections.

whatever, again, was august in canadian life and affairs was bent in 1914 upon arming canadian troops with what was indeed, by a long chalk, the pick of all match-shooting rifles. it was the last word of man in his struggle against the caprices of barometric and thermometric pressures on ranges. and it was to show a purblind europe, among other things, that sam hughes was the man and that wisdom would die with him. yet hardly had its use, in wrath, begun when there broke upon the untutored canadian foot-soldier a revelation withheld from the hugheses of this world. he perceived that the enemy, in his perversity, did not intend to stand up on a skyline a thousand yards off to be shot with all the refinements of science; point-blank was going to be the only range, except for a few specialists; rapidity of fire would matter more than precision; and all the super-subtle appliances tending to triumphs at bisley would here be no better than aids to the picking of mud from trench walls as the slung rifle joggled against them.

the great did not turn these truths of mean origin right away from the door. they would quite often take a discovery in. only there was no running to greet it.

there was no hurry in their hands,

no hurry in their feet.

like smells that originate in the kitchen and work their way up by degrees to the best bedroom the new revelations of war ascended slowly from floor to floor of the hierarchy. they did arrive in the end. the canadians got, in the end, a rifle not too great and good for business. by the third year of the war the infantry schools at the base were teaching drafts from home to use the bayonet as troops in the line had taught themselves to use it in the second. the frowning down of the tanks can hardly have lasted a year. the stokes gun was not blackballed for good. it was not for all time, but only for what seemed to them like an age, that our troops had to keep off the well-found enemy bomber with bombs that they made of old jam tins, wire, a little gun-cotton, a little time fuse, and some bits of sharp stone, old iron, or anything hard that was lying about, with earth to fill in; the higher powers did the thing well in the end; they came down handsomely at last; in the next life the mills bomb alone should be good for at least a night out once a year on an iceberg to some war office brave who would not see it killed in the cradle.

and yet authority wore, in the eyes of its troops in the field, an inexpert air—sublime, benevolent, but somehow inexpert. they had begun to notice it even before leaving england. imagine the headquarters staff of a district command watching a test for battalion bombing officers and sergeants at the close of a divisional bombing course in 1915: the instructor in charge a quick-witted regular n.c.o. who has shone at loos and is now decorated, commissioned, slightly shell-shocked, and sent home to teach, full of the new craft and subtlety of trench war; the pupils all picked for the job and devouringly keen, half of them old cricketers, all able-bodied, and all now able, after hard practice during the course, to drop a bomb on to any desired square yard within thirty-five yards of their stance; and then the staff, tropically dazzling in their red and gold, august beyond words, but genial, benign, encouraging, only too ready to praise things that they would see to be easy if only they knew more about them and were not like middle-aged mothers watching their offspring at football—so a profane bombing sergeant describes them that night to his mess.

v

"your old army's all bloody born amatoors," an australian of ripe war experience remarked with some frankness in france. his immediate occasion for generalizing so rashly was somebody's slip in passing certain grenades as good for field use. most of our hand and rifle grenades undoubtedly were. if anything they were too fine for it, too fit to beautify drawing-rooms as well. one objet d'art, a delight to the eye, was said to cost its country one pound five as against the two francs for which france was composing an angel of death less pretty but equally virtuous. still, ours would kill, if you had the heart to break up an object so fair. but the batch that made the australian blaspheme, though good in design, were mismade. they were made as if the people who made them had not guessed what they were for.

as you know, the outside of most kinds of grenade is a thick metal case serrated with deeply-cut lines that cross each other like those more shallow sunk lines on crocodile-leather, only at right angles. these lines of weakness, cut into the metal, mark out almost the whole of the case into little squares standing up in relief, sixteen or thirty-two or forty-eight or seventy-two according to type. the burst, if all goes well, attacks the lines of weakness, cuts them right through, and so disperses all the little squares of brass, cast-iron, or steel radially as flying bits of shrapnel. what led the australian to sin was that this batch had come out to france with their lines of weakness cut not half as deep as they should be. the burst only ripped the case open without breaking it up. it had been lovely in life, and in death it was not divided. it just gave a jump, the length of a frog's, and presented the foe with a cheap good souvenir, reassuring besides.

there must have been a good many thousands of these. they may have done good—perhaps won a good-conduct mark to some war office hero for rushing them out in good time to the front; perhaps assisted some politician to feel that he was riding a whirlwind and directing a storm, solving munition crises and winning the war. all human happiness counts. in france, if the physical effects of their detonation were poor, the moral reverberations which followed were lively. a bombing sergeant, sent down the line for a rest and instructing new drafts in a hollow among the sand dunes at etaples well out of authority's hearing, would start his lecture by holding one of them up and saying: "this 'ere, men, is a damn bad grenade. but it's all that the bloody tailors give you to work with. so just pay attention to me." and then he would go on to pour out his cornucopia of tips, fruits of empiric research, for doing what somebody's slackness or folly had made it so much less easy to do.

vi

whenever you passed from east to west across the british zone during the war you would find somebody saying with fervour that somebody else, a little more to the west and a little higher in rank, had not even learnt his job well enough to keep out of the way. subalterns, who by some odd arrangement of flukes had come through our attacks on the somme in 1916 and in artois and flanders next year, would hoot at the notion—it had a vogue with part of the staff in a tranquil far west—that the way to get on with the war was to raise a more specific thirst for blood in the private. battalion commanders did not soon tire of telling how in the busiest days of big battles the unseen powers would pester them for instant returns of the number of shovels they had, or of the number of men who in civil life had been fitters, or had been moulders. brigadiers would savagely wonder aloud whether it ever occurred to a higher command that to make little attack after little attack, each on a narrow, one-brigade front, was merely to ask to have each attack squashed flat in its turn by a fan-like convergence of fire from the enemy's guns on both flanks, not to speak of supports. the day the bad turn came for us, in the two-chaptered battle of cambrai, an officer on the staff of one of the worst-hit divisions observed: "our attitude is just 'we told you so'." when the good turn in the war had come the next summer there was a day, not so good as the rest, when two squadrons of horse were sent to charge, in column, up a straight, treeless rising road for half a mile and take a little wood at the top. there were many machine-guns in the wood—how could there not have been?—and the whole air sang with warnings of that. no horse or man either got to the wood or came back. they were all in a few seconds lying in the white dust, almost in the order they rode in, the officer in command a little ahead of the rest. it looked, in its formal completeness, like a thing acted, a cinema play showing a part of sennacherib's army on which the angel had breathed. on the road back from the place i met a corps commander—a great man at his work. when he heard his face crumpled up for a moment—he was a soft-hearted man. "another of those damned cavalry follies!" he growled. his voice had the scorn that the man who is versed in to-day's practice feels for the men who still move among yesterday's theories. so it was, from east to west, all the way.

all the wise men were not in the east. it was the fault of the war, the outlandish, innovatory war that did not conform to the proper text-books as it ought to have done; an unimagined war of flankless armies scratching each other's faces across an endless thorn hedge, not dreamt of in staff college philosophy; a war that was always putting out of date the best that had been known and thought and invented, always sending everyone to school again; unkind, above all, to us who, if well-to-do, bring up our young to have a proper respect for the past and to feel that if yesterday's parasol will not keep out the rain of to-day, then it ought to, and no one can blame them for using it.

vii

yet the men in the line talked, and so did the subalterns, most of whom had been in the ranks, now that the war ran into years. soldiers have endless occasions for talk. being seldom alone, and having to hold their tongues sometimes, they talk all the time that they can. and most of their talk was sour and scornful. ever since their enlistment there had been running down in them one of the springs of health in the life of a country. an unprecedented number of the most healthy, high-spirited, and nationally valuable englishmen in the prime of life were telling one another that, among those whom they had hitherto taken more or less completely on trust as their "betters," things were going on which must make the war harder for us to win; while they, the common people, cared with all their hearts about saving belgium and france, those betters, so placed that they could do more to that end if they would, seemed to be caring, on the whole, less—shouting and gesticulating enough, but ready to give up less of what was pleasant and to do less of what was hard, and perhaps not able to do much at their best. colonel repington's friends, with their scented baths, their prime vintages, and their mutinous chatter, were not actually seen; but there was a bad smell about; the air stank of bad work in high places.

most of our n.c.o.'s and men in the field had come to feel that it was left to them and to the soundest regimental officers to pull the foundered rulers of england and heads of the army through the scrape. they assumed now that while they were doing this job they must expect to be crawled upon by all the vermin bred in the dark places of a rich country vulgarly governed. they were well on their guard by this time against expressing any thoroughgoing faith in anything or anybody, or incurring any suspicion of dreaming that such a faith was likely to animate others; a man was a fool if he imagined that anyone set over him was not looking after number one; the patriotism of the press was bunkum, screening all sorts of queer games; the eloquence of patriotic orators was just a smoke barrage to cover their little manoeuvres against one another; the red tabs of the staff were the "red badge of funk"; a hospital ward full of sick men would exchange, when left to themselves, vitriolic surmises about the extravagant pay that the nurses were probably getting, and go on to suggest what vast profits the y.m.c.a. must be making out of its huts. wherever the contrary had not been proved to their own senses, the slacking, self-seeking and shirking that had muddled and spoilt their own training for war until they were put, half-trained, in the hottest of the fire must be assumed to be in authority everywhere.

long ago, perhaps, the commons of england may, on the whole, have accepted the view that while they were the fists of her army there was a strong brain somewhere behind, as good at its job as the fists were at theirs; that above them, using them for the best, mind was enthroned, mind the deviser, adapter, foreseer, the finder of ever new means to new ends, mind which knew better than fists, and from which, in any time of trial, all good counsels and provident works were sure to proceed. if so, the faith of the general mass of the english common people in any such division of functions was now pretty near its last kick. the lions felt they had found out the asses. they would not try to throw off the lead of the asses just then: you cannot reorganize a fire-brigade in the midst of a fire. that had to wait. they worked grimly on at the job of the moment, resigned for the present to seeing all the things go ill which the great ones of their world ought to have caused to go well. for themselves, in each of their units, they saw what was coming. some day soon they would be put into an attack and would come out with half their numbers or, perhaps, two-thirds, and nothing gained for england, perhaps because some old regular in his youth had preferred playing polo to learning his job. the rest would be brought up to strength with half-trained drafts and then put in again, and the process would go on over and over again until our commanders learnt war, and then perhaps we might win, if any of us were left.

while so many things were shaken one thing that held fast was the men's will to win. it may have changed from the first lyric-hearted enthusiasm. but it was a dour and inveterate will. at the worst most of the men fully meant to go down killing for all they were worth. and there was just a hope that in germany, too, such default as they saw on our side was the rule; it was, perhaps, a disease of all armies and countries, not of ours alone; there might thus be a chance for us still. on that chance they still worked away with a sullen ardour that no muddling or sloth in high places could wholly damp down. many of them were like children clinging with a cross crankiness to a hobby of learning to read in a school where some of the teachers were good, but some could not read themselves, and others could read but preferred other occupations to teaching.

all were so deeply absorbed in winning that no practical upshot of all their new thoughts about england's diseases was yet, as far as i could perceive, taking shape in their minds. on that side their mood was merely one of postponement, somewhat menacing in its form, but still postponement. "we've got to win first. then——? but we've got to win first." they were almost exactly the words in which most german prisoners, till 1918, expressed their own feeling about the old rulers of germany.