i
if you cannot hit or kick during a fight, at any rate you can spit. but, to be happy in this arm of the service, you have to feel sure that the adversary is signally fit to be spat upon. hence, on each side in every war, the civilian will-to-believe that the other side are a set of ogres, every man of them. what a capital fiend the boer, the man like botha or smuts, was made out to be during the last boer war! he abused the white flag, he sawed a woman in two, he advanced behind screens of niggers; o, he was a great fellow! in 1870 french civilians laid freely to their souls the flattering unction that the prussians murdered their prisoners. strong in what was at bottom the same joyous faith, german civilians told you that french officers usually broke their parole. a few choice spirits will even carry this fond observance into the milder climate of sport. a boy of this kidney, while looking on at a vital house match, will give his mind ease by telling a friend what "a lot of stinkers" the other house are. a follower of cambridge cricket, a man of fifty, in whom you might expect the choler of youth to have cooled, has been found musing darkly over a large photograph of an oxford eleven. they seemed to me, as is the way of these heroes, to lack nothing of outward charm except the light of intellect in the eye. but "look at them!" he observed with conviction. "the hangdog expressions! the narrow, ill-set mongol eyes! the thin, cruel lips! prejudice apart, would you like to meet that gang in a quiet place on a dark night?" from these sombre reflections he seemed to derive a sort of pasture.
little doubt, then, as to what had to come when five of the greatest nations on earth were suddenly rolling over and under each other in the dust. while their armies saw to the biting, the snarling was done with a will by the press of berlin and vienna, petrograd, paris, and london. that we were all fighting foul, every man, was the burden of the strain. phone and anti-phone, the choric hymn of detraction swelled; if this had been an age of simpler faith there might have been serious fear lest the music should reach the ear of some jove sitting at his nectar; what if he should say in a rage that those nasty little beasts were at it again, and throw such a comet down on the earth as would settle the hash of us all? but no such fears troubled europe. and then policy, viewing these operations of instinct, was moved to cut in. official propaganda began, and one of its stock lines was to help in stoking these fires in the non-combatant heart.
ii
some of the fuel to hand was fine. the german command fed the best of it all into our bunkers, gratis. it owned that its "frightfulness" plan was no slip, no "indiscretion of a subordinate," but a policy weighed and picked out—worse than that, an embodied ethical doctrine. a frenchman, when he is cross with our english virtue, will say that none of us can steal a goose without saying he does it for the public good. but the fey rulers of germany could not even be content to say it was an act of moral beauty to sink the lusitania or to burn louvain. they must go on to boast that these scrubby actions were pieces of sound, hard thinking, the only tenable conclusions to impregnable syllogisms. besides man's natural aversion to cruel acts, they thus incurred his still more universal distaste for pedants. they delivered themselves into our hand. they were beautiful butts, ready made, like the learned elderly lady in roderick random, whose bookish philosophy made her desire to "drag the parent by the hoary hair," and to "toss the sprawling infant on her spear."
but man, rash man, must always be trying to go one better than the best. with this thing of beauty there for our use, crying out to be used, some of our propagandists must needs go beyond it and try to make out that the average german soldier, the docile blond with yellow hair, long skull, and blue, woolgathersome eyes, who swarmed in our corps cages during the last two years of the war, craving for some one, anyone, to give him an order, was one of the monsters who hang about the gates of vergil's hell. if you had to make out a good hanging case against germany could you, as hamlet asks his injudicious mother, on that fair mountain cease to feed and batten on this moor? and yet some of us did. the authentic scarecrow, the school of thought that ruled the old german state, was not used for half of what it was worth. but the word went forth that any redeeming traits in the individual german conscript were better hushed up. when he showed extreme courage in an attack, not much must be made of it. when he behaved well to a wounded englishman, it must be hidden. a war correspondent who mentioned some chivalrous act that a german had done to an englishman during an action received a rebuking wire from his employer, "don't want to hear about any nice, good germans."
even in the very temple of humourless shabbiness comedy may contrive to keep up a little shrine of her own, and on this forlorn altar the dread of "crying up anything german" laid, now and then, an undesigned offering. one worthy field censor was suddenly taken aback by a dangerous flaw in a war correspondent's exultant account of a swiftly successful british attack. "within ten minutes from zero," i think the correspondent had written, "our men were sitting at ease on what had been the enemy's parapet, smoking good german cigars." "hullo!" said the censor, "this won't do. 'good' german cigars. good german cigars! no! 'good' must come out." and come out it did. like the moral of his troops, like the generalship of his chiefs, the foeman's tobacco had to be bad. it was the time when some of our patriotic pundits found out that mommsen's roman history was all wrong, and that poppo did not half know his thucydides.
iii
of all this kind of swordsmanship the most dashing feat was the circulation of the "corpse factory" story. german troops, it was written in part of our press, had got, in certain places near their front, a proper plant for boiling down the fat of their own dead. it was not said whether the product was to be used as a food, or as a lubricant or illuminant only. chance brought me into one of the reputed seats of this refinement of frugality. it was on ground that our troops had just taken, in 1918. at bellicourt the st. quentin canal goes into a long tunnel. some little way in from its mouth you could find, with a flash-lamp, a small doorway cut in the tunnel's brick wall, on the tow-path side of the canal. the doorway led to the foot of a narrow staircase that wound up through the earth till it came to an end in a room about twenty feet long. it, too, was subterranean, but now its darkness was pierced by one sharp-edged shaft of sunlight let in through a neat round hole cut in the five or six feet of earth above. loaves, bits of meat, and articles of german equipment lay scattered about, and two big dixies or cauldrons, like those in which we stewed our tea, hung over two heaps of cold charcoal. eight or ten bodies, lying pell-mell, nearly covered half of the floor. they showed the usual effects of shell-fire. another body, disembowelled and blown almost to rags, lay across one of the dixies and mixed with the puddle of coffee that it contained. a quite simple case. shells had gone into cook-houses of ours, long before then, and had messed up the cooks with the stew.
an australian sergeant, off duty and poking about, like a good australian, for something to see, had come up the stairs, too. he had heard the great fat-boiling yarn, and how this was the latest seat of the industry. sadly he surveyed the disappointing scene. ruefully he noted the hopelessly normal nature of all the proceedings that had produced it. then he broke the silence in which we had made our several inspections. "can't believe a word you read, sir, can you?" he said with some bitterness. life had failed to yield one of its advertised marvels. the press had lied again. the propagandist myth about germans had cracked up once more. "can't believe a word you read" had long been becoming a kind of catch-phrase in the army. and now another good man had been duly confirmed in the faith, ordained as a minister of the faith, that whatever your pastors and masters tell you had best be assumed to be just a bellyful of east wind.
iv
partly it came of the nature—which could not be helped by that time—of war correspondence. in the first months of the war our general staff, being what we had made it, treated british war correspondents as pariah dogs. they might escape arrest so long as they kept out of sight; that was about the sum of their privileges. long before the end of the war the chiefs of staff of our several armies received them regularly on the eve of every battle, explained to them the whole of our plans and hopes, gave them copies of our most secret objective and barrage maps; every perilous secret we had was put into their keeping. a little later still an army commander would murmur, with very little indistinctness, if he thought the war correspondents had not been writing enough about his army of late. after the armistice sir douglas haig made them a speech of thanks and praise on the great bridge over the rhine at cologne, and at the peace all the regular pariah dogs were offered knighthoods.
the regular army had set out by taking a war correspondent to be, ex officio, a low fellow paid to extract kitchen literature from such private concerns of the military profession as wars. it harboured the curious notion that it would be possible in this century to feed the nation at home on communiqués from g.h.q. alone or eked out with "eye-witness" stuff—official "word-painting" by some regular officer with a tincture of letters. with that power of learning things, only just not too late, which distinguishes our regular army from the bourbons, it presently saw that this plan had broken down. about the same time the regular army began to recognise in the abhorred war correspondent a man whom it had known at school, and who had gone to the university about the time when it, the army, was going into the army class. that was enough. foul as was his profession, still he might be a decent fellow; he might not want to injure his country.
when these reflections were dawning slowly over the regular army mind it happened—sir douglas haig having a mind himself—that his chief of intelligence was a fully educated man with a good fifty per cent. more of brains, imagination, decision, and initiative than the average of his fellow-regulars on the staff. he knew something of the press at first hand. being a scotsman, he regarded writers and well-read people with interest and not with alarm. under his command the policy of helping the press rose to its maximum. war correspondents were given the "status," almost the rank, of officers. actual officers were detailed to see to their comfort, to pilot them about the front, to secure their friendly treatment by all ranks and at all headquarters. never were war correspondents so helped, shielded and petted before. and, almost without an exception, they were good men. only one or two black sheep of the trade would try to make a reader believe that they had seen things which they had not. the general level of personal and professional honour, of courage, public spirit, and serious enterprise, was high. no average staff officer could talk with the average british correspondent without feeling that this was a sound human being and had a better mind than his own—that he knew more, had seen more, and had been less deadened by the coolie work of a professional routine. when once known, the war correspondents were trusted and liked—by the staff.
v
there lay the trouble. they lived in the staff world, its joys and its sorrows, not in the combatant world. the staff was both their friend and their censor. how could they show it up when it failed? one of the first rules of field censorship was that from war correspondents "there must be no criticism of authority or command"; how could they disobey that? they would visit the front now and then, as many staff officers did, but it could be only as afternoon callers from one of the many mansions of g.h.q., that heaven of security and comfort. when autumn twilight came down on the haggard trench world of which they had caught a quiet noon-day glimpse they would be speeding west in vauxhall cars to lighted chateaux gleaming white among scatheless woods. their staple emotions before a battle were of necessity akin to those of the staff, the racehorse-owner or trainer exalted with brilliant hopes, thrilled by the glorious uncertainty of the game, the fascinating nicety of every preparation, and feeling the presence of horrible fatigues and the nearness of multitudinous deaths chiefly as a dim, sombre background that added importance to the rousing scene, and not as things that need seriously cloud the spirit or qualify delight in a plan.
"our casualties will be enormous," a general at g.h.q. said with the utmost serenity on the eve of one of our great attacks in 1917. the average war correspondent—there were golden exceptions—insensibly acquired the same cheerfulness in face of vicarious torment and danger. in his work it came out at times in a certain jauntiness of tone that roused the fighting troops to fury against the writer. through his despatches there ran a brisk implication that regimental officers and men enjoyed nothing better than "going over the top"; that a battle was just a rough, jovial picnic; that a fight never went on long enough for the men; that their only fear was lest the war should end on this side of the rhine. this, the men reflected in helpless anger, was what people at home were offered as faithful accounts of what their friends in the field were thinking and suffering.
most of the men had, all their lives, been accepting "what it says 'ere in the paper" as being presumptively true. they had taken the press at its word without checking. bets had been settled by reference to a paper. now, in the biggest event of their lives, hundreds of thousands of men were able to check for themselves the truth of that workaday bible. they fought in a battle or raid, and two days after they read, with jeers on their lips, the account of "the show" in the papers. they felt they had found the press out. the most bloody defeat in the history of britain, a very world's wonder of valour frustrated by feckless misuse, of regimental glory and staff shame, might occur on the ancre on july 1, 1916, and our press come out bland and copious and graphic, with nothing to show that we had not had quite a good day—a victory really. men who had lived through the massacre read the stuff open-mouthed. anything, then, could figure as anything else in the press—as its own opposite even. black was only an aspect of white. with a grin at the way he must have been taken in up to now, the fighting soldier gave the press up. so it comes that each of several million ex-soldiers now reads every solemn appeal of a government, each beautiful speech of a premier or earnest assurance of a body of employers with that maxim on guard in his mind—"you can't believe a word you read."
