i

"doth any man doubt," the wise bacon asks, "that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition and unpleasing to themselves?" one of the most sweetly flattering hopes that we had in the august of 1914 was that in view of the greatness of the occasion causes were not going to have their effects.

nothing new, you may truthfully answer, in that. the improvement is one which man, in his cups and his dreams and other seasons of maudlin vision, has always perceived to have just come at last. now, he exaltedly says to himself, for a clean break with my inadequately wise and brilliant past. away with that plaguey old list of my things done which should not have been done, and of things left undone which i ought to have done. at the end of popular plays the sympathetic youth who had idled, philandered, or stolen till then would book to the rand or the yukon, fully assured that "in that free, outdoor life" one's character is not one's fate any longer; blessed, "out there," are europe's slackers and wasters, for they shall inherit the earth, or its auriferous parts. grasshoppers, too, if they drank or resorted to sentimental novels and plays, might have gallant little revolts in their hearts, and chirrup "down with causation!" and feel cock-sure that some good-natured god would give them a chance of "redeeming their pasts" quite late in autumn, and put in their way a winter provision far ampler than that which crowns the coolie labours of those sorry daughters of martha, the bees. but, for working this benign miracle in the soul, no other strong waters can equal the early days of a war. if, with unbecoming sobriety, anyone hints, in such days, that causes may still retain some sort of control, he is easily seen to have no drop of true blood in him; base is the slave who fears we must reap as we sowed; shame upon spiritless whispers about any connection between the making of beds and the lying thereon; now they shall see what excellent hothouse grapes will be borne by the fine healthy thistles that we have been planting and watering.

something in it too, perhaps—at least some centuries ago. when a great nation's army was only a few thousands strong the freak and the fluke had their chance. an achilles or two, at the top of their form on the day, might upset the odds. but when armies are millions of men, and machinery counts for more than the men, the few divine accidents of exceptional valour cannot go far. with eleven a-side a grace or an armstrong may win a game off his own bat. he will hardly do that in a game where the sides are eleven thousand apiece. more and more, as the armies increase, must the law of averages have it its own dreary way; glorious uncertainties wither; statistical "curves" of relative national fitness to win, and to stand the strain of winning or losing, overbear everything else. what are the two armies' and the two nations' relative numbers? what is the mean physique on each side? and the mean intelligence? how far has each nation's history—social, political, religious, industrial—tended to make its men rich in just pride, self-reliance, high spirit, devotion, and hardihood? how many per cent on each side have been sapped by venereal disease? how much of their work have its officers troubled to learn? these are the questions. the more men you have in a war, and the longer it lasts, the more completely has it to lose the romance of a glorious gamble and sink—or, as some would say, rise—to the plane of a circumstantial, matter-of-fact liquidation of whatever relative messes the nations engaged have made of the whole of their previous lives.

ii

any soldier will tell you the bayonet does not win battles. it only claims, in a way that a beaten side cannot ignore, a victory won already by gunfire, rifles, gas, bombs, or some combination of these. the bayonet's thrust is more of a gesture: a cogent appeal, like the urgent "how's that?" from the whole of the field when a batsman is almost certainly out. but you may go much further back. that predominant fire itself is just such another appeal. its greater volume and better direction are only the terms of an army's or a nation's claim to be registered as the winner of what it had really won long ago when, compared with the other nation, it minded its job and lived cleanly and sanely. all war on the new huge scale may be seen as a process, very expensive, of registration or verification. whenever a war is declared you may say that now, in a sense, it is over at last; all the votes have been cast; the examination papers are written; the time has come for the counting of votes and adjudging of marks. of course, we may still "do our bit," but the possible size of our bit had its limit fixed long ago by the acts of ourselves and our fathers and rulers which made us the men that we are and no more. no use now to try to cadge favour with any ad hoc god of battles. for this, of all gods, is the most dourly protestant. no squaring of him on the deathbeds of people who would not work while it was yet light.

from many points in the field—some of the best were in the tops of high trees on high ground—you could watch through your glass the casting up of accounts. you might survey from beginning to end a british attack up a bare opposite slope, perhaps with home troops on the left and canadian or australasian troops on the right. you had already seen them meet on roads in the rear: battalions of colourless, stunted, half-toothless lads from hot, humid lancashire mills; battalions of slow, staring faces, gargoyles out of the tragical-comical-historical-pastoral edifice of modern english rural life; dominion battalions of men startlingly taller, stronger, handsomer, prouder, firmer in nerve, better schooled, more boldly interested in life, quicker to take means to an end and to parry and counter any new blow of circumstance, men who had learned already to look at our men with the half-curious, half-pitying look of a higher, happier caste at a lower. and now you saw them, all these kinds, arise in one continuous line out of the earth and walk forward to bear in the riddled flesh and wrung spirit the sins of their several fathers, pastors, and masters.

time after time there would come to the watching eye, to the mind still desperately hugging the hope that known causes might not bring their normal effects, the same crushing demonstration that things are as we have made them. sometimes the line of home troops would break into gaps and bunches, lose touch and direction and common purpose, some of the knots plunging on into the back of our barrage or feasting some enemy machine-gunner on their density, others straggling back to the place whence they had started, while the dominion troops still ambled steadily on, their line delicately waving but always continuous, closing again, as living flesh closes over a pinprick, wherever an enemy shell tore a hole.

perhaps the undersized boys from our slums and the under-witted boys from the "agricultural, residential, and sporting estates" of our auctioneers' advertisements would get to their goal, the spirit wrestling prodigies of valour out of the wronged flesh, hold on there for an hour or two with the shells splashing the earth up about them like puddle water when great rain-drops make its surface jump, and then fall back under orders, without any need, the brain of our army failing to know how to use what its muscle had won. then, while you saw the triumphant australians throw back a protective flank from the left of their newly-won front to the english right, far in their rear, you knew bitterly what the australians were saying once more: "they've let us down again!" "another tommy officer who didn't know he'd won!" as if it were the fault, that day, of anyone there! our men could only draw on such funds of nerve and physique, knowledge and skill, as we had put into the bank for them. not they, but their rulers and "betters," had lost their heads in the joy of making money fast out of steam, and so made half of our nation slum-dwellers. it was not they who had moulded english rustic life to keep up the complacency of sentimental modern imitators of feudal barons. it was not they who had made our regular army neither aristocratic, with the virtues of aristocracy, nor democratic, with the different virtues of democracy, nor keenly professional with the professional virtues of gusto and curiosity about the possibilities of its work. delicta majorum immeritus lues. like the syphilitic children of some jolly victorian rake, they could only bring to this harsh examination such health and sanity as all the pleasant vices of victorian and edwardian england had left them.

iii

the winter after the battle of loos a sentry on guard at one part of our line could always see the frustrate skeletons of many english dead. they lay outside our wire, picked clean by the rats, so that the khaki fell in on them loosely—little heaps of bone and cloth half hidden now by nettles and grass. if the sentry had been a year in the army he knew well enough that they had gone foredoomed into a battle lost before a shot was fired. after the boer war, you remember, england, under the first shock of its blunders, had tried to find out why the staff work was so bad. what it found, in the words of a famous report, was that the fashion in sentiment in our regular army was to think hard work "bad form"; a subaltern was felt to be a bit of a scrub if he worried too much about discovering how to support an attack when he might be more spiritedly employed in playing polo; "the nobleness of life," as antony said, when he kissed cleopatra, was to go racing or hunting, not to sit learning how to forecast the course of great battles and how to provide for answering their calls. and so the swathes of little brown bundles, with bones showing through, lay in the nettles and grass.

consider the course of the life of the british regular officer as you had known him in youth—not the pick, the saving few, the unconquerably sound and keen, but the average, staple article made by a sleek, complacent, snobbish, safe, wealth-governed england after her own image. think of his school; of the mystic aureole of quasi-moral beauty attached by authority there to absorption in the easy thing—in play; the almost passionate adoration of all those energies and dexterities which, in this world of evolution towards the primacy of the acute, full brain, are of the least possible use as aids to survival in men and to victory in armies. before he first left home for school he may have been a normal child who only craved to be given some bit, any odd bit, of "real work," as an experience more thrilling than games. like most children, he may have had a zestful command of fresh, vivid, personal speech, his choice of words expressing simply and gaily the individual working of his mind and his joy in its work. through easy contact with gardeners, gamekeepers, and village boys he often had established a quite natural, unconscious friendliness with people of different social grades. he was probably born of the kind that pries young, that ask, when they play on sea sands, why there are tides, and what goes on in the sky that there should be rain. and then down came the shades of the prison-house. to make this large, gay book of fairy tales, the earth, dull and stale to a child importunately fingering at its covers might seem a task to daunt the strongest. but many of the teachers of our youth are indomitable men. they can make earth's most ardent small lover learn from a book what a bore his dear earth can be, with her strings of names of towns, rivers, and lakes, her mileages à faire mourir, and her insufferable tale of flax and jute. with an equal firmness your early power of supple and bright-coloured speech may be taken away and a rag-bag of feeble stock phrases, misfits for all your thoughts, and worn dull and dirty by everyone else, be forced upon you instead of the treasure you had. you may leave school unable to tell what stars are about you at night or to ask your way to a journey's end in any country but your own. between your helpless mind and most of your fellow-countrymen thick screens of division are drawn, so that when you are fifteen you do not know how to speak to them with a natural courtesy; you have a vague idea that they will steal your watch if you leave it about. above all, you have learnt that it is still "bad form" to work; that the youth with brains and no money may well be despised by the youth with money and no brains; that the absorbed student or artist is ignoble or grotesque; that to be able to afford yourself "a good time" is a natural title to respect and regard; and that to give yourself any "good time" that you can is an action of spirit. so it went on at prep. school, public school, sandhurst, camberley. that was how staff college french came to be what it was. and as it was what it was, you can guess what staff college tactics and strategy were, and why all the little brown bundles lay where they did in the nettles and grass.

iv

you are more aware of the stars in war than in peace. a full moon may quite halve the cares of a sentry; the pole star will sometimes be all that a company has, when relieved, to guide it back across country to paradisiac rest; sleeping often under the sky, you come to find out for yourself what nobody taught you at school—how orion is sure to be not there in summer, and aquila always missing in march, and how the great bear, that was straight overhead in the april nights, is wont to hang low in the north in the autumn. childish as it may seem to the wise, a few years' nightly view of these and other invariable arrangements may give a simple soul a surprisingly lively twinge of what the ages of faith seem to have meant by the fear of god—the awesome suspicion that there is some sort of fundamental world order or control which cannot by any means be put off or dodged or bribed to help you to break its own laws. "anything," the old regular warrant-officers say, "can be wangled in the army," but who shall push the dragon or the great dog off his beat? and—who knows?—that may be only a part of a larger system of cause and effect, all of it as hopelessly undodgable.

these apprehensions were particularly apt to arise if you had spent an hour that day in seeing herds of the english "common people" ushered down narrowing corridors of barbed wire into some gap that had all the german machine guns raking its exit, the nature of regular officers' pre-war education in england precluding the prompt evolution of any effectual means on our side to derange the working of this ingenious abattoir. we had asked for it all. we had made the directing brains of our armies the poor things that they were. small blame to them if in this season of liquidation they failed to produce assets which we had never equipped them to earn—mental nimbleness, powers of individual observation, quickness to cap with counter-strokes of invention each new device of the fertile specialists opposite. being as we had moulded them, they had probably done pretty well in doing no worse.

what's done we partly may compute,

but know not what's resisted.

who shall say what efforts it may have cost some of those poor custom-ridden souls not to veto, for good and all, an engine of war so far from "smart" as the tank, or to accept any help at all from such folk as the new-fangled, untraditional airmen, some of whom took no shame to go forth to the fray in pyjamas. not they alone, but all of ourselves, with our boastful chatter about the "public school spirit," our gallant, robust contempt for "swats" and "smugs" and all who invented new means to new ends and who trained and used their brains with a will—we had arranged for these easy battues of thousands of englishmen, who, for their part, did not fail. to-morrow you would see it all again—a few hundred square yards of ground gained by the deaths, perhaps, of twenty thousand men who would

go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot

which is not tomb enough and continent

to hide the slain.

so it would go on, week after week, sitting after sitting of the dismal court that liquidated in the flanders mud our ruling classes' wasted decades, until we either lost the war outright or were saved from utter disaster by clutching at aid from french brains and american numbers. like lucifer when he was confronted with the sky at night, you "looked and sank."

around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,

the army of unalterable law.

what had we done, when we could, that the stars in their courses should fight for us now? or left undone, of all that could provoke this methodical universe of swinging and returning forces to shake off such dust from its constant wheels?

v

"i planted a set of blind hopes in their minds," said prometheus, making it out to be quite a good turn that he had done to mankind. and the dr. relling of ibsen, a kind of prometheus in general practice, kept at hand a whole medicine-chest of assorted illusions to dope his patients with. "illusion, you know," said this sage, "is the tonic to give 'em." it may be. but even illusions cost something. the bill, as hotspur said of the river trent, "comes me cranking in" presently, nature's iron law laying it down that the more superb your state of inflation the deeper shall the dumps occasioned by a puncture be. the promethean gift of mr. dunlop to our race undoubtedly lifted the pastime of cycling out of a somewhat bumpy order of prose into a lyric heaven. and yet the stoutest of all nails could plunge itself into the solid tyre of old without compelling you to walk a foundered pegasus from the top of the honister pass the whole way to keswick, enjoying en route neither the blessing of a bicycle nor that of the unhampered use of shanks' mare.

so war, who keeps such a pump to blow you up with, and also such thorns for your puncturing, had to leave us the "poor shrunken things" that we are, anyhow. it is as if the average man had been passing himself off on himself, in a dream, as the youthful hero of some popular drama, and, in a rousing last act, had departed, in 1914, on excellent terms with himself and the audience, bands playing and flags flying, to start a noble and happy new life on the virgin soil of the "golden west." and now he awakes in the "golden west" on a slobbery and a dirty farm, with all the purchase money still to pay, and tools and manures remarkably dear, and no flag visible, nor instrument of music audible, and dismal reports coming in from neighbouring farmers, and cause and effect as abominably linked one to another as ever, and all the time his mind full of a sour surmise that many sorts of less credulous men have "made a bit" of inordinate size out of the bit that he did rather than made, during the raging and tearing run of the drama now taken off and, as far as may be, forgotten.