IX

"We are Fred Karno's[1]Army,[121]The ragtime A.S.C.,[2]We cannot work, we do not fight,So what ruddy use are we?And when we get to Berlin,The Kaiser he will say,Hoch, hoch, mein Gott!What a ruddy rotten lot,Is the ragtime A.S.C."

The other was a refrain to the tune of a Salvation Army hymn, "When the Roll is called up Yonder":—

"When you wash us in the water,That you washed your dirty daughter,Oh! then we will be much whiter!We'll be whiter than the whitewash on the wall."

Eventually the companies arrived in the village at all hours of the morning. No one was up. We saw that the men received their meals, which had been prepared by the cooks who had gone ahead in motor lorries. They did not spend much time over the food, for in less than half an hour "K" billets—the same Hospice de Ste. Berthe—were perfectly quiet.We then wandered away with our servants, to be met at each of our houses by hastily clad landladies, with sleep in their eyes and smoking lamps or guttering candles in their hands.

The next morning the Company paraded at half-past nine, and the day was spent in reforming sections, in issuing new kits to the men, and in working the rosters for the various courses. On Tuesday, just as breakfast was starting, an orderly brought a couple of memorandums from Battalion Orderly Room for McKnutt and Borwick.

No one watched them read the chits, but Talbot, glancing up from his plate, saw a look on Borwick's face. It was a look of the purest joy.

"What is it?" he said.

"Leave, my God!" replied Borwick; "and McKnutt's got it too."

"When are you going? To-day?" shouted the Old Bird.

"Yes; there's a car to take us to the station in a quarter of an hour."

They both left their unfinished breakfastsand tore off to their billets. There it was but a matter of moments to throw a few things into their packs. No one ever takes any luggage when going on leave. They tore back to the mess to leave instructions for their servants, and we strolled outen masseto see the lucky fellows off.

The box-body drew away from where we were standing. We watched it grow smaller and smaller down the long white road, and turned back with regrets and pleasure in our hearts. With regrets, that we ourselves were not the lucky ones, and knowing that for some of us leave would never come; with pleasure, because one is always glad that a few of the deserving reap a small share of their reward.

Then, strolling over to the Parade Ground, we heard the "Five Minutes" sounding. Some dashed off to get their Sam Brownes, others called for their servants to wipe a few flecks of dust from their boots and puttees.

When the "Fall In" began, the entire Company was standing "At Ease" on the Parade Ground. As the last note of the call sounded,the whole parade sprang to "Attention," and the Major, who had been standing on the edge of the field, walked forward to inspect.

Every morning was spent in this manner, except for those who had special courses to follow. We devoted all our time and attention to "Forming Fours" in as perfect a manner as possible; to saluting with the greatest accuracy and fierceness; and to unwearying repetition of every movement and detail, until machinelike precision was attained.

All that we were doing then is the very foundation and essence of good discipline. Discipline is the state to which a man is trained, in order that under all circumstances he shall carry out without secondary reasoning any order that may be given him by a superior. There is nothing of a servile nature in this form of obedience. Each man realizes that it is for the good of the whole. By placing his implicit confidence in the commands of one of a higher rank than his own, he gives an earnest of his ability to himself command at some future time. It is but another proof of the old adage,that the man who obeys least is the least fitted to command.

Liberty Loan Parade in New YorkCopyright by Underwood & Underwood, N.Y.A BRITISH TANK IN THE LIBERTY LOAN PARADE IN NEW YORKToList

A BRITISH TANK IN THE LIBERTY LOAN PARADE IN NEW YORKToList

When this war started, certain large formations, with the sheer lust for fighting in their blood, did not, while being formed, realize the absolute necessity of unending drill and inspection. Their first cry was, "Give us a rifle, a bayonet, and a bomb, show us how to use them, and we will do the rest." Acting upon this idea, they flung themselves into battle, disregarding the iron rules of a preliminary training. At first their very impetus and courage carried them over incredible obstacles. But after a time, and as their best were killed off, the original blaze died down, and the steady flame of ingrained discipline was not there to take the place of burning enthusiasm. The terrible waste and useless sacrifice that ensued showed only too plainly that even the greatest individual bravery is not enough.

In this modern warfare there are many trials and experiences unimagined before, which wear down the actual will-power of the men who undergo them. When troops are forcedto sit in a trench under the most terrific shell-fire, the nerve-racking noise, the sight of their comrades and their defences being blown to atoms, and the constant fear that they themselves will be the next to go, all deprive the ordinary mind of vital initiative. Having lost the active mental powers that a human being possesses, they are reduced to the level of machines. The officers and non-commissioned officers, on whom the responsibility of leadership rests, have that spur to maintain their equilibrium, but the private soldiers, who have themselves only to think of, are the most open to this devastating influence. If these machines are to be controlled, as they must be, by an exterior intelligence, they must obey automatically, and if in the past automatic obedience has not been implanted, there is nothing to take its place.

The only means by which to obtain inherent response to a given order is so to train a man in minute details, by constant, inflexible insistence on perfection, that it becomes part of his being to obey without thinking.

It must not be presumed that, in obtaining this almost inhuman reaction, all independent qualities are obliterated. For, though a man's mind is adjusted to carrying out, without questioning, any task that is demanded of him, yet in the execution of this duty he is allowed the full scope of his invention and initiative.

Thus, by this dull and unending routine, we laid the foundation of that inevitable success toward which we were slowly working.

When the Company dismissed, the Major, Talbot, and the Old Bird walked over to lunch together.

"Well, it's a great war, isn't it?" said the Major, turning to the other two.

"It's very nice to have got through a couple of shows, sir," replied Talbot. "What do you think about it, Old Bird?"

"Well, of course, war is all very well for those who like it. But give me the Base every time," answered the Old Bird, true to his reputation. Then, turning to the Major with his most ingratiating smile, he said, "By the way, sir, what about a few days in Boulogne?"

[1]A late, third-rate English pantomime producer.

[2]Stands for Army Service Corps, and its equivalent in the American Army is the Quartermaster's Corps.

It has often been observed that if this war is to end war for all time, and if all the sacrifices and misery and suffering will help to prevent any recurrence of them, then it is well worth while.

In these days of immediate demands and quick results, this question is too vague and too far-reaching to bring instant consolation. Apart from that, too, it cannot decide whether any war, however great, can ever abolish the natural and primitive fighting instinct in man.

The source from which we must draw the justification for our optimism lies much nearer to hand. We must regard the effect that warring life has already produced upon each individual member of the nations who are and who are not engaged in it.

At the very heart of it is the effect on the man who is actually fighting. Take the caseof him who before the war was either working in a factory, who was a clerk in a business house, or who was nothing at all beyond the veriest loafer and bar-lounger. To begin with, he was perhaps purely selfish. The foundation of his normal life was self-protection. Whether worthless or worthy, whether hating or respecting his superiors, the private gain and comfort for himself and his was the object of his existence. He becomes a soldier, and that act alone is a conversion. His wife and children are cared for, it is true; but he himself, for a shilling a day, sells to his country his life, his health, his pleasures, and his hopes for the future. To make good measure he throws in cheerfulness, devotion, philosophy, humour, and an unfailing kindness. One man, for instance, sells up three grocery businesses in the heart of Lancashire, an ambition which it has taken him ten years to accomplish. Without a trace of bitterness he divorces himself from the routine of a lifetime, and goes out to France to begin life again at the very bottom of a new ladder. He who for years had many men underhim is now under all, and receives, unquestioningly, orders which in a different sphere he had been accustomed to give. Apart from the mere letter of obedience and discipline he gains a spirit of devotion and self-sacrifice, which turns the bare military instrument into a divine virtue. He may, for instance, take up the duties of an officer's servant. Immediately he throws himself whole-heartedly into a new form of selfless generosity, which leads him to a thousand ways of care and forethought, that even the tenderest woman could hardly conceive. The man who receives this unwavering devotion can only accept it with the knowledge that no one can deserve it, and that it is greater gain to him who gives than to him who takes.

What life of peace is there that produces this god-like fibre in the plainest of men? Why, indeed, is it produced in the life of war? It is because in war sordidness and petty worries are eliminated; because the one great and ever-present fear, the fear of death, reduces all other considerations to their proper values. The actual fear of death is always present, but thisfear itself cannot be sordid when men can meet it of their own free will and with the most total absence of cringing or of cowardice.

In commercial rivalry a man will sacrifice the friend of years to gain a given sum, which will insure him increased material comforts. In war a man will deliberately sacrifice the life for which he wanted those comforts, to save perhaps a couple of men who have no claim on him whatsoever. He who before feared any household calamity now throws himself upon a live bomb, which, even though he might escape himself, will without his action kill other men who are near it. This deed loses none of its value because of the general belief among soldiers that life is cheap. Other men's lives are cheap. One's own life is always very dear.

One of the most precious results has been the resurrection of the quality of admiration. The man who before the war said, "Why is he my master?" is now only too glad to accept a leader who is a leader indeed. He has learned that as his leader cannot do without him, so he cannot do without his leader, and althougheach is of equal importance in the scheme of affairs, their positions in the scheme are different. He has learned that there is a higher equality than the equality of class: it is the equality of spirit.

This same feeling is reflected, more especially among the leaders of the men, in the complete disappearance of snobbishness. No such artificial imposition can survive in a life where inherent value automatically finds its level; where a disguise which in peace-time passed as superiority, now disintegrates when in contact with this life of essentials. For war is, above all, a reduction to essentials. It is the touchstone which proves the qualities of our youth's training. All those pleasures that formed the gamut of a young man's life either fall away completely or find their proper place. Sport, games, the open-air life, have taught him that high cheerfulness, through failure or success, which makes endurance possible. But the complicated, artificial pleasures of ordinary times have receded into a dim, unspoken background. The wholesomeness of the existence that henow leads has taught him to delight in the most simple and natural of things. This throwing aside of the perversions and fripperies of an over-civilization has forced him to regard them with a disgust that can never allow him to be tempted again by their inducements of delight and dissipation. The natural, healthy desires which a man is sometimes inclined to indulge in are no longer veiled under a mask of hypocrisy. They are treated in a perfectly outspoken fashion as the necessary accompaniments to a hard, open-air life, where a man's vitality is at its best. In consequence of this, and as the result of the deepening of man's character which war inevitably produces, the sense of adventure and mystery which accompanied the fulfilment of these desires has disappeared, and with it to a great extent the desires themselves have assumed a far less importance.

In peace, and especially in war, the young man's creed is casualness. Not the casualness of carelessness, but that which comes from the knowledge that up to each given point he hasdone his best. It is this fundamental peace of mind which comes to a soldier that forms the beauty of his life. The order received must be obeyed in its exact degree, neither more nor less; and the responsibility, though great, is clearly defined. Each man must use his individual intelligence within the scope of the part assigned to him. The responsibility differs in kind, but not in degree, and the last link of the chain is as important as the first. There can be no shirking or shifting, and, knowing this, each task is finished, rounded out, and put away. One might think that this made thought mechanical: but it is mechanical only in so far as each man's intelligence is concentrated on his own particular duty, and each part working in perfect order contributes to the unison through which the whole machine develops its power. Thus the military life induces in men a clearer and more accurate habit of thought, and teaches each one to do his work well and above all to do his own work only.

From this very simplicity of life, which brings out a calmness of mind and that equabletemperament that minor worries can no longer shake, springs the mental leisure which gives time for other and unaccustomed ideas. Men who wittingly, time and again, have faced but escaped death, will inevitably begin to think what death may mean. As the first lessons of obedience teach each man that he needs a leader to pass through a certain crisis, so the crisis of death, where man must pass alone, demands a still higher Leader. With the admission that no man is self-sufficient, that sin of pride, which is the strongest barrier between a man and his God, falls away. He is forced, if only in self-defence, to recognize that faith in some all-sufficient Power is the only thing that will carry him through. If he could cut away the thousand sins of thought, man would automatically find himself at faith. It is the central but often hidden point of our intelligence; and although there are a hundred roads that lead to it, they may be completely blocked. The clean flame of the disciplined life burns away the rubbish that chokes these roads, and faith becomes a nearer and more constant thing.

The sadness of war lies in the loss of actual personalities, but it is only by means of these losses that this surrender can be attained.

It must not be thought that faith comes overnight as a free gift. It is a long and slow process of many difficult steps. There may be first the actual literal crumbling, unknown in peace-time, of one's solid surroundings, to be repeated perhaps again and again until the old habit of reliance upon them is uprooted. Then comes the realization that this life at the front has but two possible endings. The first is to be so disabled that a man's fighting days are over. The other is death. Instant death rather than a slow death from wounds. Every man hopes for a wound which will send him home to England. That, however, is only a respite, as his return to France follows upon his convalescence. The other most important step is the loss of one's friends. It is not the fact of actually seeing them killed, for in the chaos and tumult of a battle the mind hardly registers such impressions. One's only feeling is the purely primitive one of relief, that it is another and not one's self. Itis only afterwards, when the excitement is over, and a man realizes that again there is a space of life, for him, but not for his friend, that the loneliness and the loss are felt. He then says to himself, "Why am I spared when many better men have gone?" At first resentment swallows up all other emotions. In time, when this bitterness begins to pass, the belief that somehow this loss is of some avail, carries him a little farther on the road to faith. This all comes to the man who before the war believed that the world was made for his pleasure, and who treated life from that standpoint. All that he wanted he took without asking. Now, all that he has he gives without being asked.

Woman, too, gives more than herself. She gives her men, her peace of mind and all that makes her life worth living. The man after all may have little hope, but while he is alive he has the daily pleasures of health, vitality, excitement, and a thousand interests. A woman has but a choice of sorrows: the sorrow of unbearable suspense or the acceptance of the end.

Yet it needed this war to show again towomen what they could best do in life: to love their men, bear their children, care for the sick and suffering, and learn to endure. It has taught them also to accept from man what he is able or willing to give, and to admit a higher claim than their own. They have been forced to put aside the demands and exactions which they felt before were their right, and to accept loneliness and loss without murmur or question.

A woman who loses her son loses the supreme reason of her existence; and yet the day after the news has come, she goes back to her work for the sons of other women. If she has more sons to give she gives them, and faces again the eternal suspense that she has lived through before. The younger women, who in times of peace would have looked forward to an advantageous and comfortable marriage, will now marry men whom they may never see again after the ten days' honeymoon is over, and will unselfishly face the very real possibility of widowhood and lonely motherhood. They have had to learn the old lesson that work for others is the only cure for sorrow, andthey have learned too that it is the only cure for all those petty worries and boredoms which assailed them in times of peace. If they have learned this, then again one may say that war is worth while.

What effect has the war had upon those countries who in the beginning were not engaged in it? The United States, for instance, has for three years been an onlooker. The people of that country have had every opportunity to view, in their proper perspectives, the feelings and changes brought about among the men and women of the combatant countries. At first, the enormous casualties, the sufferings and the sorrow, led them to believe that nothing was worth the price they would have to pay, were they to enter into the lists. For in the beginning, before that wonderful philosophy of spirit and cheerfulness of outlook arose, and before the far-reaching effects of the sacrifice of loved ones could be perceived, there seemed to be little reason or right for such a train of desolation. They were perfectly justified, too, in thinking this, when insufficient time had elapsedto enable them to judge of the immense, sweeping, beneficial effects that this struggle has produced in the moral fibre and stamina of the nations engaged.

It must be remembered that the horrors of the imagination are far worse than the realities. The men who fight and the women who tend their wounds suffer mentally far less than those who paint the pictures in their minds, from data which so very often are grossly exaggerated. One must realize that the hardships of war are merely transient. Men suffer untold discomforts, and yet, when these sufferings are over and mind and body are at ease for a while, they are completely forgotten. The only mark they leave is the disinclination to undergo them again. But on those who do not realize them in their actuality, they cause a far more terrifying effect.

Now, others, as well, have discovered that war's advantages outweigh so much its losses. They who with their own eyes had seen the wonderful fortitude with which men stand pain, and the amazing submission with whichwomen bear sorrow, returned full of zeal and enthusiasm, to carry the torch of this uplifting flame to their own countrymen.

Others will realize, too, that although one may lose one's best, yet one's worst is made better. The women will find that the characters of their men will become softened. The clear-cut essentials of a life of war must make the mind of man direct. It may be brutal in its simplicity, but it is clear and frank. Yet to counteract this, the continual sight of suffering bravely borne, the deep love and humility that the devotion of others unconsciously produces, bring about this charity of feeling, this desire to forgive and this moderation in criticism, which is so marked in those who have passed through the strenuous, searing realities of war. Since the thirty pieces of silver, no minted coin in the world has bought so much as has the King's shilling of to-day.

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