A. Hamilton Gibbs

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1

The battery, commanded by I know not whom, went on to the bitter end in that sweeping advance which broke the Hindenburg line and brought the enemy to his knees. Their luck held good, for occasional letters from the subalterns told me that no one else had been killed. The last I heard of them they were at TrÉport, enjoying life with the hope of demobilization dangling in front of their eyes. May it not dangle too long.

For me the war was over. I have never fired a gun again, nor, please God, will I ever do so.

In saying the war was over I was wrong. I should have said the fighting. There were other and equally terrible sides of this world-tragedy which I was destined to see and feel.

Let me sketch briefly the facts which led to my return to duty.

The Medical Authorities sent me to a place called The Funkhole of England, a seaside town where never a bomb from airships or raiding Gothas disturbed the sunny calm, a community of convalescent hospitals with a list of rules as long as your arm, hotels full of moneyed Hebrews, who only journeyed to London by day to make more money, and retired by night to the security of their wives in the Funkhole, shop-keepers who rejoiced in the war because it enabled them to put up their prices two hundred per cent., and indecent flappers always ready to be picked up by any subaltern.

The War Office authorities hastened to notify me that I was now reduced to subaltern, but somehow I was “off” flappers. Another department begged me to get well quickly, because, being no longer fit to command a battery, I was wanted for that long-forgotten liaison job.

The explanation of degrading from Major to subaltern is not forthcoming. Perhaps the Government were thinking of the rate payers. The difference in pay is about two shillings and sixpence a day, and there were many thousands of us thus reduced.—But it does not make for an exuberant patriotism. My reply was that if I didn’t go out as a Major, I should not hurry to get well. This drew a telegram which stated that I was re-appointed acting-Major while employed as liaison officer, but what they gave with one hand they took back with the other, for the telegram ordered me to France again three weeks before the end of my sick leave.

It was a curious return. But for the fact that I was still in uniform I might have been a mere tourist, a spectator. The job was more “cushy” even than that of R.T.O. or M.L.O. Was I glad? Enormously. Was I sorry? Yes, for out there in the thick of it were those men of mine, in a sense my children, who had looked to me for the food they ate, the clothes they wore, the pay they drew, the punishments they received, whose lives had been in my keeping so long, who, for two years, had constituted all my life, with whom I had shared good days and bad, short rations and full, hardships innumerable, suffering indescribable. It was impossible to live softly and be driven in a big Vauxhall car, while they were still out there, without a twinge of conscience, even though one was not fit to go back to them. I slept in a bed with sheets, and now and again a hot bath, receiving letters from home in four days instead of eight, and generally enjoying all the creature comforts which console the back-area officer for the lack of excitement only found in the firing line. It was a period of doing little, observing much and thinking a great deal among those lucky ones of the earth, whose lines had been cast in peaceful waters far behind even the backwash of that cataclysmic tidal wave in which so many less fortunate millions had been sucked under.

My first job was to accompany a party of French war correspondents to the occupied territory which the enemy had recently been forced to evacuate,—Dunkerque, Ostend, Bruges, Courtrai, Denain, Lille. There one marvelled at the courage of those citizens who for four years had had to bow the neck to the invader. From their own mouths we heard stories of the systematic, thought-out cruelty of the Germans who hurt not only the bodies of their victims, but their self-respect, their decency, their honour, their souls. How they survived that interminable hopeless four years of exaggerated brutality and pillage, cut off from all communication with the outside world; fed with stories of ghastly defeats inflicted upon their countrymen and allies, of distrust and revolt between England and France; fined and imprisoned for uncommitted offences against military law, not infrequently shot in cold blood without trial; their women submitted to the last indignities of the “Inspection sanitaire,” irrespective of age or class, wrenched from their homes and deported into the unknown interior, sent to work for the hated enemy behind the firing line, unprotected from the assault of any German soldier or officer,—for those women there were worse things than the firing trenches.

We saw the results of the German Official Department of Demobilization, which had its headquarters in Alsace-Lorraine at Metz, under a General, by whose direct orders all the factories in the occupied regions were dismantled and sent back piecemeal to Germany, the shells of the plant then being dynamited under pretence of military necessity. We saw a country stripped of its resources, gutted, sacked, rendered sterile.

What is the Kultur, the philosophy which not only renders such conduct thinkable, but puts it into the most thorough execution? Are we mad to think that such people can be admitted into a League of Nations until after hundreds of years of repentance and expiation in sackcloth and ashes? They should be made the slaves of Europe, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the road-sweepers and offal-burners, deprived of a voice in their own government, without standing in the eyes of all peoples.

2

French General Headquarters, to which I was then sent as liaison officer, was established in a little old-world town, not far from Paris, whose walls had been battered by the English centuries ago. Curious to think that after hundreds of years of racial antagonism we should at last have our eyes opened to the fact that our one-time enemies have the same qualities of courage and endurance, a far truer patriotism and a code of honour which nothing can break. No longer do we think of them as flippant and decadent. We know them for a nation of big-hearted men, loyal to the death, of lion-like courage, with the capacity for hanging on, which in our pride we ascribed only to the British bull dog. We have seen Verdun. We have stood side by side with them in mud and blood, in fat days and lean, and know it to be true.

In this little town, where the bells chimed the swift hours, and market day drew a concourse of peasant women, we sat breathless at the ’phone, hourly marking the map that liberated each time a little more of France. Days of wild hope that the end was at hand, the end which such a short time back had seemed so infinitely remote, days when the future began to be a possibility, that future which for four years one had not dared to dream about. Will the rose colours ever come back? Or will the memory of those million dead go down with one to the grave?

The Armistice was signed. The guns had stopped. For a breathless moment the world stood still. The price was paid. The youth of England and France lay upturned to the sky. Three thousand miles across the ocean American mothers wept their unburied sons. Did Germany shed tears of sorrow or rage?

The world travail was over, and even at that sacred moment when humanity should have been purged of all pettiness and meanness, should have bowed down in humility and thankfulness, forces were astir to try and raise up jealousy, hatred and enmity between England, France and America.

Have we learnt nothing? Are these million dead in vain? Are we to let the pendulum swing back to the old rut of dishonest hypocritical self-seeking, disguised under the title of that misunderstood word “patriotism?” Have we not yet looked into the eyes of Truth and seen ourselves as we are? Is all this talk of world peace and league of nations mere newspaper cant, to disguise the fear of being out-grabbed at the peace conference? Shall we return to lying, hatred and all malice and re-crucify Christ? What is the world travail for? To produce stillborn through our own negligence the hope of Peace? The leopard cannot change his spots, you say. My answer is that the leopard does not want to. What does the present hold out to us who have been through the Valley of the Shadow? What does it look like to us who gaze down upon it from the pinnacle of four years upon the edge of eternity?

Your old men shall see visions and your young men shall dream dreams.

The vision of the old men has been realized. In the orgy of effort for world domination they have dug up a world unrest fertilized by the sightless faces of youth upturned to the sky. Their working hypothesis was false. The result is failure. They have destroyed themselves also in the conflagration which they started. It has burnt up the ancient fetishes, consumed their shibboleths. Their day is done. They stand among the still-smoking ruins, naked and very ugly.

The era of the young men has begun. Bent under the Atlas-like burden loaded upon their shoulders, they have stood daily for five years upon the edge of eternity. They have stared across into the eyes of Truth, some unrecognizing, others with disdain, but many there are in whose returning faces is the dawn of wisdom. They are coming back, the burden exchanged. On them rests the fate of the unborn. Already their feet are set upon the new way. But are they strong enough unaided to keep the pendulum from swinging back? No. It is too heavy. Every one of us must let ourselves hear the new note in their voices, calling us to the recognition of the ideal. For five years all the science, philosophy and energy of mankind has been concentrated on the art of dealing death. The young men ask that mankind should now concentrate on the art of giving life. We have proved the power within us because the routine of the world’s great sin has established this surprising paradox, that we daily gave evidence of heroism, tolerance, kindliness, brotherhood.

Shall we, like Peter who denied Christ, refuse to recognize the greatness within ourselves? We found truth while we practised war. Let us carry it to the practice of peace.

THE END

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