I

A book may be bad and yet tell you much.

Lately I came across such a book. It is surely one of the crossest books ever written. Its author fought in France, in the ranks, for a good many months of the war. He must have been one of the men who make sergeants grey—a "proper lawyer," as Regulars call the type which a cotton district labels as "self-acting mules."

I seem to know that man. He was a volunteer, but he would not enlist until conscription came in, because of some precious doctrine he had about younger men without families. When he did join his first act was to ask to speak to the colonel. He was aggrieved because army doctors would not act, when he desired it, except as such. When anyone checked him he felt an ardent thirst to "explain," and the explanation was always that he who had checked was wrong. In the field he kept a diary and sternly would he note on its recording page that tea one day—nay, on more than one—was served "very late indeed." Heinous!

The continued existence of war is precarious. More than the League of Nations menaces its future. For it depends, at the last, on the infrequency of "proper lawyers." Armies can now be made, and moved about when made, only because the plain man who keeps the world going round does not stick up for the last ounce of his rights, or stick out for the joys of having the last word, so dourly as these. Even to keep up a game with so modest an element of voluntaryism about it as penal justice you have to have some little effort of co-operation all round. If your convicts will not even eat the whole thing begins crumbling. The "suffragettes" showed us that. A pioneer still earlier, an Indian coolie, proved it in a Fijian gaol. Were every soldier like this diarist war would have to be dropped, not because men were too good, but because they were too prickly.

II

And yet the book told something which no other book has yet succeeded in telling you. Wordy, cantankerous, dull, repeating itself like a decimal, padded with cheap political "thoughts" gathered from old "stunts" in bad papers—still, it came nearer than any other to showing you the way trench warfare struck a mind and soul quite commonplace in everything except a double dose of native sourness. Here was nothing of M. Barbusse's doctrinaire fire to make the author pervert or exaggerate. No thrill of drastic passion, not even the passionate self-pity of Dickens describing his childhood as Copperfield's, stirred the plodding and crabbed narrative. The writer seemed too peevish to be at the pains to beautify or exalt. And so his account of the bungled attack in which he took part is extraordinarily true to all that the commonplace man found to be left in almost any attack when once all the picturesque fluff filling the current literary pictures of it were found not to be there—the touch of bathos; the supposed heroic moment only seeming a bit of a "dud," a miscarriage; the hugger-mugger element of confusion; the baffling way that the real thing did not so often give men obvious gallant things to do as irritating puzzles to solve, muddles to liquidate at short notice; the queer flashes of revelation, in contact with individual enemies, of the bottomless falsity of the cheaper kind of current war psychology.

Advances, however, were far from being the staple of warfare. They caused the most losses, but still they did less than the years of less sensational routine to make what changes were made by the war in the minds of the men in the ranks. And here our pettish author found the congenial theme for his own acrid, accurate method. His trivial reiterations succeed, in the end, in piling up in the reader's mind an image of that old trench life as the sum of innumerable dreary units of irksome fatigue. This was the normal life of the infantry private in France. For N.C.O.'s it was lightened by the immunity of their rank from fatigue work in the technical sense. For the officer it was much further lightened by better quarters and the servant system. For most of his time the average private was tired. Fairly often he was so tired as no man at home ever is in the common run of his work.

If a company's trench strength was low and sentry-posts abounded more than usual in its sector a man might, for eight days running, get no more than one hour off duty at any one time, day or night. If enemy guns were active many of these hours off guard duty might have to be spent on trench repair. After one of these bad times in trenches a company or platoon would sometimes come out on to the road behind the communication trench like a flock of over-driven sheep. The weakest ones would fall out and drop here and there along the road, not as a rule fainting, but in the state of a horse dead-beat, to whom any amount of thrashing seems preferable to going on. Men would come out light-headed with fatigue, and ramble away to the men next them about some great time which they had had, or meant to have, at home. Or a man would march all right till the road fetched a bend, and then he would march straight on into the ditch in his sleep. Upon a greasy road with a heavy camber I have seen a used-up man get the illusion, on a night-march back to billets, that he was walking on a round, smooth, horizontal pole or convex plank above some fearsome sort of gulf. He would struggle hard to recover imaginary losses of footing, pant and sweat and scrape desperately sideways with his feet like a frightened young horse new to harness when it leans in against the pole, with its feet skidding outwards on the setts. Down he would go, time after time, in the mud, each time as unable to rise of himself, under the weight of his pack and equipment, as any mediÆval knight unhorsed and held down by the weight of his armour. Hauled up again to his feet, to be driven along like one of the spent cab-horses in Naples just strong enough to move when up, but not to rise, he would in another five minutes be agonizing again on the greasy pole of his delirium.

The querulist of the book took it hard, I remember, that more kind words did not come to the men. He saw his own lot very clearly, but not so clearly the lot of those other unfortunates who had to put the job through. A man who finds himself in charge of a spent horse at night, in a place where there may be no safe waiting till dawn, must do something. Ten to one he will flog or kick the horse into moving. He may feel that he, not the horse, is the beast; but still he will do it. So, too, will he bully and curse exhausted men into safety. That was what happened. Every decent N.C.O. and company officer—and far the larger part were decent—did what they could to humour and "buck" the bad cases through the pangs of endurance. Some would reach the journey's end carrying whole faggots of rifles. Some would put by their own daily rations of rum to ginger beaten men through the last mile. But there would come times when only hard driving seemed to be left. Bella, horrida bella!

III

Suppose those first eight days in the front and support trenches to be the beginning of a divisional tour of sixteen days' duty in the line. For four days now the weary men would be in reserve, under enemy fire, but not in trenches; probably in the cellars of ruined houses. But these were not times of rest. Each day or night every man would make one or more journeys back to the trenches that they had left carrying some load of food, water, or munitions up to the three companies in trenches, or perhaps leading a pack-mule over land to some point near the front line, under cover of night. Even to lead a laden mule in the dark over waste ground confusingly wired and trenched is work; to get him back on to his feet when fallen and wriggling, in wild consternation, among a tangle of old barbed wire may be quite hard work.

In intervals between these journeys most men would lie in the straw in the cellars or hobble weakly about the outside of the premises, looking as boys sometimes do when stiff with many hearty hacks sustained in a hard game of football, with a chill after it. They crawled in and out of their billets like late autumn bees, feebly scraping the eight days' plating of mud off their clothes and cleaning their jack-knives after meals with the languor of the elders in the Bible to whom the grasshopper was a burden. A few robust spirits, armed with craft and subtlety more fully than the rest, would strike out, whenever released, for some "just-a-minute," or estaminet, not too far off, nor yet too near, and there lie perdus, lest the Company Orderly Sergeant warn them for some new liturgy. This defensive policy did not lighten the work of their brethren.

After four days of their labours as sumpter mules, or muleteers, the company would plod back for another four days of duty in trenches, come out yet more universally tired at their end, and drift back to rest-billets, out of ordinary shell-fire, for their sixteen days or so of "divisional rest." Here their work was really lighter, but still it was work and not rest. It did not wholly wind up in most of the men the spring that had run down while they were in the line. And then the division would go again into the line, and the old cycle be worked through once more. So most of the privates were tired the whole of the time; sometimes to the point of torment, sometimes much less, but always more or less tired.

IV

Many, of course, lost health and drifted "down the line," as it was called, to the base, where work might be light, but much of the company rather more blighting than any work to the spirit. Hither, to all the divisional base depots and into the ultimate dust-hole or sink that was called "Base Details," there gravitated most of the walking wreckage and wastage, physical and moral, of active warfare: convalescent, sick and wounded from hospital, men found too old or too young for trench work, broken-nerved men smuggled out of the way before disaster should come, and malingerers triumphant and chuckling, or only semi-successful, suspect, and tediously over-acting.

There was the good man fretting and raging to get back to his friends and the fight, away from this tainted backwater in which the swelling flotillas of the unfit and the unwilling were left to rot at their moorings. There was the pallid and bent London clerk, faintly disguised in khaki but too blind to fight, now working furiously fifteen hours each day of his seven-day week in the orderly room—no Sunday here, no Saturday afternoon—for pure love of international right. There was the dug-out, the Grenadier Guards sergeant-major of sixty, the handsome and melancholy old boy, a Victorian survivor into our little vulgar age, with a careful and dignified manner and mighty memories of a radiant past in London, when all parades, for a good-conduct-man well up in his drill, were over by half-past ten in the morning and he had a permanent midnight pass into barracks and so could act as a super at one of the theatres every night except when doing a guard, and see life and move among genius and beauty, making good money. Oh, yes, he had acted with Irving and Booth, and lived the life, and heard the chimes at midnight.

But also the veteran crooks, old dregs of the Regular Army, Queen Victoria's worst bargains, N.C.O.'s who would boast that they had not been once on parade in the last twenty years, waiters and caterers for the whole of their martial careers till the liquor fairly lipped over the edge of their eyelids and bleached the blue of their eyes. You would hear one of them boast that no doctor on earth could find him out to be fit when he, the tactician, wished otherwise. Another had made pathological studies, learning up the few conjectural symptoms of maladies that show no outward trace; as science advanced to the point of recording detectively the true state of the heart he had deftly changed ground, relinquished rheumatism of that organ and done some work of research into pains in the head; much faith did he put, too, in the sciatic nerve. When a couple of these savants slept in one tent they would argue after Lights Out—was sciatica safest, or shell-shock, or general debility? "Them grey hairs should be a lot of use to you, corp.," one of them would quite feelingly say to a new man in the tent, "when you want to get swinging the lead."

While these ignoble presences befouled the air of a base, good things, also, were there; but you seldom quite knew which was which. All very well for the King to come out with his "Go, hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques and you were not there." But if you, too, were not at the battle—if some unlucky effect of combustion compelled you to live as a messmate of Crillon, far, far from Arques when the battle was on, you would have to use tact. Somehow the man who was undisguisedly keen to get back to the centre of things felt a slight coldness pervading the air about him. It was as if a workman, who might have so easily let well alone, had sinned against the trade-union spirit, helped to raise the standard of employers' expectation, forced the pace of dutifulness in a world where authority could be trusted to speed things up quite enough. Even officers tended to deprecate the higher temperatures of ardour in other ranks of base establishments. "You're out for distinction,"—one honest rationalist would advise—"that's what it is. Well, trust to me—up the line's not the place where you get it. Every time a war ends you'll find most of the decorations go to the people at G.H.Q., L. of C., and the bases. So, if you want a nice row of ribbons to show to your kiddies, stop here." And another would put it more subtly: "Isn't one's duty, as a rule, just here and now?" Some were good-natured; they were not for keeping the primrose path all to themselves. Others were anxious lest the taking of steep and thorny paths, as they thought them, should come to be "the done thing."

V

The men who could not shirk the choice of Hercules, for other people, were the doctors. The stay of every N.C.O. or man at a base depot was on probation. Each had to go before a Medical Board soon after he came. It adjudged him either T.B. (Temporary Base) or P.B. (Permanent Base). If marked T.B. he went before the Board again once a week, and each time he might be marked T.B. again, or, if his disablement was thought graver or more likely to last, P.B.; or he might be marked A. (Active Service), and then he would join the next draft from home going up to his own battalion or another battalion of his regiment. When once a man was marked P.B. he only went before the Board once a month, and each time he, too, might be marked either P.B., T.B., or A.

Chance relegated me once for some weeks to a base and gave me the job of marching parties of crocks, total and partial, real, half-real, and sham, across the sand dunes to the place where the faculty did its endeavour to sort them. A picture remains of a hut with a long table in it: two middle-aged army doctors sitting beyond it, like dons at a Viva, and each of my party in turn taking his stand at attention, my side of the table, facing the Board, like so many Oliver Twists. The presiding officer takes a manifest pride in knowing all the guile and subtlety of soldier-men. No taking him in—that is proclaimed in every look and tone. He has had several other parties before him to-day, and the lamp of his faith, never dazzling while these rites are on, has burnt low.

"Well, my man—cold feet, I suppose?" he begins, to the first of my lamentable party. As some practitioners are said to begin all treatments with a prefatory purge, so would this psychologist start with a good full dose of insult and watch the patient's reaction under the stimulus.

"No, sir, me 'eart's thrutched up," says the examinee. Then, while the Board perforates him from head to foot for some seconds with a basilisk stare of unbelief, he dribbles out at intervals, in a voice that bespeaks falling hope, such ineffective addenda as "Can't get me sleep" and "Not a smile in me."

"Very picturesque, indeed," says the senior expert in doubting. "We'll see to that 'thrutched' heart of yours. Kardiagraph case. Next man."

The suspect, duly spat upon, slinks out. The next man takes his place at the table. The president gives him the Dogberry eye that means: "Masters, it is proved already that you are little better than false knaves; and it will go near to be thought so shortly." What he says is: "Another old hospital bird? Eh? Now, hadn't you better get back to work before you're in trouble?"

The target of this consputation is almost convinced by its force that he must be guilty of something, if only he knew what it was. Still, he repeats authority's last diagnosis as well as he can: "Mine's Arthuritic rheumatism, sir. An' piles."

"Fall out and strip. Next man." While the next is taking his stand the presiding M.O. has been making a note, and does not look up before saying "Well, what's the matter with you—besides rheumatism?"

"No rheumatism, sir. And nothing else." The voice is as stiff as it dares.

The presiding M.O. seems taken aback. Why, here is a fellow not playing up to him! Making a nasty break in the long line of cases that fed his darling cynicism so well! Flat burglary as ever was committed. The second member of the Board comes to life and begins in a tone that savours of dissatisfaction: "Well, you're the first man——"

"I'm an N.C.O., sir." The young lance-sergeant's voice is again about as stiff as is safe. Quite safe, though, this time. For the presiding M.O. is a Regular. Verbal points of military correctitude are the law and the prophets to him. He cannot be wholly sorry when junior colleagues, temporary commissioners, slip up on even the least of these shreds of orange-peel. Like Susan Nipper, he knows his place—"me being a permanency"—and thinks that "temporaries" ought to know theirs. So he amends the outsider's false start to: "You're the first N.C.O. or man who has come before us this morning and not said he had rheumatism."

The sergeant, whom I have known for some days as a choleric body, holds his tongue, having special reasons just now not to risk a court-martial. "Well," the president snaps as if in resentment of this self-control, "what is the matter with you?"

"Fit as can be, sir."

"What are you doing down here, then, away from your unit?"

"Obeying orders of Medical Board, sir. No. 8 General Hospital, December 8."

"Not sorry, either, I daresay," the president mutters, wobbling back towards his first line of approach to the business. "Not very keen to go back up the line, sergeant, eh?"

"It's all I want, sir, thank you." The sergeant puts powerful brakes on his tongue and says only that. But he has sadly disconcerted the faculty. A major with twenty years' service has cast himself for the fine sombre part of recording angel to note all the cowardice and mendacity that he can. And here is a minor actor forgetting his part and putting everything out. From where I am keeping a wooden face near the door I see opposition arising in the heart of the outraged psychologist beyond the table.

A sound professional instinct reinforces the personal one. Whenever a soldier goes before a Medical Board it is soon clear that he wants to be thought either less fit than he is or more fit. The doctor's first impulse, as soon as he sees which way the man's wishes tend, is to lean towards the other. And this, in due measure, is just. We all understate or overstate symptoms to our own family doctors according to what we fear or desire. The doctor rightly tries to detect the disturbing force in the patient's mind, and to discount for it duly—just like "laying-off" for a side-wind in shooting. So now the president sees light again. The Board is now out to find the lance-sergeant a crock. "Hold out your wrist," says the senior member. The pulse is jealously felt.

"Rotten!" the senior member says to the junior. Then, penetratingly, to the sergeant: "What's that cicatrix you've got on the back of your hand? Both hands! Show me here."

Two spongy, purplish-red pads of new flesh are inspected. "Burns, scarcely healed!" says the president wrathfully. "Skin just the strength of wet tissue-paper! Man alive, you've a bracelet of ulcers all round your wrists. Never wash, eh?" When liquid fire flayed a man's hands to the sleeve, but not further, the skin was apt to break out, as he recovered, in small, deep boils about the frontier of the new skin and the old. The sergeant does not answer. He wants no capital punishment under the Army act.

"Man's an absolute wreck," says the major. "Debility, wounds imperfectly healed, blood-poisoning likely. Not fit for the line for two months to come. P.B.—eh?" he turns to his junior.

"That's what I should say, sir," the junior concurs, in a tone of desperate independence.

"Next man," says the major. Before the lance-sergeant has quite stalked to the door the major calls after him "Sergeant!"

"Sir?" says the sergeant, furious and red but contained.

"You're a damned good man, but it won't do," says the major. "Good luck to you!" Great are the forces of decent human relentment after a hearty let-out with the temper.

The inquisition proceeds, still on that Baconian principle of finding out which is a man's special bent and then bending the twig pretty hard in the other direction; still, too, with the dry light of reason a little suffused, as Bacon would say, with the humours of the affections, of vanity, ill-temper and impatience. Nearly everybody is morally weary. Most of the men inspected have outlived the first profuse impulse to court more of bodily risk than authority expressly orders. Most of the doctors, living here in the distant rear of the war, have outlived their first generous belief in an almost universally high moral among the men. In the training-camps in 1914 the safe working presumption about any unknown man was that he only wanted to get at the enemy as soon as he could. Now the working presumption, the starting hypothesis, is that a man wants to stay in, out of the rain, as long as you let him. Faith has fallen lame; generosity flags; there has entered into the soul as well as the body the malady known to athletes as staleness.

VI

The war had more obvious disagreeables, too; you have heard all about them: the quelling coldness of frosty nights spent in soaked clothes—for no blankets were brought up to the trenches; the ubiquitous dust and stench of corpses and buzzing of millions of corpse-fed flies on summer battle-fields; and so on, and so on—no need to go over the list. But these annoyances seemed to me to do less in the way of moulding the men's cast of mind than that general, chronic weariness, different from all the common fatigues of peace, inasmuch as each instalment of this course of exhaustion was not sandwiched in between heavenly contrasts of utter rest before and after—divine sleeps in a bed and dry clothes, and meals on a table, with a white tablecloth on it and shiny glasses. It raised some serious thoughts in professional football-players and boxers who had believed they were strong, and in navvies and tough mountaineers. You need to know this in order to understand the redoubled ardour with which that capital soldier, the Lancashire miner, has sought the off-day and ensued it since he came back from campaigning abroad.

You need, too, to know it in order to chart out the general post-war condition of mind with its symptoms of apathy, callousness, and lassitude. Something has gone to come of it if you have lain for a time in the garden of Proserpine, where the great values decline and faith and high impulse fall in like soufflÉs grown tepid, and fatalistic indifference comes out of long flat expanses of tiring sameness.

Heaven forbid that I should impute any melodious Swinburnian melancholy, or any other form of luxious self-pity, to millions of good fellows still fighting the good fight against circumstance. They would hoot at the notion. But in nearly all of them hope has, at some time or other, lost her first innocence. Time and place came when the spirit, although unbroken, went numb: the dull mind came to feel as if its business with ardour and choric spheres and quests of Holy Grails, and everything but rest, had been done quite a long while ago. Well chained to an oar in the galley, closely kept to a job in the mine, men caught a touch of the recklessness of the slave—if the world were so foul, let it go where it chose; they would snatch what they could, when they could; drink, and let the world go round.

It is not sense to hope to reattain at will that deflowered virginity of faith. Others who have it may come in good time to be a majority of us all. Already three yearly "classes" of men who did not suffer that immense loss of experience which came with war service have come of age since the war; the new skin grows over the wounds. But we cannot write off as mere dream, with no after effects, the time when it was a kind of trench fashion to meet the demoded oaths of a friend with the dogma that "There is no —— God."