Chapter I: Part 1

Transcriber’s Note
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TEN YEARS AFTER

_Ten Years After:
A Reminder_ :: :: _By
PHILIP GIBBS_ :: ::

_LONDON: HUTCHINSON & CO.
PATERNOSTER ROW_
1924

CONTENTS

PAGE

FOREWORD v

I.—THE WORLD WAR 7

II.—THE UNCERTAIN PEACE 61

III.—THE PRESENT PERILS 140

IV.—THE HOPE AHEAD 167

FOREWORD

Since the last words of this book were written the political temper of the nation has been tested by the General Election and has been revealed by the mighty majority of the Conservatives, the dismissal of the first Labour Government, and the all but mortal blow to the Liberal Party.

It would be a bad thing for the British people if that sweeping change were the sign of reaction to wooden-headed principles of autocratic rule and class legislation. It would be a worse thing for the world. But the new Conservative Government will have no support from the majority of those who voted for it if it interprets its power as a mandate for militarism, jingoism, or anti-democratic acts. The verdict of the ballot box was, certainly, not in favour of any black reaction, but in condemnation of certain foreign, revolutionary, and subversive influences with which the Labour Party were believed, fairly or unfairly, to be associated.

It is true that the Labour Ministers had denounced Communism, and during their tenure of office had revealed in many ways a high quality of statesmanship and patriotism. But all this good work was spoilt in the minds of many people of liberal thought, anxious to be fair to Labour, by the uneasy suspicion that behind the Labour Party, and in it, there were sinister influences foreign in origin, anti-British in character, revolutionary in purpose. Up and down the country some of its supporters indulged in loose-lipped talk about Social revolution, preached a class war, paraded under the Red Flag. Political incidents not quite clear in their origin, not fully explained, intensified this national uneasiness, developed into something like a scare, in minds not naturally hostile to Labour ideas. They made allowance for exaggeration, political lies and slanders, but when all allowance had been made suspicion remained that if “Labour” were given a new lease of power it might play into the hands of a crowd fooling with the idea of revolution, not as honest as some of the Labour Ministers, not as moderate as the first Labour Government. It was a risk which the people of Great Britain refused to take. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and his colleagues failed to prove their independence from their own extremists, and Liberal opinion entered into temporary alliance with Conservative thought to turn them out.

To men like myself, standing politically in “The Middle of the Road” between the extremists, the downfall of the historic Liberal Party is a tragedy and a menace. It brings the possibility of class conflict nearer by the elimination of a central balancing party of moderate opinion. That possibility will become a certainty if Mr. Baldwin’s big majority drifts into reaction, or into lazy disregard of urgent national distress. But I am inclined to believe that the new Government will be more Liberal than is pleasing to some of its reactionary supporters as Mr. MacDonald’s Government was more moderate than the wild crowd who tried to force the pace. The nation as a whole will not tolerate black reaction any more than red revolution, and England stands steady to its old traditions of caution and commonsense. Those qualities will be needed in times of trouble not far ahead.

PHILIP GIBBS.

Ten Years After:

A REMINDER

I.—THE WORLD WAR

Ten years ago, as I write these words, a spiritual tremor, as though the last trump were sounding for the judgment of God, shook the souls of many peoples. Something incredible, inconceivable, frightful, was about to happen in a world which believed it could not happen. It was the beginning of the World War in which the most civilised nations on earth, as they believed themselves to be, were to be hurled against each other, with all their power, science, manhood, wealth, in a struggle to the death.

Ten years ago.... Not much in historical time, not a great span in the life of an individual, but so long, because of what has happened, that only by an immense effort of imagination can one’s mind leap the gap between that time and this. One has to think back to another world in order to see again that year 1914 before the drums of war began to beat. It is a different world now, greatly changed, in the mental outlook of men and women, in the frontiers of the soul as well as the frontiers of nations. Dynasties have fallen, kings are in exile, the political maps have been re-drawn, new nations have come into being, old nations have lost their pride and their place. And yet that is nothing to what has happened in the minds of men and women. Old habits of thought have been smashed; old securities, traditions, obediences, convictions, lie in wreckage and, unlike the ruins of the war itself, will never be restored. We are different men and women.

Ten years after! How brief a time since that August in 1914! A mere tick of the clock in the history of mankind, yet we who are alive after so much death, who were stirred by the first shock of that war, and lived through its enormous drama, can hardly get back to ourselves as we were before the War began. Were we indeed those men and women who thought, acted and agonised in those days? Did we really believe the things that were then believed? Were we shaken by those passions, uplifted by those emotions? Are we the people who suffered and served? It is hardly possible to recapture, even in a dream, even for a few moments of illusion, the state of mind which was ours before the War happened and in the beginning of its history. It is very difficult because something has broken in us since then, and the problems of life have a different basis of thought, and all that emotion lies dead within us.

THE SENSE OF PEACE

In Europe, before it happened, there was a sense of peace in the minds of the peoples. Do they remember how safe they felt? French peasants in their fields were looking forward to a good harvest, the French shopkeeper to a good season. Alsace Lorraine?... An old sore, almost healed. Not worth re-opening at the price of the blood of a single French soldier! The German folk were drinking their laager beer as usual after days of industry. Their trade was good, they were capturing the markets of the world. Life was good. The Junkers and the militarists were talking rather loudly, and there was a lot of argument about Germany being “hemmed in” and “insulted” by England, but it was, after all, no more than high-sounding talk. The German Army was supreme in Europe, unchallenged and unchallengeable. The German Fleet was the Kaiser’s hobby. Who would attack them? Not France. Russia? Well, in East Prussia that was a secret fear, something like a nightmare, a bogey in the background of the mind—but really unthinkable. England? Bah! England was friendly in the mass and without an army worth mentioning. Poor old England! Weak and decadent as an Empire, without the power to hold what she had grabbed. One day perhaps ... but not with Socialism spreading in Germany like an epidemic. Anyhow, the good old German God was presiding over the destiny of the great German people, who were safe, strong, industrious, prosperous, and, for the present, satisfied.

In England this sense of peace, I remember, was strongest. It was hardly ruffled by any anxieties among the mass of our folk. There was trouble in Ireland. There always had been. The suffragettes were a horrible nuisance. Strikes were frequent and annoying. But the old order of English life went on, placid, comfortable, with a sense of absolute security. The aristocracy grumbled at the advance of democracy, but within their old houses, their parklands and walled gardens, they were undisturbed. They had great reserves of wealth. The beauty of the life they had built around them was not invaded. Their traditions of service, loyalties, sports, continued and would continue, they believed, because those things belonged to the blood and spirit of England.

Middle-class England was prosperous and contented. Business was good in “a nation of shopkeepers,” in spite of fierce competition. Life—apart from private tragedy—was comfortable, gay, with many social pleasures unknown in Victorian days, with a greater sense of liberty in thought and manners, and a higher standard of life for small folk. “God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world!”—barring politics, newspaper scares, women’s claims to votes—and Ireland. The people of the British Isles felt utterly secure.

It was an inherited sense, a national tradition, an unquestioned faith. It was their island prerogative. Now and again wars happened, but they only gave a touch of Romance to life. The sons of the old families went out and died like gentlemen, or came back to the music of brass bands, after the usual victories over savage tribes, splendidly described by artists and correspondents in the illustrated papers. Some of the young lads from factories and fields went off and took the King’s Shilling, and came back bronzed, with straighter backs, and a few medals. The little Regular Army was the best in the world for its size. Not even the Boer War, with its blunders, its inefficient generalship, and its drain upon youth and money, touched in any vital way the foundations of English life, its reserves of wealth, or its utter faith in national security. The British Navy was supreme at sea.

The British people had no quarrel with any great Power. All talk about a German menace, we thought, was the delusion of foolish old gentlemen in military clubs, or the scaremongering of newspapers out for circulation and sensation. The heart of England beat steadily to the old rhythm of life in country houses and fields and workshops and mean streets. Beneath the surface of modern change, progress and accidental novelties, the spirit of England and of its sister peoples was deep-rooted in the past and slow-moving towards new ideas. Outside the big cities it was still feudal in respect for the old “quality,” the old distinctions of class and service. The English people felt themselves divided by a whole world from the Continent of Europe because of that strip of sea about them. They had nothing to do, they believed, with Continental quarrels, hatreds, fears, or armies. They were safe from invasion, and masters of their own destiny. The Empire was very useful for trade, peaceful in purpose, and easily controlled by a few regiments if troubles arose among Indian hillsmen or African tribes. They had peace in their hearts, no envy of other nations, no military ambitions.

The English-speaking peoples, including the United States, believed that the world was settling down to a long era of peace. War was abominably old-fashioned! It was out of keeping with modern civilisation and with its increasing humanity, decency, respect for life, lack of cruelty, and general comfort. The world had reached a higher stage of human brotherhood. Had not science itself made war impossible between civilised peoples? The financial interests of nations were too closely interwoven. Literature, art, education, good manners, and liberal ideas had killed the very thought of war. We had got beyond the Dark Ages.... So England and America thought, or among those who did not think, felt—without question or misgiving.

Then the War happened.

THE CALL TO ARMS

Among the common folk—and I write of them—nobody knew at first how it happened, or why. An Austrian Archduke had been murdered at some place with a queer, outlandish name. Very shocking, no doubt; but what had that to do with John Smith watering his flowers in a suburban garden, or with Mrs. Smith putting the baby to bed? Still less with John K. Smithson, of Main Street, U.S.A., winding up his “flivver.” Servia—where was Servia?—was threatened with an ultimatum by Austria. Those foreign politics! Russia was taking the matter up. What had it got to do with Russia? Kings and Emperors were exchanging telegrams; Germany was intervening, backing up Austria. France was getting excited. Why? What was it all about? Why did all that stuff, columns and columns in the newspapers, turn out the sporting news? It was all very dull and incomprehensible. Russia was “mobilising,” it seemed. Germany was threatening war with Russia, France with Germany. Why? In Heaven’s name, why? What did it all mean? In the House of Commons there were strange speeches; in the newspapers terrible warnings, that England, too, might be drawn into this conflict of nations. Preposterous! The Cabinet was sitting late, hour after hour. Sir Edward Grey—a noble soul—was working for peace, desperately. There was still a hope. Surely the world had not gone mad! Surely even now the incredible could not happen. Germany could not do this thing. The German people, good-hearted, orderly, highly civilised, in some sense our kinsfolk; surely to God they were not going to plunge the world into ruin for the sake of an Austrian Archduke! In any case it was nothing to do with England—nothing at all—until every heart stood still for a second at dreadful news.

Germany had declared war on Russia and France was threatened. German troops were moving towards the French frontier and towards the Belgian frontier. Germany was demanding a right of way through Belgium to strike at the heart of France. If the demand were resisted, she threatened to smash her way through. Through Belgium, a little neutral country, at peace with all the world, incapable of self-defence, guaranteed by Great Britain and Germany, by a treaty that the German Ambassador in London desired to treat as a “scrap of paper.” God in heaven! If that were so, then there was no law in the world, no honour among nations, no safety for civilised peoples desiring peace. How could England, with any honour, stand by and see the fields of Belgium trampled under the feet of an invading army? With any shred of honour or self-respect? This was more than a threat against Belgium. It was a slash in the face of civilisation itself, a brutal attack upon all that code of law and decency by which we had struggled out of barbarism. So the leading articles said, and there was no denial in the heart of the people, though at first they had no thrill of passion but only a stupefaction in their minds. So Great Britain was going into this war? For honour’s sake and the safety of civilisation? That would mean—who could tell what it meant? Who knew anything about modern warfare between the Great Powers with all those armies and navies and piled-up armaments? It would mean Hell, anyway.

On August 4 the British Government declared war on Germany for the violation of Belgian territory. On the following day at the mouth of the Thames the cruiser _Amphion_ sank a German mine-layer, and so opened the first hostilities between the German and the British nations since their history began.

England was “in”—all in, with all her wealth, all her manhood, all her strength, to whatever the end might be, in a struggle for life or death, in which civilisation itself was at stake.

THE IGNORANCE OF THE PEOPLES

The peoples of Europe knew nothing of the forces which had led up to the conflict. They had never been told about the secret treaties—made by statesmen of the old school without their consent, though their lives were pledged in them—by which the Foreign Offices of Europe had played against each other for high stakes in a dangerous game called the Balance of Power. They were ignorant of the rivalries and greeds which had been inflamed for half a century by the rush for Africa, where France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Great Britain had bargained and intrigued and quarrelled with each other for slices of the Dark Continent which had put a black spell upon the imagination of Imperialists in all these countries. They did not know that German Imperialists believed, not without reason, that England and France had squared each other in order to prevent German influence in Morocco, and that she felt herself thwarted by the two powers in all her ambitions for “a place in the sun,” for the sources of raw material, and for the expansion of her trade. They were ignorant of Pan-German dreams of dominant power in Middle Europe, and of an Asiatic Empire following the line of Berlin to Bagdad. They were not aware of Pan-Slav ambitions cutting clean across Pan-German ambitions and looking forward to a future when the Russian Tsardom would have its second capital in Constantinople, and when the Russian race would stretch through Serbia to the Adriatic Sea. They had never realised the meaning of the Balkan Wars of 1912, when Russia was behind Serbia and Germany behind Turkey, in the first skirmish for these rival schemes. They were never told by their leaders that explosive forces were being stored up in Europe because of the rival Imperialisms which sooner or later were bound to result in infernal fire shattering the whole structure of European life.

All these things had been kept secret in the minds of kings and emperors, statesmen and diplomats, and the peoples in the mass went about their work without a thought of the dark destiny that was being woven for them in the looms of Fate. In Germany, it is true, the military caste, the Civil Service, and the Universities had been steeped in the poison of an Imperial philosophy based upon Brute Force and the right of the strong to seize the power and places of the weak. The Kaiser, picturing himself in “shining armour,” with God as his ally, had made himself the figurehead of this school of thought. From time to time he uttered portentous words. He threatened with “a mailed fist” all who dared to cross the path of German aspirations. He vowed that he would “dash to pieces” all those who opposed his will. Even in Germany before the War these words were ridiculed by peace-loving citizens, scorned by millions of theoretical Socialists, and ignored by the peasants who were busy with their sowing and reaping in quiet fields. In England they seemed but the bombast of a theatrical man born too late in the world’s history for such mediæval clap-trap. Outside small circles, in touch with the undercurrents of international policy and afraid of unspeakable things, or ready to risk them, the common folk knew nothing of their peril, and were not allowed to know.

THE CALL TO COURAGE

Ten years ago! Who can remember the spirit of Europe then? Or his own mind? That sense of horror, chilling the heart of unimaginable things, that bewilderment because so monstrous a tragedy had come out of the blue sky, without warning, as it seemed, for trivial causes, and then ... and then ... a call to the secret courage of the soul, a dedication to service and sacrifice, a welling-up of old traditions, emotions, passions, primitive instincts, which had seemed dead and useless because of world peace and the security of civilisation.

In Great Britain it was as though the nation had been shaken by a great wind in which the Voice of God was heard. In those first days—and months—there was no degradation of the height to which the spirit of the British people was uplifted. Even their enemies admit that. The petty, squalid, rotten things of life fell from them. They put away their own quarrels, self-interests, political and industrial conflicts. This thing was too big for those trivialities. It was bigger than individual lives, loves, hates, fortunes, homes or business. The old barriers of class, strongly entrenched in the structure of English life, were broken down with one careless and noble gesture. The sons of the great old families joined up with the shop boys, the peasants, the clerks, the slum-folk, and stood in the same ranks with them as volunteers in the “war for civilisation.” The daughters of the county gentry, of the clergy, and professional classes went down on their knees with shop girls and servant girls, to scrub the floors of hospitals or do any kind of work. Those wild women who had fought the police for the Vote became ambulance drivers, nurses, farm girls, ammunition workers, needlewomen—anything for service. The rich poured out their money and the sons of the rich their blood. The poor offered their bodies and all they had. It took some time for England to understand this need of soldiers. It was not until after the Retreat from Mons and terrible despatches, revealing dreadfully that the little Regular Army was but a small outpost, half-destroyed after immortal valour against overwhelming odds in France, that the recruiting stations were stormed by the young manhood of the nation, from public schools, factories, city offices, and the little villages of the countryside. Husbands left their wives, lovers their sweethearts, fathers their children, scholars their books, and enrolled themselves, as they knew, for the chance of Death. And the women let them go, urged them to go, and hid their tears. There was not a mother in England at that time, or none that I knew or ever heard of, who, looking at the strained face of her son, held him back by any passionate plea when he raised his head and stared into her eyes and said: “I must go!”

The whole nation, apart from a few individuals, was inspired by a common loyalty to ideals which seemed very clear and bright. They believed, without any complications of thought and argument, without any secret doubts, that this war had come upon the world solely because of German brutality, unprovoked, against peaceful neighbours. Stories of German atrocity, some true and many false, in the first invasion of France and Belgium, deepened their horror for a nation which had threatened civilisation itself with a return to barbarism, and under whose rule there would be no liberty, no life worth living. The chivalry of the British people, their love of fair play, their pity, were outraged by the trampling of Belgium and the agony of France, attacked by the greatest military power in the world. That was enough for them. That was what inspired them in their first rush to the rescue. It was only later that they understood the menace to their own Island and Empire, whose existence was at stake. In those early days there was no self-interest in the spiritual uprising of England and her sister nations. There was a nobility of purpose, undimmed and untarnished, crystal clear to simple minds, knowing nothing and caring nothing for deeper causes of the war than German militarism and its brutal assault. Only the newspaper press vulgarised and degraded the splendour of this simple chivalry by its appeal to blood lust and its call to hate and many frantic lies.

THE HOMING BIRDS

From all parts of the Empire the old Mother Country saw her homing birds. From Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa came bronzed and hardy men who were the uncles or the cousins or the brothers of the boys who were still storming the recruiting stations at home. After them came wave after wave of young manhood from the far Dominions, and for the first time in history the British Empire, so loosely linked, so scattered, so jealous of restraint or control from the British Government, was seen to be a federation of English-speaking peoples more strongly bound by links of sentiment and kinship in time of peril than any Imperialist of the old school could have forged by autocratic power. They were free peoples enlisting for service, as they believed also, in the cause of civilisation and in the chivalrous defence of peace-loving peoples wantonly attacked by a brutal enemy.

Looking back now with disgust of war and all its filthiness and death in our inmost souls, after years of disillusion with the results of that war, with a more complicated knowledge of its causes back in history; with a legacy of debt; unsettled problems; with new causes of hate, revenge, conflict; with justice no longer all on one side, nor injustice, one must still acknowledge the splendour of that spiritual comradeship which made all classes offer themselves for service and sacrifice to the uttermost, which was death. Not in England, nor in France, nor later in the United States, was there any love of this war for war’s sake. It did not appeal to the imagination of youth as a great adventure. Here and there its call might have come as a liberation from dull existence, or as an escape from private tragedy, or as a primitive blood lust. In very rare cases it appealed to old fighting instincts as a better thing than peace. To most it was hateful. Our young men loved life and loathed the thought of death. They did not want to kill or be killed. They disliked military discipline, dirt, lice, the thought of shell-fire, the foreboding of wounds, blindness, mutilation, and horror. They were the heirs of a civilisation in which there had been a high standard of decency, refinement, comfort, and individual liberty. Each young man when he went to the recruiting office knew in his heart that he was saying good-bye, perhaps for ever, to the things and folk he loved, to all familiar decent things, to the joy of life itself. Yet in millions they went, tide after tide ... and the women hid their tears and their agony as best they could, and found out work to do. In great houses and little homes there was the same spirit. Out of the foulest slums as well as out of fine houses came the heroic soul of a people proud of its history, impelled unconsciously by old loyalties which had been stunted but never killed by social injustice.

That was the passion of England and her sister peoples when war began. Difficult to imagine, impossible to feel again—now!... So much has happened since.

THE SPIRIT OF FRANCE

I remember the mobilisation in Paris on the day before war was declared, and that day. The French people had a different, sharper, more immediate fear. The frontier was in danger. France herself was menaced by the greatest army in the world. In one day, two days, all her life would be at stake. There was a sense of stupefaction among the common people. They too had been taken by surprise by the suddenness of the challenge. And they knew better than the English what war meant in horror and agony. In those crowds among whom I went there were many who remembered 1870—that nightmare of terror and shame and tears. There was no cheering, as when fifty years before the people in Paris had shouted _á Berlin_! in an ecstasy of war fever. In Paris there was the hush of souls who looked into the face of great death. In the streets men were parting from their women—for the last time. Some wept, not many, after the kiss of eternity. Emotion strangled one’s heart. In those days France seemed to me divine in courage, in sacrifice, in suffering. Anarchists, revolutionists, the scum of the underworld, the poor drabs, were cleansed of all evil, for a time, by love and passion—for France. They themselves did not matter. They held their lives as nothing so that France might live. The Pacifists said: “This is a war to end war.” The Socialists said: “This is a war against militarism.” The old women said: “Our sons will die, but France will be saved.” The young women said: “We give our lovers to France.” From the fields, the workshops and the factories, the manhood of France, quicker than in England, came down to the railways to join their depôts, and for hundreds of miles on the first night of war, in a train taking the first troops to the eastern frontier, I heard on the warm breeze the “Marseillaise,” the song of Liberty and France, and the tramp of marching men, and the rattle of gun waggons; and I felt the spirit of an heroic people like a physical vibration about me. After that come a thousand memories, strangely distant now, like an old dream, of roads black with fugitive people, retreating from the red flame of war; of French and Belgian towns under the first shell-fire, until they fell into flame and ruin; of wounded men, clotted with mud and blood, very quiet, on dirty stretchers, lying in rows under brown blankets, on railway platforms, in improvised hospitals, piled in farm carts, huddled under broken walls, in endless caravans of ambulances; the reek of blood, disinfectants, death; troops on the march, guns going forward, the French cavalry riding on saddle-galled horses, machine-guns in cornfields; troop trains; stations crowded with regiments; fields strewn with dead; women wheeling perambulators with babies and household goods, boys pushing old men along in wheelbarrows, farmcarts laden with children, furniture, grandmothers; the cry reiterated of “_Sales Boches!_”; the words “_C’est la guerre!_” repeated as an endless reason for infinite resignation to all this agony, and terror of civilian folk trapped in chaos; the phantasmagoria of war in modern civilisation; and always the courage of women, the valour of men, the immortal spirit of France rising above the torture of its soul and body, while the enemy thrust closer to its heart. In those days—ten years ago—an Englishman in France dedicated his heart to these people....

THE ENTENTE CORDIALE

And in those days the French people loved the English and their kinsfolk, so that when the first British troops appeared they went mad with joy, as I saw, kissing them, with streaming tears, dancing round them, flinging flowers to them, giving them fruit, as those boys, clean-shaven, bronzed, smart, laughing, singing, “It’s a long, long way to Tipperary,” went forward to be killed, wounded, maimed, blinded, broken, as most of them were before the end came, and some very soon. _Vivent les Anglais!_... Have the French people forgotten, or have we?

I was in Paris, after wild adventures, with two comrades on a day in September when it seemed that the city was doomed. It was already deserted. At mid-day, between the Place de la Concorde and the Etoile, we saw only one man, and that a policeman on a bicycle. It was no longer the seat of Government. Vast numbers had fled. We had seen them storming the trains. All others sat indoors, with their shutters closed, waiting for the tramp of German soldiers down the streets. The German guns were as close as Chantilly. Only a miracle could save Paris, as we knew, having seen the retreat of a French Army through Amiens, and the stragglers of the British Army after the Retreat from Mons, and the advance of the enemy as far as Beauvais, and a hundred signs of impending tragedy. The sun was glittering on the golden eagles above one of the bridges. The palaces, domes, spires of Paris were clear-cut under a cloudless sky. All the beauty of the city, all its meaning to the world in knowledge and art and history, invaded our hearts. If Paris were taken and France beaten, civilisation itself would be defeated and life would be worthless, and God mocked. It could not happen like that. A miracle must happen first. For God’s sake!

The miracle happened—the miracle of the Marne. The German tide was turned at last. By the blunder of the German Staff, by the audacity of Foch, by Galliéni with his army in taxi-cabs, by the desperate valour of French soldiers, fighting, dying, maddened by thirst, with untended wounds, with rage in their hearts, agonising, but without surrender in their souls because the life of France was in their guard that day. They won a victory which smashed back the German Army and destroyed their plan.

The British Army had a small share in that victory of the Marne. Its weight did not count for much, but its artillery harassed the German retreat with deadly execution, and in fighting down from Mons it had helped to spoil the German time-table and to bar the way to Paris for just that little time which enabled France to stand on its line of battle and repair the dreadful blunders of its first defence.

Have the French forgotten that? It happened ten years ago!

TRENCH WARFARE

The Germans were forced to dig in. It was the beginning of trench warfare. Then the line hardly altered for four years more, in spite of endless battles and unceasing death.

The British Regulars—that “contemptible little army” as the Kaiser called it before its rifle fire mowed down his men—were spent and done after the first and second Battles of Ypres, where they barred the way to Calais with a thin line standing among their dead. The Territorials—volunteers before the war—arrived, as steady as old soldiers. It was due to them that the Regulars had been able to get to France, leaving them for home defence. Then the new armies came into the field—“the Kitchener boys”—the First Hundred Thousand. They were those young men who had stormed the recruiting offices at the first call: from the Universities, public schools, city offices, village shops, and fields. They had been together in the ranks, learning each other’s language, bullied by sergeant-majors, broken in by discipline, taught to forget the decencies of civilisation as they had known it in their homes, the little comforts of their former state, individual liberty. Already they had left their old civilian life far behind. Yet they came out to France and Flanders like schoolboys in keenness and enthusiasm. They wanted to get into the “real thing” after all that gruelling training. They got into it quickly enough, up beyond Ypres at Hooge and St. Julien, or further south at “Plug Street” and Hill 60. They sat in water-logged trenches, with bits of dead bodies in the mud about them, under frightful shell-fire twenty times greater than the answer of their own guns because they were weak in artillery and short of shells. (The workers at home had not got into their stride in pouring out the engines of destruction.) They had no dug-outs worth the name. Only the Germans knew how to build them then, as they knew most else of war, as masters of technique, overwhelmingly superior in material, and in organisation. The British were in the low ground everywhere, with the Germans on the high ground, so that they could not march or move by daylight, or light a fire, or cross a road, without being signalled to watchful eyes and shelled without mercy. They were lousy in every seam of their shirts. There was no chance of cleanliness unless they were far behind the lines. Young gentlemen of England—and of Scotland, Ireland and Wales—found themselves like cave men: eating, sleeping, living in filth and the stench of corruption, under winged death searching for their bodies. They saw their comrades blown to bits beside them; counted their own chances, coldly, made it one in four, with luck. They were afraid of fear. To lose control—that would be worst of all. To show funk before the other men, to feel themselves ducking, shrinking, weakening, under those cursed shrieking shells, to surrender will power—that would be fatal. Some did, gibbering with shell-shock, or shot as cowards; but few. The marvel was that youth could stand so much, and still make jokes, laughing at the frightful irony between their old life and this new one, between the old lessons learnt by nice little gentlemen in nurseries, and this bloody business and primaeval stuff of killing and being killed!

It was truly a world war. Italy had come in. British troops were fighting in Africa and Asia. The Japanese Navy was in alliance with the British Fleet. Both France and England brought over coloured troops. Indian Princes poured out their wealth and offered their man power. Sikhs and Pathans rode through French fields. Gurkhas cut off the ears of German peasants after cutting their throats with curved knives. Indian cavalry, dismounted, were sent into the wet trenches of French Flanders and died of cold if they did not die of wounds. Seneghalese negroes drove French lorries, were massacred as infantry. Moroccans were billeted in French villages and Arab chiefs rode through Dunkirk. Chinese coolies unloaded British shells and cut down French forests for British trench props. And the coloured races of the world were shown the picture of the white races destroying each other for some reason which was never clear to them....

THE SLAUGHTER ON THE SOMME

The British Armies in France and Flanders reached their full strength before their great offensive on the Somme in the summer of 1915. In material and in manhood they were the best that England and the Empire could produce. The men were the fine flower of their race, in intelligence, physique, training, and spirit. In time of peace they would have lived to be leaders, administrators, artists, poets, sportsmen, craftsmen, the “quality” of their nation; the fathers of splendid children. They were in living splendour the priceless treasure of the British folk—and they were squandered, wasted, and destroyed.... Behind them now was an immense power in artillery and ammunition and the material of destruction. The factories in England had been working at full pressure, millions of women had been stuffing shells with high explosives; guns, guns, guns came pouring up the roads towards the front in an endless tide; the ground was piled with ammunition dumps, and British Generals had at their command a fighting machine incomparable at that time, not only in weight of metal, but above all in freshness of enthusiasm and heroic human fire.

The British Armies rose out of their ditches for the great attack with an ardour that had never been seen before in the history of war, and in my judgment will never be seen again. They believed that at last—after artillery duels deciding nothing, after muddled battles like that of Loos, mining and counter-mining, and trench raids, and the gain of little salients at murderous cost—they were going to “do the trick” and end the war by irresistible attack. I saw the glory of those young men and the massacres of their bodies and hopes.

At the first assault, after the greatest bombardment ever seen yet still leaving forests of barbed wire and a fortress system of trenches and tunnels twenty miles deep behind the German front lines, they were mown down in swathes by German machine-gun fire, and afterwards, in isolated positions to which they staggered, blown to bits by German gun fire. By desperate courage they smashed through the outer earthworks of that infernal trench-system; for five months they fought through that twenty miles, yard by yard; but it was sheer slaughter all the way, and they were the victims of atrocious staff work, incompetent generalship, ruthless disregard of human life, repeated and dreadful blundering. The British Generals cannot be blamed. They were amateurs doing their best in an unknown type of war. They had to learn by failures and by mistakes. Perhaps their mistakes were not worse than those of the enemy’s High Command; or not much worse. But for the men it was Hell. They were ordered to attack isolated positions, which often they captured although the whole arc of German gun fire for forty miles around was switched on to their bodies until they were annihilated. High Wood, Delville Wood, Trones Wood, Mametz Wood—a hundred more—are names that bleed with the memory of enormous sacrifice of British youth. In the end they won through to open ground and forced the enemy into a far retreat to the shelter of the Hindenburg line.

The German losses in these battles of the Somme were frightful too, and for a time certainly broke the spirit of the German Army, as thousands of letters left in their dug-outs proved beyond doubt. Their agony was as great as that of the British troops. They were pounded to death in their trenches and dug-outs, until all that land stank of their bodies, and one could not walk without treading on them. They were stunned by shell fire, tortured by fear beyond human control as they crawled out of their broken ditches to meet British bayonets. Their heroism was wonderful, as all our men confessed with an admiration which extinguished hate among those—nearly all—who had a sense of chivalry. But their losses, though enormous, were not as great as the British suffered, not half as great, I think, because defence was less costly than attack in those conditions. By the end of the battle of the Somme half a million of the finest manhood of Great Britain had been killed, wounded, blinded, shell-shocked, and broken.

The tide of wounded flowed back from the fields of the Somme in endless columns of ambulances, where the bad cases lay under brown blankets with only the soles of their boots visible. To the end of my life I shall remember those upturned soles and the huddled bodies above. The walking wounded formed up in queues outside the dressing stations: silent, patient, dog-weary, caked with a whitish clay. The casualty clearing stations were crammed, and the surgeons were overworked while, row upon row, the badly wounded were laid on the grass outside the tents or on blood-stained stretchers waiting for their turn. The “butcher’s shop” in Corbie had a great clientèle. Whiffs of chloroform reeked across the roadways. Fresh graves were dug in cemeteries behind the lines, in spreading areas. The lightly wounded, after a little rest, came back laughing, cheering and joking. A Blighty wound!... Home again!... Out of it for a few months of grace!

THE SPIRIT OF THE VICTIMS

By the end of the Battle of the Somme the first impulses of the war had died down, the first emotions had been forgotten. Disillusion, dreadful experience, bitterness, had turned the edge of idealism. One cannot understand the mind of men ten years after without going back to that period of disenchantment. The young men who had hurried to the recruiting stations were on fire with enthusiasm for France and Belgium, for the rescue of liberty and civilisation, and for love of England. They became rather damped in the training camps because of so much red-tape, eyewash, spit and polish, and humiliation. They were handled, not like men filled with heroic spirit, but often like swine. Sergeant-majors swore at them in filthy language; old officers, too feeble for the front or sent back in disgrace for their incompetence, set them to ridiculous, time-wasting work. Reviews, inspections, parades, took the heart out of them. They had not joined for this ... they were trained and staled by the time they went to France, though their spirits rose at the thought of getting into “the real thing” at last. They didn’t like it. They hated it when its routine became familiar and horrible and deadly. They were ready to stick it out to the death—they did so—but certain values altered as their illusions were shattered. It was all very well—though not at all pleasant—to die for civilisation or liberty, but it was another thing to die for some old General they had never seen because he ordered them to attack positions which were wrongly marked on his maps, or because he was competing in “raids” with the General commanding the line on his left, or because he believed in keeping up the “fighting spirit” of his troops by ordering the capture of German trenches which made another salient in his line and were bound to be blotted out in mud and blood as soon as the German guns received their signals. _Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori._ Sweet to die for one’s country—in the first flash of enthusiasm—and afterwards necessary anyhow, though distinctly unpleasant to have both legs blown off, or both eyes blinded, or one’s entrails torn out. But not in any way comforting to be sent over the top with a battalion unsupported on the right or left, or with wrong orders, or without a barrage to smash the enemy’s wire, or by some incredible blunder which meant the massacre of a man’s best pals and a hole in his stomach. Inevitable, perhaps. Yes, but unforgivable by its victims when it became a habit.... Over and over again battalions were wiped out because some one had blundered. It was the same on the German front, the French front, every front. And its effect in the minds of the fighting men was the same in all nations and on both sides of the line. It made them rage against the Staff. It made them feel that the front line men were being sacrificed, wasted and murdered by pompous old gentlemen and elegant young men living very comfortably behind the lines in pleasant châteaux of France, far from shell fire, growing “flower borders” on their breasts. Men talked like that, with increasing irony. They were unfair, often. It’s not easy to be fair when one’s certain death is being ordered by influential folk who do not share the risks.

THE PEOPLE AT HOME

For England’s sake! Yes, those young officers and men who went through the battles of the Somme and many others, seeing no end to the war, and the only chance of life in a lucky wound, endured everything of fear and filth, because at the back of their minds and hidden in their hearts was the remembrance of some home or plot of earth, some old village with an old church, which meant to them—England, or Scotland, or Wales. They “stuck it” all because in their spirit, consciously or unconsciously, was the love of their country, and in their blood the old urge of its pride. But as the war went on even this, though it was never lost and flamed up again in the darkest hours, was overcast by doubts and angers and ironies. They were all so damned cheerful in little old England! They took the losses of men as a matter of course. Business as usual and keep the home fires burning! That was all very well, but those “charity bazaars for the poor dear wounded,” all that jazz and dancing and love-making, giving the boys a good time in their seven days’ leave, earning wonderful wages in the munition works, making enormous profits out of shipping and contracts, spending their money like water, filling the theatres, keeping up the spirit of the nation, wasn’t it too much of a good thing when viewed from the angle of a trench with one’s pals’ dead bodies in No Man’s Land, and a blasted world around one, and death screaming overhead?

The profiteers were determined to “see this thing through,” to the bitter end. The Statesmen would fight to the last man. The old gentlemen on military service boards were outraged by poor devils with wives and babes who tried to evade conscription. At dinner parties and banquets these same old gentlemen, in clean linen, grew purple in the face with eloquence about the unthinkable shame of peace without victory. They would sacrifice their last son, or at least all their numerous nephews, on the altar of patriotism. They would go without sugar to the end of time rather than yield to a brutal enemy. Noble sentiments! But some of the sons and the numerous nephews who were going to be sacrificed on the altar of patriotism were secretly hoping that diplomacy, or strategy, or some miracle of God might find some decent way of peace before that sacrifice was accomplished. They were in love with life, those boys of ours. They didn’t want to die, strange as it may have seemed to those who thought it was their duty to die and look pleasant about it.

They were unfair, those fellows who sat in wet trenches cursing the levity of England, writing sonnets, some of them about the murderous old men and the laughing ladies. It was true that some old men were making money—piles of it—out of all this business of war. It was true that some of the pretty ladies seemed callous of the death of the boys they “vamped.” It was true that large numbers of men in factories and workshops were making fantastic wages in safe jobs while poor old Tommy was dodging death in the mud for fourteen pence a day. It was true that war and casualties had become so familiar to the mind that many folk at home were beginning to accept it all as a normal thing. It was true that cheerfulness, gaiety, high spirits, were adopted as the only code of life, and that melancholy, fear, pessimism, prophets of woe, were barred as people of bad form. It was true that the imagination of the average man and woman at home was incapable of visualising a front line trench or a battlefield under a German barrage fire. It was true that the newspapers were full of false optimism and false victories. It was true that in a war against militarism England had been militarised, and that officers on seven days’ leave from Hell-on-Earth were insulted by little squirts called A.P.M.’s because they didn’t carry gloves or because their collars were too light in colour, with a thousand other tyrannies. It was true that the hatred of women against “the Huns” was not shared by men who had come to have a fellow-feeling in their hearts for German peasants caught in the trap of war against their will, with no less courage than the men who killed them or whom they killed. It was true that parsons professing Christianity were more bloodthirsty than soldiers who cried out to God in hours of agony and blasphemed in hours of rage. It was true that in England in war time there was a noisy cheerfulness that seemed like callousness to those condemned to death. But it was _not_ true that England was indifferent to the sufferings of the men, or that all that optimism was due to carelessness, or that all the laughing ladies were having the time of their lives because of war’s delightful thrill and the chance of three husbands, or more lovers, in rapid sequence as battle followed battle and wiped out young life.

THE AGONY OF ENGLAND

Beneath the mask of cheeriness England agonised. Fathers grew old and white and withered because of their sons’ sacrifice, but kept a stiff upper lip when the telegraph boy was the messenger of death. The mothers of boys out there suffered martyrdom in wakeful nights, in dreadful dreams, though they kept smiling when the boys came home between the battles and—worst of all—went back again. They hid their tears, steeled their hearts to courage. Even the pretty ladies—the most frivolous, the most light-hearted—gave their love so easily because it was all they had to give, and they would grudge nothing to the boys. Apart from a vicious little set, the women were beyond words wonderful in service and self-sacrifice. In spite of all the weakness of human nature and the low passions stirred up by the war, the British people as a whole during these years of great ordeal were sublime in resignation and spiritual courage. In millions of little houses in mean streets, and in all the houses of the rich, to which a double knock came with news of a dead or wounded boy, the awful meaning of the war burnt its way into the soul of the people. But they would not yield to weakness and had a stubborn obstinacy of faith in final victory—somehow, in a way they could not see. Anyhow, they wouldn’t “let down” their men or show the white feather. They did not know that many of the men were sullen because of this unreasonable optimism, this “bloody cheerfulness.” They did not know that in the trenches, under an awful gunfire, many men looked back to England as to another world, which they no longer knew, from which they were cut off by spiritual distances no longer to be bridged, and for whose safety, frivolity, profiteers and prostitutes they were asked to die, to be shell-shocked, gassed or mutilated, under incompetent generalship and for inadequate reasons.