For some time before I was wounded, we had been in very hot places. We could scarcely expect them to be otherwise, for we had put on show after show. A "show" in our language, I should explain, has nothing in common with a theatrical performance, though it does not lack drama. We make the term apply to any method of irritating the Hun, from a trench-raid to a big offensive. The Hun was decidedly annoyed. He had very good reason. We were occupying the dug-outs which he had spent two years in building with French civilian labour. His U-boat threats had failed. He had offered us the olive-branch, and his peace terms had been rejected with a peal of guns all along the Western Front. He had shown his disapproval of us by paying particular attention to our batteries; as a consequence our shell-dressings were all used up, having gone out with the gentlemen on stretchers who were contemplating a vacation in Blighty. We couldn't get enough to re-place them. There was a hitch somewhere. The demand for shell-dressings exceeded the supply. So I got on my horse one Sunday and, with my groom accompanying me, rode into the back-country to see if I couldn't pick some up at various Field Dressing Stations and Collecting Points.
In the course of my wanderings I came to a cathedral city. It was a city which was and still is beautiful, despite the constant bombardments. The Huns had just finished hurling a few more tons of explosives into it as I and my groom entered. The streets were deserted; it might have been a city of the dead. There was no sound, except the ringing iron of our horses' shoes on the cobble pavement. Here and there we came to what looked like a barricade which barred our progress; actually it was the piled-up walls and rubbish of buildings which had collapsed. From cellars, now and then, faces of women, children and ancient men peered out--they were sharp and pointed like rats. One's imagination went back five hundred years--everything seemed mediaeval, short-lived and brutal. This might have been Limoges after the Black Prince had finished massacring its citizens; or it might have been Paris, when the wolves came down and Francois Villon tried to find a lodging for the night.
I turned up through narrow alleys where grass was growing and found myself, almost by accident, in a garden. It was a green and spacious garden, with fifteen-foot walls about it and flowers which scattered themselves broadcast in neglected riot. We dismounted and tied our horses. Wandering along its paths, we came across little summer-houses, statues, fountains and then, without any hindrance, found ourselves in the nave of a fine cathedral which was roofed only by the sky. Two years of the Huns had made it as much a ruin as Tintern Abbey. Here, too, the flowers had intruded. They grew between graves in the pavement and scrambled up the walls, wherever they could find a foothold. At the far end of this stretch of destruction stood the high altar, totally untouched by the hurricane of shell-fire. The saints were perched in their niches, composed and stately. The Christ looked down from His cross, as he had done for centuries, sweeping the length of splendid architecture with sad eyes. It seemed a miracle that the altar had been spared, when everything else had fallen. A reason is given for its escape. Every Sabbath since the start of the war, no matter how severe the bombardment, service has been held there. The thin-faced women, rat-faced children and ancient men have crept out from their cellars and gathered about the priest; the lamp has been lit, the Host uplifted. The Hun is aware of this; with malice aforethought he lands shells into the cathedral every Sunday in an effort to smash the altar. So far he has failed. One finds in this a symbol--that in the heart of the maelstrom of horror, which this war has created, there is a quiet place where the lamp of gentleness and honour is kept burning. The Hun will have to do a lot more shelling before he puts the lamp of kindness out. From the polluted trenches of Vimy the poppies spring up, blazoning abroad in vivid scarlet the heroism of our lads' willing sacrifice. All this April, high above the shouting of our guns, the larks sang joyously. The scarlet of the poppies, the song of the larks, the lamp shining on the altar are only external signs of the unconquerable, happy religion which lies hidden in the hearts of our men. Their religion is the religion of heroism, which they have learnt in the glory of the trenches.
There was a line from William Morris's Earthly Paradise which used to haunt me, especially in the early days when I was first experiencing what war really meant. Since returning for a brief space to where books are accessible, I have looked up the quotation. It reads as follows:--
"Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing,
I cannot ease the burden of your fears
Or make quick-coming death a little thing."
It is the last line that makes me smile rather quietly, "Or make quick-coming death a little thing." I smile because the souls who wear khaki have learnt to do just that. Morris goes on to say that all he can do to make people happy is to tell them deathless stories about heroes who have passed into the world of the imagination, and, because of that, are immune from death. He calls himself "the idle singer of an empty day." How typical he is of the days before the war when people had only pin-pricks to endure, and, consequently, didn't exert themselves to be brave! A big sacrifice, which bankrupts one's life, is always more bearable than the little inevitable annoyances of sickness, disappointment and dying in a bed. It's easier for Christ to go to Calvary than for an on-looker to lose a night's sleep in the garden. When the world went well with us before the war, we were doubters. Nearly all the fiction of the past fifteen years is a proof of that--it records our fear of failure, sex, old age and particularly of a God who refuses to explain Himself. Now, when we have thrust the world, affections, life itself behind us and gaze hourly into the eyes of Death, belief comes as simply and clearly as it did when we were children. Curious and extraordinary! The burden of our fears has slipped from our shoulders in our attempt to do something for others; the unbelievable and long coveted miracle has happened--at last to every soul who has grasped his chance of heroism quick-coming death has become a fifth-rate calamity.
In saying this I do not mean to glorify war; war can never be anything but beastly and damnable. It dates back to the jungle. But there are two kinds of war. There's the kind that a highwayman wages, when he pounces from the bushes and assaults a defenceless woman; there's the kind you wage when you go to her rescue. The highwayman can't expect to come out of the fight with a loftier morality--you can. Our chaps never wanted to fight. They hate fighting; it's that hatred of the thing they are compelled to do that makes them so terrible. The last thought to enter their heads four years ago was that to-day they would be in khaki. They had never been trained to the use of arms; a good many of them conceived of themselves as cowards. They entered the war to defend rather than to destroy. They literally put behind them houses, brethren, sisters, father, mother, wife, children, lands for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake, though they would be the last to express themselves in that fashion.
At a cross-road at the bottom of a hill, on the way to a gun-position we once had, stood a Calvary--one of those wayside altars, so frequently met in France, with pollarded trees surrounding it and an image of Christ in His agony. Pious peasants on their journey to market or as they worked in the fields, had been accustomed to raise their eyes to it and cross themselves. It had comforted them with the knowledge of protection. The road leading back from it and up the hill was gleaming white--a direct enfilade for the Hun, and always under observation. He kept guns trained on it; at odd intervals, any hour during the day or night, he would sweep it with shell-fire. The woods in the vicinity were blasted and blackened. It was the season for leaves and flowers, but there was no greenness. Whatever of vegetation had not been uprooted and buried, had been poisoned by gas. The atmosphere was vile with the odour of decaying flesh. In the early morning, if you passed by the Calvary, there was always some fresh tragedy. The newly dead lay sprawled out against its steps, as though they had dragged themselves there in their last moments. If you looked along the road, all the glazed eyes seemed to stare towards it. "Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy Kingdom," they seemed to say. The wooden Christ gazed down on them from His cross, with a suffering which two thousand years ago he had shared. The terrible pity of His silence seemed to be telling them that they had become one with Him in their final sacrifice. They hadn't lived His life--far from it; unknowingly they had died His death. That's a part of the glory of the trenches, that a man who has not been good, can crucify himself and hang beside Christ in the end. One wonders in what pleasant places those weary souls find rest.
There was a second Calvary--a heap of ruins. Nothing of the altar or trees, by which it had been surrounded, was left. The first time I passed it, I saw a foot protruding. The man might be wounded; I climbed up to examine and pulled aside the debris. Beneath it I found, like that of one three weeks dead, the naked body of the Christ. The exploding shell had wrenched it from its cross. Aslant the face, with gratuitous blasphemy, the crown of thorns was tilted.
These two Calvaries picture for me the part that Christ is playing in the present war. He survives in the noble self-effacement of the men. He is re-crucified in the defilements that are wrought upon their bodies.
God as we see Him! And do we see Him? I think so, but not always consciously. He moves among us in the forms of our brother men. We see him most evidently when danger is most threatening and courage is at its highest. We don't often recognise Him out loud. Our chaps don't assert that they're His fellow-campaigners. They're too humble-minded and inarticulate for that. They're where they are because they want to do their "bit"--their duty. A carefully disguised instinct of honour brought them there. "Doing their bit" in Bible language means, laying down their lives for their friends. After all they're not so far from Nazareth.
"Doing their bit!" That covers everything. Here's an example of how God walks among us. In one of our attacks on the Somme, all the observers up forward were uncertain as to what had happened. We didn't know whether our infantry had captured their objective, failed, or gone beyond it. The battlefield, as far as eye could reach, was a bath of mud. It is extremely easy in the excitement of an offensive, when all landmarks are blotted out, for our storming parties to lose their direction. If this happens, a number of dangers may result. A battalion may find itself "up in the air," which means that it has failed to connect with the battalions on its right and left; its flanks are then exposed to the enemy. It may advance too far, and start digging itself in at a point where it was previously arranged that our artillery should place their protective wall of fire. We, being up forward as artillery observers, are the eyes of the army. It is our business to watch for such contingencies, to keep in touch with the situation as it progresses and to send our information back as quickly as possible. We were peering through our glasses from our point of vantage when, far away in the thickest of the battle-smoke, we saw a white flag wagging, sending back messages. The flag-wagging was repeated desperately; it was evident that no one had replied, and probable that no one had picked up the messages. A signaller who was with us, read the language for us. A company of infantry had advanced too far; they were most of them wounded, very many of them dead, and they were in danger of being surrounded. They asked for our artillery to place a curtain of fire in front of them, and for reinforcements to be sent up.
We at once 'phoned the orders through to our artillery and notified the infantry headquarters of the division that was holding that front. But it was necessary to let those chaps know that we were aware of their predicament. They'd hang on if they knew that; otherwise----.
Without orders our signaller was getting his flags ready. If he hopped out of the trench onto the parapet, he didn't stand a fifty-fifty chance. The Hun was familiar with our observation station and strafed it with persistent regularity.
The signaller turned to the senior officer present, "What will I send them, sir?"
"Tell them their messages have been received and that help is coming."
Out the chap scrambled, a flag in either hand--he was nothing but a boy. He ran crouching like a rabbit to a hump of mud where his figure would show up against the sky. His flags commenced wagging, "Messages received. Help coming." They didn't see him at first. He had to repeat the words. We watched him breathlessly. We knew what would happen; at last it happened. A Hun observer had spotted him and flashed the target back to his guns. All about him the mud commenced to leap and bubble. He went on signalling the good word to those stranded men up front, "Messages received. Help coming." At last they'd seen him. They were signaling, "O. K." It was at that moment that a whizz-bang lifted him off his feet and landed him all of a huddle. His "bit!" It was what he'd volunteered to do, when he came from Canada. The signalled "O. K." in the battlesmoke was like a testimony to his character.
That's the kind of peep at God we get on the Western Front. It isn't a sad peep, either. When men die for something worth while death loses all its terror. It's petering out in bed from sickness or old age that's so horrifying. Many a man, whose cowardice is at loggerheads with his sense of duty, comes to the Front as a non-combatant; he compromises with his conscience and takes a bomb-proof job in some service whose place is well behind the lines. He doesn't stop there long, if he's a decent sort. Having learnt more than ever he guessed before about the brutal things that shell-fire can do to you, he transfers into a fighting unit. Why? Because danger doesn't appal; it allures. It holds a challenge. It stings one's pride. It urges one to seek out ascending scales of risk, just to prove to himself that he isn't flabby. The safe job is the only job for which there's no competition in fighting units. You have to persuade men to be grooms, or cooks, or batmen. If you're seeking volunteers for a chance at annihilation, you have to cast lots to avoid the offence of rejecting. All of this is inexplicable to civilians. I've heard them call the men at the Front "spiritual geniuses"--which sounds splendid, but means nothing.
If civilian philosophers fail to explain us, we can explain them. In their world they are the centre of their universe. They look inward, instead of outward. The sun rises and sets to minister to their particular happiness. If they should die, the stars would vanish. We understand; a few months ago we, too, were like that. What makes us reckless of death is our intense gratitude that we have altered. We want to prove to ourselves in excess how utterly we are changed from what we were. In his secret heart the egotist is a self-despiser. Can you imagine what a difference it works in a man after years of self-contempt, at least for one brief moment to approve of himself? Ever since we can remember, we were chained to the prison-house of our bodies; we lived to feed our bodies, to clothe our bodies, to preserve our bodies, to minister to their passions. Now we know that our bodies are mere flimsy shells, in which our souls are paramount. We can fling them aside any minute; they become ignoble the moment the soul has departed. We have proof. Often at zero hour we have seen whole populations of cities go over the top and vanish, leaving behind them their bloody rags. We should go mad if we did not believe in immortality. We know that the physical is not the essential part. How better can a man shake off his flesh than at the hour when his spirit is most shining? The exact day when he dies does not matter--to-morrow or fifty years hence. The vital concern is not when, but how. The civilian philosopher considers what we've lost. He forgets that it could never have been ours for long. In many cases it was misused and scarcely worth having while it lasted. Some of us were too weak to use it well. We might use it better now. We turn from such thoughts and reckon up our gains. On the debit side we place ourselves as we were. We probably caught a train every morning--the same train, we went to a business where we sat at a desk. Neither the business nor the desk ever altered. We received the same strafing from the same employer; or, if we were the employer, we administered the same strafing. We only did these things that we might eat bread; our dreams were all selfish--of more clothes, more respect, more food, bigger houses. The least part of the day we devoted to the people and the things we really cared for. And the people we loved--we weren't always nice to them. On the credit side we place ourselves as we are--doing a man's job, doing it for some one else, and unafraid to meet God.
Before the war the word "ideals" had grown out-of-date and priggish--we had substituted for it the more robust word "ambitions." Today ideals have come back to their place in our vocabulary. We have forgotten that we ever had ambitions, but at this moment men are drowning for ideals in the mud of Flanders.
Nevertheless, it is true; it isn't natural to be brave. How, then, have multitudes of men acquired this sudden knack of courage? They have been educated by the greatness of the occasion; when big sacrifices have been demanded, men have never been found lacking. And they have acquired it through discipline and training.
When you have subjected yourself to discipline, you cease to think of yourself; you are not you, but a part of a company of men. If you don't do your duty, you throw the whole machine out. You soon learn the hard lesson that every man's life and every man's service belong to other people. Of this the organisation of an army is a vivid illustration. Take the infantry, for instance. They can't fight by themselves; they're dependent on the support of the artillery. The artillery, in their turn, would be terribly crippled, were it not for the gallantry of the air service. If the infantry collapse, the guns have to go back; if the infantry advance, the guns have to be pulled forward. This close interdependence of service on service, division on division, battalion on battery, follows right down through the army till it reaches the individual, so that each man feels that the day will be lost if he fails. His imagination becomes intrigued by the immensity of the stakes for which he plays. Any physical calamity which may happen to himself becomes trifling when compared with the disgrace he would bring upon his regiment if he were not courageous.
A few months ago I was handing over a battery-position in a fairly warm place. The major, who came up to take over from me, brought with him a subaltern and just enough men to run the guns. Within half-an-hour of their arrival, a stray shell came over and caught the subaltern and five of the gun-detachment. It was plain at once that the subaltern was dying--his name must have been written on the shell, as we say in France. We got a stretcher and made all haste to rush him out to a dressing-station. Just as he was leaving, he asked to speak with his major. "I'm so sorry, sir; I didn't mean to get wounded," he whispered. The last word he sent back from the dressing-station where he died, was, "Tell the major, I didn't mean to do it." That's discipline. He didn't think of himself; all he thought of was that his major would be left short-handed.
Here's another story, illustrating how mercilessly discipline can restore a man to his higher self. Last spring, the night before an attack, a man was brought into a battalion headquarters dug-out, under arrest. The adjutant and Colonel were busy attending to the last details of their preparations. The adjutant looked up irritably,
"What is it?"
The N. C. O. of the guard answered, "We found this man, sir, in a communication trench. His company has been in the front-line two hours. He was sitting down, with his equipment thrown away, and evidently had no intention of going up."
The adjutant glanced coldly at the prisoner. "What have you to say for yourself?"
The man was ghastly white and shaking like an aspen. "Sir, I'm not the man I was since I saw my best friend, Jimmie, with his head blown off and lying in his hands. It's kind of got me. I can't face up to it."
The adjutant was silent for a few seconds; then he said, "You know you have a double choice. You can either be shot up there, doing your duty, or behind the lines as a coward. It's for you to choose. I don't care."
The interview was ended. He turned again to the Colonel. The man slowly straightened himself, saluted like a soldier and marched out alone to the Front. That's what discipline does for a man who's going back on himself.
One of the big influences that helps to keep a soldier's soul sanitary is what is known in the British Army as "spit and polish." Directly we pull out for a rest, we start to work burnishing and washing. The chaps may have shown the most brilliant courage and self-sacrificing endurance, it counts for nothing if they're untidy. The first morning, no matter what are the weather conditions, we hold an inspection; every man has to show up with his chin shaved, hair cut, leather polished and buttons shining. If he doesn't he gets hell.
There's a lot in it. You bring a man out from a tight corner where he's been in hourly contact with death; he's apt to think, "What's the use of taking pride in myself. I'm likely to be 'done in' any day. It'll be all the same when I'm dead." But if he doesn't keep clean in his body, he won't keep clean in his mind. The man who has his buttons shining brightly and his leather polished, is usually the man who is brightly polished inside. Spit and polish teaches a man to come out of the trenches from seeing his pals killed, and to carry on as though nothing abnormal had happened. It educates him in an impersonal attitude towards calamity which makes it bearable. It forces him not to regard anything too tragically. If you can stand aside from yourself and poke fun at your own tragedy--and tragedy always has its humorous aspect--that helps. The songs which have been inspired by the trenches are examples of this tendency.
The last thing you find anybody singing "out there" is something patriotic; the last thing you find anybody reading is Rupert Brooke's poems. When men sing among the shell-holes they prefer a song which belittles their own heroism. Please picture to yourself a company of mud-stained scarecrows in steel-helmets, plodding their way under intermittent shelling through a battered trench, whistling and humming the following splendid sentiments from The Plea of The Conscientious Objector:--
"Send us the Army and the Navy. Send us the rank and file.
Send us the grand old Territorials--they'll face the danger with a smile.
Where are the boys of the Old Brigade who made old England free?
You may send my mother, my sister or my brother,
But for Gawd's sake don't send me."
They leave off whistling and humming to shout the last line. A shell falls near them--then another, then another. They crouch for a minute against the sticky walls to escape the flying spray of death. Then they plod onward again through the mud whistling and humming, "But for Gawd's sake don't send me." They're probably a carrying party, taking up the rations to their pals. It's quite likely they'll have a bad time to-night--there's the smell of gas in the air. Good luck to them. They disappear round the next traverse.
Our men sing many mad burlesques on their own splendour--parodies on their daily fineness. Here's a last example--a take-off on "A Little Bit of Heaven:"
"Oh a little bit of shrapnel fell from out the sky one day
And it landed on a soldier in a field not far away;
But when they went to find him he was bust beyond repair,
So they pulled his legs and arms off and they left him lying there.
Then they buried him in Flanders just to make the new crops grow.
He'll make the best manure, they say, and sure they ought to know.
And they put a little cross up which bore his name so grand,
On the day he took his farewell for a better Promised Land."
One learns to laugh--one has to--just as he has to learn to believe in immortality. The Front affords plenty of occasions for humour if a man has only learnt to laugh at himself. I had been sent forward to report at a battalion headquarters as liaison officer for an attack. The headquarters were in a captured dug-out somewhere under a ruined house. Just as I got there and was searching among the fallen walls for an entrance, the Hun barrage came down. It was like the Yellowstone Park when all the geysers are angry at the same time. Roofs, beams, chips of stone commenced to fly in every direction. In the middle of the hubbub a small dump of bombs was struck by a shell and started to explode behind me. The blast of the explosion caught me up and hurled me down fifteen stairs of the dug-out I had been trying to discover. I landed on all fours in a place full of darkness; a door banged behind me. I don't know how long I lay there. Something was squirming under me. A voice said plaintively, "I don't know who you are, but I wish you'd get off. I'm the adjutant."
It's a queer country, that place we call "out there." You approach our front-line, as it is to-day, across anywhere from five to twenty miles of battlefields. Nothing in the way of habitation is left. Everything has been beaten into pulp by hurricanes of shell-fire. First you come to a metropolis of horse-lines, which makes you think that a mammoth circus has arrived. Then you come to plank roads and little light railways, running out like veins across the mud. Far away there's a ridge and a row of charred trees, which stand out gloomily etched against the sky. The sky is grey and damp and sickly; fleecy balls of smoke burst against it--shrapnel. You wonder whether they've caught anybody. Overhead you hear the purr of engines--a flight of aeroplanes breasting the clouds. Behind you observation balloons hang stationary, like gigantic tethered sausages.
If you're riding, you dismount before you reach the ridge and send your horse back; the Hun country is in sight on the other side. You creep up cautiously, taking careful note of where the shells are falling. There's nothing to be gained by walking into a barrage; you make up your mind to wait. The rate of fire has slackened; you make a dash for it. From the ridge there's a pathway which runs down through the blackened wood; two men going alone are not likely to be spotted. Not likely, but--. There's an old cement Hun gun-pit to the right; you take cover in it. "Pretty wide awake," you say to your companion, "to have picked us out as quickly as that."
From this sheltered hiding you have time to gaze about you. The roof of the gun-pit is smashed in at one corner. Our heavies did that when the Hun held the ridge. It was good shooting. A perfect warren of tunnels and dug-outs leads off in every direction. They were built by the forced labour of captive French civilians. We have found requests from them scrawled in pencil on the boards: "I, Jean Ribeau, was alive and well on May 12th, 1915. If this meets the eye of a friend, I beg that he will inform my wife," etc.; after which follows the wife's address. These underground fortifications proved as much a snare as a protection to our enemies. I smile to remember how after our infantry had advanced three miles, they captured a Hun major busily shaving himself in his dug-out, quite unaware that anything unusual was happening. He was very angry because he had been calling in vain for his man to bring his hot water. When he heard the footsteps of our infantry on the stairs, he thought it was his servant and started strafing. He got the surprise of his venerable life when he saw the khaki.
From the gun-pit the hill slants steeply to the plain. It was once finely wooded. Now the trees lie thick as corpses where an attack has failed, scythed down by bursting shells. From the foot of the hill the plain spreads out, a sea of furrowed slime and craters. It's difficult to pick out trenches. Nothing is moving. It's hard to believe that anything can live down there. Suddenly, as though a gigantic egg-beater were at work, the mud is thrashed and tormented. Smoke drifts across the area that is being strafed; through the smoke the stakes and wire hurtle. If you hadn't been in flurries of that sort yourself, you'd think that no one could exist through it. It's ended now; once again the country lies dead and breathless in a kind of horrible suspense. Suspense! Yes, that's the word.
Beyond the mud, in the far cool distance is a green untroubled country. The Huns live there. That's the worst of doing all the attacking; we live on the recent battlefields we have won, whereas the enemy retreats into untouched cleanness. One can see church steeples peeping above woods, chateaus gleaming, and stretches of shining river. It looks innocent and kindly, but from the depth of its greenness invisible eyes peer out. Do you make one unwary movement, and over comes a flock of shells.
At night from out this swamp of vileness a phantom city floats up; it is composed of the white Very lights and multi-coloured flares which the Hun employs to protect his front-line from our patrols. For brief spells No Man's Land becomes brilliant as day. Many of his flares are prearranged signals, meaning that his artillery is shooting short or calling for an S.O.S. The combination of lights which mean these things are changed with great frequency, lest we should guess. The on-looker, with a long night of observing before him, becomes imaginative and weaves out for the dancing lights a kind of Shell-Hole Nights' Entertainment. The phantom city over there is London, New York, Paris, according to his fancy. He's going out to dinner with his girl. All those flares are arc-lamps along boulevards; that last white rocket that went flaming across the sky, was the faery taxi which is to speed him on his happy errand. It isn't so, one has only to remember.
We were in the Somme for several months. The mud was up to our knees almost all the time. We were perishingly cold and very rarely dry. There was no natural cover. When we went up forward to observe, we would stand in water to our knees for twenty-four hours rather than go into the dug-outs; they were so full of vermin and battened flies. Wounded and strayed men often drowned on their journey back from the front-line. Many of the dead never got buried; lives couldn't be risked in carrying them out. We were so weary that the sight of those who rested for ever, only stirred in us a quiet envy. Our emotions were too exhausted for hatred--they usually are, unless some new Hunnishness has roused them. When we're having a bad time, we glance across No Man's Land and say, "Poor old Fritzie, he's getting the worst of it." That thought helps.
An attack is a relaxation from the interminable monotony. It means that we shall exchange the old mud, in which we have been living, for new mud which may be better. Months of work and preparation have led up to it; then one morning at dawn, in an intense silence we wait with our eyes glued on our watches for the exact second which is zero hour. All of a sudden our guns open up, joyously as a peal of bells. It's like Judgment Day. A wild excitement quickens the heart. Every privation was worth this moment. You wonder where you'll be by night-fall--over there, in the Hun support trenches, or in a green world which you used to sing about on Sundays. You don't much care, so long as you've completed your job. "We're well away," you laugh to the chap next you. The show has commenced.
When you have given people every reason you can think of which explains the spirit of our men, they still shake their heads in a bewildered manner, murmuring, "I don't know how you stand it." I'm going to make one last attempt at explanation.
We stick it out by believing that we're in the right--to believe you're in the right makes a lot of difference. You glance across No Man's Land and say, "Those blighters are wrong; I'm right." If you believe that with all the strength of your soul and mind, you can stand anything. To allow yourself to be beaten would be to own that you weren't.
To still hold that you're right in the face of armed assertions from the Hun that you're wrong, requires pride in your regiment, your division, your corps and, most of all, in your own integrity. No one who has not worn a uniform can understand what pride in a regiment can do for a man. For instance, in France every man wears his divisional patch, which marks him. He's jolly proud of his division and wouldn't consciously do anything to let it down. If he hears anything said to its credit, he treasures the saying up; it's as if he himself had been mentioned in despatches. It was rumoured this year that the night before an attack, a certain Imperial General called his battalion commanders together. When they were assembled, he said, "Gentlemen, I have called you together to tell you that tomorrow morning you will be confronted by one of the most difficult tasks that has ever been allotted to you; you will have to measure up to the traditions of the division on our left--the First Canadian Division, which is in my opinion the finest fighting division in France." I don't know whether the story is true or not. If the Imperial General didn't say it, he ought to have. But because I belong to the First Canadian Division, I believe the report true and set store by it. Every new man who joins our division hears that story. He feels that he, too, has got to be worthy of it. When he's tempted to get the "wind-up," he glances down at the patch on his arm. It means as much to him as a V. C.; so he steadies his nerves, squares his jaws and plays the man.
There's believing you're right. There's your sense of pride, and then there's something else, without which neither of the other two would help you. It seems a mad thing to say with reference to fighting men, but that other thing which enables you to meet sacrifice gladly is love. There's a song we sing in England, a great favourite which, when it has recounted all the things we need to make us good and happy, tops the list with these final requisites, "A little patience and a lot of love." We need the patience--that goes without saying; but it's the love that helps us to die gladly--love for our cause, our pals, our family, our country. Under the disguise of duty one has to do an awful lot of loving at the Front. One of the finest examples of the thing I'm driving at, happened comparatively recently.
In a recent attack the Hun set to work to knock out our artillery. He commenced with a heavy shelling of our batteries--this lasted for some hours. He followed it up by clapping down on them a gas-barrage. The gunners' only chance of protecting themselves from the deadly fumes was to wear their gas-helmets. All of a sudden, just as the gassing of our batteries was at its worst, all along our front-line S.O.S. rockets commenced to go up. Our infantry, if they weren't actually being attacked, were expecting a heavy Hun counter-attack, and were calling on us by the quickest means possible to help them.
Of a gun-detachment there are two men who cannot do their work accurately in gas-helmets--one of these is the layer and the other is the fuse-setter. If the infantry were to be saved, two men out of the detachment of each protecting gun must sacrifice themselves. Instantly, without waiting for orders, the fuse-setters and layers flung aside their helmets. Our guns opened up. The unmasked men lasted about twenty minutes; when they had been dragged out of the gun-pits choking or in convulsions, two more took their places without a second's hesitation. This went on for upwards of two hours. The reason given by the gunners for their splendid, calculated devotion to duty was that they weren't going to let their pals in the trenches down. You may call their heroism devotion to duty or anything you like; the motive that inspired it was love.
When men, having done their "bit" get safely home from the Front and have the chance to live among the old affections and enjoyments, the memory of the splendid sharing of the trenches calls them back. That memory blots out all the tragedy and squalor; they think of their willing comrades in sacrifice and cannot rest.
I was with a young officer who was probably the most wounded man who ever came out of France alive. He had lain for months in hospital between sandbags, never allowed to move, he was so fragile. He had had great shell-wounds in his legs and stomach; the artery behind his left ear had been all but severed. When he was at last well enough to be discharged, the doctors had warned him never to play golf or polo, or to take any violent form of exercise lest he should do himself a damage. He had returned to Canada for a rest and was back in London, trying to get sent over again to the Front.
We had just come out from the Alhambra. Whistles were being blown shrilly for taxis. London theatre-crowds were slipping cosily through the muffled darkness--a man and girl, always a man and a girl. They walked very closely; usually the girl was laughing. Suddenly the contrast flashed across my mind between this bubbling joy of living and the poignant silence of huddled forms beneath the same starlight, not a hundred miles away in No Man's Land. He must have been seeing the same vision and making the same contrast. He pulled on my arm. "I've got to go back."
"But you've done your 'bit,'" I expostulated. "If you do go back and don't get hit, you may burst a blood vessel or something, if what the doctors told you is true."
He halted me beneath an arc-light. I could see the earnestness in his face. "I feel about it this way," he said, "If I'm out there, I'm just one more. A lot of chaps out there are jolly tired; if I was there, I'd be able to give some chap a rest."
That was love; for a man, if he told the truth, would say, "I hate the Front." Yet most of us, if you ask us, "Do you want to go back?" would answer, "Yes, as fast as I can." Why? Partly because it's difficult to go back, and in difficulty lies a challenge; but mostly because we love the chaps. Not any particular chap, but all the fellows out there who are laughing and enduring.
Last time I met the most wounded man who ever came out of France alive, it was my turn to be in hospital. He came to visit me there, and told me that he'd been all through the Vimy racket and was again going back.
"But how did you manage to get into the game again?" I asked. "I thought the doctors wouldn't pass you."
He laughed slily. "I didn't ask the doctors. If you know the right people, these things can always be worked."
More than half of the bravery at the Front is due to our love of the folks we have left behind. We're proud of them; we want to give them reason to be proud of us. We want them to share our spirit, and we don't want to let them down. The finest reward I've had since I became a soldier was when my father, who'd come over from America to spend my ten days' leave with me in London, saw me off on my journey back to France. I recalled his despair when I had first enlisted, and compared it with what happened now. We were at the pier-gates, where we had to part. I said to him, "If you knew that I was going to die in the next month, would you rather I stayed or went?" "Much rather you went," he answered. Those words made me feel that I was the son of a soldier, even if he did wear mufti. One would have to play the game pretty low to let a father like that down.
When you come to consider it, a quitter is always a selfish man. It's selfishness that makes a man a coward or a deserter. If he's in a dangerous place and runs away, all he's doing is thinking of himself.
I've been supposed to be talking about God As We See Him. I don't know whether I have. As a matter of fact if you had asked me, when I was out there, whether there was any religion in the trenches, I should have replied, "Certainly not." Now that I've been out of the fighting for a while, I see that there is religion there; a religion which will dominate the world when the war is ended--the religion of heroism. It's a religion in which men don't pray much. With me, before I went to the Front, prayer was a habit. Out there I lost the habit; what one was doing seemed sufficient. I got the feeling that I might be meeting God at any moment, so I didn't need to be worrying Him all the time, hanging on to a spiritual telephone and feeling slighted if He didn't answer me directly I rang Him up. If God was really interested in me, He didn't need constant reminding. When He had a world to manage, it seemed best not to interrupt Him with frivolous petitions, but to put my prayers into my work. That's how we all feel out there.
God as we see Him! I couldn't have told you how I saw Him before I went to France. It's funny--you go away to the most damnable undertaking ever invented, and you come back cleaner in spirit. The one thing that redeems the horror is that it does make a man momentarily big enough to be in sympathy with his Creator--he gets such glimpses of Him in his fellows.
There was a time when I thought it was rather up to God to explain Himself to the creatures He had fashioned--since then I've acquired the point of view of a soldier. I've learnt discipline and my own total unimportance. In the Army discipline gets possession of your soul; you learn to suppress yourself, to obey implicitly, to think of others before yourself. You learn to jump at an order, to forsake your own convenience at any hour of the day or night, to go forward on the most lonely and dangerous errands without complaining. You learn to feel that there is only one thing that counts in life and only one thing you can make out of it--the spirit you have developed in encountering its difficulties. Your body is nothing; it can be smashed in a minute. How frail it is you never realise until you have seen men smashed. So you learn to tolerate the body, to despise Death and to place all your reliance on courage--which when it is found at its best is the power to endure for the sake of others.
When we think of God, we think of Him in just about the same way that a Tommy in the front-line thinks of Sir Douglas Haig. Heaven is a kind of General Headquarters. All that the Tommy in the front-line knows of an offensive is that orders have reached him, through the appointed authorities, that at zero hour he will climb out of his trench and go over the top to meet a reasonable chance of wounds and death. He doesn't say, "I don't know whether I will climb out. I never saw Sir Douglas Haig--there mayn't be any such person. I want to have a chat with him first. If I agree with him, after that I may go over the top--and, then again, I may not. We'll see about it."
Instead, he attributes to his Commander-in-Chief the same patriotism, love of duty, and courage which he himself tries to practice. He believes that if he and Sir Douglas Haig were to change places, Sir Douglas Haig would be quite as willing to sacrifice himself. He obeys; he doesn't question.
That's the way every Tommy and officer comes to think of God--as a Commander-in-Chief whom he has never seen, but whose orders he blindly carries out.
The religion of the trenches is not a religion which analyses God with impertinent speculation. It isn't a religion which takes up much of His time. It's a religion which teaches men to carry on stoutly and to say, "I've tried to do my bit as best I know how. I guess God knows it. If I 'go west' to-day, He'll remember that I played the game. So I guess He'll forget about my sins and take me to Himself."
That is the simple religion of the trenches as I have learnt it--a religion not without glory; to carry on as bravely as you know how, and to trust God without worrying Him.
THE END