Читать книгу Disenchantment - C. E. Montague - Страница 13

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A favourite trick with the disillusioning imp was to get hold of authority's wisely drafted time-table of work for a new division in training and mix up all the subjects and times. The effect must have often diverted the author of this piece of humour. Some day a company, say, would begin to learn bayonet-fighting. This would at once revive in the men the fading ecstasies of their first simple faith. Whenever instructors said—"Now then, men, I want to see a bit more murder in them eyes" pleasant little thrills of chartered pugnacity would inspirit them. This, they would feel, was the real thing; this was what they were there for. Then just as, perhaps, they approached the engaging and manifestly serviceable "short jab" Puck's little witticism would suddenly tell; bayonet-fighting would abruptly stop; an urgent order would come from on high to "get on with night operations" or "get on with outpost work," and one of these bodies of knowledge would, in its turn, be partly imbibed by the infant mind and then as suddenly withdrawn from its thirsty lips for something else to be started instead—perhaps a thing that had already been once started and dropped. In the working out of this fantastic pattern of smatterings a company might begin to learn bayonet-fighting three or four times and each time be switched off it before getting half way, and go to France in the end with the A.B.C. of each of several alphabets learnt to boredom and the X.Y.Z. of none of them touched, the men being left to improvise the short jab and other far-on letters by the light of nature, in intimate contact, perhaps, with less humorously instructed Germans.

All this was not universal. Still, it could and did happen. And then the men stared and marvelled. Authority, it is true, had, at the worst, some gusts of passion for perfection. But even these might fortify, in their way, the new occupant of the seat of the scorners. A sudden order might come for a brigade or other inspection, and then authority might in a brief hour become like mediæval man when he fell suddenly ill and the pains of hell gat hold of his mind and he felt that God must be squared without conduct because it might take more time to conduct himself than he had got. In this pious frenzy all attention to measures for incommoding the Germans would yield to the primary duty of whiting the sepulchre; energies that would carry a Hohenzollern Redoubt would be put into the evolution of sections which, through somebody's slackness, did not exist, or the hiding of men who, through some one's mismanagement, were not fit to be seen on parade; old N.C.O.'s would present the men with the tip for making a seemingly full valise look nicely rectangular by the judicious insertion of timber, and other homely recipes for cleaning the outsides of cups and platters. "Eye-wash?" these children of light would say, as they taught. "Of course, it's all eye-wash. What ain't eye-wash in this old world?"

It was a question much asked at the time by those whose post-war inclinations to answer "Nothing, among the lot who run England now" are whitening the hair of statesmen. They were then only asking "How far does it go? How much of the timber is rotten"? Enough to bring down the whole house? Here, there, everywhere the men's new suspicion peered about in the dark and the half-light. Most of the men were the almost boundless reservoirs of patience, humility, and good humour that common Englishmen are. They would take long to run dry. But the waters were steadily falling. Most of them had come from civil employments in which the curse of Adam still holds and a man must either work or get out, mind his P's and Q's, or go short of his victuals. They knew that in civil life a foreman who thieved like some of the Regular N.C.O.'s would soon be in the street or in gaol. They knew that in civil life a manager who could not get down to the point any better than the colonel or the major would soon have the business piled up on the rocks. Here was an eye-opening find—a world in which any old rule of that kind could be dodged if you got the right tip. It became the dominant topic for talk, more dominant even than food, the staple theme of the conversation of soldiers. How far did the rottenness go? Would they ever get to the other side of this bog through which poor old England was wading? If you bored deeper and deeper still into this amazing old Regular Army would there ever come a point at which you would strike the good firm stone of English decency and sense again? And was it open to hope that in Germany, too, such failures abounded—that these diseases of ours were rife in all armies and not in the British alone, so that there might be a chance for us still, as there is for one toothless dog fighting another?

Whatever else might lack in our training-camps throughout England during the spring and summer of 1915, good fresh food for suspicion always abounded. Runlets of news and rumour came trickling from France; wounded soldiers talked and could not be censored; they talked of the failure of French; of the sneer on the face of France; of Staff work that hung up whole platoons of our men, like old washing or scarecrows, to rot on uncut German wire; of little, splendid bands of company officers and men who did take bits of enemy trench, in spite of it all, and then were bombed to death by the Germans at leisure, no support coming, no bombs to throw back—and here, at home, old Regular colonels were saying to hollow squares of their men: "I hear that in France there's a certain amount of throwing of some sort of ginger-beer bottles about, but the old Lee-Metford's good enough for me."

No need, indeed, to look as far away as France. London, to any open eye, was grotesque with a kind of fancy-dress ball of non-combatant khaki: it seemed as if no well-to-do person could be an abstainer from warfare too total to go about disguised as a soldier. He might be anything—a lord lieutenant, an honorary colonel, a dealer in horses, a valuer of cloth, an accountant, an actor in full work, a recruiter of other men for the battles that he avoided himself, a "soldier politician" of swiftly and strangely acquired field rank and the "swashing and martial outside" of a Rosalind, and a Rosalind's record of active service. No doubt this latter carnival was not to be at its height till most of the New Army of 1914 was well out of the way. Conscription had not yet been vouchsafed to the prayers of healthy young publicists who then begged themselves off before tribunals. The ultimate farce of the mobbing of the relatively straight "conscientious objector" by these, his less conscientious brother-objectors, had still to be staged. But already the comedy, like Mercutio's wound, was enough; it served. Colonel Repington's confessional diary had not been published, but the underworld which it reveals was pretty correctly guessed by the New Army's rising suspicion. And rumour said that all the chief tribes of posturers, shirkers, "have-a-good-timers," and jobbers were banding themselves together against the one man in high place whom the New Army believed, with the assurance of absolute faith, to be straight and "a tryer." It was said that Kitchener was to be set upon soon by a league of all the sloths whom he had put to work, the "stunt" journalists whom he had kept at a distance, the social principalities and powers whose jobs he would not do. All the slugs of the commonwealth were to combine against the commonwealth unpleasantly dutiful gardener—down with his lantern and can of caustic solution!