Читать книгу Disenchantment - C. E. Montague - Страница 16

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there is to be known about our Great War of 1914-18. And he was not censored. So he put into his Henry IV and Henry V a lot of little things that our press had to leave out at the time for the good of the country. If you look closely you can see them lying about all over the plays. There is the ugly affair of the pyx, at Corbie, on the Somme; there are the little irregularities in recruiting; there are the small patches of baddish moral on the coast and even in Picardy; there is the painful case of the oldish lieutenant who drank and had cold feet, after talking bigger than anyone else. One almost expects to find something in Henry V about the mutiny at Etaples, or the predilection of the Australians for chickens. Anyhow, there is a more understanding account than any war correspondent has given of English troops about to go into battle.

Timing it for the morning of Agincourt, Shakespeare shows us three standard types of the privates who were to win the Great War. One of them, Court, says little; he just looks out for the dawn. We all know Court; he has won many battles. Bates, the second man, gives tongue pretty freely. Bates is not ruled by funk, but he professes it.

"He (the King) may show what outward courage he will, but I believe, as cold a night as 'tis, he could wish himself in the Thames up to the neck, and so I would he were, and I by him, at all adventures, so we were quit here."

Bates, being dead, yet liveth, like Court. In 1915, as in 1415, he was prosecuting his conquests in France, and his unaltered soul was fortifying itself with chants like

Far, far away would I be,

Where the Alleyman cannot catch me,

and

Oh my! I don't want to die,

I want to go home,

sung to dourly wailful tunes, at the seasons of stress when Scotsmen and Irishmen screwed themselves up to the sticking-point with their Tyrtæan anti-English ballads, when Frenchmen would soulfully hymn Glory and Love, and when Germans, if the ear did not deceive, were calling out the whole Landwehr and Landsturm of the straight patriotic lyre. Williams, the third of the Agincourt privates, lives too. He lives with a vengeance. You will remember that he was an anti-ranter, anti-canter and anti-gusher, like Bates. But he ran a special line of his own. He was not simply "fed up"—as he would say now—with tall talk about the just cause and brothers-in-arms and the moral beauty of dying in battle. He was suspicious, besides. He darkly fancied that those who emitted the stuff must have some crooked game on. "That's more than we know" was his stopper for all stock heroics. He would take none of his betters on trust, neither High Command nor Government nor Church—only one company officer whom he knew for himself—"a good old commander and a most kind gentleman." This one small plot of dry ground was reclaimed from the broad sea of Williams' scepticism.