Читать книгу Disenchantment - C. E. Montague - Страница 17

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If this Doubting Thomas abounded at Agincourt how could he not abound at, say, the third Battle of Ypres? At Agincourt our whole army was just small enough to have comradeship all the way through it—not the figure-of-speech used by the orators, but the thing that soldiers know. Comradeship in a battalion will come of itself; it may be grown, with some effort, in a brigade; in good divisions it has flickered into life for a while during a war; army corps know it not, though their headquarters staffs may dine together at times. At Agincourt the whole of our force was an infantry brigade and a half. It all lay handy in one bivouac. Generals led advancing troops as second-lieutenants do now. The commander-in-chief could go round the lines of a night and talk to the men; if he should speak to them about "we few, we happy few, we band of brothers," he would not be projecting gas.

But now——? It is nobody's fault, but all of that has been lost, as utterly lost as the old comradeship of master and journeyman worker is lost in a mill where half the thousand hands may never have seen the employer who sits in a far-away office, perhaps in a far-away town. Two million men can never be a happy few; nor yet a band of brothers—you have to know a brother first. A man could serve six months in France and never see the general commanding his division. He could be there for four years and not know what a corps or an army commander looked like. How can you help it? Many generals did what they could—more, you might say, than they should. They left their desks and maps to visit their men in the line; they made excuses to get under fire; two or three were killed doing so; one corps commander smuggled himself into the front line of an attack by his corps. But these were escapades, strictly. The higher commands have no right to get hit. Modern war has pushed the right place for them farther and farther away from the fighting, away from the men, whom some of the higher commanders, as well as the lower, do really love with a love passing the love of women—"the dear men" of whom I have heard an officer, tied to the staff and the base by the results of head wounds, speak with an almost wailing ache of desire, as horses whinny for a friend—"Would I were with him, wheresoe'er he is, either in heaven or in hell." But how were the men to know that?

Everything helped to indispose them to know it; everything went to point the contrast between their own fate and that of its distant and unknown controllers. The evolution of the war was now calling on all ranks of troops in the actual line to put up with a much diminished chance of survival, only the barest off-chance if they stayed there year after year. While they lived it was inflicting upon them in trenches a life squalid beyond precedent. And that same evolution had pressed back the chief seats of command into places where life was said to contrast itself in wonderful ways with that life of mud and stench and underground gloom.

It was quite truly said. Of the separation and contrast you got a full sense if fate took you straight from trench life in the stiff Flanders slime or the dreary wet chalk of the disembowelled Loos plain to one of the seats of authority far in the rear. G.H.Q., the most regal seat of them all, was divinely niched, during most of the war, at Montreuil, and Montreuil was a place to bring tears to the eyes of an artist, like Castelfranco, St. Andrews, or Windsor; the tiny walled town on a hill had that poignant fulness of loveliness, making the sense ache at it, like still summer evenings in England. It was a storied antique, unscathed and still living and warm, weathered mellow with centuries of sunshine and tranquillity, all its own old wars long laid aside and the racket of this new one very far from it. Walking among its walled gardens, where roses hung over the walls, or sitting upon the edge of the rampart, your feet dangling over among the top boughs of embosoming trees, you were not merely out of the war; you were out of all war! you entered into that beatitude of super-peace which fills your mind as you look at a Roman camp on a sunned Sussex down, where the gentle convexities of the turf seem to turn war into an old tale for children.

Such gardens of enchantment were not known by sight to most of our fighting troops, but they were rumoured. The mind of Williams, in the front line, worked with a surly zest on the contrast between the two hemispheres of an army—the hemisphere of combatancy, of present torment, of scant reward, of probable extinction, and the hemisphere of non-combatancy, of comfort, of safety, of more profuse decoration, the second hemisphere ruling over the former and decimating it sometimes by feats like the Staff work of 1915. Among the straw in billets and the chalk clods in dug-outs, in the reeking hot twilight of parlours in French village inns, in the confidential darkness after Lights Out in hospital wards from Bethune to Versailles and Rouen, the vinegar tongue of Williams let itself go.

Of course, he went wrong. And yet his error, like the facts which begat it, could not be helped. If all that you know of an alleged brother of yours is that he is having the best of the deal while you are getting the worst you have to be a saint of the prime to take it on trust that it really did please God, or any godlike human authority, to call him to a station in a dry hut with a stove, among the flesh-pots of an agreeable coast, and you to a station in a wet burrow full of rats and lice and yellow or white mud and ugly liabilities. And Williams was not a saint, although when he enlisted he was profusely told that he was by people who were to call him a sinner later, when as a Dundee rioter or "Bolshevik" miner, or as a Sinn Feiner or a Black-and-Tan, he transgressed some eternal law. Williams was and is only a quiet simple substance exhibiting certain normal reactions under certain chemical tests.