Читать книгу Disenchantment - C. E. Montague - Страница 18

Table of Contents

There may be laid up in Heaven a pattern of some front line by which the Staff in its rear would be really loved. But such love is not in the nature of man. If the skin on Mr. Dempsey's knuckles could speak, and were perfectly frank, it would not say that it loved the unexposed and unabraded tissues of Mr. Dempsey's directive brain. Hotspur, in deathless words, has aired the eternal grudge of the combatant soldier against the Brass Hat—

I remember, when the fight was done,

When I was dry with rage and extreme toil,

Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,

Came there a certain lord, neat and trimly dressed,

Fresh as a bridegroom.

So the jaundiced narrative flows on and on, doing the fullest justice on record to some of the main heads of the front line's immemorial distaste for the Staff—for its too Olympian line of comment upon the vulgar minutiæ of combat, its offensively manifest facilities for getting a good shave, its fertility in gratuitous advice of an imperfectly practical kind, and its occasional lapses from grace in speaking of the men, the beloved men, the objects of every good combatant officer's jealous and wrathful affection.

Or, again, you might say that a Staff is a trouser-button, which there are few to praise while it goes on with its work, and very few to abstain from cursing when it comes off. When a Staff's work is done well the front line only feels as if Nature were marching, without actual molestation, along some beneficent course of her own. But when some one slips up, and half a brigade is left to itself in a cold, cold world encircled by Germans, the piercing eye of the front line perceives in a moment how pitifully ill the Brass Hats deserve of their country. If you are an infantry-man the Brass Hats above you are, in your sight, a kind of ex officio children of perdition, like your own gunners. As long as your own gunners go on achieving the masterpiece of mathematics that is required to confine the incidence of their shells to the enemy you feel that, just for the moment, a gunner's rich natural endowment of original sin is not telling for all it is worth. But some day the frailty of man or of metal causes a short one to drop once again among you and your friends; and then you are mightily refreshed and confirmed in the stern Calvinistic faith of the infantry that there are chosen vessels of grace and also chosen vessels of homicidal mania.

If man, in all his wars, is predestined never to love and trust his Brass Hats, least of all can he struggle against this disability when he is warring in trenches. Why? Because trench life is very domestic, highly atomic. Its atom, or unit, like that of slum life, is the jealously close, exclusive, contriving life of a family housed in an urban cellar. During the years of trench war a man seldom saw the whole of his company at a time. Our total host might be two millions strong, or ten millions; whatever its size a man's world was that of his section—at most, his platoon; all that mattered much to him was the one little boatload of castaways with whom he was marooned on a desert island and making shift to keep off the weather and any sudden attack of wild beasts. Absorbed in the primitive job of keeping alive on an earth naked except in the matter of food, they became, like other primitive men, family separatists. Any odd chattel that each trench household acquired served as an extra dab of cement for the household's internal affections, as well as a possible casus belli against the unblessed outsiders who dared to cast upon it the eye of desire. A brazier with three equal legs would be coveted by a whole company. Once a platoon acquired a broken, but just practicable, arm-chair; not exactly a stronghold of luxury; rather a freakish wave of her banner; and this symbol of lost joys was borne, at great inconvenience, from sector to sector of the front, amidst the affected derision of other platoons—veiling what was well understood to be envy. It was like the grim, ineffusive spiritual cohesion of a Scottish family soldered together to keep out the world.

Constantly jammed up against one another, every man in each of these isolated knots of adventurers came to be seen by the rest for what he was worth, with the drastic clearness of open-eyed husbands and wives of long standing. They had domesticated the Day of Judgment. Many old valuations had to go by the board; some great home reputations wilted surprisingly; stones that the builders of public opinion on Salisbury Plain had confidently rejected found their way up to the heads of corners. Officers, watched almost as closely, were sorted out by the minds of the men into themes for contemptuous silence, objects of the love that doeth and beareth all things, and cases of Not Proven Yet. The cutting equity of this family council was bracing. It got the best out of everybody in whom there was anything. Imagine a similar overhauling of public life here! And the size of the scrap-heap! But to the outer world, which it did not half know, the tribunal was harsh, and harshest of all to the outer and upper world of army principalities and powers.

These were, to it, the untested, unsifted, "the crowd that was never put through it." There were presumptions against them, besides. They were akin, in the combatant's sight, to the elfish gods that had ruled and bedevilled his training at home. They were of the breed of the wasters, the misorganizers, the beauties who sent his battalion out from the Wiltshire downs to Bruay along a course of gigantic zigzags, like a yacht beating up in the teeth of a wind, first running far south to Havre, then north to near the German Ocean, and then going about and opening out again upon the southward tack until Bruay was struck; for it was, indeed, along a trajectory somewhat like that of an actual flash of lightning in some quaint engraving that Britain hurled at the enemy many of her new thunderbolts of war. Also, they stood in the shoes of the men who in French's day had sent platoon commanders to take woods and quarries not marked on their maps. And they were the men who, when troops had been marching twelve miles in full kit on the high-cambered, heavily greased Flanders setts in the rain, would appear on the roadside turf round a blind corner, sitting chubby and sleek on fresh horses, and say that the marching was damned bad and troops must go back to-morrow and do it again. But the chief count was the first—that they had not all gone through the mill; that they lived in a world in which all the respectable old bubbles, pricked elsewhere, were still fat and shining, where all the old bluffs were uncalled and still going strong, and the wangler could still inherit the earth and eye-wash reign happy and glorious.

Not a judgment wholly just. But not one contemptible either; for, wherever it ended, it set out from the right idea of judging a man only by what he was worth and what he could do. And, just or not, it was real; it influenced men's acts, not to the extent of losing us the war, but to that of helping to send the winners home possessed with that contemptuous impatience of authority which has already thrown out of gear so much of the pre-war machinery for regulating the joint action of mankind.