Читать книгу Disenchantment - C. E. Montague - Страница 19

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There was yet another special check during the war upon love and respect for the higher commands. There were so many things of moment which they were the last to find out. Time after time the great ones of this world were seen to be walking in darkness long after the lowly had seen a great light. While the appointed brains of our army were still swearing hard by the rifle, and nothing but it, as the infantry's friend, a more saving truth had entered in at the lowly door of the infantry's mind. Ignoring all that at Aldershot they had learnt to be sacred, they contumaciously saw that so long as you stand in a hole deeper than you are tall you never will hit with a rifle-bullet another man standing in just such another hole twenty yards off. But also—divine idea!—that you can throw a tin can from your hole into his.

In England the mighty had taken a great deal of pains to teach the New Army always to parry the thrust of its enemy's bayonet first, and only then to get in its own. A fine, stately procedure it was when taught by an exemplary Regular Army instructor fully resolved that, whatever Shelley may say, no part of any movement must mingle in any other part's being. In France, and no doubt on other fronts too, it abruptly dawned on those whose style this formalist had moulded, more or less, that a second German or Turk was apt to cut in before the appointed ritual of debate with the first could be carried to a happy end. Illicit abridgements followed, attended by contumacious reflections.

Whatever, again, was august in Canadian life and affairs was bent in 1914 upon arming Canadian troops with what was indeed, by a long chalk, the pick of all match-shooting rifles. It was the last word of man in his struggle against the caprices of barometric and thermometric pressures on ranges. And it was to show a purblind Europe, among other things, that Sam Hughes was the man and that wisdom would die with him. Yet hardly had its use, in wrath, begun when there broke upon the untutored Canadian foot-soldier a revelation withheld from the Hugheses of this world. He perceived that the enemy, in his perversity, did not intend to stand up on a skyline a thousand yards off to be shot with all the refinements of science; point-blank was going to be the only range, except for a few specialists; rapidity of fire would matter more than precision; and all the super-subtle appliances tending to triumphs at Bisley would here be no better than aids to the picking of mud from trench walls as the slung rifle joggled against them.

The great did not turn these truths of mean origin right away from the door. They would quite often take a discovery in. Only there was no running to greet it.

There was no hurry in their hands,

No hurry in their feet.

Like smells that originate in the kitchen and work their way up by degrees to the best bedroom the new revelations of war ascended slowly from floor to floor of the hierarchy. They did arrive in the end. The Canadians got, in the end, a rifle not too great and good for business. By the third year of the war the infantry schools at the base were teaching drafts from home to use the bayonet as troops in the line had taught themselves to use it in the second. The frowning down of the tanks can hardly have lasted a year. The Stokes gun was not blackballed for good. It was not for all time, but only for what seemed to them like an age, that our troops had to keep off the well-found enemy bomber with bombs that they made of old jam tins, wire, a little gun-cotton, a little time fuse, and some bits of sharp stone, old iron, or anything hard that was lying about, with earth to fill in; the higher powers did the thing well in the end; they came down handsomely at last; in the next life the Mills bomb alone should be good for at least a night out once a year on an iceberg to some War Office brave who would not see it killed in the cradle.

And yet authority wore, in the eyes of its troops in the field, an inexpert air—sublime, benevolent, but somehow inexpert. They had begun to notice it even before leaving England. Imagine the headquarters Staff of a district command watching a test for battalion bombing officers and sergeants at the close of a divisional bombing course in 1915: the instructor in charge a quick-witted Regular N.C.O. who has shone at Loos and is now decorated, commissioned, slightly shell-shocked, and sent home to teach, full of the new craft and subtlety of trench war; the pupils all picked for the job and devouringly keen, half of them old cricketers, all able-bodied, and all now able, after hard practice during the course, to drop a bomb on to any desired square yard within thirty-five yards of their stance; and then the Staff, tropically dazzling in their red and gold, august beyond words, but genial, benign, encouraging, only too ready to praise things that they would see to be easy if only they knew more about them and were not like middle-aged mothers watching their offspring at football—so a profane bombing sergeant describes them that night to his mess.