Читать книгу Disenchantment - C. E. Montague - Страница 22

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Yet the men in the line talked, and so did the subalterns, most of whom had been in the ranks, now that the war ran into years. Soldiers have endless occasions for talk. Being seldom alone, and having to hold their tongues sometimes, they talk all the time that they can. And most of their talk was sour and scornful. Ever since their enlistment there had been running down in them one of the springs of health in the life of a country. An unprecedented number of the most healthy, high-spirited, and nationally valuable Englishmen in the prime of life were telling one another that, among those whom they had hitherto taken more or less completely on trust as their "betters," things were going on which must make the war harder for us to win; while they, the common people, cared with all their hearts about saving Belgium and France, those betters, so placed that they could do more to that end if they would, seemed to be caring, on the whole, less—shouting and gesticulating enough, but ready to give up less of what was pleasant and to do less of what was hard, and perhaps not able to do much at their best. Colonel Repington's friends, with their scented baths, their prime vintages, and their mutinous chatter, were not actually seen; but there was a bad smell about; the air stank of bad work in high places.

Most of our N.C.O.'s and men in the field had come to feel that it was left to them and to the soundest regimental officers to pull the foundered rulers of England and heads of the army through the scrape. They assumed now that while they were doing this job they must expect to be crawled upon by all the vermin bred in the dark places of a rich country vulgarly governed. They were well on their guard by this time against expressing any thoroughgoing faith in anything or anybody, or incurring any suspicion of dreaming that such a faith was likely to animate others; a man was a fool if he imagined that anyone set over him was not looking after number one; the patriotism of the press was bunkum, screening all sorts of queer games; the eloquence of patriotic orators was just a smoke barrage to cover their little manoeuvres against one another; the red tabs of the Staff were the "Red Badge of Funk"; a hospital ward full of sick men would exchange, when left to themselves, vitriolic surmises about the extravagant pay that the nurses were probably getting, and go on to suggest what vast profits the Y.M.C.A. must be making out of its huts. Wherever the contrary had not been proved to their own senses, the slacking, self-seeking and shirking that had muddled and spoilt their own training for war until they were put, half-trained, in the hottest of the fire must be assumed to be in authority everywhere.

Long ago, perhaps, the commons of England may, on the whole, have accepted the view that while they were the fists of her army there was a strong brain somewhere behind, as good at its job as the fists were at theirs; that above them, using them for the best, mind was enthroned, mind the deviser, adapter, foreseer, the finder of ever new means to new ends, mind which knew better than fists, and from which, in any time of trial, all good counsels and provident works were sure to proceed. If so, the faith of the general mass of the English common people in any such division of functions was now pretty near its last kick. The lions felt they had found out the asses. They would not try to throw off the lead of the asses just then: you cannot reorganize a fire-brigade in the midst of a fire. That had to wait. They worked grimly on at the job of the moment, resigned for the present to seeing all the things go ill which the great ones of their world ought to have caused to go well. For themselves, in each of their units, they saw what was coming. Some day soon they would be put into an attack and would come out with half their numbers or, perhaps, two-thirds, and nothing gained for England, perhaps because some old Regular in his youth had preferred playing polo to learning his job. The rest would be brought up to strength with half-trained drafts and then put in again, and the process would go on over and over again until our commanders learnt war, and then perhaps we might win, if any of us were left.

While so many things were shaken one thing that held fast was the men's will to win. It may have changed from the first lyric-hearted enthusiasm. But it was a dour and inveterate will. At the worst most of the men fully meant to go down killing for all they were worth. And there was just a hope that in Germany, too, such default as they saw on our side was the rule; it was, perhaps, a disease of all armies and countries, not of ours alone; there might thus be a chance for us still. On that chance they still worked away with a sullen ardour that no muddling or sloth in high places could wholly damp down. Many of them were like children clinging with a cross crankiness to a hobby of learning to read in a school where some of the teachers were good, but some could not read themselves, and others could read but preferred other occupations to teaching.

All were so deeply absorbed in winning that no practical upshot of all their new thoughts about England's diseases was yet, as far as I could perceive, taking shape in their minds. On that side their mood was merely one of postponement, somewhat menacing in its form, but still postponement. "We've got to win first. Then——? But we've got to win first." They were almost exactly the words in which most German prisoners, till 1918, expressed their own feeling about the old rulers of Germany.