Читать книгу Disenchantment - C. E. Montague - Страница 9

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What could the New Army not have done if all the time of its training had been fully used! A few, at least, of its units had a physique above that of the Guards; many did more actual hours of work, before going abroad, than Guardsmen in peace-time do in two years; all were at first as keen as boys, collectors, or spaniels—whichever are keenest; when the official rations of warlike instruction fell short they would go about hungrily trying to scratch crumbs of that provender out of the earth like fowls in a run.

But there was an imp of frustration about. He pervaded, like Ariel, all the labouring ship of our State. I had seen him in Lancashire once, on one of the early days of the war, when fifty young miners marched in from one pit, with their colliery band, to enlist at an advertised place and time of enlistment. The futilitarian elf took care that the shutters were up and nobody there, so that the men should kick their heels all the day in the street and walk back at night with their tails between their legs, and the band not playing, to tell their mates that the whole thing was a mug's game, a ramp, got up by the hot-air merchants and crooks in control. The imp must have grinned, not quite as all of us have grinned since, on the wrong side of our mouths, at the want of faith that miners have in the great and wise who rule over them. Another practical joke of his was to slip into the War Office or Admiralty and tear up any letters he found from people offering gifts of motor-cars, motor-boats, steam-yachts, training grounds, etc., lest they be answered and the writers and other friends of their country encouraged. Perhaps his brightest triumph of all was to dress himself up as England and send away with a flea in her ear the Ireland whom the wonder-working Redmond had induced to offer to fight at our side. Those were a few of his master-pieces. Between times he would keep his hand in by putting it into the Old Army's head to take the keenness out of the New.

Dearest of all the New Army's infant illusions was the Old Army—still at that time the demigod host of an unshattered legend of Mons. To the new recruits any old Regular sergeant was more—if the world can hold more—than a county cricketer is to a small boy at school. He had the talisman; he was a vessel full of the grace by which everything was to be saved; like a king, he could "touch for" the malady of unsoldierliness. How could he err, how could he shirk, now that the fate of a world hung upon him?

There was something in that. No doubt there always is in illusions. They are not delusions. The pick of the old N.C.O.'s of the Regular Army were packed as tight as bits of radium with virtues and powers. A man of fifty-five who came back to the army from spending ten years in a farcical uniform whistling for taxis outside a flash music-hall would teach every rank in a battalion its duties for 4s. 8d. a day—coaching the dug-out colonel in the new infantry drill, the field officers in court-martial procedure, the chaplain in details of drum-head worship, the medical officer in the order of sick parades, the subalterns and N.C.O.'s in camp economy, field hygiene, and what not, and always holding the attention of a man or a mess or a battalion fixed fast by the magic of his own oaken character, his simple, vivid mind, his passion for getting things right, and his humorous, patient knowledge of mankind. Even such minor masterpieces as average Guards ex-sergeant-majors were rather godlike on parade. In drill, at any rate, they had the circumstantial vision and communicable fire of the prophets. Early in 1915 a little famished London cab-tout, a recruit, still rectilinear as a starved cat even after a month of army rations, was to be heard praying softly at night in his cot that he might be made like unto one of these, whom he named.