Читать книгу To Fight Alongside Friends: The First World War Diaries of Charlie May - David Crane - Страница 45

The Coy has come back and I feel a happier man than I have done for days. They blew in this morning looking dirty and wet and were at once turned loose to clean up & have an easy. And not before they wanted it, I’ll be bound. The big majority have not had a half-hour to themselves since they landed in France. I think it a mistake. ‘All work and no play’ is a very true axiom and I certainly know the men do twice the work after a day’s holiday.

Tomorrow I am going to let them have the day to themselves, even though the general is coming around. That may not be strictly military but it certainly is common sense, a factor one meets remarkably seldom in this game. I may be a heretic, certainly I am wrong to do so, but I cannot help but both see and feel that there is a vast wastage in this army of ours. Not, I mean, of materials or stores – for the distribution of such things is wonderfully organised – but of men and brains. Initiative is asked for, but woe to the man who displays it. Opinions are sometimes sought – but apparently with the sole idea of making an opportunity for the airing of some higher grade’s scheme, already settled in his own mind. So that one feels – and somewhat resents it – that there is humbug about and that one is being looked upon as more or less of a fool. One does not like being thought a fool, even though one has no claim to genius.

If I were alone in this I might be thought that unutterable thing – a man with a grievance. But I am not alone. All our officers feel as I do. And when thirty active business brains feel like that surely it were but foolishness to deny justification.

We came out here to fight, not heroically or in the heat of passion, but just to do our little bit like Englishmen should. We did not expect to be satiated with red tape and buckram or have our brains cramped into a hidebound receptacle of blank banality which those of a lad could fill.^xvii

There is still something wrong with the Army. I do not think it is with the higher command that the fault lies. Nor can I allow that it is with the company officers. It is with that vast sea of senior ranks, or climbers, that I find the fault and I cannot but believe that there the fault will be found by others more fitted to judge than I.