Part 3

The profiteers were determined to “see this thing through,” to the bitter end. The Statesmen would fight to the last man. The old gentlemen on military service boards were outraged by poor devils with wives and babes who tried to evade conscription. At dinner parties and banquets these same old gentlemen, in clean linen, grew purple in the face with eloquence about the unthinkable shame of peace without victory. They would sacrifice their last son, or at least all their numerous nephews, on the altar of patriotism. They would go without sugar to the end of time rather than yield to a brutal enemy. Noble sentiments! But some of the sons and the numerous nephews who were going to be sacrificed on the altar of patriotism were secretly hoping that diplomacy, or strategy, or some miracle of God might find some decent way of peace before that sacrifice was accomplished. They were in love with life, those boys of ours. They didn’t want to die, strange as it may have seemed to those who thought it was their duty to die and look pleasant about it.

They were unfair, those fellows who sat in wet trenches cursing the levity of England, writing sonnets, some of them about the murderous old men and the laughing ladies. It was true that some old men were making money—piles of it—out of all this business of war. It was true that some of the pretty ladies seemed callous of the death of the boys they “vamped.” It was true that large numbers of men in factories and workshops were making fantastic wages in safe jobs while poor old Tommy was dodging death in the mud for fourteen pence a day. It was true that war and casualties had become so familiar to the mind that many folk at home were beginning to accept it all as a normal thing. It was true that cheerfulness, gaiety, high spirits, were adopted as the only code of life, and that melancholy, fear, pessimism, prophets of woe, were barred as people of bad form. It was true that the imagination of the average man and woman at home was incapable of visualising a front line trench or a battlefield under a German barrage fire. It was true that the newspapers were full of false optimism and false victories. It was true that in a war against militarism England had been militarised, and that officers on seven days’ leave from Hell-on-Earth were insulted by little squirts called A.P.M.’s because they didn’t carry gloves or because their collars were too light in colour, with a thousand other tyrannies. It was true that the hatred of women against “the Huns” was not shared by men who had come to have a fellow-feeling in their hearts for German peasants caught in the trap of war against their will, with no less courage than the men who killed them or whom they killed. It was true that parsons professing Christianity were more bloodthirsty than soldiers who cried out to God in hours of agony and blasphemed in hours of rage. It was true that in England in war time there was a noisy cheerfulness that seemed like callousness to those condemned to death. But it was _not_ true that England was indifferent to the sufferings of the men, or that all that optimism was due to carelessness, or that all the laughing ladies were having the time of their lives because of war’s delightful thrill and the chance of three husbands, or more lovers, in rapid sequence as battle followed battle and wiped out young life.

THE AGONY OF ENGLAND

Beneath the mask of cheeriness England agonised. Fathers grew old and white and withered because of their sons’ sacrifice, but kept a stiff upper lip when the telegraph boy was the messenger of death. The mothers of boys out there suffered martyrdom in wakeful nights, in dreadful dreams, though they kept smiling when the boys came home between the battles and—worst of all—went back again. They hid their tears, steeled their hearts to courage. Even the pretty ladies—the most frivolous, the most light-hearted—gave their love so easily because it was all they had to give, and they would grudge nothing to the boys. Apart from a vicious little set, the women were beyond words wonderful in service and self-sacrifice. In spite of all the weakness of human nature and the low passions stirred up by the war, the British people as a whole during these years of great ordeal were sublime in resignation and spiritual courage. In millions of little houses in mean streets, and in all the houses of the rich, to which a double knock came with news of a dead or wounded boy, the awful meaning of the war burnt its way into the soul of the people. But they would not yield to weakness and had a stubborn obstinacy of faith in final victory—somehow, in a way they could not see. Anyhow, they wouldn’t “let down” their men or show the white feather. They did not know that many of the men were sullen because of this unreasonable optimism, this “bloody cheerfulness.” They did not know that in the trenches, under an awful gunfire, many men looked back to England as to another world, which they no longer knew, from which they were cut off by spiritual distances no longer to be bridged, and for whose safety, frivolity, profiteers and prostitutes they were asked to die, to be shell-shocked, gassed or mutilated, under incompetent generalship and for inadequate reasons.

The meaning of the war in those men’s minds had become less simple and clear-cut since the days when it seemed a straight fight between idealism and brutality—the Allies with all the right on their side against the Germans with all the wrong. To the end some men thought like that, and they were lucky. They were the generals, the statesmen, and, now and then, the fighting men with unbending will and purpose. But to many of our officers and men sitting in their ditches, as I know, the war was no longer as simple as that. It was no longer, they thought, a conflict between idealism and brutality. It had developed into a monstrous horror, a crime against humanity itself, in which all the fighting nations were involved equally in a struggle for existence against powers beyond their own control. The machinery of destruction was greater than the men who were its victims. Human flesh and spirit were of no avail against long-range guns and high explosives. The common German soldiers, blown to bits by our guns, torn to fragments by our mines, poisoned by our gas, as our men were so destroyed, had no more responsibility for these devilish things than we had. It may have been so in the beginning—though that was doubtful. What did they know in their peasant skulls? But now they were just the victims of the ghastly madness that had stricken us all, of the crime against civilisation into which we had all staggered. There was no getting out of it, of course. The Germans had to be killed or they would kill us, but the whole damned thing had happened against the will of those who on both sides of the lines cowered under screeching shells and hated it. Surely to God, they argued, it ought _not_ to have happened! It was civilisation that had been at fault, not those poor devils in the mud and mire.

It was the statesmen and politicians who were guilty of this thing, or the Kings and the Emperors, or the schoolmasters and the journalists, or the whole structure of society based on competition and commercial greed, supported by armies and fleets, or the incurable stupidity of the human race, or a denial of God in the hearts of men; but not the fault, certainly, of those fellows from Bavaria and Saxony who were waiting for our next attack and writing picture-postcards in their dug-outs to women who would soon be widows. So many of our men began to talk and think, as every padre knows and as I know. So, even in France, the soldiers argued, if we may believe Barbusse and others, whom I believe as evidence of that. So certainly the German troops were thinking, as I heard from prisoners and afterwards from those who had fought to the last. The original meaning of the war altered, or was overwhelmed, as man sank more deeply into the mud and misery of it on both sides. It was only a few who held fast to its first principles of right and wrong, simple, clear, and utterly divided by a line of trenches and barbed wire.

UNBROKEN LOYALTIES

The “Long, long way to Tipperary” had carried our men far from the first enthusiasm with which they had joined up as “crusaders for civilisation.” And yet they had an instinct of loyalty in them stronger than all their doubts, angers and ironies. Again and again, before their battles, and at the worst time, it rose and carried them through to desperate endeavour or frightful endurance. It was loyalty to their own manhood, to their division and battalion, to their comrades, to the spirit of this hellish game, and to the old, old spirit of race which they could not deny. The orders might be wrong, but they obeyed. The attack might be doomed before it started—and often was—but they went over the top, all out. The battalion might be wiped out under high explosives, but the last of the living, lying among the dead, held on to their holes in the earth until they were relieved or killed or captured. Comradeship helped them. It was the best thing they had all through, and very wonderful; and, more wonderful still, they kept a sense of humour, whimsical, ironical, vulgar, blasphemous, and divine, which made them guffaw at any joke suggested by a pal and laugh in the face of death itself if it were not immediate in its menace. To the end the British Army kept that saving grace of humour, denied to the Germans, not so common with the French, but our most priceless gift in a world of horror. So they went on with the job of war, while the casualties tore gaps in their ranks.

New men came out to take their places. Fresh contingents arrived from the Overseas Dominions. There were new and monstrous battles. The Australians had already come to France after the tragic epic of Gallipoli, in which they too had lost the flower of their manhood. The Canadians had been a strong link on the British front since the early battles of Ypres. In England conscription took the place of recruiting. There was to be no escape from the ordeal for any able-bodied man unless he was wanted for a home job or could get one to save his skin or his conscience.... The war went on in France and Flanders, in Italy, Russia, Palestine, Turkey, Africa. The British Empire was all in, everywhere, on sea and land. The area of destruction was widened as the months passed and the years. Battles became more murderous because the technique of war was becoming more “efficient,” its weapons more deadly. Guns increased in number and in range. Poison gas supplemented high explosives. Aeroplanes increased in size, in power, and speed of flight; in bomb-dropping activity. Tanks arrived. The British battles in Flanders five months long, after those of Arras and Vimy and Messines, were more ghastly, more sacrificial, than those of the Somme. They were fought in mud and blood. Men were drowned in shell craters. Battalions were blotted out by machine-gun fire, high explosives and gas shells.

THE WAR OF EXHAUSTION

The Germans gave way slowly, after stubborn defence, from every yard of cratered earth. Their own roads were choked with the traffic of the wounded—an endless tide of human agony. Behind them there was a welter of death and wreckage. Their man power was giving out on the Western Front. The collapse of Russia, stricken by infernal losses—four million dead!—with the very machinery of its life broken down under the weight of war, in revolt against the corruption of its own state, enraged by treachery from within, and weakened by a spreading anarchy among men who declined any longer to be slaughtered like sheep, gave Germany her last and only chance of flinging fresh forces on to the Western front and smashing through to victory by a last prodigious effort.

France was exhausted, but not yet spent. Her youth also had been thrown into the furnace fires recklessly, without a chance, time and time again, from the very beginning. Some of her generals had blundered, quarrelled, intrigued, while the manhood of France was bleeding to death. Battalions of young boys—as at Souchez—had flung themselves against almost impregnable positions and had fallen like grass before the scythe. Her coloured troops had been slaughtered like poor dumb beasts in storms of fire. Grand offensives in Champagne had been broken after losses hidden from the French people, though leaking out. The defence of Verdun, saving France from surrender, had drained it of its most precious life’s blood. There were periods when France almost despaired, when there seemed no hope at all of final victory, but only of gradual extermination, which would leave France anyhow with but women and cripples and blinded soldiers and old men, and politicians, and profiteers. At the back there were periods of mortal depression. At the front the spirit of the men was sullen. There was mutiny in many ranks. They refused to be launched into another of those “grand offensives” at the bidding of generals who wasted blood like water. The French Army ceased fighting, while the British struggled in Flanders, at the cost of 800,000 casualties in five months.

GERMANY’S LAST OFFENSIVE

Then came the crash of the German offensive in March of 1918: against the British line first. They had 114 Divisions, many fresh from Russia, against 48 under British command, tired after Flanders, and thinly scattered over a big front. It was the last thrust of the German war machine, and marvellously organised, directed and fought. The German Army, in spite of many blunders in High Command, had shewn a dynamic energy, a driving force, a relentless will, and a marvellous valour which was wellnigh irresistible. The German soldiers were no less brave than the British or French, no less wonderful in self-sacrifice, no less enduring in agony. Their final effort, when they put in the last of their man power, was a supreme achievement to which we must render homage if we have any chivalry in our souls, in spite of a loathing of war which now makes all such retrospect a nauseous horror. The German sergeants and machine gunners who carried out the new tactics of “infiltration” were great soldiers and gallant men.

The thin British line—after that struggle in Flanders and battles round Cambrai—was broken by the sheer weight of that terrific impact, and the British troops fell back fighting, until out of whole divisions only a few hundreds were left standing, and there was but a ragged line of exhausted men between Amiens and the sea.

The heart of the English-speaking peoples—all of them now, for the United States was with us at this time—stopped beating for a while, or seemed to do, as the news of that German advance went over the wires of the world. After all the battles of the French and English, their struggles, their slaughter, their sacrifice, their endurance, it looked for a little while as though it had all been in vain, and that all was lost. That was not ten years ago. It was less than seven. Yet can we recall even those days, when we felt stone cold, with a sharp anxiety thrusting its knife into our brains as the Germans came across the fields of the Somme, retaking all that ground which had been fought for yard by yard—drew near to Amiens, turned on the French, smashed their line as the British line had been smashed, and drove down to the Marne as in the first month of the war? Truly it looked like defeat. How near we were to that was only known at the time, perhaps even now, to those of us who saw with our own eyes the wild and tragic chaos of our falling back, the exhaustion and weakness of the French and British troops who had fought down to their last few men in every battalion, and the old battle grounds in possession of the enemy. Frightful weeks; ghastly emotions; scenes to sear one’s imagination for ever. Yet now—hardly remembered, so strange and self-protective is the human mind!

Looking back on that time, trying to recapture its sensations and philosophy, I cannot remember any absolute despair in England and France. By all the rules of the game we had nearly lost—within a hair’s breadth—yet we did not acknowledge that. There was no cry of surrender from either of the nations, which still had a fixed faith that ultimately we should win, somehow. There was something astounding in the stolidity of the British people on the edge of great disaster. To men at the front it seemed ignorance of the extremity of peril. But it was the spirit of the race steadying itself again to fresh ordeals, unyielding in pride; they could not be beaten, it was unthinkable. To hint it was a treachery. If more men were wanted the youngest brothers would follow their older brothers. So it happened. Three hundred thousand boys of eighteen, the last reserves of Great Britain, were shipped over to France to fill up the frightful gap. From the factories which had been pouring out the material of war, not only for the British Army but for all the Allies, all but the most indispensable men were enrolled. The physically unfit, soldiers many times wounded, old crocks, were sent out to the depôts in France.

AMERICA COMES IN

One new power was almost ready for active service on the side of the Allies. If France could only hold out long enough, this new and arduous weight would be bound to turn the scale at last against German man-power, drained down to its last reserves. The United States Army was pouring into France with great tides of men, magnificent in physique, keen in spirit, and unscarred as yet by the fires of the war. They were untrained, ignorant of lessons that could only be learnt by deadly experience, and their Generals were novices in the organisation and handling of vast masses of troops, as the British had been. They were bound to make ghastly mistakes. They would waste their men as ours had been wasted, by faulty staff work; but sheer weight of numbers and the spirit of brave men would in the long run be irresistible. Had we the time to wait for them?...

We had been waiting long for them—too long as some thought, not realising the diversity of racial views in that great country and knowing little of its historical character and meaning. Vast numbers of its people had come from Europe in the past, distant or recent, to escape—Europe. They had wanted to get away from the very hatreds and rivalries which had led to this monstrous conflict. They desired to live secure, in a civilisation where the common man might work in peace and liberty without being flagged to fight for some Kings’ quarrel or the ambitions of diplomats, or the fever of racial passion. Great numbers of them could not understand what the European quarrel was about when all was said and done. Anyhow, it had nothing to do with them, in the Middle West and the West, though New York seemed to be worried. Many intelligent Americans, shocked to the soul by this breakdown of civilisation in Europe, believed sincerely that the best service they could render the world was to stand on one side, to act finally as arbitrators between the exhausted nations among whom neither side could win—it looked like that—and to lead the stricken peoples back to sanity and peace. German Americans had a natural sympathy with the old fatherland though dismayed by its ruthlessness. Irish Americans still disliked England too much because of bitter and traditional memories to weep tears over her sacrifice or to glow with pride at the splendour of her spirit. Czechs, Slavs, Swedes were utterly neutral. In any case, apart from all racial strains, the war in Europe was enormously distant to the souls of men on isolated farmsteads, or to the crowds in the main streets of little towns west of New York. They elected President Wilson to keep them out of the war, and that strange man, with his mingling of mysticism and practical politics, his moral eloquence, and his autocratic methods, his mental disgust at war and violence, and his belief that the spiritual destiny of the United States was not to be fulfilled in terms of military force, or by any entry into the quarrels of the Old World, made them resist for a long time the strain of almost intolerable pressures, such as the German U-boat war and the rising passion of American opinion, in many classes not neutral, not indifferent to the cause of France and Great Britain, but tortured by shame, impatience, rage, because the Government of the United States refused to call its people to a crusade on the side of right and justice.

All the old stock in America, or nearly all, millions of people in little American homes who read English books, whose minds were soaked in English history, whose ancestors had sprung from English and Scottish soil, panted for their deliverance from a neutrality which was a fraud and a shame in their hearts. They were not neutral. They never had been. They were all for England. Millions of others—remembering Lafayette, and filled with a deep sentiment for France, an enormous admiration for French heroism—enraged against Germany for the ruin she had made in France—loathed the policy of President Wilson, which seemed to them cowardly, selfish and unworthy. The pressure on Wilson became stronger and more insistent. Germany helped them in every possible way by deliberate insult, by methods of sea warfare outside the traditional code of common humanity; by plots, incendiarism, and sabotage within the United States itself in order to check the supplies of stores and ammunition addressed to England and France. When war was finally declared by the United States in the spring of 1917, the American people, apart from small minorities, were no longer neutral or indifferent, and a tidal wave of enthusiasm for service swept over all barriers and oppositions from coast to coast. It rose higher and higher as the months passed, reaching to a spiritual exaltation, unlike any emotion that had ever possessed that nation before. It had different motives, different manifestations from those which possessed the peoples of Europe engaged in the war. The Americans were not conscious of self-interest. There was no sense of menace against them such as Great Britain had partly felt. There was nothing they desired to gain for themselves. It was a crusade on behalf of civilisation. It was also unconsciously a desire in the American mind to prove that in spite of all their material wealth, their comfort of life, their peace and security, they were ready to suffer, to make sacrifice, to spend their energy, and their dollars, to give their manhood and their courage for a spiritual ideal. The United States would prove to the world that it had a national soul. It would prove to itself that all the different strains of race within its citizenship had been merged and moulded into a national unity, responsive to the call of patriotism, disciplined by a common code, obedient to the voice of the State speaking for the whole people.