“Hell you say; damned if you catch me getting a Blighty today; too much trouble to get out of here.”
“Who the hell said there would be no more artillery; listen to that.”
“All right, men; shake yourselves out; stand to.”
There is a lively little echo of this, varied between man and man, back and forth along the line. Everybody is ready. There is a deadly interest in what is to come, hardly a thought of the misery of the past two days. If they could have had a good hot bath, a change of clothing and a substantial and leisurely breakfast, much the same result would have been achieved. Hardly practicable? But the rum ration is practicable, and it was adopted out of a very sensible and laudable desire to give men a chance to take care of themselves, to utilize fully their training, to achieve, with a minimum of suffering and death, the ends for which they were sent into the field.
There is no denying the practical, immediate value of this; but what I should like to get at is the purely human side of its issuance, in which it is recognized that all the devastating machinery of war – the tons of shells and bullets, the hundreds of ponderous guns and the vast array of men, motors and materials serving them – is dependent upon the work of a few elemental human beings who must face a similar concentration of destructiveness on the part of the enemy and whose energy and powers of endurance must often be severely taxed before they can even begin to do the actual work of battle.
I do not mean that the drink of rum was adopted as a dramatic and empty gesture recognizing this. The tot of rum is an old custom with the British. I do not know how long it has been observed in the army, but the morning grog of His Majesty’s Navy has long been an institution.
But I do mean that the issue of rum at this particular hour illustrates the use of common sense and that the occasion may serve to emphasize the imperative necessity for common sense in the handling of men on a modem battlefield. In the first place, soldiers of today are men not only of common sense but of intelligence and education. In the case of the United States and the principal British colonies, aside from the purely technical and formal knowledge gained at officers’ training schools, representative men from the ranks will match a similar group from among the officers in all branches of human knowledge. This is something that has become true within the last few decades and will be increasingly significant in the future. To fail to take it into account is the same as to refuse to take advantage of the scientific and mechanical developments in the business of war.
These common-sense men are, moreover, in the war for their own ends. They are free agents. In the last analysis, nearly all have of their own accord put aside their accustomed pursuits, to face, of necessity, a disruption of their normal way of life. They are not professional soldiers serving some conqueror for personal aggrandizement. The day of Alexander the Great is past. The soldiers of Attila trusted their leader and sought the hazards of battle because by the outcome they lived. They fought for flocks, pillage, women, for the sake of fighting, and to further the ambitions of their leader, which they in a measure understood and appreciated. They prospered as they were successful. The soldiers of today mistrust their leaders as being fallible, limited creatures much like themselves. They know that the blunders are made by the leaders and that the men pay for them. They recognize this as a necessary condition of modem war, even assuming that a Napoleon is at the head of it. The genius of a Napoleon is lost between headquarters and the days of preparation and the miles of chaos incident to launching and carrying on a battle today. Quick strategy and tactical acumen are resources not always directly available to the G.O.C. These qualities must be exercised largely through hundreds of ready heads on the shoulders of subalterns and sergeants and privates. The general officer who recognizes this and looks to key men all the way through his ranks is in a fair way to commanding his troops. It is the only way. The rhetorical chroniclers of battles must look for other phrases. “Flinging his legions against this wing,” or, “General Blank, perceiving at once the advantage which this maneuver gave him, threw two divisions,” etc., no longer, except in rare cases, have a shred of meaning or applicability.
So far as I know, these phrases have been little used in describing the battles of the late conflict, though if our historians are to match some of our generals, we may well expect them. But General Blank, if he was wise, counted upon the cool heads of Lieutenant Smith and Private Brown, knowing that his legions were not to be flung anywhere, that they would dissolve into a thin straggling line lost in smoke and confusion beyond his reach, and that they would advance as occasion offered, in small groups, by their own resources of courage and skill. He not only counted upon them, but he let them know in advance that he was counting upon them and did what he could to enable them to assume the responsibility in close cooperation with the general plan of battle. This was only to avail himself fully of the resources at his command.
If this sounds ridiculously non-military, that is because the cult of the military is still lost in notions of regulations and orders and obsolete ideas of discipline and methods of exercising control. They have not made the jump from the parade-ground to the battlefield and from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. It always seems to take a year or two of war to get clear of the rubbish and deadwood and make room for the leaders who are alive to the realities of the situation. A few real barrages and the concentration of machine-gun fire that goes on quietly beneath them will do wonders toward silencing the childish orders of the favorites of post commandants’ wives and the armchair theorists recognized through political and social intrigue who manage to find themselves charged with the grave business of conducting a war. This would be all right if these men alone suffered the consequences of their folly. The pity is that they escape.
They are not all politicians. Most of them are honest students of military science fallen into the common error of becoming academic. They lack experience and first-hand knowledge to bring them back to practicalities. But it does seem time that we utilized the high general average of common sense, intelligence and initiative characteristic of the people of these United States. That is exactly what is called for in war today; and men do not become imbeciles and children simply because they have put on a uniform; they still have their native intelligence – and a first interest in the efficient and intelligent conduct of their armies.
Now England is commonly held to be the example par excellence of hide-bound precedent, of dependence upon authority, of acting according to orders, of the complete paralysis of common sense until an order has been secured to enable it to function. This may or may not be true. The little apostles of regulation may have had fairly complete sway and a pretty firmly fixed hold on the military machine. But somewhere in the labyrinth of the British War Office there lived a human genius of common sense. He could not get rid of all encumbrances, but he did succeed in rendering them harmless at critical points and he had a sort of tacit understanding with the men in the field that together they would try to do as well as they could under the circumstances. This genius made use of all intelligent and courageous field officers, and he must have had a few of higher rank to enable him to rescue the essential business of war from the busy hands of officialdom.
It is useless for me to attempt to analyze his efforts or to waste words on the various things that hampered him. The net result toward which he strived was that which would immediately occur to the man of common sense familiar with the conditions of modern warfare, and the odds against him were the usual accumulation of bunk and inefficiency in addition to the stupendous responsibility of an almost superhuman job. When nothing else could be done, he contented himself with the endeavor to acknowledge that the job was impossible without the hard work and cooperation of the men in the field.
And ‘when the tumult and the shouting died’ this genius still had his eye and hand on the essentials, already busying himself with the one great, dramatic element in the spectacle of demobilization – thousands of men suddenly,
in a disorganized world, suspended, rendered, for the moment, useless, unattached. Sinews of war! A fine phrase by which patriotic orators refer to copper or steel or cotton. But these are the sinews of war – these men and their personal necessities; all else is superfluous, refinements – munitions to be expended, guns to be moved laid and fired. These will now rust, rot or corrode, unimportant, useless. And “organization” becomes a mere stack – miles of stacks – of useless papers, another incidental, a mere mechanical convenience. The whole may be tossed into the fire and the army remain as before – to be dissolved.
The bond is a very slight one. I had about come to the conclusion that officialdom had lost sight of it, and I was agreeably surprised to find that it was still known, and to have it simply acknowledged now that it was dissolved. My connection with the British Army had ended some years earlier. Most of these years I had spent on the training-ground, where, much to my annoyance, the very purpose of the training-ground seemed as often as not to have been lost sight of. Finally, disgusted, but probably much to the relief of my immediate associates, I was mustered out of the U.S. Army and had hied to the tall timber of Oregon, well back out of the way.
One day there was an unexpected visitor at my camp, miles and miles out in those Oregon backwoods. He announced himself as the British Consul, charged by his Majesty to advise me of the final disposition of affairs at the conclusion of our mutual exigent enterprise. A substantial gratuity was provided to enable men to establish contact again with normal pursuits.
The whole business was clean-cut and simple – and human. It might have been handled through the mail. A packet of forms, in quadruplicate, initialled here and there by uniformed clerks, locating, identifying and disposing of one McBride, an item of cast off war material, would have served the ends of some organizations. But the genius of common sense in the British War Office was humanly dissolving the bonds which make armies. You can’t put them on paper. It is a universal understanding between men and I accepted, the two medals as mere formal tokens of this, possessing a meaning exactly matching my understanding of it.
Chapter 15. The British Army
A RIFLEMAN at war is a soldier, and a soldier is one of an army. Something of his identity is imparted to the aggregate, something acquired from it. It is in the aggregate that he achieves victory or suffers defeat. His own state of mind and spirit is sensitive at all times to that of the whole. His record is determined not solely by his individual qualities, but, as well, by the qualities of those on either side of him, and by the organization which binds them together, directs their efforts and consolidates their gains, and by the spirit which this organization instils and fosters and the stimulus and incentive which he gains from it.
I should like, therefore, to say something about my comrades-in-arms during something like half of the not-so-recent war. Mine is not to be regarded as an illustrious record of service. I can see, now, many places where it might have been improved, but responsibility for its shortcomings is largely my own. The other fellow didn’t fail me, and I think the record gains rather than loses from being part of the record of the British Army. It gave me plenty of opportunity to show what I could do. If I felt, in the beginning, that there were some things that might have been managed better, I discovered many other things that aroused my admiration. Organization for war is a vast and complicated business. No ministry of war or general staff is omniscient. The first few weeks following the little incident in the Balkans witnessed not only the usual revolutionary change in the manner of life of the average man, but a change hardly less revolutionary in the methods of warfare itself. The civilian not only had to become a soldier, but the soldier had to become a different sort of soldier; and the ministry of war had not only to provide for his equipment and training, but to familiarize itself with the new conditions for which he was being equipped and trained.
I was better acquainted with the English and English customs than is the average American; yet, at first, I thought they were pretty slow at getting things done. I was a year late getting in the game; yet, one of the first things I ran across was a precious trio of snipers, blithely sniping away at ranges of a thousand yards and upwards. This rather dismayed me; particularly so since one of the trio was an officer. Here they were, diligently carrying on “according to orders,” unconcerned, apparently, by the obvious fact that they were accomplishing nothing, when they might so easily have got themselves into position to do some deadly work. The whole business seemed peculiarly inept – and peculiarly British. An American (only the so-called typical one) armed with the same authority would have been killing Germans in numbers, hardly knowing that he was disregarding orders in getting within range. But this is by no means to say that an American Army, under similar circumstances, would have had a well-organized and equipped sniping service. I have every reason to believe that it would not have had one, though a lot of individuals – if they could have got hold of the equipment – might have been having a great time with some real live targets. Besides, the Englishman has his own way of going about things, and eventually he did effective sniping, even if he had to get a General Order to bring him within range. And he probably had this by the time he had the equipment to justify an organization.
But it was not individual action that won the war; it was organized action. And even confining ourselves to the individual, this isolated instance tells us little about the Englishman, because it illustrates the characteristic in which he is notably weakest. It takes many other qualities to make a good soldier – and many soldiers to make an army. If you will look at the matter from all angles, I am willing to risk the charge of odium that is proverbially supposed to attach to comparisons. I hope there will be none, because I foresee that I am going to be constantly involved in comparisons. I spent a good many years with the American Army and did all my fighting with the British. And I am the more inclined to stick to my admiration for the British because it grew as my acquaintanceship lengthened. This does not, of course, mean that it grew at the expense of the United States. It is simply that I came a little nearer to understanding the Englishman. From the viewpoint of the average American he takes a good deal of understanding. And let me add here – for the other side of this matter of international amity – that he acquires a good deal of understanding before passing judgment. At his best – and you will find many of them – he is not even disposed to pass judgment. Rare virtue!
And the British Army requires a lot of understanding, even in its outward aspects, the mere catalogue of the various units. Any visitor to London has seen the Horse Guards down on Whitehall, and I am free to admit that, just common, every-day Hoosier that I am, I never see those magnificent living statues that I don’t get a thrill. Other Guards Regiments are the Coldstreams and Grenadiers and the Scots, Welsh and Irish Guards. In peace times a Guards Division is usually kept in London, forming the backbone of the garrison there and being available for the frequent ceremonies that mark the annual routine of the capital. They went to France with the first contingents, and I don’t know how many times their number flowed through their ranks – in as replacements, out as casualties – before the end.
Other regiments of the British Army bear the names of the cities or districts from which they are recruited. Many of them have histories running back for hundreds of years, and they carry on their colours the names of battles that mark turning points in the course of Empire, and of civilization, throughout many centuries. But the names of cities or districts is only the beginning. There are – to mix cavalry and infantry indiscriminately in the few names that I recall – Fusiliers, Dragoons, Foot, Horse, Rifles, Lancers, from various places and with various further designations, as King’s, Queen’s, Royal, etc.
The Territorials correspond roughly to our National Guard. They, too, are locally recruited and maintained – usually by counties, sometimes by cities. But they also run to diversity in the matter of designation, including such organizations as the London Scottish – which, by the
way, sent the first Territorial Battalions to fight in France.
Scottish, also, was the first Regular Regiment offered the war-time British Army. This was the Royal Scots. Many of the Scottish Regiments are designated by the name of the clan whose tartan they wear; or are otherwise closely identified with proud tradition: Argyll and Sutherlands, Seaforths, Black Watch, Gordons. The parade becomes colorful not only in name and battle-flags, but in dress. During the war all the various regiments were greatly augmented. Some of them had several battalions in France, all bearing the same name, but further designated by number. And each regiment maintained a training battalion in England.
And now the real diversity begins – after leaving the British Isles, having said nothing of the various auxiliary, vital, but not so glamorous organizations, such as the Royal Engineers and the various Pioneer battalions and service corps, and not mentioning the display of artillery. This diversity is first simply the stamp of a different environment – the English Colonials; but it is further a diversity of race, color, creed, tradition and spirit. Pathans, Sikhs, Gurkhas joined men from Newfoundland and the Union of South Africa. There were African natives and Fijians, men from New Zealand and Australia. They came up and over from the farthest islet of that Empire on which the sun never sets. And it seemed to me they were all British. The fiercest Sikh sergeant had about him an unmistakable British stamp. It was a treat to watch these fellows, and other native Indians. They were natural-born fighting men, and they seemed to take more pride in their work than any of the others. No matter what one of them happened to be doing, on the approach of an officer he would spring to attention – and I mean spring, and to the perfect position of attention – and execute the salute as though he himself were being honored. Seeing them, a man thought two or three times about that colossus which was Britain at war.
A Rifleman Went to War Page 27