by None
The other men in the trench were firing all the while. They had no hope; but they aimed just as if they had been shooting at Bisley.
Suddenly one of them lifted up his voice in the plainest English.
‘Gawd help us!’ he bellowed to the man next to him, ‘but we’re blooming marvels! Look at those grey… gentlemen, look at them! D’ye see them? They’re not going down in dozens, nor in ’undreds; it’s thousands, it is. Look! look! there’s a regiment gone while I’m talking to ye.’
‘Shut it!’ the other soldier bellowed, taking aim, ‘what are ye gassing about?’
But he gulped with astonishment even as he spoke, for, indeed, the grey men were falling by the thousands. The English could hear the guttural scream of the German officers, the crackle of their revolvers as they shot the reluctant; and still line after line crashed to the earth.
All the while the Latin-bred soldier heard the cry:
‘Harow! Harow! Monseigneur, dear Saint, quick to our aid! St George help us!’
‘High Chevalier, defend us!’
The singing arrows fled so swift and thick that they darkened the air; the heathen horde melted from before them.
‘More machine-guns!’ Bill yelled to Tom.
‘Don’t hear them,’ Tom yelled back. ‘But, thank God, anyway; they’ve got it in the neck.’
In fact, there were ten thousand dead German soldiers left before that salient of the English army, and consequently there was no Sedan. In Germany, a country ruled by scientific principles, the great general staff decided that the contemptible English7 must have employed shells containing an unknown gas of a poisonous nature, as no wounds were discernible on the bodies of the dead German soldiers. But the man who knew what nuts tasted like when they called themselves steak knew also that St George had brought his Agincourt bowmen to help the English.
‘SAPPER’ (HERMAN CYRIL MCNEILE)
PRIVATE MEYRICK – COMPANY IDIOT
No one who has ever given the matter a moment’s thought would deny, I suppose, that a regiment without discipline is like a ship without a rudder. True as that fact has always been, it is doubly so now, when men are exposed to mental and physical shocks such as have never before been thought of.
The condition of a man’s brain after he has sat in a trench and suffered an intensive bombardment for two or three hours can only be described by one word, and that is – numbed. The actual physical concussion, apart altogether from the mental terror, caused by the bursting of a succession of large shells in a man’s vicinity, temporarily robs him of the use of his thinking faculties. He becomes half-stunned, dazed; his limbs twitch convulsively and involuntarily; he mutters foolishly – he becomes incoherent. Starting with fright he passes through that stage, passes beyond it into a condition bordering on coma; and when a man is in that condition he is not responsible for his actions. His brain has ceased to work…
Now it is, I believe, a principle of psychology that the brain or mind of a man can be divided into two parts – the objective and the subjective: the objective being that part of his thought-box which is actuated by outside influences, by his senses, by his powers of deduction; the subjective being that part which is not directly controllable by what he sees and hears, the part which the religious might call his soul, the Buddhist ‘the Spark of God’, others instinct. And this portion of a man’s nature remains acutely active, even while the other part has struck work. In fact, the more numbed and comatose the thinking brain, the more clearly and insistently does subjective instinct hold sway over a man’s body. Which all goes to show that discipline, if it is to be of any use to a man at such a time, must be a very different type of thing to what the ordinary, uninitiated, and so-called free civilian believes it to be. It must be an ideal, a thing where the motive counts, almost a religion. It must be an appeal to the soul of man, not merely an order to his body. That the order to his body, the self-control of his daily actions, the general change in his mode of life will infallibly follow on the heels of the appeal to his soul – if that appeal be successful – is obvious. But the appeal must come first: it must be the driving power; it must be the cause and not the effect. Otherwise, when the brain is gone – numbed by causes outside its control; when the reasoning intellect of man is out of action – stunned for the time; when only his soul remains to pull the quivering, helpless body through, – then, unless that soul has the ideal of discipline in it, it will fail. And failure may mean death and disaster; it will mean shame and disgrace, when sanity returns…
To the man seated at his desk in the company office these ideas were not new. He had been one of the original Expeditionary Force;1 but a sniper had sniped altogether too successfully out by Zillebecke in the early stages of the first battle of Ypres, and when that occurs a rest cure becomes necessary. At that time he was the senior subaltern of one of the finest regiments of ‘a contemptible little army’;2 now he was a major commanding a company in the tenth battalion of that same regiment. And in front of him on the desk, a yellow form pinned to a white slip of flimsy paper, announced that No. 8469, Private Meyrick, J., was for office. The charge was ‘Late falling in on the 8 a.m. parade’, and the evidence against him was being given by CSM Hayton, also an old soldier from that original battalion at Ypres. It was Major Seymour himself who had seen the late appearance of the above-mentioned Private Meyrick, and who had ordered the yellow form to be prepared. And now with it in front of him, he stared musingly at the office fire…
There are a certain number of individuals who from earliest infancy have been imbued with the idea that the chief pastime of officers in the army, when they are not making love to another man’s wife, is the preparation of harsh and tyrannical rules for the express purpose of annoying their men, and the gloating infliction of drastic punishment on those that break them. The absurdity of this idea has nothing to do with it, it being a well-known fact that the more absurd an idea is, the more utterly fanatical do its adherents become. To them the thought that a man being late on parade should make him any the worse fighter – especially as he had, in all probability, some good and sufficient excuse – cannot be grasped. To them the idea that men may not be a law unto themselves – though possibly agreed to reluctantly in the abstract – cannot possibly be assimilated in the concrete.
‘He has committed some trifling offence,’ they say; ‘now you will give him some ridiculous punishment. That is the curse of militarism – a chosen few rule by Fear.’ And if you tell them that any attempt to inculcate discipline by fear alone must of necessity fail, and that far from that being the method in the Army the reverse holds good, they will not believe you. Yet – it is so…
‘Shall I bring in the prisoner, sir?’ The Sergeant-Major was standing by the door.
‘Yes, I’ll see him now.’ The officer threw his cigarette into the fire and put on his hat.
‘Take off your ’at. Come along there, my lad – move. You’d go to sleep at your mother’s funeral – you would.’ Seymour smiled at the conversation outside the door; he had soldiered many years with that Sergeant-Major. ‘Now, step up briskly. Quick march. ’Alt. Left turn.’ He closed the door and ranged himself alongside the prisoner facing the table.
‘No. 8469, Private Meyrick – you are charged with being late on the 8 a.m. parade this morning. Sergeant-Major, what do you know about it?’
‘Sir, on the 8 a.m. parade this morning, Private Meyrick came running on ’alf a minute after the bugle sounded. ’Is puttees were not put on tidily. I’d like to say, sir, that it’s not the first time this man has been late falling in. ’E seems to me to be always a-dreaming, somehow – not properly awake like. I warned ’im for office.’
The officer’s eyes rested on the hatless soldier facing him. ‘Well, Meyrick,’ he said quietly, ‘what have you got to say?’
‘Nothing, sir. I’m sorry as ’ow I was late. I was reading, and I never noticed the time.’
‘What were you reading?’ The question seemed superfluous –
almost foolish; but something in the eyes of the man facing him, something in his short, stumpy, uncouth figure interested him.
‘I was a-reading Kipling,3 sir.’ The Sergeant-Major snorted as nearly as such an august disciplinarian could snort in the presence of his officer.
‘’E ought, sir, to ’ave been ’elping the cook’s mate – until ’e was due on parade.’
‘Why do you read Kipling or anyone else when you ought to be doing other things?’ queried the officer. His interest in the case surprised himself; the excuse was futile, and two or three days to barracks is an excellent corrective.
‘I dunno, sir. ’E sort of gets ’old of me, like. Makes me want to do things – and then I can’t. I’ve always been slow and awkward like, and I gets a bit flustered at times. But I do try ’ard.’ Again a doubtful noise from the Sergeant-Major; to him trying ’ard and reading Kipling when you ought to be swabbing up dishes were hardly compatible.
For a moment or two the officer hesitated, while the Sergeant-Major looked frankly puzzled. ‘What the blazes ’as come over ’im?’ he was thinking; ‘surely he ain’t going to be guyed by that there wash. Why don’t ’e give ’im two days and be done with it – and me with all them returns?’
‘I’m going to talk to you, Meyrick.’ Major Seymour’s voice cut in on these reflections. For the fraction of a moment ‘Two days’ CB’ had been on the tip of his tongue, and then he’d changed his mind. ‘I want to try and make you understand why you were brought up to office to-day. In every community – in every body of men – there must be a code of rules which govern what they do. Unless those rules are carried out by all those men, the whole system falls to the ground. Supposing everyone came on to parade half a minute late because they’d been reading Kipling?’
‘I know, sir. I see as ’ow I was wrong. But – I dreams sometimes as ’ow I’m like them he talks about, when ’e says as ’ow they lifted ’em through the charge as won the day. And then the dream’s over, and I know as ’ow I’m not.’
The Sergeant-Major’s impatience was barely concealed; those returns were oppressing him horribly.
‘You can get on with your work, Sergeant-Major. I know you’re busy.’ Seymour glanced at the NCO. ‘I want to say a little more to Meyrick.’
The scandalized look on his face amused him; to leave a prisoner alone with an officer – impossible, unheard of.
‘I am in no hurry, sir, thank you.’
‘All right then,’ Seymour spoke briefly. ‘Now, Meyrick, I want you to realize that the principle at the bottom of all discipline is the motive that makes that discipline. I want you to realize that all these rules are made for the good of the regiment, and that in everything you do and say you have an effect on the regiment. You count in the show, and I count in it, and so does the Sergeant-Major. We’re all out for the same thing, my lad, and that is the regiment. We do things not because we’re afraid of being punished if we don’t, but because we know that they are for the good of the regiment – the finest regiment in the world. You’ve got to make good, not because you’ll be dropped on if you don’t, but because you’ll pull the regiment down if you fail. And because you count, you, personally, must not be late on parade. It does matter what you do yourself. I want you to realize that, and why. The rules you are ordered to comply with are the best rules. Sometimes we alter one – because we find a better; but they’re the best we can get, and before you can find yourself in the position of the men you dream about – the men who lift others, the men who lead others – you’ve got to lift and lead yourself. Nothing is too small to worry about, nothing too insignificant. And because I think that at the back of your head somewhere you’ve got the right ideas; because I think it’s natural to you to be a bit slow and awkward and that your failure isn’t due to laziness or slackness, I’m not going to punish you this time for breaking the rules. If you do it again, it will be a different matter. There comes a time when one can’t judge motives; when one can only judge results. Case dismissed.’
Thoughtfully the officer lit a cigarette as the door closed, and though for the present there was nothing more for him to do in office, he lingered on, pursuing his train of thoughts. Fully conscious of the aggrieved wrath of his Sergeant-Major at having his time wasted, a slight smile spread over his face. He was not given to making perorations of this sort, and now that it was over he wondered rather why he’d done it. And then he recalled the look in the private’s eyes as he had spoken of his dreams.
‘He’ll make good that man.’ Unconsciously he spoke aloud. ‘He’ll make good.’
The discipline of habit is what we soldiers had before the war, and that takes time. Now it must be the discipline of intelligence, of ideal. And for that fear is the worst conceivable teacher. We have no time to form habits now; the routine of the army is of too short duration before the test comes. And the test is too crushing…
The bed-rock now as then is the same, only the methods of getting down to that bed-rock have to be more hurried. Of old habitude and constant association instilled a religion – the religion of obedience, the religion of esprit de corps. But it took time. Now we need the same religion, but we haven’t the same time.
In the office next door the Sergeant-Major was speaking soft words to the Pay Corporal.4
‘Blimey, I dunno what’s come over the bloke. You know that there Meyrick…’
‘Who, the Slug?’ interpolated the other.
‘Yes. Well, ’e come shambling on to parade this morning with ’is puttees flapping round his ankles – late as usual; and ’e told me to run ’im up to office.’ A thumb indicated the Major next door. ‘When I gets ’im there, instead of giving ’im three days’ CB and being done with it, ’e starts a lot of jaw about motives and discipline. ’E hadn’t got no ruddy excuse; said ’e was a-reading Kipling, or some such rot – when ’e ought to have been ’elping the cook’s mate.’
‘What did he give him?’ asked the Pay Corporal, interested.
‘Nothing. His blessing and dismissed the case. As if I had nothing better to do than listen to ’im talking ’ot air to a perisher like that there Meyrick. ’Ere, pass over them musketry returns.’5
Which conversation, had Seymour overheard it, he would have understood and fully sympathized with. For CSM Hayton, though a prince of sergeant-majors, was no student of psychology. To him a spade was a spade only as long as it shovelled earth.
Now, before I go on to the day when the subject of all this trouble and talk was called on to make good, and how he did it, a few words on the man himself might not be amiss. War, the great forcing house of character, admits no lies. Sooner or later it finds out a man, and he stands in the pitiless glare of truth for what he is. And it is not by any means the cheery hail-fellow-well-met type, or the thruster, or the sportsman, who always pools the most votes when the judging starts…
John Meyrick, before he began to train for the great adventure, had been something in a warehouse down near Tilbury. And ‘something’ is about the best description of what he was that you could give. Moreover there wasn’t a dog’s chance of his ever being ‘anything’. He used to help the young man – I should say young gentleman – who checked weigh-bills at one of the dock entrances. More than that I cannot say, and incidentally the subject is not of surpassing importance. His chief interests in life were contemplating the young gentleman, listening open-mouthed to his views on life, and dreaming. Especially the latter. Sometimes he would go after the day’s work, and, sitting down on a bollard, his eyes would wander over the lines of some dirty tramp, with her dark-skinned crew. Visions of wonderful seas and tropic islands, of leafy palms with the blue-green surf thundering in towards them, of coral reefs and glorious-coloured flowers, would run riot in his brain. Not that he particularly wanted to go and see these figments of his imagination for himself; it was enough for him to dream of them – to conjure them up for a space in his mind by the help of an actual concrete ship – and then to go back to his work of assisting h
is loquacious companion. He did not find the work uncongenial; he had no hankerings after other modes of life – in fact the thought of any change never even entered into his calculations. What the future might hold he neither knew nor cared; the expressions of his companion on the rottenness of life in general and their firm in particular awoke no answering chord in his breast. He had enough to live on in his little room at the top of a tenement house – he had enough over for an occasional picture show – and he had his dreams. He was content.
Then came the war. For a long while it passed him by; it was no concern of his, and it didn’t enter his head that it was ever likely to be until one night, as he was going in to see Jumping Jess, or the Champion Girl Cowpuncher at the local movies, a recruiting sergeant touched him on the arm.
He was not a promising specimen for a would-be soldier, but that recruiting sergeant was not new to the game, and he’d seen worse.
‘Why aren’t you in khaki, young fellow me lad?’ he remarked genially.
The idea, as I say, was quite new to our friend. Even though that very morning his colleague in the weigh-bill pastime had chucked it and joined, even though he’d heard a foreman discussing who they were to put in his place as ‘that young Meyrick was habsolutely ’opeless’, it still hadn’t dawned on him that he might go too. But the recruiting sergeant was a man of some knowledge; in his daily round he encountered many and varied types. In two minutes he had fired the boy’s imagination with a glowing and partially true description of the glories of war and the army, and supplied him with another set of dreams to fill his brain. Wasting no time, he struck while the iron was hot, and in a few minutes John Meyrick, sometime checker of weigh-bills, died, and No. 8469, Private John Meyrick came into being.