“All along of dirtiness, all along of mess,
All along of doing things rather more or less.”
The very justification our English poet has found for a thousand overbearing actions in the East! “Forget not order and the real,” that was the underlying message of bomb and gas and submarine. After all, what right had we English not to have a gun or an aeroplane fit to bring down that Zeppelin ignominiously and conclusively? Had we not undertaken Empire? Were we not the leaders of great nations? Had we indeed much right to complain if our imperial pose was flouted? “There, at least,” said Mr. Britling’s reason, “is one of the lines of thought that brought that unseen cruelty out of the night high over the houses of Filmington-on-Sea. That, in a sense, is the cause of this killing. Cruel it is and abominable, yes, but is it altogether cruel? Hasn’t it, after all, a sort of stupid rightness?—isn’t it a stupid reaction to an indolence at least equally stupid?”
What was this rightness that lurked below cruelty? What was the inspiration of this pressure of spite, this anger that was aroused by ineffective gentleness and kindliness? Was it indeed an altogether evil thing; was it not rather an impulse, blind as yet, but in its ultimate quality as good as mercy, greater perhaps in its ultimate values than mercy?
This idea had been gathering in Mr. Britling’s mind for many weeks; it had been growing and taking shape as he wrote, making experimental beginnings for his essay, “The Anatomy of Hate.” Is there not, he now asked himself plainly, a creative and corrective impulse behind all hate? Is not this malignity indeed only the ape-like precursor of the great disciplines of a creative state?
The invincible hopefulness of his sanguine temperament had now got Mr. Britling well out of the pessimistic pit again. Already he had been on the verge of his phrase while wandering across the rushy fields towards Market Saffron; now it came to him again like a legitimate monarch returning from exile.
“When hate shall have become creative energy. …
“Hate which passes into creative power; gentleness which is indolence and the herald of euthanasia. …
“Pity is but a passing grace; for mankind will not always be pitiful.”
But meanwhile, meanwhile. … How long were men so to mingle wrong with right, to be energetic without mercy and kindly without energy? …
For a time Mr. Britling sat on the lonely parade under the stars and in the sound of the sea, brooding upon these ideas.
His mind could make no further steps. It had worked for its spell. His rage had ebbed away now altogether. His despair was no longer infinite. But the world was dark and dreadful still. It seemed none the less dark because at the end there was a gleam of light. It was a gleam of light far beyond the limits of his own life, far beyond the life of his son. It had no balm for these sufferings. Between it and himself stretched the weary generations still to come, generations of bickering and accusation, greed and faint-heartedness, the half-truth and the hasty blow. And all those years would be full of pitiful things, such pitiful things as the blackened ruins in the town behind, the little grey-faced corpses, the lives torn and wasted, the hopes extinguished and the gladness gone. …
He was no longer thinking of the Germans as diabolical. They were human; they had a case. It was a stupid case, but our case, too, was a stupid case. How stupid were all our cases! What was it we missed? Something, he felt, very close to us, and very elusive. Something that would resolve a hundred tangled oppositions. …
His mind hung at that. Back upon his consciousness came crowding the horrors and desolations that had been his daily food now for three-quarters of a year. He groaned aloud. He struggled against that renewed envelopment of his spirit. “Oh, blood-stained fools!” he cried, “oh, pitiful, tormented fools!
“Even that vile airship was a ship of fools!
“We are all fools still. Striving apes, irritated beyond measure by our own striving, easily moved to anger.”
Some train of subconscious suggestion brought a long-forgotten speech back into Mr. Britling’s mind, a speech that is full of that light which still seeks so mysteriously and indefatigably to break through the darkness and thickness of the human mind.
He whispered the words. No unfamiliar words could have had the same effect of comfort and conviction.
He whispered it of those men whom he still imagined flying far away there eastward, through the clear freezing air beneath the stars, those muffled sailors and engineers who had caused so much pain and agony in this little town.
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE
§ 1
Hugh’s letters were becoming a very important influence upon Mr. Britling’s thought. Hugh had always been something of a letter-writer, and now what was perhaps an inherited desire to set things down was manifest. He had been accustomed to decorate his letters from school with absurd little sketches—sometimes his letters had been all sketches—and now he broke from drawing to writing and back to drawing in a way that pleased his father mightily. The father loved this queer trick of caricature; he did not possess it himself, and so it seemed to him the most wonderful of all Hugh’s little equipment of gifts. Mr. Britling used to carry these letters about until their edges got grimy; he would show them to any one he felt capable of appreciating their youthful freshness; he would quote them as final and conclusive evidence to establish this or that. He did not dream how many thousands of mothers and fathers were treasuring such documents. He thought other sons were dull young men by comparison with Hugh.
The earlier letters told much of the charms of discipline and the open air. “All the bother about what one has to do with oneself is over,” wrote Hugh. “One has disposed of oneself. That has the effect of a great relief. Instead of telling oneself that one ought to get up in the morning, a bugle tells you that. … And there’s no nonsense about it, no chance of lying and arguing about it with oneself. … I begin to see the sense of men going into monasteries and putting themselves under rules. One is carried along in a sort of moral automobile instead of trudging the road. …”
And he was also sounding new physical experiences.
“Never before,” he declared, “have I known what fatigue is. It’s a miraculous thing. One drops down in one’s clothes on any hard old thing and sleeps. …”
And in his early letters he was greatly exercised by the elementary science of drill and discipline, and the discussion of whether these things were necessary. He began by assuming that their importance was overrated. He went on to discover that they constituted the very essentials of all good soldiering. “In a crisis,” he concluded, “there is no telling what will get hold of a man, his higher instincts or his lower. He may show courage of a very splendid sort—or a hasty discretion. A habit is much more trustworthy than an instinct. So discipline sets up a habit of steady and courageous bearing. If you keep your head you are at liberty to be splendid. If you lose it, the habit will carry you through.”
The young man was also very profound upon the effects of the suggestion of various exercises upon the mind.
“It is surprising how bloodthirsty one feels in a bayonet charge. We have to shout; we are encouraged to shout. The effect is to paralyse one’s higher centres. One ceases to question— anything. One becomes a ‘bayoneteer.’ As I go bounding forward I imagine fat men, succulent men ahead, and I am filled with the desire to do them in neatly. This sort of thing——”
A sketch of slaughter followed, with a large and valiant Hugh leaving a train of fallen behind him.
“Not like this. This is how I used to draw it in my innocent childhood, but it is incorrect. More than one German on the bayonet at a time is an encumbrance. And it would be swank—a thing we detest in the army.”
The second sketch showed the same brave hero with half-a-dozen of the enemy skewered like cat’s meat.
“As for the widows and children, I disregard ’em.”
> § 2
But presently Hugh began to be bored.
“Route marching again,” he wrote. “For no earthly reason than that they can do nothing else with us. We are getting no decent musketry training because there are no rifles. We are wasting half our time. If you multiply half a week by the number of men in the army you will see we waste centuries weekly. … If most of these men here had just been enrolled and left to go about their business while we trained officers and instructors and got equipment for them, and if they had then been put through their paces as rapidly as possible, it would have been infinitely better for the country. … In a sort of way we are keeping raw; in a sort of way we are getting stale. … I get irritated by this. I feel we are not being properly done by.
“Half our men are educated men, reasonably educated, but we are always being treated as though we were too stupid for words. …
“No good grousing, I suppose, but after Statesminster and a glimpse of old Cardinal’s way of doing things, one gets a kind of toothache in the mind at the sight of everything being done twice as slowly and half as well as it need be.”
He went off at a tangent to describe the men in his platoon. “The best man in our lot is an ex-grocer’s assistant, but in order to save us from vain generalisations it happens that the worst man—a moon-faced creature, almost incapable of lacing up his boots without help and objurgation—is also an ex-grocer’s assistant. Our most offensive member is a little cad with a snub nose, who had read Kipling and imagines he is the nearest thing that ever has been to Private Ortheris. He goes about looking for the other two of the Soldiers Three; it is rather like an unpopular politician trying to form a ministry. And he is conscientiously foul-mouthed. He feels losing a chance of saying ‘bloody’ as acutely as a snob feels dropping an H. He goes back sometimes and says the sentence over again and puts the ‘bloody’ in. I used to swear a little out of the range of your parental ear, but Ortheris has cured me. When he is about I am mincing in my speech. I perceive now that cursing is a way of chewing one’s own dirt. In a platoon there is no elbow-room for indifference; you must either love or hate. I have a feeling that my first taste of battle will not be with Germans, but with Private Ortheris. …”
And one letter was just a picture, a parody of the well-known picture of the bivouac below and the soldier’s dream of return to his beloved above. But Master Hugh in the dream was embracing an enormous retort, while a convenient galvanometer registered his emotion and little tripods danced around him.
§ 3
Then came a letter which plunged abruptly into criticism.
“My dear Parent, this is a swearing letter. I must let go to somebody. And somehow none of the other chaps are convenient. I don’t know if I ought to be put against a wall and shot for it, but I hereby declare that all the officers of this battalion over and above the rank of captain are a constellation of incapables—and several of the captains are herewith included. Some of them are men of a pleasant disposition and carefully aborted mental powers, and some are men of an unpleasant disposition and no mental powers at all. And I believe—a little enlightenment by your recent letter to The Times—that they are a fair sample of the entire ‘army’ class which has got to win this war. Usually they are indolent, but when they are thoroughly roused they are fussy. The time they should spend in enlarging their minds and increasing their military efficiency they devote to keeping fit. They are, roughly speaking, fit—for nothing. They cannot move us thirty miles without getting half of us left about, without losing touch with food and shelter and starving us for thirty-six hours or so in the process, and they cannot count beyond the fingers of one hand, not having learned to use the nose for arithmetical operations. … I conclude this war is going to be a sort of Battle of Inkerman on a large scale. We chaps in the ranks will have to do the job. Leading is ‘off.’ …
“All of this, my dear Parent, is just a blow off. I have been needlessly starved, and fagged to death and exasperated. We have moved five-and-twenty miles across country in fifty-seven hours. And without food for about eighteen hours. I have been with my Captain, who has been billeting us here in Cheasingholt. Oh, he is a MUFF! Oh God! oh God of Heaven! what a MUFF! He is afraid of printed matter, but he controls himself heroically. He prides himself upon having no ‘sense of locality, confound it!’ Prides himself! He went about this village, which is a little dispersed, at a slight trot, and wouldn’t avail himself of the one-inch map I happened to have. He judged the capacity of each room with his eye and wouldn’t let me measure, even with God’s own paces. Not with the legs I inherit. ‘We’ll put five fellahs hea!’ he said. ‘What d’you want to measure the room for? We haven’t come to lay down carpets.’ Then, having assigned men by coup d’æil, so as to congest half the village miserably, he found the other half unoccupied and had to begin all over again. ‘If you measured the floor space first, sir,’ I said, ‘and made a list of the houses——’ ‘That isn’t the way I’m going to do it,’ he said, fixing me with a pitiless eye. …
“That isn’t the way they are going to do it, Daddy! The sort of thing that is done over here in the green army will be done over there in the dry. They won’t be in time; they’ll lose their guns where now they lose our kitchens. I’m a mute soldier; I’ve got to do what I’m told; still, I begin to understand the Battle of Neuve Chapelle.
“They say the relations of men and officers in the new army are beautiful. Some day I may learn to love my officer—but not just yet. Not till I’ve forgotten the operations leading up to the occupation of Cheasingholt. … He muffs his real job without a blush, and yet he would rather be shot than do his bootlaces up crisscross. What I say about officers applies only and solely to him really. … How well I understand now the shooting of officers by their men. … But indeed, fatigue and exasperation apart, this shift has been done atrociously. …”
The young man returned to these criticisms in a later letter.
“You will think I am always carping, but it does seem to me that nearly everything is being done here in the most wasteful way possible. We waste time, we waste labour, we waste material, oh Lord! how we waste our country’s money. These aren’t, I can assure you, the opinions of a conceited young man. It’s nothing to be conceited about. … We’re bored to death by standing about this infernal little village. There is nothing to do—except trail after a small number of slatternly young women we despise and hate. I don’t, Daddy. And I don’t drink. Why have I inherited no vices? We had a fight here yesterday— sheer boredom. Ortheris has a swollen lip, and another private has a bad black eye. There is to be a return match. I perceive the chief horror of warfare is boredom. …
“Our feeding here is typical of the whole system. It is a system invented not with any idea of getting the best results— that does not enter into the War Office philosophy—but to have a rule for everything, and avoid arguments. There is rather too generous an allowance of bread and stuff per man, and there is a very fierce but not very efficient system of weighing and checking. A rather too generous allowance is, of course, a direct incentive to waste or stealing—as any one but our silly old duffer of a War Office would know. The checking is for quantity, which any fool can understand, rather than for quality. The test for the quality of army meat is the smell. If it doesn’t smell bad, it is good. …
“Then the raw material is handed over to a cook. He is a common soldier who has been made into a cook by a simple ceremony. He is told, ‘You are a cook.’ He does his best to be. Usually he roasts or bakes to begin with, guessing when the joint is done, afterwards he hacks up what is left of his joints and makes a stew for next day. A stew is hacked meat boiled up in a big pot. It has much fat floating on the top. After you have eaten your fill you want to sit about quiet. The men are fed usually in a large tent or barn. We have a barn. It is not a clean barn, and just to make it more like a picnic there are insufficient plates, knives and forks. (I tell you, no army people can count beyond eight or ten.) The corporals after
their morning’s work have to carve. When they have done carving they tell me they feel they have had enough dinner. They sit about looking pale, and wander off afterwards to the village pub. (I shall probably become a corporal soon.) In these islands before the war began there was a surplus of women over men of about a million. (See the publications of the Fabian Society, now so popular among the young.) None of these women have been trusted by the government with the difficult task of cooking and giving out food to our soldiers. No man of the ordinary soldier class ever cooks anything until he is a soldier. … All food left over after the stew or otherwise rendered uneatable by the cook is thrown away. We throw away pail-loads. We bury meat. …
Mr. Britling Sees It Through Page 30