i
now that most of our men in the prime of life have been in the army we seem to be in for a goodly literature of disappointment. all the ungifted young people came back from the war to tell us that they were "fed up." that was their ailment, in outline. the gifted ones are now coming down to detail. they say that a web has been woven over the sky, or that something or other has made a goblin of the sun—about as full details of a pain as you can fairly expect a gifted person to give, although he really may feel it.
no doubt disenchantment has flourished before. about the year 1880 nearly all the best art was wan and querulous; that of burne-jones was always in trouble; matthew arnold's verse was a well-bred, melodious whine; rossetti was all disenamourment and displacement. yet you could feel that their broken-toy view of the world was only their nice little way with the public. burne-jones in his home was a red, jovial man; arnold a diner-out of the first lustre; rossetti a sworn friend to bacon and eggs and other plain pleasures. the young melancholiasts of to-day are less good at their craft, and yet they do give you a notion that some sort of silver cord really seems to them to have come loose in their insides, or some golden bowl, which mattered to them, to have been more or less broken, and that they are feeling honestly sour about it. if they do not know how to take it out of mankind by writing desolatory verses about ashes and dust in the english review, at least they can, if they be workmen, vote for a strike: they thus achieve the same good end and put it beyond any doubt that they don't think all is well with the world.
ii
the higher the wall or the horse from which you have tumbled, the larger, under nature's iron law, are your bruises and consequent crossness likely to be. before we try shaking or cuffing the disenraptured young solomons in our magazines and our pits it would be humane to reflect that some five millions of these, in their turns, have fallen off an extremely high horse. of course, we have all fallen off something since 1914. even owners of ships and vendors of heavy woollens might, if all hearts were laid bare, be found to have fallen, not perhaps off a high horse, but at least off some minute metaphysical pony. still, the record in length of vertical fall, and of proportionate severity of incidence upon an inelastic earth, is probably held by ex-soldiers and, among these, by the volunteers of the first year of the war. we were all, of course, volunteers then, undiluted by indispensable harry's later success in getting dispensable johnnie forced to join us in the low countries.
most of those volunteers of the prime were men of handsome and boundless illusions. each of them quite seriously thought of himself as a molecule in the body of a nation that was really, and not just figuratively, "straining every nerve" to discharge an obligation of honour. honestly, there was about them as little as there could humanly be of the coxcombry of self-devotion. they only felt that they had got themselves happily placed on a rope at which everyone else, in some way or other, was tugging his best as well as they. all the air was ringing with rousing assurances. france to be saved, belgium righted, freedom and civilization re-won, a sour, soiled, crooked old world to be rid of bullies and crooks and reclaimed for straightness, decency, good-nature, the ways of common men dealing with common men. what a chance! the plain recruit who had not the gift of a style said to himself that for once he had got right in on the ground-floor of a topping good thing, and he blessed the luck that had made him neither too old nor too young. rupert brooke, meaning exactly the same thing, was writing:
now, god be thank'd who has match'd us with his hour,
and caught our youth and waken'd us from sleeping,
with hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpen'd power,
to turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
glad from a world grown old and cold and weary....
of course, it is easy to say to any such simpleton now: "well, if you were like that, what could you expect? vous l'avez voulu, george dandin. you were rushing upon disillusionment." of course he was. if each recruit in 1914 had been an à kempis, or even a rochefoucauld, he would have known that if you are to love mankind you must not expect too much from it. but he was not, as a rule, a philosopher. he was a common man, not much inclined to think evil of people. it no more occurred to him at that time that he was the natural prey of seventy-seven separate breeds of profiteers than it did that presently he would be overrun by less figurative lice. when garibaldi led an infantry attack against the austrians it was said that he never looked round to see if his men were following; he knew to a dead certainty that at the moment when he reached the enemy he would feel his men's breath hot on the back of his neck. the early volunteer in his blindness imagined that there was between all englishmen then that oneness of faith, love, and courage.
iii
everything helped, for a time, to keep him the child that he was. except in the matter of separation from civilian friends his daily life was pretty well that of the happiest children. the men knew nothing and hoped for wonderful things. drill, to the average recruit, was like some curious game or new dance, various and rhythmic, and not very hard: it was rather fun for adults to be able to play at such things without being laughed at. their lives had undergone an immense simplification. of course, an immense simplification of life is not certain to be a wholly good thing. a zulu's life may be simpler than einstein's and yet the estate of einstein may be the more gracious. if a boatload of men holding the order of merit were cast away on a desert island they might, on the whole, think the life as beastly as touchstone found the life in the forest of arden. yet some of those eminent men might find a soul of good in that evil. they might grill all the day and shiver all night, and be half-starved the whole of the time. but their minds would get a rest cure. while they were there they would have to settle no heartrending questions of patronage, nor to decree the superannuation of elderly worthies. the brutal instancy of physical wants might be trying; but they would at least be spared, until they were rescued, the solving of any stiff conundrums of professional ethics.
moulding the pet recreations of civilized men you find their craving to have something simple to do for a change, to be given an easy one after so many twisters. people whose work is the making of calculations or the manipulation of thoughts have been known to find a curiously restful pleasure in chopping firewood or painting tool-sheds till their backs ache. it soothes them with a flattering sense of getting something useful done straight off. so much of their "real" work is a taking of some minute or indirect means to some end remote, dimly and doubtfully visible, possibly—for the dread thought will intrude—not worth attaining. the pile of chopped wood is at least a spice of the ultimate good: visible, palpable, it is success; and the advanced and complex man, the statesman or sociologist who has chopped it, escapes for the moment from all his own advancement and complication, and savours in quiet ecstasy one of the sane primeval satisfactions.
a country fellow at the pleugh,
his acre's tilled, he's right eneugh;
a country girl at her wheel,
her dizzen's done, she's unco weel.
the climber of mountains seeks a similar rapture by going to places where he is, in full exertion, the sum of his physical faculties, little more. here all his hopes are for things close at hand: ambition lives along one arm stretched out to grasp a rock eighteen inches away; his sole aim in life may be simply the top of a thirty-foot cleft in a steep face of stone. at home, in the thick of his work, he had seemed to be everlastingly threading mazes that no one could thread right to the end; here, on the crags, it is all divinely simplified; who would trouble his head with subtle questionings about what human life will, might, or ought to be when every muscle and nerve are tautly engaged in the primal job of sticking to life as it is?
to have for his work these raptures of play was the joy of the new recruit who had common health and good-humour. all his maturity's worries and burdens seemed, by some magical change, to have dropped from him; no difficult choices had to be made any longer; hardly a moral chart to be conned; no one had any finances to mind; nobody else's fate was put in his hands, and not even his own. all was fixed from above, down to the time of his going to bed and the way he must lace up his boots. his vow of willing self-enslavement for a season had brought him the peace of the soldier, which passeth understanding as wholly as that of the saint, the blitheness of heart that comes to both with their clarifying, tranquillizing acquiescence in some mystic will outside their own. immersed in that dantean repose of utter obedience the men slept like babies, ate like hunters, and rediscovered the joy of infancy in getting some rather elementary bodily movement to come right. they saw everything that god had made, and behold! it was very good. that was the vision.
iv
the mental peace, the physical joy, the divinely simplified sense of having one clear aim, the remoteness from all the rest of the world, all favoured a tropical growth of illusion. a man, says tennyson, "imputes himself." if he be decent he readily thinks other people are decent. here were hundreds of thousands of quite commonplace persons rendered, by comradeship in an enthusiasm, self-denying, cheerful, unexacting, sanely exalted, substantially good. to get the more fit to be quickly used men would give up even the little darling vices which are nearest to many simple hearts. men who had entertained an almost reasoned passion for whisky, men who in civil life had messed up careers for it and left all and followed it, would cut off their whisky lest it should spoil their marching. little white, prim clerks from putney—men whose souls were saturated with the consciousness of class—would abdicate freely and wholeheartedly their sense of the wide, unplumbed, estranging seas that ought to roar between themselves and covent garden market porters. many men who had never been dangerous rivals to st. anthony kept an unwonted hold on themselves during the months when hundreds of reputable women and girls round every camp seemed to have been suddenly smitten with a bacchantic frenzy. real, constitutional lazy fellows would buy little cram-books of drill out of their pay and sweat them up at night so as to get on the faster. men warned for a guard next day would agree among themselves to get up an hour before the pre-dawn winter réveillé to practise among themselves the beautiful symbolic ritual of mounting guard in the hope of approaching the far-off, longed-for ideal of smartness, the passport to france. men were known to subscribe in order to get some dummy bombs made with which to practise bomb-throwing by themselves on summer nights after drilling and marching from six in the morning till five in the evening. how could they not have the illusion that the whole nation's sense of comradeship went as far as their own?
who of all those who were in camp at that time, and still are alive, will not remember until he dies the second boyhood that he had in the late frosts and then in the swiftly filling and bursting spring and early summer of 1915? the awakening bird-notes of réveillé at dawn, the two-mile run through auroral mists breaking over a still inviolate england, the men's smoking breath and the swish of their feet brushing the dew from the tips of the june grass and printing their track of darker green on the pearly-grey turf; the long, intent morning parades under the gummy shine of chestnut buds in the deepening meadows; the peace of the tranquil hours on guard at some sequestered post, alone with the sylvester midnight, the wheeling stars and the quiet breathing of the earth in its sleep, when time, to the sentry's sense, fleets on unexpectedly fast and life seems much too short because day has slipped into day without the night-long sleeper's false sense of a pause; and then jocund days of marching and digging trenches in the sun; the silly little songs on the road that seemed, then, to have tunes most human, pretty, and jolly; the dinners of haversack rations you ate as you sat on the roadmakers' heaps of chopped stones or lay back among buttercups.
when you think of the youth that you have lost, the times when it seems to you now that life was most poignantly good may not be the ones when everything seemed at the time to go well with your plans, and the world, as they say, to be at your feet; rather some few unaccountable moments when nothing took place that was out of the way and yet some word of a friend's, or a look on the face of the sky, the taste of a glass of spring water, the plash of laughter and oars heard across midsummer meadows at night raised the soul of enjoyment within you to strangely higher powers of itself. that spirit bloweth and is still: it will not rise for our whistling nor keep a time-table; no wine that we know can give us anything more than a fugitive caricature of its ecstasies. when it has blown free we remember it always, and know, without proof, that while the rapture was there we were not drunk, but wise; that for a moment some intervening darkness had thinned and we were seeing further than we can see now into the heart of life.
to one recollection at least it has seemed that the new army's spring-tide of faith and joyous illusion came to its height on a night late in the most beautiful may of 1915, in a hut where thirty men slept near a forest in essex. nothing particular happened; the night was like others. yet in the times that came after, when half of the thirty were dead and most of the others jaded and soured, the feel of that night would come back with the strange distinctness of those picked, remembered mornings and evenings of boyhood when everything that there was became everlastingly memorable as though it had been the morning or evening of the first day. ten o'clock came and lights out, but a kind of luminous bloom still on the air and a bugle blowing last post in some far-away camp that kept worse hours than we. i believe the whole hut held its breath to hear the notes better. who wouldn't, to listen to that most lovely and melancholy of calls, the noble death of each day's life, a sound moving about hither and thither, like a veiled figure making gestures both stately and tender, among the dim thoughts that we have about death the approaching extinguisher—resignation and sadness and unfulfilment and triumph all coming back to the overbearing sense of extinction in those two recurrent notes of "lights out"? one listens as if with bowed mind, as though saying "yes; out, out, brief candle." a moment's silence to let it sink in and the chaffing and laughter broke out like a splash of cool water in summer again. that hut always went to bed laughing and chaffing all round, and, though there was no wit among us, the stories tasted of life, the inexhaustible game and adventure. looker, ex-marine turned soldier, told us how he had once gone down in a diving-suit to find a lost anchor and struck on the old tin lining out of a crate, from which some octopian beast with long feelers had reached out at him, and the feelers had come nearer and nearer through the dim water. "what did you do, filthy?" somebody asked (we called looker "filthy" with friendly jocoseness). "i 'opped it," the good fellow said, and the sane anti-climax of real life seemed twice as good as the climax that any hugo or verne could have put to the yarn. another described the great life he had lived as an old racing "hen," or minor sutler of the sport of kings. hard work, of course. "all day down at epsom openin' doors an' brushin' coats and shiftin' truck for bookies till you'd make, perhaps, two dollars an' speculate it on the las' race and off back 'ome to london 'ungry, on your 'oofs." once a friend of his, who had had a bad day, had not walked—had slipped into the london train, and at vauxhall, where tickets were taken, had gone to earth under the seat with a brief appeal to his fellow travellers: "gents, i rely on your honour." the stout narrator could see no joke at all in the phrase. he was rather scandalized by our great roar of laughter. "'is honour! and 'im robbin' the comp'ny! 'nough to take away a man's kerrikter!" said the patient walker-home in emergency. it made life seem too wonderful to end; such were the untold reserves that we had in this nation of men with a hold on themselves, of hardly uprightness; even this unhelped son of the gutter, living from hand to mouth in the common lodging-houses of slums, a parasite upon parasites, poor little animalcule doing odd jobs for the caterpillars of the commonwealth—even he could persist in carrying steadily, clear of the dirt, the full vase of his private honour. what, then, must be the unused stores of greedless and fearless straightness in others above us, generals and statesmen, men in whom, as in bank-porters, character is three parts of the trade! the world seemed clean that night; such a lovely unreason of optimist faith was astir in us all,
we felt for that time ravish'd above earth
and possess'd joys not promised at our birth.
it seemed hardly credible now, in this soured and quarrelsome country and time, that so many men of different classes and kinds, thrown together at random, should ever have been so simply and happily friendly, trustful, and keen. but they were, and they imagined that all their betters were too. that was the paradise that the bottom fell out of.
