The Penguin Book of First World War Stories (3 page)

The texts are unabridged. Apart from house-styling in minor typographical details, spelling and punctuation have not been altered, but obvious printer's errors have been emended.

1
FRONT

On this dreadful day, then, when three hundred thousand men in arms with all their artillery swelled like a flood against the little English company, there was one point above all other points in our battle line that was for a time in awful danger, not merely of defeat, but of utter annihilation. With the permission of the censorship and of the military expert, this corner may, perhaps, be described as a salient, and if this angle were crushed and broken, then the English force as a whole would be shattered, the Allied left would be turned, and Sedan
²
would inevitably follow.

All the morning the German guns had thundered and shrieked against this corner, and against the thousand or so of men who held it. The men joked at the shells, and found funny names for them, and had bets about them, and greeted them with scraps of music-hall songs. But the shells came on and burst, and tore good Englishmen limb from limb, and tore brother from brother, and as the heat of the day increased so did the fury of that terrific cannonade. There was no help, it seemed. The English artillery was good, but there was not nearly enough of it; it was being steadily battered into scrap iron.

There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another: ‘It is at its worst; it can blow no harder,' and then there is a blast ten times more fierce than any before it. So it was in these British trenches.

There were no stouter hearts in the whole world than the hearts of these men; but even they were appalled as this seven-times-heated hell of the German cannonade fell upon them and overwhelmed them and destroyed them. And at this very moment they saw from their trenches that a tremendous host was moving against their lines. Five hundred of the thousand remained, and as far as they could see the German infantry was pressing on against them, column upon column, a grey world of men, ten thousand of them, as it appeared afterwards.

There was no hope at all. They shook hands, some of them. One man improvised a new version of the battle-song, ‘Goodbye, Good-bye to Tipperary',
³
ending with ‘And we shan't get there.' And they all went on firing steadily. The officers pointed out that such an opportunity for high-class, fancy shooting might never occur again; the Germans dropped line after line; the Tipperary humorist asked: ‘What price Sidney Street?'
⁴
And the few machine-guns did their best. But everybody knew it was of no use. The dead grey bodies lay in companies and battalions, as others came on and on and on, and they swarmed and stirred and advanced from beyond and beyond.

‘World without end. Amen,'
⁵
said one of the British soldiers with some irrelevance as he took aim and fired. And then he remembered – he says he cannot think why or wherefore – a queer vegetarian restaurant in London where he had once or twice eaten eccentric dishes of cutlets made of lentils and nuts that pretended to be steak. On all the plates in this restaurant there was printed a figure of St George in blue, with the motto,
Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius
–May St George be a present help to the English. This soldier happened to know Latin and other useless things, and now, as he fired at his man in the grey advancing mass – three hundred yards away – he uttered the pious vegetarian motto. He went on firing to the end, and at last Bill on his right had to clout him cheerfully over the head to make him stop, pointing out as he did so that the King's
ammunition cost money and was not lightly to be wasted in drilling funny patterns into dead Germans.

For as the Latin scholar uttered his invocation he felt something between a shudder and an electric shock pass through his body. The roar of the battle died down in his ears to a gentle murmur; instead of it, he says, he heard a great voice and a shout louder than a thunder-peal crying, ‘Array, array, array!'

His heart grew hot as a burning coal, it grew cold as ice within him, as it seemed to him that a tumult of voices answered to his summons. He heard, or seemed to hear, thousands shouting: ‘St George! St George!'

‘Ha! messire; ha! sweet Saint, grant us good deliverance!'

‘St George for merry England!'

‘Harow! Harow!
⁶
Monseigneur St George, succour us.'

‘Ha! St George! Ha! St George! a long bow and a strong bow.'

‘Heaven's Knight, aid us!'

And as the soldier heard these voices he saw before him, beyond the trench, a long line of shapes, with a shining about them. They were like men who drew the bow, and with another shout their cloud of arrows flew singing and tingling through the air towards the German hosts.

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 English
⁷
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.

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.