IV
All this relative mildness in the irritants administered to the common Englishman as soldier had its counterpart in the men’s ingrained moderateness of reaction. At Bray-sur-Somme during the battle of 1916 I saw a French soldier go so mad with rage at what he considered to be the deficiencies of his leaders that he brought out each article of his kit and equipment in succession to the door of his billet and threw it into the deep central mud of the road with a separate curse, at each cast, on war, patriotism, civilization, and the Commander-in-Chief. This Athanasian service of commination endured for a full quarter of an hour. But from an English private who witnessed the rite it only drew the phlegmatic diagnosis: “He’ll ’ave ’ad a drop o’ sugar-water an’ got excited.” Firewater itself could not excite the English soldier to so rounded an eloquence or to so sweeping a series of judgements. He never thought of throwing his messing-tin and his paybook into the mud; still less of forming a Council of Soldiers and Workmen. Either step would have been of the abhorred nature of a “scene.”
Unaggressive, unoriginal, anti-extreme, contemptuous of all “hot air” and windy ideas, he too was braked by the same internal negations that helped to keep his irredeemably middling commanders equidistant from genius and from arrant failure. Confronted now with the frustration of so many too-high hopes, the discrediting of so many persons or institutions hitherto taken on trust, he did not say, as the humbler sort of Bolshevist seems to have said in his heart: “What order, or disorder, could ever be worse than this which has failed? Why not anything, any wild-seeming nihilism or fantasy of savage rudeness, rather than sit quiet under this old contemptible rule?” Instead of contracting a violent new sort of heat he simply went cold, and has remained so. Where a Slav or a Latin might have become a hundred percent. Satanist he became about a thirty percenter. The disbelief, the suspicion, the vacuous space in the disendowed heart, the spiritual rubbish-heap of draggled banners and burst drums—all that blank, unlighting and unwarming part of Satanism was his, without any other: a Lucifer cold as a moon prompted him listlessly, not to passionate efforts of crime, but to self-regarding and indolent apathy.
From the day he went into the army till now he has been learning to take many things less seriously than he did. First what Burke calls the pomps and plausibilities of the world. He has tumbled many kings into the dust and proved the strongest emperor assailable. I remember a little private, who seemed to know Dickens by heart, applying to William the Second in 1915 the words used by the Game Chicken about Mr. Dombey—“as stiff a cove as ever he see, but within the resources of science to double him up with one blow in the waistcoat.” This he proved, too, he and his like, casting down the proud from their seats with little help from all that was highly placed and reverently regarded in his own country. Our ruling class had, on the whole, failed, and had to be pulled through by him and the French and Americans; that feeling, in one form or another, is clear in the common man’s mind. He may not know in detail the record of French as commander-in-chief, nor the exact state of the Admiralty which let the Goeben and the Breslau go free, nor the inner side of the diplomacy which added Turkey, and even Bulgaria, to our enemies, nor yet the wellborn underworld of wartime luxury, disloyalty, and intrigue which notorious memoirs have since revealed. But some horse instinct or some pricking in his thumbs told him correctly that in every public service manned mainly by our upper classes the wartime achievement was relatively low. There is very little natural inclination to class jealousy among plain Englishmen. Equalitarian theory does not interest them much. Their general relish for a gamble makes them rather like a lucky-bag or bran-tub society in which anyone may pick up, with luck, a huge unearned prize. By cheerfully helping to keep up the big gaming-hell, by giving Barnatos and Joels pretty full value for their win, the prewar governing class gained a kind of strength which a prouder and more fastidious aristocracy would have forgone. It stands in little physical danger now. But it lives, since the war, in a kind of contempt. The one good word that the average private had for bestowal among his unseen “betters” during the latter years of the war was for the King. “He did give up his beer,” was said a thousand times by men whom that symbolic act of willing comradeship with the dry throat on the march and the war-pinched household at home had touched and astonished.
Other institutions, too, had been weighed in the balance. The War Office was only the commonest of many bywords. The Houses of Parliament, in which too many men of military age had demanded the forced enlistment of others, wore an air of insincerity, apart from the loss of prestige inevitable in a war; for armies always take the colour out of deliberative assemblies. To moderate this effect a large number of members who did not go to the war found means to wear khaki in London instead of black, but this well-conceived precaution only succeeded in further curling the lip of derision among actual soldiers. The churches, as we have seen, got their chance, made little or nothing of it, and came out of the war quite good secular friends with the men, but almost null and void in their eyes as ghostly counsellors, and stripped of the vague consequence with which many men had hitherto credited them on account of any divine mission they might be found to have upon closer acquaintance. Respect for the truthfulness of the Press was clean gone. The contrast between the daily events that men saw and the daily accounts that were printed was final. What the Press said thenceforth was not evidence. But still it had sent out plum puddings at Christmas.
Neither was anything evidence now that was said by a politician. A great many plain men had really drawn a distinction, all their lives, between the solemn public assurances of statesmen and the solemn public assurances of men who draw teeth outside dock-gates and take off their caps and call upon God to blast the health of their own darling children if a certain pill they have for sale does not cure colds, measles, ringworm, and the gripes within twenty-four hours of taking. A Swift might say there never was any difference, but the plain man had always firmly believed that there was. Now, after the war, he is shaken. Every disease which victory was to cure he sees raging worse than before: more poverty, less liberty, more likelihood of other wars, more spite between master and man, less national comradeship. And then the crucial test case, the solemn vow of the statesmen, all with their hands on their sleek bosoms, that if only the common man would save them just that once they would turn to and think of nothing else, do nothing else, but build him a house, assure him of work, settle him on land, make all England a paradise for him—a “land fit for heroes to live in.” And then the sequel: the cold fit; the feint at house-building and its abandonment; all the bankruptcy of promise; the ultimate bilking, done by way of reluctant surrender to “anti-waste” stunts got up by the same cheap-jacks of the Press who in the first year of the war would have had the statesmen promise yet more wildly than they did. Colds, measles, ringworm, and gripes all flourishing, much more than twenty-four hours after, and new ailments added unto them.
No relief, either, by running from one medicine-man to the next. Few of our disenchanted men doubt that the lightning cure of the Communist is only just another version of the lightning cure of the Tory, the authoritarian, the peremptory regimentalist. “Give me a free hand and all will be well with you.” Both say exactly the same thing in the end. One of them may call it the rule of the fittest, the other the rule of the proletariat; each means exactly the same thing—the rule of himself, the enforcement on everyone else of his own darling theory of what is best for them, whether they know it or not. Small choice in rotten apples; one bellyful of east wind is a diet as poor as another. Not in the yells and counter-yells of this and that vendor of patent hot-air is the heart of the average ex-soldier engaged. Rather “Away with all gas-projectors alike” is his present feeling towards eloquent men, Left or Right. For the moment he knows them too well, and is tired of hearing of plans which might work if he were either a babe in arms or a Michael of super-angelic wisdom and power.