I
In either of two opposite tempers you may carry on war. In one of the two you will want to rate your enemy, all round, as high as you can. You may pursue him down a trench, or he you; but in neither case do you care to have him described by somebody far, far away as a fat little shortsighted scrub. Better let him pass for a paladin. This may at bottom be vanity, sentimentality, all sorts of contemptible things. Let him who knows the heart of man be dogmatic about it. Anyhow, this temper comes, as they would say in Ireland, of decent people. It spoke in Porsena of Clusium’s whimsical prayer that Horatius might swim the Tiber safely; it animates Velasquez’ knightly Surrender of Breda; it prompted Lord Roberts’s first words to Cronje when Paardeberg fell—“Sir, you have made a very gallant defence”; it is avowed in a popular descant of Newboldt’s—
To honour, while you strike him down,
The foe who comes with eager eyes.
The other temper has its niche in letters, too. There was the man that “wore his dagger in his mouth.” And there was Little Flanigan, the bailiff’s man in Goldsmith’s play. During one of our old wars with France he was always “damning the French, the parley-voos, and all that belonged to them.” “What,” he would ask the company, “makes the bread rising? The parley-voos that devour us. What makes the mutton fivepence a pound? The parley-voos that eat it up. What makes the beer threepence-halfpenny a pot?”
Well, your first aim in war is to hit your enemy hard, and the question may well be quite open—in which of these tempers can he be hit hardest? If, as we hear, a man’s strength be “as the strength of ten because his heart is pure,” possibly it may add a few footpounds to his momentum in an attack if he has kept a clean tongue in his head. And yet the production of heavy woollens in the West Riding, for War Office use, may, for all that we know, have been accelerated by yarns about crucified Canadians and naked bodies of women found in German trenches. There is always so much, so bewilderingly much, to be said on both sides. All I can tell is that during the war the Newbolt spirit seemed, on the whole, to have its chief seat in and near our front line, and thence to die down westward all the way to London. There Little Flanigan was enthroned, and, like Montrose, would bear no rival near his throne, so that a man on leave from our trench system stood in some danger of being regarded as little better than one of the wicked. Anyhow, he was a kind of provincial. Not his will, but that of Flanigan, had to be done. For Flanigan was at the centre of things; he had leisure, or else volubility was his trade; and he had got hold of the megaphones.