I
A book may be bad and yet tell you much. Lately I came across such a book. It is surely one of the crossest books ever written. Its author fought in France, in the ranks, for a good many months of the war. He must have been one of the men who make sergeants grey—a “proper lawyer,” as Regulars call the type which a cotton district labels as “self-acting mules.”
I seem to know that man. He was a volunteer, but he would not enlist until conscription came in, because of some precious doctrine he had about younger men without families. When he did join his first act was to ask to speak to the colonel. He was aggrieved because army doctors would not act, when he desired it, except as such. When anyone checked him he felt an ardent thirst to “explain,” and the explanation was always that he who had checked was wrong. In the field he kept a diary and sternly would he note on its recording page that tea one day—nay, on more than one—was served “very late indeed.” Heinous!
The continued existence of war is precarious. More than the League of Nations menaces its future. For it depends, at the last, on the infrequency of “proper lawyers.” Armies can now be made, and moved about when made, only because the plain man who keeps the world going round does not stick up for the last ounce of his rights, or stick out for the joys of having the last word, so dourly as these. Even to keep up a game with so modest an element of voluntaryism about it as penal justice you have to have some little effort of cooperation all round. If your convicts will not even eat the whole thing begins crumbling. The “suffragettes” showed us that. A pioneer still earlier, an Indian coolie, proved it in a Fijian gaol. Were every soldier like this diarist war would have to be dropped, not because men were too good, but because they were too prickly.