H G Wells Omnibus, page 267
“No!” cried Mr. Britling.
“Yes,” said Lady Frensham. “Upon them and those who have flattered and misled them. …”
And so on. …
It presently became necessary for Lady Homartyn to rescue Mr. Britling from the great lady’s patriotic tramplings. He found himself drifting into the autumnal garden—the show of dahlias had never been so wonderful—in the company of Raeburn and the staff-officer and a small woman who was presently discovered to be remarkably well informed. They were all despondent. “I think all this promiscuous blaming of people is quite the worse— and most ominous—thing about us just now,” said Mr. Britling after the restful pause that followed their departure from the presence of Lady Frensham.
“It goes on everywhere,” said the staff-officer.
“Is it really—honest?” said Mr. Britling.
Raeburn, after reflection, decided to answer. “As far as it is stupid, yes. There’s a lot of blame coming; there’s bound to be a day of reckoning, and I suppose we’ve all got an instinctive disposition to find a scapegoat for our common sins. The Tory press is pretty rotten, and there’s a strong element of mere personal spite—in the Churchill attacks for example. Personal jealousy probably. Our ‘old families’ seem to have got vulgar-spirited imperceptibly—in a generation or so. They quarrel and shirk and lay blame exactly as bad servants do—and things are still far too much in their hands. Things are getting muffed, there can be no doubt about that—not fatally, but still rather seriously. And the government—it was human before the war, and we’ve added no archangels. There’s muddle. There’s mutual suspicion. You never know what newspaper office Lloyd George won’t be in touch with next. He’s honest and patriotic and energetic, but he’s mortally afraid of old women and class intrigues. He doesn’t know where to get his backing. He’s got all a labour member’s terror of the dagger at his back. There’s a lack of nerve, too, in getting rid of prominent officers—who have friends.”
The Staff-officer nodded.
“Northcliffe seems to me to have a case,” said Mr. Britling. “Every one abuses him.”
“I’d stop his Daily Mail,” said Raeburn, “I’d leave The Times, but I’d stop The Daily Mail on the score of its placards alone. It overdoes Northcliffe. It translates him into the shrieks and yells of underlings. The plain fact is that Northcliffe is scared out of his wits by German efficiency—and in war-time when a man is scared out of his wits, whether he is honest or not, you put his head in a bag or hold a pistol to it to calm him… What is the good of all this clamouring for a change of government? We haven’t change of government. It’s like telling a tramp to get a change of linen. Our men, all our public men, are second-rate men, with the habits of advocates. There is nothing masterful in their minds. How can you expect the system to produce anything else? But they are doing as well as they can, and there is no way of putting in any one else now, and there you are.”
“Meanwhile,” said Mr. Britling, “our boys—get killed.”
“They’d get killed all the more if you had—let us say— Carson and Lloyd George and Northcliffe and Lady Frensham, with, I suppose, Austin Harrison and Horatio Bottomley thrown in—as a Strong Silent Government. … I’d rather have Northcliffe as dictator than that… We can’t suddenly go back on the past and alter our type. We didn’t listen to Matthew Arnold. We’ve never thoroughly turned out and cleaned up our higher schools. We’ve resisted instruction. We’ve preferred to maintain our national luxuries of a bench of bishops and party politics. And compulsory Greek and the university sneer. And Lady Frensham. And all that sort of thing. And here we are! … Well, damn it, we’re in for it now; we’ve got to plough through with it—with what we have—as what we are.”
The young staff-officer nodded. He thought that was “about it.”
“You’ve got no sons,” said Mr. Britling.
“I’m not even married,” said Raeburn, as though he thanked God.
The little well-informed lady remarked abruptly that she had two sons; one was just home wounded from Suvla Bay. What her son told her made her feel very grave. She said that the public was still quite in the dark about the battle of Anafarta. If had been a hideous muddle, and we had been badly beaten. The staff work had been awful. Nothing joined up, nothing was on the spot and in time. The water-supply, for example, had gone wrong; the men had been mad with thirst. One regiment which she named had not been supported by another; when at last the first came back the two battalions fought in the trenches regardless of the enemy. There had been no leading, no correlation, no plan. Some of the guns, she declared, had been left behind in Egypt. Some of the train was untraceable to this day. It was mislaid somewhere in the Levant. At the beginning Sir Ian Hamilton had not even been present. He had failed to get there in time. It had been the reckless throwing away of an army. And so hopeful an army! Her son declared it meant the complete failure of the Dardanelles project…
“And when one hears how near we came to victory!” she cried, and left it at that.
“Three times this year,” said Raeburn, “we have missed victories because of the badness of our staff work. It’s no good picking out scapegoats. It’s a question of national habit. It’s because the sort of man we turn out from our public schools has never learned how to catch trains, get to an office on the minute, pack a knapsack properly, or do anything smartly and quickly—anything whatever that he can possibly get done for him. You can’t expect men who are habitually easy-going to keep bucked up to a high pitch of efficiency for any length of time. All their training is against it. All their tradition. They hate being prigs. An Englishman will be any sort of stupid failure rather than appear a prig. That’s why we’ve lost three good fights that we ought to have won—and thousands and thousands of men— and material and time, precious beyond reckoning. We’ve lost a year. We’ve dashed the spirit of our people.”
“My boy in Flanders,” said Mr. Britling, “says about the same thing. He says our officers have never learned to count beyond ten, and that they are scared at the sight of a map. …”
“And the war goes on,” said the little woman.
“How long, oh Lord! how long?” cried Mr. Britling.
“I’d give them another year,” said the staff-officer. “Just going as we are going. Then something must give way. There will be no money anywhere. There’ll be no more men. … I suppose they’ll feel that shortage first anyhow. Russia alone has over twenty millions.”
“That’s about the size of it,” said Raeburn. …
“Do you think, sir, there’ll be civil war?” asked the young staff-officer abruptly after a pause.
There was a little interval before any one answered this surprising question.
“After the peace, I mean,” said the young officer.
“There’ll be just the devil to pay,” said Raeburn.
“One thing after another in the country is being pulled up by its roots,” reflected Mr. Britling.
“We’ve never produced a plan for the war, and it isn’t likely we shall have one for the peace,” said Raeburn, and added: “and Lady Frensham’s little lot will be doing their level best to sit on the safety-valve. … They’ll rake up Ireland and Ulster from the very start. But I doubt if Ulster will save ’em.
“We shall squabble. What else do we ever do?”
No one seemed able to see more than that. A silence fell on the little party.
“Well, thank heaven for these dahlias,” said Raeburn, affecting the philosopher.
The young staff-officer regarded the dahlias without enthusiasm. …
§ 16
Mr. Britling sat one September afternoon with Captain Lawrence Carmine in the sunshine of the barn court, and smoked with him and sometimes talked and sometimes sat still.
“When it began I did not believe that this war could be like other wars,” he said. “I did not dream it. I thought that we had grown wiser at last. It seemed to me like the dawn of a great clearing up. I thought the common sense of mankind would break out like a flame, an indignant flame, and consume all this obsolete foolery of empires and banners and militarism directly it made its attack upon human happiness. A score of things that I see now were preposterous, I thought must happen— naturally. I thought America would declare herself against the Belgian outrage; that she would not tolerate the smashing of the great sister republic—if only for the memory of Lafayette. Well—I gather America is chiefly concerned about our making cotton contraband. I thought the Balkan States were capable of a reasonable give and take; of a common care for their common freedom. I see now three German royalties trading in peasants, and no men in their lands to gainsay them. I saw this war, as so many Frenchmen have seen it, as something that might legitimately command a splendid enthusiasm of indignation. … It was all a dream, the dream of a prosperous comfortable man who had never come to the cutting edge of life. Everywhere cunning, everywhere small feuds and hatreds, distrusts, dishonesties, timidities, feebleness of purpose, dwarfish imaginations, swarm over the great and simple issues. … It is a war now like any other of the mobbing, many-aimed cataclysms that have shattered empires and devastated the world; it is a war without point, a war that has lost its soul, it has become mere incoherent fighting and destruction, a demonstration in vast and tragic forms of the stupidity and ineffectiveness of our species. …”
He stopped, and there was a little interval of silence.
Captain Carmine tossed the fag end of his cigar very neatly into a tub of hydrangeas. “Three thousand years ago in China,” he said, “there were men as sad as we are, for the same cause.”
“Three thousand years ahead perhaps,” said Mr. Britling, “there will still be men with the same sadness. … And yet— and yet. … No. Just now I have no elasticity. It is not in my nature to despair, but things are pressing me down. I don’t recover as I used to recover. I tell myself still that though the way is long and hard the spirit of hope, the spirit of creation, the generosities and gallantries in the heart of man, must end in victory. But I say that over as one repeats a worn-out prayer. The light is out of the sky for me. Sometimes I doubt if it will ever come back. Let younger men take heart and go on with the world. If I could die for the right thing now—instead of just having to live on in this world of ineffective struggle—I would be glad to die now, Carmine. …”
§ 17
In these days also Mr. Direck was very unhappy.
For Cissie, at any rate, had not lost touch with the essential issues of the war. She was as clear as ever that German militarism and the German attack on Belgium and France was the primary subject of the war. And she dismissed all secondary issues. She continued to demand why America did not fight. “We fight for Belgium. Won’t you fight for the Dutch and Norwegian ships? Won’t you even fight for your own ships that the Germans are sinking?”
Mr. Direck attempted explanations that were ill received.
“You were ready enough to fight the Spaniards when they blew up the Maine, But the Germans can sink the Lusitania! That’s—as you say—a different proposition.”
His mind was shot by an extraordinary suspicion that she thought the Lusitania an American vessel. But Mr. Direck was learning his Cissie, and he did not dare to challenge her on this score.
“You haven’t got hold of the American proposition,” he said. “We’re thinking beyond wars.”
“That’s what we have been trying to do,” said Cissie. “Do you think we came into it for the fun of the thing?”
“Haven’t I shown in a hundred ways that I sympathise?”
“Oh—sympathy! …”
He fared little better at Mr. Britling’s hands. Mr. Britling talked darkly, but pointed all the time only too plainly at America. “There’s two sorts of liberalism,” said Mr. Britling, “that pretend to be the same thing; there’s the liberalism of great aims and the liberalism of defective moral energy. …”
§ 18
It was not until Teddy had been missing for three weeks that Hugh wrote about him. The two Essex battalions on the Flanders front were apparently wide apart, and it was only from home that Hugh learned what had happened.
“You can’t imagine how things narrow down when one is close up against them. One does not know what is happening even within a few miles of us, until we get the newspapers. Then, with a little reading between the lines and some bold guessing, we fit our little bit of experience with a general shape. Of course I’ve wondered at times about Teddy. But oddly enough I’ve never thought of him very much as being out here. It’s queer, I know, but I haven’t. I can’t imagine why. …
“I don’t know about ‘missing.’ We’ve had nothing going on here that has led to any missing. All our men have been accounted for. But every few miles along the front conditions alter. His lot may have been closer up to the enemy, and there may have been a rush and a fight for a bit of trench either way. In some parts the German trenches are not thirty yards away, and there is mining, bomb-throwing, and perpetual creeping up and give and take. Here we’ve been getting a bit forward. But I’ll tell you about that presently. And, anyhow, I don’t understand about ‘missing.’ There’s very few prisoners taken now. But don’t tell Letty that. I try to imagine old Teddy in it. …
“Missing’s a queer thing. It isn’t tragic—or pitiful. Or partly reassuring like ‘prisoner.’ It just sends one speculating and speculating. I can’t find any one who knows where the 14th Essex are. Things move about here so mysteriously that for all I know we may find them in the next trench next time we go up. But there is a chance for Teddy. It’s worth while bucking Letty all you can. And at the same time there’s odds against him. There plainly and unfeelingly is how things stand in my mind. I think chiefly of Letty. I’m glad Cissie is with her, and I’m glad she’s got the boy. Keep her busy. She was frightfully fond of him. I’ve seen all sorts of things between them, and I know that. … I’ll try and write to her soon, and I’ll find something hopeful to tell her.
“Meanwhile I’ve got something to tell you. I’ve been through a fight, a big fight, and I haven’t got a scratch. I’ve taken two prisoners with my lily hand. Men were shot close to me. I didn’t mind that a bit. It was as exciting as one of those bitter fights we used to have round the hockey-goal. I didn’t mind anything till afterwards. Then when I was in the trench in the evening I trod on something slippery—pah! And after it was all over one of my chums got it—sort of unfairly. And I kept on thinking of those two things so much that all the early part is just dreamlike. It’s more like something I’ve read in a book, or seen in The Illustrated London News than actually been through. One had been thinking so often, how will it feel? how shall I behave? that when it came it had an effect of being flat and ordinary.
“They say we hadn’t got enough guns in the spring or enough ammunition. That’s all right now—anyhow. They started in plastering the Germans overnight, and right on until it was just daylight. I never heard such a row, and their trenches—we could stand up and look at them without getting a single shot at us—were flying about like the crater of a volcano. We were not in our firing trench. We had gone back into some new trenches at the rear—I think to get out of the way of the counter-fire. But this morning they weren’t doing very much. For once our guns were on top. There was a feeling of anticipation—very like waiting for an examination paper to be given out; then we were at it. Getting out of a trench to attack gives you an odd feeling of being just hatched. Suddenly the world is big. I don’t remember our gun-fire stopping. And then you rush. ‘Come on! Come on!’ say the officers. Everybody gives a sort of howl and rushes. When you see men dropping, you rush the faster. The only thing that checks you at all is the wire twisted about everywhere. You don’t want to trip over that. The frightening thing is the exposure. After being in the trenches so long you feel naked. You run like a scared child for the German trench ahead. I can’t understand the iron nerve of a man who can expose his back by turning to run away. And there’s a thirsty feeling with one’s bayonet. But they didn’t wait. They dropped rifles and ran. But we ran so fast after them that we caught one or two in the second trench. I got down into that, heard a voice behind me, and found my two prisoners lying artful in a dugout. They held up their hands as I turned. If they hadn’t I doubt if I should have done anything to them. I didn’t feel like it. I felt friendly.
“Not all the Germans ran. Three or four stuck to their machine-guns until they got bayoneted. Both the trenches were frightfully smashed about, and in the first one there were little knots and groups of dead. We got to work at once shying the sand-bags over from the old front of the trench to the parados. Our guns had never stopped all the time; they were now plastering the third-line trenches. And almost at once the German shells began dropping into us. Of course they had the range to an inch. One didn’t have any time to feel and think; one just set oneself with all one’s energy to turn the trench over. …
“I don’t remember that I helped or cared for a wounded man all the time, or felt anything about the dead except to step over them and not on them. I was just possessed by the idea that we had to get the trench into a sheltering state before they tried to come back. And then stick there. I just wanted to win, and there was nothing else in my mind. …
“They did try to come back, but not very much. …
“Then when I began to feel sure of having got hold of the trench for good, I began to realise just how tired I was and how high the sun had got. I began to look about me, and found most of the other men working just as hard as I had been doing. ‘We’ve done it!’ I said, and that was the first word I’d spoken since I told my two Germans to come out of it, and stuck a man with a wounded leg to watch them. ‘It’s a bit of All Right,’ said Ortheris, knocking off also, and lighting a half-consumed cigarette. He had been wearing it behind his ear, I believe, ever since the charge. Against this occasion. He’d kept close up to me all the time, I realised. And then old Park turned up very cheerful with a weak bayonet jab in his forearm that he wanted me to rebandage. It was good to see him practically all right too.
