The Soul of the War by Philip Gibbs

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Some of the older officers, who had been called out after many years
of civilian ease, found the spirit of youth again as soon as they set
foot on the soil of France, and indulged in I the follies of youth as
when they had been sub-lieutenants in the Indian hills. I remember
one of these old gentlemen who refused to go to bed in the Hotel
Tortoni at Havre, though the call was for six o'clock next morning with
quite a chance of death before the week was out. Some younger
officers with him coaxed him to his room just before midnight, but he
came down again, condemning their impudence, and went out into
the great silent square, shouting for a taxi. It seemed to me pitiful that
a man with so many ribbons on his breast, showing distinguished
service, should be wandering about a place where many queer
characters roam in the darkness of night. I asked him if I could show
him the way back to the Hotel Tortoni. "Sir," he said, "I desire to go to
Piccadilly Circus, and if I have any of your impertinence I will break
your head." Two apaches lurched up to him, a few minutes later, and
he went off with them into a dark ally, speaking French with great
deliberation and a Mayfair accent. He was a twentieth century
Falstaff, and the playwright might find his low comedy in a character
like this thrust into the grim horror of the war.

5

One's imagination must try to disintegrate that great collective thing
called an army and see it as much as possible as a number of
separate individualities, with their differences of temperament and
ideals and habits of mind. There has been too much of the
impersonal way of writing of our British Expeditionary Force as though
it were a great human machine impelled with one idea and moving
with one purpose. In its ranks was the coster with his cockney speech
and cockney wit, his fear of great silences and his sense of loneliness
and desolation away from the flare of gas-lights and the raucous
shouts of the crowds in Petticoat Lane--so that when I met him in a
field of Flanders with the mist and the long, flat marshlands about him
he confessed to the almighty Hump. And there was the Irish peasant
who heard the voice of the Banshee calling through that mist, and
heard other queer voices of supernatural beings whispering to the
melancholy which had been bred in his brain in the wilds of
Connemara. Here was the English mechanic, matter-of-fact, keen on
his job, with an alert brain and steady nerves; and with him was the
Lowland Scot, hard as nails, with uncouth speech and a savage
fighting instinct. Soldiers who had been through several battles and
knew the tricks of old campaigners were the stiffening in regiments of
younger men whose first experience of shell-fire was soul-shattering,
so that some of them whimpered and were blanched with fear.

In the ranks were men who had been mob-orators, and who had
once been those worst of pests, "barrack-room lawyers." They talked
Socialism and revolution in the trenches to comrades who saw no
use to alter the good old ways of England and "could find no manner
of use" for political balderdash. Can you not see all these men, made
up of every type in the life of the British Isles, suddenly transported to
the Continent and thence into the zone of fire of massed artillery
which put each man to the supreme test of courage, demanding the
last strength of his soul? Some of them had been slackers, rebels
against discipline, "hard cases." Some of them were sensitive fellows
with imaginations over-developed by cinematograph shows and the
unhealthiness of life in cities. Some of them were no braver than you
or I, my readers. And yet out of all this mass of manhood, with all their
faults, vices, coward instincts, pride of courage, unexpressed ideals,
unconscious patriotism, old traditions of pluck, untutored faith in
things more precious than self-interest--the mixture that one finds in
any great body of men--there was made an army, that "contemptible
little army" of ours which has added a deathless story of human
valour to the chronicles of our race.

These men who came out with the first Expeditionary Force had to
endure a mode of warfare more terrible than anything the world has
known before, and for week after week, month after month, they were
called upon to stand firm under storms of shells which seemed to
come from no human agency, but to be devilish in intensity and
frightfulness of destruction. Whole companies of them were
annihilated, whole battalions decimated, yet the survivors were led to
the shambles again. Great gaps were torn out of famous regiments and
filled up with new men, so often that the old regiment was but a name
and the last remaining officers and men were almost lost among the
new-comers. Yet by a miracle in the blood of the British race, in
humanity itself, if it is not decadent beyond the point of renaissance,
these cockneys and peasants, Scotsmen and Irishmen, and men
from the Midlands, the North, and the Home Counties of this little
England faced that ordeal, held on, and did not utter aloud (though
sometimes secretly) one wailing cry to God for mercy in all this hell.
With a pride of manhood beyond one's imagination, with a stern and
bitter contempt for all this devilish torture, loathing it but "sticking"
it, very much afraid yet refusing to surrender to the coward in their
souls (the coward in our souls which tempts all of us), sick of the
blood and the beastliness, yet keeping sane (for the most part) with
the health of normal minds and bodies in spite of all this wear and
tear upon the nerves, the rank-and-file of that British Expedition in
France and Flanders, under the leadership of young men who gave
their lives, with the largess of great prodigals, to the monstrous
appetite of Death, fought with something like superhuman qualities.

6

Although I spent most of my time on the Belgian and French side of
the war, I had many glimpses of the British troops who were enduring
these things, and many conversations with officers and men who had
come, but a few hours ago, from the line of fire. I went through British
hospitals and British ambulance trains where thousands of them lay
with new wounds, and I dined with them when after a few weeks of
convalescence they returned to the front to undergo the same ordeal.
Always I felt myself touched with a kind of wonderment at these men.
After many months of war the unwounded men were still unchanged,
to all outward appearance, though something had altered in their
souls. They were still quiet, self-controlled, unemotional. Only by a
slight nervousness of their hands, a slightly fidgety way so that they
could not sit still for very long, and by sudden lapses into silence, did
some of them show the signs of the strain upon them. Even the lightly
wounded men were astoundingly cheerful, resolute, and unbroken.
There were times when I used to think that my imagination
exaggerated the things I had seen and heard, and that after all war
was not so terrible, but a rather hard game with heavy risks. It was
only when I walked among the wounded who had been more than
"touched," and who were the shattered wrecks of men, that I realized
again the immensity of the horror through which these other men had
passed and to which some of them were going back. When the
shrieks of poor tortured boys rang in my ears, when one day I passed
an officer sitting up in his cot and laughing with insane mirth at his
own image in a mirror, and when I saw men with both legs amputated
up to the thighs, or with one leg torn to ribbons, and another already
sawn away, lying among blinded and paralysed men, and men
smashed out of human recognition but still alive, that I knew the
courage of those others, who having seen and known, went back to
risk the same frightfulness.

7

There was always a drama worth watching at the British base, for it
was the gate of those who came in and of those who went out, "the
halfway house" as a friend of mine called another place in France,
between the front and home.

Everything came here first--the food for guns and men, new boots for
soldiers who had marched the leather off their feet; the comforters
and body-belts knitted by nimble-fingered girls, who in suburban
houses and country factories had put a little bit of love into every
stitch; chloroform and morphia for army doctors who have moments
of despair when their bottles get empty; ambulances, instruments,
uniforms, motor lorries; all the letters which came to France full of
prayers and hopes; and all the men who came to fill up the places of
those for whom there are still prayers, but no more hope on this side
of the river. It was the base of the British Expeditionary Force, and the
Army in the field would be starved in less than a week if it were cut off
from this port of supplies.

There was a hangar here, down by the docks, half a mile long. I
suppose it was the largest shed in the world, and it was certainly the
biggest store-cupboard ever kept under lock and key by a Mother
Hubbard with a lot of hungry boys to feed. Their appetites were
prodigious, so that every day thousands of cases were shifted out of
this cupboard and sent by train and motor-car to the front. But always
new cases were arriving in boats that are piloted into harbour across
a sea where strange fish came up from the deeps at times. So the
hangar was never empty, and on the signature of a British officer the
British soldiers might be sure of their bully beef, and fairly sure of a
clean shirt or two when the old ones had been burnt by the order of a
medical officer with a delicate nose and high ideals in a trench.

New men as well as new stores came in the boats to this harbour,
which was already crowded with craft not venturesome in a sea
where one day huge submarine creatures lurked about. I watched
some Tommies arrive. They had had a nasty "dusting" on the
voyage, and as they marched through the streets of the port some of
them looked rather washed out. They carried their rifles upside down
as though that might ease the burden of them, and they had that
bluish look of men who have suffered a bad bout of sea-sickness. But
they pulled themselves up when they came into the chief square
where the French girls at the flower stalls, and ladies at the hotel
windows, and a group of French and Belgian soldiers under the
shelter of an arcade, watched them pass through the rain.

"Give 'em their old tune, lads," said one of the men, and from this
battalion of new-comers who had just set foot in France to fill up gaps
in the ranks, out there, at the front, there came a shrill whistling
chorus of La Marseillaise. Yorkshire had learnt the hymn of France,
her song of victory, and I heard it on the lips of Highlanders and
Welshmen, who came tramping through the British base to the
camps outside the town where they waited to be sent forward to the
fighting line.

"Vive les Anglais!" cried a French girl, in answer to the whistling
courtesy. Then she laughed, with her arm round the waist of a girl
friend, and said, "They are all the same, these English soldiers. In
their khaki one cannot tell one from the other, and now that I have
seen so many thousands of them--Heaven! hundreds of thousands!
--I have exhausted my first enthusiasm. It is sad: the new arrivals
do not get the same welcome from us."

That was true. So many of our soldiers had been through the British
base that they were no longer a novelty. The French flower-girls did
not empty their stalls into the arms of the regiments, as on the first
days.

It was an English voice that gave the new-comers the highest praise,
because professional.

"A hefty lot! ... Wish I were leading them." The praise and the wish
came from a young English officer who was staying in the same hotel
with me. For two days I had watched his desperate efforts to avoid
death by boredom. He read every line of the Matin and Journal
before luncheon, with tragic sighs, because every line repeated what
had been said in the French newspapers since the early days of the
war. After luncheon he made a sortie for the English newspapers,
which arrived by boats. They kept him quiet until tea-time. After that
he searched the cafes for any fellow officers who might be there.

"This is the most awful place in the world!" he repeated at intervals,
even to the hall porter, who agreed with him. When I asked him how
long he had been at the base he groaned miserably and confessed to
three weeks of purgatory.

"I've been put into the wrong pigeon-hole at the War Office," he said.
"I'm lost."

There were many other men at the British base who seemed to have
been put into the wrong pigeon-holes. Among them were about two
hundred French interpreters who were awaiting orders to proceed
with a certain division. But they were not so restless as my friend in
the hotel. Was it not enough for them that they had been put into
English khaki--supplied from the store-cupboard--and that every
morning they had to practise the art of putting on a puttee? In order to
be perfectly English they also practised the art of smoking a briar
pipe--it was astoundingly difficult to keep it alight--and indulged in the
habit of five o'clock tea (with boiled eggs, ye gods!), and braved all
the horrors of indigestion, because they are not used to these things,
with heroic fortitude. At any cost they were determined to do honour
to le khaki, in spite of the arrogance of certain British officers who
treated them de haut en bas.

The Base Commandant's office was the sorting-house of the
Expeditionary Force. The relays of officers who had just come off the
boats came here to report themselves. They had sailed as it were
under sealed orders and did not know their destination until they were
enlightened by the Commandant, who received instructions from the
headquarters in the field. They waited about in groups outside his
door, slapping their riding-boots or twisting neat little moustaches,
which were the envy of subalterns just out of Sandhurst.

Through another door was the registry office through which all the
Army's letters passed inwards and outwards. The military censors
were there reading the letters of Private Atkins to his best girl, and to
his second best. They shook their heads over military strategy written
in the trenches, and laughed quietly at the humour of men who
looked on the best side of things, even if they were German shells or
French fleas. It was astonishing what a lot of humour passed through
this central registry from men who were having a tragic time for
England's sake; but sometimes the military Censor had to blow his
nose with violence because Private Atkins lapsed into pathos, and
wrote of tragedy with a too poignant truth.

The Base Commandant was here at all hours. Even two hours after
midnight he sat in the inner room with tired secretaries who marvelled
at the physical and mental strength of a man who at that hour could
still dictate letters full of important detail without missing a point or a
comma; though he came down early in the morning. But he was
responsible for the guarding of the Army's store-cupboard--that great
hangar, half a mile long--and for the discipline of a town full of soldiers
who, without discipline, would make a merry hell of it, and for the
orderly disposition of all the supplies at the base upon which the army
in the field depends for its welfare. It was not what men call a soft job.

Through the hotel where I stayed there was a continual flow of
officers who came for one night only. Their kit-bags and sleeping-
bags were dumped into the hall, and these young gentlemen, some
of whom had been gazetted only a few months ago, crowded into the
little drawing-room to write their letters home before going to the front,
and to inquire of each other what on earth there was to do in a town
where lights are out at ten o'clock, where the theatres were all closed,
and where rain was beating down on the pavements outside.

"How about a bath?" said one of them. "It is about the last chance, I
reckon."

They took turns to the bathroom, thinking of the mud and vermin of
the trenches which would soon be their home. Among those who
stayed in the sitting-room until the patron turned out the lights were
several officers who had been on forty-eight hours' leave from the
front. They had made a dash to London and back, they had seen the
lights of Piccadilly again, and the crowds in the streets of a city which
seemed to know nothing of war, they had dined with women in
evening-dress who had asked innocent questions about the way of a
modern battlefield, and they had said good-bye again to those who
clung to them a little too long outside a carriage window.

"Worth it, do you think?" asked one of them.

"Enormously so. But it's a bit of a pull--going back to that--
beastliness. After one knows the meaning of it."

"It's because I know that I want to go back," said another man who
had sat very quietly looking at the toe of one of his riding-boots. "I had
a good time in town--it seemed too good to be true--but, after all, one
has to finish one's job before one can sit around with an easy mind.
We've got to finish our job out there in the stinking trenches."

8

I suppose even now after all that has been written it is difficult for the
imagination of "the man who stayed at home" to realize the life and
conditions of the soldiers abroad. So many phrases which appeared
day by day in the newspapers conveyed no more than a vague,
uncertain meaning.

"The Front"--how did it look, that place which was drawn in a jagged
black line across the map on the wall? "General Headquarters"--what
sort of a place was that in which the Commander-in-Chief lived with
his staff, directing the operations in the fighting lines? "An attack was
made yesterday upon the enemy's position at-----. A line of trenches
was carried by assault." So ran the officiai bulletin, but the wife of a
soldier abroad could not fill in the picture, the father of a young
Territorial could not get enough detail upon which his imagination
might build. For all those at home, whose spirits came out to Flanders
seeking to get into touch with young men who were fighting for
honour's sake, it was difficult to form any kind of mental vision, giving
a clear and true picture of this great adventure in "foreign parts."

They would have been surprised at the reality, it was to different from
all their previous imaginings. General Headquarters, for instance, was
a surprise to those who came to such a place for the first time. It was
not, when I went there some months ago, a very long distance from
the fighting lines in these days of long-range guns, but it was a place
of strange quietude in which it was easy to forget the actuality of war--
until one was reminded by sullen far-off rumblings which made the
windows tremble, and made men lift their heads a moment to say:
"They are busy out there to-day." There were no great movements of
troops in the streets. Most of the soldiers one saw were staff officers,
who walked briskly from one building to another with no more than a
word and a smile to any friend they met on the way. Sentries stood
outside the doorways of big houses.

Here and there at the street comers was a military policeman,
scrutinizing any new-comer in civilian clothes with watchful eyes.
Church bells tinkled for early morning Mass or Benediction. Through
an open window looking out upon a broad courtyard the voices of
school children came chanting their A B C in French, as though no
war had taken away their fathers. There was an air of profound peace
here.

At night, when I stood at an open window listening to the silence of
the place it was hard, even though I knew, to think that here in this
town was the Headquarters Staff of the greatest army England has
ever sent abroad, and that the greatest war in history was being
fought out only a few miles away. The raucous horn of a motor-car,
the panting of a motor-cycle, the rumble of a convoy of ambulances,
the shock of a solitary gun, came as the only reminders of the great
horror away there through the darkness. A dispatch rider was coming
back from a night ride on a machine which had side-slipped all the
way from Ypres. An officer was motoring back to a divisional
headquarters after a late interview with the chief... The work went on,
though it was very quiet in General Headquarters.

But the brains of the Army were not asleep. Behind those doors,
guarded by sentries, men in khaki uniforms, with just a touch of red
about the collar, were bending over maps and documents--studying
the lines of German trenches as they had been sketched out by
aviators flying above German shrapnel, writing out orders for
ammunition to be sent in a hurry to a certain point on the fighting line
where things were very "busy" in the afternoon, ordering the food-
supplies wanted by a division of hungry men whose lorries are waiting
at the rail-head for bread and meat and a new day's rations.

"Things are going very well," said one of the officers, with a glance at
a piece of flimsy paper which had just come from the Signals
Department across the street. But things would not have gone so well
unless at General Headquarters every officer had done his duty to
the last detail, whatever the fatigue of body or spirit. The place was
quiet, because the work was done behind closed doors in these
private houses of French and Flemish bourgeoisie whose family
portraits hang upon the walls. Outside I could not see the spirit of war
unless I searched for it.

It was after I had left "G.H.Q." that I saw something of the human side
of war and all its ceaseless traffic. Yet even then, as I travelled nearer
and nearer to the front, I was astounded at the silence, the
peacefulness of the scenery about me, the absence of all tragic
sights. That day, on the way to a place which was very close to the
German lines, children were playing on the roadside, and old women
in black gowns trudged down the long, straight high roads, with their
endless sentinels of trees.

In a furrowed field a peasant was sowing the seed for an autumn
harvesting, and I watched his swinging gestures from left to right
which seem symbolical of all that peace means and of all nature's life
and beauty. The seed is scattered and God does the rest, though
men may kill each other and invent new ways of death...

But the roads were encumbered and the traffic of war was surging
forward ceaselessly in a muddled, confused, aimless sort of way, as it
seemed to me, before I knew the system and saw the working of the
brain behind it all. A long train of carts without horses stood, shafts
down, on the muddy side of the road. Little blue and red flags
fluttered above them. A group of soldiers were lounging in their
neighbourhood, waiting, it seems, for something to turn up. Perhaps
that something was a distant train which came with a long trail of
smoke across the distant marshlands.

At the railway crossing there was a great park of motor lorries. They,
too, seemed to be waiting for new loads. Obviously this was one of
the "railheads" about which I had a lecture that morning from a
distinguished officer, who thinks in railheads and refilling stations and
other details of transport upon which the armies in the field depend
for their food and ammunition. Without that explanation all these
roadside halts, all these stationary lorries and forage carts would
have seemed like a temporary stagnation in the business of war, with
nothing doing.

A thrill comes to every one when he sees bodies of British troops
moving along the roads. He is glad when his motorcar gets held up
by some old wagons slithering axle-deep in the quagmire on the side
of the paved highway, so that he can put his head out and shout a
"Hullo, boys! How's it going? And who are you?" After all the thrill of
the recruiting days, ill the excitement of the send-off, all the
enthusiasm with which they sang Tipperary through the streets of
their first port of call in France, they had settled down to the real
business.

Some of them had been into the trenches for the first time a night or
two before. "How did you like it?" Well, it wasn't amusing to them, it
seems, but they "stuck it." They were ready to go again. That was the
spirit of it all. They "stuck it," gamely, without grousing, without
swanking, without any other thought than suffering all the hardships
and all the thrills of war like men who know the gravity of the game,
and the risks, and the duty to which they have pledged themselves.

I passed thousands of these men on a long motor journey on my first
day at the British front, and though I could not speak to very many of
them I saw on all their faces the same hard, strong, dogged look of
men who were being put through a great ordeal and who would not
fail through any moral weakness. They were tired, some of them,
after a long march, but they grinned back cheery answers to my
greetings, and scrambled merrily for the few packets of cigarettes I
tossed to them.

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