Part 10

But, at any rate; we have gone a long way from the time when Matthew Arnold, talking with "the manager of the Claycross works in Derbyshire" during the Crimean War, "when our want of soldiers was much felt and some people were talking of conscription," was told by his companion that "sooner than submit to conscription the population of that district would flee to the mines, and lead a sort of Robin Hood life underground." An illuminating passage, in more ways than one, by the way, as contrasted with the present state of things!--since it both shows the stubbornness of the British temper in defence of "doing as it likes," when no spark of an ideal motive fires it; and also brings out its equal stubbornness to-day in support of a cause which it feels to be supreme over the individual interest and will.

But the stubbornness, the discipline, the sacrifice of the armies in the field are not all we want. The stubbornness of the nation at home, of the men and the women, is no less necessary to the great end. In these early days of March every week's news was bringing home to England the growing peril of the submarine attack. Would the married women, the elder women of the nation, rise to the demand for personal thought and saving, for training--in the matter of food--with the same eager goodwill as thousands of the younger women had shown in meeting the armies' demand for munitions? For the women heads of households have it largely in their hands.

The answer at the beginning of March was matter for anxiety. It is still matter for anxiety now--at the beginning of May.

Let us, however, return for a little to the Army. What would the marvellous organisation which England has produced in three years avail us, without the spirit in it,--the body, without the soul? All through these days I have been conscious, in the responsible men I have been meeting, of ideals of which no one talks, except when, on very rare occasions, it happens to be in the day's work like anything else to talk of ideals--but which are, in fact, omnipresent.

I find, for instance, among my War Office Notes, a short address given in the ordinary course of duty by an unnamed commandant to his officer-cadets. It appears here, in its natural place, just as part of the whole; revealing for a moment the thoughts which constantly underlie it.

"Believe me when I tell you that I have never found an officer who worked who did not come through. Only ill-health and death stand in your way. The former you can guard against in a great measure. The latter comes to us all, and for a soldier, a soldier's death is the finest of all. Fear of death does not exist for the man who has led a good and honest life. You must discipline your bodies and your minds--your bodies by keeping them healthy and strong, your minds by prayer and thought."

As to the relation between officers and men, that also is not talked about much, except in its more practical and workaday aspects--the interest taken by officers in the men's comfort and welfare, their readiness to share in the men's games and amusements, and so on. And no one pretends that the whole British Army is an army of "plaster saints," that every officer is the "little father" of his men, and all relations ideal.

But what becomes evident, as one penetrates a little nearer to the great organism, is a sense of passionate responsibility in all the finer minds of the Army towards their men, a readiness to make any sacrifice for them, a deep and abiding sense of their sufferings and dangers, of all that they are giving to their country. How this comes out again and again in the innumerable death-stories of British officers--those few words that commemorate them in the daily newspapers! And how evident is the profound response of the men to such a temper in their officers! There is not a day's action in the field--I am but quoting the eye-witnesses--that does not bring out such facts. Let a senior officer--an "old and tried soldier"--speak. He is describing a walk over a battlefield on the Ancre after one of our victories there last November:

"It is a curious thing to walk over enemy trenches that I have watched like a tiger for weeks and weeks. But what of the boys who took those trenches, with their eleven rows of barbed wire in front of them? I don't think I ever before to-day rated the British soldier at his proper value. His sufferings in this weather are indescribable. When he is not in the trenches his discomforts are enough to kill any ordinary mortal. When he is in the trenches it is a mixture between the North Pole and Hell. And yet when the moment comes he jumps up and charges at the impossible--and conquers it! ... Some of the poor fellows who lay there as they fell looked to me absolutely noble, and I thought of their families who were aching for news of them and hoping against hope that they would not be left unburied in their misery.

"All the loving and tender thoughts that are lavished on them are not enough. There are no words to describe the large hearts of these men. God bless 'em! And what of the French on whose soil they lie? Can they ever forget the blood that is mingled with their own? I hope not. I don't think England has ever had as much cause to be proud as she has to-day."

Ah! such thoughts and feelings cut deep. They would be unbearable but for the saving salt of humour in which this whole great gathering of men, so to speak, moves suspended, as though in an atmosphere. It is everywhere. Coarse or refined, it is the universal protection, whether from the minor discomforts or the more frightful risks of war. Volumes could be filled, have already been filled, with it--volumes to which your American soldier when he gets to France in his thousands will add considerably--pages all his own! I take this touch in passing from a recent letter:

"A sergeant in my company [writes a young officer] was the other day buried by a shell. He was dug out with difficulty. As he lay, not seriously injured, but sputtering and choking, against the wall of the trench, his C.O. came by. 'Well, So-and-so, awfully sorry! Can I do anything for you?' 'Sir,' said the sergeant with dignity, still struggling out of the mud, 'I want a separate peace!'"

And here is another incident that has just come across me. Whether it is Humour or Pathos I do not know. In this scene they are pretty close together--the great Sisters!

A young flying officer, in a night attack, was hit by a shrapnel bullet from below. He thought it had struck his leg, but was so absorbed in dropping his bombs and bringing down his machine safely that, although he was aware of a feeling of faintness, he thought no more of it till he had landed in the aerodrome. Then it was discovered that his leg had been shot away, was literally hanging by a shred of skin, and how he had escaped bleeding to death nobody could quite understand. As it was, he had dropped his bombs, and he insisted on making his report in hospital.

He recovered from the subsequent operation, and in hospital, some weeks afterwards, his C.O. appeared, with the news of his recommendation for the D.S.O. The boy, for he was little more, listened with eyes of amused incredulity, opening wider and wider as the Colonel proceeded. When the communication was over, and the C.O., attributing the young man's silence to weakness or grateful emotion, had passed on, the nurse beside the bed saw the patient bury his head in the pillow with a queer sound of exasperation, and caught the words, "I call it perfectly childish!"

That an act so simple, so all in the bargain, should have earned the D.S.O. seemed in the eyes of the doer to degrade the honour!

* * * * *

With this true tale I have come back to a recollection of the words of the flying officer in charge of the aerodrome mentioned in my second letter, after he had described to me the incessant raiding and fighting of our airmen behind the enemy lines.

"Many of them don't come back. What then? They will have done their job."

The report which reaches the château on our last evening illustrates this casual remark. It shows that 89 machines were lost during February, 60 of them German. We claimed 41 of these, and 23 British machines were "missing" or "brought down."

But as I write the concluding words of this letter (May 3rd) a far more startling report--that for April--lies before me. "There has not been a month of such fighting since the war began, and the losses have never reached such a tremendous figure," says the Times. The record number so far was that for September 1916, in the height of the Somme fighting--322. But during April, according to the official reports, "the enormous number of 717 aeroplanes were brought to earth as the result of air-fights or by gun-fire." Of these, 369 were German--269 of them brought down by the British and 98 by the French. The British lost 147; the French and Belgian, if the German claims can be trusted, 201.

It is a terrible list, and a terrible testimony to the extreme importance and intensity of the air-fighting now going on. How few of us, except those who have relatives or dear friends in the air-service, realise at all the conditions of this fighting--its daring, its epic range, its constant development!

All the men in it are young. None of them can have such a thing as a nerve. Anyone who betrays the faintest suspicion of one in his first flights is courteously but firmly returned to his regiment. In peace the airman sees this solid earth of ours as no one else sees it; and in war he makes acquaintance by day and night with all its new and strange aspects, amid every circumstance of danger and excitement, with death always at hand, his life staked, not only against the enemy and all his devices on land and above it, but against wind and cloud, against the treacheries of the very air itself.

In the midst of these conditions the fighting airman shoots, dodges, pursues, and dives, intent only on one thing, the destruction of his enemy, while the observer photographs, marks his map with every gun-emplacement, railway station, dump of food or ammunition, unconcerned by the flying shells or the strange dives and swoops of the machine.

But apart from active fighting, take such a common experience as what is called "a long reconnaissance." Pilot and observer receive their orders to reconnoitre "thoroughly" a certain area. It may be winter, and the cold at the height of many thousand feet may be formidable indeed. No matter. The thing is done, and, after hours in the freezing air, the machine makes for home; through a winter evening, perhaps, as we saw the two splendid biplanes, near the northern section of the line, sailing far above our heads into the sunset, that first day of our journey. The reconnaissance is over, and here is the first-hand testimony of one who has taken part in many, as to what it means in endurance and fatigue:

"Both pilot and observer are stiff with the cold. In winter it is often necessary to help them out of the machine and attend to the chilled parts of the body to avoid frost-bite. Their faces are drawn with the continual strain. They are deaf from the roar of the engine. Their eyes are bloodshot, and their whole bodies are racked with every imaginable ache. For the next few hours they are good for nothing but rest, though sleep is generally hard to get. But before turning in the observer must make his report and hand it in to the proper quarter."

So much for the nights which are rather for observation than fighting, though fighting constantly attends them. But the set battles in the air, squadron with squadron, man with man, the bombers in the centre, the fighting machines surrounding and protecting them, are becoming more wonderful, more daring, more complicated every month. "You'll see"--I recall once more the words of our Flight-Commander, spoken amid the noise and movement of a score of practising machines, five weeks before the battle of Arras--"when the great move begins we shall get the mastery again, as we did on the Somme."

Ask the gunners in the batteries of the April advance, as they work below the signalling planes; ask the infantry whom the gunners so marvellously protect, as to the truth of the prophecy!