C. E. Montague

“ For any little expense to which the war might put us the Germans would pay, and our troops would return home to dismiss all trade-union officials and to regard the upper and middle classes thenceforth as a race of heaven-sent colonels—men to be followed, feared, and loved. Ah, happy vision, beautiful dream!—like Thackeray's reverie about having a very old and rich aunt. The dreamer awakes among the snows of the Mont Cenis with a horrid smell in the corridor and the hot-water pipes out of order. And so war has gone out of fashion, even among cheery well-to-do-people. ”

“ Now, after the war, he is shaken. Every disease which victory was to cure he sees raging worse than before: more poverty, less liberty, more likelihood of other wars, more spite between master and man, less national comradeship. And then the crucial test case, the solemn vow of the statesmen, all with their hands on their sleek bosoms, that if only the common man would save them just that once they would turn to and think of nothing else, do nothing else, but build him a house, assure him of work, settle him on land, make all England a paradise for him—a "land fit for heroes to live in." ”

“ The higher commands have no right to get hit. Modern war has pushed the right place for them farther and farther away from the fighting, away from the men, whom some of the higher commanders, as well as the lower, do really love with a love passing the love of women—"the dear men" of whom I have heard an officer, tied to the staff and the base by the results of head wounds, speak with an almost wailing ache of desire, as horses whinny for a friend—"Would I were with him, wheresoe'er he is, either in heaven or in hell." ”

“ Reaching a front, you find that all you want is just to win the war. Soon you are so taken up with the pursuit of this aim that you are always forgetting to burn with the gem-like flame of pure fury that fires the lion-hearted publicist at home.
A soldier might have had the Athanasian ecstasy all right till he reached the firing line. Every individual German had sunk the Lusitania; there was none righteous, none. And yet at a front the holy passion began to ooze out at the ends of his fingers. The bottom trouble is that you cannot fight a man in the physical way without somehow touching him. ”

“ This is an individual's job, and a somewhat lonely one, though a nation has to be saved by it. To get down to work, whoever else idles; to tell no lies, whoever else may thrive on their uses; to keep fit, and the beast in you down; to help any who need it; to take less from your world than you give it; to go without the old drams to the nerves—the hero stunt, the sob story, all the darling liqueurs of war emotionalism, war vanity, war spite, war rant and cant of every kind ”

“ The season of rapture goes out like a tide that has turned; a time has come when the mud flats are bare; but, long after the ebb has set in, any wave that has taken a special strength of its own from some combination of flukes out at sea may cover them up for a moment—may even throw itself far up the beach, making as if to recapture the lost high-water mark. So the youth of our war had its feints at renewal, hours of Indian summer when there was wine again in the air ”

“ Another frequent temptation of theirs is to live in a world of stale figures of speech, of flags nailed to the mast, of standing to one's guns, of deaths in last ditches, of quarter neither asked nor given. It is their hobby to figure their own secure, squabblesome lives in images taken from war. And their little excesses, their breaches of manners, and even, sometimes, of actual law, are excused, as a rule, in terms of virile disdain for anything less drastic and stern than the morals of the real warfare which they know so little. ”

“ To be suffered to do some plain work with the real spade used by mankind can give him a mystical exaltation: to come home with his legs, as the French say, re-entering his body from the fatigue of helping the gardener to weed beds sends him to sleep in the glow of a beatitude that is an end in itself. Then the paradoxes of conduct begin to twinkle into sight; sugar is good, but there is a time to refrain from taking it though you can; a lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie. ”

“ For a year the heads of our Church have been telling us what war is and does—that it is a school of character, that it sobers men, cleans them, strengthens them, knits their hearts, makes them brave, patient, humble, tender, prone to self-sacrifice. Watered by 'war's red rain,' one bishop tells us, virtue grows; a cannonade, he points out, is an 'oratorio'—almost a form of worship. ”

“ Still, the men were not cranks enough to object. "They love not poison that do poison need." The men had hated, and still continued to hate, the use of poison gas, too. It was a scrub's trick, like vitriol-throwing. But who could have done without it, when once the Germans began? And now who could object to the use of this printed gas either? Could they, in this new warfare of propaganda, expect their country to go into action armed in a white robe of candour, and nothing besides, like a maskless man going forth to war against a host assisted by phosgene and all her foul sisters? ”

“ Every year thousands of women and children must go their way bereft of the rich spiritual experience of the widow and the orphan. I try not to despond, but when I think of all that Latimer owed to the fire, Regulus to a spiked barrel, Socrates to prison, and Job to destitution and disease—when I think of these things and then think of how many of my poor fellow creatures in our modern world are robbed daily of the priceless discipline of danger, want, and torture, then I ask myself—I cannot help asking myself—whether we are not walking into a very slough of moral and spiritual squalor. ”

“ Thus does war in the end, knock at the doors of us all: like the roll of the earth upon its axis, it brings us, if not death or destitution or some ashy taste in the mouth, at any rate a sense of a fallen temperature in our bunks. However non-porous our minds, there does slowly filter into us the thought that when a million of a country's men of working age have just been killed there may be a plaguey dearth of the man-power needed to keep in pleasant order the lavatories of its trains de luxe. ”

“ Here all his hopes are for things close at hand: ambition lives along one arm stretched out to grasp a rock eighteen inches away; his sole aim in life may be simply the top of a thirty-foot cleft in a steep face of stone. At home, in the thick of his work, he had seemed to be everlastingly threading mazes that no one could thread right to the end; here, on the crags, it is all divinely simplified; who would trouble his head with subtle questionings about what human life will, might, or ought to be when every muscle and nerve are tautly engaged in the primal job of sticking to life as it is? ”

“ Battalion commanders did not soon tire of telling how in the busiest days of big battles the unseen powers would pester them for instant returns of the number of shovels they had, or of the number of men who in civil life had been fitters, or had been moulders. Brigadiers would savagely wonder aloud whether it ever occurred to a higher command that to make little attack after little attack, each on a narrow, one-brigade front, was merely to ask to have each attack squashed flat in its turn by a fan-like convergence of fire from the enemy's guns on both flanks, not to speak of supports. ”

“ You know how you seem, when that sudden light comes, to escape for a while from your common thoughts about time, as if out of a prison in which you have been shut up so long that you had almost forgotten what it is to be free: it flashes into your mind that immortality, for all you know, may exist within one moment; that life, for all you know, may draw out into state after state, and that all that you are conscious of at common times might be merely a drop or two lipping over the edge of the full vessel of some vast consciousness animating the whole world. ”

“ When a Staff's work is done well the front line only feels as if Nature were marching, without actual molestation, along some beneficent course of her own. But when some one slips up, and half a brigade is left to itself in a cold, cold world encircled by Germans, the piercing eye of the front line perceives in a moment how pitifully ill the Brass Hats deserve of their country. If you are an infantry-man the Brass Hats above you are, in your sight, a kind of ex officio children of perdition, like your own gunners. ”

“ We were all tranquilly feeding, good as gold, in the deep and pleasant meadows of the long Victorian peace when from some of the frailest animals in the pasture there rose a plaintive bleat for war. It was the very lambs that began it. "Shall we never have carnage?" Stevenson, the consumptive, sighed to a friend. Henley, the cripple, wrote a longing "Song of the Sword." Out of the weak came forth violence. Bookish men began to hug the belief that they had lost their way in life; they felt that they were Neys or Nelsons manqués, or cavalry leaders lost to the world. ”

“ The French Revolution did not, as his beautiful language implies, confine mankind for the rest of its days to the procreation of curs. And yet his words do give you, in their own lush, Corinthian way, a notion of something that probably did happen, a certain limited shifting of the centre of gravity of West European morals or manners.
One would be talking like Burke—talking, perhaps you might say, through Burke's hat—if one were to say that the war found chivalry alive and left it dead. Chivalry is about as likely to perish as brown eyes or the moon. ”

“ When you think of the youth that you have lost, the times when it seems to you now that life was most poignantly good may not be the ones when everything seemed at the time to go well with your plans, and the world, as they say, to be at your feet; rather some few unaccountable moments when nothing took place that was out of the way and yet some word of a friend's, or a look on the face of the sky, the taste of a glass of spring water, the plash of laughter and oars heard across midsummer meadows at night raised the soul of enjoyment within you to strangely higher powers of itself. ”

“ For all that you knew, any man who came out on a draft, from then on, might be the exception, the literal-minded Christian who thought it wicked to kill in a war; or an anti-nationalist zealot who thought us all equally fools, the Germans and us, to be out there pasturing lice, instead of busy at home taking the hide off the bourgeois; or one of those drift wisps of loveless critical mind, attached to no place or people more than another, and just as likely as not to think that the war was our fault and that we ought to be beaten. ”

“ Whatever the cause, he excelled in his bearing towards enemies, dead or alive. The funeral that he gave to Richthofen in France was one of the few handsome gestures exchanged in the war. And whenever Little Flanigan at home began squealing aloud that we ought to take some of our airmen off fighting and make them bomb German women and children instead, our airmen's scorn for these ethics of the dirt helped to keep up the flickering hope that the post-war world might not be ignoble.
Even on the dull earth it takes time and pains to get a clean-run boy or young man into a mean frame of mind. ”

“ V Suppose us again at war with a Power less strong at sea than ourselves. If we should want its fleet to come out and fight in the open, why not evoke, some fine morning, from every voice in our daily press, a sudden and seemingly irrepressible cry of grief and rage over the unconcealable news—the Censor might be defied by the way—that our Grand Fleet, while ranging the seas, had struck a whole school of drift mines and lost half its numbers? ”

“ What the Sphinx was to her clientèle, what the sky is to mountain-climbers and sailors, your Press is to him: an endless riddle, to be interrogated and interpreted for dear life. His wits have to be at work on it always. Like a starved rat in a house where rat-poison is laid, he can afford neither to nibble a crumb that has got the virus on it, nor yet to leave uneaten any clean crumb that has fallen accidentally from a table. Do not thrilling possibilities open before you? ”

“ How we all know the kind of public school master whose manner expresses breezy comradeship with the boys in facing jointly the boredom of admittedly beastly but still unavoidable lessons! And the assumption that life out of school is too dull to be faced without the aid of infinitely elaborated games! And the girl schools where it seems to be feared that evil must come in any space of free time in which neither a game nor a dance nor a concert nor a lecture with a lantern intervenes to rescue the girls from the presumed tedium of mere youth and health! ”

“ Dominion battalions of men startlingly taller, stronger, handsomer, prouder, firmer in nerve, better schooled, more boldly interested in life, quicker to take means to an end and to parry and counter any new blow of circumstance, men who had learned already to look at our men with the half-curious, half-pitying look of a higher, happier caste at a lower. And now you saw them, all these kinds, arise in one continuous line out of the earth and walk forward to bear in the riddled flesh and wrung spirit the sins of their several fathers, pastors, and masters. ”

“ Say a new-born company, quartered in a great town, was sent out for a long afternoon's marching. Only through long, steady grinds can the perfect rhythm of marching, like that of rowing, be generated at last. The men, youthfully eager to kiss all possible rods and endure any obtainable hardness, march forth in a high state of delight—they are going to learn how to march to Berlin! No officer being present—and scarcely any existing as yet—a sergeant-major is in command. He is a very old hand. ”

“ Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain. So it would go on, week after week, sitting after sitting of the dismal court that liquidated in the Flanders mud our ruling classes' wasted decades, until we either lost the war outright or were saved from utter disaster by clutching at aid from French brains and American numbers. Like Lucifer when he was confronted with the sky at night, you "looked and sank." ”