To Aubrey Montague Of Lautoka, Fiji “We twa hae paidlet i’ the burn.”...

Now that most of our men in the prime of life have been in the army we seem to be in for a goodly literature of disappointment. All the ungifted young people came back from the war to tell us that the...

Now that most of our men in the prime of life have been in the army we seem to be in for a goodly literature of disappointment. All the ungifted young people came back from the war to tell us that the...

The higher the wall or the horse from which you have tumbled, the larger, under Nature’s iron law, are your bruises and consequent crossness likely to be. Before we try shaking or cuffing the disenrap...

Everything helped, for a time, to keep him the child that he was. Except in the matter of separation from civilian friends his daily life was pretty well that of the happiest children. The men knew no...

The mental peace, the physical joy, the divinely simplified sense of having one clear aim, the remoteness from all the rest of the world, all favoured a tropical growth of illusion. A man, says Tennys...

What could the New Army not have done if all the time of its training had been fully used! A few, at least, of its units had a physique above that of the Guards; many did more actual hours of work, be...

What could the New Army not have done if all the time of its training had been fully used! A few, at least, of its units had a physique above that of the Guards; many did more actual hours of work, be...

Where, then, did the first shiver of disillusion begin? Perhaps with some trivial incident. Say a newborn company, quartered in a great town, was sent out for a long afternoon’s marching. Only through...

Perhaps, in another company or another battalion, some private of relative wealth has felt, in the strength of his youth and the heat of his zeal, that he wants more to do. He longs to get on with the...

What about officers, too? The men wonder again. That new company commander who started in as a captain, but never could give the simplest command on parade without his sergeant-major to give him the w...

A favourite trick with the disillusioning imp was to get hold of authority’s wisely drafted timetable of work for a new division in training and mix up all the subjects and times. The effect must have...

It was, of course, an incomplete view of the case. Shall we have Henries, Fluellens, and Erpinghams at the hand of God, and no Bardolphs, Pistols, and Nyms? Our stage was not really rotten by any mean...

Shakespeare seems to have known what there is to be known about our Great War of 1914⁠–⁠18. And he was not censored. So he put into his Henry IV and Henry V a lot of little things that our press had t...

Shakespeare seems to have known what there is to be known about our Great War of 1914⁠–⁠18. And he was not censored. So he put into his Henry IV and Henry V a lot of little things that our press had t...

If this Doubting Thomas abounded at Agincourt how could he not abound at, say, the third Battle of Ypres? At Agincourt our whole army was just small enough to have comradeship all the way through it⁠—...

There may be laid up in Heaven a pattern of some front line by which the Staff in its rear would be really loved. But such love is not in the nature of man. If the skin on Mr. Dempsey’s knuckles could...

There was yet another special check during the war upon love and respect for the higher commands. There were so many things of moment which they were the last to find out. Time after time the great on...

“Your Old Army’s all bloody born amatoors,” an Australian of ripe war experience remarked with some frankness in France. His immediate occasion for generalizing so rashly was somebody’s slip in passin...

Whenever you passed from east to west across the British zone during the war you would find somebody saying with fervour that somebody else, a little more to the west and a little higher in rank, had ...

Yet the men in the line talked, and so did the subalterns, most of whom had been in the ranks, now that the war ran into years. Soldiers have endless occasions for talk. Being seldom alone, and having...

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...

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...

And yet the book told something which no other book has yet succeeded in telling you. Wordy, cantankerous, dull, repeating itself like a decimal, padded with cheap political “thoughts” gathered from o...

Suppose those first eight days in the front and support trenches to be the beginning of a divisional tour of sixteen days’ duty in the line. For four days now the weary men would be in reserve, under ...

Many, of course, lost health and drifted “down the line,” as it was called, to the base, where work might be light, but much of the company rather more blighting than any work to the spirit. Hither, t...

The men who could not shirk the choice of Hercules, for other people, were the doctors. The stay of every N.C.O. or man at a base depot was on probation. Each had to go before a Medical Board soon aft...

The war had more obvious disagreeables, too; you have heard all about them: the quelling coldness of frosty nights spent in soaked clothes⁠—for no blankets were brought up to the trenches; the ubiquit...

“Of late years,” the novel of Shirley begins, “an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the North of England; they lie very thick on the hills; every parish has one or more of them; they are youn...

“Of late years,” the novel of Shirley begins, “an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the North of England; they lie very thick on the hills; every parish has one or more of them; they are youn...

In the eyes of the men he had notable merits. He was a running fountain, more often than not, of good cigarettes. Of the exceeding smallness of Low Country beer he could talk, man to man, with knowled...

“I’ve been a Christian all my life, but this war is a bit too serious.” So saying, a certain New Army recruit had folded up his religion in 1914, and put it away, as it were, in a drawer with his othe...

The testimonies that might have ensued were foreclosed by a shell that buried him alive in Oppy Wood, under the Vimy Ridge, where he was engaged in diverting the energies of the Central Powers from th...

Nobody used it: the tide in the affairs of churches flowed its best, but no church came to take it. Instead, as if chance had planned a kind of satiric practical epigram, came the brigade chaplain. As...

When a man enlisted during the war he found himself living the life of the common man in a Communist State. Once inside he had no more choices to make than a Russian under the Soviet. His work, his pa...

When a man enlisted during the war he found himself living the life of the common man in a Communist State. Once inside he had no more choices to make than a Russian under the Soviet. His work, his pa...

Other speculations were apt to visit your mind if, later on in the war, as a New Army officer, you watched, open-mouthed, the way that much of the Regular Army’s business was done. In civil life you m...

Returned from these illuminating experiences the victorious soldier finds the British taxpayer⁠—not, indeed, killed, but rubbing his wounds and groaning and being advised by several different kinds of...

A century of almost unbroken European peace⁠—unbroken, that is, by wars hugely destructive⁠—had built up insensibly in men’s minds a consciousness of an unbounded general stability in the political as...

If you cannot hit or kick during a fight, at any rate you can spit. But, to be happy in this arm of the service, you have to feel sure that the adversary is signally fit to be spat upon. Hence, on eac...

If you cannot hit or kick during a fight, at any rate you can spit. But, to be happy in this arm of the service, you have to feel sure that the adversary is signally fit to be spat upon. Hence, on eac...

Some of the fuel to hand was fine. The German command fed the best of it all into our bunkers, gratis. It owned that its “frightfulness” plan was no slip, no “indiscretion of a subordinate,” but a pol...

Of all this kind of swordsmanship the most dashing feat was the circulation of the “corpse factory” story. German troops, it was written in part of our Press, had got, in certain places near their fro...

Partly it came of the nature⁠—which could not be helped by that time⁠—of war correspondence. In the first months of the war our General Staff, being what we had made it, treated British war correspond...

There lay the trouble. They lived in the Staff world, its joys and its sorrows, not in the combatant world. The Staff was both their friend and their censor. How could they show it up when it failed? ...

To fool the other side has always been fair in a game. Every fencer or boxer may feint. A Rugby football player “gives the dummy” without any shame. In cricket a bowler is justly valued the more for m...

To fool the other side has always been fair in a game. Every fencer or boxer may feint. A Rugby football player “gives the dummy” without any shame. In cricket a bowler is justly valued the more for m...

It is the common habit of nations at war to ascribe to the other side all the cunning, as if the possession of a Ulysses were some sort of discredit. Happily for us our chosen Ulysses in France, at th...

If we did these things in the green leaf, what might we not do in the dry? Mobilize our whole Press, conscribe it for active service under a single control, a⁠—let us be frank⁠—a Father-General of Lie...

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 p...

Perhaps you would shrink back. Perhaps at any rate you do so now, when for the moment this great implement is not being offered to you, to take or leave, at an instant crisis of your country’s fate. Y...

Well⁠—and then? Any weapon you use in a war leaves some bill to be settled in peace, and the Propaganda arm has its cost like another. To say so is not to say, without more ado, that it should not be ...

Under the new dispensation we should have to appoint on the declaration of war, if we had not done it already, a large Staff Department of Press Camouflage. Everything is done best by those who have p...

In the autumn of 1917 the war entered into an autumn, or late middle-age, of its own. “Your young men,” we are told, “shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” The same with whole armie...

In the autumn of 1917 the war entered into an autumn, or late middle-age, of its own. “Your young men,” we are told, “shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” The same with whole armie...

One leaf that had gone pretty yellow by now was the hope of perfect victory⁠—swift, unsoured, unruinous, knightly: St. George’s over the dragon, David’s over Goliath. Some people at home seem to be st...

Even in trenches and near them, where most of the health was, time had begun to embrown the verdant soul of the army. “Kitchener’s Army” was changing. Like every volunteer army, his had sifted itself,...

The fall of the leaf had brought, too, a sad shortage of heroes⁠—of highly-placed ones, for, of course, every company had its own, authenticated beyond any proof that crosses or medals could give. A f...

In either of two opposite tempers you may carry on war. In one of the two you will want to rate your enemy, all round, as high as you can. You may pursue him down a trench, or he you; but in neither c...

In either of two opposite tempers you may carry on war. In one of the two you will want to rate your enemy, all round, as high as you can. You may pursue him down a trench, or he you; but in neither c...

In the first months of the war there was any amount of good sportsmanship going; most, of course, among men who had seen already the whites of enemy eyes. I remember the potent emetic effect of Flanig...

At no seat of war will you find it quite easy to live up to Flanigan’s standards of hatred towards an enemy. Reaching a front, you find that all you want is just to win the war. Soon you are so taken ...

With this guilty weakness gaining upon them our troops drove the Germans from Albert to Mons. There were scandalous scenes on the way. Imagine two hundred German prisoners grinning inside a wire cage ...

Even at places less distant than home the survival of old English standards of fighting had given some scandal. In that autumn of the war when our generalship seemed to have explored all its own talen...

You know the most often quoted of all passages of Burke. Indeed, it is only through quotations of it that most of us know Burke at all⁠— But the age of chivalry is gone⁠ ⁠… the unbought grace of life,...

“Doth any man doubt,” the wise Bacon asks, “that if there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave t...

“Doth any man doubt,” the wise Bacon asks, “that if there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave t...

Any soldier will tell you the bayonet does not win battles. It only claims, in a way that a beaten side cannot ignore, a victory won already by gunfire, rifles, gas, bombs, or some combination of thes...

The winter after the battle of Loos a sentry on guard at one part of our line could always see the frustrate skeletons of many English dead. They lay outside our wire, picked clean by the rats, so tha...

You are more aware of the stars in war than in peace. A full moon may quite halve the cares of a sentry; the Pole Star will sometimes be all that a company has, when relieved, to guide it back across ...

“I planted a set of blind hopes in their minds,” said Prometheus, making it out to be quite a good turn that he had done to mankind. And the Dr. Relling of Ibsen, a kind of Prometheus in general pract...

There is no one day of which you can say: “My youth ended then. On the Monday the ball of my vision had eagles that flew unabashed to the sun. On the Tuesday it hadn’t.” The season of rapture goes out...

There is no one day of which you can say: “My youth ended then. On the Monday the ball of my vision had eagles that flew unabashed to the sun. On the Tuesday it hadn’t.” The season of rapture goes out...

Night came on cloudless and windless and braced with autumn’s first astringent tang of coolness. Above, as I lay on my back in the meadow, the whole dome had a stir of life in its shimmering fresco, s...

Ten miles to the east of Amiens a steep-sided ridge divides the converging rivers of Ancre and Somme. They meet where it sinks, at its western end, into the plain. From the ridge there was, in prewar ...

There were other days, during the following months of worm-eaten success, when some mirage of the greater joys which we had forfeited hung for a few moments over the sand. It must be always a strange ...

Men wearying in trenches used to tell one another sometimes what they fancied the end of the war would be like. Each had his particular favourite vision. Some morning the Captain would come down the t...

Men wearying in trenches used to tell one another sometimes what they fancied the end of the war would be like. Each had his particular favourite vision. Some morning the Captain would come down the t...

For the day of the fighting man, him and his chivalric hobbies, was over. The guns had hardly ceased to fire before from the rear, from the bases, from London, there came flooding up the braves who fo...

The senior general need not have feared. The generous youth of the war, when England could carry, with no air of burlesque, the flag of St. George, was pretty well gone. The authentic flame might stil...

Sir Douglas Haig came to Cologne when we had been there a few days. On the grandiose bridge over the Rhine he made a short speech to a few of us. Most of it sounded as if the thing were a job he had g...

Satanism is one of the words that most of us simple people have heard others use; we guiltily feel that we ought to know what it means, but do not quite like to ask, lest we expose the nakedness of th...

Satanism is one of the words that most of us simple people have heard others use; we guiltily feel that we ought to know what it means, but do not quite like to ask, lest we expose the nakedness of th...

Today the convert does not insist upon bearing the new name. He does not, except in the case of a few doctrinaire bigots, repeat any Satanist creed. But in several portions of Europe the war made conv...

In their vices as well as their virtues the English preserve a distinguished moderation. They do not utterly shrink from jobbery, for example; they do from a job that is flagrant or gross. They give j...

All this relative mildness in the irritants administered to the common Englishman as soldier had its counterpart in the men’s ingrained moderateness of reaction. At Bray-sur-Somme during the battle of...

You may be disillusioned about the value of things, or about their security, either coming to feel that your house is a poor place to live in or that, pleasant or not, it is likely enough to come down...

How shall it all be set right? For it must be, of course. A people that did not wait to be pushed off its seat by the Kaiser is not likely now to turn its face to the wall and die inertly of shortage ...

How shall it all be set right? For it must be, of course. A people that did not wait to be pushed off its seat by the Kaiser is not likely now to turn its face to the wall and die inertly of shortage ...

That is about where we stand as a nation. Of course, a few fortunates mailed in a happy, indefeasible genius of wonder and delight at everything round them are all right. And so are a few clods of who...

Of course, life itself is all right. It never grows dull. All dullness is in the mind; it comes out thence and diffuses itself over everything round the dull person, and then he terms everything dull,...

Among the mind’s powers is one that comes of itself to many children and artists. It need not be lost, to the end of his days, by anyone who has ever had it. This is the power of taking delight in a t...

To give the cure a chance we must have a long quiet time. And we must secure it now. For the moment, no doubt, war has gone out of fashion; it pines in the shade, like the old horsehair covers for sof...

To give the cure a chance we must have a long quiet time. And we must secure it now. For the moment, no doubt, war has gone out of fashion; it pines in the shade, like the old horsehair covers for sof...

But may it not come into fashion again? Do not all the great fashions move in cycles, like stars? When our wars with Napoleon were just over, and all the bills still to be paid, and the number of visi...

If he did, it was natural. All Struwwelpeters are natural. All heirs-apparent are said to take the opposite side to their fathers still on the throne. And those learned men were heirs to the age of th...

Then the Church itself must needs take a hand⁠—or that part of the Church which ever cocks an eye at the latest fashions in public opinion, the “blessed fellows,” like Poins, that “think as every man ...

And yet all mortal things are subject to decay, even reactions, even decay itself, and there comes a time when the dead Ophelia may justly be said to be not decomposing, but recomposing successfully a...