VII
THE BRITISH OFFICER—A NEW TYPE
THE old idea of the British officer must be changed, even as the old idea of the British. Tommy. Time was when we used to think of the typical officer, especially the subaltern, as a titled, monocled young slip of a fop who had little or nothing in the way of equipment and training except social position, pull or even the money necessary to purchase a commission, who leaned on the breast of a "wet nurse" in the shape of an old bronze sergeant-major, put there to tell him what to do. That day has gone, ra-a-ther! I remember a verse of an old poem about those times:
The sand of the desert is sodden red,
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; The gatling's jammed and the colonel dead;
And the regiment's blind with dust and smoke, The river of death has brimmed its banks;
England's far and honor's a name; Yet the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks, Play up, play up, and play the game I Now, the old Rugby and Eton notion of the officered class must be revised. Echoes of the old time, however, still come to us in stories like this, which is a favorite over here:
A young subaltern was sitting in judgment upon a Tommy who had overstayed his leave. His sergeant-major was at the officer's elbow to prompt him.
"You should be ashamed, an old soldier like you," lectured the young cub. "I ought to be especially severe with you. I think I'll give you six months C. B."
Now C. B. means confined to barracks. Everything is condensed to letters in the army.
"Sh-sh-h!" said the sergeant-major. "You can't do that, sir. That's altogether too much."
"Well, make it a month then."
"No, no, sir. You can't confine a man to barracks for a month for such a petty offense."
"No?" said the young lieutenant. "Then what do you suggest?"
"A week's pay, sir; that would be quite enough."
"Very well, then, I give you a week's pay," said the young man, and reaching into his pocket, he drew out a handful of silver, counting out the seven shillings, gave them to the offender, muttering severely, "See that you don't let it occur again!" No, sir, those good old days are gone.
Yet an incident happened to us that showed us some remnants of that helplessness in official position. We, with entire innocence, had gone into a forbidden area without a pass. Nobody challenged us. We spent two days going all over that area, riding round like kings in a motor car—which, by the way, was also unlawful—and seeing all the sights. When it was time to leave we went to the police station as usual to be checked out.
"Americans," cried the police sergeant. "Where's your pass? How'd you get here? What're you doing here?" He was plainly flabbergasted.
"We just came!" said we blandly, smiling sweetly.
It developed that no civilian had a right to go on the boat by which we had gone. Perhaps the fact we were in khaki accounted for our easy entrance; but we were perfectly innocent. The sergeant took us to the chief at the chief's residence, for it was after hours. The chief called in his clerk. Then all held a serious, perplexed consultation. They had us on their hands; they were not responsible for our coming; they did not know what to do with us. At first they insisted we were not five feet ten as our identity books described us. We drew ourselves up and swore we were. They scrutinized our photos and our faces. Satisfied at last that we were the very chaps we claimed to be, they once again went into committee of the whole and decided to let us out of the area, provided we went by the proper boat line, and reported ourselves upon arrival to the O. C. (commanding officer) of the military district. They stamped our books and wrote in the proviso, and then, evidently relieved, thawed out and we had a lovely half hour's chat.
Next day, upon reaching the mainland, we went promptly to the O. C.'s office. Of course, they were expecting us. Of course we did not see the O. C. in person. But we saw a young subaltern and an old clerk. They evidently had formed no plan as to what to do with us. The subaltern consulted the old hand; and the old hand shook his head and had nothing to suggest. The whole history of our movements was told and retold and they looked blank and swore it was impossible. But there we were, serene flesh and blood evidence that it was even so. At last they decided to send us on to the civil police, with our thumbs in our mouths. Then, seeing the old clerk could suggest nothing definite, the Yankee asserted himself.
"No you don't," I said, "we are not going to chase over to the police and be sent back here, or somewhere else. You are going to write a writing of some kind, put some kind of a rubber stamp on it—we don't care what—or else we are going to spend the rest of the day quietly in these delightful chambers." So in two minutes it was done and the perplexed young cub had taken instructions from an out and out greenhorn. That is a remnant of old days.
The British officer of to-day has been through the mill. No man is supposed to buy a commission any longer. Who am I that I should say it is not, in rare instances, even yet done? But taken for all in all, officers today have come up through every degree of training and actual service in the ranks. Many have got their stripes for bravery of efficiency and all have passed certain set examinations. There are no good old days nor good old ways left in the army. To be sure, likely men are seized upon, college men, specialists, even labor contractors and foremen, and are prepared for commissions, but they must first be common Tommies, in training for months, then cadets, with a white band round their caps to indicate that they are blossoming into command; then, after examinations, full-fledged officers.
I have not found British officers reserved. I have found them modest, sometimes even to bashfulness; and about military matters, close mouthed as oysters. But, as someone has said, Englishmen, if they once open up, are perfectly willing to tell you all about themselves. If they like you they will easily open up. If they don't like you you might as well talk to a bronze statue. To-day the American, if he shows himself even halfway modest, is ace high among the Allies and they are eager to like him and talk to him.
As for myself I want no more charming companion and friend than a cultivated English officer. They are tact personified in spite of certain old American preconceptions.
One of the most attractive was a Highland major, next to whom I sat at dinner one night at the chateau in France. He was an attorney before the war and wondered how he was ever going to settle down to routine office work when all was done. He was forty or thereabouts, had just married in 1914, and had inflammatory rheumatism twice in his life, which left him with a bad heart. But he volunteered on the first day of war through sense of duty—and got by the doctors undetected. He told me how he lay night after night in his trench dugout in mud and water, and cursed himself for a fool, when all he had to do was to go to a surgeon and be transferred to base. But he was absurdly healthy all the time and seemed to bear a charmed life. Men were killed all round him, one night one on each side of him, and he was unscathed. He had developed a sort of fatalism, as so many do in the front lines, which he would admit only as a sort of Calvinism.
"Ah," said he, "it is in the trenches you come to see the bottom of men's hearts!"
That remark gave me my opening. I asked him what he meant by seeing to the bottom of men's hearts. He started, looked me between the eyes, and opened up. I thought he was hungry for religion, and my surmise was correct. He was a man of the world, but a churchman. He had not been to church for three years; had been to a parade service once or twice; expressed disappointment with the padre, and had had no religious conversation in all that time.
"Britishers do not talk much about such things, although they think much," he explained. When he found I was willing to talk of religion he would not let go of me all that evening, but led me out under the trees on the great lawn, and kept me till late bedtime. I shall never forget that splendid Highland "mon," and that night.
War has shaken English conservatism to its foundations. It will be long, I hope it will be centuries, and so do the English, before they relapse again into the satisfaction with old things and old ways that if Germany had only been wise enough to keep on in her conquering commercial path, might have led to the peaceful absorption of the British Empire. These men are now eager for new things, new ideas, new speed and efficiency, new precedents, or none at all. They are actually growing impatient of the old formula: "This is good enough for us, because it was good enough for our fathers. It always has been done this way; it always must be done just so."
Something of the new attitude may be found in the contrast of two padres, whom one sees to be typical of two classes. One of them riding on a bicycle passed a soldier of his own regiment who did not salute. The padre got down off his wheel, reprimanded the man, and made him salute. Of course the man did so; and, of course, he told all his mates and, of course, it went through the battalion; and that padre never had any more influence among those men. Another big rawboned Scotch chaplain, just back from France, had not heard of the new order that all officers in public must carry or wear kid gloves. He was swinging along, when a little subaltern stopped him and cried:
"I say padre! an officer must wear kid gloves, don't you know!"
"Now look here, sonny," came the rich growl from the Highland breast, "you toddle along, will you! there's been too much kid glove about this war, anyhow!"
I bet my bottom dollar that padre is not without influence in his own battalion.
The coolness and nonchalance of British officers is proverbial. We all have mental pictures of them leading their men over the parapets. They go with cigarettes in their mouths, no weapon in hand but a swagger stick, and their lawn tennis manners on. If you have such a picture in your mind you need not change it. After the early days of the war the general staff became more economical of officers. The mortality had been far too high, and bravery is now more tempered with discretion. But there is no discounting the elegant and easy sang froid of these highly mannered Englishmen. I have seen them at it and I know. Particular about trifles of conduct? Well, I should say! One of them told me without realizing how typical he was, how he sat one day in a tram in Liverpool and became conscious of the man across the aisle gazing at him:
"You know how some people will do; they begin at your boots, travel all the way up and finish off at your hat! Beastly annoying, don't y'know! Well, I decided to give him as good as he sent. So I just laid down my paper and I met him with an eye volley straight in the nose. A few days later I met a naval officer face to face, and although a stranger to me, he said he had seen me a few days before and had annoyed me by gazing at me, that he did not mean to be impertinent, that he was only envious. His own uniform was not to be done until late in the week. Then he told me with great glee that he had joined his ship, which was a destroyer, on a Wednesday, had put to sea on Friday, got in among a nest of U-boats, bagged three, and was back on Saturday. I never saw a man so happy."
Nobody knows all the stories of coolness and heroism among the naval men. We shall not learn them till the war is over, but here is one that perhaps the censors will allow to go by. It was told me by a medical officer who was aboard the Franconia when she was sunk while acting as a transport.
"We had five or six naval officers aboard. They were sitting in the smoking room—remember the smoking lounge in the old Franconia? It was very long, as long as this dining room, and twice as broad. They had just ordered whisky sodas. Suddenly there was an explosion and the steel floor of that smoking room just buckled up and burst apart in the middle, spilling the whisky sodas into the bottom of the ship. One of those officers called the steward and said:
"'I ask you to witness, steward, that we have paid for these whisky sodas and have not had time to drink them.'
"Then the rascals went below, got on their lifebelts, came back again, asked the steward for a big sheet of foolscap, wrote out a long, 'we the undersigned,' setting forth that they had ordered six whisky sodas, for which they had paid nine shillings, with a sixpence tip, and had not been allowed to drink them. Therefore they entered a claim against the British government for the nine shillings and sixpence with accrued interest from date. Then they walked in a body up to the bridge and handed it to the skipper. The old man told me afterwards he never was so grateful to anybody as to these cool young devils for the steadying and bucking up influence of their impudence."
It was the same medical officer who told me he was on duty at one of the entry ports, where the American medical units were coming through. It was his function among other things to welcome arrivals from our country, see them through the customs and start them on the way to the war office in London. It came to be a habit to bring the American doctors to the police authorities, and, with the assurance that these men were all right, hustle them by in a herd. One day he noticed that one of these American arrivals could speak only poor English. Except, however, for wondering a bit, he thought little of the circumstance, but sent the man on to London. A short time after, word came that the doctor with the lame English had not appeared at the war office. Then, in about six weeks came further word that the man had been caught and shot as a spy.
"Yes," cut in a colonel, sitting near, an old stager. "They are daring devils, some of these Botches. I have seen them in staff officers' uniforms, going about our lines in France, giving orders like any brass hat of them all, and then shot next day at sunrise for German spies."
These officers get "fed up" on war talk. They unbend like a loosened bow if an opportunity comes to discuss late art, music or old architecture. Some of them, of course, have read little, or only in certain lines, but when you come to the men of culture among them, you have to keep your memory working lively to keep pace with the rich flow of literary reference that ornaments their conversation. Then, after a season of this detached refreshment, before you are aware, the bow is bent again, the old look of thoughtful strain comes back, and you know that these are the men who have bent their shoulders to the task, and will not relax until they have seen it through, who are saying to themselves, consciously or unconsciously, "This one thing I do."