by John Buchan
At first my ailments hid the world from me. By and by they also became a matter of routine, a background against which other objects stood out, and I could observe things and people. These ailments did me one service; they blunted my feeling about the sufferings of my friends, who had to face a far harder lot than mine. I felt dully that I had myself got quite as much as I could bear. In that grey hollow into which the universe had shrunk there were some — usually young men — who enjoyed it all, and breathed continually the air of adventure. The ordinary man went through it with fortitude and good humour as if it had been a kind of school, finding comfort in a new fellowship. To a few with exposed nerves and inward-turning eyes it was all an agony. To those who had had some taste of the rich variousness of the old life it meant bitter disappointment and a deadly ennui. But those who suffered most were, I think, the men who had already found their niche, who were approaching middle age, and whose bodies had not the resilience of youth. They felt acutely the physical strain; their minds were full of private anxieties; above all they saw the shattering of the house of life they had made for themselves, and despaired of building another.
From the start of the War I was clear that an old regime was passing away. That I did not regret, for the radicalism which is part of the Tory creed was coming uppermost, and I looked forward to a clearing out of much rubbish. But I realised that we were at the point of contact of a world vanishing and a world arriving, and that such a situation was apt to crush those who had to meet it. A new world would have to be made, and who would be left to make it e No man can have more than perhaps a score of intimate friends, and most of mine had gone, or were going. My youngest brother and my partner in business fell at Arras. Hugh Dawnay, whom I put first among the younger soldiers, died at First Ypres; Cecil Rawling, with whom, before the War, I had made plans for an attempt on Everest, fell as a brigadier at Passchendaele; my wife’s cousin, Jack Stuart-Wortley, disappeared in the German advance of March 1918; Oxford contemporaries like Raymond Asquith and Bron Lucas, and younger friends like Charles Lister and the Grenfell twins, all were dead. Losses, which a few years before would have seemed cataclysmal, became a matter of course. One acquiesced in tragedy, but it was an acquiescence without hope or philosophy. There was no uplift of the spirit, such as is traditionally associated with battle.
I acquired a bitter detestation of war, less for its horrors than for its boredom and futility, and a contempt for its panache. To speak of glory seemed a horrid impiety. That was perhaps why I could not open Homer. I found that I could read very little, and that many things which used to charm me seemed meaningless, since they belonged to a dead world. My reading was chiefly in the Latin and Greek classics, which were beyond the caprice of time. I read and re-read Thucydides, for he also had lived among crumbling institutions; Virgil, for he had known both the cruelty and the mercy of life; Plato, above all, for he was seraphically free from the pettinesses which were at the root of our sorrows.
When I returned to England I gradually won a happier outlook. While in bed during the autumn months of 1914 I had begun a popular history of the War in monthly volumes, designed to keep my work-people in employment, and its wide circulation induced the authorities to advise its continuance. This was a hard job in France, but it was easier in London — indeed, my difficulty was that I now knew too much and was often perplexed as to what I could print. Slowly I began to see the War as a gigantic cosmic drama, embracing every quarter of the globe and the whole orbit of man’s life. Though it lacked the epic fervour and simplicity it had an apocalyptic splendour of design. This prospect, and my work, which lay largely in the study of the mind of other nations, gave me a new intellectual interest. Also I was acquiring a boundless admiration for human nature. It was a war, as I have written elsewhere, won not by the genius of the few but by the faithfulness of the many. There was no leader, civil or military, to whom I felt I could give unreasoned trust, but I could confide implicitly in the mass of my own people.
Consequently many of my pre-War interests revived, but, so to speak, on sufferance, for I felt that they had become terribly fragile. Would anything remain of the innocencies of the old life e I was reassured by two short holidays. One was a tramp in the Cotswolds, from which I returned with the conviction that the essential England could not perish. This field had sent bowmen to Agincourt; down that hill Rupert’s men, swaying in their saddles, had fled after Naseby; this village had given Wellington a general; and from another the parson’s son had helped to turn the tide in the Indian Mutiny. To-day the land was as quiet as in the beginning, and mowers were busy in the hay. A second holiday took me to my Tweedside hills. There, far up in the glens, I found a shepherd’s wife who had four sons serving. Jock, she told me cheerfully, was in France with the Royal Scots; Jamie was in “a bit ca’d Sammythrace”; Tam was somewhere on the Arctic shore and “sair troubled wi’ his teeth”; and Davie was outside the walls of Jerusalem. Her kind old eyes were infinitely comforting. I felt that Jock and Jamie and Tam and Davie would return and would take up their shepherd’s trade as dutifully as their father. Samothrace and Murmansk and Palestine would be absorbed, as Otterburn and Flodden had been, into the ageless world of pastoral.
It was our freedom from melodrama, our national gift of meiosis, our steady nerves which convinced me that we could build up the world anew and embody in it the best of the old. And something more — our power of domesticating the strange and the terrible and making portents homely. A friend, visiting wounded soldiers back from Mesopotamia, asked one man where he got his wound. “It was twa miles,” he replied, “on the Rothiemurchus side o’ Baghdad.” His native parish under the knees of the Cairngorms was the point from which he adjusted himself in a fantastic world, and the city of the Caliphs was only an adjunct. Such a race could never be rootless or homeless. No experience can be too strange and no task too formidable if a man can link it up with what he knows and loves.
II
There was little solitude for me during those years. I seemed to live among crowds both in France and in London, and, though I missed the intimate comradeship of regimental service, I rubbed shoulders with a great variety of human beings. I added to my already extensive military acquaintance, and in London I had to concern myself with every variety of social and political groups, while one side of my duties brought me into touch with the queer subterranean world of the Secret Service. No man had ever more loyal and competent colleagues, men like Lord Edward Gleichen, Charles Masterman, Geoffrey Butler, Reginald Farrer, Ernest Hodder-Williams, Henry Newbolt — to name only those who are dead...I was occasionally summoned to the War Cabinet and renewed old friendships with Milner and Carson. I met every foreigner of importance who came to London. I saw something of the veiled prophets who are behind the scenes in a crisis — Colonel House, and Lord Esher, and especially Northcliffe. Northcliffe I had known for many years, and our friendship had no breaches in it since we were wholly independent of each other. At Christmas 1916 he paid a visit to G.H.Q. and for a week, on Haig’s instructions, H took him for an elaborate tour of the British Front. He talked much during those long cold journeys, brilliantly, persuasively, sometimes almost with inspiration. Had he had a more normal education and discipline he might have been a great man, for when unswayed by vanity he had sound judgment and a penetrating insight...I saw at close quarters the intricate mechanism which directed the War at home, one of the strangest mixtures of amateur and professional, talent and charlatanry, the patriot and the arriviste which history has known, with behind it the dynamic figure of the Prime Minister, generating heat and somehow turning it into power. Of Mr. Lloyd George I have written elsewhere; proximus ardebat Ucalegon; he was the flame at which all warmed, and many scorched, their hands.
I would pay tribute to one of the most brilliant, misunderstood, and tragically fated men of our time. Charles Masterman began by being overestimated, or rather estimated on the wrong lines, and he ended by being most unjustly decried. He came into Parlia
ment at the election of 1906 in the van of the triumphant Liberals, a young Moses who was to lead the people to a new way of life. He had the idealist’s ardour and a remarkable oratorical gift, and his sensitiveness to suffering was not mere rhetoric but a profound emotion. Then came his apprenticeship to the ordinary tasks of administration, and wholly different talents were revealed. Older members of his party spoke of him as having a heart of gold and a head full of feathers. It was a complete misunderstanding; much, but not all, of his idealism disappeared in the rut of office and was replaced by a mild cynicism, but he developed notable administrative gifts, and did invaluable work for the Government in piloting some of their most controversial measures through the House. When we worked together during the War I found his judgment shrewd and bold and his mastery of detail impeccable. But I would stress above all things his loyalty. In his parliamentary career he was more faithful to his colleagues than they were to him. In his fidelity to principles and persons he put to shame the brittle loyalties of party.
I have some queer macabre recollections of those years — of meetings with odd people in odd places, of fantastic duties which a romancer would have rejected as beyond probability. I remember a dinner at my house in the spring of 1916, when I happened to be on leave, and a delegation from the Russian Duma was visiting England. I have forgotten some of the guests, but Arthur Balfour was present, and Maurice Baring, and Milyukov, the leader of the Cadets, and Protopopov. The last was a sick man and slept so badly in his hotel that I invited him to stay with me. He had great personal charm, but I think that even then he was a little mad. He professed to have learned some English poetry from his nurse, and as examples he repeated with tremendous gusto various nursery rhymes like “A Frog he would a-wooing go.” A few months later he became the henchman of the Empress and Rasputin, and the proximate cause of the Russian Revolution, and in a year the Bolsheviks had him shot in prison.
I have said that my academic interest in the art and science of war declined sadly during the campaign. What I wanted was something like Uncle Toby’s bowling-green, where he and Corporal Trim, guided by the daily news- sheet, could study at leisure Marlborough’s doings in Flanders. A very different affair was this tragic business of armies clinched in a dull grapple. But I never lost my interest in the human side. Mr. Gladstone used to say that the politician was of all types the most difficult to understand; but the politician is child’s play compared to the regular soldier. For the military profession gives its members a new artificial personality, so that only at rare intervals does the real man emerge from the ritualism of long tradition.
Of the French commanders I had only a surface knowledge. I met most of them, and, like everybody else, was impressed by Foch’s flaming spirit, and Petain’s calm mastery of his craft, and the paladin-like dignity of Gouraud. At Chantilly, too, I saw some of the younger staff officers and admired their professional competence. Many of the senior British commanders I had known from South African days. Then Lord Kitchener had been the colossus that shadowed all our paths. I was fortunate enough in my infrequent dealings with him to discover early how little he liked the colossus attitude. He was a shy man who did not mix easily with his fellows, and this shyness, combined with his formidable presence and immense reputation, used to scare those who entered his company. But nothing annoyed him more than to have people gibber before him. He liked those who stood up squarely in his presence, and the staff officers to whom he was most attached used to make him the subject of outrageous practical jokes. The last years of his life, I fear, were not the happiest. He was a man who saw the long distance more clearly than the foreground, and his work lay with the foreground. He found himself in company which was uncongenial because unfamiliar, and whose language he did not talk, for politics meant to him about as much as the Quantum theory. His friends were beginning to dread that a great career might close in an anti-climax, until that June night when the Orkney seas put an end to such forebodings.
Two others whom I had long known were Sir John French and Sir Henry Wilson. The first was the best type of the old British regular, kindly, dutiful, sagacious, winning readily the confidence and love of his men. When I used to meet him with Haldane he seemed to be not only highly trained but notably broad-minded and free from pedantry, and to have something of Wellington’s strong practical intelligence. But in supreme command he appeared to age and lose something of his vigour and perspective. It looked as if he felt his task too big and too novel for him, and, being puzzled, he relapsed too easily upon ancient conventions. Of Henry Wilson the opposite was true. The Ulster difficulties had brought us together, and I came under the charm of his swift and audacious mind. As the only British senior officer who was in close touch at the start with the French General Staff, he was a most valuable trait d’union; but this association made him adopt too readily the French cult of the offensive, and he was a vehement advocate of French ideas, even when their authors had begun to doubt them. There was something loose in his habits of thought, and his imagination made no proper contact with realities. I remember how at St. Omer in the summer of 1915 he used to prophesy. I wrote his prophecies down in a little book and most were wildly wrong. The whole man lacked discipline, both intellectual and moral. Sometimes he was dangerous, for he was very vain; he had a gift, too, of making a situation more clear than God intended it to be, and therefore he had an undue influence upon civilian minds at home. More often he was simply futile, a brilliant child bombinating in the void. But if his defects were obvious so were his qualities, his courage, his humour, his unflagging gusto. He used to tell how he once overheard some Frenchmen discussing his appearance and trying to find the mot juste. “Ce monsieur,” said one at last, “a une physionomie à part.” The whole man was à part. I never met anyone in the least like him, and that long, lean, whimsical face, like a good-natured pike, will not soon be forgotten by his friends.
The soldiers whom I have known best in my life were Julian Byng and Douglas Haig. One evening in the year 1902 I found myself sitting on my haversack at a derelict station in the South African veld wondering where I should find a meal and a bed. A cloud of dust appeared on the horizon, and presently a mounted column arrived with Byng in command. He gave me supper, and from that hour dated a close friendship. His nature was compounded of a child-like delight in simple things, a resolute and clear-sighted sagacity, infinite kindliness and a profound religion. He had that best sort of humour which sees and rejoices in the homely whimsicalities of life. In the War he was a centre of legend, and most of the stories about him have the merit of being true. The most familiar tells how during the German advance in March 1918, when he was in command of the Third Army, he was sitting in his headquarters at Albert and was visited by a staff officer from G.H.Q. Every five minutes a telephone message was handed to him, with news of the retreat of one of his divisions. Julian studied the messages, and then, laying his hand on the pile, turned to the staff officer. “Did you ever hear,” he asked, “of an admiral of my name?” Another belongs to the early days of the campaign when he commanded a cavalry division in the neighbourhood of Ypres. One evening, accompanied by a young A.D.C., he went for a walk in an unsalubrious bit of ground somewhere near Klein Zillebeke. Apparently in deep thought, he strolled unconcernedly among the craters, while shells fell unpleasantly close, and the A.D.C. became nervous for the safety of his charge and himself. “But I must not say a word,” he thought. “He is working out some tremendous scheme.” At last they reached a sunken road, and Julian beckoned the A.D.C. to him. “What do you think?” he asked. “Wouldn’t the partridges come over here nicely?”
There can have been few commanders who were more rapturously adored by their men, and it was because of his rich, understanding humanity, what in Scotland is called “innerliness,” and not because of any genial slackness, for he kept a tight rein on discipline. To whatever he commanded he gave his own “tone,” whether a cavalry division, or the Canadian Corps, or the Third Army, or the Metropolita
n Police. Like Sir Walter Scott, he talked to every man as if he were a blood relation. As Governor-General of Canada he met again the men who had served under him, and there is a Byng legend in the Dominion to-day which will always be part of its tradition. The tall figure in very old clothes, with a short pipe in his mouth, sitting on a gate talking to a prairie farmer, is a picture which Canada will long cherish. He had the key which instantaneously unlocks men’s hearts.
Haig was a different and a far more complex being. He was a member of my own Oxford college, and he was descended from one of the most famous of Border families; so he and I had a ready-made basis for friendship. Once in South Africa I carried despatches to him, and, oversleeping myself, was decanted at Colesberg platform on a bitter winter morning indecently clad in pyjamas and a British-warm. He received my apologies with the remark that Brasenose had never been a dressy college! I was for a time attached to G.H.Q. and saw a good deal of him there, and after the War, when he was settled at Bemersyde, I had ample opportunity for the study of a mind and character which no neat formula could assess. He became so much the subject of controversy that those who loved him, as I did, were inclined to a mere defiant eulogy. But eulogy was the last thing that so rare a personality sought or desired.
He was first and foremost a highly competent professional soldier. Now a soldier’s professionalism differs from that of other crafts. He acquires a body of knowledge which may be varied and enlarged by new conditions, such as new weapons and new modes of transport, but which in essence is a closed technique. The reason is that, unlike art, law and medicine, there has in the past been little in the way of a philosophy of first principles behind it to stimulate evolution; a powerful mind might work brilliantly inside its limits with little impulse to alter the fundamentals. Change and expansion were consequently in the nature of a revolution, and were brought about either by a great genius, or — slowly and grudgingly — by some cataclysmic pressure of facts. Hence the more competent and better trained a soldier was, the more averse he would be to alter his traditional creed till its failure had been proven with utter finality.
