by John Buchan
This was the attitude of all the principal commanders, British, French and German, at the beginning of the War. The campaign produced in the high command no military genius of the first order, no Napoleon, Marlborough or Lee, scarcely even a Wellington, a Stonewall Jackson or a Sherman. Its type was Grant. Hence changes of method had to come by the sheer pressure of events after much tragic trial and error. Haig was as slow to learn as any of his colleagues, and he made grave mistakes. But he did learn. Take one point, the use of cavalry; having once opened his mind, he showed himself notably receptive and prescient. Most of the tactics of the fmal advance to victory were his, and in the last great movement he leaned upon Foch no more than Foch leaned upon him. It is fair to say, I think, that his mind developed fast as soon as circumstances permitted it to develop at all.
But in a soldier character is at least as vital as intellect, and there can be no question about the quality of his character. He had none of the lesser graces which make a general popular with troops, and it took four years for his armies to feel his personality. To his friends that personality in war was a revelation. They had known him as an able, ambitious and industrious soldier, handsome and fashionable, a good sportsman, the type certain to succeed under normal conditions — in a word, a conventional type. But in supreme command a new man appeared. For one thing he spoke with a broader accent — of the Borders, oddly enough, instead of his native Fife. The religion of his childhood was recaptured, and a spirit naturally kindly and genial was braced by a kind of Covenanting fervour to an austere discipline and a constant sense of the divine fore-ordering of life. He had found deep wells from which to draw comfort. The self was obliterated, for I do not think that he ever thought of his own reputation. Unrhetorically, almost unconsciously, his country and what he held to be God’s purpose became for him the transcendent realities.
This character, thus toughened and elevated, was highly tried. He had to feel his way in his task and was often conscious of blunders, more acutely conscious, I think, than most of his critics. He had difficulties with his allies, with his colleagues, with the home Government, though, let it be said, he had far less to complain of on the latter score than most soldiers of a democracy — Wellington in the Peninsula, for example, or Lee. He had repeated bitter disappointments. He had the wolf by the ears, and at first he clung to traditional methods, when a smaller man might have tried fantastic experiments which would have assuredly spelt disaster. He did not revise his plans until the old ones had been fully tested, and a new one had emerged of which his reason could approve. Under him we incurred heavy losses, but I believe that these losses would have been greater had he been the brilliant empiric like Nivelle or Henry Wilson. When the last great enemy attack came he took the main shock with a quiet resolution; when the moment arrived for the advance he never fumbled. He broke through the Hindenburg line in spite of the doubts of the British Cabinet, because he believed that only thus could the War be ended in time to save civilisation. He made the decision alone — one of the finest proofs of moral courage in the history of war. Haig cannot enter the small circle of the greater captains, but it may be argued that in the special circumstances of the campaign his special qualities were the ones most needed — patience, sobriety, balance of temper, unshakable fortitude. His best epitaph is the sentence which Pope wrote of Harley: “He was a steady man and a great firmness of soul.”
There were no strong colours in his nature, but he diffused a gentle compelling radiance. As I have said, he was incapable of rhetoric, and his addresses to his troops, as in April 1918, were of a hodden-grey simplicity. His interests were limited. When eminent and cultivated guests came on a visit to G.H.Q., to prevent the Commander-in-Chief sitting tongue-tied, a kind of conversational menu had to be arranged. For example, Walter Pater, who had been his tutor, had once said something to him about style which he remembered, and it was desirable to lead the talk up to that. After the War he led the pleasant life of a Border country gentleman in the home of his ancestors, and a stranger, meeting him in the hunting-field or at a covert side, could never have guessed the storms he had ridden. His end came too soon — but happily, for there was no decline in his mental powers. On the very morning when I read of his death I. received from him a copy of his “appreciation” of the War, now in the British Museum, to which he had added new and illuminating passages. In peace his main interest was in the future of the men who had fought under him, and he refused all rewards until he had convinced himself that they were not forgotten. “He will go to Heaven for that, said Corporal Trim.”
III
The Armistice found me at the end of my tether and I straightway collapsed into bed. I was not fit to stand for Parliament at the ensuing election, nor did I want to, for the pre-War party labels seemed to me meaningless, so I withdrew from my candidature and induced my supporters to vote for my former opponent. It was not until the early spring of 1919 that I could crawl out of cover and survey the post-War scene.
To my surprise I found that I had recovered something of the exhilaration of youth. I was forty-three, but I seemed to have “found again my twentieth year.” My reason indeed warned me that there was little cause for optimism. The War, the vastest disordering since the breakdown of the Pax Romana, must be followed by decades of suffering and penury. Many familiar things had gone, and many more would go. Britain had lost for good her old security in the world, and, like other peoples, she would have to struggle to preserve stability at home. I hoped for something from the League of Nations, but with diffidence, for the mechanism seemed to me futile without the appropriate spirit, and I did not find that spirit in the world. But I had a new confidence in human nature, in the plain man who for four years had carried the globe on his shoulders, with no gift of expression, unperplexed by philosophies, but infinitely loyal, enduring and unconquerable. I believed that, though it would be a slow business, he might be trusted somehow to remake the world, for he was eternally, in Shelley’s words, “at enmity with nothingness and dissolution.”
As the weeks passed I realised that that was happening which Canning noted after the Napoleonic wars; “the spires and turrets of ancient establishments began to reappear above the subsiding wave.” There were times when one had the impression, soon alas! dispelled by reflection, that nothing had been lost except one’s friends. The world had not become the drab wilderness that I had feared, and I felt again Bruno’s visibilium aeternus, immensus et innumerabilis affectus.
I shall never forget my first visit to the country, to Warwickshire and Oxfordshire, in April 1919. In the early years of the War natural beauty had been to me a forbidden fruit. I was in the Salient during the second battle of Ypres, and the scent of hawthorn and lilac battling with the stink of poison-gas, and bird-song in the coverts heard in the pauses of the great guns, seemed to underline grimly the indifference of nature to human ills. I remember a June morning, too, in the Chilterns, the beauty of which seemed to me only a savage irony. Experiences in France, which at another time would have entranced me — flaming Picardy sunsets, fresh windy dawns, little towns dumb with snow under the winter moon — were things to which I had no title. I acquired a saner temper when my duties brought me back to England, but I still felt a brittleness in life and a profound insecurity, a sense that the treasures of the past and the joys of the natural world had become “too dear for my possessing.” I walked warily, as if the ground under me were mined. I used to admire the detachment of Edward Grey, who would have observed the ways of wild duck though the skies were falling; indeed we sometimes did it together in St. James’s Park when the outlook was black as Erebus. But on that April journey I recovered the past, and with it hope for the future. The War after all was only what Henry James called it, a “great interruption.” I was almost back in Keats’s Chamber of Maiden Thought. I felt like a man recovering from a fever, or like the mediaeval poet who, going into the fields after his frozen winter’s vigil, abased himself before the miracle of spring.
“Tears
Are in his eyes, and in his ears
The murmur of a thousand years.”
CHAPTER VIII — AN IVORY TOWER AND ITS PROSPECT
I
The War left me with an intense craving for a country life. It was partly that I wanted quiet after turmoil, the instinct that in the Middle Ages took men into monasteries. But it was also a new-found delight in the rhythm of nature, and in small homely things after so many alien immensities. In all times of public strife there has been this longing for rural peace; Chaucer had it, and Dunbar, and Izaak Walton:
“Far from acquaintance kest thee
Where country may digest thee...
Thank God that so hath blest thee,
And sit down, Robin, and rest thee.”
So I sold my house in London and purchased the little manor house of Elsfield, four miles from the city of Oxford.
The house and the countryside were rich in history, and I had become most historically minded. My old interest in philosophy was ebbing. I had had enough for the moment of theories and speculations, and I had certainly had enough of changes. When the future is uncertain the mind turns naturally to the certainties of the past, and finds comfort in what is beyond the peril of change. History might be only what Napoleon called it, “agreed fiction,” but at any rate it was agreed, and had the dignity of repose. I wanted the sense of continuity, the assurance that our contemporary blunders were endemic in human nature, that our new fads were very ancient heresies, that beloved things which were threatened had rocked not less heavily in the past.
In common with most of my countrymen I felt that for the time I had done with civic duty, and might reasonably return to my own affairs. That feeling, I think, explains the lack of public servants to-day, even more than the “lost generation.” No doubt a great number of able young men died, but of those who survived only a small proportion took to public life; the majority turned resolutely to private business and stayed there. They refused to bury themselves in what T. E. Lawrence used to describe as the “shallow grave of public duty.”
The intellectual atmosphere of the immediate post-War period was enough to drive the ordinary man into privacy. While plain folk everywhere set themselves sturdily to rebuild their world, the interpreting class, which Coleridge called the “clerisy,” the people who should have influenced opinion, ran round their cages in vigorous pursuit of their tails. If they were futile they were also arrogant, and it was an odd kind of arrogance, for they had no creed to preach. The same type before the War had prostrated themselves in gaping admiration of the advance of physical science and the improvements in the material apparatus of life. There was little of that left. The War had shown that our mastery over physical forces might end in a nightmare, that mankind was becoming like an overgrown child armed with deadly weapons, a child with immense limbs and a tiny head. But this belated enlightenment seemed to drain their vitality. Just as many of the boys then leaving school, who had escaped war service, suffered from a kind of accidie and were inclined to look for “soft options” in life, so the interpreting class plumed themselves wearily on being hollow men living in a waste land. “A man may dwell so long upon a thought,” Halifax wrote, “that it may take him prisoner”; and they had made a picture of the world and themselves from which they could not escape. They had no philosophy, if Plato’s definition in the Theaetetus be right—”the mood of the philosopher is wonder; there is no other source of philosophy than this” — for wonder involves some vigour of spirit. They would admit no absolute values, being by profession atomisers, engaged in reducing the laborious structure of civilised life to a whirling nebula.
It was a difficult time for those who called themselves intellectuals. They found themselves living among the fears and uncertainties of the Middle Ages, without the support of the mediaeval faith. The belief in the perfectibility of man, the omnipotence of reason, and the certainty of progress, which began with the French Encyclopaedists and flourished among the brisk dogmatists of the nineteenth century, had more or less ended with the War. It was very clear that reason could be enchained, that human nature was showing no desire to be perfected, and that the pillars of civilisation were cracking and tilting. The inerrancy of science, too, which had sustained the Victorians, was proving a broken reed, for science was going back upon itself, cultivating doubts and substituting probabilities for certainties. The world of sense and time had become distressingly insecure, and they had no other world.
One section of this class, very vocal in speech and writing, cherished modernity as its peculiar grace, regarding the word as descriptive of quality, and not merely as denoting a stage in time. These people, who were usually young, had few of the genial characteristics of youth, and their extravagances were not Plato’s agreeable impertinences of juniors to seniors. They were a haunted race, who seemed to labour under perpetual fear. Like a tenth-century monk who expected the world soon to end, they had ruled out of their lives many normal human interests on the ground that the times were too precarious for trifling. They seemed to be eager to get rid of personal responsibility, and therefore in politics — and in religion if they had any — were inclined to extremes, and readily surrendered their souls to an ancient church or a new prophet, an International or a dictator. They were owlishly in earnest and wholly humourless; and, lacking moral and intellectual balance, they were prone to violent changes. It was the old story of the debauchee turned flagellant, and a man who had made a name by raking in the garbage heaps would suddenly become a precisian in manners and morals. They had a limitless contempt for whatever did not conform to their creed of the moment and expressed it loudly, but their voices would suddenly crack, and what began as a sneer would end as a sob.
Another section gave their minds to historical portraiture — which might be more accurately described as historical fiction, for they were without the scholar’s discipline and conscience. Lytton Strachey, their fugleman, was an accomplished man of letters, but in his followers his faults became monstrous and his virtues disappeared. With slender talents, callow and arrogant, their “facetious and rejoicing ignorance” made a strange spectacle of the past. They were much concerned with sex, and found sexual interest in unusual places, dwelling upon it with a sly titter. They were sansculottes who sought to deflate majestic reputations, and reduce the great to a drab level of mediocrity, like the Jacobins who would have destroyed Chartres Cathedral because it dominated offensively their foolish little city.
There was also a curious deterioration in literary manners — it had nothing to do with morals. Frankness in literature is an admirable thing if, as at various times in our history, it keeps step with social habit; but when it strives to advance beyond it, it becomes a disagreeable pose. Among civilised people after the War the ordinary conventions held, but in literature, especially in fiction, a dull farmyard candour became fashionable, an insistence upon the functions of the body which had rarely artistic value.
“No crab more active in the dirty dance,
Downward to climb, and backward to advance.”
These dull salacities had their comic as well as their offensive side, for novelists, who had been noted for their virginal decorum, would now interpolate little bits of irrelevant coarseness to show that Master Slender was also a man of mettle.
It all spelled a revolt against humanism, a return to the sourness of puritanism without its discipline and majesty. The old humanism was a revulsion from mediaeval doctrine of original sin and salvation by divine grace. It placed the centre of gravity in man and believed in progress and the perfectibility of the world. Against such a view, which was essentially un-Christian, there were bound to be many rebels, and its opponents, the great Puritans like Cromwell, found refuge in abasement before God. The new rebels did not greatly admire humanity, seeing chiefly its animal grossness, they did not believe in progress, and they had no high-pitched dreams of a coming golden age. Therefore they were rootless and unhappy, for they had not C
romwell’s refuge. But gradually one seemed to discern the beginnings of a return to religion. There was not that spiritual awakening after the War which some had foreseen, but as the years passed there was a steady drift towards some form of faith. A proof was the number of distinguished converts to the Catholic Church; at the other end of the scale the Calvinism of Karl Barth; the revival of Thomism; the embittered puritanism of certain men of letters; and a variety of new evangels, some of them foolish enough, but all involving a stumbling quest for God. The glib agnostic had gone out of fashion.
In the prevalent intellectual anarchy there was also a craving for order and law. It was inevitable that this purpose would in certain circles be crudely interpreted, and order identified with uniformity on the communist pattern. The dream of a classless society was never very potent in Britain, for our people had Shakespeare’s belief in the virtue of a rich heterogeneity.
“Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows.”
