NOW IT CAN BE TOLD
PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME
V
On the 1st of July, 1916, began those prodigious battles which only
lulled down at times during two and a half years more, when our British
armies fought with desperate sacrificial valor beyond all previous reckoning;
when the flower of our youth was cast into that furnace month after
month, recklessly, with prodigal, spendthrift haste; when those boys
were mown down in swaths by machine-guns, blown to bits by shell-fire,
gassed in thousands, until all that country became a graveyard; when
they went forward to new assaults or fell back in rearguard actions
with a certain knowledge that they had in their first attack no more
than one chance in five of escape, next time one chance in four, then
one chance in three, one chance in two, and after that no chance at
all, on the line of averages, as worked out by their experience of luck.
More boys came out to take their places, and more, and more, conscripts
following volunteers, younger brothers following elder brothers. Never
did they revolt from the orders that came to them. Never a battalion
broke into mutiny against inevitable martyrdom. They were obedient to
the command above them. Their discipline did not break. However profound
was the despair of the individual -- and it was, I know, deep as the
wells of human tragedy in many hearts -- the mass moved as it was directed,
backward or forward, this way and that, from one shambles to another,
in mud and in blood, with the same massed valor as that which uplifted
them before that first day of July with an intensified pride in the
fame of their divisions, with a more eager desire for public knowledge
of their deeds, with a loathing of war's misery, with a sense of its
supreme folly, yet with a refusal in their souls to acknowledge defeat
or to stop this side of victory. In each battle there were officers
and men who risked death deliberately, and in a kind of ecstasy did
acts of superhuman courage; and because of the number of these feats
the record of them is monotonous, dull, familiar. The mass followed
their lead, and even poor coward-hearts, of whom there were many, as
in all armies, had courage enough, as a rule, to get as far as the center
of the fury before their knees gave way or they dropped dead.
Each wave of boyhood that came out from England brought a new mass
of physical and spiritual valor as great as that which was spent, and
in the end it was an irresistible tide which broke down the last barriers
and swept through in a rush to victory--to victory which we gained at
the cost of nearly a million dead, and a high sum of living agony, and
all our wealth, and a spiritual bankruptcy worse than material loss,
so that now England is for a time sick to death and drained of her old
pride and power.