i6 
LAND cS: WATER 
April 13, 19 1 6 
truly tlio (idiccrs tonk tlioni to lioail may be road in tlie 
stiuiis of tlio almost iiKivdiblt; drvotioii of their im-n. 
What is Koinj; to be the effort on the millions of civilians 
who have pone to school in an Army such as this ? 
Of one thing we can be quite s\ire. The men who 
have been tlirough this gnat freemasonry of arms will 
he very impatient of tiie old api)eals to class-prejudice 
which have so long distigured our politics. After the 
reulitie;. of war the sham-tights of politics will wear u 
singularly inept vesture, and in nothing will thev appear 
so inept as in their attachment to words and phrases. The 
men who will come home will have lived the life of action 
in which men are judged not by what they sa\' but by 
what tliey do. I doubt if any of them are likely to be 
hypnoti .'.>d by the old catchwordsof politics with th<' stupe- 
fying rhetoric of the platform. It may be also that they 
will be far less conscious of rights and far more alive to 
duties. They will bring a highly critical mind to bear 
upon these things. The clerk and the artisan who has 
been an N.C.O. or a subaltern, and the employer or pro- 
fessional man — there are many such— who has served as 
a private in the ranks will have learnt, the one to rule, 
the other to obey, and each will have discovered the 
peculiar secret of all Armies : that he who aspires to give 
commands nuist have learnt lirst how to execute them. 
Of all the lessons that the Army can teach that is the 
most enduring and the most valuable, and the one whicli 
the average linglishman — especially the Englishman 
who ha:, not been to a public school — needs most to learn. 
Another is the habit of turning your hand to anything 
. — on V (ififyn'itd a mcttrc la main a tout, anx chases Ifs 
plus basses annine aii\ f>liis elevees, as the French soldier 
put it-- without inquiring too closely whether it is the 
job you contracted to do or whether you are getting the 
pay you bargained for. The lirst thing a man in the 
Army finds — particularly the infantryman— is that his 
pay bears no appreciable relation to his work, that he 
may be called upon at any moment to do another man's 
job, that there's no such thing as piece-work rates and 
" overtime," and that it's a mere chance whether he 
can count on no more than four days in the trenches, 
four in support, and, no less than ten in billets 
after he has rung the changes on the one and the other. 
Also that there is no crime like that of " slacking," 
whether in a section or a whole battalion, and that 
liesitation here and slovenliness there only means that you 
are letting other fellows down. If a battalion gets a bad 
name for that kind of thing, other battalions will take 
care that they never hear the end of it ; 1 well remember 
the scorn with which my servant, a private in the Sutfolks, 
used to speak of a certain battalion who had left the 
trenches taken over by his regiment in such an untidy state 
that they had to do a kind of spring-cleaning after them. 
Whati'v.r clsf a man learns or does not learn in the 
The 
Spirit 
By L. B. 
FOR centuries they have been watching the calm 
white face of a silent god, they have gazed at 
the patient, mute eyes of a suffering i)eople. 
They have cursed it and they have taught it ; 
thc\- have feared it, and they have bullied it ; they 
tried to wring from it and master the \mknown, they 
tried to bring it to the level of their own thinking, 
to conquer it, to transform it and to destroy it. It 
remained. Then it became a nightmare to them. Some- 
times (Germans describe it as the spirit of the fiussian 
soil, as the spirit of the Russian people. The " spirit of 
a people." what is it ? Merely a phrase, a subterfuge of 
those who in self-defence try to enclose life into abstract 
words and meaningless descriptions, so that they may 
master it, measure it and juggle with it at pleasure. 
Cio into the endless sad plains of Russia, among 
its infinitely patient peasant folk. What can you (ier- 
mans do with them ? For you always wish to do some- 
thing. You and vour work and your thoughts will pas^ 
over Russia as the wind that straggles across -the plains. 
Even in that wind there is more than in your wisdom ; 
it is part of infmite nature. It has wandered across the 
Steppes, it has seen the rising sun, the cowfields have 
.\rmy. he at least learns io regard liis work as exacting 
as high a standard as his sport. He learns to " play the 
game." Is there any other national institution that 
teaches the ICnglishman that ? 
Thesi> men are going through a great school of patriotism 
and it would be atfi'ctation to deny that nine out of ten 
ICnglishmen badly needed it : TIk; luiglishman is a 
born individualist — and never so much so, paradoxical 
though it may sound, as when he calls himself a Socialist ; 
before the war he had never learnt to subordinate his 
own interests to those of the State. He was always 
a man with a grie\ance and as such an easy prey for 
exploitation by jxiliticians whose trade seems to consist 
either in discovering grievances or in inventing them. 
Hence the conscientious objector — he is a kind of survival 
of our imregenerate days aiid is no doubt genuinely 
surprised to lind that he is no longer popular. There was 
a time when he wt)uld have had all his own way in the 
parks and on the plinth of the Nelson Column, but he has 
come to cut rather a sorry figure by the side of that 
evangelist of a new gospel — the man home on leave. 
The more " leave " the authorities can hnd it possible 
to give the men at the F'ront the better ; they will 
leaven the whole nation. I well remember how during 
the old bad days some months ago when certain miners 
were crying " down tools " and, in almost so many words, 
" to hell " with the Navy and its coal, a Staff Officer at 
(1. H. 0. told me that a certain regiment raised in the 
very district affected had begged to be allowed to be sent 
home for a few days to deal with the malignants. " Yes, 
and if 1 had my way," added my friend, " I'd let them 
go and I'd make John " (he mentioned a certain 
Labour M.P., who has played the game magnificently at 
home) " a colonel and put him at the head of them." 
F'ortunately nothing so drastic is now necessary ; tlte 
men at home in the workshops and the mines are beginning 
to reflect something of the devotion of the men at the 
front. All this, however, has taken us a prodigious time 
to learn and we have paid an enormous j)rice ff)r it. 
The people at home have still much to learn ; they have 
yet to learn that the nation's extremity is not the spend- 
thrift's and the striker's opportunity. I have been in 
I'rance some seven or eight months and my official duties 
took me everywhere north of a line drawn from Rouen 
to Rheims. During the whole of that time 1 never once 
saw a drunken person, whether man or woman, soldier 
or civilian. I saw much thrift, no frivolity, and little 
pleasure, an immense, almost religious, concentration of 
purpose, and everyone living on the very margin of 
subsistence. When I returned to England 1 saw — I 
need not say what I saw ; everyone has seen it. What 
is going to save us ? There is only one thing that can 
and will save the British nation and teach it a new way 
of life — it is the British Army. 
of Russia 
Namier 
bowed to it, and it has talked to the trees in the forests, 
and it goes on towards an endless, unknown future ; just 
like the Russian people. Men have listened to its songs, 
to the songs which it sings to lonely men in the wide, open 
fields, and it has listened to the mute sighs of ]>atient, 
suffering men, who work silently, waiting for the day 
'whose coming none can tell. But what are your thoughts, 
what are those artiticial, stillborn creatures which you 
call ideas ? " Children of the Spirit ? " What is the 
spirit which is not man, which neither suffers nor rejoices 
but merely prides itself on an unreal oxistence ? Your 
ideas will pasi away unheeded. 
You call the liastern man aggressive because he is 
not willing to fight you on your own level. Why should 
he light against you ? You are the " dumb ones,"* 
the strangers, wlio com? an» go. The Russian p?asant 
can put up with much that is unpleasant, and Russia has 
put up with plenty of (iermms. Why have you so 
suddenly grown fierce ? What do you fear, you clever 
efficient, victorious people ? You have been insulted, 
Russian life itself is an insult to you. You trie d to 
•.";crmani ;irc railed in Slav lansiiayca by a woril wliicli sinnilics 
the dumb m.an " ; ' Slavs " are the " worded ones." 
