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The Spike or Victoria University College Review September 1924

Disillusion

Disillusion

It is quite obvious that C. E. Montague is with us for all time. I "attained to" his "Disenchantment" at long last, the other day, and found it what it is reputed to be—the classic English effort of the war. The failure of our literary men to meet the war as it should have been met is now traditional. Instead of grasping their opportunity, they wrought studies in hysteria and melodrama. And in that they simply reflected the public feeling of the time. A less Sensitive generation may shudder at Rose Macaulay's "Non-Combatants" or Wilfrid Ewart's "Way of Revelation," yet both are in a sense current history and mirror the national mind. This was the sort of thing which we endured, plus the balderdash of Gilbert Frankau or the jangling nerves of Gilbert Cannon.

Undoubtedly our novelists entered upon the war with as much idealism as the New Army recruits. You may see that by the ending of Arnold Bennett's "Roll Call," a novel, which, I suspect, must have been seeking a decent finish when the war provided it. But. before long Bennett had progressed to the point of deep sentiment and tawdry "naughtiness" of "The Pretty Lady." And so it went on. To be philosophical, in the war years was to be treasonable, and the best of war novels is Rose Macaulay's "Potterism," which was conceived after the Armistice. No one had the world cataclysm in focus save only Sassoon, whose discontent, I suspect, was constitutional; but whose courage, undeniably, was great. No one, that is to say, save Montague, whose vision was clear and whose observation acute. And in "Disenchantment" he gives us what we have always wanted—a complete philosophy of the war.

From the time when the New Army answered the call, this book goes calmly and lucidly to the post-war years and the remedy, if there be one. We learn of the "handsome and boundless illusions of the first volunteers, of their eagerness to discharge what they considered to be an obligation of honour. Their self-reunuciation was extreme, their anxiety to get "over there" made them the keenest and most willing soldiers. And then came the beginning of disillusion, the "finding out" of the old army men, the realisation that their superior officers were not so wonderfully competent as they were pictured. Misgivings grew into suspicion, and with the transfer to France came confirmation.

The whole history of the war follows the intolerable tedium of trench life, the failure of the Church when its missionaries proved for the men "too fussily blood-thirsty," the disgust of the army with its politicians and its press, and the long autumn of the campaign. The very real respect which the men had for the German troops, their savage rage at the reports of deliberate outrages committed by the enemy, and finally the perishing of the last illusion:

"One leaf which had gone pretty yellow by now was the hope of perfect victory—swift, unsoured, unruinous, knightly. . . . Troops in the field become realists. Ours had seen their side visibly swelling for more than two years, until Jack had become a heavier weight than the giant, and yet could not finish him off. We knew that our allies . . . outnumbered the Germans and theirs. We knew we were quite as well armed. We had seen the Germans ad page 26 vancing under our fire and made no mistake about what they were worth. Our first vision of victory had gone the way of its frail sister dream of a perfect Allied comradeship. French soldiers sneered at British now, and British at French. Both had the same derisive note in their voices when they named the 'Brav' Belges.' Canadians and Australians had almost ceased to take the pains to break it to us gently that they were the 'storm troops,' the men who had to be sent for to do the tough jobs; that, out of all us sorry Home troops, only the Guards Division, two kilted divisions, and three English ones, could be said to know how to fight. 'The English let us down again;' 'The Tommies gave us a bad plank as usual'—these were the stirring things you would hear if you called upon an Australian division a few hours after a battle in which the lion had fought by the side of his whelps."

There is more, of course, much more. The war in which the Regular Army men triumphed, successfully ousting the new soldiers from any chance of a high command; the manner in which the staff, which had neglected to learn its job in peace, did not remedy the failure in war; these and other unpleasant things are told by Montague. The blunder of Loos, the butchery of the Somme, of Arras, Flanders and Cambrai, he relates, how we "had the enemy stiff at Arras," two full years before the war ended; how the troops waited for the order to go ahead and none came; and after two days the Germans stole back under cover of nightfall to trenches from which they had fled in disorder; and, finally, a splendid piece of writing, the description of the blow by the Allied armies after the failure of the German thrust at Paris in August, 1918, and of the ultimate success.

Yet in victory disillusion prevails. "We awoke from delight and remembered. Four years ago, three years ago, even two years ago, a lasting repose of beatitude might have come with that regaining of Paradise! Now! The control of our armies, jealously hugged for so long, and used, on the whole, to so little purpose, had passed from us, thrown up in a moment of failure, dissension and dread. While still outnumbered by the enemy we had not won; while on even terms with him we had not won; only under a foreign Commander-in-chief, and with America's inexhaustible numbers crowding behind to hold up her old arms, had our just cause begun to prevail. And now the marred triumph would leave us jaded and disillusioned, divided, half-bankrupt; sneerers at lofty endeavour, and yet not the men for the plodding of busy and orderly peace; bilious with faiths and enthusiasms gone sour on the stomach. That very night I was to hear the old Australian sneer again. The British corps on their left, at work in the twisty valley and knuckle-some banks of the Somme, had failed to get on quite as fast as they and the Canadian troops on their right. 'The Canadians were all right, of course, but the Tommies! Well, we might have known!'"