第37章 THE CONSCRIPT AND THE CRISIS(1)

Very few of us ever see the history of our own time happening.And Ithink the best service a modern journalist can do to society is to record as plainly as ever he can exactly what impression was produced on his mind by anything he has actually seen and heard on the outskirts of any modern problem or campaign.Though all he saw of a railway strike was a flat meadow in Essex in which a train was becalmed for an hour or two,he will probably throw more light on the strike by describing this which he has seen than by describing the steely kings of commerce and the bloody leaders of the mob whom he has never seen--nor any one else either.If he comes a day too late for the battle of Waterloo (as happened to a friend of my grandfather)he should still remember that a true account of the day after Waterloo would be a most valuable thing to have.Though he was on the wrong side of the door when Rizzio was being murdered,we should still like to have the wrong side described in the right way.

Upon this principle I,who know nothing of diplomacy or military arrangements,and have only held my breath like the rest of the world while France and Germany were bargaining,will tell quite truthfully of a small scene I saw,one of the thousand scenes that were,so to speak,the anterooms of that inmost chamber of debate.

In the course of a certain morning I came into one of the quiet squares of a small French town and found its cathedral.It was one of those gray and rainy days which rather suit the Gothic.The clouds were leaden,like the solid blue-gray lead of the spires and the jewelled windows;the sloping roofs and high-shouldered arches looked like cloaks drooping with damp;and the stiff gargoyles that stood out round the walls were scoured with old rains and new.I went into the round,deep porch with many doors and found two grubby children playing there out of the rain.Ialso found a notice of services,etc.,and among these I found the announcement that at 11.30(that is about half an hour later)there would be a special service for the Conscripts,that is to say,the draft of young men who were being taken from their homes in that little town and sent to serve in the French Army;sent (as it happened)at an awful moment,when the French Army was encamped at a parting of the ways.There were already a great many people there when I entered,not only of all kinds,but in all attitudes,kneeling,sitting,or standing about.And there was that general sense that strikes every man from a Protestant country,whether he dislikes the Catholic atmosphere or likes it;I mean,the general sense that the thing was "going on all the time";that it was not an occasion,but a perpetual process,as if it were a sort of mystical inn.

Several tricolours were hung quite near to the altar,and the young men,when they came in,filed up the church and sat right at the front.They were,of course,of every imaginable social grade;for the French conscription is really strict and universal.Some looked like young criminals,some like young priests,some like both.Some were so obviously prosperous and polished that a barrack-room must seem to them like hell;others (by the look of them)had hardly ever been in so decent a place.But it was not so much the mere class variety that most sharply caught an Englishman's eye.It was the presence of just those one or two kinds of men who would never have become soldiers in any other way.

There are many reasons for becoming a soldier.It may be a matter of hereditary luck or abject hunger or heroic virtue or fugitive vice;it may be an interest in the work or a lack of interest in any other work.

But there would always be two or three kinds of people who would never tend to soldiering;all those kinds of people were there.A lad with red hair,large ears,and very careful clothing,somehow conveyed across the church that he had always taken care of his health,not even from thinking about it,but simply because he was told,and that he was one of those who pass from childhood to manhood without any shock of being a man.

In the row in front of him there was a very slight and vivid little Jew,of the sort that is a tailor and a Socialist.By one of those accidents that make real life so unlike anything else,he was the one of the company who seemed especially devout.Behind these stiff or sensitive boys were ranged the ranks of their mothers and fathers,with knots and bunches of their little brothers and sisters.