Disenchantment quotes

Now that most of our men in the prime of life have been in the army we seem to be in for a goodly literature of disappointment.

All the ungifted young people came back from the war to tell us that they were “fed up.” That was their ailment, in outline.

The gifted ones are now coming down to detail.

they thus achieve the same good end and put it beyond any doubt that they don’t think all is well with the world.

The higher the wall or the horse from which you have tumbled, the larger, under Nature’s iron law, are your bruises and consequent crossness likely to be.

Before we try shaking or cuffing the disenraptured young Solomons in our magazines and our pits it would be humane to reflect that some five millions of these, in their turns, have fallen off an extremely high horse.

Immersed in that Dantean repose of utter obedience the men slept like babies, ate like hunters, and rediscovered the joy of infancy in getting some rather elementary bodily movement to come right.

They saw everything that God had made, and behold! it was very good. That was the vision.

The mental peace, the physical joy, the divinely simplified sense of having one clear aim, the remoteness from all the rest of the world, all favoured a tropical growth of illusion. A man, says Tennyson, “imputes himself.”

“What did you do, Filthy?” somebody asked (we called Looker “Filthy” with friendly jocoseness).

“I ’opped it,” the good fellow said, and the sane anticlimax of real life seemed twice as good as the climax that any Hugo or Verne could have put to the yarn.

Another described the great life he had lived as an old racing “hen,” or minor sutler of the sport of kings. Hard work, of course.

But they were, and they imagined that all their betters were too.

That was the paradise that the bottom fell out of.

… parent’s all-round perfection as some sort of sample and proof of a creditable government of the world, must have a good deal of mental rearrangement to do the first time the parent comes home full of liquor and sells the furniture to get some more.

Perhaps, in another company or another battalion, some private of relative wealth has felt, in the strength of his youth and the heat of his zeal, that he wants more to do.

He longs to get on with the job. So he guilelessly goes to his own sergeant-major and asks him if there is a chance of getting some lessons in bayonet-fighting anywhere in the town. The sergeant-major sizes him up with a stare.

On this tragic climax the lecture had ended, the men had streamed out, some silent, bewildered, some dropping words of amazement.

“Lecture! W’y, it’s the man’s pers’nal ’istory!”

And then the C.O.

… all of that has been lost, as utterly lost as the old comradeship of master and journeyman worker is lost in a mill where half the thousand hands may never have seen the employer who sits in a faraway office, perhaps in a faraway town.

Two million men can never be a happy few; nor yet a band of brothers⁠—you have to know a brother first.

A man could serve six months in France and never see the general commanding his division. He could be there for four years and not know what a corps or an army commander looked like. How can you help it?

… combat, its offensively manifest facilities for getting a good shave, its fertility in gratuitous advice of an imperfectly practical kind, and its occasional lapses from grace in speaking of the men, the beloved men, the objects of every good combatant officer’s jealous and wrathful affection.

Or, again, you might say that a Staff is a trouser-button, which there are few to praise while it goes on with its work, and very few to abstain from cursing when it comes off.

When a Staff’s work is done well the front line only feels as if Nature were marching, without actual molestation, along some beneficent course of her own.

Constantly jammed up against one another, every man in each of these isolated knots of adventurers came to be seen by the rest for what he was worth, with the drastic clearness of open-eyed husbands and wives of long standing.

They had domesticated the Day of Judgment.

Many old valuations had to go by the board; some great home reputations wilted surprisingly; stones that the builders of public opinion on Salisbury Plain had confidently rejected found their way up to the heads of corners.

There was no hurry in their hands, No hurry in their feet.

Like smells that originate in the kitchen and work their way up by degrees to the best bedroom the new revelations of war ascended slowly from floor to floor of the hierarchy.

They did arrive in the end. The Canadians got, in the end, a rifle not too great and good for business.

… genial, benign, encouraging, only too ready to praise things that they would see to be easy if only they knew more about them and were not like middle-aged mothers watching their offspring at football—so a profane bombing sergeant describes them that night to his mess.

“Your Old Army’s all bloody born amatoors,” an Australian of ripe war experience remarked with some frankness in France.

His immediate occasion for generalizing so rashly was somebody’s slip in passing certain grenades as good for field use. Most of our hand and rifle grenades undoubtedly were. If anything they were too fine for it, too fit to beautify drawing-rooms as well.

What led the Australian to sin was that this batch had come out to France with their lines of weakness cut not half as deep as they should be. The burst only ripped the case open without breaking it up.

It had been lovely in life, and in death it was not divided.

It just gave a jump, the length of a frog’s, and presented the foe with a cheap good souvenir, reassuring besides.

In the southwestern postal district of London, too, his cyclone might have had a distinguished success at the time. As soon as the rumbling died away one of the hard-bitten kilted sergeants leant across to another and quoted dourly:

“A great and strong wind, but the Lorrd was not in the wind.”

“I’ve been a Christian all my life, but this war is a bit too serious.”

As soon as the rumbling died away one of the hard-bitten kilted sergeants leant across to another and quoted dourly: “A great and strong wind, but the Lorrd was not in the wind.”

“I’ve been a Christian all my life, but this war is a bit too serious.”

So saying, a certain New Army recruit had folded up his religion in 1914, and put it away, as it were, in a drawer with his other civil attire to wait until public affairs should again permit of their use.

No figure of speech, among all these that I have mixed, can give the measure of the greatness of that opportunity.

Nobody used it: the tide in the affairs of churches flowed its best, but no church came to take it.

Instead, as if chance had planned a kind of satiric practical epigram, came the brigade chaplain.

When a man enlisted during the war he found himself living the life of the common man in a Communist State.

Once inside he had no more choices to make than a Russian under the Soviet. His work, his pay, his food, his place and mode of living were fixed from on high.

To the rightful inhabitants of these paradises the intrusion of an ordinary fallen business man, with his vulgar notions of efficiency, gave something of a shock. He seemed cold and clammy—a serpent in the garden.

“At the War Office,” an old Staff officer plaintively said to one of these killjoys, “we never used to open the afternoon letters till the next day.”

He felt that life would lose its old-world bloom if he had to do things on the nail. “After all, it won’t kill the British taxpayer”—that was another golden formula.

Sadly he surveyed the disappointing scene. Ruefully he noted the hopelessly normal nature of all the proceedings that had produced it. Then he broke the silence in which we had made our several inspections.

“Can’t believe a word you read, sir, can you?” he said with some bitterness.

Life had failed to yield one of its advertised marvels. The Press had lied again. The propagandist myth about Germans had cracked up once more. “Can’t believe a word you read” had long been becoming a kind of catchphrase in the army.

Men who had lived through the massacre read the stuff open-mouthed. Anything, then, could figure as anything else in the Press—as its own opposite even.

Black was only an aspect of white.

With a grin at the way he must have been taken in up to now, the fighting soldier gave the Press up.

That “some new way” was not fated to come. The spark refused to fall, the divine accident would not happen. How could it? you ask with some reason. Had not trench warfare reached an impasse?

Yes; there is always an impasse before genius shows a way through.

Music on keyboards had reached an impasse before a person of genius thought of using his thumb as well as his fingers. Well, that was an obvious dodge, you may say, but in Flanders what way through could there have been?

Music on keyboards had reached an impasse before a person of genius thought of using his thumb as well as his fingers. Well, that was an obvious dodge, you may say, but in Flanders what way through could there have been?

The dodge found by genius is always an obvious dodge, afterwards.

Till it is found it can as little be stated by us common people as can the words of the poems that Keats might have written if he had lived longer.

“But why didn’t you put your sword through him?” an officer asked, who belonged to the school of Froissart less obviously than the private.

“Well, sir,” the captor replied, “the gentleman wasn’t looking.”

At no seat of war will you find it quite easy to live up to Flanigan’s standards of hatred towards an enemy. Reaching a front, you find that all you want is just to win the war.

… the insidious change that was to send you home, on your first leave, talking unguardedly of “old Fritz” or of “the good old Boche” to the pain of your friends, as if he were a stout dog fox or a real stag of a hare.

The deadliest solvent of your exalted hatreds is laughter.

And you can never wholly suppress laughter between two crowds of millions of men standing within earshot of each other along a line of hundreds of miles.

If you took his trench it might be no better; perhaps Incarnate Evil had left its bit of food half-cooked, and the muddy straw, where it lay last, was pressed into a hollow by Incarnate Evil’s back as by a cat’s.

Incarnate Evil should not do these things that other people in trenches do.

It ought to be more strange and beastly and keep on making beaux gestes with its talons and tail, like the proper dragon slain by St. George. Perhaps Incarnate Evil was extinct and you went over its pockets.

One would be talking like Burke—talking, perhaps you might say, through Burke’s hat—if one were to say that the war found chivalry alive and left it dead.

Chivalry is about as likely to perish as brown eyes or the moon.

Yet something did happen, during the war, to which these wild words would have some sort of relation. We were not all Bayards in 1914;

… “that if there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition and unpleasing to themselves?”

One of the most sweetly flattering hopes that we had in the August of 1914 was that in view of the greatness of the occasion causes were not going to have their effects.

Nothing new, you may truthfully answer, in that. The improvement is one which man, in his cups and his dreams and other seasons of maudlin vision, has always perceived to have just come at last.

… it lasts, the more completely has it to lose the romance of a glorious gamble and sink—or, as some would say, rise—to the plane of a circumstantial, matter-of-fact liquidation of whatever relative messes the nations engaged have made of the whole of their previous lives.

Any soldier will tell you the bayonet does not win battles.

It only claims, in a way that a beaten side cannot ignore, a victory won already by gunfire, rifles, gas, bombs, or some combination of these. The bayonet’s thrust is more of a gesture: a cogent appeal, like the urgent “How’s that?”

“They’ve let us down again!” “Another Tommy officer who didn’t know he’d won!” As if it were the fault, that day, of anyone there!

Our men could only draw on such funds of nerve and physique, knowledge and skill, as we had put into the bank for them.

Not they, but their rulers and “betters,” had lost their heads in the joy of making money fast out of steam, and so made half of our nation slum-dwellers.

That was how Staff College French came to be what it was. And as it was what it was, you can guess what Staff College tactics and strategy were, and why all the little brown bundles lay where they did in the nettles and grass.

You are more aware of the stars in war than in peace.

A full moon may quite halve the cares of a sentry; the Pole Star will sometimes be all that a company has, when relieved, to guide it back across country to Paradisiac rest;

So the youth of our war had its feints at renewal, hours of Indian summer when there was wine again in the air; in the “bare, ruined choirs” a lated golden auriole would strike up once more for a while, before leaving.

Because hope does spring eternal the evening before a great battle must always make fires leap up in the mind.

The calm before Thermopylae, the rival camps on the night before Agincourt, the ball before Waterloo—not without reason have writers of genius, searching for glimpses of life in its most fugitive acme of bloom, the poised and just breaking crest of the wave, gone to …

In the east the low, slow grumbling sound of a few guns from fifty miles of front seemed, in its approach to quietude, like the audible breath of a sleeper.

The war was taking its rest.

Some sort of musing half-dream about summer heaths, buzzing with bees, was jarred by the big blunted sound, distant and dull, of wooden boxes tumbling down wooden stairs, “off,” as they do in a farce. Of course—that night-bomber unloading on St.

… and kind, almost gay after the scabrous mud wastes and the stink of the captured dugouts of the Salient, piled up to ground-level with corpses, some feet uppermost, some heads, like fish in a basket, making you think what wonderful numbers there are of mankind.

For a moment, the object of all dream and desire seemed to have come; the flaming sword was gone, and the gate of the garden open.

Too late, as you know. 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!

Once more the longing of a multitude struggling slowly across a venomous wilderness fixed itself on the first glimpse of a Jordan beyond; for most men the Rhine was the physical goal of effort, the term of endurance, the symbol of all attainment and rest.

To win what your youth had desired, and find the taste of it gone, is said to be one of the standard pains of old age.

With a kind of blank space in their minds where the joy of fulfilment ought to have been, two British privates of 1914, now Captains attached to the Staff, emerged from the narrow and crowded High Street of Cologne on December 7, 1918, crossed the …

Had they not, by toil and entreaty, gained permission to enter the city with our first cavalry? Were they not putting their lips to the first glass of the sparkling vintage of victory? Neither of them said anything then.

The heart that knoweth its own bitterness need not always avow it straight off.

But they were friends; they told afterwards.

I think the speech was reported. But none of our foremen at home took any notice of it at all. They knew a trick worth two of Haig’s. They were as moonstruck as any victorious Prussian.

So we had failed⁠—had won the fight and lost the prize; the garland of the war was withered before it was gained.

The lost years, the broken youth, the dead friends, the women’s overshadowed lives at home, the agony, and bloody sweat—all had gone to darken the stains which most of us had thought to scour out of the world that our children would live in.

And yet the utter slacker was not countenanced, and the dunce had been known to be so dull that he was sent home as an empty by those unexacting chiefs.

There was reason in everything, even in reason.

All this relative mildness in the irritants administered to the common Englishman as soldier had its counterpart in the men’s ingrained moderateness of reaction.

“What order, or disorder, could ever be worse than this which has failed? Why not anything, any wild-seeming nihilism or fantasy of savage rudeness, rather than sit quiet under this old contemptible rule?”

Instead of contracting a violent new sort of heat he simply went cold, and has remained so.

Where a Slav or a Latin might have become a hundred percent. Satanist he became about a thirty percenter.

each means exactly the same thing—the rule of himself, the enforcement on everyone else of his own darling theory of what is best for them, whether they know it or not.

Small choice in rotten apples; one bellyful of east wind is a diet as poor as another.

Not in the yells and counter-yells of this and that vendor of patent hot-air is the heart of the average ex-soldier engaged. Rather “Away with all gas-projectors alike” is his present feeling towards eloquent men, Left or Right.

… as they are, how many things are owned as they are, how many lives are safely continued, merely because our birds of prey have not yet had the wit to see what would come of a sudden snatch made with a will and with assurance.

The total number of policemen on a racecourse is always a minute percentage of the total number of its thieves and roughs.

The bad men are not held down by force; they are only bluffed by the pretence of it.

The total number of policemen on a racecourse is always a minute percentage of the total number of its thieves and roughs.

The bad men are not held down by force; they are only bluffed by the pretence of it.

They have got the tip now, and the plain man is dimly aware how surprisingly little there is to keep us all from slipping back into the state we were in when a man would kill another to steal a piece of food that he …

Derby sweeps never had such a vogue; every kind of gamble has boomed; dealers in public entertainment have found that the rawest sensationalism pays better than ever—anything that will give a fillip, any poor new-whisky fillip, to jaded nerves.

Of course, life itself is all right. It never grows dull.

All dullness is in the mind; it comes out thence and diffuses itself over everything round the dull person, and then he terms everything dull, and thinks himself the victim of the impact of dull things.

Of course, life itself is all right. It never grows dull.

All dullness is in the mind; it comes out thence and diffuses itself over everything round the dull person, and then he terms everything dull, and thinks himself the victim of the impact of dull things.

In stupid rich people, in boys and girls deadeningly taught at dead-alive schools, in all disappointed weaklings and in declining nations, this loss of power to shed anything but dullness upon what one sees and hears is common enough.

The very clay of them has to be put into moulds and fired again. To some such remaking of bricks, some shaping and hardening anew of the most elementary, plainest units of rightness in action, we have to get back.

Humdrum decencies, patiently practised through millions of undistinguished lives, were the myriad bricks out of which all the advanced architecture of conduct was built

—the solemn temples of creeds, gorgeous palaces of romantic heroism, cloud-capped towers of patriotic exaltation. And now, just when there seems to be such a babble as never before about these grandiose structures, bricks have run short.

plenty of work for the faculties, plenty of rest for the nerves, control for desire and atrophy for conceit.

Hard?⁠—yes, but England is worth it.

Among the mind’s powers is one that comes of itself to many children and artists. It need not be lost, to the end of his days, by anyone who has ever had it.

… seems to be feared that evil must come in any space of free time in which neither a game nor a dance nor a concert nor a lecture with a lantern intervenes to rescue the girls from the presumed tedium of mere youth and health!

Everywhere the assumption that simple things have failed;

that anything like hardy mental living and looking about for oneself, to find interests, is destined to end ill;