第21章 SHOULD SOLDIERS BE POLITE?(1)
My desire was once to pass a peaceful and pleasant winter in Brussels,attending to my work,improving my mind.Brussels is a bright and cheerful town,and I think I could have succeeded had it not been for the Belgian Army.The Belgian Army would follow me about and worry me.Judging of it from my own experience,I should say it was a good army.Napoleon laid it down as an axiom that your enemy never ought to be permitted to get away from you--never ought to be allowed to feel,even for a moment,that he had shaken you off.
What tactics the Belgian Army might adopt under other conditions I am unable to say,but against me personally that was the plan of campaign it determined upon and carried out with a success that was astonishing,even to myself.
I found it utterly impossible to escape from the Belgian Army.Imade a point of choosing the quietest and most unlikely streets,Ichose all hours--early in the morning,in the afternoon,late in the evening.There were moments of wild exaltation when I imagined I had given it the slip.I could not see it anywhere,I could not hear it.
"Now,"said I to myself,"now for five minutes'peace and quiet."I had been doing it injustice:it had been working round me.
Approaching the next corner,I would hear the tattoo of its drum.
Before I had gone another quarter of a mile it would be in full pursuit of me.I would jump upon a tram,and travel for miles.
Then,thinking I had shaken it off,I would alight and proceed upon my walk.Five minutes later another detachment would be upon my heels.I would slink home,the Belgian Army pursuing me with its exultant tattoo.Vanquished,shamed,my insular pride for ever vanished,I would creep up into my room and close the door.The victorious Belgian Army would then march back to barracks.
If only it had followed me with a band:I like a band.I can loaf against a post,listening to a band with anyone.I should not have minded so much had it come after me with a band.But the Belgian Army,apparently,doesn't run to a band.It has nothing but this drum.It has not even a real drum--not what I call a drum.It is a little boy's drum,the sort of thing I used to play myself at one time,until people took it away from me,and threatened that if they heard it once again that day they would break it over my own head.
It is cowardly going up and down,playing a drum of this sort,when there is nobody to stop you.The man would not dare to do it if his mother was about.He does not even play it.He walks along tapping it with a little stick.There's no tune,there's no sense in it.He does not even keep time.I used to think at first,hearing it in the distance,that it was the work of some young gamin who ought to be at school,or making himself useful taking the baby out in the perambulator:and I would draw back into dark doorways,determined,as he came by,to dart out and pull his ear for him.To my astonishment--for the first week--I learnt it was the Belgian Army,getting itself accustomed,one supposes,to the horrors of war.It had the effect of making me a peace-at-any-price man.
They tell me these armies are necessary to preserve the tranquility of Europe.For myself,I should be willing to run the risk of an occasional row.Cannot someone tell them they are out of date,with their bits of feathers and their odds and ends of ironmongery--grown men that cannot be sent out for a walk unless accompanied by a couple of nursemen,blowing a tin whistle and tapping a drum out of a toy shop to keep them in order and prevent their running about:one might think they were chickens.A herd of soldiers with their pots and pans and parcels,and all their deadly things tied on to them,prancing about in time to a tune,makes me think always of the White Knight that Alice met in Wonderland.I take it that for practical purposes--to fight for your country,or to fight for somebody else's country,which is,generally speaking,more popular--the thing essential is that a certain proportion of the populace should be able to shoot straight with a gun.How standing in a line and turning out your toes is going to assist you,under modern conditions of warfare,is one of the many things my intellect is incapable of grasping.
In mediaeval days,when men fought hand to hand,there must have been advantage in combined and precise movement.When armies were mere iron machines,the simple endeavour of each being to push the other off the earth,then the striking simultaneously with a thousand arms was part of the game.Now,when we shoot from behind cover with smokeless powder,brain not brute force--individual sense not combined solidity is surely the result to be aimed at.Cannot somebody,as I have suggested,explain to the military man that the proper place for the drill sergeant nowadays is under a glass case in some museum of antiquities?
I lived once near the Hyde Park barracks,and saw much of the drill sergeant's method.Generally speaking,he is a stout man with the walk of an egotistical pigeon.His voice is one of the most extraordinary things in nature:if you can distinguish it from the bark of a dog,you are clever.They tell me that the privates,after a little practice,can--which gives one a higher opinion of their intelligence than otherwise one might form.But myself I doubt even this statement.I was the owner of a fine retriever dog about the time of which I am speaking,and sometimes he and I would amuse ourselves by watching Mr.Sergeant exercising his squad.One morning he had been shouting out the usual "Whough,whough,whough!"for about ten minutes,and all had hitherto gone well.Suddenly,and evidently to his intense astonishment,the squad turned their backs upon him and commenced to walk towards the Serpentine.
"Halt!"yelled the sergeant,the instant his amazed indignation permitted him to speak,which fortunately happened in time to save the detachment from a watery grave.
The squad halted.