“I have sat with some of our lads, fighting battles over again, and discussing battles to be,” wrote some amiable man who had apparently mistaken the War for a football match between England and Germany. “One officer—a mere boy—told me how he’d run up against eleven Huns in an advanced post. He killed two with a Mills bomb (‘Grand weapon, the Mills!’ he laughed, his clear eyes gleaming with excitement), wounded another with his revolver, and marched the remainder back to our own lines. …” I opened one of the illustrated weeklies and soon found an article on “War Pictures at the Royal Academy.” After a panegyric about “Forward the Guns!” (a patriotic masterpiece by a lady who had been to the Military Tournament in prewar days) the following sentence occurred: “I think I like Mr. Blank’s Contalmaison picture best. He almost makes one feel that he must have been there. The Nth Division are going over the second line, I expect—the tips of their bayonets give one this impression—and it is a picture which makes one’s pulse beat a lot faster. …”
“The tips of their bayonets give one that impression.” … Obviously the woman journalist who wrote those words was deriving enjoyment from the War, though she may not have been aware of the fact. I wondered why it was necessary for the Western Front to be “attractively advertised” by such intolerable twaddle. What was this camouflage War which was manufactured by the press to aid the imaginations of people who had never seen the real thing? Many of them probably said that the papers gave them a sane and vigorous view of the overwhelming tragedy. “Naturally,” they would remark, “the lads from the front are inclined to be a little morbid about it; one expects that, after all they’ve been through. Their close contact with the War has diminished their realization of its spiritual aspects.” Then they would add something about “the healing of Nations.” Such people needed to have their noses rubbed in a few rank physical facts, such as what a company of men smelt like after they’d been in action for a week. … The gong rang for luncheon, and Lady Asterisk left off reading a book by Tagore (whose mystical philosophies had hitherto seemed to me nebulous and unsatisfying).