War and the Future | Page 9

had been near the newly captured Austrian trenches, and

suddenly from amidst a scattered mass of Austrian bodies a quail had
risen. that had struck him as odd, and so too had the sight of a pack of
cards and a wine flask on some newly-made graves. The ordinary life
was a very /obstinate/ thing....
He talked of the courage of modern men. He was astonished at the
quickness with which they came to disregard shrapnel. And they were
so quietly enduring when they were wounded. He had seen a lot of the
wounded, and he had expected much groaning and crying out. But
unless a man is hit in the head and goes mad he does not groan or
scream! They are just brave. If you ask them how they feel it is always
one of two things: either they say quietly that they are very bad or else
they say there is nothing the matter....
He spoke as if these were mere chance observations, but everyone tells
me that nearly every day the king is at the front and often under fire. He
has taken more risks in a week than the Potsdam War Lord has taken
since the war began. He keeps himself acutely informed upon every
aspect of the war. He was a little inclined to fatalism, he confessed.
There were two stories current of two families of four sons, in each
three had been killed and in each there was an attempt to put the fourth
in a place of comparative safety. In one case a general took the fourth
son in as an attendant and embarked upon a ship that was immediately
torpedoed; in the other the fourth son was killed by accident while he
was helping to carry dinner in a rest camp. From those stories we came
to the question whether the uneducated Italians were more superstitious
than the uneducated English; the king thought they were much less so.
That struck me as a novel idea. But then he thought that English rural
people believe in witches and fairies.
I have given enough of this talk to show the quality of this king of the
new dispensation. It was, you see, the sort of easy talk one might hear
from fine-minded people anywhere. When we had done talking he
came to the door of the study with me and shook hands and went back
to his desk--with that gesture of return to work which is very familiar
and sympathetic to a writer, and with no gesture of regality at all.
Just to complete this impression let me repeat a pleasant story about

this king and our Prince of Wales, who recently visited the Italian front.
The Prince is a source of anxiety on these visits; he has a very strong
and very creditable desire to share the ordinary risks of war. He is
keenly interested, and unobtrusively bent upon getting as near the
fighting as line as possible. But the King of Italy was firm upon
keeping him out of anything more than the most incidental danger. "We
don't want any historical incidents here," he said. I think that might
well become an historical phrase. For the life of the Effigy is a series of
historical incidents.
6
Manifestly one might continue to multiply portraits of fine people
working upon this great task of breaking and ending the German
aggression, the German legend, the German effigy, and the effigy
business generally; the thesis being that the Allies have no effigy. One
might fill a thick volume with pictures of men up the scale and down
working loyally and devotedly upon the war, to make this point clear
that the essential king and the essential loyalty of our side is the
commonsense of mankind.
There comes into my head as a picture at the other extreme of this
series, a memory of certain trenches I visited on my last day in France.
They were trenches on an offensive front; they were not those
architectural triumphs, those homes from home, that grow to perfection
upon the less active sections of the great line. They had been first made
by men who had run rapidly forward with spade and rifle, stooping as
they ran, who had dropped into the craters of big shells, who had
organised these chiefly at night and dug the steep ditches sideways to
join up into continuous trenches. Now they were pushing forward saps
into No Man's Land, linking them across, and so continually creeping
nearer to the enemy and a practicable jumping-off place for an attack.
(It has been made since; the village at which I peeped was in our hands
a week later.) These trenches were dug into a sort of yellowish sandy
clay; the dug-outs were mere holes in the