R. Hugh Knyvett - Over There with the Australians

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I sometimes wonder if the donor of this piece of nerve still "feels it"
in his own leg, for, months after a man has lost his leg, he still
feels it there. There was one man in the hospital who had lost both
legs and screamed with pain every night because his toes were twisted,
and it was only when they had dug up his feet and straightened out his
toes that he got rest.

There are nerves and _nerves_, and I am sure that the grafting in me of
this piece from the _nerves_ of an Irishman has given to me more
_nerve_ than I ever had in my life before, else how could I have
written this book?

PART VI

MEDITATIONS IN THE TRENCHES

CHAPTER XXXII

THE RIGHT INFANTRY WEAPONS

I know scores of men who have been months in the trenches and over the
top in several attacks who have never fired a shot out of their rifles.
In fact, it is very, very rarely that the man in the trenches gets a
chance to aim at an enemy at a greater range than a hundred yards.
There are thousands of men whom I know who believe that the long-range
rifles used in our army to-day are useless weapons. A much more
serviceable gun to repel a counter-attack would be one firing buckshot
like a pump-gun. The bullets from our high-velocity rifles frequently
pass through the body of a man at a close range and he is not even
conscious of having been hit and continues to come on with as great
fury as before. The pellets scattering from a shotgun at a range of a
hundred yards or less would do him more damage and be far more certain
to stop him. In an actual charge our present rifle is more than
useless--it is an encumbrance, and when at grips with the enemy in his
own trenches it is often a fatal handicap. With a bayonet at the end
it is far too long, and in a trench two to four feet wide it cannot be
used with much effect. I have known our men repeatedly to unship the
bayonet and take it in their hands, throwing the rifle away. Another
danger is that men will fire their rifles down an enemy trench and
these high-velocity bullets will pass right through the bodies of the
one or two of the enemy in front of him and frequently kill his own
comrade beyond. Remember, in a fight in a trench friend and foe are
mixed up together and many of our men have been unconsciously shot by
their fellows. In every regiment a small squad of picked marksmen only
should have these long-range rifles, with the addition of telescopic
sights. The average man does not take exact aim before firing, and
nearly all the shots go high. If it were not for bombs and
machine-guns the enemy could always succeed in getting to our trenches
with very little loss. It should be remembered, too, how closely, in
an attack, we follow our own barrage--it is impossible to see to fire
through it.

The system of barrage fighting that we now use has made warfare as much
a hand-to-hand business as it was in olden times and we must go back a
good deal to old-fashioned weapons, as we have to a great extent to
old-fashioned armor. The picked snipers or sharpshooters could be
placed in points of vantage to pick off any of the enemy who exposed
themselves and a score of them in each company would get very few shots
in a day.

Another weapon that infantry should be armed with is a hand-bayonet as
there is no advantage whatever in the long reach that our present rifle
and bayonet gives. As a matter of fact, many of our men have been
killed through driving their bayonet too far into the body of their
opponent, not being able to draw it out, thus being helpless when
attacked by another of the enemy. It is no use telling men not to
drive their bayonet in more than three or four inches, for in the speed
and fury of a charge they will always drive it in right up to the hilt,
and while we retain this out-of-date weapon we should certainly put a
guard on it not further than six inches from the point. I have used a
hand-bayonet which sticks out from the fist like a knuckle-duster and
is about six inches long. The shock of the blow is taken on the
forearm which also has an iron plate running down it on which to
receive the thrust of one's opponent. This is the natural weapon for
the Anglo-Saxon, as the fist and arm is used exactly as in boxing. If
an enemy comes at you with a bayonet it is the natural and easy thing
to throw up your arm and ward it off. The iron plate saves your arm
being cut; you are in under his guard; seize his rifle with your left
hand and punch with your right, driving the knife home the six inches,
which is all that is necessary. I have been in and seen a number of
bayonet charges and I am quite satisfied that the parries and thrusts
that we teach the infantryman are only of value to get him used to
handling his rifle. After that it would be a good thing for him to
forget them.

There are only two things that it is essential to remember when you go
into a bayonet charge. The first is that _the most determined man will
win_. I have known champion men-at-arms killed by a bayonet in their
first charge and other little fellows who were no good in the practice
combats kill their man every time. If you go into a bayonet charge
with the idea of disarming your opponent and taking him prisoner you
will most certainly be killed. But if you are quite sure in your own
mind that you are going to kill every man who comes against you, you
will do it. Your determination impresses itself upon the man you
attack and he will be beaten before you reach him. The other thing
that it is wise to remember is to make your opponent attack you on your
left side. If he attacks you on the right you have to parry him and
then thrust, but for an attack on the left side the action of parrying
will bring the toe of your butt into his jaw or ribs, disabling him,
and it is a good thing to use your knee at the same time.

The general-staff officers who decide how an army should be weaponed
never do the actual fighting and few junior officers or men feel
competent to offer their advice. I am quite confident that a majority
of the fighters would agree with the foregoing opinions, and I would
like the chance of taking a company armed as I have suggested into
action, and would be quite satisfied of their superiority to any troops
on the front.

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE FORCING-HOUSE OF BESTIALITY

The Germans have given to us an illustration, though such was not
needed by thinking men to convince them of its truth, of the fact that
the beast in humanity only requires encouragement to make us more
bestial than any wild thing of the jungle or even the filthy cur of the
streets. If any man takes as his guiding principle the devilish
doctrine that the "end justified the means" he will soon become a
menace to his fellows and any good impulses that he may originally have
will pass away. The German Government made savagery, brutality, and
bestiality a deliberate policy, and now it is their unconscious
impulse. Germany is paying a terrible penalty in the degradation and
demoralization of her whole people for having given the direction of
the country into the hands of the Devil in exchange for power, and the
German army is to-day a forcing-house for bestiality and there is no
atmosphere in the whole world that so conduces to evil. In the
beginning of the war letters and statements of prisoners showed that
there were then many decent Germans who were horrified at the
abominations they had seen and committed at the command of their
government. But latterly, you cannot find any trace of this feeling.
Now they gloat over it.

There is no one in the world to-day except those who are of like mind
who do not know that the story of the German atrocities is true, for
Germany has _admitted_ enough crimes to convince any sane man that she
would stick at nothing. No action could be too cruel, no deed too
beastly, no torture too diabolical, no insult too keen, no impulse too
filthy, no disfigurement too hideous, no vandalism too shocking, no
destruction too complete, no stooping too low that Germany would
hesitate to do where she has opportunity. When Germany boasted of the
murder by drowning of women and babes on the high seas she proclaimed
to the world that she was a criminal, and we do not need to have any
other crimes proven to convince us that, while there is such a thing as
justice, she must not go unpunished.

Criminals have been forgiven, but not before they are repentant;
_Safety_, as well as _Justice_, demands that the murderer, the
assassin, the raper shall not go free. Germany has not only committed
all these crimes, but her theologians and professors have condoned
them. The man who counsels forgiveness to Germany adds hypocrisy to
the will to commit the same crimes. To forgive, we are told, is
divine, but the Divine does not forgive without repentance. Has
Germany shown signs of repentance yet? Well, then, the man who talks
of forgiveness to Germany before she is on her knees begging for
forgiveness is an enemy of peace and a condoner of crime.

It is so easy for those who have not suffered to tell the victims "to
forgive." _We_ do not go in nightly dread lest in the morning we
should have to rake among the ruins of our homes for the mangled body
of our baby! We do not have to work in daily fear lest we should have
to return to an empty house whence wife or daughter have been dragged
by brutal hands! _For three years_ the people of London and Paris and
thousands of other cities have never known but that at any moment their
house might be brought down in ruins about their ears, entombing all
that they hold dear! _For three years_ the men of northern France and
Belgium have never known but that while they were working, under
compulsion, against the life of their own blood and country in a German
munition factory, some soldiers might not be calling at their homes to
take the woman that they love God alone knows where! These very things
have happened to tens of thousands. Week after week the human hawks
come over London, and ever the toll of civilians and women and babies
done to death grows larger! One hundred thousand young girls were
taken from Lille and other cities away from knowledge or protection of
their kin, and until recently we had no news of any of them, but some
have been thrown into Switzerland, of no further use to Germany; used
up like sucked lemons, they are cast aside for the Swiss to feed.
Germany has in her maw to-day more than ten millions of slaves.

In America or Australia there are no hospitals where lie thousands of
girls too young to become mothers who have been raped. We have not
hundreds of boys who will never become men. A young girl said to me:
"There is a baby coming; it is a boche; when it is born I will cut its
throat!" A woman showed me on an estaminet floor the blood-stains of
her own baby butchered before her eyes. These were French women, not
ours. But what if they had been? Your sister! Your mother! Your
wife! And they might have been but for the accident of geography.
Would you then have felt as bitter as these people? Or would you still
have kindly feelings to Germany and not want to "humiliate her." There
may be beings who could see daughter violated or brother mutilated
without taking personal vengeance, but such should not be permitted to
breathe the air with MEN.

The only people who have a right to say what punishment shall be meted
out to Germany for her misdeeds, are the women of France, of Belgium,
of Poland, of Serbia, of Rumania, of Italy, who have suffered these
things; and if any one, King or President, Parliament or Pope, dares
stand between these people and their just wrath they deserve to be
pilloried in the minds of men as condoners of crime, as accessories
after the fact.

The only chance for permanent peace, and guarantee that these
abominable crimes shall not be committed again, is that we should so
punish Germany that she shall realize "that war does not _pay_," and
that the whole earth may know that no nation can commit these
atrocities and go unpunished.

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FEAR

The observation of men in many circumstances of peril has quite
convinced me that it is those who are most afraid that do the bravest
deeds. I do not mean that the fact that they are afraid increases the
difficulty of the doing, because it lessens it. It is fear that drives
men to heroism! And many a man attempts the superhuman feat of courage
not to show to others that he is no coward, but as evidence in the
court of his own judgment, to disprove the accusations of conscience,
which asserts he is craven. The old illustration of one soldier who
accused another of having no bravery because he had no fear, by saying,
"If you were as much afraid as I am you would have run away long ago,"
is not true to life, for it is the man of dulled feelings that is the
first to run, and the "man who is afraid of being afraid" who stays at
his post to the last. I have ever found that the best scouts, men who
must generally work alone in the dark, are those of highly strung
nervous temperaments. I have noticed, too, that our best airmen were
of the same type, for if you go into any mess of pilots on the front
you will see them always fidgeting, their hands never still, betraying
nervousness. I have gone down the trench before a charge and seen the
men with teeth chattering and blanched faces, but at the appointed
second these men go over the top, none hesitating, every man performing
prodigies of valor; not one but was a hero, yet not one that was not
afraid.

There must be something wrong with the make-up of a man who under
modern artillery-fire is not afraid. There are no nerves that do not
break down eventually under the strain, but the man who shrinks from a
shadow, and shudders at the touch of cold mud does his job with care
and walks unhesitatingly into the mouth of hell. I have seen our
signallers mending the telephone-wire under fire; each time it would
break they would curse and tremble, but immediately go out and repair
it accurately, slowly, no skimped work, repeating the performance again
and again. There is in our spirit some reserve force which on occasion
the will uses to stiffen resolution--the second wind of determination.

Fear is the "purgative of the soul"! There is nothing so wholesome for
a man as to be "scared to death"! Nothing that so drives out the
littlenesses that poison his life and set up the toxaemia of
selfishness. Many a man that before the war made the acquiring of
wealth or the gaining of the plaudits of his friends his chief aim, now
finds that these things have no appeal for him. For he has been to the
edge of life and looked into the abyss, and fear has stripped from him
the rags of self-adornment; and standing naked between the worlds his
soul has found that it needs no beautifying but the cleansing of
self-forgetfulness.

This war is one of the greatest blessings this world has ever known,
for it has brought to us fear of selfish force, fear of the engines of
our own construction, fear of isolation in world politics, fear of
secret diplomacy, fear of an unguarded peace, fear of an unprepared
future, fear of an undisciplined people, fear of an irresponsible
government, and, above all THE FEAR OF FORGETTING!

But there is another reason why a man in battle, though afraid, does
not fail. The fact is that men in a regiment or an army are not under
the domination of their own will at all, but of the collective will of
the whole. That is why some regiments are so anxious to keep alive
their traditions, and emblazon their battles on their colors. That is
why we devote so much time in the training of young recruits to the
knowledge of the esprit de corps of the regiment. That is why the
regulars are always the best fighters. It is not their longer
training, for that is a handicap with new methods of warfare. It is
not because of their superior discipline, for the territorials have not
lacked perfect discipline. But there is an atmosphere in the regular
regiments that makes one brother that goes into the regulars a better
soldier than the other that enlists in militia. This atmosphere is
compounded of pride in past achievements and confidence that the colors
that have never been lowered, though shot down on many a field, cannot
be shamed to-day. The victors of many engagements have an enormous
advantage in battle. No one expected anything but the most heroic
courage from the British regulars who had never failed when called
upon, but every one was not a little anxious how "Kitchener's" would
stand their first ordeal of fire.

Every mass of men has, besides the will and mind of each one of them, a
collective will and mind. Every town has this--who has not felt, on
entering a town and viewing its shops and people, a certain pushing
toward behavior--some towns tend to make one frivolous, others grave.
I know a city which, every time I enter, makes me think when last I was
in church, while there is another in which I always want to dance or
view the Follies. Have you not seen countrymen in town, whose clothes
proclaim that they have never been out later than nine o'clock in a
lifetime, trying to be the gay Lothario, drinking wine in a cabaret?
Every house has its personality made up of the collective minds of the
people who inhabit it. Take your child to one strange house and he
will fidget uncomfortably on the edge of his chair; but take him to
another, just as strange, and he will romp about without hesitation.
Children are like the canaries we use to detect the presence of
poisonous gases, most sensitive to atmosphere.

In the same way an army has ONE WILL, and that is why in battle you
will not see one man fail, or there will be panic and all will fail.
In every army there are individual men weak in resolution who, left to
themselves, would run away; but as the MIND of the army as a whole is
courageous, so they are swept along in spite of themselves. The German
army has ONE MIND for bestiality, and the Allied army has ONE MIND for
victory.

CHAPTER XXXV

THE SPLENDOR OF THE PRESENT OPPORTUNITY

To those who are thrilled by the old-time tales of adventurous chivalry
or moved by the narrative of high endeavor and heroic achievement for
some noble ideal, I bring a conception of the marvellous glory of these
present days. We have been wont to sing of the times when thousands
left home and comfort on a Holy Crusade, but the Crusaders of these
days are numbered in millions.

Never were there such stirring times as these, never since the first
tick of time have the hours been so crowded! Never before did so many
men live nobly or die bravely. The young knights from many lands are
seeking the Holy Grail, and finding it in forgetfulness of self and in
sacrifice for their fellows. You and I are living to-day among the
deeds of men that make the deeds of the heroes of past times pale into
insignificance. Never were there bred men of such large and heroic
mould as the men of to-day.

Here's a trench--on which a shell falls--and where one shell falls
another always follows in the same place;--the shell blows in a dugout
and there is little chance that the men sheltering therein shall be
alive, yet those on either side, knowing that another shell will fall
in a second or so, in utter forgetfulness of self leap in and with
their bare fingers scrape away the dirt lest haply there should be some
life yet remaining in this quivering, mangled human flesh.

Oh! What chances the men of earth have to-day to be as God! The
highest conception any religion has given us of God is that he is one
that would sacrifice himself--"Greater love hath no man than this that
he lay down his life for his friends"--and to-day they're doing it by
the million. Every moment is adding names to the honor-roll of heaven
of men who follow in His steps.

Have you conceived that the uniting together of the nations that love
peace in this struggle will do more to guarantee peace in the future
than anything else that has ever happened in world politics,--that it
will join France, Britain, and America into a trinity of free peoples
who will prevent war, at least for many generations? We are being
bound together by the strongest tie that ever tied nation to nation,
that ever bound one people to another, not by political treaties that
may be torn up, but by the great tie of common blood shed in a common
cause on a common soil. That narrow lane that stretches from
Switzerland to the sea is the great international cemetery, and for
many generations it will be the Mecca of pilgrimages from all our
countries. The wreaths of America will mingle with the immortelles of
France and the flowers from Britain and the pilgrims shall there get to
know, understand, and love each other as they engage in the holy task
of paying a common tribute to their common dead. Shall not the
mingling blood of Frenchmen, Britons, and Americans make the flowers of
peace to grow? They never had such soil before.

There is being created, also, in all our countries a new
aristocracy--the aristocracy of courage. We never had a chance up till
now to prove who were our real, our best people, and we have been
accustomed to measure our citizens by the false and small standards of
wealth, birth, and intellect. Well! There has been given to us to-day
a new standard whereby we can measure ourselves, the standard of
courage, sacrifice, and service. Nobody in England cares to-day
whether you are descended from William the Conqueror or not! No one
will care in America whether your ancestor came over in the Mayflower,
or whether he signed the Declaration of Independence! Every American
has a chance to-day of signing a far greater declaration than that
great one of '76--the declaration of personal willingness to sacrifice
all on the altar of liberty. In England, in America, in Australia, in
all the countries of the world in the days that are to be, men and
women will make their boast in this one thing, or have no cause for
boasting at all, of the part that they had in this fight, the greatest
fight that has ever been waged for liberty, for righteousness, and for
the virtue of womanhood.

What a splendid opportunity it is for us to be able to personally pay
the price of liberty. How easy to forget that freedom has either to be
earned by ourselves or enjoyed because some one else has paid the price
for us. Had we not forgotten in our countries that the democracy that
we boast of is no credit to us because it was won by the blood of other
men? Men died that we might be able to govern ourselves! Women
carried heart-ache and loneliness to the grave that we might make our
own laws!

Liberty! Such an easy word to mouth, but how precious in the sight of
God! Liberty is one of the treasures of heaven and only committed to
men at great cost, lest they should undervalue it.

In these great and wonderful times there has been given to us the
glorious opportunity to earn our own liberty, to prove our own personal
right to citizenship in a free country.

You may not be able to pay in good, red blood, you may not be able to
pay much in the coin of the republic, but if each of us does not pay in
whatsoever coin we have, there will come soon to us the days in which
we shall realize that we are thieves and robbers, enjoying that to
which we have no right, won so hardly with the deaths and wounds of men
and the salt tears of women. In the New World that shall be born after
the birth-pangs of the present days, we shall realize that we have no
place, our souls shall shrink and shrivel as we gaze on the honor scars
of those who have paid, and we shall be elbowed to the outskirts of the
crowd, as the people bow before the men whom the President and people
delight to honor--the men sightless, the men limbless, the memory of
the men lifeless.

CHAPTER XXXVI

NOT A FIGHT FOR "RACE" BUT FOR "RIGHT"

I have no patience with the waterish sentiment that suggests that the
lines of the Germans in America and Australia have fallen in hard
places because they are called upon to take up arms against their own
blood. For this is not a war of race, but of right! It is not a war
of Britons, Americans, and French against Germans and Austrians! It is
a war of men in all nations against beasts!

There is something in all of us that is stronger than kinship, higher
than citizenship--manhood--and every one who is a man, though he be of
German blood will join us in this struggle against the monster that has
devoured women and children and many fair lands.

We have in the Australian army one general of German blood, another of
Austrian, and hundreds of men of both, but they have been fighting
loyally with us, because they were men and could not be held back from
striking at tyranny and wrong. Remember, in the Australian army all
are volunteers.

Every one now knows what Germany stands for and the menace she is to
the future of the world if her power is not destroyed, and every one
who does not help to defeat her is an ally of the Kaiser and helping
him to win the war.

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