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Now It Can Be Told
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General SummarySIR PHILIP GIBBS (knighted in 1920), author and journalist, was a correspondent with the French and Belgian armies in 1914 and with the British army on the western front from 1915 to 1918. He has published several volumes describing what he saw and experienced during these years, in addition to Now It Can Be Told. This book was written, he declares, to set forth the real nature of the war "and by a plain statement of realities, however painful, to add something to the world’s knowledge out of which men of good-will may try to shape some new system of relationship between one people and another, some new code of international morality, preventing, or at least postponing, another massacre of youth like that five years’ sacrifice of boys of which I was a witness."
CHAPTER XXXIX
A War Correspondent at the British Front1
176. The "Old Contemptibles"2
By the time stationary warfare had been established on the
western front in trench lines from the sea to Switzerland, the
British regular army had withered away. That was after the
retreat from Mons, the victory of the Marne, the early battles
round Ypres, and the slaughter at Neuve Chapelle. The "Old
Contemptibles"3 were an army of ghosts whose dead clay was
under earth in many fields of France, but whose spirit still
"carried on" as a heroic tradition to those who came after them
into those same fields, to the same fate. The only survivors
were regular officers taken out of the fighting-lines to form the
staffs of new divisions and to train the army of volunteers now
being raised at home, and men who were recovering from wounds
or serving behind the lines: those, and non-commissioned
officers who were the best schoolmasters of the new boys, the
best friends and guides of the new officers, stubborn in their
courage, hard and ruthless in their discipline, foul-mouthed
according to their own traditions, until they, too, fell in the
shambles. It was in March of 1915 that a lieutenant-colonel
in the trenches said to me: "I am one out of 150 regular officers
still serving with their battalions. That is to say, there are
150 of us left in the fighting-lines out of 1,500."
That little regular army of ours had justified its pride in a
long history of fighting courage. It had helped to save England
and France by its own death. Those boys of ours whom I
had seen in the first August of the war, landing at Boulogne
and marching, as though to a festival, toward the enemy, with
French girls kissing them and loading them with fruit and
flowers, had proved the quality of their spirit and training. As
riflemen they had stupefied the enemy, brought to a sudden
check by forces they had despised. They held their fire until
the German ranks were within eight hundred yards of them,
and then mowed them down as though by machine-gun fire — before
we had machine-guns, except as rare specimens, here and
there. Our horse artillery was beyond any doubt the best in
the world at that time. Even before peace came German generals
paid ungrudging tributes to the efficiency of our regular
army, writing down in their histories of war that this was the
model of all armies, the most perfectly trained. It was spent
by the spring of ’15. Its memory remains as the last epic of
those professional soldiers who, through centuries of English
history, took "the king’s shilling" and fought when they were
told to fight, and left their bones in far places of the world and
in many fields of Europe, and won for the British soldier universal
fame as a terrible warrior. There will never be a regular
army like that. Modern warfare has opened the arena to the
multitude. They may no longer sit in the Coliseum watching
the paid gladiators. If there be war they must take their share
of its sacrifice. They must be victims as well as victors. They
must pay for the luxury of conquest, hatred, and revenge by
their own bodies, and for their safety against aggression by
national service.
1 Sir Philip Gibbs, . New York, 1920. Harper and Brothers.
2 Gibbs, , pp. 65–66.
3 The kaiser in 1914 is said to have referred to the British Expeditionary Force as
"contemptible."
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Chicago: "The Old Contemptibles," Now It Can Be Told in Readings in Modern European History, ed. Webster, Hutton (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1926), 447–448. Original Sources, accessed November 21, 2024, http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=IP2XJ8EKW64QSP9.
MLA: . "The "Old Contemptibles"." Now It Can Be Told, in Readings in Modern European History, edited by Webster, Hutton, Boston, D.C. Heath, 1926, pp. 447–448. Original Sources. 21 Nov. 2024. http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=IP2XJ8EKW64QSP9.
Harvard: , 'The "Old Contemptibles"' in Now It Can Be Told. cited in 1926, Readings in Modern European History, ed. , D.C. Heath, Boston, pp.447–448. Original Sources, retrieved 21 November 2024, from http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=IP2XJ8EKW64QSP9.
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