§ 4

So it was that Joan saw the beginning of the great winnowing of mankind, and Peter came home in search of his duty.

Within the first month of the war nearly every one of the men in Joan’s world had been spun into the vortex; hers was so largely a world of young or unattached people, with no deep roots in business or employment to hold them back. Even Oswald at last, in spite of many rebuffs, found a use for himself in connection with a corps of African labourers behind the front, and contrived after a steady pressure of many months towards the danger zone, to get himself wounded while he was talking to some of his dear Masai at an ammunition dump. A Hun raider dropped a bomb, and some flying splinters of wood cut him deeply and extensively. The splinters were vicious splinters; there were complications; and he found himself back at Pelham Ford before the end of 1916, aged by ten years. The Woman’s Legion captured Joan from the date of its formation, and presently had her driving a car for the new Ministry of Munitions, which came into existence in the middle of 1915.

Her career as a chauffeuse was a brilliant one. She lived, after the free manner of the Legion, with Miss Jepson at Hampstead; she went down every morning to her work, she drove her best and her best continually improved, so that she became distinguished among her fellows. The Ministry grew aware of her and proud of her. A time arrived when important officials quarrelled to secure her for their journeys. Eminent foreign visitors invariably found themselves behind her.

“But she drives like a man,” they would say, a little breathlessly, after some marvellously skidded corner.

“All our girls drive like this,” the Ministry of Munitions would remark, carelessly, loyally, but untruthfully.

Joan’s habitual wear became khaki; she had puttees and stout boots and little brass letterings upon her shoulders and sleeves, and the only distinctive touches she permitted herself were the fur of her overcoat collar and a certain foppery about her gauntlets....

459Extraordinary and profound changes of mood and relationship occurred in the British mind during those first two years of the war, and reflected themselves upon the minds of Joan and Peter. To begin with, and for nearly a year, there was a quality of spectacularity about the war for the British. They felt it to be an immense process and a vitally significant process; they read, they talked, they thought of little else; but it was not yet felt to be an intimate process. The habit of detachment was too deeply ingrained. Great Britain was an island of onlookers. To begin with the war seemed like something tremendous and arresting going on in an arena. “Business as usual,” said the business man, putting up the price of anything the country seemed to need. There was a profound conviction that British life and the British community were eternal things; they might play a part—a considerable part—in these foreign affairs; they might even have to struggle, but it was inconceivable that they should change or end. September and October in 1914 saw an immense wave of volunteer enthusiasm—enthusiasm for the most part thwarted and wasted by the unpreparedness of the authorities for anything of the sort, but it was the enthusiasm of an audience eager to go on the stage; it was not the enthusiasm of performers in the arena and unable to quit the arena, fighting for life or death. To secure any sort of official work was to step out of the undistinguished throng. In uniform one felt dressed up and part of the pageant. Young soldiers were self-conscious in those early days, and inclined to pose at the ordinary citizen. The ordinary citizen wanted to pat young soldiers on the back and stand them drinks out of his free largesse. They were “in it,” he felt, and he at most was a patron of the affair.

That spectacularity gave way to a sense of necessary participation only very slowly indeed. The change began as the fresh, bright confidence that the Battle of the Marne had begotten gave place to a deepening realization of the difficulties on the road to any effective victory. The persuasion spread from mind to mind that if Great Britain was to fight this war as she had lived through sixty years of peace, the gentleman amateur among the nations, she would lose this 460war. The change of spirit that produced its first marked result in the creation of the Ministry of Munitions with a new note of quite unofficial hustle, and led on through a series of inevitable steps to the adoption of conscription, marks a real turning about of the British mind, the close of a period of chaotic freedom almost unprecedented in the history of communities. It was the rediscovery of the State as the necessary form into which the individual life must fit.

To the philosophical historian of the future the efforts of governing and leading people in Great Britain to get wills together, to explain necessities, to supplement the frightful gaps in the education of every class by hastily improvised organizations, by speeches, press-campaigns, pos............