LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
[In view of the paper shortage it is essential that letters on these pages should be brief. We are anxious not to reduce the number of letters, but unless they are shorter they must be fewer. Writers are urged to study the art of compression.—Ed., 64 The Spectator."]
GENTLEMEN-AT-ARMS
Sut,—May someone who, like John Neill, has been serving in the ranks of the Territorial Army since the collapse of Czecho- Slovakia, and, like John H. Lockie, is anxious to have a com- mission, make an observation or two on the article and the letter?
If one is an educated man, reasonably conscious of one's talents and experience, it is very difficult to endure a good many months in the ranks of the Army. I am in a unit which began as " officer-producing," but has been much changed by the infiltration of " young soldiers," and of drafts of conscripts. I am thirty years old ; I was at a public school, and an ancient university. I have all the appropriate academic qualifications, and the odd little military qualifications of O.T.C. experience, and Certificate " A." For all my working life I was a leader-writer on a great national newspaper. I was a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, of the Critics' Circle. My life had been lived, as a journalist's must be, in and on the fringe of big events ; the world I knew was informed (or thought it was), talkative, lively. I was accustomed to seeing my name in print a good deal, attached to articles which I thought were read by a good many people ; every year or eighteen months I saw a book of mine published. I was accustomed, too, to a fairly large income, to a flat in London, and a house in the country.
All that I lost. I cannot see—if I survive—much chance of recapturing it. In the Army I have hankered a good deal. But it would be wrong to think that the props of life are its reality. That rather trite lesson I have learned again. One does not lose the fact of being educated ; one does not lose one's brains, one's taste, one's powers of observation and comment which made one a writer, because of workhouse fatigues and futile guard duty.
Nor—and here John Neill is right—does one lose one's capacity for friendship. Here at least the Army has helped me recapture lost years, given to friendship a lyric and romantic quality that I thought I should never find again this side of eternity. I have known men (in circumstances of suffering and stress) ; I have not made valuable contacts. That, for me, has redeemed the Army life's faults ; the waste, the administrative apathy, the frustration, the appalling inefficiency, the two dreary words which young men use too often, the intrigue for stripes, the lack of intelligence, and the boredom.
It is not enough, surely, to say : look what sacrifices I have made, being in the Army; nor, what shall I get out of the Army? In the near future one must give far more than take. Granted survival, what qualities can one bring to being an officer, and what qualities can one take on into the peace and our country's rebuilding?
Much responsibility, now and later, rests with us who call ourselves educated. We must not run upstairs into the Ivory Tower. As officers, we can use those qualities which the Army neglects—integrity, moral courage, organising talent, tact (the only proper function of a subaltern is to alleviate the follies of his superior officers, as he passes them down to his men). After- wards, if some power and the chance of its use remain to us in a saner peace, we can employ some of those qualities which the Army has retaught us: liking for all kinds of common men, physical toughness and the respect of other men's privacy, honesty, kindness and intellectual humility.—Yours faithfully,
JOHN CONNELL.
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