Three Chapters From ‘No Joke’.
“ When the Captain says ‘Advance’, it may be like this and it may be like that. It’s just according. But you haven’t only got one thing to remember – whatever happens, you don’t need never to get alarmed.”
FROM THE WISDOM OF LANCE-CORPORAL PAKE.
It is a time-honoured assumption that in war all good soldiers laugh at Danger. What is more, it is a true assumption : but, all soldiers not being madmen, they only laugh at danger when the danger is past. The risks of war, that is to say, are a joke to soldiers – when there is no longer any risk. That is a fact not due to any weakness in the character of the soldier but rather to the nature of laughter. To laugh is “to express mirth or joy by an explosive inarticulate sound of the voice and peculiar facial distortion.” The explosive sounds of war are sufficiently articulate – in a sense of distinct or clear – to prevent soldiers from feeling any overriding jollity or gladness at the sound of them.
There are of course, exceptions. There are exceptional men and exceptional circumstances. The exceptional men will welcome peril, hazard, risk and insecurity – danger for danger’s sake. “Which,” as V. Hugo says, “is senseless” ; but which (as soldiers know) is a very gallant, inspiring thing to have seen in other soldiers. So inspiring a thing is it that on exceptional occasions, or perhaps only on some exceptional occasion, every wartime soldier will himself have welcomed danger – and be glad to remember, afterwards, that he did so welcome it . “I never make a mistake in Business”, said a man to me not long ago, “without being glad to remember that, after all, I was at the battle of Loos.” Well, he had just made a mistake which had practically wrecked the Business : so the battle of Loos was a help to somebody, after all. but the fact remains that laughter is one of “The very privileges of Reason, being confined to the human species” : and very few human beings see any reason to laugh at danger in actual time of danger.
Of course, they may laugh without reason and with a mirth which is only apparent. Indeed, the soldier of experience knows that that is one of the first things to be watched for (and immediately suppressed) in other soldiers. Some of those other soldiers may come to laugh a little too often at the sound of a bursting shell and the thunder of bombardment. That is a laughter of hysteria, ending in hysterics ; and a soldier (who mustn’t have hysterics) must be prevented from laughing at the noise of battle so uproariously that he finally can’t join in the battle at all. for we must all admit that a battle is dangerous. That is were the Objector misses the whole point. The joke is that the Conscientious Objector gets off military service by his conscientious objection to killing people – when the fact and the only appreciable danger is that the Conscientious Objector himself may be killed is he goes to a war. Too many men are killed in a war – so very many that the addition of another Objector or two would be, it is sometimes felt, neither here nor there – but at the end of a war the percentage of men of the Fighting Troops who have consciously killed a man in battle, is infintesimal. Any really enterprising Insurance Company would ensure a Conscientious Objector against killing a man in battle. That’s nothing. It’s when the Company extends his Life Policy to cover the war risk that a Conscientious Objector may (if without exuberance) pat himself on the back.
But after the danger is over – then a man may laugh. I, for example, will laugh to think of that day when everything went wrong, and when, just as it was getting dark - But you will not require of me my little personal jokes. For all those are jokes of which each and every man will have his own store. Besides, you might think I was being hysterical.
“If soldiers in wartime must have their little jokes at the expense of Authority, they are not without Entertainment officially provided by Authority itself.”
PROFUNDITIES OF WAR.
I should suppose that in all officially promoted relaxations of war there will necessarily be something of this “gives a joke” atmosphere. Where the formation of ‘Concert Parties’ and suchlike chiefly springs from a compassionate anxiety to bring spiritual relief to the soldier, there we find the soldier getting most relief. When, in the starting of those Troupes to amuse the Troops, we find chiefly a matter-of-fact, keep-the-men-fit, direction, then the soldier finds it more difficult to laugh. But all this will be stale talk to an army of to-day – an army grown ‘more human,’ and an army in which the Jokers of the packs are accorded their proper importance. Indeed, in the army of to-day, soldiers will sometimes wonder whether the Joker element is not being overdone, whether a soldier’s playtime is not being so fully provided for that there are no times left for soldiering. And some soldiers –so some soldiers tell us – spend so much time preparing to use their spare time to the best advantage, that, when their spare time comes, their only thought is to get leave off the entertainment provided. But I do not suppose that soldiers are yet given so many jokes that they can’t see the fun of it. I merely suppose that it is intensely annoying if, when a soldier wants five men and a boy to practise a bayonet charge, he finds that every man in the place is rehearsing for the Tattoo.
Yet if it be true (as I think it is not ) that a soldier of to-day has his spare time so highly organized that he has no time to spare – then my sympathy is with the soldier of to-day, remembering the soldier of yesterday. For there were wartimes when a soldier was given his jokes as he was given his rations – to keep him fit. There were active-minded young Commanders (somewhat new to Commanding) who would stir out tired men to attend a wartime concert, just because it was down in their book that commanders should organise concerts. Or, at any rate, there was one such Commander. Unfortunately he only organised the audience: and tired men, dragged away from sleep to sit in the darkness of a draughty barn, discovered that having provided the audience they had now, themselves, to provide the concert. A concert is ‘union or agreement in any undertaking,’ and those soldiers were so united in sulphurous agreement as to the nature of this undertaking, that any little short-fall in the harmony of that evening was perhaps compensated by that.
And occasionally in those wartimes the jokes given were given rather a long way off. I myself once gave up my place at a war concert to attend which it was necessary to cross a mountain range and walk four miles through a bog. Calculating that our share of the audience would by now be about half-way through the bog on the backward journey, I lay snugly under my bivouac sheets and listened to the rain a-pelting down. And suddenly I felt very cold – colder than a man who lies in a glow of unselfishness should be feeling. Then I found that I was lying in a pool of rainwater. Then I dropped my book in the pool. Then the candle fell over and vanished. An hour later the rain stopped, and as I squatted there, wringing out my rain-sopped pyjamas in the moonlight, the voices of returning concert-goers were bourne down from the mountain pass – chanting that This was the End of a Perfect Day “when you are sitting alone with your thought.” My own least blasphemous thought was that when the army gives you a joke it may be advisable and necessary to go across a mountain range to see it.
And some of those wartime entertainments were worth seeing. Of the grand entertainments, given somewhere near the Front by real, professional, entertainers, I can only remember two. After the first of theses all the soldier audience wanted to know why the men professionals were not in the army. After the second they said the ladies were not very good in the men’s part they had taken. It was not ingratitude (and at the same time they gave ample and kindly applause). It was the obvious criticism. Entertainment near the Front was best left to the soldiers themselves. For when he is up against it (very near the front), the soldier must see the actor who is only an actor as something less than a man. And the woman who is trying to be ‘a man’ will seem to fail in the attempt.
Were those soldier entertainments really as well worth seeing as they seemed to be at the time? At the time they seemed to be marvels of thrills, pathos, wit, harmony, and all the other things which in song and sketch they were meant to be. If three or four times (only) in your life you have been to the theatre and come away feeling that here and there had the very highest been touched, then one of those times may well have been at a soldiers’ show in a wartime. If you were to go back to wartime now : if you could walk straight into a soldiers’ show, putting the clock of years back, would you count it still amongst the four? I do not know. There is too much to put back with the years – those years which the locusts have eaten. The Players – them we may put back, so disguised in their grease-paint and wigs and contraptions that we forget until after the Play that they are soldiers, too. But the audience we cannot restore. And the audience, now we come to think of it, was always an essential part of those soldier shows, for any member of the audience. As to audience, I will go to London theatre with you and I will agree that we could do, well, without the rest of the audience. Sometimes, when your laughter is of a high-pitched kind or your comments are full and frequent – sometimes I will even think that we could do without you, who sit beside me. But that is in your London theatre : in those soldier shows the audience would often be the better part of a really good show.
And that audience we cannot restore. For your Waterloo Ball may be a myth, but of that war this is true - that there were parties and audiences and that interruption of war made gaps in every audience and that memory boggles at filling those gaps. I do not think that we will try to put back that audience. I think that we will act sensible. “Act sensible” – and remember only that they laughed, care-free, at those concert parties, and were happy and jolly and gay.
“And they asked saying, ‘What’s the joke?’ Now, there was no joke”
THE PARABLE OF HESTON KOSH
Mirth and laughter, wit and humour – none of these made war bearable. That is not the suggestion. The suggestion, rather, is that too many jokes would have made it impossible ; and that if ‘Objectors’ of all nations had had the wit (and- as the saying goes – the guts) to go to war in army-corps of humorists, being funny, nobody could have gone on fighting.
….
Too many jokes would make war impossible – and so only just enough jokes were permitted by gods of war, just enough to make moments and hours bearable. There were jokes, it is true, which lasted us for years – but they were used at intervals, widely spaced. And what did we laugh at? What was the joke? Well, the funny thing was that the joke itself changed. At first we laughed at our own extreme incompetence, and, rather more heartily, at the incompetence of our neighbour. We laughed at pictures of soldiers who were wrongly dressed and who did the wrong things. We laughed, in a pleasant way, at children who caught at the soldiers’ tricks and pretended, themselves, to be soldiers. We laughed at sentries who let sham-fight enemies pass them by without challenge – and we laughed at young officers, opposing, with meager troop or platoon, whole armies of sham-fight Enemy. And we laughed a great deal at real Enemies – made to look so ridiculous…in the pictures.
And one and all, became No Joke. Incompetence was no joke when (other) people got killed by incompetence. It was no joke when the children, growing old enough, really did go away to war ; and not much of a joke when soldiers who were little more than children came out to join in the War. When the casual sentry became a casualty and the young officer in some sort of a hero, holding a whole army, contrary to all the rules, with meager platoon and troop – well, there wasn’t much fun in that. But the Funny enemy Joke died soonest, I think. Yet I remember an attempt to revive that joke, as I remember its dismal failure. Why he ever attempted it was a mystery – but he was speaking to troops come to the West from two years of more Eastern warfare : and there was a notion (in the West) that war in the East was, if not in all respects a joke, yet no exactly war. And so he decided to give them his contempt-for-the-enemy speech “You men” he announced to an assembled brigade, in his best, moral-raising vein “must remember that your enemy is only the sort of waiter-fellow to whom you used to give six-pences for handing you your hat from a London cloakroom.” Of course, the suggestion might have carried more weight if half his countrymen-audience had ever been to London or had ever possessed enough six-pences to splash about in cloak-rooms. But the general opinion among his audience was that the most knock-kneed of cloak-room attendants is bound to be something of a nuisance when supplied with a rifle, bayonet, sackful of bombs and a creeping barrage.
It was not, however, a one-sided suggestion. When that army, in its unhumorous way, marched through and on to that other side, the joke was there too – painted on a wall – the joke as seen from the other side. There was a long and ugly Englishman painted on that wall, with his allies lined up behind him. The artist had shown the Englishman and his allies in unavailing tug-of-war – all pulling against he representative of that artist’s own nation. But in spite of the fact that the artist had shown the Englishman in ludicrous black-and-white-check cap and yellow breeches the picture wasn’t really funny – or it was no longer funny enough to persuade that artist’s countrymen to stop where the picture was, and to compare the incoming Englishman with his own picture.
….
In no war have both sides been able to laugh at one and the same time. – but in that war even the whole of one side couldn’t be laughing all at the same time, nor at the same joke. To soldiers coming home on leave it was sometimes sobering and sometimes infuriating to find that there were people still laughing at things found no longer funny at the Front. To people at home it will often have been distressing, I think, when soldiers from the Front laughed as they sat at home. “Their home-treasured sayings and laughter” - Their war-treasured sayings and laughter : which of us, even now, turning over the jokes of war, will not be compelled to turn some pages more quickly than others, as memory stirs within us?
Yet it is no unreasonable to hope that before very long a People looking at war pictures will crack their sides with laughter. Already the pictures of pre-historic man, bashing his foe with a club, can be made to appear not unhumorous to us. Yet we must surely suppose that it was No joke to be bashed with a club?
War itself will remain no joke ; but we may hope that the very thought of making war will come to seem inexpressibly ludicrous. And the Old Soldier will laugh with the rest of you and the best of you. And if you are no longer able to laugh at the old soldier, his jokes – will the old soldier mind? I do not think so. The funny things of Thermopylae, the jokes of Waterloo, the jests which made war-life bearable from Beersheba unto Loos – it will not much matter to old soldiers if such things seem no longer funny to a world which sees war as ridiculous.