“It’s sad to give the last hand-shake,It’s sad the last long kiss to take,It’s sad to say farewell.”
“It’s sad to give the last hand-shake,It’s sad the last long kiss to take,It’s sad to say farewell.”
The entertainment draws to its close about 8 o’clock. Men go to bed betimes who know that a bugle will sound the reveille at 5.30 in the morning. The end of the entertainment is planned to allow time for a final cup of tea or a glass of Horlick’s Malted Milk before we go out to flounder through the mud to our tents.
This last half-hour is a busy one for the ladies behind the counter in the outer hall. Long queues of men stand waiting to be served. Dripping cups and sticky buns are passed to them with inconceivable rapidity. The work is done at high pressure, but with the tea and the food the men receive something else, something they pay no penny for, something the value of which to themis above all measuring with pennies—the friendly smile, the kindly word of a woman. We can partly guess at what these ladies have given up at home to do this work—servile, sticky, dull work—for men who are neither kith nor kin to them. No one will ever know the amount of good they do; without praise, pay, or hope of honour, often without thanks. If “the actions of the just smell sweet and blossom,” surely these deeds of love and kindness have a fragrance of surpassing sweetness.
Perhaps, after all, the hut is well named “Woodbine,” and others might be called “Rose,” “Violet,” “Lily.” The discerning eye sees the flowers through the mist of steaming tea. We catch the perfume while we choke in the reek of tobacco smoke, damp clothes, and heated bodies.
The British part of the war area in France is dotted over with huts more or less like the “Woodbine.” They are owned, I suppose, certainly run, by half a dozen different organisations. I understand that the Church Army is now very energetic in building huts, but when I first went to France by far the greater part of the work was done by the Y.M.C.A.
The idea—the red triangle is supposedto be symbolical—is to minister to the needs of the three parts of man—body, mind, and soul. At the bar which stands at one end of the hut men buy food, drink (strictly non-alcoholic), and tobacco. In the body of the room men play draughts, chess, anything except cards, read papers and write letters. Often there are concerts and lectures. Sometimes there are classes which very few men attend. So the mind is cared for.
The atmosphere is supposed to be religious, and the men recognise the fact by refraining from the use of their favourite words even when no lady worker is within earshot. The talk in a Y.M.C.A. hut is sometimes loud. The laughter is frequent. But a young girl might walk about invisible among the men without hearing an expression which would shock her, so long as she remained inside the four walls.
There are also supposed to be prayers every night and there is a voluntary service, of a very free and easy kind, on Sunday evenings. Those evening prayers, theoretically a beautiful and moving ending to the day’s labour, were practically a very difficult business. I have been in huts when the first hint of prayers, the production of a bundle of hymn-books,was the signal for a stampede of men. By the time the pianist was ready to play the hut was empty, save for two or three unwilling victims who had been cornered by an energetic lady.
In the early days the “leader” of the hut was generally a young man of the kind who would join a Christian Association in the days before the war, and the lady workers, sometimes, but not always, were of the same way of thinking. They were desperately in earnest about prayers and determined, though I think unfair ways were adopted, to secure congregations. A concert drew a crowded audience, and it seemed desirable to attach prayers to the last item of the performance so closely that there was no time to escape.
I remember scenes, not without an element of comedy in them, but singularly unedifying. A young lady, prettily dressed and pleasant to look at, recited a poem about a certain “nursie” who in the course of her professional duties tended one “Percy.” In the second verse nursie fell in love with Percy, and, very properly, Percy with her. In the third verse they were married. In the fourth verse we came on nursie nursing (business here by the reciter as if holdinga baby) “another little Percy.” The audience shouts with laughter, yells applause, and wants to encore. The hut leader seizes his opportunity, announces prayers, and the men, choking down their giggles over nursie, find themselves singing “When I survey the wondrous cross.”
My own impression is that prayers cannot with decency follow hard on a Y.M.C.A. concert. The mind and soul sides of the red triangle seem to join at an angle which is particularly aggressive. The body side, on the other hand, works in comparatively comfortably with both. Tea and cake have long had a semi-sacramental value in some religious circles, and the steam of cocoa or hot malted milk blends easily with the hot air of a “Nursie-Percy” concert or the serener atmosphere of “Abide with Me.”
Yet I am convinced that the evening-prayers idea is a good one and it can be worked successfully for the benefit of many men. I have seen the large hall of one of those Y.M.C.A. huts well filled night after night for evening prayers, and those were not only men who remained in the hall drinking tea or playing games, but many others who came in specially for prayers. A choir gathered round the piano, eager tosing the evening hymn. The hush during the saying of a few simple prayers was unmistakably devotional. It was impossible to doubt that when the benediction fell upon those bowed heads there did abide something of the peace which passeth all understanding and that hearts were lifted up unto the Lord.
There was, unfortunately, a certain amount of jealousy at one time between the Y.M.C.A. workers and the recognised army chaplains. I think that this is passing away. But when I first went to France the relations between the two organisations in no way suggested the ointment which ran down Aaron’s beard to the skirts of his garment, the Psalmist’s symbol of the unity in which brethren dwelt together.
The Y.M.C.A. workers were perhaps a little prickly. The men among them, often Free Church ministers, seemed on the lookout for the sort of snubs which Nonconformists often receive from the Anglican clergy at home. The chaplains, especially the Church of England chaplains, appeared to think that they ought to conduct all religious services in the Y.M.C.A. huts. This was unreasonable. If the Church of England had been awake to her opportunityin the early days of the war she could have built church huts all over northern France and run them on her own lines. She missed her chance, not having among her leaders any man of the energy and foresight of Sir A. Yapp.
The Church Army has done much during the last years; but it has been the making up of leeway. The Church once might have occupied the position held by the Y.M.C.A. She failed to rise to the occasion. Her officers, the military chaplains, had no fair cause of complaint when they found that they could not straightway enter into the fruits of other men’s labour.
But the little jealousy which existed between the chaplains and the Y.M.C.A. was passing away while I was in France, has now, perhaps, entirely disappeared. The war has done little good, that I ever could discover, to any one, but it has delivered the souls of the Church of England clergy who went out to France from the worst form of ecclesiastical snobbery. There are few of those who tried to work in the army who preserve the spirit of social superiority which has had a good deal to do with the dislike of the Church, which has been I imagine, a much more effective causeof “our unhappy divisions” than any of the doctrines men have professed to quarrel about.
And the Y.M.C.A. workers are less aggressively prickly than they used to be. The army authorities have weeded out a good many of the original men workers, young students from Free Church theological colleges, and put them into khaki. Their places have been taken by older men, of much larger experience of life, less keen on making good the position of a particular religious denomination. They are often glad to hand over their strictly religious duties to any chaplain who will do them efficiently.
The women workers, a far more numerous class, never were so difficult, from the Church of England chaplain’s point of view, as the men. They are, in the fullest sense, voluntary workers. They even pay all their own expense, lodging, board, and travelling. They must be women of independent means. I do not know why it is, but well-off people are seldom as eager about emphasising sectarian differences as those who have to work for small incomes. Perhaps they have more chance of getting interested in other things.
It is, I fear, true that the decay of thesectarian—that is to say undenominational—spirit in the Y.M.C.A. has resulted in a certain blurring of the “soul” side of the red triangle. This has been a cause of uneasiness to the society’s authorities at home, and various efforts have been made to stimulate the spiritual work of the huts and to inquire into the causes of its failure. I am inclined to think that the matter is quite easily understood. There is less aggressive religiosity in Y.M.C.A. huts than there used to be, because the society is more and more drawing its workers from a class which instinctively shrinks from slapping a strange man heartily on the back and greeting him with the inquiry—“Tommy, how’s your soul?” There is no need for anxiety about the really religious work of the huts. That in most places is being done.
“Y.S.C.” stands for Young Soldiers’ Club, an institution which had a short, but, I think, really useful existence in the large camp where I was first stationed. There were in that camp large numbers of boys—at one time nearly a thousand of them—all enlisted under age in the early days of the recruiting movement, all of them found by actual trial or judged beforehand to be unfit for the hardship of life in the trenches. They were either sent down from their battalions to the base or were stopped on the way up. For some time their number steadily increased. Like the children of Israel in Egypt, who also multiplied rapidly, they became a nuisance to the authorities.
Their existence in the camp was a standing menace to discipline. Officially they were men to be trained, fed, lodged, if necessary punished according to the scheme designed for and in the main suitable to men. Inreality they were boys, growing boys, some of them not sixteen years of age, a few—the thing seems almost incredible—not fifteen. How the recruiting authorities at home ever managed to send a child of less than fifteen out to France as a fighting man remains mysterious. But they did.
These were besides boys of a certain particularly difficult kind. It is not your “good” boy who rushes to the recruiting office and tells a lie about his age. It is not the gentle, amiable, well-mannered boy who is so enthusiastic for adventure that he will leave his home and endure the hardships of a soldier’s life for the sake of seeing fighting. These boys were for the most part young scamps, and some of them had all the qualities of the guttersnipe, but they had the makings of men in them if properly treated.
The difficulty was to know how to treat them. No humane C.O. wants to condemn a mischievous brat of a boy to Field Punishment No. 1. Most C.O.’s., even most sergeants, know that punishment of that kind, however necessary for a hardened evildoer of mature years, is totally unsuitable for a boy. At the same time if any sort of discipline is to be preserved, a boy, who mustofficially be regarded as a man, cannot be allowed to cheek a sergeant or flatly to refuse to obey orders. That was the military difficulty.
The social and moral difficulty was, if anything, worse. Those boys were totally useless to the army where they were, stuck in a large camp. They were learning all sorts of evil and very little good. They were a nuisance to the N.C.O.’s and men, among whom they lived, and were bullied accordingly. They were getting no education and no suitable physical training. They were in a straight way to be ruined instead of made.
It was an Irish surgeon who realised the necessity for doing something for these boys and set about the task. I do not suppose that he wants his name published or his good deeds advertised. I shall call him J. He was a typical Irishman—in looks, manner, and character one of the most Irishmen I have ever met. He had a wonderful talent for dealing with young animals. The very first time I met him he took me to see a puppy, a large, rather savage-looking creature which he kept in a stable outside the camp. One of the creature’s four grandparents had been a wolf.J. hoped to make the puppy a useful member of society.
“I am never happy,” he said, “unless I have some young thing to train—dog, horse, anything. That’s the reason I’m so keen on doing something for these boys.”
J. had no easy job when he took up the cause of the boys. It was not that he had to struggle against active opposition. There was no active opposition. Every one wanted to help. The authorities realised that something ought to be done. What J. was up against was system, the fact that he and the boys and the authorities and every one of us were parts of a machine and the wheels of the thing would only go round one way.
Trying to get anything of an exceptional kind done in the army is like floundering in a trench full of sticky mud—one is inclined sometimes to say sticky muddle—surrounded by dense entanglements of barbed red-tape. You track authority from place to place, finding always that the man you want, the ultimate person who can actually give the permission you require, lies just beyond. If you are enormously persevering, and, nose to scent, you hunt on for years, you find yourself at last back with the man from whom you started, having made a fullcircle of all the authorities there are. Then, if you like, you can start again.
I do not know how J. managed the early stages of the business. He had made a good start long before I joined him. But only an Irishman, I think, could have done the thing at all. Only an Irishman is profane enough to mock at the great god System, the golden image before which we are all bidden to fall down and worship “what time we hear the sound of” military music. Only an Irishman will venture light-heartedly to take short cuts through regulations. It is our capacity for doing things the wrong way which makes us valuable to the Empire, and they ought to decorate us oftener than they do for our insubordination.
There was an Irishman, so I am told, in the very early days of the war who created hospital trains for our wounded by going about the French railways at night with an engine and seizing waggons, one at this station, one at that. He bribed the French station masters who happened to be awake. It was a lawless proceeding, but, thanks to him, there were hospital trains. An Englishman would have written letters about the pressing need and there would not havebeen hospital trains for a long time. J. did nothing like that. There was no need for such violence. Both he and the boys had good friends. Every one wanted to help, and in the end something got done.
A scheme of physical training was arranged for the boys and they were placed under the charge of special sergeants. Their names were registered. I think they were “plotted” into a diagram and exhibited in curves, which was not much use to them, but helped to soothe the nerves of authorities. To the official mind anything is hallowed when it is reduced to curves. The boys underwent special medical examinations, were weighed and tested at regular intervals. Finally a club was established for them.
At that point the Y.M.C.A. came to our aid. It gave us the use of one of the best buildings in the camp, originally meant for an officers’ club. It was generous beyond hope. The house was lighted, heated, furnished, in many ways transformed, at the expense of the Y.M.C.A. We were supplied with a magic-lantern, books, games, boxing gloves, a piano, writing-paper, everything we dared to ask for. Without the help of the Y.M.C.A. that club could never have come into existence. And the associationdeserves credit not only for generosity in material things, but for its liberal spirit. The club was not run according to Y.M.C.A. rules, and was an embarrassing changeling child in their nursery, just as it was a suspicious innovation under the military system.
We held an opening meeting, and the colonel—one of our most helpful friends—agreed to give the boys an address. I wonder if any other club opened quite as that one. In our eagerness to get to work we took possession of our club house before it was ready for us. There was no light. There was almost no furniture. There was no organisation. We had very little in the way of settled plan. But we had boys, eight or nine hundred of them, about double as many as the largest room in the building would hold.
They were marched down from their various camps by sergeants. For the most part they arrived about an hour before the proper time. The sergeants, quite reasonably, considered that their responsibility ended when the boys passed through the doors of the club. The boys took the view that at that moment their opportunity began.
They rioted. Every window in the place was shattered. Everything else breakable—fortunately there was not much—was smashed into small bits. A Y.M.C.A. worker, a young man lent to us for the occasion, and recommended as experienced with boys’ clubs in London, fled to a small room and locked himself in. The tumult became so terrific that an officer of high standing and importance, whose office was in the neighbourhood, sent an orderly to us with threats. It was one of the occasions on which it is good to be an Irishman. We have been accustomed to riots all our lives, and mind them less than most other people. We know—this is a fact which Englishmen find it difficult to grasp—that cheerful rioters seldom mean to do any serious mischief.
Yet, I think, even J.’s heart must have failed him a little. Very soon the colonel, who was to open the club with his address, would arrive. He was the best and staunchest of friends. He had fought battles for the club and patiently combated the objections in high quarters. But he did like order and discipline.
It was one of our fixed principles, about the only fixed principle we had at first, that the club was to be run by moral influence,not by means of orders and threats. Our loyalty to principle was never more highly tried. It seems almost impossible to bring moral influence to bear effectively when you cannot make yourself heard and cannot move about. Yet, somehow, a kind of order was restored; and there was no uncertainty about the cheers with which the colonel was greeted when he entered the room. The boys in the other rooms who could not see him cheered frantically. The boys on the balcony, the boys standing in the window frames, all cheered. They asked nothing better than to be allowed to go on cheering.
With the colonel were one or two other officers, our benefactor, the local head of the Y.M.C.A., and a solitary lady, Miss N. I do not know even now how she got there or why she came, but she was not half an hour in the room before we realised that she was the woman, the one woman in the whole world, for our job. Miss N. was born to deal with wild boys. The fiercer they are the more she loves them, and the wickeder they are the more they love her. We had a struggle to get Miss N. Oddly enough she did not at first want to come to the club, being at the time deeply attached to somedock labourers among whom she worked in a slum near the quay. The Y.M.C.A.—she belonged to them—did not want to part with her. But we got her in the end, and she became mistress, mother, queen of the club.
The colonel’s speech was a success, a thing which seemed beforehand almost beyond hope. He told those boys the naked truth about themselves, what they were, what they had been, and what they might be. They listened to him. I found out later on that those boys would listen to straight talk on almost any subject, even themselves. Also that they would not listen to speech-making of the ordinary kind. I sometimes wonder what will happen when they become grown men and acquire votes. How will they deal with the ordinary politician?
I cherish vivid recollections of the early days of the club. I think of J., patient and smiling, surrounded by a surging crowd of boys all clamouring to talk to him about this or that matter of deep interest to them. J. had an extraordinary faculty for winning the confidence of boys.
There were evenings, before the electric light was installed and before we had anychairs, when Miss N. sat on the floor and played draughts with boys by the light of a candle standing in its own grease. I have seen her towed by the skirt through the rooms of the club by a boy whom the others called “Darkie,” an almost perfect specimen of the London gutter snipe. There was a day when her purse was stolen. But I think the rest of the club would have lynched the thief if they could have caught him.
There were wild boxing bouts which went on in pitch darkness, after the combatants had trampled on the candle. There was one evening when I came on a boy lying flat on his back on the floor hammering the keys of the piano, our new piano, with the heels of his boots. The tuner told me afterwards that he broke seventeen strings.
But we settled down by degrees. We had lectures every afternoon which were supposed to be—I think actually were—of an educative kind. Attendance at these lectures was compulsory. The boys were paraded and marched to the club. As we had not space in our lecture room for more than half our members, we had one set of boys on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, another on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Each lecturer delivered himself twice.
The business of keeping up a supply of lectures was not so difficult as we expected. Officers were very kind and offered us the most amazing collection of subjects. The secretary of many a literary society at home would be envious of our list. We accepted every offer we got, no matter how inappropriate the subject seemed to be.
It was impossible to tell beforehand which lectures would be popular and which would fail. Military subjects were of course common. We had “The Navy” with lantern slides. M. gave that lecture, but all his best slides were banned by the censor, for fear, I suppose, that we might have a German spy among us and that he would telegraph to Berlin a description of a light cruiser if M. exhibited one upon the screen. We had “Men who have won the V.C.” with lantern slides. That was, as was expected, a success. But we also had “Napoleon’s Campaigns” by a Cambridge professor of history, illustrated by nothing better than a few maps drawn on a blackboard. To our amazement that was immensely popular. We had “How an Army is fed,” by an A.S.C. officer, the only lecture which produced a vigorous discussion afterwards.
But we did not confine ourselves to militarysubjects. We had lectures on morals, which were sometimes a little confusing. One lecturer, I remember, starting from the fact that the boys had misstated their ages to the recruiting officers when they enlisted, hammered home the fact that all lies are disgraceful, and therefore our boys ought to be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Another lecturer, a month later, starting from the same fact, took the line that it was possible to besplendide mendax, and that we had good reason to be extremely proud all our lives of the lie told in the recruiting office.
Manners are more or less connected with morals, and we had lectures on manners; that is to say, on saluting, which is the beginning and ending of good manners in the army. A good many civilians, especially those of the intellectual “conchie” kind, are inclined to smile at the importance soldiers attach to saluting. Our lecturer convinced me—I hope he convinced the rest of his audience—that saluting is something more than a piece of tiresome ritual, that it is the external expression of certain very great ideas.
Occasionally, but not often, we were in difficulties about our lectures. Some one athome sent us a present of a beautiful set of lantern slides, illustrating a tour in Egypt. They were such fine slides that it seemed a pity to waste them. But for a long time we could not find any one who knew enough about Egypt to attempt a verbal accompaniment of the slides.
At last we got a volunteer. He said frankly that he did not know half the places we had pictures of, but offered to do his best. He did exceedingly well with the places he did know, making the tombs of the ancient Pharaohs quite interesting to the boys. But he was a conscientious man. He refused to invent history to suit strange pictures. When anything he did not recognise was thrown on the screen he dismissed it rapidly. “This,” he would say, “is another tomb, probably of another king,” or “This is a camel standing beside a ruined archway.” Every one was thoroughly satisfied.
We had another set of slides which gave us some trouble, a series of pictures of racing yachts under sail. I had to take those on myself, and I was rather nervous. I need not have been. The boys in that club were capable of taking an interest in any subject under the sun. Before I got to the last slide the audience was ready to shout thename of every sail on a racing cutter, and could tell without hesitation whether a yacht on a run was carrying her spinnaker on the port or starboard hand. They say that all knowledge is useful. I hope that it is.
Once or twice a lecturer failed us at the last moment without giving us notice. Then J. and I had to run an entertainment of an instructive kind extempore. J. was strong on personal hygiene. He might start with saluting or the theft of Miss N.’s purse, our great club scandal, but he worked round in the end to soap and tooth brushes. My own business, if we were utterly driven against the wall, was to tell stories.
The most remarkable and interesting lecture we ever had was given on one of those emergency occasions by one of our members. He volunteered an account of his experiences in the trenches. He cannot have been much more than seventeen years old, and ought never to have been in the trenches. He was undersized and, I should say, of poor physique. If the proper use of the letter “h” in conversation is any test of education, this boy must have been very little educated. His vocabulary was limited, and many of the words he did use are notto be found in dictionaries. But he stood on the platform and for half an hour told us what he had seen, endured, and felt, with a straightforward simplicity which was far more effective than any art. He disappeared from our midst soon afterwards, and I have never seen him since. I would give a good deal now to have a verbatim report of that lecture of his.
When the lecture of the afternoon was over, the club amused itself. Attendance was no longer compulsory. Boys came and went as they chose. Order was maintained and enforced by a committee of the boys themselves. It met once a week, and of all the committees I have ever known that one was the most rigidly businesslike. I cannot imagine where the secretary gained his experience of the conduct of public business; but his appeals to the chair when any one wandered from the subject under discussion were always made with reason, and he understood the difference between an amendment and a substantive resolution.
The only difficulty we ever had with that committee arose from its passion for making rules. Our idea for the management of the club was to have as few rules as possible. The committee, if unchecked, would haveout-Heroded the War Office itself in multiplying regulations. I am inclined to think that it is a mistake to run institutions on purely democratic lines, not because reasonable liberty would degenerate into licence, but because there would be no liberty at all. If democracy ever comes to its own, and the will of the people actually prevails, we may all find ourselves so tied up with laws regulating our conduct that we will wish ourselves back under the control of a tyrant.
It was during those hours of recreation that Miss N. reigned over the club. She ran a canteen for the boys, boiling eggs, serving tea, cocoa, malted milk, bread-and-butter, and biscuits. She played games. She started and inspired sing-songs. She listened with sympathy which was quite unaffected to long tales of wrongs suffered, of woes and of joys. She was never without a crowd of boys round her, often clinging to her, and the offers of help she received must have been embarrassing to her.
Miss N. had a little room of her own in the club. She furnished it very prettily, and we used to pretend to admire the view from the windows. Once we tried to persuade an artist who happened to be in camp to make a sketch from that window.The artist shrank from the task. The far background was well enough, trees on the side of a hill; but the objects in the middle distance were a railway line and a ditch full of muddy water. In the foreground there were two incinerators, a dump of old tins, and a Salvation Army hut. I dare say the artist was right in shrinking from the subject.
In that little room of hers, Miss N. had tea parties every day before the afternoon lecture. I was often there. Sometimes I brought M. with me. Always there were boys, as many as the room would hold, often more than it held comfortably.Pain d’épiceis not my favourite food in ordinary life, but I ate it with delight in that company. No one, on this side of the grave, will ever know how much Miss N. did for those boys in a hundred ways. I feebly guess, because I know what her friendship meant to me. I was, I know, a trial to her. My lax churchmanship must have shocked her. My want of energy must have annoyed her. But she remained the most loyal of fellow-workers.
There were breakfast-parties, as well as tea-parties, in Miss N.’s room on Sunday mornings. We had a celebration of the Holy Communion at 6 o’clock and afterwardswe breakfasted with Miss N. The memory of one Sunday in particular remains with me. On Easter Sunday in 1915 I celebrated on board theLusitania, a little way outside the harbour of New York, the congregation kneeling among the arm-chairs and card-tables of the great smoke-room on the upper deck. In 1916 I read the same office in the class-room of the Y.S.C., with a rough wooden table for an altar, a cross made by the camp carpenter and two candles for furniture, and boys, confirmed ten days before, they and Miss N., for congregation. Afterwards, in her little room, we had the happiest of all our parties. Surely our Easter eggs were good to eat.
I have written of the members of the Y.S.C. as boys. They were boys, but every now and then one or another turned out to be very much a man in experience. There was one whom I came to know particularly well. He had been “up the line” and fought. He had been sent down because at the age of eighteen he could not stand the strain.
I was present in our little military church when he was baptized, and on the same afternoon confirmed by Bishop Bury. I gave him his confirmation card and advisedhim to send it home to his mother for safety. “I think, sir,” he said, “that I would rather send it to my wife.” He was a fellow-citizen of mine, born and bred in Belfast. We Ulstermen are a forward and progressive people.
In the camp in which I was first stationed there was a story current which must, I think, have had a real foundation in fact. It was told in most messes, and each mess claimed the hero of it as belonging to its particular camp. It told of a man who believed that the place in which we were was being continuously and severely shelled by the Germans. He is reported to have said that war was not nearly so dangerous a thing as people at home believed, for our casualties were extraordinarily few. Indeed, there were no casualties at all, and the shelling to which he supposed himself to be subjected was the most futile thing imaginable.
A major, a draft-conducting officer, who happened to be with us one day when this story was told, improved on it boldly.
“As we marched in from the steamer to-day,” he said, “we passed a large field onthe right of the road about a mile outside the camp—perhaps you know it?”
“Barbed wire fence across the bottom of it,” I said, “and then a ditch.”
“Exactly,” said the major. “Well, one of the N.C.O.’s in my draft, quite an intelligent man, asked me whether that was the firing line and whether the ditch was the enemy’s trench. He really thought the Germans were there, a hundred yards from the road we were marching along.”
I daresay the original story was true enough. Even the major’s improved version of it may conceivably have been true. The ordinary private, and indeed the ordinary officer, when he first lands in France, has the very vaguest idea of the geography of the country or the exact position of the place in which he finds himself. For all he knows he may be within a mile or two of Ypres. And we certainly lived in that camp with the sounds of war in our ears. We had quite near us a——Perhaps even now I had better not say what the establishment was; but there was a great deal of business done with shells, and guns of various sizes were fired all day long. In the camp we heard the explosions of the guns. By going a very little way outside the camp we couldhear the whine of the shells as they flew through the air. We could see them burst near various targets on a stretch of waste marshy ground.
No one could fail to be aware that shells were being fired in his immediate neighbourhood. It was not unnatural for a man to suppose that they were being fired at him. From early morning until dusk squads of men were shooting, singly or in volleys, on two ranges. The crackling noise of rifle fire seldom died wholly away. By climbing the hill on which M. lived, we came close to the schools of the machine gunners, and could listen to the stuttering of their infernal instruments. There was another school near by where bombers practised their craft, making a great deal of noise. So far as sound was concerned, we really might have been living on some very quiet section of the front line.
We were in no peril of life or limb. There were only two ways in which the enemy worried us. His submarines occasionally raided the neighbourhood of our harbour. Then our letters were delayed and our supply of English papers was cut off. And we had Zeppelin scares now and then. I have never gone through a Zeppelin raid, anddo not want to. The threat was quite uncomfortable enough for me.
My first experience of one of these scares was exciting. I had dined, well, at a hospitable mess and retired afterwards to the colonel’s room to play bridge. There were four of us—the colonel, my friend J., the camp adjutant, and myself. On one side of the room stood the colonel’s bed, a camp stretcher covered with army blankets. In a corner stood a washhand-stand, with a real earthenware basin on it. A basin of this sort was a luxury among us. I had a galvanised iron pot and was lucky. Many of us washed in folding canvas buckets. But that colonel did himself well. He had a stove in his room which did not smoke, and did give out some heat, a very rare kind of stove in the army. He had four chairs of different heights and shapes and a table with a dark-red table-cloth. Over our heads was a bright, unshaded electric light. Our game went pleasantly until—the colonel had declared two no-trumps—the light went out suddenly without warning.
The camp adjutant immediately said nasty things about the Royal Engineers, who are responsible for our lights. J. suggested a Zeppelin scare. The colonel, whowanted to play out his hand, shouted for an orderly and light. The orderly brought us a miserably inefficient candle in a stable lantern and set it in the middle of the table. It was just possible to see our cards, and we played on. I remembered Stevenson’s shipwrecked crew who gambled all night on Medway Island by the light of a fire of driftwood. I thought of the men in Hardy’s story who finished their game on the grass by the light of a circle of glow-worms. Our position was uncomfortable but picturesque.
Another orderly came in and said that the camp adjutant was wanted at once in his office. We questioned the man and he confirmed J.’s fear that a Zeppelin scare was in full swing. The adjutant was in the position of dummy at the moment and could be spared. We played on. Then a note was brought to J. He was ordered to report at once at the camp dressing station, and there to stand by for casualties. The colonel picked up the cards and shuffled them thoughtfully. He meant, I think, to propose a game of bezique or picquet. But a note came for him, an order, very urgent, that all lights should immediately be extinguished. He opened the stable lantern and, sighing, blew out our candle.
“One blessing about this Zeppelin business,” said the colonel, “is that I don’t have to turn out the men on parade.”
I was anxious and a little worried because I did not know what my duties were in a crisis of the kind. “I suppose,” I said, “that I ought to stand by somewhere till the show is over.” I looked towards the colonel for advice, locating him in the darkness by the glow of his cigar.
“I advise you to go to bed,” he said. “I mean to. Most likely nothing will happen.”
I felt my way to the door. The colonel, taking me by the arm, guided me out of his camp and set me on the main road which led to my quarters.
I stumbled along through thick darkness, bumping into things which hurt me. I was challenged again and again by sentries, alert and I think occasionally jumpy. One of them, I remember, refused to be satisfied with my reply, though I said “Friend” loudly and clearly. I have never understood why a mere statement of that kind made by a stranger in the dark should satisfy an intelligent sentry. But it generally does.
This particular man—he had only landed from England the day before—took a seriousview of his duty. For all he knew I might have been a Zeppelin commander, loaded with bombs. He ordered me to advance and be examined. I obeyed, of course, and at first thought that he was going to examine me thoroughly, inside and out, with a bayonet. That is what his attitude suggested. I was quite relieved when he marched me into the guard-room and paraded me before the sergeant. The sergeant, fortunately, recognised me and let me go. Otherwise I suppose I should have spent a very uncomfortable night in a cell. I am not at all sure that military law allows a prisoner’s friends to bail him out.
I reached my hut at last and made haste to get into bed. It was a most uncomfortable business. I could not find my toothbrush. I spent a long time feeling about for my pyjamas. I did not dare even to strike a match. An hour later some hilarious subalterns walked along the whole row of huts and lobbed stones on to the roofs. The idea was to suggest to the inmates that bombs were falling in large numbers. It was a well-conceived scheme; for the roofs of those huts were of corrugated iron and the stones made an abominable noise. But I do not think that any one wasdeceived. A major next door to me swore vehemently.
Our French neighbours did not take much notice of these alarms. The row of lamps in the little railway station near the camp shone cheerfully while we were plunged in gloom. The inhabitants of the houses on the hill at the far side of the valley did not even take the trouble to pull down their window blinds. Either the French are much less afraid of Zeppelins than we are or they never heard the alarms which caused us so much inconvenience. These scares became very frequent in the early spring of 1916 and always worried us.
After a while some one started a theory that there never had been any Zeppelins in our neighbourhood and that none were likely to come. It was possible that our local Head-Quarters Staff was simply playing tricks on us. An intelligent staff officer would, in time, be almost sure to think of starting a Zeppelin scare if he had not much to occupy his mind. He would defend his action by saying that an alarm of any kind keeps men alert and is good for discipline.
But staff officers, though skilful in military art, are not always well up in general literature. Ours, perhaps, had never read the“Wolf, wolf,” fable, and did not anticipate the result of their action. As time went on we took less and less notice of the Zeppelin warnings until at last the whole thing became a joke. If a Zeppelin had come to us towards the end of March it would have had the whole benefit of all the lights which shone through our tents and windows, whatever that guidance might be worth.
The Zeppelins which did not come caused us on the whole more annoyance than the submarines which did. It was, of course, irritating when the English post did not arrive at the usual hour. It always did arrive in the end—being carried by some other route, though our own proper steamer neither went in nor out.
But if we, the regular inhabitants of the place, suffered little inconvenience from the submarines, the officers and men who passed through the town on their way home on leave were sometimes held up for days. The congestion became acute. Beds were very difficult to obtain. The officers’ club filled up and the restaurants reaped a harvest.
The authorities on these occasions behave in a peculiarly irritating way. They will not, perhaps cannot, promise that their steamer will sail at any particular hour orindeed on any particular day. Nor will they give an assurance that it will not sail. The eager traveller is expected to sit on his haversack on the quay and watch, day and night, lest the ship of his desire should slip out unknown to him. It is, of course, impossible for any one to do this for very long, and an M.L.O.—M.L.O.’s are sometimes humane men—will drop a hint that the steamer will stay where she is for two or even four hours. Then the watchers make a dash for club, hotel, or restaurant, at their own risk, of course; the M.L.O. gives no kind of promise or guarantee.
There was at that time, probably still is, a small shop not far from Base Head-Quarters which had over its door the words “Mary’s Tea,” in large letters. The name was an inspiration. It suggested “England, home, and beauty,” everything dearest to the heart of the young officer in a strange land. As a matter of fact there was nothing English about the place. The cakes sold were delightfully French. The tea was unmistakably not English. The shop was run by five or six girls with no more than a dozen words of English among them. When the leave boat was held up “Mary’s Tea” was crammed with young officers.
I remember seeing a party of these cheery boys sitting down to a square meal one afternoon. They were still wearing their trench boots and fighting kit. They were on their way home from the front and they were hungry, especially hungry for cakes. There were four of them. “Mary”—they called all the girls Mary, the name of the shop invited that familiarity—brought them tea and a dish piled high with cakes, frothy meringues, pastry sandwiches with custard in the middle, highly ornamental sugary pieces of marzipan, all kinds of delicate confectionery. After the fare of the trenches these were dreams of delight, but not very satisfying. The dish was cleared. The spokesman, the French scholar of the party, demanded more. “Mary”—he did not translate the name into “Marie”—“encore gâteaux, au moins trois douzaine.” Mary, smiling, fetched another dish. I suppose she kept count. I did not, nor I am sure did the feasters. They finished those and repeated the encore. Theau moins trois douzainewas a ridiculous under-estimate of their requirements. It might have been multiplied by five.
In the end there were no moregâteaux. The stock was sold out. It was not a largeshop and many others had drunk tea there that afternoon. The boys paid their bill and left, still astonishingly cheerful. I cannot remember whether the boat sailed that night or not. I hope it did. I hope the sea was rough. I should not like to think that those boys—the eldest of them cannot have been twenty-one—suffered from indigestion during their leave. Nothing but a stormy crossing would have saved them.
If the spirit of the playing fields of our public schools won, as they say, our great-grandfathers’ war, the spirit of the tuck shop is showing up in this one. The lessons learned as boys in those excellent institutions have been carried into France. Tea shops and restaurants at the bases, audaciousestaminetsnear the front, witness to the fact that we wage war with something of the spirit of schoolboys with pocket money to spend on “grub.”
Nobody will grudge our young officers their boyish taste for innocent feasts. It is a boys’ war anyway. Everything big and bright in it, the victories we have won, the cheerfulness and the enduring and the daring, go to the credit of the young. It is the older men who have done the blunderingand made the muddles, whenever there have been blundering and muddles.
“Mary’s Tea” was for officers. The men were invited to “English Soldiers’ Coffee.” It, too, was a tea shop and had a good position in one of the main streets of the town. But the name was not so well devised as Mary’s Tea. It puzzled me for some time and left me wondering what special beverage was sold inside. I discovered at last that “Coffee” was a thoughtful translation ofCafé, a word which might have been supposed to puzzle an English soldier, though indeed very few French words puzzle him for long.
I was never inside “English Soldiers’ Coffee.” But I have no doubt it would have been just as popular if it had called itself acaféor even anestaminet. The case of “Mary’s Tea” was different. Its name made it. Half its customers would have passed it by if it had announced itself unromantically as “Five o’clock” or “Afternoon Tea.”
“’Tis but in vain for soldiers to complain.” That jingle occurs over and over again in Wolfe Tone’s autobiography. It contains his philosophy of life. I learned to appreciate the wisdom of it before I had been a week in the army. I said it over and over to myself. If I had kept a diary I should have written it as often as Wolfe Tone did. I had need of all its consolation when the time came for me to leave H.
One evening—I was particularly busy at the moment in the Y.S.C.—an orderly summoned me to the chaplain’s office to answer a telephone call. I learned that orders had come through for my removal from H. to B. I had twenty-four hours’ notice. That is more than most men get, double as much as an officer gets who is sent up the line. Yet I felt irritated. I am getting old and I hate being hustled. Also I felt quite surethat there was no need for any kind of hurry.
As it appeared in the end I might just as well have had three or four more days quietly at H. and started comfortably. I arrived at my destination, a little breathless, to find I was not wanted for a week. My new senior chaplain was greatly surprised to see me. My predecessor had not given up the post I was to fill. There was nothing for me to do and nowhere for me to go. I spent several days, most unprofitably, in B. which I might have spent usefully in H. But this is the way things are done in the army, sometimes; in the Chaplains’ Department generally. And “’Tis but in vain for soldiers to complain.”
I fully expected to make a bad start on my new journey. Having been fussed I was irritable. I had spent a long day trying to do twenty things in a space of time which would barely have sufficed for ten of them. I had been engaged in an intermittent struggle with various authorities for permission to take my servant with me, a matter which my colonel arranged for me in the end.
I was in the worst possible mood when I reached the station from which I had tostart—a large shed, very dimly lit, designed for goods traffic, not for passengers. Oddly enough I began to recover my temper the moment I entered the station. I became aware that the whole business of the starting of this great supply train was almost perfectly organised, so well organised that it ran more smoothly, with less noise and agitation, than goes to the nightly starting of the Irish mail from Euston.
The train itself, immensely long, was drawn up the whole length of the station and reached out for a distance unknown to me into the darkness beyond the station. There were passenger coaches and horse waggons. Every waggon was plainly labelled with the number of men to go in it and the name of the unit to which they belonged. The windows of every compartment of the passenger coaches bore the names of four officers. A fool could have been in no doubt about where he had to go. The fussiest traveller could have had no anxiety about finding a seat. Each party of men was drawn up opposite its own part of the train. The men’s packs and arms were on the ground in front of them. They waited the order to take their places. Competent N.C.O.’s with lanterns walked upand down the whole length of the station, ready with advice and help when advice and help were needed.
It was my good fortune that I had to visit in his office the R.T.O., the organising genius of the start. My servant arrived at the last moment, an unexpected traveller for whom no provision had been made. The order which permitted him to accompany me reached him only after I had left the camp. I fully expected to be snubbed, perhaps cursed, by that R.T.O. I was an utterly unimportant traveller. I was upsetting, at the very moment of starting, his thought-out arrangements. He would have been fully justified in treating me with scant courtesy.
I found him cool, collected, complete master of every detail. He was friendly, sympathetic, ready with an instant solution of the difficulty of my servant. He even apologised—surely an unnecessary apology—for the discomfort I was likely to suffer through having to spend the night in a compartment with three other officers. I do not know the name of that R.T.O. I wish I did. I can only hope that his abilities have been recognised and that he is now commander-in-chief of all R.T.O.’s.
The night was not very unpleasant after all. My three fellow-travellers were peaceable men who neither snored nor kicked wildly when asleep. I slumbered profoundly and did not wake till the train came to a standstill on an embankment. There was no obvious reason why the train should have stopped in that particular place for half an hour or why it should have spent another three-quarters of an hour in covering the last mile which separated us from the station. But I know by experience that trains, even in peace time, become very leisurely in approaching that particular city. They seem to wander all round the place before finally settling down.
In peace time, travelling as a tourist, one does not complain. The city is rich in spires and there are nice views to be got from the railway carriage windows. We got rather too much of those views that morning. Even Wordsworth, though he did write an early morning sonnet on Westminster Bridge, would not have cared to meditate on “Houses Asleep” for an hour and a quarter before he got a wash or anything to eat.
I interviewed the R.T.O. when I reached the station and found that I could not continue my journey till 5 o’clock in theafternoon. I was not altogether sorry to have the whole day before me in a town which I had never visited. I recollected that I had a cousin stationed there and made up my mind to rely on him, if I could find him, for entertainment.
My servant’s lot was less fortunate. He belonged, of course, to that part of the army which is officially described as “other ranks”; and only commissioned officers are trusted to wander at will through that town. The “other ranks” spend the day in the railway station. They are dependent on a Y.M.C.A. canteen for food and on themselves for amusement.
I spent a pleasant day, finding my cousin quite early and visiting with him a large number of churches. Some day I mean to work out thoroughly the connection between that town and Ireland and discover why pious Frenchmen dedicated several of their churches to Irish saints.
At 4 o’clock—I like to be in good time for trains—I went back to the station. My servant was sitting patiently on my valise. A long train lay ready. As in the train in which I had travelled the night before, all the coaches and waggons were carefully and clearly labelled, but this time with the namesof the places to which they were going. I went the whole length of the train and read every label. No single carriage was labelled for B., my destination. I walked all the way back again and read all the labels a second time. Then I fell back on the R.T.O. for guidance. I found not the man I had met in the morning, but a subordinate of his.
“I’m going,” I said, “or rather I hope to go to B. What part of the train do you think I ought to get into?”
“What does your party consist of?” he asked. “How many men have you?”
“One,” I said. “You can hardly call it a party at all. There’s only my servant and myself.”
He lost all interest in me at once. I do not wonder. A man who is accustomed to deal with battalions, squadrons, and batteries cannot be expected to pay much attention to a lonely padre. I quite understood his feelings.
“Still,” I said, “I’ve got to get there.”
“You can’t get to B. in that train,” he said. “It doesn’t go there.”
I was not prepared to sit down under that rebuff without a struggle.
“The R.T.O. who was here this morning,” I said, “told me to travel by this train.”
“Sorry,” he said. “But you can’t, or if you do you won’t get to B.”
“How am I to get there?” I asked.
“I don’t know that you can.”
“Do you mean,” I said, “that no train ever goes there?”
He considered this and replied cautiously.
“There might be a train to-morrow,” he said, “or next day.”
The prospect was not a pleasant one; but I knew that R.T.O.’s are not infallible. Sometimes they have not the dimmest idea where trains are going. I left the office and wandered about the station until I found the officer in command of the train. He was a colonel, and I was, of course, a little nervous about addressing a colonel. But this colonel had kindly eyes and a sorrowful face. He looked like a man on whom fate had laid an intolerable burden. I threw myself on his mercy.
“Sir,” I said, “I want to go to B. I am ordered to report myself there. I am trying to take my servant with me. What am I to do?”
That colonel looked at me with a slow, mournful smile.
“This train,” he said,“isn’t supposedto go to B. You can’t expect me to take it there just to suit you?”
He waved his hand towards the train. It was enormously long. Already several hundred men were crowding into it. I could not expect to have the whole thing diverted from its proper course for my sake. I stood silent, looking as forlorn and helpless as I could. My one hope, I felt, lay in an appeal to that colonel’s sense of pity.
“We shall pass through T. to-morrow morning about 6 o’clock,” he said.
That did not help me much. I had never heard of T. before. But something in the colonel’s tone encouraged me. I looked up and hoped that there were tears in my eyes.
“T.,” said the colonel, “is quite close to B. In fact it is really part of B., a sort of suburb.”
That seemed to me good enough.
“Take me there,” I said, “and I’ll manage to get a taxi or something.”
“But,” said the colonel,“my train does not stop at T. We simply pass through the station. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll slow down as we go through. You be ready to jump out. Tell your servant to fling out your valise and jump after it. You won’t have much time, for the platform isn’t verylong, but if you’re ready and don’t hesitate you’ll be all right.”
I babbled words of gratitude. The prospect of a leap from a moving train at 6 a.m. was exhilarating. I might hope that I should find my servant and my luggage rolling over me on the platform when I reached it. Then all would be well. The colonel, moved to further kindness by my gratitude, invited me to travel in a coach which was specially reserved for his use.
The art of travelling comfortably in peace or war lies in knowing when to bully, when to bribe, and when to sue. Neither bullying nor bribing would have got me to B. If I had relied on those methods I should not have arrived there for days, should perhaps never have arrived there, should certainly have been most uncomfortable. By assuming the manner, and as far as possible the appearance, of a small child lost in London I moved the pity of the only man who could have helped me. But those circumstances were exceptional. As a general rule I think bullying and bribing are better ways of getting what you want on a journey.
I travelled in great comfort. There were three of us—the colonel, a colonial commissioner, in uniform but otherwise unconnectedwith the army, and myself. There was also the colonel’s servant, who cooked a dinner for us on a Primus stove.
The train stopped frequently at wayside stations. There was no conceivable reason why it should have stopped at all. We neither discharged nor took up any passengers. But the halts were a source of entertainment for the men. Most of them and all the officers got out every time the train stopped. It was the duty of the colonel, as O.C. Train, to see that they all got in again.
It was a laborious job, not unlike that of a sheep dog. The colonial commissioner and I tried to help. I do not think we were much use. But I have this to my credit. I carried a message to the engine driver and told him to whistle loud and long before he started. Having read long ago Matthew Arnold’s Essay on Heine, I know the French for “whistle” or a word which conveyed the idea of whistling to the engine driver.
When it became dark the worst of this labour was over for the colonel. The men stayed in their carriages. I suppose they went to sleep. We dined. It was a pleasant and satisfying meal. We all contributed to it. The colonel’s servant produced soup,hot and strong, tasting slightly of catsup, made out of small packets of powder labelled “Oxtail.” Then we had bully beef—perhaps the “unexpended portion” of the colonel’s servant’s day’s rations—and sandwiches, which I contributed. By way of pudding we had bread and marmalade. The colonial commissioner produced the marmalade from his haversack. I had some cheese, a Camembert, and the colonel’s servant brought us sardines on toast, and coffee. We all had flasks and the colonel kept a supply of Perrier water. Men have fared worse on supply trains.
After dinner I taught the colonel and the commissioner to play my favourite kind of patience. I do not suppose the game was ever much use to the commissioner. In his colony life is a strenuous business. But I like to think that I did the colonel a good turn. His business was to travel up to the rail head in supply trains full of men, and then to travel down again in the same train empty. When I realised that he had been at this work for months and expected to be at it for years I understood why he looked depressed. Train commanding must be a horrible business, only one degree better than draft conducting. To a man engagedin it a really absorbing kind of patience must be a boon.
The next morning the colonel woke me early and warned me to be ready for my leap. In due time he set me on the step of the carriage. He took all my coats, rugs, and sticks from me. The train slowed down. I caught sight of the platform. The colonel said “Now.” I jumped. My coats and rugs fell round me in a shower. My servant timed the thing well. My valise came to earth at one end of the platform. The man’s own kit fell close to me. He himself lit on his feet at the far end of the platform. The train gathered speed again. I waved a farewell to my benefactor and the colonial commissioner.