War must always have been a miserable business; but our fathers and grandfathers had the sense to give it an outward semblance of gaiety. They went forth to battle dressed in the brightest colours they could find. They put feathers in their hats. They sewed gold braid on their coats. They hung sparkling metal about their persons. They had brass bands to march in front of them. While engaged in the business of killing their enemies they no doubt wallowed in mud, just as we do; went hungry, sweated, shivered, were parched or soaked, grumbled and cursed. But they made a gallant effort at pretending to enjoy themselves. They valued the properties of romantic drama, though they must have recognised soon enough that the piece in which they played was the sordidest of tragedies.
We are realists. Not for us the scarlet coats, the tossing plumes, the shining helmetsor tall busbies. War is muddy, monotonous, dull, infinitely toilsome. We have staged it with a just appreciation of its nature. We have banished colour. As far as possible we have banished music.
I suppose we are right. If it is really true that a soldier is more likely to be killed when wearing a scarlet coat, it is plain common sense to dress him in mud colour. If music attracts the enemy’s fire, then bands should be left at home to play for nursemaids in parks and on piers. Yet there is something to be said for the practice of our ancestors. The soldier’s business is to kill the enemy as well as to avoid being killed himself. Indeed killing is his first duty, and he only tries to avoid being killed for the sake of being efficient.
A cheerful soldier is a much more effective fighter than a depressed soldier. Our ancestors knew this and designed uniforms with a view to keeping up men’s spirits. We have ignored their wisdom and decked ourselves in khaki. I can imagine nothing better calculated to depress the spirits, to induce despondency, and to lower vitality than khaki. The British soldier remains cheerful—indeed it is largely his unfailing cheerfulness which makes him the splendidfighting man he is—but he has had to keep up his spirits without help from the authorities who have coloured his whole life khaki and deprived him of music.
I was placed in a camp which was one of a series of camps stretching along a winding valley. To right and left of us were steep hills, and off the side of one of them, that on which M. lived, the grass had been scraped and hacked. There remained mud which harmonised tonelessly with our uniforms. Under our feet as we walked along the roads and paths which led from end to end of the valley there was mud. The parade grounds—each camp had one—were mud. The tents were mud-coloured or dirty grey. The orderly-rooms, mess-rooms, recreation huts and all the rest were mud coloured and had soiled grey roofs. Men mud-coloured from head to foot paraded in lines, marched, or strolled about or sat on mud banks smoking.
Even the women who served in the canteens and recreation huts refused to wear bright frocks, succumbing to the prevailing oppression of mud. The authorities have put even these women into khaki now, but that has made little difference. Before that order came out the ladies had failed torealise that it was their duty to deck themselves in scarlet, green, and gold, to save the rest of us from depression.
Mr. Wells went out to see the war at one time, and returned to make merry, rather ponderously, over the fact that some officers still wear spurs. Perhaps if Mr. Wells had lived for two months in a large camp wholly given over to the devil of khaki he would have taken a different view of spurs. They are almost the only things left in war which glitter. They are of incalculable value. So far from stripping them from the boots of officers supposed to be mounted, additional spurs should be worn on other parts of the uniform, on shoulder straps for instance, with a view to improving the spirits, and therefore themoral, of the army.
It does not in the least matter that spurs are seldom driven into the sides of horses. No one now uses spurs as goads. They are worn for the sake of the shine and glitter of them. In the fortunate owner they are an inspiriting evidence of “swank.” To every one else they are, as Ireland used to be, “the one bright spot” in a desperately drab world. M., a wiser man than I, always wore spurs, though I do not think he ever used them on his horses. He was naturallya man of buoyant cheerfulness, and I daresay would not have succumbed to khaki depression even if he had worn no spurs. But I think the spurs helped him. I know the sight of them helped me when they glittered on the heels of his boots as he tramped along, or glanced in the firelight when he crossed his legs in front of the mess-room stove.
For a long time after settling down in that camp I was vaguely uneasy without being able to discover what was the matter with me. I was thoroughly healthy. I was well fed. I was associating with kindly and agreeable men. I had plenty of interesting work to do. Yet I was conscious of something wrong. It was not homesickness, a feeling I know well and can recognise. It was not fear. I was as safe as if I had been in England.
I discovered, by accident, that I was suffering from an unsatisfied yearning for colour. Drafts of a Scottish regiment came out from home wearing bright-red hackles in their caps; unmistakable spots of colour amid our drab surroundings. I found my eyes following these men about the camp with a curious pleasure, and I realised that what I wanted was to see red, orblue, or green, or anything else except khaki.
Later on an order came out that camp commandants should wear coloured cap-bands and coloured tabs on their coat. It suddenly became a joy to meet a colonel. Certain camps flew flags in front of their orderly-rooms. Very often the weather had faded the colours, but it was a satisfaction to feel that once, at all events, the things had not been drab. The Y.M.C.A., adding without meaning to another to its long list of good deeds, kept its bright-red triangle before our eyes. It seems absurd to mention such things; but I suppose that a starving man will count a few crumbs a feast.
I am not a painter. If any one had talked to me before I went to France of the value of colour, I should have laughed at him. Now, having lived for months without colour, I know better. Men want colour just as they want liquid and warmth. They are not at their best without it.
Nothing seemed stranger to me at first, nothing seems more pathetic now than the pains which men took to introduce a little colour into the drab world in which we were condemned to live. Outside orderly-rooms and other important places men madearrangements of coloured stones. Sometimes a regimental crest was worked out, with elaborate attention to detail, in pebbles, painted yellow, blue, and green. Sometimes the stones were arranged in meaningless geometrical patterns. They were always brightly coloured.
There was a widespread enthusiasm for gardening. Every square yard of unused mud in that great series of camps was seized and turned into flower-beds. Men laboured at them, putting in voluntarily an amount of work which they would have grudged bitterly for any other purpose. They wanted flowers, not vegetables, though any eatable green thing would have been a treat to them.
When spring and early summer came to us we rejoiced in the result of our labours, frequently fantastic, sometimes as nearly ridiculous as flowers can be. There were beds of daffodils and hyacinths in which it was possible, when the designer acted as showman, to recognise regimental crests. The French flag came out well, if the flowers of the tricolour consented to bloom at the same time. A sergeant, who professed to be an expert, arranged a bed for me which he said would look like a Union Jack inJune. Unfortunately I left the place early in May, and I have heard nothing since about that Union Jack. I suppose it failed in some way. If it had succeeded, some one would have told me about it. A fellow-countryman of mine designed a shamrock in blue lobelia. The medical Red Cross looked well in geraniums imported from England at great expense.
Generally our efforts were along more conventional lines. I remember a rose-garden with a sundial in the middle of it. The roses, to preserve them from frost, were carefully wrapped in sacking during severe weather, and an irreverent soldier, fresh from the trenches, commented on the fact that “These blighters at the base are growing sandbags.”
We were short of implements, but we dug. I have seen table forks and broken dinner knives used effectively. I have seen grass, when there was grass, clipped with a pair of scissors. Kindly people in England sent us out packets of seeds, but we were very often beaten by the names on them. We sowed in faith and hope, not knowing what manner of thing an antirrhinum might be.
I do not believe that it was any form of nostalgia, any longing for home surroundings,which made gardeners of the most unlikely of us. Heaven knows the results we achieved were unlike anything we had ever seen at home. It was not love of gardening which set us digging and planting. Men gardened in those camps who never gardened before, and perhaps never will again. At the bottom of it all was an instinctive, unrealised longing for colour. We knew that flowers, if we could only grow them, would not have khaki petals, that, war or no war, we should feast our eyes on red and blue.
Newspapers and politicians used to talk about this as “the war to end war,” the last war. Perhaps they were right. We may at least fairly hope that this is the world’s last khaki war. It is not indeed likely that when men next fight they will revert to scarlet coats and shining breastplates. We have grown out of these crude attempts at romanticism.
But it is very interesting to note the increase of attention given to camouflage. It occurred to some one—the wonder is that it did not occur to him sooner—that a mud-coloured tiger, a tiger with a khaki skin, would be more visible, not less visible, than a tiger with its natural bright stripes.It was our seamen who first grasped the importance of this truth and began to paint ships blue, yellow, and red, with a view to making it difficult for submarine commanders to see them. There are, I believe, a number of artists now engaged in drawing out colour schemes for steamers. I have seen a mother ship of hydroplanes which looked like a cubist picture.
Landsmen are more conservative and slower to grasp new ideas. But even in my time in France tents were sometimes covered with broad curves of bright colours. They looked very funny near at hand; but they are—this seems to be established—much less easily seen by airmen than white or brown tents. It seems a short step to take from colouring tents to colouring uniforms. In the next war, if there be a next war, regiments will perhaps move against the enemy gay as kingfishers and quite as difficult to see. Fighting men will look to each other like ladies in the beauty chorus of a revue. By the enemy they will not be seen at all. War will not, in its essentials, be any pleasanter, however we dress ourselves. Nothing can ever make a joy of it. But at least those who take part in it will escape the curse of khaki which lies heavily on us.
We suffered a good deal from want of music when I went out to France, though things were better then than they had been earlier. They certainly improved still further later on. Music in old days was looked upon as an important thing in war. The primitive savage beat drums of a rude kind before setting out to spear the warriors of the neighbouring tribes. Joshua’s soldiers stormed Jericho with the sound of trumpets in their ears. Cromwell’s men sang psalms as they went forward. Montrose’s highlanders charged to the skirl of their bagpipes. Even a pacifist would, I imagine, charge if a good piper played in front of him.
Our regiments had their bands, and many of them their special marching tunes. But we somehow came to regard music as part of the peace-time, ornamental side of soldiering. The mistake was natural enough. Our military leaders recognised, far sooner than the rest of us, that this war was going to be a grim and desperate business. Bands struck them as out of place in it. Music was associated in their minds with promenades at seaside resorts, with dinners at fashionable restaurants, with ornamental cavalry evolutions at military tournaments. We were not going to France to do musicalrides or to stroll about the sands of Boulogne with pretty ladies. We were going to fight. Therefore, bands were better left at home. It was a very natural mistake to make; but it was a mistake, and it is all to the credit of the War Office, a body which gets very little credit for anything, that it gradually altered its policy.
At first we had no outdoor music except what the men produced themselves, unofficially, by singing, by whistling, or with mouth-organs. Indoors there were pianos in most recreation huts, and the piano never had a moment’s rest while the huts were open—a proof, if any one wanted a proof, of the craving of the men for music. Then bands were started privately by the officers in different camps. This was a difficult and doubtful business. Funds had to be collected to buy instruments. Musicians who could play the instruments had to be picked out from among the men, and nobody knew how to find them. Hardly anybody stayed long in these base camps, and a good musician might at any moment be reft away and sent up the line.
Yet bands came into existence. An Irish division started the first I came across, and it used to play its men to church onSundays in a way that cheered the rest of us. My friend M.’s camps on top of the hill started a band. Other camps, which could not manage bands, discovered Scottish pipers and set them playing on ceremonial occasions. Later on in another place I found an excellent band in a large Canadian hospital, and a convalescent camp started a band which went for route marches along with the men.
But these were all voluntary efforts. The best that could be said for the higher authorities is that they did not actually discourage them. The regimental bands, which we ought to have had in France, still remained at home, and I do not know that they did much playing even there. I think it was the Brigade of Guards which first brought a band out to France. It used to play in the market-place of the town which was then G.H.Q. Later on another Guards’ band went on tour round the different bases. There was no mistake about the warmth of its reception. The officers and men gathered in large numbers to listen to it on the fine Sunday afternoon when it played in the camp where I was stationed.
Since then I have heard of, and heard, other regimental bands in France. Theirvisits have been keenly appreciated. But we ought to have more than occasional visits from these bands. It is probably impossible to have them playing close to the firing-line. But it would be an enormous advantage if we had a couple of good regimental bands at every base, and especially in places where hospitals are numerous.
It is a mistake to regard music simply as a recreation or as an “extra,” outside the regular war programme. It is really an important factor in producing and maintaining that elusive but most important thing calledmoral. Men are actually braver, more enduring, more confident, more enthusiastic, if they hear music.
These qualities cannot be destroyed in our men by any privation. They are indestructible in the race. But their growth can be stimulated, and they can be greatly strengthened. A hundred years ago no one would have doubted the value of music in producing and maintainingmoral. Two hundred years ago or thereabouts Dryden wrote a poem which illustrated the power of music. Forty years ago Tolstoi wrote a short novel to show how a particular sonata affected notmoral, but morality. We seem to have forgotten the truths familiar then.
There ought not to be any doubt about the value of music in restoring health. Nobody is fool enough to suppose that a broken bone would set itself, or fragments of shrapnel emerge of their own accord from a man’s leg even if it were possible to secure the services of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. But most doctors admit that in certain obscure and baffling maladies, classed generally as cases of shell-shock, mental and spiritual aid are at least as useful as massage or drugs. Next to religion—which is an extremely difficult thing to get or apply—music is probably the most powerful means we have of spiritual treatment. There is an abundant supply of it ready to hand. It seems a pity not to use it more freely than we do.
The problem which faces the commandant of a base in France, or a camp at home, must be very like that which a public schoolmaster has to tackle. The business of instruction comes first. Men and officers must be taught their job, as schoolboys must be taught their lessons. Hardly less pressing is the problem of spare time. You cannot keep a soldier throwing bombs all day, and there is a limit to the time which can be occupied in route marching. The obvious solution of the problem is organised games and sports. Most men are keen enough on cricket and football. Most officers are glad to join tennis clubs. In some places in France there are plenty of outdoor amusements of this kind, and matches are arranged between different units which keep interest alive.
Where I was first stationed games were sternly discouraged. The theory, I think,was that the French people would be disgusted if they saw us playing. Perhaps the French people in that neighbourhood were more seriously minded than those in other parts of the country. Perhaps they were less friendly, and it was necessary to consider their feelings with particular care. I have no way of judging about that. Elsewhere the French seemed to take a mild interest in our passion for games; but in that district they may very well have been of a different mind.
Whether the official estimate of the French spirit was right or wrong, the result for us was that we were very badly off for outdoor games. Football and cricket were played, half-heartedly, for matches (on the plan of League matches at home) were not allowed. The formation of an officers’ tennis club was forbidden.
On the other hand the men were very well off for indoor amusements. Every Y.M.C.A. hut ran concerts. There were two large cinema huts in the camps. Boxing was encouraged by many officers, and interesting competitions took place which were eagerly watched.
But as the days lengthened with the coming of spring, there were hours whichhung very heavily on every one. The officers were slightly better off than the men. They could always go into the neighbouring town, some four miles off, and find a certain amount of amusement in walking about the streets. But it was a singularly dull town. The men could not leave the camps without permission, and a pass was not always, indeed not often, attainable.
Their favourite pastime was a game which they called “House,” which was known to many of us when we were children as Loto. It is an exceedingly dull game, and I cannot believe that the men would have played it as they did if any other kind of game had been possible. There is a mild element of gambling about House. A small sum of money may be won, a very small sum lost. That I suppose was the attraction.
But it was rather a pitiful thing to walk through the camps on a fine afternoon and to see every waste piece of ground occupied by House players. There is no skill whatever in the game, and the players get no exercise. They sit on the ground with a pile of small pebbles before them, while one of them calls out a series of numbers. The French people, if they had seen us playingHouse, would have come to the conclusion that we are a nation of imbeciles. Bad as it may be to have as allies men light-hearted enough to play cricket, it must be several degrees worse to have to rely on imbeciles. However, the French did not see us playing House any more than they saw us boxing or attending concerts. They were not allowed into our camps.
For the men who did succeed in getting passes out of camp, the prospect was dreary enough, dreary or undesirable. Going into town in a crowded tram is an amusement which quickly palls. Various ill-defined portions of the town, when you got there, were out of bounds, and a man had need to walk warily if he did not want trouble with the military police.
And there were worse things than military police. On the roadway which led to the camp entrance there might be seen, any fine Sunday afternoon, a crowd of French girls waiting for the men who came out. They were, plainly, not the best girls, though no doubt some of them were more silly than vicious. There were eating-shops, or drinking-shops, of which ugly tales were told. Coffee, an innocent drink, was sometimes doped with brandy, and men found themselveshalf intoxicated without knowing that they had touched drink.
There were, of course, places where men could go safely. There was, for instance, the Central Y.M.C.A. hall, where excellent food was to be had, and where there were books, papers, games, and a kindly welcome. But one Y.M.C.A. recreation hut is very like another, and it seems rather waste of a hardly-won pass out of camp to spend the afternoon very much as it might be spent without leaving camp at all. What the men craved for was variety, interest, and—what was of course almost unobtainable—the society of decent women.
I cannot help feeling that in condemning ourselves to desperate dullness we paid too high a price for the good opinion of our French friends. If they were really shocked at our levity in playing games during the war, it would have been better to lacerate their feelings a little. They would very soon have got accustomed to our ways and come to regard our excitement over a League match as nothing worse than a curious form of eccentricity.
The officers were rather better off than the men. They could stay in town long enough to dine at a restaurant, and there issomething rather exciting, for a short time, in dining at a French restaurant. There was a special officers’ tram which brought us back to camp just in time to pass the sentries before 10.30 p.m. It was invariably over-crowded and we often had to stand, crowded together on the platforms of the driver and conductor. I have seen officers, of rank which gave dignity, clinging to the back of the conductor’s platform with their feet planted insecurely on a buffer.
I remember one very exciting run home. We started rather late from town. There was a thick fog. The driver was inclined to be cautious, very properly; but it was doubtful whether we could reach the camp in time. I had found a precarious place on the step of the driver’s platform. Three subalterns, spirited boys, fresh from school, tried to speed things up by shouting, “Vîte, Vîte!” “Muchvîterthan that!” to the driver, and banging violently on the gong which warned pedestrians of our coming. The driver remained unmoved and the car moved very slowly. Two of the boys seized the driver. The third took control of the tram. I do not know whether he had any practice beforehand in electric motor work;but he made that tram go. We rushed through the fog, bumping and rattling, making very heavy weather of the points at junctions. I do not think we killed any one. If we had we should have heard of it afterwards. We got back to camp in time. The French chauffeur when he recovered his first shock seemed to enjoy himself. Our driver was a very gallant boy. No risk daunted him. I hope he has been transferred into the Tank service. The work there would suit him exactly and I feel sure he would enjoy it.
I do not know that even the prospect of returning to camp by the officers’ tram would have lured me to dine in that town very often. One French hotel is very like another, and I had dined at many before the war.
But there was one restaurant which was especially attractive. I should never have discovered it for myself, for I am not very adventurous or fond of exploring. It was situated in a slum and approached through an abominable alley. It was found first, I believe, by some A.S.C. officers permanently stationed in the town, who had time on their hands for exhaustive research. I was taken there by a friend who hoped to have thepleasure of shocking a parson by leading him into the sort of place a parson ought not to visit. As a matter of fact the place was perfectly respectable, and the only part of me which was shocked was my nose. The smells in the pitch-dark gullies which led to that eating-house were the worst I encountered in France.
It was a most unconventional restaurant. The proprietor, an elderly man, his wife, and three married daughters ran it. They were, whenever I entered the place, engaged in eating a meal of their own at a table near a large fire at one end of the room. When guests appeared they all rose, uttered voluble welcomes, and shook hands with the strangers. There were, besides the family table, four others, all of rough deal, much stained, far from clean and without table-cloths. The seats were narrow benches. If you leaned back you bumped the man at the next table. The floor was sanded and hens walked about picking up the fragments which the diners dropped. When I knew the place first it was patronised chiefly by sailors, Belgians, and the A.S.C. officers who discovered it.
Ordering dinner was an interesting business. There was no menu card. Monsieurand his family talked a kind of French which none of us could ever understand. Also they talked at a terrific speed and all at once, circling round us. We knew that they were naming the kinds of food available, for we caught words likepotageandpoissonnow and then. Our plan was to sit still and nod occasionally. One of the daughters made a note of the points at which we nodded, and we hoped for the best. The soup was generally ready. Everything else was cooked before our eyes on the fire behind the family table.
Madame did the cooking. The rest of the party sat down again to their own meal. Monsieur exhorted his wife occasionally. The daughters took it in turn to get up and bring us each course as madame finished cooking it. In this way we got a hot and excellent dinner. A good digestion was promoted by the long gaps between the courses. It was impossible to eat fast. Monsieur offered his guests no great choice in wine, but what he had was surprisingly good.
When dinner was over and the bill, a very moderate one, paid, the whole family shook hands with us again and wished us every kind of happiness and good luck.Monsieur then conducted us to a back door, and let us loose into an alley quite as dark and filthy as the one by which we entered. He was always firm about refusing to allow us to go by the way we came. I have no idea what his reasons were, but the plan of smuggling us out of the establishment gave us a pleasurable feeling that we had been breaking some law by being there. There is nothing that I ever could find in King’s Regulations on the subject, so I suppose that if we sinned at all it must have been against some French municipal regulation.
That restaurant may be quite popular now; it was getting better known even in my time. But if it becomes popular it will lose its charm. Monsieur and his family will no longer be able to shake hands with every guest. There may be table-cloths. The hens—I always thought they were thepouletswe ate fattened before our eyes—will be banished, and some officious A.P.M. will put the place out of bounds, suspecting it to be a haunt of vice. Its look and its smell, I admit, would arouse suspicion in the mind of any conscientious A.P.M., but Monsieur’s patrons, if rough, were respectable people. Even the A.S.C. officers were above reproach. They looked like men who weresatisfied at having discovered the best and cheapest dinner to be got in that town. I doubt whether they had even appreciated the eccentricities of the service.
In spite of our want of games and amusements, life in those camps was pleasant and cheerful. We all had work to do, and not too many hours of idleness. For me there were long walks with M., best and cheeriest of comrades, whose spirits and energy never failed or flagged. We saw a great deal of each other in those days until the time came at the end of April, when he moved off to a cavalry brigade; a post into which he was thrust because good horsemen are rare among chaplains. There was always excellent company in my own mess and others. Nowhere else have I met so many different kinds of men.
The regular soldiers, some of them old men, held themselves as a separate caste a little aloof from the rest of us. It is not to be wondered at. They were professionals, with a great tradition behind them. We were amateurs, and, at times, inclined to be critical of old customs and old ways. We came from every conceivable profession, and before the war had been engaged in a hundred different activities. Among us weremen of real ability, who had made good in their own way. I think the regular soldiers were a little bewildered sometimes. They, almost as completely as we, were plunged into a new world. The wonder is that they stood us as patiently as they did.
We had our mild jokes, and it was wonderful how long the mildest jokes will last in circumstances like ours. There was a story of an unfortunate private who was dragged before his colonel for failing to salute a general, a general who should have been unmistakable. In defence he said that he did not know it was a general.
“But,” said the colonel, “you must have seen the red band round his hat.”
“Yes, sir,” said the man, “but I thought that was to show he was a Salvation Army captain.”
The whole camp chuckled over that story for a week. Whether any one ever told it to the general I do not know.
Another private, an Irishman, arrived in the camp one day from the firing-line. Ours was the remotest base; two days’ journey from the nearest trench. Between us and the fighting men was what seemed an impassable entanglement of regulations, guarded at every angle by R.T.O.’s andmilitary police. It was, any one would agree about this, a flat impossibility for an unauthorised person to travel through the zone of the army’s occupation.
Yet this man did it, and did it without in the least intending to. Up to a certain point his account of himself was clear. He had been sent off, one of a party under charge of an officer. He did not know—few people in the army ever do know—where he was going. He became detached from his party and found himself, a solitary unit, at what seems to have been a railhead. The colonel who dealt with him questioned:
“Why didn’t you ask the R.T.O. where you were to go?”
“I did ask him, sir. The first thing ever I did was to ask him.”
“And what did he say?”
“What he said, sir, was ‘Go to the devil out of this.’”
The colonel checked a smile. He probably sympathised with the R.T.O.
“And what did you do then?” he asked.
“I got into the train, sir, and sure, here I am.”
That particular colonel’s temper was notoriously a little soured by long command.It was felt that the soldier had, after all, made a fair attempt to obey the orders of the R.T.O.
Another private—less innocent, I fear—caused me and a few other people some mild excitement. I was summoned to the orderly-room to answer a telephone call. I was told by some one, whose voice sounded as if he was much irritated, that he had caught the man who stole my shirt. No one, thanks to my servant’s vigilance, had stolen any shirt of mine. I said so.
“Grey flannel shirt,” said the voice, and I gathered that he was irritated afresh by my extreme stupidity. I disclaimed all knowledge of any stolen shirt, flannel or other.
An explanation followed. A deserter had been arrested. It was discovered that he was wearing four flannel shirts and three thick garments under them. “That,” I said, “is goodprima facieevidence that he really is a soldier.” I thought that a useful thing to say, and true. No one in the world except a British soldier would wear four shirts and three jerseys at the same time. The British soldier—it is one of his characteristics—puts on all the clothes he can get in any weather.
The voice at the other end of the wire swore—unnecessarily, I think. Then it told me that one of the shirts was marked with my name and that I must identify it and the man. I refused, of course. The voice offered to send the shirt round for my inspection. I did not in the least want to inspect a shirt that had been worn, probably for a long time without washing, along with six other thick garments by a deserter; but I consented to look at the thing from a distance.
In the end I did not even do that. The unfortunate man confessed to having stolen the shirt from an officer in the trenches near Ypres. How it came to have my name on it I do not yet know. I did miss a couple of shirts from my store of civilian clothes when I got home. But I am sure no officer stole them. Indeed I do not see how any officer could.
That voice—I do not know that I ever met its owner—had a wonderful power of language, strong, picturesque, and highly profane language, suitable for expressing violent emotion over a telephone wire. It was once rebuked by a very gentle captain with a remark that was widely quoted afterwards. The language had been unusuallyflamboyant and was becoming worse. “Hold on a minute,” said the listener, “and let the line cool. It’s nearly red hot at this end.”
When life failed to provide a joke or two we fell back on rumours and enjoyed them thoroughly. They say that Fleet Street as a breeding-ground for rumour is surpassed only by the drawing-rooms of the wives of ministers of state. I have no experience of either; but a base camp in France would be hard to beat. The number of naval battles declared by the best authorities to have been fought during the early months of 1916 was amazing. We had them once a week, and torpedo-boat skirmishes on off days.
Men in “the signals”—all rumour goes back to the signals in the end—had lively imaginations. We mourned the loss of Kut months before General Townshend was forced to surrender. We revelled in extracts from the private letters of people like the Brazilian ambassador in Berlin. We knew with absolute certainty the English regiments which were taking part in the defence of Verdun. The Guards, by a sudden move, seized the city of Lille, but owing to faulty staff work were cut off, hemmed in, and at last wipedout, the entire division. The last men, a mixed batch of Grenadiers, Coldstream, Scots, Irish, and Welsh, perished in a final glorious bayonet charge. It was a Guardsman who told me the story first, and he had it from what really was unimpeachable authority.
But there is no reason for railing against Rumour. She is a wild-eyed jade, no doubt, with disordered locks and a babbling tongue. But life at a base in France would be duller without her; and she does no one any real harm.
The camp in which I lived was the first in the series of camps which stretched along the whole winding valley. We were nearest to the entrance gates, at which military police were perpetually on guard; nearest to the railway station, a waysidehaltewhere few trains stopped; nearest to the road along which the trams ran into the town. All who came and went in and out passed by our camp, using a road, made, I think, by our men originally, which ran along the bottom of our parade ground and thence, with many side roads branching from it, through all the camps right along the valley. Our parade ground sloped down towards this road, ending in a steep bank which we tried to keep pleasantly grassy, which we crowned with flower-beds, so that new-comers might feel that they had arrived at a pleasant place.
Standing on this bank it was possible to watch all the entering and departing traffic of the camps, the motor lorries which rumbled by, the little road engines, always somewhat comic, which puffed and snorted, dragging trucks after them. Now and then came the motors of generals and other potentates, or the shabby, overworked Fords of the Y.M.C.A. Mounted officers, colonels, and camp commandants who were privileged to keep horses, trotted by. Orderlies on bicycles went perilously, for the road was narrow and motor lorries are big. A constant stream of officers and men passed by; or parties, on their way up the hill, to one of the instruction camps marched along.
This went on all day from early dawn till the “Last Post” sounded and quiet came. To a new-comer, as I was, one unused to armies and their ways, this traffic was a source of endless interest; but I liked most to stand on the bank above the road during the later hours of the forenoon. It was then that the new drafts, men fresh from England, marched in.
The transports which brought them reached the harbour early in the morning. The men disembarked at 8 a.m. and marched out to the camps, a distance of four or five miles.They were often weary when they arrived, wet and muddy perhaps, or powdered with dust, unshaved, unwashed. Often their faces were still pallid after a long night of seasickness. Their rifles and kit seemed a burden to some of them. They marched past our camp, and there were generally two or three of us who stood on the bank to watch and criticise.
Later on, when some of the camps had dealt with the music question, a band or a couple of pipers would go some distance along the road to meet the coming men and to play them into camp. Then, in spite of weariness and the effects of seasickness, the new drafts stepped out bravely and made a good show.
I had a friend, a sergeant who had seen much service, one of those N.C.O.’s of the old army to whom the empire owes a debt which will never be properly understood. He often stood beside me to watch the new men come in. He taught me to criticise their marching, to appreciate their bearing. He wore a South African ribbon then. He wears the Mons ribbon now and a couple of gold wound stripes and doubtless several chevrons, red and blue.
The skirl of pipes came to us, and amoment later the quick, firm tread of men marching.
“Guards, sir,” said my friend.
They passed, swinging along, a mixed draft of Grenadiers, Coldstream, Scots, Irish, Welsh. My friend straightened himself as they went by.
“The Guards, sir, is the Guards, wherever they are.”
He was not himself a guardsman, but there was no trace of jealousy in his voice. I have noticed the same thing again and again. There are people who dislike the Guards, accusing them of conceit or resenting certain privileges. I never met any one who refused to give the Guards first place in battle, on the march, in camp. It is a magnificent record to have established in an army like ours, a wonderful record to have kept through a long-drawn war like this, when every regiment has been destroyed and remade of new material half a dozen times.
Another draft came by.
“Territorials, sir.”
My friend was prejudiced; but he is not the only soldier of the old army who is prejudiced against territorials. Against new battalions, Kitchener battalions, of regularregiments there is no feeling. The old army took them to its heart, bullied them, taught them as if they were younger brothers. The Territorials are step-brothers at best. Yet they have made good in France. I wonder that the prejudice persists. They do not march like the Guards. Even the London Territorials have not accomplished that. But they have established themselves as fighters, in the desperate holding of the Ypres salient in earlier days, and ever since everywhere in the long battle-line.
“R.F.A.,” said my friend, “and the biggest draft of the lot. There must be a damned lot of guns at the front now. We could have done with a few more at Mons. It’s guns that’s wanted in this war. Guns and men behind them. And it’s guns, and gunners anyway, we’re getting. Look at those fellows now. You’ll see worse drafts; though”—he surveyed the men carefully—“you might see better. There’s some of them now that’s young, too young. They’ll be sent back sick before they harden. Beg pardon, sir, but here’s our lot at last. I must be going.”
He saluted and turned. A body of men with an elderly officer at their head followed the gunners closely. They turned sharp tothe left up the steep little road which leads into our camp. They halted in the middle of the parade ground. Salutes were given and returned. The draft was handed over. The elderly officer detached himself and made his way to the mess-room. I followed to greet him, and to hear the latest news from England.
“What sort of a passage?”
“Vile. We crossed in a superannuated paddle-boat. Everybody sick. Not a spot to lie down in. My men were detailed to clean up the blessed packet afterwards. That’s why we’re late. Such a scene. Ugh! Can I get a drink?”
I do not know any one who has a more consistently disagreeable job than a draft-conducting officer. He crosses and recrosses the Channel under the most uncomfortable conditions possible. He has a lot of responsibility. He gets no praise and little credit. He is generally an elderly man. He has, most likely, been accustomed for years to an easy life. He is often an incurable victim to seasickness. There is no interest and no excitement about his work. He lives for the most part in trains and steamers. He snatches meals in strange messes, railway refreshment rooms, and quayside restaurants.He may have to conduct his draft all the way from Cork or Wick. He may be kept waiting hour after hour for a train. He may be embarked and disembarked again three or four times before his steamer actually starts. The men of his draft are strangers to him. He does not know whether his sergeants are trustworthy or not. Yet there is no epidemic of suicide among draft-conducting officers, though there very well might be. Great and unconquerable is the spirit of the British dug-out officer.
The draft itself may have had a bad time too, especially in the matter of cleaning up the ship; but then the draft does not have it once a week. And the draft has not got to turn round and go straight back again. And for the draft the business has the advantage of novelty. It is exciting to land for the first time in France, to be pursued by little boys who say “Souvenir!” and “Good night!” early in the morning. And there is something about getting there at last, after months of weary training, which must stir the most sluggish imagination.
The draft is examined by the doctors. One way and another a doctor in a base camp has a busy time of it. He begins at6 a.m., diagnosing the cases of the men who report sick. The hour at which it is possible to report sick is fixed inconveniently early in order, it is hoped, to discourage disease. Men who are not very bad may actually prefer the usual parades and fatigues to reporting sick at 6 a.m. For sickness is not even a sure way of escape. Doctors have a nasty trick of awarding “medicine and duty” in doubtful cases, which is distinctly more unpleasant than duty without medicine. From that on the doctor is kept busy, till he drops off to sleep for half an hour before dinner in the mess-room.
I thought at first that the doctors might have been spared the task of examining incoming drafts. The men have all been passed fit at home before they start, and it does not seem reasonable to suppose that their constitutions have seriously deteriorated on the journey. But the new examination is really necessary. Doctors, according to the proverb, differ. They even seem to differ more widely than other men. The home doctor for some reason takes an optimistic view of human ailments, and is inclined to pass a man fit who will certainly collapse when he gets up the line. The doctor in the base camp knows that he willbe abominably “strafed” if he sends “crocks” to the front. He does not want them returned and left on his hands at the base. So he picks the plainly unfit men out of the drafts, and, after a tedious round of form filling, sends them back to England.
There was, for instance, Private Buggins, whose case interested me so much that I should like very much to hear the end of his story. Private Buggins suffered from curvature of the spine. It was plain that he could not carry a pack for very long. Some one at home passed Private Buggins fit and he came out with a draft. He was picked out of that draft at the base in France. At the end of a fortnight’s strenuous labour (form filling), Private Buggins was sent back to England.
A fortnight after that he turned up again in France, one of another draft. Once more he was detached. Once more the wheels creaked round and Private Buggins went back to England. This time three weeks elapsed before he joined another draft and again submitted himself for medical examination in France. The result was the same. I do not wonder. I saw Buggins’s spine once, and I hold strongly that “Blighty is the place for him.”
After that I lost sight of Private Buggins, for I was moved to a new camp; but I have no reason to suppose the case is settled. He is still, in all probability, crossing and recrossing the English Channel. By this time I expect he has found out ways of living tolerably comfortably under the conditions of his nomadic military service. But he ought to be given a special medal when the war is over and he is allowed to settle down again somewhere.
A new draft also submits to kit inspection. I suppose kits are inspected in England before the start is made; but the British soldier has an amazing desire to get rid of the parts of his equipment which strike him as superfluous. He appears to shed kit as he goes along, and often succeeds in arriving at the end of the journey with only half the things he ought to have.
Yet he goes to war with few possessions. I am sure his pack is heavy enough to carry, but its contents look pitifully insufficient when spread out on a parade ground for inspection. A cake of soap, a razor, a small towel, two or three brushes, a spare pair of socks, a clean shirt—it seems little enough for a man to face an unknown world with, a man who is heir to the gifts of a complex civilisation.
Once thoroughly inspected, the draft ceases to be a draft, and is merged in the camp. The men settle down in the lines of their battalion, take their share in the life and work of their fellows until the day comes when they are joined to another draft and sent forth on a yet more adventurous journey.
Drafts coming to us from England arrived in the morning. Drafts going from us to the front departed at night. I suppose the numbers of those who came and of those who went balanced like the figures in a well-kept ledger. To me it always seemed that there were more going than coming—an illusion certainly, since our camp never emptied. But those who came were all strangers, while many of those who went were friends, and many more were acquaintances. Therefore, the going left gaps which the new-comers did not seem to fill.
The orders that a draft was to go to the front came to us in the morning from the Officer Commanding Reinforcements. So many officers and men of such-and-such a battalion were to proceed to such-or-such a place. Lists, nominal rolls, were prepared in the orderly-room. The men were warned. The officers rushed into town to completetheir kit or add to it small articles likely to be useful. Trench boots, trench coats, tins of solidified methylated spirits, all sorts of odds and ends, were picked up at the ordnance stores or at French shops which dealt specially in such things. Advice was eagerly sought—and the most curious advice taken—by those who had never been up the line before. That last day at the base was busy and exciting. There was a spirit of light-heartedness and gaiety abroad. We laughed more than usual and joked oftener. Behind the laughter—who knows?
In the camp there was much going to and fro. Men stood in queues outside the quartermaster’s stores, to receive gas masks, first field dressings, identification discs, and such things. Kits were once more inspected, minutely and rigorously. Missing articles were supplied. Entries were made in pay books.
Later on the men crowded into the canteen or the Y.M.C.A. hut. Letters were written, pathetic scrawls many of them. There was a feeling of excitement, tense and only half suppressed, among the men who were going. There was no sign of depression or fear; certainly no hint of any sadness of farewell.
For us who stayed behind it was different. I saw scores of these drafts depart for the unknown, terrible front. I never got over the feeling of awe. There are certain scenes which will abide in my memory to the end of my life, which I do not think I can possibly forget even afterwards, when my turn comes and I join those men who went from us, of whom we next heard when their names appeared in the lists of killed.
It was my custom to invite those who were going to “partake of the most comfortable sacrament of the body and blood of Christ” before they started. At first we used to meet in my hut; but that was too small for us, though only a few from each departing draft gathered there. Later on I used a room in a neighbouring house.
It was late in the afternoon, generally 6 o’clock, before the officers and men were ready to come. The shadows had gathered. The candles on my rude altar shone, giving the little light we needed. About to face death these boys—to me and especially at that time they all seemed boys—kneeled to salute their King who rules by virtue of a sacrifice like theirs. They took His body and His blood, broken and shed for them whose bodies were also dedicated,just as His was, for the saving of the world. My hands trembled, stretched out in benediction over the bowed young heads. Did ever men do greater things than these? Have any among the martyrs and saints of the church’s calendar belonged more clearly to the great fellowship of Christs crucified, whose splendid destiny it is to redeem the world?
These eucharists are among the scenes which it is impossible ever to forget. There are also others, no less impressive, in the recurring drama of the departing drafts.
The day closes early in these great camps. At half-past eight the recreation huts close their doors. Concerts and entertainments are over. The men stream back to their tents along muddy roads, laughing, chatting, singing. Lights appear in the tents, and a glow, red or white, shines through the canvas. One after another these are extinguished. The “Last Post” sounds from a dozen bugles. The multitudinous noises of camp life die away. The rifle-fire which has crackled all day on the ranges has long ceased. The spluttering of machine guns in the training camps vexes the ear no more. The heavy explosions of shell testing are over for another day. Save for the sharpchallenge of a sentry here and there, and the distant shriek of a railway engine, there is almost unbroken silence for a while.
At half-past nine perhaps, or a little later, men come silently from the tents and assemble on the parade ground. They fall in, small detachments from four or five regiments, each forming its own lines of men. They carry rifles. Their packs are on their backs. Their haversacks, mess tins, and all the kit of marching infantry are strung round them. A draft from this camp and many drafts from all this great collection of camps are going “up the line” to-night.
“Up the line.” The phrase means a long railway journey, very many hours of travelling perhaps, for the train moves slowly. The journey will end where the railway stops short of the firing-line, and these men will join their comrades, filling the gaps in many battalions. Some of them are fresh from home, young soldiers. Others, recovered from wounds or sickness, are going back to perils and hardship which they already know. For all of them this is the last parade in safety for many a long day. Henceforth, till the coming of peace releases them, or a wound sends them backto rest, or death puts an end to their soldiering, they will go in peril day and night, will endure incredible hardships constantly.
They stand silent. At the head of the waiting columns are men with lanterns in their hands, faint spots of light in the surrounding gloom. Down the hill from his quarters the colonel comes. The adjutant and the sergeant-major leave the orderly-room. A little group of officers stands back in the shadow. They are there to see their comrades off. A sharp order is given. There is a rattle of arms and accoutrements. The waiting men stand to attention. The colonel makes his progress up and down the line of men, taking a last look at their equipment. An orderly carrying a lantern goes before him. He inspects each man minutely. Now and then he speaks a few words in a low tone. Otherwise the silence is complete.
The inspection is over at last. He takes his place at the head of the column. Certain formal orders are read out by the adjutant. There is something about the unexpended portion of the day’s rations. There cannot be much “unexpended” at 10 o’clock at night; but the military machine, recklessly prodigal of large sums of money, is scrupulouslyniggardly about trifles. But it does not matter. No one at the moment is concerned about the unexpended portion of his ration. There is a stern injunction against travelling on the roof of railway carriages. “Men,” the order explains, “have been killed owing to doing so.” We suppose vaguely that those men were better dead. No one in his right senses would willingly travel on the top of a railway carriage at dead of night in a snowstorm. And as we stand on the parade ground it begins to snow. There is much else, but the reading stops at last. The colonel speaks. He wishes all good fortune to those who go. He reminds them that they are the guardians of the honour of famous regiments. He assures them that the hearts of those who stay behind go with them. He is himself one of those who stay behind; but there is something in the way he speaks which makes us sure that he would gladly go. He does not say this. It is not his way to talk heroics. But more certainly than if he had said the words the men know that it is not of his own choice that he stays behind.
It is my turn to speak, to pray. Surely never to any minister of God has suchopportunity been given. But what words can I find? What supplication fits the time and place? I beg the men to pray, to seek from above courage, strength, patience, inward peace. I make my prayer for them, that God will lighten the surrounding darkness and deliver us all from the perils of “this night.” I am feeble, helpless, faithless, without vision; but at least I can give the benediction. “The Peace of God——” Even war cannot take that from the heart of him who has it.
From a neighbouring camp comes the sound of men singing as they tramp down the muddy road. Another draft is on its way. From a camp still farther off we hear the skirl of bagpipes. There, too, men have said good-bye to security and are on their way. A sharp order rings out. Then another. The men on the parade ground spring to attention, turn, march.
They begin to sing as they go. “Tipperary,” in those days was losing its popularity. “If I were the only boy in the world” had not come to its own. For the moment “Irish eyes are smiling” is most popular. It is that or some such song they sing, refusing even then to make obeisance to heroic sentiment. The little group ofofficers, the sergeants, the orderlies with the lanterns, stand and salute the columns as they pass.
Far down the road we hear a shouted jest, a peal of laughter, a burst of song.
In what mood, with what spirit does the soldier, the man in the ranks, go forth into the night to his supremely great adventure? We do more than guess. We know. We chaplains are officers, but we are something more than officers. We are, or ought to be, the friends of men and officers alike. We have the chance of learning from the men’s own lips what their feelings are. Hardly ever do we get the least suggestion of heroic resolve or hint of the consciousness of great purpose. Very often we hear a hope expressed—a hope which is really a prayer for God’s blessing. But this is almost always for those left at home, for wife and children, parents, brothers, friends. It is as if they and not the men who fight had dangers to face and trials to endure.
From his intimate talk we may guess that the soldier thinks very little about himself and very much about those he has left behind. He says little of what his life has been, less still about that to which he looks forward. His mind is altogetheroccupied with the little affairs of his home life, with the marriage of this friend, the wages earned by son or daughter, the thousand details of life in some English village or some great city. Sometimes we hear an expression of pleasure at the thought of joining again comrades by whose side the writer has fought. Sometimes an anticipation from a young soldier of seeing in the fighting-line some friend who has gone there before him.
It is not thus that an imaginative writer would represent the talk of soldiers who say farewell. I suppose that those who speak as these men do are lovers of peace and quiet ways, have no great taste for adventuring, find war not a joy but a hard necessity. Yet as we know, as all Europe knows now, there are no better fighters in the world than these citizen soldiers whose blood the bugle stirs but sluggishly, whose hearts are all the time with those whom they have left at English firesides.
I knew many recreation huts, Y.M.C.A. huts, Church Army huts, E.F. canteens, while I was in France. I was in and out of them at all sorts of hours. I lectured in them, preached in them, told stories, played games, and spent in the aggregate many hours listening to other people singing, reciting, lecturing. It was always a pleasure to be in these huts and I liked every one of them. But I cherish specially tender recollections of Woodbine Hut. It was the first I knew, the first I ever entered, my earliest love among huts. Also its name was singularly attractive. It is not every hut which has a name. Many are known simply by the number of the camp they belong to, and even those which have names make, as a rule, little appeal to the imagination. It is nice and loyal to call a hut after a princess, for instance, or by the name of the donor,or after some province or district at home, whose inhabitants paid for the hut. One is no way moved by such names.
But Woodbine! The name had nothing whatever to do with the soldier’s favourite cigarette, though that hut, or any other, might very well be called after tobacco. I, a hardened smoker, have choked in the atmosphere of these huts worse than anywhere else, even in the cabins of small yachts anchored at night. But cigarettes were not in the mind of the ladies who built and named that hut. Afterwards when their hair and clothes reeked of a particularly offensive kind of tobacco, it may have occurred to them that they were wiser than they knew in choosing the name Woodbine.
But at first they were not thinking of tobacco. They meant to make a little pun on their own name like the pun of the herald who gave “Ver non semper viret” to the Vernons for a motto; associating themselves thus modestly and shyly with the building they had given, in which they served. Also they meant the name to call up in the minds of the soldiers who used the hut all sorts of thoughts of home, of English gardens, of old-fashioned flowers,of mothers’ smiles and kisses—the kisses perhaps not always mother’s. The idea is a pretty one, and the English soldier, like most cheerful people, is a sentimentalist, yet I doubt if ten of the many thousands of men who used that hut ever associated it with honeysuckle.
When I first saw “Woodbine” over the door of that hut, the name filled me with astonishment. I knew of a Paradise Court in a grimy city slum, and a dilapidated whitewashed house on the edge of a Connaught bog which has somehow got itself called Monte Carlo. But these misfits of names moved me only to mirth mingled with a certain sadness. “Woodbine” is a sheer astonishment. I hear the word and think of the rustic arches in cottage gardens, of old tree trunks climbed over by delightful flowers. I think of open lattice windows, of sweet summer air. Nothing in the whole long train of thought prepares me for or tends in any way to suggest this Woodbine.
It is a building. In the language of the army—the official language—it is a hut; but hardly more like the hut of civil life than it is like the flower from which it takes its name. The walls are thin wood. The roof is corrugated iron. It contains twolong, low halls. Glaring electric lights hang from the rafters. They must glare if they are to shine at all, for the air is thick with tobacco smoke.
Inside the halls are gathered hundreds of soldiers. In one corner, that which we enter first, the men are sitting, packed close together at small tables. They turn over the pages of illustrated papers. They drink tea, cocoa, and hot milk. They eat buns and slices of bread-and-butter. They write those letters home which express so little, and to those who understand mean so much. Of the letters written home from camp, half at least are on paper which bear the stamp of the Y.M.C.A.—paper given to all who ask in this hut and scores of others. Reading, eating, drinking, writing, chatting, or playing draughts, everybody smokes. Everybody, such is the climate, reeks with damp. Everybody is hot. The last thing that the air suggests to the nose of one who enters is the smell of woodbine.
In the other, the inner hall, there are more men, still more closely packed together, smoking more persistently, and the air is even denser. Here no one is eating, no one reading. Few attempt to write. The evening entertainment is about to begin. On anarrow platform at one end of the hall is the piano. A pianist has taken possession of it. He has been selected by no one in authority, elected by no committee. He has occurred, emerged from the mass of men; by virtue of some energy within him has made good his position in front of the instrument. He flogs the keys, and above the babel of talk sounds some rag-time melody, once popular, now forgotten or despised at home. Here or there a voice takes up the tune and sings or chants it.
The audience begin to catch the spirit of the entertainment. Some one calls the name of Corporal Smith. A man struggles to his feet and leaps on to the platform. He is greeted with applauding cheers. There is a short consultation between him and the pianist. A tentative chord is struck. Corporal Smith nods approval and turns to the audience. His song begins. If it is the kind of song that has a chorus the audience shouts it and Corporal Smith conducts the singing with waving of his arms.
Corporal Smith is a popular favourite. We know his worth as a singer, demand and applaud him. But there are other candidates for favour. Before the applause has died away, while still acknowledgments arebeing bowed, another man takes his place on the platform. He is a stranger and no one knows what he will sing. But the pianist is a man of genius. Whisper to him the name of the song, give even a hint of its nature, let him guess at the kind of voice, bass, baritone, tenor, and he will vamp an accompaniment. He has his difficulties. A singer will start at the wrong time, will for a whole verse, perhaps, make noises in a different key; the pianist never fails. Somehow, before very long, instrument and singer get together—more or less.
There is no dearth of singers, no bashful hanging back, no waiting for polite pressure. Every one who can sing, or thinks he can, is eager to display his talent. There is no monotony. A boisterous comic song is succeeded by one about summer roses, autumn leaves, and the kiss of a maiden at a stile. The vagaries of a ventriloquist are a matter for roars of laughter. A song about the beauties of the rising moon pleases us all equally well. An original genius sings a song of his own composition, rough-hewn verses set to a familiar tune, about the difficulty of obtaining leave and the longing that is in all our hearts for a return to “Blighty, dear old Blighty.” Did evermen before fix such a name on the country for which they fight?
Now and again some one comes forward with a long narrative song, a kind of ballad chanted to a tune very difficult to catch. It is about as hard to keep track with the story as to pick up the tune. Words—better singers fail in the same way—are not easily distinguished, though the man does his best, clears his throat carefully between each verse and spits over the edge of the platform to improve his enunciation. No one objects to that.
About manners and dress the audience is very little critical. But about the merits of the songs and the singers the men express their opinions with the utmost frankness. The applause is genuine, and the singer who wins it is under no doubt about its reality. The song which makes no appeal is simply drowned by loud talk, and the unfortunate singer will crack his voice in vain in an endeavour to regain the attention he has lost.
Encores are rare, and the men are slow to take them. There is a man towards the end of the evening who wins one unmistakably with an inimitable burlesque of “Alice, where art thou?” The pianist failsto keep in touch with the astonishing vagaries of this performance, and the singer, unabashed, finishes without accompaniment. The audience yells with delight, and continues to yell till the singer comes forward again. This time he gives us a song about leaving home, a thing of heart-rending pathos, and we wail the chorus: