THE THEATRE
Just outside the town, G.H.Q. Recreation Ground provided a lumpy football ground and a still more lumpy cricket ground. Both our national games languished, however, for the stock reason—want of time. There were teams, and occasional matches, and sometimes an enthusiastic sportsman would send an urgent whip round to call attention to our deplorable neglect of the games that made England great. He would get a few half-hearted promises of reform, but there was no hope in fighting against the great obstacle. It was like a college in which every one was a "swotter."
So the 300 or so Monks of Montreuil lived their laborious lives. The balance of G.H.Q. staff, some 250, scattered about the environs of Montreuil with their offices at Paris Plage or Le Touquet or the Forest of Crécy, could follow a somewhat milder discipline. They were "Second Echelon" mostly. Current operations had not much concern for them and it was possible to take horse-back exercise, to keep up football and cricket and even tennis and golf. At Le Touquet, which was a well-known pleasure centre before the war, there were good golf links and some excellent tennis courts. On occasions the Commander-in-Chief decided to think out his problems over a round of golf, and a little bungalow was maintained at Le Touquet for his convenience.
Paris Plage was a splendid beach, but so faras G.H.Q. officers were concerned its attractions were wasted. Occasionally an officer having business at one of the Directorates near by would spare an hour for a swim, but it was not possible on a hot Saturday or Sunday to suspend the battle, or the preparation for the battle, in progress and adjourn as a body to the seaside. Not only time but transport was lacking. The only means of getting down to the beach—a distance of about twelve miles—was by motor-car, and regulations against "joy-riding" were strict. Not only were there regulations; there were also precautions to see that the regulations were kept. A car could go out from G.H.Q. garage only on an order from the officer in charge of cars, and it was his business to get a chit as to what was the reason for the journey. Occasionally police patrols would be stationed on the roads with instructions to stop every car and examine its papers. This was excused as a precaution against espionage. It was designed more to be a precaution against waste of petrol or "joy-riding," as a few officers found to their cost.
So the life of the Montreuil officer resolved itself ordinarily into this simple routine: he worked and he walked on the Ramparts. But there was one fine relief to tedium for the majority—a dinner-party every night. The big generals, because they had to, and a few unwise souls, because they chose to, favouredprivate messes and confronted at dinner at night the same men as they met in the office all day; and, without a doubt, found it rather monotonous. The majority of the officers messed at the Officers' Club, which had a couple of hundred members and could rival the old reputation of the House of Commons as "the finest Club in Europe."
The qualification for joining the Officers' Club was to be an officer of the British Army or of an Allied Army stationed at Montreuil. The subscription was five francs per month, and for that and a ridiculously small sum per day the Club gave members three square meals a day and afternoon tea. The Club kept up a good cellar, and to the very last, when good wine was almost unprocurable in London or Paris except at exorbitant prices, the Officers' Club, Montreuil, could sell a vintage claret or burgundy at nine francs a bottle, a decent wine at five francs a bottle, and champagne at fifteen francs a bottle. The Expeditionary Force Canteens were the caterers, and aimed at only a nominal profit. Once a week there was a fixed guest night and a band, but members could bring guests at any time. Waiting was done by Q.M.A.A.C.s, neat deft little ladies who brought a hint of home to the exiles.
Custom was against forming coteries. So there were constantly differing dinner-parties, and the conversation was rich in variety andinterest. The backbone of the Mess were the Regular Army officers, the majority of them colonels, with a sprinkling of brigadiers, a few majors and a few captains. The majority in the Mess, however, were temporary officers, a few of senior rank, mostly staff captains or attached officers. There were always some visitors, a politician or some other personage from home, staff officers from the War Office or from the various Armies, regimental officers having business at G.H.Q., guests from the various private messes at Montreuil.
Talk ranged from the most serious shop to the most airy nothings. There were experts there in almost every department of human knowledge, men who had seen many cities and known the minds of many men. The representatives of the Allied nations gave an extra note of variety. You might sit at the same table with an American one night, an Italian another, or a Frenchman or Belgian or Portuguese. The majority of men present were distinguished men either in the Service or in some civil profession or business. Travel, science, art and literature, were all well represented.
IN THE OFFICERS' CLUB
Smoking was prohibited in the Officers' Club until a certain hour, and the Q.M.A.A.C. waitresses had no difficulty in seeing that the rule was kept by all ranks. At an earlier date, when a sergeant-major with men orderlies hadcharge of the waiting, discipline on this point was not so easily maintained. Any junior officer lighting up before the hour was promptly checked. But a sergeant-major found it difficult to take "disciplinary action" against an officer of General rank. One evening a very lofty general indeed, a visitor to the Mess, started a huge cigar at 8 o'clock. Smoking was not allowed until 8.20. The sergeant-major was a man of resource. Bringing in a ladder, he mounted to the Mess clock and solemnly set it on to 8.20. A General was smoking, therefore it must be 8.20.
As I have said, they fed us very well at the Mess. But of course we grumbled at the food and found one point of criticism in the fish. Montreuil being practically a seaside town, the fish was naturally not good, authority having transferred to this English colony in France the invariable tradition of British seaside resorts to send all the fresh fish away and consume the refuse. Our fish was always plaice, and it was often plaice that had known better days. One wag spoke of it as the "vintage plaice," professed to know that it had been "laid down" the year the war started, and that the "bins" would not be exhausted until the war ended.
But the plaice was never a really serious grievance. It gave opportunity, but not valid cause, to grumble, and discussion of it diedaway after an officer one night quoted mock heroically:
Ah, friend—had this indubitable factHaply occurred to poor LeonidasHow had he turned tail on Thermopulai!It cannot be that even his few witsWere addled to the point that, so advised,Preposterous he had answered—"Cakes are prime,Hearth-sides are snug, sleek dancing-girls have worth,And yet for country's sake, to save our godsTheir temples, save our ancestors their tombs,Save wife and child and home and liberty,—Iwould chew sliced-salt-fish, bear snow—nay, starveIf need were—and by much prefer the choice!"
After dinner the routine was to go and look at the map before settling down again to work. Military Intelligence, in one of its rooms, kept up-to-date hour-by-hour a map of the fighting front, and after dinner we would crowd to this room to see the latest official news put up on the map and to hear the latest unofficial stories which embroidered the news. One evening, as a great advance on our part was marked up on the map, the clerk, moving the flag-pins, announced:
"They say the enemy cleared out so quickly that they left the hospitals behind, and the Australian corps has captured 50 German nurses. They report that they are looking well after them."
A titter went round the group of officers. Ithappened to be the night after the story had circulated—a story which President Wilson has since adopted among his family of anecdotes—that the Australians, having the Americans to co-operate with, had had to remonstrate with them for their undue rudeness to the Germans. The Australians had a reputation for being quite direct enough in their method of teaching the Boche not to be a Boche.
The titter, perhaps, had an injurious inference to some ears, for a General officer remarked, a little sternly:
"Gentlemen, the Australians are a gallant race. The German—er—ladies will be quite safe with them."
So, of course, it proved. It was fiction that any Colonial troops showed an undue sternness to prisoners. The average German knew that he was quite safe in the hands of any British unit—whether it was from Australia, Canada, or the Motherland.
The after-dinner peep at the map was a great finish to dinner. When the Armistice was signed officers were disconsolate for the loss of their ten minutes in the M.I. room. "I miss," said one, "our pleasant daily habit of advancing ten kilomètres on a front of fifty kilomètres."
No, life at G.H.Q. was sober and strenuous, but it was not dull or tedious. If a man hasgood work to do, lovely aspects of Nature to look upon, interesting company at his meals, he has all the real essentials of contentment; well, most of them.
Ladies at G.H.Q.? An almost accurate chapter might be written on this point on the lines adopted in that exhaustive and conscientious book on Iceland, which had a brief chapter:
The Snakes of Iceland.There are no snakes in Iceland.
The Snakes of Iceland.
There are no snakes in Iceland.
There were no ladies at G.H.Q., not at any rate in the sense that would be in the mind of the average inquirer. On the too rare occasions when I was able to get a leave from G.H.Q., or was sent over to London on a task, the civilians I encountered in London exhibited a considerable interest in the ladies that were thought to haunt G.H.Q.
This was by no manner of means an entirely or indeed a mainly feminine curiosity. Many people have an ineradicable idea that an Army on a campaign ravages the hearts of all the female population of the occupied territory, as well as drawing on the beauty of its own land to recruit charming camp followers. I can recall, on returning from a small war some time before 1914, attending a dinner-party in London and being tremendously flattered at the fact that as soon as the ladies went upstairsall the men (some of them very distinguished men) crowded round me in a spirit of inquiry. With all the resources at my disposal I framed in my mind a brief and vivid appreciation of the campaign. But—they did not want to know why the Turkish Army failed or the Serbian Army succeeded. Someone rather well known in London had got into a scrape in the course of the campaign, and there were some very scandalous details alleged. My eager inquirers wanted to know all those scandalous details, and were obviously disappointed to learn that there was no reasonable foundation for them, and at once lost all interest in the campaign. My "appreciation" had not the chance to be uttered.
Probably they concluded I was rather an unintelligent person not to have discovered all the horrid details. Certainly those to whom I told the truth about the ladies and G.H.Q. thought I was either very sly or very unobservant. Indeed one very hearty old gentleman, with a great passion for horrid details, patted me on the back publicly.
"That's right, that's right. I admire you for sticking to your friends. But of course we do not believe you."
Categorically, it isnota fact that "beautiful leaders of British society" constantly graced G.H.Q. with their presence. In the very early stages of the war some of the "Smart Set"considered it rather the thing to get over to the battlefields and make a week-end sensation of a glimpse at the Calvary of Civilisation. They usually got over through the influence of political friends, and most often by way of the Belgian section of the Front, which was not so sternly guarded as the British or French sections. Military authority discountenanced these visits—however "fashionable" and beautiful the visitors—and soon put a stop to them. After 1914, except nurses and Q.M.A.A.C.s it was very rare for a woman to enter British Army areas. Those few who did come had very definite business and were expected to attend very strictly to that business and then to move off.
There was a suspicion that some few, a very few, "workers" were in France not so much for work as because they found it amusing. These got no further than the Base ports as a rule, and were not officially encouraged. The vast majority of the women workers in France were there for patriotism's sake, attended strictly to their business, and had no time (or inclination, presumably) for frivolity.
All this is very disappointing, I am aware. But it is true. The life we lived at G.H.Q. was truly monastic. We never saw an English woman unless she were a nurse or Q.M.A.A.C. or some other uniformed fellow-officer or fellow-soldier.
THE PLACE GAMBETTA
Nor was there any idle local feminine societyto take the thoughts of officers from the stern tasks of war. Montreuil was very, very prim and dull even for a small French provincial town. There may still be some people whose ideas of French social life are based on those quarters of Paris whose theatres, books, newspapers, restaurants, manners are shaped by the wishes (or fancied wishes) of the floating population of visitors and of a small section of idle and worthless French. But I fancy that in these days such people are few; and most people know that the average of French life is not at all like Montmartre or the Latin Quarter, which are less typical of France than, say, Piccadilly Circus is of England. For thorough straight-laced respectability there is nothing to beat a small French provincial town.
Montreuil was the most respectable place one could imagine before the war. It sheltered a small colony of artists in the summer, attracted by the wonderful panoramas from the ramparts; but they came to work, and did not bring with them what is supposed to be the atmosphere of the Latin Quarter. The local population was exceedingly decorous and rather inclined to be clerical in sympathy, for Montreuil was a great centre for schools.
During our occupation of the town as the home of G.H.Q. there might be noted occasionally the arrival from Paris, orelsewhere, of some gay young lady or couple of ladies who, having heard that the British Army had its headquarters there, had decided, from motives of patriotism, ofcamaraderie, or from less admirable motives, to come and enliven the dullness of the place. Departure would follow with ungallant promptitude. The same day, or the next, the lady would move away, with a gendarme to see that she did not miss her train.
The monastic severity of life at G.H.Q. relaxed a little, I think, when the immediate environs of Montreuil were passed. Then you had got out of the area of First Echelon G.H.Q. and were in that of the Second Echelon, which was largely made of subsidiary services not so directly concerned with the administration of the fighting Army. Life was a little less strenuous, and perhaps Aphrodite was not altogether neglected for Ares. Here conditions reflected the average attitude of the British Army administration in the matter of morals, which was practically that of British civilian life, with somewhat more precaution and guardianship but no grandmotherly supervision. The female personnel of the Army was very carefully safeguarded. The male personnel, if it were absolutely bent on it, could find opportunities for mischief in some of the Base towns. G.H.Q. itself—partly perhaps because of the necessity of extreme safeguards against espionage—was expected to lead astrictly single life; to conform to the perfect standard that was supposed to rule in the Provost Marshal's branch. That rigour, of course, was dictated not by an exceptional prudery in the P.M. authorities but by military convenience. Ordinarily, outside of G.H.Q. and the Provost Marshal's branch, there was a margin allowed for human error.
Paris Plage, the jolly beach at the mouth of the Canche near Montreuil, was for a long time "out-of-bounds" to all British troops. Paris Plage had, in pre-war days, rather a "Montmartre" reputation in Paris. It was the beach for the cheap tripper. It was the beach to which the hardworkingbourgeoisof the city who had to stick to his bureau during the summer sent his wife, and came down to see her on Sundays. It was also the beach for the Don Juan of modest means to visit with his temporary Juanita. Not this Paris reputation reacting on the traditional British hypocrisy caused the long-standing ban on Paris Plage, but practical sanitary reasons. It had not then a good reputation from the point of view of health. But as the size and the activities of G.H.Q. increased and it was necessary to find places for new departments near Montreuil, Paris Plage had to be utilised. After being subjected to a drastic sanitary inquisition it was thrown open to the troops and became the headquarters of several minor departments.
But of course the old gay life did not return. It was no longer a suburb of Montmartre. Still it preserved a certain air of rakishness. Going through there in a car one day with another staff officer we noticed a little shop in the windows of which were displayed very coquettishly two or three filmy articles of femininedessous. A lightning glance through the door showed that there was quite a bevy of fair shop assistants—about three assistants to each item of merchandise. In the window there was this simple device, in English:
CHEQUES CASHED.
We dared not investigate further. A G.H.Q. car is so clearly recognisable as such that it could not stop outside, and the subterfuge of drawing up at the Directorate of Inkstands and making a reconnaissance on foot we felt to beinfra dig. It was only possible to pass the shop slowly on the return journey, and to look out for it the next month when going that way again. It was still open, still bore its artless device. It was a little bit of the old life of Paris Plage that had escaped the shocks of war.
In very truth we were a dull lot from one point of view. Even the conversation at meals was ordinarily wanting in that type of anecdote which—as Walpole said when he was asked why it was rife at his table, where sat the greatest men of Europe, who should have had somethingbetter to talk about—is popular "because every man understands it." Perhaps the propriety of our conversation was partly due to the fact that there was nearly always a padre within earshot. Perhaps I may dare the explanation of the general absence of "sex interest" in our lives, that here were gathered together a band of men with very exacting and very important work to do, and that they simply had not time nor inclination to bother about what is usually an amusement of idle lives.
As soon as any subject is involved in political discussion the facts about it are apt to be distorted in the interests of some particular view. The "Shell shortage" in the early stages of the war has become in a sense a political issue; and that I do not intend to discuss. But some facts about munitions supply must be given—for that was the very pivot of the war—irrespective of what political case they help or harm.
The British Force at the outset of the war suffered from a shell and gun shortage as compared with its enemy, because it had been trained and equipped for a different type of warfare from that which actually came. It had very little high explosive shell, and what it had was rarely "high explosive" in the real sense of the term. The patient search for a foolprooffuse had been so successful that our H.E. shell was comparatively inoffensive when it reached the enemy's lines. It spluttered off rather than shattered off. All this was put right in time. But the difficulties which the Munitions Supply Department had to face at the outset were enormous. There were, considered in the lights of the needs of this war, practically no shells, no guns, and no machinery for making them. Essential material was lacking in many cases, and the only source of quick supply was Germany, which alone in the world had organised for war.
But all difficulties were overcome. How great the growth some comparative figures will show. The production of high explosive in 1914 was almost negligible. The year's supply would not keep the guns of 1918 going for a day. In 1915 we began to produce high explosive on a large scale, and in amounts which made the 1914 output seem contemptible, but still in quite inadequate quantities. In 1916 we had increased the 1915 amount sevenfold. In 1917 we had increased that 1916 amount fourfold. From March, 1915, to March, 1917, the increase was twenty-eight fold. Of machine-guns we made samples in 1914 and we began to manufacture quantities in 1915. In 1917 we made twenty times as many as in 1915. Of aeroplanes the figures mounted in steep flights. In 1916 we seemed to be producingvastly. In 1917 the rate of production for the first six months had increased fourfold as compared with the previous year, and another great acceleration was in progress.
In the end we were enormously superior to any other Army in the field in the matter of munitions. To the very day of the Armistice improvements in the quality and rate of productions were still going on in preparation for the Spring, 1919, campaign, which it was anticipated would end the war. The German threw up the sponge before then. If he had waited he would have been literally blown out of his trenches and his chief cities.
In one sense, of course, we never had enough, but if I were asked to name a date on which a serious shortage of munitions ceased I should say September 19th, 1915, on the eve of the battle of Loos. On that date, a year after Trench War began, word was passed around to the batteries of the British line in a phrase copied from the provision shops of London: "Ammunition is cheap to-day." Every gun-pit stocked up with shell. The gates of the dumps were opened and shell fairly poured out. Battery Commanders, who knew the days when one shell per gun per day was the limit allowed, saw with joy thousands of shells, and, as they began eagerly to fire them off, thousands more coming.
On the 23rd of September a regular bombardmentof the whole German line facing the British line began. The artillery was undertaking the preliminary work of wire-cutting and parapet pounding. The 18-pounders with shrapnel, the howitzers with high explosive, started at dawn, and all through the day systematically smashed away at the German's defences. That went on for two more days. The fourth day we intensified our shell-fire. Along many sections of the Front the German wire was down, and the parapet of the German trench breached. The enemy increased his artillery fire, too, attacking our trenches and searching for our observing stations and batteries, but on the whole getting the worst of the artillery duel. On the morning of the 25th the final artillery duel began. It was the greatest artillery bombardment in history up to that date, though afterwards so eclipsed by the records of the Somme, the Ancre and of Messines as to be remembered as a mere splutter. But at the time it was vastly impressive.
The morning was dull but the flashes of guns were so continuous as to give a light which was almost unbroken. It flickered, but it never failed. The earth itself quivered and shook with the repeated shocks of the guns. The air became a tattered hunted thing, torn wisps of it blown hither and thither by the constant explosions.
The Battle of Loos did not give us the break-throughwe expected, but, in so far as my observation is worth anything, the reason was not lack of munitions. Loos showed that the task was a more complicated one than merely smashing down the front line of enemy trenches. "Trench War" was resumed, whilst the British Army prepared for the next phase opening in July, 1916, with the first Battle of the Somme. By then munitions supply had grown gigantically and in the mechanics of war we were far ahead of the Germans. This was not only in artillery but in infantry equipment and in our unique weapon the "Tank," which was the mechanical contrivance having the most decisive results on the issue of the war. These appeared in September, 1916, two years after "Trench War" had begun, and were ultimately destined to make that sort of war impossible, a task which the German poison gas had failed to accomplish.
As a race we are never consciously dramatic, or I would have imagined on that September 1916 morning that the arrival of the Tanks on the Somme front had been carefully timed and stage-managed. The morning was dull and misty. Over the seared and terrible land little wisps of fog rose and fell. All likeness to our gentle mother earth had been battered out of the fields, which were rubbish-heaps of churned-up débris of bodies, dust, weapons—hideously pock-marked by the eruption of the shells.Where had been villages were dirtier patches of desolation. Where had been woods, groups of splintered stumps. It was an abomination of desolation, like as when the earth was first formed out of the void. In the midst of this desolation out of the mist came, crawling uncouthly, the Tanks, like prehistoric saurians.
The German forces were obviously frightened by the Tanks, which climbed over their trenches, and impervious to rifle bullets, smashed up machine-gun emplacements and redoubts. But that Tank of 1916 was nothing like the perfected machine of 1918. Its rear steering wheel was a weak-spot liable to be shot away. Its pace was too slow for it to keep up with charging infantry. No real tactics had been evolved for its use.
But, such as it was, that Tank at first brought alarm to more than the enemy. In going to and from the battle front it "got the wind up" many a British dug-out. Here is an artillery officer's yarn of the first "Tank night":
"Our 'Mess' was a roofed-over shell-hole a mile or so in front of Martinpuich. The roof would keep out shrapnel bits but was no use against a direct hit from a shell. I was Orderly Dog for the night and it was my business to take action, when, outside, a strange spluttering, growling, scratching, spitting sound broke into the steady barking of the guns. It was like a thousand cats, a hundred dogs, and a sea-sickelephant or two scrambling and squabbling together in a dust-hole. I went to investigate. A Tank wandering home was within ten yards of our Mess, heading straight for it. With all theinsoucianceI could command at such a crisis I begged the Tank to stop; urged that our roof was designed to keep out splinters only and was neither shell-proof nor Tank-proof; pointed out that if it persisted in its course seven artillery officers, some of whom had wives and children, and all of whom had mothers, would be pulped. Then I became calmer and told the Tank that there was some wine in the Mess and even some whisky and soda, if the Tank would now stop and have a drink. Fortunately a Tank is a slow mover and my cooler arguments had effect by the time it had got within five yards of our roof-tree. Then it backed water and we were safe. The Tank is a noble animal, but it adds a little to the anxieties of life underground."
THE FOSSE
"The Tank" was the great mechanical find of the war, and it was an all-British find. High authority had many fine name-proposals for the useful monsters, but Tommy took the matter into his own hands and coined the word "Tank," and "Tank" it remained. Those who are interested in matters of language may note that the French do not use the word "Tank" but describe a "Tank" as achar d'assaut, which is accurate, but has a weaklook. It is an illustration of their jealous and admirable care of their language. They will not allow foreign words to intrude if that can be avoided. We, on the other hand, are quite careless about our language. The orders of our Army in France were bespattered with French words and phrases for which there were quite good English equivalents. (Garerégulatricefor "distributing station" is one of the many scores of cases in point.) It is a pity that we are so careless in regard to our mother tongue. I made an effort once to persuade G.H.Q. that British Army orders and instructions should be put out in English without any foreign admixture, but met with little sympathy. The intrusion of French words was not so bad, but German words had an almost equal degree of hospitality.
But to return to our munitions. The hand bomb was a weapon which by 1914 we had allowed to fall out of use. The British Grenadiers no longer threw grenades. But Trench War brought back the bomb as a weapon, and our bomb was soon better than the German bomb. At the first Somme battle (1916) we showed a definite superiority in bomb supply and bomb use. This development was altogether in our favour. The bomb—beastly weapon as it is, and beastly as are the wounds it inflicts—lends its favour to the quickerbrain, the prompter courage, the keener leadership. The football field and the cricket green both give a good foundation for the murderous art of bombing. As soon as we had the bombs our bombing superiority grew with every day.
An instance to illustrate bombing: For the taking of the village of Contalmaison (1916) a preliminary task was the capture of Horse Shoe trench. The attack on this was prospering when it was held up at a critical point by the unmasking of a German machine gun on our right flank. To the fire of this gun we were fully exposed, and its effect was murderous. A young cricketer rose to the occasion. Single-handed he rushed the gun with a bag of bombs, got to his distance and destroyed it with a couple of "hot returns from the outfield."
In using ammunition the B.E.F. put up some startling records. On August 8th, 1918, when our big final thrust began there were used 15,598 tons in a single day. On September 29th, 1918, there were used 23,706 tons. Here are some other big figures:
Date.Battle.Amount.1/7/16Somme12,776tons9/4/17Vimy24,706"3/6/17Arras17,162"7/6/17Messines20,638"31/7/17Ypres22,193"20/9/17}21/9/17}Polygon Wood42,156"
In the depôts in France we kept a reserve of 258,000 tons of ammunition, and the issues in a normal month ran to about that figure though it varied a good deal month by month. Thus the average expenditure during the last months of 1918 was: May, 5,478 tons daily; June, 4,748 tons daily; July, 5,683 tons daily; August, 9,046 tons daily; September, 8,576 tons daily; October, 4,748 tons daily; November, 3,158 tons daily. On November 11th, the last day of the war, we used 233 tons of ammunition.
Different varieties of ammunition had widely different rates of use. The gigantic 15-inch howitzer on some days did not fire a single round. It was a "big day" when it fired fifty rounds. It was just as well that it was not a gun which indulged in thousands of rounds, for a ten-ton broad-gauge railway truck would only take twelve rounds for it. The 18-pounder fieldgunswould shoot 100,000 rounds on a normal day, and on a heavy day would use 200,000 rounds. The cost of ammunition was, in a time of heavy fighting, up to £3,000,000per day.
A heavy item in munitions was for defence against poison gas and for our own poison gas service. We entered with extreme reluctance into the ghastly business, but once we started we soon made the German sorry that he had brought that element into the war. Our gases were more potent and more plentiful than his.For lack of material he could not give his men perfect gas protectors, while to our men we could and did.
The last loathsome trick of the enemy in this direction was the introduction of mustard gas, a powerful corrosive which was discharged from shells. The use of mustard gas by the enemy raised a number of problems for Supplies as apart from the Medical Staffs. The disinfection with chloride of lime of ground contaminated with the gas, a prompt change of clothing and bath treatment for men affected, proved efficacious in dealing with mustard gas. There was, too, safety in protective overalls of oilskin. Mustard gas affected the Veterinary Service heavily, there being many casualties to horses and mules through passing over ground infected with the gas.
The inventive spirit was naturally strong in the Army, and some of the most useful of the new ideas in the way of munitions or equipment came from men in the Field. These ideas were tested in the Army workshops, and occasionally there was a certain amount of waste owing to the same idea, or nearly the same idea, being experimented with simultaneously in more than one Army. So an Army Order from Home recalled the King's Regulation that War Office approval must be obtained before experimental work was done inregard to any invention. But this, it was urged from G.H.Q., would act prejudicially to the interests of the Force in France, since many very useful inventions regarding stores and material had come from officers and men of the Force and it was not in the best interests of the public to put any obstacles in the way of future inventions. This was recognised, and a subsequent Army Order gave authority to the Commander-in-Chief of any Expeditionary Force to authorise trials of inventions; but precautions were taken in regard to duplication and overlapping.
There were not in the Field so many foolish inventors as at Home. No such merry idea came to G.H.Q. as that anti-submarine device with which the Admiralty was plagued—a liquid air shell which on being exploded anywhere in the vicinity of a submarine formed an extensive iceberg (through the lowering of the surrounding temperature by a release of the liquid air from pressure). On this iceberg the submarine would be brought to the surface. The next step would be easy: open with an oyster knife, sprinkle with pepper and salt and a dash of lemon juice, and serve.
The B.E.F. had never anything quite so naive as that. Its limit was the inventor who claimed to be able to project an X-ray from an electric battery so that it would kill anything within 1,000 yards. This invention would have beena great war-stopper. It would have been only necessary to set up a sufficient number of the projectors along our Front, switch on the current and march on to Berlin. It was offered at a time when inventions were rather the fashion, and it needed courage to scoff at even the most curious notion. So it actually got to the stage of a trial with a High Authority present. The inventor set up his projector; an animal was let loose within its deadly range and, surely enough, dropped dead. Unfortunately for the inventor a medical scoffer subjected the animal to apost mortemexamination and found that it had evidently resolved on suicide, for it had taken a large dose of strychnine. This discouraged further trials of the X-ray device.
The inventor with a "wireless" device for exploding enemy magazines also cropped up. You projected a wireless ray and it blew up a dump. This invention could be very convincingly demonstrated within your own lines. All that was necessary was to provide in the dump a certain amount of loose explosive, a fulminate, and a receiver tuned to receive your wireless message. We were not on sufficiently good terms with the Germans to persuade them to arrange their ammunition depôts in this way for our convenience.
There was a closeliaisonkept up between the B.E.F. and the Ministry of Munitions. WhenMr. Winston Churchill was Minister of Munitions he was over in France so frequently that a small château was kept up for him at G.H.Q. He was wont to come into the Officers' Club for his meals. There was always an air about him that he would have liked to be in the jack-boots of his famous ancestor and give the world a spectacle of another Marlborough winning victories in Flanders.
Probably more than half the men at G.H.Q. had been "crocked" at one time or another during the campaign, from wounds or one of those fevers of the battlefield born of mud and filth and fatigue. Some came to work on the Staff whilst still under medical treatment, and there was a local hospital at Montreuil which was a boon to those out-patients needing massage for their scars or quinine for their fevers.
Apart from the doctors of this hospital only the very big men of the medical services appeared ever at G.H.Q. It was a pleasure not easily won to persuade them to talk over their work. But when they did talk, what wonders they had to tell of!
A BY-WAY
Socrates in prison, when the fetters weretaken off his legs, as he rubbed them to make the blood run freely again, speculated on how pleasure always followed pain, so that the two seemed to be linked together by some unbreakable bond. One would like to hear Socrates to-day, as his limb, injured in Flanders, was rubbed back to usefulness, talking to his masseur on the good that will follow the evil of the Great War as surely as if the two had been linked together and one was the consequence of the other. Matter for a fine homily there from the stubborn old hero with the divinely clear mind!
Those optimists who thought that a new heaven and a new earth would come at the end of the war, and that even all politicians would become sincere, alert, and vigorous in the public service, were perhaps not reasonable and may be disappointed in some measure; but no one can observe closely the phenomena of the war without being sure that from its sacrifices and lessons much good will come. The dreadful fire that had to be kindled to burn out the cancer of Germanism burned out evil too in the nations that were the instruments of vengeance. Peoples who went into war iron will come out steel ultimately; for the war, as well as being preservative, will prove regenerative.
There is no better proof of this than in the tale of our campaigns against the germs, thosepitiless enemies who are always attacking human content and happiness. It was a wonderful part of the war, that defensive and offensive against Disease, with its trench systems which hold up foes whom we cannot destroy with our present weapons; its Intelligence Department, spying with a thousand microscopes into the designs and dispositions of the enemy; its clever diplomatic service, always raising up allies in our blood against germ invasion; its long illustrious roll of heroes who have given up life or health to hold positions against odds or to go out on forlorn hopes.
In this the benefits springing out from the Great War show splendid and palpable. In the process of beating the Germans we made such great advances in the war against the germs that we greet peace as a definitely healthier people, organised to save, in a generation or two, for service in this world, more than the total of all those who went to a Higher Service from the fields of France and Belgium.
Because the war has given a sounder national discipline, because it has cleared so many obstacles from the path of medical organisation, the world's death-rate, according to sound calculations, will in future years show a substantial decrease. The toll taken by the Germans will be more than made up by thelives saved from the germs. The British Medical Service, following in the path of the victorious British Army, and wielding an authority that it never knew before, carried on a war against disease in Europe, Asia, and Africa that is now saving thousands of lives, and will save millions in the ultimate result. Enteric, cholera, dysentery, scurvy, small-pox, beri-beri, malaria, phthisis were fought successfully. Even that national British disease, rheumatism, was pushed back from some of its trenches and compelled to surrender not a few of its ridges.
Fascinating as a fairy tale, absorbing as a good detective story, stimulating as the records of a stubborn battle, will be the record of British medical work in the Great War when it comes to be written. It will not be a story merely of drains and drugs and dressings, but also of kindly amulets and beneficent golden fishes; of wicked germs who chalk their throats to deceive with soft talk little red corpuscles; of fairy princes who destroy wicked enchantments with spells from tiny glass tubes. Those attentive gentlemen experimenting with neck ribbons smeared with potent charms have not come to their second childhood; they are on the track of the perfectcimicifugewhich will keep lice off the body and, keeping off lice, will reduce the range of typhus and other diseases. A great tank of little live fish sent out to a malariaFront does not mean that we are relapsing into the old Chinese school of medicine (which prescribed a live mouse to be swallowed whole as a remedy for one complaint), but that these little fish love to eat the eggs of the anopheles mosquito, which spreads malaria. It lays its eggs in ponds; the fish eat the eggs; the eggs don't hatch; the mosquitoes don't come; and there is less malaria.
If your mind is more attracted by detective stories than by fairy tales, turn to a bacteriological laboratory and watch the tracking down of the Hidden Hand that is responsible for odious diseases; for example, that one known popularly as spotted fever, a very deadly disease of over-crowding. A cunning criminal is the spotted fever germ, and he has not yet been quite fully identified and convicted. A victim of spotted fever has in his throat and spinal fluid the causative germ; but this germ hides behind a smoke cloud of other germs and must be placed quite definitely before it can be destroyed. It was found that it is a germ shaped like a double bean, that it is to be distinguished from other germs of the same shape by the fact that its hide is impervious to a certain stain which those other germs will absorb. It was further found that this spotted fever germ would not increase and multiply at a warmth of 23 degrees C., whilst otherwise similar germs would. Therecertain knowledge stopped for a time. Other double-bean, non-staining, non-growing at 23 degrees C. germs existed, among whom the real criminal lived and hid. Finally, four bad brother germs were found and are now being dealt with, and the disease is no longer a serious menace.
The divine purpose for good that runs stubbornly through life and has made it impossible for the murderous German plans to thrive in spite of all our neglects and stupidities, crops up insistently in the story of the British medical campaign in this war. Thus, chlorine gas came into the field first as the poison gas of the Germans; it remained in the field on the British side chiefly as a means for purifying water.
One interesting result of the war which we noticed at G.H.Q. was the abandonment of the Early Victorian primness in conversation in England. Soldiers going home on leave noticed it from 1916 onwards; and on the balance of the evidence I do not think they were at all responsible for it. They would go away from Boulogne, after an extra careful bath and the putting on of a clean tunic, with a steady resolution to put away from their thoughts and their tongues all the coarseness of the camp; and find themselves at their first dinner party in England tackled by some young lady in herteens on the subject of lice; or by some matron not yet in the thirties on the subject of venereal disease at the Front. They would come back often with a distinct feeling of shame-shock, to welcome the comparative reticence of Mess conversation.
It was my duty once to see the representative of an organisation that wished to have lectures delivered to all the soldiers on the subject of "v.d." To my surprise the representative proved to be a lady—and a young and attractive lady at that. She plunged into her subject without the least trace of embarrassment. She wanted lectures, with pictures, in every recreation hut of the B.E.F., France, and was firm to brush away the objection that "the men might not like it," and scornful of the reservation that if the lectures were permitted they were not to be "parade lectures,"i.e., the men were not to be compelled to attend.
Finally, discovering that though the lady wanted "pictures" she had not the pictures but expected the Army to supply them, I took refuge in a subterfuge. "Very sorry, very sorry indeed, but there is no Vote out of which we can get the pictures."
But the lady was insistent. She knew that there were cinematographs provided for the soldiers.
"Oh, but that is not my department. That is Amusements."
"Very well," she said firmly. "I'll see Amusements."
And she went away to convince some other Staff Officer that universal lectures on v.d., with pictures, would be an appreciated Amusement.
I do not know where the idea sprang from that v.d. was very common in the Army. So far as my observation went, and from what inquiries I made of medical officers, the opposite was the case. Among the officers with whom I came into touch during the campaign—many hundreds in the aggregate—I only heard of one case. Among the men of my battery before I was on the Staff I never heard of one case during 18 months of regimental life.
The Army's standard of health in this respect was better than that of the average of the civilian population. There were some tragic outbreaks—one in Cairo, another (of much less seriousness) with Amiens as its focus—but on an average the record was good.
British ideas did not favour the degrees of regulation and interference in this matter that other countries tolerate. But the soldier had some safeguards which the civilian had not. For instance it was the duty of the Assistant Provost Marshal of a Division, whenever a man reported sick from v.d., to go to the hospital, interview the patient and try to find out thefons et origo. If his mission were successfulthe person responsible was promptly expelled from the Army area.
One of the Dominion Corps adopted the method of advising prophylactic precautions (and supplying the means of prophylaxis). The British Army on a whole did not follow that course, though in the later stages of the campaign the means of prophylaxis were available if applied for.
But enough on that point. It was the surgical rather than the medical side of the R.A.M.C. that interested G.H.Q. So many had "taken a knock" and put in a spell at a hospital. Opinion was practically unanimous that "Hospital" was a place of real human sympathy as well as devoted skill, and that "sister" was the best pattern of womankind.
It is etiquette in the Army to call her always "Sister," though technically "sister" is an intermediate grade between "nurse" and "matron." Matron is a great dignitary. She has, in the language of the Bar, "taken silk," and when her silk gown rustles into the room it is etiquette for officers to stand up, provided they have legs and strength to stand up. Otherwise you "come to attention" by smiling as well as you can; a respectful, cheerful, but not an hilarious or free-and-easy smile. It should convey the message that you are having the time of your life in the best possible of hospitals under the best possible of matrons. The Sisterwhose patient you are will be very much hurt if you do not smile properly at Matron. "Sister" is of many different grades of skill, but of an almost unvarying grade of devotion, the highest.
A "strafer," in hospital language, is a Sister who by ten years or so of hard anxious work and self-denial has reached to the height of an office boy's wage and a professional skill which saves lives daily and cuts weeks off one's stay in hospital. You are always glad when she has gone away from your wound, but at the back of your gladness is the knowledge that you want her for next dressing. A good "strafer" goes over a wound with the enthusiasm of a thrush with a large family going over a lawn for worms. She examines, searches, squeezes, probes, looking out for shed pieces of bone, for "proud flesh," for odd corners where inflammatory matter might lurk. She is looking for mischief, and any mischief found is promptly "strafed." If it is bad she calls in the doctor; if it is minor she has her own little armoury of mischief-breakers, scissors, pincers, nitrate of silver, and the like.
Matrons are easily offended. At a certain hospital in France the King was half expected as a visitor. The Matron at once had a bad attack of decoration fever. As I was a lightly-wounded that time I assisted her policy of deceiving his Majesty into thinking that thehospital was always a fairy bower by going out and "finding" some flowers. Then Matron had clean quilts on all the beds, and the order went forth that these were to be kept creaseless and smooth. But one patient would persist in crooking up his knees. Matron argued with him. He disloyally pleaded that he was much more comfortable that way. Now, having got the flowers for the ward, I thought I had the right to give advice as a sort of accomplice, and I suggested mildly: "Better break his knees, Matron."
She was offended. Then the King did not come after all; and I think she was inclined to blame me for that.
But matrons are not altogether an evil; like the Staff and adjutants and brigade majors, they are at the worst necessary evils, at the best quite good sorts. But there is one matron-habit that should be dealt with sternly by regulation. If a very pretty nurse were posted to a hospital, Matron generally tried to assign her to the sick sisters' ward. Obviously that was bad strategy. The prettiness of their nurse would have no cheering effect on sick sisters, but to sick officers a pretty sister irresistibly suggests the wisdom of getting well quickly. Fortunately the supply of pretty sisters is too great to allow of their all being absorbed in wards for sick sisters.