CHAPTER VICASTLES IN FLANDERS
With the British, as with the French and German armies in the field, you will sometimes find Headquarters Staffs housed in a château. A Staff wants plenty of elbow-room, it wants quarters away from the noise and dust of the high-road and the bustle of a town; it has to choose a fairly secluded spot, so as to escape the vigilant eyes of enemy airmen and the bombardment which inevitably follows detection. This word château is very misleading. It is what you might call a “portmanteau” word. It signifies not only the Alexander Dumas type of medieval castle; it also means practically any large house standing in its own grounds. Thus, when I have set out to find the Headquarters of the Nth Division in the Château of Blancques (B 13 c., or some similar hieroglyphic, marking the spot on the Staff maps, will be the address given to me at General Headquarters), I have never known whether I shall find the Divisional General living amid the picturesque surroundings of a real old French château, with slender grey turrets, and lichen-covered walls, and a black and shining moat, or amid the stucco and red brick, the pitch-pine and stained glass, of some preposterous mansionbuilt by a retired merchant on the outskirts of an industrial town.
When I think of this war in years to come, however, I feel that I shall always see some of its incidents re-enacted against the idyllic background of one or other of the ancient châteaux of this part of France. There is little enough picturesqueness, Heaven knows, in this most business-like of wars, but there is an undeniable touch of romance in the scenes which take place in and about these fine old castles in our zone of occupation. I always came upon them with a feeling of surprise, these old châteaux, in a country that with its smoke-stacks and mine-shafts speaks of anything rather than of old-world romance. They are mostly tucked away behind a screen of trees, to shelter them from the icy winds which blow across these melancholy Flanders flats in winter; they are almost always surrounded by a moat, and stand in their own grounds, which remain in their natural state, with wide stretches of short grass interspersed with wild flowers between groups of fine old trees.
These grand old houses, which have witnessed so many stirring scenes of war in the past, were awakened from many years of slumber by the arrival of our army in the North of France. The little stumpy bridges across their moats, which had re-echoed under the hoofs of horsemen in the armies ofle Roi Soleil; the tall, pointed turrets which had seen in succession the cocked hats ofle grand Marlbrook’sinfantry; the ragged bonnets of the Revolution; the beplumed busbies of Wellington’s cavalry, filing alongthe white roads threading the distant plain, were once again the silent witnesses of the bustle of an army in the field. A slender pennant was affixed to the lichen-covered gate-post; sentries in khaki, stolid, slow-moving, rifle with fixed bayonet at the “Order arms,” materialized apparently out of nowhere; motor-cars came whirring up, discharging lean, athletic-looking officers in caps of red and gold; while motor-lorries unloaded themselves of stacks of papers and maps and stores and sleeping-valises and kit-bags. A party of extraordinarily energetic people took possession of stables or an outhouse, or some building conveniently adjacent to the château, and decorated roof and walls with telegraph and telephone wires, and set up a pole flying a blue and white flag over against a fair fretwork sign, “R.E. Signallers.” To the Signallers’ station presently began to arrive the motor-cyclist despatch orderlies in a frantic fuss of noise and a cloud of dust.
The old châteaux hardly knew themselves again in all this activity. Northern France is so eminently industrial that one had forgotten that it had its relics of the old nobility of France as well, though many of the ancient châteaux had passed into other hands, and some were seldom if ever inhabited at all save by the caretakers and a few old servants.
So the old places awoke.The Timesand theDaily Mailappeared where formerly theFigaroandLa Croix(pillars of the old French nobility) were seen; theWinning Postfound itself side by side withThe Lives of the Saints(in thirty-eight volumes incalf); and pictures of charming young ladies cut out of theSketchorLa Vie Parisienne, particularly Rudolphe Kirchner’s delightful sketches from the latter, were pinned up on the walls next to family portraits of dead-and-gone châtelains and châtelaines. The green tree-frogs, sprawling lazily in the sunshine among the sedge on the surface of the moat, leapt away in high indignation at the invasion of their realm by noisy young men with bath-towels. The rooks in the plantation cawed in raucous protest against the thin blue curls of smoke arising from the camp-fires of the troops bivouacked among the oaks and beeches, singing, hammering, rattling tins, and jesting from dawn to dark. The birds watched in amazement men-folk doing work they had been wont to believe was the prerogative of rabbits and moles, scraping deep holes in the ground, roofing them with timber, and thatching them with leaves, and vanishing therein when blasts on a whistle heralded the approach of the curious new birds recently noticed in the sky, birds that glittered whitely far up among the clouds and droned angrily like a giant bumble-bee.
I have seen many striking contrasts in these châteaux of France. One day I turned into the courtyard of as dainty a little château as ever the fifteenth Louis of gallant memory built for a lady. It was one of the country places of a French officer then at the front, and very rarely visited by him. Its grounds were neglected, the iron gates were rusted and broken, and the stonework running round the flat and shallow fish-pond was hoary and crackedwith age. Against a superb background of green foliage, a mighty screen of poplars bordering a drive that ran out to the blue horizon, a horseman sat on his horse, turbaned, a lance at his stirrup, immobile, a sublime equestrian statue. It was an Indian sowar, a Pathan trooper of the native cavalry. He sat perfectly still in the sunshine, in the silence that was Pompadour France....
Again, I remember calling at a château to get a pass to visit a certain part of our line. It was a hybrid kind of place. The old part of the château had been caught up and surrounded, as it were, in an imposing pile of new red brick. On the lawn in front ran a lean fragment of old grey wall, along which the scarlet rambler climbed recklessly, profusely, in and out of the castellated coping and athwart a broken arch. Two motor-cyclist despatch-riders sat on the lawn beneath a giant walnut-tree and tinkered with their cycles. In the distance the guns drummed gently, continuously. A young man came strolling across the lawn. He was an officer. His khaki tunic and breeches and puttees had seen hard service, his cap was thrust back from his forehead. In his hand he carried a sheaf of papers, with which he returned, rather punctiliously, the salute of the two motorcyclists. As he passed me I saw it was the Prince of Wales.
He passed into my vision briefly that day and passed out again, very slim, still a little diffident, in the pink of condition, as he passes to and fro in the midst of our army in the field, restless when he is held back too long from the front, happy only whenhe feels that he is sharing the dangers and hardships of the army. The Prince of Wales with the army in France! What a fine suggestion there is about the phrase! It kindles my imagination every time I see him there with the troops. Possibly the grey old tower of that modernized château which watched him strolling nonchalantly across the grass that morning had also looked down upon his most famous ancestor, him whose sable armour, once famed in France, you may see to this day in the Cathedral at Canterbury.
This region is rich in association with our fighting past. I spent a morning once with a Headquarters Staff in a château where Marlborough (who has left the impress of his magnetic personality so deeply stamped on the French imagination) had stayed when he was conducting his operations against Marshal Villar’s famousNe Plus Ultralines. A quiet, reposeful spot was that château, with a rococo atmosphere, with panelled rooms and old furniture, and gold-framed portraits of military men of a past age. In a little study on the ground-floor, where “Corporal John” may have worked himself, a General explained to me over a table spread with maps his hopes and ambitions for the coming summer. Outside a Staff Officer was explaining the working of a trench mortar, the invention of one of the officers quartered in the château; others were talking of the fishing they had managed to get in the neighbourhood. Mortars and fishing! As subjects of conversation they were as topical in the times of “the army in Flanders” as to-day.
One day I picked up a thread which conducted mestraight back to Waterloo. It was in an old château I found it, an exquisitely preserved gem of the early seventeenth century, with a pigeon-coop, emblematic of seigneurial rights, and a dainty little flower-garden, a perfect corner of old France which, as a contemporaneous print hung in one of the rooms of the château attested, had not changed its appearance since it was laid out when the château was built. In this château Grant’s Brigade of cavalry, which fought at Waterloo, was quartered for two years after the battle. The place was still redolent of the memories of the British cavalry which, as part of the army of occupation of the Allies after the overthrow of Napoleon, had been quartered in the château and in the little township which surrounds it. In the outer wall of the stables they showed me a row of rings affixed there for the horses, a hundred years ago, by the men of the 15th Hussars who were in Grant’s Brigade. In and about the little town surrounding the château, on the occasion of my visit, I met again men of the 15th Hussars quartered there—the 15th Hussars of to-day, gallantly carrying on the great traditions which their forbears at Waterloo helped to establish.
These ancient châteaux in our zone of operations often change their occupants. A Staff moves on and disappears, and before the old house has had time to relapse into its secular sleep there is another irruption of “brass-hats” in motor-cars and mess orderlies in motor-lorries.
The General Staff room is generally established in the largest room of the château. I have seen somecurious contrasts in these rooms. I have in mind a long and lofty apartment with a broad alcove made by a story of one of the corner turrets of the château. On the walls old-fashioned oil-paintings hung side by side with innumerable maps, army orders, and various indications, serious and facetious. A Staff Officer was sitting at a big old oak table spread with an extraordinary collection of mud-stained papers. This was the Intelligence Officer going through correspondence found on German prisoners and dead. In the alcove another Staff Officer was talking on the telephone to a Brigade Headquarters; sandbags was the theme, and its discussion developed a certain amount of acerbity as it proceeded. A young man in very muddy riding-boots stood by the handsome carved-stone mantelpiece, his cap on the back of his head, a riding-crop in his hand. He was waiting with some impatience for the sandbag debate to finish.
In its outward appearance the room was a blend of suggestions of peace and war. There were touches of the boudoir, the bureau, and the barrack-room in the furniture. One or two daintybergèrechairs, a work-stand, a pretty cabinet or two, spoke of some feminine influence that had once reigned here; the typewriters, the telephone, suggested the city office; while the barrack-room touch was provided by the Sam Browne belts, the revolvers, the riding-crops and swagger canes which were scattered about in the corners and on the tables and chairs.
Life in these châteaux is not always so peaceful as their appearance would indicate. Not so very longago I was having tea in a château with a Headquarters Staff, and the very tea-things on the table rattled with the continual air-percussion of shells screeching to and fro about the place. It was an ill-omened place, that dining-room, for all the windows on one side had been smashed, and in front of them a solid barricade of sandbags had been erected to diminish the effect of shells bursting on the gravel without. As we drank our tea placidly, half a dozen heavy shells went wailing over the house, and exploded noisily in the immediate vicinity.
There are châteaux, like the château of Hooge of which I spoke in a previous chapter, which have been totally destroyed by shell-fire. Yet you may find troops living in the grounds, in dug-outs furnished from the château, or sometimes even in a single room or cellar of the château which has escaped destruction. I have been to châteaux where almost every day shells plumped square into the crumbling brickwork, ploughing their way through ancient rafters and bursting with reverberating explosions amid Buhl tables and Empire chairs and Louis XIV. clocks and old French prints. I have seen gardens still blooming amid a horrid welter of destruction, with standard roses rearing their slender stems on high, and London pride and stocks and syringa straggling over little graves dotted here and there between gaping shell-holes, and tree-trunks blasted lying across shattered cucumber-frames.
I have been in a room, the last room habitable in a pretty little country-house where the flooring was of parquet, once highly polished, no doubt, but now stained with mud and scratched by hobnailed boots.A splendid Empire clock ticked away on the white marble mantelpiece; the table, spread with tin plates and cups, some bully-beef in a saucer, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of whisky, was Buhl; the chairs were of mahogany in the Empire style. A common wash-hand-stand, retrieved, I should think, from the stables, stood in a corner; in another corner an Empire couch had been spread with a flea-bag and blankets, and served as a bed for the doctor, who had his quarters there. Two walls of the apartment were curtained off with sacking, for beyond was the open air—roofless rooms, piled-up with débris, and shattered walls.
But what of the proprietors of these châteaux in our lines? you may ask. The British Army pays for everything it uses, pays rent for the châteaux it occupies, as for the horses or cattle it may (very rarely) requisition. The châtelains have very often gone away until the war is over; sometimes they have been called up to the French or Belgian armies, as the case may be. I have met with cases in which the châtelain has lived in his château during our occupation, and the officers quartered there have dined daily at his table.
The position is a little delicate. Our army is an army of gentlemen, and both officers and men have shown in this war that they know how to respect the feelings and property of the civilian population in our zone of operations. But, obviously, considerable tact is required to reconcile some elderly Countess, accustomed all her life to preside over a well-conducted, placid, and scrupulously clean household, with the irruption of a horde of healthy, active men,shod with hobnails (“Mon Dieu, le parquet!”), very often muddy (“O Ciel, mes tapis!”), and inclined to smoke pipes all over the place.
In one case I heard of, a Headquarters Staff, on arriving at a château where they were to establish themselves, found that the owner and his wife, an elderly couple, had not been on the best of terms with their predecessors, a Headquarters Staff that had just moved on. A tactful Staff Captain went out to reconnoitre the ground. He found that their hosts had been a triflefroisséby a lack of understanding on the part of the other British officers who had been quartered there. He laid himself out to make friends with the old couple with some success.
One day they mentioneden passantthat it was a pity there was only one swan on the lake, and that a female. The Staff Captain took counsel. Presently, with great secrecy, the youngest member of the Staff, who was thought to require a change of air, was despatched to Paris with strict orders only to return with a male swan. The British officer is a resourceful person. In three days the subaltern was back with a gentleman swan in a basket. This graceful present broke the ice between the British officers and their hosts, and when I visited that château, not only did the old couple preside daily at the officers’ mess, but they had also given them the usage of certain rooms which they had resentfully closed to their predecessors.
Occasionally, on the other hand, the châtelain—in the case I have in mind it was a châtelaine—is irreconcilably disagreeable. The lady in this case was married, and her husband, having been mobilized,was serving somewhere in the French firing-line. This circumstance had fired her indignation. With woman’s sweet unreasonableness, she laid it down that soldiers who were not in the firing-line were a good-for-nothing pack of ne’er-do-wells, and if they expected to have a nice comfortable time in her château, she would show them that they were vastly mistaken. So this preposterous person would visit the house several times a day—she lived herself in another house close by—ferret about for any damage done, and generally make herself an unmitigated nuisance. The gardener actually had instructions, which he carefully observed, to lop off the heads of every flower in the grounds to prevent the British officers from plucking them for their rooms. The General quartered there might have had the woman promptly packed off about her business by saying a word to the French Military Mission at General Headquarters. He was, however, much too polite to do that, so the lady was suffered in silence, and only scolded behind her back.
This case, which I have only mentioned because it is amusing, and not because it is typical, is quite exceptional. In the main, the relations between our army and its French hosts have been admirable. There has been a maximum of consideration on the one hand, a maximum of grateful hospitality on the other. In years to come the memories that will linger about these old châteaux of those who gratefully accepted their hospitality will be of brave, unostentatious, clean-living gentlemen, like Bayard, premier knight of France,sans peur et sans reproche.