'There's our hut!' said the young hut-leader, pointing through iron
palings at a couple of toy Noah's Arks built large. 'No--that's the
_nth_ Division's cinema. The Y.M.C.A. is the one beyond.'
The enclosure behind the palings had been a parade-ground in piping
times; and British squads, from the pink French barracks outside the
gates, still drilled there between banks of sterilised rubbish and
lagoons of unmedicated mud. The place was to become familiar to me under
many aspects. I have known it more than presentable in a clean suit of
snow, and really picturesque with a sharp moon cocked upon some towering
trees, as yet strangely intact. It was at its best, perhaps, as a
nocturne pricked out by a swarm of electric torches, going and coming
along the duck-boards in a grand chain of sparks and flashes. But its
true colours were the wet browns and drabs of that first glimpse in the
December dusk, with the Ark hull down in the mud, and the cinema a
sister ship across her bows.
The hut-leader ushered me on board with the courtesy of a young
commander inducting an elderly new mate; the difference was that I had
all the ropes to learn, with the possible exception of one he had
already shown me on our way from the local headquarters of the Y.M.C.A.
The battered town was full of English soldiers, to whom indeed it owed
its continued existence on the right side of the Line. In the gathering
twilight, and the deeper shade of beetling ruins, most of them saluted
either my leader's British warm, or my own voluminous trench-coat (with
fleece lining), on the supposition of officers within. Left to myself, I
should have done the wrong thing every time. It is expressly out of
order for a camp-follower to give or take salutes. Yet what is he to do,
when he gets a beauty from one whose boots he is unfit to black? My
leader had been showing me, with a pleasant nod and a genial civilian
gesture, easier to emulate than to acquire.
In the hut he left me to my own investigations while he was seeing to
his lamps. The round stove in the centre showed a rosy chimney through
the gloom, like a mast in a ship's saloon; and in the two half-lights
the place looked scrupulously swept and garnished for our guests, a
number of whom were already waiting outside for us to open. The trestle
tables, with nothing on them but a dusky polish, might have been
mathematically spaced, each with a pair of forms in perfect parallels,
and nothing else but a piano and an under-sized billiard-table on all
the tidy floor. The usual display of bunting, cheap but cheerful, hung
as banners from the joists, a garish vista from platform to counter.
Behind the counter were the shelves of shimmering goods, biscuits and
candles in open cases on the floor, and as many exits as a scene in a
farce. One door led into our room: an oblong cabin with camp beds for
self and leader, tables covered with American cloth, dust, toilet
requisites, more dust, candle-grease and tea-things, and a stove of its
own in roseate blast like the one down the hut.
The crew of two orderlies lived along a little passage in their kitchen,
and were now at their tea on packing-cases by the boiler fire. They were
both like Esau hairy men, with very little of the soldier left about
them. Their unlovely beds were the principal pieces of kitchen
furniture. In the kitchen, too, for obscure reasons not for me to
investigate, were the washing arrangements for all hands, and any face
or neck that felt inclined. I had heard a whisper of Officers' Baths in
the vicinity; it came to mind like the tinkle of a brook at these
discoveries.
At 4.30 the unkempt couple staggered in with the first urn, and I took
my post at the tap. One of them shuffled down the hut to open up; our
young skipper stuck a carriage candle in its grease on the edge of the
counter, over his till, saying he was as short of paraffin as of change;
and into the half-lit gloom marched a horde of determined soldiers, and
so upon the counter and my urn in double file. 'Tea, please, sir!' 'Two
teas!' 'Coop o' tay, plase!' The accents were from every district I had
ever known, and were those of every class, including the one that has no
accent at all. They warmed the blood like a medley of patriotic airs,
and I commenced potman as it were to martial music.
It was, perhaps, the least skilled labour to be had in France, but that
evening it was none too light. Every single customer began with tea: the
mugs flew through my hands as fast as I could fill them, until my end of
the counter swam in livid pools, and the tilted urn was down to a gentle
dribble. Now was the chance to look twice at the consumers of our
innocuous blend. One had a sheaf of wound-stripes on his sleeve; another
was fresh trench-mud from leathern jerkin (where my view of him began)
to the crown of his shrapnel helmet; many wore the bonnets of a famous
Scotch Division, all were in their habit as they fought; and there they
were waiting for their tea, a long perspective of patient faces, like
school-children at a treat. And here was I, fairly launched upon the
career which a facetious density has summed up as 'pouring out tea and
prayer in equal parts,' and prepared to continue with the first half of
the programme till further orders: the other was less in my line--but I
could have poured out a fairly fluent thanksgiving for the atmosphere of
youth and bravery, and most infectious vitality, which already filled
the hut.
In the meantime there was much to be learnt from my seasoned neighbour
at the till, and to admire in his happy control of gentlemen on their
way up the Line. Should they want more matches than it suited him to
sell, then want must be their master; did some sly knave appear at the
top of the queue, without having worked his way up past my urn, then it
was: 'I saw you, Jock! Go round and come up in your turn!' Or was it a
man with no change, and was there hardly any in the till?--'Take two
steps to the rear, my friend, and when I have the change I'll serve
you!' When he had the change, the sparks might have flown with it
through his fingers; he was lightning calculator and conjuror in one,
knew the foul franc note of a dubious bank with less than half an eye,
and how to refuse it with equal firmness and good-humour. I hardly knew
whether to feel hurt or flattered at being perpetually 'Mr.' to this
natural martinet, my junior it is true by decades, but a leader I was
already proud to follow and obey.
In the first lull he deserted me in order to make tea in our room, but
took his with the door open, shouting out the price of aught I had to
sell with an endearing verve, name and prefix included every time. It
made me feel more than ever like the mate of a ship, and anxious to earn
my certificate.
Then I had _my_ tea--with the door shut--and already an aching back for
part of the fun. For already the whole thing was my idea of fun--the
picnic idea--an old weakness. Huts especially were always near my heart,
and our room in this one reminded me of bush huts adored for their
discomfort in my teens. Of the two I preferred the bush fireside, a
hearth like a powder-closet and blazing logs; but candles in their own
grease-spots were an improvement on the old slush-lamp of moleskin and
mutton-fat. The likeness reached its height in the two sheetless bunks,
but there it ended. Not a sound was a sound ever heard before. The
continual chink of money in the till outside; the movement of many
feet, trained not to shuffle; the constant coughing of men otherwise in
superhuman health; the crude tinkle of the piano at the far end of the
hut--the efficient pounding of the cinema piano--the screw-like throb of
their petrol engine--the periodical bringing-down of their packed house,
no doubt by the ubiquitous Mr. Chaplin! Those were the sounds to which
we took our tea in the state-room of the Ark. She might have been on a
pleasure-trip all the time.
That first night I remember going back and diving into open cases of
candles, and counting out packets of cigarettes and biscuits, sticks of
chocolate, boxes of matches, and reaching down tinned salmon, sardines,
boot-laces, boot-polish, shaving-soap and tooth-paste, button-sticks,
'sticks of lead' (otherwise pencils), writing-pads, Nosegay Shag, Royal
Seal, or twist if we had it, and shouting for the prices as I went,
coping with the change by light of luck and nature, but doling out the
free stationery with a base lingering relief, until my back was a
hundred and all the silver of the allied realms one composite coin that
danced without jingling in the till. Gold stripes meant nothing to me
now; shrapnel helmets were as high above me as the stars; the only hero
was the man who didn't want change. Often in the early part I thought
the queue was coming to an end; it was always the sign for a fresh
influx; and when the National Anthem came thumping from the cinema, the
original Ark might have sunk under such a boarding-party of thirsty
tea-drinkers as we had still to receive. I noted that they called it tea
regardless of the contents of the urn, which changed first to coffee and
then to cocoa as the night wore on: tea was the generic term.
At last the smarter and tarter of the two orderlies, he who compounded
the contents of the urns, sidled without ceremony to the commander's
elbow.
'It wants a minute to the 'alf-hour, sir.'
Gramophone alone could give the husky tone of chronic injury, palette
and brush the red eyes of resentment turned upon his kind beyond the
counter. Our leader consulted his wrist-watch with a brisk gesture.
'I'll serve the next six men,' he ultimated, and the seventh man knocked
at his heart in vain. Green curtains closed the counter in the wistful
faces of the rest; if I can see them still, it is the heavenly music of
those curtain-rings that I hear! The mind's eye peeps through once more,
and spies the last gobblers at the splashed tables littered with mugs
and empty tins; the last dawdlers on a floor ankle-deep in the envelopes
of twopenny and half-franc packets of biscuits; and a little man
broom-in-hand at the open door, spoiling to sweep all the lot into
outer darkness.
In the kitchen, while both orderlies fell straight to work upon this
Augean scene, our versatile leader, as little daunted by the hour, gave
further expression to his personality in an omelette worthy of the
country, and in lashings of Suchard cocoa made with a master hand. I
remember with much gratitude that he also made my yawning bed, and that
we turned in early to the tune of rain:
A fusillade upon the roof,
A tattoo on the pane.
Only the pane was canvas, and the fusillade accompanied by some local
music from the guns outside the town.