He who loves a good novel will find himself in clover in a Y.M.C.A. hut
at the front. Not that he will have much time to read one there, except
as I read my night-cap _The Romance of War_; but a better book of the
same name will never stop writing itself out before his eyes, a book all
dialogue and illustrations, yet chock-full of marvellous characters,
drawn to a man without a word of commentary or analysis. To a man,
advisedly, since it will be a novel without a heroine; on the other
hand, all the men and boys will be heroes, at any rate to the kind of
reader I have in mind. Something will depend on him; he will have to
apply himself, as much as to any other kind of reading. He must have
eyes to see, brains to translate, a heart to love or pity or admire. He
must have the power to penetrate under other skins, to tremble for them
more than for his own, to glow and sweat with them, to shiver in shoes
he is not fit to wear. Many can go as far for people who never existed
outside some author's brain; these are they on whom the most stupendous
of unwritten romances is least likely to be lost. It lies open to all
who care to take their stand behind a hut counter in a forward area in
France.
The character to be seen there, and to be loved at sight! The adventures
to be heard at first-hand, and sometimes even shared! The fun, the
pathos, the underlying horror, but the grandeur lying deeper yet, all to
be encountered together at any minute of any working hour! The Romance
of War it is, but not only the romance; and talking of my sedative, with
all affection for an author who once kept me only too wide awake, it was
not of him that I thought by day behind my counter. It was of Dickens.
It was of Hugo. It was of Reade, who might have done the best battle in
British fiction (and did one of the very best sea-fights), of Scott and
Stevenson and the one or two living fathers of families who will die as
hard as theirs. Their children were always coming to life before our
eyes, especially the Dickens progeny. Sapper Pinch was a friend of mine,
with one or two near relations in the R.A.M.C. There were several
Private Tapleys, and not one of them a bore; on the contrary, they were
worth their weight in gold. And there was an older man whose real name
was obviously Sikes, though the worst thing we knew about him was that
he smoked an ounce of Nosegay every day he was down, and never said
please or thank-you. Once, when we had not seen him for sixteen days, he
knew there was something else he wanted but could not remember what.
'Nosegays!' I could tell him, and planked a packet on the counter. It
was the one time I saw him smile.
But it was not only business hours that brought forth these immortals;
two of the best were always with us in the superbly contrasted persons
of our two orderlies. The slower and clumsier of the pair was by rights
an Oxfordshire shepherd; in the Army, even under necessity's sternest
law, he was matter in the wrong place altogether. Oxfordshire may not be
actually a part of Wessex, but there is one part of Oxfordshire as
remote as the scene of any of the Wessex Novels, and that was our
Strephon's native place. He might have been the real and original
Gabriel Oak--as Mr. Hardy found him, not as we fortunately know the
bucolic hero of _Far from the Madding Crowd_.
Our Gabriel was the simplest bumpkin ever seen or heard off the London
stage. He it was who, in his early days in France, had heavily inquired:
'Who be this 'ere Fritz they be arl tarkin' about?' Thus did he
habitually conjugate the verb _to be_; but all his locutions and most
of his manners and customs, his puzzled head-scratchings, his audible
self-communings, his crass sagacity and his simple cunning, were
pastoral conventions of quite time-honoured theatricality. His very
walk, for all his drills, was the ponderous waddle of the stage rustic.
But on his own showing he had (like another Tommy) 'proved one too many
for his teachers' at an early stage of his military education. Not all
their precept and profanity, not all his pristine ardour as a volunteer,
had sufficed to put poor Gabriel on terms of adequate familiarity with
his rifle.
'I couldn' make nothin' of it, sir,' he would say with rueful candour.
'So they couldn' make nothin' o' me.'
His simplicity was a joy, though he was sometimes simple to a fault. One
morning I caught him draining our tea-pot as a loving-cup: matted head
thrown back, brawny elbows lifted, and the spout engulfed in his honest
maw: a perfect silhouette, not to be destroyed by a sound, much less a
word of protest, even had we not been devoted to our gentle savage. But
one of us did surreptitiously attend to the spout before tea-time. And
once before my eyes his ready lips sucked the condensed-milk off our
tin-opener before plunging it into a tin of potted meat. He had a
moustache of obsolete luxuriance, I remember with a shudder in this
connection; but the last time I saw him the moustache was not.
'You see, sir,' explained Gabriel, regretfully, 'I had a cold, an' it
arl ...'
I hope my muscles were still under due control. To know our Gabriel was
to perish rather than hurt his feelings; for he had the softest heart of
his own, and in Oxfordshire a wife and children to share its affections
with his ewes and lambs. 'An' I think a lot on 'em, too, sir,' said
Gabriel, when he showed me the full family group (self in uniform) done
on his last 'leaf.' Really a sweet simpleton, even when (as I was nearly
forgetting) he announced a brand-new Brigadier-General, who had honoured
me with a visit, as 'A gen'leman to see you, sir!'
The only man of us who had the heart to tell the angelic Gabriel off was
his brother orderly, a respectable and patriotic Huish, if such a
combination can be conceived. Our Mr. Huish was the gentleman who always
said it wanted five minutes to the 'alf-hour when it wanted at least
ten, and too often sped the last of our lingering guests with insult
into outer darkness. Like his prototype he was a fiery little Londoner,
with a hacking cough and a husky voice ever rising to a shout in his
dealings with bovine Gabriel. There was nothing of the beasts of the
field about our Huish; he was the terrier type, and more than true to it
in his fidelity to his temporary masters. At us he never snarled. His
special province was the boiler stove; he was generally blacked up to
the red rims of his eyes, like a seaside minstrel, and might have been
collecting money in his banjo as we saw him first of a dim morning. But
the instrument was only our frying-pan carried at arm's length, and our
approval of an unconscionable lot of rashers all the recognition he
required. 'W'en I 'as plenty I likes to give plenty,' was his
disreputable watchword in these matters. I am afraid he was not supposed
to cook for us at all.
Huish was always bustling, or at least shambling with alacrity; whereas
Gabriel went about his lightest business with ponderous deliberation and
puzzled frown. Both were men of forty who had done the right thing early
in the war; they had nothing else in common except the inglorious job
which they owed to their respective infirmities. Huish, after many
rejections on the score of his, had yet contrived to land in khaki at Le
Havre on the last day of the first battle of Ypres; and though he had
never been nearer the fighting than he was with us, no one who knew his
story or himself could have grudged him his 1914 ribbon. His canine
delight, on learning that he was just entitled to it, was a thing to
see and to enter into.
Let us hope Gabriel did; he was not very charitable about Huish behind
his back. It was Gabriel's boast that he had 'never been in the 'ands of
the police,' and his shame to inform us that Huish had. But the sun has
its spots, and the overwhelming superiority of Huish in munitions of
altercation was perhaps some excuse. Daily we caught his rising voice
and Gabriel's rumbling monotone; what it was about we never knew; but
Huish had all the nerves in the kitchen, and the shepherd must have been
a heavyweight on them at times. Their language, however, as we heard it
under mutual provocation, was either a considerable compliment to the
Y.M.C.A. or an exclusive credit to themselves. Gabriel was duly
archangelic in this regard; the other's only freedom a habit of calling
a thing an 'ell of a thing, and on occasion an Elizabethan
expressiveness, entirely inoffensive in his mouth.
I wanted their photographs to take with me when I left, and had
prevailed upon them to get taken together at my expense. The result lies
before me as I write. Both are washed, brushed up, shaven and uniformed
out of daily knowledge. Huish stands keenly at attention, as smart as he
could make himself; it is not his fault that the sleeves of his new
tunic come down nearly to his finger-tips. On his right shoulder rests
the forgiving paw of Gabriel; a perceptibly sardonic accentuation of the
crow's-feet round his eyes may perhaps be attributed to this prompting
of the shepherd's heart or the photographer's _finesse_. But the pose
was a consummation; it was in the course of a preliminary transaction
that their excessive gratification obliged me to disclaim benevolence.
'I shall want some of the copies for myself, you know,' I had warned
them both.
'Quite right, sir!' cried Huish, heartily. 'It's like a man with a dog
an' a bitch--'e must 'ave 'is pick o' the pups!'
Huish could take the counter at a pinch, but it was neither his business
nor his pleasure; and our gentle shepherd found French coinage as dark a
mystery as the British rifle. But we were very often assisted by an
unpaid volunteer, another great character in his way. We never knew his
name, and to me at least he was a new type. A Hull lad, eighteen years
old, private in a Labour Battalion employed near the town, he must have
had work enough by day and night to satisfy even one of his strength and
build, which were those of a little gorilla. And yet never a free
evening had this boy but he must spend it behind our counter, slaving
like the best of us for sheer love. But it was the work _he_ loved; he
was a little shop-keeper born and bred; his heart was in the till at
home; that was what brought him hot-foot to ours; and his passionate
delight in the mere routine of retail trade was the new thing to me in
human boyhood.
At first I had wondered, the hobby seemed so unnatural: at first I even
kept an eye on him and on the till. Our leader had gone on leave before
the New Year; nobody seemed to know how far he had encouraged the boy,
or the origin of his anomalous footing in the hut; and we were taking a
cool thousand francs a day. But our young volunteer bore microscopic
scrutiny, but repaid it all. His was not only a labour of love
unashamed, but the joyous exercise of a gift, the triumphant display of
an inherent power. He beat the best of us behind a counter. It was his
element, not ours for all the will and skill in the world; he was a fish
among swimmers, a professional among amateurs, and the greatest
disciplinarian of us all. The home till may have been behind a bar in
the worst part of Hull, long practice in prompt refusal have given him
his short way with old soldiers opening negotiations out of their turn.
It was a good way, however, as cheery as it was firm. I can hear it now:
'Naw, yer dawn't, Jock! Get away back an' coom oop in't queue like
oother people!'
It was never resented. Though not even one of us, but the youngest and
lowliest of themselves, that urchin by his own virtue exercised the
authority of a truculent N.C.O. with the whole military machine behind
him. I never heard a murmur against him, or witnessed the least
reluctance to obey his ruling. And with equal impunity he addressed all
alike as 'Jock.'
But that, though one of his many and quaint idiosyncrasies, was perhaps
the covert compliment that took the edge off all the rest.
And it brings me to the Jocks themselves, who deserve a place apart from
Y.M.C.A. orderlies and the best of boys in a Labour Battalion.