First a word about this generic term of 'Jock.' I use it advisedly, yet
not without a qualm. It is not for a civilian to drop into military
familiarities on the strength of a winter with the Expeditionary Force;
but this sobriquet has spread beyond all Army areas; like 'Tommy,' but
with a difference worth considering, it has passed into the language of
the man still left in the street. If not, it will; for you have only to
see him at his job in the war, doing it in a way and a spirit all his
own, and a Jock is a Jock to you ever after. As the cricketer said about
the yorker, what else can you call him?
The first time the word slipped off my tongue, except behind their
backs, and I found I had called a superb young Seaforth Highlander
'Jock' to his noble face, I stood abashed before him. It sounded an
unpardonable liberty; apologise I must, and did.
'It's a name I am proud to be called by,' said he quite simply. I never
committed the apology again.
It was not as though one had called an English soldier 'Tommy' to his
face; the Jock's answer brought that home to me, and with something like
a shock--not because 'Jock' was evidently rather more than a term of
endearment, but because 'Tommy' suddenly seemed rather less. Each
carried its own nuance, its quite separate implication, and somehow the
later term took higher ground. I wondered how much later it was. Did it
begin in South Africa? There were no Jocks in _Barrack-Room Ballads_;
but there was 'Tommy,' the poem; and between those immortal lines I read
my explanation. It was from them I had learnt, long years before either
war, that it was actually possible for purblind peace-lovers to look
down upon the British soldier, under the name those lines dinned in. The
Jocks had not been christened in those dead days; that was their luck;
that was the difference. _Their_ name belonged to the spacious times
which have given the fighting-man the place of honour in all true
hearts.
Hard on Tommy! As for the Jocks, they have earned their good name if men
ever did; but I am to speak of them only as I saw them across a Y.M.C.A.
counter, demanding 'twust' without waste of syllables, or
'wrichting-pads,' or 'caun'les'; huge men with little voices, little men
with enormous muscles; men of whalebone with the quaint, stiff gait
engendered by the kilt, looking as though their upper halves were in
strait waistcoats, simply because the rest of them goes so free; figures
of droll imperturbability, of bold and handsome _sang-froid_, hunting
in couples among the ruins for any fun or trouble that might be going.
'As if the town belonged to them!' said one who loved the sight of them;
but I always thought the distinctive thing about the Jock was his air of
belonging to the town, ruined or otherwise, or to the bleak stretch of
war-eaten countryside where one had the good fortune to encounter him.
His matter-of-fact stolidity, his dry scorn of discomfort, the soul
above hardship looking out of his keen yet dreamy eyes, the tight smile
on his proud, uncomplaining lips--to meet all these in a trench was to
feel the trench transformed to some indestructible stone alley of the
Old Town. These men might have been born and bred in dug-outs, and
played all their lives in No-Man's Land, as town children play about a
street and revel in its dangers.
I am proud to remember that they held the part of the line I was in at
Christmas. I saw them do everything but fight, and that I had no wish to
see as a spectator; but everybody knows how they set about it, the enemy
best of all. I have seen them, however, pretty soon after a raid: it was
like talking to a man who had just made a hundred at Lord's: our hut was
the Pavilion. I never saw them with their blood up, and to see them
merely under fire is to see them just themselves--not even abnormally
normal like less steady souls.
Said a Black Watchman in the hearing of a friend of mine, as he mended a
parapet under heavy fire, in the worst days of '15: 'I wish they'd stop
their bloody sniping--_and let me get on with my work_!'
The Jock all over! So a busy man swears at a wasp; the Jock at war is
just a busy man until something happens to put a stop to his business.
In the meantime he is not complaining; he is not asking you when this
dreadful war will finish; he is not telling you it can never be finished
by fighting. He went to the war as a bridegroom to his bride, and he has
the sense and virtue to make the best of his bargain till death or peace
doth them part. He may sigh for his release like other poor devils; his
pride will not let him sigh audibly; and as for 'getting out of it,'
divorce itself is not more alien to his stern spirit. It is true that he
has the business in his blood: not the Covenanters only but the
followers of Montrose and Claverhouse were Jocks before him. It is also
true that even he is not always at concert pitch; but his nerves do not
relax or snap in damp or cold, as may the nerves of a race less inured
through the centuries to hardship and the incidence of war. In bitter
fighting there is nothing to choose between the various branches of the
parent oak. The same sound sap runs through them all. But in bitter
weather on the Western Front give me a hutful of Jocks! If only Dr.
Johnson could have been with us in the Y.M.C.A. from last December to
the day of big things! It would have spoilt the standing joke of his
life.
In the jaunty bonnet that cast no shadow on the bronzed face underneath,
with the warm tints of their tartans between neat tunic and
weather-beaten knees, their mere presence lit up the scene; and to
scrape acquaintance with one at random was nearly always to tap a
character worthy of the outer man. There are those who insist that the
discipline of the Army destroys individuality; it may seem so in the
transition stage of training, but the nearer the firing-line the less I
found it to be the case. I knew a Canadian missioner, turned Coldstream
Guardsman, who was very strong and picturesque upon the point.
'Out here,' said he, 'a man goes naked; he can't hide what he really is;
he can't camouflage himself.'
The Jock does not try. In the life school of the war he stands stripped,
but never poses; sometimes rugged and unrefined; often massive and
majestic in body and mind; always statuesque in his simplicity, always
the least self-conscious of Britons. Two of his strongest point are his
education and his religion, but he makes no parade of either, because
both are in his blood. His education is as old as the least humorous of
the Johnsonian jibes, as old as the Dominie and the taws: a union that
bred no 'brittle intellectuals,' but hard-headed men who have helped the
war as much by their steadfast outlook as by their zest and prowess in
the field. As for their religion, it is the still deeper strain, mingled
as of old with the fighting spirit of this noble race. It is most
obvious in the theological students, even the full-fledged ministers, to
be found in the ranks of the Jocks to-day; but I have seen it in rougher
types who know nothing of their own sleeping fires, who are puzzled
themselves by the blaze of joy they feel in battle and will speak of it
with characteristic frankness and simplicity.
'The pleasure it gives ye! The pleasure it gives ye!' said one who had
been breathing wonders about their ding-dong, hand-to-hand
bomb-and-bayonet work. 'This warr,' he went on to declare, 'will do more
for Christianity than ever was done in the wurruld before.'
This also he reiterated, and then added surprisingly:
'Mine ye, I'm no' a Christian mysel'; but this warr will do more for
Christianity than ever was done in the wurruld before.'
The personal disclaimer was repeated in its turn, in order to remove any
possible impression that the speaker was any better than he ought to be.
At least I thought that was the explanation; none was offered or indeed
invited, for there were other men waiting at the counter; and we never
met again, though he promised to come back next night. That boy meant
something, though he did not mean me to know how much. He came from
Glasgow, talked and laughed like Harry Lauder, and did both together all
the time. His conversation made one think. It would be worth recording
for its cheery, confidential plunge into deep waters; nobody but a Jock
would have taken the first header.
Yet, out of France, the Scottish have a reputation for reserve! Is it
that in their thoroughgoing way they strip starker than any, where all
go as naked as my Canadian friend declared?
They are said to be (God bless them!) our most ferocious fighters. I
should be sorry to argue the point with a patriotic Australian; but my
money is on the Jock as the most affectionate comrade. It is a touching
thing to hear any soldier on a friend who has fought and fallen at his
side; but the poetry that is in him makes it wonderful to hear a Jock;
you get the swirl of the pipes in his voice, the bubble of a Highland
burn in his brown eyes. So tender and yet so terrible! So human and so
justly humorous in their grief!
'He was the best wee Sergeant ever a mon had,' one of them said to me,
the night after a costly raid. We have no English word to compare with
that loving diminutive; 'little' comes no nearer it than 'Tommy' comes
near 'Jock.' One even doubts whether there are any 'wee' Sergeants who
do not themselves make use of the word.
I could tell many a moving tale as it was told to me, in an accent that
I never adored before. On second thoughts it is the very thing I cannot
do and will not attempt. But here is a letter that has long been in my
possession; a part of it has been in print before, in a Harrow
publication, for it is all about a Harrow boy of great distinction; but
this is the whole letter. It makes without effort a number of the points
I have been labouring; it throws a golden light on the relations between
officers and men in a famous Highland Regiment; but its unique merit
lies in the fact that it was _not_ written for the boy's people to read.
It is a Jock's letter to a Jock, about their officer:--
'FRANCE,
1. 9. 15.