The Jocks started me thinking in units, the Gunners set me off on the
chance meetings of this little war, and between them they have taken me
rather far afield from my Noah's Ark in the mud. But I am not going back
just yet, though the ground is getting dangerous. I am only too well
aware of that. It is presumptuous to praise the living; and I for one
would rather stab a man in the back than pat him on it; but may I humbly
hope that I do neither in these notes? The bristling risks shall not
deter me from speaking of marvellous men as I found them, nor yet from
expressing as best I may the homage they inspired. I can only leave out
their names, and the names of the places where we met, and trust that my
precautions are not themselves taken in vain. But there is no veiling
whole units, or at least no avoiding some little rift within the veil.
And when the unit is the Guards--but even the Guards were not all in one
place last winter.
Enough that at one time there were Guardsmen to be seen about the
purlieus of that 'battered caravanserai' which the war found an antique
city of sedate distinction, and is like to leave yet another scrap-heap.
The Guards were in the picture there, if not so much so as the Jocks;
for in kilt and bonnet the Jocks on active service are more like Jocks
than the Guards are like Guardsmen; nevertheless, and wherever they
wander, the Guards are quite platitudinously unlike any other troops on
earth.
Memorable was the night they first swarmed into my first hut.
'Debouched,' I daresay, would be the more becoming word; but at any rate
they duly marched upon the counter, in close order at that, and (as the
correspondents have it) 'as though they had been on parade.' Few of them
had anything less than a five-franc note; all required change; soon
there was not a coin in the till. I wish the patronesses of Grand
Clearance Sales could have seen how the Guards behaved that night. Not
one of them showed impatience; not one of them was inconsiderate, much
less impolite; the sanctity of the queue could not have been more
scrupulously observed had our Labour boy been there to see to nothing
else. He was not there, and I sighed for him when there was time to
sigh; for it was easily the hardest night's work I had in France. But
the Guards did their best to help us; they were always buying more than
they wanted, 'to make it even money'; continually prepared to present
the Y.M.C.A. with the change we could not give them. Never was a body
of men in better case--calmer, more immaculate, better-set-up, more
dignified and splendid to behold. They might have walked across from
Wellington Barracks; they were actually fresh from what I have heard
them call 'the Cambrai do.'
There was a bitterly cold night a little later on; it was also later in
the night. My young chief was already a breathing pillar of blankets. I
was still cowering over a reddish stove, thinking of the old hot-water
bottle which was even then preparing a place for my swaddled feet: from
outer darkness came the peculiar crunch of heavy boots--many pairs of
them--rhythmically planting themselves in many inches of frozen snow. I
went out and interviewed a Guards' Corporal with eighteen eager, silent
file behind him, all off a leave train and shelterless for the night,
unless we took them in. I pointed out that we had no accommodation
except benches and trestle-tables, and the bare boards of the hut, where
the stove had long been black and the clean mugs were freezing to their
shelf.
'We shall be very satisfied,' replied the Corporal, 'to have a roof over
us.'
I can hear him now: the precise note of his appreciation, candid yet not
oppressive: the dignified, unembittered tone of a man too proud to make
much of a minor misfortune of war. Yet for fighting-men just back from
Christmas leave, howsoever it may have come about, what a welcome! I
never felt a greater brute than lying warm in my bed, within a yard of
the stove that still blushed for me, and listening to those silent men
taking off their accoutrements with as little noise as possible,
preparing for a miserable night without a murmur. Later in the winter,
it was said that men were coming back from leave disgruntled and
depressed. My answer was this story of the Corporal and the eighteen
freezing file. But they were Guardsmen nearly all.
Not the least interesting of individual Guardsmen was one who across our
counter nicely and politely declared himself an anarchist. It was the
slack hour towards closing-time, before the National Anthem at the
cinema prepared us for the final influx, and I am glad I happened to be
free to have that chat. It was most instructive. My Guardsman, who was
accompanied by the inevitable Achates, was not a temporary soldier; both
were fine, seasoned men of twelve or thirteen years' service, who had
been through all the war, with such breaks as their tale of wounds had
necessitated. The anarchist did all the talking, beginning (most
attractively to me) about cricket. He was a keen watcher of the game, an
old habitue of Burton Court and intense admirer of certain
distinguished performers for the Household Brigade. 'A great man!' was
his concise encomium for more than one. How the anarchy came in I have
forgotten. It was decked in dark sayings of a rather homely cut,
concerning the real war to follow present preliminaries; but I thought
the real warrior was himself rather in the dark as to what it was all to
be about. At any rate he failed to enlighten me, as perhaps I failed to
enlighten him on the common acceptation of the term 'anarchy.' Reassure
me he did, however, by several parenthetical observations, which seemed
to fall from the inveterate soldier rather than the _soi-disant_
revolutionary.
'But of course we shall see this war through first,' he kept
interrupting himself to impress on me. 'Nothing will be done till we
have beaten Germany.'
On balance I was no wiser about the anarchist point of view, but all the
richer for this peep into a Guardsman's mind. It was like a good
sanitary cubicle filled with second-hand gimcrackery, but still the same
good cubicle, still in essentials exactly like a few thousand more. The
meretricious jumble was kept within rigid bounds of discipline and good
manners, and not as a temporary measure either; for I was solemnly
assured that the 'real war,' when it came, would be a bloodless one.
Let us hope other incendiaries will adopt my friend's somewhat difficult
ideal of an ordered anarchy! As for his manners, I can only say I have
heard views with which I was in full personal agreement made more
offensive by a dogmatic advocate than were these monstrous but quite
amiable nebulosities. If anarchy is to come, I know which anarchist I
want to 'ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm'; he will spare
Burton Court, I do believe; and even catch himself saluting, with true
Guards' _elan_, the 'great men' who are still permitted to hit out of
it.
Tradition in the Guards, you conjecture, means more than machine-guns,
more than artillery support; it is half the battle they are always
pulling out of the fire. It may be other things as well. I heard a
delightful story about one Battalion--but I heard it from a
fellow-tradesmen whose business it is (or was, before the war) to say
more than his prayers. The libel, for it is too good to be true, was
that one of the senior Battalions, having given a dinner in some Flemish
town early in the war, did a certain amount of inadvertent damage to
municipal property during the subsequent proceedings. One in authority
wrote to apologise to the _maire_, enclosing the wherewithal for
reparation: whereupon the _maire_ presented himself in high glee,
brandishing an equally handsome apology for the same thing done in the
same place by the same Regiment in--1711!
One royal night I had myself as the guest of a Company in another of
their Battalions. The camp was about half-way between our hut and the
front line, near the road and in mud enough to make me feel at home. But
whereas we weltered in a town-locked pool, this was in the open sea; not
a tree or a chink of masonry in sight; just a herd of 'elephants' or
Nissen huts, linked up by a network of duck-boards like ladders floating
in the mud. Mud! It was more like clotted cocoa to a mind debauched by
such tipple, and the great split tubes of huts like a small armada
turned turtle in the filth.
The outer tube I think was steel--duly corrugated--but wooden inner
tubes made the mess-hut and the one I shared with my host voluptuously
snug and weather-proof. It was the wildest and wettest night of all the
winter, but not a drop or a draught came in anywhere, and I am afraid I
thought with selfish satisfaction of the many perforations in our own
thin-skinned hut. An open fire was another treat to me; and I remember
being much intrigued by a buttery-hatch in the background. It reminded
me of the third act of _The Admirable Crichton_.
There were only four of us at dinner, or five including a parrot who
hopped about saying things I have forgotten. All the other three were
temporary Guardsmen; that I knew; but to me they seemed the lineal
descendants of the bear-skinned and whiskered heroes in old volumes of
_Punch_. I suppose they were colder in their Balaclava huts, but I
warrant the other atmosphere was much the same. We should not have had
Wagner on a gramophone before Sebastopol; but they would have given me
Veuve Cliquot, or whatever the very best may have been in those days;
and if I had committed the solecism of asking for more bread, having
consumed my statutory ration, the mess-waiter of 1855 would have put me
right in the same solicitous undertone that spared my blushes in 1918.
The perfect blend of luxury and discipline would have been as
captivating then as now and ever, and the kindness of my hosts a thing
to write about in fear and trembling, no matter how gratefully.
But there would have been no duck-boards to follow through wind and rain
to my host's warm hut, and I should not be looking back upon as snug a
winter's night as one could wish to spend. How we lay talking while the
storm frittered its fury upon the elephant's tough hide! Once more it
was talk of schooldays, but not of mine; it was all about Eton this
time, and nearly all about a boy there who had been most dear to us
both. He was now out here in his grave; but which of them was not? Of
the group that I knew best before the war, only he whom I was with
to-night! I lay awake listening to his even breathing, and prayed that
he at least might survive the holocaust yet to come.