Two capital nights we passed in our ideal dungeon. It was deep yet dry,
miraculously free from rats, and so very heavily vaulted, so tucked away
under tons of debris, and yet so protected by the standing ruins, that
it was really difficult to imagine the projectile that could join the
party. There was, to be sure, a precipitous spiral staircase to the
upper air, but even it did not descend straight into our lair. Still, a
direct hit on the stairs would have been unpleasant; but one ran as much
risk of a direct hit by lightning in peace-time. It seems indecent to
gloat over a safety verging on the ignoble at such a time; but those two
nights it was hard to help it; and the dim morning light upon the warm
brick arches, bent like old shoulders under centuries of romance, added
an appeal not altogether to the shrinking flesh.
The day between had been very like the first day. I thought the
bombardment a shade less violent; but worse news was always coming in.
Far fewer books were taken out, far fewer men had their afternoon to
themselves, but only too many were their tales of bloodshed, especially
on the outskirts of the town. They told them simply, stoically, even
with the smile that became men whose turn it might be next; but the
smile stopped short at the lips. Still worse hearing was the fall of
village after village in sectors all too near our own; and yet more
sinister rumours came from the far south. Our greatest anxieties were
naturally nearest home, and our chief comfort the unruffled faces of
such officers as passed our way. 'He seems to be meeting with some
success, too!' as one vouchsafed from his saddle, after an opening in
the style of the gentleman who was still demanding Hewletts for his
Sergeant.
The second night we had a third cellarman, leader of one of the outlying
huts now being abandoned every day. Almost hourly our headquarters were
filling up with refugee workers flushed with their sad adventures; but
this young fellow had been through more than most; a man had been killed
in his hut, and he himself was in the last stages of exhaustion. He had
been fast asleep when we descended from the turmoil for our night of
peace; and fast asleep I left him in the morning, little thinking that
most of us had spent our last night in the neighbourhood.
It was another of those brilliant days we shall remember every March
that we may live to see. The devil's choristers were still singing
through the blue above, still thundering their own applause in the
doomed quarter of the town. Yet to stand blinking in the keen sunlight,
snuffing the pure invigorating air, was to vote the whole thing weak and
unconvincing. The picturesque ruins were not real ruins. The noises were
not the noises of a real bombardment; they were too simple and too
innocuous, one had heard them better done upon the stage. It seemed
particularly impossible that anything could happen to me, for instance,
at the head of my cellar stairs, or to the very immaculate Jocks' Padre
picking his way towards me, over a mound of last year's ruins, to us as
old as any other hill.
But it was that Padre who struck the sinister note at once. What were we
going to do? Do! His meaning was not clear to me; he made it clear
without delay. His Jocks--_our_ Jocks--the rocks of my military
faith!--had gone away back. Divisional Headquarters, at all events, had
shifted out of that; it was the same with the other Divisions in the
Corps, the Padre thought; and he took it we should all be ordered back
if we didn't go! A place with a ridge had been taken by the enemy, who
had only to get his field-guns up--and that was only a question of
hours--to make the town a great deal unhealthier than it was already.
I was horrified. It was the one thing I had never contemplated, being
turned out of the little old town! After all, it had been an
unhealthier spot a year ago than it yet threatened to become again. A
year ago the very Line had curled through its narrow rim of suburbs; and
yet the troops had stuck to the town; there had been cellarage for all,
barricades in streets swept by machine-guns, and a Y.M.C.A. hut run by a
valiant veteran through thick and thin. One or two of us, at least, had
been prepared for the same thing over again, _plus_ our Rest Cave and
all our books at a safe depth underground. That prospect had thrilled
and fascinated; the one now foreshadowed seemed too black to come true.
But at breakfast we had it officially from the mere boy (from a Public
School, however) in local charge of the lot of us. We had better get
packed; it would be safer; but he hoped, perhaps more heartily than any
of us, that the extremity in view would not arise. So we pulled out
kit-bags and suit-cases of which we had forgotten the sight--and my
jolly little room never looked itself again. No room does, once you
start packing the belongings that made it what it was; but I never hated
that hateful job so much in all my life. Nor did I ever do it
worse--which is saying even more. Two days and nights under continuous
shell-fire, even when it is only the music of those spheres that he
hears incessantly, does find a man out in one way or another. My way
was forgetfulness and, I fear, a certain irritability. There are some of
my most cherished little possessions that I shall never see again, and a
good friend or so with whom I fear I was a trifle gruff. I hope they
have forgiven me. But a shell-burst may be easier to bear than a
pointless question, especially when you are asking one or two yourself.
At lunch-time the A.P.M. sent in for me. I found him outside in the sun,
with the D.A.A. and Q.M.G., I think it was--both of them very grave and
business-like in their shrapnel helmets, their gas-masks hooked up under
their chins. They, too, wanted to know what we proposed to do; they,
too, explained exactly why the town would presently become no place for
any of us. But it was not for me to speak for the other workers, who by
this time were most of them on the spot; we were all as sheep in the
absence of our Public School shepherd, who had gone off in the Ford to
seek instructions at Area Headquarters. Some of them, indeed, took the
opportunity of speaking for themselves; and who had a better right? It
may be only my impression that we all had a good deal to say at the same
time: I know I voiced my dream about the Rest Cave. The official faces
were not encouraging; indeed, they put their discouragement in words
open to an ominous construction. They did not say Janiculum was lost,
but they left us perhaps deservedly uneasy on the point.
And it was all idiotically, if not shamefully, exasperating! Those heavy
shells still raining into the town; untold pain and damage ensuing every
minute; the town-crier with his bell even then upon his rounds, warning
civilians to evacuate; little parties of them already under way, here a
toothless old lady in her Sunday weeds, a dignified old gentleman
pushing a superannuated perambulator full of household gods, a prancing
terrier loving the sad excitement of it all; and a man old enough to
know better thinking only of his makeshift hut, hardly at all about
their lifelong homes compulsorily abandoned in their poor old age, yet
with a step so proud and so unfaltering! The perambulator, perhaps, was
now a nobler and a sadder treasure than any it contained. But just then
the hut was home and treasure-house to me; filled day by day with hearts
of gold and souls of iron; and now what would become of it and them!
For the first time since the first day of all, nobody was there when we
opened; but presently a handful drifted in, as unconcerned as the
terrier in the road, but without a symptom of the dog's ingenuous
excitement. What was it to them if the day was big with all our fates!
It would not be their first big day; but it was not their day at all
just yet, whatever it might be to us. To them it was still a May day
come in March, the air was still charged with the fulness of life, and
the hut with all that they had found in it hitherto. It was only to us,
in our narrow, keen experience, that everything was spoilt, or spoiling
before our eyes.
'It's too good a day to waste in war,' said one of them across an idle
counter.
It was not his first utterance recorded in these notes; and there seemed
a touch of affectation about it. But he was one of the clever lot I
liked, and what I thought his self-consciousness only drew us closer;
for I defy you to live under shell-fire, for the first time, without
thinking of yourself, and what the next moment may mean to you--and what
the moment after--at the back of your mind. It is another thing when
your hands are full. But the peculiar traffic at our counter had
dwindled steadily during the bombardment. And it had lost even more in
character than in bulk. Impossible, at least for me, to keep up the
tacit pretence that a book was more important than a battle; it had
taken our visitor from Oxford (whom I suspect of an eager assent to the
proposition) to turn a really deaf ear to the song and crash of high
explosive. Mine was hardened, but it heard everything; my mind employed
itself on each report; and for the last two days the men and I had been
talking War.
But to this young man I talked about his friends whom I might never see
again. He had brought back a bundle of their books, and in their names
he thanked me for my 'kindness' to them: as if it were all on one side!
As if they had not, all of them, done more for me than I for them! They
were doing things up to the end; bringing back their books, at their
plain inconvenience, on their way to the forefront of the fight; even
bringing me, to the eleventh hour, their little offerings of books, the
last tokens of their good-will.
It was hard to tell them we were closing down, it might be only for a
day or two; harder still to say what one felt without striking an
unhelpful note; and I took no risks. We could only refuse their money
all the afternoon, entertain them as best we could, and pack them off
with a hand-grip and 'Good luck!'
There was trouble, too, behind the scenes. Our dear old Madame was one
of those for whom the town-crier had rung a knell; by half-past three
she must be out of house, home, and native place. But it was not the
shipwreck of her simple life that brought the poor soul in tears to the
hut. All the world knows how the homely French take the personal
tragedies of war, with the national shrug and a dry eye for their share
of the national burden; and Madame was French to her finger-tips. She
was therefore an artist, who put her hand to nothing she was not minded
to finish as creditably as the good God would let her. Think, then, of
her innocent shame at having to deliver our week's laundry wringing wet
from the mangle! It was the last mortification; and all our
protestations were powerless to assuage the sting to her sensibilities.
As for her helpmate, our orderly, for all his capabilities he had never
replaced the two heroes of the other hut in my affections; and at this
juncture he had managed to get a little drunk. But from information
since received one can only wonder it did not happen oftener; for the
man had tragedy in his life, and his story would be the most dramatic in
these pages had I the heart to tell it. By us he had done more than his
duty, and for the hut almost as much as Madame herself. The last sight
of each was saddening, and yet a part of the closing scenes, as the pair
had been part of our lives.
By half-past five the Y.M.C.A. men had their orders: all to evacuate
except four of the youngest or strongest, who might stay for the present
to help with the walking wounded. Only too naturally, the Rest Hut was
not represented among the chosen. But permission was given us to remain
open another hour; and there were perhaps a dozen readers under the
still sunny skylights to the end. It went hardest of all to tell them
they would have to go. Two or three looked up from the papers to ask in
dismay about their lecture. I had forgotten there was to have been a
lecture; but here were these children waiting to take their places for
the promised treat, and more came later. Nothing all day had illustrated
quite so graphically the difference between their point of view and
ours; to them bursting shells, falling houses, and emptying town were
all in the day's work. They had to carry on just the same; it was more
than distasteful to be obliged to point out that we could not. The
lecturer, I said, if he was still alive, would be in the thick of things
by this time. That went home; he is the man they all read, the man who
has sung the praises of the private soldier with an understanding
enthusiasm unsurpassed by any war correspondent in any war. A week
earlier the hut would have been full to bursting; it shall burst if they
like one night this winter--all being better than that Saturday in
March--and a war still on!
A regular patron of our Quiet Room Evenings, an oldish man with a fine
scorn stamped upon his hard-bitten face, said one or two things I
valued the more as coming from him, though I doubt if we had exchanged a
dozen words before. I shook his hand, and all their hands, as they went
out. They were pleased with us for having kept open a day longer than
any of the other huts. I hope I said the other huts had been closed by
order; but I only remember wanting to say a great deal more, and
thinking better of it. After all, we had understood each other in that
hut to a degree beyond the need of heavy speeches.