It was not my first acquaintance with the town, nor yet with the hotel
to which our billet was affiliated. I had been there on a book-raid in
better days. It was in that hotel I found the hero of the apopthegm:
'Once a soldier--always a civilian!' And now its dismal saloons were
overflowing with essential civilians who might have been soldiers all
their lives; only here and there could one detect a difference; all
seemed equally imbued with the traditional nonchalance of the British
officer in a tight place. But for their uniform, and their martial
carriage, they might have been a festive gathering of the Old Boys of
any Public School.
After breakfast we others sallied forth. The sun was still prematurely
hot. The uninjured street was full not only of khaki, but of the
townsfolk of both sexes, a new element to us in any but rare glimpses.
Their Sunday faces betrayed no sign of special anxiety. The bells were
tinkling peacefully for mass as we crossed the little river flowing
close behind the backs of the houses, and climbed the grassy height on
which the citadel stands bastioned. A party of British soldiers was
camped in its chill shadow; many were washing at the stream below,
their bodies white as milk between their trousers and their sunburnt
necks. Some, I think, were actually bathing. They did not look like the
battered remnant of a grand Battalion. Yet that was what they were.
We foregathered with one chip from the modern battle-axe: a Sergeant and
old soldier who had been through all the war and through South Africa.
The last three days beat all. There had never been anything to touch
them. Masses had melted before his eyes. There they were, as thick as
corn, one minute, and the next they lay in swathes, and the next again
the swathes were one continuous stack of dead. The illustration was the
Sergeant's, and I know the fine rolling countryside he got it from; but
it was not the burden of his yarn. This came in so often, with an effect
so variable, that I was puzzled, knowing the perverse levity of the
type.
'No nation can stand it,' were the exact words more than once. 'No
nation that ever was, can go on standing it.'
'Do you mean----?'
But I saw he didn't! The whites of his eyes were like an inner ring of
brick-red skin, but it was their blue that flamed with sardonic humour.
'I mean the Germans!' cried he. 'No nation on earth can go on standing
what they had to stand yesterday and the day before. It's not in human
nature to go on standing it. I don't say as we didn't get it too....'
Nor could he, while telling us what the remnant in the tents and on the
river-bank represented; but all such information was imparted in the
tone of a man making an admission for the sake of argument or fair play.
If I remember, the Sergeant had two wound-stripes under his pile of
service chevrons. But he had borne more lives than a squad of cats.
'Each time I find I'm all right, I just shake 'ands with myself and
carry on.' We got him to shake hands with us, and so parted with a
diamond in human form.
Along the road below came the rag-time of a mediocre band; we hurried
down and stood in a gateway to review a company of Australians marching
into the town. This string of jewels was still unscattered by the fight,
of the same high water as our south-country Sergeant, only different in
cut and polish, if not of set sarcastic purpose. They were marching in
their own way; no stride or swing about it; but a more subtle
jauntiness, a kind of mincing strut, perhaps not unconsciously sinister
and unconventional, an aggressive part of themselves. But what men! What
beetling chests, what muscle-swollen sleeves, what dark, pugnacious,
shaven faces! Here and there a pendulous moustache mourned the beard of
some bushman of the old school; but no such adventitious aids could
have improved upon the naked truculence of most of those mouths and
chins. In their supercilious confidence they reminded me of the early
Australian cricketers, of beardless Blackham, Boyles and Bonnors taking
the field to mow down the flower of English cricket, in the days when
those were our serious wars. How I had hated the type as a schoolboy
sitting open-mouthed and heart-broken at the Oval! How I had feared it
as a hobble-de-hoy in the bush itself! But, in the day of battle, could
there have been a better sight than this potential band of bush-rangers
and demon bowlers? Not to my glasses; nor one more bitter for the mate
of the Rest Hut, thrice rejected from those very ranks.
We wandered idly in their wake; and the next sight that I remember,
though it may not have been that morning, was almost as cheering in its
very different way. It was the spectacle of a single German prisoner,
being marched through the streets by a single British soldier with fixed
bayonet. The prisoner was an N.C.O., and a fine defiant brute, marching
magnificently just to show us. But his was not the hate that conceals
hate; he was the incarnation of the ineffable hymn, with his
quick-firing eyes and the high angle of his powerful chin. Physically
our man could not compare with him. And that seemed symbolical, at a
moment when signs and symbols were in some request.
Then there were the men one had met before. Congested as it was with
traffic to and from the fighting, this little town was even more a
rendezvous for old acquaintance than the one from which we had beaten
our compulsory retreat. I was always running into somebody I had known
of old or through his people. One glorious young man, who had been much
upon my mind, came into the restaurant where we were having lunch on the
Tuesday. His eyes were clear but strained, his ears loaded with yellow
dust that toned artistically with his skin and hair. He said he had had
his first sleep for five nights--under a railway arch. Before the war he
had been up at Cambridge, and a very eminent Blue; if I said what he had
it for, and what ribbon he was wearing now, I might as well break my
rule and name him outright. But there had been three big brothers, then;
now there was only this one left--and at one time not much of him. It
did my heart good to see him here--looking as if he had never known a
day's illness, or the pain of wounds or grief--looking a young god if
there was one in France that day.
But it was not only for his own or for his family's sake that the mere
sight of this splendid fellow was such a joy. The things he stood for
were more precious than any life or group of lives. He stood for the
generation which has been wiped out almost to a boy, as I knew it; he
stood for his brothers, and for all our sons who made their sacrifice at
once; he stood for the English games, and for those who had seemed to
live for games, but who jumped into the King's uniform quicker than they
ever changed into flannels in their lives. 'It is the one good thing the
war has done--to give public-school fellows a chance--they are the one
class who are enjoying themselves in this war.' So wrote one whose early
innings was of the shortest; and though it was a boyish boast, and they
were not the only class by any means, I should like to know which other
was quite as valuable when the war, too, was in its infancy? In each and
every country, by one means or the other, the men were to be had: only
our Public Schools could have furnished off-hand an army of natural
officers, trained to lead, old in responsibility, and afraid of nothing
in the world but fear itself. There were very few of the first lot left
last March, and now there are many fewer. Of one particular Eton and
Harrow match, I believe it can be said that not half-a-dozen of the
twenty-two players are now alive. It was something to meet so noble a
survivor, still leading in battle as he had learnt to lead at school and
college, both on and off the field.
Nor had one to hang about hotels and restaurants, or camps or the street
corners, to see men straight from the fight or just going in, and to
take fresh heart from theirs. The chief local Y.M.C.A. was full of both
kinds, one more appealing than the other. It was perhaps the least
conscious appeal ever made to human heart; for men are proud in the day
of battle, and they are also mighty busy with their own affairs. What
pocket stores they were laying in! What sanguine reserves of tobacco and
cigarettes! That was a heartening sign. But there were no foreboding
faces that I could see. It is one of the strong points of the inner
soldier that he never thinks it is his turn; but if shell or bullet 'has
his name on it,' it will 'see him off,' as he also puts it. Some call
this fatalism. I call it Faith. It is their plain way of bowing to the
Will of God. But the only bow I saw was over the long last letters many
were writing, as though the bugle was already blowing for them, as
though they well knew what it meant. There was no looking unmoved upon
those bent backs and hurrying hands.
Nor were they the most poignant figures; it was the men who had been in
it that one could not keep one's eyes off. Those we had seen bathing in
the morning were nothing to them. They had a night's rest behind them;
these were brands still smoking from the fire. Dirty as dustmen,
red-eyed, and with the growth of all these days upon their haggard
faces, some sat at the tables, eating and drinking like men who had just
discovered their own emptiness; and many lay huddled on the floor, as on
the battle-field itself, filling the hut with its very atmosphere. To
step over them, and to sit with the men who had a mind to talk, was to
get into the red heart of the thing that was going on.
Not that they had very much to tell; all were hazy as to what had
happened; but all agreed it was the worst thing they had been through
yet, and all bore out our Sunday morning friend, that it was worse for
the enemy than for anybody else. This unanimity was remarkable;
especially if you consider, first the military history of that last ten
days in March, and secondly the fact that none of these unwounded
stalwarts was there for a normal reason. Each stood for scores or
hundreds who had gone under in the fight, or been taken prisoner. Yet it
was worse for the enemy! Yet we were going to win! I cannot swear to the
statement in those words, but it was implicit in their every utterance,
and emphatic in the things they never said. For though I brought
biscuits to many, and sat while they steeped them in their mugs and
gulped them down, not a first syllable of complaint reached my ears. On
that I would take my stand in any witness-box. And a Y.M.C.A. man knows;
they trust us, and speak their minds.
Often in the winter 'peace-time,' as hinted early in these notes, I have
seen men shudder at the prospect of the trenches, heard bitter murmurs
at the mud and misery, and have done my best to answer the natural cry:
'When is this dreadful war going to finish? It will never be finished by
fighting!' There was nothing of that sort to cope with now. In the
winter I have heard lamentations for the stray man killed by a sniper or
a stray shell. There was the case of the Lewis gunner who had earned his
special leave; there was 'the best wee sergeant,' and there were others.
But there was none of that now that men were falling by the thousand;
not from a single one of these ravenous, red-eyed survivors. You may say
it was their hunger, weariness, and consequent insensibility, the
acquiescence of the sleeper in the snow. But they were full of
confidence phlegmatic yet serene. They were on the winning side; there
was never a doubt of it on their lips or in their eyes; and with us they
had no reason to keep their doubts to themselves. They had voiced them
freely in the winter. But now they had no doubts to voice.
I do not propound their perspicacity or postulate an instinct they did
not claim themselves. I merely state a fact from observation of these
handfuls of men in the first days of the great crisis. That was the way
they reacted against the greatest enemy success since the first month of
the war. It is the English way, and always has been. And they happen to
be busy finishing the old sequel as I write.
Yet if you had seen their eyes! I remember as a little boy seeing Lady
Butler's 'Charge of the Light Brigade' at my first Academy. I am not
sure that I have looked upon the canvas since, but the wild-eyed central
figure, 'back from the mouth of Hell,' rises up before me after forty
years. There is, to be sure, only the most odious of comparisons between
his heroic stand and the posture of my friends, who were not posing for
a Victorian battle-piece, but bolting biscuits and spilling tea on a
Y.M.C.A. table in modern France. Nevertheless, some of them had those
eyes.