It was a welcome and a half that the girls gave. Apart from all

fighting, the deep-lined, barbed-wire Australian visage attracts in a

land where the men are smooth-faced. And the notion of men fighting

for France from the other end of the earth made no favour too much.

Troop-trains had been passing at regular intervals for a month, and

they were on the lookout for khaki. They swarmed to the stations with

favours of fruit and flowers and embraces. They waved as the train came

in; they chatted sweetly and unintelligibly at the platform; and they

waved long and friendly as we moved away. The little children came with

lilies and roses (little French girls are the loveliest things God ever

made), and held up their faces to be kissed. And their big sisters not

only did not blench at embraces, but invited them; and would get up and

ride five miles _pour compagnie_.

We stayed three hours at Avignon--at night. An Englishman we

encountered on the station was so glad to see men of his own tongue

that he took us about the streets and the cafés to show us the city

proper, and missed his train without a pang. This was about midnight,

and Avignon was just fairly awake. Trade in the cafés was at its

zenith. Amongst other things we saw (for the first time) how tactful,

shrewd, and charming a waitress a French provincial girl may be.

Lyons we reached at 2.30 a.m., and had time for a four hours' walk.

The inevitable route was over the Rhône, mist-laden, and up the

villa-crowned hill in the midst of the city; and, when the sun had

overspread the wakening valley, down into the strawberry markets, and

away to the station, threading a way amongst the strawberry waggons,

bearing in the fruit in voluptuous piles.

Macon, the next long stop, we remember for the provender we put aboard

there. This is mere carnality, but the capons and fruits and pies and

pastry of Macon were unforgettable.

This lasted us to Dijon. Dijon we shall always remember as the city

where the girls were hungriest for souvenirs. Souvenirs had been

demanded (and sometimes given) at any stage of the journey. But at

Dijon the houris were infected with a souvenir madness; and since they

were the prettiest girls we had yet seen, we departed stripped and

deploring we had not brought from Australia each a bushel of badges.

For there were bound to be more girls, quite as irresistible.

Then there was Laroche, where more rations had to be got. This was a

hungry business--and even a thirsty.

And between Laroche and the great city an unhappy thing occurred. We

were due to change at Villeneuve, a Parisian suburb. But at Villeneuve

(2 a.m.) no one seemed to be awake; and at 3 we were in Paris,

forlorn and regretful (though in a thoroughly half-hearted fashion)

of the oversight which had disorganised our movement-order. There was

therefore nothing to be done but hastily swallow _café au lait_ in

a matutinally busy eating-house, and hail a taxi in the Place de la

Bastille: this after learning that the Rouen train would not leave

before 7.30. "_Vue Générale de Paris--trois heures_," was the order,

in crude English-French. And the chauffeur put down the dividing glass

window behind him, and in his taxi-jargon showed us everything--Hôtel

de Ville, Notre-Dame, the Pantheon, l'Académie de France, Palais du

Sénat, the Invalides, the Champs-Elysées, the Eiffel Tower, Place de

la Concorde, l'Église de la Madeleine, round about the Louvre and the

Luxembourg, and the rest of them.

This was vulgar Americanism; but nothing else was to be done. And so

we got back to the Gare Lyon, and in the half-hour to spare descended

and gaped unsophisticated at the Parisian tube railways disgorging

their freight of men and women (mostly women) who had found their work.

Then the train began its crawl up to Versailles and its loveliness,

nestling in the thick wooded heights, and by many blessed stops and

shuntings we came by Juvisy and Achères to Rouen, late in the drizzling

night, took a cup of steaming coffee at the Croix Rouge Cantine pour

Permissionaires, and marched out to camp; and didn't care much where it

might be, so long as we had where to lay our head.

Three days in Rouen left one with the knowledge that it is dangerous

to transport suddenly a body of Australians, after eighteen months'

residence on Anzac and in Egypt, to a land where the wine is cheap and

every girl is pretty.

CHAPTER II

BILLETED

The natural course was to advertise. The _Journal de Rouen_ received

us tolerantly, even compassionately. No one of us could speak French,

but one pretty member of the office staff (more accurately, one member

of the pretty office staff) could speak a kind of English. The first

demand was for a _petite annonce_ in French. And when the lady saw this

was out of the question for us, she offered a translation of an English

paragraph.

It brought a shoal of responses in French. A kind of horse-sense

had led us to get them addressed "to this office," where the fair

translator could be requisitioned. They were seductive replies--in

the inevitable language of proprietresses. Some offered rooms and

meals; some rooms and breakfast; some rooms and no more; others

specified a _femme de chambre_ of the first quality (and these were

looked at twice). None offered a bath. This is the most extraordinary

country. It drives you to the conclusion, anyhow, that a bathroom is

necessary neither to health nor good looks, and thereby runs counter

to a long-established English prejudice. A bathroom is by no means a

necessary part of the furniture of a good hotel. Those that have been

driven by the English occupation into adding one, brag about it in

their advertisements and charge "a franc a time." Those that steadily

decline to add it are losing custom.

The conclusion of the matter was we yielded to none of their

blandishments, but went to an hotel, and that for good reasons. They

resolve themselves into a question of feeding--_i.e._, of meal-hours.

You go into lodgings in a flat, and of necessity there are more or less

definitely limited periods for meals. This is killing, even when not

regarded in the light of irregular working hours. To be tied to 8 for

breakfast, 1 for lunch, and 6 for dinner, is to be in gaol. The chief

beauty of an hotel is that you may have breakfast from 6.30 to 10,

lunch from 12 to 2.30, and dinner from 6 to 9.30. This leaves you, to

some extent, at freedom with the leisure an exacting Headquarters does

sometimes throw to you.

Breakfast is altogether French. You'll get no more than _café au lait_

and roll--not even _confiture_, without paying through the nose for

this violation of French usage. If you order eggs or _omelette_ (or

both) you not only wait long for it, but are looked on with disfavour

even in a first-class establishment. But the coffee is so rich and

mellow and the roll so crisp and the butter so creamy that you can make

a large meal of them. You usually eat and drink far more than it's good

form to consume. He's a barbarian who asks for anything better.

This you take in the early morning almost alone in the winter-garden

looking on the courtyard. The matutinal _femme de chambre_ is frequent

and busy about the place. The call for hot water and for grub in the

rooms is insistent. If you want to be called early and to shave, you

write up on the blackboard in the bureau the formula: 31 (_no. de

chambre_)--5-1/2--_e.c._ (_eau chaude_)--_entrez_; that is, let the

damsel enter without knocking. And enter she does with the steaming

jug; and, with a charming frankness, wakens you by the shoulder, and,

if not abnormally busy (and she's seldom too busy for that), sits on

the edge of the bed with her shining morning face, telling you sweetly

the quality of the weather, and that it's time you were out, until

satisfied you are on the way to uprising, as distinct from turning

over again. And morning greetings of the most refreshing sort have

been known to be exchanged thus over the edge of the bed. One of the

satisfactions of such an exchange (though not necessarily the chief)

would be that you know the sweet creature associates nothing sordid

with the greeting--even though this is a bedroom and you're in your

'jamas. An English maid in the circumstances would probably begin with

a hostile shriek, and end by relating to the manager how a base and

licentious soldier had made violent overtures to her; and you would

suffer ejection with ignomy.

And so the French (and especially the French women) score in morality

at every turn.

You see nothing of the hotel all morning. But on returning for lunch

your _chambre_ is "done" with a taste and thoroughness that delight,

and drive you to register a vow you'll never more be guilty of

untidiness. British officers in France have a reputation for hoggishly

littering their rooms that requires a lot of redeeming. But the French

maid is not dismayed. She returns to the attack daily, with a pride in

her art which no piggery can dissipate.

Luncheon has the light touch that's the prime charm of French cooking.

There's endless variety without heaviness or monotony: a whiff of _hors

d'œuvre_, a taste of fish, a couple of "made" dishes (made well), a

scrap of delicious cold-meat, salads, fruits (who shall do justice to

the fruits of Normandy in June?--her strawberries, peaches, plums,

grapes, melons, and cherries), _crême_, cheeses, biscuits, _cidre_ and

coffee. Then you hear a barbarous Captain beside you blaspheming: "The

first thing I'll do when I get leave is to go to the Savoy and have a

decent English feed. I can't stick this French grub!" This is the sort

of man that ought to be suppressed by the State and debarred from going

abroad. It's with justice that the French taunt us with our English

"heaviness"--heaviness in eating, in drinking, thinking, and doing. One

of the privileges of being in France is that of eating what the French

alone know how to prepare.

All the same, one does not immediately get used to horse. _Cheval_, in

some form or other, is served out every dinner. There's not nearly so

much beef as horse consumed. The French like it better. The sign of

a golden horse's head surmounts the doorway of most butcher's shops;

many a shop displays the severed head, as the English do those of sheep

and pigs. The Parisian taxi-cabs are ousting the horse-cabs fast.

Proprietors are selling off their beasts. The newspapers, announcing

the result of the sales, will tell you most of the horses went to

butchers, as a matter of course.

In the medley of French on the menu-card (which you don't scan very

closely) you miss _cheval_ until it's pointed out to you: it's

disguised. You then discover you've been eating horse for weeks,

unwittingly, and enjoying it. It's too late to turn back, even if you

didn't like the beast. So you continue to eat and relish the faithful

defunct friend to man.

Dinner begins about nine. That's the meal for which people who don't

live at the hotel "drop in"--people from the suburbs and the country:

wounded and base-Colonels, with their wives and daughters; music-hall

artistes, business-men. The place hums and echoes with high-spirited

chatter. Much wine gets drunk--as much by the women as by the men. At

the end of an hour the place is fairly agog. The proprietor himself,

dressed in his best--as though persisting in the time-honoured practice

of a tavern-host--carves an enormous joint (a kind of half a pony)

in the centre of the room, under the apex of the dome. This is very

interesting. Only one thing is awry: the women eat greedily. The

prettiest of them (and whether they take wine or not) masticate with a

primitive eagerness and _abandon_ that is disgusting.

The late-sitters remain until eleven over their wine and cigarettes,

and then adjourn to the courtyard and sit and call for coffee and

liqueurs. If they move before midnight, it's unusual. The courtyard

resounds until the small-hours have crept on. And in those hours the

maids on duty are busy enough answering the call of the chamber-bells

with drinks. You will see them hurrying up and down the lighted

staircases and in and out the rooms of the brilliantly lit front,

muttering (one imagines) the complaint of the frogs: "It may be sport

to you, but it's death to us!" But they never let you think so: at two

in the morning they will smile and rap out repartee with a good-humour

that it's hard to believe feigned. And who's to say that it is? These

people are unfeignedly light-hearted. They satirise us for our moods

and our livers; and tell us (not without justice) we don't know how to

live. By comparison, we're not happy unless we're miserable....

You will catch the youngsters in the courtyard only by dining at six.

You can play with them an hour in the twilight after, and that's a joy

not to be lost, recur as often as it may. You can talk their language,

even if you can't talk French.

CHAPTER III

THE SEINE AT ROUEN

I don't know what the Seine at Rouen is like in times of peace-trade.

They say war has quadrupled its congestion. I well believe it. The

pool is crammed below the Grand Pont--there's nothing above but barge

traffic--with ships disgorging at a frenzied rate at the uneven cobbled

quays.

One can imagine the port lazing along before the War in the informal

and leisurely way that is French. The French enjoy living. They are

industrious enough for that. But they don't take their work hardly

nor continuously. They take it in chunks. It gets done. But there is

no sort of inflexible determination in their method. The Egyptians,

too, have not continuity, but with them the work does _not_ get done.

Both peoples work sporadically. But the Egyptian takes his chunk of

work because he has to; the Frenchman because he likes it. That is the

difference. The Egyptian is not industrious. The French like work, and

therefore take it in tastes, never hogging it. They like to get the

flavour of work. The Englishman who eats it down misses all that, and

is commiserated by the French for the desecrating greed with which he

attacks his task.

So you can envisage the quay in peace-time: the unsystematic and

picturesque dumping of merchandise in the open quays, and the hum of

leisured talk; the additions to the acres of wine-barrels under the

elms beyond, and the subtractions from them; and the rich fruitiness

of the _bon arome_ soaking out of those casks. You get it now if you

walk amongst them: walk through the shadowed wine-store on a hot day,

and the odour hanging beneath the trees is a refreshment in itself.

But in these days the lading and the discharge of the wine-ships is

done feverishly and raucously, and too hurriedly for any attempt at

arranging them on shore. The wine-ship lies there with the stuff piled

monstrously on every yard of her deck, and it's being slung off as fast

as may be. It's the only drink of the French soldier; there's as much

urgency for its transit as for the off-loading of English supplies.

Huge tanks stand as waggons on the adjoining railway and they wait to

be filled, and so the _vin ordinaire_ goes up in bulk that exceeds the

content of many score of barrels.

The same urgency hurries off supplies from the ships. The Admiralty

is shouting continuously for the completion of discharge. No ship, at

this time, lies there at her ease. She fairly groans and creeks in

travail of discharge. It proceeds as vigorously at night, under the

flares, as by day. Hordes of labour battalions are handling it into

the store-hangars, or into the waiting supply-trams, or into lorries.

The parti-coloured French are trundling the wine-barrels hither and

thither for store or for despatch. The rattle of cranes, the panting

of lorries, the scream and rumble of trains, the shouting of orders,

are deafening and incessant. Supply-ships, timber-ships, coal-ships,

wine-ships, ammunition-ships, petrol-ships, are strung down-stream in

a deafening queue. The base is a distractingly busy place.

Over against all that is the quiet domesticity of the barges. War

doesn't hurry them, nor sap at the foundations of their family life.

They'll sleep along the river, happen what may. General Joffre's

professed aspiration _après la guerre_ is to retire to a Seine barge,

and finish there. He could choose nothing in sharper contrast with the

turmoil of war. The reaction from Generalship could not well be borne

in more complementary circumstances. The comfortable somnolence of a

Seine barge is invincible. They are not yet requisitioned for the base

purposes of war. They are a thing apart, and therefore have no call for

busyness.

They are enormously long, and have a grace of outline unexampled in the

world of barges. A Thames barge is stumpy and crude beside them. There

is scope in their length for grace of line. Look down on them from the

heights of Bonsecours, packed orderly amongst the Seine islands. Look

at them in queue dreaming along in the wake of some fussy tug; either

way you'll get their nobility of contour.

Each is a microcosm. They are self-contained as to family, burden,

poultry, pony, cat and dog, rabbit-pen, and garden. The mother and

daughter and the small boys all take a hand in pushing on the business

of _le père_. In fact, it is they who do the thing: he lounges and

smokes and directs the policy. In the waist of the ship is the stable,

with a pony that usually is white, and perhaps a cow, and the pens of

hens, and the basketed rabbit-hutch. The boys pursue the dog round

the potted plants when there's no work. In the same circumstances

the mother and daughters sun themselves on the hatches. Children

are born there to a lifelong sojourn in the craft. There they get

their schooling, and there, until adolescence, they acquire their

knowledge of the world. There probably is scope for a science of

barge-psychology. Can one in reason expect a world war to intrude far

into the life of a Seine barge? Hardly that.

They hold as much as a small ship; the journey to Paris is far and

slow. They are cut off from the world almost as effectually as a

marooned Swiss Family Robinson.

Hospital ships berth below the bridge, and are filled from the motor

ambulances with an awful celerity. You may always know when an

ambulance train is at the Rive Gauche Gare by the long procession of

Red Cross motors streaming from the station over the Grand Pont to

the hospital berth, and by the wide-eyed crowd making a slow-swaying

cordon round the military police to watch the procession of stretchers

ascending the gangways. The Red Cross ship may get her complement in

two or three hours. Then she turns business-like and heads down-stream

for _le Havre_. And then!--_Blighty_, for comfort and fitting

alimentation, and _home_ for the tortured.

The Seine is a tragic stream at Rouen. Corpses are fished up daily.

Parisian suicides float down and are intercepted, and dogs and other

beasts seem to get drowned in plenty. This is hard on so fair and happy

a city. Why can't Paris look after her own weary-of-breath?

The Ile la Croix stands at the heart of the city. The Pont Corneille

rests across it. The island is a town in itself, with theatres,

churches, factories, baths, and thick residential quarters, and groves,

and well-defined streets. Here is another little world in itself,

consistent with the barges that lie about it.

All over the island--and, still more ubiquitously, all over the

quay-sides--are girls and women hawking fruit and cakes and chocolate.

The girls are pretty. They better custom by fooling English Tommies to

the top of their bent by that French-Arcadian intersexual frankness

of discourse and gesture of which English girls know so little,

and which Tommy adores so ardently and furtively. This gives the

right to put up the price. Tommy, in this land of vines, and in the

season--finds himself paying her two francs a pound for grapes. "_Très

cher aujourd'hui, Monsieur!_"--"_Mais oui, m'selle--voulez-vous

m'embrasser?_"--."_Nothin' doin', ole shap!_" ... These girls are

quick-brained, as alertful in mind as you could expect by their

well-moulded features and their lithe, straight bodies. There is no

insistence, in France, upon the ugly vulgarism of rotundity in women

and girls. The girls of France spell, in their bodies, anything but

sombreness in spirit or clumsiness in brain. They have never been out

of Rouen, but they fling repartee in Arabic at Australians as though

they had lived in Cairo. Their only source of such an accomplishment is

the Australian soldier himself, and the persistence of Arabic with him.

And he does not go out of his way to teach anyone. He learns French

with halting slowness, even when some Rouennaise is making efforts

to teach him. But these girls take up his English and his incidental

Arabic in their swift and light mental stride.

CHAPTER IV

ROUEN _REVUE_

Except when Lena Ashwell comes with her English concert-party, evening

entertainments--that is, public entertainments--in Rouen are limited

by some cinemas and two theatres that stage _revue_. The cinemas are

like all other cinemas, except that the humour is broader and sexual

intrigue is shown in a more fleshly and passionate form. The audience

differs from an English, not in that flirtation is more fierce, but

in the running fire of comment directed at the film, and from the way

in which crises in the plot are hailed. Everyone smokes who has the

habit. The women who do not, masticate noisily at sweets. The girls

in the front row of stalls playfully pull the hair of the orchestra,

specialising in the 'cello: his deep, detached notes amuse them. This

is their way of showing he attracts their attention. The conductor is

the pianist too. In his dual capacity he displays astounding resource

and agility. The combination of these functions is diverting, even in

an Englishman. The films present a preponderance of carnal domestic

problems.

_Revue_ is another story. An Englishman has no right to attend French

_revue_ without being prepared to discount it at a rate governed by

the difference between the national temperaments. Where English

_revue_ suggests and insinuates, French explicates the detail. French

insinuates too, on occasion, but with the motive of subtlety as

distinct from that of English furtiveness: the difference between

cleverness and morbidity. All this applies to _amours_, chiefly

between the already-married. French _revue_ goes further, and deals

disgustingly in physiological detail which the English stage declines

to handle even by implication. And the ladies on the stage are

obviously amused by the cruder passages to an unprofessional degree.

They giggle outright. The work on the stage, in fact, is curiously

informal. Dialogue _sotto voce_ in the corners is not make-believe--nor

rehearsed. They carry on a genuine conversation, much of which is

criticism of their colleagues at work, much personal comment on the

advanced rows of the audience. A French company is never afraid to let

you know that, after all, it's only acting you're looking at. English

downrightness would maintain the delusion at all costs.

A lot of improvisation goes on--some by choice, some of necessity.

French versatility flashes out brilliantly here and there with

something that's not in the book; and when a fellow's memory fails

he improvises with convincing readiness. There's no such thing as a

breakdown, though _revue_ here runs for so long a season that actors

might easily be forgiven for growing too stale to improvise. But that

they avert by the habit of improvisation from choice.

When, therefore, there comes a "turn" which purports to be classical

poses, the effect is blasphemous rather than ludicrous. The spectacle

of thick-painted whores clutching clumsily at the spirit of Greek

motion and Greek suspension-of-motion, with their lewd simperings and

vulgar disproportion of bust, is repellent. At the critical moment

someone giggles in the wings and the goddess baulks. The orchestra

swells to cover the gaping _hiatus_ which no improvisation can bridge.

The Salome-dance and the _ballet_ are quite other things. They perform

them here to perfection. Their temperament provides the _abandon_

without which such turns fall stodgy. But classical poses? No!--hardly

that!

A French audience in war-time clamours for a military turn or two;

and gets them. There's a scene from the trenches presented with a

convincing sort of realism--from the death of a comrade to the exchange

of fornicatory ribaldries and the pursuit of vermin. Asphyxiation is

effected, not by the enemy, but by the corporal's removing his boots.

The humour is broad and killing. Shrieking applause drowns half the

repartee. Judged by the accompanying gesture, some obviously good

things are missed. The delivery of the mail under the parapet, and its

perusal, leave little doubt as to the proper function of _la bonne

marraine_--the fair unknown correspondent acquired by advertisement.

Then there is a turn military which discloses the nature of the

friendly encounters between the _Poilu_ and the girls of the village

through which he is passing.

There is some really good singing. And there is always a song in

English, delivered with a naïve crudity of pronunciation, to which the

English soldiers respond at the chorus with allied fervour. "The Only

Girl," "Who were you with Last Night?" "Here we are Again," are the

favourites.

The ushers are girls. They know how to keep in order the crowd of lewd

French youths in spirited attire who affect the pit, who, without

restraint, would make the place unbearable. Mostly the ushers do it

with their tongues; where these weapons fail they cuff them, and cuff

them hard--no mere show of violence. The French termagant is a fearsome

creature. She's here, and she's conducting on the tram-cars. There she

is a match for any man. No lout is free to dispute her authority. She

always emerges from a battle of words master of the situation. _Master_

is the word. The conductors are the only girls (though mostly women) in

Rouen who are not pretty as a class. Individuals are, but the class is

unsexed, growing moustaches which are often more than incipient. The

only womanly thing about them is their black dress and perky, red-edged

cap. They give the impression that they would do well in the trenches.

The theatre ushers--who are "chuckers-out" too--are less masculine

and less plain-featured. The management chooses them with half an eye

to feature, with a regard chiefly to physical strength. The tramways

manager lays no store by looks. Why should he? Good looks don't draw

custom on the cars. But he does ensure that they shall be able to take

care of themselves, and "boss" the vehicle.

CHAPTER V

LA BOUILLE

The steamer leaves the Quai de Paris every afternoon at two. Most

days it is crowded. The War does not hinder women and the ineligible

and _les blessés_ from taking their pleasure down the lovely Seine.

Why should it? People should in war-time look to the efficiency of

civilians as well as of soldiers. It is as profitable, to this end,

that the Seine pleasure-boats should run as that the London theatres

should keep open under the darkened anti-Zeppelin sky.

It's women who crowd the boat, with their sons and their younger

brothers. There's also a leavening of handsome women who go down

for purposes not considered virtuous by the British. There are many

soldiers--_en permission_, with powers of enjoyment equal to those of

the Tommy who shouts to the liftmaid in the Tube: "Hurry up, miss! I've

only got ten days!" These fellows from the trenches, with their women

hanging upon them, are prepared to compress much into their leave.

There are a few wanting limbs, who are not on leave.

The boat races down the pool of Rouen through the gauntlet of colliers,

timber-ships, supply-ships, multitudinous barges, and swinging cranes.

Once past the island, the commercial river-side is done with, and

the journey proceeds through some of the most exquisitely beautiful

hill-country in Normandy. Rouennaise merchants have grown fat on the

trade of decades of peace, and have built their _maisons_ on the grand

scale on the slopes of the Dieppedale and Roumare Forêts. The forests

clothing this Seine Valley are famed through all Europe for growth and

colour. The _maisons_ lie buried in their depths, thrusting up their

towers and high gables. The slim Seine Islands are thick with groves,

and mansions stand in the midst of them too. And for many miles down

the right bank under the chalk ridge the houses stand trim in their

orchards on the river's brink. Their little summer-houses overlook the

road, seated and cushioned; and the old people sit there looking on the

river, watching the youngsters play and the old men and the soldiers

fishing from the wall.

These banks are castled, too, like the Rhine. The potentates of

Normandy chose the heights of this river basin from all the rest of

Normandy, for reasons that are obvious. Apart from the elevation of

these hills, the beauty of the sites is something to aspire to live

in the midst of. Many of these old seats are crumbling. Some are so

strongly built they will last for ever. All were built by men with some

force of personality. Famous amongst them is the fine old castle of

Robert le Diable, the rough parent of William the Conqueror. It's the

oldest, and half decayed, but its strong points are still reared up

there on the hill-brow.

You move on under these noble hills, broken rarely by a timbered

valley. There is nothing sombre aboard. Whatever the French can or

cannot do, they can talk--gratefully and incessantly. The Norman

tongue, however unintelligible, is incredibly pleasing in the mouths

of its women. It is as free from harshness as the landscape. And the

prattle of the children is music which a river orchestra would defile.

The beautiful La Bouille is the objective of most passengers.

_Untrammelled_ is the word for this little town. The women are fresh;

the men are simple; the houses straggle quaintly and cleanly along the

front; and the white walls and the gables climb in an unsophisticated

fashion up the wooded hills beside the white, winding road. There is a

_Place_ set out by the landing-stage, lined with cafés under the trees.

The river-men in their wide _pantalons_ and loose corduroy blouses sip

wine with their women; their children romp in the centre of the square.

You will be nobly entertained if you do no more than sit there and call

for refreshment to the red-cheeked waitress. But you will probably

not be content without wandering up the hill-road after an hour at

the tables. And if you do not grow envious of the youths who sit on

the bank with company by that road-side, you are more than human. In

Normandy love-making there is nothing embarrassed, but an unforced give

and take that is not traditionally reputed to lie along the path of

true love. Whether this is true love or not (and it probably isn't), it

looks quite as delicious, and it sufficeth them. One wonders whether,

after all, they are due to demand much more. The girl looks at you

frankly from the midst of it, as who should say: "And why do not you,

in this land of sweet sunlight, fulfil, too, the law of your existence?"

From almost every house, as you ascend, some houri smiles a

half-welcome at you and would not be greatly confused or displeased if

you took it for a whole, and, entering, made yourself at home.

At the hilltop you'll come on the old _Maison brûlée_, with a café in

the recess, and much merry company. If you stay there as long as you

want to, you'll miss the last boat to Rouen. So you quit drinking-in

the Seine beauty revelling below you up and down the river basin, and

saunter back to the steamer. All the town is there to see her leave.

Everyone smiles and "waves" and says _Come again_ in no uncertain

pantomime. And all the journey back in the soft evening you say you

will.

SECTION B.--PICARDY AND THE SOMME

CHAPTER I

BEHIND THE LINES--I

The road between ---- and ---- is a fearful and wonderful place in

the swift-closing winter evening. The early winter rains are drifting

gustily across it. The last of the autumn leaves are whirling away. The

far western valley is a gulf of mist; the rain-squalls wash about its

slopes.

The road beneath you, between its low flanks, is a channel of mobile

black slush, too far churned for striation. Ever since the rains began,

two weeks ago, there has been a traffic on it that is continuous--a

traffic that has had to be directed and disentangled at innumerable

stages along its length. So the road surface (it washes over a solid

foundation) is a squirting slime.

The motor-lorry is the vehicle _par excellence_. The wonder is how

it is supplied and maintained at this rate. In most villages is a

tyre-press where its wheels are re-rubbered as often as need be--and

begad! that's often enough to keep a large and noble army of mechanics

hard-worked. Any day you can see the old tyre being prised off and the

new, smooth, full, blue one pushed on. The old is like nothing so much

as a rim of Gruyère cheese, with the perforations clean through to the

rim, everywhere. The question that always occurs is: Did the lorry run

to the last on a tyre like that? The answer is: Yes--had to.

The motor-lorry it is, then, that monopolises the road. There is a

stream of them passing either way which is not quite constant, but is

nearly so. Lorries are almost as thick as the trees that line every

road in France.

Between these honking, rumbling streams, and in the gaps of them, other

traffic goes as it can--that is, Colonel's cars, motor-cycles (there

are almost as many cycles as lorries; but they can pant an intermittent

course through any maze), motor-ambulances, tractors. There are French

Colonels, English Colonels, mere Majors, and even Generals, threading

impatiently through the maze. It is obviously aggravating to them, this

snail's pace. A Colonel likes to tear along, because he is a Colonel.

One is speaking now of a main road between railheads. Put them on a

side-road, where there is nothing in sight but a few ambulances, a

lorry or two, and some cows and women, and they move at a pace that

inspires an adequate respect in all who have to stand aside for their

necks' sake.

But in this horde of beastly lorries what can a Colonel do, more than

glare and gnaw a rain-dewed moustache? There are supply lorries,

ammunition lorries, Flying Corps lorries, road-repairing lorries,

lorries bearing working-parties, freights of German prisoners, lorries

returning empty. Beside, there are always a few 'buses moving troops,

and sometimes, participating in the general _mêlée_, is a troop of

cavalry or a half-mile of artillery limbers or a divisional train of

horse transport--or all three--making an adequate contribution to the

creaking, rattling, lumbering, panting, honking, shouting, cursing,

squelching, bobbing, swaying, dodging throng. A military highroad

in France behind the line, any time in the day or night, baffles

description--especially if it's raining.

Conceive (if you can) what this becomes at ten o'clock at night in an

advanced section of the road where lights would be suicidal. But I

doubt if you can--no, not unless you've been in the whirl of it.

Far the pleasanter journey you'll have by boarding your motor-lorry on

a fine summer morning. The country smiles all about you. _Smile_ is the

only word. You catch the infection of green bank, green plain flecked

with brown and gold stubble and streaked with groves of elm and beech,

poplar and plane: you get infected and rejoice. If you climb the crest

of one of the slopes less gentle than most slopes here, you may look

down on it all--on the double line of trees setting-off here and there

across the plains, up the slopes, down the valleys, marking the roads,

of which trees are the invariable index; at the winding stream, banked

with hop and willow, flowing through a belt of richer greenness: that's

how you know a stream from a height--not by the water, of which you see

nothing for the groves that border it, but by the irregularity of these

plantations (the roads are planted with a deliberate symmetry) and the

deepening in the colour of the lush grasses of the basin.

You'll look down, too, on the villages dropped irregularly along its

course. There's the low roof, the gable, the amorphous mass of greys

and yellows topped by the pyramidal church spire rising grey slate to

its summit. The number of villages you may see in thirty square miles

of the Somme district is amazing. The whole Somme Valley is a mazed

network of roads and streams, with groves and harvest-fields in the

crowding interstices, the whole teeming with grey villages. This is the

character of the country; and very lovely it is.

From your hilltop you'll see, perhaps, a bombing-school at play in

the valley--the line of murderous, irregular bursts in their white,

vapourish smoke, all forced into the extremity of unnaturalness by the

deep colour of the wood behind.

In June the depth of the colour in this French country gave the sky

itself a depth of colour not known in Australia. The cumulus resting on

the sky-line would be arresting in its contrast with wood and pasture,

and the blue of the gaps above it heightened too. Sometimes the days

were clouded in the vault, but with a clear horizon; then you would get

a kind of rich opalescence, the sunlight shut out above deflected and

concentrated in the glowing horizon, its streaks of colour intensified

fourfold by the depth of green in the landscape. Some such middle

afternoons I never shall forget.

Upon the less frequented roads civilian traffic is frequent. It's

mostly country-women in carts with pigs or oxen behind or with produce

(or merchandise) for a village market. The village markets for a whole

district are conducted by a sort of mobile column of vendors. They

move (under a pass issued from the _gendarmerie_) from village to

village in a species of caravan. Every village has a set market-day;

the vendors move in agreement with it. They sell under booths on

the pavements--sell fabrics, fruit, vegetables, fish, drapery, and

clothing; and at some corner agreed upon they have the cattle market,

with all the beasts tethered by a rope from horns to knee.

Approaching a village which is "holding" its market, you'll meet these

beasts being driven in gangs, united in sixes and sevens by a rope

connecting their horns. They are almost all conducted by women and

boys. The boys are incredibly cruel to them, not only _en route_, but

at the market-place.

It's not the women and girls conducting the market cattle who abuse

them. They (and those in the market wagons) give you a smile and "_Bon

jour, m'sieur_." There is a charm about this French usage of looking

you in the eye and giving you a frank smile and a cheerful _Good-day_

without ever having met you before.

You cannot go far without traversing some part of a military

highroad--such is the frequency and the height of mobility. Especially

is this so about those railheads adjacent to the line. Troops of

cavalry, infantry, and artillery and horsed transport crowd French

routes, even to the exclusion of the motor-lorry. For miles you may

see nothing but a sea of yellow, bobbing, wash-basin trench-helmets.

Unlovely they are, but useful. In such parts, too, the motor-'buses

for rushing up reinforcements prevail. They come in long, swaying

processions, filled with grinning warriors, who exchange repartee

between themselves and the freight of other 'buses, and spend a lot of

time in gnawing biscuit and jam. They gesticulate with these morsels.

The 'buses are just such as you see in the Strand, except for colour,

which here is, of course, a dingy khaki. Above and within, when they

are stuffed, they have an enormously useful carrying capacity.

At some stages of a route (and at very frequent stages) you pass a

lorry-park, in the vicinity of which you are ordered to reduce the

pace. There are whole battalions of lorries laagered and parked--miles

of them--lining the main roads, lining the side-roads, lined in the

fields; hordes of them radiating from the H.Q. at the main road. They

are splashed and streaked and pied with colour, like Jacob's ewes,

to baffle aircraft. They resemble, indeed, the streaked cruisers off

Anzac. Some columns have other decorations. You'll pass, for instance,

a Dickens convoy: the lorries are named from the novels--Sarah Gamp

preceding Mr. Pickwick, with Little Nell panting in the rear; Bill

Sykes, Scrooge, and the rest of them--with (in rare cases) crude

attempts at illustration by portraiture.

The fleets of lorries give a sense of efficiency and mobility--even of

dignity--as they stand ranked there.

Casualty clearing stations are very frequent indeed in these advanced

posts. With a curious appearance of contradictoriness, their marquees

are streaked and splashed against aircraft, but here and there bear an

enormous Red Cross glaring an appeal at the heavens. The language of

all this is: "We're hospital, and you know it from these outward and

visible signs. But if you're going to be frightful, we'll make it as

hard as we can for you to hit." ... Over the road is the burial-ground,

significantly full.

Mostly these hospitals are on a railway-line. Some are not. From the

latter the stream of motor-ambulances is continuous at certain seasons.

There are Sisters in these advanced stations; they are little more

than dressing stations, and more than seldom they are shelled. It's

no joke for women; they do not blench. There have been "honours and

rewards" made them for continuing to dress cases when suffering wounds

themselves.

And who shall describe the strafings suffered by some of the

advanced railheads? Shelling of clearing stations may be more or

less accidental, but railheads are good game and are shelled very

deliberately and very thoroughly. I visited one afternoon a railhead

supply depôt that had been shelled from five to nine that morning. The

havoc was good ground for self-congratulation by the enemy batteries

that caused it. Nine-inch shell for four hours, if well observed by

those who deliver it, can do great things. There were shell-holes all

over the station yard--lines ripped up, trucks blown to splinters,

supply stacks scattered to the fields, petrol dump smouldering,

station-house battered. This is horribly disorganising. Only one thing

is worse, of that kind: the strafing of a railway junction by bombs.

This is obstructive, and isolating almost beyond retrieve.

The villages about such stations suffer seriously. They bear the marks

about the house walls. Villages adjacent to batteries--apart from

railheads--get it even worse. Generally they lie behind a wood which

conceals our heavy artillery.

At any junction along a military road you are impressed by the

usefulness of the military police. They stand there directing the

traffic by pantomime, just as in London. Their word is law from which

there is no appeal. If a driver grows argumentative it is always

the worse for him. District A.P.M.'s will allow no dispute of the

directions of their minions. You must wait for their instructions

and obey them very exactly. If they tell you to wait you dare not

budge; if you do, there's your number glaring on your bonnet, and

your goose is cooked. The military police are all-powerful on the

road, and proportionately autocratic. A sergeant will step into a

stretch of clear rural road and address the driver: "What limit is on

your speed?"--"Six miles."--"My instructions to you are to go much

slower."--"Why" (irritably), "what am I going now?"--"Never mind that"

(with a conclusive gesture); "I've timed you from the last post, and

you're too fast. I'm not making a case of it, but you go slower. Hear?"

And this monument of British administrative exactitude walks off, after

saluting perfunctorily (he gives you no loophole), and throws you

permission to go on and behave.

You proceed, with the guns belching over the ridge, the observation

balloons overhanging the slope silently spotting and sending down

cool and deadly mathematical messages. The 'planes drone above; the

multitudinous machinery of war creaks and rumbles down the road; the

landscape lies around you incongruously quiet and lovely.

CHAPTER II

BEHIND THE LINES--II

The lines of communication one can expect to be trailed with interest.

There the strings are being pulled--though that is a pitiable figure.

It is more than a rehearsal for the soul-shaking drama enacting on

the Front; but it is as full of interest as orchestral rehearsal is

more interesting than the performance _coram publico_. Rehearsal in

orchestra shows the final performance in the making: here you see the

Somme Battle in the making. A French town that is within seven miles

of the guns, and is also the Headquarters of the ----th Army, unites

the ordered busyness of the base with the fevered activity of the

second line. It slumbers not nor sleeps. The stream and the screech and

roar of trains is intense and incessant. There is no more appreciable

interval between troop-trains, supply-trains, ammunition-trains,

rumbling through than there is between the decipherable belchings

of the guns over the north-east ridge. The buzz of 'planes is as

unintermittent as either. The Army Headquarters in the Hôtel de

Ville is as strident a centre by night as by day. "The sea is in the

broad, the narrow, streets, ebbing and flowing." These words recur by

suggestion with a peculiar insistence. It is the flood military; and

to this peaceful pastoral town it is as foreign and as ubiquitous as

an encroaching sea. The Hôtel de Ville is the centre of a wide area

of civil buildings commandeered for its purposes by Headquarters.

This sometime produce-store is now "Reports Office"; that hotel is

"Signals"; a private _maison_ adjoining is for "Despatch-Riders."

All civilian and pedestrian traffic stands aside for the horde of

despatch-riders and their motor-cycles. The cars of the Staff whirl

through the crowded streets with a licence which takes account of

nothing but their objective. Mounted officers are trooping day and

night.

More significant than all this is the unending stream of

motor-ambulances. They transport from the dressing stations behind the

line to the colony of casualty clearing-stations here; they transfer

from them to the ambulance-trains; and what these cannot take they pant

away with gently to the nearest base. You may stand on the upreared

Citadelle ramparts any night and watch these long processions of pain

throbbing quietly down the sloping road from ---- into the town. And

simultaneously you will see another column climbing the road to ---- at

the other side. The head lights make a long concurrent brilliance, like

the ray of a searchlight.

An advanced C.C.S. behind the line sees a constant ebb and flow.

Jaded Sisters will hear with a sense of relief the order to evacuate,

glimpsing a respite, however brief. But before the evacuation is

completed a causal connection is evident between the order and an

attack at dawn on the --st instant, and all its ghastly fruits. And

whilst the last of the old maimed are being put gently aboard, the

new-comers, stained with mud and blood, are being laid in the still

warm beds. There is no time for orderliness here. Life for the Sisters

is one fevered and sporadic attempt at alleviation--more than an

attempt: the relief is accomplished, but at a cost to the workers which

leaves its index on feature and figure.

All this is in piteous contrast with the healing peacefulness of the

country-side. If you climb the low ridge behind the town any evening

you can see the flap-flap of the gun-flashes like a disorganised

Aurora. And if you stay till midnight you'll see it intensify into a

glowing wall. So gentle is the landscape immediately about you that

you can conceive what it would be without that murderous wall of fire

and that portentous heart-shaking thunder. This is war, relentless and

insatiable.

The days open dewy and crisp with the first touch of winter's severity,

before his tooth is keen. The first breath of a French September

morning is elating. The harvest is just reaped and cocked, and stands

in its brown and yellow stubble. The head of a slope will give you

the landscape gently undulating under its succession of woods and

streams and gathered harvest, with frequent villages scattered down the

valleys and straggling up the slopes. Over all this you look away to

the captive balloons depending over the line spotting for the belching

guns; and the song of the little birds that the distant guns cannot

quench is swallowed in the buzz of the aircraft engines of a flight

of scouters setting off on patrol; to-morrow it will be the whirr of

a squadron of battle-'planes tearing through the upper distance on a

raid. And any morning the air above you is flecked with the puffs of

missiles sent hurtling after a Fokker out of its proper territory. As

the peaceful evening settles down you will see a whole school of our

craft coming home to roost at ----: eighteen to twenty, like a flock

of rooks settling at the end of the day. The _Angelus_ ringing in the

belfry of the village _Église_ is drowned in the hum.

The little wayside Calvaries are daily smothered in the dust of

motor-lorries. Peaceful French domesticity makes an attempt to live

its life in the welter of trains and 'planes, tractors and lorries,

cars and cycles, horse and foot. It will get it lived _après la

guerre_--not before. The children of the villages do not play much;

they gaze open-mouthed and wide-eyed at the incessant train of troops

and strident vehicles. Unless the War finishes soon, they will have

forgotten how to play. The village estaminet is no longer the haunt of

the light-hearted, light-speaking, wine-sipping French _paysan_; it

is overcrowded with noisy, sweaty Tommies who have no abiding city,

demanding drink. The air of it reeks. The girls are too busy for

repartee; they have time only for feverish serving.

Passenger trains are rarely to be seen--traffic _militaire_ by day and

by night. Rural domestic journeys on the _chemin de fer_ are over and

gone. It is supplies or troops or guns; a frantic railway staff and a

frenzied _chef de gare_ who has forgotten what smooth and intermittent

traffic on his line is like.

CHAPTER III

C.C.S.

The ----th C.C.S. claims to be the hospital farthest advanced on the

Somme. The claim is justified. Its grounds are lit at night by the

gun-flashes. The discharge of our own heavies rattles the bottles in

its dispensary and makes its canvas tremble. Sleep is sometimes driven

from the eyes of its patients, not by pain, but by the thunder of

bombardment. Convoys from the dressing stations have but a short run.

The wounded arrive with the trench-mud wet upon them. Clearing them up

is quick, if filthy, work, and in clearing them up is engaged a small

battalion of orderlies.

The whole hospital is under canvas, except the operating-theatre, which

is a hut, hermetically sealed, as it were, and heated to a working

temperature--and, incidentally, an even temperature--by some ingenious

device. Surgery cannot get done with numbed hands. Yes--and the

officers' ward is a hut, to deepen the great gulf fixed between Tommy

and his officer, even when they both are in mortal pain. The difference

in the degrees of comfort between a marquee and a hut, in the Somme

winter, is incredible. Unhappily, too, in these winter months there is

a horrible shortage of coal and paraffin. This tells again in favour

of the hut. The officers' hut is as warm as your civilian sitting-room,

and wellnigh as comfortably furnished. No ingenuity could make it

possible to say this of a marquee.

But it is only the wounded officers who are comfortable. The Medical

Officers freeze and soak in bell-tents. You'll see the batmen drying

their blankets nightly at the mess-fire before their "bosses" go to

rest. No artificial heating is possible in these tents, because there

is no fuel available for those who are well. M.O.'s retire after an

all-night bout in the theatre to their clammy beds, and sleep from

exhaustion; and for no other reason. They wake, and shiver into dewy

clothes. They shiver through their meals in the biting mess-tent,

and they plod through the sea of slush that surrounds the wards

incessantly, now that the winter has set in. For the ground is never

dry. When it's not raining (which is seldom) it's snowing--and snowing

good and hard, as a rule, in fat flakes as big as carnations.

But they're a cheerful mess, with work enough to save them from

dwelling overmuch on the discomforts of the Somme winter. There

are twenty of them. The Colonel is a Regular, with long years of

Indian service behind him, whose favourite table topics are big-game

and economic problems--particularly those hypothetical economic

difficulties which are likely to confront us after this war. His

customary opponent is Padré Thomas, the Roman Catholic Chaplain, who

took a double-first at Oxford and was one time an Eton master. He

receives weekly from a favourite nephew, reading for matriculation,

Latin prose exercises, the merits of which he discusses with those

members of the mess whose classical scholarship war has not quite

obliterated.

There is Wallace, the X-ray expert, whose chief topic is the shortage

of paraffin, lacking which his apparatus cannot carry-on. He's a

Scotchman who once graduated in Arts. He is chief consulting specialist

with the Chaplain on the merits of his nephew's prose composition.

The Anglican padré is a raw-boned Scot (six-feet four) who has lived

mostly in Russia and Germany. He talks a great deal of vodka and the

hoggishness of German manners. "What a treat it would be," he says,

"to march into Berlin with the pipes playing, go through to meet the

Russians on the other side, and have a foregathering! That night I

should cast away _all_ my ecclesiastical badges!"

He preaches to the camp of German prisoners close by with a grace that

is not altogether good. He cannot abide Germans. One envisages him as

delivering them fire-and-brimstone discourses and calling them weekly

to repentance.

The quietest members of the mess are the surgical specialists, P----

and R----. They are also the hardest worked and the most irregular at

meals. It is rarely that they are taking their soup before the others

have finished. This is perhaps a good thing, in the light of their

frank physiological discussion at table of cases just disposed of in

the theatre. On taking-in day they frequently do not come to table at

all. I doubt whether they eat; if they do, it is a snack between cases

in the _abattoir_. The hospital takes in and evacuates on alternate

days. Theatre cases must be done at once, for it may be necessary

to evacuate them to the base on the following day; it is, in fact,

necessary, unless they are unable to bear transportation, and many are

too critical for that--head cases, spinal cases, and the like. Cases

that suffer greatly are visited with the merciful hypodermic before

they start on their jolting journey in the ambulance-train. Not that

A.T.'s are rough: they're amazingly smooth. But however smooth, they

are agonising to the man whose nerves are lacerated and exposed, or

into whose tissue the scalpel has cut deep.

The A.T. draws into an improvised siding adjacent to the wards. There

is no question of mechanical transport to the train. It is the practice

to establish C.C.S.'s beside a railway, where evacuation during a push

can be facile and expeditious.

P---- and R----, the men of few words, but of great and bloody deeds,

have operated in some degree or other on wellnigh every case that

boards the ambulance-train.

Added to the shortages in fuel which hit the wounded so hard is

that other present hardship: the congestion on railways. As soon

as an A.T. is wired as having left the Army garage at ----, such

preparations must be made as will ensure that the wounded will be

ready to board her immediately on her arrival. They must be waiting

in the evacuation tents by the siding before the minimum time of her

arrival. But notwithstanding regulations which provide that A.T.'s

shall take precedence over all other railway-traffic whatsoever, that

requisitioned is frequently four or five hours late--such is the

present state of the roads. That means four hours of frozen agony in

the evacuation tents. Fuel cannot be spared for warming them, when it

is more than the wards can do to get warmed. A shivering padré moves

round amongst them administering comfort which makes no pretence at

being spiritual, except in a punning sense. That's one thing very few

padrés in the war-zone have been obtuse enough not to learn: that

attempts at spiritual consolation may sometimes be inopportune. Every

padré knows the full war-value of creature-comforts--even for his

spiritual ends. So he moves about the evacuation tent ministering to

the body rather than to the soul.

The surgical specialists have long since ceased to have connection with

this stage of their patients' movements basewards. They are in the

theatre making ready more for the journey down.

The mess harbours the O.C. of a mobile laboratory. He moves between

the hospitals within the Army testing serums. He wears the peering

aspect of a man accustomed to microscopic examination. All his table

conversation is of an inquiring nature--better, an investigatory

nature--into matters that are quite impersonal. During a whole meal

he will talk of nothing but the Northern Territory of Australia or

the structure of the Great Barrier Reef on the Queensland coast. If

he's talking of the Reef he deals in a series of questions and in

an examination of your answers thereto, until he has built up for

himself--with the aid of diagrams contrived with table implements and

slabs of bread--an accurate notion of the surface structure. He's

as much interested in modern history as in science. One evening he

edified the mess, by arrangement, with an hour's discourse on the

causes leading up to the American Civil War. For this he prepared

with academic care. It was curious to see how he could, for an hour,

sustain the interest of the mess in so remote and comparatively

insignificant a struggle, when that mess was stationed in the

heart of the Somme at the height of the push.... His laboratory

walls were decorated with pictures by no means scientific, and yet

physiological. They are extracted from _La Vie Parisienne_, a French

weekly illustrated journal of extraordinary frankness. But in this

man there is nothing lewd. But he has an unusual appreciation of

French cleverness; and that is a faculty alarmingly wanting in the

normal English officer. French drawings, which the English call lewd

are by no means lewd: merely intensely clever. They convey no notion

of lewdness to the French mind. But the English, except in the case

of isolated representatives of that race, will never understand the

French--in other matters than that of art. So great is the gulf of

miscomprehension fixed between the French and English that it becomes

a daily deepening mystery how they could ever have found themselves

Allies. Still more mysterious is it that they should continue so....

These are the men who impress you most in the mess. There's Wallace,

the Scotchman who never says more than he's obliged, but has the tender

heart with his patients. He always trembles when giving the anæsthetic

in critical cases. He calls himself weak-kneed for it, and reviles

himself unmercifully for a womanish fellow (he's intensely masculine);

but he can't help it.

There's Thompson, another Scotchman (the mess is fairly infested with

Scots) who is dental surgeon. His gift is disconcerting repartee, with

which he occasionally routs the C.O.

These are the officers. But what of the Sisters? There are eight

of them. When you have said they are entirely unselfish, you have

included most attributes. That includes an irrepressible spirit that

no continuity of labour can break. It includes gentleness which

familiarity with pain in others does not quench. And it includes a

contempt of personal comfort that must sometimes amaze even themselves

if they ever find time to grow either introspective or retrospective.

They sleep in tents; they lack fuel; they shiver by the hour in damp

beds unless exhaustion drives them to sleep; and they rise in the murky

morning to don sodden garments. They work hard and without intermission

for twelve to sixteen hours--and indefinitely when a "stunt" has

brought the convoys from the line. But none of these things beats them

down.

The theatre Sisters deserve immortalisation. All the qualities of

patience and gentleness, endurance and cheerfulness, seem intensified

in them. They have not the smallest objection to your watching them

work in the theatre; nor have the surgeons. Rather, they encourage you,

and get you to help in a minor way when the place is busy.

It is rarely on receiving-day that four "tables" are not in use

simultaneously. This makes it inevitable that the victims, as they are

brought in and laid out for the anæsthetic, see within six feet sights

not calculated to fortify them. Some smile in hardy fashion; some smile

in a fashion that is not hardy. The abject terror of those wretches out

of whom pain has long since beaten all the fortitude is horrible to

see. What must be the state of that man, made helpless by unassuaged

suffering, who sees the scalpel at work upon a fellow beside him--the

gaping incision; the merciless pruning of the shattered limb; the

hideous bloodiness of the steaming stump at amputation--and hears the

stertorous breathing of the subject and his agonised subconscious

moaning, which has all the infection of terror that actual suffering

would convey?

Yes; this is inevitable. There can be no privacy. Despatch is

everything. Nowhere is rapidity so urgent as in the theatre of a C.C.S.

It means lives. The hideous gas-gangrene forms and suppurates in a

single hour. This is the worst enemy of the field hospital surgeon.

Half an hour's postponement of operation--even less--may mean death.

And in other cases, if the preliminary operation is not performed in

time for the case to move by A.T. for finishing at the base, it may

cost a life equally. The surgeon has not time to fortify his victim by

explanation or exhortation. He is lifted from stretcher to table; the

anæsthetist takes his seat at the head, sprinkles the mask and applies

it; the surgeon moves up (he has already seen the case in ward); the

stertorous breathing begins; the Sister attends and places ready to

his hands what the surgeon requires in swabs and implements; and with

the impressive directness of long and varied experience the incision

is made and the table is in a moment stained. But let there be no

confounding of rapidity with haste, despatch with carelessness. As

much time as is necessary, so much will be given; but not more. Most

striking feature of all is the curiously impersonal and scientific

thoroughness of the surgeon here; this, and the providential faculty

of humour in both surgeons and Sisters in the throes of it all,

without which the tragedy of the place would be overwhelming. The

case is treated with the impersonality (and the persistence) due

to a scientific problem, and as such is wrestled with. Three hours

will be given, if necessary; and sometimes they are. It is a grim

and continuous fight with death, without intermission. But, like any

successful warrior, the surgeon jokes in the midst of it. A smile--even

a gentle guffaw--comes with a strange effect in this place of blood,

but it "saves the situation." This, with the marked impersonality of

the surgeon, can be nothing but reassuring to the potential victim,

waiting his turn on the adjacent table.

One does not realise until he sees it what hard physical labour an

amputation involves, with scalpel and saw; nor how bloodless it can be;

nor how revolting is the warm stink of steaming human flesh suddenly

exposed; nor how interest swamps repulsion as you watch a skull

trephined; nor how utterly strange, for the first time, is the sight

of a man lying there with his intestines drawn forth reposing upon his

navel.

A man can suffer many wounds and still live--one man with multiple

bomb and shell wounds; not a limb untouched; an arm and a leg gone; a

skull trephined; fragments extracted from thigh and chest and shoulder;

the other hand shattered; to say nothing of wounds and bruises and

putrefying sores innumerable. Human endurance and survival can become

incredible.

There are sessions in the theatre at which an orderly is kept almost

busy passing between the M.O.'s, registering, for purposes of record,

the nature of the operation.

"What shall I enter, sir?"

"Appendicitis, acute--abdomen closed," says P----.

"If you had not added _abdomen closed_," says R----, "would one be at

liberty to infer it had been left open?"

"Get your head read!" says P----.... The orderly passes on.

"What's this, sir?"

"Damn you! Can't you see I'm busy?" K---- is boring, with all the

strength of his massive shoulders, into the skull of his case.

Trephining is, literally, hard work; but not that alone. L---- is

cutting, cutting, cutting, at the buttock of the wretch, paring the

hideous gas gangrene as one would pare the rottenness from an apple.

A third surgeon is probing for bomb splinters in rear of the thigh;

and getting them. The man is splintered all over. For one horrible

moment you conceive him as suddenly and treacherously deprived of

unconsciousness, with ---- boring here to the brain membrane, ----

slicing generously at his buttock, and ---- probing relentlessly to the

bone in the gaping incision.

"Well, it certainly looks as though we are doing what we like," says

----. "It _is_ rather bloody; yet the C.O. says the most revolting

operation to watch is that of the removal of a finger-nail."

"If we go much further, he'll drop his subconscious ire upon us," says

----.

"Yes, I suppose his subconsciousness is protesting in blasphemous

silence: '_Pourquoi_'?"

"Stitches, Sister," says ----, at the head. The blood-clot has flowed;

and in a twinkling the triangular exposure of skull is covered by the

stitched scalp.

"He'll be easier," says ----.

And then begins the tabulation of his multiple wounds. They cover half

a page. It's a miracle of symbolism which can suggest all that man has

suffered (and has yet to suffer) in the handwriting of half a page....

"Clear, thank God!" says ----, as Multiple Wounds is borne out

insensible half an hour later. "It's eleven, and I've been here since

the middle of the morning; and I could almost sleep. Good-night,

Sister! I'm off."

So they go to the freezing dampness of their camp stretchers. The

orderlies set about "cleaning up."

But at one they're all called. The railhead, three kilometres off, has

been shelled. A convoy has brought forty casualties. Half of them must

pass through the theatre without delay. So the nerve-jangling work

recommences, and goes on past the murky dawn, beyond the breakfast

hour. It is snowing hard. They are hard-pressed to keep the theatre

warm enough for delicate surgery. To equalise the temperature has

become impossible. But things are as they are, and cannot be bettered;

and there will come an end to this spurt, though how long will be the

respite, who can say? It would be longer if the surgeons were not so

dangerously understaffed. There's ---- on a long-deferred and necessary

leave; there are ---- and ---- who have fallen ill: one through the

overstrain of incessant surgery; the other a victim to his sopping,

inclement tent. The watchword is _Carry on_. There may be assistance

by importation to the staff; on the other hand, there may not. There

will be, if possible; but the pressure is severe all over the Somme

Hospitals during the offensive, and the bases are drained.

The hospital railhead was shelled one afternoon. One may have the

charity to surmise the Hun was shooting at the aerodrome; which stands

seven hundred yards from the hospital; for the shell fell about the

aerodrome rather than in the C.C.S. However that may be, shell did

burst in the hospital, either by accident or design.

The order was to evacuate immediately. The Colonel ordered the Sisters

to enter a car and be transported beyond range. They declined. The

Colonel, a bachelor, not skilled in negotiation with the long-haired

sex, commanded the matron to command them. Matron ordered them to their

tents to prepare to flit. She went to them in ten minutes' time. "Are

you ready?"--"No, Matron; there's a small mutiny brewing here. If the

patients are to go, we're going with them."--"I'm not going; I was just

in the middle of my dressings; I'm going to finish the others."--"They

shan't go without us, Matron!" ... So with a splendid indignation

they disobeyed. The Matron is accustomed to obedience, but she didn't

get it. She went to the Colonel and explained. "Well, damn 'em! the

witches! Let 'em have their way!" The Matron broke into a run. "Take

your flasks and your hypodermics; you can go!"

So they superintended all the removings, attending here and there with

the merciful preliminary syringe; and, when the preliminaries to the

journey were over, jumped up with the car-drivers, and the evacuation

began into a field on the ---- road. Those that could walk, walked; and

some that couldn't well walk had to do so....

They laid them out in rows, by wards. Some were dying. Some died on

the way. Some died in the grass, cut by the bitter wind as they lay

there gazing into the unkindly heaven. The rain came in frozen gusts.

Those still hovering on the border-line were blown and soaked into

death. The groaning of the wounded was hideous. Shattered limbs are

hard to bear in the complete comfort of a civilian hospital. What

is a wounded man to do but die, exposed to the pelting rain of the

Somme winter? Brandy and hot tea and cigarettes brought a transient

consolation: most men were insensible to aid from such fragmentary

comfort. It began to be plain that the risk from shell-fire was not

more dangerous than this from exposure; a return was ordered. Sisters,

doctors, patients, concurred with equal fervour. And so they were taken

back.

The shelling had ceased.

Next morning came the ambulance-train.

CHAPTER IV

THE FOUGHTEN FIELD

I visited the fields of Beaumont-Hamel and Miraumont and Bapaume soon

after they had been abandoned, in the pleasant sunshine of an April

Sabbath afternoon. It was the abomination of desolation I saw--and

felt. Of Beaumont-Hamel there was not a stone left standing, it was

not until I had been told that a village once stood there that I began

to distinguish the powdered rubble from its surroundings. There was

difficulty in doing that, for not only were the buildings demolished,

but their bricks crunched and crumbled.

As we approached the old line from ----, the degrees of demolition

in the villages showed clearly how near they had stood to the field

of fire, and how systematic had been the German bombardment. The

remoter villages showed merely sporadic gaps in the walls--which might

have been the result of accident rather than of purpose--or a church

spire tottering. Nearer villages showed large areas containing not

more than the skeletons of houses. The villages which had been in

occupation--such as Beaumont-Hamel itself--had not one stone left upon

another. The twisted wire straggled through them; the battered trenches

wormed about.

We left the car at Miraumont and walked up the old road overlooking

the village and Grandcourt Wood. They call it a road for the sake

of topography. But did you ever see ring-barked trees standing in

a morass?--that is it, with this difference: that these trees are

branchless. You can conceive nothing more gaunt and desolate than that

colony of splintered trunks standing down in the grassless valley of

pools. The pools are shell-holes, so frequent that they have the aspect

of a morass striated by thin ridges of black mud. The ridges are the

lips of shell-holes.

Miraumont stands down the slope above the wood. It is less completely

ruined than Beaumont-Hamel, but by that the more pathetic to look on.

You can see what it has been: you cannot judge what Beaumont-Hamel may

have been.

As far as you can see in any direction there is no blade of grass,

though the spring has begun, and all the earth untouched by war is

greening. Between ---- and ---- the loveliness of the early spring is

upon the land; the primrose and the violet are starring the grass in

the woods, and all the terraced slopes of the valleys are fair with

the young crop. Here you see nothing but brown clay pocked by shell,

the graceless grey zigzag of the ruined trench, the litter of deserted

arms and equipment and smashed shelter, battered frames of village

dwellings, and the limbless deformity of the splintered woods.

We walked up the ruined road beyond Miraumont. Both sides were thick

with dug-outs. The road had been a kind of shelter between its low

banks. I thought what the traffic on this road must have been when

it was ours and the Germans were entrenched beyond it; how it would

be shelled because it was low and naturally congested with British

traffic; how the dug-outs would be peopled continuously by passers-by

flinging themselves in for a momentary respite when the bursts were

accurate.... The dug-outs were deep and littered with cast-off

great-coats, tunics, scarves, boots; with jam-tins, beef-tins, rusted

bayonets, clips of unused cartridge, battered rifles. It had been

a road for the supply of ammunition to the front line. Its corners

were choked with bombs, shell-case, and small-arm ammunition. In its

excavations were dumps of barbed wire unused. You could infer all the

busyness and congestion, the problem and the cursing of harassed and

supercrowded transport in this road.

We reached the crest of the hill and struck to the left across the old

field. This brought us upon a plateau. There had been more intense

fighting here than on the slopes. There had been rain incessantly,

too. The shell-holes were filled, and they were so frequent that the

landscape resembled nothing so much as a coral reef at low tide. It was

with the risk of slipping in that one made a way along the field at

all. To have fallen in and taken a mouthful of that green liquid would

have meant death. Those pools that were not green were red. Either

colour implied only the degree of putrefaction of the corpses that lay

beneath; but not always beneath. Here protruded a head, there a knee

or a shoulder or a buttock; sometimes a gaunt hand alone outstretched

from the stinking pool. The pools stunk; the ground stunk; the whole

landscape smelt to heaven. My friend had brought, in his wisdom, some

black Burmah cheroots. They were as strong as could be got, but they

could not overwhelm the revolting stink of human putrefaction that

rose all round. One asks what will it be when the spring is advanced

and the pools are dry. One asks, too, when and how this land will be

re-farmed. It is sown with live bomb and "dud" shell. One foresees the

ploughing peasant having the soul blown out of him one spring morning.

It will be long before the sword becomes the ploughshare. In the making

of the _via sacra_, too, will there be many casualties.

Fighting on this plateau must have been hellishly intense and deadly.

The only conceivable cover was the trench and dug-out: no natural mound

nor sheltering bank. The dug-outs were correspondingly deep, burrowing

down into the bowels of the earth. Like pimples on the broad face of

the plateau were machine-gun and artillery emplacements. These had

plainly been built extraordinarily strong, but not strong enough to

stand the direct fire to which they had been exposed inevitably. How

any structure--or any excavation, indeed--withstands the intensity of

modern artillery fire is inconceivable.

The tangles of wire that traversed this high ground were gapped and

contorted. A rifle was wrapped about in the murderous mesh; it had

been grasped by a human hand; beyond was the man to whom it may have

belonged, caught in the same gentle embrace. The steel helmet beneath

the network, the rag of tunic flapping in the breeze from the jags,

were all-expressive. You needed not to be told explicitly of what they

were the symbols.

Near the edge of the plateau was the crater of an exploded mine. It had

been sapped from beneath the brow of the rise. Now it was a pond. The

hideous deep green hue of the water betrayed the full meaning of that

formula: "We exploded a mine and occupied the lip of the crater." Some

of them were still occupying it: others were lying in the foul mouth of

it.

To look on the whole of it--mottled acres, pimples of emplacements,

streak of trench, wall of wire--was to know something of the

hellishness of life here when this area was the field of battle.

We stumbled off the tableland into ground which had been German.

Immediately beneath the crest they had had their howitzer emplacements.

There were battered guns of theirs still there. We nosed down into

their dug-outs, built well, and to a depth that was safe. They had

been artillery dug-outs; the telephone-wires still crept down the

wooden wall beyond the entrance. Below we found hideous dead, some

shattered, as though bombed by an invader; heaps of beer-bottles, too,

and many German novels. You could visualise these fellows having nights

of revelry down there, drinking themselves oblivious to the roar of

the guns above. It was possibly in the height of mirth that we broke

through and bombed them where they reeled below in festivity. One does

not know. This may be maligning them. Possibly they were a temperate

lot, filled with zeal for the Fatherland. These bottles may have been

the moderate collection of months. They may have been bombed beneath

because they had decided to die hard. The facile assumption is far too

common that the German is a drunken brute whose hobby is debauchery.

The area about the gun emplacements was littered with scores of tons of

ammunition, which will probably never be salved. Littered with bombs it

is too, and with trench helmets, and the leather and brass and iron of

equipment. We got many souvenirs here, creeping about like ghouls among

the dead and the heaps of material.

We returned to the main road past the groups of irregular graves, past

the French labour-parties at work upon fresh roads and upon salvage,

back to the skeleton of Miraumont. Then the car swept down behind

Beaumont-Hamel, through the woods to Albert, which we skirted by the

putty factory. The Virgin with her Child looked down, hideously maimed,

from the cathedral spire. We came home through the ridges and the

avenues of Acheux, down the valley of the Authie.

CHAPTER V

AN ADVANCED RAILHEAD

At an advanced railhead one has to contend with other difficulties than

that of the congestion of railway traffic, which is inevitable near the

line. There are the French, who control all the traction. This includes

the shunting: you must not forget the shunting. It's the shunting

that kills. Your pack (_pack_ is the technical term for supply-train)

may arrive at railhead at 5 p.m.; but it may not be in position for

clearance by divisions until midnight. This plays the devil with

divisional transport. You advise them by telephone that their pack will

arrive at railhead at 5: let them get their transport down. Transport

arrives at 4.30, to be "on the safe side"; but it waits impatiently six

and eight and ten hours to clear. Very hard on horses, this; almost

as hard on lorry-drivers, if the division is clearing by mechanical

transport. There is language used by drivers waiting thus for hours in

the snow or the bitter wind. The language of a horse-transport driver

is a very expressive thing; it has a directness that is admirable.

At ---- the transport--and especially the horse transport--got tired

of this system, if system it could be called. They got to the stage

at which they posted an orderly at railhead to watch the shunting of

packs with his own eyes. That orderly was not to move off until he

not only saw the train arrive, but saw it in position too. Not until

he returned to Headquarters with this doubtfully welcome news were the

horses taken from their lines.

It's urgently necessary that packs should be "placed" early, for more

reasons than one. But one is that the men in the line are depending

on a prompt delivery of rations by the divisional transport. If,

therefore, the pack arrives twenty-four hours late (as frequently

it does), it is manifestly undesirable that the French should delay

its clearance ten hours more. Another reason is that if you have

four packs arriving in the day--as many railheads have--your _cour

de gare_ will not accommodate them all for clearance simultaneously;

usually it will not accommodate more than two at once. For yours

are not the only trains whose clearance is urgent: there are

ammunition-trains, stone-trains for road-making, trains of guns and

horses for disembarkation, trains stuffed with ordnance stores and

canteen stores, trains of timber for the R.E.'s. The clearance of any

is needed urgently at any railhead. The term "railhead," by the way, is

interpreted somewhat foggily by the popular mind. There used to be a

notion abroad that it connoted a railway terminus. That is, of course,

not so. It does connote a point in the line convenient for clearance

by divisions. There may be five railheads in eighty miles of line, and

the last of them not a terminus. A railhead, therefore, because it is a

point convenient, is inevitably busy.

If tardiness in despatch from the base or railroad congestion _en

route_ should congest your railhead suddenly, it may be necessary to

indent for fatigue from the corps whose railhead yours is. Usually

it is a night fatigue that must be requisitioned. Conceive the

attitude of the fatigue that marches to railhead at 9 p.m. through

the snow-slush, for eight hours' work. Conceive, also, the ingenuity

with which, during operations, they secrete themselves in the nooks

and crannies of supply-stacks, out of the bitter blast, until the rum

issue is made. Half the energy of the N.C.O.'s is dissipated in keeping

their disgusted mob up to strength. Conceive, too, the appropriation

of "grub" that goes on in the bowels of these supply-stacks, and the

cases of jam and veal-loaf dropped and burst by accident in transit.

All-night fatigues that are borrowed are the very deuce.

The winter-night clearance at railhead goes on in the face of much

difficulty and hardship. The congestion of transport in the yard is

almost impossibly unwieldy: it moves in six-inch mud and in pitch

darkness, except for the flares of the issuers, and except when there

is neither rain nor snow, which is seldom. The cold is bitter and

penetrating, so is the wind. Horses plunge in the darkness; drivers,

loaders, and issuers curse; and to the laymen, who cannot be expected

to see the system which does lie beneath this apparent chaos, it is

miraculous that the clearance gets done at all.

The mistakes occur which are inevitable in the circumstances. The

divisions clear by brigades. One brigade sometimes gets off with the

rum or the fresh vegetable of another. Sometimes this is accidental,

sometimes not. In any case it is a matter for internal adjustment by

the division itself.

The adjustment of packs is a matter of extreme difficulty at the

railhead of a corps whose troops are mobile. Any corps railhead in the

Arras sector in March, 1917, furnished a good example of that. We were

to push at Arras. This meant that reinforcements whose arrival it was

difficult, if not impossible, to forecast, were constantly coming in

and raising the strength of the divisions drawing. It takes three days

for orders on the base increasing the packs to take effect at railhead.

An increase of five thousand in ration strength may be effected at half

a day's notice only. They must be fed. The pack is inadequate to this

extent. The division must be sent to another railhead to complete, or

to a field supply depôt, or to a reserve supply depôt. It may take them

a day to collect their full ration. You immediately wire the base for

an increase in pack. By the time the wire has taken effect at railhead,

the reinforcements (in these mobile days of an advance) may have moved

on beyond Arras; you have all your increase as surplus on your hands.

They must be dumped, and the increase in pack cancelled. It's not

impossible that, the day after you have cancelled it, you will have

need of it for fresh unadvised arrivals.

The thaw restrictions in traffic hit very hard the clearance at

railheads. For seven days during the thaw, such was the parlous

softness of the roads, it was out of the question to permit general

traffic in lorries. All the clearance must be done by horse transport,

which, by comparison with M.T., is damnably slow. It delayed the

clearance of trains by half-days. Divisions which had to trek by G.S.

waggon to other railheads to complete were hard put to it to get their

men in the line fed.

Units which had no horse transport available had been instructed

beforehand to draw thaw and reserve rations to tide them over the

period. They stuck to their quarters, and ate tinned beef and biscuit.

But special dispensations had to be granted for traffic by lorries.

When a coal-train arrived at railhead it was unthinkable to clear

it by H.T. General Service waggons would take a week to clear four

hundred tons of coal. Dispensations had to be granted for other urgent

reasons. The cumulative effect was that of lorry traffic to a dangerous

extent--dangerous because the frost bites so deep that when the thaw

is at its height ruts are two feet deep. It bites down at the soft

foundation beneath the cobble-stones of the village streets; and on

the country roads the subsoil has no such protection as cobbles from

the oppression of loaded lorries. But it was curious to see, in the

villages, the cobbles rising _en masse_ like jelly either flank of

the lorry, or rising like a wave in the wake of the lumbering thing.

Lorries got ditched in the country roads beyond immediate deliverance

by other lorries. Nothing less than a steam tractor could move them. A

convoy of tractors was set aside in each road-area for no other purpose

than to obey calls to the rescue of ditched lorries. Certain roads

were so badly cut that they had to be closed to traffic of any kind:

motor-cycle with side-car that ventured on was bogged. The personnel

of the road-control was increased twenty-fold to check speeds and to

indicate prohibited roads. The worst tracts of the roads in use were so

bad as to be paved with double rows of railway sleepers until the frost

had worked out. Some roads will never recover; they will have to be

closed until remade.