LEAVE
Leave is the be-all and end-all of anyone
who has been at the front for any great
time. It is supposed to come every three
months. It never does, but you know that if
you stay long enough it will come, for Army
Headquarters, Corps H.Q., Divisional H.Q. and
finally Brigade H.Q. (I don't dare mention
Battalion H.Q.!) "may use all of the
leave some of the time, and some of the leave
all of the time, but they cannot go on using
all of the leave all of the time," to paraphrase
Mr. P. T. Barnum in regard to fooling the
people.
So all you must do is to possess your soul
in patience, avoid getting directly in front of
a shell or bullet, and some day in the dim
and distant future leave will come for you to
expose yourself once again to the temptations
of the World, the Flesh and the Devil in
London; that is, if any of them remain when the
Bishop of London, the Food Controller, the
Anti-Treating Laws, and the Provost Marshal
have done their work.
One day a fellow officer (in this connection
I nearly said sufferer) informs you that his
batman was told by the O.C.'s batman that
he had heard that the Brigadier General was
taking leave the end of the month. After that
you go on hearing by devious routes that the
Brigade Majors, Captains, and Lieutenants
are going soon, and suddenly you realize that
shortly your own Battalion Headquarters will
find leave filtering through on them. And
perchance, toward the end of the list, you know
you come somewhere.
It is then you look up your bank account,
if you happen to have any, and you take no
extra chances either with shells or superstitions,
for soldiers are almost as superstitious
as sailors.
You could barely find in the British Armies
ten men who would light three cigarettes
with one match, and that despite the fact that
the match ration is sometimes as absent as
the rum ration. We none of us are superstitious,
but we adhere to the same platform
as did a very charming Canterbury lady.
Her two sons, as fine chaps as England
produces, were at the front, and as she and I,
walking down St. George's Place, came to
a ladder leaning against the wall of a building,
she carefully walked round the other side of
it, saying:
"You know, Doctor, I am not the faintest
bit superstitious, but I am not taking any
chances these days." And that is the position
of the Army in the field. They are not taking
any chances.
Your leave comes one day after many
months beyond the three required of you. You
start to a railhead where you put up for a
night at an Officers' Club and mingle with the
other happy beings who are leaving for the
same purpose on the nine-mile-per-hour French
train in the morning. As you sit about after
a dinner that makes your ration meals for the
past six months look literally like "thirty
cents," you light a cigarette, cock up your
heels, and look at the world through a
beaming face, made ruddy by an extra portion of
the grape juice of France, and wearing a smile
that won't come off.
"You going on leave, too?" you ask genially
of your neighbor, a young officer of that
Suicide Club, the Royal Flying Corps. He is
about twenty-one, and you feel old enough to
almost patronize him. But before you do it
you glance carefully at his left breast to see
if it is, or is not, covered with D.S.O., M.C.,
and perhaps, V.C., ribbons. To your relief
you find it isn't. However, on second thought,
you decide you will keep your patronizing for
the Army Service Corps and not for these
smiling, gay, life-risking, dare-devil boys about
you.
"Y-yes in a w-w-way," the young chap
answers with a charming boyish smile, "sick
leave. My old b-bus hit the earth s-s-suddenly,
and I'm g-going for a rest. I d-d-didn't
always talk l-l-like this." And in an engaging
way he stammers out an invitation for you to
take a Crême de Menthe with him. Of course,
courtesy compels you, much against your
desire, to accept. He has with him two others
of the R.F.C., all young like himself, and
for a couple of hours you listen to their
modest tales of their really wonderful exploits,
undreamed of except by the far-seeing few
twenty-five years ago. One of the others has
a scraped nose, blackened eye and swollen lip,
which he says he received when his "waggon,"
in landing, struck a rough bit of ground which,
"he tried to plow up and he must have hit
the bally gravel underneath."
"W-were you t-t-tight?" asks the first with
that boyish smile.
"Certainly not," indignantly replied the
other, and he laughed. "Of course, I had had a
couple in the morning, but I had a sleep
afterwards, and anyway, the O.C. smelt my breath,
and he wouldn't have allowed me up if he had
smelt anything."
And you listen with fascination to their
comparisons of their machines and their
methods of diving; and "stalling," in which they
drive up against the wind in such a way that
they can keep stationary in relation to a certain
bit of earth; and "corkscrewing," or nose-diving,
towards the earth with a circular turning
of the whole aeroplane, out of the midst of
enemies, and righting the machine thousands of
feet lower down out of danger.
You become quite an expert as you listen.
They tell you that earlier in the war the
German aviators were very chivalrous foes,
returning courtesy for courtesy, never shooting a
fallen enemy, and dropping notes as to the fate
of some of our missing airmen. On one
occasion the great German aviator, Immelman, who
remained chivalrous till his death, dropped a
box of cigars on the aerodrome of a great
British pilot, "with the compliments of the German
Air Service." The following night the Briton
returned the compliment in the same manner.
But now the Germans in the air, as on the sea
and on land, are much less sportsmanlike and
take mean advantages of a fallen foe.
You listen to stories of the great exploits of
Baron Richtofen's "circus," and still greater
of the "circus" of our own Captain Ball--unhappily
since killed--who at times went up in
his pyjamas. He had a trick of shooting
straight up through the roof of his plane at
an enemy overhead and, fearing that the
enemy might some day try the same trick on him,
he had a machine gun so placed that he could
also shoot through the floor directly
downwards. Oh, what entrancing, picturesque
stories, beyond the wildest dreams of imagination
two generations ago!
"I always take up with me a goodly supply
of cigarettes in case I have to land where I
can't get any. Do you?" asks one.
"N-no, I d-d-don't. That's looking for
t-t-trouble. I order b-b-breakfast of p-porridge
and cream and b-b-bacon and eggs," smiles our
young stammering friend. "And then it's all
ready when I c-c-come in."
You listen for hours to these gallant boys
who have all the fine natural courtesy and
modesty of the well-bred English, and the gayety
of a Charles O'Malley. Unconsciously they
make you feel that you really have seen such
a prosaic side of the war in comparison with
them. Then, like all good Britons, they for
some time curse the Government, and you aid
and abet them. The night wears on, the liqueur
bottle runs low, and at last you must say
good-night to these rollicking boys who insist that
you must not fail when you come back to visit
their mess, "for you C-C-Canadians, you know,
are such d-damned fine chaps, and we l-love to
meet you."
The little sin of flattery is so easily
forgiven when it is accompanied by that frank,
fascinating smile, and when you have all been
tasting a drop of good French liqueur.
You wend your way up creaky old stairs
to No. 13, or is it 31, and, luxury of luxuries,
you find a tub of hot water--or it was hot at
the hour for which you ordered it--awaiting
you. Divesting yourself of your clothes you
double your body this way and that in a vain
endeavor to dip more than half of yourself at once.
At last you feel clean, and you struggle
into pyjamas, and crawl into bed between real,
white, clean linen sheets for the first time in
six months, and you sleep as no emperor can
sleep on the most silken of divans, while you
dream of the morrow when you really begin
your leave.
Leave! Ah, we were speaking of leave!
Well, let us, you and I, take it together. Let
us enjoy to the full the flesh-pots of London.
For our leave lasts only ten days, and the war
must go on till we have shown the Hun that
he cannot autocratically put his Prussian
militaristic crown of thorns on the fair brow of
Civilization.