BACK TO LONDON
I am on my way back to London, grateful and glad to be once more on our
side of the Channel.
"Five days!" exclaims a young soldier in the train.
He flings back his head, draws a deep breath, and remains staring like
an imbecile at the roof of the railway carriage for quite two minutes.
Then he shakes himself, draws another deep breath, and says again, still
staring at the roof:
"Five days!"
The train has started now out into the night. We have left Folkestone
well behind. We have pulled down all the blinds because a proclamation
commands us to do so, and we are softly, yet swiftly rushing through the
cool, sweet-smelling English country back towards good old Victoria
Station, where all continental trains must now make their arrivals and
departures.
"Have you been wounded, Sir?" asks an old lady in a queer black
astrakhan cap, and with a big nose.
"Wounded? Rather! Right on top of the head." He ducks his fair head to
shew us. "I didn't know it when it happened. I didn't feel anything at
all. I only knew there was something wet. Blood, I suppose. Then they
sent me to the Hospital at S. Lazaire, and I had a ripping Cornish
nurse. But lor, what a fool I was! I actually signed on that I wanted to
go back. Why did I do that? I don't know. I didn't want to go back.
_Want to go back?_ Good lor! Think of it! But I went back! and the next
thing was Mons! Even now I can't believe it, that march. The Germans
were at us all the time. It didn't seem possible we could do it. 'Buck
up, men! only another six kilometres!' an officer would say. Then it
would be: 'Only another seven kilometres! keep going, men!' Sometimes we
went to sleep marching and woke up and found ourselves still marching.
Always we were shifting and relieving. It was a wonderful business. It
seemed as if we were done for. It seemed as if we couldn't go on. But we
did. Good lor! _We did it!_ Somehow the English generally seem to do it.
Some of us had no boots left. Some of us had no feet. _But WE DID IT!_'"
The old lady with the black astrakhan cap nods vigorously.
"And the Germans wouldn't acknowledge that victory of ours," she says!
"I didn't see it in any of their papers."
It is rather lovely to hear the dear creature alluding to Mons as "our
victory!"
But indeed she is right. Mons is, in truth, our glory and our pride!
But it is still more startling to find she knows secret things about the
German newspapers, and we all look at her sharply.
"I've just come from Germany!" the old lady explains. "Just come from
Dresden, where I've been living for fifteen years. Oh dear! I did have a
time getting away. But I had to leave! They made me. _Dresden is being
turned into a fortified town and a basis for operations!_"
We all now listen to _her_, the soldiers three as well.
"Whenever we heard a noise in Dresden, everyone said, 'It's the Russians
coming!' So you see how frightened they are of the Russians. They are
scared to death. They've almost forgotten their hatred for England. They
talk of nothing now but the Russians. Their terror is really pathetic,
considering all the boasting they've been doing up to now. They made a
law that no one was to put his head out of the window under _pain of
death_!"
"Beasts!" says the wounded one.
"There's only military music in Dresden now. All the theatres and
concert rooms are shut. And of course from now there will be nothing but
military doings in Dresden! Yes, I lived there for fifteen years. I
tried to stay on. I had many English friends as well as Germans, and the
English all agreed to taboo all English people who adopted a pro-German
tone. Some did, but not many. My greatest friends, my dearest friends
were Germans. But the situation grew impossible for us all. We were not
alienated personally, but we all knew that there would come between us
something too deep and strong to be defied or denied, even for great
affection's sake. So I cut the cables and left when the order was given
that Dresden was henceforth to be a fortified town. Besides, it was
dangerous for me to remain. I was English, and they hissed at me
sometimes when I went out. It was through the American Consul's
assistance that I was enabled to get away. I saw such horrid pictures of
the English in all the shops. It made my blood boil. I saw one picture
of the Englishmen with _three legs to run away with!_"
"Beasts!" says the wounded one. "Wait till I travel in Germany!"
"And, oh dear!" goes on the old lady, "I was so frightened that I should
forget and put my head out without thinking! As I sat in the train
coming away from Dresden, I said to myself all the time, 'You must not
look out of the window, or you'll have your head shot off!' That was
because they feared the Russian spies might try to drop explosives out
of the trains on to their bridges!"
"Beasts!" says the wounded one again.
It is really remarkable what a variety of expressions this fair-haired
young English gentleman manages to put in a word.
He belongs to a good family and at the beginning of the War he cleared
out without a word to anyone and enlisted in the ranks. Now he is
coming home on five days' leave, covered with glory and a big scar, to
get his commission. He is a splendid type. All he thinks about is his
Country, and killing Germans. He is a gorgeous and magnificent type, for
here he is in perfect comradeship with his pal Tommy in the corner, and
the Irishman next to him. Evidently to him they are more than gentlemen.
They are men who've been with him through Mons, and the Battle of the
Aisne, and the Battle of Ypres, and he loves them for what they are! And
they love him for what he is, and they're a splendid trio, the soldiers
three.
"When I git into Germany," says Tommy, "I mean to lay hands on all I can
git! I'm goin' to loot off them Germans, like they looted off them pore
Beljins!"
"Surely you wouldn't be like the Crown Prince," says the old lady, and
we all wake up to the fact then that she's really a delightful old lady,
for only a delightful old lady could put the case as neatly as that.
"Shure, all I care about," says the big, quiet Irishman in the corner,
"is to sleep and sleep and sleep!"
"On a bed," says the wounded one. "Good lor! Think of it! To-night I'll
sleep in a bed. I'll roll over and over to make sure I'm there. Think of
it, sheets, blankets. We don't even get a blanket in the trenches. We
might get too comfortable and go to sleep."
"What about the little oil stoves the newspapers say you're having?"
asks the old lady.
"We've seen none of them!" assert the soldiers three.
"Divil a one of them," adds the Irishman.
"I've eat things I never eat before," says Tommy suddenly, in his simple
way that is so curiously telling. "I've eat raw turnips out of the
fields. They're all eatin' raw turnips over there. And I've eat sweets.
I've eat pounds of chocolates if I could get them and I've never eat
them before in my life sinst I was a kid."
"Oh, chocolates!" says the wounded one, ecstatically. "But chocolate in
the sheet--thick, wide, heavy chocolate--there's nothing on earth like
it! I wrote home, and put all over my letters, Chocolate, _chocolate_,
CHOCOLATE. They sent me out tons of it. But I never got it. It went
astray, somewhere or other."
"But they're very good to us," says Tommy earnestly. "We don't want for
nothin'. You couldn't be better treated than what we are!"
"What do you like most to receive?" asks the old lady.
"Chocolate," they all answer simultaneously.
"The other night at Ypres," says Tommy with his usual unexpectedness,
"a German came out of his trenches. He shouted: 'German waiter! want to
come back to the English. Please take me prisoner.' We didn't want no
German waiters. We can't be bothered takin' the beggars prisoners. We
let go at him instead!"
"They eat like savages!" puts in the Irishman. "I've see them shovelling
their food in with one hand and pushing it down with the other. 'Tis my
opinion the Germans have got no throats!"
"The Germans have lots to eat," asserts Tommy. "Whenever we capture them
we always find them well stocked. Brown bread. They always have brown
bread, and bully beef, and raisins."
"Beasts!" says the wounded one again. "But good lor, their Jack
Johnsons! When I think of them now I can't believe it at all. They're
like fifty shells a minute sometimes. Sometimes in the middle of all the
inferno I'd think I was dead; or in hell. I often thought that."
"Them guns cawst them a lot," says Tommy. "It cawst £250 each loading.
We used to be laying there in the trenches and to pass the time while
they was firing at us we'd count up how much it was cawsting them.
That's 17s. 6d., that bit of shrapnel! we'd say. And there goes another
£5! They waste their shells something terrible too. There's thirty
five-pound notes gone for nothing we'd reckon up sometimes when thirty
shells had exploded in nothin' but mud!"
Then the wounded one tells us a funny story.
"I was getting messages in one day when this came through: '_The Turks
are wearing fez and neutral trousers!_' We couldn't make head or tail of
the neutral trousers! So we pressed for an explanation. It came. '_The
Turks are wearing fez, breaches of neutrality!'_"
* * * * *
And while we are laughing the train runs into Victoria Station and the
soldiers three leap joyously out into the rain-wet London night.
Then dear familiar words break on our ears, in a woman's voice.
"Any luggage, Mum!" says a woman porter.
And we know that old England is carrying on as usual!
THE END
[Illustration: SKETCH MAP OF BELGIUM]