BILLETS IN THE FIELD
People at home often imagine that our troops _live_ in the trenches.
They do not. Generally speaking, they live in billets behind the line,
and move into the trenches at regular intervals. They take their turn
for duty in the trenches like policemen going on their beat. As a rule
the procedure is for them to spend a fixed period in the front-line
trenches, another period in reserve (living in billets behind the
firing-line, which are occupied in rotation by the troops who, in this
particular sector, are out of the trenches), and a further period
resting somewhere in the rear. The turn for duty in the trenches
is therefore something exceptional, requiring a special effort of
endurance, for, if there is any liveliness, or, as we say out here,
“frightfulness,” going, there may be no sleep for anybody for several
days and nights on end, something demanding special preparations in the
way of supplies of cigarettes and other luxuries likely to drop out if
there is any difficulty about getting rations up.
The greater part of the life of our men at the front is therefore spent
in billets in our zone of occupation. Naturally, these billets vary
enormously. Roofless houses in ruined villages or dug-outs in the
open in a country absolutely devoid of food of any kind are as like
as not the sour lot of the troops awaiting their turn of duty in the
trenches, though sometimes a village situated at no great distance from
the firing-line will provide admirable accommodation for men just out
of the firing-line. I dined one June evening with the officers of the
famous Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry. I found them waiting their
turn for duty in the trenches in a positively palatial mansion, the
home of a wealthy French merchant of these parts.
I well remember the pride with which they showed me over their
quarters. I saw their bedrooms, vast apartments with huge four-poster
beds with heavy, old-fashioned _ciels_, and their bath-room, renowned
throughout their division--a pleasant, clean, white-tiled place, with
three different sizes of baths, as great an array of douches as you
would find at a spa, and an apparatus for warming bath-towels. When I
thought of other officers I had seen, painfully scrubbing themselves
in a few inches of tepid water in a leaky canvas bath in the sordid
surroundings of a filthy Flemish farm, I agreed that the “Princess
Pat.’s” had every reason to bless the good fortune which had endowed
them with a super-bathroom within a few miles of the firing-line.
Before dinner we walked round the garden. It was a kind of St.
James’s Theatre garden scene, with masses of greenery and banks of
flowering plants and great beds of flowers gushing over on to the
exquisite stretch of soft green turf. As we strolled they told me of
their charming host and hostess. The latter, it appeared, had given
them their best rooms, and had installed for them a special kitchen,
where their orderlies might mess about--as orderlies do all over the
world--to their heart’s content. The model of charity and goodness,
this French merchant and his lady wife every morning distributed
handfuls of copper to the poor of the place who gathered in long files
at their gates. On the Feast of the Sacred Heart in June the host and
hostess, patterns of pious Catholics, sent a message, worded with
charming diffidence, to the British officers asking them whether they
would care to join in a service of prayer in the private chapel of
the mansion. The Feast of the Sacred Heart had been set aside by the
French Bishops as a special day of intercession for the victory of
French arms. Of course the officers agreed. Presently you might have
seen them assembled in the little chapel with the host and hostess and
the members of their household, the stalwart forms of the Canadian
officers, heroes of the stricken field of Ypres, kneeling in prayer to
the God that knows not nations for the triumph of the right. Afterwards
the host took his guests down to his little study, and there, in a
bottle of his best wine, cobwebbed and reverently handled, the company
drank success to the Allied arms.
In the billets near the front our men are birds of passage. One goes
up to the trenches as light as possible, so everything that is not
essential for the comfort of the inner and outer man in the highly
uncomfortable surroundings of the front line is left behind. These
squalid ruined houses in the wrecked villages behind the firing-line
are sad places to visit when the battalion returning to them has been
in action. There in the common room which the officers use both for
messing and for sleeping you may see the kits and personal belongings
of officers who will return to that billet no more. You may see letters
there addressed to the dead, unopened, expectant, as though waiting to
be unburdened of the messages of love and anxious inquiry they bear.
Ah, those empty billets at the front! Their atmosphere is charged
with mourning. With what tense expression one sees in the face of men
who have been through a modern artillery bombardment. The survivors
sit about in silence, seeming almost to resent the presence of the
new-comers drafted in from England without delay to take the places of
their fallen comrades. This depression, however, is only a phase. It
soon passes. Men get used to the loss of their comrades. But if you
know them well you will find how hard, how defiant, how reckless it
makes them.
A battalion that has “copped it,” as the soldiers say, is not allowed
to sit about in billets and brood over its losses. For they will brood
unless they are stirred up. After Neuve Chapelle Sir John French, going
round the battalions that had taken part in that gallant fight, came
upon some depleted billets, such as I have described, with the Colonel,
one of the few officers surviving, sitting by the fire with his head
between his hands, prone to overwhelming grief. The Commander-in-Chief
is a man of heart and understanding. He talked to that Colonel as one
soldier to another, and told him that the losses of his fine battalion
were the price that had to be paid for victory. Then Sir John had the
battalion paraded, and spoke to the men in the same sense.
This war gets you by the heart-strings when you see the awful gaps it
tears in the ranks of men who have been closely associated for years.
After that fight at Neuve Chapelle, when our losses were heavy, but
not so heavy as in fights to come, I lunched with the Rifle Brigade
in their billets close behind the firing-line. The battalion had been
the first in the village of Neuve Chapelle, and over lunch (out of tin
plates in a workman’s cottage) the Colonel and the officers gave me
a most picturesque account of the Riflemen’s sweeping rush into the
ruined village, and their adventures in getting the Germans out of the
cellars and dug-outs.
It was a jolly meal. Five of the officers were there, beside the
Colonel, including the machine-gun officer (formerly the Regimental
Quartermaster-Sergeant), who had just got his commission. Three
months later I lunched with the Colonel again. He had by that time
become a Brigadier. Of all that merry luncheon-party, only he and
the machine-gun officer (now a Captain with the Military Cross, and
promoted Brigade Machine-Gun Officer) survived. The other three were
dead, killed within a few hours of one another on the Fromelles
ridge. The survivors at luncheon that day spoke of them with infinite
affection, with obvious regret, but without any lamentation. Death
has another aspect out here. It is often the matter of a fraction of
an inch. One friend is taken and the other left. And the survivor
“carries on,” only in his heart wondering “Why he and not I?”
Our men make longer stays in the billets situated farther away from
the front than in those which are merely the jumping-off place for
the trenches. Some of the cavalry spent months on end in the same
billets, cursing this horseless war and chafing at their inaction. From
time to time they took their turn in the trenches, and played their
part manfully, as at Ypres on May 13, when the flower of the cavalry
suffered cruel losses from a terrible German bombardment. But for
the most part they carried on what was practically peace training in
conditions which were depressing and monotonous to the last degree.
Thus I fell in with a crack Hussar regiment billeted in some farms well
off the main road. Their billets were so remote that it took me a good
hour to locate them. After inquiring successively from two privates in
an _estaminet_, a farrier-sergeant playing ball with a small girl in a
courtyard, and a battered-looking young subaltern riding down the road,
a long, low farm-house with a red-tiled roof, built round three sides
of a yard in which a duck-pond, a dung-heap, and several enormous pigs
were the outstanding features, was pointed out to me as the officers’
quarters. I side-stepped the dung-heap, skirted the pond, and, dodging
the pigs, banged on the door with my riding-crop. “_Entrez!_” shouted
someone within, and I entered the mess of the 3rd Hussars.
“Mess” summed up the scene rather well. Of the four or five officers
in the room, most were lying, the picture of boredom, on sleeping
valises which lined the walls of the long, low-pitched room. A table
on trestles in the centre was piled up with maps, field-glasses,
cigarette-tins, magazines, a mass of Sam Browne belts, a Sparklet
bottle, a tin of shortbread, and some flowers in a shell-case. The
stone floor was thick with mud, brought in fresh that morning, as the
boots of the officers present certified.
I was rapturously received. One of the chairs was cleared of its
contents. On shouts of “Orderly,” a door in the corner opened, and a
strong smell of frying and a greasy-looking soldier in a grey army
shirt and khaki trousers emerged simultaneously. He brought glasses
and a bottle of local beer; the box of cigarettes was produced, and
then I was ordered summarily to tell the company what was happening
at home and at the front. Was America coming in? And Italy? (This was
before Italy’s intervention.) What were they going to do with that
fellow, Ramsay Macdonald? They heard nothing, nothing, where they
were. Were the cavalry _never_ coming into action in this dam-fool
hole-in-the-ground war? They might be at Shorncliffe for all they were
seeing of the war....
Would I come round the horse-lines before lunch? The man I had come
to see, a Captain, conducted me via the dung-heap, the duck-pond, and
the pigs to an orchard where the horses of this squadron were picketed
in a sea of mud. It was a sad, weeping morning, like a spring day in
Ireland. The horses looked very fit despite the wet winter they had
passed through. “Mind that little ’orse, sir,” said a grizzled old
private as we passed. “Rather a character, that man,” said my friend:
“re-engaged; typical old soldier; regular scamp. Talk to him.”
He was a wizened little man in the forties, with a horsy manner, and
had been all through the retreat from Mons. Only one of his remarks has
stuck in my head. I was asking him about the food. He was pleased to
be very well satisfied with the efforts of the A.S.C. on his behalf.
“No one ain’t got no cause to grumble,” he said, “and that’s the truth.
You gets yer grub reg’lar, and that’s more than a lot of them in this
army did before. Of course”--with fine sarcasm--“there is some as wants
stewed apples and custard ev’ry day for dinner, and there’s no pleasing
the likes of those. No, sir, the food’s all right.”
By the time we returned to the farm-house the table had been cleared
and set with a number of tin plates, a loaf of ration bread, and some
tin cups. It was a rough meal, there is no denying the fact. There were
sardines as _hors-d’œuvre_, some very tough roast beef, and potatoes,
and some tinned apricots and boiled rice. We washed it down with very
strong tea and condensed milk out of the aforesaid tin cups. “D’you
mind tea?” asked my host apologetically. “We mostly have it for lunch.”
I did not mind a bit. But I wondered idly to myself what the 3rd
Hussars would have said if, a few months previously, you had suggested
tea for lunch in their elegant mess at home!
Puck, in his most mischievous mood, never conceived anything more
glaringly inappropriate than the British soldier in billets in France.
Probably no greater contrast could be found than, on the one hand,
the French peasant, working from daybreak to nightfall, scraping and
stinting and saving to realize a profit where he can, to add a franc or
two to his _bas de laine_, and, on the other, the British soldier--who
receives about the same wage as a farm-hand in this part of France,
unless he is in the Mechanical Transport, when with 6s. a day he is
far better paid than the curé or the village schoolmaster--wasteful,
liberal-handed, as thriftless about money as he is about food. Without
warning the two are flung together. Suddenly they are called upon to
live together on a footing of the utmost intimacy.
To know a man you must live with him. That is how the North of France
has got to know the British soldier. After making due allowance
for English madness--_spleen_, the French call it--the peasant has
discovered the British soldier to be the most easy-going of lodgers,
whose liberal allowances in the matter of rations and broad ideas
about money enable all manner of small transactions to be arranged of
advantage to the host and his cronies in the village, who is always
ready to do odd jobs about the house, who is a kind of nurse to the
children, who is, in short, the best of fellows imaginable. This is all
to the credit side. On the debit side there is the British soldier’s
unaccountable and inexplicable mania for washing himself, requiring
quantities of clean cold water that appear positively incredible in
comparison with the small jugful which suffices for the ablutions of
the host and his entire family.
The German comic (God save the mark!) press loves to portray the
“savage” British soldier “preying” on the North of France, to the
despair of the unfortunate French peasant, abandoned to the clutches of
the wicked English by an unscrupulous Government of Paris Chauvinists.
In reality the “unfortunate” French peasant in these parts is living on
British rations, and making more money than ever before in his life.
In all the villages about our line the boys and girls of all ages are
wearing British Army badges. I met a cowherd once who was wearing a
most unmistakable pair of British khaki riding-breeches. I lunched one
day at an hotel in a town in our zone where British ration bread was
served at the _table d’hôte_. The hostess noticed the query in my eye,
and hastened to explain: “_C’est un officier anglais qui loge chez nous
et qui demande, comme ça, que l’on lui sert de son pain à lui._” That
might pass for the bread, but the soft sugar had specks of black in it,
those flakes of tea which you will always find in British ration sugar.
I said no more, but paid without a murmur three francs for the worst
meal I have ever eaten in France.
[Illustration:
_Underwood & Underwood phot._
BILLETS IN THE FIELD: THE BRITISH SOLDIER AND HIS PEASANT HOSTS.]
It says much for the tact of our army in the field that it has wielded
the wide powers conferred on it with the utmost loyalty by the
French, _vis-à-vis_ the civilian population, without any friction.
In all the towns and villages of our zone of occupation you will see
printed notices signed by “_Le Général Commandant la ---- Armée
Anglaise_,” or “_Le Capitaine_ A.P.M.” (Assistant Provost-Marshal),
with directions for the closing of cafés and _estaminets_ at a fixed
time, and the hour by which the civilian population must be indoors.
In most places the sale of spirits to the British Army is absolutely
prohibited. If an _estaminet_ offends in any way against these
regulations, the British authorities have power to close it--a power
that is often exercised. There is no direct intercourse between the
British military authorities and the civilian population, however. The
French _officiers de liaison_ attached to the different armies and
corps and the Mayors act as go-betweens. Things work very smoothly by
this arrangement, which removes the disagreeable possibility of our
military authorities having to exercise direct pressure on the French
civilians. Billeting and requisitioning are worked on similar lines,
and there is a Claims Commission which, in consultation with the
French, deals with the redemption of requisitioning receipts and claims
for indemnity for damages, etc.
The rank and file of our army that went to Mons knew practically only
two words of French, apart from _Wee wee_ and _Nong_, French words
familiar to every Britisher since the days of Boney, and those were
_souvenir_ and _bong_. The British Army increased its French vocabulary
by these two words in the course of its triumphal progress from the sea
coast to the interior through villages _en fête_, where the peasants
loaded the troops with good things of every description, asking only in
return a badge as a _souvenir_. That is why most of our men went into
action badgeless, and the giving away of badges had to be prohibited.
That is why to-day, when you see a man with the initials of his
regiment written in faded ink on his cap in default of a badge, you may
know almost to a certainty that that man went through the great retreat.
The British Army has improved its acquaintance with the French tongue
since those early days of the war. It has, indeed, contrived a kind of
_lingua franca_ as a vehicle of speech between itself and its hosts in
the billets. The vocabulary is small, being in the main restricted to
articles of food and drink. Grammar is a negligible quality, and the
accent varies from the clipped speech of North Britain to the broad
burr of the West of England. The French being reputed a race which sets
great store by politeness, _sivvoo-play_ is freely tacked on to all
sentences in conversation with the natives. The difficulties of the
modification of the definite article are simply abridged by prefixing
to the substantive _doo_ (_du_). Thus, milk is _doolay_, bread
_doopong_, water _doolo_, wine _doovang_. Jam, indispensable adjunct
to all meals of our army in the field, has, as every schoolboy knows,
no exact equivalent in French, for the simple reason that the French
seldom eat jam except in the form of a kind of fruit jelly which they
call _confiture_. But the British soldier never hesitated. The army
slang for jam is, I believe, _poz_ or _pozzie_, so jam became _doopoz_,
and was speedily recognized by the natives under that form.
The peasants on their side have fallen into a kind of pigeon French,
accompanied by a good deal of simple gesture, which, even with the
most elementary vocabulary, is extremely easy to understand. As the
population of the region of France abutting on the Belgian frontier
speaks Flemish as well as French, the peasants in some parts of our
line are able to draw on Flemish (which has many words resembling
English) to supplement their vocabulary in talking with _les
solgaires_, as they call them. The children, with childhood’s ready
ear for languages, pick up English from our men extraordinarily fast.
The ragged urchins who sell the London newspapers at G.H.Q. (General
Headquarters) every evening have gathered quite a lot of English one
way and another, though, I must say, some of their expressions savour
very strongly of “our army in Flanders.”
Our men, too, are very quick about French. On Sunday afternoons in the
villages in the rear you may see Mr. Atkins going for a quiet stroll
with his host in billets, some gnarled old peasant, and carrying on
quite an animated conversation with him about the crops and what not.
The mess orderlies at G.H.Q. are wonderful. On market-days they are to
be seen in the Grand’ Place, baskets on their arms, haggling away as
fluently as may be in French with the old women selling butter and eggs
and fish and fruit.
Our army in the field has a fine sweeping way with the pronunciation
of the names of places in its zone of occupation. _Wipers_ and
_Plug Street_ are classical and well-known examples of the phonetic
adaptation of such names. In many cases a place, as pronounced by our
men, is instantly recognized when seen in print, a fine tribute to
the correctness of their phonetics. Often their pronunciation is a
very close imitation of what the name of the place sounds like in the
mouth of a Flemish boor. “Wipers” is astoundingly near the Flemish
pronunciation of Ypres. In the same way _Gertie-wears-velvet_ is an
almost perfect phonetic rendering of _Godewaersvelde_, and easy to
remember at that. I have amused myself by keeping a little list of the
pronunciation by our army of some of the names familiar to them in our
zone of operations:
Armentières Arm-in-tears.
Haverskerque Haversack.
Reninghelst Running Hold.
Festubert Fest-Hubert.
Etaples Eatables.
Lumbres Lumbers.
Hinges (As in English).
Vieux Berquin Viooks Berkwinn.
Potijze, or Potyze Pottidjy.
Wytschæte White Sheet.
Cuinchy Quinchey.
Hazebrouck Azebrook.
Beuvry Bouvry (as in Bouverie Street).
Haltebast Hell-and-Blast.
The amusing thing is that the whole army has adopted this nomenclature.
You will hear Staff officers who know French well speaking of
“Arm-in-tears” and “White Sheet.” With the Expeditionary Force it is
“the thing” to do as the army does.
There is no doubt that our men were very uncomfortable both in the
trenches and out during the long wet winter in Flanders. Even after a
dry spell in the summer a heavy shower sufficed to turn the roads and
paths and communication trenches about the firing-line into regular
quagmires. But the warm air of a perfect summer, when the sun is never
long absent, puts a different complexion on everything. The quagmires
dry up, the hot sunshine evaporates the moisture in sodden garments,
and the exquisite garb in which summer clothes these Flanders flats, so
gloomy and repelling in winter, quickly restores depressed spirits.
In its summer dress Flanders indeed is very fair. Behind the
firing-line the wind and the birds have done the work of man. The
fields are all asway with wheat and barley and oats, sprung up of
themselves, splashed with great stains of scarlet and blue where
poppies and cornflowers nod in the breeze. Nature has scattered with
a liberal hand these most English of flowers, suggestive of all that
is most beautiful in the English countryside, wherever the sappers’
pick has thrown up the clods of earth, be it from a trench, be it from
a grave. In the little gardens about the shattered homesteads, where
abandoned equipment, ends of hospital dressings, scattered cartridges,
and empty ammunition boxes tell of the war that has passed that way,
the scarlet ramblers still scramble with flaming petals athwart the
blasted walls, in and out of the empty window-frames. The red roofs
of the farms nestling in masses of swaying greenery, the roses in the
village gardens, the blooming hedgerows--all this is the beauty of
summer England, surest cure for home-sickness and ennui.
Very wisely the military authorities out here have always encouraged
the playing of games by the men in their periods of recreation. They
have recognized that games keep the men physically fit, and also take
their minds off the dangers and hardships of their life at the front.
Games keep the men from brooding over the perils they have escaped
as over the dangers that may stand before. Games keep them out of
mischief, from loafing about the villages and clandestine drinking,
which so often leads to unreflected acts. It is in no spirit of
frivolity, but in the spirit of the old maxim, “_Mens sana in corpore
sano_,” that our men while away their leisure hours with cricket
and football and sing-songs. I am anxious to reaffirm this, to all
Englishmen, self-evident truth because (there is no object in cloaking
the matter) the French have shown at times a tendency to be scandalized
at the recreations of our army in the field. As time has gone on, and
they have come to know us even better than before, they have begun to
understand that the Englishman, in taking his games with him into the
field of war, is only carrying on our great system of national hygiene
which has turned out all our great fighters of history from Francis
Drake to the Grenfells.
Therefore, fair weather or foul, our army in the field contrives to
amuse itself in its leisure hours, sparse though they may be. In
winter it played football. The ground was always rough, and sometimes
pitted with shell-holes. Four of the black and white posts which the
signallers use for laying their field telegraph wires served as goal.
But the ball was tight and firm, blown up by some kindly A.S.C. driver
with his tyre-pump, the players were hard and keen. I have seen many a
good game played not a mile behind the firing-line, always liable to
be disturbed by sporadic outbursts of German “frightfulness.”
[Illustration:
_“Daily Mail” phot._
CRICKET AT THE FRONT.]
Summer brought cricket and rounders. Real cricket bats were seldom
seen, but quite a serviceable substitute can be fashioned out of a
packing-case, which will also supply both stumps and bails. With a
composition ball and willing and eager fielders many excellent games
were played in all kinds of surroundings, on every imaginable--and
unimaginable--sort of wicket. A brigade of the Indian Cavalry had a
rounders team of which great things were said. The Machine Gun School
introduced badminton. The war correspondents’ mess invented a weird
kind of pseudo-cricket played with a broomstick and a soft ball.
During the winter two concert parties had a great vogue. The one, “The
Follies,” was run by the 4th Division, and consisted of army talent
assisted by two charming young ladies, one a refugee from Lille, the
other, I believe, a daughter of an _estaminet_ keeper at Armentières,
where “The Follies” performed several times a week for months. I
never heard them, but I am told that their “show” was excellent, and
attracted spectators from far down our line. The _pièce de résistance_
was, I believe, the singing of “Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts for
Soldiers” by the young female refugee, a considerable feat if you
remember that the young person did not know a word of English. Most of
“The Follies” are dead by now, killed in action in the spring. Thus
does cruel war break up pleasant partnership. The two young ladies
were absorbed in the second concert party, “The Fancies,” which also
had a successful career.
In an existence which, save for the spells of fighting, is
comparatively monotonous, the weekly baths arranged for the men are
quite an event. The danger of vermin as the transmitters of disease
aroused the medical authorities, at an early stage of the campaign, to
the necessity of providing regular bathing facilities for the men in
the firing-line. The numerous large buildings in this part of France
afforded ideal wash-houses, and “bathing-stations,” as they are called,
are now established in all divisional areas. Here, while the men are
enjoying a good scrub-down with plenty of soap in huge vats and tubs
filled with hot water, their uniform is disinfected and their soiled
shirts, underwear, and socks are replaced by clean ones. On bathing
days, which are mostly every day, these bathing-stations are a sight
that does the heart good, so delighted are the men to get their bodies
clean, to have the feel of clean underwear next their skin. If needs
be, the British soldier will put up with any amount of discomfort. But
the discomfort he resents most of all is to be deprived of his soap and
water. “Cleaning up” morning and evening is as much a rite with our
army in the field as the morning and evening prayer of the Moslem.
The installation of these bathing-stations was the idea of a young
officer of the R.A.M.C. It frequently happens in our army in the field
that, if a man happens on a good idea, he is told to go “ahead with
it.” This young doctor’s idea was a very happy one, and he “went ahead
with it” to such good purpose that it was copied, and, as I have said,
“bathing-stations” were arranged throughout the army. They are now
show-places to which the distinguished visitor is invariably conducted.
It is whispered that sometimes, when these visits have been arranged at
short notice, bathers are not available, so a squad of men, who perhaps
had had their bath the day before, are ordered to the bath and are
solemnly washed again. Though perhaps on these occasions the clothing
and bodies of the men seem surprisingly clean, the visitors to the
“star” bathing-station, where personages of note are always conducted,
can see “the real thing” in the shape of a lamentable garment preserved
between two sheets of glass. It is known as “The Lousy Shirt,” and
is an indisputably genuine relic of winter, literally covered with
the cremated remains of hundreds of this most unconventional insect.
The doctor in charge of the bathing-station declares his intention of
presenting the shirt to the United Service Museum after the war.
In many parts of the line, where the German rarely desists from
“frightfulness,” the troops waiting their turn in the trenches live
entirely in dug-outs, as such houses as are still standing are not
safe owing to shell-fire. A dug-out is, as its name implies, a
shelter scraped out of the ground, the earth being laid on timbers
placed crosswise on top. A dug-out will afford adequate cover against
bullets and shrapnel and splinters of shell. It will not as a rule,
unless quite exceptionally solid, resist a direct hit by a shell. If
a dug-out is struck fair and square in this way, its occupants seldom
escape. Some of the dug-outs I have seen were models of neatness and
ingenuity. One in particular, used as regimental headquarters in a
village that had been totally destroyed--the 2nd Worcesters, the heroes
of Gheluvelt, were there when I visited it in June--was reached by a
neat flight of wooden steps and had practicable casement windows. Walls
and roof were papered in an artistic shade of green, linoleum was on
the floor, a mirror and coloured prints of General Joffre and Sir John
French hung on the walls, and there were tables and chairs in addition
to a camp-bed in a corner. A pigeon-hole with a slide in one wall gave
access to a second room, “the office.” The place was dry and well
ventilated. It had a great local reputation as the “super-dug-out.” A
framed notice on the wall proudly attested the fact that it had been
visited by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales.
Round about Ypres, where the country has been laid waste by shell-fire,
everybody lives in dug-outs.
When up in the Ypres salient one day I ran across an old friend in the
person of the C.O. of the 16th Lancers. He and his officers were living
in dug-outs constructed in the grounds of a ruined country house. I
reminded him that the last time I had seen him had been in the very
handsome dining-room of the 16th Lancers mess at The Curragh. Then he
was wearing the red and gold mess-kit of “The Scarlet Lancers.” Now
he was in the worn and stained khaki, plastered with mud from top to
toe, with a disreputable old cap with ear-pieces and monstrously heavy
boots. “Perhaps you’d care to have a look at our mess here,” he said,
and pointed at a black hole in a mud-bank a few feet away. Outside some
facetious orderly had affixed a notice-board inscribed “Hotel Ritz,”
with various light-hearted remarks to the effect that it was licensed
for the sale of beer and wines to be consumed on the premises.
This dug-out was what it purported to be, a hole in the ground,
muddy and damp and depressing. At the back several sleeping-valises
lay on the ground. There was an elegant table and some chairs,
white-enamelled, with turned legs. “The table’s got a marble top,” said
a sad-looking Major sitting there, “like the tables at the Carlton!”
I have visited troops in their billets in every part of our line. I
have been to headquarters installed in fine old châteaux, with which I
deal in a subsequent chapter; I have lunched with Brigadiers quartered
in hovels so mean and filthy that they would disgrace the lowliest
cabin of the West of Ireland; I have sat and chatted with sappers
living in holes scraped out of the sides of a bank like kingfishers’
nests; I have seen our soldiers living in wooden hutments and under
canvas; I have seen them in grubby little workmen’s cottages in suburbs
of the industrial towns of the North of France and in dreary, rambling
old French barracks. Sometimes they were comfortable (and the British
soldier is able to make himself comfortable on astonishingly little!);
generally they were uncomfortable. But they never grumbled at their
rough lot. They groused about their inaction and bemoaned their hard
fate at not being able to “get a crack at the Germs.” By no single
word, however, did they indicate that they regarded their conditions
of life as anything exceptional, anything outside the great game in
which they are engaged. The army does its best for them. Their food
is plentiful, extraordinarily varied, seeing the difficulties of
transport, and absolutely regular in every part of the line. The army
gives them, amongst other things, cigarettes and tobacco and matches
and newspapers. As my Hussar said, the A.S.C. does not run to “stewed
apples and custard.” It cannot give them houses always; it cannot give
them family life; it cannot protect them against the dark angel that
stalks these Flanders flats by day and night. But it smooths things as
best it can, and for the rest the cheerful philosophy of the British
soldier “carries on.”