CASTLES IN FLANDERS
With the British, as with the French and German armies in the field,
you will sometimes find Headquarters Staffs housed in a château. A
Staff wants plenty of elbow-room, it wants quarters away from the
noise and dust of the high-road and the bustle of a town; it has to
choose a fairly secluded spot, so as to escape the vigilant eyes of
enemy airmen and the bombardment which inevitably follows detection.
This word château is very misleading. It is what you might call a
“portmanteau” word. It signifies not only the Alexander Dumas type of
medieval castle; it also means practically any large house standing in
its own grounds. Thus, when I have set out to find the Headquarters
of the Nth Division in the Château of Blancques (B 13 c., or some
similar hieroglyphic, marking the spot on the Staff maps, will be
the address given to me at General Headquarters), I have never known
whether I shall find the Divisional General living amid the picturesque
surroundings of a real old French château, with slender grey turrets,
and lichen-covered walls, and a black and shining moat, or amid the
stucco and red brick, the pitch-pine and stained glass, of some
preposterous mansion built by a retired merchant on the outskirts of
an industrial town.
When I think of this war in years to come, however, I feel that I
shall always see some of its incidents re-enacted against the idyllic
background of one or other of the ancient châteaux of this part of
France. There is little enough picturesqueness, Heaven knows, in this
most business-like of wars, but there is an undeniable touch of romance
in the scenes which take place in and about these fine old castles
in our zone of occupation. I always came upon them with a feeling of
surprise, these old châteaux, in a country that with its smoke-stacks
and mine-shafts speaks of anything rather than of old-world romance.
They are mostly tucked away behind a screen of trees, to shelter them
from the icy winds which blow across these melancholy Flanders flats in
winter; they are almost always surrounded by a moat, and stand in their
own grounds, which remain in their natural state, with wide stretches
of short grass interspersed with wild flowers between groups of fine
old trees.
These grand old houses, which have witnessed so many stirring scenes
of war in the past, were awakened from many years of slumber by the
arrival of our army in the North of France. The little stumpy bridges
across their moats, which had re-echoed under the hoofs of horsemen in
the armies of _le Roi Soleil_; the tall, pointed turrets which had seen
in succession the cocked hats of _le grand Marlbrook’s_ infantry; the
ragged bonnets of the Revolution; the beplumed busbies of Wellington’s
cavalry, filing along the white roads threading the distant plain,
were once again the silent witnesses of the bustle of an army in the
field. A slender pennant was affixed to the lichen-covered gate-post;
sentries in khaki, stolid, slow-moving, rifle with fixed bayonet at
the “Order arms,” materialized apparently out of nowhere; motor-cars
came whirring up, discharging lean, athletic-looking officers in caps
of red and gold; while motor-lorries unloaded themselves of stacks of
papers and maps and stores and sleeping-valises and kit-bags. A party
of extraordinarily energetic people took possession of stables or an
outhouse, or some building conveniently adjacent to the château, and
decorated roof and walls with telegraph and telephone wires, and set up
a pole flying a blue and white flag over against a fair fretwork sign,
“R.E. SIGNALLERS.” To the Signallers’ station presently began to arrive
the motor-cyclist despatch orderlies in a frantic fuss of noise and a
cloud of dust.
The old châteaux hardly knew themselves again in all this activity.
Northern France is so eminently industrial that one had forgotten that
it had its relics of the old nobility of France as well, though many of
the ancient châteaux had passed into other hands, and some were seldom
if ever inhabited at all save by the caretakers and a few old servants.
So the old places awoke. _The Times_ and the _Daily Mail_ appeared
where formerly the _Figaro_ and _La Croix_ (pillars of the old French
nobility) were seen; the _Winning Post_ found itself side by side
with _The Lives of the Saints_ (in thirty-eight volumes in calf);
and pictures of charming young ladies cut out of the _Sketch_ or _La
Vie Parisienne_, particularly Rudolphe Kirchner’s delightful sketches
from the latter, were pinned up on the walls next to family portraits
of dead-and-gone châtelains and châtelaines. The green tree-frogs,
sprawling lazily in the sunshine among the sedge on the surface of the
moat, leapt away in high indignation at the invasion of their realm by
noisy young men with bath-towels. The rooks in the plantation cawed
in raucous protest against the thin blue curls of smoke arising from
the camp-fires of the troops bivouacked among the oaks and beeches,
singing, hammering, rattling tins, and jesting from dawn to dark. The
birds watched in amazement men-folk doing work they had been wont to
believe was the prerogative of rabbits and moles, scraping deep holes
in the ground, roofing them with timber, and thatching them with
leaves, and vanishing therein when blasts on a whistle heralded the
approach of the curious new birds recently noticed in the sky, birds
that glittered whitely far up among the clouds and droned angrily like
a giant bumble-bee.
I have seen many striking contrasts in these châteaux of France. One
day I turned into the courtyard of as dainty a little château as ever
the fifteenth Louis of gallant memory built for a lady. It was one of
the country places of a French officer then at the front, and very
rarely visited by him. Its grounds were neglected, the iron gates were
rusted and broken, and the stonework running round the flat and shallow
fish-pond was hoary and cracked with age. Against a superb background
of green foliage, a mighty screen of poplars bordering a drive that ran
out to the blue horizon, a horseman sat on his horse, turbaned, a lance
at his stirrup, immobile, a sublime equestrian statue. It was an Indian
sowar, a Pathan trooper of the native cavalry. He sat perfectly still
in the sunshine, in the silence that was Pompadour France....
Again, I remember calling at a château to get a pass to visit a certain
part of our line. It was a hybrid kind of place. The old part of the
château had been caught up and surrounded, as it were, in an imposing
pile of new red brick. On the lawn in front ran a lean fragment of
old grey wall, along which the scarlet rambler climbed recklessly,
profusely, in and out of the castellated coping and athwart a broken
arch. Two motor-cyclist despatch-riders sat on the lawn beneath a
giant walnut-tree and tinkered with their cycles. In the distance the
guns drummed gently, continuously. A young man came strolling across
the lawn. He was an officer. His khaki tunic and breeches and puttees
had seen hard service, his cap was thrust back from his forehead. In
his hand he carried a sheaf of papers, with which he returned, rather
punctiliously, the salute of the two motorcyclists. As he passed me I
saw it was the Prince of Wales.
He passed into my vision briefly that day and passed out again, very
slim, still a little diffident, in the pink of condition, as he passes
to and fro in the midst of our army in the field, restless when he is
held back too long from the front, happy only when he feels that he is
sharing the dangers and hardships of the army. The Prince of Wales with
the army in France! What a fine suggestion there is about the phrase!
It kindles my imagination every time I see him there with the troops.
Possibly the grey old tower of that modernized château which watched
him strolling nonchalantly across the grass that morning had also
looked down upon his most famous ancestor, him whose sable armour, once
famed in France, you may see to this day in the Cathedral at Canterbury.
This region is rich in association with our fighting past. I spent a
morning once with a Headquarters Staff in a château where Marlborough
(who has left the impress of his magnetic personality so deeply
stamped on the French imagination) had stayed when he was conducting
his operations against Marshal Villar’s famous _Ne Plus Ultra_ lines.
A quiet, reposeful spot was that château, with a rococo atmosphere,
with panelled rooms and old furniture, and gold-framed portraits of
military men of a past age. In a little study on the ground-floor,
where “Corporal John” may have worked himself, a General explained to
me over a table spread with maps his hopes and ambitions for the coming
summer. Outside a Staff Officer was explaining the working of a trench
mortar, the invention of one of the officers quartered in the château;
others were talking of the fishing they had managed to get in the
neighbourhood. Mortars and fishing! As subjects of conversation they
were as topical in the times of “the army in Flanders” as to-day.
One day I picked up a thread which conducted me straight back to
Waterloo. It was in an old château I found it, an exquisitely preserved
gem of the early seventeenth century, with a pigeon-coop, emblematic
of seigneurial rights, and a dainty little flower-garden, a perfect
corner of old France which, as a contemporaneous print hung in one of
the rooms of the château attested, had not changed its appearance since
it was laid out when the château was built. In this château Grant’s
Brigade of cavalry, which fought at Waterloo, was quartered for two
years after the battle. The place was still redolent of the memories
of the British cavalry which, as part of the army of occupation of
the Allies after the overthrow of Napoleon, had been quartered in the
château and in the little township which surrounds it. In the outer
wall of the stables they showed me a row of rings affixed there for the
horses, a hundred years ago, by the men of the 15th Hussars who were in
Grant’s Brigade. In and about the little town surrounding the château,
on the occasion of my visit, I met again men of the 15th Hussars
quartered there--the 15th Hussars of to-day, gallantly carrying on the
great traditions which their forbears at Waterloo helped to establish.
These ancient châteaux in our zone of operations often change their
occupants. A Staff moves on and disappears, and before the old house
has had time to relapse into its secular sleep there is another
irruption of “brass-hats” in motor-cars and mess orderlies in
motor-lorries.
The General Staff room is generally established in the largest room
of the château. I have seen some curious contrasts in these rooms.
I have in mind a long and lofty apartment with a broad alcove made
by a story of one of the corner turrets of the château. On the walls
old-fashioned oil-paintings hung side by side with innumerable maps,
army orders, and various indications, serious and facetious. A Staff
Officer was sitting at a big old oak table spread with an extraordinary
collection of mud-stained papers. This was the Intelligence Officer
going through correspondence found on German prisoners and dead. In the
alcove another Staff Officer was talking on the telephone to a Brigade
Headquarters; sandbags was the theme, and its discussion developed a
certain amount of acerbity as it proceeded. A young man in very muddy
riding-boots stood by the handsome carved-stone mantelpiece, his cap on
the back of his head, a riding-crop in his hand. He was waiting with
some impatience for the sandbag debate to finish.
In its outward appearance the room was a blend of suggestions of
peace and war. There were touches of the boudoir, the bureau, and the
barrack-room in the furniture. One or two dainty _bergère_ chairs, a
work-stand, a pretty cabinet or two, spoke of some feminine influence
that had once reigned here; the typewriters, the telephone, suggested
the city office; while the barrack-room touch was provided by the Sam
Browne belts, the revolvers, the riding-crops and swagger canes which
were scattered about in the corners and on the tables and chairs.
Life in these châteaux is not always so peaceful as their appearance
would indicate. Not so very long ago I was having tea in a château
with a Headquarters Staff, and the very tea-things on the table rattled
with the continual air-percussion of shells screeching to and fro about
the place. It was an ill-omened place, that dining-room, for all the
windows on one side had been smashed, and in front of them a solid
barricade of sandbags had been erected to diminish the effect of shells
bursting on the gravel without. As we drank our tea placidly, half a
dozen heavy shells went wailing over the house, and exploded noisily in
the immediate vicinity.
There are châteaux, like the château of Hooge of which I spoke in a
previous chapter, which have been totally destroyed by shell-fire.
Yet you may find troops living in the grounds, in dug-outs furnished
from the château, or sometimes even in a single room or cellar of
the château which has escaped destruction. I have been to châteaux
where almost every day shells plumped square into the crumbling
brickwork, ploughing their way through ancient rafters and bursting
with reverberating explosions amid Buhl tables and Empire chairs and
Louis XIV. clocks and old French prints. I have seen gardens still
blooming amid a horrid welter of destruction, with standard roses
rearing their slender stems on high, and London pride and stocks and
syringa straggling over little graves dotted here and there between
gaping shell-holes, and tree-trunks blasted lying across shattered
cucumber-frames.
I have been in a room, the last room habitable in a pretty little
country-house where the flooring was of parquet, once highly polished,
no doubt, but now stained with mud and scratched by hobnailed boots. A
splendid Empire clock ticked away on the white marble mantelpiece; the
table, spread with tin plates and cups, some bully-beef in a saucer,
a loaf of bread, and a bottle of whisky, was Buhl; the chairs were of
mahogany in the Empire style. A common wash-hand-stand, retrieved, I
should think, from the stables, stood in a corner; in another corner an
Empire couch had been spread with a flea-bag and blankets, and served
as a bed for the doctor, who had his quarters there. Two walls of the
apartment were curtained off with sacking, for beyond was the open
air--roofless rooms, piled-up with débris, and shattered walls.
But what of the proprietors of these châteaux in our lines? you may
ask. The British Army pays for everything it uses, pays rent for
the châteaux it occupies, as for the horses or cattle it may (very
rarely) requisition. The châtelains have very often gone away until
the war is over; sometimes they have been called up to the French or
Belgian armies, as the case may be. I have met with cases in which
the châtelain has lived in his château during our occupation, and the
officers quartered there have dined daily at his table.
The position is a little delicate. Our army is an army of gentlemen,
and both officers and men have shown in this war that they know how to
respect the feelings and property of the civilian population in our
zone of operations. But, obviously, considerable tact is required to
reconcile some elderly Countess, accustomed all her life to preside
over a well-conducted, placid, and scrupulously clean household, with
the irruption of a horde of healthy, active men, shod with hobnails
(“_Mon Dieu, le parquet!_”), very often muddy (“_O Ciel, mes tapis!_”),
and inclined to smoke pipes all over the place.
In one case I heard of, a Headquarters Staff, on arriving at a château
where they were to establish themselves, found that the owner and his
wife, an elderly couple, had not been on the best of terms with their
predecessors, a Headquarters Staff that had just moved on. A tactful
Staff Captain went out to reconnoitre the ground. He found that their
hosts had been a trifle _froissé_ by a lack of understanding on the
part of the other British officers who had been quartered there. He
laid himself out to make friends with the old couple with some success.
One day they mentioned _en passant_ that it was a pity there was
only one swan on the lake, and that a female. The Staff Captain took
counsel. Presently, with great secrecy, the youngest member of the
Staff, who was thought to require a change of air, was despatched to
Paris with strict orders only to return with a male swan. The British
officer is a resourceful person. In three days the subaltern was back
with a gentleman swan in a basket. This graceful present broke the ice
between the British officers and their hosts, and when I visited that
château, not only did the old couple preside daily at the officers’
mess, but they had also given them the usage of certain rooms which
they had resentfully closed to their predecessors.
Occasionally, on the other hand, the châtelain--in the case I have in
mind it was a châtelaine--is irreconcilably disagreeable. The lady
in this case was married, and her husband, having been mobilized,
was serving somewhere in the French firing-line. This circumstance
had fired her indignation. With woman’s sweet unreasonableness, she
laid it down that soldiers who were not in the firing-line were a
good-for-nothing pack of ne’er-do-wells, and if they expected to have
a nice comfortable time in her château, she would show them that they
were vastly mistaken. So this preposterous person would visit the
house several times a day--she lived herself in another house close
by--ferret about for any damage done, and generally make herself an
unmitigated nuisance. The gardener actually had instructions, which he
carefully observed, to lop off the heads of every flower in the grounds
to prevent the British officers from plucking them for their rooms. The
General quartered there might have had the woman promptly packed off
about her business by saying a word to the French Military Mission at
General Headquarters. He was, however, much too polite to do that, so
the lady was suffered in silence, and only scolded behind her back.
This case, which I have only mentioned because it is amusing, and not
because it is typical, is quite exceptional. In the main, the relations
between our army and its French hosts have been admirable. There has
been a maximum of consideration on the one hand, a maximum of grateful
hospitality on the other. In years to come the memories that will
linger about these old châteaux of those who gratefully accepted their
hospitality will be of brave, unostentatious, clean-living gentlemen,
like Bayard, premier knight of France, _sans peur et sans reproche_.