A REINFORCEMENTS CAMP
I
_The Sunny Valley_
The reinforcements camp lay pleasantly in a sunny valley. The nearest
town was Harfleur, besieged exactly five hundred years earlier by Henry
V. of England, who placed his chief reliance on his big guns and his
mines and was not disappointed. The camp commandant was insistent that
the ground round the tents and huts should be turned into gardens, and
before long the valley was bright with flowers. There was peace over all
the landscape here. Sometimes a train of horse trucks, crowded with men
standing at the sliding doors or sitting with legs dangling over the
rails, panted up the long slope past the foot of the valley, and every
evening the supply trains pulled slowly off on their way to the front,
each laden with one day's rations for twelve thousand men. Fresh drafts
for the infantry and artillery arrived every day, stayed a few days, and
then were sent up the line. Probably a thousand men a month would be a
fair estimate for the wastage from a division at that time, that is, the
whole Expeditionary Force had to be renewed completely once a year, as
far as its fighting units were concerned. Drafts therefore were
continually passing through our camp, and I had many opportunities of
studying the morale of individuals of all ranks. The result was
interesting and worth setting down. My experience was that the good
heart of fighting men was affected by only two avoidable causes. The
first was the large number of young able-bodied men engaged in
occupations, on the lines of communications and at the base, which might
have been carried through effectively by others. These young men never
were in danger, while those who happened to have enlisted in combatant
corps were sent back to face death again and again. This (we are told)
has now been rectified, but it was for long a source of great soreness.
The second influence making for soreness was the amazing amount of
wrangling that went on at home, among the newspapers, between masters
and men, and so on. Officers would get furious with the conduct of the
'workers,' and condemn them wholesale as a class. One had to be at once
cautious and persistent in bringing home to them the fact that their
own men, whom they admired and loved, whom they knew would follow them
anywhere, were drawn from just the same class as those men who were out
on strike. Another reason why it would have been better to have had
older men and married men at the bases lay in the temptations
surrounding the men there on every side. These also have to be reckoned
with as part of the inevitable cost of war. It says much for the grit
and character of the average Briton that so many come through unscathed.
II
_The Man from Skye_
As I was going round the tents one day I had a long talk with a man in a
draft just leaving for the front to join a Highland regiment. He had
not been long out of hospital, and, like his companions, had scarcely
pulled himself together after the sadness of a second farewell.
Following a good plan of always handing on any rumour, however
improbable, which is of a thoroughly cheerful nature I said, referring
to a report that was current in the messes that morning, 'They say Lord
Kitchener says it will be all over by September.' He looked at me very
seriously and said sternly, 'It iss not for Lord Kitchener to say when
the war will be over. It iss only for God to say that.' Presently he
said, 'And what iss more, I will nefer see Skye again.' I had tried
every way in vain to lift his foreboding from him, and now I said
sternly like himself, 'It is not for you to say whether you will ever
see Skye again; only God can know that.' He moved a little, restlessly,
and answered slowly, 'Yess, that iss so, but--yess, it iss so.'
Sometimes when we were asking one another that old familiar unanswerable
question I would tell the story of the man from Skye and his answer to
the problem. We were very glad to hear a few weeks later that he had
been discharged as permanently unfit, and was by then in his loved misty
isle.
The Principal Chaplain visited the camp during my chaplaincy there. The
Rev. Dr. Simms, who ranks as a major-general, has charge of all
chaplains other than those of the Church of England. His tall,
distinguished, unassuming figure will always stand, in the minds of
those who were under his administration, for infinite kindness, wisdom,
and scrupulous fairness between all parties. Dr. Wallace Williamson of
St. Giles', Edinburgh, who was visiting the troops in France,
accompanied him. Their service on Sunday was very moving. Hearts were
near the surface in those brief days between the farewell and the
battlefield. The three Scotsmen whom I knew best of those who were at
this service are all dead: one fell at Loos, one in Mesopotamia, and one
on the Somme. The oldest of them, who was an officer in a Guards
battalion, could not speak and his eyes were full of tears. There was no
possibility here of the remark that one Lowlander made to another after
listening to a very celebrated London preacher: 'Aye, it was beautiful,
and he cud mak' ye see things too, whiles; but, man! there was nae
_logic_ in 't.'
It was about this time that we heard of the sinking of the _Lusitania_.
Somehow from this moment we knew better where we were and for what we
fought. Every one's thoughts were very grim. This was sheer naked
wickedness done plainly and coldly in the sight of God and man.
III
'_You can hear them now_'
One broiling afternoon as I sat talking with a friend in my tent an
orderly came to the door and said to him, 'Message for you, sir.' He
glanced at it. It was his orders to join his battalion at the front. We
shook hands and he went off, glad to be on the move again after hanging
about waiting so long. In five minutes the orderly was back with orders
for me to proceed at once to the 2nd London Territorial Casualty
Clearing Station. I said good-bye to Adams, my servant. No man was ever
more fortunate in his batmen--Adams, a typical regular, fiercely proud
of his regiment; Campion, the London Territorial, a commercial traveller
in civil life; and Munro, the Royal Scot, who within a month or two of
the outbreak of war could no longer suppress the fighting spirit of the
Royal Regiment stirring within him, and voluntarily rejoined, leaving a
wife and six children behind him. He was a foreman in the Edinburgh
Tramways Company. Handy man that he was, he could turn his hand to
anything, whether it was devising a ferrule for a broken walking stick
out of the screw of a pickle bottle, or making a bleak-looking hut
habitable, or producing hot tea from nowhere, or transforming a
wet-canteen marquee into a decent place for Communion (empty tobacco
boxes for table, beer barrels discreetly out of sight), or building a
pulpit out of sandbags in the corner of a roofless saloon bar.
The supply train left at a very early hour, and by devious routes
reluctantly approached the railhead. The journey took thirty hours. It
was long enough to teach the lessons never to go on a military train in
France without something to read, or to drink rashly from an aluminium
cup containing hot liquid, or to rely on bully beef as a sole article of
diet. Towards evening the Irishman in charge of the train had pity and
took me along--we had stopped for the thirty-fifth time--to admire his
Primus stove in full blast, and to share his excellent dinner. But
(stove or no stove) the world is divided into those who can do that sort
of thing and those who cannot; who, wrestling futilely with refractory
elements, wish they had never been born.
He said that before we reached the railhead we would probably hear the
sound of the guns. The phrase is used to barrenness, even to ridicule,
but the reality when first heard rings a new emotion in your breast. The
night was windless and warm, and about ten o'clock as we stood in a
wayside station the Ulsterman came up to me and said, 'Listen, you can
hear them now.' And away to the east could be heard a deep shaking sound
rising and fading away in the still air--the sound of British artillery
fighting day and night against yet overwhelming odds.
Twenty hours later, after many wanderings, a friendly Field Ambulance
car deposited me at the door of the mess of the clearing station, where
the arrival of a 'Scotch minister' had been awaited with a good deal of
curiosity and possibly some apprehension.
A CLEARING STATION WHEN THERE IS 'NOTHING TO REPORT'