TO THE FRONT
_France, April 8th._
So the Australians are in France. A great reception at the port of
landing, so we hear. A long, weary train journey in a troop train which
never alters its pace, but moves steadily on, halts for meals, jogs on
again, waits interminably outside strange junctions. Some days ago it
landed the first units, somewhere behind the front.
We reached France some time after the first units. The excitement of
seeing an Australian hat had long since evaporated. A few troops had
been left in camp near the port, and we met some of those on leave in
the big town. They might have been there since their babyhood for all
they or the big town cared.
And there we first heard mentioned the name of a town to which our
troops were supposed to have gone. It was quite a different town from
the one which we had heard of on board ship. It was snowing up there
where our men were, they said.
The train took us through beautiful country not yet touched by the
spring of the year. There were magnificent horses in the rich brown
fields--great draught horses such as I have never seen in any country
yet. But the figure that drove the harrow was always that of an old man
or a young boy; or, once or twice, of a woman. There were women digging
in the fields everywhere; or trudging back along the roads under great
bundles of firewood. The country was almost all cultivated land, one
vast farming industry. And they had managed to get through the whole
year's work exactly as if the men were there. As far as we could see
every field was ploughed, every green crop springing. It is a wonderful
performance.
We had not the least idea where we were going until in the end we
actually got there. Travelling in France is quite different from
travelling in Egypt or England. In Egypt you still exercise your brain
as to which train you shall travel by and where you will stay and where
you will change. But in France there is no need for you to think out
your own journey--it is useless for you to do so. The moment you reach
France the big hand of General Headquarters takes hold of you; and from
that instant it picks you up and puts you down as if you were a pawn on
a chessboard. Whatever the railway station, there is always a big
British policeman. The policeman directs you to the Railway Transport
Officer and the Railway Transport Officer tells you how long you will
stay and when you will leave and where you will go to next. And when you
get to the next place there is another policeman who sends you to
another Railway Transport Officer; until you finally come to a policeman
who directs you from the station and up the street of a little French
town, where, standing on the wet cobbles at the corner of the old city
square, under dripping stage scenery gables, you find another British
policeman who passes you to another policeman at another corner who
directs you under the very archway and into the very office which you
are intended by General Headquarters to reach.
And if you go on right up to the very trenches themselves you will find
that British policeman all the way; directing the traffic at every
country cross-road where there is likely to be a congestion of the great
lumbering motor-lorries; standing outside the ruined village church
which the long-range guns have knocked to pieces in trying to get at a
supply dump or a headquarters; waiting at the fork-roads where you
finally have to leave your motor-car and walk only in small parties if
you wish to avoid sudden death; on point duty at the ruined farmhouses
which it is unhealthy at certain hours of the day to pass. At the corner
where you finally turn off the road into the long, deepening
communication trench; even at the point where the second line trenches
cross the communication trench to the front trenches--in some cases you
find that policeman there also, faithfully telling you the way,
incidentally with a very close and critical eye upon you at the same
time.
He is simply the British policeman doing his famous old job in his
famous old way. He is mostly the London policeman, but there are
policemen from Burnley, from Manchester, from Glasgow amongst them. And
up near the lines you find the policeman from Sydney and Melbourne
waving the traffic along with a flag just as he used to do at the corner
of Pitt and King Streets. Just as he used to see that the by-laws of the
local council were carried out, so he now has to see to the rules and
orders made by the local general. It is a thankless job generally; but
when they get as far as this most people begin to be a little grateful
to the policeman.
Our railway train and the policeman had carried us over endless
farmlands, through forests, beside rivers, before we noticed, drawn up
along the side of a quarter of a mile of road, an endless procession of
big grey motor-lorries. Every one was exactly like the next--a tall grey
hood in front and a long grey tarpaulin behind. It was the first sign of
the front. Presently a French regiment went by along a country road--not
at all unlike our Australian troops in some ways--biggish fellows in
grey-blue overcoats, all singing a jolly song. They waved to us in the
same light-hearted way Australians have. There were more fair-haired
men, among some of the French troops we have seen, than there would be
in one of our own battalions.
After this there came great stores at intervals, and timber yards--hour
after hour of farmhouses and villages where there was a Tommy in every
doorway, Tommies in every barn, a Tommy's khaki jacket showing through
every kitchen window; until at last towards evening we reached a country
populated by the familiar old pea-soup overcoats and high-necked
jackets and slouch hats of Australians.
There they were, the men whom we had last seen on the Suez Canal--here
they were, already, in the orchard alongside of the old lichened,
steep-roofed barn--four or five of them squatting round a fire of
sticks, one stuffing his pipe and talking, talking, talking all the
while. I knew that they were happy there before ever they said it. A
track led across a big field--there were two Australians walking along
it. A road crossed the railway--two Australians were standing at the
open door of the house, and another talking to the kiddies in the
street. There was a platoon of them drilling behind a long barn.
A long way ahead of that, still going through an Australian country, we
stopped; and a policeman showed us to the station entrance where there
was a motor-car which took us and our baggage to the little house where
we were billeted. On the green door of the house next to it, behind the
pretty garden, was scrawled in chalk, "Mess--five officers." That was
where we were to feed.
[Illustration: "TALKING WITH THE KIDDIES IN THE STREET"]
It was as we came back from tea that I first noticed a distant
sound--ever so familiar--the far-off heavy roar of the big guns at
Cape Helles. It was guns firing along the lines away to the east of us.
And as we walked back after dinner that night from the little mess-room,
across the garden hedge and over the country beyond, there flashed ever
and anon hither and thither a distant halo of light. It was the field
guns firing, and the searchlights flashing over a German parapet.
Yesterday for the first time an Anzac unit entered the trenches in
France.