ON LEAVE TO A NEW ENGLAND
_Back in France._
It was after seven weeks of very heavy fighting. Even those whose duty
took them rarely up amongst the shells were almost worn out with the
prolonged strain. Those who had been fighting their turns up in the
powdered trenches came out from time to time tired well nigh to death in
body, mind and soul. The battle of the Somme still grumbled night and
day behind them. But for those who emerged a certain amount of leave was
opened.
It was like a plunge into forgotten days. War seemed to end at the
French quayside. Staff officers, brigadier-generals, captains, privates
and lance-corporals--they were all just Englishmen off to their homes.
They jostled one another up the gangway--I never heard a rough word in
that dense crowd. They lay side by side outside the saloon of the
Channel turbine steamer. A corporal with his head half in the doorway,
too seasick to know that it was fair in the path of a major-general's
boots; a general Staff officer and a French captain with their backs
propped against the oak panelling and their ribs against somebody else's
baggage; a subaltern of engineers with his head upon their feet; a
hundred others packed on the stairs and up to the deck; and a horrible
groaning from the direction of the lavatories--it was truly the happiest
moment in all their lives.
The crossing passed like a dream--scarcely noticed. Seven weeks of
strain can leave you too tired almost to think. A journey in a
comfortable railway compartment through prim, hazy English fields, the
carriage blue with smoke from the pipes of its inhabitants (a Canadian,
three or four Englishmen and a couple of Australians), has gone almost
unremembered. As the custom is in England, they were mostly ensconced
behind their newspapers, although there is more geniality in an English
railway carriage to-day than was usual before the war. But most people
in that train, I think, were too tired for conversation.
It was the coming into London that left such an impression as some of us
will never forget. Some of us knew London well before the war. It is
the one great city in the world where you never saw the least trace of
corporate emotion. It divides itself off into districts for the rich and
districts for the poor, and districts for all the grades in between the
two, which are the separate layers in the big, frowning edifice of
British society; they may have had some sort of feeling for their class
or their profession--the lawyer proud of his Inns of Court and of the
tradition of the London Bar, the doctor proud of London schools of
medicine, and the Thames engineer even proud of the work that is turned
out upon the Thames. But there was no more common feeling or activity in
the people of London than there would be common energy in a heap of sand
grains. They would have looked upon it as sheer weakness to exhibit any
interest in the doings even of their neighbours.
The battle of the Somme had begun about nine weeks before when this
particular train, carrying the daily instalment of men on leave from it,
began to wind its way in past the endless back-gardens and yellow brick
houses, every one the replica of the next, and the numberless villa
chimneys and chimney-pots which fence the southern approaches of the
great capital. They are tight, compact little fortresses, those English
villas, each jealously defended against its neighbour and the whole
world by the sentiment within, even more than by the high brick wall
around it. But if they were all rigidly separate from each other, there
was one thing that bound them all together just for that moment.
It happened in every cottage garden, in every street that rattled past
underneath the railway bridges, in every slum-yard, from every window,
upper and lower. As the leave train passed the people all for the moment
dropped whatever they were doing and ran to wave a hand at it. The
children in every garden dropped their games and ran to the fence and
clambered up to wave these tired men out of sight. The servant at the
upper window let her work go and waved; the mother of the family and the
girls in the sitting-room downstairs came to the window and waved; the
woman washing in the tub in the back-yard straightened herself up and
waved; the little grocer out with his wife and the perambulator waved,
and the wife waved, and the infant in the perambulator waved; the boys
playing pitch-and-toss on the pavement ran towards the railway bridge
and waved; the young lady out for a walk with her young man waved--not
at all a suppressed welcome, quite the reverse of half-hearted; the
young man waved, much more demurely, but still he did wave. The flapper
on the lawn threw down her tennis-racket and simply flung kisses; and
her two young brothers expressed themselves quite as emphatically in
their own manner; the old man at the corner and the grocer-boy from his
cart waved. For a quarter of an hour, while that train wound in through
the London suburbs, every human being that was near dropped his work and
gave it a welcome.
I have seen many great ceremonies in England, and they have left me as
cold as ice. There have been big set pieces even in this war, with brass
bands and lines of policemen and cheering crowds and long accounts of it
afterwards in the newspapers. But I have never seen any demonstration
that could compare with this simple spontaneous welcome by the families
of London. It was quite unrehearsed and quite unreported. No one had
arranged it, and no one was going to write big headlines about it next
day. The people in one garden did not even know what the people in the
next garden were doing--or want to know. The servant at the upper
window did not know that the mistress was at the lower window doing
exactly as she was, and vice versa. For the first time in one's
experience one had experienced a genuine, whole-hearted, common feeling
running through all the English people--every man, woman and child,
without distinction, bound in one common interest which, for the time
being, was moving the whole nation. And I shall never forget it.
It was the most wonderful welcome--I am not exaggerating when I say that
it was one of the most wonderful and most inspiriting sights that I have
ever seen. I do not know whether the rulers of the country are aware of
it. But I do not believe for a moment that this people can go back after
the war to the attitude by which each of those families was to all the
others only so much prospective monetary gain or loss.