Everybody who is anything is at the front. Never was there such a place
for meeting as at Flanders. The Strand is not in it. My own experience
is that of everybody else. One finds at the front men one has lost
sight of for years, old friends who have dropped away in the hurry of
existence, chance acquaintances of a Riviera train de luxe, men one has
met in business, men who have measured one for clothes.
Often I have heard my name sung out from the center of a column of
marching troops, and a figure has stepped out to the roadside who,
after my mind has shredded it of the unfamiliar uniform, the deep brown
sunburn, the set expression, has revealed itself as old Tubby Somebody
whom one had known at school, or Brown with whom one had played golf on
those little links behind the Casino at Monte Carlo, or the manager of
Messrs. Blank in the city.
I wanted to find a relation of mine, a sergeant in a famous London
regiment, and wrote to his people to get the number of his battalion
and his company. When the reply came I discovered that the man I wanted
was billetted not a hundred yards from me in the village, in which the
War Correspondents' Headquarters were situated, where he had come with
the shattered remnant of his battalion to rest, after the terrible
"gruelling" they sustained in the second battle of Ypres.
At the front one constantly witnesses joyous reunions, brother meeting
brother in the happy, hazardous encounter of two battalions on the road
or in the trenches. The very first man I met on coming out to the front
was a motor-car driver, whose father had particularly asked me to look
out for his boy. I discovered that he was the man appointed to drive
me!
Humor is probably the largest component part of the spirit of the
British soldier, a paradoxical, phlegmatic sense of humor that comes
out strongest when the danger is the most threatening. A Jack Johnson
bursts close beside a British soldier who is lighting his pipe with
one of those odious French sulphur matches. The shell blows a foul
whiff of chemicals right across the man's face. "Oh, dear! Oh, dear!"
he exclaimed with a perfectly genuine sigh, "these 'ere French matches
will be the death o' me!"
A reply which is equally characteristic of the state of mind of the
British soldier who goes forth to war is that given by the irate driver
of a staff car to a sentry in the early days of the war. The sentry
in the dead of night had levelled his rifle at the chauffeur because
the car had not stopped instantly on challenge. The driver backed his
car toward where the sentry was standing. "I'll 'ave a word with you,
young feller," he said. "Allow me to inform you that this car can't
be stopped in less than twenty yards. If you go shoving that rifle of
yours in people's faces some one will get shot before this war's over!"
There is a great strain of tenderness in the British soldier, a great
readiness to serve. Hear him on a wet night in the trenches, begrimed,
red-eyed with fatigue, chilled to the bone, just about to lie down for
a rest, offer to make his officer, tired as he is, "a drop of 'ot tea!"
Watch him with German prisoners! His attitude is paternal, patronizing,
rather that of a friendly London policeman guiding homeward the errant
footsteps of a drunkard.