You like song, dear Private Atkins, its lilt and its sentiment, and you
have been singing your way through battle, on the hills of France and
the plains of Belgium. You are really a poet, as well as a first-rate
fighting man, though the very idea will make your camp-fire rock with
laughter. Well, in your letters from the war to the old folk and the
young folk at home, you have written things worthy to be bound in cloth
of gold.
You have, in particular, being a natural fellow, written yourself to
them, and you are just splendid, singly and collectively. You look out
from your epistles with a smile on your lips, humour in one eye and a
touch of the devil in the other, and you cry, “Are we downhearted?”
“No!” gladly answer we, who have been listening to the news of battle
ringing down the street, and for a moment, perhaps, forgetting you and
your writing on the wall with the bayonet point.
You do get the red, living phrases, don’t you, Private Atkins? “The
hottest thing in South Africa was frost-bitten compared with what’s
going on here.” “The Boer War was a mothers’ meeting beside this
affair.” “Another shell dropped at me and I went like Tod Sloan.” “Did
you see that German man’s face when I told him about our victories?
Poor devil! He opened his mouth like a letter-box.” No, Thomas, you may
not be a scribe, but you “get there,” especially when the order comes,
“All rifles loaded and handy by your side!”
“It’s hard, but it’s good,” is how you sum up your campaigning,
and there goes a bottom truth. “You can’t,” as you say, “expect a
six-course dinner on active service,” but you would break your heart to
be out of it all. “When I am in the thick of the fire a strange feeling
comes over me. I feel and see no danger--I think it is the fighting
blood of my forefathers.” Yes, and when you receive a rifle bullet
through the arm or leg it feels “a bit of a sting,” nothing more,
“like a sharp needle going into me, but shrapnel hurts--hurts pretty
badly.” You are not, however, going to let mother, wife, or sweetheart
know this, because it would worry them.
You dread to tell them that “when the bullet went in my leg the main
artery was severed, and they are going to take part of it off and leave
me a cripple for life.” Still harder is it to write: “I am wounded,
and do not hope to live; I am going and so cannot come home as I
hoped; I send all my love.” And then there is an echo of infinity and
immortality in the thought, “When a fellow gets shot you never think
he is gone, but that he will come back.” Someone softly starts singing
“Nearer, my God, to Thee,” and it runs sweetly along the ranks, the
muffled prayer of inextinguishable hearts for a soul in flight.
But “Black Marias” and “Jack Johnsons” and “coal-boxes,” as you call
the enemy’s howitzer shells, are driving along, and you accept them
with your usual Atkins philosophy. The gun you know as “Aunt Sally”
is flopping her big shells at you; “Calamity Jane” salutes you in
odd volumes from miles away, and “Belching Billy” chimes in now and
then. “Whistling Rufus,” whose shells are smaller, is also in the
turmoil, but, being without fear of the big brethren, you merely have
a contempt for him. Still, the whole roar keeps you from the hour’s
sleep you are entitled to snatch, and therefore you gently swear at the
Kaiser as “William the Weed,” nickname Von Kluck “Old Von o’Clock,”
and grimly subscribe to the Uhlans as “Ewe-lambs.” Always you remain
the good sportsman, saying, “Put me a shilling on Gravelotte for the
Cesarewitch, if this letter is in time”; or, “Fancy Robins drawing the
Palace 1--1. Cheers!”
What was it you said when the doctor was bandaging your shattered knee?
That you wouldn’t be able to play for Maidstone United at Christmas!
You had forgotten the remark. Possibly you had also forgotten that four
of you, and rather “bad cases,” enjoyed “nap” on the top of a Red Cross
motor-lorry, all the way to the hospital. One of you contained six
bullets, and he said on the operating-table, “There will be enough to
make the missus a pair of earrings.” Another of you, a big Highlander,
had pleaded not to be taken from the firing line because “I have still
some shots left and I can do something with them.” “Keep smiling” is
your motto; “there’s only one winner in this game--roll on, England.”
Your gay bravery, your simple tenderness, and your fine humour make
an epic, Thomas Atkins, and it is you yourself who write it, all
unknowingly. “Tell mother I’m all Sir Garnet, Al.” “How is little Dick?
Give him a kiss. He must be a great man in this long while. Love to the
old lady and write soon”; and then, “I am wading in blood!” “Irene’s
prayer-book is always with me, although it upsets me to think of her
saying her little prayers for me. I have got some French slippers for
the children, which I hope to be able to bring to England. They are
very quaint--_Bon jour!_” “I parted with my badge to a little Belgian
girl who, with her mother, was giving our boys milk to drink. She was
just like Dora, and was wildly delighted to get such a souvenir.” “If
you have not sold Nigger I should like to have a photo of him and the
two boys, or Jack and the dog, to show some of my chums.” Thinking
tenderly of home!
With tenderness, Private Atkins, you have chivalry; or, as you would
put it yourself, you “know how to behave towards a woman.” “The Red
Cross girleens, with their purty faces and their sweet ways, are as
good men as most of us, and better than some of us. They are not
supposed to venture into the firing line, but they get there all the
same, and devil the one of us durst turn them away.” Of course not,
my Irish soldier, and maybe it was you who plucked the grapes that a
French maiden couldn’t reach, and had the surprise and confusion of
your life when, in thanks, she kissed you on both cheeks. She knew,
with the woman’s instinct, that she could fire your chivalry and still
trust it. “_Très correct_” is the universal tribute you get in France,
and it is a tribute to wear under your medals, next to your heart--a
Legion of Honour for the gentleman you are.
You have given your French friends another true taste of yourself in
your high spirits, your jollity, your manifestation that the merry
heart goes all the day. You have the gift of wonder, which means
imagination, and occasions for exercising it, as when the concussion of
a shell flung you up into a tree, and your sergeant, missing you and
looking around, asked in military language where you had gone! You came
down to tell him and couldn’t, and thereupon the wonder of the thing
seized him also. That incident was of the drawbridge order which links
tragedy and humour, for they march together even in the battlefield
with you. Serious, nay, grave things may be framing you about, but your
eye never misses the rift of humour, and that is good.
There was a shell which lighted on a field kitchen while the master
cook was stirring the dinner. It was a near shave for him, but,
as he did escape, you mostly recall his rueful appearance as he
gathered himself out of the scattered soup. Another of our vignettes
is of some cows getting into the battle arena, and of half a dozen
infantrymen calmly milking them. “Early doors this way; early doors,
ninepence!” you once cried for slogan in a hard charge. When the German
searchlights fell on you for the first time, your comment was, “Why,
Bill, it’s just like a play and us in the limelight.” It was the Irish
element in you which shouted, “Look at thim divils retraitin’ with
their backs facin’ us,” adding, about a lucky shamrock supposed to have
been given to the Kaiser by somebody, “Sure, Hinissey, and there’ll be
a leaf apiece for us when we get to Berlin.”
Your philosophy, Private Atkins, cannot be upset even when a shrapnel
bullet knocks a few inches out of your arm. No; your lament is that it
carries away a tattooed butterfly of which you were very proud. You
date your letters from the “Hotel de la Openaires, Rue de Grassies, bed
most comfortable and all arrangements up-to-date.” You have your little
joke all the time, and so when you meet the Foot Guards on a Sunday
you ask them which band is playing in the Park? Now and then the joke
is against you, but you only enjoy it all the more, which is the final
testimony that you are a true humorist.
Perhaps if the joke singles out overmuch you go “all the colours of the
rainbow,” a lovable thing, because it reveals your modesty. Otherwise
you always are in your element, be the field tented white or stricken
red. You are the complete knight in khaki, self-respecting, proud of
your regiment, a lion-rampant of bravery and resolution, tender-hearted
for all suffering; and we shall not forget your simple request, “Think
kind of a soldier!” How could we when we know that you have a greater
song than “Tipperary,” although you only sing it silently to yourselves
in the dark watches of the night:
“_A little I’m hurt, but not yet slain;
I’ll but lie down and bleed awhile
And then I’ll rise and fight again._”