And now the scene changes. The stage is set afresh for another act
of the great drama in which our hero plays the leading part or the
tiniest of _rôles_, according as we take his conception or history’s
of the great events amongst which his life is running its course.
For, by analysis, war is found to be made up of millions of little
dramas in which the “lead” is played by every single combatant, in
which the greatest actors may have but the shadowiest of _rôles_, in
which the most portentous moments of history are but “noises of.”
It is only the historian, coldly surveying the stage through the
lorgnette of posterity, who can disentangle the myriad threads of
these subsidiary incidents and weave them into the mighty drama, in
which the great actors are seen in their proper _rôles_, where such
pygmies as our Ensign are but blurred figures in a vast stage crowd,
a moving background, as it were,--after the Meiningen school of the
drama,--against which the events of history are enacted.
The scene shifts, then, from Belgium to France. Gone are the flat
plains, the ugly red-brick houses, uglier than ever now that war has
stripped them from roof to cellar; gone the dull, straight roads
with their strip of uneven, red-hot _pavé_ in the centre; gone that
everlasting ragged silhouette of Ypres’ ravaged towers, seen from every
angle of the salient; gone the stagnant canals, the dirty estaminets.
Slow and protesting, with many halts, the train bearing the Battalion
southward, through the heat and dust of a blazing summer day, leaves
the Belgian scene of war behind. It carries them deep into the fair
land of France, among the green hills and undulating valleys, the
long white roads, the pretty and prosperous villages, the old-world
chateaux with their seigneurial dove-cots and weather-stained towers
peering forth from the summer foliage, the natty _auberges_ with their
white-curtained windows and little tables before the door. This is all
but the “front cloth,” however, behind which the stage is being set for
the drama in which the Battalion is yet to play its part. This fair
picture of France, spread out in the warm afternoon sunshine, is only
the foreground. Behind it somewhere, where the guns are growling dully,
lies the Unknown, the Land of Adventure for which they are ultimately
bound.
Motor-lorries met them at the railhead where their train journey ended,
and whirled them, in a long procession of white dust-clouds, to a large
and comfortable village where already other Guards’ battalions were
lodged. As the men, white as masons with the dust, descended from the
lorries, our Ensign looked about him. There was the Billeting Officer,
perspiring and protesting (as is the way of the Billeting Officer),
the quartermaster-sergeants, his accomplices, beside him. On every
door stood the traces of their handiwork. “2 Platoons, No. 1 Coy.,” “1
Platoon, No. 4 Coy.,” “Pioneers,” “2 officers,”--these were some of the
inscriptions our Ensign saw scrawled in chalk on the doors of houses
and sheds and on the posts of the farmyard gates.
Three platoons of his company, our young man discovered, were billeted
in the buildings of a big yard behind an estaminet, a number of large
sheds and outhouses, some of red brick, others with merely wattle
walls, running round three sides of the yard. Our Ensign ardently
desired a wash and also a drink, but he found that all the officers
were busy looking after the comfort of their men, seeing that their
quarters were reasonably clean, and inquiring from the dispassionate
French peasants as to facilities for water. That is the rule of the
army,--the men first, the officers afterwards.
So our young man lost no time in following the example of The Beak and
Peter, and visited his platoon in their billet. They were very well
off, for their lodging was in a large, dry, clean loft, with a cement
floor, above the stables. He and his brother officers between them were
successful in begging some straw off the lady of the estaminet, whose
sole concern appeared to be for her fowls.... _Ah, Monsieur, il y avait
des Anglais chez nous qui out volé mes poules.... Oh, la, la, qu’ils
ont volé!_...
But our Ensign soothed her fears by clinching on the spot a contract
for eggs for the double-company Mess, as long as the Battalion should
be there, and by paying down five francs on account. Quite mollified,
the lady showed them a horse-pond near by where the men might wash, and
the village well, where (after due analysis of the water by the doctor,
in accordance with the Brigade order) the men might draw drinking water.
Leaving the men, stripped to the waist, carrying in their hands little
ends of soap and rather dingy towels, swarming about the horse-pond,
our Ensign and his brother officers fared forth to locate their own
quarters. In the village street they found the Billeting Officer the
centre of an indignant group. In the whole of B----, he announced,
wiping his damp brow, there were but four beds for officers--the
company commanders were to have these,--the rest must forage for
themselves. The double-company Mess was quartered in the estaminet
behind which the greater part of our Ensign’s company was billeted.
There might be some tents for officers later....
There was a chorus of obloquy. What slackness on the part of the
Billeting Officer! Had one ever heard the like? Why, the place was full
of comfortable-looking houses where, for a franc or two, one might get
a clean and comfortable bed! One wouldn’t mind paying....
The discussion lasted whilst the young lions of the double-company
Mess lapped up white wine and soda in the dark and filthy back-room
of the estaminet where the mess was situated. Poultry walked between
their legs: there were millions of flies: a dishevelled wench stirred a
saucepan over a red-hot stove, and ancient, gnarled peasants, murmuring
“_Bien le bon jour, m’sieurs!_” entered and sat down with them at the
table. Apparently the back-room was a kind of village club. In the
front room of the estaminet, judging by the trampling of feet and the
frantic cries of “Doo beer, Ma!” the greater part of the Battalion was
refreshing itself after the heat of the day.
Peter had a servant, a prodigy among men, and a pearl among servants,
which his name was Cardwell. Even our Ensign lowered before the
Admirable Cardwell the banner he bore so proudly aloft on behalf of the
faithful Johnson. For Cardwell spoke French: Cardwell knew the ways of
the peasants: Cardwell had been known to extract a meal and a bed out
of the dourest old harridan who ever bolted her door with the cry--“_Je
ne veux pas des soldats chez moi!_”
So Peter drew our Ensign aside, and whispered--
“Cardwell will find us something: leave it to Cardwell!”
But even Cardwell drew a blank in B----; he returned to the estaminet,
where his “master,” as the soldier servants say, was sitting hopefully
among the flies and the poultry and the peasants, and ruefully
announced his failure. The village was overflowing with refugees from
the occupied territory (under the French Government relief scheme):
the Billeting Officer had spoken true,--there was not a bed in the
place. But then the faithful Johnson came to the rescue. In the
courtyard of the estaminet he had laid out soap and water and a towel
for our Ensign to have that much-needed wash; and he informed his
“master” that tents were to be had, and if our Ensign would furnish the
men to draw the tent from the Quartermaster, and indicate a spot where
it should be pitched, he would attend to it at once. There was a clean
garden behind the estaminet which might do, the man added.
Peter and our Ensign inspected the spot, and decided that it would do:
the needful authority was obtained from The Beak, the tent was pitched
behind the estaminet, and the two officers had their kits deposited
therein, thereby inaugurating a tent partnership which lasted through
the summer.
That evening a select party consisting of our Ensign, Peter, Apollo,
The Don, and a tall and serious-minded subaltern of their Mess, whom
everybody called Roderick, dined in state at a hotel in a neighbouring
town, to which they were conveyed through the kindly offices of a
motor-ambulance driver. There, among all kinds of big-wigs of the
Guards’ Division, they ate a thoroughly bad dinner, at an extortionate
price, washed down by utterly spurious _Château Laffitte_, and
professed themselves hugely delighted with their evening. It was a
glorious summer night, and when they got back to their billet Peter and
our Ensign pulled their valises out of the tent and slept beneath the
stars.
As the result of an argument on the art of foraging on active service,
springing from severe strictures on the paucity of the fare at the
double-company Mess, Peter and our Ensign were bidden to dinner the
next night with a brother officer, who professed, after experience of
active service in half a dozen wars, to be able to get an epicurean
meal in any village, no matter how short local supplies were--and B----
was very short. The troops going through on their way to the Somme had
seen to that!
The veteran acted as his own cook, and the four--for one of the company
commanders made up the _parti carré_--dined under an apple-tree,
beneath the stars, off three young ducks and two young chickens, with
delicious fresh peas and new potatoes. The guests contributed, as
their share of the repast, two bottles of _Roederer_ purchased in the
neighbouring town.
As a dinner it was a _tour de force_, for heaven alone knows what
blandishments these succulent dishes represented: as a meal, it was
a frankly gluttonous performance. Our Ensign, who was Piquet Officer
that day, felt that he could scarcely walk, so gorged was he with food,
when he rose from the table under the apple-tree to go and turn out
the guards. But in war you learn to be thankful for what you can get
to-day, for the morrow is ever uncertain.
The Battalion arrived at B---- on a Sunday, and at six o’clock on the
following Tuesday morning it was on the road again. It rendezvoused
with the rest of the Brigade at a given point _en route_, from which
the whole Brigade marched to its destination at V----, some seventeen
or eighteen miles distant.
The day was a regular “scorcher.” Even at the early hour of their
departure there was a touch of fiery heat in the sun’s rays. There
was not a cloud in the sky, and already the heat was shimmering among
the corn-stooks in the stubble. The road was deep in dust, and every
wayside leaf was powdered white.
The country was terribly hilly, and the men--who were in marching
order, their steel helmets strapped on the back of their packs--were
sweating freely even at the end of the first mile of the march. Trench
warfare gives the men scant opportunity for exercise, and a long march
in the summer heat over hilly roads with a heavy load is a strain on
the fittest of troops.
But the men made light of the heat and the dust as they trudged along,
marching at ease with their rifles slung, with the drums crashing out
in front of them. When soldiers are standing a march well, there is a
constant ripple of conversation, of chaff, and little snatches of song
running up and down the ranks. The men were frankly delighted with the
pretty French countryside, the cows in the fields, the sheep on the
uplands, the geese and ducks and cocks and hens in the villages--all
these were reminders of their country homes, reminders such as they had
seldom seen in the mournful land of death from which they had come. A
donkey braying behind a hedge, a drove of pigs on the road, set them
all a-laughing. Like children, they commented in a running vein of
criticism upon everything they saw.
“Och!” said a voice behind our Ensign, “’tis kilt I am wid the heat
intoirely. Did ye ever see the like o’ thim lads in front? Sure,
they’re runnin’ us off our legs!”
“’Tis the same old game,” declaimed disdainfully Sergeant Kinole,
plodding along at the head of the platoon; “I know them lads in front
of the company! One, two--left, right--keepin’ the step with the
Company Commander’s horse. I declare to God we’ll all be goin’ on our
hands and knees be the time we get in!”
This flight of fancy elicited a general laugh. Then the running
commentary broke out afresh. A venerable-looking old peasant was
digging in a field.
“Bon jour, Daddy!” cried a voice.
“Is ut diggin’ spuds ye are?” asked another.
“Arrah, let him be,” said a deep voice. “’Tis diggin’ his own grave he
is, th’ ould rascal!”
The “ould rascal” looked up from his digging with a sheepish,
toothless grin, and the Battalion tramped by in a cloud of dust and a
ripple of jests and laughter.
They joined up with the Brigade and marched on, drums beating gaily in
front, baggage-limbers and carts and cookers trailing out to the rear,
through the torrid heat. The passing of the Brigade was an event in the
little town where our Ensign and his friends had dined. The streets
were crowded, every window had its frieze of faces, every shop-door its
knot of gossips, to see the column go by. It was the first time for a
century that the Guards had been in those parts.
The heat was truly terrific. The sun beat down fiercely out of a
brazen sky. The dust was choking: the hills merciless. The chatter and
the chaff gradually died away, and when the whistles sounded for the
regulation halt at the end of each hour of marching, the men fell out,
dragged off their packs and dropped heavily on the grass.
At last, when the sun was high in the sky, they reached their
destination. V---- was a straggling little village built on either side
of the slope of the white high-road, smothered in dust, shaken to its
very foundations by the incessant rumbling of motor-lorries passing
through, with a soporific and neglected-looking château, where ducks
promenaded solemnly in the courtyard, a wisp of river and a camp of
huts.
The men were lodged in the huts,--regular cauldrons of heat they were,
too, infested by flies,--pitched on an unprotected slope of sun-baked
earth from which every blade of grass had been trodden. Huts had been
set apart for the officers, but they would have none of them. Some
one, with a taste for epigram, said the place looked like a dismantled
poultry show. The officers, one and all, voted for quarters in the open
air, as the weather was so beautifully fine.
After various negotiations, in which Apollo, who had the gift of
tongues, played a leading _rôle_, permission was obtained from the
local _châtelain_, who was henceforth known and is referred to
in this narrative as The Baron, to pitch tents on the grass in a
pleasant old apple orchard across the road from the huts. In this
picturesque old-world _verger_ the officers of the Battalion were
lodged. Headquarters’ tents were ranged at one end of the orchard, the
officers’ tents pitched all round its edge, and the different company
messes installed in the open air.
For ten delightful days the Battalion spent a peaceful routine
existence. The order went forth that cap-stars and buttons would be
polished, and once more, at the morning inspection, our Ensign found
himself, as in bygone days in barracks at home, scrutinising the men
of his platoon for any signs that might betray a hasty or indifferent
toilet. The Division or the Brigade--anyhow, the authority that
governs these things--decided that the village streets were unduly
dirty, and the supervision of a daily scavenging party was added to
the duties of the Piquet Officer. Rubbish and dirt lying about the
camp were collected and burnt, the village streets were picked clear
of empty Woodbine cases and sardine tins and matches and bits of
newspaper, and swept and garnished, so that when the Brigade marched
out of V---- it left a clean village behind.
Three times within a hundred years had the high tide of war swept
across the village and the little château where The Baron and three
generations of his family before him had been born. On a window-pane
of his house was still to be seen the name “JULIE,” scratched with a
diamond on the glass by the wife of a Cossack officer quartered at the
château in 1812, while Europe was breathing again after the departure
of The Ogre to Elba. In 1870 The Baron, while yet a lad, had seen
the Prussians, most insolent of conquerors, lodging at the château;
forty-four years after, in the heyday of their victorious advance,
he had watched their cavalry passing through the village before the
Battle of the Marne had sent them to the right-about and shattered all
their hopes. Since those black August days of 1914 The Baron had seen
all manner of fighting-men in and about his ancient home, _poilus_
and cuirassiers and Spahis and _goumiers_, at first, and then, after
a little time, the British,--English and Scots and Welsh and Irish,
and Indians and Australians and Canadians and South Africans. From the
windows of his château he had seen the whole flood of battle flowing
down to the Somme--and he was a little shy of soldiers.
For in war, he told our Ensign over a glass of home-brewed cider,
poultry goes a-missing from the farmyards, and the game vanishes from
the woods, and the orchards are bereft of fruit, and young trees
unaccountably hacked down.... “One does not grudge it, ... enfin, c’est
la guerre!”
But when The Baron found that the new-comers did not loot his chickens
or poach his rabbits or break down his trees, his heart warmed to his
guests in the orchard. He sent the officers, as a present, a hamper of
his delicious home-brewed cider; he plundered his kitchen-garden to
supply them with vegetables at a very moderate price--_les affaires
sont les affaires, n’est-ce pas?_--(and vegetables are hard to come by
where the locust hosts of the Somme have passed), and he sold them his
ducklings. One night he dined with the double-company Mess beneath the
apple-trees in the orchard, and made himself as charming as a well-bred
Frenchman can. Of the Guards he said: “_On voit bien ce sont des gens
qui savent se conduire!_”
It was The Baron who told the double-company Mess of the little river
in which they enjoyed many bathes in the hot summer afternoons. It was
a few miles distant, an ice-cold, crystal-clear stream with a chalky
bottom, that emptied itself into a deep and surging mill-pond at the
foot of a ruined mill. Our Ensign and his brother officers used to
ride over after tea, and, passing by the mill-pond, where the men of
the Coldstream and Grenadiers quartered in the neighbourhood used to
disport themselves, would ascend the stream a little and plunge in off
the grassy banks. They often had a silent spectator of these bathes--a
grey-haired man who sat for hours, a dog beside him, fishing in the
stream. One day they spoke to him, and discovered that he was a citizen
of Lille, a _réfugié_, waiting in a quiet spot for the day of victory.
Patting his dog, he used to say in his mournful way, “_Lui, aussi, est
Lillois: c’est tout ce qu’il me reste de ma famille!_”
Thus the summer days went by very pleasantly. Routine duties filled
in their mornings, short route-marches to keep the men fit, parades,
company drill, and, of course, daily “orders”; in the afternoons there
was bathing or rides out to other Guards’ battalions quartered about
the place, or a concert by the Irish Guards’ band, which had come out
in its turn from London to spend a few weeks with the Guards’ Division.
One afternoon The Lad, whom our Ensign had not seen again since their
rather hasty parting under shell fire, came over with one or two others
from his battalion and stayed to dinner in the orchard. Our Ensign
and some of the others returned this visit, and dined with the other
battalion in a camp of huts in a wood, and, after a very merry dinner,
wobbled perilously home on bicycles in the dark, over an execrable road.
The weather remained magnificent. Every night the majority of the
officers slept outside their tents in the orchard, under a velvety
sky spangled with a vast array of stars, sometimes with the moon hung
like a great lamp among the trees. The awakening in the freshness of
dawn was a sheer delight, with the birds chirruping in the apple-trees,
the sky benign and blue in the gentle light of the newly-risen sun,
the grass which formed their _descente du lit_ glittering with the
morning dews. The men also, in their camp, dragged forth their packs at
nightfall from the huts and lay down to sleep _à la belle étoile_.
On Sundays there was Brigade Divine Service in an orchard behind
the château. On one or two occasions the band was in attendance
and accompanied the old English hymns with fine effect. It was an
unforgettable scene--the lines of tall, well-knit figures in khaki,
bare-headed, standing on the grass in the sunshine or in the shade of
the fruit trees, the Brigade Chaplain in his white surplice in the
centre, close to him the little group of officers, a few patients with
bandaged heads or arms from a local casualty clearing station, a knot
of wide-eyed French youngsters, and the deep tones of the men’s voices
blending with the solemn strains of the band.
No less impressive was the Irish Guards’ Mass held on the same spot
every Sunday at an earlier hour, the R.C. Chaplain to the Battalion,
his leggings protruding unexpectedly below his sacerdotal vestments,
celebrating at a portable altar surrounded by the kneeling figures
of the big Irishmen--a wonderful and deeply impressive sight. Mass
invariably concluded with an Irish hymn--
“O glorious Saint Patrick,
Dear Saint of our Isle!”
which the Irishmen used to sing with immense religious feeling and with
a volume of sound that must have made the château windows tremble.
Every day came news of further successes on the Somme: every day our
Ensign and his friends discussed the Battalion’s chances of an early
share in the great push: every day there were fresh rumours of great
tasks supposedly awaiting the Guards on the Somme; but nothing ever
came of them.
On the last day of their stay, the King, who was visiting the Army in
France, came to see the Brigade, and walked into the orchard where the
officers of our Ensign’s Battalion were quartered and where they were
waiting to be presented. The double-company Mess had ransacked the
village for flowers to put on the mess-table in honour of the occasion,
and had procured some beautiful La France roses which, placed in
soda-water bottles, lent a nice touch of colour to the table. It was at
the mess-table under the trees where they were presented to the King,
so they felt that their labours had not been in vain.
The Battalion left V---- with many regrets on a dull steamy day, and
marched to a dirty fly-ridden camp in the woods of M----, where it
rained mercilessly and life was squalid and drear. There they stayed
for two days and a half, a wonderful night bombardment of the Hun
lines by the British artillery the only diversion, and then received
unexpected orders to leave. Everybody believed that the Battalion was
going straight into the fight, and some of the young officers summoned
the Battalion barber to their tents and got their hair cut on the
strength of the rumour.
But their hour had not yet struck. The village of L---- was their next
destination. Here they spent two days, and were then informed that they
were going into the trenches again for a short spell. This rumour was
at first received with incredulity. Nevertheless it was true.
By the following evening the Battalion was once more in the front line.