CHAPTER XIX

CITIZEN SOLDIERS 289

A PADRE IN FRANCE

CHAPTER I

THE UTTERMOST PART

I have always admired the sagacity of Balak, King of Moab, about whom

we learn something in the Book of Numbers. He was threatened with

invasion by a powerful foe and felt unequal to offering armed

resistance. He invoked the aid of spiritual powers by inviting a

prophet, Balaam, to come and curse the army of the invaders. Balaam

suffered himself to be persuaded and bribed by the king. All

kings--and the statesmen who nowadays regulate the conduct of

kings--understand the business of managing men so far. Persuasion and

bribery are the methods of statecraft. But Balak knew more than the

elements of his trade. He understood that spiritual forces, if merely

bribed, are ineffective. To make a curse operate there must be a

certain amount of conviction in the mind of the curser. Balaam was

not convinced, and when he surveyed the hosts of Israel from the top

of a hill felt himself compelled by the spirit within him to bless

instead of curse. The king, discouraged but not hopeless, took the

prophet to the top of another hill, showed him a different view of

the camp of Israel and invited him to curse the people from there.

At first sight this seems a foolish thing to have done; but properly

considered it appears very crafty. From the fresh viewpoint, Balaam

saw not the whole, but only the "uttermost part" of the hosts of

Israel. I suppose he no longer saw the first-line troops, the army in

battle array. Instead he saw the base camps, the non-combatant

followers of the army, a great deal that was confused and sordid,

very little that was glorious or fine. It might conceivably have been

possible for him to curse the whole army and cast a blight upon its

enterprise, when his eyes rested only on the camp-followers, the

baggage trains, the mobs of cattle, the maimed and unfit men; when

the fine show of the fighters was out of sight. Plainly if a curse of

any real value was to be pronounced it must be by a prophet who saw

much that was execrable, little that was obviously glorious.

It is Balak's sagacity in choosing the prophet's second point of view

which I admire. If any cursing of an army is done at all, it will be

done by some one, whose post is behind the lines, who has seen, not

the whole, but only the uttermost part, and that the least attractive

part of the hosts.

It was my luck to remain, all the time I was in France, in safe

places. I never had the chance of seeing the gallantry of the men who

attack or the courageous tenacity of those who defend. I missed all

the excitement. I experienced none of those hours of terror which I

have heard described, nor saw how finely man's will can triumph over

terror. I had no chance of knowing that great comradeship which grows

up among those who suffer together. War, seen at the front, is hell.

I hardly ever met any one who doubted that. But it is a hell

inhabited not by devils, but by heroes, and human nature rises to

unimaginable heights when it is subjected to the awful strain of

fighting. It is no wonder that those who have lived with our fighting

army are filled with admiration for the men, are prepared to bless

altogether, not war which we all hate, but the men who wage it.

The case is very different behind the lines. There, indeed, we see

the seamy side of war. There are the men who, in some way or other,

have secured and keep safe jobs, the _embusqués_ whom the French

newspapers constantly denounce. There are the officers who have

failed, proved unfit for command, shown themselves lacking in courage

perhaps, and in mercy have been sent down to some safe base. There

are the men who have been broken in spirit as well as in body, who

drag on an existence utterly dull, very toilsome, well-nigh hopeless,

and are illuminated by no high call for heroic deeds. There the

observer sees whatever there is to be seen of petty spite and

jealousies, the manipulating of jobs, the dodging of regulations, all

that is most ignoble in the soldier's trade. There also are the men

with grievances, who, in their own estimation, are fit for posts

quite other than those they hold. Some one described war at the front

as an affair of months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. If

that philosopher had been stationed at a base he might have halved

his epigram and described war as months of boredom unpunctuated even

by terror.

Yet even behind the lines, in the remotest places, that which moves

our admiration far outshines what is sordid and mean. We still bless,

not war, but soldiers. We forget the failures of man in joyful

contemplation of his achievements.

Here are the great hospitals, where suffering men succeed each other

day after day, so that we seem to see a mist of pain rising like a

ceaseless cloud of incense smoke for the nostrils of the abominable

Moloch who is the god of war. A man, though long inured to such

things, may curse the Moloch, but he will bless the sufferers who

form the sacrifice. Their patience, their silent heroism, are beyond

our praise.

Here are huge cemeteries, long lines of graves, where every morning

some are laid to rest, with reverence indeed, but with scant measure

of the ritual pomp with which men are wont to pay their final honour

to the dead. These have passed, not in a moment amid the roar of

battle, but after long bearing of pain, and lonely, with the time for

last farewells but none greatly loved to say them to. Yet, standing

above the lines of rude coffins, viewing the names and numbers

pencilled on the lids, our hearts are lifted up. We know how great it

is to lay down life for others. The final wailing notes of the "Last

Post" speak our feeling: "Good night. Good-bye. See you again, soon."

Here, among those less worthy, are men who are steadily doing,

without much hope of praise, things intolerably monotonous, doing

them day after day for years, inspired by what Ruskin calls "the

unvexed instinct of duty." Often these are old men, too old for field

command. They have spent their lives in the army, have learned, have

worked, have waited in the hope that some day their chance would

come. Soldiers by profession and desire, they have looked for the

great opportunity which the war they foresaw would give. The war came

and the opportunity; but came too late for them. They can look for

nothing but the dull duties of the base. They do them, enduring minor

hardships, facing ceaseless worries, going calmly on, while the great

stream of war on which they hoped to float moves on, leaving them

behind. With them are others, younger men, who have seen some

fighting, have been wounded or broken in health. Often they have

struggled hard to secure the posts they hold. They might have gone

home. They counted it a desirable thing to be employed still, since

actual fighting was impossible, somewhere in touch with fighting men.

I wonder how much Balaam divined of the greatness which, no doubt,

was in "the uttermost part" of the host when the king showed it to

him. I suppose he understood something of it, for once again, to the

indignation of Balak, he blessed instead of cursing. I am sure that

any one who has lived long among the men at our bases will feel as I

do, that his pride in what is great there far outweighs his

disappointment at the other things he saw. I never saw the fighting

or the actual front, but even if I had seen nothing else but the

fighting I could scarcely feel greater admiration for our officers

and men or more love for them.

I have, of course, no tales of adventure to tell. Perhaps I am too

old for adventuring, or never had the spirit which makes adventures

possible. Yet I own to a certain feeling of disappointment when the

doctor who examined me in London told me with almost brutal frankness

that he would not allow me to be sent to the front. To France I might

go, and even that permission, I think, was a concession. But in

France I must remain in places where hardship is not extreme. Doctors

are powerful people in the army and in certain matters their word is

the supreme law. But fortunately there are always other doctors. And

I think I could in the end have managed to get to the very front, in

spite of that first man, though he held high rank and was much

be-tabbed. But by the time I found out how to get round his

prohibition I had become so much interested in my work that I did not

want to leave it and even felt grateful to that doctor for sending me

to France in the position of a man marked P.B., letters which stand

for Permanent Base, and mean that their bearer will not be asked to

go where fighting is.

For one other thing I am thankful to the doctor who examined me. He

did not ask me to be vaccinated, inoculated, or half-poisoned in any

other way. If he had demanded such things of me before I held my

commission, I might have had to yield, and I should have disliked the

business greatly. Afterwards I remained an unpersecuted heretic and

never underwent any of these popular operations. For months, I know,

a form was constantly filled up about me and sent to the medical

staff of the base at which I was, stating the awful fact that I had

escaped the safeguards provided for me, and was still alive. I used

to expect that trouble of some sort would arise, but none ever did.

Perhaps the authorities were merciful to me because I made no

attempt to propagate my opinions; which indeed are scarcely opinions.

I should not dream of denying that inoculation of every known kind is

excellent for other people, and ought to be rigorously enforced on

them. My only strong feeling is that I should escape.

My medical examination was a much more rigorous and unpleasant

business than my interview--I can scarcely call this an

examination--with my particular chief, the Chaplain-General. He

appeared to be satisfied by previous inquiries that I was a fit and

proper person--or as little unfit as could reasonably be hoped--to

minister to soldiers in France. He took down my answers to half a

dozen questions on a sheet of paper which somebody afterwards must

have lost, for I had to answer the same questions again by letter

after I got to France.

Up to the point of my interview and examination in London, the

negotiations with regard to my commission as Chaplain to the Forces

were conducted with dignified deliberation. My letters were answered

a fortnight or so after they were received. There was no sense of

urgency or hurry. We might have been corresponding about a monument

to be erected at a remote date to some one still alive and quite

young. This, if slightly irritating, gave me a feeling of great

confidence in the Chaplains' Department of the War Office. It was

evidently a body which worked methodically, carefully, and with due

consideration of every step it took. Its affairs were likely to prove

efficiently organised. I looked forward to finding myself part of a

machine which ran smoothly, whose every cog fitted exactly into the

slot designed for it. No part of the War Office was likely at the

moment to adopt a German motto; but the Chaplains' Department was

plainly inspired by the spirit of Goethe's _Ohne haste, ohne raste_.

I have heard other men complain that the Department is dilatory, not

merely deliberate, and that it is often impossible to get an answer

to a letter at all. There is a story told of a man who wrote offering

his services as chaplain, wrote again after a decent interval,

continued to write for many months, and finally received, by way of

reply, a nice little tract--not even on patience, but on conversion.

I do not know whether that story is true or not. No tract was ever

sent to me, and my letters were answered--after a time.

After my visit to London, the interview, and the examination, the

whole spirit of the proceedings changed. I was involved in a worse

than American hustle, and found myself obliged to hustle other

innocent people, tailors and boot-makers, in order to get together

some kind of a kit in time for a start to be made at the shortest

possible notice.

I am told that the whole military machine works in this way in

dealing with individuals. There is a long period of leisurely and

quiet thought--it sometimes appears of complete inertia. Then there

is a violent rush, and all sorts of things happen in a minute. I do

not know for certain whether officers in other branches of the

service suffer in this way. My experience as a chaplain made me feel

like a bullet in a gun. For a long time I lay passive, and, except

for the anxiety of anticipation, at rest. The man who held the weapon

was making up his mind to fire. Then, without any special warning to

me, he pulled the trigger, and before I could take a long breath I

was flying through space to an unknown destination, without even the

comfort of knowing that I had been aimed at any particular object.

But my faith in the Department was unshaken. I remembered the

cautious deliberation of the earlier proceedings, and came to the

conclusion that whereas there had been for many months an ample

supply of chaplains at the front, and a regular flow of

reinforcements from home, a sudden and desperate shortage had

occurred--owing to casualties in battle, or some kind of

pestilence--and that it was necessary to rush new men to the scene of

action at the highest speed. This explanation seemed to me

reasonable. It did not turn out to be true. There was no particularly

urgent demand for chaplains when I reached France.

I am now inclined to think that the Chaplains' Department does its

business in this particular way with deliberate intention. It desires

first to produce an impression of stability, wisdom, and forethought.

It proceeds slowly, and for long periods does not proceed at all. It

also wishes its servants to feel that it is vigorous, filled with

energy, and working at terrifically high pressure. Then it does

things with a rush which would put to shame the managing directors of

the New York Underground Railway.

CHAPTER II

GETTING THERE

I made my start from Victoria Station on a January morning. I had

worn His Majesty's uniform for no more than two days, and was still

uneasily conscious of my strange clothes. I was uncertain about the

proper adjustment of straps and buttons. I came for the first time in

my life into touch with the army. I, a man of over fifty, went back

with a leap to the emotions of forty years before. I was a new boy in

a big school.

Others--some who have had the experience and more who have not--have

described that start from Victoria or Waterloo. They have said

something about the pangs of farewell, though I cannot imagine how

any one who has been through it wants to talk about that. They have

said a good deal about the thrill of excitement which comes with the

beginning of adventure. They have described a certain awe of the

unknown. They have tingled with intense curiosity.

I confess chiefly to bewilderment, the discomfort of strangeness and

an annoying sense of my own extreme insignificance. I was a new boy.

I wanted to behave properly, to do the right thing, and I had no way

of knowing what the right thing was. I was absurdly anxious not to

"cheek" anybody, and thereby incur the kind of snubbing, I scarcely

expected the kicks, which I had endured long ago when I found myself

a lonely mite in a corner of the cloisters of my first school.

I sat, with my bundle of papers tucked in beside me, in a corner of a

Pullman car. Opposite me was an officer. I recognised, by the look of

his Sam Browne belt, that he was an old boy, that he had been there

before. I did not know then, being wholly unskilled in pips and

badges, what he was. My impression now is that he was an artillery

captain, probably returning to the front after leave. It seems

ridiculous to be afraid to speak to an artillery captain; but nothing

would have induced me to begin a conversation with that man. For all

I knew he might have been a general, and it might have been the worst

kind of bad form for a mere padre to speak to a general. I even

thought of saluting him when I first caught his eye, but I did not

know how to salute.

It was he, in the end, who spoke to me. We had reached the end of our

train journey and were gathering coats and haversacks from the racks

above our heads. I left my papers--_Punch_ and _The Bystander_--on

the seat.

"You ought to take those with you," he said. "You'll find lots of

fellows jolly thankful to get them over there."

So I was going to a land where men could not easily come by _Punch_

and _The Bystander_. In a general way I knew that before he spoke. I

had heard of the hardships of war. I was prepared for my share of

them. But I had somehow failed to realise that it might be

impossible, under certain circumstances, to buy _Punch_ if I wanted

it.

The boat, though we arrived beside it early in the morning, did not

actually start till afternoon. I might have gone to an hotel and had

a comfortable luncheon. I was afraid to do anything of the sort.

Military discipline is not a thing to play tricks with. I had made

up my mind about that before I started, and in the orders given

me for my journey there was not a word about luncheon. I went

hungry--foolishly, no doubt.

I heard a story once about a sergeant and several men who were cut

off by the Germans from their battalion. They held out for forty

hours and were finally rescued. It was found that they had not

touched their iron (emergency) ration. Asked why they had gone hungry

when they had food in their pockets, the sergeant replied that the

eating of iron rations without orders from a superior officer was

forbidden. His was a great devotion to discipline--heroic, though

foolish. My abstinence was merely foolish. I could not claim that I

had any direct orders not to go to an hotel for luncheon.

While I waited on the deck of the steamer I met M. He was alone as I

was; but he looked much less frightened than I felt. He was a padre

too; but his uniform was not aggressively new. It seemed to me that

he might know something about military life. My orders were "to

report to the M.L.O." when I landed. I wanted very much to know what

that word "report" meant. I wanted still more to know what an M.L.O.

was and where a stray voyager would be likely to find him.

It was not difficult to make friends with M. It is never difficult

for one padre to make friends with another. All that is necessary by

way of introduction is a frank and uncensored expression of opinion

about the Chaplains' Department of the War Office. The other man's

soul is knit to yours at once. I cannot now remember whether M. or I

attacked the subject first. I know we agreed. I suppose it is the

same with all branches of the service. Combatant officers are, or

used in those days to be, one in heart when discussing the Staff. I

never met a doctor who did not think that the medical services are

organised by congenital idiots. Every one from the humblest A.S.C.

subaltern to the haughtiest guardsman agrees that the War Office is

the refuge of incompetents. Padres, perhaps, express themselves more

freely than the others. They are less subject to the penalties which

threaten those who criticise their superiors. But their opinions are

no stronger than those of other people.

Even without that bond of common feeling I think I should have made

friends with M. No franker, more straightforward, less selfish man

has crossed the sea to France wearing the obscured Maltese Cross

which decorates the cap of the padre. It was my first real stroke of

luck that I met M. on the deck of that steamer. As it turned out he

knew no more than I did about what lay before us. His previous

service had been in England and he was going to France for the first

time. An M.L.O. was a mystery to him.

But he was cheerful and self-confident. His view was that an

exaggerated importance might easily be attached to military orders.

If an M.L.O. turned out to be an accessible person, easily

recognised, we should report to him and set our consciences at ease.

If, on the other hand, the authorities chose to conceal their M.L.O.

in some place difficult to find, we should not report to him. Nothing

particular would happen either way. So M. thought, and he paced the

deck with so springy a step that I began to hope he might be right.

Our passage was abominably rough. M., who dislikes being seasick in

public, disappeared. I think what finished him was the sight of an

officer in a kilt crawling on his hands and knees across the wet and

heaving deck, desperately anxious to get to the side of the ship

before his malady reached its crisis. M.'s chair was taken by a

pathetic-looking V.A.D. girl, whose condition soon drove me away.

It is one of the mitigations of the horrors of this war that whoever

takes part in it is sure to meet friends whom he has lost sight of

for years, whom he would probably lose sight of altogether if the

chances of war did not bring unexpected meetings. That very first day

of my service was rich in its yield of old friends.

When I fled from the sight of the V.A.D.'s pale face, I took to

wandering about the decks and came suddenly on a man whom I had last

seen at the tiller of a small boat in Clew Bay. I was beating

windward across the steep waves of a tideway. His boat was running

free with her mainsail boomed out; and he waved a hand to me as he

passed. Once again we met at sea; but we were much less cheerful. He

was returning to France after leave, to spend the remainder of a

second winter in the trenches. He gave it to me as his opinion that

life in the Ypres salient was abominable beyond description, and that

no man could stand three winters of it. I wanted to ask him questions

about military matters, and I might have got some light and leading

from him if I had. But somehow we drifted away from the subject and

talked about County Mayo, about boats, about islands, and other

pleasant things.

M., recovering rapidly from his seasickness, proved his worth the

moment we set foot on dry land. He discovered the M.L.O., who seemed

a little surprised that we should have taken the trouble to look him

up. We left him, and M., still buoyant, found another official known

as an R.T.O. He is a man of enormous importance, a controller of the

destinies of stray details like ourselves. He told us that we should

reach our destination--perhaps I should say our first objective--if

we took a train from the _Gare Centrale_ at 6 p.m. We had a good look

at the _Gare Centrale_, to make sure that we should know it again.

Then M. led me off to find a censor. Censors, though I did not know

it then, are very shy birds and conceal their nests with the cunning

of reed warblers. Hardly any one has ever seen a censor. But M. found

one, and we submitted to his scrutiny letters which we had succeeded

in writing. After that I insisted on getting something to eat. I had

breakfasted at an unholy hour. I had crossed the sea. I had endured

great mental strain. I had tramped the streets of an exceedingly

muddy town in a downpour of rain. I felt that I must have food and if

possible, wine. M. is indifferent to food and hardly ever tastes

wine. But he is a kind-hearted man. He agreed to eat with me, though

I am sure he would much rather have looked up another official or

two, perhaps introduced himself to the Base Commandant.

We went to an hotel, the largest and most imposing in the town, but,

as I discovered months afterwards, quite the worst. There I found

another friend. Or rather, another friend found me. He was a young

man in the uniform of the R.A.M.C. and he rushed at me from the far

end of a large _salon_. I am ashamed to say that I neither recognised

him nor knew his name when he told it to me. But there was no doubt

of his friendly feelings. He asked me where I was going. I told him,

"G.H.Q." It appeared that he had just come from G.H.Q. in a motor.

How he came to have control of a motor I do not know. He was a very

junior officer, not on anybody's staff and totally unconnected with

transport of any kind. He offered us the car and said that we could

start any time we liked. He himself was going on leave and the car

had to go back to G.H.Q. I had been distinctly told by the R.T.O. to

go in a train and--it was my first day in the army--I had a very high

idea of the importance of obeying orders. M. laughed at me. So did

my other friend.

"Nobody," he said, "cares a pin how you get there, and it doesn't

matter when. This week or next, it's all the same. In fact, if I were

you I should take a couple of days off and see the country before I

reported at G.H.Q."

I know now that I might have done this and that no one would have

been surprised or angry if I had. But the new-boy feeling was

still strong on me. I was afraid. It seemed to me an awful thing

to go for a tour in the war zone in a kidnapped motor, which might

for all I knew be a car specially set apart for the use of the

Commander-in-Chief.

At 6 o'clock we started in that car, M., I, and a total stranger who

emerged from the hotel at the last moment and sat on my valise. There

was also the driver and M.'s luggage. M. had a great deal of luggage.

We were horribly cramped. It rained with increasing fury. We passed

through a region of pallid mud, chalk, I suppose, which covered us

and the car with a slimy paste. But I enjoyed the drive. Sentries,

French and English, challenged us, and I could see the rain

glistening on their bayonets in the light of our lamps. We rushed

through villages and intensely gloomy woods. Sign-posts shone white

for an instant at cross roads and disappeared. The wind whipped the

rain against our faces. The white slime utterly dimmed my spectacles,

and I looked out at walls of darkness through frosted glass.

The stranger, balanced perilously on my valise, shouted to me the

news that G.H.Q. had been bombed by aeroplanes the day before. It was

all that was wanted to complete the sense of adventure. I could have

wished for a bomb or two which would miss us, for the sight of a

Taube (they were Taubes, not Fokkers or Gothas, in those days)

swooping into sight suddenly through the darkness and vanishing

again. None came.

We took the advice of our unknown travelling companion and engaged

rooms in the hotel he recommended. It was not at all a bad hotel. If

we had had any sense or experience, we should have dined and gone

straight to bed. That was what M. wanted to do. I suffered from an

attack of conscience, and insisted that we ought to report ourselves

to the Deputy-Chaplain-General.

"Our orders," I reminded M., "are to report on arrival."

We set out to look for the Deputy-Chaplain-General, M. averring that

he had a special talent for finding his way in strange towns at

night. Owing to what are officially known as the "unhappy divisions"

of the Christian Church, there are two chief chaplains in France. One

controls the clergy of the Church of England. The other drives a

mixed team of Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, and others

who owe spiritual allegiance to what is called "The United Board." At

that time both these gentlemen had offices in the same town.

In spite of M.'s instinct for locality we came on the wrong one

first. Our chief was located in the most obscure corner. We found him

at last, or rather we found his office. The good man himself was

probably in bed. An orderly invited us to write our names in block

capitals, insisting severely on the block capitals, in a large book.

Then--he must have recognised that we were new boys and gullible--he

said that we ought to report ourselves to some one else called the

billeting officer.

The fact that we were already provided with beds made no difference.

To the billeting officer we ought to go. It is greatly to our credit

that we did. I followed M. through the streets of that town, very

narrow streets, very twisty and very badly lighted. I felt as

Carruthers did when Davis piloted him across the sand-banks through

the fog to Memert. It was 11 o'clock when we found the billeting

officer. He was playing bridge and did not in the least want to see

us, appeared indeed to think that our visit was unnecessary and

troublesome. We left him hurriedly.

Our hotel seemed a home when we got back to it. A friendly subaltern

helped us out of a difficulty and increased our knowledge of the

French language by telling us that:

"In this country when you want soda water you say 'Oh, gas us.'"

We said it to the damsel behind the bar, and I have seldom been more

surprised than I was when she produced a siphon. After that we went

to bed.

CHAPTER III

A JOURNEY IN THE WAR ZONE

Next morning we went to see the Deputy-Chaplain-General. It is not

right or possible, either in the army or anywhere else, to plunge

straight into very august presences. We introduced ourselves first to

a staff officer. I was impressed afresh with the way the war throws

old acquaintances together. I had taken that staff officer out

trout-fishing, when he was a small boy, and he remembered it. He said

that Irish trout gave better sport than those in the French rivers,

from which I gathered that it was sometimes possible to get a little

fishing, in between battles and other serious things. He had also

been a college friend of M.'s at Cambridge. He asked us to luncheon

and treated us most hospitably. Indeed, I formed an impression that

officers, at all events staff officers at G.H.Q., are not badly fed.

I have in my time "sat at rich men's feasts." That staff officers'

luncheon did not suffer by comparison. M. is, as I said, indifferent

to food, but even he was moved to admiration.

"If this," he said afterwards, "is war, the sooner it comes to

England the better."

It is pleasant to be treated as an honoured guest, and the

friendliness of that officer was reassuring. But I had not yet

done with the new-boy feeling. It came on me with full force

when I was led into an inner office for an interview with the

Deputy-Chaplain-General. He was both a bishop and a general. I have

met so many bishops, officially and otherwise, that I am not in the

least afraid of them. Nor do generals make me nervous when I am not

myself in uniform. But a combination of bishop and general was new to

me. I felt exactly as I did in 1875, when Mr. Waterfield of Temple

Grove tested my knowledge of Latin to see what class I was fit for.

There was no real cause for nervousness. The Deputy-Chaplain-General,

in spite of his double dose of exalted rank, is kind and friendly:

but I fear I did not make any better impression on him than I did on

my first head master. Mr. Waterfield put me in his lowest class. The

Deputy-Chaplain-General sent me to the remotest base, the town

farthest of any town in British occupation from the actual seat of

war. M., whose interview came after mine, might perhaps have done

better for himself if he had not been loyal to our newly formed

friendship. As Ruth to Naomi so he said to me, "Where thou goest I

will go," and expressed his wish to the Deputy-Chaplain-General.

This, I am sure, was an act of self-denial on his part, for M. has an

adventurous spirit. The Deputy-Chaplain-General is too kind and

courteous a man to refuse such a request. It was settled that M. and

I should start work together.

We set forth on our journey at 4 o'clock that afternoon, having first

gone through the necessary business of interviewing the R.T.O. He was

a young man of a most detestable kind. The R.T.O. has a bad name

among officers who travel in France. He is supposed to be both

uncivil and incompetent. My own experience is not very large, but I

am disinclined to join in the general condemnation. I have come on

R.T.O.'s who did not know their job. I have come on others wearied

and harassed to the point at which coherent thought ceases to be

possible. I only met one who deliberately tried to be insolent

without even the excuse of knowing the work he was supposed to be

doing. On the other hand I have met men of real ability engaged on

military railway work, who remain quietly courteous and helpful even

when beset by stupid, fussy, and querulous travellers.

M. and I struggled into a train and immediately became possessed by

the idea that it was going the wrong way, carrying us to the front

instead of the remote base to which we were bound. I do not remember

that we were in any way vexed. We had a good store of provisions,

thanks to my foresight and determination. We were in a fairly

comfortable carriage. We were quite ready to make the best of things

wherever the train took us.

A fellow-traveller, a young officer, offered us comfort and advice.

He had a theory that trains in France run round and round in circles,

like the London Underground. The traveller has nothing to do but sit

still in order to reach any station in the war area; would in the end

get back to the station from which he started, if he sat still long

enough. M. refused to believe this. He insisted on making inquiries

whenever the train stopped, and it stopped every ten minutes. His

efforts did not help us much. The porters and station masters whom he

hailed did not understand his French, and he could make nothing of

their English. The first real light on our journey came to us in an

odd way. At one station our compartment was suddenly boarded by three

cheerful young women dressed in long overalls, and wearing no hats.

"Are you," they asked, "going to B.?"

"Not if we can help it," I said. "But we may be. The place we are

trying to go to is H."

The young women consulted hurriedly.

"If you're going to H.," said one, "you must go through B."

A second, a more conscientious girl, corrected her.

"At least," she said, "you may go through B."

"I should think," said the third, "that through B. is as likely a way

as any. Will you take a letter for us? It's most important and the

post takes ages. You've only got to hand it to any of our people you

see on the platform or drop it in at any of our canteens. It will be

delivered all right."

Who "our people" or what "our canteens" might be I did not at that

time know. It was our fellow-traveller who offered to take the

letter.

"I'm not exactly going to B.," he said; "but I expect I'll fetch up

there sooner or later."

The letter was given to him. The young women, profuse in their

thanks, sprang from the train just as it was starting. Our

fellow-traveller told me that our visitors belonged to the Y.M.C.A. I

was not, even then, much surprised to find a Young Men's Christian

Association run chiefly by young women, but I did wonder at this way

of transmitting letters. Afterwards I came to realise that the

Y.M.C.A. has cast a net over the whole war area behind the lines, and

that its organisation is remarkably good. I imagine that the letter

would have reached its destination in the end wherever our

fellow-traveller happened to drop it. I suppose he took the same

view. His responsibility as a special messenger sat lightly on him.

"I may spend the night at B.," he said, "or I may get into the Paris

express by mistake. It is very easy to get into a wrong train by

mistake, and if I once get to Paris it will take me a couple of days

to get away again. I'm not in any kind of hurry, and I deserve a

little holiday."

He did. He had been in the trenches for months and was on his way to

somewhere for a course of instruction in bombing, or the use of

trench mortars, or map-reading. In those days, early in 1916, the

plan was to instruct young officers in the arts of war after they had

practised them, successfully, for some time. Things are much better

organised now. Trains are no longer boarded by young women with

letters which they wish to smuggle through uncensored. It is

difficult to get into the Paris express by accident. But courses of

instruction are still, I imagine, regarded by every one, except the

instructors, as a way of restoring officers who are beginning to

suffer under the strain of life in a fighting battalion. A holiday

frankly so-called, in Paris or elsewhere, would be better; but a

course of instruction is more likely to meet with the approval of a

general.

That journey of ours would have taken eight or ten hours in peace

time. We spent thirty hours over it, and that was considered good

going. The theory of circulating trains turned out to be entirely

wrong. We changed at wayside stations, standing for hours on desolate

platforms. We pursued trains into remote sidings in the middle of the

night, tripping over wires and stumbling among sleepers. We ate

things of an unusual kind at odd hours. We slept by snatches. I

shaved and washed in a tin mug full of water drawn from the side of

an engine. M., indomitably cheerful, secured buns and apples at 6

o'clock in the morning. He paid for the buns. I believe he looted the

apples out of a truck in a siding near our carriage.

We found ourselves at noon in a large town with four hours' leisure

before us. An R.T.O.--we reported to every R.T.O. we could

find--recommended an excellent restaurant. M. shaved and washed

elaborately in a small basin which the thoughtful proprietor had

placed in the passage outside the dining-room door. We had a huge

meal and made friends with a French officer who was attached to some

of our troops as interpreter. He had spent two years before the war

at Cambridge. There perhaps, more probably elsewhere, he had been

taught that Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb are the most influential people

in England, and that Mr. H. G. Wells, though not from a purely

literary point of view a great writer, is the most profound

philosopher in the world. He deeply lamented the fact that compulsory

military service had just been introduced into England.

"The last fortress of individual liberty," he said, "has fallen. The

world is now militarised."

I reminded him that Ireland still remained a free country; but he did

not seem consoled. He took the view that the Irish, though not

compelled to fight, are an oppressed people.

I found that interpreter an interesting man, though he would not talk

about the early fighting at Charleroi where he had been wounded. I

should much rather have heard about that. Lyrical eulogies of Mr. and

Mrs. Sidney Webb seemed out of place. I had been "militarised" for no

more than four days. But I already felt as if the world in which

clever people suppose themselves to think were a half-forgotten

dream. The only reality for me was that other world in which men,

who do not profess to be clever, suppose themselves to be doing

things. On the whole the soldiers, though they fuss a good deal, seem

to have a better record of actual accomplishment than the thinkers.

The last stage of our journey--an affair of some six hours--was

unexciting. I think I should have slept through the whole of it if it

had not been for a major, plainly a "dug-out" who had not gone

soldiering for many years. He had landed from England a day before we

did, and had, by his own account, been tossed about northern France

like a shuttlecock, the different R.T.O.'s he dealt with being the

battledores. He had been put into trains going the wrong way, dragged

out of them and put into others which did not stop at his particular

station. He was hungry, which he disliked; dirty, which he disliked

still more; and was beginning to lose hope of ever reaching his

destination. M. slept; but then M. was at the far end of the

compartment. The other three people with us were French, and the

major could not speak their language. It was to me that he expressed

his feelings, so I could not sleep.

We reached H. at 10 p.m., almost as fagged and quite as dirty as

that major. I had already learned something. I was determined not to

report myself to any one until I had washed, slept, and eaten. It was

snowing heavily when we arrived. With the help of a military

policeman whom we met we found an hotel. He told us that it was a

first-rate place; but he was no judge of hotels. It was very far from

being good. We had, however, every reason to be thankful to that

policeman. We secured two beds. While we were smoking our final

pipes, two young officers turned up. They had been round all the good

hotels in the town and failed to find accommodation. They failed

again in our hotel. We had engaged the last two beds. They went off

sadly to sleep on the platform in the railway station. If our

policeman had known more about hotels and sent us to a good one, it

might very well have been our fate to sleep on the platform.

Next morning, M., who is extraordinarily persevering, secured a bath.

It is a great advantage when in France not to know any French. M. is

wholly unaffected when the proprietor of an hotel, the proprietor's

wife, the head waiter, and several housemaids assure him with one

voice that a bath is _tout à fait impossible_. He merely smiles and

says: "Very well then, bring it along or show me where it is." In the

end he gets it, and, fortunate in his companionship, so do I.

CHAPTER IV

SETTLING DOWN

There are, or used to be, people who believe that you can best teach

a boy to swim by throwing him into deep water from the end of a pier

and leaving him there. If he survives, he has learned to swim and the

method has proved its value. If he drowns, his parents have no

further anxiety about him. The authorities who are responsible for

the religion of the army believe in this plan for teaching chaplains

their business. Having accepted a civilian parson as a volunteer,

they dump him down in a camp without instruction or advice, without

even so much as a small red handbook on field tactics to guide him.

There he splutters about, makes an ass of himself in various ways,

and either hammers out some plan for getting at his job by many

bitter failures, or subsides into the kind of man who sits in the

mess-room with his feet on the stove, reading novels and smoking

cigarettes--either learns to swim after a fashion or drowns

unlamented.

M., who had at all events three months' English experience behind

him, found himself on the top of a steep hill, the controller of a

wooden church planted in the middle of a sea of sticky mud. He

ministered to a curiously mixed assortment of people, veterinary men,

instructors in all kind of military arts, A.S.C. men, and the men of

a camp known as Base Horse Transport.

The army authorities have been laughed at since the war began on

account of their passion for inverting the names of things. You must

not, if you want such a thing, say one pot of raspberry jam. You say,

instead, jam, raspberry, pot, one. It is odd that in the few cases in

which such inversion is really desirable the authorities refuse to

practise it. Horse Transport, Base, would be intelligible after

thought. Base Horse Transport, till you get accustomed to it, seems a

gratuitous insult to a number of worthy animals, not perhaps highly

bred but strong and active.

Base Detail is another example of the same thing. To describe a man

as a detail is bad enough. To call him a Base Detail must lower his

self-respect, and as a rule these poor fellows have done nothing to

deserve it. A Base Details Camp contains, for the most part, men who

have just recovered from wounds received in the service of King and

Country. "Details" perhaps is unavoidable, but it would surely be

possible to conform to the ordinary army usage and call the place

Camp, Details, Base.

My fate was more fortunate than M.'s. I had no church--he had the

better of me there--but I was put into a homogeneous camp, an

Infantry Base. (Our colonel was a masterful man. He would not have

allowed us to be called Base Infantry.) There was a small permanent

staff in the camp, the colonel, the adjutant, the doctor, and myself

among the officers, a sergeant-major, an orderly-room staff, and a

few others among the men. Every one else passed in and out of the

camp, coming to us from England in drafts, or from hospitals as

details, going from us as drafts into the mists of the front. Our

camp occupied the place of a reservoir in a city's water supply. The

men and officers flowed in to us from many sources, stayed a while

and flowed out again through the conduits of troop trains when the

insatiable fighting army, perpetually using and losing men, turned

on its taps, demanding fresh supply.

It happened, I do not know why, that there had never been a chaplain

specially attached to that camp before. I have no reason to suppose

that a chaplain had been asked for or was specially desired. I

expected, at best, to be tolerated as a necessary evil; at worst to

be made to feel that I was a nuisance.

I was, in fact, extremely kindly received. My experience is that a

chaplain is almost always well received both by officers and men in

France, and is very much less a stranger than a parson at home who

finds himself in a club where he is not well known. But I do not

pretend that my first evening in that mess was a particularly

comfortable one. As it happened, neither the colonel nor the adjutant

was there. I had as companions half a dozen officers, any one of whom

was young enough to be my son. They were laboriously polite and

appallingly respectful. We talked to each other in restrained

whispers and I do not think that any one laughed during the whole

course of dinner.

My discomfort lasted far beyond that evening, and I do not wonder

that it took me some time to settle down. I came, for the first time

in my life, under military discipline. I lived in a mess, a strange

kind of life for me. I had to obey rules which I did not know and

conform to an etiquette which was utterly strange to me. Looking back

over it all now I realise that I must have blundered horribly, and

trodden, without intending to, on all sorts of tender feet. Yet, from

the moment I entered the camp I received nothing but kindness and

consideration.

The officers of our old army are wonderful. Every one, I think,

agrees about this. To me it seems that one of the most wonderful

things about them is the way they have treated civilians, amateurs,

always ignorant, often conceited, who suddenly burst into their

highly organised profession. Now and then, though rarely, I came

across senior officers set temporarily in positions of command who

were objectionable or silly, who "assumed the god" and made

themselves ridiculous. But these were seldom regular soldiers. And

perhaps what I resented arose from too much zeal, was an attempt, by

wrong ways, to achieve a kind of dignity which every one respects.

Looking back over the period of my service I do not know that I met

more than two or three of this kind, tyrants to their men, insolent

to officers of lower rank. The regular soldier, who has given his

life to his profession and has generally served and fought in various

corners of the world, is amazingly considerate and helpful to

outsiders even when they are gauche and awkward.

The adjutant received me in the orderly-room when I reached the camp,

some time after dark. I was as respectful as possible for I thought

he was the colonel. Even if I had known him for an adjutant I should

still have been respectful, for I like to be on the safe side of

things and I had not the remotest idea what the position and

functions of an adjutant are. I know now that he is something like an

archdeacon, a man of enormous importance whose duties it is a little

difficult to define exactly. He expected me. With the help of the

sergeant-major he had found a servant for me and assigned a hut to

me.

For the servant I have nothing but praise. He could and did darn

socks well. Indeed he confided to me that when at home he darned his

wife's stockings, being much better at the job than she was. He could

talk to French people in a language that was neither theirs nor his,

but which they understood without difficulty. He was very punctual

and he did not like the kind of tobacco which I smoke. His one fault

was that he did not know whether an oil stove was smoking or not and

could not learn. I am often haunted by the recollection of one snowy

night on which I arrived at my hut to find the whole air inside dense

with fine black smuts. I had to drag everything I possessed out of

the hut into the snow. It took me hours to get myself clean after

that night, and I still find traces of lampblack on some of the

garments which suffered with me.

But that inability to deal with lamps was my servant's one failing.

In every other respect I was satisfied with him. I hope he was

equally satisfied with me. He was at first. I know that; for he asked

for the congratulations of a friend on his appointment. "I have got a

soft job at last," he said. "I'm an officer's servant, and a

chaplain's at that." The job, I imagine, continued to be a soft one

all the time I was in France; but I am not sure that he would have

said "and a chaplain's at that" quite so complacently the morning

after my scene with the oil stove in the snow storm. Chaplains do

not, of course, swear; but any one who studies the Psalms gains a

certain command of language which can be used effectively and without

scandal.

For the hut I cannot say anything good. This was in no way the

adjutant's fault. He had nothing else except that hut to offer me. It

was made of brown canvas, stretched over a wooden frame. It was lit

by small square patches of oiled canvas let into its walls at

inconvenient places. It had a wooden door which was blown open and

shut on windy nights and could not be securely fastened in either

position. There was a corrugated-iron roof--apparently not part of

the original plan of the hut--on which pouring rain made an

abominable noise. The floor bent and swayed when walked on. Small

objects, studs and coins, slipped between the boards of the floor and

became the property of the rats which held revel there night and day.

The hut was cold in winter and stiflingly hot in summer. Draughts

whistled through its walls and up between its boards when the wind

blew. On calm nights it was impossible to get any fresh air into it

at all. The canvas was liable to catch fire on the smallest

provocation. I do not think there can be in the world any more

detestable form of human habitation than huts like that. Mine was not

unique. There were hundreds of them in those camps. They were, I am

told, the invention of a man who succeeded in palming off these

fruits of stupidity and malice on the War Office. They were called by

his name. If I knew how to spell it I should set it down here for

public execration. I expect he made a fortune out of his huts.

My first few nights in that hut were cold and unhappy, for I slept on

the floor in a "flea bag." Then, with the help of the quartermaster,

I secured a camp bedstead and was much less uncomfortable. The

quartermaster came from Galway and was sympathetic with a

particularly helpless fellow-countryman. He served me out blankets

until I was ashamed to accept any more. He supplied the oil stove,

and it kept my bath water from freezing during the night when it

could be got to burn without smoking.

My servant "acquired" packing-cases and arranged them as washstand

and dressing-table. He hung cords like clothes lines across the

corners of the hut and suspended my kit on them. He watched the

comings and goings of other officers and looted from vacant huts a

whole collection of useful articles--a lantern which held a candle, a

nest of pigeon-holes, three bookshelves, a chair without a back, a

tin mug for shaving water, and a galvanised iron pot which made an

excellent basin. He spent a whole morning making and fixing up

outside my door a wooden boot-scraper. I suppose he hoped in this way

to prevent my covering the floor of the hut with mud. But the effort

was wasted. The scraper lay down flat on its side whenever I touched

it with my foot. It remained a distinguishing ornament of my hut,

useful as a guide to any one who wanted to know where I lived, but no

good for any other purpose. In this way I gradually became possessed

of a kind of Robinson Crusoe outfit of household furniture.

I cannot say that I was ever comfortable in that hut. Yet the life

agreed with me. It is evidently a mistake to suppose that damp beds,

damp clothes, and shivering fits at night are injurious to health. It

is most unpleasant but it is not unwholesome to have to rise at 2

a.m. or 3 a.m. and run up and down in the rain to get warm enough to

go to sleep.

Yet I escaped without even a cold in my head. I should be most

ungrateful if I wished any real harm to the inventor of those huts.

But perhaps some day his health will give way and he will find

himself suffering from rheumatism, congestion of the lungs, or frost

bite. Then I hope he will try a winter in one of his own huts. He

will not like it, but he will be a healthy man again before

spring--if he is not dead.

CHAPTER V

KHAKI

War must always have been a miserable business; but our fathers and

grandfathers had the sense to give it an outward semblance of gaiety.

They went forth to battle dressed in the brightest colours they could

find. They put feathers in their hats. They sewed gold braid on their

coats. They hung sparkling metal about their persons. They had brass

bands to march in front of them. While engaged in the business of

killing their enemies they no doubt wallowed in mud, just as we do;

went hungry, sweated, shivered, were parched or soaked, grumbled and

cursed. But they made a gallant effort at pretending to enjoy

themselves. They valued the properties of romantic drama, though they

must have recognised soon enough that the piece in which they played

was the sordidest of tragedies.

We are realists. Not for us the scarlet coats, the tossing plumes,

the shining helmets or tall busbies. War is muddy, monotonous, dull,

infinitely toilsome. We have staged it with a just appreciation of

its nature. We have banished colour. As far as possible we have

banished music.

I suppose we are right. If it is really true that a soldier is more

likely to be killed when wearing a scarlet coat, it is plain common

sense to dress him in mud colour. If music attracts the enemy's fire,

then bands should be left at home to play for nursemaids in parks and

on piers. Yet there is something to be said for the practice of our

ancestors. The soldier's business is to kill the enemy as well as to

avoid being killed himself. Indeed killing is his first duty, and he

only tries to avoid being killed for the sake of being efficient.

A cheerful soldier is a much more effective fighter than a depressed

soldier. Our ancestors knew this and designed uniforms with a view to

keeping up men's spirits. We have ignored their wisdom and decked

ourselves in khaki. I can imagine nothing better calculated to

depress the spirits, to induce despondency, and to lower vitality

than khaki. The British soldier remains cheerful--indeed it is

largely his unfailing cheerfulness which makes him the splendid

fighting man he is--but he has had to keep up his spirits without

help from the authorities who have coloured his whole life khaki and

deprived him of music.

I was placed in a camp which was one of a series of camps stretching

along a winding valley. To right and left of us were steep hills, and

off the side of one of them, that on which M. lived, the grass had

been scraped and hacked. There remained mud which harmonised

tonelessly with our uniforms. Under our feet as we walked along the

roads and paths which led from end to end of the valley there was

mud. The parade grounds--each camp had one--were mud. The tents were

mud-coloured or dirty grey. The orderly-rooms, mess-rooms, recreation

huts and all the rest were mud coloured and had soiled grey roofs.

Men mud-coloured from head to foot paraded in lines, marched, or

strolled about or sat on mud banks smoking.

Even the women who served in the canteens and recreation huts refused

to wear bright frocks, succumbing to the prevailing oppression of

mud. The authorities have put even these women into khaki now, but

that has made little difference. Before that order came out the

ladies had failed to realise that it was their duty to deck

themselves in scarlet, green, and gold, to save the rest of us from

depression.

Mr. Wells went out to see the war at one time, and returned to make

merry, rather ponderously, over the fact that some officers still

wear spurs. Perhaps if Mr. Wells had lived for two months in a large

camp wholly given over to the devil of khaki he would have taken a

different view of spurs. They are almost the only things left in war

which glitter. They are of incalculable value. So far from stripping

them from the boots of officers supposed to be mounted, additional

spurs should be worn on other parts of the uniform, on shoulder

straps for instance, with a view to improving the spirits, and

therefore the _moral_, of the army.

It does not in the least matter that spurs are seldom driven into the

sides of horses. No one now uses spurs as goads. They are worn for

the sake of the shine and glitter of them. In the fortunate owner

they are an inspiriting evidence of "swank." To every one else they

are, as Ireland used to be, "the one bright spot" in a desperately

drab world. M., a wiser man than I, always wore spurs, though I do

not think he ever used them on his horses. He was naturally a man of

buoyant cheerfulness, and I daresay would not have succumbed to khaki

depression even if he had worn no spurs. But I think the spurs helped

him. I know the sight of them helped me when they glittered on the

heels of his boots as he tramped along, or glanced in the firelight

when he crossed his legs in front of the mess-room stove.

For a long time after settling down in that camp I was vaguely uneasy

without being able to discover what was the matter with me. I was

thoroughly healthy. I was well fed. I was associating with kindly and

agreeable men. I had plenty of interesting work to do. Yet I was

conscious of something wrong. It was not homesickness, a feeling I

know well and can recognise. It was not fear. I was as safe as if I

had been in England.

I discovered, by accident, that I was suffering from an unsatisfied

yearning for colour. Drafts of a Scottish regiment came out from home

wearing bright-red hackles in their caps; unmistakable spots of

colour amid our drab surroundings. I found my eyes following these

men about the camp with a curious pleasure, and I realised that what

I wanted was to see red, or blue, or green, or anything else except

khaki.

Later on an order came out that camp commandants should wear coloured

cap-bands and coloured tabs on their coat. It suddenly became a joy

to meet a colonel. Certain camps flew flags in front of their

orderly-rooms. Very often the weather had faded the colours, but it

was a satisfaction to feel that once, at all events, the things had

not been drab. The Y.M.C.A., adding without meaning to another to its

long list of good deeds, kept its bright-red triangle before our

eyes. It seems absurd to mention such things; but I suppose that a

starving man will count a few crumbs a feast.

I am not a painter. If any one had talked to me before I went to

France of the value of colour, I should have laughed at him. Now,

having lived for months without colour, I know better. Men want

colour just as they want liquid and warmth. They are not at their

best without it.

Nothing seemed stranger to me at first, nothing seems more pathetic

now than the pains which men took to introduce a little colour into

the drab world in which we were condemned to live. Outside

orderly-rooms and other important places men made arrangements of

coloured stones. Sometimes a regimental crest was worked out, with

elaborate attention to detail, in pebbles, painted yellow, blue, and

green. Sometimes the stones were arranged in meaningless geometrical

patterns. They were always brightly coloured.

There was a widespread enthusiasm for gardening. Every square yard of

unused mud in that great series of camps was seized and turned into

flower-beds. Men laboured at them, putting in voluntarily an amount

of work which they would have grudged bitterly for any other purpose.

They wanted flowers, not vegetables, though any eatable green thing

would have been a treat to them.

When spring and early summer came to us we rejoiced in the result of

our labours, frequently fantastic, sometimes as nearly ridiculous as

flowers can be. There were beds of daffodils and hyacinths in which

it was possible, when the designer acted as showman, to recognise

regimental crests. The French flag came out well, if the flowers of

the tricolour consented to bloom at the same time. A sergeant, who

professed to be an expert, arranged a bed for me which he said would

look like a Union Jack in June. Unfortunately I left the place early

in May, and I have heard nothing since about that Union Jack. I

suppose it failed in some way. If it had succeeded, some one would

have told me about it. A fellow-countryman of mine designed a

shamrock in blue lobelia. The medical Red Cross looked well in

geraniums imported from England at great expense.

Generally our efforts were along more conventional lines. I remember

a rose-garden with a sundial in the middle of it. The roses, to

preserve them from frost, were carefully wrapped in sacking during

severe weather, and an irreverent soldier, fresh from the trenches,

commented on the fact that "These blighters at the base are growing

sandbags."

We were short of implements, but we dug. I have seen table forks and

broken dinner knives used effectively. I have seen grass, when there

was grass, clipped with a pair of scissors. Kindly people in England

sent us out packets of seeds, but we were very often beaten by the

names on them. We sowed in faith and hope, not knowing what manner of

thing an antirrhinum might be.

I do not believe that it was any form of nostalgia, any longing for

home surroundings, which made gardeners of the most unlikely of us.

Heaven knows the results we achieved were unlike anything we had ever

seen at home. It was not love of gardening which set us digging and

planting. Men gardened in those camps who never gardened before, and

perhaps never will again. At the bottom of it all was an instinctive,

unrealised longing for colour. We knew that flowers, if we could only

grow them, would not have khaki petals, that, war or no war, we

should feast our eyes on red and blue.

Newspapers and politicians used to talk about this as "the war to end

war," the last war. Perhaps they were right. We may at least fairly

hope that this is the world's last khaki war. It is not indeed likely

that when men next fight they will revert to scarlet coats and

shining breastplates. We have grown out of these crude attempts at

romanticism.

But it is very interesting to note the increase of attention given to

camouflage. It occurred to some one--the wonder is that it did not

occur to him sooner--that a mud-coloured tiger, a tiger with a khaki

skin, would be more visible, not less visible, than a tiger with its

natural bright stripes. It was our seamen who first grasped the

importance of this truth and began to paint ships blue, yellow, and

red, with a view to making it difficult for submarine commanders to

see them. There are, I believe, a number of artists now engaged in

drawing out colour schemes for steamers. I have seen a mother ship of

hydroplanes which looked like a cubist picture.

Landsmen are more conservative and slower to grasp new ideas. But

even in my time in France tents were sometimes covered with broad

curves of bright colours. They looked very funny near at hand; but

they are--this seems to be established--much less easily seen by

airmen than white or brown tents. It seems a short step to take from

colouring tents to colouring uniforms. In the next war, if there be a

next war, regiments will perhaps move against the enemy gay as

kingfishers and quite as difficult to see. Fighting men will look to

each other like ladies in the beauty chorus of a revue. By the enemy

they will not be seen at all. War will not, in its essentials, be any

pleasanter, however we dress ourselves. Nothing can ever make a joy

of it. But at least those who take part in it will escape the curse

of khaki which lies heavily on us.

We suffered a good deal from want of music when I went out to France,

though things were better then than they had been earlier. They

certainly improved still further later on. Music in old days was

looked upon as an important thing in war. The primitive savage beat

drums of a rude kind before setting out to spear the warriors of the

neighbouring tribes. Joshua's soldiers stormed Jericho with the sound

of trumpets in their ears. Cromwell's men sang psalms as they went

forward. Montrose's highlanders charged to the skirl of their

bagpipes. Even a pacifist would, I imagine, charge if a good piper

played in front of him.

Our regiments had their bands, and many of them their special

marching tunes. But we somehow came to regard music as part of the

peace-time, ornamental side of soldiering. The mistake was natural

enough. Our military leaders recognised, far sooner than the rest of

us, that this war was going to be a grim and desperate business.

Bands struck them as out of place in it. Music was associated in

their minds with promenades at seaside resorts, with dinners at

fashionable restaurants, with ornamental cavalry evolutions at

military tournaments. We were not going to France to do musical

rides or to stroll about the sands of Boulogne with pretty ladies.

We were going to fight. Therefore, bands were better left at home. It

was a very natural mistake to make; but it was a mistake, and it is

all to the credit of the War Office, a body which gets very little

credit for anything, that it gradually altered its policy.

At first we had no outdoor music except what the men produced

themselves, unofficially, by singing, by whistling, or with

mouth-organs. Indoors there were pianos in most recreation huts, and

the piano never had a moment's rest while the huts were open--a

proof, if any one wanted a proof, of the craving of the men for

music. Then bands were started privately by the officers in different

camps. This was a difficult and doubtful business. Funds had to be

collected to buy instruments. Musicians who could play the

instruments had to be picked out from among the men, and nobody knew

how to find them. Hardly anybody stayed long in these base camps, and

a good musician might at any moment be reft away and sent up the

line.

Yet bands came into existence. An Irish division started the first I

came across, and it used to play its men to church on Sundays in a

way that cheered the rest of us. My friend M.'s camps on top of the

hill started a band. Other camps, which could not manage bands,

discovered Scottish pipers and set them playing on ceremonial

occasions. Later on in another place I found an excellent band in a

large Canadian hospital, and a convalescent camp started a band which

went for route marches along with the men.

But these were all voluntary efforts. The best that could be said for

the higher authorities is that they did not actually discourage them.

The regimental bands, which we ought to have had in France, still

remained at home, and I do not know that they did much playing even

there. I think it was the Brigade of Guards which first brought a

band out to France. It used to play in the market-place of the town

which was then G.H.Q. Later on another Guards' band went on tour

round the different bases. There was no mistake about the warmth of

its reception. The officers and men gathered in large numbers to

listen to it on the fine Sunday afternoon when it played in the camp

where I was stationed.

Since then I have heard of, and heard, other regimental bands in

France. Their visits have been keenly appreciated. But we ought to

have more than occasional visits from these bands. It is probably

impossible to have them playing close to the firing-line. But it

would be an enormous advantage if we had a couple of good regimental

bands at every base, and especially in places where hospitals are

numerous.

It is a mistake to regard music simply as a recreation or as an

"extra," outside the regular war programme. It is really an important

factor in producing and maintaining that elusive but most important

thing called _moral_. Men are actually braver, more enduring, more

confident, more enthusiastic, if they hear music.

These qualities cannot be destroyed in our men by any privation. They

are indestructible in the race. But their growth can be stimulated,

and they can be greatly strengthened. A hundred years ago no one

would have doubted the value of music in producing and maintaining

_moral_. Two hundred years ago or thereabouts Dryden wrote a poem

which illustrated the power of music. Forty years ago Tolstoi wrote a

short novel to show how a particular sonata affected not _moral_, but

morality. We seem to have forgotten the truths familiar then.

There ought not to be any doubt about the value of music in restoring

health. Nobody is fool enough to suppose that a broken bone would set

itself, or fragments of shrapnel emerge of their own accord from a

man's leg even if it were possible to secure the services of the Pied

Piper of Hamelin. But most doctors admit that in certain obscure and

baffling maladies, classed generally as cases of shell-shock, mental

and spiritual aid are at least as useful as massage or drugs. Next to

religion--which is an extremely difficult thing to get or

apply--music is probably the most powerful means we have of spiritual

treatment. There is an abundant supply of it ready to hand. It seems

a pity not to use it more freely than we do.

CHAPTER VI

LEISURE HOURS

The problem which faces the commandant of a base in France, or a camp

at home, must be very like that which a public schoolmaster has to

tackle. The business of instruction comes first. Men and officers

must be taught their job, as schoolboys must be taught their lessons.

Hardly less pressing is the problem of spare time. You cannot keep a

soldier throwing bombs all day, and there is a limit to the time

which can be occupied in route marching. The obvious solution of the

problem is organised games and sports. Most men are keen enough on

cricket and football. Most officers are glad to join tennis clubs. In

some places in France there are plenty of outdoor amusements of this

kind, and matches are arranged between different units which keep

interest alive.

Where I was first stationed games were sternly discouraged. The

theory, I think, was that the French people would be disgusted if

they saw us playing. Perhaps the French people in that neighbourhood

were more seriously minded than those in other parts of the country.

Perhaps they were less friendly, and it was necessary to consider

their feelings with particular care. I have no way of judging about

that. Elsewhere the French seemed to take a mild interest in our

passion for games; but in that district they may very well have been

of a different mind.

Whether the official estimate of the French spirit was right or

wrong, the result for us was that we were very badly off for outdoor

games. Football and cricket were played, half-heartedly, for matches

(on the plan of League matches at home) were not allowed. The

formation of an officers' tennis club was forbidden.

On the other hand the men were very well off for indoor amusements.

Every Y.M.C.A. hut ran concerts. There were two large cinema huts in

the camps. Boxing was encouraged by many officers, and interesting

competitions took place which were eagerly watched.

But as the days lengthened with the coming of spring, there were

hours which hung very heavily on every one. The officers were

slightly better off than the men. They could always go into the

neighbouring town, some four miles off, and find a certain amount of

amusement in walking about the streets. But it was a singularly dull

town. The men could not leave the camps without permission, and a

pass was not always, indeed not often, attainable.

Their favourite pastime was a game which they called "House," which

was known to many of us when we were children as Loto. It is an

exceedingly dull game, and I cannot believe that the men would have

played it as they did if any other kind of game had been possible.

There is a mild element of gambling about House. A small sum of money

may be won, a very small sum lost. That I suppose was the attraction.

But it was rather a pitiful thing to walk through the camps on a fine

afternoon and to see every waste piece of ground occupied by House

players. There is no skill whatever in the game, and the players get

no exercise. They sit on the ground with a pile of small pebbles

before them, while one of them calls out a series of numbers. The

French people, if they had seen us playing House, would have come to

the conclusion that we are a nation of imbeciles. Bad as it may be to

have as allies men light-hearted enough to play cricket, it must be

several degrees worse to have to rely on imbeciles. However, the

French did not see us playing House any more than they saw us boxing

or attending concerts. They were not allowed into our camps.

For the men who did succeed in getting passes out of camp, the

prospect was dreary enough, dreary or undesirable. Going into town in

a crowded tram is an amusement which quickly palls. Various

ill-defined portions of the town, when you got there, were out of

bounds, and a man had need to walk warily if he did not want trouble

with the military police.

And there were worse things than military police. On the roadway

which led to the camp entrance there might be seen, any fine Sunday

afternoon, a crowd of French girls waiting for the men who came out.

They were, plainly, not the best girls, though no doubt some of them

were more silly than vicious. There were eating-shops, or

drinking-shops, of which ugly tales were told. Coffee, an innocent

drink, was sometimes doped with brandy, and men found themselves

half intoxicated without knowing that they had touched drink.

There were, of course, places where men could go safely. There was,

for instance, the Central Y.M.C.A. hall, where excellent food was to

be had, and where there were books, papers, games, and a kindly

welcome. But one Y.M.C.A. recreation hut is very like another, and it

seems rather waste of a hardly-won pass out of camp to spend the

afternoon very much as it might be spent without leaving camp at all.

What the men craved for was variety, interest, and--what was of

course almost unobtainable--the society of decent women.

I cannot help feeling that in condemning ourselves to desperate

dullness we paid too high a price for the good opinion of our French

friends. If they were really shocked at our levity in playing games

during the war, it would have been better to lacerate their feelings

a little. They would very soon have got accustomed to our ways and

come to regard our excitement over a League match as nothing worse

than a curious form of eccentricity.

The officers were rather better off than the men. They could stay in

town long enough to dine at a restaurant, and there is something

rather exciting, for a short time, in dining at a French restaurant.

There was a special officers' tram which brought us back to camp just

in time to pass the sentries before 10.30 p.m. It was invariably

over-crowded and we often had to stand, crowded together on the

platforms of the driver and conductor. I have seen officers, of rank

which gave dignity, clinging to the back of the conductor's platform

with their feet planted insecurely on a buffer.

I remember one very exciting run home. We started rather late from

town. There was a thick fog. The driver was inclined to be cautious,

very properly; but it was doubtful whether we could reach the camp in

time. I had found a precarious place on the step of the driver's

platform. Three subalterns, spirited boys, fresh from school, tried

to speed things up by shouting, "_Vîte, Vîte!_" "Much _vîter_ than

that!" to the driver, and banging violently on the gong which warned

pedestrians of our coming. The driver remained unmoved and the car

moved very slowly. Two of the boys seized the driver. The third took

control of the tram. I do not know whether he had any practice

beforehand in electric motor work; but he made that tram go. We

rushed through the fog, bumping and rattling, making very heavy

weather of the points at junctions. I do not think we killed any one.

If we had we should have heard of it afterwards. We got back to camp

in time. The French chauffeur when he recovered his first shock

seemed to enjoy himself. Our driver was a very gallant boy. No risk

daunted him. I hope he has been transferred into the Tank service.

The work there would suit him exactly and I feel sure he would enjoy

it.

I do not know that even the prospect of returning to camp by the

officers' tram would have lured me to dine in that town very often.

One French hotel is very like another, and I had dined at many before

the war.

But there was one restaurant which was especially attractive. I

should never have discovered it for myself, for I am not very

adventurous or fond of exploring. It was situated in a slum and

approached through an abominable alley. It was found first, I

believe, by some A.S.C. officers permanently stationed in the town,

who had time on their hands for exhaustive research. I was taken

there by a friend who hoped to have the pleasure of shocking a

parson by leading him into the sort of place a parson ought not to

visit. As a matter of fact the place was perfectly respectable, and

the only part of me which was shocked was my nose. The smells in the

pitch-dark gullies which led to that eating-house were the worst I

encountered in France.

It was a most unconventional restaurant. The proprietor, an elderly

man, his wife, and three married daughters ran it. They were,

whenever I entered the place, engaged in eating a meal of their own

at a table near a large fire at one end of the room. When guests

appeared they all rose, uttered voluble welcomes, and shook hands

with the strangers. There were, besides the family table, four

others, all of rough deal, much stained, far from clean and without

table-cloths. The seats were narrow benches. If you leaned back you

bumped the man at the next table. The floor was sanded and hens

walked about picking up the fragments which the diners dropped. When

I knew the place first it was patronised chiefly by sailors,

Belgians, and the A.S.C. officers who discovered it.

Ordering dinner was an interesting business. There was no menu card.

Monsieur and his family talked a kind of French which none of us

could ever understand. Also they talked at a terrific speed and all

at once, circling round us. We knew that they were naming the kinds

of food available, for we caught words like _potage_ and _poisson_

now and then. Our plan was to sit still and nod occasionally. One of

the daughters made a note of the points at which we nodded, and we

hoped for the best. The soup was generally ready. Everything else was

cooked before our eyes on the fire behind the family table.

Madame did the cooking. The rest of the party sat down again to their

own meal. Monsieur exhorted his wife occasionally. The daughters took

it in turn to get up and bring us each course as madame finished

cooking it. In this way we got a hot and excellent dinner. A good

digestion was promoted by the long gaps between the courses. It was

impossible to eat fast. Monsieur offered his guests no great choice

in wine, but what he had was surprisingly good.

When dinner was over and the bill, a very moderate one, paid, the

whole family shook hands with us again and wished us every kind of

happiness and good luck. Monsieur then conducted us to a back door,

and let us loose into an alley quite as dark and filthy as the one by

which we entered. He was always firm about refusing to allow us to go

by the way we came. I have no idea what his reasons were, but the

plan of smuggling us out of the establishment gave us a pleasurable

feeling that we had been breaking some law by being there. There is

nothing that I ever could find in King's Regulations on the subject,

so I suppose that if we sinned at all it must have been against some

French municipal regulation.

That restaurant may be quite popular now; it was getting better known

even in my time. But if it becomes popular it will lose its charm.

Monsieur and his family will no longer be able to shake hands with

every guest. There may be table-cloths. The hens--I always thought

they were the _poulets_ we ate fattened before our eyes--will be

banished, and some officious A.P.M. will put the place out of bounds,

suspecting it to be a haunt of vice. Its look and its smell, I admit,

would arouse suspicion in the mind of any conscientious A.P.M., but

Monsieur's patrons, if rough, were respectable people. Even the

A.S.C. officers were above reproach. They looked like men who were

satisfied at having discovered the best and cheapest dinner to be

got in that town. I doubt whether they had even appreciated the

eccentricities of the service.

In spite of our want of games and amusements, life in those camps was

pleasant and cheerful. We all had work to do, and not too many hours

of idleness. For me there were long walks with M., best and cheeriest

of comrades, whose spirits and energy never failed or flagged. We saw

a great deal of each other in those days until the time came at the

end of April, when he moved off to a cavalry brigade; a post into

which he was thrust because good horsemen are rare among chaplains.

There was always excellent company in my own mess and others. Nowhere

else have I met so many different kinds of men.

The regular soldiers, some of them old men, held themselves as a

separate caste a little aloof from the rest of us. It is not to be

wondered at. They were professionals, with a great tradition behind

them. We were amateurs, and, at times, inclined to be critical of old

customs and old ways. We came from every conceivable profession, and

before the war had been engaged in a hundred different activities.

Among us were men of real ability, who had made good in their own

way. I think the regular soldiers were a little bewildered sometimes.

They, almost as completely as we, were plunged into a new world. The

wonder is that they stood us as patiently as they did.

We had our mild jokes, and it was wonderful how long the mildest

jokes will last in circumstances like ours. There was a story of an

unfortunate private who was dragged before his colonel for failing to

salute a general, a general who should have been unmistakable. In

defence he said that he did not know it was a general.

"But," said the colonel, "you must have seen the red band round his

hat."

"Yes, sir," said the man, "but I thought that was to show he was a

Salvation Army captain."

The whole camp chuckled over that story for a week. Whether any one

ever told it to the general I do not know.

Another private, an Irishman, arrived in the camp one day from the

firing-line. Ours was the remotest base; two days' journey from the

nearest trench. Between us and the fighting men was what seemed an

impassable entanglement of regulations, guarded at every angle by

R.T.O.'s and military police. It was, any one would agree about

this, a flat impossibility for an unauthorised person to travel

through the zone of the army's occupation.

Yet this man did it, and did it without in the least intending to. Up

to a certain point his account of himself was clear. He had been sent

off, one of a party under charge of an officer. He did not know--few

people in the army ever do know--where he was going. He became

detached from his party and found himself, a solitary unit, at what

seems to have been a railhead. The colonel who dealt with him

questioned:

"Why didn't you ask the R.T.O. where you were to go?"

"I did ask him, sir. The first thing ever I did was to ask him."

"And what did he say?"

"What he said, sir, was 'Go to the devil out of this.'"

The colonel checked a smile. He probably sympathised with the R.T.O.

"And what did you do then?" he asked.

"I got into the train, sir, and sure, here I am."

That particular colonel's temper was notoriously a little soured by

long command. It was felt that the soldier had, after all, made a

fair attempt to obey the orders of the R.T.O.

Another private--less innocent, I fear--caused me and a few other

people some mild excitement. I was summoned to the orderly-room to

answer a telephone call. I was told by some one, whose voice sounded

as if he was much irritated, that he had caught the man who stole my

shirt. No one, thanks to my servant's vigilance, had stolen any shirt

of mine. I said so.

"Grey flannel shirt," said the voice, and I gathered that he was

irritated afresh by my extreme stupidity. I disclaimed all knowledge

of any stolen shirt, flannel or other.

An explanation followed. A deserter had been arrested. It was

discovered that he was wearing four flannel shirts and three thick

garments under them. "That," I said, "is good _prima facie_ evidence

that he really is a soldier." I thought that a useful thing to say,

and true. No one in the world except a British soldier would wear

four shirts and three jerseys at the same time. The British

soldier--it is one of his characteristics--puts on all the clothes he

can get in any weather.

The voice at the other end of the wire swore--unnecessarily, I think.

Then it told me that one of the shirts was marked with my name and

that I must identify it and the man. I refused, of course. The voice

offered to send the shirt round for my inspection. I did not in the

least want to inspect a shirt that had been worn, probably for a long

time without washing, along with six other thick garments by a

deserter; but I consented to look at the thing from a distance.

In the end I did not even do that. The unfortunate man confessed to

having stolen the shirt from an officer in the trenches near Ypres.

How it came to have my name on it I do not yet know. I did miss a

couple of shirts from my store of civilian clothes when I got home.

But I am sure no officer stole them. Indeed I do not see how any

officer could.

That voice--I do not know that I ever met its owner--had a wonderful

power of language, strong, picturesque, and highly profane language,

suitable for expressing violent emotion over a telephone wire. It was

once rebuked by a very gentle captain with a remark that was widely

quoted afterwards. The language had been unusually flamboyant and

was becoming worse. "Hold on a minute," said the listener, "and let

the line cool. It's nearly red hot at this end."

When life failed to provide a joke or two we fell back on rumours and

enjoyed them thoroughly. They say that Fleet Street as a

breeding-ground for rumour is surpassed only by the drawing-rooms of

the wives of ministers of state. I have no experience of either; but

a base camp in France would be hard to beat. The number of naval

battles declared by the best authorities to have been fought during

the early months of 1916 was amazing. We had them once a week, and

torpedo-boat skirmishes on off days.

Men in "the signals"--all rumour goes back to the signals in the

end--had lively imaginations. We mourned the loss of Kut months

before General Townshend was forced to surrender. We revelled in

extracts from the private letters of people like the Brazilian

ambassador in Berlin. We knew with absolute certainty the English

regiments which were taking part in the defence of Verdun. The

Guards, by a sudden move, seized the city of Lille, but owing to

faulty staff work were cut off, hemmed in, and at last wiped out,

the entire division. The last men, a mixed batch of Grenadiers,

Coldstream, Scots, Irish, and Welsh, perished in a final glorious

bayonet charge. It was a Guardsman who told me the story first, and

he had it from what really was unimpeachable authority.

But there is no reason for railing against Rumour. She is a wild-eyed

jade, no doubt, with disordered locks and a babbling tongue. But life

at a base in France would be duller without her; and she does no one

any real harm.

CHAPTER VII

COMING AND GOING

The camp in which I lived was the first in the series of camps which

stretched along the whole winding valley. We were nearest to the

entrance gates, at which military police were perpetually on guard;

nearest to the railway station, a wayside _halte_ where few trains

stopped; nearest to the road along which the trams ran into the town.

All who came and went in and out passed by our camp, using a road,

made, I think, by our men originally, which ran along the bottom of

our parade ground and thence, with many side roads branching from it,

through all the camps right along the valley. Our parade ground

sloped down towards this road, ending in a steep bank which we tried

to keep pleasantly grassy, which we crowned with flower-beds, so that

new-comers might feel that they had arrived at a pleasant place.

Standing on this bank it was possible to watch all the entering and

departing traffic of the camps, the motor lorries which rumbled by,

the little road engines, always somewhat comic, which puffed and

snorted, dragging trucks after them. Now and then came the motors of

generals and other potentates, or the shabby, overworked Fords of the

Y.M.C.A. Mounted officers, colonels, and camp commandants who were

privileged to keep horses, trotted by. Orderlies on bicycles went

perilously, for the road was narrow and motor lorries are big. A

constant stream of officers and men passed by; or parties, on their

way up the hill, to one of the instruction camps marched along.

This went on all day from early dawn till the "Last Post" sounded and

quiet came. To a new-comer, as I was, one unused to armies and their

ways, this traffic was a source of endless interest; but I liked most

to stand on the bank above the road during the later hours of the

forenoon. It was then that the new drafts, men fresh from England,

marched in.

The transports which brought them reached the harbour early in the

morning. The men disembarked at 8 a.m. and marched out to the camps,

a distance of four or five miles. They were often weary when they

arrived, wet and muddy perhaps, or powdered with dust, unshaved,

unwashed. Often their faces were still pallid after a long night of

seasickness. Their rifles and kit seemed a burden to some of them.

They marched past our camp, and there were generally two or three of

us who stood on the bank to watch and criticise.

Later on, when some of the camps had dealt with the music question, a

band or a couple of pipers would go some distance along the road to

meet the coming men and to play them into camp. Then, in spite of

weariness and the effects of seasickness, the new drafts stepped out

bravely and made a good show.

I had a friend, a sergeant who had seen much service, one of those

N.C.O.'s of the old army to whom the empire owes a debt which will

never be properly understood. He often stood beside me to watch the

new men come in. He taught me to criticise their marching, to

appreciate their bearing. He wore a South African ribbon then. He

wears the Mons ribbon now and a couple of gold wound stripes and

doubtless several chevrons, red and blue.

The skirl of pipes came to us, and a moment later the quick, firm

tread of men marching.

"Guards, sir," said my friend.

They passed, swinging along, a mixed draft of Grenadiers, Coldstream,

Scots, Irish, Welsh. My friend straightened himself as they went by.

"The Guards, sir, is the Guards, wherever they are."

He was not himself a guardsman, but there was no trace of jealousy in

his voice. I have noticed the same thing again and again. There are

people who dislike the Guards, accusing them of conceit or resenting

certain privileges. I never met any one who refused to give the

Guards first place in battle, on the march, in camp. It is a

magnificent record to have established in an army like ours, a

wonderful record to have kept through a long-drawn war like this,

when every regiment has been destroyed and remade of new material

half a dozen times.

Another draft came by.

"Territorials, sir."

My friend was prejudiced; but he is not the only soldier of the old

army who is prejudiced against territorials. Against new battalions,

Kitchener battalions, of regular regiments there is no feeling. The

old army took them to its heart, bullied them, taught them as if they

were younger brothers. The Territorials are step-brothers at best.

Yet they have made good in France. I wonder that the prejudice

persists. They do not march like the Guards. Even the London

Territorials have not accomplished that. But they have established

themselves as fighters, in the desperate holding of the Ypres salient

in earlier days, and ever since everywhere in the long battle-line.

"R.F.A.," said my friend, "and the biggest draft of the lot. There

must be a damned lot of guns at the front now. We could have done

with a few more at Mons. It's guns that's wanted in this war. Guns

and men behind them. And it's guns, and gunners anyway, we're

getting. Look at those fellows now. You'll see worse drafts;

though"--he surveyed the men carefully--"you might see better.

There's some of them now that's young, too young. They'll be sent

back sick before they harden. Beg pardon, sir, but here's our lot at

last. I must be going."

He saluted and turned. A body of men with an elderly officer at their

head followed the gunners closely. They turned sharp to the left up

the steep little road which leads into our camp. They halted in the

middle of the parade ground. Salutes were given and returned. The

draft was handed over. The elderly officer detached himself and made

his way to the mess-room. I followed to greet him, and to hear the

latest news from England.

"What sort of a passage?"

"Vile. We crossed in a superannuated paddle-boat. Everybody sick. Not

a spot to lie down in. My men were detailed to clean up the blessed

packet afterwards. That's why we're late. Such a scene. Ugh! Can I

get a drink?"

I do not know any one who has a more consistently disagreeable job

than a draft-conducting officer. He crosses and recrosses the Channel

under the most uncomfortable conditions possible. He has a lot of

responsibility. He gets no praise and little credit. He is generally

an elderly man. He has, most likely, been accustomed for years to an

easy life. He is often an incurable victim to seasickness. There is

no interest and no excitement about his work. He lives for the most

part in trains and steamers. He snatches meals in strange messes,

railway refreshment rooms, and quayside restaurants. He may have to

conduct his draft all the way from Cork or Wick. He may be kept

waiting hour after hour for a train. He may be embarked and

disembarked again three or four times before his steamer actually

starts. The men of his draft are strangers to him. He does not know

whether his sergeants are trustworthy or not. Yet there is no

epidemic of suicide among draft-conducting officers, though there

very well might be. Great and unconquerable is the spirit of the

British dug-out officer.

The draft itself may have had a bad time too, especially in the

matter of cleaning up the ship; but then the draft does not have it

once a week. And the draft has not got to turn round and go straight

back again. And for the draft the business has the advantage of

novelty. It is exciting to land for the first time in France, to be

pursued by little boys who say "Souvenir!" and "Good night!" early in

the morning. And there is something about getting there at last,

after months of weary training, which must stir the most sluggish

imagination.

The draft is examined by the doctors. One way and another a doctor in

a base camp has a busy time of it. He begins at 6 a.m., diagnosing

the cases of the men who report sick. The hour at which it is

possible to report sick is fixed inconveniently early in order, it is

hoped, to discourage disease. Men who are not very bad may actually

prefer the usual parades and fatigues to reporting sick at 6 a.m. For

sickness is not even a sure way of escape. Doctors have a nasty trick

of awarding "medicine and duty" in doubtful cases, which is

distinctly more unpleasant than duty without medicine. From that on

the doctor is kept busy, till he drops off to sleep for half an hour

before dinner in the mess-room.

I thought at first that the doctors might have been spared the task

of examining incoming drafts. The men have all been passed fit at

home before they start, and it does not seem reasonable to suppose

that their constitutions have seriously deteriorated on the journey.

But the new examination is really necessary. Doctors, according to

the proverb, differ. They even seem to differ more widely than other

men. The home doctor for some reason takes an optimistic view of

human ailments, and is inclined to pass a man fit who will certainly

collapse when he gets up the line. The doctor in the base camp knows

that he will be abominably "strafed" if he sends "crocks" to the

front. He does not want them returned and left on his hands at the

base. So he picks the plainly unfit men out of the drafts, and, after

a tedious round of form filling, sends them back to England.

There was, for instance, Private Buggins, whose case interested me so

much that I should like very much to hear the end of his story.

Private Buggins suffered from curvature of the spine. It was plain

that he could not carry a pack for very long. Some one at home passed

Private Buggins fit and he came out with a draft. He was picked out

of that draft at the base in France. At the end of a fortnight's

strenuous labour (form filling), Private Buggins was sent back to

England.

A fortnight after that he turned up again in France, one of another

draft. Once more he was detached. Once more the wheels creaked round

and Private Buggins went back to England. This time three weeks

elapsed before he joined another draft and again submitted himself

for medical examination in France. The result was the same. I do not

wonder. I saw Buggins's spine once, and I hold strongly that "Blighty

is the place for him."

After that I lost sight of Private Buggins, for I was moved to a new

camp; but I have no reason to suppose the case is settled. He is

still, in all probability, crossing and recrossing the English

Channel. By this time I expect he has found out ways of living

tolerably comfortably under the conditions of his nomadic military

service. But he ought to be given a special medal when the war is

over and he is allowed to settle down again somewhere.

A new draft also submits to kit inspection. I suppose kits are

inspected in England before the start is made; but the British

soldier has an amazing desire to get rid of the parts of his

equipment which strike him as superfluous. He appears to shed kit as

he goes along, and often succeeds in arriving at the end of the

journey with only half the things he ought to have.

Yet he goes to war with few possessions. I am sure his pack is heavy

enough to carry, but its contents look pitifully insufficient when

spread out on a parade ground for inspection. A cake of soap, a

razor, a small towel, two or three brushes, a spare pair of socks, a

clean shirt--it seems little enough for a man to face an unknown

world with, a man who is heir to the gifts of a complex civilisation.

Once thoroughly inspected, the draft ceases to be a draft, and is

merged in the camp. The men settle down in the lines of their

battalion, take their share in the life and work of their fellows

until the day comes when they are joined to another draft and sent

forth on a yet more adventurous journey.

Drafts coming to us from England arrived in the morning. Drafts going

from us to the front departed at night. I suppose the numbers of

those who came and of those who went balanced like the figures in a

well-kept ledger. To me it always seemed that there were more going

than coming--an illusion certainly, since our camp never emptied. But

those who came were all strangers, while many of those who went were

friends, and many more were acquaintances. Therefore, the going left

gaps which the new-comers did not seem to fill.

The orders that a draft was to go to the front came to us in the

morning from the Officer Commanding Reinforcements. So many officers

and men of such-and-such a battalion were to proceed to such-or-such

a place. Lists, nominal rolls, were prepared in the orderly-room. The

men were warned. The officers rushed into town to complete their kit

or add to it small articles likely to be useful. Trench boots, trench

coats, tins of solidified methylated spirits, all sorts of odds and

ends, were picked up at the ordnance stores or at French shops which

dealt specially in such things. Advice was eagerly sought--and the

most curious advice taken--by those who had never been up the line

before. That last day at the base was busy and exciting. There was a

spirit of light-heartedness and gaiety abroad. We laughed more than

usual and joked oftener. Behind the laughter--who knows?

In the camp there was much going to and fro. Men stood in queues

outside the quartermaster's stores, to receive gas masks, first field

dressings, identification discs, and such things. Kits were once more

inspected, minutely and rigorously. Missing articles were supplied.

Entries were made in pay books.

Later on the men crowded into the canteen or the Y.M.C.A. hut.

Letters were written, pathetic scrawls many of them. There was a

feeling of excitement, tense and only half suppressed, among the men

who were going. There was no sign of depression or fear; certainly no

hint of any sadness of farewell.

For us who stayed behind it was different. I saw scores of these

drafts depart for the unknown, terrible front. I never got over the

feeling of awe. There are certain scenes which will abide in my

memory to the end of my life, which I do not think I can possibly

forget even afterwards, when my turn comes and I join those men who

went from us, of whom we next heard when their names appeared in the

lists of killed.

It was my custom to invite those who were going to "partake of the

most comfortable sacrament of the body and blood of Christ" before

they started. At first we used to meet in my hut; but that was too

small for us, though only a few from each departing draft gathered

there. Later on I used a room in a neighbouring house.

It was late in the afternoon, generally 6 o'clock, before the

officers and men were ready to come. The shadows had gathered. The

candles on my rude altar shone, giving the little light we needed.

About to face death these boys--to me and especially at that time

they all seemed boys--kneeled to salute their King who rules by

virtue of a sacrifice like theirs. They took His body and His blood,

broken and shed for them whose bodies were also dedicated, just as

His was, for the saving of the world. My hands trembled, stretched

out in benediction over the bowed young heads. Did ever men do

greater things than these? Have any among the martyrs and saints of

the church's calendar belonged more clearly to the great fellowship

of Christs crucified, whose splendid destiny it is to redeem the

world?

These eucharists are among the scenes which it is impossible ever to

forget. There are also others, no less impressive, in the recurring

drama of the departing drafts.

The day closes early in these great camps. At half-past eight the

recreation huts close their doors. Concerts and entertainments are

over. The men stream back to their tents along muddy roads, laughing,

chatting, singing. Lights appear in the tents, and a glow, red or

white, shines through the canvas. One after another these are

extinguished. The "Last Post" sounds from a dozen bugles. The

multitudinous noises of camp life die away. The rifle-fire which has

crackled all day on the ranges has long ceased. The spluttering of

machine guns in the training camps vexes the ear no more. The heavy

explosions of shell testing are over for another day. Save for the

sharp challenge of a sentry here and there, and the distant shriek

of a railway engine, there is almost unbroken silence for a while.

At half-past nine perhaps, or a little later, men come silently from

the tents and assemble on the parade ground. They fall in, small

detachments from four or five regiments, each forming its own lines

of men. They carry rifles. Their packs are on their backs. Their

haversacks, mess tins, and all the kit of marching infantry are

strung round them. A draft from this camp and many drafts from all

this great collection of camps are going "up the line" to-night.

"Up the line." The phrase means a long railway journey, very many

hours of travelling perhaps, for the train moves slowly. The journey

will end where the railway stops short of the firing-line, and these

men will join their comrades, filling the gaps in many battalions.

Some of them are fresh from home, young soldiers. Others, recovered

from wounds or sickness, are going back to perils and hardship which

they already know. For all of them this is the last parade in safety

for many a long day. Henceforth, till the coming of peace releases

them, or a wound sends them back to rest, or death puts an end to

their soldiering, they will go in peril day and night, will endure

incredible hardships constantly.

They stand silent. At the head of the waiting columns are men with

lanterns in their hands, faint spots of light in the surrounding

gloom. Down the hill from his quarters the colonel comes. The

adjutant and the sergeant-major leave the orderly-room. A little

group of officers stands back in the shadow. They are there to see

their comrades off. A sharp order is given. There is a rattle of arms

and accoutrements. The waiting men stand to attention. The colonel

makes his progress up and down the line of men, taking a last look at

their equipment. An orderly carrying a lantern goes before him. He

inspects each man minutely. Now and then he speaks a few words in a

low tone. Otherwise the silence is complete.

The inspection is over at last. He takes his place at the head of the

column. Certain formal orders are read out by the adjutant. There is

something about the unexpended portion of the day's rations. There

cannot be much "unexpended" at 10 o'clock at night; but the military

machine, recklessly prodigal of large sums of money, is scrupulously

niggardly about trifles. But it does not matter. No one at the

moment is concerned about the unexpended portion of his ration. There

is a stern injunction against travelling on the roof of railway

carriages. "Men," the order explains, "have been killed owing to

doing so." We suppose vaguely that those men were better dead. No one

in his right senses would willingly travel on the top of a railway

carriage at dead of night in a snowstorm. And as we stand on the

parade ground it begins to snow. There is much else, but the reading

stops at last. The colonel speaks. He wishes all good fortune to

those who go. He reminds them that they are the guardians of the

honour of famous regiments. He assures them that the hearts of those

who stay behind go with them. He is himself one of those who stay

behind; but there is something in the way he speaks which makes us

sure that he would gladly go. He does not say this. It is not his way

to talk heroics. But more certainly than if he had said the words the

men know that it is not of his own choice that he stays behind.

It is my turn to speak, to pray. Surely never to any minister of God

has such opportunity been given. But what words can I find? What

supplication fits the time and place? I beg the men to pray, to seek

from above courage, strength, patience, inward peace. I make my

prayer for them, that God will lighten the surrounding darkness and

deliver us all from the perils of "this night." I am feeble,

helpless, faithless, without vision; but at least I can give the

benediction. "The Peace of God----" Even war cannot take that from

the heart of him who has it.