From a neighbouring camp comes the sound of men singing as they tramp

down the muddy road. Another draft is on its way. From a camp still

farther off we hear the skirl of bagpipes. There, too, men have said

good-bye to security and are on their way. A sharp order rings out.

Then another. The men on the parade ground spring to attention, turn,

march.

They begin to sing as they go. "Tipperary," in those days was losing

its popularity. "If I were the only boy in the world" had not come to

its own. For the moment "Irish eyes are smiling" is most popular. It

is that or some such song they sing, refusing even then to make

obeisance to heroic sentiment. The little group of officers, the

sergeants, the orderlies with the lanterns, stand and salute the

columns as they pass.

Far down the road we hear a shouted jest, a peal of laughter, a burst

of song.

In what mood, with what spirit does the soldier, the man in the

ranks, go forth into the night to his supremely great adventure? We

do more than guess. We know. We chaplains are officers, but we are

something more than officers. We are, or ought to be, the friends of

men and officers alike. We have the chance of learning from the men's

own lips what their feelings are. Hardly ever do we get the least

suggestion of heroic resolve or hint of the consciousness of great

purpose. Very often we hear a hope expressed--a hope which is really

a prayer for God's blessing. But this is almost always for those left

at home, for wife and children, parents, brothers, friends. It is as

if they and not the men who fight had dangers to face and trials to

endure.

From his intimate talk we may guess that the soldier thinks very

little about himself and very much about those he has left behind. He

says little of what his life has been, less still about that to which

he looks forward. His mind is altogether occupied with the little

affairs of his home life, with the marriage of this friend, the wages

earned by son or daughter, the thousand details of life in some

English village or some great city. Sometimes we hear an expression

of pleasure at the thought of joining again comrades by whose side

the writer has fought. Sometimes an anticipation from a young soldier

of seeing in the fighting-line some friend who has gone there before

him.

It is not thus that an imaginative writer would represent the talk of

soldiers who say farewell. I suppose that those who speak as these

men do are lovers of peace and quiet ways, have no great taste for

adventuring, find war not a joy but a hard necessity. Yet as we know,

as all Europe knows now, there are no better fighters in the world

than these citizen soldiers whose blood the bugle stirs but

sluggishly, whose hearts are all the time with those whom they have

left at English firesides.

CHAPTER VIII

WOODBINE HUT

I knew many recreation huts, Y.M.C.A. huts, Church Army huts, E.F.

canteens, while I was in France. I was in and out of them at all

sorts of hours. I lectured in them, preached in them, told stories,

played games, and spent in the aggregate many hours listening to

other people singing, reciting, lecturing. It was always a pleasure

to be in these huts and I liked every one of them. But I cherish

specially tender recollections of Woodbine Hut. It was the first I

knew, the first I ever entered, my earliest love among huts. Also its

name was singularly attractive. It is not every hut which has a name.

Many are known simply by the number of the camp they belong to, and

even those which have names make, as a rule, little appeal to the

imagination. It is nice and loyal to call a hut after a princess, for

instance, or by the name of the donor, or after some province or

district at home, whose inhabitants paid for the hut. One is no way

moved by such names.

But Woodbine! The name had nothing whatever to do with the soldier's

favourite cigarette, though that hut, or any other, might very well

be called after tobacco. I, a hardened smoker, have choked in the

atmosphere of these huts worse than anywhere else, even in the cabins

of small yachts anchored at night. But cigarettes were not in the

mind of the ladies who built and named that hut. Afterwards when

their hair and clothes reeked of a particularly offensive kind of

tobacco, it may have occurred to them that they were wiser than they

knew in choosing the name Woodbine.

But at first they were not thinking of tobacco. They meant to make a

little pun on their own name like the pun of the herald who gave

"_Ver non semper viret_" to the Vernons for a motto; associating

themselves thus modestly and shyly with the building they had given,

in which they served. Also they meant the name to call up in the

minds of the soldiers who used the hut all sorts of thoughts of home,

of English gardens, of old-fashioned flowers, of mothers' smiles and

kisses--the kisses perhaps not always mother's. The idea is a pretty

one, and the English soldier, like most cheerful people, is a

sentimentalist, yet I doubt if ten of the many thousands of men who

used that hut ever associated it with honeysuckle.

When I first saw "Woodbine" over the door of that hut, the name

filled me with astonishment. I knew of a Paradise Court in a grimy

city slum, and a dilapidated whitewashed house on the edge of a

Connaught bog which has somehow got itself called Monte Carlo. But

these misfits of names moved me only to mirth mingled with a certain

sadness. "Woodbine" is a sheer astonishment. I hear the word and

think of the rustic arches in cottage gardens, of old tree trunks

climbed over by delightful flowers. I think of open lattice windows,

of sweet summer air. Nothing in the whole long train of thought

prepares me for or tends in any way to suggest this Woodbine.

It is a building. In the language of the army--the official

language--it is a hut; but hardly more like the hut of civil life

than it is like the flower from which it takes its name. The walls

are thin wood. The roof is corrugated iron. It contains two long,

low halls. Glaring electric lights hang from the rafters. They must

glare if they are to shine at all, for the air is thick with tobacco

smoke.

Inside the halls are gathered hundreds of soldiers. In one corner,

that which we enter first, the men are sitting, packed close together

at small tables. They turn over the pages of illustrated papers. They

drink tea, cocoa, and hot milk. They eat buns and slices of

bread-and-butter. They write those letters home which express so

little, and to those who understand mean so much. Of the letters

written home from camp, half at least are on paper which bear the

stamp of the Y.M.C.A.--paper given to all who ask in this hut and

scores of others. Reading, eating, drinking, writing, chatting, or

playing draughts, everybody smokes. Everybody, such is the climate,

reeks with damp. Everybody is hot. The last thing that the air

suggests to the nose of one who enters is the smell of woodbine.

In the other, the inner hall, there are more men, still more closely

packed together, smoking more persistently, and the air is even

denser. Here no one is eating, no one reading. Few attempt to write.

The evening entertainment is about to begin. On a narrow platform at

one end of the hall is the piano. A pianist has taken possession of

it. He has been selected by no one in authority, elected by no

committee. He has occurred, emerged from the mass of men; by virtue

of some energy within him has made good his position in front of the

instrument. He flogs the keys, and above the babel of talk sounds

some rag-time melody, once popular, now forgotten or despised at

home. Here or there a voice takes up the tune and sings or chants it.

The audience begin to catch the spirit of the entertainment. Some one

calls the name of Corporal Smith. A man struggles to his feet and

leaps on to the platform. He is greeted with applauding cheers. There

is a short consultation between him and the pianist. A tentative

chord is struck. Corporal Smith nods approval and turns to the

audience. His song begins. If it is the kind of song that has a

chorus the audience shouts it and Corporal Smith conducts the singing

with waving of his arms.

Corporal Smith is a popular favourite. We know his worth as a singer,

demand and applaud him. But there are other candidates for favour.

Before the applause has died away, while still acknowledgments are

being bowed, another man takes his place on the platform. He is a

stranger and no one knows what he will sing. But the pianist is a man

of genius. Whisper to him the name of the song, give even a hint of

its nature, let him guess at the kind of voice, bass, baritone,

tenor, and he will vamp an accompaniment. He has his difficulties. A

singer will start at the wrong time, will for a whole verse, perhaps,

make noises in a different key; the pianist never fails. Somehow,

before very long, instrument and singer get together--more or less.

There is no dearth of singers, no bashful hanging back, no waiting

for polite pressure. Every one who can sing, or thinks he can, is

eager to display his talent. There is no monotony. A boisterous comic

song is succeeded by one about summer roses, autumn leaves, and the

kiss of a maiden at a stile. The vagaries of a ventriloquist are a

matter for roars of laughter. A song about the beauties of the rising

moon pleases us all equally well. An original genius sings a song of

his own composition, rough-hewn verses set to a familiar tune, about

the difficulty of obtaining leave and the longing that is in all our

hearts for a return to "Blighty, dear old Blighty." Did ever men

before fix such a name on the country for which they fight?

Now and again some one comes forward with a long narrative song, a

kind of ballad chanted to a tune very difficult to catch. It is about

as hard to keep track with the story as to pick up the tune.

Words--better singers fail in the same way--are not easily

distinguished, though the man does his best, clears his throat

carefully between each verse and spits over the edge of the platform

to improve his enunciation. No one objects to that.

About manners and dress the audience is very little critical. But

about the merits of the songs and the singers the men express their

opinions with the utmost frankness. The applause is genuine, and the

singer who wins it is under no doubt about its reality. The song

which makes no appeal is simply drowned by loud talk, and the

unfortunate singer will crack his voice in vain in an endeavour to

regain the attention he has lost.

Encores are rare, and the men are slow to take them. There is a man

towards the end of the evening who wins one unmistakably with an

inimitable burlesque of "Alice, where art thou?" The pianist fails

to keep in touch with the astonishing vagaries of this performance,

and the singer, unabashed, finishes without accompaniment. The

audience yells with delight, and continues to yell till the singer

comes forward again. This time he gives us a song about leaving home,

a thing of heart-rending pathos, and we wail the chorus:

"It's sad to give the last hand-shake,

It's sad the last long kiss to take,

It's sad to say farewell."

The entertainment draws to its close about 8 o'clock. Men go to bed

betimes who know that a bugle will sound the reveille at 5.30 in the

morning. The end of the entertainment is planned to allow time for a

final cup of tea or a glass of Horlick's Malted Milk before we go out

to flounder through the mud to our tents.

This last half-hour is a busy one for the ladies behind the counter

in the outer hall. Long queues of men stand waiting to be served.

Dripping cups and sticky buns are passed to them with inconceivable

rapidity. The work is done at high pressure, but with the tea and the

food the men receive something else, something they pay no penny for,

something the value of which to them is above all measuring with

pennies--the friendly smile, the kindly word of a woman. We can

partly guess at what these ladies have given up at home to do this

work--servile, sticky, dull work--for men who are neither kith nor

kin to them. No one will ever know the amount of good they do;

without praise, pay, or hope of honour, often without thanks. If "the

actions of the just smell sweet and blossom," surely these deeds of

love and kindness have a fragrance of surpassing sweetness.

Perhaps, after all, the hut is well named "Woodbine," and others

might be called "Rose," "Violet," "Lily." The discerning eye sees the

flowers through the mist of steaming tea. We catch the perfume while

we choke in the reek of tobacco smoke, damp clothes, and heated

bodies.

The British part of the war area in France is dotted over with huts

more or less like the "Woodbine." They are owned, I suppose,

certainly run, by half a dozen different organisations. I understand

that the Church Army is now very energetic in building huts, but when

I first went to France by far the greater part of the work was done

by the Y.M.C.A.

The idea--the red triangle is supposed to be symbolical--is to

minister to the needs of the three parts of man--body, mind, and

soul. At the bar which stands at one end of the hut men buy food,

drink (strictly non-alcoholic), and tobacco. In the body of the room

men play draughts, chess, anything except cards, read papers and

write letters. Often there are concerts and lectures. Sometimes there

are classes which very few men attend. So the mind is cared for.

The atmosphere is supposed to be religious, and the men recognise the

fact by refraining from the use of their favourite words even when no

lady worker is within earshot. The talk in a Y.M.C.A. hut is

sometimes loud. The laughter is frequent. But a young girl might walk

about invisible among the men without hearing an expression which

would shock her, so long as she remained inside the four walls.

There are also supposed to be prayers every night and there is a

voluntary service, of a very free and easy kind, on Sunday evenings.

Those evening prayers, theoretically a beautiful and moving ending to

the day's labour, were practically a very difficult business. I have

been in huts when the first hint of prayers, the production of a

bundle of hymn-books, was the signal for a stampede of men. By the

time the pianist was ready to play the hut was empty, save for two or

three unwilling victims who had been cornered by an energetic lady.

In the early days the "leader" of the hut was generally a young man

of the kind who would join a Christian Association in the days before

the war, and the lady workers, sometimes, but not always, were of the

same way of thinking. They were desperately in earnest about prayers

and determined, though I think unfair ways were adopted, to secure

congregations. A concert drew a crowded audience, and it seemed

desirable to attach prayers to the last item of the performance so

closely that there was no time to escape.

I remember scenes, not without an element of comedy in them, but

singularly unedifying. A young lady, prettily dressed and pleasant to

look at, recited a poem about a certain "nursie" who in the course of

her professional duties tended one "Percy." In the second verse

nursie fell in love with Percy, and, very properly, Percy with her.

In the third verse they were married. In the fourth verse we came on

nursie nursing (business here by the reciter as if holding a baby)

"another little Percy." The audience shouts with laughter, yells

applause, and wants to encore. The hut leader seizes his opportunity,

announces prayers, and the men, choking down their giggles over

nursie, find themselves singing "When I survey the wondrous cross."

My own impression is that prayers cannot with decency follow hard on

a Y.M.C.A. concert. The mind and soul sides of the red triangle seem

to join at an angle which is particularly aggressive. The body side,

on the other hand, works in comparatively comfortably with both. Tea

and cake have long had a semi-sacramental value in some religious

circles, and the steam of cocoa or hot malted milk blends easily with

the hot air of a "Nursie-Percy" concert or the serener atmosphere of

"Abide with Me."

Yet I am convinced that the evening-prayers idea is a good one and it

can be worked successfully for the benefit of many men. I have seen

the large hall of one of those Y.M.C.A. huts well filled night after

night for evening prayers, and those were not only men who remained

in the hall drinking tea or playing games, but many others who came

in specially for prayers. A choir gathered round the piano, eager to

sing the evening hymn. The hush during the saying of a few simple

prayers was unmistakably devotional. It was impossible to doubt that

when the benediction fell upon those bowed heads there did abide

something of the peace which passeth all understanding and that

hearts were lifted up unto the Lord.

There was, unfortunately, a certain amount of jealousy at one time

between the Y.M.C.A. workers and the recognised army chaplains. I

think that this is passing away. But when I first went to France the

relations between the two organisations in no way suggested the

ointment which ran down Aaron's beard to the skirts of his garment,

the Psalmist's symbol of the unity in which brethren dwelt together.

The Y.M.C.A. workers were perhaps a little prickly. The men among

them, often Free Church ministers, seemed on the lookout for the sort

of snubs which Nonconformists often receive from the Anglican clergy

at home. The chaplains, especially the Church of England chaplains,

appeared to think that they ought to conduct all religious services

in the Y.M.C.A. huts. This was unreasonable. If the Church of England

had been awake to her opportunity in the early days of the war she

could have built church huts all over northern France and run them on

her own lines. She missed her chance, not having among her leaders

any man of the energy and foresight of Sir A. Yapp.

The Church Army has done much during the last years; but it has been

the making up of leeway. The Church once might have occupied the

position held by the Y.M.C.A. She failed to rise to the occasion. Her

officers, the military chaplains, had no fair cause of complaint when

they found that they could not straightway enter into the fruits of

other men's labour.

But the little jealousy which existed between the chaplains and the

Y.M.C.A. was passing away while I was in France, has now, perhaps,

entirely disappeared. The war has done little good, that I ever could

discover, to any one, but it has delivered the souls of the Church of

England clergy who went out to France from the worst form of

ecclesiastical snobbery. There are few of those who tried to work in

the army who preserve the spirit of social superiority which has had

a good deal to do with the dislike of the Church, which has been I

imagine, a much more effective cause of "our unhappy divisions" than

any of the doctrines men have professed to quarrel about.

And the Y.M.C.A. workers are less aggressively prickly than they used

to be. The army authorities have weeded out a good many of the

original men workers, young students from Free Church theological

colleges, and put them into khaki. Their places have been taken by

older men, of much larger experience of life, less keen on making

good the position of a particular religious denomination. They are

often glad to hand over their strictly religious duties to any

chaplain who will do them efficiently.

The women workers, a far more numerous class, never were so

difficult, from the Church of England chaplain's point of view, as

the men. They are, in the fullest sense, voluntary workers. They even

pay all their own expense, lodging, board, and travelling. They must

be women of independent means. I do not know why it is, but well-off

people are seldom as eager about emphasising sectarian differences as

those who have to work for small incomes. Perhaps they have more

chance of getting interested in other things.

It is, I fear, true that the decay of the sectarian--that is to say

undenominational--spirit in the Y.M.C.A. has resulted in a certain

blurring of the "soul" side of the red triangle. This has been a

cause of uneasiness to the society's authorities at home, and various

efforts have been made to stimulate the spiritual work of the huts

and to inquire into the causes of its failure. I am inclined to think

that the matter is quite easily understood. There is less aggressive

religiosity in Y.M.C.A. huts than there used to be, because the

society is more and more drawing its workers from a class which

instinctively shrinks from slapping a strange man heartily on the

back and greeting him with the inquiry--"Tommy, how's your soul?"

There is no need for anxiety about the really religious work of the

huts. That in most places is being done.

CHAPTER IX

Y.S.C.

"Y.S.C." stands for Young Soldiers' Club, an institution which had a

short, but, I think, really useful existence in the large camp where

I was first stationed. There were in that camp large numbers of

boys--at one time nearly a thousand of them--all enlisted under age

in the early days of the recruiting movement, all of them found by

actual trial or judged beforehand to be unfit for the hardship of

life in the trenches. They were either sent down from their

battalions to the base or were stopped on the way up. For some time

their number steadily increased. Like the children of Israel in

Egypt, who also multiplied rapidly, they became a nuisance to the

authorities.

Their existence in the camp was a standing menace to discipline.

Officially they were men to be trained, fed, lodged, if necessary

punished according to the scheme designed for and in the main

suitable to men. In reality they were boys, growing boys, some of

them not sixteen years of age, a few--the thing seems almost

incredible--not fifteen. How the recruiting authorities at home ever

managed to send a child of less than fifteen out to France as a

fighting man remains mysterious. But they did.

These were besides boys of a certain particularly difficult kind. It

is not your "good" boy who rushes to the recruiting office and tells

a lie about his age. It is not the gentle, amiable, well-mannered boy

who is so enthusiastic for adventure that he will leave his home and

endure the hardships of a soldier's life for the sake of seeing

fighting. These boys were for the most part young scamps, and some of

them had all the qualities of the guttersnipe, but they had the

makings of men in them if properly treated.

The difficulty was to know how to treat them. No humane C.O. wants to

condemn a mischievous brat of a boy to Field Punishment No. 1. Most

C.O.'s., even most sergeants, know that punishment of that kind,

however necessary for a hardened evildoer of mature years, is totally

unsuitable for a boy. At the same time if any sort of discipline is

to be preserved, a boy, who must officially be regarded as a man,

cannot be allowed to cheek a sergeant or flatly to refuse to obey

orders. That was the military difficulty.

The social and moral difficulty was, if anything, worse. Those boys

were totally useless to the army where they were, stuck in a large

camp. They were learning all sorts of evil and very little good. They

were a nuisance to the N.C.O.'s and men, among whom they lived, and

were bullied accordingly. They were getting no education and no

suitable physical training. They were in a straight way to be ruined

instead of made.

It was an Irish surgeon who realised the necessity for doing

something for these boys and set about the task. I do not suppose

that he wants his name published or his good deeds advertised. I

shall call him J. He was a typical Irishman--in looks, manner, and

character one of the most Irishmen I have ever met. He had a

wonderful talent for dealing with young animals. The very first time

I met him he took me to see a puppy, a large, rather savage-looking

creature which he kept in a stable outside the camp. One of the

creature's four grandparents had been a wolf. J. hoped to make the

puppy a useful member of society.

"I am never happy," he said, "unless I have some young thing to

train--dog, horse, anything. That's the reason I'm so keen on doing

something for these boys."

J. had no easy job when he took up the cause of the boys. It was not

that he had to struggle against active opposition. There was no

active opposition. Every one wanted to help. The authorities realised

that something ought to be done. What J. was up against was system,

the fact that he and the boys and the authorities and every one of us

were parts of a machine and the wheels of the thing would only go

round one way.

Trying to get anything of an exceptional kind done in the army is

like floundering in a trench full of sticky mud--one is inclined

sometimes to say sticky muddle--surrounded by dense entanglements of

barbed red-tape. You track authority from place to place, finding

always that the man you want, the ultimate person who can actually

give the permission you require, lies just beyond. If you are

enormously persevering, and, nose to scent, you hunt on for years,

you find yourself at last back with the man from whom you started,

having made a full circle of all the authorities there are. Then, if

you like, you can start again.

I do not know how J. managed the early stages of the business. He had

made a good start long before I joined him. But only an Irishman, I

think, could have done the thing at all. Only an Irishman is profane

enough to mock at the great god System, the golden image before which

we are all bidden to fall down and worship "what time we hear the

sound of" military music. Only an Irishman will venture

light-heartedly to take short cuts through regulations. It is our

capacity for doing things the wrong way which makes us valuable to

the Empire, and they ought to decorate us oftener than they do for

our insubordination.

There was an Irishman, so I am told, in the very early days of the

war who created hospital trains for our wounded by going about the

French railways at night with an engine and seizing waggons, one at

this station, one at that. He bribed the French station masters who

happened to be awake. It was a lawless proceeding, but, thanks to

him, there were hospital trains. An Englishman would have written

letters about the pressing need and there would not have been

hospital trains for a long time. J. did nothing like that. There was

no need for such violence. Both he and the boys had good friends.

Every one wanted to help, and in the end something got done.

A scheme of physical training was arranged for the boys and they were

placed under the charge of special sergeants. Their names were

registered. I think they were "plotted" into a diagram and exhibited

in curves, which was not much use to them, but helped to soothe the

nerves of authorities. To the official mind anything is hallowed when

it is reduced to curves. The boys underwent special medical

examinations, were weighed and tested at regular intervals. Finally a

club was established for them.

At that point the Y.M.C.A. came to our aid. It gave us the use of one

of the best buildings in the camp, originally meant for an officers'

club. It was generous beyond hope. The house was lighted, heated,

furnished, in many ways transformed, at the expense of the Y.M.C.A.

We were supplied with a magic-lantern, books, games, boxing gloves, a

piano, writing-paper, everything we dared to ask for. Without the

help of the Y.M.C.A. that club could never have come into existence.

And the association deserves credit not only for generosity in

material things, but for its liberal spirit. The club was not run

according to Y.M.C.A. rules, and was an embarrassing changeling child

in their nursery, just as it was a suspicious innovation under the

military system.

We held an opening meeting, and the colonel--one of our most helpful

friends--agreed to give the boys an address. I wonder if any other

club opened quite as that one. In our eagerness to get to work we

took possession of our club house before it was ready for us. There

was no light. There was almost no furniture. There was no

organisation. We had very little in the way of settled plan. But we

had boys, eight or nine hundred of them, about double as many as the

largest room in the building would hold.

They were marched down from their various camps by sergeants. For the

most part they arrived about an hour before the proper time. The

sergeants, quite reasonably, considered that their responsibility

ended when the boys passed through the doors of the club. The boys

took the view that at that moment their opportunity began.

They rioted. Every window in the place was shattered. Everything else

breakable--fortunately there was not much--was smashed into small

bits. A Y.M.C.A. worker, a young man lent to us for the occasion, and

recommended as experienced with boys' clubs in London, fled to a

small room and locked himself in. The tumult became so terrific that

an officer of high standing and importance, whose office was in the

neighbourhood, sent an orderly to us with threats. It was one of the

occasions on which it is good to be an Irishman. We have been

accustomed to riots all our lives, and mind them less than most other

people. We know--this is a fact which Englishmen find it difficult to

grasp--that cheerful rioters seldom mean to do any serious mischief.

Yet, I think, even J.'s heart must have failed him a little. Very

soon the colonel, who was to open the club with his address, would

arrive. He was the best and staunchest of friends. He had fought

battles for the club and patiently combated the objections in high

quarters. But he did like order and discipline.

It was one of our fixed principles, about the only fixed principle we

had at first, that the club was to be run by moral influence, not by

means of orders and threats. Our loyalty to principle was never more

highly tried. It seems almost impossible to bring moral influence to

bear effectively when you cannot make yourself heard and cannot move

about. Yet, somehow, a kind of order was restored; and there was no

uncertainty about the cheers with which the colonel was greeted when

he entered the room. The boys in the other rooms who could not see

him cheered frantically. The boys on the balcony, the boys standing

in the window frames, all cheered. They asked nothing better than to

be allowed to go on cheering.

With the colonel were one or two other officers, our benefactor, the

local head of the Y.M.C.A., and a solitary lady, Miss N. I do not

know even now how she got there or why she came, but she was not half

an hour in the room before we realised that she was the woman, the

one woman in the whole world, for our job. Miss N. was born to deal

with wild boys. The fiercer they are the more she loves them, and the

wickeder they are the more they love her. We had a struggle to get

Miss N. Oddly enough she did not at first want to come to the club,

being at the time deeply attached to some dock labourers among whom

she worked in a slum near the quay. The Y.M.C.A.--she belonged to

them--did not want to part with her. But we got her in the end, and

she became mistress, mother, queen of the club.

The colonel's speech was a success, a thing which seemed beforehand

almost beyond hope. He told those boys the naked truth about

themselves, what they were, what they had been, and what they might

be. They listened to him. I found out later on that those boys would

listen to straight talk on almost any subject, even themselves. Also

that they would not listen to speech-making of the ordinary kind. I

sometimes wonder what will happen when they become grown men and

acquire votes. How will they deal with the ordinary politician?

I cherish vivid recollections of the early days of the club. I think

of J., patient and smiling, surrounded by a surging crowd of boys all

clamouring to talk to him about this or that matter of deep interest

to them. J. had an extraordinary faculty for winning the confidence

of boys.

There were evenings, before the electric light was installed and

before we had any chairs, when Miss N. sat on the floor and played

draughts with boys by the light of a candle standing in its own

grease. I have seen her towed by the skirt through the rooms of the

club by a boy whom the others called "Darkie," an almost perfect

specimen of the London gutter snipe. There was a day when her purse

was stolen. But I think the rest of the club would have lynched the

thief if they could have caught him.

There were wild boxing bouts which went on in pitch darkness, after

the combatants had trampled on the candle. There was one evening when

I came on a boy lying flat on his back on the floor hammering the

keys of the piano, our new piano, with the heels of his boots. The

tuner told me afterwards that he broke seventeen strings.

But we settled down by degrees. We had lectures every afternoon which

were supposed to be--I think actually were--of an educative kind.

Attendance at these lectures was compulsory. The boys were paraded

and marched to the club. As we had not space in our lecture room for

more than half our members, we had one set of boys on Mondays,

Wednesdays, and Fridays, another on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and

Saturdays. Each lecturer delivered himself twice.

The business of keeping up a supply of lectures was not so difficult

as we expected. Officers were very kind and offered us the most

amazing collection of subjects. The secretary of many a literary

society at home would be envious of our list. We accepted every offer

we got, no matter how inappropriate the subject seemed to be.

It was impossible to tell beforehand which lectures would be popular

and which would fail. Military subjects were of course common. We had

"The Navy" with lantern slides. M. gave that lecture, but all his

best slides were banned by the censor, for fear, I suppose, that we

might have a German spy among us and that he would telegraph to

Berlin a description of a light cruiser if M. exhibited one upon the

screen. We had "Men who have won the V.C." with lantern slides. That

was, as was expected, a success. But we also had "Napoleon's

Campaigns" by a Cambridge professor of history, illustrated by

nothing better than a few maps drawn on a blackboard. To our

amazement that was immensely popular. We had "How an Army is fed," by

an A.S.C. officer, the only lecture which produced a vigorous

discussion afterwards.

But we did not confine ourselves to military subjects. We had

lectures on morals, which were sometimes a little confusing. One

lecturer, I remember, starting from the fact that the boys had

misstated their ages to the recruiting officers when they enlisted,

hammered home the fact that all lies are disgraceful, and therefore

our boys ought to be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Another

lecturer, a month later, starting from the same fact, took the line

that it was possible to be _splendide mendax_, and that we had good

reason to be extremely proud all our lives of the lie told in the

recruiting office.

Manners are more or less connected with morals, and we had lectures

on manners; that is to say, on saluting, which is the beginning and

ending of good manners in the army. A good many civilians, especially

those of the intellectual "conchie" kind, are inclined to smile at

the importance soldiers attach to saluting. Our lecturer convinced

me--I hope he convinced the rest of his audience--that saluting is

something more than a piece of tiresome ritual, that it is the

external expression of certain very great ideas.

Occasionally, but not often, we were in difficulties about our

lectures. Some one at home sent us a present of a beautiful set of

lantern slides, illustrating a tour in Egypt. They were such fine

slides that it seemed a pity to waste them. But for a long time we

could not find any one who knew enough about Egypt to attempt a

verbal accompaniment of the slides.

At last we got a volunteer. He said frankly that he did not know half

the places we had pictures of, but offered to do his best. He did

exceedingly well with the places he did know, making the tombs of the

ancient Pharaohs quite interesting to the boys. But he was a

conscientious man. He refused to invent history to suit strange

pictures. When anything he did not recognise was thrown on the screen

he dismissed it rapidly. "This," he would say, "is another tomb,

probably of another king," or "This is a camel standing beside a

ruined archway." Every one was thoroughly satisfied.

We had another set of slides which gave us some trouble, a series of

pictures of racing yachts under sail. I had to take those on myself,

and I was rather nervous. I need not have been. The boys in that club

were capable of taking an interest in any subject under the sun.

Before I got to the last slide the audience was ready to shout the

name of every sail on a racing cutter, and could tell without

hesitation whether a yacht on a run was carrying her spinnaker on the

port or starboard hand. They say that all knowledge is useful. I hope

that it is.

Once or twice a lecturer failed us at the last moment without giving

us notice. Then J. and I had to run an entertainment of an

instructive kind extempore. J. was strong on personal hygiene. He

might start with saluting or the theft of Miss N.'s purse, our great

club scandal, but he worked round in the end to soap and tooth

brushes. My own business, if we were utterly driven against the wall,

was to tell stories.

The most remarkable and interesting lecture we ever had was given on

one of those emergency occasions by one of our members. He

volunteered an account of his experiences in the trenches. He cannot

have been much more than seventeen years old, and ought never to have

been in the trenches. He was undersized and, I should say, of poor

physique. If the proper use of the letter "h" in conversation is any

test of education, this boy must have been very little educated. His

vocabulary was limited, and many of the words he did use are not to

be found in dictionaries. But he stood on the platform and for half

an hour told us what he had seen, endured, and felt, with a

straightforward simplicity which was far more effective than any art.

He disappeared from our midst soon afterwards, and I have never seen

him since. I would give a good deal now to have a verbatim report of

that lecture of his.

When the lecture of the afternoon was over, the club amused itself.

Attendance was no longer compulsory. Boys came and went as they

chose. Order was maintained and enforced by a committee of the boys

themselves. It met once a week, and of all the committees I have ever

known that one was the most rigidly businesslike. I cannot imagine

where the secretary gained his experience of the conduct of public

business; but his appeals to the chair when any one wandered from the

subject under discussion were always made with reason, and he

understood the difference between an amendment and a substantive

resolution.

The only difficulty we ever had with that committee arose from its

passion for making rules. Our idea for the management of the club was

to have as few rules as possible. The committee, if unchecked, would

have out-Heroded the War Office itself in multiplying regulations. I

am inclined to think that it is a mistake to run institutions on

purely democratic lines, not because reasonable liberty would

degenerate into licence, but because there would be no liberty at

all. If democracy ever comes to its own, and the will of the people

actually prevails, we may all find ourselves so tied up with laws

regulating our conduct that we will wish ourselves back under the

control of a tyrant.

It was during those hours of recreation that Miss N. reigned over the

club. She ran a canteen for the boys, boiling eggs, serving tea,

cocoa, malted milk, bread-and-butter, and biscuits. She played games.

She started and inspired sing-songs. She listened with sympathy which

was quite unaffected to long tales of wrongs suffered, of woes and of

joys. She was never without a crowd of boys round her, often clinging

to her, and the offers of help she received must have been

embarrassing to her.

Miss N. had a little room of her own in the club. She furnished it

very prettily, and we used to pretend to admire the view from the

windows. Once we tried to persuade an artist who happened to be in

camp to make a sketch from that window. The artist shrank from the

task. The far background was well enough, trees on the side of a

hill; but the objects in the middle distance were a railway line and

a ditch full of muddy water. In the foreground there were two

incinerators, a dump of old tins, and a Salvation Army hut. I dare

say the artist was right in shrinking from the subject.

In that little room of hers, Miss N. had tea parties every day before

the afternoon lecture. I was often there. Sometimes I brought M. with

me. Always there were boys, as many as the room would hold, often

more than it held comfortably. _Pain d'épice_ is not my favourite

food in ordinary life, but I ate it with delight in that company. No

one, on this side of the grave, will ever know how much Miss N. did

for those boys in a hundred ways. I feebly guess, because I know what

her friendship meant to me. I was, I know, a trial to her. My lax

churchmanship must have shocked her. My want of energy must have

annoyed her. But she remained the most loyal of fellow-workers.

There were breakfast-parties, as well as tea-parties, in Miss N.'s

room on Sunday mornings. We had a celebration of the Holy Communion

at 6 o'clock and afterwards we breakfasted with Miss N. The memory

of one Sunday in particular remains with me. On Easter Sunday in 1915

I celebrated on board the _Lusitania_, a little way outside the

harbour of New York, the congregation kneeling among the arm-chairs

and card-tables of the great smoke-room on the upper deck. In 1916 I

read the same office in the class-room of the Y.S.C., with a rough

wooden table for an altar, a cross made by the camp carpenter and two

candles for furniture, and boys, confirmed ten days before, they and

Miss N., for congregation. Afterwards, in her little room, we had the

happiest of all our parties. Surely our Easter eggs were good to eat.

I have written of the members of the Y.S.C. as boys. They were boys,

but every now and then one or another turned out to be very much a

man in experience. There was one whom I came to know particularly

well. He had been "up the line" and fought. He had been sent down

because at the age of eighteen he could not stand the strain.

I was present in our little military church when he was baptized, and

on the same afternoon confirmed by Bishop Bury. I gave him his

confirmation card and advised him to send it home to his mother for

safety. "I think, sir," he said, "that I would rather send it to my

wife." He was a fellow-citizen of mine, born and bred in Belfast. We

Ulstermen are a forward and progressive people.

CHAPTER X

THE DAILY ROUND

In the camp in which I was first stationed there was a story current

which must, I think, have had a real foundation in fact. It was told

in most messes, and each mess claimed the hero of it as belonging to

its particular camp. It told of a man who believed that the place in

which we were was being continuously and severely shelled by the

Germans. He is reported to have said that war was not nearly so

dangerous a thing as people at home believed, for our casualties were

extraordinarily few. Indeed, there were no casualties at all, and the

shelling to which he supposed himself to be subjected was the most

futile thing imaginable.

A major, a draft-conducting officer, who happened to be with us one

day when this story was told, improved on it boldly.

"As we marched in from the steamer to-day," he said, "we passed a

large field on the right of the road about a mile outside the

camp--perhaps you know it?"

"Barbed wire fence across the bottom of it," I said, "and then a

ditch."

"Exactly," said the major. "Well, one of the N.C.O.'s in my draft,

quite an intelligent man, asked me whether that was the firing line

and whether the ditch was the enemy's trench. He really thought the

Germans were there, a hundred yards from the road we were marching

along."

I daresay the original story was true enough. Even the major's

improved version of it may conceivably have been true. The ordinary

private, and indeed the ordinary officer, when he first lands in

France, has the very vaguest idea of the geography of the country or

the exact position of the place in which he finds himself. For all he

knows he may be within a mile or two of Ypres. And we certainly lived

in that camp with the sounds of war in our ears. We had quite near us

a----Perhaps even now I had better not say what the establishment

was; but there was a great deal of business done with shells, and

guns of various sizes were fired all day long. In the camp we heard

the explosions of the guns. By going a very little way outside the

camp we could hear the whine of the shells as they flew through the

air. We could see them burst near various targets on a stretch of

waste marshy ground.

No one could fail to be aware that shells were being fired in his

immediate neighbourhood. It was not unnatural for a man to suppose

that they were being fired at him. From early morning until dusk

squads of men were shooting, singly or in volleys, on two ranges. The

crackling noise of rifle fire seldom died wholly away. By climbing

the hill on which M. lived, we came close to the schools of the

machine gunners, and could listen to the stuttering of their infernal

instruments. There was another school near by where bombers practised

their craft, making a great deal of noise. So far as sound was

concerned, we really might have been living on some very quiet

section of the front line.

We were in no peril of life or limb. There were only two ways in

which the enemy worried us. His submarines occasionally raided the

neighbourhood of our harbour. Then our letters were delayed and our

supply of English papers was cut off. And we had Zeppelin scares now

and then. I have never gone through a Zeppelin raid, and do not want

to. The threat was quite uncomfortable enough for me.

My first experience of one of these scares was exciting. I had dined,

well, at a hospitable mess and retired afterwards to the colonel's

room to play bridge. There were four of us--the colonel, my friend

J., the camp adjutant, and myself. On one side of the room stood the

colonel's bed, a camp stretcher covered with army blankets. In a

corner stood a washhand-stand, with a real earthenware basin on it. A

basin of this sort was a luxury among us. I had a galvanised iron pot

and was lucky. Many of us washed in folding canvas buckets. But that

colonel did himself well. He had a stove in his room which did not

smoke, and did give out some heat, a very rare kind of stove in the

army. He had four chairs of different heights and shapes and a table

with a dark-red table-cloth. Over our heads was a bright, unshaded

electric light. Our game went pleasantly until--the colonel had

declared two no-trumps--the light went out suddenly without warning.

The camp adjutant immediately said nasty things about the Royal

Engineers, who are responsible for our lights. J. suggested a

Zeppelin scare. The colonel, who wanted to play out his hand,

shouted for an orderly and light. The orderly brought us a miserably

inefficient candle in a stable lantern and set it in the middle of

the table. It was just possible to see our cards, and we played on. I

remembered Stevenson's shipwrecked crew who gambled all night on

Medway Island by the light of a fire of driftwood. I thought of the

men in Hardy's story who finished their game on the grass by the

light of a circle of glow-worms. Our position was uncomfortable but

picturesque.

Another orderly came in and said that the camp adjutant was wanted at

once in his office. We questioned the man and he confirmed J.'s fear

that a Zeppelin scare was in full swing. The adjutant was in the

position of dummy at the moment and could be spared. We played on.

Then a note was brought to J. He was ordered to report at once at the

camp dressing station, and there to stand by for casualties. The

colonel picked up the cards and shuffled them thoughtfully. He meant,

I think, to propose a game of bezique or picquet. But a note came for

him, an order, very urgent, that all lights should immediately be

extinguished. He opened the stable lantern and, sighing, blew out our

candle.

"One blessing about this Zeppelin business," said the colonel, "is

that I don't have to turn out the men on parade."

I was anxious and a little worried because I did not know what my

duties were in a crisis of the kind. "I suppose," I said, "that I

ought to stand by somewhere till the show is over." I looked towards

the colonel for advice, locating him in the darkness by the glow of

his cigar.

"I advise you to go to bed," he said. "I mean to. Most likely nothing

will happen."

I felt my way to the door. The colonel, taking me by the arm, guided

me out of his camp and set me on the main road which led to my

quarters.

I stumbled along through thick darkness, bumping into things which

hurt me. I was challenged again and again by sentries, alert and I

think occasionally jumpy. One of them, I remember, refused to be

satisfied with my reply, though I said "Friend" loudly and clearly. I

have never understood why a mere statement of that kind made by a

stranger in the dark should satisfy an intelligent sentry. But it

generally does.

This particular man--he had only landed from England the day

before--took a serious view of his duty. For all he knew I might

have been a Zeppelin commander, loaded with bombs. He ordered me to

advance and be examined. I obeyed, of course, and at first thought

that he was going to examine me thoroughly, inside and out, with a

bayonet. That is what his attitude suggested. I was quite relieved

when he marched me into the guard-room and paraded me before the

sergeant. The sergeant, fortunately, recognised me and let me go.

Otherwise I suppose I should have spent a very uncomfortable night in

a cell. I am not at all sure that military law allows a prisoner's

friends to bail him out.

I reached my hut at last and made haste to get into bed. It was a

most uncomfortable business. I could not find my toothbrush. I spent

a long time feeling about for my pyjamas. I did not dare even to

strike a match. An hour later some hilarious subalterns walked along

the whole row of huts and lobbed stones on to the roofs. The idea was

to suggest to the inmates that bombs were falling in large numbers.

It was a well-conceived scheme; for the roofs of those huts were of

corrugated iron and the stones made an abominable noise. But I do not

think that any one was deceived. A major next door to me swore

vehemently.

Our French neighbours did not take much notice of these alarms. The

row of lamps in the little railway station near the camp shone

cheerfully while we were plunged in gloom. The inhabitants of the

houses on the hill at the far side of the valley did not even take

the trouble to pull down their window blinds. Either the French are

much less afraid of Zeppelins than we are or they never heard the

alarms which caused us so much inconvenience. These scares became

very frequent in the early spring of 1916 and always worried us.

After a while some one started a theory that there never had been any

Zeppelins in our neighbourhood and that none were likely to come. It

was possible that our local Head-Quarters Staff was simply playing

tricks on us. An intelligent staff officer would, in time, be almost

sure to think of starting a Zeppelin scare if he had not much to

occupy his mind. He would defend his action by saying that an alarm

of any kind keeps men alert and is good for discipline.

But staff officers, though skilful in military art, are not always

well up in general literature. Ours, perhaps, had never read the

"Wolf, wolf," fable, and did not anticipate the result of their

action. As time went on we took less and less notice of the Zeppelin

warnings until at last the whole thing became a joke. If a Zeppelin

had come to us towards the end of March it would have had the whole

benefit of all the lights which shone through our tents and windows,

whatever that guidance might be worth.

The Zeppelins which did not come caused us on the whole more

annoyance than the submarines which did. It was, of course,

irritating when the English post did not arrive at the usual hour. It

always did arrive in the end--being carried by some other route,

though our own proper steamer neither went in nor out.

But if we, the regular inhabitants of the place, suffered little

inconvenience from the submarines, the officers and men who passed

through the town on their way home on leave were sometimes held up

for days. The congestion became acute. Beds were very difficult to

obtain. The officers' club filled up and the restaurants reaped a

harvest.

The authorities on these occasions behave in a peculiarly irritating

way. They will not, perhaps cannot, promise that their steamer will

sail at any particular hour or indeed on any particular day. Nor

will they give an assurance that it will not sail. The eager

traveller is expected to sit on his haversack on the quay and watch,

day and night, lest the ship of his desire should slip out unknown to

him. It is, of course, impossible for any one to do this for very

long, and an M.L.O.--M.L.O.'s are sometimes humane men--will drop a

hint that the steamer will stay where she is for two or even four

hours. Then the watchers make a dash for club, hotel, or restaurant,

at their own risk, of course; the M.L.O. gives no kind of promise or

guarantee.

There was at that time, probably still is, a small shop not far from

Base Head-Quarters which had over its door the words "Mary's Tea," in

large letters. The name was an inspiration. It suggested "England,

home, and beauty," everything dearest to the heart of the young

officer in a strange land. As a matter of fact there was nothing

English about the place. The cakes sold were delightfully French. The

tea was unmistakably not English. The shop was run by five or six

girls with no more than a dozen words of English among them. When the

leave boat was held up "Mary's Tea" was crammed with young officers.

I remember seeing a party of these cheery boys sitting down to a

square meal one afternoon. They were still wearing their trench boots

and fighting kit. They were on their way home from the front and they

were hungry, especially hungry for cakes. There were four of them.

"Mary"--they called all the girls Mary, the name of the shop invited

that familiarity--brought them tea and a dish piled high with cakes,

frothy meringues, pastry sandwiches with custard in the middle,

highly ornamental sugary pieces of marzipan, all kinds of delicate

confectionery. After the fare of the trenches these were dreams of

delight, but not very satisfying. The dish was cleared. The

spokesman, the French scholar of the party, demanded more. "Mary"--he

did not translate the name into "Marie"--"_encore gâteaux, au moins

trois douzaine_." Mary, smiling, fetched another dish. I suppose she

kept count. I did not, nor I am sure did the feasters. They finished

those and repeated the encore. The _au moins trois douzaine_ was a

ridiculous under-estimate of their requirements. It might have been

multiplied by five.

In the end there were no more _gâteaux_. The stock was sold out. It

was not a large shop and many others had drunk tea there that

afternoon. The boys paid their bill and left, still astonishingly

cheerful. I cannot remember whether the boat sailed that night or

not. I hope it did. I hope the sea was rough. I should not like to

think that those boys--the eldest of them cannot have been

twenty-one--suffered from indigestion during their leave. Nothing but

a stormy crossing would have saved them.

If the spirit of the playing fields of our public schools won, as

they say, our great-grandfathers' war, the spirit of the tuck shop is

showing up in this one. The lessons learned as boys in those

excellent institutions have been carried into France. Tea shops and

restaurants at the bases, audacious _estaminets_ near the front,

witness to the fact that we wage war with something of the spirit of

schoolboys with pocket money to spend on "grub."

Nobody will grudge our young officers their boyish taste for innocent

feasts. It is a boys' war anyway. Everything big and bright in it,

the victories we have won, the cheerfulness and the enduring and the

daring, go to the credit of the young. It is the older men who have

done the blundering and made the muddles, whenever there have been

blundering and muddles.

"Mary's Tea" was for officers. The men were invited to "English

Soldiers' Coffee." It, too, was a tea shop and had a good position in

one of the main streets of the town. But the name was not so well

devised as Mary's Tea. It puzzled me for some time and left me

wondering what special beverage was sold inside. I discovered at last

that "Coffee" was a thoughtful translation of _Café_, a word which

might have been supposed to puzzle an English soldier, though indeed

very few French words puzzle him for long.

I was never inside "English Soldiers' Coffee." But I have no doubt it

would have been just as popular if it had called itself a _café_ or

even an _estaminet_. The case of "Mary's Tea" was different. Its name

made it. Half its customers would have passed it by if it had

announced itself unromantically as "Five o'clock" or "Afternoon Tea."

CHAPTER XI

ANOTHER JOURNEY

"_'Tis but in vain for soldiers to complain._" That jingle occurs

over and over again in Wolfe Tone's autobiography. It contains his

philosophy of life. I learned to appreciate the wisdom of it before I

had been a week in the army. I said it over and over to myself. If I

had kept a diary I should have written it as often as Wolfe Tone did.

I had need of all its consolation when the time came for me to leave

H.

One evening--I was particularly busy at the moment in the Y.S.C.--an

orderly summoned me to the chaplain's office to answer a telephone

call. I learned that orders had come through for my removal from H.

to B. I had twenty-four hours' notice. That is more than most men

get, double as much as an officer gets who is sent up the line. Yet I

felt irritated. I am getting old and I hate being hustled. Also I

felt quite sure that there was no need for any kind of hurry.

As it appeared in the end I might just as well have had three or four

more days quietly at H. and started comfortably. I arrived at my

destination, a little breathless, to find I was not wanted for a

week. My new senior chaplain was greatly surprised to see me. My

predecessor had not given up the post I was to fill. There was

nothing for me to do and nowhere for me to go. I spent several days,

most unprofitably, in B. which I might have spent usefully in H. But

this is the way things are done in the army, sometimes; in the

Chaplains' Department generally. And "_'Tis but in vain for soldiers

to complain_."

I fully expected to make a bad start on my new journey. Having been

fussed I was irritable. I had spent a long day trying to do twenty

things in a space of time which would barely have sufficed for ten of

them. I had been engaged in an intermittent struggle with various

authorities for permission to take my servant with me, a matter which

my colonel arranged for me in the end.

I was in the worst possible mood when I reached the station from

which I had to start--a large shed, very dimly lit, designed for

goods traffic, not for passengers. Oddly enough I began to recover my

temper the moment I entered the station. I became aware that the

whole business of the starting of this great supply train was almost

perfectly organised, so well organised that it ran more smoothly,

with less noise and agitation, than goes to the nightly starting of

the Irish mail from Euston.

The train itself, immensely long, was drawn up the whole length of

the station and reached out for a distance unknown to me into the

darkness beyond the station. There were passenger coaches and horse

waggons. Every waggon was plainly labelled with the number of men to

go in it and the name of the unit to which they belonged. The windows

of every compartment of the passenger coaches bore the names of four

officers. A fool could have been in no doubt about where he had to

go. The fussiest traveller could have had no anxiety about finding a

seat. Each party of men was drawn up opposite its own part of the

train. The men's packs and arms were on the ground in front of them.

They waited the order to take their places. Competent N.C.O.'s with

lanterns walked up and down the whole length of the station, ready

with advice and help when advice and help were needed.

It was my good fortune that I had to visit in his office the R.T.O.,

the organising genius of the start. My servant arrived at the last

moment, an unexpected traveller for whom no provision had been made.

The order which permitted him to accompany me reached him only after

I had left the camp. I fully expected to be snubbed, perhaps cursed,

by that R.T.O. I was an utterly unimportant traveller. I was

upsetting, at the very moment of starting, his thought-out

arrangements. He would have been fully justified in treating me with

scant courtesy.

I found him cool, collected, complete master of every detail. He was

friendly, sympathetic, ready with an instant solution of the

difficulty of my servant. He even apologised--surely an unnecessary

apology--for the discomfort I was likely to suffer through having to

spend the night in a compartment with three other officers. I do not

know the name of that R.T.O. I wish I did. I can only hope that his

abilities have been recognised and that he is now commander-in-chief

of all R.T.O.'s.

The night was not very unpleasant after all. My three

fellow-travellers were peaceable men who neither snored nor kicked

wildly when asleep. I slumbered profoundly and did not wake till the

train came to a standstill on an embankment. There was no obvious

reason why the train should have stopped in that particular place for

half an hour or why it should have spent another three-quarters of an

hour in covering the last mile which separated us from the station.

But I know by experience that trains, even in peace time, become very

leisurely in approaching that particular city. They seem to wander

all round the place before finally settling down.

In peace time, travelling as a tourist, one does not complain. The

city is rich in spires and there are nice views to be got from the

railway carriage windows. We got rather too much of those views that

morning. Even Wordsworth, though he did write an early morning sonnet

on Westminster Bridge, would not have cared to meditate on "Houses

Asleep" for an hour and a quarter before he got a wash or anything to

eat.

I interviewed the R.T.O. when I reached the station and found that I

could not continue my journey till 5 o'clock in the afternoon. I was

not altogether sorry to have the whole day before me in a town which

I had never visited. I recollected that I had a cousin stationed

there and made up my mind to rely on him, if I could find him, for

entertainment.

My servant's lot was less fortunate. He belonged, of course, to that

part of the army which is officially described as "other ranks"; and

only commissioned officers are trusted to wander at will through that

town. The "other ranks" spend the day in the railway station. They

are dependent on a Y.M.C.A. canteen for food and on themselves for

amusement.

I spent a pleasant day, finding my cousin quite early and visiting

with him a large number of churches. Some day I mean to work out

thoroughly the connection between that town and Ireland and discover

why pious Frenchmen dedicated several of their churches to Irish

saints.

At 4 o'clock--I like to be in good time for trains--I went back to

the station. My servant was sitting patiently on my valise. A long

train lay ready. As in the train in which I had travelled the night

before, all the coaches and waggons were carefully and clearly

labelled, but this time with the names of the places to which they

were going. I went the whole length of the train and read every

label. No single carriage was labelled for B., my destination. I

walked all the way back again and read all the labels a second time.

Then I fell back on the R.T.O. for guidance. I found not the man I

had met in the morning, but a subordinate of his.

"I'm going," I said, "or rather I hope to go to B. What part of the

train do you think I ought to get into?"

"What does your party consist of?" he asked. "How many men have you?"

"One," I said. "You can hardly call it a party at all. There's only

my servant and myself."

He lost all interest in me at once. I do not wonder. A man who is

accustomed to deal with battalions, squadrons, and batteries cannot

be expected to pay much attention to a lonely padre. I quite

understood his feelings.

"Still," I said, "I've got to get there."

"You can't get to B. in that train," he said. "It doesn't go there."

I was not prepared to sit down under that rebuff without a struggle.

"The R.T.O. who was here this morning," I said, "told me to travel by

this train."

"Sorry," he said. "But you can't, or if you do you won't get to B."

"How am I to get there?" I asked.

"I don't know that you can."

"Do you mean," I said, "that no train ever goes there?"

He considered this and replied cautiously.

"There might be a train to-morrow," he said, "or next day."

The prospect was not a pleasant one; but I knew that R.T.O.'s are not

infallible. Sometimes they have not the dimmest idea where trains are

going. I left the office and wandered about the station until I found

the officer in command of the train. He was a colonel, and I was, of

course, a little nervous about addressing a colonel. But this colonel

had kindly eyes and a sorrowful face. He looked like a man on whom

fate had laid an intolerable burden. I threw myself on his mercy.

"Sir," I said, "I want to go to B. I am ordered to report myself

there. I am trying to take my servant with me. What am I to do?"

That colonel looked at me with a slow, mournful smile.

"This train," he said, "isn't supposed to go to B. You can't expect

me to take it there just to suit you?"

He waved his hand towards the train. It was enormously long. Already

several hundred men were crowding into it. I could not expect to have

the whole thing diverted from its proper course for my sake. I stood

silent, looking as forlorn and helpless as I could. My one hope, I

felt, lay in an appeal to that colonel's sense of pity.

"We shall pass through T. to-morrow morning about 6 o'clock," he

said.

That did not help me much. I had never heard of T. before. But

something in the colonel's tone encouraged me. I looked up and hoped

that there were tears in my eyes.

"T.," said the colonel, "is quite close to B. In fact it is really

part of B., a sort of suburb."

That seemed to me good enough.

"Take me there," I said, "and I'll manage to get a taxi or

something."

"But," said the colonel, "my train does not stop at T. We simply pass

through the station. But I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll slow down

as we go through. You be ready to jump out. Tell your servant to

fling out your valise and jump after it. You won't have much time,

for the platform isn't very long, but if you're ready and don't

hesitate you'll be all right."

I babbled words of gratitude. The prospect of a leap from a moving

train at 6 a.m. was exhilarating. I might hope that I should find my

servant and my luggage rolling over me on the platform when I reached

it. Then all would be well. The colonel, moved to further kindness by

my gratitude, invited me to travel in a coach which was specially

reserved for his use.

The art of travelling comfortably in peace or war lies in knowing

when to bully, when to bribe, and when to sue. Neither bullying nor

bribing would have got me to B. If I had relied on those methods I

should not have arrived there for days, should perhaps never have

arrived there, should certainly have been most uncomfortable. By

assuming the manner, and as far as possible the appearance, of a

small child lost in London I moved the pity of the only man who could

have helped me. But those circumstances were exceptional. As a

general rule I think bullying and bribing are better ways of getting

what you want on a journey.

I travelled in great comfort. There were three of us--the colonel, a

colonial commissioner, in uniform but otherwise unconnected with the

army, and myself. There was also the colonel's servant, who cooked a

dinner for us on a Primus stove.

The train stopped frequently at wayside stations. There was no

conceivable reason why it should have stopped at all. We neither

discharged nor took up any passengers. But the halts were a source of

entertainment for the men. Most of them and all the officers got out

every time the train stopped. It was the duty of the colonel, as O.C.

Train, to see that they all got in again.

It was a laborious job, not unlike that of a sheep dog. The colonial

commissioner and I tried to help. I do not think we were much use.

But I have this to my credit. I carried a message to the engine

driver and told him to whistle loud and long before he started.

Having read long ago Matthew Arnold's Essay on Heine, I know the

French for "whistle" or a word which conveyed the idea of whistling

to the engine driver.

When it became dark the worst of this labour was over for the

colonel. The men stayed in their carriages. I suppose they went to

sleep. We dined. It was a pleasant and satisfying meal. We all

contributed to it. The colonel's servant produced soup, hot and

strong, tasting slightly of catsup, made out of small packets of

powder labelled "Oxtail." Then we had bully beef--perhaps the

"unexpended portion" of the colonel's servant's day's rations--and

sandwiches, which I contributed. By way of pudding we had bread and

marmalade. The colonial commissioner produced the marmalade from his

haversack. I had some cheese, a Camembert, and the colonel's servant

brought us sardines on toast, and coffee. We all had flasks and the

colonel kept a supply of Perrier water. Men have fared worse on

supply trains.

After dinner I taught the colonel and the commissioner to play my

favourite kind of patience. I do not suppose the game was ever much

use to the commissioner. In his colony life is a strenuous business.

But I like to think that I did the colonel a good turn. His business

was to travel up to the rail head in supply trains full of men, and

then to travel down again in the same train empty. When I realised

that he had been at this work for months and expected to be at it for

years I understood why he looked depressed. Train commanding must be

a horrible business, only one degree better than draft conducting. To

a man engaged in it a really absorbing kind of patience must be a

boon.

The next morning the colonel woke me early and warned me to be ready

for my leap. In due time he set me on the step of the carriage. He

took all my coats, rugs, and sticks from me. The train slowed down. I

caught sight of the platform. The colonel said "Now." I jumped. My

coats and rugs fell round me in a shower. My servant timed the thing

well. My valise came to earth at one end of the platform. The man's

own kit fell close to me. He himself lit on his feet at the far end

of the platform. The train gathered speed again. I waved a farewell

to my benefactor and the colonial commissioner.

CHAPTER XII

MADAME

Madame was certainly an old woman, if age is counted by years. She

had celebrated her golden wedding before the war began. But in heart

she was young, a girl.

I cherish, among many, one special picture of Madame. It was a fine,

warm afternoon in early summer. The fountain at the lower end of the

garden spouted its little jet into the air. Madame loved the

fountain, and set it working on all festive occasions and whenever

she felt particularly cheerful. I think she liked to hear the water

splashing among the water-lily leaves in the stone basin where the

goldfish swam. Behind the fountain the flowers were gay and the fruit

trees pleasantly green round a marvellous terra-cotta figure,

life-size, of an ancient warrior. Below the fountain was a square,

paved court, sunlit, well warmed.

Madame sat in a wicker chair, her back to the closed green jalousies

of the dining-room window. Beside her was her workbox. On her knees

was a spread of white linen. Madame held it a sacred duty _visiter la

linge_ once a week; and no tear remained undarned or hole unpatched

for very long. As she sewed she sang, in a thin, high voice, the

gayest little songs, full of unexpected trills and little passages of

dancing melody.

Madame was mistress. There was no mistake about that. Monsieur was a

retired business man who had fought under General Faidherbe in the

Franco-Prussian war. He was older than Madame, a very patient, quiet

gentleman. He was a little deaf, which was an advantage to him, for

Madame scolded him sometimes. He read newspapers diligently, tended

the pear trees in the garden, and did messages for Madame.

There was also Marie, a distant cousin of Monsieur's, herself the

owner of a small farm in Brittany, who was--I know no term which

expresses her place in the household. She was neither servant nor

guest, and in no way the least like what I imagine a "lady-help" to

be. She was older than Madame, older, I fancy, even than Monsieur,

and she went to Mass every morning. Madame was more moderate in her

religion. Monsieur, I think, was, or once had been, a little

anti-clerical.

Madame was the most tender-hearted woman I have ever met. She loved

all living things, even an atrocious little dog called Fifi, half

blind, wholly deaf, and given to wheezing horribly. Only once did I

see her really angry. A neighbour went away from home for two days,

leaving a dog tied up without food or water in his yard. We climbed

the wall and, with immense difficulty, brought the creature to

Madame. She trembled with passion while she fed it. She would have

done bodily harm to the owner if she could.

She did not even hate Germans. Sometimes at our midday meal Monsieur

would read from the paper an account of heavy German casualties or an

estimate of the sum total of German losses. He chuckled. So many more

dead Boches. So much the better for the world. But Madame always

sighed. "_Les pauvres garçons_," she said. "_C'est terrible,

terrible._" Then perhaps Monsieur, good patriot, asserted himself and

declared that the Boche was better dead. And Madame scolded him for

his inhumanity. Our own wounded--_les pauvres blessés_--we mentioned

as little as possible. Madame wept at the thought of them, and it

was not pleasant to see tears in her bright old eyes.

But for all her tender-heartedness Madame did not, so far as I ever

could discover, do much for the men of her own nation or of ours. An

Englishwoman, in her position and with her vitality, would have sat

on half a dozen committees, would have made bandages at a War Work

Depot, or packed parcels for prisoners; would certainly have knitted

socks all day. Madame did no such things. She managed her own house,

mended her own linen, and she darned my socks--which was I suppose, a

kind of war work, since I wore uniform.

The activities of Englishwomen rather scandalised her. The town was

full of nurses, V.A.D.'s, and canteen workers. Madame was too

charitable to criticise, but I think she regarded the _jeune fille

Anglaise_ as unbecomingly emancipated. She would have been sorry to

see her own nieces--Madame had many nieces, but no child of her

own--occupied as the English girls were.

I have always wondered why Madame took English officers to board in

her house. She did not want the money we paid her, for she and

Monsieur were well off. Indeed she asked so little of us, and fed us

so well, that she cannot possibly have made a profit. And we must

have been a nuisance to her.

In England Madame would have been called "house proud." She loved

every stick of her fine old-fashioned furniture. Polishing of stairs

and floors was a joy to her. We tramped in and out in muddy boots. We

scattered tobacco ashes. We opened bedroom windows, even on wet

nights, and rain came in. We used monstrous and unheard-of quantities

of water. Yet no sooner had one guest departed than Madame grew

impatient to receive another.

On one point alone Madame was obstinate. She objected in the

strongest way to baths in bedrooms. As there was no bathroom in the

house, this raised a difficulty. Madame's own practice--she once

explained it to me--was to take her bath on the evening of the first

Monday in every month--in the kitchen, I think. My predecessors and

my contemporaries refused to be satisfied without baths. Madame

compromised. If they wanted baths they must descend to _le cave_, a

deep underground cellar where Monsieur kept wine.

I, and I believe I alone of all Madame's guests, defeated her. I

should like to believe that she gave in to me because she loved me;

but I fear that I won my victory by unfair means. I refused to

understand one word that Madame said, either in French or English,

about baths. I treated the subject in language which I am sure was

dark to her. I owned a bath of my own and gave my servant orders to

bring up sufficient water every morning, whatever Madame said. He

obeyed me, and I washed myself, more or less. Madame took her defeat

well. She collected quantities of old blankets, rugs, sacks, and bed

quilts. She spread them over the parts of the floor where my bath was

placed. I tried, honourably, to splash as little as possible and

always stood on a towel while drying myself.

After all Madame had reason on her side. Water is bad for polished

floors, and it is very doubtful whether the human skin is any the

better for it. Most of our rules of hygiene are foolish. We think a

daily bath is wholesome. We clamour for fresh air. We fuss about

drains. Madame never opened a window and had a horror of a _courant_

_d'air_. The only drain connected with the house ran into the well

from which our drinking water came. Yet Madame had celebrated her

golden wedding and was never ill. Monsieur and Marie were even older

and could still thoroughly enjoy a _jour de fête_.

Madame had a high sense of duty towards her guests. She and Marie

cooked wonderful meals for us and even made pathetic efforts to

produce _le pudding_, a thing strange to them which they were

convinced we loved. She mended our clothes and sewed on buttons. She

pressed us, anxiously, to remain _tranquille_ for a proper period

after meals.

She did her best to teach us French. She tried to induce me--she

actually had induced one of my predecessors--to write French

exercises in the evenings. She made a stringent rule that no word of

English was ever to be spoken at meals. I think that this was a real

self-denial to Madame. She knew a little English--picked up sixty

years before when she spent one term in a school near Folkestone. She

liked to air it; but for the sake of our education she denied

herself. We used to sit at dinner with a dictionary--English-French

and French-English--on the table. We referred to it when stuck, and

on the whole we got on well in every respect except one.

Madame had an eager desire to understand and appreciate English

jokes, and of all things a joke is the most difficult to translate. A

fellow-lodger once incautiously repeated to me a joke which he had

read in a paper. It ran thus: "First British Soldier (in a French

Restaurant): 'Waiter, this 'am's 'igh. 'Igh 'am. _Compris?_' Second

British Soldier: 'You leave it to me, Bill. I know the lingo.

_Garçon, Je suis._'"

I laughed. Madame looked at me and at W., my fellow-lodger, and

demanded a translation of the joke. I referred the matter to W. His

French was, if possible, worse than mine, but it was he who had

started the subject. "Ham," I said to him, "is _jambon_. Go ahead."

W. went ahead, but "high" in the sense he wanted did not seem to be

in the dictionary. I had a try when W. gave up and began with an

explanation of the cockney's difficulty with the letter "h." Madame

smiled uncomprehendingly. W., who had studied the dictionary while I

talked, made a fresh start at "_je suis_." "_Je suis_--I am.

_Jambon_--ham, _c'est à dire ''am' à Londres_.'" We worked away all

through that meal. At supper, Madame, still full of curiosity, set us

at it again.

We pursued that joke for several days until we were all exhausted,

and Madame, politely, said she saw the point, though she did not and

never will. I do not believe that joke can be translated into French.

Months afterwards I had as fellow-lodger a man who spoke French well

and fluently. I urged him to try if he could make Madame understand.

He failed.

Madame was most hospitable. She was neither worried nor cross when we

asked friends to dine with us. Indeed she was pleased. But she liked

due notice so that she could devote proper attention to _la cuisine_.

M., who was at that time with a cavalry brigade, used to come and

spend a night or two with me sometimes. He was a special favourite

with Madame and she used to try to load him with food when he was

leaving. One very wet day in late autumn, Madame produced a large

brown-paper bag and filled it with pears. She presented it to M. with

a pretty speech of which he did not understand a word. M. was

seriously embarrassed. He liked Madame and did not want to hurt her

feelings; but he had before him a railway journey of some hours and

then five miles on horseback. It is impossible to carry a brown-paper

bag full of pears on a horse through a downpour of rain. The bag

gets sopped at once and the pears fall through it. M. pushed the bag

back to Madame.

"_Merci, merci_," he said. "_Mais non, pas possible._"

Madame explained that the pears were deliciously ripe, which was

true.

M. said, "_À cheval, Madame, je voyage à cheval_."

Madame pushed the bag into his hands. He turned to me.

"For goodness' sake explain to her--politely, of course--that I can't

take that bag of pears. I'd like to. They'd be a godsend to the mess.

But I can't."

Madame saw the impossibility in the end; but she stuffed as many

pears as she could into his pocket, and he went off bulging

unbecomingly.

M. used to complain that he ate too much when he came to stay with

me. I confess that our midday meal--we ate it at noon, conforming to

the custom of the house--was heavy. And Madame was old-fashioned in

her idea of the behaviour proper to a hostess. She insisted on our

eating whether we wanted to eat or not, and was vexed if we refused

second and even third helpings.

Madame was immensely interested in food and we talked about marketing

and cookery every day. I came, towards the end of my stay, to have a

fair knowledge of kitchen French. I could have attended cookery

lectures with profit. I could even have taught a French servant how

to stew a rabbit in such a way that it appeared at table brown, with

thick brown sauce and a flavour of red wine. The marketing for the

family was done by Madame and Marie, Marie in a high, stiff, white

head-dress, carrying a large basket.

On the subject of prices Madame was intensely curious. She wanted to

know exactly what everything cost in England and Ireland. I used to

write home for information, and then we did long and confusing sums,

translating stones or pounds into kilos and shillings into francs;

Monsieur intervening occasionally with information about the rate of

exchange at the moment. Madame insisted on taking this into account

in comparing the cost of living in the two countries. Then we used to

be faced with problems which I regard as insoluble.

Perhaps a sum of this kind might be set in an arithmetic paper for

advanced students. "Butter is 2_s._ 1_d._ a pound. A kilo is rather

more than two pounds. The rate of exchange is 27·85. What would that

butter cost in France?"

We had an exciting time when the municipal authorities of the town in

which we lived introduced fixed prices. Madame, who is an entirely

sensible woman, was frankly sceptical from the start about the

possibility of regulating prices. Gendarmes paraded the market-place,

where on certain days the countrywomen sat in rows, their vegetables,

fowl, eggs, and butter exposed for sale. They declined, of course, to

accept the fixed prices. Madame and her friends, though they hated

being overcharged, recognised the strength of the countrywomen's

position. There was a combination between the buyers and sellers.

The gendarmes were out-witted in various ways. One plan--Madame

explained it to me with delight--was to drop a coin, as if by

accident, into the lap of the countrywoman who was selling butter.

Ten minutes later the purchaser returned and bought the butter under

the eyes of a satisfied policeman at the fixed price. The original

coin represented the difference between what the butter woman was

willing to accept and what the authorities thought she ought to get.

That experiment in municipal control of prices lasted about a month.

Then the absurdity of the thing became too obvious. The French are

much saner than the English in this. They do not go on pretending to

do things once it becomes quite plain that the things cannot be done.

Food shortage--much more serious now--was beginning to be felt while

I lived with Madame. There were difficulties about sugar, and

Monsieur had to give up a favourite kind of white wine. But neither

he nor Madame complained much; though they belonged to the _rentier_

class and were liable to suffer more than those whose incomes were

capable of expansion. No one, so far as I know, appealed to them to

practise economy in a spirit of lofty patriotism. They simply did

with a little less of everything with a shrug of the shoulders and a

smiling reference to the good times coming _après la guerre_. And, on

occasion, economy was forgotten and we feasted.

One of the last days I spent in Madame's house was New Year's Day,

1917. I and my fellow-lodger, another padre, were solemnly invited to

a dinner that night. It was a family affair. All Madame's nieces,

married and single, were there, and their small children, two

grand-nieces and a grand-nephew. Madame's one nephew, wounded in the

defence of Verdun, was there.

Our usual table was greatly enlarged. The folding doors between the

drawing-room and dining-room were flung open. We had a blaze of lamps

and candles. We began eating at 6.30 p.m.; we stopped shortly after

10 p.m. But this was no brutal gorge. We ate slowly, with

discrimination. We paused long between the courses. Once or twice we

smoked. Once the grand-niece and grand-nephew recited for us,

standing up, turn about, on their chairs, and declaiming with fluency

and much gesture what were plainly school-learnt poems. One of

Madame's nieces, passing into the drawing-room, played us a pleasant

tune on the piano. At each break I thought that dinner was over. I

was wrong time after time. We talked, smoked, listened, applauded,

and then more food was set before us.

There were customs new to me. At the appearance of the plum

pudding--a very English pudding--we all rose from our seats and

walked in solemn procession round the table. Each of us, as we passed

the sacred dish, basted it with a spoonful of blazing rum, and, as

we basted, made our silent wish. We formed pigs out of orange skins

and gave them lighted matches for tails. By means of these we

discovered which of us would be married or achieve other good fortune

in the year to come. We drank five different kinds of wine, a sweet

champagne coming by itself, a kind of dessert wine, at the very end

of dinner, accompanied by small sponge cakes.

The last thing of all was, oddly enough, tea. Like most French tea it

was tasteless, but we remedied that with large quantities of sugar

and we ate with it a very rich cake soaked in syrup, which would have

deprived the fiercest Indian tea of any flavour.

I think Madame was supremely happy all the evening. I think every one

else was happy too. I have never met more courteous people. In the

midst of the most hilarious talk and laughter a niece would stop

laughing suddenly and repeat very slowly for my benefit what the fun

was about. Even when the soldier nephew told stories which in England

would not have been told so publicly, a niece would take care that I

did not miss the point.

Madame's drawing-room was very wonderful. At one time she had known a

painter, a professor of painting in a school near her home. He

adorned the walls of her drawing-room with five large oil-paintings,

done on the plaster of the wall and reaching from the ceiling to very

near the floor. Four of them represented the seasons of the year, and

that artist was plainly a man who might have made a good income

drawing pictures for the lids of chocolate boxes. His fur-clad lady

skating (Winter) would have delighted any confectioner. The fifth

picture was a farmyard scene in which a small girl appeared, feeding

ducks. This was the most precious of all the pictures. The little

girl was Madame's niece, since married and the mother of a little

girl of her own.

The furniture was kept shrouded in holland and the jalousies were

always shut except when Madame exhibited the room. I saw the

furniture uncovered twice, and only twice. It was uncovered on the

occasion of the New Year's feast, and Madame displayed her room in

all its glory on the afternoon when I invited to tea a lady who was

going to sing for the men in one of my camps.

I think that all Madame's lodgers loved her, though I doubt if any of

them loved her as dearly as I did. Letters used to arrive for her

from different parts of the war area conveying news of the officers

who had lodged with her. She always brought them to me to translate.

I fear she was not much wiser afterwards. She never answered any of

them. Nor has she ever answered me, though I should greatly like to

hear how she, Monsieur, Marie, Fifi, and Turque are getting on.

Turque was a large dog, the only member of the household who was not

extremely old.

CHAPTER XIII

"THE CON. CAMP"

We always spoke of it, affectionately and proudly, as "the Con.

Camp." The abbreviation was natural enough, for "convalescent" is a

mouthful of a word to say, besides being very difficult to spell. I

have known a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England come to

grief over the consonants of the last two syllables in addressing an

envelope to me; and there was a story of a very august visitor, asked

to write in an album, who inquired about a vowel and was given the

wrong one by one of the staff. If those doubtful spellers had known

our pleasant abbreviation they would have escaped disaster.

To us the "Con." justified itself from every point of view. I am not

sure that we had an equal right to the conceited use of the definite

article. There are other "Con." camps in France, many of them. We

spoke of them by their numbers. Ours had a number too, but we rarely

used it. We were _The_ Con. Camp. Our opinion was no doubt

prejudiced; but the authorities seemed to share it. The Con. Camp was

one of the show places of the British Army. Distinguished visitors

were always brought there.

The Government, the War Office, or whoever it is who settles such

things, encourages distinguished visitors to inspect the war. There

is a special officer set apart to conduct tourists from place to

place and to show them the things they ought to see. He is provided

with several motor-cars, a nice château, and a good cook. This is

sensible. If you want a visitor to form a favourable opinion of

anything, war, industry, or institution, you must make him fairly

comfortable and feed him well.

Yet I think that the life of that officer was a tiresome one. There

was very little variety in his programme. He showed the same things

over and over again, and he heard the same remarks made over and over

again about the things he showed. Sometimes, of course, a

distinguished visitor with a reputation for originality made a new

remark. But that was worse. It is better to have to listen to an

intelligent comment a hundred times than to hear an unintelligent

thing said once. Any new remark was sure to be stupid, because all

the intelligent things had been said before.

To us, who lived in the Con. Camp, distinguished visitors, though

common, were not very tiresome. We were not obliged to entertain them

for very long at a time. They arrived at the camp about 3.30 p.m.,

and our C.O. showed them round. After inspecting an incinerator, a

tent, a bath, a Y.M.C.A. hut, and a kitchen, they came to the mess

for tea. Our C.O. was a man of immense courtesy and tact. He could

answer the same question about an incinerator twice a week without

showing the least sign of ever having heard it before.

I have often wondered who selected the distinguished visitors, and on

what principle the choice was made. Whoever he was he cast his net

widely.

Journalists of course abounded, American journalists chiefly--this

was in 1916--but we had representatives of Dutch, Norwegian, Swiss,

Italian, Spanish, Russian, and South American papers. Once we even

had a Roumanian, a most agreeable man, but I never felt quite sure

whether he was a journalist or a diplomatist. Perhaps he was both.

Authors--writers of books rather than articles--were common and

sometimes were quite interesting, though given to asking too many

questions. It ought to be impressed on distinguished visitors that it

is their business to listen to what they are told, and not to ask

questions.

Politicians often came. We once had a visit from Mr. Lloyd George,

but I missed that to my grief.

Generals and staff officers from neutral countries came occasionally

in very attractive uniforms.

Doctors always seemed to me more successful than other people in

keeping up an appearance of intelligent interest.

Ecclesiastics were dull. They evidently considered it bad form to

allude to religion in any way and they did not know much about

anything else. But ecclesiastics were rare.

Royalties, I think, excited us most. We once had a visit from a king,

temporarily exiled from his kingdom. He wore the most picturesque

clothes I have ever seen off the stage and he was very gracious. All

of our most strikingly wounded men--those who wore visible

bandages--were paraded for his inspection. He walked down the line,

followed by a couple of aides-de-camp, some French officers of high

rank, an English general, our C.O., and then the rest of us. Our band

played a tune which we hoped was his national anthem. He did not seem

to recognise it, so it may not have been the right tune though we had

done our best.

He stopped opposite an undersized boy in a Lancashire regiment who

had a bandage round his head and a nose blue with cold. The monarch

made a remark in his own language. He must have known several other

languages--all kings do--but he spoke his own. Perhaps kings have to,

in order to show patriotism. An aide-de-camp translated the remark

into French. An interpreter retranslated it into English. Somebody

repeated it to the Lancashire boy. I dare say he was gratified, but I

am sure he did not in the least agree with the king. What his Majesty

said was, "How splendid a thing to be wounded in this glorious war!"

It is easy to point a cheap moral to the tale. So kings find pleasure

in their peculiar sport. So boys who would much rather be watching

football matches at home suffer and are sad. _Delirant reges_.

_Plectuntur Achivi_.

It is all as old as the hills, and republicans may make the most of

it. Yet I think that that king meant what he said, and would have

felt the same if the bandage had been round his own head and he had

been wearing the uniform of a private soldier. There are a few men in

the world who really enjoy fighting, and that king--unless his face

utterly belies him--is one of them. Nothing, I imagine, except his

great age, kept him out of the battles which his subjects fought.

The Con. Camp deserved the reputation which brought us those flights

of distinguished visitors. I may set this down proudly without being

suspected of conceit, for I had nothing to do with making the camp

what it was. Success in a camp or a battalion depends first on three

men--the C.O., the adjutant, and the sergeant-major. We were

singularly fortunate in all three.

The next necessity is what the Americans call "team work." The whole

staff must pull together, each member of it knowing and trusting the

others. It was so in that camp. The result was fine, smooth-running

organisation. No emergency disturbed the working of the camp. No

sudden call found the staff unprepared or helpless. So much, I

think, any one visiting and inspecting the camp might have seen and

appreciated. What a visitor, however intelligent, or an inspector,

though very able, would not have discovered was the spirit which

inspired the discipline of the camp.

Ours was a medical camp. We flew the Red Cross flag and our C.O. was

an officer in the R.A.M.C. Doctors, though they belong to a

profession which exists for the purpose of alleviating human

suffering, are not always and at all times humane men. Like other men

they sometimes fall into the mistake of regarding discipline not as a

means but as an end in itself. In civil life the particular kind of

discipline which seduces them is called professional etiquette. In

the army they become, occasionally, the most bigoted worshippers of

red-tape. When that happens a doctor becomes a fanatic more ruthless

than an inquisitor of old days.

In the Con. Camp the discipline was good, as good as possible; but

our C.O. was a wise man. He never forgot that the camp existed for

the purpose of restoring men's bodies to health and not as an example

of the way to make rules work. The spirit of the camp was most

excellent. Regulations were never pressed beyond the point at which

they were practically of use. Sympathy, the sympathy which man

naturally feels for a suffering fellow-man, was not strangled by

parasitic growths of red-tape. We had to thank the C.O. and after him

the adjutant for this. I met no officers more humane than these two,

or more patient with all kinds of weakness and folly in the men with

whom they had to deal.

They were well supported by their staff and by the voluntary workers

in the two recreation huts run by the Y.M.C.A. and the Catholic

Women's League. The work of the C.W.L. ladies differed a little from

that of any recreation hut I had seen before. They made little

attempt to cater for the amusement of the men. They discouraged

personal friendships between the workers and the men. They aimed at a

certain refinement in the equipment and decoration of their hut. They

provided food of a superior kind, very nicely served. I think their

efforts were appreciated by many men.

On the other hand the workers in the Y.M.C.A. hut there as everywhere

made constant efforts to provide entertainments of some kind. Three

or four days at least out of every week there was "something on."

Sometimes it was a concert, sometimes a billiard tournament, or a

ping-pong tournament, or a competition in draughts or chess.

Occasionally, under the management of a lady who specialised in such

things, we had a hat-trimming competition, an enormously popular kind

of entertainment both for spectators and performers. Every suggestion

of a new kind of entertainment was welcomed and great pains were

taken to carry it through.

I only remember one occasion on which the leader of that hut shrank

from the form of amusement proposed to him. The idea came from a

Canadian soldier who said he wished we would get up a pie-eating

competition. This sounded exciting, and we asked for details. The

competitors, so the Canadian said, have their hands tied behind their

backs, go down on their knees and eat open jam tarts which are laid

flat on the ground. He said the game was popular in the part of

Canada he came from. I longed to see it tried; but the leader of the

hut refused to venture on it. It would, he said, be likely to be very

messy. He was probably right.

In that hut the workers aimed constantly at getting into personal

touch with the men. This was far easier in the Con. Camp than at the

base camp where "Woodbine" was. The numbers of men were smaller. As a

rule they stayed longer with us. But at best it is only possible for

a canteen worker to make friends with a few men. With most of those

who enter the hut she can have no personal relations. But I am sure

that the work done is of immense value, and it is probably those who

need sympathy and friendship most who come seeking it, a little

shyly, from the ladies who serve them.

In normal times the Con. Camp received men from the hospitals; men

who were not yet fit to return to their regiments, but who had ceased

to need the constant ministrations of doctors and nurses. The

conditions of life were more comfortable than in base camps, much

more comfortable than at the front or in billets. The men slept in

large tents, warmed and well lighted. They had beds. The food was

good and abundant. Great care and attention was given to the cooking.

Much trouble was taken about amusements. The camp had a ground for

football and cricket. It possessed a small stage, set up in one of

the dining-halls, where plays were acted, a Christmas pantomime

performed, and a variety entertainment given every week. There were

whist drives with attractive prizes for the winners. Duty was light.

Besides the "fatigues" necessary for keeping the camp in order there

were route marches for those who could march, and an elaborate system

of physical exercises under trained instructors.

The men remained in camp for varying periods. No man was kept there

for more than three months. But some men passed through the camp

being marked fit almost as soon as they left hospital. That was the

normal routine; but it happened once while I was there that things

became very abnormal and the organisation of the camp was tested with

the utmost severity.

Just before the Somme offensive began some mischievous devil put it

into the heads of the authorities to close down the only other

convalescent camp in the neighbourhood. Its inmates were sent to us

and we had to make room for them. Our cricket ground was sacrificed.

Paths were run across the pitch. Tents were erected all over it. My

church tent became the home of a harmonium, the only piece of

ecclesiastical salvage from the camp that was closed. Then my church

tent was taken from me, sacrificed like all luxuries to the

accommodation of men. Just as we were beginning to settle down again

came the Somme offensive.

Like every one else in France we had long expected the great push.

Yet when it came it came with startling suddenness. We went out one

morning to find the streets of the town crowded with ambulances. They

followed each other in a long, slow, apparently unending procession

across the bridge which led into the town from the railway station.

They split off into small parties turning to the left and skirting

the sea shore along the broad, glaring parade, or climbed with many

hootings through the narrow streets of the old town. Staring after

them as they passed us we saw inside figures of men very still, very

silent, bandaged, swathed.

All the morning, hour after hour, the long procession went on. The

ambulances, cleared of their burdens at the various hospitals, turned

at once and drove furiously back to the station. The hospitals were

filled and overfilled and overflowing. Men who could stand more

travelling were hurried to the hospital ships. Stretcher-bearers

toiled and sweated. The steamers, laden to their utmost capacity,

slipped from the quay side and crept out into the Channel. One

hospital was filled and cleared three times in twenty-four hours. The

strain on doctors and nurses must have been terrific.

For one day we in the Con. Camp remained untouched by the rushing

torrent. Then our turn came. The number of lightly wounded men was

very great. Many of them could walk and take care of themselves. A

hospital bed and hospital treatment were not absolutely necessary for

them. They were sent to us. They arrived in char-à-bancs, thirty at a

time. We possessed a tiny hospital, meant for the accommodation of

cases of sudden illness in the camp. It was turned into a

dressing-station.

The wounded men sat or lay on the grass outside waiting for their

turns to go in. They wore the tattered, mud-caked clothes of the

battlefield. The bandages of the casualty clearing-station were round

their limbs and heads. Some were utterly exhausted. They lay down.

They pillowed their heads on their arms and sank into heavy slumber.

Some, half hysterical with excitement, sat bolt upright and talked,

talked incessantly, whether any one listened to them or not. They

laughed too, but it was a horrible kind of laughter. Some seemed

stupefied; they neither slept nor talked. They sat where they were

put, and stared in front of them with eyes which never seemed to

blink.

Most of the men were calm, quiet, and very patient. I think their

patience was the most wonderful thing I ever saw. They suffered, had

suffered, and much suffering was before them. Yet no word of

complaint came from them. They neither cursed God nor the enemy nor

their fate. I have seen dumb animals, dogs and cattle, with this same

look of trustful patience in their faces. But these were men who

could think, reason, feel, and express themselves as animals cannot.

Their patience and their quiet trustfulness moved me so that it was

hard not to weep.

By twos and threes the men were called from the group outside and

passed through the door of the dressing-station. The doctors waited

for them in the surgery. The label on each man was read, his wound

examined. A note was swiftly written ordering certain dressings and

treatment. The man passed into what had been the ward of the

hospital. Here the R.A.M.C. orderlies worked and with them two nurses

spared for our need from a neighbouring hospital. Wounds were

stripped, dressed, rebandaged. Sometimes fragments of shrapnel were

picked out.

The work went on almost silently hour after hour from early in the

morning till long after noon. Yet there was no hurry, no fuss, and I

do not think there was a moment's failure in gentleness. Some hard

things have been said about R.A.M.C. orderlies and about nurses too.

Perhaps they have been deserved occasionally. I saw their work at

close quarters and for many days in that one place, nowhere else and

not again there; but what I saw was good.