Our men were not always in the trenches. As the New Army grew in numbers
reliefs were more frequent than in the old days, when battalions held
the line for long spells, until their souls as well as their bodies were
sunk in squalor. Now in the summer of 1915 it was not usual for men to
stay in the line for more than three weeks at a stretch, and they came
back to camps and billets, where there was more sense of life, though
still the chance of death from long-range guns. Farther back still, as
far back as the coast, and all the way between the sea and the edge of
war, there were new battalions quartered in French and Flemish villages,
so that every cottage and farmstead, villa, and chateau was inhabited
by men in khaki, who made themselves at home and established friendly
relations with civilians there unless they were too flagrant in their
robbery, or too sour in their temper, or too filthy in their habits.
Generally the British troops were popular in Picardy and Artois, and
when they left women kissed and cried, in spite of laughter, and joked
in a queer jargon of English-French. In the estaminets of France
and Flanders they danced with frowzy peasant girls to the tune of a
penny-in-the-slot piano, or, failing the girls, danced with one another.
For many years to come, perhaps for centuries, those cottages and
barns into which our men crowded will retain signs and memories of that
British occupation in the great war. Boys who afterward went forward to
the fighting-fields and stepped across the line to the world of ghosts
carved their names on wooden beams, and on the whitewashed walls
scribbled legends proclaiming that Private John Johnson was a bastard;
or that a certain battalion was a rabble of ruffians; or that Kaiser
Bill would die on the gallows, illustrating those remarks with portraits
and allegorical devices, sketchily drawn, but vivid and significant.
The soldier in the house learned quite a lot of French, with which
he made his needs understood by the elderly woman who cooked for his
officers' mess. He could say, with a fine fluency, “Ou est le blooming
couteau?” or “Donnez-moi le bally fourchette, s'il vous plait, madame.”
It was not beyond his vocabulary to explain that “Les pommes de terre
frites are absolument all right if only madame will tenir ses cheveux
on.” In the courtyards of ancient farmhouses, so old in their timbers
and gables that the Scottish bodyguard of Louis XI may have passed them
on their way to Paris, modern Scots with khaki-covered kilts pumped up
the water from old wells, and whistled “I Know a Lassie” to the girl who
brought the cattle home, and munched their evening rations while Sandy
played a “wee bit” on the pipes to the peasant--folk who gathered at
the gate. Such good relations existed between the cottagers and their
temporary guests that one day, for instance, when a young friend of mine
came back from a long spell in the trenches (his conversation was of
dead men, flies, bombs, lice, and hell), the old lady who had given him
her best bedroom at the beginning of the war flung her arms about him
and greeted him like a long-lost son. To a young Guardsman, with
his undeveloped mustache on his upper lip, her demonstrations were
embarrassing.
It was one of the paradoxes of the war that beauty lived but a mile or
two away from hideous squalor. While men in the lines lived in dugouts
and marched down communicating trenches thigh-high, after rainy
weather, in mud and water, and suffered the beastliness of the primitive
earth-men, those who were out of the trenches, turn and turn about, came
back to leafy villages and drilled in fields all golden with buttercups,
and were not too uncomfortable in spite of overcrowding in dirty barns.
There was more than comfort in some of the headquarters where our
officers were billeted in French chateaux. There was a splendor of
surroundings which gave a graciousness and elegance to the daily life of
that extraordinary war in which men fought as brutally as in prehistoric
times. I knew scores of such places, and went through gilded gates
emblazoned with noble coats of arms belonging to the days of the Sun
King, or farther back to the Valois, and on my visits to generals
and their staffs stood on long flights of steps which led up to old
mansions, with many towers and turrets, surrounded by noble parks and
ornamental waters and deep barns in which five centuries of harvests had
been stored. From one of the archways here one might see in the mind's
eye Mme. de Pompadour come out with a hawk on her wrist, or even Henri
de Navarre with his gentlemen-at-arms, all their plumes alight in the
sun as they mounted their horses for a morning's boar-hunt.
It was surprising at first when a young British officer came out and
said, “Toppin' morning,” or, “Any news from the Dardanelles?” There
was something incongruous about this habitation of French chiteaux by
British officers with their war-kit. The strangeness of it made me laugh
in early days of first impressions, when I went through the rooms of one
of those old historic houses, well within range of the German guns with
a brigade major. It was the Chateau de Henencourt, near Albert.
“This is the general's bedroom,” said the brigade major, opening a door
which led off a gallery, in which many beautiful women of France and
many great nobles of the old regime looked down from their gilt frames.
The general had a nice bed to sleep in. In such a bed Mme. du Barry
might have stretched her arms and yawned, or the beautiful Duchesse de
Mazarin might have held her morning levee. A British general, with his
bronzed face and bristly mustache, would look a little strange under
that blue-silk canopy, with rosy cherubs dancing overhead on the
flowered ceiling. His top-boots and spurs stood next to a Louis Quinze
toilet-table. His leather belts and field-glasses lay on the polished
boards beneath the tapestry on which Venus wooed Adonis and Diana
went a-hunting. In other rooms no less elegantly rose-tinted or darkly
paneled other officers had made a litter of their bags, haversacks,
rubber baths, trench--boots, and puttees. At night the staff sat down
to dinner in a salon where the portraits of a great family of France, in
silks and satins and Pompadour wigs, looked down upon their khaki.
The owner of the chateau, in whose veins flowed the blood of those old
aristocrats, was away with his regiment, in which he held the rank of
corporal. His wife, the Comtesse de Henencourt, managed the estate, from
which all the men-servants except the veterans had been mobilized. In
her own chateau she kept one room for herself, and every morning came
in from the dairies, where she had been working with her maids, to say,
with her very gracious smile, to the invaders of her house: “Bon jour,
messieurs! Ca va bien?”
She hid any fear she had under the courage of her smile. Poor chateaux
of France! German shells came to knock down their painted turrets, to
smash through the ceilings where the rosy Cupids played, and in one hour
or two to ruin the beauty that had lived through centuries of pride.
Scores of them along the line of battle were but heaps of brick-dust and
twisted iron.
I saw the ruins of the Chateau de Henencourt two years after my first
visit there. The enemy's line had come closer to it and it was a target
for their guns. Our guns--heavy and light--were firing from the back
yard and neighboring fields, with deafening tumult. Shells had already
broken the roofs and turrets of the chateau and torn away great chunks
of wall. A colonel of artillery had his headquarters in the petit salon.
His hand trembled as he greeted me.
“I'm not fond of this place,” he said. “The whole damn thing will come
down on my head at any time. I think I shall take to the cellars.”
We walked out to the courtyard and he showed me the way down to the
vault. A shell came over the chateau and burst in the outhouses.
“They knocked out a 9.2 a little while ago,” said the colonel. “Made a
mess of some heavy gunners.”
There was a sense of imminent death about us, but it was not so sinister
a place as farther on, where a brother of mine sat in a hole directing
his battery... The Countess of Henencourt had gone. She went away with
her dairymaids, driving her cattle down the roads.