but little encouragement to talk from sunset to cock-crow. Perhaps the
unfortunate German officer divined as much. But the spell of Shiva Lal's
eloquence is rudely broken by Major D----, who takes me by the arm to go
elsewhere. And the little group squatting on their haunches at their
mid-day meal cease listening and dip their _chupattis_ in the aromatic
_dhal_, in that slow, ruminant, ritualistic way in which the Indian
always eats his food.
"_Ram, Ram! Tumhi kothun allé?_" said my friend Smith, turning aside to
a lonely figure on my right. A cry of joy escapes a dark-featured
Mahratta who has been looking mournfully on from his bed of pain,
comprehending nothing of these dialogues. We have, indeed, been talking
in every language except Mahrathi. And he, poor soul, has lost both
feet--they were frostbitten--and will never answer the music of the
charge again. But at the sound of his own tongue he raises his body by
the pulley hanging at the head of his cot, and gravely salutes the
sahib. Like Ruth amid the alien corn, his heart is sad with thoughts of
home, and he has been dreaming between these iron walls of the wide,
sunlit spaces of the Deccan. As his feverish brain counts and re-counts
the rivets on the ship-plates, ever and anon they part before his
wistful eyes, and he sees again the little village with its grove of
mangoes and its sacred banyan on the inviolable _otla_; he hears once
again the animated chatter of the wayfarers in the _chowdi_.
"Where is thy home?"
"Sahib, it is at Pirgaon."
"I know it--is not Turkaran Patal the head-man?"
The dark face gleams with pleasure. "Even so, sahib."
"Shall I write to thy people?"
"The sahib is very kind."
"So will I do, and, perhaps, prepare thy people for thy homecoming. I
will tell them that thou hast lost thy feet with the frostbite, but art
otherwise well."
"Nay, sahib, tell them everything but that, for if my people hear that
they will neither eat nor drink--nay, nor sleep, for sorrow."
"Then will I not. But I will tell them that thou art a brave man."
The Mahratta smiles mournfully.
"And have you heard from your folk at home?" I ask of the others,
leaving Smith and the Mahratta together.
"Yea, sahib, the exalted Government is very good to us. We get letters
often." It is a sepoy in the 107th who speaks. "My brother writes even
thus," and he reads with tears in his eyes: "'We miss you terribly, but
such is the will of God. I have been daily to Haji Baba Ziarat' (it is a
famous shrine in India), 'and day and night I pray for you, and am very
distressed. I am writing to tell you to have no anxiety about us at
home, but do your duty cheerfully and say your prayers. Repeat the
beginning with the word "Kor" and breathe forty times on your body.
Your father is well, but is very anxious for you, and weeps day and
night.'"
"I also have received a letter." The speaker is a Bengali, and, though a
surgeon and non-combatant, must have his say. "My brother writes that I
am to enlight the names of my ancestors, who were tiger-like warriors,
and were called Bahadurs, by performing my duties to utmost
satisfaction." This is truly Babu English.
"And you will do the same?"
"Yea, I must do likewise. My brother writes to me, 'If you want to face
this side again, face as Bahadur.' And he saith, 'Long live King George,
and may he rule on the whole world.' And so say we all, sahib."
"And you?" This to a Shia Mahomedan whose right hand is bandaged.
"Ah, sahib, my people can write to me, but write to them I cannot. Will
the honourable sahib send a word for me who am thus crippled?"
"Yea, gladly; what shall the words be?"
"Say, then, oh sahib, these words: 'Your servant is well and happy here.
You should pray the God of Mercy that the victory may be to our King,
Jarj Panjam. And to my lady mother and my lady the sister of my father,
and to my brother, and to my dear ones the greetings of peace and
prayer. And the sum of fifty rupees which I arranged for my family' (his
wife) 'will be paid to you every month.' The sahib is very kind."
"The sahib would like to hear a story?" The speaker is a jemadar of the
59th. "So be it. Know then, sahib, that I and twelve men of my company
were cut off by the _German-log_, and I, even I only, am left. It was in
this wise. My comrades advanced too far beyond the trenches, and we lost
our way. And the _German-log_ make signs to us to surrender, but it is
not our way and we still advance. And they open fire with a
machine-gun--so!" The speaker makes sounds as a man who stutters. "And
we are all hit--killed and wounded, and fall like ripe corn to the
sickle. And I am wounded in the leg and I fall. And the German officer,
he come up and hitted me in the buttock to see if I were dead. But I lay
exceeding still and hold my breath. And they pull me by the leg" (can it
be that the jemadar is pulling mine?), "a long way they pull me but
still I am as one dead. And so I escaped." He looks round for approval.
"That was well done, jemadar." His lustrous eyes flash with pleasure.
"And how is it with your food?"
"Good" ("_Bahout accha_"), comes a chorus of voices. "The exalted
Government has done great things. We have _ghee_"--a clarified butter
made of buffalo or cow's milk--"and _goor_"--unrefined sugar. "And we
have spices for our _dhal_--ginger and garlic and chilli and turmeric.
Yea, and fruits also--apricots, date-palms, and sultanas. What more can
man want?"
"It is well." But it is time for me to go. Smith is still talking to the
Mahratta, whose eyes never leave his face. "Come on, old man," I say,
"it is time to go." Smith turns reluctantly away. As I looked over my
shoulder the Mahratta was weeping softly.
VI
THE TROOP TRAIN
We were standing in the lounge of the Hotel M---- at the Base. "I'll
introduce you to young C---- of the Guards when he comes in," the Major
was saying to me. "He is going up to the Front with me to-night by the
troop train. You don't mind if I rag a bit, do you, old chap? You see
he's only just gazetted from Sandhurst, a mere infant, in fact, and he's
a bit in the blues, I fancy, at having to say good-bye to his mother.
He's her only child, and she's a widow. The father was an old friend of
mine. Hulloa, C----, my boy. Allow me to introduce you."
A youth with the milk and roses complexion of a girl, blue eyes, and
fair hair, well-built, but somewhat under the middle height--such was
C----, and he was good to look upon.
Introductions being made, we filed into the _salle à manger_.
"Chambertin, Julie, s'il vous plaît," said the Major. "There's nothing
like a good burgundy to warm the cockles of your heart." He had the
radiant eye of an Irishman, and smiled on Julie as he gave the order.
"So you're leaving your hospital to go up and join a Field Ambulance?" I
said.
"That's so, old man. There was a chance of my being made A.D.M.S. at the
Base some day if I'd stayed on, but I wanted to get up to the Front, and
I've worked it at last. Besides I'm not too fond of playing Bo-peep with
my pals in the R.A.M.C. Beastly job, always worrying the O.C.'s. Talking
about A.D.M.S.'s, did I ever tell you the story of how I pulled the leg
of old Macassey in South Africa?"
"No," I said, although B---- had a way of telling the same stories twice
over occasionally. The one story he never told, not even once, was how
he got the D.S.O. at Spion Kop. I had heard it often enough from other
men in the service, and could never hear it too often. And let me tell
you that to know B---- and have the privilege of his friendship, is to
be admitted to the largest freemasonry of officers in the British Army.
"Well, it was like this," continued B----. "The A.D.M.S. was a thorn in
the side of every O.C. at the Base, walking up and down like the very
devil, seeking whose reputation he might devour, and ordering every
O.C. to turn his hospital upside down. He took a positive delight in
breaking men. You know the type, the kind of man who breaks his wife's
heart not because he's bad, but because he's querulous. The nagging
type. Nothing could please him. So one day he came to Simpson's show,
where I was second in command. "How many patients have you got
accommodation for here?" he asked me, Simpson being laid up with a
recurrence of his malaria. "Four hundred and fifty, sir," I said. "Very
good, have accommodation for a thousand to-morrow night," said Macassey
with a cock of his eye that I knew only too well. We were not full up,
as it was, although pretty hard-worked, being short-handed and with a
devil of a lot of enteric, and there wasn't the remotest likelihood of
any more patients arriving, as they were switching them off to Durban.
However, it was no use grousing, that only made old Macassey more wicked
than ever, but I thought I'd have it in black and white; so I saluted
and said, 'Bad memory, sir, my old wound in India, d'you mind writing
the order down?'"
"My dear B----," I interrupted, "you know you've the memory of a
Recording Angel."
"So I do, my son, and so I did. Also I knew that Macassey's memory,
like that of most fussy men, was as bad as mine was good. I thought I'd
catch him out sooner or later. He and I went round the camp, and, after
about half-an-hour of the most putrid crabbing, he suddenly caught sight
of some double-roofed Indian tents that Simpson had got together with
great difficulty for the worst cases. You see we'd mostly tin huts, and
in the African heat they're beastly. 'Ah, I see,' said Macassey
wickedly. 'I see you have some good double-roofed tents here; let me
have eight of them sent to me to-morrow night.' That left us with four,
and how we were to shift the patients was a problem. 'Very good, sir,' I
said, 'but I may forget the number. D'you mind?' And I held out my Field
Note-book, having turned over the page." (There are not many people who
can say 'No' to B----.) "He didn't mind, So he wrote it down. Naturally
I took care of those pages. Next day old Macassey must have remembered
that he had issued two contradictory orders in the same day. Ordered me
to expand and contract at the same time, like the third ventricle. And
he knew that I had first-class documentary evidence, and that I guarded
his autographs as though I were going to put 'em up for sale at
Sotheby's. He never troubled us any more."
"That was unkind of you, Major," I said insincerely.
"Not so, my son. You see, I knew he'd been worrying old Simpson, and he
wasn't fit to undo the latchet of Simpson's shoes. Why! have you never
heard the story of Simpson and the giddy goat?"
"The goat?" said the sub.
"Yes, the goat. Useful animal the goat, if a trifle capricious. It was
like this. Old Simpson, who's got a head on his shoulders big enough to
do all the thinking for the Royal College of Physicians, and ditto of
Surgeons, with a good few ideas left over for the R.A.M.C., determined
to get to the bottom of Mediterranean Fever--a nasty complaint, which
had worried the Malta garrison considerably. Now the first thing to do
when you are on the track of a fever is, as they say in the children's
picture-books, 'Puzzle: Find the Microbe.' It occurred to Simpson to
suspect the goat. Why? Well, because he'd noticed that goat's milk was
drunk in Malta and Egypt. So he began to study the geographical
distribution of the goat with the zeal of an anthropologist localising
dolicocephalic and brachycephalic races. He found eventually that
wherever you could 'place' a goat you would find the fever. Wherefore he
took some goat's milk and cultivated it assiduously in an alluring
medium of Glucose-nutrose-peptone-litmus."
"Dot and carry one. Please repeat," I interjected.
"Glucose-nutrose-peptone-litmus," repeated the Major.
"Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar-man,
thief," soliloquised the subaltern, who was brightening up.
"Quite so," said the Major with a benignant glance. "Well, he then got a
culture."
"A what?"
"Culture. Poisonous growth; hence German 'Kultur,'" said the Major
etymologically. "To proceed. He then inoculated some guinea-pigs. No! I
don't mean directors in the City, though he might have done worse. And
lo! and behold! he found the fever. You know the four canons of the
bacteriologist? One, 'get'; two, 'cultivate'; three, 'inoculate'; four,
'recover.'"
"Well done, Simpson," I said.
"You may say that, my friend. And now there's old Simpson down at the
Base in charge of No. 12 General saving lives by hundreds and thousands.
You know while the bullet slew its thousands, septicaemia has slain its
tens of thousands. How did he stop it? Why, by doing the obvious, which,
you may have observed, no one ever does till a wise man comes along. He
got wounds to heal themselves. He promoted a lymphatic flow from the
rest of the body by putting suppositories of chloride of sodium inside
drainage-tubes in the wound. The heat of the body melts them, you see.
There are three great medical heroes of this war--Almroth Wright,
Martin-Leake, and Simpson."
I could have named a fourth, but I held my tongue.
"Time to get on our hind legs," the Major now said monitorily. "Julie,
_l'addition_ s'il vous plaît."
"Bien, monsieur," said Julie, who had been watching the Major admiringly
without comprehending a word of what he said. Women have a way of
falling in love with the Major at first sight.
We stumbled along between the rails and over the sleepers, led by the
Major, who carried a hurricane lamp, and by the help of its fitful rays
we leapt across the pools of water left in every hollow. We passed some
cattle-trucks. The Major held up the lamp and scrutinised a legend in
white letters--
Hommes 40. Chevaux 12.
"Reminds me of the Rule of Three," said the Major meditatively. "If one
Frenchman is equal to three and one-third horses, how many Huns are
equal to one British soldier?"
"They are never equal to him," said the subaltern brightly. "If it
wasn't for machinery we'd have crumpled them up long ago."
"True, my son," said the Major, "and well spoken."
The men were grouped round the cattle-trucks, each man with his kit and
120 rounds of ammunition. They had just been through a kit inspection,
and the O.C. in charge of details had audited and found it correct by
entering up a memorandum to that effect in each man's pay-book. Though
how the O.C. completes his inventory of a whole draft, and certifies
that nothing from a housewife to thirty pairs of laces per man is
missing, is one of those things that no one has ever been able to
understand. Perhaps he has radiographic eyes, and sees through the
opaque integument of a ground-sheet at one glance. Also the Medical
Officer at the Base Depôt had endorsed the "Marching Out States," after
scrutinising, more or less intimately, each man's naked body, with the
aid of a tallow candle stuck in an empty bottle. A medical inspection of
three hundred men with their shirts up in a dark shed is a weird and
bashful spectacle. An N.C.O. was supervising the entraining at each
truck; the escort was marching up and down the permanent way on the
off-side. The R.T.O. handed the movement orders to the senior officer in
command of drafts, and I saw that they were going to get a move on very
soon.
We were now opposite a first-class compartment, and a slim figure loomed
up out of the darkness.
"Halloa! is that you, C----? I thought you were gone on ahead of us, my
boy."
"So I was, sir, but some of my men are missing, and I'm sending a
corporal to hunt them up. We're off in a few minutes. I met young T----
just now. I've been trying to cheer him up," he added. It was evident
that the subaltern was now understudying the Major in his star part of
cheering other fellows up. "He's feeling rather blue," he continued.
"Depressed at saying good-bye to his friends, you know."
"Oh, that's no good. Tell him I've got a plum-pudding and a bottle of
whisky among my kit. Yes, and a topping liqueur."
I looked at B----'s compartment. His servant, a sapper, was stowing the
kit in the racks and under the seat, with the help of a portable
acetylene lamp which burnt with a hard white light in the darkness, a
darkness which you could almost feel with your hand.
"I say, B----," I asked as I contemplated a hay-stack of things, "what's
the regulation allowance for an officer's luggage? I forget."
"One hundred pounds. Oh yes, you may laugh, old chap, but I got round
the R.T. officer. Christmas! you know. And I can stow it in my billet.
Cheers the other fellows up, you know."
B----'s kit weighed, at a moderate computation, about a quarter of a
ton, and included many things not to be found in the field-service
regulations. But it would never surprise me if I found a performing
elephant or a litter of life-size Teddy Bears in his baggage. He would
gravely explain that it cheered the fellows up, you know.
"Major," I said, "you are a 'carrier'!"
"Carter Paterson?" said the Major, with a glance at his luggage.
"No, I didn't mean that. You are not as quick in the uptake as usual,
especially considering your medical qualifications. What I meant was
that you remind me, only rather differently, of the people who get
typhoid and recover, but continue to propagate the germs long after they
become immune from them themselves. You're diffusing a gaiety which you
no longer feel."
It was a bold shot, and if we hadn't been pretty old friends it would
have been an impertinence. The Major put his arm in mine and took me
aside, so that the subaltern should not hear. "You've hit the
bull's-eye, old chap," he said, in a low voice. "But don't give me away.
Come into the carriage."
He was strangely silent as we sat facing each other in the compartment,
each of us conscious of a hundred things to say, and saying none of
them. The train might start at any moment, and such things as we did say
were trivial irrelevancies. Suddenly he pulled out a pocket-book, and
showed me a photograph.
"My wife and Pat--you've never seen Pat, I think? We christened her
Patricia, you know?"
It was the photograph of a laughing child, with an aureole of curls,
aged, I should say, about two.
"Pat sent me this," the Major said, producing a large woollen comforter.
She had sent it for Daddy to wear during the cold nights with the Field
Ambulance. I handed back the photograph, and B---- studied it intently
for some minutes before replacing it in his pocket-book. Suddenly he
leaned forward in a rather shamefaced way. "I say, old chap, write to my
wife!"
"But, my dear fellow, I've never met her except once. She must have
quite forgotten who I am."
"I know. But write and tell her you saw me off, and that I was at the
top of my form. Merry and bright, you know."
We looked at each other for a moment; and I promised.
There was the loud hoot of a horn and a lurch of the couplings, as
C---- sprang in. I grasped B----'s hand, and jumped on to the footboard
of the moving train.
"Good-bye, old chap."
"Good-bye, old man."
B---- had gone to the front. I never saw him again.
* * * * *
Three weeks later I was sitting at _déjeuner_ in the Metropole, when a
ragamuffin came in with the London papers, which had just arrived by the
leave-boat. I took up the _Times_ and looked, as one always looks
nowadays, at the obituary column. I looked again. In the same column,
one succeeding the other, I read the following:
Killed in action on 8th inst., near Givenchy, Arthur Hamilton C----
of the ---- Guards, 3rd Battalion, only child of the late Arthur C.
and of Mrs. C. of the Red House, Little Twickenham, aged 19.
Behold! I take away the desire of thine eyes with a stroke.
Killed in action on the 8th inst., while dressing a wounded soldier
under fire, Major Ronald B----, D.S.O., of the Royal Army Medical
Corps, aged 42.
Greater love hath no man than this.
II
THE FRONT
VII
THE TWO RICHEBOURGS
We had business with the _maire_ of the commune of Richebourg St. Vaast.
Any one who looks at a staff map of North-West France will see that
there are two Richebourgs; there is Richebourg St. Vaast, but there is
also Richebourg l'Avoué, and although those two communes are separated
by a bare three or four kilometres there was in point of climate a
considerable difference between the two. In those days we had not yet
taken Neuve Chapelle, and Richebourg l'Avoué, which was in front of our
lines, was considered "unhealthy." Richebourg St. Vaast, on the other
hand, was well behind our lines and was considered by our billeting
officers quite a good residential neighbourhood.
We had left G.H.Q., and after a journey of two hours or so passed
through Laventie, which had been rather badly mauled by shell-fire, and
began to thread our way through the skein of roads and by-roads that
enmeshes the two Richebourgs. The natural features of the country were
inscrutable, and landmarks there were none. The countryside grew
absolutely deserted and the solitary farms were roofless and untenanted.
Eventually we found our road blocked by a barricade of fallen masonry in
front of a village which was as inhospitable as the Cities of the Plain.
A vast silence brooded over the landscape, broken now and again by a
noise like the crackling of thorns under a pot. As we took cover behind
a wall of ruined houses we heard a sinister hiss, but whence it came or
what invisible trajectory it traced through the leaden skies overhead
neither of us could tell. Silence again fell like a mist upon the land;
not a bird sang, not a twig moved. The winter sun was sinking in the
west behind a pall of purple cloud in a lacquered sky--the one touch of
colour in the sombre greyness. The land was flat as the palm of one's
hand, its monotony relieved only by lines of pollarded willows on which
some sappers had strung a field telephone. Raindrops hung on the copper
wire like a string of pearls, and the heavy clay of the fields was
scooped and moulded by the rain into little saucer-like depressions as
if by a potter's thumb. Behind us lay the reserve trenches, their clay
walls shored up with wickerwork, and their outskirts fringed with barbed
wire whose intricate and volatile coils looked like thistledown. The
village behind whose walls we now sheltered lay in a No Man's Land
between the enemy's lines and our own, and the sodden fields were not
more desolate.
A tornado of artillery fire had swept over it, and of the houses nothing
was left but indecencies, shattered walls and naked rafters, beneath
which were choked heaps of household furniture, broken beds, battered
lamps, and a wicker-chair overturned as in a drunken brawl. What had
once been the street was now a quarry of broken bricks, with here and
there vast circular craters as though a gigantic oak-tree had been torn
out of the earth by the roots. And now the weird silence was broken by
sounds as of some one playing a lonely tattoo with his fingers upon a
hollow wooden board, but the player was invisible, and as we looked at
each other the sound ceased as suddenly as it began. Our practised ear
told us that somewhere near us a machine-gun was concealed, but these
furtive sounds were so homeless, so impersonal, that they eluded us like
an echo.