the songs most affected by our men, and also of the topographical
Limericks with which they beguile the long hours in the trenches. And if
the English soldier is addicted to versifying it may be pleaded in his
behalf that, as Mommsen apologetically remarks of Caesar, "they were
weak verses." Not always, however, I have seen some unpublished verses
by a young officer on the staff of the late General Hubert Hamilton, a
man beloved by all who knew him, describing the burial of his dead chief
at night behind the firing-line, which in their sombre and elegiac
beauty are not unworthy to rank with the classical lines on the burial
of Sir John Moore. And there is that magnificent _Hymn before Battle_ by
Captain Julian Grenfell, surely one of the most moving things of its
kind.
With such diversions do our men beguile the interminable hours. After
all it is the small things that men resent in life, not the big ones. I
once asked a French soldier over a game of cards--in civil life he was a
plumber, whom we shall meet again[7]--whether he could get any sleep in
the trenches amid the infernal din of the guns. "Oh, I slept pretty well
on the whole," he explained nonchalantly, "mais mon voisin,
celui-là"--he pointed reproachfully to a comrade who was imperturbably
shuffling the pack--"il ronflait si fort qu'il finissait par me
dégoûter."
FOOTNOTE:
[7] See Chapter XV.
XI
AT G.H.Q.[8]
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Billet de Logement. |
| |
| Mme. Bonnard, 131 rue Robert le Frisson, logera les sous-dits, |
| savoir: un officier, un sous officier, deux hommes; fournira le lit, |
| place au feu et à la chandelle, conformément à loi du 3 juillet, 1877.|
| Délivré à la Mairie, |
| le 31me Janvier, 1915. |
| Le Maire ---- |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
The Camp Commandant, who is a keeper of lodging-houses and an Inspector
of Nuisances, had given me a slip of paper on which was inscribed the
address No. 131 rue Robert le Frisson and a printed injunction to the
occupier to know that by these presents she was enjoined to provide me
with bed, fire, and lights. Armed with this billeting-paper and
accompanied by my servant, a private in the Suffolks, who was carrying
my kit, I knocked at the door of No. 131, affecting an indifference to
my reception which I did not feel. It seemed to me that a
rate-collector, presenting a demand note, could have boasted a more
graceful errand. The door opened and an old lady in a black silk gown
inquired, "Qu'est-ce que vous voulez, M'sieu'?" I presented my
billeting-paper with a bow. Her waist was girt with a kind of
bombardier's girdle from which hung a small armoury of steel implements
and leather scabbards: scissors, spectacle case, a bunch of keys, a
button-hook, and other more or less intimidating things. "Jeanne," she
called in a quavering voice, and as the _bonne_ appeared, tying her
apron-strings, they read the billeting-paper together, the one looking
over the shoulder of the other, Madame reading the words as a child
reads, and as though she were speaking to herself. The paper shook in
her tremulous hands, and I could see that she was very old. It was
obvious that my appearance in that quiet household was as agitating as
it was unexpected. "Et votre ordonnance?" she asked, with a glance at my
servant. "Non, il dort dans la caserne." "Bien!" she said, and with a
smile made me welcome.
It was soon evident that, my credentials being once established, I was
to be regarded as a member of the household, and nothing would satisfy
Madame but that I should be assured of this. Having shown me my bedroom,
with its pompous bed draped with a tent of curtains, she took me on a
tour of her _ménage_. I was conducted into the kitchen, bright with
copper pans and the _marmite_--it was as sweet and clean as a dairy; the
resources of the still-room were displayed to me, and the confitures and
spices were not more remarkable than the domestic pharmacy in which the
herbs of the field had been distilled by Madame's own hands to yield
their peculiar virtues, rue for liver, calamint for cholera, plantain
for the kidneys, fennel for indigestion, elderberry for sore throat, and
dandelion for affections of the blood. Then I was shown the oak presses
full of linen white as snow and laid up in lavender. This inventory
being concluded, I was presented with a key of the front door to mark my
admission into the freedom of the house, and invited to take a glass of
Burgundy while Sykes was unpacking my kit upstairs.
Madame, it seemed, was a widow of eighty-five years of age, without
issue, and if her eyes were dim and her natural force abated, her teeth,
as she proudly told me, were her own. She obviously belonged to that
_rentier_ class who spend the evening of their days in the quiet town
which serves as G.H.Q.--a town which has a kind of faded gentility, and
which, behind its inscrutable house-fronts, conceals a good deal of
quiet opulence in the matter of old china, silver, and oak. In her youth
Madame had kept a _pension_ and had had English demoiselles among her
charges. She had never been to England but she had heard of "Hyde Park."
Did I know it? She received my assurance with obvious gratification as
though it established a personal intimacy between us. "Avez-vous tué des
Allemands?" My negative answer left her disappointed but hopeful.
"La guerre, quand finira-t-elle?" interjected the _bonne_, who, I
afterwards found, had a husband at the war. Those interrogatories were
to become very familiar to me. Every evening, when I returned from my
visits to Divisional and Brigade Headquarters, mistress and servant
always put me through the same catechism:
"Avez-vous tué des Allemands?"
"La guerre, quand finira-t-elle?"
The immense seriousness, not to say solicitude, with which these
inquiries were addressed to me eventually led me into the most
enterprising mendacities. I killed a German every day, greatly to
Madame's satisfaction, and my total bag when I came away was
sufficiently remarkable to be worth a place in an official _communiqué_.
I think it gave Madame a feeling of security, and I hoped Jeanne might
consider that it appreciably accelerated the end of the war. But
"Guillaume," as she always called him, was the principal object of
Madame's aversion, and she never mentioned the name of the All-Highest
without a lethal gesture as she drew her tremulous hand across her
throat and uttered the menacing words: "Couper la gorge." She often
uttered these maledictions to Sykes in the kitchen, as she watched him
making the toast for my breakfast, and I have no doubt that the "Oui,
Madame," with which he invariably assented, gave her great satisfaction.
Doubtless it made her feel that the heart of the British Army was sound.
Sykes used to study furtively a small book called _French, and how to
speak it_, but he was very chary of speaking it, and seemed to prefer a
deaf-and-dumb language of his own. But he was naturally a man of few
words, and phlegmatic. He described the first battle of Ypres, in which
he had been "wownded," in exactly twenty-four words, and I could never
get any more out of him, though he became comparatively voluble on the
subject of his wife at Norwich and the twins. He was an East Anglian,
and made four vowels do duty for five, his e's being always pronounced
as a's; he had done his seven years' "sarvice" with the colours, and was
a reservist; he was an admirable servant--steady, cool, and honest. I
imagine he had never acted as servant to any of his regimental officers,
for on the first occasion when he brought up my breakfast I was not a
little amused to observe that the top of the egg had been carefully
removed, the rolls sliced and buttered, and the bread and butter cut
into slender "fingers," presumably for me to dip into the ochreous
interior of the egg; it reminded me of my nursery days. Perhaps he was
in the habit of doing it for the twins. I gently weaned him from this
tender habit. He performed all his duties, such as making my bed, or
handing me a letter, with quick automatic movements as though he were
presenting arms. Also his face, which was usually expressionless as
though his mind were "at ease," had a way of suddenly coming to
"attention" when you spoke to him. He had a curious and recondite
knowledge of the folk-lore of the British Army, and entertained me at
times with stories of "Kruger's Own," "The White Shirts," "The Dirty
Twelfth," "The Holy Boys," "The Saucy Seventh," having names for the
regiments which you will never find in the _Army List_. In short, he was
a survival and in a way a tragic survival. For how many of the old Army
are left? I fear very few, and many traditions may have perished with
them.
In his solicitude for me Sykes had jealous rivals in Madame and Jeanne.
Madame reserved to herself as her peculiar prerogative the deposit of a
hot-water "bottle" in my bed every night, such a hot-water bottle as I
have never seen elsewhere. It reminded me of nothing so much as the
barrel of one of the newer machine-guns, being a long fluted cylinder of
black steel. This was always borne by Madame every night in ritualistic
procession, Jeanne following with a silver candlestick and a
night-light. The ceremony concluded with a bow and "good-night," two
words of which Madame was inordinately proud. She never attained
"good-morning," but she more than supplied the deficiency of English
speech by the grace of her French manners, always entering my room at 8
A.M. as I lay in bed, with the greeting, "Bon matin, M'sieu',
avez-vous bien dormi?" Perhaps I looked, as I felt, embarrassed on the
first occasion, for she quickly added in French, "I am old enough to be
your mother"--as indeed she was. She had at once the resignation in
repose and the agitation in action of extreme old age. I have seen her
dozing in her chair in the salon, as I passed through the hall, with her
gnarled hands extended on her knees in just that attitude of quiet
waiting which one associates with the well-known engraving in which
Death is figured as the coming of a friend. But when she was on her feet
she moved about with a kind of aimless activity, opening drawers and
shutting them and reopening them and speaking to herself the while,
until Jeanne, catching my puzzled expression, would whisper loudly in
my ear with a tolerant smile, "Elle est très VIEILLE." Jeanne had
acquired a habit of raising her voice, owing to Madame's deafness, which
resulted in her whispers partaking of the phonetic quality of those
stage asides which, by a curious convention, while audible at the very
back of the dress circle, are quite inaudible to the other characters on
the stage. Whether Madame ever overheard these auricular confidences I
know not. If she did, I doubt if she regarded them, for she was under
the illusion, common to very old people who live in the society of a
younger generation and were mature adults when their companions were
merely adolescent, that Jeanne, who had entered her service as a child,
had never grown up. If Madame seemed "très vieille" to Jeanne, it was
indisputable that Jeanne continued "très jeune" to Madame. She was,
indeed, firmly convinced that she was looking after Jeanne, whereas in
truth it was Jeanne who looked after her. For Jeanne was at least
thirty-five, with a husband at the war, in virtue of whom she enjoyed a
separation allowance of one franc a day, and a boy for whom she received
ten sous. Her husband, a _pompier_, got nothing. It never occurred to
her to regard this provision as inadequate. And she was as capable as
she was contented, and sang at her work.
It was often difficult to believe that this quiet backwater was within
an hour or two of the trenches. G.H.Q. was indeed situated well back
behind "the Front," which, however precise the maps in the newspapers
may affect to make it, is, like the Equator of our school-books, a more
or less "imaginary line drawn across the earth's surface." Imaginary
because if a line be, as we were taught with painful reiteration, length
without breadth, then "the Front" is not a line at all, much less a
straight line in the sense of the shortest distance between two points.
It is not straight, for it curves and sags and has its salients and
re-entrant angles; and it is not a line, for it has breadth as well as
length. Broadly speaking, the Front extends back to the H.Q. of the
armies (to say nothing of the H.Q. of corps, divisions, and brigades),
and thence to G.H.Q. itself, which may be regarded as being "the Back of
the Front," to vary a classical expression of _Punch_. The Front is,
indeed, to be visualised not as a straight line but as a fully opened
fan, the periphery of which is the fire-trenches, the ribs the lines of
communication, and the knob or knuckle is General Headquarters. When we
extend our Front southwards and take over the French trenches we just
expand our fan a little more. When we come to make a general advance all
along the periphery, the whole fan will be thrust forward, and the
knuckle with it, for the relative distances of General Headquarters,
and minor Headquarters, from this periphery and from one another are a
more or less constant quantity, being determined by such fixed
considerations as the range of modern guns and the mobility of
transport.
From G.H.Q., the brain of the Army, the volitional centre of the whole
organism, radiate the sensory and motor nerves by which impressions at
the Front are registered and plans for action transmitted. It is the
home of the Staff, not of the Armies, and contains more "brass hats"
than all the other Headquarters put together. Beyond the "details" in
the barracks it contains few of the rank and file, and its big square
betrays little of the crowded animation of the towns nearer the fighting
line, with their great parks of armoured cars, motor lorries, and
ammunition waggons, their filter-carts, and their little clusters and
eddies of men resting in billets. The Military Police on point-duty have
a comparatively quiet time, although despatch-riders are, of course, for
ever whizzing to and fro with messages from and to the Front. It is as
full of departmental offices as Whitehall itself--some 153 of them to be
exact--each one indicated by a combination of initial letters, for staff
officers are men of few words and cogent, and it saves time to say "O."
when you mean Operations, "I." for Intelligence, "A.G." for
Adjutant-General; a fashion which is faithfully followed at the other
H.Q., for D.A.A.Q.M.G. saves an enormous number of polysyllables.
Hence the proximity of hostilities has left but little outward and
visible sign upon the ancient town. The tradesmen have, it is true, made
some concessions to our presence, and one remarks the inviting legends
"Top-hole Tea" in the windows of a _pâtisserie_ and "High life" over the
shop of a tailor. Four of us made a private arrangement with a buxom
housewife, whereby, in return for four francs per head a day and the
pooling of our rations, she undertook to provide us with lunch and
dinner, thereby establishing a "Mess" of our own. Many such fraternities
there were in the absence of a regular regimental mess. But these
arrangements were more private than military, the only obligation on the
ordinary householder being the furnishing of billets. Occasionally the
cobbled streets became the scene of an unwonted animation when young
French recruits celebrated their call to the colours by marching down
the streets arm-in-arm singing ribald songs, or a squad of sullen German
prisoners were marched up them on their way to the prison, within which
they vanished amid the imprecations of the crowd. One such squad I saw
arriving in a motor lorry, from the tailboard of which they jumped down
to enter the gates, and one of them, a clumsy fellow of about thirteen
stones, landed heavily in his ammunition boots from a height of about
five feet on the foot of a British soldier on guard. The latter winced
and hastily drew back his foot, but beyond that gave no sign; I wondered
whether, had the positions been reversed and the scene laid across the
Rhine, a German guard would have exhibited a similar tolerance. I doubt
it.
The town itself seemed to be living on its past, for indubitably it had
seen better days. An ancient foundation of the Jesuits now converted
into the Map and Printing Department of the R.E.'s, a church whose huge
nave had been secularised to the uses of motor transport, a museum which
served to incarcerate the German prisoners, all testified to the
vanished greatness, as did also the private mansions, which preserved a
kind of mystery behind their high-walled gardens and massive double
doors. There was one such which I never passed at night without thinking
of the Sieur de Maletroit's door. The streets were narrow, tortuous, and
secretive, with many blind alleys and dark closes, and it required no
great effort of the imagination--especially at night when not a light
showed--to call to mind the ambuscades and adventures with the watch
which they must have witnessed some centuries before. The very names of
the streets--such as the _Rue d'Arbalête_--held in them something of
romance. To find one's billet at night was like a game of blind man's
buff, and one felt rather than saw one's way. Not a soul was to be seen,
for the whole town was under _droit de siège_, and the civilian
inhabitants had to be within doors by nine o'clock, while all the
entrances and exits to and from the town were guarded by double sentries
night and day. Certain dark doorways also secreted a solitary sentry,
and my own office boasted a corporal's guard--presumably because the
Field-Cashier had his rooms on the first floor. The sanitation was truly
medieval; on either side of the cobbled streets noisome gutters formed
an open sewer into which housewives emptied their slop-pails every
morning, while mongrel dogs nosed among the garbage. Yet the precincts
were not without a certain beauty, and every side of the town was
approached through an avenue of limes or poplars. But in winter the
sodden landscape was desolate beyond belief, these roads presenting just
that aspect of a current of slime in a muddy sea which they suggested to
the lonely horseman on the eve of Waterloo in that little classic of De
Vigny's known to literature as _Laurette_.
Such was the country and such the town in which we were billeted. Now
upon a morning in February it happened that I was smoking a cigarette in
the little garden, bordered by hedges of box, while waiting for my car,
and as I waited I watched Jeanne, with her sleeves rolled up to her
elbows and a clothes-peg in her mouth, busy over the wash-tub. "Vous
êtes une blanchisseuse, aujourd'hui?" I remarked. She corrected me.
"Non, m'sieu', une lessiveuse." "Une lessiveuse?" For answer Jeanne
pointed to a linen-bag which was steeping in the tub. The linen-bag
contained the ashes of the beech-tree; it is a way of washing that they
have in some parts of France, and very cleansing. To specialise thus is
_lessiver_. As we talked in this desultory fashion I let fall a word
concerning a journey I was about to undertake to the French lines, a
journey that would take me over the battlefield of the Marne. "La Marne!
Hélas, quelle douleur!" said Jeanne, and wiped her eyes with the corner
of her apron. "But it was a glorious victory," I expostulated. Yes, but
Jeanne, it seemed, had lost a brother in the battle of the Marne. She
pulled out of her bosom a frayed letter, bleached, stained, and
perforated with holes about the size of a shilling, and handed it to me.
I could make nothing of it. She handed me another letter. "Son
camarade," she explained, and no longer attempted to hide her tears.
And this was what I read:
Le 10 sept., 1914.
CHÈRE MADAME--Comme j'étais très bon camarade avec votre frère Paul
Duval et que le malheur vient de lui arriver, je tient à vous le
faire savoir, car peut-être vous serai dans l'inquiétude de pas
recevoir de ces nouvelles et de ne pas savoir où il est. Je vous
dirai que je vient de lui donner du papier à lettre et une enveloppe
pour vous écrire et aussitôt la lettre finit il l'a mis dans son
képi pour vous l'envoyé le plus vite possible et malheureusement un
obus est arriver, et il à etait tué. Heureusement nous étions trois
près de l'un l'autre et il n'y a eut de lui de touché. Je vous envoi
la petite lettre qu'il venait de vous faire, et en même tant vous
verrez les trous que les éclats d'obus l'on attrapper. Recevez de
moi chère madame mes sincères salutations.
JULES COPPÉE.
Tambour au 151e Regiment d'Inf.,
2e Cie 42e Division, Secteur postale 56.
Crude and illiterate though it was, the letter had a certain noble
simplicity. "Très gentil," I remarked as I returned it to Jeanne, and
thought the matter at an end. But Jeanne had not done, and, with much
circumlocution and many hesitations, she at last preferred a simple
request. I was going to visit the battlefield of the Marne--yes? I
assented. Well, perhaps, perhaps Monsieur would visit Paul's grave, and
perhaps if he found it he would take a photograph. "Why, certainly," I
said, little knowing what I promised. But the request was to have a
strange sequel, as you shall hear. Sykes came to say my car was at the
door. As I clambered in and turned to wave a farewell, Madame and
Jeanne stood on the doorstep to wish me _bon voyage_. "J'espère que vous
tuerez plusieurs Allemands," cried Madame in a quavering voice.
"Veuillez ne pas oublier, M'sieu'," cried Jeanne wistfully. I waved my
hand, and had soon left rue Robert le Frisson far behind me.
FOOTNOTE:
[8] The town described in this sketch is described not as it is, but as
it was some months ago, and nothing is to be inferred from the title as
to its present significance.
XII
MORT POUR LA PATRIE
Two days later a French staff-officer greeted me in the vestibule of the
Hôtel de Crillon at Paris. It was the Comte de G----; he had been
deputed by the Ministry of War to act as my escort on my tour of the
French lines. He proved to be a charming companion. He was a magnificent
figure of a man six feet three inches in height at least, an officer of
dragoons, and he wore the red and white brassard, embroidered in gold
with a design of forked lightning, which is the prerogative of the
staff. A military car with a driver and an orderly in shaggy furs
awaited us outside on the Place de la Concorde. It was a sumptuous car,
upholstered in green corded silk, with nickel fittings, and displaying
on its panels the motto _Quand même_, and the monogram of a famous
actress. It had been requisitioned. The air was cold--there had been
frost overnight--but the sun was brilliant. As we threaded our way
through Paris and its suburbs, a Paris chastened and resolute, I caught
a glimpse of the barges upon the Seine with the women standing on the
convex hatches hanging out clothes to dry--and I thought of Daudet and
_La Belle Nivernaise_. As more and yet more men are called up to the
colours women take their place, until the houses of business are like
nunneries--with a few aged Fathers Superior. Having had business the day
before at the Société Générale, I had had occasion to reflect on these
things as I stood in the counting-house watching some fifty girl typists
at work, the room resounding with the tap-tap of their machines, as
though fifty thrushes were breaking snails upon a stone. A wizened
little clerk, verging upon superannuation, had beguiled my time of
waiting with talk of the war: how his wife from Picardy had lost fifteen
of her _parents_, while of four painters and paper-hangers who had
started doing up his flat on the 2nd of July only one--disabled--had
returned to finish the job; the rest were dead. Musing on these things
as we drove through the Bois de Vincennes I understood the resolution of
our Allies and the significance of the things my companion pointed out
to me as we drove: here a row of trees felled to provide a field of
fire, there a gun emplacement, and reserve trenches all the way from
Paris to Soissons. They are leaving nothing to chance.