the water, the mechanics having assisted her initial progress by
pushing the lower stays and then ducking under the planes, as she
gathered way, and just missing decapitation. It's a way they have. She
took a run for it, her engine humming like a top, and then rose, and
gradually climbed the sky. Peter gazed at her wistfully. "And he
promised to take me up some day," he said sadly.
"Yes, some day, Peter," I said encouragingly. "But it's time we were
getting back. You know you've got to catch the leave-boat at four
o'clock this afternoon."
* * * * *
Peter's father and I stood on the quay, having taken farewell of Peter.
There was an eminent Staff Officer going home on leave--a very great man
at G.H.Q., a lieutenant-general, who inspired no less fear than respect
among us all. He knew Peter's father in his distant way, and had not
only returned his salute, but had even condescended to ask, in his
laconic style, "Who is the boy?"--whereupon Peter's father had, with
some nervousness, introduced him. All the other officers going home on
leave, from a Brigadier down to the subalterns, stood at a respectful
distance, glancing furtively at the hawk-like profile of the great man,
and lowering their voices. It was a tribute not only to rank but to
power. As the ship gathered way and moved slowly out of the harbour I
pulled the sleeve of Peter's father. "Look!" I said. The
Lieutenant-General and Peter were engaged in an animated conversation on
the deck, and the great man, usually as silent as the sphinx and not
less inscrutable, was evidently contesting with some warmth and great
interest, as though hard put to keep his end up, some point of debate
propounded to him by Peter.
"T----, old chap," I said, "Peter'll be a great man some day."
Peter's father said nothing, but his eyes grew misty. Perhaps he was
thinking of that lonely grave in the distant plains of the Deccan where
Peter's mother sleeps.
XVII
THREE TRAVELLERS
(_October 1914_)
My train left Paris at 1.52 in the afternoon. It was due at Calais at
eight o'clock the same evening. But it soon became apparent that
something was amiss with our journey--we crawled along at a pace which
barely exceeded six miles an hour. At every culvert, guarded by its
solitary sentry, we seemed to pause to take breath. As we approached
Amiens, barely halfway on our journey, somewhere about 9.30 P.M., we
passed on the opposite line of rails a Red Cross train, stationary, and
throwing deep rhomboid shadows in the candid moonlight. One glimpse of
an open horse-box revealed to me in a flash the secret of our languor.
It was a cold, keen night; the full moon rode high in a starless sky,
and there must have been ten or twelve degrees of frost. We had left far
behind us the diaphanous veils of mist hovering above river banks, out
of which the poplars stood argent and fragile, as though the landscape
were a Japanese print. Through the open door of the horse-box I saw a
soldier stretched upon his straw, with a red gaping wound in his
half-naked body. Over him stooped a nurse, improvising with delicate
ministries a hasty dressing. In the next carriage the black face of a
wounded Senegalese looked out, unearthly in the moonlight. Ahead of us
an interminable line of trains (some seventy of them I was told) had
passed, conveying fresh troops. Then I knew. The Germans, hovering like
a dark cloud some twenty miles away, had been reinforced, and a fierce
battle was in progress. The news of it had travelled by some mysterious
telepathy to every village along the line, and at every crossing groups
of pale-faced women, silent and intent, kept a restless vigil. They
looked like ghosts in the moonlight; no cheer escaped them as we passed,
no hand waved an exuberant greeting. In the twilight we had already seen
red-trousered soldiers, vivid as poppies against the grass, digging
trenches along the line, and at one point a group of sappers improvising
a wire footbridge across the river. The contagion of suspense was in the
air,--you seemed to catch it in the faint susurrus of the poplars.
"Shall we get to Calais?" I asked.
"Bon Dieu! I know not," was the reply of the harassed guard.
We pursued our stealthy journey, reached Abbeville somewhere about
midnight, and Boulogne in the small hours. 4 A.M. Calais at last! I
joyfully exclaimed. But between Calais Ville and Calais Maritime a group
of officers boarded our train and, for some mysterious reason, we were
headed off to Dunkirk. It grew colder and more cold, and I had had no
food since noon of yesterday. But my thoughts were with our men, the men
whom I had lately come to know, now lying out on the bare earth in the
moonlit trenches, keeping their everlasting vigil and blowing on their
fingers numbed with cold. We reached Dunkirk at 6 A.M. No explanation
why the train had played truant at Calais was vouchsafed me, nor was any
hope held out of a return. In those days I was travelling as a private
person, and was not yet endowed with the prerogatives by which, in the
name of a Secretary of State, I could requisition cars and impress men
to do my bidding.
At a hopeless moment I had the good fortune to fall in with a King's
Messenger, carrying despatches, who was in the next carriage. He
produced his special passports, and the prestige of "Courrier du Roi,"
Knight of the Order of the Silver Greyhound, worked a miracle. Every
one was at our service. We were escorted to the military headquarters
of Dunkirk--through streets already echoing with the march of French
infantry, each carrying a big baton of bread and munching as he kept
step, to an office in which the courteous commandant was just completing
his toilet. The Consul was summoned, the headquarters hotel of the
English officers was rung up, and thither we went through an ambuscade
of motor-cars in the courtyard.
A lieutenant of the Naval Flying Squadron was ready for us with his
powerful Rolls-Royce, and we were soon on the high road to Calais.
Everywhere were the stratagems of war: a misty haze of barbed-wire
entanglements in the distant fields, deep trenches, earthworks six feet
thick masking rows of guns. Time pressed, but every mile or so we were
stopped by a kind of Hampton Court maze, thrown across the road, in the
shape of high walls of earth and stone, compelling our lieutenant at the
steering-wheel to zigzag in and out, and thereby putting us at the mercy
of the sentry who stood beside his hut of straw and hurdles, and
presented his bayonet at the bonnet as though preparing to receive
cavalry. The corporal came up, and with him a little group of French
soldiers, their cheeks impoverished, their glassy eyes sunk in deep
black hollows by their eternal vigil. "Officier Anglais!" "Courrier du
Roi!" we exclaimed, and were sped on our way with a weary smile and
"Bonjour! messieurs." Women and old men were already toiling in the
fields, stooping like the figures in Millet's "Gleaners," as we raced
through an interminable avenue of poplars, past closed inns, past
depopulated farms, past wooden windmills, perched high upon wooden
platforms like gigantic dovecots. At each challenge a sombre word was
exchanged about Antwerp--again that strange telepathy of peril. Calais
at last! and a great empty boat with a solitary fellow-passenger.
* * * * *
He was a London wine-merchant of repute, who had got here at last from
Rheims, whither he had gone to pay his yearly inspection of the
champagne vintage, only to find the red wine-press of war. Three weeks
he had lived like primitive man in the wine-cellars of Rheims, with the
shells screaming overhead--screaming, he says, just like the long-drawn
sobbing whistle of an express train as it leaves a tunnel. Never has he
lived such days before; never, he fervently prays, will he live them
again. From his narrative I got a glimpse of a subterranean existence,
as tenebrous and fearful as the deepest circle of Dante's _Inferno_,
with a river of tears falling always in the darkness of the vaults. A
great wine-cellar--there are ten miles of them at Rheims--crowded with
four thousand people, lighted only by candles, and swarming with huge
rats; the blanched faces of women, the crying of children, the wail of
babies at the breast. Overhead the crash of falling masonry--the men had
armed themselves with big iron pikes to hew their way out in case the
vaults fell in. Life in these catacombs was one long threnody of
anguish. Outside, the conscious stone of the great monument of mediaeval
aspiration was being battered to pieces, and the glorious company of the
apostles, the goodly fellowship of the martyrs, suffered another and a
less resurgent martyrdom. After days of this crepuscular existence he
emerged to find the cathedral less disfigured than he had feared. One
masterpiece of the mediaeval craftsmen's chisel is, however,
irremediably destroyed--the figure of the devil. We hope it is a
portent.
* * * * *
The King's Messenger had posted from a distant country, and his way
through Dijon had been truly a Via Dolorosa. Thirty-six people standing
in the corridor, and in his own crowded compartment--he had surrendered
his royal prerogative of exclusion--was a woman on the verge of
hysteria, finding relief not in tears but in an endless recital of her
sorrow. She and her husband had a son--the only son of his mother--gone
to the front, reported badly wounded, and for days, like Joseph and
Mary, the anxious parents had sought him, only to find him on the
threshold of death, with a bullet in his liver. Again and again she
beguiled her anguish by chronicles of his miraculous childhood--his
precocious intelligence at five, his prescience at six, his unfathomable
wisdom at seven. The silent company of wayfarers listened in patience to
the twice-told tale. No one could say her nay as she repeated her litany
of pain. She was, indeed, the only passenger in that compartment whose
eyes were dry. _Stabat Mater Dolorosa._
XVIII
BARBARA
It was the Duchess of X.'s Hospital at a certain _plage_ on the coast. I
had motored thither through undulating country dotted with round beehive
ricks and past meadows on which a flock of gulls, looking in the
distance like a bed of white crocuses, were settled in platoons. As we
neared the coast the scenery changed to shifting dunes of pale sand,
fine as flour, and tufted with tussocks of wiry grass. Here clumps of
broom and beech, with an occasional fir, maintained a desperate
existence against the salt winds from the Atlantic, and the beeches held
up plaintive arms like caryatids supporting the intolerable architrave
of the sky. The bare needle-like branches of the broom and fir stood out
blackly against the biscuit-coloured sand with the sharp outlines of an
etching.
I had taken a hospitable cup of tea with the Duchess in the Matron's
room. She was clothed in fine linen but without her purple; she wore
the ordinary and serviceable slate-coloured dress of a nurse. It was
here I had the honour of being introduced to Barbara. She was nursing a
doll with great tenderness, and had been asking the Duchess why she did
not wear her "cowonet."
"This is Barbara--our little Egyptian," said the matron.
Barbara repudiated the description hotly.
"She was born in Egypt," explained the matron.
"Ah," I said, "that wasn't your fault, Barbara, was it? But it was
Egypt's good fortune."
Barbara ignored the compliment with the simplicity of childhood, and
proceeded to explain with great seriousness: "You see, Mummy was
travelling, and she comed to Egypt. She didn't know I was going to
happen," she added as if to clear Mummy of any imputation of
thoughtlessness.
"And your birthday, Barbara?"
Barbara and I discovered that both of us have birthdays in March--only
six days apart. This put us at once on a footing of intimacy--we must
have been born under the same star. Barbara proceeded to inform me that
she rather liked birthdays--except the one which happened in Egypt. I
had half a mind to execute a deed of conveyance on the spot, assigning
to her all my own birthdays as an estate _pour autre vie_, with all
_profits à prendre_ and presents arising therefrom, for I am
thirty-eight and have no further use for them.
"I am afraid there are more than six years between us, Barbara," I said
pensively.
Barbara regarded me closely with large round eyes.
"About ten, I fink. I'm seven, you know."
"How nice of you to say that, Barbara. Then I'm only seventeen."
Barbara regarded me still more closely.
"A little more, p'waps--ten monfs."
"Thank you, Barbara. I'll remind you of that some day." After all, ten
years is no obstacle to the course of true love. "But what is the matter
with the doll?" Despite a rosy flush the doll has a field-dressing round
her auburn locks, and one leg is immensely stout owing to a tourniquet.
Barbara looked at me rather less favourably than before. It was evident
that she now thought poorly of my intelligence, and that I had made a
_faux pas_.
"I'm a nurse," Barbara explained, loftily, showing an armlet bearing the
ensign of the Red Cross. I was about to remind her of 1 & 2 Geo. V. cap.
20, which threatens the penalties of a misdemeanour against all who wear
the Red Cross without the authority of Army Council, but I thought
better of it. Instead of anything so foolish, I exhibit a delicate
solicitude about the health of the patient. I put myself right by
referring to it as "he." A less intelligent observer might pronounce it
to be decidedly of the female sex. Still, I reflected, women have
enlisted in the Army before now. I proceeded to inspect the injured limb
with professional gravity. "A compound fracture, I think, Barbara. He
will require careful nursing."
Barbara liked this--no one in the matron's room had ever exhibited such
a clinical interest in the case before, and she thinks "fwacture" rather
imposing.
"Let me feel his pulse," I said. I held a waxen arm between my thumb and
forefinger, and looked at my wrist-watch for some seconds, Barbara
gazing at me intently.
"Hum! hum! I think we had better take his temperature," I said, as I
held a clinical thermometer in the shape of a fountain-pen to the
rosebud lips of the patient. "103, I think."
"Will you wite a pwescwiption?" asked Barbara anxiously.
"Certainly, an admirable suggestion, Barbara. Let me see, will this do,
do you think?" I scribbled on my Field Note-book, tore out the page, and
handed it to Barbara.
Brom. Potass. 3 grs.
Hydrochl. 5 quarts.
Quin. Sulph. 1 pt.
She scrutinised it closely. It puzzled her, though her bewilderment was
nothing to the astonishment which that prescription would have excited
in a member of the medical profession.
"Fank you," said Barbara, who was no less pleased than puzzled, and who
tried to look as if she quite understood. Her little face, with its halo
of golden curls, was turned up to mine, and she now regarded me with a
respect for my professional attainments which was truly gratifying.
I was transcribing a temperature-chart for Barbara's patient when a
tactless messenger came to say that my car was at the door. Barbara hung
on my arm. "Will you come again, and take his tempewature--Pwomise?"
I promised.
XIX
AN ARMY COUNCIL
(_October 1914_)
All the morning I had travelled through the pleasant valleys of Normandy
between chalk-hills crowned with russet beeches. The country had the
delicacy of one of Corot's landscapes, and the skies were of that
unforgettable blue which is the secret of France. The end of my journey
found me at No. ---- General Hospital. The chaplain, an old C.F.
attached to the Base Hospitals, who had rejoined on the outbreak of the
war, and myself were the centre of a group of convalescents. They wore
the regulation uniform of loose sky-blue flannels, resembling a fitter's
overalls in everything except the extreme brilliance of the dye, with
red ties tied in a sailor's knot. The badges on their caps alone
betrayed their regiments. There were "details" from almost every
regiment in the British Army, and one could hear every dialect from
John o' Groat's to Land's End. Their talk was of the great retreat.
"Hell it was--fire and brimstone," said a R.F.A. man. "We limbered up,
our battery did, and got the guns off in column of route, but we were
more like a blooming ambulance than a battery. We had our limbers and
waggons chock full o' details--fellers who'd been wounded or crocked up.
And reservists wi' sore feet--out o' training, I reckon," he added
magisterially.
"Never you mind about resarvists, my son," interjected a man in the
Suffolks. "We resarvists carried some of the recroots on our backs for
miles. We ain't no chickens."
"No, that we bain't," said a West-countryman. "I reckon we can teach
them young fellers zummat. Oi zeed zome on 'em pretty clytenish[13] when
they was under foire the fust time. Though they were middlin' steady,
arterwards," he added indulgently as though jealous of the honour of his
regiment.
"'Twere all a duddering[14] mix-up. I niver a zeed anything loike it
afore. Wimmen an' childer a-runnin' in and out among us like poultry; we
could'n keep sections o' fours nohow. We carried some o' the little
'uns. And girt fires a-burnin' at night loike ricks--a terrible
blissey[15] on the hills. And 'twere that dusty and hot oi did get
mortal drouthy in my drawt and a niver had a drop in my water-bottle;
I'd gied it all to the childer."
"What about rations?" said the chaplain.
"Oh I were bit leery[16] i' my innerds at toimes, but oi had my
emargency ration, and them A.S.C. chaps were pretty sprack;[17] they kep
up wi' us most times. 'Twere just loike a circus procession--lorries and
guns and we soldjers all a-mixed up. And some of the harses went cruel
lame and had to be left behind."
"That they did," said a small man in the 19th Hussars who was obviously
a Londoner. He was slightly bow-legged and moved with the deliberate
gait of the cavalryman on his feet. "Me 'orse got the blooming 'ump with
corns."
"Ah! and what do you think of the Uhlans?"
He sniffed. "Rotten, sir! They never gives us a chawnce. They ain't no
good except for lootin'. Regular 'ooligans. We charged 'em up near Mons,
our orficer goin' ahead 'bout eight yards, and when we got up to 'em 'e
drops back into our line. We charges in a single line, you know, knee to
knee, as close together as us can get, riding low so as to present as
small a target as we can."
"And you got home with the Uhlans?" I asked.
"Once. Their lances ain't much good except for lightin' street-lamps."
"Street-lamps?" said the chaplain literally.
"Yuss. They're too long. The blighters 'ave no grip on them. We just
parry and then thrust with the point; we've giv' up cutting exercises.
If the thrust misses, you uses the pommel--so!" He executed an
intimidating gesture with his stick.
"Well, ah've had ma bit o' fun," interjected a small H.L.I. man
irrelevantly, feeling, apparently, it was his turn in the symposium, as
he thrust a red head with a freckled skin and high cheek-bones into the
group. "Ah ken verra weel ah got 'im. It was at a railway stashon where
we surprised 'em. Ah came upon a Jerrman awficer--I thocht he were
drunk--and he fired three times aht me with a ree-vol-ver. But ah got
'im. Yes, ah've had ma bit o' fun," he said complacently as he cherished
an arm in a sling.
With him was a comrade belonging to the "Lilywhites," the old 82nd, now
known as the first battalion of the South Lancs, with whom the H.L.I.
have an ancient friendship. The South Lancs have also their
antipathies--the King's Liverpools among them--but that is neither here
nor there.
"It were just like a coop-tie crowd was the retreat," he drawled in the
broad Lancashire dialect. "A fair mix-up, it were."
"What do you think of the Germans?"
There was a chorus of voices. "Not much"--"Blighters"--"Swine."
"Their 'coal-boxes' don't come off half the time," said the R.F.A. man
professionally. "And their shrapnel hasn't got the dispersion ours has.
Ours is a treat--like sugar-loaf." The German gunnery has become deadly
enough since then.
"Their coal-boxes do stink though," said a Hoxton man in the Royal
Fusiliers. "Reminds me of our howitzer shells in the Boer War; they used
to let off a lot of stuff that turned yellow. I've seen Boers--hairy
men, you know, sir--with their beards turned all yellow by them. Regular
hair-restorers, they was."
"I remember up on the Aisne," continued the Hoxton man, who had an
ingenuous countenance, "one of our chaps shouted 'Waiter,' and about
fifty on 'em stuck their heads up above the trenches and said, 'Coming,
sir.'"
There was a shout of laughter. The chaplain looked incredulous. "Don't
mind him, he's pulling your leg, sir," said his neighbour. It is a
pastime of which the British soldier is inordinately fond.
"They can't shoot for nuts, that's a fact," said a Rifleman. "They
couldn't hit a house if they was in it. We can give them five rounds
rapid while they're getting ready to fire one. Fire from the hips, they
do. I never seen the likes of it." It was the professional criticism of
the most perfectly trained body of marksmen in the world, and we
listened with respect. "But they've got some tidy snipers," he added
candidly.
"They was singing like an Eisteddfod," said a man in the South Wales
Borderers, "when they advanced. Yess, they was singing splendid. Like a
_cymanfa ganu_,[18] it wass. Fair play."
"And what do you boys do?" asked the chaplain. "Do you sing too?"
"Faith, I swore," said one of the Munsters, "I used every name but a
saint's name." The speaker was a Catholic, and the chaplain was Church
of England, or he might have been less candid.
"There was a mon in oor company," said the red-headed one, feeling it
was his turn again, "that killed seven Jerrmans--he shot six and
baynitted anither. And he wur fair fou[19] afterwards. He grat like a
bairn."
"Aye, mon," said a ruddy man of the Yorks L.I., "ah knaw'd ah felt mysen
dafflin[20] when ah saw me pal knocked over. He comed fra oor toon, and
he tellt me hissen the neet afore: 'Jock,' 'e said, 'tha'll write to me
wife, woan't tha?' And ah said, 'Doan't be a fule, Ben, tha'll be all
right.' 'Noa, Jock,' he tellt me, 'ah knaw'd afore ah left heeam ah
should be killt. Ah saw a mouldiwarp[21] dead afore oor door; me wife
fair dithered[22] when she saw't.'"
The chaplain and myself looked puzzled. "It's a kind o' sign among the
fouk in our parts, sir," he proceeded, enlightening our ignorance. "And
'e asked me to take his brass for the wife. But ah thowt nowt of it. And
we lost oor connectin' files and were nobbut two platoons, and we got it
somethin' cruel; the shells were a-skirling[23] like peewits ower our
heids. And Ben were knocked over and 'e never said a ward. And then ah
got fair daft."
There was silence for a moment.
"I found this," suddenly interrupted a despatch-rider. He was a
fair-spoken youth, obviously of some education. He explained, in reply
to our interrogatories, that he was a despatch-rider attached to a
Signal Company of the R.E. He produced a cap, apparently from nowhere,
by mere sleight of hand. It was greasy, weather-stained, and in no
respect different from a thousand such Army caps. It bore the badge and
superscription of the R.E. We looked at it indifferently as he held it
out with an eleemosynary gesture.
"A collection will now be taken," said the Hoxton man with a grin.
But the despatch-rider did not laugh. "I found this cap," he said
gravely, "on Monday, September 7th, in a house near La Ferté. We stopped
there for four hours while the artillery were in action. We saw a broken
motor bicycle outside a house to which the people pointed. We went in.
We found one of our despatch-riders with an officer's sword sticking in
him. Our section officer asked the people about it, and they told him
that the despatch-rider arrived late one night, having lost his way and
knocked at the door of the house. There were German officers billeted
there. They let him in, and then they stuck him up against a wall and
cut him up. He had fifteen sabre-cuts," he added quietly.