magistrate be sadly compelled to admit his impotence. The magistrate,
however, appeared in nowise perturbed, nor did he for a moment relax his
authoritative expression. He was turning over the pages of the _Code
d'Instruction Criminelle_, glancing occasionally at a now wholly
penitent prisoner trembling before the majesty of the law. At last he
spoke. "I will deal with you," he said with an air of indulgence, "under
Chapter VIII. of the Code. You will be bound over to come up for
judgment at the end of the war if called upon. You will deposit a
_cautionnement_ of twenty francs. And now, gentlemen, we are at your
service."
"Fiat justitia ruat coelum," whispered A---- to me, as the prisoner,
deeply impressed, opened a leather purse and counted out four greasy
five-franc notes.
FOOTNOTE:
[27] Defamation. It is a misdemeanour according to Belgian law.
XXVII
HIGHER EDUCATION
British Headquarters must, I think, be the biggest Military Academy in
the world. It has its Sandhurst and its Woolwich and even its Camberley.
It ought long ago to have been incorporated by Order in Council as a
University with Sir John French as Chancellor. It has more schools in
the Art of War than I can remember, and every School has an Instructor
who deserves to rank as a full-time Professor. To graduate in one of
those schools you must get a fortnight's leave from your trenches or
your battery, at the end of which time you return to do a little
post-graduate work of a very practical kind with the aid of a
machine-gun or a trench-mortar. At the beginning of the war higher
education at G.H.Q. was somewhat neglected, and the company officer who
desired to improve himself in the lethal arts had to be content with
private study. Company officers went in for applied chemistry by making
flares out of a test-tube full of water, delicately balanced in a
bully-beef tin containing sodium. The tins were tied to the barbed-wire
entanglements in front of our trenches, and when the stealthy Hun,
creeping on his stomach, bumped against the wire the test-tube
overflowed into the tin and a lurid patch of greenish flame revealed the
clumsy visitor to our look-outs. That was before we were supplied with
calcium flares. Then, too, the sappers went in for experimental research
by making trench-mortars out of old stove-pipes.
To-day all that is changed. A chemical corps has come out to join the
sappers, and the gunners have received some highly finished
trench-mortars from Vickers's. A trench mortar is a kind of toy howitzer
and very useful when you want to try conclusions with a neighbouring
trench at short range. The mortars are not exactly things to play with,
and so two "schools" of mortars have been instituted to teach R.G.A. men
how to handle them. Every morning at nine o'clock two young subalterns
meet their class of fifty pupils in a château, and explain with the aid
of a diagram on a blackboard the internal economy of the mortar and its
50-lb. bomb, the adjustment of angles of elevation to ranges, and the
respective offices of fuse, charge, and detonator. When the class have
had enough of this they go off to a neighbouring field to simulate
trench warfare and hold a demonstration. This is real sport. They have
dug a sector of trenches, duly traversed, and at some two or three
hundred yards distance have dug another sector and decorated it
realistically with barbed-wire entanglements. Thither one afternoon we
conveyed the mortar to the first trenches on an improvised carriage,
placed it behind one of the traverses, and duly clamped it down. The
subaltern took up a periscope and got the thread-line on the target--you
find the range without instruments and by your own intuitions. "Three
hundred, I think," he remarked pensively. A pupil adjusted the range
indicator at 71·30 to get the elevation, and his assistant took up what
looked like a huge jar of preserved ginger. It was the bomb. Having put
the tail to it he inserted the detonator. "Fuse at 27." He set the
indicator with as much care as if he were setting the hands of his
watch. The man took the fuse delicately, put in the test-tube and
attached the lanyard. These operations had been closely followed by the
class, who made a circle round the bomb like a football "scrum." It was
now time to line the trenches, for the "tail" of the bomb is apt to kick
viciously when the thing is fired. As they spread out, the man removed
the two safety-pins in the top of the fuse and pulled the lanyard. There
was a voice of thunder and a sheet of flame, followed by what seemed an
interminable pause. We scanned the brown furrows in front of us and
suddenly the earth shot skywards in a fan; a cloud of dirty-black smoke
floated over our target. The whole class leapt the parapet and streamed
away across the furrows like a pack of hounds in full cry, until they
suddenly disappeared below the surface of the earth. We followed and
found them standing in a huge crater whose sides were hollowed out as
neatly as those of a cup. "Done it again," said the subaltern
complacently, "we've never had a blind."
At the Machine-gun School they do things on a larger scale, and Wren's
could teach them nothing in the art of cramming. The Instructor reckons
to put his class of 200 officers and men through a six months' course in
a fortnight. There is need for it. The Germans started this war with
eleven machine-guns (it is now anything from twenty to forty) to a
battalion. We started with two. For years they have enlisted, trained,
and paid a special class of men to man them. Consequently we had a great
deal of leeway to make up. We are making it up, hand over fist, thanks
to the Instructor, one of the most brilliant and devoted officers I
know, and a man who spends his nights in inventing or perfecting
improvements. He has got a pocket edition of a machine-gun made of
tempered steel and weighing only 27 lb., as against our old one, which
is of gun-metal and weighs 58 lb.--a material difference when it is a
question of an advance. The new one, he explains somewhat illogically,
with paternal pride, can be carried into action "like a baby." Having
decided to give it a trial we carried it tenderly to a quarry and
proceeded to "feed" it with a belt of cartridges. The Instructor set up
a small stick against the bank of a gravel quarry and returned and
adjusted the tangent-sight at 100 on the standard. He got the fore-sight
and back-sight in a line on the stick, seized the traversing-handles,
released the safety-catch, and pressed the button with his right thumb
with the persistency of a man who cannot make the waiter answer the
electric bell. "Tap--tap--tap." There was a series of explosions as
though the sparking plug of a motor-bicycle was playing tricks. The
target danced like a thing possessed. It hopped and skipped and curtsied
under that deadly stream of bullets. Then he slowly swept that gravel
bank with the traversing handles till the pebbles jumped like
hailstones. "I think she'll do," he remarked appreciatively as he folded
up the tripod.
The R.E. is the Army's school of technology. To do a survey or make a
bridge or lay a telephone is all in the day's work. But your sapper is
a man of ideas, and is for ever seeking out new inventions. So he has
turned his attention to chemistry, and "R.E." has a chemical corps which
has put aside the blow-pipe and the test-tube at home to come out and
study the applied chemistry of war. Just now they are engaged in
discovering the most effective method of laying noxious gases. Copper
vessels of ammonia in a trench to disperse the gas when it gets there
are all very well, but by that time you may have more pressing
attentions of the enemy to engage you; the thing is to prevent the gas
getting there. Hence ingenious minds are considering how to project with
a spray something upon the advancing fog which will bring it to earth in
the form of an innocuous compound. Spray that something over the
parapet, and if you can spray it far enough and wide enough you may
precipitate the deadly green and brown mists into chlorides or bromides
which will be as harmless as bleaching-powder and not less salubrious.
Others have turned their attention to automatic flares. You can get a
startling illuminant if you suspend a test-tube containing sulphuric
acid in a vessel of chlorate of potash, and it will be all the better if
you add a little common sugar and salt. You balance your test-tube in
the hollow of a bamboo stick and fill the top knot of the stick with
the chlorate of potash; then you plant your sticks, not too securely,
outside your barbed-wire entanglements, and string them together with a
trip-wire. As for the patrolling Hun who bumps against that trip-wire,
it were better for him that a millstone were hung round his neck.
This is Higher Education and post-graduate research. But elementary
education is not neglected. At the H.Q. of the --th Corps is an O.T.C.
where privates in the H.A.C. and the Artists practise the precepts of
the _Infantry Manual_ and study night operations in the meadows within
sound of the guns.
Truly it is, in the words of the stout Puritan, a nation not slow and
dull but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent,
subtle and sinewy, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that
human capacity can soar to.
XXVIII
THE LITTLE TOWNS OF FLANDERS AND ARTOIS
The little towns of Flanders and Artois are Aire, Hazebrouck, Bethune,
Armentières, Bailleul, Poperinghe, and Cassel. They are known in the
Army vernacular as Air, Hazybrook, Betoon, Arm-in-tears, Ballyhool
(occasionally Belial), Poperingy, and Kassel. The fairest of these is
Cassel. For Cassel is set upon a hill which rises from the interminable
plain, salient and alluring as a tor in Somerset, and seems to say to
the fretful wayfarer, "Come unto Me all ye that are weary, and I will
give you rest." For upon the hill of Cassel the air is sweet and fresh,
the slopes are musical with a faint lullaby of falling showers, as the
wind plays among the birches and the poplars, and over all there is a
great peace. The motor-lorries avoid the declivities of Cassel, and the
horsemen pass by on the other side. Some twenty windmills--no less and
perhaps more--are perched like dovecots on the hill, lifting their
sails to the blue sky. Some day I will seek out a notary at Cassel and
will get him to execute a deed of conveyance assigning to me, with no
restrictive covenants, the freehold of one of those mills, for I have
coveted a mill ever since I succumbed to the enchantments of _Lettres de
mon moulin_. True, Flanders is not Provence, and the croaking of the
frogs, croak they never so amorously, among the willows in the plains
below is a poor exchange for the chant of the _cigale_. But these mills
look out over a landscape that is now dearer to me than Abana and
Pharpar, for many a gallant friend of mine lies beneath its sod.
Cassel is approached by a winding road that turns and returns upon
itself like a corkscrew, and is bordered by an avenue of trees. It has a
bandstand--what town in Flanders and Artois has not?--and a church.
Cheek by jowl with the church is a place of convenience, which seems to
me profane in more senses than one. I have never been able to make up my
mind whether such secularisation of a church wall is the expression of
anti-clerical antipathies, or of a clerical common-sense peculiarly
French in its practical and unblushing acceptance of the elementary
facts of life. But about Cassel I am not so sure. The sight of that
shameless annexe is too familiar in France to please our fastidious
English tastes--it seems to express a truculent nonconformity, it is too
like a dissenting chapel-of-ease.
Wherever God erects a house of prayer
The devil always builds a chapel there.
I have never had the courage to solve my uncertainties by buttonholing a
Frenchman and asking him what is the truth of the matter. I am sure
Anatole France could supply me with any number of whimsical
explanations, all of them suggestive, and not one of them true.
But, except for this sauciness, Cassel is a demure and pleasant place.
Bailleul is mean in comparison, though it has a notable church tower in
which there are traces of some Byzantine imagination brought hither,
perhaps, by a Spanish Army of occupation. Also it has a tea-room which
is the trysting-place of all the officers in billets, and the
_châtelaine_ of which answers your lame and halting French in nimble
English. On the road to Locre it has those Baths and Wash-houses which
have become so justly famous, and whence hosts of British soldiers come
forth like Naaman white as snow, but infinitely more companionable.
Almost any day you may see a bathing-towel unit marching thither or
thence in column of route, their towels held at the slope or the trail
as it pleases their fancy. And in a field outside Bailleul I have seen
open-air smithies and the glow of hot coals, the air resounding with the
clink of hammers upon the anvil--a cheering spectacle on a wet and
inclement winter's day. But Bailleul has few amenities and no charms. It
is, however, occasionally visited by that amazing troupe of variety
artistes, known as the Army Pierrots, who provide the men in billets
with a most delectable entertainment for 50 centimes, the proceeds being
a "deodand," and appropriated to charitable uses. For all that, Bailleul
stinks in the nostrils of fatigue-parties.
Bethune is like the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land, for it is
the rendezvous of the British Army, and men tramp miles to warm their
hands at its fires of social life. Its _pâtisserie_ has the choicest
cakes, and its hairdresser's the most soothing unguents of any town in
our occupation. It has a great market-place, where the peasants do a
thriving business every Saturday, producing astonished rabbits by the
ears from large sacks, like a conjuror, and holding out live and
plaintive fowls for sensual examination by pensive housewives. Also it
has a town-hall in which I once witnessed the trial by court-martial of
a second-lieutenant in the R.A.M.C. for ribaldry in his cups and conduct
unbecoming an officer and a gentleman--a spectacle as melancholy as it
is rare, and of which the less said the better. It has a church with
some lurid glass of indifferent quality, and (if I remember rightly) a
curious dovecote of a tower. The transepts are hemmed in by shops and
warehouses. To the mediaevalist there is nothing strange in such
neighbourliness of the world and the Church. The great French churches
of the Middle Ages--witness Nôtre Dame d'Amiens with its inviting
ambulatory--were places of municipal debate, and their sculpture was, to
borrow the bold metaphor of Viollet-le-Duc, a political "liberty of
speech" at a time when the chisel of the sculptor might say what the pen
of the scrivener dared not, for fear of the common hangman, express.
Bethune is not the only place where I have seen shops coddling churches,
and the conjunction was originally less impertinent than it now seems.
It was not that the Church was profaned, but that the world was
consecrated; honest burgesses trading under the very shadow of the
flying buttresses were reminded that usury was a sin, and that to charge
a "just price" was the beginning of justification by works. But I have
not observed that the shopkeepers of Bethune now entertain any very
mediaeval compunction about charging the British soldier an unjust
price.
Armentières is on the high road to Lille, but at present there is no
thoroughfare. It's a dispiriting town, given over to industrial
pursuits, and approached by rows of mean little cottages such as you may
see on the slopes of the mining valleys of South Wales. Two things stand
out in my memory--one, the spectacle of a corporal being tried for his
life in the Town Hall by a court-martial--there had been a quarrel over
a girl in billets and he had shot his comrade; the other the sight of a
regiment of Canadians ("Princess Pat's," I believe), drawn up in the
square for parade one winter afternoon before they went into the
trenches for the first time. And a very gallant and hefty body of men
they were.
Poperinghe is a dismal place, and to be avoided.
Hazebrouck is not without some pretentiousness. It has the largest
_place_ of any of them, with a town-hall of imposing appearance, but
something of a whited sepulchre for all that. I remember calling on a
civilian dignitary there--I forget what he was; he sat in a long narrow
corridor-like room, all the windows were hermetically sealed, a
gas-stove burnt pungently, some fifty people smoked cigarettes, and at
intervals the dignitary spat upon the floor and then shuffled his foot
over the spot as a concession to public hygiene. Therefore I did not
tarry. The precincts of the railway-station are often crowded by batches
of German prisoners, villainous-looking rascals, and usually of the
earth earthy. I watched some of them entraining one day; with them was a
surly German officer who looked at his fellow-prisoners with contempt,
the crowd of inhabitants with dislike, and (so it seemed to me) his
guards with hatred. No one spoke to him, and he stood apart in
melancholy insolence. Perhaps he was the German officer of whom the
story is told that, being conducted to the Base in a third-class
carriage in the company of some of his own men, and under the escort of
some British soldiers, he declaimed all the way down against being
condemned to such low society, until one of his guards, getting rather
"fed up" with it all, bluntly cut him short with the admonition: "Stow
it, governor, we'd have hired a blooming Pullman if we'd known we was
going to have the pleasure of your society. Yus, and we'd have had Sir
John French 'ere to meet you. But yer'll have to put up with us low
fellows for a bit instead, which if yer don't like it, yer can lump it,
and if yer won't lump it, where will yer have it?" and he tapped his
bayonet invitingly. Needless to say, the speaker's pleasantry was
impracticable. But the officer did not know that; he only knew the way
they have in Germany. Wherefore the officer relapsed into a thoughtful
silence.
Hazebrouck has a witty and pleasant _procureur de la République_, who
once confided to me that the English were "irresistible." "In war?" I
asked. "_Vraiment_," he replied, "but I meant in love."
But the towns occupied by our Army are monotonously lacking in
distinction. To tell the truth they wear an impoverished look, and are
singularly unprepossessing. I prefer the villages, the small châteaux
built on grassy mounds surrounded by moats, and the timbered farm-houses
with their red-tiled roofs and barns big enough to billet a whole
company at a pinch. The country is one vast bivouac, and every cottage,
farm, and mansion is a billet. Near the edge of the Front you may see
men who have just come out of action; I remember once meeting a group of
Royal Irish, only forty-seven left out of a Company, who had been in the
attack by the 8th Division at Fleurbaix, and I gazed at them with
something of the respectful consternation with which the Babylonians
must have regarded Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego after their ordeal in
the fiery furnace. Yet nothing of their demeanour betrayed the brazen
fury they had gone through; they sat by the hedge cleaning their
accoutrements with the utmost nonchalance. They reminded me of the North
Staffords, one of whose officers, whom I know very well, when I asked
him what were his impressions of a battle, replied, after some
reflection: "I haven't got any; all I can remember of a hot corner we
were in near Oultersteen was that my men, while waiting to advance, were
picking blackberries." It was a man of the North Staffords who,
according to the same unimpeachable authority, was heard shouting out
when half the trench was blown in by a shell, and he had extricated
himself with difficulty: "'Ere, where's my pipe? Some one's pinched my
pipe!"
But it isn't always quite as comforting as that. The servant of a friend
of mine, a young subaltern in the Black Watch, whom, alas! like so many
other friends, I shall never see again, in describing the church parade
held after the battle of Loos, in which his master was killed by a
shell, wrote that when the chaplain gave out the hymn "Rock of Ages" the
men burst into tears, their voices failed them, and they broke down
utterly. And I remember that on one occasion when some four-fifths of
the officers of a certain battalion had gone down in the advance, and
the shaken remnant fell back upon their trenches, deafened and
distraught, one of the officers--he had been a master in a great public
school before the war--took out of his pocket a copy of the _Faerie
Queene_, and began in a slow, even voice to read the measured cadences
of one of its cantos, and, having read, handed it to a subaltern and
asked him to follow suit. The others listened, half in wonder, half in
fear, thinking he had lost his senses, but there was method in his
madness and a true inspiration. The musical rhythm of the words
distracted their terrible memories, and soon acted like a charm upon
their disordered nerves.
And on his breast a bloody cross he bore,
The dear remembrance of his dying Lord,
For whose sweet sake that glorious badge he wore,
And dead (as living) ever him adored:
Upon his shield the like was also scored,
For sovereign hope, which in his help he had:
Right faithful true he was in deed and word;
But of his cheer did seem too solemn sad:
Yet nothing did he dread, but ever was ydrad.
Clusters of men in billets; men doing a route-march to keep them fit;
Indian cavalry jogging along on the footpath with lances in rest; herds
of tethered horses in rest-camps; a string of motor-buses painted a
khaki-tint; a "mobile" (a travelling workshop) with its dynamo humming
like a top and the mechanics busy upon the lathe; an Army Postal van
coming along, like a friend in need, to tow my car, stranded in the mud,
with a long cable; sappers, like Zaccheus, up a tree (but not
metaphorically); despatch-riders whizzing past at sixty miles an
hour--these are familiar sights of the lines of communication, and they
lend a variety to the monotonous countryside without which it would be
dull indeed. For it is a countryside of interminable straight
lines--straight roads, straight hop-poles, and poplars not less
straight, reminding one in winter of one of Hobbema's landscapes without
their colouring. But to the south of the zone of our occupation, as you
leave G.H.Q. for the Base, you exchange these plains of sticky clay and
stagnant dykes for a pleasant country of undulating downs and noble
beech woods, and one seems to shake off a nightmare of damp despondency.
It may be remarked that I have said nothing of Ypres. The explanation is
painfully simple. Ypres has ceased to exist. It is merely a heap of
stones, and the trilithons on Salisbury Plain are not more desolate.
XXIX
THE FRONT ONCE MORE