all its own way. Anti-aircraft guns fill the space about it with
bursting shrapnel, other aeroplanes rise to attack it, machine guns
spit bullets at it. If no damage is done, the unfortunate observer
is kept far too busy to worry about what is going on down below him.
On one occasion we were conducting a series by the help of aerial
observation. It was a beautifully clear day, and to our astonishment
our first three rounds were signalled "Not observed." Then came a
message, "Observation impossible, am coming home," and in about a
minute we saw our aeroplane "coming home" at top speed, closely pursued
by three hostile machines. Sometimes one is fortunate enough to witness
an air duel, which is one of the most magnificent sights imaginable.
The anti-aircraft guns are silent, the risk of hitting their friends
is too great, and high up above the ground the machines wheel and
turn and dive at angles that seem incredible to the watchers below.
Very faintly comes the roar of the engines and the staccato rattle
of machine guns and automatic pistols. At last one of the machines,
finding itself overpowered, dives suddenly, and then, straightening its
course, makes a long vol plané to the safety of its own lines, followed
by its antagonists till the anti-aircraft fire becomes too hot for
them. Or there is a sudden silence, a curious fluttering as of a winged
bird, and, quite slowly as it seems, a torn mass of metal and canvas
dives headlong to earth. Or perhaps one morning a dull drone attracts
one's attention, and, looking up, one sees against the deep blue of
the sky an aerial squadron, their wings almost pure white in the sun,
a flight of sinister wild geese, carrying bombs to the destruction of
some important railway centre. Flanders is much to be recommended as a
suitable spot in which to undergo the cure of ennui.
The men off duty seem also to find plenty of occupation. For one thing
there is always something to grumble at--either it rains, and the
billets leak water through their broken-down roofs, or the mail does
not arrive one day, or something of the kind happens--for the gunner is
an inveterate "grouser" at trifles, although such incidents as being
shelled only seem to amuse him. And then he can go to the nearest spot
in which the inhabitants have still been allowed to remain, where he
finds every cottage converted into an _estaminet_. There he may sit
with a group of his friends drinking that strange beer that is about
as intoxicating as tea and not quite so harmful, and he can grumble
at that. Gunner Wolverhampton, the sheen upon whose nose indicates
that he is probably something of a connoisseur in the matter of beer,
says that it tastes like the water that mother washes the onions in,
and I daresay it does. Here, sitting in these cottage parlours, you
find him holding long conversations with their owners and perhaps a
handful of French soldiers, in the curious language that is rapidly
growing up. If there should be a girl in the place (her age or looks
are quite immaterial) he cannot refrain from chaff. "You compree
promnade?" he says. "Si, si," she replies. "Well, you come promnade
with moi down the route, savvy?" She shakes her head. "You no bon,"
he says gravely. "Mais oui, moi j'suis bonne, mais vous méchant." "No
bon, my dear, but portez two beers, twoppence, compree?" The way the
two nations understand one another is amazing. "The old girl at the
farm was telling me last night all about the time when the Bosches
was here," said Gunner Wolverhampton to me one day. "How on earth did
you manage to understand her?" I asked. "Oh, we got along famous," he
replied, and very soon showed me that she had made him understand her
remarks thoroughly. On one occasion, finding a party of French linesmen
stranded for a length of wire, one of our telephonists gave them a
piece, and ever afterwards the two batteries were on terms of the
greatest intimacy. The men used to go and sit in one another's billets,
frequently, after the manner of their kind, exchanging headgear as they
did so, with the most curious effects, as when a burly gunner clad in
a brown sweater and a French steel helmet, and carrying a long French
rifle, strolled across the road. The startling resemblance he bore to a
Cromwellian soldier made us all turn out to see him.
Gunner Wolverhampton, as the archetype of his fellows, deserves more
than passing notice. He had served twelve years in the regiment, had
taken his discharge, and was in civilian employment when the war broke
out. As soon as recruiting regulations allowed, that is about the third
week of the war, he re-enlisted. These re-enlisted men were allotted
regimental numbers from one upwards in the order in which they offered
themselves, and Gunner Wolverhampton is justly proud of his single
figure number. In appearance he is about forty-five, with a grave face,
a well-built figure, and a slow and weighty method of speech. His
peculiarity lies in his nose, which is a rich crimson--it must have
been a most expensive acquisition. When asked his civilian trade, he
gives it as sign-painter, a statement that once surprised one of his
comrades into remarking _sotto voce_, "Gawd love us, chum, I thought
you was a whisky-taster!" An old soldier of the finest type, knowing
all the ropes and imbued with that highest form of self-respect that
only the traditions of the service can propagate, he is perfectly
invaluable by the mere force of his example in these days when soldiers
are turned out by the million in a few months. A certain proportion
of the battery _matériel_ and stores were entirely in his hands, and
he has never throughout the campaign been found deficient by so much
as a pick-handle, nor has his gun ever failed to be spotlessly clean
and in perfect order. Without the inclination or necessary educational
qualifications for promotion, he is useful and contented as a gunner,
and in times of emergency the whole of his section, including the
non-commissioned officers themselves, instinctively turn to him for
guidance. He it is that when the detachments are worn out after a long
period of digging or of working the gun, keeps them hard at it by his
example and by caustic criticism of their relative feebleness; he it
was that walked calmly down to where a neighbouring battery was being
shelled and led a party out, as though he were taking some friends to
get a drink, to where the shells were falling viciously round two or
three wounded men, bringing them in with utter unconcern for his own
danger. Ah, Gunner Wolverhampton, if this war makes of all who serve in
it men such as you, then the cost of it in blood and treasure will be
as nothing when set by the side of the freshly won strength of a nation
rejuvenated!
Happy hours are those spent just behind the line between the strenuous
days of strife, when one feels merely a spectator of the pageantry
of war, when one can study men at their best, for the strain of war
brings out the good qualities of human nature and atrophies the bad.
Hours they are of leisure, when one may drive into a town of perhaps
some considerable local importance, where, even under the strange forms
that war has cast upon it, the old peace-time life of the community
yet lives. Not all the jostling crowd of khaki, the long trains of
supply columns that block the narrow mediæval streets of Béthune, have
essentially altered the character of the place as the market-town of
the neighbouring district; the old square tower, the graceful belfry,
still look down upon a crowd of _gamins_, of hatless women and girls,
of old men standing in the market-place. Only the young men are
wanting, and their place is taken by this surging crowd of the young
men of another nation. Commercially, all such towns must be reaping a
golden harvest. See how every pastry-cook's window bears the legend
"Tea Rooms," extending below it a tempting array of _pâtisserie_ that
would shame the best of those dreadful "tea-shops" of our native land.
And, when sufficiently allured, elbow your way in amongst the hungry
rabble that speak a curious tongue they believe to be French--it does
not matter, the proprietress and her daughter learnt English long ago,
and have now almost acquired this same curious tongue--and try to get a
seat. So it is with all the shops, and the Frenchman, with his instinct
to provide what is required, has contrived that the most exacting of
these English officers with their innumerable and most peculiar wants,
shall rarely go away unsatisfied. In such towns as these will be found
the representatives of those peculiar units that are raised (or do
they raise themselves?) apparently for the sole purpose of encumbering
the roads. But perhaps in the villages is seen the more amusing side
of international commerce. In the towns everybody seems to know by
instinct what the soldier wants--I have heard a gunner ask for fried
fish and chips in the vernacular of Newcastle, and get it--but in the
villages considerable parleying is sometimes necessary. There is a
story of a man who rode to a farmhouse where eggs were to be obtained,
and demanded "oofs." But madame was unresponsive. "Non compris,
monsieur, peut-être il veut du lait, de la beurre----?" Desperate,
the man dismounted, and, picking up his horse's foot, tapped it
significantly. "No, ma'am, not lay or burr, oofs, oofs, can't you see?"
XII
A WAR MESS
More amusement is usually to be derived from the Battery Mess than
from any other side of the not uninteresting life of the campaign.
Let half-a-dozen officers of varying ages, temperaments and ideas be
collected at random from half the civilized globe, and set them down in
a situation where their only relaxation must be found in one another's
company, and watch the result. It can readily be imagined that there
are endless piquant possibilities, a vast field of quiet entertainment
for the student of the lighter side of existence.
As a rule, for the care of its material side, some heavenborn genius
arises from amongst the ruck of his fellows, whose well-ordered brain
revels in the details of cooks, and ration beef and the most convenient
hour for dinner. Happy is the mess in its possession of him, how
willingly its members forego any say in the matters pertaining to
sustenance, in how docile a spirit do they submit to his autocratic
ruling that marmalade is to be kept for breakfast alone, that lunch
shall consist of bully-beef and cheese! Our own battery was blessed
beyond its fellows in a tyrant of dazzling capabilities, who coaxed
mysterious dishes, of course with the collusion of the mess-cook, from
the most unpromising materials, who fed us bountifully from secret
stores of his own such time as we wandered forlorn over the face of
the land, who allowed no comment upon the quality of the bacon or
the resilience of the bread. We all looked blindly to him for our
daily needs, much as the Children of Israel looked to Moses in the
wilderness, and we were never disappointed. May his memory be for ever
associated with these precious words--he fed us well!
Mess premises may be divided into two classes, the first being found in
cases where the battery position is in a locality where the inhabitants
are still in occupation of their houses, and consisting of some room
in an _estaminet_ or farmhouse, the second being improvised in a ruin
or dug-out. Both are capable of providing both trouble and comfort,
in both a stern resolution to take things cheerfully as they come
results wonderfully quickly in the discovery that one is getting on
very well considering. I have a vivid picture in my memory of a mess
of the first type, once the public room of an _estaminet_, now given
over for our use. A few chairs and a table furnished it, its doors
opened upon a courtyard of extraordinary capabilities in the way of
mud, wherein stood the battery car, a horse or two, and several fowls,
one or more of which items one invariably fell over in the dark. Next
to the mess-room was the kitchen, of whose stove we had the use, and
wherein perpetually _madame_ and the two mess servants bickered for
space for their culinary operations. And yet perhaps we were even
more comfortable in a home that we made for ourselves in an abandoned
miner's cottage. We glazed the windows, repaired the shell-holes in
the roof, stole doors and a stove, and made the place thoroughly
weatherproof and comfortable. And then, the furnishing and decoration!
No newly-engaged couple, who, if we may believe the posters, spend
their hours of bliss in arguing whether they shall confide their
savings to Messrs. Deal & Glue or to the Houndsditch Furnishing Co.,
ever furnished with such a zest as did we. Abandoned villages lay
all around us, ours was the freedom to loot as we would. The only
trouble was that we were by no means the first comers--"our wants
had all been felt, our errors made before"--and it required diligent
search to find anything of any use. Our wheeler mended a broken table,
two triumphant servants struggled in with a gigantic sideboard, the
roofless and abandoned church was raided for cane-seated chairs,
we descended like vultures upon a rival mess when the battery that
owned it, being ordered to another position, abandoned it. Growing
ambitious, we refused to be contented with mere use, our cultivated
taste demanded ornament, decoration of the bare walls, and our craving
was gratified. Out of every house we took the marvellous examples of
the photographer's art that we found there, wonderful enlargements
of the owner, his wife, his children, in their Sunday best, and hung
them indiscriminately, the more prepossessing "on the line," the rest
grouped with artistic abandon. Should their exiled owners ever return
to them, what delight will be theirs to find those two old enemies
Monsieur Malbranque and Madame Rietz hanging lovingly side by side,
or that stern old maid, Mademoiselle Dalbine, surrounded by a group
of miscellaneous children! What litigation may not ensue when Madame
Apelghem finds her mahogany chest-of-drawers in Madame Puchon's cellar,
or Monsieur Verlane his brand-new cooking-stove firmly cemented into
the bedroom of that doubtful lady Ma'm'selle Frisson! With what regret
did we leave this home-like mess to take the road once more, and with
what true instinct did the senior subaltern insist upon the loading
into the last lorry of the best loved of the portraits, so that it
might follow the battery in all its wanderings as a perpetual memory
of happy days! It was a truly fearsome enlargement of a terribly
ugly little girl, her face, with the mouth hanging open, bearing an
expression of acute agony, her hands crossed over the region where the
pain might be expected to be, her toes turned in despondently. "The
Flatulent Child" we christened her, yet perhaps none of us, gazing into
those inexpressive eyes, can fail to remember days whose happiness will
always be a precious memory to us all.
The food question practically solves itself; rations of surpassing
quality are provided in quantities that tax the keenest appetite
to consume, all that remains is to cook them and to provide such
delicate extras as may be desired. And in that same provision of extras
there lies many a snare. France is not a desert and savage land, as,
judging by the preparations that a conscientious mess secretary makes
before he embarks, one might expect to find it, and nearly everything
that one wants can be obtained in the towns behind the line at very
reasonable prices. We had arranged with a large firm in England to
send us fortnightly supplies, and there our troubles began. The firm
played their part nobly, and beginning with the day we set out upon
our adventures, sent regularly the fortnightly consignments. But heavy
artillery owes no allegiance to division or army corps, but wanders
like some distended bumblebee about the line, sipping honey in the
shape of rations now from this point, now from that, until the Military
Forwarding Officers, the Railway Transport Officers, and all the
host of curiously termed people whose business it is to play trains
in this distracted land, lose all count of the whereabouts of any
particular battery. The result of this to us was that for six weeks
after our arrival in France we heard nothing of our long-expected
delicacies, despite frantic journeys to railhead after railhead, and
piteous applications to supply officers all over the country. By
this time we had learnt that we could get what we wanted close at
hand, and had ceased to worry about them, when one day we received a
message that some stores were awaiting us at a certain station forty
miles away. Seizing a favourable opportunity, we dashed over there in
the battery car and secured the first consignment, and being by that
time fairly well settled, we left instructions for the forwarding of
any subsequent lots that might turn up. Then the accumulation of the
fruitless weeks began to pour in upon us. At every tactical crisis the
ration-lorry would dash up to the battery, amidst a tempest of shot
and shell, and unload numberless cases of things of which we already
had a superfluity. Box after box was dumped upon us, packed tight with
tins of cold and sodden fruit, of strange cereal foods, of desiccated
and strange-tasting soups. Who, in a country where food is treated as
a fine art, would wish to live upon such things? Yet our stern tyrant,
his mind rebelling at the mere thought of waste, ordained that it must
be so, and so it was. Alas, for the flesh-pots of France, the omelettes
and coffee of _Madame_! How tragic that you must vanish to appear no
more!
Of sleeping quarters much might be written. What in theory could be
more delightful than to sleep in one's valise in the open air--the
thing is supposed to be waterproof--to wake up fresh in the early
morning and roll on the dewy grass by way of a bath? What indeed? The
romance of the proceeding appeals to the man allured by the specious
prospect of campaigning, and he invariably attempts it for a few
nights, until he grows strangely silent towards bed-time and furtively
steals away to some billet he has found. After that he fluctuates
between spreading his valise in a chicken-run (it was night when we
spread out our valises, and the major's language on discovering in
the morning that he had been trying to hatch out a likely-looking
brood of chickens was, to put it respectfully, bracing) and crawling
luxuriously, in the full glory of pyjamas, between real sheets. The
valise itself is all right, there is nothing more comfortable, the
only trouble is that it is bed and portmanteau combined, so that one's
night's rest is shared by all one's belongings, including one's spare
pair of boots. And I never met a pair of boots in such circumstances
that had not the power of being in several places at once, till one's
valise, whichever way one turned, did not seem to be as closely packed
with boots as a cobbler's shop. I repeat, the valise is all right,
that is if one's servant knows how to fold the blankets in it, and
how to dispose the softer of its contents under one's head. But the
occasional luxury of a real bed is very welcome, only--treat the casual
mattress with caution until you know it thoroughly. If etymology means
in Flanders the study of the language of the trenches, entomology is
likewise the study of a doubtful mattress, and both sciences are often
more extensive than it would appear. Better in most billets is the
bare floor with a valise upon it than the most tempting bed. Usually,
however, one has to use both. For many nights two of us occupied a
room exactly six feet by eight, more than half of which was occupied
by the bed. Our process of turning-in was interesting and extremely
scientific. We had tossed up for the bed, and my friend had won it, so
he retired to rest first. When he was safely in bed, I came in, put
all the remaining furniture outside the door, shut it, laid down my
valise, and crawled into it, my head jammed against the door, and my
feet up the stove pipe, like Alice in the house of the White Rabbit.
He slept with his feet out of the window, until early one morning a
passing horse, of inquisitive temperament, seeing the blanket, gave it
a sharp tug. My friend woke up convinced the Huns were upon us.
My most comfortable nights were spent in a coal cellar, which two of
us had cleared out and adapted to our uses. My stable companion, being
something of a sybarite, looted an iron bedstead on which to spread his
valise--it was a new and improved type, and when extended in all its
glory had a curious canopy of its own, the effect of the whole being
like nothing so much as Noah's Ark. Into this, with much difficulty and
objurgation he would crawl, when the mysterious concern would promptly
convert itself into a portable washingstand or some other fitment of
extreme utility, whence it had to be coaxed into the Ark-like form
again. I, less ambitious, supported a shutter on some bricks, and laid
my very ordinary valise on that. It was far less ostentatious, and I
had fewer adventurous nights. It was cold in that cellar, so we raided
a stove that we lit every evening, finding plenty of broken rafters
in the ruined houses round us to serve for fuel. We shall neither of
us know again such nights as those, lulled to sleep as we were by the
sleepless batteries around us, although in profound peace we might rest
in the most sumptuous bed that Tottenham Court Road ever produced.
In this ideal spot we had a bathroom with a huge stove in it, on which
to boil many gallons of water in petrol cans, and no luxury could equal
the luxury of those hot baths. There was a tragedy connected with it,
though. One young officer was wallowing in a glorious sea of foaming
lather, when a shell burst a few yards from the door. Not being sure
where and when to expect the next, he dashed as he was through the
battery to his dug-out, the soap-suds flying from him as foam from the
limbs of some swift-footed sea-god. Nor was the major more fortunate.
Condemned to spend many weary days and nights in his O.P., and missing
the bathroom, he constructed one on the same plan, but less the stove,
in the house he used for the purpose. But unfortunately there was
only a wooden partition between him and the enemy, and one day stray
bullets began to come through this with alarming frequency. He, too,
was compelled to beat a hurried retreat.
Strange, too, are the messes that two or three officers, alone together
on detachment, establish for their own convenience. I know of one in
the dark low hall of an old farmhouse, that is in itself mess-room,
kitchen and sleeping apartment for the servants of the two officers who
lived in the little room opening off it. Life there was very much as we
imagine it in mediæval times, the officers had their meals with their
servants standing behind their chairs--not from a desire for wanton
display, but because there was nowhere else to go--by the light of
two candles and the red glow of the stove in the background. Upon the
oaken beams of the ceiling hung strange shapes that were the implements
of war, looted German rifles and bayonets, haversacks, water-bottles,
binoculars, sextants and other lethal weapons. A dripping oilskin dried
by the fire, the faint smell of warm wet gum-boots mingled with that
of the boiling cabbage. Perhaps the telephone that buzzed incessantly
introduced a modern element, but everything else, seen in the gloom of
the shaded candles, looked ghostly, unreal, a scene from some forgotten
haunt of a robber baron. And the rats ran fearlessly across the floor,
or sat very still in the corners, their fierce eyes shining as the
light caught them. Tea was the meal of the day in that mess, for then
one of the two came in from his observation post at Suicide Corner,
for which he had set out at half-past five in the morning, tired and
hungry, and tea when the light has failed and the rising mist of late
autumn foretells a white frost is a worthy meal. Suicide Corner was
a bleak spot, too, and eight hours in such a place with nothing but
bully-beef sandwiches for lunch gives one an amazing appetite. And if
one's companion is Scotch with an apparently limitless acquaintance who
send him shortbread and oat-cake, then one's cup of delight is full
indeed.