It might have been for exercise merely, or it might be down to the sea
and away to the front for the battle of ‘Our Raj.’ The quiet hotel where
people sit together and talk in earnest strained pairs is well used to
such departures. The officers of a whole Division—the raw cuts of their
tent-circles lie still unhealed on the links—dined there by scores;
mothers and relatives came down from the uttermost parts of Scotland for
a last look at their boys, and found beds goodness knows where: very
quiet little weddings, too, set out from its doors to the church
opposite. The Division went away a century of weeks ago by the road that
the mule-battery took. Many of the civilians who pocketed the wills
signed and witnessed in the smoking-room are full-blown executors now;
some of the brides are widows.
And it is not nice to remember that when the hotel was so filled that
not even another pleading mother could be given a place in which to lie
down and have her cry out—not at all nice to remember that it never
occurred to any of the comfortable people in the large but sparsely
inhabited houses around that they might have offered a night’s lodging,
even to an unintroduced stranger.