To excuse oneself to oneself is human: but to excuse oneself to
one’s children is Hell.—_Arabic Proverb._
Billeted troops are difficult to get at. There are thousands of them in
a little old town by the side of an even older park up the London Road,
but to find a particular battalion is like ferreting unstopped burrows.
‘The Umpty-Umpth, were you looking for?’ said a private in charge of a
side-car. ‘We’re the Eenty-Eenth. ‘Only came in last week. I’ve never
seen this place before. It’s pretty. Hold on! There’s a postman. He’ll
know.’
He, too, was in khaki, bowed between mailbags, and his accent was of a
far and coaly county.
‘I’m none too sure,’ said he, ‘but I think I saw——’
Here a third man cut in.
‘Yon’s t’ battalion, marchin’ into t’ park now. Roon! Happen tha’ll
catch ‘em.’
They turned out to be Territorials with a history behind them; but that
I didn’t know till later; and their band and cyclists. Very polite were
those rear-rank cyclists—who pushed their loaded machines with one vast
hand apiece.
They were strangers, they said. They had only come here a few days ago.
But they knew the South well. They had been in Gloucestershire, which
was a very nice southern place.
Then their battalion, I hazarded, was of northern extraction?
They admitted that I might go as far as that; their speech betraying
their native town at every rich word.
‘Huddersfield, of course?’ I said, to make them out with it.
‘Bolton,’ said one at last. Being in uniform the pitman could not
destroy the impertinent civilian.
‘Ah, Bolton!’ I returned. ‘_All_ cotton, aren’t you?’
‘Some coal,’ he answered gravely. There is notorious rivalry ‘twixt coal
and cotton in Bolton, but I wanted to see him practise the self-control
that the Army is always teaching.
As I have said, he and his companion were most polite, but the total of
their information, boiled and peeled, was that they had just come from
Bolton way; might at any moment be sent somewhere else, and they liked
Gloucestershire in the south. A spy could not have learned much less.
The battalion halted, and moved off by companies for further evolutions.
One could see they were more than used to drill and arms; a hardened,
thick-necked, thin-flanked, deep-chested lot, dealt with quite
faithfully by their sergeants, and altogether abreast of their work.
Why, then, this reticence? What had they to be ashamed of, these big
Bolton folk without an address? Where was their orderly-room?
There were many orderly-rooms in the little old town, most of them in
bye-lanes less than one car wide. I found what I wanted, and—this was
north-country all over—a private who volunteered to steer me to
headquarters through the tricky southern streets. He was communicative,
and told me a good deal about typhoid-inoculation and musketry practice,
which accounted for only six companies being on parade. But surely they
could not have been ashamed of _that_.