Last winter a famous figure walked in Behagnies. Soldiers came to see
him from their billets all down the Arras road, from Ervillers and
from Sapigny, and from the ghosts of villages back from the road,
places that once were villages but are only names now. They would walk
three or four miles, those who could not get lorries, for his was one
of those names that all men know, not such a name as a soldier or poet
may win, but a name that all men know. They used to go there at
evening.
Four miles away on the left as you went from Ervillers, the guns
mumbled over the hills, low hills over which the Verys from the
trenches put up their heads and peered around,--greeny, yellowy
heads that turned the sky sickly, and the clouds lit up and went grey
again all the night long. As you got near to Behagnies you lost sight
of the Verys, but the guns mumbled on. A silly little train used to
run on one’s left, which used to whistle loudly, as though it asked to
be shelled, but I never saw a shell coming its way; perhaps it knew
that the German gunners could not calculate how slow it went. It
crossed the road as you got down to Behagnies.
You passed the graves of two or three German soldiers with their names
on white wooden crosses,--men killed in 1914; and then a little
cemetery of a French cavalry regiment, where a big cross stood in the
middle with a wreath and a tricolor badge, and the names of the men.
And then one saw trees. That was always a wonder, whether one saw
their dark shapes in the evening, or whether one saw them by day, and
knew from the look of their leaves whether autumn had come yet, or
gone. In winter at evening one just saw the black bulk of them, but
that was no less marvellous than seeing them green in summer; trees by
the side of the Arras-Bapaume road, trees in mid-desert in the awful
region of Somme. There were not many of them, just a cluster, fewer
than the date palms in an oasis in Sahara, but an oasis is an oasis
wherever you find it, and a few trees make it. There are little places
here and there, few enough as the Arabs know, that the Sahara’s deadly
sand has never been able to devastate; and there are places even in
the Somme that German malice, obeying the Kaiser as the sand of Sahara
obeys the accursed sirocco, has not been able to destroy quite to the
uttermost. That little cluster of trees at Behagnies is one of these;
Divisional Headquarters used to shelter beneath them; and near them
was a statue on a lawn which probably stood by the windows of some
fine house, though there is no trace of the house but the lawn and
that statue now.
And over the way on the left a little further on, just past the
officers’ club, a large hall stood where one saw that famous figure,
whom officers and men alike would come so far to see.
The hall would hold perhaps four or five hundred seats in front of a
stage fitted up very simply with red, white and blue cloths, but
fitted up by some one that understood the job; and at the back of that
stage on those winter evenings walked on his flat and world-renowned
feet the figure of Charlie Chaplin.
When aëroplanes came over bombing, the dynamos used to stop for they
supplied light to other places besides the cinema, and the shade of
Charlie Chaplin would fade away. But the men would wait till the
aëroplanes had gone and that famous figure came waddling back to the
screen. There he amused tired men newly come from the trenches, there
he brought laughter to most of the twelve days that they had out of
the line.
He is gone from Behagnies now. He did not march in the retreat a
little apart from the troops, with head bent forward and hand thrust
in jacket, a flat-footed Napoleon: yet he is gone; for no one would
have left behind for the enemy so precious a thing as a Charlie
Chaplin film. He is gone but he will return. He will come with his
cane one day along that Arras road to the old hut in Behagnies; and
men dressed in brown will welcome him there again.
He will pass beyond it through those desolate plains, and over the
hills beyond them, beyond Bapaume. Far hamlets to the east will know
his antics.
And one day surely, in old familiar garb, without court dress, without
removing his hat, armed with that flexible cane, he will walk over the
faces of the Prussian Guard and, picking up the Kaiser by the collar,
with infinite nonchalance in finger and thumb, will place him neatly
in a prone position and solemnly sit on his chest.