Chapter V: Part 5

A lieutenant of the Naval Flying Squadron was ready for us with his powerful Rolls-Royce, and we were soon on the high road to Calais. Everywhere were the stratagems of war: a misty haze of barbed-wire entanglements in the distant fields, deep trenches, earthworks six feet thick masking rows of guns. Time pressed, but every mile or so we were stopped by a kind of Hampton Court maze, thrown across the road, in the shape of high walls of earth and stone, compelling our lieutenant at the steering-wheel to zigzag in and out, and thereby putting us at the mercy of the sentry who stood beside his hut of straw and hurdles, and presented his bayonet at the bonnet as though preparing to receive cavalry. The corporal came up, and with him a little group of French soldiers, their cheeks impoverished, their glassy eyes sunk in deep black hollows by their eternal vigil. "Officier Anglais!" "Courrier du Roi!" we exclaimed, and were sped on our way with a weary smile and "Bonjour! messieurs." Women and old men were already toiling in the fields, stooping like the figures in Millet's "Gleaners," as we raced through an interminable avenue of poplars, past closed inns, past depopulated farms, past wooden windmills, perched high upon wooden platforms like gigantic dovecots. At each challenge a sombre word was exchanged about Antwerp--again that strange telepathy of peril. Calais at last! and a great empty boat with a solitary fellow-passenger.

* * * * *

He was a London wine-merchant of repute, who had got here at last from Rheims, whither he had gone to pay his yearly inspection of the champagne vintage, only to find the red wine-press of war. Three weeks he had lived like primitive man in the wine-cellars of Rheims, with the shells screaming overhead--screaming, he says, just like the long-drawn sobbing whistle of an express train as it leaves a tunnel. Never has he lived such days before; never, he fervently prays, will he live them again. From his narrative I got a glimpse of a subterranean existence, as tenebrous and fearful as the deepest circle of Dante's _Inferno_, with a river of tears falling always in the darkness of the vaults. A great wine-cellar--there are ten miles of them at Rheims--crowded with four thousand people, lighted only by candles, and swarming with huge rats; the blanched faces of women, the crying of children, the wail of babies at the breast. Overhead the crash of falling masonry--the men had armed themselves with big iron pikes to hew their way out in case the vaults fell in. Life in these catacombs was one long threnody of anguish. Outside, the conscious stone of the great monument of mediaeval aspiration was being battered to pieces, and the glorious company of the apostles, the goodly fellowship of the martyrs, suffered another and a less resurgent martyrdom. After days of this crepuscular existence he emerged to find the cathedral less disfigured than he had feared. One masterpiece of the mediaeval craftsmen's chisel is, however, irremediably destroyed--the figure of the devil. We hope it is a portent.

* * * * *

The King's Messenger had posted from a distant country, and his way through Dijon had been truly a Via Dolorosa. Thirty-six people standing in the corridor, and in his own crowded compartment--he had surrendered his royal prerogative of exclusion--was a woman on the verge of hysteria, finding relief not in tears but in an endless recital of her sorrow. She and her husband had a son--the only son of his mother--gone to the front, reported badly wounded, and for days, like Joseph and Mary, the anxious parents had sought him, only to find him on the threshold of death, with a bullet in his liver. Again and again she beguiled her anguish by chronicles of his miraculous childhood--his precocious intelligence at five, his prescience at six, his unfathomable wisdom at seven. The silent company of wayfarers listened in patience to the twice-told tale. No one could say her nay as she repeated her litany of pain. She was, indeed, the only passenger in that compartment whose eyes were dry. _Stabat Mater Dolorosa._

XVIII

BARBARA

It was the Duchess of X.'s Hospital at a certain _plage_ on the coast. I had motored thither through undulating country dotted with round beehive ricks and past meadows on which a flock of gulls, looking in the distance like a bed of white crocuses, were settled in platoons. As we neared the coast the scenery changed to shifting dunes of pale sand, fine as flour, and tufted with tussocks of wiry grass. Here clumps of broom and beech, with an occasional fir, maintained a desperate existence against the salt winds from the Atlantic, and the beeches held up plaintive arms like caryatids supporting the intolerable architrave of the sky. The bare needle-like branches of the broom and fir stood out blackly against the biscuit-coloured sand with the sharp outlines of an etching.

I had taken a hospitable cup of tea with the Duchess in the Matron's room. She was clothed in fine linen but without her purple; she wore the ordinary and serviceable slate-coloured dress of a nurse. It was here I had the honour of being introduced to Barbara. She was nursing a doll with great tenderness, and had been asking the Duchess why she did not wear her "cowonet."

"This is Barbara--our little Egyptian," said the matron.

Barbara repudiated the description hotly.

"She was born in Egypt," explained the matron.

"Ah," I said, "that wasn't your fault, Barbara, was it? But it was Egypt's good fortune."

Barbara ignored the compliment with the simplicity of childhood, and proceeded to explain with great seriousness: "You see, Mummy was travelling, and she comed to Egypt. She didn't know I was going to happen," she added as if to clear Mummy of any imputation of thoughtlessness.

"And your birthday, Barbara?"

Barbara and I discovered that both of us have birthdays in March--only six days apart. This put us at once on a footing of intimacy--we must have been born under the same star. Barbara proceeded to inform me that she rather liked birthdays--except the one which happened in Egypt. I had half a mind to execute a deed of conveyance on the spot, assigning to her all my own birthdays as an estate _pour autre vie_, with all _profits à prendre_ and presents arising therefrom, for I am thirty-eight and have no further use for them.

"I am afraid there are more than six years between us, Barbara," I said pensively.

Barbara regarded me closely with large round eyes.

"About ten, I fink. I'm seven, you know."

"How nice of you to say that, Barbara. Then I'm only seventeen."

Barbara regarded me still more closely.

"A little more, p'waps--ten monfs."

"Thank you, Barbara. I'll remind you of that some day." After all, ten years is no obstacle to the course of true love. "But what is the matter with the doll?" Despite a rosy flush the doll has a field-dressing round her auburn locks, and one leg is immensely stout owing to a tourniquet.

Barbara looked at me rather less favourably than before. It was evident that she now thought poorly of my intelligence, and that I had made a _faux pas_.

"I'm a nurse," Barbara explained, loftily, showing an armlet bearing the ensign of the Red Cross. I was about to remind her of 1 & 2 Geo. V. cap. 20, which threatens the penalties of a misdemeanour against all who wear the Red Cross without the authority of Army Council, but I thought better of it. Instead of anything so foolish, I exhibit a delicate solicitude about the health of the patient. I put myself right by referring to it as "he." A less intelligent observer might pronounce it to be decidedly of the female sex. Still, I reflected, women have enlisted in the Army before now. I proceeded to inspect the injured limb with professional gravity. "A compound fracture, I think, Barbara. He will require careful nursing."

Barbara liked this--no one in the matron's room had ever exhibited such a clinical interest in the case before, and she thinks "fwacture" rather imposing.

"Let me feel his pulse," I said. I held a waxen arm between my thumb and forefinger, and looked at my wrist-watch for some seconds, Barbara gazing at me intently.

"Hum! hum! I think we had better take his temperature," I said, as I held a clinical thermometer in the shape of a fountain-pen to the rosebud lips of the patient. "103, I think."

"Will you wite a pwescwiption?" asked Barbara anxiously.

"Certainly, an admirable suggestion, Barbara. Let me see, will this do, do you think?" I scribbled on my Field Note-book, tore out the page, and handed it to Barbara.

Brom. Potass. 3 grs.
Hydrochl. 5 quarts.
Quin. Sulph. 1 pt.

She scrutinised it closely. It puzzled her, though her bewilderment was nothing to the astonishment which that prescription would have excited in a member of the medical profession.

"Fank you," said Barbara, who was no less pleased than puzzled, and who tried to look as if she quite understood. Her little face, with its halo of golden curls, was turned up to mine, and she now regarded me with a respect for my professional attainments which was truly gratifying.

I was transcribing a temperature-chart for Barbara's patient when a tactless messenger came to say that my car was at the door. Barbara hung on my arm. "Will you come again, and take his tempewature--Pwomise?"

I promised.

XIX

AN ARMY COUNCIL

(_October 1914_)

All the morning I had travelled through the pleasant valleys of Normandy between chalk-hills crowned with russet beeches. The country had the delicacy of one of Corot's landscapes, and the skies were of that unforgettable blue which is the secret of France. The end of my journey found me at No. ---- General Hospital. The chaplain, an old C.F. attached to the Base Hospitals, who had rejoined on the outbreak of the war, and myself were the centre of a group of convalescents. They wore the regulation uniform of loose sky-blue flannels, resembling a fitter's overalls in everything except the extreme brilliance of the dye, with red ties tied in a sailor's knot. The badges on their caps alone betrayed their regiments. There were "details" from almost every regiment in the British Army, and one could hear every dialect from John o' Groat's to Land's End. Their talk was of the great retreat.

"Hell it was--fire and brimstone," said a R.F.A. man. "We limbered up, our battery did, and got the guns off in column of route, but we were more like a blooming ambulance than a battery. We had our limbers and waggons chock full o' details--fellers who'd been wounded or crocked up. And reservists wi' sore feet--out o' training, I reckon," he added magisterially.

"Never you mind about resarvists, my son," interjected a man in the Suffolks. "We resarvists carried some of the recroots on our backs for miles. We ain't no chickens."

"No, that we bain't," said a West-countryman. "I reckon we can teach them young fellers zummat. Oi zeed zome on 'em pretty clytenish[13] when they was under foire the fust time. Though they were middlin' steady, arterwards," he added indulgently as though jealous of the honour of his regiment.

"'Twere all a duddering[14] mix-up. I niver a zeed anything loike it afore. Wimmen an' childer a-runnin' in and out among us like poultry; we could'n keep sections o' fours nohow. We carried some o' the little 'uns. And girt fires a-burnin' at night loike ricks--a terrible blissey[15] on the hills. And 'twere that dusty and hot oi did get mortal drouthy in my drawt and a niver had a drop in my water-bottle; I'd gied it all to the childer."

"What about rations?" said the chaplain.

"Oh I were bit leery[16] i' my innerds at toimes, but oi had my emargency ration, and them A.S.C. chaps were pretty sprack;[17] they kep up wi' us most times. 'Twere just loike a circus procession--lorries and guns and we soldjers all a-mixed up. And some of the harses went cruel lame and had to be left behind."

"That they did," said a small man in the 19th Hussars who was obviously a Londoner. He was slightly bow-legged and moved with the deliberate gait of the cavalryman on his feet. "Me 'orse got the blooming 'ump with corns."

"Ah! and what do you think of the Uhlans?"

He sniffed. "Rotten, sir! They never gives us a chawnce. They ain't no good except for lootin'. Regular 'ooligans. We charged 'em up near Mons, our orficer goin' ahead 'bout eight yards, and when we got up to 'em 'e drops back into our line. We charges in a single line, you know, knee to knee, as close together as us can get, riding low so as to present as small a target as we can."

"And you got home with the Uhlans?" I asked.

"Once. Their lances ain't much good except for lightin' street-lamps."

"Street-lamps?" said the chaplain literally.

"Yuss. They're too long. The blighters 'ave no grip on them. We just parry and then thrust with the point; we've giv' up cutting exercises. If the thrust misses, you uses the pommel--so!" He executed an intimidating gesture with his stick.

"Well, ah've had ma bit o' fun," interjected a small H.L.I. man irrelevantly, feeling, apparently, it was his turn in the symposium, as he thrust a red head with a freckled skin and high cheek-bones into the group. "Ah ken verra weel ah got 'im. It was at a railway stashon where we surprised 'em. Ah came upon a Jerrman awficer--I thocht he were drunk--and he fired three times aht me with a ree-vol-ver. But ah got 'im. Yes, ah've had ma bit o' fun," he said complacently as he cherished an arm in a sling.

With him was a comrade belonging to the "Lilywhites," the old 82nd, now known as the first battalion of the South Lancs, with whom the H.L.I. have an ancient friendship. The South Lancs have also their antipathies--the King's Liverpools among them--but that is neither here nor there.

"It were just like a coop-tie crowd was the retreat," he drawled in the broad Lancashire dialect. "A fair mix-up, it were."

"What do you think of the Germans?"

There was a chorus of voices. "Not much"--"Blighters"--"Swine."

"Their 'coal-boxes' don't come off half the time," said the R.F.A. man professionally. "And their shrapnel hasn't got the dispersion ours has. Ours is a treat--like sugar-loaf." The German gunnery has become deadly enough since then.

"Their coal-boxes do stink though," said a Hoxton man in the Royal Fusiliers. "Reminds me of our howitzer shells in the Boer War; they used to let off a lot of stuff that turned yellow. I've seen Boers--hairy men, you know, sir--with their beards turned all yellow by them. Regular hair-restorers, they was."

"I remember up on the Aisne," continued the Hoxton man, who had an ingenuous countenance, "one of our chaps shouted 'Waiter,' and about fifty on 'em stuck their heads up above the trenches and said, 'Coming, sir.'"

There was a shout of laughter. The chaplain looked incredulous. "Don't mind him, he's pulling your leg, sir," said his neighbour. It is a pastime of which the British soldier is inordinately fond.

"They can't shoot for nuts, that's a fact," said a Rifleman. "They couldn't hit a house if they was in it. We can give them five rounds rapid while they're getting ready to fire one. Fire from the hips, they do. I never seen the likes of it." It was the professional criticism of the most perfectly trained body of marksmen in the world, and we listened with respect. "But they've got some tidy snipers," he added candidly.

"They was singing like an Eisteddfod," said a man in the South Wales Borderers, "when they advanced. Yess, they was singing splendid. Like a _cymanfa ganu_,[18] it wass. Fair play."

"And what do you boys do?" asked the chaplain. "Do you sing too?"

"Faith, I swore," said one of the Munsters, "I used every name but a saint's name." The speaker was a Catholic, and the chaplain was Church of England, or he might have been less candid.

"There was a mon in oor company," said the red-headed one, feeling it was his turn again, "that killed seven Jerrmans--he shot six and baynitted anither. And he wur fair fou[19] afterwards. He grat like a bairn."

"Aye, mon," said a ruddy man of the Yorks L.I., "ah knaw'd ah felt mysen dafflin[20] when ah saw me pal knocked over. He comed fra oor toon, and he tellt me hissen the neet afore: 'Jock,' 'e said, 'tha'll write to me wife, woan't tha?' And ah said, 'Doan't be a fule, Ben, tha'll be all right.' 'Noa, Jock,' he tellt me, 'ah knaw'd afore ah left heeam ah should be killt. Ah saw a mouldiwarp[21] dead afore oor door; me wife fair dithered[22] when she saw't.'"

The chaplain and myself looked puzzled. "It's a kind o' sign among the fouk in our parts, sir," he proceeded, enlightening our ignorance. "And 'e asked me to take his brass for the wife. But ah thowt nowt of it. And we lost oor connectin' files and were nobbut two platoons, and we got it somethin' cruel; the shells were a-skirling[23] like peewits ower our heids. And Ben were knocked over and 'e never said a ward. And then ah got fair daft."

There was silence for a moment.

"I found this," suddenly interrupted a despatch-rider. He was a fair-spoken youth, obviously of some education. He explained, in reply to our interrogatories, that he was a despatch-rider attached to a Signal Company of the R.E. He produced a cap, apparently from nowhere, by mere sleight of hand. It was greasy, weather-stained, and in no respect different from a thousand such Army caps. It bore the badge and superscription of the R.E. We looked at it indifferently as he held it out with an eleemosynary gesture.

"A collection will now be taken," said the Hoxton man with a grin.

But the despatch-rider did not laugh. "I found this cap," he said gravely, "on Monday, September 7th, in a house near La Ferté. We stopped there for four hours while the artillery were in action. We saw a broken motor bicycle outside a house to which the people pointed. We went in. We found one of our despatch-riders with an officer's sword sticking in him. Our section officer asked the people about it, and they told him that the despatch-rider arrived late one night, having lost his way and knocked at the door of the house. There were German officers billeted there. They let him in, and then they stuck him up against a wall and cut him up. He had fifteen sabre-cuts," he added quietly.

No one laughed any more. We all crowded round to look at that tragic cap. "The number looks like one--nought--seven--something," said the chaplain, adjusting his glasses, "but I can't make out the rest." "Poor lad," he added softly. No one spoke. But I saw a look in the eyes of the men around me that boded ill for the Hun when they should be reported fit for duty.

The English soldier hides his feelings as though he were ashamed of them. The sombre silence became almost oppressive in the autumnal twilight, and I sought to disperse it.

"I suppose you're pretty comfortable here?" I said, for the camp seemed to leave nothing to be desired.

But this was to open the sluices of criticism. The British soldier begins to "grouse" the moment he becomes comfortable--and not before. He will bear without repining everything but luxury.

"One and six a day we gets," cried one of them, "and what's this about this New Army getting four bob?"

"I think you're mistaken, my son," said the chaplain gently.

"Well, there's chaps in this 'ere camp, Army cooks they calls themselves, speshully 'listed for the war, and they gets six bob. And those shuvvers--they're like fighting cocks."

"Well, there seems nothing to complain of in the matter of supplies," I said. They had been having a kind of high tea on tables laid across trestles on the lawn, and one of them, using his knife as a bricklayer uses his trowel, was luxuriously spreading a layer of apple and plum jam upon a stratum of hard-boiled egg, which reposed on a bed-rock of bread and butter, the whole representing a most interesting geological formation and producing a startling chromatic effect.

"Why, sir, if you read the papers you wud 'a thocht it was a braw pic-nic." said the red-headed one. "You wud think we were growin' fat oot in the trenches. Dae ah look like it?"

My companion, the grey-headed chaplain, took the Highlander affectionately by the second button of his tunic and gave it a pull. "Not much space here, eh? I think you're pretty well fed, my son!"

A bugle-call rang out over the camp. "Bed-time," said a Guardsman, "time to go bye-bye. Parade--hype! Dis-miss! The orderly officer'll be round soon. Scoot, my sons."

They scooted.

The silvery notes of the bugle died away over the woods. Night was falling, and the sky faded slowly from mother-of-pearl to a leaden gray. We were alone. The chaplain gazed wistfully at the retreating figures, his face seemed suddenly shrunken, and I could see that he was very old. He took my arm and leaned heavily upon it. "I have been in the Army for the best part of my life," he said simply, "and I had retired on a pension. But I thank God," he added devoutly, "that it has pleased Him to extend my days long enough to enable me to rejoin the Forces. For I know the British soldier and--to know him is to love him. Do you understand?" he added, as he nodded in the direction the men had gone.

As I looked at him, there came into my mind the haunting lines of Tennyson's "Ulysses."

"Yes," I said, "I understand."

FOOTNOTES:

[13] Pale.

[14] Confusing.

[15] Blaze.

[16] Empty.

[17] Smart.

[18] Welsh for a singing meeting.

[19] Mad.

[20] Imbecile.

[21] A mole.

[22] Trembled.

[23] Screaming.

XX

THE FUGITIVES

"But pray that your flight be not in the winter."

Some four or five miles north of Bailleul, where the _douane_ posts mark the marches of the Franco-Belgian frontier, is the village of Locre. Here the clay of the plains gives way to a wooded ridge of low hills, through which the road drives a deep cutting, laying bare the age of the earth in a chronology of greensand and limestone. Beyond the ridge lies another plain, and there it was that on a clammy winter's day I came upon two lonely wayfarers. The fields and hedgerows were rheumy with moisture which dripped from every bent and twig. The hedges were full of the dead wood of the departed autumn, and on a decrepit creeper hung a few ragged wisps of Old Man's Beard. The only touch of colour in the landscape was the vinous purple of the twigs, and a few green leaves of privet from which rose spikes of berries black as crape. Not a living thing appeared, and the secret promises of spring were so remote as to seem incredible.

The man and woman were Flemish of the peasant class; the man, gnarled like an old oak, the purple clots in the veins of his wrists betraying the senility of his arteries; the woman, withered as though all the sap had gone out of her blood. She had a rope round her waist, to the other end of which a small cart was attached; under the cart, harnessed to the axle, two dogs panted painfully with their tongues out; behind the cart the man pushed. It contained a disorderly freight: a large feather-bed, a copper cauldron, a bird-cage, a mattock, a clock curiously carved, a spinning-wheel with a distaff impoverished of flax, and some kitchen utensils, which, as the woman stumbled and the cart lurched, clanked together.

As our car drew up, they stopped, the woman holding her hands to her side as though to recover breath.

"Who are you? Where do you come from?" said my companion, a French officer.

They stared uncomprehendingly.

He spoke again, this time in Flemish:

"_Van waar komt gy? Waar gaat gy heen?_"

The man pointed with his hand vaguely in the direction of the Menin ridge.

There followed a conversation of which I could make but little. But I noticed that they answered my companion in a dull, trance-like way, as though our questions concerned no one so little as themselves.

"They're fugitives," he repeated to me. "Been burnt out of their farm by the Bosches near the Menin ridge."

"Are they all alone?" I asked.

He put some further questions. "Yes, their only son was shot by the Germans when they billeted there."

"Why?"

"They don't know. The Bosches took all they had and drove the live-stock away. These few sticks are all they have left. Curious, isn't it," he added meditatively, "that you never see any Flemish fugitives without their feather-beds?" I had often noticed it. Also I had noticed the curious purposelessness of their salvage, as though in trying to save everything they succeeded in saving nothing that was of any consequence. Perhaps it is that, as some one has remarked, all things suddenly become equally dear when you have to leave them.

"But where are they going?"

The man stared at my companion as he put my question; the woman gazed vacantly at the lowering horizon, but neither uttered a word. The canary in its little prison of wire-work piped joyfully, as a gleam of sunshine lit up the watery landscape. Somewhere the guns spoke in a dull thunder. The woman was pleating a fold of her skirt between thumb and forefinger, plucking and unplucking with immense care and concentration. The man was suddenly shaken with a fit of asthma, and clutched at the cart as though seeking support.

We waited for some reply, and at length the man answered between the spasms of his malady.

"He says he doesn't know," my companion translated. "He's never been outside his parish before. But he thinks he'll go to Brussels and see the King of the Belgians. He doesn't know the Germans are in Brussels. And anyhow he's on the wrong road."

"But surely," I hazarded, "the _maire_ or the _curé_ could have told him better."

"He says the Germans shot the _curé_ and carried off the _maire_. It's a way they've got, you know."

It was now clear to us that this tragic couple were out on an uncharted sea. Their little world was in ruins. The bells that had called them to the divine offices were silent; the little church in which they had knelt at mass was in ruins; the parish registers which chronicled the great landmarks in their lives had been devoured by the flames; their hearth was cold and their habitation desolate. They had watched the heavens but they might not sow; they had turned their back on the fields which they would never reap. There was an end to all their husbandry, and they had no one left to speak with their enemies in the gate. This was the secret of their heavy lethargy.

My companion and I took counsel together. It were better, we agreed, to maintain them on the road to Bailleul. For we knew that, though Bailleul had been stripped bare by the German hussars before they evacuated it, the French, out of the warmth of their hearts, and the British, out of the fulness of their supplies, would succour this forlorn couple. Many a time had I known the British soldier pass round the hat to relieve the refugees out of the exiguous pay of himself and his fellows; not seldom has he risked a stoppage of pay or a spell of field-punishment by parting with an overcoat, for whose absence at kit inspection he would supply every excuse but the true one. And, therefore, to Bailleul we directed them to go.

But as I looked back I saw those bent and dwindling figures still standing in the mud. The woman continued to pluck at her dress; the man gazed at the horizon with the same dull vacancy. They had the weary humility of the figures in Millet's "Angelus," without their inspiration, and in their eyes was a dumb despair.

XXI

A "DUG-OUT"[24]

Driver George Hawkins, of the ----th Battery (K), was engaged in drying one of the leaders of the gun team. The leader, who answered, when he felt so inclined, to the name of "Tommy," had been exercised that morning in a driving rain, and Driver Hawkins was concerned lest Tommy should develop colic with all its acute internal inconveniences. He performed his ministrations with a wisp of straw, and seemed to derive great moral support in the process from the production of a phthisical expiration of his breath, between clenched teeth, resulting in a sibilant hiss. Like most ritualistic practices this habit has a utilitarian origin: it serves to keep the dust of grooming from entering the lungs. But in process of time it has acquired a touch of mysticism, and is supposed to soothe the horse and sustain the man. Had Hawkins not been absorbed in a localised attention to Tommy's fetlocks he would have observed that his charge had suddenly laid his ears back. But being something of a chiropodist he was studying the way Tommy put his foot to the ground, for he suspected corns. The next moment Driver Hawkins found himself lying in a heap of straw on the opposite side of the stable. Tommy had suddenly lashed out, and landed him one on the left shoulder. Driver Hawkins picked himself up, more grieved than hurt. He looked at Tommy with pained surprise.

"I feeds yer," he said reproachfully, "I waters yer, I grooms yer, I stays from my dinner to dry yer, and what do I get for it? Now I ask yer?" Tommy was looking round at him with eyes of guileless innocence.

"What do I get for it?" he repeated argumentatively. "I gets a blooming kick."

"Blooming" is a euphemism. The adjective Hawkins actually used was, as a matter of fact, closely associated with the exercise of the reproductive functions, and cannot be set down here.

"Beg pardon, sir," said Hawkins, saluting, as he caught sight of the Major and myself who had entered the stable at that moment. The Major was trying hard to repress a smile. "Go on with your catechism, Hawkins," he said. It was evident that Hawkins belonged to the Moral Education League, and believed in suasion rather than punishment for the repression of vice.

"I suppose you're fond of your horses, Hawkins?" I said unguardedly. But no R.F.A. driver wears his heart on his sleeve, and Hawkins's reply was disconcerting. "I 'ates 'em, sir," he whispered to me as the Major turned his back; "I'm a maid-of-all-work to them 'orses. They gives me 'ousemaid's knee, and my back do ache something cruel."

"He doesn't, though," said the Major, who had overheard this auricular confidence. We had left the stable. "Our drivers are mighty fond of their horses--and proud of them too. It's quite an infatuation in its way. But come and see the O.T.C. We've got them down here for the weekend, by way of showing them the evolutions of a battery. They've got their instructor, an N.C.O. who's been dug out for the job, and I've lent him two of the guns to put them through their paces. He's quite priceless--a regular chip of the old Army block."

"Now, sir," the sergeant was saying, "get them into single file." They were to change from Battery Column to Column of Route.

"Battery...!" began the cadet in a piping voice.

"As y' were," interjected the sergeant in mild expostulation. "You've got to get it off your chest, sir. Let them 'ear it. So!" And he gave a stentorian shout. It was a meritorious and surprising performance, for he was fat and scant of breath. The sedentary duties of hall-porter at the ---- Club, after twenty-one years' service in the Army, had produced a fatty degeneration which no studious arrangement of an Army belt could altogether conceal.

"Battery!" began the cadet, as he threw his head back and took a deep breath. "Advance in single file from the right. The rest mark time."

"Rest!" said the sergeant reproachfully. "There ain't no rest in the British Army. Rear, say, 'Rear,' sir."

"Rear, mark time!" said the cadet uncomfortably.

"Now," said the sergeant, as he wiped his brows, "double them back, sir."

"Battery, run!" said the cadet brightly.

"As y' were! How could yer, Mr. ----?" said the sergeant grievously. "The British Army never runs, sir! They doubles." The cadet blushed at the aspersion upon the reputation of the British Army into which he had been betrayed.

"Double--march!"

They doubled.

The sergeant now turned his attention to a party at gun drill. It was a sub-section, which means a gun, a waggon, and ten men. The detachment was formed up behind the gun in two rows, odd numbers in front, even numbers behind.

"Section tell off!"

"One," from the front row. "Two," from the back. "Three," from the front. The tale was duly told in voices which ran up and down the scale, tenor alternating with baritone.

"Without drag-ropes--prepare to advance!" shouted the sergeant. The odd numbers shifted to the right of the gun, the evens to the left, but numbers "4" and "6," being apparently under the impression that it was a game of "musical chairs," found themselves on the right instead of the left.

"Too many odds," shouted the sergeant. "The British Army be used to 'eavy hodds, but not that sort. Nos. 4 and 6 get over to the near side."

"Halt! Action front!" They unlimbered, and swung the gun round to point in the direction of an imaginary enemy.

The detachment were now grouped round the gun, and I drew near to have a look at it. No neater adaptation of means to end could be devised than your eighteen-pounder. She is as docile as a child, and her "bubble" is as sensitive to a touch as mercury in a barometer.

"No. 1 add one hundred. Two-nought minutes more left!" shouted the sergeant, who, with the versatility of a variety artiste, was now playing another part from his extensive repertoire. He was forward observing officer.

One of his pupils turned the ranging gear until the range-drum registered a further hundred yards, while another traversed the gun until it pointed twenty minutes more left.

As we turned away they were performing another delicate and complicated operation which was not carried through without some plaintive expostulation from the N.C.O.

"It reminds me," remarked the Major colloquially, as we strolled away, "of Falstaff drilling his recruits. So does the texture of the khaki they serve out to the O.T.C. 'Dowlas, filthy dowlas!' But you've no idea how soon he'll lick them into shape. These 'dug-outs' are as primitive as cave-dwellers in their way but they know their job. And what is more, they like it."

As we passed the stables I heard ecstatic sounds--a whinny of equine delight and the blandishments of a human voice. Through the open door I caught a glimpse of Driver Hawkins with his back turned towards us. His left arm was round Tommy's neck and the left side of his face rested upon Tommy's head; the fingers of his right hand were delicately stroking Tommy's nose.

"I forgives yer," I heard him say with rare magnanimity, "yus, I forgives yer, old boy. But if yer does it again, yer'll give me the blooming 'ump."

I passed hurriedly on. It was not for a stranger to intrude on anything so intimate.

FOOTNOTE:

[24] On leave in England.

XXII

CHRISTMAS EVE

(_1914_)

"Halt! Stop, I mean."

The ring of choristers in khaki and blue flannel faced with cotton wool looked at their conductor, a sergeant in the Glosters, with intense and painful concentration. They were rehearsing carols in the annexe of a Base hospital on Christmas Eve, and the sergeant was as hard to please as if they were recruits doing their first squad drill. They were a scratch lot, recruited by a well-meaning chaplain to the Forces, from Base "details" and convalescents. Their voices were lusty, but their time erratic, and one ardent spirit was a bar ahead and gaining audibly with each lap despite the desperate spurts of the rest.

"Opened out his throttle--'e has," whispered an Army driver professionally to his neighbour; "'e's a fair cop for exceedin' the speed limit."

The sergeant glanced magisterially at the offender, a young Dorset, who a year ago was hedging and ditching in the Vale of Blackmore, but who has lately done enough digging for a whole parish.

"You've lost your connecting files, me lad," he exclaimed reproachfully; "you ain't out on patrol, yer know. 'Shun! Now again! 'Christians'."

Christians, awake! Salute the happy morn,
Whereon ...

The familiar melody was shut behind me as I closed the door. Those West-country voices awoke in me haunting memories of my childhood, and, in a flash, I saw once again a ring of ruddy faces on a frosty night, illuminated by the candle in a shepherd's horn lantern, their breath a luminous vapour in the still air, and my mother holding me up at the window of our Wiltshire house, as I looked out from the casement of the nursery upon the up-turned faces of the choristers below and wondered mazily whether they had brought Father Christmas with them.

A low cry of pain reached my ears as I opened the door of Surgical Ward A.I. A nurse was removing a field-dressing from a soldier just brought down from the Front. The surgeon stood over him ready to spray the wound with peroxide. "Buck up, old chap," cried the patients in the neighbouring beds who looked on encouragingly at these ministries. Another moan escaped him as the discoloured bandage, with its faint odour of perchloride, was stripped from the raw and inflamed flesh.

"Next gramophone record, please!" chanted his neighbours. The patient smiled faintly at the exhortation and set his teeth.

"That's better, sonny," whispered the nurse with benign approval.

"It won't hurt you, old chap, I'm only going to drain off the septic matter," interjected the surgeon in holland overalls, with sleeves tucked up to the elbow. "Here, give me that tube." The dresser handed him a nickel reed from the sterilising basin.

With a few light quick movements the wound was sprayed, dressed, cleansed, and anointed, and the surgeon, like the good Samaritan, passed on to the next case. Only last night the patient was in the trenches, moaning with pain, as the stretcher-bearers carried him to the aid-post, and from the aid-post to the forward dressing station, whence by an uneasy journey (there were no sumptuous hospital-trains in those days) he had come hither. But what of the others who were hit outside the trenches and who lay even now, this Christmas Eve, in that dreadful No Man's Land swept by the enemy's fire, whither no stretcher-bearer can go--lying among the dead and dying, a field of creeping forms, some quivering in the barbed wire, where dead men hang as on a gibbet, hoping only for a cleanly death from a bullet before their wounds fester and poison the blood in their veins.

Whereon--the Saviour--of mankind--was--born.

The measured cadence fell on my ear as I left the ward and passed beyond the annexe. The sergeant had now got his section well in hand. I turned up the long winding road towards my quarters. It was a cold moonlight night, and every twig of broom and beech was sharply defined as in a black-and-white drawing. Overhead each star was hard and bright, as though a lapidary had been at work in the heavens, and never had the Great Bear seemed so brilliant. But none so bright and legible--or so it seemed to me--as Mars in all that starry heraldry.

"Bon soir, monsieur!" It was the voice of the sentry, and came from behind a barricade of hurdles, thatched with straw, on the crest of the road over the downs. His bayonet gleamed like a silver needle in the moonlight, and he was alone in his vigil. No shepherds watched their flocks by night, neither did angels sing peace on earth and goodwill towards men. Only the cold austerity of the stars kept him company. Perhaps the first Christmas Eve was just such a starry night as this; the same stars may have looked down upon a manger in Bethlehem. But on the brow of the hill was one of those wayside shrines which symbolise the anguish of the Cross, and these very stars may have looked down upon the hill of Calvary.

IV

THE FRONT AGAIN

XXIII

THE COMING OF THE HUN

The _maire_ sat in his parlour at the Hôtel de Ville dictating to his secretary. He was a stout little man with a firm mouth, an indomitable chin, and quizzical eyes. His face would at any time have been remarkable; for a French provincial it was notable in being clean-shaven. Most Frenchmen of the middle class wear beards of an Assyrian luxuriance, which to a casual glance suggest stage properties rather than the work of Nature. The _maire_ was leaning back in his chair, his elbows resting upon its arms and his hands extended in front of him, the thumb and finger-tips of one hand poised to meet those of the other as though he were contemplating the fifth proposition in Euclid. It was a characteristic attitude; an observer would have said it indicated a temperament at once patient and precise. He was dictating a note to the _commissaire de police_, warning the inhabitants to conduct themselves "paisiblement" in the event of a German occupation, an event which was hourly expected. Much might depend upon that proclamation; a word too little or too much and Heaven alone knew what innuendo a German Commandant might discover in it. Perhaps the _maire_ was also not indifferent to the question of style; he prided himself on his French; he had in his youth won a prize at the Lycée for composition, and he contributed occasional papers to the journal of the Société de l'Histoire de France on the antiquities of his _department_. Most Frenchmen are born purists in style, and the _maire_ lingered over his words.

"Continuez, Henri," he said with a glance at the clerk. "_Le Maire, assisté de son adjoint et de ses conseillers municipaux et de délégués de quartier, sera en permanence à l'hôtel de Ville pour assurer_--" There was a kick at the door and a tall loutish man in the uniform of a German officer entered, followed by two grey-coated soldiers. The officer neither bowed nor saluted, but merely glared with an intimidating frown. The _maire's_ clerk sat in an atrophy of fear, unable to move a muscle. The officer advanced to the desk, pulled out his revolver from its leather pouch, and laid it with a lethal gesture on the _maire's_ desk. The _maire_ examined it curiously. "Ah, yes, M. le Capitaine, thank you; I will examine it in a moment, but I have seen better ones--our new service pattern, for example. Ja! Ich verstehe ganz gut," he continued, answering the officer's reckless French in perfect German. "Consider yourself under arrest," declaimed the officer, with increasing violence. "We are in occupation of your town; you will provide us within the next twenty-four hours with ten thousand kilos of bread, thirty thousand kilos of hay, forty thousand kilos of oats, five thousand bottles of wine, one hundred boxes of cigars." ("Mon Dieu! it is an inventory," said the _maire_ to himself.) "If these are not forthcoming by twelve noon to-morrow you will be shot," added the officer in a sudden inspiration of his own.

The _maire_ was facing the officer, who towered above him. "Ah, yes, Monsieur le Capitaine, you will not take a seat? No? And your requisition--you have your commandant's written order and signature, no doubt?" The officer blustered. "No, no, Monsieur le Capitaine, I am the head of the civil government in this town; I take no orders except from the head of the military authority. You have doubtless forgotten Hague Regulation, Article 52; your Government signed it, you will recollect." The officer hesitated. The _maire_ looked out on the _place_; it was full of armed men, but he did not flinch. "You see, monsieur," he went on suavely, "there are such things as receipts, and they have to be authenticated." The officer turned his back on him, took out his field note-book, scribbled something on a page, and, having torn it out, handed it to one of his men with a curt instruction.

The _maire_ resumed his dictation to the hypnotised clerk, while the officer sat astride a chair and executed an impatient _pas seul_ with his heels upon the parquet floor. Once or twice he spat demonstratively, but the _maire_ took no notice. In a few minutes the soldier returned with a written order, which the officer threw upon the desk without a word.

The _maire_ scrutinised it carefully. "Ten thousand kilos of bread! Monsieur, we provide five thousand a day for the refugees, and this will tax us to the uttermost. The bakers of the town are nearly all _sous les drapeaux_. Very well, monsieur," he added in reply to an impatient exclamation from the officer, "we shall do our best. But many a poor soul in this town will go hungry to-night. And the receipts?" "The requisitioning officer will go with you and give receipts," retorted the officer, who had apparently forgotten that he had placed the _maire_ under arrest.

* * * * *

Subdued lights twinkled like glow-worms in the streets as the _maire_ returned across the square to the Hôtel de Ville. He threaded his way through groups of infantry, narrowly escaped a collision with three drunken soldiers, who were singing "Die Wacht am Rhein" with laborious unction, skirted the park of ammunition waggons, and reached the main entrance. He had been on his feet for hours visiting the _boulangeries_, the _pâtisseries_, the hay and corn merchants, persuading, expostulating, beseeching, until at last he had wrung from their exiguous stores the apportionment of the stupendous tribute. It was a heavy task, nor were his importunities made appreciably easier by the receipt-forms tendered, readily enough, by the requisitioning officer who accompanied him, for the inhabitants seemed to view with terror the possession of these German documents, suspecting they knew not what. But the task was done, and the _maire_ wearily mounted the stairs.

The officer greeted him curtly. The _maire_ now had leisure to study his appearance more closely. He had high cheek-bones, protruding eyes, and a large underhung mouth which, when he was pleased, looked sensual, and, when he was annoyed, merely cruel. The base of his forehead was square, but it rapidly receded with a convex conformation of head, very closely shaven as though with a currycomb, and his ears stood out almost at right angles to his skull. The ferocity that was his by nature he seemed to have assiduously cultivated by art, and the points of his moustaches, upturned in the shape of a cow's horns, accentuated the truculence of his appearance. In short, he was a typical Prussian officer. In peace he would have been merely comic. In war he was terrible, for there was nothing to restrain him.

Meanwhile the officer called for a corporal's guard to place the _maire_ under arrest. "But you will first sign the following _affiche_--by the General's orders," he exclaimed roughly.

Le Maire informe ses concitoyens que le commandant en chef des
troupes allemandes a ordonné que le maire et deux notables soient
pris comme otages pour la raison que des civils aient tiré sur des
patrouilles allemandes. Si un coup de fusil était tiré à nouveau
par des civils, les trois otages seraient fusillés et la ville
serait incendiée immédiatement.

Si des troupes alliées rentraient le maire rappelle à la population
que tout civil ne doit pas prendre part à la guerre et que si l'un
d'eux venait à y participer le commandant des troupes allemandes
ferait fusilier également les otages.

"One moment," said the _maire_ as he took up a pen, "'_les civils_'! I ordered the civil population to deposit their arms at the _mairie_ two days ago, and the _commissaire de police_ and the gendarmes have searched every house. We have no armed civilians here."

"Es macht nichts," said the officer; "we shall add '_ou peut-être des militaires en civil_.'"

The _maire_ shrugged his shoulders at the disingenuous parenthesis. It was, he knew, useless to protest. For all he knew he might be signing his own death-warrant. He studied the style a little more attentively. "Mon Dieu, what French!" he said to himself; "'était,' 'seraient,' 'venait'! What moods! What tenses! Monsieur le Capitaine," he continued aloud, "if I had used such French in my exercises at the Lycée my instituteur would have said I deserved to be shot. Pray allow me to make it a little more graceful." But the Prussian's ignorance of French syntax was only equalled by his suspicion of it. The _maire's_ irony merely irritated him and his coolness puzzled him. "I give you thirty seconds to sign," he said, as he took out his watch and the inevitable revolver. The _maire_ took up a needle-like pen, dipped it in the ink, and with a sigh wrote in fragile but firm characters "X---- Y----." The officer called a corporal's guard, and the _maire_, who had fasted since noon, was marched out of the room and thrust into a small closet upon the door of which were the letters "_Cabinet_." This, he reflected grimly, was certainly what in military language is called "close confinement." The soldiers accompanied him. There was just room for him to stretch his weary body upon the stone floor; one soldier remained standing over him with fixed bayonet, the others took up their position outside.

Meanwhile a company of Landwehr had bivouacked in the square, four machine-guns had been placed so as to command the four avenues of approach, patrols had been sent out, sentries posted, all lights extinguished, and all doors ordered to be left open by the householders. Billeting officers had gone from house to house, chalking upon the doors such legends as "_Drei Männer_," "_6 Offiziere--Eingang verboten_," and, on rare occasions "_Gute Leute hier_." The trembling inhabitants had been forced to wait on their uninvited guests as they clamoured noisily for wine and liqueurs. All the civilians of military age, and many beyond it, had been rounded up and taken under guard to the church; their wives and daughters alone remained, and were the subject of menacing pleasantries. So much the _maire_ knew before he had returned from his errand. As he lay in his dark cell he speculated painfully as to what might be happening in the homes of his fellow-townsmen. He sat up once or twice to listen, until the toe of the sentry's boot in his back reminded him of his irregularity. Now and again a woman's cry broke the silence of the night, but otherwise all was still. He composed himself to sleep on the floor, reflecting that he must husband his strength and his nerves for what might lie ahead of him. He was very tired and slept heavily in spite of his cold stone bed. At the hour of one in the morning he was awakened by a kick, and he found himself staring at an electric torch which was being held to his face by a tall figure shrouded in darkness. It was the captain. He sat up and rubbed his eyes.

"'_Fusillé_'! Bien! so I am to be shot! and wherefore, Monsieur le Capitaine?"

"Some one has fired upon us," said the officer, "one of your dirty fellows; you must pay for it."

"And the order?" asked the _maire_ sleepily; "you have the Commandant's order?"

"Never mind about the order," said the officer reassuringly, "the order will be forthcoming at eight o'clock. Oh yes, we shall shoot you most authoritatively--never fear."

The officer knew that nothing could be done until eight o'clock, for he dared not wake the Commandant, but he did not see why he should deny himself the pleasure of waking up this pig of a _maire_ to see how he would take it. The _maire_ divined his thoughts, and without a word turned over on his side and pretended to go to sleep again. From under his drooping eyelids he saw the officer gazing at him with a look in which dislike, disappointment, and pleasurable expectation seemed to be struggling for mastery. Then with a click he extinguished his torch and withdrew.

At eight o'clock the _maire_ awoke to learn with mild surprise that he was not to be shot. Beyond that his guard would tell him nothing. It was only afterwards he learnt that one of the drunken revellers had been prowling the streets, and, having given the sentries a bad fright by letting off his rifle at a lamp-post, had expiated his adventure at the hands of a firing party in the cemetery outside the town.