Chapter II: Part 2

It was only about a minute's walk along the trench, past more dug-outs lit by cigarette-ends, past a trench store-cupboard quietly labelled BOMBS, and a sentry in a sand-bagged _cul-de-sac_. The door at which we knocked was no more imposing than our own, the sanctuary within no roomier, but like the deck-house of a well-appointed yacht after a tramp's forecastle. Art-green walls and fixed settees, a narrow table all spotless napery and sparkling glass, forks and spoons as brilliant as a wedding-present, all these were there or I have dreamt them. I would even swear to flowers on the table, if it were a case of swearing one way or other. But what they gave us to eat, with two exceptions, I cannot in the least remember; it was immaterial in that atmosphere and company, though I recall the other man's bated breathings on the point. My two exceptions were porridge at breakfast and scones at tea; both were as authentic as the mess-waiter's speech; and it would not have surprised me if the porridge had been followed by trout from the burn, so much was that part of the Line just then a part of Scotland.

It was a genial atmosphere in more ways than one. Always on coming in one's spectacles turned to ground-glass and one's out-door harness to melting lead. The heat came up an open stairway from the bowels of the earth, as did the chimney which I painfully mistook for a hand-rail the first night, when the Colonel was kind enough to take me down below. It was the first deep dug-out I had seen in working order, and it seemed to me deliciously safe and snug; the officers' berths in fascinating tiers, again as on shipboard, all but the Colonel's own, by itself at one end. It made me very jealous, yet rather proud, when I thought of our freezing lair upon the sunken road.

Then, before we went, he took me up to an O.P. on top of all. I think we climbed up to it out of the _cul-de-sac_, and I know I cowered behind a chunk of parapet; but what I remember best is the zig-zag labyrinth in the foreground, that unending open grave with upturned earth complete, yet quiet as any that ever was filled in; and then the wide sweep of moonlit snow, enemy country nearly all, but at the moment still and peaceful as an arctic floe. Our own trenches the only solid signs of war, like the properties in front of a panorama; not a shot or a sound to give the rest more substance than a painted back-cloth. It was one of those dead pauses that occur on all but the noisiest nights, and make the whole war nowhere more unreal than on the battle-field.

But when the very next day was at its quietest we had just the opposite experience. We were sitting at luncheon in this friendly mess, and the guns might have been a thousand miles away until they struck up all at once, like a musical-box in the middle of a tune. Their guns, this time; but you would not have thought it from the faces round the table. One or two exchanged glances; a lifted eyebrow was answered by a smile; but the conversation went on just the same until the officer nearest the door withdrew detachedly. New subject no longer avoidable, but treated with becoming levity. Not a bombardment, just a Strafe, we gathered; it might have been with blank shell, had we not heard them bursting. Exit another officer; enter man from below. Something like telegram in his hand: retaliation requested by front line. 'Put it through to Brigade.' Further retirements from board; less noise for moment. New sound: enemy 'plane over us, seeing what they've done. New row next door: our machine-guns on enemy 'plane! New note in distance: retaliation to esteemed order.... Other man and I alone at table, dying to go out and see fun, but obviously not our place. And then in a minute it is all over, not quite as quickly as it began, but getting on that way. Strafe stopped: 'plane buzzing away again: machine-guns giving it up as a bad job: cheery return of Belisarii, in the order of their going, Colonel last and cheeriest of all.

'Had my hair parted by a whizz-bang,' says he, 'up in that O.P. we were in last night.'

And, as he replenished a modest cup, the curtain might have fallen on the only line I remember in the whole impromptu piece, which could not have played quicker as a music-hall sketch, or held a packed audience more entranced than the two civilian supers who had the luck to be on the stage.

But we had to pay for our entertainment; for although it turned out to have been an absolutely bloodless Strafe, yet a portion of our parapet had been blown in, which made it inexpedient for us to go round the front line that afternoon, as previously arranged by our indulgent hosts. In the evening they were going into reserve, and another famous Regiment coming to 'take over.' The new-comers, however, were just as good to us in their turn; and the new Colonel so kind as to take me round himself on Christmas morning.

CHRISTMAS DAY

The tiny hut is an abode of darkness made visible by a single candle, mounted in its own grease in the worst available position for giving light, lest the opening of the door cast the faintest beam into the sunken road outside. On the shelf flush with the door glimmer parental urns with a large family of condensed-milk tins, opened and unopened, full and empty; packing-cases in similar stages litter the duck-board flooring, or pile it wall-high in the background; trench-coats, gas-masks, haversacks and helmets hang from nails or repose on a ledge of the inner wall, which is sunken roadside naked and unashamed. Two weary figures cower over the boiler fire; they are the other man and yet another who has come up for the night. A third person, who may look more like me than I feel like him, hovers behind them, smoking and peering at his watch. It is the last few minutes of Christmas Eve, and for a long hour there has been little or nothing doing. Earlier in the evening, from seven or so onwards, there seemed no end to the queue of armed men, calling for their mug of cocoa and their packet of biscuits, either singly, each for himself, or with dixies and sand-bags to be filled for comrades on duty in the trenches.

The quiet has been broken only by the sibilant song of the boiler, by desultory conversation and bursts of gunfire as spasmodic and inconsequent. Often a machine-gun has beaten a brief but furious tattoo on the doors of darkness; but now come clogged and ponderous footfalls--mud to mud on the duck-boards leading from the communication trench--and a chit is handed in from the outer moonlight.

'24--12--17.

'To Y.M.C.A. Canteen,
'---- Avenue.

'DEAR SIRS,--I will be much obliged if you will supply
the bearer with hot cocoa (sufficient for 90 men)
which I understand you are good enough to issue to
units in this line. The party are taking 2 hot-food
containers for the purpose.

'Thanking you in anticipation,
'I am, yours faithfully,
'(Illegible),
'O/C B Co.,
'1/8 (Undesirable).'

Torpid trio are busy men once more. Not enough cocoa ready-made for ninety; fresh brew under way in fewer seconds than it takes to state the fact. Third person already anchored beside open packing-case, enormous sand-bag gaping between his knees, little sealed packets flying through his hands from box to bag in twins and triplets. By now it is Christmas morning; cakes and cigarettes are forthwith added to statutory biscuits, and a sack is what is wanted. Third person makes shift with second sand-bag, which having filled, he leaves his colleagues working like benevolent fiends in the steam of fragrant cauldrons, and joins the group outside among the shell-holes.

They are consuming interim dividends of the nightly fare, as they stand about in steely silhouette against the shrouded moonlight. The scene is not quite so picturesque as it was last night, when no star of heaven could live in the light of the frosty moon and every helmet was a shining halo; to-night the only twinkle to be seen is under a helmet's rim.

'Merry Christmas, sir, an' many of 'em,' says a Tyneside voice, getting in the first shot of a severe bombardment. The third person retaliates with appropriate spirit; the interchange could not have been franker or heartier in the days of actual peace on earth and apparent good-will among men. But here they both are for a little space this Christmas morning. Cannon may drum it in with thunderous irony, and some corner-man behind a machine-gun oblige with what sounds exactly like a solo on the bones, but here in the midst of those familiar alarms the Spirit of Christmas is abroad on the battle-field. He may be frightened away--or become a casualty--at any moment. One lucky flourish with the bones, one more addition to these sharp-edged shell-holes, and how many of the party would have a groan left in him? One of them groans in spirit as he thinks, never so vividly, of countless groups as full of gay vitality as this one, blown out of existence in a blinding flash. But his hardy friends are above such morbid imaginings; the cold appears to be their only trouble, and of it they make light enough as they stamp their feet. Some are sea-booted in sand-bags, and what with their jerkins and low, round helmets, look more like a watch in oilskins and sou'-westers than a party of Infantry.

'We nevaw died o' wintaw yet,' says the Tynesider. 'It takes a lot to kill an old soljaw.' But he owns he was a shipyard hand before the war; and not one of them was in the Army.

All hope it is the last Christmas of the war, but the Tyneside prognostication of 'anothaw ten yeaws' is received with perfect equanimity. There is general agreement, too, when the same oracle dismisses the latest peace offer as 'blooff.' But it must be confessed that articulate ardour is slightly damped until somebody starts a subject a great deal nearer home.

'Who'd have thought that we should live to see a Y.M. in the support line!'

Flattering echoes from entire group.

'Do you remember that chap who kept us all awake in barracks, talking of it?'

'I nevaw believed him. I thought it was a myth, sir. And nothing to pay an' all! It must be costing the Y.M. a canny bit o' money, sir?'

The third person--who has been hovering on the verge of the inveterate first--only commits himself to the statement that he helped to give away 785 cups of cocoa and packets of biscuits the night before. Rapid calculations ensue. 'Why, that must be nearly ten pounds a night, sir?'

'Something like that.'

'Heaw that, Corporal! An' now it's cigarettes an' cakes an' all!'

But the containers are ready, lids screwed down upon their steaming contents. Strong arms hoist them upon stronger backs; the plethoric sand-bags are shouldered with still less ado, and off go the party into the slate-coloured night, off through the communication trenches into the firing-line they are to hold for England until the twelve hundred and thirty-ninth daybreak of the war.

Peering after them with wistful glasses, the third person relapses altogether into the first. Take away the odd two hundred, and for a thousand days and nights my heart has been where their muffled feet will be treading in another minute. Yes; a round thousand must be almost the exact length of days since I first came out here in the spirit, and to stay. But never till this year did I seriously dream of following in the flesh, or till this moment feel the front line like a ball at my feet. Even the day before yesterday the arrangement was not so definite as it is to-day; it was not the Colonel himself who was to have taken us round by special favour and appointment. Yet how easily, had the Strafe happened half-an-hour later than it did, might we not have come in for it, perhaps at the very place where the parapet was blown down! It would have been a wonderful experience, especially as there were no casualties. Will anything of the kind happen to-day? I have a feeling that something may; but then I have had that feeling every sentient moment up the Line. And nothing that can come can come amiss; that is another of my feelings here, if not the strongest of them all. This Christmas morning it rings almost like a carol in the heart, almost like a peal of Christmas bells--jangled indeed by the heart's own bitter flaws, and yet piercing sweet as Life itself.

But for all my elderly civilian excitement, before a risk too tiny to enter a young fighting head at all, sleep does not fail me on a new couch of my own construction. The sand-bagged lair was none too dry in the late hard frost; in the unseasonable thaw that seems to be setting in, it is no place for crabbed age. Youth is welcome to the two beds with the water now standing on their indiarubber sheets, and youth seems quite honestly to prefer them; so I make mine on the biscuit-boxes in the shed, turn my toes to the still glowing coke in the boiler fire, press my soles to the hot-water bottle which has distinguished itself by freezing during the day, and huddle down as usual in all the indoor and outdoor garments I have with me, under my share of the blankets, which I have been drying assiduously every evening. _The Romance of War_ performs its nightly unromantic office ... and I have had many a worse night upon a spring-mattress.

Colonel finished breakfast when I reach the mess; ready for me by the time I have had mine. We glove and muffle ourselves, adjust gas-masks 'at the ready,' and sally forth on his common round and my high adventure, tapping the still slippery duck-boards with our sticks.

A colourless morning, neither freezing nor thawing; visibility probably low, luminosity certainly mediocre; in fact, typical Christmas weather of the modern realistic school, as against the Christmas Number weather of the last ten days. Yet it is the Christmas Number atmosphere that haunts me as an aura the more tenacious for its utter absence on all sides: the sprig of holly in the cake, the presents on the table, the joys of parent and child--never more at one--and blinding visions in both capacities, down to that last war-time Christmas dinner at the Carlton ... such are the sights that await me after all in the front-line trench! I have dreamt of it for years, yet now that I am here it is of the dead years I dream, or of this Christmas morning anywhere but where it is one's beatitude to be spending it.

Not that I fail to see a good deal of what is before my eyes at last; but never for many yards is the trench that we are in the only one I seem to see, and a comparison between the two is irresistible. Perhaps the width and solidity of this trench would impress me less if it were not all so different from Belgium as I all but knew it in 1915; the machine-gunners at their posts in the deep bays, like shepherds sheltering behind a wall, yet somehow able to see through the wall, would stand out less if the fire-step also were manned in the old way. But now trenches are held more by machinery and by fewer men, at any rate, in daytime; and at night men evidently do not sleep so near their work as then they did; at least, I look in vain for dug-outs in this sector of the front line. And I still look in vain for trouble, though all the time I feel all sorts of possibilities impending: a strange mixture of curiosity and dread it is--ardent curiosity, and quite pleasurable dread--that weaves itself into the warp of all inward and outward impressions whatsoever: can it be peculiar to self-ridden civilians, or are there really brave men like the Colonel in front of me (with a bar to his D.S.O.) who have undergone similar sensations at their baptism of fire?

It is not exactly mine; nothing comes anything like so near me as that sniper's bullet on the way up the other day; but little black bursts do keep occurring high overhead, where one of our airmen is playing peep among the clouds. The fragments must be falling somewhere in the neighbourhood; and a more alarming kind of shell has just burst on the high ground between our parados and the support line. Not very close--I must have been listening to something else--but the Colonel points out the smoking place with his stick and his quiet smile. His smile is part of him, very quiet and contained, full of easy-going power, and a kindness incapable of condescension. He might be my country-house host pointing out the excellence of his crop, but his touch is lighter and I am not expected to admire. He is, of all soldiers I ever met, just the one I would choose to be alongside if I had to be hit. I don't believe his face would alter very much, and I should be dying not to alter it more than I could help.

But, in spite of all interior preparation, it is not to be. He has given me a glimpse of No-Man's Land, not through a periscope but in a piece of ordinary looking-glass; we are nearing the damaged place where his presence is required and mine emphatically is not. Not that he says anything of the sort, but I see it in his kindly smile as he hands me over to his runner for safe-conduct to the place from whence I came. Still as much disappointed as relieved, as though a definite excitement had been denied to me, I turned and went with equal reluctance and alacrity.

'The bravest officer in the British Army!' was the runner's testimony to our friend. I have heard the honest words before, but this hero-worshipper had chapter and verse for his creed: 'Six times he has been wounded in this war, and never yet gone back to Blighty for a wound!'

I had not noticed the six gold stripes--if any--but it is not everybody who wears his full allowance. And if ever I met a man who cared less than most brave men about all such things, I believe I said good-bye to him last Christmas Day.

We were to meet again in the evening; in the meantime I was to have my Christmas dinner with the other Colonel and his merry men, now in reserve. I found them in an ex-Hun dug-out, more like a forecastle than the other headquarters; everything underground, and the bunks ranged round the board; but there was the same sheen on the table-cloth, the same glitter of glass and plate, the same good cheer and a turkey worthy of the day, and a ham worthy of the turkey, and a plum-pudding worthy of them both. It is not for the guest of a mess to say grace in public; but Christmas dinner in the trenches is a case apart. As the school tag might have had it, _non cuivis civi talia contingunt_.

There were crackers, too, I suddenly remember, and the old idiotic paper caps and mottoes, and Christmas cards wherever one went. In the new legions there is nearly always some cunning hand to supply the unit with a topical Christmas card: one of our two Battalions had a beauty, and even the Y.M.C.A. made bold to circulate an artistic apotheosis of our quarters on the sunken road. But those are not the Christmas cards I still preserve; my ill-gotten souvenirs are typewritten scraps on typewriting-paper, unillustrated, but all the more to the point: 'Best wishes for Xmas and Good Luck in 1918, from the Brigadier and Staff, --th Infantry Brigade.'--'Christmas Greetings and All Good Luck from --th Infantry Brigade Headquarters.'--'Christmas Greetings and Good Luck from ----th Divisional Artillery.' I must say this kind appealed to me, though I sent away a good many of the more ambitious variety. In neither was there any conventional nonsense about a 'happy' or even a 'merry' Christmas; and that, in view of the well-known perversity of the Comic Spirit, may have been one reason why so much merriment accrued. Nor did the contrast between unswerving ceremonial and a sardonic simplicity, as shown in this matter of the Christmas cards, begin or end there; for while I had followed crystal and fine table-linen into reserve for my Christmas dinner, the hospitable board behind the front line was now spread with newspapers, and we drank both our whisky-and-soda and our coffee out of the same enamelled cup.

The Colonel who had taken me into the front line after breakfast was not at dinner that night; for all his wounds he had gone down with common influenza, and I was desolated. It was my last chance of thanking him, as the other man and I were leaving in the early morning. All day I had been thinking of all that I had seen, and of all I had but foreseen, though so vividly that I felt more and more as though I had actually had some definite escape; besides, the things I had heard about him after we parted made me covet the honour of shaking hands once more with so very brave a man. I had my wish. In the middle of dinner a servant emerged from below to say: 'The Colonel would like to see the Y.M.C.A. officer before he went.'

I can see him still, as I found him, hot and coughing on the bunk in the corner by itself. 'I thought you would be interested to hear,' said he, 'that the very minute you left me this morning a rum-jar burst on the parados just behind me. You know how I wear my helmet, with the strap behind? It blew it off.'

So my escape had been fairly definite after all, and the thing I was so ready for had really happened 'the very minute' my back was turned! But that, unhappily, is not the whole coincidence. Five months later it was written of 'this good and gallant leader' that 'while inspecting his battalion in the trenches he was struck by a fragment of shell from a trench mortar (i.e. a rum-jar) and killed instantaneously.' My parenthesis; the rest from _The Times_ notice, which also bears out the story of the six wounds, except that they were seven, and four of them earned ('with an immediate award of the D.S.O.') on a single occasion. There is more in the notice that I should like to quote, more still that I could say even on the strength of that one morning's work; but who am I to praise so grand a man? I only know that I shall never see another Christmas without seeing that front-line trench, and a quiet, dark man in the pride and prime of perfect soldierhood, self-saddled with an old camp-follower who felt as a child beside him.

THE BABES IN THE TRENCHES

In the morning we made our tracks in virgin snow. It had fallen heavily in the night, and was still falling as we turned into the trench. So was a light shower of shell; but it blew over; and now our good luck seemed almost certain to attend us to our journey's end.

The snow thinned off as we plodded on our way. But it had altered and improved the trenches out of knowledge, lying thick along the top on either hand and often half-way down the side, so that we seemed like Gullivers striding between two chains of Lilliputian Alps. It was nevertheless hard going in our valley, where the duck-boards were snowed under for long stretches without a break, and warmer work in my fleece lining than I had known it yet. My gas-mask was like a real mill-stone round the neck; and though the other man had possessed himself of part of my impedimenta, that only made me feel my age the more acutely. Almost a great age I felt that morning; for nights on packing-cases in a low temperature, and an early start on biscuits and condensed-milk prepared with cold water, after short commons of sleep, are the kind of combination that will find a man out. I was not indeed complaining, but neither was I as observant as I might have been. I had been over this part of the ground by myself the day before, on the way to my Christmas dinner. It did look rather different in the snow, but that was to be expected, and the other man knew the way well. So I understood, and he emphatically affirmed the supposition on such provocation as I from time to time felt justified in giving the voluntary bearer of my pack. It was only when we came to some suspiciously unfamiliar landmark, something important (but I honestly forget what) in a bay by itself, that I asserted myself sufficiently to call a halt.

'We never passed _that_ before!'

'Oh, yes, we did. I'm sure we did. I think I remember it.'

That ought not to have satisfied me; but you cannot openly discredit a man who insists on carrying your pack. I was too fatigued to take it from him, and not competent to take the lead. On he led me, perspiring my misgivings at every pore; but under a tangled bridge of barbed wire I made a firmer stand.

'Anyhow, you don't remember _this_!' I asserted point-blank.

'No. I can't say I do.'

'Then how do you account for it?'

'It must have been put up in the night.'

I cannot remember by what further resource of casuistry that young man induced me to follow him another yard; yet so it was, and all the shame be mine. He himself was the next to falter and stand still in his tracks, and finally to face me with a question whose effrontery I can still admire:

'What would you do if we met a Hun? Put your hands up?'

We were, in fact, once more impinging upon the firing line, and by a trench at the time, apparently, not much in use. I know it seemed long hours since we had encountered a soul; but then it might have been for the best part of another hour that my guilty guide now left me in order to ascertain the worst, and I do not seriously suppose it was very many minutes. I remember cooling off against the side of the trench, and hearing absolutely nothing all the time. That I still think remarkable. It was not snowing; the sun shone; visibility must have been better than for two whole days; and yet nothing was happening. I might have been waiting in some Highland glen, or in a quarry in the wilds of Dartmoor. I think that particular silence was as impressive, as intimidating, as the very heaviest firing that I heard in all my four months at the front.

No harm came of our misadventure; it was possibly less egregious than it sounds. A wrong turning in the snow had taken us perhaps a mile out of our way; but a trench mile is a terribly long one, and I know how much I should like to add for the state of the duck-boards on this occasion, and how much more for that of a lame old duck who thought they were never, never coming to an end! The valley of the guns was nothing after them, though the guns were active at the time, an anti-aircraft battery taking an academic interest in a humming speck on high. Beyond the valley ran the road, and beyond the road the river, where we were to have caught a boat. Of course we had just succeeded in missing it. A homeward-bound lorry picked us up at last. And we were in plenty of time for the plain mid-day meal at our humble headquarters in the town. But by then I was done to the world and dead to shame. I suppose I have led too soft a life, taking very little exercise for its own sake, though occasionally going to the other extreme from an ulterior motive. So I have been deservedly tired once or twice in my time; but I didn't know what it was to be done up before last Boxing Day.

The short mile down to the hut that afternoon was the longest and worst of all. Stiffness was setting in, and the snow so deep in the ruinous streets; but every yard of the way I looked forward to my sheetless bed; and few things in life have disappointed me so little. The fire was out, it seemed, and was worth lighting first. There was a sensuous joy about that last purely voluntary effort and delay. I even think I waited to let my old hot-water bottle share in the triumphal entry between blankets that were at least dry, plentiful, and soft as a feather-bed after the lids of those packing-cases up the Line!

And it was our Christmas concert in the hut that evening: the copious entertainment disturbed without spoiling my rest, rather bringing it home to every aching inch of me as the heavenly thing it was. Song and laughter travelled up the hut, and filtered through to me refined and rarefied by far more than the little distance. Somebody came in and made tea. It was better than being ill. I lay there till nine next morning; then went down to the Officers' Baths, and came out feeling younger than at any period of actual but insensate youth.

DETAILS

(_January-February, 1918_)

ORDERLY MEN

He who loves a good novel will find himself in clover in a Y.M.C.A. hut at the front. Not that he will have much time to read one there, except as I read my night-cap _The Romance of War_; but a better book of the same name will never stop writing itself out before his eyes, a book all dialogue and illustrations, yet chock-full of marvellous characters, drawn to a man without a word of commentary or analysis. To a man, advisedly, since it will be a novel without a heroine; on the other hand, all the men and boys will be heroes, at any rate to the kind of reader I have in mind. Something will depend on him; he will have to apply himself, as much as to any other kind of reading. He must have eyes to see, brains to translate, a heart to love or pity or admire. He must have the power to penetrate under other skins, to tremble for them more than for his own, to glow and sweat with them, to shiver in shoes he is not fit to wear. Many can go as far for people who never existed outside some author's brain; these are they on whom the most stupendous of unwritten romances is least likely to be lost. It lies open to all who care to take their stand behind a hut counter in a forward area in France.

The character to be seen there, and to be loved at sight! The adventures to be heard at first-hand, and sometimes even shared! The fun, the pathos, the underlying horror, but the grandeur lying deeper yet, all to be encountered together at any minute of any working hour! The Romance of War it is, but not only the romance; and talking of my sedative, with all affection for an author who once kept me only too wide awake, it was not of him that I thought by day behind my counter. It was of Dickens. It was of Hugo. It was of Reade, who might have done the best battle in British fiction (and did one of the very best sea-fights), of Scott and Stevenson and the one or two living fathers of families who will die as hard as theirs. Their children were always coming to life before our eyes, especially the Dickens progeny. Sapper Pinch was a friend of mine, with one or two near relations in the R.A.M.C. There were several Private Tapleys, and not one of them a bore; on the contrary, they were worth their weight in gold. And there was an older man whose real name was obviously Sikes, though the worst thing we knew about him was that he smoked an ounce of Nosegay every day he was down, and never said please or thank-you. Once, when we had not seen him for sixteen days, he knew there was something else he wanted but could not remember what. 'Nosegays!' I could tell him, and planked a packet on the counter. It was the one time I saw him smile.

But it was not only business hours that brought forth these immortals; two of the best were always with us in the superbly contrasted persons of our two orderlies. The slower and clumsier of the pair was by rights an Oxfordshire shepherd; in the Army, even under necessity's sternest law, he was matter in the wrong place altogether. Oxfordshire may not be actually a part of Wessex, but there is one part of Oxfordshire as remote as the scene of any of the Wessex Novels, and that was our Strephon's native place. He might have been the real and original Gabriel Oak--as Mr. Hardy found him, not as we fortunately know the bucolic hero of _Far from the Madding Crowd_.

Our Gabriel was the simplest bumpkin ever seen or heard off the London stage. He it was who, in his early days in France, had heavily inquired: 'Who be this 'ere Fritz they be arl tarkin' about?' Thus did he habitually conjugate the verb _to be_; but all his locutions and most of his manners and customs, his puzzled head-scratchings, his audible self-communings, his crass sagacity and his simple cunning, were pastoral conventions of quite time-honoured theatricality. His very walk, for all his drills, was the ponderous waddle of the stage rustic. But on his own showing he had (like another Tommy) 'proved one too many for his teachers' at an early stage of his military education. Not all their precept and profanity, not all his pristine ardour as a volunteer, had sufficed to put poor Gabriel on terms of adequate familiarity with his rifle.

'I couldn' make nothin' of it, sir,' he would say with rueful candour. 'So they couldn' make nothin' o' me.'

His simplicity was a joy, though he was sometimes simple to a fault. One morning I caught him draining our tea-pot as a loving-cup: matted head thrown back, brawny elbows lifted, and the spout engulfed in his honest maw: a perfect silhouette, not to be destroyed by a sound, much less a word of protest, even had we not been devoted to our gentle savage. But one of us did surreptitiously attend to the spout before tea-time. And once before my eyes his ready lips sucked the condensed-milk off our tin-opener before plunging it into a tin of potted meat. He had a moustache of obsolete luxuriance, I remember with a shudder in this connection; but the last time I saw him the moustache was not.

'You see, sir,' explained Gabriel, regretfully, 'I had a cold, an' it arl ...'

I hope my muscles were still under due control. To know our Gabriel was to perish rather than hurt his feelings; for he had the softest heart of his own, and in Oxfordshire a wife and children to share its affections with his ewes and lambs. 'An' I think a lot on 'em, too, sir,' said Gabriel, when he showed me the full family group (self in uniform) done on his last 'leaf.' Really a sweet simpleton, even when (as I was nearly forgetting) he announced a brand-new Brigadier-General, who had honoured me with a visit, as 'A gen'leman to see you, sir!'

The only man of us who had the heart to tell the angelic Gabriel off was his brother orderly, a respectable and patriotic Huish, if such a combination can be conceived. Our Mr. Huish was the gentleman who always said it wanted five minutes to the 'alf-hour when it wanted at least ten, and too often sped the last of our lingering guests with insult into outer darkness. Like his prototype he was a fiery little Londoner, with a hacking cough and a husky voice ever rising to a shout in his dealings with bovine Gabriel. There was nothing of the beasts of the field about our Huish; he was the terrier type, and more than true to it in his fidelity to his temporary masters. At us he never snarled. His special province was the boiler stove; he was generally blacked up to the red rims of his eyes, like a seaside minstrel, and might have been collecting money in his banjo as we saw him first of a dim morning. But the instrument was only our frying-pan carried at arm's length, and our approval of an unconscionable lot of rashers all the recognition he required. 'W'en I 'as plenty I likes to give plenty,' was his disreputable watchword in these matters. I am afraid he was not supposed to cook for us at all.

Huish was always bustling, or at least shambling with alacrity; whereas Gabriel went about his lightest business with ponderous deliberation and puzzled frown. Both were men of forty who had done the right thing early in the war; they had nothing else in common except the inglorious job which they owed to their respective infirmities. Huish, after many rejections on the score of his, had yet contrived to land in khaki at Le Havre on the last day of the first battle of Ypres; and though he had never been nearer the fighting than he was with us, no one who knew his story or himself could have grudged him his 1914 ribbon. His canine delight, on learning that he was just entitled to it, was a thing to see and to enter into.

Let us hope Gabriel did; he was not very charitable about Huish behind his back. It was Gabriel's boast that he had 'never been in the 'ands of the police,' and his shame to inform us that Huish had. But the sun has its spots, and the overwhelming superiority of Huish in munitions of altercation was perhaps some excuse. Daily we caught his rising voice and Gabriel's rumbling monotone; what it was about we never knew; but Huish had all the nerves in the kitchen, and the shepherd must have been a heavyweight on them at times. Their language, however, as we heard it under mutual provocation, was either a considerable compliment to the Y.M.C.A. or an exclusive credit to themselves. Gabriel was duly archangelic in this regard; the other's only freedom a habit of calling a thing an 'ell of a thing, and on occasion an Elizabethan expressiveness, entirely inoffensive in his mouth.

I wanted their photographs to take with me when I left, and had prevailed upon them to get taken together at my expense. The result lies before me as I write. Both are washed, brushed up, shaven and uniformed out of daily knowledge. Huish stands keenly at attention, as smart as he could make himself; it is not his fault that the sleeves of his new tunic come down nearly to his finger-tips. On his right shoulder rests the forgiving paw of Gabriel; a perceptibly sardonic accentuation of the crow's-feet round his eyes may perhaps be attributed to this prompting of the shepherd's heart or the photographer's _finesse_. But the pose was a consummation; it was in the course of a preliminary transaction that their excessive gratification obliged me to disclaim benevolence.

'I shall want some of the copies for myself, you know,' I had warned them both.

'Quite right, sir!' cried Huish, heartily. 'It's like a man with a dog an' a bitch--'e must 'ave 'is pick o' the pups!'

Huish could take the counter at a pinch, but it was neither his business nor his pleasure; and our gentle shepherd found French coinage as dark a mystery as the British rifle. But we were very often assisted by an unpaid volunteer, another great character in his way. We never knew his name, and to me at least he was a new type. A Hull lad, eighteen years old, private in a Labour Battalion employed near the town, he must have had work enough by day and night to satisfy even one of his strength and build, which were those of a little gorilla. And yet never a free evening had this boy but he must spend it behind our counter, slaving like the best of us for sheer love. But it was the work _he_ loved; he was a little shop-keeper born and bred; his heart was in the till at home; that was what brought him hot-foot to ours; and his passionate delight in the mere routine of retail trade was the new thing to me in human boyhood.

At first I had wondered, the hobby seemed so unnatural: at first I even kept an eye on him and on the till. Our leader had gone on leave before the New Year; nobody seemed to know how far he had encouraged the boy, or the origin of his anomalous footing in the hut; and we were taking a cool thousand francs a day. But our young volunteer bore microscopic scrutiny, but repaid it all. His was not only a labour of love unashamed, but the joyous exercise of a gift, the triumphant display of an inherent power. He beat the best of us behind a counter. It was his element, not ours for all the will and skill in the world; he was a fish among swimmers, a professional among amateurs, and the greatest disciplinarian of us all. The home till may have been behind a bar in the worst part of Hull, long practice in prompt refusal have given him his short way with old soldiers opening negotiations out of their turn. It was a good way, however, as cheery as it was firm. I can hear it now:

'Naw, yer dawn't, Jock! Get away back an' coom oop in't queue like oother people!'

It was never resented. Though not even one of us, but the youngest and lowliest of themselves, that urchin by his own virtue exercised the authority of a truculent N.C.O. with the whole military machine behind him. I never heard a murmur against him, or witnessed the least reluctance to obey his ruling. And with equal impunity he addressed all alike as 'Jock.'

But that, though one of his many and quaint idiosyncrasies, was perhaps the covert compliment that took the edge off all the rest.

And it brings me to the Jocks themselves, who deserve a place apart from Y.M.C.A. orderlies and the best of boys in a Labour Battalion.

THE JOCKS

First a word about this generic term of 'Jock.' I use it advisedly, yet not without a qualm. It is not for a civilian to drop into military familiarities on the strength of a winter with the Expeditionary Force; but this sobriquet has spread beyond all Army areas; like 'Tommy,' but with a difference worth considering, it has passed into the language of the man still left in the street. If not, it will; for you have only to see him at his job in the war, doing it in a way and a spirit all his own, and a Jock is a Jock to you ever after. As the cricketer said about the yorker, what else can you call him?

The first time the word slipped off my tongue, except behind their backs, and I found I had called a superb young Seaforth Highlander 'Jock' to his noble face, I stood abashed before him. It sounded an unpardonable liberty; apologise I must, and did.

'It's a name I am proud to be called by,' said he quite simply. I never committed the apology again.

It was not as though one had called an English soldier 'Tommy' to his face; the Jock's answer brought that home to me, and with something like a shock--not because 'Jock' was evidently rather more than a term of endearment, but because 'Tommy' suddenly seemed rather less. Each carried its own nuance, its quite separate implication, and somehow the later term took higher ground. I wondered how much later it was. Did it begin in South Africa? There were no Jocks in _Barrack-Room Ballads_; but there was 'Tommy,' the poem; and between those immortal lines I read my explanation. It was from them I had learnt, long years before either war, that it was actually possible for purblind peace-lovers to look down upon the British soldier, under the name those lines dinned in. The Jocks had not been christened in those dead days; that was their luck; that was the difference. _Their_ name belonged to the spacious times which have given the fighting-man the place of honour in all true hearts.

Hard on Tommy! As for the Jocks, they have earned their good name if men ever did; but I am to speak of them only as I saw them across a Y.M.C.A. counter, demanding 'twust' without waste of syllables, or 'wrichting-pads,' or 'caun'les'; huge men with little voices, little men with enormous muscles; men of whalebone with the quaint, stiff gait engendered by the kilt, looking as though their upper halves were in strait waistcoats, simply because the rest of them goes so free; figures of droll imperturbability, of bold and handsome _sang-froid_, hunting in couples among the ruins for any fun or trouble that might be going. 'As if the town belonged to them!' said one who loved the sight of them; but I always thought the distinctive thing about the Jock was his air of belonging to the town, ruined or otherwise, or to the bleak stretch of war-eaten countryside where one had the good fortune to encounter him. His matter-of-fact stolidity, his dry scorn of discomfort, the soul above hardship looking out of his keen yet dreamy eyes, the tight smile on his proud, uncomplaining lips--to meet all these in a trench was to feel the trench transformed to some indestructible stone alley of the Old Town. These men might have been born and bred in dug-outs, and played all their lives in No-Man's Land, as town children play about a street and revel in its dangers.

I am proud to remember that they held the part of the line I was in at Christmas. I saw them do everything but fight, and that I had no wish to see as a spectator; but everybody knows how they set about it, the enemy best of all. I have seen them, however, pretty soon after a raid: it was like talking to a man who had just made a hundred at Lord's: our hut was the Pavilion. I never saw them with their blood up, and to see them merely under fire is to see them just themselves--not even abnormally normal like less steady souls.

Said a Black Watchman in the hearing of a friend of mine, as he mended a parapet under heavy fire, in the worst days of '15: 'I wish they'd stop their bloody sniping--_and let me get on with my work_!'

The Jock all over! So a busy man swears at a wasp; the Jock at war is just a busy man until something happens to put a stop to his business. In the meantime he is not complaining; he is not asking you when this dreadful war will finish; he is not telling you it can never be finished by fighting. He went to the war as a bridegroom to his bride, and he has the sense and virtue to make the best of his bargain till death or peace doth them part. He may sigh for his release like other poor devils; his pride will not let him sigh audibly; and as for 'getting out of it,' divorce itself is not more alien to his stern spirit. It is true that he has the business in his blood: not the Covenanters only but the followers of Montrose and Claverhouse were Jocks before him. It is also true that even he is not always at concert pitch; but his nerves do not relax or snap in damp or cold, as may the nerves of a race less inured through the centuries to hardship and the incidence of war. In bitter fighting there is nothing to choose between the various branches of the parent oak. The same sound sap runs through them all. But in bitter weather on the Western Front give me a hutful of Jocks! If only Dr. Johnson could have been with us in the Y.M.C.A. from last December to the day of big things! It would have spoilt the standing joke of his life.

In the jaunty bonnet that cast no shadow on the bronzed face underneath, with the warm tints of their tartans between neat tunic and weather-beaten knees, their mere presence lit up the scene; and to scrape acquaintance with one at random was nearly always to tap a character worthy of the outer man. There are those who insist that the discipline of the Army destroys individuality; it may seem so in the transition stage of training, but the nearer the firing-line the less I found it to be the case. I knew a Canadian missioner, turned Coldstream Guardsman, who was very strong and picturesque upon the point.

'Out here,' said he, 'a man goes naked; he can't hide what he really is; he can't camouflage himself.'

The Jock does not try. In the life school of the war he stands stripped, but never poses; sometimes rugged and unrefined; often massive and majestic in body and mind; always statuesque in his simplicity, always the least self-conscious of Britons. Two of his strongest point are his education and his religion, but he makes no parade of either, because both are in his blood. His education is as old as the least humorous of the Johnsonian jibes, as old as the Dominie and the taws: a union that bred no 'brittle intellectuals,' but hard-headed men who have helped the war as much by their steadfast outlook as by their zest and prowess in the field. As for their religion, it is the still deeper strain, mingled as of old with the fighting spirit of this noble race. It is most obvious in the theological students, even the full-fledged ministers, to be found in the ranks of the Jocks to-day; but I have seen it in rougher types who know nothing of their own sleeping fires, who are puzzled themselves by the blaze of joy they feel in battle and will speak of it with characteristic frankness and simplicity.

'The pleasure it gives ye! The pleasure it gives ye!' said one who had been breathing wonders about their ding-dong, hand-to-hand bomb-and-bayonet work. 'This warr,' he went on to declare, 'will do more for Christianity than ever was done in the wurruld before.'

This also he reiterated, and then added surprisingly:

'Mine ye, I'm no' a Christian mysel'; but this warr will do more for Christianity than ever was done in the wurruld before.'

The personal disclaimer was repeated in its turn, in order to remove any possible impression that the speaker was any better than he ought to be. At least I thought that was the explanation; none was offered or indeed invited, for there were other men waiting at the counter; and we never met again, though he promised to come back next night. That boy meant something, though he did not mean me to know how much. He came from Glasgow, talked and laughed like Harry Lauder, and did both together all the time. His conversation made one think. It would be worth recording for its cheery, confidential plunge into deep waters; nobody but a Jock would have taken the first header.

Yet, out of France, the Scottish have a reputation for reserve! Is it that in their thoroughgoing way they strip starker than any, where all go as naked as my Canadian friend declared?

They are said to be (God bless them!) our most ferocious fighters. I should be sorry to argue the point with a patriotic Australian; but my money is on the Jock as the most affectionate comrade. It is a touching thing to hear any soldier on a friend who has fought and fallen at his side; but the poetry that is in him makes it wonderful to hear a Jock; you get the swirl of the pipes in his voice, the bubble of a Highland burn in his brown eyes. So tender and yet so terrible! So human and so justly humorous in their grief!