Chapter IV: Part 4

It was not my inspiration to run one of our huts entirely as a library for the troops. I was merely the fortunate person chosen to conduct the experiment. In most of the huts there was already some small supply of books for circulation, and at our headquarters in the town a dusty congestion of several hundred volumes which nobody had found time to take in hand. The idea was to concentrate these scattered units, to obtain standard reinforcements from London and the base, indent for all the popular papers and magazines, and go into action as a Free Library at the Front. It was at first proposed to do without any kind of a canteen; but I was all against driving a keen reader elsewhere for his tea, and held out for light refreshments after four and cigarettes all the time. On this and many other points I was given my way in a fashion that would have fired anybody to make the venture a success.

The hut placed at my disposal was a very good one in the middle of the town, indeed within the palisade of the once magnificent Town Hall. That grandiose pile had been knocked into mountains of rubbish, with the mere stump of its dizzy belfry still towering over all as the Matterhorn of the range. These ruins formed one side of a square like a mouthful of bad teeth, all hollow stumps or clean extractions; our upstart hut was the only whole building of any sort within sight. It had a better saloon than my last land-ship; on the other hand, it was infested with rats from the surrounding wrecks. They would lope across the floor under one's nose, or dangle their tails from the beams overhead, and I slept with a big stick handy.

Relays of peace-time carpenters, borrowed from their units for a day or two each, fell upon all the benches and table-tops they required, and turned them into five long tiers of book-shelves behind the counter. In the meantime our own Special Artist was busy on a new and noble scheme of decoration, and two or three of us up to our midriffs in the first thousand books. They were a motley herd: the sweepings of unknown benefactors' libraries, the leavings of officers and men, cunning shafts from the devout of all denominations, and the first draft of cheap masterpieces from the base. Classification was beyond me, even if time had been no object: how could one classify 'The Sol of Germany,' 'A Yorkstireman Alroad,' 'The Livinz Waze,' 'From Workhouse to Westminster: Life-Story of With Gooks, M.P.' (four copies), or even the books these titles stood for in the typewritten catalogue that arrived (from Paris) too late to entertain us? All authors in alphabetical order seemed the simplest principle; and in practice even that arrangement ran away with days.

Then each volume had to be labelled (over the publishers' imprint on the binding) and the labels filled in with the letter and number of each in one's least illegible hand; and this took more days, though the rough draft of the catalogue emerged simultaneously; and the merit of the plan, if any, was that the catalogue order eventually coincided with that of the actual books on the shelves. The drawback was that books kept dropping in or turning up too late for insertion in their proper places. I could think of no better way out of this difficulty than by resorting to a large Z class, or dump, for late-comers. This met the case though far from satisfying my instincts for the rigour of a game. Another time (this coming winter, for instance, when I hope to have it all to do again) I shall be delighted to adopt some more approved method of dealing with a growing library; last spring one had to do the best one could by the light of nature. Nevertheless, there was not much amiss (except the handwriting) with the clean copy (in carbon duplicate) of a catalogue which ran to a good many thousand words, and kept two of us out of bed till several successive midnights; for by this time I had a staunch confederate who took the whole thing as seriously as I did, and perhaps even found it as good fun.

We had hoped to open--it was really very like producing a play--early in February, but a variety of vicissitudes delayed the event until the twentieth of the month. As the day approached we had many visitors, who had heard of our effort and were prepared to spread our fame; time was well lost in showing them round, and I confess I enjoyed the job. They had to begin by admiring the scraper. It was perhaps the worst scraper in Europe--I ached for a week from sinking its two uprights into harder chalk with a heavier pick-axe than I thought existed--but it was symbolical. It meant that you could leave the mud of war outside our hut; but I am afraid the first thing to be seen inside was inconsistent with this symbol. It was the complete _Daily Mail_ sketch-map of the Western Front, the different sheets joined together and mounted on the locked door opposite the one in use. The feature of this feature was that the Line was pegged out from top to bottom with the best red-tape procurable in the town. It toned delightfully with the art-green of the sketch-map.

In the ordinary Y.M.C.A. nobody would have seen it! In winter, at any rate, it is dusk at high noon in the ordinary hut, which is lighted only by canvas windows under the eaves. In our hut, however, we had a pair of fine skylights, expressly cut to save our readers' eyes, and glazed with some shimmering white stuff which seemed to increase the light, like a fall of snow, instead of slightly diluting it like the best of glass. The side windows glistened with the same material, so that a dull day seemed to clear up as you entered. Between the skylights stood four trestle tables under one covering of American cloth, whereon the day's papers, magazines and weeklies, were to be displayed club-fashion; the writing tables, likewise in American cloth, were arranged under the side windows; and at an even distance from either end of the fourfold reading table were the two stoves. One stove is the ordinary hut-allowance.

Round each stove ran a ring of canvas and wicker arm-chairs, in which a tired man might read himself to sleep, and between the chairs stood little round tables for his tea and biscuits when he woke. They were garden tables painted for the part, with spidery black legs and bright vermilion tops, and on each a nice new ash-tray (of the least possible intrinsic value, I admit) in further imitation of the club smoking-room. That was the atmosphere I wanted for the body of the hut.

At the platform end we were ready for anything, from itinerant lecturers to the most local preacher, and from hymns to comic songs; the best piano in the area was equal to any strain; and a somewhat portentous rostrum, though not knocked together for me, was just my height, while the American cloth in which we found it was a dead match for our extensive importations of that fabric. It was at this end of the hut that our Special Artist and Decorator had excelled himself. All down the sides were his frieze of flags, his dado of red and white cotton in alternate stripes, and his own extraordinarily effective chalk drawings on sheets of brown paper between the windows. But for the angle under the roof, over the platform, he had reserved his masterpiece. One day, while we were still busy with the books, our handy man of genius had stood for an hour or two on a ladder; and descending, left behind him a complete allegorical cartoon of Literature, including many life-size figures in flowing robes busy with the primitive tools of one's trade. I am not an art critic, like my friend the war correspondent, who ruthlessly detected faults in drawing, instead of applauding all we had to show him; to me, the pride of our walls was at least a remarkable _tour de force_. The Official Photographer was to have come at a later date to witness if I exaggerate. He left it too long. He may have another chance this winter. 'Literature' has been preserved.

These private views too often started at the counter, because visitors had a way of entering through my room; but to see the library as I do think it deserved seeing, one had to turn one's back upon all I have described, and with a proper piety bear down upon the books. In their five long shelves, each edged and backed with the warm red cotton of the dado, and broken only by my door behind the counter, those thirty yards of good and bad reading were wholly good to see, on our opening day especially, before the first borrower had made the first gap in their serried ranks. There indeed stood they at attention, their labels at the same unwavering height as so many pairs of puttees (except the few I had not affixed myself); and I felt that I, too, had turned a mob into an army.

Immediately over the top row, on a scroll expertly lettered by our Special Illuminator (another of our talented band), its own new motto, from Thomas a Kempis, ran right across the hut:

_Without Labour there is no Rest; nor without Fighting can the Victory be Won._

I really think I was as pleased with that, on the morning I thought of it in bed (having just decided to call the hut The Rest Hut), as Thackeray is said to have been when he danced about his bedroom crying--'"Vanity Fair"! "Vanity Fair"! "Vanity Fair"!' But I only once heard a remark upon our motto from the men. 'Well, that's logic anyhow!' said one when he had read it out across the counter. I could have wished for no better comment from a soldier.

Higher still, in the angle of the roof at this end, the flags of the Allies enfolded the Sign of the Rest Hut, which was an adaptation of the Red Triangle. I was having a slightly more elaborate version compressed into a rubber stamp for all literary matter connected with the hut.

The rubber stamp did not arrive in time for the opening; nor had there been time to stick our few rules into more than a few of the books. But I had a paste-pot and a pile of these labels ready on the counter. And since we _are_ going into details, one may as well swing for the whole sheep:--

THE REST HUT LIBRARY
(=Y.M.C.A.=)

_This book may be taken out on a deposit of =1 franc.=
which will be returned when the book is brought back._

_Books cannot be exchanged more than once daily, and
no Reader is entitled to more than one volume at a
time._

_A book may be kept as long as required: but in each
other's interests Readers are begged to return all
books as soon as they conveniently can, and in as good
order as possible._

Frankly, we flattered ourselves on dispensing with time-limit and fine; and in practice I can commend that revolutionary plan to other amateur librarians. Obviously you are much less likely to get a book back at all if you want more money with it. You shall hear in what circumstances many of ours were to come back, and at what touching trouble to men of whom one can hardly bear to think to-day.

But all the books were not for circulation; a Poetry and Reference Shelf bestrode my end of the counter. Duplicate Poets were to be allowed out like novels; but they were not expected to have many followers. A more outstanding feature, perhaps the apple of the librarian's glasses was the New Book Table, just in front of the counter at the same end. I thought a tableful of really new books would be tremendously attractive to the real readers, that their mere appearance might convey a certain element of morale. So one long day I had spent upon fifteen begging letters to fifteen different publishers--not the same begging letter either, for some of them I knew and some knew me not wisely but too well. On the whole the fifteen played up, and the New Book Table was well and truly spread for the inaugural feast. The novelties were to grace it for a fortnight before going into the catalogue; and we started with quite a brave display. There were travels and biographies, new novels and books of verse, all spick-and-span in their presentation wrappers; and we arranged them most artistically on a gaudy table-cloth that cost thirty francs; with a large cardboard mug (by our Illuminator) warning other mugs off the course. And I think that really is the last of our preparations, unless I mention the receptacles for waste-paper, which proved quite unable to compete against the floor.

They were, I daresay, the most fatuously faddy and elaborate preparations ever made for a library which might be blown sky-high at any moment by a shell. I had not forgotten that none too remote contingency. But it was the last thing I wanted any man to remember from the moment he crossed our threshold. We were just about five miles from the Germans, and I had gone to work exactly as I should in the peaceful heart of England. But that was just where I wanted a man to think himself--until he stepped back into the War.

OPENING DAY

It really _was_ rather like a first night; but there was this intimidating difference, that whereas the worst play in the world draws at least one good house, we were by no means certain of that measure of success. Our venture had been announced, most kindly, in Divisional Orders, as well as verbally at the Y.M. Cinema; but still we knew it was not everybody who believed in us, and that 'a wash-out' had been predicted with some confidence. Even those in authority, who had most handsomely given me my head, were some of them inclined to shake theirs over the result. It was therefore an exciting moment when we opened at two o'clock on the appointed afternoon. There was more occasion for excitement when I had to lock the door for the last time some weeks later; and the two disappointments are not to be compared; but my private cup has seldom filled more suddenly than when I unlocked it with my own hand--and beheld not one solitary man in sight! 'A wash-out' was not the word. It was my Niagara.

At least it looked like it; but after one bad quarter of an hour it turned into a steady trickle of repentant warriors. If the two of us had been holding a redoubt against the enemy, I am not sure that we should have been more delighted to see them than we were. In half an hour the big reading table was surrounded by solemn faces; each of the two stoves had its full circle in the easy chairs; the New Book Table had been discovered, was being thronged, and the best piano in the area yielding real music to the touch of a real pianist. The Rest Hut had started on its short but happy voyage.

Those there were who came demanding candles and boot-polish, and who fled before our softest answers; and there were seekers after billiards who had to be directed elsewhere for their game. I had tipped too many cues at the last hut, and stopped too many games for the further performance of that worse than thankless task, to have the essential quality of the Rest Hut subverted by a billiard-table. The readers, writers, musicians, and above all the weary men, of an Army Corps were the fish for my rod; and we had not been open an hour before I was enjoying good sport, tempered by early misgiving about my flies.

The first book that I connect with a specific inquiry was one that I had certainly failed to order. It was 'anything of Walter de la Mare's'; and I felt a Philistine for having nothing, but a fool for supposing for a moment that I had pitched my hut within the boundaries of Philistia. There might have been a conspiracy to undeceive me on the point without delay. The Poetry Shelf (despite deficiencies so promptly proven) received attention from the start. I forget if it was Mr. de la Mare's admirer who presently took out _The Golden Treasury_, of which we mercifully had several copies; it was certainly a Jock. I showed him the Shelf, and could have wrung his hand for the tone in which he murmured 'Keats!' It was reverential, awe-stricken and just right. Clearly _his_ Dominie had not abused the taws.

In the meantime I had taken a deposit on three prose volumes. These were they, these the first three authors to cross my counter:

1. George Meredith: _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_.

2. Robert Louis Stevenson: _Across the Plains_.

3. Hilaire Belloc: _Mr. Clutterbuck's Election_.

As I say, it seemed like a conspiracy--but I swear I was not one of the conspirators! They were--my benefactor already--the pianist, and his friends; three young privates in the R.A.M.C., all afterwards great friends of mine. Of course, this form was too good to be true of the mass; and the particular Field Ambulance to which they belonged was an unusually brainy unit, as I came to know it through many other representatives; but I shall always be grateful to that musical young Meredithian for the start he gave me, and may this mite of acknowledgment meet his spectacles.

On the same opening page of my first day-book, to be sure, a less rarefied level is reached by some comparatively pedestrian stuff, including a work of Mr. Charles Garvice and no fewer than two wastrels 'of my own composure' (as the village organist had it); but my place (though gratifying) was obviously due to an ulterior curiosity; and among the twenty-three books in all that went out that afternoon, there was a further burst of four that went far to restore the higher standard: they were _Lorna Doone_, _My Novel_, _Nicholas Nickleby_ and _Oliver Twist_. The two first fell to Jocks; the Blackmore masterpiece was read forthwith from cover to cover in the trenches, and that Jock came down by special permission for something else as good!

A happy afternoon, and of still happier omen! But I was going to need more 'good stuff'; that was the first hard fact to be faced. I had not reckoned with those eager intellectuals, the young stretcher-bearers who had borne a lantern for the nonce. They were going to bring their friends, and did; and were I to tabulate the books these youths took out between them, in the busy month to come, it would be pronounced, I think, as good a little library as a modern young man, with a sociological bias and a considered outlook, could wish to form. And then there were all the books we hadn't got for them! But these missing friends did more, perhaps, to make friends for the Rest Hut than such as were there to close the subject; for one might be able to suggest something else instead; and the man might have read that already, but his face might lighten at the recollection, and across the counter on our four elbows the pair of us forge that absent book into the first link of friendship.

But any one can gossip about the books he loves, and with a soldier at the front any fool could talk on any topic. So I had it both ways, as one seldom does, according to the saying. It may be that the men who found their pleasure in the Rest Hut were by nature responsive and enthusiastic, and not merely sensitised and refined by the generous fires of constant camaraderie and unselfish suffering. I am speaking of them now only as I found them across that narrow counter, while I deliberately pasted my label of rules inside the cover, and deliberately dabbed my rubber-stamp down on the fly-leaf opposite. I have seen clean into a noble heart between these delaying rites and a meticulous entry in my day-book. It was pain to me when three or four were waiting their turn, and a certain despatch became imperative; it always meant a corresponding period without any work or any friend-making across the counter.

At the short end, beyond the flap (never lowered in the Rest Hut), my friend and mate dispensed the cigarettes and biscuits, and tea made with devoted care by a wrinkled Frenchwoman worth all the Y.M.C.A. orderlies I ever saw, not excepting the two stalwarts at the Ark. The Rest Hut orderly was a smart soldier of the old type, a clever carpenter, and a good cook with large ideas about breakfast. He lived out, did not give us his whole time, and early struck me as a man of mystery; but he was a quick and willing worker who did his part by us. The jewel of the hut's company was my mate. I can only describe him as an Australian Jock, and of the first water on both sides. Twice or thrice rejected in Australia, he had come home to try again and yet again with no better luck; so here he was, with his fine heart and his dry cough, as near the firing-line as he could get 'for the duration.' I may lose a friend for having said so much, yet I have to add that he had taken the whole burden of the till and its attendant accounts (a hut-leader's business) off the shoulders of inexperience. Friends who predicted the worst of me in this connection, and are surprised to see me still outside a defaulter's cell, will please accept the only explanation.

It was a musical tea that opening afternoon, for another of our talented troupe brought the pick of his orchestra from the Association Cinema in the main street hard by; and for an hour it was like the Carlton, with a difference. I wonder what the Carlton could charge for that difference, even at this stage of the war!

Altogether I thought myself the luckiest civilian alive that February afternoon; but my bed of roses had its crumpled leaf. On the fine great cardboard programme for the week (next the map: our Illuminator again), with its cunning slots for moveable amusements, besides that of the Cinema Orchestra there was something about Prayers. That was where I was coming in--on the wrong side of the counter--and as the night advanced it blew a gale inside me. Five minutes before the time, I mounted the platform and made known the worst; and ever afterwards finished the evening by pursuing the same plan, so that all who wished could withdraw, losing only the last five minutes, and no man (I promised them) have anything unpalatable thrust down his throat. I am not sure that it was the most courageous method of procedure; but it was mine, and the men knew where they were. I used to read a few verses, a Vailima Prayer and but one or two more: some men went out, but there was the satisfaction of feeling that those who stayed were in the mood for Prayers.

After the first week or ten days, a third worker came to help us; and he being a minister, I persuaded him to relieve me of this nightly duty, though with a sigh that was not all relief. I always loved reading to the men, but Prayers are shy work for an old layman, and soldiers (if I know them) care less for the deathless composition of a Saint than for the unpremeditated outpouring of the man before their eyes. The minister used to give them all that, perched on a chair in their midst; and he kept a much fuller hut than I at my rostrum of American cloth.

THE HUT IN BEING

I had thought of finishing my account of our opening day with the impressions of a Corporal in the A.S.C., as recorded in his diary that very night. But though the extract reached me in a most delightful way, and though decency would have disqualified the flattering estimate of 'the Superintendent' (as 'a man of cheery temperament'), on examination none of it quite fits in. As description it covers, though with the fleeter pen of youth, ground on which I have already loitered: enough that it was all 'a big surprise' to him: 'a "home from home"' already to one soldier of a literary turn, and likely in his opinion to prove a joy to 'some of the lonely hearts of the lads in khaki.' _Q.E.F._

And though it was weeks and months before the Corporal's testimony came to hand, it felt from the beginning as though we really had 'done it.' I say 'it felt,' because there was something in those few thousand cubic feet of air that one could neither see nor hear; something atmospheric, and yet far transcending any atmosphere, whether of the smoking-room or library or what-not, that we had thought to create; for it was something the men had brought with them, nothing that we had ready. Just as they say on the stage that it is the audience who do half the acting, so it was the soldiers who fought half our little battle--and the winning half.

Each of those first days the hut seemed fuller than the day before; more men came early and stayed late; more were to be counted napping round the stoves (as in my rosiest visions) at the same time; more and more books were taken out; and better books, because it was the better-educated men who came flocking in, the intellectual pick of an Army Corps who made our hut their club. If ever a dream came true, if ever a reality excelled an ideal, it was in the wonderful success of our little effort. Little enough, in all conscience; a bubble in the tide of travail; but it is only in little that these delightful flukes come off, and the bubble was soon enough to burst.

In the meantime there were elements of imperfection even in our Rest Hut: one or two things, and on both sides of the counter, to pique a passion for the impeccable.

To begin with the books, we really had _not_ enough Good Stuff. Not nearly! Nor am I thinking only, nor yet chiefly, of Good Stuff in the shape of narrative fiction. It is true that we had not Merediths enough, nor a supply of Wessex Novels in any way equal to the demand among my Red Cross friends (who read infernally fast) and others of the elect; nor did the two complete Kipling sets, ordered long before the library was opened, ever look like coming. These authors we had only in odd volumes, and few were the nights they spent upon their shelves. But a novel-reader is a novel-reader, one can generally find him something; my difficulty was in coping with another type altogether--the real bookworm--who is far more particular about his food. Anything but novels for this gentleman as I knew him at the front; and he was often the last person one would have suspected of his particular tastes, sometimes a very young gentleman indeed. There was one such, a rugged lad with a strong Lancashire or Yorkshire accent, whom I thought I should never suit. Lamb, Emerson, Ruskin and Carlyle, he demanded in turn as glibly as Woodbines or Gold Flakes; but either I had them not, or they were out. Macaulay's Essays happened to be in. 'The literary ones?' said the boy, suspiciously, to my suggestion. 'I don't want the political!' I remember he took a _Golden Treasury_ in the end; as already noted, I had several copies, and needed every one.

Then I found that I required a better selection of technical works of all sorts. Engineers, especially, want engineering books and journals; it is a rest to the fighting man to pursue his peace-time interests or studies at the front. Nothing, one can well imagine, takes him out of khaki quicker; and that is what his books are for, nor will he shut them a worse soldier. Of devotional works, as I may have hinted, we opened with a fair number; this was increased later by a strong consignment from Tottenham Court Road. But it was impossible to be too strong on that side--with a Division of Jocks in the sector!

'It's the only subject that interests me,' said a tight-lipped Scottish Rifleman, quite simply, on the third day. He was not a man I would have surrendered to with much confidence on a dark night, but he had brought back a book called _The Fact of Christ_, and he wanted something else in the same category. Just then there was nothing; but with imbecile temerity I did say we had a number of 'religious novels' by a lady of great eminence. 'I'm no a believer in _her_,' was his only reply. I can still see his grim ghost of a smile. Himmel help the Hun who sees it first!

The young man vanished for his sixteen days, and in his absence came the bale of theology from Tottenham Court Road.

'Now I've got something for you,' said I when I saw his keen face again; and lifted off its shelf Dr. Norman Macleod's most weighty tome. I cannot check the Parisian typist who rendered the title _Caraid nan Gaidherl_; the subject, however, was the only one that interested the Scottish Rifleman, and I took the tongue for his very own. My mistake!

'But that'll be in Gaelic,' said he, without opening the book. 'I have never studied Gaelic, though a Highlander born. Now, had it been Hebrew,' and he really smiled, 'I micht have managed!'

I saw he might; for obviously he had been a theological student when he felt it incumbent upon him (especially as such) to play a Jock's part in the Holy War. I saw, too, that his smile was shy and gentle in its depths, only grim on top. I think, after all, he would have given his last cigarette to a prisoner of anything like his own manhood.

But there was one worse failure than any deficiency on our shelves, and that, alas! was my own poor dear New Book Table. I had not looked after it as I ought, and neither had my friend and fellow-worker; in my eagerness to keep our respective departments ideally distinct, this fancy one had fallen between two stools. Several of the new books were missing before we actually missed one; then we took nightly stock, and with mortifying results. At last it could go on no longer, and the new books were replaced by old bound volumes of magazines, more difficult to deport. But I was determined to have it out with the hut; and I chose the next Sunday evening service, in the course of which I made it a rule to have my say about things in general, for the delicate duty.

I didn't a bit like doing it, as I held my regular readers above suspicion, and they formed the bulk of the little congregation; and that night I was in any case more nervous than I meant them to see, as for once I had decided to tackle the 'sermon' myself. It was the first evening of Summer Time; lamplight was unnecessary; and the splendid men sitting at ease in the arm-chairs, which they had drawn up to the platform end, or at the tables or on the floor, made a great picture in the soft warm dusk. One candle glimmered at the piano, and one on that egregious rostrum, as I stood up behind it and trembled in my boots.

I told them the New Book Table had ceased to exist as such; that I had prostrated myself before fifteen of my natural enemies, in order to spread that table to their liking; but that there had been so many desertions from my crack corps that we were obliged to disband it. Not quite so pat as all that, but in some such words (and to my profound relief) I managed to get a laugh, which enabled me to say I thought it hard luck on the ninety-and-nine just persons that the hundredth man should borrow books without going through the preliminary formalities. But I added that if they came across any of the deserters, and would induce them to return to their unit, I should be greatly obliged. They were jolly enough to clap before I launched into my discourse, and it was what their rum ration must have been to them. I wish as much could be done for poor deacons before going over _their_ top.

But the point is that at least one deserter did return next day; and what touched me more, the little gifts of books, which they had taken to bringing me for the library, increased and multiplied from that night. Nor must I forget the humorist (not one of my high-brows) who button-holed me on my way back to the counter:--

'Beg yer pardon, Mr. 'Ornung, but that pinchin' them new books--wasn't a Raffles trick, was it?'

But if we failed where I had thought we were doing something extra clever, we met with great success in a less deliberate innovation for which I can claim but little credit.

In our quiet hut there was no need for the usual Quiet Room; but there it was, at the platform end, as much use as in the heart of the Great Sahara. I had thought of turning it into a little informal sort of lecture-room, for readings and other entertainments which might not be to everybody's taste. But I had no time to organise or run a side-show; neither of us had a spare moment in the beginning. Though we never opened in the morning, except to officers who cared to come in as friends, there was plenty to do behind the scenes--parcels of new books to unpack and acknowledge, supplementary catalogues to prepare--all manner of preparations and improvements that took the two of us all our time. Then my second mate, the minister, fell from Heaven--for he was just our man.

He had made a hobby of the literary evening in his Border parish; had come out armed with a number of vivacious appreciations of his favourite authors, the very thing for our Quiet Room. I handed it over to him forthwith, and we embarked together upon a series of Quiet Room Evenings, which I do believe were a joy to all concerned. At any rate we always had an audience of forty or fifty enthusiasts, who took part in the closing discussion, and in time might have been encouraged to put up a better lecture than either of us. The minister, however, was very good; and what he had cut out, in his unselfish pursuit of brevity, I could sometimes put into a more ponderous performance at the end. It was a greater chance than any that one got on Sunday evening; for though I promise them there was never any previous idea of improving the occasion, yet it was impossible to sit, pipe in mouth, chatting about some great writer to that roomful of thinking, fighting men, and not to touch great issues unawares. Life and death--wine and women--I almost shudder to think what subjects were upon us before we knew where we were! But a great, big, heavenly heart beat back at me, the composite heart of fifty noblemen on easy terms with Death; and if they heard anything worth remembering, it came from themselves as much as though they had written the things down and handed them up to me to read out. I have known an audience of young schoolboys as kindlingly responsive to a man who loved them; but here were grown soldiers on the battle's brink; and their high company, and their dear attention, what a pride and privilege were they!

If only it had been earlier in the season, not the very hush before the hurricane! There were so many lives and works that we were going to thresh out together--Francis Thompson's, for one. He had crept into our evening with Edgar Allan Poe. I had promised them a long evening with Francis; the stretcher-bearers, especially, were looking forward to it as much as I was; but I had to send for the books, and they were not in time.

And on the last of these Quiet Room Evenings, a young lad in a Line regiment had stayed behind and said:

'May we have a lecture on Sir John Ruskin, sir?'

I said of course they might--but I was not competent to deliver it myself. His books were on the way, however, for there had been more than one inquiry for them. They also arrived too late.

I had never seen the boy before, nor did I again. I may this winter. He shall have his 'lecture on Sir John Ruskin'--if I have to get it up myself!

WRITERS AND READERS

For my own ends I kept a kind of librarian's ledger, in which was entered, under the author's name, every book that ever went out, together with its successive dates of departure and return. This amateurish scheme may not have been worth the labour it entailed, in spare moments at the counter or last thing at night, after a turn-over of perhaps a hundred volumes, many of which needed new labels before retiring to the shelf. But I was never sorry I had let myself in for it. Theoretically, one had only to look up a book in this ledger to tell whether it was in or out; but in practice my reward was not then, but is now, when I can see at a glance who really were our popular authors, and which books of theirs were never without a partner, and which proved wall-flowers.

Statistics, however, are notoriously bad witnesses; and some of mine would not stand cross-examination. Thus, take him for all in all, the author of _The First Hundred Thousand_ may add the blue ribbon of the Rest Hut to his collection; but then, we had practically all his books, and some of them four or five deep. Nor was the one that had more outings than anything of anybody's on our shelves on that account the most popular; it may even have been the author's nearest approach to a bad penny. On the other hand, our four copies of _The First Hundred Thousand_ were out almost as long as we were open, and all four 'failed to return.' As for its sequel, our only copy eloped with its first partner: had all our authors been Ian Hays there would have been no carrying on the library after the first hundred thousand seconds.

The run on these two books was the more noteworthy in view of the fighting reader's distaste for 'shop.' It was the flattering exception to a very human rule; for I find, taking a good many days at random, that while all but thirteen of every hundred issues were novels, less than three of the thirteen were books about the war. Some forty-nine readers out of fifty wanted something that would take them out of khaki, and nearly nine out of ten pinned their faith to fiction.

How many preferred a really good novel is another and a more invidious matter; but nothing was more refreshing than the way the older masters held their own. Dickens was in constant demand, especially among the older men; and they really read him, judging by the days the immortal works stayed out. Again, it was worth noting that here in France _A Tale of Two Cities_ had twice as many readers as _Pickwick_, which came next in order of popularity. Thackeray was not fully represented, but we had all his best and they were always out. Of the Brontes we had next to nothing, of Reade and Trollope far too little; but _It is Never too Late to Mend_ enchanted a Sapper, a Machine Gunner, and a Red Cross man in turn, while _Orley Farm_ would have headed our first day's list had it been there in time. George Eliot was never without readers, but Miss Braddon had more, and _The Woman in White_ only one! After Dickens, however, the most popular Victorian was the first Lord Lytton.

I confess it rejoiced my heart to hand out the protagonists of a belittled age at least as freely as their 'opposite numbers' of the present century. But I had my surprises. Scott (Sir Walter!) was a firm wall-flower for the first fortnight; probably the Jocks knew him off by heart; and, of course, the same thing may apply to their unnatural neglect of the so-called Kaleyard School of other days. There was, at any rate, nothing clannish about their reading. It was a Jock who took _The Unspeakable Scot_ for its only airing; and more than three-fourths of my Stevensonians were Sassenachs. But one could still conjure with the name of Stevenson, as with many another made in his time. Mr. Kipling's soldiers are adored by legions created in their image. Sir H. Rider Haggard was never on the Rest House shelf. Messrs. Holmes and Watson were the most flourishing of old firms, and Gerard the only Brigadier taken seriously at my counter. Ruritania, too, got back some of its own trippers from the Five Towns; for though you would have thought there was adventure enough in the air we breathed, there was more realism, and it was against the realism we all reacted. Mr. Bennett, to be sure, did not occupy nearly enough space in our capricious catalogue; neither, for that matter, did Mr. Weyman, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Vachell, nor yet Miss Marie Corelli or Sir Thomas Hall Caine. The fault was not mine, I can assure them.

Mr. H. G. Wells, on the other hand, utilised a better chance by tying with the author of _Arsene Lupin_, and just beating Mr. Phillips Oppenheim, for a place it would be unprofitable to compute. Even they could not live the pace of Mr. Charles Garvice, who in his turn succumbed to the lady styled the Baroness Horsy by her fondest slaves; to these two and to Miss Ethel Dell, among others I have or have not presumed to mention, I could wish no greater joy than my job at that counter when their books were coming in, and 'another by the same author, if you've got one,' being urgently demanded in their place. The most enthusiastic letter ever written for an autograph could not touch the eager tone, the live eye, the parted lips of those unconscious tributes. It is not the look you see in Mudie's as you wait your turn; but I have seen it in small boys chasing pirates with 'Ballantyne the Brave,' and in one old lady who fell in love every Sunday of her dear life with the hero of _The Family Herald Supplement_. It was even better worth seeing in a soldier with _Just a Girl_ in his ruthless hand, and _The One Girl in the World_ trembling on a reverential tongue. The man might have been performing prodigies of dreadful valour up the Line, but his soul had been on leave with a lady in marble halls.

There were two young Privates in the A.S.C. who bolted their Garvice at about two days to the book; and two trim Corporals of the Rifle Brigade who made as short work of the other magicians. This type of reader always hunted in couples, sharing the most sympathetic of all the passions, if not the books themselves, which would double the rate of consumption. They were the hard drinkers at my bar; but the hardest of all was a lean young Jock, who smiled as hungrily as Cassius, and arrived punctually at six every evening to change his book. He looked delicate, and was, I think, like other regular attendants, on light duty in the town; in any case he took his bottle of fiction a day without fail, and once, when it was raining, drained it under my nose and wanted another. I refused to serve him. Unlike the other topers, he was a sardonic critic. One night he banged the counter with a book in my own old line, and the invidious comment:

'He can do what _you_ no can!'

I said I was sure, but inquired the special point of superiority.

'He can kill his mon as often as he likes,' said McCassius, grimly, 'and bring him to life again. Fufty times he has killed yon mon--fufty times!'

They were very nice to me about my books--but very honest! There was a certain stretcher-bearer, a homely old fellow with a horse-shoe moustache and mild brown eyes; not from the high-brow unit, but perhaps a greater reader than any of them; and one of those who eschewed the novel. _Scenes of Clerical Life_ (on top of Lenotre's _Incidents of the French Revolution_, and our two little volumes of _Elia_) had been his only dissipation until, our friendship ripening, he weighed me with his tranquil eyes and asked for _Raffles_. I seemed to detect a streak of filial piety in the departure, and gave him as fair warning as I could; but only the book itself could put him off. He returned it without a word to temper his forgiving smile, and took out _The Golden Treasury_ as a restorative. Poetry he loved with all his gentle soul; but when, at a later stage, he asked if I thought he could 'learn to write poetry,' the wounds of vanity were at least anointed.

He used to take down Mr. David Somervell's capital _Companion to the Golden Treasury_ from the Poetry Shelf; and it was delightful to watch his bent head wagging between text and note, a black-rimmed forefinger creeping down either page, and his back as round as it could possibly have been before the war. He told me he was a Northamptonshire shoemaker by trade; and though you would trust him not to scamp a sole or bump a stretcher, there was nothing to show that the war meant more to him than his last, or life more than a chance of reading--the shadow lengthening in the sunshine that he found in books. Once I said how I envied him all that he had read; very gently--even for him--he answered that he owed it all to his mother, who had taught him when he was so high, and would be eighty-one come Tuesday. The man himself was only forty; but he was one of those guileless creatures who make one unconsciously look up to them as elders as well as betters. And at the front, where the old are so gloriously young, and the young so pathetically old, nothing is easier than to forget one's own age: often enough mine was brought home to me with a salutary shock.

'When I was up the Line,' said one of my friends, bubbling over with a compliment, 'a chap said to me, "You know that old--that--that _elderly_ man who runs the Rest Hut? He's the author of _Raffles_!"'

Disastrous refinement! And the fellow grinned as though he had not turned what might have been a term of friendship into one of pure opprobrium. Elderly! One would as lief be labelled Virtuous or Discreet.

Another of my poetry lovers did really write it--but not his own--there was too much of a twinkle in _his_ brown eyes! They were twinkling tremendously when I saw them first, fixed upon the Poetry Shelf, and the tightest upper lip in the hut seemed to be keeping down a cheer. No sooner had we spoken than he was saying he kept his own anthology in his field pocket-book--and could I remember the third verse of 'Out of the night that covers me'? Happily I could; and so made friends with a man after my heart of hearts.

In the first place, he spoke the adorable accent of my native heath or thereabouts; and the things he said were as good as the way he said them. Sense and sensibility, fun and feeling, candour and reserve, all were there in perfect partnership, and his twinkling eyes lit each in turn. Before the war he had been a postal telegraphist, and 'there wasn't a greater pacifist alive'; now he was an R.E. signaller attached to the Guards, and as for pacifism--the twinkle sharpened to a glitter and his upper lip disappeared.

Yet another man of forty, he had joined up early, and assigned any credit to his wife--'good lass!' He was splendid about her and their cheery life together; there was a happy marriage, if you like! 'Ever a rover,' as he said romantically (but with the twinkle), he might be in a post-office, but his heart was not; and it seemed the couple were one spirit. Every summer they had taken their holiday tramping the moors, their poets in their pack: 'when we were tired we would sit down and read aloud.' No wonder the Poetry Shelf made him twinkle! There were two cheery children, 'shaping' as you would expect; their dad borrowed my _If_ to copy out for the small boy's birthday, as well as in his field anthology.

Loyalty to one's own, when so impassioned, is by way of draining the plain man's stock: perfect home lives are not so common that the ordinary middle-aged ratepayer makes haste to give up one for the wars. But the anthologist had not been 'wrapped up' like the rest of us. His loyalties did not even end at his country. That first afternoon, I remember, he told me he had been 'a bit of a Theosophist.'

'Aren't you one now?'

'No; but I still have a warm corner in my heart for them.'

I thought that very finely said of a creed outlived. Give me a warm corner for an old love, be it man, woman, or sect!

Daily he dropped in to read and chat; not to take out a book until his turn came for the Line. It was just when the German push seemed imminent to many, was indeed widely expected at a date when my friend would still be at his dangerous post. He knew well what it might mean at any moment; and I think he said, 'The wireless man must be the last to budge,' with the smile he kept for the things he meant; but for once his eyes were not doing their part. 'Well, thank God I've _had_ it!' he said of his happy past as we locked hands. 'And nothing can take it away from you,' I had the nerve to say; for these may be the comforts of one's own heart, but it seems an insolence to offer them to a younger man with a harder grip on life. Happily we understood each other. 'And many happy chats had we,' he had written on the back of the photograph he left me. He had also written his wife's address. _David Copperfield_ went with him when we parted. I wondered if I should ever see either of them again.

Sure enough, on the predicted night, came the roll of drum-fire, as like thunder as a noise can be; but it was our drum-fire, as it happened, and down came my friend next day to tell me all about it. No-Man's Land had been 'boiling like cocoa' under our shells; he was full of the set-back administered to Jerry, of the fun of underground wireless and the genius of Charles Dickens. I sent him back with _Joseph Vance_, and we talked of nothing else at our next meeting. It was our last; but I treasure a letter (telling of 'the ruined city of our friendship,' among other things), and a field-card of more recent date; and have every hope that the writer is still lighting up underground danger-posts with his wise twinkle, and still adding to his field anthology.

Yet another hard reader was a Coldstream Guardsman, a much younger man, and one of the handsomest in the hut. He, too, if you will believe me, had brown eyes--a thing that could not happen to three successive characters in a novel--but of another order altogether. If they had never killed a lady in their time, their molten glow belied them. This young man liked a classic author of full flavour. _Tom Jones_ was probably his favourite novel, but we had it not. De Maupassant would have enchanted him--but not the coarse translations on vile paper--or Rousseau's or Cellini's open secrets. As it was he had to put up with Anatole France, and oddments of Swift and Wilde; nor do I forget his justifiable disgust on discovering too late that our _Gulliver_ was a nursery version. He was a delightful companion across the counter: subtle, understanding, soft-spoken, in himself a romantic figure, yet engagingly vulnerable to romance.