Chapter V

And now the scene changes. The stage is set afresh for another act of the great drama in which our hero plays the leading part or the tiniest of _rôles_, according as we take his conception or history’s of the great events amongst which his life is running its course. For, by analysis, war is found to be made up of millions of little dramas in which the “lead” is played by every single combatant, in which the greatest actors may have but the shadowiest of _rôles_, in which the most portentous moments of history are but “noises of.” It is only the historian, coldly surveying the stage through the lorgnette of posterity, who can disentangle the myriad threads of these subsidiary incidents and weave them into the mighty drama, in which the great actors are seen in their proper _rôles_, where such pygmies as our Ensign are but blurred figures in a vast stage crowd, a moving background, as it were,--after the Meiningen school of the drama,--against which the events of history are enacted.

The scene shifts, then, from Belgium to France. Gone are the flat plains, the ugly red-brick houses, uglier than ever now that war has stripped them from roof to cellar; gone the dull, straight roads with their strip of uneven, red-hot _pavé_ in the centre; gone that everlasting ragged silhouette of Ypres’ ravaged towers, seen from every angle of the salient; gone the stagnant canals, the dirty estaminets. Slow and protesting, with many halts, the train bearing the Battalion southward, through the heat and dust of a blazing summer day, leaves the Belgian scene of war behind. It carries them deep into the fair land of France, among the green hills and undulating valleys, the long white roads, the pretty and prosperous villages, the old-world chateaux with their seigneurial dove-cots and weather-stained towers peering forth from the summer foliage, the natty _auberges_ with their white-curtained windows and little tables before the door. This is all but the “front cloth,” however, behind which the stage is being set for the drama in which the Battalion is yet to play its part. This fair picture of France, spread out in the warm afternoon sunshine, is only the foreground. Behind it somewhere, where the guns are growling dully, lies the Unknown, the Land of Adventure for which they are ultimately bound.

Motor-lorries met them at the railhead where their train journey ended, and whirled them, in a long procession of white dust-clouds, to a large and comfortable village where already other Guards’ battalions were lodged. As the men, white as masons with the dust, descended from the lorries, our Ensign looked about him. There was the Billeting Officer, perspiring and protesting (as is the way of the Billeting Officer), the quartermaster-sergeants, his accomplices, beside him. On every door stood the traces of their handiwork. “2 Platoons, No. 1 Coy.,” “1 Platoon, No. 4 Coy.,” “Pioneers,” “2 officers,”--these were some of the inscriptions our Ensign saw scrawled in chalk on the doors of houses and sheds and on the posts of the farmyard gates.

Three platoons of his company, our young man discovered, were billeted in the buildings of a big yard behind an estaminet, a number of large sheds and outhouses, some of red brick, others with merely wattle walls, running round three sides of the yard. Our Ensign ardently desired a wash and also a drink, but he found that all the officers were busy looking after the comfort of their men, seeing that their quarters were reasonably clean, and inquiring from the dispassionate French peasants as to facilities for water. That is the rule of the army,--the men first, the officers afterwards.

So our young man lost no time in following the example of The Beak and Peter, and visited his platoon in their billet. They were very well off, for their lodging was in a large, dry, clean loft, with a cement floor, above the stables. He and his brother officers between them were successful in begging some straw off the lady of the estaminet, whose sole concern appeared to be for her fowls.... _Ah, Monsieur, il y avait des Anglais chez nous qui out volé mes poules.... Oh, la, la, qu’ils ont volé!_...

But our Ensign soothed her fears by clinching on the spot a contract for eggs for the double-company Mess, as long as the Battalion should be there, and by paying down five francs on account. Quite mollified, the lady showed them a horse-pond near by where the men might wash, and the village well, where (after due analysis of the water by the doctor, in accordance with the Brigade order) the men might draw drinking water.

Leaving the men, stripped to the waist, carrying in their hands little ends of soap and rather dingy towels, swarming about the horse-pond, our Ensign and his brother officers fared forth to locate their own quarters. In the village street they found the Billeting Officer the centre of an indignant group. In the whole of B----, he announced, wiping his damp brow, there were but four beds for officers--the company commanders were to have these,--the rest must forage for themselves. The double-company Mess was quartered in the estaminet behind which the greater part of our Ensign’s company was billeted. There might be some tents for officers later....

There was a chorus of obloquy. What slackness on the part of the Billeting Officer! Had one ever heard the like? Why, the place was full of comfortable-looking houses where, for a franc or two, one might get a clean and comfortable bed! One wouldn’t mind paying....

The discussion lasted whilst the young lions of the double-company Mess lapped up white wine and soda in the dark and filthy back-room of the estaminet where the mess was situated. Poultry walked between their legs: there were millions of flies: a dishevelled wench stirred a saucepan over a red-hot stove, and ancient, gnarled peasants, murmuring “_Bien le bon jour, m’sieurs!_” entered and sat down with them at the table. Apparently the back-room was a kind of village club. In the front room of the estaminet, judging by the trampling of feet and the frantic cries of “Doo beer, Ma!” the greater part of the Battalion was refreshing itself after the heat of the day.

Peter had a servant, a prodigy among men, and a pearl among servants, which his name was Cardwell. Even our Ensign lowered before the Admirable Cardwell the banner he bore so proudly aloft on behalf of the faithful Johnson. For Cardwell spoke French: Cardwell knew the ways of the peasants: Cardwell had been known to extract a meal and a bed out of the dourest old harridan who ever bolted her door with the cry--“_Je ne veux pas des soldats chez moi!_”

So Peter drew our Ensign aside, and whispered--

“Cardwell will find us something: leave it to Cardwell!”

But even Cardwell drew a blank in B----; he returned to the estaminet, where his “master,” as the soldier servants say, was sitting hopefully among the flies and the poultry and the peasants, and ruefully announced his failure. The village was overflowing with refugees from the occupied territory (under the French Government relief scheme): the Billeting Officer had spoken true,--there was not a bed in the place. But then the faithful Johnson came to the rescue. In the courtyard of the estaminet he had laid out soap and water and a towel for our Ensign to have that much-needed wash; and he informed his “master” that tents were to be had, and if our Ensign would furnish the men to draw the tent from the Quartermaster, and indicate a spot where it should be pitched, he would attend to it at once. There was a clean garden behind the estaminet which might do, the man added.

Peter and our Ensign inspected the spot, and decided that it would do: the needful authority was obtained from The Beak, the tent was pitched behind the estaminet, and the two officers had their kits deposited therein, thereby inaugurating a tent partnership which lasted through the summer.

That evening a select party consisting of our Ensign, Peter, Apollo, The Don, and a tall and serious-minded subaltern of their Mess, whom everybody called Roderick, dined in state at a hotel in a neighbouring town, to which they were conveyed through the kindly offices of a motor-ambulance driver. There, among all kinds of big-wigs of the Guards’ Division, they ate a thoroughly bad dinner, at an extortionate price, washed down by utterly spurious _Château Laffitte_, and professed themselves hugely delighted with their evening. It was a glorious summer night, and when they got back to their billet Peter and our Ensign pulled their valises out of the tent and slept beneath the stars.

As the result of an argument on the art of foraging on active service, springing from severe strictures on the paucity of the fare at the double-company Mess, Peter and our Ensign were bidden to dinner the next night with a brother officer, who professed, after experience of active service in half a dozen wars, to be able to get an epicurean meal in any village, no matter how short local supplies were--and B---- was very short. The troops going through on their way to the Somme had seen to that!

The veteran acted as his own cook, and the four--for one of the company commanders made up the _parti carré_--dined under an apple-tree, beneath the stars, off three young ducks and two young chickens, with delicious fresh peas and new potatoes. The guests contributed, as their share of the repast, two bottles of _Roederer_ purchased in the neighbouring town.

As a dinner it was a _tour de force_, for heaven alone knows what blandishments these succulent dishes represented: as a meal, it was a frankly gluttonous performance. Our Ensign, who was Piquet Officer that day, felt that he could scarcely walk, so gorged was he with food, when he rose from the table under the apple-tree to go and turn out the guards. But in war you learn to be thankful for what you can get to-day, for the morrow is ever uncertain.

The Battalion arrived at B---- on a Sunday, and at six o’clock on the following Tuesday morning it was on the road again. It rendezvoused with the rest of the Brigade at a given point _en route_, from which the whole Brigade marched to its destination at V----, some seventeen or eighteen miles distant.

The day was a regular “scorcher.” Even at the early hour of their departure there was a touch of fiery heat in the sun’s rays. There was not a cloud in the sky, and already the heat was shimmering among the corn-stooks in the stubble. The road was deep in dust, and every wayside leaf was powdered white.

The country was terribly hilly, and the men--who were in marching order, their steel helmets strapped on the back of their packs--were sweating freely even at the end of the first mile of the march. Trench warfare gives the men scant opportunity for exercise, and a long march in the summer heat over hilly roads with a heavy load is a strain on the fittest of troops.

But the men made light of the heat and the dust as they trudged along, marching at ease with their rifles slung, with the drums crashing out in front of them. When soldiers are standing a march well, there is a constant ripple of conversation, of chaff, and little snatches of song running up and down the ranks. The men were frankly delighted with the pretty French countryside, the cows in the fields, the sheep on the uplands, the geese and ducks and cocks and hens in the villages--all these were reminders of their country homes, reminders such as they had seldom seen in the mournful land of death from which they had come. A donkey braying behind a hedge, a drove of pigs on the road, set them all a-laughing. Like children, they commented in a running vein of criticism upon everything they saw.

“Och!” said a voice behind our Ensign, “’tis kilt I am wid the heat intoirely. Did ye ever see the like o’ thim lads in front? Sure, they’re runnin’ us off our legs!”

“’Tis the same old game,” declaimed disdainfully Sergeant Kinole, plodding along at the head of the platoon; “I know them lads in front of the company! One, two--left, right--keepin’ the step with the Company Commander’s horse. I declare to God we’ll all be goin’ on our hands and knees be the time we get in!”

This flight of fancy elicited a general laugh. Then the running commentary broke out afresh. A venerable-looking old peasant was digging in a field.

“Bon jour, Daddy!” cried a voice.

“Is ut diggin’ spuds ye are?” asked another.

“Arrah, let him be,” said a deep voice. “’Tis diggin’ his own grave he is, th’ ould rascal!”

The “ould rascal” looked up from his digging with a sheepish, toothless grin, and the Battalion tramped by in a cloud of dust and a ripple of jests and laughter.

They joined up with the Brigade and marched on, drums beating gaily in front, baggage-limbers and carts and cookers trailing out to the rear, through the torrid heat. The passing of the Brigade was an event in the little town where our Ensign and his friends had dined. The streets were crowded, every window had its frieze of faces, every shop-door its knot of gossips, to see the column go by. It was the first time for a century that the Guards had been in those parts.

The heat was truly terrific. The sun beat down fiercely out of a brazen sky. The dust was choking: the hills merciless. The chatter and the chaff gradually died away, and when the whistles sounded for the regulation halt at the end of each hour of marching, the men fell out, dragged off their packs and dropped heavily on the grass.

At last, when the sun was high in the sky, they reached their destination. V---- was a straggling little village built on either side of the slope of the white high-road, smothered in dust, shaken to its very foundations by the incessant rumbling of motor-lorries passing through, with a soporific and neglected-looking château, where ducks promenaded solemnly in the courtyard, a wisp of river and a camp of huts.

The men were lodged in the huts,--regular cauldrons of heat they were, too, infested by flies,--pitched on an unprotected slope of sun-baked earth from which every blade of grass had been trodden. Huts had been set apart for the officers, but they would have none of them. Some one, with a taste for epigram, said the place looked like a dismantled poultry show. The officers, one and all, voted for quarters in the open air, as the weather was so beautifully fine.

After various negotiations, in which Apollo, who had the gift of tongues, played a leading _rôle_, permission was obtained from the local _châtelain_, who was henceforth known and is referred to in this narrative as The Baron, to pitch tents on the grass in a pleasant old apple orchard across the road from the huts. In this picturesque old-world _verger_ the officers of the Battalion were lodged. Headquarters’ tents were ranged at one end of the orchard, the officers’ tents pitched all round its edge, and the different company messes installed in the open air.

For ten delightful days the Battalion spent a peaceful routine existence. The order went forth that cap-stars and buttons would be polished, and once more, at the morning inspection, our Ensign found himself, as in bygone days in barracks at home, scrutinising the men of his platoon for any signs that might betray a hasty or indifferent toilet. The Division or the Brigade--anyhow, the authority that governs these things--decided that the village streets were unduly dirty, and the supervision of a daily scavenging party was added to the duties of the Piquet Officer. Rubbish and dirt lying about the camp were collected and burnt, the village streets were picked clear of empty Woodbine cases and sardine tins and matches and bits of newspaper, and swept and garnished, so that when the Brigade marched out of V---- it left a clean village behind.

Three times within a hundred years had the high tide of war swept across the village and the little château where The Baron and three generations of his family before him had been born. On a window-pane of his house was still to be seen the name “JULIE,” scratched with a diamond on the glass by the wife of a Cossack officer quartered at the château in 1812, while Europe was breathing again after the departure of The Ogre to Elba. In 1870 The Baron, while yet a lad, had seen the Prussians, most insolent of conquerors, lodging at the château; forty-four years after, in the heyday of their victorious advance, he had watched their cavalry passing through the village before the Battle of the Marne had sent them to the right-about and shattered all their hopes. Since those black August days of 1914 The Baron had seen all manner of fighting-men in and about his ancient home, _poilus_ and cuirassiers and Spahis and _goumiers_, at first, and then, after a little time, the British,--English and Scots and Welsh and Irish, and Indians and Australians and Canadians and South Africans. From the windows of his château he had seen the whole flood of battle flowing down to the Somme--and he was a little shy of soldiers.

For in war, he told our Ensign over a glass of home-brewed cider, poultry goes a-missing from the farmyards, and the game vanishes from the woods, and the orchards are bereft of fruit, and young trees unaccountably hacked down.... “One does not grudge it, ... enfin, c’est la guerre!”

But when The Baron found that the new-comers did not loot his chickens or poach his rabbits or break down his trees, his heart warmed to his guests in the orchard. He sent the officers, as a present, a hamper of his delicious home-brewed cider; he plundered his kitchen-garden to supply them with vegetables at a very moderate price--_les affaires sont les affaires, n’est-ce pas?_--(and vegetables are hard to come by where the locust hosts of the Somme have passed), and he sold them his ducklings. One night he dined with the double-company Mess beneath the apple-trees in the orchard, and made himself as charming as a well-bred Frenchman can. Of the Guards he said: “_On voit bien ce sont des gens qui savent se conduire!_”

It was The Baron who told the double-company Mess of the little river in which they enjoyed many bathes in the hot summer afternoons. It was a few miles distant, an ice-cold, crystal-clear stream with a chalky bottom, that emptied itself into a deep and surging mill-pond at the foot of a ruined mill. Our Ensign and his brother officers used to ride over after tea, and, passing by the mill-pond, where the men of the Coldstream and Grenadiers quartered in the neighbourhood used to disport themselves, would ascend the stream a little and plunge in off the grassy banks. They often had a silent spectator of these bathes--a grey-haired man who sat for hours, a dog beside him, fishing in the stream. One day they spoke to him, and discovered that he was a citizen of Lille, a _réfugié_, waiting in a quiet spot for the day of victory. Patting his dog, he used to say in his mournful way, “_Lui, aussi, est Lillois: c’est tout ce qu’il me reste de ma famille!_”

Thus the summer days went by very pleasantly. Routine duties filled in their mornings, short route-marches to keep the men fit, parades, company drill, and, of course, daily “orders”; in the afternoons there was bathing or rides out to other Guards’ battalions quartered about the place, or a concert by the Irish Guards’ band, which had come out in its turn from London to spend a few weeks with the Guards’ Division. One afternoon The Lad, whom our Ensign had not seen again since their rather hasty parting under shell fire, came over with one or two others from his battalion and stayed to dinner in the orchard. Our Ensign and some of the others returned this visit, and dined with the other battalion in a camp of huts in a wood, and, after a very merry dinner, wobbled perilously home on bicycles in the dark, over an execrable road.

The weather remained magnificent. Every night the majority of the officers slept outside their tents in the orchard, under a velvety sky spangled with a vast array of stars, sometimes with the moon hung like a great lamp among the trees. The awakening in the freshness of dawn was a sheer delight, with the birds chirruping in the apple-trees, the sky benign and blue in the gentle light of the newly-risen sun, the grass which formed their _descente du lit_ glittering with the morning dews. The men also, in their camp, dragged forth their packs at nightfall from the huts and lay down to sleep _à la belle étoile_.

On Sundays there was Brigade Divine Service in an orchard behind the château. On one or two occasions the band was in attendance and accompanied the old English hymns with fine effect. It was an unforgettable scene--the lines of tall, well-knit figures in khaki, bare-headed, standing on the grass in the sunshine or in the shade of the fruit trees, the Brigade Chaplain in his white surplice in the centre, close to him the little group of officers, a few patients with bandaged heads or arms from a local casualty clearing station, a knot of wide-eyed French youngsters, and the deep tones of the men’s voices blending with the solemn strains of the band.

No less impressive was the Irish Guards’ Mass held on the same spot every Sunday at an earlier hour, the R.C. Chaplain to the Battalion, his leggings protruding unexpectedly below his sacerdotal vestments, celebrating at a portable altar surrounded by the kneeling figures of the big Irishmen--a wonderful and deeply impressive sight. Mass invariably concluded with an Irish hymn--

“O glorious Saint Patrick,
Dear Saint of our Isle!”

which the Irishmen used to sing with immense religious feeling and with a volume of sound that must have made the château windows tremble.

Every day came news of further successes on the Somme: every day our Ensign and his friends discussed the Battalion’s chances of an early share in the great push: every day there were fresh rumours of great tasks supposedly awaiting the Guards on the Somme; but nothing ever came of them.

On the last day of their stay, the King, who was visiting the Army in France, came to see the Brigade, and walked into the orchard where the officers of our Ensign’s Battalion were quartered and where they were waiting to be presented. The double-company Mess had ransacked the village for flowers to put on the mess-table in honour of the occasion, and had procured some beautiful La France roses which, placed in soda-water bottles, lent a nice touch of colour to the table. It was at the mess-table under the trees where they were presented to the King, so they felt that their labours had not been in vain.

The Battalion left V---- with many regrets on a dull steamy day, and marched to a dirty fly-ridden camp in the woods of M----, where it rained mercilessly and life was squalid and drear. There they stayed for two days and a half, a wonderful night bombardment of the Hun lines by the British artillery the only diversion, and then received unexpected orders to leave. Everybody believed that the Battalion was going straight into the fight, and some of the young officers summoned the Battalion barber to their tents and got their hair cut on the strength of the rumour.

But their hour had not yet struck. The village of L---- was their next destination. Here they spent two days, and were then informed that they were going into the trenches again for a short spell. This rumour was at first received with incredulity. Nevertheless it was true.

By the following evening the Battalion was once more in the front line.