Chapter III (2)

Howe had been made colonel of the lately raised Royal Americans, the ancestors of the 60th Rifles, the famous King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Shortly afterwards he was transferred to the command of the 55th Regiment. Pitt then appointed him to be brigadier to General Abercromby, who, in 1758, was placed in chief command of the Central Advance on Canada, along the line of Lake George and Lake Champlain. Abercromby neither was, nor had the reputation of being, a first-rate general, and Lord Chesterfield was no doubt roughly accurate when he wrote, ‘Abercromby is to be the sedentary and not the acting commander.’ The inspiration and the motive force were to come from Howe. Early in July 1758 the army, consisting of over 6000 regulars and some 9000 provincials, was carried on _bateaux_ and whaleboats to the northern end of Lake George, where, near the outlet of that lake into Lake Champlain, stood the immediate objective, the French fort of Ticonderoga. The force was landed, an advance was made through dense forest and scrub, Lord Howe with a party of Rangers was leading the principal column, they stumbled across a French reconnoitring party, there was a skirmish, and Howe was killed. ‘The French lost above three hundred men, and we, though successful, lost as much as it was possible to lose in one.’ That is one of the many comments made upon the incident, all on the same note. Here is another: ‘In Lord Howe the soul of General Abercromby’s army seemed to expire.’ Two days later Abercromby ordered a headlong, blundering assault upon the works of the fort, which ended in terrible losses and complete repulse.

In his dispatch of August 26, 1915, reporting upon the operations at the Dardanelles up to that date, Sir Ian Hamilton wrote:

‘Lieutenant-General Sir W. R. Birdwood has been the soul of
Anzac. Not for one single day has he ever quitted his post.
Cheery and full of human sympathy, he has spent many hours of
each twenty-four inspiring the defenders of the front trenches,
and if he does not know every soldier in his force, at least
every soldier in the force believes he is known to his chief.’

Here we have something like a modern counterpart, happily still with us, of Lord Howe.

It is at once the glory of the British Empire, and its chief source of strength, that it contains within it so many diverse elements, all co-operating for the common weal, all owing free and willing allegiance to one sovereign. Many races combine to make the great community which we call by the strangely inaccurate term of Empire; and the British race itself, in the process of transplantation, has developed different types in differing lands, climates, and surroundings. The home Briton, born and bred within the four seas of the United Kingdom, necessarily differs somewhat in character and physique from the Briton of the Canadian prairies or the Australian backblocks. The Canadian Briton again differs from the Australasian or South African, while among Australasians the Australian is of one type, the New Zealander of another. All supplement each other; all contribute to the common stock some ingredient which the others have not, and the sum total is greater and richer than if the units of which it is composed were all alike and uniform. On the other hand, diversities demand wise handling, or they may become a source not of strength, but of weakness. It is as easy to drift farther apart as to come closer, to exaggerate differences as to minimise them. Every citizen of the Empire is a missionary of the Empire, for by the individual citizens the types are judged. The home Briton who visits Australia leaves behind him a good or bad taste for England among the Australians with whom he has been brought into contact. The Australian who comes to the Old Country gives to Australia among the people of the Old Country a better or a worse name. But of necessity the leaders are most potent in mission work, and among the leaders those who lead armed men on active service; who are in touch with them day by day in the camp, on the march, in the trenches or on the open battlefield; on whom it devolves to enforce discipline, and with whom it rests whether or not discipline means friction. It is impossible to measure the amount of lasting good which is wrought when overseas soldiers associate tact and sympathy with home leadership or, on the other hand, the mischief which results from want of personal assimilation. It is not by any means military capacity alone that makes the soul of an Empire army. We are all beginning to know each other, to value each other, to make allowances for each other, to an extent which was impossible before steamers multiplied the coming and going of men, and turned uncertain and spasmodic into regular and assured communication. Doubts can be at once set at rest and misapprehensions promptly removed by the use of the submarine cable. Moreover, this familiarising process, and the annihilation of distance, is a progressive matter. Every year leaves us rather closer to one another than we were the year before. If, even under these favourable modern conditions, the personal element still plays a most important part, it was all-important in the middle years of the eighteenth century.

In the Seven Years’ War, when, in the words of Frederick the Great, England, having been long in labour, had at length brought forth a man, that man, William Pitt, set himself to fight France in America, and sent out what were for the time comparatively large armies to conquer Canada. He called upon the British North American colonies to co-operate and raise their levies; and inasmuch as his appeal was made in wise and tactful terms, and the colonies realised that for once England would not leave them in the lurch, they, or some of them, answered to the call with patriotism and goodwill. Thus regular soldiers from England, in greater numbers than ever before, came among the colonists, and provincial regiments were raised to march and fight side by side with the troops of the line. Then was seen and felt in its fullest extent the difference between the home Briton and his brother beyond the seas, at a time when the divergence was most pronounced. The regulars were very regular, the Provincials were very provincial; from a military point of view the two bodies of men were at opposite poles. The Provincials knew nothing of training or discipline; they were nondescript, temporary soldiers of small democracies; they were farmers enlisted for the campaign, their term of service in any case not exceeding one year: few had uniforms, some brought guns with them, some had none to bring: the officers were in effect chosen by the men. The troops of the line, on the other hand, imported into the backwoods of North America the stiffness and rigidity of European dress, discipline, and tactics in the eighteenth century, and between the officers and soldiers there was a great gulf fixed, as between the ranks of society in Europe.

It was but natural that these officers should regard the provincial soldiery with disdain, and that a corresponding resentment should be felt in the provincial ranks. Some of the greatest soldiers of the day were not exempt from this partisan feeling. After the disaster to Braddock’s force in 1755, Washington, who had been present on the field and who contrasted the conduct of the Virginians in the fight with that of the regulars, wrote in the bitterest terms of the latter. Wolfe, on the other hand, had, in 1758, no words strong enough to express his disgust at the shortcomings of the American soldiers. ‘The Americans are in general the dirtiest, most contemptible cowardly dogs that you can conceive.’ If these were the views of the foremost men of the day in the colonial levies and in the regular army respectively, it must be presumed that the lesser men felt at least as strongly. Mrs. Grant, the authoress of ‘Memoirs of an American Lady,’ a book which was published at New York, in 1809, speaks of the ‘secret contempt’ with which ‘many officers justly esteemed, possessed of capacity, learning, and much knowledge, both of the usages of the world and the art of war ... regarded the blunt simplicity and plain appearance of the settlers’; and among the officers who came out from England there must have been a large proportion whose contempt was not unspoken or unnoticed.

It was not merely a case of friction between the professional soldier and the amateur, the one looking down upon the other, and the other resenting the airs of the superior person. The mischief was deeper seated. The northern colonies of British America were cradled in centrifugal traditions: a large proportion of the first colonists had come out to be rid of the Home Government, its discipline and its control. Puritanism was the dominant religious and political creed; and the surroundings, except at a few town centres, were of a stern and simple kind. Among men and women born and reared on these lines, and into their family circles, came regimental officers from England, many, if not most, of whom had been bred in the ways of fashionable English Society, which, in the middle of the eighteenth century, was not, to say the least of it, characterised by high tone or scrupulous refinement. The settlers in the New World, by the mere fact of their removal out of the Old World into the wilderness, had preserved for themselves and their descendants the old-time feeling and modes of thought in the Old World, and to them the new leaven from an up-to-date Old World was a leaven of unrighteousness. Mrs. Grant was the daughter of an officer in the 55th Regiment, Howe’s own regiment, but she had spent her childhood in the American atmosphere, and had been mainly brought up in a Dutch family. Consequently she tells us that she was ‘a little ashamed of having a military father,’ and writes of ‘the scarlet coat, which I had been taught to consider as the symbol of wickedness.’ It was to some extent as though Cavaliers and Roundheads had come to life again, and were jostling one another, while fighting under the same flag and for the same cause, as a prelude to once more springing at each other’s throats.

At this time and place a man of the type of Lord Howe was an almost priceless asset to the cause of Imperial Unity—a cause which can never stand still, but either declines or goes forward, and goes forward only through intelligent appreciation of existing conditions and active sympathy with living men. Of high social standing in England, and acknowledged military reputation, he set himself, by precept and still more by personal example, to the work of assimilation.

‘This gallant man,’ says the Annual Register for 1758, ‘from
the moment he landed in America, had wisely conformed and
made his regiment conform to the kind of service which the
country required. He did not suffer any under him to encumber
themselves with superfluous baggage; he himself set the example
and fared like a common soldier. The first to encounter
danger, to endure hunger, to support fatigue; rigid in his
discipline but easy in his manners, his officers and soldiers
readily obeyed the commander, because they loved the man.’

Wolfe wrote of him as a man ‘whom nature has formed for the war of this country,’ and Mrs. Grant, that he was ‘above the pedantry of holding up standards of military rules, where it was impossible to enforce them, and the narrow spirit of preferring the modes of his own country to those proved by experience to suit that in which he was to act.’ She christens him ‘This young Lycurgus of the camp.’

Under Howe everything was literally cut down to meet the exigencies of American warfare. Gold and scarlet was laid aside: baggage was reduced to a minimum: the muskets were shortened: their barrels were darkened: the skirts of the long regimental coats were cut off: Indian leggings were brought into use. Wolfe writes in May 1758, ‘Our clothes, our arms, our accoutrements, nay even our shoes and stockings are all improper for this country. Lord Howe is so well convinced of it that he has taken away all the men’s breeches.’ A French writer tells us that the officers and men were only allowed one shirt apiece. ‘Lord H. set the example, by himself washing his own dirty shirt, and drying it in the sun, while he in the meantime wore nothing but his coat.’ And here is the unkindest cut of all—in Mrs. Grant’s words:

‘The greatest privation to the young and vain yet remained.
Hair well dressed, and in great quantity, was then considered
as the greatest possible ornament, which those who had it took
the utmost care to display to advantage, and to wear in a bag
or queue, whichever they fancied. Lord Howe’s was fine and very
abundant; he, however, cropped it and ordered every one else to
do the same.’

In all things the commander set the example: he never asked his officers or men to do anything or to give up anything which he did not do or give up himself. Thus his regiment of regulars was set in order for backwood fighting and, what was more, it was attuned to the ways of the land and of the people of the land. ‘They were ever after considered as an example to the whole American Army.’

Mrs. Grant tells a story, which Francis Parkman has repeated in his delightful ‘Montcalm and Wolfe,’ of Lord Howe giving a dinner to his officers in his tent. The furniture consisted of logs of wood and bearskins, ‘and presently the servants set down a large dish of pork and pease.’ Howe pulled a sheath with a knife and fork in it out of his pocket, and proceeded to carve the meat. The officers ‘sat in a kind of awkward suspense’ for want of knives and forks, until Howe, after expressing surprise that they did not possess ‘portable implements’ of the kind, ‘finally relieved them from their embarrassment, by distributing to each a case the same as his own, which he had provided for that purpose.’ The real point of the story is that, if Howe had been an ordinary man, his dinner would probably have been resented by the officers as an impertinent practical joke. But he was not an ordinary man; among his officers and soldiers he was like King David: ‘Whatsoever the king did pleased all the people.’

Albany in New York State was always the base for expeditions against Canada, by the central route, which lay along the line of water communication. In war time through Albany regiments came and went, and in and around it they congregated and encamped. Albany was pre-eminently a centre for the old New York families of Dutch descent. On the upper waters of the Hudson and the lower reaches of the Mohawk River, which joins the Hudson a little above Albany, were the estates of the ‘patroons’ of the Dutch régime, and here their descendants lived and thrived. Mrs. Grant, in her Memoirs, tells of the lives and surroundings of one of the foremost of these families, the Schuylers, whose homes were in Albany and to the north of it in the district known as ‘The Flats.’ In her book an old Mrs. Schuyler (‘Aunt Schuyler’) is the central figure, as she was in the year 1758 the central figure of the Schuyler clan. The book tells of Lord Howe’s intimacy with the family, though he never took up his quarters with them, for he ‘always lay in his tent with the regiment which he commanded’; how the old lady loved him almost as a son, how sadly and affectionately she sped him on his last advance, and her grief when the news came that he was killed. ‘Aunt Schuyler ... had the utmost esteem for him, and the greatest hope that he would at some future period redress all those evils that had formerly impeded the service; and perhaps plant the British standard on the walls of Quebec.’ We have drawn for us the contrast between the good and bad type of officer, the gentleman and the bully, though both may be efficient fighting men. Returning to his friends on one occasion, Howe found to his great indignation that in his absence Captain Charles Lee had come through and, ‘as if he were in a conquered country,’ commandeered the loyal old lady’s stock and property, without having the necessary warrants for his high-handed proceedings. Lee’s next visit was after the fight at Ticonderoga, when he was brought back a wounded man to be nursed by those whom he had browbeaten and robbed. He was a king’s officer; but it is difficult to deduce from his case the moral that conduct such as his brought on the Revolution, seeing that he became a general in the Revolutionary army, of great though somewhat dubious reputation.

In 1757 and 1758 Lord Howe was winning the love and esteem of all who came into contact with him in America. In 1759 the Assembly of Massachusetts voted the monument to his memory. In 1765 the men of Boston were rioting against the Stamp Act, and in 1773 throwing cargoes of tea into Boston harbour. In 1775 came open war with the Mother Country and the fight of Bunker Hill. At Bunker Hill hardest of hard fighters among the Americans was Israel Putnam: he had been by Howe’s side when the latter was killed. The night before his death Howe had been in company with John Stark, noted among the New Hampshire Rangers who followed Robert Rogers. It was Stark who, in 1777, planned and won the fight at Bennington, which was the beginning of the end of Burgoyne’s army. A young member of the Schuyler group, who had taken Howe to their hearts, was Philip Schuyler, afterwards one of the best known and most trusted of the Revolutionary leaders. Probably England and America had drifted too far apart at the time of the Seven Years’ War for any human influence to bring them wholly into line again. Yet, had Howes been multiplied and English statesmen and commanders been modelled on his lines, the parting might well have been postponed and been less bitter when it came. He stands out in history as one who in his day did all that man could do to bring the Colonies and the Mother Country closer together; and he is a type of the Englishmen who are still wanted to-day, and who happily are not wanting, as shown by the love and confidence borne towards Sir William Birdwood by the splendid fighting men from the Southern Seas, whom he led to less and yet to more than victory.

Just over a year from the date of Lord Howe’s death and Abercromby’s repulse at Ticonderoga, a much abler general than Abercromby, Jeffrey Amherst, marched once more against the fort. The French abandoned their entrenchments in front of it, of which Amherst promptly took possession; and a rearguard, left to hold the fort itself, after two or three days’ artillery fire, blew it up and left the ruins to be occupied by Amherst’s army. As the death of Lord Howe had immediately preceded Abercromby’s attack, so a day before the second enterprise ended successfully, another officer, well known in the army and in English Society, though not comparable with Lord Howe, was killed. An entry in Knox’s Historical Journal runs: ‘The Honourable Colonel Townshend was picked off to-day in the trenches by a cannon shot; he is very deservedly lamented by the General and the army’; a later entry mentions that his body was taken to Albany for burial. On the south side of the nave of Westminster Abbey, much farther up towards the Chancel than the place where the monument to Lord Howe stands, will be found a monument—

‘erected by a disconsolate parent, The Lady Viscountess
Townshend, to the memory of her fifth son, The Honble.
Lt.-Colonel Roger Townshend, who was killed by a cannon ball on
the 25th of July 1759 in the 28th year of his age, as he was
reconnoitring the French lines at Ticonderagoe in North America
... tho’ premature his death, his life was glorious, enrolling
him with the names of those immortal statesmen and commanders
whose wisdom and intrepidity in the cause of this comprehensive
and successful war have extended the commerce, enlarged the
Dominion, and upheld the Majesty of these Kingdoms beyond the
idea of any former age.’

The monument is an elaborate one, and the eulogy is obviously exaggerated. Horace Walpole would evidently have had it otherwise. In his ‘Short Notes of My Life’ he tells us, ‘I gave my Lady Townshend an epitaph and design for a tomb for her youngest son, killed at Ticonderoga; neither was used.’ He also gives us to understand that the mother was not so disconsolate as the monument asserts:

‘My Lady Townshend, who has not learning enough to copy a
Spartan mother, has lost her youngest son. I saw her this
morning—her affectation is on t’other side; she affects
grief—but not so much for the son she has lost, as for t’other
that she may lose.’

And again, ‘Poor Roger, for whom she is not concerned, has given her a hint that her hero George may be mortal too.’ Whatever may have been the mother’s preferences, the two brothers loved each other dearly. A few weeks before he was killed, Roger Townshend wrote to George Townshend’s wife to tell her of her husband’s safe arrival at Halifax from England in the best of health, and how he had sent him supplies of fresh vegetables to make up for the long sea-voyage. The letter continues:

‘My opinion of General Amherst as an honest good man, and my
attachment to him as a soldier I thought would never allow me
to wish that I might serve under any other person in America,
but the tie of brother and friend united is too powerful, and I
confess nothing ever gave me more real concern than not being
employed on the same expedition.’

In turn we have George Townshend writing sadly before the fall of Quebec of the news of his brother’s death; and after Quebec had fallen, on the eve of his return to England, he writes to Amherst:

‘I hear I have got Barrington’s regiment. Alas, what a Bouquet
this had been a year or two hence for poor Roger. I assure
you I return thoroughly wounded from America. I loved him
sincerely.’

George Townshend, the eldest son, whom Walpole clearly did not love, was Wolfe’s well-known brigadier, to whom Quebec capitulated, and around whom so much controversy gathered. He ended as a Marquess and a Field-Marshal, and there is no reason to doubt that he was a competent soldier. So also evidently was the younger brother. Amherst appointed him to be one of the two Deputy Adjutant-Generals of his army, his own brother, Colonel Amherst, being the other. We read of him in connection with the training of the Provincial regiments, and as commanding a detachment of Rangers sent to reconnoitre along Lake George. Amherst wrote to Wolfe that he had intended to send him home with dispatches after the fall of Ticonderoga, that his loss ‘marred the enjoyment I should otherwise have had in the reduction of the place.’ We may set him down as one of the might-have-beens, and Dean Stanley would presumably have classed him as the unsuccessful brother. If he had marked military ability, it has assuredly remained in the family; for those who read the epitaph upon his monument in Westminster Abbey, with its reference to a comprehensive war and upholding the majesty of these kingdoms, will carry their thoughts across the seas from North America to Mesopotamia, from Ticonderoga to Kut.[1]

FOOTNOTES

[1] All who are interested in the personalities of the Seven Years’ War, as far as North America was concerned, owe a deep debt of gratitude to Dr. Doughty, the Government Archivist of the Dominion of Canada, for the immense amount of material which he has collected and made accessible in ‘The Siege of Quebec’ (Doughty and Parmelee), and in his edition, for the Champlain Society, of Knox’s Historical Journal.

_THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES: THE FIRST CHRISTMAS._

BY BOYD CABLE.

The Divisional Ammunition and Supply Column had done a long march on the Christmas Eve. It was not so much that the distance was long in measured kilometres, but from a point of time, of dragging weariness, of bad roads, of cold and wet and discomfort it was prolonged to a heart-breaking length.

The column had taken the road at daybreak, and this meant that the men had to be on parade a full quarter-hour before, had to turn out of their uncomfortable billets and sleeping-places an hour and a half before the time to parade. In that time they had to pack their kits (a quick enough and simple job, to be sure), put on their wet boots, water and feed their horses, eat a biscuit-and-cheese breakfast, scramble for a ‘lick and a promise’ sort of wash, harness up their teams, pack picketing gear and odd stores on the wagons and sheet them over, have themselves and everything belonging to them packed and harnessed and standing ready to turn out promptly to the shout of ‘Hook in.’ They were all ready, and with a nicely-timed handful of seconds to spare, when the word came, because the practice that makes perfect had been their regular routine for a good many months past, and there had been plenty of times when they had been obliged to do the same routine in very much less than this present leisured hour and a half.

It was raining when the wagons turned out, formed up on the road, and, dropping into place unit by unit, rolled steadily off on the march. The rain was taken quite philosophically and as a matter of course, as indeed it had come to be by now and any time for a month past. There were a good many even by then who had wondered where all the rain could come from, and held a firm opinion that it must cease very soon, on the reasonable assumption that no rain supply is inexhaustible and that the past month must have ‘pretty well emptied the watering-pot.’ They were to learn for another solid three months almost without a break what the Flanders watering-pot can supply when it really sets about the job in earnest, and it was to come to be a standing joke and boast of the first Expeditionaries that you could always tell one of the men who went through that first winter in France because an examination of his toes would show him to be web-footed.

But at the end of December the wet had not been accepted as such a permanent feature of life as it was to become, and there were plenty of men in the column who, as they marched out that Christmas Eve, looked up at the sky and round the grey horizon and tried to find, or persuade themselves and each other they could see, a spot where it was ‘lifting.’ But it did not lift, and before long the men’s damp clothes, half dried by body heat in sleeping in them, had become soaked and saturated through again. It was cold too, and fingers gripped about the wet reins of their pairs of horses grew numbed and stiff, were periodically revived with much blowing of warm breath—the only item of warmth left about a man—into cupped hands, and arm beating and flapping. The roads were heavy, rutted and inches deep in stiff mud, flooded in parts by the overflow from brimming-over ditches.

The march was bad enough in its early stages; it became acute in its discomfort as the day wore on, and men and horses grew tired and more tired. By far the worst feature was the constant series of halts. The road taken by the column was filled for miles with a slow-crawling and packed procession of horses and wagons. The slightest check at the head of the procession meant a stop to all the rest, and because each wagon took a fraction of time longer than the one ahead to see its predecessor started and to get under way itself, what to a wagon in the front ranks was no more than a slowing to avoid running into the wagon ahead was easily translated a few teams back into a pull-up and immediate move on, and further back the line to a longer and longer interval of halt. So that in the middle and rear of the line there were frequent halts of a minute, two, three, and up to ten minutes. And if a wagon driving through an extra soft portion of road was caught and held beyond the immediate strength of the tired team to pull out, the halt might spin out into anything up to fifteen minutes. Several times during the day there were hour-long halts at cross- or fork-roads, while cross streams of traffic passed clear or entering streams were shuffled in. Towards mid-day exasperated officers strove to avail themselves of the frequent halts to water and feed. Buckets would be unhooked from their places under the wagons, and the drivers, leaning out and scooping the water up from the ditches, would perhaps get so far in the watering performance when there would be a hurried order to ‘Get mounted,’ the buckets would be emptied, the drivers hurriedly remount and move on again—to halt again perhaps within a hundred yards. No officer dare halt or hold his section of the column to complete his watering and feeding because the orders were imperative to press on and avoid halting the whole. A halt to feed was actually made about 2 P.M. when it was plain that there was no hope of getting the column in, as had been intended, by the early afternoon; but the halt was so short that there could be no attempt to cook food or make a hot drink for the men. They ate cold bully beef and biscuit while the horses fed, and finished their meal in the saddle when the horses moved again.

During the afternoon it grew steadily colder, and the rain drizzled on without ceasing. The road ran parallel now with the firing line, and as the darkness fell the horizon was lit continually with rising and falling belts of light from the trench flares, while the guns flashed quick leaping and vanishing gusts of vivid light, rolled and grumbled and roared incessantly. The rattle and splutter of rifle fire swelled to what one might have thought an alarming nearness when the road twisted in towards the firing line, or a falling away of the ground or change in the wind allowed the sound to carry better, dropped away again to no more than a distant crackle as a belt of wood shut it off or the road ran wide out from the battle line.

But of all these things the men on the road were heedless. They were concerned only with the slowness of the journey, the wish for it to end, the approach of dark long before it could be completed. The column carried no lights, and as the night shut down the road under the horses’ feet became almost invisible to the eyes of the drivers sitting on their horses or box seats. Each lead driver had to be content to follow close on the tracks of the wagon in front of him, to hold his tired horses up when they stumbled, to halt them quickly when the wagon ahead halted, to move them on again instantly on the other vehicle starting. Every man kept his eyes carefully away from the dancing lights on the horizon, because watching them for a few seconds meant a temporary total blindness and the vanishing of the road beneath them when they came to look down, and this driving in the dark was quite bad enough without that.

The inevitable happened at last. A team driven too close to the road-side brought its wagon wheels within a foot of the ditch, just at a part, unfortunately, where the road-edge sloped sharply to the steep side of the ditch. The ‘long-rein driver’ perched on the box called a sharp word of warning and swung his wheelers to the left, felt the wagon beneath him skid sideways, lurch suddenly, sink sharply ‘by the stern’ and halt abruptly. The driver of the next team saw what had happened, shouted to the other drivers behind him, wrenched his horses’ heads clear of the bogged wagon and tried to pull up. But the horses, jerked from their sleepy plodding, swerved, plunged, slithered wildly on the wet road; the wagon wheels, gripped fast by the sharp thrust of the brake, failed to bite on the slippery surface, skidded forward, butted the wheelers heavily, slewed, slithered again and brought up with a splintering jar and a rear wheel fast locked in the wheel of the bogged wagon. The near wheeler of the second team, floundering and splashing and scrambling wildly for foothold, caught the bump of the wagon, fell, and slid wholesale into the ditch. The road was completely and effectually blocked.

Now the ditches in this part of Flanders are anything from about three to six feet deep, and their sides are cut down as straight and smooth as a wall; in winter they are full to the brim with ice-cold water, and their bottom is an unplumbed depth of mud of the consistency of molasses and the tenacity of fish glue. From all of which you will understand and appreciate the difficulty of rescuing the trapped wagon and horse, although you will never, unless you have experienced it, understand the wetness, the cold, the exasperating stupidity of the horse, the monumental bulk and weight and the passive resistance of a wet and mud-plastered wagon, the bitter unpleasantness of the whole job.

Actually, although this may appear surprising, the salving of the horse was a greater difficulty than the restoration of the wagon to the road. The wagon had to be unloaded, it is true, but after that a plank pushed sloping down under the wheel, a swarm of men clustering and clutching on the wheels and tailing on a couple of drag-ropes, brought the concern out with a rush. Then the team was hooked in again and the wagon rolled off, and with a chorus of cries, of scuffling hoofs, of grinding wheels, the column halted behind the stalled wagons came to life and rumbled on their way. The horse made a longer and more temper-raising job. Driver Jim Ruff, of the A.S.C., had always had an inordinate pride in his wheelers, a liking for them that in connection with a human would have been called love, a belief in their intelligence that was beyond doubt. But that night his pride had a muddy fall, his love a cooling off into annoyance, his belief a staggering blow. ‘Golly,’ the ditched near-wheeler, displayed a stupidity that, as Driver Ruff assured her, would have disgraced ‘a mongrel mule,’ an indifference to helping herself, and a calm resignation and acceptance of her fate that respectively, and again in the words of Driver Ruff, ‘was more like a oyster than a ’orse’ and ‘might do for a bloomin’ padre, but wasn’t no use in the A.S.C.’ Driver Ruff, at the first crash of catastrophe, had flung down off his perch and was round at his wheelers’ heads in a flash, unhooking ‘Wog,’ lying quietly on his side in the road and waiting for assistance and instructions, and adjuring the struggling ‘Golly’ to keep quiet an’ not make a fool of herself. ‘Golly’ took the advice so completely that, having quietened, she refused—although the mud clamped about her legs may have had something to do with it—to move a limb thereafter. At first Ruff and the other drivers called to assist tried to persuade her to get her fore-feet on the bank, then by passing a drag-rope round her fore-legs tried to pull them from under her and up on to firm ground. The only result was to upset her balance and set her slowly sinking sideways until her body was completely covered and only her neck and head were above water. It began to look as if the horse must drown in a four- or five-foot ditch.

Meantime the wagon was man-handled along and into the side of the road and the stream of vehicles resumed their interrupted march, rumbling past a busy rescue party grouped at the ditch-side, working in the light of a couple of lanterns with picks and spades and drag-ropes, to extricate the sunken ‘Golly.’ At last a shelving cut was made in the bank of the ditch, and Driver Ruff, already three parts soaked with splashings and fumblings to fix a rope correctly about his horse, completed the job and the soaking by plunging boldly into the ditch and passing a couple of ropes under the mare’s body. A string of men tailed on to the ropes, and at the word from an A.S.C. officer who had taken charge of the proceedings threw their weight into a regular tug-of-war heave, and hauled the animal out bodily on to the shelving bank, up it, and on to the road.

It was after ten o’clock before the wheelers were hooked in and the wagon swung into the traffic procession, with Driver Ruff soaked and shivering on the box. In ten minutes he had to pull up again for another block somewhere in the darkness ahead. He climbed down and stamped to and fro for full thirty minutes. Then he went and rummaged out a couple of box-lids he had been saving in his wagon for firewood, and, always keeping a wary ear turned to the road for the sound of callings and crunching wheels that would tell him the transport was on the move again, jumped the ditch, hunted in the darkness of a patch of wood, and managed to collect a small armful of twigs and branches. He split his dry wood, built it up and lit it, his fingers so numbed and shaking that he could scarcely fumble out a match. Under the shelter of his cap—it was still drizzling fine rain—he managed to get a brisk flame going, and when he had it burning strong and bright piled his twigs and branches on it. The wood hissed and sputtered, but caught at last, and tongues of flame began to crackle up, throwing a cheerful radiance on the wet faces and forms of the men who quickly crowded round and a most grateful glow of life-giving warmth on Driver Ruff, crouched with chattering teeth and blue lips close over the blaze. But before the fire had even completely caught there came a distant shout, repeated along and down the line, ‘Get mounted—get mounted,’ and the sound, far off at first but rapidly coming nearer and nearer, of tramping hoof-beats, scrunching wheels, and the rumble of moving wagons. The men about the fire scattered and ran to their horses, and Ruff had no choice but to leave his precious fire and run with them. The procession started, wagon after wagon—and within two hundred yards halted again. The disgusted Ruff had the mortification of seeing his fire blazing up strongly and cheerfully and immediately surrounded by a fresh crowd of the nearest men. It was too far to go back, since the move might come again any minute, and anyhow Ruff guessed the difficulty he would have in forcing a way to the front of the dense ring about his own fire. He tried to wrap his wet coat closer about him, and sat huddled and shivering on his seat for another half-hour before the way was clear and the wagons crawled on again.

It was nearly midnight when he dragged wearily into camp. He took his horses’ bits out, slacked their girths, gave them generous feeds, and when their nosebags were empty hung a net full of hay to the point of the wagon-pole, and then went to the cook-house, where he was given a mess-tin of soup and meat and a mug of hot tea. These things finished to the last bite and drop, he, by special and gracious favour of the cook, took off his soaking boots and hung his wet jacket before the embers of the fire, sat himself beside it, and dropped instantly into deep sleep. This, be it noted, was the only sleep he had been able to have for some thirty-six hours. The night before the column marched he had been out with his wagon drawing rations from ‘Refilling Point,’ had been from 6 P.M. on the road, waiting his turn for loading, moving up a wagon’s length at a time to the loading-place, where, under the light of a couple of lanterns, men were hacking up cheeses, dismembering sides of bacon, trundling out boxes of bully and biscuits and tins of tea and sugar. Driver Ruff had pulled out as soon as his wagon was loaded, waited for the others to complete their loading, moved on to rejoin his unit with them. Delays and checks on a road already, even at that early hour, astir with traffic, had prevented their reaching the camping-ground until about a couple of hours before the hour fixed to turn out on the march, and that brief time had been fully occupied by Ruff, first in watering and feeding and rubbing down his horses, and then in getting his own breakfast, packing his kit for the road, and harnessing up again.

Now, as may be imagined, he slept heavily, sitting huddled over the half-dead fire, on this his second night out of bed, after a day of wearying and strenuous work—and in case that be not properly understood it may be remarked that sitting on the hard wooden seat of a jolting wagon, bumping and jarring over a rough road, holding a pair of ‘heavy draught’ horses and steering them with a constantly needed care, hauling them up every few minutes, all these things are actually tiring hard physical work.

But he only slept for half an hour. At the end of that time he was shaken roughly awake and told to get a move on, and to fall in outside the lines before hooking in his horses. He rose stiffly, sore in every joint and aching in every limb as if he had been beaten and bruised with a club. The fire was dead and he was chilled to the marrow with the cold that had struck in from his wet clothes, with the more miserable cold that comes out of late and insufficient sleep. He shook like a man in the ague, and his teeth chattered as he thrust his arms into the clammy dampness and coldness of his jacket’s clinging sleeves. Putting on his boots was sheer torture. They were icy cold, and the wet leather was stiff and hard as a board. Altogether he was just about as miserable, cold, and uncomfortable as a man can be, as he hobbled stiffly from the cook-house into the bitter rawness of the winter morning. As he went out one of the cooks came in and commenced to make up the fire, and it suddenly struck Driver Ruff what a magnificent and enviable job a cook had, always messing about with a warm fire and hot water and other of the pleasantest things in life. The cook, roused from a warm straw bed in the cold of one o’clock to light a fire with damp wood, probably held a different opinion of the pleasures of his office. Ruff had three minutes with his horses before the ‘Fall in’ was called. They whickered and nuzzled at him, each jealously pushing the other’s head aside as he spoke to them and rubbed their noses and pulled their ears. ‘After all, Golly,’ he said, ‘a cook don’t have horses; eh, Wog?’ and at that thought the cook’s job lost its savour and a gleam of content warmed the driver’s soul.

A figure suddenly appeared in the shape of lamp-illumined breeches and boots and a blot of shadow above them, and his sergeant spoke briskly: ‘Hullo, Ruff. Merry Christmas.’

‘Lumme!’ said Driver Ruff. ‘If I hadn’t clean forgot—same to you, sergeant.’

‘An’ may we see the next at ’ome,’ said the sergeant. ‘Now what about this pair o’ yours? Had a stiffish day yesterday, didn’t they?’

Ruff told him briefly but pungently the sort of day they had had and the work they had done. He was so eloquent on their behalf—quite omitting any mention of his own sorrows—that the sergeant promised to manage it somehow that they’d get a light wagon-load that day and the other wagons share the balance.

Driver Ruff began to feel the world not so bad a place after all, and even the briefly outlined programme of the day’s work to begin at once and keep on till evening did not cast him down. ‘They’ll do it easy with a light load,’ he said cheerfully.

The ‘Fall in’ was called, and wondering rather at this unusual item of the morning’s work, the men fell in at the end of the horse lines, standing in an ankle-deep porridge of mud.

Their officer addressed them shortly, an N.C.O. beside him with a lantern, and another with a handful of envelopes and a bundle of cardboard boxes. The wagons, said the officer, would go to Refilling Point, load, march together from there and rejoin the Division at their new camp, separate there, and each take their rations to their own units. And because he might not see them together again that day he had paraded them then to wish them a happy Christmas and good luck, and to give them a little present that had been sent out to every man in the Expeditionary Force.

One by one the men received a photograph of the King and Queen with a message written on the back, and a brass tobacco-box containing tobacco and cigarettes and the Christmas wishes of Princess Mary.

‘Bloomin’ ’andsome,’ said one driver admiringly. ‘I’m goin’ to send mine ’ome to be kep’ for me. There’ll be bags o’ new troops out ’ere in the spring, but we’ll allus ’ave these to show we was out wi’ the first crush.’

‘My dad’s got ’is Queen’s chocolate box yet that she gave the first lot out in S’th Africa,’ said Driver Ruff. ‘I’ll be upsides with ’im now.’

‘I been thinkin’ this week past,’ said a third, ‘that I never knew anythin’ less like Christmas comin’. It seems more like it now somehow.’

And so ‘somehow’ it did. One might hardly expect a handful of men, turned out in the raw cold small hours of a winter morning, standing in mud over their boots, with a long weary day’s work and a bare half night’s uncomfortable sleep behind them, and another wet and weary day ahead, to rise with any enthusiasm to a call for ‘three cheers for the King and Queen.’ But they did it, the ‘H’ray’ leaping eagerly and cheerfully close on the last sound of the word, of the officer’s ‘Hip-hip-hip⸺.’

And Driver Ruff’s was the first and loudest and gayest voice of the lot.

INTO GERMANY ON THE EVE OF WAR.

BY W. E. DE B. WHITTAKER.

Early in 1914 there had been various schemes in being with the object of crossing the Atlantic by aeroplane under the terms of a prize offered by a London print. Two alone of these were in any way practicable, one by an English retired naval officer on an aeroplane provided at the expense of an American millionaire, and the other by the late Mr. Gustav Hamel, who was to have flown from Newfoundland on an English aeroplane, and who would have been financed by English money. Mr. Hamel was drowned in the English Channel on May 23, when the arrangements for the great flight were in a very advanced stage. A few weeks later Mr. H. S. Keating came forward and made private arrangements to take over part of the organisation which had been brought together earlier in the year. He intended himself to make the proposed attempt to fly from Newfoundland to Ireland at his own expense. This personal assumption of the burden of the entire cost made the attempt one of pure sport without any hope of gain, as the expenditure must of necessity very greatly exceed the amount of the prize offered.

Harry Sheehy Keating, an Irishman by birth, a one-time subaltern in the Grenadier Guards, had spent a year or two in the United States and in Mexico, during which period he had become an aviator. Of an adventurous disposition, he welcomed any form of sport or daring that would relieve the monotony of existence—before the war.

The selection of an aeroplane on which to make the Atlantic flight was a matter of no little difficulty. We heard that on July 10 Herr Boehm had flown at Johannisthal on an Albatross biplane for twenty-four hours twelve minutes without once alighting. We decided therefore that we would go to Berlin and see what the Albatross Company could do for us.

As we had neither of us travelled in Holland or Germany we determined to motor from the Hook of Holland to Berlin and back. The threat of war which by now filled all the London news sheets we did not believe. ‘Wolf’ had been cried so often. The Sarajevo murder and its immediate results would drift into history in company with Fashoda and Agadir and no blood at all would be spilt.

An accident detained us on the way to Harwich, so that we missed Saturday and Sunday’s boats, and only landed at the Hook in the very early morning of Tuesday, July 27, and at once entered into a fog of mystery which did not lift entirely until we reached the Hague on our return journey on August 5. We neither of us knew a word of the language of either country which we were to visit, and the daily papers contained what were to us merely cabalistic symbols.

We crossed the German frontier a mile or two beyond Oldenzaal and by dinner time we had reached Rheine. Here the weather changed. The sun disappeared and a depressing soft rain began to fall. We dined uncomfortably and wondered a little irritably why the German people should be so excited. We knew no reason.

Anxious to reach Berlin with as little delay as possible we left Rheine after dinner and drove through the darkness and pouring rain and appalling roads towards Osnabruck. We had no windscreen and the hood therefore became valueless. Keating with characteristic determination drove while I crouched in the bottom of the car. Both of us were drenched by the time we reached the Kaiserhof Hotel at Osnabruck and the car was in a pitiful state. We felt that Germany was giving us no adequate welcome. Our host, a man of charming manners, told us that the mobilisation orders were about to be issued, and that shortly the deceitful Russian would be taught a lesson of value. We were asked, a little eagerly, if England would assist, and those who listened were obviously disappointed when we said we thought she would not interfere.

In the morning, as it still rained, we bought a large sheet of celluloid as a substitute for the long-broken windscreen. At a later date we bitterly regretted ever having seen or heard of this celluloid. As the rain still fell we did not leave until the late afternoon, and therefore did not get further than Minden when night fell. Both of us were angry, chiefly owing to Keating’s total inability to read a route in a Continental Guide, which was, in any case, quite inaccurate. Here at Minden, where our ancestors had fought as allies with the Germans in the year of victory, 1759, there were unmistakable signs of approaching war. The hotel (Stadt London) was packed with officers and their families eating a fond farewell lest on the morrow the worst might come. Dinner passed to the clicking of heels and an orgy of ceremonial salutes by officers who were about to bid good-bye to ‘review-order’ for years to come.

In the streets the tramp of the troops, the clatter of horses’ hoofs, and the rumble of iron-shod wheels continued throughout the night. While here we learnt that Austria had on the day before declared war on Serbia, and that soon the Emperor’s eagles would end all Balkan troubles for all time.

On Thursday the weather cleared and the sun shone. We passed through Hanover, where we bought tiny silk flags of the German States with some faint idea of showing the people that we did not really dislike them. In Brunswick we ate sandwiches and drank very dark beer from huge china mugs while we sat in an old oak-panelled hall with a high roof also of oak.