Chapter FIVE: Terra Incognita

We have not yet reached France, but we have discovered England. It is a small island, and the visitor must be prepared for a primitive civilization—for instance, _The Saturday Evening Post_ costs at least fifteen cents—but it offers a fruitful and interesting field for exploration.

Our debarkation was not attended by any marked popular demonstration. Some of us were inclined to resent the omission as savouring of insular aloofness. But now we know the real reason. _We are not supposed to be here._ We are a dead secret. The port in which we disembarked has no name. Its inhabitants are plunged into an official trance. Therefore it would hardly be reasonable to expect the insensible population of an anonymous city to proffer a civic welcome to American soldiers who are officially invisible anyway.

However, by a fortunate accident at the moment of our arrival, a band of musicians happened to be discoursing melody on the wharf, including such airs as “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Dixie.” Moreover, a group of British Staff Officers groped their way on board our imperceptible vessel and greeted us cordially. They furthermore presented to every man of us copies of a letter written by King George with his own hand, bidding us welcome to his realm and expressing a wish that it were possible for him to shake hands with each one of us in person. Scores of copies of that letter are now already on their way home to America—the first souvenir of the War.

Thereafter we were packed into a child’s train, drawn by a toy engine, and conveyed at a surprising pace through a country of green fields, cut up into checker-board squares by hedges and narrow lanes, populated mainly by contemplative cows and dotted with red-roofed farms and villages.

Occasionally we passed a camp. The tents were toylike and tidy, like the country. They fitted the landscape, just as a great four-square American Army tent, with its wooden walls and dust-coloured canvas top, fits in with a Texan horizon. In these camps were men in khaki—some drilling, some performing ablutions in buckets, some kicking a football. Mr. Joe McCarthy’s passion for being waved at was at length gratified.

Occasionally we stopped at the station of some town. These were always crowded, as were the trains. The strange little compartments in which the English confine themselves when travelling were packed with humanity—some of it standing up and clinging to the luggage-rack—all of it encumbered with much personal property in the shape of bundles and babies. Evidently the War has cut down transportation. At either end of these trains a seething mob contended, with surprising good temper, around a mountain of heavy baggage piled upon the platform beside the express-van.

“Ain’t they got no Red Caps in this country?” enquired Mr. McCarthy in disparaging tones.

“Their Red Caps are all wearing tin helmets over in France,” replied the well-informed Al Thompson. “Everybody here up to fifty is drafted. Folks have to tote their own grips. I notice quite a few women porters around. I guess their husbands are in France, and these are holding down their jobs for them.”

In which Al spoke no more than the truth.

Meanwhile, in another part of the train, our friend Jim Nichols, Major Powers, and one Bond, a stout, comfortable representative of the Medical Service, together with Boone Cruttenden—the latter somewhat _distrait_, for Miss Frances Lane had been swept away with the other ninety-and-nine, by a different train, to be no more seen—were sharing a compartment with Captain Norton and a British Staff Officer—a youthful Major. The Major’s name was Floyd; he had materialized during the chaos of debarkation. Norton had introduced him to the American officers; stately salutes had been exchanged; gentlemen had stated in a constrained manner that they were pleased to know one another; the whole party had crowded into one compartment, and the train had started.

For nearly an hour almost total silence reigned. Americans are sensitive folk, and Floyd’s melancholy visage and paralyzing monocle fulfilled our friends’ most pessimistic anticipations of the British Staff Officer. After a few laboured commonplaces the conversation lapsed altogether, and the Americans devoted their attention to the flying landscape.

Norton, a little uncomfortable, glanced occasionally in the direction of his brother officer. Major Floyd sat bolt upright in his seat, his gaze focussed upon infinity. Norton, who was a man of warm heart and quick temper, was conscious of a vague feeling of resentment.

“I wonder,” he mused, “why an image like this should have been sent as conducting officer. No wonder Americans think us unsociable and rude. And people over there were so good to us—”

At this moment Floyd removed his monocle and addressed his right-hand neighbour—Boone Cruttenden.

“And now, Lieutenant, what are your impressions of our country?”

Boone Cruttenden smiled. “You have not given me much time to formulate any, Major,” he said, glancing at his wrist-watch. “Just an hour!”

“That is fifty-nine minutes longer than the _World_ reporter gave me when I landed at West Twenty-Third Street ten years ago,” replied Floyd.

“You know America?” Four homesick Americans spoke simultaneously.

Floyd’s eyes twinkled.

“Some of it,” he said. “I was with the General Electric Company at Schenectady for three years. After that I worked on various electrical-engineering jobs for about four years; I got as far west as Cincinnati. I’m not a professional warrior, like Norton there.”

“Still, you have seen service in this War?” said Major Powers.

“Oh, yes, I managed to get home from America just in time for the start of things.”

“Have you served in France, or on one of your other fronts?” asked Cruttenden. “The British Army has such a large selection.”

“France all the time—_and_ Belgium. Most of us have taken a course of the Ypres Salient.”

“I guess those ribbons the Major is wearing would give us details, if we could read them,” observed Jim Nichols. “What do they stand for, Major?”

Floyd laughed.

“As a traditional Englishman,” he said, “I suppose I ought to hang my head confusedly and decline to answer. But I have spent ten years outside my own country, so I will tell you. This little fellow with the rainbow effect you probably know: Norton has it too. It means that we were both in Flanders in Nineteen Fourteen. The khaki, red, and blue is the Queen’s Medal for the South African War. By the way, Major Powers, I notice that you have the Spanish War ribbon. What is your other one—the yellow and blue?”

“That relates to our Mexican Border troubles,” replied Powers. “More discomfort than danger getting that. What is that third ribbon of yours—the red with the blue edges?”

“That? Oh, that is the D.S.O.”

“What does that stand for?” asked Boone.

“Well, before the War it was popularly supposed to stand for ‘Dam Silly Officer!’ Since then, however, the military profession has risen in the eyes of the world; so it now means ‘Done Something or Other’!”

“And what did you get it for?” pursued the insatiable Boone.

Floyd laughed.

“Counting jam-tins at the Base!” he said.

“I suppose it was while counting jam-tins you lost your arm,” suggested the quiet voice of Major Bond.

Floyd laughed again.

“You are too sharp for me, Doctor,” he said. “I plead guilty. My left arm is an understudy. The original is astray somewhere around Beaumont Hamel. I have had to stay at home since then. But now I want to get back to my first question, Lieutenant. What are your impressions of this country—your first impressions? I really do want to know. I have been aching to ask you for the last hour, but I felt that I had to play up a little first. Monocle—vacant stare, and all that! The traditional Englishman, in fact. I felt you were entitled to meet one,” continued this eccentric man; “and I took especial pains to give you a good impersonation, because you may experience some difficulty in finding another. The fact is, the traditional Englishman is getting rare. We have all been shaken out of ourselves these days. After the War he may come back—perhaps. Perhaps not.” He sighed gently. “But at present I am here to supply you with information about the customs and institutions of this country. I am detailed for the job. I am paid for it. Please ask me questions, somebody?”

No one could resist this solemn appeal. First one query was proffered, then another. Presently the American passion for getting to the root of the matter was in full play.

“Why did the English travel in closed boxes? Why were the locomotives so small, and why did they burn soft coal? Why were there so many overhead bridges when a grade-crossing would suffice? What would be the wages of that old man working in that field? What was that bright yellow crop growing in that section? Why did vehicles in a street keep to the left? Was there any organized system of irrigation, that the country was all so green? Was there game in those woods, and who had the right to hunt it?”

Norton, a professional soldier from his school days, knew nothing of many of these things. He was also a typical Englishman, and had been brought up to accept matters as he found them. But he was the son of an English country squire, and he was able to name the various crops—meadow-grass, hay-grass, wheat, oats, barley, potatoes, beans—whose variegated colours impart to an English landscape its curious crazy-quilt effect. He was well-versed, too, in agricultural economics and the hoary traditions of the feudal system, and discussed voluminously, as an Englishman will when started upon his own subject, upon farm-labourers’ wages, the rotation of crops, and the Ground Game Act.

Floyd, who agreed with Dr. Samuel Johnson in regarding one green field as very like another green field, recked nothing of these things. But he was a mine of information on railroad management. To a deeply interested audience he traced the origin of the standard railway gauge of the world back to an obscure English colliery road of George Stephenson’s days: he ascribed the multitude of overhead bridges and tightly locked level crossings to the benevolent fussiness of the Board of Trade. He even knew—to the frank amazement of Captain Norton—the maximum height from rail-level to which a British locomotive, by reason of the aforesaid bridges, can aspire—thus accounting for the stunted appearance of the same by comparison with its American brother, which in an atmosphere of greater freedom is permitted to soar some nine feet higher. Greatly daring, he even justified the British custom of keeping to the left, on the ground that it dated back to the days when men rode on horseback, and riders and postilions, to mount or dismount, must perforce draw in to the near side of the road.

An American is forever battling between two instincts—native appreciation of what is modern and efficient, and inherited veneration for what is ancient and inconvenient. Common sense usually compels him to favour the former; but he is never so happy as when he can conserve or justify the latter.

Major Floyd gratified this instinct. He carried his hearers back to the days of stage-coaches. He told of the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway; of Brunel and the Broad Gauge; of the railway races in the nineties, when the Scottish Express ran four hundred miles in seven hours. Altogether, in his able hands, “Romance brought up the Nine Fifteen.”

The locomotive gave a shriek, and the train began to slow down. Major Powers turned from the contemplation of a tiny English town nestling in a shallow valley a mile away. With its red roofs and square church tower set against a background of living green, it looked the embodiment of uneventful drowsiness. Certainly a little imagination was required to realize that under nearly every one of these same roofs there stood at least one empty chair—a chair that might or might not be occupied again—and that beneath that ancient tower for four long years, week by week, in good times and in bad, women, children, and old men had congregated to pray that those whose names were inscribed upon the illuminated scroll in the church porch—squire’s son, parson’s son, farmer’s son, poacher’s son—might in God’s good time come home again, having achieved the purpose for which they had set out.

Powers possessed the requisite imagination. He had been reared in Kentucky—that land of fair women and noble horses. This toy town, which could have been transported bodily into his native State without materially affecting either the landscape or the census, appealed to him, as small children appeal to large people.

He turned to Norton, and said simply:

“Captain, I have never been outside of America before. I have been looking over this little island of yours, and I want to tell you, right now, that I think it is worth fighting for!”

“Thanks awfully,” said Norton gravely, and offered an unexpected hand.