After all Madame had reason on her side. Water is bad for polished floors, and it is very doubtful whether the human skin is any the better for it. Most of our rules of hygiene are foolish. We think a daily bath is wholesome. We clamour for fresh air. We fuss about drains. Madame never opened a window and had a horror of a courant d'air. The only drain connected with the house ran into the well from which our drinking water came. Yet Madame had celebrated her golden wedding and was never ill. Monsieur and Marie were even older and could still thoroughly enjoy a jour de fete.

Madame had a high sense of duty towards her guests. She and Marie cooked wonderful meals for us and even made pathetic efforts to produce le pudding, a thing strange to them which they were convinced we loved. She mended our clothes and sewed on buttons. She pressed us, anxiously, to remain tranquille for a proper period after meals.

She did her best to teach us French. She tried to induce me—she actually had induced one of my predecessors—to write French exercises in the evenings. She made a stringent rule that no word of English was ever to be spoken at meals. I think that this was a real self-denial to Madame. She knew a little English—picked up sixty years before when she spent one term in a school near Folkestone. She liked to air it; but for the sake of our education she denied herself. We used to sit at dinner with a dictionary—English-French and French-English—on the table. We referred to it when stuck, and on the whole we got on well in every respect except one.

Madame had an eager desire to understand and appreciate English jokes, and of all things a joke is the most difficult to translate. A fellow-lodger once incautiously repeated to me a joke which he had read in a paper. It ran thus: "First British Soldier (in a French Restaurant): 'Waiter, this 'am's 'igh. 'Igh 'am. Compris?' Second British Soldier: 'You leave it to me, Bill. I know the lingo. Garcon, Je suis.'"

I laughed. Madame looked at me and at W., my fellow-lodger, and demanded a translation of the joke. I referred the matter to W. His French was, if possible, worse than mine, but it was he who had started the subject. "Ham," I said to him, "is jambon. Go ahead." W. went ahead, but "high" in the sense he wanted did not seem to be in the dictionary. I had a try when W. gave up and began with an explanation of the cockney's difficulty with the letter "h." Madame smiled uncomprehendingly. W., who had studied the dictionary while I talked, made a fresh start at "je suis." "Je suis—I am. Jambon—ham, c'est a dire ''am' a Londres.'" We worked away all through that meal. At supper, Madame, still full of curiosity, set us at it again.

We pursued that joke for several days until we were all exhausted, and Madame, politely, said she saw the point, though she did not and never will. I do not believe that joke can be translated into French. Months afterwards I had as fellow-lodger a man who spoke French well and fluently. I urged him to try if he could make Madame understand. He failed.

Madame was most hospitable. She was neither worried nor cross when we asked friends to dine with us. Indeed she was pleased. But she liked due notice so that she could devote proper attention to la cuisine.

M., who was at that time with a cavalry brigade, used to come and spend a night or two with me sometimes. He was a special favourite with Madame and she used to try to load him with food when he was leaving. One very wet day in late autumn, Madame produced a large brown-paper bag and filled it with pears. She presented it to M. with a pretty speech of which he did not understand a word. M. was seriously embarrassed. He liked Madame and did not want to hurt her feelings; but he had before him a railway journey of some hours and then five miles on horseback. It is impossible to carry a brown-paper bag full of pears on a horse through a downpour of rain. The bag gets sopped at once and the pears fall through it. M. pushed the bag back to Madame.

"Merci, merci," he said. "Mais non, pas possible."

Madame explained that the pears were deliciously ripe, which was true.

M. said, "A cheval, Madame, je voyage a cheval."

Madame pushed the bag into his hands. He turned to me.

"For goodness' sake explain to her—politely, of course—that I can't take that bag of pears. I'd like to. They'd be a godsend to the mess. But I can't."

Madame saw the impossibility in the end; but she stuffed as many pears as she could into his pocket, and he went off bulging unbecomingly.

M. used to complain that he ate too much when he came to stay with me. I confess that our midday meal—we ate it at noon, conforming to the custom of the house—was heavy. And Madame was old-fashioned in her idea of the behaviour proper to a hostess. She insisted on our eating whether we wanted to eat or not, and was vexed if we refused second and even third helpings.

Madame was immensely interested in food and we talked about marketing and cookery every day. I came, towards the end of my stay, to have a fair knowledge of kitchen French. I could have attended cookery lectures with profit. I could even have taught a French servant how to stew a rabbit in such a way that it appeared at table brown, with thick brown sauce and a flavour of red wine. The marketing for the family was done by Madame and Marie, Marie in a high, stiff, white head-dress, carrying a large basket.

On the subject of prices Madame was intensely curious. She wanted to know exactly what everything cost in England and Ireland. I used to write home for information, and then we did long and confusing sums, translating stones or pounds into kilos and shillings into francs; Monsieur intervening occasionally with information about the rate of exchange at the moment. Madame insisted on taking this into account in comparing the cost of living in the two countries. Then we used to be faced with problems which I regard as insoluble.

Perhaps a sum of this kind might be set in an arithmetic paper for advanced students. "Butter is 2s. 1d. a pound. A kilo is rather more than two pounds. The rate of exchange is 27.85. What would that butter cost in France?"

We had an exciting time when the municipal authorities of the town in which we lived introduced fixed prices. Madame, who is an entirely sensible woman, was frankly sceptical from the start about the possibility of regulating prices. Gendarmes paraded the market-place, where on certain days the countrywomen sat in rows, their vegetables, fowl, eggs, and butter exposed for sale. They declined, of course, to accept the fixed prices. Madame and her friends, though they hated being overcharged, recognised the strength of the countrywomen's position. There was a combination between the buyers and sellers.

The gendarmes were out-witted in various ways. One plan—Madame explained it to me with delight—was to drop a coin, as if by accident, into the lap of the countrywoman who was selling butter. Ten minutes later the purchaser returned and bought the butter under the eyes of a satisfied policeman at the fixed price. The original coin represented the difference between what the butter woman was willing to accept and what the authorities thought she ought to get. That experiment in municipal control of prices lasted about a month. Then the absurdity of the thing became too obvious. The French are much saner than the English in this. They do not go on pretending to do things once it becomes quite plain that the things cannot be done.

Food shortage—much more serious now—was beginning to be felt while I lived with Madame. There were difficulties about sugar, and Monsieur had to give up a favourite kind of white wine. But neither he nor Madame complained much; though they belonged to the rentier class and were liable to suffer more than those whose incomes were capable of expansion. No one, so far as I know, appealed to them to practise economy in a spirit of lofty patriotism. They simply did with a little less of everything with a shrug of the shoulders and a smiling reference to the good times coming apres la guerre. And, on occasion, economy was forgotten and we feasted.

One of the last days I spent in Madame's house was New Year's Day, 1917. I and my fellow-lodger, another padre, were solemnly invited to a dinner that night. It was a family affair. All Madame's nieces, married and single, were there, and their small children, two grand-nieces and a grand-nephew. Madame's one nephew, wounded in the defence of Verdun, was there.

Our usual table was greatly enlarged. The folding doors between the drawing-room and dining-room were flung open. We had a blaze of lamps and candles. We began eating at 6.30 p.m.; we stopped shortly after 10 p.m. But this was no brutal gorge. We ate slowly, with discrimination. We paused long between the courses. Once or twice we smoked. Once the grand-niece and grand-nephew recited for us, standing up, turn about, on their chairs, and declaiming with fluency and much gesture what were plainly school-learnt poems. One of Madame's nieces, passing into the drawing-room, played us a pleasant tune on the piano. At each break I thought that dinner was over. I was wrong time after time. We talked, smoked, listened, applauded, and then more food was set before us.

There were customs new to me. At the appearance of the plum pudding—a very English pudding—we all rose from our seats and walked in solemn procession round the table. Each of us, as we passed the sacred dish, basted it with a spoonful of blazing rum, and, as we basted, made our silent wish. We formed pigs out of orange skins and gave them lighted matches for tails. By means of these we discovered which of us would be married or achieve other good fortune in the year to come. We drank five different kinds of wine, a sweet champagne coming by itself, a kind of dessert wine, at the very end of dinner, accompanied by small sponge cakes.

The last thing of all was, oddly enough, tea. Like most French tea it was tasteless, but we remedied that with large quantities of sugar and we ate with it a very rich cake soaked in syrup, which would have deprived the fiercest Indian tea of any flavour.

I think Madame was supremely happy all the evening. I think every one else was happy too. I have never met more courteous people. In the midst of the most hilarious talk and laughter a niece would stop laughing suddenly and repeat very slowly for my benefit what the fun was about. Even when the soldier nephew told stories which in England would not have been told so publicly, a niece would take care that I did not miss the point.

Madame's drawing-room was very wonderful. At one time she had known a painter, a professor of painting in a school near her home. He adorned the walls of her drawing-room with five large oil-paintings, done on the plaster of the wall and reaching from the ceiling to very near the floor. Four of them represented the seasons of the year, and that artist was plainly a man who might have made a good income drawing pictures for the lids of chocolate boxes. His fur-clad lady skating (Winter) would have delighted any confectioner. The fifth picture was a farmyard scene in which a small girl appeared, feeding ducks. This was the most precious of all the pictures. The little girl was Madame's niece, since married and the mother of a little girl of her own.

The furniture was kept shrouded in holland and the jalousies were always shut except when Madame exhibited the room. I saw the furniture uncovered twice, and only twice. It was uncovered on the occasion of the New Year's feast, and Madame displayed her room in all its glory on the afternoon when I invited to tea a lady who was going to sing for the men in one of my camps.

I think that all Madame's lodgers loved her, though I doubt if any of them loved her as dearly as I did. Letters used to arrive for her from different parts of the war area conveying news of the officers who had lodged with her. She always brought them to me to translate. I fear she was not much wiser afterwards. She never answered any of them. Nor has she ever answered me, though I should greatly like to hear how she, Monsieur, Marie, Fifi, and Turque are getting on. Turque was a large dog, the only member of the household who was not extremely old.



CHAPTER XIII

"THE CON. CAMP"

We always spoke of it, affectionately and proudly, as "the Con. Camp." The abbreviation was natural enough, for "convalescent" is a mouthful of a word to say, besides being very difficult to spell. I have known a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England come to grief over the consonants of the last two syllables in addressing an envelope to me; and there was a story of a very august visitor, asked to write in an album, who inquired about a vowel and was given the wrong one by one of the staff. If those doubtful spellers had known our pleasant abbreviation they would have escaped disaster.

To us the "Con." justified itself from every point of view. I am not sure that we had an equal right to the conceited use of the definite article. There are other "Con." camps in France, many of them. We spoke of them by their numbers. Ours had a number too, but we rarely used it. We were The Con. Camp. Our opinion was no doubt prejudiced; but the authorities seemed to share it. The Con. Camp was one of the show places of the British Army. Distinguished visitors were always brought there.

The Government, the War Office, or whoever it is who settles such things, encourages distinguished visitors to inspect the war. There is a special officer set apart to conduct tourists from place to place and to show them the things they ought to see. He is provided with several motor-cars, a nice chateau, and a good cook. This is sensible. If you want a visitor to form a favourable opinion of anything, war, industry, or institution, you must make him fairly comfortable and feed him well.

Yet I think that the life of that officer was a tiresome one. There was very little variety in his programme. He showed the same things over and over again, and he heard the same remarks made over and over again about the things he showed. Sometimes, of course, a distinguished visitor with a reputation for originality made a new remark. But that was worse. It is better to have to listen to an intelligent comment a hundred times than to hear an unintelligent thing said once. Any new remark was sure to be stupid, because all the intelligent things had been said before.

To us, who lived in the Con. Camp, distinguished visitors, though common, were not very tiresome. We were not obliged to entertain them for very long at a time. They arrived at the camp about 3.30 p.m., and our C.O. showed them round. After inspecting an incinerator, a tent, a bath, a Y.M.C.A. hut, and a kitchen, they came to the mess for tea. Our C.O. was a man of immense courtesy and tact. He could answer the same question about an incinerator twice a week without showing the least sign of ever having heard it before.

I have often wondered who selected the distinguished visitors, and on what principle the choice was made. Whoever he was he cast his net widely.

Journalists of course abounded, American journalists chiefly—this was in 1916—but we had representatives of Dutch, Norwegian, Swiss, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and South American papers. Once we even had a Roumanian, a most agreeable man, but I never felt quite sure whether he was a journalist or a diplomatist. Perhaps he was both.

Authors—writers of books rather than articles—were common and sometimes were quite interesting, though given to asking too many questions. It ought to be impressed on distinguished visitors that it is their business to listen to what they are told, and not to ask questions.

Politicians often came. We once had a visit from Mr. Lloyd George, but I missed that to my grief.

Generals and staff officers from neutral countries came occasionally in very attractive uniforms.

Doctors always seemed to me more successful than other people in keeping up an appearance of intelligent interest.

Ecclesiastics were dull. They evidently considered it bad form to allude to religion in any way and they did not know much about anything else. But ecclesiastics were rare.

Royalties, I think, excited us most. We once had a visit from a king, temporarily exiled from his kingdom. He wore the most picturesque clothes I have ever seen off the stage and he was very gracious. All of our most strikingly wounded men—those who wore visible bandages—were paraded for his inspection. He walked down the line, followed by a couple of aides-de-camp, some French officers of high rank, an English general, our C.O., and then the rest of us. Our band played a tune which we hoped was his national anthem. He did not seem to recognise it, so it may not have been the right tune though we had done our best.

He stopped opposite an undersized boy in a Lancashire regiment who had a bandage round his head and a nose blue with cold. The monarch made a remark in his own language. He must have known several other languages—all kings do—but he spoke his own. Perhaps kings have to, in order to show patriotism. An aide-de-camp translated the remark into French. An interpreter retranslated it into English. Somebody repeated it to the Lancashire boy. I dare say he was gratified, but I am sure he did not in the least agree with the king. What his Majesty said was, "How splendid a thing to be wounded in this glorious war!"

It is easy to point a cheap moral to the tale. So kings find pleasure in their peculiar sport. So boys who would much rather be watching football matches at home suffer and are sad. Delirant reges. Plectuntur Achivi.

It is all as old as the hills, and republicans may make the most of it. Yet I think that that king meant what he said, and would have felt the same if the bandage had been round his own head and he had been wearing the uniform of a private soldier. There are a few men in the world who really enjoy fighting, and that king—unless his face utterly belies him—is one of them. Nothing, I imagine, except his great age, kept him out of the battles which his subjects fought.

The Con. Camp deserved the reputation which brought us those flights of distinguished visitors. I may set this down proudly without being suspected of conceit, for I had nothing to do with making the camp what it was. Success in a camp or a battalion depends first on three men—the C.O., the adjutant, and the sergeant-major. We were singularly fortunate in all three.

The next necessity is what the Americans call "team work." The whole staff must pull together, each member of it knowing and trusting the others. It was so in that camp. The result was fine, smooth-running organisation. No emergency disturbed the working of the camp. No sudden call found the staff unprepared or helpless. So much, I think, any one visiting and inspecting the camp might have seen and appreciated. What a visitor, however intelligent, or an inspector, though very able, would not have discovered was the spirit which inspired the discipline of the camp.

Ours was a medical camp. We flew the Red Cross flag and our C.O. was an officer in the R.A.M.C. Doctors, though they belong to a profession which exists for the purpose of alleviating human suffering, are not always and at all times humane men. Like other men they sometimes fall into the mistake of regarding discipline not as a means but as an end in itself. In civil life the particular kind of discipline which seduces them is called professional etiquette. In the army they become, occasionally, the most bigoted worshippers of red-tape. When that happens a doctor becomes a fanatic more ruthless than an inquisitor of old days.

In the Con. Camp the discipline was good, as good as possible; but our C.O. was a wise man. He never forgot that the camp existed for the purpose of restoring men's bodies to health and not as an example of the way to make rules work. The spirit of the camp was most excellent. Regulations were never pressed beyond the point at which they were practically of use. Sympathy, the sympathy which man naturally feels for a suffering fellow-man, was not strangled by parasitic growths of red-tape. We had to thank the C.O. and after him the adjutant for this. I met no officers more humane than these two, or more patient with all kinds of weakness and folly in the men with whom they had to deal.

They were well supported by their staff and by the voluntary workers in the two recreation huts run by the Y.M.C.A. and the Catholic Women's League. The work of the C.W.L. ladies differed a little from that of any recreation hut I had seen before. They made little attempt to cater for the amusement of the men. They discouraged personal friendships between the workers and the men. They aimed at a certain refinement in the equipment and decoration of their hut. They provided food of a superior kind, very nicely served. I think their efforts were appreciated by many men.

On the other hand the workers in the Y.M.C.A. hut there as everywhere made constant efforts to provide entertainments of some kind. Three or four days at least out of every week there was "something on." Sometimes it was a concert, sometimes a billiard tournament, or a ping-pong tournament, or a competition in draughts or chess. Occasionally, under the management of a lady who specialised in such things, we had a hat-trimming competition, an enormously popular kind of entertainment both for spectators and performers. Every suggestion of a new kind of entertainment was welcomed and great pains were taken to carry it through.

I only remember one occasion on which the leader of that hut shrank from the form of amusement proposed to him. The idea came from a Canadian soldier who said he wished we would get up a pie-eating competition. This sounded exciting, and we asked for details. The competitors, so the Canadian said, have their hands tied behind their backs, go down on their knees and eat open jam tarts which are laid flat on the ground. He said the game was popular in the part of Canada he came from. I longed to see it tried; but the leader of the hut refused to venture on it. It would, he said, be likely to be very messy. He was probably right.

In that hut the workers aimed constantly at getting into personal touch with the men. This was far easier in the Con. Camp than at the base camp where "Woodbine" was. The numbers of men were smaller. As a rule they stayed longer with us. But at best it is only possible for a canteen worker to make friends with a few men. With most of those who enter the hut she can have no personal relations. But I am sure that the work done is of immense value, and it is probably those who need sympathy and friendship most who come seeking it, a little shyly, from the ladies who serve them.

In normal times the Con. Camp received men from the hospitals; men who were not yet fit to return to their regiments, but who had ceased to need the constant ministrations of doctors and nurses. The conditions of life were more comfortable than in base camps, much more comfortable than at the front or in billets. The men slept in large tents, warmed and well lighted. They had beds. The food was good and abundant. Great care and attention was given to the cooking.

Much trouble was taken about amusements. The camp had a ground for football and cricket. It possessed a small stage, set up in one of the dining-halls, where plays were acted, a Christmas pantomime performed, and a variety entertainment given every week. There were whist drives with attractive prizes for the winners. Duty was light. Besides the "fatigues" necessary for keeping the camp in order there were route marches for those who could march, and an elaborate system of physical exercises under trained instructors.

The men remained in camp for varying periods. No man was kept there for more than three months. But some men passed through the camp being marked fit almost as soon as they left hospital. That was the normal routine; but it happened once while I was there that things became very abnormal and the organisation of the camp was tested with the utmost severity.

Just before the Somme offensive began some mischievous devil put it into the heads of the authorities to close down the only other convalescent camp in the neighbourhood. Its inmates were sent to us and we had to make room for them. Our cricket ground was sacrificed. Paths were run across the pitch. Tents were erected all over it. My church tent became the home of a harmonium, the only piece of ecclesiastical salvage from the camp that was closed. Then my church tent was taken from me, sacrificed like all luxuries to the accommodation of men. Just as we were beginning to settle down again came the Somme offensive.

Like every one else in France we had long expected the great push. Yet when it came it came with startling suddenness. We went out one morning to find the streets of the town crowded with ambulances. They followed each other in a long, slow, apparently unending procession across the bridge which led into the town from the railway station. They split off into small parties turning to the left and skirting the sea shore along the broad, glaring parade, or climbed with many hootings through the narrow streets of the old town. Staring after them as they passed us we saw inside figures of men very still, very silent, bandaged, swathed.

All the morning, hour after hour, the long procession went on. The ambulances, cleared of their burdens at the various hospitals, turned at once and drove furiously back to the station. The hospitals were filled and overfilled and overflowing. Men who could stand more travelling were hurried to the hospital ships. Stretcher-bearers toiled and sweated. The steamers, laden to their utmost capacity, slipped from the quay side and crept out into the Channel. One hospital was filled and cleared three times in twenty-four hours. The strain on doctors and nurses must have been terrific.

For one day we in the Con. Camp remained untouched by the rushing torrent. Then our turn came. The number of lightly wounded men was very great. Many of them could walk and take care of themselves. A hospital bed and hospital treatment were not absolutely necessary for them. They were sent to us. They arrived in char-a-bancs, thirty at a time. We possessed a tiny hospital, meant for the accommodation of cases of sudden illness in the camp. It was turned into a dressing-station.

The wounded men sat or lay on the grass outside waiting for their turns to go in. They wore the tattered, mud-caked clothes of the battlefield. The bandages of the casualty clearing-station were round their limbs and heads. Some were utterly exhausted. They lay down. They pillowed their heads on their arms and sank into heavy slumber. Some, half hysterical with excitement, sat bolt upright and talked, talked incessantly, whether any one listened to them or not. They laughed too, but it was a horrible kind of laughter. Some seemed stupefied; they neither slept nor talked. They sat where they were put, and stared in front of them with eyes which never seemed to blink.

Most of the men were calm, quiet, and very patient. I think their patience was the most wonderful thing I ever saw. They suffered, had suffered, and much suffering was before them. Yet no word of complaint came from them. They neither cursed God nor the enemy nor their fate. I have seen dumb animals, dogs and cattle, with this same look of trustful patience in their faces. But these were men who could think, reason, feel, and express themselves as animals cannot. Their patience and their quiet trustfulness moved me so that it was hard not to weep.

By twos and threes the men were called from the group outside and passed through the door of the dressing-station. The doctors waited for them in the surgery. The label on each man was read, his wound examined. A note was swiftly written ordering certain dressings and treatment. The man passed into what had been the ward of the hospital. Here the R.A.M.C. orderlies worked and with them two nurses spared for our need from a neighbouring hospital. Wounds were stripped, dressed, rebandaged. Sometimes fragments of shrapnel were picked out.

The work went on almost silently hour after hour from early in the morning till long after noon. Yet there was no hurry, no fuss, and I do not think there was a moment's failure in gentleness. Some hard things have been said about R.A.M.C. orderlies and about nurses too. Perhaps they have been deserved occasionally. I saw their work at close quarters and for many days in that one place, nowhere else and not again there; but what I saw was good.

With wounds dressed and bandaged, the men went out again. They were led across the camp to the quartermaster's stores and given clean underclothes in place of shirts and drawers sweat soaked, muddy, caked hard with blood. With these in their arms they went to the bath-house, to hot water, soap, and physical cleanness. Then they were fed, and for the moment all we could do for them was done.

These were all lightly wounded men, but, even remembering that, their power of recuperation seemed astonishing. Some went after dinner to their tents, lay down on their beds and slept. Even of them few stayed asleep for very long. They got up, talked to each other, joined groups which formed outside the tents, wandered through the camp, eagerly curious about their new surroundings. They found their way into the recreation huts and canteens. They shouted and cheered the performers at concerts or grouped themselves round the piano and sang their own songs. Those who had money bought food at the counter.

But many had no money and no prospect of getting any. They might have gone, not hungry, but what is almost worse, yearning for dainties and tobacco, if it were not for the generosity of their comrades. I have seen men with twopence and no more, men who were longing for a dozen things themselves, share what the twopence bought with comrades who had not even a penny. I passed two young soldiers near the door of a canteen. One of them stopped me and very shyly asked me if I would give him a penny for an English stamp. He fished it out from the pocket of his pay-book. It was dirty, crumpled, most of the gum gone, but unused and not defaced. I gave him the penny. "Come on, Sam," he said, "we'll get a packet of fags."

They say a lawyer sees the worst side of human nature. A parson probably sees the best of it; but though I have been a parson for many years and seen many good men and fine deeds, I have seen nothing more splendid, I cannot imagine anything more splendid, than the comradeship, the brotherly love of our soldiers.

The very first day of the rush of the lightly wounded into our camp brought us men of the Ulster Division. I heard from the mouths of the boys I talked to the Ulster speech, dear to me from all the associations and memories of my childhood. I do not suppose that those men fought better than any other men, or bore pain more patiently, but there was in them a kind of fierce resentment. They had not achieved the conquest they hoped. They had been driven back, had been desperately cut up. They had emerged from their great battle a mere skeleton of their division.

But I never saw men who looked less like beaten men. Those Belfast citizens, who sign Covenants and form volunteer armies at home, have in them the fixed belief that no one in the world is equal to them or can subdue them. It seems an absurd and arrogant faith. But there is this to be said. They remained just as convinced of their own strength after their appalling experience north of the Somme as they were when they shouted for Sir Edward Carson in the streets of Belfast. Men who believe in their invincibility the day after they have been driven back, with their wounds fresh and their bones aching with weariness, are men whom it will be very difficult to conquer.

Nothing was more interesting than to note the different moods of these wounded men. One morning, crossing the camp at about 7 o'clock, I met a Canadian, a tall, gaunt man. I saw at once that he had just arrived from the front. The left sleeve of his tunic was cut away. The bandage round his forearm was soiled and stained. His face was unshaven and very dirty. His trousers were extraordinarily tattered and caked with yellow mud. He had somehow managed to lose one boot and walked unevenly in consequence. I had heard the night before something about the great and victorious fight in which this man had been. I congratulated him. He looked at me with a slow, humorous smile. "Well," he drawled, "they certainly did run some."

A Lancashire boy, undersized, anaemic-looking, his clothes hanging round him in strips, got hold of me one morning outside the dressing-station and told me in a high-pitched voice a most amazing story. It was the best battle story I ever heard from the lips of a soldier, and the boy who told it to me was hysterical. He had been buried twice, he and his officer and his Lewis gun, in the course of an advance. He had met the Prussian Guard in the open, he and his comrades, and the famous crack corps had "certainly run some." That was not the boy's phrase. When he reached the climax of his tale his language was a rich mixture of blasphemy and obscenity.

There was a Munster Fusilier, an elderly, grizzled man who had been sent back with some German prisoners. He had, by his own account, quite a flock of them when he started. He found himself, owing to shrapnel and other troubles, with only one left when he drew near his destination.

But he was a provident man. He had collected all available loot from the men who had fallen on the way down, and the unfortunate survivor was so laden that he collapsed, sank into the mud under an immense load of helmets, caps, belts, everything that could have been taken from the dead. The Munster Fusilier stood over him with his rifle. "You misfortunate b——," he said. "And them words," he said to me confidentially, "got a move on him, though it was myself had to carry the load for him the rest of the way."



CHAPTER XIV

A BACKWATER

I look back with great pleasure on my connection with the Emergency Stretcher-bearers' Camp. It was one of three camps in which I worked when I went to B. I liked all three camps and every one in them, but I cherish a feeling of particular tenderness for the Stretcher-bearers.

Yet my first experience there was far from encouraging. The day after I took over from my predecessor I ventured into the men's recreation room. I was received with silence, frosty and most discouraging. I made a few remarks about the weather. I commented on the stagnant condition of the war at the moment. The things I said were banal and foolish no doubt, yet I meant well and scarcely deserved the reply which came at last. A man who was playing billiards dropped the butt of his cue on the ground with a bang, surveyed me with a hostile stare and said:

"We don't want no —— parsons here."

Somebody in a far corner of the room protested mildly.

"Language, language," he said.

I did not really object much to the language. I had heard the British soldiers' favourite word too often to be shocked by it. What did hurt and embarrass me was the fact that I was not welcome; and no one made any attempt to reassure me on that point.

Indeed when the same unpleasant fact that I really was not welcome was conveyed to me without obscenity in the next camp and with careful politeness in the third I found it even more disagreeable than it was when the stretcher-bearer called me a —— parson. The officers in the convalescent camp, the centre camp in my charge, were all kindness in their welcome, but the sergeant-major ——. We became fast friends afterwards, but the day we first met he looked me over and decided that I was an inefficient simpleton. Without speaking a word he made his opinion plain to me. He was appallingly efficient himself and I do not think he ever altered his perfectly just opinion of me. But in the end, and long before the end, he did all he could to help me.

The worst of all the snubs waited me in Marlborough Camp, and came from a lady worker, afterwards the dearest and most valued of the many friends I made in France. I shall not soon forget the day I first entered her canteen. She and her fellow-worker, also a valued friend now, did not call me a "—— parson"; but they left me under the impression that I was not wanted there. Her snub, delivered as a lady delivers such things, was the worst of the three.

For my reception in the Stretcher-bearers' Camp I was prepared.

"You'll find those fellows a pretty tough crowd," so some one warned me.

"Those old boys are bad lots," said some one else. "You'll not do any good with them."

I agree with the "tough." I totally disagree with the "bad." Even if, after eight months, I had been bidden farewell in the same phrase with which I was greeted, I should still refuse to say "bad lot" about those men. I hope that in such a case I should have the grace to recognise the failure as my fault, not theirs, and to take the "bad lot" as a description of myself.

The Emergency Stretcher-bearers when I first knew them were no man's children. The Red Cross flag flew over the entrance of their camp, but the Red Cross people accepted no responsibility for them. Their recreation room, which was not a room at all, but one end of their gaunt dining-room, was ill supplied with books and games, and had no papers. There were no lady workers in or near the camp, and only those who have seen the work which our ladies do in canteens in France can realise how great the loss was. There was no kind of unity in the camp.

It was a small place. There were not more than three hundred men altogether. But they were men from all sorts of regiments. I think that when I knew the camp first, nearly every one in it belonged to the old army. They were gathered there, the salvage of the Mons retreat, of the Marne, of the glorious first battle of Ypres, broken men every one of them, debris tossed by the swirling currents of war into this backwater.

Their work was heavy, thankless, and uninspiring. They were camped on a hill. Day after day they marched down through the streets of the town to the railway station or the quay. They carried the wounded on stretchers from the hospital trains to the Red Cross ambulances; or afterwards from the ambulance cars up steep gangways to the decks and cabins of hospital ships. They were summoned by telephone at all hours. They toiled in the grey light of early dawn. They sweated at noonday. Soaked and dripping they bent their backs to their burdens in storm and rain. They went long hours without food. They lived under conditions of great discomfort. It was everybody's business to curse and "strafe" them. I do not remember that any one ever gave them a word of praise.

It was the camp, of all that I was ever in, which seemed to offer the richest yield to the gleaner of war stories. I have always wanted to know what that retreat from Mons felt like to the men who went through it. We are assured, and I do not doubt it, that our men never thought of themselves as beaten. What did they think when day after day they retreated at top speed? Of what they suffered we know something. How they took their suffering we only guess. I hoped when I made friends with those men to hear all this and many strange tales of personal adventures.

But the British soldier, even of the new army, is strangely inarticulate. The men of the old army, so far as concerns their fighting, are almost dumb. They would talk about anything rather than their battles. There was a man in the Life Guards who had received three wounds in one of the early cavalry skirmishes. He wanted to talk about cricket, and told me stories about a church choir in which he sang when he was a boy.

There was a Coldstream Guardsman. I never succeeded in finding out whether he was in the famous Landrecies fight or not. The most he would do in the way of military talk was to complain, privately, to me of the lax discipline in the camp, and to compare the going of his comrades from the camp to the quay with the marching of the Coldstreamers on their way to relieve guard at Buckingham Palace. There was an old sergeant from County Down who was more interested in growing vegetables—we had a garden—than anything else, and a Munster Fusilier who came from Derry, of all places, and exulted in the fact that his sons had taken his place in the regiment.

At first this curious reticence was a disappointment to me. It is still a wonder. I am sure that if I had been one of the "Old Contemptibles" I should talk of nothing else all my life. But I came to see afterwards that if I had heard battle stories I should never have known the men. The centre of interest of their lives was at home. They, even those professional soldiers, were men of peace rather than war. The soldiers' trade was no delight to them.

I dare say the Germans, who took pains to learn so much about us beforehand, knew this, and drew, as Germans so often do, a wrong inference from facts patiently gathered. They thought that men who do not like fighting fight badly. It may be so sometimes. It was certainly not so with our old army. We know now that it is not so with the men of our new army either.

After a while the stretcher-bearers and I began to know each other. The first sign of friendliness was a request that I should umpire at a cricket match on a Sunday afternoon. I am not sure that the invitation was not also a test. Some parsons, the "——" kind, who are not wanted, object to cricket on Sundays. My own conscience is more accommodating. I would gladly have umpired at Monte Carlo on Good Friday, Easter, Advent Sunday, and Christmas, all rolled into one, if those men had asked me.

Later on, after many cricket matches, we agreed that it was desirable to get up entertainments in the camp. There was no local talent, or none available at first, but I had the good luck to meet one day a very amiable lady who undertook to run a whole entertainment herself. She also promised not to turn round and walk away when she saw the piano.

We stirred ourselves, determined to rise to the occasion. We made a platform at the end of the dining-room. I took care not to ask, and I do not know, where the wood for that platform came from. We discovered among us a man who said he had been a theatrical scene painter before he joined the R.E. He can never, I fancy, have had much chance of rising to the top of his old profession, but he painted a back scene for our stage. It represented a country cottage standing in a field, and approached by an immensely long, winding, brown path. The perspective of that path was wonderful. He also painted and set up two wings on the stage which were easily recognisable as leafy trees. For many Sundays afterwards I stood in front of that cottage with a green tree on each side of me during morning service.

Another artist volunteered to do our programmes. His work lay in the orderly-room and he had at command various coloured inks, black, violet, blue, and red. He produced a programme like a rainbow on which he described our lady visitor as the "Famous Favourite of the Music Hall Stage." She had, in fact, delighted theatre goers before her marriage, but not on the music hall stage. I showed her the programme nervously, but I need not have been nervous. She entered into the spirit of the thing.

A thoughtful sergeant, without consulting me, prepared for her a dressing-room at the back of the stage. A modest man himself, he insisted upon my leading her to it. We found there a shelf, covered with newspaper. On it was a shaving mirror, a large galvanised-iron tub half full of cold water, a cake of brown soap, a tattered towel, and a comb. Also there was a tumbler, a siphon of soda water, and a bottle of port.

"The dears," she said. "But I can't change my frock; I've nothing but what I stand up in. What shall I do?"

I glanced at the bottle of port; but she shrank from that.

"I must do something," she said. "I'll powder my nose." The shaving mirror, at least, was some use.

The entertainment began stiffly. We were not accustomed to entertainments and felt that we ought to behave with propriety. We clapped at the end of each song, but we displayed no enthusiasm. I began to fear for our success. But our lady—she did the whole thing herself—conquered us. We were laughing and cheering in half an hour. In the end we rocked in our seats and howled tumultuously when the sergeant-major, a portly man of great dignity, was dragged over the footlights. Our lady pirouetted across the stage and back again, her arm round the sergeant-major's waist, her cheek on his shoulder, singing, "If I were the only girl in the world and you were the only boy."

We believed in doing what we could for those who came to entertain us. When we secured the services of a "Lena Ashwell" Concert Party we painted a large sign and hung it up in front of the stage: "Welcome to the Concert Party." We forgot the second "e" in Welcome and it had to be crammed in at the last moment above the "m" with a "^" underneath it.

We made two dressing-rooms, one for ladies and one for gentlemen. The fittings were the same—brown soap, cold water, shaving mirror, tumbler and siphon. But in the gentlemen's room we put whisky, in the ladies' port. The whole party had tea afterwards in the sergeants' mess—strong tea and tinned tongue. A corporal stood at the door as we left holding a tray covered with cigarettes.

I learned to play cribbage while I was in that camp. I was pitted, by common consent, against an expert, a man who had been wounded at Le Cateau and had his teeth knocked out as he lay on the ground by a passing German, who used the butt of his rifle. Round me were a dozen men, who gave me advice and explained in whispers the finesse of the game. It was hot work, for the men sat close and we all smoked.

I also learned that the British soldier, when he gives his mind to it, plays a masterly game of draughts. There was a man—in civil life he sailed a Thames barge—who insulted me deeply over draughts. He used to allow me to win one game in three, and he managed so well that it was weeks before I found out what he was doing.

We had whist drives, and once a billiard tournament, run on what I believe is a novel principle. We had only one table, half sized and very dilapidated. We had about thirty entries. We gave each player five minutes and let him score as much as he could in the time, no opponent interfering with him. The highest score took the prize.

But all entertainments and games in that camp were liable to untimely interruption. Messages used to come through from some remote authority demanding stretcher-bearers. Then, though it were in the midst of a game of whist, every man present had to get up and go away.

There was one occasion on which such a summons arrived just as the men had assembled to welcome a concert party. The dining-room was empty in five minutes. We who remained were faced with the prospect of a concert without an audience. But our sergeant-major met the emergency. He hurried to a neighbouring camp and somehow managed to borrow two hundred men. The concert party was greatly pleased, but said that the Emergency Stretcher-bearers did not look as old and dilapidated as they had been led to expect.

There came a time when the camp changed and many old friends disappeared. At the beginning of the Somme battle there was a sudden demand for stretcher-bearers to serve at the advanced dressing-stations. Almost every day we were bidden to send men. Little parties assembled on the parade ground and marched off to entrain for the front. I used to see them lined up on the parade ground, war-battered men, who looked old though they were young, with their kits spread out for inspection. The least unfit went first; but indeed there was little choice among them. Not a man of them but had been wounded grievously or mourned a constitution broken by hardship. Yet they went cheerfully, patient in their dumb devotion to duty, hopeful that the final victory for which they had striven in vain was near at hand at last.

"We'll have peace before Christmas." So they said to me as they went.

That "Peace before Christmas"! It has fluttered, a delusive vision, before our men since the start. "Is it true that the cavalry are through?" I suppose that was another delusion, that riding down of a flying foe by horsemen. But it was not only the stretcher-bearers who clung to it.

We saw our friends no more after they disappeared into the smoking furnace of the front. They were scattered here and there among the dressing-stations in the fighting area. Many of them, I suppose, stayed there, struck down at last, ending their days in France as they began them, with the sound of the guns in their ears. Others, perhaps, drifted back to England more hopelessly broken than ever. They must be walking our streets now with silver badges on the lapels of their coats, and we, who are much meaner men, should take our hats off to them. A few may be toiling still, where the fighting is thickest, the last remnants of the "Old Contemptibles."

Their places in the camp and their work on the quays were taken by others, men disabled or broken in the later fights when the new armies won their glory. The character of the camp changed. We became more respectable than we were in the old days. No one any longer spoke of us as a "bad lot," or called us "a tough crowd." Perhaps we were not so tough. Certainly we cannot have been tougher than the men who made good in those first terrific days, who continued to make good long after they could fight no more, staggering through the Somme mud with laden stretchers. They grumbled and groused. They blasphemed constantly. They drank when they could. They wanted no "—— parson" among them. But they were men, unconquered and unconquerable.



CHAPTER XV

MY THIRD CAMP

At the front, the actual front where the fighting is, imagination runs riot in devising place names, and military maps recognise woods, hills, and roads by their new titles. At the bases a severer spirit holds sway. I recollect one curious and disagreeable camp which was called, colloquially and officially, Cinder City. Otherwise camps were known by numbers or at best by the French names of the districts in which they were situated. I thought I had hit on another exception to this rule when I first heard of this camp. It seemed natural to have called a camp after one of our generals. In fact nothing of the sort occurred. It was the French name for the place. We took over the name when we pitched our tents.

Indeed the camp was not the sort of place which gets a name given to it. It is only places which somebody loves or hates, in which somebody is one way or other interested, which get new names given them. Nobody, or nobody in high authority, took an interest in this camp. It was a stepchild among camps, neither attractive enough to be loved nor disagreeable enough to be hated and reviled.

With a string of other dull camps, it was under the command of a colonel who, having much on his mind besides the care of this camp, lived elsewhere. Only one officer slept in the camp. He had a bedroom which was half office, decorated—he several times assured me that his predecessor was responsible for the decoration—with pictures from La Vie Parisienne. The proprietors of that journal must have profited enormously by the coming of the British military force. If there is any form of taxation of excess profits in France that editor must be paying heavily. Yet the paper is sufficiently monotonous, and it is difficult to imagine that any one wants to take it in regularly.

Except this bedroom, the officer in command had no habitation in the camp. He messed elsewhere and, as was natural, spent his spare time elsewhere. He did all he could for the camp, but he could not do very much. He was of subordinate rank and of no great military importance. It was very difficult to stir the authorities to any great interest in the camp. There was a certain amount of excuse for them. It never seemed worth while to take much trouble for the men there. The function of the camp was peculiar. Men were drafted into it from convalescent camps and hospitals when they were passed "fit," and were ready to rejoin their units. The business of the camp authorities was to sort the men out, divide them into parties, and dispatch them to the depots of their regiments.

Every day men came into camp and were for the moment "details." They belonged to all possible regiments and branches of the service. Every day parties of men left the camp for the different base depots. At 10 a.m. the H. party for H., at 12 noon the E. party for E., no longer "details," but drafts consigned to their proper depots at H., E., or elsewhere. Their stay in the camp was usually very brief. It was scarcely worth while trying to make them comfortable or doing anything to make life pleasant for them.

It was, I think, rather hard on men to be sent straight from the comfort and warmth of a hospital or convalescent camp to a place as Spartan as this. Instead of having a bed to sleep on, the unfortunate "detail" found himself condemned to the floor boards of a bell tent, with a very meagre allowance of well-worn blankets. In cold weather the change was abrupt and trying, but of course it had to be made sooner or later, and I suppose the men had no reasonable excuse for grumbling.

Very much harder on them was the lack of accommodation in the camp. Things are much better now in this respect; but when I knew the camp first, there was no recreation room except a small and inconvenient E.F. Canteen.

The Y.M.C.A. never established itself there. The Church Army put up a small hut, but sent no worker to look after it; and even that hut was not opened till the early summer of 1916. By a curious chance the E.F. Canteen was worked by ladies instead of the usual orderlies. The ladies were in fact there, running a small independent canteen, before the E.F. Canteen took over the place. Rather unwillingly, I think, the E.F. Canteen people took over these ladies. It was a most fortunate thing that they did so.

Miss L., the head of this little band of workers, was a lady of unusual ability, energy, and sympathy. I have said that no one in authority cared for the camp. Miss L., who had no military authority, not only cared for it—she loved it. It was to her and her assistants that the camp owed most of what was done for it. I have seen much splendid work done by our voluntary ladies in France, but I have never seen better work done under more difficult circumstances than was done by these ladies.

I suppose it is foolish to be surprised at any evidence of the blatant vulgarity of the men who earn their living by the horrid trade of politics. They speak and act after their kind; and it is probably true that silk purses cannot be made out of sows' ears. Yet I own to having experienced a shock when Mr. Macpherson in the House of Commons described our lady workers as "camp followers." Even for a politician, even in the House of Commons, that was bad.

Miss L. and her assistants had no great organisation behind them to which they could appeal, which would take their part and fight their battles. Like the men they worked for, they were "details." The E.F. Canteen authorities, who employed but did not pay them, looked upon those ladies with suspicion. They were allowed to work. They were not welcomed. I think the E.F. Canteen people would have got rid of them if they could. Yet they did work which in quantity was at least equal to that of the orderlies usually employed, and in quality enormously superior.

The room which served as a canteen was singularly inconvenient. The part of it used by the men was far too small, and used to be disagreeably crowded in the evenings and on wet days. The space behind the counter was narrow, gloomy, and ill ventilated. A worker serving there had the choice of being half choked or blown about by furious draughts. Miss L. preferred the draughts, which she called "fresh air." I sometimes found myself inclined to regard suffocation as the pleasanter alternative.

I have never seen a more inconvenient kitchen than that in which those ladies worked. It was small, low, and very gloomy. It had an uneven floor, on which it was quite possible to trip. The roof leaked badly in half a dozen places, and on wet days an incautious person splashed about. In summer with two fires burning that kitchen became fiercely hot. Even an electric fan, presented by a sympathetic visitor, did little to help. No self-respecting English kitchen maid would have stayed two hours in a house where she was given such a kitchen to work in.

Yet wonderful hot suppers were cooked there in long succession. Huge puddings and deep crocks of stewed fruit were prepared. A constant supply of tea, coffee, and cocoa was kept ready to replenish exhausted kettles on the counter outside, and all the washing up for hundreds of men was done in a very small sink.

The cooking and bar serving were the smallest part of the work those ladies did. Miss L. was active as a gardener. In most camps in France men take to gardening willingly, and require little help or encouragement. In this camp it was different. No one stayed there long enough to be interested in the garden. I have seen photographs of the camp before I knew it, as it was in 1915, a desolate stretch of trampled mud. I saw recently a photograph of the camp in 1917. It was then gay with flowers. I knew it in 1916, when Miss L. had begun her gardening and was gradually extending her flower-beds, creating new borders and fencing off small spaces of waste ground with wooden palings.

Her enthusiasm stimulated men, who could never hope to see any result of their labours, to do something for the camp. One man, a miner from Northumberland, set out the name of the camp in large letters done in white stones on a green bank behind the canteen. He gave all his spare time for two days to the work, and when he had finished we discovered that he had left out a letter in the first syllable of the name. He was a patient as well as an enthusiastic man. He began all over again.

Miss L. went to great trouble in providing amusements for the men. Here she worked against great difficulties. An organisation like the Y.M.C.A. has control of concert parties and lecturers who are sent round to various huts, thus greatly lightening the labour of the local workers. The camp canteen had no organisation behind it, and could command no ready-made entertainments. In the sweat of our brows we earned such concerts as we had, and any one who has ever got up a concert, even at home, knows how much sweating such activities involve. In the end, moved by pity at our plight, the Y.M.C.A. people used to lend us concert parties, especially "Lena Ashwell" parties, the best of their kind. I have always found the Y.M.C.A. generous in sharing their good things with those outside their organisation.

Another difficulty which faced Miss L. was the want of any suitable place for entertainments. The canteen was far too small. The Church Army hut, when we had got it opened, was a little better, but still not nearly large enough for the audience which a good concert party drew. We had to use the dining-hall. It was not always available and was seldom available at the exact time we wanted it. It had no stage and no piano. Each time a concert was held there, a stage had to be erected for the occasion, the piano hauled over from the canteen, and some kind of decoration arranged.

One of the minor inconveniences of the camp was the extraordinary uncertainty of the lighting. Other camps, even the Con. Camp occasionally, suffered from failure of the supply of electricity. For some reason the thing happened more often in this camp than elsewhere; and even when the current was running strongly we found ourselves in darkness because our wires fused in places difficult to get at, or branches fell from trees and broke wires. We got accustomed to these disasters when they happened at ordinary times.

Miss L. and her assistants were ladies of resource and indomitable spirit. It was a small thing to them to find the canteen suddenly plunged into total darkness while a crowd of men was clamouring for food and drink at the counter. A supply of candles was kept ready to hand. They were placed in mugs (candlesticks were lacking of course) and set on the counter. By the aid of their feeble gleam the ladies groped their way into the kitchen for tea, filled cups, and counted out change. The scene always reminded me of Gideon's attack on the Midianites when his soldiers carried lamps in pitchers. Occasionally some one knocked over a mug. There was a crash and a blaze, a very fair imitation of the battle in the Book of Judges.

It was worse when a whist drive or a singing competition in the Church Army hut was interrupted by one of these Egyptian plagues of darkness. But even then we did not allow ourselves to be seriously embarrassed. The men, responsive to the instinct of discipline, sat quiet at the whist tables with their cards in their hands. The glow of burning cigarettes could be seen, faint spots of light; nothing else.

Miss L. hurried to the canteen for candles. They were set in pools of their own grease on the tables and the games went on. A singing competition scarcely even paused. The competitors sang on. The pianist managed to play. The audience applauded with extra vigour until candles were brought and set in rows, like footlights, in front of the stage.

Our worst experience of light failure occurred one evening when we had a visit from a very superior concert party. We had secured it only after much "wangling." We made every possible preparation for its reception. One of Miss L.'s assistants drew out a most attractive advertisement of the performance with a picture of a beautiful lady in a red dress at the top of it. We posted this up in various parts of the camp; but we were not really anxious about the audience. It always "rolled up."

We set up a stage in the dining-room, a large high stage made out of dining-tables, a little rickety, but considered by good judges to be fairly safe. We spread a carpet, or something which looked like a carpet, on it. Only Miss L. could have got a carpet in the camp, and I do not know how she did it. We hung up a large Union Jack, Miss L.'s private property, which was used on all festive occasions and served as an altar cloth on Sundays. The E.F. Canteen authorities were worried for a week beforehand, and, lest they should be worried more, promised us a new piano, "same," so they put it, "to be delivered" in time for the concert. The promise was not kept.

That was our first misfortune. With deep misgiving we dragged our own piano out of the canteen and set it on the stage. The musical members of Miss L.'s staff assured us that it was desperately out of tune. The least musical of us could assure ourselves that several notes made no sound at all, however hard you hit them. And the concert party was a very grand one.

It arrived in two motors, and we abased ourselves before it, babbling apologies. One after another the members of the party approached our piano and poked at it with their forefingers. One after another they turned away looking depressed. The only one of them who remained moderately cheerful was a man who did conjuring tricks. It was, I imagine, through his good offices that the party agreed to attempt its programme.

The audience, who knew the failings of our piano as well as we did, applauded the first song rapturously. Then without the slightest warning every lamp in the place went out. A dog, a well-beloved creature called Detail, who was accustomed to sit under Miss L.'s chair at concerts, began to bark furiously. That, I think, was what finally broke the temper of the concert party. We had an oil lamp ready for emergencies. It was lit, and I saw the leader of the party beckoning to me. His face was fearfully stern. I fully expected him to say that the whole party would leave at once.

But he did nothing so drastic. He demanded the instant expulsion of Detail. There was a scuffle at the far end of the room. The audience rose to its feet and cheered tumultuously. Detail, I am sorry to say, barked again. I saw eight men staggering through the crowded room bearing a piano. It was quite new, and, I am told, almost in tune. The situation was saved. The singers were mollified and went on with their programme by the light of one lamp, two candles (on the piano), and three stable lanterns. An orderly with a screwdriver and a box of matches sought for the fused wire. Detail crept under her mistress's chair again unrebuked. She was an animal of cultivated tastes and hated missing concerts. She usually behaved with decorum, not barking except by way of applause when the audience shouted and noise of any kind was legitimate.

The camp is, I am told, very different now. There is a new canteen, large, well furnished, and beautiful. Concerts can be held in it and church services. No one is any longer crowded out of anything. The kitchen is a spacious place in which it is possible to cook without great physical suffering. There are more flower beds, well-kept lines between the tents, an impressive entrance. No doubt even the electric light shines consistently. The days of makeshift are over and the camp is a credit to the Expeditionary Force.

But I should not like to go back there again. I should be haunted with memories of old days which were trying but pleasant. I should wish myself back at one of the cheery tea-parties in the old canteen kitchen, when we sat on packing-cases and biscuit-boxes, when we shifted our seats about to dodge the raindrops from the roof, when we drank out of three cracked cups and thick mugs borrowed from the canteen.

I should remember pay-nights when the men stood before the counter in a dense mob, all hungry, each holding in his hand a five-franc note, when we had no change, not a franc, not a sou; when, in desperation, I used to volunteer to collect change from any one who had it, giving chits in exchange for small coins. Such crises do not arise now, I suppose.

Sitting in comfort at a table in the fine new canteen I should remember sadly a wet afternoon in the Church Army hut when there was no room to move and the air was heavy with Woodbine smoke and the steam of drying cloth, when I perched on the corner of a window-sill and pitted myself against a chess player who challenged me suddenly and turned out to be a master of the game and the secretary of a chess club in Yorkshire.

I should remember, with how great regret! how, evening after evening, Miss S. left her pots and pans, smoothed her tousled overall, and came over to the Church Army hut to play a hymn for us at evening prayers; how the men, an ever-changing congregation, chose the same hymns night after night till we came to hate the sound of their tunes; how we, reserving Sunday evenings for our property, chose the hymn then and always chose the same one—which I shall never sing again without remembering Miss S. at the piano, smelling the air of that hut, and being troubled by a vision of the faces of the men who sang.

I should not find Miss S. there if I went back, or Captain L., or any one, almost, whom I knew. No doubt their successors are doing well, mine better than ever I did, which would be no difficult thing; but I could not bear to see them at their work. Ghosts of old days would haunt me.

And worst of all, Miss L. is gone. The rest of us have passed and no one misses us much, I suppose. Our places are easily filled. Her place in that camp no one will ever quite fill. "Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all."



CHAPTER XVI

LEAVE

At last! I have the precious paper safe in my hand, in my pocket with a button fastened tight to keep it there: my leave warrant, passport to ten days' liberty, rest, and—other things much more desirable than liberty or rest. It is issued to me late on Sunday night for a start on Monday morning.

The authorities are desperately suspicious. They trust no man's honour. They treat even a padre as if he were a fraudulent cashier, bent on cheating them if he can. I do not blame them. In this matter of leave every man is a potential swindler. A bishop would cheat if he could. If I had got that leave warrant an hour or two sooner than I did, I should have made a push for the boat which left on Sunday evening. Thereby I should have deprived the army of my services during the night, a form of swindling not to be tolerated, though what use I am to the army or any one else when I am in bed and asleep it would be very difficult to say.

All that night the wind shrieked, rattling windows to the discomfort of those who were lucky enough to have roofs over their heads, threatening the dwellers in tents with the utter destruction of their shelters. Very early, before the dawn of the winter morning, the rain began, not to fall—the rain in a full gale of wind does not fall—but to sweep furiously across the town.

I heard it, but I did not care. I turned and snuggled close under my blankets. In an hour or two it would be time to get up. My day would begin, the glorious first day of leave. What does rain matter? or what do gales matter? unless—a horrid fear assailed me. Was it possible that in such a gale the steamer would fail to start. I turned and twisted, tortured by the thought. Every time the windows rattled and the house shook I sweated hot and cold.

In the end, tormented beyond endurance, I got up and dressed some time between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. I did more. Without the coffee which Madame had promised me I sallied forth and tramped through the deserted streets of the town, fording gutters which were brooks, skirting close by walls which promised what sailors call a "lee."

The long stretch of the quay was desolate. Water lay in deep pools between the railway lines among the sleepers. Water trickled from deserted waggons and fell in small cascades from the roofs of sheds. The roadway, crossed and recrossed by the railway, had little muddy lakes on it and broad stretches of mud rather thicker than the water of the lakes.

Far down the quay lay a steamer with two raking funnels—the leave boat, the ship of heart's desire for many men. Clouds of smoke, issuing defiantly from her funnels, were immediately swept sideways by the wind and beaten down by the rain. The smoke ceased to be smoke, became a duller greyness added to the greyness of the air, dissolved into smuts and was carried to earth—or to the faces and hands of wayfarers—by the rain.

Already at 7 o'clock there were men going along the quay—a steady stream of them, tramping, splashing, stumbling towards the steamer. In the matter of the sailing of leave boats rumour is the sole informant, and rumour had it that this boat would start at 10 a.m. Leave is a precious thing. He takes no risks who has secured the coveted pass to Blighty. It is a small matter to wait three hours on a rain-swept quay. It would be a disaster beyond imagining to miss the boat.

Officers make for the boat in twos or threes, their trench coats, buttoned tightly, flap round putteed or gaitered legs. Drenched haversacks hang from their shoulders.

Parties of men, fully burdened with rifles and kit, march down from the rest camp where they have spent the night. The mud of the trenches is still thick on them. One here and there wears his steel helmet. They carry all sorts of strange packages, sacks tied at the mouth, parcels sewed up in sacking, German helmets slung on knapsacks, valueless trophies of battlefields, loot from captured dug-outs, pathetically foolish souvenirs bought in French shops, all to be presented to the wives, mothers, sweethearts who wait at home.

A couple of army sisters, lugging suit-cases, clinging to the flying folds of their grey cloaks, walk, bent forward against the wind and rain. A blue-coated Canadian nurse, brass stars on her shoulder straps, has given an arm to a V.A.D. girl, a creature already terrified at the prospect of crossing the sea on such a day. The rain streams down their faces, but perhaps Canadians are accustomed to worse rain in their own country. Certainly this young woman does not seem to mind it. She is smiling and walks jauntily. Like many of our cousins from overseas she is rich in splendid vitality.

A heavy grey motor rushes along, splashing the walkers. Beside the driver is a pile of luggage. Inside, secure behind plate glass from any weather, sits a general. Another motor follows and still others. British staff officers and military attaches from allied nations, the privileged classes of the war, sweep by while humbler men splash and stumble.

But in front of the gangway of the leave boat, as at the gates of Paradise, there is no distinction of persons. The mean man and the mighty find the same treatment there. There comes a moment when the car must be left, when crossed sword and baton on the shoulder straps avail their wearer no more than a single star.

A sailor, relentless as Rhadamanthus, stands on the gangway and bars the way to the shelter of the ship. No one—so the order has gone forth—is to be allowed on board before 9 o'clock. There is shelter a few yards behind, a shed. A few seek it. I prefer to stand, with other early comers, in a cluster round the end of the gangway, determined, though we wait hours, to be among the first on board.

The crowd grows denser as time goes on. The Canadian sister, alert and competent, secures a seat on the rail of a disused gangway and plants two neat feet on the rail opposite. An Australian captain, gallant amid extreme adversity, offers the spare waterproof he carries to the shivering V.A.D. I find myself wedged tight against a general. He is elderly, grizzled, and looks fierce; but he accepts a light for his cigarette from the bowl of my pipe. It was his only chance of getting a light then and there. Now and then some one asks a neighbour whether it is likely that the boat will start on such a day.

A depressed major on the outskirts of the crowd says that he has it on the best authority that the port is closed and that there will be no sailings for a week. The news travels from mouth to mouth, but no one stirs. There is a horrid possibility that it may be true; but—well, most men know the reputation of that "best authority." He is the kind of liar of whose fate St. John speaks vigorously in the last chapter but one of his Apocalypse.

The ship rises slowly higher and higher, for the tide is flowing. The gangway grows steeper. From time to time two sailors shift it slightly, retying the ropes which fasten it to the ship's rail. The men on the quay watch the manoeuvre hopefully.

At 9 o'clock an officer appears on the outside fringe of the crowd. With a civility which barely cloaks his air of patronage he demands way for himself to the ship. His brassard wins him all he asks at once. On it are the letters "A.M.L.O." He is the Assistant Military Landing Officer, and for the moment is lord of all, the arbiter of things more important than life and death. In private life he is perhaps a banker's clerk or an insurance agent. On the battlefield his rank entitles him to such consideration only as is due to a captain. Here he may ignore colonels, may say to a brigadier, "Stop pushing." He has what all desire, the "Open Sesame" which clears the way to the ship.

He goes on board, acknowledging with careless grace the salute of one of the ship's officers. He stands on the shelter deck.

With calm dignity he surveys the swaying crowd beneath him. "There's no hurry, gentlemen," he says. There is no hurry for him. He has risen from his bed at a reasonable hour, has washed, shaved, bathed, breakfasted. He has not stood for hours in drenching rain. The look of him is too much for the general who is wedged beside me in the crowd. He speaks:

"What the——? Why the——? When the——? Where the——?" He is a man of fluent speech, this general. I thought as much when I first looked at him. Now it seems that his command of language is a great gift, more valuable than the eloquence of statesmen or the music of poets. The Canadian sister leads the applause of the crowd. The general turns to me with a deprecating smile.

"Excuse me, padre, but really——"

The army respects the Church, knows that certain necessary forms of speech are not suited to clerical ears. But the Church is human and can sympathise with men's infirmities.

"If I were a general," I said, "I should say a lot more."

The general, encouraged by this absolution, does say more. He mentions the fact that he is going straight to the War Office when he reaches London. Once there he will—the threat vaporises into jets of language so terrific that the air round us grows sensibly warmer. I notice that the V.A.D. is holding tight to the hand of the Canadian sister.

The A.M.L.O., peering through the rain from the shelter deck of the steamer, recognises the rank of his assailant. The mention of the War Office reaches him. He wilts visibly. The stiffness goes out of him before the delighted eyes of the crowd. He admits us to the ship. Another gangway is lowered. In two thin streams the damp men and draggled women struggle on board. Certain officers, the more helpless subalterns among us, are detailed for duty on the voyage. They parade on the upper deck. To them at least the A.M.L.O. can still speak with authority. He explains to the bewildered youths what their duties are. Each passenger, so it appears, must wear a life-belt. It is the business of the subalterns to see that every one ties round his chest one of those bandoliers of cork.

On the leave boat the spirit of democracy is triumphant. Sergeants jostle commissioned officers. Subalterns seize deck chairs desired by colonels of terrific dignity. Privates with muddy trousers crowd the sofas of the first-class saloon. Discipline we may suppose survives. If peril threatened, men would fall into their proper places and words of command would be obeyed. But the outward forms of discipline are for a time in abeyance. The spirit of goodfellowship prevails. The common joy—an intensified form of the feeling of the schoolboy on the first day of the Christmas holidays—makes one family of all ranks and ages.

No doubt also the sea insists on the recognition of new standards of worth. The humblest private who is not seasick is visibly and unmistakably a better man than a field-marshal with his head over the bulwarks. Curious and ill-assorted groups are formed. Men who at other times would not speak to each other are drawn and even squeezed together by the pressure of circumstance.

Between two of the deckhouses on the lower deck of this steamer is a narrow passage. Porters have packed valises and other luggage into it. It is sheltered from the rain and will be secure from showers of flying spray. Careless and inexperienced travellers, searching along the crowded decks for somewhere to sit down, pass this place by unnoticed. Others, accustomed in old days to luxurious travelling, scorn it and seek for comfort which they never find.

I come on this nook by accident; and at once perceive its value as a place of shelter and refuge. I sit down on the deck with my haversack beside me. I wedge myself securely, my feet against one side of the passage, my back against the other. I tuck my waterproof round me and feel that I may defy fate to do its worst.

A few others drift into the refuge, or are pressed in by the crowd outside. The Canadian sister, a competent young woman, has found her way here and settled down her helpless V.A.D. on a valise—a lumpy, uncomfortable seat. A private from a Scottish regiment is here, two Belgians and a Russian staff officer struggle in a narrow space to adjust their life-belts. A brigadier, a keen-eyed, eager-faced young man, one of those to whom the war has given opportunity and advancement, joins the group. He speaks in French to the Belgians and the Russian. He helps to make the V.A.D. less utterly uncomfortable. He offers me his flask and then a cigar.

There is one subject of conversation. Will the boat start? The Russian is hopeful. Is not England mistress of the seas? The V.A.D. is despondent. Once before in a long-ago time of leave the boat did not start. The passengers, and she among them, were disembarked. The Scottish private has heard from a friend of his in "the Signals" that German submarines are abroad in the Channel. The brigadier is openly contemptuous of all information from men in "the Signals." The Canadian sister is cheerful. If she were captain of the ship, she says, she would start, and, what is more, fetch up at the other side.

The captain, it appears, shares her spirit. The ship does start. The harbour is cleared and at once the tossing begins. The party between the deckhouses sways and reels. It becomes clear very soon that it will be impossible to stand. But sitting down is difficult. I have to change my attitude. It is not possible for any one else to sit down if I keep my legs stretched out, and the others must sit down or else fall. The brigadier warns the Russian to be careful how he bestows himself.

"Don't put your feet on my haversack," he says. "There's a bottle of hair-wash in it."

The Russian shifts his feet.

"There'll be a worse spill if you trample on mine," I murmur. "There's a bottle of Benedictine in it."

"Padre!" said the brigadier. "I'm ashamed of you. I had the decency to call it hair-wash."

The Canadian sister laughs loud and joyously.

It is noticed that the Scottish private is becoming white. Soon his face is worse than white. It is greyish green. The Canadian sister tucks her skirts under her. The prospect is horrible. There is no room for the final catastrophe of seasickness. The brigadier is a man of prompt decision.

"Out you go," he says to the man. "Off with you and put your head over the side."

I feel that I must bestir myself for the good of the little party, though I do not want to move. I seize the helpless Scot by the arm and push him out. The next to succumb is the Russian staff officer. His face is pallid and his lips blue. The V.A.D. is past caring what happens. The two Belgians are indifferent. The Canadian sister, the brigadier, and I take silent counsel. Our eyes meet.

"I can't talk French," I say.

"I can," said the Brigadier.

He does. He explains politely to the Russian the indecency of being seasick in that crowded space. He points out that there is one course only open to the sufferer—to go away and bear the worst elsewhere. Honour calls for the sacrifice. The Russian opens his eyes feebly and looks at the deck beyond the narrow limits of his refuge. It is swept at the moment by a shower of spray. He shudders and closes his eyes again. The brigadier persuades, exhorts, commands. The Russian shakes his head and intimates that he neither speaks nor understands French. He is a brave and gallant gentleman. Shells cannot terrify him, nor the fiercest stuttering of the field guns make him hesitate in advance, but in a certain stage of seasickness the ears of very heroes are deaf to duty's call.

A little later I take the cigar from my mouth and crush the glowing end on the deck. I am not seasick, but there are times when tobacco loses its attractiveness. The brigadier becomes strangely silent. His head shrinks down into the broad upturned collar of his coat. Only the Canadian sister remains cheerfully buoyant, her complexion as fresh, her cheeks as pink as when the rain washed them on the quay.

The throbbing of the engines ceases. For a brief time the ship wallows in the rolling seas. Then she begins to move backwards towards the breakwater of the harbour. The brigadier struggles to his feet and peers out.

"England at last," he says. "Thank goodness."

Women, officers, and men fling off the life-belts they have worn and crowd to the gangways. With shameless eagerness they push their way ashore. The voyage is over.

Along the pier long trains are drawn up waiting for us. We crowd into them; lucky men, or foreseeing men with seats engaged beforehand, fill the Pullman cars of the train which starts first. It runs through the sweet familiar English country incredibly swiftly and smoothly. Luncheon is served to us. On this train, at least, there still are restaurant cars. We eat familiar food and wonder that we ever in the old days grumbled at railway fare. We lie back, satisfied, and smoke.

But there is in us an excitement which even tobacco will not soothe. The train goes swiftly, but not half swiftly enough. We pass town and hamlet. Advertisement hoardings, grotesque flat images of cows, outrageous commendations of whisky or pills, appear in the fields. We are getting near London. Pipes are laid by. We fidget and fret. The houses we pass are closer together, get closer still, merge into a sea of grey-slated roofs. The air is thick, smoke-laden. The train slows down, stops, starts again, draws up finally by the long platform.

Then——! To every man his own dreams of heaven hereafter. To every man his own way of spending his leave.



CHAPTER XVII

A HOLIDAY

Holidays, common enough in civil life, are rare joys in the B.E.F. Leave is obtainable occasionally. But nobody speaks of leave as "holidays." It is a thing altogether apart. It is almost sacred. It is too thrilling, too rapturous to be compared to anything we knew before the war. We should be guilty of a kind of profanity if we spoke of leave as "holidays." It ought to have a picturesque and impressive name of its own; but no one has found or even attempted to find an adequate name for it. If we were pagans instead of professing to be Christians, if we danced round fountains and set up statues of Pan for our worship and knew nothing of the Hebrew spirit, we might get a name for "leave" out of the vocabulary of our religious life. Being what we are we cannot do that, but we rightly decline to compare leave with ordinary holidays.

Only a few men in the army succeed in getting what is properly called a holiday, a day or two off work with a change of scene. I got one, thanks to M. It is one of the many things, perhaps the least of them, for which I have to thank his friendship.

M. had formed an exaggerated, I fear a totally erroneous, idea of my powers of entertaining men. It occurred to him that it would be a good thing if I gave lectures to the men of the cavalry brigade to which he was attached. What he said to the general who commanded the division I do not know, but somehow, between the general and M., the thing was worked. I found myself with a permit to travel on railways otherwise barred to me and three golden days before me.

No one can say that life in my three camps was dull. Life is never dull or monotonous for a man who has plenty of pleasant work to do and a party of good friends as fellow-workers. But a change is always agreeable, and I looked forward to my trip with impatient excitement.

It was like being a schoolboy again and going forth to the Crystal Palace with money in my pocket, an entire half-crown, to be dribbled away in pennyworths of sherbet and visits to curious side-shows. That party was an annual affair for us that came in June as a celebration of the Queen's birthday. My visit to M. was in August, but the weather was still full summer.

As a lecturing tour that expedition was a flat failure. M.'s cavalry, officers and men, were frankly bored and I realised from the very start that I was not going to justify whatever M. said to the general about me.

In every other respect the holiday was a success. I enjoyed it enormously and I gained some very interesting experience. I saw French rural life, a glimpse of it. Cavalry cannot be concentrated in large camps as infantry are. When they are not wanted for fighting they are scattered in small parties over some country district where they can get water and proper accommodation for their horses. The men are billeted in farm-houses. The officers live in chateaux and mess in the dining-halls of French country gentlemen if such accommodation is available, or take over two or three houses in a village, sleep where they can and mess in the best room which the interpreter and the billeting officer can find.