As we sat down to the stew which our orderly had compounded with the assistance of the ingenious Mr. Maconochie, the Camp Commandant sighed heavily. "I am a kind of receptacle for the waste products of everybody's mind," he exclaimed petulantly. "This morning I was rung up on the telephone and asked if I would bury a dead horse for the Canadian Division; I told them I hadn't a Prayer Book and it couldn't be done. Then two nuns called and asked me to find a discreet soldier—un soldat discret—to escort them to Hazebrouck; I told them to take my servant, who is a married man with five children. Then an old lady sent round to ask me to come and drown her cat's kittens; I said it was impossible, as she hadn't complied with the Notification of Births Act."

The Mess listened to this plaintive recital in unsympathetic silence. Perhaps they reflected that as the Camp Commandant is one of those to whom much, in the way of perquisites of office, is given, from him much may legitimately be expected. "Well, you may think yourself lucky you haven't my job," said the Deputy-Assistant-Adjutant-General at length. "I'm getting rather fed up with casualty lists and strength returns. I'm like the man who boasted that his chief literary recreation was reading Bradshaw, except that I don't boast of it and it isn't a recreation—it's damned hard work. I have to read the Army List for about ten hours every day, for if I get an officer's initials wrong there's the devil to pay. And I spent half an hour between the telephone and the Army List to-day trying to find out who 'Teddy' was. The 102nd Welsh sent him in with their returns of officers' casualties as having died of heart failure on the 22nd inst."

"Well, but who is 'Teddy,' anyhow?" asked the Camp Commandant.

"He is the regimental goat," replied the D.A.A.G. "I suppose they thought it amusing. When I tumbled to it I told their Brigade Headquarters on the telephone that I quite understood their making him a member of their mess, as they belonged to the same species."

"Wait until you've had to track down a case of typhoid in billets," said the R.A.M.C. man who looks after infectious diseases. "I've been on the trail of a typhoid epidemic at La Croix Farm, where a company of the Downshires are billeted, and it made me sad. They had their filters with them and they swore they hadn't touched a drop of impure water, and that they treasured our regulations like the book of Leviticus. And yet the trail of that typhoid was all over my spot chart, and the thing was spreading like one of the seven plagues of Egypt. At last I tracked it down to an Army cook; the rotter had had typhoid about five years ago and simply poisoned everything he touched. He was what we call a carrier."

"What did you do with him?" said the A.D.M.S.

"He won't do any more cooking; I've sent him home. The fellow's a perfect leper, and ought to be interned like an alien enemy."

"Well, I'd rather have your job than mine even if prevention is more honourable than cure," said he whom we know as "Smells," and who has a nose like a fox-terrier's. "I am the avant-garde of the Staff, and you fellows can thank me that you are so merry and bright. If I didn't make my sanitary reconnaissances with my chloride of lime and fatigue parties, where would you all be?"

"We should all be home on sick-leave and very pleased to get it," said the A.P.M. ungratefully.

"The maire thinks I'm mad, of course," continued 'Smells,' "and I can't make him understand that cesspools and open sewers in the street are not conducive to health."

"I expect they think we're rather too fond of spreading broad our phylacteries," said the Assistant Provost Marshal. "Now I'm a sort of licensing authority, Brewster Sessions in fact, for this commune, and the estaminet proprietors think I'm a Temperance fanatic," he said, as he put forth his hand for the whisky bottle. "One of them told me the other day he preferred a German occupation to a British one, because the Huns let him sell as much spirits to their men as he liked. And yet I'm sure the little finger of a French provost-marshal is thicker than my loins any day."

"Yes," said the Camp Commandant, "it's our melancholy duty to be impertinent. I'm supposed to read all you fellows' letters before I stamp them. I'd be rather glad if they were liable to be censored again at the Base or somewhere else en route; it would relieve me of any compunction about the first reading, the text and preamble of the envelope would be good enough for me. You fellows write abominably."

"I'm something of a handwriting expert myself," said the A.P.M., ignoring the aspersion. "They have changed the colour of the passes again this month, and so I'm engaged in a fresh study of the A.G.'s signature; I believe he changes his style of handwriting with the colour of the pass. I wonder what is the size of the A.G.'s bank balance," he murmured dreamily; "I believe I could now forge his signature very artistically."

"I wish some one would start a school of handwriting at G.H.Q.," said the A.D.M.S. "I believe I receive more chits than any man on the staff." "Chits," it should be explained, are the billets-doux of the Army wherein officers send tender messages to one another and make assignations.

"Did you hear about that chit the Camp Commandant at the Headquarters of the ——th Corps sent to the A.Q.M.G.?" asked the A.P.M. "No? Well, the A.Q.M.G. of the other Army wrote to Ferrers asking if they had made use of any Ammonal and, if so, whether the results were satisfactory. Ferrers sent it on to the Camp Commandant for report and the Camp Commandant wrote back a chit saying plaintively, 'This is not understood. For what purpose is Ammonal used—is it a drug or an explosive?' Ferrers told him to ask the Medical Officer attached to Corps headquarters, which he did. Thereupon he wrote back another chit to Ferrers, saying that the M.O. had informed him that 'Ammonal' was a compound drug extensively used in America in cases of abnormal neurotic excitement, and that, so far as he knew, it was not a medical issue to Corps H.Q. He therefore regretted that he was unable to report results, but promised that if occasion should arise to administer it to any of the Corps H.Q. personnel he would faithfully observe the effects and report the same. When the A.Q.M.G. read the reply he betrayed a quite abnormal degree of neurotic excitement; in fact, he was quite nasty about it."

"What the devil did he mean?" asked the A.D.M.S.

"Well, that points the moral of your remarks about handwriting," said the A.P.M. encouragingly. "The Camp Commandant had written what looked like an 'o' in place of an 'a.' Ammonol is a drug; ammonal is an explosive."

"Well, I wish some one would teach the Huns how to write decently." The speaker was Summersby of the Intelligence Corps. The Intelligence are a corps of detectives and have to estimate the strength, the location, and the composition of the enemy's forces. Everything is grist that comes to their mill and they will perform surprising feats of induction. They can reconstruct a German Army Corps out of a Landwehr man's bootlace, his diary, his underclothing, or his shoulder-strap—but the greatest of these is his diary. "I've been studying the diaries of prisoners until I feel a Hun myself. They remind me of the diary I used to keep at school, they are all about eating and drinking. The Hun is a glutton and a wine-bibber. But I found something to-day—'Keine Gefangene' in an officer's field note-book."

"Translate, my Hunnish friend," said the A.P.M.

"No prisoners," replied Summersby shortly.

"I hope you handed the swine over to the P.M.," said the Camp Commandant.

"Well, no," said Summersby. "You see he had a plausible explanation—by the way, what perfect English those German officers talk; I'll bet that man has eaten our bread and salt some time. He said it was a Brigade order to the men not to make the taking of prisoners a pretext for going back to the rear in large parties but to leave them to the supports when they came up. The curious thing is that that officer belongs to the 112th and we've our eye on the 112th. One of their men, a fellow named Schmidt, who surrendered on the 19th of last month, said they'd had an order to take no prisoners but kill them all. His regiment was the 112th," he added darkly.

"The filthy swine!" we cried in a chorus, and our talk grew sombre as we exchanged reminiscences.

"What pleases me about you fellows," said Ponsonby, who had been listening with a languid air, and who was formerly in the F.O. where he composed florid speeches in elegant French for Hague Plenipotentiaries, "is your habits of speech. In diplomacy we contrive to talk a lot without saying anything, whereas Army men manage to talk little and say a great deal. You've got four words in the Army which seem to be a mighty present help in trouble at H.Q. Their sustaining properties are remarkable and they seem to tide over very anxious moments. When you are in a hole you say 'Damn all,' and when you are asked for instructions you cry 'Carry on.' I suppose it's by sitting tight and using those words with discrimination that you fellows arrive at greatness and attain Brigadier rank. That seems to be the first thing a third-grade staff-officer learns."

"The first thing a third-grade staff-officer learns is to speak respectfully of his superiors," said the A.P.M., as he hurled a cushion at Ponsonby, who caught it with a bow. Ponsonby is irrepressible and, in spite of his supercilious civilian airs, much is forgiven him. He turned to the D.A.A.G. and said, "Hooper, you've forgotten to say grace. For what we have not received"—he added, with a meaning glance at a Stilton cheese which the A.A.G.'s wife has sent out from home and which remained on the sideboard—"the Lord make us truly thankful." This was an allusion to the D.A.A.G.'s sacerdotal functions. For the Adjutant-General and his staff, who know the numbers of all the Field Ambulances, can lay hands—but not in the apostolic sense—upon every chaplain attached thereto; the A.G. is the Metropolitan of them all and can admonish, deprive, and suspend.

The D.A.A.G. ignored the plaintive benediction. "I think we've fixed it up with those Red Cross drivers," he said complacently. The A.G.'s department had been wrestling with the disciplinary problem presented by these birds of passage on the lines of communication. "We've decided that they are Army followers under section 176, sub-section 10, of the Army Act, and that you 'follow' the British Army from the moment you accept a pass to H.Q. My chief called some of them together yesterday, and being in a benevolent humour told them that they were now under military law and might be sentenced to anything from seven days' field-punishment to the punishment of death. This was pour encourager les autres. They looked quite thoughtful."

"That's a nice point," commented Ponsonby pensively. "Should an Army follower be hanged or is he entitled to be shot? I put it to you," he added, turning to the Judge-Advocate. "I want counsel's opinion."

"I never give abstract opinions," retorted the man of law. "But the safest course would be to hang him first and shoot him afterwards."

"Your counsel is as the counsel of Ahithophel," said Ponsonby. "I'll put you another problem. Is a carrier-pigeon an Army follower? Because Slingsby never has any appetite for dinner" (this was notoriously untrue), "and I have a strong suspicion that he converts—that's a legal expression for fraud, isn't it?—his carrier-pigeons into pigeon-pie. What is the penalty for fraudulent conversion of an Army follower?" Slingsby, who in virtue of his aquiline features is known as Aquila vulgaris, has charge of the carrier-pigeons and takes large baskets of them out to the Front every day; he is supposed to be training them by an intimate use of pigeon-English not to settle when the shells explode. Unfortunately his pigeons are usually posted as "missing," and go to some bourne from which no pigeon has ever been known to return. Ponsonby glances suspiciously at Slingsby's portly figure.

But the Judge-Advocate had stolen away to study a dossier of "proceedings," and his departure was the signal for a general dispersion. "Come and have a drink," said Ponsonby to the "I" man. "Can't, you slacker," was the reply. "I've got to go and make up an 'I' summary. 'Notes of an Air Reconnaissance. Distribution of the enemy's forces. Copy of a German Divisional Circular. Notes on the German system of signalling from their trenches.' You know the usual kind of thing. Just now we're trying to discover how many guns they've got in the batteries of their new formations. We've noticed that their 77-mm. projectiles now arrive in groups of four, and we suspect that two guns have been withdrawn. But it may be only a blind."

As we turned out into the darkened street to make our way to our respective offices a supply column rumbled over the pave, each of the seventy-two motor-lorries keeping its distance like the ships of a fleet. Despatch-riders with blue and white armlets whizzed past on their motor-bicycles, and high overhead was the loud droning hum of the aeroplane going home to roost. The thunder of guns was clearly audible from the north-east. The D.A.A.G. turned to me and said, "It's Hill 60 again. My old regiment's up there. And to-morrow the casualty returns will come in. Good God! will it never end?"



XXVI

FIAT JUSTITIA

PARQUET du Tribunal de Iere Instance d'Ypres

At last I had found it. I had spent a mournful morning at Ypres seeking out the procureur du roi, and I had sought in vain. He was nowhere to be found. Ypres was a city of catacombs, wrapt in a winding-sheet of mortar, fine as dust, which rose in clouds as the German shells winnowed among the ruins. The German guns had been threshing the ancient city like flails, beating her out of all recognition, beating her into shapes strange, uncouth, and lamentable. The Cloth Hall was little more than a deserted cloister of ruined arches, and the cathedral presented a spectacle at once tragic and whimsical—the brass lectern still stood upright in the nave confronting a congregation of overturned chairs as with a gesture of reproof. The sight of those scrambling chairs all huddled together and fallen headlong upon one another had something oddly human about it; it suggested a panic of ghosts. Ypres is an uncanny place.

We returned to Poperinghe, our way choked by a column of French troops, pale, hollow-eyed, their blue uniforms bleached by sun and rain until all the virtue of the dye had run out of them. Before resuming our hunt for the procureur du roi—who, we now found, had removed from Ypres to Poperinghe—we entered a restaurant for lunch. It was crowded with French officers, with whom a full-bosomed, broad-hipped Flemish girl exchanged uncouth pleasantries, and it possessed a weird and uncomely boy, who regarded A——, the Staff officer accompanying me, with a hypnotic stare. He peered at him from under drooping eyelids, flanking a nose without a bridge, and my companion didn't like it. "He is admiring you," I remarked by way of consolation, as indeed he was. "What do you call it?" said A—— petulantly to a R.A.M.C. officer who was lunching with us. The latter looked at the boy with a clinical eye. "Necrosis—syphilitic," he said dispassionately. "And he's handing us the cakes!" A—— exclaimed with horror. "Fetch me an ounce of civet." We declined the cakes, and, having paid our addition, hastily departed to resume our quest of the procureur.

Eventually we found the legend set out above. It was a placard stuck on the door of a private house. We entered and found ourselves in a kitchen with a stone floor; japanned tin boxes, calf-bound volumes, and fat registers, all stamped with the arms of Belgium, were grouped on the shelves of the dresser. A courteous gentleman, well-groomed and debonair, with waxed moustaches, greeted us. It was the procureur du roi. With him was another civilian—the juge d'instruction. They politely requested us to take a seat and to excuse a judicial preoccupation. The juge d'instruction was interrogating an inhabitant of Poperinghe. The procureur explained to me that the prevenu (the accused), who was not present but was within the precincts, was charged with calomnie[27] under Section 444 of the Code Penal. "But," I exclaimed in astonishment, "are you still administering justice?" "Pourquoi non?" he asked in mild surprise. It was true, he admitted, that his office at Ypres had been destroyed by shell-fire, the maison d'arret—in plain English, the prison—was open to the four winds of heaven, and warders and gendarmes had been called up to the colours. But justice must be done and the majesty of the King of the Belgians upheld. The King's writ still ran, even though its currency might be limited to the few square miles which were all that remained of Belgian territory in Belgian hands. All this he explained to me with such gravity that I felt further questions would be futile, if not impertinent. I therefore held my tongue and determined to follow the proceedings closely, being not a little curious to observe how the judgment would be enforced.

The witness took the oath to say the truth and nothing but the truth ("rien que la verite"), concluding with the solemn invocation, "Ainsi m'aide Dieu." The parties had elected to have the proceedings taken in French.

"Your name?" said the judge, as he studied the proces-verbal prepared by the procureur.

"Jules F——."

"Age?"

"Cinquante-cinq."

"Profession?"

"Cordonnier."

"Residence?"

"Rue d'Ypres 32."

This preliminary catechism being completed, the prosecutor unfolded his tale. He had been drinking the health of His Majesty the King of the Belgians and confusion to his enemies in an estaminet at the crowded hour of 7 P.M. The accused had entered, and in the presence of many of his neighbours had said to him, "Vous etes un Bosche." "Un Bosche!" repeated the witness indignantly. "It is a gross defamation." With difficulty had he been restrained from the shedding of blood. But, being a law-abiding, peaceful man and the father of a family, he volubly explained, he had laid this information ("denonciation") before the procureur du roi.

The judge looked grave. But he duly noted down the testimony, after some perfunctory cross-examination, and, it being read over to the witness, the judge added "Lecture faite," and the persisting witness signed the deposition with his own hand. The prosecutor having retired, two other witnesses, whom he had vouched to warranty, came forward and testified to the same effect. And they also signed their depositions and withdrew.

The magistrate ordered the usher to bring in the accused, who had been summoned to appear by a mandat d'amener. He was a stout, dark, convivial-looking soul, with a merry eye, not altogether convinced of the enormity of his delict, and inclined at first to deprecate these proceedings. But the dialectical skill of the magistrate soon tied him into knots, and reduced him to a state of extreme penitence.

"Where were you on the 3rd of April at 7 P.M.?" began the magistrate, making what gunners call a ranging shot. The accused appeared to have been everywhere in Poperinghe except at the estaminet. He had been to the butcher's, the baker's, and the candlestick-maker's.

"At what hour did you enter the Cafe a l'Harmonie?"

The accused tried to look as if he now heard of the Cafe "A l'Harmonie" for the first time, but under the searching eye of the magistrate he failed. He might, he conceded, have looked in there for a thirsty moment.

"Do you know Jules F——?" the magistrate persisted. The accused grudgingly admitted the existence of such a person. "Is he a German?" asked the magistrate pointedly. The accused pondered. "Would you call him a Bosche?" persisted the magistrate. "I never meant to call him 'a Bosche,'" the accused said in an unguarded moment. The magistrate pounced on him. He had found the range. After that the result was a foregone conclusion. The duel ended in the accused tearfully admitting he thought he must have been drunk, and throwing himself on the mercy of the magistrate.

"It is a grave offence," said the magistrate severely, as he contemplated the lachrymose delinquent. "An estaminet is a public place within the meaning of Section 444 of the Code Penal. Vous avez mechamment impute a une personne un fait precis qui est de nature a porter atteinte a son honneur." "And calculated to provoke a breach of the peace," he added. "It is punishable with a term of imprisonment not exceeding one year." The face of the accused grew long. "Or a fine of 200 francs," he pursued. The lips of the accused quivered. "You may have to go to a maison de correction," continued the magistrate pitilessly. The accused wept.

I grew more and more interested. If this was a "correctional" offence, the magistrate must in the ordinary course of things commit the prisoner to a chambre de conseil, thereafter to take his trial before a Tribunal Correctionnel. But chamber and tribunal were scattered to the four corners of the earth.

Here, I felt sure, the whole proceedings must collapse and the magistrate be sadly compelled to admit his impotence. The magistrate, however, appeared in nowise perturbed, nor did he for a moment relax his authoritative expression. He was turning over the pages of the Code d'Instruction Criminelle, glancing occasionally at a now wholly penitent prisoner trembling before the majesty of the law. At last he spoke. "I will deal with you," he said with an air of indulgence, "under Chapter VIII. of the Code. You will be bound over to come up for judgment at the end of the war if called upon. You will deposit a cautionnement of twenty francs. And now, gentlemen, we are at your service."

"Fiat justitia ruat coelum," whispered A—— to me, as the prisoner, deeply impressed, opened a leather purse and counted out four greasy five-franc notes.

FOOTNOTE:

[27] Defamation. It is a misdemeanour according to Belgian law.



XXVII

HIGHER EDUCATION

British Headquarters must, I think, be the biggest Military Academy in the world. It has its Sandhurst and its Woolwich and even its Camberley. It ought long ago to have been incorporated by Order in Council as a University with Sir John French as Chancellor. It has more schools in the Art of War than I can remember, and every School has an Instructor who deserves to rank as a full-time Professor. To graduate in one of those schools you must get a fortnight's leave from your trenches or your battery, at the end of which time you return to do a little post-graduate work of a very practical kind with the aid of a machine-gun or a trench-mortar. At the beginning of the war higher education at G.H.Q. was somewhat neglected, and the company officer who desired to improve himself in the lethal arts had to be content with private study. Company officers went in for applied chemistry by making flares out of a test-tube full of water, delicately balanced in a bully-beef tin containing sodium. The tins were tied to the barbed-wire entanglements in front of our trenches, and when the stealthy Hun, creeping on his stomach, bumped against the wire the test-tube overflowed into the tin and a lurid patch of greenish flame revealed the clumsy visitor to our look-outs. That was before we were supplied with calcium flares. Then, too, the sappers went in for experimental research by making trench-mortars out of old stove-pipes.

To-day all that is changed. A chemical corps has come out to join the sappers, and the gunners have received some highly finished trench-mortars from Vickers's. A trench mortar is a kind of toy howitzer and very useful when you want to try conclusions with a neighbouring trench at short range. The mortars are not exactly things to play with, and so two "schools" of mortars have been instituted to teach R.G.A. men how to handle them. Every morning at nine o'clock two young subalterns meet their class of fifty pupils in a chateau, and explain with the aid of a diagram on a blackboard the internal economy of the mortar and its 50-lb. bomb, the adjustment of angles of elevation to ranges, and the respective offices of fuse, charge, and detonator. When the class have had enough of this they go off to a neighbouring field to simulate trench warfare and hold a demonstration. This is real sport. They have dug a sector of trenches, duly traversed, and at some two or three hundred yards distance have dug another sector and decorated it realistically with barbed-wire entanglements. Thither one afternoon we conveyed the mortar to the first trenches on an improvised carriage, placed it behind one of the traverses, and duly clamped it down. The subaltern took up a periscope and got the thread-line on the target—you find the range without instruments and by your own intuitions. "Three hundred, I think," he remarked pensively. A pupil adjusted the range indicator at 71.30 to get the elevation, and his assistant took up what looked like a huge jar of preserved ginger. It was the bomb. Having put the tail to it he inserted the detonator. "Fuse at 27." He set the indicator with as much care as if he were setting the hands of his watch. The man took the fuse delicately, put in the test-tube and attached the lanyard. These operations had been closely followed by the class, who made a circle round the bomb like a football "scrum." It was now time to line the trenches, for the "tail" of the bomb is apt to kick viciously when the thing is fired. As they spread out, the man removed the two safety-pins in the top of the fuse and pulled the lanyard. There was a voice of thunder and a sheet of flame, followed by what seemed an interminable pause. We scanned the brown furrows in front of us and suddenly the earth shot skywards in a fan; a cloud of dirty-black smoke floated over our target. The whole class leapt the parapet and streamed away across the furrows like a pack of hounds in full cry, until they suddenly disappeared below the surface of the earth. We followed and found them standing in a huge crater whose sides were hollowed out as neatly as those of a cup. "Done it again," said the subaltern complacently, "we've never had a blind."

At the Machine-gun School they do things on a larger scale, and Wren's could teach them nothing in the art of cramming. The Instructor reckons to put his class of 200 officers and men through a six months' course in a fortnight. There is need for it. The Germans started this war with eleven machine-guns (it is now anything from twenty to forty) to a battalion. We started with two. For years they have enlisted, trained, and paid a special class of men to man them. Consequently we had a great deal of leeway to make up. We are making it up, hand over fist, thanks to the Instructor, one of the most brilliant and devoted officers I know, and a man who spends his nights in inventing or perfecting improvements. He has got a pocket edition of a machine-gun made of tempered steel and weighing only 27 lb., as against our old one, which is of gun-metal and weighs 58 lb.—a material difference when it is a question of an advance. The new one, he explains somewhat illogically, with paternal pride, can be carried into action "like a baby." Having decided to give it a trial we carried it tenderly to a quarry and proceeded to "feed" it with a belt of cartridges. The Instructor set up a small stick against the bank of a gravel quarry and returned and adjusted the tangent-sight at 100 on the standard. He got the fore-sight and back-sight in a line on the stick, seized the traversing-handles, released the safety-catch, and pressed the button with his right thumb with the persistency of a man who cannot make the waiter answer the electric bell. "Tap—tap—tap." There was a series of explosions as though the sparking plug of a motor-bicycle was playing tricks. The target danced like a thing possessed. It hopped and skipped and curtsied under that deadly stream of bullets. Then he slowly swept that gravel bank with the traversing handles till the pebbles jumped like hailstones. "I think she'll do," he remarked appreciatively as he folded up the tripod.

The R.E. is the Army's school of technology. To do a survey or make a bridge or lay a telephone is all in the day's work. But your sapper is a man of ideas, and is for ever seeking out new inventions. So he has turned his attention to chemistry, and "R.E." has a chemical corps which has put aside the blow-pipe and the test-tube at home to come out and study the applied chemistry of war. Just now they are engaged in discovering the most effective method of laying noxious gases. Copper vessels of ammonia in a trench to disperse the gas when it gets there are all very well, but by that time you may have more pressing attentions of the enemy to engage you; the thing is to prevent the gas getting there. Hence ingenious minds are considering how to project with a spray something upon the advancing fog which will bring it to earth in the form of an innocuous compound. Spray that something over the parapet, and if you can spray it far enough and wide enough you may precipitate the deadly green and brown mists into chlorides or bromides which will be as harmless as bleaching-powder and not less salubrious.

Others have turned their attention to automatic flares. You can get a startling illuminant if you suspend a test-tube containing sulphuric acid in a vessel of chlorate of potash, and it will be all the better if you add a little common sugar and salt. You balance your test-tube in the hollow of a bamboo stick and fill the top knot of the stick with the chlorate of potash; then you plant your sticks, not too securely, outside your barbed-wire entanglements, and string them together with a trip-wire. As for the patrolling Hun who bumps against that trip-wire, it were better for him that a millstone were hung round his neck.

This is Higher Education and post-graduate research. But elementary education is not neglected. At the H.Q. of the —th Corps is an O.T.C. where privates in the H.A.C. and the Artists practise the precepts of the Infantry Manual and study night operations in the meadows within sound of the guns.

Truly it is, in the words of the stout Puritan, a nation not slow and dull but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.



XXVIII

THE LITTLE TOWNS OF FLANDERS AND ARTOIS

The little towns of Flanders and Artois are Aire, Hazebrouck, Bethune, Armentieres, Bailleul, Poperinghe, and Cassel. They are known in the Army vernacular as Air, Hazybrook, Betoon, Arm-in-tears, Ballyhool (occasionally Belial), Poperingy, and Kassel. The fairest of these is Cassel. For Cassel is set upon a hill which rises from the interminable plain, salient and alluring as a tor in Somerset, and seems to say to the fretful wayfarer, "Come unto Me all ye that are weary, and I will give you rest." For upon the hill of Cassel the air is sweet and fresh, the slopes are musical with a faint lullaby of falling showers, as the wind plays among the birches and the poplars, and over all there is a great peace. The motor-lorries avoid the declivities of Cassel, and the horsemen pass by on the other side. Some twenty windmills—no less and perhaps more—are perched like dovecots on the hill, lifting their sails to the blue sky. Some day I will seek out a notary at Cassel and will get him to execute a deed of conveyance assigning to me, with no restrictive covenants, the freehold of one of those mills, for I have coveted a mill ever since I succumbed to the enchantments of Lettres de mon moulin. True, Flanders is not Provence, and the croaking of the frogs, croak they never so amorously, among the willows in the plains below is a poor exchange for the chant of the cigale. But these mills look out over a landscape that is now dearer to me than Abana and Pharpar, for many a gallant friend of mine lies beneath its sod.

Cassel is approached by a winding road that turns and returns upon itself like a corkscrew, and is bordered by an avenue of trees. It has a bandstand—what town in Flanders and Artois has not?—and a church. Cheek by jowl with the church is a place of convenience, which seems to me profane in more senses than one. I have never been able to make up my mind whether such secularisation of a church wall is the expression of anti-clerical antipathies, or of a clerical common-sense peculiarly French in its practical and unblushing acceptance of the elementary facts of life. But about Cassel I am not so sure. The sight of that shameless annexe is too familiar in France to please our fastidious English tastes—it seems to express a truculent nonconformity, it is too like a dissenting chapel-of-ease.

Wherever God erects a house of prayer The devil always builds a chapel there.

I have never had the courage to solve my uncertainties by buttonholing a Frenchman and asking him what is the truth of the matter. I am sure Anatole France could supply me with any number of whimsical explanations, all of them suggestive, and not one of them true.

But, except for this sauciness, Cassel is a demure and pleasant place.

Bailleul is mean in comparison, though it has a notable church tower in which there are traces of some Byzantine imagination brought hither, perhaps, by a Spanish Army of occupation. Also it has a tea-room which is the trysting-place of all the officers in billets, and the chatelaine of which answers your lame and halting French in nimble English. On the road to Locre it has those Baths and Wash-houses which have become so justly famous, and whence hosts of British soldiers come forth like Naaman white as snow, but infinitely more companionable. Almost any day you may see a bathing-towel unit marching thither or thence in column of route, their towels held at the slope or the trail as it pleases their fancy. And in a field outside Bailleul I have seen open-air smithies and the glow of hot coals, the air resounding with the clink of hammers upon the anvil—a cheering spectacle on a wet and inclement winter's day. But Bailleul has few amenities and no charms. It is, however, occasionally visited by that amazing troupe of variety artistes, known as the Army Pierrots, who provide the men in billets with a most delectable entertainment for 50 centimes, the proceeds being a "deodand," and appropriated to charitable uses. For all that, Bailleul stinks in the nostrils of fatigue-parties.

Bethune is like the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land, for it is the rendezvous of the British Army, and men tramp miles to warm their hands at its fires of social life. Its patisserie has the choicest cakes, and its hairdresser's the most soothing unguents of any town in our occupation. It has a great market-place, where the peasants do a thriving business every Saturday, producing astonished rabbits by the ears from large sacks, like a conjuror, and holding out live and plaintive fowls for sensual examination by pensive housewives. Also it has a town-hall in which I once witnessed the trial by court-martial of a second-lieutenant in the R.A.M.C. for ribaldry in his cups and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman—a spectacle as melancholy as it is rare, and of which the less said the better. It has a church with some lurid glass of indifferent quality, and (if I remember rightly) a curious dovecote of a tower. The transepts are hemmed in by shops and warehouses. To the mediaevalist there is nothing strange in such neighbourliness of the world and the Church. The great French churches of the Middle Ages—witness Notre Dame d'Amiens with its inviting ambulatory—were places of municipal debate, and their sculpture was, to borrow the bold metaphor of Viollet-le-Duc, a political "liberty of speech" at a time when the chisel of the sculptor might say what the pen of the scrivener dared not, for fear of the common hangman, express. Bethune is not the only place where I have seen shops coddling churches, and the conjunction was originally less impertinent than it now seems. It was not that the Church was profaned, but that the world was consecrated; honest burgesses trading under the very shadow of the flying buttresses were reminded that usury was a sin, and that to charge a "just price" was the beginning of justification by works. But I have not observed that the shopkeepers of Bethune now entertain any very mediaeval compunction about charging the British soldier an unjust price.

Armentieres is on the high road to Lille, but at present there is no thoroughfare. It's a dispiriting town, given over to industrial pursuits, and approached by rows of mean little cottages such as you may see on the slopes of the mining valleys of South Wales. Two things stand out in my memory—one, the spectacle of a corporal being tried for his life in the Town Hall by a court-martial—there had been a quarrel over a girl in billets and he had shot his comrade; the other the sight of a regiment of Canadians ("Princess Pat's," I believe), drawn up in the square for parade one winter afternoon before they went into the trenches for the first time. And a very gallant and hefty body of men they were.

Poperinghe is a dismal place, and to be avoided.

Hazebrouck is not without some pretentiousness. It has the largest place of any of them, with a town-hall of imposing appearance, but something of a whited sepulchre for all that. I remember calling on a civilian dignitary there—I forget what he was; he sat in a long narrow corridor-like room, all the windows were hermetically sealed, a gas-stove burnt pungently, some fifty people smoked cigarettes, and at intervals the dignitary spat upon the floor and then shuffled his foot over the spot as a concession to public hygiene. Therefore I did not tarry. The precincts of the railway-station are often crowded by batches of German prisoners, villainous-looking rascals, and usually of the earth earthy. I watched some of them entraining one day; with them was a surly German officer who looked at his fellow-prisoners with contempt, the crowd of inhabitants with dislike, and (so it seemed to me) his guards with hatred. No one spoke to him, and he stood apart in melancholy insolence. Perhaps he was the German officer of whom the story is told that, being conducted to the Base in a third-class carriage in the company of some of his own men, and under the escort of some British soldiers, he declaimed all the way down against being condemned to such low society, until one of his guards, getting rather "fed up" with it all, bluntly cut him short with the admonition: "Stow it, governor, we'd have hired a blooming Pullman if we'd known we was going to have the pleasure of your society. Yus, and we'd have had Sir John French 'ere to meet you. But yer'll have to put up with us low fellows for a bit instead, which if yer don't like it, yer can lump it, and if yer won't lump it, where will yer have it?" and he tapped his bayonet invitingly. Needless to say, the speaker's pleasantry was impracticable. But the officer did not know that; he only knew the way they have in Germany. Wherefore the officer relapsed into a thoughtful silence.

Hazebrouck has a witty and pleasant procureur de la Republique, who once confided to me that the English were "irresistible." "In war?" I asked. "Vraiment," he replied, "but I meant in love."

But the towns occupied by our Army are monotonously lacking in distinction. To tell the truth they wear an impoverished look, and are singularly unprepossessing. I prefer the villages, the small chateaux built on grassy mounds surrounded by moats, and the timbered farm-houses with their red-tiled roofs and barns big enough to billet a whole company at a pinch. The country is one vast bivouac, and every cottage, farm, and mansion is a billet. Near the edge of the Front you may see men who have just come out of action; I remember once meeting a group of Royal Irish, only forty-seven left out of a Company, who had been in the attack by the 8th Division at Fleurbaix, and I gazed at them with something of the respectful consternation with which the Babylonians must have regarded Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego after their ordeal in the fiery furnace. Yet nothing of their demeanour betrayed the brazen fury they had gone through; they sat by the hedge cleaning their accoutrements with the utmost nonchalance. They reminded me of the North Staffords, one of whose officers, whom I know very well, when I asked him what were his impressions of a battle, replied, after some reflection: "I haven't got any; all I can remember of a hot corner we were in near Oultersteen was that my men, while waiting to advance, were picking blackberries." It was a man of the North Staffords who, according to the same unimpeachable authority, was heard shouting out when half the trench was blown in by a shell, and he had extricated himself with difficulty: "'Ere, where's my pipe? Some one's pinched my pipe!"

But it isn't always quite as comforting as that. The servant of a friend of mine, a young subaltern in the Black Watch, whom, alas! like so many other friends, I shall never see again, in describing the church parade held after the battle of Loos, in which his master was killed by a shell, wrote that when the chaplain gave out the hymn "Rock of Ages" the men burst into tears, their voices failed them, and they broke down utterly. And I remember that on one occasion when some four-fifths of the officers of a certain battalion had gone down in the advance, and the shaken remnant fell back upon their trenches, deafened and distraught, one of the officers—he had been a master in a great public school before the war—took out of his pocket a copy of the Faerie Queene, and began in a slow, even voice to read the measured cadences of one of its cantos, and, having read, handed it to a subaltern and asked him to follow suit. The others listened, half in wonder, half in fear, thinking he had lost his senses, but there was method in his madness and a true inspiration. The musical rhythm of the words distracted their terrible memories, and soon acted like a charm upon their disordered nerves.

And on his breast a bloody cross he bore, The dear remembrance of his dying Lord, For whose sweet sake that glorious badge he wore, And dead (as living) ever him adored: Upon his shield the like was also scored, For sovereign hope, which in his help he had: Right faithful true he was in deed and word; But of his cheer did seem too solemn sad: Yet nothing did he dread, but ever was ydrad.

Clusters of men in billets; men doing a route-march to keep them fit; Indian cavalry jogging along on the footpath with lances in rest; herds of tethered horses in rest-camps; a string of motor-buses painted a khaki-tint; a "mobile" (a travelling workshop) with its dynamo humming like a top and the mechanics busy upon the lathe; an Army Postal van coming along, like a friend in need, to tow my car, stranded in the mud, with a long cable; sappers, like Zaccheus, up a tree (but not metaphorically); despatch-riders whizzing past at sixty miles an hour—these are familiar sights of the lines of communication, and they lend a variety to the monotonous countryside without which it would be dull indeed. For it is a countryside of interminable straight lines—straight roads, straight hop-poles, and poplars not less straight, reminding one in winter of one of Hobbema's landscapes without their colouring. But to the south of the zone of our occupation, as you leave G.H.Q. for the Base, you exchange these plains of sticky clay and stagnant dykes for a pleasant country of undulating downs and noble beech woods, and one seems to shake off a nightmare of damp despondency.

It may be remarked that I have said nothing of Ypres. The explanation is painfully simple. Ypres has ceased to exist. It is merely a heap of stones, and the trilithons on Salisbury Plain are not more desolate.



XXIX

THE FRONT ONCE MORE

A witty subaltern once described the present war as a period of long boredom punctuated by moments of intense fear. All men would emphasise the boredom, and most men would admit the fear. The only soldiers I ever met who affected to know nothing of the fear were Afridis, and the Afridi is notoriously a ravisher of truth. But the predominant feeling—in the winter months at any rate—was the boredom. There was a time when some units, owing to the lack of reserves, were only relieved once every three weeks, and time hung heavy on their hands. Under these circumstances they began to take something more than a professional interest in their neighbours opposite. The curiosity was reciprocated. Items of news, more or less mendacious, were exchanged when the trenches were near enough to permit of vocal intercourse. Curious conventions grew up, and at certain hours of the day and, less commonly, of the night, there was a kind of informal armistice. In one section the hour of 8 to 9 A.M. was regarded as consecrated to "private business," and certain places indicated by a flag were regarded as out of bounds by the snipers on both sides. On many occasions working parties toiled with pick and shovel within talking distance of one another, and, although it was, of course, never safe to presume upon immunity, they usually forbore to interfere with one another. The Bedfords and the South Staffords worked in broad daylight with their bodies half exposed above the trenches, raising the parapet as the water rose. About 200 yards away the Germans were doing the same. Neither side interfered with the navvy-work of the other, and for the simplest of all reasons: both were engaged in fighting a common foe—the underground springs. When two parties are both in danger of being drowned they haven't time to fight. To speak of drowning is no hyperbole; the mud of Flanders in winter is in some places like a quicksand, and men have been sucked under beyond redemption. A common misery begat a mutual forbearance.

It was under such circumstances that the following exchange of pleasantries took place. The men of a certain British regiment heard at intervals a monologue going on in the trenches opposite, and every time the speaker stopped his discourse shouts of guttural laughter arose, accompanied by cries of "Bravo, Mueller!" "Sehr komisch!" "Noch einmal, Mueller!" Our men listened intently, and an acquaintance with German, so imperfect as to be almost negligible, could not long disguise from them the fact that their Saxon neighbours possessed a funny man whose name was Mueller. Their interest in Mueller, always audible but never visible, grew almost painful. At last they could restrain it no longer. At a given signal they began chanting, like the gallery in a London theatre, except that their voices came from the pit:

We—want—Mueller! We—want—Mueller! We—want—Mueller!

The refrain grew more and more insistent. At last a head appeared above the German parapet. It rose gradually, as though the owner were being hoisted by unseen hands. He rose, as the principal character in a Punch and Judy show rises, with jerky articulations of his members from the ventriloquial depths below. The body followed, until a three-quarter posture was attained. The owner, with his hand upon his heart, bowed gracefully three times and then disappeared. It was Mueller!

It is some months since I was in the British trenches,[28] and I often wonder how our men have accommodated themselves to the ever-increasing multiplication of the apparatus of war. The fire trenches I visited were about wide enough to allow two men to pass one another—and that was all. Obviously the wider your trench the greater your exposure to the effects of shell-fire, and if we go on introducing trench-mortars, and gas-pumps, and gas-extinguishers, to say nothing of a great store of bombs, as pleasing in variety and as startling in their effects as Christmas crackers, our trenches will soon be as full of furniture as a Welsh miner's parlour. But doubtless the sappers have arranged all that. Some of these improvements are viewed by company officers without enthusiasm. The trench-mortar, for example, is distinctly unpopular, for it draws the enemy's fire, besides being an uncanny thing to handle, although the handling is done not by the company but by a "battery" of R.G.A. men, who come down and select a "pitch." I have seen a trench-mortar in action—it is like a baby howitzer, and makes a prodigious noise. Our own men deprecate it and the enemy resent it. It is an invidious thing. The gas-extinguisher is less objectionable, and, incidentally, less exacting in the matter of accommodation. It is a large copper vessel resembling nothing so much as the fire-extinguishing cylinders one sees in public buildings at home. About our gas-pumps I know nothing except by hearsay. They are in charge of "corporals" in the chemical corps of the sappers, and your corporal is, in nine cases out of ten, a man whose position in the scientific world at home is one of considerable distinction. He is usually a lecturer or Assistant-Professor in Chemistry at one of our University Colleges who has left his test-tubes and quantitative analysis for the more exciting allurements of the trenches. I sometimes wonder what name the fertile brain of the British soldier has found for him—probably "the squid." He has three gases in his repertoire, each more deadly than the other. One of them is comparatively innocuous—it disables without debilitating; and its effect passes off in about twenty minutes. The truth is that we do not take very kindly to the use of this kind of thing. Still, our men know their business, and our gas, whichever variety it was, played a very effective part in the capture of the Hohenzollern Redoubt.

For the greater part of the winter months the "Front" was, to all appearances above ground, as deserted as the Sahara and almost as silent. Everybody who had to be there was, for obvious reasons, invisible, and the misguided wayfarer who found himself between the lines was in a wilderness whose intimidating silence was occasionally interrupted by the sound of projectiles coming he knew not whence and going he knew not whither. The effect was inexpressibly depressing. But a mile or two behind our lines all was animation, for here were Battalion and Brigade Headquarters, all linked up by a network of field telephones, which in turn communicated with Divisional Headquarters farther back. Baskets of carrier-pigeons under the care of a pigeon fancier, who figures in the Army List as a captain in the R.E., are kept at these places for use in sudden emergency when the wires get destroyed by shell-fire. The sappers must, I think, belong to the order of Arachnidae; they appear to be able to spin telephone wires out of their entrails at the shortest notice. Moreover, they possess an uncanny adhesiveness, and a Signal Company man will leg up a tree with a coil of wire on his arm and hang glutinously, suspended by his finger-tips, while he enjoys the view. These acrobatic performances are sometimes exchanged for equestrian feats. He has been known to lay cable for two miles across country at a gallop with the cable-drum paying out lengths of wire. The sapper is the "handy man" of the Army.

The location of these Headquarters on our side of the line is a constant object of solicitude to the enemy on the other. Very few officers even on our side know where they all are. I had confided to me, for the purpose of my official duties, a complete list of such Headquarters, and the first thing I did, in pursuance of my instructions, was to commit it to memory and then burn it. To find out the enemy's H.Q.—with a view to making them as unhealthy as possible—is almost entirely the work of aeroplane reconnaissance. To discover the number and composition of the units whose H.Q. they are is the work of our "Intelligence." Of our Intelligence work the less said the better—by which I intend no aspersion but quite the contrary. The work is extraordinarily effective, but half its effectiveness lies in its secrecy. It is all done by an elaborate process of induction. I should hesitate to say that the "I" officers discover the location of the H.Q. of captured Germans by a geological analysis of the mud on the soles of their boots, in the classical manner of Sherlock Holmes; but I should be equally indisposed to deny it. There is nothing too trivial or insignificant to engage the detective faculties of an "I" man. He has to allow a wide margin for the probability of error in his calculations; shoulder-straps, for example, are no longer conclusive data as to the composition of the enemy's units, for the intelligent Hun has taken of late to forging shoulder-straps with the same facility as he forges diplomatic documents. Oral examination of prisoners has to be used with caution. But there are other resources of which I shall say nothing. It is not too much to say, however, that we have now a pretty complete comprehension of the strength, composition, and location of most German brigades on the Western front. Possibly the Germans have of ours. One thing is certain. Any one who has seen the way in which an Intelligence staff builds up its data will not be inclined to criticise our military authorities for what may seem to an untutored mind a mere affectation of mystery about small things. In war it is never safe to say De minimis non curatur.

If "I" stands for the Criminal Investigation Department (and the study of the Hun may be legitimately regarded as a department of criminology) the Provost-Marshal and his staff may be described as a kind of Metropolitan Police. The P.M. and his A.P.M.'s are the Censores Morum of the occupied towns, just as the Camp Commandants are the Aediles. It is the duty of an A.P.M. to round up stragglers, visit estaminets, keep a cold eye on brothels, look after prisoners, execute the sentences of courts-martial, and control street traffic. Which means that he is more feared than loved. He is never obtrusive but he is always there. I remarked once when lunching with a certain A.P.M. that although I had already been three weeks at G.H.Q., and had driven through his particular district daily, I had never once been stopped or questioned by his police. "No," he said quietly, "they reported you the first day two minutes after you arrived in your car, and asked for instructions; we telephoned to G.H.Q. and found you were attached to the A.G.'s staff, and they received orders accordingly. Otherwise you might have had quite a lively time at X——," which was the next stage of my journey. G.H.Q. itself is patrolled by a number of Scotland Yard men, remarkable for their self-effacing habits and their modest preference for dark doorways. Indeed it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than to get into that town—or out of it. As for the "Society ladies," of whom one hears so much, I never saw one of them. If they were there they must have been remarkably disguised, and none of us knew anything of them. A conversational lesson in French or English may be had gratuitously by any Englishman or Frenchman who tries to get into G.H.Q.; as he approaches the town he will find a French sentry on the left and an English sentry on the right, the one with a bayonet like a needle, the other with a bayonet like a table-knife, and each of them takes an immense personal interest in you and is most anxious to assist you in perfecting your idiom. They are students of phonetics, too, in their way, and study your gutturals with almost pedantic affection for traces of Teutonisms. If the sentry thinks you are not getting on with your education he takes you aside like Joab, and smites you under the fifth rib—at least I suppose he does. If he is satisfied he brings his right hand smartly across the butt of his rifle, and by that masonic sign you know that you will do. But it is a mistake to continue the conversation.

Still, holders of authorised passes sometimes lose them, and unauthorised persons sometimes get hold of them and "convert" them to their own unlawful uses. The career of these adventurers is usually as brief as it is inglorious; when apprehended they are handed over to the French authorities, and the place that knew them knows them no more. They are shot into some mysterious oubliette. The rest is silence, or, as a mediaeval chronicler would say, "Let him have a priest."

We have taught the inhabitants of Flanders and Artois three things: one, to sing "Tipperary"; two, to control their street traffic; and three, to flush their drains. The spectacle of the military police on point duty agitatedly waving little flags like a semaphore in the middle of narrow and congested street corners was at first a source of great entertainment to the inhabitants, who appeared to think it was a kind of performance thoughtfully provided by the Staff for their delectation. Their applause was quite disconcerting. It all so affected the mind of one good lady at H—— that she used to rush out into the street every time she saw a motor-lorry coming and make uncouth gestures with her arms and legs, to the no small embarrassment of the supply columns, the confusion of the military police, and the unconcealed delight of our soldiers, who regard the latter as their natural enemy. Gentle remonstrances against such gratuitous assistance were of no avail, and eventually she was handed over to the French authorities for an inquiry into the state of her mind.

Drains are looked after by the Camp Commandant, assisted by the sanitary section of the R.A.M.C. It is an unlovely duty. I am not sure that the men in the trenches are not better off in this respect than the unfortunate members of the Staff who are supposed to live on the fat of the land in billets. In the trenches there are easy methods of disposing of "waste products"; along some portion of the French front, where the lines are very close together, the favourite method, so I have been told, is to hurl the buckets at the enemy, accompanied by extremely uncomplimentary remarks. In the towns where we are billeted public hygiene is a neglected study, and the unfortunate Camp Commandants have to get sewage pumps from England and vast quantities of chloride of lime. Fatigue parties do the rest.

The C.C. has, however, many other things to do.

Finding my office unprovided with a fire shovel, I wrote a "chit" to the C.C.:

Mr. M. presents his compliments to the Camp Commandant, and would be greatly obliged if he would kindly direct that a shovel be issued to his office.

A laconic message came back by my servant:

No. 105671A. The Camp Commandant presents his compliments to ————- Mr. M., and begs to inform him that he is not an 2 ironmonger. The correct procedure is for Mr. M. to direct his servant to purchase a shovel and to send in the account to the C.C., by whom it will be discharged.

The Commandant, quite needlessly, apologised to me afterwards for his reply, explaining mournfully that the whole staff appeared to be under the impression that he was a kind of Harrods' Stores. He could supply desks and tables—the sappers are amazingly efficient at turning them out at the shortest notice—and he could produce stationery, but he drew the line at ironmongery. But his principal task is to let lodgings.

The Q.M.G. and his satellites, who are the universal providers of the Army, have already been described. Their waggons are known as "transports of delight," and they can supply you with anything from a field-dressing to a toothbrush, and from an overcoat to a cake of soap. And as the Q.M.G. is concerned with goods, the A.G. is preoccupied with men. He makes up drafts as a railway transport officer makes up trains, and can tell you the location of every unit from a brigade to a battalion. Also, he and his deputy assistants make up casualty lists. It is expeditiously done; each night's casualty list contains the names of all casualties among officers up till noon of the day on which it is made out. (The lists of the men, which are, of course, a much bigger affair, are made up at the Base.) The task is no light one—the transposition of an initial or the attribution of a casualty to a wrong battalion may mean gratuitous sorrow and anxiety in some distant home in England. And there is the mournful problem of the "missing," the agonised letters from those who do not know whether those they love are alive or dead.

It is only right to say that everything that can possibly be done is done to trace such cases. More than that, the graves of fallen officers and men are carefully located and registered by a Graves Registry Department, with an officer of field rank in charge of it. Those graves lie everywhere; I have seen them in the flower-bed of a chateau used as the H.Q. of an A.D.M.S.; they are to be found by the roadside, in the curtilage of farms, and on the outskirts of villages. The whole of the Front is one vast cemetery—a "God's Acre" hallowed by prayers if unconsecrated by the rites of the Church. The French Government has shown a noble solicitude for the feelings of the bereaved, and a Bill has been submitted to the Chamber of Deputies for the expropriation of every grave with a view to its preservation.

The Deputy Judge-Advocate-General and his representatives with the Armies are legal advisers to the Staff in the proceedings of courts-martial. The Judge-Advocate attends every trial and coaches the Court in everything, from the etiquette of taking off your cap when you are taking the oath to the duty of rejecting "hearsay." He never prosecutes—that is always the task of some officer specially assigned for the purpose—but he may "sum up." Officers are not usually familiar with the mysteries of the Red Book,[29] however much they may know of the King's Regulations; and a Court requires careful watching. One Judge-Advocate whom I knew, who was as zealous as he was conscientious, instituted a series of Extension lectures for officers on the subject of Military Law, and used to discourse calmly on the admissibility and inadmissibility of evidence in the most "unhealthy" places. Speaking with some knowledge of such matters, I should say that court-martial proceedings are studiously fair to the accused, and, all things considered, their sentences do not err on the side of severity. Even the enemy is given the benefit of the doubt. There was a curious instance of this. A wounded Highlander, finding himself, on arrival at one of the hospitals, cheek by jowl with a Prussian, leapt from his bed and "went for" the latter, declaring his intention to "do him in," as he had, he alleged, seen him killing a wounded British soldier in the field. There was a huge commotion, the two were separated, and the Judge-Advocate was fetched to take the soldier's evidence. The evidence of identification was, however, not absolutely conclusive—one Prussian guardsman is strangely like another. The Prussian therefore got the benefit of the doubt.

The prisoner gets all the assistance he may require from a "prisoner's friend" if he asks for one, and the prosecutor never presses a charge—he merely unfolds it. Moreover, officers are pretty good judges of character, and if the accused meets the charge fairly and squarely, justice will be tempered with mercy. I remember the case of a young subaltern at the Base who was charged with drunkenness. His defence was as straightforward as it was brief:

I had just been ordered up to the Front. So I stood my friends a dinner; I had a bottle of Burgundy, two liqueurs, and a brandy and soda, and—I am just nineteen.

This ingenuous plea in confession and avoidance pleased the Court. He got off with a reprimand.

The liaison officers deserve a chapter to themselves. Their name alone is so endearing. Their mission is not, as might be supposed, to promote mariages de convenance between English Staff officers and French ladies, but to transmit billets-doux between the two Armies and, generally, to promote the amenities of military intercourse. As a rule they are charming fellows, chosen with a very proper eye to their personal qualities as well as their proficiency in the English language. Among them I met a Count belonging to one of the oldest families in France, an Oriental scholar of European reputation, and a Professor of English literature. The younger ones studied our peculiarities with the most ingratiating zeal, and one of them, in particular, played and sang "Tipperary" with masterly technique at an uproarious tea-party in a patisserie at Bethune. Also they smoothed over little misunderstandings about delits de chasse, gently forbore to smile at our French, and assisted in the issue of the laisser-passer. Doubtless they performed many much more weighty and mysterious duties, but I only speak of what I know. To me they were more than kind; they gave me introductions to their families when I went on official visits to Paris and to the French lines; zealously assisted me to hunt down evidence, and sometimes accompanied me on my tour of investigation. Among the many agreeable memories I cherish of the camaraderie at G.H.Q. the recollection of their constant kindness and courtesy is not the least.

One word before I leave the subject of the Staff. There has been of late a good deal of pestilential gossip by luxurious gentlemen at home about the Staff and its work. It is, they say, very bad—mostly beer and skittles. I have already referred to these charges elsewhere; here I will only add one word. A Staff is known by its chief. He it is who sets the pace. During the time I was attached to it, the G.H.Q. Staff had two chiefs in succession. The first was a brilliant soldier of high intellectual gifts, now chief of the Imperial Staff at home, who, although embarrassed by indifferent health, worked at great pressure night and day. His successor at G.H.Q. is a man of stupendous energy, commanding ability, and great force of character, who has risen from the ranks to the great position he now holds. By their chiefs ye shall know them. Under such as these there was and is no room for the "slacker" at G.H.Q. He got short shrift. There were very few of that undesirable species at G.H.Q., and as soon as they were discovered they were sent home. I sometimes wonder whether one could not trace, if it were worth while (which it isn't), these ignoble slanders to their origin in the querulous lamentations of these deported gentlemen, whence they have percolated into Parliamentary channels. But it really isn't worth while. The public has, I believe, taken the thing at its true valuation. In plain speech it is "all rot."

NOTE.—The last paragraph was written before the recent changes at G.H.Q. and at the War Office, but the reader will not need any assistance in the identification of the two distinguished Chiefs of Staff here referred to.—J.H.M.

FOOTNOTES:

[28] The writer's experience of the trenches is described in some detail in Chapter VIII.

[29] The Manual of Military Law.



XXX

HOME AGAIN

Sykes had finished packing my kit and had succeeded with some difficulty in re-establishing the truth of the axiom that a whole is greater than its parts. When I contemplated my valise and its original constituents, it seemed to me that the parts would prove greater than the whole, and I had in despair abandoned the problem to Sykes. He succeeded, as he always did. One of the first things that an officer's servant learns is that, as regards the regulation Field Service allowance of luggage, nothing succeeds like excess.

Sykes had not only stowed away my original impedimenta but had also managed to find room for various articles of vertu which had enriched my private collection, to wit:

(1) One Bavarian bayonet of Solingen steel.

(2) Two German time-fuses with fetishistic-looking brass heads.

(3) A clip of German cartridges with the bullets villainously reversed.

(4) A copper loving-cup—i.e., an empty shell-case presented to me with a florid speech by Major S—— on behalf of the ——th Battery of the R.F.A.

(5) An autograph copy of The Green Curve bestowed on me by my friend "Ole Luk-Oie" (to whom long life and princely royalties).

(6) The sodden Field Note-book of a dead Hun given me by Major C—— of the Intelligence, with a graceful note expressing the hope that, as a man of letters, I would accept this gift of belles-lettres.

(7) A duplicate of a certain priceless "chit" about the uses of Ammonal[30] (original very scarce, and believed to be in the muniment-room of the C.-in-C., who is said to contemplate putting it up to auction at Sotheby's for the benefit of the Red Cross Fund).

(8) An autograph copy of a learned Essay on English political philosophers presented to me by the author, one of the liaison officers, who in the prehistoric times of peace was a University professor at Avignon.

(9) A cigarette-case (Army pattern), of the finest Britannia metal, bestowed on me with much ceremony by a Field Ambulance at Bethune, and prized beyond rubies and fine gold.

(10) A pair of socks knitted by Jeanne.[31]

To these Madame[32] had added her visiting-card—it was nearly as big as the illuminated address presented to me by the electors of a Scottish constituency which I once wooed and never won—wherewith she reminded me that my billet at No. 131 rue Robert le Frisson would always be waiting for me, the night-light burning as for a prodigal son, and steam up in the hot-water bottle.

I had said my farewells the night before to the senior officers on the Staff, in particular that distinguished soldier and gallant gentleman the A.G., to whose staff I had been attached (in more senses than one), and who had treated me with a kindness and hospitality I can never forget. The senior officers had done me the honour of expressing a hope that I should soon return; their juniors had expressed the same sentiments less formally and more vociferously by an uproarious song at their mess overnight.

The latter had also, with an appearance of great seriousness, laden me with messages for His Majesty the King, the Prime Minister, Lord Kitchener, the two Houses of Parliament, and the ministers and clergy of all denominations: all of which I promised faithfully to remember and to deliver in person. Sykes, with more modesty, had asked me if I would send a photograph, when the film was developed of the snapshot I had taken of him, to his wife and the twins at Norwich.

My car, upon whose carburettor an operation for appendicitis had been successfully performed by the handy men up at the H.Q. of the Troop Supply Column, stood at the door. I held out my hand to Sykes, who was in the act of saluting; he took it with some hesitation, and then gave me a grip that paralysed it for about a quarter of an hour.

"If you be coming back again, will you ask for me to be de-tailed to you, sir? My number is ——. Sergeant Pope at the Infantry Barracks sees to them things, sir."

I nodded.

"Bon voyage, monsieur," cried Madame in a shrill voice.

"Bon voyage," echoed Jeanne.

I waved my hand, and the next moment I had seen the last of two noble women who had never looked upon me except with kindness, and who, from my rising up till my lying down, had ministered to me with unfailing solicitude.

* * * * *

At the Base I boarded the leave-boat. Several officers were already on board, their boots still bearing the mud of Flanders upon them. It was squally weather, and as we headed for the open sea I saw a dark object gambolling upon the waves with the fluency of a porpoise. A sailor stopped near me and passed the time of day.

"Had any trouble with German submarines?" I asked.

"Only once, sir. A torpedo missed us by 'bout a hund-erd yards."

"Only once! How's that?"

For answer the sailor removed a quid of tobacco from one cheek to the other by a surprisingly alert act of stowage and nodded in the direction of the dark object whose outlines were now plain and salient. It was riding the sea like a cork.

"Them," he said briefly. It was a t.b.d.

At the port of our arrival the sheep were segregated from the goats. The unofficial people formed a long queue to go through the smoking-room, where two quiet men awaited them, one of whom, I believe, always says, "Take your hat off," looks into the pupil of your eyes, and lingers lovingly over your pulse; the other, as though anxious to oblige you, says, "Any letters to post?" But his inquiries are not so disinterested as they would seem.

The rest of us, being highly favoured persons, got off without ceremony, and made for the Pullman. As the train drew out of the station and gathered speed I looked out upon the countryside as it raced past us. England! Past weald and down, past field and hedgerow, croft and orchard, cottage and mansion, now over the chalk with its spinneys of beech and fir, now over the clay with its forests of oak and elm. The friends of one's childhood, purple scabious and yellow toad-flax, seemed to nod their heads in welcome; and the hedgerows were festive with garlands of bryony and Old Man's Beard. The blanching willows rippled in the breeze, and the tall poplars whispered with every wind. I looked down the length of the saloon, and everywhere I saw the blithe and eager faces of England's gallant sons who had fought, and would fight again, to preserve this heritage from the fire and sword of bloody sacrilege. Fairer than the cedars of Lebanon were these russet beeches, nobler than the rivers of Damascus these amber streams; and the France of our new affections was not more dear.

Twilight was falling as the guard came round and adjured us to shut out the prospect by drawing the blinds. As we glided over the Thames I drew the blind an inch or two aside and caught a vision of the mighty city steeped in shadows, and the river gleaming dully under the stars like a wet oilskin. At a word from the attendant I released the blind and shut out the unfamiliar nocturne. Men rose to their feet, and there was a chorus of farewells.

"So long, old chap, see you again at battalion headquarters."

"Good-bye, old thing, we meet next week at H.Q."

"To-morrow night at the Savoy—rather! You must meet my sister."

As I alighted on the platform I saw a crowd of waiting women. "Hullo, Mother!" "Oh, darling!" I turned away. I was thinking of that platform next week when these brief days, snatched from the very jaws of death, would have run their all too brief career and the greetings of joy would be exchanged for heart-searching farewells.

* * * * *

I was dining at my club with two friends, one of them a young Dutch attache, the other a barrister of my Inn. We did ourselves pretty well, and took our cigars into the smoking-room, which was crowded. Some men in a corner were playing chess; the club bore, decent enough in peace but positively lethal in war, was demonstrating to a group of impatient listeners that the Staff work at G.H.Q. was all wrong, when, catching sight of me, he came up and said, "Hullo, old man, back from the Front? When will the war end?" I returned the same answer as a certain D.A.A.G. used to provide for similar otiose questions: "Never!"

"Never! Hullo, what's that?"

Every one in the room suddenly rose to their feet, the chess players rising so suddenly that they overturned the board. "Damn it, and it was my move, I could have taken your queen," said one of them. Outside there was a noise like the roaring of the lion-house at the Zoo; your anti-aircraft gun has a growl of its own. "They're here," said some one, and we all made for the terrace.

I looked up and saw in the dim altitudes a long silvery object among the stars. As the searchlights played upon it, it seemed almost diaphanous, and the body appeared to undulate like a trout seen in a clear stream. Jupiter shone hard and bright in the southern hemisphere, and suddenly a number of new planets appeared in the firmament as though certain stars shot madly from their spheres. Round and about the monster came and went these exploding satellites. Then another appeared close under her, and like a frightened fish she swerved sharply and was lost to view among the Pleiades.

"Let's go and see what's happened," said one of my friends. "I hear she's dropped a lot of bombs down——."

As we went down the street I saw that for about two hundred yards ahead it was sparkling as with hoar-frost. Suddenly the soles of our boots "scrunched" something underfoot. I looked down. The ground was covered with splinters of glass. As we drew nearer we caught sight of a cordon of police, and behind them a great fire springing infernally from the earth, and behind the fire a group of soldiers, whose figures were silhouetted against the background. Our way was impeded by curious crowds, among whom one heard the familiar chant of "Pass along, please!"

We stopped. Close to us two men were stooping with heads almost knocking together and searching the ground, while one of them husbanded a lighted match against the wind.

"Blimey, Bill," said one to the other, "I've found 'un!"

"What have you found?" we asked of him.

"A souvenir, sir!"

Truly, they know not the stomach of this people.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] See Chapter XXV.

[31] See Chapter XI.

[32] Ibid.

THE END

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