L. of c. (lines of communication); being the letters of a temporary officer in the Army service corps

L. OF C.

(LINES OF COMMUNICATION)

L. OF C*

(LINES OF COMMUNICATION)

BEING THE LETTERS OF A
TEMPORARY OFFICER IN
THE ARMY SERVICE CORPS

BY

CAPTAIN JAMES E. AGATE

LONDON
CONSTABLE AND COMPANY, LTD.

1917

TO

FRITZ EDWARD DEHN
ARTHUR BROOK ASPLAND

AND

ALLAN MONKHOUSE

TO THE LAST OF WHOM

THE LETTERS WERE ORIGINALLY WRITTEN

THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY AND

GRATEFULLY DEDICATED

CONTENTS

JOINING UP

THE 'SHOT

HUTMENT AND CANVAS

LEAVE .

CORPORAL SIMPSON

THE PLAIN

GETTING READY

SOLDIERS AND SONGS

A CHOICE OF BOOKS

MY FRIENDS IN THE RANKS

THE RETURN TO SCHOOL

A FALSE START

IN THE PAS DE CALAIS

A QUESTION OF PROPERTY

GENTLEMEN'S GENTLEMEN

OFF AT LAST .

SPECIAL PURCHASE

EN PROVENCE .

EN PLEINE CRAU

IN PARENTHESIS

DUNSCOMBE

ix

PAOB

I

6

12

34
47
55
61
81
89

97
in

118
129
137
J47
162
167
179
187
194

220

442904

X

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

XXII. A BREATHING SPACE. AT THE MOULIN

DAUDET .... 229

XXIII. A USE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL . . 235

XXIV. THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY . . 247
XXV. OUR OPTIMISTS . . . 252

XXVI. CRICKETERS ALL . . . 261

XXVII. IN THE MATTER OF COURAGE . . 270

XXVIII. NOSTALGIES DE CASERNE . . 277

XXIX. RE-BIRTH 281

ABOUT one -third of these letters appeared originally in
the columns of the Manchester Guardian, to the Proprietor
of which newspaper my best thanks are due for permis-
sion to republish.

I have tried to arrange the letters in an order which
will give the reader some idea of logical sequence, and by
sorting them into chapters to give them the appearance
of a book.

There is neither attempt at portraiture nor reference

to individuals in the letters.

J. E. A.
FRANCE,
September 2$th, 1916.

" MAN comes into life to seek and find his sufficient beauty,
to serve it, to win and increase it, to fight for it, to face
anything and bear anything for it, counting death as
nothing so long as the dying eyes still turn to it. And fear
and dullness and indolence and appetite, which indeed
are no more than fear's three crippled brothers, who
make ambushes and creep by night, are against him, to
delay him, to hold him off, to hamper and beguile and
kill him in that quest."

The History of Mr. Polly. H. G. WELLS.

CHAPTER I

JOINING UP

On the idle hill of summer,

Sleepy with the flow of streams,

Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.

Far and near and low and louder

On the roads of earth go by,
Dear to friends and food for powder,

Soldiers marching, all to die.

East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain,

Lovely lads and dead and rotten ;
None that go return again.

*** Far the calling bugles hollo,

High the screaming fife replies,
Gay the files of scarlet follow :
Woman bore me, I will rise.

A SHROPSHIRE LAD.

SUPPLY and Transport I sing, but before
singing let me make admission concern-
ing no less a matter than the vanity of pure
reason. The humiliating thing about pure
reason is its inability to hold its own against
the merest dollop of sentiment. Take my own

L. of C.

case. Alive to the folly of heroics, of heroical
leanings even, I have yet found myself strangely
and wonderfully elated since the first putting
on of uniform. I have gone about my first
day and a half of soldiering spouting all the
recruiting songs I can remember, the most
exquisite of which I have pressed into the
service of this, my first letter. I have been
thrilling to these little verses like the veriest
youngster from school. They have helped me
to survive what might have been the sharp
disillusion of a first eager glance into the new
" Whole Duty of Man," the " Army Service
Corps Manual, Part II." It is good, unreason-
ingly good, to be some kind of a soldier.

What matter if little be found in the Manual
having to do with glory ? What if it belong
essentially to the books that are no books, if
it be less exciting than " Mrs. Beeton " or
the novels of George Eliot, who, as some wit
averred, ought to have been a policeman ? I
am out for romance, adventure and " to keep
the passion fresh," as George Meredith urges.
It's a great game this soldiering, or it can be
made into a great game. And therefore one
glorifies this epic of the slaughter-house, looks
kindly on carcase-weights, finds passion in
field ovens, and zest in the life and works of
that good fellow Maconochie. Don't think me
flippant. My hero was ever Mercutio with his

Joining Up

light-hearted end and impatient " Why the
devil came you between us ? I was hurt under
your arm/' So ought a man to take the last
that can happen to him, and to do him justice
such is the immemorial temper of the English
soldier.

However we may be minded to take our
endings it is surely a mistake to take the
beginnings of soldiering too seriously, to blaze
away at Patriotism to the exclusion of all the
other fine, trivial, muddlesome motives that
may have gone to the joining up. There was
camaraderie, wasn't there, and the sense of
fairness ? There was duty, love of adventure,
the itch to teach the braggart a lesson, the
conviction that it wouldn't do to be out of it.
Then the desire to prove ma$hood, and the
mere fling of it all. For myself I am not sure
that the determining factor was not the play-
ing of national airs in Trafalgar Square by the
band of the Irish Guards on a sunny morning
in June.

In for it anyhow, whatever the jumble of
motives, I give you warning that soldiering is
not going to change civilian standards. To
give up books and the theatre in favour of
doing something utilitarian and " rendering 'J
a report on that something with the imagina-
tion and feeling for style of a chartered account-
ant— to drop the amateur and looker-on and

4 L. of C.

begin " hoping to merit by prompt attention
to business, etc. etc./' in the circularising
manner of a Sam Gerridge — all this is an ad-
venture in fresh matter, but not in fresh
standards. To take on new fights is not to go
back on old victories nor yet on old defeats. . . .
We'll return to this again. As a precaution
against over-seriousness I have enlisted that
good friend and comrade-in-arms " Sense of the
Ridiculous." The tricks of self-reliance, self-
assurance and the genial " You-be-damned-
ness " of the Army I hope to pick up reason-
ably soon, but until they come along I feel like
a new boy, very shy of his school. In the
meantime I am much hampered by these new
trappings. " The set of the tunic's 'orrid." It
is good to think that there are still two clear
days before the plunge into the Aldershot
middle of things. Two days in which to practise
buckling and unbuckling, donning and doffing.
Two days in which to eat, drink and sleep in
the new armour, as we are told Irving did in
the mail of his sinister, fantastic knights.
After these two days of strenuous respite I am
to " proceed " to Aldershot to report. To
whom ? How ? At what time ? Do I tackle
Orderly Room in full marching order, with
water-bottle ? And should the water-bottle
be full ? What, if it comes to that, is—" Orderly
Room " ? I picture to myself a kind of polite

Joining Up

police court, suave and well-mannered a la
Galsworthy. ... I have spent to-day strutting
up and down Regent Street returning salutes
without knowing the way of it. I note that
that past-master of etiquette, the private
soldier, salutes with the hand furthest from
the officer. Should I return the salute with
the hand furthest from the soldier ? I tremble
to think that this is only one of many thousands
of pitfalls into which I propose to take the
gayest of headers. How I've laughed at the
martial innocents of Punch. Well, it's my
turn to be laughed at now, and I hope I'm
game !

CHAPTER II

THE 'SHOT

Devise, wit ! write, pen ! for I am whole volumes in folio.

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

HAVING " proceeded " hither I propose to
give you my experiences in order of
relative importance. Well then, food has
become quite vital. One eats four huge meals
a day, and drinks more cups of tea to the ten
minutes than ever Dr. Johnson achieved in the
hour. Next in order comes the longing for
sundown, and the sense of relief when we
break off. A minor gratitude is that up to the
end of the first day feet seem to be fairly sound.
One doesn't drink here for drinking's sake,
water being warm and brackish, but because
throats are parched and choked with the sand
of the parade ground. After tea one sits in
the sun until dinner-time, imbibing lemon-
squashes by the half-dozen. Aeroplanes glint-
ing like jewelled dragon-flies in the evening
gold drone in the still air. Even at eighty
miles an hour they would seem to hover.
Next in remembered sensation comes one's
annoyance at not being able to drill a squad
of recruits of a trivial ten days' standing.

6

The 'Shot

They mark time when you give the order to
double, completing the movement in defiance
of you and on a word from the drill sergeant,
most tactful of diplomats. Very real the
physical fatigue and Ruskinian exaltation in
the fitness of body ! Then the sense of terror
at the possibility of being late for any one of
ten scheduled duties — the old awe of the head-
master. Last and most significant item in this
sentimental review, we have ceased to think
about the war. What is the fall of Constanti-
nople to the fact that we cannot unravel our
squads ? Indeed we have become reconciled
to the commonplace and live for the moment.
Mr. Polly said — and I add him to Mercutio as
my favourite hero — that if you didn't like
your life all you had to do was to alter it.
We've altered ours, and got rid of irksomeness.
Nobody cares a jot about the higher patriotism,
but everybody cares a great deal about not
being the least competent officer in a mess of
one hundred and ten. As for the brutalising
tendency of military training (see our peace-
cranks), you visualise an enemy as a kind of
abstract ninepin, that is if you bother about
visualising him at all.

A week later,

No ! You do not address me as c< Lieu-
tenant." Plain " Mister," please. I hesitated
to write again too soon through fear of losing

8

L. of C.

first raptures. I have wanted to be able to
reaffirm them, and to be quite honest about it.
The beginnings of disillusion — for I had them,
you know — turned out to be merely physical,
and it is physical ill which makes the spirit
quail. High thinking is a poor game when you
are hopping about in agony on alternate feet.
There is no sand of the desert hotter than the
sand of the Aldershot parade ground, and I
have been reduced to such condition that I
had to drive into the town to buy boots two
sizes larger than I had ever previously worn.
Even then I had to take the largest pair off
surreptitiously at mess, quite failing to get into
them when we left the table, and drawing
down upon my head and feet the wrath of
anathematising mess-presidents. How, too, can
you think nobly when you can only walk
straddle-legged and sit down with precaution ?
But I want you to realise that these prepos-
terous, insignificant worries are to the soldier
in training a thousand times more important
than Zeppelin raids, the fall of Przemysl, or
the Great War itself. Physical agonies apart,
we contrive to be immensely happy.

I wonder if it interests you to hear my day.

5.30. (Ugh !) Rise.

6.30. Parade (this means being drilled).

7.45. Breakfast.

The 'Shot

8.45. Parade (this means drilling people
who know more about it
than you do).

10.0. Lecture (telling you how to write
out a cheque or give a
receipt, wrap up a parcel,
make out an invoice,
sharpen a pencil, etc.).
12.0. Break Off.
12.30. Lunch.

1.45. Parade (more drill).

3.45. Parade (ditto ditto).

4.45. Tea.

6.0. Retire to study. This means wal-
lowing in a bath, greasing
your feet, cursing your
boots, skylarking with
brother officers, quarrelling
about the towels, and
generally behaving like boys
in the lower school, until

8.0. Dinner.

9.0. The port goes round.
10.0. Intellectual conversation. Which
means yawns, snores, etc.,
until

10.15. BED. This is an unpleasant arrange-
ment of blankets smeared
with the various greases you
have been anointing your-

10

5-30.

L. of C.

self faith, but remarkably
resembling Paradise, until
(Ugh) Rise. And so da capo, as we
used to say in civilian days
when we had a little music.

We spend our spare time instructing one
another in the really simple mazes of section
drill. With matches, draughts, a candlestick
for a marker, patience and good temper you
can achieve wonderful results. Only on parade
unfortunately, under the cold glare of the
C.O., with no bits of paper to help you and no
sympathetic friend to whisper " To the inner
flank, you silly fool/' it isn't so easy. It is
a grim experience to be told to line the squad
up facing the church, and to find them grinning
at the abattoirs ; to bear with the delight of
some thousand souls or so, and to hear from
the sergeant-major that you haven't the brain
of an ansemic fowl. You reflect that if the
C.O. addresses you it will probably be in dis-
pleasure, and that you will crawl before him
on your belly. Hence, after office hours—
what am I saying ? — I mean of course off duty,
the merriment and the colossal flippancy of us
all. Nobody, from whatever high-souled motive
he enlisted, is any longer imbued with the
spirit of rushing to his country's side in her
hour of direst need, or at least he takes jolly

The 'Shot

n

good care to keep quiet about it. We grouse
and grumble half the day and spend the rest
in a perfect ecstasy of amazement at the
astonishing fools sane, ordinary, fairly 'cute,
averagely quick-witted individuals can on occa-
sion make of themselves. To crawl before the
C.O. on your belly is momentarily distressing.
To laugh about it afterwards and to go on
laughing is the part of a wise man, and crawling
and laughing all day long is making very wise
men of us indeed.

CHAPTER III

HUTMENT AND CANVAS

Thou think'st 'tis much that this contentious storm
Invades us to the skin. . . .
Pour on, I will endure.

KING LEAR.

HIS place, somewhere in Yorkshire, is
nearly Heaven, or will be if ever it stops
raining. We are in camp in the loveliest of
dales, in what in untrampled days was a daisied
meadow surrounded by giant fir trees against
which the smoke curls up blue and acrid.
One thinks of all the gipsy lore one has ever
read from Borrow to that charming book of
one's childhood, "A Peep Behind the Scenes."
Did you ever have this pathetic story read to
you on Sunday evenings by an old nurse ; or
any other melancholy yarn about caravans
and circus-mongers, golden-haired children and
pathetically ill-used mothers ? If you did you
will remember that caravanning is very much
akin to soldiering. Contact with ground and
grass, keen sun and tempering wind, the
physical content, hard work and perpetually
recurring fatigue do simplify life wonderfully.
Your pay may be a pittance, but the work is

12

Hutment and Canvas

honourable. You are proud of it whether it be
streets of tents nattily erected, stacks of hay
neatly tarpaulined, or carcases all in a row.
The ground was bare ; you have made it a
village, with canteens, living places, latrines,
horse lines, rows of transports, officers' and
sergeants' messes, butcheries, bakeries, cook-
shops ; and there was no profit in it, only
satisfaction and a wage ... I grant you we
must not have too naked a simplicity. There
are times after dinner when I would sell my
soul Lr a decent cup of coffee and a really
good cigar. The route from Aldershot to this
place lying through the grill - room of the
Piccadilly Hotel, I had a bottle of the

" Fizzy sort that leaps
Bubbles, and price, to catch the eye,"

just in case the best brands should not be
found to grow on gooseberry bushes in these
wilds, which indeed they don't. " Eyes look
your last," one said as one turned one's back
upon civilisation. And that's the end, for a
time I suppose, to a life that no enforced
villegiatura will ever make one entirely re-
nounce. I have always maintained that the
most sumptuous apartment in the world was
the cloak-room at the Cafe Anglais, ruinous in
its proud simplicity. Now one washes in a
bucket, the last word in makeshifts, but I

L. of C.

CMNpnM*HMMKMnKP**W»*MrM

shall never be able whole-heartedly to declare
the bucket first and the famous cloak-room
nowhere. I think, by the way, you might send
me a cheap copy of Walden's " Thoreau," or
Thoreau 's " Walden " — the fellow who lived
in a wood. It is just the mood, or what I feel
ought to be the mood. And per contra, as the
accountants say, send me also a cheap copy,
if you see one lying about, of Maupassant's
" Bel Ami."

" Bel Ami " will look well on my book-
shelf— a strip of wood raised to protect the
books from the grass — between " Field Service
Regulations " and " War Establishments of
New Armies." One will look up from the hot
pavements of Paris, their flaneurs and dis-
creditable adventurers, to the abutting woods ;
and then one will be quite sure that, what-
ever the philosophers say, the fairest of
meadows with daisies pied and violets blue
and the most picturesque and insanitary of
country villages will not.be able to claim mind
and soul for ever. Whoever has condoned the
marriage of Bel Ami and not deplored that
hero's eleventh-hour nostalgia of old loves,
whoever has the courage, in reading, of that
triumphant, infamous close must find these
green fields a purgatory. . . .

But to get back to pastoral matters. An

Hutment and Canvas 1 5

Irish youth has just interrupted me to say
that he has found a gorge with " wonderful
fishing in it, pheasants as big as ostriches."
He is a romantic youth, something homesick
for Ireland and quite unable to understand
why Dublin should not be angry with " The
Playboy of the Western World." I like him
for his worship of the lady whom you and I
have so often seen as Pegeen. This boy will
have it that she is the most wonderful actress
since Mrs. Siddons, "if indade that lady was
anny actress at all," and the most beautiful
woman since Helen of Troy, whom he goes
so far as to admit never having seen. I suggest
that the lady might be content with one or
other pinnacle, but my young friend will not
have it.

There is something rather wistful about
hearing all these brogues and twangs and
country tongues. Harry Lauders abound, and
an argument between a Glasgow Highlander
and the genuine article from Tipperary is well
worth listening to. It is only the English, I
think, who have no sense of humour. I ask
a pompous N.C.O. what his red ribbon is for.
He replies gravely :

" Eighteen years of undetected crime, Sir ! '
Our marching songs, if not always humorous,
are at least quaint. There is one of which the

i6

L. of C.

lilt will be with me to my dying day. The
libretto is artlessness itself :

" Wash me in the water that you
Washed your dirty daughter
And I shall be whiter than the
Whitewash on the wall."

I have marched to this for hours and
get no forrader with the plot. There are
other songs of less reputable character, and it
is a thing to be pondered over by parsons and
bishops and all high functionaries ignorant of
human nature that the more ribald the song
the shorter the march. Perhaps some day
our intellectuals will discover that wars are
not won by the Emersons and Matthew Arnolds.
(Why I have always regarded these two
eminent authors as the type of the Perfect
Prig I don't know.) Wars are won by men
with (i) good feet, (2) good digestions, (3) good
teeth, (4) a sense of humour and (5) strong
appetites of all sorts. The man who enlists
for his sweet country's sake is a bit of a nuis-
ance ; he should have been born a leading
article. The fellow who does it for a lark, or
because everybody else is enlisting, or for a
jumble of reasons, or for no reason at all, is
the man we most want. The men here don't
know there is a war going on. They eat, drink,
sleep, smoke, and make love to the village

Hutment and Canvas 1 7

girls. You can't run an army like a secondary
school, and it's no use trying.

§2

Thanks for your letter, refreshing as your-
self, calm, collected, but a shade regretful.
You envy me here — and indeed I am immensely
to be envied — but you must realise that even
this war is temporary and accidental and must
come to an end and release us all, if you can
call it release, to return to buying and selling
at a profit. When you have been in the army
for a little while the word " profit " stinks in
your nostrils. In the army we buy the things
we want because we want 'em. That is genuine
demand. We do not buy to sell again. That
is not a genuine demand. As for taking
advantage of a seller's need to pander to a
buyer's greed, those of us who come out of
offices are amazed that we can ever have
engaged in traffic so indescribably base. We
have quite decided that our return to civil life
shall see a simplification of trading. The
producer shall deal direct with the consumer
with a kind of Carter Paterson delivering
between the two, for hire without profit.
Fascinating project, isn't it ?

I am sometimes not quite sure whether this
simple life of the camp is quite the complete
existence — whether it is very much more than

i8

L. of C.

a glorious picnic with, for the fighting units,
the risk of death and hurt thrown in. I some-
times think I am going to long again for a
world where the mentality of people is above
the age of fourteen. I know I am going to
long some evening for the Palladium and
Little Tich. Last night I actually found my-
self thinking I had dined more comfortably
than sitting on a plank that was rapidly giving
in the middle, and bringing one's chin to the
level of one's plate with one's feet in a pool
of water, and a steady trickle of rain down
the back of one's neck. It's no use shifting
your seat. So many places, so many holes
in the roof. It is strangely cold at nights, and
although a camp bed makes an exquisite couch,
and a sleeping bag is an adorable contrivance,
it is a nuisance that three blankets and a
couple of great-coats cannot always be relied
on to keep your toes from freezing. I am not
grumbling. I am " keeping the passion fresh "
right enough. Nothing can be more exhilarat-
ing, nothing can be jollier than a damp tent
with a layer of blessed dew spread over all
one's belongings, sticking the leaves of books
together and taking the condition out of such
cigars as these warlike times afford. For the
rest of our pastoral advantages see Shakspere's
exiled Dukes passim. It's my solicitude for
you which makes me suggest that we are not

Hutment and Canvas 19

having all the fun of the fair. Then again,
you stay-at-homes have got a function too.
It's your job to keep a sane end up through
all the shocks that are to come, shocks that
will affect the thoughtful citizen more than the
fighting soldier. It will be your job to restore
balance when we come home, to give us some-
thing to hitch to at the end.

Although in so far as his command is con-
cerned a Lieutenant is Omnipotence, I am
not quite so tremendous a person as I would
have you believe. I cannot, for instance, put
a drunken private to death, King's Regulations
leaving even less choice than is enjoyed by a
High Court judge. My men are cheerful old
birds from the London Docks, averaging fifty
years of age. They look down on soldiering
and call me Boss, Guv'nor, or even Gaffer.

" You are Robinson ? " I ask one man.

" Yes, Sir, Mister Robinson, Sir/' replies
that worthy with a purely civilian tug at his
forelock.

Gone are my dreams of a regiment smarter
than the Guards — of a crack lot of gentlemen-
rankers or genteel blackguards in hiding for
the period of the war. The detachment con-
sists of labourers, cabmen and cab-washers,
with an occasional window-cleaner or brick-
layer. They are all equally willing, good-
natured, devoid of guile and irreclaimable.

2O

L. of C.

In a word they are just human. Between us
we handle the most amusing things, sides of
frozen beef sweating in the sun, to be kept
well to the leeward of one's nobility ; firewood,
tons of it, and clay for oven-making. As
Lady Tree says in the play, "What fun men
have ! '; Then we unload bread, ten thousand
crisp, crackling loaves daily.

I am afraid I am giving you these details
in very disorderly fashion, but you must under-
stand that this is not an Army Service Corps
Text-book, but merely an account of the work
as it presents itself to the beginner pitchforked
into it and told to " carry on." The rule in
the army when confronted with a job is to get
it done somehow. This applies more particu-
larly to the impossible jobs which, alas ! abound.
Issue your order with the utmost conviction
and authority,, prepared to take the wigging
if the method has been wrong. But if you get
the job done you may be sure the wigging will
never come to hand.

§3

I begin this sitting on a couple of railway
sleepers in the coal-yard, immensely fascinated
by the coals and they tumbling into the chute,
as my Irish friend says. As it threatens to
be another magnificently wet day, with the
straightest of straight rains and the most

Hutment and Canvas 2 1

ferocious of tiger-skies, I may have to return
to my tent and transfer my writing to a
courtesy-desk, a wonderful affair of soap
boxes. Much time has been taken up lately
in (a) paying court to that fickle jade the
" Pay and Mess Book/' and (6) lending a
hand in the private affairs of my rascals.
" My gallant crew, good morning/' said the
Captain in the comic opera. " Sir, good
morning. We trust we see you well/' replied
the gallant lads. Such are the relations be-
tween my little mob and their C.O.

The " Pay and Mess Book " is the account
kept between the soldier and his Government
in the matter of pay and rations. A pri-
vate gets one and twopence a day and
sixpence Corps pay, one and eightpence
altogether. Seven times one and eight-
pence is eleven and eightpence, and the
man either allots money or he doesn't. It
sounds absurdly simple ; but it is in reality
more complicated than the War Loan. Men
have a nasty way of straying to other units
and remaining on your pay sheet, or they go
sick, or indulge in leave, and all of it plays old
'Harry with the ration allowances. Then they
borrow. They are called home, say to Aberdeen
or to Penzance. The fare is thirty shillings
at the cheaper rates, and of course the man
wants a few shillings to spend. Equally of

22

L. of C.

course no soldier ever has a penny. So you
advance him the money and arrange to stop
it out of his future pay. Then one of two
things happens. Either he comes back, and
you feel a blackguard for deducting five shillings
a week out of eight (in the case where the
fellow allots) for what must seem to him
incalculable aeons ; or he doesn't come back,
in which case you are done in and pay out
of your own pocket.

Two of my friends went away this morning
for a week-end, both of them with the genial
assurance that whereas the penalty for desertion
had no terrors for them, the idea of doing their
officer in for their railway fares staggered them
utterly. In their way these old rascals are
gentlemen. One of them, aged fifty-four, has
gone to be married, the clergyman having
promised to perform the ceremony free of
charge.

" For the sake of the child ? " I query.

" No, Sir, children, Sir ! Three girls and a
boy, Sir ! "

The other goes to town, Hackney or Isling-
ton, I forget which, to see a sick daughter and
explain to an ailing wife whose allotment
allowance has not yet reached her that the
negligence if any is none of his. There must
be these little hitches, he will explain to her,
in so colossal and new-born a concern as these

Hutment and Canvas

New Armies. I who have now been connected
with the Army for about ten minutes am more
and more amazed at the miracle it all is. The
thing for you civilians to realise is that a new
world has been created out of nothing. It is
all a masterpiece of improvisation, a bravura
achievement, a tour deforce of rising to occasion.

Knotty points of discipline are always crop-
ping up. A man in my lot whom two " beers "
make quite silly has just completed a stretch
of twenty-eight days' field punishment, No. 2,
which means amongst other things the loss of
twenty-eight days' pay. The orderly officer
finds him drunk on guard. Should we send
him forward to the higher majesties who will
break him altogether, or should we try an
appeal to reason ? Sober, he is an extra-
ordinarily good man, the best driver in his
company. Another hefty dollop of punish-
ment and he will go wrong and cease to care.
It isn't easy. And yet to be lenient seems
hardly fair to the next sentry, a smart, ener-
getic, spry little chap, proud of being a sentry
and guarding a few tarpaulins as though they
were Crown Jewels. I know he tramps his
two hours at a real smart pace, and stands to
attention like a figure of stone, even in the
dark with no one looking on.

" But for the grace of God — ' should be
written up in every Orderly Room.

24 L. of C.

It is terrible to think of the things one, too,
might be brought to book about. At the
present moment I have mislaid ten thousand
loaves, and can't account for some fifty trucks
of coal I have got surplus. In civilian life I
should balance the two and be well content
to call it quits. The bread failing to arrive
by the usual train this morning, some two
thousand ferocious Highlanders set forth on
their route march breakfastless, giving me the
hungriest of " Eyes right ! " as they passed.
Eighteen bags of oats are missing from my
store-tent and I am accused of prigging another
regiment's tarpaulins. Last night I redoubled
and lost five hearts handsomely, with the C.O.
for partner. . . .

In spite of all this mischancy business one
asserts that the Army Service Corps is the
brain of the army. Infantry work is mere
foot-slogging — money for nothing in the pockets
of whoever does the army's boots. I may be
biased, but it seems to me that leading an
army is child's-play — feeding it a work of high
imagination, romance even.

§4

Sometimes one catches a glimpse of romance
— the Stevenson sort — in this strange existence.
I felt absurdly the touch of it the other night.
The meat had got lost, and we had to motor

Hutment and Canvas

sixty miles for it — 22,000 Ibs. of prime cuts.
We found it at a mining junction, where we
had dinner and went to a theatre ! How's
that for a debauch of civilisation ? I have
forgotten the name of the play, a well-known
comedy. It was all about a foundling bush-
ranger who dined unsuspecting and unsus-
pected at the house of his own mother, and
was waited on by his foster-brother, and
sat opposite a swell detective whose horse
he once stole in the bush. I found this tosh
of really absorbing interest, and the theatre
a renewed joy. All the same I was so tired
that I fell asleep in the eighteenpenny stalls.
Then came the Stevenson bit, the long night
drive back to camp, the glare of the lamps,
the frightened rabbits scampering across the
road, and the intoxication of being held up
by real military on the look-out for head-
lights that might show the way to a Zeppelin.
We got back in the early morning drunk with
the air and fatigue. It sounds uneventful on
paper, but we had the world to ourselves, and
for forty miles saw nothing but sentries and
sleeping camps. The moon was at full in a sky
of pale and brilliant blue. I think it must
have been the signpost " To Edinburgh "
that set my imagination going. I am sorry to
make so poor a botch of it in the recollection.
Little things move one strangely when life

26

L. of C.

is so much simplified. There was churcl
parade last Sunday, for instance, and the march
to the old country church, which held just 350
of us. There was no other congregation, and
the men sang well-known hymns with great
sturdiness and plentiful thoughts of home.
Extraordinary the concord between the rough,
not untender walls of the old church and the
rough, not always uncouth faces of these lads
in brown ! They did good work at the canteen
later on, showing little disposition to senti-
mentalise once the service over, which is to
their credit.

Since my last letter I have had a tumble, a
ludicrous fall from a horse, and a knee the
size of a football keeps me in bed. It is Sunday,
and the whole crowd of officers has called,
from the C.O. to the youngest sub., all of them
offering drinks as the best of remedies for big
knees, so that there is danger of befuddlement.
Between visits I have a go at old books. The
man in the next tent has lent me his Rabelais
— Urquhart and Le Motteux's wonderful trans-
lation— another fellow lives on the Shaw plays,
the next fellow to him dotes on Dickens, and
we all borrow. By the way, if you come across
a cheap Browning send it along ; it's good to
be in the healthy vein. And of course there's
always Shakspere for wet days. Although
one is pretty well plunged into a " real ':

Hutment and Canvas

27

existence, an existence composed of getting up
at five o'clock, drilling, shovelling coal, ex-
amining sore feet, obeying orders and giving
them — both unimaginatively — nosing about
the camp for unsavoury odours, prescribing
chloride of lime and disposing of refuse-tips—
in spite of all this books go on, and Falstaff
remains more real than life itself.

Have you ever tried living under canvas,
and counting yourself as much the king of
space as you always were, while being more
or less literally bounded in a nutshell ? It is
a fascinating experience, but I am not at all
sure that after a time it may not begin to pall.
Perhaps the only way to be happy in camp
is to find out what you have in common, not
with picked spirits, but with every blessed
fellow in the mess. You have got to get hold
of some great common measure of humanity.
Begin with the principle that everybody likes
a gin-and-bitters before lunch, or its equivalent.
Study the equivalents ! Try to realise that
everybody likes a whisky-and-soda after dinner,
or its equivalent, which may be a walk in the
gloaming. Everybody likes chucking a pretty
barmaid under the chin or, say, reading Herrick.
We all want to keep fit, if some of us are keener
on mental fitness than the other sort. It is
extraordinary how elastic you can make your
equivalents, and it is just as well to remember

28

L. of C.

that your own whims and idiosyncrasies, your
own equivalents, may need some sympathetic
translating before they are acceptable to every
member of the mess.

In case you are inclined to jib at trite
moralisings, jejune quotations and tags from
the poets, you had better realise here and now
that camp-life leads to the rediscovery of all
the old adages and proverbs, A companiable
fellow at mess is worth more than your blue-
blooded, unneighbourly sort, " kind hearts,"
etc. You tumble into bed, not too dissatisfied
with yourself — " Something attempted, some-
thing done." An evening walk turns into a
Gray's Elegy. The marching of troops with
their bands, the skirling of pipes, and all the
" pomp and circumstance " set one wondering
whether somebody or other was not right about
the " crowded hour." In fact, you can see for
yourself that this sudden simplification of
living turns the mind into the trail of old truths
discovered afresh and verified anew.

§5

To-day has been August Bank Holiday, and
it has rained as though it were the Clerk of the
Bad Weather's last chance. My tent is on a
slope of at least one in five, the office half being
divided from the bed-sitting-room half by a
river rising in the horse-lines and falling, via

Hutment and Canvas 29

my apartments, into the dingle at the bottom
of the field. My batman, wet to the skin and
garnishing his operations with strange Gaelic
oaths, is doing elementary trench work with
no more success than to turn what was a peace-
ful stream into a brown succession of muddy
spates reminiscent of the canvases of Clarence
Whaite. My defences against boredom are
wearing thin. I am taking the last few pages
of a novel by Percy White in careful nibbles,
like a shipwrecked sailor reduced to his last
biscuit. The simile is not bad, since in the
matter of interest we are well marooned here.
One's job by becoming less problematical
becomes less interesting. The loaves and sides
of beef, the coals, groceries and firewood,
which at the beginning were a full day's
occupation, have taken to getting themselves
unloaded of their own accord and I to twiddling
my thumbs in sheer inanity. To whatever
degree of attenuation one spins out one's
work, holding a boot parade one afternoon and
a sock parade the next, there is little to do
after midday.

I wonder if you have ever counted the hours
between breakfast and dinner. There is an
appalling succession of 'em. By this time
everybody in camp has told his best stories
ten times over and his worst five ; one thunder-
storm has come to be very much like another :

3° L. of C.

and it is borne in upon one with damnable
iteration that a bugle has only five notes. Our
bugler, by the way, is apparently content with
four. The wretch hides himself for evening
practice in a thicket in the rear of my tent.
Oh ! villainous nightingale that would pipe
his lays on four whole notes and a fraction of
a fifth ! Darkling I listen, and call him names
" in many a mused rhyme."

Soldiers, when they join, bargain for every-
thing except boredom. Hardships one under-
stands, and it is agreed that the other fellow
will be up to whatever heroism is going. But
to eat in a field, and sleep in a field, and work
in a field, and play in a field, and always the
same silly field, day in and day out, makes a
stiff call on the higher patriotism. For, pace
Wordsworth, a field is a field when all is said
and done, and a damp place at that. Of course,
you must understand that to grumble is the
amateur soldier's new-found privilege, and you
are not to run away with any impression of
serious discontent. The food may be declared
" rotten " — it is, by the way, excellent — we
may decry the beauties of Nature — who is here
in her loveliest mood — we may trumpet our
grievances about being stuck in a hole with
no picture-palace, no pier, no pierrots, and no
girls — that is the men's great weariness, the
severance from Romance — but if boredom and

Hutment and Canvas 31

the capacity to endure it are going to count in
this war, then we shall all stick it cheerfully
without sight of girl or promenade until—
well, until it ceases to rain, which is the longest
period our imagination is capable of. I do
very distinctly sympathise with the fellows
who work hard all day and haven't anywhere
to go at night, with nothing to read, no games
to play, no music to hear, and nothing to look
at except grass, and trees, and green things
growing. It sounds like Keats, but it's dull.
. . . Do you remember the poem in which
Baudelaire prays for Something New — heaven
or hell ?

" Verse-nous ton poison pour qu'il nous reconforte !
Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous brule le cerveau,
Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe ?
Au fond de 1'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau ! "

. . . Don't take all this too seriously. One is
morally entitled to a grumble at the persistence
of the rain and the plumminess of the jam, the
awful plumminess of the jam and the everlast-
ingness of the rain. Life here is very little
heroic. It is a monotonous round of food and
sleep and weather, weather and food and sleep.
Two trivial entertainments are there of
which we never tire — the C.O.'s charming pair
of dachshunds, " Rolls " and " Royce," almost
human in their folly, and the early morning
Swedish drill, would-be sunbaths, and bare-

L. of C.

I •• -mi

foot dancing of a very young subaltern with a
Taste for the Beautiful. Sometimes we pay a
surprise visit to a neighbouring camp in a
schoolboy attempt to catch them with their
refuse-tips and cattle-lines to windward of the
kitchens and above the water-supply, or with
the abattoir in full view of the road, or the
wood-stacks up against the bakery fire. These
little catches seldom come off, and one is
generally chagrined to find the camp set out
rather better than one's own.

The C.O. has come in as I write with a piece
of news. We are under orders for Salisbury
Plain. This is, I hear, the last lair and fast-
ness of the Spirit of Desolation and Feldein-
samkeit, so I suppose all we shall have to do
will be to lie on our backs in the grass if it is
dry enough and hum that nasty fellow Brahms.
But we shall only be two hours from London.
So that's that ! — In the meantime for dinner
and bridge.

I reopen this to record a tremendous moral
snubbing I received last night. Scrambling to
bed through the slush, after a " swarry " con-
sisting of hot soup, a topping steak-and-kidney
pie, suet dumpling, cheese and coffee, winding
up with liqueurs, an excellent cigar, and goodish
hands of cards, I stumbled into a half-drowned
sentry about the size of nothing at all, with

Hittment and Canvas

33

a ferocious cold and hardly enough voice ]<[!
to challenge, but ever so gamely defending his
hundred yards of beat. I asked him if he was
not sick to death of his job, to which he replied
cheerily, " Not by no means, Sir ! Quite dry
underneath, Sir ! Mustn't grumble at nothing,
Sir ! Army discipline, Sir ! ' So I gave him
a bob for a drink in the morning, probably
against all the rules of the aforesaid army
discipline. Here was a lad wet through, with
his last meal six hours behind him and another
six till he breaks his fast, a sea of mud to plough
through and a swamp to sit him down in — and
withal perfectly contented. And here had I
been grumbling and grousing, with a good
dinner for the eating and a warm or warmish
bed to go to. True, the irrigation system of
canals laid out on my bedroom floor makes a
fool of Schiaparelli's network on Mars, but
I've no right to grouse. If last night's sentry
had been an Artist he would have been able
to regale himself with all the luxuries of self-
commiseration. But the probability is that he
was only an ordinary* decent fellow and not
troubled with the Higher Squeamishness.

CHAPTER IV

LEAVE
§1

I AM full of a Baudelairian Spleen this morn-
ing, the result of leave, a miserable week-
end leave, just long enough to make one's soul,
in the hackneyed phrase, desperately unquiet
within one. I had made the most strenuous
resolutions to have no further traffic with that
fair-seeming wanton, Mistress Furlough, to
resist all her importunities. But the adjutant,
who was in an unusually good temper, betrayed
me by saying that our move to the Plain was
not yet and by throwing out a " Saturday to
Monday any good to anybody ? Room for one
in the car." And of course I managed to shout
a little louder than the rest.

It was with little pretence at dignity that
the C.O., the Senior Supply Officer and myself
climbed into the car which was to take us to
the London train forty miles away. The whole
Divisional Train stood round us punctiliously
saluting the C.O. and jeering enviously at the
other two. How could we be dignified after
the half-lunatic frenzy with which early that
morning we had performed our ablutions out-

34

Leave

35

side our tents singing " Who paid the rent for
Mrs. Rip van Winkle ? " and treading on the
sward measures that would have put to shame
all the tangoing, fox-trotting, barefoot-dancing
and art-capering that ever made the fortune
of an illustrated weekly ? It was exactly like
a trio of fourth-form boys going home for the
holidays. We played havoc with the railway
lunch, a meal of quite unusual delicacy. Like
that Bohemian banquet at which the host
announced that there would be plates, it is to
be recorded that at this banquet of the per-
manent way there were knives and forks. We
played three-handed bridge all the way to
town, at which I lost eight hundred points,
arriving at King's Cross the poorer by two
days' hard-earned pay. In case you do not
know how to calculate the cost of week-end
leave, I will tell you. It is quite simple. You
make careful calculation of all possible ex-
penditure, double it, add a sovereign, only to
find yourself borrowing to pay the bill for
Sunday night's dinner.

On arrival in town, we were careful to avert
our eyes from the gay butterfly who, we pre-
tended, was to await the C.O. on the platform.
Schoolboy-like we had always credited the C.O.
with unimaginable gallantry, concocting the
most incredible yarns. You remember how
glibly Stalky talked of the Head being thrown

36 L. of C.

out of a West End music-hall, after hackini
the chucker-out on the shins ? In the same
way we had peopled King's Cross with legions
of fair women ready to fall on the neck of our
gallant C.O. Nobody, we felt sure, would
believe us if we had to go back with some
lame tale of a little old lady with white hair
and quiet voice, and an old-fashioned mothering
way with her.

Strange that one should find life in camp
beyond all the ecstasies and at the same time
ecstatically embrace the first opportunity of
getting away from it. Well, people are built
that way, and lovely though Yorkshire hill and
dale may be, one wearies of perpetual exile and
hankers for the sociabilities. Better a dinner
of herbs in Soho than in these unpeopled wilds
perpetual cuts off perpetual beeves — or so one
thinks after a couple of months of dining out
with Nature. And of course leave means
London. We tell our provincials that their
cities are romantical places and we produce
one of Mr. Muirhead Bone's idealisations of
canal-bank and factory-chimney to prove it.
But no one seriously suggests that provincial
towns are amusing places o' nights, or that
their humdrum streets cannot be improved
upon for an afternoon's airing. No ! the
provinces won't do for leave. London is the
soldier-on-furlough's spiritual home.

Leave 37

After dinner — and what a dinner ! — with
plates, knives, forks, napkins, finger-bowls with
water in 'em, champagne-glasses with cham-
pagne in 'em, to the brim and flowing over, the
result of weeks of economising — one sent for
an evening paper for a look at the theatres.
One called to mind that excellent and learned
dramatic critic, now most excellent and regi-
mental of sergeants, who won his third stripe
after competition with an ex-liftman from the
Hotel Metropole. This erudite personage ad-
mitted that once, during a week-end in London,
when he had the choice of two French comedies,
a flamboyant Sardou with a great French
actress, a Shaksperian revival on new-art
lines, the latest Russian dancer, and the latest
Pinero, he went bravely and unashamedly to
the Follies, twice. So did not I bother my
head about the Intellectual Drama or any sort
of Repertory superciliousness, but plumped for
the Palace. Bang went eleven and sixpence —
more than a day's pay — but the performance
was the last word in " man-about-town, brandy -
and-soda smartness/' as Mr. George Moore once
said of Arthur Roberts. I've forgotten all
about the theatre now and should hardly know
good acting from the high-brow'd intellectual
stuff, but Nelson Keys struck me as the very
genius of mimicry, a kind of pocket Galipaux,
even smaller than the great little Frenchman.

38 L. of C.

On Sunday we had a kind of Pals' luncheon
party. There was a lawyer turned stretcher-
bearer and an author, who had been printed,
from the Artists' Rifles. The Sportsmen's
Battalion sent a painter of some repute, whilst
the good ship " Crystal Palace " released a
most excellent Hamlet masquerading as a
sailor. Later on round the piano we got a bit
sentimental singing choruses from revue and
cursing our luck and the midnight train that
was to take us back into exile.

And now comes the sting of it all, the Baude-
lairian Spleen, the sublime discontent. London
on leave, however exquisite, isn't all gold.
One is too much given to counting the minutes
like a small boy at the Pantomime. Then
there's no real appetite ; one resorts too
willingly to the adventitious aperitif. Neither
is there any air or atmosphere and the beds
are too soft. One misses the friendly beetle
and the enquiring earwig. And thus it comes
about that the midnight departure from King's
Cross — once you have got over the dismay of
it — the returning crowd, the long, silent night-
journey, the grey dawn, the grey towers of
York Cathedral, the view of the crowded,
sleepy, silent train speeding north after dropping
you at five o'clock in the morning in these quiet
dales — so it comes about that these things are
all to the good.

Leave 39

Still I am unsettled this morning and not
at my best ; I don't like the effect of London
on the Yorkshire Dales. I am unimaginatively
indenting for a " table, soldier's, six-foot, tops,
one/' and a " table, soldier's, six-foot, trestles,
pairs, one " ; also for " axes, pick, head, 4! Ibs.,
one," and " axes, pick, helves, 36 inches, ferruled,
one," which means that the detachment is in need
of a table and pickaxe. As I scribble this mean-
ingless jargon, momentarily shorn of its glamour,
I curse London and wish I had paid you a visit
instead. There is something about your Albert
Square and Victoria Station, Plymouth Grove
and Alexandra Park that is solid, unemotional,
purposefully normal and as little unsettling as
the poems of passion of Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

Most bitter sting of all, I have now exhausted
all my stored-up leave and must set to work
to get in credit again. After all the sky here
is splendid and for the moment it doesn't rain.
But what a consolation !

§2

One recovers fairly quickly from the day-
after-the-party feeling, the leave-depression,
as the Germans would call it. An hour's
fretting and one buckles to again, to find
renewed charm in the life of the camp for
which London is so royally unfitting. Imagine
that the train has dropped you at five o'clock

40 L. of C.

in the morning at the little station in the dales.
Your fellow-travellers, soldiers all, wonder
drowsily what stoppage this can be on a journey
which was to be plain sailing all the way to
Edinburgh, but before the train is under way
again you see them settle down once more to
their uneasy slumbers. Before you, ensconced
in the greenest of hollows, lies the little camp-
row after row of trim tents, so many pagodas
in some story-teller's dawn. From the slopes
of the hills and the tops of the dark firs unseen
fingers are plucking away the shrouds of
wreathing mist, which cling a little yet, reluctant
to leave this tiny Paradise. You catch your
breath as you think of these quiet dales and
the garish city only seven hours away. There
is no one on the station and the gates are
locked. You throw your kit over the palings
and climb a fence a few yards away by the
signal-box. Not a soul stirs as you creep
through the ghostly lines, brushing the dew
from the streets of this grassy village. You
unlace the door of your house, striking damp
after the close, hot joys of London. Your
blankets invite you as who should say " This
is indeed a bed." In two hours it will be day
and you alone of all the camp know how
gorgeous the promise of that day.

Breakfast finds you reassuring your little
world that London stands where it did. You

Leave

describe what sort of food is being eaten in
the restaurants and what new songs are being
sung at the revues. You find that there are
two new subalterns in the mess, Londoners
both, born within sound of Bow Bells, Cockneys
to their innermost core and being. Like
Henley's news-boy they are all dart and leer
and poise, irresistible within their sphere.
There is about them a cocksureness that is at
once sparrow-like and overwhelming. The
most charming, nicely-mannered, well-groomed,
well-intentioned young gentlemen that ever
adorned the counters of a bank, their plight
in this purely pastoral setting is pitiful. Never
a bar to lean over, nor yellow-haired radiance
to be chaffed across marble tops meticulously
swabbed. They enliven the mess with tales
of the West End in which the Empire figures
as quaintly and as. recurrently as in the frothy
little ditties of Miss Vesta Tilley. But in less
than a week even these modish, wide-awake
young men will have begun to leave town
behind them and to succumb to the fascination
of life in the army.

The fascination of life in the army ! Of course
it's fascinating, even if the beginning is a
trifle humiliating. It is humiliating to find
that you, a person of some cultivation in your
own walk of life, have not yet mastered the

42 L. of C.

art of ordering a pair of boots, paying for the
week's groceries, or even writing a report on
some infantile matter of business. Heedless
of formula, ignorant of the existence of any
set of rules governing official correspondence,
you fall into the trap of writing your C.O.
a civil note as from one gentleman to another.
Never shall I forget my first report — having
v to do with the choice subjects of latrines and
incinerators — which I began according to the
more or less polite usages of civil life " Dear
Major Tompkins." Nor shall I ever forget the
punctilious Tompkins' receipt thereof. The
whole difficulty is of course that whereas in
peace times the young officer grows to his
work, the exigencies of the present war demand
that untutored and inexperienced young gentle-
men should be conducted on the morning of
their arrival to their offices, to wit one tent,
and after being advised that the unlikely-
looking mob of ruffians now getting in the
coal is their squad should be abandoned to
their own uninformed devices with the general
instruction to " carry on." But after one or
two days of mishap and bungling, light breaks
in and the army way of doing things is seen
to be fool-proof. In a week one sees through
the rigmarole, and the complicated and involved
become sun-clear. One reckons it absurd, for

Leave

43

instance, that anybody in need of a hammer
and tacks should not know that the thing to do
is to sit down and invite the D.A.D.O.S., on a
jolly little form specially invented for the
purpose, to issue to you forthwith —

' Hammers, claw, 32 oz., one/1 and
" Nails, iron, clout, wrought, counter-
sunk, No. 104, lots of."

Of course it is not really quite so simple as all
this. I happen to have stumbled on the Army
Form giving this romantic description of the
habits of the Hammer and the Nail — (It sounds
like a song out of " Patience/') The initial
difficulty is to discover the original Army Form
on which to apply for all the others. You
might imagine that this form would be labelled
quite simply A.F. I (Army Form Number One).
But the game is not by any means so easy as
this would make it. I had been begging,
borrowing, and stealing Army Forms for many
weeks before I discovered that there was a
legitimate way of getting hold of them. The
novice's pursuit of the original Army Form is
the finest hunting known to human intelligence.
The chase may be long and stern, but there is
a kill at the end of it.

After a time you begin to have a suspicion
that the essential thing in Supply work is not
so much supplying as accounting for having

44

L. of C.

supplied, or for not having supplied, as the
case may be. Take the case of my immediate
friends, the bacon boxes. From the moment
a bacon box is filled with bacon and forwarded
by the consignor to the day it is received by
the consignee and returned empty it is saddled
with a way-bill in quadruplicate. Take a long
breath while I explain.

A way-bill is what civilians call an invoice,
and there are always four copies of it. One is
kept by the consignor, two copies go to the
consignee, one of which he keeps as a " receipt
voucher " or the authority for bringing the
goods on his charge, the other copy being
signed by him and returned to the consignor
as that consignor's " issue voucher " or proof
of issue. The fourth copy is for the civilian
carrie/, for example, the railway company. I
hope that is perfectly clear, as I have copied
it all out of a text-book, not having, as the
exquisite said, the tapster's mind for these
reckonings.

Now wherever the wretched bacon box is
sent it cannot escape its birth certificate,
always as I have already told you a quad-
ruplicate affair. But the fate of bacon boxes
is to be commandeered by officers . (You give
a corporal in the Supply Section half a crown
to steal half a dozen for you and hand them
over to the wheelwright.) They next reappear

Leave 45

as wardrobes or washstands or chests of drawers
—this time it is a five - shilling piece which
changes hands — with the disconcerting result
that there is often no bacon box to give sense
to the pile of minutes which have been enquir-
ing after its health for some weeks past, and
are now marked by an insistent and semi-
offensive tone. And better for a Supply Officer
that a whole battalion should go forth on its
route march baconless than that a single
bacon box should be returned as missing.
No wonder our elegant little subalterns are
inclined at the beginning to regard life in the
Army as store-keeping on an unusually vulgar
scale.

Life in the Supply, then, is a whirl of missing
bacon boxes and defaulting meat bags, rather
than of the handsome dashing affair one's
spurs would have indicated it to be. Farewell
the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious
war, but not farewell, alas ! to the neighing
steed, to the rearing, biting, shying, stumbling,
kicking, bucking, jibbing sort that are served
out to us. The charger allotted to the more
pedestrian of our two new subalterns, an
excellent fellow on a walking tour but no horse-
man, takes four men to hold him and a rough-
rider two hours to get up. The horse is officially
" nervous," but not returnable to Remounts,
and our little gentleman has to overcome equal

46

L. of C.

quantities of the animal's nervousness and his
own. It is thought probable that in a day or
two one at least of our new subalterns may
begin to see something of a more adventurous
side to store-keeping. We shall see.

CHAPTER V

CORPORAL SIMPSON

WE have all been through something of
an ordeal, and as Corporal Simpson
seems to be bound up with it I shall tell you
about both at the same time. We have been
through nothing less than a general inspection
which, as everybody knows, is a kind of In-
quisition, taking one back to end-of-term
examinations and putting everybody in camp
into a state of schoolboy funk. Junior officers
who are really middle-aged men of business
are harried and badgered about all sorts of
unfamiliar lore acquired long after the mind
has got set. Memory holding none too firm
a seat in these rusty brains of ours we fill the
air with agonised enquiry as to the composition
of Brigades and Divisions, the exact meaning
of the words " First-line Transport " and
" Base Details," the constitution of a Divisional
Train, the number of G.S. Wagons (a) mobilisa-
tion, (6) on concentration ; the amount a mule
(a) can eat, (6) must eat according to regulations.
Alone the Majors walk about tolerably at
their ease — theirs the composure of sixth-

47

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L. of C.

form demi-gods not easily to be ruffled. As
for the C.O., no need to be nervous on behalf
of a genius who can combine a mastery of the
big things of soldiering with an encyclopaedic
knowledge of the little ones.

Neither had I too many anxieties on my
own account. The coal-yard of which I am
supreme dictator had been swept and garnished
to such a point that any inspecting General
might dine pleasurably off its floor. I had at
my tongue's end the exact number of pounds
of oats to a bag, had made sure about maize
growing on trees or being of the macaroni
order of things, knew exactly how many
soldier bakers we had lent to the civilian
bakery a hundred miles away. All kinds of
knowledge, pertinent and otherwise, were to be
had from me for the asking. Fully forewarned
and forearmed I prepared to bestow thought
on the state of poor Simpson, my corporal, who
may know his right hand from his left, but
is in perpetual doubt about his squad's. It
had just occurred to me to ask him for sugges-
tions how to get his men from the coal-yard
to the level crossing with his left leading in case
so fiendish a trick were played on us by the
General, when I saw him approaching with the
air of one inviting conversation.

Had I considered the suitability to present
occasion of the great passage in " Samson

Corporal Simpson 49

Agonistes " beginning " Oh, how comely it is
and how reviving " ? Did not the phrase
" the brute and boist'rous force of violent
men " seem to me worthier of Englishmen with
their inheritance of great speech than " Hun "
or " pirate " or even " baby-killer " ? Making
a mental note to look up my " Golden Treasury "
before the next parade so as to get on terms
of debatable equality with this poetic corporal,
I bade him, brutally and boisterously, move
off the detachment from the left and dis-
entangle it at the level crossing in rehearsal
for the General on the morrow.

Well, the Great Man came, saw and had all
his thirst for knowledge overcome. He inspected
the kitchens, interviewed the more tractable of
the horses — the permanently obstreperous having
all gone sick, strange to say — saw us harness up
and despatch a column. After lunch he made
a speech at once critical and encouraging,
dropped hints as to the more economical dis-
posal of the camp dripping and expressed a
candid opinion as to the riding capabilities of
our N.C.O.'s, preserving a complete reticence
as to the horsemanship of the officers. But to
my intense chagrin he never came near the
detachment, nor cast an eye upon the yard.

We said good-bye to the General with some-
thing of the :-,.-.. nation of relief — " speeding the
parting with a vengeance," was Simpson's

50 L. of C.

version. The General's last word had been
something about reaching before nightfall
another camp a hundred miles away. And
this is where Simpson, who is a dab hand at
poetry, pulled off the one common-sense
achievement of his career. He had wormed
it out of the General's chauffeur — that they
came from the same town may explain the
lad's expansiveness — that the General was going
to pay us another visit on the morrow, " one
of his surprise-packets." Six a.m. next morn-
ing therefore found me in my coal-yard fever-
ishly loading and unloading nothing in parti-
cular. At five minutes past the sentries I had
posted gave warning of the approach of the
big grey car, and at ten minutes past I was
meeting question with answer, pat, with all
the old sensation of scoring off one's form-
master. One awful moment I had of almost
irresistible temptation.

" Do you know where your hay comes
from ? " asked the General.

" Yes, Sir ! " said I, and at that moment the
thought of Mr. Arnold Bennett's immortal
Card flashed through my mind.

" Do you ! " trembled on my lips. It was
an awful moment. Simpson considered when
he approached me about it afterwards that I
should have had the courage of Denry's
" cardishness." I felt that up to that time

Corporal Simpson 51

my henchman had credited me with this
literary insolence and that I had fallen in his
esteem.

I am not surprised at Simpson, having long
known him for a kindred soul entertaining
relations with the Muses. I first recognised
the litterateur in him the day when I told my
squad of navvies that though there may be six-
and-sixty ways of writing tribal lays, there is
only one way of shovelling coal and that way
my way.

" From Mr. Kipling, I think, Sir/' put in
Simpson.

Simpson may not be much of a practical
soldier, but he makes up by being more than a
bit of a poet. I discovered that before the war
he was a railway clerk with a passion for the
cinema. He confessed to having " written "
many of these soul-stirring films, and to having
had them played all over America and Australia
at a profit of over four guineas per drama. He
outlined some of the plots and even gave me
one or two of the scenarios to read. " Her
Only Son " dealt pathetically with the lad
who steals the widow's last mite. " A Noble
Deception " concerned a hero who unwittingly
made love to his brother's girl. To wean her
affections from him the hero had to sham
drunkenness. (Simpson never goes to the
theatre proper, and had never heard of " David

52 L. of C.

Garrick " !) " Pals " was all about a pavement
artist and a flower-girl, with a moral that the
poor as well as the rich may know true and
faithful friendship. Simpson is strong upon
the domesticity of the picture-play. Once, in
the columns of a theatrical newspaper he had
it out with a famous dramatic critic who knew
no better than to fall foul of the inanity of the
cinema drama. This impudent fellow would,
according to Simpson, have pigeon-holed the
film-drama into : (#) The lovers meet, have
trouble and come together again. (6) Black-
guards turn up trumps, (c) Prodigal sons
restore to glory their mortgaged ancestral
homes.

" But I filled his slate ! ': said Simpson.
" If the cinema was not to use this sort of plot,
I challenged him to say what sort of plot the
cinema was to use ! And he had no answer."

Simpson's favourite poets are Byron, Mrs.
Browning, and Henry Kirke White, and his
pet hobby musical comedy. The theatre proper
has no interest for him. It lacks go, he declares.

I first made Simpson's acquaintance through
borrowing him when I was short of a lance-
corporal.

' ' He is the biggest darned fool in the camp,
and you can have him with pleasure," said his
officer, who before the war was used to dragoon-
ing coolies, and had not too much patience with

Corporal Simpson 53

poesy. Simpson was a full corporal at that
time, and as the strength of the detachment
only allowed a lance-corporal, the fellow, scent-
ing a kindred spirit, volunteered to lose a stripe.
I accepted this, and Simpson took to looking
happy instead of mooning about the camp.
We talk " Shakspere and the musical glasses/'
and when Simpson has a quotation to throw
off his chest he chooses me as the victim. In-
cidentally he works like blazes, inefficiently
perhaps, but in an ecstasy of zeal and always
at the double. To-day I saw the unusual sight
of Simpson walking. He explained that he had
just been inoculated.

" To do a great good do a little harm,"
he suggested, nosing a discussion.

Perhaps my friend has rather too great an
affection for polysyllables and a florid, tonsorial
style of speech that is strangely reminiscent of
the society diction of our leading playwright.
I ask Simpson if there are any letters for me.
He replies :

" It would appear, Sir, that there are four."

Once when he was telling me with some
emotion of a friend killed at the front and ex-
patiating on the ties between them, I hazarded,
in language which I thought would please him,
Mrs. Cortelyon's famous " twin cherries on one
stalk."

" Exactly, Sir/' said Simpson, adding, " and

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L. of C.

if you will permit the liberty, Sir, I should lik<
to say that I have often admired your figures
of speech, not so much, Sir, for their accuracy,
as on behalf of their elegance."

A few weeks after I had accepted Simpson's
sacrifice of a stripe, instructions came through
to add a sergeant to the strength of the detach-
ment. Simpson has accepted the two additional
stripes with the same equanimity with which
he discarded one.

" It's not the stripe that makes the soldier >J
is his equable philosophy.

CHAPTER VI

THE PLAIN

WE'RE off, and the fever called waiting
is ended at last ! Here have I been
for two months without a line to you and now
at the last minute I could write reams. But
that would be wearisome and there's time only
for essentials. What then shall I tell you
about the Plain before we go ? I could do an
admirable guide-book about Old Sarum, with
stories of the Canadian vet. who thought
Salisbury Cathedral " nobby " and Stonehenge
" real smart." Perhaps I should tell you that
Stonehenge really is impressive in spite of the
silly little guide-book which flaunts a photo-
graph of a local country seat cheek by jowl
with a view of the Great Trilithon. In spite,
too, of the iron railing and the stolid police-
man— whose stolidity melts at a shilling. Nor
must you be put off by rows upon rows of tin
huts lining and ruling the horizon for all the
world like the mean streets of Mr. Morrison's
novels. You declare for a city of the dead,
a shell, a husk, so silent is it and so motionless.
And then you begin to realise the immense

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MHHHMMmHMMHMMBMM

distances. This little world is miles away, its
inhabitants are no bigger than flies ; their
incomings and their outgoings are hardly re-
markable and fail to break the silence. Some-
times on quiet evenings you can hear the
blowing of faint bugles, recalling you from the
grave and certain past to the fretful mirage of
the pr sent. Stonehenge may well claim a
place among the Great Monuments, since it can
face Time undaunted and suffer no shrinkage in
its immense setting.

Something there is about life on the Plain
that puts me out of patience with minor
grumblings, something that is more than the
consciousness that the period of training is at
an end, more, even, than the sense that a great
adventure is about to begin. I am more
conscious of England here than I have ever
been outside literature, and in actual terms of
soil and stone and landmark. Salisbury, Win-
chester, Bath, this is England with a vengeance,
the histories come to life again. Those pictures
in the primers, of rounded arches, vaulted
roofs and traceried windows, those quaint
WQodcuts of recumbent knights gravely asleep
— how the old school-books come back to one !
And here am I in that part of England where
you may stand in the light of these actual
windows, peer through these very arches,
finger curiously the lineaments of these carven

The Plain 57

knights, their stone pillows and quiet swords.
I swear that either I was dreaming yesterday
or did in very sooth see over a shop front
in Salisbury : " Hengist and Horsa, Haber-
dashers/' I dined at the " Haunch of Venison/'
an old-fashioned hostelry of slanting ceilings
and warped floors, secret passages and unsus-
pected alcoves. The landlord has in his time
done much digging for treasure, unearthing
coins and fabulous pottery. He shows a
gallon jug with a false bottom permanently
in favour of the host to the tune of a full half-
pint. A crumbling wainscot yielded him a
slipper of Charles the Second's day, and the
whole house is the sort of thing which we up
north would be proud to reconstruct in an
" Arts and Crafts " exhibition as a titbit of
Mediaeval England. But down here people
put the Beautiful to its proper use and live
in it. If the very stones of Salisbury prate of
the past, so do the hedgerows breathe out its
spirit. . . .

There are occasions when the least intro-
spective of us must take stock of his senti-
mental position. An evening on the Plain in
war-time is one of them. Men are here from
all the ends of the Empire for all sorts of
reasons. Some for the " sweet punishment of
their enemies," some that they may be ' honour-

L. of C.

ably avenged/* some for the adventure, some
through the loss of their jobs ; some hating it,
some unutterably bored, many inspired, a few
who will never find their feet, but not one, so
far as I can gather, who would turn back if he
could. " Man comes into life to seek and find
his sufficient beauty, to serve it, to win and
increase it, to fight for it, to face anything and
bear anything for it, counting death as nothing
so long as the dying eyes still turn to it. And
fear and dullness and indolence and appetite
— which indeed are no more than fear's three
crippled brothers — who make ambushes and
creep by night, are against him, to delay him,
to hold him off, to hamper and beguile and
kill him in that quest." This is neither
Ecclesiastes nor yet Bunyan, but a great living
novelist. This passage seems to me worthy to
be printed on a little card and served out to
every soldier with his Pay Book. Each of us
here, surely, has his " sufficient beauty." It
may be a family tie, or a grand passion, an art
or a friendship, a religion or even an ideal of
politics. At the last, it may be love of country.
What each man's " sufficient beauty " may be,
it is no man's business to enquire. Enough
that each man here is ready to fight and to
face and to dare for it, and is already putting
dullness and fear, appetite and indolence
behind him.

rPhe Plain 59

There are times when one is a little doubtful
of this, when one wonders how high thinking,
or the best that we may contrive in that line,
can go hand in hand with pettifogging drudgery,
the unimaginative routine, the annihilation of
initiative, and the stamping into a single
pattern that must necessarily be the kernel of
army training. But each man, having the
problem to solve for himself, solves it in his
own way. There is much human nature abroad,
and perhaps too much of the small and mean
side of it to be encountered. I have come
across a few great gentlemen and some bullies,
much nobility of disposition, all the mean-
nesses and most of the vulgarities. Then,
too, when one thinks of one's own slender
achievements and meagre attainments in actual
practical soldiering one fights shy of pro-
claiming so grand a text. I suppose I have
learnt just about enough of musketry not to be
too safe with a rifle ; the words of command
come to me just that incalculable fraction of a
second too late for perfect confidence ; I have
obtained such mastery of the mysteries of
Army Forms as would qualify me for the position
of post-boy in a business office, and here I am
mouthing about the sufficient beauty of life !
It is in the evening, when one goes back to
one's quiet office to finish a little work over a
vile cigar, that one is most sure about the finer

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issues. It is dark, the stars are out, a sentry
passes calmly a hundred feet away. The camp
is silent, save for the distant din of trivial tunes
trivial instruments, the soldier's evening

on

melody. In the next hut the regimental
sergeant-major is twanging a mandolin, the
companion of many years. Further down the
lines a gramophone is sentimentalising " Johnny
O'Morgan, with his little mouth-organ, playing
' Home, Sweet Home/ J" and from half a dozen
huts, in all manner of keys, resounds the ever
popular " Keep the Home Fires Burning."
Even that most mannerless of unlicked cubs,
young Jones, is making the officers1 mess
melancholy with his untrained, beautiful voice
and sentimental air. As I relight my cigar
for the tenth time — they are sixpence each
and must be relighted — I know that unto
each man in this camp, from the waster in the
ranks to the least heeding sub., there is a
" sufficient beauty/' And in that faith we
leave these shores to-morrow.

CHAPTER VII

GETTING READY

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.

PROVERBS.
§1

A AS that at the eleventh hour a telegram
should have come to hand informing my
gallant gang of navvies and their zestful C.O.
that we were not for France after all, but for
absorption at the Depot !

I proceeded then to hand over and pay
Aldershot the visite de ceremonie usual on a
re-posting, next receiving orders to hold myself
in readiness to proceed to, let us say, the coral
strands of " Patagonia." I should have pre-
ferred " Peru/' with its antiquities, memorials
of a bygone civilisation and serpents of old
Orinoco, but " Patagonia " would do. Any-
where to get out ! Anywhere ! And to hold
oneself in readiness seemed the affair of ten
minutes.

It is not very heartening, however, when
one's first step on the Patagonian road lands
one back again in yet another and remoter
part of the Plain. Our national poet's recurrent
" Another part of the field " must have been a

61

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reminiscence of postings and re-postings to the
Warwick Territorials of the period. Be that
as it may, the first stage of the Patagonian
expedition found me less than thirty miles
from my previous billet on what is rapidly
becoming the plainest of plains, decanted as it
were at a tumble-down shanty at the end of a
single -line railway at a very late hour on a
particularly dirty night, with an unknown
camp three miles away on roads more darkling
than Piccadilly at midnight. The porter is
asleep, the cloak-room closed, there is no sign
of a cab. Impossible to get into touch with
the Barrack-warden, whose landlady, reminis-
cent of Mrs. Micawber in her faded dressing-
gown and brown kid gloves, declines to wake
him at that hour of the morning. However,
one shakes down somewhere, and next morn-
ing a famous Brigadier to whose staff I am
attached, without tabs, confirms the news that
" Patagonia " is genuinely and definitely at
hand.

Then begins all over again the " getting
ready " that has been our constant preoccupa-
tion for a twelve-month, the revision of clothing
on tropical lines, the discarding, for my own
part, of a particularly handsome sheepskin
coat with leather facings, the result of a life-
time's savings and the wonder of the camp.
I am not going to say a single word about the

Getting Ready 63

revision of purely military plans involved in
the change from Flanders to " Patagonia/'
the question of flying wings forgathering at
" Aden/' of mechanical transport coming along
at " Ceylon/' of mule trains joining up at
" Vancouver." All matters of the higher
strategy, the use of native troops, the relative
advantages of a frank coastal landing or a
surreptitious invasion from the Back of Beyond,
which is supposed to be friendly to us or at
least neutral, the likelihood of gas — all these
matters we leave for the Higher Command.
What we discuss o' nights round the fire at
Head-quarters' mess is kit — our own and the
men's, but principally our own. The men's kit
will be all laid down in a wonderful document
called a mobilisation store table, of which
more hereafter, whilst the personal luggage of
officers is allowed to remain more or less a
matter of individual taste and fancy. Men
must take, officers may take — all the difference
between the " may " and " must " in the rules
of that ancient and meaningless game of golf
we used to play in the days of long ago. Besides
discussion of kit there is a desire on the part of
officers to pool their stocks of knowledge, or
shall we say conjecture ? The Signalling Officer
hazards the view that " Patagonia " is a great
country for buffalo and the lassoing thereof.
He is met with the objection that Patagonian

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grass is notoriously man-high, and inimical,
surely, to sporting proclivities, but the Staff
Captain, who confesses to basing his know-
ledge on recollections of a book of his boyhood
called " The Wild Horseman of the Pampas/'
supports him whole-heartedly. The Captain
has the alternative theory that the natives do
their lassoing from platforms erected on bamboo
poles on which they live after the manner of
Peter Pan or the ultra-rational gentleman in
Mr. Chesterton's tree story.

The Brigade Supply Officer contemplates
taking a ton of coloured beads, in the belief
that if you are sufficiently lavish with bits of
glass and discarded top-hats the native chiefs
will give you half their kingdoms, and the most
ebony of their daughters to wife. The Brigade
Major, a " picked man of countries/' talks
bush-fires and biltong, pemmican and mocas-
sins, tsetse fly and the burrowing flea, snakes-
rattle and strokes-sun, thorn-proof drill and
sun-helmets, blackwater fever, sleeping-sickness
and malaria, the antics of the mosquito and the
prevalence of big game. A subaltern holds the
view that the Patagonian lion, though small,
is the fiercest of his species, with a bite very
much worse than his bark. He has been known,
however, to take fright at the sudden opening
of an umbrella. The Brigadier is severely non-
speculative. He understands that we may

Getting Ready

have to rely on yaks or donkeys for our heavy
draught and the native for our private luggage.
The native load, carried on the head, is sixty
pounds. " You are a careless fellow," says
the local phrase-book under the heading " Con-
versation with natives JJ —and one suspects
reference to the loss of half one's luggage —
"take care lest I dislike you again to-day.0
The General goes on to advise the study of
pack-saddlery and the purchase of tin boxes to
defeat the white ant. The Machine Gun Officer
and the Requisition Officer (myself) lie very
low and say nothing, the former because he is
on the eve of a momentous discovery about
indirect fire and doesn't care a rap what
country he is for^ so long as he has somebody
to pot at on the other side of a hill, the
Requisition Officer because his knowledge of
" Patagonia " is confined to " King Solomon's
Mines " and the book in which Stanley says
" Dr. Livingstone, I presume ? " Towards
bed-time talk dies away in terms of colonial
allowances, banking facilities, postal arrange-
ments, the proper dose of quinine, the nice
question of tobacco.

Let it not be thought that the men are for-
gotten. The exact amount and style of clothing
they are to take is laid down beyond appeal
and is not within our control, but the officer
who should neglect to see that his men are

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L. of C.

comfortable in their outfit would be a scoundrel.
And so we have endless boot and clothing
parades, and much discarding, altering, adapt-
ing, fitting — but it is one's own outfit that pro-
vides the mental torture. Alone the General
remains calm. He has gone through a year of
the present war, the South African Campaign,
and whatever small scraps in India he has been
able to get himself ordered to, on an iron con-
stitution and a couple of shirts. Now he lets
fall a hint that it will be quite time for us to
get Patagonian kit when we drop anchor at
" Antananarivo." His staff are rendered there-
by vaguely uneasy, and the opinion is held
that, being a Brigadier, he may know some-
thing. What is called Patagonia may only be
a euphemism for somewhere nastier.

More disconcerting than a bolt from the blue,
but not altogether unexpected, comes the
stolid, emotionless telegram informing all our
eager and passionate starters in the great race
that they are not going to be allowed to start
after all. Follow ejaculations loud and deep.
The Brigadier himself gives a little squeak of
disappointment. I am sent round to the more
downcast to tell them that they also serve who
are only transferred from one mudheap in
Wiltshire to another, and to look as though I
believed it. " And thus from hour to hour we
ripe and ripe/' quotes a cynical schoolmaster

Getting Ready

and bachelor of arts — a poor hand at scrubbing
a floor, by the way. I can only agree that
after seventeen months' training troops should
be ripe enough. ... I return to the mess
and find them full of lead, but trying to smile,
pretending to get up enthusiasm for our next
ordered destination.

' You'll wear your beastly sheepskin yet/'
the Brigadier snaps. And so to bed, but only
moderately cheerful, to dream of opening
umbrellas in the face of Patagonian lions, in
full marching kit of sheepskin, pugaree, and
mosquito net.

Disappointment endures for the night only,
joy coming along in the morning in the shape
of an official letter expanding and amplifying
the telegram. Our destination has been changed
to "Peru." Peru after all! Where's your
Patagonia now ?

The geographical indications contained here-
in must not be taken too seriously. Natural
ignorance and a calculated obscurantism are
happily coincident.

§2

" Not gone yet ? " This now general greeting
to the subaltern home on one of his recurring
penultimate " last leaves " contains a ring of

68 L. of C.

scepticism calculated to jar on youthful ardour
held in durance yet as eagerly aflame as on the
great day seventeen months ago. The poig-
nancy of the most tremendous partings becomes
blunted by iteration. The high Roman, laying
upon the lips of his royal mistress of many
thousand kisses the poor last, is in the tragic
vein ; our modern type, with its " insane
farewells " protracted to banality, leans first
to tragi-comedy and topples comfortlessly on
anti-climax at the last.

One wonders whether the subaltern strain-
ing at the leash has adequate conception of the
complexity of the non-military preparation
that must precede the actual slipping of the
dogs of war. Let me explain, not talking in
Armies, nor yet in Divisions : lesser magnitudes,
a handful of five thousand, are more my
weight.

Let us assume that officers and their men are
at their physical and mental best, that they
have mastered the most complicated systems
of drill and the fine arts of musketry, that they
are experts at bayonet -fighting and bomb-
throwing, trench -digging and map -reading,
semaphore and heliograph. The skill of their
machine-gunning is as entrancing as the
ingenuity of their wire entanglements is devilish.
The tone of the battalions is high ; the men can
endure all things with serenity, they are, in a

Getting Ready

military sense, ready. Now comes the order
for immediate concentration at Camp X, en
route for " Patagonia." A day or two to get
into camp, say the units ; a day or two to
make each other's acquaintance, a day more
for the grand march past the Brigadier, and
in a week we are off ! ... Two months later
finds the Brigade still marching past the
Brigadier, sadder soldiers probably, none the
wiser, certainly, as to when, if ever, they are
to get out. No civilian knows as the belated
soldier knows, what it is to be " fed up/'

It was just two months ago, coincident with
our concentration, that the Mobilisation Store
Table made its first insidious appearance, and
Delay looked spectrally forth. The Mobilisa-
tion Store Table (generally called Mob. Table)
is Procrastination's dme damnee. It is the last
word in human ingenuity and dovetailedness.
More comprehensive than the " Encylopsedia
Britannica," more compendious than the 'cutest
pocket dictionary, it contains the bare neces-
saries of living, and the minimum of the simple
comforts after which the town-bred are going
to hanker. Now you may have a very good
idea that " Patagonia " is the last place to
which the Powers that Be intend that you
really shall proceed ; you may believe that
they are marking time and waiting upon
international events which you, in your know-

70 L. of C.

ledge of high strategy and Weltpolitik, decide
will take you to " Peru/' You know, too,
that nothing can be more divergent from the
Patagonian Mob. Table than his Peruvian
brother, and you hesitate to send out your
colossal indents. It is as though you were
ordering dinner for Wednesday when the guests
may be bidden for Thursday. Take warning
therefore from a sad little story. There was
once a wily old Colonel who, though in receipt
of orders for " Labrador/' got a tip from high
places that he was going to " Bolivia/' With
insidious cunning the Colonel committed him-
self only to such items as were common to the
tables for both countries. But how much of
unwisdom did he discover in this vacillation
between furs and cashmeres, preventives of
frostbite and palliatives of sunburn, when the
order came along actually to proceed to the
destination originally foreshadowed ! The batta-
lion, provided with a modicum of authorised
raiment, was, from an official point of view,
practically naked. The rest of the story is
painful, and has no place here.

The clothing and arming of the individual
is the least of the trouble. You can change
tropical kit for Arctic and the Japanese rifle
for the Lee-Enfield in the twinkling of an
Ordnance Officer's eye. Nor is there much
bother about miscellaneous stores. The axes-

Getting Ready

pick, and the hooks-reaping, the belts, rubber
and lunatic-restraining, and the knives open-
ing-tins— once learn to ask for these by their
right names and Ordnance is all docility and
expedition. The fun begins with the formation
of the " first line transport " and the arrival
of the mules. Brigadiers who have won dis-
tinction on a hundred fields may blow in as
they list, Brigade Majors with fifty famous
fights to their credit roll up as the fancy takes
them, Staff Captains of the top-hole order
push in and push off, ordinary Colonels tumble
over each other in the scramble for commands
—these things are of little moment. It is
the descent upon the Brigade of its comple-
ment of mules — some hundreds of jolly little
fellows with strongly marked personalities —
that stirs the camp to its vitals. Half the
mules are unmanageable, whilst the other half
have never been tried. Nor will any of the
luckless young gentlemen condemned to ride
them have ever been on horse or mule before,
whereas to ride postillion on a self-opinionated
mule and drive its recalcitrant partner with
rein and whip and voice is an equestrian feat.
To drape the curious entanglements — alleged
harness — round a pair and hitch the result to
a G.S. wagon is a thing the untrained imagina-
tion of the new Transport Officer boggles at.
Next to arrive are the officers' chargers, where-

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upon ensues a display of haute ecole to turn
old Astley in his grave. The Brigade Signal
Company, probably Welsh, is the next to turn
up, and every hill and hummock for miles
round is capped with gnomish figures beating
the air with true Celtic fervour. Then the
Field Ambulance, and lastly, always beyond
criticism, a company of A.S.C. Remember, O
youth of England, on fire for the duration of
the war, remember through all your urgency
of hot blood, that Head-quarters, the four
battalions, the Signal Section, the Ambulance,
the A.S.C. Company with its saddlers, wheelers,
farriers, butchers, bakers, issuers, clerks, are
each an individual organisation with interior
economy of its own. At the striking of the
great hour all these units must be keyed to
concert-pitch together, no mean feat of syn-
chronisation.

Of a sudden the order is telegraphed to
abandon thought of " Patagonia " and to gird
up our loins for " Peru." Hot on the heels of
this diverting wire comes the Peruvian Mob.
Table, bearing to the Patagonian Table no
more than the faintest of family likenesses.
Ordnance is made to sit up while strengths
and establishments are ecstatically revised,
excitement running fever high. And now we
inform the authorities that we are nearly,
nearly ready. We have a grand field day ;

Getting Ready

73

the procession of transport in all its wonder,
variety, and colour, though stragglesome, is
yet a procession. Even the mules begin to
have an inkling of the meaning of the word
precision, and when that happens it is odds
upon their drivers, who are the real trouble,
getting some sort of a glimmer of it, too. And
now it appears that during all these endless,
dragging weeks, when the whole of Head-
quarters from Brigadier downwards is strung
up, through strain, almost to the point of
relying on the reports and figures submitted
by those little ants their indefatigable clerks
— it now appears that we have never for a
moment been lost sight of by the authorities.
Telegrams enquiring as to our " state " rain
down upon us. The last vaccinations, inocula-
tions, and eliminations of the unfit are through.
Then comes the day when the Brigadier, having
confidently challenged the authorities to show
cause why he should not now be sent out, is
seen to draw his Brigade Major apart and
engage him in deep converse. In answer to
our mute enquiries there is much shaking of
the head, nodding, and histrionic air of " We
could an we would/' They look wiser, do
these great ones, than even we could have
thought possible who rate them above all other
Brigade Majors and Brigadiers. Is rumour
about to justify herself at the last ? Can it be

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true that getting ready is over, and that oui
fiery subaltern may renew his farewells, this
time in all seriousness ? Even now he doubts it.

§3

It is a long lane which has no turning, and
in the fullness of time even the most dilatory
of brigades " pushes off/' At the long last
embarkation orders do actually arrive, and
straightway the camp is swept from end to
end with rumours concerning " Ecuador." And
" Ecuador " it positively turns out to be, not
"Patagonia" nor yet "Peru." True that
these most secret orders are sent in triple
envelope at dead of night. Equally true that
next morning the same orders are whispered
from hut to hut. Before nightfall they are the
brazen gossip of the camp. Rumour is even
rife that the Brigadier and his staff will not
accompany the Brigade : " They get squiffy at
mess, old man ; not to be trusted with our
valuable lives," is the reason generally assigned
by the troops. Rumour is indeed justified,
though perhaps not for the reason assigned.
It is only too true that our famous Brigadier is
to leave us, to be translated to a higher place.

" Never has Brigadier been more greatly
looked up to by his men/' declares the Colonel
of our best battalion at a final sing-song given

Getting Ready

75

in the Brigadier's honour. This to the General's
face.

" A damned good sort, a topper ! " is the
expression more often used behind his back.

The quality of the cheering which greets
the fine, spare figure with greying hair, now
rising to address his men for the last time, is
proof that affection for a leader is no fiction
of the sentimentalist. So upright a soldier
might well have stepped out of the pages of
our strong and silent novelists, some such
forceful, uncompromising honesty must have
inspired the playwrights of the trumpet-blowing
regenerative drama. As for considered courtesy,
let us say the suave and polished raisonneur
of a Le Bargy or a Wyndham, a George
Alexander at his least-mannered. The Brigadier
begins by telling the men that he has com-
manded few finer battalions. He is careful
not to say that they are the best, the very
best of his experience, but he implies that he is
satisfied with them — measured praise more
valuable than glib extravagance.

" 'E never did 'old much with soft-soaping,
did 'e, Bill ? " says a hushed voice which I
recognise as belonging to the General's servant.
" Never was much for 'anding out the ne plus
ultras/' replies his pal, one Private Jackson,
a mess-waiter, who in his time has suffered
education.

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L. of C.

11 1 am sorry you are to go abroad without
me," the Brigadier continues. " It is a grief
to me that I shall not command you in your
new field of enterprise. You have done well
at home ; you are going to a new country "
which country the General of course does not
specify — " and I am sure when you get
there . . ."

What the General is sure about nobody will
ever know, for —

" Where ? " interrupts a voice in excited
whisper and admirable simulation of suspense.
For of course the boys know just as much about
it as the Staff. The Brigadier joins heartily in
the roar of laughter which ensues, bringing his
speech to an end with formal complimenting
of the Colonel and Officers.

The day of the Brigade's departure is a day
of weariness for a Head-quarters presently to
be divorced and left behind. There is the
tedium of leave-taking, the ceremonial visiting,
the multiplicity of indifferent farewells. But
there is a good deal of very genuine regret.
Good-byes, it seems, can be said in a hundred
ways. A cheerful soul will recommend you not
to forget the night when a distinguished Head-
quarters Staff, armed with sticks and a couple
of inexpert fox-terriers, failed to take the
measure of a fine rat delivered to them by the
mess-cook. Yet another will bid you think of

Getting Ready 77

those early days when advantage was taken
of your military innocence to persuade you
that a " muzzles horse " was the very latest
thing in " helmets anti-gas/' Yet another is
still harping on the Brigadier.

" Do you remember, old man, what a down
he had on string ? "

String was the Brigadier's one obsession.
Mules whose harness was pieced with string
were to him what donkeys were to Betsy Trot-
wood. Just as that intrepid lady would cry
out " Janet ! Donkeys ! ' what time she
advanced to the assault, so the General with
a shout of " String, by Gad ! " would upset the
mess table to threaten some luckless driver,
whose only sin had been to supplement the
remissness of Ordnance, with a liberal allow-
ance in this world of Field Punishment No. 2
and in the world to come the pains of eternal
torment. At this stage even the least popular
among the officers take on warmer shades of
desirability. This arrant snob, that irascible
old fool, such an arch-nepotist as yonder old
fox who, raising a battalion from his home-
acres, has thought fit to officer it from his own
dynasty — even these are tinged with a depart-
ing glow. Then there are the minor pangs ever
so much more acute than the major woes.
That nervous horse of yours who, when first
you had him, was wont to plunge at a carrot

L. of C.

•••••••••MMMiMMHHMM

and now eats out of your hand, goes back to
Remounts. Your groom, mysteriously collected
from the cavalry, returns thither. Last pang
of all, your servant rejoins his regiment. You
have established some kind of relationship
with the faithful fellow, setting many diligences
and assiduities against his poor skill in valeting.

"Under-handed, Sir, I calls it, all this chop-
ping and changing ; under-handed, Sir, that's
what it is ! " was the final farewell of my most
excellent and aggrieved of servants. So you
shake hands with him and wish him well ;
he to attend some less experienced sprig of
the New Armies, you to acquire some feckless
loon.

It is melancholy to hear the " So-longs ! '
of the subalterns who twenty years ago might
have peopled the pages of Rudyard Kipling
and to-day are so many heroes of Ian Hay.
Unemotional, not too imaginative, not too
highly gifted outside their jobs, shy of theoris-
ing, fonder of a bit of ratting, these young men
have a very real genius for getting things done.
What does it matter that they have no language
outside the jargon of their sports, that perilous
adventure and certain death are just so much
standing up to fast bowling ? They are the
" clean-run, straight-going, white men, good
fellows all " of their pet author — the best of
our race, in a word.

Getting Ready

79

At one o'clock on a cold, wet, and cheerless
morning, with half a gale of wind blowing,
the first half of the first battalion entrains at
the shored-up wooden platform of the camp
siding. Bugles have been blowing and now
the first detachments file down the little plat-
form in ghostly silence, looking strangely wan
in the fitful light of the flares. They wear sun-
helmets on this night of wind and weather, and
squatting by their baggage gaze with Oriental
indifference on the great setting out. There is
little enthusiasm, little jubilating, no hint of
' Tipperary," and one wonders how departure
can be so little heroic. Doors are shut and
blinds lowered. A pause of five minutes, and
at the bidding of the R.T.O. the train glides
silently away. At intervals of an hour other
trains move off, eight times in all.

And now the last of the troops are gone.
It is a raw, chill morning and a tired Brigade-
Major turning to a weary Staff Captain asks
him in the special brand of Cockney we keep
for our extremes of depression :

" Wot abaht it, old son ? "

" A fair knock-aht, gives me the pip ! " is
the reply.

Not down-hearted, perhaps, but a shade
thoughtful, we wend our way to breakfast,
servantless, groomless, and unhorsed. The
Brigadier has gone betimes to his new com-

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mand. The camp, yesterday a teeming city,
is to-day the abode of desolation. There is
none to command and none to obey. To-
morrow will see us, who have lived so long
together, strangers even to one another. We
are homeless, stranded, shelved, up-ended, once
more returnable to store. The brigade has
" na-poo'd."

CHAPTER VIII

SOLDIERS AND SONGS

HERE we are again ! " varied to " Here
we are still/' — the time-honoured phrase
of the Harlequinade is the burden of many a
letter from the training camps. It had been all
Lombard Street to a China orange on my going
out with the Brigade, but the Powers that Be
had other plans, although those plans have not
yet been divulged. One has the old " left
behind " feeling. It is the feeling one used to
have as a child when it was one's turn to stand
down from a treat. . . .

What shall I write you about, since write I
must to cloak disappointment and the baffling
sense of being held in leash, more or less use-
lessly ? No need of a reminder that I am not
precisely of the greyhound build, nor yet
expecting to be slipped to any very martial
purpose. The point is that whilst the youth
of England has laid silken dalliance and all the
rest of it in its wardrobes I, at least, have left
an old jacket and a favourite cleek in a dusty
locker — " Cleek " is by way of being a phrase

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d'auteuY, or the proper thing to say, as I could
never manage the beastly club, and used to
slog with an iron — but that is by the way.
The real grouse is that everybody else has been
drilling and preparing and getting ready for
ever so long, and to such apparent good pur-
pose too, since they're gone — good luck go with
'em ! — to adventure and heroism, discomfort
and being afraid, leaving the very air behind
them full of ardour and resolution, whilst the
handful of us who are left have only our stocks
of patience and the national poets to draw on.
Poetry was always a good prop, you know,
and music a sufficient stay, if it was the right
sort of poetry and the right sort of music. I've
been thinking a good deal lately about the
adaptability of the arts, and wondering whether,
if we can't persuade the great arts to unbend,
we can obtain for the little ones a trifle of more
courteous recognition. Take popular music,
and the songs the soldier likes to hear sung.
I do not mean the unsingable stuff that
ought to be popular, the chanteys, folk-songs,
and other erudite nonsense, but the rowdy
chorus and plaintive anthem with which we
are all made genuinely jolly and pleasantly sad.
For the first time in the history of this country
our aesthetes and intellectuals have had to do
a little mental slumming, have been brought
into actual contact with vulgar intelligence and

Soldiers and Songs

popular feeling ; and the intellectual mind has
discovered that you cannot grub out of a
common dixie, wash at a common tap, pig in
a common tent, and ignore common discom-
forts without sharing the simple emotions and
ways of expressing them that are common to
the crowd.

The first and last thing to note in connection
with our new attitude towards popular music
is our supreme unconcern as to whether we
are in the presence of an Art or not. Great
Art, we know, can transfigure dung-heaps ;
Popular Art has to do with things that resent
transfiguration, leave-takings, home-comings,
simple heroisms, and uncomplicated dyings.
Let us be perfectly clear about this. It is not
denied that great music can deal adequately
with these themes, for people with educated
ears to hear. What great music can do is not
the question. In this new art it is the themes
themselves which, given a modicum of skill in
the handling, provide our stimulus and our
exaltation. I have seen an audience of the
New Army, clever and simple together, held
in ecstasy as whole-souled as any amazement
of the expert for the latest bloom of a Delius
or a Stravinsky. It will be argued that the
comparison is vicious, that this is the old affair
of triangles versus blueness again, that the one
is art and the other what Mr. George Moore

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wittily calls an alternative form of bicycling —
that, in short, you must not measure the
exhilaration of a " Sea Drift " against the non-
aesthetic emotions of " Till the Boys Come
Home." I quite agree. Surely, however, we
want to find a more understanding attitude
towards these non-artistic patterns in rhyme
and non-aesthetic arrangements in sound. Music
possessing so great a power over the emotions
of so vast a number must be the concern of
sympathetic and not supercilious criticism.

Let me describe a Soldiers' Concert on
Salisbury Plain. You must realise, first of
all, the cardinal difference between the hours
of leisure of the civilian and the warrior in
training. The civilian, though his job be as
tedious as tallow-chandling, has yet a few
evening hours in which he may seek out the
excitement or interest for the sake of which
he has endured the day. The soldier is denied
all interest in his hours of ease, and is confronted
from Retreat to Reveille with intellectual
vacancy. There is nothing for him to do, and
the most ardent volunteer cannot fill the empty
hours for weeks on end with a sense of the
Heroic, however sublime, or a feeling for
Adventure, however romantic. And surely
Wordsworth monopolised for all time all the
fun there is to be got out of the Sense of Duty.

Into this abyss of boredom and Wiltshire

Soldiers and Songs

mud where we all sat gnawing our fingers,
something after the way in which, according
to Flaubert, the primeval monsters of the
earth's earlier mud were wont unwittingly to
devour their feet, fell the welcome news that
a Concert Party, headed by Mr. Courtice
Pounds, would entertain us at an early date.
On the appointed evening everybody in camp
struggled through the mud and waded to the
Y.M.C.A. hut. The " hall " was full to door-
jamb and window-ledge, and never could a
more expectant audience have faced the sym-
pathetic soprano, the gay soubrette, the tenor
and basso, heroes of a thousand gramophone
triumphs, the professedly comic fellow, and
Mr. Pounds. The entertainment began with
a little song about Ireland, trumpery in pathos
and infantile in wit. This at once met with
a reception rarely accorded at classical con-
certs to the most wistful of German " Lieder."
Next a song by the tenor, with the burden
" When You Come Home at Eventide/' floats
us down the stream of melancholy. The verse
steers a deft course between the muses of Mr.
Stephen Phillips and Mr. Albert Chevalier :
" One must go first. Ah, God, one must go
first " ; whilst everybody knows the old coster's
prayer, " And when we part, as part we
must. ..." Every eye in the hall was bright
and shining, and the tenor, who used the utmost

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simplicity, seemed to understand that " More
matter and less art " may be the very stuff
of right-mindedness. A further exercise in
elegiacs brought the audience to unashamed
tears. The music, save for a dying fall, had
little interest. I suppose the tune laid claim
to no sort of " melodic line " or whatever the
jargon may be, but the words beginning

" Sometimes between long shadows on the grass
The little truant waves of sunshine pass"

had a ring of sincerity about them, bringing
nostalgia to the officers and simple memories
of home to the men.

Mr. Pounds himself began in a vein of regret.
He sang one of the many settings of " Mandalay "
and managed to convey so much of the silence
which in the poem " 'ung that 'eavy '" that
the audience hardly ventured to breathe.
" There ain't no 'buses runnin' from the Bank
to Mandalay/' and we realise that neither are
there any running from the Plain to our homes.
At the conclusion of the song there was a
moment of silence and then the audience broke
into overwhelming applause. This brought up
the singer again, now with the kindly relief of
some rollicking humour. Mr. Pounds reeled
off some of the best of his Touchstone — a
wonderfully good performance it is, too, as all
play-goers will remember — and then on to a

Soldiers and Songs

series of imitations — bananas back-firing and
other quaint phenomena. Mr. Pounds has
nearly as many countenances in his bundle of
masks as the greatest of French comedians,
and certainly Coquelin never achieved any-
thing more realistic than this actor's " Earwig
nibbling his bedding." A subsequent song
entitled " They Ve shifted mother's grave to
build a cinema " was hailed with shrieks of
delight untempered with misgivings as to
feasibility. Then a very arch young lady sang
a very arch ditty about another arch young
lady who intended to " side-track " seaside
flirtation and stick to somebody for keeps.
" Good-bye, boys, I'm through ! " was the
expressive title, calling up visions of straw
hats and socks, bands and pier-heads, Brighton
and Margate, Blackpool's Empress Ballroom
and the sweep of the promenade at Douglas.
Then we all fell to thinking of Miss Florrie
Forde and the choruses of that lady, testifying
to the sunshine of each other's smile till it was
time for " God Save the King."

There had been fun at the concert, but the
dominant feature was a simple emotion. The
audience wended its way home a shade thought-
fully, thinking not so much of supper as of
sweethearts and wives. We would have had
the concert an hour longer — and what amateur
of the classics can say more, or as much ?

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Two days later I noticed at church many of
the faces I had seen at the concert. The organist,
a musician of not too considerable attainment,
invoked the spirit of devotion entirely success-
fully in sounds of the faintest musical signifi-
cance. Meaningless modulations meandered
fitfully round the walls of the old church, and
I would not have exchanged them for all the
ordered wealth of Bach and Palestrina. They
did their job, lying lightly on our soldier-spirit
and bringing us to serious mood. Great art
may easily become a vexation to the simple
mind ; to many a soldier it is simply unintelli-
gible. As for these unpretentious contrivances
in tunefulness that catch and hold our simple
taste, and for which we have as yet no adequate
name — shall criticism after the war be content
to lump them all together as rubbish of no
value ?

What answer, I wonder, have the Academics ?
They must be soldiers as well as Academics, or
they will be out of court.

CHAPTER IX

A CHOICE OF BOOKS

HAS it ever occurred to you that we don't
so much choose our books as read those
which are chosen for us ? Publisher and book-
seller are in a conjurer's league to " force "
books upon us as if they were cards in a trick.
A publisher of my acquaintance once told me
that his output was divided roughly into good,
profitable sellers, books that were too poor to
sell, and masterpieces that were too good.
And do you know how he got rid of both sorts
of undesirables ? By the simple expedient
of saying to the shopkeeper, " My dear fellow,
you want a hundred copies of ' Through Blood
to Berlin ' or ' Hand and Heart for Haig/ do
you ? Oh no, you don't ! You'll just take
eighty copies of either of those and ten of a
stumer I've got stuck with. And the balance'll
have to be So-and-So's latest, and I assure you
it's the best Sonnet-series since Wordsworth.
So cheer up and look happy. I've let you
off cheap." And the bookseller cheers up
and looks happy, for he knows that within
reason he can sell a certain number of copies of

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anything. But he would rather have eighty
per cent of a known seller and twenty per
cent of rubbish. It's the masterpiece he's up
against.

Now I have made up my mind to go to the
front, or as near as I shall ever get to the front
— if ever I get ordered to the front at all, of
which I begin to have grave doubts — attended
by a dozen or so of books of my own choosing.
Not books that some old wiseacre has chosen
for me and that I am to like for decency's
sake ; nor books picked up haphazard ; nor
yet books urged upon my sensibility by some
pretty lady on the cover. " Watch for the
dicky-bird ! " used to be the admonition of the
photographer to the two-year-old infant. " Look
at pretty lady ! " says the present-day pub-
lisher to his fractious public, fighting shy even
of " David Copperfield 'J unless reassured by
a picture of a present-day Dora in curls and
a hat, playing with a snarling little Jip and a
hundred years out of date. No publisher's
tricks for me ! I'm out for the masterpieces
and no compromise. All that is wanted in
the way of second-rate thinking and slipshod,
careless writing I can do for myself. And I
entirely decline to believe that if ever I get
into a tight place — which Heaven forbid ! — I
shall get out of it any more easily or acquit
myself any less shiversomely for having, say,

A Choice of Books

' The Scarlet Pimpernel " in my pocket instead
of " Esmond."

Here is my round dozen of books.

1. The Bible and Shakspere.

2. David Copperfield.

3. (a) Balzac's " La Cousine Bette " and
(i) " L'lllustre Gaudissart."

4. Flaubert's " L'Education Sentiment ale."

5. Maupassant's " Bel Ami."

6. H. G. Wells' " History of Mr. Polly.1'

7. Conrad's " Lord Jim."

8. The Oxford Book of English Verse.

9. The Oxford Book of French Verse.

10. Whitaker's Almanac.

11. A volume of G. K. Chesterton's Essays,
or " Les Liaisons Dangereuses," by Choderlos
de Laclos.

So far so good. In case you object that
these are not the eleven best books in the
world I reply that they are my best eleven
best books. I append retorts to any other
objections.

i. Admitted that this is another case of
Hamlet's " That's two of his weapons."
As I cannot get in all I want in any other
way this cannot be helped.

92

L. of C

2. The biggest-hearted novel written, except
perhaps " Bleak House." The former wins
on a vote by virtue of Micawber.

3. (a) Balzac's greatest.

(6) This is open to the same objection as
i, but as it is hardly fair that " La Cousine
Bette " should be in one volume only,
seeing that so many of the " Human
Comedy " are in two, I am allowing my-
self another. Besides, was not Gaudissart
a commercial traveller like some soldiers
I know ?

4. Not only is this Flaubert's masterpiece,
but in my opinion after Ecclesiastes the
greatest of all sermons on human vanity.
In this book is contained the famous
passage on the funeral of M. Dambreuse,
" dont il ne sera plus question sur cette
terre,'K that passage which, Mr. George
Moore informs us, there are not in the
world more than forty people capable of
appreciating. This delightful and impul-
sive critic imagines these forty superior
beings as meeting once a year in Paris to
recite the passage to one another under
the lilacs of the Champs Elysees.

5. Perhaps this is where the courage of one's
convictions comes in.

6. I do not attempt to defend this.

A Choice of Books

93

7. The finest story in the world.

8. Obvious.

9. Not for the ballads of Villon, the sonnets
of Ronsard and du Bellay, the courtliness
of Corneille, the frigidity of Racine, the
grandiloquence of Hugo, the brassy splen-
dour of Leconte de Lisle, the terror of
Baudelaire or the malaise of Verlaine,
but for the epitaph on a little sixteenth-
century dog. Beginning

" Dessous ceste motte verte
De lis et roses couverte
Gist le petit Peloton
De qui le poil foleton
Frisoit d'une toyson blanche
Le doz, le ventre, et la hanche."

the poem goes on to enumerate the little
fellow's amiabilities and social graces.

" Peloton tousjours veilloit
Quand son maistre sommeilloit,
Et ne souilloit point sa couche
Du ventre ny de la bouche,
Car sans cesse il gratignoit
Quand ce desir le poingnoit ;
Tant fut la petite beste
En toutes choses honneste."

Note the parellels between this fanciful
little threnody and our own great poetry.

" Car la mort ayant envie
Sur 1'ayse de nostre vie/'

94 L. of C.

•———•——•———————«——

" Envying earth's good hap,
spatches Peloton,

Death de-

"Qui maintenant se pourmeine
Parmi ceste umbreuse plaine,
Dont nul ne revient vers nous " —

in a word, to that undiscovered country
from whose bourn no traveller returns.
Poor Peloton,

"qui estoit digne
D'estre au ciel un nouveau signe,
Temperant le Chien cruel
D'un printemps perpetuel " —

worthy, when he should die, to be cu1
out in little stars like our own romantic
hero !

What charm and good sense in a col-
lection which can find place for the grand
sonnet series Antiquitez de Rome, and
this other tiny miracle of fancy and
regret !

ii. A toss-up to be decided later. Aubrey
Beardsley confessed in his last terrible
letters of alternate hope and fear that
he read passages from the Lives of the
Saints or a page of Laclos as he felt ill or
well.

The last place, like all last places, takes a
deal of filling. I have almost decided to
plump for —

A Choice of Books 95

12. A volume of W. W. Jacobs' stories, pro-
bably " At Sunwich Port."

" There is no news/' interposed Mrs.
Kingdom, during an interval. " Mr. Hall's
aunt died the other day."

" Never heard of her/' said the Captain.

11 Neither had I, till then," said Mrs.
Kingdom. "What a lot of people there are
one never hears of, John."

The Captain stared at her offensively. . . .

And if that is not sufficient justification, I can
only quote the following :

" I wouldn't put a ticket marked * Look
at this ' on that coat," said Mr. Smith severely,
". it oughtn't to be looked at."

" It's the best out o' three all 'anging
together," said Mr. Kybird evenly.

" And look 'ere," said Mr. Smith, " look
what an out-o'-the-way place you've put
this ticket. Why not put it higher up on
the coat ? "

" Becos the moth-hole ain't there," said
Mr. Kybird.

When, if ever, great literature should fail us,
there must still be virtue in this excellent fooling.

I am afraid the thirty-five pound kit allow-
ance is going to be something of a difficulty.

96 L. of C.

But it is a well-known Army maxim that
difficulties exist for the express purpose of
being circumvented. Such part of my library,
then, as cannot be got into the valise will have
to be dependent from my person, and any odd
volumes left over stowed away on my devoted
batman. In addition to the pockets, patch,
for helmets anti-gas, I am inventing a " poche
aux langues etrangeres " after the manner of
the addle-pated student in the Scenes de la
Vie de Boheme. Some thought-out scheme for
securing a reasonable supply of reading matter
is essential. In the days of our small wars it
used to be left to each officer to contribute a
book apiece, until on one occasion every single
one of them turned up with the works of Adam
Lindsay Gordon ! There is a danger that under
such a system to-day " The First Hundred
Thousand " would be the only book in the
camp ! And how good it is ! Almost am I
tempted to cut out the Shakspere in its favour.
Positively I cannot make up my mind whether
Hamlet or Private Mucklewame would make
the better companion for a campaign.

CHAPTER X

MY FRIENDS IN THE RANKS

The land where I shall mind you not
Is the land where all's forgot.

A SHROPSHIRE LAD.

I WONDER whether I can make you realise
how happy a family may be contained
within the establishment of a Depot Unit of
Supply. It is giving away no military secret
to say that the strength of a Depot Unit is
laid down as fourteen men, including one officer
and one warrant officer, this latter always to
be addressed as " Mr./' and a very pleasant
fellow when he doesn't bother his head about
his status, the little more and how much it
would be.

What sort of fellows, then, are the rank and
file in the A.S.C., the men upon whom depends
much of the efficiency of the officer's job and a
good deal of his personal happiness ? For you
must realise that the officer's job is permanently
with him, never to be left behind as you leave a
business in the city. Were a generalisation of
the rank and file to be attempted it would be
Mr. Wells' " Bert Smallways " all over again —
the clerk, the shop-boy, the draper's assistant,

•

98

L. of C.

Now there is little that is common and every-
thing that is likeable about the shop-boy who
really is a shop-boy. His manner of smoking
a fag may be the manner of his class, he may be
suspected of taking a disquieting interest in
social questions, of possessing views concerning
the dignity of clerking. But the chances are
that he knows what life is like on thirty shillings
a week, that he has the pluck to take that life
cheerfully, the wit to ignore its limitations and
the courage to persuade some pretty simpleton
to share that life with him, limitations, economies,
the whole anxious bag of tricks. How, after
the war, is one going to drop all acquaintance
with these honest, likeable fellows, and how is
it going to be practicable to keep up all the
friendships which one has made in every corner
of the land ?

Disbanding at the end of the war is going
to be a scattersome affair, a bigger upheaval
than enlisting. I cannot quite see an end to
the friendships with butchers, bakers, candle-
stick-makers, the clerks and issuers who talk
to their officer of their sweethearts, wives and
children, and make him a partner in their joys
and sorrows.

Three months did I have, during the period
of vagabondage known as training, of perfect
companionship with my little staff. We were
rather more than a baker's dozen all told,

=

My Friends in the Ranks 99

always under orders for the remoter theatres
of the war and always being left behind. We
had, in the picturesque army phrase, " damn-
all " to do. To please the Brigadier we stole
cinders from a neighbouring railway siding
and drained the swamp all around the Wilt-
shire farmhouse in which Brigade Head-quarters
condescended to lay its head. To smooth the
way for the immaculate feet of the Brigade
Major we constructed elegant footpaths raised
above the mud with the aid of the aforesaid
cinders. To entertain the Staff Captain and
incidentally the Staff Captain's terrier, a mangy
little beast, we caught rats and got plentifully
bitten by ferrets for our trouble. We put out,
and were suspected of engineering, a fire at the
Supply Details billets which secured for us
some much-needed equipment. As one of our
new soldiers remarked, if the fire was not
authentic it was of the ben trovato order of
things. Sometimes it fell to one to give a
hand in the preparation and revision of those
gins and snares for adjutants, the dossiers
of District Courts - Martial. "You wear the
stripes on your sleeves, you ought to wear
them somewhere else, or words to that effect/'
was a bowdlerising for the tender ears of the
court of which I was enormously proud.

To me would fall the paying of the Brigade's
ceremonial visits. On behalf of the Brigadier

IOO

L. of C.

one had something civil to say to elderly ladies
gushing about the influence of classical music
on the soldier. In reply to letters on pink
and Paris-scented note-paper one called—
Romance being a shy bird down Wiltshire
way. When the note-paper was stout and
well-to-do Brigadier and Staff would call in
person about lunch-time — good feeds never
coming amiss on top of Government rations.

There was a fine opportunity for making
friends on the day when I had to overhaul a
gang of drivers unloaded on us with a record
none too favourable. Fifty strong they were,
fifty ill-favoured, shiftless, brow-beaten, sullen
ne'er-do-weels. Not an ounce of vice in the
lot so far as one could discern at a rough-and-
ready stock-taking. Their crime-sheets, which
averaged a yard long, revealed nothing more
heinous than an inability to keep sober and
a mania for indiscreet observation as to the
appearance and manners of their N.C.O.'s.
I shall never forget the kind of shamed bravado
with which this flock of black sheep took their
shepherding into the presence. Uncertain as to
what to do with their hands, half snatching at
caps, they appeared to know nothing about
the ritual which prescribes that the arms
should hang loosely by the sides, the thumb
in line with the seam of the trousers. One
man, the possessor of as pugnacious a coun-

My Friends in the Ranks i6i

tenance as ever I set eyes on, stood smartly
to attention. Turning up his record I found
it to contain every variety of ingenious dare-
devilry, with a very fair leaning towards
assault and battery.

" Davies, Sir. Driver Davies, No. T4, 999999,
goes by the name of Kid Davies, Sir, from
Lambeth. Only wants matching to keep him
quiet/' was the whispered precis of the sergeant
in charge. " Give him something to occupy
his mind, Sir."

On the spot I made up my mind to match
Driver Davies at the next inter-regimental
boxing-tourney for a shade of the odds against
any pick of the Staff Captain's. This would
at least give the fellow something to keep
himself fit for. Between the forty-nine others
of as unruly a gang as ever did twenty-eight
days' Field Punishment No. 2 in their own
country or were tied to a cart abroad, it was
not possible at this early stage to make nice
discrimination. Facing them one realised once
again that discipline, untempered by discern-
ment or kindliness or sense of humour, unmakes
as many men as it makes. Finely used, dis-
cipline braces and toughens, unimaginatively
used, it hardens and brutalises. " But for a
public school education and some profane
patronage I should be ' for it ' as certainly as
the poor devil on the mat," in a cheap frame

IO2

L. of C.

to match the calendars and inkpots, were a
worthy fitting for any C.O.'s desk.

A simple question of English had been at the
root of all Private Davies' persistent mis-
demeanours.

" It was all along of the missus bein' took
bad — 'er wot I lives wiv, Sir — an' me 'oppin'
it, and arsking for no leave. Of course I cops
out and Colonel, 'e says, speaking very quick,
'I suppose, my man/ ses 'e, 'I suppose you
realise the gravity of wot you was doing ? '
Thinking as 'ow he wants to know if I sees
now wot I done I ses, ' Yessir,' meaning as
'ow I sees now as I ought to 'ave put in for
leave and 'opped it if leave didn't come orf.
' O, you did realise it, did you ? ' says the ole
man. ' Yessir,' ses I. ' That makes it ten
times worse,' ses 'e, ' twenty-eight days deten-
tion ! ' Corporal on p'lice tells me as 'ow I
ought to 'ave sed ' No, Sir ! ' me not realism'
nothin' at the time. But 'ow was I to know
wot 'e meant ? "

From that day he had realised a certain
hopelessness in trying to understand an officer
or to get an officer to understand him. Con-
sequently he had given up trying to soldier
or go straight.

All this I learnt from Da vies later on. At
the time it was a question of getting into some
sort of personal relation with the gang. So

My Friends in the Ranks 103

I made an impromptu speech, which had the
merit of being entirely unconsidered. I told
them that I fully appreciated — of course I
didn't use any long words like that — the valour
of their famous mutiny at their last station,
that I considered the way a mere handful of
them held their hut against a whole company
of A.S.C. worthy of a corps more pronouncedly
combatant than ourselves. Followed sugges-
tions as to the advisability, however, of keeping
" rough houses " for brother Boche. Warming
to one's subject one made confidences.

" I understand that you have openly declared
that you don't care a blank blank for whatever
officer is put in charge of you. Now I have
asked to be put in charge of you because there
is a devil of a lot of hard work to be done
down here and you look a likely lot. There is
a hundred tons of muck to be shifted for a
start, and at least forty mules that nobody
can get into harness. Now we are just going
to get the place ship-shape, straighten up the
blessed mokes and give the General the sur-
prise of his life."

Then for a peroration.

" Get the blooming work done and you chaps
shall have a ' cushy ' time. But shirk or grouse,
and, by Gad, I'll twist your tails till your eyes
drop out like ruddy dormice ! '

So strong is the old habit of trade unionism

104

L. of C.

that the men, shuffling out, held a meeting
to consider the situation. In less than half an
hour they returned a deputation to announce
that they had decided to soldier and how much
muck did the officer say there was to shift ?
Whether addresses such as I delivered are laid
down in the text-books for officers I don't
know. The proof of the pudding is in the
eating, and the fact remains that until the
Brigade broke up there was not a serious crime
amongst the lot, nothing at which one could
not honourably wink. A more amiable crew
of rascals I never desire to meet. Hereafter,
in a better world than this I shall desire more
love and knowledge of them.

" 'E's a bloke as any other bloke can fetch
'is meaning," was conveyed to me as a candid
criticism.

My career as the guide, philosopher, and
trainer to Driver Davies was of short duration.
I matched him successfully at the inter-
regimental tourney against the Staff Captain's
fancy, a burly youth who turned it up in the
first round. The terms of the wager were my
week's pay and allowances against the right
to take out either of the Captain's horses. All
Davies got out of it was ten bob, which he
accepted under protest, and the privilege of
an extra horse to groom, about which he made
no sort of demur whatever, and as soon as I

My Friends in the Ranks 105

had licked him into some sort of shape he was
transferred to another Unit, which is the Army
way.

Among my other friends in the Supply
Details was Staff-Sergeant Smethurst, butcher
by profession, and cattle dealer by inclination.
He confirmed the generally accepted theory
that you had only to get a job as buyer to a
concern founded on the principle, of mutual
benefit, to exchange a business doing three
beasts a week for half a dozen rows of houses
and a stake in the country.

Next, Corporal Withers, an ansemic, be-
spectacled individual of despondent mien, in
reality a human stove of warm-hearted cheer-
fulness. In private life an income-tax col-
lector, he confessed that in his hours of ease
he has been known to gather his children on
his knee and play to them upon the flute.
Withers always reminded me of that pathetic
figure, Dickens' Mr. Mell, his fellow-flautist,
and I liked him for it.

My transport sergeant, as dashing a chap
as ever ruined a horse's mouth, was too much
given to the tender passion. I mistrusted
from the beginning that frank, open coun-
tenance which always characterises the emo-
tional ruffian. I was not altogether surprised
when one day he asked me to explain how it
was that he preferred the young ladies who

io6

L. of C.

wouldn't have anything to say to him to
those who would. I read him a little lecture
on the French theme : " Les seules femmes a
desirer sont celles que Ton n'a pas eues," and
advised him to cease taking an amateur's
interest in the passion and get married. To
my great astonishment get married he did
no later than the following week to a young
woman of very determined character. I hope
she kept him in orcjer, but I have no sort of
belief that he ever quite settled down.

Private Alexander McDonald McNicol — I
write the name with real melancholy — was
of Scotchmen the dourest and most uncom-
promising. Clerk in an Aberdeen warehouse
he was five times rejected. Dodging the
doctors at the sixth attempt, he crept into the
Army a martyr to rheumatism. On the morn-
ings following wet days he would keep his
" bed " in such pain that he could hardly bear
the weight of the blanket on him.

" It juist gets a wee bit unbearable/' he
would say, " but 111 juist stick it, man, I
maun juist stick it ! "

Never a " Sir " and hardly ever a salute,
but I realised that his surliness had nothing
to do with being willing or unwilling. Before
ever I knew he was ailing I took him a twenty-
mile tramp in full kit and, as I afterwards
learnt, as much agony as may be endured

My Friends in the Ranks 107

without falling out. He nevertheless led the
singing all the way, enlivening the march with
some extraordinarily non-humorous Scotch
ditties, only to take to his bed for a week
afterwards. I tried my hardest to get him
to apply for his discharge, but without success.
The stubborn fellow resisted to the point of
insubordination. There is no pathetic ending
to his story, or if there is, thank goodness I
never knew it. The last I heard of him was
that he had been taken to hospital at Aldershot
with an attack of rheumatic fever. I -have
never been able to learn how it fared with
him. . . .

As for my four schoolmaster clerks, I find
it almost as hard to differentiate between them
on paper as it was in the flesh. These were
fellows that you were proud indeed to wear
in your heart of hearts. They were school-
masters from the Midlands with a mania for
supposing that as an officer I should know
more about, let us say, igneous rock formation
than they did. I learnt a good deal from
them on our route marches and they enjoyed
the Gilbertian position as much as I did. It
is not often that wit goes to the carting of
manure and it was my boast that my two
Bachelors of Science, my Bachelor of Arts,
and the low fellow who had no letters of any
sort after his name wielded their shovels more

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L. of C.

amusingly than any other four soldiers in the
camp. And I'm willing to bet that they dis-
placed as many pounds of muck per man per
minute as the most brainless sons of toil in
the Brigade. For you know the Army judges
entirely by results, and something which at
school we used to call " foot-pounds/' and not
amusingness, is the standard.

' What are you in private life, Moorcroft ? "
I asked one of them on the first morning of our
acquaintance.

" Science Master, Sir/' answered the fellow
with a grin, looking up from the scrubbing of
a floor.

" Then let's have a little more blooming
science about this scrubbing job," said I.
" You've missed all the corners. Cleaning a
floor doesn't mean shifting matter from one
wrong place to another, which is just about
all I know about science."

" Well, it's something to know that much,
Sir," said Moorcroft more than respectfully.
He is, I understand, the author of several
formidable treatises on trigonometry, the
binomial theorem, and other educational wild-
fowl. But he and I could never quite agree
as to his capabilities as a scrubber of floors.
In my opinion he always made a poor job of
it, and I had the pluck to tell him so.

I do not want you to suppose that all the

My Friends in the Ranks 109

geese of my detachment were swans. There
were one or two determined scallywags whose
interest in life was confined to getting as much
food, drink, and sleep as possible in exchange
for the minimum amount of work. Of them
I can find nothing to report. My little list
shall be concluded with Private Muggridge,
an extravagant, wildly improbable fellow with
a shock of flame-coloured hair and the appear-
ance of having got up in a high wind. There
was about him a blend of owlishness and
hilarity which was reminiscent of Traddles
and might have been induced by reading too
much Chesterton. A ferocious lepidopterist,
nothing that flew or crawled or had too many
legs had any secrets for him.

What jaunts we went on when we had
finished our scavenging ! " Route marches,1' I
called them, " war-symposia," according to
Muggridge — lepidopterist and linguist, " bright,
bloomin' picnics/' according to the bakers
and issuers. What farm-house teas did we
not devour, what distances did we not cover !
What did we not see of Wessex ! Stonehenge
we visited and Old Sarum, the Chapel at
Marlborough College, the Church at Lam-
bourne ! We got to know every foot of the
Downs between Salisbury and Devizes. We
talked seriously of the war and of our several
attitudes towards it, a thing which in an

no

L. of C.

officers' mess would be considered bad form.
We talked of their wives and their kids at
home. And often in the long trudge down the
avenues of the forest which was our favourite
route we would feel the silence as of cathedral
aisles. The light thickening to dusk we would
reel off the last few miles to the soberness of
Cardinal Newman's well-known hymn, as little
mawkishness going to the singing of it as to
the rousing choruses with which the day's
march would be begun. Then at last we would
see the cheerful farm-house windows beckoning
us, showing a welcome cheerier than any palace,
and we would know the content of tired bodies
and minds at case.

CHAPTER XI

THE RETURN TO SCHOOL

T TNDER War Office Authority you will proceed
forthwith to Woolwich.

And to Woolwich forthwith the wanderer
proceeds, trailing bag and baggage, camp kit
and Wolseley valise. To the Army Service
Corps officer proceeding to Woolwich, the
Arsenal is the least noteworthy object of
his pilgrimage. His Mecca is the A.S.C. Depot,
the repository of his Corps' secrets, the lair
of its archives. As Charing Cross and Port
Said to the globe-trotter, so the portals of
Woolwich to the A.S.C. In the Mess, if you
wait long enough, you will encounter the
whole Army Service Corps world. Time, Chance,
and Design converge here and campaigns
end in old friends meeting. The warrior
handsomely home, his job cleaned up, the
invalid for light duty only, the tyro chafing
to get out, the officer with Supply at his
finger-ends impatient to pick up Transport —
all these forgather at Woolwich.

Woolwich, where next my caravan came

112

L. of C.

momentarily to rest after the departure of
the Brigade, was full of heroes invalided from
Anzac and Suvla, amazingly casual gentry
these, lacking all outward and visible sign
of the extraordinary. Their manners at mess
turned out to be not finer than anybody
else's, their calls at Bridge not more daring,
their handling of a cue not more brilliant
than a mere civilian's. We tendered our ears,
but they opened not their mouths. Or if
they did it was not to talk heroics, but to
goad at one another with a fine fourteen-
year-old gaiety and zest.

" Awful dirty fellow, Jones/1 says some
monocled splendour of the Public Schools,
" had all the Straits to bathe in, and pre-
ferred to sit on the shore and scratch ! "

To which the immaculate Jones will reply :

" Remember the day, old man, when you
marched past H.Q. wearing that beastly
eyeglass of yours and every man -Jack of
your lot had his identification disk in his
eye ? "

And the monocled one grins.

Strange race they must seem to our more
emotional Allies, this race of well-bred English-
men with their reticence, their scorn of the
journalistic instinct, their adhesion to the
shibboleths of silence and under-statement.

The Return to School

Ply them as skilfully as you may, the con-
versational catch is negligible.

" I tell you what, old man, they fairly put
the wind up me that day ! " is their way of
recording some unendurable terror, whilst, "they
weren't liking it much " has to do for the panic
of the enemy.

" Were you in the war or only in Flanders ? "
is their way of impressing upon you that they
consider Gallipoli to have been of two unhealthy
places the less desirable.

And yet it would be unwise to judge the
temper of these boys by their cult of the in-
articulate. There is Mather, for example, a
fair youth with a childish face, blue eyes and
expression verging on the simple. He retailed
to me the innumerable dodges to which he
had recourse before succeeding in hoodwinking
the doctors. It had been, as he phrased it,
"some" hoodwinking, seeing that at one time
of his life he had been partially paralysed,
at another had lain six months in bed to
humour a heart, and had for years been deficient
of half a rib. The Dardanelles gave this
weakling the D.S.O. Beneath a smile that
might have graced Tom Brown's too angelic
chum, there lurked, his pals told me, a malignant
ferocity and flame of hate belonging more to
racial hysteria than to any sense of patriotism.

L. of C.

Merridew, Mather's partner in butchery,
lean and hungry personage, a veritable Smee
with his air of pistols and piracy, did his killing,
when he had any to do, with an air of aloof-
ness and detachment. Of murderous demeanour,
he is never happy save in the bosom of his
family.

To Woolwich, then, to join that penitential
scheme of things, euphemistically known as a
" School of Instruction " ! No matter that
you have helped history to record impossible
landings, you will conduct a squad on its
peregrinations round the back-yard which serves
Woolwich for a parade ground. It may be
that it is only a few weeks ago that you gave
the order to swarm up cliffs on which there
was holding only for your men's eyebrows ;
nevertheless you will drone away with the
monstrous " Squad will Retire ! Fours-
Right ! " Your standard floating in the breeze
will be the washing of the poverty-stricken
tenements which surround the Barrack Yard.
It was perhaps horse-mastership of no mean
order which in Flanders kept your transport
on its legs ; no matter, you will attend a
lecture on the horse and differentiate in chorus
with a dozen others the point of the shoulder
from the angle of the haunch. You will take
off belt, spurs, and tunic, and with sleeves

The Return to School 1 15

rolled up and braces dropped, learn to clean
a charger, whilst the driver whose job it should
be openly grins. Nine o'clock each morning
you will attend a function called Company
Office ; ten-thirty finds you at C.O.'s Orderly
Room.

It may be weeks, it may be only a single day
before a telegram whisks you away as it whisked
me, to a still more arduous House of Correction,
to wit, our old friend Aldershot, there to join
the •— th Division "shortly proceeding over-
seas/1 This meaning any time within the
month, twenty-four hours' last leave is graciously
accorded. Time then to run up town and back,
but not always time for a run home. Nothing
remarkable to be found in town on the occasion
of my last leave save and gloriously excepting
Miss Gene vie ve Ward's triumphant flicker in
the evening of her days. " What's brave,
what's noble, let's do it after the high English
fashion," this valorous old lady would seem
to proclaim by her war-time carriage. Seldom
on our stage so rare, so brave a spectacle as
this of old age infinitely gay, rounding off life
high-handedly with a full smack of Meredithian
gusto. . . . But this, however glorious, is again
by the way. We are for Aldershot and a
sterner theatre. In the meantime, and till we
go, the punctiliousness of parade, the small

n6 L.ofC.

subserviences, the unwilling shepherding to
school, to answer names in class and shout in
chorus round a blackboard.

Aldershot and Woolwich, like everything
else in this world, are very much what you
make them. It may irk you to be treated like
a small boy at school, to conform to fantastic
decrees as to dress, to subscribe to mysterious
fetishes and taboos. Woe to the temporary
officer who has had too good a time at some
too genial Head-quarters, who has hob-nobbed
with Brigadiers, moved among " Brass Hats "
as among social equals and nodded affably to
simple Colonels. It is humiliating to find rules
taking the place of ordinary good manners,
to be forbidden the chairs round the fireplace,
to be confounded with the unlicked cub of the
New Armies, to be suspected of horse-play, of
pouring whiskey down the piano and drumming
on the keyboard with your field-boots. But
these are after all the merest pin-pricks of a
self-consciousness which should have been long
ago laid aside. Aldershot and Woolwich have
their compensating greatness, a seemliness con-
sonant with the portraits and regimental plate
of the mess. A day or two of its strictness
and something of the initial keenness steals over
you again. Your year's round of training is
nearly over. Aldershot, the Yorkshire Dales,

The Return to School 117

the Plain, the Wiltshire mud, Woolwich and
now Aldershot once more " shortly for em-
barkation " —surely some sort of realisation
must be at hand ? Surely it is to prove worth
the waiting !

CHAPTER XII

A FALSE START

We'm powlert up and down a bit
And had a glorious day.

THREE JOLLY HUNTSMEN.

HAZLITTS apology for a famous essay,
you will remember, was a partridge
roasting on the spit and an hour to spare
before dinner. My excuse for the present
letter is an excellent dejeuner at a cheap and
popular brasserie, somewhere in France — for
I have actually got to France at last — a
Cafe Boulestin, the last of the cigars brought
over from England, and an hour to wait whilst
our S.S.O. (Senior Supply Officer) who led us
up to the front and brought us back again,
after the manner of the famous Duke of York,
finds out the orders. We have at last suc-
ceeded in getting out of England, have been
up to the front, and finding ourselves de trop
have discreetly returned to the Base. But
we are still " Somewhere in France," and
that is something.

After months of postings and re-postings to
commands, of which the upshot has invariably
been absorption or elimination, the old familiar

118

V

False Start 1 19

wash-out " in a word, I and seven other in-
veterate hopefuls were appointed Supply and
Requisition Officers to a Division actually in
France and existing on its boot -laces till such
time as our most competent selves could be
hurried up to its relief.

Now the duty of Brigade Supply and Re-
quisition Officers is to ascertain from the
quartermasters of the Brigade exactly how
many rations each Battalion is likely to require
three days hence, and having ascertained the
amount required, to deliver the goods. This
is simplicity itself, what is not quite so simple
is the secondary line along which all Supply
work must move — the line of accounts. Feed-
ing troops is child's play, it is the accounting
for having fed them which is the very devil.
There is a complicated system of apron-strings,
called in the text-books a Chain of Respon-
sibility, by which you are bound to the petti-
coats of (a) the D.A.Q.M.G.1 (nobody very
tremendous, you have probably dined with
him in civil life), (6) the D.A.A. and O.M.G.2
(rather a stickler, this fellow), and (c) the A. A.
and Q.M.G.3 (a very big gun indeed). These
people should be learnt by heart after the
manner of the Kings of England.

1 Deputy Assistant Quartermaster-General.

2 Deputy Assistant Adjutant and Quartermaster-General.

3 Assistant Adjutant and Quartermaster-General.

120

L. of C.

The linking up of responsibility is done b]
forms, your bane of existence or very present
help in time of trouble, according as you have
let them get out of hand or have acquired
complete mastery over them. You will do well
to realise from the start that never can you
receive so much or so little as a ration of mus-
tard (one-fiftieth part of an ounce) or a ration
of pepper (one thirty-sixth part of an ounce)
without taking these amounts on your charge.
Never must you be so ill-advised as to reissue
these quantities to the next fellow without
seeing that he takes them on his charge and so
clears yours. For to take on charge is to
asssume reponsibility, and everybody in the
Army knows that the proper thing to do with
responsibility is to shelve it, or if you can't
shelve it, to pass it on. In other words, when
you unload your pepper and your mustard on
the other fellow, unload them on the proper
form, and see that you get his signature.

So that you may have an idea of what a very
important part of the machine a Brigade
Supply Officer is justified in considering him-
self, let me tell you that it is his job to look
after the requirements of a brigade, which
is roughly four thousand men strong, or a
heterogeneous mob, seven thousand five hun-
dred strong, of Artillery and Ammunition
Columns, Engineers, Signallers, Cyclists, Motor

A False Start

121

Machine Guns, Cavalry Squadron, Transport
Train, Ambulance, and Oddments. He looks
after the wants, then, of a fourth part of a
Division, a twelfth part of an Army Corps, the
forty-eighth part of an Army. Supplies for
the Brigade come up by rail from Base to Rail
Head, are there handed over to the Motor
Transport Lorries, to be dumped down at
Refilling Point, loaded again into the Horse
Transport Wagons, to be finally handed over
to regimental quartermasters who take them
away in their own regimental Transport and
distribute them to the troops. And here ends
the technical part of this Brigade Supply
Officers' Manual Without Tears.

Eight of us, then, nine with the S.S.O. —
picked men, we flattered ourselves, from
Flanders and Gallipoli, Egypt and Salonika,
the Plain, Woolwich, and Sick Leave—-
forgathered on the square at Aldershot, to
take to ourselves our " Details," Butchers,
Bakers, Clerks, and to draw our " Technical
Equipment " — Saddlery, Stationery, Cleavers,
Pick-axes, Scales, Lanterns, Flag-poles — all the
paraphernalia of a gipsy's caravan. An hour
to draw, an hour to pack, and we are ready.
But such eagerness would leave altogether out
of account the inevitable delay arranged for
our annoyance by the Powers that Be, because
they know it teases. Whether our Division

122

L. of C.

starve or not, for a whole fortnight do we
miserably mark time. Submarines in the
Channel, mines washed down the Gulf Stream,
the temporary indisposition of some mythical
A.D.V.K.1 are alleged as reasons. But all
things come to the officer who hangs on, even
embarkation, and at the long last we are
bidden to pack up and discharge mess bills.
There was one rowdy corner of the mess that
night, champagne-corks popping defiance at
the table reserved for Senior Officers, indepen-
dence turning to frank foolhardiness with the
smoking of eight colossal cigars. Then did the
occupants of eight of the Ante-Room's best
chairs gaze at truculent Majors as man to man.
We had left school and were, as Stalky said,
" Mister Corkran, if you please ! "

Now a journey to the front is not the straight-
forward affair you might imagine. In civil
life one seems to remember going to a ticket-
office, asking for a ticket, and devoting one's
personal attention to getting to the place
printed thereon. In the Army things are ar-
ranged differently. To begin with you are
not supposed to know what place you are
going to. Your first step on the journey is
an order to report yourself at a particular
time to your local R.T.O. (Railway Transport
Officer) who, it is understood, will hand you

1 Assistant Director of Valises and Kit Bags.

A False Start 1 23

your " Movement Order/' This is a chit
carrying you as far as the port of embarka-
tion, where you are taken in hand by the M.L.O.
(Military Landing Officer), who puts you on
board a vessel of sorts. Here, for the first time,
you are supposed to get some sort of inkling of
the country of your destination. Even the
name of the port at which you are to land is
vouchsafed. Arrived in port you are again
handed over to the M.L.O., who passes you
on to a series of R.T.O/s. When finally the
train pulls up at a wayside station not bigger
than a coffee-stall, and you are unceremoni-
ously bundled out into the rain, you feel that
at last you have reached the end of the world,
which is indeed very nearly the case. You
have reached what is to all intents and pur-
poses and for the moment, the end of the
civilised World. Before you lies the territory
of the unspeakable Hun.

I will not bore you with too detailed an
account of our departure from Aldershot, the
formal review in the early morning and a
blinding snowstorm, the day-long railway
journey, the crowding on to a tramp steamer,
the bartering of half-crowns for berths, the night
passed at vingt-et-un in a stuffy saloon. Morn-
ing brings us into a port not a thousand miles
from the field where Shakspere's great Harry
threw off his chest the first of the world's

124

L. of C.

greatest series of Army Orders. Nor will
worry you with the details of our land journey,
how we were first despatched to an alleged
rest camp, dank, mouldy, and yet delightful,
since it was abroad, how we spent sleepless
nights in unlighted and unwarmed troop trains,
making acquaintance with every siding in
the north of France and a philosophy of shunt-
ing undreamt-of on the most dilatory of home
systems. Troops in France travel by stealth,
blushing to find their movements famed. The
day is devoted to washing and brushing up,
to lounging about station-yards, to idling in
recreation rooms where you may drink coffee
and bang on a piano. Tommy, in these hours
of ease spent in French goods-yards, bears a
charmed life, sitting on foot-plates, lurching
across lines heedless of whistles and warnings.
Tired, bored, half his kit lost, his good temper
is unshakable. He is indifferent alike to
comfort and discomfort, impervious to ex-
hilaration and depression, no nearer heroics
now than he was behind his counter or at the
pit-head.

The men are always confined to the yards,
the officers are privileged to stroll as far as th$
Cathedral, the Hotel de Ville, the Palais de
Justice, the Joan of Arc statue, which are
the four sights common to every French town.
And often a bath, breakfast, and a good lounge,

A False Start

125

careless of the sights, contents our souls for
the day.

Officers and men entrain again at night-
fall, and again we jog uneventfully along.
At last, and entirely without the air of doing
anything extraordinary, the train pulls up
and we are arrived. Can these acres of un-
eventfulness be really the front ? A few empty
fields, a stunted bush, a couple of estaminets
of a squalor unknown to Zola, a handful of
poverty-stricken cottages, half a dozen clay-
pits, sand-banks, rushes, weeds. No trenches
and no troops. Only a hundred or so of navvies
— an A.S.C. Labour Company — loading sand
into railway trucks.

" Say, Bill," says a cheerful private, " this
'ere blinkin' war won't last another six
months."

" An' w'y not ? " demands Bill, shifting
his quid in anticipation of a discussion along
the lines of Mr. Belloc's theories of attrition.

" 'Cos we'll have the 'ole of blinkin' France
in blinkin' railway trucks afore then."

The truth of the matter is that we are still
some seventeen miles behind the lines. There
is nothing here except desolation, and letters
from this place, if letters were ever sent, would
be indeed News from Nowhere. No matter,
we are where we would be. No matter that
we hear that there is billeting accommodation

126

L. of C.

for 5000 men and that the area already contains
some 75,000. No matter that we look like
being lodged a la belle etoile, we are where we
would be.

But something noteworthy is to happen
after all. Word has preceded us by telegraph
that our Details only are to remain in this
most romantic place. The officers will return
by the next train, the authorities having
other views for us. A hurried good-bye to
the Details, and in less than twenty minutes
we are in the train again. . . .

Of the return I am not tempted to write
much, the flame of adventure which had
burned so brightly flickering disconsolately
and threatening extinction. We notice dis-
comforts now which escaped us before. Travel
by goods-train at the rate of thirty-six miles
in nine hours is not exhilarating. Why the
devil, we ask one another angrily, are not
the carriages heated or at least lighted ? We
discover that we have not had a wink of sleep
for four nights. The wit of the party, who
amused us so on the way up by ordering Eau
de Ricqles as an aperitif and Eau de Javel
as a liqueur, perseveres with what is now seen
to have been a poorish joke. We undress
and make up some sort of a bed on the floor
of a goods-truck, on the word of the R.T.O.
that we shall not be disturbed till morning.

A False Start

127

Shortly after midnight, and just as we have
succeeded in falling into an uneasy sleep, we
are rudely aroused by an uncouth railway
official, who gives us the choice of being left
in a siding for, say a week, or of getting dressed
and shouldering our kit through half a mile
of unknown railway line to an undiscoverable
platform. There are, of course, no porters on
hand at this absurd hour, and we struggle
ineffectually with valises whose weight ap-
proximates more nearly to a ton than to
thirty-five pounds. We look round the sleeping
trains for a soldier or two with the torso and
mien of an amiable blacksmith. A couple of
Hercules roused from their slumbers look
kindly upon our offer of five francs. They
haul away at our kits, and land them after
great effort on the wrong platform. We miss
the connection comfortably. . . .

The prospect in front of us is pretty gloomy.
There is apparently no choice save as between
a Base Supply Depot or yet another School
of Instruction. What a Scylla ! What a
Charybdis ! Nor is our fate in our own hands,
or we might hope with the lady novelist by
steering for both, successfully to miss both.
We shall know our fate when the S.S.O. returns
with the orders.

In the meantime don't take this grumble

128

L. of C.

too seriously. Quite between ourselves, I
never had a jollier time than during this abor-
tive journey to the front. Wrapped up in a
magnificent sheep-skin — the one the Brigadier
swore I should succeed in pressing into service
— with the whole of one side of a first-class
carriage to sprawl full length on, pockets
crammed with pasties, fruit, French biead,
and bottles of wine, a case of decent cigars,
and a more than decent fellow to share them
with, one slept and ate and drank and talked
one's bellyful. And what more can one desire ?

CHAPTER XIII

IN THE PAS DE CALAIS

/^HARYBDIS it turned out to be— in
^*s other words a School of Instruction,
and for a special torment Scy//# to follow, as
you shall hear. But really, whether I went
from the School of Instruction to the Base
Horse Transport Depot or the other way
round, I am not now quite clear. You will
have to take the letters as they come for a bit.
Often I begin a letter and have to break off,
and don't get the chance to resume until I've
been moved on a couple of Depots or so, which
is the best explanation I can offer for a mudd-
ling of tenses almost as wilful as Conrad at
his best. The rest of this present letter, for
instance, was written nearly a month ago.

To beguile the tedium of a course of lectures
on baking in the field — and I feel it in my
bones that I shall never command a Field
Bakery — let .me tell you something of the Pas
de Calais as it is in war-time. (I am jotting
these notes down under the nose of the lecturer
and the cover of a text-book, just as we used
to do at school, so you must not look for the
beau style or the mot juste.}

,29

130 L. of C.

The Pas de Calais, or so much as I have
seen of it, is entirely given up to the prosaic
business of making bullets for the heroical to
shoot, and it is perhaps hardly fair to debit
this devoted and hard-working department
with dullness when we should be praising it
for strenuous and successful endeavour. Not
even the fairest of towns, not even Rouen,
with her dreaming towers, looks her best at
five o'clock in the morning after a night spent
in a baggage-train in the middle of winter.
What do cathedrals matter when your prime
needs are breakfast, bath, and bed ? Leaving
the station you encounter droves of factory
hands. Now the factory hand going to work
in the morning is a very different person from
the petite ouvriZre of the French novels who
spends most of her time trotting about the
pavements of Paris for the delectation of the
-flaneur. The work-girl of the North is, in
point of fact, very little different from her
Lancashire sister, of both of whom it may be
suggested that their charm is predominantly
a matter of rude and rugged simplicity. Abbe-
ville struck me as remarkable for its factories,
palatial goods-yard, and phenomenal squalor ;
Amiens less for its cathedral than for its air
of bourgeois comfort. This town is surely the
Paradise of the small shopkeeper. My re-
collections of Havre are concerned chiefly

In the Pas de Calais 131

with a pertinacious cold in the head traditional
to the place. For the rest the town struck me
as being as dreary as one of those thriving
manufacturing centres around which the Man-
chester school of dramatists would seek to
weave some sort of textile glamour.

But then I have my reasons for disliking
Havre. It was there I discovered that French
hotel proprietors increase the Regie price of
cigars, which at best are in villainous condition,
by 125 per cent. Of course no one but a lunatic
ever orders drinks or smokes in the hotel in
which he is staying, wisely en pension. For
the bland, benevolent lady who presides at
the caisse and charges you at an inclusive
rate of n francs a day vin d part is invari-
ably a harpy of the deepest dye. Her chief
accomplice, the maztre-d' hotel, is always a
finished brigand and the Boots a palpable
cut-throat. The trio are in league to lure you
from the safe territory of inclusive terms to
the zone of the perilous " extra/1 There a
bottle of beer costs a franc, a cup of tea with
a couple of miserable biscuits a franc and a
half, a bath two to three francs, a smoke
anything you like. (I find I am always think-
ing and talking and writing about cigars.
They are the one civilian luxury I have not
been able to drop.) A week's sojourn in a
French hotel is a life-experience in rapine. It

132

L. of C.

would take a Rothschild to afford both the
morning tub and one of his eponymous cigars.
Personally, I did not wash.

" How many tons of dough, then, must we
reckon on for a Division ? " asks the lecturer
suddenly.

Distrait I answer, " Three weeks, Sir/' to
be told I have not been paying attention. . . .
But to resume, as a famous comedian used to
remark in happier days.

The only relief from war and war-thoughts
which the Pas de Calais would seem to afford
is to be found in the theatre and the Tournee
Charles Barret in " Primerose." Never have
I been able to achieve the time, the place and
the well-known actor altogether. Either I
have forestalled him by a week or lagged a
day behind. At Rouen I was lucky enough
to catch up with a music-hall of sorts. Of the
many famous descriptions of the French music-
hall in peace times the best perhaps is to be
found in Huysmans' " Sceurs Vatard," a piece
of realism to double the good citizen's sub-
scription to his local Vigilance Society. But
the war-time music-hall is for a more " serious "
pen than Huysmans' ! I think that the little
show at Rouen might have amused you. To
begin with, the salle has the air of a school-
room, smacking in this respect not a little of
our own Repertory Theatres. The audience

In the Pas de Calais 133

at the afternoon performance at which I
assisted was composed entirely of soldiers and
children, the militaires by far the more easily
amused. The first turn, a song by some gawky
innocent concerning Easter violets, Swiss lakes,
and a forsaken maiden, showed that the English
music-hall has not, as has been generally sup-
posed, a monopoly of the inane. The second
turn, a song by a motherly body with a strong
bias in favour of the domestic virtues, estab-
lished the fidelity of the " poilu." The English,
it would seem then, are not alone in their in-
sistence on the association of heroism and the
proprieties. Followed an impersonator of celeb-
rities, a large-nosed, heavy-jowled Italian with
a mask like Coquelin's from which all expression
had been sponged. The impersonation con-
sisted, as in England, in the donning of a wig,
whiskers, and moustachios — " face-fittings/'
Mr. Frank Richardson would for once be
justified in calling them — and in the enuncia-
tion of a trite and suitable epigram. Marat
is rhetorical, Danton proudly mum. An ex-
president shakes hands paternally. " Ce que
j 'adore dans la fleur " declares a commonplace
Zola, " c'est le fumier que Ton met autour."
Then comes a string of allied monarchs, with
much playing of National Anthemsj and stand-
ing up on the part of the audience. The
Tsar of Russia, King George of England — the

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L. of C.

impersonator used the same set of features
for the two, only varying the uniform — King
Albert of Belgium, King Peter of Servia, some
allied potentates whom I did not recognise;
the line looked like stretching till the crack
of doom. General Joffre, standing firm on
the road to Paris, had a magnificent " On ne
passe pas ! >J Napoleon, following, declared
amid thunders of applause, " II est malin, le
pere Joffre. Dire qu'a la Marne il m'a chipe
mon plan ! "

After this blaze of patriotism we are further
cheered by a troupe of young ladies bearing the
mark of the English professional dancing-
academy and attired like an ultra-coquettish
brand of boy-scouts, bare knees, sashes, lan-
yards, sombrero hats, all complete. The pro-
gramme announces them as " les tommy's,
uniform's correct." They are hailed with
frantic enthusiasm by the French soldiers,
and the English officers present are constrained
to smile. As the afternoon wore on, the pro-
gramme became a trifle more grown-up. There
was Mdlle. Denys, as to whose charms the pro-
gramme became lyrical.

" Elle est jeune, elle est gentille,
Comme on chantait autrefois,
Vous aimerez son minois
Car c'est une belle fille.
Elle eut seduit le roi d'Ys
Notre charmante Denys."

In the Pas de Calais

135

This use of the poetic announcement would
appear to be fairly general in French pro-
vincial programmes, since the appearance of
the next artist is also heralded in verse.

" Exquise, adorable, charmante,
Un vrai bijou du grand Paris
La jeune Pauline Lisery
Viens recueillir, tr£s rougissante
Au pays de la Bovary,
Un tres gros succes qui 1'enchante."

As who should say a London star descending
on the Potteries to receive the congratula-
tions of the Hilda Lessways. At the very
end of the programme a typical piece of
French buffoonery, a loony in terms of our
ally's characteristic excitability ! The cream
of this artist's performance was his derniere
creation "Proserpine!" ("Priere de chanter
avec lui "). I give you the words of the chorus
which, agreeably to demand, we all shouted
together.

" Ah ! Proserpine (bis)
Donne-moi ta rate et ton foie gras
Tes cheveax carotte et tes pieds plats,

Ah ! Proserpine (bis).

J's'rai ton mandarin et tu m'donn'ras tes mandarines,
Ah ! Proserpine."

Idiotic though the words are, seldom if
ever have I heard so infectious a refrain.
We shouted and yelled the chorus, stamped
our feet, and yelled again. The swing of it

136

L. of C.

whirled us off our feet and into the street,
and I left Rouen half-an-hour afterwards,
divided between dazzling memories of the
cathedral and the lilt of " Proserpine." Come
to think of it, France is perhaps not too un-
happily summarised in these extremes of the
propos grivois and dreaming stone. . . .

Perhaps of all French towns Boulogne has
seemed to me to be taking the war most seri-
ously. The sight of maimed humanity lying
in the grounds of the Casino, distorted, twisted,
curiously listless and awesomely still, is a
sufficient silencer of impatience. One should
not take it amiss, it would seem, if Directors
of Personal Services do appear to forget all about
one's existence. These maimed bodies would
seem to counsel patience, though the waiting be
undistinguished, even though it be not much
more than hanging about.

" Look what we bear/' these poor bodies
seem to say, " so carry on, though your job is
in no way distinguished and your names
will not be blazoned across the sky/'

CHAPTER XIV

A QUESTION OF PROPERTY

7^ HE theory that appetite grows with
what it feeds on does not hold good of
the romantic appetite for the present war.
It is not easy now to recall the first fervours
and high ardours that were ours in the late
summer of 1914. The war was of reckonable
size then ; the sixpenny reviews wrote in
noble strain about heirs to peerages rubbing
shoulders with their own plough-boys — Duke's
son, cook's son, and all the rest of it. The
Times sold broadsheets of the nation's litera-
ture at a penny. The London streets, parade
ground of jaded sensation, wore an air of ex-
pectancy : you would have said a country
town with a fair in progress. Flags were
flown out of sheer light-heartedness and love
of bravery ; one went easily to church. For
all this superficial seriousness, war was for
the leisured classes a new emotion and a new
luxury. Or if this is too hard, let us say that
in the beginning the war came to them as a
new and strange tonic.

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138

L. of C.

The wonder and passion of war in its begin-
ning are but words ; the world is soon engaged
in a business that takes poorly to a gloss of
fine sentiments. And yet it would seem that,
in spite of the nobility of common cause and
universal effort, there is danger when romance
turns to too grief-laden a reality, when the
first lump in the throat has ached itself out,
and one no longer senses the beauty of sacri-
fice, becomes conscious only of the fullness of
pain. It is then that the will to victory by
force of arms is in danger of yielding to talk
of victory by silver bullets. From this the
easy transition to the mean vindictiveness of
an industrial campaign. We shall be a nation
of shopkeepers indeed if we are to let victory
peter out in under-selling.

I was stationed at one of the Channel bases
when the news came through that a British
passenger boat had been torpedoed and could
barely keep afloat. People were playing Bridge
in the hotel smoke-room. At one table soldiers,
at another the Senior Service were taking odd
shillings out of each other. A knock at the
door, and a youthful Assistant Paymaster,
burdened with responsibility out of all keeping
with his cherubic appearance, entered the
room and with a rather bored air handed the
Senior Naval Officer a slip of paper.

A Question of Property 139

" Zepps again ? " queried a commander, a
mountain of a man addicted to holding villainous
cards with unimpaired cheerfulness.

" Not this time, old son," replied a gallant
officer, of whom it may be predicted that at
no emotional crisis whatsoever will he find the
phrase " old son " trite or inadequate. " Chan-
nel steamer torpedoed. Only women and
children on board."

" Only women and children ! '; The phrase
on the lips of a British officer is significant of
the times. Let peace be declared to-morrow
and this gallant sailor will send his ship's
company overboard for a child's toy. Let
peace be declared and this officer will risk his
life for a dog. But we are at war, and women
and children are perforce become " only women
and children." It is some solace to realise that
this reasonable and logical sailor will not hesi-
tate to throw Reason and Logic overboard
should the question ever arise of the rescue
of a single infant in arms. It is of some comfort
to know that the British Naval Officer has
strong and chivalrous ideas of his own as to
when expedience should be jettisoned and
healthy unreason taken on board.

And yet there is something in the encroach-
ments of callousness. Let me confess that my
own visit to an ill-fated boat was dictated

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L. of C.

less by considerations of sympathy than by
the need for distraction after a particularly
wearisome lecture on Standard Divisional Pack
Trains. One had vague anticipations of tjpie
sensational and the bizarre ; one went to
gape, in a word. It was a long and not too
enlivening walk from the Lecture-theatre past
the docks where loading and unloading was
proceeding languidly, the checkers checking
not for dear life but listlessly, stifling a yawn.
(I am conscious that this is a travesty of
methodical labour kept up hour after hour,
and that it were ridiculous to demand the
feverishness or the crowded confusion of the
" Work " and " Labour " of a Madox Brown
or a Brangwyn.) Nobody knew exactly where
the British boat was berthed. "La-bas,"
vaguely was all that could be indicated.

Suddenly one came into view of three-quarters
of a steamboat, to crib from the playwright's
" half a milkman at the level crossing." It
was not till one got alongside and saw the
ragged edges of a mortal wound that she seemed
a stricken ship. A small crowd of twenty
persons was gathered at the end of the
jetty gazing idly, with an apparent absence
of any sense of tragedy. There she lay, a
dingy, ill-kept Channel steamer, her decks
littered with orange-peel, umbrellas, handbags,
shabby cloaks and seedy travelling bags, odds

A Question of Property

141

and ends of baggage proclaiming the second-
class passenger and the refugee. Through the
portholes the remains of untidy meals, greasy
plates and unrinsed glasses. Forward the
crude truncating of the vessel, broken off as
you snap a twig. Still no sinister indication,
no tragic hint. Twisted and tawdry metal-
work and splintered matchwood painted and
varnished to the handsomeness expected of
saloons, was all that was to be seen. The
bowels of the ship had apparently discharged
no worse horrors than velveteen seatings, lace
curtains reminiscent of lodging-houses, odds
and ends of lacquer and imitation bronze.
The last of the victims had been taken ashore
twenty minutes earlier. Poor vestiges of
humanity, they were the least of the concern
of busy officialdom. For were not the mails
on board, the precious mails, vital to our
trade ?

A detachment of British soldiers had been
sent for to unload the letter-bags — a change
of fatigue unattended by any sense of melan-
choly. The lads from an English farming
county went about their work gaily, skylark-
ing, the eternal fag between their lips, and that
marked determination to impose the manners
of their country which makes for the suprem-
acy of our race. There was some little un-
pleasantness, even, over a particularly uncouth

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L. of C.

yokel's non-recognition of a French officer.
I intervened, and had all the difficulty in the
world to get some sort of apology out of the lad,
who, after satisfying the French officer with a
half-hearted salute, offered me for all excuse,

" 'Ow could I tell 'e was a bloomin' orficer,
Sir, seein' 'as 'ow 'e don't look like one ? 'Is
legs ain't much to write 'ome about, are they,
Sir ? "

It was a strange, incongruous scene of
wrangling, etiquette, formalities, commonplace
anxieties, preoccupations. A stout, foolish-
looking woman, whose daughter had been
drowned, was in a state of agitation over a miss-
ing hand-bag containing money and trinkets
to the value of forty pounds. True that the
tragedy was fourteen hours old and that the
woman must have eaten and drunk and dried
her clothes in the interval. Nevertheless, there
was something ignominious and baffling in this
concern for a hand-bag. . . . The captain of
the ship being injured, British officials had
taken charge. Mindful of the exigencies of
property — the dead are not to be pilfered, less
on their proper account than for the avoidance
of subsequent explanations with legal repre-
sentatives— they allowed no one to go on
board, handing umbrellas and minor objects
over the side after " proof of identity " had
been fully established.

A Question of Property 143

Then with enormous circumstance the ritual
of bringing up the mails was gone through.
How well one knew those mails and their
commonplace contents. Regrets that goods
sold on joint-account had resulted in a loss to
the seller. Astonishment that after recent pur-
chases the market should have declined so
heavily. Suggestions that customers should
" buy down " and so " average up " prices.
Forecasts as to a rapid and immediate rise.
Assurances that the raw material had actually
achieved a couple of points in an upward
direction. Denials that the green stains com-
plained of in the calicoes could by any possi-
bility be mildew. Surprise that the untutored
mind of the poor native should lead him into
the belief that he is being cheated. Dismay
at hearing that stocks have never been so heavy.
Anxiety at the continued drought. Congratu-
lations on the rains. Statement of accounts
showing , . . Faugh !

I was roused from contemplation of this
mass of verbiage and insincerity by the voice
of a young French sailor crying,

" C'est salaud, quand meme ! "

The cry was wrung from him after long con-
templation of the boat, but the exclamation
was strangely in accord with one's conjectures
as to the mails. I know well that you are
going to ask, sensible fellow that you are,

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L. of C.

whether there must not be business corre-
spondence, and how otherwise I would have
such correspondence conducted. There is no
answer, and that's the irony of it.

Next I fell a-listening to a gentleman who
wanted to talk Insurance. It was immoral,
he held, nay worse, it was financially unsound,
for Governments to insure. Were not such
premiums so many bribes to shoulder risks
which should be the common burden of the
nation ? It seemed that he was the author of
a treatise on the subject which had appeared
in the columns of some technical journal. Did
I think the ship was worth patching up ? What
was my idea of her value as she lay there ? Did
I imagine that the possibility of European war
had been sufficiently taken into account in de-
termining the scope of sinking funds ? Like
Dr. Johnson who, when prattled to by some
offensive bore, " withdrew his attention/' I
answered vaguely, and thought of those fifty
unhappy victims whose fate seemed to be no
man's concern. The insurance gentleman, find-
ing me unworthy of his professional acumen,
moved away.

It was getting dusk, and I walked out on to
the breakwater. Outside a magnificent sea
was running. The sun, red and fiery, shot a
last glance from beneath lids heavy and swollen.

A Question of Property

A final ray, glorious and sinister, lit up with
the distinctness of a photographic negative a
hospital ship making her way slowly between
the pier-heads, and the masts of a sunken cargo
boat, an earlier victim of the war. In some
strange and subtle way the anger of sea and
sky quickly restored a sense of dignity and
tragedy to the scene of baggage-rescue and
insurance-mongering I had just left. One
could think again in terms of the momentous,
of sea and sky incarnadined for a generation by
the red hand of an amazing Emperor.

And yet it is not to be wondered at that one
begins almost to be sorry for this monster figure.
Is there not something small in the clamour for
human punishment ? Is there not something
tragic in this fate which pushes from murder
to murder ? "I am in blood stepp'd in so
far/'-— you know the rest. Surely we do wrong
to deny greatness to the man ? It is not to be
thought that the world has been plunged into
war by a mere charlatan, that it is a mere
whipster who has got the world's swords. I
have just seen an exhibition of Raemaeker's
cartoons, in all of which the Emperor is shown
as a figure of iniquity, malevolence, murder,
as a man impious, treacherous, base. And yet
dignity is left — the dignity of isolation. There
is even an approach to pity in the spectacle
of the murderer of innocents shielding seared

146

L. of C.

eyeballs from their upturned gaze; there is
pathos in this figure of woe cut off from all
human intercourse. This Emperor's conscience
should be this Emperor's Hell. Let us not
sink below the level of so great a revenge.

CHAPTER XV
GENTLEMEN'S GENTLEMEN

The noble lord who cleans the boots.

THE GONDOLIERS.

^ERVANTS in the army are an integral
wlj part of an officer's life. I don't know how,
after it is all over, I am ever going to get up
o' mornings without an encouraging cup of
tea, an early paper, shaving water enticingly
to hand, and a voice suggesting in an un-
compromising Scotch accent that " it'll be
juist aboot the noo you'll be getting up, Sorr."
I shall be lost without that friendly shadow
pursuing me, recovering pencils, note-books,
handkerchiefs, always at hand with Daily
Mails, cigarettes, whiskey-and-sodas. A sturdy
independence goes with these small attentions,
which are to be acknowledged in the spirit in
which one takes the salute — a very different
affair from the touched cap or tugged forelock
of your groom or stable-boy.

True that no civilian may be a hero to his
valet, and perhaps the civilian who should
deliberately pose before his man would cut
a singularly sorry and unheroic figure in those

147

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L. of C.

critical eyes. In the Army, however, there
exists a definite obligation to put up an ap-
pearance worthy of the Blue Bell and Soldier's
Friend, Kiwi and Cherry Blossom expended
by your servant on your heroic behalf. For
one has the feeling that the private in the
New Armies would be " demeaning " himself,
in the old-fashioned below-stairs phrase, if
he consented to turn valet on the strength
of the weekly half-crown alone, rather than
for the honour and glory, the spick and span-
ness of the commissioned ranks. Like the
simpering gentleman with the weak legs at
Mrs. Waterbrook's dinner-party, who would
rather be knocked down by a man with Blood
in him than be picked up by a man without,
your new and enthusiastic Tommy would
rather be " on the mat " before an officer who
looks like an officer than approved by the
entire civilian world. So much has the new
soldier taken on of the spirit of the old.

" Bruised pieces, go ; you have been nobly
borne " was once an officer's farewell to heroic
harness heroically put off. It would be within
the scope of the present enquiry into the ways
of batmen to ask whether Antony had always
worn the " sevenfold shield of Ajax " to the
satisfaction of his servant. Did he never
spur to Egyptian banquets without waiting
for that last little bit of polish and elbow-

Gentlemen's Gentlemen

149

grease with which Eros used to turn him into
an officer and gentleman of the period ?

" You do me no credit, Sorr, rushing off
in all your swarth and sweat/' was the com-
plaint of a batman who took the right view
of his responsibilities.

However much of the well-dressed hero
you may be to your man, however magnifi-
cently the beau-ideal born of his pains, it
never does to fish for compliments in these
dour waters. The best you will land will be
a home truth. A friend of mine once showed
the photograph of a pretty sister to his servant,
and asked whether he could trace a like-
ness.

"Indeed, Sorr/' replied that worthy, "in-
deed, Sorr, I can not! The young leddy's
varra guid-looking ! ''

Then after a pause, and by way of amends,
" Kind o' makes a fellow want to be at home
again, Sorr/'

Officers' servants have a curious way of
being Scotch, and consequently of being taci-
turn to the point of being morose. One fellow
I had whom I judged by mien and aspect
alone to be a past master of the Gaelic. Once
only did I succeed in provoking him to speech.
It was on the occasion of my ignominious fall
from a horse, resulting in a damaged knee and
experimental massage on the part of my

L. of C.

attendant more distinguished for vigour than
for subtlety. I was constrained to remark,
biting my lip after the manner of the midship-
men of Colling wood's day undergoing amputa-
tion between jokes,

" It's not really as painful as you might
suppose, McGill."

No answer.

" I should think it will be all right in
week ? "

No answer.

" What about putting in for sick leave ? "

No answer.

" I don't see how I can go on parade to-
morrow."

Still no answer. Would nothing induce the
wretch to speak ?

" It's a damned nuisance not being able
to walk, anyhow ! " This in desperation and
entire unsuccess. At last the sulky brute,
best and most patient of fellows at heart,
having concluded his ministrations, and ar-
ranged the tent in the order beloved of good
servants, decided to break what must have
been a lifelong vow of silence.

" And you'll no be able to r-r-r-un either-r-r ! ''
This was the only remark I ever heard him
make. I used to call him " Man Friday," a
nickname in which he silently acquiesced.
At least, whenever I shouted " Friday 'J he

Gentlemen s Gentlemen

would put in an outraged but mute appear-
ance.

To tease the fellow into speech I tried giving
him a shilling less at the month-end than was
due to him, only to find it added to the next
month's account for boot polish. Then I
tried a shilling too much, only to discover it
next morning on the dressing-table under
my collar-stud. So I gave up all attempt at
intercourse by speech and resigned myself
to signs, in which language we got on very
well indeed, till he obtained what in France
is called a surds to go hay-making in the
congenial and doubtless conversationless soli-
tudes of Argyll. He sent me a picture post-
card of his native village, with a view of the
manse, but of course there was nothing added
to the printed matter. He had successfully
resisted even the printed invitation to " Write
Here/'

Once when I was attached to the tiniest
unit in the service, I had a clerk for a batman
and a batman for a clerk. This is a round-
about way of saying that a command a dozen
strong does not run to a servant for the officer.

" How much is one hundred and seventy-
eight fivepence-half pennies ? " I asked my
batman-clerk.

" Couldn't say, I'm sure, Sir," came the
prompt reply.

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L. of C.

1 Work it out, then," a trifle sharply. Then,
after a long pause,

" I must confess, Sir/' said the lad, without
any trace of embarrassment, " I must confess,
Sir, that that's where you 'as me ! '!

Then I, " Did you never go to school, Boy ?

" Yessir ! "

" Didn't they teach you arithmetic ? "

" No, Sir ; only sums."

" Then why can't you do this one ? " (Then
very slowly) "One hundred and seventy-eight
times fivepence halfpenny — how much is that ?
I don't ask you to do it in your head. Take
a piece of paper and a pencil and work it
out."

Then to my surprise the boy began to look
like crying.

" It ain't the amount of the sum, Sir, wot's
the trouble, it's the sort. Now if only you was
to ask me 'ow many ha'pences in the two
shillings ..."

It turned out that the poor wretch had
been a pawnbrokers' assistant so long that
he could only reckon in that most ignoble
scale.

It was the same gentle youth to whom I
gave careful instructions overnight to call me
at four o'clock the following morning, seeing
that I had to be on duty at the rifle range.
When I awoke my thoughts ran in some-

Gentlemen's Gentlemen

'53

thing like the following order : That I had
held uncommonly good cards the previous
night ; that I had signed an unusual number
of chits • that the forthcoming weekly mess
bill would testify to that fact ; that it was
a good job I was Mess Secretary and could
owe myself the amount ; that it was likewise
a good job that the papers who run the war
didn't get to hear of such enormities as fifteen
bob changing hands at a deal ; that the smell
of frying bacon went very well with the scent
of burning pine ; that — Snakes and Thunder
— it must be nearly nine o'clock, with
range-practice started a good two hours ago.

At that very moment an orderly put his
head through the flap of the tent.

" The Colonel's compliments, Sir, and would
like to know how you've slept ! " This with
a grin. " I should look pretty lively if I was
you," he added commiseratingly, " unless you
are thinking of going sick, Sir."

My batman in hurried attendance, very
white and very assiduous, proffered excuses
adequate to his simple mind.

" I come in, Sir, at five o'clock has directed,
and I 'as a good look at you, Sir. As 'ow I
didn't think as you ought to be disturbed,
Sir. Very 'ot and flushed you looked, Sir,
very tired, if I may say so. So I ses to meself,
1 Let 'im 'ave 'is sleep out. Do 'im good ! '

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L. of C.

which is beggin' your pardon, Sir, if I've done
wrong/'

The subsequent interview with the Colonel
cannot, I think, be of any particular interest.
All the same, I received further confirmation
in a pet theory of mine that delinquents should
be allowed a little more freedom of excuse.
I have often thought that if a civil prisoner
were able to say, " I ask your Lordship to
grant me the favour of five minutes' private
conversation," and if his Lordship had the
sense to fall in with the suggestion, many a
little matter of forgery, house-breaking, wife-
beating, or breach of promise, might be brought
to more equitable if less formal settlement.
And if such a system were in vogue at Orderly
Room it is probable that I could have cleared
up to the Colonel's better satisfaction that
little matter of being some three hours late for
parade.

It was still the same youth who gave me one
of the most unpleasant quarters of an hour
of my life. He it was who put me in the posi-
tion of having to solve the following awkward
problem. " A is an officer who foolishly leaves
money lying about. The only possible person
who could have taken it is his servant, B.
B is a fool, but A trusts him implicitly. What
should A do ? "

Throughout the whole of riding-school I

Gentlemen's Gentlemen 155

debated within myself what the plague A
should do. Should A tell B that two pound
notes had disappeared, and give B the oppor-
tunity of saying that he had put them away
for safety ? Should A ignore the theft ?
Should A ignore all the laws of deduction as
laid down by Gaboriau and Edgar Allan Poe,
Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown, and
convince himself that he had never lost the
money ?

What A did was to prepare a dignified little
speech with which to receive the confession
of B, duly tackled. A few words of censure,
a trifle of exhortation, rounding off with a
pat on the shoulder and a recommendation
to B to wipe his eyes and chuck playing such
silly-ass tricks in the future. For A had de-
cided that to let the matter slide would be
so much moral cowardice.

Judge then of A's discomfiture when B
countered absolute proof with the stoutest of
denials, asseverations of honesty that nothing
could shake, offers of reference to all the
pawnbrokers in the country, protestations of
vast sums of money handed over counters in
exchange for rings, watches, tea-services, petti-
coats, all the currency of the trade ; and
never a penny wrong in the accounts, never
a halfpenny missing from a score of tills.

Of course one crumpled up immediately,

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L. of C.

all the stories one had ever heard of wrongful
accusation and miscarriage of justice running
through one's head.

" You don't expect anybody to believe this,
about the lady and the sovereign, do you ? 'J
said the constable, and poor Jo replied,

" I don't know that I do, Sir. I don't expect
nothink at all, Sir, much, but that's the true
hist'ry on it."

So, with Dickens in my head — I was reading
" Bleak House " at the time — I decided to
withdraw the accusation.

When, later in the day, I found the two
notes safely stowed away in my cigarette-
case, I can assure you that never did A, in
any Hard Case that ever I heard of, feel such
a perfect fool. In reply to my profuse apolo-
gies the boy said,

" Can't say as how I feel no pertickler relief,
Sir, now you've found the notes. I've always
served you well, Sir, and wouldn't do no
wrong for two pounds no'ow. I never felt
no guilt, Sir, so of course I don't feel no per-
tickler inner cence."

I think you will agree that the boy scored.
And I begin to have the conviction that neither
Sherlock Holmes nor Father Brown are much
good when it comes to concrete cases.

One batman I had who " gave notice 'J
as they say in domestic circles — on the ground

Gentlemen's Gentlemen

157

that the duties were derogatory and beneath
a disciple of Karl Marx, Mr. and Mrs. Webb,
and other advanced people. Coming down
to actual grievances I gathered that Private
Jenkins had not enlisted to clean spurs. I
retorted that I had not joined to count sides
of bacon. After a good deal of discussion
I admitted that there was a lot to be said for
a reasoned Socialism which should embrace
the apportioning of jobs according to ability,
and there and then offered to clean Jenkins'
boots for him if he would undertake to get
my Pay and Mess Book ready for the Pay-
master. Jenkins did not see his way to accept
but reiterated his demand to be sent back to
his bomb-throwing squad, having been origi-
nally chosen as a member of that " Suicide
Club " on account of his fame as a bowler
of Saturday afternoon googlies down Hammer-
smith way. . . . And of course I released him.

Incredible, isn't it, the change in this war
from the suburban to the heroic, from the
long summer afternoons in cheap flannels,
the bottled beer, the turn-in at the local Palace
—the blood stirring to some chastely-leering
middle-aged temptress in peripatetic contem-
plation of her rosary ? Incredible the change
to all that war means ! Surely nothing the
old Greeks and Romans wrote about their
imperishable heroes ill becomes our heroic

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L. of C.

shop-boys. For all their quaint manners,
their American snub-nosed boots, their eternal
decoration of the half-smoked fag, the breed
has joined the immortals, without forfanterie,
without fuss. My socialist friend is not at
all out for the heroic. All he wants is " An
over or two at the blighters." . , . Well,
in his own phrase, may the wicket suit him
and may he bowl unchanged !

The most extraordinary gentleman-in-
waiting fell to my lot down Wiltshire way.
It so happened that the fellow declared him-
self a typist and a passionate devotee of high-
class literature. In a weak moment of mis-
giving such as, I take it, may have attacked
John Milton in the middle of " Paradise Lost/'
I asked the youth whether some of the scrib-
bling which I had got him to type for me was
any damned use at all.

" I shouldn't say it was as bad as all that,
Sir," was his respectful reply, " not but what
I should like to make a few suggestions. On
paper, Sir, after due consideration." To which
my astonished consent.

I can see the scene now — a Head-quarters
on the Downs, a bare unfurnished cottage,
a trestle-table in the window, a gale of wind
and rain blowing, a black curtain of night
hiding mile after mile of bleak dreary plain,
a guttering candle and a fitful fire : on the

Gentlemen's Gentlemen 159

bare walls not a nail " pour faciliter le suicide."
The hour is midnight, for you must know
that though the Muse may be an exacting
mistress the Army is a jealous and ever-watch-
ful wife, from whom you may not steal many
minutes of the day.

So far as I could discover, my Mtman-
typist, and as it turned out collaborator,
spent such part of the night as he did not
sit up typing for me, sleeping on the office
table with his feet in the waste-paper basket
and his head in the safe. The suggestions
which he produced on paper, diffidently, as
the result of much study, were all of the nature
of objections.

' This passage reads very pleasingly with
its reverence for Nature, but suggest deleting
the word ' latrines/ which brings one's thoughts
down to the humdrum of life." Good taste,
the fellow had.

" ' To be read for ever and ever, intermin-
ably, every Sunday evening ! ' Delete ' for
ever and ever/ which implies continuity whilst
' every Sunday evening ' suggests faithful re-
currence at regular intervals/' A logical mind,
as well !

" ' Preposterous, ignominious, infinitesimal/
Wearisome ! Delete without hesitation." Me-
thought the young man did delete too much,
but I invariably deleted. Once only was I

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L. of C.

annoyed with him, and that was when he
mistyped a passage on which I prided myself
very considerably. The passage was about
Sarah Bernhardt, and should have run " The
rare hand of the ageing artist/' The villain
made it read " the safe hand of the agency
artiste." But when he made " eagerness spread
over the General's face " read " a Guinness
spread over the General's face," I merely
pulled his ears.

My present batman is of the surly, tyran-
nising sort, half childhood's nurse and half
golf-caddy. I go in dread and fear of him.
I eat when he thinks I should be hungry and
sleep when he thinks I should be tired. In
the daytime he stands on guard, a self-imposed
fatigue, outside the office door, keeping mere
importunacy away, and letting in the genuine
grievance. His " flair 'J for the idler and
the busybody is unerring, but he bullies
me into seeing people in whom he takes an
interest.

" You'll juist be seein' this puir body,"
he'll say, " her man's awa' at the front and
she's fower bairns." Whereupon, without wait-
ing for an answer, he ushers in the good lady
and all her tribe. And then I know I'm going
to consent to something or grant something,
or waive something — of course on the proper
forms for consenting, granting, and waiving

Gentlemen's Gentlemen 161

—which I shall have all the difficulty in the
world in justifying later on. But by the time
the question of justification crops up, let us
hope that the war will be over, and that we
shall be private gentlemen again, officer and
servant too.

CHAPTER XVI

OFF AT LAST

"Malbrouck s'en va-t'en guerre."

OLD FRENCH SONG.

WHENEVER, in the New Army, your
fate takes a flagrantly outrageous turn
in the way of postings to the unheard-of—
the counting of tarpaulins or enumeration
of odd bits of string — it is safe to assume
that the many excellencies fitting you for
a vastly superior job have been thrust upon
the Authorities at a time when there are
no superior jobs going. For the moment
they, the aforesaid Authorities, have not the
vaguest notion what to do with you. Will
you therefore be so good as to content your
soul in peace, till like Sentimental Tommy
they " find a way " ; and will you in the
meantime, please, consent to inhabit such
Rest Camps, Schools of Instruction, and all
the rest of it, as shall be indicated to you ?
There you will find the Senior Officer out of
a job, the convalescent, the derelict, the lost
and strayed. Cynically deceptive though these
resorts may be — there is no rest in Rest Camps

162

Off at Last 163

but rather an exceeding strenuousness ; phe-
nomenally non-recuperative also the bestowal
of humanity sardine-wise into canvas summer-
houses, draughty, ill-ventilated, close, and
clammy — these Rest Camps are the most
temporary of afflictions. Officers are literally
there to-day and gone to-morrow. Rest Camps
are the Army's Left Luggage Office, and the
individual is nothing more nor less than a
human parcel, deposited to-day, withdrawn
under the week. Let no parcel despair ; of
a surety it will be called for. It is the safe,
uneventful job, the adequate performance of
some useful drudgery, which is the very devil.
Let him abandon hope who is set to count
bacon boxes towering pyramidally to a roof,
or to attend the loading with biscuit, bacon,
and jam, jam, bacon, and biscuit of the
early morning Standard Divisional Pack-train.
'" Money or no release ! " said Mr. Gulpidge
darkly, to the gloomy Spiker. There is no
money minted which can secure release from
the Detail or Bulk Issue Store of the Base
Supply Depot. Hope only for the cessation
of hostilities, you counter-jumpers pro tern.,
you luckless guards of Dummy Trains. You
are in the category of the lost parcel and the
dead letter ; you will never be redeemed.

It was not with unmixed dismay therefore
that I found myself about this time condemned

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L. of C.

to that worst of immediate fates, a Base Horse
Transport Depot. The manifest absurdity
of putting the experienced soldier — ten months'
service, if you please ! — through recruit's drill
on the square ; the obvious impropriety of
asking the trained officer of nearly a year's
standing to " muck out " stables and groom
the mounts of half-fledged transport drivers
— the preposterousness of such treatment
argued a swift release. And, bless you ! my
stay at this particular depot has not yet
amounted to more than five days. Trans-
ference, it is obvious, must become once more
the order of the day.

I think I could perhaps support the tedium
of a Depot if it ever got beyond being lectured
to and resulted in an actual job. There is
a certain fascination in calculating that from
a tale of a hundred bacon-boxes received and
fifty issued there should be remainder fifty,
and a certain excitement in dashing up to the
pile and seeing with your own eyes that the
fifty are there in very sooth. In this way
the Higher Mathematics are brought home
to one. It is the eternal lecturing which sticks
in one's gills. One wants to see whether one
is any sort of a hand at doing an actual job,
and the war is getting on. ...

I am a shade more hopeful to-night :
have been transferred to yet another School

Off at Last

165

of Instruction. There I have been asked
about my proficiency in the French tongue,
and have admitted to an astounding fluency
therein. I even gave an undertaking to master
any patois inside three weeks. There is some
question, I understand, of the South of France,
old Provence, the Riviera.

Now would not this suit me exactly ? Did
I not once in the days when one bothered
about art and literature, review the works
of one Mistral ? Since that time have I not
considered myself a master of the Provencal ?
Do I not dote on " Tartarin de Tarascon " ?
To be billeted at Nice and roam the Cote
d'Azur. . . . Fuyezt douce image ! as the senti-
mental gentleman in " Manon " has it. In
plain English, it's a deal too good to be true.

And yet this is a job that would suit me
down to the ground. It can only have to
do with the fruits of the earth, olives, almonds,
figs, thistles, corn. And have I not served
apprenticeship with farmers ; am I not steeped
in low cunning ; and, what is more, have I
not kept as pretty a piece of horseflesh as
any in the Stud-book ; — a fellow that hath
had losses in the selling thereof, go to ! — and
one that hath had the law of corn factors,
hay and straw dealers, and all the riff-raff of
a countryside ; a soldier that hath still a
pony at grass, three acres, three tunics, and

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everything handsome about him ? An they
know their Dogberry they'll give me the job !

Later. I am ordered to report for duty
to-morrow night not a thousand miles from
Marseilles. " Malbrouck s'en va-t'en guerre/'
— or perhaps you'll say he is going still further
away from it. Anyhow, " orders is orders,"
and I am glad to be off at last.

CHAPTER XVII

SPECIAL PURCHASE

I WONDER if I can explain to you the
mixed feelings with which one sets out
on one's first real job in the Army. Imagine
that you have been cooped up in a School
of Instruction for ten days, during which
time you have been conscious of closer scrutiny
and appraisement than has been your lot
since you were a boy at school. The Com-
mandant of the School is there not so much
for the purpose of instructing you as for finding
out your capacities and defects, and decid-
ing which of the many jobs which come into
his office you are likely to make the least
mess of. It is the personal equation all over
again. I know exactly how small boys feel
when they are being engaged to tie up parcels
and run errands at six shillings a week. One
has an almost irresistible craving to pick up
pins from the floor of the lecture theatre to
show the economic mettle of which one is
made. This, the traditional way to the hearts
of Bank Managers, Financial Magnates, and
Secretaries of State, should be a good Army

167

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L. of C.

stunt too, since a pin saved is a pin gained
in the Army as much as anywhere else. A
School of Instruction, then, is nothing less
than a Labour Exchange of the more elegant
sort, the labour therein being rated at never
less than 75. 6d. a day plus allowances. Let
us suppose that vast quantities are required
of a particular commodity. Word is sent to
the School that an officer is required to " pro-
ceed " to the locality in which this commodity
may be presumed to abound, and there to
devote the whole of his heart, soul, brain,
mind, energy, inclination, and occasionally
cash — personal out-of-pocket expenses being
a matter of ticklish and belated adjustment
between self and Paymaster — to the pur-
chase and despatch of prearranged quanti-
ties at prearranged prices. Actually this boils
down to the officer sending forward as much
as he can lay hands on at the best price he
can get.

I wonder if I can make you realise the ela-
tion with which one learns that one has been
chosen as an expert in say, Vegetable Marrows,
or Marrows Vegetable, as we call them. I
wonder if you can realise the profound satis-
faction with which one receives one's Move-
ment Order for that part of France in which
that succulent fruit most liberally flourishes,
the feverish impatience with which one turns

Special Purchase

169

up the Army Service Corps Manual, Part II,
to find out what shape, size, colour, weight
the perfect model should be. With what
ecstasy does one turn up Melons Water, the
kindred subject to Marrows Vegetable, for
such hints as may be further vouchsafed ! A
good half of my journey was shared in com-
pany with that very advanced young play-
wright of the violet sunsets and the purple
passions — or the purple sunsets and the violent

passions, I forget which — K . I was glad

to see that the war has altered nothing in

K Js eyeglass, the shape of his nose, or

the extravagance of his opinions. I found
him still full of the exuberant wit and pro-
found logic of the best of his bon mots. It
was uttered, if you remember, on the occa-
sion when the guarantors of a famous series
of classical concerts squealed at having to
put their hands in their pockets. " The func-
tion of a guarantor/1 said K "is to guar-
antee. " Whereat the guarantors squealed more
loudly than ever. How we laughed over old
memories of nights at the theatre and soi-
disant intellectual supper parties ; at old
opinions and the two o'clock in the morning
courage thereof. " I am not so foolish," said
an old German philosopher, probably Goethe,
" as to be ashamed of changing my opinions."
We agreed, did K and I, in all the un-

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L. of C.

repentant exhilaration of a journey South,
that our opinions had never been so foolish
as to need changing. One thing only marred
the perfect pleasantness of a never-to-be-
forgotten journey, and that was K 's per-
sistence in talking Potatoes when I wanted
to talk Marrows Vegetable.

I left him in Paris. As my train mov<

slowly out of the Gare St. Lazare, K

adjusted his eyeglass and said,

" About gathering the beastly things, old
man. You fasten a string round the tree,
retire to a safe distance, and pull like blazes.
And then you get a little boy to pick 'em up
for you. It's fine exercise and should suit
you. So long ! ' He turned away before
I could get out any retort, to engage in con-
versation with a porter with all the exquisite-
ness and choice of words which mark the
true barbarian.

You can have little idea of the awful re-
sponsibility attaching to one's first job, or
of the awful loneliness of that responsibility.
There was once a young lady in a play who
declared that whenever she saw a spade she
was in the habit of calling it a spade. To
which her uppish friend replied, " Ah well,
I have never seen a spade, which shows that
our social spheres have been widely different."
It may very well be that the officer in charge

Special Purchase

171

of Marrows Vegetable has never moved in
their world, has never been on terms with
these delightful creatures, has never met them
till they were dressed for dinner. It may
very well be that, expert or no expert, you
could fob him off with a pumpkin or good-
sized pomegranate. It may be, and I say
this in the smallest possible voice, that all
the military training he has undergone, the
Parades and the Orderly Rooms, the marches
and the counter-marches, the buckling on of
swords and the putting on of spurs will have
taught him very little of the proper conduct
of a greengrocery business on a colossal scale.
Dumped down in the middle of Provence with
the order to produce not in the air nor on paper,
but on an actual railway wagon, within the
week one million Marrows Vegetable, the
officer will have nothing to rely on but his
own natural common sense. Let us take it
that he is to some extent a master of the lingo,
that he can at least get about without the
aid of a conversation book. You remember
the experiment with a German-English conver-
sation book in "Three Men on the Bummel,"
and the fate of George, who went into a boot-
shop where boots were visibly stacked on
shelves, piled in corners, and hanging in ropes
from the ceiling, and blindly asked the pro-
prietor, "One has told me that you have here

172 L. of C.

boots for sale ? " All the way from Paris and
throughout the whole night journey, I was
oppressed with the feeling that I should enter
my first farm-house and exclaim in my best
Provengal, and pointing to a field of the waving
fruit, " Has one perhaps here Marrows for
sale ? JJ Taking the existence of the Marrows
for granted, I felt sure that I should require
to exercise the utmost care in my selection,
and I could think of no better way than that
of taking the good lady of the farmstead
into my confidence. " Would you, Ma'am,"
I proposed for a formula, " consider this a
good Marrow, a sound Marrow, a Marrow
that nobody need be ashamed of, a Marrow
that will give satisfaction to your Allies, that
will bring credit on yourself and family ? "
And then I should proceed, I determined,
to rattle the Marrow, and satisfy myself that
there was nothing wrong with it inside. If
it emitted a juicy sound and if there were no
signs of the pips being insecurely fastened on,
I should know it to be a good Marrow and a
trustworthy, and I should take it to my bosom.
All of which indifferent facetiousness covers
a very genuine nervousness and anxiety not to
make a mess of the job confided to one.

There is rather more in buying than the
mere matter of selection. There is the ques-
tion of price, and it is likely enough that you,

Special Purchase

as representing the British Government, and
the good lady, as representing her husband
in the trenches — which, to do her justice, she
does uncommonly well— may not in this matter
of price see precisely eye to eye. There is
behind you the mysterious power called Re-
quisition, about which the farmer's wife knows
at least as much as the Purchasing Officer.
She knows very well, for instance, that the
first condition of the Power to Requisition
is that you must leave the farmer sufficient
of the commodity to satisfy the normal needs
of himself and family. The first thing, then,
that the good lady does on being requisi-
tioned is to dry her eyes and prove to you
that her present crop, being the poorest she
has had for many years, is very much below
her reduced family's need, not counting the
bunches of the fruit which she intends to
send to her good man. No, Requisitioning
is only to be resorted to when the arts of
wheedling, cajoling, bullying, — very little of
this — have completely failed.

The first week's supply of Marrows gets
itself bought somehow or other, and then
comes the grand question of delivery, there
being fewer slips 'twixt cup and lip than
between farm and wagon. But difficulties
exist only to be conquered, and Saturday
night, your first Saturday night in France

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finds you a worn-out wreck, jaded, lunatic,
and half -dazed, but with your million Marrows
— you know there are a million, neither more
nor less, because you counted them yourself
— safely and snugly ensconced in their wagons
on their long journey to Paris.

Of course the business is not quite as smooth
sailing as it sounds. Remembering the diffi-
culty you had to comply with the official
regulations governing the provision of groceries
for a command eighteen strong — your first
commarid — you will have very great doubts
at the end of your first week as to whether
you have successfully divined, complied with,
or circumvented the million regulations which
you know must exist for safeguarding the de-
spatch of a million Marrows Vegetable. For
a week, for a month perhaps, all goes well.
Then suddenly a cloud no bigger than a man's
hand is seen upon the horizon, coming from
the direction of your Supply Directorate. It
is only a very trifling matter, a polite, even
courteous, enquiry as to whether you have
a reason, and if so what, please, for buying
a penny india-rubber from the little shop
round the corner, when it is, or should be,
known that this article is a Stationery Issue.
" Attention is drawn to the fact, please/'
and " Will you kindly note, please/' — the
word "please" is cheap in the Army — "that

Special Purchase

175

you must do nothing of the sort in the future/'
As who should say Breakers Ahead ! This
little note is only the precursor of a score
of others descending upon you like an ava-
lanche, all of them " Wanting to Know Why."
You answer them with what inventiveness
you may, but the sum of your replies is that
a million Marrows were asked for and a million
despatched.

And then there are the Reports. You come
in at the end of a long day, during which
nothing has gone right and everything has
gone wrong. You have not succeeded in
buying a single Marrow, your loaders, carters,
and checkers have gone on strike. You realise
that you have overlooked a little lot of seven
hundred and fifty thousand, which has gone
unpleasantly rotten, and that your accounts
will not balance by ten thousand francs or
so. You have just had word that through
some faulty loading, for which you are per-
sonally responsible, there has been a spill
and a derailment on the main line. Nothing,
it is thought by the local station-master, can
save the Paris express. You realise that
your batman is in a filthy temper, and are
more than ever confirmed in the opinion that
your clerk is half-witted. With a sheepish
grin the latter hands you a letter in which
you are requested to state on your word as

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a British Officer, and without any hanky-
panky or beating about the bush, how many
Marrows Vegetable you have bought, intend
to buy, have reasonable probability of buying ;
how many you have delivered (a) green, (6)
yellow ; how many you have got in stock of
each colour upon the farms, on the railway
stations, and in transit. And you will divide
into (a) ripe, (6) unripe, (c) over-ripe. And
will you state the average length, width, and
breadth, weight and succulence to two places
of decimals, please ? And will you state,
please, what religion your staff professes, and
whether there are any expert ratcatchers among
them ? The day has broken, and country
people are about again, before you can begin
to think of bed. At 4 a.m. you find you have
nearly completed the first item of your report.
You go to bed. At 6 a.m. you rise again to
find in the English mail a letter hoping the
life of a country gentleman suits you. . . .

The great compensation for an extremely
unheroic, but let us hope useful, job is the
charm of the faithful simple-souled peasantry
among whom one moves. Of course they
are cute ; he would be a poor farmer indeed
who did not know how many Marrows make
five. You realise, as you go round the farms,
that the price of Marrows Vegetable, although
of great importance, is yet not of the highest

Special Purchase

177

importance. The one great thing that matters
in the farmsteads is the safe return of their
men-folk. I have not the least intention of
sentimentalising over this, their heart's desire ;
it is strong enough to stand without any words
of mine, behind all the querulousness of old
men finding the war a shade too long, of mothers
and wives who say little, of children who
vaguely understand.

Saturday is the day when the officer stays
at home to settle up accounts for the business
of the week. Outside the office door a long
queue of weather-beaten old gentlemen, of
dames wrinkled and bent, of young mothers
with a couple of children tugging at their
skirts. Inside the office a scene like Wilkie's
" Rent Day." They are not particularly good
at their numbers, these simple country-folk, and
after a short experience of the British Army's
habit of insisting on paying for what it has had,
they are content to leave their reckoning in the
officer's hands. And yet, despite the pleasant-
ness these Saturdays can be long. With
country-folk conversation is apt to be more
of a habit than an art, and Saturday, the
conversational " day out," is their pnly chance.
There is a secret exit to my office, and I am
proud of the fact that up to the present on
one occasion only have I made cowardly
escape, leaving the clerk to inform the tail

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L. of C.

end of the queue that the bank was closed
and the audience terminated. I have reason
to believe that he delivered himself as follows :

11 Mossoos, the Lootenant has footed the
camp ! '

But this was on one occasion only, and the
tail-end contained some really terrible bores.

P.S. — I expect you are all agog to know
what I really am dealing in. I am afraid that
you must master your curiosity and go on
thinking Marrows Vegetable.

CHAPTER XVIII

EN PROVENCE

La Prouv£n£o cantavo, e km terns courreguS ;

E coume au Rose la Durdngo

Perd a la fin soun escourrengo,

Lou gai reiaume de Prouvdn9O
Dins lou sen de la Fran9o a la fin s'amaguS.

FROM THE PROVENCAL.

OF all the towns in Southern France
Aries, the centre of Marrows Vegetable,
is the most celebrated, the oftenest visited,
the most notably discussed. It is the Paradise
of the cheap philosopher. Does not the thunder
of the Paris express shake to its crazy founda-
tions the ancient palace of Constantine ?
Is not the peace of the Alyscamps, that bury-
ing place of Roman dead, violated seven
days a week by the clamour of the goods-
yard and the clang of the giant workshop ?
Is not the sleepy Rhone bridged as unroman-
tically as the Menai Straits ? How reconcile
antique beauty with electric light ? And
in these latter days how reconcile the Arles-
ienne of the pure Greek profile with the bullet-
headed prisoner of war ?

Leaving this easy philosophy to take care

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L. of C.

of itself, let us at least say that Aries, the
sentimental capital of Provence, is old in a
sense undreamt of by those new-comers, the
English. Henry James was wont to tease
his American countrymen with our stately
houses and immemorial butlers ; well might
he have used the cobble-stones of Aries, along
which he hobbled so painfully, to pelt us in
our turn. We are, come to think of it, so
desperately new.

But Aries has no misgivings on the score
of pedigree ; her line comes down unbroken.
The historian will tell you that through Aries
Hannibal's Numidians marched to the sack
of Italy, that within her walls a Roman Em-
peror had his palace, that during the governor-
ship of Decimus Junius Brutus, a Greek
designed and built the exquisite theatre, still
to be seen. He will go on to tell you of the
Amphitheatre, of the thickness of its walls,
its diameter, its seating capacity. He will
compare you the Coliseum at Rome. He
will reconstruct you the Venus d' Aries, and
discuss whether she may not be a reproduc-
tion of the lost Aphrodite of Praxiteles. If
your historian have imagination he will tell
you of the seas of blood that have flowed
within the walls of the arena and of horrors
that belong more properly to the nightmare
pages of a Huysmans than to sober history.

En Provence

181

If he have sentimental leanings, he will talk
of Petrarch and Laura, Aucassin and Nicolete,
and others of the world's famous lovers. Then
will he grow lyrical over the famed Arlesienne
beauty, and rhapsodical over the inability
of alien blood to debase its coinage. " At
Marseilles the Phocceans may have planted
their arsenals, founded their markets, trained
their sailors. But at Aries they loved and bred.
Here was the bosom upon which the weary sea-
farer reposed, and here paid back to posterity
the debt he owed the woman of his choice."

Though every stone in the town cry Ro-
mance, it is to be confessed that for the un-
romantically-minded interest is scant. Even
the compiler of guide-books has to make
excuses for this dullness which can be felt.
" As for the town/' declares one otherwise en-
thusiastic French writer, "she remains wrapped
in her mantle of profound peace. No change
has power over her ; satisfied with past glory
she is content to exhibit that glory to the
passer-by." And again, " As for the town,
she is not dead but slumbers ; the artist may
dream here undisturbed."

But there are those who are not artists
and who nurse a more or less legitimate griev-
ance. What is it to them that the Greek
theatre slumbers on the hill ? All they know
is that the French theatre in the town is awake

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one night in fifty. What to them that the
mighty dead sleep in the Alyscamps ? All
they care is that the living go to bed at ten.
There is, to be sure, the cinema, but I must
confess to a reluctance to mingle with the
faint hauntings and shadowy whisperings of
Aries, the lurid " Mysteries of New York/'
Besides, on five nights out of seven, does not
the cinema announce " Reldche " ?

In the jargon of a town clerk, Aries has
only two " centres of activity/' the Cafe
Malarte and the Place du Forum. Once a
week, each Saturday morning, the country-
side forgathers at the Cafe Malarte, across
the way from the Alyscamps, where, one
repeats, sleep the mighty dead. There, drown-
ing the odour of garlic in innumerable petits
verres, the farming community gathers to
chaffer and outdo each other in the matter
of sheep and oxen. After the dejeuner the
crowd reassembles in the Place du Forum,
there to rogue one another amiably in the
matter of Marrows Vegetable. On Sunday
morning the grandiose Place du Forum — it
is really the village square — is alive for the
hiring. If you want neatsherd, goatsherd,
shepherd, wagoner, or labourer in your vine-
yard, loader or checker for your Marrows, it
behoves you to engage him betimes. For we
are at war and labour is scarce. Of French

En Provence

183

labourers there are but few, and those few
old men and striplings. Spaniards there are
in plenty, in all the bravery of red sashes,
sombreros, and espadrilles. A few Italians,
a handful of Arabs, and a lost Serb or two
make up a motley crowd whose tongues are
legion. One gets on well enough with ordi-
nary French, a smattering of Spanish, a few
odd phrases culled from Italian Opera, and
an instinct for the Provencal.

It is worthy of note that the curious version
of the French tongue affected by " the Paris-
ians/' as the provincial in magnificent scorn
calls the dweller in the capital, is here a dead
language. In the Rhone valley the final " e "
must always be sounded.

" Quand est-ce que finira cett-e malheur-
eus-e guerr-e ? " is the form the universal query
takes.

" C'est Venus tout-e entier-e a sa proie attache-e."

Thus the great line will have to run in
the future or I shall have no inkling what
the fuss is all about. Vile though this pro-
nunciation is, you have to use it to be under-
stood. There is plenty of time to regret the
purity of " Parisian " French during the stagna-
tion which descends upon the town at midday
on Sunday till it wakes again for another week's
hiring.

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During that week you may wander about
Aries and ignore your century. It is not the
show relics of the place which make for
forgetfulness, but rather the unrecorded
carving over a forgotten doorway, the pagan
homage to some careless god or wayside shrine
of gentle saint. If the present intrude at
all it will be at the glimpse of some innocent
going to first communion or at the show of
priestly obsequies. There do the horses go
steeped in crepe to the very nostrils, a phe-
nomenon accusing the improbability of the
present day. Let me describe to you
the village square, sulky in its blaze of heat.
Eight trees define the market-place, a play-
ground within a square, fenced round by eight
toy victorias surmounted by eight giant para-
sols and hitched to eight sufficiently sorry
nags. At one end of the square is pedest ailed
a bronze Mistral, wearing his impresario's
hat with wide curling brim, dignified, courte-
ous, very much the grand poet. There are
sixteen establishments in the square, to which
lead eight by -streets. Two hotels, three
coiffeurs, two warehouses entirely given up
to the sale of picture postcards, one bureau
de tabaCy and two antiquarian strongholds.
And then the bars. Eight of them, almost a
Scriptural adhesion to a mystic number. The
apprentice in every trade is his own master

since the patron has been called to the war,
and Figaro takes his ease at any one of these
eight hospitable retreats, casting an eye on
the shop whenever he thinks he will. Customers
can wait, says Figaro, and the docile Provengal
attends the boy's pleasure accordingly.

Shop windows suggest that you may supply
yourself with everything that you cannot
possibly want. One supposes that the natives
must wear out their boots and clothes, but
there is no evidence of any possibility of re-
newal. The whole populace would seem to
live by cutting each other's hair, by selling
each other cups of coffee, by an interchange
of picture postcards and immortelles. Bric-
a-brac, oddments, and perfumery rule the
market, and in the matter of taste the capital
is not consulted. Our gay little scents are
far indeed from the ultra-sophisticated Trefle,
the smart Fougeres, or the well-bred Peau
d'Espagne. We like the innocent Rosee de
Jasmin, the courageous Etoile de Napoleon,
the faithful Cceur de Jeannette, and the candid
Frimousse d'Or. But, mind you ask for
Frimouss-e d'Or, or you will not be under-
stood. The jewellers' ware is in the Arlesian
mode — gold wafer-thin but cumbersome and
over-elaborate, studded with stones that cannot
be diamonds and are not bright enough
for paste. Then there are the trinkets and

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charms, heads of Jeanne d'Arc, profiles of
Arlesiennes, rings with the affecting legend
" Plus qu'hier, moins que demain," cigales
with the motto " Lou souleu me fai canta,"
which I leave you to translate for yourself.
Of " serious " commodities I note vermicelli
of the kind known as " Angels' Hair," tooth-
powder made by the Peres Chartreux at Tarra-
gone, and all manner of liqueurs in bottles of
rare, fantastic shapes. And last the post-
cards. The " portrait d'un beau tommy/'
wearing his stripes the wrong way up, ogles
one of our fair allies. Pendent to him the
French lover, curled and scented, whispers
doggerel into the shoulder-blades . of some
prepossessing damsel. And in these post-
cards there is France. France is the country
of the sentimentalists.

CHAPTER XIX

EN PLEINE CRAU

Un grand gaillard, les cheveux boucles, la barbe en pointe
longue et inculte, avec une face de Christ ravage, un
Christ soulard, violeur de filles et detrousseur de grandes
routes. . . .

LA TERRE.

I AM out of patience with Zola and Zola-
ism. Has it ever struck you that France
lacks the realist to deal as faithfully with
the peasant as with the shopkeeper ? What
a picture there is still to draw of the
narrowness and charitableness of the country-
side, of its close-fistedness and large-handed
generosity, of its shrewdness and bonhomie,
of its low cunning and childish stupidity !
The owners of the pleasant vineyards of this
sunny country will not sell their produce
a day earlier than has been the custom of
their fathers, though the whole world, made
thirsty with war, cry out for the thin trickle
of their grape. And how they stick to their
Marrows Vegetable I am too weary to tell
you. But we need our faithful novelist for
other passions and obstinacies than those

187

1 88

L. of C.

of buying and selling. We need a novelist
who, without sentimentalising, shall see the
peasant less grossly and less ignobly than the
great French realist. Maupassant's gibe that
before tackling " La Terre " the author took
a victoria to see the peasants may not have
been meant for more than a witticism, but it
contains the germ of truth.

Never was there a greater libel on the peasant
than this romantic piece of inaccurate report-
ing, or so one feels after contact with the
soil of Provence, richer, redder, of a greater
fecundity than the soil of the Loir. If ever
earth should take for its expression the pas-
sions of her teeming humanity, then surely
in full Provence, en pleine Crau, that voice
were heard at its most primitive. Yet you
may wander in these pleasant fields and chat
with the labourer without gleaning any hint
of that which Zola would tell you is passing
through his mind. You may shelter from
the sun behind the curtained doorway of
any mas you will without the consciousness
that incest and outrage are at your elbow.
You may walk the roads and talk with gipsies,
pedlars, harvesters, teamsters, rejoicing in all
the bravery of gay shirts scantily covering
brown skins, the finery of aluminium rings
and the reddest of roses in the thick black
locks of their hair. In none of their voices

En Pleine Crau

189

will you hear the Zolaesque baying of the
beast. If, to adopt the phraseology of the
arch-realist these grands gaillards have the
face of Christ — and it is true they remind one
of the early Italian masters — it is the face
of a Christ eminently bon enfant. . . .

In my last I tried to describe the senti-
mental atmosphere of Provence, its harking
back to Crusaders and to Caesars, its tales
of fighters and lovers. The very names of
the towns make appeal to one's sense of history
and fable. Avignon, with its Popes and old-
world nursery rhyme, Tarascon, with its genial
braggart, Aries, with its fame of lovely women.
Then there are the towns of which one may
know nothing, but of which the very names
are enticing. Such are St. Re my and Vaucluse,
Les Saintes Maries de la Mer and Aigues-
Mortes.

Home-keeping Englander that you are, what
picture do you make to yourself of Provence ?
A Romantic mise en scene of Tennysonian re-
treats, where never wind blows loudly — shade
of the mistral and sirocco — and where poppy,
lotus, and mandragora are the staple fare ?
A land something more westerly in temper
than our own West Country, a land of orchards
and setting sun ? A land of golden melon and
indolent peach ? . . .

To be perfectly candid, Provence is not at

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L. of C.

all like any of the exquisite descriptions of it
which one reads. Provence, or that little
bit of it which I have come to know, is a jumble
of three of the most matter-of-fact types of
country you can imagine. There is the country
of the Alpines, exaggerated mole-hills scarcely
more hazardous than the golf course at Winder-
mere, the soil a gritty yellow dust. At the
foot of the Alpines a rich plain wonderfully
irrigated and cared for. Through this rich
belt of cultivation runs the scorching road-
way, shaded by mile-long avenues of plane
trees, linking village to village, and serving
as standards for the sublimely incongruous
service of electric light. Not an inch of ground
which is not under the most jealous cultiva-
tion ; the village lads, denied a green, are
driven into the roadway thick in dust to play
at their crazy game of bowls. To this belt
of astounding fertility there succeeds a tract
of marshland where the reeds grow man high,
giving place in turn to a red and sandy
plain entirely barren and strewn with countless
millions of round smooth pebbles, the muni-
tion factory of a David. Across the Rhone
the Camargue, an annexe to this desolate
region, a wilderness of swamp, morass, and
river. Wild bulls inhabit here, or are main-
tained to supply the peace-time mises-d-mort
in the arenas of Aries and Nimes. They are

En Pleine Crau

191

tended by a ragged little girl of some fourteen
summers, who drives them with the butt end
of an old umbrella. A herd or two of really
wild horses is to be seen, sturdy, thick-necked,
short-legged little fellows, of a dirty white
or doubtful grey, typical trappers, for whom
" no day too long " as they say at the Re-
positories. In their natural state they are
an admirable imitation of the pictures of
Rosa Bonheur. A stork, a heron, and a certain
army motor-car stuck in the mud complete
the flora and fauna of this comfortless tract
of country.

Never in the rich belt of the Crau any real
orchard-sense despite the Kate Greenaway
ladders ranged around the cherry trees. Never
in Provence any promise of pleasant deviation
in roads logical as the French mind, leading
straightly and unswervingly to a fixed goal.
There is in this brilliant, too-explicit country
none of the half-lights, mists or decline of
day which make for romance. The sap burst-
ing the leaves of the plane trees against the
morning sun is without mystery, is visibly
and actively red, like the blood of fingers
held to candle-light. Nor have the fields
any thought beyond production and repro-
duction. So obsessed are they with the trick
of a Zolaesque fecundity that I ache at times,
positively ache, to put them to an English

192

L. of C.

use, to dot them with white figures set for
fast bowling.

Figures of graver moment to the French
mind than our players at cricket are the old
men gathering what may very well prove
to be their last crop. They give you to think
sometimes, do these old men bent with years
and burnt with the sun. All here is work
and thrift. You may talk with a Spaniard
cooking his meal by the roadside, and you
will smile to think how the ill-kempt beard,
matted hair, mild brown eye, and gentle
expression have misled a prying novelist into
talk of a " Christ ravage " and a " Christ
soulard." The manners of the young man
may be rustic, his breath smell distressfully
of garlic, his lowering fringe heavy with sweat
hang like a curtain over his dark eyes, but
you are to know that he drinks water, lives
frugally, and rolls into the hedge to sleep an
honest, light-hearted sleep. He is a very
fairly civilised, ordinary, well-behaved young
man. You may be sure that, having made
up my mind about all this, I have not let the
occasion pass for some pretty philosophising.
" How little did you really know, old Zola/'
I have found myself saying, " of the real
peasant, of the sunny, open-hearted, open-
handed child of this straightforward land !
Drunkenness, pilfering, and the petty vices

En Pleine Crau

193

may still keep a lingering hold over us, but
we shake them off pretty much as we will.
We may rob hen-roosts, but we have at least
secured the Beast within us/* And much more
in the same strain.

CHAPTER XX

IN PARENTHESIS

§1

I'VE been doing a considerable amount of
theatre-going lately and wondering if I
should confess it to you. Those excitable
busybodies, the Germans — to put 'em no worse
— have started all sorts of disputatious hares
with their letting off of nonsensical crackers
and silly banging of guns. How far right are
we to continue to take a moderate interest in
the amenities of life now that these madmen
have tuned all table talk to the tremendous
themes of battle, murder, and sudden death ?
You can't quite realise perhaps how immensely
far off the war seems to us down here. One
gets in the way of regarding the soldier as
a distant consumer of Marrows Vegetable.
. . . Nothing of late has happened to me of
greater excitement than a dispute as to roads
with my particularly Scotch, dour, and un-
yielding chauffeur. As you know, I loathe
and detest every form of motor-machinery
and cannot give you any indication of the

194

In Parenthesis

195

particular make of scrap-iron I ride about
in except that it is a long, low car painted
grey. Equally you know that I have pro-
found faith in specialists and experts of all
kinds, holding that the ignoramus should in
all circumstances be mum. The lad insisted
that a certain road would save ten miles of
the way home. I contented myself with
pointing out meekly (a) that the road was
chiefly under water and (6) that I was expected
to dine at seven with the mayor of the village.
Totally cowed by that particular stare of con-
tempt and indulgence affected by Scotchmen
who are also motor experts I gave way. It
was turned nine when a diligent scouring of
the desolate country-side succeeded in pro-
ducing a farmer who possessed the mules, the
tow-rope and the goodwill to extricate us
from the slough of unmetalled road and flood
into which we had sunk axle-deep. And it
was past midnight — summer time or no summer
time — before the heir of Bannockburn owned
he was beat. I, of course, had been beat from
the start. Why can't they invent a water-
proof engine ? I make you a present of the
suggestion.

Never a word of apology from the expert,
though I think I did right to construe his
repeated offers to carry my heavy coat at
least some part of the weary fourteen-mile

trudge home as so many expressions of regret.
We made up some sort of supper at the hotel
out of scraps of meat, ends of cheese, grapes
and a bottle of wine belonging to a civilian.
" You'll no be bearin' me a gr-r-rudge for all
this?" said Scottie, fortified by food almost
to graciousness. And as he wished me good
night, " It's no so terrible air-r-rly you'll be
wantin' the car the morn, efter your exer-
r-rcise ? " — in which I recognised the inveterate
optimism of the professional mechanic hopeful
as to a broken-down car fourteen miles away—
and that within three hours of daylight. By
some marvellous means known only to Scotch
chauffeurs we were on the road again by
ten o'clock, but I have reason to believe he
took a French mechanic into his confidence.

I had plenty of time for thought then, in
that mosquito-haunted vigil while my expert
driver tinkered unavailingly away. And my
thoughts took shape more or less as follows,
punctuated of course by offers of vague help
and futile suggestion.

The Germans, drat 'em ! had broken in
upon a world progressing in an orderly and self-
respecting way — Insurance Schemes, Propor-
tional Representation Schemes, Town Planning
Schemes, the recognition that there might be
practical value in the dreams of H. G. Wells,
. . . and a great deal more which you will

In Parenthesis

197

find ever so much better put in that great
writer's earliest book, . . . Repertory Theatres,
. . . then a sudden switch on to the doubt
as to whether " Art for Art's Sake " had ever
been a creed going deeper than the artist's
smug self-sufficingness. . . . Whether, sound or
unsound, this creed hadn't been sent down by
the German onslaught for a generation or two,
as you send down a boxer for the count. . . .
That it was all very well for a Gauthier to say
that he would rather his boots leaked than his
rhyme, but that to-day we might have to
choose between the rich texture of fine verse
and the poor nakedness of Belgium and Serbia.
. . . That, on the other hand, the only mental
stimulus of which one had been conscious
during the last three months in this sleepy,
out-of-the-way, old-world Provence, was not
the unreal, slowly-filtering war-news, but —
now for a confession ! — the occasional dis-
traction of the local theatre. Perhaps I had
been more interested than another. The
retired cobbler will to his old last, you know,
and there is the example of the busman's
holiday. Anyhow, I determined that my next
letter to you should be about the theatre of
these parts. Honestly, I don't know that I
can connect it with the war in any way, or
that I shall try to. And if you think I am
trifling, then imagine I have put up a notice-

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L. of C.

board, " Theatre-Lovers Only. General Public
Warned Off."

SOIREE DE THEATRE EN PROVENCE

It had been a morning of real hard work
and I had forgotten to lunch. Column after
column of self-opiniative French figures there
had been to add up, and much wondering as
to the capacity of one's pay to make good
arithmetical blunders and the handing out of
a thousand franc note in place of one for a
hundred.

" C'est trop fort de vouloir dejeuner a trois
heures, le jour meme ou Ton attend des
artistes ! " grumbles the amiable Italian waiter
at the country town's best inn.

" Quels artistes, mon brave ? " I ask him.

" On ne sait pas trop. A ce qu'on dit, des
Parisiens." And he goes off grumbling to
interview the chef. In less than five minutes
they produce between them an omelette aux
truffes, a bifteck a I'anglaise (no English cook
ever sponsored such a dish), a cream cheese,
a basket of peaches, half a bottle of a very
drinkable rose-pink wine of the country, and
an admirable cup of coffee, the whole not dear
at three francs fifty. Over the Maryland
cigarette — the cigars are finished and the

In Parenthesis

199

cigarette is all one's nerves permit in these,
I beg you to believe, overworked and shaky
days — I fall to wondering what manner of
Parisian players these may be who judge so
small a town worthy of a visit and do not fear
compare with the shades of Greek actors
haunting the ruined theatre on the hill. It
is now the very witching hour of the siesta ;
the waiters from the rival hotels forgather
at a neutral cafe to talk over their clients
and smoke a rank cigar. A great peace broods
over the sunlit square. A dog rinding the
golden pavement too hot crosses to the violet
shade. There is no other movement. From
far away down the absurdly narrow and crooked
street leading to the station, the source of all
our news of the outer world, comes the faint
rumble of a ramshackle fly. An elegant phaeton
in the days of the First Empire, this broken-
down ruin makes a stately tour of the square,
stopping finally before my hotel. I gaze idly
at the single figure which is its occupant. The
lady, preparing to descend, throws back her
long blue veil. Then to my indescribable
astonishment and unutterable delight from
the carriage descends . . . RE JANE ! I rub
my eyes, but there is no mistaking the buoyant
walk, the careless insolent carriage. The
" Parisians from all accounts " means Re jane !
It has always struck me as foolish that in

2OO

L. of C.

the daily press one has to use the belittling
prefixes. What have artists to do with being
called Monsieur and Madame or what have
these minor courtesies to do with them ? The
weekly reviews manage these things better.
Arthur Symons could write unrebuked " Sarah
Bernhardt prepares the supreme feast ; Re jane
skins emotions alive ; Duse serves them up
to you on golden dishes." I am too far from
my books to verify the quotation, but I would
go bail for " Rejane skins emotions alive."
There has always been fascination for me in
the mere letters of a great artist's name. DUSE
on a hoarding is more than Duse ; it is all the
sad grace of La Gioconda. BERNHARDT
brings back a hot afternoon of late summer
many years ago, a wait of hours outside the
door of a provincial pit, a long pale poster in
white, silver, and mauve, and an eneffably
wistful Lady of the Camelias, trailing glamour
and more than mortal radiance. RIiJANE
stands in my mind for all the insolence of
Paris, the arrogance of great courtisanes, the
crude manners and crude sorrows of the femme
du peuple.

I shall never forget the first time I saw Rejane.
It was one sultry evening in Paris and in
spite of the great actress the house was thin.
I forget the title of the play, some comical-
historical, historical-comical drama a la mode.

In Parenthesis

2OI

Coquelin, I remember, had a tirade on behalf
of the dignity of the actor's calling, and he
and Rejane played together a scene of peasant
jealousy. I had a solitary seat in the front
row of the almost empty stalls. (It was my
first visit to Paris and I had saved up for the
treat.)

It seems to me now that the great actress
had not been averse that evening to over-
whelming with all the splendour of her art
this obviously foreign little greenhorn gazing
up at her. She may have felt the need of
someone to play to. The fact remains that
never have I since seen on any stage the like
of that peasant agony. It gave one the im-
pression of torture and vivisection, of an
animal dumb despite the torrent of words.
Symons was right ; this was indeed emotions
skinned alive. . , .

I tried to say something of this in a letter
to the artist, conveyed with the compliments
(unofficial) of the British Army and a gerbe of
flowers some five feet by three. I am senti-
mental enough to think that it must be some-
thing, even to artists the most weary of success,
to know at first hand that their success is real.
A singularly conscientious and sensitive actor
once told me that whenever he went on to the
stage jaded or listless he would pull himself
together with the thought that he might be

2O2

L. of C.

about to unlock the door into the world of
beauty to some poor devil stumbling on the
threshold. Perhaps it was foolish to write the
wildly extravagant letter I did, but the tempta-
tion was strong. It is not often given to the
marooned — for one is marooned here, you know,
in the matter of streets and theatres, restaurants
and people, all that go to make up town,—
to have the isolation so surprisingly relieved.

There was none of the stage-managed success
in this visit of a great actress. There descends
from a rickety hired carriage at an unpre-
tentious hotel " une artiste, une Parisienne,
a ce qu'il parait." At the stuffy little theatre
a crowd of farmers, shopkeepers, and appren-
tices assembles. There is one row of stalls
only and in the well of the orchestra the chef
and sous-chef, the waiter, boots, and chamber-
maid from the hotel. The play is " Madame
Sans-Gene," and the audience take play and
acting without very much ado. This is Parisian
acting, d ce qu'il parait, but nothing, their
apathy would seem to suggest, so tremendously
out of the way.

After the performance I make a frugal
supper of biscuits and a bottle of Vichy in
the half-lighted hall of the Hotel, which is
the only sitting-room. It is the hour when
all good dramatic critics revise the essay
which they have written in intelligent anticipa-

In Parenthesis

203

tion. I find myself wondering whether any
of our best instructed critics have pointed
out that whereas Ellen Terry in the English
version of the play was simply mannerless,
Re jane is magnificently sans -gene — a very
different matter. Or that our great and dear
actress had her revenge in the matter of pathos,
inasmuch as when the French Marechale spoke
of following her husband in the field, one
marvelled at the justice and cleverness of the
actress's emotion, but that when the English
Duchess made her declaration, a lump in the
throat would come that defied analysis. My
contribution to criticism would have been
that the excellent actor who played Napoleon
could never have seen Irving or he would
surely not have omitted to point his remarks
to the Queen of Naples by banging the backs
of pricelessly-bound volumes with the tongs
as our great actor used to do.

In the midst of these musings there is a
ring at the door -bell; the sleepy porter goes
with an ill grace to open and Rejane enters,
filling the dingy place not with a legendary
radiance, but with a bustling air of business-
like competence. She instructs the porter to
see that her bill is ready betimes in the morn-
ing. Then a few gracious words to me, who
have nothing to say in return, a pleasant
acceptance of the flowers, a kindly passing

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L. of C.

over of the letter, a bow, and the actress
disappears. At ten o'clock the next morning
she has left the town and we go about our
normal affairs with what appetite we may.
There is somehow or other a certain sameness
in this business of Marrows Vegetable.

§3

A FRENCH VERSION OF SALOME

I want you to imagine yourself in one
of the Roman arenas of Southern France.
I want you to imagine a gorgeous night of
late June, the sky a deep blue, so blue that
you can look up past the arc lamps into a
vault that is not darkness but colour. Over
the rim of the last of the tiers of stone the
moon rides as it has ridden for a thousand
years. Moths that might have fluttered in the
folds of a decoration by Aubrey Beardsley
hang on the curtain of night. The centuries
fall away and we feel humiliated, grotesque
even to our dress. Entering from the street
we pass through what we must suppose to be
the pit, to what we must equally suppose to
be the stalls. The stage is an immense dis-
tance away. Vaguely one perceives by the
barbaric costumes of the actors, their excess
of jewels, the long red tresses of the women

In Parenthesis

205

twined about with pearls, the raven beards
of the men, that the play is Eastern. But for
the moment neither the traffic of the stage,
the tinkle of the orchestra, nor the simulation
of passion in the air holds our attention. Alone
the walls of the theatre tease our brain and
spirit. Of what passions, crimes, cruelties are
they not eloquent ! What butcheries have
they not seen, what debaucheries have they
not sheltered! The imagination will not have
it that yonder dark stain is not of yesterday.
The immense crowd which has assembled is as
little distracting as the play of the stage.
At one end of the crescent emerging into the
light thrown from the stage is to be seen a
young peasant lying at full length on his
stomach, his brown chin supported in his
brown hand. A small child plays quietly on
the broad ledge by his side. At the other
end of the crescent a soldier on leave talks
earnestly to a young girl. Half a dozen
recruits are laughing and joking. The audi-
torium is so vast that these interruptions do
not amount to a disturbance.

Twenty thousand souls are listening to the
rise and fall of Massenet's " Herodiade," not
too momentous in a French opera-house,
mightily unequal to the task of stilling the
echoes of the past thrown back by these grey
walls. The stage setting is gaudy and fantastic,

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L. of C.

blue cypress against yellow rocks. The actors,
arrayed in all the colours of a child's box of
paints, declaim, gesticulate and go about their
operatic business to no very great purpose.
The triviality of rehearsed emotions has become
obvious in this setting of grey stone. How
can old walls which have drunk their fill of
actual tragedy take seriously the rhyme and
the jingle, the cardboard pretence ? What
can they make of this sham Tetrarch mouth-
ing a sham passion, this Herodiade bringing
off roulades and fiorituri, this Salome winning
and spritely with the click of French heels
under her Eastern robe ?

Now I have no intention of going back on
our old love, the theatre. We hold, don't
we, you and I, that the stage can better mere
portrayal, can heighten passion. We hold
that no theme is too big to be contained within
the box of tricks which is the theatre. But
let us agree that it is a box of tricks of which
we must respect the conventions. You do
not ask your conjurer to bring off miracles
in the absence of an apparatus, nor should
you ask your actor to perform his wonders
outside the mimic scene. The actor bestriding
a couple of cardboard boulders becomes an
English king ; topple them over and there is
a breach in a fortress walls. Furnish the same
actor with a first-class set of battlements

In Parenthesis

207

reproduced from the architectural records of
the period ; give the scenic artist and the
stage carpenter their unimaginative fling, and
you will have neither Harfleur nor Henry
the Fifth ; you will have only an actor and
a piece of acting to applaud.

How much more destructive of illusion,
then, when you carry actuality a step further,
from stage realism to the very bricks and mortar
of a setting which has known tragedy. Plant
your actor on the platform of Elsinore, let
him tread the Rialto of Venice or the Forum
of old Rome, and you will have stripped him
of his conjurer's apparatus, of his legitimate
appurtenances, his rightful box of tricks.

Diderot tells of a visit to the studio of
Pigalle, then at work on his monument to
the Marechal de Saxe, and of a beautiful
courtisane who was sitting as model for the
figure of France. "Mais comment croyez-vous
qu'elle me parut entre les figures colossales qui
Fenvironnaient ? Pauvre, petite, mesquine,
une espece de grenouille ; elle en etait ecrasee."

So were the actors in " Herodiade " crushed,
dwarfed by their surroundings. Excellent
artists in a theatre, they shrank to incon-
ceivable littleness when their stage swelled to
the Roman Empire. Herod, most sinister of
personages, became a middle-aged noceur in
red velvet, Herodiade a commonplace virago,

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L. of C.

Salom£, a feather-brained young woman
sobered by the fear lest the attentions of
the prophet might not prove " serious/' To
be fair to the actors one cannot maintain that
this was entirely their fault. The cypress
trees insisted on pointing to heaven instead
of to perfectly acceptable flies, the yellow
background of the desert would dissolve into
the mocking walls of grey stone instead of into
coulisses taken for granted. These actors
were condemned to enact their tragedy, as a
wit said of an overweighted Hamlet, like
rabbits with thunderbolts tied to their tails.

If I were writing this letter in the Diderot
manner, I should make you break in here,

" There must be something very wrong
with your art of the theatre/' you would say,
"if it cannot rise to the level of history, if it
is not capable of being stimulated and inspired
by pregnant scenes."

And perhaps we have got to the heart of
the mystery. Perhaps opera at its best can
never be, for the play-goer as distinct from
the musician, a sufficiently serious art. I have
often wondered what Charles Lamb would
have had to say to the spectacle of kings,
confronted with their dishonour, mute until
fiddles and bassoons had recounted their life
histories ; at lovers bleeding to death through
whole acts — who would have thought tenors

In Parenthesis

209

to have had so much blood in 'em ? — at stout
sopranos waving shawls in obedience to a
stick wagged at them by a manikin on a
stool ! . . . But let us assume that opera is
a feasible medium for the highest emotion of
the theatre. The fault of non-effectiveness
then must lie in the choice of opera, in the
positively uncanny preference of Massenet to
Strauss. What though the shudder in the
German Opera, the pale ardour in the play
of Wilde, the leer in the drawings of Beardsley
are so many distempered elaborations redeemed
only by genius ? In the hands of Massenet
the simple story is become travesty. Genius
were better.

"St. Jean-Baptiste est poursuivi par Salome
qui, eprise de lui, finit par lui faire partager
son amour/'

I quote from the programme. Herodiade
demands the head of the prophet very much
against the will of Salome, who has her ven-
geance thwarted by the belated discovery that
Herodiade is her mother. Nothing is left for
the young lady but a pathetic suicide which
she accordingly effects. What monkeying with
a text ! Well may the apologetic programmist
call the character-drawing denature !

Let us leave the operatic stage to its impre-
sarios and chefs d'orchestre, its prima donnas
and premieres danseuses. What actors, simple

2IO

L. of C.

straightforward actors, are there or have there
ever been capable of holding their own against
the stones of the Arena ? Would one invite
Duse to court so grand a disaster ? Would
not Re jane be the first to declare the entre-
preneur mad who should propose so hare-
brained an adventure ? Was not Mounet-
Sully too consciously sublime, and would he
not have turned the Bible into Hugo ? Our
own Irving would have achieved a failure
tremendous as his Lear. There remains one
only of the great artists of our time, and we
are still too near her to judge.

A little anecdote. A great actress was giving
a lesson to a pupil on the bare stage of her
theatre. Said the pupil, who could not manage
a sufficiently desperate "Au secours!"

" But, Madame, will you not show me the
proper way to cry for help ? "

" My child," replied the actress. " Were I
to cry for help those decorators of mine up
there in the ceiling would come rushing down
on to the stage ! "

And this intense power of conviction is due
not to an excess of spirit or superabundance
of soul, but to the perfect recognition of the
theatre's lath and plaster and a perfect mastery
of its tricks. Amazing paradox of this theatre
of ours, that it should be the conjurer, the
conscious manipulator, the calculating and

In Parenthesis

211

contriving artist who speaks most eloquently
to our souls ! But I cannot bring myself to
believe that even the great artist who is rapidly
becoming my King Charles's head could hold
her own against the ghosts of the Arena.
Which is a heresy for which I shall probably
be very sorry in the morning.

§4

AN OPERA OF ROSSINI

Away she went over the smooth turf at a canter.

EDITH VERNON'S LIFE-WORK.

What do you think of the discovery that
the actor may escape annihilation by declining
to take his art too portentously ? There's
daylight for you ! The scene of this piece of
critical perceptiveness was again the Arena,
the time last Sunday afternoon, the occasion
Rossini's bombastic, twaddlesome " William
Tell," vulgar from the first bar of its rowdy
music-hall overture to the last of its fatuous
top notes. And yet one revelled in the noisy
rubbish. There wasn't, you see, the faintest
pretence at illusion. " On chante comme on
peut," said the bourgeoise when her daughter
took too much pressing. One shouts " William
Tell " as loud as one can and there's an end.

212

L. Of C.

Does it not strike you as rather curious
that a person not altogether ignorant of the
French language, nor of the conventional
idiom of the opera-singer, and with a two-
franc stall well to the front should still be
unable to decide with whom the gentleman
in the sky-blue breeches slashed d la Holbein
is in love, and what the obstacle to his suit ?
For an act or so this round-faced, oleaginous
hero, half brigand, half butter-merchant, now
Tupman, now Chadband, now Mr. Charles
Hawtrey's farcical make-up many years ago
as the fancy-dress Duke in " Lord and Lady
Algy," bleated his passion into the void.
After a time attention was drawn to a depress-
ing young woman attired en amazone and
given to patrolling the chamois-haunted glades
of what looked like the more expensive parts
of Switzerland. This personage took one
straight back to the pork -pie period of du
Maurier, and reminded me insistently of a
book of childhood's days, one " Edith Vernon's
Life-work." Failing throughout the whole
performance to gather the name of the heroine
I called her Edith Vernon, after the equestrian
heroine of that lachrymose romance. It was
Edith Vernon then who seemed to have nothing
whatever to do in life except to wear straw-
berry velvet and to wander up and down
green swards tapping a green gauntlet with a

In Parenthesis 213

jewelled riding- whip. After two acts, during
which the sky-blue gentleman had been as
dumb before this lady as Romeo in the presence
of Rosaline, we were suddenly astonished by
the ecstatic announcement " Sa flamme repond
a ma flamme/' set to the vulgarest tune I ever
did hear. But one had all along been taking
the lover for William Tell himself since he
was the possessor of the loudest voice in the
cast and was obviously out to break the back
of the opera. What, one began to wonder,
would Edith Vernon make of the small boy
who was to prove the son of this middle-aged
philanderer ? One foresaw expostulatory re-
citatives of enormous length and arias of a
heart-rending sentimentality.

To everybody's relief a baritone looking
absurdly like Wotan hereabouts presented him-
self, and proceeded to establish his claim to
be considered the rightful owner to the title
of the opera, although for a long time one had
taken him for Gessler. But by a subtle process
of elimination one made up one's mind that
this last could only be the fellow with the
picric -acid beard who looked as though he
had made-up for " Aida." But the characters
did not come properly into their own until
the scene of the apple, when everybody who
was anybody forgathered on the stage at
once. It was now definitely determined that

214

L. of C.

Boy Blue could not by any possibility be
William Tell, but who he really was and who
the strawberry-coloured, one will never know
till one drops across Rossini in the shades.

Once again one noted that Italian Opera, of
which this is a particularly flagrant specimen,
has no mean between the highly diverting
and the extremely lugubrious. Whatever the
shade of sentiment in the libretto, whatever
the level of the passion, needs must, when a
maestro composes, that the music perch on
one or the other of these two stools. " Mon
pere est mort ; je 1'ai vu pour la derniere fois "
was positively chortled by the smirking, bow-
ing, scraping brigand. After another equally
sensational aria, the last, as it turned out, of
the afternoon, the loud-voiced hero bowed
himself off into the wings for good, and emerg-
ing from the other side buried his round and
beaming face, in full view of the audience,
in a mug of foaming beer handed up by an
enthusiastic admirer.

And yet in spite of the farcical plot, the
trumpery music and the naive interpretation,
there was an amount of theatrical illusion con-
siderably bettering the fiasco of " Herodiade."
On this sunny afternoon there had been no
attempt to rivalise with great surroundings,
to shout down the voices of ghosts. The
actors making no claim beyond the legitimate

In Parenthesis

215

pretensions of their art, the puppet show and
the box of tricks came into their own again.
Boy Blue and Edith Vernon, well within the
Operatic convention, not even trying too whole-
heartedly to avoid the ridiculous, left more
for the imagination to take hold of than that
other Herod with all his mouthing. And in
the theatre imagination works the better the
more it has to do.

§5

A PERFORMANCE OF GOUNOD'S " FAUST

Verdi, Verdi, when you wrote " II Trovatore " did you dream

Of the City when the sun sinks low,

Of the organ and the monkey and the many-coloured stream
On the Piccadilly pavement, of the myriad eyes that seem
To be litten for a moment with the wild Italian gleam
As A die la morte parodies the world's eternal theme

And pulses with the sunset-glow.

THE BARREL ORGAN.

Again the Arena, which might lead you to
suppose that A.S.C. officers spend their time
gallivanting round the country-side at the
heels of play-actors. But there you would
be grievously mistaken. It does not follow
that you do a job any the worse for choosing
a day on which the little town is en fete. There
is a gala night in the Arena and you are invited
by a hospitable French merchant to dinner.

216

L. of C.

Of the dinner no need to say much. You
know what French hospitality is— the soupe,
the unknown fish out of the Rhone, a male-
volent, ill-mannered fish, " pas gentil du tout/'
the old lady who cooked him averred, seeing
that it had bitten her while she was cleaning
him alive under the tap, the grillade, the
haricots verts, which have so little in common
with our own French beans, the poulet, the
salade, the cheese, and the dessert, greengages,
peaches, apricots, the whole arrose with a
small white wine, a famous Bordeaux, a
Chateauneuf-du-Pape from the Rhone valley,
and an unknown champagne, alas ! demi-sec.

But you cannot know what it is to drink
French coffee on the balcony of a fifth-floor
flat gazing at a famous monument to a bygone
civilisation literally on the other side of the
way. One gets so used to the romantic in
Provence that to stroll across the street into
a Roman Amphitheatre is not more remark-
able than to dine at Hammersmith and turn
into Olympia. Except that from my host's
the distance is so short that the transfer from
dinner-table to stall may be effected " without
the trouble of drawing on one's gloves," as
our foremost playwright, always well dressed
in the matter of dialogue, makes his noble lord
say.

At this my third performance in these old

In Parenthesis

217

arenas, I was conscious of being less staggered
by antiquity, of being able to compute that
fifteen thousand souls even at a franc a piece
is a goodish " house." Attention, then, was
not too awesomely distracted from Gounod's
masterpiece, always an amusing opera, rising
almost to seriousness when the Faust is as
arresting a personage and as magnificent an
actor as he was on this occasion. Imagine a
Faust with the brow of a Siegfried, and the
mouth and chin of an Apollo. Imagine a
radiance more than healthy, the renewed eclat
of some vieux marcheur turned Greek god.
Imagine a chevelure of amber curls parted
gloriously and descending to the shoulders in
cascades infinitely well arranged. Imagine eyes
of which the flame has been relit by the pencil,
of which the lids are heavy with passion bought
at the chemist's. There is something of Little
Lord Fauntleroy in this velvet-suited hero,
something of that great male, the Marquis de
Valmont in Choderlos de Laclos' " Liaisons
Dangereuses," a hint of the opera-singer in
Beardsley's " Venus and Tannhauser/' a trace
in the hips and carriage of the exorbitant
gentleman who demands too much from life
in Picasso's "London Music Hall." What
Marguerite could have resisted ce beau tenor of
the fascinating ways, as we know she didn't ?
The very make-up of which the actor had so

218

L. of C.

magnificent a courage was a whole Conte Cruel
of Villiers de lisle-Adam.

Even the orchestra came under the influence
of the strange spell. The first violin, be-
spectacled, middle-aged, fiddled away with
passion. " Et Ego in Arcadia " quavered and
insisted the thin trickle of his obbligato. In
the stalls a " modish little lady " kept closing
and unclosing her jewelled hand ; at her side
an " old and haggard demirep " moved uneasily
in her seat. And now that I have slipped into
these phrases I know what it is that has been
stirring me so intensely.

It is not the parody of passion in the music,
it is not the passion emanating from these old
grey walls. It is the recollection of the passion
of London, of its many-coloured stream, myriad
eyes, pavements, theatres, restaurants. It is
the old passion of the street and the crowd,
to which this well-worn music has sent one
harking back. A circumscribed London too,
not much bigger than a barrel organ's beat.
Who would not exchange the whole of Pro-
vence for a world of no bigger radius than the
Elephant and Castle where the buses are,
the Waterloo Road with its touts and rogues,
Vauxhall where the lilacs bloom, Hammersmith
where in Horse Show Week the little ponies go
round and round. Though the music's only
Gounod there's London to make it sweet.

In Parenthesis

219

That night over a last cigar on the balcony
overlooking the now silent Arena one grew
philosophic. Said my host, breaking a long
silence,

" A bien regarder, la vie ne vaut pas grand'-
chose."

" C'est un foin secondaire," I replied, know-
ing his agricultural leanings.

" Je vous comprends. Tres secondaire meme !
Mais, que voulez vous ? " This with the
familiar shrug of the shoulders. Then, after
a time, " Pardi ! "

Finally I. " La vie, voyez vous, ga n'est
jamais si bon ni si mauvais qu'on croit,"
which is my favourite quotation from Maupas-
sant. Then reflecting on the poverty of mind
which has nothing less trite to offer on the
twin subjects of Life and Death than a feeble
witticism and an outworn quotation, I bid
good night to my friend and walk slowly to
my hotel.

CHAPTER XXI

I

DUNSCOMBE

CAN hear you saying, in spite of my
warning, that my last few letters are all
very well, but that a soldier should have
sterner doings to relate than going to the
play, to which the retort that, quite between
ourselves, A.S.C. Officers are sometimes en-
gaged less in soldiering than in the conduct
of a large and responsible wholesale business
with rounds to make and market - places to
attend, and we must have some recreation.
I am beginning to forget military terms and
have now only the very vaguest recollection
of drill. In the beginning of things my bed-
room was my office and one worked and break-
fasted, and worked and lunched, and worked
and had dinner, and worked until bedtime all
within the same four walls. But now that
the business has grown and the turnover has
increased from one million — Marrows Vegetable,
I think we agreed to call 'em — to two million
a week, I have been authorised to take a bona
fide office with a room for the clerks, of whom

220

Dunscombe

221

I now have two. Also I have taken in a partner,
one Dunscombe.

Now taking in a partner in the Army is by
no means a matter of choice. An officer
receives orders to " proceed " to take up a
partnership with you whether he wants to or
not, and you will arrange, please, to take into
partnership, somebody of whose very name
and existence you were unaware till you
opened the telegram. How diffidently he
takes up his position and how cordially you
try to make him feel he is the one person you
would have chosen ! You have your first
meal together and it is as well to realise at
once that for six months, perhaps for twelve,
you will breakfast together and lunch together,
and take coffee after lunch together, and dine
together and take coffee after dinner together,
at the same little table in the same dull little
cafe across the road. There is no danger of
a quarrel over anything that really matters,
but there is every likelihood that you will fall
out because you do not like the shape of each
other's noses. So it is as well to lay in a good
stock of the small courtesies and minor fore-
bearances.

From the first moment of setting eyes on
old Dunscombe I knew we should never fall
out. (I call him " old Dunscombe " because
he is so preternaturally young.) And yet I

222

L. Of C.

do not think that we have a single interest in
common. So much the better. As some wit
said, a bishop and a jockey get on together
far better than two bishops with different
shades of gaiters. Which of us is the bishop
and which the jockey, I will leave you to
decide for yourself.

Dunscombe is the very best type of young
Englishman, extraordinarily cute in every-
thing that relates to affairs, and extraordinarily
simple in everything that doesn't. To him
one tune is very much like another and every-
thing that appears in print equally good to
read. In comparison with Kirchner and Bairns-
father, Michael Angelo and Titian are very
small beer. You would not ask Dunscombe
to choose a book for you, but you would trust
him unhesitatingly in a tight place or in any
matter of honour or friendship. Sound on all
questions of money and women, he will have
nothing to do with any complicated notions
of morality. Many writers have had a shot
at the young Englishman. He has been
idealised in " The Brushwood Boy/1 and set
forth perhaps too nakedly in his manly, common-
place self-sufficiency, in the civilian novels of
Mr. Ian Hay. It has been left to a Frenchman
to draw Dunscombe perfectly, and you will
find him in the second lieutenant of Abel
Hermanns " L'Autre Aventure du Joyeux

Dunscombe 223

Garfon." There is the perfect hitting-off of
the well-bred, clean-living Englishman, im-
memorially endowed with the fougue of perfect
condition, the temper of a boy, and the heart
and brain of a child. If anything is wanting
it is a dash of the " guileless fool " of the legend,
and of the artlessness of Kipps.

Dunscombe 's method of making himself
understood by the French peasant is of a
rare simplicity. He will muster up what he
can remember of his schoolboy French, add a
flavouring of Whitechapel, round off every
sentence with a " Vous savez," and serve up hot
and strong. And when the poor Provencal
" comprees" but indifferently, " Gaw-blimey ! '
says Dunscombe, " the blighters don't under-
stand their own language/' The knowing
thing, according to Dunscombe, is to engueuler
the native on every possible occasion. That
is why the poor waiter who knows not our
English humour has to suffer a bombardment,
at every meal, reminiscent of the Tottenham
Court Road on Saturday night. " Look here,
you spawn of Pompeii, you leanin' disgrace to
Pisa, if you don't activvy that bloomin' om-y-
lette I'll topple you over for good an1 all,
s'welp me if I don't ! " The poor Pompeiian
smiles foolishly, doubtless reflecting to him-
self that the English have a wit all their own.
But to the timid little woman who also waits

224

L. of C.

at table Dunscombe is gallantry personified.
" Donnez-moi le droit de vous aimer tout le
temps " is the meaningless pleasantry, derived
from recollection of old music-halls, to which
the poor girl has to submit daily.

Dunscombe is at his very best in diplomatic
parlance. Having demanded ten million
Marrows Vegetable from an arrondissement
only capable of producing eight, we received
a visit from the perturbed but always courteous
Maire. " But how, Messieurs, how, explain me
that, am I to provide you with an of them so
enormous quantity ? "

" La reponse, M. le Maire/1 said Dunscombe
gravely, " c'est un citron ! J: And I was too
greatly overcome by laughter to offer an
adequate interpretation. To this day the
Mayor of that little town regards the pair of
us as exceptionally bereft of reason even for
Englishmen.

It goes almost without saying that Duns-
combe is a practical joker for whom other
people's pyjamas exist only that they may
be sewn up and bedroom slippers that they
may be stuffed with sardines. Given the
combination of a batman who is a barrack-
room lawyer, short-sighted and a devotee of
Woodbines, together with a Saturday night's
good dinner and a wopping big hare presented
by a kindly farmer, and the trick is as good as

Dunscombe 225

done. Invading our batman's quarters — a
kind of cubby-hole and larder combined — we
turn down the old boy's bed, your sober friend
aiding and abetting, and instal Puss therein,
spectacles on nose made out of a bit of wire
which ought in these self-denying times to
have come off a soda-water bottle, but didn't,
a " fag " between his or her teeth, the head
propped up by pillows, paws on counterpane,
and intent on Field Service Regulations — Part
II. Casualty Section, for all the world the
image of our servant in expository mood.
All this happened last night by the way.
Going to bed after our weekly battle at Picquet,
at which I was the winner by some 1200 points
or no less a sum than three francs, my head
had scarcely touched the pillow when I was
roused by a frantic yell from the next room,
followed by a crash of glass and a hurtling
thud. Rushing in to see what was up I beheld
Dunscombe trembling from head to foot and
waving a pair of hare's ears at me.

" It came off in my hand," said Dunscombe.
' It " being the body of poor Puss found at
the bottom of his bed and now lying, via the
window, in the courtyard below.

I explained to the shaken joker that he
mustn't make use of a phrase consecrated
entirely to housemaids exhibiting vestiges of
indies to housekeepers minus a jug.

226

L. of C.

"I'll teach the blighter to play practical
jokes on me ! " went on the boy, with that
sense of fairness which makes the British
officer so popular with his men. But I per-
suaded him not to make an Orderly Room
matter of it, foreseeing a defence of the " You
began it, Sir, please " order. So we condemned
the ruffian to a Jugged Hare fatigue next day,
and to parade with the Red Currant Jelly at
seven precisely. All of which sounds very
subversive of discipline, but isn't really.

Besides, the incident gave rise to a literary
and philosophic discussion of the highest
interest, lasting till the early hours or rather
the late hours of the morning, the morrow
being Sunday. The hare propped up in bed
had reminded me too insistently of the manner-
less hare in " Struwelpeter," which, when shot
at and missed, rudely put its fingers to its
nose. We debated whether the best book for
children ever written had a right to be German,
and whether Beethoven's symphonies were up
to much after all. I urged that it would be
a pity if " The Mastersingers " and " Rosen-
kavalier " should turn out to have been per-
formed in London for the last time. Duns-
combe didn't know about that, but admitted
that " The Merry Widow " was " pretty decent,"
and that it would be " jolly rough luck on
vStrauss if they never give it again."

Dunscombe

227

A good fellow, Dunscombe. It's he and
his like who are winning the war. Hats off
to his simplicity !

We have hit upon an amicable division of
the work. First of all we divided it into two
parts as nearly equal as possible. Then we
tossed up which of us should choose ; the
winner to pay five francs into the kitty.
Dunscombe won the toss, forked out the five
francs, and chose the out-of-door job. Since
that date I have blossomed into a first-rate
accountant. I who formerly through sheer
funk used to pay cabmen twice as much as
they asked, now haggle with a tenacious
peasantry for half a centime. In the old days
I should have been tempted to squander six-
pence or five shillings or five pound ten — after
the Harold Skimpole manner — anything to
get rid of the bother of discussion. To-day
I am become an arithmetician, and as a rate-
payer you will be glad to know that your
money is in safe hands. We indulge in childish
games, do Dunscombe and I. At the end of
each week we have a grand sweep and who-
ever has lost the most Marrows Vegetable
pays for drinks. On Saturday last Dunscombe
came rushing back to the office in a state of
the wildest excitement ; " Your turn this time,
old man," said he, " my field-stock balances
to a marrow." " What of that ? " said I,

228

L. of C.

with superiority, " my book-stock balances to
a pip."

So we both paid for rounds, for which I
can only offer as excuse an unparalleled zeal
in the administration of the nation's affairs
and a temperature of 102° in the shade.
Besides, were we not both in the condition
described by Mr. Mantalini as that of a " demn'd,
damp, moist, unpleasant body " ?

CHAPTER XXII

A BREATHING SPACE. AT THE MOULIN DAUDET

THE bank clerk gets his day off by Act of
Parliament, the factory hand by virtue
of his Trade Union, let the champions of a
soft-hearted capital prate as they will. The
labourer has his Saturday afternoon, the shop
assistant his half -day, the sewing-maid her
night out. It is apparently only the Army
Service Corps officer who officially is never
off duty. Laborious as the ant, steeped in
the spirit of diligence, cast in the mould of
the late Dr. Brewer, made after the image of
the indefatigable Smiles, this strenuous officer
will, however, if taxed, admit to an occasional
stand-easy.

It was during some such breathing space
that I bethought me of the " Moulin Daudet."
Little difficulty in finding this " Object of
interest " — see local guide-book — since the
streets hereabouts are plastered with instruc-
tions to the sightseer. The thriftiest people
in the world, the French show a wise eco-
nomy in spending royally of their intellectual
treasure.

229

230

L. of C.

Not a halfpenny squandered which may be
legitimately saved, these delightful niggards
increase their wealth in spending it. Never
was a race more lavish of the renown of its
illustrious dead. Street after street bears the
name of a great man, his dates and the category
of his genius. In the Proven9al towns so much
beloved by Daudet you can read " Gounod,
compositeur," " Blaise Pascal, philosophe,"
" Corneille, tragedien," " Diderot, encyclo-
pediste," " Moliere, auteur classique," " Vol-
taire, prosateur frangais." " Favorin, orateur,
philosophe arlesien " suggests a prosy gentle-
man holding forth in the cafes. Balzac and
Hugo are big enough to call for neither dates
nor data. Daudet's street, a parched and
dusty lane in a tiny village on the edge of the
crumpled hills, also wears without comment
the name of the poet, but this is perhaps
because there is no single word to describe
the poet and boulevardier. And are not the
house and windmill close at hand for him
who walks the lanes to read ?

One takes the windmill first. Not a very
imposing ruin, this overgrown pepper-box with
its inexplicable stumps of wings. In some
moods the visitor will find it entirely common-
place, in others he will see in it the dwelling
of dwarfs from a fairy tale of Hans Christian
Andersen, or the abode of Sugar-Plum Fairies

A Breathing Space 23 1

from a Suite de Ballet. Over the doorway a
mauve plate bears in gold lettering the in-
scription :

" Je revenais au moulin
songer au livre que j'ecrirais plus tard
et que je daterais de ma ruine
aux ailes mortes."

A. DAUDET.

The mill is perched on a tiny eminence.
At your feet the landscape, dusty scrub and
stunted almond tree, spreads to the steel-blue
Rhone. The distant hills are blue too, but
it is a blue without hesitation, the turquoise
and sapphire of an opera-singer's jewels. The
roads, which in a less logical country would
be winding their way to the heart of some
mystery, gleam here like the explicit streamers
of a prima donna's bouquet. Of haze and
middle distance, doubt and surmise, nothing ;
the horizon is as well defined as a saucer's
rim. The sun dipping below this rim will
plunge the world into brilliant obscurity, into
night without languor. There is too much
that is uncompromising in the glory of the
Proven9al day. Even though it rain, which is
unthinkable, the country will but blossom
into purple and red like the heart of Maud's
lover. Only it will be the purple and red of
the peasant's immemorial umbrella, the pea-
cock sheen, the unreasonable iridescence of

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village panoplies. At sundown all living
things go to a concerted rest with the pre-
cision of an orchestra : the day's piece is
played. From this decided country twilight
has been banished, day surrendering to night
without parley. The sentiment of evening is
become strange, we know nothing of the day's
close and the dusk, the moods of sagesse and
recueillement. He was no poet of Provence
who wrote :

" Ma Douleur, donne-moi la main ; viens par ici,
. . . Vois se pencher les defuntes Annees,
Sur les balcons du ciel, en robes surannees ;
Surgir du fond des eaux le Regret souriant ;
Le Soleil moribond s'endormir sous une arche,
Et, comme un long linceul trainant a 1'Orient,
Entends, ma chere, entends la douce Nuit qui marche."

The southern night moves with too pre-
cipitate a stride for this Parisian ; descends
like the quick and brutal curtain of the stage.

From the mill we take the little path to
the chateau, imposing, elegant, and untidy
like all French chateaux. The fagade is
delicate-tinted like the best note-paper, but
the drive is choked with weeds, and tall rank
grasses climb the pale blue trellised gates.
Though the house is now a hospital the present
owner will show you the room in which Daudet
actually wrote the famous letters — dated with
so innocent a fiction from the tumble-down

A Breathing Space

233

windmill — the grotto, le cagnard, to which in
moments of weariness and lassitude, la cagne,
the author would repair to meditate, think
out a sentence, drop off into a doze. On the
front of the house the inscription — again gold
lettering on a mauve ground :

" Maison Benie ! Que de fois
je suis venu la, me reprendre
a la Nature, me guSrir
de Paris et de ses fievres."

Thus writes Daudet, and one wonders. . . .
Did Daudet in very sooth desire to be cured
of Paris and its fevers ? How much of sin-
cerity was there in this craving for repose ?
Or rather how much more nearly was it not
akin to the feverish villegiaturas of neurotic
poets, of grandiloquent poetesses harrying their
lovers into romantic solitudes, of courtisanes
working themselves up into " a state " at
the very mention of the words purete, campagne.
How long before Daudet began to hanker
after his beloved Paris ? How long before
each of us would be up and packing, sick for
the town, sick for the spectacle of other men's
fevers, though we be shaken by no ague of
our own ?

Hear Daudet himself on his sickness of
soul ! He is apostrophising a soldier on fur-
lough who, countryman though he be, has

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lost the taste for hedgerows, and dreams of
Paris, drumming to while away his leave.

" Reve, reve, pauvre homme ! . . . Si tu as
la nostalgic de ta caserne, est-ce que, moi, je
n'ai la nostalgic de la mienne ? Mon Paris
me poursuit jusqu'ici comme le tien. Tu
joues du tambour sous les pins, toi ! Moi,
j'y fais de la copie. ... Ah ! les bons Pro-
ven9aux que nous faisons ! La-bas, dans les
casernes de Paris, nous regrettions nos Alpines
bleues et Fodeur sauvage des lavandes ; main-
tenant, ici, en pleine Provence, la caserne
nous manque, et tout ce qui la rappelle nous
est cher ! . . ."

And as Gouguet Frangois, dit Pistolet,
drummer of the thirty-first regiment of the
line, drums his way down the hill, Daudet
cries,

" Et moi, couche dans Therbe, malade de
nostalgic, je crois voir, au bruit du tambour
qui s'eloigne, tout mon Paris defiler entre les
pins. ... Ah ! Paris ! . . . Paris ! . . . Tou-
jours Paris ! "

CHAPTER XXIII

A USE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL

A thing of beauty, etc.

JOHN KEATS.

IF the south of France is one vast retreat
from the actualities of the war, it contains
remoter fastnesses yet in the way of store-
houses of the antique, unshakable by destruc-
tive agencies other than Time. Of such is the
little Musee Lapidaire one stumbled into on
a scorching afternoon in late June. . . . Tired
out with the heat, weary of kicking my heels
about waiting for a telephone call, I have to
confess starting back for the office in a state
of exasperation with the world in general and
old Dunscombe in particular. It is the com-
plication of minor worries and not the great
tragedies which drives the unstable to suicide.
I am afraid my stability has not been proof
of late against the airs of station-masters, the
mulishness of carters, the vagaries of railway
wagons, and the almost human disobliging-
ness of tarpaulins. There is something un-
English about the unreliability of these latter.

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L. of C.

Imagine that on Monday I received from
England one hundred and five of these graceful
objects, that I counted them myself, that on
Tuesday I issued sixty-two, on Wednesday
three, on Thursday twenty, on Friday three
more. Going to the station to-day full of
confidence in my arithmetic to claim the
remaining seventeen, I find , nine ! I hold a
drum-head court-martial on everybody in the
village from the Mayor downwards, it being
the pleasing habit in this part of the world
to have no use for lock and key, so that he
who loafs may steal. Everybody of course is
acquitted and leaves the court without a
stain on his character except the President,
who finds that he has lost, or cannot account
for, which comes to the same thing, eight
tarpaulins. But this is not all. I have had a
silly, meaningless row with Dunscombe, who
complains of my not having done an hour's
honest work since he came here. I retort
with an offer of a certificate as to his having
put in sixteen full working hours out of every
twenty-four, all of them to the wrong purpose !
A childish quarrel worthy of the ushers in
" Stalky/* Then there has been an annoying
post-bag this morning, allowances apparently
not having come to hand, and my banker's
version of recent drawings not in the least
tallying with my own ideas on the matter.

A Use for the Beautiful 237

Then there is Private Tompkins, who having
enlisted under the name of Jenkins, and having
been known by that name for many moons,
has now no more sense than to want to revert
to his original name. I point out that a rose
by any other name would smell as sweet, and
that in my opinion Jenkins is a very much
better name than Tompkins. I lecture him on
the folly of being in any way connected with
two such absurd families. " Pickwick " lying
handy on my desk — being part of an issue of
books sent down by an O.C. with a regard
for the literary comforts of his men, and
consequently absorbed into the office — I read
him the passage in which the learned judge
confounds Mr. " Phunky " with Mr. " Monkey."
Tompkins laughs, thinks I read well, and
persists in his demand to be known by his
proper name. This is all very well for Tomp-
kins, but what about Tompkins' officer ? Has
he not now to wade through a dossier composed
of some twenty-six separate and distinct
minutes ? Must he not decipher, learn, mark,
and certify to having digested all that Woolwich
Dockyard, the A.G/s office at the Base, the
O.C. Advanced Base, and half a dozen other
nebulous functionaries have been thinking about
the matter, think at the present moment, and
are going to think for some considerable time
to come ? What is all that to Tompkins ?

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L. of C.

Is not his officer there for the express purpose
of (a) doling him out ten francs whenever he
is hard up, (6) recommending and passing on
his applications for leave, and (c) filling in
long statements of particulars as to the colour
of his hair, his height, age, chest measure,
changes of posting, date of embarkation, pro-
motions, reductions, rate of pay, changes of
rate of pay, allotments, ailments, and any
little preference in the matter of a name ? As
the French say, c'est trop fort !

Anyhow, I was in no sort of mood for the
magnificent doorway of the church of St.
Trophime, so crossing the road to avoid it I
turned into the Musee Lapidaire, where at
least it would be cool, and one could sit
down, and there would be nobody to talk
to, and one could shut one's eyes for ten
minutes.

It so happened that this large room, with
its air of a Nonconformist chapel, contained
other humanity than its stone gods and
goddesses. There was an English lady and
there was the guide, both of whom, I grumbled
to myself, had attained the age when they
might reasonably be expected to have got
past the desire to look at such frippery as
Centaurs and Venuses. I was annoyed with
both of them, and could have wished them
and their chatter anywhere else. After

A Use for the Beautiful 239

little time, during which one tried not to listen
to what must obviously be the most trivial
of criticism, one was forced to the disagreeable
conclusion that they were two remarkable
women, a conviction most annoying to any-
body in a pet. The English lady, obviously
a bachelor, was wearing a mannish costume
in which she might have played golf, done the
galleries at Florence, or gone shopping. I
gathered that she was passing through Aries,
acting as chauffeuse to an inspectress of a
society for providing wounded French soldiers
with English comforts. The car she drove,
washed, garaged, and repaired whenever it
wasn't running, which I gathered was pretty
often, was, I afterwards heard, an old lumber-
ing omnibus that might have been the latest
model in 1904. And yet here was this little
lady who had spent the morning in overalls
under the car — an excuse for ill -temper if
ever there was one — now natty and fresh as
paint, talking sculpture against the enthu-
siastic guide. It seems from what the little
lady said that she was herself actively engaged
in that art, one of the few living artists left to
work directly in the stone. Stone was her
passion, and I listened with interest and a
vanishing sulkiness to theories about it being
entirely wrong to look at statuary as stories
in relief. It is proper, she held, to look at a

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L. of C.

statue as a mass, a pattern or, simply, a lump
in stone. The guide, a little wizened creature
who might have stepped out of the pages of
Henry James, was for a more anecdotal inter-
pretation.

Did not the gross curves of a Silenus lacking
head and feet betray sloth, torpor, and debauch?
" II est degoutant, ce vieux monstre ! " Then of
a fragment of a dancing girl : " Voyez comme
c'est beau, ce mouvement, Madame ! Hein ?
Oh, la, la, c'que $a vous a Fair d'avoir etc une
chouette petite personnel.

Greatly to my disappointment the artistic
little lady left soon afterwards, the indefatigable
guide turning to me with the intimation that
the accumulated lore of centuries was now
entirely at my disposal. Still something surly,
I consented to walk round her gallery of
marvels. We began with Augustus and Con-
stantine, whose effigies provoked from me the
suggestion that to a historical ignoramus all
dead and gone Emperors are pretty much
alike. Still under the influence of my Tompkins-
Dunscombe depression, I opined that Nero and
Caligula were a much ill-used pair and probably
the best of the imperial bunch. The old lady
insisting on the historians, I objected that
both Emperors were probably too nimble-
witted for the serious people who, cocking a
suspicious eye at amusingness, prefer to write

A Use for the Beautiful 241

intelligent men down as scoundrels. In this
way do the stupid justify themselves. The old
lady then led me up to the Venus d'Arles,
surely the Penelope among Venuses.

" She is but half unclad " is the guide-book
apology, to which I feel like retorting with
Beardsley's design for a ballet-dancer flounced
and frilled from head to foot. " She wears, as
is her right, the highest charms of mortal
woman, yet she has not quite stepped down
from Olympus to the earth." As who should
say, Touch me if you dare ! " More human
than the proud and severely simple goddess
from Melos, more dignified than the subtly
and delicately sensual Venus de Medicis, this
exquisite statue holds a middle place/' A
Venus, in other words, upon which even
Dickens' Mrs. Snagsby might have allowed her
spouse to gaze. I vaunt the praises of the
less highly-prized Venus of the rival museum
at Nimes. Not in the least grave, not in the
least tender, not in the least sentimental,
with nothing of the grand pose about her,
neither banal, nor tedious, nor halo'd with any
crown of domesticity, this " gueuse parfumee
de Provence/' this Venus of the Quarter has
me at her knees. (This is really a crib from
R.L.S. and Elizabeth Bennet.) If a goddess,
then assuredly goddess of a dainty sham
divinity ; if an Esther, then many a Rubempre'

242

L. of C.

had hanged himself for love. A chef-d'oeuvre
of the frivolous, a delightful flippancy, a
piquancy as of those early Latin poets of
whom it is so very difficult to get an ungarbled
translation.

In reply to this declaration, my outraged
cicerone exclaims :

" Mais je la connais, cette Venus-la. C'est
elle qui a 1'air d'avoir ete une fameuse coquine !
D'ailleurs c'est un peu dans son metier. Les
Venus ne peu vent etre que des garces, Monsieur,
allez ! ' Which remark shows how much
superior in mentality is my guide to those
dragonsome horrors, throated and wristleted in
white muslin, who at home show you through
the palaces of the great, fearing to raise
their eyes to heaven lest they should en-
counter the rose-pink Amours trafficking on the
ceiling.

It is a pleasure to argue with this combative
old lady. Finally she shows me the magnificent
sarcophagus called the Death of Hippolytus.
On the front panel is the unhappy Phedre,
to give her the more familiar French name,
seated in an attitude of abandon. The old
nurse leaning towards Hippolytus is the entre-
metteuse indignantly repulsed by that incensed
young man. Besides the moral score he is
holding his horse on an impatient rein and
would be off hunting. A tiny cupid reaches

A Use for the Beautiful 243

up over Phedre's knee and inserts his arrow
into her bosom. So far so good ; the old lady
and I are agreed upon the story. But in the
middle of the panel we come upon a difficulty,
or rather two difficulties — a magnificent pair
of male figures to whom the figures of Phedre
and Hippolytus are significantly subservient.
The guide-books have it that these are the
Dioscures, Castor and Pollux, supposed to have
become enamoured of the skill in hunting of
the owner of the tomb, and to have snatched
him from earth to become their celestial
huntsman. The old lady will hear nothing
but that one of the figures is the outraged
Theseus, without being provided with a role
in the story for the other. I point out that
to make one of two equally outstanding figures
into a principal in a world-wide drama and
the other into nobody at all, is like going to
the theatre and expecting to see one only of
the Brothers Griffiths. But I am in the wrong
country and the allusion misses fire.

Upon one thing only do we agree, and that
is the charm of the head of a boy some nine
or ten years old, neither Roman nor Greek,
but French of the eighteenth century. The
head rests on a collaret of stone, and it needs
very little imagination to visualise the high
blue collar affected by Napoleon's officers, and
to see in the delicate brow and tumbled hair,

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chiselled nose and determined lips, a little hero
who, growing up, was to lead brave men
against us at Waterloo.

Refreshed by my brush with the old lady,
and having vented on her and her really
exquisite monuments all my quite unnecessary
spleen, I resumed my way to the office singularly
refreshed. How slight, indeed, in the light of
half an hour of old beauty do present worries
appear. Perhaps I really did put into the
Field Cashier half a dozen more appeals than
I had made mental note of. On the office
steps I met Dunscombe, who informed me
gaily that he had discovered in our hotel a
particularly obnoxious brand of champagne
in which he proposed that we should bury
the hatchet, a flight of rhetoric which is the
kind of thing Dunscombe indulges in when
he is in high spirits. The bottle, it was to be
distinctly understood, was to be at his expense ;
it being likewise understood that I was the
most industrious fellow alive. I accepted as
to the first bottle, insisting that the second
should be mine, it being understood not only
that I withdrew all that I had said about the
quality of Dunscombe 's work, but everything
I had ever said on any subject whatsoever.
After dinner, in the confidential mood engen-
dered by a couple of bottles of really villainous

A Use for the Beautiful 245

champagne, I made concession of the loss of
the wretched tarpaulins.

" I shouldn't worry about it, old man, if I
were you," said Dunscombe. " After all, what's
eight tarpaulins ? You can easily steal them
from old Johnson. He's half asleep most of
the time and won't miss 'em. And if he does,
and there's a Court of Inquiry, and you have
to pay for 'em, it'll only run you a hundred
and sixty quid, a matter of ten months' pay !
And as for that blighter Tompkins, he can
change his name to Dunscombe for all I care."

" Well, but," I objected, " it says in K.R.
that he has to make a declaration before a
J.P., and there ain't no blooming J.P.'s in this
part of the world."

" Don't need any," said Dunscombe. " Just
write ' Declared before me in the absence of a
competent military authority.' Sorry, old man,
you know what I mean ! By the way, there's
an old girl here driving a car on some hospital
job. A beastly old crock it is too. Driven it
all the way from Paris, by Gad ! A jolly
plucky sort. Says we are the first English
people she's seen for a month, and wants us
to take an hour off to-morrow afternoon and
she'll drive us round the sights."

The rest of the evening was spent in genial
recrimination as to which of us should go, I
urging Dunscombe that he is looking a bit

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L. of C.

fagged and could do with a half -holiday,
Dunscombe winning on the declaration :

" It's only ruins and romance of sorts, so
you'd better go. I've no sort of use for the
bally stuff."

CHAPTER XXIV

THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY

I COUNT half an hour well spent to-day in
doing homage to France. We were com-
manded, Dunscombe and I, to attend the
grand review of troops to be held sous les lices,
i.e. in the shade of the one and only boulevard
of this overgrown village. There are not more
than a handful of coloured troops, tirailleurs
marocains, to be reviewed at this particular
moment. (This does not mean that France is
short of men, but that a Depot is a Depot, and
that on occasion a Depot sends out more men
than it receives.)

It was a particularly gorgeous morning, and
the crowd had turned out in all its bravest
colours. As we walked up the road along the
lane of smiling faces it seemed as though
their owners made up one large family rather
than a populace. Acutely conscious of being
the cynosure of all eyes, the British Army,
drawing on two pairs of faded brown gloves
which would have been the envy of Mrs.
Micawber, threw out its chest, drew in its

247

248

L. of C.

waistband, and marched to its appointed
place on the grand stand twelve foot by ten,
to the excited whisper of " Les Angliches ! ''

To our places then with much calculation
and discretion in the matter of saluting, bowing,
nodding, shaking hands, and being shaken
hands with. The degrees of deference due to
the military are easily determined by their
badges of rank. It is the civilian big-wigs
who call for the finer tact. Sous-prefet and
Mayor, Mayor's Secretary and Commissaire
de Police, Parliamentary Deputy and Justice
of the Peace, have each their separate rank
and expect a nicely-graded civility. Hard
cases in social etiquette called for instant and
discerning solution. Can it be that we have
just snubbed Dogberry and humbled our-
selves to Verges ? Was the gentleman with
the three-cornered hat and the silver braid
who looked so surprised when we shook hands
with him really the Sous-prefet, or only the
Mayor's coachman who shall hand round the
sweet champagne at the conclusion of the
proceedings ? One is conscious of having
committed a " gaffe 'J and a full-sized one
at that.

On the little platform everybody is wear-
ing " blacks/' with a rusticity and curve
of brim unknown even in Drumtochty. Or,

The Fourteenth of July

249

to change countries, one looks round and half
expects a Homais to rise to his feet and
address the villagers in a flood of Flaubertian
mockery.

A droning fanfare on the nouba, and the
ceremony begins. The Medaille Militaire and
the Croix de Guerre are pinned on to the breasts
of half a dozen cripples from one of France's
colonies. They hear unmoved the record of
their heroism read out, hobbling away cheer-
fully on what is left to them of legs. In the
cafis afterwards these African \ children are
to be seen chattering and gabbling away as
pleased as Punch. Next the decoration of
ex-soldiers invalided out of the Army. And
last the saddest and most moving of all public
spectacles to-day, the presentation of medals
to the relatives of dead heroes. A father, a
brother, a widow, two little girls in deep
mourning are lined up facing the stand. In
complete silence the Commandant hands them
the reward of valour. With faces strangely
transfigured the family ascends the steps lead-
ing to the little platform on which we are all
assembled. In proud humility the father and
brother raise their hats and we stand up in
silent acknowledgment. The tension is broken
by a march past of the troops. A little cloud
of Arab horsemen on grey and white steeds,
their white cloaks floating on the wind, whirls

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romantically by. The noubas drone once more
and the review is at an end. We salute the
Commandant and mingle with the crowd melt-
ing into the cafes.

It is the fourteenth of July and in honour
to France we stifle our desire for work and
decide to take a holiday. At Dunscombe's
suggestion we drop into chairs outside a cafe.
Hardly have we ordered, still in honour of
France, the most pernicious drink we can
think of, or that is now allowed to be sold,
when there appears on the kerb an old, old
man with a shock of white hair falling over
his shoulders after the manner of the Abbe
Liszt and a face all whelks and bubukles.
Under his arm he carries a violin ; in his eyes
the far-away look of the dreamer who has
kept spirit unsullied and taken no care of
the spirit's case. Coming to the halt in
front of us the old gentleman asks if we are
Serbs.

" Angliches ! " we reply. Then to our con-
fusion does he put fiddle to chin and produce
a quavering version of our National Anthem.
The fourteenth of July, stirring France to her
depths, has moved even this crazy brain.
Dunscombe thinks we ought to stand to atten-
tion, I am not quite sure, so we compromise ;
Dunscombe standing up at the end and gravely
saluting. Before we can consider the propriety

The Foiirteenth of July

251

of offering alms, the old man with immense
dignity has moved away. It is not till he has
well turned the corner that he resumes the
forgotten operas which are his trade.

CHAPTER XXV

OUR OPTIMISTS

IN this pleasant land of Provence one could
almost be tempted to do without news-
papers. The communiques are posted in the
cafes at night and in the morning one gets the
London papers of the day before yesterday.
What more could any reasonable man want ?
Every evening however, at half-past ten a late
edition of a Provencal newspaper announces
itself in the darkened square by the blowing
of a toy trumpet. Since the town has gone
to bed a whole hour before, there has to be a
general unlocking of doors and darting hither
and thither in the queerest apparel before the
news can be secured. I imagine that every
night the householder, realising that an edition
printed at least six hours earlier cannot possibly
contain anything which he has not already seen
in the telegrams of his cafe, retires to bed in
the full determination to resist the blowing of
the little tin trumpet, but that the itch of
sheer curiosity overcomes him.

I have never been able to decide to what
particular shade of French politics this little

252

Our Optimists

253

paper belongs, but I do know that it and its
morning colleague are the two most joyous and
optimistic little sheets in the world. " They "
are always on the point of being smashed, of
having " their " front pierced, of being starved,
of undergoing spontaneous combustion. A
vigorous onslaught on our Western front is
evidence that " they " must have depleted
" their " Eastern lines, and vice versa. Nor
are these cheerful prophets in the least ham-
pered in their forecasts of to-day by the mis-
carriage of their predictions of yesterday. The
war is always going to end to-morrow. No
matter that distinguished experts contradict
each other in the same column ; the war will
end next week. No matter that Berlin, Vienna,
and Budapest remain intact ; the war will end
next month. No matter that arrangements
are being made in men and money to provide
for a campaign next year ; that only means
that the war will be brought to an end in this.
Never have I read anything so heartening.
Away with melancholy !

On topics other than the war these little
papers preserve their unimpaired cheerfulness.
What do we care that every day a column is
devoted to " Our Assassinations/' another to
" Our Thefts," and a third to " Our Conflagra-
tions " ? Is there not compensation in the
numerous little acts of honesty and restitution

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L. of C.

occurring daily and recorded with quaint
ceremony ?

" Act of probity. The young M. J. and

R. T.— — , eight years, have found each on the
public way a bank-note of one franc which
they have hastened to hand over to the police.
We felicitate them on this good action."

runs one inspiring paragraph.

" There has been found on the public way

a watch and chain by Mr. D. J. , mobilised

at the powder works, who has hastened to
deposit them, the watch and chain, at the
police station, to be handed over to their
rightful owner. We felicitate this honest
soldier."

is yet another. Or you will read :

"Arrest at ion. The police of our town has
yesterday put under arrest the named

L. T. , aged thirty-three years, porter,

without fixed abode, and his mistress

F. V. , without profession. This joyous

couple has been sent to the lock up."

Joyous couple indeed, without a home and
without a profession ! Or :

"The service of the fourriere has captured
yesterday eleven dogs. We wish to believe

Our Optimists

255

that the escape of six of them will not be
facilitated as happened on the last occasion/'

Then I cull the following charming account of
what we English would consider a very ordinary
attempted suicide.

"Dolorous instance. A certain Mr. X. of
our town was fatigued with life. The
nostalgic charms of the Delta of Trin-
quetaille having no longer any attractions
for him, the strong voice of the Rhone
which passed in grumbling close to his
dwelling no longer brought to his mind
other thoughts than those of the nothing-
ness of terrestrial existence : a charming and
enticing nothingness which he wished to
taste more fully. But it was not in the
Book of Destiny that Mr. X. should quit
this earth on the 2oth May, 1916, or on
any other date chosen by him. In the
unrecognisable garb of humble labourers,
two guardian angels were watching over him.
At the moment when, having launched him-
self into the void, but still clutching hold of
his self-erected gallows, the hung one cried
out ' I strangle ! cut me down ! ' Messieurs

V. and C. , two robust fellows who

were passing, broke open the door of the de-
spairing one and cut down the dead-alive,
who has promised to no more begin again/'

L. of C.

A light is thrown on amenities of life in
Marseilles by the following, under the heading
" L'Arabe boxeur."

" It is a quite young negro, curly-headed,
who has permitted himself one night to thrash
a belated wayfarer. Result : four months
imprisonment."

These non-Puritan little journals' sheets are
full of delightful stories which might be by
Maupassant, illustrative of life in Marseilles.
They are mostly of the nature of Awful Warn-
ings and have for headings " The Bad En-
counters " or " The Elegant Young Man Who
was only a Scoundrel/' They begin almost
invariably with an aperitif too gallantly offered
and too lightly accepted, ending up next morn-
ing with everybody in the story complaining
to the police of missing reticules and bank-
notes gone astray.

Examples are not wanting of the esprit
gaulois. Take for instance the capital little
paragraph headed " The Butter of M. Hiibner."
I translate.

" M. the Professor Hiibner of Berlin amuses
himself with researches of the highest possible
interest. Having remarked that German
maid-servants are obliged to wait in a queue
for four hours in order to receive 100 grammes
of butter, the Professor has the brilliant idea

Our Optimists

257

to calculate the loss of vital energies pro-
voked by this long standing.

On leaving the house the girl has her grand
complement of vital energies. She takes her
place in the file of the beseeching ones. Her
Butter-Karte is in the hand. From that
moment the energies commence to escape !
In proportion as the fatigue increases the loss
increases. M. Hiibner, spectacles on nose,
observes avec passion the phenomenon. At
the end of her four hours' wait the girl has
disposed of a respectable quantity of energies.
Poor little Slavey !

The learned one takes his notebook and
calculates. So many energies are equal to
so many grammes of butter. . . . Finally
the learned one finds that the girl has lost
as many energies as would correspond to
fifty-two grammes of butter. C'est beau la
science! It is obvious, then, that after this
prolonged stationment the poor exhausted
one does not receive her 100 grammes of
butter, receiving in reality only forty-eight
grammes of the precious delicacy since she
has previously consumed fifty-two grammes
without suspecting it. C'est admirable!

Nor is this all. The Professor has pushed
his deductions still further. If the girl
instead of exhausting herself on the pave-
ment had remained quietly in bed she would

L. of C.

have gained, it appears, an amount of energy
greater than the forty-eight grammes of
butter obtained after four hours' painful
quest.

Let us salute this super-learned Berliner.
He has perhaps found the solution of the
food problems the most kolossal. Sleep !
counsels the Professor. Restez couches ! Ne
bougez pas ! During this agreeable repose,
your energies will increase and as they are
convertible into butter, you will enjoy an
excellent cuisine au beurre, confectioned in
the mysteries of your inside. . . .

Doux pays /"

11 Doux pays " is magnificent ! But it is not
more magnificent than the wealth of scorn
reserved for " their " Emperor and " their "
princeling, by the poetasters of the little
Gazette Rimee. The poem " Les Morts-Debout 'J
is full of a shattering contempt :

Or, le kaiser sur une cime
Avec son fils rmmero un,
Le fameux generalissime,
Guettait son entree a Verdun.

Celui-ci disait a son pere :
" Surtout pas de conseils. Je sais
Dieu merci ! comment on opere
Avec ces cochons de Francais."

Our Optimists 259

La-dessus son artillerie
Ouvrit, sur notre front, un feu
Tel, qu'on 1'entendait jusqu'en Brie,
Et que 1'espace en etait bleu.

Apres cet action savante,
" II ne doit plus — j'ose esperer —
Rester la-bas ame vivante . . .
C'est le moment de se montrer.

" Montrez-vous — dit-il — a sa garde,
Et puis n'oubliez pas surtout,
Que votre Empereur vous regarde,
Et moi, votre Kronprinz, itou."

Et, comme ce polichinelle

A de la lecture, il cria :

" Maintenant, a la Tour de Nesles !

A Verdun si tu veux Papa ! "

The puppet-prince then orders his battalions
to the advance, shoulder to shoulder in that
close formation which is the best recipe for
Dutch courage. In a few seconds he levels
his glasses to observe progress, but the battalions
have come strangely to the halt. The prince
sends one of his entourage forward to make
enquiries, but the Staff-Officer replies,

" Too late, prince ! They are dead where
they stand/'

I do not know which is the more admirable,
" Son fils numero un " or " Et, comme ce
polichinelle a de la lecture/' But the whole
poem is of a fiercer, more tigerish quality than

260

L. of C.

anything we English can contrive in the way
of humour.

" Et moi, votre Kronprinz, itou " is Punch,
edited by Villiers de FIsle-Adam.

These little French newspapers are wonder-
ful. They let conjecture and prophecy take
the place of news, but it is conjecture and
prophecy cheap at a sou.

CHAPTER XXVI

CRICKETERS ALL

My Hornby and my Barlow long ago.

FRANCIS THOMPSON.

Whatever happens you will know I batted well.

LAST LETTER OF AN ENGLISH OFFICER.

SO it seems that you in England have
decided to do away with this year's
August Bank Holiday, and that yet another
year is to go past without those old-time battles
of the giants — Lancashire versus Yorkshire
and Surrey versus Notts. Will you be very
greatly shocked if I confess to you that not
the news of the Retreat from Mons, the Battle
of the Marne, nor yet the Great Push itself
holds half the excitement for the grown-up man
as the news of the cricket field once held for
the boy. How far will you take this to be
evidence of an imperfect sanity, how far an
unusual admission of the more or less normal ?
Is it conceivable that at the front itself, in the
actual trenches, the whacking of the foe is to
some stunted intelligence of less intimate
moment than the sound correction of presump-

261

262

L. of C.

tuous Chelsea by heroic Fulham ? Is it not
conceivable that all human intelligence is
" stunted/' that it is only a matter of degree,
and that we ought none of us to be ashamed
of the truth about ourselves, however improb-
able and however grotesque ?

I am not ashamed then of the admission
that present-day communiques are awaited
with less eagerness than the bulletins of the
cricket field were awaited by a small boy some
thirty years ago. Perhaps this is only another
way of saying that as one grows older the
world grows less magical, and that the biggest
things in life begin to look as though they
were not so very big after all. When I read
the letters of -officers saying that the pitch is
the queerest that they have ever played on,
that the German bowling is deadly accurate
and that whatever happens it may be known
that they batted well, I see in the mind's eye
a bumpy pitch in a croft on a Yorkshire farm
and a family of small boys scoring fours to a
boundary forty yards away, fielding for dear
life, and bowling desperately the holidays
through. Each morning would bring with it
the excitement of the newspaper posted from
home, with its alternating joy and depression
according as Lancashire were doing well or ill.
The news of Monday's cricket would reach
us on Wednesday ; Saturday's on Tuesday.

Cricketers All

263

Monday, you may easily calculate, was our
dies non, this being the era when Sunday
papers were to be read surreptitiously, if read
at all, and were not even potentially forward-
able by any self-respecting housekeeper. My
father, always the most unselfish of men,
would put off his curiosity as to the world's
affairs, or the little corner of them regulated
at St. Stephen's, until we youngsters had
slaked our more impatient thirst. To-day I
cannot help thinking that the players of that
far-off time were better cricketers than any
we have now. Those were the days when
K. J. Key led out to battle Abel, Lohmann,
and W. W. Read, when Peel and Ulyett bowled
to Shrewsbury and Gunn ; when Grace faced
Steel, Spofforth and Turner played skittles
with our best, and Pilling in revenge showed
Blackham how to stand up to fast bowling.
It were well that our schoolboys of to-day
should realise that there was cricket and
famous cricket too before the days of Hobbs,
of Hirst even ; when bowlers swerved without
making a fuss about it, googlies were unknown,
and famous batsmen running out to Humphries
were bowled by a lob.

In a corner of a society paper sent recently
from home I came across an account of a
fashionable horse-show at which a well-known
animal, a big black, hulking, string - halted

264 L. of C.

faineant of a horse, too slow for a funeral, a
horse I always disliked, had at last been
soundly whacked. Hardly do I like to tell
you of the time I wasted over that unimportant
paragraph, the brown study I fell into of sun-
burnt rings and grand stands, of well-known
whips and famous judges, of gay ponies and
proud horses, of strenuous duels and momentous
decisions, of anxious settings out and triumphant
home-comings, a reverie not to be disturbed
by any echo of guns on far-away frontiers.

It was at Bakewell Show that I caught the
fever of the show-ring. It was there I first
saw the late Mr. William Foster's ponies, Mel-
Valley's Flame, Mel-Valley's Fame, Mel-Valley's
Fume, and Mel-Valley's King George. I write
down the names in an effort to recapture the
first wonder of these marvellous little heroes
of the ring, actors in bronze and amber better-
ing, in verve and " attack," any stage-player
that ever I did see. Straightway I decided
that I too would show a pony. The following
year at the same show I was the delirious
exhibitor of a marvellous three-year-old filly.
"In some perfume is there more delight/' says
the poet, "than in the breath that from my
mistress reeks/' but no boudoir ever reeked
more agreeably than that filly's box ! We sat
up the greater part of the night before the
show washing her four white stockings and doing

Cricketers All

265

up in approved show-ring fashion her charming
little mane. " My mistress when she walks
treads on the ground." Not so my pretty-
She was fire and air at home, and was to be
fire and air in the show-ring on the morrow.
She was to go mountains high, with dash,
pace, poise, balance, rhythm, to be pulled in
after a single tour of the ring unquestionably
and indisputably the winner. It was my first
show.

As the shiversome little beast stood outside
the ring ready for the fray, the lad and I,
trembling with pride, stripped the rugs off
for the inspection of a well-known and friendly
critic.

" She would look well/1 said the great
authority, " in a pie ! '

Before I could fathom the profundity of that
dictum we were in and out of the ring, seventh
in a class of seven.

Now in case you are going to find it difficult
to reconcile all this chatter of cricket matches
and ponies with the most stupendous of all
wars, I beg to call your attention to the phrase
which, I would once have agreed, should stand
first on the list of tags to be avoided by the
fastidious writer. I mean the phrase about the
playing fields of Eton. But the war has obtained
for this old tag a new lease of life, giving it
occasion once again to prove its superb and

266 L. of C.

universal truth. I have never yet met the
regular soldier who was not at heart a school-
boy, who did not regard the war as an affair
of sport. For three months I was the only
amateur at a Brigade Headquarters' Mess,
where the Regulars, from Brigadier downwards,
were just so many large-hearted children. The
Brigadier, coming down to breakfast and open-
ing his morning paper to find the Great Offen-
sive still hanging fire, would roundly declare
the whole Cabinet to be in the pay of the
Germans, and hope for a long-nosed, bespec-
tacled, dressing-gowned, Heath-Robinsonian spy
under the table to mark his words. The
Brigade Major was full of ghoulish little
pleasantries to beguile the captivity of " Brother
Boche/' while the Staff Captain bubbled over
with fun in which slow fires and toasting forks
bore their part. Of the peril and heroism
and " all that sort of rot/' never a word.
' The friendly Hun fairly put the wind up me
that morning/' was the nearest any of them
ever got to seriousness. And they wrould fall to
cheerful descriptions of comrades dying quaintly,
even comically. Never a hint that deep down
these men were full of gentleness and pity. . . .
And always when they were not joking
about death and danger, they would be talk-
ing of their dogs and their horses, of critical
holes and innings well-played, of bisques well-

Cricketers All

267

taken and matches snatched out of the fire,
of Wimbledon and Queen's, of Wilding and
" Punch " Fairs. The first official letter that
came into my hands out here was a circular
thanking everybody for keenness and efficiency
in the despatch of troops. I have little com-
punction in mentioning myself in this connec-
tion as the particular operation referred to had
been concluded before I left England. "It is
gratifying to think/' the letter ran, " that
everybody, officers and men, ' played for the
side/ ; And never did writer show finer sense
of what we English can stomach in the way of
praise.

Some talk of Alexander and some of Hercules,
but they are not the English sort. When we
get tired and worried, and thoroughly sick of
it all — which does happen, you know — we go
back to thoughts of our hobbies. Many a
fellow's spirit in this war has soared, not to a
very great height perhaps, not very perceptibly
above the ground — has moved its wings to
soar, if you will, at the thought of a loft of
pigeons, a whippet, a muddy field, a couple of
goal-posts. Many a butcher-boy's courage has
been renewed, unconsciously if you like, at
thought of his pony's pluck, and how he could
always trust the little beast to hang on and
lick the other fellow's down the street. When
I am tired or down in the mouth or worried by

268

L. of C.

a " stinker " or have had a row with old
Dunscombe, I don't go turning up the great
speeches about St. Crispin's Day, and precious
stones set in silver seas. I am a thousand times
more likely to think of an old pony and the
way he would pull out a spurt at his fortieth
tour of the ring when, by all the laws of the
game, he should be dead beat. Am I then to
be shorter of courage than my horse ? God
forbid ! Let's get on with the job again.

I am not sure that in an earlier letter I did
not write rather uppishly about the mania for
metaphors drawn from sport. I do repent me.
They are the natural expression of the tem-
perament of the average British soldier, Regular
and Occasional, a brave man, a sportsman and
a gentleman. I am not ashamed if at times I
find myself thinking less of the war than of
the cricket-field. I am not ashamed if hardly
a day passes without a thought of Flame,
Fume, and Fame, of Kitty Melbourne and her
marvellous action, Bauble, pre-eminent in grace
and beauty, Veronique, heroine of a thousand
rings. As to you, The Swell, old enemy whom
we could never quite beat, though we did get
the decision on occasion, staunch and trusty
foeman on many a Saturday afternoon, here's
to you ! And to that little ball of fury whom
you could never quite conquer, First Edition,
gay in victory or defeat, the best of Fortune

Cricketers All

269

and a gay old age ! And you too, my old
ponies, Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, good
luck go with you ! You are not forgotten.

What's that you say ? I never owned ponies
with such names ! Where's your literary sense
gone to, man, that you must look for Stud-
Book accuracy in a peroration ?

CHAPTER XXVII

IN THE MATTER OF COURAGE

All the lads in khaki are as brave as brave can be. That
is axiomatic. — DAILY PAPER.

"T ALWAYS thought that he was a great
X soldier, not from any lust of battle or
hatred of the enemy, but from sheer devotion
to duty. When orders came through for our
last move into the firing line, after we had
finished our packing and the rest of us were
pacing about restlessly, he took out a pocket
edition of La Bruyere's ' Les Caracteres ' and
continued to read it until we actually moved
off. He could hold himself singularly aloof.
I remember his reading ' Le Cid ' and a book
on Napoleon in those last days, also Shakspere."
(Commanding Officer's letter to the family of
a subaltern killed in action.)

" How should I bear myself if roped into
the thick of it ? " is a question which must
constantly recur to tt^e most sheltered, reading
of the incredible bravery and fantastic heroism
which has descended, as it were a common
mantle, upon the " lads in khaki." Two classes

270

In the Matter of Courage 27 1

of soldiers are there whose courage we may
very well agree to take for axiomatic. They
are the soldiers made out of the best stuff our
land affords, whose motto, were such things
ever spoken of, would be the old-time Noblesse
oblige!, and they are the simple fellows, the
common ruck of our fighting men, who would
want the Norman phrase translated into the
very rudest Saxon before they had any inkling
of its meaning.

Noblesse oblige ! Was it not the most English
of our novelists who a century ago wrote half-
ironically of the painter's trick of depicting our
old nobility on horseback with a battle, a
spring mine, volumes of smoke, flashes of
lightning, a town on fire, and a stormed fort
all in full action between the horse's legs, all
to show how little nobility makes of such
trifles ? Now hear your Socialist. Is it not
the least, he will say, that the young sprig
who in his life has done nothing for his country
except shoot over it, ride to hounds over it,
represent it at its games until such time as
he may legislate for it with a crowd of other
sprigs similarly equipped — is it not the least
you can ask that blue blood will give its
country value and fight and die when occasion
serves ? And your honest Socialist will be the
first to admit that the English blood has paid
its debt unquestioningly and in full. But the

272

L. of C.

ploughboy, the factory hand, the miner, the
" men of grosser blood " to whom your young
sprig is to be the " shining copy " ? The scion
of Mr. Wells's later Bladesover and the Blade-
soverian world finds his courage in an instinct
born of heredity ; whence the inspiration of
Bladesover's gardener boy ? I can only think
that the stream of inspiration from which the
old Greeks drew their delight in the " sweet
punishment of enemies/' is not yet dried up.
" Giving the blighters hell " may very well be
our modern variant.

Courage has never been, can never be, a
class matter. Peer and ploughboy, and every
intermediate grade in the community, have
found that courage which so amazes the world.
But there is a not too accountable race of men
now roped into action for the first time, the
spectators of life, the dilettantes, the preferers
of shadow to substance, nuance to colour, the
dream to the waking. They are the poets now
faced with sterner work in the earth than the
digging for medals of dead Emperors ; sculptors
now to realise that the bust which was to out-
live the city may literally perish with it. I
have called them an unaccountable race, and
yet they are the descendants of our national
poet's most intimate heroes. The poet will
clothe a career of murder in a haze of twilight
regrets and wistful hankerings after honour ;

In the Matter of Courage 273

a weakling will wind Melancholy off a reel,
setting talk of worms and graves and epitaphs
against kingdoms thrown away. A boggier
and a strumpet's fool will brag more eloquently
in defeat than in victory. Such an one would
" mock the midnight bell," would " call together
all his sad captains/' would " force the wine
peep through their scars " — the Nelson touch
in disgrace. True that these arch-sentimen-
talists, to do them justice, had as pretty a
knack as any non-introspective one of us of
falling on their swords when the proper time
came. But their present-day successors, har-
monical fiddlers on the strings of sensualism,
as old Meredith calls them, whence do they
draw their courage ? Is it unthinkable that
they draw their resolution from some remem-
bered colour, from some leit-motif recalled,
from some great writer's phrase ? " Le
courage," said a very shaky hero of Balzac on
his way to execution, " c'est un costume a
prendre." How many cowards have dressed
for battle with a better heart through the
comfort of some phrase ?

Do you remember the creed of Mr. Shaw's
artist-scoundrel, " I believe in Michael Angelo,
Velasquez, and Rembrandt ; in the might of
design, the mystery of colour . . . " ? I forget
how the exquisite nonsense goes but it is
something in that strain. It is the strain

274 £• of C.

abhorred of the subaltern with all his dislike
for fine phrases, which he cannot believe to be
sincere and of which he is afraid. Were the
subaltern to enunciate a creed, you would find
it concerned with the smartness of Kirchner
and the mysteries of Revue. The difference
between the sentimentalist and the soldier is
that whereas the sentimentalist lives on fine
phrases, without conceiving an obligation to
translate them into fine deeds, you can never
be sure what magnificent action the inarticulate
soldier may not keep tucked up with his hand-
kerchief in his sleeve. You know how every
French bric-a-brac shop contains the statuette
of a whistling peasant boy ? After the war some
British sculptor must give the world the type
of British Subaltern, not much older than the
peasant boy and not more serious, laughing at
danger and whistling, positively whistling, on
Death.

" What's that rubbish you're always writ-
ing ? " said Dunscombe to me one night.
" Expect to make money out of it or what ?
Chuck us over some of the stuff and let's have
a look." I think I ought to say here that
Dunscombe has done his twelve months in the
trenches and wears the ribbon of the Military
Cross.

" Lumme ! " said he, after I had chucked him

In the Matter of Courage 275

a few sheets. " It's plain you've never been
within a thousand miles of the front. Think-
ing's no use at that sort of game ; and if you
were Shakspere and Julius Caesar rolled into
one it wouldn't help any. You can't tell
beforehand what sort of a show you're going
to put up. It isn't the question of being a
decent chap or being a blackguard. It's just
how it takes you, like vaccination. And by
the way, that Noblesse oblige idea of yours is
all bally rot."

"Well, but," I replied meekly, "it's what
I can't help thinking down here."

"It's not what you think down here but
what you'd do up there, my son, that 'ud be
more to the point," Dunscombe retorted.
" Thinking's no sort of a way out of it. You'd
just get into a hell of a funk same as every-
body else. We all of us get the wind up, only
some show it more than others. Even those
artist fellows you talk so much hot-air about
get through all right. In fact they damned
well have to. The bravest chap I ever met
used to cry himself to sleep every night. Sheer
nerves ! I've even seen a lawyer fellow — and
you know what skunks they are — go over the
top and fetch a chap in. But he said it wasn't
to be taken as a precedent. In fact, you never
can tell and it's no use jawin'. Let's talk about
something else."

So we fell to discussing the last revue we
had seen at the Palace. And we agreed that
the show had been top-hole and the girls
ripping. . . .

CHAPTER XXVIII

NOSTALGIES DE CASERNE

IT would be equally a mistake, I suppose,
to write of war as an unmixed tale of
horror as it would be to insist on a romantic
paean of Pomp and Circumstance. I write a
little diffidently here, having known little more
than the camaraderie of the training grounds.
And yet . . . and yet one must affirm that, to
the truly valiant, life can never have been so
full as when it was held most cheap. Never
again will men throw for so desperate a stake,
all adventure to come being but gambling
within one's means, the most contemptible
wagering of all. I have heard men declare
that though under shell fire they shake as
with an ague, they have come to miss the
fascination of the guns. . . .

I know you are laughing at me now ; that
you think the high-falutin strain and a job
on Lines of Communication five hundred
miles from the front in the highest degree
incongruous. I agree. I am reminded of
the wounded Tommy who, pestered by per-
tinacious Duchesses, replied,

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L. of C.

" Am I anxious to get back to the trenches,
lidy ? In course I am ! Just a-languishin'
for 'em. Kind o' pining for them perishin'
blighters wot busts in your ear-'ole. Good
arternoon, Mum, and thank you kindly ! "

One is on safer ground in asserting that
after the war the ex-soldier will have days
when he will pine for his time of bondage,
for the schooling and the comradeship of the
camp. The Germans are sure to have a mouth-
ful of a word for this hankering ; the French
have the charming phrase " nostalgies de
caserne/' Hear one of their writers in this
strain :

"Oh! le bois de Vincennes, les gros gants
de coton blanc, les promenades sur les forti-
fications ... Oh ! la barriere de 1'Ecole, les
filles a soldats, le piston du Salon de Mars,
1'absinthe dans les bouisbouis, les confidences
entre deux hoquets, les briquets qu'on de-
gaine, la romance sentimentale chantee une
main sur le coeur ! . . ."

I do not suppose that the soldier of the New
Army is much of a hand at any one of this
formidable list of recreations, which smack too
much of the Ville Lumiere in time of peace.
Not one per cent, I suppose, of the New Armies
has been cooped up in the capital, whereas
hundreds of thousands will have passed through

Nostalgies de Caserne

279

the purgatory of the 'Shot to the paradise of
the open-air training grounds \ will have en-
dured North Camp till the heaven of Borden
and Tidworth, Warminster and Codford, have
been reached. Dreariest, starkest, muddiest,
most desolate villages of the Plain, how agree-
able in recollection, how infinite your charm !
I should be guilty of an outrage to the truth
if I claimed Aldershot as an Elysium. Let me
not deny that it is a trifle distressing to be
roused from one's slumbers, sore labour's bath,
great nature's second course, and all the poetic
rest of it at something after five. It is, then,
admittedly a trifle wearisome to pad round
the square hour after hour ; to pursue day
after day the tedious routine of " Carry on
with your squads, gentlemen." It is a trifle
humiliating to have to sink your identity ; to
defer to an expert on tinned meat, carrying
a superior number of stars, about subjects
other than tinned meat. It is wearing to be
doubled round the cricket-field ; to be tumbled
off horses. It is exasperating to crawl to bed
at nine o'clock because one may not " upon
the rack of this tough world stretch him out
longer." . . . Yes ! Aldershot is a tough pro-
position, but I would not for the world have
entered the army through an easier gate. (I
am conscious of a diplomatic hedging here,
since Aldershot is a wood out of which no

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L. of C.

temporary officer may be said safely to have
emerged, until at the end of the war he emerges
altogether.)

Wherein, I have often wondered, lies the
charm of those desolate barracks on the Plain ?
Can it be the guards, inspections, parades,
fatigues, coarse meals, small discomforts, minor
privations, the ennui, the doubtful blanket,
the mud ? And yet my thoughts go back
over and over again, even in this exquisite
sunshine of Provence, to tramps along the
liquid Salisbury Road, over the squdgy Wilt-
shire Downs, through the muddy Yorkshire
Dales. In fancy I hear once again the drip,
drip, of the rain. In imagination I shiver in
my tent and fail to get so much as a glimpse
at the crowded and insufficient stove. And yet
a thrill of pleasure goes scooting down my
back at the recollection of the carelessness,
the joviality, the light-heartedness of it all.
Here's a nostalgia of the mud for you healthier
than the Frenchman's ! Oh, for the life of the
camp again with its acrid scent of wood fires
and thin blue trickle of smoke curling to the
tops of the pine-trees, the rhythm of the
tattoo beating in your ears ! Oh, for the
lassitude of the camp, the weariness that is
half physical and half spiritual, the peace to be
enjoyed without question or trouble of the
understanding !

CHAPTER XXIX

RE-BIRTH

Versed in the weird gnvoiserie

Affected by Verlaine,
And charmed by the chinoiserie

Of Marinetti's strain,
In all its multiplicity
He worshipped eccentricity,
And found his chief felicity

In aping the insane.

And yet this freak ink-slinger,
When England called for men,

Straight ceased to be a singer
And threw away his pen,

Until, with twelve months' training

And six months' hard campaigning,

The lure of paper-staining
Has vanished from his ken.

Transformed by contact hourly

With heroes simple-souled
He looks no longer sourly

On men of normal mould,
But, purged of mental vanity
And erudite inanity,
The clay of his humanity

Is turning fast to gold. PUNCH.

The war may bring fresh subjects, it will not bring fresh
standards. . . . — DAILY PAPER.

I REALLY find it hard to have patience
with those root-and-branch enthusiasts who
threaten after the war to carve out of the drill-
book a new heaven and a new earth. These

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L. of C.

passionate reformers* would refashion our pre-
war ways of thinking, and remodel our simplest
pleasures. We are to become " serious " in
the French sense. He who in melancholy
mood affected the Muses must now shoulder
a rifle. He who was wont to challenge the
morning or, more prosaically, go down to
business in the City humming the opening
phrase of " Rosenkavalier," must keep his
thoughts on getting and keeping fit. They
will have nothing to do, these super-
regenerative ones, with the non-utility of the
careless arts. So many Betsy Trot woods, they
will have no meandering. The whole energy
of our race is to be devoted to beating the
German in the war which is to succeed this,
and to underselling him in the intervening
peace. Even the simple pleasures of life are
to be reformed, and reformed altogether.
No more the " throwing hey-jinks, the filling of
bumpers, the rolling out of catches, the calling
in a fiddler, the leading out everyone his lady
to dance/1 This is not the " seriousness " which
is to characterise the nation.

A soldier, it is said, may have no politics
and equally, I suppose, he should have no
views on Militarism. He may be permitted,
however, to hold that War is but a phase in the
world's evolution, and that civilisation has her
face set steadily towards Peace. He may even

Re-birth

283

be permitted to hold that the best way to
breed fine soldiers is to breed fine civilians,
and if evidence in support of this proposition
were needed, to cite the regiments which sent
the Prussian Guard packing. There is not a
history of the war which will not relate how
the young civilians of England took their pens
from behind their ears, their yard-measures
from their shoulders and the paper from their
cuffs, and jumped over the counter to teach
Arrogance its lesson. But the hot-gospellers
take too much for granted when they assume
that we shall never again go back to the
wearing of pens behind our ears and the
measure round our shoulders. These ultra-
hopefuls make too little of human nature, take
into too little account its persistent return to
normal. They are going to do wonders in the
way of changing spots for the leopard and
remaking beds for the clumsy. And yet it all
comes back to the old problem of the sincerity
with which old leaves may be turned down.
Perhaps it is well that simple people should
have their simple creeds, and perhaps it is
very well indeed that the world should contain
as few as possible of the curious race of artists
who are indifferent to the morality of black
and white, and care only for the matter of
their interest. According to our moral re-
formers this bothersome breed of amateurs

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L. of C.

and lookers-on is in for a thorough washing,
cleansing, scraping from head to toe, to be
rigged out, after disinfecting, with a brand-new
suit of morality and a nice, clean, moral pocket-
handkerchief on which to wipe the smuggest
of noses. I read in my daily paper :

" In the days before the war the unreal was
supplanting the real in art and letters. An
unclean cult was rising, distorting mirrors
were being held up to nature, and a form
of artistic insanity was creeping through the
art world. The irresponsible Bohemianism
with its child-like faults and God-like gifts
had given way to a cold-blooded perversity
which destroyed the souls of men and
withered the hearts of women. The blast of
war was the trump of doom to this world
of bad dreams. Faced with the terrible
reality of primitive force the artificial gods
tumbled from their crazy pedestals and in
the agony of war men were born again. "

I rub my eyes and wonder if I am gone
crazy.

And yet . . . and yet there is something in
all this. These last few days I have been
meeting in a little cafe of this old-world town,
taking their aperitif before dinner, an actor and
his wife. They may not be in the very first
flight of actors, but they are from Paris and

Re-birth

285

in time of peace have a certain success. Their
occupation gone and their interest in the war
but languid, they are, Oh, so desperately out
of everything that matters to-day. The actor
gives his hat a rakish tilt, waves his thin hands,
toys with a cane a shade too handsome, yawns,
and tosses fifty centimes to an old woman
selling war-news, rejecting the paper proffered
in return. The war has gone past him and he
has found no interest in it. The woman never
speaks at all, her daytime art gone to the
forcing of her features to an expression of
childlikeness, an elaboration of the ingenuous.
She drums on her teeth with her long and over-
manicured nails — an odious mannerism ! She
is bored. Her eyes are as weary as the Monna
Lisa's, but you would do wrong to credit their
owner with excess of soul. And yet on an
evening when they condescended to play to us
in some anecdote of the war they moved even
the clods of the village to tears. Ce sont des
artistes.

Let me tell you a story, as Sir Arthur Pinero's
radiant young man in the forties would say.
There was once an English lord who took for
mistress a French actress. As his lordship lay
dying he divined that the woman bending over
him was memorising for reproduction in the
theatre the rictus sardonicus of his agony.
" Take away that woman," he said to his

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i

attendants. Then in a farewell of ineffable
contempt, and turning his face to the wall,
" Une artiste . . . vous n'etes que cela ! " You
will find the story in Goncourt's " La Faustin."
" And the point of the yarn, Jesson ? "
The point of the yarn is that the actor,
genius or mere cabot, is not going to be over-
awed by any matter of fisticuffs, however
exaggerated and colossal. Life and death,
living and dying, come they never so close,
are but so much grist to his mill, so much
" material." He may go back on his art and
play the man, but it will be against the grain.
The public has never had any very clear
appreciation on this score, their misappre-
hension being twofold. First, that poets of
the sickness of Verlaine, actors of the rictus
sardonicus order, cannot be sincere. Second,
that before the artist can attain to fine deeds
he must forswear fine words. Both these
doctrines find me in the profoundest disagree-
ment. I would rather maintain that the
exquisite artist may be the veriest poltroon,
and, if you like, that there lies the pity of it.

;

The sum of all this is that the war, although
it may bring fresh subjects will not bring fresh
standards, nor change by one jot or tittle our
attitude towards the good and bad. Beauty
will be found as of old in strange places and

Re-birth

287

n humdrum ; in strange happinesses, strange
melancholies ; in ordinary joys and sorrows.
The war, though it may heighten emotion, will
not change its quality. " Above all, no em-
phasis ! " was Heine's advice to a nation
addicted to Schwarmerei. " Above all, no
high-falutin ! " might be a word in season to
our own. And therefore I am going to confess
that after the war I hope to find fresh joy
in the simplest things of life ; in rounds of
golf and tramps over the moors, in the smell
of stables and the lore of grooms, in deep
chairs and fireside talks, friendships and
good books — which means the books that to
me are good — in country lanes and mean
streets, in theatres, music-halls, gin palaces,
and crowds.

It has been good, old friend, writing to you.
I have tried to keep the passion fresh in an
adventure of which the incidents have been
unexciting and the denouement tame. It is not
easy to keep the passion fresh in a world of
vegetable marrows. But the beginning was
good. ... I have tried to keep up the exalta-
tion of the soldier-music playing in Trafalgar
Square that June morning more than a year
ago. What was it the little girl said about a
brass band making people feel happier than
they really are ? I know it to be true that five
minutes of the Band of Guards may make a

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L. of C.

man feel more of a soldier than the rigours of
the Army will effect in ten years. I wear a
civilian's heart on my sleeve, you know, as
well as my stars, of which a third comes sur-
prisingly to hand even as I pen this. . . .

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BV
WILLIAM BKfcNDON AN D SON, LT1X, PLYMOUTH.

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