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IN THE DAY OF BATTLE

It was not my first acquaintance with the town, nor yet with the hotel to which our billet was affiliated. I had been there on a book-raid in better days. It was in that hotel I found the hero of the apopthegm: 'Once a soldier – always a civilian!' And now its dismal saloons were overflowing with essential civilians who might have been soldiers all their lives; only here and there could one detect a difference; all seemed equally imbued with the traditional nonchalance of the British officer in a tight place. But for their uniform, and their martial carriage, they might have been a festive gathering of the Old Boys of any Public School.

After breakfast we others sallied forth. The sun was still prematurely hot. The uninjured street was full not only of khaki, but of the townsfolk of both sexes, a new element to us in any but rare glimpses. Their Sunday faces betrayed no sign of special anxiety. The bells were tinkling peacefully for mass as we crossed the little river flowing close behind the backs of the houses, and climbed the grassy height on which the citadel stands bastioned. A party of British soldiers was camped in its chill shadow; many were washing at the stream below, their bodies white as milk between their trousers and their sunburnt necks. Some, I think, were actually bathing. They did not look like the battered remnant of a grand Battalion. Yet that was what they were.

We foregathered with one chip from the modern battle-axe: a Sergeant and old soldier who had been through all the war and through South Africa. The last three days beat all. There had never been anything to touch them. Masses had melted before his eyes. There they were, as thick as corn, one minute, and the next they lay in swathes, and the next again the swathes were one continuous stack of dead. The illustration was the Sergeant's, and I know the fine rolling countryside he got it from; but it was not the burden of his yarn. This came in so often, with an effect so variable, that I was puzzled, knowing the perverse levity of the type.

'No nation can stand it,' were the exact words more than once. 'No nation that ever was, can go on standing it.'

'Do you mean – ?'

But I saw he didn't! The whites of his eyes were like an inner ring of brick-red skin, but it was their blue that flamed with sardonic humour.

'I mean the Germans!' cried he. 'No nation on earth can go on standing what they had to stand yesterday and the day before. It's not in human nature to go on standing it. I don't say as we didn't get it too…'

Nor could he, while telling us what the remnant in the tents and on the river-bank represented; but all such information was imparted in the tone of a man making an admission for the sake of argument or fair play. If I remember, the Sergeant had two wound-stripes under his pile of service chevrons. But he had borne more lives than a squad of cats. 'Each time I find I'm all right, I just shake 'ands with myself and carry on.' We got him to shake hands with us, and so parted with a diamond in human form.

Along the road below came the rag-time of a mediocre band; we hurried down and stood in a gateway to review a company of Australians marching into the town. This string of jewels was still unscattered by the fight, of the same high water as our south-country Sergeant, only different in cut and polish, if not of set sarcastic purpose. They were marching in their own way; no stride or swing about it; but a more subtle jauntiness, a kind of mincing strut, perhaps not unconsciously sinister and unconventional, an aggressive part of themselves. But what men! What beetling chests, what muscle-swollen sleeves, what dark, pugnacious, shaven faces! Here and there a pendulous moustache mourned the beard of some bushman of the old school; but no such adventitious aids could have improved upon the naked truculence of most of those mouths and chins. In their supercilious confidence they reminded me of the early Australian cricketers, of beardless Blackham, Boyles and Bonnors taking the field to mow down the flower of English cricket, in the days when those were our serious wars. How I had hated the type as a schoolboy sitting open-mouthed and heart-broken at the Oval! How I had feared it as a hobble-de-hoy in the bush itself! But, in the day of battle, could there have been a better sight than this potential band of bush-rangers and demon bowlers? Not to my glasses; nor one more bitter for the mate of the Rest Hut, thrice rejected from those very ranks.

We wandered idly in their wake; and the next sight that I remember, though it may not have been that morning, was almost as cheering in its very different way. It was the spectacle of a single German prisoner, being marched through the streets by a single British soldier with fixed bayonet. The prisoner was an N.C.O., and a fine defiant brute, marching magnificently just to show us. But his was not the hate that conceals hate; he was the incarnation of the ineffable hymn, with his quick-firing eyes and the high angle of his powerful chin. Physically our man could not compare with him. And that seemed symbolical, at a moment when signs and symbols were in some request.

Then there were the men one had met before. Congested as it was with traffic to and from the fighting, this little town was even more a rendezvous for old acquaintance than the one from which we had beaten our compulsory retreat. I was always running into somebody I had known of old or through his people. One glorious young man, who had been much upon my mind, came into the restaurant where we were having lunch on the Tuesday. His eyes were clear but strained, his ears loaded with yellow dust that toned artistically with his skin and hair. He said he had had his first sleep for five nights – under a railway arch. Before the war he had been up at Cambridge, and a very eminent Blue; if I said what he had it for, and what ribbon he was wearing now, I might as well break my rule and name him outright. But there had been three big brothers, then; now there was only this one left – and at one time not much of him. It did my heart good to see him here – looking as if he had never known a day's illness, or the pain of wounds or grief – looking a young god if there was one in France that day.

But it was not only for his own or for his family's sake that the mere sight of this splendid fellow was such a joy. The things he stood for were more precious than any life or group of lives. He stood for the generation which has been wiped out almost to a boy, as I knew it; he stood for his brothers, and for all our sons who made their sacrifice at once; he stood for the English games, and for those who had seemed to live for games, but who jumped into the King's uniform quicker than they ever changed into flannels in their lives. 'It is the one good thing the war has done – to give public-school fellows a chance – they are the one class who are enjoying themselves in this war.' So wrote one whose early innings was of the shortest; and though it was a boyish boast, and they were not the only class by any means, I should like to know which other was quite as valuable when the war, too, was in its infancy? In each and every country, by one means or the other, the men were to be had: only our Public Schools could have furnished off-hand an army of natural officers, trained to lead, old in responsibility, and afraid of nothing in the world but fear itself. There were very few of the first lot left last March, and now there are many fewer. Of one particular Eton and Harrow match, I believe it can be said that not half-a-dozen of the twenty-two players are now alive. It was something to meet so noble a survivor, still leading in battle as he had learnt to lead at school and college, both on and off the field.

Nor had one to hang about hotels and restaurants, or camps or the street corners, to see men straight from the fight or just going in, and to take fresh heart from theirs. The chief local Y.M.C.A. was full of both kinds, one more appealing than the other. It was perhaps the least conscious appeal ever made to human heart; for men are proud in the day of battle, and they are also mighty busy with their own affairs. What pocket stores they were laying in! What sanguine reserves of tobacco and cigarettes! That was a heartening sign. But there were no foreboding faces that I could see. It is one of the strong points of the inner soldier that he never thinks it is his turn; but if shell or bullet 'has his name on it,' it will 'see him off,' as he also puts it. Some call this fatalism. I call it Faith. It is their plain way of bowing to the Will of God. But the only bow I saw was over the long last letters many were writing, as though the bugle was already blowing for them, as though they well knew what it meant. There was no looking unmoved upon those bent backs and hurrying hands.

Nor were they the most poignant figures; it was the men who had been in it that one could not keep one's eyes off. Those we had seen bathing in the morning were nothing to them. They had a night's rest behind them; these were brands still smoking from the fire. Dirty as dustmen, red-eyed, and with the growth of all these days upon their haggard faces, some sat at the tables, eating and drinking like men who had just discovered their own emptiness; and many lay huddled on the floor, as on the battle-field itself, filling the hut with its very atmosphere. To step over them, and to sit with the men who had a mind to talk, was to get into the red heart of the thing that was going on.

Not that they had very much to tell; all were hazy as to what had happened; but all agreed it was the worst thing they had been through yet, and all bore out our Sunday morning friend, that it was worse for the enemy than for anybody else. This unanimity was remarkable; especially if you consider, first the military history of that last ten days in March, and secondly the fact that none of these unwounded stalwarts was there for a normal reason. Each stood for scores or hundreds who had gone under in the fight, or been taken prisoner. Yet it was worse for the enemy! Yet we were going to win! I cannot swear to the statement in those words, but it was implicit in their every utterance, and emphatic in the things they never said. For though I brought biscuits to many, and sat while they steeped them in their mugs and gulped them down, not a first syllable of complaint reached my ears. On that I would take my stand in any witness-box. And a Y.M.C.A. man knows; they trust us, and speak their minds.

Often in the winter 'peace-time,' as hinted early in these notes, I have seen men shudder at the prospect of the trenches, heard bitter murmurs at the mud and misery, and have done my best to answer the natural cry: 'When is this dreadful war going to finish? It will never be finished by fighting!' There was nothing of that sort to cope with now. In the winter I have heard lamentations for the stray man killed by a sniper or a stray shell. There was the case of the Lewis gunner who had earned his special leave; there was 'the best wee sergeant,' and there were others. But there was none of that now that men were falling by the thousand; not from a single one of these ravenous, red-eyed survivors. You may say it was their hunger, weariness, and consequent insensibility, the acquiescence of the sleeper in the snow. But they were full of confidence phlegmatic yet serene. They were on the winning side; there was never a doubt of it on their lips or in their eyes; and with us they had no reason to keep their doubts to themselves. They had voiced them freely in the winter. But now they had no doubts to voice.

I do not propound their perspicacity or postulate an instinct they did not claim themselves. I merely state a fact from observation of these handfuls of men in the first days of the great crisis. That was the way they reacted against the greatest enemy success since the first month of the war. It is the English way, and always has been. And they happen to be busy finishing the old sequel as I write.

Yet if you had seen their eyes! I remember as a little boy seeing Lady Butler's 'Charge of the Light Brigade' at my first Academy. I am not sure that I have looked upon the canvas since, but the wild-eyed central figure, 'back from the mouth of Hell,' rises up before me after forty years. There is, to be sure, only the most odious of comparisons between his heroic stand and the posture of my friends, who were not posing for a Victorian battle-piece, but bolting biscuits and spilling tea on a Y.M.C.A. table in modern France. Nevertheless, some of them had those eyes.

OTHER OLD FELLOWS

It was pleasant one morning to hear a sudden voice at my elbow: 'How's the Rest Hut?' and to find at least one of its regular frequenters still whole and hearty, in the press outside this teeming Y.M.C.A. But a more embarrassing encounter occurred the same day and on the same too public spot.

It began in the hut, with a couple of sad young Jocks, who were like to be sad, as they might have said; but they only smiled in wry yet not unhumorous resignation. Their story was that of thousands upon the imperative stoppage of all leave. These two had started off on theirs, and were going aboard at Boulogne when headed back to their Battalion, which they had now to find. It chanced to be one of those to which I had helped to minister in the sunken road at Christmas. They remembered the Cocoa Man, as I had been called there, but in the morning they were not demonstrative.

About mid-day we met again, and as I say, in the surging crowd outside the Y.M.C.A. This time the case was sadly altered; the hapless pair had been consoling themselves at another spring, and were at the warm-hearted stage. Nothing was now too good for the poor Cocoa Man, no compliment too wildly hyperbolical. Falling with their unabated forces upon both his hands, only stopping short of the actual neck, they greeted him as 'a brave mon' in that concourse of braves, and proceeded to embroider the charge with unconscionable detail.

'Thairty-five yarrds from the Gairmans,' declared one, 'this ol' feller was teemin' cocoa in the trenches. I'm tellin' ye! Lash C'rishmash – mind ye – shnow an' ische! Thairty-five yarrds from the Gairmans – strike me dead!'

A vindictive Deity might well have taken him at his word, for dividing the real distance by more than ten. But nothing came of it except a murmur of general incredulity, obsequiously confirmed by the Cocoa Man, and from the other Jock's wagging head a sentimental echo: 'Thish ol' feller! Thish ol' feller!' he could only say for the pavement's benefit.

'Why was I there?' demanded the spokesman, with a rhetorical thump upon his chest. 'Dis-cip-line – dis-cip-line – only reason I was there. But this ol' feller – '

'Thish ol' feller!' screamed the other, in a paroxysm of affection; and when I had eventually retrieved both hands I left them singing my longevity in those terms, like a catch, and took my blushes to a safer part of the town.

'I've given them a bitty,' whispered one of our ministers, who had assisted my escape, 'and told them to go away and get something to eat.'

And the sly carnal wisdom of the advice, no less than the charity which made it practicable, left a good taste in the mouth. It was the kind of thing I ventured to think we wanted in our workers. In any community of sinners there is room for the saint who will help a man to get sober sooner than scold him for getting drunk.

Not that I saw above half-a-dozen tipsy men in all the huts that I was ever in. They were to be seen, no doubt, but they did not come our way. The soldier who seeks the Y.M. in his cups is not a hardened case. He is the last person to be discouraged, as he will be the first to deplore his imprudence in the morning. I have heard a splendid young New Zealander speak of the lapse that had cost him his stripes as though nobody had ever made so dire a fool of himself. That is the kind of notion to scout even at the cost of a high line in these matters. It is possible to make too much of the virtues that come easily to ourselves; and to the average Y.M.C.A. man the cardinal virtues seemed very like second nature. This is not covert irony, but a simple fact which, for that matter, ought hardly to have been otherwise, since most of us were ministers of one denomination or another. The minority were apt to feel, but were not necessarily justified in feeling, that a more liberal admixture of 'sinful laymen' might have put us, as a body, even more intimately in touch with the men than we undoubtedly were.

Chief, however, among the virtues of my comrades, I think any unprejudiced observer would have placed that of Courage. There were now no fewer than eighty of us, all leaves before the wind of war, blown helter-skelter into this little town that must be nameless. We had come off all sorts and sizes of trees, down to the most sensitive and frailest; but from the first squall to the last we were permitted to face, and throughout these days of precarious shelter, in many ways a higher test, I never saw a man among us outwardly the worse for nerves. And be it known that the small personal escapes and excitements recorded in these notes, were as nothing to the full-size adventures of a great many of our refugees. In outlying huts, cheek by jowl with the camps they served, the shelling had been far heavier and more direct than the officers of the Rest Hut had been privileged to undergo; the responsibility had been much greater, and the means of escape not to be compared with ours. Little home-made dug-outs, under the hut itself, had been their nearest approach to our vaulted dungeon, a tattoo of shrapnel their variety of shell-music. Whole walls had been blown in on them, men killed and wounded under the riddled roof. Some had suffered even more from a bodyguard of our own guns than from the enemy; one reverend gentleman declared in writing that his 'hut reeled like a ship in a great sea.'

Another wrote: 'A wave of gas entered our domain and we had a season of intense coughing and sneezing, also watering of eyes. Thinking it was but a passing wave of gas from our own guns, we did not use our respirators, but reaching up to a box of sweets I distributed them to my comrades, and we lay sucking sweets to take away the taste.' (This was a Baptist minister with a South African ribbon, and not the man to lie long doing anything.) 'After breakfast I called upon the Artillery Officers to offer my staff to make hot cocoa and supply biscuits during the morning for the hard-worked gun-teams, an offer which he gratefully accepted. I then made my way up to the dressing-station to see if the Medical Officer required our services for the walking wounded. His reply being in the affirmative, I took stock of the equipment we had on the spot, then went back to bring up all necessary articles, also my comrades. The small hut we have near the dressing-station for this work was being so hotly shelled that the M.O. would not allow us to remain there, so we worked outside the dressing-station door, a little more sheltered, but still exposed to shell-fire. We comforted the wounded, gave them hot tea and free cigarettes. A lull occurred during the morning in our work, so Mr. – returned to make the cocoa for the gun-teams, Mr. – remained to carry on at the dressing-station, and I returned to clear the cash-boxes, fill my pockets with rescued paper-money, prepared again for emergency… We continued our work with the wounded, and as the same increased in number, I then assisted in bandaging the smaller wounds, having knowledge of that kind of work. Later, the A.P.M. gave me his field-glasses and asked me to act as observer and report to him every change in the progress of the battle of the ridges. This was most interesting work, but meant constant exposure. One of our aeroplanes sounded its hooter and dropped a message about 600 yards away. On reporting it I was asked to cross over and see that the message was delivered to the correct battery.'

This was a man! But do not forget he was also a Baptist minister on a four-months furlough at the front. 'Once a soldier!' he too may have said after his first campaign, and clinched it by entering his ministry; but here he was in his pious prime, excelling his lay youth in deeds of gallantry, and covering our civilian heads with his reflected glory. No wonder he 'heard from two sources that my work on that day received mention in military dispatches.' Let us hope it did. 'If true,' he makes haste to add, 'the work of my two colleagues is as much deserving.' But who inspired them? Before they turned their backs, 'the advancing Germans were only about 700 yards away. Securing some of our goods, we decided to retire upon – for the night and return if possible the next day.' The last six words italicise themselves.

The party went out of the frying-pan into heavier fire further back: 'Soon after we had retired to rest the Germans commenced to bombard the place with high velocity shells from long range… A Lieutenant in our hut went to the door, but reeled back immediately with a shattered arm. A Corporal outside received a nasty wound in the shoulder. We set to work bandaging the wounds of these men and making them comfortable while others went to obtain a conveyance. There was no shelter, so after the wounded were safely on their way to a C.C.S. we lay down in our blankets, considering it as easy to be shelled in the warm as standing in the cold' – more wine that needs no printer's bush. Later, he relieved the leader of a very hot hut indeed, where he had for colleague 'one who was calm in the hour of danger.' Here the congenial pair 'were able to carry on for four days, when the order came for us to evacuate. We distributed our stock of goods to the soldiers, then closed up. That night we lay in our blankets counting the bursting shells around us at three shells per minute.' On their arrival in our common port, naturally not before, 'the effects of the gas at – began to make themselves felt, and I was ordered by the Medical Officer to take a week's complete rest.' One wonders if a rest was better earned in all those terrific days.

The document from which I have been quoting is only one of many placed at my disposal. It is typical of them all, exceptional solely in the telling simplicity of the narrator. The writer was not our only minister who came through the fire pure gold; he was not even the only Baptist minister. One there was, the gentlest of souls, whose heroic story I may yet make shift to tell, though it deserves the hand of Mr. Service or of 'Woodbine Willie.' Such were the men I had the honour of working with last winter, and of such their adventures as against the personal experiences it was necessary to recount first or else not at all. I confess they make my Rest Hut look a little too restful as I set them down; for there we were wonderfully spared the tangible horrors of the situation; but many of these others, as little used to bloodshed as ourselves, had left a shambles behind them, and looked upon the things that haunt a mind.

And yet, as I began by saying, not a man of them showed shaken nerves, or what mattered more to those of us who had seen less, a shaken faith. Therein they were not only worthy of the men they had served so devotedly to the end, but of the sublime tradition it was theirs to uphold. It was a great matter that there should not have been one heart among us so faint as to affect another, that we should have carried ourselves at least outwardly as I think we did. But to some of us it seemed a yet greater matter, in the days of anti-climax and reaction now in store, that those to whom we were entitled to look for spiritual support did not fail us in a single instance.