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ENGINEERS AND APPLIANCES
Lark Hill is where the Canadian Engineers live, in the midst of a profligate abundance of tools and carts, pontoon wagons, field telephones, and other mouth-watering gear. Hundreds of tin huts are being built there, but quite leisurely, by contract. I noticed three workmen, at eleven o’clock of that Monday forenoon, as drunk as Davy’s sow, reeling and shouting across the landscape. So far as I could ascertain, the workmen do not work extra shifts, nor even, but I hope this is incorrect, on Saturday afternoons; and I think they take their full hour at noon these short days.
Every camp throws up men one has met at the other end of the earth; so, of course, the Engineer C.O. was an ex-South African Canadian.
‘Some of our boys are digging a trench over yonder,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to look at ‘em.’
The boys seemed to average five feet ten inches, with thirty-seven inch chests. The soil was unaccommodating chalk.
‘What are you?’ I asked of the first pickaxe.
‘Private.’
‘Yes, but before that?’
‘McGill (University understood). Nineteen twelve.’
‘And that boy with the shovel?’
‘Queen’s, I think. No; he’s Toronto.’
And thus the class in applied geology went on half up the trench, under supervision of a Corporal-Bachelor-of-Science with a most scientific biceps. They were young; they were beautifully fit, and they were all truly thankful that they lived in these high days.
Sappers, like sergeants, take care to make themselves comfortable. The corps were dealing with all sorts of little domestic matters in the way of arrangements for baths, which are cruelly needed, and an apparatus for depopulating shirts, which is even more wanted. Healthy but unwashen men sleeping on the ground are bound to develop certain things which at first disgust them, but later are accepted as an unlovely part of the game. It would be quite easy to make bakehouses and super-heated steam fittings to deal with the trouble. The huts themselves stand on brick piers, from one to three feet above ground. The board floors are not grooved or tongued, so there is ample ventilation from beneath; but they have installed decent cooking ranges and gas, and the men have already made themselves all sorts of handy little laboursaving gadgets. They would do this if they were in the real desert. Incidentally, I came across a delightful bit of racial instinct. A man had been told to knock up a desk out of broken packing-cases. There is only one type of desk in Canada – the roller-top, with three shelves each side the knee-hole, characteristic sloping sides, raised back, and long shelf in front of the writer. He reproduced it faithfully, barring, of course, the roller-top; and the thing leaped to the eye out of its English office surroundings. The Engineers do not suffer for lack of talents. Their senior officers appear to have been the heads, and their juniors the assistants, in big concerns that wrestle with unharnessed nature. (There is a tale of the building of a bridge in Valcartier Camp which is not bad hearing.) The rank and file include miners; road, trestle, and bridge men; iron construction men who, among other things, are steeplejacks; whole castes of such as deal in high explosives for a living; loco-drivers, superintendents, too, for aught I know, and a solid packing of selected machinists, mechanics, and electricians. Unluckily, they were all a foot or so too tall for me to tell them that, even if their equipment escaped at the front, they would infallibly be raided for their men.
AN UNRELATED DETACHMENT
I left McGill, Queen’s, and Toronto still digging in their trench, which another undergraduate, mounted and leading a horse, went out of his way to jump standing. My last glimpse was of a little detachment, with five or six South African ribbons among them, who were being looked over by an officer. No one thought it strange that they should have embodied themselves and crossed the salt seas independently as ‘So-and-So’s Horse.’ (It is best to travel with a title these days.) Once arrived, they were not at all particular, except that they meant to join the Army, and the lonely batch was stating its qualifications as Engineers.
‘They get over any way and every way,’ said my companion. ‘Swimming, I believe.’
‘But who was the So-and-So that they were christened after?’ I asked.
‘I guess he was the man who financed ‘em or grub-staked ‘em while they were waiting. He may be one of ‘em in that crowd now; or he may be a provincial magnate at home getting another bunch together.’
THE VANGUARD OF A NATION
Then I went back to the main camp for a last look at that wonderful army, where the tin-roofed messes take French conversation lessons with the keen-faced French-Canadian officers, and where one sees esprit-de-corps in the making. Nowhere is local sentiment stronger than in Canada. East and West, lake and maritime provinces, prairie and mountain, fruit district and timber lands – they each thrill to it. The West keeps one cold blue open-air eye on the townful East. Winnipeg sits between, posing alternately as sophisticated metropolis and simple prairie. Alberta, of the thousand horses, looks down from her high-peaked saddle on all who walk on their feet; and British Columbia thanks God for an equable climate, and that she is not like Ottawa, full of politicians and frozen sludge. Quebec, unassailable in her years and experience, smiles tolerantly on the Nova Scotian, for he has a history too, and asks Montreal if any good thing can come out of Brandon, Moose Jaw, or Regina. They discuss each other outrageously, as they know each other intimately, over four thousand miles of longitude – their fathers, their families, and all the connections. Which is useful when it comes to sizing up the merits of a newly-promoted non-commissioned officer or the capacities of a quarter-master.
As their Army does and suffers, and its record begins to blaze, fierce pride of regiment will be added to local love and the national pride that backs and envelops all. But that pride is held in very severe check now; for they are neither provinces nor tribes but a welded people fighting in the War of Liberty. They permit themselves to hope that the physique of their next contingent will not be worse than that of the present. They believe that their country can send forward a certain number of men and a certain number behind that, all equipped to a certain scale. Of discomforts endured, of the long learning and relearning and waiting on, they say nothing. They do not hint what they will do when their hour strikes, though they more than hint their longing for that hour. In all their talk I caught no phrase that could be twisted into the shadow of a boast or any claim to superiority, even in respect to their kit and outfit; no word or implication of self-praise for any sacrifice made or intended. It was their rigid humility that impressed one as most significant – and, perhaps, most menacing for such as may have to deal with this vanguard of an armed Nation.
V
INDIAN TROOPS
Larai meṅ laddu nahiṅ batte (War is not sugar-plums). —Hindi Proverb.
Working from the East to the West of England, through a countryside alive with troops of all arms, the car came at dusk into a cathedral town entirely inhabited by one type of regiment. The telegraph-office was an orderly jam of solid, large, made men, with years of discipline behind them and the tan of Indian suns on their faces – Englishmen still so fresh from the troopships that one of them asked me, ‘What’s the day o’ the month?’ They were advising friends of their arrival in England, or when they might be expected on short leave at the week’s end; and the fresh-faced telegraph girls behind the grilles worked with six pairs of hands apiece and all the goodwill and patience in the world to back them. That same young woman who, with nothing to do, makes you wait ten minutes for a penny stamp while she finishes a talk with a lady-friend, will, at a crisis, go on till she drops, and keep her temper throughout. ‘Well, if that’s her village,’ I heard one of the girls say to an anxious soul, ‘I tell you that that will be her telegraph-office. You leave it to me. She’ll get it all right.’
He backed out, and a dozen more quietly took his place. Their regiments hailed from all the old known stations of the East and beyond that into the Far East again. They cursed their cool barrack accommodation; they rejoiced in the keen autumn smells, and paraded the long street all filled with ‘Europe shops’; while their officers and their officers’ wives, and, I think, mothers who had come down to snatch a glimpse of their boys, crowded the hotels, and the little unastonished Anglo-Indian children circulated round the knees of big friends they had made aboard-ship and asked, ‘Where are you going now?’
One caught scraps of our old gipsy talk – names of boarding-houses, agents’ addresses: ‘Milly stays with mother, of course.’ ‘I’m taking Jack down to school to-morrow. It’s past half-term, but that doesn’t matter nowadays’; and cheery farewells between men and calm-eyed women. Except for the frocks, it might have been an evening assembly at any station bandstand in India.
Outside, on the surging pavements, a small boy cried: ‘Paper! Evenin’ paper!’ Then seductively: ’Kargus!’
‘What?’ I said, thinking my ears had cheated me.
‘Dekko! Kargus!’ said he. (’Look here! Paper!’)
‘Why on earth d’you say that?’
‘Because the men like it,’ he replied, and slapped an evening paper (no change for a penny) into the hand of a man in a helmet.
Who shall say that the English are not adaptable?
The car swam bonnet-deep through a mile of troops; and a mile up the road one could hear the deep hum of all those crowded streets that the cathedral bells were chiming over. It was only one small block of Anglo-India getting ready to take its place in the all-devouring Line.
