A Padre in France Part 11

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

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

The wounded men sat or lay on the gra.s.s outside waiting for their turns to go in. They wore the tattered, mud-caked clothes of the battlefield. The bandages of the casualty clearing-station were round their limbs and heads. Some were utterly exhausted. They lay down.

They pillowed their heads on their arms and sank into heavy slumber.

Some, half hysterical with excitement, sat bolt upright and talked, talked incessantly, whether any one listened to them or not. They laughed too, but it was a horrible kind of laughter. Some seemed stupefied; they neither slept nor talked. They sat where they were put, and stared in front of them with eyes which never seemed to blink.

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

Their patience and their quiet trustfulness moved me so that it was hard not to weep.

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

The work went on almost silently hour after hour from early in the morning till long after noon. Yet there was no hurry, no fuss, and I do not think there was a moment's failure in gentleness. Some hard things have been said about R.A.M.C. orderlies and about nurses too.

Perhaps they have been deserved occasionally. I saw their work at close quarters and for many days in that one place, nowhere else and not again there; but what I saw was good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing was more interesting than to note the different moods of these wounded men. One morning, crossing the camp at about 7 o'clock, I met a Canadian, a tall, gaunt man. I saw at once that he had just arrived from the front. The left sleeve of his tunic was cut away.

The bandage round his forearm was soiled and stained. His face was unshaven and very dirty. His trousers were extraordinarily tattered and caked with yellow mud. He had somehow managed to lose one boot and walked unevenly in consequence. I had heard the night before something about the great and victorious fight in which this man had been. I congratulated him. He looked at me with a slow, humorous smile. "Well," he drawled, "they certainly did run some."

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

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

But he was a provident man. He had collected all available loot from the men who had fallen on the way down, and the unfortunate survivor was so laden that he collapsed, sank into the mud under an immense load of helmets, caps, belts, everything that could have been taken from the dead. The Munster Fusilier stood over him with his rifle.

"You misfortunate b----," he said. "And them words," he said to me confidentially, "got a move on him, though it was myself had to carry the load for him the rest of the way."

CHAPTER XIV

A BACKWATER

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

Yet my first experience there was far from encouraging. The day after I took over from my predecessor I ventured into the men's recreation room. I was received with silence, frosty and most discouraging. I made a few remarks about the weather. I commented on the stagnant condition of the war at the moment. The things I said were ba.n.a.l and foolish no doubt, yet I meant well and scarcely deserved the reply which came at last. A man who was playing billiards dropped the b.u.t.t of his cue on the ground with a bang, surveyed me with a hostile stare and said:

"We don't want no ---- parsons here."

Somebody in a far corner of the room protested mildly.

"Language, language," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I agree with the "tough." I totally disagree with the "bad." Even if, after eight months, I had been bidden farewell in the same phrase with which I was greeted, I should still refuse to say "bad lot"

about those men. I hope that in such a case I should have the grace to recognise the failure as my fault, not theirs, and to take the "bad lot" as a description of myself.

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

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

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

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

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

There was a Coldstream Guardsman. I never succeeded in finding out whether he was in the famous Landrecies fight or not. The most he would do in the way of military talk was to complain, privately, to me of the lax discipline in the camp, and to compare the going of his comrades from the camp to the quay with the marching of the Coldstreamers on their way to relieve guard at Buckingham Palace.

There was an old sergeant from County Down who was more interested in growing vegetables--we had a garden--than anything else, and a Munster Fusilier who came from Derry, of all places, and exulted in the fact that his sons had taken his place in the regiment.

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

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

After a while the stretcher-bearers and I began to know each other.

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

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

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

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

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