A Padre in France Part 7

The business of keeping up a supply of lectures was not so difficult as we expected. Officers were very kind and offered us the most amazing collection of subjects. The secretary of many a literary society at home would be envious of our list. We accepted every offer we got, no matter how inappropriate the subject seemed to be.

It was impossible to tell beforehand which lectures would be popular and which would fail. Military subjects were of course common. We had "The Navy" with lantern slides. M. gave that lecture, but all his best slides were banned by the censor, for fear, I suppose, that we might have a German spy among us and that he would telegraph to Berlin a description of a light cruiser if M. exhibited one upon the screen. We had "Men who have won the V.C." with lantern slides. That was, as was expected, a success. But we also had "Napoleon's Campaigns" by a Cambridge professor of history, ill.u.s.trated by nothing better than a few maps drawn on a blackboard. To our amazement that was immensely popular. We had "How an Army is fed," by an A.S.C. officer, the only lecture which produced a vigorous discussion afterwards.

But we did not confine ourselves to military subjects. We had lectures on morals, which were sometimes a little confusing. One lecturer, I remember, starting from the fact that the boys had misstated their ages to the recruiting officers when they enlisted, hammered home the fact that all lies are disgraceful, and therefore our boys ought to be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Another lecturer, a month later, starting from the same fact, took the line that it was possible to be _splendide mendax_, and that we had good reason to be extremely proud all our lives of the lie told in the recruiting office.

Manners are more or less connected with morals, and we had lectures on manners; that is to say, on saluting, which is the beginning and ending of good manners in the army. A good many civilians, especially those of the intellectual "conchie" kind, are inclined to smile at the importance soldiers attach to saluting. Our lecturer convinced me--I hope he convinced the rest of his audience--that saluting is something more than a piece of tiresome ritual, that it is the external expression of certain very great ideas.

Occasionally, but not often, we were in difficulties about our lectures. Some one at home sent us a present of a beautiful set of lantern slides, ill.u.s.trating a tour in Egypt. They were such fine slides that it seemed a pity to waste them. But for a long time we could not find any one who knew enough about Egypt to attempt a verbal accompaniment of the slides.

At last we got a volunteer. He said frankly that he did not know half the places we had pictures of, but offered to do his best. He did exceedingly well with the places he did know, making the tombs of the ancient Pharaohs quite interesting to the boys. But he was a conscientious man. He refused to invent history to suit strange pictures. When anything he did not recognise was thrown on the screen he dismissed it rapidly. "This," he would say, "is another tomb, probably of another king," or "This is a camel standing beside a ruined archway." Every one was thoroughly satisfied.

We had another set of slides which gave us some trouble, a series of pictures of racing yachts under sail. I had to take those on myself, and I was rather nervous. I need not have been. The boys in that club were capable of taking an interest in any subject under the sun.

Before I got to the last slide the audience was ready to shout the name of every sail on a racing cutter, and could tell without hesitation whether a yacht on a run was carrying her spinnaker on the port or starboard hand. They say that all knowledge is useful. I hope that it is.

Once or twice a lecturer failed us at the last moment without giving us notice. Then J. and I had to run an entertainment of an instructive kind extempore. J. was strong on personal hygiene. He might start with saluting or the theft of Miss N.'s purse, our great club scandal, but he worked round in the end to soap and tooth brushes. My own business, if we were utterly driven against the wall, was to tell stories.

The most remarkable and interesting lecture we ever had was given on one of those emergency occasions by one of our members. He volunteered an account of his experiences in the trenches. He cannot have been much more than seventeen years old, and ought never to have been in the trenches. He was undersized and, I should say, of poor physique. If the proper use of the letter "h" in conversation is any test of education, this boy must have been very little educated. His vocabulary was limited, and many of the words he did use are not to be found in dictionaries. But he stood on the platform and for half an hour told us what he had seen, endured, and felt, with a straightforward simplicity which was far more effective than any art.

He disappeared from our midst soon afterwards, and I have never seen him since. I would give a good deal now to have a verbatim report of that lecture of his.

When the lecture of the afternoon was over, the club amused itself.

Attendance was no longer compulsory. Boys came and went as they chose. Order was maintained and enforced by a committee of the boys themselves. It met once a week, and of all the committees I have ever known that one was the most rigidly businesslike. I cannot imagine where the secretary gained his experience of the conduct of public business; but his appeals to the chair when any one wandered from the subject under discussion were always made with reason, and he understood the difference between an amendment and a substantive resolution.

The only difficulty we ever had with that committee arose from its pa.s.sion for making rules. Our idea for the management of the club was to have as few rules as possible. The committee, if unchecked, would have out-Heroded the War Office itself in multiplying regulations. I am inclined to think that it is a mistake to run inst.i.tutions on purely democratic lines, not because reasonable liberty would degenerate into licence, but because there would be no liberty at all. If democracy ever comes to its own, and the will of the people actually prevails, we may all find ourselves so tied up with laws regulating our conduct that we will wish ourselves back under the control of a tyrant.

It was during those hours of recreation that Miss N. reigned over the club. She ran a canteen for the boys, boiling eggs, serving tea, cocoa, malted milk, bread-and-b.u.t.ter, and biscuits. She played games.

She started and inspired sing-songs. She listened with sympathy which was quite unaffected to long tales of wrongs suffered, of woes and of joys. She was never without a crowd of boys round her, often clinging to her, and the offers of help she received must have been embarra.s.sing to her.

Miss N. had a little room of her own in the club. She furnished it very prettily, and we used to pretend to admire the view from the windows. Once we tried to persuade an artist who happened to be in camp to make a sketch from that window. The artist shrank from the task. The far background was well enough, trees on the side of a hill; but the objects in the middle distance were a railway line and a ditch full of muddy water. In the foreground there were two incinerators, a dump of old tins, and a Salvation Army hut. I dare say the artist was right in shrinking from the subject.

In that little room of hers, Miss N. had tea parties every day before the afternoon lecture. I was often there. Sometimes I brought M. with me. Always there were boys, as many as the room would hold, often more than it held comfortably. _Pain d'epice_ is not my favourite food in ordinary life, but I ate it with delight in that company. No one, on this side of the grave, will ever know how much Miss N. did for those boys in a hundred ways. I feebly guess, because I know what her friends.h.i.+p meant to me. I was, I know, a trial to her. My lax churchmans.h.i.+p must have shocked her. My want of energy must have annoyed her. But she remained the most loyal of fellow-workers.

There were breakfast-parties, as well as tea-parties, in Miss N.'s room on Sunday mornings. We had a celebration of the Holy Communion at 6 o'clock and afterwards we breakfasted with Miss N. The memory of one Sunday in particular remains with me. On Easter Sunday in 1915 I celebrated on board the _Lusitania_, a little way outside the harbour of New York, the congregation kneeling among the arm-chairs and card-tables of the great smoke-room on the upper deck. In 1916 I read the same office in the cla.s.s-room of the Y.S.C., with a rough wooden table for an altar, a cross made by the camp carpenter and two candles for furniture, and boys, confirmed ten days before, they and Miss N., for congregation. Afterwards, in her little room, we had the happiest of all our parties. Surely our Easter eggs were good to eat.

I have written of the members of the Y.S.C. as boys. They were boys, but every now and then one or another turned out to be very much a man in experience. There was one whom I came to know particularly well. He had been "up the line" and fought. He had been sent down because at the age of eighteen he could not stand the strain.

I was present in our little military church when he was baptized, and on the same afternoon confirmed by Bishop Bury. I gave him his confirmation card and advised him to send it home to his mother for safety. "I think, sir," he said, "that I would rather send it to my wife." He was a fellow-citizen of mine, born and bred in Belfast. We Ulstermen are a forward and progressive people.

CHAPTER X

THE DAILY ROUND

In the camp in which I was first stationed there was a story current which must, I think, have had a real foundation in fact. It was told in most messes, and each mess claimed the hero of it as belonging to its particular camp. It told of a man who believed that the place in which we were was being continuously and severely sh.e.l.led by the Germans. He is reported to have said that war was not nearly so dangerous a thing as people at home believed, for our casualties were extraordinarily few. Indeed, there were no casualties at all, and the sh.e.l.ling to which he supposed himself to be subjected was the most futile thing imaginable.

A major, a draft-conducting officer, who happened to be with us one day when this story was told, improved on it boldly.

"As we marched in from the steamer to-day," he said, "we pa.s.sed a large field on the right of the road about a mile outside the camp--perhaps you know it?"

"Barbed wire fence across the bottom of it," I said, "and then a ditch."

"Exactly," said the major. "Well, one of the N.C.O.'s in my draft, quite an intelligent man, asked me whether that was the firing line and whether the ditch was the enemy's trench. He really thought the Germans were there, a hundred yards from the road we were marching along."

I daresay the original story was true enough. Even the major's improved version of it may conceivably have been true. The ordinary private, and indeed the ordinary officer, when he first lands in France, has the very vaguest idea of the geography of the country or the exact position of the place in which he finds himself. For all he knows he may be within a mile or two of Ypres. And we certainly lived in that camp with the sounds of war in our ears. We had quite near us a----Perhaps even now I had better not say what the establishment was; but there was a great deal of business done with sh.e.l.ls, and guns of various sizes were fired all day long. In the camp we heard the explosions of the guns. By going a very little way outside the camp we could hear the whine of the sh.e.l.ls as they flew through the air. We could see them burst near various targets on a stretch of waste marshy ground.

No one could fail to be aware that sh.e.l.ls were being fired in his immediate neighbourhood. It was not unnatural for a man to suppose that they were being fired at him. From early morning until dusk squads of men were shooting, singly or in volleys, on two ranges. The crackling noise of rifle fire seldom died wholly away. By climbing the hill on which M. lived, we came close to the schools of the machine gunners, and could listen to the stuttering of their infernal instruments. There was another school near by where bombers practised their craft, making a great deal of noise. So far as sound was concerned, we really might have been living on some very quiet section of the front line.

We were in no peril of life or limb. There were only two ways in which the enemy worried us. His submarines occasionally raided the neighbourhood of our harbour. Then our letters were delayed and our supply of English papers was cut off. And we had Zeppelin scares now and then. I have never gone through a Zeppelin raid, and do not want to. The threat was quite uncomfortable enough for me.

My first experience of one of these scares was exciting. I had dined, well, at a hospitable mess and retired afterwards to the colonel's room to play bridge. There were four of us--the colonel, my friend J., the camp adjutant, and myself. On one side of the room stood the colonel's bed, a camp stretcher covered with army blankets. In a corner stood a washhand-stand, with a real earthenware basin on it. A basin of this sort was a luxury among us. I had a galvanised iron pot and was lucky. Many of us washed in folding canvas buckets. But that colonel did himself well. He had a stove in his room which did not smoke, and did give out some heat, a very rare kind of stove in the army. He had four chairs of different heights and shapes and a table with a dark-red table-cloth. Over our heads was a bright, unshaded electric light. Our game went pleasantly until--the colonel had declared two no-trumps--the light went out suddenly without warning.

The camp adjutant immediately said nasty things about the Royal Engineers, who are responsible for our lights. J. suggested a Zeppelin scare. The colonel, who wanted to play out his hand, shouted for an orderly and light. The orderly brought us a miserably inefficient candle in a stable lantern and set it in the middle of the table. It was just possible to see our cards, and we played on. I remembered Stevenson's s.h.i.+pwrecked crew who gambled all night on Medway Island by the light of a fire of driftwood. I thought of the men in Hardy's story who finished their game on the gra.s.s by the light of a circle of glow-worms. Our position was uncomfortable but picturesque.

Another orderly came in and said that the camp adjutant was wanted at once in his office. We questioned the man and he confirmed J.'s fear that a Zeppelin scare was in full swing. The adjutant was in the position of dummy at the moment and could be spared. We played on.

Then a note was brought to J. He was ordered to report at once at the camp dressing station, and there to stand by for casualties. The colonel picked up the cards and shuffled them thoughtfully. He meant, I think, to propose a game of bezique or picquet. But a note came for him, an order, very urgent, that all lights should immediately be extinguished. He opened the stable lantern and, sighing, blew out our candle.

"One blessing about this Zeppelin business," said the colonel, "is that I don't have to turn out the men on parade."

I was anxious and a little worried because I did not know what my duties were in a crisis of the kind. "I suppose," I said, "that I ought to stand by somewhere till the show is over." I looked towards the colonel for advice, locating him in the darkness by the glow of his cigar.

"I advise you to go to bed," he said. "I mean to. Most likely nothing will happen."

I felt my way to the door. The colonel, taking me by the arm, guided me out of his camp and set me on the main road which led to my quarters.

I stumbled along through thick darkness, b.u.mping into things which hurt me. I was challenged again and again by sentries, alert and I think occasionally jumpy. One of them, I remember, refused to be satisfied with my reply, though I said "Friend" loudly and clearly. I have never understood why a mere statement of that kind made by a stranger in the dark should satisfy an intelligent sentry. But it generally does.

This particular man--he had only landed from England the day before--took a serious view of his duty. For all he knew I might have been a Zeppelin commander, loaded with bombs. He ordered me to advance and be examined. I obeyed, of course, and at first thought that he was going to examine me thoroughly, inside and out, with a bayonet. That is what his att.i.tude suggested. I was quite relieved when he marched me into the guard-room and paraded me before the sergeant. The sergeant, fortunately, recognised me and let me go.

Otherwise I suppose I should have spent a very uncomfortable night in a cell. I am not at all sure that military law allows a prisoner's friends to bail him out.

I reached my hut at last and made haste to get into bed. It was a most uncomfortable business. I could not find my toothbrush. I spent a long time feeling about for my pyjamas. I did not dare even to strike a match. An hour later some hilarious subalterns walked along the whole row of huts and lobbed stones on to the roofs. The idea was to suggest to the inmates that bombs were falling in large numbers.

It was a well-conceived scheme; for the roofs of those huts were of corrugated iron and the stones made an abominable noise. But I do not think that any one was deceived. A major next door to me swore vehemently.

Our French neighbours did not take much notice of these alarms. The row of lamps in the little railway station near the camp shone cheerfully while we were plunged in gloom. The inhabitants of the houses on the hill at the far side of the valley did not even take the trouble to pull down their window blinds. Either the French are much less afraid of Zeppelins than we are or they never heard the alarms which caused us so much inconvenience. These scares became very frequent in the early spring of 1916 and always worried us.

After a while some one started a theory that there never had been any Zeppelins in our neighbourhood and that none were likely to come. It was possible that our local Head-Quarters Staff was simply playing tricks on us. An intelligent staff officer would, in time, be almost sure to think of starting a Zeppelin scare if he had not much to occupy his mind. He would defend his action by saying that an alarm of any kind keeps men alert and is good for discipline.

But staff officers, though skilful in military art, are not always well up in general literature. Ours, perhaps, had never read the "Wolf, wolf," fable, and did not antic.i.p.ate the result of their action. As time went on we took less and less notice of the Zeppelin warnings until at last the whole thing became a joke. If a Zeppelin had come to us towards the end of March it would have had the whole benefit of all the lights which shone through our tents and windows, whatever that guidance might be worth.

The Zeppelins which did not come caused us on the whole more annoyance than the submarines which did. It was, of course, irritating when the English post did not arrive at the usual hour. It always did arrive in the end--being carried by some other route, though our own proper steamer neither went in nor out.

But if we, the regular inhabitants of the place, suffered little inconvenience from the submarines, the officers and men who pa.s.sed through the town on their way home on leave were sometimes held up for days. The congestion became acute. Beds were very difficult to obtain. The officers' club filled up and the restaurants reaped a harvest.

The authorities on these occasions behave in a peculiarly irritating way. They will not, perhaps cannot, promise that their steamer will sail at any particular hour or indeed on any particular day. Nor will they give an a.s.surance that it will not sail. The eager traveller is expected to sit on his haversack on the quay and watch, day and night, lest the s.h.i.+p of his desire should slip out unknown to him. It is, of course, impossible for any one to do this for very long, and an M.L.O.--M.L.O.'s are sometimes humane men--will drop a hint that the steamer will stay where she is for two or even four hours. Then the watchers make a dash for club, hotel, or restaurant, at their own risk, of course; the M.L.O. gives no kind of promise or guarantee.

There was at that time, probably still is, a small shop not far from Base Head-Quarters which had over its door the words "Mary's Tea," in large letters. The name was an inspiration. It suggested "England, home, and beauty," everything dearest to the heart of the young officer in a strange land. As a matter of fact there was nothing English about the place. The cakes sold were delightfully French. The tea was unmistakably not English. The shop was run by five or six girls with no more than a dozen words of English among them. When the leave boat was held up "Mary's Tea" was crammed with young officers.

I remember seeing a party of these cheery boys sitting down to a square meal one afternoon. They were still wearing their trench boots and fighting kit. They were on their way home from the front and they were hungry, especially hungry for cakes. There were four of them.