Part 5

At night the very lights shine reluctant over the scene, but the moon beams impassive on the dead. Burial parties work almost silently, speaking in whispers, and, shocking anomaly, one now and then hears some trophy hunter declare, “Say, this is some souvenir, look at this ‘Gott mit Uns’ buckle!”

“A” COMPANY RUSTLES

When we got into the bally place it was raining in torrents, and the air was also pure purple because the Colonel found some one in his old billet, and the Town-Major, a cantankerous old dug-out who seemed to exist chiefly for the purpose of annoying men who did go into the front line, was about as helpful as the fifth wheel to a wagon. Finally, the Colonel shot out of his office like an eighteen-pounder from a whizz-bang battery, and later on the tattered remnants of our once proud and haughty Adjutant announced to us, in the tones of a dove who has lost his mate, that there were no billets for us at all, and that officers and men would have to bivouac by the river.

Under all circumstances the Major is cheerful--and he has a very clear idea of when it is permissible to go around an order. Also the Town-Major invariably has the same effect on him as such an unwelcome visitor as a skunk at a garden-party would have on the garden-party. Having consigned the aforesaid T.-M. to perdition in Canadian, English, French, and Doukhobor, he said: “We are going to have billets for the men, and we are going to have billets for ourselves.” That quite settled the matter, as far as we Company officers were concerned. In the course of the next half-hour we had swiped an empty street and a half for the men, and put them into it, and then we gathered together, seven strong, and proceeded to hunt for our own quarters.

There is a very strongly developed scouting instinct among the Canadian forces in the Field. Moreover, we are not overawed by outward appearances. In the centre of the town we found a château; and an hour later we were lunching there comfortably ensconed in three-legged arm-chairs, with a real bowl of real flowers on the table, and certain oddments of cut-glass (found gleefully by the batmen) reflecting the bubbling vintage of the house of Moët et Chandon. Our dining-hall was about sixty feet by twenty, and we each had a bedroom of proportionate size, with a bed of sorts in it. Moreover, the place was most wonderfully clean--it might almost have been prepared for us--and McFinnigan, our cook, was in the seventh heaven of delight because he had found a real stove with an oven.

“I cannot understand,” said the Major, “how it is no one is in this place. It’s good enough for a Divisional Commander.”

There was actually a bath in the place with water running in the taps. Jones, always something of a pessimist, shook his head when he saw the bath.

“Look here, all you boys,” he said, “this is no place for us. There is an unwritten law in this outfit that no man, unless he wears red and gold things plastered all over his person, shall have more than one bath in one month. Now _I_ had one three weeks ago, and I am still---- but why dwell on it?”

Needless to say he was ruled out of order.

Just to show our darned independence, we decided to invite most of the other officers of the battalion to dinner that evening, “plenty much swank” and all that kind of thing. Would that we had thought better of it. Of course we eventually decided to make a real banquet of it, appointed a regular mess committee, went and saw the Paymaster, and sent orderlies dashing madly forth to buy up all the liqueurs, Scotch, soda, and other potations that make glad the heart of man. We arranged for a four-course dinner, paraded the batmen and distributed back-sheesh and forcible addresses on the subjects of table-laying and how to balance the soup and unplop the bubbly.

Nobody came near us at all. As far as the Town-Major was concerned we might have been in Kamtchatka. The Major had gone to the C.O. (_after_ lunch) and told him we had “found a little place to shelter in,” and as the latter had written a particularly biting, satirical, not to say hectic note to the Brigadier on the subject of the Town-Major’s villainy, and was therefore feeling better, he just told the Major to carry on, and did not worry about us in the least.

Nineteen of us--Majors, Captains, and “Loots”--sat down to dinner. It was a good dinner, the batmen performed prodigies of waitership; the wine bubbled and frothed, frothed and bubbled, and we all bubbled too. It was a red-letter night. After about the seventeenth speech, in which the Doc. got a little mixed concerning the relationship of Bacchus and a small statue of the Venus de Milo which adorned one corner of the room, some one called for a song. It was then about 11 “pip emma.”

We were in the midst of what the P.M. called a little “Close Harmony”--singing as Caruso and McCormack NEVER sang--when we heard the sound of feet in the passage, feet that clanked and clunk--feet with spurs on.

A hush fell over us, an expectant hush. The door opened, without the ceremony of a knock, and in walked not any of your common or garden Brigadiers, not even a Major-General, but a fully-fledged Lieutenant-General, followed by his staff, and the Town-Major.

In our regiment we have always prided ourselves on the fact that we can carry on anywhere and under any circumstances. But this fell night our untarnished record came very near to disaster. It was as though Zeus had appeared at a Roman banquet being held in his most sacred grove.

The General advanced three paces and halted. Those of us who were able to do so got up. Those who could not rise remained seated. The silence was not only painful, it was oppressive. A steel-grey, generalistic eye slowly travelled through each one of us, up and down the table, unadorned with the remnants of many bottles, the half-finished glasses of many drinks. Just then the Town-Major took a step forward; he was a palish green, with an under-tinge of yellow.

“WHAT is the meaning of----” said the General, in a voice tinged with the iciest breath of the far distant Pole, but he got no further.

There was a sudden rending, ear-splitting roar, the lights went out, the walls of the château seemed to sway, and the plaster fell in great lumps from the frescoed ceiling.

That (as we afterwards discovered) no one was hurt was a marvel. It is the one and only time when we of this regiment have thanked Fritz for shelling us. In the pale light of early dawn the last member of the party slunk into the bivouac ground. The General, where was he? We knew not, neither did we care.

But it was the first and last time that “A” Company rustled a Corps Commander’s Château!

“MINNIE AND ‘FAMILY’”

When first I met her it was a lush, lovely day in June; the birds were singing, the grass was green, the earth teemed with life, vegetable and animal, and the froglets hopped around in the communication trenches. Some cheery optimist was whistling “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” and another equally cheery individual was potting German sniping plates with an accuracy worthy of a better cause. It was, in sooth, “A quiet day on the Western Front.”

And then _she_ came. Stealing towards me silently, coming upon me like a brigand in the leafy woods. I did not see her ere she was descending upon me, but others did. There came distant yells, which I failed to interpret for a moment; then, glancing upward, I saw her bobbing through the air, her one leg waving, her round ugly head a blot on the sky’s fair face. The next thing that happened was that the trench gathered unto itself wings, rose and clasped me lovingly from the neck down in a cold, earthy embrace, the while the air was rent with an ear-splitting roar, like unto a battery of 17-inch naval guns firing a salvo. After that I respected Minnie; I feared her--nay, I was deadly scared of her.

Of all the nasty things “old Fritz” has invented, the Minenflamm is perhaps the nastiest of all. She is purely vicious, utterly destructive, and quite frightful. The very slowness with which she sails through the air is in itself awe-inspiring. I never see Minnie without longing for home, or the inside of the deepest German dug-out ever digged by those hard-working German Pioneer blighters, who must all have been moles in their respective pre-incarnations. Minnie reminds one of Mrs. Patrick Campbell in _The Second Mrs. Tangueray_: all fire and flame and perdition generally.

If you are a very wide-awake Johnny, absolutely on the spot, don’t-you-know--you may hear her sigh ere she leaves the (temporary) Vaterland to take flight. It is a gentle sigh, which those verblitzender English artillery-men are not meant to hear. If you _do_ happen by chance to hear it, then the only thing to do, although it is not laid down in K. R. & O. or Divisional Orders (you see they only _hear_ about these things), is to silently steal away; to seek the seclusion which your dug-out grants. Later, if you are a new officer, and want to impress the natives, as it were, you saunter jauntily forth, cigarette at the correct slope, cane pending vertically from the right hand, grasped firmly in the palm, little finger downwards, cap at an angle of 45°, and say: “Minnie, by Jove! Eh what? God bless my soul. Did it fall over heah or over theah?” Which is a sure way of making yourself really popular.

Fortunately Minnie has her dull days. Days when she positively refuses to bust, and sulks, figuratively speaking, in silent wrath and bitterness on the upper strata of “sunny” France, or Belgium, as the case may be. After many Agags have trodden very delicately around her, and she has proved incurably sulky and poor-spirited, some one infused with the Souvenir spirit carts her away, and pounds her softly with a cold-chisel and a mallet, until he has either dissected her interior economy, or else she has segmented _his_.

Minnie has her little family. The eldest male child is called by the euphonious name of Sausage, and he has brothers of various sizes, from the pure-blood Hoch-geboren down to the bourgeois little chap who makes an awful lot of fuss and clatter generally. I remember meeting little Hans one day, about the dinner hour, when he was a very naughty boy indeed. The Company was waiting to get a half-canteenful of the tannin-cum-tea-leaves, called “tea” on the Western front (contained in one large dixie placed in a fairly open spot in the front line), when suddenly little Hans poked his blunt nose into the air, and all notions of tea-drinking were banished _pro tem_. In other words, the Company took cover automatically, as it were, without awaiting any word of command. Personally I tripped over a bath-mat, came into close contact with an old shell-hole full of mud, and offered up a little prayer in the record time of one-fifth of a second. Instead of entering Nirvana I only heard a resounding splash, followed by a sizzling sound, like that made by an exhausted locomotive. Little Hans had fallen into the dixie, and positively refused to explode. I think the tannin (or the tea leaves) choked him!

There is also an infant--a female infant--who deserves mention. Her name is Rifle-grenade, and, according to the very latest communication from official sources, the gentleman who states with some emphasis that he is divinely kingly, refuses to sanction any further production of her species. Like many females she is one perpetual note of interrogation. She starts on her wayward course thus: “Whrr-on? Whrr-oo? Whoo? Whoo? Whe-oo? Whe-_oo_?” And then she goes off with a bang, just as Cleopatra may have done when Antony marked a pretty hand-maid.

To sum up: Minnie and her children are undoubtedly the product of perverted science and Kultur, aided and abetted by the very Devil!

AN OFFICER AND GENTLEMAN

He was a tall well-built chap, with big, blue eyes, set far apart, and dark wavy hair, which he kept too closely cropped to allow it to curl, as was meant by nature. He had a cheery smile and a joke for every one, and his men loved him. More than that, they respected him thoroughly, for he never tolerated slackness or lack of discipline for an instant, and the lips under the little bronze moustache could pull themselves into an uncompromisingly straight line when he was justly angry.

When he strafed the men, he did it directly, without sparing them or their failings, but he never sneered at them, and his direct hits were so patently honest that they realised it at once, and felt and looked rather like penitent little boys.

He never asked an N.C.O. or man to do anything he would not do himself, and he usually did it first. If there was a dangerous patrol, he led. If there was trying work to do, under fire, he stayed in the most dangerous position, and helped. He exacted instant obedience to orders, but never gave an order that the men could not understand without explaining the reason for it. He showed his N.C.O.’s that he had confidence in them, and did not need to ask for their confidence in him. He had it.

In the trenches he saw to his men’s comfort first--his own was a secondary consideration. If a man was killed or wounded, he was generally on the spot before the stretcher-bearers, and, not once, but many times, he took a dying man’s last messages, and faithfully wrote to his relations. A sacred duty, but one that wrung his withers. He went into action not only _with_ his men, but at their head, and he fought like a young lion until the objective was attained. Then, he was one of the first to bind up a prisoner’s wounds, and to check any severity towards unwounded prisoners. He went into a show with his revolver in one hand, a little cane in the other, a cigarette between his lips.

“You see,” he would explain, “it comforts a fellow to smoke, and the stick is useful, and a good tonic for the men. Besides, it helps me try to kid myself I’m not scared--and I _am_, you know! As much as any one could be.”

On parade he was undoubtedly the smartest officer in the regiment, and he worked like a Trojan to make his men smart also. At the same time he would devote three-quarters of any leisure he had to training his men in the essentials of modern warfare, his spare time being willingly sacrificed for their benefit.

No man was ever paraded before him with a genuine grievance that he did not endeavour to rectify. In some manner he would, nine times out of ten, turn a “hard case” into a good soldier. One of his greatest powers was his particularly winning smile. When his honest eyes were on you, when his lips curved and two faint dimples showed in his cheeks, it was impossible not to like him. Even those who envied him--and among his brother officers there were not a few--could not bring themselves to say anything against him.

If he had a failing it was a weakness for pretty women, but his manner towards an old peasant woman, even though she was dirty and hideous, was, if anything, more courteous than towards a woman of his own class. He could not bear to see them doing work for which he considered they were unfit. One day he carried a huge washing-basket full of clothes down the main street of a little village in Picardy, through a throng of soldiers, rather than see the poor old dame he had met staggering under her burden go a step farther unaided.

The Colonel happened to see him, and spoke to him rather sharply about it. His answer was characteristic: “I’m very sorry, sir. I forgot about what the men might think when I saw the poor old creature. In fact, sir, if you’ll pardon my saying so, I would not mind much if they did make fun of it.”

He loved children. He never had any loose coppers or small change long, and two of his comrades surprised him on one occasion slipping a five-franc note into the crinkled rosy palm of a very, very new baby. “He looked so jolly cute asleep,” he explained simply.

Almost all his fellow-officers owed him money. He was a poor financier, and when he had a cent it belonged to whoever was in need of it at the time.

One morning at dawn, he led a little patrol to examine some new work in the German front line. He encountered an unsuspected enemy listening post, and he shot two of the three Germans, but the remaining German killed him before his men could prevent it. They brought his body back and he was given a soldier’s grave between the trenches. There he lies with many another warrior, taking his rest, while his comrades mourn the loss of a fine soldier and gallant gentleman.

“S.R.D.”

When the days shorten, and the rain never ceases; when the sky is ever grey, the nights chill, and the trenches thigh deep in mud and water; when the front is altogether a beastly place, in fact, we have one consolation. It comes in gallon jars, marked simply “S.R.D.” It does not matter how wearied the ration party may be, or how many sacks of coke, biscuits, or other rations may be left by the wayside, the rum always arrives.

Once, very long ago, one of a new draft broke a bottle on the way up to Coy. H.Q. (The rum, by the way, _always_ goes to Coy. H.Q.) For a week his life was not worth living. The only thing that saved him from annihilation was the odour of S.R.D., which clung to him for days. The men would take a whiff before going on a working-party, and on any occasion when they felt low and depressed.

There are those who would deny Tommy his three spoonfuls of rum in the trenches; those who declare that a man soaked to the skin, covered with mud, and bitterly cold, is better with a cayenne pepper lozenge. Let such people take any ordinary night of sentry duty on the Western front in mid-winter, and their ideas will change. There are not one, but numberless occasions, on which a tot of rum has saved a man from sickness, possibly from a serious illness. Many a life-long teetotaler has conformed to S.R.D. and taken the first drink of his life on the battle-fields of France, not because he wanted to, but because he had to. Only those who have suffered from bitter cold and wet, only those who have been actually “all-in” know what a debt of gratitude is owing to those wise men who ordered a small ration of rum for every soldier--officer, N.C.O., and man--on the Western front in winter.

The effect of rum is wonderful, morally as well as physically. In the pelting rain, through acres of mud, a working-party of fifty men plough their weary way to the Engineers’ dump, and get shovels and picks. In single file they trudge several kilometres to the work in hand, possibly the clearing out of a fallen-in trench, which is mud literally to the knees. They work in the mud, slosh, and rain, for at least four hours. Four hours of misery--during which any self-respecting Italian labourer would lose his job rather than work--and then they traipse back again to a damp, musty billet, distant five or six kilometres. To them, that little tot of rum is not simply alcohol. It is a God-send. Promise it to them before they set out, and those men will work like Trojans. Deny it to them, and more than half will parade sick in the morning.

It is no use, if the rum ration is short, to water it down. The men know it is watered, and their remarks are “frequent and painful, and free!” Woe betide the officer who, through innocence or intentionally, looks too freely on the rum when it is brown! His reputation is gone for ever. If he became intoxicated on beer, champagne, or whisky, he would only be envied by the majority of his men, but should he drink too much rum--that is an unpardonable offence!

As a rule, one of the hardest things in the world to do is to awaken men once they have gone to sleep at night. For no matter what purpose, it will take a company a good half-hour to pull itself together and stand to. But murmur softly to the orderly Sergeant that there will be a rum issue in ten minutes, and though it be 1 A.M. or the darkest hour before dawn, when the roll is called hardly a man will be absent! That little word of three letters will rouse the most soporific from their stupor!

Few men take their rum in the same fashion or with the same expression. The new draft look at it coyly, carry the cup gingerly to their lips, smell it, make a desperate resolution, gulp it down, and cough for five minutes afterwards. The old hands--the men of rubicund countenance and noses of a doubtful hue--grasp the cup, look to see if the issue is a full one, raise it swiftly, and drain it without a moment’s hesitation, smacking their lips. You can see the man who was up for being drunk the last pay-day coming from afar for his rum. His eyes glisten, his face shines with hopefulness, and his whole manner is one of supreme expectation and content.

It is strange how frequently the company staff, from the Sergeant-Major down to the most recently procured batman, find it necessary to enter the inner sanctum of H.Q. after the rum has come. The Sergeant-Major arrives with a large, sweet smile, acting as guard of honour. “Rum up, sir.” “Thank you, Sergeant-Major.” “I’ve detailed that working-party, sir.” “Thank you, Sergeant-Major.” “Is that all, sir?” “Yes, thank you, Sergeant-Major.” He vanishes, to reappear a minute later. “Did you CALL me, sir?” “No” ... long pause ... “Oh! Still there? Er, have a drink, Sergeant-Major?” “Well, sir, I guess I _could_ manage a little drop! Thank you, sir. _Good_-night, sir!”

BEDS

“Think of my leave coming in two weeks, and of getting a decent bed to sleep in, with sheets!”

Sancho Panza blessed sleep, but perhaps he always had a good bed to sleep in; we, who can almost slumber on “apron” wire, have a weakness for good beds.

To appreciate fully what a good bed is, one must live for a time without one, and go to rest wrapped in a martial cloak--to wit a British warm or a trench coat, plus the universal sand-bag, than which nothing more generally useful has been seen in this war. Any man who has spent six months (in the infantry) at the front knows all about beds. Any man with a year’s service is a first-class, a number one, connoisseur. The good bed is so rare that whoever spends a night in one talks about it for a week, and brings it up in reminiscences over the charcoal brazier.

“You remember when we were on the long hike from the salient? And the little place we struck the third night--Cattelle-Villeul I think it was called? By George, I had a good bed. A peach! It had a spring mattress and real linen sheets--not cotton--and two pillows with frilly things on them, and a ripping quilt, with a top-hole eider-down. I was afraid to get into it until my batman produced that new pair of green pyjamas with the pink stripes. It simply hurt to give that bed up!”

And if you let him he will continue in like vein for half an hour. Recollections of that bed have entered into his soul; it is one of the bright spots in a gloomy life.

Needless to say, the farther you go back from the line, the better the beds. They can be roughly classified as follows: Battle beds. Front line beds. Support beds. Reserve beds. Divisional rest beds. Corps reserve beds, and Army Reserve beds. Beyond this it is fifty-fifty you will get a good bed, provided there are not too many troops in the place you go to.

Battle beds, as such, are reserved for battalion commanders, seconds in command, and adjutants. Sometimes Os.C. units have a look-in, but the humble sub. has _not_, unless he is one of those Johnnies who can always make something out of nothing.