Chapter 14

Bailleul is mean in comparison, though it has a notable church tower in which there are traces of some Byzantine imagination brought hither, perhaps, by a Spanish Army of occupation. Also it has a tea-room which is the trysting-place of all the officers in billets, and the _châtelaine_ of which answers your lame and halting French in nimble English. On the road to Locre it has those Baths and Wash-houses which have become so justly famous, and whence hosts of British soldiers come forth like Naaman white as snow, but infinitely more companionable. Almost any day you may see a bathing-towel unit marching thither or thence in column of route, their towels held at the slope or the trail as it pleases their fancy. And in a field outside Bailleul I have seen open-air smithies and the glow of hot coals, the air resounding with the clink of hammers upon the anvil--a cheering spectacle on a wet and inclement winter's day. But Bailleul has few amenities and no charms. It is, however, occasionally visited by that amazing troupe of variety artistes, known as the Army Pierrots, who provide the men in billets with a most delectable entertainment for 50 centimes, the proceeds being a "deodand," and appropriated to charitable uses. For all that, Bailleul stinks in the nostrils of fatigue-parties.

Bethune is like the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land, for it is the rendezvous of the British Army, and men tramp miles to warm their hands at its fires of social life. Its _pâtisserie_ has the choicest cakes, and its hairdresser's the most soothing unguents of any town in our occupation. It has a great market-place, where the peasants do a thriving business every Saturday, producing astonished rabbits by the ears from large sacks, like a conjuror, and holding out live and plaintive fowls for sensual examination by pensive housewives. Also it has a town-hall in which I once witnessed the trial by court-martial of a second-lieutenant in the R.A.M.C. for ribaldry in his cups and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman--a spectacle as melancholy as it is rare, and of which the less said the better. It has a church with some lurid glass of indifferent quality, and (if I remember rightly) a curious dovecote of a tower. The transepts are hemmed in by shops and warehouses. To the mediaevalist there is nothing strange in such neighbourliness of the world and the Church. The great French churches of the Middle Ages--witness Nôtre Dame d'Amiens with its inviting ambulatory--were places of municipal debate, and their sculpture was, to borrow the bold metaphor of Viollet-le-Duc, a political "liberty of speech" at a time when the chisel of the sculptor might say what the pen of the scrivener dared not, for fear of the common hangman, express. Bethune is not the only place where I have seen shops coddling churches, and the conjunction was originally less impertinent than it now seems. It was not that the Church was profaned, but that the world was consecrated; honest burgesses trading under the very shadow of the flying buttresses were reminded that usury was a sin, and that to charge a "just price" was the beginning of justification by works. But I have not observed that the shopkeepers of Bethune now entertain any very mediaeval compunction about charging the British soldier an unjust price.

Armentières is on the high road to Lille, but at present there is no thoroughfare. It's a dispiriting town, given over to industrial pursuits, and approached by rows of mean little cottages such as you may see on the slopes of the mining valleys of South Wales. Two things stand out in my memory--one, the spectacle of a corporal being tried for his life in the Town Hall by a court-martial--there had been a quarrel over a girl in billets and he had shot his comrade; the other the sight of a regiment of Canadians ("Princess Pat's," I believe), drawn up in the square for parade one winter afternoon before they went into the trenches for the first time. And a very gallant and hefty body of men they were.

Poperinghe is a dismal place, and to be avoided.

Hazebrouck is not without some pretentiousness. It has the largest _place_ of any of them, with a town-hall of imposing appearance, but something of a whited sepulchre for all that. I remember calling on a civilian dignitary there--I forget what he was; he sat in a long narrow corridor-like room, all the windows were hermetically sealed, a gas-stove burnt pungently, some fifty people smoked cigarettes, and at intervals the dignitary spat upon the floor and then shuffled his foot over the spot as a concession to public hygiene. Therefore I did not tarry. The precincts of the railway-station are often crowded by batches of German prisoners, villainous-looking rascals, and usually of the earth earthy. I watched some of them entraining one day; with them was a surly German officer who looked at his fellow-prisoners with contempt, the crowd of inhabitants with dislike, and (so it seemed to me) his guards with hatred. No one spoke to him, and he stood apart in melancholy insolence. Perhaps he was the German officer of whom the story is told that, being conducted to the Base in a third-class carriage in the company of some of his own men, and under the escort of some British soldiers, he declaimed all the way down against being condemned to such low society, until one of his guards, getting rather "fed up" with it all, bluntly cut him short with the admonition: "Stow it, governor, we'd have hired a blooming Pullman if we'd known we was going to have the pleasure of your society. Yus, and we'd have had Sir John French 'ere to meet you. But yer'll have to put up with us low fellows for a bit instead, which if yer don't like it, yer can lump it, and if yer won't lump it, where will yer have it?" and he tapped his bayonet invitingly. Needless to say, the speaker's pleasantry was impracticable. But the officer did not know that; he only knew the way they have in Germany. Wherefore the officer relapsed into a thoughtful silence.

Hazebrouck has a witty and pleasant _procureur de la République_, who once confided to me that the English were "irresistible." "In war?" I asked. "_Vraiment_," he replied, "but I meant in love."

But the towns occupied by our Army are monotonously lacking in distinction. To tell the truth they wear an impoverished look, and are singularly unprepossessing. I prefer the villages, the small châteaux built on grassy mounds surrounded by moats, and the timbered farm-houses with their red-tiled roofs and barns big enough to billet a whole company at a pinch. The country is one vast bivouac, and every cottage, farm, and mansion is a billet. Near the edge of the Front you may see men who have just come out of action; I remember once meeting a group of Royal Irish, only forty-seven left out of a Company, who had been in the attack by the 8th Division at Fleurbaix, and I gazed at them with something of the respectful consternation with which the Babylonians must have regarded Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego after their ordeal in the fiery furnace. Yet nothing of their demeanour betrayed the brazen fury they had gone through; they sat by the hedge cleaning their accoutrements with the utmost nonchalance. They reminded me of the North Staffords, one of whose officers, whom I know very well, when I asked him what were his impressions of a battle, replied, after some reflection: "I haven't got any; all I can remember of a hot corner we were in near Oultersteen was that my men, while waiting to advance, were picking blackberries." It was a man of the North Staffords who, according to the same unimpeachable authority, was heard shouting out when half the trench was blown in by a shell, and he had extricated himself with difficulty: "'Ere, where's my pipe? Some one's pinched my pipe!"

But it isn't always quite as comforting as that. The servant of a friend of mine, a young subaltern in the Black Watch, whom, alas! like so many other friends, I shall never see again, in describing the church parade held after the battle of Loos, in which his master was killed by a shell, wrote that when the chaplain gave out the hymn "Rock of Ages" the men burst into tears, their voices failed them, and they broke down utterly. And I remember that on one occasion when some four-fifths of the officers of a certain battalion had gone down in the advance, and the shaken remnant fell back upon their trenches, deafened and distraught, one of the officers--he had been a master in a great public school before the war--took out of his pocket a copy of the _Faerie Queene_, and began in a slow, even voice to read the measured cadences of one of its cantos, and, having read, handed it to a subaltern and asked him to follow suit. The others listened, half in wonder, half in fear, thinking he had lost his senses, but there was method in his madness and a true inspiration. The musical rhythm of the words distracted their terrible memories, and soon acted like a charm upon their disordered nerves.

And on his breast a bloody cross he bore, The dear remembrance of his dying Lord, For whose sweet sake that glorious badge he wore, And dead (as living) ever him adored: Upon his shield the like was also scored, For sovereign hope, which in his help he had: Right faithful true he was in deed and word; But of his cheer did seem too solemn sad: Yet nothing did he dread, but ever was ydrad.

Clusters of men in billets; men doing a route-march to keep them fit; Indian cavalry jogging along on the footpath with lances in rest; herds of tethered horses in rest-camps; a string of motor-buses painted a khaki-tint; a "mobile" (a travelling workshop) with its dynamo humming like a top and the mechanics busy upon the lathe; an Army Postal van coming along, like a friend in need, to tow my car, stranded in the mud, with a long cable; sappers, like Zaccheus, up a tree (but not metaphorically); despatch-riders whizzing past at sixty miles an hour--these are familiar sights of the lines of communication, and they lend a variety to the monotonous countryside without which it would be dull indeed. For it is a countryside of interminable straight lines--straight roads, straight hop-poles, and poplars not less straight, reminding one in winter of one of Hobbema's landscapes without their colouring. But to the south of the zone of our occupation, as you leave G.H.Q. for the Base, you exchange these plains of sticky clay and stagnant dykes for a pleasant country of undulating downs and noble beech woods, and one seems to shake off a nightmare of damp despondency.

It may be remarked that I have said nothing of Ypres. The explanation is painfully simple. Ypres has ceased to exist. It is merely a heap of stones, and the trilithons on Salisbury Plain are not more desolate.

XXIX

THE FRONT ONCE MORE

A witty subaltern once described the present war as a period of long boredom punctuated by moments of intense fear. All men would emphasise the boredom, and most men would admit the fear. The only soldiers I ever met who affected to know nothing of the fear were Afridis, and the Afridi is notoriously a ravisher of truth. But the predominant feeling--in the winter months at any rate--was the boredom. There was a time when some units, owing to the lack of reserves, were only relieved once every three weeks, and time hung heavy on their hands. Under these circumstances they began to take something more than a professional interest in their neighbours opposite. The curiosity was reciprocated. Items of news, more or less mendacious, were exchanged when the trenches were near enough to permit of vocal intercourse. Curious conventions grew up, and at certain hours of the day and, less commonly, of the night, there was a kind of informal armistice. In one section the hour of 8 to 9 A.M. was regarded as consecrated to "private business," and certain places indicated by a flag were regarded as out of bounds by the snipers on both sides. On many occasions working parties toiled with pick and shovel within talking distance of one another, and, although it was, of course, never safe to presume upon immunity, they usually forbore to interfere with one another. The Bedfords and the South Staffords worked in broad daylight with their bodies half exposed above the trenches, raising the parapet as the water rose. About 200 yards away the Germans were doing the same. Neither side interfered with the navvy-work of the other, and for the simplest of all reasons: both were engaged in fighting a common foe--the underground springs. When two parties are both in danger of being drowned they haven't time to fight. To speak of drowning is no hyperbole; the mud of Flanders in winter is in some places like a quicksand, and men have been sucked under beyond redemption. A common misery begat a mutual forbearance.

It was under such circumstances that the following exchange of pleasantries took place. The men of a certain British regiment heard at intervals a monologue going on in the trenches opposite, and every time the speaker stopped his discourse shouts of guttural laughter arose, accompanied by cries of "Bravo, Müller!" "Sehr komisch!" "Noch einmal, Müller!" Our men listened intently, and an acquaintance with German, so imperfect as to be almost negligible, could not long disguise from them the fact that their Saxon neighbours possessed a funny man whose name was Müller. Their interest in Müller, always audible but never visible, grew almost painful. At last they could restrain it no longer. At a given signal they began chanting, like the gallery in a London theatre, except that their voices came from the pit:

We--want--Müller! We--want--Müller! We--want--Müller!

The refrain grew more and more insistent. At last a head appeared above the German parapet. It rose gradually, as though the owner were being hoisted by unseen hands. He rose, as the principal character in a Punch and Judy show rises, with jerky articulations of his members from the ventriloquial depths below. The body followed, until a three-quarter posture was attained. The owner, with his hand upon his heart, bowed gracefully three times and then disappeared. It was Müller!

It is some months since I was in the British trenches,[28] and I often wonder how our men have accommodated themselves to the ever-increasing multiplication of the apparatus of war. The fire trenches I visited were about wide enough to allow two men to pass one another--and that was all. Obviously the wider your trench the greater your exposure to the effects of shell-fire, and if we go on introducing trench-mortars, and gas-pumps, and gas-extinguishers, to say nothing of a great store of bombs, as pleasing in variety and as startling in their effects as Christmas crackers, our trenches will soon be as full of furniture as a Welsh miner's parlour. But doubtless the sappers have arranged all that. Some of these improvements are viewed by company officers without enthusiasm. The trench-mortar, for example, is distinctly unpopular, for it draws the enemy's fire, besides being an uncanny thing to handle, although the handling is done not by the company but by a "battery" of R.G.A. men, who come down and select a "pitch." I have seen a trench-mortar in action--it is like a baby howitzer, and makes a prodigious noise. Our own men deprecate it and the enemy resent it. It is an invidious thing. The gas-extinguisher is less objectionable, and, incidentally, less exacting in the matter of accommodation. It is a large copper vessel resembling nothing so much as the fire-extinguishing cylinders one sees in public buildings at home. About our gas-pumps I know nothing except by hearsay. They are in charge of "corporals" in the chemical corps of the sappers, and your corporal is, in nine cases out of ten, a man whose position in the scientific world at home is one of considerable distinction. He is usually a lecturer or Assistant-Professor in Chemistry at one of our University Colleges who has left his test-tubes and quantitative analysis for the more exciting allurements of the trenches. I sometimes wonder what name the fertile brain of the British soldier has found for him--probably "the squid." He has three gases in his repertoire, each more deadly than the other. One of them is comparatively innocuous--it disables without debilitating; and its effect passes off in about twenty minutes. The truth is that we do not take very kindly to the use of this kind of thing. Still, our men know their business, and our gas, whichever variety it was, played a very effective part in the capture of the Hohenzollern Redoubt.

For the greater part of the winter months the "Front" was, to all appearances above ground, as deserted as the Sahara and almost as silent. Everybody who had to be there was, for obvious reasons, invisible, and the misguided wayfarer who found himself between the lines was in a wilderness whose intimidating silence was occasionally interrupted by the sound of projectiles coming he knew not whence and going he knew not whither. The effect was inexpressibly depressing. But a mile or two behind our lines all was animation, for here were Battalion and Brigade Headquarters, all linked up by a network of field telephones, which in turn communicated with Divisional Headquarters farther back. Baskets of carrier-pigeons under the care of a pigeon fancier, who figures in the Army List as a captain in the R.E., are kept at these places for use in sudden emergency when the wires get destroyed by shell-fire. The sappers must, I think, belong to the order of Arachnidae; they appear to be able to spin telephone wires out of their entrails at the shortest notice. Moreover, they possess an uncanny adhesiveness, and a Signal Company man will leg up a tree with a coil of wire on his arm and hang glutinously, suspended by his finger-tips, while he enjoys the view. These acrobatic performances are sometimes exchanged for equestrian feats. He has been known to lay cable for two miles across country at a gallop with the cable-drum paying out lengths of wire. The sapper is the "handy man" of the Army.

The location of these Headquarters on our side of the line is a constant object of solicitude to the enemy on the other. Very few officers even on our side know where they all are. I had confided to me, for the purpose of my official duties, a complete list of such Headquarters, and the first thing I did, in pursuance of my instructions, was to commit it to memory and then burn it. To find out the enemy's H.Q.--with a view to making them as unhealthy as possible--is almost entirely the work of aeroplane reconnaissance. To discover the number and composition of the units whose H.Q. they are is the work of our "Intelligence." Of our Intelligence work the less said the better--by which I intend no aspersion but quite the contrary. The work is extraordinarily effective, but half its effectiveness lies in its secrecy. It is all done by an elaborate process of induction. I should hesitate to say that the "I" officers discover the location of the H.Q. of captured Germans by a geological analysis of the mud on the soles of their boots, in the classical manner of Sherlock Holmes; but I should be equally indisposed to deny it. There is nothing too trivial or insignificant to engage the detective faculties of an "I" man. He has to allow a wide margin for the probability of error in his calculations; shoulder-straps, for example, are no longer conclusive data as to the composition of the enemy's units, for the intelligent Hun has taken of late to forging shoulder-straps with the same facility as he forges diplomatic documents. Oral examination of prisoners has to be used with caution. But there are other resources of which I shall say nothing. It is not too much to say, however, that we have now a pretty complete comprehension of the strength, composition, and location of most German brigades on the Western front. Possibly the Germans have of ours. One thing is certain. Any one who has seen the way in which an Intelligence staff builds up its data will not be inclined to criticise our military authorities for what may seem to an untutored mind a mere affectation of mystery about small things. In war it is never safe to say _De minimis non curatur_.

If "I" stands for the Criminal Investigation Department (and the study of the Hun may be legitimately regarded as a department of criminology) the Provost-Marshal and his staff may be described as a kind of Metropolitan Police. The P.M. and his A.P.M.'s are the _Censores Morum_ of the occupied towns, just as the Camp Commandants are the _Aediles_. It is the duty of an A.P.M. to round up stragglers, visit _estaminets_, keep a cold eye on brothels, look after prisoners, execute the sentences of courts-martial, and control street traffic. Which means that he is more feared than loved. He is never obtrusive but he is always there. I remarked once when lunching with a certain A.P.M. that although I had already been three weeks at G.H.Q., and had driven through his particular district daily, I had never once been stopped or questioned by his police. "No," he said quietly, "they reported you the first day two minutes after you arrived in your car, and asked for instructions; we telephoned to G.H.Q. and found you were attached to the A.G.'s staff, and they received orders accordingly. Otherwise you might have had quite a lively time at X----," which was the next stage of my journey. G.H.Q. itself is patrolled by a number of Scotland Yard men, remarkable for their self-effacing habits and their modest preference for dark doorways. Indeed it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than to get into that town--or out of it. As for the "Society ladies," of whom one hears so much, I never saw one of them. If they were there they must have been remarkably disguised, and none of us knew anything of them. A conversational lesson in French or English may be had gratuitously by any Englishman or Frenchman who tries to get into G.H.Q.; as he approaches the town he will find a French sentry on the left and an English sentry on the right, the one with a bayonet like a needle, the other with a bayonet like a table-knife, and each of them takes an immense personal interest in you and is most anxious to assist you in perfecting your idiom. They are students of phonetics, too, in their way, and study your gutturals with almost pedantic affection for traces of Teutonisms. If the sentry thinks you are not getting on with your education he takes you aside like Joab, and smites you under the fifth rib--at least I suppose he does. If he is satisfied he brings his right hand smartly across the butt of his rifle, and by that masonic sign you know that you will do. But it is a mistake to continue the conversation.

Still, holders of authorised passes sometimes lose them, and unauthorised persons sometimes get hold of them and "convert" them to their own unlawful uses. The career of these adventurers is usually as brief as it is inglorious; when apprehended they are handed over to the French authorities, and the place that knew them knows them no more. They are shot into some mysterious _oubliette_. The rest is silence, or, as a mediaeval chronicler would say, "Let him have a priest."