Chapter 9

A REINFORCEMENTS CAMP

I

_The Sunny Valley_

The reinforcements camp lay pleasantly in a sunny valley. The nearest town was Harfleur, besieged exactly five hundred years earlier by Henry V. of England, who placed his chief reliance on his big guns and his mines and was not disappointed. The camp commandant was insistent that the ground round the tents and huts should be turned into gardens, and before long the valley was bright with flowers. There was peace over all the landscape here. Sometimes a train of horse trucks, crowded with men standing at the sliding doors or sitting with legs dangling over the rails, panted up the long slope past the foot of the valley, and every evening the supply trains pulled slowly off on their way to the front, each laden with one day's rations for twelve thousand men. Fresh drafts for the infantry and artillery arrived every day, stayed a few days, and then were sent up the line. Probably a thousand men a month would be a fair estimate for the wastage from a division at that time, that is, the whole Expeditionary Force had to be renewed completely once a year, as far as its fighting units were concerned. Drafts therefore were continually passing through our camp, and I had many opportunities of studying the morale of individuals of all ranks. The result was interesting and worth setting down. My experience was that the good heart of fighting men was affected by only two avoidable causes. The first was the large number of young able-bodied men engaged in occupations, on the lines of communications and at the base, which might have been carried through effectively by others. These young men never were in danger, while those who happened to have enlisted in combatant corps were sent back to face death again and again. This (we are told) has now been rectified, but it was for long a source of great soreness. The second influence making for soreness was the amazing amount of wrangling that went on at home, among the newspapers, between masters and men, and so on. Officers would get furious with the conduct of the 'workers,' and condemn them wholesale as a class. One had to be at once cautious and persistent in bringing home to them the fact that their own men, whom they admired and loved, whom they knew would follow them anywhere, were drawn from just the same class as those men who were out on strike. Another reason why it would have been better to have had older men and married men at the bases lay in the temptations surrounding the men there on every side. These also have to be reckoned with as part of the inevitable cost of war. It says much for the grit and character of the average Briton that so many come through unscathed.

II

_The Man from Skye_

As I was going round the tents one day I had a long talk with a man in a draft just leaving for the front to join a Highland regiment. He had not been long out of hospital, and, like his companions, had scarcely pulled himself together after the sadness of a second farewell. Following a good plan of always handing on any rumour, however improbable, which is of a thoroughly cheerful nature I said, referring to a report that was current in the messes that morning, 'They say Lord Kitchener says it will be all over by September.' He looked at me very seriously and said sternly, 'It iss not for Lord Kitchener to say when the war will be over. It iss only for God to say that.' Presently he said, 'And what iss more, I will nefer see Skye again.' I had tried every way in vain to lift his foreboding from him, and now I said sternly like himself, 'It is not for you to say whether you will ever see Skye again; only God can know that.' He moved a little, restlessly, and answered slowly, 'Yess, that iss so, but--yess, it iss so.' Sometimes when we were asking one another that old familiar unanswerable question I would tell the story of the man from Skye and his answer to the problem. We were very glad to hear a few weeks later that he had been discharged as permanently unfit, and was by then in his loved misty isle.

The Principal Chaplain visited the camp during my chaplaincy there. The Rev. Dr. Simms, who ranks as a major-general, has charge of all chaplains other than those of the Church of England. His tall, distinguished, unassuming figure will always stand, in the minds of those who were under his administration, for infinite kindness, wisdom, and scrupulous fairness between all parties. Dr. Wallace Williamson of St. Giles', Edinburgh, who was visiting the troops in France, accompanied him. Their service on Sunday was very moving. Hearts were near the surface in those brief days between the farewell and the battlefield. The three Scotsmen whom I knew best of those who were at this service are all dead: one fell at Loos, one in Mesopotamia, and one on the Somme. The oldest of them, who was an officer in a Guards battalion, could not speak and his eyes were full of tears. There was no possibility here of the remark that one Lowlander made to another after listening to a very celebrated London preacher: 'Aye, it was beautiful, and he cud mak' ye see things too, whiles; but, man! there was nae _logic_ in 't.'

It was about this time that we heard of the sinking of the _Lusitania_. Somehow from this moment we knew better where we were and for what we fought. Every one's thoughts were very grim. This was sheer naked wickedness done plainly and coldly in the sight of God and man.

III

'_You can hear them now_'

One broiling afternoon as I sat talking with a friend in my tent an orderly came to the door and said to him, 'Message for you, sir.' He glanced at it. It was his orders to join his battalion at the front. We shook hands and he went off, glad to be on the move again after hanging about waiting so long. In five minutes the orderly was back with orders for me to proceed at once to the 2nd London Territorial Casualty Clearing Station. I said good-bye to Adams, my servant. No man was ever more fortunate in his batmen--Adams, a typical regular, fiercely proud of his regiment; Campion, the London Territorial, a commercial traveller in civil life; and Munro, the Royal Scot, who within a month or two of the outbreak of war could no longer suppress the fighting spirit of the Royal Regiment stirring within him, and voluntarily rejoined, leaving a wife and six children behind him. He was a foreman in the Edinburgh Tramways Company. Handy man that he was, he could turn his hand to anything, whether it was devising a ferrule for a broken walking stick out of the screw of a pickle bottle, or making a bleak-looking hut habitable, or producing hot tea from nowhere, or transforming a wet-canteen marquee into a decent place for Communion (empty tobacco boxes for table, beer barrels discreetly out of sight), or building a pulpit out of sandbags in the corner of a roofless saloon bar.

The supply train left at a very early hour, and by devious routes reluctantly approached the railhead. The journey took thirty hours. It was long enough to teach the lessons never to go on a military train in France without something to read, or to drink rashly from an aluminium cup containing hot liquid, or to rely on bully beef as a sole article of diet. Towards evening the Irishman in charge of the train had pity and took me along--we had stopped for the thirty-fifth time--to admire his Primus stove in full blast, and to share his excellent dinner. But (stove or no stove) the world is divided into those who can do that sort of thing and those who cannot; who, wrestling futilely with refractory elements, wish they had never been born.

He said that before we reached the railhead we would probably hear the sound of the guns. The phrase is used to barrenness, even to ridicule, but the reality when first heard rings a new emotion in your breast. The night was windless and warm, and about ten o'clock as we stood in a wayside station the Ulsterman came up to me and said, 'Listen, you can hear them now.' And away to the east could be heard a deep shaking sound rising and fading away in the still air--the sound of British artillery fighting day and night against yet overwhelming odds.

Twenty hours later, after many wanderings, a friendly Field Ambulance car deposited me at the door of the mess of the clearing station, where the arrival of a 'Scotch minister' had been awaited with a good deal of curiosity and possibly some apprehension.

A CLEARING STATION WHEN THERE IS 'NOTHING TO REPORT'