II THE FRONT

VII

THE TWO RICHEBOURGS

We had business with the maire of the commune of Richebourg St. Vaast. Any one who looks at a staff map of North-West France will see that there are two Richebourgs; there is Richebourg St. Vaast, but there is also Richebourg l'Avoué, and although those two communes are separated by a bare three or four kilometres there was in point of climate a considerable difference between the two. In those days we had not yet taken Neuve Chapelle, and Richebourg l'Avoué, which was in front of our lines, was considered "unhealthy." Richebourg St. Vaast, on the other hand, was well behind our lines and was considered by our billeting officers quite a good residential neighbourhood.

We had left G.H.Q., and after a journey of two hours or so passed through Laventie, which had been rather badly mauled by shell-fire, and began to thread our way through the skein of roads and by-roads that enmeshes the two Richebourgs. The natural features of the country were inscrutable, and landmarks there were none. The countryside grew absolutely deserted and the solitary farms were roofless and untenanted. Eventually we found our road blocked by a barricade of fallen masonry in front of a village which was as inhospitable as the Cities of the Plain.

A vast silence brooded over the landscape, broken now and again by a noise like the crackling of thorns under a pot. As we took cover behind a wall of ruined houses we heard a sinister hiss, but whence it came or what invisible trajectory it traced through the leaden skies overhead neither of us could tell. Silence again fell like a mist upon the land; not a bird sang, not a twig moved. The winter sun was sinking in the west behind a pall of purple cloud in a lacquered sky—the one touch of colour in the sombre greyness. The land was flat as the palm of one's hand, its monotony relieved only by lines of pollarded willows on which some sappers had strung a field telephone. Raindrops hung on the copper wire like a string of pearls, and the heavy clay of the fields was scooped and moulded by the rain into little saucer-like depressions as if by a potter's thumb. Behind us lay the reserve trenches, their clay walls shored up with wickerwork, and their outskirts fringed with barbed wire whose intricate and volatile coils looked like thistledown. The village behind whose walls we now sheltered lay in a No Man's Land between the enemy's lines and our own, and the sodden fields were not more desolate.

A tornado of artillery fire had swept over it, and of the houses nothing was left but indecencies, shattered walls and naked rafters, beneath which were choked heaps of household furniture, broken beds, battered lamps, and a wicker-chair overturned as in a drunken brawl. What had once been the street was now a quarry of broken bricks, with here and there vast circular craters as though a gigantic oak-tree had been torn out of the earth by the roots. And now the weird silence was broken by sounds as of some one playing a lonely tattoo with his fingers upon a hollow wooden board, but the player was invisible, and as we looked at each other the sound ceased as suddenly as it began. Our practised ear told us that somewhere near us a machine-gun was concealed, but these furtive sounds were so homeless, so impersonal, that they eluded us like an echo.

It was this complete absence of visible human agency that impressed us most disagreeably, as with a sense of being utterly forlorn amid a play of the elements, like Lear upon the heath. There came into my mind, as our eyes groped for some human sign in the brooding landscape, the thought of the prophet upon the mount amid the wind and the earthquake and the fire seeking the presence of his God and finding it not. And here too all these assaults upon our senses were fugitive and ghostly, and we felt ourselves encompassed about as by some great conspiracy. We walked curiously up the little street until we reached the last house in the village, and came out beyond the screen of its wall. At the same instant something sang past my ear like the twang of a Jew's harp, my foot caught in a coil of wire, and I fell headlong. My companion, lagging behind and not yet clear of the friendly wall, stopped dead and cried to me not to stand up. I crawled back among the rubbish to the cover of the house. We took counsel together. To retreat were perilous, but to advance might be fatal. We lowered our voices as, cowering behind walls, and picking our way delicately among the débris, we crept back to our car behind the entrance to the village. The driver started the engine and we moved forlornly along the narrow causeway, skirting the unfathomable mud that lay on either side, until we spied a ruined farmhouse where a company had made its billet and mud-coloured knots of soldiers stood round braziers of glowing coals. We had some parley with the company commander, who was of the earth earthy. His words were few and discouraging. As we crawled on, darkness enveloped us, but we dared not light our head-lamps. Suddenly the car slipped on the greasy road, staggered, and lurched over into the morass, hurling us violently upon our sides. We clambered out and contemplated it solemnly as we saw our right wheels over the axles in mud. No friendly billet was now in sight, and as we stood profanely considering our plight the darkness behind us was split by a long shaft of greenish light, and the whole landscape was illuminated with a pallid glow, as the German star-shells discharged themselves over the fan-like tops of the elms silhouetted against the sky. The jack was useless in the soft mud, it sank like a stone, and as we shoved and cursed we awaited each fresh discharge of the star-shells with increasing apprehension, for we presented an obvious target to the enemy's snipers. On the seat of the car was my despatch-box, and in that box was a little dossier of papers marked "O.H.M.S. German Atrocities. Secret and Confidential." "If the Germans catch us there'll be one atrocity the more," remarked my Staff Officer grimly, "but they'll spare us the labour of recording it."

Our futile efforts were interrupted by the sound of feet upon the causeway as a column of reliefs loomed up out of the darkness. A hurried altercation in low tones, a subdued word of command, and a dozen men, their rifles and entrenching tools slung over their shoulders, applied themselves to the back of our car, and slowly it slithered out of the mud. The column broke into file to allow us to pass, my companion went on ahead with a tiny electric torch to show the way, and with infinite caution we nudged slowly along the rank, the faint light of the torch bringing face after face out of the darkness into chiaroscuro, faces young and fresh and ruddy. Not a word was spoken save a whispered command carried down the rank, mouth to ear, "No smoking, no talking "—"No smoking, no talking "—"No talking, no smoking." Mules, carrying sections of machine-guns and packs of straw, loomed up out of the darkness as we passed, until the last of the column was reached and the frieze of ghostly figures was swallowed up into the night. We drew a long breath, for we knew now from the colonel of the battalion whose men had delivered us from that Slough of Despond that we had been within 150 yards of the German lines. We had mistaken Richebourg l'Avoué for Richebourg St. Vaast.

VIII

IDOLS OF THE CAVE

Like the Cyclopes they dwelt in hollow caves, and each Colonel uttered the law to his children and recked not of the others except when the Brigadier came round. True there were two and a half battalions in their line of 2700 yards, but all they knew was that the next battalion to their own was the Highlanders; it was only when the five days were up and they were marched back to billets that they were able to cultivate that somewhat exclusive society. Their trenches were like the suburbs, they were faintly conscious that people lived in the next street, but they never saw them. Their neighbours were as self-contained and silent as themselves, except when their look-outs or machine-guns became loquacious. Then they too became eloquent, and the whole line talked freely at the Germans 200 yards away. By day the men slept heavily on straw in hollows under the parapet, supported with crates and sprinkled with chloride of lime; by night they were out at the listening posts, in the sap-heads, or behind the parapet, with their eyes glued to the field of yellow mustard in front of us. They had watched that field for three months. They knew every blade of grass therein. No experimental agriculturist ever studied his lucerne and sainfoin as they have studied the grasses of that field. They have watched it from winter to spring; they have seen the lesser celandine give way to pink clover and sorrel, and the grass shoot up from an inch to a foot. They have, indeed, been studying not botany but ethnology, searching for traces of that species of primitive man known to anthropologists as the Hun. They have never found him except once, when one of our look-outs saw something crawling across that field about midnight and promptly emptied his magazine. In the morning they saw a grey figure lying out in the open; the days passed and the long grass sprang up and concealed it till nothing was left to attest its obscene presence except a little cloud of black flies. Their horizon is bounded by rows of sand-bags, and their interest in those sand-bags is only equalled by their interest in the field in front of them. Occasionally one of our men finds them more than usually interesting. There is a loud report, the click of a bolt, and the pungent smell of burnt cordite. Then all is still again.

The tangent-sight on the standard of their machine-gun is always at 200, and they have not altered the range for three months. Occasionally at night the N.C.O. seizes the traversing-handles, and with his thumb on the button slowly sweeps that range of sand-bags, till the feed-block sucks up the cartridge-belt like a chaff-cutter and the empty cartridge-cases lie as thick round the tripod as acorns under an oak. The Huns reply by taking a flashlight photograph of us with a calcium flare, and then all is still again. In such excursions and alarms do they pass the long night.

Though five-sixths of them slept stertorously in their holes by day, by night they were as wakeful as owls, and not less predatory. Life in the trenches is one long struggle for existence, and in the course of it they developed those acquired characteristics whereby the birds of the air and the beasts of the field maintain themselves in a world of carnage. They learnt to walk delicately on the balls of their feet as silently as hares, to see in the dark like foxes, to wriggle like the creeping things of the field, to lower their voices with the direction of the wind, to select a background with the moonlight, and to stand motionless on patrol with muscles rigid like a pointer when the star-shells dissolved the security of the night. They studied to dissemble with their lips and to imitate the vocabulary of nature. They grew more and more chary of human speech, and listening posts talked with the trenches by pulls on a fishing-reel. They never sheathed their claws, and working-parties wore their equipment as though it were the integument of nature. Bayonets were never unfixed unless the moon were very bright. At night they scraped out their earths like a badger, and, like the badger's, those earths were exceeding clean. The men were numbered off by threes from the flank, and one in three watched for two hours while the other two worked, repairing parapets, strengthening entanglements, and filling sand-bags. Every half-hour the N.C.O. on duty crept round to report, or to post and relieve, while now and again a patrol went out to observe. All this was done stealthily and with an amazing economy of speech. Night was also the time of their foraging, when the company's rations were brought up the communication trench and handed over by the C.Q.M.S. to each platoon sergeant, who passed them on to the section commander, and he in turn distributed them among his men in such silence and with such little traffic that it seemed like the provision of manna in the wilderness. At dawn pick-axe and spade were laid aside, the rum ration was served out, and all men stood to, for dawn was the hour of their apprehension.

Two miles behind them is a battery of our field guns, and they have with them an observing officer who talks intimately to his battery on the field telephone in that laconic language of which gunners are so fond, such as "One hundred. Twenty minutes to the left." Then the shells sing over their heads with a pretty low trajectory, and the Huns, beginning to get annoyed, reply with their heavy guns. There is a low whistle up aloft, a noise like the fluttering of invisible wings, and the next moment a cloud of black smoke rises over the village of X—— Y——, behind the trenches. The Smoke Prevention Society ought to turn their attention to "Jack Johnsons"; their habits are positively filthy.

These things, however, disturbed them but little and bored them a great deal. So they set to work to make their particular rabbit-warren into a Garden City. They held it on a repairing lease, and were constantly filling sand-bags, but that was merely to prevent depreciation, and didn't count. They first of all paved their trenches with bricks; there was no difficulty about the supply, as the "Jack Johnsons" obligingly acted as house-breakers in the village behind our lines, and bricks could be had for the fetching. Then the orderly transplanted some pansies and forget-me-nots from the garden of a ruined house, and made a border in front of the company commander's dug-out. The communication trench had been carried across a stream with some planks, and one day a man with a gift for carpentry fixed up a balustrade out of the arms of an apple-tree, which had been lopped off by shell, and we had a rustic bridge. When May came, water anemones opened their star-like petals on the surface of the clear amber stream, the orchard through which the communication trench had been cut burst into blossom, the sticky clay walls of the trench became hard as masonry in the sun, and one morning a board appeared with the legend "Hyde Park. Keep off the grass."

With these amenities their manners grew more and more refined. I have read somewhere, in one of those dull collections of sweeping generalisations that are called sociology, that each species of the genus homo has to go through a normal sequence of stages from barbarism to civilisation, and that we were once what the South Sea Islanders are now. Which may be very true, but as regards that particular primitive community I can testify that their social evolution has in three months gone through all the stages that occupy other communities three thousand years. They began as cave-dwellers and they end by occupying suburban villas—the captain's dug-out has a roof of corrugated iron, a window, a book-shelf, a table, and even chairs, and his table manners have vastly improved. They have progressed from candles stuck in bully-beef tins to electric reading-lamps. Three months ago they were hairy men whose beards did grow beneath their shoulders, and their puttees were cemented with wet clay; to-day they are clean-shaven and their Burberrys might be worn in Piccadilly. They slept with nothing between them and the earth but a ground sheet what time they were not, like the elephant, sleeping on their feet and propped against a trench wall. Now they sleep on a bed with a wooden frame. I have read somewhere that for a thousand years Europe was unwashed. It may be so, but I know that this particular tribal community progressed rapidly through all such stages, from a bucket to a shower-bath in billets, in about six weeks, and you can see their men any day washing themselves to the waist near the support trenches—men who a month or two ago had forgotten how to take their clothes off. They are, in fact, a highly civilised community. Some traces of their aboriginal state they still retain, and they cherish their totem, which is a bundle of black ribbons, rather like the flattened leaves of an artichoke, attached to the back of their collars. It is the badge of their tribe. Also at night some of them develop the most primitive of all instincts and crawl out on their stomachs with a hand-grenade to get as near as may be to the enemy's listening posts and taste the joy of killing. But by day they are as demure and sleepy as the tortoiseshell cat which has taken up its quarters in the dug-out.

Such is their life. But they are quietly preparing to get a move on. Some R.G.A. men have arrived with four pretty toys from Vickers's, and one fine morning they are going to disturb those sand-bags opposite them with a battery of trench mortars; our field guns will draw a curtain of shrapnel in front of the German support trenches, and then they will satisfy their curiosity as to what is behind those inscrutable sand-bags.

IX

STOKES'S ACT

An offender when in arrest is not to bear arms except by order of his C.O. or in an emergency.—The King's Regulations.

I

The President of the Court and the Judge-Advocate stood in private colloquy in one of the deep traverse-like windows of the Hôtel de Ville over-looking the Place. A heavy rain was falling from a sullen sky, and the deserted square was a dancing sea of agitation as the raindrops smote the little pools between the cobbles and ricochetted with a multitudinous hiss. Now and again a gust of wind swept across, and the rain rattled against the windows. On the opposite side of the square one of the houses gaped curiously, with bedroom and parlour exposed to view, as though some one had snatched away the walls and laid the scene for one of those Palais Royal farces in which the characters pursue a complicated domestic intrigue on two floors at once. That house, with its bed exposed to the rain dripping from the open rafters, was indeed both farcical and indecent; it stood among its unscathed neighbours like a pariah. The rain was loud and insistent, but not so loud as to dull the distant thunder of the guns. The intermittent gusts of wind now and again interrupted its monotonous theme, but the intervals were as brief as they were violent, and in this polyphonic composition of rain, wind, and guns, the hissing of the raindrops came and went as in a fugue and with an inexpressible mournfulness.

Inside the room was a table covered with green baize, on which were methodically arranged in extended order a Bible, an inkstand, a sheaf of paper, and a copy of the Manual of Military Law. Behind the table were seven chairs, and to the right and left of them stood two others. The seven chairs were for the members of the court; the chair on the extreme right was for the "prisoner's friend," that on the left awaited the Judge-Advocate. About five yards in front of the table, in the centre of an empty space, stood two more chairs turned towards it. Otherwise the room was as bare as a guard-room. And this austere meagreness gave it a certain dignity of its own as of a place where nothing was allowed to distract the mind from the serious business in hand. At the door stood an orderly with a red armlet bearing the imprint of the letters "M.P." in black.

"I have read the summary pretty carefully," the Judge-Advocate was saying, "and it seems to me a clear case. The charge is fully made out. And yet the curious thing is, the fellow has an excellent record, I believe."

"That proves nothing," said the Colonel; "I've had a fellow in my battalion found sleeping at his post on sentry-go, a fellow I could have sworn by. And you know what the punishment for that is. It's these night attacks; the men must not sleep by night and some of them cannot sleep by day, and there are limits to human nature. We've no reserves to speak of as yet, and the men are only relieved once in three weeks. Their feet are always wet, and their circulation goes all wrong. It's the puttees perhaps. And if your circulation goes wrong you can't sleep when you want to, till at last you sleep when you don't want to. Or else your nerves go wrong. I've seen a man jump like a rabbit when I've come up behind him."

"Yes," mused the Judge-Advocate, "I know. But hard cases make bad law."

"Yes, and bad law makes hard cases. Between you and me, our military law is a bit prehistoric. You're a lawyer and know more about it than I do. But isn't there something for civilians called a First Offenders Act? Bind 'em over to come up for judgment if called on—that kind of thing. Gives a man another chance. Why not the soldier too?"

"Yes," replied the Judge-Advocate, "there is. I believe the War Office have been talking about adopting it for years. But this is not the time of day to make changes of that kind. Everybody's worked off his head."

Eight officers had entered the room at intervals, the subalterns a little ahead of their seniors in point of time, as is the first duty of a subaltern whether on parade or at a "general," and, having saluted the President in the window, they stood conversing in low tones.

The Colonel suddenly glanced at his left wrist, walked to the middle chair behind the table, and taking his seat said, "Now, gentlemen, carry on, please!" As they took their places the Colonel, as President of the Court, ordered the prisoner to be brought in. There was a shuffle of feet outside, and a soldier without cap or belt or arms, and with a sergeant's stripes upon his sleeve, was marched in under a sergeant's escort. His face was not unpleasing—the eyes well apart and direct in their gaze, the forehead square, and the contours of the mouth firm and well-cut. The two took their places in front of the chair, and stood to attention. The prisoner gazed fixedly at the letters "R.F.," which flanked the arms of the Republic on the wall above the President's head, and stood as motionless as on parade. A close observer, however, would have noticed that his thumb and forefinger plucked nervously at the seam of his trousers, and that his hands, though held at attention, were never quite still. The escort kept his head covered.

At the President's order to "bring in the evidence," the soldier on duty at the door vanished to return with a squad of seven soldiers in charge of a sergeant, who formed them up in two ranks behind the prisoner and his escort. And they also stood exceeding still.

The President read the order convening the court, and, as he recited each officer's name and regiment, the owner acknowledged it with "Here, sir." When he came to the prisoner's name he looked up and said, "Is that your name and number?" The escort nudged the prisoner, who recalled his attention from the wall with an immense effort and said "Yes, sir."

"Captain Herbert appears as prosecutor and takes his place." As the ritual prescribed by the Red Book was religiously gone through, the prisoner continued to stare at the wall above the President's head, and the rain rattled against the window-panes with intermittent violence. Having finished his recital, the President rose, and with him all the members of the court rose also. He took a Bible in his hand and faced the Judge-Advocate, who exhorted him that he should "well and truly try the accused before the court according to the evidence," and that he would duly administer justice according to the Army Act now in force, without partiality, favour, or affection.... "So help you God." As the colonel raised the book to his lips he chanted the antiphon "So help me God." And the Judge-Advocate proceeded to swear the other members of the court, individually or collectively, three subalterns who were jointly and severally sworn holding the book together with a quaint solemnity, as though they were singing hymns at church out of a common hymn-book. Then the Judge-Advocate was in turn sworn by the President with his own peculiar oath of office, and did faithfully and with great earnestness promise that he would neither divulge the sentence, nor disclose nor discover any votes or opinions as to the same. Which being done, and the President having ordered the military policeman to march out the evidence, the sergeant in charge cried "Left turn. Quick march. Left wheel," and the little cloud of witnesses vanished through the doorway.

The President proceeded to read the charge-sheet:—

"The accused, No. , Sergeant John Stokes, 2nd Battalion Downshire Regiment, is charged with Misbehaving before the enemy in such a manner as to show cowardice, in that he at , on October 3rd, 1914, when on patrol, and when under the enemy's fire, did run away."

All this time the prisoner had been studying the wall, his eyes travelling from the right to the left of the frieze, and then from the left to the right again. It was noticeable that his lips moved slightly at each stage of this laborious visual journey. "Forty-seven." "Forty-nine." "Forty-eight." Stokes was immensely interested in that compelling frieze. He counted and recounted the number of figures in the Greek fret with painful iteration. Apparently he was satisfied at last, and then his eyes began to study the inkstand in front of the President. The President seemed an enormous distance away, but the inkstand very near and very large, and he found himself wondering why it was round, why it wasn't square, or hexagonal, or elliptic. Then he speculated whether the ink was blue or black, or red, and why people never used green or yellow. His brain had gone through all the colours of the spectrum when a pull at his sleeve by the escort attracted his attention. Apparently the Colonel was saying something to him.

"Do you plead guilty or not guilty?"

The prisoner stared, but said nothing. The escort again pulled his sleeve as the Colonel repeated the question.

Stokes cleared his throat, and looking his interlocutor straight in the face, said, "Guilty, sir." The members of the court looked at each other, the Colonel whispered to the Judge-Advocate, the Judge-Advocate to the Prosecutor. The Judge-Advocate turned to the prisoner, "Do you realise," he asked, not unkindly, "that if you plead 'Guilty' you will not be able to call any evidence as to extenuating circumstances?" The prisoner pondered for a moment; it seemed to him that the Judge-Advocate's voice was almost persuasive.

"Well, I'll say 'not guilty,' sir."

He now saw the President quite close to him; that monstrous inkstand had diminished to its natural size. Nothing was to be heard beyond the hissing of the rain but the scratching of the Judge-Advocate's quill, as he slowly dictated to himself the words "The—prisoner—pleads—'not guilty.'" But why they had asked him a question which could only admit of one answer and then persuaded him to give the wrong one, was a thing that both puzzled and distressed John Stokes. Why all this solemn ritual, he speculated painfully; he was surely as good as dead already. He found himself wondering whether the sentence of the Court would be carried out in the presence of only the firing party, or whether the whole of his battalion would be paraded. And he fell to wondering whether he would be reported in the casualty lists as "killed in action," or would it be "missing"? And would they send his wife his identity-disc, as they did with those who had fallen honourably on the field? All these questions both interested and perplexed him, but the proceedings of the Court he regarded little, or not at all.

Meanwhile the Prosecutor was unfolding the charge in a clear, even voice, neither extenuating nor setting down aught in malice. In a court-martial no Prosecutor ever "presses" the charge; he may even alleviate it. Which shows that Assizes and Sessions have something to learn from courts-martial. The case was simple. Prisoner had gone out on the night of the 3rd with a patrol commanded by a subaltern. An alarm was raised, and he and the greater part of the patrol had run back to the trenches, leaving the officer to stand his ground and to return later with his left arm shattered by a German bullet.

All this Stokes remembered but too well, though it seemed to have happened an immense time ago. He remembered how the subaltern had warned him that the only thing to do when a German flare lit up the night was to stand quite still. And he had not stood still, for one of the most difficult things for a man to believe is that to see suddenly is not the same thing as being seen; he had ducked, and as he moved something seared his right cheek like red-hot iron, and then—but why recall that shameful moment? A paradoxical psychologist in a learned essay on "the Expression of Emotion" has argued gravely that the "expression" precedes the emotion, that a man doesn't run because he is afraid but is afraid because he runs. Sergeant Stokes had never heard of psychology, but to this day he believes that it was his first start that was his undoing. He had begun to run without knowing why, until he knew why he ran—he was afraid. Yes, that was it. He had had, in Army vernacular, "cold feet." But why he ran in the first instance he did not know. It was true he hadn't slept for nearly three weeks, and that his duty as N.C.O. to go round every half-hour during the night to watch the men and stare at that inscrutable field, and to post and relieve, had made him very jumpy. And then a young subaltern had died in his arms the day before that fatal night—he could see the grey film glistening on his face like a clouded glass. How queer he had felt afterwards. But what had that to do with the charge? Nothing at all.

And while the prisoner pondered on these things he was recalled by the voice of the President. Did he wish to ask the witness any questions? His company commander had been giving evidence. No; he had no questions to ask. And as each witness was called, and sworn, and gave evidence, all of which the Judge-Advocate repeated like a litany and duly wrote down with his own hand—the prisoner always returned the same answer.

Now the prisoner's friend, a young officer who had never played that rôle before, and who was both nervous and conscientious, had been studying Rule 40 in the Red Book with furtive concentration. What was he to do with a prisoner who elected neither to make a statement nor to put questions to witnesses, and who never gave him any lead? But he had there read something about calling witnesses as to character, and, reading, recollected that the company commander had glanced at the prisoner with genuine commiseration. And so he persuaded Stokes, after some parley, to call the captain to give evidence as to character. The captain's words were few and weighty. The prisoner, he testified, was one of the best N.C.O.'s in his company, and, with the latitude which is characteristic of court-martial proceedings, the captain went on to tell of the testimony borne by the dead subaltern to the excellent character of John Stokes, and how the said John Stokes had been greatly affected by the death of the subaltern. And for the first time John Stokes hung his head. But beyond that and the quivering of his eyelashes he made no sign.

And it being a clear case the Judge-Advocate, as a Judge-Advocate may do, elected not to sum up, and the prisoner was taken to the place from whence he came. And the Court proceeded to consider their finding and sentence, which finding and sentence, being signed by the President and the Judge-Advocate, duly went its appointed way to the Confirming Authority and there remained. For the General in Chief command in the field was hard pressed with other and weightier matters, having reason to believe that he would have to meet an attack of three Army Corps on a front of eight miles with only one Division. Which belief turned out to be true, and had for Sergeant John Stokes momentous consequences, as you shall hear.

II

When John Stokes found himself once more in charge of a platoon he was greatly puzzled. He had been suddenly given back his arms and his belt, which no prisoner, whether in close or open arrest, is supposed to wear, and his guard had gone with him. He knew nothing about Paragraph 482 of the King's Regulations, which contemplates "emergencies"; still less did he know that an emergency had arisen—such an emergency as will cast lustre upon British arms to the end of time. But that strange things were happening ahead he knew full well, for his new unit was as oddly made up as Falstaff's army: gunners, cooks, and A.S.C. drivers were all lumped together to make a company. Some carried their rifles at the slope and some at the trail, some had bayonets and some had not, certain details from the Rifle Brigade marched with their own quick trot, and some wore spurs.

Of one thing he was thankful: his old battalion, wherever they were, were not there. And the company commander coming along and perceiving the stripes on his sleeve, had, without further inquiry, put him in charge of a platoon, and thereafter he lost sight of his guard altogether.

He knew nothing of where he was. Few soldiers at the Front ever do: they will be billeted in a village for a week and not know so much as the name of it. But that big business was afoot was evident to him, for they were marching in column of route almost at the double, under a faint moon and in absolute silence—the word having gone forth that there was to be no smoking or talking in the ranks.

Not a sound was to be heard, except the whisper of the poplars and the tramp of the men's feet upon the pavé. The road was so greasy with mud that it might have been beeswaxed, and Stokes's boots, the nails of which had been worn down, kept slipping as on a parquet floor. As they passed through the mean little villages not a light was to be seen; even the estaminets were shut, but now and again a dog barked mournfully at its chain. Once a whispered command was given at the head of the column, which halted so suddenly that the men behind almost fell upon the men in front, and then backed hastily; and these movements were automatically communicated all down the column, so that the sections of fours lurched like the trucks of a train which is suddenly pulled up. At that moment something flashed at the head of the column, and Stokes suddenly caught a glimpse of the faces of the captain and the subaltern in an aureole of light lit by the needle-like rays of an electric torch as they studied a map and compass.

But in no long time their ears told them they were nearing their destination, even as a traveller learns that he is nearing the sea. For they heard the crackle of musketry following upon the altercation of guns. All this passed as in a dream, and it seemed little more than a few minutes before Sergeant Stokes, having passed through a curtain of shrapnel, had his platoon extended in some shallow support trenches to which the remnants of the regiment whom they were called upon to stiffen had fallen back. It was a critical moment: our first trenches were in the hands of the enemy, and the whole line was sagging under the impact of the German hordes. Somehow that trench had to be recaptured—to be recaptured before the Germans had converted the parados into an invulnerable parapet and had constructed a nest of machine-guns to sweep with a crossfire the right and left flanks, where our line curved in like a gigantic horse-shoe. Of all this Sergeant Stokes knew as little as is usually given to one platoon to know on a front of eight miles.

As dawn broke and the stars paled, the word came down the line, and, in a series of short rushes, stooping somewhat in the attitude of a man who is climbing a very steep hill, they moved forward in extended order about eight or ten paces apart carrying their rifles with bayonets fixed. A hail-storm of lead greeted them, and all around him Sergeant Stokes saw men falling, and as they fell lying in strange attitudes and uncouth—some stumbling (he had seen a hare shot in the back dragging its legs in just that way), others lying on their faces and clutching the earth convulsively as they drummed with their feet, and some very still. Overhead there was a sobbing and whimpering in the air. A little ahead to the left of him a machine-gun was tap-tapping like a telegraph instrument, and as it traversed the field of their advance the men went down in swathes.

If only he could get to that gun! On the right a low hedge ran at right angles to the German trench, and making for it he took such little cover as it afforded, and ran forward as he had never run before, not even on that night of baneful memory. His heart was thumping violently, there was a prodigious "stitch" in his side; and something warm was trickling down his forehead into his eyes and half blinding him, while in his ears the bullets buzzed like a swarm of infuriated bees. The next moment he was up against a little knot of grey-coated figures with toy-like helmets, he heard a word that sounded like "Himmel," and he had emptied his magazine and was savagely pointing with his bayonet, withdrawing, parrying, using the butt, his knees, his feet. He suddenly felt very faint....

That is all that John Stokes remembers of the first battle of Ypres. For the next thing he knew was that a voice coming from an immense distance—just as he had once heard the voice of the dentist when he was coming to after a spell of gas—was saying something to him as he seemed to be rising, rising, rising ever more rapidly out of unfathomable depths, and then out of a mist of darkness a window, first opaque and then translucent, framed itself before his eyes, and he was staring at the sun. The voice, which was low and sweet—an excellent thing in woman—was saying, "Take this, sonny," and the air around him was impregnated with a faint odour of iodoform. Then he knew—he was in hospital.

III

"Yes, a curious case," said one officer to the other as he sat in a certain room at Headquarters, staring abstractedly at the list of Field Ambulances and of their Chaplains attached to the wall. "A very curious case. It reminds me of something Smith said to me about bad law making hard cases. It was jolly lucky the findings of the Court were held up all that time. If the C.-in-C. had confirmed them and the sentence had been promulgated, Stokes would now be doing five years at Woking. Whereas, there he is back with his old battalion, holding a D.C.M., and not reduced by one stripe."

"Not so curious as you think, my friend," replied the other. "Why, I saw forty men under arrest marching through H.Q. the other day singing—singing, mind you. There's hope for a man who sings. Of course, field punishment doesn't matter much; it is only a matter of a few days and a spell of fatigue duty. Though, mind you, I don't say that cleaning out latrines isn't pretty hard labour. But when it comes to breaking a man with a clean record because he has fallen asleep out of sheer weariness—well, what's the good of throwing men like that on the scrap-heap? Of course, you must try them, and you must sentence them, but you can give them another chance. You know Stokes's case fairly made us sit up, and we haven't let the grass grow under our feet. Look at that."

The Judge-Advocate read the blue document that was pushed across the table: "An Act to suspend the operation of sentences of Courts-martial." He studied the sections and sub-sections with the critical eye of a Parliamentary draughtsman. "Yes," he said, after some pertinent emendations, "it'll do. But the title is too long for common use at G.H.Q."

"Why!" said the other with a certain paternal sensitiveness, "what do you suggest?"

"I suggest," said the Judge-Advocate pensively,—"I suggest we call it Stokes's Act."

Now this story has one merit—if it has no other. It is true. And as for the rest of the Act and its preamble, and its sections and its sub-sections, are they not written in the Statute Book? In the Temple they call it 5 & 6 Geo. V. cap. 23. But out there they call it "Stokes's Act."

X

THE FRONT

Persons of a rheumatic habit are said to apprehend the approach of damp weather by certain presentiments in their bones. So people of a nervous temperament—like the writer—have premonitions of the approach to "the Front" by a feeling of cold feet. These are usually induced by the spectacle of large and untimely cavities in the road, but they may be accentuated, as not infrequently happened, by seeing the process of excavation itself—and hearing it. The effect on the auditory nerves is known as "k-r-rump," which is, phonetically speaking, a fairly literal translation. The best thing to do on such occasions is to obey the nursery rhyme, and "open your mouth and shut your eyes." The intake of air will relieve the pressure on your ear-drums. I have been told by one of our gunners that the gentle German has for years been experimenting in order to produce as "frightful" and intimidating a sound by the explosion of his shells as possible. He has succeeded. Cases have been known of men without a scratch laughing and crying simultaneously after a too-close acquaintance with the German hymnology of hate. The results are, however, sometimes disappointing from the German point of view, as in the case of the soldier who, being spattered with dirt but otherwise untouched, picked himself up, and remarked with profound contempt, "The dirty swine!"

The immediate approach to the trenches is usually marked by what sailors call a "dodger," which is to say, a series of canvas screens. These do not conceal your legs, and if you are exceptionally tall, they may not conceal your head. Your feet don't matter, but if you are wise you duck your head. Nine out of ten soldiers take an obstinate pride in walking upright, and will laugh at you most unfeelingly for your pains. Once in the communication trench you are fairly safe from snipers, but not, of course, from shrapnel or high-angle fire. A communication trench which I visited, when paying an afternoon call at a dug-out, was wide enough to admit a pony and cart, and, as it has to serve to bring up ration-parties and stretcher-bearers as well as reliefs, it is made as wide as is consistent with its main purpose, which is to protect the approach and to localise the effect of shell-fire as much as possible, the latter object being effected by frequent "traversing." To reach the fire-trenches is easy enough; the difficulty is to find your way out of them. The main line of fire-trenches has a kind of loop-line behind it with innumerable junctions and small depôts in the shape of dug-outs, and at first sight the subaltern's plan of the estate was as bewildering as a signalman's map of Clapham Junction. And the main line is complicated by frequent traverses—something after the pattern of a Greek fret, whereas such French trenches as I have seen appeared to prefer the Norman dog-tooth style of architecture. A survey of these things makes it easy to understand the important part played by the bomb and the hand-grenade in trench warfare, for when you have "taken" part of a trench you never know whether you are an occupier or merely a lodger until you have fully explored what is behind the traverses to the right and left of you. The delivery of a bomb serves as a very effective notice of ejectment. The back of the trench is protected by a ridge of earth commonly known as a parados. My servant, whose vocabulary was limited, called it a paradox, and was not very wide of the mark.

Somewhere behind the trenches at varying distances are the batteries. The gunners affect orchards and copses as affording good cover for their guns, and if none are to be found they improvise them. Hop-poles trailed with hops or cut saplings will do very well. Usually there is a delectable garden, which is the peculiar pride of the men. Turf emplacements are constructed for the six guns, and turfed dug-outs house the telephone-operator and the gunners. The battery officers are billeted some way back, usually in a kind of farmhouse, whose chief decorative feature is a midden-heap; in England it would promptly be the subject of a closing order by any Public Health authority.

There is nothing more admirable than a field-gun. As a ship answers her helm or an aeroplane its controls, so does an eighteen-pounder respond to every turn of her elevating and traversing gear. Watch a gunner laying his gun on a target he cannot see; observe him switch the gun round from the aiming point to the target; remark the way in which the sight clinometer registers the angle of sight and the drum registers the range; and then ask yourself whether the smartest ship that ever sailed the high seas could be more docile to a turn of the wheel. With perfect simplicity did a man in the R.F.A. once say to me, "We feel towards our gun as a mother feels to her child; we'd sooner lose our lives than our gun." In that confession of faith you have the whole of the gunner's creed.

The heavy guns are generally to be found in splendid isolation; one such I visited and I marvelled at its appearance; it resembled nothing so much as the mottled trunk of a decayed plane-tree except for its girth. "Futurist art," explained the major deprecatingly as I stared at its daubed surface; "it makes it unrecognisable." It certainly did. Close by were what looked at a distance like a bed of copper cucumbers. "More gardening?" I asked. "Yes, market gardening," replied the major; "if we lay the shells like that with sand-bags between them we prevent their igniting one another in case of accidents. It helps us to deliver the goods."

A mile or two from the battery headquarters at X—— Y—— was the observing station. The battery-major and myself were accompanied thither by a huge mastiff who in civil life was a dairyman by profession and turned a churn, but had long since attached himself to the major as orderly. We duly arrived at a deserted farm, but at this point the mastiff stopped dead and declined to come any further. I thought this churlish, and told him so, but he merely wagged his tail. When we entered the farmyard I understood. It was pitted with shell-holes, and they were obviously of very recent excavation. As a matter of fact the Huns suspected that farm, and with good reason, and treated it to intermittent "Hate." The mastiff therefore always waited for the battery-major at what it judged, quite erroneously, to be a safe distance. We clambered up into a loft by means of unreliable ladders. In the roof of the loft some tiles had been removed, and leaning our arms on the rafters we looked out. "You see that row of six poplars over there?" said the Major, pointing to a place behind the German trenches. I recognised them, for the same six poplars I had seen through a periscope in the trenches the day before. "Well, you see the roof of a house between the second and third tree from the right? Good!" He turned to the telephone operator in the corner of the loft. "Lay No. 2 on the register! Report when ready!" The operator repeated the words confidentially to the distant battery, and even as he spoke the receiver answered "Ready!" "Fire!" I had my eyes glued to the house, yet nothing seemed to happen, and I rubbed my field-glasses dubiously with my pocket-handkerchief. Had they missed? Even as I speculated there was a puff of smoke and a spurt of flame in the roof of the house between the poplars. We had delivered the goods.

If one of those ruinous farms does not contain a battery mess the chances are that it will shelter a field ambulance or else a company in billets. Field ambulances, like the batteries, are somewhat migratory in their habits, and change their positions according as they are wanted. But a field ambulance is not, as might be supposed, a vehicle but a unit of the R.A.M.C, with a major or a colonel in charge as O.C. The A.D.M.S. of a division has three field ambulances under him, and when an attack in force is projected he mobilises these three units at forward dressing stations in the rear of the trenches. They are a link between the aid-posts in front and the collecting stations behind. From the collecting stations the wounded are sent on to the clearing hospitals and thence to the base. It sounds beautifully simple, and so it is. The most eloquent compliment to its perfection was the dreamy reminiscence of a soldier I met at the base: "I got hit up at Wipers, sir; something hit me in the head, and the next thing I knew was I heard somebody saying 'Drink this,' and I found myself in bed at Boulogne." Every field ambulance has an attendant chaplain, and a very good sort he usually is. Is the soldier sick, he visits him; penitent, he shrives him; dying, he comforts him. One such I knew, a Catholic priest, six feet two, and a mighty hunter of buck in his day, who was often longing for a shot at the Huns, and as often imposing penances upon himself for such un-ghostly desires. He found consolation in confessing the Irishmen before they went into the trenches: "The bhoys fight all the better for it," he explained. He was sure of the salvation of his flock; the only doubts he had were about his own. We all loved him.

There is one great difference between life in billets and life in the trenches. In billets the soldier "grouses" often, in trenches never. This may be partly due to a very proper sense of proportion; it may also be due to the fact that, the necessity for vigilance being relaxed and the occasions for industry few, life in billets is apt to become a great bore. The small Flemish and French towns offer few amenities; in our mess we found our principal recreation in reunions with other fraternities at the pâtisserie or in an occasional mount. Of pâtisseries that at Bethune is the best; that at Poperinghe the worst. Besides, the former has a piano and a most pleasing Mademoiselle. In the earlier stages of our occupation some of the officers at G.H.Q. did a little coursing and shooting, but there was trouble about délits de chasse, and now you are allowed to shoot nothing but big game—namely, Germans—although I have heard of an irresponsible Irishman in the trenches who vaulted the parapet to bag a hare and, what is more remarkable, returned with it. Needless to say, his neighbours were Saxons. As for the men, their opportunities of relaxation are more circumscribed. Much depends on the house in which they are billeted. If there is a baby, you can take the part of mother's help; one of the most engaging sights I saw was a troop of our cavalrymen (they may have been the A.V.C.) riding through Armentières, leading a string of remounts, each remount with a laughing child on its back. Or, again, you can wash. If you are not fortunate enough to be billeted at Bailleul, which has the latest thing in baths, enabling men to be baptized, like Charlemagne's reluctant converts, in platoons, you can always find a pump. The spectacle of our men stripped to the waist sousing each other with water under the pump is a source of standing wonder to the inhabitants. I am not sure whether they think it indecent, or merely eccentric; perhaps both. But then, as Anatole France has gravely remarked, a profound disinclination to wash is no proof of chastity. Besides, as one of the D.M.S.'s encyclicals has reminded us, cleanliness of body is next to orderliness of kit. If you take carbolic baths you may, with God's grace, escape one or more of the seven plagues of Flanders. These seven are lice, flies, rats, rain, mud, smells, and "souvenirs." The greatest of these is lice, for lice may mean cerebro-meningitis. Owing to their unsportsmanlike and irritating habits they are usually called "snipers." But, unlike snipers, they are not entitled to be treated as prisoners of war (their habits partake too much of espionage), and when captured they receive a short shrift from an impassive man with a hot iron in the asbestos drying-room.

But it may well happen that in spite of babies, and baths, and brass bands, and footballs, and boxing-gloves, and playing marbles (the General in command of one of our divisions told me he had seen six Argyll and Sutherland sergeants playing marbles with shrapnel bullets in some support trenches), the men get bored. They are often very crowded, and crowding may develop fastidious animosities. A man may tolerate shrapnel in the trenches with equanimity, and yet may find his neighbour's table-manners in billets positively intolerable. Men may become "stale" or get on each other's nerves. When a company commander sees signs of this, he has one very potent prescription; he prescribes a good stiff route march. It has never been known to fail. Many a time in the winter months, when out visiting Divisional Headquarters, did I, in the shameful luxury of my car, come across a battalion slogging along ruddy and cheerful in the mud, and singing with almost reproachful unction:

Last night I s-s-aw you, I s-saw you, you naughty boy!

Some one ought to make an anthology (for private circulation only) of the songs most affected by our men, and also of the topographical Limericks with which they beguile the long hours in the trenches. And if the English soldier is addicted to versifying it may be pleaded in his behalf that, as Mommsen apologetically remarks of Caesar, "they were weak verses." Not always, however, I have seen some unpublished verses by a young officer on the staff of the late General Hubert Hamilton, a man beloved by all who knew him, describing the burial of his dead chief at night behind the firing-line, which in their sombre and elegiac beauty are not unworthy to rank with the classical lines on the burial of Sir John Moore. And there is that magnificent Hymn before Battle by Captain Julian Grenfell, surely one of the most moving things of its kind.

With such diversions do our men beguile the interminable hours. After all it is the small things that men resent in life, not the big ones. I once asked a French soldier over a game of cards—in civil life he was a plumber, whom we shall meet again[7]—whether he could get any sleep in the trenches amid the infernal din of the guns. "Oh, I slept pretty well on the whole," he explained nonchalantly, "mais mon voisin, celui-là"—he pointed reproachfully to a comrade who was imperturbably shuffling the pack—"il ronflait si fort qu'il finissait par me dégoûter."

FOOTNOTE:

XI

AT G.H.Q.[8]

Billet de Logement. Mme. Bonnard, 131 rue Robert le Frisson, logera les sous-dits, savoir: un officier, un sous officier, deux hommes; fournira le lit, place au feu et à la chandelle, conformément à loi du 3 juillet, 1877. Délivré à la Mairie, le 31^me Janvier, 1915. Le Maire ——

The Camp Commandant, who is a keeper of lodging-houses and an Inspector of Nuisances, had given me a slip of paper on which was inscribed the address No. 131 rue Robert le Frisson and a printed injunction to the occupier to know that by these presents she was enjoined to provide me with bed, fire, and lights. Armed with this billeting-paper and accompanied by my servant, a private in the Suffolks, who was carrying my kit, I knocked at the door of No. 131, affecting an indifference to my reception which I did not feel. It seemed to me that a rate-collector, presenting a demand note, could have boasted a more graceful errand. The door opened and an old lady in a black silk gown inquired, "Qu'est-ce que vous voulez, M'sieu'?" I presented my billeting-paper with a bow. Her waist was girt with a kind of bombardier's girdle from which hung a small armoury of steel implements and leather scabbards: scissors, spectacle case, a bunch of keys, a button-hook, and other more or less intimidating things. "Jeanne," she called in a quavering voice, and as the bonne appeared, tying her apron-strings, they read the billeting-paper together, the one looking over the shoulder of the other, Madame reading the words as a child reads, and as though she were speaking to herself. The paper shook in her tremulous hands, and I could see that she was very old. It was obvious that my appearance in that quiet household was as agitating as it was unexpected. "Et votre ordonnance?" she asked, with a glance at my servant. "Non, il dort dans la caserne." "Bien!" she said, and with a smile made me welcome.

It was soon evident that, my credentials being once established, I was to be regarded as a member of the household, and nothing would satisfy Madame but that I should be assured of this. Having shown me my bedroom, with its pompous bed draped with a tent of curtains, she took me on a tour of her ménage. I was conducted into the kitchen, bright with copper pans and the marmite—it was as sweet and clean as a dairy; the resources of the still-room were displayed to me, and the confitures and spices were not more remarkable than the domestic pharmacy in which the herbs of the field had been distilled by Madame's own hands to yield their peculiar virtues, rue for liver, calamint for cholera, plantain for the kidneys, fennel for indigestion, elderberry for sore throat, and dandelion for affections of the blood. Then I was shown the oak presses full of linen white as snow and laid up in lavender. This inventory being concluded, I was presented with a key of the front door to mark my admission into the freedom of the house, and invited to take a glass of Burgundy while Sykes was unpacking my kit upstairs.

Madame, it seemed, was a widow of eighty-five years of age, without issue, and if her eyes were dim and her natural force abated, her teeth, as she proudly told me, were her own. She obviously belonged to that rentier class who spend the evening of their days in the quiet town which serves as G.H.Q.—a town which has a kind of faded gentility, and which, behind its inscrutable house-fronts, conceals a good deal of quiet opulence in the matter of old china, silver, and oak. In her youth Madame had kept a pension and had had English demoiselles among her charges. She had never been to England but she had heard of "Hyde Park." Did I know it? She received my assurance with obvious gratification as though it established a personal intimacy between us. "Avez-vous tué des Allemands?" My negative answer left her disappointed but hopeful.

"La guerre, quand finira-t-elle?" interjected the bonne, who, I afterwards found, had a husband at the war. Those interrogatories were to become very familiar to me. Every evening, when I returned from my visits to Divisional and Brigade Headquarters, mistress and servant always put me through the same catechism:

"Avez-vous tué des Allemands?"

"La guerre, quand finira-t-elle?"

The immense seriousness, not to say solicitude, with which these inquiries were addressed to me eventually led me into the most enterprising mendacities. I killed a German every day, greatly to Madame's satisfaction, and my total bag when I came away was sufficiently remarkable to be worth a place in an official communiqué. I think it gave Madame a feeling of security, and I hoped Jeanne might consider that it appreciably accelerated the end of the war. But "Guillaume," as she always called him, was the principal object of Madame's aversion, and she never mentioned the name of the All-Highest without a lethal gesture as she drew her tremulous hand across her throat and uttered the menacing words: "Couper la gorge." She often uttered these maledictions to Sykes in the kitchen, as she watched him making the toast for my breakfast, and I have no doubt that the "Oui, Madame," with which he invariably assented, gave her great satisfaction. Doubtless it made her feel that the heart of the British Army was sound. Sykes used to study furtively a small book called French, and how to speak it, but he was very chary of speaking it, and seemed to prefer a deaf-and-dumb language of his own. But he was naturally a man of few words, and phlegmatic. He described the first battle of Ypres, in which he had been "wownded," in exactly twenty-four words, and I could never get any more out of him, though he became comparatively voluble on the subject of his wife at Norwich and the twins. He was an East Anglian, and made four vowels do duty for five, his e's being always pronounced as a's; he had done his seven years' "sarvice" with the colours, and was a reservist; he was an admirable servant—steady, cool, and honest. I imagine he had never acted as servant to any of his regimental officers, for on the first occasion when he brought up my breakfast I was not a little amused to observe that the top of the egg had been carefully removed, the rolls sliced and buttered, and the bread and butter cut into slender "fingers," presumably for me to dip into the ochreous interior of the egg; it reminded me of my nursery days. Perhaps he was in the habit of doing it for the twins. I gently weaned him from this tender habit. He performed all his duties, such as making my bed, or handing me a letter, with quick automatic movements as though he were presenting arms. Also his face, which was usually expressionless as though his mind were "at ease," had a way of suddenly coming to "attention" when you spoke to him. He had a curious and recondite knowledge of the folk-lore of the British Army, and entertained me at times with stories of "Kruger's Own," "The White Shirts," "The Dirty Twelfth," "The Holy Boys," "The Saucy Seventh," having names for the regiments which you will never find in the Army List. In short, he was a survival and in a way a tragic survival. For how many of the old Army are left? I fear very few, and many traditions may have perished with them.

In his solicitude for me Sykes had jealous rivals in Madame and Jeanne. Madame reserved to herself as her peculiar prerogative the deposit of a hot-water "bottle" in my bed every night, such a hot-water bottle as I have never seen elsewhere. It reminded me of nothing so much as the barrel of one of the newer machine-guns, being a long fluted cylinder of black steel. This was always borne by Madame every night in ritualistic procession, Jeanne following with a silver candlestick and a night-light. The ceremony concluded with a bow and "good-night," two words of which Madame was inordinately proud. She never attained "good-morning," but she more than supplied the deficiency of English speech by the grace of her French manners, always entering my room at 8 a.m. as I lay in bed, with the greeting, "Bon matin, M'sieu', avez-vous bien dormi?" Perhaps I looked, as I felt, embarrassed on the first occasion, for she quickly added in French, "I am old enough to be your mother"—as indeed she was. She had at once the resignation in repose and the agitation in action of extreme old age. I have seen her dozing in her chair in the salon, as I passed through the hall, with her gnarled hands extended on her knees in just that attitude of quiet waiting which one associates with the well-known engraving in which Death is figured as the coming of a friend. But when she was on her feet she moved about with a kind of aimless activity, opening drawers and shutting them and reopening them and speaking to herself the while, until Jeanne, catching my puzzled expression, would whisper loudly in my ear with a tolerant smile, "Elle est très VIEILLE." Jeanne had acquired a habit of raising her voice, owing to Madame's deafness, which resulted in her whispers partaking of the phonetic quality of those stage asides which, by a curious convention, while audible at the very back of the dress circle, are quite inaudible to the other characters on the stage. Whether Madame ever overheard these auricular confidences I know not. If she did, I doubt if she regarded them, for she was under the illusion, common to very old people who live in the society of a younger generation and were mature adults when their companions were merely adolescent, that Jeanne, who had entered her service as a child, had never grown up. If Madame seemed "très vieille" to Jeanne, it was indisputable that Jeanne continued "très jeune" to Madame. She was, indeed, firmly convinced that she was looking after Jeanne, whereas in truth it was Jeanne who looked after her. For Jeanne was at least thirty-five, with a husband at the war, in virtue of whom she enjoyed a separation allowance of one franc a day, and a boy for whom she received ten sous. Her husband, a pompier, got nothing. It never occurred to her to regard this provision as inadequate. And she was as capable as she was contented, and sang at her work.

It was often difficult to believe that this quiet backwater was within an hour or two of the trenches. G.H.Q. was indeed situated well back behind "the Front," which, however precise the maps in the newspapers may affect to make it, is, like the Equator of our school-books, a more or less "imaginary line drawn across the earth's surface." Imaginary because if a line be, as we were taught with painful reiteration, length without breadth, then "the Front" is not a line at all, much less a straight line in the sense of the shortest distance between two points. It is not straight, for it curves and sags and has its salients and re-entrant angles; and it is not a line, for it has breadth as well as length. Broadly speaking, the Front extends back to the H.Q. of the armies (to say nothing of the H.Q. of corps, divisions, and brigades), and thence to G.H.Q. itself, which may be regarded as being "the Back of the Front," to vary a classical expression of Punch. The Front is, indeed, to be visualised not as a straight line but as a fully opened fan, the periphery of which is the fire-trenches, the ribs the lines of communication, and the knob or knuckle is General Headquarters. When we extend our Front southwards and take over the French trenches we just expand our fan a little more. When we come to make a general advance all along the periphery, the whole fan will be thrust forward, and the knuckle with it, for the relative distances of General Headquarters, and minor Headquarters, from this periphery and from one another are a more or less constant quantity, being determined by such fixed considerations as the range of modern guns and the mobility of transport.

From G.H.Q., the brain of the Army, the volitional centre of the whole organism, radiate the sensory and motor nerves by which impressions at the Front are registered and plans for action transmitted. It is the home of the Staff, not of the Armies, and contains more "brass hats" than all the other Headquarters put together. Beyond the "details" in the barracks it contains few of the rank and file, and its big square betrays little of the crowded animation of the towns nearer the fighting line, with their great parks of armoured cars, motor lorries, and ammunition waggons, their filter-carts, and their little clusters and eddies of men resting in billets. The Military Police on point-duty have a comparatively quiet time, although despatch-riders are, of course, for ever whizzing to and fro with messages from and to the Front. It is as full of departmental offices as Whitehall itself—some 153 of them to be exact—each one indicated by a combination of initial letters, for staff officers are men of few words and cogent, and it saves time to say "O." when you mean Operations, "I." for Intelligence, "A.G." for Adjutant-General; a fashion which is faithfully followed at the other H.Q., for D.A.A.Q.M.G. saves an enormous number of polysyllables.

Hence the proximity of hostilities has left but little outward and visible sign upon the ancient town. The tradesmen have, it is true, made some concessions to our presence, and one remarks the inviting legends "Top-hole Tea" in the windows of a pâtisserie and "High life" over the shop of a tailor. Four of us made a private arrangement with a buxom housewife, whereby, in return for four francs per head a day and the pooling of our rations, she undertook to provide us with lunch and dinner, thereby establishing a "Mess" of our own. Many such fraternities there were in the absence of a regular regimental mess. But these arrangements were more private than military, the only obligation on the ordinary householder being the furnishing of billets. Occasionally the cobbled streets became the scene of an unwonted animation when young French recruits celebrated their call to the colours by marching down the streets arm-in-arm singing ribald songs, or a squad of sullen German prisoners were marched up them on their way to the prison, within which they vanished amid the imprecations of the crowd. One such squad I saw arriving in a motor lorry, from the tailboard of which they jumped down to enter the gates, and one of them, a clumsy fellow of about thirteen stones, landed heavily in his ammunition boots from a height of about five feet on the foot of a British soldier on guard. The latter winced and hastily drew back his foot, but beyond that gave no sign; I wondered whether, had the positions been reversed and the scene laid across the Rhine, a German guard would have exhibited a similar tolerance. I doubt it.

The town itself seemed to be living on its past, for indubitably it had seen better days. An ancient foundation of the Jesuits now converted into the Map and Printing Department of the R.E.'s, a church whose huge nave had been secularised to the uses of motor transport, a museum which served to incarcerate the German prisoners, all testified to the vanished greatness, as did also the private mansions, which preserved a kind of mystery behind their high-walled gardens and massive double doors. There was one such which I never passed at night without thinking of the Sieur de Maletroit's door. The streets were narrow, tortuous, and secretive, with many blind alleys and dark closes, and it required no great effort of the imagination—especially at night when not a light showed—to call to mind the ambuscades and adventures with the watch which they must have witnessed some centuries before. The very names of the streets—such as the Rue d'Arbalête—held in them something of romance. To find one's billet at night was like a game of blind man's buff, and one felt rather than saw one's way. Not a soul was to be seen, for the whole town was under droit de siège, and the civilian inhabitants had to be within doors by nine o'clock, while all the entrances and exits to and from the town were guarded by double sentries night and day. Certain dark doorways also secreted a solitary sentry, and my own office boasted a corporal's guard—presumably because the Field-Cashier had his rooms on the first floor. The sanitation was truly medieval; on either side of the cobbled streets noisome gutters formed an open sewer into which housewives emptied their slop-pails every morning, while mongrel dogs nosed among the garbage. Yet the precincts were not without a certain beauty, and every side of the town was approached through an avenue of limes or poplars. But in winter the sodden landscape was desolate beyond belief, these roads presenting just that aspect of a current of slime in a muddy sea which they suggested to the lonely horseman on the eve of Waterloo in that little classic of De Vigny's known to literature as Laurette.

Such was the country and such the town in which we were billeted. Now upon a morning in February it happened that I was smoking a cigarette in the little garden, bordered by hedges of box, while waiting for my car, and as I waited I watched Jeanne, with her sleeves rolled up to her elbows and a clothes-peg in her mouth, busy over the wash-tub. "Vous êtes une blanchisseuse, aujourd'hui?" I remarked. She corrected me. "Non, m'sieu', une lessiveuse." "Une lessiveuse?" For answer Jeanne pointed to a linen-bag which was steeping in the tub. The linen-bag contained the ashes of the beech-tree; it is a way of washing that they have in some parts of France, and very cleansing. To specialise thus is lessiver. As we talked in this desultory fashion I let fall a word concerning a journey I was about to undertake to the French lines, a journey that would take me over the battlefield of the Marne. "La Marne! Hélas, quelle douleur!" said Jeanne, and wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron. "But it was a glorious victory," I expostulated. Yes, but Jeanne, it seemed, had lost a brother in the battle of the Marne. She pulled out of her bosom a frayed letter, bleached, stained, and perforated with holes about the size of a shilling, and handed it to me. I could make nothing of it. She handed me another letter. "Son camarade," she explained, and no longer attempted to hide her tears. And this was what I read:

Le 10 sept., 1914.

Chère Madame—Comme j'étais très bon camarade avec votre frère Paul Duval et que le malheur vient de lui arriver, je tient à vous le faire savoir, car peut-être vous serai dans l'inquiétude de pas recevoir de ces nouvelles et de ne pas savoir où il est. Je vous dirai que je vient de lui donner du papier à lettre et une enveloppe pour vous écrire et aussitôt la lettre finit il l'a mis dans son képi pour vous l'envoyé le plus vite possible et malheureusement un obus est arriver, et il à etait tué. Heureusement nous étions trois près de l'un l'autre et il n'y a eut de lui de touché. Je vous envoi la petite lettre qu'il venait de vous faire, et en même tant vous verrez les trous que les éclats d'obus l'on attrapper. Recevez de moi chère madame mes sincères salutations.

Jules Coppée. Tambour au 151^e Regiment d'Inf., 2^e Cie 42^e Division, Secteur postale 56.

Crude and illiterate though it was, the letter had a certain noble simplicity. "Très gentil," I remarked as I returned it to Jeanne, and thought the matter at an end. But Jeanne had not done, and, with much circumlocution and many hesitations, she at last preferred a simple request. I was going to visit the battlefield of the Marne—yes? I assented. Well, perhaps, perhaps Monsieur would visit Paul's grave, and perhaps if he found it he would take a photograph. "Why, certainly," I said, little knowing what I promised. But the request was to have a strange sequel, as you shall hear. Sykes came to say my car was at the door. As I clambered in and turned to wave a farewell, Madame and Jeanne stood on the doorstep to wish me bon voyage. "J'espère que vous tuerez plusieurs Allemands," cried Madame in a quavering voice. "Veuillez ne pas oublier, M'sieu'," cried Jeanne wistfully. I waved my hand, and had soon left rue Robert le Frisson far behind me.

FOOTNOTE:

XII

MORT POUR LA PATRIE

Two days later a French staff-officer greeted me in the vestibule of the Hôtel de Crillon at Paris. It was the Comte de G——; he had been deputed by the Ministry of War to act as my escort on my tour of the French lines. He proved to be a charming companion. He was a magnificent figure of a man six feet three inches in height at least, an officer of dragoons, and he wore the red and white brassard, embroidered in gold with a design of forked lightning, which is the prerogative of the staff. A military car with a driver and an orderly in shaggy furs awaited us outside on the Place de la Concorde. It was a sumptuous car, upholstered in green corded silk, with nickel fittings, and displaying on its panels the motto Quand même, and the monogram of a famous actress. It had been requisitioned. The air was cold—there had been frost overnight—but the sun was brilliant. As we threaded our way through Paris and its suburbs, a Paris chastened and resolute, I caught a glimpse of the barges upon the Seine with the women standing on the convex hatches hanging out clothes to dry—and I thought of Daudet and La Belle Nivernaise. As more and yet more men are called up to the colours women take their place, until the houses of business are like nunneries—with a few aged Fathers Superior. Having had business the day before at the Société Générale, I had had occasion to reflect on these things as I stood in the counting-house watching some fifty girl typists at work, the room resounding with the tap-tap of their machines, as though fifty thrushes were breaking snails upon a stone. A wizened little clerk, verging upon superannuation, had beguiled my time of waiting with talk of the war: how his wife from Picardy had lost fifteen of her parents, while of four painters and paper-hangers who had started doing up his flat on the 2nd of July only one—disabled—had returned to finish the job; the rest were dead. Musing on these things as we drove through the Bois de Vincennes I understood the resolution of our Allies and the significance of the things my companion pointed out to me as we drove: here a row of trees felled to provide a field of fire, there a gun emplacement, and reserve trenches all the way from Paris to Soissons. They are leaving nothing to chance.

Our journey was uneventful until we reached Coulommiers, where we had certain inquiries to make which have nothing to do with this narrative. We interviewed the maire in his parlour at the Hôtel de Ville, a little man, and spirited, who had hung on at his post during the German occupation, and done his best to protect his fellow-townsmen against the lust and rapine of the Huns. Under such circumstances the office of municipal magistrate is no sinecure. It is, in fact, a position of deadly peril, for by the doctrine of vicarious punishment, peculiar to the German Staff, an innocent man is held liable with his life for the faults of his fellow-townsmen, and, it may be, for those of the enemy also. Doubtless it appeals to their sinister sense of humour, when two of their own men get drunk and shoot at one another, to execute a French citizen by way of punishment. It happened that during the German occupation of Coulommiers the gas supply gave out. The maire was informed by a choleric commandant that unless gas were forthcoming in twenty-four hours he would be shot. The little man replied quietly: "M'éteindre, ce n'est pas allumer le gaz." This illuminating remark appears to have penetrated the dark places of the commandant's mind, and although the gas-jets continued contumacious (the gas-workers were all called up to the colours) the maire was not molested. It was here that we heard a shameful story (for the truth of which I will not vouch) of a certain straggler from our army, a Highlander, who tarried in amorous dalliance and was betrayed by his enchantress to the Huns, who, having deprived him of everything but his kilt, led him mounted upon a horse in Bacchanalian procession round the town. As to what became of him afterwards nothing was known, but the worst was suspected. The Huns have a short way and bloody with British stragglers and despatch-riders and patrols, and I fear that the poor lad expiated his weakness with a cruel death.

At Coulommiers we turned northwards on the road to La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, a pleasant little town on the banks of the Marne, approached by an avenue of plane trees whose dappled trunks are visible for many miles. Here we had lunch at the inn—a dish of perch caught that morning in the waters of the Marne, a delicious cream-cheese, for which La Ferté is justly famous, and a light wine of amber hue and excellent vintage. The landlord's wife waited on us with her own hands, and as she waited talked briskly of the German occupation of the town. The Huns, it appeared, had been too hustled by the Allies to do much frightfulness beyond the usual looting, but they had inflicted enormous losses on the pigs of La Ferté. It reminded me of the satirical headline in a Paris newspaper, over a paragraph announcing a great slaughter of pigs in Germany owing to the shortage of maize—"Les Bosches s'entregorgent!" Madame told us with much spirit how she had saved her own pig, an endearing infant, by the intimation that a far more succulent pig was to be found higher up the street, and while the Bosches went looking for their victim she had hidden her own in the cellar. Her pig is now a local celebrity. People come from afar to see the pig which escaped the Bosches. For the pigs whom the Bosches love are apt to die young. But what had impressed her most was the treatment meted out by a German officer, a certain von Bülow, who was quartered at the inn, to one of his men. The soldier had been ordered to stick up a lantern outside the officer's quarters, and had been either slow or forgetful. Von Bülow knocked him down, and then, as he lay prostrate, jumped upon him, kicked him, and beat him about the head and face with sabre and riding-whip. The soldier lay still and uttered not a cry. Madame shuddered at the recollection, "Épouvantable!"

We crossed the place and called on a prominent burgess. He received us hospitably. In the hall of his house was a Uhlan's lance with drooping pennon which excited our curiosity. How had it come here? He was only too pleased to explain. He had taken it from a marauding Uhlan with whom he had engaged in single combat, strangling him with his own hands—so!

He held out a pair of large fat hands of the consistency of clay; he was of a full habit and there were pouches under his eyes. In England he would have been a small tradesman, with strong views on total abstinence, accustomed to a diet of high tea, and honoured as the life-long superintendent of a Sunday school. I was more astonished than sceptical, but perhaps, as the Comte suggested in a whisper, the Uhlan was drunk. Here, too, we heard tales of loot, especially among ladies' wardrobes. It is a curious fact that there is nothing the Hun loves so much as women's underclothing. As to what happens when he gets hold of the lingerie many scandalous stories are told, and none more scandalous than the one which appeared in the whimsical pages of La Vie Parisienne. But that is, most emphatically, quite another story.

From La Ferté we drove on to Lizy, where the gendarme, wiping his mouth as he came hurriedly from the inn, told us a harrowing tale, and then to Barcy, where the maire, though busy with a pitch-fork upon a manure heap, received us with municipal gravity. We were now nearing the battlefield of the Marne, and here and there along the roadside the trunks of the poplars, green with mistletoe, were shivered as though by lightning. Yet nothing could have been more peaceful than the pastoral beauty of the countryside. We passed waggons full of roots, drawn by a team of white oxen under the yoke, and by the roadside a threshing machine was being fed by a knot of old men and young women from an oat-rick. The only hints of the cloud on the horizon were the occasional passage of a convoy and the notable absence of young men. As we raced along, the furrows, running at right angles to the road, seemed to be eddying away from us in pleats and curves, and this illusion of a stationary car in a whirling landscape was fortified by the contours of the countryside, which were those of a great plain, great as any sea, stretching away to a horizon of low chalk hills. Suddenly the car slowed down at a signal from my companion and stopped. We got out. Not a sound was to be heard except the mournful hum of the distant threshing machine, but a peculiar clicking, like the halliard of a flagstaff in a breeze, suddenly caught my ear. The wind was rising, and as I looked around me I saw innumerable little tricolour flags fluttering against small wooden staves. It was the battlefield of the Marne, the scene of that immortal order of Joffre's in which he exhorted the sons of France to conquer or die where they stood. As he had commanded, so had they done. With an emotion too deep for words we each contemplated these plaintive memorials of the heroes who lay where they fell. Our orderly wept and made no effort to hide his tears. I thought of Jeanne's wistful petition, but my heart sank, for these graves were to be numbered not by hundreds but by thousands. "C'est absolument impossible!" said the Comte, to whom I had communicated my quest. A sudden cry from the orderly, who was moving from grave to grave in a close scrutiny of the inscriptions, arrested us. He was standing by a wooden cross, half draped by a tattered blue coat and covered with wreaths of withered myrtle. A képi pierced with holes lay upon the grave. And sure enough, by some miracle of coincidence, he had found it. On a wooden slab we read these words:

Paul Duval, 151^e Rég. d'Inf. 6 sept. 1914 MORT POUR LA PATRIE.

The sun was fast declining over the chalk hills and it grew bitter cold. I unfolded my camera, stepped back eight paces, and pressed the trigger. We clambered back into the car and resumed the road to Meaux. As I looked over my shoulder the last things I saw in the enfolding twilight were those little flags still fluttering wistfully in the wind.

XIII

MEAUX AND SOME BRIGANDS

We lay the night at Meaux. It was a town which breathed the enchantments of the Middle Ages and had for me the intimacy of a personal reminiscence. Sixteen years earlier, when reading for a prize essay at Oxford, I had studied the troubled times of Étienne Marcel in the treasures of the Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartes, and I knew every kilometre of this country as though I had trodden it. Meaux, Compiègne, Senlis—they called to my mind dreamy hours in the dim religious light of muniment-rooms and days of ecstasy among the pages of Froissart. Little did I think when I read those belligerent chronicles in the sequestered alcoves of the Bodleian and the Bibliothèque Nationale, tracing out the warlike dispositions of Charles the Bad and the Dauphin and the Provost of the Merchants, that the day would come when I would be traversing these very fields engaged in detective enterprises upon the footprints of contemporary armies. To compare the variae lectiones of two manuscripts concerning a fourteenth-century skirmish is good, it has all the excitement of the chase; but to be collating the field note-book of a living Hun with the dossier of a contemporary Justice de Paix, this is better. It has all the contact of reality and the breathless joy of the hue and cry. And, after all, were things so very different? Generations come and go, dynasties rise and fall, but the earth endureth for ever, and these very plains and hills and valleys that have witnessed the devastation of the Hun have also seen the ravages of the mercenaries and free companies of the Middle Age. As I lay in my bed that night at the inn I turned over the pages of my pocket volume of M. Zeller's Histoire de France racontée par les contemporains, and hit on the "Souvenirs du brigand Aimerigot Marchès," ravisher of women, spoiler of men, devourer of widows' houses. And as I read, it seemed as though I were back in the department du Contentieux of the Ministry of War in Paris deciphering the pages of a German officer's field note-book. For thus speaks Aimerigot Marchès in the delectable pages of Froissart distilled by M. Zeller into modern French:

There is no time, diversion, nor glory in this world like that of the profession of arms and making war in the way we have. How blithe were we when we rode forth at hazard and hit on a rich abbé, an opulent prior or merchant, or a string of mules from Montpelier, Narbonne, Limoux, Toulouse, or Carcassonne laden with the fabrics of Brussels or furs from the fair of Lendit, or spices from Bruges, or the silks of Damascus and Alexandria! All was ours or was to ransom at our sweet will. Every day we had more money. The peasants of Auvergne and Limousin provisioned us and brought to our camp corn and meal, and baked bread, hay for the horses and straw for their litter, good wines, oxen, and fine fat sheep, chicken, and poultry. We carried ourselves like kings and were caparisoned as they, and when we rode forth the whole country trembled before us. Par ma foi, cette vie était bonne et belle.

Is not that your very Hun? He is a true reversion to type. Only, whereas among the French he is a thing of the savage past, among the Germans he is a product of the kultured present. And to turn from the field note-book of the German soldier with its swaggering tale of loot, lust, and maudlin cups, its memoranda of stolen toys for Felix and of ravished lingerie for Bertha, all viewed in the rosy light of the writer's egotism as a laudable enterprise, to the plain depositions of the Justice de Paix, and see the reverse side of the picture with its tale of ruined homes and untilled fields, was just such an experience as it had been to turn from the glittering pages of Froissart to the sombre story of Jean de Venette,[9] a monk of Compiègne, Little Brother of the Poor and chronicler of his times, as he pondered on these things in the scriptorium:

In this year 1358, the vines, source of that beneficent liquor which gladdens the heart of man, were no longer cultivated; the fields were neither tilled nor sown; the oxen and the sheep went no longer to the pasture. The churches and houses, falling into decay, presented everywhere traces of devouring flames or sombre ruins and smouldering. The eye was no longer gladdened as before with the sight of green meadows and yellowing harvests, but rather afflicted by the aspect of briers and thistles, which clustered everywhere. The church bells no longer rang joyously to call the faithful to the divine offices, but only to give the alarm to the peasants at the approach of the enemy and the signal for flight.

As it was in the days of Jean de Venette, so it is now. I thought of that mournful passage as I wandered next day among the ruins of Choisy-au-Bac, a village not twenty miles from the place where Jean de Venette was born, and saw old women cowering among the ruins of their burnt-out homes.

If the good Carmelite of the fourteenth century returned to Meaux to-day he would have little difficulty in finding his way about the city, for though she must have aged perceptibly she can have changed but little. The timbered mills on wooden piles still stand moored in the middle of the river like so many ships, just as they stood in the twelfth century, and the cathedral with its Gothic portals and great rose-window—though it has grown in stature and added here and there a touch of the flamboyant in its tracery, even as a man will break out into insurgent adventures when he feels the first chill of age—is stamped with the characters of the fourteenth century. And I think Jean de Venette would find a congenial spirit in my friend the bishop, Monsignor Marbot, for like Jean he is a lover of the poor. It was Monsignor Marbot who went in procession to the battlefield of the Marne with crucifix and banner and white-robed acolytes, and in an allocution of singular beauty consecrated those stricken fields with the last rites of the Church. And it was Monsignor Marbot who remained at his post all through the German occupation to protect his flock while the Hun roamed over his diocese like a beast of prey. Though the Hun thinks nothing of shooting a maire, and has been known to murder many an obscure village priest, he fights shy of killing a bishop; there might be trouble at the Holy See. Many a moving tale did the good bishop tell me as we sat in his little house—surely the most meagre and ascetic of episcopal palaces, in which there was nothing more sumptuous than his cherry and scarlet soutane and his biretta.