'WE FALL TO RISE'

(March-April, 1918)

BEFORE THE STORM

That dramatic month would have been memorable for the weather if for nothing else. Day after day 'the March sun felt like May,' if ever it did; and though it dried no hawthorn-spray in the broken heart of our little old town, and there was neither blade nor petal to watch a-blowing and a-growing, yet Spring was in our nostrils and we savoured it the more eagerly for all we knew it must bring forth. Then the overshadowing ruins took on glorious hues in the keen sunlight, especially towards evening; the outer grey so warm and soft, like a mouse's fur; the inner lining, of aged brick, an even softer tone of its own, neither red nor pink. Day after day a clean sky threw the jagged peaks into violent relief, and high lights snowed their Matterhorn, until a sidelong sunset picked the whole chain out with shadows like falls of ink. It was a sin to spend those afternoons indoors, even in the Rest Hut, where the two stoves stood idle for days on end, and all the windows open.

Then there were the still and starry nights. Then there were the moonlight nights, not so still, but nothing very dreadful happening our way. Our big local gun might have gone on tour; at least I seem to remember many a night when it did not shake us in our beds, when indeed there was little but the want of sheets and pillow-cases to remind us that we were not in England, where after all one can hear more guns than are noticed any longer, and an aeroplane at any hour of the twenty-four. Many a night there was no more than that to remind us that we were only just behind the Line.

Sometimes, as the two of us sat last thing over a nice open fireplace that had found its way into my room from one of the skeleton houses on the opposite side of the square, one or other would fall to moralising upon the past life of the place we had made so much our own. It was a dutiful effort to remember that the Hôtel de Ville had not always been a mangled pile, its palisaded courtyard once something other than the site of a Y.M.C.A. hut. But the reflection failed to haunt us as it might have done; the present and the living were too absorbing, to say nothing of the imminent future; and as for the dead past, we had our own. And yet we knew from guide-book and album what shining pools of parquet, what ceilings heavily ornate, what monumental intricacies in wood and stone, what crystal grandiosities, formed the huge rubbish-heaps between the mouse-grey walls with the reddish lining: we knew, but it was no use trying to care. The Hôtel de Ville had finished its course; the Rest Hut was just getting into its stride. Another chunk off the stump of the once delicate and dizzy belfry, what did it signify unless the chunk came through our roof? That was our only anxiety in the matter, and we debated whether such a chunk would fly so far, or fall straight down as apparently the rest of the campanile had done before it. My chief mate, however, wound up every debate with the reiterated conviction that there would be no German push at all; they were 'not such fools' as to make one. But for my part I never went to bed without wondering whether that would be the last of our quiet nights, or a quiet night at all. And deadly quiet they had grown; even the rats no longer disturbed us; every one of them had departed, and for no adequate reason within our knowledge. Even the sceptic of a mate had something trite but sinister to say about 'a sinking ship.' ...

One afternoon, two days before the date on which most people seemed to expect things to happen, a harbinger arrived as I sat perched behind the counter. We were not long open; most of the men present were clustered round the newspaper table; you really could have heard some pins drop. That was why, for a second or two, I did hear something I had never heard before, and have no wish to hear again. It sounded exactly like a miniature aeroplane approaching at phenomenal speed. I was just beginning to wonder what it was when there followed the most extraordinary crash. Not an explosion; not a breakage; but the loud flat smack a dining-table might make if you hauled it up to a ceiling by its castors and let it fall perfectly evenly upon a bare floor. It was the roof, however, that had been hit.

We went out to look, and one of the men picked up a fragment of shell, only about three inches long and less than an inch wide. That was my table-top. The jagged edge of it glittered as though incrusted with tiny brilliants; but the fragment was quite cold, showing that it had travelled far since the burst. 'One of our Archies,' said most of the men; but the Rest Hut orderly, who wore a Gunner badge said laconically: 'Fritz—range-finding!' He was borne out by a High Commander who honoured me with a visit some days later. I believe it was the first bit of German stuff that had found its way into the middle of the town since the previous November; and a very interesting and effective little entry it made, in the quietest hour of one of those uncannily quiet days, and in the precincts of what we flattered ourselves was the quietest hut on any front. But the funny (and rather disappointing) thing was that it had failed to leave so much as its mark upon our roof. It must have skimmed the apex and glanced off the downward slope—convex side down—as a stone glances off a pond. 'The little less,' and it would have drilled the reverse slope like a piece of paper. I have often thought of that cluster of forage caps, under the silky skylights, round the central table; but what I shall always hear, plainer than the terrific smack that left no mark, is that first little singing whirr as of a dwarf propeller of gigantic power. I think that must be the most sickening sound of all under heavy shell-fire in the open.

Next day was the eve of the expected attack, which did not in point of fact take place for another week and more; but how widespread was the expectation we learnt for ourselves by our own small signs and portents. A dozen francs were refunded on a dozen books whose borrowers were afraid they would have no more time just then to read another; but when it all blew over for that week, back they came with their deposits, and out went more books than ever. The mate was jubilant. Of course there had been no German attack; and never would be; they were not such fools! Nor was he by any means alone in his opinion; many officers—but enough! We were not, to be sure, by way of meeting many officers. And yet Wednesday, March 20th, brought two to my room whose respective deliverances are worth remembering in the light of subsequent events.

One was the Gunner who had given me steak and onions on our All Uppingham day in the dark depths of the earth. He was as cheery as if he had been making another century in the Old Boys' Match, instead of having just gone on with his heavies on a new pitch altogether. It was going to suit him. He felt like getting wickets. And the Pavilion was not a dug-out this time; it was an elephant, in which the Major and he could put me up any night I liked. Why not that night? He had come in a car; he could take me back with him.

Why not, I sometimes wonder to this day! There were good, there were even creditable, reasons; but, beyond the fact that I was now much attached to my counter, I honestly forget what they were. I only know that my hospitable friend's new wicket was one of the first to be overrun by a field-grey mob; and though the Major and he are still enjoying rude health on the right side of the Line, and it goes without saying that they left the ground with becoming dignity, I am afraid I should have been out of place in the procession. Exciting moments I must have had, but I should have been sorry to play Anchises to my friend's Æneas. And I was to have my little moments as it was.

My other visitor was, curiously, another cricketer, whom I had first seen bowling in the University match at Lord's. It is not his department of the greater game; nor do I intend to compromise this officer by means of any further clue; for he it was who informed me that the push was really coming before morning. 'So they say,' he smiled, and we passed on to matters of more immediate interest. Time enough to be interested in the push when it did come; from all reports I was likely to find myself in the stalls, and he of course would be on the stage. So that was that. In the meantime I had a great fixture arranged and billed for the Saturday evening. An old friend was coming over from the Press Château to lecture in the Rest Hut, for the first time on any platform; there were to be seats for all our other friends, officers and men, and some supper in my room for half-a-dozen of us and the lecturer. It was of this we talked, and probably of pre-war cricket, and my beloved men, over the last quiet tea I was to have there. Books went out very freely till we closed. With Our Faces to the Light, Heroes and Hero-Worship, The Supreme Test, and Our Life after Death, were among the last half-dozen titles!

ANOTHER OPENING DAY

... It did not wake me up till four or five in the morning. Then I knew it had begun. The row was incessant rather than tremendous; not nearer than it had often been, when that big local gun was at home, but indubitably different. Some supplementary sound followed most of the reports, as the receding swish of a shattered breaker follows the first crash. I guessed what it was, but I wanted to be sure. I wanted to ask the mate, on the other side of the partition behind my head; but I didn't want to wake him up on purpose. The only unnerved man I met in France, one of our workers whose railway-carriage had been blown in by a bomb on the last stage of his journey from the coast, had awakened the man in the next bed for company's sake the night after. He was brave enough to own it. I wanted company, but I had not the hardihood to sing out for it until I heard a movement through the partition.

The mate, of course, did not believe it was the push; but he confessed it sounded the sort of thing one would expect to hear if the Germans were fools enough to make a push. It sounded like rather distant thunder, with sporadic claps in the middle distance. I smoked a pipe with my Spectator before trying for some more sleep, and was just dropping off when our orderly arrived with jaunty tread.

'It's Fritz,' said he, with sardonic unconcern. 'You can hear the houses coming down.'

And there followed the tale of damage done so far.

I am afraid we were both up with the wind, if not with the sun. But we shaved without bloodshed; for it is remarkable how a shell-burst can fail to jog your elbow, or to spill your tea, when you have been educated up to that type of disturbance. We had grown so used to guns in the night that the quiet nights were the uncanny ones; and even they were generally punctuated first or last by a comfortable bang from the local heavy; the 'All's Well!' of that night-watchman, which, if it woke us up, only encouraged us to go to sleep again with an increased sense of security. A shell-burst at a decent distance sounded much the same for the first—and only startling—second. And all that morning, and generally throughout the day, they kept their distance with quite unexpected decency.

But they did sing over our heads; they did keep the blue above us vocal with their shrill, whining cries; it was astounding to look up into the unruffled heavens and see no trace of their course. As one gazed, the crash came in the streets a few hundred yards away; and often after the crash, by an interval of seconds, a noise as of some huge cart shooting its rubbish. Somebody said it was like a great lash whistling over us and cracking amid the herd of living houses just beyond. It really was; and what followed was the groan as yet another piece was taken out of the palpitating town.

Two things came home to us while the day was young. It was biggish stuff that was coming in, at a longish range; and it was coming in on business, not on pleasure. Its business was to feel for barracks, batteries, and other sound investments for valuable munitions; not to have a sporting flutter here, there, and everywhere; much less to indulge in the sheer luxury of pestling a ruined area to powder. If or when they made some ground, and brought up their field-guns, it would be a different matter; then it might pay them to keep us skipping in all parts of the town at once; but, for the present, we in our part were in quite ignoble security—unless Fritz lost his strength! We had, however, to remember that we were in a straight line between wicket and wicket; nor did his singing deliveries give us much chance of forgetting the fact.

News was not long in reaching us from less fortunate localities. The station was catching it; and we had a busy hut all but adjoining the station. We looked upon our comrades at the Station Hut with mingled envy and commiseration, when one or two of them dropped in to recount their adventures and escapes. A short-pitched one had killed four officers in the street in their direction. And it so happened that business took me to the spot during the course of the morning.

It would be idle to pretend it was an enjoyable expedition. A friend went with me; we wore our shrapnel helmets, and everybody we met was wearing his. That alone gave the streets an altered appearance; otherwise everything wore its normal aspect; the March sun was more like May than ever, the sky more innocently blue, the cool light hand of spring softer and more caressing. On the way we met two chaplains of the Guards, who gave us details of the tragedy; on its scene we saw clean wounds on the stone facing of a house, the chipped places standing out in the strong sunlight, but did not investigate too closely. Two of the officers had been standing in the doorway, two crossing the open space we skirted; two had been killed outright, and two were dying or dead of their wounds. Shells whistled continuously as we walked, but not one burst before our eyes.

On my return the mate and I had a look at a dungeon under the Town Hall, as a possible sleeping-place. It was part of an underground system for which the town was famous. One could walk for miles, from chamber to chamber, as one can crawl from cell to cell in the foundations of most big houses. We had long talked of going to ground there, with all our books, in the day of battle; and now we viewed provisional sites, though only one of us allowed that the day had dawned.

'This is not the push,' I was stoutly assured. 'This is only a feint, man. They are not such fools ...'

After lunch we opened to the bang and whistle of our own guns, for a change. The sacred mid-day meal was never followed up by enemy gun-fire in my hearing; the time-table obviously included a methodical siesta, which it was our daily delight to spoil. Not that my Rest Hut crowd betrayed much pleasure in the proceedings; for once, indeed, I could not help thinking them rather a stolid lot. There they sat as usual under the sunny skylights, dredging the day's news as though it were the one uninteresting thing in the hut, or playing dominoes and draughts, like a nurseryful of unnaturally good children. It is difficult to describe their demeanour. To say that they looked as though nothing was happening is to imply a studied unconcern; and there was certainly nothing studied on their side of the counter; on ours, it seemed as if the Rest Hut had only needed this external din to make it really restful.

'Our friend Jerry's a bit saucy this morning,' said the emissary of a sick Sergeant who sent for a fresh Maurice Hewlett every day that week. It was the first comment of the afternoon on the day's events. 'Our friend Jerry' had risen from his siesta and was giving us whistle and bang for our bang and whistle; and still every shot sounded plumb over the hut. It was like the middle of a tennis-court during a hard rally; but I never heard anybody suggest that either side might hit into the net.

Then, I remember, came a new-comer, a husky lad with a poisoned wrist.

'Gimme one o' them books.'

I had my formula in such cases.

'Who is your favourite author?'

'Don't know as I have one; gimme any good yarn.'

'What's the best yarn you ever read?'

'I don't often read one.'

'The last you did read?'

Lost in the mists. I set The Hound of the Baskervilles on him, and saw him well bitten by the book before the afternoon was out or the bombardment by way of abating. There was no tea-interval on the other side, that I remember; but we had ours as usual in my room, and it was either that afternoon or the next that an eminent Oxford professor, out on a lecturing tour, gave us his company. He was delightfully interested in the library, and spent most of the afternoon behind the counter, making out a list of books he talked of sending us, chatting with the men, and endearing himself to us all. I daresay he was the oldest man who had ever entered the hut; but I still see him perched on top of our little home-made step-ladder, in overcoat and muffler and soft felt hat, while the shells burst nearer, or at any rate made more noise, as the day drew in. Book in hand, and a kindly, interested, quizzical smile upon his face, the professor looked either as though he never heard one of them, or as though he had heard little else all his life. He cheered one more than the cheeriest soldier, for his was not the insensibility of usage, but the selfless preoccupation of a lofty soul.

Earlier in the week I had accepted an invitation to dine that evening with a mess at the other end of the town. It was quite the wrong end for dinner at such a time; it was the end where the German shells were feeling about for things worth smashing. They kept skimming across the streets as I found my way through the dusk, and ours came skimming back; it was the tennis-court again, but this time one seemed to be crossing it on gigantic stilts, head and shoulders above the chimney-pots. But nothing happened. It was a seasoned mess, all padres and doctors, to the best of my recollection; and they gave one a confidence more welcome than all their conscious hospitality. I enjoy my evening immensely—as I look back.

There was a window at each end of the dinner-table. No sooner were we seated than there occurred outside one of these windows about the loudest explosion I ever heard. No chair was pushed back, and I am bound to say that was the end of it; they said it was further off than I can yet believe. They also seemed to think it was a bomb. There I trusted they were right. Bombs cannot go on falling on or even about the same place. But in fifteen minutes to the tick we had the same thing outside the other window. This time the glass came tinkling down, and it was thought worth while to inquire whether there were any casualties in the kitchen. There were none: no doubt some chair would have been pushed back if the answer had been in the affirmative.

And that was all, except a great deal of shell-talk, and comparison of hair-breadth escapes, between my two hosts (both of whom had borne charmed lives—but who has not, out there?) when the rest were gone, and a shower of stuff in the soft soil of the garden as I was going myself. Perhaps 'shower' is too strong a word; but one of the many things I can still hear is the whizz and burial of at least one lethal fragment close beside us in the dark. The kind pair insisted on walking back with me, and were strong in their advice to me to seek a cellar for the night. This being their own intention, and the idea that I found in the mind of my mate on regaining the Rest Hut, he and I spent the next hour in transferring our beds and bedding to the dungeon aforesaid, where I for one slept all the better for the soothing croon of shells high overhead in waking intervals.

It was officially computed that over eight hundred large shells arrived in our little town that day, the historic 21st March, 1918.

THE END OF A BEGINNING

Two capital nights we passed in our ideal dungeon. It was deep yet dry, miraculously free from rats, and so very heavily vaulted, so tucked away under tons of débris, and yet so protected by the standing ruins, that it was really difficult to imagine the projectile that could join the party. There was, to be sure, a precipitous spiral staircase to the upper air, but even it did not descend straight into our lair. Still, a direct hit on the stairs would have been unpleasant; but one ran as much risk of a direct hit by lightning in peace-time. It seems indecent to gloat over a safety verging on the ignoble at such a time; but those two nights it was hard to help it; and the dim morning light upon the warm brick arches, bent like old shoulders under centuries of romance, added an appeal not altogether to the shrinking flesh.

The day between had been very like the first day. I thought the bombardment a shade less violent; but worse news was always coming in. Far fewer books were taken out, far fewer men had their afternoon to themselves, but only too many were their tales of bloodshed, especially on the outskirts of the town. They told them simply, stoically, even with the smile that became men whose turn it might be next; but the smile stopped short at the lips. Still worse hearing was the fall of village after village in sectors all too near our own; and yet more sinister rumours came from the far south. Our greatest anxieties were naturally nearest home, and our chief comfort the unruffled faces of such officers as passed our way. 'He seems to be meeting with some success, too!' as one vouchsafed from his saddle, after an opening in the style of the gentleman who was still demanding Hewletts for his Sergeant.

The second night we had a third cellarman, leader of one of the outlying huts now being abandoned every day. Almost hourly our headquarters were filling up with refugee workers flushed with their sad adventures; but this young fellow had been through more than most; a man had been killed in his hut, and he himself was in the last stages of exhaustion. He had been fast asleep when we descended from the turmoil for our night of peace; and fast asleep I left him in the morning, little thinking that most of us had spent our last night in the neighbourhood.

It was another of those brilliant days we shall remember every March that we may live to see. The devil's choristers were still singing through the blue above, still thundering their own applause in the doomed quarter of the town. Yet to stand blinking in the keen sunlight, snuffing the pure invigorating air, was to vote the whole thing weak and unconvincing. The picturesque ruins were not real ruins. The noises were not the noises of a real bombardment; they were too simple and too innocuous, one had heard them better done upon the stage. It seemed particularly impossible that anything could happen to me, for instance, at the head of my cellar stairs, or to the very immaculate Jocks' Padre picking his way towards me, over a mound of last year's ruins, to us as old as any other hill.

But it was that Padre who struck the sinister note at once. What were we going to do? Do! His meaning was not clear to me; he made it clear without delay. His Jocks—our Jocks—the rocks of my military faith!—had gone away back. Divisional Headquarters, at all events, had shifted out of that; it was the same with the other Divisions in the Corps, the Padre thought; and he took it we should all be ordered back if we didn't go! A place with a ridge had been taken by the enemy, who had only to get his field-guns up—and that was only a question of hours—to make the town a great deal unhealthier than it was already.

I was horrified. It was the one thing I had never contemplated, being turned out of the little old town! After all, it had been an unhealthier spot a year ago than it yet threatened to become again. A year ago the very Line had curled through its narrow rim of suburbs; and yet the troops had stuck to the town; there had been cellarage for all, barricades in streets swept by machine-guns, and a Y.M.C.A. hut run by a valiant veteran through thick and thin. One or two of us, at least, had been prepared for the same thing over again, plus our Rest Cave and all our books at a safe depth underground. That prospect had thrilled and fascinated; the one now foreshadowed seemed too black to come true.

But at breakfast we had it officially from the mere boy (from a Public School, however) in local charge of the lot of us. We had better get packed; it would be safer; but he hoped, perhaps more heartily than any of us, that the extremity in view would not arise. So we pulled out kit-bags and suit-cases of which we had forgotten the sight—and my jolly little room never looked itself again. No room does, once you start packing the belongings that made it what it was; but I never hated that hateful job so much in all my life. Nor did I ever do it worse—which is saying even more. Two days and nights under continuous shell-fire, even when it is only the music of those spheres that he hears incessantly, does find a man out in one way or another. My way was forgetfulness and, I fear, a certain irritability. There are some of my most cherished little possessions that I shall never see again, and a good friend or so with whom I fear I was a trifle gruff. I hope they have forgiven me. But a shell-burst may be easier to bear than a pointless question, especially when you are asking one or two yourself.

At lunch-time the A.P.M. sent in for me. I found him outside in the sun, with the D.A.A. and Q.M.G., I think it was—both of them very grave and business-like in their shrapnel helmets, their gas-masks hooked up under their chins. They, too, wanted to know what we proposed to do; they, too, explained exactly why the town would presently become no place for any of us. But it was not for me to speak for the other workers, who by this time were most of them on the spot; we were all as sheep in the absence of our Public School shepherd, who had gone off in the Ford to seek instructions at Area Headquarters. Some of them, indeed, took the opportunity of speaking for themselves; and who had a better right? It may be only my impression that we all had a good deal to say at the same time: I know I voiced my dream about the Rest Cave. The official faces were not encouraging; indeed, they put their discouragement in words open to an ominous construction. They did not say Janiculum was lost, but they left us perhaps deservedly uneasy on the point.

And it was all idiotically, if not shamefully, exasperating! Those heavy shells still raining into the town; untold pain and damage ensuing every minute; the town-crier with his bell even then upon his rounds, warning civilians to evacuate; little parties of them already under way, here a toothless old lady in her Sunday weeds, a dignified old gentleman pushing a superannuated perambulator full of household gods, a prancing terrier loving the sad excitement of it all; and a man old enough to know better thinking only of his makeshift hut, hardly at all about their lifelong homes compulsorily abandoned in their poor old age, yet with a step so proud and so unfaltering! The perambulator, perhaps, was now a nobler and a sadder treasure than any it contained. But just then the hut was home and treasure-house to me; filled day by day with hearts of gold and souls of iron; and now what would become of it and them!

For the first time since the first day of all, nobody was there when we opened; but presently a handful drifted in, as unconcerned as the terrier in the road, but without a symptom of the dog's ingenuous excitement. What was it to them if the day was big with all our fates! It would not be their first big day; but it was not their day at all just yet, whatever it might be to us. To them it was still a May day come in March, the air was still charged with the fulness of life, and the hut with all that they had found in it hitherto. It was only to us, in our narrow, keen experience, that everything was spoilt, or spoiling before our eyes.

'It's too good a day to waste in war,' said one of them across an idle counter.

It was not his first utterance recorded in these notes; and there seemed a touch of affectation about it. But he was one of the clever lot I liked, and what I thought his self-consciousness only drew us closer; for I defy you to live under shell-fire, for the first time, without thinking of yourself, and what the next moment may mean to you—and what the moment after—at the back of your mind. It is another thing when your hands are full. But the peculiar traffic at our counter had dwindled steadily during the bombardment. And it had lost even more in character than in bulk. Impossible, at least for me, to keep up the tacit pretence that a book was more important than a battle; it had taken our visitor from Oxford (whom I suspect of an eager assent to the proposition) to turn a really deaf ear to the song and crash of high explosive. Mine was hardened, but it heard everything; my mind employed itself on each report; and for the last two days the men and I had been talking War.

But to this young man I talked about his friends whom I might never see again. He had brought back a bundle of their books, and in their names he thanked me for my 'kindness' to them: as if it were all on one side! As if they had not, all of them, done more for me than I for them! They were doing things up to the end; bringing back their books, at their plain inconvenience, on their way to the forefront of the fight; even bringing me, to the eleventh hour, their little offerings of books, the last tokens of their good-will.

It was hard to tell them we were closing down, it might be only for a day or two; harder still to say what one felt without striking an unhelpful note; and I took no risks. We could only refuse their money all the afternoon, entertain them as best we could, and pack them off with a hand-grip and 'Good luck!'

There was trouble, too, behind the scenes. Our dear old Madame was one of those for whom the town-crier had rung a knell; by half-past three she must be out of house, home, and native place. But it was not the shipwreck of her simple life that brought the poor soul in tears to the hut. All the world knows how the homely French take the personal tragedies of war, with the national shrug and a dry eye for their share of the national burden; and Madame was French to her finger-tips. She was therefore an artist, who put her hand to nothing she was not minded to finish as creditably as the good God would let her. Think, then, of her innocent shame at having to deliver our week's laundry wringing wet from the mangle! It was the last mortification; and all our protestations were powerless to assuage the sting to her sensibilities. As for her helpmate, our orderly, for all his capabilities he had never replaced the two heroes of the other hut in my affections; and at this juncture he had managed to get a little drunk. But from information since received one can only wonder it did not happen oftener; for the man had tragedy in his life, and his story would be the most dramatic in these pages had I the heart to tell it. By us he had done more than his duty, and for the hut almost as much as Madame herself. The last sight of each was saddening, and yet a part of the closing scenes, as the pair had been part of our lives.

By half-past five the Y.M.C.A. men had their orders: all to evacuate except four of the youngest or strongest, who might stay for the present to help with the walking wounded. Only too naturally, the Rest Hut was not represented among the chosen. But permission was given us to remain open another hour; and there were perhaps a dozen readers under the still sunny skylights to the end. It went hardest of all to tell them they would have to go. Two or three looked up from the papers to ask in dismay about their lecture. I had forgotten there was to have been a lecture; but here were these children waiting to take their places for the promised treat, and more came later. Nothing all day had illustrated quite so graphically the difference between their point of view and ours; to them bursting shells, falling houses, and emptying town were all in the day's work. They had to carry on just the same; it was more than distasteful to be obliged to point out that we could not. The lecturer, I said, if he was still alive, would be in the thick of things by this time. That went home; he is the man they all read, the man who has sung the praises of the private soldier with an understanding enthusiasm unsurpassed by any war correspondent in any war. A week earlier the hut would have been full to bursting; it shall burst if they like one night this winter—all being better than that Saturday in March—and a war still on!

A regular patron of our Quiet Room Evenings, an oldish man with a fine scorn stamped upon his hard-bitten face, said one or two things I valued the more as coming from him, though I doubt if we had exchanged a dozen words before. I shook his hand, and all their hands, as they went out. They were pleased with us for having kept open a day longer than any of the other huts. I hope I said the other huts had been closed by order; but I only remember wanting to say a great deal more, and thinking better of it. After all, we had understood each other in that hut to a degree beyond the need of heavy speeches.

THE ROAD BACK

There was a strange lull in the firing, and no meal-time to account for it, as I carried the baggage over piecemeal to our headquarters off the opposite end of the little square. The mate was doubtless busy relieving me of my final responsibilities in the matter of stores or accounts; at any rate I remember those two or three halting journeys with his light and my heavy kit. The sun was setting in a slight haze, as though the air were full of gold-dust. The shadows of the crippled houses lay at full length in the square. The big guns were strangely still; their field-guns were taking them a good long time to mount upon the captured ridge. I made my final trip, turned in under the arch at headquarters, where the little Ford 'bus was waiting for the last of us, and incidentally for my last and lightest load. I had not put it in when those infernal field-guns got going.

I do not know what happened in other parts of the town. It seems unlikely that they opened fire on our part in particular, but as I stood talking in a glass passage there came a whirlwind whizz over the low roofs, a crack and a cloud in the adjoining courtyard, and, as I turned back under the arch, another whizz and another bang in the street I had just quitted. So I would have sworn in perfect faith; and for several minutes the street was full of acrid smoke, to bear me out. But it seems the second burst was in the next house, or in the next but one. All I can say is that both occurred within about fifteen paces of the spot where I stood as safe as the house that covered me. And yet the soldiers tell you they prefer shell-fire in the open! With great respect, I shall stick up for the devil I know.

But what has interested me ever since is the hopelessness of expecting two persons to give anything like the same account of a violent experience which has taken them both equally by surprise. Nor is it necessary to go gadding about the front in order to test this particular proposition; try any couple who have been in the same motor accident. It must be done at once, before they have time to compare notes; indeed, they should be kept apart like suspect witnesses in a court. Suspicion will be amply vindicated in nine cases out of ten; for the impression of any accident upon any mind depends on the state of that mind at the time, on the impressions already there, and on its imaginative quality at any time. Hence the totally different versions of the same event from three or four equally truthful persons. A boy I had known all his life was killed just before I went out: three honest witnesses gave three contradictory descriptions of the tragedy. Two of the three were all but eye-witnesses, and C. of E. chaplains at that! No wonder we argued about our beggarly brace of shells. The chief mate (last to leave the ship, by the way) heard three, and a fourth as we drove away in the Ford. My powers of registration were only equal to the two described.

It was good to be high and dry in the little 'bus, though it would have been better with as much as the horn to blow to keep one's mind out of mischief. Our driver was a fine man wearing the South African and 1914 ribbons. Invalided out, he had wormed his way back to France in the Y.M.C.A.; but it was a soldier's job he did again that night, and for days and nights to follow. Once a shell burst in his path and smashed the radiator; he plugged it up with wood and kept her going. It is provoking to be obliged to add that I was not in the car at the time.

Nor did I thoroughly enjoy every minute of the hours I spent in it that Saturday night; there was far too much occasion both for pangs and fears. Though we had kept open longer than any other hut, and everybody else (who was going) had left the town before us, yet the rest had gone on foot and it seemed a villainy to pass them plodding in the stream of refugees outside the town. It is true they all boarded lorries at the earliest opportunity, and actually reached our common haven before us; but that did not make our performance less inglorious at the time. Nor had we any extenuating adventures on the way. The road, we understood, was being heavily shelled; unless the enemy slumbered and slept, it was bound to be; but I for one saw nothing of it. The Ford hood reduced the landscape to a few yards of moonlit track, and the Ford engine drowned all other noises of the night. But there was the perpetual apprehension of that which never once occurred. Wherever we stopped, it had been occurring freely. One of our huts, some kilometres out, was ringed with huge shell-holes; but none were added during the interminable time we waited in the road, while business was being transacted with which three of the four of us had nothing to do. I do not know which was greater, the relief of getting under way again, or the shame of leaving the crew of that hut to their fate.

Yet we had but to forget our own miserable skins and sensibilities, to remember we were only on-lookers, and be thankful to be there that night in any capacity whatsoever. For the straight French road whereon we travelled—the wrong way, for our sins!—was choked with strings of lorries and motor-'buses full of reinforcements for the battle-line; silent men, miles and miles of them, mostly invisible, load after load; all embussed, not a single company to be seen upon the march. It was weird, but it was gorgeous: the tranquil moon above, the tossing dust below, and these tall landships, packed with fighting-men, looming through by the hundred. This one, we kept saying, must be the last; but scarcely were we abreast, grazing her side, craning to make out the men behind her darkened ports, than another ship-load broke dimly through the dust, to tower above us in its turn.

Thousands and thousands of gallant hearts! Sometimes the men themselves fretted the top of a familiar 'bus—of course in khaki like its load—but for the most part they were out of sight inside. And—it may have been the drowning thud of their great engines, the noisier racket of our own—but not a human sound can I remember first or last. So they passed, speeding to the rescue; so they passed, how many to their reward! Louder than our throbbing engines, and louder than the guns they deadened, the fighting blood of England sang that night through all these arteries of France; and our own few drops danced with our tears, hurt as it might to rush by upon the other side.

What with one stoppage and another, and always going against the stream of heavy traffic, the thirty or forty kilometres must have taken us three or four hours; and there, as I was saying, were our poor pedestrians in port before us. It dispelled anxiety, if it did no more. But there was no end to our mean advantages; for the good easy men were making their beds upon the bare boards of the local Y.M.C.A., where we found them with the refugees from yet another group of forsaken huts, some eighty souls in all. They assured us there were no beds to be had in the place, that the Town Major had commandeered every mattress. But a cunning and influential veteran whispered another story in my private ear; and on the understanding that his surreptitious arrangements should include the mate of the Rest Hut, we adjourned with our friend in need to the best hotel in the town, whence after supper we were conducted to a still better billet. Here were not only separate beds, with sheets on them, but separate rooms with muslin curtains, marbled wash-stands, clocks and mirrors. It was true we had been forced to leave our heavy baggage at headquarters in our own poor town; and there had not been room in my despatch-case for any raiment for the night. But that was because I had refused to escape without my library records, whatever else was left behind. And the extensive contact with cool linen could not lessen the glow of virtue, on that solitary head, with which I stretched myself out in comfort inconceivable fifteen hours before.

The day, beginning with the shock received from the Scottish Padre at the head of the dungeon stairs, had been packed with surprise, disappointment, irritation, mortal apprehension and emotion more varied than any day of mine had ever yet brought forth. But I was physically tired out, and a great deal more stolid about it all that night than I feel now, six months after the event. The silence, I remember, was the only thing that troubled me, after those three days and nights of almost incessant shell-fire. But it was a joyous trouble—while it lasted. Hardly had I closed my eyes upon the moonlit muslin curtains, when I woke with a start to that unaltered scene. The only difference was the slightly irregular hum of an enemy aeroplane, and the noise of bombs bursting all too near our perfect billet.

IN THE DAY OF BATTLE

It was not my first acquaintance with the town, nor yet with the hotel to which our billet was affiliated. I had been there on a book-raid in better days. It was in that hotel I found the hero of the apopthegm: 'Once a soldier—always a civilian!' And now its dismal saloons were overflowing with essential civilians who might have been soldiers all their lives; only here and there could one detect a difference; all seemed equally imbued with the traditional nonchalance of the British officer in a tight place. But for their uniform, and their martial carriage, they might have been a festive gathering of the Old Boys of any Public School.

After breakfast we others sallied forth. The sun was still prematurely hot. The uninjured street was full not only of khaki, but of the townsfolk of both sexes, a new element to us in any but rare glimpses. Their Sunday faces betrayed no sign of special anxiety. The bells were tinkling peacefully for mass as we crossed the little river flowing close behind the backs of the houses, and climbed the grassy height on which the citadel stands bastioned. A party of British soldiers was camped in its chill shadow; many were washing at the stream below, their bodies white as milk between their trousers and their sunburnt necks. Some, I think, were actually bathing. They did not look like the battered remnant of a grand Battalion. Yet that was what they were.

We foregathered with one chip from the modern battle-axe: a Sergeant and old soldier who had been through all the war and through South Africa. The last three days beat all. There had never been anything to touch them. Masses had melted before his eyes. There they were, as thick as corn, one minute, and the next they lay in swathes, and the next again the swathes were one continuous stack of dead. The illustration was the Sergeant's, and I know the fine rolling countryside he got it from; but it was not the burden of his yarn. This came in so often, with an effect so variable, that I was puzzled, knowing the perverse levity of the type.

'No nation can stand it,' were the exact words more than once. 'No nation that ever was, can go on standing it.'

'Do you mean——?'

But I saw he didn't! The whites of his eyes were like an inner ring of brick-red skin, but it was their blue that flamed with sardonic humour.

'I mean the Germans!' cried he. 'No nation on earth can go on standing what they had to stand yesterday and the day before. It's not in human nature to go on standing it. I don't say as we didn't get it too....'

Nor could he, while telling us what the remnant in the tents and on the river-bank represented; but all such information was imparted in the tone of a man making an admission for the sake of argument or fair play. If I remember, the Sergeant had two wound-stripes under his pile of service chevrons. But he had borne more lives than a squad of cats. 'Each time I find I'm all right, I just shake 'ands with myself and carry on.' We got him to shake hands with us, and so parted with a diamond in human form.

Along the road below came the rag-time of a mediocre band; we hurried down and stood in a gateway to review a company of Australians marching into the town. This string of jewels was still unscattered by the fight, of the same high water as our south-country Sergeant, only different in cut and polish, if not of set sarcastic purpose. They were marching in their own way; no stride or swing about it; but a more subtle jauntiness, a kind of mincing strut, perhaps not unconsciously sinister and unconventional, an aggressive part of themselves. But what men! What beetling chests, what muscle-swollen sleeves, what dark, pugnacious, shaven faces! Here and there a pendulous moustache mourned the beard of some bushman of the old school; but no such adventitious aids could have improved upon the naked truculence of most of those mouths and chins. In their supercilious confidence they reminded me of the early Australian cricketers, of beardless Blackham, Boyles and Bonnors taking the field to mow down the flower of English cricket, in the days when those were our serious wars. How I had hated the type as a schoolboy sitting open-mouthed and heart-broken at the Oval! How I had feared it as a hobble-de-hoy in the bush itself! But, in the day of battle, could there have been a better sight than this potential band of bush-rangers and demon bowlers? Not to my glasses; nor one more bitter for the mate of the Rest Hut, thrice rejected from those very ranks.

We wandered idly in their wake; and the next sight that I remember, though it may not have been that morning, was almost as cheering in its very different way. It was the spectacle of a single German prisoner, being marched through the streets by a single British soldier with fixed bayonet. The prisoner was an N.C.O., and a fine defiant brute, marching magnificently just to show us. But his was not the hate that conceals hate; he was the incarnation of the ineffable hymn, with his quick-firing eyes and the high angle of his powerful chin. Physically our man could not compare with him. And that seemed symbolical, at a moment when signs and symbols were in some request.

Then there were the men one had met before. Congested as it was with traffic to and from the fighting, this little town was even more a rendezvous for old acquaintance than the one from which we had beaten our compulsory retreat. I was always running into somebody I had known of old or through his people. One glorious young man, who had been much upon my mind, came into the restaurant where we were having lunch on the Tuesday. His eyes were clear but strained, his ears loaded with yellow dust that toned artistically with his skin and hair. He said he had had his first sleep for five nights—under a railway arch. Before the war he had been up at Cambridge, and a very eminent Blue; if I said what he had it for, and what ribbon he was wearing now, I might as well break my rule and name him outright. But there had been three big brothers, then; now there was only this one left—and at one time not much of him. It did my heart good to see him here—looking as if he had never known a day's illness, or the pain of wounds or grief—looking a young god if there was one in France that day.

But it was not only for his own or for his family's sake that the mere sight of this splendid fellow was such a joy. The things he stood for were more precious than any life or group of lives. He stood for the generation which has been wiped out almost to a boy, as I knew it; he stood for his brothers, and for all our sons who made their sacrifice at once; he stood for the English games, and for those who had seemed to live for games, but who jumped into the King's uniform quicker than they ever changed into flannels in their lives. 'It is the one good thing the war has done—to give public-school fellows a chance—they are the one class who are enjoying themselves in this war.' So wrote one whose early innings was of the shortest; and though it was a boyish boast, and they were not the only class by any means, I should like to know which other was quite as valuable when the war, too, was in its infancy? In each and every country, by one means or the other, the men were to be had: only our Public Schools could have furnished off-hand an army of natural officers, trained to lead, old in responsibility, and afraid of nothing in the world but fear itself. There were very few of the first lot left last March, and now there are many fewer. Of one particular Eton and Harrow match, I believe it can be said that not half-a-dozen of the twenty-two players are now alive. It was something to meet so noble a survivor, still leading in battle as he had learnt to lead at school and college, both on and off the field.

Nor had one to hang about hotels and restaurants, or camps or the street corners, to see men straight from the fight or just going in, and to take fresh heart from theirs. The chief local Y.M.C.A. was full of both kinds, one more appealing than the other. It was perhaps the least conscious appeal ever made to human heart; for men are proud in the day of battle, and they are also mighty busy with their own affairs. What pocket stores they were laying in! What sanguine reserves of tobacco and cigarettes! That was a heartening sign. But there were no foreboding faces that I could see. It is one of the strong points of the inner soldier that he never thinks it is his turn; but if shell or bullet 'has his name on it,' it will 'see him off,' as he also puts it. Some call this fatalism. I call it Faith. It is their plain way of bowing to the Will of God. But the only bow I saw was over the long last letters many were writing, as though the bugle was already blowing for them, as though they well knew what it meant. There was no looking unmoved upon those bent backs and hurrying hands.

Nor were they the most poignant figures; it was the men who had been in it that one could not keep one's eyes off. Those we had seen bathing in the morning were nothing to them. They had a night's rest behind them; these were brands still smoking from the fire. Dirty as dustmen, red-eyed, and with the growth of all these days upon their haggard faces, some sat at the tables, eating and drinking like men who had just discovered their own emptiness; and many lay huddled on the floor, as on the battle-field itself, filling the hut with its very atmosphere. To step over them, and to sit with the men who had a mind to talk, was to get into the red heart of the thing that was going on.

Not that they had very much to tell; all were hazy as to what had happened; but all agreed it was the worst thing they had been through yet, and all bore out our Sunday morning friend, that it was worse for the enemy than for anybody else. This unanimity was remarkable; especially if you consider, first the military history of that last ten days in March, and secondly the fact that none of these unwounded stalwarts was there for a normal reason. Each stood for scores or hundreds who had gone under in the fight, or been taken prisoner. Yet it was worse for the enemy! Yet we were going to win! I cannot swear to the statement in those words, but it was implicit in their every utterance, and emphatic in the things they never said. For though I brought biscuits to many, and sat while they steeped them in their mugs and gulped them down, not a first syllable of complaint reached my ears. On that I would take my stand in any witness-box. And a Y.M.C.A. man knows; they trust us, and speak their minds.

Often in the winter 'peace-time,' as hinted early in these notes, I have seen men shudder at the prospect of the trenches, heard bitter murmurs at the mud and misery, and have done my best to answer the natural cry: 'When is this dreadful war going to finish? It will never be finished by fighting!' There was nothing of that sort to cope with now. In the winter I have heard lamentations for the stray man killed by a sniper or a stray shell. There was the case of the Lewis gunner who had earned his special leave; there was 'the best wee sergeant,' and there were others. But there was none of that now that men were falling by the thousand; not from a single one of these ravenous, red-eyed survivors. You may say it was their hunger, weariness, and consequent insensibility, the acquiescence of the sleeper in the snow. But they were full of confidence phlegmatic yet serene. They were on the winning side; there was never a doubt of it on their lips or in their eyes; and with us they had no reason to keep their doubts to themselves. They had voiced them freely in the winter. But now they had no doubts to voice.

I do not propound their perspicacity or postulate an instinct they did not claim themselves. I merely state a fact from observation of these handfuls of men in the first days of the great crisis. That was the way they reacted against the greatest enemy success since the first month of the war. It is the English way, and always has been. And they happen to be busy finishing the old sequel as I write.

Yet if you had seen their eyes! I remember as a little boy seeing Lady Butler's 'Charge of the Light Brigade' at my first Academy. I am not sure that I have looked upon the canvas since, but the wild-eyed central figure, 'back from the mouth of Hell,' rises up before me after forty years. There is, to be sure, only the most odious of comparisons between his heroic stand and the posture of my friends, who were not posing for a Victorian battle-piece, but bolting biscuits and spilling tea on a Y.M.C.A. table in modern France. Nevertheless, some of them had those eyes.

OTHER OLD FELLOWS

It was pleasant one morning to hear a sudden voice at my elbow: 'How's the Rest Hut?' and to find at least one of its regular frequenters still whole and hearty, in the press outside this teeming Y.M.C.A. But a more embarrassing encounter occurred the same day and on the same too public spot.

It began in the hut, with a couple of sad young Jocks, who were like to be sad, as they might have said; but they only smiled in wry yet not unhumorous resignation. Their story was that of thousands upon the imperative stoppage of all leave. These two had started off on theirs, and were going aboard at Boulogne when headed back to their Battalion, which they had now to find. It chanced to be one of those to which I had helped to minister in the sunken road at Christmas. They remembered the Cocoa Man, as I had been called there, but in the morning they were not demonstrative.

About mid-day we met again, and as I say, in the surging crowd outside the Y.M.C.A. This time the case was sadly altered; the hapless pair had been consoling themselves at another spring, and were at the warm-hearted stage. Nothing was now too good for the poor Cocoa Man, no compliment too wildly hyperbolical. Falling with their unabated forces upon both his hands, only stopping short of the actual neck, they greeted him as 'a brave mon' in that concourse of braves, and proceeded to embroider the charge with unconscionable detail.

'Thairty-five yarrds from the Gairmans,' declared one, 'this ol' feller was teemin' cocoa in the trenches. I'm tellin' ye! Lash C'rishmash—mind ye—shnow an' ische! Thairty-five yarrds from the Gairmans—strike me dead!'

A vindictive Deity might well have taken him at his word, for dividing the real distance by more than ten. But nothing came of it except a murmur of general incredulity, obsequiously confirmed by the Cocoa Man, and from the other Jock's wagging head a sentimental echo: 'Thish ol' feller! Thish ol' feller!' he could only say for the pavement's benefit.

'Why was I there?' demanded the spokesman, with a rhetorical thump upon his chest. 'Dis-cip-line—dis-cip-line—only reason I was there. But this ol' feller——'

'Thish ol' feller!' screamed the other, in a paroxysm of affection; and when I had eventually retrieved both hands I left them singing my longevity in those terms, like a catch, and took my blushes to a safer part of the town.

'I've given them a bitty,' whispered one of our ministers, who had assisted my escape, 'and told them to go away and get something to eat.'

And the sly carnal wisdom of the advice, no less than the charity which made it practicable, left a good taste in the mouth. It was the kind of thing I ventured to think we wanted in our workers. In any community of sinners there is room for the saint who will help a man to get sober sooner than scold him for getting drunk.

Not that I saw above half-a-dozen tipsy men in all the huts that I was ever in. They were to be seen, no doubt, but they did not come our way. The soldier who seeks the Y.M. in his cups is not a hardened case. He is the last person to be discouraged, as he will be the first to deplore his imprudence in the morning. I have heard a splendid young New Zealander speak of the lapse that had cost him his stripes as though nobody had ever made so dire a fool of himself. That is the kind of notion to scout even at the cost of a high line in these matters. It is possible to make too much of the virtues that come easily to ourselves; and to the average Y.M.C.A. man the cardinal virtues seemed very like second nature. This is not covert irony, but a simple fact which, for that matter, ought hardly to have been otherwise, since most of us were ministers of one denomination or another. The minority were apt to feel, but were not necessarily justified in feeling, that a more liberal admixture of 'sinful laymen' might have put us, as a body, even more intimately in touch with the men than we undoubtedly were.

Chief, however, among the virtues of my comrades, I think any unprejudiced observer would have placed that of Courage. There were now no fewer than eighty of us, all leaves before the wind of war, blown helter-skelter into this little town that must be nameless. We had come off all sorts and sizes of trees, down to the most sensitive and frailest; but from the first squall to the last we were permitted to face, and throughout these days of precarious shelter, in many ways a higher test, I never saw a man among us outwardly the worse for nerves. And be it known that the small personal escapes and excitements recorded in these notes, were as nothing to the full-size adventures of a great many of our refugees. In outlying huts, cheek by jowl with the camps they served, the shelling had been far heavier and more direct than the officers of the Rest Hut had been privileged to undergo; the responsibility had been much greater, and the means of escape not to be compared with ours. Little home-made dug-outs, under the hut itself, had been their nearest approach to our vaulted dungeon, a tattoo of shrapnel their variety of shell-music. Whole walls had been blown in on them, men killed and wounded under the riddled roof. Some had suffered even more from a bodyguard of our own guns than from the enemy; one reverend gentleman declared in writing that his 'hut reeled like a ship in a great sea.'

Another wrote: 'A wave of gas entered our domain and we had a season of intense coughing and sneezing, also watering of eyes. Thinking it was but a passing wave of gas from our own guns, we did not use our respirators, but reaching up to a box of sweets I distributed them to my comrades, and we lay sucking sweets to take away the taste.' (This was a Baptist minister with a South African ribbon, and not the man to lie long doing anything.) 'After breakfast I called upon the Artillery Officers to offer my staff to make hot cocoa and supply biscuits during the morning for the hard-worked gun-teams, an offer which he gratefully accepted. I then made my way up to the dressing-station to see if the Medical Officer required our services for the walking wounded. His reply being in the affirmative, I took stock of the equipment we had on the spot, then went back to bring up all necessary articles, also my comrades. The small hut we have near the dressing-station for this work was being so hotly shelled that the M.O. would not allow us to remain there, so we worked outside the dressing-station door, a little more sheltered, but still exposed to shell-fire. We comforted the wounded, gave them hot tea and free cigarettes. A lull occurred during the morning in our work, so Mr. —— returned to make the cocoa for the gun-teams, Mr. —— remained to carry on at the dressing-station, and I returned to clear the cash-boxes, fill my pockets with rescued paper-money, prepared again for emergency.... We continued our work with the wounded, and as the same increased in number, I then assisted in bandaging the smaller wounds, having knowledge of that kind of work. Later, the A.P.M. gave me his field-glasses and asked me to act as observer and report to him every change in the progress of the battle of the ridges. This was most interesting work, but meant constant exposure. One of our aeroplanes sounded its hooter and dropped a message about 600 yards away. On reporting it I was asked to cross over and see that the message was delivered to the correct battery.'

This was a man! But do not forget he was also a Baptist minister on a four-months furlough at the front. 'Once a soldier!' he too may have said after his first campaign, and clinched it by entering his ministry; but here he was in his pious prime, excelling his lay youth in deeds of gallantry, and covering our civilian heads with his reflected glory. No wonder he 'heard from two sources that my work on that day received mention in military dispatches.' Let us hope it did. 'If true,' he makes haste to add, 'the work of my two colleagues is as much deserving.' But who inspired them? Before they turned their backs, 'the advancing Germans were only about 700 yards away. Securing some of our goods, we decided to retire upon —— for the night and return if possible the next day.' The last six words italicise themselves.

The party went out of the frying-pan into heavier fire further back: 'Soon after we had retired to rest the Germans commenced to bombard the place with high velocity shells from long range.... A Lieutenant in our hut went to the door, but reeled back immediately with a shattered arm. A Corporal outside received a nasty wound in the shoulder. We set to work bandaging the wounds of these men and making them comfortable while others went to obtain a conveyance. There was no shelter, so after the wounded were safely on their way to a C.C.S. we lay down in our blankets, considering it as easy to be shelled in the warm as standing in the cold'—more wine that needs no printer's bush. Later, he relieved the leader of a very hot hut indeed, where he had for colleague 'one who was calm in the hour of danger.' Here the congenial pair 'were able to carry on for four days, when the order came for us to evacuate. We distributed our stock of goods to the soldiers, then closed up. That night we lay in our blankets counting the bursting shells around us at three shells per minute.' On their arrival in our common port, naturally not before, 'the effects of the gas at —— began to make themselves felt, and I was ordered by the Medical Officer to take a week's complete rest.' One wonders if a rest was better earned in all those terrific days.

The document from which I have been quoting is only one of many placed at my disposal. It is typical of them all, exceptional solely in the telling simplicity of the narrator. The writer was not our only minister who came through the fire pure gold; he was not even the only Baptist minister. One there was, the gentlest of souls, whose heroic story I may yet make shift to tell, though it deserves the hand of Mr. Service or of 'Woodbine Willie.' Such were the men I had the honour of working with last winter, and of such their adventures as against the personal experiences it was necessary to recount first or else not at all. I confess they make my Rest Hut look a little too restful as I set them down; for there we were wonderfully spared the tangible horrors of the situation; but many of these others, as little used to bloodshed as ourselves, had left a shambles behind them, and looked upon the things that haunt a mind.

And yet, as I began by saying, not a man of them showed shaken nerves, or what mattered more to those of us who had seen less, a shaken faith. Therein they were not only worthy of the men they had served so devotedly to the end, but of the sublime tradition it was theirs to uphold. It was a great matter that there should not have been one heart among us so faint as to affect another, that we should have carried ourselves at least outwardly as I think we did. But to some of us it seemed a yet greater matter, in the days of anti-climax and reaction now in store, that those to whom we were entitled to look for spiritual support did not fail us in a single instance.

THE REST CAMP—AND AFTER

Y.M.C.A. work was over for the time being in the fighting areas. Hundreds of huts and mountains of stores had been abandoned or destroyed. What was to be done with the six or seven dozen of us, now thoroughly superfluous men (and as many more in other centres), was the immediate problem. It was solved by the High Command putting at our disposal an Army rest-camp on the coast.

Thither we all started by rail on the evening of Tuesday, March 26th. Ten minutes after our train left, the station was heavily bombed; half-an-hour later we were lying low in a cutting, under a mercilessly full moon, but perhaps in deeper shadow than we supposed, while a German aeroplane scoured the sky for mischief. There was an Anti-Aircraft Battery also concealed about the district; thanks to its activities, we were at length able to proceed with less fear of molestation. But only fitfully; the full moon saw to that. It was as light as noonday through smoked glasses, and very soon our train was hiding in the next wood that happened to intersect the line.

Did we waste time talking about it, discussing our chances, or mildly anathematising our last-straw luck? Not for many minutes; at least, not in the bare truck round which some fifty of us squatted on our baggage. We had begun the last stage of our exodus in a certain fashion; and in that fashion we went on—and on. Before we were five minutes out, one of them had struck up a hymn, and we had sung it with all our lungs and hearts. Another and another followed; and in the stoppages, after a human peep at the sky, and a silence broken by the beat of the destroyer's engine, there was always some exalted voice to lead us yet again, and a stentorian following every time. Though the tunes were often strange to me, and to my mind no improvement on the ones I wanted, the hymns themselves were the old hymns that take a man back to his old home and his old school. Each was like a bottle charged with the essence of some ancient scene. One savoured the scents of vanished rooms, heard the sound of voices long past singing or long ago stilled; forgotten influences, childish promptings, looks and thoughts and sayings, came leaping out of the dead past into that dark truck hiding for dear life in a wood. And of all the unreal situations I was ever in—or invented, for that matter—this at last struck me as about the most unconvincing and far-fetched. Yet at the same time, like all else that really matters, it seemed the most natural thing in the world: as though the whole history of mankind had not led up to the horrors and splendours of this stupendous war more inevitably than our fifty life-lines converged in that truck-load of brave, faithful, hymn-singing men.

Then a hymn would end, and there would be sometimes as much as a minute of natural talk and normal thinking. But it was like the lorries full of fighting-men in the moonlit dust; always a new leader filled the breach; and the officers of the Rest Hut had long been stolid listeners when we stopped once more, not to hide, but at some station, and that weary pair sneaked out into another truck. Here there were but other two before them: a sardonic Anglican, and a young man enviably asleep under less covering than would have soothed our thinner blood. Side by side we cowered upon a packing-case, a Rest Hut blanket about our legs, and discussed the secular situation over a pipe. Almost the last thing we two had heard in the town was a whisper about the German cavalry; a rumour so sensational that we were keeping it to ourselves; but it only confirmed the mate in his prophetic conviction that the fools were just cutting their own throats deeper with every mile they advanced. That was his hymn; not a stage of our flight had he failed to beguile with the grim refrain; but in the truck I seem to recall a wilder dream of getting into some dead man's uniform, if the other folly went much further, and risking a firing-party for one blow at a Boche by fair or foul. It was perhaps as well that we were going beyond the reach of any such desperate temptations.

The Rest Camp was on a chilly plateau at the mouth of the Somme: it might have been the Murrambidgee for all the warfare within reach. A few faint flashes claimed our wistful attention on a clear night, but I have heard the guns better here in Sussex. On the other hand, it was a military camp, laid out on scientific principles that appealed to the camp-following spirit, and military discipline kept us on our acquired mettle. I had not slept under canvas for thirty years, and rather dreaded it, especially as the weather had turned cold and unsettled. A tent in the rain had perhaps more terrors for many of us than a snug hut under occasional shell-fire; but few if any were the worse for the experience. Indeed, the chief drawback was an appetite out of all proportion to available rations; but, though tempers were at times on edge, and fists clenched in the bacon queue, on one of our few bacon mornings, no grumbling disgraced the board. We reminded ourselves and each other of the lads we had left to bear the brunt, and we started our humdrum days with vociferous jocosity in the wash-house.

Easter was upon us before we were fairly settled, or a tent pitched large enough to hold us all; and it was 'in sundry places,' indeed, that we mobilised as a congregation. One was the open shed in which we shivered over meals, and one the camp shower-baths. But on Easter Day, which was fine and bright, all adjourned to a neighbouring wood, then breaking into bud and song; and sitting or leaning in a circle against the trees, at the intersection of two green rides, we held our service in Nature's sanctuary. In that ring of unmilitary men in khaki there were few who had not been nearer violent death than ever in their lives before, very few but were prepared to face it afresh at the first chance, one at least who was soon to be killed behind his counter; and presently a young man standing in our midst, an Anglican with a Nonconformist gift of speech, brought the spring morning home to our hearts, filled them with thankfulness for our lot and trust in the issue, and pride of sacrifice, and love of Him Who showed the way, in a sermon one would not have missed for the best they were getting in London at that hour. It was not the only fine sermon we had in the Rest Camp; and wonderful it was to hear the same simple note struck so often, albeit from different angles of the Christian faith, and so seldom forced. We must have had representatives of all the English-spoken Churches, save and except the parent of them all; constantly an Anglican and a Dissenter would officiate together, with many a piquant compromise between their respective usages; but when it came to preaching, they were like searchlights trained from divers quarters upon the same central fact of Christianity. The separate beams might taper off into the night, but high overhead they met and mingled in a single splendour.

But there was one minister who took no part; he lay too sick in our tent; and yet his mere record is the sermon I remember best. He was that other Baptist already mentioned, a shy bachelor of fifty, the most diffident and (one might have thought) least resolute of men. A lad he loved had come out and been killed; the impulse took him to follow and throw himself into the war in the only capacity open to his years. The Y.M.C.A. is the refuge of those consciously or unconsciously in quest of this anodyne. We had met at my first hut, where he had slaved many days as an extra hand. Never was one of us so deferential towards the men; never were they served with a more intense solicitude, or addressed across the counter with so many marks of respect. 'Sir,' he never failed to call them to their faces, or 'this gentleman' when invoking expert intervention. That gentleman, being one, never smiled; but we did, sometimes, in our room. Then one Sunday I persuaded him to preach. It was a revelation. The hut had heard nothing simpler, manlier, straighter from the shoulder; and the war, not just then the safest subject, was finely and bravely treated, both in the sermon and the final prayer. A fighting sermon and a fighting prayer, for all the gentle piety that formed the greater part, and all the sensitive mannerism which would never make us smile again.

At that time our outpost in the support line, scene of my Christmas outing, had been running a good many weeks; and its popularity as a holiday resort was not imperceptibly upon the wane. Most of us had tasted its fearful joys, and there were no offers for a second helping; it was emphatically a thing to have done rather than the thing to do again. It came to the Baptist's turn, and when his week was up there was a genuine difficulty in relieving him, one or two on the rota having fallen sick. Our young commandant went up to ask if he would mind doing an extra day or two. Mind! It was his one desire; he was as happy as a king—and he had quite transformed the place. The tiny hut was no longer the pig-sty described in an earlier note; it was as neat and spotless as an old maid's sanctum. The urns were like burnished silver. The fire never smoked. The bed had been brought in from the unspeakable tunnel under the sand-bags; it was as dry as a bone, and curtained off at its own end of the cabin. All these improvements the Baptist had wrought single-handed, besides fending and cooking for himself: no Battalion Headquarters for him! An extra week was just what he had been longing for; in point of fact, he stayed four weeks on end, as against my four paltry days!

Shells arrived in due course; death happened at the door; men grievously wounded staggered in for first aid; the lengthening days kept him fireless till evening; but the cocoa had never been so well made, or so continuous the supply. Once a big shell burst within a yard of the grassy roof, on the very edge of the high ground of which the roof was a colourable extension. It brought down all the mugs and urns and condensed-milk tins with a run; and that day we did see the Baptist at our mid-day board. 'It shook me up a bitty,' he confessed with his shy laugh; but back he went in the afternoon; and illness alone restored him to us when the month was up.

But the gem of his performance was an act of moral gallantry: and here is needed the Rough Rhyme of a Padre or of a Red Cross Man. One cold night a Sergeant-Major—Regimental, I do believe—honoured the cabin with his presence, only to fire a burst of improper language at the weather and the war. The Baptist, whom we may figure on the verge of genuflexion before the august guest, lost not a moment in standing up to him.

'You can't talk like that here, sir!' he cried with stern simplicity. 'It's not allowed!'

'Can't,' if you please, and 'not allowed'! You picture the audience settling down to the dreadful drama, hear the cold shudders of the callow, see the turkey-cock turning an appropriate purple. He very soon showed what he could do; but it was no longer a spontaneous or such a glib display. The rum that happened somehow to be in him seems to have had something to do with this; but not, it may be, as much as the Sergeant-Major pretended; and the torpor that rather suddenly supervened I diagnose as the ready resource of an expert in camouflage. Better gloriously drunk than ignominiously admonished by an unprintable hiatus of a Y.M. Padre!

So a party of muscular volunteers escorted the S.M. to his dug-out. But the next day he returned alone, crisp-footed and square-jawed, apparently to put the Baptist in his place for ever. Exactly what followed, that gentle hero was not the man to relate. Again one pictures Peeping Tommies exposing themselves on the sunken road to see the fun, perhaps the murder; but what I really believe they might have seen, before many minutes were up, was the spectacle of the two protagonists upon their knees.

Stranger things have been happening, even on that sunken road of ours. It was lost to us in those very days of the Army Rest Camp; it had not been recovered when I was busy expatiating on its Christmas charms; its recovery was one of the first loose stones in the avalanche of vast events which has caught me up.... And now they say the war is over! To have seen something of it all in the last dark hour—and nothing since—is to find even more than the old war-time difficulty in believing half one hears. One has too many fixed ideas and violent impressions, not only of those four months, but of these four years: a man has to clear his own entanglements before he can begin to advance with such times. In the meantime the patter about Indemnities and Demobilisation leaves him cold. Demobilisation will have to begin nearer home than charity, in the armies of our thoughts; and some are not as highly disciplined as others, some hearts too sore to enter as they would into this Peace.

For them there is still the Y.M.C.A. That little force of camp-followers still holds the field, has nothing to say to any Armistice, may well have started its most strenuous campaign. With the Armies of Occupation its work will hardly be the romantic enterprise it was; with all the danger, most of the glamour will have departed; but the deeper attractions are the less adventitious, while the Rhine at any rate should provide some piquant novelties in place of old excitements. The grand fleet of huts will soon be anchored there—including, as I hope, the new Rest Hut that was to have been tucked up close behind the Line. Once more before each counter there will be the old press of matchless manhood and humanity; neater and sprucer, I make no doubt, but otherwise neither more nor less like conquering heroes than their old unconquerable selves; and just once more, behind the counter, the chance of a lifetime, but the last chance, for 'sinful laymen' of the milder sort!

Will it be taken? Are our courageous ministers to have the last field practically to themselves, or will a few mere men of the world even now step in, if only for the honour of the laity? They would if they knew what the work is like and what it may be made, how free a hand is given one, how generously one is met by all concerned, and the modicum of spiritual equipment essential if only that modicum be sincere. Pre-war notions about the Young Men's Christian Association still militate a little against the Y.M.C.A. for all the halo of success attaching to those capitals; but hear a soldier from the front upon the 'Y.M.' tout court, and his affectionate abbreviation of an abbreviation will in itself tell you something of the institution as it is to-day. It has meant rather more to him than 'tea and prayer in equal parts'; yet that conception still prevails in superior circles. Quite lately I heard a dignitary of the Established Church speak with pain of a brilliant young Oxford man of his acquaintance, who, rejected of the Army, must needs be 'giving out tea in some tent in France!' It seemed to him a truly shocking waste of fine material; but if that young man was not giving out a great deal more than creature comforts, and getting at least as good as he gave, then it was a still more wanton waste of an opportunity which the finest young man alive might have been proud to seize.

The truth is, of course, that no man is too good for this job. He may be a specialist, and more valuable to the community where he is than he would be (to the community) in a Y.M.C.A. or a Church Army hut. He may be a Cabinet Minister, a Bishop, or a Judge: that does not make him too good to minister to the men who have borne the brunt of this war: it only makes him too busy and perhaps too old. One must not even now be extra liable to 'die of winter,' as the Tynesider said, nor yet too dainty about bed and board. But the better the man, the better he will do this work, the more he will bring to it, the more he will find in it; the greater will be his tact, the greater his loving-kindness and humility; the readier will he be to recognise many a better man than himself in our noble rank-and-file—to learn all they have to teach him in patience and naturalness, unselfishness and simplicity—and to perceive the higher service involved in serving them, even across a counter.

It may or may not be that Mr. Kipling is thinking of the Y.M.C.A. I do not know the title of his poem, or whether it has yet appeared elsewhere, or another line of it. These lines I owe to his kindness, and as usual they crystallise all that one was trying to say. But to some of us the crumbs that fell were a feast of fine humanity, and great indeed was his reward who gathered them.

Printed in Great Britain by Butler and Tanner, Frome and London.

Transcriber's Note: The following typographical errors present in the original edtion have been corrected.

In "Under Way", equal fimrness and good-humour was changed to equal firmness and good-humour.

In "Christmas Day", abroad on the battlefield was changed to abroad on the battle-field.

In "The Babes in the Trenches", The fire was out; it seemed was changed to The fire was out, it seemed.

In "Orderly Men", a period was changed to a comma after copies for myself.

In "The Hut in Being", 'I don't want the political'! was changed to 'I don't want the political!'

In "War and the Man", argumentum at hominem was changed to argumentum ad hominem.