Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front

'He was young so far as years were concerned, but he was old in wisdom. He never asked one of us to do that which he would not do himself. He shared our hardships and our joys. He was in fact one of ourselves as far as comradeship and brotherly love was concerned. We never knew who he was till we saw his death in the Press, but this we did know, that he was Lieut. – , a gentleman and a soldier every inch, and mind you the average Tommy is not too long in getting the size of his officer, and it is not every day that one like – joins the Army…

He was liked by his fellow-officers, but he was loved, honoured and respected by his men, and you know, Sir, that I am not guilty of paying tributes to anyone where they are not deserved…'

I love Thomas for the two italicised asides. It was not he who underlined them; but they declare his politics as unmistakably as Sandy's bit about those arguments with their officer. For 'little – ' was the son of one of Scotland's noblest and most ancient houses; but Thomas is careful to explain that they never knew that until the papers told them, and we have internal evidence that Sandy never gave it a thought. He lays no stress on the fact that 'none of the rest of them ever mixed themselves with us the same as he done': the gem of both tributes, when you come to think of it.

I think of it the more because I knew this young Harrovian a little in his brilliant boyhood (Head of the School and Captain of the Football Eleven), but chiefly because I happen to have seen his grave. It is on the outskirts of a village that was still pretty and wooded in early '17, though the church was in a bad way even then. Now there can be little left; but I hope against hope that some of the wooden crosses which so impressed me are still intact. For there as ever among his men, I think even alongside 'wee Mac' and the others named in that pathetic postscript, lies 'little – ', truly 'mixing himself with them' to the last.

In the same row, under mound and cross as neat as any, lay 'an unknown German soldier'; and for his sake, perhaps, if all have not been blown to the four winds, the present occupiers¹ will do what can be done to protect and preserve the resting-place of 'little – ' and his Jocks.

GUNNERS

Next to the Jocks, I used to find the Gunners the cheeriest souls about a hut. Nor do I believe that mine was a chance experience; for the constant privilege of inflicting damage on the Hun must be, despite a very full share of his counter-attentions, a perpetual source of satisfaction. A Gunner is oftener up and doing, far seldomer merely suffering, than any other being under arms. The Infantry have so much to grin and bear, so very much that would be unbearable without a grin, that it is no wonder if the heroic symbol of their agony be less in evidence upon ordinary occasions. Cheeriness with them has its own awful connotation: they are almost automatically at their best when things are at their worst; but the gunner is always enjoying the joke of making things unpleasant for the other side. He is the bowler who is nearly certain of a good match.

He used to turn up at our hut at all hours, sometimes in a Balaclava helmet that reminded one of other winter sports, often with his extremities frozen by long hours in the saddle or on his limber, but never wearied by much marching and never in any but the best of spirits. He was always an interesting man, who knew the Line as a strolling player knows the Road, but neither knew nor cared where he was to give the next performance. I associate him with a ruddy visage and a hearty manner that brought a breeze in from the outer world, as a good stage sailor brings one from the wings.

One great point about the Gunners is that you can see them at their job. I had seen them at it on a former brief visit to the front, and even had a foretaste of their quality of humour, which is by no means so heavy as a civilian wag might apprehend. The scene was the tight-rope road between Albert and Bapaume, then stretched across a chasm of inconceivable devastation, and only three-parts in our hands; in fact we were industriously shelling Bapaume and its environs when a car from the Visitors' Château dumped two of us, attended by a red-tabbed chaperon, in the very middle of our guns.

Not even in later days do I remember such a row as they were making. Shells are as bad, but I imagine one does not hear a great many quite so loud and live to write about it. Drum-fire must be worse at both ends; but I have heard only distant drum-fire, and on the spot it must have this advantage, that its continuity precludes surprise. But a series of shattering surprises was the essence of our experience before Bapaume. The guns were all over the place, and fiendishly camouflaged. I was prepared for all sorts of cunning and picturesque screens and emplacements, and indeed had looked for them. I was not prepared for absolutely invisible cannon of enormous calibre that seemed to loose off over our shoulders or through our legs the moment our backs were turned.

If you happened to be looking round you were all right. You saw the flash, and your eye forewarned your ear in the fraction of a second before the bang, besides reassuring you as to the actual distance between you and the blazing gun; but whenever possible it took a mean advantage, and had me ducking as though somebody had shouted 'Heads!' I say 'me,' not before it was time; for I can only speak with honesty for myself. By flattering chance I was pretending to enjoy this experience in good company indeed; but the great man might have been tramping his own moor, and doing the shooting himself, for all the times I saw his eyelids flicker or his massive shoulders wince. He made no more of a howitzer that jovially thundered and lightened in our path, over our very heads, than of the brace of sixty-pounders whose peculiarly ear-destroying duet 'scratched the brain's coat of curd' as we stood only too close behind them. They might have been a brace of Irish Members for all their intimidatory effect on my illustrious companion.

But the fun came when we adjourned to the Battery Commander's dug-out, and somebody suggested that the Forward Observing Officer would feel deeply honoured by a word on the telephone from so high an Officer of State. All urbanity, the O.S. took down the receiver, and was heard introducing himself to the F.O.O. by his official designation, as though high office alone could excuse such a liberty. The receiver cackled like a young machine-gun, and the O.S. beamed dryly on the O.C.

'He wants to know who the devil I really am!' he reported with due zest.

Hastily the spectacled young Major vouched for the other speaker. The receiver changed hands once more. The Forward Observing Officer was evidently as good as his style and title.

'He says – "in that case" – I'd better look him up!' twinkled the O.S. 'Is there time? He says he's quite close to the sugar factory.'

The sugar factory was unmistakable, not as a flagrant sugar factory but as the only fragment of a building left standing within the sky-line. It proved a snare. Our F.O.O. was unknown there; if he had ever been at the ex-factory, he had kept himself to himself and gone without leaving an address; and though we sought him high and low among the shell-holes, under the belching muzzles of our guns, it was not intended by Providence (nor yet peradventure by himself) that we should track that light artillery comedian to his place of concealment.

Still, one can get at a gunner (in the above sense only) quicker than at any other class of acquaintance in the Line.

It is, after all, a very small war in the same sense as it is said to be a small world; and in our ruined town I was always running into some soldier whom I had known of old in leather or prunella. I have had the pleasure of serving an old servant as an impressive N.C.O., of welcoming others of all ranks on both sides of the counter. Thus it was that one day I had a car lent me to go pretty well where I liked, subject to the approval of a young Staff Officer, my escort. I thought of a Gunner friend hidden away somewhere in those parts. He was an Old Boy of my old school. So, as it happened, was the High Commander to whom the car belonged; so, by an extraordinary chance, was the young Staff Officer. The oldest of them, of course, long years after my time; but an All Uppingham Day for me, if ever I had one! I only wish we could have claimed the hero of the day as well.

The car took us to within a couple of miles of my friend, who was not above another mile from No-Man's Land. It was a fairly lively sector at the best of times, which was about the time I was there. The enemy had shown unseasonable activity only the night before, and we met some of the casualties coming down a light railway, up which we walked the last part of the way. Two or three khaki figures pushing a truck laden with a third figure – supine, blanketed, and very still: that was the picture we passed several times in the thin February sunlight. One man looked as dead as the livid landscape; one had a bloody head and a smile that stuck; one was walking, supported by a Red Cross man, coughing weakly as he went. Round about our destination were a number of shell-sockets, very sharp and clean, all made in the night.

It was quite the deepest dug-out I was ever in, but I was not sorry when I had found my eyes in the twilight of its single candle. Warm, down there; a petrol engine throbbing incomprehensibly behind a curtain at the foot of the flight; a ventilating shaft at the inner end; hardly any more room than in an Uppingham study. How we talked about the old place, three school generations of us, sitting two on a bed until I broke down the Major's! The Major might have been bored before that – he who alone had not been there. But even my ponderous performance did not disturb a serene forbearance, a show of more than courteous interest, which encouraged us to persist in that interminable gossip about masters (with imitations!) so maddening to the uninitiated. At length the petrol engine stopped; I doubt if we did, though steak and onions now arrived. May I never savour their crude smell again without remembering that time and place; the oftener the better, if there be those present who do not know about the Major.

His second-in-command, my Uppingham friend, told me as he saw us along the light railway on our way back. In 1914 the Major had been a Nonconformist Minister. Never mind the Denomination, or the part of Great Britain: because the Call sounded faint there, and his flock were slow to answer, the shepherd showed the way, himself enlisting in the ranks: because he was what he was, and came whence he came, here and thus had I found him in 1918, commanding a battery on the Somme, at the age – but that would be a tale out of school. A legion might be made up of the men whose real ages are nobody's business till the war is over; then they might be formed into a real Old Guard of Honour, and splendidissime mendax might be their motto.

I do not say the Major would qualify. I have forgotten exactly what it was I heard upon the point. But I am not going to forget something that reached me later from another source altogether, namely the lips of a sometime N.C.O. of the Battery.

'There was not,' he asserted, 'better discipline in any battery in France. But not a man of us ever heard the Major swear.'

It was a great friend of mine that I had gone forth to see: a cricketer whose only sin was the century that kept him out of the pavilion: a man without an enemy but the one he turned out to fight at forty. Yet the man I am gladdest to have seen that day on the Somme is not my friend, but my friend's friend and Major… And to think that he opened his kindly fire upon me by saying absurd things about the only book of mine which has very many friends; and that I let him, God forgive me, instead of bowing down before the gorgeous man!

THE GUARDS

The Jocks started me thinking in units, the Gunners set me off on the chance meetings of this little war, and between them they have taken me rather far afield from my Noah's Ark in the mud. But I am not going back just yet, though the ground is getting dangerous. I am only too well aware of that. It is presumptuous to praise the living; and I for one would rather stab a man in the back than pat him on it; but may I humbly hope that I do neither in these notes? The bristling risks shall not deter me from speaking of marvellous men as I found them, nor yet from expressing as best I may the homage they inspired. I can only leave out their names, and the names of the places where we met, and trust that my precautions are not themselves taken in vain. But there is no veiling whole units, or at least no avoiding some little rift within the veil. And when the unit is the Guards – but even the Guards were not all in one place last winter.

Enough that at one time there were Guardsmen to be seen about the purlieus of that 'battered caravanserai' which the war found an antique city of sedate distinction, and is like to leave yet another scrap-heap. The Guards were in the picture there, if not so much so as the Jocks; for in kilt and bonnet the Jocks on active service are more like Jocks than the Guards are like Guardsmen; nevertheless, and wherever they wander, the Guards are quite platitudinously unlike any other troops on earth.

Memorable was the night they first swarmed into my first hut. 'Debouched,' I daresay, would be the more becoming word; but at any rate they duly marched upon the counter, in close order at that, and (as the correspondents have it) 'as though they had been on parade.' Few of them had anything less than a five-franc note; all required change; soon there was not a coin in the till. I wish the patronesses of Grand Clearance Sales could have seen how the Guards behaved that night. Not one of them showed impatience; not one of them was inconsiderate, much less impolite; the sanctity of the queue could not have been more scrupulously observed had our Labour boy been there to see to nothing else. He was not there, and I sighed for him when there was time to sigh; for it was easily the hardest night's work I had in France. But the Guards did their best to help us; they were always buying more than they wanted, 'to make it even money'; continually prepared to present the Y.M.C.A. with the change we could not give them. Never was a body of men in better case – calmer, more immaculate, better-set-up, more dignified and splendid to behold. They might have walked across from Wellington Barracks; they were actually fresh from what I have heard them call 'the Cambrai do.'

There was a bitterly cold night a little later on; it was also later in the night. My young chief was already a breathing pillar of blankets. I was still cowering over a reddish stove, thinking of the old hot-water bottle which was even then preparing a place for my swaddled feet: from outer darkness came the peculiar crunch of heavy boots – many pairs of them – rhythmically planting themselves in many inches of frozen snow. I went out and interviewed a Guards' Corporal with eighteen eager, silent file behind him, all off a leave train and shelterless for the night, unless we took them in. I pointed out that we had no accommodation except benches and trestle-tables, and the bare boards of the hut, where the stove had long been black and the clean mugs were freezing to their shelf.

'We shall be very satisfied,' replied the Corporal, 'to have a roof over us.'

I can hear him now: the precise note of his appreciation, candid yet not oppressive: the dignified, unembittered tone of a man too proud to make much of a minor misfortune of war. Yet for fighting-men just back from Christmas leave, howsoever it may have come about, what a welcome! I never felt a greater brute than lying warm in my bed, within a yard of the stove that still blushed for me, and listening to those silent men taking off their accoutrements with as little noise as possible, preparing for a miserable night without a murmur. Later in the winter, it was said that men were coming back from leave disgruntled and depressed. My answer was this story of the Corporal and the eighteen freezing file. But they were Guardsmen nearly all.

Not the least interesting of individual Guardsmen was one who across our counter nicely and politely declared himself an anarchist. It was the slack hour towards closing-time, before the National Anthem at the cinema prepared us for the final influx, and I am glad I happened to be free to have that chat. It was most instructive. My Guardsman, who was accompanied by the inevitable Achates, was not a temporary soldier; both were fine, seasoned men of twelve or thirteen years' service, who had been through all the war, with such breaks as their tale of wounds had necessitated. The anarchist did all the talking, beginning (most attractively to me) about cricket. He was a keen watcher of the game, an old habitué of Burton Court and intense admirer of certain distinguished performers for the Household Brigade. 'A great man!' was his concise encomium for more than one. How the anarchy came in I have forgotten. It was decked in dark sayings of a rather homely cut, concerning the real war to follow present preliminaries; but I thought the real warrior was himself rather in the dark as to what it was all to be about. At any rate he failed to enlighten me, as perhaps I failed to enlighten him on the common acceptation of the term 'anarchy.' Reassure me he did, however, by several parenthetical observations, which seemed to fall from the inveterate soldier rather than the soi-disant revolutionary.

'But of course we shall see this war through first,' he kept interrupting himself to impress on me. 'Nothing will be done till we have beaten Germany.'

On balance I was no wiser about the anarchist point of view, but all the richer for this peep into a Guardsman's mind. It was like a good sanitary cubicle filled with second-hand gimcrackery, but still the same good cubicle, still in essentials exactly like a few thousand more. The meretricious jumble was kept within rigid bounds of discipline and good manners, and not as a temporary measure either; for I was solemnly assured that the 'real war,' when it came, would be a bloodless one. Let us hope other incendiaries will adopt my friend's somewhat difficult ideal of an ordered anarchy! As for his manners, I can only say I have heard views with which I was in full personal agreement made more offensive by a dogmatic advocate than were these monstrous but quite amiable nebulosities. If anarchy is to come, I know which anarchist I want to 'ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm'; he will spare Burton Court, I do believe; and even catch himself saluting, with true Guards' élan, the 'great men' who are still permitted to hit out of it.

Tradition in the Guards, you conjecture, means more than machine-guns, more than artillery support; it is half the battle they are always pulling out of the fire. It may be other things as well. I heard a delightful story about one Battalion – but I heard it from a fellow-tradesmen whose business it is (or was, before the war) to say more than his prayers. The libel, for it is too good to be true, was that one of the senior Battalions, having given a dinner in some Flemish town early in the war, did a certain amount of inadvertent damage to municipal property during the subsequent proceedings. One in authority wrote to apologise to the maire, enclosing the wherewithal for reparation: whereupon the maire presented himself in high glee, brandishing an equally handsome apology for the same thing done in the same place by the same Regiment in – 1711!

One royal night I had myself as the guest of a Company in another of their Battalions. The camp was about half-way between our hut and the front line, near the road and in mud enough to make me feel at home. But whereas we weltered in a town-locked pool, this was in the open sea; not a tree or a chink of masonry in sight; just a herd of 'elephants' or Nissen huts, linked up by a network of duck-boards like ladders floating in the mud. Mud! It was more like clotted cocoa to a mind debauched by such tipple, and the great split tubes of huts like a small armada turned turtle in the filth.

The outer tube I think was steel – duly corrugated – but wooden inner tubes made the mess-hut and the one I shared with my host voluptuously snug and weather-proof. It was the wildest and wettest night of all the winter, but not a drop or a draught came in anywhere, and I am afraid I thought with selfish satisfaction of the many perforations in our own thin-skinned hut. An open fire was another treat to me; and I remember being much intrigued by a buttery-hatch in the background. It reminded me of the third act of The Admirable Crichton.

There were only four of us at dinner, or five including a parrot who hopped about saying things I have forgotten. All the other three were temporary Guardsmen; that I knew; but to me they seemed the lineal descendants of the bear-skinned and whiskered heroes in old volumes of Punch. I suppose they were colder in their Balaclava huts, but I warrant the other atmosphere was much the same. We should not have had Wagner on a gramophone before Sebastopol; but they would have given me Veuve Cliquot, or whatever the very best may have been in those days; and if I had committed the solecism of asking for more bread, having consumed my statutory ration, the mess-waiter of 1855 would have put me right in the same solicitous undertone that spared my blushes in 1918. The perfect blend of luxury and discipline would have been as captivating then as now and ever, and the kindness of my hosts a thing to write about in fear and trembling, no matter how gratefully.

But there would have been no duck-boards to follow through wind and rain to my host's warm hut, and I should not be looking back upon as snug a winter's night as one could wish to spend. How we lay talking while the storm frittered its fury upon the elephant's tough hide! Once more it was talk of schooldays, but not of mine; it was all about Eton this time, and nearly all about a boy there who had been most dear to us both. He was now out here in his grave; but which of them was not? Of the group that I knew best before the war, only he whom I was with to-night! I lay awake listening to his even breathing, and prayed that he at least might survive the holocaust yet to come.