Chapter 10. The Daily Round

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_ CHAPTER X. THE DAILY ROUND

In the camp in which I was first stationed there was a story current which must, I think, have had a real foundation in fact. It was told in most messes, and each mess claimed the hero of it as belonging to its particular camp. It told of a man who believed that the place in which we were was being continuously and severely shelled by the Germans. He is reported to have said that war was not nearly so dangerous a thing as people at home believed, for our casualties were extraordinarily few. Indeed, there were no casualties at all, and the shelling to which he supposed himself to be subjected was the most futile thing imaginable.

A major, a draft-conducting officer, who happened to be with us one day when this story was told, improved on it boldly.

"As we marched in from the steamer to-day," he said, "we passed a large field on the right of the road about a mile outside the camp--perhaps you know it?"

"Barbed wire fence across the bottom of it," I said, "and then a ditch."

"Exactly," said the major. "Well, one of the N.C.O.'s in my draft, quite an intelligent man, asked me whether that was the firing line and whether the ditch was the enemy's trench. He really thought the Germans were there, a hundred yards from the road we were marching along."

I daresay the original story was true enough. Even the major's improved version of it may conceivably have been true. The ordinary private, and indeed the ordinary officer, when he first lands in France, has the very vaguest idea of the geography of the country or the exact position of the place in which he finds himself. For all he knows he may be within a mile or two of Ypres. And we certainly lived in that camp with the sounds of war in our ears. We had quite near us a----Perhaps even now I had better not say what the establishment was; but there was a great deal of business done with shells, and guns of various sizes were fired all day long. In the camp we heard the explosions of the guns. By going a very little way outside the camp we could hear the whine of the shells as they flew through the air. We could see them burst near various targets on a stretch of waste marshy ground.

No one could fail to be aware that shells were being fired in his immediate neighbourhood. It was not unnatural for a man to suppose that they were being fired at him. From early morning until dusk squads of men were shooting, singly or in volleys, on two ranges. The crackling noise of rifle fire seldom died wholly away. By climbing the hill on which M. lived, we came close to the schools of the machine gunners, and could listen to the stuttering of their infernal instruments. There was another school near by where bombers practised their craft, making a great deal of noise. So far as sound was concerned, we really might have been living on some very quiet section of the front line.

We were in no peril of life or limb. There were only two ways in which the enemy worried us. His submarines occasionally raided the neighbourhood of our harbour. Then our letters were delayed and our supply of English papers was cut off. And we had Zeppelin scares now and then. I have never gone through a Zeppelin raid, and do not want to. The threat was quite uncomfortable enough for me.

My first experience of one of these scares was exciting. I had dined, well, at a hospitable mess and retired afterwards to the colonel's room to play bridge. There were four of us--the colonel, my friend J., the camp adjutant, and myself. On one side of the room stood the colonel's bed, a camp stretcher covered with army blankets. In a corner stood a washhand-stand, with a real earthenware basin on it. A basin of this sort was a luxury among us. I had a galvanised iron pot and was lucky. Many of us washed in folding canvas buckets. But that colonel did himself well. He had a stove in his room which did not smoke, and did give out some heat, a very rare kind of stove in the army. He had four chairs of different heights and shapes and a table with a dark-red table-cloth. Over our heads was a bright, unshaded electric light. Our game went pleasantly until--the colonel had declared two no-trumps--the light went out suddenly without warning.

The camp adjutant immediately said nasty things about the Royal Engineers, who are responsible for our lights. J. suggested a Zeppelin scare. The colonel, who wanted to play out his hand, shouted for an orderly and light. The orderly brought us a miserably inefficient candle in a stable lantern and set it in the middle of the table. It was just possible to see our cards, and we played on. I remembered Stevenson's shipwrecked crew who gambled all night on Medway Island by the light of a fire of driftwood. I thought of the men in Hardy's story who finished their game on the grass by the light of a circle of glow-worms. Our position was uncomfortable but picturesque.

Another orderly came in and said that the camp adjutant was wanted at once in his office. We questioned the man and he confirmed J.'s fear that a Zeppelin scare was in full swing. The adjutant was in the position of dummy at the moment and could be spared. We played on. Then a note was brought to J. He was ordered to report at once at the camp dressing station, and there to stand by for casualties. The colonel picked up the cards and shuffled them thoughtfully. He meant, I think, to propose a game of bezique or picquet. But a note came for him, an order, very urgent, that all lights should immediately be extinguished. He opened the stable lantern and, sighing, blew out our candle.

"One blessing about this Zeppelin business," said the colonel, "is that I don't have to turn out the men on parade."

I was anxious and a little worried because I did not know what my duties were in a crisis of the kind. "I suppose," I said, "that I ought to stand by somewhere till the show is over." I looked towards the colonel for advice, locating him in the darkness by the glow of his cigar.

"I advise you to go to bed," he said. "I mean to. Most likely nothing will happen."

I felt my way to the door. The colonel, taking me by the arm, guided me out of his camp and set me on the main road which led to my quarters.

I stumbled along through thick darkness, bumping into things which hurt me. I was challenged again and again by sentries, alert and I think occasionally jumpy. One of them, I remember, refused to be satisfied with my reply, though I said "Friend" loudly and clearly. I have never understood why a mere statement of that kind made by a stranger in the dark should satisfy an intelligent sentry. But it generally does.

This particular man--he had only landed from England the day before--took a serious view of his duty. For all he knew I might have been a Zeppelin commander, loaded with bombs. He ordered me to advance and be examined. I obeyed, of course, and at first thought that he was going to examine me thoroughly, inside and out, with a bayonet. That is what his attitude suggested. I was quite relieved when he marched me into the guard-room and paraded me before the sergeant. The sergeant, fortunately, recognised me and let me go. Otherwise I suppose I should have spent a very uncomfortable night in a cell. I am not at all sure that military law allows a prisoner's friends to bail him out.

I reached my hut at last and made haste to get into bed. It was a most uncomfortable business. I could not find my toothbrush. I spent a long time feeling about for my pyjamas. I did not dare even to strike a match. An hour later some hilarious subalterns walked along the whole row of huts and lobbed stones on to the roofs. The idea was to suggest to the inmates that bombs were falling in large numbers. It was a well-conceived scheme; for the roofs of those huts were of corrugated iron and the stones made an abominable noise. But I do not think that any one was deceived. A major next door to me swore vehemently.

Our French neighbours did not take much notice of these alarms. The row of lamps in the little railway station near the camp shone cheerfully while we were plunged in gloom. The inhabitants of the houses on the hill at the far side of the valley did not even take the trouble to pull down their window blinds. Either the French are much less afraid of Zeppelins than we are or they never heard the alarms which caused us so much inconvenience. These scares became very frequent in the early spring of 1916 and always worried us.

After a while some one started a theory that there never had been any Zeppelins in our neighbourhood and that none were likely to come. It was possible that our local Head-Quarters Staff was simply playing tricks on us. An intelligent staff officer would, in time, be almost sure to think of starting a Zeppelin scare if he had not much to occupy his mind. He would defend his action by saying that an alarm of any kind keeps men alert and is good for discipline.

But staff officers, though skilful in military art, are not always well up in general literature. Ours, perhaps, had never read the "Wolf, wolf," fable, and did not anticipate the result of their action. As time went on we took less and less notice of the Zeppelin warnings until at last the whole thing became a joke. If a Zeppelin had come to us towards the end of March it would have had the whole benefit of all the lights which shone through our tents and windows, whatever that guidance might be worth.

The Zeppelins which did not come caused us on the whole more annoyance than the submarines which did. It was, of course, irritating when the English post did not arrive at the usual hour. It always did arrive in the end--being carried by some other route, though our own proper steamer neither went in nor out.

But if we, the regular inhabitants of the place, suffered little inconvenience from the submarines, the officers and men who passed through the town on their way home on leave were sometimes held up for days. The congestion became acute. Beds were very difficult to obtain. The officers' club filled up and the restaurants reaped a harvest.

The authorities on these occasions behave in a peculiarly irritating way. They will not, perhaps cannot, promise that their steamer will sail at any particular hour or indeed on any particular day. Nor will they give an assurance that it will not sail. The eager traveller is expected to sit on his haversack on the quay and watch, day and night, lest the ship of his desire should slip out unknown to him. It is, of course, impossible for any one to do this for very long, and an M.L.O.--M.L.O.'s are sometimes humane men--will drop a hint that the steamer will stay where she is for two or even four hours. Then the watchers make a dash for club, hotel, or restaurant, at their own risk, of course; the M.L.O. gives no kind of promise or guarantee.

There was at that time, probably still is, a small shop not far from Base Head-Quarters which had over its door the words "Mary's Tea," in large letters. The name was an inspiration. It suggested "England, home, and beauty," everything dearest to the heart of the young officer in a strange land. As a matter of fact there was nothing English about the place. The cakes sold were delightfully French. The tea was unmistakably not English. The shop was run by five or six girls with no more than a dozen words of English among them. When the leave boat was held up "Mary's Tea" was crammed with young officers.

I remember seeing a party of these cheery boys sitting down to a square meal one afternoon. They were still wearing their trench boots and fighting kit. They were on their way home from the front and they were hungry, especially hungry for cakes. There were four of them. "Mary"--they called all the girls Mary, the name of the shop invited that familiarity--brought them tea and a dish piled high with cakes, frothy meringues, pastry sandwiches with custard in the middle, highly ornamental sugary pieces of marzipan, all kinds of delicate confectionery. After the fare of the trenches these were dreams of delight, but not very satisfying. The dish was cleared. The spokesman, the French scholar of the party, demanded more. "Mary"--he did not translate the name into "Marie"--"encore gateaux, au moins trois douzaine." Mary, smiling, fetched another dish. I suppose she kept count. I did not, nor I am sure did the feasters. They finished those and repeated the encore. The au moins trois douzaine was a ridiculous under-estimate of their requirements. It might have been multiplied by five.

In the end there were no more gateaux. The stock was sold out. It was not a large shop and many others had drunk tea there that afternoon. The boys paid their bill and left, still astonishingly cheerful. I cannot remember whether the boat sailed that night or not. I hope it did. I hope the sea was rough. I should not like to think that those boys--the eldest of them cannot have been twenty-one--suffered from indigestion during their leave. Nothing but a stormy crossing would have saved them.

If the spirit of the playing fields of our public schools won, as they say, our great-grandfathers' war, the spirit of the tuck shop is showing up in this one. The lessons learned as boys in those excellent institutions have been carried into France. Tea shops and restaurants at the bases, audacious estaminets near the front, witness to the fact that we wage war with something of the spirit of schoolboys with pocket money to spend on "grub."

Nobody will grudge our young officers their boyish taste for innocent feasts. It is a boys' war anyway. Everything big and bright in it, the victories we have won, the cheerfulness and the enduring and the daring, go to the credit of the young. It is the older men who have done the blundering and made the muddles, whenever there have been blundering and muddles.

"Mary's Tea" was for officers. The men were invited to "English Soldiers' Coffee." It, too, was a tea shop and had a good position in one of the main streets of the town. But the name was not so well devised as Mary's Tea. It puzzled me for some time and left me wondering what special beverage was sold inside. I discovered at last that "Coffee" was a thoughtful translation of Cafe, a word which might have been supposed to puzzle an English soldier, though indeed very few French words puzzle him for long.

I was never inside "English Soldiers' Coffee." But I have no doubt it would have been just as popular if it had called itself a cafe or even an estaminet. The case of "Mary's Tea" was different. Its name made it. Half its customers would have passed it by if it had announced itself unromantically as "Five o'clock" or "Afternoon Tea." _

Read next: Chapter 11. Another Journey

Read previous: Chapter 9. Y.S.C.

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