Rumours were rife again, and mostly right this time. “The C.O. knew the part we were going to: a chalk country ... rolling downs ... four or five weeks’ rest ... field training thirty miles from the firing-line.” Chalk downs! To a Kentish man the words were magic, after the dull sodden flats of Flanders. I longed for a map of France, but could not get hold of one. As we marched to Lillers I looked at the flat straight roads and the ditches, at the weary monotony, uninspired by hill or view, at the floods on the roads, and the uninteresting straightness of the villages; and I felt that I was at the end of a chapter. Any change must be better than this. And chalk! chalk! short dry turf, and slopes with purple woods! I had forgotten these things existed.

I forget the name of the village where we halted for two nights. I had a little room to myself, reached by a rickety staircase from the yard. One shut the staircase door to keep out the yard. Here several new officers joined us, Clark being posted to our company, and soon I began to see my last two months as history. For we began to tell our adventures to Clark, who had never been in the firing-line! Think of it! He was envious of our experiences! So I listened in awe and heard a tale develop, a true tale, the tale of the night the mine went up. It was no longer a case of disputing how many trench-mortars came over, but telling an interested audience that trench-mortars did come over! Clark had never seen one. And I listened agape to hear myself the hero of a humorous story. When the mine went up, I had come out of my dug-out rather late and asked if anything had happened. This tale became elaborated: I was putting my gloves on calmly, it seems, as I strolled out casually and asked if anyone had heard a rather loud noise! And so stories crystallised, a word altered here and there for effect, but true, and as past history quite interesting.

The move was made the occasion, by our C.O., of very elaborate and careful operation orders. No details were left to chance, and a conference of officers was called to explain the procedure of getting a battalion on a train and getting it off again. As usual, the officers’ valises had to be ready at a very early hour, and the company mess-boxes packed correspondingly early. Edwards, I think, was detailed as O.C. loading-party. Everything like this was down in the operation orders. The adjutant had had a time of it.

Certainly the entraining went like clockwork, and once more I was seated in a grey-upholstered corridor carriage; the men were in those useful adaptable carriages inscribed “Chevaux 10. Hommes 30.” Our Tommies were evidently a kind of centaur class, for they went in by twenties. As far as I can remember, we entrained at 10.0 a.m.; we arrived at a station a few miles from Amiens at 9.0 p.m. A slow journey, but I felt excited like a child. I must keep going to the corridor to put my head out of the window. It was a sparkling, nippy air; the smell of the steam, the grit of the engine—these were things I had forgotten; and soon there were rolling plains, hills, clustering villages. The route, through St. Pol, Doullens, and Canaples, is ordinary enough, no doubt; and so, too, the gleam of white chalk that came at last. But if you think that ordinary things cannot be wonderful beyond measure, then go and live above ground and underground in Flanders for two months on end in winter; then, perhaps, you will understand a little of my good spirits.

It was quite dark when we arrived. Then for three and a half hours we waited in a meadow outside the station, arms piled, the men sitting about on their waterproof sheets. Meanwhile the transport detrained, a lengthy business. Tea was produced from those marvellous field-kitchens. The night was cold, though, and it was too damp to sit down. For hours we stood about, tired. Then came the news that our six-mile march would be more like double six; that the billets had been altered!... At half-past twelve we marched off. It was starlight, but pretty dark. Eighteen miles we marched, reaching Montagne at half-past seven; every man was in full marching kit, and most of them carried sandbagfuls of extras. It was a big effort, especially as the men had done nothing in the nature of a long march for months. Well I remember it—the tired silence, the steady tramp, along the interminable road. Sometimes the band would strike up for a little, but even bands tire, and cannot play continuously. Mile after mile of hard road, and then the hedges would spring up into houses, and from the opened windows would gaze down awakened women. Hardly ever was a light shown in any house. Then the village would be left behind, and men shifted their packs and exchanged a sand-bag, unslung a rifle from one shoulder to the other, and settled down to another stretch, wondering if the next village would be the last.

So it went on interminably all through the winter night. Once we halted in a village, and I sat on a doorstep with O’Brien discussing methods of keeping our eyes open. Edwards had been riding the horse, and had nearly tumbled off asleep. At another halt, half-way up a hill, I discovered a box of beef lozenges and distributed it among No. 6 platoon. All the last ten miles I was carrying a rifle and a sand-bag. Sergeant Callaghan had the same, besides all his own kit. Sergeant Andrews kept on as steady as a rock. There were falterers, but we kept them in; only in the last two miles did one or two drop out. And all the while I was elated beyond measure; partly at seeing men like Ginger Joe, with his dry wit flashing, and Tudor, with his stolid power; but partly, too, at the climb uphill, the swing down, mysterious woods, and the unmistakable trunks of pines. And all the time we were steadily climbing; we must be upon a regular tableland.

Dawn broke, and it got lighter and lighter—and so we entered Montagne. The quartermaster had had a nice job billeting at 2.0 a.m., but he had done it, and the men dropped on to their straw, into outhouses, anywhere. The accommodation seemed small and bad, but that could be arranged later. To get the men in, that was the main thing. One old woman fussed terribly, and the men looked like bayoneting her! We soon got the men in somehow. Then for our own billets. We agreed to have a scratch breakfast as soon as it could be procured. Meanwhile I went to the end of the village and found myself on the edge of the tableland; before me was spread out a great valley, with a poplar-lined road flung right across it; villages were dotted about; there were woods, and white ribbon by-roads. And over it all glowed the slant morning sun. I was on the edge of a chalky plateau; it was all just as I had imagined. I slept from 11.0 a.m. to 7.0 p.m., when I got up for a meal at which we were all short-tempered! And at 9.0 p.m. I retired again to sleep till 7.0 next morning.

Montagne—How shall I be able to create a picture of Montagne? As I look back at all those eight months, the whole adventure seems unreal, a dream; yet somehow those first few days in the little village had for me a dream-like quality, unlike any other time. I think that then I felt that I was living in an unreality; whereas at other times life was real enough; and it is only now, afterwards, that these days are gradually melting through distance into dreams. At any rate, if the next few pages are dull to the reader, let him try and weave into them a sort of fairy glamour, and imagine a kind of spell cast over everything in which people moved as in a dream.

First, there was the country itself. The next day (after a day’s sleep and a night’s on top of it) was, if I remember right, rather wet, and we had kit inspection in billets, and tried to eke out the hours by gas-helmet drill, and arm-drill in squads distributed about the various farmyards and barns. Then Captain Dixon decided to take the company out on a short route march, and as it was raining very steadily we took half the company with two waterproof sheets per man. One sheet was thrown round the shoulders in the usual way; the other was tied kilt-wise round the waist. The result was an effective rainproof, if unmilitary-looking dress! We set off and soon came to a large wood with a broad ride through it.

Along this ride we marched, two-deep now, and I at the rear as second-in-command. Here I felt most strongly that strange glamour of unreality. It was but three months ago, and I was in the heart of Wales, yet such was the effect of a few months that I looked on everything with the most exuberant sense of novelty. The rain-beads on the red-brown birch trees; the ivy; the oaks; the strange stillness in the thick wood after the gusts of wind and slashes of rain; especially the sounds—chattering jays, invisible peeping birds, the squelching of boots on a wet grass track—everything reminded me of a past world that seemed immeasurably distant, of past winters that had been completely forgotten. Then we emerged into a wide clearing along the edge of the wood, full of stunted gorse and junipers. Long coarse grass grew in tussocks that matted under foot; and now I could see the whole company straggling along in front of me, slipping and sliding about on the wet grass in their curious kilt-like costumes, some of which were now showing signs of uneasiness and tending to slip in rings to the ground. Everyone was very pleased with life. A halt was called at length, and while officers discussed buying shot-guns at Amiens, or stalking the wily hare with a revolver, Tommy, I have reason to believe, was planning more effective means of snaring Brer rabbit. Next day in orders appeared an extract from corps orders re prohibition of poaching and destruction of game. It was all part of the dream that we were surprised, almost shocked, at this unwarranted exhibition of property rights! Not that there was much game about, anyhow.

The next day we did an advance guard scheme, down in the plain. It was a crisp winter day, and I remember the great view from the top of the hill, on the edge of the plateau as you leave Montagne. It was all mapped out, with its hedgeless fields, its curling white roads, and its few dark triangles and polygons of fir woods. But we had not long to see it, for we came into observation then (so this dream game pretended!) and were soon in extended order working our way along over the plain. It all came back to one, this “open warfare” business, the advancing in short rushes, the flurried messages from excited officers to stolid platoon-sergeants, the taking cover, the fire-orders, the rattling of the bolts, the lying on the belly in a ploughed field; and yes! the spectator, old man or woman, gazing in stupid amazement at the khaki figures rushing over his fields. Then came the assault, bayonets fixed, and the C.O.’s whistle, ending the game for that day. “Game,” that was it: it is all a game, and when you get tired you go home to a good meal, and discuss the humour of it, and probably have a pow-wow in the evening in which the O.C. “A” is asked why he went off to the left, the real answer being that he lost direction badly, but the actual answer given explaining the subtlety of a detour round a piece of dead ground! Which is the dream? this, or the mud-slogging in the trenches and the interminable nights?

For, every night we went to bed! Think of it! Every night! Always that bed, that silence, that priceless privacy of sleep! I had a rather cold ground-floor billet with a door that would not shut; yet it was worth any of your beds at home! And I should be here for a month, perhaps six weeks! I wrote for my basin and stand, for books, for all sorts of things. I felt I could accumulate, and spread myself. It was like home after hotels! For always we had been moving, moving; even our six days out were often in two or even three different billets.

So, too, with our mess. The dream here consisted of a jolly little parlour that was the envy of all the other company messes. As usual, the rooms led into one another, the kitchen into the parlour, the parlour into a bedroom; I might almost continue, and say the bedroom into a bed! For the four-poster, when curtained off, is a little room in itself. It was a good billet, but best of all was Madame herself. Suffice it to say she would not take a penny for use of crockery; and she would insist on us making full use of everything; she allowed all our cooking to be done in her kitchen; and on cold nights she would insist on our servants sitting in the kitchen, though that was her only sitting-room. Often have I come in about seven o’clock to find our dinner frizzling merrily on the fire under the supervision of Gray, the cook, while Madame sat humbly in the corner eating a frugal supper of bread and milk, before retiring to her little room upstairs. Ah, Madame! there are many who have done what you have done, but few, I think, more graciously. If we tried to thank her for some extra kindness, she had always the same reply “You are welcome, M. l’Officier. I have heard the guns, and the Germans passed through Amiens; if it were not for the English, where should we be to-day?”

So we settled down for our “rest,” for long field days, lectures after tea, football matches, and week-ends; I wrote for my Field Service Regulations, and rubbed up my knowledge of outposts and visual training. But scarcely had I been a week at Montagne when off I went suddenly, on a Sunday morning, to the Third Army School. I had been told my name was down for it, a few days before, but I had forgotten all about it, when I received instructions to bicycle off with Sergeant Roberts; my kit and servant to follow in a limber. I had no idea what the “Third Army School” was, but with “note-book, pencil, and protractor” I cycled off at 11.0 a.m. “to fields and pastures new.”

Most people, I imagine, have had the following experience. They have a great interest in some particular subject, yet they have somehow not got the key to it. They regret that they were never taught the elements of it at school; or it is some new science or interest that has arisen since their schooldays, such as flying or motoring. They are really ashamed of asking questions; and all books on the subject are technical and presuppose just that elementary knowledge that the interested amateur does not possess. Then suddenly he comes on a book with those delicious phrases in the preface promising “to avoid all technical details,” apologising for “what may seem almost childishly elementary,” and containing at the end an expert bibliography. These are the books written by very wise and very kind men, and because they are worth so much they usually cost least of all!

Such was my delightful experience at the Army School. I will confess to a terrible ignorance of my profession—I did not know how many brigades made up a division; “the artillery” were to me vague people whom the company commander rang up on the telephone, and who appeared in gaiters in BÉthune; a bomb was a thing I avoided with a peculiar aversion; and as to the general conduct of the war I was the most ignorant of pawns. The wildest things were said about Loos; the Daily Mail had just heard of the Fokker, and I had not the remotest idea whether we were hopelessly outclassed in the air, or whether perhaps after all there were people “up top” who were not so surprised or disconcerted at the appearance of the Fokker as the Northcliffe Press. Moreover, I had been impressed with the reiteration of my C.O., that my battalion was the finest in the Army, and that my division was likewise the best. Yet I had always felt that there were other good battalions, and that “K.’s Army” was, to say the least of it, in a considerable majority when compared with the contemptible little original which I had had the luck to join!

Imagine my delight, then, at finding myself one of over a hundred captains and senior subalterns representing their various battalions. Regulars, Territorials, and Kitcheners, we were all there together; one’s vision widened like that of a boy first going to school. Here at least was a great opportunity, if only the staff was good. And any doubt on that question was instantly set at rest by the Commandant’s opening address, explaining that the instructors were all picked men with a large experience in this war, that in the previous month’s course mostly subalterns had been sent and this time it had been the aim to secure captains only (oh! balm in Gilead this!) and that apologies were due if some of the lectures and instructions were elementary; that bombing experts, for instance, must not mind if the bombing course started right at the very beginning, as it had been found in the previous course that it was wrong to presume any military knowledge to be the common possession of all officers in the school. Those who understood my simile of the expert’s kind book to the amateur will understand that there were few of us who did not welcome such a promising bill of fare.

I do not intend to say much about the instruction at the Army School—a good deal of what I learnt there is unconsciously embodied in the rest of this book—but it is the spirit of the place that I want to record. I can best describe it as the opposite of what is generally known as academic. Theories and text-books about the war were at a discount: here were men who had been through the fire, every phase of it. It was not a question of opinions, but of facts. This came out most clearly in discussions after the lectures; a point would be raised about advancing over the open: “We attacked at St. Julien over open ground under heavy fire, and such and such a thing was our experience” would at once come out from someone. And there was no scoring of debating points! We were all out to pool our knowledge and experience all the time.

The Commandant inspired in everyone a most tremendous enthusiasm. His lectures on “Morale” were the finest I have ever heard anywhere. “Put yourself in your men’s position on every occasion; continually think for them, give them the best possible time, be in the best spirits always;” “long faces” were anathema! No one can forget his tale of the doctor who never laughed, and whom he put in a barn and taught him how to! “‘Hail fellow well met’ to all other officers and regiments” was another of his great points. “Give ’em a d—d good lunch—a d—d good lunch.” “Get a good mess going.” “Ask your Brigadier into lunch in the trenches: make him come in.” “Concerts?—plenty of concerts in billets.” “An extra tot of rum to men coming off patrol.” All this was a “good show.” But long faces, inhospitality, men not cheerful and singing, officers not seeing that their men get their dinners, after getting into billets, before getting their own; officers supervising working-parties by sitting under haystacks instead of going about cheering the men; brigadiers not knowing their officers; poor lunches—all these things were a “bad show, a d—d bad show!” These lectures were full of the most delicious anecdotes and thrilling stories, and backed up by a huge enthusiasm and a most emphatic practice of his preaching. We had a concert every Wednesday, and every Saturday the four motor-buses took the officers into Amiens, and the sergeants on Sundays—week-ends were in fact “good shows.”

Then there were the lectures. The second week, for instance, was a succession of lectures on the Battle of Loos. These lectures used to take place after tea, and the discussion usually lasted till dinner. First was a lecture by an infantry major of the Seventh Division (who needless to say had been very much in it!). Then followed one by an artillery officer, giving his version of it; then followed an R.E. officer. There was nothing hidden away in a corner. It was all facts, facts, facts. An enlarged map of our own and the German trenches was most fascinating to us who had for the most part never handled one before. I remember the Major’s description of the fighting in the Quarries; it was one of the most vivid bits of narrative I have ever heard. Then there were other fascinating lectures—Captain Jefferies, the big game hunter, on Sniping: the Commandant again on Patrol work and discipline, and Dealing with prisoners: two lectures from the Royal Flying Corps, perhaps most fascinating of all.

We drilled hard with rifles: we took a bombing course and threw live bombs: we went through the gas, and had a big demonstration with smoke bombs: we went to a squadron of the R.F.C., inspected the sheds, saw the aeroplanes, and had anything we liked explained: we went out in motor-buses and carried out schemes of attack and defence: we did outpost schemes: drew maps: dug trenches and revetted them. In short, there was very little we did not do at the School.

It was, in fact, a “good show.” The School was in a big white chÂteau on the main road—a new house built by the owner of a factory. The village really lies like a sediment at the bottom of a basin, with houses clustering and scrambling up the sides along the high road running out of it east and west, getting thinner and fewer up the hill, to disappear altogether on the tableland. The jute factory was working hard night and day: we used to have hot baths in the long wooden troughs that are used for dyeing long rolls of matting, and I know no hot baths to equal those forty-footers!

Needless to say, we took advantage of our commandant’s arrangement for free ‘bus rides into Amiens every Saturday. Christmas Day falling on a Saturday, we all had a Christmas dinner at the HÔtel de l’Univers. This, needless to say, was a “good show.” It was a pity, though, that turkey had been insisted on, as turkey with salad, minus sausages, bread-sauce, and brussels sprouts did not seem somehow the real thing; the chef had jibbed at sausages especially! Better at Rome to have done completely as Rome does. After all we cannot give the French much advice in cooking or in war. Otherwise the dinner was good, and unlike our folk at home we had a merry Christmas.

Of course I went to see the Cathedral that Ruskin has claimed to be the most perfect building in the world; indeed, each Saturday found me there; for like all true beauty the edifice does not attract merely by novelty but satisfies the far truer test of familiarity. Yet I confess to a thrill on first entering that dream in stone, which could not come a second time. For down in the mud I had forgotten, in the obsession of the present, man’s dreams and aspirations for the future. Now, here again I was in touch with eternal things that wars do not affect. I remember once at Malvern we had been groping and choking in a thick fog all day; then someone suggested a walk, and three of us ventured out and climbed the Beacon. Half-way up the fog began to thin, and soon we emerged into a clear sunshine. Below lay all the plain wrapped in a great level blanket of white fog; here and there the top of a tall tree or a small hill protruded its head out of the mist and seemed to be laughing at its poor hidden companions; and in a cloudless blue the sun was smiling at mankind below who had forgotten his very existence. So in Amiens Cathedral I used to get my head out of the thick fog of war for a time, and in that stately silence recover my vision of the sun.

The cathedral is a building full of all the freshness of spring. I was at vespers there on Christmas afternoon, and was then impressed by the wonderful lightness of the building: so often there is gloom in a cathedral, that gives a heavy feeling. But Amiens Cathedral is perfectly lighted, and in the east window glows a blue that reminded me of viper’s bugloss in a Swiss meadow. My imagination flew back to the building of the cathedral, and to the brain that conceived it, and beyond that again to the tradition that through long years moulded the conception; and behind all to the idea, the ultimate birth of this perfect creation. And one seemed to be straining almost beyond humanity, to see the first spring flowers looking up in wonder at the sky. The stately pillars were man’s aspiration towards his Creator, the floating music his attempt at praise.

Yet it was only as I left the building that I found the key to the full understanding of this perfect expression of an idea. Round the chancel is a set of bas-reliefs depicting a saint labouring among his people. But what people! They live, they speak! The relief is so deep, that some of the figures are almost in the round, and several come outside the slabs altogether. They are the people of mediÆval Amiens; they are the very people who were living in the town while their great cathedral rose stone by stone to be the wonder of their city, the pride of all Picardy. Almost grotesque in their vivid humanity, they are the same people who walk outside the cathedral to-day. The master-artist, greater in his dreams than his fellow men, was yet blessed with that divine sense of humour that made him love them for their quaint smallnesses! So in Amiens I felt a double inspiration: there was man’s offering of his noblest and most beautiful to his Creator, and there was also the reminder, in the saint among the Amiens populace, that God’s answer was not a proud bend of the head as He deigned to accept the offering of poor little man, but a coming down among them, a claiming of equality with them, even though they refuse still to realise their divinity, and choose to live in a self-made suffering and to degrade themselves in a fog of war.

All too quickly the month went by. The enthusiasm and interest of everybody grew in a steady crescendo, and no one, I am sure, will ever forget the impression left by the Major-General who was deputed to come and “tell us one or two things” from the General Staff. In a quiet voice, with a quiet smile, he compared our position with that of a year ago; told us facts about our numbers compared with the enemy’s; our guns compared with his; the real position in the air, the temporary superiority of the Fokker that would vanish completely and finally in a month or so; in everything we were now superior except heavy trench-mortars, and in a month or so we should have a big supply of them too, and a d—d sight heavier! And we could afford to wait. One got the impression that all our grousings and doubtings were completely out of date, that up at the top now was a unity of command that had thought everything out and could afford to wait. Later on I forgot this impression, but I remember it so well now. Even through Verdun we could afford to wait. We had all the cards now. There was a sort of breathless silence throughout this quiet speech. And when it ended with a “Good luck to you, gentlemen,” there was applause; but one’s chief desire was to go outside and shout. It was a bonfire mood: best of all would have been a bonfire of Daily Mails!

We returned to our units on Sunday, 9th January, 1916, by motor-bus, which conveyed us some sixty or seventy miles, when we were dropped, Sergeant Roberts, myself, and Lewis, my servant. Leaving Lewis with my valise, we walked in the moonlight up to Montagne, where I got the transport officer to send a limber for my valise. “O’Brien on leave” was the first thing I grasped, as I tried to acclimatise myself to my surroundings. Leave! My three months was up, so I ought to get leave myself in a week or so; in a few days in fact. My first leave! The next week was rosy from the prospect. My second impression was like that of a poet full of a great sunset and trying to adjust himself to the dry unimaginative remarks of the rest of the community who have relegated sunsets to perdition during dinner. For every one was so dull! They groused, they maligned the Staff, they were pessimistic, they were ignorant, oh! profoundly ignorant; they were in fact in a state of not having seen a vision! I could not believe then that the time would come when I, too, should forget the vision, and fix my eyes on the mud! Still, for the moment, I was immensely surprised, though I was not such a fool as to start at once on a general reform of everyone, starting with the Brigadier. For under the Commandant’s influence one felt ready to tell off the Brigadier, if he didn’t get motor-’buses to take your men to a divisional concert instead of saying the men must march three miles to it. But, as I say, I restrained myself.

A week of field days, of advance guards and attacks in open order, of battalion drill, company drill, arm-drill, gas-helmet drill; lectures in the school in the evening, and running drill before breakfast. Yet all the time I felt chafing to get back into the firing-line. I felt so much better equipped to command my men. I wanted to practise all my new ideas. Then my leave came through.

Leave “comes through” in the following manner. The lucky man receives an envelope from the orderly room, in the corner of which is written “Leave.” Inside is an “A” Form (Army Form C 2121) with this magic inscription: “Please note you will take charge of —— other ranks proceeding on leave to-morrow morning, 17th inst. They will parade outside orderly room at 7.0 a.m. sharp.” Then follow instructions as to where to meet the ’bus. “Take charge!” If you blind-folded those fellows they would find their way somehow by the quickest route to Blighty! The officer is then an impossible person to live with. He is continually jumping about, upsetting everybody, getting sandwiches, and discussing England, looking at the paper to see “What’s on” in town, talking, being unnecessarily bright and cheery. He is particularly offensive in the eyes of the man just come back from leave. Still, it is his day; abide with him until he clears off! So they abode with me until the evening, and next morning Oliver and I started off in the darkness with our four followers. As we left the village it was just beginning to lighten a little, and we met the drums just turning out, cold and sleepy. As we sprang down the hill, leaving Montagne behind us, faintly through the dawn we heard rÉveillÉ rousing our unfortunate comrades to another Monday morning!

Then came the long, long journey that nobody minds really, though every one grumbles at it. At B—— an hour’s halt for omelettes and coffee and bread and jam, while the Y.M.C.A. stall supplied tea and buns innumerable. B—— will be a station known for all time to thousands. “Do you remember B——?” we shall ask each other. “Oh! yes. Good omelettes one got there.” Then the port, and fussy R.T.O’s again. Why make a fuss, when everyone is magnetised towards the boat? Under the light of a blazing gas-jet squirting from a pendant ball, we crossed the gangway.

There were men of old time who fell on their native earth and kissed it, on returning after exile. We did not kiss the boards of Southampton pier-head, but we understood the spirit that inspired that action as we steamed quietly along the Solent over a grey and violet sea. There were mists that morning, and the Hampshire coast was grey and vague; but steadily the engine throbbed, and we glided nearer and nearer, entered Southampton Water, and at last were near enough to see houses and fields and people. People. English women.

We disembarked. But what dull people to meet us! Officials and watermen who have seen hundreds of leave-boats arrive—every day in fact! The last people to be able to respond to your feelings. Still, what does it matter? There is the train, and an English First! Some one started to run for one, and in a moment we were all running!...

But you have met us on leave.