An inhuman philosopher or a strong, silent poseur might affect to treat with indifference his leave from the Front. Personally I have never met a philosopher inhuman enough or a poseur strongly silent enough to repress evidence of wild satisfaction, after several months of war at close quarters, on being given a railway warrant entitling him to ten days of England, home, and no duty. But if you are a normal soldier who dislikes fighting and detests discomfort, the date of your near-future holiday from the dreary scene of war will be one of the few problems that really matter. Let us imagine a slump in great pushes at your sector of the line, since only during the interval of attack is the leave-list unpigeonholed. The weeks pass and your turn creeps close, while you pray that the lull may last until the day when, with a heavy haversack and a light heart, you set off to During the journey you begin to cast out the oppressive feeling that a world and a half separates you from the pleasantly undisciplined life you once led. The tense influence of those twin bores of active service, routine and risk, gradually loosens hold, and your state of mind is tuned to a pitch half-way between the note of battle and that of a bank-holiday. Yet a slight sense of remoteness lingers as you enter London. At first view the Charing Cross loiterers seem more foreign than the peasants of Picardy, the Strand and Piccadilly less familiar than the Albert-PoziÈres road. Not till a day or two later, The one unsatisfactory aspect of leave from France, apart from its rarity, is the travelling. This, in a region congested by the more important traffic of war, is slow On the last occasion when I was let loose from the front on ticket-of-leave, I added twenty-four hours to my Blighty period by a chance meeting with a friendly ferry-pilot and a resultant trip as passenger in an aeroplane from a home depÔt. Having covered the same route by train and boat a few days previously, a comparison between the two methods of travel left me an enthusiast for aerial transport in the golden age of after-the-war. The leave train at ArriÈre was time-tabled for midnight, but as, under a war-time edict, French cafÉs and places where they lounge are closed at 10 P.M., it was at this hour that Though confronted with a long period of waiting, in a packed entrance-hall that was only half-lit and contained five seats to be scrambled for by several hundred men, every one, projected beyond the immediate discomfort to the good time coming, seemed content. The atmosphere of jolly expectancy was comparable to that of Waterloo Station on the morning of Derby Day. Scores of little groups gathered to talk the latest shop-talk from the trenches. A few of us who were acquainted with the corpulent and affable R.T.O.—it is part of an R.T.O.'s stock-in-trade to be corpulent and affable—sought out his private den, and exchanged yarns while commandeering his whisky. Stuff Redoubt had been stormed a few days previously, and a Canadian captain, who had been among the first to enter the Hun stronghold, told of the assault. A sapper discussed some recent achievements of mining parties. A tired gunner subaltern spoke viciously of a stupendous bombardment that allowed The train, true to the custom of leave trains, was very late. When it did arrive, the good-natured jostling for seats again reminded one of the London to Epsom traffic of Derby Day. Somehow the crowd was squeezed into carriage accommodation barely sufficient for two-thirds of its number, and we left ArriÈre. Two French and ten British officers obtained a minimum of space in my compartment. We sorted out our legs, arms, and luggage, and tried to rest. In my case sleep was ousted by thoughts of what was ahead. Ten days' freedom in England! The stout major on my left snored. The head of the hard-breathing Frenchman to the right slipped on to my shoulder. An unkempt subaltern opposite wriggled and turned in a vain attempt to find ease. I was damnably cramped, but above all impatient for the morrow. A The soldier on leave, eager to be done with the preliminary journey, chafes at inevitable delay in Boulogne. Yet this largest of channel ports, in its present state, can show the casual passer-by much that is interesting. It has become almost a new town during the past three years. Formerly a headquarters of pleasure, a fishing centre and a principal port of call for Anglo-Continental travel, it has been transformed into an important military base. It is now wholly of the war; the armies absorb everything that it transfers from sea to railway, from human fuel for war's blast-furnace to the fish caught outside the harbour. The The spirit of the place is altogether changed. From time immemorial Boulogne has included an English alloy in its French composition, but prior to the war it shared with other coastal resorts of France an outlook of smiling carelessness. Superficially it now seems more British than French, and, partly by reason of this, it impresses one as being severely business-like. The great number of khaki travellers is rivalled by a huge colony of khaki Base workers. Except for a few matelots, French fishermen, and the wharfside cafÉs, there is nothing to distinguish the quays from those of a British port. The blue-bloused porters who formerly met one with volubility and the expectation of a fabulous tip have given place to khakied orderlies, the polite customs officials to old-soldier myrmidons of the worried embarkation officer. Store dumps with English The military note dominates everything. A walk through the main streets leaves an impression of mixed uniforms—bedraggled uniforms from trench and dug-out, neat rainbow-tabbed uniforms worn by officers attached to the Base, graceful nursing uniforms, haphazard convalescent uniforms, discoloured blue uniforms of French permissionaires. Everybody is bilingual, speaking, if not both English and French, either one or other of these languages and the formless Angliche The boat, due to steam off at eleven, left at noon,—a creditable performance as leave-boats go. On this occasion there was good reason for the delay, as we ceded the right of way to a hospital ship and waited while a procession of ambulance cars drove along the quay and unloaded their stretcher cases. The Red Cross vessel churned slowly out of the harbour, and we followed at a respectful distance. Passengers on a Channel leave-boat are quieter than might be expected. With the country of war behind them they have attained the third degree of content, and so novel is this state after months of living on edge that the short crossing does not allow sufficient time for them to be moved to exuberance. One promenades the crowded deck happily, taking care not to tread on the staff spurs, and talks of fighting as if it were a thing of the half-forgotten past. The Front seemed very remote from the train that carried us from Dovstone to London. How could one think of the wilderness "Twenty to eleven by all the clocks of Piccadilly; Buy your love a lily-bloom, buy your love a rose." It had been raining, and the faint yet unmistakable tang sniffed from wet London streets made one feel at home more than anything else. We dispersed, each to make his interval of heaven according to taste, means, and circumstances. That same evening I was fortunate in being helped to forget the realities of war by two experiences. A much-mustached A.P.M. threatened me with divers penalties for the wearing of a soft hat; and I was present at a merry gathering of theatrical luminaries, enormously interested in themselves, but enormously bored by the war, which usurped so much newspaper space that belonged by rights to the lighter drama. Curtain and interval of ten days, at the It was a morning lovely enough to be that of the world's birthday. Not a cloud flecked the sky, the flawless blue of which was made tenuous by sunlight. The sun brightened A westward course, with the fringe of London away on our left, brought us to the coast-line all too soon. Passing Dovstone, the bus continued across the Channel. A few ships, tiny and slow-moving when observed from a machine at 8000 feet and travelling 100 miles an hour, spotted the sea. A cluster of what were probably destroyers threw out trails of dark smoke. From above mid-Channel we could see plainly the two coasts—that of England knotted into small creeks and capes, that of France bent into large curves, except for the sharp corner at Grisnez. Behind was Blighty, with its greatness and its—sawdust. Ahead was the province of battle, with its good-fellowship and its—mud. I lifted the puppy to show him his new country, but he merely exhibited boredom and a dislike of the sudden rush of air. At Calais we turned to the right and followed a network of canals south-westward to Saint Gregoire, where was an aircraft depÔt similar to the one at Rafborough. New machines call at Saint Gregoire before passing to the service of aerodromes, and in its workshops machines damaged but repairable are made fit for further service. It is also a higher training centre for airmen. Before they join a squadron pilots fresh from their Having been told by telephone from my squadron that one of our pilots had been detailed to take the recently arrived bus to the Somme, I awaited his arrival and passed the time to good purpose in watching the aerobatics and sham fights of the pool pupils. Every now and then another plane from England would arrive high over the aerodrome, spiral down and land into the wind. The ferry-pilot who had brought me left for Rafborough almost immediately on a much-flown "quirk." The machine he had delivered at Saint Gregoire was handed over to a pilot from Umpty Squadron when the latter reported, and we took to the air soon after lunch. The puppy travelled by road over the last lap of his long journey, in the company of a lorry driver. The bus headed east while climbing, for we had decided to follow the British lines as far as the Somme, a course which would be prolific in interesting sights, and which would make us eligible for that rare gift of The coloured panorama below gave place gradually to a wilderness—ugly brown and pock-marked. The roads became bare and dented, the fields were mottled by shell-holes, the woods looked like scraggy patches of burnt furze. It was a district of great deeds and glorious deaths—the desolation surrounding the Fronts of yesterday and to-day. North of Ypres we turned to the right and hovered awhile over this city of ghosts. Seen from above, the shell of the ancient city suggests a grim reflection on the mutability of beauty. I sought a comparison, and could think of nothing but the skeleton of a once charming woman. The ruins stood out in a magnificent disorder that was starkly impressive. Walls without roof, buildings with two sides, churches without tower, were everywhere prominent, as though proud to survive the orgy of destruction. The shattered Cathedral retained much of its former grandeur. Only the old Cloth Hall, half-razed and without arch or belfry, seemed to cry for vengeance on the vandalism that Left of us was the salient, studded with broken villages that became household names during the two epic Battles of Ypres. The brown soil was dirty, shell-ploughed, and altogether unlovely. Those strange markings, which from our height looked like the tortuous pathways of a serpent, were the trenches, old and new, front-line, support, and communication. Small saps projected from the long lines at every angle. So complicated was the jumble that the sinister region of No Man's Land, with its shell-holes, dead bodies, and barbed wire, was scarcely distinguishable. A brown strip enclosed the trenches and wound northward and southward. Its surface had been torn and battered by innumerable shells. On its fringe, among the copses and crests, were the guns, though Following the belt of wilderness southward, we were obliged to veer to the right at St. Eloi, so as to round a sharp bend. Below the bend, and on the wrong side of it, was the Messines Ridge, the recent capture of which has straightened the line as far as Hooge, and flattened the Ypres salient out of existence as a salient. Next came the torn and desolate outline of Plug Street Wood, and with it reminiscences of a splendid struggle against odds when shell-shortage hampered our 1915 armies. ArmentiÈres appeared still worthy to be called a town. It was battered, but much less so than Ypres, possibly because it was a hotbed of German espionage until last year. The triangular denseness of Lille loomed up from the flat soil on our left. As we passed down the line the brown At Arras we entered our own particular province, which, after months of flying over it, I knew better than my native county. Gun-flashes became numerous, kite balloons hung motionless, and we met restless aeroplane formations engaged on defensive patrols. With these latter on guard our chance of a scrap with roving enemy craft would have been remote; though for that matter neither we nor they saw a single black-crossed machine throughout the afternoon. From Gommecourt to the Somme was an Of all the crumbled roads the most striking was the long, straight one joining Albert and Bapaume. It looked fairly regular for the most part, except where the trenches cut it. Beyond the scrap-heap that once was PoziÈres two enormous quarries dipped into Some eight miles east of Bapaume the Bois d'Havrincourt stood out noticeably. Around old Mossy-Face, as the wood was known in R.F.C. messes, were clustered many Boche aerodromes. Innumerable duels had Below the PoziÈres-Bapaume road were five small woods, grouped like the Great Bear constellation of stars. Their roots were feeding on hundreds of dead bodies, after each of the five—Trones, Mametz, Foureaux, Delville, and Bouleaux—had seen wild encounters with bomb and bayonet beneath its dead trees. Almost in the same position relative to the cluster of woods as is the North Star to the Great Bear, was a scrap-heap larger than most, amid a few walls yet upright. This was all that remained of the fortress of Combles. For two years the enemy strengthened it by every means known to military science, after which the British and French rushed in from opposite sides and met in the main street. We flew once more over a countryside of multi-coloured crops and fantastic woods, and so to the aerodrome. Snatches of familiar flying-talk, unheard during the past ten days of leave, floated from the tea-table as I entered the mess: The machine that "went down in flames near Douai" was piloted by the man whose puppy I had brought from England.
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