1

In June, 1914, I came out of a hospital in Philadelphia after an operation, faced with two facts. One was that I needed a holiday at home in England, the second that after all hospital expenses were paid I had five dollars in the world. But there was a half-finished novel in my trunk and the last weeks of the theatrical tour which had brought me to Philadelphia would tide me over. A month later the novel was bought by a magazine and the boat that took me to England seemed to me to be the tangible result of concentrated will power. “Man proposes....” My own proposal was to return to America in a month or six weeks to resume the task of carving myself a niche in the fiction market.

The parting advice of the surgeon had been that I was not to play ball or ride a horse for at least six months. The green sweeping uplands of Buckinghamshire greeted me with all their fragrance and a trig golf course gave me back strength while I thought over ideas for a new novel.

Then like a thunderbolt the word “War” crashed out. Its full significance did not break through the ego of one who so shortly would be leaving Europe far behind and to whom a personal career seemed of vital importance. England was at war. The Army would be buckling on its sword, running out its guns; the Navy clearing decks for action. It was their job, not mine. The Boer War had only touched upon my childish consciousness as a shouting in the streets, cheering multitudes and brass bands. War, as such, was something which I had never considered as having any personal meaning for me. Politics and war were the business of politicians and soldiers. My business was writing and I went up to London to arrange accommodations on the boat to New York.

London was different in those hot August days. Long queues waited all day,—not outside theatres, but outside recruiting offices,—city men, tramps, brick-layers, men of all types and ages with a look in their eyes that puzzled me. Every taxi hoot drew one’s attention to the flaring poster on each car, “Young Men of England, Your King and Country need you!”

How many millions of young men there were who would be glad to answer that call to adventure,—an adventure which surely could not last more than six months? It did not call me. My adventure lay in that wonderland of sprouting towers that glistened behind the Statue of Liberty.

But day by day the grey wave swept on, tearing down all veils from before the altar of reality. Belgian women were not merely bayoneted.

“Why don’t we stop this? What is the Army doing?” How easy to cry that out from the leafy lanes of Buckinghamshire. A woman friend of mine travelled up in the train with me one morning, a friend whose philosophy and way of life had seemed to me more near the ideal than I had dreamed of being able to reach. She spoke of war, impersonally and without recruiting propaganda. All unconsciously she opened my eyes to the unpleasant fact that it was my war too. Suppose I had returned to New York and the Germans had jumped the tiny Channel and “bayoneted” her and her children? Could I ever call myself a man again?

I took a taxi and went round London. Every recruiting office looked like a four-hour wait. I was in a hurry. So I went by train to Bedford and found it crowded with Highlanders. When I asked the way to the recruiting office they looked at me oddly. Their speech was beyond my London ear, but a pointing series of arms showed it to me.

By a miracle the place was empty except for the doctor and an assistant in khaki.

“I want to join the Cavalry,” said I.

“Very good, sir. Will you please take off your clothes.”

It was the last time a sergeant called me sir for many a long day.

I stripped, was thumped and listened to and gave description of tattoo marks which interested that doctor greatly. The appendix scar didn’t seem to strike him. “What is it?” said he, looking at it curiously, and when I told him merely grunted. Shades of Shaw! I thought with a jump of that Philadelphia surgeon. “Don’t ride a horse for six months.” Only three had elapsed.

I was passed fit. I assured them that I was English on both sides, unmarried, not a spy, and was finally given a bundle of papers and told to take them along to the barracks.

The barracks were full of roughnecks and it occurred to me for the first time, as I listened to them being sworn in, that these were my future brother soldiers. What price Mulvaney, Learoyd and Ortheris? thought I.

I repeated the oath after an hour’s waiting and swore to obey orders and respect superior officers and in short do my damnedest to kill the King’s enemies. I’ve done the last but when I think of the first two that oath makes me smile.

However, I swore, received two shillings and three-pence for my first two days’ pay and was ordered to report at the Cavalry Depot, Woolwich, the following day, September 3, 1914.

The whole business had been done in a rush of exaltation that didn’t allow me to think. But when I stepped out into the crowded streets with that two shillings rattling in my pocket I felt a very sober man. I knew nothing whatever of soldiering. I hardly even knew a corporal from a private or a rifle from a ramrod, and here I was Trooper A. H. Gibbs, 9th Lancers, with the sullen rumble of heavy guns just across the Channel—growing louder.

2

Woolwich!

Bad smells, bad beer, bad women, bad language!—Those early days! None of us who went through the ranks will ever forget the tragedy, the humour, the real democracy of that period. The hand of time has already coloured it with the glow of romance, but in the living it was crude and raw, like waking up to find your nightmare real.

Oxford University doesn’t give one much of an idea of how to cope with the class of humanity at that Depot in spite of Ruskin Hall, the working-man’s college, of which my knowledge consisted only of climbing over their wall and endeavouring to break up their happy home. But the Ruskin Hall man was a prince by the side of those recruits. They came with their shirts sticking out of trousers seats, naked toes showing out of gaping boots, and their smell—— We lay at night side by side on adjoining bunks, fifty of us in a room. They had spent their two days’ pay on beer, bad beer. The weather was hot. Most of them were stark naked. I’d had a bath that morning. They hadn’t.

The room was enormous. The windows had no blinds. The moon streamed in on their distorted bodies in all the twistings of uneasy sleep. Some of them smoked cigarettes and talked. Others blasphemed them for talking, but the bulk snored and ground their teeth in their sleep.

A bugle rang out.

Aching in every limb from the unaccustomed hardness of the iron bed it was no hardship to answer the call. There were lavatories outside each room and amid much sleepy blasphemy we shaved, those of us who had razors, and washed, and in the chill of dawn went down to a misty common. It was too early for discipline. There weren’t enough N.C.O.’s, so for the first few days we hung about waiting for breakfast instead of doing physical jerks.

Breakfast! One thinks of a warm room with cereals and coffee and eggs and bacon with a morning paper and, if there’s a soot in our cup, a sarcastic reference as to cleanliness. That was before the war.

We lined up before the door of a gun shed, hundreds of us, shivering, filing slowly in one by one and having a chunk of bread, a mug of tea and a tin of sardines slammed into our hands, the sardines having to be divided among four.

The only man in my four who possessed a jack-knife to open the tin had cleaned his pipe with it, scraped the mud off his boots, cleaned out his nails and cut up plug tobacco. Handy things, jack-knives. He proceeded to hack open the tin and scoop out sardines. It was only my first morning and my stomach wasn’t strong in those days. I disappeared into the mist, alone with my dry bread and tea. Hunger has taught me much since then.

The mist rolled up later and daylight showed us to be a pretty tough crowd. We were presently taken in hand by a lot of sergeants who divided us into groups, made lists of names and began to teach us how to march in the files, and in sections,—the elements of soldiering. Some of them didn’t seem to know their left foot from their right, but the patience of those sergeants was only equalled by the cunning of their blasphemy and the stolidity of their victims.

After an hour of it we were given a rest for fifteen minutes, this time to get a handful of tobacco. Then it went on again and again,—and yet again.

The whole of that first period of seven days was a long jumble of appalling happenings; meals served by scrofulitic hands on plates from which five other men’s leavings and grease had to be removed; bread cut in quarter loaves; meat fat, greasy, and stewed—always stewed, tea, stewed also, without appreciable milk, so strong that a spoon stood up in it unaided; sleeping in one’s clothes and inadequate washing in that atmosphere of filth indescribable; of parades to me childish in their elementariness; of long hours in the evening with nothing to do, no place to go, no man to talk to,—a period of absolute isolation in the middle of those thousands broken only by letters which assumed a paramount importance, constituting as they did one’s only link with all that one had left behind, that other life which now seemed like a mirage.

Not that one regretted the step. It was a first-hand experience of life that only Jack London or Masefield could have depicted. It was too the means of getting out to fight the Boche. A monotonous means, yes, but every day one learnt some new drill and every day one was thrilled with the absolute cold-blooded reality of it all. It was good to be alive, to be a man, to get one’s teeth right into things. It was a bigger part to play than that of the boy in “The Blindness of Virtue.”

3

Two incidents stand out in that chrysalis stage of becoming soldiers.

One was a sing-song, spontaneously started among the gun sheds in the middle of the white moonlight. One of the recruits was a man who had earned his living—hideously sarcastic phrase!—by playing a banjo and singing outside public houses. He brought his banjo into the army with him. I hope he’s playing still!

He stuck his inverted hat on the ground, lit a candle beside it in the middle of the huge square, smacked his dry lips and drew the banjo out of its baize cover.

“Perishin’ thirsty weather, Bill.”

He volunteered the remark to me as to a brother.

“Going to play for a drink?” I asked.

He was already tuning. He then sat down on a large stone and began to sing. His accompaniment was generous and loud and perhaps once he had a voice. It came now with but an echo of its probable charm, through a coating of beer and tobacco and years of rough living.

It was extraordinary. Just he sitting on the stone, and I standing smoking by his side, and the candle flickering in the breeze, and round us the hard black and white buildings and the indefinable rumble of a great life going on somewhere in the distance.

Presently, as though he were the Pied Piper, men came in twos and threes and stood round us, forming a circle.

“Give us the ‘Little Grey ’Ome in the West,’ George!”

And “George,” spitting after the prolonged sentiment of Thora, struck up the required song. At the end of half an hour there were several hundred men gathered round joining in the choruses, volunteering solos, applauding each item generously. The musician had five bottles of beer round his inverted hat and perhaps three inside him, and a collection of coppers was taken up from time to time.

They chose love ballads of an ultra-sentimental nature with the soft pedal on the sad parts,—these men who to-morrow would face certain death. How little did that thought come to them then. But I looked round at their faces, blandly happy, dirty faces, transformed by the moon and by their oath of service into the faces of crusaders.

How many of them are alive to-day, how many buried in nameless mounds somewhere in that silent desolation? How many of them have suffered mutilation? How many of them have come out of it untouched, to the waiting arms of their women? Brothers, I salute you.

---

The other incident was the finding of a friend, a kindred spirit in those thousands which accentuated one’s solitude.

We had been standing in a long queue outside the Quartermaster’s store, being issued with khaki one by one. I was within a hundred yards of getting outfitted when the Q.M. came to the door in person and yelled that the supply had run out. I think we all swore. The getting of khaki meant a vital step nearer to the Great Day when we should cross the Channel. As the crowd broke away in disorder, I heard a voice with an ‘h’ say “How perfectly ruddy!” I could have fallen on the man’s neck with joy. The owner of it was a comic sight. A very battered straw hat, a dirty handkerchief doing the duty of collar, a pair of grey flannel trousers that had been slept in these many nights. But the face was clear and there was a twinkle of humorous appreciation in the blue eye. I made a bee-line for that man. I don’t remember what I said, but in a few minutes we were swapping names, and where we lived and what we thought of it, and laughing at our mutually draggled garments.

We both threw reserve to the wind and were most un-English, except perhaps that we may have looked upon each other as the only two white men in a tribe of savages. In a sense we were. But it was like finding a brother and made all that difference to our immediate lives. There was so much pent-up feeling in both of us that we hadn’t been able to put into words. Never have I realized the value and comfort of speech so much, or the bond established by sharing experiences and emotions.

4

My new-found “brother’s” name was Bucks. After a few more days of drilling and marching and sergeant grilling, we both got khaki and spurs and cap badges and bandoliers, and we both bought white lanyards and cleaning appliances. Smart? We made a point of being the smartest recruits of the whole bunch. We felt we were the complete soldier at last and although there wasn’t a horse in Woolwich we clattered about in spurs that we burnished to the glint of silver.

And then began the second chapter of our military career. We all paraded one morning and were told off to go to Tidworth or the Curragh.

Bucks and I were for Tidworth and marched side by side in the great squad of us who tramped in step, singing “Tipperary” at the top of our lungs, down to the railway station.

That was the first day I saw an officer, two officers as a matter of fact, subalterns of our own regiment. It gave one for the first time the feeling of belonging to a regiment. In the depot at Woolwich were 9th Lancers, 5th Dragoon Guards, and 16th Lancers. Now we were going to the 9th Lancer barracks and those two subalterns typified the regiment to Bucks and me. How we eyed them, those two youngsters, and were rather proud of the aloof way in which they carried themselves. They were specialists. We were novices beginning at the bottom of the ladder and I wouldn’t have changed places with them at that moment had it been possible. As an officer I shouldn’t have known what to do with the mob of which I was one. I should have been awkward, embarrassed.

It didn’t occur to me then that there were hundreds, thousands, who knew as little as we did about the Army, who were learning to be second lieutenants as we were learning to be troopers.

We stayed all day in that train, feeding on cheese and bread which had been given out wrapped in newspapers, and buns and biscuits bought in a rush at railway junctions at which we stopped from time to time. It was dark when we got to Tidworth, that end-of-the-world siding, and were paraded on the platform and marched into barracks whose thousand windows winked cheerily at us as we halted outside the guardroom.

There were many important people like sergeant-majors waiting for us, and sergeants who called them “sir” and doubled to carry out their orders. These latter fell upon us and in a very short time we were divided into small groups and marched away to barrack rooms for the night. There was smartness here, discipline. The chaos of Woolwich was a thing of the past.

Already I pictured myself being promoted to lance-corporal, the proud bearer of one stripe, picking Boches on my lance like a row of pigs,—and I hadn’t even handled a real lance as yet!

5

Tidworth, that little cluster of barrack buildings on the edge of the sweeping downs, golden in the early autumn, full of a lonely beauty like a green Sahara with springs and woods, but never a house for miles, and no sound but the sighing of the wind and the mew of the peewit! Thus I came to know it first. Later the rain turned it into a sodden stretch of mud, blurred and terrible, like a drunken street-woman blown by the wind, filling the soul with shudders and despair.—The barrack buildings covered perhaps a square mile of ground, ranged orderly in series, officers’ quarters—as far removed from Bucks and me as the Carlton Hotel—married quarters, sergeants’ mess, stables, canteen, riding school, barrack rooms, hospital; like a small city, thriving and busy, dropped from the blue upon that patch of country.

The N.C.O.’s at Tidworth were regulars, time-serving men who had learnt their job in India and who looked upon us as a lot of “perishin’ amatoors.” It was a very natural point of view. We presented an ungodly sight, a few of us in khaki, some in “blues,” those terrible garments that make their wearers look like an orphan’s home, but most in civilian garments of the most tattered description. Khaki gave one standing, self-respect, cleanliness, enabled one to face an officer feeling that one was trying at least to be a soldier.

The barrack rooms were long and whitewashed, a stove in the middle, rows of iron beds down either side to take twenty men in peace times. As it was we late comers slept on “biscuits,” square hard mattresses, laid down between the iron bunks, and mustered nearly forty in a room. In charge of each room was a lance-corporal or corporal whose job it was to detail a room orderly and to see furthermore that he did his job, i.e., keep the room swept and garnished, the lavatory basins washed, the fireplace blackleaded, the windows cleaned, the step swept and whitewashed.

Over each bed was a locker (without a lock, of course) where each man kept his small kit,—razor, towel, toothbrush, blacking and his personal treasures. Those who had no bed had no locker and left things beneath the folded blankets of the beds.

How one missed one’s household goods! One learnt to live like a snail, with everything in the world upon one’s person,—everything in the world cut down to the barest necessities, pipe and baccy, letters, a photograph, knife, fork and spoon, toothbrush, bit of soap, tooth paste, one towel, one extra pair of socks. Have you ever tried it for six months—a year? Then don’t. You miss your books and pictures, the bowl of flowers on the table, the tablecloth. All the things of everyday life that are taken for granted become a matter of poignant loss when you’ve got to do without them. But it’s marvellous what can be done without when it’s a matter of necessity.

Bucks unfortunately didn’t get to the same room with me. All of us who had come in the night before were paraded at nine o’clock next morning before the Colonel and those who had seen service or who could ride were considered sheep and separated from the goats who had never seen service nor a horse. Bucks was a goat. I could ride,—although the sergeant-major took fifteen sulphuric minutes to tell me he didn’t think so. And so Bucks and I were separated by the space of a barrack wall, as we thought then. It was a greater separation really, for he was still learning to ride when I went out to France to reinforce the fighting regiment which had covered itself with glory in the retreat from Mons. But before that day came we worked through to the soul of Tidworth, and of the sergeant-major, if by any stretch of the imagination he may be said to have had a soul. I think he had, but all the other men in the squadron dedicated their first bullet to him if they saw him in France. What a man! He stands out among all my memories of those marvellous days of training when everything was different from anything I had ever done before. He stands before me now, a long, thin figure in khaki, with a face that had been kicked in by a horse, an eye that burnt like a branding iron, and picked out unpolished buttons like a magnet. In the saddle he was a centaur, part of the horse, wonderful. His long, thin thighs gripped like tentacles of steel. He could make an animal grunt, he gripped so hard. And his language! Never in my life had I conceived the possibilities of blasphemy to shrivel a man’s soul until I heard that sergeant-major. He ripped the Bible from cover to cover. He defied thunderbolts from on high and referred to the Almighty as though he were a scullion,—and he’s still doing it. Compared to the wholesale murder of eight million men it was undoubtedly a pin-prick, but it taught us how to ride!

6

Reveille was at 5.30.

Grunts, groans, curses, a kick,—and you were sleepily struggling with your riding breeches and puttees.

The morning bath? Left behind with all the other things.

There were horses to be groomed and watered and fed, stables to be “mucked out,” much hard and muscular work to be done before that pint of tea and slab of grease called bacon would keep body and soul together for the morning parade. One fed first and shaved and splashed one’s face, neck, and arms with water afterwards. Have you ever cleaned out a stable with your bare hands and then been compelled to eat a meal without washing?

By nine o’clock one paraded with cleaned boots, polished buttons and burnished spurs and was inspected by the sergeant-major. If you were sick you went before the doctor instead. But it didn’t pay to be sick. The sergeant-major cured you first. Then as there weren’t very many horses in barracks as yet, we were divided half into the riding school, half for lance and sword drill.

Riding school was invented by the Spanish Inquisition. Generally it lasted an hour, by which time one was broken on the rack and emerged shaken, bruised and hot, blistered by the sergeant-major’s tongue. There were men who’d never been on a horse more than twice in their lives, but most of us had swung a leg over a saddle. Many in that ride were grooms from training stables, riders of steeple-chasers. But their methods were not at all those desired in His Majesty’s Cavalry and they suffered like the rest of us. But the sergeant-major’s tongue never stopped and we either learned the essentials in double-quick time or got out to a more elementary ride.

It was a case of the survival of the fittest. Round and round that huge school, trotting with and without stirrups until one almost fell off from sheer agony, with and without saddle over five-foot jumps pursued by the hissing lash of the sergeant-major’s tongue and whip, jumping without reins, saddle or stirrups. The agony of sitting down for days afterwards!

Followed a fifteen-minute break, after the horses were led back to the stables and off-saddled, and then parade on the square with lance and sword. A lovely weapon the lance—slender, irresistible—but after an hour’s concentrated drill one’s right wrist became red-hot and swollen and the extended lance points drooped in our tired grasp like reeds in the wind. At night in the barrack room we used to have competitions to see who could drive the point deepest into the door panels.

Then at eleven o’clock “stables” again: caps and tunics off, braces down, sleeves rolled up. We had a magnificent stamp of horse, but they came in ungroomed for days and under my inexpert methods of grooming took several days before they looked as if they’d been groomed at all.

Dinner was at one o’clock and by the time that hour struck one was ready to eat anything. Each squadron had its own dining-rooms, concrete places with wooden tables and benches, but the eternal stew went down like caviar.

The afternoon parades were marching drill, physical exercises, harness cleaning, afternoon stables and finish for the day about five o’clock, unless one were wanted for guard or picquet. Picquet meant the care of the horses at night, an unenviable job. But guard was a twenty-four hours’ duty, two hours on, four hours off, much coveted after a rough passage in the riding school. It gave one a chance to heal.

Hitherto everything had been a confused mass of men without individuality but of unflagging cheerfulness. Now in the team work of the squadron and the barrack room individuality began to play its part and under the hard and fast routine the cheerfulness began to yield to grousing.

The room corporal of my room was a re-enlisted man, a schoolmaster from Scotland, conscientious, liked by the men, extremely simple. I’ve often wondered whether he obtained a commission. The other troopers were ex-stable boys, labourers, one a golf caddy and one an ex-sailor who was always singing an interminable song about a highly immoral donkey. The caddy and the sailor slept on either side of me. They were a mixed crowd and used filthy language as naturally as they breathed, but as cheery and stout a lot as you’d wish to meet. Under their grey shirts beat hearts as kindly as many a woman’s. I remember the first time I was inoculated and felt like nothing on earth.

“Christ!” said the sailor. “Has that perishin’ doctor been stickin’ his perishin’ needle into you, Mr. Gibbs?”—For some reason they always called me Mr. Gibbs.—“Come over here and get straight to bed before the perishin’ stuff starts workin’. I’ve ’ad some of it in the perishin’ navy.” And he and the caddy took off my boots and clothes and put me to bed with gentle hands.

The evening’s noisiness was given up. Everybody spoke in undertones so that I might get to sleep. And in the morning, instead of sweeping under my own bed as usual, they did it for me and cleaned my buttons and boots because my arm was still sore.

Can you imagine men like that nailing a kitten by its paws to a door as a booby-trap to blow a building sky high, as those Boches have done? Instead of bayoneting prisoners the sailor looked at them and said, “Ah, you poor perishin’ tikes!” and threw them his last cigarettes.

They taught me a lot, those men. Their extraordinary acceptation of unpleasant conditions, their quickness to resent injustice and speak of it at once, their continual cheeriness, always ready to sing, gave me something to compete with. On wet days of misery when I’d had no letters from home there were moments when I damned the war and thought with infinite regret of New York. But if these fellows could stick it, well, I’d had more advantages than they’d had and, by Jove, I was going to stick it too. It was a matter of personal pride.

Practically they taught me many things as well. It was there that they had the advantage of me. They knew how to wash shirts and socks and do all the menial work which I had never done. I had to learn. They knew how to dodge “fatigues” by removing themselves just one half-minute before the sergeant came looking for victims. It didn’t take me long to learn that.

Then one saw gradually the social habit emerge, called “mucking in.” Two men became pals and paired off, sharing tobacco and pay and saddle soap and so on. For a time I “mucked in” with Sailor—he was always called Sailor—and perforce learned the song about the Rabelaisian donkey. I’ve forgotten it now. Perhaps it’s just as well. Then when the squadron was divided up into troops Sailor and I were not in the same troop and I had to muck in with an ex-groom. He was the only man who did not use filthy language.

It’s odd about that language habit. While in the ranks I never caught it, perhaps because I considered myself a bit above that sort of thing. It was so childish and unsatisfying. But since I have been an officer I think I could sometimes have almost challenged the sergeant-major!

7

As soon as one had settled into the routine the days began to roll by with a monotony that was, had we only known it, the beginning of knowledge. Some genius has defined war as “months of intense boredom punctuated by moments of intense fear.” We had reached the first stage. It was when the day’s work was done that the devil stalked into one’s soul and began asking insidious questions. The work itself was hard, healthy, of real enjoyment. Shall I ever forget those golden autumn dawns when I rode out, a snorting horse under me, upon the swelling downs, the uplands touched by the rising sun; but in the hollows the feathery tops of trees poked up through the mist which lay in velvety clouds and everywhere a filigree of silver cobwebs, like strung seed pearls. It was with the spirit of crusaders that we galloped cross-country with slung lances, or charged in line upon an imaginary foe with yells that would demoralise him before our lance points should sink into his fat stomach. The good smells of earth and saddlery and horse flesh, the lance points winking in the sun, were all the outward signs of great romance and one took a deep breath of the keen air and thanked God to be in it. One charged dummies with sword and lance and hacked and stabbed them to bits. One leaped from one’s horse at the canter and lined a bank with rifles while the numbers three in each section galloped the horses to a flank under cover. One went over the brigade jumps in troop formation, taking pride in riding so that all horses jumped as one, a magnificent bit of team work that gave one a thrill.

It was on one of those early morning rides that Sailor earned undying fame. Remember that all of the work was done on empty stomachs before breakfast and that if we came back late, a frequent occurrence, we received only scraps and a curse from the cook. On the morning in question the sergeant-major ordered the whole troop to unbuckle their stirrup leathers and drop them on the ground. We did so.

“Now,” said he, “we’re going to do a brisk little cross-country follow-my-leader. I’m the leader and” (a slight pause with a flash from the steely eye), “God help the weak-backed, herring-gutted sons of —— who don’t perishin’ well line up when I give the order to halt. Half sections right! walk, march!”

We walked out of the barracks until we reached the edge of the downs and then followed such a ride as John Gilpin or the Baron Munchausen would have revelled in—perhaps. The sergeant-major’s horse could jump anything, and what it couldn’t jump it climbed over. It knew better than to refuse. We were indifferently mounted, some well, some badly. My own was a good speedy bay. The orders were to keep in half sections—two and two. For a straight half-mile we thundered across the level, drew rein slightly through a thick copse that lashed one’s face with pine branches and then dropped over a precipice twenty feet deep. That was where the half-section business went to pieces, especially when the horses clambered up the other side. We had no stirrups. It was a case of remaining in the saddle somehow. Had I been alone I would have ridden five miles to avoid the places the sergeant-major took us over, through, and under,—bramble hedges that tore one’s clothes and hands, ditches that one had to ride one’s horse at with both spurs, banks so steep that one almost expected the horse to come over backwards, spinneys where one had to lie down to avoid being swept off. At last, breathless, aching and exhausted, those of us who were left were halted and dismounted, while the sergeant-major, who hadn’t turned a hair, took note of who was missing.

Five unfortunates had not come in. The sergeant-major cast an eye towards the open country and remained ominously silent. After about a quarter of an hour the five were seen to emerge at a walk from behind a spinney. They came trotting up, an anxious expression on their faces, all except Sailor, who grinned from ear to ear. Instead of being allowed to fall in with us they were made to halt and dismount by themselves, facing us. The sergeant-major looked at them, slowly, with an infinite contempt, as they stood stiffly to attention. Then he began.

“Look at them!” he said to us. “Look at those five....” and so on in a stinging stream, beneath which their faces went white with anger.

As the sergeant-major drew breath, Sailor stepped forward. He was no longer grinning from ear to ear. His face might have been cut out of stone and he looked at the sergeant-major with a steady eye.

“That’s all right, Sergeant-Major,” he said. “We’re all that and a perishin’ lot more perhaps, but not you nor Jesus Christ is going to make me do a perishin’ ride like that and come back to perishin’ barracks and get no perishin’ breakfast and go on perishin’ parade again at nine with not a perishin’ thing in my perishin’ stomach.”

“What do you mean?” asked the sergeant-major.

“What I says,” said Sailor, standing to his guns while we, amazed, expected him to be slain before our eyes. “Not a perishin’ bit of breakfast do we get when we go back late.”

“Is that true?” The sergeant-major turned to us.

“Yes,” we said, “perishin’ true!”

“Mount!” ordered the sergeant-major without another word and we trotted straight back to barracks. By the time we’d watered, off-saddled and fed the horses we were as usual twenty minutes late for breakfast. But this morning the sergeant-major, with a face like a black cloud, marched us into the dining-hall and up to the cook’s table.

We waited, breathless with excitement. The cook was in the kitchen, a dirty fellow.

The sergeant-major slammed the table with his whip. The cook came, wiping a chewing mouth with the back of his hand.

“Breakfast for these men, quick,” said the sergeant-major.

“All gone, sir,” said the cook, “we can’t——”

The sergeant-major leaned over with his face an inch from the cook’s. “Don’t you perishin’ well answer me back,” he said, “or I’ll put you somewhere where the Almighty couldn’t get you out until I say so. Breakfast for these men, you fat, chewing swine, or I’ll come across the table and cut your tripes out with my riding whip and cook them for breakfast! Jump, you foul-feeder!” and down came the whip on the table like a pistol shot.

The cook swallowed his mouthful whole and retired, emerging presently with plenty of excellent breakfast and hot tea. We laughed.

“Now,” said the sergeant-major, “if you don’t get as good a breakfast as this to-morrow and every to-morrow, tell me, and I’ll drop this lying bastard into his own grease trap.”

Sailor got drunk that night. We paid.

8

The evenings were the hardest part. There was only Bucks to talk to, and it was never more than twice a week that we managed to get together. Generally one was more completely alone than on a desert island, a solitude accentuated by the fact that as soon as one ceased the communion of work which made us all brothers on the same level, they dropped back, for me at least, into a seething mass of rather unclean humanity whose ideas were not mine, whose language and habits never ceased to jar upon one’s sensitiveness. There was so little to do. The local music hall, intensely fifth rate, only changed its programme once a week. The billiard tables in the canteen had an hour-long waiting list always.

The Y.M.C.A. hadn’t developed in those early days to its present manifold excellence. There was no gymnasium. The only place one had was one’s bed in the barrack room on which one could read or write, not alone, because there was always a shouting incoming and outgoing crowd and cross fire of elementary jokes and horseplay. It seemed that there was never a chance of being alone, of escaping from this “lewd and licentious soldiery.” There were times when the desert island called irresistibly in this eternal isolation of mind but not of body. All that one had left behind, even the times when one was bored and out of temper, because perhaps one was off one’s drive at the Royal and Ancient, or some other trivial thing like that, became so glorious in one’s mind that the feel of the barrack blanket was an agony. Had one ever been bored in that other life? Had one been touchy and said sarcastic things that were meant to hurt? Could it be possible that there was anything in that other world for which one wouldn’t barter one’s soul now? How little one had realised, appreciated, the good things of that life! One accepted them as a matter of course, as a matter of right.

Now in the barrack-room introspections their real value stood out in the limelight of contrast and one saw oneself for the first time: a rather selfish, indifferent person, thoughtless, hurrying along the road of life with no point of view of one’s own, doing things because everybody else did them, accepting help carelessly, not realising that other people might need one’s help in return, content with a somewhat shallow secondhand philosophy because untried in the fire of reality. This was reality, this barrack life. This was the first time one had been up against facts, the first time it was a personal conflict between life and oneself with no mother or family to fend off the unpleasant; a fact that one hadn’t attempted to grasp.

The picture of oneself was not comforting. To find out the truth about oneself is always like taking a pill without its sugar coating; and it was doubly bitter in those surroundings.

Hitherto one had never been forced to do the unpleasant. One simply avoided it. Now one had to go on doing it day after day without a hope of escape, without any more alleviation than a very occasional week-end leave. Those week-ends were like a mouthful of water to Dives in the flames of hell,—but which made the flames all the fiercer afterwards! One prayed for them and loathed them.

The beating heart with which one leaped out of a taxi in London and waited on the doorstep of home, heaven. The glory of a clean body and more particularly, clean hands. It was curious how the lack of a bath ceased after a time to be a dreadful thing, but the impossibility of keeping one’s hands clean was always a poignant agony. They were always dirty, with cracked nails and a cut or two, and however many times they were scrubbed, they remained appalling. But at home on leave, with hot water and stacks of soap and much manicuring, they did not at least make one feel uncomfortable.

The soft voices and laughter of one’s people, their appearance—just to be in the same room, silent with emotion—God, will one ever forget it? Thin china to eat off, a flower on the table, soft lights, a napkin.—The little ones who came and fingered one’s bandolier and cap badge and played with one’s spurs with their tiny, clean hands—one was almost afraid to touch them, and when they puckered up their tiny mouths to kiss one good night.—I wonder whether they ever knew how near to tears that rough-looking soldier-man was?

And then in what seemed ten heart-beats one was saying good-bye to them all. Back to barracks again by way of Waterloo and the last train at 9 p.m.—its great yellow lights and awful din, its surging crowd of drunken soldiers and their girls who yelled and hugged and screamed up and down the platform, and here and there an officer diving hurriedly into a first-class compartment. Presently whistles blew and one found oneself jammed into a carriage with about twelve other soldiers who fought to lean out of the window and see the last of their girls until the train had panted its way out of the long platform. Then the foul reek of Woodbine cigarettes while they discussed the sexual charms of those girls—and then a long snoring chorus for hours into the night, broken only by some one being sick from overmuch beer.

The touch of the rosebud mouth of the baby girl who had kissed me good-bye was still on my lips.

9

It was in the first week of November that, having been through an exhaustive musketry course in addition to all the other cavalry work, we were “passed out” by the Colonel. I may mention in passing that in October, 1914, the British Cavalry were armed, for the first time in history, with bayonets in addition to lance, sword and rifle. There was much sarcastic reference to “towies,” “foot-sloggers,” “P.B.I.”—all methods of the mounted man to designate infantry; and when an infantry sergeant was lent to teach us bayonet fighting it seemed the last insult, even to us recruits, so deeply was the cavalry spirit already ingrained in us.

The “passing out” by the Colonel was a day in our lives. It meant that, if successful, we were considered good enough to go and fight for our country: France was the Mecca of each of us.

The day in question was bright and sunny with a touch of frost which made the horses blow and dance when, with twinkling lance-points at the carry, we rode out with the sergeant-major, every bright part of our equipment polished for hours overnight in the barrack room amid much excited speculation as to our prospects.

The sergeant-major was going to give us a half-hour’s final rehearsal of all our training before the Colonel arrived. Nothing went right and he damned and cursed without avail, until at last he threatened to ride us clean off the plain and lose us. It was very depressing. We knew we’d done badly, in spite of all our efforts, and when we saw, not far off, the Colonel, the Major and the Adjutant, with a group of other people riding up to put us through our paces, there wasn’t a heart that didn’t beat faster in hope or despair. We sat to attention like Indians while the officers rode round us, inspecting the turnout.

Then the Colonel expressed the desire to see a little troop drill.

The sergeant-major cleared his throat and like an 18-pounder shell the order galvanised us into action. We wheeled and formed and spread out and reformed without a hitch and came to a halt in perfect dressing in front of the Colonel again, without a fault. Hope revived in despairing chests.

Then the Colonel ordered us over the jumps in half sections, and at the order each half section started away on the half-mile course—walk, trot, canter, jump, steady down to trot, canter, jump—e da capo right round about a dozen jumps, each one over a different kind of obstacle, each half section watched far more critically perhaps by the rest of the troop than by the officers. My own mount was a bay mare which I’d ridden half a dozen times. When she liked she could jump anything. Sometimes she didn’t like.

This day I was taking no chances and drove home both spurs at the first jump. My other half section was a lance-corporal. His horse was slow, preferring to consider each jump before it took it.

Between jumps, without moving our heads and looking straight in front of us, we gave each other advice and encouragement.

Said he, “Not so perishin’ fast. Keep dressed, can’t you.”

Said I, “Wake your old blighter up! What’ve you got spurs on for?—Hup! Over. Steady, man, steady.”

Said he, “Nar, then, like as we are. Knee to knee. Let’s show ’em what the perishin’ Kitchener’s mob perishin’ well can do.” And without a refusal we got round and halted in our places.

When we’d all been round, the Colonel with a faint smile on his face, requested the sergeant-major to take us round as a troop—sixteen lancers knee to knee in the front rank and the same number behind.

It happened that I was the centre of the front rank—technically known as centre guide—whose job it was to keep four yards from the tail of the troop leader and on whom the rest of the front rank “dressed.”

When we were well away from the officers and about to canter at the first jump the sergeant-major’s head turned over his shoulder.

“Oh, you’re centre guide, Gibbs, are you! Well, you keep your distance proper, that’s all, and by Christ, if you refuse——”

I don’t know what fate he had in store for me had I missed a jump but there I was with a knee on either side jammed painfully hard against mine as we came to the first jump. It was the man on either flank of the troop who had the most difficult job. The jumps were only just wide enough and they had to keep their horses from swinging wide of the wings. It went magnificently. Sixteen horses as one in both ranks rose to every jump, settled down and dressed after each and went round the course without a hitch, refusal or fall, and at last we sat at attention facing the Colonel, awaiting the verdict which would either send us back for further training, or out to—what? Death, glory, or maiming?

The Major looked pleased and twisted his moustache with a grin. He had handled our squadron and on the first occasion of his leading us in a charge, he in front with drawn sword, we thundering behind with lances menacing his back in a glittering row, we got so excited that we broke ranks and flowed round him, yelling like cowboys. How he damned us!

The Colonel made a little speech and complimented us on our work and the sergeant-major for having trained us so well,—us, the first of Kitchener’s “mob” to be ready. Very nice things he said and our hearts glowed with appreciation and excitement. We sat there without a movement but our chests puffed out like a row of pouter pigeons.

At last he saluted us—saluted us, he, the Colonel—and the officers rode away,—the Major hanging behind a little to say with a smile that was worth all the cursings the sergeant-major had ever given us, “Damn good, you fellows! Damn good!” We would have followed him to hell and back at that moment.

And then the sergeant-major turned his horse and faced us. “You may think you’re perishin’ good soldiers after all that, but by Christ, I’ve never seen such a perishin’ awful exhibition of carpet-baggers.”

But there was an unusual twinkle in his eye and for the first time in those two months of training he let us “march at ease,” i.e., smoke and talk, on the way back to stables.

10

That was the first half of the ordeal.

The second half took place in the afternoon in the barrack square when we went through lance drill and bayonet exercises while the Colonel and the officers walked round and discussed us. At last we were dismissed, trained men, recruits no longer; and didn’t we throw our chests out in the canteen that night! It made me feel that the Nobel prize was futile beside the satisfaction of being a fully trained trooper in His Majesty’s Cavalry, and in a crack regiment too, which had already shown the Boche that the “contemptible little army” had more “guts” than the Prussian Guards regiments and anything else they liked to chuck in.

I foregathered with Bucks that night and told him all about it. Our ways had seemed to lie apart during those intensive days, and it was only on Sundays that we sometimes went for long cross-country walks with biscuits and apples in our pockets if we were off duty. About once a week too we made a point of going to the local music-hall where red-nosed comedians knocked each other about and fat ladies in tights sang slushy love songs; and with the crowd we yelled choruses and ate vast quantities of chocolate.

Two other things occurred during those days which had an enormous influence on me; one indeed altered my whole career in the army.

The first occurrence was the arrival in a car one evening of an American girl whom I’d known in New York. It was about a week after my arrival at Tidworth. She, it appeared, was staying with friends about twenty miles away.

The first thing I knew about it was when an orderly came into stables about 4.30 p.m. on a golden afternoon and told me that I was wanted at once at the Orderly Room.

“What for?” said I, a little nervous.

The Orderly Room was where all the scallawags were brought up before the Colonel for their various crimes,—and I made a hasty examination of conscience.

However, I put on my braces and tunic and ran across the square. There in a car was the American girl whom I had endeavoured to teach golf in the days immediately previous to my enlistment. “Come on out and have a picnic with me,” said she. “I’ve got some perfectly luscious things in a basket.”

The idea was heavenly but it occurred to me I ought to get permission. So I went into the Orderly Room.

There were two officers and a lot of sergeants. I tiptoed up to a sergeant and explaining that a lady had come over to see me, asked if I could get out of camp for half an hour? I was very raw in those days,—half an hour!

The sergeant stared at me. Presumably ladies in motor-cars didn’t make a habit of fetching cavalry privates. It wasn’t “laid down” in the drill book. However, he went over to one of the officers,—the Adjutant, I discovered later.

The Adjutant looked me up and down as I repeated my request, asked me my name and which ride I was in and finally put it to the other officer who said “yes” without looking up. So I thanked the Adjutant, clicked to the salute and went out. As I walked round the front of the car, while the chauffeur cranked up, the door of the Orderly Room opened and the Adjutant came on to the step. He took a good look at the American girl and said, “Oh—er—Gibbs! You can make it an hour if you like.”

It may amuse him to know, if the slaughter hasn’t claimed him, that I made it exactly sixty minutes, much as I should have liked to make it several hours, and was immensely grateful to him both for the extra half hour and for the delightful touch of humour.

What a picnic it was! We motored away from that place and all its roughness and took the basket under a spinney in the afternoon sun which touched everything in a red glow.

It wasn’t only tea she gave me, but sixty precious minutes of great friendship, letting fall little remarks which helped me to go back all the more determined to stick to it. She renewed my faith in myself and gave me renewed courage,—for which I was unable to thank her. We British are so accursedly tongue-tied in these matters. I did try but of course made a botch of it.

There are some things which speech cannot deal with. Your taking me out that day, oh, American girl, and the other days later, are numbered among them.

11

The other occurrence was also brought about by a woman, the woman for whom I joined up. It was a Sunday morning on which fortunately I was not detailed for any fatigues and she came to take me out to lunch. We motored to Marlborough, lunched at the hotel and after visiting a racing stable some distance off came back to the hotel for tea, a happy day unflecked by any shadow. In the corner of the dining-room were two officers with two ladies. I, in the bandolier and spurs of a trooper, sat with my back to them and my friend told me that they seemed to be eyeing me and making remarks. It occurred to me that as I had no official permission to be away from Tidworth they might possibly be going to make trouble. How little I knew what was in their minds. When we’d finished and got up to go one of the officers came across as we were going out of the room and said, “May I speak to you a moment?”

We both stopped. “I see you’re wearing the numerals of my regiment,” said he and went on to ask why I was in the ranks, why I hadn’t asked for a commission, and strongly advised me to do so.

I told him that I hadn’t ever thought of it because I knew nothing about soldiering and hadn’t the faintest idea of whether I should ever be any good as an officer. He waved that aside and advised me to apply. Then he added that he himself was going out to France one day in the following week and would I like to go as his servant? Would I? My whole idea was to get to France; and this happened before I had been passed out by the Colonel. So he took down my name and particulars and said he would ask for me when he came to Tidworth, which he proposed to do in two days’ time.

Whether he ever came or not I do not know. I never saw him again. Nor did I take any steps with regard to a commission. My friend and I talked it over and I remember rather laughing at the idea of it.

Not so she, however. About a fortnight later I was suddenly sent for by the Colonel.

“I hear you’ve applied for a commission,” said he.

It came like a bolt from the blue. But through my brain flashed the meeting in the Marlborough Hotel and I saw in it the handiwork of my friend.

So I said, “Yes, sir.”

He then asked me where I was educated and whether I spoke French and what my job was in civil life and finally I was sent off to fill up a form and then to be medically examined.

And there the matter ended. I went on with the daily routine, was passed out by the Colonel and a very few days after that heard the glorious news that we were going out as a draft to France on active service.

We were all in bed in the barrack room one evening when the door opened and a sergeant came in and flicked on the electric light, which had only just been turned out.

“Wake up, you bloodthirsty warriors,” he cried. “Wake up. You’re for a draft to-morrow all of you on this list,” and he read out the names of all of us in the room who had been passed out. “Parade at the Quartermaster’s stores at nine o’clock in the morning.” And out went the light and the door slammed and a burst of cheering went up.

And while I lay on my “biscuits,” imagining France and hearing in my mind the thunder of guns and wondering what our first charge would be like, the machinery which my friend had set in motion was rolling slowly (shades of the War Office!) but surely. My name had been submerged in the “usual channels” but was receiving first aid, all unknown to me, of a most vigorous description.

12

Shall I ever forget that week-end, with all its strength of emotions running the gamut from exaltation to blank despair and back again to the wildest enthusiasm?

We paraded at the Quartermaster’s stores and received each a kit bag, two identity discs—the subject of many gruesome comments—a jack-knife, mess tin, water bottle, haversack, and underclothes. Thus were we prepared for the killing.

Then the Major appeared and we fell in before him.

“Now which of you men want to go to the front?” said he. “Any man who wants to, take one pace forward.”

As one man the whole lot of us, about thirty, took one pace forward.

The Major smiled. “Good,” said he. “Any man not want to go—prove.”

No man proved.

“Well, look here,” said the Major, “I hate to disappoint anybody but only twenty-eight of you can go. You’ll have to draw lots.”

Accordingly bits of paper were put into a hat, thirty scraps of paper, two of them marked with crosses. Was it a sort of inverted omen that the two who drew the crosses would never find themselves under little mounds in France?

We drew in turn, excitement running high as paper after paper came out blank. My heart kicked within me. How I prayed not to draw a cross. But I did!

Speechless with despair the other man who drew a cross and I received the good-natured chaff of the rest.

I saw them going out, to leave this accursed place of boredom and make-believe, for the real thing, the thing for which we had slaved and sweated and suffered. We two were to be left. We weren’t to go on sharing the luck with these excellent fellows united to us by the bonds of fellow-striving, whom we knew in sickness and health, drunk and sober.

We had to remain behind, eating our hearts out to wait for the next draft—a lot of men whom we did not know, strangers with their own jokes and habits—possibly a fortnight of hanging about. The day was a Friday and our pals were supposed to be going at any moment. The other unlucky man and myself came to the conclusion that consolation might be found in a long week-end leave and that if we struck while the iron of sympathy was hot the Major might be inclined to lend a friendly ear. This indeed he did and within an hour we were in the London train on that gloomy Friday morning, free as any civilian till midnight of the following Tuesday. Thus the Major’s generosity. The only proviso was that we had both to leave telegraphic addresses in case——

But in spite of that glorious week-end in front of us, we refused to be consoled, yet, and insisted on telling the other occupants of the carriage of our rotten luck. We revelled in gloom and extraneous sympathy until Waterloo showed up in the murk ahead. Then I’m bound to confess my own mental barometer went up with a jump and I said good-bye to my fellow lancer, who was off to pursue the light o’ love in Stepney, with an impromptu Te Deum in my heart.

My brother, with whom I spent all my week-ends in those days, had a house just off the Park. He put in his time looking like a rather tired admiral, most of whose nights were passed looking for Zeppelins and yearning for them to come within range of his beloved “bundooks” which were in the neighbourhood of the Admiralty. Thither I went at full speed in a taxi—they still existed in those days—and proceeded to wallow in a hot bath, borrowing my brother’s bath salts (or were they his wife’s?), clean “undies” and hair juice with a liberal hand. It was a comic sight to see us out together in the crowded London streets, he all over gold lace, me just a Tommy with a cheap swagger stick under my arm. Subalterns, new to the game, saluted him punctiliously. I saluted them. And when we met generals or a real admiral we both saluted together. The next afternoon, Saturday, at tea time a telegram came. We were deep in armchairs in front of a gorgeous fire, with muffins sitting in the hearth and softly shaded electric lights throwing a glow over pictures and backs of books and the piano which, after the barrack room, made us as near heaven as I’ve ever been. The telegram was for me, signed by the Adjutant.

“Return immediately.”

It was the echo of a far-off boot and saddle.—I took another look round the room. Should I ever see it again? My brother’s eye met mine and we rose together.

“Well, I must be getting along,” said I. “Cheero, old son.”

“I’ll come with you to the station,” said he.

I shook my head. “No, please don’t bother.—Don’t forget to write.”

“Rather not.—Good luck, old man.”

“Thanks.”

We went down to his front door. I put on my bandolier and picked up my haversack.

“Well—so long.”

We shook hands.

“God bless you.”

I think we said it together and then the door closed softly behind me.

Partir, c’est mourir un peu.—Un peu.—God!

13

The next day, Sunday, we all hung about in a sort of uneasy waiting, without any orders.

It gave us all time to write letters home. If I rightly remember, absolute secrecy was to be maintained so we were unable even to hint at our departure or to say good-bye. It was probably just as well but they were difficult letters to achieve. So we tied one identity disc to our braces and slung the other round our necks on a string and did rather more smoking than usual.

Next morning, however, all was bustle. The orders had come in and we paraded in full fighting kit in front of the guardroom.

The Colonel came on parade and in a silence that was only broken by the beating of our hearts told us we were going out to face the Boche for our King and Country’s sake, to take our places in the ranks of a very gallant regiment, and he wished us luck.

We gave three rather emotional cheers and marched away with our chins high, followed by the cheers of the whole barracks who had turned out to see us off. Just as we were about to entrain the Major trotted up on his big charger and shook us individually by the hand and said he wished he were coming with us. His coming was a great compliment and every man of us appreciated it to the full.

The harbour was a wonderful sight when we got in late that afternoon. Hundreds of arc lights lit up numbers of ships and at each ship was a body of troops entraining,—English, Scotch and Irish, cavalry, gunners and infantry. At first glance it appeared a hopeless tangle, a babel of yelling men all getting into each other’s way. But gradually the eye tuned itself up to the endless kaleidoscope and one saw that absolute order prevailed. Every single man was doing a job and the work never ceased.

We were not taking horses and marched in the charge of an officer right through the busy crowd and halted alongside a boat which already seemed packed with troops. But after a seemingly endless wait we were marched on board and, dodging men stripped to the waist who were washing in buckets, we climbed down iron ladders into the bowels of the hold, were herded into a corner and told to make ourselves comfortable. Tea would be dished out in half an hour.

Holds are usually iron. This was. Furthermore it had been recently red-leaded. Throw in a strong suggestion of garlic and more than a hint of sea-sickness and you get some idea of the perfume that greeted us, friendly-like.

The comments, entirely good-natured, were unprintable. There were no bunks. We had one blanket each and a greatcoat. My thoughts turned to the first-class stateroom of the Caronia in which only four months previously I had had no thought of war. The accepted form of romance and the glamour of war have been altered. There are no cheering crowds and fluttering handkerchiefs and brass bands. The new romance is the light of the moon flickering on darkened ships that creep one after the other through the mine barrier out into deep waters, turning to silver the foam ripped by the bows, picking out the white expressionless faces of silent thousands of khaki-clad men lining the rail, following the will-o’-the-wisp which beckoned to a strange land.

How many of them knew what they were going to fight for? How many of them realized the unforgettable hell they were to be engulfed in, the sacrifice which they so readily made of youth, love, ambition, life itself—and to what end? To give the lie to one man who wished to alter the face of the world? To take the part of the smaller country trampled and battered by the bully? To save from destruction the greasy skins of dirty-minded politicians, thinking financially or even imperially, but staying at home?

God knows why most of us went.

But the sting of the Channel wind as we set our faces to the enemy drove all reason from the mind and filled it with a mighty exultation. If Death were there to meet us, well, it was all in the game.

We climbed up from the hold next morning to find ourselves in Portsmouth harbour. The word submarines ran about the decks. There we waited all day, and again under cover of dark made our way out to open water, reaching Havre about six o’clock next morning.

We were marched ashore in the afternoon and transferred to another boat. Nobody knew our destination and the wildest guesses were made. The new boat was literally packed. There was no question of going down into a hold. We were lucky to get sufficient deck space to lie down on, and just before getting under way, it began to rain. There were some London Scottish at our end of the deck who, finding that we had exhausted our rations, shared theirs with us. There was no question of sleeping. It was too cold and too uncomfortable. So we sang. There must have been some two thousand of us on board and all those above deck joined in choruses of all the popular songs as they sat hunched up or lying like rows of sardines in the rain. Dawn found us shivering, passing little villages on either bank of the river as we neared Rouen. The early-rising inhabitants waved and their voices came across the water, “Vivent les Anglais! A bas les Boches!” And the sun came out as we waved out shaving brushes at them in reply. We eventually landed in the old cathedral city and formed up and marched away across the bridge, with everybody cheering and throwing flowers until we came to La BruyÈre camp.

Hundreds of bell tents, thousands of horses, and mud over the ankles! That was the first impression of the camp. It wasn’t until we were divided off into tents and had packed our equipment tight round the tent pole that one had time to notice details.

We spent about nine days in La BruyÈre camp and we groomed horses from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day, wet or fine. The lines were endless and the mud eternal. It became a nightmare, relieved only by the watering of the horses. The water was about a kilometre and a half distant. We mounted one horse and led two more each and in an endless line splashed down belly-deep in mud past the hospital where the slightly wounded leaned over the rail and exchanged badinage. Sometimes the sisters gave us cigarettes for which we called down blessings on their heads.

It rained most of the time and we stood ankle-deep all day in the lines, grooming and shovelling away mud. But all the time jokes were hurled from man to man, although the rain dripped down their faces and necks. We slept, if I remember rightly, twenty men in a tent, head outwards, feet to the pole piled on top of each other,—wet, hot, aching. Oh, those feet, the feet of tired heroes, but unwashed. And it was impossible to open the tent flap because of the rain.—Fortunately it was cold those nights and one smoked right up to the moment of falling asleep. Only two per cent. of passes to visit the town were allowed, but the camp was only barb-wired and sentried on one side. The other side was open to the pine woods and very pretty they were as we went cross-country towards the village of St. Etienne from which a tram-car ran into Rouen in about twenty minutes. The military police posted at the entrance to the town either didn’t know their job or were good fellows of Nelsonian temperament, content to turn a blind eye. From later experience I judge that the former was probably the case. Be that as it may, several hundreds of us went in without official permission nearly every night and, considering all things, were most orderly. Almost the only man I ever saw drunk was, paradoxically enough, a police man. He tried to place my companion and myself under arrest, but was so far gone that he couldn’t write down our names and numbers and we got off. The hand of Fate was distinctly in it for had I been brought up and crimed for being loose in the town without leave it might have counted against me when my commission was being considered.

One evening, the night before we left for the front, we went down for a bath, the last we should get for many a day. On our way we paid a visit to the cathedral. It was good to get out of the crowded streets into the vast gloom punctured by pin-points of candlelight, with only faint footfalls and the squeak of a chair to disturb the silence. For perhaps half an hour we knelt in front of the high altar,—quite unconsciously the modern version of that picture of a knight in armour kneeling, holding up his sword as a cross before the altar. It is called the Vigil, I believe. We made a little vigil in khaki and bandoliers and left the cathedral with an extraordinary confidence in the morrow. There was a baby being baptised at the font. It was an odd thing seeing that baby just as we passed out. It typified somewhat the reason of our going forth to fight.

The bath was amusing. The doors were being closed as we arrived, and I had just the time to stick my foot in the crack, much to the annoyance of the attendant. I blarneyed him in French and at last pushed into the hall only to be greeted by a cry of indignation from the lady in charge of the ticket office. She was young, however and pretty, and, determined to get a bath, I played upon her feelings to the extent of my vocabulary. At first she was adamant. The baths were closed. I pointed out that the next morning we were going to the front to fight for France. She refused to believe it. I asked her if she had a brother. She said she hadn’t. I congratulated her on not being agonized by the possibilities of his death from hour to hour. She smiled.

My heart leaped with hope and I reminded her that as we were possibly going to die for her the least she could do was to let us die clean. She looked me straight in the eye. There was a twinkle in hers. “You will not die,” she said. Somehow one doesn’t associate the selling of bath tickets with the calling of prophet. But she combined the two. And the bath was gloriously hot.

15

That nine days at La BruyÈre did not teach us very much,—not even the realization of the vital necessity of patience. We looked upon each day as wasted because we weren’t up the line. Everywhere were preparations of war but we yearned for the sound of guns. Even the blue-clad figures who exchanged jokes with us over the hospital railing conveyed nothing of the grim tragedy of which we were only on the fringe. They were mostly convalescent. It is only the shattered who are being pulled back to life by a thread who make one curse the war. We looked about like new boys in a school, interested but knowing nothing of the workings, reading none of the signs. This all bored us. We wanted the line with all the persistence of the completely ignorant.

The morning after our bath we got it. There was much bustle and running and cursing and finally we had our saddles packed, and a day’s rations in our haversacks and a double feed in the nose-bags.

The cavalry man in full marching order bears a strange resemblance to a travelling ironmonger and rattles like the banging of old tins. The small man has almost to climb up the near foreleg of his horse, so impossible is it to get a leg anywhere near the stirrup iron with all his gear on. My own method was to stick the lance in the ground by the butt, climb with infinite labour and heavings into the saddle and come back for the lance when arranged squarely on the horse.

Eventually everything was accomplished and we were all in the saddle and were inspected to see that we were complete in every detail. Then we rode out of that muddy camp in sections—four abreast—and made our way down towards the station. It was a real touch of old-time romance, that ride. The children ran shouting, and people came out of the shops to wave their hands and give us fruit and wish us luck, and the girls blew kisses, and through the hubbub the clatter of our horses over the cobbles and the jingle of stirrup striking stirrup made music that stirred one’s blood.

There was a long train of cattle trucks waiting for us at the station and into these we put our horses, eight to each truck, fastened by their ropes from the head collar to a ring in the roof. In the two-foot space between the two lots of four horses facing each other were put the eight saddles and blankets and a bale of hay.

Two men were detailed to stay with the horses in each truck while the rest fell in and were marched away to be distributed among the remaining empty trucks. I didn’t altogether fancy the idea of looking after eight frightened steeds in that two-foot alleyway, but before I could fall in with the rest I was detailed by the sergeant.

That journey was a nightmare. My fellow stableman was a brainless idiot who knew even less about the handling of horses than I did.

The train pulled out in the growing dusk of a cold November evening, the horses snorting and starting at every jolt, at every signal and telegraph pole that we passed. When they pawed with their front feet we, sitting on the bale of hay, had to dodge with curses. There was no sand or bedding and it was only the tightness with which they were packed together that kept them on their feet. Every light that flashed by drew frightened snorts. We spent an hour standing among them, saying soothing things and patting their necks. We tried closing the sliding doors but at the end of five minutes the heat splashed in great drops of moisture from the roof and the smell was impossible. Eventually I broke the bale of hay and threw some of that down to give them a footing.

There was a lamp in the corner of the truck. I told the other fellow to light it. He said he had no matches. So I produced mine and discovered that I had only six left. We used five to find out that the lamp had neither oil nor wick. We had just exhausted our vocabularies over this when the train entered a tunnel. At no time did the train move at more than eight miles an hour and the tunnel seemed endless. A times I still dream of that tunnel and wake up in a cold sweat.

As our truck entered great billows of smoke rushed into it. The eight horses tried as one to rear up and crashed their heads against the roof. The noise was deafening and it was pitch dark. I felt for the door and slid it shut while the horses blew and tugged at their ropes in a blind panic. Then there was a heavy thud, followed by a yell from the other man and a furious squealing.

“Are you all right?” I shouted, holding on to the head collar of the nearest beast.

“Christ!” came the answer. “There’s a ’orse down and I’m jammed up against the door ’ere. Come and get me out, for Christ’s sake.”

My heart was pumping wildly.

The smoke made one gasp and there was a furious stamping and squealing and a weird sort of blowing gurgle which I could not define.

Feeling around I reached the next horse’s head collar and staggered over the pile of saddlery. As I leaned forward to get to the third something whistled past my face and I heard the sickening noise of a horse’s hoof against another horse, followed by a squeal. I felt blindly and touched a flank where a head should have been. One of them had swung round and was standing with his fore feet on the fallen horse and was lashing out with both hind feet, while my companion was jammed against the wall of the truck by the fallen animal presumably.

And still that cursed tunnel did not come to an end. I yelled again to see if he were all right and his fruity reply convinced me that at least there was no damage done. So I patted the kicker and squeezed in to his head and tried to get him round. It was impossible to get past, over or under, and the brute wouldn’t move. There was nothing for it but to remain as we were until out of the tunnel. And then I located the gurgle. It was the fallen horse, tied up short by the head collar to the roof, being steadily strangled. It was impossible to cut the rope. A loose horse in that infernal mÊlÉe was worse than one dead—or at least choking. But I cursed and pulled and heaved in my efforts to get him up.

By this time there was no air and one’s lungs seemed on the point of bursting. The roof rained sweat upon our faces and every moment I expected to get a horse’s hoof in my face.

How I envied that fellow jammed against the truck. At last we came out into the open again, and I slid back the door, and shoved my head outside and gulped in the fresh air. Then I untied the kicker and somehow, I don’t know how, got him round into his proper position and tied him up, with a handful of hay all round to steady their nerves.

The other man was cursing blue blazes all this time, but eventually I cut the rope of the fallen horse, and after about three false starts he got on his feet again and was retied. The man was not hurt. He had been merely wedged. So we gave some more hay all round, cursed a bit more to ease ourselves and then went to the open door for air. A confused shouting from the next truck reached us. After many yells we made out the following, “Pass the word forward that the train’s on fire.”

All the stories I’d ever heard of horses being burnt alive raced through my brain in a fraction of a second.

We leaned to the truck in front and yelled. No answer. The truck was shut.

“Climb on the roof,” said I, “and go forward.” The other man obeyed and disappeared into the dark.

Minutes passed, during which I looked back and saw a cloud of smoke coming out of a truck far along the train.

Then a foot dropped over from the roof and my companion climbed back.

“Better go yourself,” he said. “I carnt mike ’im understand. He threw lumps of coal at me from the perishin’ engine.”

So I climbed on to the roof of the swaying coach, got my balance and walked forward till a yard-wide jump to the next roof faced me in the darkness.

“Lord!” thought I, “if I didn’t know that other lad had been here, I shouldn’t care about it. However——” I took a strong leap and landed, slipping to my hands and knees.

There were six trucks between me and the engine and the jumps varied in width. I got there all right and screamed to the engine driver, “Incendie!—Incendie!”

He paused in the act of throwing coal at me and I screamed again. Apparently he caught it, for first peering back along all the train, he dived at a lever and the train screamed to a halt. I was mighty thankful. I hadn’t looked forward to going back the way I came and I climbed quickly down to the rails. A sort of guard with a lantern and an official appearance climbed out of a box of sorts and demanded to know what was the matter, and when I told him, called to me to follow and began doubling back along the track.

I followed. The train seemed about a mile long but eventually we reached a truck, full of men and a rosy glare, from which a column of smoke bellied out. The guard flashed his lantern in.

The cursed thing wasn’t on fire at all. The men were burning hay in a biscuit tin, singing merrily, just keeping themselves warm.

I thought of the agony of those jumps in the dark from roof to roof and laughed. But I got my own back. They couldn’t see us in the dark, so in short snappy sentences I ordered them to put the fire out immediately. And they thought I was an officer and did so.

16

The rest of the night passed in an endeavour to get to sleep in a sitting position on the bale of hay. From time to time one dozed off, but it was too cold, and the infernal horses would keep on pawing.

Never was a night so long and it wasn’t till eight o’clock in the morning that we ran into Hazebrouck and stopped. By this time we were so hungry that food was imperative. On the station was a great pile of rifles and bandoliers and equipment generally, all dirty and rusty, and in a corner some infantry were doing something round a fire.

“Got any tea, chum?” said I.

He nodded a Balaklava helmet.

We were on him in two leaps with extended dixies. It saved our lives, that tea. We were chilled to the bone and had only bully beef and biscuits, of course, but I felt renewed courage surge through me with every mouthful.

“What’s all that stuff?” I asked, pointing to the heap of equipments.

“Dead men’s weapons,” said he, lighting a “gasper.” Somehow it didn’t sound real. One couldn’t picture all the men to whom that had belonged dead. Nor did it give one anything of a shock. One just accepted it as a fact without thinking, “I wonder whether my rifle and sword will ever join that heap?” The idea of my being killed was absurd, fantastic. Any of these others, yes, but somehow not myself. Never at any time have I felt anything but extreme confidence in the fact—yes, fact—that I should come through, in all probability, unwounded. I thought about it often but always with the certainty that nothing would happen to me.

I decided that if I were killed I should be most frightfully angry! There were so many things to be done with life, so much beauty to be found, so many ambitions to be realized, that it was impossible that I should be killed. All this dirt and discomfort was just a necessary phase to the greater appreciation of everything.

I can’t explain it. Perhaps there isn’t any explanation. But never at any time have I seen the shell or bullet with my name on it,—as the saying goes. And yet somehow that pile of broken gear filled one with a sense of the pity of it all, the utter folly of civilization which had got itself into such an unutterable mess that blood-letting was the only way out.—I proceeded to strip to the waist and shave out of a horse-bucket of cold water.

There was a cold drizzle falling when at last we had watered the horses, fed and saddled them up, and were ready to mount. It increased to a steady downpour as we rode away in half sections and turned into a muddy road lined with the eternal poplar. In the middle of the day we halted, numbed through, on the side of a road, and watered the horses again, and snatched a mouthful of biscuit and bully and struggled to fill a pipe with icy fingers. Then on again into the increasing murk of a raw afternoon.

Thousands of motor lorries passed like an endless chain. Men muffled in greatcoats emerged from farm-houses and faintly far came the sound of guns.

The word went round that we were going up into the trenches that night. Heaven knows who started it but I found it a source of spiritual exaltation that helped to conquer the discomfort of that ride. Every time a trickle ran down one’s neck one thought, “It doesn’t matter. This is the real thing. We are going up to-night,” and visualised a Hun over the sights of one’s rifle.

Presently the flames of fires lit up the murk and shadowy forms moved round them which took no notice of us as we rode by.

At last in pitch darkness we halted at a road crossing and splashed into a farmyard that was nearly belly-deep in mud. Voices came through the gloom, and after some indecision and cursing we off-saddled in a stable lit by a hurricane lamp, hand-rubbed the horses, blanketed them and left them comfortable for the night.

We were given hot tea and bread and cheese and shepherded into an enormous barn piled high with hay. Here and there twinkled candles in biscuit tins and everywhere were men sitting and lying on the hay, the vague whiteness of their faces just showing. It looked extremely comfortable.

But when we joined them—the trench rumour was untrue—we found that the hay was so wet that a lighted match thrown on it fizzled and went out. The rain came through innumerable holes in the roof and the wind made the candles burn all one-sided. However, it was soft to lie on, and when my “chum” and I had got on two pairs of dry socks each and had snuggled down together with two blankets over our tunics and greatcoats, and mufflers round our necks, and Balaklava helmets over our heads we found we could sleep warm till reveille.

The sock question was difficult. One took off soaking boots and puttees at night and had to put them on again still soaking in the morning. The result was that by day our feet were always ice-cold and never dry. We never took anything else off except to wash, or to groom horses.

The next morning I had my first lesson in real soldiering. The results were curious.

The squadron was to parade in drill order at 9 a.m. We had groomed diligently in the chilly dawn. None of the horses had been clipped, so it consisted in getting the mud off rather than really grooming, and I was glad to see that my horse had stood the train journey and the previous day’s ride without any damage save a slight rubbing of his tail. At about twenty minutes to nine, shaved and washed, I went to the stables to saddle up for the parade. Most of the others in that stable were nearly ready by the time I got there and to my dismay I found that they had used all my gear. There was nothing but the horse and the blanket left,—no saddle, no head collar and bit, no rifle, no sword, no lance. Everything had disappeared. I dashed round and tried to lay hands on some one else’s property. They were too smart and eventually they all turned out leaving me. The only saddle in the place hadn’t been cleaned for months and I should have been ashamed to ride it. Then the sergeant appeared, a great, red-faced, bad-tempered-looking man.

I decided on getting the first blow in. So I went up and told him that all my things had been “pinched.” Could he tell me where I could find some more?

His reply would have blistered the paint off a door. His adjectives concerning me made me want to hit him. But one cannot hit one’s superior officer in the army—more’s the pity—on occasions like that. So we had a verbal battle. I told him that if he didn’t find me everything down to lance buckets I shouldn’t appear on parade and that if he chose to put me under arrest, so much the better, as the Major would then find out how damned badly the sergeant ran his troop.

It was a good bluff. Bit by bit he hunted up a head collar, a saddle, sword, lance, etc. Needless to say they were all filthy and I wished all the bullets in Germany on the dirty dog who had pinched my clean stuff. However, I was on parade just half a minute before the Major came round to inspect us. He stopped at me, his eye taking in the rusty bit and stirrup irons, the coagulations on the bridle, the general damnableness of it all. It wasn’t nice.

“Did you come in last night?” The voice was hard.

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you come up from the base with your appointments in that state?”

“No, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

The sergeant was looking apoplectic behind him.

“These aren’t my things, sir,” said I.

“Whose are they?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Where are your things?”

“They were in the stables at reveille, sir, but they’d all gone when I went to saddle up. The horse is the only thing I brought with me, sir.”

The whole troop was sitting at attention, listening, and I hoped that the man who had stolen everything heard this dialogue and was quaking in his wet boots.

The Major turned. “What does this mean, Sergeant?”

There was a vindictive look in the sergeant’s eye as he spluttered out an unconvincing reply that “these new fellows wanted nursemaids and weren’t ’alf nippy enough in lookin’ arter ’emselves.”

The Major considered it for a moment, told me that I must get everything clean for the next parade and passed on.

At least I was not under arrest, but it wasn’t good enough on the first morning to earn the Major’s scorn through no fault of my own. I wanted some one’s blood.

Each troop leader, a subaltern, was given written orders by the Major and left to carry them out. Our own troop leader didn’t seem to understand his orders and by the time the other three troops had ridden away he was still reading his paper. The Major returned and explained, asked him if all was clear, and getting yes for an answer, rode off.

The subaltern then asked the sergeant if he had a map!

What was even more curious, the sergeant said yes. The subaltern said we had to get to a place called FlÊtre within three quarters of an hour and they proceeded to try and find it on the sergeant’s map without any success for perhaps five minutes.

During that time the troopers around me made remarks in undertones, most ribald remarks. We had come through FlÊtre the previous day and I remembered the road. So I turned to a lance-corporal on my right and said, “Look here, I know the way. Shall I tell him?”

“Yes, tell him for Christ’s sake!” said the lance-corporal. “It’s too perishin’ cold to go on sitting ’ere.”

So I took a deep breath and all my courage in both hands and spoke. “I beg your pardon, sir,” said I. “I know FlÊtre.”

The subaltern turned round on his horse. “Who knows the place?” he said.

“I do, sir,” and I told him how to get there.

Without further comment he gave the word to advance in half sections and we left the parade ground, but instead of turning to the left as I had said, he led us straight on at a good sharp trot.

More than half an hour later, when we should have been at the pin point in FlÊtre, the subaltern halted us at a crossroads in open country and again had a map consultation with the sergeant. Again it was apparently impossible to locate either the crossroads or the rendezvous.

But in the road were two peasants coming towards us. He waited till they came up and then asked them the way in bad German. They looked at him blankly, so he repeated his question in worse French. His pronunciation of FlÊtre puzzled them but at last one of them guessed it and began a stream of explanations and pointings.

“What the hell are they talking about?” said the subaltern to the sergeant.

The lance-corporal nudged me. “Did you understand?”

“Yes,” said I.

“Tell him again,” he said. “Go on.”

So again I begged his pardon and explained what the peasants had told him. He looked at me for a moment oddly. I admit that it wasn’t usual for a private to address his officer on parade without being first spoken to. But this was war, the world war, and the old order changeth. Anyhow I was told to ride in front of the troop as guide and did and brought the troop to the rendezvous about twenty minutes late.

The Major was not pleased.

Later in the day the subaltern came around the stables and, seeing me, stopped and said, “Oh—er—you!”

I came to attention behind the horse.

“What’s your name?” said he.

I told him.

“Do you talk French?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where were you educated?”

“France and Oxford University, sir.”

“Oh!” slightly surprised. “Er—all right, get on with your work”—and whether it was he or the sergeant I don’t know, but I had four horses to groom that morning instead of two.

From that moment I decided to cut out being intelligent and remain what the French call a “simple” soldier.

By a strange coincidence there was a nephew of that subaltern in the Brigade of Gunners to which I was posted when I received a commission. It is curious how accurately nephews sum up uncles.

17

When we did not go out on drill orders like that we began the day with what is called rough exercise. It was. In the foggy dawn, swathed in scarfs and Balaklava helmets, one folded one’s blanket on the horse, bitted him, mounted, took another horse on either side, and in a long column followed an invisible lance-corporal across ploughed fields, over ditches, and along roads at a good stiff trot that jarred one’s spine. It was generally raining and always so cold that one never had the use of either hands or feet. The result was that if one of the unbitted led horses became frolicsome it was even money that he would pull the rope out of one’s hands and canter off blithely down the road,—for which one was cursed bitterly by the sergeant on one’s return. The rest of the day was divided between stables and fatigues in that eternal heart-breaking mud. One laid brick paths and brushwood paths and within twenty-four hours they had disappeared under mud. It was shovelled away in sacks and wheelbarrows, and it oozed up again as if by magic. One made herring-bone drains and they merged in the mud. There seemed to be no method of competing with it. In the stables the horses stood in it knee-deep. As soon as one had finished grooming, the brute seemed to take a diabolical pleasure in lying down in it. It became a nightmare.

The sergeant didn’t go out of his way to make things easier for any of us and confided most of the dirtier, muddier jobs to me. There seemed to be always something unpleasant that required “intelligence,” so he said, and in the words of the army I “clicked.” The result was that I was happiest when I was on guard, a twenty-four-hour duty which kept me more or less out of the mud and entirely out of his way.

The first time I went on I was told by the N.C.O. in charge that no one was to come through the hedge that bounded the farm and the road after lights out, and if any one attempted to do so I was to shoot on sight. So I marched up and down my short beat in the small hours between two and four, listening to the far-off muttering of guns and watching the Verey lights like a miniature firework display, praying that some spy would try and enter the gap in the hedge. My finger was never very far from the trigger, and my beat was never more than two yards from the hedge. I didn’t realize then that we were so far from the line that the chances of a strolling Hun were absurd. Looking back on it I am inclined to wonder whether the N.C.O. didn’t tell me to shoot on sight because he knew that the sergeant’s billet was down that road and the hedge was a short cut. The sergeant wasn’t very popular.

There was an estaminet across the road from the farm, and the officers had arranged for us to have the use of the big room. It was a godsend, that estaminet, with its huge stove nearly red-hot, its bowls of coffee and the single glass of raw cognac which they were allowed to sell us. The evenings were the only time one was ever warm, and although there was nothing to read except some old and torn magazines we sat there in the fetid atmosphere just to keep warm.

The patron talked vile French but was a kindly soul, and his small boy, Gaston, aged about seven, became a great friend of mine. He used to bring me my coffee, his tiny, dirty hands only just big enough to hold the bowl, and then stand and talk while I drank it, calling me “thou.”

“T’es pas anglais, dis?”

And I laughed and said I was French.

“Alors comment qu’ t’es avec eux, dis?”

And when one evening he came across and looked over my shoulder as I was writing a letter, he said, “QuÉ que t’Écris, dis?”

I told him I was writing in English.

He stared at me and then called out shrilly, “Papa. V’lÀ l’FranÇais qu’Écrit en anglais!”

He had seen the Boche, had little Gaston, and told me how one day the Uhlans had cleaned the estaminet out of everything,—wine, cognac, bread, blankets, sheets—les sales Boches!

As the days dragged muddily through it was borne in on me that this wasn’t fighting for King and Country. It was just Tidworth over again with none of its advantages and with all its discomforts increased a thousand-fold. Furthermore the post-office seemed to have lost me utterly, and weeks went by before I had any letters at all. It was heart-breaking to see the mail distributed daily and go away empty-handed. It was as though no one cared, as though one were completely forgotten, as though in stepping into this new life one had renounced one’s identity. Indeed, every day it became more evident that it was not I who was in that mud patch. It was some one else on whom the real me looked down in infinite amazement. I heard myself laugh in the farm at night and join in choruses; saw myself dirty and unbathed, with a scarf around my stomach and another round my feet, and a woollen helmet over my head; standing in the mud stripped to the waist shaving without a looking-glass; drinking coffee and cognac in that estaminet.—Was it I who sometimes prayed for sleep that I might shut it all out and slip into the land of dreams, where there is no war and no mud? Was it I who when the first letters arrived from home went out into the rainy night with a candle-end to be alone with those I loved? And was it only the rain which made it so difficult to read them?

18

The culminating point was reached when I became ill.

Feeling sick, I couldn’t eat any breakfast and dragged myself on parade like a mangy cat. I stuck it till about three in the afternoon, when the horse which I was grooming receded from me and the whole world rocked. I remember hanging on to the horse till things got a bit steadier, and then asked the sergeant if I might go off parade. I suppose I must have looked pretty ill because he said yes at once.

For three days I lay wrapped up on the straw in the barn, eating nothing; and only crawling out to see the doctor each morning at nine o’clock. Of other symptoms I will say nothing. The whole affair was appalling, but I recovered sufficient interest in life on the fourth morning to parade sick, although I felt vastly more fit. Indeed, the argument formed itself, “since I am a soldier I’ll play the ‘old soldier’ and see how long I can be excused duty.” And I did it so well that for three more days I was to all intents and purposes a free man. On one of the days I fell in with a corporal of another squadron, and he and I got a couple of horses and rode into Bailleul, which was only about three miles south of us, and we bought chocolates, and candles and books, and exchanged salutes with the Prince of Wales, who was walking in the town. Then we came back with our supplies after an excellent lunch at the hotel in the square, the “Faucon,” and had tea with the officers’ servants in a cosy little billet with a fire and beds. The remarks they made about their officers were most instructive, and they referred to them either as “my bloke” or “’is lordship.”

And there it was I met again a man I had spoken to once at Tidworth, who knew French and was now squadron interpreter. He was a charming man of considerable means, with a large business, who had joined up immediately on the outbreak of war. But being squadron interpreter he messed with the officers, had a billet in a cottage, slept on a bed, had a private hip bath and hot water, and was in heaven, comparatively. He suggested to me that as my squadron lacked an interpreter (he was doing the extra work) and I knew French it was up to me.

“But how the devil’s it to be done?” said I, alight with the idea.

“Why don’t you go and see the Colonel?” he suggested.

I gasped. The Colonel was nearly God.

He laughed. “This is ‘Kitchener’s Army,’” he said, “not the regular Army. Things are a bit different.” They were indeed!

So I slept on the idea and every moment it seemed to me better and better, until the following evening after tea, instead of going to the estaminet, I went down to squadron headquarters. For about five minutes I walked up and down in the mud, plucking up courage. I would rather have faced a Hun any day.

At last I went into the farmyard and knocked at the door. There were lights in the crack of the window shutters.

A servant answered the door.

“Is the Colonel in?” said I boldly.

He peered at me. “What the perishin’ ’ell do you want to know for?”

“I want to see him,” said I.

“And what the ’ell do you want to see him for?”

I was annoyed. It seemed quite likely that this confounded servant would do the St. Peter act and refuse me entrance into the gates.

“Look here,” I said, “it doesn’t matter to you what for or why. You’re here to answer questions. Is the Colonel in?”

The man snorted. “Oh! I’m ’ere to answer questions, am I? Well, if you want to know, the Colonel ain’t in.—Anything else?”

I was stumped. It seemed as if my hopes were shattered. But luck was mine—as ever. A voice came from the inner room. “Thomson! Who is that man?”

The servant made a face at me and went to the room door.

“A trooper, sir, from one of the squadrons, askin’ to see the Colonel.”

“Bring him in,” said the voice.

My heart leapt.

The servant returned to me and showed me into the room.

I saw three officers, one in shirt sleeves, all sitting around a fire. Empty tea things were still on a table. There were a sofa, and armchairs and bright pictures, a pile of books and magazines on a table, and a smell of Egyptian cigarettes. They all looked at me as I saluted.

“Thomson tells me you want to see the Colonel,” said the one whose voice I had heard, the one in shirt sleeves. “Anything I can do?”

It was good to hear one’s own language again, and I decided to make a clean breast of it.

“It’s awfully kind of you, sir,” said I. “Perhaps you can. I came to ask for the interpretership of my squadron. We haven’t got one and I can talk French. If you could put in a word for me I should be lastingly grateful.”

His next words made him my brother for life. “Sit down, won’t you,” he said, “and have a cigarette.”

Can you realize what it meant after those weeks of misery, with no letters and the eternal adjective of the ranks which gets on one’s nerves till one could scream, to be asked to sit down and have a cigarette in that officers’ mess?

Speechless, I took one, although I dislike cigarettes and always stick to a pipe. But that one was a link with all that I’d left behind, and was the best I’ve ever smoked in my life. He proceeded to ask me my name and where I was educated, and said he would see what he could do for me, and after about ten minutes I went out again into the mud a better soldier than I went in. That touch of fellow feeling helped enormously. And he was as good as his word. For the following morning the Major sent for me.

19

The rain had stopped and there had been a hard frost in the night which turned the roads to ice. The horses were being walked round and round in a circle, and the Major was standing watching them when I came up and saluted.

“Yes, what is it?” he said.

“You sent for me, sir.”

“Oh—you’re Gibbs, are you?—Yes, let’s go in out of this wind.” He led the way into the mess and stood with his back to the fire.

Every detail of that room lives with me yet. One went up two steps into the room. The fireplace faced the door with a window to the right of the fireplace. There was a table between us with newspapers on it, and tobacco and pipes. And two armchairs faced the fire.

He asked me what I wanted the interpretership for. I told him I was sick of the ranks, that I had chucked a fascinating job to be of use to my King and country, and that any fool trooper could shovel mud as I did day after day.

He nodded. “But interpreting is no damned good, you know,” he said. “It only consists in looking after the forage and going shopping with those officers who can’t talk French.—That isn’t what you want, is it?”

“No, sir,” said I.

“Well, what other job would you like?”

That floored me completely. I didn’t know what jobs there were in the squadron and told him so.

“Well, come and have dinner to-night and we’ll talk about it,” said he.

Have dinner! My clothes reeked of stables, and I had slept in them ever since I arrived.

“That doesn’t matter,” said the Major. “You come along to-night at half-past seven. You’ve been sick all this week. How are you? Pretty fit again?”

He’s Brigadier-General now and has forgotten all about it years ago. I don’t think I ever shall.

There were the Major, the Captain and one subaltern at dinner that night—an extraordinary dinner—the servant who a moment previously had called me “chum” in the kitchen gradually getting used to waiting on me at the meal, and I, in the same dress as the servant, gradually feeling less like a fish out of water as the officers treated me as one of themselves. It was the first time I’d eaten at a table covered with a white tablecloth for over two months, the first time I had used a plate or drunk out of a glass, the first time I had been with my own kind.—It was very good.

The outcome of the dinner was that I was to become squadron scout, have two horses, keep them at the cottage of the interpreter, where I was to live, and ride over the country gathering information, which I was to bring as a written report every night at six o’clock. While the squadron was behind the lines it was, of course, only a matter of training myself before other men were given me to train. But when we went into action,—vistas opened out before me of dodging Uhlan patrols and galloping back with information through a rain of bullets. It was a job worth while and I was speechless with gratitude.

It was not later than seven o’clock the following morning, Christmas Eve, 1914, that I began operations. I breakfasted at the cottage to which I had removed my belongings overnight, and went along towards the stables to get a horse.

The man with whom I had been mucking in met me outside the farm. He was in the know and grinned, cheerily.

“The sergeant’s lookin’ for you,” he said. “He’s over in the stables.”

I went across. He was prowling about near the forage.

“Good morning, Sergeant,” said I.

He looked at me and stopped prowling. “Where the——” and he asked me in trooperese where I had been and why I wasn’t at early morning stables. I told him I was on a special job for the Major.

He gasped and requested an explanation.

“I’m knocked off all rolls, and parades and fatigues,” I said. “You’ve got to find me a second horse. They are both going to be kept down the road, and I shall come and see you from time to time when I require forage.”

He was speechless for the first and only time. It passed his comprehension.

At that moment the sergeant-major came in and proceeded to tell him almost word for word what I had told him. It was a great morning, a poetic revenge, and eventually I rode away leading the other horse, the sergeant’s pop eyes following me as I gave him final instructions as to where to send the forage.

Later, as I started out on my first expedition as squadron scout, he waved an arm at me and came running. His whole manner had changed, and he said in a voice of honey, “If you should ’appen to pass through Ballool would you mind gettin’ me a new pipe?—’Ere’s five francs.”

I got him a pipe, and in Bailleul sought out every likely looking English signaller or French officer, and dropped questions, and eventually at 6 p.m., having been the round of Dramoutre, Westoutre, and Locre, took in a rather meagre first report to the Major. How I regretted that I had never been a newspaper reporter! However, it was a beginning.

The following morning was Christmas Day, cold and foggy, and before starting out I went about a mile down the road to another farm and heard Mass in a barn. An odd little service for Christmas morning. The altar was made of a couple of biscuit boxes in an open barn. The priest wore his vestments, and his boots and spurs showed underneath. About half a dozen troopers with rifles were all the congregation, and we kneeled on the damp ground.

The first Christmas at Bethlehem came to mind most forcibly. The setting was the same. An icy wind blew the wisps of straw and the lowing of a cow could be heard in the byre. Where the Magi brought frankincense and myrrh we brought our hopes and ambitions and laid them at the Child’s feet, asking Him to take care of them for us while we went out to meet the great adventure. What a contrast to the previous Christmas, in the gold and sunshine of Miami, Florida, splashed with the scarlet flowers of the bougainvillea, and at night the soft, feathery palms leaning at a curious angle in the hard moonlight as though a tornado had once swept over the land.

The farm people sold me a bowl of coffee and a slice of bread, and I mounted and rode away into the fog with an apple and a piece of chocolate in my pocket, the horse slipping and sliding on the icy road. Not a sound broke the dead silence except the blowing of my horse and his hoofs on the road. Every gun was silent during the whole day, as though the Child had really brought peace and good will.

I got to within a couple of miles of Ypres by the map, and saw nothing save a few peasants who emerged out of the blanket of fog on their way to Mass. A magpie or two flashed across my way, and there was only an occasional infantryman muffled to the eyes when I passed through the scattered villages.

About midday I nibbled some chocolate, and watered my horse and gave him a feed, feeling more and more miserable because there was no means of getting any information. My imagination drew pictures of the Major, on my return with a blank confession of failure, telling me that I was no good and had better return to duty. As the short afternoon drew in, my spirits sank lower and lower. They were below zero when at last I knocked reluctantly at the door of the mess and stood to attention inside. To make things worse all the officers were there.

“Well, Gibbs?” said the Major.

“It isn’t well, sir,” said I. “I’m afraid I’m no damn good. I haven’t got a thing to report,” and I told him of my ride.

There was silence for a moment. The Major flicked off the ash of his cigarette. “My dear fellow,” he said quietly, “you can’t expect to get the hang of the job in five minutes. Don’t be impatient with it. Give it a chance.”

It was like a reprieve to a man awaiting the hangman.

20

The squadron, having been on duty that day, had not celebrated Christmas, but the estaminet was a mass of holly and mistletoe in preparation for to-morrow, and talk ran high on the question of the dinner and concert that were to take place. There were no letters for me, but in spite of it I felt most unaccountably and absurdly happy as I left the estaminet and went back to my billet and got to bed.

The interpreter came in presently. He had been dining well and Christmas exuded from him as he smoked a cigar on the side of his bed.

“Oh, by the way,” he said, “your commission has come through. They were talking about it in mess to-night. Congratulations.”

Commission! My heart jumped back to the Marlborough Hotel.

“I expect you’ll be going home to-morrow,” he went on; “lucky devil.”

Home! Could it be? Was it possible that I was going to escape from all this mud and filth? Home. What a Christmas present! No more waiting for letters that never came. No more of the utter loneliness and indifference that seemed to fill one’s days and nights.

The dingy farm room and the rough army blanket faded and in their place came a woman’s face in a setting of tall red pines and gleaming patches of moss and high bracken and a green lawn running up to a little house of gables, with chintz-curtained windows, warm tiles and red chimneys, and a shining river twisting in stately loops. And instead of the guns which were thundering the more fiercely after their lull, there came the mewing of sandpipers, and the gurgle of children’s laughter, and the voice of that one woman who had given me the vision.—

21

The journey home was a foretaste of the return to civilisation, of stepping not only out of one’s trooper’s khaki but of resuming one’s identity, of counting in the scheme of things. In the ranks one was a number, like a convict,—a cipher indeed, and as such it was a struggle to keep one’s soul alive. One had given one’s body. They wanted one’s soul as well. By “they” I mean the system, that extraordinary self-contained world which is the Army, where the private is marched to church whether he have a religion or not, where he is forced to think as the sergeant thinks and so on, right up to the General commanding. How few officers realise that it is in their power to make the lives of their juniors and men a hell or a heaven.

It was a merciful thing for me that I was able to escape so soon, to climb out of that mental and physical morass and get back to myself.

From the squadron I went by motor lorry to Hazebrouck and thence in a first-class carriage to Boulogne, and although the carriage was crowded I thought of the horse truck in which I’d come up from Rouen, and chuckled. At Boulogne I was able to help the Major, who was going on leave. He had left a shirt case in the French luggage office weeks before and by tackling the porter in his own tongue, I succeeded in digging it out in five minutes. It was the only thing I’ve ever been able to do to express the least gratitude,—and how ridiculously inadequate.

We spent the night in a hotel and caught the early boat, horribly early. But it was worth it. We reached London about two in the afternoon, a rainy, foggy, depressing afternoon, but if it had snowed ink I shouldn’t have minded. I was above mere weather, sailing in the blue ether of radiant happiness. In this case the realisation came up to and even exceeded the expectation. Miserable-looking policemen in black waterproof capes were things of beauty. The noise of the traffic was sweetest music. The sight of dreary streets with soaked pedestrians made one’s eyes brim with joy. The swish of the taxi round abrupt corners made me burst with song. I was glad of the rain and the sort of half-fog. It was so typically London and when the taxi driver stopped at my brother’s house and said to me as I got out, “Just back from the front, chum?” I laughed madly and scandalously overtipped him. No one else would ever call me chum. That was done with. I was no longer 7205 Trooper A. H. Gibbs, 9th Lancers. I was Second Lieutenant A. Hamilton Gibbs, R.F.A. and could feel the stars sprouting.

My brother wasn’t at home. He was looking like an admiral still and working like the devil. But his wife was and she most wisely lent me distant finger tips and hurried me to a bath, what time she telephoned to my brother.

That bath! I hadn’t had all my clothes off more than once in six weeks and had slept in them every night. Ever tried it? Well, if you really want to know just how I felt about that first bath, you try it.

I stayed in it so long that my sister-in-law became anxious and tapped at the door to know if I were all right. All right! Before I was properly dressed—but running about the house most shamelessly for all that—my brother arrived.

It was good to see him again,—very good. We “foregathered,”—what?

And the next morning scandalously early, the breakfast things still on the table, found me face to face once more with the woman who had brought me back to life. All that nightmare was immediately washed away for ever. It was past. The future was too vague for imaginings but the present was the most golden thing I had ever known.

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